Time to Buy Mountain Real Estate

Today I learned about the newest imminent threat to human survival: the Thwaites Glacier.

A glacier is a river of ice, more or less. It sits on land, and it moves slowly downhill and into the nearest body of water. The Thwaites Glacier is an England-sized glacier in Antarctica, and it seems to be melting and becoming less stable. I just saw a hysterical news report attributing the melting to global warming and claiming the glacier’s collapse could raise sea levels by 3 meters (10 feet).

The reporter, one Palki Sharma of India’s World is One News service, says this is a “projection,” not a possibility. Unfortunately for her credibility, it is neither.

I own property that is probably less than 10 feet above sea level, so when I saw the story, I (unlike most people) decided to find out what was going on. I looked at Wikipedia, which certainly gets its share of contributions from millennial environment-crazed leftists. No mention of an impending catastrophe. I found a website devoted to the glacier. Still nothing. Finally, I found a BBC report, quoting researchers. Guess what? The actual projection is 65 centimeters, and such a rise is not expected for “many centuries.”

Is the BBC losing its wokeness? Of course not. It’s controlled by leftists. If the BBC is optimistic about any environmental issue, you can bet the scientific consensus is on the same page.

I saw an Internet comment attributing the glacier’s problems to something other than global warming, and I found out the comment was correct. Guess what’s under the glacier? New volcanic activity, along with the heat it brings. This appears to be the main reason the ice is melting.

Someone help me understand how cow flatulence and wonderful Western lifestyles like mine contribute to changes in volcanic activity. I would really like to see the Powerpoint.

Palki Sharma thinks we need immediate action to prevent the world from going under the waves. She wants a drastic cut in emissions. It’s sad that a journalist people listen to is willing to issue opinions concerning engineering and science, which could affect the prosperity of billions of people, without making a responsible effort to learn the truth.

She thinks a disastrous change in the glacier’s seaward end will happen within the next 5 years, so she believes we need to get rid of emissions right away. It makes me wonder what she studied in school. No STEM person with any sense would say such a thing.

Assuming global warming is significant and caused by human activity, which is a huge assumption, if human beings quit giving off CO2 right now, the world’s climate wouldn’t change much at all during the next 5 years. Even wacked-out vegan scientists admit that. They say change takes decades. If the glacier is going to open up within 5 years, there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Why didn’t she look into this? My guess: political science degree. History, maybe. Or, and it pains me to write it, communications. The major people flock to when they can’t wrap their heads around basket weaving.

Her network is all about promoting India at the expense of China, Russia, and America. Why, then, would she carelessly promote a move that would keep India weak and poor? India needs modernization. It’s very backward. It doesn’t even have a good power grid. Indian machine tool companies still make lathes built to run off flat belts connected to overhead shafts turned by steam engines. Everyone else abandoned these maybe 110 years ago. If India can’t make CO2 in large amounts while it steps up its game, it will never be a prosperous modern nation.

Is the goal to bring other countries down to India’s pitiable level?

I’m starting to wonder if World is One News is like the Epoch Times and RT, which are primarily political instruments. Maybe it’s not a journalistic organization. Maybe the whole point of its existence is to spread propaganda to undermine large countries that have interests adverse to India’s.

I have to wonder how many sacred, useless cattle there are in India. Is Palki Sharma willing to have them slaughtered in order to stop climate change? That would go over big.

As for the best-known disaster currently in the news, it’s looking like I may have been right about the Omicron variant. South African scientists say it still appears to be a very mild disease, and it’s so common, it has been found in sewer water less than 100 miles from me, in a little city in Central Florida. If it’s in the sewers of lazy Central Florida, it’s in people all over the world. If it’s this widespread, and the mild symptoms hold up, it will be a huge blessing. Better to get the sniffles and gain immunity to future infections than to get Delta and risk serious problems. Omicron could “vaccinate” millions of people who would otherwise refuse to be vaccinated, and that could be very helpful.

I’ll make another SWAG about Omicron. It will turn out to be much more common than they think it is. I learned that ordinary tests don’t distinguish Delta from Omicron, so presumably, there are a huge number of cases that haven’t been identified. The Omicron wave has already started in America and many other places. It’s not coming; it’s here.

Last week, Zambia was having something like 15 new coronavirus cases per week. My wife in Lusaka says they’re about to tell the world they found 400 today or yesterday. That can’t be the Delta variant, because it has been all over Zambia for months. It came and went. Omicron is the only obvious explanation.

