The Federalist Papers. Provides a lot of background on what the writers of the Constitution were thinking about when they wrote the Constitution. Too bad most of our current political class has never read it.
The problem with inbreeding depends on the closeness of the relationship. With your sibling? If you carry ANY defective recessive genes at all, the chances of a child having it expressed is one half. With your 2nd cousin? A much lower chance of recessives matching. But in a small community, you'll almost certainly be marrying a cousin of some degree or another, even if your culture either marries outside the village (Ashkenazim) or raids for women (Viking or Polynesian, for example). If your culture tracks genealogy and tries to prevent inbreeding, then the problem is reduced. (People in the "Old Country" didn't know WHY inbreeding was bad, but they could see the effects!)
Any small tribe or village, even up to the last century, is going to have some inbreeding; if there's only 250 people in your village (and assuming that the population has been relatively stable for the last few hundred years) and every potential mate in your village is at least a 4th cousin, probably more than one way. As James Burke noted, the steam engine caused a revolution in genetic engineering, because with the railroad and the steamship, it was possible to meet and mate with people who weren't related to you at all.
Hybrid vigor works on people. Look at the stature of people from feudal Japan and China; stereotypically small, almost tiny. When those people came to Hawaii and wed other Japanese (and Chinese) people from other villages, their children were inches taller - living in the same culture, often on similar diets. Their children were taller still, and THEIR children are the size of everybody else.
If they're in an enclosed fixture - like in the ceiling of my hallway - then yes, heat buildup can be a problem. Add "sideways installation" to "heat buildup in an enclosed fixture", and I was getting 3-4 weeks lifespan for a 15W CFL.
Twelve dollars isn't "dirt cheap" for light bulbs; not when a 4-pack of 75W incandescent bulbs used to cost about $1.50. And they would only make economic sense if electrical power were to skyrocket in price, which (because of the recent discoveries of enormous reservoirs of natural gas) probably isn't going to happen.
They made the same long-life claim for CFLs, too. That claim was a lie. Will this one be? I'm no longer willing to make big investments in high-priced lightbulbs until they have a track record for long life.
I was an early adopter of the CFL "pigtail" lightbulbs. The problem was, they were VERY expensive, took a long time to light up, and had much shorter-than-promised lifespans.
CFLs fail quickly if they are in any orientation other than vertical. Sideways or pointing down? A couple of months, tops. CFLs were severely affected by heat buildup, which is still a problem. In any enclosed fixture, they lasted about a month.
The only CFLs still in use in my home are a set of outdoor coach lamps; small, vertical, outside, and I don't care how long it takes for them to light up.
Just one more example of "feel-good" ignorant legislators writing laws they don't understand to solve non-existent problems.
Gore requested a PARTIAL recount only in a few carefully selected districts; Bush's advisers said "All or nothing". Gore's lawyers wanted to exclude all overseas military ballots; Bush's people wanted them included. The Florida state supreme court was dithering when the US Supreme Court overruled them.
But the recounts WERE DONE. Several newspapers got together and carefully, over the next several months, recounted ALL the Florida ballots. You probably didn't hear about it, because in EVERY recount scenario, Bush still took the election. Even the limited "Only My Friends" scenarios; Gore lost. Get over it.
Full disclosure; I'm a retired Navy officer. I didn't vote for either Bush. I strongly opposed the Iraq invasion on the ground, but believe that we should have leveled Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires". If neither the British nor the Russians could make Afghanistan work, why did Bush think HE could? But once we attacked Iraq, we should have leveled Baghdad. And once our folks dug Saddam out of his hole, we should have executed him on the spot and left, with a warning to whatever new government sprang up, "Don't make us come back here, because we'll do even worse to YOU."
The Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland Security are farces, and all of then should be abolished. But Obama has done more with government surveillance of OUR OWN CITIZENS that he has done for potential adversaries. He should be impeached, and tried for treason.
You should probably avoid posting when drunk, stoned, or hallucinating.
The inanimate concepts and attributes that you mention have no opinions, agreements or disagreements. My original post was to object to the conflation of the GOP, the Tea Party, and the KKK. These entities are not similar in any respect. The Tea Party and the GOP are mostly orthogonal, and the Tea Party and the KKK have virtually nothing in common.
Further, your inane association with the worst conspiracy theorists does not do you credit.
