Increasing Polar Ice, Healthy Coral Reefs, No Rise In Sea Levels - A Climate Activist Loses It And Goes 'Round The Bend

 'Mighty cold for May, isn't it?', Edgar the gardener remarked to Cheryl Biggs, a bit of a poke in the eye to a woman who was always screeching about climate change, global warming, the rising seas, the melting ice caps, and the coming environmental Armageddon.  

Of course it was none of his business, but as he trimmed the hedges and raked the lawn, he could hear her go on about how soon Miami would be under water, the Maldives would disappear, southern crops would be incinerated, and life in cities would become unbearable. 

People will run their air conditioners full steam, energy output will be at maximum capacity and the air will be filled with billions more tons of hydrocarbons fueling even more heat and existential destruction.  Before long, there will be no stopping the inevitable.  Even Canadian crops will burn up, the Colorado River will run dry, Sacramento Valley will be a charred wasteland, and Los Angeles gangs will roam the city looking for water. 

Edgar shook his head when he heard the worst of it - the shrieks and lamentation, the anguish, the palpable pain - but he had to laugh at this flailing caricature of a mad woman, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury, lights out craziness, the end of days, repentance, and anticipation of a fiery, all-too-soon Judgment Day. 

He pulled up his collar against the unseasonable chill - global warming, said climate activists.  The melting polar ice was cooling the Arctic Ocean and currents were bringing cold water to the East Coast of the United States, chilling the air, disrupting normal Spring patterns, and keeping sweaters and mufflers from mothballs. 

Edgar was old enough to have heard it all, from Al Gore's dire predictions of environmental doom, to periodic updates citing bird migrations, hurricane activity, and coral reef erosion.  The drumbeat grew louder and more insistent. It was no longer just a bass line increasing in tempo, but a thundering crash of timpani, snare drums, and cymbals.  Climate warriors were in the streets in phalanxes, shouting, beseeching, pleading for environmental sanity. They howled like Old Testament prophets and latter day Doomsday sayers.  There is little time left. 

 

Of course none of this was true, all confabulations and very inspired demagoguery.  Harping on about something so beyond human reach but insisting that if we all pulled together and bought electric cars, turned down the heat and raised the thermostat in the summer, used prudence and good sense and gave our all for the planet, maybe...just maybe...disaster could be avoided. 

Meanwhile the polar caps gained ice, flawed, biased reports predicting dramatic rises in global temperatures were uncovered for the shameless screeds they were, new underwater high-resolution spectrometry showed that the Australian coral reefs were thriving, sea levels were not rising but holding steady.  

While most Americans who had been unbothered by all the climate fol-de-rol, kept their thermostats where they had always been, and kept Ford-350s at the top of the list said, 'I told you so'. They had just made it through the unconscionable government shutdown of everything during COVID, the senseless six-foot rule, outdoor masking, vigilantism and totally freaked-out housewives - all fabricated and cockamamie - that the climate change hoopla was to be expected. 

Edgar was old enough to remember the Hong Kong flu, a savage, highly infections virus, when he and his young girlfriend took turns at the stove, so weak were they; but when able out they went, no masks, no distancing, no panic. Every so often a flu strain got out of hand but it would die out, would take its toll but would not be an extinction-level event. Life went on, schools remained open, businesses bought and sold, it was a challenging time but soon over. 

'Soon we won't be needing you, Edgar', Cheryl said as she paid the man.  'All this...', and here she pointed to the luxuriant skip laurels, the chrysanthemums, the thick grass, the magnolia, and cherry trees all in bloom, 'will be history'. 

Edgar nodded, smiled, and said, 'Not for a while, Mrs. Biggs, see you next week', and with that he loaded up his gear and headed back to Maryland.  He put an Iron Maiden tape in the deck - why he still loved heavy metal was beyond him and his children but he did, dutifully almost...a statement? - swung on to the Beltway and headed for Poolesville. 

'What's a mother to do?', Cheryl said, remembering the old ad for Velveeta cheese or some other spread, but this was no time for idle fancy. The climate emergency had not disappeared, just lost traction given the various wars going on, the financial scandals in Minnesota and California, and the wild doings of Donald Trump.  Climate change would soon be back in the news once the seas started rising, the ice caps went back to melting, and the coral reefs began again to degrade. 

Yet the ethos, the zeitgeist of America had changed once the harbinger of bad times, former President Joe Biden, was out of office.  Trump had tapped a chord - Americans weren't the worriers progressives had made them out to be.  Live and let live, and make hay while the sun shines had always been tried and true adages. Unbelievably, they not only didn't care about climate change, they thought the whole thing was a hoax. 

