I think it's based on level of involvement. When something goes down, you're not going to have that song in the back of your head, worries about your appointment tomorrow, or be trying to figure out what the hell happened in The Fountain. Your whole brain is engaged.
My "time slowed down" experience was this: I was biking home from work along a road with a sidewalk only on one side, traffic whizzing by, no bike lanes. I was on the left hand side, which meant oncoming traffic was in the nearby lane. I wasn't going particularly fast; I know the consequences of not playing it safe. Suddenly a shoelace got into my gears and yanked the bike to the right, and off the sidewalk I went, and was headed straight for an oncoming car that had to be going at least 40 miles per hour.
There wasn't any time or place for panic. Instead, every part of my brain had to figure out what to do, stat. The bike was unpredictable with my shoelace and the chain trying to eat each other. In a split second I concluded that if I didn't make it wipe out right away, I would roll into the car's path, and it could be game over.
And that's what I did. The bike went on its side and me on top of it. The car missed by inches.
I got up and hurried home, and only when I had a chance to stop did it hit me. But, in the state of mind I had during the incident, that was the longest second and change of my life thus far.
An error of that miniscule size being used to dismiss that quantity of scientific evidence shows quite a lot of bias. If you're looking for a way to ignore the highest CO2 levels in 650,000 years and a very rapid change with no end in sight, I guess that'll have to do.
I happen to know that this man's been running satellite experiment and gathering hard data for decades. If the models are so flimsy, they get tossed out. I'm sorry, but these are professionals, not the peanut gallery of pundits that characterizes some ends of the blogosphere.
If you want to disbelieve a computer model, fine, but you're actually setting up a straw man argument by claiming that the science stops there. Large numbers of climate scientists saying something is over 90% certain is anything but a simulation jockey's hypothesis.
Knowing Mr. Russell personally, I can also tell you that he puts science ahead of his ideology, and he definitely says that anthropogenic warming is a major factor. As a good scientist with decades of solid work behind him, he does not propose every last effect of this, nor will he tell you that it's final and we know it all, but he will point to piles and piles of evidence.
I will definitely vouch for his bona fides, though.
Hats off to Russell. The man's been doing solid satellite-based experiments for decades. He's someone you should listen to about climate science.
I can tell you in advance, though, that there's a likely conclusion as to why noctilucent clouds are becoming more prevalent. That is predicted by the global warming simulations. The warmth being radiated from earth is being trapped in the lower atmosphere, and so while it heats up, the upper atmosphere actually cools. That's a solid hypothesis that's already gotten support from the evidence.
Having a history of using MS-DOS, the Amiga, OS/2, and Linux since the Slackware 0.9x days, I'm now using OSX on my MacBook Pro primarily. "Not as much software available" may be true in some respects, but you should ask yourself how that really affects you. You don't need quantity, you need quality. Right now I have the well integrated, nicely designed software suite that comes with OSX, and a shell prompt is just a click away where I have my MacPorts which makes getting the standard open source software that I have to have available.
My other machines are a Windows/Linux desktop and a Kurobox running Debian. The desktop rarely gets turned on, and the Kurobox does its job serving out NFS and SMB shares and hosting the occasional nethack game quite well. In practice, though, when all these machines are available, it's the quality that counts.
This is really just yet another non-renewable energy we're talking about here. I simply do not think we have an energy future that does not include a heightened efficiency, let alone a few reality check on "needs". The rising cost of energy is merely a symptom of human overconsumption. You cannot just throw nuclear power at this problem; that's just revving the engines of an out-of-control machine.
Actually, no. The British MI6 and the CIA knew the Nigerian yellowcake hoax for what it was, and they were ignored by the administration. It did not stand up to scrutiny at all, and the word of it was in British newspapers before Bush's State of the Union address, as they critiqued Colin Powell's UN address. That was before the big invasion, obviously. Our media didn't cover the story until months afterwards, and then, it was "water under the bridge."
And if such a central piece of evidence is such a flimsy sham, and yet it is used to justify attacking another country, what makes you think Bush was merely deluded?
Politicians have a long history of using flimsy excuses to whip up public support for a war they want for their own reasons, and politicians in the USA are not an ounce different.
You know, given what we know about Bin Laden, I think the most instructive thing is to consider what business he thinks he's in. He sees his group as in the business of bleeding empires until they withdraw or die. Considering that the scenario in Afghanistan helped weaken the Soviet Union, he sees that as a success. The way things are going now with our putting forth so much effort into Iraq that could actually make a big difference elsewhere, I imagine he thinks he's succeeding.
