1. Does not follow, actually. A large fraction of those without health insurance do so because they are healthy and have no use for it.
And people living longer does bad things to Social Security.
2. I can't dispute this point, because I don't know enough about the current causes of bankruptcy. It's quite possible you're right.
That said, Medicare has deductibles, and uncovered expenses. Which is why people on Medicare still pay for additional health insurance.
3. Actually, no. It means that in the future, but it does not eliminate GM's current contractual obligations. So GM will STILL be a pension/medical benefits company that makes cars on the side. Until EVERYONE under the current contract dies.
Is this good for GM? Hell, yes. It leaves them in Purgatory for another half century, but lets them off the hook after that. Is it good for the American people? I'm less sanguine about that part of it. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. Just depends on how I'm feeling.
Note, by the way, that I have no intrinsic objection to national healthcare. I DO have an intrinsic objection to self-delusion. And the belief that the Iraq War money would fund health and happiness for all Americans is self-delusion. It isn't enough, even if we didn't mind the deficits associated with it.
You say that like the cost of healthcare is greater than insurance.
So, I take it your health insurance has no deductibles? And ALL medical procedures are covered? Wish I had a plan like that. Hell, wish I had health insurance at all - cancer will tend to kill that sort of thing real fast.
Realistically, though, your health insurance, like mine last time I had some, costs less than total medical costs. Because you're required to pay those deductibles and whatnot.
Why not just extend Medicare to everyone - old, young, rich, and poor? It works for the rest of the world!
Medicare outlays are between $350 billion and $400 billion per year right now.
Medicare covers between 45 and 50 million people right now.
Taking the most optimistic of those figures ($350 billion and 50 million people), we see that Medicare extended to the general population would cost on the order of $2 trillion (with a "TR") per year. Which would ALL be deficit, unless we increased Medicare taxes by a factor of six or so. Note that Medicare is expected to spend more in 2008 than Medicare taxes take in already.
So, you're talking about increasing payroll taxes from 1.45% (each, from you, and from your employer) to about 9% (from each of you). At least.
Stop the war against the middle east and we will have enough money to pay for healthcare for every american and triple the budget for NASA and all science foundations.
We could do that. Of course, the deficits that resulted from spending all that money on the war won't vanish just because we spend that money on health care. So your proposed solution is high deficits forever?
Note, however, that we've spent on the order of 1.5 trillion on the war in seven years. Which is only 200 billion per year. Which won't pay for healthcare for every American, since it amounts to only $670 per person - less than the cost of Health Insurance by a considerable margin, much less the actual cost of healthcare.
I guess I didn't do a good enough job editing that post. If you read between the lines of the second sentence "...if we stopped increasing... and... distributed... equitably..." you'll see that I realize it's a distribution problem. But that doesn't change the fact that so long as you make more food, there will be more people.
I agree it's largely a political issue in terms of who is hungry at any given moment. And even with a perfectly balanced food supply, that would still be a problem.
Population growth rate has little, if anything, to do with food supply. If you want population growth to zero, or even go into decline, then do the same thing the Europeans and Americans have done - raise everyone's standard of living.
I should, perhaps, point out that the world's population growth rates were higher back in the days when people really did starve regularly and on a large scale than they are now. The Green Revolution pretty much ended starvation, but the population growth rates declined rather than increasing when the food supply increased.
there is no such thing. as soon as you make enough food to feed all the starving people, they immediately set about making more people. Of course, if we stopped increasing food production and merely distributed existing food supplies equitably, we'd all be a little peckish, but the population would eventually stabilize at some number.
Whyever do you think we don't produce enuogh food to feed everyone on the planet? Even India is a net exporter of food these days. Politics is the only reason people are starving anywhere. When the local thugocracy decides that it wants to starve some convenient minority, suddenly we have a famine....
Of course not. He's one guy out of 432. And a freshman Representative at that. He'll have no more effect than any other freshman Congressman does, which is to say, none at all.
However, the debt has increased greatly under the Republicans, and the Republicans fight every attempt to balance it, like forcing the shutdown of the government under Clinton because he told them he wouldn't sign an unbalanced budget, so they submitted an unbalanced one to call his bluff, but it wasn't a bluff.
