Want to lower the price of gas? Here's a few obvious prescriptions...

1. Implement fiscal policies in the US that will stop the free fall in the value of the dollar. Most of the world's oil is priced in dollars and a drop in the value of the dollar represents a price cut. In earlier times the producers had to swallow this price cut because there was a lot more oil than there was demand. Not so anymore. So the price in dollars rises to reflect a constant income for the producers. Such policies will be very painful as a result of the irresponsible policies of the current regime in Washington.

2. Stop playing war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US is consuming an ocean of distillates running tanks, trucks, and aircraft in these countries. If that were to stop tomorrow afternoon, there would certainly be a measurable downtick in worldwide demand.

3. Stop threatening Iran and explain to the Israelis that we won't tolerate them doing it either. American aggression has made the markets nervous and when American aggression is directed at the world's 4th largest oil producer, prices move. It is amusing to listen to the US, Europe, and Israel pontificate about an Iranian threat considering that if I were to try to add up all the attacks on other countries perpetrated by those three entities in the last 50 years would require all my fingers, all my toes, both arms and legs, and numerous hairs on my head. The number of attacks by Iran in the same time frame? Zero. It appears that having scimitars chucked at you by watery bints is more of a qualification for supreme executive authority than acute analytical skills.

4. Off shore and ANWR drilling and exploration? Not so much. That sort of activity as well as other changes in other country's behavior would put the kabosh on Mr. Leonard's eagerly anticipated peak oil fantasy but won't help the supply of crude anytime soon.

It has not always been so. I used to love to fly. I've flown to South America, Europe, the Middle East, and all over the US. Not anymore, not if I can avoid it. The driver here is not surly or unhelpful airline staff; it is airport security.

I have always resented the outrages in the name of "security" and, of course, in recent years it has gone from the merely ridiculous and sublime to intrusive and idiotic. The straw that broke the camel's back came the last time I flew - about 3 years ago. We were starting the process of moving some 2,000 miles and step one was to load as much of our stuff as would fit into our 3/4 ton van and driving it out here. We then flew back to continue the moving process that would culminate in a tractor trailer load of our stuff (with apologies to the late, great George Carlin) being picked up. But when we started to pack up to fly back, I suddenly realized that I couldn't take a bunch of my stuff with me on the airplane. We had to have our daughter (who would be living on our property until we moved) mail our stuff back to us and/or do without it until we moved out here. That's why, when it looked like I was going to have to help another daughter by driving with her husband with their stuff to their new home, I was looking at the train schedules.

It might well have been foolish deciding to start life off with a rug rat (not everybody can pull things off the way you did) but, hey, if you can't be foolish what is there to life?

The real reason for all the coverage, of course, is that officially the United States is Puritan.

This isn't to say that my self hood hasn't been called into question or that it couldn't in the future but, really, not all that often.

is actually in the grand tradition of all robber barons. Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and others were all voracious businessmen who screwed people and companies left and right, just like Mr. Gates and made themselves immensely wealthy, just like Mr. Gates. In the fullness of time, they used their ill-gotten gains for concert halls, foundations, endowments, and other philanthropic activities, just like Mr. Gates.

Their ruthlessness, chicanery, and underhanded dealings all seem to be forgiven and forgotten in the glow of their philanthropy, just like, it seems, Mr. Gates.

That the reason to exempt the US from the UN war crimes court was because our legal system could be relied on to punish war criminals.

Oh, well.

Your comment about it being all about the relationship is, of course, a truism. The rest of the stuff about gender stereotyping, not so much so. Most high profile marriages that get in trouble do so not because of gender stereotyping but rather from the outsized egos of the individuals involved. Plus, beautiful women have a special disability - their beauty. Lots and lots of men don't get past the beauty to discover the woman underneath it which is the source of the lines from a 50s or 60s tune that go like this:

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life

Never make a pretty woman your wife

You want my personal point of view

Get an ugly woman to marry you.

Wealth, fame, success? They have their place, I guess but not as a personality descriptor.