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The economy has improved do to high oil prices, and Putin has about as much to do with that as Al Gore has to do with the internet boom of the 90's. Though it would explain why he would want to allow tension with Iran to simmer.

Bush has had to deal with an overwhelmingly Marxist western media trying to rubbish him at every opportunity as well. The people can tell and the only thing you can do is let them burn themselves up in their own hatred.

Yeah, we tried that with Afghanistan. It didn't work.

Democratic intervention has nothing to do with enforcing political will onto another people, and everything to do will allowing the peoples will to be enforced in their own country, at least as far as any government of man can enforce the will of the people it pretends to represent.

This is perhaps the biggest oil myth out there. If the west stops buying oil, the price will drop only to the point were developing countries can afford it, and the oil states will then take advantage of them. And they are a lot easier to influence socially, politically, religiously, ect than we are. Remember the Sudanese genocide is little more than Arab colonization of Africa.

You'll be able to build several sun shades/reflectors in the time it takes to aim and fire all your KBO's.

I don't theres any trap here. Just a bunch of ruling backwards extremist mullahs who have raised the ire of some even more backwards extremist mullahs would like to rule, and discovered that there is a Western, female, unburka-ed, teacher, over which they can sir up a hornets nest for their own gain.

I don't see an issue with power shortages, but grow lights do burn out and are fragile. Your going to have to use as much available light as possible.

A Hydroponic greenhouse of the Earth salad bar staples and cereals for man and beast is vital to all our efforts. Nuclear surface, and even transit power is almost a necessity, if not a given already, so our heating and lighting supplements are covered. The biggest remaining issues are bulk scale nutrient creation, and ensuring a clean primary light source.

Considering the strain that ethonal production is already putting on things, I would say it it would.

Even better yet, just what do we have to do to properly adapt to a world devoid of permenant polar ice? First we would have to cease the emitting of CO2, because the slow unintentional bleed will clearly cause tremendous damage to an unprepared human civilization.  Then we'd have to determine if we could control the process, and maintain a stable level at the end, and I think its very important that such a goal is attainable in the maximum of human life span, less than a century. Anything more and your asking far to much of a generation who had nothing to do with the decision making process.

We need to be all on roughly the same level as far as Education is concerned. I use education as the standard only because it is the overriding factor controlling social and economic status. We need to close the education gap before the economic one because economics are probably more of an impediment in a situation such as this anyway. If people can gain the knowledge to live a modern, and necessarily mobile life and provide for their wants and needs on the rawest of the raw materials, then all this is just a matter of organization. Socially, we are in the midst of the last great social revolution of man. Technology is making the mere act of living less of a question, putting the driving force of man more in the quality category. The meaning of life will be far more of a concern than were the next meal comes from. Socially, two camps have developed, the free and the enslaved. The free think that every man has the right to act according to their beliefs so long as it doesn't infringe on others right to do the same. The enslaved, or rather the slave masters believe that any excerise of free will that varies from them is a bad influence that must be squashed as threat to them. This will either end when the free people prevail, or the whole thing will descend into thermonuclear genocide if the free people can't be bothered to stand up for themselves. And it will be settled in a generation or two.

That aside, the remaining road blocks are technological. The biggest single change is probably cheap carbon nanotubes for all your construction needs. Their isn't much that can't be made directly from them that can't be had locally pretty much anywhere.

Not if it prevents the average consumer from making the expensive transition to said alternatives.

Tancredo is a single issue runner: the border fence. Beyond that he I don't think he pays much attention to anything.

I'd be more worried about the uranium

The key to preventing the former Soviet block from hemorrhaging nasty stuff from the Soviet era is empowering and working with them. They have all the potential and sophistication as the west and none of the prosperity. Its no wonder their a little bitter and like to arbitrarily oppose us despite the obvious danger it puts them in.

Its a poorly worded question. There is no question whether we need to adapt to a change. We do. The question is where on the thermometer should the Earths temperature be.

Iran deserves an arms embargo from everyone, not just Russia.

And we have a hard enough time stopping countries from producing WMD's on their own. I'll worry about those before the Aks.

Honestly, the best defense we have against ak's are our own. But I can't buy one in my state with anything bigger than a 10 round clip, much less a collapsible stock, a pistol grip, a silencer thread or bayonet lug. So really, were only disarming ourselves.

Russian designed stuff is produced, found, and used all over the world by former Soviet bloc countries, drug cartels, even various US allies because its so dam cheap. Its the legacy of the cold war we'll have to deal with for the next century or so.

We can't take it personally. I'm sure the Russians didn't like having their own stuff turned against them in Chechnya either.