The Witness Chronicles, February 6, 2024

2024 weather and the stunning irresponsibility of the Republican Party

Better days .Photo by Cedric Letsch on Unsplash

Screwy, Scary 2024 Weather: It’s Everywhere All At Once

330 mudslides in and around LA, Chile’s heartbreak, & Cat Six?

Here in the northeastern US we are currently basking in bright sunlight under clear blue skies. There is little to no snow and temps will hit 20 degrees above normal by the weekend, very weird for February.

But that’s about the only good weather news. Meteorologists are discussing the need for a Category Six hurricane designation for storms with winds over 197 mph. There have been five in recent years. A new category might take into consideration more than wind speed, including wave impacts, speed of formation, and other destructive forces in addition to wind.

At 197+ the wind alone can destroy nearly any building it encounters. Add in storm surge and a Cat Six would be a major catastrophe anywhere it hits.

2024 weather is off to a fast and scary start with unprecedented firestorms in Chile that have killed over a hundred, with many more missing. The entirety of California is getting bombed with gale force winds and torrential rain from atmospheric rivers, a term unfamiliar just a few years ago but now becoming a norm.

The combination of rain, fires, and drought have created ideal conditions for mudslides in and around Los Angeles with an estimated 330 over the past 36 hours and more rain on the way. The images are truly apocalyptic with houses sliding down hills, cars buried, and people describing finding themselves in bed and flowing on a river of mud. 

Those storms are affecting the entire southwest and avalanches have taken lives in the Sierras. They are estimated to be a once in one thousand year storm, though those measurements are largely becoming meaningless as records are constantly broken.

I spoke with a friend from NYC this morning who is in Miami escaping the winter for a few days, but it is relatively cold and windy with sixty mph gusts. She was going shopping for cold weather gear that she had optimistically left behind in New York.

We’re seeing human migration patterns changing with reporting that more and more affluent younger adults are leaving the coasts in search of more stable and affordable living. Even California’s iconic piers are being weakened or even destroyed by high water and wave action.

So, once again we are faced with mountains of evidence that climate change is going full force and we still have politicians shouting about drilling more and burning more in an almost biblical defiance of reality.

I guess we should ask them what exactly constitutes evidence that would wean them off the bribes of the fossil fuel companies, who we now know saw this scenario as far back as the early nineteen fifties. They kept it hush hush, then ramped up efforts to sow the seeds of irrational denial. Fertile seeds nourished by political slush money.

This feels like a feedback loop gone wildly out of control, because it is. We see these events on the news, now daily, and shrug and move on with our lives, perhaps wondering briefly what you do when your house is filled with mud and sliding down a hill.

Then we go back to TikTok or some other distraction, momentarily glad that this stuff isn’t happening to us. Until it is, because there aren’t many places even slightly immune to the bad stuff.

One of our presidential candidates is doubling down on the denial scenario, promising to gut environmental agencies and drill, drill, drill. It would be supremely ironic if his Florida fiefdom were to fall victim to one of those Cat Six weather bombs.

It’s a perfectly plausible possibility for any waterfront property in Florida.

These weather events always take out the more affordable properties first, contributing to the rise of homelessness, but with this apparent escalation, even the billionaires can’t buy their way out of watching their palaces slide down hills or get blasted  into firewood.

One half of our government has willingly chosen to not govern, even in the face of these disasters, instead hoping they can use them to win elections via the blame game. But the blame game has a way of backfiring as voters get fed up with corrupt politicians putting greed and power ahead of governing or facing reality.

Writing about this risks being a broken record or joining Don Quixote in his war with windmills, but it needs to be said. Just because we have normalized events that are not even slightly normal, there is no excuse for inaction. We can’t claim it is not in our backyards because it is or soon will be.

On the positive side, and yes there is one, the inevitable forces of capitalism are inching us towards a future without fossil fuels, as alternatives become profitable, apparently the only way they become widespread. I’m ok with market forces driving change if nothing else will. It’s the one thing that will break the complacency in DC on the right about what is easily the worst human catastrophe, barring nuclear warfare, that humanity has ever faced.

Maybe some good old fashioned greed is finally going to show some value for once. Or maybe not.

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House Republicans Choose Politics Over Country

Creating problems instead of solutions

It’s time to tell them to get to work or get out. The House GOP has chosen to make things worse in a desperate attempt to win in November. Not just some things, everything. They pretend inflation is still a problem. It is not. They scream about the border but refuse to do anything about it. They tell us to be afraid because fear is all they have left.

They live in fear, cowering before a man who will spend the majority of his year in court losing case after case, a man who brags about keeping the country from moving forward, for his own purposes. A scared man, a fake businessman who is literally losing tens of millions weekly in those same courts.

It would all be absurd if it were not so completely the truth that they could care less about the country they were elected to govern. It borders on treason and I say that because they are openly defying our President and supporting Vladimir Putin, a war criminal who leads the government of an enemy country.

This is a losing strategy but it is the strategy of Donald Trump, a serial loser who has methodically taken his once proud and principled party down, until they are nothing but mindless lackeys. Americans need to wake up and get pissed off, then we need to tell these people to get to work.

The first thing they need to do is pass the immigration bill in the Senate, a bill that contains nearly everything they have demanded for years. Trump issued a supreme order from on high that they must do nothing about immigration so he has something to campaign on.

The man is so empty of ideas that the only thing he can do is create problems to blame on Biden, and more important, to distract voters from his actual situation. By the end of this year it is likely he will be both a convicted felon and will have to pay damages that could total a half a billion dollars.

So he and his House will let more people die at the borders, look on while the Texas governor defies the Supreme Court, and the law of the land, and watch as Russia destroys a sovereign country in Ukraine, possibly igniting a global war.

That’s a lot of bad, very bad. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a man who believes that the United States should be an evangelical Christian country that persecutes gays and people of color, is blocking any action on all these things abd taking pride in it.

He takes pride in doing nothing and he is a presumptive leader of his party, except he is not. There is no Republican leadership in Congress. They have surrendered to Trump, a man who appears to be cracking under the pressure of his own crimes and misdemeanors.

Meanwhile, Biden and the Democrats are racking up wins left and right. Inflation is falling, we are rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, and Biden is engaged with the world trying to put out the fires of war across Europe and the Middle East.

Biden does not need to run on Donald Trump’s do nothing record, he can run on showing how real Americans get to work solving problems instead of prolonging them. He can remind Americans what being great really means. It does not mean hating, tearing down, running away from solutions, and running towards problems. 

This is a tipping point and it would be so easy to avoid chaos. All the Republican Party needs to do is come to their senses, vote to get things done instead of making things worse and realize their guy is nothing more than an ego run amok.

But they are running out of time. They risk losing it all because they choose politics and fear over patriotism and country. We need to tell them how angry we are about their selfish worship of power and greed and a little man, angry and running scared.

Nine months from now they will lose it all and they will deserve it.

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~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen. 

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