Just stop the panic

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door."

Bilbo Baggins offered that advice to his nephew in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it's good advice, so far as it goes. You never know where leaving your home might take you. You should be aware of where you're going and what you're doing. And of serious threats to your person.

Still, we have to leave our homes. We have to go out and live our lives; it's senseless and probably unhealthy to never leave home. Yet that seems to be the corner we're slowly backing ourselves into with the Corona virus scare.

Of course, you should do all the common sense things the situation requires. Stay home if you're sick, see to your personal cleanliness and hygiene, check on elderly relatives, friends, and neighbors. But all the other stuff? Just stop worrying.

If you are not otherwise in jeopardy, go shopping, eat out, have a pint at the pub. Live your life. Because quite bluntly, all this fear about an infinitesimal chance of contracting let alone dying from the disease is absurd, and borderline insanity. Walking out that door is fraught with all kinds of peril of anyway. You might get shot or hit by a bus, right? But you don't, you can't, let that keep you from life. Reacting to this small threat with paralysis is absolutely not the thing never to do.

A Question on Global Warming

There are concerns being expressed by weather watchers that April could find many areas of the nation looking at recorded snowfalls. This isn't all that unusual; it was only about 6 years ago that Detroit had around 7 inches of snow on April 7th, and as we had up until late yesterday a winter storm watch for our neck of the woods. Indeed, snow flurries have occurred in the Motor City recently as late as the 22nd of April. Late snow just isn't big news around here.

Until you factor in that hobgoblin, global warming. If we are warming up too much, why are temperatures staying so low so far into the spring? To be sure, that is not the easiest question to address, as there are myriad factors involved in what creates our weather. But to hear the global warming crowd, there is only the one factor: us.

We recognize that there are rarely any nicely gradual changes in our climate, and that even presuming global warming to be true cannot mean that changes in our weather will occur on a steady, sliding scale. But again, that seems to be more of an argument against rather than for any kind of spectacular climate change. Why ought we assume that something on a scale almost unimaginable will happen when all credible evidence suggests that nature moves slowly, and sort of back and forth? It rocks, but doesn't roll.

Yes, there are convoluted explanations by the scare mongers which assert that these cold spells in fact support their point. Yet until we can see something straightforward and easily explainable, our money will be against them. It's the safe bet in light of their shrill tone.