Greens Caught with Their Plants Down

According to an article published in today’s Toronto Sun, and republished by The Drudge Report, the godfather of global warming, James Lovelock, told msnbc.com in an interview that he had been unnecessarily “alarmist” in about his predictions of climate change. 

Lovelock, a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist, developed the Gaia theory, which states that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

He is a genuine “science” scientist, not a “political scientist.”  His invention of the electron capture detector in 1957, which first enabled scientists to measure chlorfluorocarbons and other pollutants in the atmosphere, led to the birth of the modern environmental movement. 

Lovelock’s inventions have been used by NASA and many other scientific organizations.  He recently retired at the age of 92.

The Sun reports, “Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ‘the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.’

“Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

“Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

“He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

“Among his observations to the Guardian:

(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.

“As Lovelock observes, “Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it … Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.”

(2) Lovelock blasted Greens for treating global warming like a religion.

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed. “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”

(3) Lovelock mocks the idea that modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

(4) Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

This news comes as Democrats in the N.J. Assembly stall Bill A-2168, the N.J. Residential Foreclosure Act, which would essentially act as a government land-grab.  Despite being posted on the board list, there was no vote on the bill yesterday in the Assembly, reportedly because there were not 41 votes in the Democratic Caucus for this bill.  The Left will be keeping the pressure on weak legislators to fold and support this Communistic and extremely dangerous bill.

The RFA would greatly enable Smart Growth’s agenda of environmentalism and what they call “economic justice” – the redistribution of wealth.  Putting undesirable tenants (and that’s really all they would be) into struggling middle class neighborhoods would depress properties even further than they already are.

Unable to sell their homes, more property owners would go into debt.  The Obamacare Act, if upheld, will certainly finish the job, as anyone who has lost their home to medical bills can attest.  Taken together, these factors will facilitate the movement of millions of people (across the country) into Smart Growth communities, where no one will own any property at all.

The Progressives know we’re onto them.  They’ve had to rename their programs, which have eaten into small town communities like termites, whittling away the foundations of American society until they collapse.

Let us pray that more scientists like Dr. Lovelock have an attack of conscience and expose the Greens’ communist agenda.  Green, as Glenn Beck observed, is the new Red.

School Buses - The Rolling Zoos

My mother was a bus driver for 25 years.  School buses, charter buses, special ed vans.  She witnessed all sorts of human behavior.  I’m writing a novel about her adventures as a reporter, a bus driver and a mother.

The first time Mom got behind the wheel of her bus – Bus No. 25 – she looked in the rearview mirror and her jaw dropped. 

“What have I gotten myself into?” she thought.

Behind her was 35 feet of empty bus seats.  She wondered how she was ever going to manage this ginormous vehicle.  She’d learned to drive the steamroller and the paver, though, so figured she’d drive this monstrous bus, too.  She had to; we needed the money and this was the only job that coincided with our school hours.

She was so proud when she passed the driver’s test (the written test was a snap).  When her first week of school runs was over, she came home with sagging soldiers.  Mom was strong, but not stout and muscular.  This was 1970 - the school buses didn’t have power steering.  That’s not what was bothering Mom, though.  She’d moved countless boulders in our backyard to create her wildflower garden.  She could handle a bus loaded with kids.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she sighed.

“Is the bus too heavy for you to drive, Mom?” I asked.

“Oh, no.  It’s these kids.  They’re horrible.  They’re monsters.  They fight.  They throw things.  They curse.  They insult me.  They insult each other.  The bigger ones pick on the littler ones.  I don’t know how teachers do it.  I’m going to hand in my resignation.  I just can’t put up with this.   My nerves won’t take it.”

“But, Mom,” I noted.  “It’s not your fault.  Teachers have only have 25 kids; you have 54, on the elementary school runs.  The teachers are facing the kids most of the day; you have your back to them.  And you’re driving the bus.”

“That’s right.  Fifty kids and one adult with her back to them who’s trying to pay attention to the road.   Only a lunatic would take a job like this.”

“I tried to tell you that, Mom, that’s why I don’t like riding the bus; it’s a rolling zoo – or a rolling lunatic asylum.  There’s no one to keep order.  Look, these other women have done it and they don’t have your education.”

