I have to listen to her take a few questions but she seems divisive. If she is such a great woman why dont I see her embrace women from all backgrounds. Women of all backgrounds would love to support a strong woman.

Sorry but a strong woman stands up for the rights of other women. Women that want a CHOICE. Most women don’t want to be told what they can do with their bodies.

Has she been to areas that are plagued with gun violence?

and since she is running on a Country First ticket. No questions her patriotism when she wants to put Alaska First.

So ladies continue to love, support and vote someone that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. so you can feel better about yourself. I want someone that will make me feel better about the Country First. I can me feel better about me. So Sarah Palin thanks but no thanks.

Regardless of what sort of parent you are, new lives in this country consume a disproportionately large amount of natural resources and produce a disproportionately large amount of trash.

Also about DINKs owing football teams? Fred Levy Jr. former owner of the Rams has grandchildren.

When there were fewer people on the planet, it was just fine to have as many children as you could support. There was just that much more surface area per person. Dilution was an appropriate way to handle pollution for a long period of human history.

A concrete way to think about this is the metaphor used by the carbon foot print calculators. You know the ones I mean, where you enter the number of miles you drive per day, the square footage of your home, whether or not you fix plumbing leaks quickly and receive an estimate of how many earths it would take to support all the people on earth if all the people on earth lived in the same manner. To get the number down from the inevitable 3 to 7 earths that are needed for most US residents, you could drastically change your life style or you could reduce the number of people you multiply by (the world population).

Most likely it will take a concerted effort by citizens of the first world to reduce our consumption and our population. As economies of third world countries improve, and as education levels (especially of women) in third world countries improve, as their job prospects improve etc. birth rates have been falling. This is not the only part of the answer, however, because at the same time, the standard of living in third world countries increases along with consumption.

As usual, there is no simple solution. It will take contribution from intelligent people of all political sensibilities to arrive at a solution (or more likely, many solutions) to this problem. First we need to be clear that there is a problem. It is much easier to pretend we can keep coming up with technological fixes to our consumption problem. It is even easier to blame global warming on sunspot cycles which clearly we can’t control. However, sunspot activity does not correlate with our consumption habits.

Also: about the sunspots. I believe the poster is referring to a literature search rather than hands on research, since she refers me to a blogger’s account of someone’s research. It should be noted that the blog posting refered to is formated to look like an article from the online (and peer-reviewed) journal _Science_ but it is a blog post, not a peer-reviewed primary research article. The distinction is not trivial. The insistence on peer-review makes science (as a discipline, not the journal) a conservative endeavor where change is not taken lightly and paradigms take mountains of evidence to change. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand it ensures that accepted scientific ideas of the day have been soundly investigated. However, when someone has conflicting evidence, changing the state of the field takes a long time. Science allows a constant re-evaluation of theory in light of new evidence making it our best method of solving problems of the physical realm.

I want my children (and my children’s children and so on) to have woods and streams and farm fields (not industrial feed lots – real fields, with grass and clover) and deserts and tundra and oceans to explore and find joy in. I would prefer that they (my children’s children and so on) not live through the massive population crash we are heading for. At some point (unless we reduce our consumption and our population) we will increase our population faster than we can come up with ways to squeeze more corn out of fewer acres and some people will survive but most will not. Long before that however, our future generations will loose the opportunity to enjoy the gorgeous landscapes we enjoy today.

Has it escaped folks’ notice that, in the days before birth control, that might be about the MEDIAN for a healthy family?

What, then, has changed?

Simply put, it is the tendency of Americans and the post-industrial West to prefer self-centered playing with toys to the raising of children.

While not all DINKs exemplify this, the vast increase in their numbers does. We want to travel, we want to live in big houses, we want hi-def, we want new-car, caviar, four-star daydreams. (Think I’ll buy me a football team.) Hard to do that with a little liability who has to be toilet-trained and who keeps drawing with crayon on the wallpaper.

So, when families had no option, most of them learned selflessness and give-and-take out of necessity.

Nowadays, while there *are* selfless DINKs and while there might — possibly — be self-centered parents of nine, it is usually those who demonstrate their willingness to care patiently for the future of the country who most certainly exhibit (a.) the sacrificial willingness to take on a burden for the sake of a cause greater than themselves, and (b.) optimism about the future of the country.

Hurrah for Sarah Palin and her husband. May their children appreciate their lives and the character of their parents, and pass on that generous gift to their own children in turn.