What's needed is a statistical analysis of morbidity, mortality (or longevity) and cost, including the cost of American families going bankrupt due to uncovered medical expenses and loss of income due to breadwinner mortality. The bean counters and wonks in the Federal Government could easily deliver such an objective analysis. We all know what the results would be. Americans are paying far too much for far too little and suffering pain, death, and bankruptcy to a greater extent than people in just about any civilized country.

President Obama needs to show some real leadership here. The country could easily be mobilized to get behind universal coverage. Unless, of course, our President is just another lackey of the corporate globalist elite...

Not all the bad news has to do with imbalances in our economic system, though these are obviously significant.

More serious is the continued growth in world human population and increasing demands for energy at a time when our ability to extract fossil fuels seems to have reached a maximum Since late 2005 extraction rates have plateaued at about 85,000,000 barrels per day. This figure has resisted any upward movement, even when former President G.W. Bush went to the Saudis begging for more. We can most likely expect a rapid decline in extraction rates in the not-to-distant future. Even if we were able to make use of unlimited amounts of fossil fuels, the impact of this on the Earth's climate would be devastating, not to mention the pollution that is part-and-parcel of industrial civilization.

Fossil fuel energy is essential to support a population well beyond the Earth's long-term carrying capacity. The energy from gasoline and diesel fuel is used to plant, fertilize, cultivate, irrigate, harvest, process, package, and distribute our food.

Supplies of needed fresh water for agriculture, industry, and domestic use are reaching their limits in many parts of the world. The mining water from non-renewing aquifers has been used to support farming in many areas, but these will obviously not be perpetually productive. And as the water must be pumped from greater and greater depths, more and more energy is needed to raise it to the surface.

So now we have a planet with a rapidly increasing human population that is demanding more from the environment at a time when the resources that were used to support the growth of that population are dwindling. On top of that, there seems to be little consciousness that unlimited population growth is the root of practically all our woes and that none of our problems are ultimately solvable without reducing the human population radically. Limiting ones family size is, under the circumstances, an ethical imperative.

We've used our post-industrial knowledge to overbuild an unstable support system based on pre-industrial values, specifically the measure of success based on perpetual growth and exploitation. Without widespread recognition of this folly and a commitment to change destructive behaviors, most of us are pretty well doomed.

If the Republican Party wants to once again be the party of strict constitutionalism, of personal liberty, and of small, efficient government, it has to purge itself of the Bush Era neocon poison. The best way to do this is to get behind the effort to investigate abuses in the Bush Administration and prosecute those who have broken the law. Not a whole lot of people are going to be interested in joining a political party whose practices are diametrically opposed to its supposed political philosophy.

With fewer and fewer people sympathizing with the flatulent, peevish rantings of Mr. Limbaugh, the Republican Party could still maintain its overall weight on the national scene if its members would follow his lead to in self-indulgence gourmandary.

If all the straw men that he creates as targets for his attacks could be burned in a power plant, the entire state of Florida may well enjoy energy self-sufficiency.

If Rush Limbaugh's bloviated outgassings, oral and anal (it's sometimes hard to tell the difference), flammable and incendiary, could be harnessed, and put to use rather than simply dispersing into the void, accomplishing nothing beyond increasing social and physical entropy, then the nation would be well on its way to achieving energy independence!

I updated my Savings Bond Wizard this morning and found that my some of my more recently purchased I (for inflation) bonds are paying over 8 per cent. The rate on these bonds is connected in some hocus pocus way with inflation rates. Well, common sense tells us that anyone (like the Federal Government) that is already deep in hock who goes out to borrow a gazillion more dollars is going to have to pay astronomical interest rates. What this means is that, in the future, more tax dollars are going to go into the pockets of government securities holders and less of it will go to provide goods and services. Since most government securities are held by large financial interests, including a substantial number of foreign ones, the overall effect will be to further enrich the financial oligarchs and export more dollars abroad.

Republicans seem to be justifiably alarmed at this prospect, but they will not be taken seriously until they show some responsibility and contrition for the many violations of the Constitution and human rights they perpetrated over the last 8 years, as well as the way they themselves enlarge the national debt at a time when we had the prosperity to pay it down had we not been blowing away billions in military adventures.

I have both Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts. The Hotmail account goes back to its pre-Microsoft days, when it worked pretty well. Since Microsoft took over, they've made it so complex that I don't even bother to access it at home where I have dialup, as it runs so slowly that it would take me an hour to look at a dozen emails. Yahoo works reasonably well with the slow connection. I never have figured out why people use Internet Explorer, either. It seems to me the ultimate in user-unfriendly software. Please, Microsoft, leave Yahoo alone!