A week ago in Slate, Christopher Beam ("Have You Heard the Good News?") parodied three brief blurbs on the nonexistence of an Iranian nuclear threat (I'm willing to stick out my neck and call it that), the "ending" of the stem cell debate, and the slowing spread of the AIDS epidemic. Beam adds rosy predictions about: the end of socialism in Venezuela, the gross overstatement of genocide in Darfur, and so on.
Beyond the humor, the Iranian news is really the one bright spot in what is shaping up to be another, well, terrible month for, uhh, humanity.
From my morning headline browse:
- Of course, the new Balkan powderkeg. Explosion set for circa February 2008.
- The bombing in Algeria. "Al Qaeda" in Algeria is really nothing new, but this seems to represent at least a resurgence.
- The bombing in Beirut. They still don't have a proper government.
- The fiasco that is shaping up in Bali. I hope the governments at least understand that we basically have until 2015 to arrest greenhouse gas emissions increases.
12 December 2007
Good news?
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I was thinking of just that same article this morning in the shower, particularly in the context of Bali (historian of the future (if we have one): "...the Bali Conference was seen immediately as a major international failure to deal with the challenges posed by climate change...one of the conference's chief villains, the Canadian government, was represented...), but also today in the context of the Canadian government making one of the most idiotic, boneheaded, optics-over-substance, jaw-dropping decisions of recent memory (which is saying a lot...an awful lot).
Read it, and weep.
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