Sounds reliable to me, and I've read fairly extensively about the subject.

You need another book or five. The Spitfire was a very good fighter, but was developed in the usual manner. Fighters, as a general rule, didn't have turrets. The British actually did build a fighter that was a big leap into a radical idea, the Boulton Paul Defiant that had a turret. It sucked.

The Battle of Britain was not nearly as close-run a thing as some people think. At one time, Fighter Command was pretty close to pulling the fighter squadrons north, and just letting the Germans dominate the airspace of southern England, but the Germans changed their tactics (the Germans had no idea what to do, or how successful they were being, having limited information on what the British were doing). At that point, an invasion would have been opposed by the Royal Navy, who could have destroyed most of the invasion force by running destroyers through the German flotillas at high speed. (The Germans actually did do a test of their landing plans, under ideal conditions, and they didn't work anyway.) Now, if you want to wish the RAF and the RN away, we get to the problem that the Brits really did have large military forces on the island. They were mostly badly equipped (but getting better equipped all the time), so it would have taken a real military operation to conquer Britain. It would have also taken real logistics, the sort that wouldn't have worked since all British ports in the area were rigged for demolition. Every so often, the British military likes to wargame out the invasion, and it's incredible how much they have to change reality to give the Germans a chance.

(4) isn't enough. It's possible to have a repeatable experiment that doesn't mean what people hope it does.

The Casimir effect doesn't change any whole-system momentum. It obeys all conservation laws. You have two sheets of material, very close, and the Casimir effect pulls them together, the same way magnets can pull together (although with a completely different mechanic).

A reactionless drive would violate the Law of Conservation of Momentum*. This, in turn, would mean that the laws of physics change over space, which means we'd have pieces of space be inherently distinguishable, which is going to screw up relativity among other things (if this patch has certain properties, then the frame of the patch is a preferred reference frame).

In practice, this might be an edge case. In terms of theory, this is likely more disruptive than relativity was.

*At least in Newtonian physics. It gets more complicated when you bring in relativity, partly because there is no such thing as space by itself.

No effect for 18 years? Wrong. What was an anomalously hot year at the end of the 90s is pretty well normal now.

Also, you're not allowing for natural variation here. A certain amount of warming can be masked by natural variation. However, natural variation doesn't maintain trends decades long.

Also, by "no effect" you're referring to the slowdown in increase of atmospheric temperature, ignoring other possible heat sinks.

I'd suggest that you read something by real scientists, not media or politicians.

That's why you don't look to politicians or the media for scientific information. They're going to try to make a controversy, because that's what gets votes or sells commercials.

You look and see what the scientists are saying. They can be wrong, but agreeing with a whole lot of smart people who have spent a tremendous amount of time studying a subject is the way to bet.

If one side is busy vilifying scientists as a group, the odds are that they're wrong, since they're trying to taint all the useful evidence of what's going on.

Now this is amusing. AC claims that skeptics are right, presumably saying there's no global warming. AC proceeds to quote one paper, which says that climate models are generally correct, and emphasizes that the rapid warming of 1975-2000 is real global warming, although possibly overstated.

Supernova observations can't be reproduced. We take the records we've got and use them as well as possible, but we can't go back and use another instrument on last year's supernova. By your reasoning, then, supernovas are not suitable for scientific inquiry. And that super-powered cosmic ray observed in the 90s? Can't be reproduced, so I suppose there's no point in trying to figure out how it happened scientifically.

The US was working towards getting into a war with Germany. FDR considered Japan a distraction.

In fact, the US and Germany were at war starting September 1941, although the war was undeclared for a few months, and it was limited to naval combat. The US had been violating international law for Britain and against Germany for several months before then. Hitler knew a full-scale war with the US was coming, and wanted to get in the first declaration of war.

The warrant for Assange's arrest was properly sent through Interpol, and upheld by the English courts. I haven't noticed anybody calling for Assange to be brought over here except for some idiot politicians, and if the US wanted to get him I'd think it would be easier to do so from the UK. Standard legal procedure is that Sweden can't send him to some other country without UK permission, so he'd be in a position where it would take UK and Swedish agreement to be sent to the US, not just UK.

You do realize that you know almost nothing of the 15-year-old and his family, right? It seems to me equally likely that he has low self-esteem and serious boundaries, and the only way he can get approval is by bringing good grades home. Or the situation might be entirely different.

He's a 15-year-old who did something stupid. I can't tell whether he was malicious or simply panicked. BTW, I know of a case of arson, by an adult, that caused a whole lot more damage than this did, and he didn't spend long locked up. I doubt five years is the appropriate amount of time.

That's because the government isn't attached to any other churches, in general. There actually were charter schools around here using government funds to teach Islam around here, and that was cut off when it became known. My taxes aren't going to Islam or Buddhism or Shinto. They shouldn't be going to Christianity either.

However, we keep seeing people wanting to spend my tax money on Christian stuff. We keep seeing people wanting to have official government bodies have Christian prayers. A fair number of Christians want to junk that part of the First Amendment and have governments in the US identify as Christian.

The natives would own it if their government hadn't been forcibly overthrown by US business interests acting illegally (by US law as it existed at the time).

Florida in 2000 is a really bad example of anything. It was so close that there's a whole lot of things that would have changed the outcome. One county put out an illegal butterfly ballot (in a bipartisan decision), and that confused enough Gore supporters into accidentally voting for Buchanan to make Bush win.