BLIEDEN

Welcome back to The Cold Bath. Mr. A  started off this episode with a simple question

ANON

want to talk about Global Warming?

BLIEDEN

Now, I always want to talk about Global Warming.  It's the thing that I'm afraid of most in the world so I was the one who started off the conversation and Mr. A was the listener.  Here's what I said. Let me just say this about Global Warming.  Every day I'm driving in my car and every day I step on the accelerator and I think I'm killing the planet and um...you know, I think it's true.  I know that that anxiety is somehow important to me.  I alway s need something  to focus on.  When I was a kid it was nukes and burglars.  Those are two things that I was terrified of as a child.  Nukes and burglars.  Always afraid that we were going to melt in a radioactive explosion or someone was going to break into the house.  And um, I'm still afraid of burglars, still afraid of nukes and now there's this sort of a fear of the apocalypse which has taken the form of my fear of global warming.  I always need something to be worried about and that's it and I'm honestly really worried about it.  Now I wish that I could just hear someone say Global Warming is a hoax. Global warming is essentially a marketing tool.  I wish I could hear that and think "oh thank god "  But I don't.  I hear that and I think that person is...

ANON

A turd.

BLIEDEN

...making it worse.  Yeah I think that person is a turd.  A little backstory on this.  Earlier in the week Mr. A called me up and asked me to look on Drudge, which I really hate doing.  But I did it and there was this interview with Vaclav Klaus, who is the president of the Czech Republic, who was asked by a reporter about Global Warming and Klaus says it's  huge hoax and he doesn't think we should bother with it.  So I call Mr. A back and say this guy is a turd.  Now here is Mr. A's description of the Vaclav Klaus interview.

ANON

This reporter was interviewing him but they were quite breathless and they had the assumption that it was real.

BLIEDEN

That Global Warming was real.

ANON

Yeah. They are the victims of the oligarchy through one of the oligarchy's indoctrination centers which I call the Narrowversity.  And when they had the University many years ago they would have not two points of view.  They would have twenty-seven points of view.  And you can't have liberalism without the University. And we don't have the University anymore, so we're going into an age of no liberalism. 

BLIEDEN

Well this is, ah for people who don't know you I have to say this is just, this is a theme that you go back to again and again and again which is The Death Of The University which...happened in the sixties you think?

ANON

No it took a very long time.  Our citizens believe in conspiracy.  They don't believe in stupidity.  That's how we lost the Red Cars in Los Angeles.  Conspiracy and stupidity.  Yes there was a conspiracy but it wouldn't have worked had there not been a long basis of stupidity which is "oh I want to get rid of the cars.  I want to get rid of the red cars. They don't pollute  and they're very cheap and we paid for them anyway and um, we want to replace them with these smoke belching, poison belching automobiles because they're the latest thing.  Now if you live long enough everything turns around. That's why if you wear a tie never throw away your ties because the new ties are getting narrower or wider because they'll come back.  Because there's only narrow and wide.

BLIEDEN

My wife had me throw away some jeans from the nineties.  I had these Levi's 501's and soon after we got married she was like "those jeans look ridiculous."  And I was like "I've been wearing them," you know my argument was "I've been wearing them for fifteen years." And she's like "that's my point exactly."

ANON

First of all this is what you're going to get.  This is a trade off because you married a twenty-year old girl.  Ah, the same thing happened to a very wealthy and influential guy. Not that smart but, you know, not that good looking but very influential.  His name is Charlie and he married this twenty year old girl and you know, it almost destroyed his whole family.  It's true.  It's a sad story.  It happened in England.  Her name was Diana, the goddess of the hunt and it's all about a forty year old man marrying a twenty year old girl.

BLIEDEN

Clarification. My wife is 28. Not 20. This is both the best part of talking to Mr. And the worst part.  He teases me with a global warming discussion then somehow we wind up talking about Princess Di. And by the way,  he has these insanely interesting things to say about the royal family.  But I can't let the discussion go there.  Not today.  So I say let's get back on track and this is the very first thing he says after I insist that we get back on track.

ANON

Since they're listening to us on the internet, I just want to tell them what the internet is.

BLIEDEN

What?

