A week or two back I had someone put forth the idea to me that the world would be better off without people in it. This is something, I just can’t agree with. Here’s the way it seems to me:

When we say we want a healthy environment it isn’t really the health of the environment that we’re concerned with. It’s how well suited the environment is for keeping us alive that we’re actually concerned with. If we weren’t here the environment would not be Better Off. Nature doesn’t care about what we’re doing. Nature invented rat’s asses just so it could not give them about us. Pretty much nothing we do can harm nature. We can only harm us.

People might argue “But humanity is causing pollution which upsets the balance of nature” and I say “nope”. Nature is never actually balanced, it is just forever in the act of balancing. The makeup of the atmosphere is certainly different because of what we’ve pumped into it, but nature will, over time, get used to that. Species will adapt to the new atmosphere and thrive. Ages ago the atmosphere had much more oxygen because God wanted giant bugs around, but now we’ve got less oxygen. Nature goes on in spite of these changes and what we’re really worried about is how well nature can support us.

People may argue “But humanity’s influence has caused a ton of species to go extinct and that upsets the ecosystem” and I say again “nope”. When you think about it, far more species have gone extinct from your ice ages and your asteroid strikes and your freakin’ whatever caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event. When it comes to wiping out animal life, humanity just Can Not Compete with Mama Nature.

People may argue “But when nature causes something to happen, it’s natural, when we do it its unnatural” and I say once more times “nope”. Even though in the paragraphs proceeding this one I drew a line of distinction between humanity and nature, we really are as much a part of this planet as any other life form. Let us say that, in prehistoric times, some predator species crossed a land bridge somewhere and got into an ecosystem and wiped the floor with the competition and changed the whole scene, would you say that nature would be better off without that species or would it be cool because they’re animals and, unlike us, they don’t know any better? Well this sort of thing has happened nonstop over millions of years and nature still got us here. And if you’re saying that we’re supposed to know better, I say “why”? If nature seems to be fine with a constant change of ecosystems, why would it be Better if we defy that? Isn’t going against nature the exact thing you’re accusing us of?

My point here is that saying the environment would be Better Off without humanity is like saying a hospital would be easier to keep clean if you didn’t let patients in. You’d end up with a cleaner hospital, sure, but what would be the point of that? We should certainly be working hard to maintain an environment that keeps us alive. But not for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of humanity.

If I didn’t have to pay rent, I could have all of my debt (both credit cards, my line of credit and my savings account overdraft fees) paid off in a year easily. All it would take is the money that I currently pay toward rent would go to the debt. Now I probably would not bother to do so, honestly. I would probably take a couple trips and see a couple of countries and eat french toast in them. But even so I could handily be debt free in three years or so. This just goes to show a point that I’ve always assumed was correct: Being homeless is clearly the most financially sound way to be. If only I didn’t need a place to keep all my stuff. And also to sleep. Apart from that, I bet the homeless are laughing all the way to the bank.

Haiku!

Twenty-four times ten
is two hundred and forty.
That was easy math.

Doing math also brought me another realization. There’s this “global experiment” (whatever that means) that challenges people to go through a month with only six items of clothing for a month. Since this doesn’t count socks and underwear and you are allowed to count multiple copies of the same item (example: all blue jeans count as one), I can pretty much say that I have unwittingly participated in this experiment, like, several times. Wasn’t hard.

A year or two ago I bought a box of tissues solely because it had superheroes on the box. At the time I didn’t need them, I just liked that it had superheroes so I bought it. Hopefully revealing that weakness won’t lead to manufacturers of products like corkscrews and ladles adding heroes in the hopes of getting my sales. But anyway, I mostly forgot about them until this holiday season when I got something of a cold. Now needing the tissues and keeping the box by my side for several days I got to thinking about them once more, and now I must bring that thinking to the Internet.

There they are. They are out on patrol perhaps, notice a big monster and proceed to stop its rampage. That’s superheroes for you. I’ve no doubt that these guys are inspired by the Invincibles. They’re definitely a family.

First thought, I would say they are Environmentally friendly heroes. The green costumes. The slimy monster who eats trees and windmills (!!). The fact the tissue paper they sell was made of recycled materials. It all adds up. Perhaps they’re not like the Planeteers who only fight enviro-crime, but they certainly lean that way.

Individually:

• The little girl can fly and create some manner of, what appears to soap, which she throws at the monster. Perhaps she can create other things to throw and was just choosing something appropriate to the situation? The fact she keeps the pollution monster as a pet shows that she’s an idealist. Even that evil beast, she feels, could be redeemed with a little love.
• The boy, probably a young teenager has elastic powers. The way he raises an eyebrow before grappling the creature’s leg tells me that he is something of a jokester. But he is no loner. You can tell he likes being part of this family. Probably because they are superheroes and that’s awesome.
• Mom can fly and shoot some sort of energy from her hands. Either it’s a cleansing beam in accordance with the posited environmental theme, and this is why the pollution monsters shrinks, or it is just a straight-up shrink beam. Either way, that’s our finishing move for this skirmish.
• Now, the father is interesting. I have no doubt that his frame holds superhuman strength and probably nigh invulnerability. But what impresses me most is that he stays out of the fight. A coward? No, I suspect he knows that punching that thing’s face off is just going to make a mess and his family is more than capable without him. These guys have clearly done this before.

So that’s them. We don’t know their names or anything else about them. I have to wonder, though, did the person hired by No Name brand to create these heroes and decorate a box of tissues with them put more thought into them than went into the story. Is this a case of fictional characters who have been thought out more than their medium gives them a chance to show? Could their creator have given them names and origins or were they but a moment’s work and then forgotten. Were they a labor of love or a mercenary way to spend a day drawing?
Either way, this post is a monument to these forgotten heroes. We salute you! You’re still better than Aquaman.

I AM PROBABLY THE FIRST PERSON TO TALK ABOUT THESE GUYS ON THE INTERNET. I WIN.

My cold is totally better now.

As I walk to or from work for the last month or so, there has been a discarded banana peel on the side of the highway. While the peel itself has shrivelled and blackened beyond recognition, the blue sticker on it lives on bright and powerful. Such is mankind’s power over nature.

I read that China has begun raising the prices on the chopsticks it exports to Japan, because Japan uses so many of them that it is using up China’s forests. Now, usually, I’m against deforestation, but the article said that the alternative plastic chopsticks can only be used about 150 times more than the wooden ones before they are disposed of. That means they’re still considered disposable. It seems to me that wood biodegrades easier than plastic, so the garbage would be worse for the environment. The fact that there only one chopstick thrown out for every hundred and fifty there used to be is meaningless. We’ll have plenty of room for landfills where those forests used to be! It’s like I always say, the worst option is only the worst option when you’re not in denial! Hooray! Environment saved and all it cost us was a bunch of useless trees.

I also read once that scientists found a way to make plastic from corn. Are they still doing that because that actually does sound like a good thing.