And thanks to our country's lax response to corruption and stupidity in our capitol, he's probably right.
Well, here we go. You "want your side to win", even if it means invading a country based on what are demonstrably lies. This isn't football. There are moral consequences. Americans would respond similarly if someone invaded and occupied their country, destroyed its infrastructure, and left the majority without so much as electricity and running water - count on it. And the more superior in open conflict the occupying army in this hypothetical scenario were to be, as the American military is, the more logical the methods being used by the hypothetical insurgents would look.
The pattern I see in this country is stereotyping other people based on scenarios they've never had to face that are caused by the meddling of the US military and CIA that, again, most citizens are ill-informed of. It does amount to racism.
It really sounds to me like you make the "my country, right or wrong" argument to justify going with (illegitimate) political powers, despite the fact that our country wouldn't even exist but for rational dissent.
You realize that the Iraq Body Count Project, by definition of how it requires reports to two foreign news media sources, will always be by definition undercounting. It's good to have it, but in an arena like Iraq they're going to only see a small fraction, per their own site:
We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording. It is no part of our practice, at least as far as our published totals are concerned, to make any prediction or projection about what the "unseen" number of deaths might have been.
The Lancet's methods are the same as those used by the government elsewhere, and they didn't even include Fallujah, which saw huge numbers of civilian casualties. You simply don't bomb a city like that without piling up lots of killed and maimed civilizans, er, "collateral damage".
Now, normally I would go down the road with you about how the CIA knew the Japanese were trying to surrender, etc., which by now is familiar to people on either side of the argument and you clearly have a preference.
Here's something not so well known: Iwo Jima, Saipan, all those island hopping battles were not any indication of how an invasion of the main Japanese islands would go. The CIA wasn't kidding about the intent to surrender. While the outer islands and their inhabitants were dispensable human shields, because they were a different ethnicity and the mainland Japanese had racist attitudes towards them, Japan proper was not. They told the remote islanders horror stories about the Allies and to commit mass suicide if taken, whereas they would have done no such thing if the main islands had been invaded.
But this really backs up the fact that the CIA had good information on the Japanese intent to surrender, and that the bomb was dropped as a demonstration of military might, especially to the Soviets.
My nefarious un-American dining activities know no bounds. I love those saffron-spiced chicken kabobs. And hamburgers just don't stand up to a wrap in lavash wrap with koubideh ground beef and a dash of yogurt sauce, and cilantro, and tomatoes and veggies chargrilled to perfection. I even like the basmati rice and the fresh pomegranates and dates that are better than you get in any typical American store. I've scarfed down so many lunches like that and loved every bit.
Take that, Bush. Better gitmo me before I buy a hookah, or a Sufi poetry book.
And today, down the road from there, I'm going Chinese and buying dim sum. You're so screwed.
No, Iraq is not the scene of terrorists with bombs causing all the damage we've seen. You're buying into a selective analysis meant to blame those foreign devils for the state of their country, the same as those who have been taking this "white man's burden" style of intervention into the third world have always done.
You do realize that when mostly you're shooting a missile from an airplane into a building where a suspected "terrorist" is, you're going to get a lot of casualties right? You may argue that US soldiers are trained to avoid killing civilians, but when the whole system of aerial warfare is careless of collateral damage, it doesn't matter.
American bombs blew the infrastructure for "shock and awe" and the majority of Iraq's city population has been without steady electricity and proper sewage since. They dropped cluster bombs, which like land mines destroy civilian lives because of the unexploded ordnance left laying about. Then there's the depleted uranium. Cancer is skyrocketing in Iraq, on account of the radiation levels our weapons have sown. The radiation levels are a thousand times the usual. Do you know what the half-life of that stuff is? We're talking billions of years.
Yes, insurgent groups and sectarian militias added to the body count, but the conditions on the ground were set up for that by turning Iraq into a hellhole.
Bush's America is the cause. It is the instigator. When a brute like Saddam has ruled more gently than Bush's occupation, it's quite damning. Bush, his cohorts, and everyone who followed orders to do this bear the moral responsibility.
We'd never bombard our cities this way to do in a few dangerous criminals, and the fact that we do that in Iraq shows how little their lives mean to the powers that be.
If fewer of our troops die than on D-Day, an occupation that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians is right, get with the program and STFU. Much improved medical technology and procedure means that many more troops are living with horrific injuries that would have died in World War 2 - never mind that.
