It's not just shipping. The farming and manufacture techniques are an order of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional techniques. The so-called green revolution is oil intensive, and could fall on its ass.
The supreme court will rule in favour of the media companies, because most media violence researchers don't have a leg to stand on. I published an essay online on the topic here: The Utopian Pseudo-Science of Media Effects.
Actually, most laws that forbid civil liberties are based on third person effects. For example: *I* haven't been too adversely affected by violent media, but other less educated and less mature people are. Why else is there an epidemic in violence?
Moralists are always using third person effects. Moral outrage is always about some at risk group. Always has been.
There are a few flaws with the reasoning, but there is no point being reasonable with a moralist. They really do think that they are smarter than everyone else. I know, since I went head-to-head with them in academia, trying to get them to explain themselves. I found the lack of intellectual integrity disappointing, but pointing out that something is intellectual vacuous doesn't piece the veil of ignorance, even in academia.
You can read about the quality of the academic debate online here: Psychology’s Quixotic Quest For the Media-Violence Connection. Although this article dates back to 1999, it is surprisingly up-to-date. In my own research, I found the flaws in the research, and then attempted to get the researchers to explain them. I was met with the attitude: "there will always be doubters of everything." Hardly worthy of intellectual respect when you don't consider answering questions important.
The best book on the science is: Freedman, J., L. (2002). Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Even though this book is almost 9 yrs old, there is no rebuttal to it.
You can read what the other side has to say here: Huesmann, L., R. (2010). Nailing the coffin shut on doubts that violent video games stimulate aggression: Comment on Anderson at al. (2010). Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 179-181.
Huesmann is one of the most respected media violence researchers, and responsible for a lot of the theory. His article is a joke, and he doesn't answer questions. How could he not know how absurd this all is? Never under-estimate the power of denial and group-think. These people think they are building a better world, but really they are propagating their madness about things that they do not understand.
There is little to no danger that 15-18 year old kids throwing pipe bombs are real cops, even if that were in the game.
The dominate paradigm in the humanities, and much of psychology, is called Social Constructionism. This has come to define feminism (unfortunately) and much of the academy. While no doubt profound, social constructionism has been taken way to far, and has turned into environmental determinism. The humanities are scared silly at any thought that biology may have an important role to play in human behaviour. It is considered racist, sexist and morally wrong to even consider it. In particular, any attempt to question social constructionist principles is attacked by main-stream feminists because it threatens their hope for fixing men -- who are subtly taught by society to dominate women -- the first principle of being a man (really!). Social constructionism is a powerful force in a politically correct and pusillanimous academy.
If you take the view that society shapes us, and causes patriarchy, violence, sexual aggression, and everything else under the sun... then it is a slippery slope before you are soon moralising about everything you don't like in society. Because -- if you can manipulate the environment (society), then you can fix all of the problems. Thus, social constructionists (feminists, sociologists, many psychologists, the humanities), see violence, and look to find how society teaches us to be violent. The answer is obvious: media violence.
Problem is, empirical studies just don't support the proposition. There is a very weak correlation (bordering on noise), and correlation does not equal causation. It could be that naturally violent people prefer violent media. An unexplored hypothesis. Instead, correlation is taken as causation, and numerous other inconsistencies are explained away -- because being wrong on this point, means being wrong about a great many things regarding human nature and societys.
This confusion is entrenched, because of political bias, and a sense of absolute rectitude on the part of anti-media-violence advocates.
D has had contracts since the get-go. Sometimes I wonder if it would be a better world if all the C and C++ out there was *magically* reimplemented into a better language.
On the plus side -- none of the violence causes any harm, or if it does, only in a small portion of individuals. I did a review of media violence research, and was appalled by what I found. Basically, we have two sides. One makes academic arguments, and use the scientific method. Their research does not support the main-stream view. The other side rides on the coat tails of real science, pretends to use the scientific method, but only responds to academic criticism with political arguments. They are almost always social constructionists, feminists, and environmental determinists.
It took me about a year of reading both sides of the argument to reach this conclusion. Consider that today we have the most depraved violence in history, and the lowest violence rate. Shockingly simple. See here for more details: Psychology's quixotic Quest For the Media-Violence Connection.
Essentially if the Demand for oil by the US is met by the supply the US has, the prices only really go up for everyone else who loses out.
wtf? Talk about a sense of entitlement. The USA can plunder other countries resources, but protect its own. Not according to all those free trade agreements that the global corporate elite have been pushing on the world.
