- The sky is falling, the sky is falling

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer-philosopher who has an amusing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today: The Ideology of Catastrophe. He reminds us, for example, that Al Gore in his jeremiad An Inconvenient Truth warned that "we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction" if people didn't wise up and check the air pressure in their tires. The film came out six years ago, and do you really think that catastrophe is now four years in the future? I don't think so. What happened? Did everyone pump up their tires to 32 pounds pressure in the interim? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford