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Yesterday Tigger, beloved cat-familar and friend of Cara the HaintOps passed into eternity. Tigger had developed liver failure. She will be greatly missed by her co-cat Boo, her dog-brothers Darwin and Zeus, and of course her humans, Cara and Ryan and their children Dane and Lily (also known as the HaintGirl for those of you who’ve come to local booksignings).

My deepest sympathy for your loss and my highest praise for how you and your family are handling this very necessary part of life, death.

Cara, the HaintOps and mother of Lily the HaintGirl, has experienced a loss in her family. Tigger, her 13-year-old cat, had to be passed into eternity yesterday due to apparent liver failure. My deepest sympathy for her loss.

From Common Dreams comes this definitely uncheery report that there is no way to reverse the climactic changes we’re seeing now due to global warming. Seems that about 120 scientists from 11 countries have been working on a study for 20 years investigating the changes and the findings are not pretty. According to their findings, we can’t stop our bad behaviours fast enough.

Here’s a short quote from the article first printed in the Canadian Press:

One of the most surprising for David Barber, a sea ice specialist at the University of Manitoba, was the fact polar ice is melting at a rate of about 74,000 square kilometres each year - an area about the size of Lake Superior - and has been for the last 30 years.

“This is a very significant result, and it’s not some sort of trend that’s going to shift back the other way,” Barber said Tuesday.

Barber added there is increasing concern in the scientific community that there are factors actually speeding up the melt, but he cautions it’s too late to reverse the trend.
“The time to act actually was a few decades ago,” he said.

“We’re not going to be able to shift the economies of the planet to get off this fossil fuel addiction in a week, a year or a decade. But we have to start the process now to have some stability for future generations.”

So much for the Bush administration’s assertions that global warming can be dealt with by new technologies. File this one under the, “we should have noticed when the armadillos started moving north” category. Too bad. It was such a nice planet…

If you haven’t heard about it, HBO’s new documentary Dealing Dogs throws much needed light on the very ugly side of the dog business, puppy mills. If you’ve ever wondered if the puppy mills are really THAT bad, check out this film. I haven’t seen it but living in Missouri I’ve seen and heard of the evil incarnate that are those who cruelly breed dogs just to make money.

As I look at my “furkids,” I cannot even imagine how completely rotted away at the core those breeders featured in this film must be to treat dogs with such hatred and cruelty.

I hate to think what sort of lives await these “people.”

The world must halt greenhouse gas emissions and reverse them within two decades or watch the planet spiralling towards destruction, scientists said on Monday.

We’re down to it according to leading scientists. No more wishy-washy “maybes” according to the guys who know. For more information check out this article from Reuters on Truthout.

Synchronicity is all around us, isn’t it? Just this week I got an email from a reader on the East Coast who said that while she was reading Haint, the weather was much warmer than normal and the wind blew incessantly. She said it really set the tone for her reading of Haint. For those of you who’ve read it, you’ll recognize why.

In many ways our cultural evolution is really devolution. What does this say about where Haint’s world will be in a century or so?

Look at commerce for example. We’ve gone from cheering for the Jean Val Jeans (Les Miserables’ hero who redeems his life on part by proudly providing good jobs and lives working people in a French village) to cheering for corporate tycoons so far removed emotionally from the lives and welll-being of their employees that they might as well be living in different countries. You’re right, they ARE often living in different countries so let’s say different universes.

And really they ARE in different universes, aren’t they? The Ken Lays and Donald Trumps and Carly Fiorinos have no more feeling for the lives of everyday people making, oh say 34K as they do for Martians with three eyes and indescribable mouths. The language may be ostensibly the same but they sure can’t converse. Of course, the Trumps and Lays can send messages down to the Martians below but the Martians don’t seem to be able to send messages back up the chain, do they?

But back to evolution or devolution. When Victor Hugo’s hero redeems his life and character by spending it making better lives for the villagers, we all felt uplifted. When he was chased for an old “crime” we all felt betrayed by the supposed system of law. Why? Because we realized that Val Jean’s greater good moves him past the relatively puny crime.

Now, we cheer unbelievable egotistic posturing in business leaders who would just as soon throw their workers against each other in dog pit fights to the death as look at them. As long as their is an endless supply of workers to feed their egos and pockets and egos again, these “leaders” don’t care what happens. How so different than the fictional hero of a time that we suppose to be less ethical, less advanced than our own.

What does this say about us and our society that we applaud the cruel and grasping, instead of the caring and giving? Perhaps it says that we are not moving forward as we would think or hope. Perhaps it says that we should rethink the way we want the future to look. Hugo did, and saw a world where leadership was a trust, not an entitlement.

Perhaps in Haint’s world, we should see if that is true as well.