I tire of man’s quibble. I know freedom, And riots aren’t freedom. Once we strolled groves Not planted by man; men didn’t seed or weed them. Once breaking bread broke fragrant, fresh-baked loaves. Now communion’s become a mere cracker. I long for the Lord. My patience is frayed. When innocence chirps, I want to smack her. I’m becoming a crab. All that I’ve made Is sterile. I confess my bankruptcy. Only You can make all clashing noise become song. Without You all men’s sly activity Is only a mess. We do it all wrong. How do You do it? I haven’t a chance But You can change all with one loving glance.
For years I have had a Survivalist tendency, which regularly embarrasses me. There are few things more humbling than to predict the end of the world, and have the world keep right on going.
To be blunt, I just don’t see how the world does it. I try to be generous, and see the good side of people, but the fact of the matter is that people aren’t perfect, and when push comes to shove all people, (including myself), can have their imperfections make them be fools. When I was young I felt the grown-ups were fools, and when older I felt my peers were fools, and now that I at long last have grown gray, I deem young whippersnappers fools. During elections I feel I’m voting for the lesser of two foolishnesses. Fools always are running the show, and it seems no good could possibly come of it, but the show goes on.
It occurs to me that there is no possible way such fools could be responsible for the fact humanity hasn’t destroyed itself, and therefore someone else must be running the show.
And No, the “someone else” isn’t big-shot fools with piles of money who think they can avoid public scrutiny by pulling strings behind-the-scenes. Why not? Because such blowhards are more blatant than they think; they think others are fools and they are wise, but even fools see through their craft; they are transparent to even the slow-witted, given time; their duplicity catches up with them, which has given rise to statement’s such as Sir Walter Scott’s,
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”
And Abraham Lincoln’s,
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
In other words, the people who may think they are “running the show” are perhaps the greatest of fools. They think they are “in control” but in the end they discover they are not, which proves they are fools.
The Assyrian king Sennacherib was certain he was “in control” when he marched on Jerusalem with perhaps 185,000 troops, but for some reason Jerusalem is the one city he never captured. Sennacherib didn’t like to admit there was anything he didn’t control, and later he bragged he had caged the king of Jerusalem like a bird.
Sennacherib’s version of history
Of course the Jew’s had a different version. As Isaiah tells the tale, Sennacherib got too cocky, and said no city’s gods had been able to save any city’s citizens from his armies, and Jerusalem’s god Yahweh was no different, whereupon Yahweh killed his army in their sleep overnight, sending Sennacherib home like a dog with his tail between its legs, where he was later assassinated by his own son.
Many secular people dislike giving God any glory, and seek scientific explanations. They pooh-pooh the idea of some hocus-pocus bringing an authority “in control” to a screeching halt, and search for a scientific explanation. One idea is that the king of Jerusalem, Hezekiah, had diverted all the clean water through tunnels into Jerusalem, and the Assyrians were forced to drink dirty water and contracted Cholera.
Hezekiah’s “Siloam Tunnel” which brought water into Jerusalem
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judea remained an island of independence midst the vastness of the Assyrian Empire (and, in the end, Sennacherib indeed was murdered by his own son). So history demonstrates we are not the first people who have seen our confident plans derailed by some invisible germ. Nor does such derailing need a germ like the Corona Virus; (a tsunami will do, if you are the king of Atlantis).
The 1954 Polio Epidemic was the invisible germ which derailed my father’s confident expectations. He was a surgeon who had developed his dexterity to an amazing, almost ridiculous, degree. When he stitched a severed artery together he sewed twenty tiny stitches, tying each knot with one hand. It’s a pity there is no film of his fingers at work. It’s also a pity some mindless germ could come along and paralyze such fingers.
Events like that tend to test our faith. We lose faith in ourselves when we see we are weak, and we lose faith in the world when the world hits us with cruel fate. So what is left to have faith in?
It is at this point there is a great divide. Some say there is nothing but the world to have faith in, and some say there is an Other-worldly Creator.
Those given to worldly desires are prone to slipping into a might-makes-right mentality, a survival-of-the-fittest which sees brutality as acceptable, as it gets you what you want, whereas kindness gets you nothing but kicked, and is seen as weakness. This brutality becomes a test of faith in and of itself, as the brutal mock those who differ, and torture those who believe in a loving Creator, in a sense attempting prove creation isn’t loving, with hate.
Lions licking the wounds of St. Euphemia as she dies after being brutally tortured for not worshiping the politically-correct god Aries.
It must have been a bit disconcerting to the might-makes-right mentality when they threw St. Euphemia to the lions, and rather than mauling her the lions tended to her wounds, however, because eventually she did die, as far as might-makes-right was concerned they had proven their point. They saw no angels nor “other side”, and death was a finality to them, and in a sense was what they were (and are) ruled by, and what they have faith in. In the long run they may be wrong, but they see things in terms of the short term.
One has to admit that it is a bit of a drag to have to die to see there is something other than might-makes-right, which is worthy of faith. One prefers to see evidence without needing to be a martyr. I suppose that is why we like movies where the good guys win. And the poet-king David did assert that if you live long enough, and can survive a great deal of betrayal and hardship, you will see the Creator’s kindness this side of heaven. In Psalm 31 he sings,
…The wicked plot against the righteous And gnash their teeth at them; But the Lord laughs at the wicked For he knows their day is coming. The wicked draw the sword And bend the bow To bring down the poor and needy, To slay those whose ways are upright. But their swords will pierce their own hearts, And their bows will be broken. Better the little that the righteous have Than the wealth of many wicked…
And later in the same psalm David reassures,
…I was young and now am old Yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken Or their children begging bread. They are generous and lend freely, Their children will be blessed…
This seems an extraordinary thing for David to assert, considering he went through the agony of seeing his son Absalom attempt to usurp his throne in much the same manner that Sennacherib’s son attempted. David definitely paid his dues to sing his blues. The testing of one’s faith is no child’s play, but once one is “tried and true” there seems to be a powerful assurance given to one that a Loving Creator watches over them; an assurance which appears to be nonsense to believers in might-makes-right.
In the eyes of might-makes-right any faith in a Loving Creator is a sort of con artistry. They roll their eyes when they see a priest waving belching incense-holders and speaking Latin, impressing the ignorant with their mambo-jumbo. In fact priests raising communion crackers, and stating “Hoc Est Corpus”, may be the derivation of “Hocus Pocus”, which in turn may be the derivation of “Hoax.” In the eyes of might-makes-right, religion seems purely an act, to trick suckers with.
