Or New Jersey

Actually, it is in the interest of Americans to maintain the embargo. If it ends, the USA gets:

1) good cigars (to raise the cancer rates)
2) good rum (to raise the alcoholism rates)
3) cheaper sugar (to raise obesity rates)

First, the government already seized that land. Any claims to that land by returned exiles will probably be met with the same attitude as claims by Canadians to lands that their Loyalist ancestors lost after the US Revolution.

Second, the land is probably now reserved for use by higher level Party members; they won't be moving.

Third, Cuban prostitutes and taxi drivers make more money than their doctors or University professors.

Yea, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat !

Except that there is a limit to how much US citizens can buy per trip, which works out to about half a dozen of the best cigars. My question is how much can you bring back from Canada? I can imagine a business with otherwise unemployed Detroit youths crossing the bridge to Ontario, buying a handful of loose cigars, and recrossing as many times s day as are allowed.

Anyway, the Cuban exiled cigar families that moved to other countries in the Caribbean produce cigars just as good as Cubans made by Cuban bureaucrats, often better.

The reason for the embargo was the property of US citizens and companies seized by Cuba, not those once owned by the exile community (but usually seized before they left).

Sorry, but I feel that gutless cowards have the same free speech rights as the rest of us, even to advocating for others to snivel and bow and tug their forelocks.

After all, AC is desperately trying to save our families' lives from our advocating copyrights shorter than 150 years after the death of the last person associated with some work, or net neutrality (or against it, or whatever), or using mil-spec encryption on our daily emails.

To be fair, the AC is just expressing the same attitude as every non-political person in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Or the attitude of slaves in the Antebellum South. Or Hegel's redefinition of "freedom" as the recognition of necessity.

Not everyone is cut out to be Nat Turner, or John Brown. The AC clearly isn't.

I know about the Toba Hypothesis, but the last time that I read something related to the population crunch, the crunch and the eruption were supposedly not close enough together for cause and effect. If Toba is back under indictment, good, that makes things make sense; OTOH, things making too much sense is often a sign that you are missing something important, because reality tends towards messiness.

Yes, but Walter was a huge fanboi, as he would have admitted if he had ever seen the term. I always thought that ABC had the better scientific info, but watching Cronkite just plain gush was more fun. Adding in Schirra after his Apollo flight made CBS the better choice, all around.

Well, yes, if you convert it from one big rock to a big bunch of pebbles too small to survive passing through the atmosphere, it WILL help a lot. Still years without summers, but not a total extinction event. They never show the effects of all that particulate matter on the sunsets, never mind the next winter lasting two years or more (at least in New England), but then rom-cons never show the couple getting bored with each other after a few years, either.

BTW, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" was a non-fiction essay, not a story, and it deliberately left off the obvious solution, a simulated red sun environment (a real red sun worked for Kal-El and every other Kryptonian, why not a simulated one for Junior-El?).

And only mate with her once every seven years.

He is probably assuming omni-directional radio versus lasers. OTOH, at light year distances, even the best focused laser spreads like a flashlight beam does, so rubycodez is still wrong.

For the past century, we have been radiating radio waves like a small radio star, and are obvious above background for almost 100 light years. Unfortunately, in Habitable Planets For Man (which "solved" the Drake equation with values now known to be wildly optimistic) the estimate was that communication-capable civilizations were about 1000 light years apart, so even the entire world isn't good enough to show above some possible someone-else's background.

Neanderthals make up about 3% of non-African human DNA, and not all the same 3% (supposedly we can ID about 20% of their genome from various groups), so you cannot really call them a separate species. Subspecies, maybe, but not their own species.

Intelligence is a bit of an advantage - there is a reason that predators are always more intelligent than their preferred prey - but it only gets one so far. A super-intelligent panda or koala, bound to one food source in one biome, would be an extinction waiting to happen. To support a really intelligent species you need adaptability on the same order as the Norway black rat. Ocean-based might be different, given that cuttlefish seem to be really quite intelligent even though they only live a few years and so have little chance of actually using their smarts for anything.

Then who/what was capable of reducing the population of Europe by 1/3 (to take the monkish chronicles) to 50% (based on the number of abandoned English boroughs) to 2/3 (last estimate that I read, based on abandoned boroughs not enough to maintain the pre-Death populations of the still-occupied ones)?

The only close competitor would be whatever almost extincted humanity about 80,000 years ago, reducing the African portion of the species to the equivalent of about 1000 unrelated individuals (I have no idea if it affected the Neanderthal, Denisovian, or the Indonesian "hobbit" groups, or any other non-African groups that we have not yet identified, by as much), and I would question whether hunter-gatherers ever class as "in large groups"

A piece of cold, wet, spaghetti. Gluten-free spaghetti, at that.