Actually this reminds me more of the SEA vs Phil Katz fight - two small companies that are at the cusp of a pissing match. I doubt that there is an army of lawyers available - if a lawsuit starts, both parties probably lose.
What exactly was the "waste" on existing energy industries? That energy industry is currently powering your entire civilization.
The ROI on our existing energy infrastructure is the difference between the agrarian 1860s and now. And the existing energy industry is far cleaner and cheaper than the pre-existing industries (cutting down entire forests for fuel in the 1600s or the 80% coal power of the late 1800s). Our primary problem right now is one of scale - we switched to an infrastructure that was so (relatively) clean and efficient that we now can use so much of it that even the (relatively) small amount of pollution per unit of power is overwhelming the environment.
It'll be a fantastic day when the alt-energy sector can replace even the incremental growth of our energy use. We seem to have done a poor job of being a VC for the sector - maybe we should concentrate on basic and applied research.
(All that said, Cool Planet Fuels looks pretty cool.)
You apparently don't bother to read anything other than "Commies == bad" and then put ??? at the end.
Let's put it more simply - Five Year Plans tend to suck because they operate under the assumption that the central government has perfect knowledge and perfect foresight. Both of these things are false but appeal to intellectual vanity so they are tried again and again. Occasionally, where the preexisting system was absolutely ass backward, the first couple of plans work just because some sort of order is better than chaos, but once you've got a semi-functional economy, it stagnates as the central authority loses the ability to account for all the needs and nuances of the new economy.
Detailed plans for an entire country's economy don't work out too well in the long term. If you simply mean we should have a "Five Year Plan" for some specific piece of work you want done (new infrastructure, new pollution controls) - that's simply called "planning" and is routinely done throughout the world. You're merely bitching about the fact that governments have a tendency to screw up even that more limited planning too.
No, statist counties plan on large scales. Large scale planning tends to lead to large scale centrally planned industry, which are generally poorly run and wasteful of resources. Look at the environmental records of the big statist countries versus the more decentralized democracies and tell me which have been better. I'll take the USA's environmental record and economic output per unit of emission over that of any of the Five Year Plan countries any day.
Note that the last two are two of the most rapidly industrializing countries in the world and are now the major CO2 producers. Well executed Five Year Plans rapidly increase carbon intensity - hurray!
Most of the other Five Year Plan systems ended with the death of the Soviet Union.
Of course, they were one better than the Four Year Plan.
One of whom, Terry Jones, subsequently went on to detail the case against the Romans in Barbarians. Not entirely successfully, but it's an interesting bit of revisionism.
Wait - it's that building? It's the New Years Eve Ball-Drop building - which is why they can get those ridiculous ad dollars - the entire area is built around that building (heck, Times Square is named after that building - it was the New York Times offices 100 years ago or so).
It's also a ridiculously narrow building sitting on what is effectively a traffic island - I'd hate to try to get large numbers of people in and out of that building these days. The Walgreens is at the base of the building and is still so narrow that most parts of it have no more than two cramped aisles of goods - the shop is three stories tall and is still probably less than half the square footage of an average Walgreens. The north end of the building is one window wide while the south end is four windows wide.
It's kind of a shame that the building itself is covered up, as it's gorgeous, but if there was a case that lot dimensions and position call for just using a building for advertising, this is it.
Being a lover of all things doughnutty, I'm not a fan at all of Dunkin' Donuts. They sell stuff that is vaguely donut shaped and I suppose they can soak up coffee, but that's about it.
That being said, my company has an office in Manhattan. I've visited a few times and there seems to be a ubiquitous box of DD sitting around. The weird thing is - the Manahttan DDs are far superior to any DD I've had the misfortune of eating anywhere else. They occasionally seem almost like real donuts.
So, if the sign in Times Square can get some sucker to try a Manhattan DD, they may think "not bad" and try again. When they get back to their home area and get the craptacular donuts produced there, it may take a few visits before they give up. Or maybe they try a different branch, thinking that that one local branch must just have bad employees. Pretty soon, that poor sucker has eaten a dozen bad donuts.
This is the reason for the advertisement - getting the poor folk in flyover country to remember a "good" Dunkin' Donut and keep trying to find one locally. As DD has pretty much obliterated most other donut chains outside the South, they will wander aimlessly like nomads, trying to find a good donut.
$3.6 million and a few higher-quality donut shops in the immediate area of the advertisement is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than upgrading the quality of the donuts across the entire system.
