"Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear"

                                                                  Le Jour Après Demain.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

There are three jokes in Spielberg's Jurassic Park that I've never been sure if anyone else was perceptive enough to pick up on, although it's ridiculous to assume no one else has, as Spielberg makes them rather obvious. But as I'm a rather ridiculous person, I don't entirely discount it. My favorite one is the title of this post, which I meant as a reference to climate change. It occurs when the jeep in which Jeff Goldblum, crippled by a broken leg, is being whisked away to safety as a T-Rex bears down on him and his rescuers. He glances in the side-view mirror where can be read the above-mentioned quote while the reflection of the dinosaur chasing them begins to get smaller as they gain enough speed to pull away from it. I remembered a comic who had once opined, "Just what we need at 65 miles and hour, Optical Illusions." Which brings up the second sight gag, which is a post-it stuck on the corrupt computer operator's terminal which pictures Oppenheimer and his famous pipe-smoking pose with the epithet, "The Father of the Baby Boom", written under it:

 

The Father of the Baby Boom

The first atomic bomb was, after all, called "Little Boy". The third gag, I remember noting, but can't for the life of me remember what it was, just that there was one (damn).

Why the Jurassic Park references? Because unlike its sequels, which were pure money-plays, empty vehicles slapped together to further monetize the success of the first film, the original was a metaphor, it held a message as hidden as its jokes were (which is why I'm kicking myself for not remembering the third one), a message that was usually mouthed in the riddles posed to the parks' scientists by Goldblum's character, as, for example, when he asks, in regard to making live dinosaurs from ancient DNA preserved in amber, "But does discovering that perhaps you could do it, mean that you should do it?" (or words to that effect).

In a recent post on Naked Capitalism, in which Researchers describe the results of a Gulf Stream System collapse as "Unimaginably Catastrophic", it cites scientists as saying "we cannot allow this to happen". But exactly as in Jurassic Park, we aren't "allowing" this to happen, we are causing this to happen. No natural event occurred that made the amber start using the encased dinaosaur DNA to replicate and create a monster: humans did that. Similarly, oil, coal, and natural gas aren't spontaneously erupting from the earth and being ignited by lightning strikes; WE are digging it up and setting it aflame in increasingly larger amounts every year. Because, as with the Canadian tar sands (my dentist is a young man who hails from British Columbia, yet he has never heard of the Athabasca tar sands in the next-door province of Alberta ... the largest industrial project on the heavily-scarred face of the earth!) there was nobody asking the Goldblum question. Nor were they there to ask it about fracking either: "Just because we can develop the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, does that mean that we should"? Although even if it were asked, we already know the answer. "No. But we're going to do it anyway." Money, after all, is the ultimate argument, now usually paired with "jobs", so that the hoi polloi, too, will be as eager as the greediest tycoon to sign up to have their world destroyed. So when I read such nonsense as, "We cannot allow this to happen," when in fact "we", as in scientists, first off, revealed that it was possible, then outlined exactly how it could be brought about, and finally provided the engineering expertise to make it happen, the emptiness of such statements, and their fig leaf nature, is made manifest.

As in Jurassic Park, mankind has brought the environment of another era, the one that brought about the great extinction preceding our current man-made extirpation, to modern times; and that environment is fraught with danger for the people wishing to live their lives  as normal human beings, from the Chinese peasantry that has been wrenched off their land and added to the slave-like labor force of the suicidal industrialization pace the Chinese Communist Party is using to maintain its iron grip around the throat of its citizens while it builds such mega-projects as the Three Gorges dam, to the tribes of the Amazon, by which I am not referring to Jeff Bozo's workforce, but those indigenous tribes that Bolsonaro has vowed to wipe off the face of the earth so as to grow sugar cane to power ICE machines. Once again there is no one asking, "Just because we can develop the most destructive method of fuel production on the face of the earth, does that mean we should"? Nor has anyone who actually needs to be taken into account, stood up to insist that, "we cannot allow this to happen". We not only can "allow" it to happen, but Corponationals will use whatever force it takes, pay whatever politician they must, oust any regime it's necessary to, in order to make sure that it does happen.

As the collateral damage piles up in Jurassic Park, the dreamer who came up with the idea hangs on to it for dear life, and only when the prospect of his own grandchildren being bloodily ripped to pieces and stuffed down the craw of hungry lizards does he relent. Yet, once they're safe, he hesitates before climbing into the helicopter that has come to whisk them all off to safety, and in that wistful hesitation is broadcast his determination to try again. Exactly as in King Kong, the rabid Capitalist exposes to a danger that never existed, until he conjured it up, the very people he's depending on to pay for his misadventure. Using the marvels of scientific discovery and research, he brought monstrous beings, Frankensteins he could not control, that served no other purpose than to satisfy his outsized, salivating-at-the-mouth, Greed, right to where they could do the most damage. Yet he has learned nothing; and neither have we, even as we are straddled with the onerous costs incurred to pay the price for all the deaths, all the trauma, all the loss his "vision" has imposed.

Life in the Carboniferous Era: What we are causing to happen.
Just as Covid variants don't "spread" to other continents: humans BRING them.

But there are no helicopters waiting to swoop in and whisk us away from the climate-wrenching destruction the Multi-Pronged Corponational monsters that we have created but find we cannot control, have wrought; billionaires' dyspeptic fantasies of settlements on Mars notwithstanding. We are trapped on this Jurassic Park world where Jackdaws stalk the land and a methane monster has encased us in a worldwide web of noxious heat-trapping fumes from which there is no escape. And as the rampant destruction from the weather-gone-wild events that get worse year after year costs more and more in economies that are being crushed by the collateral damage of crop failures, destroyed infrastructure and depleted resources, outpaces the ability of them to repair the escalating damage, we can already see, as evidenced from the Covid-19 pandemic, Corporate profits only rise; their control only grows; their appetites only become more insatiable; and their presence ever more intrusive. We have made sure the fictitious monsters (corporations exist only because we imagined them into existence) we have designed in our laboratories are fail-safe, protected from human interference by mechanisms we no longer understand and cannot therefore bring to bear. Like cybercriminals, they have an agenda of their own and every effort to rein them in makes them stronger as it advertises our inability to curtail their destructive impacts on our most vital industries. Even now, the wild animals from which the virus jumped to humans are all still traded in all of China and Southeast Asia, just as though nothing has happened (including in the same wet market from which the virus arose), aided and abetted, like the arms trade and the drug trade, by Corponational outlaws, and funded by the money-laundering financial system without whose covert assistance their ill-gotten gains could never be monetized.

The Bat and the Fossil: Their meeting was not just "Happenstance":
"We built that bridge".

So even as the scientist that fret over the collapse of the Gulf Stream System of ocean circulation insist that, "we cannot allow this to happen," the inconvenient truth staring us in the face is telling us quite the opposite: "We cannot, and certainly will not, make even the slightest effort to stop this from happening." 

(And no, hand-wringing doesn't count).