As I remember, the government shutdown was NOT because the Republican Congress submitted an unbalanced budget, but because they submited a budget that didn't increase spending as much as Clinton would like. Hardly a picture of fiscal responsibility.
A Republican president and Republican Congress will give us what we had under Regan, lots of debt and no fiscal responsibility.
When Reagan was President, we had a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, by the way. Not straight Republican. Sorry.
If you have a boarder in your house, and you balance your budget for your wife and children, is your household budget balanced? Everything you have direct control over balances. But the boarder could have an unbalanced budget. So, do you define your household to exclude such separate programs, or do you include them in your household budget? It's not just a separate line item, but a whole separate entity.
If I have a boarder, I don't use HIS money to balance my budget. I don't say "well, I spent $10000 more than we made, but Rick, who lives above the garage, spent $10000 LESS than he made, so my budget is balanced. This is what Clinton did. And what every President who has made a pretense of TRYING to balance the budget since FDR has done.
The only guarantee that it wouldn't stay balanced was the election of a Republican. It may have been harder, but it certainly wouldn't have been impossible for someone else to have balanced the budget in 2001.
No. We had a recession then. Tax revenues declined. The budget has items that MUST increase yearly (those cost of living raises you may have heard about), and Congress is not in the habit of raising taxes during a recession (since that just makes the recession worse). So almost by definition, the budget balancing would have ended with the next budget, no matter what else happened in the meantime.
Again, kudos to Clinton for succeeding, but his success was short-lived, and could not have been other than shortlived. The only way the budget will ever be balanced is if the Government is forced to reduce spending to less than tax revenues permanently. And that won't happen.
I can't imagine a Democratic president and Congress would be any better.
We have only to look at the deficits in Clinton's first two years to see what would happen in that case, since the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress then.
Useful clue, by the way - the House of Representatives is the only body that can originate budget bills. And before 1994, the House had been Democratic for longer than my lifetime. And I just turned 50.
Done, during the Clinton administration. Subsequently undone.
Remember the "Social Security Lockbox"? Neat phrase meant to suggest something that didn't exist in the real world. When Clinton balanced the budget (for one year, the recession that started at the end of 2000 guaranteed it wouldn't stay balanced no matter what), he did it by using the contents of that hypothetical Social Security Lockbox. In other words, the budget was "balanced", but we had to increase our national debt just as if it hadn't been balanced....
This is not meant to suggest that any other President or Congress has done better, mind you. But I can't buy "the budget is balanced" when the national debt increases.
Or was there some other Colt besides the.45 I fired in the Army?
I'll admit, it was rugged, but inaccurate as all get out. Basically, a.45 caliber belly gun. Any decent revolver was a better sidearm for self defense. And nothing beats a 12 gauge shotty for close in household defense.
The Army doesn't believe that the pistol has any purpose other than to shoot someone who gets in your face - beyond hand-hand range, you have a rifle. What a pistol has to do is be rugged as all hell - when you need to shoot one, you REALLY need it to work without fail, and it has to make the guy you shoot lay down and stop bothering you. Which is why the.45 was invented - the older.38's didn't get too many one-shot stops in the Philippines.
Civilian 1911's tend to be very accurate (far more than you need for self-defense - you don't do self-defence at 50 yards, unless you like prison time) and very reliable. And when you shoot someone with one, they tend to lay down and stop bothering you....
It still leaves one wondering how the steaming pile of garbage that is Netscape worked for him. I mean, it was OK in the 90s but it's terrible compared to other modern browsers. This is just a stupid mindset; if there are better options then the old one's not "working for you" as it should.
How to explain. He does certain things every day with his web browser. It does all of those things well. Therefore it "works for him".
Firefox adds whole new capabilities. But it still does those things he does about as well as Netscape does. Therefore, to him, there is no advantage to Firefox.
Yes, Firefox does a host of things he has never considered. So? Microsoft Office does a host of things most of us never use too. Do you automatically upgrade your MS Office suite because the new Office has added yet another function that a professional typesetter might use once a year, but you'll never use at all?
The truly lovely thing about being a late-adopter is that you don't have to put up with the headaches of bleeding edge tech. Buggy programs, neat new designs that don't work in the Real World (tm), that sort of thing.
When I realize how much of my time I've spent dealing with bugs just to use the Latest And Greatest, I wish I'd decided to be a late-adopter.
