I assume you mean the 2013 cuts -- those have been matched, basically dollar for dollar, by increasing the "temporary" budget for Afghanistan. US military spending remains outrageous, at about the level of the rest of the world put together.

Fundamentalism is a part of it, yes, but would never amount to anything like what we've seen were it not for widespread anti-US sentiments stemming from more pragmatic reasons, such as US foreign policy for the last, oh, seven decades. 911 was a scandalous crime, no doubt about it, but to state that it is completely unrelated to your own actions is patently false.

Coming from someone who apparently still believes the Iraq war had anything to do with 911 other than rhetoric, and somehow still manages to delude himself that anti-American sentiment somehow thrives in complete isolation of its international posturing -- yeah, baffling is what that is.

I think the point is that when the police are shooting people in great numbers -- I don't think the US has a peer in that dept -- then it might not be a great idea to give them even more destructive weaponry. Sure it would be "contingency" equipment when anyone asks, but sooner or later it'll be standard issue.

Remember those billions (!) of rounds of ammo that DHS bought?

In combination with the, shall we say, questionable record of accountability of police actions, tooling up to this extent seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Do you honestly think that a business is going to sink billions of dollars in capital outlays to make a gigantic automated factory which produces crap that no one can buy?

How many billions of dollars were sunk into building houses nobody could afford the mortgages on?

What people don't seem to realize is that the robots that replace workers will be cheap

Why?

To replace workers, they don't have to be cheap, they simply have to be cheapER than the worker they replaced. Just because I make $x/yr doesn't mean I can afford a robot that costs ($x-$50).

But do you real want bob to be working 0 hours and have jack working 60-80 all the time?

If he's Bob, of course!
If he's Jack, of course not!

If he's hiring Jack, of course he wants to hire Jack to work 80 hours a week in an overtime exempt position so they don't have to pay two people to do the work one person can do.

Are you seriously surprised that Justice is not blind? She hasn't been for quite some time, as best I can tell, not to mention that someone rigged her scales.

"Two-tier justice", I think that's what they call it. The common practice of threatening outrageous sentences to pressure people into a plea bargain, which is to say be found guilty without a day in court -- but of course they only even attempt that when they estimate the cost of mounting a defense would prove problematic.

Actually it seems to me that now we ought to distinguish three- or even four-tier justice, accounting for cases such as this one where political considerations come into play and recently there have even been cases of corporations being found guilty of very serious offenses but deemed " to big to jail".

Nope, we can't. But point was that circumstances might winnow the better or worse minds from the average, and if that's the basis of the population you've got available to test, you'll get skewed results.

Likely the spectrum of intelligence isn't so different, but the bumps in the curve are in different places.

There's also skew that happens other ways because, well, history. Frex, I'd hazard that Africans who got enslaved and shipped off to America were, as a group, not the brightest bulbs in their particular regional box -- cuz the brighter bulbs were doing the enslaving and selling of their unfortunate neighbors.

"This is how the PC establishment thinks. If there is a conceivable way to twist and distort what is said so that it can be labeled racist, they will do it."

Exactly. Which is why we make so little progress in treating genetic disease that happens to afflict mental processes. "Oh no, you couldn't have inherited that; someone must have done something to make you that way."

We select for personality traits, intelligence, etc. in animals... that's all genetics. Is it so hard to consider that different environments would have selected for different mental traits in humans, too? And that a physical or mental advantage in that environment might be a disadvantage elsewhere?

Frank Spinath (best known as the lead singer in Edge of Dawn, but a professor of psychology in his day job) published a paper a few years ago on the heritability of personality traits in humans. He found the heritability was around .3, which is actually very high for a trait that is subject to environmental influence.

(And all the breeders of performance animals are saying, "We told you so...")

We're not throwing you in jail without a trial, we're merely restricting your "privilege" to travel more than 6 feet in any direction.

So you don't know if they're read it, yet you categorically state that someone is wrong in assuming they haven't read it since it's not stated that they have?

I didn't read your post, I just randomly clicked around on the screen and mashed on my keyboard with my fists and yet not only did I manage to quote your post, I formed a perfectly valid reductio ad absurdam by demonstrating how absurd it is to state that I haven't read your post while quoting it and replying to it's content.

Same principle applied to the Newcastle outbreak on chicken farms (mostly small producers) a few years ago. Inspectors dashed madly from farm to farm checking for infected chickens, spreading the virus as they went. Smart farmers locked the gate (the inspection was voluntary) and saved their chickens. (Smarter ones vaccinated, but I don't know how good the vaccine is. Tho it's useful for treating distemper in dogs.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Since it's already happened in one form, it's not only not far-fetched, it's more likely than not, and we can't say what its effects would be (perhaps benign, perhaps even more lethal). So, yeah, by all means keep the damn thing contained as best we can.

This game video done by a friend is interesting from a modern-vectors standpoint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I find it more likely that some microorganism will find a way to extract energy from the particles, if it's not already doing so. Which may produce the GP's possible state of equilibrium.

Nor do they tell us the ratio to non-plastic junk floating in that same water, especially naturally occuring junk. Not every particle floating in the oceans is of human origin; I'd hazard most are the result of atmospheric dust.