Worst of all, the nation was building energy- and water-sucking data centers at an unstoppable pace. The demand for AI was growing by leaps and bounds, and the country was desperate to find ways to fuel it.  Solar and wind power simply wouldn't do, nuclear would take years to build back up, so it was dig, baby dig for coal and gas.  

The climate would heat up despite the new, soon to be discredited evidence that it is not, and this greedy, inconscient demand for energy to make Google searches a bit more thorough would only accelerate the trend.  Not only was the climate crisis still upon us, we were even closer to disaster. 

What if...what if...what if the naysayers were right and the earth was not warming, then what?  The last twenty years of activism would have been for nothing, a waste of time, a buy-in to a total fabrication, a victim of the worst scam on record.  Perish the thought, she said, and went about her business; but the juice had been squeezed out of the orange.  

The climate and environmental conferences were airless, spiritless, poorly attended affairs. Could she simply say, 'Let bygones be bygones' and turn her attention to something else which needed fixing? Hardly.  She was an old lady now, and the time for change had long gone.  It was chaise lounge time at best. 

'You gave it your best, dear', her husband said to her as he sprayed the rose bushes for aphids.  'It was the effort that counted'. 

How could he say that, Cheryl wondered?  Effort without result is wasted effort, nothing less, so there he is self-satisfied, spraying away without a care in the world when the wind had been completely taken out of her sails.  

Her husband picked her an American Beauty, and the gloom lifted.  Little things, she thought.  I must learn; but she couldn't let go of that visceral need for social change so part of her life for decades.  Is it too late for the black man? she wondered, or the mestizo? 

 

True belief had taken its toll, and once engrained in the credulous soul, there's no getting rid of it. 

The Senator And His Courtesan - An Unapologetic Libertine In A Censorious Age

Haley Windham grew up on a farm in a small farm community of Presbyterians who had moved there in the early years of the 19th century, prospered thanks to hard work, faith, and singular ambition.  Hiram Windham, the family patriarch, had settled on land newly platted thanks to the Lewis and Clark expedition that explored and laid initial claim to the lands west of the Mississippi.  Plat 454 once bought and titled became the Windham family homestead, five hundred acres of fertile eastern prairie on which Hiram husbanded livestock, grew corn, and tended to goats and chickens.

By the time Haley was a young woman, the rural life of the Midwest no longer held any interest.  She had had her fill of eggs, milking, drawing water, and tending to her five brothers and sisters, and after a spell at Franklin Pierce junior college, headed east to Washington to seek her fortune. 

Haley was a modest girl and 'fortune' was not a mythical wealth of Croesus, a spectacular marriage, or good fortune.  It was only getting what any young, bright, attractive young woman deserved.  She had no particular long term goal in mind, but had the good sense to approach her Senator and apply for an internship.  She would be loyal, diligent, and patient; and he would find her a most able and apt assistant. 

Now this Senator was unusual for his times - a censorious, accusatory, puritanical era of MeToo supposition of male deceit and misogyny - for he cared nothing for such rectitude.  Women were women who all looked alike with their clothes off, who all had a peculiarly female ambition, but who were still in the thrall of male protectorship - easily seduced by men who took them seriously, explored their inner rooms, and treated them with respect and dignity. 

The Senator had been gifted with a silver tongue, useful both for the seduction of young women and for political election.  The constituents of his state loved him, and his career from state legislator to attorney general, to Congressman to Senator was one of easy elision and happy outcomes.  They liked him for what he did for their state, but loved him for his charm, easygoing sexual confidence, and sincerity.  As such they not only forgave him for his sexual dalliances, they loved him for it. 

Now every Senator since Alexander Hamilton's day has had lovers, mistresses, and concubines.  One remembers the origins of the august Upper Chamber and Alexander Hamilton's debate with his colleague Thomas Jefferson over the dangers of populism. 'One must be wary of the mob, my dear Thomas', he wrote in a letter to Jefferson, 'lest they enslave us and send us back to Africa along with the Mandingos here to pick cotton'.  S

Such respect for breeding, education, and intelligence provided a buffer to the ragged peasantry that Jefferson so loved, and gave a certain privilege and social immunity to those who legislated there.  Sexual pleasure was by and large the currency of the realm. 

Times change, and such patrician privilege went by the wayside as the Senate became much like its little brother the House of Representatives, 'a bunch of rubes' said Hamilton, 'hayseeds, chicken farmers, and wool gatherers'.  Along the way these Senators got infected with the same puritanical fervor as their friends in the Longworth building and led - at least in public - lives of moral rectitude and self-censorship. 

Things went from bad to worse, and by the time that Joe Biden was president, the country - let alone the Senate - was dominated by a cabal of shrewish vixens who lambasted men and their misogynist intentions at every turn.  Men, whether Walmart greeters, plumbers, or Senators were to hew to the same moral line.  Keep it in your pants or there will be hell to pay. 

