A post to die by

You might as well read it; it's as good a way as any to while away your last moments on tortured Earth, a planet which is, like you, perishing from climate change.

As an added advantage, assuming a Hereafter exits and is blessed with a mass media component, you'll be better prepared to become a media critic in Heaven.

Our text comes from Radio Iowa:

"The looming impacts of climate change on the State of Iowa was the subject of a meeting in Des Moines today."*

That is the lede, the key fact the reporter and editor think you should know.  Of course we all agree with the assumptions it capsulizes:

--Climate change is happening with the unstated subtext that it is your fault and mine.

--Climate change will have an "impact," a much more serious thing than a simple "effect."

--The impact is "looming," again a word of sufficient drama to make us all fall to our knees in repentance for not driving a Volt and subsisting on dandelion greens and  stewed cottonwood bark.

---

The body of the piece is somewhat cute in the same sense that a kitty tangled in Aunt Priscilla's yarn is cute. The analogy breaks down, however, with the realization that little pussy is not contorting in lust for camera, microphone, and above-the-fold headline attention. She is just having fun or, perhaps, trying to  get free.

The story might not have impacted my attention in such a rilly awesome manner if it had stuck with the usual horrific predictions settled scientific facts that logically follow your earth-hating decision to use a reading light this evening. Flooded cities. Continental droughts. Displaced polar bears. Al Gore gasping for a final breath from the unburned hydrocarbons emitted by everything except, of course, his private jets.

But Iowa is not to be constrained by those banalities. I mean, Hell, even the New York Times and Jerry Brown know all about that.

Instead we found some experts with a new take on how you are about to die. Mosquitoes. Vast billions more mosquitoes, bigger, meaner, more dangerous, and loaded with virulent new poisons for which even Merck and Eli Lily have no antidote.

So take heed. Strip off your Spandex and send your power-hungry computer off to a certified recycling center. Make new clothes from sustainable resources, hemp fiber and slabs of birch bark. Gather your tribe and find a remote valley where you can live in harmony with nature on the veggies of the forest and -- absent a PETA chapter nearby -- slugs and snails and lightly boiled mosquitos.


*EDIT: I didn't even notice Radio Iowa reporting the  the "impactS  ...  was." It were not a typo by me.