Tri-Cataclysm

 We’re living in a weirdly dangerous world. I’m old—86 by at least one count—and I have never quite seen anything like this age we now inhabit. What the hell is going on?

1. COVID – perhaps the most widespread and deadliest disease the world has ever seen.  Well, maybe The Black Death (Bubonic Plague) during the 14^th century was worse, especially given the level of ignorance about disease that existed.  Yeah, it was bad then too, but in the 14^th century, we could blame it on actual ignorance, whereas now we have this stupidity thing we have to add in. Imagine 21^st century people yelling about their “freedom” being imposed upon, by requiring them to wear masks, and even, get vaccinated.  I imagine in the 14^th century, people would have accepted these restrictions happily.  When the alternative was death, people used to pay attention and do the right thing. I think of polio, smallpox, measles, etc.  All those diseases we eliminated because people got vaccinated.  What a concept, huh? Now, folks regard interventions as some sort of government plot to be resisted at all costs.

2. Climate Change – climate change may in fact be the most catastrophic human-caused event ever to occur on this planet. Although our science community has been warning us at least since the 1970s (that’s 50 years ago folks) that we needed to do something serious about constraining carbon emissions, we have largely ignored them, until now. And now, it seems less the underlying science than catastrophic wild fires, huge storms, flooding, droughts, each seemingly larger and more damaging than the last that has finally gotten our attention.  We humans seem not to learn about anything important until it smacks us across the face.  Even that cute little girl, Greta Thunberg, who has been yelling at us and warning us for several years now, is only now beginning to attract our attention.  She has been organizing school climate strikes since about 2018, when she was 15 years of age.  Think of that. At age 15, she was organizing for action to defeat climate change.  But, despite the attention she has received, it seems we really needed to be smacked across the face—the floods, wild fires, droughts are happily providing that slap. Now, we still need to observe carefully whether humans will also figure a way out of actual action to arrest climate catastrophe.  Real action around the globe is kind of like gun control in America. There are always arguments around actual corrective changes, without any actual changes taking place. And with climate, reducing carbon emissions requires us to radically alter how we manage to transport ourselves about, and how we produce energy. Those industries would rather “Keep on Truck’n” and so they will happily bribe political officialdom to allow just that.

3. Afghanistan (and other natural catastrophes) – We seemingly never actually learn anything from our past excursions into military disasters. Apparently America has never been really any good at this war thingie, except when it involves two big armies, at least one of which is European in origin. We were quite exceptional in that War of Independence, War of 1812, Civil War, World War I and World War II. Note that all involved actual formal armies that more or less understood war in the same terms. We succeeded by being better armed, and better organized.  But it seems, whenever we drift into a “conflict” between two foreign entities not of European origin, without reliance on conventional armies and conventional army strategies and tactics, we fumble around like teenagers at their first boy-girl party.  I’m thinking of, say, Korea, Vietnam, and the whole of the Middle East messiness.  In none of those did we ever manage to achieve the clear Winner and Peace Treaty thing.  We seem to have achieved a kind of stalemate in Korea, actual defeat in Vietnam, the first in our history, and then a retreat in the face of a likely defeat in our various Middle Eastern enterprises. At least the British, in India, achieved a kind of civilized and ultimately peaceful withdrawal—call it what you will. But they left with all their troops intact, and a reasonably civilized resulting governmental solution in its wake.   That would have been absolutely splendid in Afghanistan, but it was not to be. First the Brits, then the Russians, then finally the Americans tried to secure a stable, peaceful government there, but alas, none of us knew how to do that. Mainly, of course, neither do the Afghans. The Taliban taking over is just one more period in Afghan history in which one corrupt regime replaces another corrupt regime.  Exactly what we will all consider doing when this Taliban regime fails and the place falls into chaos once more, with catastrophic effects on surrounding countries, is anyone’s guess.  I understand that our corrupt republican party is now considering impeaching Joe Biden for his disastrous Afghan withdrawal, and to that, I reply . . . Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. You guys really have no class and no clue do you?  Taking advice again from that Giant Turd at MaraLago??

But I assume that we will go on, unless the republican party decides they prefer the Trump-Christian Taliban approach to government reorganization—revolution. Hopefully not, though.  I keep wondering when we will see a replacement party begin to take shape in America. See, we actually need two functioning parties to argue and to bring about intelligent changes to our approach to life.  Hey, George Will, why not return to Life and begin yelling for a new party?

