Enviro-Mental Breakdown

Two Parter

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ONE - You might find it surprising that I still need a bit of convincing that humans are the worst species to have ever inhabited the earth.

If were to be hoenst with myself, then sure, there's no way around that fact. Even once you discount all our atrocities there's still all those poor rare strains of fungus that we've annihilated in building another McDonald's in some rural Mongolian town.

I'll spare you the fact that, hey, since we're the only species with a system of morals, we must necessarily be the worst species to have ever existed.

But I don't really buy it, I think it's a pointless argument. Which is why I'm ASTOUNDED to learn that, for all the lip-service people pay to ideas like "How nice would the Earth be if humans were to just die out" and "we deserve to be extinct for all the awful shit we've done," there is actually a group that is dedicated to this very idea.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement exists. It seems like a headline from The Onion for god's sake. But they're committed to exactly what it sounds like: halting the birth rate to an absolute zero in order to freeze the damage being done to earth (environmentally) to that millions of other species can be preserved.

It's a radical strain, and I don't imagine many people would be giving much thought to joining. Still, you have to admire VHEMT's candor in saying something so utterly stupid; it traipses into the realm of boldness.

Great minds have always had the most radical ideas. Too bad these guys, despite they're sheer genius, are ensuring that there will be no one around to carry on they're legacy. Let's hope that they'll extinct themselves sooner rather than later, so the rest of us can get on with finding real solutions.

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TWO - I thought this was the funniest thing I'd read all day, despite that it stems from such awful news.

Russia tested, on Sept. 11 2007, a new kind of bomb that is reportedly the most powerful non-nuclear weapon on earth, 5x more powerful than an American-made bomb of the same description.

Here's an exerpt from that article:

MOSCOW (AP) - The Russian military has successfully tested what it described as the world's most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia's state television reported Tuesday.

It was the latest show of Russia's military muscle amid chilly relations with the United States.
Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the "dad of all bombs" is four times more powerful than the U.S. "mother of all bombs."

"The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability," said Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military's General Staff, said in televised remarks.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment, he added.

Whew. I mean, if you're going to turn hundreds of thousands of people into fertilizer, it's probably a good thing that you could grow a few organic carrots out of it, right?

...right?