“If I’m so smart, then why am I driving a school bus?”

“Don’t give up on it, yet, Mom.  You’ll get a handle on them.  This one bus driver?  The kids were giving her a hard time, and she just stopped the bus right in the middle of the road, went back and gave them a verbal what-for.  She told them if it happened again, she’d take them back to the school.”

“Did it happen again?”

“Yeah, they started fighting again in the back of the bus.  She stopped, but they opened up the emergency exit and jumped out.”

“What did the driver do then?”

“Nothing.  She continued on her run.  So that’s what you’ll do if the kids give you any trouble – you’ll take them back to the school.”

And she did, too, on many occasions.  Returning to the school was a very effective damper on hyperactive kids who wanted to go home.  I went with her on some of those runs later on and there were some very long, very quiet faces as we pulled up to the school door.  The principal would give them a lecture and send the bus on its way.  You didn’t hear a word the second time.

Bus drivers, like teachers, get into a routine after a few years of learning what stage of development certain age groups are at.  They learn what works and what doesn’t.  Scolding works with the little ones.  High school kids are pretty much housebroken by the time they get to the school bus.  It’s the middle school/junior high school kids that bus drivers, teachers, and parents all agree are aliens from another planet.

Unfortunately, it’s a story as old as school buses themselves.  Take 50 7^th and 8^th graders, enclose them in a moving school bus with only one adult who has their back to them and their mind the road, and you have a recipe for insanity.

Young adolescents are from hell – or some alien planet.  You say good night to your sweet, well-mannered 12 year old on the eve of their 13^th birthday, and when you wake up, you find yourself facing a sullen, rude, snarling alien from another planet.

Glenn Beck was rightly upset over the horrid treatment of a school bus monitor on a bus filled with 13 and 14 year-olds.  They mocked her and insulted her in true, adolescent, alien fashion.  Glenn blamed our degenerated culture, and that’s true to some extent.  The sorry fact is, though, that it’s the age.  Your typical 13-year old is simply a 2 or 3-year old in a bigger body, just as self-centered, thoughtless, cruel, and irresponsible.

Happily, bus drivers have found an answer to their behavior:  returning them to the school.  That usually does the trick.  Adolescent aliens are clever though, and go home and weep to their feckless parents.  Ask any parent what it’s like to deal with a 13 year old.  What the schools used to do is handed graded punishments.  The first was a warning.  The second was in-school detention.  The third was revocation of bus privileges.  In other words, the monsters either had to walk to school on their tentacles or their parents had to drive them.

Driving them was an inconvenience to the parents, and so they turned to litigation.  State law required that the students be provided transportation beyond a certain distance of the school and to deny that privilege constituted a safety hazard.

So then the schools and bus companies tried school bus monitors like Karen Klein.  Ms. Klein would be a fine monitor on a grade school bus, and probably even a high school bus.  But it takes a certain kind of monitor – or for that matter, a teacher – to handle 13 year-olds and their barbaric social kind.  I had a friend who was training to be a teacher.  For some reason, the authorities didn’t like her and assigned her to a 7^th grade classroom.  She lasted a week.  She said she knew it wasn’t her; that’s what they did to prospective teachers they wanted to discourage.

The typical middle school teacher has to have a tough hide, but a good appearance.  They also have to be able to “negotiate” with the kids.  If they want to survive the 7^th grade classroom they have to have the ability to turn a blind eye to their students’ calumny and a deaf ear to the torment they wreak on hapless classmates.  They have to be buddies with the boss of the classroom, which isn’t them.

My younger brother has taken Mom’s place on the bus runs.  He complains about getting the worst runs – that is, the middle schoolers.  He’s got those runs because he’s big (though not swarthy) – 6 foot 4 inches.  At one time, he was a bouncer.  He can handle them where the other drivers can’t, although they test him, too.  But even he gets tired of them.  He has nothing to fear from them; it’s just that their behavior disgusts him.

