"Screw the rules, screw politness, screw civility: I've got money, I rule the local media, I have friends within the mafia, and I have diplomatic immunity: the man is a roten perveted bastard, he has virtually never been punished for this, and will probably never be. "

Don't blame Berlusconi, blame the European tendency to elevate trust in authority over self-defense. Italian women could defend themselves quite handily by getting guns, as in America, or by organizing local businessmen to quietly terrorize the criminals right back, as in Brazil.

"But once again I point the finger at the american people who have the mentality of frightened ....... you can't frighten people who actually think ...."

Since the most fear-ridden people in the western world are the leftists, what does this say about their intelligence?

"I am still waiting to see a laptop on Obama's desk. Preferably not an Apple."

What lump of silicon have been hiding under the last few months? Obama's status as the first Apple user in the White House is well known.

"I have enough trouble getting a travel expenses cleared and a few $80,000 server racks bought, cabled and bolted down. I imagine a multi-million-dollar upgrade to the White House's IT infrastructure will involve certain hurdles (contract bidding, for instance, where cost and not merit may have an inverse effect on a project's progress)."

The White House would have no difficulty buy any IT infrastructure it might need. The problem is much more fundamental than that: politicians operate in the world of law, which imposes fundamental constraints on the tech they can use. Ever notice that whenever you deal with the legal world you have to give up the last hundred years of technology and do everything over fax machines? This is because fax has attained a legal status that newer technologies have not.

"The common sense understanding is that CO2 traps more heat in the atmosphere and that should uniformly warm the planet. Our atmosphere is much more complicated than that. Adding *energy* to the atmosphere does create a slight aggregate warming, which we have observed. But it also changes weather patterns, increasing the frequency of record low temperatures, and increases the severity of winter storms."

I keep reading these sentences over and over, hoping they will make sense to me. Sorry, but they still don't.

I shave with an Occam. The effect you describe, 'slight warming in some places and slight cooling in others' can also be explained as the average temperature of Earth not changing significantly enough to measure in weather patterns whose daily chaotic fluctuations totally swamp any recent temperature trend. But no - the flat-earth lobby insists we're all going to die at once for this latest raison de jour, just as fervently as it once told us we would be squeezed to death in overpopulation by 1970, starve to death by 1980, be irradiated by 1990, and run out of industrial minerals by 2000. Sorry, but this boy stopped believing in your cry of wolf after about the third failed prediction of catastrophe.

But the cohort that fills our prisons is nonviolent drug offenders. I see no reason to keep them locked up. It's time to declare the War on Drugs a failure and withdraw our troops from Mendocino County.

"All I know is: "we're working on it." Trust me, it's miserable for me, too."

While we're on the subject of site design changes, can we finally get letters threads for each article on one long page? Breaking them up into hundreds of little pages is a relic of the dialup era that should have been buried with the 1900s.

...he needs to drive a silver stake through the heart of the coal industry.

"NOT ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN voted for the stimulus package."

This seems weird to me too, and I speak as a Republican. It was the GOP, after all, who passed $850 in bailout payments to the bad bankers and fund managers who created this mess in the first place. This was money dished out to those who screwed up, with not a single job created or piece of infrastructure built. So if the Democrats pass "WPA 2.0" it will seem statesmanlike by comparison.

"As for windpower, this article was stunningly immature - apparently based on T. Boone Pickens' commercials. The first absurdity is that we are talking about "Power For the Grid", not fairy dust. And The Grid only accepts strictly even power, or it crashes. Windpower advocates insist we ignore that basic requirement because at best, windpower is wildly inconsistent."

Just because wind power can't go onto the grid doesn't make it worthless. Wind turbines need to be matched to some load that will tolerate a fluctuating supply, such as desalinating water for coastal cities or charging batteries for electric vehicles. While WV still have some peaks left, are there any potential sites for pumped storage? People, let's get creative.

"Note on nuclear: I doubt that it is possible to replace both coal and nuclear with renewables today - but it is possible to replace coal."

One of coal's hidden problems is that burning coal belches far more radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere than would be allowed from any nuclear plant. Coal emissions are grandfathered, while nuclear plants have to be totally clean.

We can replace coal in the grid baseload by mass-producing today's standardized reactor designs, like the AP-1000. The old generation of nukes were costly because they were one-of-a-kinders. If we start by adding new units at existing approved sites, there will be plenty of time to qualify new sites before a second round of construction.

Just like you and me, he deducted what his accountant told him he could deduct. Our tax code is so bizarre and confusing that any tax strategy can be proposed to a client by sufficiently imaginative accountant, and any tax return can be found legally wanting by a sufficiently creative auditor. The difference is that unlike the little people, Daschle gets a benefit-of-doubt chance to just withdraw his nomination if challenged.