The End of the World
Common Dreams today has an article that is particularly distinguished not only by all its info about the breakups of the Antarctic ice sheets but also by its comments section.
I always approach the comments on Common Dreams with extreme trepidation, ever since I discovered that reading any of their articles that have something to do with the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton is like drinking a pitcherful of Japanese Beetle juice. Actually that applies to just about any article dealing with politics, period, since CD's denizens are totally consumed with the idea of forming a 3rd party, which they would love to do at the expense of the Democrats. They retain just enough moxie, which is not much, to know that they have no hope at all of doing so with any remnants of the Repubs. In fact they give the Repubs a free ride, which is the main thing that repulses me.
But on non-political subjects a better class of commenters seems to appear, and, as at the end of the cited article, they may even end up collectively composing a second article that is just as informative, if not more so.
Mainly here they are predicting the end of the world, the human components of it -- in a huge variety of ways, and they don't think it will take long in coming.
Nobody appreciates the idea of the end of the world more than me. I don't mean the total obliteration of the planet. I mean instead events that will drastically erase the many ways that humans, by rampant proliferation and misuse of technology, have harmed the planet. But when this end comes, I expect it to do so slower than these commenters would like to think.
Maybe that's because of what my mother did, sometime in the 1950's or in the early '60's during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when, for nitwit reasons, the "world" really did seem to be on the verge of, if not ending as such, to be at least altered in some distinctly unpleasant ways.
When, in the early '50's, the Russians ended the American monopoly on nuclear arms, it caused quite a tizzy, and, coming so closely on the heels of the terrific, widespread conflagration of World War 2, there were all sorts of predictions flying around about a nuclear Armageddon.
That seemed logical to me, and I thought it would be something to see, and meanwhile we would need something to eat while it was going on. So I started stocking canned goods in one of the kitchen cabinets.
I was a little stunned and maybe a little miffed when my mother scoffed at the whole idea. So I didn't get very far with my preparations, and my five or six cans just stayed up on that shelf for several years, until they had to be discarded.
No appearance of the Four Horsemen just yet! But, as the saying goes, better late than never.
Now, years later, I feel that I am much better prepared for the show. I no longer live in a city that is slated for the floods. I live on higher ground. I calculate that at about 800 feet elevation, if enough ice sheets way south of here melt into the sea, that should put me in the running for my hilly 20 acres of woods in a county that nobody's heard of to become prime waterfront property. I have plenty of wood for cooking and heat, and I have a well that is still functioning, so far. I know how to do lots of homesteading, survival things, though at the moment I don't practice them. I am on good terms with all my neighbors, and I have a double and almost complete collection of useful tools. I may even have an arsenal that just might enable me, if I had the will, to hold off the starving hordes from my hometown for all of two seconds.
But I won't say that I'm ready. I won't say that I'm looking forward to the end of the world, because it is definitely something that I don't want to see. But I will say that it is something that has always been interesting to hear about.
I always approach the comments on Common Dreams with extreme trepidation, ever since I discovered that reading any of their articles that have something to do with the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton is like drinking a pitcherful of Japanese Beetle juice. Actually that applies to just about any article dealing with politics, period, since CD's denizens are totally consumed with the idea of forming a 3rd party, which they would love to do at the expense of the Democrats. They retain just enough moxie, which is not much, to know that they have no hope at all of doing so with any remnants of the Repubs. In fact they give the Repubs a free ride, which is the main thing that repulses me.
But on non-political subjects a better class of commenters seems to appear, and, as at the end of the cited article, they may even end up collectively composing a second article that is just as informative, if not more so.
Mainly here they are predicting the end of the world, the human components of it -- in a huge variety of ways, and they don't think it will take long in coming.
Nobody appreciates the idea of the end of the world more than me. I don't mean the total obliteration of the planet. I mean instead events that will drastically erase the many ways that humans, by rampant proliferation and misuse of technology, have harmed the planet. But when this end comes, I expect it to do so slower than these commenters would like to think.
Maybe that's because of what my mother did, sometime in the 1950's or in the early '60's during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when, for nitwit reasons, the "world" really did seem to be on the verge of, if not ending as such, to be at least altered in some distinctly unpleasant ways.
When, in the early '50's, the Russians ended the American monopoly on nuclear arms, it caused quite a tizzy, and, coming so closely on the heels of the terrific, widespread conflagration of World War 2, there were all sorts of predictions flying around about a nuclear Armageddon.
That seemed logical to me, and I thought it would be something to see, and meanwhile we would need something to eat while it was going on. So I started stocking canned goods in one of the kitchen cabinets.
I was a little stunned and maybe a little miffed when my mother scoffed at the whole idea. So I didn't get very far with my preparations, and my five or six cans just stayed up on that shelf for several years, until they had to be discarded.
No appearance of the Four Horsemen just yet! But, as the saying goes, better late than never.
Now, years later, I feel that I am much better prepared for the show. I no longer live in a city that is slated for the floods. I live on higher ground. I calculate that at about 800 feet elevation, if enough ice sheets way south of here melt into the sea, that should put me in the running for my hilly 20 acres of woods in a county that nobody's heard of to become prime waterfront property. I have plenty of wood for cooking and heat, and I have a well that is still functioning, so far. I know how to do lots of homesteading, survival things, though at the moment I don't practice them. I am on good terms with all my neighbors, and I have a double and almost complete collection of useful tools. I may even have an arsenal that just might enable me, if I had the will, to hold off the starving hordes from my hometown for all of two seconds.
But I won't say that I'm ready. I won't say that I'm looking forward to the end of the world, because it is definitely something that I don't want to see. But I will say that it is something that has always been interesting to hear about.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:54 AM
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