If the majority of the American public were whipped up into a war frenzy, you should join in on the five minute hate, even though the facts are out there and they say it's a huge fraud. It's your country, right or wrong.
You'll serve your masters quite well, if not your country's ideals.
Actually, brains do confer a distinct advantage to predators. I don't mean speaking the Queen's English and making parlor conversation kind of brains; I mean the brains my cat shows when she approaches from the opposite side of the nearest tree to the squirrel she's stalking.
Here's one distinct case of how brains can confer predatory advantage.. Marsupial tigers had a much stronger bite than the modern placental counterpart. Sabretoothed cats had their famous large canines. However, the modern large cats are smart enough to learn to bite their prey at the back of the neck where it counts, and that smarts, I'll wager, carries with it adaptability for the long term, provided we don't wipe them out or their habitat.
Sorry, sir, but the Khasi people of India put two and two together about what global warming has to do with peace, and gave Al Gore an award earlier this year.
I'm just really surprised to see so much talk about a $200 price drop and so little mention of the $100 refund Apple offered previous iPhone buyers (link here). Can you really make a fair assessment of the subject without mentioning that fact?
Given the high levels of demand for the iPhone, I think the initial price was justified. I could barely avoid the stampede in the Apple store where I was taking in my heavily used laptop in for repair, the day it was launched. The early iPhone adopters I know, once they've weighed things, are happy campers.
In short, I don't think it's worth your time to bitch about this!
To continue with standing the silly societal cliches on their head, I have a close relative who happens to be both a devout conservative Mormon and a climate scientist with decades of satellite studies under his belt. You bet anthropogenic global warming is real to him, even if it isn't to many in his social and religious circles. At this point his studies include studying some of the radical changes going on in the atmosphere that are suggestive of global cooling in the upper atmosphere. Hint: the heat's being trapped lower down.
With perspectives like this, skepticism on global warming is only for idealogues and businessmen whose pet projects are at odds with doing something about it, in my view. At this point, with things I've read phrases like "lack of scientific evidence" like a sick, sad joke.
It's also technologist bias. Hey, I like gadgets, but let's keep this in perspective. We all - well, near all of us here on sites like Slashdot - went through the stage of being wowed by all this great stuff and thinking that AI and nanotech were going to get us to nirvana, and it was just a couple bazillion lines of code and some shiny gadgets away. People like Dyson envisioned really great stuff based on pure technological progress. Well, you can't do all this and not keep account of the costs, and we still need to eat something and live somewhere in a viable biosphere, let alone understand and appreciate this world we're in. I don't see how Dyson or, also recently, Card can legitimately go toe to toe with ice caps shrinking even during the winter, or CO2 concentrations higher than measurable in 600,000 years, or coral reefs bleaching and dying, or observed positive feedback loops from the tundra melting and exhaling the CO2 that was locked in it.
It's bias, pure and simple. They really really want their technologist dreams to come to pass. Who can blame them? It was bright and shiny. The fringe extreme on the other side would walk out on that dream forever.
Life comes before gadgets, pure and simple. We not only need to pay attention to what's happening in the world, we sure aren't realizing any dreams if we end up dead or just getting by around the polar caps in a century or two like J. Lovelock predicts. I don't see hard science in these claims. I see dreamers not liking this stack of cards. Hey, guys, my sympathies.
While I don't believe in strict construction of the U.S. Constitution, I do appreciate it when strict constructionists have their say, because they show how far beyond any reasonable interpretation things like this domestic spying are. Sometimes I even think they're right. The executive branch sorely needs someone who believes in keeping government power from trampling human rights. That's why Ron Paul is viable.
The Constitution gives the Federal government to regulate interstate commerce, which is why it has a role to play in this bridge on an interstate highway. It has a right to enforce safety standards, and the duty to fund it. This was something the writers of the US Constittution considered debatable - the main concern being whether federal funds and powers were affecting the states equally.
That strict/loose debate is here, and the attacks on human rights, habeas corpus, and the rule of law the Bush administration has made is way, way out there. This is just plain scary and wrong and against anything any educated patriot of this country stands for.
We should be considering what it would take to steer Apophis into a stable orbit. Can you imagine the amount of raw material on that thing? It would be a heyday for science, and then the space progam, and then the economy. Any manufacturing we could do with that significant quantity of iron and rock in space rather than this precious biosphere is worth looking into, and it's a lot easier to bring things down here than to launch them up there.
And no, I don't mean making "rods from God" or any of that other military nonsense.
