View From the Future: The Real News

I can't say that the Kavanaugh story isn't important to the future. If he is confirmed as expected, the ideology he represents and decisions he is likely to make, and now the severe damage to the credibility of the Court will further erode the resources and damage the trust that government will need to respond to the enormous challenges that are surely coming.

 Any further damage to government's ability to respond to inevitable emergencies the likes of which this country hasn't seen obviously will make those situations more chaotic, devastating and longer-lasting.  And the further tumble into our own Dark Age threatens to rend the social fabric on a even larger and potentially irreparable scale.

But this is this secondary to the causes of the coming crises, which the fast-moving controversies of the moment comfortably obscure. Last week in the midst of this uproar of the moment, the UN issued a report indicating that the world is nowhere near on target in reducing atmospheric carbon that will push the global environment into near total disaster.  It says the initial target of no more than a 1.5C increase in global temperature is already out of reach.

Meanwhile the otherwise climate crisis-denying White House supported this view in a report that assumes the global temperature will have risen by a super-catastrophic 4C by the year 2100.  They use this figure to justify getting rid of emissions restrictions because in themselves they won't be enough to prevent this outcome, so fossil fuel companies can just go ahead and make their money while their children's and grandchildren's planet burns.

Though the hurricane disaster in the Carolinas also sped off the front pages, the effects continue--most recently with giant mosquitoes, and potentially mosquito-borne diseases to come.  Evidence continues to grow that the global heated oceans contribute to the severity of these storms.

Then there is the news in disease.  Somehow it seems, a rough total of 80,000 deaths from last year's flu in the US managed to escape everybody's notice.  It is an unheard of number in a country with presumably good health care and public health resources.

Disease meets the Dark Age, with Ebola as exhibit #1.

 When this deadly disease struck central Africa four years ago or so, thousands of people died in a frighteningly short period of time.  There was panic over the contagion, but also other Dark Age manifestations: suspicion of healthcare workers (eight were hacked to death in Guinea), quarantine centers and burial teams were attacked. Conspiracy theories that the disease and then the vaccines were plots were spread by ambitious politicians.

Now there is an Ebola outbreak in the Congo, with a "very high" risk that it will spread beyond.  Today effective vaccines exist as they did not in 2014.  But various manifestations of panic, poor public health and especially Dark Age politics threatens to make the situation much worse:

"That led the WHO's emergencies chief, Peter Salama, to warn that insecurity, public defiance about vaccinations and politicians fanning fears ahead of elections in December could create a "perfect storm" leading the outbreak to spread."

Note that these Dark Age manifestations are hardly restricted to "backward" or "non-great" countries.  They echo the dark strains we hear every day in America.