The 800-pound gorilla in the corner of the room where economic growth is being debated is human population growth. According to the Census Bureau, we have gifted Gaia with a net increase of a little over 261,000 humans every day during 2006. Nearly a couple of million extra humans every week. Talk about your unsustainable growth!

We need to remember that the concept of economic growth, as we have come to know and expect it, is no older than the scientific and technological revolution which made it possible. It is no coincidence that Adam Smith and Isaac Newton came along just before humanity hit its first billion, after maybe 18,000 years of trying in our current H. sapiens incarnation, around 1800 CE.

The couple of centuries since then is less than an eye-blink in ecological time. Our human response, breeding ourselves to the limits of the carrying capacity of the earth, if not beyond (if I knew how, I would link to Salon's review of Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry), suggests that science and technology and economic growth, and the comfortable life they have made possible, will turn out to be an evolutionary dead end.

If the wine sipper actually gives up his racing for this marriage, and the librarian actually lets him, they both deserve what will come.

It's a beautiful fall afternoon in the Arkansas Ozarks, and even the dummies are discovering that the Neocons, for all that they are dangerous, are as laughable as those funny little men who want their women hidden.

It really is the best medicine.

Both fair AND balanced.

As always.

It's becoming perfectly clear. George Allen would be the perfect successor to George W. Bush. They're a perfect match.

Rumor has it that Satan has filed a slander suit against Hugo Chavez, seeking punitive damages and a permanent injunction. The venue hasn't been determined yet, but given the list of witnesses, it's likely that the trial will be held in Satan's home district.

Somewhere north of 40% of the American population still believes that there was a connection between Iraq/Saddam and September 11.

If we could just introduce a basic intelligence test as a prerequisite for voting, there wouldn't be another Republican elected for two generations.

A real and realistic policy to reduce abortion?

Not if you're a Republican.

Google cannot find it for me tonight, but I have a firm memory from the aftermath that someone said that the citizens of 44 different nations died at ground zero on September 11.

It was, after all, the "world" trade center, and for those few weeks afterwards the world was with us, if only because, for all of our strength, our experience of suffering was so touchingly naieve.

Al Lewis said "America gets the politicians they deserve. That's it. And you keep struggling."

What America currently deserves is to have the highest court of our land occupied for the next generation by moral and intellectual cripples.

That's it. And we keep struggling.

It is a good thing for Republicans that their children are too stupid to read numbers. If they could, they would surely murder their parents as they sleep.

What American children today, even Garrison's latest gap-toothed girl, instinctively sense is that human children are surplus to requirement. Back when Newton triggered the current evolutionary dead-end explosion of knowledge, only about four or Garrison's and my lifetimes ago, it had taken H. sapiens millenia since the retreat of the latest glaciers to reach a billion. Where are we now?

Human children exist today only for the purpose of testing how far we can let our need to breed overshoot the carrying capacity of this tiny rocky shell. What they sense instinctively is that the past has nothing to teach them, and the future has nothing to comfort them.

Son, after you have had enough of them, you will come to realize that the zero birthdays are easy. Forty is just the end of a decade of being thirty. Next year, you and the twin will just be old. (Ask your children.) It probably won't even occur to you to draw about it.

Cary is not quite right, for all that he has never been completely wrong. What I-less is trying to understand is the dynamics of being a beta male.

Alpha only looks to be fun when you're not it.

Run, girl! Run like the wind!

As you cross the threshold, give a prayer of thanks that fate or courage saved you from a lifetime of bondage.

It's not just a child he wants.

Suddenly, The Matrix doesn't look so fanciful.

And he was looking at food, not water.

Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution of the '70's doubled the production of grain but tripled the consumption of water. Every technological fix that lets us extend the exponential metastasis of the human population just means that there will be that many billions more humans dying when we finally find by blind experimentation the absolute limits of the carrying capacity of our little rock.