‘Thanksgiving 2022’

George Rebane

[This came in email, and reading it I immediately began looking for some hyperbole.  But given this administration’s stated goals, established direction, and ongoing ‘progress’ thereto, I couldn’t find any.  Perhaps you can dear reader.]

"Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband. "In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered.  Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington.

Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad example it sets for the rest of the world," Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be.  Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in.  It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey.  Even though it was the best type of Veggie Meat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce and mince-meat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey.  And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020 to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting.  The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold.  Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats-which were monitored and controlled by the electric company-be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family.  Or at least most of the family. Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment.  He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program.  And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort.  "The RHC's resources are limited," explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone.  "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled.  I'm sorry for your loss."

Ed couldn't make it either.  He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines-for everyone but government officials.  The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in.  Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion.  No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids.  Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists."  Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022.  That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved.  Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine.  Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact.  "A living Constitution is extremely flexible," said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan."  Europe has had laws like this one for years.  We should learn from their example," she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children.  He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him.  Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner.  Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford.  She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether.  Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner," but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility.  It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being.  Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13.  The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to "spur economic growth."  This time they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement.  At least he had his memories.  He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before Obama and government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential.  Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them.

He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2012, when all the real nonsense began.  "Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought.

  Maybe so........Winston.......... Maybe so.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

I wonder If I will even be around on the National Day of Atonement in 2022. The SBC Energy Police will have cut off all of my gas and electricity as punishment for being a global warming skeptic under the Power Conservation Act of 2016, forcing us to burn renewable wood in a single EPA approved stove that produces more asthma aggravating smoke than heat. My only hope was to continue my asthma meds, but the we had not heard from the RHC in six months, they refused to return our phone calls and all internet communication has been blocked My emergency stock pile was gone.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

I just sent this on to Susan, sounds crazy today but really not so much, crazier that ya it might be true the way we are going.

[Todd Juvinall]

I will be in the internment camp for re-education because I smuggled some Twinkies into the state from the last holdout against the tyranny, Nevada. I must rise at 6am for my first class, "The Obedience to Authority" and I must swear 12 times to their altar in the Lenin Chapel in the middle of the camp.

[Greg Goodknight]

George, take heart on one small point. I'd bet a friendly drink at the local watering hole of your choice that global warming will be dead as an active political issue within two years.

[wmartin]

"global warming will be dead as an active political issue within two years"

It strikes me that that is already the case.

When you get right down to it, global warming is a thing people read about or (more likely) see on TV. As far as emergencies go, it'll tend to rank below their own illness, their neighbors bankruptcy, or a needed car repair.

It seems to me that it's pretty hard to argue that 6+ billion people have had a fair amount of effect on the planet. Greenhouse gases are just part of the pantheon of evil humors visited on the world by people just being people. It's fairly easy to extrapolate forward in terms of growth of economies (and energy use is a good approximation of same), population growth, and increases of efficiency (which lag the economy, sadly). Even paleolithic societies have had devastating results on regional ecosystems although they are laughably viewed as being earth-friendly. Go figure.

It's hard to take the global warming people seriously, even assuming that cosmic rays/sun behavior/vulcanism aren't prime movers, until they settle down on a couple of questions.

1) What is the aim? Current climate conditions? Climate conditions given no people at all? It's difficult to avoid terraforming as a desireable end given the tendency for ice ages to wipe out a large part of the developed world's land area in just a few decades.
2) Why ignore population growth? Simply put, there are too many people. To a large degree wealth=pollution and changes to that equation happen incrementally. It seems silly to worry about anthropocene effects while not taking the number of anthros into account. Perhaps the end game for the hard-core global warming types is for 20 billion people to live in apartment blocks eating nutra-loaf, but I'd hate to think so.

I must say that it is amusing the see the hand wringing about sea level changes. If you want to worry about something, worry about greenhouse gas feedback loops and large scale break down of ecologies. Fretting about whether Manhattan is 30 feet underwater is absurd, we'd probably be better off. Of course, with the financial district wiped out, the President would have to hunt around for a new source of campaign donations.

[George Rebane]

Gentlemen - I'd love to take on all comers for GregG's bet, and would be doubly blessed if I were to lose. Can someone describe a simple measure of "dead as an active political issue in two years"? For example, if CARB were to be still alive and kicking our butts with AB32, then global warming to me would still be alive. And by extension, any of the other legislative monstrocities that were given life by the AGW scare.

We must remember that active political issues often die a successful death - Ride of Valkyries comes to mind - leaving behind a legacy that continues damage decade after decade. Consider the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, or Lincoln's launch of the 'greenback dollar' - each in their own right a fiercly debated political issue, each now dead with a menacing shadow that grows by the year.

[Michael Anderson]

I like wmartin's comments.

Too many people, not enough salmon.

Our planet tends to work things out with its given inputs. One way or another.

[George Rebane]

As an aside - did you know that the feds will not recognize the hundreds of thousands of salmon raised in norCal rivers, and will only count the fish spawned in the wild? Dams providing needed water and flood control must be destroyed in order to increase such 'natural' salmon counts.

[Michael Anderson]

Point of order, George. There can be no hatchery salmon w/o the wild version.

Counting hatchery salmon is like counting belly-button lint.

[George Rebane]

While not claiming to be a biologist, my meager knowledge there says that hatcheries have and continue to be totally self-sustaining sources of fish once they start harvesting their own eggs - i.e. to mix a metaphor, their hatchlings are not geldings.

