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• Cars don't kill people, people kill people!
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• Once I was afraid of dying, nowadays I am afraid of living!
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"We also then set a small bomb off, if you like, that completely wipes the data...

As well as the ear and most of the face of the thief? Seems a little harsh.

I'm too old to join the Army (41) and I'd be 4F if I tried (I had lymphatic cancer at age 22), so you can stop pretending that you understand anything about me. If you think it's frivolous to be concerned that a presidential candidate wants to over-regulate daily life in America, that's perfectly within your rights. I'm no Libertarian, and I had high hopes that Nader in 2000 would open peoples' eyes to the fact that we're really living in a one-party system, but he absolutley destroyed his credibility in 2004 by ignoring real concerns and focusing on the truly frivolous "problem" of the "integrity" of baseball. Baseball has plenty of problems, and I would start with kicking out the drug abusers, but Mr. Nader was more concerned about Spider-Man appearing on the playing field. OK, sure. Now who's being immature? If you haven't read this, you should.

Those Israeli cell phones can damage more than your eyes!

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18581/artic le_detail.asp
Daylight Savings!
By Kelly Jane Torrance ... Michael Downing .... has recently published Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time (Shoemaker & Hoard), a charming light history of time in America. ... one can conclude from Spring Forward that we should blame the twice-yearly time change on capitalists. Downing explains that "without Daylight Saving, the commodities, stock, and bond traders on Wall Street could expect no opportunity at all for arbitrage--buying securities on one market for immediate resale in another market at an advantageous price and profiting by the price discrepancy." The time change gave traders one hour in which the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange were both open. .... Federal legislators often justified their bills by arguing that the change would save fuel costs. But Downing argues that a real case for this was never made.....

There is nothing wrong with chopping down trees! Get over it.

Sweden is quite socialist and is richer per capita than the US ($38 760 in Sweden to $36 620 in the US according to The Economist's World in 2005).

Do we have the same World in 2005 publication? Mine shows Sweden's GDP per head is $43,480 (page 89), the U.S.'s $41,530 (page 92). (Switzerland, a less-socialist nation than Sweden, but moreso than the U.S., beats both, with a per-capita GDP of $51,490).

Of course, looking at the CIA World Factbook, we find that the U.S. has a per-capita GDP of $37,800 (2003 estimate), vs. Sweden's $26,800, and Switzerland's $32,700. So the question is which source do we rely upon: the CIA, or the Economist Intelligence Unit (which compiles such data for The Economist)? IMO, that's a tough call. The Economist's figures are newer though, and I've never had any beefs with their figures, so I'm inclined to go by theirs...

(I am curious now how this discrepancy occurred... I greatly doubt GDP figures for each nation shot up so much that per-capita GDP in Switzerland rose by 60% in only 1 year! :-) My guess is that different methods of determining GDP were used, and the simple division of getting a per-capita figure produced such greatly-different values.)

I also think you may be confusing the modern day definition of socialism with Marxism.

I doubt it. I define socialism by strict economic definition, absent political/social influences. I define socialism as follows: "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and distributed by a government over which there may be any possible level of democratic control."

Marxism is really the step of Marx's theory that deals with the workers of the world overthrowing the capitalist class and creating a classless, communist (i.e. wealth is owned and shared equally) economy.

America did awfully well under "socialist" Roosevelt in the 1930s. FDR's New Deal dragged America out of the Depression.

That's hardly a universal view.

There is debate among economists about the truth of that belief. I don't subscribe to most Austrian economic theory, but here's another critique of the claim. (The author is an Austrian, but he cites 3 neoclassical economists on the subject as well, lending somewhat more credibility...)

Also, it's worth noting that more-respectable economists (like Nobel prize-winning Milton Friedman) have made it mainstream thought -- mainstream enough to be taught in undergrad. Monetary Policy classes, at least -- that government mismanagement, primarily by the Federal Reserve, exacerbated the bank failures of 1929-1933, turning what would have been a severe recession into the Great Depression that we now know it as. See also Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, or any of his popular books (Capitalism and Freedom or Free to Choose).

It's a well-respected enough assessment that even Paul Krugman (whom you cite (below) and whom I'm not especially a fan of) is cited in the above AEI article (I admit they're a biased source, but any source in the social sciences is biased. In any case, the article is still worth reading) as noting "Nowadays, practically the whole spectrum of economists, from Milton Friedman leftward, agrees that the Great Depression was brought on by a collapse of effective demand, and that the Federal Reserve should have fought the slump with large injections of money."

Whether FDR's policies got us *out* of the govn'ts

The American Enterprise has an article on why the Kyoto deserved to die.
Reasons:
1. Kyoto "Would have exempted China and other developing nations entirely (despite the fact that their growing emissions would have swamped the reductions from the developed nations)."
2. "Long before President Bush acted, this approach had been rejected by the U.S. Senate in a vote of 95-0, which is why President Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification."

The American Enterprise has an article on why the Kyoto deserved to die.
Reasons:
1. Kyoto "Would have exempted China and other developing nations entirely (despite the fact that their growing emissions would have swamped the reductions from the developed nations)."
2. "Long before President Bush acted, this approach had been rejected by the U.S. Senate in a vote of 95-0, which is why President Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification."

