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Brad DeLong reprints this old piece of dialogue from Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin: Since September it’s just gotten colder and colder. There’s less daylight now, I’ve noticed too. This can only mean one thing — the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice.

Dad says the sun isn’t going out. He says it’s colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder how many people believe that the reason it gets colder in winter is because the Earth is farther away from the sun? This despite the well-known fact that it’s currently getting warmer in Australia.

I would like someone to do a survey on this topic. Thank you very much for your consideration.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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