The big dig, a failure? That barely counts as a failure. Try this: the Canadian Gun Registry, estimated to cost about $100 million dollars, ended up costing BILLIONs of dollars (and Canada doesn't exactly have billions of dollars to waste), it's had to be mostly scrapped, and it accomplished basically nothing because it ignored the fact that Canadians don't particularly want to register their guns, and there's no real way to force them short of searching 27 million people's homes.
I think that the model to follow is the Chinese one, where corrupt government officials are quickly and efficiently dropped in prison, executed, and their organs distributed to transplant victims in timely fashion.
It suprising how skilled some groups of people are without any training. I mean, individuals with inherent skill crop up everywhere, but groups, not so much. I read about how people who grew up on military bases often have an unusual penchant for engineering, because as children they tended to get themselves underfoot in places where vehicles and machines were repaired. They could screw around with parts, figure how things went together, and construct strange godless machines that crossed lines man was not meant to cross. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that farm kids had a knack for electrical and mechanical work, and I'll bet more than a few take to chemistry pretty fast -- farming is remarkably chemistry-based. The biology side of farming is a no-brainer of course. Another surprising one? The children of clergy -- many church groups got into networking quite early, using BBSes and early list servers to get information around. Plus, nearly every church minister has to be a part-time desktop publisher to make all of the church's bulletains and whatnot, so clergyman had computers before a lot of people. So you can find church-brats that developed unusual aptitudes for computer technology.
Doesn't the US have that "Guardian Angel" group? In major Canadian cities, we keep hearing about how they're trying to establish a presence here, but it turns out that very people want them here since they're bascally little better than vigilantes that harass teenagers and assault the homeless.
Not really. Court is great if you're talking about constitutional or criminal law. Checks and balances abound there. But the laws that are created by the government beauracracies are a different beast altogether. Ever tried to appeal a parking fine? It's easier to appeal a murder conviction than a speeding ticket. Being drunk and disorderly is the kind of thing where you get arrested, spend the night in jail, possibly receive a severe beating and/or tasering, and no accountability will ever be enforced in any way. Unless you count the periodic city-wide riots that places like LA get as "accountability", and since very few cops are killed in those events, I don't count them at all. The point being, the police don't NEED evidence, because you already spent the night in jail, you already got strip-searched, and it's all over and done with before you ever get a chance to involve a lawyer.
Very good explanation. You could even compare this to the Human brain, which only operates at about 50Hz (if I remember my AI class properly) but can have every single one of the trillions of Neurons doing its own little threshold calculation. Granted, it's difficult to compare Neural nets to non-linear circuit systems in a meaningful way, but it does demonstrate the ridiculous extreme of parallelisation.
This may be true NOW, but in the environment in which we evolved, it wasn't so. Hunter gatherer tribes probably consisted entirely of people who were related. The only way to get new genes into a group was to either kidnap a few wenches from the next tribe over, or kick out a few of your young men so that they go and join some other tribe (and by extension, allow the occasional healthy guy from another tribe to join if he brings a nice dead Zebra or Gazelle with him). War accomplishes almost precisely the latter, if only temporarily. It wasn't until the rise of advanced tools, basic agriculture, and the appearance of the first artisans, that sufficient motivation existed for trade networks to blossom. And although this took place a suprisingly long time ago (10,000 years ago, if what I've heard is true), it's still just heartbeat ago on the evolutionary timescale. As an aside, the history of how trade and economics influenced the development of society is extremely interesting. Marx's ideas about communisn may have fizzled / been corrupted beyond recognition, but his ideas about the central role of economics in the development of all human societies is dead on, from art to religion to government to science, is dead on.
Don't worry, the deluxe edition will have a TV suspended from a swivelling arm, and a little trailer attachment with a beer cooler and pizza hot-box. Living rooms and kitchens will be redundant. Homes could just be a single room with a catheter rig in one corner, and a sink with a rag-on-a-stick in it in another corner. The nation will save billions in construction costs!
