It’s the morning of Dec 30th, only 40 hours left in 2021. Most of the news this morning is pretty gloomy. I think I’ll just get these off my chest before the New Year and try to be more positive after that.

• The January 6th investigation has accumulated a lot of evidence of conspiracy by elected officials to overthrow the 2020 election and federal government, but there’s no indication that the Justice Department will take any action.
• The giant asteroid really *is* about to hit the planet, according to a lot of climate researchers. In this case the asteroid is the the Thwaites glacier, a chunk of Antarctic ice the size of Florida (!?!). It is almost certainly going to drop into the ocean within the next five years, bringing a sea-level rise of 2-10 feet. The upper end of that range leads to world-bending disruptions. Goodbye Miami, New Orleans and Houston. Goodbye, Venice and a lot of Pacific islands.
• The Omicron COVID variant is burning through the worldwide population rapidly, and no one has a clue as to its long-term effects. It *does* seem to affect multiple organs, not just lungs. That’s nice. So it’s probably time to hunker down again for a while. No New Year’s Eve parties, no international travel. Maybe no travel at all for a few months.

It’s a good thing I’m a generally positive person. Or maybe I just have the very-human ability to ignore facts that I would prefer to not deal with.