I, again, only speak about that country which I know most, Lebanon, and almost anyone I know here, and even the politicians, do want the conflict to end.
Great! What have you done, so far, to achieve that goal?
Second, the difference between Lebanon(or any other Arab state) and Israel in this issue of difficulties dealing with the Palestinians is that the Arab states did not take their lands away from them, nor did they force them(directly or indirectly due to conflict) to migrate en-masse from their lands.
This is simply a lie. Well, a collection of lies, really.
Te very charter which established Israel as a state also invited the Arab inhabitants to stay and be part of the process of building a new nation. The Idea that Israel forced them to move is ludicrous. The (Arab-initiated) war which followed certainly did lead to much occupation and displacement - namely, the territories currently known as "Palestine" were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, all Jews were expelled, and the Arab inhabitants were largely ignored and/or mistreated. This is all a matter of public record - I don't know how you can expect to tell such baseless lies and not be challenged on them.
No, he didn't mention Christians specifically. Can you tell me what other "far right" subgroup has been accused of being "anti-science"? What other group could he possibly be talking about?
The far-right as a whole. For instance, being anti-AGW has nothing to do with christianity, but tends to be much more common on the right side of the political spectrum.
Personally I think it's a bit of a trollish phrase; there's as much anti-science idiocy on the left as there is on the right (eg. anti-nuclear hippies, anti-vaccine zealots, and all kinds of "organic", "natural", and "alternative medicine" fools). The phrase "anti-science far right" seems intended to elicit an emotional response. However, while a significant percentage of the anti-science positions on the far-right could probably be attributed to religion, the phrase itself does not require or imply a religious component.
You're right in that it has nothing to do with the anti-science far right. Your diatribe about christians, on the other hand, has nothing to do with anything. He never mentioned christians. Didn't even imply a religious component. Thou dost protest too much.
This, along with the battery life issue mentioned in TFA and missing encryption, is one of the reasons I still carry a 4-day-battery 'feature' phone.
Android does full-disk encryption (at least 3.0 does - not sure about earlier versiona) and battery life is much improved starting with 3.1 thanks to better CPU throttling and implementation of WiFi power-saving features.
As for the original complaint, there are various apps which can kill tasks either manually or by setting specific criteria. Yeah, it would be nice if the OS had better support for it built-in, and it porbably will eventually, but it's still not an insurmountable problem even now.
Most of the countries with massive agricultural subsidies already are the cheap food exporters. In the US in particular, there's a lot of unsubsidized food being produced competitively.
That's the first time I've heard a claim like that. I'm not sure I believe it, though it seems semi-plausible. Anyway, as I said earlier, I'm not necessarily in favor of food subsidies - it just seemed like you completely misunderstood the argument being made in favor of them, so I tried to explain it. I think it depends - sometimes food subsidies can be a good idea, sometimes they're bad idea, but it's important to understand the issues before coming to any kind of conclusion.
I could see this argument working for a country with a high population density and no reliable nearby allies. But that's not the situation with the US which both has immense local agriculture, a reliable food producing ally, Canada right on its border, and a massive trade network with the rest of the world.
I'd tend to agree. There might have been a good reason for the US to implement subsidies in the past, but they're unnecessary today, for the most part.
BTW, have some basic respect for the dead, even if you disagree with him or don't care for his works. Save your jokes for people who are alive or committed serious crimes in life.
What the... he's dead??
Just checked wikipedia and it says he died in 2008. I had no idea. Dammit. I thought his newest book was taking a while...
There's interesting speculation that agricultural subsidies are a good portion of the cause of obesity in the US.
There's interesting speculation that unicorn farts cause cancer.
But the dumbest part of all? Subsidies don't actually address a need. We don't need stability in food crops because the market is already very stable. People aren't going to stop buying food, so farmers aren't going to stop growing food.
Look, I'm not a fan of subsidies, but you clearly don't even understand the argument. If the price of imported food is cheaper than the price of local food, a country will import more and grow less. If the price difference is great enough, they'll import almost all their food. Depending on where the imports come from, that creates all sorts of issues. If half of your food comes from, say, China, what happens if the Chinese get pissed at you? What happens if they have internal conflicts that interrupt trade? What happens if they have a really shitty growing season?
