The "deity litmus test" does prove something: it proves that a group of people reject empiricism and will believe in mythology -- no matter how many of the claims in that mythology are categorically false.
We're not talking about whether people believe in some arbitrary omnipotent being. We're talking about people believing specifically in the Christian God. A god who supposedly said things like: "Ask, and it shall be given you." This is clearly an outright lie. So anyone who believes that the bible is anything other than fiction is believing something that they KNOW is untrue. That directly contradicts scientific thinking. "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." Another statement that Christians believe, even though Christians are routinely killed by natural causes, by each other, by non-Christians, by animals, etc.
Let's review:
Americans are terrified that terrorists are out to get them, despite the fact that terrorism kills fewer Americans each year than the flu, fewer than cancer, fewer than suicide, fewer than murder, fewer than automobile accidents, fewer than natural disasters, etc. That pretty much makes Americans irrational cowards. So much for the "home of the brave".
Only a handful of Islamic Theocracies have people that are in less acceptance of evolution than America; not to mention the way Americans disbelieve scientists about every other subject as well. The universe is 13.2 billion years old? Of course not! The grand canyon proves the Genesis story! So much for advanced.
America has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. So much for being anything other than a society of monsters.
America rather consistently loses wars against third-world countries. Very impressive, and definitely great. Then they criticize the rest of the world for not being stupid enough to get on board for the big defeat. So America is simultaneously weak (for losing), stupid (for going to war in the first place), and petty (for getting mad at nations run by rational, literate people).
Anti-illectualism: almost unheard of outside of the United States and Islamic Theocracies.
What's remarkable in all of this is how closely America resembled places like Iran. The same obsession with imaginary enemies, quite comparable religion fundamentalism, a disrespect for rationalism of any kind, the idolization of leaders based on their charisma rather than their actual decision making skills, and a tendency to cling desperately to "moral" principles that have been clearly shown to make life worse for everyone.
Don't you love how Americans can only maintain their delusions of adequacy by comparing their nation to the very shittiest, backwards little hellholes on the entire planet? God forbid Americans ever compare their nation to, you know, other modern industrialized nations?
Here's the deal: stop saying that America is the greatest nation on Earth, the most advanced nation on Earth, the home of the free, the home of the brave, or any of that other bullshit, and MAYBE people will stop pointing out that every one of those claims is a baldfaced lie.
There's a reason that there are no Jack "Ryanism" cults -- there's no Jack Ryan to start them. Personality cults need a person for everyone to initially cluster around. And that person is invariably ascribed supernatural powers. Most Scientologists don't know anything about Xenu -- but they do know about this wonderful guy Hubbard who registered OT9 and revealed the great secrets of life and could see the past and future. Scientology is, for all intents and purposes, Hubbardism. Mormons really do believe that Smith was a prophet, a man with the supernatural power to commune with God. For that matter, Muslims believe that Muhammed was a guy with supernatural powers. The very thing that separates Islam and Mormonism from other Abrahamaic religions is their belief that Muhammed and Joseph Smith were magical men with superpowers. The same goes for Jim Jones and his followers, David Koresh and his followers, etc. That's how personality cults work. They don't NEED real supernatural powers. People are naturally stupid, and will ascribe these powers to their heroes.
Even now, you can see the same thing happening in America. Millions of Americans believe that George W Bush was sent by God to lead America, and that he can do no wrong. They literally pray to portraits of him. And Dubya has said that he speaks the word of God, several times. Personality cults can be based around anyone, no matter how stupid, illiterate, and incompetent.
One more step down the ladder - the argument that "because there were Christians, there must have been a Chirst." I point you to Scientology. Must there have been a Xenu? I point you to Mormonism. Must there have been golden tablets, an angel named Moroni?
Well, I could make the comparable claims that, because there is scientology, it's reasonably probable that there was an L. Ron Hubbard. Because there is mormonism, it's reasonably probable that there was a Joseph Smith. Most ideas originate with SOMEONE. That's what makes the idea of some guy named Jesus running around telling people to be nice to each other and disobey the government seem so likely. After all, why name your religion after a person who doesn't exist, when there is a perfectly good person who did exist and who created the religion in the first place?
