When you read news of your homeland, there’s always a twinge of desperation because you’re hoping that ‘Oh man, wouldn’t it be nice if they didn’t make a mockery of themselves this time’, even though you know the existing track record is already against you. Of course, you turn on the news, something you rarely do these days, as it’s boring and specifically designed to make you feel shitty for ninety percent of its run-time, but end on a high note so you leave feeling elated and those little nuggets of sadness burrow deep inside your subconscious, leaving your id to question whether or not you’re actually depressed; you’re not, you’re just being royally fucked with by people who just want more cash from your wallet. There, on the screen, is what you didn’t want to see: your ‘team’ taking another fucking L right in the goddamn chops, and not even trying to dodge it; just eating it like the shit-sandwich was exactly the point and not an unfortunate outcome of something that should’ve never snowballed this far, and wouldn’t have if people were a little smarter and a lot more cognizant.

Climate Strike showed up today in Hartford, and though I am hundreds of miles away, the pain was felt immensely. I never understand why people feel the need to ‘protest’ or, in this case, ‘strike’, when it is the real world equivalent of making petitions on Change.org; for those unaware, morons go to the aforementioned website to make digital papers that other morons sign, and then nothing happens because, like actual petitions, nobody cares. Good ol’ Carl of Swindon Applebee’s made this a common tactic in the online/YouTube skeptic circle, and if you know anything about him, you wouldn’t even have needed me to spell out why all this shit is laughable.

I could understand if you were working in a job where they were royally dunking on their workers and fucking them left, right, and sideways, so you strike to force the hands of the business owners to pay what they rightfully owe their workers, but this isn’t the case here. Most of these people are teenagers, and before you accuse me of generalizing, here’s a quick supercut of some of the big names on the Climate Strike website:

I really enjoyed making that.

I’m not linking to their website, or similarly titled ones like ‘Global Climate Strike’, as I have no desire to give such a ridiculous kerfuffle traffic, but go to either of those pages and they look like they were made in some bootleg version of Frontpage. Again, these advocates are children. What on Earth do children and teenagers know about anything? Answer: they don’t. I’m not far enough removed to not understand the modus operandi of this stuff, which is simply that these kids are outraged (because that’s the only emotion teenagers are capable of) and think simply gathering fixes problems. I’m also far enough removed, learned, and experienced to know that such tactics don’t solve shit, and it’s a fucking farce to think congregating with cardboard cut-out signs and shouting at passing public moves the goalposts down the line. It’s this line of thinking that is why modern movements and social causes never last; dipshits don’t realize the public at large will not cater to their caterwauling, and so they give up because they’ve gotten their way via tantrums all their life, and are too stupid/lazy to try another more nuanced method.

‘Sahltines, don’t you usually care about this stuff? Aren’t you a flaming libfag? Don’t you lean left, you shit?’ I do. On a properly scaled and biased political spectrum, I’m slightly left of center, and when I was younger, I was slightly left of center. On a modern political spectrum, I land, ‘at best’, dead center, and in more cases than not, fairly right. I haven’t changed, because me at fifteen (the average age, it seems, of the movement organizers) thought rallies and protests were retarded, just as I do now. What’s changed is the political landscape is more extreme, and as such, it behooves more people to do extremely stupid and actively detrimental nonsense, like clogging up pedestrian walkways and streets for a problem that is too difficult to have such a simple solution. As another example of how these troglodytes don’t understand the complexities, here’s a bit of the FAQ from the Global Climate Strike website:

As we deal with devastating climate breakdown and hurtle towards dangerous tipping points, young people are calling on millions of us across the planet to disrupt business as usual

Nice. Instead of holding a proper summit in a room and conducting things in a manner that is civilized and would allow for proper debate, argumentation, and both sides to logically attempt to eviscerate the others’ argument to reach a win state that can be followed by the watching masses, average-ass people like me who do work for a living that adheres to LEED’s garbage standards, and who work with people who are actively working to build better dams, increase retention ponds, install better lighting, erect efficient turbines, research for better solar absorption panels, and shit that actually helps solve this ‘crisis’ are now inconvenienced because Suzy Q., who is currently failing Algebra I, is mad the Earth is getting slightly warmer; fuckin’ sweet!

Millions of school climate strikers have been leaving their classrooms every Friday.

So, instead of learning and working to become more intelligent and savvy to be able to come up with answers that solve this problem better, kids are going to forego that to be loud and annoying? Sign me the fuck up; I cannot wait for the future.

