WEATHER

WEATHER

From today’s news:

“Americans from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border were pummeled by a historic winter storm Monday as heavy snow, freezing rain and Arctic temperatures made highways impassable, closed airports and crippled the electricity supply in Texas on one of its coldest days in decades.”

Climate change deniers will point to this and say hey, there is no such thing as global warming.  Classic mistake:  weather is not climate.  Actually, climate scientist say that global warming has caused the jet stream to be more erratic, resulting in pulling down more frigid air from the polar regions.  Whatever the cause the US is now in the Big Chill.  Weather or not, as Mark Twain, or perhaps Charles Dudley Warner once said:  Everyone talks about the weather; nobody does anything about it.

Today I also saw a post from a neighbor up the road that asserted that the power outages in Texas was a result of them relying too much on renewable energy.  She advocates for more burning of fossil fuels.  So much for carbon sequestration. 

Since we can’t do anything about the weather, let’s switch to the current political climate.  Predictably Congress will increase the security budget for the Capitol and are in the process of forming a 9-11 style commission to investigate the January 6 riot.  It will take time.  In the meantime, President Biden has promised to end the pandemic and give more money to hurting Americans.  He has promised to attack climate change and promote immigration reform.  Good luck will all that. He inherited a mess.  Former President Trump is crowing about the Senate not convicting him of high crimes and misdemeanors and is promising to remain engaged in the political scene, and promising to punish those who voted against him, and to take back America from the socialist Democrats.  I guess he still thinks he is the king of the thirty percent.

Some say we are more divided than ever.  Any reader of history will recognize that we have never been truly the United States of America but have always had divisions.  Examples: The Civil War; the isolationist America First movement of the early 20^th Century; the McCarthy era; the Vietnam war.  Nevertheless, our current divisions are great, and the atmosphere is rather chilly