Such sophist cynics feel the common man is ignorant and superstitious, nothing but “Deplorables” and “Useful Idiots” and “Bitter Clingers”, mere fools who are easily swayed by glitter and stampeded by fear, which may be why they create their own hoaxes involving Global Warming and the Global Pandemic. However the people see through such hoaxes, given time, and the creators of the hoaxes then become desperate, and make their hoax a sort of requirement, a false god such as the politically-correct worship of Aries which St. Euphima was martyred for not kowtowing to. Some things never seem to change. The politically-correct of our times become equally furious at those who do not kowtow to their modern politically-correct hoaxes. They feel they have the might and it gives them the right. However they are not truly the ones “in control”, though they may think they are.
A hoax cannot exist independently; it depends upon a Real Thing it is pretending to be. In some ways it is a copy, an imitation, and even a flattery of the Real Thing, up to and until the moment it attempts to replace the Real Thing. From that moment on it suffers in comparison, and people cannot be stopped from comparing.
This brings me back to where I started, looking around myself and seeing the lunatics are running the asylum. It has looked that way to me for decades. Of course, I am a fool to be calling everyone else a fool. But at least I’m not pretending I’m in control. I acknowledge that, though I may be creative, I am not the Creator. I feel I am walking about in the pages of a magnificent epic written by an Author who was there before page one, and will be there after the last page. If anyone is “in control”, it is the Author who wrote the plot.
Lastly, I feel this Author is compassionate. The point of his epic is not that “might makes right”, but rather the point is a beautiful mystery called “Love”. Also, because the Author sees ahead, death has not the sting to Him it has to us who live in the moment. We live in this world, and are horrified by the fact six million Jews were led into gas chambers. The Author is less horrified because he sees six million Jews walking out on the other side.
Even so, one wonders what is so compassionate about allowing a might-makes-right madman to kill six million, and the answer seems to be that the Author feels freedom is a beautiful thing. He allows fools to be foolish, (up to a point). He wants the characters in his epic to figure things out for themselves, and this involves “free will”. If He wants absolute obedience he has his angels. However we mere mortals are apparently made to be more than robots to God’s majestic will (which is what His beautiful angels are), and this involves the freedom to disobey. Because we are fools, our freedom blunders into various forms of addiction and slavery, and bogs us down in the evil tendencies of might-makes-right, including even mass murder, until our foolishness finally wises us up, and we come to understand true freedom involves love, respecting the dignity of all, caring for the unfortunate and freeing others from all forms of slavery, until at long last we figure out that true freedom is obeying God’s majestic will, like the angels do, only we don’t do it like robots; rather we freely do it because we’ve learned to want it, as it merges us with the absolute freedom and independence of the Author, and we perhaps even cease our wandering in the pages of His creation’s plot, and vanish outside the epic’s covers.
I’ll flatter myself by stating the ideas in the above paragraph are somewhat profound, but I know from years of experience they are sheer foolishness to the politically-correct might-makes-right crowd. To them it is just another one of my lame poems. I’ve wasted years intimating to the overbearing, attempting to hint control may be in Hands more capable than theirs, and I am all too familiar with the jeering push-back of the politically-correct. And this again brings me back to where I began, which is my perception that those who think they are “in control” are fools.
While I am no prophetic historian-poet like Isaiah, I can relate to what he describes in the sixth chapter of his book. Eager to bring God’s message to his people, he learns God’s message to his people is basically, “You are too deaf to hear the message.” Then, when Isaiah wants to know when the people of Israel will stop being so deaf, he learns it will only be after the land has been reduced to a wasteland.
I thought about this event, which occurred roughly 2750 years ago, when I walked into the market around two months ago and saw there was abruptly no toilet paper. There was really no reason for such a shortage in a land as wealthy as the United States, but the corona-virus-panic was making people behave like fools. I confess I felt a certain nervousness, for I wondered, like Isaiah, how long my homeland would persist with such foolishness. I wondered if my homeland might even become a wasteland.
I’ve been wondering that for a half century. That is how long it has been since I felt the general public moved from sanity to foolishness. Back in 1969 a sort of revival occurred, which some called “The Summer Of Love,” and it seemed people briefly saw how beautiful life might be, and behaved as if such a sanity was already here. I felt a very real hope at that time, but since then my faith has been tested by foolishness after foolishness.
What did I see back then? Well, people spoke of “Truth, Love and Understanding”, and it wasn’t insincerely. People really seemed to believe it, and what’s more to live it, albeit briefly. Only later did hypocrisy set in with a vengeance. “Truth, Love and Understanding” were cheapened.
Not that “Truth, Love and Understanding” are any less beautiful, but they also can be mere words, words which have been used by people to sell breakfast cereal, or to seduce another person’s spouse, or to gain votes, until the true meaning of the words have been adulterated by low lusts and greedy desires and blind hate, to a point where they have lost their real meaning, as words. They have shrunken to hoaxes, pretending to be The Real.
That which is beneficial to the human spirit has been dirtied by the corrupt. To deprive the human spirit in such a manner is a prescription for a poverty worse than physical poverty (which can be a blessing), for it is a spiritual poverty, and can even be a worship of death and a hatred of life and of life’s true “Truth, Love and Understanding.” Such changing-of-the-meaning-of-words is called, “perversion.”
To “pervert” is, “to cause to turn away from what is right, proper, or good”. But what is it that causes people to turn away? Many weaknesses, but largely it is fear of losing stuff, or losing the position which enables one to get stuff. With the fear comes a sort of blindness, the mindless behavior seen when shoppers get out of hand at a department store’s sale, and fight each other over flimsy garments ( or the infamous “Cabbage Patch Dolls”), which they don’t really need. Dignity is disheveled into frothing foolishness which cares more for worldly rubbish than the One who made this world possible. And they call this behavior, “political correctness.”
No good can come from such nonsense, which is why I’ve been confidently predicting the end of the world any day now, for fifty years. It is a good thing I never became rich, for if had I the money I would have built a bunker in the hills, and only come out once a year like the ground-hog to be spooked by my shadow. It is also a good thing I’m not an Old Testament prophet like Isaiah, for the punishment for false prophesy back then was to be led to the edge of town and stoned to death. By now I’d have been stoned to death around fifty times. The only ones worse at forecasting the future have been the weathermen.
