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I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

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From Michael Crichton's Web Site: Travels...

Off Tahiti he swam through a school of sharks. In the highlands of New Guinea he moved among painted tribesmen for whom life is perpetual. At midnight in Africa he came eye to eye with an elephant. In the American desert he entered startling new realms of the paranormal.

This is a record of those travels - an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder.

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Of all the things I wrote about [in Travels], spoon bending seems to stick in the rationalist throat. It just bugs people. I don't know why.

I don't know why spoon-bending occurs. I have no explanation. I can't describe it any better than I did in the book. But I have no doubt that it occurs. More than seeing adults bend spoons (they might be using brute force to do it, although if you believe that I suggest you try, with your bare hands, to bend a decent-weight spoon from the tip of the bowl back to the handle. I think you'd need a vise.)

But to see a little kid of 8 or 10 running around with a thick bar of aluminum that he has bent-not a lot, but enough so that if you roll it on a table, it doesn't roll flat-is to realize that whatever is going on, it's not brute force. I think that spoon bending is not "psychic" or bugga-bugga. It's something pretty normal, but we don't understand it. So we deny its existence.

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