“Even Hercules Would Have Lost.”

Those are the words of Giorgos Kalomoiris. He was describing how fighting a wildfire in Greece this summer felt like fighting the Hydra, a famous snake monster with many heads. “Cut off one, two more appear in its place,” the saying goes.

On the Greek island of Evia, spelled most often as Euboea but pronounced the same, (The “b” is spoken as a “v”), the fires were vicious.

Wildfires wiped out most of the forest. It burned people out of homes and old, prosperous businesses. One firefighter helped save the homes of others even as his own home was destroyed by the conflagration.

As I played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, frustrated to near death and restarting several times as a masochistic love of it turned to bitter obsession, I did not know that these horrors were playing out in today’s Greek world. In the historical fiction game, the players will travel the ancient Aegean Sea in an attempt to find and save the character’s family, the fictional daughter and grandchildren of Leonidas I of Sparta.

At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, the main character is a mercenary living on “Kephallonia” a mostly neutral, small island west of Ellis and Arkadia. To find who pulled apart their family when they were a child, the character, called a misthios, must find and kill every member of the cult known as Kosmos, which existed long before Leonidas and the famous Battle of The 300.

In creating the game, Ubisoft of Canada recreated the Ancient Greek world with breathtaking detail as far as known and mythological historic sites. Some are based on real features of the land, some on descriptions of the world’s oldest pure historians.

The player encounters real people from history including Socrates, Cleon, Pericles, Alkibiates, Hipocrates, Aspasia, Herodotus and more. Laboriously moving by sea, horseback and foot between the city-states, wild huntresses, Cultists, bandits and of course, Spartans and the Delian league (Athenians) along with pirates and other mercenaries, all represent constant threats, along with fierce animals.

I couldn’t help but get a curiosity about the Ancient Greek world, its history, its people. The creators of the game did some good work, but the game is the most tasking I’ve ever played. Some find it easy. I doubt their sincerity. If you should make it to Thera and figure out the puzzle to open the doors to Atlantis, you find out that, impossibly, Pythagoras is your real father and he’s still alive.

He tasks you with beating, in single combat, four creatures: The Minotaur, The Medusa, the Cyclops and the Sphinx. All can readily kill your character. But you have to kill them in epic boss fights and collect artifacts from inside their dead bodies, then take them back to Pythagoras. Then begins a truly sadistic journey through Elysium and Hades before you can finally enter the city of Atlantis.

Of course by 431, Hercules (Heracles), Perseus and Jason are long gone, but their stories live on. In Hades, there’s a boss fight with Hercules, and I wasn’t about to go in his cave after him. I used ghost arrows to shoot him through the rock walls. It takes a long time that way. But as his health diminishes he shouts an insult at his unseen foe: “You fight like an Argonaut!”

That’s hilarious since Hercules was an Argonaut.

The Ancient Greek world still fascinates us. The epic poem keeps the romantic and the terrifying alike alive to this day.

But I have to wonder. What would Socrates or Pericles think if they could see their people now? The lands scorched, trees burned to charcoal, animals gone or rapidly going extinct. Would the wars, the plague of 430 seem so terrible now, compared to what they would see, and then see what must follow?

To have a Greek firefighter compare a wildfire to the Hydra and pronounce that it would have overcome the great Hercules himself is not, to me, a use of hyperbole.

It’s just sad.

In the United States, the wildfires get names now, like hurricanes. This summer, 14 percent of the giant sequoia trees were incinerated. Homes in wildfire-prone areas are steadily rising in value, while HUD sells homes in flood-prone areas to the poor, knowing full well that the homes cannot survive.

In New York, flooding in the Holland Tunnel and subways, thought to be a freak during Superstorm Sandy, told us that it was not a once-in-a-lifetime event. And that it will keep happening.

A study predicts the obvious: people born after 2020 will encounter with terrifying regularity storms and droughts and wildfires that will make the awful summer of 2021 look peaceful in comparison. There will be more casualties, infrastructure destroyed, animal extinctions and food shortages than you or I can fathom. And we can already see a bad moon rising.

At the United Nations, Boris What’s-his-name, the UK Prime Minister who is really a bag of dead cats with a kitten in the middle eating its way out posing as a man, made a plea for world governments to take global warming seriously. Boris? That’s extraordinary, old boy!

As food prices rise astonishingly fast, due to global warming and greed, immigration policies which limit farm workers and more, we see also the pattern of extinction in wildlife, both plant and animal. What’s really bad is that rarely seen species are counted extinct, removing them from endangered status, which means everyone gives up on them. As animals no longer protected, they’ll certainly die. Yet history has shown us that we can help if we just don’t give up. The Perigrine falcon, bald eagle and some sea fowl have been brought back from endangered lists. We can do great things when we don’t give up.