You may be underestimating the breeding potential of soldiers. Yes, those who die in war don't get to spread their genes around as much at home. But they get a disproportionate number of opportunities to spread their genes around abroad. The number of French children with an American, German, or British daddy after WW1 was astounding. The same goes for British children after WW2, and no small number of German children. Canadian and American vets with an English wife that they met during the war were so common that it's a cliche.
Women dig out-of-towners, and occupying soldiers are just about the manliest out-of-towners anyone will ever meet. Plus, during an occupation, soldiers typically have the best food, sundries, and other assorted things that are great to have. The point being, it's entirely possible that the drive for war exists precisely because we evolved to wage war as a way of periodically spreading and mixing different gene pools. Just something to think about.
Hey, with modern advances in insulin pumps, prosthetic feet, and scooters, it'll be no big deal! I hope to start marketing a scooter that's basically designed as motorized wheelbarrow. It will be sold with a free prying bar and some barrow-lube to help people remove themselves from the scooter when they get to their couch.
I think you missed my sarcasm -- I totally agree that:
Cheney is a complete ass-hat whose only redeeming characteristic is he's just evil, rather than evil AND stupid like Bush Jr. Any government so terrible that it would make conservatives miss Clinton and Gore for their aggressive government downsizing, and liberals miss Bush Senior for his fiscal prudence, is a government that needs to go. You could run an escaped mental patient for president right now and probably do alright in the polls.
Veterans deserve, at the very barest minimum, to have their physical and emotional injuries treated and to be looked after if they are too disabled to work (although personally I'd say this is true of everyone). If someone gets one of their arms blown off for their country, it seems somehow inadequate to give them just a prosthetic claw, a small pension, and an ackward pause where the handshake should have gone.
Videogames are a superb psychological training and conditioning tool -- and not just for people with post-traumatic stress conditions. Research has shown that they can improve the concentration of people with attention deficit disorders. They have powerful anti-anxiety and pain-control effects. In one experiment, people with claustrophobia were able to spend two hours inside an MRI machine without panicking by playing a video game while they were inside. Even without claustrophobia, most people can't stand more than half hour inside on of those things. The improved visual acuity and hand-eye coordination that videogames promote is unrivalled. Videogamers can often see better than the deaf and hear better than the blind, two groups that are known for their enhanced senses. I could go on and on.
You're quite right of course. If the "resistance" in Iraq confined its attacks to America soldiers, they would be freedom fighters. In reality, attacks on American troops are rare. They mostly target other Iraqis who simply aren't the "right" type of Muslim. That barely even qualifies as terrorism; it's more along the lines of a slow, decentralized holocaust.
Imagine if the French resistance in WW2 had schismed into seperate Catholic and Protestant factions, and they'd spent all their time killing each other instead of collecting useful intelligence for the Allies. The people of Yugoslavia put aside enormous cultural difference, ceased all internal violence, and totally unified to form the largest and strongest resistance army that there has even been -- and ousted the Nazis themselves. Tito and company -- probably the best example of freedom fighters since the American war of independence. By way of contrast, consider China during WW2. If the Chinese had cooperated, Japan would have never been able to successfully invade let alone retain control once they were in. Chinese resistance failed because imperialists and Maoists were never able to put their own civil war on hold (although the Maoists apparently tried several times, which part of the reason that the people supported them after the war). It is just mind boggling how far the Iraqi extremists are from being anything other than a plague upon their homeland.