Our house is on fire. The climate crisis is an emergency but we’re not acting like it. People everywhere are at risk if we let oil, coal and gas companies continue to pour more fuel on the fire.  Our hotter planet is already hurting millions of people.

I love how I always hear this, and yet I never see any fucking numbers. And, as I’ve said before, this is shit that I am completely behind. I just can’t stand that dipshits have completely and utterly co-opted a movement that makes perfect sense and turned it into a flaming dumpster because they are too lazy, stupid, and disingenuous to take the five seconds to source their fucking claims, or have a reasonable argument or take.

These Climate Strikes won’t solve the climate crisis alone.

THEN WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!

Workers’ rights and labour laws vary hugely around the world, and not everyone can work, strike or be part of a union. On a grossly unequal planet, some of us can’t do without a single day’s pay, and some of us work for bosses who would fire us if we dared try. 

Your boss would fire you for not doing what you said you were going to do, which is exactly the contract you signed by accepting the job. You’re breaching the contract; of course you can be fired because you’re not holding up your end of the legal agreement. If you want to protest, take a fucking personal day; I swear, it’s like these people have never spent one moment working a real job in the real world in their lives. Oh, right, they haven’t, because they’re fucking TEENAGERS.

From the horse’s mouth.

If anyone, ever, tells or asks you to ‘be an ally’, what they are saying is they are too spineless, yellow-bellied, cowardly, or some other synonym that means ‘bitch-made’ to fight their own battles, and instead need to always bring a fuckin’ posse with them. This is fucking gang-level mentality. This is shit fans of garbage groups like ICP do when someone makes fun of their terrible music taste; they round up ten of their friends and come and beat you with lead pipes, rather than just take matters into their own hands because they know, subconsciously, they’re too fucking weak-willed and limp-wristed, so they need a fuckin’ squad, not unlike the modern police, who are all fat, out of shape, and send ten cars to a DIP arrest when you only need one fucker on a bicycle.

Scientists from Yale and 23 other universities have been busy trying to answer this question for us kids from Plant-for-the-Planet. Just a short time ago, in September 2015, they revealed a definitive answer to this question – the earth has three trillion trees! At first glance, this seems like an enormous number. However, scientists also found out that we humans have already destroyed 46%, so almost half, of the trees that there once were. Furthermore, the study shows that we lose around 15 billion trees per year due to deforestation.

Here’s a quick map I marked up showing all the places people aren’t and trees are; please keep in mind this is just a small fraction of the total area:

What’s that, it looks exactly like I went to Google Maps and took a snapshot of the northeastern United States and Canada? That’s exactly what I did because, as you can see, it’s fucking green everywhere. Do you know why? That’s where tons and tons of trees are. ‘But Sahltines, there are tons of people living there! They’re everywhere and they’re hurting!’

You sure about that?

Upon closer inspection, you’d be full of shit to believe that. You see all that green in between the major highways and hub cities? That’s all area ripe to be lived on and cultivated. The whole ‘save the trees, the land is dying’ chicanery has been going on for well before I was born, and it has always been a load of bull dump. It comes from people who either live in cities and have never left, or on farms and only travel into the urbanized areas and, somehow, never walk next door to the vast open space that surrounds them. I went hiking just a few hours ago, and I saw more flat, open fields than I did houses, and I live somewhere that doesn’t have the population density of a gnats’ dick.

More importantly, if you’re telling us to plant trees, why in the fuck do we need to gather to do this? I have a garden with multiple different vegetables, flowers, and herbs, and I’m in the process of collecting seeds from both store-bought and naturally sourced fruits vegetables, and trees, and I didn’t feel the need to tell the world how much I’m directly saving the planet. Perhaps that’s because I’m not a fucking attention-whoring blowhard, which is certainly a big part of it, but perhaps it’s also because I don’t need to be driven by the concept of a ‘crisis’ to want to be as self-sufficient as possible while learning as much as I can about the place I inhabit. It’s almost like not being a dipshit cock holster benefits the planet, benefits the person, and benefits society!

Fucking clown world.

