Life on the Mississippi

A brief note while awaiting the 4th US Circuit to announce its decision on Virginia's challenge to socialized medicine...

The Mississippi River has gone completely wild and is something like 45 to 50+ feet over flood level. The Army Corps (or as the Comrade would say, "corpse") of Engineers has blown up levees and is opening spillways and other things all along the river to try to save anything that borders the Big Muddy.

Too much rain and snow, and it all ends up in the Mississippi. The Mississippi is one of the longer rivers in the world, fed by tributaries that also are some of the longest rivers in the U.S., at least: the Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas.

Mark Twain wrote a book called Life on the Mississippi about his days as a river boat pilot. He started out describing the river in general, at one point comparing it to a snake that occasionally rolled over, pretty much wiping out everything around it. For example, during the Civil War, the Mississippi flowed just under the bluffs of Vicksburg. The Yankees couldn't get past the guns on those bluffs, and finally attacked Vicksburg from the land side and kept it under siege for a couple of months until the starving city surrendered.

I haven't seen it myself, but I've heard that nowadays, the Mississippi doesn't run in the same place anymore -- or at least it didn't. The river apparently is "reclaiming" Vicksburg as I write this.

And what's the cause of all this? The unusually high precipitation over last winter and earlier this spring. All the fault of Global Warming?

No, actually, it's something called La Nina -- "the girl" -- as opposed to El Nino -- "the boy." La Nina is a mass of atmospheric conditions in the Pacific Ocean that is actually COOLER than normal. El Nino is the heat.

And all last year there were very few sun spots, which is supposed -- maybe? -- also to have significant impact on weather on earth.

So the tree-huggers are wise to shift their stupid argument from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change." Yeah. 'Cause the climate changes. You can count on that.The earth doesn't sit still. Never has, never will. And it doesn't need any "rights" under human law. It's a law unto itself. And it makes our little efforts look silly, doesn't it?

You can also count on the fact that there's not a damn thing we human beings can do about it. We're not the cause, but we feel the effects.We don't control nature and to pretend that we do -- that we even can -- is a kind of mind-boggling arrogance. Nature doesn't need our protection. It does whatever it wants.

The only place politics can have anything to do with this is on the ground, in rescue and recovery efforts.

Save the Republic.