Everyone generalizes all the time. If you didn't generalize about absolutely everything, you'd be incapable of any action or thought whatsoever. Generalizing about the majority, of course, is particularly appropriate, since the majority is precisely the group about which generalizations are accurate. And reality is that Americans are an extraordinarily anti-intellectual people. Not at the nearly the same level as the totalitarian regimes of the 30s and 40s (where intellectuals were sometimes jailed or killed) or modern Islamic states (where intellectuals are consistently jailed or killed), but definitely far worse than other modern industrialized western nations. Some nations actually put scientists on their currency. I think Fermi would look quite smashing on a $50 bill, don't you? Edison could be on $100, Tesla could go on dollar coins (heh). Feynman, being an accomplished safecracker as well as a scientific genius and brillian teacher, could get the $1000 bill. It makes a lot more sense to celebrate these people that actually improved the world in a very real way, rather a bunch of jackasses whose only redeeming quality is that their lies were relatively consistent and easy to fall for.
Thinking of fixing, there was a famous incident in WW2 where a supposedly ruined American aircraft carrier was repaired to battle-worthiness in three days. Its presence in a subsequent engagement created enough confusion among the Japanese commanders to cost them the battle. And you know, America really did once have a reputation for precisely this kind of engineering awesomeness, which helped build America into the industrial giant it is. Could America ever regain this prestige? Maybe... if they'd ditch their hero worship of illiterate business school and start celebrating their genius Scientists and Engineers again, if they tried to be the kind of Country that Einstein immigrated to, rather than the kind of country he emigrated from, if the very idea of someone having a degree other than an MBA didn't make the average American vomit with an intense anti-illectualist rage.
Well, you have to admit, the shuttles seemed like a good idea. They haven't panned out as promised, but it still makes sense to try and get as much return on that investment (if only scientific return) as possible while waiting for NASA's next generation of launch vehicles to be designed and built.
I think maybe what we're going to see is a rather serious shift in how we think about space travel. I'll bet China is going to come up with some very innovative ideas as they develop their space program. There's the vast amounts of existing expertise available in NASA, the ESA, and what's left of the Russian space program. The ESA and NASA are still pumping out cool new ideas. And now we have the private sector trying to get its foot in the door. With all of this knowlege, skill, imagination, and toil, the dam is probably getting close to bursting, ushering a new age of space exploration and technology. History has shown rather clearly that when you get this much competition (or cooperation -- in science, they're basically the same thing) going on, big stuff happens.
Why would you want to help them? I thought the current national thinking was that veterans should just "get off welfare" -- at least if the VP is to be believed. Besides, the government has already told us that playing videogames will reliably turn you into a psychotic baby-murderer. You really want to take someone who's been trained to kill and make them into a crazed maniac?
I think there's little doubt that it would push up the cost of food. But North America already has some of the lowest food prices in the industrialized world, and it shows. There's room for some give in that area...
Libertarians aren't bad, but I think the important difference between true conservatives and libertarians is that conservatives acknowledge the benefits of at least some central power, with limits and oversight on how it is used. Too many libertarians have that whole "A city-funded fire department?! That's creeping socialism!! NO!!!!" attitude that relegates them to the lunatic fringe.
Cheaper than hydrogen? Good god yes! Where do you even go to buy hydrogen? The question with gasoline is how it is priced versus ethanol, diesel, and natural gas. Next-generation combustion engines should be able to run on a variety of different hydrocarbon fuels though, which ought to open up the possibility of all those fuels competing with each other more directly. That's when things will get interesting, as America starts turning its ENORMOUS agricultural potential towards producing biodiesel and ethanol and it's technological excellence towards finding super-efficient ways to produce them affordably.
$570 billion... and this is what passes for "conservative" in America? Damn, if a few enterprising Republicans were interested, they could split off and form The Conservative Party of America (or something like that); run on a campaign of cutting taxes, slashing spending, using the military solely for domestic defence, and stamping out corruption, and they ought to be able to completely trounce the Republicans (who have completely betrayed their conservative ideals) and the Democracts (who have completely betrayed their liberal ideals).
ANyway, on topic, I doubt fuel cells are the answer... yet. The technology is still too young and the costs too high. I think biodiesel, ethanol, and electric -- all of which have been proven and affordable for decades -- are the way to go. That said though, have you ever heard of these ideas for a coal fuel-cell power plant? Absolutely fascinating. If a plant like that could ever be built... watch out!