The only way the USA could keep local oil prices significantly different from the global market is to put trade restrictions on oil export. That would not go over well, and probably trigger global resource protectionism: we all know that there is a coming crunch. Even the ones in denial. The USA would lose big-time in this scenario.
Even if it succeed in keeping treaties in tact but horde oil to itself, the USA would lose its ability to bargain from a stronger position. Besides, the corporate elite would never do that, because they don't give a frack about USA sovereignty.
Your assertion bespeaks of a huge sense of patriotic entitlement that will cause lots of damage until the cold hard light of reality pieces through the veil of ignorance. Waking up from such dreams is never pleasant.
The government had power to set meaningful regulations when the public supported the general principle. For example, meat handling regulations were brought in just over a hundred years ago, which are responsible for the nice safe shrink-wrapped meat we have today. (The meat industry is in a war on those regulations, and the quality of meat has been going down over the past 10 years.)
This was considered such a good thing, that the zeitgeist held that the best products were inspected by experts and held up to official standards. Businessmen were, by their nature, crooks, and would try to pull the wool over the eyes of their consumers. So regulations were like Hobbs Leviathan for business, just as the police are the Leviathan for citizens.
Switch to the modern world, and business interests are heavily invested in sophisticated spin campaigns, to ensure an endless party -- sometimes at our expense. Thanks to neo-liberalism and the Fox effect, anything remotely centrist is painted as some type of extremism. The AGW denial campaign uses exactly the same tactic: take an extreme position, and then non-experts will think that the truth lies in-between. The result is a shift in the zeitgeist, as the door starts to swing more and more in your direction.
Some might think that this type of extremism will be seen through. Think again. Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea, Post-revolutionary France, they all show just how dark society can become under the grip of extremism. Germany is and was a fine country, and sunk very quickly thanks to media spin that blew on the embers of chauvinism and authoritarianism. And that is exactly what Fox and the tea-party stands for.
only reveals truth about the person making the claim.
Blessed are not the cognitive relativists. They are not correct. Certainty does lie somewhere, for which we need to understand the nature of your mind -- how it works, and constructs your mental model.
Let's see, in reality clothianidin was granted full approval this year -- April 2010! That's 4 years of a completely Democratically controlled congress and 2 years of a Democratic House+Senate+President.
Obviously the democrats don't just sack and then re-staff these agencies. They are formed over time, and can be quickly destroyed. Bush administration was particularly virilent in its war on science, and removing intellectualism from interferring with business interests. Bush was very much a gut-instinct kind of guy.
If the democrats had more spine, they/would/ re-staff these organisations, and buy a TV channel that exclusively tells their side of the story - a homolouge to fox. But alas, democrats generally believe in being educated, and that means listening to others.
Pssstttttt.... 15 years before the events you cited... Clinton was president.
Welcome to the school of repbulican mathematics. You cannot accuse Clinton of being an ideological deregulartor. That would make it Ronald Reagan, who is famous for coming to office and saying "Government is the problem." The Reagan administration actually asked businesses which regulations they wanted to get rid of, an then simply crossed them off the books. And that was considered a good thing.
The democrats have bowed to republican pressure on non-governence, and Bill Clinton was very much a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. He continued the deregulatory program of Greenspan, which started in ernest under Reagan. fyi, I don't think Reagan or Bush Senior were idiots or bad presidents. They were excellent public servents in their way. For example, Reagan helped end the threat to the ozone layer at a cost far less then anybody expected.
Modern republicanism is absurdly vacuous because of its war on education and intellectualism.
I guess as long as these morons continue to lie and cheat their way into power we deserve to have poisoned gulf seafood and the end of flowering crops.
You are missing something very very important from your analysis. Republicans genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Crazy eh? Welcome to the human condition.
Corporations allow for economies of scale that pure private ownership cannot.
wtf? He is talking about limited liability, not economies of scale. If there were no corporations, then investors in market activity become legally liable for the activities of the company. He's talking about removing corporations, but not removing companies. Corporation laws have a nasty side-effect that creates a moral race to the bottom, and we have seen some repugnant acts from companies yet nobody is held responsible. Wouldn't it be nice if powerful people would be more responsible for the shit they make? Instead we reward the psychopath, and many CEOs are psychopaths.