People do exactly the same things now: running around, claiming to be deific, claiming they can perform miracles, forming personality cults, etc. In fact, the existence of Scientology or David Koresh and his lackeys demonstrates just how easily this can happen. Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, it stands to reason that these folks existed. Are the stories about them true? Doubtful... except for the story of Confucius, it's just too plausible to deny; a failed beauracrat who died penniless and ignored by everyone. What's not to believe?
A "lack of good candidates"?! How do managers become so primitive and stupid? They're looking for artisans in the age of mass production. Artisans are great if you're willing to pay artisan prices -- which range in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars now. If you want a run of the mill $30,000/year code monkey or IT goblin, be prepared to accept run of the mill quality.
Modern businesses are seemingly incapable of accepting that labour is a commodity like any other. If you want the best, you have to pay the highest prices. If pay the lowest wages, you get the worst. If you wont even pay that much, you don't get workers at all. That's why I laugh whenever I hear about a labour shortage -- the very idea is ridiculous. When some loser in the construction field tries to claim that there aren't enough people for him to hire, I thankfully have enough of a sense of decorum to not make an analogy to my own lack of a BMW; I don't own a BMW because I wont pay what a BMW costs. Construction-guy doesn't have any employees (and is going out of business) because he's unwilling to pay what a construction worker costs. And companies lack IT workers because they wont pay what THEY cost -- either to hire, the cost to train them up to an acceptable level of skill, to hire enough of them to compensate for poor skills, or whatever else. That's just how commodities work.
So, from your idea of what a Christian perspective is, the depressed should simply stay depressed so that they wont become more evil?
Personally, I'd say that -- from a Christian perspective -- the existence of depression contradicts the existence of a loving, forgiving God. From a saner, atheistic perspective, the existence of depression is just a sign that our society needs better mental health programs, and that our culture needs to prevent people from becoming alienated and isolated.
The thetans can't help themselves -- they were brainwashed in Xenu's soul-brainwashing facilities. Wont somebody please think of the thetans? They need our love, not our contempt.
It's just instincts. We instinctively consider violence against others to be wrong. We instinctively consider helping others to be good, especially family and those who resemble them. More specifically, we feel empathy when other people suffer, and that conditions us to avoid actions that might lead to that suffering, almost as surely as if that suffering had affected us. That's the purpose of the empathy response, it's what makes "do unto others...." a basic biological imperative.
Well, everything about the mind is inherently genetic. But depression drugs fixing your morality? I wasn't aware that chronic unhappiness was immoral. So the seriously depressed are evil, bad people? Thanks for that awesome insight!
A very good point. Engineering is, in a very real sense, not a field of its own. It is a component of scientific disciplines. Chemical engineering, software engineering, structural engineering, and basically anything where you need to actually USE your science to produce something in the real world. If anything, many of the problems that are experienced in the world are directly the result of NOT applying engineering methodologies to a domain where they are needed (or not even applying scientific principles in the first place).
It's a rather impressive feat, in any case. It makes you wonder whether the USA could still accomplish something like that. I mean, this is a country that no longer possesses the capacity to perform basic disaster management. Hopefully the CDC is in more of a fighting trim than other goverment agencies in the US.
It's a serious logistical and organizational challenge to control disease, particularly one like Malaria that is spread by agents that fly, are difficult to see, possess basic intelligence, and can assemble new agents from raw materials. Even eliminating Malaria from an area as small as the eastern US was probably, when all was said and done, a bigger task than the global elimination of smallpox (which was still an amazing feat in it's own right, both logistically and diplomatically).
The nice thing (in this context anyway) with mosquitoes is that there are many different species, and only a fraction of them can be hosts for the malaria parasite. Driving those few types to extinction is just about the most low-impact extinction event imaginable.
Furthermore, 99 times out of 100, the extinction or addition of a species to an ecosystem is a complete non-event. We all hear about cane toads and cane beetles in Australia, kudzu in the south, invasive bamboos everywhere, zebra muscles in the great lakes, and so on. But those are the small minority. Many zoologists consider the region around Las Vegas (I think it's Las Vegas, some city in California anyway) to have the highest vertebrate biological diversity on Earth, because of all the exotic pets that have gotten loose and found their own little niche to enjoy. No famines or ecological disasters; new species almost always create new niches.