That is changing rapidly. Cargo ships in North American waters are now required to burn low-sulfur diesel instead of bunker fuel. And there are several different attempts to harness wind power to lower fuel consumption. The link above wouldn't work on big container vessels but could be used in conjunction with biodiesel to drop net carbon emissions to near zero.
There was the Beluga Skysail for container ships that demonstrated a 20% reduction in fuel usage but they appear to have gone out of business.
The Gaza Strip as it exists today appears to be the entire territory that Israel took over from the Egyptians in 1967.
The UN Partition plan wasn't accepted by any of the regional powers and the Gaza strip was occupied by Egypt from 1948 to 1967 (with a brief six-month interlude in 1956-57). It is this version of "the Gaza Strip" that Israel withdrew from in 2005.
So, at least in this respect, it appears that Israel did completely release the Gaza Strip as it had been known for over 60 years and by several different governments.
That $1 million for 10 patients was for the live cell test on humans. The PLG (poly-lactide-co-glycolide, used in resorbable sutures) version tested on mice would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
Sounds like they just take some bits of myelin, soak them in nano-structured PLG which latches on to them and then inject that into the bloodstream, where it migrates to the spleen and reeducates the next generation of T-cells. Very promising.
Please. It's because universities are overwhelmingly run by a single ideology (in this case, leftism, but in another time or universe, rightism). Combine a monoculture of 'correct' thought, a hypersensitivity to hurting any favored/traditionally disenfranchised group's feelings and (as you said) fear of lawsuits and the professional outrage club and you get these codes. The fact that university faculty are usually the strongest supporters of and agitators for these codes should be shocking, but sadly it isn't.
Corporations generally don't care at all about what you say - they just want your money. It's really only the content industry (MP/RIAA) that wants to throttle speech - ISPs and other non-content groups have been fighting a losing battle against them for years. The internet is brought to you by corporations and for the most part all they care about is charging you for the delivery of bits - the default attitude of nearly all of them when the MP/RIAA started its little crusade was to ignore them or fight back against them. They've added DRM and the like grudgingly at best - it's a cost and a headache to them and pisses off their customers.
I haven't been to atheist conventions, so I have no idea how bad things are or are claimed to be.
The 'ElevatorGate' controversy certainly does seem to be a case where things spiraled out of control. Neither side is covered in glory there.
And if you haven't already, I would take some time to read SkepChick.org. Definitely hipster, anti-patriarchy feminism. I'm not trying to say that pejoratively - if that's what they truly feel, they should write about it and try to persuade. More speech = good.
I don't personally find it very persuasive but I'd probably have more fun hanging out with Rebecca Watson and her crew than Dawkins.
I believe he did at some point, but honestly that whole controversy is a mess and has really drawn out some battle lines.
Apparently Dawkins and Watson were at a conference in Dublin and Watson said some derogatory things during a speech about a (female, feminist, atheist) friend of Dawkins. She then went on to tell a story of being harrassed on an elevator (ElevatorGate) implying that all male atheists were misogynists.
Dawkins gets mad and leaves some really awful comments on a message board. Watson now uses those comments to continue to slam atheists as misogynists (see the Slate article - it's Watson's latest attempt at publicizing this story a year later).
The core conflict seems to be that you have an atheist movement (male and female) and a confrontational, hipster feminist/anti-patriarchy movement (Watson and others) that agree on atheism and little else. Watson is trying to merge the two movements and is annoyed at the pushback. The existing atheist movement is annoyed at someone trying to coopt their movement. It's led to some really unfortunate (and nasty) verbal warfare.
Given my understanding (which is far from complete), it looks like Watson and her group are the aggressors but Dawkins and his group have handled it very poorly.
California and Illinois are acknowledged fiscal basket cases - the inflation adjusted per capita increase in spending in those two states from 2000 to 2012 were 42% and 57% respectively. The median state (Michigan at #25) had a 38% increase - slightly better than the US.
Let's just say that neither level of government has been fiscally responsible. All of these figures are increases per capita - more money being spent per person - which means even if everyone (including the rich) was pitching in like it was the height of the dot-com bubble we'd still be under water.
I must be missing something here, because I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is between plants going through the digestive tracts of ruminants, where bacterial flora break down the carbohydrates, cellulose and hemi-cellulose into carbon dioxide, methane and other gases, and natural decay/composting, where bacterial flora break down the carbohydrates, cellulose and hemi-cellulose into carbon dioxide, methane and other gases.