Lincoln, who freed the slaves, was a Republican; in fact, he was the first Republican president. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democrat, helped to found the KKK and was its first Grand Wizard. Virtually all of the authors of "Jim Crow" legislation after the Civil War were Democrats. Democrat Senator Richard Byrd, who died only a few years ago, cut his teeth on politics as the Grand Kleagle of the Klan. Sheriff "Bull" Connor was not only a Democrat, he was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Virtually all of the big-name racists in the country before 1964 were Democrats, and LBJ was only able to pass the Civil Rights Bill with a lot of Republican support.
It's true that the Bushs were no friends to Liberty, but the Clinton/Obama machine has been FAR worse in terms of the surveillance state.
Please! Soak the cat with the garden hose. More effective, less messy, and the water dilutes the urine and breaks down the feces to something more approximating fertilizer.
In my neighborhood, my wife IS the "crazy cat lady", and this is what I ask all my neighbors to do. End result: the cats stay in MY yard, the neighbors are mostly happy (and take proper satisfaction in their "revenge" when they need to) and no hard feelings. Except the cats, but who are THEY going to complain to?
The "solutions" that the warmists propose will probably lead to the collapse of the western economy, and the empowerment of tyranny and statists of every variety. It's not a "let's eliminate CO2 even though that might NOT be the problem" thing; taking the "safe" choice may well be more dangerous. A rich economy with plenty of resources will be better able to mitigate environmental problems than a starvation-level scarcity economy wracked by war and strife.
The "consensus" for a thousand years after Aristotle was that the Sun went around the Earth - even though Aristarchus of Samos had proposed the correct "heliocentric" model a hundred years before. Aristotle was wrong about that - and about so much else. His understanding of anatomy, of physics, of chemistry, of... well, nearly everything - was entirely wrong. But that was the "consensus".
The consensus pre-Alvarez was that cataclysmic impacts never changed life on Earth. The consensus on continental drift was "balderdash".
A scientist must ALWAYS consider contrary hypotheses. The "consensus" is that the loudest faction in the crowd is correct, when it usually is NOT.
I rented the movie "Starship Troopers" a few years after it came out; I delayed because Hollyweird invariably screws up good SF novels, and Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" was a masterpiece.
I found most of the movie to be vile, repulsive and hideous; the "naked coed shower scenes" were the movie's ONLY redeeming value.
The vast number of potential exoplanets could never be detected by Kepler. Kepler worked by detecting occultations, and the chances of a planet at 1AU distance actually occulting a G0 star 10+ LY away would be... miniscule. Think about how few visible stars happen to be ON the ecliptic as viewed from Earth; Those would be the ONLY aliens with a Kepler-analog telescope which might discover US.
The fact that the Kepler telescope discovered as many exoplanets as it did, given the geometric odds against it, means that there must be planets orbiting a majority - perhaps a VAST majority - of stars.
The whole idea of "time zones" was so that the mid-19th century populace, who was accustomed to setting their clocks (such as they were) to 12Noon at Sun transit (which is the definition of "noon" anyway) could all be persuaded to agree on whatever time the railway station master said it was - and all the railway station masters had to agree on what time it was to keep from banging trains together. So "time zones" are entirely artificial contrivances.
The best description I ever saw was a cartoon back in the early 70's; Richard Nixon in a rocking chair, explaining that he was going to make this blanket longer by cutting a foot of the blanket from one end and sewing on to the other - just like daylight savings time did, you see.
The British had (used to have?) "Summer time", which was like DST. The Bermudians didn't bother to change the clocks; they had "summer hours" for most businesses. from like 7AM to 3PM. It accomplished the same thing.
I see three practical options.
1. Do nothing. It ain't broke, so don't try "fixing" it. We're mostly accustomed to the quirks of DST, so who cares?
2. Set a single "American" time zone, and set all the clocks to it. Businesses and schools can set their opening/start times and closing/end times to whatever they want. Two time zones would be foolish.
3. Switch everything over to GMT. We're a global economy; we ought to have a global clock. Besides, what relevance does sunrise or sunset have when you're on the Moon, or in a space habitat? After all; Arthur C. Clarke wrote "If man survives... then for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"
Say what you want about Bush; the enormous increases in surveillance has come mostly on Obama's watch - and be honest, now, most of you KNOW that. But you voted for him, so what can you do?
EVERY Obama promise was false, most especially this one: “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009
Obama was the guy who corrupted the IRS, and deployed more armed guards around the Barry-cades than he ever did around the southern border. He's the President of Drones.