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I think it's based on level of involvement. When something goes down, you're not going to have that song in the back of your head, worries about your appointment tomorrow, or be trying to figure out what the hell happened in The Fountain. Your whole brain is engaged.
My "time slowed down" experience was this: I was biking home from work along a road with a sidewalk only on one side, traffic whizzing by, no bike lanes. I was on the left hand side, which meant oncoming traffic was in the nearby lane. I wasn't going particularly fast; I know the consequences of not playing it safe. Suddenly a shoelace got into my gears and yanked the bike to the right, and off the sidewalk I went, and was headed straight for an oncoming car that had to be going at least 40 miles per hour.
There wasn't any time or place for panic. Instead, every part of my brain had to figure out what to do, stat. The bike was unpredictable with my shoelace and the chain trying to eat each other. In a split second I concluded that if I didn't make it wipe out right away, I would roll into the car's path, and it could be game over.
And that's what I did. The bike went on its side and me on top of it. The car missed by inches.
I got up and hurried home, and only when I had a chance to stop did it hit me. But, in the state of mind I had during the incident, that was the longest second and change of my life thus far.
An error of that miniscule size being used to dismiss that quantity of scientific evidence shows quite a lot of bias. If you're looking for a way to ignore the highest CO2 levels in 650,000 years and a very rapid change with no end in sight, I guess that'll have to do.
I happen to know that this man's been running satellite experiment and gathering hard data for decades. If the models are so flimsy, they get tossed out. I'm sorry, but these are professionals, not the peanut gallery of pundits that characterizes some ends of the blogosphere.
If you want to disbelieve a computer model, fine, but you're actually setting up a straw man argument by claiming that the science stops there. Large numbers of climate scientists saying something is over 90% certain is anything but a simulation jockey's hypothesis.
Knowing Mr. Russell personally, I can also tell you that he puts science ahead of his ideology, and he definitely says that anthropogenic warming is a major factor. As a good scientist with decades of solid work behind him, he does not propose every last effect of this, nor will he tell you that it's final and we know it all, but he will point to piles and piles of evidence.
I will definitely vouch for his bona fides, though.
Hats off to Russell. The man's been doing solid satellite-based experiments for decades. He's someone you should listen to about climate science.
I can tell you in advance, though, that there's a likely conclusion as to why noctilucent clouds are becoming more prevalent. That is predicted by the global warming simulations. The warmth being radiated from earth is being trapped in the lower atmosphere, and so while it heats up, the upper atmosphere actually cools. That's a solid hypothesis that's already gotten support from the evidence.
(Disclaimer: I'm a distant family member).
Is that your solution to life's problems? Run away from them?
I see you're no Einstein.
Having a history of using MS-DOS, the Amiga, OS/2, and Linux since the Slackware 0.9x days, I'm now using OSX on my MacBook Pro primarily. "Not as much software available" may be true in some respects, but you should ask yourself how that really affects you. You don't need quantity, you need quality. Right now I have the well integrated, nicely designed software suite that comes with OSX, and a shell prompt is just a click away where I have my MacPorts which makes getting the standard open source software that I have to have available.
My other machines are a Windows/Linux desktop and a Kurobox running Debian. The desktop rarely gets turned on, and the Kurobox does its job serving out NFS and SMB shares and hosting the occasional nethack game quite well. In practice, though, when all these machines are available, it's the quality that counts.
This is really just yet another non-renewable energy we're talking about here. I simply do not think we have an energy future that does not include a heightened efficiency, let alone a few reality check on "needs". The rising cost of energy is merely a symptom of human overconsumption. You cannot just throw nuclear power at this problem; that's just revving the engines of an out-of-control machine.
...And all that process of uranium mining and refinement runs on sweet dreams and sunshine?
Actually, no. The British MI6 and the CIA knew the Nigerian yellowcake hoax for what it was, and they were ignored by the administration. It did not stand up to scrutiny at all, and the word of it was in British newspapers before Bush's State of the Union address, as they critiqued Colin Powell's UN address. That was before the big invasion, obviously. Our media didn't cover the story until months afterwards, and then, it was "water under the bridge."
And if such a central piece of evidence is such a flimsy sham, and yet it is used to justify attacking another country, what makes you think Bush was merely deluded?
Politicians have a long history of using flimsy excuses to whip up public support for a war they want for their own reasons, and politicians in the USA are not an ounce different.
