No, Mr. Anonymous, the price of a Starbucks fancy coffee won't feed a poor family for a week. Thanks to globalization, poor people in the Third World are increasingly having to pay the same prices for food as people in the First World, which makes them even poorer. There are sometimes subsidies for some staples, but otherwise that's about it.

Same message goes to those who object to the One Laptop Per Child project because they have wildly inaccurate ideas about how much food the money would buy.

The Norse people who settled in Greenland around AD 1000 managed to hang on for about 400-450 years before they were wiped out ... by a climate that turned colder and by refusal to learn from the Inuit: the Norse apparently reached Greenland from the east before the Inuit got there from the west. If the Arctic were ice-free in the 1400s, the Norse in Greenland would not have been wiped out by the loss of all their crops and livestock. The idea that the Chinese found an ice-free Arctic is just bats.

Jared Diamond's Collapse has a detailed discussion of the fate of the Greenland Norse.

Steve Gilliard's excellent blog has covered the black community's mixed reactions to Sen. Obama long before Salon did, more effectively than Salon has (Salon has lots of great writing, but you don't have his expertise). You should read him, Joan. http://www.thenewsblog.net (sorry, your interface does not appear to support links).

I think that the purpose the defense had, in talking about the possibility of calling Cheney, was to help get a favorable jury. If Cheney is a potential witness, then anyone who hates Cheney's guts (that is, 2/3 of the country) can be dismissed for cause.

I wouldn't be surprised if Libby feels resentment about Karl Rove, but my impression is that he's still fiercely loyal to Dick Cheney.

The idea of putting Cheney on the stand to face a hostile prosecutor was, I'm sure, a feint; if it were serious Cheney would have gone to court to stop it.

I'm a MoveOn member. I would have preferred Barbara Lee's bill, but that bill wouldn't have gotten more than 100 votes, tops. I felt that the MoveOn poll was slanted, but even if less slanted, I think most of the members would have gone for supporting the Pelosi bill, because, as Barbara Lee herself said, the alternative was a Republican bill giving Bush a complete blank check. It might have been 60 percent instead of 80-something.

The key is whether the Pelosi bill is a starting point, and whether the House can be held together.

When it comes to human reproduction, there are some things that just can't be made equal. 100% of mothers are present when the child is born; a significant fraction of fathers aren't. This means that it simply isn't possible, at the beginning of a child's life, for a mother to be irresponsible in quite the same way as it is for a father.

I'm against pressuring people into marriage just because of pregnancy, but I'm fine with efforts to specifically address fathers (especially single fathers) and helping them to be more involved both financially and emotionally with their children to the extent that it's beneficial for the child.

Glenn, you've written several times something similar to this quote from your article:

There is a widely accepted journalistic principle that reporters are not required to conceal the identity of anonymous sources who feed them false information with the intent to induce the journalist to disseminate the falsehoods. In fact, in such a situation, there is an obligation on the part of the reporter to reveal who the sources are who passed on those lies.

I see no evidence that such a principle actually exists and is followed. Sources lie to journalists, and journalists go back to the same sources, again and again.

Glenn,

Looks like you might have dropped some text just after "Other than the fact that Coulter used a prohibited word ...".

It certainly seems that Ms. Clark-Flory read only the first page of the Post's article and not the second, and other commenters have called her on it. But why did the Post lead with the fluff (anecdotal stuff about one couple) and leave the meat (polling data indicating that there are real gender differences) for the end of the article? It's not just Broadsheet writers who are in a rush, and only absorb the first few paragraphs of an article; it's a rule of journalism that you write based on this assumption.

That said, in my family it's my wife who's been actively checking out the alternatives to incandescent light bulbs; right now we have a mix, because some of our outlets have dimmers. And she found some cool (literally; the bulbs are practically cold to the touch) LED Christmas lights for our tree this year.

I'm in my late 40s, and I remember struggles with my third-grade teacher, who thought I'd be much better off if I learned to use my right hand. People now in their 70s often had their hands slapped every time they tried to use their left hand. That's why no conclusions can be drawn from the fact that there are fewer elderly left-handers. The societal pressure against is enormous, and it shows up in the language: "left-handed complement", "gauche" (French for left), "sinister" (Latin for left), etc. In the old days, you had to be really determined if you wanted to be a left-hander.

There have long been claims that forcing a left-handed child to use his or her right hand is associated with stuttering, but the research seems inconclusive. Still, parents should know that there may be negative consequences if you don't accept your child's natural hand preference.