But in this case, the use of chemical and/or biological weapons is a no no, and outlawed by the international community for a reason. It's time to destroy any such weapons since Syria's gov does not seem to have any restrain in the use of such weapons.

Personally I do not believe Assad used chemical weapons, and this looks like a charade pulled off to start a war.

• First, Assad has no reason to cause an international outcry by using chemical weapons—he's winning, the last thing he needs is giving an excuse to the US to enter the conflict.
• Second, the US and Western countries were expecting the rebels to win. Currently, they are losing, and the US/NATO seem to want Syria really badly: at this point they really needed a casus belli, and guess what here it is. Coincidence?
• Third, a new war is great to distract the media from whatever Snowden has to reveal.
• Fourth, seriously: war over war crimes? Since when anybody started a war on principles? Cynical as I may be, I won't buy the line that suddenly all our leaders take civilian casualties so seriously.

The rebels have degenerated as they were infiltrated from so many radical groups with different agendas. At this point, if they win they will be just as bad as Assad, only less predictable. Who is the US intending to install in Syria? How are they going to control the nation? Has anyone learnt anything at all from Iraq?

Not a bad idea. I never understood why so many music players don't also come with radio tuners.

In several countries, especially in Europe, this would make you subject to a TV licence, which can be quite hefty. In Norway that is $400–500 a year, other countries vary. In South Korea, instead, it is only $30, so I guess people do not care as much. Sometimes TV licences are on a per-user or per-household basis instead of per-device, so maybe Koreans already pay for this at home.

Also, there are additional charges when playing music or video in public. I had a Nokia 5230 in Germany that actually had a radio receiver, but it would work only with the earphones plugged in. In Italy, the SIAE (the local branch of the MAFIAA) routinely raids weddings to levy fines to anyone playing recorded music (most people hire live musicians instead nowadays, given how expensive the licence is).

Norway here. There are minor antisemitic far-right groupings (Vigrid, Norgespatriotene), though modern far-right ideology is much more anti-immigrant that anti-Jewish. Muslims in their observant clothing in Oslo are far more common than in NY (yes, I have been there), some middle-easterners I know joked that parts of Oslo look like Lahore (and thank the flying spaghetti monster for that, at least there is some decent food around!). Norway has a murder rate 8 times lower than the US, and in one place where you need to defend yourself (Svalbard, from polar bears) you are handed a shotgun after getting off the plane.

I also lived in Germany, and while neo-Nazis are ostensibly banned they do have their stores (Thor Steinar chain) and their not-so-well-disguised party (NPD), plus some others. Also there, muslims wear what they want, and the murder rate is 6 times lower than the US.

Burning coal produces a lot more of radioactive dust

I am quite tired of this, but... Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.

With all due respect, you are applying 20th-century reasoning to 21st-century problems. Base load is a concept gradually on the way out, because as wind and solar are introduced to the energy mix, flexibility needs to be shifted to the consumer side, since as you say yourself wind and solar are intermittent. Flexibility on the consumer side is implemented as hydroelectric dams pumping water up to store the energy, water boilers storing heat when there is available electricity, or in the future hydrogen stations revving up and producing and storing more hydrogen for vehicles. This was not easily done before the age of IT and smart grids, now it's being introduced.

For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.

Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.

Source: I'm a native of Lulea.

If you are, why do you spell it wrong? Either Luleå, or Luleaa if you are on a non-Nordic keyboard.

I refer to the meeting of the Great Risks Commission in L'Aquila. Granted, no scientist actually stood on a podium and proclaimed absolute certainty there would be no earthquake, but they knew very well that the meeting was just a media event to pass that message, message that was broadcast nationwide the same evening on all TV networks.

They knew very well what was going on, they manipulated the meeting minutes after the earthquake, and they should be held responsible for the deaths that resulted directly as a consequence of their actions.

jails seismologists

It seems you are referring to those seismologists who were sentenced for "not having predicted the L'Aquila earthquake". This is not correct: they were sentenced, and rightly so, for having misled the public that there was a certainty that no earthquake was going to happen. That's different from saying that there was no certainty it was going to happen. Their (very public) statements convinced many to return to their homes, and die there when the earthquake happened.

throws out acquittals

It seems you are referring to the fact that in Italy prosecutors can appeal an acquittal. This is a possibility in any European country I know of. If anything, the US is special in that new information cannot be used to reopen a case after the defendant has been pronounced innocent only one time.

can't get a single charge to stick on Berlusconi

Why actually there is one. He has dodged a lot but he was sentenced for tax evasion (same as Al Capone, guess what) and already lost an appeal. There is a very real chance he will be convicted in the last degree of appeal this year and will be automatically thrown out of the Parliament. While of course he should have gone to jail long ago, and flaws in the Italian system allowed him to get off scot-free on many an occasion, but prosecutors in the Italian system have not given him preferential treatment for being a powerful politicial.

On the other hand, I have not heard about a single US prosecutor indicting G. W. Bush for starting a war of aggression. That's way worse than tax evasion, corruption, rape or murder. That's the same crime of Nuremberg. Same goes for indicting Dick Cheney for aiding and abetting torture, international kidnapping ring (known as "extraordinary renditions"), or Obama for international terrorism (because that's what drone strikes are).

There aren't a lot of places where you can say the US judicial system has better moral standing, but compared to the Italian system, it does--by a long shot.

The US system still practices death penalty, and is based on Common Law (just a notch above tribal law). The Italian system, for all its shortcomings, is not going to get you killed. Also, in lawsuits, the losing part can be and often is sentenced to pay for the other part's legal costs, so frivolous lawsuits are much less common than in the US. Thank you very much, we will keep our Roman-Napoleonic code.

There is already today an excess of food production. People do not starve because there is not enough food, they starve because they are not given the food, usually because they are too poor to afford it, or because their supply lines have been cut by wars or embargoes. There is no need to increase world food production, only to get the food to those needing it.

Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.

That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.