Boy, are we full of ourselves.

The idea that conservation will "save the planet," along with the associated idea that humans are responsible for global warming, other than the most recent little up-tick, is about as homocentric as the idea that humans were present at the beginning of time and that the Earth is the center of the universe.

Last I heard, the planet has been around for some 4.5 billion years. Our ancestors were blowing paint on their hands in the caves at Lascaux some 18,000 years ago, so humans as we would recognize them have been around for some four ten-thousandths of one percent of the planet's history. (My math is always subject to correction.)

What we are really trying to save is not the planet, but our western, scientific, industrial way of life that dates back maybe 200 years, Isaac Newton being as good a corner post as any. What we fail to recognize is that the resulting explosion of overpopulation on the societal level and obesity on the personal level (they must be related) makes it increasingly difficult to do so. Clever technical solutions like Borlaug's Green Revolution and now desalination do not solve problems, they merely defer the final accounting, and make sure there will be more of us around when the day comes.

China's poverty reduction will most certainly not kill the planet, but it may go a long way to killing off industrial civilization and the majority of humans who depend on industrialization for a living.

Alberto Gonzales is just a symptom, one among a rising flood. The disease is the lingering decay of intelligence and decency that started to fester along the Ptomac back when Saint Ronnie first took office.

I live in the Arkansas Ozarks, so some of the geographic references may not mean much, but I will at least start out interested in what you have to say.

Whether I stay interested is up to you.

The real voice of the people is Bob Somerby. He's had these stilted marionettes figured out for years.

Andrew, this is apropos of nothing, but you seem to review the comments.

Have you seen the remarkable software that Hans Rosling (and others, surely, at the Gapminder Foundation) has developed to make statistical analysis appear to be intuitively obvious? The link is here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92.

The topic is debunking myths, what we think we know, about health issues in third world countries, so the content is relevant to HTWW. (I wonder how many of us readers could have outperformed his theoretical chimpanzees on the world health quiz.) But the real star of the show is the way he takes oceans of dry statistics, the real fuel of the Dismal Science, and turns them into visual ideas that are instantly understandable.

The TED website says that Google bought the software back in March. It will be interesting to see what comes next.

Andrew,

So you did, post Gapminder and Rosling, and although it was back in the days before I was (at least) a daily reader, I stand to be corrected. Did a damned fine job of describing the 2-D Lava Lamp images that make us think we have seen numbers move over time, too.

What I don't understand is, how did you post on 7/28/06 a link that now comes up as having been posted in April, '07? Can you tell me now what I'll be impressed with next March?

From what I remember from my quintuple bypass, the time that your heart is stilled and the pump is keeping you alive is called clamp time. Because John Ransom had those wonderfully efficient fingers, delicately tapered as the legs of a ballerina, my clamp time for five bypasses was less than two hours.

Since the recovery, some three years ago just about now, I have noticed a definite decline in my memory. I have no idea whether the decline is due to clamp time, or to the fact that I have never before been 60 years old.

There may well be adverse consequences to surviving medical emergencies, whether clamp time to heal broken hearts or chemo to treat cancer. It behooves us to remember with gratitude that, until these past few decades, the single consequence of cancer or cardiovascular disease would have been death, and all of our memories would have been lost.

The real difference between Clinton and Obama in 2002 was that she was in the Senate and he was not.

The real reason that Clinton voted to authorize was the correct perception that not only the neocons but the vast majority of the bloodthirsty American electorate would have ripped off her head and pissed down her throat had she failed to do so.

The real bridge that Clinton is now trying to build to that portion of the bloodthirsty electorate which now, finally, has enough integrity to be embarrassed, is to say, "See, I was gullible enough to be fooled just like you."

This should be great news for Oklahoma, which has been involved for years in litigation with Arkansas. It seems that the wild and scenic rivers and reservoirs of northeast Oklahoma are fed by the open sewers of the chicken farms of northwest Arkansas. Maybe Oklahoma can build dams and fertilizer plants at the border.

O frabjous day! Caloo! Callay!

Anything that causes discomfort to even a part of the uterine slavery crowd makes me happy. Does that mean that John Roberts is my friend?

The wonder is not that Bush is down to 26%, but that he's still up to 26%.

I guess the remainder are the working definition of "some of the people all of the time."

If Congress uses its contempt power to arrest and detain Miers, can they park her in Gitmo?

At least she'd be one of the minority to know the charges against her.