Coincidentally “Weathermen” was the name we used for a radical group during my youth, a fringe of the leftist SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) officially named “The Weather Underground”. Disgusted with the world’s foolishness, especially the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, they decided the appropriate response was to blow up the “establishment” with bombs. The only people they managed to kill were themselves, when a bomb they were constructing blew up, but their activity did make people uneasy, especially if you happened to live next door to the bomb factory, like the young actor Dustin Hoffman:
Dustin Hoffman removing painting from apartment next to bomb blast
The foolishness of thinking blowing things up solves problems was likely a consequence of a sort of despair my generation felt, facing the problems of our time. (This despair may have been in part due to the fact marijuana doesn’t solve problems.) I thought the group “Ten Years After” captured the despair well with their song, “I’d Love To Change The World.”
The more extreme radicals were not willing to take Ten Years After’s advice, “I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.” They wanted to take power into their own hands, and “gain control”. Out of this foolishness came professor Saul Lewinsky’s teaching, distilling the need for control into eight basic areas:
1) Healthcare– Control healthcareand you control the people
2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.
What I see in such a foolish and destructive desire to control others is a distrust of others approaching paranoid derangement. The sense others are fools is not extended to the self; there is no true sense of brotherhood. For example, while Stalin may have called many “comrade” before the Russian Revolution in 1917, the definition of “comrade” became narrower and narrower, as the definition of “enemies of the state” became broader and broader, until by his death he had “liquidated” nearly every person his own age who he had originally called “comrade”. When he “reorganized” agriculture it was not aimed at feeding Russia and in fact millions starved; it was all about control. Food must not be produced by independent farmers, but by the “collective”, which was a disaster.
In fact a couple of attributes of the paranoid mindset that must “control” others is its failure to produce, and its amazing inefficiency. The less freedom is allowed the less people have. It is all well and good to propose a “five year plan” that sets goals, but the goals are seldom achieved, and often the consequences of “control” are poverty and famine, such as has recently (2019) been seen in Venezuela. Society as a whole becomes poorer. This explains the question mark in the lyrics of the Ten Years After song I referred to earlier:
Tax the rich, feed the poor Till there are no rich no more?
Much of the inefficiency is due to people without experience writing the rules and regulations which “order” the people who have actual experience. Bureaucrats who have never run a business order about businessmen, spinsters who have never raised a child order about mothers, men who have never had dirt beneath their nails order about farmers. It is a recipe for disaster. The inherent distrust and paranoia which distrusts others is a self-fulfilling fear; if you distrust the ability of fellow fools to produce, production plummets.
It is amazing how different things become when you allow fellow fools freedom. Rather than merely calling them “comrade” you treat them like they actually are comrades. It involves true brotherhood and true sisterhood, the awareness that although we are all imperfect, God is in everyone. It gives up control to a higher ideal, a Power beyond our scope. It puts faith in the motto on the coins of the United States, “In God We Trust.”
That is the reason for number seven, in Saul Lewinsky’s eight areas necessary for complete control of a culture: Abolish God.
Faith in God and in fellow man results in astonishing productiveness, which goes against number two in Lewinsky’s madness, which deems poverty necessary for control.
Number five, which demands “control of welfare”, includes control of food, and jumped out at me because of the shortages I saw, not merely of toilet paper, but also of some food supplies, which occurred as the Corona Virus Panic swept my homeland, followed by demands by some that the government immediately seize control of food supplies.
I have studied the famines that occurred in both Russia and China when the might-makes-right mentality sought to “improve” food production and food distribution, and it is blatant that the “old fashioned” people, experienced at farming and marketing food, did a far better job than eager bureaucrats and the new-and-improved farming of collectives. (In the final days of the Soviet Union some freedom to farm outside of the “collective” was again permitted, even though such farmers farmed for “selfish gain”, and, despite the inherent selfishness, 5% of the farmers promptly produced 50% of Russia’s food.)
As I looked around during the so-called “pandemic” it seemed, to this old fool, that I was witnessing a naked grab for power by some who operate by the Saul Lewinsky playbook. They have been frustrated in their efforts to steer the United States to the “left”, for Americans want to be “straight”. Having seen a non-leftist elected by the people, the “left” sought to seize power in other undemocratic ways, utilizing falsehoods promoted by a blatantly biased media to attempt to impeach President Trump, and then, when that failed, attempting to use fear to panic people with an ordinary virus, into giving up their Liberty. As I watched this occur I found myself rapidly become just as paranoid as the might-makes-right mindset. The question then became, could I be a fool who behave differently than the might-makes-right fools, or would I be a fool dragged down to their level?
I thought , first, I should be honest. The “left” isn’t, preferring propaganda. Much of any “panic” is due to a sort of blindness induced by fear, with the fear aided and abetted by a sort of intellectual slight-of-hand which isn’t honest. In my years of combating the Global Warming Panic I’ve seen honesty is the best policy, and like to say, “Stand by the Truth and the Truth will stand by you.” While it may be true that “A lie will travel around the world as Truth is just putting on it’s pants”, Truth is like the turtle in the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, whereas lies are as flighty as a rabbit, (and while the life expectancy of a rabbit is short, turtles endure.) Aesop was quite correct, 2600 years ago, “Slow and steady wins the race”. Hoaxes will wilt like shadows, under the light of Truth.
Second, I should be brave. While honesty compels me to confess I do fear, one need not run like a rabbit and hide in a hole. Nor should one be shamed by mindless political-correctness into cowardly retreats. Once it became obvious the virus wasn’t going to overwhelm the hospitals, the reason for the quarantine of healthy people vanished, and healthy people have every legal and constitutional right to resume going about their ordinary business, which includes the risk of catching a cold every day of their lives. So I have gone back to work. If people want to make new laws, the laws need to be be legislated in a constitutional manner. We need to be brave enough to tell certain power-mad governors and mayors that they are the ones breaking the constitutional law, and they are the ones who need to obey. Have courage.
Third, I should be kind. It is hard to be kind to might-makes-right people who deem me a fool, and who are full of hateful, paranoid distrust. But they are pitiable, for they are basically frightened fools. Talk to them, and ask questions, and get them to confess who and what they are afraid of, and reassure them that there are civil ways of defeating feared consequences.
