Speaking of box office poison, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stars in a new documentary called “To The End” about how manmade global warming is destroying the Earth. It debuted in theaters over the weekend and earned a whopping $80 per screening. How very responsible of moviegoers not to burn any fossil fuels by driving to see it.

https://redstate.com/jimthompson/2022/12/13/aocs-new-climate-film-hits-iceberg-sinks-into-the-abyss-n673427

Judging from that write-up, it sounds pretty terrible. AOC is the kind of narrator who could make Greta Thunberg sound both mature and like a scientific expert in comparison. But I did get a kick out of this self-righteous quote from AOC: “Some of us actually have to live in the future that you all are setting on fire.”

“We all”? So AOC doesn’t use fossil fuels or plastics or fly in airplanes? She lives in a cave and eats bugs, the way Klaus Schwab wants us all to? Or does she instead live large and get her photo in lots of fashion magazines made out of dead trees?

One of the few benefits of being as old as I am is that you’ve lived through enough attempts to panic you into acting without thinking that you recognize when you’re being hosed. I'm already living in the future that earlier eco-radicals like AOC tried to scare me with. Unfortunately for them, my memory still works.

I've lost count of all the environmental apocalypses I've somehow managed to survive, from the global cooling in the ‘60s to acid rain to the ozone hole to the death of the oceans (tuna was supposed to be a rare delicacy that cost $80 a can by the 1980s) to Florida and New York City being underwater by now. Not a single one of those doomsday predictions has come true. Computer climate models have also been around long enough for us to know that none of their predictions have come true.

To quote John Prine, "We are living in the future. I'll tell you how I know. I read it in the papers fifteen years ago." I also read 15 years ago that by now, snow would be a thing of the past. Tell that to people across the Northern US who are currently experiencing the first blizzard of the season, just in time to keep them away from theaters showing AOC’s movie.

Incidentally, I find it amusing that so many so-called “film critics” hailed this movie that audiences avoided as if it were a kale salad coated in coronavirus. For an interesting explanation of why critics are so out of touch with audiences, check out this video (if you’re short on time, the real problem begins around the 5:30 mark):

https://youtu.be/E8ZB2SjNzrc

Related: This is an interesting interview with a former stand-up comic and comedy historian about the rise and (hopefully) fall of cancel culture, how cranks who used to write angry letters to the newspaper got empowered by social media and fooled people into thinking they were the majority opinion, and how they pushed it so far that comics and audiences are fed up and finally pushing back against them (thank you, Dave Chappelle!)

https://archive.vn/tET5q