Historically, it was probably a mistake to begin busing children to school.  Busing them turned them into cosseted monsters, spoiled, selfish, and ruthlessly cruel.  You may ask where are the parents?  Well, they’re cowering.  Where are the school officials?  They’re cowering, too, on advice of counsel.  Where’s the bus driver?  Trying to drive the bus and get these creatures off her bus as soon as possible.  Where’s the bus monitor?  Isn’t it their job to control this rolling zoo?  They will, if they can.  You can’t expect a grandmother to take on 50 foul-mouthed adolescents.

It takes a big man, and I do mean man.  Or the Men in Black.

A Fast President and a Furious Public

As a House committee was about to vote on condemning Attorney General Eric Holder for withholding information on the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, in which at least one individual – a border patrol agent – was killed, Obama invoked executive privilege, barring Congress from reading any documents pertaining to the case.

The Democrats and their propaganda media wriggled and dodged, and tried to throw it back on the Bush administration.  However, Committee Chairman Issa noted that the Bush administration’s role was in 2004 and this was 2011.  They were talking about now.

The Media is accusing the Republican-held Congress of partisanship, failing to note that the Democrats also voted along partisan lines.  Echoes of the Watergate Era, when Pres. Richard Nixon was forced to resign after invoking executive privilege.  Although it was a spurious excuse for violating the rule of law, we’ve quickly forgotten that all Nixon was trying to do was discover whether the Democratic National Committee was accepting foreign donations, particularly from Communist countries.

No one died – except perhaps respect for the law – during the Watergate scandal.  Nixon’s actions were incredibly foolish, to say the least.  He paid for it with his office.  Giving guns to Mexican drug cartels (ostensibly in the hopes of the straw man being led to the “Big Guns”) was dangerous and counterproductive, and cost at least one person his life, and considering the numbers of guns (rumored to be in the hundreds and thousands), probably more.

The Democrats complain that the Bush Administration began the operation, on a more limited scale.  We can depend upon the Obama administration to turn this event to account and push for the legalization of drugs.  Think of all the lives saved, he’ll say.

The Media is quick to note that this is the first time Obama has invoked executive privilege.  He hasn’t needed to up until now because he’s done everything by fiat.  He’s invoked executive privilege in preventing the investigation of the Fast and Furious scandal.  His counterpart in Congress at the time, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, released the Obamacare legislation only a few days before the vote, making it impossible for anyone to read what the legislation involved before it was signed into law.  Today, we find out the Supreme Court’s decision on that piece of legislation. 

This scandal is similar to Watergate, only we have more information now than we did then.  We have better means of communication, and we no longer hear only one side of the story.  Nixon said, famously, that the cover-up is worse than the crime.  Nixon risked his presidency on a gamble; Obama is risking thousands of lives and our freedom on an arrogant presumption:  that he is an emperor, not a president.

Life in the Fish Bowl

For the last few days, Glenn Beck has been mourning his fish bowl and Orson Welles’ fish.  Not real fish, but the fish the late, great actor had painted on the bowl, and then signed.  Seems, a cleaning lady came into his office and found the dirty bowl on his desk.  Clearly, the materials Welles used were not water soluble and so the bowl went uncleaned all the time.

Not knowing any better, and wanting to do a good deed for the great man, the cleaning lady cleaned the bowl – and it looks like about three-quarters of the drawings along with the famous signature – away.  It was probably only the act of a moment.  Since some of the drawings still remain, she must have fled in horror of such an error, neglecting finish the rest of the job of cleaning the office.  According to Beck’s producer, Stu Burgiere, she left without vacuuming the carpet.

Uncharacteristically, Beck did not lose his temper and did not fire the cleaner.  Stu wanted to know why not – he’d fired plenty of other people for lesser cause.  Beck looked at his now-defaced – and worthless – fish bowl, and grumbled that probably he ought to draw some lesson from it, something about the dangers of erasing history.

Indeed, he should have.  However, he didn’t go any further.  He was still in mourning for this prized possession.  He named his own company after Welles’ Mercury Theater of the Air.  He purchased the bowl at great price as a symbol of the connection between Welles’ company and his own.

Drowning himself in self-pity in his empty fish bowl, he missed many lessons.  Here are just a few:

1.       You can’t build on someone else’s success, although many do – politicians, actors, business owners.  Fate wiped the slate – or in this case, the fish bowl – clean, leaving a trace of Welles’ work, but only a trace and not his signature.

