What a fascinating opportunity for Americans to watch their own national plunge into authoritarianism mirrored abroad. A couple of points should be obvious:

- Kadima made the mistake that the Democrats did not, which was getting involved in the fruitless, unwinnable vortex of violence into which their respective right wing is relentlessly drawing their country. Likud would not have managed the ongoing debacle vis a vis Israel's neighbors any better, but they got to keep their hands clean this time around. Let American centrists take note — don't try to fight neo-conservative fire with fire.

- Israelis are afraid, and (not to flog a dead horse) as Bill Clinton put it, when people are afraid they will always choose leaders who are strong and wrong over leaders who are right, but weak. True friends of Israel must find ways to encourage those who are right to discover their strength, and give them the opportunity to demonstrate it.

- No nation, irrespective of how dedicated or how conceived, is wholly immune to the lure of massively centralized corporate power combined with militant authoritarianism. (An Italian of the last century coined a term to describe a society organized on those principles, but I would be accused of being anti-Semitic if I said what it is.) When a people begin to declare that their democracy no longer works and flirt with this sort of alternative, it's imperative that those who resist the trend start planning carefully. Their next moves could be their last as a free people.

Thank you, Editor, for publishing this excerpt from Break Through in Salon. The authors' lack of any genuine point to make is nicely revealed beneath their gratuitously contrarian wrapping, and it's clear that there's no reason to read any further — the authors didn't realize or don't care that they aren't actually making any sense, and in either case it's safe to assume that the same failing applies throughout the rest of their book.

Just to pick a few obvious things: for one, their characterization of the relationship between science and environmentalism is patently false. For example, for some time there was debate amongst environmentalists about the relative significance of the greenhouse (warming) versus albedo (cooling) effects in the Earth's climate. Both are well-recognized factors in planetary science, but as mounting evidence revealed that the greenhouse effect is overwhelmingly the more significant of the two at present, environmentalists in the albedo camp struck their tents and joined the cause. That's not Crichtonesque — it's scientific, in the highest sense of the term. And it's characteristic of how environmental science works.

For another, their notion that environmental "doom-saying" is somehow trivially refuted by reference to the physical indestructibility of the Earth is fatuous and juvenile. The modern movement to preserve the Earth's ecology from harm has never been predicated on the idea that humanity will somehow literally destroy the Earth. Indeed, Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem immeasurably pleased with themselves for articulating as an alternative — the idea that we should be asking who will live, and how well — the central tenet of most if not all of the environmental works they deride, from Caron to Gore. What kind of rock do they live under, to come up with that and believe that they'd cleverly hit on something nobody else has?

But most of all, what is it with them and climate change? Their discussion of it is riddled with hyperbole and weasel words. Human life "possibly" affects the climate? There "may"(!) be a mass die-off of plant and animal species? What is this? Terrestrial climate has not varied "wildly" over the billions of years of life on Earth — it has varied by a great amount, broadly one might say, but never "wildly" until the modern era. That's the whole point of the widespread concern about climate change today — it's more rapid by orders of magnitude than anything ever seen before.

It's almost as if Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren't actually familiar with any of the works they keep citing, and just want to build straw men with which to attack the movement to check climate change.

There's something almost Twainian in the image of a father mustering his stoned courage for the culturally obligatory talk about responsibility — while he drives the car home, no less. (Fortunately for all involved, including us who read Gary Kamiya, the tale does not turn from comic hypocrisy to tragic road accident.)

But why do we Americans consider "the Talk" so necessary? In many cultures, the idea of initiation into adult mysteries is intrinsically separate from family. The mysteries are still revealed, just not in a familial context. I imagine from a social-psychological point of view this helps reinforce the idea of transition from childhood into a community of autonomous young adult peers.

Indeed, modern sex and drug education in schools serves such a purpose and, when not hijacked, serves it well. And why not? There's something empowering for teenagers in the process of learning the mysteries of consciousness and reproduction — the brass tacks of responsibility for one's own body that we turn over fully at the ritual age of 18 — without those heretofore responsible looking over their shoulders. It's respectably heavy stuff, and putting it squarely on the shoulders of young people who are about to be grownups is a way of recognizing them as adults.

Now, if it had been my kid, and I really wanted to teach him a lesson, I would have made him take my keys away. That's something that any young person should know how to do. And it would have made Twain proud.