I have some bad news for you (CORRECTED)
The last week of 2021 was not one of hope. If you were paying attention, the real news was all bad
The End of Winter
CNN.com recently posted a short video and accompanying script called “The End of Winter,” all about the ongoing ice meltdown in Greenland. The creator, Porter Fox, has been chronicling disappearing ice shelfs and more across the Northern Hemisphere for several months. Greenland was just the last leg of his trek.
“On the first leg of my world tour, snow scientists in Oregon told me that a million-square miles of spring snowpack in the Northern Hemisphere had disappeared – in just the last 50 years,” he wrote. “Others, in Washington’s North Cascades, explained how the length of winter was projected to decline across the US, in some locations by more than 50 percent by 2050 and by 80 percent by 2090.”
The Swiss Alps will lose all their ice by the end of this century and the 660,000 square mile ice sheet in Greenland is beyond the possibility of salvation, too. “If it melts completely, sea levels will rise more than 20 feet, inundating every coastline in the world,” he later writes.
Oh, you’re expecting a joke or smarmy remark now? Pretty standard rhetorical fare, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
“Don’t Look Up”
It’s all about climate change, of course. Life on this planet is between 3.7 and 4 billion years old, yet devastation on such a massive scale will be a mere 300 or 400 years after the industrial revolution, irrespective of the fact that there have been ice ages and global warming (#in the past. The point is that this time the change is happening much faster, and it is human activity causing it.
The CNN special report is an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario. The heavily promoted new #Netflix movie, “Don’t Look Up,” (#dontlookupfilm) is about the end of the world period. I watched it, and while it felt like an extended Saturday Night Live parody that just isn’t as funny as the producers and writers seem to have thought, the metaphor employed for the stark realities facing Earth because of climate change was reasonable. Spoiler Alert! Sort of. A giant meteor is hurtling toward Earth, and when it hits, we’ll all be as dead as the dinosaurs. It will be an extinction event. A constant theme in the movie is that no one is taking the threat seriously enough because climate change is real, and it’s already enabling the kinds of truly unusual weather events we’ve seen in recent years. Personally, I like to think that most people can understand the threat. I mean, any clown on television can see it, perhaps even Homer Simpson.
Or, maybe not. We are all Homer Simpson, I’m afraid.
Covid At-home Test Kits
My son, daughter-in-law and grandson just returned from visiting family in England, my daughter-in-law’s home country. Proof of vaccination and negative Covid test results were required for travel, and in England they give away Covid rapid at-home tests for the asking, and they have plenty of them. Just go to any chemist (pharmacist to you). Meanwhile, my wife and I, who are staying in Arlington, Virginia this winter, where the kids live, can’t find a Covid rapid at-home test anywhere. (To be fair, the local health department is offering free testing in a park near us – the line has been hundreds of people long all day long recently.) But the drugstores are sold out for the rapid tests everywhere near us.
Yet I discovered one place where I could get a quick test, without waiting in a long, long line. It was at nearby Reagan National Airport, where I’ve been volunteering at the USO center. Uh, yeah, for prices ranging from $150 to $255 per but, hey, do you want to fly home or not? There are few international flights from Reagan (yes, Canada is a foreign country), but there are connecting flights that will take you anywhere, and some airlines and countries require a recent negative test. I’m not actually planning any trips, but can you say “war profiteering?”
Memorial, In Memoriam
Why are we going to the Olympics in Beijing? Hell, why are we competing alongside Russia?
Nothing against the individual athletes, of course, but the latest political atrocity by Vladimir Putin’s regime in the new Russian Empire was the closure of the country’s oldest and arguably most respected human rights group, #Memorial. Yes, it was a court that ordered the closure (a Supreme Court, no less, I think) but the law under which the group was punished was pure bull. What looked like an authoritarian regime a couple of weeks ago is starting to look a lot like Joe Stalin territory. Maybe Vlad will get a new nickname – Koba, perhaps?
On the other hand, our own Papa Joe presides over the Democratic Party in the United States, and virtually all Democrats in our House of Representatives recently voted on a law combating Islamophobia, including a section allowing our State Department to work with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in other countries to identify Islamophobia. But, folks, the corrupt Russian law that said Memorial was a ‘foreign agent’ identifies exactly the behavior that our Democratic Party is encouraging in our State Department.
Not the end of the world, but perhaps the end of civilization as we know it
Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital, recorded 150 murders as of December 21, well above the previous record, which was set last year. That’s 150 out of a population of 166,000. Compare that to Chicago, which saw 729 murders through the end of the year, the highest in 25 years, but Chicago has a population of about 2,700,000. You do the math to see what the relative murder rates are.
(An earlier version of this post misstated the estimated age of life on Earth.)