Cheesespread

Terrorist plot to scare Americans with global-warming foiled by “super FBI”
A recent report confirming the scientific consensus that human-generated greenhouse gases are the main cause of global warming has since been determined to be part of an “insidious terrorist plot” to scare and confuse Americans.

“I’m dawgone proud of the new, deluxe-super FBI,” Bush told reporters while playing hopscotch with a duck on the White House lawn. “The first thing terrorists would have us believe is that we should stop spending—stop buying trucks, shotguns, eating out—all great things that make up Americana as we know it.”

Bush asked that citizens “blissfully ignore” the recent report, which found that the country’s air now exceeds “1.0 on the respiratory hazard index for all of America"—meaning that, in addition to major heat waves, pest outbreaks, loss of coastland and wetlands and water shortages, we are also all at increasing risk of getting cancer from the everyday air we breathe, especially in California.

Bush went on to jokingly discount the scientific community as “a bunch of geeks with slide-rules who couldn’t get laid in college,” spurring laughter from adoring, handpicked reporters in the audience.

In closing, he added that the evil terrorist plan almost worked because it was grounded in “facts that some people actually believe.

“Sure, deadly pollution is not all that good, from what I can tell,” he said. “But it’s too late now to stop this ‘greenhouse’ attack. A better thing for us to do is to decrease air quality restrictions on automotive makers and hunt more oil by taking over more countries. As always, we gotta keep spending and proving we are No. 1—which we know we are in the eyes of the one true supreme God Jesus who will lead us to victory against those who would soil the ultimate purity of our precious bodily fluids.”

Corresponding with the government’s wishes to downplay terrorist messages, the new global-warming report received little if any attention in the major media outlets.

Overheard
“The real threat comes from those pathogens that are already among us and killing us or may evolve increased ability to do so. If the current state of evidence implicating infectious causation is on target, we are already dying of terrible global pandemics of heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer—pandemics caused by infectious agents that are lethal but overlooked. We have been worrying about a few stray cats, while we are being stalked by leopards.”

—Paul W. Ewald, from The Next Fifty Years (Science in the First Half of the 21st Century)

Weekly props
1. Nader vs. NBA refs (read between the lines)
2. Kevin Philips’ Wealth and Democracy
3. New York Review of Books
4. Watching the Lewis/Tyson fight at Puerto Vallarta
5. Crispin Glover in update of Melville’s Bartleby