In San Francisco, and other so called 'liberal' bastions, laws are not created to give people the freedoms to live the life that they choose, they are created to radically socially engineer a population according to specific mores that the 'elites' prefer. So if the elites are tree-hugging PETA members, then they want to fashion society in that image, regardless of the hypocracy and stupidity it causes. One could say that all social engineering is applying a first order linear model to a chaotic system and then crying about how the results don't work.

How this is different than theocracy, I don't know.

This is because most, if not all, journalists on the science beat have no scientific training at all. They are the same j-school idiots as everyone else, trained to hype up the bad parts of a story to sell more newspapers.

So, apparently according to the WHO, DDT is as dangerous as coffee. I'ma go drink up a nice mosquito-free latte now.

What you should be offended by is that the WHO apparently doesn't classify things well at all.

People only freak out when they find out what 'food additives' are because they are informed about them in a way designed to make them freak out. It's scare tactics - exactly what has been used to control uninformed populations for centuries. It doesn't matter if it's true or false. Once the scare enters the public consciousness, it's impossible to dislodge.

"Do YOU know what THEY put in YOUR food?"
"Do YOU know how ANIMALS are SLAUGHTERED?"
"Do YOU know that CELL PHONES cause CANCER?"

That's not an invitation to learn more, that's an invitation to your amygdala to go batshit insane.

Depends on the definition of 'innocent'.

To the Jihadi, tax-paying westerners are not innocent, because they help to fund wars against those who wish to wage war against them.

To the Jihadi, non-tax-paying westerners are not innocent because their lifestyle is not rightly guided by Sharia, thus their blood is legally spilled.

A fanatic will always find rationalizations to kill people who don't agree with them... unless the fanatic is killed first, or the meme that produces said fanatic(s) is destroyed.

I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.

The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.

European socialism does lead to drastic social stratification, however. Maybe not monetarily, but in terms of class.

There is the mediocre middle class, where everyone's the same. These people have no voice whatsoever. If they speak up, they are racist or fascist nationalists.

There's the slightly more mediocre poor class living on the labor of the middle class's taxes and providing nothing. These folks, typically immigrants from the third world can have a violence veto, and are courted by ..
The elites, who control the language and the government bureaucracy, and force the middle class to suffer immobility and slow erasure of their national culture to appease ghettoized immigrant groups who form massive voting blocs that help keep the elites in power.

Safety and security forces, such as police and fire are functions of most conceptions of a 'limited government' state, as are roads and basic infrastructure. The state exists to take care of highly unprofitable yet necessary services. Libertarianism is not equal to Anarchy as some here seem to posit.

What happened here is an unfortunate circumstance that the local government subcontracted out fire protection to another district because it refused to pay for it itself. In a purely libertarian environment, the fire fighters would have charged him a huge bill for the fire service on call, not just stood there like inhuman robots and watched as humans suffered.

This joke never stops being funny.

All of this is quite obvious if you actually look into what happened, unless of course you're a Chavez lackey.

Or a complete idiot. Unfortunately there's way too many people who put their blinkers on and can't understand how legal systems work. This is especially true amongst the faux-liberals who think that every legal system is exactly like the US ("They can't exile a -president-!!@# That's illegal!!!!#!@111") or who will go to bat to defend an elected leader's power grab to dictatorhood while being virulently anti-Bush ("Bushitler's going to take over the gubment pemanently!!11!! Darth Cheney!!@111!!! Yay Chavez and Ahmadinejad!!)

There was nothing 'coup-like' about the Honduran reaction to Zelaya's power-grab. The only people who still buy into that meme are retards (or the mainstream media, or Obama's government).

"Black holes are thought to form when a star greater than 4 times the mass of the Sun explodes in a supernova and then collapses. "

If a star is greater than _8_ solar masses you get a supernova.

Final Fantasy isn't manga. It's a video game. Manga is a Japanese term for comic books.

I don't really feel like I should have to geek out on this, but seriously, is it too much to ask that people actually know what they are talking about before they say they "don't like it"?