There are problems with the report (per Figures 4, apparently zero people between the ages of 5 and 25 died of air pollution), but there are also problems with your response:

#1. Pollution-related illnesses and deaths are rarely quick or pleasant. Heart disease. Lung cancer. Stroke. Respiratory infections. These are not pleasant ways to go.

#2. Relating to #1, "Person-years lost". If I stubbornly live to the ripe old age of 85, but the last third of that is spent choking on my own phlegm, being hooked up to machines on a weekly/monthly basis, and puttering about in my wheelchair whilst breathing with the assistance of an oxygen tank, apparently I haven't lost any person-years - in fact, by refusing to lay down and die, I've _improved_ my region's "person-years lost" statistic.

#3. So their headline "Air pollution killed 7 million people in 2012" is misleading whilst your conclusion "the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics" is not? Seriously?

# The climate hasn't "warmed" in at least 16 years.

Statement: as I understand things, it's not disputed that up until then it was rising? And that it's also not disputed that we're still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere (at an increasing rate, even)? I can think of something that stops rising in temperature even though it continues to accept energy - substances undergoing a phase change from solid to liquid.

Armchair hypothesis: we've reached the point where atmospheric temperature has reached a temporary equilibrium point as the excess heat is instead going into changing the phase of the polar and glacial ice fields and permafrost zones.

Query: I presume somebody's already thought of this, so are there any observations that would tend to confirm or disprove?

I'm well aware of the First Amendment, because the Establishment clause is exactly why there should not be tax exemptions for churches.

(1) the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

(2) by making in law the tax exemptions for establishments of religion, Congress has violated the First Amendment.

That's it. Period. Nobody needs a tax exempt company or a tax exempt multi-storey statue of a crucifix or a tax exempt state-of-the-art thousand-seat multimedia amphitheater just so they can pray. But as Congress and the Churches want to have their cake and eat it too, we get laws like those in the PDF you cited, full of weasel words and "oh but we really aren't respecting establishment of religion" regulations you could drive a televangelist's limo through - ironic when one of the few things that ever saw Jesus truly angered was the act of hypocrisy, and for the pertinent example I refer you to his chasing the money changers out of the temple.

I mean, look at the title of that PDF: "tax guide for Churches and Religious Organizations benefits and responsibilities under the federal tax law"

And _that's_ the stench that pervades government. Hypocrisy. Do as we say, not as we do. We don't torture, it's enhanced interrogation. We uphold our oath, but none of us read through the Patriot Act before we voted on it. We don't spy on our citizens, we just collect metadata that would've caught Paul Revere. We are the land of the Free, ignore our incarceration rate exceeding Russia and China combined. We outlawed slavery (except the government can do it!), pay no attention to our for-profit prisons. We uphold democracy and the will of the people, except when it suits our interests to topple it in other countries. And on and on and on.

It reeks.

# We don't call it "race-phobia" or "men-phobia" or "women-phobia", the labelling of disagreeing with an accusation of fear (homo-phobia) does not allow the conversation to begin on a level of mutual respect, where people merely have disagreements on personal behavior.

While undoubtedly some poor unfortunates suffer from it, I have yet to encounter anyone who has a genuinely pathological homo-phobia, in the sense of an actual anxiety disorder. I have, however, encountered homo-ignorants and homo-bigots. The ignorant I can understand, but it's very hard to respect a bigot.

# Race and gender are not behavioral, but physiological facts, and therefore subjective debates easily point out a subject bias against an unchangeable reality. But it seems _any_ disagreement with homosexuality is instantly labeled as "hate", and I propose it's partly because of the fear label associated with disagreement.

Sexuality is a physiological fact too, as any person who has experienced puberty can attest. Whether you are primarily heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, if you see an attractive person who matches your preferred phenotype(s), your body reacts physiologically (it can also react to partial matches and false positives, which can be really confusing for those raised with an "either-or" mindset).

