VBVW for March 23, 2007:
Environmental Retardation

• The Very Best

Major competition to YouTube was announced by NBC, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo, a group that would have once been the media equivalent of the Death Star. As players in Google’s/YouTube’s shadow, they’ve got to try harder to make us surfers happy. Maybe now we’ll get the funny Saturday Night Live skits back online.

The European Union has relaxed its rules on international flights, opening the door to more competition and probably lower fares. Environmentalists are moaning that this may increase air travel and cause more “climate change.” Well, we’ll be happy to discuss it with them while we’re enjoying the “climate change” during our next cheap flight to the Riviera.

US District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. struck down 1998’s Child Online Protection Act. In one of the rare victories for the First Amendment in recent years, Reed stated that it was up to parents and caregivers to keep kids off of porn websites, and not the duty of the website’s creator. Isn’t it time that parents in this country started accepting responsibility for the behavior–online or off–of their little crumb crunchers?

• The Very Worst

Being a Russian sucked during the Cold War, and there are signs that things haven’t changed all that much in the past few decades. Sixty three elderly residents of a Russian nursing home died when a security guard ignored fire alarms, while more than 100 miners died in Russian mine collapse. Things haven’t been this grim for the Societ working class since the price of vodka went up.

Paul McCartney signs with Starbucks to record his new album. Either Paul needs the money, or we need another album to remind us that Sir Paul hasn’t written a single solitary decent song in 32 years.

Environmental groups want a baby polar bear in the Berlin Zoo killed because its mother abandoned it, and the cub will “not be a real polar bear” if it is fed and raised by humans. Polar bears are already losing their artic glacier homes to global warming, and now the tree-huggers want to kill one that has a nice non-melting permanent residence.