Entertaining excerpts from Charlie Rose's interview with Ted Turner, Tuesday, April 1, 2008 on PBS:

Ted Turner, on what will happen if global warming is not addressed immediately:
Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down.

O.K.

Ted Turner, on what he told the U.N. in a speech Tuesday:
Right now the U.S. is spending $500 billion a year on the military which is more than all 190 countries in the world put together. The two countries that the military-industrial complex and some of the politicians would like to demonize and make enemies are Russia and China. China just wants to sell us shoes. They're not building landing craft to attack the United States. And Russia wants to be our friends, too.

China just wants to sell shoes... lots of shoes. Curiously, Turner compared our relationship with Russia to our relationship with China.

Ted Turner:
I think that they're [the Iraqi insurgents] patriots and that they don't like us because we've invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we'd be doing the same thing: we'd be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded.

Charlie Rose:
Nobody likes an occupying force, or to be occupied.

True, just ask Kuwait.

Ted Turner:
I think a lot. I spend a lot of time thinking. And I hope that's not a sin.

And let me tell you another one, another story: We're not the only superpower that's being beaten by a third world country that doesn't have a single airplane. The Russians got beat, too.

Charlie Rose:
In Afghanistan.

Ted Turner:
That's exactly right.

Charlie Rose:
With whose help?

Ted Turner:
Well, we were helping Osma bin Laden, we were backing him that time.

Oops.