Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Jólabókaflóō

FYI: My original title for this piece was “Back to the Future,” but I thought that this present title was more of an eye-catcher, and much more appropriate for Christmas Eve.

Recently I received a book from Amazon. It was sitting on my doorstep in the usual Amazon packaging. Initially on feeling the package I did not know what it was, but then I thought, “oh yeah, it was probably the book we we giving for jólabókaflóō, a new local family Christmas tradition, based on a long standing Danish and Icelandic tradition. (FYI: From Google, Jólabókaflóð, or “Yule Book Flood,” originated during World War II when foreign imports were restricted, but paper was cheap. … While giving books is not unique to Iceland, the tradition of exchanging books on Christmas Eve and then spending the evening reading is becoming a cultural phenomenon.)

As I like to spend some time educating my readers in things that they could never know about without this blog, remember the word, “jólabókaflóð,” as you might be tested sometime in the future!

Anyway, I was wrong. It was not  the jólabókaflóð book that we had ordered. The book was “the DENIAL” by Ross Clark. But I did not order that book. Who could it have been from? (After reading the reviews on the back cover, I could guarantee that it was not a gift to me from the Sierra Club.) 

BTW: “Thank you, Steve.”

Once I started reading my personal jólabókaflóð book, I had a hard time putting it down. I even found myself preferentially picking it up over my latest Stephen King novel! Each night as I read it, I thought to myself, “this is Back to the Future, at least for California.” 

The setting for “the DENIAL” was England. Without spoiling it for you, Great Britain had morphed into not just a Green culture . . . rather an over the top, crazy Green culture. In addition there was roving blackouts which proved to be a major issue in the cold winter with persistently cloudy and sometime windless days . . . all heat was electric. All modes of transportation were electric, which meant that getting anywhere was completely unreliable during prolonged power outages. A farm animal was a big no-no because they produce a lot of methane, and so meat was extremely limited and rationed. Everybody had to keep personal records of their carbon consumption, and if mistakes were discovered during carbon audits, big fines and potential jail time. The cancel culture was over the top! Etc., etc. etc.

Now granted the book was written as satire, but here in California I think it merely presages our own Back to the Future . . . to me the only real question is how long have we got before the Dems turn California into an American version of “the DENIAL?”

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