"actually, I recall either reading or hearing Paul Hawken talk about the extraordinary number of jobs that could be created if we adopted ecologically responsible practices, including intra-industry recycling ..."

Please be careful to distinguish creation of jobs from creation of wealth. How many of the jobs that you mention would create products we could sell overseas to help pay for all the things we buy overseas?

I think the RIAA has lost sight of the real objective. They seem to think that reducing piracy will necessarily increase sales. This may not be a correct assumption.

I don't know about anybody else, but this news does *NOT* fill me with the desire to run out and buy lots and lots of CDs from RIAA member companies. If enough other people share my opinion, this could be quite a phyrric victory for RIAA.

"What Craig seems to have done is pretty icky, but it doesn't especially violate the public trust."

That depends on his constituents. If Mr. Craig campaigned on a "values-oriented" ticket and was elected by voters who expected him to uphold those values, then I would say has has violated their trust.

"The vast majority of the compact fluorescent light-bulbs that are replacing incandescents are manufactured in China."

Free-trade advocates are constantly telling us that we should get educated and innovate ourselves into a competitive position in the global economy. This is an example of why that advice is a load of hogwash. No matter how creative people are in the U.S., the companies that make the products will still outsource the work of making them overseas, and we'll still have a lack of U.S. jobs.

"Nor are plant closures here the fault of Chinese people who are willing to work for less. Does GE have no agency in all this?"

People in China are able to work for less because their cost of living isn't as high. People in rural China can get by on an annual income of only $300. At that rate it would take 25 years of wages to pay one year of my property tax. There is simply no way that a person could survive in the U.S. at Chinese-rate pay.

"Willing" has nothing to do with this.

"The real question raised -- and not at all answered -- by Irvine's essay is, supposing that eco-suicide does loom for humanity, how practically does one go about avoiding it?"

There is no avoidance if our population truly is above the planet's carrying capacity. We just get to decide if we want to ease our population back down to a sustainable level, or postpone dealing with the problem until it is a crisis and let nature reduce our number for us. We might be able to retain a lot of the comforts our technology has given us if we plan. If we let nature do the job for us, we'll probably end up all the way back in the stone age, with little hope of climbing back again because all the easily-accessed resources will be gone.

... they want their readers back.

... and realized that the "country" of Iraq has been held together at gunpoint for its entire existence.

It won't be long before U.S. companies' love of offshoring has left the U.S. without enough qualified scientists and engineers to do any significant innovation. When that happens, we'll just steal ideas and designs from everybody else.

I'm sure that Bush could make a full-blown national emergency by attacking Iran, particularly now that the Russians have said "Don't do it". Bush will then invoke all the Executive directives he's been churning out to make himself dictator for life.

Advanced megalomania?

I just contributed $100 to Chris Dodd's campaign. Then I went to Barack Obama's campaign website and told them that I had just contributed to Dodd and why I had done so.

... I just saw a news article that reported the estimated damage from the California wildfires has reached $1 billion. That's about the same as the cost of two days of war in Iraq.

... the Democrats are thinking about how much fun *they* could have abusing such powers when they win the White House. And perhaps the Republicans should think about whether or not they want president Hillary's political goons tapping their phones.

The idea is for both the Democrats and the Republicans to chose candidates that nobody will vote for, so that people will be grateful when King George invokes executive order 51 and cancels the elections.

They represent stockholders who want to unload their holdings in Countrywide.

"Suppose you were any one of several countries on the backside of the oil production curve - say Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Norway or the USA - would you expand production in order to lower prices on a finite resource? Hardly."

I'll go further and suggest that expanding production isn't in *our* interest, either. Exhausting an irreplaceable resource while it is still indispensible isn't a very smart thing to do. We need to reduce our dependency *before* the oil runs out.

Bush is telling us that it's not worth his effort to appoint a competent liar.

The Iraq fiasco has probably caused a lot of turnover in the upper ranks of our military. We know that the Bush administration does not tolerate any disagreement from its minions. I think General Shinseki was just one the more prominent examples. I suspect that most of the high-ranking officers who have voiced disagreement with Bush's policies have been dismissed or been moved out of the chain of command.

It is frightening to think that politics played a role in the selection of officers who were promoted to replace the dissenters. It is possible that much of our military's high command now consists of people like Col. Boylan.

The real nightmare is thinking about how this may relate to executive directive 51.

So, how long have you served in Iraq? Have you served in the military at all?

Or are you just another chickenhawk loudmouth like Rush Limbaugh?