Fourth, I should keep the faith. I may not have control, but I am not in control of the seasons and they still function wonderfully. I can’t build a bird’s nest, but the birds build wonderful nests and still have time to sing. Do not dwell on despair when there are as many reasons for hope; do not take the worm’s view when the robin feeds its young. Faith takes some effort, so be disciplined, and go out of your way to see the beauty. Joy is not illegal.
Lastly, control that which is given to you to control. While I believe the final control lies in the hands of the Creator who created us, and while I don’t believe I need to control others and that they deserve the liberty they are given, I too have been given my realm to govern. I need to garden my personal plot of earth, whether it be a physical garden, or the plot of a story I’m writing.
One thing about the might-makes-right mentality is that they crave to plot. In some ways, to me, “plot” is the sound manure makes as it falls from the rear of livestock. But manure is good stuff, (called “brown gold” by some farmers), and I work it into the soil of my plot to grow potatoes. And that is my personal counter-revolution, and my counter-control. As an old fool and survivalist, I counter any leftist plot to control food supplies with my plot of potatoes. If all goes well, I’ll harvest more than I can eat, and it won’t matter if the markets have empty shelves.
Of course, all might not go well. Bugs and blights and droughts and hail might happen. But that is one good thing about having a garden. It is a constant reminder that though we attempt to control what we can, complete control is not ours, so we keep an eye to the Sky.
If man actually had some noticeable effect on the planet’s levels of CO2, you would expect to see some change in the yearly CO2 rise measured on Mauna Loa, caused by the shut-down of industry and air travel, worldwide. But there is not even a blip of difference. In fact, if you are into blips, there is an infinitesimal increase, in the seventh month of the yearly eight-month rise in CO2 levels, which infinitesimally proves the opposite of the Alarmist theory, which suggests mankind causes the increase in CO2.
After eight months rising, the CO2 levels usually sink for four months, due to a voracious appetite for CO2 on the part of plants. Most of the world’s land is in the northern hemisphere, and, even in the arctic tundra, growth is explosive during the long days of summer. The planet’s CO2 levels quail under the onslaught of this vegetable onslaught.
You might think men were more mighty than vegetables, but apparently we’re not. We don’t even blip the CO2 levels.
This should cause an inquiring mind to go, “Hmm”. There is this process called “thinking”, or “using your mind”, which brings out the Sherlock Holmes in a healthy psyche. A vigorous and athletic brain loves a mystery, and enjoys the world of wonder. Of course, some do not think for themselves.
(At this point I’ll skip writing and deleting a ten-page-rant).
My personal conclusion (see many past blogs) has been that perhaps the planet’s reason for rising CO2 levels might be something other than mankind.
The sun goes through “sunspot cycles”, and measurements have determined the sun pours more energy down on earth when there are many sunspots than when there are few.
But, (Sherlock Holmes inquires), how would sunlight increase or decrease the levels of CO2?
Well, Sherlock, it turns out that, besides plants, another thing that absorbs CO2 is water. Our planet is covered by vast seas, and all that water is absorbing CO2, but only to a certain point. This “certain point” is determined by the temperature of the water. Cold water can absorb more CO2 than warm water. Therefore, if the seas are warmer, less CO2 can be absorbed (and some might be released) than would be the case when the seas are colder.
Therefore an inquiring mind might conclude that when the sun had many spots and more energy was poring down, the seas would become warmer, and less CO2 would be absorbed. Therefore one would confidently check the evidence, and would be shocked. Data disproves the initial hypothesis.
If one looks at the SST (Sea Surface Temperatures) for when the sun was “noisy” and sunspots were numerous, the sea’s surfaces are significantly colder than they are now, when the sun is very “quiet” and has an unblemished face for weeks on end. How is this possible? How can a hotter sun make a colder sea? How can a colder sun make a warmer sea?
It has occurred to me that increased energy from the sun doesn’t merely effect thermometers, but also anemometers. Energy can take the form of wind. Wind can cool oceans through evaporation, causing billowing clouds blocking the sun, and, perhaps most significantly, wind can cause up-welling from the ocean’s chilly depths.
The most notorious of these up-wellings is the La Nina, and, when the La Nina surges up along the coast of Peru, it leads to a huge increase in the population of fish, and a dramatic drop in SST, and creates a chill which changes the weather patterns even to the far side of the planet. In terms of this discussion, it demonstrates that stronger Trade Winds is an example where more energy brings about lower temperatures.
Conversely, it would seem a weaker sun might lead to weaker Trade Winds and warmer SST, and be an example where less energy brings about warmer temperatures.
However one wonders how long this example of contrary thought could last. How long could less energy keep making things warmer? Is there a point where, having in a sense robbed Peter to pay Paul, the seas would run out of warmth stored by a warmer past, and face a sort of bankruptcy? Is there some point at which SST start to drop, even without the chill of up-wellings? And, at that point, would the seas become more able to absorb CO2? Leading to an abrupt drop in CO2 levels?
This is only the tip of an iceberg, when it comes to the issues the true Sherlock Holmeses of climate-science are scrutinizing. My example only involves a few of many variables. Profound wondering can spring from subjects I haven’t mentioned, such as oceanic currents that move through dramatic swings; the effects of cosmic rays on cloud-cover; whether the sun effects earthquakes and volcanoes; whether volcanic ash effects the albedo of arctic sea-ice; whether a meridional jet-stream can push sea-ice south and chill the North Atlantic; (and that is only the start).
The more I study, the greater my wonder becomes, and just about the only thing I have concluded is that any person who says “the science is settled” hasn’t studied very much. If fact to say “the science is settled” may be solid proof you are not a scientist.
The fact the panic about the corona virus has shut down so much of ordinary life has given us a strange and unique opportunity to test many preconceptions people have about how humanity effects the weather. Personally I am very interested in how the lack of contrails may effect temperatures, especially under conditions when contrails seed clouds and form vast swaths of cirri-cumulus, and especially at night.
One thing I fully expect to see is preconceptions demolished. Part of life is seeing we are mistaken, for few of us are actual prophets. Most of us are like weathermen, who do their best, but often see their forecasts proven incorrect.
It need not be a bad thing to have preconceptions crash into ruin, for often our preconceptions blind us. For example, preconceptions about a different race or religion can keep us from getting to know the unique individuality of another person. Then, when we are forced to depend on them due to unexpected circumstances, (perhaps as shipmates in a storm at sea, or a rush when working at a fast food counter, or serving in the same unit in a battle), we see past our preconceptions and our prejudices, and consequently we sometimes discover a best friend, in a person whom we otherwise might have avoided.