And when dickhead politicians on the take crawl into their holes and let good people do what’s right.

China has made policy to stop construction of coal burning power plants. But we in the west do nothing.

Folks, we are all in great peril. There is no denying it, and those who try to should be seen as they are, greedy, delusional or ignorant.

I honestly care about how this world and everyone on it will continue after I’m gone. History is already chock-full of horror; yet we are writing an even more terrifying one, and we have no right to do so. Global warming is, according to health officials, the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. Future generations will live in a dystopia no movie can depict. Crime, disease, famine and war will accompany weather disasters like rising water levels, supercanes, thunderstorms from nightmares, fires and more, and I’m telling you that for all the ridicule she has endured, Greta Thunberg is right: it’s a world dying that we are killing, and whether or not you believe in an end of days prophecy, it’s already coming.

God damn it, stop this!

***

On Evia, people who lived in peace with nature are now in total despair. Can’t we sympathize, are we that hard-hearted, that selfish, that it means nothing to us?

In Rome, an unlikely scenario plays out. Wild boar (which root for trash but can get deadly, are ill-tempered and carry things best not mentioned) proliferate. They’re everywhere, prompting a common declaration: “We’ve been invaded.”

Wasn’t there something about the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse being given the power to kill with disease, war, and the wild beasts of the Earth?

Animals are responding to wildfires, deforestation and global warming.

Ask yourself if you really want to see that get worse. For that passage to come true.

Ask. Think. But be quick; we’re almost out of time.

Sometimes I Have The Worst Feeling…

One of the worst things about PTSD is the feeling of impending doom you sometimes get. It’s hard to shake and impossible to ignore. I get it about six times a year, and there’s no telling how long I’ll be a prisoner. I’ve never admitted this in quite these words before. I couldn’t. How do you face such a thing? Because, when it happens, it’s overwhelming. You’re honestly certain that the world is coming to an end.

In 1999, a shitload of people had this. The hysteria was contagious. Many references were made to the “end of the thousand years”. Nostradamus was said to have predicted the battle of Armageddon in December of 1999. There were fears of computer systems crashing, leaving cities without power, and that mayhem would surely reign.

The movies that came out that year didn’t seem to help much. Schwarzenegger was in an underrated film, “End of Days”, Johnny Depp was in the terrifying “Ninth Gate”, which let everyone down with an absolutely dumbass ending to a decent story. But there were plenty of debunkers and unbelievers, too. Watching wrestling, which was better at the time, was fun. Chris Jericho went by the nickname “Y2J” in a thumbing of the nose at the worriers. His Titantron entrance showed chaos erupting.

Plenty of scholars pointed out that Nostradamus was at best a scribbler of fantasy whose writings were completely open to any interpretation a reader wanted to apply.

In November, the superstitious and pseudoscientific population took a truly weird event as an omen. In the eastern Atlantic, Hurricane Lenny was born. He did something that confounded the NOAA, no small feat. He traveled east. He was the first to be observed doing so exclusively, without looping once either north or east. He was born over water and died there, a freak among Atlantic storms which are known to be unpredictable.

The threat we faced was nothing more than fear. On New Year’s Eve I watched the countdown to midnight in Times Square. At 00:00 hours, nothing happened. Nothing blew up. Nothing shut down. Nothing crashed. There was no chaos, no mayhem.

People are often scared of the things that never happen and the things that do happen but defy easy explanation, like Hurricane Lenny. I’ve sure been hit by both. It seems that it’s in our genes.

But what gets me the most is when people should be afraid, but aren’t.

I saw that people reacted to the coronavirus with a mixed response. In some states, people stayed home, but by then the virus was well seeded here. The United States has been the epicenter of COVID-19 for months. Now people have had enough and are reopening businesses. That could have been done with minimal risk and physical distancing. Masks are mostly illusory and provide little protection. But those, combined with distancing and testing, are effective. Quarantine after a positive test result is essential. Some people did it. Some didn’t. Some were contagious way before getting tested, making it worse, so what we had before the protests was a climbing rate of infection. Stories of a decline were false or just wishful thinking and denial. No decline existed. New York may have seen a drop but that’s a different story.