ANON

The internet is Jeffersonian free speech.  We don't have free speech because we gave the public airwaves away to the highest bidder and they never gave them back.  Funny thing.  And so now instead of having reporters, we have Katie Couric. Now I have nothing against Katie Couric.  She gets 85,000 dollars a day and I have never earned 85,000 dollars a year, so she's way ahead of me.  But the internet is real Jeffersonian free speech.  In other words, the citizens are about as right as the journalists, you know, half the time.  But the citizens know they're wrong half the time and the journalists who also know they're wrong eighty percent of the time, can't say so because they're working for these giant corporations, ah, but when Dan Rather brought forward the forged papers, they had to know it was forged, because they're not stupid.  Now apparently, as in the White House there is no institutional memory at CBS.  There are no adults.   But this happens.

BLIEDEN

I've read the blow by blow account.  Have you read that how they met him in a motel and...

ANON

Right.

BLIEDEN

...the interview...there was a breakdown and Rather was very embarrassed and

ANON

Right.

BLIEDEN

You know it doesn't seem like...

ANON

There's just one thing they left out.

BLIEDEN

What?

BLIEDEN

Okay I cut out the part about the one thing they left out.  Why? Because I can't prove it and neither can Mr. A.  We don't know.  Does that mean that everything we do include in the program is absolutely verifiably correct?  No way.  But you gotta draw the line somewhere, right?   So we keep talking about Dan Rather and CBS, then     Mr. A launches into a long complaint about 60 minutes, specifically a recent piece by Andy Rooney.  

ANON

The other night he questioned whether Americans should have the vote.  He questioned Universal Suffrage.  Nothing wrong with that if you're a fascist.  If you're a liberal there's something really really wrong.

BLIEDEN

Did he do it in a humorous way?

ANON

No.

BLIEDEN

Like, "let me question why..."

ANON

He did it in a sly, snarky, smarmy 60 Minutes way.  He introduced it as if it were a poll.

BLIEDEN

Now, pay attention to the way that Mr. A says "poll."  Listen again.

ANON

He introduced it as if it were a poll.

BLIEDEN

Now for Mr. A watchers like myself, this is an immediate tipoff that Mr. A is referencing not only the misleading nature of polls, but his own history in professional politics where his job, at times, so he claims, was to produce polls which gave favorable results to his candidates.  Mr. A claims that polls can be rigged to give you pretty much any result you want, and the example he always gives is this.  Let's say you're doing a poll on the race of a candidate.  So question number one might be, "Are you racist?" And most people would say "No."  Then question number two is "Would you ever vote for a black candidate?" More respondents are going to say "Yes."  They would vote for a black candidate because they were primed by the answer they had to give to question one, that they aren't a racist.  Because no one thinks they're racist because being racist is bad.  So in that way you have rigged your poll to say that more respondents would vote for a black candidate than perhaps is actually true.  I guess the point of this argument, if I'm retelling it right, is that without that first question, a higher number of people might simply say "No, I wouldn't vote for a black candidate."  So what's the point of all this.  What was Andy Rooney's poll?  Here's Mr. A describing the offensive part of it.

ANON

He asked the question "Should people who have IQ's under 80 be permitted to vote?"  Now this would be fine.  Absolutely fine if we were living in Nazi Germany.

BLIEDEN

But again, and because I didn't see the piece, was it his Andy Rooney sort of...he was presenting the side that he disagrees with in a snarky way to show...

ANON

That's right...

BLIEDEN

Okay.  But he doesn't really...he wasn't really putting forth the idea...

ANON

He was.  He was.  Because you don't say to people, outside of Nazi Germany   that we're not going to allow universal suffrage anymore.  That works in Nazi Germany.  That's a perfectly legitimate Nazi Germany idea, it's just not an American liberal idea.

BLIEDEN

Alright that is 4 references to Nazi Germany.  4 Nazi references means I'm going to go online and find the Andy Rooney piece.  Which I did.  And to tell you the truth, listening to it I get it.  I get the idea that Mr. ANONymous is saying that putting the idea out there is putting the idea out there.  And having heard the piece myself I honestly can't tell what Andy Rooney thinks.  So I'm gonna play it for you, and I'm gonna play the whole thing, and then we're gonna move on, cause I don't know.