The state introduced this problem, and they should protect against it, if the corporation is such a wonderful thing. Instead we see corporations being used as a power grab for plutocrats.
His unfounded assumption is that the wealthy are not using money to create jobs.
It is a question of efficiency. Investment capital is a key component of the economy, and one argument for regulation is that that capital ought to be efficiently utilized. Instead we seem to assume price equals value as some mystical truth, and that somehow the market can use this principle to find its most efficient manifestation. Yet this wide-eyed idea is not founded in fundamental qualities of human nature. I mean our madnesses: pride, irrationality, greed, dominance, corruption, nepotism, cronyism, narcissism, ignorance, superiority, chauvinism, etc. Power becomes a law unto itself, and corrupts, which is why we have the separation of powers within our culture. The breakdown of the separation of powers is being used by plutocrates of the US to solidify their power, and that is instinctively more important than efficiently investing capital. The values that made our society great in the first place is what is at stake.
These people are actually killing the economy and making people poor by creating a money-sink in the economy where no value is added. They are not only hurting these big companies with their greed, they are helping to force a divide in wealth distribution and indirectly making real people go hungry.
Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists. The economy of imaginary things is precisely what the new world order stands for, and an expression of the correctness of laisezz-faire capitalism. Railing against it is totalitarian, and will just interfer with wealth creation and freedom. Interesting that wealth is created out of imaginary things that are meaningless, trivial, and detrimental to getting real work done. But, in the words of one venture capitalist: IP is the new gold. The economy has to grow somehow -- and that is the ultimate rationalisation for this madness.
In other countries this freedom of speech was just not so thoroughly tested as in USA.
You have got to be kidding. Don't forget that the UK lost India because of freedom of the press. The public read about violent crack downs and sided with Ghandi. Freedom of the press did not suffer.
Contrast to the US military, which believes that Vietnam failed because of the media. So they start their own manage-public-perception operation to ensure the success of their missions. We can all see how that is going.
The reason why the press in the USA sucks is because the separation of powers is breaking down in the face of modern marketing techniques, and an integration of political and corporate interests into one. This is what conservativism has become, but it is not fundamentally conservative, because market fundamentalism if not a traditional idea, but a creation of the mind that certain Republicans are trying to stamp onto society. Thank Rand and Greenspan. This is freedom, and it is also totalitarianism, because it views any attempt to set rules as somehow out of sync with how things are. This is quite ironic, and non-conservative, because market fundamentalism is implemented as such a rule.
It's time the species got that lesson, and stopped using the world we rely on as a toilet
It is so interesting that "skeptics" are afraid of this thought because they see it as a totalitarian power grab. Ironically, they have to defend themselves against climate policy by making a totalitarian power grab. I am not sure where hatred of environmentalism comes from, but is it moronic, and not fundamentally conservative. In the words of Margaret Thatcher: No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.. Thatcher was, of course, trained as a scientist
They're combining DNA, not teaching mice to appreciate musical theatre.
How do you know that appreciating musical theatre does not come from special combinations of DNA? Where do you think your personality comes from? Ask any parent, and they'll tell you that their infant come into this world with their own individual personality -- what them Christian folk call a soul. behavioural geneticists have well established the strong genetic influence on personality and behaviour.
I'm just saying that such a procedure has the potential to clear up the whole nature/nurture debate in the case of homosexuality.
The whole nature-nurture debate has already been clarified on homosexuality and generally. The only reason why we keep arguing about it is because it doesn't jive with some people's politics:
Homophobes and the religious-right want to change peoples "immoral" behaviour, and therefore cannot stand the thought that biology (God?) created certain people as homos
Feminists/post-modernists/social-constructionists cannot stand the thought that biology has any substantial role in anything, and therefore rail against any suggest of biological essentialism
In both cases, the nature-nurture debate is confounded with moral issues. Whether fundamentalist christian, or feminist, the moralist believes that they are right and must somehow change society. Facts are too threatening to a mind that constructs its identity in such a way.
True, but nonetheless, there will be a lot of companies lobbeying for more security, and pointing out that they have a win-win situation with politicians who get to engage strong support from a xenophobic and authoritarian demographic. I suspect these motives operate deeply in the instinctive urge for money and influence that some people experience very strongly. Evidently, a lot of self-deception is going on, because the war on terror is a circus show -- and some are getting hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
probably even less if one considers impacts of mass production and technological improvements.