Florida just went from about 1500 cases per day to around 4000. That’s not Delta. No way. Delta peaked in late August, and there is no reason why it should come back. About 2500 of those cases must be Omicron.

To me, it all adds up to a helpful, highly contagious variant that will displace strains that are more harmful, while increasing our immunity.

The big question is what the next variant will be like. Delta was worse than Alpha. Omicron is much better than both. Will Pi be a killer or another coronavirus cold?

As a person who picks up useless trivia, I know that viruses generally become nicer as they mutate, but recent reading tells me they sometimes get meaner.

It looks like scientists are fairly sure of one thing: we will be getting new strains forever, just like we get new flu strains, so repeat vaccinations will be a fact of life unless covid mutates permanently into a series of viruses that don’t make us very sick.

Whatever the future holds regarding new variants, I am pretty pleased with Omicron. Maybe next week we’ll start seeing a lot of deaths, and I’ll be sorry I wrote that.

Final apocalypse-related note: my friend Mike persuaded me to listen to Brian Williams, the NBC journalist who got in trouble for serial lying. NBC didn’t fire him, which is a shame. He kept broadcasting, and as you probably know, he just quit. He made a weird announcement about his concerns for America’s future.

Mike told me to listen to him instead of reading abbreviated quotations, so I gritted my teeth and did as instructed. I still don’t know what Williams is talking about.

He claims he is neither liberal nor conservative, but an institutionalist. I looked that word up, and it means nearly nothing. Something about respecting established forms, especially with regard to religion. Maybe he needs some help figuring out what he is. Here I am to save the day, a la Mighty Mouse: he’s a liberal. Maybe he thinks he’s not because he’s somewhat more certain of his gender than many of his colleagues, but he is. Go read up on his history.

He says politicians want to burn America down with us inside it, in spite of their educations. What does that mean? Mike thought he was talking about the Deep State, implying his hands were tied by it. I didn’t get that sense at all. I assume it will turn out Williams is talking about conservatives who dare to go to rallies and support the Second Amendment and so on. I think he’s still on a January 6 kick. I’ll bet he’s thinking about people like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. I very much doubt he’s concerned about BLM’s riots, murders, and arson, or about Antifa’s, or about the armed gangs of racist looters that are taking over retail areas in leftist-controlled cities. I don’t think he’s concerned about leftist politicians who did away with cash bail, support BLM and Antifa, refuse to prosecute violent thieves, and pretend black-on-corporate looting isn’t happening.

I still maintain that 1/6 was a much smaller deal than it was made out to be. Leftists love to say it was an insurrection, as though we nearly saw overloaded helicopters ferrying survivors off the Capitol dome. An insurrection is the attempted replacement of one government with another, and it requires a plan, armed troops, and a lot of support. January 6 was a bunch of unarmed halfwits who got excited about election fraud and decided they could do what leftist rioters had done elsewhere without consequences. January 6 was the political equivalent of streaking at the Super Bowl. They thought they could protest inside a building belonging to the federal government and get away with it. They didn’t bargain on Congress’s horror at seeing its lax first-stage security overrun and exposed, or on the difference between occupying a federal building in Portland and occupying the one Congress uses, or on the pro-left bias of the courts.

They probably thought they could briefly interrupt the processing of the election results, but there is no way they could have believed they were going to undo the election or mount a coup.

No one–not even a truly stupid individual–could expect to overthrow the government by having a few giddy, selfie-taking protestors run amok in the Capitol. D.C. has a police force armed with machine guns. We have an army, too. Everyone knows these things.

The violence and casualties of the riot were grossly overstated. If you died from atherosclerosis during the riot, two blocks away, you were considered a casualty. It didn’t begin to assume the same scale as mostly-peaceful violence perpetrated by leftist groups.

Let’s see what Williams is saying a month from now. I think “institutionalist” will turn out to mean something a lot like “socialist.” Place your bets.

Of course, if you live near the ocean, you may not be around to see what happens. Not if Palki Sharma is right.

I feel that the end of the age is closer than ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if God took his people away by Christmas. Insanity is the norm now. Demonic activity is off the charts. I don’t think anyone still expects life to return to normal. We have the feeling we’re waiting for something else, but most people don’t know what it is.