By CLAY MERCER

 

Aren’t we all thankful that world leaders and Barack Obama have gathered in Paris to fight global warming?
I saw the other day that the raw data collected by NASA from various weather stations, including data going back to 1880, was analyzed by a German scientist who reported that the Earth has been getting colder rather than warmer.
In fact, according to Dr. Freidrich Karl Ewert, the earth has cooled an entire degree Fahrenheit since 1940.  Between 1880 and 1940, there was gradual ‘warming’- think in terms of ‘tenths of a degree’ – but after 1940, we’ve been in a cooling trend.
The reason that NASA had been reporting global warming, Dr. Ewert said, was that they ‘fiddled’ with the figures to make it look as if the earth was getting hotter.  Well, that certainly ties in with the NASA emails that suggested they’d better over-hype the dangers of global warming or no one would take it seriously.
This whole process reminds me of the fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes.  Nobody wanted to admit that they couldn’t see the finest material on earth, so they all pretended to believe a lie, until a child pointed out the truth.
I have a friend who believes Christianity to be “too much smoke and mirrors.”  Yet he’s convinced that global warming is real.  At the very least he’ll admit that “something is going on.”
I know a guy that believes ISIS is not a threat to the security of the United States.  According to him, I’m more likely to be killed by a cow than a terrorist.  Maybe so, but the last time I looked, cows weren’t beheading people, burning people alive, or chanting “Death to America.”
Cows also don’t carry automatic weapons and plant bombs on Russian airliners.  In fact, the closest thing I can find where a bovine engages in hate speech is the Chick-fil-A advertising campaign.  Since I know that’s as ‘real’ as the Geico gecko, they don’t concern me all that much.
Well, Clay, what does bother you?
First of all, start with reality.  For instance, the Black Lives Matter protesters bother me.  I realize that it’s racist to say that ‘all lives matter,’ although, like nuclear physics, while I don’t understand the theory behind the statement, I recognize the fact that certain groups of African Americans feel this way.
Because they feel this way, they also feel that it’s acceptable to force various politicians off a stage while that politician is campaigning.  I lived through the sixties’ civil rights protests and I saw incredible acts of violence, but I never saw Martin Luther King, Jr. force anyone off a stage.
Legalized marijuana bothers me.  Okay, it’s not the idea of legal pot that bothers so much as the various variations the legal pot has taken.  For instance, at the Green Solutions pot bar in Boulder, you can buy taffy, chocolate toffee bars, gummies, hard candies, hazel crunch chocolate bites, cookies and cream bars, dreamsicle bars (citrus flavored), and the infamous chocolate chip cookie.
The people who are worried about toddlers ingesting second hand reefer smoke better wake up and smell the cannabis.  It’s not just the western states that are going to pot, friends and neighbors.
It bothers me that the insanity that it’s okay to shout down anyone who disagrees with you is considered a viable means to social justice.  It bothers me that a nation that declared open warfare on tobacco smoke is running wide open in the charge to get marijuana into as many homes as possible. That’s reality.