Is the ratio of gases vastly different between ruminant digestion and 'natural' decay? Do dinosaur farts have a much higher methane-to-CO2 ratio than, say, a peat marsh does? Or a forest? Did the existence of ruminants change the landscape in a way that lowered or raised background, "natural decay caused" methane production? And how certain can we be that the intestinal flora of sauropods were the same as those of cows and antelope today? Reptile digestion differs from mammalian digestion today - why wouldn't it be different 65 million years ago?
It's an interesting thought experiment, but considering it's not easily falsifiable, not so scientific. Sounds like another way to jump on the climate change bandwagon without all that pesky real-world data to deal with.
It doesn't have to. Libertarians would rightfully point out that corporations are a legal fiction created and given power by the state.
Libertarians tend to be pro-market, not pro-business. Corporations like restricted and regulated markets - free markets (with their attendant "creative destruction") terrify them. "Too big to fail" is a statist term, not a libertarian one.
If companies had to be organized in smaller units (which would be just fine from a libertarian perspective), you'd be far less scared of their power. Resilient networks of smaller companies that are more in tune with their communities should work nearly as well given modern communication systems. If GM leaves Detroit, it's devastating; if Hank's Tool and Die closes down, it's sad for them, but life goes on.
Even the biggest bugaboo libertarian scary monsters, the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, are organized as a private corporation - it's pretty much owned and run by two guys. Big, big company, but far more like the local guys who did really, really well than the faceless transnational corporations that strike the biggest fears on the left.
I'm not a mathematician, but that Tau "article" seems to steal a few bases.
It whines about A=(pi)r2 while C=(pi)D and how that shows that diameter is fundamental. But that's not the way I learned it anyway - the formula was always C=2(pi)r. Radius was fundamental, not diameter.
Which is even more obvious when you go into spheres, where everything is based off radius (A=4(pi)r2, V=4/3(pi)r3).
If we use diameter, you have to remember additional divisors (4 for the areas, 8 for the volumes). I can't speak on whether the whole "one turn" argument would help understanding other concepts, but aside from people who are working to become mathematicians, I suspect that the fact that the radius-based "magic formulas" are simpler will keep them around...
p.s. What magic brew do you have to use to get Slashdot to accept HTML codes like pi? Or Unicode? Every attempt ended up getting stripped, so I went with (pi).
It's kind of unfortunate that the whole Rush Limbaugh stupidity (almost a tautology there) has skewed the coverage so much. Very few people outside of progressive policy wonks or the backwaters of the right-leaning blogosphere know who Sandra Fluke really is.
Ezra Klein (Mr. Progressive Policy Wonk for the Post) had a brief write up on Sandra Fluke prior to the controversy. It turns out that she knew about Georgetown's contraceptive policy before she even enrolled (over 3 years ago, long before any contraceptive controversy) and enrolled with the idea of changing the policy. Which has pretty much been her full time job ever since - she was the president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice during this time.
So, on one level, she's exactly the sort of activist "expert" that both sides invite to these panels, but she was being sold as "just" a student with a story to tell. It's annoying that this kind of stuff goes on. I'm not opposed to activists being on panels - they have immersed themselves in the issues - but I would want that stuff mentioned fairly prominently so I can properly weigh the testimony.
Ms. Fluke has been politically active for many years - she's a professional activist (not the most unbiased sources, but you can find details here and here). She's not a young law student who got swept up in events (aside from Limbaugh's disgusting comments).
Tell me your background and give me your data - I'll try to be open minded about both. Just don't play these gotcha games.
Actually, in Northeastern Illinois, the LDS church is the main organizer of the entire district. Most troops are not LDS affiliated, but all the main organizing events (council meetings, etc.) take place at the LDS church and they are definitely the prime movers.
I'm not LDS and I have no problem with them running things. In general, scouting here is probably a little more liberal than in many areas - I don't detect any LDS "agenda". The LDS church is just really into Boy Scouts and they have lots of people volunteering to do the hard/boring stuff. Good for them!
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Actually this reminds me more of the SEA vs Phil Katz fight - two small companies that are at the cusp of a pissing match. I doubt that there is an army of lawyers available - if a lawsuit starts, both parties probably lose.
What exactly was the "waste" on existing energy industries? That energy industry is currently powering your entire civilization.
