The Latter Days

Throughout history, one seer or another has proclaimed that doom is nigh. Fortunately, humanity has managed to soldier on through war, plague, famine, flood, and sundry other forms of devastation and destruction. From the warnings of Jeremiah to Nostradamus, prophecy of end times abounds. There is of course, a universal reckoning coming for every individual, but so far as the human race is concerned, through every vicissitude, people manage to muddle on-world war, drought, crash-depressions great and small, man as a species survives them all. Suddenly a force so cataclysmic emerges that if we do not act immediately the damage will be irreversible. Is the new threat pot-bellied dictators in possession of atomic weapons? No, that we can live with, or Islamists trying to awaken the Mahdi down the well with a readiness to shake the earth to do rouse Him? No, Obama is certain that if sufficient accommodation is made, the Jihadist will be placated. Is it some new disease ravaging the land and stalking the swine, both two- and four-legged? No, a vaccine is on the way along with a national care scheme in the US to stick it to us. The danger that has to be mitigated so much that the House of Representatives voted the largest implicit tax increase in history is... man made global warming. Not climate change mind you, but warming after science comes to suggest that for more than a decade without this intervention that the world has actually been cooling. We have plenty of problems on our collective plate, but somehow half a degree rise or fall in temperature over a century with all sorts of factors barely considered, sun and sunspots, precipitation, mass almost unregulated industrial expansion in our competitor nations, particularly China but with India rising, even volcanoes, hardly seem to merit the three thousand dollar a year per family expense that the cap and trade bill will force according to many economists. The dole dwellers who are Obama's natural constituency won't have to worry as the slowly strangled productive will bear the burden for them as we are already carrying their welfare, education, medical care, and unpaid debt, but no matter how much devalued currency Obama prints, that new unnecessary $3000 hidden levy will hurt-but like all else for the bootstraps brigades, this is not the end of the world.