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the Fish and well, pretty much every 1960s hit maker other than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles appeared onstage over the next three/four days. It wasn’t easy to sleep. It also wasn’t easy to wash, eat or use a toilet. My brother and I stayed up all night, as most people did that weekend. Melanie sang “Beautiful People” sometime after midnight, as I recall, and Janis Joplin arrived in a helicopter, but don’t hold me to any time schedule, as this was a long time ago and the 30 hours or so that I spent at the festival rolled up into one long day’s night. After the rain came the mud,
ast week, we talked about the 2022 report that said the world is on a trajectory to increase carbon and other emissions by 10% in 2030. As part of our thinking about what humans have done to cause warming of the earth, and the results it will have on humans, we should also consider the catastrophic results of human actions in causing confluent, adverse events in the natural world. The world’s human population in the year A.D. 1, was about 200 million. By 1500 it was 461 million. By 1800 it had grown to 1 billion. In November 2022, the world’s population reached 8 billion — an incredible, 800% growth in only 223 years. The world population is forecast to grow to 11 billion by 2100, when it is expected to plateau. Humans, driven by an accelerated population growth of 800%, sought and acquired vast areas of land to live on, grow crops, hunt game, raise cattle, mine for minerals, and dig for water and for oil. They massively destroyed forests, water sources and natural growth in the process. With the Industrial Revolution, followed by the technology revolution, over this 223-year time period, the confluences of population growth and industrial revolution emerged and jointly destroyed more habitats and ecosystems across the world, resulting in the wiping out of nearly 70% of the world’s wildlife. In parallel, they caused global warming that now threatens the planet. Another adverse event is our inability to stop the accelerating melting of ice in the huge ice sheets and glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and around the world. Data from two NASA-supported Grace Missions indicates that the massive Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets have been losing ice mass since 2002. It is likely that the tipping point has passed where increasing melting of ice can be slowed or stopped within foreseeable time frames. The ice age that created these huge ice sheets and glaciers occurred 100,000 years ago. That ice age lasted until 25,000 years ago. Only another ice age can replace lost ice sheets and glaciers. In 2020, the Royal Society reported on recent studies estimating that since the end of the last ice age, average temperatures have risen by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (7-9 degrees Fahrenheit). That change has occurred over the last 7,000 years. But the society also reported that CO-2 in the atmosphere has risen by more than 40% in the past 200 years, much of this since the early 1970s. The current speed of warming is now 10 times that occurring at the end of the ice age. Back to another adverse event in the making. Ice sheets and glaciers contain most of the earth’s freshwater. The ice sheets and glaciers of Antarctica, alone, contain twothirds of the earth’s freshwater, which is melting into the salty oceans, raising sea levels. The ice sheets and glaciers at the North and South poles and around the world, in Greenland and other countries, act as enormous reflectors of the sun’s rays, pushing 90% of the sun’s heat in that area, back into the atmosphere. This ice is melting at an accelerating rate. When the reflecting shield is gone, it cannot be replaced. The Washington Post in January 2021 published details of a report that stated that Earth is losing 1.2 trillion tons
Please see BUCKLEY on C4
Please see DONOVAN on C4
COURTESY PHOTOS
Democrats have no good option for 2024 No promising alternatives exist as concerns are raised about Biden’s age
Editor’s note: Since this column was written, a third Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, announced his campaign.
F
ormer South Carolina Governor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential announcement, which makes her the first Republican to declare other than former President Donald Trump himself, formally commences what should prove to be a tumultuous GOP presidential primary. But despite the impending made-for-TV tumult in the GOP primary, the fact remains that the party has a number of possible or likely candidates who are either wellqualified or broadly popular with a substantial slice of the national electorate.
