All our splendid monuments

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on weather and humanity.

Let’s just say it outright – there is no better reminder – not death, not illness, not orgasm, not birth or marriage or divorce, not surgery or getting fired or going slightly mad on a cocktail of laudanum and cocaine and savage karmic dread – there is no better reminder that we know nothing, own nothing, and are powerless to do anything about it anyway, than the weather.
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Behold, the charming folly of men. All our dazzling metropolises, gleaming inventions, churning power grids, information superhighways and devious plans to thwart the gods, all flattened in an hour by nothing more than some fantastically livid wind and rain....

We know, but we don’t want to know. There is no way we can sustain our gluttonous empires at current rates, no way to fully protect from our (at least partially self-wrought) destruction – not to mention how many enduring, unsinkable empires just like ours have been annihilated time and again throughout the ages, every time God and the Devil meet for a poker game.

What a gift! What a joke! We are wired to forget. We shall, very shortly, in a manner of days, go about our lives not in constant, trembling fear of the next hurricane, the imminent big quake here in SF, the next lightning bolt that could at any conceivable moment launch from the hand of Zeus and reduce your bones to smoldering ash. And thank goodness for that.
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Look over there! Sunshine! Whew.