Granted, we should generally try to avoid these things just in case -- we don't need any more problems like the cane-beetle infestation. Still, when a species is extremely harmful to Humans or our interests, it may be worth taking the risk. The screw-worm fly that I mentioned is a horrible, horrible parasite. Exterminating it was well worth the risk, even just in terms of how it affects the cattle and dairy industry, not to mention the occasional Human infections. Malaria mosquitoes? Unless their extinction resulted in the worst ecological collapse in recorded history, it would be totally worth it. Saving all those lives, and gentrifying those parts of the world. Once third world nations have functioning economies, there's that much less incentive to hunt endangered species like Gorillas and Needlesnakes into extinction. I'll take the gorilla over the mosquito any day.
But I totally agree -- the GM solution, if it works, is much more ecologically sound. Not to mention it's probably cheaper and much less labour-intensive. It's especially good that Malaria is being tackled from multiple fronts: the bed nettings to protect people, efforts to get the parasite out of the mosquitoes, all the research into that antimalarial drug that can't be synthesized yet but works so well, etc.
Well, the USA has already been doing the next best thing -- eradicating certain insect species by engineering worse versions. There are about a dozen noxious parasites that were wiped out in most of North and South America by introducing (literally) millions of sterilized males into the ecosystem for a few years in a row. The sterile males grow larger and healthier than their virile counterparts (on account of not needing to produce any sperm), and so females breed with them preferentially. It's extraordinarily effective. Ever seen a screw-worm fly infection? Extinctions aren't always a bad thing... Actually, I think that's why the USA no longer has any native reservoirs of Malaria. I know that the American southeast is theoretically an ideal Malaria-zone, and did indeed have Malarial reservoirs a few centuries ago.
The only reason it hasn't been applied to malarial mosquitoes in Asia and Africa is that there are something like two dozen species to deal with, and each one would require its own entire eradication program and on a much larger scale (it turns out that Asia is really big). That's what's cool about this idea -- it's a slightly more subtle variant of what the US has been doing for decades now. It's just more targetted -- eliminating the particular genes that allows malaria to be carried rather than the entire insect. And it avoids the need to breed millions or billions of the bugs yourself and releasing them every year -- the insects do it all for you, as long as the new alleles really are favourable.
Very clever -- IF it actually works. Goodness knows the people in the third-world don't need to have Malaria keep kicking them while they're down. Any chance to reduce the size of Malaria's bootprint is definitely worth a serious look.
Property tax is about more than just paying for local services -- it is intended to prevent land from going to waste. It ensures that the most valuable land is used productively. Otherwise you end up with aristocrats hanging on to big pieces of land and never exploiting them fully, and a bunch of old people living in shacks on pieces of land that could be developed into useful things like factories or apartment complexes. Property taxes are a way for society to enforce its stake on property.
Of course people should have that right, it's a perfectly reasonable freedom that aligns well with our instinctual notions of how "property" functions (unlike, say, renting things or intellectual property). Nevertheless, certain types of property -- particularly real estate (and money, which the state owns anyway) -- the remainder of society is inherently among the stakeholders, and the property can not be dispensed arbitrarily. If you want your land to be contaminated with uranium salts when you die, it ain't gonna happen -- even if your estate includes the uranium salts and enough money to settle the lawsuits for everyone that gets exposed to uranium-poisoning. If your will states that the land should remain a vacant lot for the next millenia, it ain't gonna happen -- even if your will includes the money to cover the property tax for that entire period. Hell, the existence of property tax alone demonstrates that society retains some stake on all real estate.
That's ludicrous. Are you really suggesting that you wouldn't bother trying to become wealthy if you couldn't pass it on to your children? The millions of people that DON'T have children, and STILL work to better themselves and accumulate wealth and property speak to the absurdity of that claim.
I fully agree that people should be free to dispense their estate however they like. What I don't agree with is the notion that their children have a right to that estate. They don't have ANY right to ANY of it. If they get it, lucky them. If they don't, welcome to the club. Most people wont get shit from their parents, or at least nothing with any value beyond sentimental.