And while you can attempt to apply behavioural modification to a person's physiological responses via various feedback techniques (some ethical, some not), that works for any sexuality - and about as (in)effectively. Thus, any claim of "homosexuals can choose not to be homosexual" is just as (in)valid as "heterosexuals can choose not to be heterosexual".

# No one expects a racist Nazi to love black people, but we absolutely expect them not to attack them. And we even enforce free speech laws that allow these people to openly run organizations that support racial superiority.

True. From an idealistic viewpoint, we shouldn't force people to change just because they have different beliefs. From a cynical viewpoint, letting them go about their business peacefully means more opportunity for information on their ideologies, intentions and whereabouts. And from both viewpoints, it gives those people more exposure to facts that contradict their beliefs.

# But with homosexuality it's the reverse, there is a movement to force a belief change and acceptance of another persons beliefs. Without honest objective discourse, emotionally biased labels and arguments will suppress disent that even Nazi's don't suffer under.

Is that the same "honest objective discourse" that paints homosexuality as a psychological disorder? And if we're wanting to be honest and objective, we also don't want to ignore the preponderance of other movements in other directions or pretend they're not there. How many countries make all heterosexual activities a crime punishable by imprisonment or death, again?

# This social group (slashdot) espouses scientific disagreement as a basis for learning. I propose we start hearing both sides of the arugment about sexuality objectively, apply the doctrine of tolerance equally and remove the subjective and biased label of "homophobia" to those they merely disent.

Agreed, and therefore I propose a new term for the condition of an irrational but non-pathological antagonism towards homosexuality: "homobigotry".

No, my example is "Australia uses a preferential voting system, which is less susceptible to creating two-party cartels than America's first post voting system."

Seriously, how on earth did you manage to get "Australia uses pencils" as the crux of my argument?

Perhaps _you_ should be telling _me_ a system or specific part of a system that you think would be better than what America has now? After all, you did say it had the best system "yet" implemented. That implies at least some modicum of room for improvement.

The things you point out are *human behavior* problems, not inherent to any system.

They are however inherent to systems that involve humans in any feedback loop - such as, say, any system that allows humans to govern humans (which is every single form of government on Earth ever tried). That's why, for example, Communism as a system of government is fundamentally flawed, because it models humans as a homogenous hive rather than as multiple mixed heterogeneous tribes. We are not bees.

The thing that makes a system "better" in this context is its ability to **be corrected** [....] So start over...tell me a better **system** and point out specific parts of the system and why they are better than the US system of checks and balances.

The first electoral example I gave: "the US uses first past the post rather than preferential voting, despite the latter being mathematically proven to be less flawed."

The US electoral system has a mathematically (and historically) proven tendency towards two overwhelmingly large parties and the effective gagging of smaller parties (which may then radicalise). Once reaching this point, the main tendencies include the two parties colluding (producing corruption and statism) and/or polarising (producing civil unrest and radicalisation). I acknowledge that other voting systems also have these problems (see Arrow's Impossibility Theorem), however not to the same extent. And preferential voting isn't particularly complicated to run; for example Australia manages it with a purely manual system (paper and pencil, no voting machines) and the results are tallied nation-wide within a week (usually the polls are held on a Saturday with the outcome known by Wednesday), with voter fraud practically non-existent.

WTF? Of course not. Both are illegal and wrong, but still, just how did you manage to conflate the issue of warrantless surveillance with the issue of laws applied ex post facto or the issue of tainted evidence?

The GP made the mistake of arguing against illegal surveillance because it could catch illegal activity. I pointed out that was a bad argument, and that the argument should be against illegal surveillance because it is _illegal_.

Australia? Canada? Denmark? New Zealand? Norway? Switzerland? Etcetera. And before you leap up, I do know there is no "perfect" government, not by a long shot, but that is _not_ an excuse to pretend "ours is better", let alone your audacity of "ours is best". Don't pull that crap on me, I'm not that gullible. If a country isn't objectively looking at other countries to adapt what their governments are doing better to improve the quality of life for their citizens, that country is in serious trouble.