SUVs are indeed safer... in a crash. On a gentle curve, on the other hand, they're a death trap. How many accidents are you in? How many times do you turn? Of course, I'm even more screwed since I ride a bike, a vehicle which can sadly only claim the safety edge in one situation: falling into a body of water. When you're on a bike, SUVs are the ideal vehicles to be involved in collisions with, since they guarantee you a quick clean death, rather the lifetime as a cripple in excruciating pain that car-collisions offer.
There's no reason gas has to reach $5/gal. If America (and yes, it pretty much HAS to be America that leads here, no one else has that rare combination of extensive agricultural, vast industrial power, and a free market that's willing to work with the government on super-projects) were to get really serious about producing biopetrol and biodiesel, as well as radically scaling up its ethanol production capacity, this could be averted. America is a fantastic chunk of land for producing absolutely INCREDIBLE yeilds of a wide variety of crops. Grow the right crops and process the right parts of them, process all the sewage and other organic waste, augment it with wind and solar to power the agricultural industry and anything else that doesn't require portable fuel, and America might actually be able to get back into the position of having cheap fuels that are abundant enough to be exported to countries that weren't so progressive. Wouldn't that be nice? Exporting vast quantities of carbon-neutral gasohol and biodiesel fuels to China and India and getting rich(er) in the process? The technology already exists, the demand is there -- the market just needs some of the regulatory hurdles removed, some leadership, and a jolt to get the process underway.
A bit offtopic, but: SUVs get a bad rap in all of this, but if they were to run on biodiesel, ethanol, or even plain old natural gas, their contribution to global pollution would become neglible, and no one would ever have to settle for a vehicle that doesn't rollover during gentle turns ever again. SUVs are only a problem if
You put shitty, inefficient engines in them and run them on petrol.
You enjoy not perishing in a fatal rollover.
Your genitals fall within the normal Human range and you feel no particular need to overcompensate for them.
The response to the transit bombings was pretty inspiring. The English have some sort of strange ability to rise above things that you just don't see in many other cultures. I guess any people that can survive half a decade of Nazi terror bombing will be rather inured to any kind of atrocity you can dream up. But yeah, the Brits have the right idea -- the best response to terror attacks is to get out there and flaunt your freedom, keep laughing, and marginalize the aims of the terrorists by completely ignoring them (at least until the opportunity to go in and ruin their shit comes along).
More Americans are killed by slippery bathtubs in any given year than have been killed by all terrorist attacks ever committed against America in all of history. Americans suffer from hundreds of times as many pirate attacks than they do terrorist attacks. Pirates, for gods sake. Keep these kinds of things in mind, and nothing Al Qaeda can ever do will be worth more than a footnote in the actuary tables regarding structural damage to office towers. Terror attacks only matter to cowards. Keep your cool, fuck the fear, live free or die.
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The big dig, a failure? That barely counts as a failure. Try this: the Canadian Gun Registry, estimated to cost about $100 million dollars, ended up costing BILLIONs of dollars (and Canada doesn't exactly have billions of dollars to waste), it's had to be mostly scrapped, and it accomplished basically nothing because it ignored the fact that Canadians don't particularly want to register their guns, and there's no real way to force them short of searching 27 million people's homes.
I think that the model to follow is the Chinese one, where corrupt government officials are quickly and efficiently dropped in prison, executed, and their organs distributed to transplant victims in timely fashion.
It suprising how skilled some groups of people are without any training. I mean, individuals with inherent skill crop up everywhere, but groups, not so much. I read about how people who grew up on military bases often have an unusual penchant for engineering, because as children they tended to get themselves underfoot in places where vehicles and machines were repaired. They could screw around with parts, figure how things went together, and construct strange godless machines that crossed lines man was not meant to cross. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that farm kids had a knack for electrical and mechanical work, and I'll bet more than a few take to chemistry pretty fast -- farming is remarkably chemistry-based. The biology side of farming is a no-brainer of course. Another surprising one? The children of clergy -- many church groups got into networking quite early, using BBSes and early list servers to get information around. Plus, nearly every church minister has to be a part-time desktop publisher to make all of the church's bulletains and whatnot, so clergyman had computers before a lot of people. So you can find church-brats that developed unusual aptitudes for computer technology.
