1. Never marry a middle-aged woman who gets her marital advice from an ancient priest.

2. Never marry a woman who will write about you in her NYTimes column.

3. Never marry a woman who is sarcastic about everything except marriage.

4. Never marry a woman who is going to judge you on your career, religion, family, and friends and all the other things you can't do much about.

That said, if Dowd wants to get drunk, get laid, and wake up in Vegas with a paperclip wedding ring, then what the hell: Tell her I'm game.

Maybe that's the difference between men and women.

He could have been the Dr. Phil of his day. Or maybe Dr. Phil is the Dr. Joe of our day. One of the two.

I think Dowd is kind of hot in that Nighthawks pose. Could be worse--imagine Paul Krugman in f-me pumps.

I don't know, but "Straight Guys and Musicals" sounds like it should be a musical.

I like the way Leonard sets up these three types of nations. I'm going to substitute "tier" for "world."

I think the EU could consider partnering nations into groups composed of a first tier country, a second tier EU country, and, ideally, a third tier non-EU country or perhaps region of such a country.

For example:

Germany

Poland

India (or Uttar Pradesh)

Refigure a single emission limit within this block, and annually disperse equal credits to all citizens within the block that together equal the emission limit. Create a trading market so citizens of the block can sell the credits.

The EU should also place the blocks in competition with each other with incentives for the blocks that decrease their emission limits by the largest margins.

Basically, each block would now have a cross section of the world's problems, but also a cross section of the varied resources of each region. India would get proportionately larger payout for its share of emission credits (higher population) and India and Poland would likely benefit as Germany would have greater incentives to provide more efficient technologies or pollution control devices where they will have the greatest effect. The EU might miss its original targets, but emissions within this larger system might be reduced to a much greater net overall.

We are no different than those mice infestations you see reported on TV occasionally. Where hordes of mice have completely overrun and area and consumed everything in sight only to disappear.

There's the human-animal analogy again. Actually, we ARE different than mice. Unlike mice, we consume more than it takes to survive and reproduce. We're worse than mice then. But the other aspect of the analogy, here rendered as "area," others use "cage," "petri dish" etc, is also mistaken because humans routinely expand their niche. I'm not suggesting there are not natural limits, but that the analogy drastically distorts the problem, and focuses attention on raw population numbers rather than total consumption. It's basically a way to point the finger away from the bad resource policies of the wealthy and toward the poor who are most numerous. The analogy suggests that each human's consumption is similar in size, and that is simply not the case.

The hyperconsumerism that has become the accepted "norm" in the US is a recent occurrence in human history. It is not necessary for survival of humans, or of human culture, or of the economy.

We have been working on lowering population for decades now, and yet consumption has only increased dramatically, often in the very same countries successfully lowering population growth or even actual population. Population efforts simply cannot stand in the way of measuring and combatting overconsumption directly.