CSotD: Why Our Kids Can’t Have Nice Things
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Non Sequitur (AMS) addresses the crucial question of life on Earth being obliterated by a meteor, the odds of which, I would note, have not changed simply because we are better at tracking space objects. Though they may become slightly lower, since we’re working on ways of dealing with it.
Not that we haven’t been thunked a few times aside from the one that eventually killed the dinosaurs (through climate change, not impact. We’ll get to that in a minute).
There was a pretty good hit sometime in Arizona and in more recent times in Russia, but we’re still here. That’s not a tribute to our resilience. Just a comment on probability.
Flo’s idea of ducking-and-covering is funny in part because of Then-Wife’s co-worker, whom I’ve mentioned before, who thought if she stayed inside she wouldn’t be hurt by Skylab falling on her.
About five years after that, I was on talk radio at a station where I could see Cheyenne Mountain through the studio window, and that was when Thomas K. Jones, Reagan’s deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said we’d be okay in a nuclear war because people could simply lay a door across two sawhorses and shovel dirt on it.
I got some government expert on the air and, having pointed out that our being within sight of Cheyenne Mountain suggested that we’d all be iridescent jelly within the first three minutes of a nuclear war, asked him about doors and dirt and shovels.
He admitted that the only real plan for survival would be to GTFO, and that the only real way to do that would be to do it early enough in the impending political crisis that we’d avoid the traffic. And the lineup at the gas pumps. And so forth.
Which made more sense, but boils down to this bit of wisdom:
The way to survive a nuclear war is to not be there.
It’s an unassailable truth, except that, while there are all sorts of things you can survive by not being there, for other threats, “not being there” can be quite a challenge.
Part of avoiding harm involves understanding the nature of the risk. Tim Campbell (WPWG) references the argument that the Founders wrote the Second Amendment with muzzle-loading flintlocks in mind, which is sorta kinda true — that is what they had — but mostly irrelevant, because the whole concept of autonomous state militias as a line of national defense had nothing to do with the specific weapons that existed.
The only thing less accurate than assuming it relied on flintlocks is to reason that by “well-regulated militia,” the Founders meant “any nitwit who can find a gun.”
Or that, once the militias had disgraced themselves in the War of 1812 and been replaced by a more robust standing army, the Second Amendment had any more meaning than the Third.
Point being that, while children would be much safer if school shooters carried muzzleloaders instead of semi-automatic weapons, they’d be even safer if a sane government recognized that the Second Amendment became archaic and irrelevant about a quarter century after it was written, which was more than 200 years ago.
Which doesn’t much matter if you avoid being shot only to die of cancer or by drowning in the rising oceans or of starvation when the crops no longer grow, which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There seems to be little reason for Joe Manchin to oppose a measure to control oil drilling off the coast. After all, West Virginia is not only more than 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean but hilly enough to avoid inundation when the waters rise.
And there’s even less reason for him to be against seeking new forms of energy, since he doesn’t know that his personal wealth comes from coal mining.
He doesn’t know this because it’s all in a blind trust so that, as soon as he entered office, he promptly forgot all about it.
And he’s probably too busy passing laws or making sure they don’t get passed to have noticed the $763,407 in contributions he has received from oil and gas companies.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the oceans of the world, Shell Oil is preparing to use sonic blasting to locate oil, which harms marine life but provides a way to keep that petrol flowing.
Not only is the anthropomorphic sea life in Madam & Eve opposed, but so are a whole lot of actual people in South Africa, as this editorial from the Financial Mail indicates.
And as this illustration from that editorial emphasizes.
Which does not appear to have mattered.
And it’s not just them, and it’s not just there.
Which leads us to
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Well, Darling, we could elect a new Mother Nature, but it wouldn’t be easy, since, of course, she wouldn’t take money from the people who make the planet warmer.
And we’d need to elect enough people like her to form a super majority.
So, no, we can’t, but maybe some day you and your friends will.
Meanwhile, we’ve gotten past the point of denying that climate change will happen, and now we’re denying that it already is happening, thanks in large part to news organizations that seem to have a vested interest in making people believe things that aren’t true and making them not believe things that are.
And even though your generation seems to be smartening up, even if it becomes all of you and not just an energetic majority, the best you will ever be able to do is to keep it just the way it is right now.
By which I mean the “right now” of 20 or 30 years from now when you’re old enough to have something to say about it and the people who don’t want anything to change have mostly died.
So what you see happening now is what you’re gonna have to live with all your lives, only probably a little worse.
But here’s some good news: Duck-and-Cover actually does work against tornadoes.
Often. Mostly. Sometimes.
It’s not so good against hurricanes.
Well, never mind. You’ll think of something.
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