Let's recap:
You can do whatever the hell you want with your estate.
Your children can go to hell, because they don't have the tiniest whiff of a right to any of it. If they get it, that's nice. If they don't, that's just life, and they can suck it up and grow a pair.
We're talking about two completely different stakeholders here: the property owner, who has certain rights over the piece of property, and a bunch of spoiled brats, who have no rights whatsoever over that property, no claim of any kind. I'm not sure what you don't understand about this. If you decide to give your estate to charity, do your hypothetical offspring get to whine to the government about it? If you die without a will and it defaults to the state, do they get to whine about that? If your land is conquered by Vikings, do a bunch of unemployed gas-huffing losers get to claim that land as their own three centuries from now just because they're descended from you? No. And you know it.
It's really a meaningless idea. Even if I give my property to my children BEFORE I die, the government can still take a goodly chunk of it (in the form of income taxes if nothing else -- nearly all gifts qualify as income). If we're talking about land, the government generally has some sayso over how it changes hands anyway. Cities do and always have asserted their right to dictate how land is used, and to dictate the terms by which it changes hands. And we're not even talking about ME deciding who gets my land when I die -- we're talking about (to follow the analogy) my great grand children bitching to the government about where my land goes when I die. Any issue surrounding the dispensation of property when I die is between me and the feds. My offspring, should I have any, have ZERO claim to it, no rights whatsoever. Their offspring doubly so.
Inheritance is just a holdover from the feudal system, and it's a stupid one. Any inheritance that one does receive is a windfall, nothing more. Complaining about not getting an inheritance is the mark of a petulant child. 99% of the people in the world have to make their own fortune, and start with nothing. Those who engage in petty whining because they believe that they should be part of a landed aristocracy are worthy of complete and utter contempt. It's true when Bush the second feels that he is owed the presidency and the opportunity to run dozens corporations into the ground, it's true when spoiled brats squabble over their parents' estate, it's true when a musician's children fight with a record company for the right to put their parent's music in deoderant commercials, and it's true when aboriginal peoples demand back the land that their ancestors' lost.
Worst of all, every single piece of tribal land was itself taken from some other tribe in the distant past, numerous times in most cases. There isn't a human being on the entire planet who is sitting on a piece of land that wasn't brutally siezed from someone else a dozen times over. Should we start doing mitochondrial analyses to decide who is most closely related to the very first Hominids to take up residence on that land, and hand it over to them? My god, the whole concept gets so ridiculous that it staggers the imagination. We'd probably have to dredge up some Siberian or Mongolian farmer who just happens to be the closest living relative to the very first people to cross the landbridge, and give all of North America and South America to him.
I'd be pretty aggravated if the government killed my relatives and took their land, yes. Would I expect the government to give ME the land? Now that's just stupid. To assert that I am, in that case, owed anything more substantial than a "sorry, our bad" is beyond ridiculous.
If the government were trying to take ANYONE'S land now, without at least the decency to pay them the market value of the land plus some despotism surcharge and the requirement of making a "the survival of our society depends on this" argument before a jury (or other citizen committee), I'd back those people 100%. Would I expect the government to give it to their great-great-great grandchildren for no reason? To give that land to a bunch of losers that had done nothing to earn it? Absolutely not. If they want some land, they can go out and earn it, just like everyone else has to.
Yes, the natives got screwed over back during the colonial period, and it sucks. But all of the aggrieved are dead, and all of the offenders are dead. That makes it a non-issue today. No one has the right to what their parents' owned. If they have the great fortune to be born to parents that own property of value, and the even greater fortune to have those parents will that property to them, that's great. But it's by no means a guaranteed inheritance, nor is it a right of any kind. America and Canada's aboriginal peoples are NOT an aristocracy, and they are not landed by birth.
There is a gargantuan difference between asserting that the government has no right to take what is mine, and asserting that other people have no right to keep what was once in the distance past owned by my ancestors.
The NIMBY disease is at its worst with aboriginal tribes. They've stubbornly rejected the modern world, and will enter into a complete and total state of panic and moral outrage over anything that isn't done using sacred herbs from the Buffalo and tinctures of beaver urine.