Don't bother modding me down; you all KNOW it's true. Even if you HATE admitting that you were had by styrofoam phony "Greek" columns and a smooth teleprompter delivery.
Please define "reputable" in a way that doesn't automatically mean "biased to agree with me".
There ARE NO 'heavily biased right-wing sites". Fox is moderate-right; most of the other "news" sites are on the left side of the political spectrum. Your perspective on the news reveals more about your own biases than anything else.
Actually, you should easily be able to tell that I _AM_ and American, and where I live, and a lot about me. If you only knew how to look. (Somebody else started the thread. But you knew that, too, right?)
I'm not a Republican; I'd admit that; the GOP is mostly a bunch of morons who are only SLIGHTLY less stupid than the Democrat morons. But this nation is heading for a civil war, if SOMEBODY doesn't start dialing back the class-warfare rhetoric and stop spiking the spending. The Federal income this year is an ALL TIME RECORD HIGH - the problem is that the spending is EVEN HIGHER!!!!!
The debt ceiling has been raised a dozen times since Obama was elected, and our debt is now a third greater. Obama has never once signed a budget. Federal spending REQUIRES a budget. All we've had since then are "continuing resolutions", because they keep pushing it UP and UP and UP....
At some point, this has to stop. If not now, when?
Baloney. Gerrymandering is more often the province of Democrats; here in California, Speaker of the House John Burton once proclaimed his redistricting proposal as his own contribution to abstract art. So we had a constitutional amendment to give redistricting to a special committee - except that SOMEHOW, the Democrats running the legislature managed to pack the committee with.... OTHER DEMOCRATS!!!
Texas is the only notable example of GOP gerrymandering, and the Dems have given them no end of grief for it. That's THEIR tactic, dontchaknow.
Slashdot Mirror
Also; everything by Frederic Bastiat, but especially his short essay "That Which Is Seen, And That Which Is Not Seen".
The Federalist Papers. Provides a lot of background on what the writers of the Constitution were thinking about when they wrote the Constitution. Too bad most of our current political class has never read it.
The problem with inbreeding depends on the closeness of the relationship. With your sibling? If you carry ANY defective recessive genes at all, the chances of a child having it expressed is one half. With your 2nd cousin? A much lower chance of recessives matching. But in a small community, you'll almost certainly be marrying a cousin of some degree or another, even if your culture either marries outside the village (Ashkenazim) or raids for women (Viking or Polynesian, for example). If your culture tracks genealogy and tries to prevent inbreeding, then the problem is reduced. (People in the "Old Country" didn't know WHY inbreeding was bad, but they could see the effects!)
Any small tribe or village, even up to the last century, is going to have some inbreeding; if there's only 250 people in your village (and assuming that the population has been relatively stable for the last few hundred years) and every potential mate in your village is at least a 4th cousin, probably more than one way. As James Burke noted, the steam engine caused a revolution in genetic engineering, because with the railroad and the steamship, it was possible to meet and mate with people who weren't related to you at all.
Hybrid vigor works on people. Look at the stature of people from feudal Japan and China; stereotypically small, almost tiny. When those people came to Hawaii and wed other Japanese (and Chinese) people from other villages, their children were inches taller - living in the same culture, often on similar diets. Their children were taller still, and THEIR children are the size of everybody else.
If they're in an enclosed fixture - like in the ceiling of my hallway - then yes, heat buildup can be a problem. Add "sideways installation" to "heat buildup in an enclosed fixture", and I was getting 3-4 weeks lifespan for a 15W CFL.
Twelve dollars isn't "dirt cheap" for light bulbs; not when a 4-pack of 75W incandescent bulbs used to cost about $1.50. And they would only make economic sense if electrical power were to skyrocket in price, which (because of the recent discoveries of enormous reservoirs of natural gas) probably isn't going to happen.
Agreed: CFLs still suck.
They made the same long-life claim for CFLs, too. That claim was a lie. Will this one be? I'm no longer willing to make big investments in high-priced lightbulbs until they have a track record for long life.
I was an early adopter of the CFL "pigtail" lightbulbs. The problem was, they were VERY expensive, took a long time to light up, and had much shorter-than-promised lifespans.
CFLs fail quickly if they are in any orientation other than vertical. Sideways or pointing down? A couple of months, tops. CFLs were severely affected by heat buildup, which is still a problem. In any enclosed fixture, they lasted about a month.