/praying for the day when my fellow liberals understand that all civil rights are important.

A few of them do:

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the constitution they don't like.

--Alan Dershowitz


http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17057/artic le_detail.asp/
A Liberal Democrat's Lament
By Robert Cottrol

The notion of a right to arms bespeaks a very different relationship. It says the individual is not simply a helpless bystander in the difficult and dangerous task of ensuring his or her safety. Instead, the citizen is an active participant, an equal partner with the state in ensuring not only his own safety but that of his community.

This is a serious right for serious people. It takes the individual from servile dependency on the state to the status of participating citizen, capable of making intelligent choices in defense of one's life and ultimately one's freedom. This conception of citizenship recognizes that the ultimate civil right is the right to defend one's own life, that without that right all other rights are meaningless, and that without the means of self-defense the right to self-defense is but an empty promise.

In the longer term perspective, a recent expert study estimated that the world is approaching the limits of global food production capacity based on present technologies. Its most optimistic projection suggests that a doubling of food production by 2050 might be technically feasible, and this could feed 7.8 billion people if grain is largely used as human food and not for animals. A likely higher level of population growth, or a failure of sufficient commitment to increase food supplies around the world, will create severe problems for a major part of the world population (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). The pessimistic assumptions seem more likely, as present per capita food production is stagnating if not declining, and some crops may be close to biological and environmental limits. Already 700 million people experience endemic hunger, not counting those added by natural disasters (Serageldin, 1995).

Further,

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects the world's population to grow to more than 8 billion by 2030. The FAO projects that global food production must increase by 60 percent to accommodate the estimated population growth, close nutrition gaps, and allow for dietary changes over the next three decades. Food charity alone simply cannot eradicate hunger. Increased supply--with the help of tools like bioengineering --is crucial.

Last year Ethiopia's population grew by 2.7%; according to this article: 'Most years, Ethiopia has to depend on some level of food aid as it rarely grows enough to feed the whole population.' The reliefweb article also states: 'many impoverished rural families say they have no choice but to have large families to help raise their incomes.' This strongly suggests that poverty is a vicious circle: because people are poor and famine-stricken they have more children; which leads to even greater pressure on food production; which, at its non-GM present state, is unable to answer with requisite increases in the amount it yields; which leads to even greater poverty; and so on and on and on. A way to break that vicious circle would be to provide people with the means to farm their own food locally and with better chances of success. In their article Technology That Will Save Billions From Starvation Prakash and Conko write:

The productivity gains from G.M. crops, as well as improved use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, allowed the world's farmers to double global food output during the last 50 years, on roughly the same amount of land, at a time when global population rose more than 80 percent. Without these improvements in plant and animal genetics and other scientific developments, known as the Green Revolution, we would today be farming on every square inch of arable land to produce the same amount of food, destroying hundreds of millions of acres of pristine wilderness in the process.

It is estimated that Vitamin A deficiency leads to some 1,000,000 children dying and some additional 300,000 being struck by blindless every year. According to the WHO between 100 and 140 million children are vitamin A deficient and between 250,000 to 500,000 children per year become blind due to Vitamin A deficiency. If, as Patrick Moore says, 'adding a daffodil gene to rice in order to produce a genetically modified strain of rice can prevent half a million children from going

Here is where today's science becomes guesswork, however. Less ice could actually be better. Scientists still know very little about how the Arctic Ocean processes carbon, and a competing theory holds that open water could actually pick up more greenhouse gases.

If human activity is turning "much of the Arctic into a polynya (a body of water that doesn't freeze in winter), then the Arctic or polar seas may become much more effective at removing the atmospheric carbon than they currently are," Papakyriakou said.

The poster of this article (and those discussing the potential positive feedback mechanism that kicks in if ice is a greater sink than open water) are really smudging the issue here, and smudging it for political effect without regard either for the necessarily tentative nature of science at the margins (here, the untested margins of modelling an entire planetary ecosystem) or for the consequences of making scientists look like ridiculous Chicken Littles.

I ride a bicycle to work, take the train, and am generally supportive of environmentally friendly living and governance. But, as a scientist, I am severely disappointed when other scientists (let alone journalists or Greenpeace) take an unfinished scientific debate and use it to propose sweeping changes in our lives -- changes that woud plunge a huge number of people into poverty (I live an environmentally sustainable life, but it does cost a lot more and I wouldn't demand that a single mother of two do it as well -- hey, you driving that pickup! shell out $50,000 for an electric car.)

This is turning into a bit of a rant, but if you want to learn what other enivronmentalists -- who are also scientists -- think about the current fights over the greenhouse effect, GMOs, etc, you should read Patrick Moore's recent article (Moore was the cofounder of Greenpeace.)

See the real results of that survey here.

Not only will you see that the news is generally favorable (and this was before the killing/capture of Saddam and sons), but the result you're quoting is from the question: "Will they [the US] help or hurt Iraq over the next five years?"

And that was a loaded question anyway, as it implies that the US would still be in full-occupation mode five years from now.