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A Tale of Two Scientific Consensuses

Uhm, that must be a web only article, it's dated 6 April 2007 and isn't in my paper edition for May 2007. And I don't recall it being in April's edition.

There's a scientific consensus that GM crops are safe.

We should listen to a "scientific consensus" when they say climate change will kill us all, but we shouldn't listen to them when they say GM crops are safe?

I'm ashamed of the way the press covered this story. Journalists are known for putting horrible puns in their headlines, and they have a certain standard to live up to with that. By titling TFA "Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?", they have missed an obvious opportunity to do that: it should have been called "Plight of the Bumblebee".

Oh wait, I take it back. I just checked Google News, and actually there is an article with exactly that title. So, balance is restored and the press is behaving normally, although I'm still ashamed of them.

At a recent Seattle Ruby Brigade hack night someone asked how many people used the DVORAK keyboard layout. Out of 9 people, 7 used DVORAK and only 2 were using QWERTY. I personally made the switch last Christmas, after 25 years of typing with QWERTY. What do you use? Have you switched to DVORAK? Have you been wanting to make the switch? Has anyone else noticed an increase in adoption of DVORAK lately?

At a recent Seattle Ruby Brigade hack night someone asked how many people switched to the furry lifestyle. Out of 9 people, 7 had made the switch and only 2 were not into that kind of stuff. I personally made the switch last Christmas, after 25 years of boring normalcy. What alternative lifestyle are you into? Have you switched to the furry lifestyle? Have you been wanting to make the switch? Has anyone else noticed an increase in furries lately?

You're in the UK. They want to watch everything that *everybody* does. There are 32 surveillance cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell's Home.

Just to be clear on this, let's make sure we're all on the same page. Clinton was asked by a grand jury about consensual activities between two adults who are considered legally capable of making their own decisions.

The question had no bearing whatsoever on his ability to do his job as president. In fact, the vast majority of people who complain about Clinton are opposed to him not because of his activities, but because they think he's a bad person. And not just because he lied, but because of his sexual proclivities!

The simple fact is that he never should have asked the question, because it had no bearing on anything. And because it was in front of a grand jury, he was denied his fifth amendment rights.

Your post has a certain amount of truthiness to it.

Bill Clinton was not the victim of some vast right wing conspiracy. He was the victim of the sexual harassment laws and policies that he, his wife, the Democratic Party, and their Feminist supporters enacted in the early 1990s.

Rather than learning a lesson about the nature of government power -- which his political enemies did use against him -- and undoing the bad policies they enacted, he and his supporters decided that the laws they supported just shouldn't be applied to him.

But I'm sure you and many others take comfort in the leftist myth about Bill Clinton as the innocent victim, while so many other people had their lives ruined during the sexual harassment witch-hunts post-Anita Hill and Tailhook.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/30591.html

License to Grill

How the Clintons invited Ken Starr into their private lives.

Virginia Postrel | April 1998

Like just about everyone else in America, I believe Bill Clinton had a sexual affair--if not dictionary-definition "sexual relations"--with intern Monica Lewinsky. I think it's likely, though by no means a sure thing, that he lied about that affair in a sworn deposition. And I wouldn't put it past him to suborn perjury or obstruct justice, though the evidence at this writing is very murky on those serious charges.

The president has what is popularly known as a zipper problem. He appears to like the sort of women who are unlikely to head health care task forces or jet off to Davos, Switzerland, to lecture the world on the morally corrupting effects of capitalism. Given both power and charisma, Clinton seems to have ample opportunity to act on his impulses. And though it's unlikely that Lewinsky will be his final fling, he manages to hold his marriage together and even inspire ferocious loyalty in his wife. Power and charisma probably have something to do with that feat too.

Clinton also lies all the time--so much that he often appears unable to tell he's doing it. His State of the Union address was full of what Washington Post columnist James Glassman rightly calls "big, brazen, and undeniable" lies, starting with "two whoppers": that "we have the smallest government in 35 years" and that Clinton wants to spend any budget surplus on Social Security rather than new programs. The government has shrunk (modestly) by only one measure, the number of federal employees; it spends, taxes, and regulates more than ever. And Clinton is proposing so many new spending programs--without offsetting cuts--that he can't fund them without substantial new taxes on cigarettes and corporate income. Given his lies about policy, and about his past, it's not surprising that even his political allies disbelieve him about Monica Lewinsky.