The only CFLs still in use in my home are a set of outdoor coach lamps; small, vertical, outside, and I don't care how long it takes for them to light up.
Just one more example of "feel-good" ignorant legislators writing laws they don't understand to solve non-existent problems.
Gore requested a PARTIAL recount only in a few carefully selected districts; Bush's advisers said "All or nothing". Gore's lawyers wanted to exclude all overseas military ballots; Bush's people wanted them included. The Florida state supreme court was dithering when the US Supreme Court overruled them.
But the recounts WERE DONE. Several newspapers got together and carefully, over the next several months, recounted ALL the Florida ballots. You probably didn't hear about it, because in EVERY recount scenario, Bush still took the election. Even the limited "Only My Friends" scenarios; Gore lost. Get over it.
Full disclosure; I'm a retired Navy officer. I didn't vote for either Bush. I strongly opposed the Iraq invasion on the ground, but believe that we should have leveled Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires". If neither the British nor the Russians could make Afghanistan work, why did Bush think HE could? But once we attacked Iraq, we should have leveled Baghdad. And once our folks dug Saddam out of his hole, we should have executed him on the spot and left, with a warning to whatever new government sprang up, "Don't make us come back here, because we'll do even worse to YOU."
The Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland Security are farces, and all of then should be abolished. But Obama has done more with government surveillance of OUR OWN CITIZENS that he has done for potential adversaries. He should be impeached, and tried for treason.
You, on the other hand, are simply being foolish.
You should probably avoid posting when drunk, stoned, or hallucinating.
The inanimate concepts and attributes that you mention have no opinions, agreements or disagreements. My original post was to object to the conflation of the GOP, the Tea Party, and the KKK. These entities are not similar in any respect. The Tea Party and the GOP are mostly orthogonal, and the Tea Party and the KKK have virtually nothing in common.
Further, your inane association with the worst conspiracy theorists does not do you credit.
Lincoln, who freed the slaves, was a Republican; in fact, he was the first Republican president. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democrat, helped to found the KKK and was its first Grand Wizard. Virtually all of the authors of "Jim Crow" legislation after the Civil War were Democrats. Democrat Senator Richard Byrd, who died only a few years ago, cut his teeth on politics as the Grand Kleagle of the Klan. Sheriff "Bull" Connor was not only a Democrat, he was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Virtually all of the big-name racists in the country before 1964 were Democrats, and LBJ was only able to pass the Civil Rights Bill with a lot of Republican support.
It's true that the Bushs were no friends to Liberty, but the Clinton/Obama machine has been FAR worse in terms of the surveillance state.
Please! Soak the cat with the garden hose. More effective, less messy, and the water dilutes the urine and breaks down the feces to something more approximating fertilizer.
In my neighborhood, my wife IS the "crazy cat lady", and this is what I ask all my neighbors to do. End result: the cats stay in MY yard, the neighbors are mostly happy (and take proper satisfaction in their "revenge" when they need to) and no hard feelings. Except the cats, but who are THEY going to complain to?
Ken White of Popehat has that angle well covered.....
http://www.popehat.com/2013/11/15/new-from-kleargear-free-speech-only-3500-plus-shipping-and-handling/
The "solutions" that the warmists propose will probably lead to the collapse of the western economy, and the empowerment of tyranny and statists of every variety. It's not a "let's eliminate CO2 even though that might NOT be the problem" thing; taking the "safe" choice may well be more dangerous. A rich economy with plenty of resources will be better able to mitigate environmental problems than a starvation-level scarcity economy wracked by war and strife.
The "consensus" for a thousand years after Aristotle was that the Sun went around the Earth - even though Aristarchus of Samos had proposed the correct "heliocentric" model a hundred years before. Aristotle was wrong about that - and about so much else. His understanding of anatomy, of physics, of chemistry, of ... well, nearly everything - was entirely wrong. But that was the "consensus".
The consensus pre-Alvarez was that cataclysmic impacts never changed life on Earth. The consensus on continental drift was "balderdash".
A scientist must ALWAYS consider contrary hypotheses. The "consensus" is that the loudest faction in the crowd is correct, when it usually is NOT.
AGW is more Aristotle than Aristarchus.
Alien Asteroid Mining. Either that, or the Fithp from the Niven & Pournelle book "Footfall", preparing a dinosaur killer to soften up the Earth.
