Clearly this will be applied far more to women than to men. There's no reason to even ask. The calculus is simple:

Patriarchal religion = Make women subordinate, invisible, otherwise dead if no option remains.

Patriarchal culture = Make women uncertain, esteemless, valueless except as a commodity of/mechanism for male expression.

Patriarchal governance = Make women secondary, powerless, get them to collaborate in their own oppression.

This latest ruling only confirms that Iran has "hit the trifecta" in the patriarchal stakes. Not too late to place your bets though, America is in the chute for the next race.

My vote, AncientAssyrian, is that he'll go for the first choice, AKA The Fredo Option. This administration is nothing but a work furlough program for career criminals anyway, so the only difference between office time and jail time is the letterhead on the stationary. He'll be doing just as much good for the American people behind bars as he ever did behind a desk, which is to say, zilch.

former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney will be required to report to a federal penitentiary sometime within the next few weeks

While this is great news, how much better it would be without the words "former chief of staff to" in there.

A boy can dream, can't he?

We have always had Manichean reductionists in our midst, promising a black-and-white world with clear choices for the feeble of wit and will. That they became ascendant over the past decade I ascribe to two things.

The first is that we do not teach or cultivate critical thinking in this country. We prize absolutism over nuance, dogma over reason, folk sense over hard science. Our population as a group does not have the intellectual tools that many European and Asiatic nations possess to deal with a complex world, and to respond to crises (such as 9/11) in a rational way. I lay these conditions at the feet of our appalling educational system and particularly the mass media, which profits greatest from a docile and distractable audience.

The second factor is the influence of postmodernism on America dialog. It may sound bizarre to invoke Derrida et al when discussing the anti-intellectual and Francophobic American public, but the pernicious nonsense of postmodernism has enabled all kinds of new moral charlatanism. By relativising everything, postmodernism has enabled Americans (and others) to blithely ignore whatever facts are inconvenient as "framework" issues, matters of subjective bias instead of objective reality.

Where am I going with all this? Simply here - we may repair some of the ills of this nation with a change of administration, but greater problems will always persist so longer as we allow our country to continue in a course of isolated relativism, detached from the world at large.

I lamented the retention of the anonymous option back when Salon first announced it. I also said that maybe 1% of posts genuinely need anonymity, due to potential real world repercussion, while the other 99% will be for exercises in trolling and chickenshittery.

Glad to see my conclusion has been borne out.

I've been reading that Peak Coal is coming sooner than expected as well. But the worse peaks I've read about recently are those affecting rare metals and minerals. New Scientist has an excellent overview here - http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426051.200-earths-natural-wealth-an-audit.html (membership needed for full article).

Essentially, the elements that go into things like LCDs, batteries, and yes, solar panels, are poised to run out within the next 50 years, some within the next decade. Like oil and coal, the source mines for these are often held by only a few nations. Unlike oil, there's no "alternative fuel" to replace the minerals and metals. (New technologies may be able to circumvent some losses, but if you absolutely must have iridium and there isn't any, then that's that.)

I'd like to see Andrew cover this aspect of resource exhaustion for Salon. I think it needs just as much coverage as the coming shortages in oil, coal, and water, especially as these mineral resources are literally irreplacable.

An interesting notion, but a real non-starter for now. Until the energy required to do so becomes more abundant and cheaper (you see the problem), it's just not feasible. For instance, if some cosmic force extracted all the gold from the Moon and stacked it on the surface as refined bars, it would cost more to go get them and bring them back than they'd be worth.

I personally think that carbon is going to eventually replace most exotic materials in future technology. It's just too versatile, and new structures like fullerenes and nanotubes bring out properties in carbon we never suspected it possessed. But there will inevitably be situations where we need some of the rare stuff, and that's when the problem kicks in. If we need a few ounces of iridium for fusion reactor triggers or some such, then asteroid mining makes sense. But space extraction is probably never going to be feasible for supplying the tonnes of material needed for consumer goods like LCD screens.

It's the media. No seriously, it is. What the hell else is it, if not?

Specifically, it's the targetted media, and the lack of honesty and truth contained therein. There are no more "facts" in any given broadcast than there is "science" in the average classroom. And both herald from the same root cause - people want a tailored reality that reinforces their beliefs, not one that challenges them.

If you so desire, you can indundate yourself with TV, radio, books, and films which immerse you in a deeply biased unreality. You can cocoon yourself with layers of nonsense so thick that you may as well be wearing your ass cheeks as headphones.

And until such time as it becomes either unprofitable or illegal to disseminate propaganda, lies, and inflammatory rhetoric far and wide, this problem of the ignorant masses will remain with us.