Monsters, Inc.

Saturday night is movie night here at the Dilettante household and my kids were screening a really good movie from the seemingly endless trove of Disney/Pixar fare that we've managed to accumulate over the years, Monsters, Inc. The basic premise of the movie is that the monsters who live in Monstropolis go into the world and scare children to capture the energy from their screams.

It's sort of the same approach that Democrats in the Minnesota Senate like to use to push for legislation to get their global warming/regulatory agenda off the dime. Watch as Sen. Ellen Anderson talks about how children are afraid they are going to die from global warming, then listen as her Republican counterpart Julianne Ortman calmly and methodically calls her out.

As usual, Leo is on the case.

In our day, our teachers would scare us while telling scary stories of
goblins and witches on Halloween. These days, kids are frightened with equally
frightening (and equally fanciful) stories of polar bears swimming and the earth
conflagrating in a huge fireball, all because mom and dad drive an SUV and don't
throw the pop cans where they're supposed to. The difference, back then was that
the teachers didn't give the impression that the witches and the goblins were
real.

Indeed.