Country Living has its moments, you know? The transition in seasons was remarkable, and included a stretch of three or four days of temperate breeze and clear blue sky, dotted periodically with white gentle puffy reminders of pleasant change.

The Weather Lady laid it on thick last night, though. She used her computer models based on Sciency stuff and advised of the possibility of flooding as a cool Canadian front collides over the Piedmont with a warm, moist air mass from the Gulf. We rose to gray rain, and those of us who pay attention to the long planting boxes were relieved of the watering chore until tomorrow.

So, from an agricultural perspective, there is good news a little short of full ‘joy.’ No watering is required today except from Nature. That has to be balanced with the prospects of things to talk about for the next few precious months. And try to deal with what they hold in topics of gentle mirth, constructive and respectful bi-partisan discussion, and a general effort to make things better for us all.

See? We were laughing, too. There was a swirl of news out of Europe yesterday. We are not under the same restrictions in discussing their bizarre public policy decisions. Some of them have parallels here, so we need to be careful not to get our attorney or her legal section in an uproar. We will keep it at the idea of nuclear power, for the moment. Our Engineer DeMille asked around the Veteran circle to determine what portion of the group had gone to sea on ships powered by the atom. Some raised two hands, others a number of fingers that averaged four or five. Considering the number of missions conducted by those ships and submarines, there has been a remarkable record of safety coupled with reliable power over the last sixty years. Have there been accidents? Sure. There was one famous accident site just fought over in Ukraine, but it was mostly used for drama in an ongoing crisis about something else. There is new technology as well, safer and smaller Thorium reactors, but no one seems to mention them that much as we pave the Piedmont with solar panels and data centers.

There is more organized Sciency stuff beyond the simple matters like those atoms. There is general agreement that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind is as unpredictable as the Piedmont rain. But even if those two problems were addressed there is more madness around. For those who have been following the issue for the last fifty or sixty years, there seems to be little correlation between the always ominous predictions and reality. New York was supposed to be mostly underwater a few decades ago, remember? All the island nation-states were innundated years ago, except for the ones building new runways at sea level to support increased tourism. So, we are used to “news” as just “more noise.”

The weather- Climate, if you prefer, since that sounds more Sciency and authentic- is just one of the issues with a long track record. Another parallel issue with Sciency computer applications is “population.” We talked about that the other day, and the predictions of the startling depopulation in the Developed World based on predicted demographic readjustment. The statistic that was most startling was about China, where some predict by 2050 the population will drop by half by the year 2050. Simple division can still be accomplished here at the Fire Ring, and this should be something we can keep track of.

If China’s population of 1.5 Billion citizens is to fall by seven or eight hundred million over the next 28 years. We all agree there are too many strip malls in Northern Virginia. We stop short of saying the population should be aggressively limited to a number determined in the back seat of someone’s SUV. We would frame it in a more Sciency manner, like “China is going to lose 25 million people a year,” but that would be measurable. People might start to notice.

The same sort of fun with numbers can be applied here in the Piedmont, which is that the more of us sitting around the Fire Ring means fewer folks actually working to pay the taxes to keep us comfortable.

We are in favor of that. And once you put faces and names to the population described by the Sciency folks, it applies a personal aspect to the problem. Our problem. We will naturally be following that with the same level of interest we have applied to all the other Sciency predictions that have not worked out that accurately. We enjoy the alarm, since it provides excitement.

But they are still building strip malls down here in the Piedmont. We think we may survive as many as five or six years, since other Sciency people are telling us the average life expectancy around here in a little short of 80 years. We believe in Science and averages, and take comfort in the fact that whatever happens in 2050, we are unlikely to experience any of the inconvenience the Sciency folks are predicting. Given the supply chain issues that seem to go with Climate and Population, we may order a replacement computer while we have time to wait, you now?

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com