You know, given what we know about Bin Laden, I think the most instructive thing is to consider what business he thinks he's in. He sees his group as in the business of bleeding empires until they withdraw or die. Considering that the scenario in Afghanistan helped weaken the Soviet Union, he sees that as a success. The way things are going now with our putting forth so much effort into Iraq that could actually make a big difference elsewhere, I imagine he thinks he's succeeding.
And thanks to our country's lax response to corruption and stupidity in our capitol, he's probably right.
Well, here we go. You "want your side to win", even if it means invading a country based on what are demonstrably lies. This isn't football. There are moral consequences. Americans would respond similarly if someone invaded and occupied their country, destroyed its infrastructure, and left the majority without so much as electricity and running water - count on it. And the more superior in open conflict the occupying army in this hypothetical scenario were to be, as the American military is, the more logical the methods being used by the hypothetical insurgents would look.
The pattern I see in this country is stereotyping other people based on scenarios they've never had to face that are caused by the meddling of the US military and CIA that, again, most citizens are ill-informed of. It does amount to racism.
It really sounds to me like you make the "my country, right or wrong" argument to justify going with (illegitimate) political powers, despite the fact that our country wouldn't even exist but for rational dissent.
The Lancet's methods are the same as those used by the government elsewhere, and they didn't even include Fallujah, which saw huge numbers of civilian casualties. You simply don't bomb a city like that without piling up lots of killed and maimed civilizans, er, "collateral damage".
Now, normally I would go down the road with you about how the CIA knew the Japanese were trying to surrender, etc., which by now is familiar to people on either side of the argument and you clearly have a preference.
Here's something not so well known: Iwo Jima, Saipan, all those island hopping battles were not any indication of how an invasion of the main Japanese islands would go. The CIA wasn't kidding about the intent to surrender. While the outer islands and their inhabitants were dispensable human shields, because they were a different ethnicity and the mainland Japanese had racist attitudes towards them, Japan proper was not. They told the remote islanders horror stories about the Allies and to commit mass suicide if taken, whereas they would have done no such thing if the main islands had been invaded.
But this really backs up the fact that the CIA had good information on the Japanese intent to surrender, and that the bomb was dropped as a demonstration of military might, especially to the Soviets.
My nefarious un-American dining activities know no bounds. I love those saffron-spiced chicken kabobs. And hamburgers just don't stand up to a wrap in lavash wrap with koubideh ground beef and a dash of yogurt sauce, and cilantro, and tomatoes and veggies chargrilled to perfection. I even like the basmati rice and the fresh pomegranates and dates that are better than you get in any typical American store. I've scarfed down so many lunches like that and loved every bit.
Take that, Bush. Better gitmo me before I buy a hookah, or a Sufi poetry book.
And today, down the road from there, I'm going Chinese and buying dim sum. You're so screwed.
No, Iraq is not the scene of terrorists with bombs causing all the damage we've seen. You're buying into a selective analysis meant to blame those foreign devils for the state of their country, the same as those who have been taking this "white man's burden" style of intervention into the third world have always done.
You do realize that when mostly you're shooting a missile from an airplane into a building where a suspected "terrorist" is, you're going to get a lot of casualties right? You may argue that US soldiers are trained to avoid killing civilians, but when the whole system of aerial warfare is careless of collateral damage, it doesn't matter.
American bombs blew the infrastructure for "shock and awe" and the majority of Iraq's city population has been without steady electricity and proper sewage since. They dropped cluster bombs, which like land mines destroy civilian lives because of the unexploded ordnance left laying about. Then there's the depleted uranium. Cancer is skyrocketing in Iraq, on account of the radiation levels our weapons have sown. The radiation levels are a thousand times the usual. Do you know what the half-life of that stuff is? We're talking billions of years.
Yes, insurgent groups and sectarian militias added to the body count, but the conditions on the ground were set up for that by turning Iraq into a hellhole.
Bush's America is the cause. It is the instigator. When a brute like Saddam has ruled more gently than Bush's occupation, it's quite damning. Bush, his cohorts, and everyone who followed orders to do this bear the moral responsibility.
We'd never bombard our cities this way to do in a few dangerous criminals, and the fact that we do that in Iraq shows how little their lives mean to the powers that be.
So let me get this right:
If fewer of our troops die than on D-Day, an occupation that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians is right, get with the program and STFU. Much improved medical technology and procedure means that many more troops are living with horrific injuries that would have died in World War 2 - never mind that.