I don't have anything against aboriginal peoples; it's just their stupid, stupid, backwards, stupid cultures that I have a problem with. The fact that they believe that their great-grandparents' claims to a piece of land have even the slightest relevance today just proves how ridiculous they are. It's the very worst sense entitlement imaginable -- a sense of entitlement to someone else's possessions. You'll never catch ME going out and suing the government to get back land that my great grandparents were too stupid to not trade for muskets.
Well, such enlightened patriotism is always refreshing. Still, I'm not sure what you mean by "they prefer to have no future at all". I can't even begin to fathom what that would look like, outside of the idea of self-termination, which is probably not what you mean...
I guess it could refer to the staggering number of Americans that genuinely believe that the rapture will occur at soon, let alone that believe it will happen at all. I used to try to be tolerant of religion, but after seeing what it's done to the USA, I now make it a point to help people of faith to feel deep embarassment and shame over their nutty beliefs (as nicely as possible, of course).
Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.
Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts and the US is VERY friendly with two of the nations with the largest supplies (Australia, and everybody's favourite exploiter of Yankee overpopulation, Canada). Still, with just a bit of effort and will, America could satisfy both environmental concerns and industrial concerns using coal. Nuclear power and America's bountiful wind and tidal resources just make the picture that much sweeter.
That's the thing I always forget about Americans -- they never receive any benefit from their taxes, unless you count the huge amount of money that gets spent arranging for young Americans to be crippled in foreign lands. Frankly, if I were American, I'd probably boycott my taxes on principal, and be distrustful of anything the government did.
For starters, IF the US went in for a socialized healthcare system (probably in the European-style, where the public and private systems compete), taxes would have to be increased. US taxes are about 30% lower than Canada's (I think that's the figure, anyway), and the US squanders most of what it collects; when you count what Americans spend on healthcare, the difference is much lower.
It ultimately comes down to American culture -- in particular, the fact that Americans tolerate a level of corruption in their politicians that is unheard of outside of the worst banana dictatorships and African diamond-warlords. If Americans started voting based on the government's ability to budget sanely and to get maximum value for their tax dollars, rather than on retarded bullshit like how Christian the leaders are, America could have it all. Frankly, I don't know how America got so obsessed with Demagogues to begin with. The city on the hill was never meant to have a sociopath at the apex.
That's the thing: I have taken it past just a few months before. I worked out regularly at a gym for 8 months when I started college, arguably the healthiest point in my entire life. Even when I got to the point of being able to run five miles, I still usually threw up after running just a single city block.
You're talking about healthy people starting a workout routine to improve their naturally good physical condition. I'm talking about naturally unhealthy people trying to deny their nature and torturing themselves to accomplish what could be better achieved with the occasional walk, like your mother (A walk is very different than a workout).
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about whether people believe in some arbitrary omnipotent being. We're talking about people believing specifically in the Christian God. A god who supposedly said things like: "Ask, and it shall be given you." This is clearly an outright lie. So anyone who believes that the bible is anything other than fiction is believing something that they KNOW is untrue. That directly contradicts scientific thinking. "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." Another statement that Christians believe, even though Christians are routinely killed by natural causes, by each other, by non-Christians, by animals, etc.
Let's review:
- Americans are terrified that terrorists are out to get them, despite the fact that terrorism kills fewer Americans each year than the flu, fewer than cancer, fewer than suicide, fewer than murder, fewer than automobile accidents, fewer than natural disasters, etc. That pretty much makes Americans irrational cowards. So much for the "home of the brave".
- Only a handful of Islamic Theocracies have people that are in less acceptance of evolution than America; not to mention the way Americans disbelieve scientists about every other subject as well. The universe is 13.2 billion years old? Of course not! The grand canyon proves the Genesis story! So much for advanced.
- America has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. So much for being anything other than a society of monsters.
- America rather consistently loses wars against third-world countries. Very impressive, and definitely great. Then they criticize the rest of the world for not being stupid enough to get on board for the big defeat. So America is simultaneously weak (for losing), stupid (for going to war in the first place), and petty (for getting mad at nations run by rational, literate people).
- Anti-illectualism: almost unheard of outside of the United States and Islamic Theocracies.