Doesn't the US have that "Guardian Angel" group? In major Canadian cities, we keep hearing about how they're trying to establish a presence here, but it turns out that very people want them here since they're bascally little better than vigilantes that harass teenagers and assault the homeless.
Not really. Court is great if you're talking about constitutional or criminal law. Checks and balances abound there. But the laws that are created by the government beauracracies are a different beast altogether. Ever tried to appeal a parking fine? It's easier to appeal a murder conviction than a speeding ticket. Being drunk and disorderly is the kind of thing where you get arrested, spend the night in jail, possibly receive a severe beating and/or tasering, and no accountability will ever be enforced in any way. Unless you count the periodic city-wide riots that places like LA get as "accountability", and since very few cops are killed in those events, I don't count them at all. The point being, the police don't NEED evidence, because you already spent the night in jail, you already got strip-searched, and it's all over and done with before you ever get a chance to involve a lawyer.
Very good explanation. You could even compare this to the Human brain, which only operates at about 50Hz (if I remember my AI class properly) but can have every single one of the trillions of Neurons doing its own little threshold calculation. Granted, it's difficult to compare Neural nets to non-linear circuit systems in a meaningful way, but it does demonstrate the ridiculous extreme of parallelisation.
This may be true NOW, but in the environment in which we evolved, it wasn't so. Hunter gatherer tribes probably consisted entirely of people who were related. The only way to get new genes into a group was to either kidnap a few wenches from the next tribe over, or kick out a few of your young men so that they go and join some other tribe (and by extension, allow the occasional healthy guy from another tribe to join if he brings a nice dead Zebra or Gazelle with him). War accomplishes almost precisely the latter, if only temporarily. It wasn't until the rise of advanced tools, basic agriculture, and the appearance of the first artisans, that sufficient motivation existed for trade networks to blossom. And although this took place a suprisingly long time ago (10,000 years ago, if what I've heard is true), it's still just heartbeat ago on the evolutionary timescale. As an aside, the history of how trade and economics influenced the development of society is extremely interesting. Marx's ideas about communisn may have fizzled / been corrupted beyond recognition, but his ideas about the central role of economics in the development of all human societies is dead on, from art to religion to government to science, is dead on.
Don't worry, the deluxe edition will have a TV suspended from a swivelling arm, and a little trailer attachment with a beer cooler and pizza hot-box. Living rooms and kitchens will be redundant. Homes could just be a single room with a catheter rig in one corner, and a sink with a rag-on-a-stick in it in another corner. The nation will save billions in construction costs!
Women dig out-of-towners, and occupying soldiers are just about the manliest out-of-towners anyone will ever meet. Plus, during an occupation, soldiers typically have the best food, sundries, and other assorted things that are great to have. The point being, it's entirely possible that the drive for war exists precisely because we evolved to wage war as a way of periodically spreading and mixing different gene pools. Just something to think about.
Hey, with modern advances in insulin pumps, prosthetic feet, and scooters, it'll be no big deal! I hope to start marketing a scooter that's basically designed as motorized wheelbarrow. It will be sold with a free prying bar and some barrow-lube to help people remove themselves from the scooter when they get to their couch.
Didn't Israel put Einstein on one of their bills?
You're quite right of course. If the "resistance" in Iraq confined its attacks to America soldiers, they would be freedom fighters. In reality, attacks on American troops are rare. They mostly target other Iraqis who simply aren't the "right" type of Muslim. That barely even qualifies as terrorism; it's more along the lines of a slow, decentralized holocaust.
