February 1, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 17
Jason Box of Ohio State University, an expert on cryonics. If the process is maintained but not expedited, the predicted meltdown indicates that natural and manmade climate changes will raise the sea level of the planet by about three feet and flood the living spaces of about 100 million people from Florida to Vietnam and Bangladesh. A total meltdown could submerge Brooklyn, much of the American South, and large areas of Japan, still the world’s third economy and a U.S. military and economic ally. About 13 percent of the Netherlands is already below sea level, and despite the marvelous imagination and energy the Dutch people have shown in ecologically responsible energy, ranging from wind farms to wind-powered tricycles as standard transportation. Another three feet could place one of the countries that originated religious tolerance and western democracy and first sheltered the Mayflower Pilgrims at serious risk. The Netherlands is protected by dykes – but there were dykes at Fukushima and Sendai province in Japan, and they didn’t stop the tsunami that killed 20,000 people. The grolars and pizzlies are the harbingers of a global climate disaster. The mothers still teach the young bears to hunt, and they seem to understand the need for habitat change better than Americans understand the need for habitat protection. What do ordinary or extraordinary Americans think of this? My friends out West tell me that environmental groups, church groups, ranchers, farmers, and tribal Indians recently joined hands to send the Keystone Pipeline back to the drawing board due to environmental threats. “The protestors stopped them,” a friend from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation told me last week. “Now they can find some other part of the country to contaminate instead.” In Washington, the government is playing games with oil flow from Iran to follow up on orders from somebody who wants to twist Iran’s tail. We just celebrated a very quiet anniversary of a catastrophe that happened the last time we cut off somebody’s oil supply in the interest of several foreign governments and turned a formerly useful anti-communist ally into a deadly enemy. Playing political games with oil supply made it happen. The guys who played the games won. The guys on the U.S.S. Arizona and U.S.S. Oklahoma lost. What does the world think of us? They’re laughing and scared at the same time, not only of our huge potential for violence but also of our ignorance. While mainstream Americans huff and puff through the online news, anybody who can read a foreign language, or the English-language newspapers published in Ireland and India, can watch while America’s reputation sinks through the cracks in the floor, partly due to climate pollution and partly through political corruption. I recently got a wake-up call. I had elected not to drive to an SAT tutoring session after a cosmic skid in my SUV and searched the computer until I came up with a 2011 German TV movie called “Konterrevolution.” This is the story of the Kapp-Luttwitz Putsch of March 1920, as told from the perspective of the Centrists, the Nationalists, and the Communists. The Nationalists want to bump the Centrists out of power and bring back the Kaiser, the Centrists want a liberal democracy with elections and welfare, and the Communists want to affiliate with Moscow and dominate Europe. Hitler shows up for two minutes near the end as a semi-psychotic creep in a dirty raincoat, shrugged off by the Nationalists and everybody else, which is spot on. The Centrists are lovable folks with funny beards but sensible politics. The Nationalists are split between gentleman and scoundrels. Watch Hermann Ehrhardt, the top slugger for the Nationalists. One scene is a flip of the bird to “Casablanca.” The kindly old democratic folks are reverently singing their national anthem in an expensive Berlin hotel when a French military attaché and a British attaché try to drown them out by singing “La Marseillaise.” In “Casablanca,” this works wonderfully. In “Konterrevolution,” the towering Hermann Ehrhardt charges the attachés and punches the music out of both of them. The rest of the people in the hotel politely applaud. The next day, the British attaché with a black eye and the French attaché with his army in a sling show up and demand that Ehrhardt’s unit be disbanded as punishment for the punch-out the Allies lost. “He’s only got 5,000 men but they could beat the whole Polish army,” one of them says, but they sack him, so Ehrhardt joins the takeover attempt, marches into Berlin, and marches out again after the labor unions shut off the water and electricity and don’t show up for work. Ehrhardt and the other Nationalist leader in the film, Waldemar Pabst, though cold-blooded killers of Communists, remained life-long anti-Nazis. Hitler tried to kill Ehrhardt, after Ehrhardt called Hitler “das Idiot,” and refused to support him. Pabst called Hitler a disgusting buffoon and later joined the plot to kill him. The fact that modern Germans are not afraid to see things that way indicates that the awe the Germans and most other Central and Eastern Europeans once had for America has faded considerably, as it did a long time ago in France. Most Europeans west of Russia don’t even want to move here anymore. Most Japanese with serious money prefer France or Germany. The Chinese still enjoy America – because they basically own it. We need to rub our eyes and realize that the rest of the world is not thrilled with our tendency to pollute the planet and sell out to foreign money. If the labor unions can’t save us, we may get stuck with somebody more dangerous than a displaced polar bear like Ehrhardt. He was an outmoded creature. The mutant could be worse.
