...among all politicians and others who seek political solutions to scientific questions. This is simple to understand why if one considers that the very process of scientific inquiry, it's essence, while it begins with a question invariably results in more questions, which leads to more discovery and so on...and as you might imagine, it is the antithesis of political action which in essence seeks to limit the set of actions and understanding in order to exact a specific kind of solution that stays just where we want it and don't go giving me more information that blows my scheme out of the water.

So it is with the environment especially as we can see how poorly we understand these vastly complex models which continually make fools of the experts and dissappoint the rest of us while sapping what credibility the public has for "science" and the frustrations of actually acquiring complete and total control of nature.

In the mean time, efforts in research to unlock the secrets of fusion energy go under-funder or restricted to dead-end projects like the Tokomak which, because politicians think science should follow only one course of exploration at a time, hogged all the DOE's research money for decades.

Slowly but surely advances are emerging that will make the energy question moot, but not to worry, there will be plent of other scientific issues on which smart politicians and others will be able to be completely wrong and muddle headed for many years to come, thereby satisfying our monkey instinct craving for argument.

People of the world...relax.

Interesting discussion. Those arguing from the old point of view are sure to be left behind and those arguin about new technology are clearly not looking ahead enough. As fission is becoming safer, marginally, the old problems will still linger, but by leapfrogging ahead into the near future where new understanding of fusion will make obsolete the concerns brought up by both sides of this argument. It is happening, it won't be the ITER Tokomak, and it will open the solar system to exploration, while making environmental restoration an affordable option, if we can limit our population (big 'if')

If, just a few generations ago, you were to make similar statements about many essentials to our modern life, everything from the common availability of aluminum, cheap electricity and the ubiquity of computers with their memory so cheap it's almost free, you would have been institutionalized. Cheap, safe and non-radioactive fusion may seem like a dream but the technical foundations are being developed and the theories are promising. All that's missing is the drive to explore and develope it. And yet the leadership,like the electorate itself, is more likely to know all about how to manufacture buggy whips than how to prepare for the terraforming of Mars.

Wrong. Heterosexual men like women whose looks say something about their reproductive fitness. Boobs come with the territory. If it were just about boobs we'd be forming fond associations with guys with man-tits and I think you can see that man-tits are at best neutral when it comes to judging our fellow men and sometimes a negative when congitive dissonance is an issue..or neurosis. What we like is secondary sexual characteristics that say "I'm likely to succeed in making you procreate"....nice young looking mammaries say that the woman can feed the babies...too big or saggy may mean she's already had too many and the probability is reduced. some pubic hair is necessary but again, too much may indicate the female is too old and that the probablity is reduced.

We also like perfume on women, but then smelling like flowers is understood when one realizes what flowers actually are; sex attractants.

Straight 10% tariffs on all imports would present a stable, rational, and non-negotiable aspect to the international trade landscape instead of the draconian, byzantine and highly suspicious instrument of quasi-foreign relations that it now is. Additionally a simple and steady 10% tariff provide the funding for national infrastructure and alleviate the dependence that has developed in the last few decades on the dreaded and even-more suspicious and universally despise "income tax" which is so rife with abuses as to be hardly worth trying to "fix".

...when we get to the subject of "brazilians"...it will inevitably have to be addressed. The public's "right to know" must be upheld.

Having watched the entire bottled water phenomenon grow from it's being some sort of sarcastic joke or preposterous satire that portrayed people being actually stupid enough to pay a lot of money for what comes free from the tap in their homes, into a multi billion dollar business where we blindly watched the safety of our water supply become so suspect that we'd think of bottled water as a necessity (without hardly a complaint except from those "crazy" environmentalists) as we complain about $4 a gallon gas while never flinch at $12 gallon tap water.

Now I see everyone totally taken-in by the alarm over global warming and all I can think is that there is a very important aspect to human perceptions at work in both of these social phenomenon. No doubt there is good reason to be concerned over the quality of our water supplies, just as there is plenty of reason to be concerned over the impacts of human activity on the health of our environment, but the responses by our society, as it's being led by business and politics (blithely reposed on satin sheets) leads me to suspect that the leaderships suggestions have more to do with profits than proofs.