But this TriCataclysm has really begun affecting life on earth.  It seems difficult at best to awaken each morning and smell the roses, and absorb the sunlight, and truly enjoy that first cup of espresso. Every joy is now tinged with these dark elements of potential disaster. I know, I know, it’s tough being 86 and trying to find happiness.  But, looking at and listening to Greta, it seems equally tough being 18 and trying to find happiness. She just has more energy to expend on that vital task.  Well, good luck Greta. You may save us after all, just don’t expect too much from we Americans. We seem to value money and that great Ponzi Scheme in the sky called organized Religion a bit more than rational thoughts about humanity. Keep on kiddo. We need more folks just like you Greta.

And on our overall theme, I came across an article on dinosaurs. Remember them? Well, think of us as modern dinosaurs. See below . . . or, if you prefer, just go have a second glass of wine. Ta ta.

____________________________________________________________________________________

 

And from the National Geographic (Dinosaur extinction facts and information | National Geographic)

One of the most well-known theories for the death of the dinosaurs is the Alvarez hypothesis, named after the father-and-son duo Luis and Walter Alvarez. In 1980, these two scientists proposed the notion that a meteor the size of a mountain slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, filling the atmosphere with gas, dust, and debris that drastically altered the climate.

Their key piece of evidence is an oddly high amount of the metal iridium in what’s known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, layer—the geologic boundary zone that seems to cap any known rock layers containing dinosaur fossils. Iridium is relatively rare in Earth's crust but is more abundant in stony meteorites, which led the Alvarezs to conclude that the mass extinction was caused by an extraterrestrial object. The theory gained even more steam when scientists were able to link the extinction event to a huge impact crater along the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. At about 93 miles wide, the Chicxulub crater seems to be the right size and age to account for the dino die-off.

In 2016, scientists drilled a rock core inside the underwater part of Chicxulub, pulling up a sample stretching deep beneath the seabed. This rare peek inside the guts of the crater showed that the impact would have been powerful enough to send deadly amounts of vaporized rock and gases into the atmosphere, and that the effects would have persisted for years. And in 2019, paleontologists digging in North Dakota found a treasure trove of fossils extremely close to the K-Pg boundary, essentially capturing the remains of an entire ecosystem that existed shortly before the mass extinction. Tellingly, the fossil-bearing layers contain loads of tiny glass bits called tektites—likely blobs of melted rock kicked up by the impact that solidified in the atmosphere and then rained down over Earth.

Volcanic fury

However, other scientists maintain that the evidence for a massive meteor impact event is inconclusive, and that the more likely culprit may be Earth itself.

Ancient lava flows in India known as the Deccan Traps also seem to match nicely in time with the end of the Cretaceous, with massive outpourings of lava spewing forth between 60 and 65 million years ago. Today, the resulting volcanic rock covers nearly 200,000 square miles in layers that are in places more than 6,000 feet thick. Such a vast eruptive event would have choked the skies with carbon dioxide and other gases that would have dramatically changed Earth’s climate.

Proponents of this theory point to multiple clues that suggest volcanism is a better fit. For one, some studies show that Earth’s temperature was changing even before the proposed impact event. Other research has found evidence for mass die-offs much earlier than 66 million years ago, with some signs that dinosaurs in particular were already in a slow decline in the late Cretaceous. What’s more, volcanic activity is frequent on this planet and is a plausible culprit for other ancient extinctions, while giant meteor strikes are much more rare. This all makes sense, supporters say, if ongoing volcanic eruptions were the root cause of the world-wide K-Pg extinctions.

Why not both?

Increasingly, scientists trying to unravel this prehistoric mystery are seeing room for a combination of these ideas. It’s possible the dinosaurs were the unlucky recipients of a geologic one-two punch, with volcanism weakening ecosystems enough to make them vulnerable to an incoming meteor.

 

Crises of the Mind

I used to work in aerospace, first at the Firestone Guided Missile Division, where we produced a guided missile sort of right out of WW II.  The Corporal was a direct follow-on to Hitler’s V II rocket that he used to send over the waters into Britain’s back yard during the war.  Ours had a range of about 100 miles, and was essentially a battlefield weapon. It was an odd weapon, since an airplane, almost any WW II fighter-bomber would have caused more enemy destruction at less cost and fuss.

But then in 1957 I switched to Lockheed, the new Missiles and Space Company just beginning to operate in the San Francisco Bay Area, just before that turned into Silicon Valley. Lockheed was designing and producing several creatures. The one on which I worked as an engineer was the Polaris Missile. Now that was a giant step ahead in wartime technology. The Polaris was a formidable Cold War weapon. (It was intended to be launched from a submarine.) Yeah, instead of sitting on the ground somewhere in the US or Europe, this dude was intended to be carried around under water in a nuclear submarine. Now each submarine was large enough to house 16 launch tubes, so 16 Polaris missiles.  And each missile could carry 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads. Now think of that. Each submarine could launch enough weaponry to destroy 160 enemy targets, as in Cities.  How’s that for an advance in Cold War weaponry?

