Saturday May 29, 2004

It's official. The results are in. The New York Times and NPR are biased. They lean decisively....to the right.

For those of your who have succumbed to the meme that the Berg beheading was somehow the result of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, this from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Saudi special forces rescued 25 hostages today when they stormed a building where suspected al-Qaeda militants had already slit the throats of nine people, a survivor told AFP. Among the dead were seven Asians, a Swede and an Italian, said Nijar Hijazin, who had himself been taken hostage at the housing compound in the kingdom's Eastern Province yesterday. "The nine had their throats cut by the kidnappers when they tried to escape at night by the stairs," Hijazin told AFP, watching the removal of bodies.

Since I'm a meteorologist, a lot of people are interested to know where I stand on "The Day After Tomorrow". Puuuhhhlllleeeeeeeese. I know, I know, Al the Gorebot and the Moveon.org folks had a rally at the kick off and the whole issue has been politicized. There has been screeching from both the right and the left since its release. But, hey. It's a movie. It's fiction. Get over it. Did you ask to get the firefighters feedback on "The Towering Inferno"? No. Did you ask the seismologists about "Earthquake" (or even the latest "10.5")? Of course not. So why does anyone care what the scientific community thinks about Day After. I'll tell what I think--and I haven't even seen it yet. It's probably the typical hokey disaster movie--which I love. There's probably some oddball scientist who everyone thinks is a nut job--and he turns out to be right. Out of all the billions of people in the world, the movie will be a super duper ultra closeup of just a few. Yeah, they'll be the thronging masses running for cover, but the storyline will zoom in on two isolated individuals and how they make it in the end. Of course the government officials will overreact and look like buffoons. All typical stuff. And I love it. I loved the Irwin Allen disaster flicks of the 70's and I love em today. I watched 10.5 (see my May 4th post). Completely hokey. And I loved it. Go watch "The Day After Tomorrow", but don't judge the science in it. Say to yourself, "it's just a movie". Repeat.

Those on the left are so amusing, I just can't resist posting them from time to time--if only for a little levity:

Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States. At the moment, our slaves are stuck in a combat zone, getting killed and maimed, and there's nothing they can do about it except hunker down and pray. Yes, our slaves signed up of their own free will, but most of them were as misled about their job as the rest of us were about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And I don't think "slave" is too strong a word to describe someone who is not permitted to quit his job no matter how dangerous it becomes or how much he hates it. For most of us, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and guaranteed that we have the right to withhold our labor. It doesn't protect soldiers. Our armed forces recruiters are quite adept at making military service appear beneficial (it mostly is) and safe (it's not). The threat of war is minimized, because few rational people actually want to fight.