The protesters are in close proximity to each other. Some wear masks, some don’t. But the lack of spacing, the viral load concentration between people as they talk or breathe heavily as they walk distances that elevate heart rate, is a really big problem. I deleted my blog “The Last of the American Dream” because nobody ever read it. To get views, you really need a paid WordPress domain and search engines have to like you. And people have to “like” your posts. I don’t have either advantage and people just don’t come here. My other blog was more political and science based. I followed up news stories on climate change and fact checked, then tried to explain in simple terms what to expect. Believe me, it’s not good. These days nobody wants to read about it. No one wants to put it on the cable news. You can ignore or even disbelieve anything you want. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It is there. Every update I read proved a past prediction about the speed of glacial melt in gross error. Sea level rise isn’t the guide, it’s merely an effect. Watching huge wedges of ice shelf fall into the sea is partially a guide, but what so many miss is that the more ice is lost, the more danger we are in, both short term and long. It should scare the shit out of you, because it’s too late to stop it. Seawater is very good at retaining heat. That seawater, perhaps a degree or two warmer than in past decades, eats away at ice. The sun heats the air more, so that blue pools of melt water are clearly seen on top of expanses of glaciers. Melting has been achieved from above and below. The tundra is thawing. Fear among scientists that an inevitable release of methane will happen, will be epic and catastrophic, are true. Yet no one talks about it. Except scientists and teenage girls smarter than any of us can ever be. Nobody reads. Nobody listens.

The pandemic may have shut down a lot of emissions as highways were empty of traffic for a minute. The Los Angeles sky cleared. The earth didn’t constantly tremble from motor vehicles. I know we can make changes. But now it’s forgotten as the fossil fuels burn again. None will remember. The climate change wasn’t slowed. It wasn’t long enough to do that. In truth even if it had been sustained for two years or more, the temperature would still rise because of what’s already in the atmosphere, which isn’t visible, as smog is.

It’s a pity people aren’t terrified of what’s in store. Every prediction is obsolete before it’s made. It’s far, far worse than you can imagine.

Being unable to imagine something is no sin, but knowing that an event or condition will come and doing nothing about it, is.

We are in an existential crisis. As a country. As a species.

Nightmares are here. More will come.

TRUMP’S AMERICAN DESTRUCTION

You can lie to others. Even to yourself. If you truly see Trump as a saviour, you are full of lies. He has set a record for lies told by a sitting president, so don’t be too hard on yourself for being full of shit.

Everything he’s done has caused irreparable damage to this country. Now Joe Biden admits to fears that Trump will as president bring all his powers to bear in order to limit ballots. He’s considered the possibility that even if he loses the election, Trump will play dictator and refuse to leave the White House. Fuck, I predicted that in 2017, then again last year on my blog. You saw the White House surrounded within days of the first signs unrest following George Floyd’s murder. A new fence. New concrete. Mercenaries brought in to show his power, armed to the teeth, as all dictators begin. He was castigated for his threat to use regular military personnel against protesters; be thankful he backed up. Someone finally stood up to him and made a difference.

That difference will vanish into nothingness when he tries it next time. He has a mission. He clearly acts on the whim of Vladimir Putin. The mission is to take this country to a level of weakness that will allow Russia to complete its invasion of Ukraine and take other countries as well. It’s about resources and military targets. While our military focused on the hopeless war against terror, draining money and wasting lives and time, Russia consolidated every resource for home defense. They can’t be prevented from military operations in other countries with the condition he’s put us in. Putin bides his time, awaiting the hour he knows Trump and his family and confederacy of goons will provide for him. We know Trump was professionally groomed without knowing how deep he was in the shit.

Putin isn’t as stupid as his puppet. He’s watched the United States lose face militarily since Vietnam. He knows what Nixon called “peace with honor” was bullshit, a dishonorable defeat in a war we should have known better than to get into following the French colonial forces getting their asses kicked. When we disengaged, everyone seemed happy. But around the globe, it was seen as proof that America didn’t hold up to its commitment to people it had vowed to save. That on the ground, in the air and even at sea, American forces could be beaten and bloodied.

That war did more damage than anyone but a few can ever know. Veterans returned broken, guilt ridden and damaged beyond the possibility of healing. Scholars picked it all apart in thick volumes that should be required reading. Documentaries were made. In the end, what remained was a nightmare Kennedy and Johnson had inflicted on our country. We’ve been mocked ever since, tested, shoved, provoked and battered as a result of incompetent intelligence and leadership. Money taken from intelligence resources and put elsewhere. Resources which would have kept us out of Iraq and prevented needless death and the destabilization of that entire region.