No one would accuse the oil companies and the other forces opposed to climate protection of being unduly creative, but they have now achieved something that surprised everyone. They have created two new species: the grolar and the pizzly. Hunters and eco-tourists had begun noticing, before the turn of the present century, that some Arctic bears were light brown rather than white, as are the polar bears, and had somewhat broader jowls and faces. In 2006, a hunter shot one of these off-white polar bears and requested a DNA analysis and an anatomical autopsy for the animal. The bear turned out to be the offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly bear. Since then, many other off-white Arctic bears have been observed, and these new bears are classified as either “grolars” or “pizzlies.” Two new subspecies have been created by a fact of life that some people still consider debatable: global warming as it impacts the North Pole and the South Pole. Scientists tell us that as recently as 10,000 years ago there were grizzlies, but no polar bears. The grizzlies, capable of eating anything including freshly-killed meat, carrion, fish, or plant life, thrived mightily in the northern latitudes because they were at the top of an ample food chain. Their localized success was so formidable that they expanded out onto the ice of the northern polar cap. As the grizzly bears began to live on the ice all or most of the year, they adapted through natural selection – incontrovertible within the major species, though not, I think as an explanation of the creation of new phyla. The northernmost bears gradually became completely white, the color of camouflage on the snow and ice fields of the polar cap. The polar bears also developed streamlined torsos, webbed feet and nostrils that could shut completely underwater. They became adapted aquatic predators, pursuing seals and walruses in water or ambushing them on land, or scavenging dead whales. They also gradually lost the ability, or at least the need, for plant food. They found a home on the Arctic ice sheets. The climate change that causes ice ages is due to tilts in the Earth that increase or decrease exposure to the sun. There is not a thing we can do about this. The climate changes that cause global warming are due primarily to carbon emissions from motor vehicles and the generation of electricity. These carbon emissions have raised global temperatures by about two percent in the last 40 years, and about four percent in Alaska and northern Canada. This is not a figure invented by tree huggers. A scientist named James Balog set up 26 cameras to shoot one frame per hour for three years during the first decade of the century. Viewers can watch the ice seem to dance as the glaciers in Arctic rivers slowly shrink back toward the North Pole. Scientists also report that the great Columbia Glacier has receded 10 miles in the past 30 years – a half-mile in one year at the turn of the decade. During the remainder of this century, mountain glaciers in the United States are expected to disappear entirely. The ice melt as the snow and ice turn into water actually speeds the process. “We’ve underestimated the speed of the system,” said
Grolars and pizzlies: Creating new species
Obituaries
(continued from previous page) siblings in the Netherlands: Jan, Sjouke and Flip Douma; Anneke Mulder; and Tjikke Wielenga. She was predeceased by her husband Jacob A. Van Leeuwen, her grandson Sean Broersma, and her great-grandson Jacob Pier. Arrangements were made by Vander Plaat Funeral Home in Wyckoff. Memorial donations may be made to the Christian Health Care Center Employee Fund, 301 Sicomac Avenue, Wyckoff, NJ 07481. Armando “Art” J. Vitale of Franklin Lakes, formerly of Wayne, died Jan. 23. He was 86. He was a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War. He was Eastside High School Class of 1944 graduate. He worked as a machinist for the New Era Corporation in Paterson for 25 years and later for the Sandvik Corporation in Fair Lawn, before retiring from Royal Master Grinders of Oakland. He is survived by his children Joyce A. Riley of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania and Elaine M. Kaufman of Hopewell Junction, New York, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and his sister Jill Calabrese of Weeki Wachee, Florida. He was predeceased by his wife Alice Vitale (nee Van Houten), and his siblings Lena Marino, Joseph, Alex, and Guerino Vitale. Arrangements were made by Vander May Wayne Colonial Funeral Home in Wayne. Maurice A. Zanetto of Wyckoff, formerly of Teaneck, died Jan. 22. He was 94. He was a U.S. Army veteran of WWII. He had been employed with Hoffman-Roche Pharmaceuticals in Nutley. He was a member of Teaneck’s American Legion Post #128. He is survived by his children Richard, and Sandra Zanetto, and three grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife Olga (nee Medoro). Arrangements were made by Volk Leber Funeral Home in Teaneck. Memorial donations may be made to the Christian Health Care Center, 301 Sicomac Avenue, Wyckoff, NJ 07481. tional handicapped parking space, and add two concrete pads for the potential placement of electric generators for the buildings. GS Realty did not agree to provide the generators. The applicant claimed they are very expensive and not required by state code. It was agreed, however, that a lockbox for emergency access to the buildings would be provided, that the elevators in both buildings would comply with the state building code, and that permanent markers would identify the limits of the grass paver area for emergency vehicles.
Maurice A. Zanetto
Armando J. Vitale
Housing plan
(continued from page 9) GS Realty agreed to add a fire hydrant and to locate the hydrants according to the direction of borough fire officials. The applicant also agreed to add standpipes to the buildings for fire protection, provide an emergency access on Colonial Road, add general parking spaces and an addi-