In the movie, _Ed Wood_, Johnny Depp does a great one-sided phone call with a prospective producer. Hearing the reaction the producer had to his previous movie, the confident if semi-demented smile never leaving his face, Wood/Depp says, "....worst movie you ever saw?......this one'll be better!"

There's a sordid resemblance between the behavior of our current rulers

and the skeevy high-school huevon who keeps pleading with the girl he

has cornered in his car to just let him go one step further -- under

the shirt, then under the bra, etc. And after he's had his way with

her, she might feel ashamed of what she let happen, but apparently the

Demcratic delegation, along with all the usual media suspects, have

no such shame, and keep getting date-raped, over and over and over.

Or maybe they're in on it, and the joke's on us. Which is worse?

It appears that most Salon readers live on the coast, which might be a very bad place to be if global warming melts enough ice.

Don't be ridiculous. A huge fraction of the population lives near the coasts, all over the world. I seem to recall the figure of 50% within 50 miles. This settlement pattern isn't strange, because of proximity to resources and trade routes.

Their selfishness would deny those who benefit from global warming from enjoying its benefits.

Have you ever been to the Salton Sea? Now there's a place where you can see first-hand what happens when the water level rises, oh, ten or twenty feet and submerges twentieth-century industrial constructions. This water-level rise was not due to global warming, but to another kind of sorcerer's-apprentice situation where some folks opened a waterway for irrigation purposes but were then unable to close it up again.

You can see the top of a "Phillips 66" gas station, well, actually, just the sign at the top of the pole, and it even with a limited imagination you can get a pretty good idea of what kind of recreational wonderland is down there. That's a tiny town in the desert, now imagine the same thing up and down all coasts around the world. Imagine "oceanfront property" where you can't exactly surf, because of all the jagged, ruined, toxic crap at the shoreline.

Anyone writing to this list bemoaning global warming who has flown anywhere in the last year is a hypocrite.

At the present time, we can choose between unsustainably polluting travel on the one hand, or no travel at all, on the other. It's not as if by not taking an airplane, or by sitting in one place and not moving at all I can make any material difference in how much greenhouse gas is emitted by the current incarnation of our economic/industrial machine. And although I'm sure you'd like everyone who disagrees with you to wear a hair shirt and go live in a Unabomber shack in the woods, that's not going to happen.

I haven't read all the comments, but almost all of those I've read express something close to the gobsmack-edness I feel WRT to the article. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are able to write literate sentences and to construct what at a superficial level resembles a logical article, but the points made range from trivial to irrelevant. If it's a parody, it's not sharp enough to be actually funny -- go read The Onion to pick up some technique, guys. But otherwise, it's so lame and sophomoric that it hangs out of Salon's nose like a stray booger.

Of course, there is the one comment whose writer sees all the negative comments as indicating a lockstep PC mentality among Salon readers. Well, OK, I guess if the concept of a rabid anti-stupidity faction weren't kind of self-contradictory, I'd happily sit in it.

So are the Salon editors stupid enough not to expect this kind of reaction, or is this some kind of Google-analytics sweeps-week trick?

What has happened to that Left in this country that its adherents don't want to read, watch or talk about anything they disagree with?

Agreement isn't the problem, and if you had actually read the comments you so blithely dismiss, you would see that they were not made by people who had refused to read the article, or who were reluctant to engage in debate.

The comments were made by people who, having read the article, were annoyed by its stupidity, its errors in logic, its excesses in rhetoric (how many straw men can Nordhaus and Shellenberger get to dance on their little heads?). Or were offended because they couldn't believe anyone was ever born stupid enough to present those arguments honestly and found themselves forced to the conclusion that the authors have as much respect for the truth as a streetwalker has for her average john.

This ia a peace prize. Petraeus is a General who supports the war that his president and spokesman unleashed against all international rules.

Right. So he's perfect.

Back in 2002 Norman Mailer gave a speech of which I read a transcript, in which he said that he now believed that fascism was a more natural way of organizing a human society than democracy was. He wasn't endorsing fascism; he said he found this very depressing, and so do I, but I can't at this point cite a whole lot of evidence upon which to disagree with him.

Glenn here provides more evidence that would tend to support Mailer, and hopes he is wrong as to how it's going to play out. I too hope Glenn is wrong, and Mailer, and I.

@Nulla Sallus

Let the hoi polloi fly or fly themselves like the 'libertarians' on the radio who treat us to tales of flying their own planes (Boortz). Let the TSA eat itself to irrelevance.

I think that with a minor word substitution, the recommendation above is pretty much the attitude of the current regime: "Let the hoi polloi f themselves."