It’s difficult to choose ideas for my weekly ICO letter
because there are so many possibilities. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW, which
morphed into climate change, then severe weather, and now “whatever happens is
a sign of human-caused catastrophic warming) is always available, particularly
now that Earth has gone almost two decades without significant warming. It
would seem difficult to blame things on warming in the absence of warming, but
droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods, rising sea level, and other
phenomena, all occurring within historic natural patterns, have all been
erroneously deemed unusual and unprecedented.
Serendipitously, this week my topic was given me on Tax Day by
an ICO reporter. Last week I mentioned that certain prominent Democrats paid
experts to prepare their income taxes. As you might expect, tax experts are not
employed to facilitate their clients overpaying their taxes. After emailing my
letter to the ICO, a reporter challenged
my assertion that these prominent Democrats wanted to save on their taxes. I
emailed back news stories showing they did, and the matter was settled except
the reporter replied that I was challenged to protect the ICO against libel
charges. I emailed back that I had signed the letter, not the ICO editor.
Today the reporter emailed me a link to a news story of an
editor sued as the re-publisher of a defamatory letter, and added that facts
asserted in ICO letters are checked the same as facts in ICO news stories. I
replied with a personal fact that they are not – I’m very publicly an agnostic,
not a fundamentalist as some writers have stated – and I chuckled thinking of
all the AGW letters and articles that would be thrown out if the ICO did what
they said.
But I’d hate to lose all that inspiration.
No comments:
Post a Comment