Our Panicky World

I really wonder how we can all live our day-to-day lives without spending all our time cowering in fear. I mean the news media is bad enough, using their sweeps period to tell us that "what's in your sock drawer could kill you" and talking heads always going on about the latest ways terrorists could kill us all. Worse yet is when the news media takes an event that already on the surface sounds like bad news and amplifies it to the point where you just wonder if people are now just going to spend the rest of their lives rolled up the fetal position, afraid to do anything or go anywhere. And maybe that's why we've gotten to the point where ANYTHING can cause people to get hysterical, whether it's real or not.

And so it was that an advertising campaign for the movie version of a cult favorite cartoon caused an entire city to shut down in panic last Wednesday. I'm sure you've all heard about this by now... Cartoon Network did a "viral" marketing campaign for the movie version of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", one of their popular late-night "Adult Swim" cartoons. The campaign involved light-up signs of what looks like a "Space Invaders"-type character giving the finger. These things were placed in visible high-traffic areas in 10 major cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. And Boston. Aside from hitting their target audience, these signs didn't amount to a nanosecond worth of media or civic attention in nine of these 10 cities for the couple of weeks they've been up. But someone in Boston saw one of these things, thought it was a bomb, and the whole city went apeshit. Traffic shut down, bomb squads called, two people who helped "plant" these signs were arrested.

Once it was discovered what this was really about, civic leaders in Boston became irate and immediately demanded harsh penalties from Turner Broadcasting, the owner of Cartoon Network... something to the tune of "every penny they have." They said that since this "device" had lights and circuitry and wiring, it could easily be mistaken for a bomb. Funny thing is I see "devices" like that everyday, with lights, and circuitry, and wiring, and they're "planted" on highways where they could cause a lot of destruction.

They're called "Amber Alert boards", normally used to display traffic conditions, but also used for missing child alerts.

As a result, a lot of people are laughing at Boston right now, which a lot of us probably needed to do since there hasn't been much reason to laugh at Boston since the Red Sox finally won a World Series 2 years ago. Fans of the show think it's hilarious. I think it's hilarious, and I don't understand the show at all. I watched it one time with my roommate (who loves the show, incidentally), and I was completely lost. Plus, it got even better when the two guys arrested for this stunt, upon posting bail, proceeded to hold a press conference... where they limited the discussion to the subject of 1970s hairstyles. You can't make this stuff up! I watched this during my lunch break at work on Thursday, and it was the funniest thing ever. The CNN anchors absolutely flummoxed at what was going on, having no idea what to say about this. The reporters trying to ask questions about the case, only to be rebuffed by responses like, "That is not a hair question... that's not a hair question either..." Apparently, these guys are performance artists, which just shows that they know how to get in on a good joke.

And Boston apparently doesn't get the joke... because the video of this press conference is on WBZ-TV's website with a headline declaring that these guys are "making a mockery" of what happened. No Boston, you are making yourselves easy to be mocked by your self-righteousness. The reporters screamed, "You made this city spend $1 million because of this!" No, Boston... you CHOSE to spend $1 million on this because you panicked. On "24", does CTU panic whenever some "threat" gets called in? No, they're the standard of professionalism, picking through the intelligence and then determining what action needs to be taken. Boston, your citizens are embarrassed today; your city is the laughingstock of the country right now. I think it would be best if you just meekly retract your dumb legal threats and let this all blow over.
If New York City, the city where 3000 innocent people lost their lives to terrorism on 9-11, can look at something like this with barely a blink, you should be able to as well.

Meanwhile in Paris, hysteria of a different kind was happening in the form of the international report on climate change. Now I am no climatologist and I don't profess to know a lot about the subject, but I do know when something doesn't make sense, and global warming and all the things people blame it for does not make sense to me. Reading through news stories on the report, which may as well have been titled, "We're Doomed," I see that the average temperature of the world has risen a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. Based on this data, these scientists have declared that the world's average temperature in the next 100 years will go up by... UP TO 10 DEGREES? Excuse me? Forget to carry a one somewhere? I mean you guys seem to think that this is all caused by greenhouse gases, which are being curbed by many countries (and U.S. states), so theoretically, would that not mean that continuing to do this will slow down global warming, rather than make it INCREASE TENFOLD?!?

Meanwhile, they claim that this phenomena will lead to more lake-effect snow for us hardy souls in Central New York, but there will be less snow cover. Huh? Usually, when more snow falls, that means there's more snow on the ground, not less. And then there's the one that makes the least sense to me... there will be more droughts because of the higher temperatures, but because hot air can hold more moisture, there will be more rainfall and stronger storms. Apparently, these people need to be introduced to something called a "contradiction."

Now reading the nuts and bolts of this report and all it entails is bad enough, but when it is slapped on the front page of the Sub-Standard, errrr, Post-Standard with the headline, "Climate Report: It's Your Fault", well that's enough to make the average local tree-hugger have a complete emotional breakdown. "I knew I should have stopped more of my friends from buying SUVs, I knew I should have helped the Earth Liberation Front torch more housing developments... now WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" Oh, and there's the helpful item from this report that the Sub-Standard chose to print in one of the lead paragraphs so it made the front page... global warming will continue for centuries even if greenhouse gas emissions are stabilized because the process has already begun and cannot be stopped.

Well, I guess that makes all this whining over passing the Kyoto Protocol and whether or not the president is doing enough to curb emissions rather moot, doesn't it? I mean if there's nothing we can do because the snowball's already rolling down the hill and we can't stop it, well geez, that's one less thing I have to worry about. Forgive my selfishness, but we're all going to die someday, regardless of whether the Earth's temperature goes up half a degree or 10 degrees by the time we do. We learned the hard way that our industrial process had some built-in mistakes that caused damage to the environment, and we're already taking steps to remedy those mistakes. No radical environmentalist agenda is going to stop global warming, so we may as well be calm and rational about this.

But of course, when a story like this breaks, calm and rational goes out the window, so I'm sure instead you're going to see a lot of letters and protests blaming not all of humanity for this, but one human... President Bush. Despite the fact that the warmest year on record occured in 1998, when Clinton was president (must have been all the hot air from people talking about Monica), despite the fact that greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have been on the decline for some time, and despite the fact that China and India continue to belch greenhouse gases all they want, because Kyoto doesn't apply to them. So I'm gonna make a prediction here... look for this to be a new flashpoint for liberals to try to (here we go again) impeach Bush. In fact, that may have already started before the report came out: earlier in the week, many government scientists testified that the White House allegedly tried to make them keep their global warming predictions on the downlow, so to speak. Well there ya go, folks... a Watergate-style cover-up, high crimes and misdemeanors at their finest! (note: intense sarcasm applied by the author of this blog)

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go prepare for my Super Bowl party (and blog entry) tomorrow... although I really feel like I should just go hide in a closet somewhere...