Nonetheless, Clinton does not deserve his current round of legal troubles. To be publicly humiliated as a moral weakling, lacking both judgment and self-control--that he deserves. To be distrusted by both intimates and the general public--he deserves that too. But for sexual pecadillos and routine lies to lead to possible high crimes and misdemeanors takes more tha

just remember: the same people who sport bumper stickers saying "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" and are proud about getting their news from Comedy Central, they're the same ones writing letters to the editor in all the papers saying the debate is over

Another thing we've heard from the Grünsturmabteilung is that there's such a strong "consensus" around their view of what's happening with the weather. When a similarly large consensus says there's no danger in (for instance) genetically-modified foods, they ignore it and keep prattling on with their Chicken Little alarmism. Consensus only seems to matter to the Grünsturmabteilung when it works in their favor.

Reanalyzing the Stern Report, Yale University economist William Nordhaus recently noted that a "high-damage" scenario might reduce global GDP by almost 14 percent in the year 2200. On the Stern Report's own assumptions, "This means that per capita consumption would grow from $7,800 today to only $81,000 in 2200," instead of $94,000 (in today's dollars). That's not good, but it hardly seems catastrophic.

I mention them because of all the possible groups out there, they're about the last that would think to jump on the global warming bandwagon. And yet, Reason Magazine (Free Minds and Free Markets!), the definitive Libertarian magazine, has at this point pretty much accepted: global warming exists, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to it, and a variety of things will Need To Be Done about it, one way or another, sooner or later. And I think this sort of thinking, coming from this group, should serve as sort of a bell-weather in politics. And I think that their approach to the topic is one that the Republican Party should strongly consider mimicking: stop squabbling about what is and isn't happening, and why. Worry instead about What Should Be Done.

Now, granted, their ideas of what Should Be Done and the state of things are not very much in line with what the Democratic Party would probably favor. They had a recent article entitled The Convenient Truth on the topic (and they lambast current global-warming politicans for "mistaking panic for virtue").

... This argues not for passivity, and not for delay, but for gradualism: setting up policies that will tighten the screws on greenhouse-gas emissions over the next few decades. The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective.

Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions ... Fortuitously, a carbon tax could also reduce the U.S. budget deficit and the geopolitical leverage of sinister "petrocracies" such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Policy prescriptions don't come any more convenient than that.

I mention them because of all the possible groups out there, they're about the last that would think to jump on the global warming bandwagon. And yet, Reason Magazine (Free Minds and Free Markets!), the definitive Libertarian magazine, has at this point pretty much accepted: global warming exists, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to it, and a variety of things will Need To Be Done about it, one way or another, sooner or later. And I think this sort of thinking, coming from this group, should serve as sort of a bell-weather in politics. And I think that their approach to the topic is one that the Republican Party should strongly consider mimicking: stop squabbling about what is and isn't happening, and why. Worry instead about What Should Be Done.

Now, granted, their ideas of what Should Be Done and the state of things are not very much in line with what the Democratic Party would probably favor. They had a recent article entitled The Convenient Truth on the topic (and they lambast current global-warming politicans for "mistaking panic for virtue").

... This argues not for passivity, and not for delay, but for gradualism: setting up policies that will tighten the screws on greenhouse-gas emissions over the next few decades. The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective.

Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions ... Fortuitously, a carbon tax could also reduce the U.S. budget deficit and the geopolitical leverage of sinister "petrocracies" such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Policy prescriptions don't come any more convenient than that.

We need this tech and we need it TODAY.

On a less snarky note, it's advances like these which give credibility to the philosophy of gradualism in embracing environmentally-friendly technologies. Yes, Al Gore, there is a Global Warming, but it's not going to kill us today, and it's not going to kill us tomorrow, and it may start to make things uncomfortable in the coming decades but we're going to be a lot better equipped to deal with it then. A slow-and-steady approach to making the world more environmentally friendly will combat climate change a lot better than the radical agenda you will so often find advocated.

Carbon dioxide both accumulates and dissipates in the atmosphere very slowly. Because the stock of greenhouse gases already present in the atmosphere dwarfs any one year's emissions, and because any one year's emissions can be changed only slightly, stabilizing greenhouse gases is like turning an aircraft carrier, only much slower. Annual emissions might be stabilized toward midcentury, and atmospheric concentrations at some point after that; but sharp turns are impossible and short-term effects minuscule.

In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. "In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation [to increased worldwide temperature]," he wrote. "But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors."

