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How can we be so dumb? 
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Post Re: How can we be so dumb?
magamud wrote:
Are Flame Retardants Putting Our Health at Risk?

I've read that ancient Romans thought using lead pipes to deliver water to homes (or lead vessels to manufacture sweeteners) was a step forward. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Fri Oct 17, 2014 5:49 am
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Plastic pollution is off the charts. So is human ignorance of the extent of the problem. We are poisoning all future life on this planet, including the life of our own descendants, meaning children, grandchildren, and their children. This was all blindly done in the pursuit of money, as the driving force behind the development of plastic products was "reducing costs". Our short-sightedness is going to cost us more than we can imagine.

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The study also examined how the plastic bottles, bags, toys and vast amount of other floating plastic gathers at “gyres,” where ocean currents come together into a massive circular eddy that traps the plastic. At those ocean gyres, the garbage is smashed together by wave action after becoming brittle in the sun. Once the plastic is shredded into pieces as small as grains of sand, it can spread widely.

As a result, researchers cannot easily determine where the smallest pieces have gone. One related study found 35,000 tons of plastic in the ocean, but they were expecting to find millions. The plastic didn’t disappear; it just became harder to find as it became more deeply enmeshed in the biosphere. Even more disturbing is the finding that plastic pieces easily become coated with other toxic substances such as PCBs, thereby helping to retain and spread the most poisonous substances. The toxic-coated, poisonous plastic is swept into the ocean’s deepest reaches to be ingested by marine organisms. After ingesting the pollutants and absorbing the toxic substances, the organisms pass them to predators higher in the food chain, where they become increasingly concentrated. Eventually, of course, that plastic reaches humans. Once the plastic enters the food chain, it doesn’t disappear. It works its way up. -- source


But look at the bright side! Fukushima radiation may sterilize the oceans and wipe out that pesky food chain anyway, which will keep the plastic poisons isolated in the ocean, which our descendants can simply avoid. No food chain means no food, so our descendants go extinct via mass starvation, the market for plastic products disappears, and plastic pollution ends! By simply taking humans out of the equation, equilibrium (sustainability) can return to the planet.

The knowledge that we are the problem and that we will destroy ourselves certainly gives us hope for the future! :thumbup:

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Sun Dec 21, 2014 8:47 pm
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The upcoming generations are working hard to show us that, comparatively speaking, the older generations weren't so dumb after all (even though we were).

Or maybe they are just showing us just how dumbed-down the young generations have become.

Sunburn art!

Quote:
One of the unhealthiest trends to hit social media in recent years, sunburn art involves using sunscreen or stencils on parts of their body to burn various designs into their skin.

What will they convince us to do next? Pierced eyeballs? Stump carving? Deformity implants? :lol:

Maybe we shouldn't laugh... :shock:

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Wed Jul 08, 2015 11:04 pm
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"We are neck deep in plastic waste. A single Evian bottle falls into 10,000 pieces, then into smaller ones, tiny as a human hair. All this turns into nano-waste, which eventually evaporates into the air we breathe. This is a problem all of us here in France, in Britain, in the Arab countries need to do something about. That’s why this initiative is so good." -- source

The initiative being spoken about is just picking up some trash every day.

I already do this almost every day. I fill up several plastic shopping bags (many of which I find on the ground) with trash every time I go on my daily walk. I usually dump it in the city trash cans at City Hall. Although that makes my immediate environment slightly cleaner, that trash still ends up in the earth.

The problem is the system we take for granted. It is insane. It makes no sense to generate all that high-tech waste in the first place. We spend enormous time, effort, and money in the first place to make that stuff, then we use it once and throw it away! And just as bad, it is often harmful to living things, including us, after it has been discarded.

Everything should be easily biodegradable or be recycled. Picking up trash is not enough. We have to quit generating it.

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Tue Mar 29, 2016 4:54 am
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Trees in a forest are not the competitors humans believe. People have a mindset that in Nature, it's all "survival of the fittest". It's not. There is cooperation going on that we don't see. Trees communicate. They exchange nutrients. They help each other. They network.

If only we were smart enough to see it, we would understand ourselves better by learning about trees. And by learning about lots of other things, too.

The human world steered by sociopaths is based more and more on competition. That philosophy is crippling us. We need a human world based more and more on cooperation. A philosophy of cooperation would allow us to thrive. But the psychology of sociopaths does not approve of cooperation for humanity. The ruling sociopaths maintain their selfish power by strategies of "divide and rule". The last thing they want is for humanity to "unite and thrive".

A humanity united in cooperation would change everything for the better. The ruling sociopaths will not allow it. Perhaps the ruling sociopaths are the problem.

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Sun Jul 24, 2016 8:24 pm
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Review this post from 10 years ago. The link to the all-important video at the bottom was broken, but I just fixed it and added a second location for when YouTube breaks the link again. Watch that short video. It still fills me with shame for my own species.

It's not just birds who are suffering. It's everything that lives in the ocean. And soon enough, it will be us.

Quote:
For years, fish have been feeding on tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean, mistaking them for food.