This just goes to show that everyone over there is idiotic. Laser cannons that'll turn the whole place into a toxic wasteland to protect youreself from rocketfire...what'll they think of next?
Why do people always type (write) the words "ummm" and/or "errr" to make a point when posting? In the spoken word, "umm" is generally a filler used to buy time as you formulate what to say. It's generally considered a bad habit if you use it too much, akin to saying "like" all the time. But you don't need to do that when you write because you can simply pause and stop typing. So why do people do that?
Probably to suggest that the person they're responding to said something so silly that they had to stop and think of a way to explain things in simpler fashion for the poor schmuck.
I think the OP means to stay that every time a study on prayer/astrology has been done, it has demonstrated that there is no connection between the two.
If that's what he meant to say, he should have said that. Instead, he said "Neither prayer nor any other supernatural or religious belief has ever been observed to be effecacious". Note that word "ever" in there. If he'd said "no scientist has ever done so", then I'd have agreed with him. If he'd said "not in the memory of man", I'd have gone along with it.
Alas, he used "ever", which covers at least the last six thousand years (people have been praying that long, or longer. How much longer is uncertain, since not all religions advocate prayer, and not all deities have (mythologically speaking, of course) paid attention to prayer).
Now, we could take the word "observed" to imply "observed by a scientist" if we wanted to. Personally, I think people other than scientists observe things all the time, so I won't so take it.
Note also that he doesn't restrict himself to prayer. If he had done so, it might have been easier to convince me. But he had to add an open-ended "or any other supernatural or religious belief" to his statement. Since "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a religious belief, and it has shown itself to be reasonably effective as a general-purpose guide to living, his statement is false on its face, even if we discard the turns of phrase that take a nice, limited statement and turn it into a pile of verbal mush....
Of course, cats have their downside. I once had this huge 20-pound orange beast who destroyed my stereo with piss, routinely bullied all the neighborhood dogs, almost gave me phlebitis by sleeping on my legs at night, and would bite if I tried to stand up before he was done with this lap nap.
While those last two points could qualify as "downsides" (or not - one discourages sloth, and one encourages you to relax and not stress so much), I fail to see the problem with the first two.
Okay, you have to get a new stereo - this is BAD? I wish I could convince my wife that we REALLY, REALLY NEED A NEW STEREO.
And beating up the neighborhood dogs is just gravy - keeps them from pooping in your yard, or barking at night, that sort of thing.
No, they haven't. Neither prayer nor any other supernatural or religious belief has ever been observed to be effecacious.
Can you send me the references of the Studies that include EVERY such event in the history (and prehistory, come to that) of humankind? Off the top of my head, I can't remember the title.
And if you don't have a study (or group of same) that includes EVERY such event, then stating "Neither prayer nor any other supernatural or religious belief has ever been observed to be effecacious" is quite unscientific of you.
Also, you shouldn't use big words like "efficacious" unless you can spell them correctly - it distracts from your point when you look semi-literate. Especially since "effective" would be so much clearer (and easier for you to spell, to boot).
I'll give you a clue - 99.99% of all thinking is short term. Why worry today what you can worry about tomorrow sort of thing?
Bad journalism is NOT about greed. It's about what motivates people who practice it. Just as what motivates YOU is important to YOU, what motivates my next door neighbor is important to HIM.
You work on the assumption, it seems, that YOUR point of view is Right, and anyone who disagrees with you is Wrong. Fact is, my motivations are MORE important to me than YOUR motivations are to me. And every bit as important to me as your motivations are to you.
You might want to keep that in mind when planning to Change the World - you have to engage the motivations of everyone else, not just tell them that they're Wrong, and you are Right. Because then they'll just laugh at you as a pretentious knothead.
Alas, journalism is about Changing the World to most journalists - they're not in it for the magnificent (not!) salary, they're in it to Make a Difference. And they can Make a Difference only to the extent that they get people to read what they say. Hence, the desire for readers on their part. And not just a few hundred readers, either.
If you want to change journalism for the better, you need to learn to work WITH thier motivations, not just declare that their motivations are Wrong.
And so far, I've seen damn little of that here, or elsewhere - much easier to tell someone his motivations and ambitions are WRONG than to use his motivations to get what you want out of life, the universe, and everything....