This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth -- and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad -- is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue. /blockquote]

Actually, in California (which the OP cites), and particularly in the Bay Area (where I'm moving soonish, so I've been researching), the primary primary primary component of your cost of living is going to be HOUSING oh my god $2300/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment? Okay, so that was a high-end apartment in a pretty nice spot, but my parents have a 4-bedroom 3-bathroom house on about a quarter-acre or so for less than half that. If I dig deeper and look at some cost of living figures in depth, San Francisco appears to be cheaper across the board in all the other categories listed (average household consumer expenditures, education, entertainment, transportation, retail, and non-retail)... either that or people are more frugal (perhaps they have to be)...

And why is housing in California so expensive? Many reasons, but oil isn't really a big one. First of all, there's a lot of people who want to live out there for one reason or another. Another major thing is that California has a lot of regulations on land use which limit development, further driving up the price of developable land. Issues with traffic and congestion further shape the development of the area, cramming more people into less physical space; and while the traffic problem isn't the fault of the government, local authorities typically view congestion as a good thing because it means more people using public transport, a major part of the environmental agenda:

In the words of David Solow, head of the Metrolink commuter rail in Southern California, congestion is "actually good" because "it drives people out of their cars."

Then there are building codes - while the earthquake reinforcements make sense, California's insistence on all that environmental eco-friendliness has shaped development codes and raised the price of construction considerably. And then there are taxes and taxes and taxes. (Including things like the gas tax, 44.7 cents/gallon - only Connecticut is higher). And energy prices are higher for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, you guessed it, environmental regulations...

California prides itself on being an environmental leader, and I am sure that they are leading the way in weaning the country off oil... but this has made it more expensive, not less. People use oil because it is cheap and makes sense, not because they enjoy being ripped off somehow.

Unfortunately that would prevent the US government from printing and spending money with abandon on it's pet projects so I don't see it happening until there's some kind of a crisis.

You're obviously clueless on Patriot Act I-II (most likely on the whole subject) otherwise you wouldn't say such rubbish crap after you just praised our so-called "great free speech laws" - the Patriot Act I and II violate the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments as it's been pointed out several times since 2001. I suggest you to educate yourself on subject to avoid posting further idiocies like this - here's a good starting point: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36528.html BTW I'm pretty sure you're a troll but at least your rubbish comments made me to register finally after many years of lurking. :)

Gal: The fascists are slowly taking over this country, an.

Guy: No kidding! We need to arm themselves [sic] before they --

Gal: "Arm ourselves"? Don't you believe in gun control?

That is absolutely correct. Ketosis, of course, should not be compared to ketoacidosis; the latter is what the former does to some people with impaired systems. I actually wrote a fairly long article on the Atkins diet for Everything2 because the writeups under that node were largely incorrect. I got inspired to write it by a NYT article entitled What if it's all Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes. (Especially read that last link if you are still a doubter, although it does not appear the entire article is there.)

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28714.html

Getting fat, diet, appetite, hunger, psychology, exercise, loosing weight is a tad more complicated than "eat as much steak you want and loose weight". You can choose to focus on the studies that focus on a very limited potion of that complexity, and extrapolate from that all kinds of hypothesis. Fact remains that people are getting fatter, while a LOT of people earn wast amounts of money from both the pro-fat camp (wich are both the fat people and the slim atkins-people) and the no-fat camp.

Eating only butter all day, you can loose weight. Eating only dry bread all day, you can gain weight. Neither is very healthy. The easiest way for normal people in their everyday life to loose some weight, is to cut down on the fat used. Simply because fat is the most energyrich food. Heart-disease IS indeed relatet to cholesterol, and cholesterol IS indeed relatet to saturated fat, but it's not 100% - there are a multitude of other factors. Journalists just never really understood science very well...

http://www.freakonomics.com/pdf/DeliberatePractice (PsychologicalReview).pdf

Most homework is probably ineffective. The mere act of doing something produces no learning unless there is a feedback mechanism and the learner is actually trying to improve. I'm guessing that 99% of the time the transfer function for the feedback path approaches an open circuit as far as homework is concerned.

If the homework does get marked, there is usually no mechanism for the student to learn and improve the mark. The bad students get beaten down and lose all confidence that they can learn. Bad, clueless teachers will achieve this result no matter whether or not they assign homework. They might as well save themselves the effort of whatever marking they do. They should quit giving homework to the early grade students. It wouldn't hurt the students.

What do I think works? http://www.reason.com/news/show/28479.html http://www.jumpmath.org/ http://www.spiritofmath.com/about3a.html There are lots of amazing teachers out there who produce amazing results. The ones I link to are math teachers because math is the one subject where excellent teaching produces uncontrovertable, measurable results. What these teachers have in common is apathy or even outright hostility from school administration. The problem starts at the top folks.

