Is reading The Stranger online actually any greener than reading the printed-in-Yakima hard copy? It was time to roll up my sleeves and do some real, primary, research on the question. Allow me to show my work.

Human understanding of life has come in spurts, separated by decades of consolidation and grappling with new data or new ways of thinking about biology. We’re, right now, in midst of another spurt in our understanding of life.

The optimistic among us assume that, eventually, new technology or new political movements will stop carbon release into the atmosphere. One of the comforting assumptions about climate change is that the effects of humans putting carbon into the atmosphere can be reversed. Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, right? So, if we just stop adding more, eventually carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should drop, and the adverse climate changes should reverse.

Nope.

Well, that was a lot of money chasing nothing. A vast pool of money, and a growing list of problems–why wasn’t the connection ever made? Why didn’t at least some of this wealth go to solving even a few of these problems?

We need to try something new, to start a new engine behind our economy.

What is leveraging? Investing with borrowed money.

Can anyone tell me why highly leveraged investment schemes are in any way desirable?

Want to distill down the New Deal-era financial reforms? If you want our money to bail you out, you have to play honestly and by our rules.

Today’s “solution” to the present crisis is all bailout, no regulation–the mirror image of FDR’s. It’s going to fail.

If you aren’t concerned about the massive bailout of Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae by the US taxpayers, you should be.

The next president, who in turn will set the regulatory environment, really matters.

McCain’s record is terrible.

If I were a woman accused of claiming my daughter’s child was my own, and I knew such accusations were false, I’d use science to prove myself right.

The second “storm of the century” is about to hit New Orleans, less than five years after the first “storm of the century.”

That should make you wonder.

East Aloha street is the city’s designated route for cyclists to get East and West across Northern Capitol Hill.

Roll that in your mind, if you’re prone to think the Critical Mass people were asking for it.