I would prefer a more accurate version of this story: three clerics have admitted to vandalizing the Senate hearing room by smearing the furniture with a fetish substance.

To me that PR firm's "about" page seems to state a simple truth worthy of a bumper sticker: The Right Fools the Right People. That's how the party of Lincoln gets around Lincoln's Rule of Fooling the People.

What the hell is the Vice President doing in a shooting party anyway? Whittington, or anyone else, could just as easily shot HIM by accident.

Two corrections: the American Quaternary (not Quarternary) Association does not publish Eos, which is the house organ of the American Geophysical Union. AMQUA's letter ran in last week's issue, which is behind the firewall but has the same wording as the copy cited here.

This move by the AAPG is a great miscalculation, but I'm not surprised. The AAPG statement on climate change is not dated, but it refers to no literature later than 1999 and should have been reassessed long ago. (In fact its whole set of policy statements at http://dpa.aapg.org/gac/index.cfm is a Web Page That Sucks.) AAPG is a relatively insular group and might not be as sensitive to offending the community of scientists as the broader-based societies. But offend it did. The author of Jurassic Park surely deserves the award, but not the author of State of Fear. Since it can't back down from that embarrassment, the best thing AAPG could do right now is revisit its statement on climate change.

Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, in Canada, has been exploring this territory for many years.

http://www.laurentian.ca/neurosci/_research/mystical.htm

Besides stimulating ecstatic experiences, his team has a working theory of UFOs and earthquake lights based on geophysical phenomena--the tectonic strain theory.

The USGS--not "the Bush administration"--has been working on this new internal policy for two years. Compared to most agencies, the USGS has been a gentlemen's club since its founding in 1879. Until science became "politics by other means," the research carried out by the government's geologists was almost never controversial. It is telling that a long-overdue bureaucratic procedure to keep agency leaders from being blindsided by today's manufactured controversies is itself being blown up in the press. Did it ever occur to anyone that the USGS is protecting itself from the White House?

Nobody can win in today's poisonous atmosphere. I look forward to the post-Bush era, assuming we can recover from the damage. Disclaimer: I have served in the USGS and talk to its scientists, although I haven't yet heard their responses to this news.

The treadmill has no effect on the plane; once the plane starts moving the treadmill, "designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction," won't push the plane back. Conduct a thought experiment the next time you fly in a plane, and you'll see that your experience as a passenger would be precisely the same.

You could indeed create a treadmill that would keep a car in the same place. The car's thrust is applied through its tires. That's probably what people can't get past.

I've been going to the annual AGU meetings for years in San Francisco, but this was my first AAAS meeting. It's a real press frenzy compared to the hardcore geophysics stuff at AGU. OTOH, all the sessions are well "curated" and the overall theme of the meeting, sustainability science, was carried out well in nearly all the sessions I saw. Posting about it at geology.about.com -- sorry I didn't run into you anywhere.

The land east of San Ramon is an epic battleground between old and new in the starkest way: wheat farmers and ranchers, on rain-fed land, versus big-box luxury "homes" with immense infrastructure. Thanks for bringing it to life so well. Old-timers in the Bay area have a ringside seat on a microcosm of the whole world's predicament. Around here, thinking locally is a good analogy of thinking globally. It's important to see things from a bicycle or on foot.

"In other words, we don't have the luxury of hoping for the best, of sitting back and being passive in the face of this threat. In the past, we would say oceans would protect us and, therefore, what happened overseas may not matter here at home."

Bush is talking about himself, and projecting it onto everyone else too. But did Bill Clinton ever believe that "oceans would protect us and, therefore, what happened overseas may not matter here at home"? Has ANY president in the last century ever believed that?

"The American believes that all men and women -- all -- have equal rights, because that is the will of the Almighty and it is God that endows them. Indeed, we believe that no person stamped in the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, degraded, and imbruted by its fellows."

No, the American *Christian* believes that. It's a weak nation and a weak philosophy that must prop up the Declaration and the Constitution with sectarian dogma. The founding fathers wrote those documents to stand on their own merit. Our nation and philosophy have grown weak by the slow failure of the humanities, once robustly secular, and now personality-cults of higher education presume to speak for America where Enlightenment philosophy once held sway. Our political discourse has fallen into a swoon, and Gingrich and Falwell now preside over our nightmares.