The ROI on our existing energy infrastructure is the difference between the agrarian 1860s and now. And the existing energy industry is far cleaner and cheaper than the pre-existing industries (cutting down entire forests for fuel in the 1600s or the 80% coal power of the late 1800s). Our primary problem right now is one of scale - we switched to an infrastructure that was so (relatively) clean and efficient that we now can use so much of it that even the (relatively) small amount of pollution per unit of power is overwhelming the environment.
It'll be a fantastic day when the alt-energy sector can replace even the incremental growth of our energy use. We seem to have done a poor job of being a VC for the sector - maybe we should concentrate on basic and applied research.
(All that said, Cool Planet Fuels looks pretty cool.)
You apparently don't bother to read anything other than "Commies == bad" and then put ??? at the end.
Let's put it more simply - Five Year Plans tend to suck because they operate under the assumption that the central government has perfect knowledge and perfect foresight. Both of these things are false but appeal to intellectual vanity so they are tried again and again. Occasionally, where the preexisting system was absolutely ass backward, the first couple of plans work just because some sort of order is better than chaos, but once you've got a semi-functional economy, it stagnates as the central authority loses the ability to account for all the needs and nuances of the new economy.
Detailed plans for an entire country's economy don't work out too well in the long term. If you simply mean we should have a "Five Year Plan" for some specific piece of work you want done (new infrastructure, new pollution controls) - that's simply called "planning" and is routinely done throughout the world. You're merely bitching about the fact that governments have a tendency to screw up even that more limited planning too.
Randall Mills is whispering "hydrinos" right now and bilking a new set of investors... ;)
No, statist counties plan on large scales. Large scale planning tends to lead to large scale centrally planned industry, which are generally poorly run and wasteful of resources. Look at the environmental records of the big statist countries versus the more decentralized democracies and tell me which have been better. I'll take the USA's environmental record and economic output per unit of emission over that of any of the Five Year Plan countries any day.
Five Year Plans still exist where they always existed - communist states and developing countries.
Vietnam, China, India.
Note that the last two are two of the most rapidly industrializing countries in the world and are now the major CO2 producers. Well executed Five Year Plans rapidly increase carbon intensity - hurray!
Most of the other Five Year Plan systems ended with the death of the Soviet Union.
Of course, they were one better than the Four Year Plan.
Welcome to Federalism. A concept Republicans give lip service to and Democrats run screaming from.
One of whom, Terry Jones, subsequently went on to detail the case against the Romans in Barbarians. Not entirely successfully, but it's an interesting bit of revisionism.
Wait - it's that building? It's the New Years Eve Ball-Drop building - which is why they can get those ridiculous ad dollars - the entire area is built around that building (heck, Times Square is named after that building - it was the New York Times offices 100 years ago or so).
It's also a ridiculously narrow building sitting on what is effectively a traffic island - I'd hate to try to get large numbers of people in and out of that building these days. The Walgreens is at the base of the building and is still so narrow that most parts of it have no more than two cramped aisles of goods - the shop is three stories tall and is still probably less than half the square footage of an average Walgreens. The north end of the building is one window wide while the south end is four windows wide.
It's kind of a shame that the building itself is covered up, as it's gorgeous, but if there was a case that lot dimensions and position call for just using a building for advertising, this is it.
Being a lover of all things doughnutty, I'm not a fan at all of Dunkin' Donuts. They sell stuff that is vaguely donut shaped and I suppose they can soak up coffee, but that's about it.
That being said, my company has an office in Manhattan. I've visited a few times and there seems to be a ubiquitous box of DD sitting around. The weird thing is - the Manahttan DDs are far superior to any DD I've had the misfortune of eating anywhere else. They occasionally seem almost like real donuts.
So, if the sign in Times Square can get some sucker to try a Manhattan DD, they may think "not bad" and try again. When they get back to their home area and get the craptacular donuts produced there, it may take a few visits before they give up. Or maybe they try a different branch, thinking that that one local branch must just have bad employees. Pretty soon, that poor sucker has eaten a dozen bad donuts.
This is the reason for the advertisement - getting the poor folk in flyover country to remember a "good" Dunkin' Donut and keep trying to find one locally. As DD has pretty much obliterated most other donut chains outside the South, they will wander aimlessly like nomads, trying to find a good donut.
$3.6 million and a few higher-quality donut shops in the immediate area of the advertisement is a whole hell of a lot cheaper than upgrading the quality of the donuts across the entire system.
That is changing rapidly. Cargo ships in North American waters are now required to burn low-sulfur diesel instead of bunker fuel. And there are several different attempts to harness wind power to lower fuel consumption. The link above wouldn't work on big container vessels but could be used in conjunction with biodiesel to drop net carbon emissions to near zero.
