Anxiety overload

I shudder to think how many among us are zonked on Zoloft or zooming on Xanax, but it's gotta be a pretty good slice of the populace. Then there's the folks feeding the OD pandemic, burying their anxieties with opiods of one sort or another until fentanyl buries them. Not to mention the run-of-the-mill beer-swilling pot-heads like me, who are just hanging on for the ride and hoping to make the best of it. Point is, everybody got a lot on their plate. That pandemic didn't disappear just because we took our maskes off. Global warming and cooling and species extinction aren't around the corner, they're already here, and what are you doing about it? Sorry, buying an electric vehicle isn't gonna budge the overall trajectory that much. The overall tragectory seems to indicate that we're fucked. My old pal Kipling called me up tonight. He retired recently and is just starting to notice that we're fucked. He tries to avoid the Xanax and the Zoloft and sticks to the basics, like me. Lucky for him, he's already got a spot in the country and a thousand gallon stash of diesel. He's gonna be growing vegtables and running his generator in perpetuity. When you got that going on, you don't have to sweat the other shit. Relax!

The future is sand, my friends

I had no idea. Been so consumed by the impending WWIII and the global famine that’s just around the corner, not to mention that lingering pandemic, the climate emergency, or, God forbid, a Trump comeback, it was inconceivable that we could be made even more depressed. But I was watching Al Jazeera for a spell, and by golly, apparently we are on the brink of a global sand shortage. Don’t laugh. Apparently sand is the most-utilized commodity on earth after water. You can’t build a road or an apartment block without it. Anywhere. Now that I think of it, I remember being on holiday in Myrtle Beach, thirty years ago, and reading something in the local paper about sand being barged in from Florida or somewhere. So I guess the problem has metastasised. Seems to me this isn’t so much a matter of an absolute sand shortage, but rather, there’s lots of sand, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed. I’m guessing Goldman Sachs has field teams staking out the vast expanses of desert in Saharan Africa and the Gobi desert. Sand merchants will corner the market and become the new billionaire class. The future is sand, my friends.

Climate crisis makes weather worse but better

Check out this story at CBC.

It's a good-news bad-news story.

The bad news is that due to anthropogenic climate devastation, we're having more climate catastrophes than ever. Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, rising sea levels and melting glaciers; you name it. If we don't get off the fossil fuels right quick we're gonners.

Then again, maybe not.

The good news is that worse and worse climate catastrophes kill fewer and fewer people. 

That's gonna piss off Greta something fierce. 

I find it mildly amusing the way these bullshit emission targets the Western world resets every few years at their interminable "climate conferences," from Rio to Kyoto to Paris and beyond, are treated as our planet's only route to salvation. If that's even remotely true, we're well and truly screwed. We've never met any of those targets and we never will! It's one big fat exercise in PR and political grandstanding.

But the climate we're wrecking seems to get kinder to us the more we wreck it.

How does that make sense?

Perhaps humanity will keep evolving as it has for the past few hundred thousand years...

Adapt or die!

Greta's billionaire string-pullers

There's a serious case of cognitive dissonance on view at Global Research today. The top story under "latest news and top stories" is Millions march against Climate Change, Capitalism and War.  And they did! It's a happy story!

Alas, right next to it we find this headline; Climate and the Money Trail. If you're at all curious about how a troubled teen from Sweden became a global icon literally overnight, this story explains much.

Here's the lowdown on the "climate emergency" from the think-tank here at Falling Downs. Yes, human activity is without a doubt responsible for contributing to a changing climate. Yes, we should treat our only home with respect and do all we can to mitigate the environmental impact of human activity.

However, imagining that we can stop climate from changing is more than a little hubristic.  In fact, it's downright delusional. Twenty-thousand years ago the place I'm writing from today was under a couple of miles of ice. There was obviously a lot of serious climate change thousands of years before humankind went apeshit with the fossil fuels.

The latest scary headlines tell me that sea levels could rise by three feet before the end of the century. If that's the case, we'll have to do what humans and every other species that has survived has always done.

Adapt!

Yes, it'll be inconvenient and expensive, but eminently doable. Rebuilding on higher ground is a pretty straight-forward undertaking. There's more than enough higher ground available to accommodate everyone!

To the extent that there are sincere folks who believe that participating in Thunberg's "climate strikes" is a blow against capitalism, they're being duped. The corporate foundations and do-gooder billionaires behind Greta are far more interested in saving their skins than saving the planet.

And if they can further enrich themselves in the process, so much the better for them!