I feel as if all the point of progressivism has just served to use it as a target. Every place where there has been an attempt to move forward, it turns out that the forces of moving back are more motivated, more powerful, and they play dirty.

Again, I take advantage of the AI image generators, to illustrate a posting with emotional content. Does it convey adequately? Caravaggio would do it better, but he’s not around so this suffices to make my point.

I saw a piece the other day on one of my usual climate sources, that apparently we may be headed for what they are calling a “super el nino” event. What’s so super about it? It’s just another way of saying a “hotter longer drier summer.” They keep pulling in the date for when the global economy collapses and the great dying starts – as if blocking the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t a bit of a problem. But I feel like we are just adding insult to injury: how can we even pretend that governments care about climate change, when the first thing they seem to like to do is set eachothers’ oil supplies on fire? My efforts are no long even a fart in a hurricane.

It also seems as though even the “good guys” are going into this, stupid. In 1988 I bought a Honda CRX HF – the “HF” stood for high fuel efficiency. I was so excited! It was my first new car (my previous one was the proverbial $75 car) and I put low profile, harder wheels on it so it would turn sharper (I thought) and I was pretty amazed that I was getting about 50mpg. Partly that was because I realized that the 1200CC engine in the thing meant it wanted to be driven like a motorcycle, and knew how to do that. It was a good car and lasted almost a decade until someone T-boned me in the process of doing a U-turn in an open 4-lane street. That impact was terrifying; it folded the little honda almost in half. From then on I remembered that it’s not how light my vehicle is, if someone in a tank smashes into me. Flash forward, and now I have 2 cars – a highway car and a farm truck. The farm truck is a big V-8 powered Silverado that gets 20mpg. The highway car is a honda that gets 25mpg in fuel saver mode. I keep wondering what happened to 50mpg cars? Of course the answer is that they cannot co-exist on highways with semitrailers and big V-8 powered Silverados like mine. Of course there is absolute lack of political will to do anything – in fact the political will runs more toward undoing anything. It’s shocking as hell. Anyhow, I decided to gift the honda to a friend who really needs it, and now as I am older and less concerned, I thought I’d buy something I always wanted: a Toyota land cruiser. I started looking at them and saw that they’re hybrids, using the same highly successful principles as the Prius. I was going to become a hybrid-driving liberal! Shall I pierce my septum? But then I noticed that the land cruiser, even though it’s a hybrid, etc., gets 24-25mpg. It doesn’t take a degree in rocket scatology to figure that if it was a V-6 in there it would outperform the hybrid, and my Silverado, too.

Then, the war started and I realized how huge my carbon footprint is, and at this point I almost hope future generations die quickly with a minimum of whining. Especially the descendants of Trump voters. Eat them, first.