I remember some places here in the US trying similar such boot camps for troubled teens, and to my knowledge they didn't work.

YouTube seems to have removed this terrific video after a takedown order from CBS television, but if you can see it, you will be chilled by how far down that slippery slope we've fallen.

Andy Griffith: Terrorist Sympathizer!

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118263.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvoC551i2E
http://www.scruffydan.com/blog/?p=644

Apparently the "climate Nuremburg" comment came from one David Roberts of a "humor" site that was making one of those ha-ha-only-serious comments:

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."

The comment got the attention of Congressional Republicans, here (with more details). Reason Magazine likened such a proposal to an inquisition, here. The Congressional article cited an author criticizing the use of the term "climate change denier," here. That writer's thread from two days later (2006.10.11) asks people to help find the origin of such terms. The first comment there cites a 2001 book review in Nature (big-name scientific journal) making the comparison:

The text [of "The Skeptical Environmentalist"] employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren't dying of AIDS, that Jews weren't singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on.

Similarly, a 2001 article in The Ecologist compares denial of global warming -- that is, refusal "to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity" with no regard to why -- with "the refusal of many European Jews to recognize their impending extermination."

So, for years there have been explicit comparisons in the media by people who support GW. So, it's true that at least some environmentalists with some influence are using "denial" in a loaded way to demonize their opponents. By the way, your own comment said no, it's not being used that way... and then that "Greenhouse denial can be at least as evil and murderous as Holocaust denial."

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

The fallacy is that the price of any single commodity can be used as a metric to determine the "real" cost of everything else.

Gold? Diamonds? Lattes?

All of these have monetary prices that rise and fall against other commodities as their demand and supply rise and fall. The value of real estate shot thru the roof the last 5 years. Is that because there is suddenly less of it?

No. Demand rose, caused partly by a flagging stock market which motivated investors to invest put money in real estate rather than stocks and/or mutual funds.

And adjusting for inflation is not the only factor! The total wealth of the average American has more than doubled in the last 30 years. Thus, even commodities that have not significantly risen or fallen in price over the past 30 years have gotten "cheaper" simply because the ability of the average Joe is much more able to afford it.

Most of this additional wealth comes in the form of intellectual property. Take THAT to the bank, fella...

I sure do! My own lifestyle is well supported by my role as a software engineer - 6 figures, 3000 Sq ft home, 5 happy, well-fed children (plus 2 foster children), etc. and this is all because of intellectual property that I create in large quantities...

Testimonial privileges require a court to weigh the government's evidence as to why they need her testimony. Yet Judith Miller was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison based exclusively upon written evidence from witnesses whose identities and testimony were kept secret from her and her lawyers. They were given no opportunity to defend her against, question, or rebut the secret evidence the courts relied upon exclusively in convicting her. Indeed, a full eight pages of the D.C. Court of Appeals decision discussing and analyzing this secret evidence was redacted from the published opinion.
Source

Feb. 7, 2006 Significant sections of a previously redacted judicial opinion were released Friday after an appellate court ruled that certain information about grand jury testimony in the CIA leak investigation is no longer secret.

Dow Jones Inc. had filed a motion asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to release eight redacted pages from Judge David S. Tatel's concurring opinion in a February 2005 court ruling that then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matt Cooper must testify before a grand jury that was investigating who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the press.

Judge Tatel, in one of three concurring opinions written by the three-judge panel, found that there is a common law privilege but that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had overcome it. Tatel explained how Miller's testimony was critical to the investigation, how the grand jury had exhausted all other available resources, and that the public interest favored compelling her testimony. In doing so, eight pages of his decision were sealed from the public to preserve grand jury secrecy and to protect classified information.

The same three judges replied to Dow Jones' motion Friday and allowed large sections of Tatel's decision to be released, stating, in a decision written by the court as a whole, "we are satisfied here that there is no longer any need to keep significant portions of the eight pages under seal. Libby's indictment, now part of the public record, reveals some grand jury matters, and we see little purpose in protecting the secrecy of grand jury proceedings that are no longer secret."

No one disputes Global Warming... What is in dispute is cause and cure, if any.

But you're right. When Reason Magazine, the unofficial publication of Libertarian politics, "Free Minds and Free Markets", says "global warming is an issue", then... well, in my book, there's not much more sense to holding out on the issue.

... did not it?

