This weather is something alright. It was like sixteen degrees
below zero pretty much all day with twenty mile an hour winds. My thought was
if it’s so bad here, what must poor Beagles be suffering through, and when I
looked it up the answer was not so much. I guess the way to look at it is that
the polar vortex (love that name), is like a beanie that sits atop the north
pole and its coldest point is right underneath the button on the top and when it
is knocked askew that cold air continues to be underneath the button, even when
that button strays south of the north pole. I rather enjoy these extreme winter
storms, kind of exciting in early winter, but after a few weeks I get tired of
them and there is still so much winter to go.
I’m sure you know that global warming does not really address
individual incidents of weather. It’s not like every place on earth will
gradually get a few degrees warmer. My music mechanics knowledge is dim, but I
think it’s like if you are playing something in a certain key there will still
be notes above and below that key, and if you go a key higher there will be
notes that will be lower than some of the notes in the lower key. And actually
it won’t even be the same song. Because weather is so complicated even though
the average world wide temps will be higher, there will be places that will be
colder, and worst of all wet and dry areas will be switched around so that some
breadbaskets will become deserts and some deserts, when we get around to moving
our infrastructure there, will become breadbaskets, and because weather is so
complicated we don’t know in advance which breadbaskets and deserts will be
effected. Those guys that think it will be just like turning up the thermostat
in a room are guys who snoozed through science class.
Though civilization first appeared in the middle east, it was
invented independently a little later in China and India, and a lot later in the
Americas. I think originally Mesopotamia was pretty nice but it got farmed
out. I have nothing to back this up, but it has always been my suspicion that
the reason Africa is so fucked up compared to other continents is because that’s
where we started from. One reason America became so powerful was that it was
all new and untouched, save for the Indians who didn’t touch it much and were
easily brushed aside, and it is that, more than our political institutions (oh
and the greatness of the American people) that made us so dominant. But then
that doesn’t explain why South America has remained such a backwater. I don’t
know.
Speaking of Mars, I think it is just lunatics (marsatics?) who want
to go there. I suppose it would be exciting if you were skating down the canals
and battling Martian monsters, but what those guys would be doing is sitting in
rooms full of machinery staring at blips on computer screens. Why don’t they
just become accountants, at least they would have their weekends free. And who
would pay to send a bunch of marastics like them? Costs a lot of money to send
stuff across the solar system, so why waste it on fragile and unreliable sacks
of protoplasm when you can instead send shiny, obedient, silicon?
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