But these Congressional vixenish bullies were still women, and they gave the Senator a royal pass.  He not only gave them the time of day but convinced them that he was firmly in their camp. Gender must be aligned to protect women, chastise men, and allow for freedom of sexual choice. 

Of course this was all a contrived scam. The Senator neither believed this feminist cant or paid it any mind.  Women were women, a distinctive, historically consistent class, to be used when convenient, praised when advantageous, and seduced whenever possible. 

It was tribute to the Senator's canniness and ingenuity that he led the live of a Lothario, a Casanova, a Count de Valmont in the midst of such hysterical sexual fol-de-rol.  So when he took the lovely Haley Windham as his lover, every single one of the watchdog harridans on Capitol Hill looked the other way.  If they had any second thoughts it was because the handsome, desirable Senator had not chosen them. 

The Senator was married of course to a charming woman in her own right who, both seduced by her charming, irresistible husband and politically ambitious also looked the other way.  A marriage of convenience; and only by taking lovers of her won did she escape the opprobrium of deceived wife. 

Remarkable for 21st century American politics, the Senator acted no differently than Francois Mitterrand, former President of France at whose gravesite mourned his legitimate daughter and wife and his lover and illegitimate adult child.  He was as open as Mitterrand, Sarkozy, and presidential pretender Dominique Strauss-Kahn, famous sexual libertine and sexual adventurer. 

He was the very epitome of 'diversity', that overmarketed, hapless, divisive, and rudely ignorant deformation of heterogeneity. As much as many progressives hated to admit it, he occupied one of the  sexual points on the gender spectrum - not only a straight, white male, but one aggressively so, a virtual sexual wolf on the prowl. 

Haley Windham was well taken care of by the Senator, often seen at his side, but never demanding attention.  She was his consort, concubine, lover, and confidant and she wanted no more.  There is chivalry in adultery and the Senator treated Haley like a princess, and for that his constituents loved him even more.  He was never dismissive or disregarding of his wife - on the contrary she was always with him at official functions, respected as his partner and sexually liberated individual.  

It was a bit like the English Victorians Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson who enjoyed the pleasures and privileges of an open marriage and were accorded no censure for it. 

The affair between the Senator and Haley Windham lasted longer than anyone - particularly he - expected, but when it did there were no tears shed.  They parted friends and both went on to successful individual lives. 

It all goes to show you - there is no such thing as absolutes.  Life is a series of comings and goings and the most able, morally accommodating, and considerate people will not only survive but profit. 

As for the MeToo harridans of Washington, the old maids, shrewish, embittered women of the Left, they were left to whoop and holler, castigate and excoriate to no avail.  They had been so snookered by the Senator that if not for his charm and warm, engaging manner, would be the hated enemy.

And so it would always be.  Savvy men have never taken feminist screeds seriously, and used the perennial feminine desire to be taken seriously to good advantage.  No harm, no foul.  The Senator went on as if the brouhaha on the Left never existed, and the cabal of wicked sisters never knew how unimportant they were. 

Donald Trump's Mistress - Joining Putin And Xi In A Geopolitical And Sexual Triumvirate

Vladimir Putin's mistress, Christina Belenkaya - or at least his No. 1 mistress, his favorite and mother of two daughters, is well taken care of by the state, no questions asked.  Not only is this care a product of Russian security, but Russian tradition.  The Czars since Ivan the Terrible all had mistresses, considered the most beautiful women in the land, above comparison, prized possessions part of the royal treasury. 

So it was no surprise that President Putin had his choice of beautiful, desirable women - nor was it a surprise that these young women readily agreed.  Although they knew that their time in the palace would be short - an emperor has the right to exchange old goods for new - the riches, cachet, and sybaritic life would be memorable.  Better to have loved and lost, etc., especially when it comes to the concubines of the czar.  

For all this sumptuous royal tradition, President Putin is far more sexually recondite than, say Presidents Mitterrand and Sarkozy of France, men who invited their mistresses to live in their own chambers at the Elysees.  The French public thought nothing of these affairs - it was only normal for a French president to take his pleasure after a long day of looking after the Republic, and in fact, having a mistress was de rigeur for the normal, healthy French male.

Even the working class had their cinq-a-sept liaisons more often than not with the ladies of Pigalle - a working man spent his salary on food, wine, and women; and just like President Sarkozy, after a hard day at the factory, deserved a bit of a respite from metro, boulot, dodo. 

The Chinese imperial tradition was no different.  The emperors of every dynasty for thousands of years enjoyed harems of the most beautiful women of the realm.  The Emperor Tzu-Ling was particularly proud of the women in his charge, chosen from each of the many distinct regions of China.  Every night he took out his map of the Middle Kingdom, circled his finger with his eyes closed, placed it blindly on the map, and selected a woman from the region on which his finger had landed. 

