Tilt-a-Whirl
“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
-Cassius, Julius Caesar
As we approach the Fourth of July weekend in southern Maine, many are wondering where on Earth is the expected summer? As the South simmers in a torturous heat wave, we face day after day of rain and sub-normal temperatures. Other parts of the country are besieged by floods, and Midwestern cities are now experiencing the haze emanating from uncontrollable Canadian wildfires that are again about to imbue New York City with an impenetrable orange atmosphere that appears to portend the coming of the Apocalypse.
Meanwhile, a senseless and barbarous war slogs along in Ukraine, while Putin’s seemingly impregnable hold on power is now subject to question after a once loyal warlord threatened to march his mercenaries into Moscow itself. In our country, the odds-on favorite to represent the once-mainstream GOP is an aspiring autocrat and demagogue who has more legal problems than any man since Al Capone. The Democrats unenthusiastically stand behind a competent but uninspiring octogenarian who is being challenged by a scion of America’s most enduring political clan who proselytizes about the dangers of Covid vaccines and posits that Prozac is a cause of the ongoing proliferation of mass shootings.
Although not as momentous as other periods of history including the demise of the Roman Empire, the Great Plague of 1348, the discovery of the New World, the American, French and Russian Revolutions, the development of the atomic bomb or the fall of the Berlin Wall, current events raise a question that is on most of our minds: what in the world is going on with the world?
Well it seems that science may offer an answer. There is decided evidence that the Earth’s axis is moving and that it may be related to human-influenced events. It appears that the melting of the polar ice sheets and the overuse of ground water for agricultural and ordinary human purposes have contributed to a noticeable shift in the Earth’s spin as the imaginary pole around which the planet rotates has wandered south from its traditional location at the geographic North Pole.
Now I am not much of a scientist, but it seems to me that this phenomenon is as good a reason as any to explain the current craziness in the world. After all, if a shift in the Earth’s spin can occur, the possibilities of its effects on the planet are endless.
Not buying it? Well maybe another recent scientific discovery can explain the current lunacy. It appears that the universe is surrounded by gravitational waves caused by supermassive black holes, a revelation that is apparently further verification of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. But how can this finding account for our current experiences? How the hell do I know? I just live here.
