WEIRD WEATHER AND CLIMATE HUBRIS

While temperatures have risen to over 100^o  in areas west of here, in New York it has been unusually chilly. It is now June 19th and temperatures are currently still in the 50s. This has made for great gardening weather, but terrible swimming weather. Meanwhile late yesterday rains arrived which no one had predicted. 

If nothing else this shows us two things: first, weather is precarious and at best only partially predictable even now, and less and less accurate the further ahead we look. This only makes claims of certainty about “climate” many years from now simply ridiculous despite what the “experts” tell us. For the only certainty in life is uncertainty. It is just another instance of people claiming to know far more than they actually do know, and that is too often the source of much of the damage we do ourselves. Time and again things are grossly mismanaged and end in failure because of this sort of conceit. But because we are now a resolutely humane and ever-indulgent society, heads never role even after they have bungled everything.  What we really need is a big dose of humility, and a healthy skepticism about any claims of certainty. 

This does not mean denial of “climate change;” (which is a bit of an oxymoron), for the simple reason that if you have millions upon millions of more people coming online in a better standard of living based upon fossil fuels there are inevitably going to be consequences. The trouble is most of them are located on the other side of the world, and yet we have idiots insisting that we shoot ourselves in the foot  to correct something that is increasingly attributable to other places. There are things we can, should and will do to ameliorate all of this short of self-destruction, but they are more on the order of simple things, like planting trees, rather than dubious schemes telling us what to do and how we should live, or crash “crisis” programs towards this end that only cause other problems because they are fundamentally based upon ideological principles that vary sharply from reality.  The truth is that climate change is a constantly evolving process, with or without us, that is of an order of complexity far beyond our actual capabilities- again because we have people, who in Socrates terms, claim to know more than they actually do know.

The second thing to note is that given the great variations in weather, temperature, etc. just in this country, it is preposterous to seek to impose “one size fits all” policies on everyone that are out of touch with the realities on the ground that people actually  face. These conditions are inherently varied and complex, and cannot logically adhere to a single standard. Ye that is what we face with inept policy-makers seeking to impose uniform solutions on all of us in places where they simply do not apply. In the area where I live there is an abundance of water resources, while out west there are serious drought conditions. But the latter is the result of what few will yet admit, namely overdevelopment beyond what the region can sustain in terms of water resources, and ludicrous overdependence upon a single river across several states. Meanwhile in California where the consequences are going to be more severe, instead of investing in desalinization technology, or channeling water resources from the Pacific Northwest where they are abundant, they throw away money on mass transit boondoggles than no one is going to use. 

This is all a result of hubris on the part of an elite that is running out of credibility across the board, and rather than more prescriptions from them as to how we should go about things, what we really need is considerably more silence, restraint, and humility on their part. 

 

THINGS ARE GOING TO GET WORSE

Things are going to get worse before they get better. Over a year ago some of us were predicting we were headed towards the present economic meltdown, but unfortunately there is yet more trouble, hardship, and uncertainty ahead. We saw it in the 1970s, with sky high interest rates, gas lines, record oil prices, and soaring inflation, wage and price controls, etc but the underlying conditions this time around are even worse, given the way trillions of dollars we didn’t have were profligately tossed away with very little to show for it, along with the government-induced sabotage of the economy. 

None of this had to be. There were no trends, “underlying causes,” things beyond our control, etc. This is a totally man-made disaster created by the execrable  Biden administration, which for purely ideological reasons based on fantasies about energy, deliberately sabotaged our domestic oil and gas production, and continues to do so to this day despite all of the damage and the human cost, while at the same time going begging to dictators and enemies around the world to produce more oil that is far more polluting than anything we produce here. This along with other “progressive” policies which have completely failed across the board, continue to make things worse. 

They and their collaborators in the media and woke corporations must pay for the damage they have done, but even if and when there is a change in congress in the next election and the Republicans gain control, we will still have two more years of the most feckless, incompetent, and venal administration in our history.  They will continue to have control over the levers of power unless they are removed from office. There are ample grounds for impeachment already, and the Democrats have been doubly derelict in their duty by failing to act on their own on this. But unless there are enough sane ones left, without some Democratic votes this will be difficult to realize, so there can be little in the way of immediate relief. The only other possibility may be for the congress to in effect set up a sort of shadow government, and drive this rotten regime into irrelevance. 

But fixing this mess is going to take time, which means that you can look forward to higher inflation across the board with continuously rising prices and high interest rates, a stock market in further decline, and outright recession, and resulting  stagflation. Because they profligately threw away trillions on nothing there is also little leeway left for government to come to the rescue now because they already spent the money, which leaves only an even worse alternative, namely inflating the currency even more to the point where it becomes worthless. 

This does not mean that things are hopeless. They will eventually get better, but not as long as the people who caused all of this in the first place and who continue to make it worse with everything they try are anywhere near power. There are things the next congress can and will do to ameliorate the situation, but unless and until profligate spending ends, oil and gas production resumes at full throttle, and decisions are again based on reality, not “progressive”ideological fantasies, economic improvement will be slow in coming. 

Sadly, this is only one element of the disaster we find ourselves in. We still have to deal with a disintegrating society, perverted culture, rising crime, millions of illegals flooding our country (who have been encouraged to think they have some sort of right to violate our laws and have no real attachment to this country the way legal immigrants do), record drug overdose deaths from fentanyl crossing a border that has been handed over to Mexican drug cartels and deliberately supplied by the Chinese Communists, along with a rotten elite deeply in bed with the latter, which is still below the surface because so many of them are compromised, as well as precarious international relations caused by the base weakness of the regime, etc. etc. The next congress will have a very full plate to contend with, and the question now is whether any group of people can possibly possess enough civic virtue to clean up this mess.