It will not be less -- because of the cost of resources, which are already being squeezed.
It's not just shipping. The farming and manufacture techniques are an order of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional techniques. The so-called green revolution is oil intensive, and could fall on its ass.
The supreme court will rule in favour of the media companies, because most media violence researchers don't have a leg to stand on. I published an essay online on the topic here: The Utopian Pseudo-Science of Media Effects.
Actually, most laws that forbid civil liberties are based on third person effects. For example: *I* haven't been too adversely affected by violent media, but other less educated and less mature people are. Why else is there an epidemic in violence?
Moralists are always using third person effects. Moral outrage is always about some at risk group. Always has been.
There are a few flaws with the reasoning, but there is no point being reasonable with a moralist. They really do think that they are smarter than everyone else. I know, since I went head-to-head with them in academia, trying to get them to explain themselves. I found the lack of intellectual integrity disappointing, but pointing out that something is intellectual vacuous doesn't piece the veil of ignorance, even in academia.
You can read about the quality of the academic debate online here: Psychology’s Quixotic Quest For the Media-Violence Connection. Although this article dates back to 1999, it is surprisingly up-to-date. In my own research, I found the flaws in the research, and then attempted to get the researchers to explain them. I was met with the attitude: "there will always be doubters of everything." Hardly worthy of intellectual respect when you don't consider answering questions important.
The best book on the science is: Freedman, J., L. (2002). Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Even though this book is almost 9 yrs old, there is no rebuttal to it.
You can read what the other side has to say here: Huesmann, L., R. (2010). Nailing the coffin shut on doubts that violent video games stimulate aggression: Comment on Anderson at al. (2010). Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 179-181.
Huesmann is one of the most respected media violence researchers, and responsible for a lot of the theory. His article is a joke, and he doesn't answer questions. How could he not know how absurd this all is? Never under-estimate the power of denial and group-think. These people think they are building a better world, but really they are propagating their madness about things that they do not understand.
There is little to no danger that 15-18 year old kids throwing pipe bombs are real cops, even if that were in the game.
The dominate paradigm in the humanities, and much of psychology, is called Social Constructionism. This has come to define feminism (unfortunately) and much of the academy. While no doubt profound, social constructionism has been taken way to far, and has turned into environmental determinism. The humanities are scared silly at any thought that biology may have an important role to play in human behaviour. It is considered racist, sexist and morally wrong to even consider it. In particular, any attempt to question social constructionist principles is attacked by main-stream feminists because it threatens their hope for fixing men -- who are subtly taught by society to dominate women -- the first principle of being a man (really!). Social constructionism is a powerful force in a politically correct and pusillanimous academy.
If you take the view that society shapes us, and causes patriarchy, violence, sexual aggression, and everything else under the sun... then it is a slippery slope before you are soon moralising about everything you don't like in society. Because -- if you can manipulate the environment (society), then you can fix all of the problems. Thus, social constructionists (feminists, sociologists, many psychologists, the humanities), see violence, and look to find how society teaches us to be violent. The answer is obvious: media violence.
Problem is, empirical studies just don't support the proposition. There is a very weak correlation (bordering on noise), and correlation does not equal causation. It could be that naturally violent people prefer violent media. An unexplored hypothesis. Instead, correlation is taken as causation, and numerous other inconsistencies are explained away -- because being wrong on this point, means being wrong about a great many things regarding human nature and societys.
This confusion is entrenched, because of political bias, and a sense of absolute rectitude on the part of anti-media-violence advocates.
D has had contracts since the get-go. Sometimes I wonder if it would be a better world if all the C and C++ out there was *magically* reimplemented into a better language.
On the plus side -- none of the violence causes any harm, or if it does, only in a small portion of individuals. I did a review of media violence research, and was appalled by what I found. Basically, we have two sides. One makes academic arguments, and use the scientific method. Their research does not support the main-stream view. The other side rides on the coat tails of real science, pretends to use the scientific method, but only responds to academic criticism with political arguments. They are almost always social constructionists, feminists, and environmental determinists.
It took me about a year of reading both sides of the argument to reach this conclusion. Consider that today we have the most depraved violence in history, and the lowest violence rate. Shockingly simple. See here for more details: Psychology's quixotic Quest For the Media-Violence Connection.