2.      Just because you’ve become “great” doesn’t make everything you do great.  Beck valued the fish bowl not because of its artwork, which was only mediocre, but because of the signature.  Had it not borne the handwriting of Orson Welles, it would have wound up in a yard sale.  Beck has advertised a new step-program, with Part 4 involving creativity.  He has invited the creative to join him.  But only the creative with a known signature.  Many talented, Conservative writers languish because they can’t get a break, while Beck hires writers from the notoriously Liberal Saturday Night Live to write for his only erratically funny BSofA.

3.      He didn’t lose his temper with this lowly cleaning lady and fire her but decided to be charitable and forgiving.  That is easy to do with the lowliest of people.  Charity and forgiveness are as worthless as an Orson Welles fish bowl without the signature unless it is dispensed with equal justice.  If he will forgive the cleaning lady, then he must forgive the hapless intern who gives him the wrong pen or the assistant who doesn’t stop the video in time.  It is a sign of the times.  Yet Beck touts winners and scorns the average.  It is a sign of the times.  My astrology teacher told me that as we advanced into the Age of Capricorn, there would only be two kinds of people left:  the wealthy, the successful, the powerful, and their lowly minions.  George Bernard Shaw said that those who could not prove themselves useful to society should dispatch themselves forthwith.  Beck censured the playwright for such sentiments, but then follows them to the letter.  If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser.  The world only has room for winners and those who serve them in some way.  The rest deserve to be winnowed out.  Many of us already have been winnowed out and unless we get 700s on the scholastic tests there will be no place for us to go.  A substitute teacher in grade school once cautioned us that there was no forgiveness for mistakes in the real world; we must be perfect if we are to survive.  Otherwise, we will be at the mercy of the capricious.

4.      A fish bowl is meant for fish.  This fish bowl served no purpose except vanity and pride.  Many artifacts have come down through history that once served a purpose and now sit in museums for their historic and artistic value.  Man’s creations are fleeting, though.  They are nothing to the creations of God.  Orson Welles’ painted some crude fish on the bowl, but only God can create the fish that would normally occupy that bowl.  Orson Welles is not greater than God, and clearly God meant to teach Beck that lesson, among others.

5.      In our ever-increasing technological society, we are more and more vulnerable to scrutiny, both God’s and the government’s.  There is no place to hide in a glass fish bowl and no place where you’ll be safe, unless some great hand places some aquarium accoutrements into the bowl.  The painted fish were safe as long as no one cleaned the bowl.  We cannot depend upon filth for our safety, though.  Culturally, we live in a very dirty fish bowl, amusing ourselves with artificial, second-rate prose and poetry.  We cannot hide forever in a glass bowl.  We are being watched and studied.

6.      Finally, some of the painted fish still remain.  Indeed, it is a caution about being careful with history and not erasing what has been written in the past.  The Progressives are eager to erase all our past history as a nation.  They intend to wipe it as clean as Glenn’s fish bowl.  There will only be two kinds of fish in that bowl.  The Nephew and his girlfriend just returned from their visit to China.  They told us about a fish park they visited.  In one pond was a certain kind of carp.  The Nephew noted that there were no fish smaller than what could fit into the carp’s mouth.  They had eaten all the smaller fish.  Our bureaucratic government – and our mounting debt – are the carp, and we’re the little fish, about to be sent into extinction.

We can only learn the lessons God is trying to teach us if we stop looking within ourselves and look from the outside in.

The lessons are as clear as a glass fish bowl.

The Corzine Democrats

N.J. Gov. Christie, addressing a town hall meeting in Cedar Grove this morning, noted the ominous re-emergence of a certain kind of Democrat.  There are some Democrats you can get along with, he told the skeptical audience, and compromise with.  Sometimes you have to compromise to get things done, he said.  But he vowed that while he might compromise on a political deal, he’d never compromise on his principles.

This particular kind of Democrat to whom he was referring is what he calls “The Corzine Democrat.”  When an audience member shouted out, “Why isn’t he in jail?!” Christie replied that if he was still the attorney general, he probably would be.  “But that’s not my job anymore, pal.  I’ve moved on.  I have a new job now.”  Christie normally won’t acknowledge shout-outs at town hall meetings, but this one intrigued him.