These “microplastics,” sometimes thinner than human hair, are now in 85–90 percent of some fish populations, albeit in relatively small quantities, says Richard Thompson, a marine biology professor at Plymouth University.

We humans then eat the fish.

Thompson, who has been studying the effects of plastic waste in the oceans for over 20 years, said the direct harm of microplastics to humans is not yet known.

“Scientific understanding of the harm is in its infancy,” Thompson said. -- source

Once the effects reach us, they will likely have reached almost everything else living on the planet. You see, the Earth is mostly a closed, self-contained system. And whatever we do to that system, we do to ourselves.

Even the native Americans could see that:

Quote:
"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. All things are bound together." -- Chief Seattle

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Mon Aug 15, 2016 6:40 am
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... today we are worse off intellectually than at any time I can remember. But at least now, we have the Internet, making available every idea under the Sun to anyone who seeks to know about it. The contemporary, pathetic, mainstream American "intellect" (if one can call it such) hit rock bottom years ago and now is hopelessly mired in vacuous mindlessness. -- source

Perhaps that explains how we can be so dumb.

The Internet is no panacea, either. It delivers disinformation as easily as true information. It is censored as readily as the prior generation of ink on paper. And it has been transformed by advertising into a major annoyance. Have we learned nothing from television? Will it get to the point where I will refuse to reference the Internet, just like I refuse to watch television?

I'm thinking "yes".

Perhaps that also explains how we can be so dumb. And where does this curse come from? Sociopaths. They are the ones driven to control everything, including knowledge. They are the ones who don't care how their behaviors affect others. They are the ones that take no responsibility for their actions. They are the ones that feel no shame, have no empathy, and consider themselves superior to everyone else.

Uncle Zook has often ridiculed me for finding sociopathy at the heart of humanity's problems, but there it always is, whether we like it or not. Deviant human psychology in the form of sociopathy is the real curse of our species. It's not how dumb we are. It's how sociopathic we are. Actually, it's worse than that, because most humans are not sociopaths. But those that are have far too much liberty, and they ruin it for the rest of us.

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Sat Dec 17, 2016 7:49 pm
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Today I took apart a Dremel rotary hand tool. The variable speed switch wasn't working properly any more, having only two states -- off and full speed. This was not acceptable, as variable speed allows much greater control, so I elected to attempt repairs.

The technology in this simple tool is absolutely awesome. There is a small but powerful electric motor, something very few people really understand. There are four sealed bearings that allow high-speed rotation with little friction. The case itself is a marvel of design engineering, accommodating every working part with obvious efficiency. The rotating plastic carriers of the spring-loaded carbon brushes were especially intriguing, and the most mystifying. It took me some time and effort to figure out their purpose and how they worked to allow quick assembly of the intricate and cramped brush mechanism. All of this had me asking, "How can we be so effing smart?"

And yet we can't even figure out that sociopaths rule over us, and more importantly, how to stop them.

Seeing how smart we are really emphasizes how dumb we are. It was a painful dichotomy.

That's the bad news. The good news is my Dremel tool works like new again.

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Thu Dec 29, 2016 8:10 am
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The story of Easter Island reflects the dichotomy of human genius / madness. If the story is accurate, the fate of humanity is precarious.

And sad.




Secrets of Easter Island !!!


April 5, 2017: Video censored (in less than two months), and not a copy to be found using master censor engine, er... search engine Google. The YouTube ID was _7nkRxEvwHw, but I cannot locate any alternate copies, even though the YouTube title is correct. Too bad, as the video clearly illustrated how a group of human beings, isolated and on their own (as we are on Earth), can destroy themselves by following sociopathic leaders. We are on the same path, I am sorry to say, and it looks like someone wants us to continue on that path, deliberately removing all obstacles (like this video) that might deter us. Hmm, could it be our sociopathic leaders? Nah -- conspiracy theory.

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Fri Feb 10, 2017 11:48 pm
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Quote:
It needs to be remembered that this scenario is a worst case one. A methane blowout could happen in as little as nine years. But as Prof. Wanless says, we don't know when it could happen. It might be a century or more hence, and given that possibility, we should not be despairing but rather embarking on a global crash program to reduce carbon emissions the likes of which humanity has never known or contemplated.

The trouble is, it's hard to imagine that happening though, particularly here in a country where half the people don’t even think climate change is happening, or if they do notice things getting warmer, think that’s just a peachy thing that will reduce their heating bills. -- source

I'm all for reducing my heat bill! I told my natural gas company to get lost, as I refuse to pay their $127 extortion fee just to turn my gas back on! So my house has been pretty cold this winter, getting as low as 38 degrees F.

But I'm not sure I want cheaper bills just so humanity can go extinct! :shock:

I'm doing everything I can think of to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. The problem is, the ruling sociopaths are driving this bus, and what I do is totally insignificant by comparison. We have free energy technologies that could completely eliminate our need for fossil fuels, but the ruling sociopaths won't allow us to have them. They have a successful and lucrative con-game in place, and they want to milk it for all it can bring them.

Idiots.

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Sat Feb 11, 2017 1:38 am
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