What is true in the case of racism is also true in the case of science. We need to invent a new “ism”. Perhaps “science-ism”.
If you suffer from the bigotry of science-ism then you put your faith in some pathetic preconception, and can’t be bothered to think like Sherlock Holmes. You are in awe of priests who mutter mumbo-jumbo in Latin, and never learn Latin yourself. You genuflect to the inanity of “the science is settled”, when it isn’t.
The science isn’t settled in terms of short-term weather forecasting, and it especially isn’t settled in terms of the long-term forecasting called “climate”.
Also the science isn’t settled in terms of vaccines for a virus. You may get a ‘flu shot, but it is no guarantee you won’t get the ‘flu, for the ‘flu does this marvelous thing called “mutate”. Any doctor who pretends he can control a virus is either young and ignorant, or a quack.
If you are a true Sherlock Holmes, then I encourage you to think about the part “mutation” plays in life. Think about occasions it may be a good thing, as well as the times it may cause us illness. (For example, if our antibodies didn’t “mutate”, could they take the new form that defends us from a “mutated” virus?) (For another example, is not “selectively breeding” not an example of “selectively mutating”, whether you be breeding a fatter strawberry or a fiercer watchdog?) (For a final example, when an artist such as Beethoven overcomes deafness to write his Song of Joy, is not his originality “mutating” the beautiful works of the Masters he learned from, including Bach?)
Sherlock Holmes seeks the Truth, and Truth is eternal, but Truth includes change. Otherwise there would be no such thing as springtime. There would be no such thing as sunrise. There would be no such thing as healing for the desperately ill.
Therefore I conclude it is unwise to say “the science is settled” about either the climate, or the corona virus. God blessed you with a brain, so I urge you to be a Sherlock Holmes. Dare to question. Especially question politicians, for they are suppose to be servants, not bosses.
You are the boss. Why? Because when we die, no one else is going to do our dying for us. And when that stark moment comes, and we face the Starkness, I doubt it will do much good to snivel, “That big bully made me do it. He lived my life for me.” When push comes to shove, you are the boss. So, be bossy, Sherlock.
*******
Update: WUWT reports mankind saw a 17% decrease in emmisions, which emphasizes the lack of any dip in the Monau Loa graph.)
I’ve made it to spring, but to grunt two words, “Made it”, to the Maker, (for I assume That was who I said it to, as the birds Went wild with song, and azure skies made room For kindness, and warm beams stroked my shoulder With forgiveness), just seems inadequate. “Made it.” Surely I can sing bolder And be more like blooms; surely some great Poem can be sighed; surely I can dance Like goats in pastures; at least do something Better than grunt, “Made it”. Yet singer’s stance And poet’s pose is too grand. I cannot sing. “Made it’s” all I’ve got for the One who creates, Yet that’s all that He wants as He patiently waits.
I think the poor weathermen may be feeling slighted, with everyone ignoring their warnings due to concerns about the Wu-flu. I’ve got a little weather-radio in my study, and it has an alarm that goes off when the weather office feels the ordinary public should be alerted to some danger. Lately they’ve been setting that alarm off for silly fears, or so it seems to me. For example, if I hear it go off, and feel compelled to drop what I am doing, and to hobble hurriedly into my study, and then only learn that overpasses may be frosty and slippery in the morning, or there may be patches of fog down in the hollows after dark, or that a late freeze may nip delicate indoor plants, if you have left any out on your porch, it hardly seems worth all the hoop-la.
In some ways the people on the other side of that squawking weather-radio remind me of a small child who hasn’t been receiving enough attention, and who therefore prances and dances about disturbing adult conversations. I try to be patient and see they mean well, but at times I get the feeling they must think the general public consists of complete morons. It wouldn’t surprise me if they set off a blaring warning to tell people it was suppertime, and hunger might happen.
I get a bit irked when I’m treated like a moron, especially when I need to do some task that involves risk. Some people just can’t stand risk. Fifty years ago I never would cut down a tree with my grandmother watching, because the anxiety she’d be subjected to would have been cruel. In like manner, I try not to burn brush with town officials watching, because they don’t trust me, even though the only time I burned up a backyard was fifty-five years ago, in 1965, when I was twelve. That experience taught me well, and I’ve been very careful with fire when its windy ever since.
The best time to burn is in the spring, before lush green weeds spring up and before trees create an emerald canopy which casts the shade that keeps the ground damp. Between the spring sun being as high as it is in August, and the dry air coming down from snow-covered lands to the north, (which, when warmed, achieves a parched humidity of Death Valley dryness), conditions are perfect for seeing the “duff” (the top inch or two of dead leaves on a forest floor) dry within hours of a rain. Sometimes I would miss these prime conditions, and might fail to burn, were it not for the fact my weather radio blares out a warning, telling me it’s dreadfully dangerous.
Often the radio alerts me to stuff I already know. I am sixty miles from the sea, but when the moon is full and the wind swings to the east I have a sort of instinct that kicks in, dating from years I spent by the sea, My old bones know the tides will be high, and even though I don’t have a rowboat any more I remember to draw it up farther on the beach, and not to park my car in the low lot by the salt marsh. It is only after these obsolete considerations have gone drifting through the back of my mind that the weather-radio goes off with shrill warnings about high surf and spill-over, sixty miles away.
After a while the weather-radio becomes a bit like the little boy who cried wolf. I tend to ignore the alarm. Or, if I go to listen, it is only because I’m puzzled about what on earth they could be in a frenzy about this time. This eventually puts the meteorological Alarmists in the position of the little boy, when the wolf actually comes.
I do glance over the written forecasts, and therefore I was well aware a front was coming through, likely with thunder, to end the workweek. I planned accordingly, keeping an eye to the sky, and also checking the weather radar on my cellphone. The forecast was a bit too hasty, regarding when the thunder would arrive, and this actually helped me, because I hurried to get things planted before a deluge, and then the deluge was delayed, so I could keep working, and I was done earlier than I would have been if I worked in my ordinary, dawdling, old-man manner. Of course, at my age working fast did hobble me a mite, yet it was nice to go home early and sit with my wife on the screen-porch, watching the skies darken, sipping a beer, and ignoring the silly weather-radio going completely berserk, off in the distance, in my study.