Imagine if the French resistance in WW2 had schismed into seperate Catholic and Protestant factions, and they'd spent all their time killing each other instead of collecting useful intelligence for the Allies. The people of Yugoslavia put aside enormous cultural difference, ceased all internal violence, and totally unified to form the largest and strongest resistance army that there has even been -- and ousted the Nazis themselves. Tito and company -- probably the best example of freedom fighters since the American war of independence. By way of contrast, consider China during WW2. If the Chinese had cooperated, Japan would have never been able to successfully invade let alone retain control once they were in. Chinese resistance failed because imperialists and Maoists were never able to put their own civil war on hold (although the Maoists apparently tried several times, which part of the reason that the people supported them after the war). It is just mind boggling how far the Iraqi extremists are from being anything other than a plague upon their homeland.
Everyone generalizes all the time. If you didn't generalize about absolutely everything, you'd be incapable of any action or thought whatsoever. Generalizing about the majority, of course, is particularly appropriate, since the majority is precisely the group about which generalizations are accurate. And reality is that Americans are an extraordinarily anti-intellectual people. Not at the nearly the same level as the totalitarian regimes of the 30s and 40s (where intellectuals were sometimes jailed or killed) or modern Islamic states (where intellectuals are consistently jailed or killed), but definitely far worse than other modern industrialized western nations. Some nations actually put scientists on their currency. I think Fermi would look quite smashing on a $50 bill, don't you? Edison could be on $100, Tesla could go on dollar coins (heh). Feynman, being an accomplished safecracker as well as a scientific genius and brillian teacher, could get the $1000 bill. It makes a lot more sense to celebrate these people that actually improved the world in a very real way, rather a bunch of jackasses whose only redeeming quality is that their lies were relatively consistent and easy to fall for.
Thinking of fixing, there was a famous incident in WW2 where a supposedly ruined American aircraft carrier was repaired to battle-worthiness in three days. Its presence in a subsequent engagement created enough confusion among the Japanese commanders to cost them the battle. And you know, America really did once have a reputation for precisely this kind of engineering awesomeness, which helped build America into the industrial giant it is. Could America ever regain this prestige? Maybe... if they'd ditch their hero worship of illiterate business school and start celebrating their genius Scientists and Engineers again, if they tried to be the kind of Country that Einstein immigrated to, rather than the kind of country he emigrated from, if the very idea of someone having a degree other than an MBA didn't make the average American vomit with an intense anti-illectualist rage.
Well, you have to admit, the shuttles seemed like a good idea. They haven't panned out as promised, but it still makes sense to try and get as much return on that investment (if only scientific return) as possible while waiting for NASA's next generation of launch vehicles to be designed and built.
I think maybe what we're going to see is a rather serious shift in how we think about space travel. I'll bet China is going to come up with some very innovative ideas as they develop their space program. There's the vast amounts of existing expertise available in NASA, the ESA, and what's left of the Russian space program. The ESA and NASA are still pumping out cool new ideas. And now we have the private sector trying to get its foot in the door. With all of this knowlege, skill, imagination, and toil, the dam is probably getting close to bursting, ushering a new age of space exploration and technology. History has shown rather clearly that when you get this much competition (or cooperation -- in science, they're basically the same thing) going on, big stuff happens.
Why would you want to help them? I thought the current national thinking was that veterans should just "get off welfare" -- at least if the VP is to be believed. Besides, the government has already told us that playing videogames will reliably turn you into a psychotic baby-murderer. You really want to take someone who's been trained to kill and make them into a crazed maniac?
I think there's little doubt that it would push up the cost of food. But North America already has some of the lowest food prices in the industrialized world, and it shows. There's room for some give in that area...
Libertarians aren't bad, but I think the important difference between true conservatives and libertarians is that conservatives acknowledge the benefits of at least some central power, with limits and oversight on how it is used. Too many libertarians have that whole "A city-funded fire department?! That's creeping socialism!! NO!!!!" attitude that relegates them to the lunatic fringe.