I think as engineers, we kept our minds on the day’s tasks at hand—designing some piece of the monster. We really did not think much about what we were really about—designing a mechanism that could destroy much of the world, if not the entire globe.  I mean, we showed up each day for work at around 8:30, stayed until 5-5:30ish and then went home, or sometimes out for an after work drink at a local pub.  Even there, we didn’t talk much about what we were about. Mainly, we chatted about movies we had seen, what our kids were up to, or maybe where we might go for our vacation.  Well, we also chatted about cars a lot.  As engineers, we all loved cars, especially sports cars, or other unique creatures of the road. Many of my engineer buddies owned exotic cars. One of them drove a 1927 Rolls Royce. Another fellow drove a 1959 Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing.  MGs, TRs, Jags, Alfa Romeos.  Lots of money went into that auto parade.  And so, there was a lot of chattering about cars.  I had a wife and a young child, so, of course, I did not own a sports car. I drove a Borgward Isabella (look it up).

And so we worked and played along through the 1950s into the 1960s.  And then we had an election in 1960, and John F. Kennedy was elected. Such a nice, clear moment in time. A decent, intelligent human being as our president. Wow, what a concept. But throughout this period, tensions arising out of that Cold War with Russia kept increasing. I assume our missile development program might have contributed somewhat to those tensions.  But increase they did.  And then this dude Nikita Khrushchev showed up on the scene in Moscow.  And he wanted to shake things up a bit. So he looked around and then he came across this other dude, named Fidel Castro who had taken over Cuba. Fidel was an ornery dude looking for a way to increase his relative independence of the US. So, Nikita began talking with Fidel, and they arrived at a momentous decision—the Russians would respond to our missilery in Eastern Europe with some missiles in Cuba, and maybe add some Russian aircraft he could use to survey American interests.

So beginneth  the Cuban Missile Crisis. And what was that crisis you might ask? Well, here from Wiki is a little brief on that period.

“The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962 (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, tr. Karibsky krizis, IPA: [kɐˈrʲipskʲɪj ˈkrʲizʲɪs]), or the Missile Scare, was a 1 month, 4 day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba. Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in U.S. national security and nuclear war preparation. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.^[3]

In response to the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro in July 1962, and construction of a number of missile launch facilities started later that summer.

Meanwhile, the 1962 United States elections were under way, and the White House denied charges for months that it was ignoring dangerous Soviet missiles 90 mi (140 km) from Florida. The missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range R-12 (NATO code name SS-4) and intermediate-range R-14 (NATO code name SS-5) ballistic missile facilities.

When this was reported to President John F. Kennedy, he then convened a meeting of the nine members of the National Security Council and five other key advisers in a group that became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM). During this meeting, President Kennedy was originally advised to carry out an air strike on Cuban soil in order to compromise Soviet missile supplies, followed by an invasion of the Cuban mainland. After careful consideration, President Kennedy chose a less aggressive course of action to avoid a declaration of war. After consultation with them, Kennedy ordered a naval "quarantine" on October 22 to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. By declaring a quarantine rather than a blockade, the United States was able to avoid a further conflict. This quarantine fell short of a traditional blockade and so avoided the implications of a state of war.^[4] The US announced it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.

After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to not invade Cuba again. Secretly, the United States agreed that it would dismantle all of the Jupiter MRBMs, which had been deployed in Turkey against the Soviet Union. There has been debate on whether or not Italy was included in the agreement as well. While the Soviets dismantled their missiles, some Soviet bombers remained in Cuba, forcing the Naval quarantine to stay in place until November 20 of that year.^[4]

When all offensive missiles and the Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba, the blockade was formally ended on November 20, 1962. The negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union pointed out the necessity of a quick, clear, and direct communication line between the two Superpowers. As a result, the Moscow–Washington hotline was established. A series of agreements later reduced US–Soviet tensions for several years until both parties eventually resumed expanding their nuclear arsenals.”

And there we sat every day, designing that big missile that might one day destroy all of Russia, while simultaneously listening to daily news reports about the worsening crisis on our southern doorstep. Would they actually launch missiles at us? And, if so, where would those missiles be aimed? Every day, we would gather after work and chat, while we drank martini’s, or gin and tonics, and pondered the possibility that we might not actually make it to the next day.