We are so slow to learn. Even slower to stop, take a breath and consider our actions and give proper appraisal of the possible consequences. Vietnam and Nixon changed everything. We rebounded but with his presidency the corporate world had taken hold of the republican party by the balls, and it never let go. It never will. Water rights are taken by corporate interests by the most horrible means, and in return we get chemicals that are added “for taste” but aren’t tasty at all; they simply make one thirstier as well as being a potential threat to fetuses if enough is taken in by an expectant mother. Not that each bottle contains toxic levels, but over time and with enough consumption, it’s possibly a threat. In any event it is a dirty goddamn trick. Microplastic material is found in alarming amounts and a devoted drinker has been said to take in the equivalent of a credit card in a week. But soon you’ll have no choice but to buy your water from these brazen corporations. Or, to be more accurate, illegal conglomerates who make money enough to fight court rulings and fuck us up the ass. And we take it readily, without asking for any lube or some gratuitous foreplay.

Chaos has been the rule of thumb during the Trump administration. Christ what a ride. And it’s a horror now, today, on a level we’ve never seen. We never asked for it. I have no patience for motherfucking morons who say, “He’s your president! He was elected so show respect!”

That’s normal considering they were never respectful to President Obama. They bitched despite never having one dishonorable thing he ever did for them to bitch about. The conspiracy theories never panned out. The accusations were nonsensical bullshit. He worked his ass off for us and saved us from a terrible economic situation that was the result of carelessness and greed. Trump’s been all about tearing apart everything Obama worked so hard for.

THE PANDEMIC

The Trump White House was super slow on the uptake. Someone in there knew something, sure as hell, because the CDC was required to clear statements with the administration first. And more was done to muffle the threat. We have ourselves to blame for sitting still. We got news. It was reported. Nobody wanted to believe it. Since when does something that bad suddenly travel that fast?

I read everything I could. I knew it would be bad, but I thought it would be worse than it is at this point. I talked about chaos theory and why predictions were too limited to be accurate. The NOAA has trouble predicting the paths of hurricanes, which don’t cooperate very well with data input. Programs have limits. As far as coronavirus is concerned, I knew and warned that it was impossible to predict, that this wasn’t an SIV, but a SARS disease, more contagious and more deadly than H1N1 influenza. There are variables, I wrote, which cannot be foreseen, but can and will cause the spread among the population to behave unpredictably. It was going to be worse, in other words, than the programs could calculate.

For example, who could have predicted that travel restrictions imposed by the White House would have so many exemptions? Who could have known that summer weather wouldn’t stop it, that there would be no resurgence in the fall because it never went away? Who knew Arizona or Texas would be hotspots in June?

Chaos theory dictates unpredictability in any closed system, and biology is a closed system. Outside forces may occasionally intrude, as in extinction-event meteoroids, but even that comes from an unpredictable, closed system we can define as the known galaxy. Aside from such rare events, we feel secure without reason to feel secure in any way. Disasters happen suddenly, no warning given, or with short warning. Even hurricanes can be tricky, making devilish moves and making landfall when no one was prepared because watches had been lifted. It is rare but it does happen. Just look up spaghetti models and rummage around. Have a go at it. You’ll see what I mean.

One variable impacting the pandemic is the murder of George Floyd. It outraged, as well it should have, a large part of our country. The protesters did us proud, but there’s the devil to pay. Already spikes are being seen in the infections of coronavirus. It will get much, much worse. And severe heat won’t matter. As we enter summer, Arizona is fucked-up. North Carolina has a governor second-guessing reopening public spaces or businesses. Half of the contiguous United States is seeing a terrifying rise in cases of Covid-19.

Combined, hurricane season, global warming, social and economic upheaval, political corruption and the coronavirus have put dark days in our path. Chaos theory is in full play, showing it’s not just real but that we’re weak, all too mortal, and that we must pay for our habit of not heeding warnings. Our habitual abuse of the environment. And for cowardly failing to stand up to a man with no soul. He should never have made it this far. But he has made it this far, constantly being aided by republican politicians and corporate money and clout. If I wonder whether this is the beginning of events predicted in the Bible, you’ll forgive me, yes?

You can disagree, of course. I’m sure I come off as a madman. But tell me: this time last year, did you see this coming? If someone had told you, what would you have thought?

Time To Run

Last night as I watched live coverage of the DC area riot, and trust me, that’s what it was, I saw this live as it happened. It’s not an isolated incident either; reporters were targets for police in a lot of areas. It seems to be spontaneous, done by officers who blame all of this on media broadcasting the video of George Floyd’s murder all over the world, which to the minds of some, must be what caused all of this: the fake news media. Which, of course, Trump has tweeted since this began, remarkably increasing the mantra over the usual frequent outbursts on Twitter and camera. On a phone call with governors today, he ranted and shamed them for not using more National Guard units and not using more force against protesters.

