{"id":650,"date":"2009-03-31T12:52:21","date_gmt":"2009-03-31T17:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=650"},"modified":"2022-05-22T08:30:58","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T13:30:58","slug":"the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The End Of The World As We Know It"},"content":{"rendered":"

One reason Global Warming, er, sorry, Climate Change, doesn’t have me wetting myself in fear is I’ve lived through too many other End Of The World As We Know It predictions. These are a few of the EOTWAWKI predictions I recall in my lifetime:<\/p>\n

The Cold War<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the most real and likely end of the world. We even came close a couple of times, but it never happened. It ended when Reagan’s military budgets drove the USSR into bankruptcy. Thank you, Ronnie, not only for ending WW III but for the sheer glee of watching lefties go through painful logic contortions to avoid giving you credit.<\/p>\n

Armageddon<\/strong> – I was raised in an apocalyptic cult that proclaimed the world would end in 1975. I left them around ’74.\u00a0 I wasn’t brave; I just realized it was nonsense.\u00a0 Then I became a vampire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Famine 1975”<\/strong> – A bestseller that predicted we’d all be eating our pets by the mid-seventies.\u00a0 Here we are in 2009 with more food than we know what to do with.\u00a0 (Sorry, famine-stricken countries.\u00a0 Your starvation is caused by government and economic policies, not lack of food.)<\/p>\n

Global Cooling<\/strong> – The big scare in the 70s was that global cooling <\/em>was going to kill us all.\u00a0 We’d be fighting off glaciers and the only way to stop it was to shut down industry.\u00a0 (Sound familiar?)<\/p>\n

Pollution<\/strong> – We were all going to die in our own filth.\u00a0 Rivers were catching fire!\u00a0 There was no hope, we were doomed.\u00a0 (Rachel Carson was before my time, or at least before I was politically aware.)\u00a0 We were told that breathing in big cities was the same as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.\u00a0 (Nonsense, of course, but it scared a lot of people.)\u00a0 Nixon created the EPA to deal with it, and they actually did, cleaning up things pretty well until Carol Browner took over and turned the agency into a junk science machine whose primary goal, besides increasing their own power and funding, was harassing big companies for sport.<\/p>\n

“The Population Bomb”<\/strong> – Another fun EOTWAWKI book, predicting the fall of mankind via overpopulation.\u00a0 Dr. Paul Erlich has an amazing <\/em>record.\u00a0 He’s been predicting disaster for four decades, and\u00a0 every one<\/em> of his predictions has been wrong.\u00a0 His 100% track record has made him a darling of the left, where he continues to pontificate for a living.<\/p>\n

The Jupiter Effect<\/strong> – on March 10, 1982, all the planets would line up and the gravitational stress would cause huge earthquakes and probably rip the planet apart.\u00a0 The planets weren’t really lined up, and even if they were the effect would have been too small to measure.\u00a0 The most interesting thing that happened on that day was Travis Jackson and Happy Chandler were elected to Baseball Hall of Fame. Also, 28 skiers in Bromont, Quebec performed backflips while holding hands.\u00a0 No studies were done to see if funky gravity made the feat easier.<\/p>\n

Flesh Eating Bacteria<\/strong> – OMG, We’re All Gonna Die because FEB was going to consume our bodies in a matter of hours!\u00a0 It’s going to spread like bad pop music and kill us all.\u00a0 Except it didn’t.<\/p>\n

The China Syndrome<\/strong> – The movie came out the week of the Three Mile Island accident.\u00a0 Only one of them was a real disaster, but the two events raised enough fears to stall the development of nuclear power ever since.<\/p>\n

Killer Bees<\/strong> – First they’d kill all the regular bees.\u00c2\u00a0 Then they’d kill us.\u00a0 And it will hurt even more than watching the multitude of cheesy movies about it.<\/p>\n

The Millennium Bug<\/strong> – Airplanes would fall out of the sky and traffic lights would go kerflooey, causing massive accidents.\u00a0 Nuclear plants would meltdown and sewerage plants would spew effluent into the environment.\u00a0 None of that ever happened, due to a massive program to fix software and replace old computers before that fateful day.\u00a0 I was part of a team working on the problem for a bank.\u00a0 I found one old computer, whose sole purpose in life was to make one call a day, via modem, and transfer money from a government tax collection department to the bank.\u00a0 If that had been allowed to fail the result would have been. . . the money sitting in the wrong account for a day or two.<\/p>\n

I predicted<\/a> the bug would cause a few minor incidents, but even that wimpy prediction was wrong.<\/p>\n

Bird Flu<\/strong> – Limited to birds, but we should remain afraid because it will cross over and wipe out a billion or two of us.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure if this is still considered a current threat or not.\u00a0 Threats tend to lose their OMG! effect rather quickly, and so have to be replaced by fresh threats from time to time lest we actually relax and enjoy our lives.<\/p>\n

And here we are, with fresh new threats to mankind.\u00a0 And these, were assured, are far <\/em>more dangerous than those overblown old threats.\u00a0 Global Warming has morphed into Climate Change, allowing any fluctuation in either direction to be hailed as the EOTWAWKI. And we’ve also got Bee Colony Collapse and Ocean Acidification and and and and…<\/p>\n

Pardon me while I don’t get all upset about it. I’ve got far more serious things to consider, like should I make chili for dinner, or have the leftover lasagna?<\/p>\n

Oh damn, the lasagna is moldy.\u00c2\u00a0 It was good lasagna too. Now that’s<\/em> worth getting upset about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One reason Global Warming, er, sorry, Climate Change, doesn’t have me wetting myself in fear is I’ve lived through too many other End Of The World As We Know It predictions. These are a few of the EOTWAWKI predictions I recall in my lifetime: The Cold War \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the most real and likely end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2313,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions\/2313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}