What's remarkable in all of this is how closely America resembled places like Iran. The same obsession with imaginary enemies, quite comparable religion fundamentalism, a disrespect for rationalism of any kind, the idolization of leaders based on their charisma rather than their actual decision making skills, and a tendency to cling desperately to "moral" principles that have been clearly shown to make life worse for everyone.Here's the deal: stop saying that America is the greatest nation on Earth, the most advanced nation on Earth, the home of the free, the home of the brave, or any of that other bullshit, and MAYBE people will stop pointing out that every one of those claims is a baldfaced lie.
Even now, you can see the same thing happening in America. Millions of Americans believe that George W Bush was sent by God to lead America, and that he can do no wrong. They literally pray to portraits of him. And Dubya has said that he speaks the word of God, several times. Personality cults can be based around anyone, no matter how stupid, illiterate, and incompetent.
People do exactly the same things now: running around, claiming to be deific, claiming they can perform miracles, forming personality cults, etc. In fact, the existence of Scientology or David Koresh and his lackeys demonstrates just how easily this can happen. Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, it stands to reason that these folks existed. Are the stories about them true? Doubtful ... except for the story of Confucius, it's just too plausible to deny; a failed beauracrat who died penniless and ignored by everyone. What's not to believe?
Modern businesses are seemingly incapable of accepting that labour is a commodity like any other. If you want the best, you have to pay the highest prices. If pay the lowest wages, you get the worst. If you wont even pay that much, you don't get workers at all. That's why I laugh whenever I hear about a labour shortage -- the very idea is ridiculous. When some loser in the construction field tries to claim that there aren't enough people for him to hire, I thankfully have enough of a sense of decorum to not make an analogy to my own lack of a BMW; I don't own a BMW because I wont pay what a BMW costs. Construction-guy doesn't have any employees (and is going out of business) because he's unwilling to pay what a construction worker costs. And companies lack IT workers because they wont pay what THEY cost -- either to hire, the cost to train them up to an acceptable level of skill, to hire enough of them to compensate for poor skills, or whatever else. That's just how commodities work.
Personally, I'd say that -- from a Christian perspective -- the existence of depression contradicts the existence of a loving, forgiving God. From a saner, atheistic perspective, the existence of depression is just a sign that our society needs better mental health programs, and that our culture needs to prevent people from becoming alienated and isolated.
The thetans can't help themselves -- they were brainwashed in Xenu's soul-brainwashing facilities. Wont somebody please think of the thetans? They need our love, not our contempt.
It's just instincts. We instinctively consider violence against others to be wrong. We instinctively consider helping others to be good, especially family and those who resemble them. More specifically, we feel empathy when other people suffer, and that conditions us to avoid actions that might lead to that suffering, almost as surely as if that suffering had affected us. That's the purpose of the empathy response, it's what makes "do unto others ...." a basic biological imperative.
Well, everything about the mind is inherently genetic. But depression drugs fixing your morality? I wasn't aware that chronic unhappiness was immoral. So the seriously depressed are evil, bad people? Thanks for that awesome insight!
A very good point. Engineering is, in a very real sense, not a field of its own. It is a component of scientific disciplines. Chemical engineering, software engineering, structural engineering, and basically anything where you need to actually USE your science to produce something in the real world. If anything, many of the problems that are experienced in the world are directly the result of NOT applying engineering methodologies to a domain where they are needed (or not even applying scientific principles in the first place).
Is it? That's what I get for not being American.
It's a serious logistical and organizational challenge to control disease, particularly one like Malaria that is spread by agents that fly, are difficult to see, possess basic intelligence, and can assemble new agents from raw materials. Even eliminating Malaria from an area as small as the eastern US was probably, when all was said and done, a bigger task than the global elimination of smallpox (which was still an amazing feat in it's own right, both logistically and diplomatically).
"Asia is really big." Hippo et al, localhost publishing, 2007.
Now I'm all set for my masters thesis!
