It's the end of the world as we know it, stupid!

FRANK MIELE

No one can forget the immortal words of James Carville when he was advising Bill Clinton how to get elected president in 1992: "It's the economy, stupid!" That certainly showed the power of brevity, didn't it?

So this week you get five shorter columns for the price of one longer one.

The common theme? It's the end of the world as we know it, stupid!

1) "It's the babies, stupid!"

Just when you were wondering what was causing global warming, the answer finally comes to us, via London's Daily Mail newspaper - It's the babies, stupid!

Toni Vernelli, who works for an "environmental charity," was the subject of a recent profile in the newspaper, and revealed that she had "terminated her pregnancy" 10 years ago in order to help "save the planet." She then valiantly had herself sterilized to make sure that she was not a vessel for the destruction of the planet.

For her it's a simple choice:

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of overpopulation."

I'm sure I speak for all right-thinking people when I echo the sentiments of her boyfriend after she was sterilized and say "Congratulations." We are sure you did the world a favor by not reproducing.

2 "It's the Latin, stupid!"

Pope Benedict XVI is considering restoring the Gregorian chant to a place of higher prominence in liturgical celebrations in the Catholic Church. This comes on the heels of a papal decision to allow churches to restore the Latin Mass if they wish to do so.

The director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, Monsignor Valentin Grau, applauded signs that the Gregorian chant had gained papal favor, and he said that the traditional church music of the sixth century "should become again the living soul of the assembly."

There's no denying the beauty and solemnity of Gregorian chants, but as far as becoming the "living soul" of the church, I think the pope might need to ask Monsignor Grau what part of "living" he doesn't understand.

Even 30 years ago when I was filling out my Gregorian chant collection, I was getting most of my records from what we called the "cut-out bin," the place where undesirable albums were sent for "deep discount."

The times they are a-changin' - and Gregorian chants will probably make a big comeback in the "living soul" of the church about the same time you and I start telling jokes in Latin.

3: "It's the Middle Ages, stupid!"

Speaking of the Middle Ages, we might want to move forward to the 7th century, so that we can consider the modern Islamic church, which has never budged one day past the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D.

As we have just seen in our discussion of the Catholic Church, this is not an uncommon tendency among religions in general. With a "received truth" in hand, there is really no impetus toward "progress" because what we call progress would necessarily also be a deviation from what is considered the law of God.

This is not a criticism per se, but rather a statement of fact.

In the case of Islam, the religion believes that the Prophet Muhammed is the last and most important messenger of God. Therefore, the faith adheres strictly to the teachings of Muhammed, and judges all actions and thoughts by how well they correspond to the Koran or other teachings associated with Muhammed.

To our tolerant Western society, it sounds harmless enough - until you realize that the Koran encourages, indeed demands, all kinds of medieval ideas which are anathema to free men and women.

Most recently, this was illustrated by the case of a 19-year-old Saudi woman who was sentenced to 200 lashes of the whip after being gang-raped by seven men.

What was the woman's crime? She was alone with a man to whom she was not related at the time the seven men attacked her and her companion. At first she only got 90 lashes, but then her lawyer complained about the sentence, so it was increased to six months in prison and 200 lashes, a potentially fatal assault. The lawyer's license to practice law was also suspended.

Saudi Arabia employs a strict reading of sharia law, or Islamic religious law, and so there is hardly any recourse available to the young woman. Only this: According to Saudi law, it is actually illegal for non-related men and women to meet in private, a concept known as "khalwa." Supposedly the man and woman actually met in public, until they were abducted and raped in private. If that is the case, the woman may win an appeal. If not, she has no hope at all because it is the law itself which has determined she has no rights.

The men who raped her, by the way, had originally received sentences between 10 months and five years. The appeals court did lengthen those sentences to between two and nine years, for what it's worth.

It should be considered a sign of the great difficulty the West faces in assimilating the world's 1.2 billion Muslims into the modern community that none of them could properly be offended by the young woman's sentence without renouncing the core of their religion.

Remember: The Middle Ages never ended; they just moved to the Middle East.

4: "It's a dictatorship, stupid!"

Hugo Chavez, the darling of the Hollywood elite, has grown more and more brazen in his disregard of fundamental human rights recently, and not a peep has been heard out of Sean Penn, Danny Glover or Cindy Sheehan.

Imagine that.

Chavez has already worked to shut down the free press, committed election fraud, and thrown out the concept of private property. Now, he is said to be confident of victory in a Dec. 2 referendum that will let him follow in Castro's benighted footsteps as "el presidente for life."

The Washington Post notes that under the so-called "constitutional reform," Chavez would have "broad powers to seize property, to dispose of Venezuela's foreign exchange reserves, to impose central government rule on local jurisdictions and to declare indefinite states of emergency under which due process and freedom of information would be suspended."

So how could the people of Venezuela possibly vote for this? Easy. Chavez has learned the lessons of socialism - promise people that they will get more for doing less. In this case, the referendum shortens the workday from eight to six hours. How do you say "Cool, dude!" in Spanish?

No need to rig elections when you can buy 'em.

5) "It's the end of everything, stupid!"

OK, this has to rank as one of my favorite stories of all time. Two professors of cosmology have recently reported in New Scientist magazine that the universe may be coming to a quicker conclusion than it would otherwise, thanks to the Nosy Parker instincts of none other than … cosmologists!

You've got to put on your thinking cap to fully comprehend this one, but the good news is that you don't have to worry about 1 through 4 on your list any more, because No. 5 blows them all away.

As many students of basic physics already know, science has theorized for some time that we change things simply by looking at them. For those who want to try to comprehend the theory more fully, do a quick Google search for "Schrodinger's cat" and you will find out that the cat is both living and dead until someone looks at it, at which point the observer forces an outcome and the cat either drops dead or goes its merry way. (Well, sort of, but that will have to do for the short version.)

Now Professors Lawrence Krauss and James Dent have taken the theory of Schrodinger's cat and applied it to the big picture, the really big picture. In fact, they claim that because scientists have caught a glimpse of some "what-not" called "dark energy," they have speeded up our return to the formless void from which we came. If we had kept our peepers shut, we could have avoided the whole mess on the theory that a "watched pot never boils" (seriously!). But cosmologists are the Captain Kirks of science, going where no man has gone before and having fun doing it.

How do you say "trippy" in quantum physics? Or in Latin, for that matter?

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com.