Month: July 2023

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The Death of the Earth?


For a month now, I have seen on television the record high temperatures being realized in southwestern America and now it is moving towards the plain’s states. But this is not just an American phenomenon. Across the globe, countries are being ravaged by heat waves. The Saharah Desert is moving more southward. The polar ice of both poles is melting at an alarming rate. And today, I heard on NBC news that the water temperature in the Florida Keys is 101!

In the north polar regions, many animals rely upon a polar cap just to survive. The polar bear is the one being hurt the most buy our climate change. What happens in the north pole ice disappears completely? What happens in the Greenland glacier melts away? What happens in the ice shelves of the south pole disappear? What happens is there becomes an ecological disaster!

Since the dawn of industrialization in the 19th century, the world has been moving towards this moment in time. People seem to be either blissfully unaware or just refuse the looming disaster. Our planet survives because of a synergy between all the animals on earth, from the microscopic to the largest of whales. There are whales that eat only plankton. What happens to them when the plankton disappears? What happens when water temperatures rise to high for certain fish and mammals that cannot adjust? And what happens to people when their water supply and food supply dwindles?

People may not believe that survival of the human race as it is, is at stake. We must cut carbon emissions to zero and fast. A scientific project for the year 2030 was 7 years off! That project has been met this year.

Scientist has warned that a rise in the average temperature of the earth but just 2 degrees Fahrenheit will kill off many species of animal that are part of the food chain and thereby cause a food chain calamity. We are a part of that food chain and yet we do very little.

The United States, China, and India are among the biggest contributors to global warning. China is still building coal fired power plants. Coal is a huge polluter!

We need only look at the planet Venus to find out what happens when a planet’s upper atmosphere is so thick with gases that hold in the sun’s heat to see a possible future for our planet.

The answer is really simple. All the peoples of the earth must switch to a power grid of electricity powered by the sun and stop the usage of fossil fuels and nuclear fuels as well. Nuclear power plants are heat polluters because of the great amount of heat they give off. We have a number of carbon zero methods of electrical generation: the sun itself, wind, water of rivers and the water of the oceans. In some places the use of volcanic steam is possible.

Our technology is evolving but it can evolve faster if the demand for is grows faster. The wind farms of today will look nothing like those of the future. The use of solar panels should become a mainstream part of every country’s power grid.

We have two choice and only two choices. We can continue as we are and guarantee a future of desperation world-wide or we can use the technology that is at our hands to change the course of our human existence.

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Colombia: An American Friend


Why Colombia as a topic. I was researching who belonged to OPEC as a start, but it produced no countries that I did not expect. But there was Venezuela. I wondered how this could be the only country, besides the United States, in the Americas to produce oil. It turns out that it is not. Along with Venezuela there are Brazil, a true surprise to me, Mexico and Colombia. Colombia made the most sense to me as it shares a long border with Venezuela to its north and east.

I remember many years ago there were advertisements on television about coffee from Colombia. As it turns out Colombia is only second to Brazil in coffee production. Then I looked at who are Colombia’s main trading partners, and it turns out that the United States import more than double of another other country.

My thoughts turned to thinking that Colombians as a whole must be much like Americans in their earning power. But that is just not the case. First, we must look at the Colombian peso. Right now, the inflation rate in Colombia is 13.3%. It is most simply about the demand for products not produced in Colombia far outpaces its exports. The Colombian Peso is in constant fluctuation and of late, its value against America, its biggest trading partner, has fallen dramatically. That means that certain necessities are very expensive. The following table lists the top 8 imports Colombia gets from America.

  1. Machinery including computers (11.6% of total imports)
  2. Electrical machinery, equipment (11.1%)
  3. Vehicles (10.7%)
  4. Mineral fuels including oil (8.3%)
  5. Plastics, plastic articles (4.8%)
  6. Pharmaceuticals (4.4%)
  7. Organic chemicals (3.8%)
  8. Cereals (3.4%)

And so, a weak Peso vs the Dollar makes importing these things to Colombia very expensive to Colombians.

Rich people, regardless of where they live, seem to have a certain immunity to things like inflation. That is because buying an automobile, regardless of price, is not at issue to them. But when you consider the average Colombian, if they must have an automobile, it must be the least expensive available.

The median household income in Colombia is $15,812. That is below our poverty line but in Colombia, many goods and services are inexpensive relative to an individual’s income. In 1991 Colombia changed its constitution to include socialized medicine. But then I came across a figure which absolutely floored me. The rate of single mothers in Colombia is 84%! Of course, then I had to look at education levels. Well, that turns out to be 59% of Colombians have completed a secondary education or GED. Compare that to America which is 88%.

What do single mothers do for a living? An article written in Forbes magazine states, “Beyond the challenges the sheer volume of these numbers bring forth to already strained resources, the issue in Colombia is further compounded by the fact that a large majority of these single-parent families are headed by women, and that women represent a disproportionate percentage of the countries poor, a phenomenon commonly labeled as the “Feminization of Poverty”.  It is well-documented that lone-mother households are at the highest risk of poverty amongst women due to lack of income. This is further exacerbated by deprivation of capabilities and the gender biases present in both Colombian society and government. The culmination of all these factors in modern day Colombia has resulted in a vicious cycle of emotional, financial and social problems and other stressful life events for both the single mothers and their children.”

