Once again, the pro-car crowd are ignoring their assumptions. One of the main reasons infernal-combustion steel-wheelchairs are so inefficient is that they are getting zero mpg while idling. Most of this idling is done during intra-city travel. Is there any reason, other than a fear of being killed by other two-ton wheelchairs or a physical disability, for driving in town? All of this driving boils down to laziness and selfishness. Electric-grid assist options will not get us anywhere near the 80-90% emission reductions required over the next fifteen years to avoid catastrophic climactic "tipping points". At some point, hopefully very soon, we are going to have to face the fact that there is not enough low-emission energy available to allow it to be wasted it on such frivolous activities as cruising around town in a steel shell.

I'm sure there is abundant data to back up the author's observation that selfish driving habits are widespread. However, I would like to propose an alternate explanation for our society's deadly driving habits. People are inherently creatures of habit who do things the same way over and over until something dramatic causes them to attempt to change. Couple that to the fact that we allow people to establish their (lifelong) driving habits during their most narcissistic years and we have a formula for deadly roads.

This hypothesis is just barely testable. Find the few hundred people who stopped (or dramatically reduced) their driving for a few years and then started driving class A trucks. I would bet that they are significantly less likely to drive like a typical American than a control group who did not give up driving before training to drive trucks.

Hopefully this will all be moot as we move away from fossil-fool powered wheelchairs towards more sensible transportation options.

It is becoming clear that a great many of the miscarriages in this country and Latin America are caused by exposure to toxic chemicals placed into our environment by Republican-controlled corporations. So, the people who fund the Republican party (in order to avoid regulations that would cut profits but clean up the environment) may be responsible for more forced abortions than all of the voluntary abortions performed in America.

I guess killing cells with a motivation that involves improving the lives of people is evil, but killing cells (and perhaps fetuses) for profit is good.

Last night, Obama translated the Repubicants' favorite description of their policies as, "the on your own" society. Now that the entire Gulf coast and Florida are basically uninsurable, it (just try to get a new policy at an affordable rate), it gives a whole new meaning to "on your own".

Here in Eugene we had Homeland Security call in our local gang of thugs and rapists (the Eugene police department) because they were concerned a group of college kids would "storm the federal building" while doing street theater to protest herbicide spraying. We got to witness nonviolent protesters having their hair pulled, their heads smashed to the pavement and several multiple taserings.

Since reading "The Gulag Archipelago" as a teenager, I always wondered what it would be like to live in the Soviet Union. I wonder no more.

Nothing much, just an increase in the current massive extinction event to include an unintelligent species of primate.

So why is Obama a black man with a white mother and not a white man with a black father? Yes Virginia, America is still a racist nation.

By the way, cut with the term "African American". Since humanity evolved in Africa, all Americans are African Americans. We just have different ancestral means and times of departure.

Brides used to be just property and the wedding was a public transfer of property from one family to another; are they that traditional?

A Professor at Yale used documents he found at the Vatican to demonstrate that the Catholic church performed the equivalent of gay marriages from 200 C.E. to 900 C.E. These were performed inside the churches while weddings, being mere property transfers, were performed outside of the buildings. I hope these "traditionalists" didn't hold their wedding inside a church.

Just because something has been done one way for some period of time neither makes it the correct way of doing it nor does it make it the original way of doing it.

Sorry for the late response. About twenty years ago I watched an installment of "60 Minutes" that covered these early Church-sanctioned unions. After a quick look on Wikipedia, it looks like it was probably John Boswell, but not the book referenced by another. Likely the interview was about material Boswell published in "The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe".

I hope this helps.

I couldn't agree more that most of the vaccine/autism story has been B.S. However, the article is somewhat incomplete in ignoring last year's court decision in favor of a physician's daughter whose autism was caused by her exposure to vaccines. The catch is that she had an underlying genetic "defect" that rendered her unusually susceptible to such an outcome.

Interestingly, in America we have a clear genetic component to many of our autism cases; in Italy no such genetic correlation exists. This is likely explained by our exposure to many more toxic substances than the average Italian. Just ask our bats (white nose disease) and bees (colony collapse disorder) about our excessively toxic environment.

Unfortunately, about all that is needed to approve a new chemical release in America is a potential profit.