Furthermore, 99 times out of 100, the extinction or addition of a species to an ecosystem is a complete non-event. We all hear about cane toads and cane beetles in Australia, kudzu in the south, invasive bamboos everywhere, zebra muscles in the great lakes, and so on. But those are the small minority. Many zoologists consider the region around Las Vegas (I think it's Las Vegas, some city in California anyway) to have the highest vertebrate biological diversity on Earth, because of all the exotic pets that have gotten loose and found their own little niche to enjoy. No famines or ecological disasters; new species almost always create new niches.
Granted, we should generally try to avoid these things just in case -- we don't need any more problems like the cane-beetle infestation. Still, when a species is extremely harmful to Humans or our interests, it may be worth taking the risk. The screw-worm fly that I mentioned is a horrible, horrible parasite. Exterminating it was well worth the risk, even just in terms of how it affects the cattle and dairy industry, not to mention the occasional Human infections. Malaria mosquitoes? Unless their extinction resulted in the worst ecological collapse in recorded history, it would be totally worth it. Saving all those lives, and gentrifying those parts of the world. Once third world nations have functioning economies, there's that much less incentive to hunt endangered species like Gorillas and Needlesnakes into extinction. I'll take the gorilla over the mosquito any day.
But I totally agree -- the GM solution, if it works, is much more ecologically sound. Not to mention it's probably cheaper and much less labour-intensive. It's especially good that Malaria is being tackled from multiple fronts: the bed nettings to protect people, efforts to get the parasite out of the mosquitoes, all the research into that antimalarial drug that can't be synthesized yet but works so well, etc.
The only reason it hasn't been applied to malarial mosquitoes in Asia and Africa is that there are something like two dozen species to deal with, and each one would require its own entire eradication program and on a much larger scale (it turns out that Asia is really big). That's what's cool about this idea -- it's a slightly more subtle variant of what the US has been doing for decades now. It's just more targetted -- eliminating the particular genes that allows malaria to be carried rather than the entire insect. And it avoids the need to breed millions or billions of the bugs yourself and releasing them every year -- the insects do it all for you, as long as the new alleles really are favourable.
Very clever -- IF it actually works. Goodness knows the people in the third-world don't need to have Malaria keep kicking them while they're down. Any chance to reduce the size of Malaria's bootprint is definitely worth a serious look.
Property tax is about more than just paying for local services -- it is intended to prevent land from going to waste. It ensures that the most valuable land is used productively. Otherwise you end up with aristocrats hanging on to big pieces of land and never exploiting them fully, and a bunch of old people living in shacks on pieces of land that could be developed into useful things like factories or apartment complexes. Property taxes are a way for society to enforce its stake on property.
Of course people should have that right, it's a perfectly reasonable freedom that aligns well with our instinctual notions of how "property" functions (unlike, say, renting things or intellectual property). Nevertheless, certain types of property -- particularly real estate (and money, which the state owns anyway) -- the remainder of society is inherently among the stakeholders, and the property can not be dispensed arbitrarily. If you want your land to be contaminated with uranium salts when you die, it ain't gonna happen -- even if your estate includes the uranium salts and enough money to settle the lawsuits for everyone that gets exposed to uranium-poisoning. If your will states that the land should remain a vacant lot for the next millenia, it ain't gonna happen -- even if your will includes the money to cover the property tax for that entire period. Hell, the existence of property tax alone demonstrates that society retains some stake on all real estate.
I fully agree that people should be free to dispense their estate however they like. What I don't agree with is the notion that their children have a right to that estate. They don't have ANY right to ANY of it. If they get it, lucky them. If they don't, welcome to the club. Most people wont get shit from their parents, or at least nothing with any value beyond sentimental.
Let's recap:
We're talking about two completely different stakeholders here: the property owner, who has certain rights over the piece of property, and a bunch of spoiled brats, who have no rights whatsoever over that property, no claim of any kind. I'm not sure what you don't understand about this. If you decide to give your estate to charity, do your hypothetical offspring get to whine to the government about it? If you die without a will and it defaults to the state, do they get to whine about that? If your land is conquered by Vikings, do a bunch of unemployed gas-huffing losers get to claim that land as their own three centuries from now just because they're descended from you? No. And you know it.
