@Typo-MAGAshiv

His discussions did not include people who were led to addiction by their doctors,

Dude, I was in a position of listening to all three hours of his radio show, every day, for literally half a decade. Therefore, I can say with certainty: Rush did NOT, I mean not fucking once EVER, clarify, caveat, offer exceptional or outlier cases, that could in any way get even perceived as "diluting/softening" his hard-line positions on issues, particularly that of drugs. Even "legal" pharmaceuticals, he stood hard for the for-profit model, and vilified every other alternative as "socialized medicine, a slippery slope directly to full Communist takeover of the USA."

So yes, he was HARD in favor of the status quo that financially incentivizes doctors, hospital systems, and pharmaceutical companies, to push pills for money, and fuck all the guardrails around those with abuse potential. And, he wasn't just speaking in a vacuum. He was nationally syndicated, with an audience of tens of millions, who called themselves "Dittoheads" which as repeated on-air meant "I love you and completely agree with and believe everything you say!"

Thus, he modeled ideas, behaviors, and attitudes for the entire American Right Wing culture. His platform and positions, therefore held a symbiotic relationship with the culture and positions of law enforcement up to and including Federal agencies (classic example Chief Darryl Gates saying publicly, "Casual drug users ought to be taken out and SHOT!"), legislative bodies therefore the drafting, enactment, and enforcement of drug laws and literally tens of millions of dollars per year budgeted for interdiction and enforcement activities.

For my part, I was closely involved with the "legalize hemp/cannabis" movement, therefore a ground level soldier intimately involved in the "Drug War," Immersed in it personally, not a casual pundit on the sidelines with no more skin in the game than agreeing with a fat fuck radio host.

SO, for one of THE. TOP. players in the entire 2 decade drug war vertical industry and legislative machine, who in service of this position expressed the harshest possible treatment of OTHER drug users, to carve out a personal exception, and to selectively do the opposite of the entire corpus of his expressed position on the entire thing, is COMPLETELY out of the fucking question. When it came down to him personally, "falling victim" to the same human foibles and weaknesses he spent literally thousands of hours condemning others for; he deserves ZERO compassion, mercy, empathy, and other such things he also condemned personally, and claimed belonged to his ideological opposites, "The Left", when it suited him and the entire breadth and height of his hard line positions on drugs and their users.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

A victim of the opioid epidemic,

A much more generous excuse than Limbaugh himself used regularly, calling drug abuse a crime and moral failing NOT a disease, and that addicts "should be sent up" when talking about other people. Also much more generous personal accountability-shirking than this community is generally known for...

He didn't get addicted to opioids until after a botched surgery in like 2002 or so.

The surgery was in the '90s. He finally publicly admitted the addiction in 2003, getting out ahead of it getting revealed as he worked his way through the legal system.

So hateful! Such a hater.

Yup, he worked HARD to earn every bit of my hate, for his ongoing lack of compassion and outright hate expressed on-air at groups he deemed political foes. I'll always remember him as a fat fuck hypocrite.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

the polar icecaps increased in size, as did the glaciers being tracked

Are you looking at the big picture, or repeating cherry picked and spoon fed measurement methods? Polar ice and glacier VOLUME, as well as annual sea ice extent, show steady declines since 1979, and the ice of the latter measure, steadily showing long term permanent ice comprising it getting replaced year by year with thinner annual ice.

Because by 1998, he had become quite thin and maintained it for the rest of his life.

Also got addicted to Hillbilly Heroin, and doctor shopped his way to permanent hearing loss. Most compelling argument for existence of a just God, that he lost 0.001dB of hearing ability for each time he uttered on-air, "Long haired, dope-smoking, maggot-infested hippies" as part of his consistent support for the Right-Wing authoritarian "War on Drugs." You're literally admiring drug-addict-thin, not healthy diet and lifestyle thin. I'd also put money on gastric bypass, weight loss prescriptions, and other cheat codes.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

The issues from the 1970s warned about an upcoming ice age. By the 1990s, the same retards were worried about "global warming".

