I don't know if I wrote that. Ditto letters aren't really my style. I read every word you wrote ranting about the TSA, and went back and read older letters about it as well. That's actually when I became a faithful "Ask the Pilot" reader. I agree wholeheartedly that banning water on airplanes is one of the stupidest moves in airline history. And, if it's any comfort, even though I'm opposed to making people sit on airplanes for long lengths of time, I don't completely blame the airlines. It seem to me, based on what I read here, that a good part of the problem is the policy that a planes scehduled take-off time can be cancelled and then rescheduled with no warning. That doesn't mean that I don't hold the airlines responsible for poor treatment, where applicable. But the TSA is separate from the airlines. I can be annoyed with the TSA before I fly and still annoyed with an airline when my flying experience is horrible. I wish I were rich enough to afford first class, but since I'm not, flying is hell.

... have started with Afghanistan? Now, when we are mired in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to have decided that they will leave no stone unturned in attempted to clean up the mess they've made. If they had shown this same dedication to cleaning up and holding Afghanistan, they might have been able to actually accomplish something.

This is not a situation that I think can be compromised away. One one side, you have farmers who want to use this genetically modified crop. On the other, you have people who want their crops totally uncontaminated. In between, you have the wind, blowing pollen from one field to another. No amount of "compensation" will satisfy the organic growers, who simply want to continue to grow their pure crops. And I doubt that anything is going to stop agribusiness from entering this new realm of genetically modified crops. An EIS will slow things down, but I don't really see how it can find a compromise that will suit anybody. The two sides are simply at odds.

That said, I don't think the major issue here should be contamination of organic crops, or even the health effects of using genetically modified crops. They can fairly easily run tests to determine if the crops are safe, and organic farmers have been dealing with contamination from nearby crop-dusters for quite a while. The biggest issues are ones that our government environmental impact analysis process is totally unequipped to deal with: How will releasing human-modified genes effect the environment? Are we going to end up with pesticide resistant weeds? Will there be massive insect deaths as some weird side-effect of this technology? What are the long term effects? Nobody could have guessed when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk that someday somebody would fly airplanes into buildings in an act of terrorism. I think we can safely say that we would have move forward with aviation if we had known, since the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Every innovation comes with unknown risks and benefits. I'd like to have people at least trying to study the effects of genetic modification of crops before we implement their growth in an large-scale manner.

Until they develop a computer that can be laid on the kitchen counter, covered with flour, and have egg yolk dropped on it without breaking down, cookbooks will be safe. I've used a few on-line recipes, but it's more of a hassle to print them out and then use them than it is to grab my favorite cookbook and search for a recipe. And it's hard to know how good the recipe will be before you cook it. My "Best of Cook's Illustrated" has never failed me, and I still depend on "Better Homes and Garden's New Cook Book" for basics. If I'm making a cake for a special occasion, I know that I can go to one of my trusted books and get a good recipe. If I get a recipe on-line, I don't know who tested it.

That said, the internet is wonderful for less common recipes. For example, my husband had a craving for the pea soup of his youth in Quebec, called "Habitant Pea Soup". I was able to find a variety of recipes and he helped me sort out which were closest to the soup his grandmother made.

... if the housing bust busted and the real big story of 2007 turned out to be the mystery of the missing bees. In all honesty, the bee situation worries me more than the housing problems. Recessions are not good things, but when I think of what an actual loss of bees would mean to agriculture, even the worst recession pales in comparison. Let's hope this is a temporary downturn in bee populations, not a trend.

They all went to Wall Street and stung the traders in retaliation for agribusiness's promotion of genetically modified crops that may kill insects. Why do I have a vision of a fat, poorly shaven, man in a bee costume?

Okay, seriously... Isn't this just a reaction to China's meltdown? Which is a reaction to our housing lending meltdown? Traditionally, we are used to being the leaders. The rest of the world could pretty much go to hell and we'd stand strong. I don't think that attitude will work now that we are so heavily indebted to the rest of the world. My gut tells me that at some point there will be a reckoning for living high on borrowed money. Maybe that's just my puritan streak... but it doesn't make sense that a nation can just borrow more and more money and never set up a payment plan to get itself out of debt.