U
titled her column, “Biden’s a Great The same is simply not true for President. He Should Not Run the Democratic Party. And as the Again.” octogenarian President Joe Biden The Times followed Ms. shows all signs of imminently Goldberg’s column with a number launching his re-election of responsive letters to the editor, campaign, even the mainstream which ran last week under press is starting to fret. the title, “Is Biden Too Old The New York Times, to Run Again?” the closest thing to What’s more, on Democratic Party Pravda, Thursday, Politico and has over the past year run CNN published nearly a series of urgent articles identical articles strongly sounding the alarm on Mr. suggesting White House Biden’s unprecedented palace intrigue and a presidential age and Josh Hammer party apparatus torn declining cognitive about what to do with abilities. Last July, the its senile commander in chief: Times ran an article titled, “At 79, Politico’s piece was titled, “Senior Biden Is Testing the Boundaries Democrats’ Private Take on Biden: of Age and the Presidency.” Last He’s Too Old.” CNN’s eerily similar November, another Times article article was titled, “Biden’s age is a was titled, “President Biden hot topic as he looks to extend his Turns 80, Making Him the First time in the Oval Office until he is Octogenarian in the Oval Office”; 86.” and earlier this month, left-wing Clearly, many in the Biden commentator Michelle Goldberg
the concomitant appointment of a White House are leaking like a special counsel to investigate his loose faucet. Even more notably, scandalous negligence indicate the liberal press, which would some in the Deep State may also normally protect an incumbent Democratic president at all costs, is desire — necessitates finding a replacement candidate. the one stirring the pot. And therein lies the rub. Of the Some card-carrying members three leading of the insular alternative Washington candidates press corps are for the worried about Columnist Star Parker says Nikki Haley Democrats’ 2024 the re-election stands out as a promising Republican presidential prospects of presidential candidate. C3. nomination, the oldest-ever there are no sitting president, appealing options. All three, in who in his first term has presided fact, are terrible options. over a calamitous Afghanistan I speak here of Vice withdrawal, 40-year-high inflation, soaring violent crime rates and the President Kamala Harris, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete worst humanitarian crisis at the Buttigieg and California Gov. Gavin southern border in U.S. history. Newsom. And who can blame them? The fact that Kamala Harris At the same time, disposing of is unlikable, unliked, generally an incumbent president — as the recent revelation of Biden’s illicitly retained classified documents and Please see HAMMER on C4
MORE INSIDE
Remembering the Woodstock Generation and thinking about today
pon a closer examination of the chaos at the southern border of the United States, it occurs to me that two of the situations the U.S. faces today have stark similarities to a seminal event that occurred on a farm in upstate New York some 54 years ago. It was officially called the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, but the town fathers in Woodstock decided they couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) handle the expected crowds the festival was likely to attract. Other nearby towns were considered (White Lake, Saugerties), but organizers finally found and settled on a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. —
site had become steaming boxes of 50 miles or so from Woodstock offal and were already overflowing, — owned by a compliant and gas stations had run out of gasoline, easygoing farmer named Max and food was hard to come Yasgur. by. My brother and I looked You may not be able PURELY at each other upon hearing to pick us out, but my POLITICAL this and agreed that “All brother David and I were right; this sounds like fun!” two of the faces in that It was. crowd of nearly 500,000 We had to park about mostly twenty-somethings a mile (maybe two) away who gathered on Max’s from the entrance as property in the summer of traffic had completely 1969 (Aug. 15-18) for what stopped on 17W. I is now known simply as the James Buckley abandoned my car on the Woodstock Festival. side of the road, and we As my brother and I began hoofing it, along headed north on New with thousands of others making York State Highway 17W, the radio their way single file and abreast advised us that the crowd was with one goal in mind: to get to the growing too large, that there was music festival. For the most part, no water to drink, the few toilets on
local inhabitants were thoroughly bemused but friendly and helpful. They, of course, had never seen anything like the army of high-spirited bedraggled hippies swarming through their neighborhoods. When we finally arrived, there was no gate, nothing to stop anyone who didn’t have a ticket from getting in. The entrances had been completely overwhelmed, and the fence laid flat hours before. As we walked toward the stage, we heard the plaintive words of Richie Havens’ calling out from his song, “Freedom.” Bert Sommer performed his own material. John Sebastian from The Lovin’ Spoonful, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, Joe McDonald of Country Joe and