It's the same reason the US is slowly trying to get away from middle-eastern eastern oil. It's not a good idea to put your country at the mercy of outside suppliers, especially ones with whom you have... "issues". If you're suddenly getting only 50% of the oil you normally get, that would be really, really bad... but nowhere near as bad as if you suddenly have only half as much food.
Except Mexico drug cartel is better armed, better organized, and far more willing to kill their own people then anything in Afghanistan.
I doubt it. Oh, you might have a point on the "better organized" bit, and they're probably better trained since a lot of them are ex-military. But their armaments are generally no better than what the Taliban has, and if you think that they're more wiling to kill "their people" you haven't been paying attention to Afghanistan.
No, the main difference is that Afghanistan is an occupied nation, while Mexico is still notionally a free civil society. If the Mexican government declared martial law, deployed the military to occupy all major cities, set up FOB's and sent out regular fighting patrols into the country-side, you'd see the cartels start to look a lot more like the Afghan "insurgents". If they got some help from NATO, it would go a lot faster.
Not saying that's what they should do, BTW. Just disagreeing with your conclusions.
Or we could stop militarizing law enforcement, and try a new, less violent approach to drug policy (like, say, legalization).
I agree that legalizing is the way to go; however, what, exactly, do you imagine these cartels will do once their product goes mainstream? Turn into nice polite businessmen, running legitimate businesses with 10% profit margins?
Let's not be silly. As soon as you legalize drugs, most of these organizations will turn to other illegal ventures. You'll see more kidnapping, more human-trafficking, more violent crimes of all sorts. In the long term it would probably result in a decrease in crime, but limiting their ability to get "easy money" from the drug trade will only work if we're willing to go in and physically destroy the cartels at the same time.
Of course, the guy who suggested that it be done by the US military is out to lunch; I'm pretty sure the Mexican government might have something to say about that. The US military can work as advisers and trainers. They might even assist in some specific operations where the Mexican government requests it. But the bulk of the work will have to be done by the Mexicans themselves.
about how much NASA costs, I just posted this same link on another site. It shows an outstanding graph of the overall federal budget for 2011 broken down by Agency.
Yeah, you know, maybe spending $200 on a pair of shoelaces might not seem all that much when compared to my annual budget, but it's still friggin' ridiculous.
Look, I LOVE NASA, and would be happy to see them receive 10 times the funding... but spending it like this? Screw that. If they're not going to make a real effort, then give the $30 billion to SpaceX and let NASA do the stuff they're good at: science.
No, it's not going to be cheap - these sorts of treatments are custom builds and there is a lot of fiddly tech involved, even after they streamline the process. It probably would not be used on rarer cancers because you would have to do all that work without the possibility of a really big payoff.
Naw, see, a lot of people get this stuff wrong. Earlier you talked about drugs which cost "100,000" a year. The reason they cost so damn much is exactly because they treat extremely rare conditions. From what I remember reading, the most expensive drug on the market treats a disease that affects less than 100 people per year in the US. So yes, you probably would see this used on "rarer cancers", but you'd end up paying a lot less if you have a common cancer vs. a rare one.
I'm not sure it applies in the case of AGW though, because there are some good scientists who fall on the side of the skeptics.
There are always good scientists who side with fringe views. Take Lynn Margulis, for instance. Brilliant biologists. Carl Sagan's wife*. 9/11 fruitcake. I loved and respected Sagan, and I think Druyan's contribution to biology has been fantastic - does that mean I should believe that 9/11 was an inside job? Or does it mean that even brilliant scientists make horrible mistakes sometimes, especially when they're commenting on topics outside of their field of expertise?
It's a similar issue with the anti-evolution twits, and their list of 700+ scientists who deny evolution. Do you honestly think a list like that tells us something about the science?
*Then again, she was his first wife, and maybe there's a reason for that:p
If you're honest, you'll realize that the majority of "climate change orthodoxists" are also simply ideologues repeating talking points.
Sure. So what?
Look, a "round-earth orthodoxist" may not be familiar with the different ways of determining the shape of the earth, but they don't need to be; if put on the spot they can always go look at the literature. A flat earther, on the other hand, better be intimately familiar with the literature if he expects to be taken at all seriously. If you're going against the grain, the onus is on you to show that you have a detailed understanding of the established models, and that you've found a serious problem with them. You're not going to do that by repeating talking points from pundits and quacks.
