Thoughts On A Sunday

I wasn't really awake despite the fact that I'd been up for about half an hour and was showered and saved. As is my habit, I listen to NPR on Sunday mornings while attending my morning ablutions.

After a short series of news stories during Weekend Edition came the usual announcements about organizations and companies sponsoring NPR. It wasn't until this particular round of sponsorship blurbs finished that I realized what it is the announcer had said.

“Soylent Corporation, providing edible protein in a variety of colors. Remember, Soylent Green is people.”

It's a good thing I didn't have my razor to my neck!

Then I remembered that today is April Fool's Day.

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During “Meet The New Press”, the question of the day was “Should Condi Rice run for president?”

In my opinion, she should. I see her as America's own Maggie Thatcher. She's extremely intelligent, well versed in foreign policy, and she knows how Washington works. She would also be a counterbalance to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Should she decide to run, then my ideal Republican ticket would be either Rice/Thompson or Thompson/Rice. Either way I could see them defeating the Democrat ticket, hands down.

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Speaking of Meet The New Press there are two big changes coming up that I believe will help the show gain a wider listening audience. First, starting next weekend the show will run from 11AM to 1PM on Saturdays. Second, sometime in the next 2 or 3 weeks, Meet The New Press will be live streaming on the Internet. They're goin' global!

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My favorite mythbuster, John Stossel, is at it again, this time about child kidnapping. To hear the media explain it, you'd think that children were being snatched off the street by the thousand, if not the millions. Such 'reporting' does nothing but create hysteria over something that really is very rare. But as Stossel explains it, that hasn't stopped the media from scaring the heck out of parents and kids.

In television public-service announcements the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children warns, "Every day 2,000 children are reported missing." Center president Ernie Allen told me, "Our goal is to reach into every home and to generate that key lead that leads to the recovery of a child. We need to send a message to the American public that this is serious."

[...]

Scaring kids might be justified if abductions were common. But the media makes the problem look far bigger than it is. The stereotypical kidnapping, where a child is abducted by a stranger and murdered, ransomed, or kept for a significant period of time, rarely happens. In fact, there are only 100 or so such cases every year.

Most 'kidnappings' are usually triggered by custodial disputes, meaning that the non-custodial parent of a child takes them from the custodial parent, either by deception, outright 'snatching off the street', or something in between, and flees out of town, out of the county, across state lines, or even out of the country. But it hear the media, you'd think that the opposite is true.

As Stossel explains it, “The Center for Missing Children is a piece of the Fear Industrial Complex. It raises money by scaring us.”

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With gas prices heading up again, some folks are already making plans for dealing with it during their upcoming summer vacations. I know I am. Some won't travel as far and others won't ravel as long as they might otherwise. In some places in the East gas is already approaching $3 per gallon. On the Weest Coast gas has already hit $4 per gallon and it's not even summer yet!

Last summer gas prices on Lake Winnipesaukee ran well above $3 per gallon, with most I saw being between $3.35 and $3.57 per gallon at the peak, about 20 to 30¢ per gallon higher than at a gas station. A lot of people with gas guzzling boats spent a lot less time out on the water and more time tied up at their slips last summer. I think it will be a repeat this summer. So does the manager of one of the local marinas that I ran across earlier today.

During last year I saw what I can only describe as a reversal of envy. In the past it wasn't uncommon for me to see some really nice fast/big boats out on the lake and wonder what it would be like to have one. Last summer a lot of the folks with those big boats looked upon my 20 foot runabout with envy, knowing that I could run around all week on the 30 gallons of gas my boat carried, while that same 30 gallons would last them all of half a day and was but a third of a tankful on their boats.

I expect the same treatment this year.

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There's more on a possible Fred Thompson run for the presidency. The one thing that Thompson has going for him over the other GOP candidates is name and face recognition, both among political groups and television/movie viewers.

Many political pundits think he'll announce sometime this summer should he decide to run.

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BeezleBub, Submarine Tim, his boss, Dawn, and I went to see The Last Mimzy at the local mega-multi-cineplex.

The critics hated it. We loved it.

The stuffed rabbit, Mimzy, was designed and made by Daphne Blau of the Sunapee region in New Hampshire. She usually makes teddy bears, but she was tapped to create the stuffed rabbit for the movie.

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The whole Iranian blunder of seizing the 15 British sailors and marines has become, quite frankly, farcical.

You know something's not quite right when the Iranians gave the coordinates of where the British were seized and they were in Iraqi waters. Once informed of this, they changed the coordinates to make it seem as if they had been in Iranian waters. That right there convinces me the Iranians are lying.

If the coordinates that both the British Navy and the Iranians gave as a location where the sailors and marines were seized were the same, then it seems that the Iranians knew they had taken the hostages – that's what President Bush called them and that's what I believe they are – in Iraqi waters.

They have committed an act of war, no different than the one they committed back in 1979 when they invaded US sovereign territory, i.e. the US Embassy in Teheran. Maybe it's time we started treating their actions for what they are – war.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice continues to melt, snow tires are coming off cars, and where Monday will arrive all too soon.