The frog got out a long time ago.  But as usual we bad mouth the animals to make ourselves feel superior (Naturally! We are the only creature God finds worthy of obsessing about.) and warn ourselves not to be stupid like the animals.  Hey! Frogs with their tiny little excuses for brains are too stupid to get out of a slowly heating kettle of water, and will stay there smiling until they’re ready for the plate! You don’t wanna be stupid like that do you?  C’mon, let’s get out and turn down the heat!  

But no, we did not heed the moral of the inert-frog story.  We’re still here.  Some of us have now rolled over on our backs and placidly spout scalding water from between our lips, decades after humanity’s only competent authorities in the matter (no, not Rand Paul, Scott Atlas and Marjorie Taylor Greene) began to predict exactly what we are now experiencing:  Tiny bubbles (but every now and then, disconcertingly, an anomalously bigger one) rise from the bottom of the kettle.  Hmmm, do I smell something (sniff sniff?) 

The frog got out a long time ago.  He’s sitting over there now, one of his bubble eyes scrutinizes the oddity (With his other eye he sees far into the future.)  He wonders what is wrong with us.  His brain works well enough!

Decades ago humanity’s only competent authorities on climate change (Climate scientists!..well I’ll be!) told us the straight up truth about what was going to happen with the water in the kettle if we didn’t turn down the heat.  Instead of immediately beginning to turn down the heat before the situation became an emergency--calmly, intelligently, methodically, scientifically! with a savoir-faire that would not be possible even for Savoir Faire himself while fleeing terrorized from a world of floods, fires, famine, disease, deadly internecine struggles over resources necessary for human life etc.--what did we do?  Well, nothing, really, nothing so far, if one considers that to qualify as “something” the response must in some way be more than laughably incommensurate with the danger.  We waited so long that in the intervening period between the climate warnings decades ago and now--another catastrophe, an apparent eerie twin to the catastrophe of a human-heated world, but actually its father: the loss of what is left of our democracy--arrives at this crucial moment to confound humanity’s desire to save itself.

Some wealthy and powerful humans, with a major investment in fossil fuels and informed by their own scientists, understood early on, sooner than most, the truth about hydrocarbons and climate change, but immediately began lying about it.  They spent billions on the lies over the years, but because they understood this lying as a wonderful investment (the kind of lucrative investment for the future that you want to brag about, but can’t because then they would come for you with torches and string you up!) reaping billions more in continuing profit that would be endangered if they did not lie--their predominant assessment was that lying to the rest of humanity was a Dick Cheneyesque “no-brainer,” and only “fuzzy thinking” weaklings would not lie in that situation.  Did they at least pause to think about their descendants?  We have no evidence that they did or do.  On the other hand, we know that they learned decades ago to habitually lie about and hide what they think and do.

It is a mystery.  With his far-seeing eye the frog probably knows, but hasn’t said.  Maybe these wealthy and powerful humans are secretly very concerned about their progeny, maybe they have already dug an underground world where their progeny can live after the world above has died, murdered by their own fathers' lies.

Maybe these superwealthy and powerful have become, in an historically novel manifestation, what is called psychotic, driven mad by more wealth and power than their tiny little excuses for brains could handle.  Maybe we have not been living in a plutocracy or an oligarchy after all, but a psychosisocracy: rule by psychosis.  Noting the extreme discrepancy between Charles Koch’s public utterances and what the evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt he actually believes, it is clear that Koch, like Donald Trump, is one of the biggest liars in the world, but more dangerous than Trump.  For his own gratification but at the expense of humanity Koch has hired and organized an army of liars/political operatives to help him impose his self-centric political vision on humanity.  Is this psychotic?

We would ask the frog but he has hopped away, so we might never know.