Do not know of their credentials or previous work, but based on this article the authors do come off as opinioned without basis and often make little sense. What is this para-phrased wail they have, "We see hope and environmentalists only see despair". What? Did they not have an editor?

And did they miss the part where the modern industrial revolution just occured like really recently in the past 100+ years or so and thereby we as humans really just started to have a global impact? In the past, pockets of humanity here and there could and have screwed their local environment in such a way to screw themselves. To say this is just nature at work is stupendously stupid. Yeah, why don't we explode our tens of thousands of nuclear war heads, I mean if we did it would just be an act of nature like a volcanoe or something right? Yeah, right. We are now RESPONSIBLE for the new ability we have to wipe out most if not all of the human race. It's not a question whether the earth will survive our most stupid moves, the earth will take care of itself and actually the earth itself could decide to wipe out the human race. But for us it is not even a question whether we want to protect and preserve the earth. We have to live on it. We need the earth to survive. It’s simple. Damn.

They do kind of strike a chord with me, reasonable or not, in the notion that the environmentalist movement can hold nature “too” precious or sacred. Nature is sacred but it is also ruthless and brutal. I see tremendous beauty in nature but also horror, precluding my ability to get too romantic about it. And again, this does not diminish our responsibility in our stewardship of the earth.

"This faith in science is often accompanied by the antiquated view that there are facts separate from values and interpretations."

This statement seems to strike a number of emotional chords, maybe from having to live under the Bush anti-science dark ages. If they meant that facts are immutable but that based on values, perceptions of those facts are variable, then cheers, they have actually made sense. If they meant that facts are variable based on perceptions and values, than boo, they are some of the worst assholes to inhabit the planet. That’s the kind of thinking that keeps Neanderthals in power.

The supreme court refuses to hear the case of the man who was "mistakenly" and secretly imprisoned for 4 months because it would require the Bush administration to reveal "state secrets". And here we have the same bunch releasing information in a way that undermined an espionage network tracking Bin Laden. Apparently outing Valerie Plame and that spy network was not enough.

The issue is that this administration is not just stupid, they are maliciously stupid. There is nothing, absolutely nothing the Congress should allow these bunch of sociopathic bozos to do in secret.

Warning, going way off topic.

So what exactly is Salonista supposed to mean other than being intended as a slur.

Is it the liberal counterpoint to dittoheads? Except that dittoheads like to be called dittoheads, they like not having to think and are proud of it. Is it a reference to communists or socialists? Except that I think the cold war and undermining socialist regimes in South America, we are a little past. We've moved onto the fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here schtik.

So I looked up salon in the dictionary and found a definition for salon: "a gathering of people of social or intellectual distinction". So who knows maybe Salonista is a actually a compliment. Being called socially and intellectually distinctive is ok with me.

So if someone believes they are using the term Salonista as a slur, does that infer they hate intellectuals? Is the opposite of a Salonista a knuckle-dragger?

If you made it this far, see I warned you - way off topic.

Deconstructing rudys frivilous lawsuit bullshit, I come to the following probably just as frivilous conclusions:

Frivilous lawsuit = a poor entity against a rich entity

Most frivilous lawsuit = poor liberal entity againt rich conservative entity

Justified lawsuit = rich entity against a smaller rich entity

Most Justified lawsuit = rich conservative entity against any liberal entity

And will conservatives ever shut the fuk up with the free market bullshit. Freedom is never free. Or as I believe Skinner put, "Freedom with out license is tyranny". Free market has to have the same oversight, rules, and regulations that all other aspects of our free society has. Or screw it, let's just declare general amnesty retroactively and what the hell going forward as well for any "freedom" from law or regulation a fortune 500 company may require in sustaining the "free market".

I have never seen a more lame bunch of authoritarian wanna bees on one stage at one time.

What totally pisses me off, when the see no evil, hear no evil monkeys spout the number of innocent souls (geesh could you use any more melodramatic language) lost after our pull out from Vietnam, is that they never mention the numbers killed before we arrived and the number of innocent souls killed while we were there.

The are many estimates that fall over a wide range, but generally the worse casualties for the innocents occurred in the period while we were engaged in Vietnam.

I like rhetoric too as well as hyperbole, so obviously then Phillip J. Hubbell if surrounded by al-qaida with black masks pointing Ak-47s and grenade launcers at him on one side and a 12 year old girl with a John Kerry button on the other, would shoot the 12 year old girl.

Nice to know.

All I care about is muslims are dying. That's a good thing. -- cameljockey

Don't you have some squirrels to torture in the woods or something.