Careful, here. You're repeating uncritically, the retconning propaganda of oil and large industrial interests, with massive profits on the line in convincing the masses that "Environmentalists are full of shit." This superficial summary completely leaves out the REASONS that a manmade ice age was a real threat in the 70s, and that the legitimate threat changed to global warming by the 90s. I will now show that the ACTUAL non-predictive bullshitters all along, are those who claimed that "Environmentalists will bankrupt industries and take away cars and trucks."

During the postwar industrial boom, the population explosion helped drive a massive increase in particulate emissions, along with "invisible" CO2. One effect was worldwide particulate smog that blocked a significant percentage of solar input reaching ground level. Projections of growth of population and industry from 1950s numbers, solidly forecast a long and strong enough change to the very albedo of planet earth, to precipitate a new ice age.

One example you can see right in your NatGeo collection: Historical Ansel Adams photos of the crisp clear splendor of the remote Yosemite Valley. Then photos from the 70s where the same view was obscured for 200+ days a year by particulate emissions from power plants hundreds of miles upwind, then later with many times the population but with emissions equipment mandated into place, the view once again clear for 200+ days a year. Growing up in Los Angeles, in the 70s smog days were so bad that elementary students weren't allowed out into the playground to exercise and increase our respiration rate of the sickening brown soup that obscured the view just across the school's own athletic field.

Particulate filters an NOx scrubbers, are expensive at the individual vehicle level, but scale up very efficiently, to a percentage of production output to emissions capture, in big "smokestack" industries. The last frontier yet unconquered, is capturing the "invisible' CO2 emissions at scale.

Thus, emission reduction mandates that gained traction in the late 60s-70s, got realized in effective installed equipment through the 80s. So, entering the 90s, sun-blocking particulate emissions were on the downswing, while "invisible" CO2 emissions continued scaling upward with fossil fuel burning. Thus comes the positive feedback loop of "Radiative forcing" for which there is a detailed Wiki article. CO2 does not significantly block incoming solar radiation, but it DOES block the reradiation of the different wavelength back out to space. Thus, the "greenhouse effect." The steady increase of particulate blocking of insolation, no longer matches the steady increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

This is the PHYSICAL MECHANISM by which concern over "impending ice age" in the 70s, got replaced by legitimate concern over "impending global warming."

After receiving much rightful ridicule over the years, they started calling it "climate change".

Actually a direct response to dip shits saying, "Hurr durr, just shoveled 10 inches of Global Warming out of my driveway!" which is a weather not a climate factor.

A specific example of these dumb-fuck appeal memes getting injected into the popular culture. Studies made in the early 90s examined the entire life cycle of using biomass instead of fossil fuel for large scale power generation. Every aspect of the cycle, from fuel burned and CO2 generated during planting, harvest, transport, meticulously accounted for and the net CO2 impact,compared to the impact of the same amount of power generated by fossil fuel inputs. Turns out, renewable biomass is a much lower net producer of CO2, compared to extracting and burning carbon based fossil fuels.

Some crops, notably hemp, were found to result in a net REDUCTION in CO2. In other words, the growth of the plant, absorbed more CO2 out of the atmosphere, than the whole farming, transport, and ultimate burning in a power plant, ultimately released back into the atmosphere. Side note, hemp burns SO hot, that there have been cases of power plants built for other inputs getting damaged when burning large seizures of marijuana crops.

Anyway, I heard when that fat fuck Rush Limbaugh reported this finding, twisted to suit the agenda of the fossil fuel producers who paid for the $800 dollar surrogate penis cigars he loved to get photographed smoking. He said in a voice dripping with contempt and "Stupidest shit ever heard" snideness, "These environmentalist wackos said, that global warming can be stopped... by growing marijuana. Then his out-tro theme sound as he went to commercial. This is a nuts-and-bolts citation, of one exact mechanism of petrochemical industry favoring propaganda, getting delivered to the right wing masses, on the basis of ZERO actual understanding or legitimate critical analysis.