Oh, irony... :-/

Paul B.

P.S. Reason has some good coverage of the incident: http://reason.com/news/show/118476.html and the aftermath: http://reason.com/blog/show/118625.html .

And of course any self-respecting /.-er respects Bruce Schneier, who has this http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/nont errorist_em.html to say...

And everyone knows that bombs have blinking lights on 'em. Every single movie bomb you've ever seen has a blinking light.

... did not it?

Oh, irony... :-/

Paul B.

P.S. Reason has some good coverage of the incident: http://reason.com/news/show/118476.html and the aftermath: http://reason.com/blog/show/118625.html .

And of course any self-respecting /.-er respects Bruce Schneier, who has this http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/nont errorist_em.html to say...

And everyone knows that bombs have blinking lights on 'em. Every single movie bomb you've ever seen has a blinking light.

The ACLU fought against this exact kind of move in California - the use of paper ballots vs the use of electronic ballots - because according to them, electronic ballots are "twice as accurate" and the use of paper ballots would disenfranchise voters. According to the left and the ACLU in 2003, "punch cards are unfit for use" and are all for electronic voting.

i was there when they did this, and MAN... they were insistent that paper ballots go into the dustbin of history because of their error rates and their propensity to "confuse minority voters". Their words, not mine.

So, i guess that the governor of Florida should get his lawyers ready for this... taking their state back into the dark ages...

Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why, and they turn their nose saying, "But, but, but, but its GREEN!"

Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently declared that the new Democratic Congress will mandate that a quarter of new vehicles sold in the use flexible fuel technology by 2010. Said Schumer: "These are things that will help the middle class and those who aspire to be in the middle class," Schumer said. Because nothing helps the "aspiring middle class" more than tacking on a few hundred (or thousand) bucks to the price of their Ford minivan.

But don't worry, the Republican party has plenty of blame for idiotic ethanol subsidies and the like. It's part of their general scheme of buying off the Midwestern states. Blah, anyway; six years in power, and what did they do with it? Built a political machine. Nice going, yo. Thanks for nothing...

Now, how was that bit at the end supposed to go like... ah. *ahemahemahemahemahem* I'M PROBABLY GOING TO GET MODDED DOWN FOR THIS ...

An interesting discussion of the "Superiority" of the Dvorak keyboard
is at http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html

According to this article, the studies that "proved" that Dvorak was a
better keyboard were all flawed in very significant ways.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36962.html
yeah, somehow i dont think anyone who disagrees should be put on trial for war crimes, literally.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2 165452.ece
I also dont think scientists who disagree with the liberal position should be punished with losing their licences.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/116863.html

Except that SS is not a funded "pay as you go" system. That's been a fiction since the beginning. Social Security is paid out to recipients based on current receipts, not current receipts plus a surplus set aside and saved for future benefits. The surplus has not been "saved" in some big bank vault. Thanks to Teddy Kennedy's bill in the 1970's, the money in the Social Security Trust fund is used to purchase government savings bonds (with a 0.5% ROI), effectively taking the money from Social Security and adding it to the General Fund. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund is only solvent when you add in the eight trillion dollars of IOU's that the U.S. Congress has written to them.

When SS was created in 1933, the ratio was one recipient was being paid for by 10 payers. In 1980, the ratio was down to 6 earners paying in for each recipient. As of 2000, the number is three point five to one. By 2015 (when the last baby boomers are jumping on the system), the number will be two to one or less, and the "surplus" will be draining at over 400 billion dollars a year. That's 400 billion dollars that the Congress will now *have* to pay back to the Social Security Trust Fund.

Now, think about that. Not only will they have to pay $400B into Social Security, but the vast amount of money that Social Security used to pay into the General Fund via their savings bonds won't be there any more either. That's about $250 Billion more not going in. So we have an instant additional $650B deficit in the federal budget. Can you imagine coming up with an extra 2/3rds of a TRILLION dollars a year?

Do you really think that the government is going to stop spending money? What will they cut? Education, Health care, Social Services, the Military, the FBI, roads?

Or do you think there will be a new round of tax hikes on "the richest Americans", which, according to the definition of rich in the 1993 tax increase was, "Anyone earning over $32,800 a year."

By 2029, the Social Security Trust Fund is completely broke, and, with raising life expectancies, and fewer children per parent, the payout rate by 2035 is predicted to be 1 payer for each 3 recipients. The only way to support that system is an 80% tax rate. America was formed when the colonists rebelled against an appalling tax rate of... seven percent.

