Year 2, Month 10, Day 4: Hats Back On, Gentlemen — An Idiot.

Hey, gang! Want to make fun of an idiot? Check out Norah Flanagan, in the Enid, Oklahoma, “News and Eagle.” You can’t make this shit up. Well, actually, you can:

I would probably be a bit more concerned about belching cows heating up the atmosphere than I am if the people doing the so called tests and crying in their green tea weren’t treating the climate changes like a religion. Every time I hear anything about the subject I get this ultra nasty picture in my head of goofy looking Moonies (that cult that hands out flowers and plays tambourines on streets) I’ve never seen a Moony with my own two eyes, only pictures in magazines and on TV, but these climate people remind me of them. They’re goofy.

Has the weather changed in the last few years? Yes it has. We’re cruising toward three seasons rather than four. Freeze your nostrils shut cold winter, monsoon season, and hot enough to fry eggs in the dirt at 6 a.m. summers. When you take into consideration that this area right here, the Canisteo Valley, was once a tropical rain forest, and that we had a mini ice age back in the Middle Ages, then it doesn’t take a big stretch for a thinking person to figure out that we’ve entered ANOTHER weather cycle. All things have a cycle, there’s light, there’s dark, there’s cold, there’s hot, there’s life, there’s death. Nothing stays the same. Absolutely nothing. So why in the world would people think that the weather should? Besides, Al Gore being the poster child for the Global Warming/ Moony freaks is a good nuff reason for me to shoot darts at the theory. I didn’t trust the guy back when he was Bill Clinton’s number 2 and now that he’s got those wiggly jowel thingies and does a comb over he creeps me out even worse.

When it comes to Global Warming, it’s kinda like God, you either believe or you don’t. I’m just one of those skeptics who like to see the actual data right in front of me. I don’t need a nerd in a lab coat deciphering the numbers for me, I’m quite capable of reading graphs and numbers all by myself, and the last thing that I want to see when I’m looking at data is the word ‘projected’. What? Projected means in the future, not right now. Projected means maybe. I don’t want maybe. I want this is what has happened/this is what will result.

The Enid News And Eagle only accepts letters in the mail — no email. So this one went off on Saturday morning, October 30. It’s been too long since I mocked an idiot.

When it comes to climate change, Norah Flanagan doesn’t need a “nerd in a lab coat deciphering the numbers for me”), and deprecates words like “projected” as meaningless. How does this attitude work in other areas?

One day her doctor finds a suspicious lump, but Norah feels fine — so she doesn’t care.

She reads the numbers on her biopsy results, but doesn’t understand them. A big number is good. Or is it bad?

A “nerd in a lab coat” (who happens, usefully, to be an oncologist) recommends a course of therapy and tells her the projected survival rate. But since she doesn’t want “maybe,” the advice goes unheeded. Plus which, the doctor has “wiggly jowl thingies” so she knows he’s a quack.

I hope she would not be so reckless. Experts spend years mastering a subject or a skill; we trust mechanics with our cars and surgeons with our lives for this reason.

Climate scientists (whom she compares to deluded cultists) have spent years learning to interpret the data on our planet’s health. If an overwhelming consensus of planetary diagnosticians tell us there’s a problem, dismissing them simply because their words are unwelcome (or because they’re funny-looking) is as foolish as ignoring an oncologist’s advice in the face of a metastasizing cancer.

Warren Senders

I will give an Antigravity CD to the first person to correctly identify the provenance of my headline.