I suffer from all the frailties commonly assigned to humans. I want what I want, I use fossil fuels, though I drive so little that I use less than a gallon of gasoline per day, on the average, and I'm a bit conscientious about wasting energy in that I keep my thermostat at 62 degrees F in the winter and 82 in the summer. On average, TV is not on more than about an hour per day, but I do use radio quite a bit, though sometimes it's over the internet. I certainly don't even believe the TV unless it's about the weather and can be verified by a look outdoors.

I use an automatic washer and dryer, though I hang my linens outdoors because they smell better that way. I don't make circuit boards at home because of the resulting environmental risks, except for a couple of times per year, when I want to run some cupric sulfate down my effluent plumbing in order to discourage intruding tree root incursions.

I trust the energy industry to act in its best interests, and likewise, the automobile, banking, entertainment, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and other major manufacturing industries in the U.S. It happens that those interests are not well aligned with my own, but I think I know what their interests are. Like most shortsighted teenagers, these interests focus on getting what they want as soon as possible, and to hell with the consequences. Those consequences will, ultimately lead to their demise, and ours, including mine, and there's really nothing I can do about it.

We live in a culture of one dollar = 1 vote, and I have not enough dollars to make a difference. If I had $100E12, or whatever 50+% of the worlds capital amounts to would be, everyone would do things my way. That's not the case, however.

The only comfort I take in all this is the knowledge that, once humanity has, as God planned it, destroyed itself, it won't be back so nature, as God planned it, can restore the perfection He intended before mistakenly creating man and leaving him here to mess things up, as "western society" always does. It's the old story of the grasshopper (e.g. Wall Street) and the ant.

BTW, who do you think puts those "auditors and the Securities and Exchange Commision" that you mention in place? Why would anyone trust them? I don't know whether it's the Texans or the GOP ... I'm not even sure the Democrats would function differently if they were the Texans in charge. It wasn't much different under ElbyJay and Sam Rayburn than it is under Dubya and his Pappy, and don't think for a minute it's not George-I who's pulling the strings ... Dubya hasn't got the brains to create the mess we've got now.

RE