Essentially if the Demand for oil by the US is met by the supply the US has, the prices only really go up for everyone else who loses out.
wtf? Talk about a sense of entitlement. The USA can plunder other countries resources, but protect its own. Not according to all those free trade agreements that the global corporate elite have been pushing on the world.
The only way the USA could keep local oil prices significantly different from the global market is to put trade restrictions on oil export. That would not go over well, and probably trigger global resource protectionism: we all know that there is a coming crunch. Even the ones in denial. The USA would lose big-time in this scenario.
Even if it succeed in keeping treaties in tact but horde oil to itself, the USA would lose its ability to bargain from a stronger position. Besides, the corporate elite would never do that, because they don't give a frack about USA sovereignty.
Your assertion bespeaks of a huge sense of patriotic entitlement that will cause lots of damage until the cold hard light of reality pieces through the veil of ignorance. Waking up from such dreams is never pleasant.
while the starvation and famine of their population takes a back seat?
I think I smell a burning patriot.
I agree -- this could well be the start of a fishing expedition.
... trying to make a scapegoat out of him.
It is how the authoritarian minds works. You are either with us, or against us. Basic intelligence doesn't play a role.
The government had power to set meaningful regulations when the public supported the general principle. For example, meat handling regulations were brought in just over a hundred years ago, which are responsible for the nice safe shrink-wrapped meat we have today. (The meat industry is in a war on those regulations, and the quality of meat has been going down over the past 10 years.)
This was considered such a good thing, that the zeitgeist held that the best products were inspected by experts and held up to official standards. Businessmen were, by their nature, crooks, and would try to pull the wool over the eyes of their consumers. So regulations were like Hobbs Leviathan for business, just as the police are the Leviathan for citizens.
Switch to the modern world, and business interests are heavily invested in sophisticated spin campaigns, to ensure an endless party -- sometimes at our expense. Thanks to neo-liberalism and the Fox effect, anything remotely centrist is painted as some type of extremism. The AGW denial campaign uses exactly the same tactic: take an extreme position, and then non-experts will think that the truth lies in-between. The result is a shift in the zeitgeist, as the door starts to swing more and more in your direction.
Some might think that this type of extremism will be seen through. Think again. Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea, Post-revolutionary France, they all show just how dark society can become under the grip of extremism. Germany is and was a fine country, and sunk very quickly thanks to media spin that blew on the embers of chauvinism and authoritarianism. And that is exactly what Fox and the tea-party stands for.
only reveals truth about the person making the claim.
Blessed are not the cognitive relativists. They are not correct. Certainty does lie somewhere, for which we need to understand the nature of your mind -- how it works, and constructs your mental model.
Let's see, in reality clothianidin was granted full approval this year -- April 2010! That's 4 years of a completely Democratically controlled congress and 2 years of a Democratic House+Senate+President.
/would/ re-staff these organisations, and buy a TV channel that exclusively tells their side of the story - a homolouge to fox. But alas, democrats generally believe in being educated, and that means listening to others.
Obviously the democrats don't just sack and then re-staff these agencies. They are formed over time, and can be quickly destroyed. Bush administration was particularly virilent in its war on science, and removing intellectualism from interferring with business interests. Bush was very much a gut-instinct kind of guy.
If the democrats had more spine, they
Pssstttttt.... 15 years before the events you cited... Clinton was president.
Welcome to the school of repbulican mathematics. You cannot accuse Clinton of being an ideological deregulartor. That would make it Ronald Reagan, who is famous for coming to office and saying "Government is the problem." The Reagan administration actually asked businesses which regulations they wanted to get rid of, an then simply crossed them off the books. And that was considered a good thing.
The democrats have bowed to republican pressure on non-governence, and Bill Clinton was very much a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. He continued the deregulatory program of Greenspan, which started in ernest under Reagan. fyi, I don't think Reagan or Bush Senior were idiots or bad presidents. They were excellent public servents in their way. For example, Reagan helped end the threat to the ozone layer at a cost far less then anybody expected.
Modern republicanism is absurdly vacuous because of its war on education and intellectualism.
I guess as long as these morons continue to lie and cheat their way into power we deserve to have poisoned gulf seafood and the end of flowering crops.
You are missing something very very important from your analysis. Republicans genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Crazy eh? Welcome to the human condition.