Journalism is about more than just how many readers you can get.
Actually, it's not. Few or no readers means that you're not getting the information out to the audience. Which you can do just as well by not writing the article at all.
Journalism, first and foremost, is about eyeballs on pages. No matter how insightful you are, no matter how important the subject matter, nothing is accomplished if you don't get read.
You may choose to believe that journalistic integrity means getting it RIGHT, first and foremost. I'm sure most college journalism students would agree. In the Real World (tm), you've got to have readers to matter. Consider how much the Watergate Scandal would have mattered if the stories had been written in a way that bored the readers to tears in the first paragraph. Consider Global Climate Change - if every story about the subject had been written like an academic paper (yes, I've read some of the papers on the subject), then NOONE outside academia would give a rat's ass about it - because they'd know nothing of the subject whatsoever, having never read or heard anything about it.
Mind you, excessive levels of fear-mongering are probably a little over the top. But if that's what it takes to get people to stand up and take notice of a potential catastrophe, then go to town with it!
The problem is this. Researching a story properly (not just science), a good story, should, unless it is breaking news take anywhere up to a month to perfect. First you have to understand the field the story is in, be it science, politics etc. Most Journalists specialise so getting the basics for this process shouldn't take too long. However most journalists aren't specialised enough. Having a science correspondant with a major (or worse minor) in physics is pretty close to useless if the story is about some new technique in microbiology. So instead of needing a day to get up on the material, it should take a week. However, since you have to publish publish publish you cant afford to take that amount of time.
Facinating insight - you can get up to speed in microbiology in a week?! I'm impressed, really I am.
Note, by the way, that having someone well versed in the sciences writing your science articles just ensures that they'll be as exciting as dry toast. Not what you want when you're hoping people will write to your editor saying "you should promote that boy doing your Science articles, because he's such an entertaining fellow that he deserves to be writing front-page articles".
One slight modification to the lone-scientist-against-the-establishment narrative might be to cast the scientific method itself as the hurdle for our budding young scientist to overcome. This approach would allow the writer to detour into describing what the scientific method is and why it's important to scientists.
Of great interest to Science, Science Teachers, and wanna-be Scientists, but basically boring. This is not the way to write a story that causes the reader to Continue-On-Page-32.
I think that it's really odd that people can claim to be strict constructionists and still pretend like we have a right to bear firearms which is an inalienable right.
That's because the purpose of the 2nd amendment wasn't to guarantee firearms, but to guarantee that the people had the right to form militias and appropriate weapons to arm the militias.
You've obviously never read the Federalist Papers, or any of the other writings of the Framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, have you?
Also, you managed to skip the history of the Militia Act. Did you know that it's still operational? Did you know that YOU are a member of the Militia? Along with every other male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45, except a few politicians. Did you know that the Militia Act REQUIRES you to own a firearm and ammunition for same?
Alas, it takes very little research into the subject to make it clear that the 2nd Amendment is an individual Right to keep and bear firearms. "to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." as an example of an argument made in favour of the Bill of Rights (and in opposition to the Constitution without a Bill of Rights).
You must be using a different definition of Bible Thumper than me then. In my mind the "thumper" part come from the image of them jabbing their finger on the bible while insisting that everything is this book is absolutely true. Bible Thumper certainly doesn't refer to all Christians.
I'm certainly using a different definition of Bible Thumper than you. I've known a lot of people who would qualify as Bible Thumpers (read: evangelical Christians), but I've never known anyone personally who was a Biblical Literalist. Or anyone who insisted that everything in "this book" is absolutely true, for that matter.
Most Bible Thumpers aren't actually Biblical Literalists. So most of them aren't totally wrong. The ones who are totally wrong are the Literalists. Most of whom are idiots, especially the one in the 19th century who came up with that 6000 years old crap. Which isn't in the Bible, and isn't extrapolatable from the Bible without WAAAAY more assumptions than make any sense at all.
Especially when that particular idiot assigned a particular date to the Creation. Which is only conceivable if every person whose age was mentioned in the Bible dropped dead on their own birthdays....
Slashdot Mirror
You'll be wanting the Department of Redundancy Department. Two doors down.
Either that, or you're trying to distinguish between future patents in the past....