The weather-radio becomes basically useless when actual storms approach, for besides pertinent information they need to legally cover their butts by adding a string of extra advise, such as not to stand by open windows and not to drive into flooded roadways and not to do ten other things. It’s a bit like the tag that warns you not to use your electric toaster in the shower, and is delivered in an animated computer voice, with the emotion never quite right. This robot-voice might be bearable if they went through the inane list only once, but the computer automatically adds the warnings to each specific alert about each storm cell, and when there is a whole line of storms with many separate alerts the redundancy becomes ridiculous.
If I want actual information beyond what I can see with my own eyes I turn to my wife, who is good at multitasking, and even while chatting with me can text on her cellphone with numerous others. I am not as good at multitasking, and can only attend to stretching out my legs and my beer.
It was downright cozy, just sitting on the porch watching the western skies darken and flash, and hearing the first soft purring of distant thunder, when suddenly both my wife’s cellphone and my cellphone let out a piercing whistle, and the screen yelled, “Tornado Warning”.
I sighed. A “warning” is different from a “watch”, for it means an actual tornado has been sighted, but it was obvious the tornado wasn’t nearby. However my wife was texting like crazy, dealing with other women who were also texting like crazy. I used my cellphone to check the radar, looking for what is called a “hook echo” that a tornado tends to be associated with. I took the screenshot I pasted at the start of this post, which shows a typical line of thunderstorms, with what might be “hooks” well to our north, and some big cells approaching but likely passing to our south. (I would not like to be in the shoes of the fellow who has to look at such maps and issue actual warnings.)
By this point my wife had already determined one daughter was in a house with no cellar, and a granddaughter was serving ice-cream from a tiny shed-like stand. She asked if they should run for cover. I shrugged, and said it didn’t look that bad, but that they should listen for sirens. Then I sauntered outside the screen porch to scan the sky.
Now, at this point I suppose you could scold me. One is not suppose to saunter, when a tornado warning has been issued. One is not suppose to go outside, but rather down to the cellar. In fact a nosy neighbor could, I suppose, have tattled on me, but that would have involved confessing they too were looking out their window, rather than rushing to their cellar.
The fact is, I am not very good at panicking. I have spent a good part of my life “in harms way”, in one way or another. Panic has never seemed as wise as “assessing the risk”. Only occasionally have such assessments resulted in the appropriate response being, “Run like hell”.
The approaching flashes of lightning to the west were numerous, but I’ve seen worse. Most meaningful to me was the thunder. It was all the soft, sky-to-sky sort. There wasn’t a single thumping, ground-shaking, sky-to-ground bolt, even off in the distance. To me this is an indication of storms past their prime, and of storm cells with little updraft and on their way to becoming merely downdrafts of thunderless rain. I told my wife I wasn’t all that impressed, and she immediately texted my opinion far and wide. She also was getting other opinions from other old coots from far and wide. The worst we heard of was some hail. There wasn’t even much talk of winds. We saw no need to hurry to the cellar, and settled back onto our cozy porch.
It took about ten minutes for the storm to pass. There was heavy rain, a brief smattering of hail, some vivid lightning more than a mile overhead (counting the time between flashes and rumbles) and surprisingly little wind. Usually a storm gives you at least one blast that makes the trees thrash their branches, and blows the rain in through the screens, but this storm was meek.
So it looks like we failed at storm-panic, the same way we’ve failed at virus-panic. But at least the storm watered my plants. The virus, on the other hand, seems a complete nothing-burger, in these parts.
Not a petal is shed from any sweet bloom That drifts down outside of God’s loving will, Though Nero’s lions roar and terrible doom Approaches Christians, they sing, and a thrill Transforms the crude crowds in coliseums. Nero frowns, for compared to divine powers His fingering might can only be thumbs; He can’t nip all seeds nor crush all flowers. His heart may make winter; spring still comes. Though he murdered his Mom, and Rome’s ashes Were his crude urban renewal, The Christians he slew peered past death’s flashes To where Spring’s eternal. Nero needs school. The fact is that mighty men’s taxes and axes Makes them up-tight where the godly relaxes.
If we Love You, God, we must love neighbors? Even when those neighbors are cruel opponents? Tame mules with kindness? And put away spurs? Turn cheek even when they’re caught with no pants? I’ve forgiven for years, yet they never learn. Like addicts they chase their folly to death. Investing in error pays me no return. I steel nerves as they steal; waste my breath, For they don’t really want their neighbors free. The kind, they call “suckers”. Knives in the back They give unto others. Chortling glee They fear no angelic counterattack. Vengeance is Yours, but I’m anticipating The look on their snoots the day You stop waiting.
The past winter saw a surprising number of powerful lows cross Barents Sea into Kara Sea, with the north winds behind these gales pulling sea-ice south around Svalbard. The most recent gale took a more traditional route, hooking back west in a retrograde manner and passing right over Svalbard.
The MOSAiC Expedition, in the sea-ice about a third of the way to the Pole from Svalbard, experienced winds of 83 km/hr north of the gale, as the sea-ice accelerated from a nearly stationary drift to a drift of over a kilometer an hour for a while. The bow-radar on the Polarstern showed a lead open and close, but not a great break-up of sea-ice. The sea-ice, which had been showing a slow drift southeast, was jerked west-southwest.
The MOSAiC Expedition, north of all the Barent Sea storms, has seen sea-ice in the Transpolar Drift move about twice as fast as usual. The hook to the southeast was unusual, and perpendicular to the drift the Fram saw, New Years to Mayday, in 1896.
The recent jerk to the west-southwest is more in line with the Fram’s Track. It will be interesting to study the condition of the sea-ice, once the weather clears and the satellite view improves. Currently it looks like the gale tore the sea-ice from the north coast of Svalbard.
What I wonder about is how much the sea-ice was compressed between Svalbard and the MOSAiC expedition. The Polarstern is suppose to head south towards Svalbard to be resupplied, and what they desire for such a journey is leads, and not pressure ridges.
There is an excellent video of part of the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn”s trip south from the MOSAiC site to port, showing how it has to back up and then ram to get through even ordinary sea-ice, yet has a far easier time once it finds leads skimmed with baby-ice.