Another source took me to what jobs a single mother might take and among them is “sex worker.” I am not just talking about prostitution, the most obvious, but a much less obvious option they take which at the least keeps them off the street, “Cam Girl.” What is that? That is an online industry that has been around a very long time where, mostly men, go to find women, and sometimes men, who will perform various sex acts for them. I found such a site, I will not mention its name, where I was able to chat with a number of women. With one or two exceptions, each was a single mother where the father took no part in support of his child. They had taken the job out of desperation for some sort of an income. One woman in particular, who I will call Julie, recently had to be in the hospital. While she was in the hospital her income went to zero, which brought yet another hardship on she and her son. And as it turns out, such incidents are not uncommon at all. Even worse for them, when people find out what they do, they are ostracized by their community and God forbid their family should find out. They stand the stark possibility of being thrown out of the only housing they have.

American commerce is entwined with that of Colombia, but it seems to me that American investors would do well to invest in Colombia where labor is cheap and readily available. American venture capitalists would not only find it a good investment, but in turn, the people of Colombia would have a chance of lifting themselves out of poverty and those women working in the sex business would have other options.

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Regrets? Jealousy?


I have lived long enough to have a long list of regrets. A long time ago there was the regret that I did not get to know my father better before he died. There is a regret that a beautiful woman who I dated off and on, that I did not try to take it further. There are so many other regrets too. But why?

I think it is a normal human condition to begin with. But it is like trying to get more water from an empty bottle. It is not happening. This is where it is okay to remember the past and our regrets, but we must never stare at them because there is no good that will come of that.

Now I come to jealousy. I call this the worst feeling anyone could ever have. First of all, if you feel jealous, you must ask yourself the question, what inside you is so insecure that you allow this feeling to arise in you? Men are really bad with this one. A man is walking down a street with his girlfriend or wife who is a stunning beauty. He notices men are looking at her and he gets mad at her! Why? She has done nothing wrong. Or, worse case, he takes a swing at some stranger who had the audacity to look a little too long at his lady. It means he is insecure about his relationship with her. This applies to women as well. That a man wants to look at the lady you are with is a compliment. Even if they stare! Take solace in the fact that you have her/him and that person does not. The best thing to do with jealousy is to toss it out as a totally useless emotion.

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Why Don’t Americans Read?


I can answer that with a simple statement, “I don’t know.”

Something has happened within our culture which keeps American, without regard to education, from reading. The most obvious sign of this is how many newspapers have ceased publication in the past 25 years along with formerly daily newspapers which have become three day a week papers.

I am tactile person who likes nothing better than to read a daily newspaper in its newsprint form. Until my wife and I moved to Eastern North Carolina, on Sunday mornings, I went out and bought both the Boston Globe and the New York Times. We sat at our dining room table pouring over these publications with delight. Newspapers’ ability to sustain publication relies entirely on its circulation. As across the nation those numbers have decreased, the ability of the newspaper to get much needed advertising has also declined. Newspapers, even though they print news that you may have heard 12 hours earlier on the television, offer something that television news reports do not; their coverage of a story is far more complete. Additionally, television news cannot give the same amount of news as a newspaper does. But this is where the non-reading public comes into play. I suspect that a large portion of the American public will say that they do not have time to read a newspaper. But for most of them the real truth is that they just cannot be bothered to do so.

Fifty years ago, in any city of any size that you ventured to, had at least one bookstore, and, in most cases, there were multiple bookstores. In larger cities the used bookstores were easy to find. That is not true any longer. My wife and I are avid book readers. My wife reads them electronically and I buy the hardcover book. Either way, we read a lot of books. But independent bookstores are shuttering their operations more and more. There simply exists little call for what they sell. Where I now live, Barnes & Noble is my refuge.

I know from the experience of having worked for many years in public school systems, that reading is a major part of their curriculum. But for some reason, people who go through those systems may be looking at reading as something they did not like to do in primary and secondary schools and so why should they continue?

And then there are our public libraries. If such figures existed, I suspect the foot travel into these institutions has dramatically decreased. And those books are free which means that people on limited budgets cannot use the excuse of not having the funds to buy books.

I read a lot as a way to escape the realities of our world into the world of fiction. I also subscribed to the Boston Globe’s electronic version just to stay abreast of the news of a state I called home for most of my life but also because it is the only daily source of that type of news available to me here in Eastern North Carolina. We have two “daily” newspapers, as their masthead declares, that come out 3 days a week, have about 8 pages of mostly advertising, and are overpriced, $2.00 per copy.

It is my belief that Americans have lost sight of the value in reading the printed word. The last time to general public got into a reading frenzy was when the various Harry Potter books were published. Since then, everyone has reverted back. Are we heading to being a country of illiterates? To some degree, yes. Are we becoming a country which is ill-informed of the news of the nation and the world? Most definitely!

I have no idea how to get the general public back to reading except to write my blog about what I see as a problem. And of course, my blog, and others like it, appeal mostly to people who read.