Last summer, I was on a fourteen hour train ride. Two seats ahead of me was a clueless mother with an infant in a car seat on the floor underneath her six-year-old screamer. I really felt sorry for the kid; all he wanted to do was play with the similarly aged girl behind him. He probably thought his name is No and Bad. She actually hit him for asking the girl behind him a question and had no food, toys or books for this long trip. When another parent offered to watch the infant so that the clueless mother could take her son downstairs and calm him down, she screamed at her.

While I usually condemn driving cars, I really wish the car rental company had made an exception and rented her a car in spite of her lack of credit.

CNN is now in last place among the cable "news" networks. I wonder why people don't tune in to a station that offers such insightful news and analysis?

I agree that we could all go on for quite some time with how Americans waste large amounts of energy. However, please don't use cash for clunkers as an example of how to cut back on oil use/GHG emissions. The EU did an analysis of the impact of various incarnations of C4C and concluded that it would lower emissions if and only if:

1.) There is no age limit on the clunker being turned in

2.) There is no requirement to purchase a new motor vehicle

Notice we did the opposite. Because of the embodied energy and carbon costs of building new wheelchairs, forcing new production is an environmentally poor idea. It might have had a positive impact on the economy as a whole, but that is another can of worms entirely.

Kerik will do a couple of years for seriously enriching himself and then lying about it to authorities. Meanwhile a small-time arsonist who torched a couple of SUVs in Oregon gets a couple of decades for his property crime (since reduced to one decade) and poor people who rob banks get at least a decade. We should try being a nation of laws where we are all equal under the law.

This is a capitalist society. That means that if you can obtain millions of dollars at a young age, then you can let that capital work for you and you don't need a high paying job/career, since you have capital-derived income. Therefore, who cares if a nude modeling career is short lived? It is analogous to being a football running back. Few who try succeed, those who succeed have very short careers but most of them are set for life. Modeling has an advantage over footballing in that it rarely leads to early dementia or death. However, both positions are filled by people who are genetically gifted and have often worked very hard to make their bodies something many people like to see.

The fact that both activities tend to excite males more than females does not make them evilly sexist avenues of female degradation. Males look at great running backs and imagine they have something in common with them. Women look at nude models and get angry that the models don't have 25% body fat (or higher, yikes) like they do. There were times when being fat was considered sexy, but that was when it was difficult to obtain enough food to be fat, thus being fat was a demonstration of power. We currently live in a culture where calories are readily available and physical work is optional for most. Thus, it is more difficult to be fit than fat and the act of not carrying extra adipose is a demonstration of discipline, which is akin to power.

I much prefer the bumper sticker version of feminism to the cranky anti-sex version:

Feminism: the radical notion that women are people

I assume that the solar installation would be a grid-tie system. If that is the case, does the calculator add in the monthly fee to PG&E? It is one thing to meet all of one's energy needs all the time, and another to "net zero" by supplying the grid with extra production at times of plenty and drawing from the grid when production is insufficient, thus avoiding the need to store energy.

Where I live (OR), we have reverse-incentive energy pricing tiers. If you are conservative in use (daily use<10kWhrs/day), then you pay more per kWhr than the pigs who use five times as much (actually, the average household uses 60 kWhrs/day here). This is because of the "administrative fee". No wonder Oregonians use twice as much electricity as Californians. Supposedly some of the energy-directed stimulus was supposed to give incentives to utilities to reduce monthly administrative fees to avoid this perverse situation. Is that happening?

How about an amendment that gives elected and appointed federal officials the same coverage as that received by an average American. I guess we'll have to add a supplemental bill to any medical care they receive to bankrupt them, since they can afford a few million dollar hits that the rest of us can't.

Dollars to donuts that the holdouts call themselves christians.

Twenty-five years ago I encountered one of these pageants. Two women and I were bicycling around the East Coast when we came off the Blue Ridge Parkway for much-needed showers (no proper campgrounds on the Parkway). At the Roanoke Sheraton we found ourselves in a large elevator with several contestants and their parents. The girls were really interested in the collection of dirty cyclists and their parents had to keep yelling at them to stay away from us. I actually saw a mother strike her daughter for smearing her lipstick.

I was,and still am, filled with pity for the girls and revulsion at the parents. These things are just so counter to any Western ideals that I have ever been exposed to that I simply cannot mentally process what might drive people to do this to children. I wonder if seeing the two women I was with traveling around the country on their bikes planted any seeds in the minds of the girls we saw. I guess I'll never know.