In all, the journey of the Kapitan Dranitsyn from the MOSAiC site to port took three and a half weeks. The ship made it about halfway back to port in the thick sea-ice, and then was met by the Russian icebreaker Admiral Makarov, that refueled it. I think it took four days to complete the refueling. They then proceeded to the edge of the sea-ice in Barents Sea, but had to wait before venturing out into the open water because a gale was raging and the seas were too high. (I guess icebreakers are not designed for ocean storms.) They had to wait a week for the waves to subside under fifteen feet, but the MOSAiC scientists aboard got to observe how sea-ice fractures under the duress of huge swells. When the gale subsided they rushed across Barents Sea and two days later safely arrived in Tromso. (Likely some of the scientists had further adventures getting back to their home countries through the travel-bans of the Pandemic.)
It will be interesting to see what the Polarstern experiences, heading south.
The storm brought milder air over the arctic sea, including the year’s first patch of above-freezing air north of the Laptev Sea.
The sea-ice “extent graph” shows the typical decline for this time of recent years:
Interestingly, the “volume” graph hasn’t fallen much, suggesting much of the sea-ice lost on the “extent” graph is baby-ice at the periphery, without much bulk to it.
Five years ago I wrote a piece for the “Watts Up With That” website called “Micro-critters Rule”, to some degree spoofing Alarmist’s contention that they completely understand the biology of the Arctic, but also marveling at the way life can colonize the most extreme landscapes. I stated life is rugged and can take on all challenges. In some ways this ran completely against the Greenpeace belief that nature is extremely fragile and we humans should be banned from walking on large parts of it, because we break everything we touch.
I began by bringing up something which always seems to disturb environmentalists who sail the Northwest Passage, which is that Nature has her own private strip-mine up there, bluffs of exposed lignite coal which have been self-igniting, combusting and producing a rank stench for eons, called “The Smoking Hills”.
In like manner nature produces the La Brea Tar Pits, the sulfur springs of Yellowstone, and the oil slicks of the Gulf of Mexico. Yet rather than extinguishing life, life steps up to the challenge, and chows down on noxious chemicals like candy. This is especially true of the smallest examples of life. Even in Yellowstone’s geysers, at temperatures approaching boiling, species of life kick back and call it home.
One particularly bleak landscape exists in the arctic, after the glaciers recede. It is a landscape devoid of organic matter: It is either rock scoured by ice, or else sand and gravel washed by thousands of years of ice-water. All organic matter has been transported hundreds, even thousands, of miles away to the south, and no carbon is available to form the building blocks of life, so such starkness doesn’t enter into Alarmist’s concerns about Global Warming.
All their focus is on another landscape, the “permafrost”, rich in carbon. The permafrost can be a surprisingly deep ooze made up of wet and incompletely composted topsoil, (which includes some mysteries, such as young plants strangely churned down far below levels one would expect to find them). The Alarmist fear was that Global Warming would speed up the composting process, causing the permafrost to burp and belch huge amounts of greenhouse gasses.
I wasn’t all that worried, for my own study of history led me to believe it was warmer in the Medieval Warm Period, and that, if the burping and belching of primal ooze didn’t lead to runaway warming back then, it would not lead to runaway warming now. However the Alarmists not only were worried, but some were panicked.
This led to a fight among Alarmists between the alarmed and the panicked, which interested me for I am always interested when my opponents eat their own.
The panicked were not worried about CO2, because it was a pipsqueak greenhouse gas compared to methane. Methane was a far more potent greenhouse gas, and methane would be sure to be belched by thawing permafrost, for it is belched as “swamp gas” by every other mire on earth. They were certain the planet could not handle the increase, and were quite angry other Alarmists were not alarmed enough.
However it turns out there is an arctic creature which actually chows down on methane. It lives not in the carbon-rich permafrost, but in those stark landscapes of bare stone and washed gravel and sand which are practically devoid of carbon. These micro-critters snatch methane from the air, and are the pioneers that colonize the wasteland, laying down the first traces of carbon which allow lichens to follow, which allow mosses to succeed them, leading to grasses and the finally the first willows and conifers. As far as these micro-critters are concerned, the more methane the merrier.
At this point I’d like to diverge from the direction my original article went, (which was to talk of other microcritters which no one suspected lived on the underside of arctic sea-ice), and instead to focus on the panic some felt about any sort of superabundance of methane.
Basically the panic was due to an incomplete understanding of the majesty of creation. In essence, we mortals are prone to leaping to conclusions. We think we have everything figured out, when in fact we have lots to learn. We are basically too big for our britches, and the younger you are, the smaller your waistline tends to be, and therefore the young have smaller britches and it is easier for the young to get too big for them. (Or, I should confess, this was true of me.)
As one gets older one experiences, like a weatherman, times when their forecasts are incorrect. One becomes aware they are not as smart as they think. This seems to be especially true when it comes to what must be described as “worry”. In the case of many, what they worried would happen never came to pass, but in my own life the very things I worried would happen did happen, and much to my surprise I didn’t die, nor merely survive, but actually benefited.
This brings me to the current panic about the corona virus. People are behaving as if worry is a reality, rather than a creation of our imagination. Rather than “Don’t worry; Be happy”, people say, “Do worry; Be unhappy.”
I will appear cynical, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t point out that the people most interested in fueling the worry are those who suffer from the error of thinking they stand to gain, if others suffer. Some doctors care more about making money than healing, and some politicians care more about gaining power than serving.
The fact of the matter is that this is but one virus out of many. We are part of a world where we are exposed to countless virus every day, and countless bacteria as well. Some of these micro-critters are actually helpful to us. They help us digest our food, and help us remain healthy in other less-well-understood ways.
For example, children exposed to lots of dirt and even manure on a farm tend to have stronger immune systems than children who live in very clean environments. There is some evidence that, if the body is not challenged by outside virus and bacteria, its immune system goes haywire and attacks itself. This manifests as various “allergic” responses, which take forms as varied as mild sneezing, to asthma, to the immune system attacking joints, (arthritis).
This is not to say that children on a farm should not have tetanus shots, or shouldn’t wash food fertilized by manure. However one can go too far, and can allow worry to rule.
If you “quarantine” yourself to an excess, you are actually weakening your immune system. If you don’t go to the beach, you are not exposing yourself to a thousand micro-critters in the seaweed, and if you don’t play on the playground or golf-course you are not exposing yourself to another thousand. Just as a muscle gets weaker if you never work out, your immune system gets weaker if you never go out.
Therefore when the quarantine is lifted we should expect a surge in sniffles and fevers.
I can just imagine what the media will make of such a surge. They will suggest we should all rush back into quarantine, when it was the quarantine that caused the problem in the first place.