I get this from the 9/11 deniers all the time, too - they go on and on about how "the sheeple" aren't familiar with all the events surrounding 9/11, and they're largely correct. Which is why the average person tends to get stumped when inundated with "facts" by a truther. But anyone who IS familiar with the details, or who works in one of the many fields which the truthers run roughshod over in their haste to make a point, it's obvious that they're completely clueless too - they've just memorized a bunch of details and hundreds of talking points. In their case, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Not trying to draw any equivalences between truthers anti anti-AGW folks, BTW, just making an analogy.
And, as a bit of personal background, I used to think AGW was a bunch of bullshit up until I actually went and looked at the science a couple years ago. I even have a shirt with Al Gores picture on it that says "I may not have invented the Internet, but I did make up global warming!". And I still wear it on occasion, just for fun:)
I know that a lot of the scenarios being put forward look like overblown doom-mongering, and many probably are, but there's no denying that CO2 causes warming, and that humans have released massive amounts of it in our recent past. I tend to part ways with the AGW crowd when it comes to how - and how soon - to do something about it, but if you're still convinced that AGW isn't real, you really need to go do some more research.
Alright, yeah, I'm being overly sarcastic with you for no good reason. I just thought your reply was amusing.
Yes, I could have made my original response to him far more detailed. If I hadn't been finishing my lunch break at work, I might have done so. Or I might not have, since I'm getting a little tired of answering the same claims over and over again. Either way, I appreciate you stepping in to fill the gaps in my response. Thanks!
Him: "In 1939, Germany invaded Poland using recovered alien spacecraft, and discovered that the whole nation was actually occupied by lizards wearing human costumes."
I agree for the most part, but what you don't seem to get is that these measures wouldn't cost those companies anything. When their operating costs go up, they don't decrease their profits - they jack up the prices. You and I are the ones who would end up paying for it. And if the corporations become uncompetitive because companies in other nations don't have to shoulder the same costs, it's you and I who would end up broke and out of work - not some multi-billionare CEO.
For years, a "Vast Majority" of scientists and doctors said that smoking doesn't cause cancer.
As soon as we actually started doing studies into the health effects of smoking, the cancer link became clear immediately. The Nazis did the original research in the 1920's, though their research was largely ignored due to the political situation which followed shortly after. When the Brits undertook their own research in 1950, it took only 4 years before the scientific consensus was solidly behind the smoking-cancer link. The following "controversy" was caused entirely by exactly the same type of nonsense that's going on today: big business funding their own "science", and media reporting fringe views as if they were equivalent to the scientific consensus.
First a hacker exposed a major scientist fully admitting the numbers were fudged to show global warming models working
No, that's bullshit.
The second was excused because the scientist was a skeptic *gasp* and believed Intelligence Design is plausible... therefore he can't be a "real" scientist.
More bullshit.
There is reason to doubt, and people who do doubt shouldn't be ridiculed. I prefer my science to be more like science than religion.
There is reason to doubt some parts, and there is always room for healthy skepticism. However, there is a massive difference between skepticism and cynicism. The vast majority of the "climate change skeptics" I've met are simply ideologues repeating talking points; they don't bother to do any research, they don't understand the science, and they have no interest in learning anything - they only care about voicing their opinion as loudly as possible, while ridiculing scientists and dismissing any research they don't like. That's not skepticism.
Now they have even changed the name to Climate Change (when is it NOT changing) to avoid the fact the predictions have failed.
Heh. Yeah, it's not as if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first formed in 1988, or anything. Nope, scientists clearly invented that term yesterday in order to cover their asses!
Please. There's some room for skepticism when it comes to AGW, but there's no need to be a moron about it.
There are some fucking crazy dudes out in those hills, just ask the locals.
It's not nice to talk about the scientists at the radio telescope observatory that way. I would have thought a site dedicated to geek culture would be a bit more understanding...
I also don't want any of my kids to feel like they need to join the military and invade the Middle East to keep my gas tank full.
Maybe you should educate them better, instead of letting them get pumped full of that "no-blood-for-oil!" propaganda? Maybe you can teach them about Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
I, again, only speak about that country which I know most, Lebanon, and almost anyone I know here, and even the politicians, do want the conflict to end.
Great! What have you done, so far, to achieve that goal?
Second, the difference between Lebanon(or any other Arab state) and Israel in this issue of difficulties dealing with the Palestinians is that the Arab states did not take their lands away from them, nor did they force them(directly or indirectly due to conflict) to migrate en-masse from their lands.
