Blue Monday

 Rainy days and Mondays always get us down. 

It's another edition of Rumpole's "WE'RE DOOMED"! ( (c) Rumpole's Blog, 2021, all rights and wrongs reserved). 

First the good news. Covid numbers across the board and the nation are falling. We are wearing masks. We are getting inoculations. We are social distancing, and guess what? It works! The science words. Who would-a-thunk-it?  The downside to this is that we passed a half a million deaths from Covid19 on Sunday. More Americans died in less than a year fro Covid19 than the combined deaths in WWII and Vietnam. Good thing we had a smart and motivated president from the start of the pandemic or it could have been worse.  

Our President has secured 600 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines combined. Yes POTUS 46, not 45 did that. And those will be fully available by July which means they should be in the arms of every American who wants one by August. And this does NOT include the Johnson and Johnson vaccine coming on line shortly. JnJ has said it will have 500 million doses ready before the end of the summer as well. America will lead the world in vaccines and distributing vaccines to those countries who need it. A far cry from the xenophobic "America First" nonsense of the last few years. When Americans arrive in far flung lands and vaccinate needy populations, the goodwill that buys is inestimable. As our current president said to the leaders of the NATO countries this past week: "We're back!".

Now, the sobering news why none of this may matter. 

It turns out that the reason for the Neanderthals' disappearance from earth was something called a "polar-switch." About 42,000 years ago (or roughly as long as it takes to get a file from the 9th floor attorneys' room in the REGJB) the magnetic fields at the north and south pole switched. As the magnetic fields switched, the part of the atmosphere that protects us from solar radiation disappeared. There was dramatic climate change, which the Neanderthal Republican Party at the time  (Motto: Eurasia first!) called "fake news and science" (you don't think the current Neanderthal Republicans  had the imagination to come up with that on their own, do you?). 

Well unfortunately for the Neanderthals, (Republican ones and otherwise), the climate change news was not fake and the solar radiation killed them all. The CNN article is here.

Now here is the worse news: The polar magnetic fields may be fixin to switch again. In the current issue of the journal Science, there is an article detailing the current weakening of the Earth's magnetic field by 9% in the last 170 years and there is "rapid movement" of the northern magnetic field across the northern hemisphere. 

A magnetic field switch would be bad. How bad? Like worse than having to pick a jury in Broward bad. 

In other words...