I read the story about 40 years ago. It wasn't original then, but I wasn't old enough to read it much earlier than that, so it was original to me.
But, it was silly then, and silly now. Alas, the premise that humanity has been becoming stupider with each successive generation is basically stupid.
Because if it had done so, then we'd have the average intellect of a lizard by now.
And people living longer does bad things to Social Security.
2. I can't dispute this point, because I don't know enough about the current causes of bankruptcy. It's quite possible you're right.
That said, Medicare has deductibles, and uncovered expenses. Which is why people on Medicare still pay for additional health insurance.
3. Actually, no. It means that in the future, but it does not eliminate GM's current contractual obligations. So GM will STILL be a pension/medical benefits company that makes cars on the side. Until EVERYONE under the current contract dies.
Is this good for GM? Hell, yes. It leaves them in Purgatory for another half century, but lets them off the hook after that. Is it good for the American people? I'm less sanguine about that part of it. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. Just depends on how I'm feeling.
Note, by the way, that I have no intrinsic objection to national healthcare. I DO have an intrinsic objection to self-delusion. And the belief that the Iraq War money would fund health and happiness for all Americans is self-delusion. It isn't enough, even if we didn't mind the deficits associated with it.
So, I take it your health insurance has no deductibles? And ALL medical procedures are covered? Wish I had a plan like that. Hell, wish I had health insurance at all - cancer will tend to kill that sort of thing real fast.
Realistically, though, your health insurance, like mine last time I had some, costs less than total medical costs. Because you're required to pay those deductibles and whatnot.
Medicare outlays are between $350 billion and $400 billion per year right now.
Medicare covers between 45 and 50 million people right now.
Taking the most optimistic of those figures ($350 billion and 50 million people), we see that Medicare extended to the general population would cost on the order of $2 trillion (with a "TR") per year. Which would ALL be deficit, unless we increased Medicare taxes by a factor of six or so. Note that Medicare is expected to spend more in 2008 than Medicare taxes take in already.
So, you're talking about increasing payroll taxes from 1.45% (each, from you, and from your employer) to about 9% (from each of you). At least.
We could do that. Of course, the deficits that resulted from spending all that money on the war won't vanish just because we spend that money on health care. So your proposed solution is high deficits forever?
Note, however, that we've spent on the order of 1.5 trillion on the war in seven years. Which is only 200 billion per year. Which won't pay for healthcare for every American, since it amounts to only $670 per person - less than the cost of Health Insurance by a considerable margin, much less the actual cost of healthcare.
Population growth rate has little, if anything, to do with food supply. If you want population growth to zero, or even go into decline, then do the same thing the Europeans and Americans have done - raise everyone's standard of living.
I should, perhaps, point out that the world's population growth rates were higher back in the days when people really did starve regularly and on a large scale than they are now. The Green Revolution pretty much ended starvation, but the population growth rates declined rather than increasing when the food supply increased.
Whyever do you think we don't produce enuogh food to feed everyone on the planet? Even India is a net exporter of food these days. Politics is the only reason people are starving anywhere. When the local thugocracy decides that it wants to starve some convenient minority, suddenly we have a famine....
Of course not. He's one guy out of 432. And a freshman Representative at that. He'll have no more effect than any other freshman Congressman does, which is to say, none at all.
As I remember, the government shutdown was NOT because the Republican Congress submitted an unbalanced budget, but because they submited a budget that didn't increase spending as much as Clinton would like. Hardly a picture of fiscal responsibility.
When Reagan was President, we had a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, by the way. Not straight Republican. Sorry.
If I have a boarder, I don't use HIS money to balance my budget. I don't say "well, I spent $10000 more than we made, but Rick, who lives above the garage, spent $10000 LESS than he made, so my budget is balanced. This is what Clinton did. And what every President who has made a pretense of TRYING to balance the budget since FDR has done.
No. We had a recession then. Tax revenues declined. The budget has items that MUST increase yearly (those cost of living raises you may have heard about), and Congress is not in the habit of raising taxes during a recession (since that just makes the recession worse). So almost by definition, the budget balancing would have ended with the next budget, no matter what else happened in the meantime.
