Or both?  There's no doubt that these are atypical times.  And it is human nature to find some kind of template in which to fit them.

Longstanding suspicions of the evil nature of many powerful members of our government(s) are now being confirmed.  Their collaborators in the media have already squandered much of their credibility.  Meanwhile, we are being constantly told how polarized we've become.  What that really means is that some of us are still believing the lies that we're being told.  The rest of us are yearning for all of this to come to an end.

Eric Blair changed his name to George Orwell so he wouldn't embarrass his family when he published his factual account of his life as a vagrant — a lifestyle he assumed in order to write Down and Out in Paris and London.  The term "Orwellian" is used to describe vivid literary descriptions of a dystopic future.

A native of Prague Bohemia, which is now in Czechia, Franz Kafka's work was somewhat more fantastic than Orwell's but nonetheless also did a good job of revealing the dark institutional side of human nature.  Most famously, The Trial portrayed a hapless Josef K — who could never even learn what it was that he was being accused of.  Kafka's day job was with an insurance company, with which his law degree helped.  He died fairly young at 40 from tuberculosis, which wasn't all that unusual back in those days.

Were the story of Josef K's trial to be told today, it would be about Donald Trump.  Lawsuits and criminal charges are raining down on him from the sky.  His enemies are so afraid of his possible second term as president that they are trying to smother him in paper.  Meanwhile, the current president is being revealed as a consummate criminal...beyond a reasonable doubt.  The Orwellians in the media, however, are continuing their censorship of contrary information.  Unless one accesses conservative media such as the New York Post, talk radio, or AT and Townhall, the Biden bribery scandal and its DoJ cover-up are hardly mentioned — if at all. 

Orwell would not be surprised by our current Deep State's clamor to cling to power whenever such is being threatened.  He may have expected the forces of tyranny to prevail in spite of profound public anger.  But our actual world is brimming with apostasies.  Adherents to the Deep State's dogma are noticeably breaking away, Matt Taibbi (formerly of Rolling Stone) and Bari Weiss (formerly of the N.Y. Times) being some of the more notable.  The political sphere is just beginning to launch a spate of defections, and next year's elections will take away some of the protective ambiguity behind which some are hiding.

Kafka's brainchildren are recklessly coughing up tyrannic edicts while using for an excuse the artificial hysteria being generated over reasonably normal weather.  The Biden administration has recently announced that all military vehicles will run on batteries as of 2030.  Since the purpose of fighting a war is to not lose, vast quantities of diesel-powered field generators will be needed to keep the caissons rolling along. 

Governor Hair Gel of California has followed along by announcing a ban on the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035.  The trick with this is to have enough lead time so the victims of such nonsense will have forgotten the original announcement — and will be more surprised than angry when they realize they've been screwed.  As of next January, California's already legislated ban on the sale of gas-powered gardening equipment will take effect.  I had thought of opening a giant hardware store in Carson City, Nevada, that specialized in selling such contraband...but several others have already beaten me to the punch.

What is not often said is that just about everybody is a staunch environmentalist because no one wants to live on a dying planet.  We just disagree on how to keep that from happening.  Ironically, the first modern environmentalists were hunters.  They wanted to maintain a stable population of wild animals to hunt.  The National Wildlife Federation is a product of that desire.  Beginning in the early 1970s, intense political activity has surrounded this issue.  And since the midterm election of 2006, when the Democrats took back the House of Representatives, "global warming" has been a front-burner issue — regardless of its lack of genuine statistical substance.

The first lecture that was given to my undergraduate ecology class was about the three principal chemicals needed to sustain plant life on Earth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK).  The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, and plants get it through various means — for example, legumes have symbiotic bacteria on their roots that feed them nitrogen.  Potassium is fairly common in the Earth's crust and is easily absorbed.  Phosphorus, however, in the primary form of phosphate, is not water-soluble.  Commercial agriculture uses significant quantities of these chemicals to produce food.  Phosphate comes from slaughterhouse bone meal and various deposits on land of accumulated bird excrement.  The problem is that phosphates leach out of cultivated soil and find their way to the oceans, where they are lost from further use.

"Sustainability," a modern buzz word, is based on repeated cycles.  Carbon, the Kafkaesque demon of global warming, cycles around and around, from photosynthesizing plant to combustible fuel, back to carbon dioxide.  Phosphate doesn't do that.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.