You know, the way this article started out--making it clear that the writer was a Baby Boomer, and then following that up with what might be considered a typical, self-involved Boomer perspective, "Aging is a bit more shocking to me than it might be to someone else"--I was prepared for another woe-is-me, middle-aged whine.

Hey, I was wrong.

I have a number of friends like Peter Kurth--not many; a lot of them are dead--who managed to just ride the wave of new medications and make it to middle age with a good chance of living to the designated "3 score years and ten." And they experience much the same strange combination of shock (at being alive) and irritation (at the indignity of middle age) that Kurth so gracefully describes.

The only thing I want to say, as a non-HIV-positive middle-aged guy, is if Kurth's major problems are that he's lived a lot longer than he expected, and he's now under doctor's order's to jerk off more, life can't be too bad.

I didn't mean to be "Anonymous;" I must have clicked the button accidentally and simply not noticed. I do not tend to post anonymously. My apologies.

Maybe it's just me, but I certainly don't think Romney looks like "a prospective president." To these 60s sitcom overloaded eyes, his dark hair and jutting chin make him look a lot more like Fred Gwynne than a president.

Don't believe me? Look for yourself:

http://www.imdb.com/gallery/mptv/1361/Mptv/1361/20790_0004.jpg.html?path=pgallery&path_key=Gwynne,%20Fred

Now ask yourself: do we really want Herman Munster in the Oval Office?

The question that always runs through my mind whenever Bush (or Cheney) talks about torture is, "Are they knowingly lying, or do they actually believe the doublespeak bullshit definitions and legal rationalizations that they're tame lawyers have come up with?"

My inclination is to think that Cheney is lying, and Bush is simply deluding himself ("I can say this because lawyers told me that what we're doin' is legal."). I have a hard time believing that Bush could stand up there and make these blatantly ridiculous statements otherwise. But of course, I may be misunderestimating him.

(I'm also constantly amazed that the President, a professional politician--who, as an author once wrote, has no usable skill other than "jawbone," i.e. the ability to blather--is such a terrible speaker. Those continual sentence constructions of the form "There are highly trained professionals questioning these extremists and terrorists. In other words, we got professionals who are trained in this kind of work." What next? "They're good folks. In other words, they're folks who are good." Yeesh.)

I've been trying to figure out a different way to say this that's more eloquent, but I'm afraid I can't. So I'll just say it: What the heck was that all about?

After plowing through four or five paragraphs of complaining about eco-catastrophists, I was ready to hear the author's proposals for how we can "start celebrating ourselves" and still keep the environment in balance. "They must have a vision for preserving critical areas of the ecosystem," I kept thinking. And I kept reading, and it kept not being there.

Plenty of bitching about environmentalists, though. Yes, Nordhaus and Shellenberger went on and on about them, all right. (Are these guys friends with Bjørn Lomborg?)

But finally it came: "What's needed today is a politics that seeks authority not from Nature or Science but from a compelling vision of the future that is appropriate for the world we live in and the crises we face." Ah, excellent! And what is that, exactly?

Well, Nordhaus and Shellenberger don't say, actually. They just commence to bashing more environmentalists, and then launch into a bizarre human triumphalism spiel, combined with some genuinely odd ideas about over-population. ("The more the merrier!" seems to be the gist.)

Honestly, I'm baffled. It was environmentalists that helped bring back the California Condor. It was environmentalists that helped get the clean air and clean water acts passed. It is often environmentalists that bring attention to issues that would otherwise get ignored. Because of the awareness created by environmentalists, folks can still float down the Colorado river in Austin without panicking about heavy metal contamination. But these guys seem to ignore that because Julia Butterfly Hill "saved only three acres." And therefore environmentalism is a bad thing? How logical is that?

Sure, the Green movement can and does go overboard. But do these two guys really think that there will be an Amazon to marvel at, a redwood forest to enjoy, and great rivers to swim in if we just sit back and celebrate the "seven billion wondrous human animals" the planet is filled with? (Seven billion!)

Somehow I don't think the cure for environmentalists taking things too far is a pair of Pollyannas telling us that we should just enjoy the "great wildness abounding inside and outside of ourselves."

Ye gods.