Inheritance is just a holdover from the feudal system, and it's a stupid one. Any inheritance that one does receive is a windfall, nothing more. Complaining about not getting an inheritance is the mark of a petulant child. 99% of the people in the world have to make their own fortune, and start with nothing. Those who engage in petty whining because they believe that they should be part of a landed aristocracy are worthy of complete and utter contempt. It's true when Bush the second feels that he is owed the presidency and the opportunity to run dozens corporations into the ground, it's true when spoiled brats squabble over their parents' estate, it's true when a musician's children fight with a record company for the right to put their parent's music in deoderant commercials, and it's true when aboriginal peoples demand back the land that their ancestors' lost.
Worst of all, every single piece of tribal land was itself taken from some other tribe in the distant past, numerous times in most cases. There isn't a human being on the entire planet who is sitting on a piece of land that wasn't brutally siezed from someone else a dozen times over. Should we start doing mitochondrial analyses to decide who is most closely related to the very first Hominids to take up residence on that land, and hand it over to them? My god, the whole concept gets so ridiculous that it staggers the imagination. We'd probably have to dredge up some Siberian or Mongolian farmer who just happens to be the closest living relative to the very first people to cross the landbridge, and give all of North America and South America to him.
If the government were trying to take ANYONE'S land now, without at least the decency to pay them the market value of the land plus some despotism surcharge and the requirement of making a "the survival of our society depends on this" argument before a jury (or other citizen committee), I'd back those people 100%. Would I expect the government to give it to their great-great-great grandchildren for no reason? To give that land to a bunch of losers that had done nothing to earn it? Absolutely not. If they want some land, they can go out and earn it, just like everyone else has to.
Yes, the natives got screwed over back during the colonial period, and it sucks. But all of the aggrieved are dead, and all of the offenders are dead. That makes it a non-issue today. No one has the right to what their parents' owned. If they have the great fortune to be born to parents that own property of value, and the even greater fortune to have those parents will that property to them, that's great. But it's by no means a guaranteed inheritance, nor is it a right of any kind. America and Canada's aboriginal peoples are NOT an aristocracy, and they are not landed by birth.
There is a gargantuan difference between asserting that the government has no right to take what is mine, and asserting that other people have no right to keep what was once in the distance past owned by my ancestors.
I don't have anything against aboriginal peoples; it's just their stupid, stupid, backwards, stupid cultures that I have a problem with. The fact that they believe that their great-grandparents' claims to a piece of land have even the slightest relevance today just proves how ridiculous they are. It's the very worst sense entitlement imaginable -- a sense of entitlement to someone else's possessions. You'll never catch ME going out and suing the government to get back land that my great grandparents were too stupid to not trade for muskets.
I guess it could refer to the staggering number of Americans that genuinely believe that the rapture will occur at soon, let alone that believe it will happen at all. I used to try to be tolerant of religion, but after seeing what it's done to the USA, I now make it a point to help people of faith to feel deep embarassment and shame over their nutty beliefs (as nicely as possible, of course).
Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts and the US is VERY friendly with two of the nations with the largest supplies (Australia, and everybody's favourite exploiter of Yankee overpopulation, Canada). Still, with just a bit of effort and will, America could satisfy both environmental concerns and industrial concerns using coal. Nuclear power and America's bountiful wind and tidal resources just make the picture that much sweeter.
For starters, IF the US went in for a socialized healthcare system (probably in the European-style, where the public and private systems compete), taxes would have to be increased. US taxes are about 30% lower than Canada's (I think that's the figure, anyway), and the US squanders most of what it collects; when you count what Americans spend on healthcare, the difference is much lower.
It ultimately comes down to American culture -- in particular, the fact that Americans tolerate a level of corruption in their politicians that is unheard of outside of the worst banana dictatorships and African diamond-warlords. If Americans started voting based on the government's ability to budget sanely and to get maximum value for their tax dollars, rather than on retarded bullshit like how Christian the leaders are, America could have it all. Frankly, I don't know how America got so obsessed with Demagogues to begin with. The city on the hill was never meant to have a sociopath at the apex.
You're talking about healthy people starting a workout routine to improve their naturally good physical condition. I'm talking about naturally unhealthy people trying to deny their nature and torturing themselves to accomplish what could be better achieved with the occasional walk, like your mother (A walk is very different than a workout).