There are no Mars Climate Model deniers, because we haven't found oil/gas there.

Yet.

The solution to that was proposed years ago.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/481/

This is a key point. No military in the world is going to want a weapon system that they have zero control over. Limited control, maybe - but we've had that for decades in the form of long range guided cruise/ballistic missiles, and even then there's a human "in the loop" (in the decision to launch/fire). Some of those may also have a self-destruct/abort, but the early ones certainly didn't.

Furthermore, trying to draw an artificial line between a present-day cruise missile that gets launched from a ship, flies to its target and blows up, and something like the X-47 drone that launches from a carrier, flies to its target, drops a bomb that blows up, then flies back to the carrier... I'm not really seeing the difference, nor the a reason why countries are going to want to ban one and not the other, or at least why every advanced country would want to ban one, and not the other.

You know what, maybe there's even something bad in there - but by now, I'm so fatigued by hearing the incessant parade of outrage and supposed scandal that it's like the boy who cried wolf. I'm just not listening anymore.

It's not just with the Clintons, either. Obama has been subjected to the same stream of crap, trying to put together some sort of scandal or conspiracy, or even flat out making things up ("Obama is coming for your guns!") when they've got nothing better to go on. During the 2008 primaries, I even thought at one point "Better Obama win than Clinton, because he doesn't have that baggage, and it's better if we don't have to relive that whole deluge of minor non-scandals and animosity." It was such a ridiculously naive thought, because it had nothing to do with the Clintons personally, and everything to do with there being a Democrat in the White House.

I generally support Nuclear power, but in reference to old plants shutting down? Good. Old reactor designs need to be retired, because quite frankly they're not safe enough compared to what's available now.

No, the problem isn't that older plants which have seen significant wear and tear face too many regulatory hurdles to continue operating - it's that NEW plants, using more advanced, safer technology, are facing too many legal hurdles in most cases to get built. We're talking about Passively Safe fourth-gen reactors, the sort that would be able to survive even something like Fukushima without a meltdown. We can't get these old plants replaced with new ones, so the old ones keep running with increasingly creaky equipment? That strikes me as downright crazy.

Cthulhu's alarm clock going off, maybe?

In other news, Microsoft announced that they needed the government to increase the number of H-1B visa workers allowed into the country, because the American educational system just wasn't producing enough skilled workers to meet the needs of high tech companies.

This is not meant to defend, but rather to explain. Pretty much two things have happened:

The first is that everything is standard now, because everyone's running the same stuff. To spy on the Nazis, the Polish and British had to break the "Enigma" devices that the Germans were using. Nobody in Britain was using these, let alone anywhere but Germany and its allies. Same for Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, etc. The US breaking the Japanese codes to gain advance knowledge of the attack on Midway couldn't have had any implication against anyone in the USA, because even if we were going to rely on something for privacy, we wouldn't be using classified Japanese military encryption. Today however, not only is encryption in widespread use, but we're all pretty much using the same kinds of encryption and other systems to handle and safeguard our data. Want to break into a computer used by the North Korean/Chinese/Syrian/Iranian/American/British/etc military? They're all going to be running some version of Windows, MacOS, or *NIX, just like pretty much everyone else in the world. The same goes with communications channels. While there are some exceptions, like in China or Russia, most people in the world use the same services and sites (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc) that people in the USA and the rest of the West do.

Now, all of that would probably be reasonably solvable with some strong oversight and precautions to make sure that any domestic stuff that got pulled in by accident was swiftly and ruthlessly purged, if it weren't for the second factor, which is...

Terrorism and Drugs, aka "The War on." These two combined have had an incredibly corrosive effect on civil liberties. The War on Drugs pretty much has been the single biggest factor in setting law enforcement agencies against the general public, because when large swathes of your populace don't obey (because the laws are stupidly draconian and unrealistic among other things), well, we basically ended up with an attitude that the average person is probably a (drug) criminal. It's worse on the part of some (DEA, looking at you here) than others, and that's before all the incentives like civil asset forfeiture come into play.

What the War on Terrorism did was scare enough people that they tore down what walls there were between law enforcement and intelligence. Remember that bit after 9/11 about how the CIA and FBI didn't compare notes enough? That applies to the DEA, too. It also made a whole new swath of Americans into potential suspects, as well as increasing support among the general public for doing "whatever it takes." Remember, the various agencies (DEA/FBI) were trying to push similar stuff in the past, they just never got as far with it until after 9/11.