Before you leap to conclusions (and become too big for your britches) I’d like to give two examples when the obvious conclusion was incorrect.
When the bubonic plague was killing between a quarter and half the people in towns in Europe, it was noticed many Jews didn’t get the plauge. Therefore it was concluded Jews were poisoning non-Jews. Wrong. The simple fact of the matter was that the plague was spread by fleas, and Jews had cleaner households and fewer fleas.
During the polio epidemic of 1954 is was noticed that poor Mexicans didn’t get it. Therefore it was concluded chili peppers were the cure. Wrong. The simple fact of the matter is that polio is spread by water, partly by sneezed aerosols but also by unsanitary drinking water and swimming pools. Also, if you are exposed as a child the illness is far less severe, in most cases. Mexicans were exposed when young, while non-Mexicans were older, and suffered more.
In the above two cases one sees Jews saved by cleanliness while Mexicans were saved by the inability to be so clean. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but one should not jump to conclusions and call dirty gardeners ungodly for growing flowers. Nor should we intentionally eat manure. We should not think we know it all. We should not be too big for our britches.
The expression “too big for your britches” actually was coined by the American congressman Davey Crockett about the American president Andrew Jackson (though Crockett called britches “breeches”.) This shows you the stuff we are now dealing with is not new. Politics brings out the worst, and, occasionally, the best.
The best politicians care more about serving than gaining power, just as the best doctors care more about healing than about getting rich.
In order to become worthy of the word, “best”, they obey an ancient spiritual law which asks us to love. Not only to “love thy neighbor”, but to “love thy enemy”. The best doctors take the Hippocratic oath very seriously.
Sadly, some in the current Corona Virus Crisis are more interested in power and money than they truly care about you and me. When China cut off all air traffic from Wuhan to other parts of China, but urged air traffic to other parts of the world, they were not loving their neighbors. And when pharmaceutical companies and their sycophants salivate over our tax dollars for research grants for vaccines that don’t exist, and peddle pills that cost over a thousand dollars, and attempt to suppress pills that cost a half dollar, they are not good Samaritans.
Opposed to such denial of spirituality are some doctors who take their Hippocratic oath seriously. Then we witness such good men banned from posting on Facebook. It makes the common man aware some non-spiritual people want to repress Freedom of Speech. It makes us worry.
Worry is unwise. Instead we need to simply trust in Truth, and do what good politicians and good doctors do, stand by the Truth.
You may be banned from Facebook, and lose social standing in other ways, and even lose your livelihood and join the poor. But, “blessed are the poor”. And also, “It is easier for an camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven.”
It is hard not to worry, and to even become paranoid, when we witness ordinary people expressing ordinary concerns being banned from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or what-have-you. If you can’t handle feeling suspicious, do not stimulate your paranoia by watching the following statements of a formerly-famous female virus-researcher (whose statements are now banned from YouTube). (To make the link work remove the hyphen).
Personally, I’m very tired of paranoia. I’ve been dealing with it for more than a half century. When I was a boy my father, a surgeon, threatened the livelihood of psychiatrists by suggesting they didn’t obey the rules of science. They marshaled a nasty push-back, a concerted effort to prove my father was insane (and he did become very mad, about what they did). Therefore I am all too acquainted with how ugly life gets when you threaten another man’s precious purse, and my personal escape from it has been to have an empty wallet.
Now I’m old, and able to be glad I chose to be poor. Where others have lived ugly lives, mine has seemed beautiful to me. Where others cringed and responded out of fear of losing their precious purse, I’ve learned to understand that great line, “when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” Of course, a man with a mansion will not listen to a man sleeping in a dented old car. He has eyes but cannot see.
Instead of attempting to argue with those who insist there is some benefit in harming others, I just look at the dirt, and at the micro-critters behind the Corna Virus. They are life, part of a creation created by a Creator who likes life, and sustains it as a reflection of what He is, which is above all Love.
The Corona Virus is but a solitary germ midst a vast pantheon of micro-critters we can’t see, part of an ebb-and-flow of life. To them a mote of dust in a sunbeam is a giant planet, and the interplay and interrelations between them all is a fabulous balance crucial to the crucible brewing life. The so-called “experts” in microbiology are fools, if they think they see more than the tip of a tip of a tip of an iceberg. And if they take it a step further, and audaciously insist they alone can come up with the “cure”, a patented miracle drug and/or vaccine they “own”, and that everyone should stay home until they come up with their miracle drug and/or vaccine, for the solitary germ called the Corona Virus, than even fools start to shake their heads in wonder, for even fools recognize they are not the Creator of life, and rather are part of the Creator’s creation. “Experts”, however, dream of power, control, domination, and of ruling all, when they cannot rule even a micro-critter.
People besotted by power think they control, but have no control over their own arrogance and, oddly, their own worry. China’s draconian responses are like a worried old lady’s. For example, it’s “One Child Policy” was based upon worry about overpopulation. Rather than solving a problem the One Child Policy created a graying population with too many old people, which requires new draconian responses. Behind all the “policy” is a disregard of life, and much cruelty, based largely on worry.
People who base their lives on worry’s fear often create the very situations they fear most. The law of unintended consequences kicks in, along with any number of Murphy’s Laws, and, if I ignore my own advise and fall prey to worry, I worry that the people who seek to “control” viruses, and through mandatory vaccinations to “control” people, (and perhaps even to “control” population by decreasing it by seven billion), will make some science fiction movies become real. The plot would have unexpected twists and turns, such as a virus mutating so that it only attacks the rich and powerful who think they are vaccinated against it. Also people who have little regard for life tend not to trust each other, and, just as Stalin “liquidated” and “purged” nearly every fellow communist of his own age whom he had initially called “comrade”, the plot would involve betrayal and backstabbing and the rich and powerful eating their own, and times would get darker and darker until…
Until humanity gets sick and tired of it. Perhaps hyperinflation would make money worthless, as cataclysms made power meaningless. At that point people would long for what was abandoned when politicians put power before service, and doctors put money before healing, and what would that be? Life.
Then, according to lore, the Creator of Life, seeing so many turn to Him, will ride down from the sky midst great glory to our rescue. Then the world will be returned to the way He intended it to be, where even the smallest germ reflects his Love. And, also according to lore, even if we die before this Great Day, we will be somehow revived, and will get to see it.
Sunrise's Swansong 