In the sixties a number of revolutionary social concepts earned recognition that had heretofore been considered as the bleatings of misguided fringe elements.

1) All people really are endowed with certain inalienable rights and must be treated with fairness and given the same opportunities regardless of their race, color, creed, or national origin. The defacto racism of the fifties was discredited in the sixties.

2) People have a right to the pursuit of happiness independent of the rigidly conventional ideas of society. We need not all strive to become corporate drones, afraid to appear in any way unconventional lest we suffer the disapproval of fellow citizens. The fifties was an era of enormous social and ideological repression, of pathological conformity, from which we sought liberation in the sixties.

3) What happens to the Earth really does matter. It is not just a supplier of natural resources for economic gain or a dump for unlimited amounts of waste, but a vast living mechanism, subject to abuse and injury. The environmental movement that grew in the sixties is the vanguard of efforts to maintain a habitable Earth.

As a result of the events of the sixties, most people now recognize the injustice of racism and prejudice, tare more tolerant of the alternative and experimental life-styles many of their fellow citizens pursue, and understand more fully and effectively the role they play in the destruction or preservation of the biosphere. No other decade in my life experience (I'm in my sixth) has so profoundly altered our collective social consciousness.

You can tell it's a '62 or '63 because it has the oval front turn signals rather than the "bullet-style" turn signals of the earlier buses, but they are white rather than the amber color that were introduced in '64. The old VW buses are super cool, and fun to drive as long as you don't have to fight freeway traffic or try to keep them on the road with cross- or head-winds. The handling can best be described as half truck and half sports car. My '64 VW Sundial camper has taken me 150,000 miles in 31 years. Of course, you can't be in a hurry to get where you're going and you are best advised to carry a multitude of spare parts, a complete set of tools, coveralls, and bailing wire. Also, don't forget the shop manual and John Muir's classic "Compleat Idiot" book.

I signed up for a Hotmail account before the Microsoft takeover. It worked pretty well on my home dialup connection, but after Microsoft took over, it runs so slow and freezes up so often, I hardly ever look at it. My Yahoo email works well regardless of the connection speed. Microsoft Internet Explorer is so inconvenient and counterintuitive to use, I switched to Netscape years ago and now use Firefox. The new Microsoft Word which came on one of my new computers is so baffling I never use it. The older version is also crap...I'd just like to have a word processor with no "defaults" making decisions about outline formatting,etc. I spend ages fighting the stupid thing, going back over something it did because it thought it was smarter than me. What you type should be what you get.

I don't really care too much for the moral issues, but when a company monopolizes a given field of business and then foists off one excremental product after another on the public, it's no wonder that the concept of evil becomes associated with it.

As the availability of petroleum declines over the next couple of decades (or sooner) and fuel prices accelerate upward, fewer and fewer people will be able to afford air travel. Consequently, the number of flights and routes available will inevitably decline. My prediction is for the extinction of commercial air travel by 2020, although there are currently signs that it will occur at an earlier date. Most people will be too concerned with feeding themselves by that time to worry much about missing that vacation in Hawaii anyway.

Bush, after having been "selected" by quasi-legal, quasi-criminal processes, took an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States". This he has abysmally failed to do, although he does have an out in the first part of the oath "to the best of my Ability...", of which he appears to have none. In any case the most important decisions of his administration have been made by those who are his legal subordinates, but his de facto superiors, who realize that a ventriloquist's dummy or marionette is a useful dodge in evading accountability.

The whole lot of them, Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc., needs to be brought before Congress for summary impeachment. How much more documentation of lying, corruption, and downright evil do the American people and the Congress need before acting to excise this political cancer from our nation? If this gang of criminals is allowed to continue in public office, what does this do for the standard of performance by elected and appointed officials?