And Darwinian is an archangel! If this keeps up, I'm going to petition Salon to publish Paglia twice a week! These threads are the Comstock Lode.

Now, I'm off to sacrifice a goat to Xrandadu Hutman and a chicken to Darwinian.

American journalism is beginning to resemble British yellow journalism such as the Sun, a tabloid reeking with vicious attacks on anything or anyone as long as papers sell. I am particularly tired about the insistent harping on what a candidate did or said 40 yrs ago. Contrary to popular belief (for which i hold as much regard as i do for the IQ of dehydrated carrot) change is good. If someone sticks to or continues with the same behavioral antics of yesteryear that strongly suggests illiterate and boneheaded ignorance.

A good example is the use of marijuana. I have yet to meet any college student from the 60's who has not at least tried it once. And so what? I suppose that getting drunk and driving into walls is a better method of judging character?

Please wake up and stop sounding like tabloids all the time and lets have some real analysis and reporting. And please, no more 6 o'clock news presented by over coiffed cretins and their desperate attempt at witticisms.

thanks

Like no-one else. Practically everyone you see who posts, "gosh, Camilla, how I love thee! Thou art gracious, and smart, and thy farts smellest of lotus and vanilla! Listen thee not to all of the bad liberals who sayest thou art incapable of operating heavy machinery due to the drugs thou art smoking! They are merely jealous of thine glory!," is a first time poster, including the latest.

I like the observations because they confirm my own observations and ideas namely:

1) Obama ran an excellent campaign because he and a few insiders were in control, they had several months to hone strategy which was essentially to defeat one chief rival in Hillary. Now as President elect he has expanded his team beyond the campaign strategists and has to deal with people he is only vaguely familiar with in his own team as well as the opposition.

2) After becoming president elect, Obama has been briefed by Penatagon/National Security insiders about the stete of the war on terror at home and in the mid-east so now he has to deal with the bigger reality.

3) The Republicans and consevative media are well honed at being the party out of power from the Clinton years and are very primed to avenge the liberal attacks on Bush and conservative domestic/foreign policies.

4) Obama has never been a governor or run a large scale operation ala the Clintons, so Hillary's campaign accusation "He's not ready" is not now falling on deaf ears amongst the Hillary supporters and conservatives. Making her Sec'y of State fulfills a "keep your enemies closer" philosophy.

5) Moves like the Sanjay Gupta appointment as Surgeon General underscores a shallow approach by selecting a TV personality who's good at presentation although presentation was Obama's own forte.

6) Obama still has the "big plus" of his own intelligence, intellectual grasp of issues, personal grasp of race and the fact that he is still the one the people elected.

that Paglia describes the mainstream media as "urban elite?" Is there a better definition of Paglia herself that I'm not aware of? A Master's from Yale with a best-selling book titled "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" and somehow Katie Couric and Dick Cavett are elitist?

Give me a break and please stop wrapping yourself in the transparent cape of the everyman.

I'm calling up my wife and telling her that my dissin' Paglia on teh intarwebs got us a chicken!

That'll show her what my wasting time the teh intertubes gets us.

I was sure that in this week's column our Camille was going to leap to the defense of Joe the Plumber, as a shining example of American masculinity, who uses language in a joyously experimental be-bop manner, or some such bvllsh!t. She would then explain that if you think his remarks, about how the media should not report on the war in Gaza, for example, are totally idiotic, then you must be hopelessly elitist, and therefore evil, because the nasty elitists were mean to her at Yale. (The fact that maybe they were hard on her because she doesn't know the difference between a statement of opinion and a reasoned argument defending it is another discussion for another day).

But it seems that Joe the Plumber will have to wait for his glorification, because she's still trying to punctuate Sarah Palin's bvllsh!t to make it looks as though the woman was trying to say something rather than to bluff her way out of answering a question.

Yes, it's Camille who's trying to punctuate Sarah's word salad. Is anyone here seriously dumb enough to think she isn't writinge those "letters" to herself?

contrary to your theory, it appears that you did not receive a star

Obama strings together run-on sentences punctuated by long, drawn-out, high-pitched, droning "aaaaaaaannnnnds" and the occasional "BUTTTT." In between the "ands" and the "buts," there are a lot of self-evident platitudes with very little substance. His chief accomplishment is either winning elections or driving his opponents out of the race by accessing their divorce records.

None of this gives any indication that he's going to govern wisely or well. But one can HOPE, as the Obama campaign has repeatedly repeated!

says

"Perhaps you are so suffocated by the CO2 spewing from Al Gore's mouth, you are incapable of appreciating a JOKE?"

[in reference to a denial based on it's cold outside]

If it was a joke why isn't it funny?

and says:

"Not sure about you, but I actually READ scientific articles about such things as equatorial glaciers and sediment layers."

Those aren't scientific articles.

And to be sure about me: I'm a physicist old enough to have read the first global warming articles and said "thin theory on weak data." I have no job interest in the question, only interest in my own quality of life.

In the last thirty years the data and calculations have consistantly improved. The questions have narrowed and the

uncertainties have shrunken. The deniers have retreated from "it's wrong," to "what about this" to "maybe it won't be as big as predicted because maybe this would have a counteracting effect" to "it will cost too much," while failing to consider the costs of doing nothing.

The prediction problem has never been one of unknown physics but rather the complexity of prediction for the exact system of topography and atmosphere we have. The theory of the formation of clouds is nearly 100 years old, but including the

details of the reflectivity and location of every cloud formed in response to changes in temperature, flow, pressure and water content used to be way too much information. Computers are about one trillion times faster and bigger than 30 years ago. At the same time, the historical climate information used to test models has similarly improved. Now you can do a model including where continents were 100M years ago and get a pretty good reflection of climate data. Similarly, you can reproduce the detailed climate for the last few hundred years, without free parameters.

It seems that climate change denial never seems to come from real climate study but always seems to arise from personal philosophy. One of: it's wrong to change the world except how we are already changing it or it's our right to change the world but we shouldn't change to avoid approaching problems because we've always lived this way, or we're so small compared to God, we should do whatever we want because we can't possibly change anything.