Let me make one thing very clear. It’s a bad time to be a cop. In New York, officers marched with protesters while one recklessly forced an NYPD vehicle into the crowd. They’re either targets no matter how good they are, or they’re counted as evil by wearing a badge because bad cops also wear badges. That said, Trump has been egging the violence from civilians on, stoked the furnace, and now calls for military troops to come in and fuck shit up.

He’s being himself; he got where he is because he is good at polarizing and dividing with a simple vocabulary and common rhetoric.

He’s still doing it and he will not stop. From claiming that paper ballots by mail are a danger to democracy to considering sending the 101st Airborne to quell what he sees as a threat to his power and reelection, he’s continuing his mission to take American people and putting them under the heel. He’s still backed by congressional Republicans who won’t stand up to him. It’s part blackmail; he gets the dirty on people then threatens them. The dirt is substantial, as it must be to have made them so pliant. For some, the revelation of their dirt would wind up with criminal cases and Barr would be licking his ass all the way. For others, families would be destroyed. There’d be damage to national security, and as proof that Trump doesn’t care about our country’s safety, I remind you that after his inauguration, a Russian eavesdropping ship was parked off the east coast for an unacceptable time when it shouldn’t have been allowed that close in the first place. He had a private oval office meeting with Russians and wouldn’t permit any media except TASS. How many more examples do people need to know he’s a criminal with a purely criminal mind?

None of the protesters who really want change are provoking the police. According to NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, their ranks have been infiltrated by anarchists and other fringe types, but mostly plain criminals of various ages. The crimes they’re going for is entering a store and using the cover of the crowds to get away with armloads of merchandise. The anarchist types are the ones flipping cars, setting fires and attacking police. There’s a slight blurring in there, as some angry people do get violent, and those aren’t restricted to any race. I get that; they’re angry beyond certain levels of control. But multiracial protesters are peacefully coming out to show that murder is simply unacceptable and that police murdering a black man over a fucking twenty dollar note cannot be tolerated, will not be tolerated.

This is a bad situation. Dire. We can witness the end of the United States of America and see it turned into something horrifying, or we can get our shit together and cause change.

At the heart of all this are several things converging at the worst possible time. First, the economy was bound to crash. No bull market had ever been sustained for so long, and I saw it with dread. The longer it lasted, the harder the fall would be. Indicators told keen economists that it was going to happen but their warnings were ignored. It took the COVID-19 pandemic to push us over the edge, and struggling businesses such as department stores have followed Sears: JC Penney has filed Chapter 11, and with the news being so concentrated on COVID-19 and now the social unrest, I can’t find much else. Suffice it to say that our economy is in the toilet. Now it will kill people who should not die. Crowds during this pandemic, whether masked or not, will unquestionably spread the disease. Within a week we will see either a suppression of COVID-19 numbers on the news, or a sharp spike. Either way, the spike will be there.

Let us not forget that during the stay-at-home months, Los Angeles was photographed with a crystal clear skyline. Geologists could hear the Earth for the first time in modern history with cutting edge tech. The cars weren’t moving. Factories went dark or slowed down. Not as many trucks ran because essential goods had priority. Stars could be seen in places where young people had never seen them. We saw what was possible in regards to climate change. And climate change is the uncredited player that makes everything worse. Without it, probably no COVID-19 pandemic ever happens. Infections peculiar to warmer temperatures have been observed.

There’s a super fungus that exploded in the world scene suddenly, and it’s one thing among others that have adapted to warmer temperatures. It’s believed that the fungus could not survive inside a human body because body temperature alone would kill it. Well the fungus survives body temperature now, and it is virtually untreatable.

COVID-19 may not have happened. Imagine that. One of the components to climate change predictions is supercanes, storms so powerful that they make every hurricane before it look like a thunderstorm. Another predicted component is super pandemics, and I have no reason to doubt that we ain’t seen nothin yet.

In the current pandemic chaos was already in play, but the murder of George Floyd was unbearable, and all I can do is hope that all of this won’t be in vain. Trump claims he won’t allow Floyd’s death to be in vain. But he has yet to express sympathy. He said he will use the regular Army to put down insurrection, a threat instead of a call for peace. For calm.

If that happens, kiss democracy goodbye. He will become a military dictator. No election in November.

Think it can’t happen?

Or are you in favor of it?

We’re in undiscovered territory. We’ve never been here before. You and I can’t see what will happen. We don’t know.

Donald Trump’s just become the greatest threat to this country in all its history.

He’s posing with a Bible in front of the church that burned last night. God damn the fake son of a bitch. The evangelicals will have orgasms over that shit. It all just got so much worse.