He said New Jerseyans have a great sense of humor.  They elected him, a Republican governor, but gave him a Democrat legislature.  The legislature is in the last 12 days of session and they’re like kids who were given a book report assignment back in January and are only now getting to it.  They will promise to give New Jersey taxpayers a tax cut comes next January, but not now.  What they want now is the permission to spend more money.

Christie’s predecessor approved tax increases 115 times during his administration.  He said it worked out to another new tax increase every 25 days.  For eight years, the Garden State has been waiting for its property tax relief, and with a Corzine-Democrat legislature, he says we should hold our breath waiting for it.  The same Democrat legislature he says he’s been able to compromise with on such items as pension reform.

He correctly blamed the various taxes residents and companies must pay for flight of more affluent residents, who paid 41 percent of taxes in the state before moving to greener pastures.  Those same taxes make it difficult for businesses to remain competitive in this state.  When a businesswoman whose medical lab business is struggling, he referred her to business grants that can help her company technologically.  It sounded like yet another government hand-out, but at least the company would be producing something.

I sat there with an American flag in my lap.  Had this woman not questioned him about the sorry state of business in New Jersey, I would have asked him about my flag.  It has a “Made in China” label on it.  We’re in a sorry state, indeed, when we can’t even produce our own flags.  I believe in competition, but it seemed to me this was taking things a little too far.

Christie, however, sounded all the right notes on making New Jersey a competitive business environment.  Of course, it would happen with a Corzine-Democrat legislature, which is why we must never dismiss our local elections, and why we must get out the Conservative vote.

He also noted that one of our problems is that so many college students – 38,000 students this year (including The Nephew, who is home again with his sweet, Made in China girlfriend – some imports aren’t bad).  That should say something about our education system when the only girl smart enough for him came from China (but is very happy to be in America; she even took upon herself an Anglicized name).  She and many other foreign students come to American schools for science and engineering educations so we must be doing something right; we’re just not doing enough of it on the elementary and secondary levels so that American students pursue degrees in those fields.  They certainly don’t do it much in New Jersey and that’s something that must change, Christie said.  That’s why Christie has pursued the Rutgers merger.

Christie admits even he didn’t go to school in New Jersey; he attended the University of Delaware.  When students refuse go to school here, when companies won’t do business here, and people can’t afford have a home here, we’ve got to ask ourselves:  what are we doing wrong?

We know the answer and we know who to point the finger at:  ourselves.  We’ve got to take more responsibility for the condition of the state and do something about it, not just shrink back in our shells with a shrug and say there’s nothing we can do while freeloaders put the same old corrupt politicians back into office.

New Jersey wasn’t always this way.  It wasn’t this way when my parents moved us here.  City people, we were far too quiet and acquiescent in allowing the same old politics to run their course and run the state into the ground.  If things are a mess, then we need to roll up our sleeves and do something about it, before the situation becomes so critical that there really isn’t anything we can do about it.

A Father's Role

Socialists have spent generations demeaning the role of the father in our society.  In the Sixties, they were quite blatant about it, scorning a society where men ruled – a “paternalistic”, authoritarian society that did not give women their “equal” opportunity.

My mother said that a woman can’t teach her son to be a man.  She was the exception to the rule, teaching my older brother to stand up to the neighborhood bully when the boy assaulted my brother on his paper route.  My father was all man, but he’d turned pacifist since World War II.  He’d seen too many men die.  He believed we needed to win in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism, but even though he was a boxing fan and a John Wayne fan, he didn’t want to teach his elder son to fight.  He had an almost reverent (for an agnostic) respect for peace.

So the duty fell to Mom, instead.

Our parents were disturbed by the portrayal of fathers on television in the Sixties.  They were made out to be buffoons or fools.  There exceptions here and there, and there were the reruns of the Fifties, which the Progressives despised:  Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and Bonanza, which debuted in September, 1959, right on the brink of the Sixties.