This is simply a lie. Well, a collection of lies, really.
Te very charter which established Israel as a state also invited the Arab inhabitants to stay and be part of the process of building a new nation. The Idea that Israel forced them to move is ludicrous. The (Arab-initiated) war which followed certainly did lead to much occupation and displacement - namely, the territories currently known as "Palestine" were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, all Jews were expelled, and the Arab inhabitants were largely ignored and/or mistreated. This is all a matter of public record - I don't know how you can expect to tell such baseless lies and not be challenged on them.
No, he didn't mention Christians specifically. Can you tell me what other "far right" subgroup has been accused of being "anti-science"? What other group could he possibly be talking about?
The far-right as a whole. For instance, being anti-AGW has nothing to do with christianity, but tends to be much more common on the right side of the political spectrum.
Personally I think it's a bit of a trollish phrase; there's as much anti-science idiocy on the left as there is on the right (eg. anti-nuclear hippies, anti-vaccine zealots, and all kinds of "organic", "natural", and "alternative medicine" fools). The phrase "anti-science far right" seems intended to elicit an emotional response. However, while a significant percentage of the anti-science positions on the far-right could probably be attributed to religion, the phrase itself does not require or imply a religious component.
You're right in that it has nothing to do with the anti-science far right. Your diatribe about christians, on the other hand, has nothing to do with anything. He never mentioned christians. Didn't even imply a religious component. Thou dost protest too much.
This, along with the battery life issue mentioned in TFA and missing encryption, is one of the reasons I still carry a 4-day-battery 'feature' phone.
Android does full-disk encryption (at least 3.0 does - not sure about earlier versiona) and battery life is much improved starting with 3.1 thanks to better CPU throttling and implementation of WiFi power-saving features.
As for the original complaint, there are various apps which can kill tasks either manually or by setting specific criteria. Yeah, it would be nice if the OS had better support for it built-in, and it porbably will eventually, but it's still not an insurmountable problem even now.
Most of the countries with massive agricultural subsidies already are the cheap food exporters. In the US in particular, there's a lot of unsubsidized food being produced competitively.
That's the first time I've heard a claim like that. I'm not sure I believe it, though it seems semi-plausible. Anyway, as I said earlier, I'm not necessarily in favor of food subsidies - it just seemed like you completely misunderstood the argument being made in favor of them, so I tried to explain it. I think it depends - sometimes food subsidies can be a good idea, sometimes they're bad idea, but it's important to understand the issues before coming to any kind of conclusion.
I could see this argument working for a country with a high population density and no reliable nearby allies. But that's not the situation with the US which both has immense local agriculture, a reliable food producing ally, Canada right on its border, and a massive trade network with the rest of the world.
I'd tend to agree. There might have been a good reason for the US to implement subsidies in the past, but they're unnecessary today, for the most part.
Your response has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Did you even read my comment?
BTW, have some basic respect for the dead, even if you disagree with him or don't care for his works. Save your jokes for people who are alive or committed serious crimes in life.
What the ... he's dead??
Just checked wikipedia and it says he died in 2008. I had no idea. Dammit. I thought his newest book was taking a while ...
Feathered dinosaurs in a Jurassic Park reboot could still be made scary. Look at this raptor, for example.
Ah, yes. It has the fearsome power of making it's prey die from laughter.
There's interesting speculation that agricultural subsidies are a good portion of the cause of obesity in the US.
There's interesting speculation that unicorn farts cause cancer.
But the dumbest part of all? Subsidies don't actually address a need. We don't need stability in food crops because the market is already very stable. People aren't going to stop buying food, so farmers aren't going to stop growing food.
Look, I'm not a fan of subsidies, but you clearly don't even understand the argument. If the price of imported food is cheaper than the price of local food, a country will import more and grow less. If the price difference is great enough, they'll import almost all their food. Depending on where the imports come from, that creates all sorts of issues. If half of your food comes from, say, China, what happens if the Chinese get pissed at you? What happens if they have internal conflicts that interrupt trade? What happens if they have a really shitty growing season?
It's the same reason the US is slowly trying to get away from middle-eastern eastern oil. It's not a good idea to put your country at the mercy of outside suppliers, especially ones with whom you have ... "issues". If you're suddenly getting only 50% of the oil you normally get, that would be really, really bad ... but nowhere near as bad as if you suddenly have only half as much food.
