Guys, please. Its Friday evening here in the states. Reading the intro my eyes glazed over half way through it. This is time for friends, food, drink, and some more drink. Way too intense a story to follow right now. Have a great evening!

The whole lot of it is fraud and waste perpetrated by politicians on the tax paying public. My bill is in the mail.

In the interest of equal opportunity corruption, you can find another example in one of the current health reform proposals - tax "Cadillac" health insurance plans but exempting government and union employees.

Government cannot do ANYTHING of any significance without this kind of corruption. That is the single best reason to keep government out of it.

Trees are only effective removing co2 from the atmosphere during their growth phase. Once they mature it's pretty much a wash - the co2 they remove vs the methane they emit due to organic decomposition. To use trees for geo-engineering we first need to cut down the old growth forests (including as much of their root system as possible) and use the lumber in a way that will sequester the co2 (like build housing). This will free up land on a huge scale so we can then plant new trees.

The problem isn't unions good/bad, business good/bad or government good/bad. Its simpler than that. I know it sounds trite but the old adage is true, "power corrupts." Whatever the power, union, big business or government, it will become corrupt and ultimately only interested in its own growth and expansion. I think we know that and try to balance power with power. So you have big business that we balance with unions and government. But what eventually happens is these centers of power start working together to advance common agendas. The net result in any case is, we get screwed.

If you read Robert Bellah's "The Good Society", he argues that we need a strong "civil society" to offset the powers in economic realm and the political realm.

Unfortunately we just argue back and forth in the political realm as if there lies the solution to our problems.

Here's my take on it. Government's goal is to grow; grow in power and control over all. The means to do this involves making people afraid. When people are afraid they are willing, in fact may demand, that government step in and "do something." This is not a left or right issue. The right might use the "terror threat" to make people afraid, the left "global warming." Both have used "economic meltdown." So we argue the merits of this or that all the while the government rolls along on its real agenda.

People generally don't change or adapt. Progress happens when old farts (like me) die off and are replaced by younger people with different ideas.

Has anyone estimated the environmental impact of generating so much energy from the wind? We cannot assume no impact. If you are taking that energy from the wind, there will be an impact somewhere. Maybe drought in the upper mid-west US from cutting down gulf stream airflow through Texas? I don't know, just wondering.

Your description of religious morality is laughable but the question still remains. What is the moral authority we're applying? I'm willing to discuss any you might suggest. Kant's Moral Imperative? Rawl's Original Position? If those don't suit your fancy we could say people democratically decide morality. Or perhaps we could rely on the US Constitution. Or I guess you can continue your ad hominem argument but that won't get us very far.

Hmmm, interesting. Since we don't like religion any more I'm not sure what moral authority we use to define torture and pronounce it "wrong." I think we need to use relative morality and contextualize our actions toward them so it makes sense from their cultural perspective. Keep in mind the cultures of many of these folks will cut off hands for robbery, stone women for adultery, etc. With that as a standard I doubt anything the US has done could be considered torture.

Your bigotry does not disguise the fact that you cannot explain the difference between a republic and democracy. Actually I think Obama is a good thing for America. Each generation needs to learn how vacuous his ideals are. Too many today were not around while Carter was president so the lessons need to be learned again. So let's get this out of our system so we can get back to the idea that growth and prosperity are driven by PEOPLE pursuing "self interest rightly understood." (Dazzle me copponex by telling me where that quote is from.)

This is not a democracy. It is a republic. You should learn the difference before you end up with neither.

The mortgage industry hardly ever had a free hand. When you have government assuming significant risk by guaranteeing loans, you don't have the necessary risk vs reward considerations that keeps markets healthy. So yes, the government was complicit but hardly the only ones to blame. You do have companies and individuals that took advantage of the situation to increase profit. You also have individuals that took advantage of the situation to get more home than they could afford. There is plenty of blame to go around. What I think is funny now is that you had unsustainable deficit spending by consumers that lead to unsustainable economic growth. That bubble has burst. To fix it we are now going to inject unsustainable deficit spending by the government. What a laugh!

Hey guys, the USSR doesn't existing any more.

In fact the two should NOT meet due to separation of church and state.