So when I was looking to attend university, I had to have stellar grades, extra-curriculars, both physically-involved and scholastically-focused, visit the institutions, pay money and complete applications, and then wait anxiously to the inevitable denial of acceptance because the pool ‘was too competitive’ (read: you don’t have the right connections/aren’t poor enough/not the right skin color/we just don’t want the money you’re willing to throw at us because we’re really stupid), and all this nobody girl had to do was be fifteen, want to save trees, and help whales not get caught in nets like the big, dumb idiots they are. And now she’s the leader of the Hartford chapter of this group. Fucking great.

“Some politicians will say that small incremental changes are all that is possible, but that time is over,” Wazer said. “Perhaps if we had taken action in the past, we wouldn’t have to take such drastic action now. But we didn’t and now it is a huge weight, hanging over me, my generation and future generations.”

No, if you weren’t raised by parents who did take part in this shit, but then gave up in their mid-thirties out of malaise and incapability, then pushed their ideologies onto you because they needed something to live vicariously through so that they would be validated in some form, then we wouldn’t be here right now. We also probably wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a fucking moron and actively working towards reducing the carbon footprint, or cross-breeding new plants and trees to better absorb carbon, or advocating everyone go back to having a victory garden in their backyard, or divining better modes of public transportation, or telling the fucking Connecticut politicians to actually fund the right shit, like better quality asphalt for the DoT to use on the roads so they don’t need repairs every fucking year, or better education across the board so that people won’t have to keep dumping money into unbalanced and corrupt private/charter schools that get funding on the taxpayer’s dime, and to also not put it in their fucking pockets. Yes, I am going hard in the paint on this, because I lived through all this, and now some snot-nosed brat is indirectly telling me I’m a piece of shit because my efforts went right where hers are going to go (into the trash bin)? Fuck you.

Bet you thought I was kidding about them whales, huh?

Oh wow, twenty-six whole years old? It’s totally not like you, as a woman, are going to live longer on average and, thanks to modern health breakthroughs and medicine, will allow you to even live longer than that, effectively meaning that from now until eleven years from now, you’ll probably be completely fine and, most likely, won’t have changed a beat, unfortunately for the rest of us who have to deal with you. Unlike you, Sena (side note: what kind of name is that?), I’ll officially be ‘old as dirt’ then, so actually solving climate problems would be neato, but frankly, I’d rather work on the thing called the aging process and dying, because as ready as I am for it at any moment, I would sure like to live forever to do all the shit I want to.

Ugh.

No, you fucking old has-been human-shaped leather sack, the existential threat of our time is that Jeffery Epstein was murdered in fucking cold blood, and nobody seems to give a shit about it. It’s existential because it’s the ballsiest and sloppiest assassination attempt put forward by the people who actually own this planet we live on and all the countries we inhabit, and despite that, nobody gives a fucking shit that they can off one of their own, a fucking mega pedophile, in effectively broad daylight in a supremely tight and high security prison while actual Big Brother is being implemented everywhere by China and Google step-by-step, and here we are, crying about the whales and the trees.

News flash: nature doesn’t give a shit about us. Just about every single animal and creature out there can kill us, and they can do it easily and efficiently. That includes plants, fungi, obviously fauna, plenty of flora, and even the air and ocean. Fuck, rocks kill people all the time, and those fuckers don’t even have lives. I hike all the time and I never think, ‘You know what we need more of? These trees that are surrounding me and could crush me at any moment.’ These zealots also don’t realize that there are specifically culled and curtained off portions of the land used to grow all the organic materials we need to survive. Yes, random burnings of the Amazon rainforest by tree poachers who are being idiots trying to make a quick buck off a scheme that will not work out, mostly because they haven’t thought their plan of attack through, is a travesty, but what isn’t are whales who keep floating into our nets. I mean, they’re the size of fucking coach buses, are you telling me they can’t flip around or just use their massive fins to rip through this stuff? I’m supposed to believe the average commercial fishing net can stop a mega-ton monster? Get the fuck out of here.

Chief among them is action announced Thursday — but anticipated since Trump took office — to prevent California from setting its own stricter emissions standards for motor vehicles. The state has been regulating such emissions since before the Clean Air Act existed. When the act was passed, it provided for California to seek waivers for more restrictive emissions – often referred to as the California waiver – and other states were allowed to use the California levels. Connecticut is among about a dozen states that do so.

