A Pressing Matter

Let me start by saying that I don't really expect much of my fellow man. I think we're motivated primarily by selfishness, and that there isn't much altruism out there. Not only am I not that shocked by it, I actually find it fairly logical. I tell you this so you'll understand when I say how this next bit disgusted me, and made me ashamed to be a human being, you'll understand just how severe I think it is.

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

Four other people were injured in the incident, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. And just when you thought you couldn't add insult to injury, it appears that the shoppers complained...because the store had to be shut down by the police.

[Police spokesman] Fleming said criminal charges were possible but that it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers in surveillance videos.

I dearly hope they can prosecute a few of these assholes.

Can You Say "Old News"?

You can if you've been a semi-regular reader here. This is by Wesley Pruden, and appears in today's op-ed in The Washington Times:

So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one. The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn't warmed since 1995.

he continues:

Only last month Dr. Hansen's institute announced that October was the hottest on record, and then said "uh, never mind." The London Daily Telegraph calls this "a surreal blunder [that] raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming."

In this account, the institute had to make the humiliating climb-down after two leading skeptics of the global-warming scam, Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Steve McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst, discovered that temperature readings from September had been carried over and repeated for October.

I've pointed out some of the problems with the whole global warming/climate change frenzy here, here, and here, and there are many others out there (much more qualified than I) saying much the same thing.

What are the odds Al Gore will give his Nobel Prize back?

Wow

I can't say too much about this. I was tooling around YouTube, and I ran across this. It's one of my favorite songs, and I really like this version. If you like it, go visit her website.



Man, that's purty.

R.I.P.

This came out of nowhere:

Prolific novelist and "ER" creator Michael Crichton has passed away. He was 66.

I always liked him. I had just finished my latest book on tape (CD, really), and was ready to start his newest.

I Guess All Green People Look The Same To Him...

I was just watching Obama give a stump speech in Ohio, and he was trying to make a joke about John McCain being a "sidekick" to President Bush (a joke that he already had used, by the way).

"He's like Kato to the Green Lantern. Y'all remember that. Those of you who are over a certain age."

If you're going to make a pop culture reference, it's usually a good idea to get it right. Bruce Lee's Kato played the sidekick of Van Johnson's The Green Hornet.

Just a couple of thoughts...

* He couldn't come up with a better example of a sidekick in the last 40 years??

* Maybe he didn't want to. After all, unlike Obama's ticket, the one without the experience is usually the sidekick. Guess he didn't want to point that out too much.

* Another reason he shouldn't have choosen the show "The Green Hornet"? Kato kicked some serious ass. If I had to be any sidekick, Kato's a pretty good one to be.

UPDATE: It wasn't worth another post, but I just watched Obama say that we don't know what John McCain stands for because "he's talked a lot about me" but not the issues. This is after discussing for five minutes what he thinks McCain did wrong, including what I wrote about above. In fact, after writing the post, and this update, he's still talking about McCain. Does he understand the meaning of "hypocrite"?