(vanity) Art Bell has gone off the Global Warming deep end.

The week before yet another global bullcr*, I mean global warming sell-out attempt.

Art Bell rolls out of his Manila retirement, just long enough to explain in a shrill multi-hour screed, why Americans who still live in America - need to make sacrifices.

He's been on this global warming crap for years. I ceased all respect for the guy. I no longer want to listen to his guest hosting.

Originally I thought maybe he had another "superstorm" book (he co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm) and that was why he was a global warming supernut.

Bell and his successor Noory are amazingly talented at the deadpan interview - I marvel as (infrequently) I listen to either credulously interview someone one night whose theory/conspiracy/explanation is in total contravention to one expressed by someone another evening.

I started listening to Art Bell in 1996 when I worked overnight shifts.

Bell is the best interviewer I have ever heard. His gift is to get people to tell their own stories, and let the listeners make up their own minds about the validity of the claims.

That said, Bell isn't the brightest guy on radio. As his success grew, I think he became detached from the reality of the way most of us live.

From what he described, Ramona took care of the ordinary business for him, and when she died suddenly, I don't think Bell has been the same since. Remarrying a few months--not that many weeks later to a young girl he had never met, but only chatted with on amateur radio is odd, and saying Ramona's spirit guided him to her is odder.

Most of Bell's fans know about the son who was molested, & about the horrible way Bell was libeled and won the case he brought against his libelers. Fewer of his fans know about Bell's older children from an even earlier marriage, whom he appears to ignore. Maybe this is why he is so attentive to his youngest daughter. Bell's judgment is not the best.

He used to say he was a libertarian, and maybe he was, but between the success, the isolation, and the emotional turmoil of the last few years of his life, Bell is changed and I don't enjoy listening to a guy broadcasting from an isolated condo in Manila, removed from third world realities and distanced from ground truth in the US.

It's too bad. I really used to enjoy listening to Bell. Not all of his guests or callers were freaks.

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