The long Communist regime under Mao Tse Tung was a peculiarly chaste one.  There was no room in the Communist canon for sexual dalliance.  Work was the ethos of the era, work, work and more work; and the forced labor, internment camps, and failed agricultural communes made life so penitential for the Chinese peasant, sex was the last thing on his mind. 

However with China's entry into the modern capitalist world, money, time, and leisure became once again coins of the realm, and the members of the politburo were free to choose their lovers.  In fact, the current President, Xi Jinping, not unlike his Russian counterpart, has a reverence and respect for his imperial past where concubinage was part of the royal tradition. 

The President's mistress, Fei Fei Wang, is a young woman from Shanghai who came to the President's attention during a routine tour of the provinces.  Polite inquiries were made, respectful overtures advanced to the girl's parents and grandparents, and a generous donation made to the memory of the family departed. 

Fei Fei was installed in the Royal Suite of the Presidential palace, provided all the perks of her station but kept out of sight.  Things had changed in China since the dynastic emperors - the sexual conservatism of the Mao years still had currency, and so Xi found himself betwixt and between - anxious to enjoy the privileges of the old emperors, but cautious because of still modest populace. 

American Presidents have not had mistresses as much as they have had sexual dalliances.  Only Franklin Roosevelt had a longtime mistress with whom he developed a special, loving relationship.  The other presidents had no interest in sexual fidelity and picked and chose as they went along.  JFK, thanks to his youth, energy, and beauty had his pick of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets, and Marilyn Monroe was the jewel in the crown. 

LBJ used the Secret Service to pimp for him, and he was known as much for his herculean sexual appetite as for his workaholic approach to the presidency.  Even dour, sour, jowly Richard Nixon was reported to have a mistress - a woman in Dupont Circle who visited Camp David and spent long weekend with him.  

Henry Kissinger, a fat, rumpled, ugly Jewish man had his pick of the litter.  He famously observed that power was the greatest aphrodisiac and he benefitted mightily from it.  Women who ordinarily would have paid him no mind were anxious to share his bed once he was Secretary of State. 

Bill Clinton lowered the bar.  From trailer trash to fellatio under the Lincoln Desk with an intern, he was the laughing stock of the world; but at least he didn't suffer painfully like his successor Joe Biden who, with the scourge mentality of MeToo and under the watchful eye of a cabal of censorious progressive shrews, made fidelity a point, not just a circumstance. 

Which leads us to Donald Trump, a man who loves beautiful women, has squired and bedded them as long as he can remember.  He had women from Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York - actresses, producers, real estate giants, call girls, and international beauty queens; but now that he is a second term president and nearing eighty, would that fire still be burning?

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina lamented God's irony for creating an intelligent, sentient, creative, insightful being, given him a scant few decades to live, and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold hard steppes of Russia. 

A worse irony say many is that God gave men a lifelong desire for women, but granted them but a few years to satisfy it; and so it is that Donald Trump, like the rest of us, thinks about women all the time, and given Presidential authority, a mere gesture can have them in the White House. 

The man is politically incorrect, dismissive of the uppity, censorious women who consider men a predatory evil, and is unconcerned about his political or economic future.  He cannot run for president again, has no particular concern for historical legacy, and has billions in his bank accounts for when he retires. 

Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York who was caught in flagrante delicto with a high-priced call girl in the Honeymoon Suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, said that he had done nothing wrong. 'I'm too busy running the state to chase women, he said, so an hour or two with Mrs. Longworth's ladies is all I can afford', he said or words to that effect, but was dunned out of office by a critical, censorious public. 

So Trump could have his way with any one of Mrs. Longworth's girls - she runs an absolutely tight ship and with the one exception of the New York governor, has maintained complete secrecy for the afternoon affairs of Washington's power corridor elite. 

This, however is not Trump's style. He wants his own arm candy, female admirers, women who love him, so why not?  In the few years remaining in the White House, he could certainly become an octogenarian Al Pacino or Robert Di Niro who have young lovers and children by them. 

There have been rumors about Trump's sexual dalliances, and few doubt them. If Trump has joined Putin and Xi in a geopolitical triumvirate as powerful as the world has seen, then why not join them in enjoying the perks of Emperors, and Czars?

Not only does Trump want to feel his oats for perhaps one last time, he could care less if he is caught with his pants down.  The tone deaf presidential candidate Gary Hart dared the press to catch him in an adulterous affair and they did.  Hart withdrew from the campaign and was forgotten. 

Not so Trump.  In fact he would love to be caught - 'Powerful man with beautiful woman not his wife' would be just the headline for him.