Apparently the director hadn't actually READ the book far enough to realize that Juan Rico was a Filipino.
I rented the movie "Starship Troopers" a few years after it came out; I delayed because Hollyweird invariably screws up good SF novels, and Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" was a masterpiece.
I found most of the movie to be vile, repulsive and hideous; the "naked coed shower scenes" were the movie's ONLY redeeming value.
The vast number of potential exoplanets could never be detected by Kepler. Kepler worked by detecting occultations, and the chances of a planet at 1AU distance actually occulting a G0 star 10+ LY away would be ... miniscule. Think about how few visible stars happen to be ON the ecliptic as viewed from Earth; Those would be the ONLY aliens with a Kepler-analog telescope which might discover US.
The fact that the Kepler telescope discovered as many exoplanets as it did, given the geometric odds against it, means that there must be planets orbiting a majority - perhaps a VAST majority - of stars.
The whole idea of "time zones" was so that the mid-19th century populace, who was accustomed to setting their clocks (such as they were) to 12Noon at Sun transit (which is the definition of "noon" anyway) could all be persuaded to agree on whatever time the railway station master said it was - and all the railway station masters had to agree on what time it was to keep from banging trains together. So "time zones" are entirely artificial contrivances.
The best description I ever saw was a cartoon back in the early 70's; Richard Nixon in a rocking chair, explaining that he was going to make this blanket longer by cutting a foot of the blanket from one end and sewing on to the other - just like daylight savings time did, you see.
The British had (used to have?) "Summer time", which was like DST. The Bermudians didn't bother to change the clocks; they had "summer hours" for most businesses. from like 7AM to 3PM. It accomplished the same thing.
I see three practical options.
1. Do nothing. It ain't broke, so don't try "fixing" it. We're mostly accustomed to the quirks of DST, so who cares?
2. Set a single "American" time zone, and set all the clocks to it. Businesses and schools can set their opening/start times and closing/end times to whatever they want. Two time zones would be foolish.
3. Switch everything over to GMT. We're a global economy; we ought to have a global clock. Besides, what relevance does sunrise or sunset have when you're on the Moon, or in a space habitat? After all; Arthur C. Clarke wrote "If man survives ... then for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"
Say what you want about Bush; the enormous increases in surveillance has come mostly on Obama's watch - and be honest, now, most of you KNOW that. But you voted for him, so what can you do?
EVERY Obama promise was false, most especially this one: “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009
Obama was the guy who corrupted the IRS, and deployed more armed guards around the Barry-cades than he ever did around the southern border. He's the President of Drones.
Don't bother modding me down; you all KNOW it's true. Even if you HATE admitting that you were had by styrofoam phony "Greek" columns and a smooth teleprompter delivery.
Please define "reputable" in a way that doesn't automatically mean "biased to agree with me".
There ARE NO 'heavily biased right-wing sites". Fox is moderate-right; most of the other "news" sites are on the left side of the political spectrum. Your perspective on the news reveals more about your own biases than anything else.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/08/pelosi-loves-gerrymandering/
Actually, you should easily be able to tell that I _AM_ and American, and where I live, and a lot about me. If you only knew how to look. (Somebody else started the thread. But you knew that, too, right?)
I'm not a Republican; I'd admit that; the GOP is mostly a bunch of morons who are only SLIGHTLY less stupid than the Democrat morons. But this nation is heading for a civil war, if SOMEBODY doesn't start dialing back the class-warfare rhetoric and stop spiking the spending. The Federal income this year is an ALL TIME RECORD HIGH - the problem is that the spending is EVEN HIGHER!!!!!
The debt ceiling has been raised a dozen times since Obama was elected, and our debt is now a third greater. Obama has never once signed a budget. Federal spending REQUIRES a budget. All we've had since then are "continuing resolutions", because they keep pushing it UP and UP and UP....
At some point, this has to stop. If not now, when?
Baloney. Gerrymandering is more often the province of Democrats; here in California, Speaker of the House John Burton once proclaimed his redistricting proposal as his own contribution to abstract art. So we had a constitutional amendment to give redistricting to a special committee - except that SOMEHOW, the Democrats running the legislature managed to pack the committee with .... OTHER DEMOCRATS!!!
Texas is the only notable example of GOP gerrymandering, and the Dems have given them no end of grief for it. That's THEIR tactic, dontchaknow.