Just so everybody understands why harsher restrictions are bad in this case: states that impose these restrictions do so to make more money off the citizens, and then line their pockets with that extra dough. They are not doing it because they give a fuck about your garden of daisies and mums. The fact that this is a law that California, a state that spends more of its time championing the safety of wildlife than spending a single year building a handful of dams and reservoirs to solve their self-imposed ‘water crisis’ while they bus it over from fucking Nevada, should be enough of a red flag to anyone with a functioning brain cell. They would not need to do this if they actually used the money from taxes and grants and bonds properly and not to fund their pet projects or bolster their administrative, sit-on my-ass-and-do-nothing-but-call-it-work salaries.

Connecticut has joined other states fighting in court many of the Trump environmental rollbacks.

This is because Connecticut is a dumb state filled with dumb people. How else could you explain how they convinced taxpayers that charter schools were a necessity and the way of the future, and that money should go to them and not public schools that the taxpayer’s children already go to? For those who don’t know, charter schools are publicly funded schools that are based on the private school model, so many are built on public dime, collect tuitions, and are rife with all the same problems big private schools are, like donor favoritism, racial biasing towards non-whites/Asians, and heavily biased curriculum that indoctrinate students early to whatever causes the staff feels is necessary to the learning process, rather than teaching them their fuckin’ ABCs and 123s. It also mentions Dick Blumenthal in the next paragraph, which I won’t quote here for brevity, but having met Rick myself, he’s a mega douche on all accounts.

Wat.

First, Emma, no man is going to marry you or start a family because he is going to find this (because the internet never forgets), or, god forbid, listen to you talk, and think, ‘This lady is crazy. I need to get out of here!’ If you think your future ends in your mid twenties, then you sure think very low of yourself and your peers, and it implies to me that life is probably going to be too hard for you once you leave the safety of your scholastic sandboxes, and that you’ll probably jump from somewhere high, which is likely a good thing at the end of the day for everyone. It, at the very least, signals you are a moron, so enjoy whatever dead-end life you seem keen on living for the next ten years or so; as if the world is going to implode in 2030/2040 when these deadlines are being set for. It’s almost like teenagers are exceptional individuals.

Oi vey.

You will all be able to vote by the time these legislative measures roll around, and well before then. I’m not helping you destroy the world I live in because you want to fuck a whale/tree stump.

She questions whether she would one day want to start a family. “I don’t know if I want my kids to live in a world where they can’t swim in the ocean without wearing a hazmat suit, and that really makes me sad and it’s very disturbing.”

This is, by far, the dumbest thing I have heard in my life. What kind of shit are these kids watching that they think in a decade’s time our oceans are going to be a radioactive nightmare. Neala, honey, do us all a favor, and tie your tubes now, because nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, on this planet, that has read this sentence, wants you to have kids, because the abuse you will directly inflict on them and their pristine minds is not something I will stand by idly and watch happen.

Oh. Oh wow. Wow.

I’m glad I’ve saved this here for the purposes of my own ranting, but also for the inevitable posterity when Sanya, who is probably of Indian descent, eventually gets a job in the environmental science/engineering sector, possibly even because she is of Indian descent and a woman, and therefore a ‘protected class’. Wesleyan, you’re right up there with the fucking Ivy League schools; what are you doing, buddy?

Thankfully, that’s the end of the article. I’m sure I could find more about all these nobodies, because they’re stupid and put their own information on the internet all willy nilly, like the fucking zoomers they are, but honestly, if I continue, I’m going to want to drive through a tree.

People, if you really, truly give a shit about the environment, then grow a garden in your yard of plants and fruits and vegetables so you spend less time going to the store. Cultivate some fruit trees to help with the local carbon footprint. Advocate for more efficient diesel engines; current ones don’t cut down on black carbon, which is still one of the direct leading contributors to climate problems, and we would’ve solved this this past decade has these idiots not scared manufacturers out of using diesel entirely. Don’t buy a Tesla or any electric/hybrid vehicle; they cost more to make than your conventional machine in resources that these zealots want to save. Go get a degree in engineering, math, or science of some kind, and work to solve these problems directly. Don’t join protest groups. Don’t sign up for ‘Save the Earth’ events. Don’t be talked down by these idiots. In short, go out and do an actual something, and for the love of all that is sacred, shut the fuck up about it. People who really want to do good and do the next right thing don’t spend their time patting themselves on the back about how good they are, they move on to the next right thing. Anyone who is like Sena or the people in these Climate Strike movements is always someone you need to watch out for, because they aren’t doing this explicitly to save the *insert whatever here*, because if they were, they would just shut the fuck up and do it. They want attention, time, and probably your money.

Fuck that, and fuck them.