Corporations allow for economies of scale that pure private ownership cannot.
wtf? He is talking about limited liability, not economies of scale. If there were no corporations, then investors in market activity become legally liable for the activities of the company. He's talking about removing corporations, but not removing companies. Corporation laws have a nasty side-effect that creates a moral race to the bottom, and we have seen some repugnant acts from companies yet nobody is held responsible. Wouldn't it be nice if powerful people would be more responsible for the shit they make? Instead we reward the psychopath, and many CEOs are psychopaths.
The state introduced this problem, and they should protect against it, if the corporation is such a wonderful thing. Instead we see corporations being used as a power grab for plutocrats.
His unfounded assumption is that the wealthy are not using money to create jobs.
It is a question of efficiency. Investment capital is a key component of the economy, and one argument for regulation is that that capital ought to be efficiently utilized. Instead we seem to assume price equals value as some mystical truth, and that somehow the market can use this principle to find its most efficient manifestation. Yet this wide-eyed idea is not founded in fundamental qualities of human nature. I mean our madnesses: pride, irrationality, greed, dominance, corruption, nepotism, cronyism, narcissism, ignorance, superiority, chauvinism, etc. Power becomes a law unto itself, and corrupts, which is why we have the separation of powers within our culture. The breakdown of the separation of powers is being used by plutocrates of the US to solidify their power, and that is instinctively more important than efficiently investing capital. The values that made our society great in the first place is what is at stake.
These people are actually killing the economy and making people poor by creating a money-sink in the economy where no value is added. They are not only hurting these big companies with their greed, they are helping to force a divide in wealth distribution and indirectly making real people go hungry.
Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists. The economy of imaginary things is precisely what the new world order stands for, and an expression of the correctness of laisezz-faire capitalism. Railing against it is totalitarian, and will just interfer with wealth creation and freedom. Interesting that wealth is created out of imaginary things that are meaningless, trivial, and detrimental to getting real work done. But, in the words of one venture capitalist: IP is the new gold. The economy has to grow somehow -- and that is the ultimate rationalisation for this madness.
In other countries this freedom of speech was just not so thoroughly tested as in USA.
You have got to be kidding. Don't forget that the UK lost India because of freedom of the press. The public read about violent crack downs and sided with Ghandi. Freedom of the press did not suffer.
Contrast to the US military, which believes that Vietnam failed because of the media. So they start their own manage-public-perception operation to ensure the success of their missions. We can all see how that is going.
The reason why the press in the USA sucks is because the separation of powers is breaking down in the face of modern marketing techniques, and an integration of political and corporate interests into one. This is what conservativism has become, but it is not fundamentally conservative, because market fundamentalism if not a traditional idea, but a creation of the mind that certain Republicans are trying to stamp onto society. Thank Rand and Greenspan. This is freedom, and it is also totalitarianism, because it views any attempt to set rules as somehow out of sync with how things are. This is quite ironic, and non-conservative, because market fundamentalism is implemented as such a rule.
It's time the species got that lesson, and stopped using the world we rely on as a toilet
It is so interesting that "skeptics" are afraid of this thought because they see it as a totalitarian power grab. Ironically, they have to defend themselves against climate policy by making a totalitarian power grab. I am not sure where hatred of environmentalism comes from, but is it moronic, and not fundamentally conservative. In the words of Margaret Thatcher: No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.. Thatcher was, of course, trained as a scientist
They're combining DNA, not teaching mice to appreciate musical theatre.
How do you know that appreciating musical theatre does not come from special combinations of DNA? Where do you think your personality comes from? Ask any parent, and they'll tell you that their infant come into this world with their own individual personality -- what them Christian folk call a soul. behavioural geneticists have well established the strong genetic influence on personality and behaviour.
The whole nature-nurture debate has already been clarified on homosexuality and generally. The only reason why we keep arguing about it is because it doesn't jive with some people's politics:
In both cases, the nature-nurture debate is confounded with moral issues. Whether fundamentalist christian, or feminist, the moralist believes that they are right and must somehow change society. Facts are too threatening to a mind that constructs its identity in such a way.
True, but nonetheless, there will be a lot of companies lobbeying for more security, and pointing out that they have a win-win situation with politicians who get to engage strong support from a xenophobic and authoritarian demographic. I suspect these motives operate deeply in the instinctive urge for money and influence that some people experience very strongly. Evidently, a lot of self-deception is going on, because the war on terror is a circus show -- and some are getting hurt.
It's really about societies values and self-knowledge.