The GOP has excelled at supporting something in a way that doesn't support it. They give enough to distract which ever group they need to distract and yet walk a very fine line*.

Case in point: Those existing stem cell lines. They were viewed as being non-viable and not usable for research. Plus according to many of the articles that I read at the time, they were 'owned' by many different groups and weren't available to anyone or any institution that wanted to use them in research. So by supporting just those lines, the right was placated because no new feti were going to be used but the researchers were squelched too.

On to global warming. It's only a hoax to the stockholders of the corporations and their lobbyist pampered politicians. Well, and the general Fox News devotees and others swayed by passionate arguments based on bullshit. The evidence for it is everywhere, if you look.

It's not so much that the right and the GOP are non-thinking and silly. No, I fear that it goes much deeper than that. The right and the GOP, et al, are parasites that seek to feed off the other inhabitants of this country and to get what they feel they deserve. They want their four star daydreams and their Hummers and their private jets and their massive tax cuts and lobbyist millions and that minorities and women are put in their place. Many, if not all of the true hardcore right wing are not so heavily closeted Nihilists who seek the utter destruction of the governmental and societal structures of this country. They seek the kind of structure that existed before the great depression where the corporations ruled the land. Where you lived and worked at the corporations sole discretion. A time where human life was valued not for what it could do for societal body in general but for the corporate entity in particular. A time before social security, before OSHA, before Medicare and Medicaid. A time when your whole family, from as early as the age of 5 worked 16 hour days in a 6 or 7 day work week. A time when you dropped in the field or were killed by the machines and another economic slave popped into your place.

A time when the leaders of the country sat in their palatial mansions planning their vacations to their far flung 'cottages' across the world and had nary a care over who they hurt, how many children weren't educated, how many lives they consumed to stay in their lap of luxury...

The hard core right wingers look back on the aristocratic times of Europe with the kind of longing that a teenager of the 70's had for Farrah Fawcett...

* The Bushies had the power to kill any chances for any gay anything but they didn't. Why ruin a good thing. Eliminating the ability for gay marriage completely at the federal level would have helped silence a large part of their 'base'. They have to keep their base angry, insensed and passionate. If anything the GOP isn't as much afraid of science as they are marketers of raw naked emotion.

My mother-in-law is quite a woman. She took to email like a duck to water. We got her an iPhone after she ruined her last phone and she immediately set to putting her harp music on it and now 'tex mex's' both of us. She has tried to master the camera and sending pictures too. She's nearly 70 and still likes (appreciates?) her Windows PC. We tried to get her on a Mac but she said that it took her so long to get the pc down that her brain doesn't have room for anything else.

She does quite well for someone who's last computer programming class was done with punch cards...

Her emails are a trip. We are trying to save them for posterity...

My moms can't/won't get it down and I don't know why. (I have 2, birth and adopted who passed away a few years ago)

"There are just not that many other situations in modern life where we spend as significant an amount of time in such close quarters with strangers."

Except for people that work in cubicle farms in today's 'modern' offices...

Where I worked, the diseases spread like a pandemic. People were either too stupid or needed the money and came to work sick and *BAM* they gave it to everyone else.I remember catching a particularly nasty upper respiratory bug that in a span of two weeks, hit everyone.

I guess they aren't 'strangers' but some of them were pretty damn strange.

Those that had kids were probably more communicable and caused the most illness but it does happen. It spreads like wildfire...

I hope that these companies can emerge from the shadows of the dinosaurs that are the fossil fuel 'dirty energy' corporate behemoths.

It will truly be a bright day when that happens.

Where I live we are fighting at least one and possibly two coal plants that the state once 'fast tracked'. The companies behind them claim 'new jobs' and 'cheap energy' and that 'clean coal' will 'save the world'...

When it is pointed out that 'clean coal' isn't, people say that it really doesn't matter because 'we' need the jobs more than a 'clean environment' and since it's already contaminated by the chemical corporation (for over a century) what does a little more pollution matter.

Yes, this manufactured economy has coincidentally put the corporations in the drivers seat for ramming through the wickedest anti-environmental agenda ever imagined. Kinda funny, huh. Almost like it was planned that way.