I don't think there's an American alive who would tolerate eighty cents of every dollar going to someone else who didn't plan for retirement.

But you don't have to believe me. The Social Security Trustees don't say it survives until 2056. In fact, they've had to repeatedly move the bankruptcy date up, now to 2029. In fact, over history they've been hopelessly optimistic about the future, and have been repeatedly slapped by reality showing that things are much worse then they claimed. Here, here, here, and here. The first one is the trustee report from 2004. The rest are articles from various sources. I intentionally picked articles from all sides of the political spectrum. There is a broad bi-partisan acknowledgement that the system is in horrible trouble -- President Clinton's own committee recommended privatization as the only alternative to higher taxes or lower benefits. The only people denying it are the ones running on "keeping social security safe". People like Barbara Boxer and the like who continuously say there's no problem with the system, even as it racks up 12 digit shortfalls year after year. ($200,000,000,000+ in 2004).

So, I've been putting my own money away (401Ks, IRAs, etc) because I know I can't count on Social Security to give me anything. In fact, more people under the age of 30 believe that we'll make contact with aliens in the next 30 years than believe that Social Security will still be available for them.

I don't really have a problem with cameras in public places, because I am not a criminal. However, I would rather avoid being in the lime-light if possible, aside from being on the internet, I like to avoid paper - or video - trails strictly out of principle. I do think it is an invasion of privacy, though a minor one. But I see it as a snowball effect that will simply get bigger and more far-reaching.

Now, this may sound radical, but I think guns are the answer. Bear with me. If every citizen, crimial or not, were packing heat, I think it would make someone think twice before trying to rob, rape or murder. Consider this, "53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., ., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police," (Joyce Malcolm, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html).

I echo the thoughts of the writer of that article (which is a very interesting read), In that I believe all humans do fear death or injury, and if it can be avoided it would be. Now, I'm not suggesting that arming all of society will end crime, but what I do think it will do is reduce violent crime significantly, leaving only the most violent criminals, which will slowly be phased out either through the justice system or self-defense.

The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.

Two economists have already researched and answered that question (though it's still controversial). The answer is a resounding: YES. They concluded that first-mover advantage provides sufficient incentive.

Completely irrelevant. It has nothing to do with facism whatsoever. And by the reports in the press about the nilly-willy use of paramiliteric units in the US, you should be living in facist land yourself, if you use that as a measurement. http://reason.com/files/58eba09a914d0927da75a44c92 8e9325.jpg

This is the same old sad thinkofthechildren thing you have in the US.

I don't think that many people are saying the climate doesn't change over time and that us as humans are affecting it greatly, but one of the main claims is that by creating more greenhouse gases and contributing to 'global warming', we are slowing down the process of glaciation. (after the Devensian/Wisconsinan period, the holocene epoch (interglacial period) has lasted longer than usual, and this is what a lot of people are pointing to, despite glacial periods being known for their fluctations in length. Another good theory on it can be found here, where it is claimed that he observed warming actually reflects the Urban Heat Island effect, as most readings are done in heavily populated areas which are expanding with growing population (which of course will be hotter due to roads/buildings/people etc trapping heat).

I definitely think it is a good time for people to start investigating the possible bias on this issue, as those who are lobbying government for changes in policy on industry are going to start having serious economic effects (on both companies and the country as a whole) without the majority of the public being aware that global warming is a theory, and not fact, but hey - if global warming is the accepted theory, i'm happy to reduce the methane levels in the atmosphere by eating more steak, heh.

I found this article saying that Gore overstates the case somewhat in may cases and backs up its facts with references: http://www.reason.com/news/show/116471.html All in all, I still have no idea to what extent human activity has contributed to global warming. To my mind it makes sense to look to renewable energy sources that cause less pollution anyway, simply because the oils going to run out and pollution obviously impacts on health. In our current political framework, I don't see how that's going to happen.

If George W. Bush wasn't there to stop their evil plans we'd be looking at stagflation, runaway tax increases, enormous increases in the size of our federal government, and massive amounts of new regulations on our businesses that will make it impossible for them to compete with foreign competitors.