If the majority of the American public were whipped up into a war frenzy, you should join in on the five minute hate, even though the facts are out there and they say it's a huge fraud. It's your country, right or wrong.
You'll serve your masters quite well, if not your country's ideals.
Actually, brains do confer a distinct advantage to predators. I don't mean speaking the Queen's English and making parlor conversation kind of brains; I mean the brains my cat shows when she approaches from the opposite side of the nearest tree to the squirrel she's stalking.
Here's one distinct case of how brains can confer predatory advantage.. Marsupial tigers had a much stronger bite than the modern placental counterpart. Sabretoothed cats had their famous large canines. However, the modern large cats are smart enough to learn to bite their prey at the back of the neck where it counts, and that smarts, I'll wager, carries with it adaptability for the long term, provided we don't wipe them out or their habitat.
Sorry, sir, but the Khasi people of India put two and two together about what global warming has to do with peace, and gave Al Gore an award earlier this year.
I'm just really surprised to see so much talk about a $200 price drop and so little mention of the $100 refund Apple offered previous iPhone buyers (link here). Can you really make a fair assessment of the subject without mentioning that fact?
Given the high levels of demand for the iPhone, I think the initial price was justified. I could barely avoid the stampede in the Apple store where I was taking in my heavily used laptop in for repair, the day it was launched. The early iPhone adopters I know, once they've weighed things, are happy campers.
In short, I don't think it's worth your time to bitch about this!
To continue with standing the silly societal cliches on their head, I have a close relative who happens to be both a devout conservative Mormon and a climate scientist with decades of satellite studies under his belt. You bet anthropogenic global warming is real to him, even if it isn't to many in his social and religious circles. At this point his studies include studying some of the radical changes going on in the atmosphere that are suggestive of global cooling in the upper atmosphere. Hint: the heat's being trapped lower down.
With perspectives like this, skepticism on global warming is only for idealogues and businessmen whose pet projects are at odds with doing something about it, in my view. At this point, with things I've read phrases like "lack of scientific evidence" like a sick, sad joke.
Panspermia: (n) the theory which states that sperm gets all over everything.
It's also technologist bias. Hey, I like gadgets, but let's keep this in perspective. We all - well, near all of us here on sites like Slashdot - went through the stage of being wowed by all this great stuff and thinking that AI and nanotech were going to get us to nirvana, and it was just a couple bazillion lines of code and some shiny gadgets away. People like Dyson envisioned really great stuff based on pure technological progress. Well, you can't do all this and not keep account of the costs, and we still need to eat something and live somewhere in a viable biosphere, let alone understand and appreciate this world we're in. I don't see how Dyson or, also recently, Card can legitimately go toe to toe with ice caps shrinking even during the winter, or CO2 concentrations higher than measurable in 600,000 years, or coral reefs bleaching and dying, or observed positive feedback loops from the tundra melting and exhaling the CO2 that was locked in it.
It's bias, pure and simple. They really really want their technologist dreams to come to pass. Who can blame them? It was bright and shiny. The fringe extreme on the other side would walk out on that dream forever.
Life comes before gadgets, pure and simple. We not only need to pay attention to what's happening in the world, we sure aren't realizing any dreams if we end up dead or just getting by around the polar caps in a century or two like J. Lovelock predicts. I don't see hard science in these claims. I see dreamers not liking this stack of cards. Hey, guys, my sympathies.
While I don't believe in strict construction of the U.S. Constitution, I do appreciate it when strict constructionists have their say, because they show how far beyond any reasonable interpretation things like this domestic spying are. Sometimes I even think they're right. The executive branch sorely needs someone who believes in keeping government power from trampling human rights. That's why Ron Paul is viable.
The Constitution gives the Federal government to regulate interstate commerce, which is why it has a role to play in this bridge on an interstate highway. It has a right to enforce safety standards, and the duty to fund it. This was something the writers of the US Constittution considered debatable - the main concern being whether federal funds and powers were affecting the states equally.
That strict/loose debate is here, and the attacks on human rights, habeas corpus, and the rule of law the Bush administration has made is way, way out there. This is just plain scary and wrong and against anything any educated patriot of this country stands for.
We should be considering what it would take to steer Apophis into a stable orbit. Can you imagine the amount of raw material on that thing? It would be a heyday for science, and then the space progam, and then the economy. Any manufacturing we could do with that significant quantity of iron and rock in space rather than this precious biosphere is worth looking into, and it's a lot easier to bring things down here than to launch them up there.
And no, I don't mean making "rods from God" or any of that other military nonsense.