There was the Beluga Skysail for container ships that demonstrated a 20% reduction in fuel usage but they appear to have gone out of business.
The Gaza Strip as it exists today appears to be the entire territory that Israel took over from the Egyptians in 1967.
The UN Partition plan wasn't accepted by any of the regional powers and the Gaza strip was occupied by Egypt from 1948 to 1967 (with a brief six-month interlude in 1956-57). It is this version of "the Gaza Strip" that Israel withdrew from in 2005.
So, at least in this respect, it appears that Israel did completely release the Gaza Strip as it had been known for over 60 years and by several different governments.
That $1 million for 10 patients was for the live cell test on humans. The PLG (poly-lactide-co-glycolide, used in resorbable sutures) version tested on mice would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
Sounds like they just take some bits of myelin, soak them in nano-structured PLG which latches on to them and then inject that into the bloodstream, where it migrates to the spleen and reeducates the next generation of T-cells. Very promising.
Please. It's because universities are overwhelmingly run by a single ideology (in this case, leftism, but in another time or universe, rightism). Combine a monoculture of 'correct' thought, a hypersensitivity to hurting any favored/traditionally disenfranchised group's feelings and (as you said) fear of lawsuits and the professional outrage club and you get these codes. The fact that university faculty are usually the strongest supporters of and agitators for these codes should be shocking, but sadly it isn't.
Corporations generally don't care at all about what you say - they just want your money. It's really only the content industry (MP/RIAA) that wants to throttle speech - ISPs and other non-content groups have been fighting a losing battle against them for years. The internet is brought to you by corporations and for the most part all they care about is charging you for the delivery of bits - the default attitude of nearly all of them when the MP/RIAA started its little crusade was to ignore them or fight back against them. They've added DRM and the like grudgingly at best - it's a cost and a headache to them and pisses off their customers.
I haven't been to atheist conventions, so I have no idea how bad things are or are claimed to be.
The 'ElevatorGate' controversy certainly does seem to be a case where things spiraled out of control. Neither side is covered in glory there.
And if you haven't already, I would take some time to read SkepChick.org. Definitely hipster, anti-patriarchy feminism. I'm not trying to say that pejoratively - if that's what they truly feel, they should write about it and try to persuade. More speech = good.
I don't personally find it very persuasive but I'd probably have more fun hanging out with Rebecca Watson and her crew than Dawkins.
I believe he did at some point, but honestly that whole controversy is a mess and has really drawn out some battle lines.
Apparently Dawkins and Watson were at a conference in Dublin and Watson said some derogatory things during a speech about a (female, feminist, atheist) friend of Dawkins. She then went on to tell a story of being harrassed on an elevator (ElevatorGate) implying that all male atheists were misogynists.
Dawkins gets mad and leaves some really awful comments on a message board. Watson now uses those comments to continue to slam atheists as misogynists (see the Slate article - it's Watson's latest attempt at publicizing this story a year later).
The core conflict seems to be that you have an atheist movement (male and female) and a confrontational, hipster feminist/anti-patriarchy movement (Watson and others) that agree on atheism and little else. Watson is trying to merge the two movements and is annoyed at the pushback. The existing atheist movement is annoyed at someone trying to coopt their movement. It's led to some really unfortunate (and nasty) verbal warfare.
Given my understanding (which is far from complete), it looks like Watson and her group are the aggressors but Dawkins and his group have handled it very poorly.
Yeah, it was well reported in the science press at the time: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/07/richard-dawkins-draws-feminist-wrath-over-sexual-harassment-comments/39637/
Yeah, because the federal government has been so much better at keeping its fiscal house in order.
The highest debt per capita of any state in the country is Connecticut at $5,402.
The per capita debt of the federal government is $51,654.92 or more than 9 times as much.
Total spending per capita in the United States has gone from $6,339.90 in 2000 to $11,194.30 in 2010. The inflation adjusted increase was 39.4%.
California and Illinois are acknowledged fiscal basket cases - the inflation adjusted per capita increase in spending in those two states from 2000 to 2012 were 42% and 57% respectively. The median state (Michigan at #25) had a 38% increase - slightly better than the US.
Let's just say that neither level of government has been fiscally responsible. All of these figures are increases per capita - more money being spent per person - which means even if everyone (including the rich) was pitching in like it was the height of the dot-com bubble we'd still be under water.
Lynx? Doesn't it use that weird WWW thingy?