Except Mexico drug cartel is better armed, better organized, and far more willing to kill their own people then anything in Afghanistan.
I doubt it. Oh, you might have a point on the "better organized" bit, and they're probably better trained since a lot of them are ex-military. But their armaments are generally no better than what the Taliban has, and if you think that they're more wiling to kill "their people" you haven't been paying attention to Afghanistan.
No, the main difference is that Afghanistan is an occupied nation, while Mexico is still notionally a free civil society. If the Mexican government declared martial law, deployed the military to occupy all major cities, set up FOB's and sent out regular fighting patrols into the country-side, you'd see the cartels start to look a lot more like the Afghan "insurgents". If they got some help from NATO, it would go a lot faster.
Not saying that's what they should do, BTW. Just disagreeing with your conclusions.
Or we could stop militarizing law enforcement, and try a new, less violent approach to drug policy (like, say, legalization).
I agree that legalizing is the way to go; however, what, exactly, do you imagine these cartels will do once their product goes mainstream? Turn into nice polite businessmen, running legitimate businesses with 10% profit margins?
Let's not be silly. As soon as you legalize drugs, most of these organizations will turn to other illegal ventures. You'll see more kidnapping, more human-trafficking, more violent crimes of all sorts. In the long term it would probably result in a decrease in crime, but limiting their ability to get "easy money" from the drug trade will only work if we're willing to go in and physically destroy the cartels at the same time.
Of course, the guy who suggested that it be done by the US military is out to lunch; I'm pretty sure the Mexican government might have something to say about that. The US military can work as advisers and trainers. They might even assist in some specific operations where the Mexican government requests it. But the bulk of the work will have to be done by the Mexicans themselves.
If there were a god, you would have gotten modded +5,000 funny :)
about how much NASA costs, I just posted this same link on another site. It shows an outstanding graph of the overall federal budget for 2011 broken down by Agency.
Yeah, you know, maybe spending $200 on a pair of shoelaces might not seem all that much when compared to my annual budget, but it's still friggin' ridiculous.
Look, I LOVE NASA, and would be happy to see them receive 10 times the funding ... but spending it like this? Screw that. If they're not going to make a real effort, then give the $30 billion to SpaceX and let NASA do the stuff they're good at: science.
No, it's not going to be cheap - these sorts of treatments are custom builds and there is a lot of fiddly tech involved, even after they streamline the process. It probably would not be used on rarer cancers because you would have to do all that work without the possibility of a really big payoff.
Naw, see, a lot of people get this stuff wrong. Earlier you talked about drugs which cost "100,000" a year. The reason they cost so damn much is exactly because they treat extremely rare conditions. From what I remember reading, the most expensive drug on the market treats a disease that affects less than 100 people per year in the US. So yes, you probably would see this used on "rarer cancers", but you'd end up paying a lot less if you have a common cancer vs. a rare one.
I'm not sure it applies in the case of AGW though, because there are some good scientists who fall on the side of the skeptics.
There are always good scientists who side with fringe views. Take Lynn Margulis, for instance. Brilliant biologists. Carl Sagan's wife*. 9/11 fruitcake. I loved and respected Sagan, and I think Druyan's contribution to biology has been fantastic - does that mean I should believe that 9/11 was an inside job? Or does it mean that even brilliant scientists make horrible mistakes sometimes, especially when they're commenting on topics outside of their field of expertise?
It's a similar issue with the anti-evolution twits, and their list of 700+ scientists who deny evolution. Do you honestly think a list like that tells us something about the science?
*Then again, she was his first wife, and maybe there's a reason for that :p
If you're honest, you'll realize that the majority of "climate change orthodoxists" are also simply ideologues repeating talking points.
Sure. So what?
Look, a "round-earth orthodoxist" may not be familiar with the different ways of determining the shape of the earth, but they don't need to be; if put on the spot they can always go look at the literature. A flat earther, on the other hand, better be intimately familiar with the literature if he expects to be taken at all seriously. If you're going against the grain, the onus is on you to show that you have a detailed understanding of the established models, and that you've found a serious problem with them. You're not going to do that by repeating talking points from pundits and quacks.
