Winter Storm

The little red dot thing is me.

All that blue and purple is the snowstorm a-comin.

It's going to get pretty nasty tonight. 

 ...and it's looking bad for the next two days.

They're even warning everyone to be ready for power outages.

We are very fortunate: we have full oil lanterns, plenty of wood for the insert, a fridge full of food and big front porch to move it to if the power goes out.  It's looking like hundreds of thousands of people across the country will be affected by this storm. Pray for those on the streets; those who have no heat alternative; those with empty refrigerators; those who are alone; the children; the elderly; the sick. It's going to get cold, dark, icy and dangerous.

No Pressure?

Rather than contribute to the spread of No Pressure, a pretty horrifying short film produced by a group of climate change activists kicking off a carbon footprint reduction campaign today, I posted Friday's Catholic News Roundup from RealCatholicTV.com instead.

This program is from RealCatholicTV.com

RealCatholicTV.com has the decency to cut the rest of the scene, which is of the two children deciding not to do anything about climate change literally exploding. (The producers of No Pressure billed their little project as "comical", by the way.)

From the embedded video: "Some have actually chosen to defend the offensive presentations, perhaps revealing the dark underbelly of a movement bent on global political change, and controlling individuals who disagree at any cost."

Dark underbelly indeed. RealCatholicTV.com produced a real eye-opener titled Global Warming Unmasked: The Hidden Agenda, uncovering "climate change" advocates as little more than population reduction eugenicists.

*     *     *

The whole issue reminds me of this:

It's a giant granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia, inscribed with 10 principles for humanity.  The first principle: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature."  Very scary, since the global population is nearly 15 times this number, and the people behind building it remain a complete mystery.

Contraception Conundrum (cont'd)

What continues to gnaw at me regarding this issue is not just that a clear inconsistency in views of secular environmentalists regarding contraception's effect on the environment seems to exist.

My Dad always told me, "if you think you know what you're looking at, take a step back and look at the bigger picture."

The goal of population control advocates is to reduce the number of human beings on the planet, for the sake of the earth. Essentially, they are little by little removing human beings from the environmental equation.

The more fact sheets I read from Population Connection's website, the more my head spins.  I have read paper after paper discussing human activity. Growth rates, resource depletion, deforestation, highway congestion, water shortages...the hopeless list and scope of potential disasters humans will either cause or face is alarming--alarming enough to reclassify humans as destructive parasites upon the earth to be controlled, if not eradicated.

Self-loathing and self-destruction isn't limited to the individual human, I guess.  When a society lacks hope, it will turn on itelf, just like an individual will.  Does a suicide victim care about contaminating the floor with their blood?  After all, someone else will clean up the mess.  Neither does a self-destructive society care that they're contaminating water with their tools of self-destruction.  Once we're gone, nature will clean up the mess.

It's more important than ever that we cling to our Lord and His Church if we are going to turn any of this around.  As Catholics, we should be spending some time every day in formation activities that expand our understanding of our Lord and His Church. 

This is as good a place to start as any:
COMPENDIUM OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

Contraception Conundrum

I found this quotation on American Papist:

Contraception is almost five times cheaper as a means of preventing climate change than conventional green technologies, according to research by the London School of Economics.

Everyone who knows me knows that I lean green. We recycle, use reusable grocery bags, garden, use alternate heat sources during the winter, utilize natural remedies, and are setting up a means of capturing rain water for use in and around our home. I've even written here about Church teaching regarding the environment. So my first thought after reading this quotation was this: "at the expense of the environment" I guess isn't an issue?

Let me back up.  A couple of weeks ago, I read this article titled Protecting environment must involve morals, Archbishop Chaput insists.  Read the relevant excerpt here. (If you're not reading American Papist, you really should be).

So this afternoon I decided to take a look out there to see what the environmentalists really do have to say.  After all, the article about Archbishop Chaput states that only one environmentalist reacted passively to the discovery that artificial contraception in the Denver water supply was the cause of bizarre mutations in trout.

Low and behold, I found the Earth Island Institute's website (Earth Island was founded by David Brower, FYI) containing an article discussing the downright frightening effects of BPAs (found in plastics and epoxy resins), livestock hormones and pesticides on our water supplies, along with another form of pollution:

...another major source of water contamination is all the pills we pop. The proportion of healthcare spending in North America devoted to prescription drugs, including estrogen-laced birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy, has risen dramatically in recent decades. In the last five years, prescriptions grew by 12 percent. The human body can absorb only some of the medication, and the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. Discarded medicines often find their way there too.

...it’s not looking like the “answer to pollution is dilution” theory works. After being ingested, excreted, and flushed down the drain, these drugs are not being filtered out by water treatment facilities. What that means is that people could be getting a small dose of thousands of different drugs with every glass of drinking water. The resulting health implications are just beginning to be realized.

(from Pink Water: Plastics, Pesticides, and Pills Are Contaminating Our Drinking Supply By Holly Pyhtila, August 2008; emphasis mine.  To read the article in its entirety, go to www.earthisland.org, scroll to the bottom of the page and in the search field type "Pink Water".)

As it turns out, birth control pills aren't just affecting some trout in a Denver stream. This problem is affecting all life on earth.

HMM.

So back to that first quotation from APP.  You know, the one about contraception being cheaper than human carbon emissions?