Mom deeds the house to LW and her hubby. LW and hubby borrow enough to pay off the existing liens. Mom pays the amount of the old first mortgage as rent, and LW and hubby make up the difference. Mom invests in her eternal salvation, LW and hubby own the equity in the house when Mom cashes her chips.

Unless I'm missing something, the United States Constitution doesn't have much leverage in Canada.

Earth to H. sapiens: From the time you are old enough to grow hair in your armpits, you will be hardwired to want to fuck someone, anyone. It will seem enormously important.

Anyone care to guess the age of puberty when Romeo thought Juliet was worth dying for? Deal with it.

Could we not test Wallace's hypothesis of a "brain-independent consciousness" by putting his brain in a blender and measuring the consciousness that is left? Of course, we'll need to rely on reports from other mystics with 2,500 years of training, since all that science will be able to see is grey putty.

All that Norman Borlaug has done, at current rates, is make it possible that 12 billion humans will be fighting over that last drop of potable water when the Great Die-Off begins.

High-technology farming didn't solve any problems, it just deferred them to a time when the lemmings will have farther to fall.

Wait until the basketball players get a load of this costume. Just when you thought sports couldn't look any sillier.

How can we tell? Does he just not care enough to pay attention, or does he lack the capacity to remember, or even to distinguish the known from the unknown in his own brain?

In the end, the policy effect is the same.

I've been out of touch. Glad to see there are plenty of others to beat the doom and gloom drum in my absence.

Our predecessors the Neanderthals (the jury is still out on whether they were our ancestors) were at the top of the food chain for about a quarter of a million years, through several of the ice age cycles when the glaciers reached what is now southern France and Kansas City. I read recently (no idea how the anthropologists can know this) that at their peak there may have been 10,000 living Neanderthals.

Our ancestors for sure, Homo sapiens, didn't start to come up out of Africa until around 40,000 years ago, and didn't displace (absorb or kill off) the Neanderthals until the peak of the last ice age, around 18,000 years ago. I haven't seen an estimate of the H. sapiens population as of 16,000 BCE, but it took us until the time of Jesus to hit a quarter or a third of a billion, and until 1804 to hit our first billion.

In the last couple of centuries, four of my lifetimes, since we've started down what I'm betting is the evolutionary dead-end of the scientific-technological revolution, our numbers have increased 600%, and now the U.N. is estimating 900% by 2075. Talk about your hockey sticks! The fact is that no one knows whether we'll ever get there.

The problem isn't food or petroleum, it's water. Earlier this year, Salon reviewed Pearce's book, When the Rivers Run Dry, but I don't know how to link to it. Borlaug's Green Revolution doubled the production of food, but it tripled the consumption of water. The Colorado and the Yellow and the Yangtze don't reach the ocean. The Ogallah Acquifer, laid down by the melting of the last glaciers 18,000 years ago, has been sucked nearly dry in 50 years.

The truth is that no one knows whether there is enough fresh water on and in the earth to support 9 billion humans. No one knows if there is enough cushion in our tiny shell of atmosphere to absorb the carbon that 9 billion increasingly consuming humans will produce. No one knows if melting ice caps will kill the deep-ocean currents. You with children are betting your progeny's lives on what you do not know.

Our name, Homo sapiens, is supposed to mean we're the thinking humans. Given our response to cheap, abundant food with overpopulation on a societal scale and obesity on a personal scale (you have to wonder if they're related), the last 200 years make it look like we do our thinking with our stomachs and our genitals.

How many times do we have to be reminded that people lie in polls, because they don't want to be seen as the cracker, sexist, racist scum that they are, and then go into the privacy of the booth (including a substantial number of blacks and women) and vote what's in their heart.

C'mon people, we're talking about the electorate that put George W. Bush in the Presidency TWICE! (Well, once and a half.)

I am repeating myself, but maybe not in this forum.

What the Republicans have done since the time of Saint Ronnie, and with a fervor in the past dozen years, is to take my old grey lady of blind justice, with her blindfold and scales, and dress her up in the whore's clothes of partisan politics.

What is offensive is not just that they have stuffed the federal bench with partisan hacks; what is offensive is that, in order to find hacks that agree with them, they have hammered through the appointment of stupid judges and justices. The collective IQ of the federal bench has probably dropped 30 points in the last quarter-century.

If we start today, which is far from a given, it will take a generation for the federal bench to regain the respect of the nation.