Afghanistan and the Taliban (8/19/2021)

Yesterday, I checked the latest visits to my blogs. It is fun to see how many hits I get and if you all look at some of the other posts of mine in addition to the front page. Naturally, the top ten get a lot of hits, since I posts those on the right hand side of my blog. In other words, it will be difficult to bump those of the list. We may get the occasional new number 10; however, the top 5 is pretty darn fixed.

Now, I cannot see who you all are, but I can see the country you come from, what browser type you are using and the operating system you are using. But the post that you are looking at is the most fun. It struck me that that someone looked at this one post from 2017 entitled “Education is for weaklings, really?” In this post I discuss how our religious conservatives or what we probably should call are religious Taliban was railing over the airwaves that education poisons the minds of people. I discussed in that post how they favored the lowest common denominator.  If you read the post and my bio, you know I am somewhat educated and that my family is educated as well.  I am proud of it.  Moreover, I am an educator.  I taught at the university level in New Mexico, in southwestern Ohio, and here in the Tidewater of Virginia.  I am a trainer (adult educator) in my current job.

I was rereading my post last night and here on the news we learned that the Taliban had again taken over Afghanistan after we the U.S. decided to pull out. Yes, it was of course tRump who put it all in motion and Biden who completed the job. I agree both presidents are at fault, and I do not want to go into that argument today.  It had to be done, I guess. It is just a damn shame, we really tried to build a nation, educate women and children, and we will see, what will happen. The Taliban does not have a good reputation when it comes to education of women and arts and sciences, in general.

This is why I felt it so poignant that the education “sucks” post of mine popped up on the recently read list of mine. What a coincidence that it popped up!  I have always thought that the religious fanatics in this country are no better than the Taliban in Afghanistan. I initially thought they were more subtler in trying to take over and dominate the country. However, with tRump they were emboldened. They put in two or three religious fanatics on the supreme court, and who knows how many others on the court, so now we have their form of sharia law. On January 6th this year they stormed Congress in an attempt to violently overthrow the Government. Moreover, they are as racist as the Taliban and armed.

The US or Q or whatever Taliban at the US capital on 1-6-2021

Concluding, as educated folks, educators, and at least pro democracy people (and hopefully liberals), we need to my vigilant and resist the religious Taliban that is raising its ugly head in this country before they turn us into a white (racist) Afghanistan.

The AMOC is going amok (8/10/2021)

This week we learn that global warming may have some real strange bedfellows. Ice age anyone? Unbelievable, now I have to concede to some of the conservative pundits who were telling us that the climate is all cyclical, and we were due for an ice age and not for warming out of control. Where did I or all these doomsday prognosticators go wrong? Here I wrote a whole post on how things were not cyclical, but we were trapped in a death spiral. No, now we are learning that the movie “The day after tomorrow” may actually be spot on.

This was a scene from this past winter, but can you just imagine walking in the woods on August 10, in coastal Virginia and experiencing this.  Yes, I have been in a snowstorm in Wyoming on July 3rd, but that was at high elevation.

What changed? Well, it is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that seems to be getting screwed up. Now what the hell is he talking about? The AMOC going amok?

Very simply put the gulf stream is part of AMOC, a circulation of ocean currents that brings warmer waters to the northern hemisphere and the temperate climate to western Europe.  Part of the AMOC is a colder flow back over the ocean floor. Cold water is heavier and where the warm and the cold meet (for instance the Labrador Straights) it provides great fish habitat.

This past week two papers were published, one by a climate scientist (Niklas Boers) and one by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who both claim that the circulation is weakening, slowing down or may actually stopping. This may actually happen abruptly, or more likely by the end of this century (no one is sure yet). The result should be the end of warm temperate weather in Europe and North America. North America and Europe will likely experience an ice age like in the movie; maybe not overnight but fairly rapidly. In addition, there will be droughts in these areas and in west Africa and because the current actually pulls water away from the east coast of the U.S. there will be extra sea level rise. Exciting isn’t it!

But why is this happening?

Therein lies the 10-million-dollar question isn’t it. The cause is global warming. While that may seem crazy, but all that ice and melting (cold) freshwater runoff (read too much runoff and caused by global warming) from the melting Greenland glaciers that enters the ocean is essentially interrupting, weakening, blocking the AMOC. Somewhat like a feedback loop, it may actually usher in a new ice age. While the other ice ages may have been caused by the earth’s shift on its axis, this may be caused indirectly by humankind.

It would sure be an interesting scenario to think about, I am not sure if scientists really know if this will really happen and if so, how severe it would be. It is just fascinating and scarry at the same time to see and think about what is happening now that we humans are influencing the natural world as opposed of being part of the natural world. There are so many things happening around us presently that never happened before, at least not at such a large scale like the floods, hurricanes and wildfires.