Lavender contains plant estrogens that seem to be as hormonally disruptive as the chemical estrogens in phthalates. Scientists have recently discovered that boys bathed in lavender bath products are growing breasts. That's hormonal disruption, right there.

It's certainly not good that the beauty industry is putting hormonal disruptors in beauty products.

But it's also not good that people are ignoring the existence of natural hormonal disruptors in common plants used in "natural" cosmetic products.

Plants want to live, but they are preyed upon by animals. That lavender bush didn't go to the trouble of producing all those lovely flowers just so you could rip them off the plant and use them in your bath.

One way plants fight back is to produce chemicals that disrupt the hormones of their animal predators.

So be careful. Don't go into this situation wearing political blinders, assuming that big corporations and synthetic chemicals are the only source of this problem.

Humans invented politics. Nature and chemistry don't know politics. Politics exists SOLELY in the human brain. The natural world really doesn't care.

People forget that a lot of the victims of Stalinist repression in period 1937-38 confessed to bizarre conspiracies to take down the Soviet state. Many of the people who signed these confessions were loyal Communist Party officials who took part in the October Revolution.

How did the Soviet secret police get loyal Communists to sign confessions to conspiring against Communism?

Sleep deprivation and torture. Stalin was able to manufacture vast artificial conspiracies against the state by making his prisoners psychotic with sleep deprivation and then torturing them into false confessions.

This is why I do not believe that torture, or whatever this administration wants to call it, can give us reliable information that we can use to protect our country against terrorists.

You don't know that someone is telling the truth just because they've been tortured.

There were thousands upon thousands of false confessions tortured out of people by Communists.

And now it even makes me sick that I need to invoke Stalin and Communism in a discussion of American policy.

Eeewww ick ick ick I need to go wash my hands.

She sounds like someone the temp agency sent over because the real press secretary was out with the flu.

This makes me wonder -- is it possible to satirize an administration like this or are we at some critical point where social satire and social realism collapse into one another and form a singularity of unsuspendable disbelief?

I smell a publicity stunt. By the way, notice we aren't talking about Darfur.

If it's not dry this year like it was last year, then the next problem to worry about will be mudslides.

Fires in the fall, mudslides in the winter -- why ARE people moving to Southern California???

I hope this scares a lot of people away.

There was 105 inches of snow -- more snow than the entire 1976-77 season.

And you're claiming it was warmer than normal that year? How could that possibly be true, when a normal April has like 20 inches of snow tops?

It was colder than hell during spring break. I skied so I know. I had to wear my winter parka in April. Plus my Hot Chillies and a wool sweater and a hoodie.

I used to work on the Ski Patrol in Mammoth and I don't ever remember it being that cold during Spring Break before.

Looking over the snowfall history at Mammoth Mountain, I found that in the period 1968-1987, there were zero years with over 600 inches of snow, and one year with less than 100 inches of snow.

Between 1988 and 2007, there were three years with over 600 inches of snow and zero years with less than 100 inches of snow.

I'm certainly not doubting global warming but honestly, when you make these claims about the snowpack and the temperature in April 2006, I'd like to see some numbers, seriously.

I've given you some hard numbers, now you give me some.

As long as it's not a slutty melting polar ice cap.

Robin Prosser's suicide. Maybe Bill should write about Robin. I know he cares very deeply about her situation.

But if he did write about Robin, then you'd have to go somewhere other than Salon to read about it, because I'm pretty sure it would never get published here.

I had one of those boyfriends in high school who was obsessed with cars. By the end of our relationship, I knew how a car made it down the road. I learned by listening to my boyfriend explain why his car had stopped making it down the road.

By the time we split up, my lesson plan in automotive breakdown had encompassed the entire car from the carburetor to the cylinders to the camshaft to the gearbox, the axles, and finally even the exhaust.

This experience really helped me when I studied physics and engineering in college.