I get this from the 9/11 deniers all the time, too - they go on and on about how "the sheeple" aren't familiar with all the events surrounding 9/11, and they're largely correct. Which is why the average person tends to get stumped when inundated with "facts" by a truther. But anyone who IS familiar with the details, or who works in one of the many fields which the truthers run roughshod over in their haste to make a point, it's obvious that they're completely clueless too - they've just memorized a bunch of details and hundreds of talking points. In their case, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Not trying to draw any equivalences between truthers anti anti-AGW folks, BTW, just making an analogy.
And, as a bit of personal background, I used to think AGW was a bunch of bullshit up until I actually went and looked at the science a couple years ago. I even have a shirt with Al Gores picture on it that says "I may not have invented the Internet, but I did make up global warming!". And I still wear it on occasion, just for fun :)
I know that a lot of the scenarios being put forward look like overblown doom-mongering, and many probably are, but there's no denying that CO2 causes warming, and that humans have released massive amounts of it in our recent past. I tend to part ways with the AGW crowd when it comes to how - and how soon - to do something about it, but if you're still convinced that AGW isn't real, you really need to go do some more research.
:)
Alright, yeah, I'm being overly sarcastic with you for no good reason. I just thought your reply was amusing.
Yes, I could have made my original response to him far more detailed. If I hadn't been finishing my lunch break at work, I might have done so. Or I might not have, since I'm getting a little tired of answering the same claims over and over again. Either way, I appreciate you stepping in to fill the gaps in my response. Thanks!
The hack actually happened: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html . While what the emails imply may be in contention, his claim that it happened is not bullshit.
Him: "In 1939, Germany invaded Poland using recovered alien spacecraft, and discovered that the whole nation was actually occupied by lizards wearing human costumes."
Me: "That's bullshit."
You: "No, the invasion actually happened."
No, WV is NOT part of the Bible Belt ... probably have a lot more in common with the people of western PA and eastern KY than anyone in the Deep South.
You mean KY as in home-of-the-creationist-museum-KY? :) If that's not part of the bible belt, the US is in bigger trouble than I thought ...
I agree for the most part, but what you don't seem to get is that these measures wouldn't cost those companies anything. When their operating costs go up, they don't decrease their profits - they jack up the prices. You and I are the ones who would end up paying for it. And if the corporations become uncompetitive because companies in other nations don't have to shoulder the same costs, it's you and I who would end up broke and out of work - not some multi-billionare CEO.
For years, a "Vast Majority" of scientists and doctors said that smoking doesn't cause cancer.
As soon as we actually started doing studies into the health effects of smoking, the cancer link became clear immediately. The Nazis did the original research in the 1920's, though their research was largely ignored due to the political situation which followed shortly after. When the Brits undertook their own research in 1950, it took only 4 years before the scientific consensus was solidly behind the smoking-cancer link. The following "controversy" was caused entirely by exactly the same type of nonsense that's going on today: big business funding their own "science", and media reporting fringe views as if they were equivalent to the scientific consensus.
First a hacker exposed a major scientist fully admitting the numbers were fudged to show global warming models working
No, that's bullshit.
The second was excused because the scientist was a skeptic *gasp* and believed Intelligence Design is plausible... therefore he can't be a "real" scientist.
More bullshit.
There is reason to doubt, and people who do doubt shouldn't be ridiculed. I prefer my science to be more like science than religion.
There is reason to doubt some parts, and there is always room for healthy skepticism. However, there is a massive difference between skepticism and cynicism. The vast majority of the "climate change skeptics" I've met are simply ideologues repeating talking points; they don't bother to do any research, they don't understand the science, and they have no interest in learning anything - they only care about voicing their opinion as loudly as possible, while ridiculing scientists and dismissing any research they don't like. That's not skepticism.
Now they have even changed the name to Climate Change (when is it NOT changing) to avoid the fact the predictions have failed.
Heh. Yeah, it's not as if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first formed in 1988, or anything. Nope, scientists clearly invented that term yesterday in order to cover their asses!
Please. There's some room for skepticism when it comes to AGW, but there's no need to be a moron about it.
There are some fucking crazy dudes out in those hills, just ask the locals.
It's not nice to talk about the scientists at the radio telescope observatory that way. I would have thought a site dedicated to geek culture would be a bit more understanding ...
It wouldn't be nice to invade Canada either.
Just try it, ya hozers ;)
I also don't want any of my kids to feel like they need to join the military and invade the Middle East to keep my gas tank full.
Maybe you should educate them better, instead of letting them get pumped full of that "no-blood-for-oil!" propaganda? Maybe you can teach them about Canada.