Again, kudos to Clinton for succeeding, but his success was short-lived, and could not have been other than shortlived. The only way the budget will ever be balanced is if the Government is forced to reduce spending to less than tax revenues permanently. And that won't happen.
We have only to look at the deficits in Clinton's first two years to see what would happen in that case, since the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress then.
Useful clue, by the way - the House of Representatives is the only body that can originate budget bills. And before 1994, the House had been Democratic for longer than my lifetime. And I just turned 50.
Remember the "Social Security Lockbox"? Neat phrase meant to suggest something that didn't exist in the real world. When Clinton balanced the budget (for one year, the recession that started at the end of 2000 guaranteed it wouldn't stay balanced no matter what), he did it by using the contents of that hypothetical Social Security Lockbox. In other words, the budget was "balanced", but we had to increase our national debt just as if it hadn't been balanced....
This is not meant to suggest that any other President or Congress has done better, mind you. But I can't buy "the budget is balanced" when the national debt increases.
The Army doesn't believe that the pistol has any purpose other than to shoot someone who gets in your face - beyond hand-hand range, you have a rifle. What a pistol has to do is be rugged as all hell - when you need to shoot one, you REALLY need it to work without fail, and it has to make the guy you shoot lay down and stop bothering you. Which is why the .45 was invented - the older .38's didn't get too many one-shot stops in the Philippines.
Civilian 1911's tend to be very accurate (far more than you need for self-defense - you don't do self-defence at 50 yards, unless you like prison time) and very reliable. And when you shoot someone with one, they tend to lay down and stop bothering you....
How to explain. He does certain things every day with his web browser. It does all of those things well. Therefore it "works for him".
Firefox adds whole new capabilities. But it still does those things he does about as well as Netscape does. Therefore, to him, there is no advantage to Firefox.
Yes, Firefox does a host of things he has never considered. So? Microsoft Office does a host of things most of us never use too. Do you automatically upgrade your MS Office suite because the new Office has added yet another function that a professional typesetter might use once a year, but you'll never use at all?
The truly lovely thing about being a late-adopter is that you don't have to put up with the headaches of bleeding edge tech. Buggy programs, neat new designs that don't work in the Real World (tm), that sort of thing.
When I realize how much of my time I've spent dealing with bugs just to use the Latest And Greatest, I wish I'd decided to be a late-adopter.
This just goes to show that everyone over there is idiotic. Laser cannons that'll turn the whole place into a toxic wasteland to protect youreself from rocketfire...what'll they think of next?
Probably to suggest that the person they're responding to said something so silly that they had to stop and think of a way to explain things in simpler fashion for the poor schmuck.
If that's what he meant to say, he should have said that. Instead, he said "Neither prayer nor any other supernatural or religious belief has ever been observed to be effecacious". Note that word "ever" in there. If he'd said "no scientist has ever done so", then I'd have agreed with him. If he'd said "not in the memory of man", I'd have gone along with it.
Alas, he used "ever", which covers at least the last six thousand years (people have been praying that long, or longer. How much longer is uncertain, since not all religions advocate prayer, and not all deities have (mythologically speaking, of course) paid attention to prayer).
Now, we could take the word "observed" to imply "observed by a scientist" if we wanted to. Personally, I think people other than scientists observe things all the time, so I won't so take it.
Note also that he doesn't restrict himself to prayer. If he had done so, it might have been easier to convince me. But he had to add an open-ended "or any other supernatural or religious belief" to his statement. Since "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a religious belief, and it has shown itself to be reasonably effective as a general-purpose guide to living, his statement is false on its face, even if we discard the turns of phrase that take a nice, limited statement and turn it into a pile of verbal mush....
While those last two points could qualify as "downsides" (or not - one discourages sloth, and one encourages you to relax and not stress so much), I fail to see the problem with the first two.
Okay, you have to get a new stereo - this is BAD? I wish I could convince my wife that we REALLY, REALLY NEED A NEW STEREO.
And beating up the neighborhood dogs is just gravy - keeps them from pooping in your yard, or barking at night, that sort of thing.
Can you send me the references of the Studies that include EVERY such event in the history (and prehistory, come to that) of humankind? Off the top of my head, I can't remember the title.
And if you don't have a study (or group of same) that includes EVERY such event, then stating "Neither prayer nor any other supernatural or religious belief has ever been observed to be effecacious" is quite unscientific of you.
