The illusion that taxing our way to a solution in the belief that if only the govenment had more money to spend on a social problem whose source is commonly (and I think wrongly) identified as due to poverty, is one that needs some examination.

What's kinda funny, or tragic, depending on one's point of view, is that those rich liberals (they all look the same in their expensive homes and cars anyway) in SF (a town I know pretty well having lived there and interacted with the full range of social strata) are singularly despised by both the poor and the working stiffs, who blame all their troubles (again identified as lack of money) on the rich, regardless of what they do with it..it's never the right thing since there's never enough and some poor bloke has bad luck and is unhappy. I love SF, really, including all its contradictions, and I'm hardly a fat cat or a conservative, but from my perspective the happiest people in SF, and anywhere, and I presume Kansas too, are those who are living simply regadless of their wealth and are doing things for their community and that brings real fullfillment.

The best thing the government can do sometimes is get out of the way and praise those who help their neighbors. This unhappiness cannot be cured with money and I suspect the urban environment, planned and designed as it is, is at least partly if unwittingly, to blame.

A complex picture is being developed, it seems for the cause of the Air France crash and you include the possibility of hail, among other weather conditions. When I first heard that it appeared as if the plane broke up in mid-air, I really wondered what could do that know from your column and myown knowledge of engineered materials just how hard that would be to do if you tried.

But one meteorological phenomenon that was not discussed, unless I missed it, was the likelyhood of megacryometeors. Though it contains the word "meteo" it does not allude to objects from space but rather the phenomenon of their falling from the sky, which is what meteor means. The wiki on this is very interesting and its association with the ITCZ is hard to miss, considering that not too long ago one weighing 220kg fell in Brazil...what it weighed and how many accompanied this mega sized hailstone is not speculated upon but if they form at high altitudes and are then subjected to the adiabatic conditions in the air column it was likely much much larger. How often the fall is another queston since they melt once they hit the ground..how would we identify them or know?

The fact that air travel through this zone is statistically safe and these kinds of collisions would be extremely rare would not eliminate the possibility altogether and would explain a mid-air break up if a plane encoutered a particularly large one or even a swarm of them since the conditions of their formation would presumably be on a scale that weather systems in the ICTZ are.

...that a lot of money will trade hands, though my suspicion is that the bulk of it will travel from the accounts of large national corporations to the hands of eager broadcasters and other so-called and self-identified journalists in payment for the increased numbers of eyeballs glued to the screen/page where they will also be subjected to the power of advertising and the allure of material goods.

I wish this issue of religious garb; whether to wear it or not, would stand away from the question of whether it is or isn't to be allowed and instead see the emergence of the real question, which is: "should anyone have to wear it, or be subjected to religious strictures that they do not want to observe?"

I don't care if the halloween party in the Castro decides that next year's theme will be "burqas for everybody", nor do I care is some young deluded moslem teenage girl wants to wear it to school, or for that matter if she wants to wear an exposed crucifix. I'd be upset if some believers in the flying spaghetti monster, as unlikely as it seems, decided they wanted their son or daughter to wear some identifiable article of clothing or decration when the kid doesn't want to, the same as I'm opposed to moslems requiring their kids to wear religiously approved clothing. If the kid doesn't wear it, it will be the parents problem, not society's. The operational word is "wants". It's the forcing of behaviors, one way of the other and the intolerance for other's public expressions of the beliefs, silly or as serious as they may be, that is the question that should be addressed, and it's pathetic that the few deluded scriptural fundamentalists from the major religions that are driving the public's perception of the issue rather than the voices of reason, freedom of thought, and liberty to act.