Quote of the Week...from Al Gore

The day I made that statement about inventing the Internet, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the Camcorder.                                       ---Al Gore

Al Gore, our vice-president during the Clinton presidency from 1993-2001, has for several years been one of the acknowledged leaders in promoting education and action to combat human-induced carbon emissions into the atmosphere that may cause potentially catastrophic global warning in the decades to come.  In 2006 he came out with the film An Inconvenient Truth with its accompanying book...I just finished reading his 2017 An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which accompanied another film of the same title.  This book merits more than just one brief review, and I plan to discuss it in future articles.  For now, back to Al Gore...

His above quote is a humorous response to the ridicule he received from having said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiate in creating the Internet".  Note that he never really claimed to have invented the Internet, yet did he go into an angry fit and start screaming "fake news" and personally attacking his detractors?  No, he made a pretty funny self-deprecating joke instead.  It's sad to presently have as my national leader someone for whom such a capacity for humor...as well as humility...is completely alien and unattainable.  And he seems to attract, as likeminded souls, people with a similar deficit in their own personality makeup, not that all Trump supporters are like that...but I think a few definitely are.  Still, Al Gore has shown his own degree of pomposity at times, and it has been at his worst moments in this regard when he has made statements whose silliness resembles comments that the baseball great Yogi Berra used to say, statements like If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure or A zebra does not change its spots or A low voter turnout is an indicator of fewer people going to the polls.  Still, I feel that Gore,  for whom I did not vote in 2000 (and regret that decision), would have beaten George W. Bush in 2004 had he thrown his hat into the ring during that election...I would have voted for him then.  But I think by then Al had already taken on this climate change issue as a personal commitment...I do have a few reservations about how he is promoting it all, though, and will mention these in a future article...