The Iraquis Can See It. The Kurds

I Am Not Religious. I Do Not Believe That Personhood Is Conferred Upon Conception. But I Also Do Not Believe That A Human Embryo Is The Moral Equivalent Of A Hangnail And Deserves No More Respect Than An Appendix.

Obsession With Self Is The Motif Of Our Time.

When A Party Is In Opposition, It Opposes. That's Its Job. But When It Comes To Power, It Must Govern. Easy Rhetoric Is Over, The Press Of Reality Becomes Irresistible. By Necessity, It Adopts Some Of The Policies It Had Once Denounced. And A New National Consensus Is Born.

If We Insist That Public Life Be Reserved For Those Whose Personal History Is Pristine, We Are Not Going To Get Paragons Of Virtue Running Our Affairs. We Will Get The Very Rich, Who Contract Out The Messy Things In Life The Very Dull, Who Have Nothing To Hide And Nothing To Show And The Very Devious, Expert At Covering Their Tracks And Ambitious Enough To Risk Their Discovery.

I Don't Think You Can Pump Carbon Dioxide Into The Atmosphere Indefinitely And Not Have A Reaction. But There Are Great Scientists Such As Freeman Dyson, One Of The Greatest Physicists Of The Last Hundred Years, Who Has Studied The Question, Who Believes Quite The Opposite. The Reason Transnational Action Is So Difficult Is Because The Major Problem With Climate Change Is, A, That There Is No Consensus, And, B, That The Economic Cost Is Simply Staggering. Reversing It Completely Might Mean Undoing The Modern Industrial Economy.