And their 'belly-button lint' sure tastes good.

[Todd Juvinall]

There wouldn't be millions of acres of wheat or rice if there weren't people growing the plants and harvesting the seeds either MichaelA. The point is the salmon are not counted in the books by the government.

[Greg Goodknight]

WM, in a way, your metaphysics is as bad as the warmist metaphysics and it's just a fortunate accident that you are correct, and they aren't ;)

It's easy to argue that 6 billion people are having a drastic effect on the atmosphere. There are computer models that kinda match the surface temperature records, and those models show a clear runaway warming in the coming century with current greenhouse gas emissions. The problem remains that they models are unverified (some would say they are already shown to be false) with some troubling assumptions coded into them, mainly some very crude and even laughable assumptions about clouds. Somehow, I don't think the assumption that more water vapor in the atmosphere (the key to positive feedbacks from more greenhouse gas) doesn't result in more clouds was very realistic, and we do now know there were previously unknown natural forcings (or at least reasonably ignored 10 years ago) that the IPCC AR4 models do not take into account that can account for the heat the models assumed were due to CO2.

No positive feedbacks, no catastrophic warming. If you look at the temperature vs Carbon 14 graph over the last 500 million years, it's clear that galactic cosmic rays are a primary driver of the great ice ages and hothouse earth ages, and with current evidence of day to day influences, it's inconceivable they should be ignored in any verifiable planetary general circulation model.

BTW, my definition of 'active political issue' is any regulatory agency, state or local, actively regulating 'greenhouse gases' due to their effect on world temperatures, or anyone holding (or campaigning for with a chance in hell to win) political office doing so on a platform of pounding us down to Civil War era carbon footprints in order to heal the planet. I think it will be pretty much dead as a campaign issue in the silly season of the 2012 elections. There is one megabuck atmospheric physics experiment underway in a CERN particle beam, and I think once those results are being published in the peer reviewed literature you can expect a number of national science organizations revising their position papers adopted circa 2007 after the IPCC AR4 report was run up the flagpole. Once that happens, any claims of a "settled science" fall by the wayside and even an EPA under an alarmist Democratic administration will have to put regulatory action on hold.

[George Rebane]

GregG, please tell us more about the CERN experiment.

[Greg Goodknight]

I've written about this multiple times in the past but very possibly not here. CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) was proposed and accepted in '98 then prompty defunded after the lead physicist, Jasper Kirkby, made the mistake of musing that GCR could be the cause of one half to all of the warming attributed to CO2. Funding was reinstated when the low budget version, Svensmark's SKY experiment funded by a $600K grant from Denmark's Carlsberg Foundation (ie Beer, not oil, money) published in 2006. CLOUD-06 replicated the SKY experiment and the CLOUD-09 (nice accident of time) apparatus was constructed. IIRC they've been gathering data for at over a year.

Kirkby gave this talk a month ago and describes the science and the experiment as it currently stands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63AbaX1dE7I

His rhetoric is much more guarded today than 13 years ago, and the 65 minutes is well worth watching.

[Russ Steele]

I have a Google Alert for any published information on the CLOUD experiment for over a year. I will have it up on The Dalton Minimum Returns blog once is is published. I agree with Greg, watching the 65 minute video can be very interesting and informative. I am hoping for a peer reviewed paper this year, but my guess it the global warming gate keepers at the major scientific journals are going to make publication very difficult, which will only delay the process even more.

[George Rebane]

Thanks Russ. Could you also post a link on RR to the DMR blog piece when you publish it?

[Greg Goodknight]

Russ, while papers by the Kirkby team may have a hard time passing muster at the journals where the Climategate crowd were able to get open minded editors fired, there are a number of reputable atmospheric and particle physics journals that are not so afflicted. Especially in the light of the climategater's subverting the peer review process from start to finish, I doubt megabucks research from the bowels of the CERN would get the same treatment from *anyone*.

It was Shaviv & Veizer '03 and Svensmark '06 that turned me from lukewarmer to skeptic to scoffer in early 2007. This is the soft underbelly of the AGW panic, the 'great climate centres' should be, as reported by James Lovelock (of Gaia fame), scared stiff that they've got the physics wrong, that clouds and aerosols are running the show and they missed it.

BTW I just happen to be watching BookTV on C-SPAN2, with LIVE coverage of the "2011 LA Times Festival of Books" at USC, and, at the 11:55PM PT mark, warmiing alarmist and "science historian" Naomi Oreskis has just, in effect, claimed that physicist extraordinaire Freeman Dyson was making pronouncements against cAGW because he's no longer in the limelight, is past his prime, and just wants attention. Amazing; just goes to show you can denounce even the most brilliant older folks as being senile if they're politically incorrect.

[Greg Goodknight]

Excuse me, Oreskes petite slander against Dyson was at about the 11:55*AM* mark...

[Russ Steele]

Naomi Oreskis has been proven wrong so many times, who is listening anymore except the warming cults and their propaganda prone leaders? I watched a video of Dyson explaining his views on AGW and he seem quite clear and lucid, no sign of senility that I could see.

[Greg Goodknight]

In this case, she had free reign on C-SPAN for maybe an hour. One of the other panelists (Timothy Ferris) who is also a warmer tried to blunt her attack on Dyson by saying he was "Real Sharp" but she just continued to lay into him.

Maybe tomorrow I'll transcribe her little slander. Fortunately, watching (or, as I was doing, having it as background noise) live TV on TiVo saves the last half hour so when you press record, it's like having a time machine to push the button 30 minutes earler.