We actually discussed what we might do. If the missiles began, would we run off to the Pacific coast, or would we head for the hills, to hide out in the mountains, assuming we could actually reach there? Yes, we actually held such discussions, and so the possibility of the end of our lives began entering our consciousness.  See, this was not World War II we were pondering, where all the action took place beyond that great sea. No, this wartime might arrive right on our doorsteps.  And so the tensions began increasing, while our work on a device to destroy the Russian people continued.

This period of crisis lasted for several months and did not end formally until November 1962, when we began to breathe normally again, and we were able to think about such things as sports cars, or families, or vacations.

And then my life regained its normalcy.

Now life in this country and, in fact this world, is rarely without some crisis in the making. Goodness, remember Ronald Reagan, messing around in both Iran and Central America? Oh, he did love to stir that pot. And let us not forget Korea, and then Vietnam, that endless blood sport. But with all those horrific blood sports, the action was elsewhere. It was technically possible to get on with the activities of your daily living, and not focus every hour of every day on those warring events.

And we did enjoy all of our activities of daily living. We got to travel a lot, even living for a few years in India, traveling to Europe, and other exotic locations (does Australia qualify as exotic?).  And then we retired and moved to North Carolina to be close to a daughter and some grandkids.

That retirement phase has been quite wonderful I must confess. We have managed to see much of our family both here and farther away with some frequency, and so retirement has been a wonder.

Then recently, this young lady, one Greta by name, began appearing in our consciousness.  And she began saying things that others had said for several decades, although quite without notice.  I think scientists had been saying since maybe the 1970s that we really needed to begin paying attention to our global climate. That we were really screwing up with our emissions of carbon into our atmosphere and that, eventually we would begin paying a price. That is, our climate would in fact begin to change—heating up our globe and changing our environment in deadly ways. But they always put off the period when the dues had to be paid.

Suddenly, enter 2020. We now had arguably the stupidest human on the planet as our president.  And then, that dreaded little creature known as the COVID entered our world in the Chinese city of Wuhan. And again, we were preoccupied, so for a time we just pointed our fingers at China, until that little COVID creature spread beyond China. And then it really spread, and people all over the globe, including especially here in America, began to sicken and then die. It seemed wherever stupid political leadership was in place, the disease spread more rapidly, and more people died. And America sported arguably the dumbest human we have known, so we did relatively little to prevent the worst effects.

And then, finally, 2021 arrived and we managed to kick out our Neanderthal president (although he continues to deny that fact). But he succeeded in not managing the disease, to the point that hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily.

But were we done with catastrophe? Ummm, no, because then our climate suddenly began changing in big ways. California has always had forest fires, but suddenly whole regions of the state were burning away.  The entire Pacific Northwest was turning into a tropical zone. Areas that normally consider 85 or maybe 90 very hot, now suddenly were seeing temperatures creep up into the 120s and above range.  And we suddenly had fires beginning because of lightning (or Jewish Space Lasers, take your pick).  Storms were beyond dangerous.

Ice sheets were collapsing. In one region, an entire town began sinking due to water being sucked out of the substrata, causing the soil structure beneath to collapse.

Climate change had joined forces with COVID to change the conversation.  Was the globe on fire, and would that fiery creature get to you or would COVID end it all for you? Take your pick.

And so that terror-filled mind-set has entered our world.  And still we have people denying the worst effects of the disease or climate change—take your pick. It seems that stupid people everywhere are into denial. Here we have two governors, Florida and Texas who specialize in denial, and their people are dying heavily as a direct result.

Now, unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no easy answer. We can’t sit down at a table with Mister COVID, or Madame Climate-Change.  No, we only have responses that can play out over the long haul. And the responses must begin with POLITICS, and then they must engage the world of MONEY.  We must stop electing stupid people to govern us.  Texas and Florida are examples, but the world of American politics is rife with idiocy.  How in heavens name did anyone even consider voting for Trump or Green, or Bohbert,  or Cruz, or Rubio, or Mitch,  or, for heaven’s sake now Giuliani?  Really? Rudy gets your vote? Really? And you watch Hannity & Co, and expect to understand anything??

So, we really need a wholesale re-outfitting of our Congress, and our State houses. And we need to begin demanding some honesty and some actual intelligence in our public discourse.  Because, folks,  we are killing ourselves with these folks-yep, it’s exactly like committing suicide.  It’s like being tossed into a cellar filled with sickly degenerates and then deciding that we really are not going to get vaccinated against their disease.

Now, you are entirely correct that all of this is your choice. Yep, you can continue to support the idiots of our world. OR, you can open your eyes and your minds, and begin considering human intelligence as a pathway to a new world.  Yep, there are actually folks out there in America who possess functional brains, and who are willing to at least begin confronting the problem of MONEY as a corrupting influence in the World.

It’s really your choice folks.