Really funny. Not! Bush has increased the size of government and took the US from the biggest budget surplus to the biggest budget deficit ever. Republicans are supposedly fiscally conservative but while they've cut taxes they've also balloned federal spending and created entire new agencies and departments. Reason magazine, Free Mind and Free Markets has an article in the current issue, "The Budget-cutters Who couldn't Stop Spending" which isn't online yet, that details just how Republican have gone on spending sprees. There's the expansion in medicare spending estimateds to cost as much as $1.2 trillion in the first 10 years. Then they stuff billions more in so called supplimental approriations bills such as $150 million to the NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminitration, added to a bill to pay for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with another $2.3 billion for avian flu preparedness, which already get $3.8 billion, added to the same bill. This year's supplimental bill is $94.5 billion which makes it the largest supplimental bill ever. In 2005 supplimental appropriations represented 16.7% of new discretionary spending which was $143 billion compared to $7 billion in 1998 when discretionary spending was only .9%.

...piling on Rick Santorum at Hit & Run!

This fits in well with the widely acknowledged past cycles of ice ages vs greenhouse eras. By some mechanism, (probably Life on Earth), greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere faster than they are removed by natural processes. Eventually, temperatures rise and the icecaps and glaciers melt. The crust adjusts to the loss of lots of pressure on it, causing widespread adjustments in the crust, accompanied by the release of volcanoes that have been corked up for a very long time.

Take the Yellowstone caldera, for instance -- a mega-volcano that has erupted in the past on a roughly 650,000 year cycle (last eruption was 640,000 years ago, the previous 1.3 million years ago, and the one before that 2.1 million years ago). Such an eruption would spew enough dust into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun for a long time, plunging the planet into an ice age as the accumulated atmospheric carbon leaves the atmosphere over several decades and most of the Life on Earth dies off. That would, of course, include me and thee.

Eventually, Life reasserts itself and starts putting carbon back into the atmosphere, after the dust has fallen back onto the planet, and the cycle begins anew.

Just an idea, but it seems to fit the current circumstances. And while we may or may not be responsible for the latest increases in atmospheric carbon (the current warming cycle began 30,000 years ago), we are most certainly contributing to it.

The question is, does this represent a credible notion of what is happening, and if not, what's a better story that fits the historical record?

And if this IS a credible story, what can we do to interrupt the cycle? Greg Benford seems to have several reasonable notions.

And as for Consequences -- consider the incineration of most of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with surrounding states including the agricultural areas in the mid-US covered with a meter or so of ash. And with an instant Ice Age in the wings -- now THAT's consequences!

Of course, as a democratic nation, it's our Right to sit around and blather over whether there is a problem of not, and who's to blame, and what SINGLE SOLUTION must be taken to deal with it, or if we should do anything at all, since we cannot prove (until the balloon goes up) whether or not there is anything to this.

Sentient beings would not approach this situation in that manner. Maybe in the next spin of the great wheel of Darwin, some actual sentient beings will come to exist on this planet.

I am sitting here reading the Slashdot comments and noting that not one person is noting that these nuclear documents are from 1991. No one has ever denied that Saddam had a nuclear program before the first Gulf War. The actions of Bush I shut that down.

This has nothing to with whether Saddam had WMDs when we went to war in this decade. All the intelligence that we have suggests that he was as close to nuclear weapons as a good university (i.e. the know-how but not the infrastructure).

The vast expansion of criminal law--something the president failed to bring up in his State of the Union address, lest it undercut his shrinking-government lie--is among the most important, and most threatening, trends of recent years. But Monicagate is not built on criminal law. It arises from the expansion of a civil offense: sexual harassment.

Media-savvy but legally unsophisticated liberal commentators, such as radio talk show host Tom Leykis, make a passionate, and fairly persuasive, argument about Clinton's presumed affair: It may be bad, but it's a private matter. It's between Bill, Hillary, and Monica. It's none of our business. It certainly doesn't belong in court. "Why are we asking questions about the president's sex life?" asks Leykis. "Why is that relevant to anything? Why should the president be put in a position of having to lie about something that's none of our business in the first place?"

Why indeed? The tempting answer is, Because you asked for it. Demanded it. Screamed and yelled and waxed indignant. You dedicated the 1992 Democratic National Convention to the cause. Remember "The Year of the Woman"? It was a media frenzy. And the number one agenda item was a ban on any hint of sexuality in the workplace.

Writing cheap symbolism into real law is a dangerous thing to do. But Congress did it in 1994. Ratifying the view that sexual harassment is too serious a matter to be governed by normal legal constraints, the very same Democratic Congress that reauthorized the Independent Counsel statute rewrote the rules of evidence. The new rules allow a defendant's sexual history--not just previous allegations of harassment--to be dragged into sexual harassment suits. (The plaintiff's history, however, was made inadmissable.)