The show ran through the entire 1960s up to 1973, with Lorne Greene cast as the widowed 19^th Century rancher of three sons (all by different mothers).  Cartwright was the consummate father figure, played admirably by Greene.  The show’s 14 year-run (quite a long run in television) is a testament to Green’s kindly, paternal influence.

Another cast member, Michael Landon (“Little Joe”) would go on to play a father figure himself, “Pa Ingalls” in the popular series, Little House on the Prairie.  In fact, Landon went straight from Bonanza to Little House on the Prairie, in 1974.  Did Landon inherit Greene’s “paternal” acting skills.

Greene went on, in 1978, to play another father figure in the short-lived Sci-Fi series, Battlestar Galactica.  Lasting only 24 episodes (about a year), the show was criticized for its poor production values and actually sued for allegedly trying to infringe on the popularity of the first Star Wars movie, released the year before.

Although Battlestar Galactica was, and would be considered, “camp”, there was something so comforting about it.  Amidst the destruction of a far-off solar system, you felt a connection.  Battlestar was all about family.  Not just Adama (Lorne Greene), and his children, who followed him into service, but all those who joined their space convoy in search of a legendary planet called “Earth”.

The message was that though these survivors represented 12 colonies with very different cultures (all based on the zodiac), and hinting at an ancient Egyptian background, they were all united in two things:  defense against a common enemy and a long trek, that might well take generations.

The original Battlestar Galactica was faulted for not taking itself too seriously.  The show didn’t perhaps take special effects seriously, but it certainly took family seriously.  Battlestar had an appealing optimism to it, most often represented in the eldest son’s sidekick, Starbuck, orphaned at an early age, and more or less adopted by Adama’s family.

The eldest son Apollo, played by Richard Hatch (no, not the Richard Hatch from Survivor; the Richard Hatch from the old soap opera, All My Children), was the lead, but at some point Dirk Benedict overshadowed him as Starbuck.  Not that Hatch wasn’t very pleasant to look at and admirable in his veneration for his father.  But it was Starbuck who never believe in giving up or giving in to despair.

In the final episode, he’s fighting with his girlfriend, Cassiopeia (played by Laurette Spang, one of the actresses from the original Dark Shadows), about going on a dangerous mission to destroy a Cylon battlestar (the machines that want to wipe out the human race).  Spang was really crying – presumably she was upset about the show ending – and Benedict tells her, “You can’t always go around assuming the worst is going to happen.  That’s no way to live.”

Apollo, for his part, proves to be a terrific father to his stepson, Boxey, although you see very little of the boy in the later episodes.  In fact, he’s great with all the kids throughout the series.  One assumes that the widowed Apollo will take up a young lady pilot, also the daughter of a battlestar commander, on her invitation to move into the future and produce sons like him.

We never get a chance to find out.  Twice, the producers tried to resurrect Battlestar Galactica.  Two years after the first show was curtained, another was produced, still starring Lorne Greene.  But this version didn’t have Hatch and Benedict (who was, by this time, committed to The A Team).  Apparently, it also didn’t have the same script writers.  This BG was so ridiculous as to be unwatchable, and didn’t last very long.

Then Battlestar Galactica was resurrected yet again in 2004.  This show had a five-year run, although it ought to have been cancelled after the first episode.  The very scene, although it begins with an intriguing narration, soon degenerates into pornography, from which it never recovers.  Starbuck is replaced by a cigar-chomping Stardoe, probably a nod to lesbian viewers.  There’s nothing optimistic or redeeming about this Starbuck, and certainly nothing entertaining.

That is the sad state of our culture in the 21^st Century.  That this show should have endured for five years, on laser-blasts and culture shock, while the original only survived one year is a sad commentary on the state of culture.  We’ve forgotten how to be light-hearted, modest, and respectful.  Heroes are dark and angry, women are as crude and foul-mouthed as the men, and fathers are a sad caricature of their forbearers.  At least on television and the movies.

Where are today’s Glenn Fords, Lorne Greenes, Robert Youngs, and Michael Landons?  The Battlestar Galactica was on a quest to find its civilizations forefathers, or their descendants.  If a real Galactica is on her way here to Earth, she’s in for a major shock and disappointment if she scans our broadcasts.