February 1, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 17 “We’ve underestimated the speed of the system,” said 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. 21st century learning initiative that emphasizes skills that prepare students for the future and developed an in-house Professional Development Academy, the Ramsey Education Academy of Learning, to ensure that staff members receive training on current research-based strategies to improve student success. The district maintains a high level of student success with test scores that are consistently above state levels. Ramsey also consistently has over 90 percent of its high school graduates continue their education. The district also has a vibrant co-curricular program with student athletes being recognized at the league, county, and state levels, and band and choral programs that have been recognized nationally and internationally. Ramsey High School has been recognized by New Jersey Monthly magazine as one of the state’s top 75 high schools. open the next day. This new ordinance will hold the owners responsible as well with severe consequences for illegal activity. “We’re not going to tolerate this type of activity.” The terms of the ordinance allow for unannounced visits from the department of health and the police department. Violations of the ordinance shall be grounds for the immediate revocation of a license. However, the ordinance allows that the license shall not be revoked until there is a hearing before the health officer. “At the hearing before the health officer, the licensee shall have an opportunity to answer and may thereafter be heard, and upon due consideration and deliberation by the health officer, the license may be revoked or the complaint may be dismissed. The decision of the health officer shall constitute final administrative action of the municipality,” the ordinance states. 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. Grolars and pizzlies: Creating new species Montesano (continued from page 3) school principal in Montvale and a middle school science teacher and administrator in Ridgewood. He is president of the Bergen County Association of School Administrators. He was recently named the 2012 New Jersey Association of School Administrators Superintendent of the Year. Montesano was selected as the state’s overall winner after earning the title for the northern region. He has also received the Bergen County Elementary and Middle Schools Administrators Association Administrative Excellence Award. Under Montesano, Ramsey has: launched a successful Massage (continued from page 7) “The new massage therapy ordinance…finally gives some teeth to control illegal sexual activities in massage therapy establishments,” Chief Gurney said. “Over the years, there have been several massage therapy establishments that have been involved in illegal prostitution. The Ramsey Police Department, along with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, has conducted undercover operations when we have received complaints of illegal prostitution activities at message therapy establishments. Unfortunately, there were no true consequences for the ownership of these establishments. The individual message therapist would be arrested; however, the message parlor would be