Electoral: the US uses first past the post rather than preferential voting, despite the latter being mathematically proven to be less flawed. The US also insists on using easily-hacked electromechanical and proxy voting methods despite the proven scalability and reliability of manual systems used by other countries.

Legislative: it appears to be legal (or any law against it is toothless) for US Congress members to vote on a bill without reading it first. For example, it is suspected that zero members of Congress actually read the final text of the Patriot Act before voting on it.

Medical: the US healthcare system is a mess, with a much poorer safety net than is provided in many other Western and Nordic countries.

Military: the US has a long history of testing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons on its own people without their consent, of overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments, of providing military assistance to despotic countries despite knowing that those countries were actively engaged in using chemical weapons against civilian and military targets, and has even recently relied on policies of extraterritorial kidnapping, torture of prisoners, rules of engagement allowing the use of lethal force against unconfirmed targets (e.g. drone strikes on civilians), mass warrantless surveillance, and the public denial of these activities, even to the extent of lying to Congress while under oath.

Prison: the US reserved the power of slavery to the government, then commercialised its prisons for profit. Other countries simply outlawed slavery, period.

I could go on, but I'm getting too angry at the sheer hypocrisy of the behaviour I'm summarising for you.

No. If it was illegal when you did it, it doesn't become any less illegal just because nobody found the evidence that caught you until X hours/months/years later. The statute of limitations - if applicable - doesn't make what you did legal, it makes prosecuting you for it illegal. Profound difference.

The actual problem is that all of this surveillance is one-way. The watchers refuse to be watched in turn, and when we take matters into our own hands and catch them elbow-deep in the cookie jar, we are the ones persecuted. That is not acceptable.

If a customer brought me a production system that badly infected, it would be unethical of me not to begin by recommending a bare metal format and clean reinstall from original sources - but good luck convincing the entire state and federal circus to collectively resign in the best interests of the country. ;p

And no, your government is not the best system yet implemented. There are well-documented flaws in its electoral and legislative methods, its medical, military and prison policies, its telecommunications and utilities frameworks, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Your leaders' collective hubris and greed, plus a divisive educational system that (I'd use "subtly" here, but I'm not sure that's the right word) conditions unthinking patriotism, makes it hard for you to change them.

P.S. Not that my own country doesn't have faults and flaws too, but yours is the nuclear-armed no-knock super-power. :)

Ah, but I don't think I have the right to such a movie. I just recognise the fact that the particular legislative framework erected to protect their profitability is flawed at a fundamental level, and it continues to empower the dysfunctional sociopolitical environment that originally built that framework, feeding on itself - which is why copyright terms have increased from seven years to more than seventy years. Hellooooo, Mickey.

TLDR? Bad laws empower bad people; that some good was done along the way is no excuse.

And what "patent law have to do with movies" is that they share the same fundamental flaw and a similar origin. We study history that we may avoid repeating it, right?

Y'know, the only reason a lot of those "turned out it wasn't a problem" disaster scenarios didn't happen was because of scientific advances, sometimes serendipitous ones.

Relying on our scientists to keep pulling technological miracles out of their asses at a time when we continue to cut their relative funding and bury them in bureaucracy? Might not be a good idea.

Or, the government could pay citizens a flat stipend out of the national budget, and let the citizenry individually/collectively decide how much the artists/studios should get. Based on some of the "art" my government has subsidised in the past, the citizenry would do a far better job of it.

Personally, I do wait the months until a movie becomes a cheap rental at the local DVD store. Doesn't change the fact that copyright (and patent) law is a protection racket.

"Hi, we're the government, Bob has a patent on that widget, so you have to pay him whatever he demands or stop selling them. Oh, you came up with the design independently? Doesn't matter, he filed a patent and paid us our fee. Now step away from your widget-maker or it'll go badly for you."

Protection racket.

Hmm, 5VDC data lines and 240VAC power lines all using minijack style connectors, what could possibly go wrong? :p