Also, you shouldn't use big words like "efficacious" unless you can spell them correctly - it distracts from your point when you look semi-literate. Especially since "effective" would be so much clearer (and easier for you to spell, to boot).
I'll give you a clue - 99.99% of all thinking is short term. Why worry today what you can worry about tomorrow sort of thing?
Bad journalism is NOT about greed. It's about what motivates people who practice it. Just as what motivates YOU is important to YOU, what motivates my next door neighbor is important to HIM.
You work on the assumption, it seems, that YOUR point of view is Right, and anyone who disagrees with you is Wrong. Fact is, my motivations are MORE important to me than YOUR motivations are to me. And every bit as important to me as your motivations are to you.
You might want to keep that in mind when planning to Change the World - you have to engage the motivations of everyone else, not just tell them that they're Wrong, and you are Right. Because then they'll just laugh at you as a pretentious knothead.
Alas, journalism is about Changing the World to most journalists - they're not in it for the magnificent (not!) salary, they're in it to Make a Difference. And they can Make a Difference only to the extent that they get people to read what they say. Hence, the desire for readers on their part. And not just a few hundred readers, either.
If you want to change journalism for the better, you need to learn to work WITH thier motivations, not just declare that their motivations are Wrong.
And so far, I've seen damn little of that here, or elsewhere - much easier to tell someone his motivations and ambitions are WRONG than to use his motivations to get what you want out of life, the universe, and everything....
Actually, it's not. Few or no readers means that you're not getting the information out to the audience. Which you can do just as well by not writing the article at all.
Journalism, first and foremost, is about eyeballs on pages. No matter how insightful you are, no matter how important the subject matter, nothing is accomplished if you don't get read.
You may choose to believe that journalistic integrity means getting it RIGHT, first and foremost. I'm sure most college journalism students would agree. In the Real World (tm), you've got to have readers to matter. Consider how much the Watergate Scandal would have mattered if the stories had been written in a way that bored the readers to tears in the first paragraph. Consider Global Climate Change - if every story about the subject had been written like an academic paper (yes, I've read some of the papers on the subject), then NOONE outside academia would give a rat's ass about it - because they'd know nothing of the subject whatsoever, having never read or heard anything about it.
Mind you, excessive levels of fear-mongering are probably a little over the top. But if that's what it takes to get people to stand up and take notice of a potential catastrophe, then go to town with it!
Facinating insight - you can get up to speed in microbiology in a week?! I'm impressed, really I am.
Note, by the way, that having someone well versed in the sciences writing your science articles just ensures that they'll be as exciting as dry toast. Not what you want when you're hoping people will write to your editor saying "you should promote that boy doing your Science articles, because he's such an entertaining fellow that he deserves to be writing front-page articles".
Of great interest to Science, Science Teachers, and wanna-be Scientists, but basically boring. This is not the way to write a story that causes the reader to Continue-On-Page-32.
You've obviously never read the Federalist Papers, or any of the other writings of the Framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, have you?
Also, you managed to skip the history of the Militia Act. Did you know that it's still operational? Did you know that YOU are a member of the Militia? Along with every other male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45, except a few politicians. Did you know that the Militia Act REQUIRES you to own a firearm and ammunition for same?
Alas, it takes very little research into the subject to make it clear that the 2nd Amendment is an individual Right to keep and bear firearms. "to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." as an example of an argument made in favour of the Bill of Rights (and in opposition to the Constitution without a Bill of Rights).
I'm certainly using a different definition of Bible Thumper than you. I've known a lot of people who would qualify as Bible Thumpers (read: evangelical Christians), but I've never known anyone personally who was a Biblical Literalist. Or anyone who insisted that everything in "this book" is absolutely true, for that matter.
Most Bible Thumpers aren't actually Biblical Literalists. So most of them aren't totally wrong. The ones who are totally wrong are the Literalists. Most of whom are idiots, especially the one in the 19th century who came up with that 6000 years old crap. Which isn't in the Bible, and isn't extrapolatable from the Bible without WAAAAY more assumptions than make any sense at all.
Especially when that particular idiot assigned a particular date to the Creation. Which is only conceivable if every person whose age was mentioned in the Bible dropped dead on their own birthdays....