Back when you primarily got internet access via the phone lines, say, in the late 90s to early 2000s, how was the market for internet service? Maybe this is just me, but I remember a ton of different providers, all trying to offer better service/better prices/etc. Why was that? Well, by that point, phone service was mandated to be unbundled by the FCC, meaning that you could get phone service from anyone, and in turn, could use that to get internet service from a large number of people.

Now, what was the regulatory regime that was under? I think it was called... Title II?

The ideal is to have the infrastructure be publicly owned (or so heavily regulated that it might as well be), and then let anyone offer services over that infrastructure. It works great with roads, and so many other things. Don't let a monopoly in infrastructure distort competition in other markets.

The most expansion of services and speed in the internet was during the time it was being offered primarily over the phone lines, which were a Title II regulated infrastructure over which (by that point) anyone could offer service. Costs went down, service went up, and everyone was competing for customers. It only hit a wall when those telephone lines were no longer able to handle the advancing speeds that most customers wanted.

I certainly understand the potential problems and inefficiencies inherent in tax-funded services. However, at a micro-level, these things can work, simply because they're close enough to the people using and paying for them to be very responsive, even moreso than an independently owned company. This isn't true in a city of 400,000; but it's certainly true in a small town of say, 100 people. If I live in such a place, and we vote for it - heck, maybe even say we need a 2/3rds majority - and we are generally fine with the taxes we pay and the services we receive, I don't see the problem. If service gets bad, or the people hired to run it need replacing, it's a lot easier to get a group of people in a small town to fix that.

Again, this does not hold true for any large group or area, but when we're talking about small, rural towns that probably aren't getting much corporate interest to begin with, this can be a very reasonable solution for them.

And according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12333, that part of it dates back to Reagan.

Really, I don't think you're going to find any president in recent history whose hands are clean on any of this. They're all responsible for adding another layer or two. The only time I can think of anything getting rolled back was the Church Committee and such in response to Watergate, but even that didn't go nearly far enough, I suspect.

But where does Natalie Portmann fit in?

What should also be mentioned is the change in demographics. There were about 40,000 native Hawaiians at the time (1890ish).

Was it crappy that white people took over the islands? Yes. It was also completely normal for the time period. By 1900 there were more Japanese alone on the islands than natives. It's certainly not unfeasible to think that if the USA hadn't, that either Japan or some European power would have established at least a protectorate.

Look, history is a long story of people doing crappy things to other people. That doesn't mean we should wash our hands of it completely, or forget about it all, but there need to be reasonable goals. Those goals should be trying to get everyone to a reasonable footing today - things like making sure children can get an education, people can get opportunities for jobs, to build wealth, etc. We shouldn't just say "oh, well, you have the poor historical luck to be poor and live in a poor area now, so your schools will suck, etc, tough luck" for instance. If anything, that's at the heart of today's problems - the systematic past destruction of and transfer of wealth.

But at the same time, we're not going to be able to just turn back the clock. It would be insane to just think we should do something like give Manhattan back to the Lenape tribe (nevermind the rest of New Jersey, Delaware, etc), because you'd be evicting over a million people on behalf of 10,000 or so.

Also, the "Native" population only comprises about 5.9% as of the 2010 Census. There are more Filipino (14.6%) and Japanese (13.6%) alone. Various "white/caucasian" ethnic groups are about 25%. Even if you add in "Other Pacific Islander" to the Native column, it's still only 10% of the population.

Also crappy as that may be and have been, it should probably also be mentioned that the alternative was not "Hawaii lives happy and free and everything is perfect." It would have been being turned into a Protectorate or Possession of some other power - probably Japan. In the early 1920s the population of Hawaii was over 40% Japanese, and only 25% "Native."

Furthermore, Hawaii, unlike every single other exterior territory (excepting Alaska, which is very different from the rest) the USA has acquired, is now a state with full voting rights. Contrast this to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Marianas, American Samoa, etc... And let's not even get started on how much worse the native tribes in the various interior regions of the USA were treated.

While I do have some sympathy for the fact that the USA steamrollered the fuck out of lots of indigenous native populations, nevermind those it displaced to form in the first place, there do need to be limits.