The Slowing of Earth’s Inner Core Does Not Mean That We’re All Going to Die – The

It’s a miracle, I’m alive. Let me read you a tweet that the Spanish newspaper El País posted last night: “LATEST: The Earth’s inner core has slowed down and data indicates that it will rotate in the opposite direction to the surface, subsequently shortening the day.” Look, I had finished work, one of those crappy days, like most days in the life of a writer, exhausted, tired, and half-stunned, and I had gone down to the bar, my other office, to enjoy a beer. The moment I picked up my cellphone and took my first sip, that headline popped out at me, causing me to spit the beer in the bartender’s face, the beer slipping out of my hand and falling straight onto my pants, leaving my crotch looking like an elephant had pissed on me.

I read it six times. I checked that it really was the official Twitter account of the most widely read — and most progressive — newspaper in Spain. And I only managed to recover my breath after seeing some of the comments: “I guess to avoid disaster we have 48 hours to change our cars for electric cars,” “It’s the fifth time the world is ending this week,” and, my favorite: “OK, but do I have time to go to the supermarket? I need toilet paper.”

It’s amazing how since the pandemic, we believe everything. I mean, if any old fake Twitter account were to announce a Russian nuclear attack on the heart of Europe, it would take us a while to realize that it was fake news. Or if someone posted that the sky had collapsed on part of the earth, crashing down on the heads of thousands of people, we’d eat that one up too. There is a generation of 20-somethings who are simply shouting to the heavens, “OK, I’ve seen enough extraordinary historical events!”

But along with the coinciding of certain extraordinary events, such as the pandemic, the jihadist attacks in the heart of major cities, or the return of war to Europe, there is a background of alarmism that has not been dictated by history, but has been consciously driven by the immense lobby of climate apocalypse fans. That is why, unconsciously, when we read a headline about some natural catastrophe, we already know that before we get to the second paragraph that we will be told that it is due to global warming, or global cooling, or your habit of sipping straws made of plastic instead of cardboard.

And this is especially true of the progressive press. El País, for example, is the big climate change newspaper in Spain and one of the most irritating in Europe. They have been announcing the apocalypse since the first polar bear Al Gore ever cast slipped off a slab of ice and got his fangs stuck in an icicle; a polar bear who, by the way, was fired for being clumsy. We are so used to farce and lies in the media that we have not even found it too scandalous that only an hour after photographs of a bunch of policemen arresting Greta Thunberg in a climate protest were distributed all over the world, a video was leaked giving some context, showing that the girl, who was having a good old laugh with the policemen, posed for a photo of the exact moment of her arrest to add drama and gain sentimental followers for the most idiotic cause we’ve seen in centuries.

And speaking of idiots, this week the award for idiot of the year goes to the heads of the NGO Oxfam International, the same NGO that should have been dissolved in 2018 after a scandal broke involving parties with prostitutes and several senior officials in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. But not only are they still around, but they have started a colossal campaign called “Tax The Rich,” the slogan AOC wore on her dress at a gala for the rich where she was not the poorest. Oxfam’s Tax The Rich is part of the biggest and most blatant communist campaign ever developed by an NGO and, if there is one good thing about it, it is that at least they are taking off their masks. The campaign slogan says things like, “We pay for the things that rich people don’t pay for.”

And I tell you about Oxfam because it’s all the same. The madman in El País who turned practically irrelevant scientific information into an imminent and apocalyptic “Breaking news” headline, the general hysteria about climate change all over the press, and the rage of an NGO against the rich (an NGO that I suspect has been funded for years with the donations of the poor…). It’s all the same thing. Whatever the problem, they present the same failed solution: more state, more taxes, more class hatred, and less freedom. Don’t expect me to turn up to that party.

Translated by Joel Dalmau.