"Many people look at what happened to the American buffalo on the western plains in the 19th century and wonder how people then could have been so shortsighted. But apparently nothing has changed. "

I, for one, hope that we can solve the tuna depletion problem in exactly the same way we solved the bison problem: by making the transition from hunting in the wild to farming the species.

"I'm suppose to care about the opinions of people who make judgments about other people's characters and intelligence based on their footwear?"

Reading this hoity thread, I see people who have lost out on all the issues that are truly important to them, so they flame on the basis of recreational footwear choice.

"PLEASE don't think you are necessarily doing wild stocks of fish a favor by eating farm-raised fish. Often just the opposite is the case. Salmon "farms," for example, are largely unregulated sources of massive pollution and parasites that have devastated wild salmon. Shrimp farming has been devastating to disappearing mangrove habitat in the tropics."

Of course the Luddite lobby automatically rejects any solutions to environmental problem. The actual aim of these rich white trust-fund kids, as evidenced by all the messages herein dripping scorn on the yellow-peril teeming millions of the world, is to eliminate that fraction of the human species which was not"educated" at the schools where their own cohort was indoctrinated with their hallmark sense of eternal superiority.

I'm sure that when we first began farming the land we encountered the same set of technical problems you cite. Through trial and error, we learned a set of safe and sustainable agricultural practices. Now we are starting to go through the same process at sea. With the technology and speed of information transfer that civilization has brought us, this won't take the centuries and generations it tequired the first time around.

...in a continent where the local strongman just grabs land from anyone who succeeds in making it productive?

Investors with a colonial army to back them up, that's who.

"[Anti-]vaccine [hypotheses]s are the creationism of the left"

If that were only the whole story! The left actually prides itself on being wrong about virtually every aspect of science other than Darwin. They're not even too comfortable with evolutionary biology, either.

This story is not about energy, or health effects. It's about lawyers. The worst aspect of Obama's energy program, and the whole reason that it will go nowhere, is that it has no provision for legislating the NIMBY lobby out of existence by granting automatic, no if-and-or-buts approval to energy projects that are built to standard designs.

When engineers design a new automobile or a new aircraft, they walk a prototype through the safety approval process exactly once. Thereafter, buyers are free to purchase as many copies of the same design as they can afford, without needing to get each one of them reapproved. We need to do this for windmills, and we need to do it for nuclear reactors.

"Peer review? Reproducible results?"

Don't need no steenkeeng peer review or reproducible results. We're talking Green religion here, a fundamental tenet of which is that all methods of generating energy are evil and must be stopped. On the wind turbine front once again, this story came across today:

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5720AF20090803?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

If we want to put up wind turbines, we'll at some point have to start shooting these bastards.

...Where's the TVA of the new century? Is it going to be the power plants that aren't being built, the transmission grid that has fallen into the hands of lawyers, or the waste repository in Nevada that the majority-Democrat Senate just killed?

Was it ransom or just a free weekend in Pahrump, NV for the Little King?

Is this the official term for public protest that you people are going to be using in our Stasi files?

"What does your solution do about prescriptions?"

Old Joe is right in saying that insurance-as-prepayment is a poor model. My approach would be to rip out the whole set of monopoly privileges that has made healthcare so overpriced to begin with, and give consumers the unlimited right to shop around for all medical goods and services.

When we want to buy computers and electronic components, we can shop the world online. Why are we forbidden from shopping around for our prescriptions in the same way? Computer chip manufacturers have high R & D costs, just like the pharma companies. Their products are patent-protected, just like medications; so why don't electronics manufacturers need special monopoly laws "protecting" their US markets?

If consumers had the right to shop for everyday medicine, insurance could resume its rightful role in covering high-end diseases. When was the last time you needed insurance to buy a computer?

"..ballast, that it sure could jettison, or shed, or blast, off into empty space, sure would make this country a lot cooler place..."

Go ahead and send conservatives into space. Let the meek then inherit the Earth - it's all they deserve.

"A fact that has not been introduced into this discussion is that vaginas, like penises, vary in length, circumference and elasticity."

An organ that plays beautifully in a chapel may not play as well in a cathedral.

The Enlightenment may have been an age of science, but the 19th century to follow was the real breakthrough era. In France, Britain and the US this was the age when science flowered into engineering, which in turn made still larger discoveries in science possible. We are still benefiting from this process of positive feedback.

Unfortunately, our romantic side has not kept up. Instead of glorying in the human creativity that science and engineering represent, that early romance corroded into fear. It's time the liberal arts community had a new Enlightenment of its own.

...thereby benefiting us all.