I'll have to look it up on Gopher and see what all the fuss is about...
I must be missing something here, because I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is between plants going through the digestive tracts of ruminants, where bacterial flora break down the carbohydrates, cellulose and hemi-cellulose into carbon dioxide, methane and other gases, and natural decay/composting, where bacterial flora break down the carbohydrates, cellulose and hemi-cellulose into carbon dioxide, methane and other gases.
Is the ratio of gases vastly different between ruminant digestion and 'natural' decay? Do dinosaur farts have a much higher methane-to-CO2 ratio than, say, a peat marsh does? Or a forest? Did the existence of ruminants change the landscape in a way that lowered or raised background, "natural decay caused" methane production? And how certain can we be that the intestinal flora of sauropods were the same as those of cows and antelope today? Reptile digestion differs from mammalian digestion today - why wouldn't it be different 65 million years ago?
It's an interesting thought experiment, but considering it's not easily falsifiable, not so scientific. Sounds like another way to jump on the climate change bandwagon without all that pesky real-world data to deal with.
Philistine! Everyone knows the proper pronunciation is C-Octothorpe!
It doesn't have to. Libertarians would rightfully point out that corporations are a legal fiction created and given power by the state.
Libertarians tend to be pro-market, not pro-business. Corporations like restricted and regulated markets - free markets (with their attendant "creative destruction") terrify them. "Too big to fail" is a statist term, not a libertarian one.
If companies had to be organized in smaller units (which would be just fine from a libertarian perspective), you'd be far less scared of their power. Resilient networks of smaller companies that are more in tune with their communities should work nearly as well given modern communication systems. If GM leaves Detroit, it's devastating; if Hank's Tool and Die closes down, it's sad for them, but life goes on.
Even the biggest bugaboo libertarian scary monsters, the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, are organized as a private corporation - it's pretty much owned and run by two guys. Big, big company, but far more like the local guys who did really, really well than the faceless transnational corporations that strike the biggest fears on the left.
I'm not a mathematician, but that Tau "article" seems to steal a few bases.
It whines about A=(pi)r2 while C=(pi)D and how that shows that diameter is fundamental. But that's not the way I learned it anyway - the formula was always C=2(pi)r. Radius was fundamental, not diameter.
Which is even more obvious when you go into spheres, where everything is based off radius (A=4(pi)r2, V=4/3(pi)r3).
If we use diameter, you have to remember additional divisors (4 for the areas, 8 for the volumes). I can't speak on whether the whole "one turn" argument would help understanding other concepts, but aside from people who are working to become mathematicians, I suspect that the fact that the radius-based "magic formulas" are simpler will keep them around...
p.s. What magic brew do you have to use to get Slashdot to accept HTML codes like pi? Or Unicode? Every attempt ended up getting stripped, so I went with (pi).
It's kind of unfortunate that the whole Rush Limbaugh stupidity (almost a tautology there) has skewed the coverage so much. Very few people outside of progressive policy wonks or the backwaters of the right-leaning blogosphere know who Sandra Fluke really is.
Ezra Klein (Mr. Progressive Policy Wonk for the Post) had a brief write up on Sandra Fluke prior to the controversy. It turns out that she knew about Georgetown's contraceptive policy before she even enrolled (over 3 years ago, long before any contraceptive controversy) and enrolled with the idea of changing the policy. Which has pretty much been her full time job ever since - she was the president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice during this time.
So, on one level, she's exactly the sort of activist "expert" that both sides invite to these panels, but she was being sold as "just" a student with a story to tell. It's annoying that this kind of stuff goes on. I'm not opposed to activists being on panels - they have immersed themselves in the issues - but I would want that stuff mentioned fairly prominently so I can properly weigh the testimony.
Ms. Fluke has been politically active for many years - she's a professional activist (not the most unbiased sources, but you can find details here and here). She's not a young law student who got swept up in events (aside from Limbaugh's disgusting comments).
Tell me your background and give me your data - I'll try to be open minded about both. Just don't play these gotcha games.
Actually, in Northeastern Illinois, the LDS church is the main organizer of the entire district. Most troops are not LDS affiliated, but all the main organizing events (council meetings, etc.) take place at the LDS church and they are definitely the prime movers.
I'm not LDS and I have no problem with them running things. In general, scouting here is probably a little more liberal than in many areas - I don't detect any LDS "agenda". The LDS church is just really into Boy Scouts and they have lots of people volunteering to do the hard/boring stuff. Good for them!