ANdy Rooney

We like to think that we have a Democracy in this country and we do, but we don't vote on very issue.  Our elected officials do that for us.  We don't always agree with them of course.  For example, we didn't vote to go to war in Iraq.  We elected our leader, George W. Bush and he and his advisors decided that that was the right thing to do.  If it had been put to a vote, we probably wouldn't be there now.  It would be interesting if we all voted on the issues that come up before Congress, for example, how would you vote on these things if you had the chance.  Iraq: take all of our troops out of there immediately.  Yes or No?  Where would you stand on this?  Double the number of soldiers we have in Iraq so we can win the war in a hurry and get out.  Yes or No?  Next question.  Of the one million, four hundred thousand soldiers and sailors that we  have in the US Army and Navy, 325,000 are stationed outside the United States.  Do you know what they're all doing out there?  If we brought them all back home and then reduced our military by half that would save us about 220 billion dollars.  That's about 700 dollars for each of us.  If you got the money in cash would you vote for it?  Yes or No?  Immigration.  Last year about 700,000 legal immigrants were admitted to the United States.  Legal, not illegal.  We don't need more people and we should stop immigration now.  Agree or Disagree?  Pennies?  There are now a 140 billion pennies in circulation and you can't buy much of anything with one penny.  Should we stop making pennies?  Yes or no?  IQ.  Every American should have to take an IQ test.  Anyone who scored under 80 would be considered too dumb to vote.  Yes or No.   I wish we could all vote on everything but I kno it's not practical.  I don't think it's unreasonable though, for us to expect both Congress and the President to find out what we do think and to pay attention to that.  Maybe we don't vote often enough.  We only vote for President once every 4 years.  It's a long time if we get a bad one. Agree or disagree.

BLIEDEN

Global warming.

ANON

I hope there are no children listening.  Okay?  And if there are, turn the radio off.  Okay, ready? 

BLIEDEN

Yeah.

ANON

I love to spank girls, so I believe in global warming.  Right?

BLIEDEN

Hold on, just so I understand, you're saying that if it's hotter, girls will be taking their...

ANON

No no no no no.  Global warming.  Warming their globes.  And there you see the source of global warming.  The source is the palm of your hand. It's not like rape. It's not like, you know, giving somebody knockout drugs.   I am against the date rape drug, and I'm against the date rape drug for the same reason I am against 60 Minutes.  It's a way of narcosizing so as...you can get what you want.  And the citizens have no defense against the date rape drug of the masked media.

BLIEDEN

What is it about spanking?  Is it...do you like to see the...I want..

ANON

I'll tell you exactly  what it is.  The sixth and seventh posterior dermatomes are oppositte the genitals, and when they're excited a person has an orgasm.   This is not like spanking a child, which I don't know if I'm for.  I never had any children so I never had to face the question.  But really the issue is global warming, and whenever I hear that and whenever anyone hears it from now that will be something that they'll think of...in the mix.. along with the million other things.  Now you...you got it.  The word is anxiety.  And this is what the masked media has done to you and every other young person who's the victim of the post 60's university or what I call the Narrowversity.  Anxiety is what they want to develop.  Now why?  Cause they wanted to make you anxious?  No. Because they wanted to market products.  Products of the future.  One of the problems was the cars, they were not wearing out fast enough. So they had to sell people on a new concept car.  And the concept car was the precious car. The "save the earth" mobile.  They're just trying to sell you some new shit.

BLIEDEN

Alright. Let me tell you guys my perspective on this. I went  to a post 60's university, and I'm telling you that's not why I want to buy a hybrid car.  Scientists publishing scientific results about the effects of greenhouse gasses is what made me want to buy a hybrid car.  I still want one.  I can't afford any new car but when I can I will most certainly buy a hybrid.  And I also want to say this.  The media didn't make me want to buy a hybrid either.  Major media outlets have been giving equal time to the global warming debunkers for years.  In a time when no peer review journal would give any weight to the global warming counter argument, major media outlets were still calling it a "debate."  So I'm sorry Mr. A, I don't buy this one.  But now here's a crazy twist.  I am, by virtue of publishing this podcast, I guess I am part of the media, well in the interest of full disclosure, my father works in solar energy.  So who stands to gain from the global warming hype?  My family.  Me. Am I using the media to disseminate my global warming propaganda so that I can, in the words of Mr. A, sell you some new shit?  I have to say that in my heart of hearts, I don't believe I am. I think the world's heating up and that it's our fault.  But that's my anxiety.  That's what I have chosen to hold on to. But lest you should think that it's all doom and gloom here on the Cold Bath we do on occassion, talk about girls. Which is what we did on this particular day. So I leave you not with a tease, but with Mr. A's final thought that day, and this time, he really was thinking about warm globes.