So the president of the United States can be asked, under oath, about his sex life. It doesn't matter if the sex was consensual or even if the woman made the first move. It doesn't have to be harassment; indeed, no one claims anything of the kind in the Lewinsky case. But Congress chose to make every intimate detail fair game. And if, like many a cheating spouse, the president lies to cover up adultery, he is guilty of a serious crime--perjury, a potentially impeachable offense.

In 2004 Reason Magazine put the name and a satellite photo of the house of 40.000 of their subscribers.
http://www.reason.com/putting/

It's a nice way of saying "We know where You live, and where Your kids go to school"

We have 2 trillion barrels of oil in the US in the form of oil shale. This oil is recoverable at $30 a barrel. There are many other forms of oil to recover and many new deep water fields left to explore.

In the mean time, we should continue to work on hybrid and other technologies to reduce our consumption. Doom and gloom on this is not justified or necessary.

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb100606.shtml

Paul B.

Hi JakartaDean.

Add Gun Control to Litany of Misbegotten Government Plans
National crime rates compared
England has worst crime rate in world
Statistics Confirm Huge London Crime Wave
Gun Control's Twisted Outcome

There are plenty more links out there--this was about 5 minutes of googling.

By the time this gets to court, either or both houses of Congress will be controlled by Democrats. Which means that Congress can and will investigate this.

People who trust Democrats to uphold the constitution have a very short memory. I shouldn't even have to look up FDR, LBJ, etc.

For a more recent example, just take a look at this article.

They may be better than republicans (personally, I find the pissing contest of 'lesser of two evils' repulsive and therefore I don't vote), but democrats certainly can't be trusted with our liberty.

But this is the wrong audience to be dissing democrats. After all, Slashdot's full of former Dean-ocrats, even though his stance on civil liberties wasn't pretty.

REASON * April 1998

License to Grill
How the Clintons invited Ken Starr into their private lives.

By Virginia Postrel

Like just about everyone else in America, I believe Bill Clinton had a sexual affair--if not dictionary-definition "sexual relations"--with intern Monica Lewinsky. I think it's likely, though by no means a sure thing, that he lied about that affair in a sworn deposition. And I wouldn't put it past him to suborn perjury or obstruct justice, though the evidence at this writing is very murky on those serious charges.

The president has what is popularly known as a zipper problem. He appears to like the sort of women who are unlikely to head health care task forces or jet off to Davos, Switzerland, to lecture the world on the morally corrupting effects of capitalism. Given both power and charisma, Clinton seems to have ample opportunity to act on his impulses. And though it's unlikely that Lewinsky will be his final fling, he manages to hold his marriage together and even inspire ferocious loyalty in his wife. Power and charisma probably have something to do with that feat too.

Clinton also lies all the time--so much that he often appears unable to tell he's doing it. His State of the Union address was full of what Washington Post columnist James Glassman rightly calls "big, brazen, and undeniable" lies, starting with "two whoppers": that "we have the smallest government in 35 years" and that Clinton wants to spend any budget surplus on Social Security rather than new programs. The government has shrunk (modestly) by only one measure, the number of federal employees; it spends, taxes, and regulates more than ever. And Clinton is proposing so many new spending programs--without offsetting cuts--that he can't fund them without substantial new taxes on cigarettes and corporate income. Given his lies about policy, and about his past, it's not surprising that even his political allies disbelieve him about Monica Lewinsky.

Nonetheless, Clinton does not deserve his current round of legal troubles. To be publicly humiliated as a moral weakling, lacking both judgment and self-control--that he deserves. To be distrusted by both intimates and the general public--he deserves that too. But for sexual pecadillos and routine lies to lead to possible high crimes and misdemeanors takes more than just Clinton's personal flaws. It takes very bad policy.

There is one sense in which the president deserves what has happened to him: He and his political allies are the people who made it possible, who created the legal mechanisms by which his private life became a matter of public, legal record. In that bitter irony lies the one hopeful aspect of L'Affaire Monica. It may, finally, create a consensus to rein in legal excesses that threaten not just Bill Clinton but the liberties of all Americans. But if Republicans are seduced by scandal and Democrats by dreams of vengeance, it may make matters worse.

The "crisis in the White House" begins with the Independent Counsel Statute. From the start, many Republicans opposed that law for corroding the constitutional division of powers. Back then, of course, presidents were Republicans, so the opposition was easy to ascribe to partisan motives. But in 1994, when the statute was up for reauthorization, a Democrat was in the White House, and his party controlled Congress. The most vocal opposition still came from conservative Republicans, who turned out to be remarkably principled.

They were utterly