Cheaper than hydrogen? Good god yes! Where do you even go to buy hydrogen? The question with gasoline is how it is priced versus ethanol, diesel, and natural gas. Next-generation combustion engines should be able to run on a variety of different hydrocarbon fuels though, which ought to open up the possibility of all those fuels competing with each other more directly. That's when things will get interesting, as America starts turning its ENORMOUS agricultural potential towards producing biodiesel and ethanol and it's technological excellence towards finding super-efficient ways to produce them affordably.
$570 billion ... and this is what passes for "conservative" in America? Damn, if a few enterprising Republicans were interested, they could split off and form The Conservative Party of America (or something like that); run on a campaign of cutting taxes, slashing spending, using the military solely for domestic defence, and stamping out corruption, and they ought to be able to completely trounce the Republicans (who have completely betrayed their conservative ideals) and the Democracts (who have completely betrayed their liberal ideals).
ANyway, on topic, I doubt fuel cells are the answer ... yet. The technology is still too young and the costs too high. I think biodiesel, ethanol, and electric -- all of which have been proven and affordable for decades -- are the way to go. That said though, have you ever heard of these ideas for a coal fuel-cell power plant? Absolutely fascinating. If a plant like that could ever be built ... watch out!
SUVs are indeed safer ... in a crash. On a gentle curve, on the other hand, they're a death trap. How many accidents are you in? How many times do you turn? Of course, I'm even more screwed since I ride a bike, a vehicle which can sadly only claim the safety edge in one situation: falling into a body of water. When you're on a bike, SUVs are the ideal vehicles to be involved in collisions with, since they guarantee you a quick clean death, rather the lifetime as a cripple in excruciating pain that car-collisions offer.
There's no reason gas has to reach $5/gal. If America (and yes, it pretty much HAS to be America that leads here, no one else has that rare combination of extensive agricultural, vast industrial power, and a free market that's willing to work with the government on super-projects) were to get really serious about producing biopetrol and biodiesel, as well as radically scaling up its ethanol production capacity, this could be averted. America is a fantastic chunk of land for producing absolutely INCREDIBLE yeilds of a wide variety of crops. Grow the right crops and process the right parts of them, process all the sewage and other organic waste, augment it with wind and solar to power the agricultural industry and anything else that doesn't require portable fuel, and America might actually be able to get back into the position of having cheap fuels that are abundant enough to be exported to countries that weren't so progressive. Wouldn't that be nice? Exporting vast quantities of carbon-neutral gasohol and biodiesel fuels to China and India and getting rich(er) in the process? The technology already exists, the demand is there -- the market just needs some of the regulatory hurdles removed, some leadership, and a jolt to get the process underway.
A bit offtopic, but: SUVs get a bad rap in all of this, but if they were to run on biodiesel, ethanol, or even plain old natural gas, their contribution to global pollution would become neglible, and no one would ever have to settle for a vehicle that doesn't rollover during gentle turns ever again. SUVs are only a problem if
The response to the transit bombings was pretty inspiring. The English have some sort of strange ability to rise above things that you just don't see in many other cultures. I guess any people that can survive half a decade of Nazi terror bombing will be rather inured to any kind of atrocity you can dream up. But yeah, the Brits have the right idea -- the best response to terror attacks is to get out there and flaunt your freedom, keep laughing, and marginalize the aims of the terrorists by completely ignoring them (at least until the opportunity to go in and ruin their shit comes along).
More Americans are killed by slippery bathtubs in any given year than have been killed by all terrorist attacks ever committed against America in all of history. Americans suffer from hundreds of times as many pirate attacks than they do terrorist attacks. Pirates, for gods sake. Keep these kinds of things in mind, and nothing Al Qaeda can ever do will be worth more than a footnote in the actuary tables regarding structural damage to office towers. Terror attacks only matter to cowards. Keep your cool, fuck the fear, live free or die.