And, of course, the Democrats won Congress in 2000, so the deficits Bush started up and continued through economic good times are...um, excuse me, the Democrats won congress in 2006, so you need to tell us why Clinton and a Republican Congress got the budget darn near balanced, while Bush and a Republican Congress blew the deficit up so much.

Colin Powell wrote an autobiographical book called "It Worked for Me", basically a long and fascinating ramble on important events in his life. Read it. Pay attention to what Powell says about his UN speech about such weapons. Ideally, get the audiobook, which Powell read, so you can get the tone of voice.

Then come back and tell us about what led up to the invasion. It's going to be different.

Yup. This is why I consider the FICA contributions to be a particularly regressive tax, and not something like pension contributions. I also consider the deceptively named employer's portion to be a tax, although at least I don't pay income tax on it. It's money coming from the payroll allocation of my employer that the Feds get whether I like it or not. If you've ever been self-employed, you see the full scale of these taxes on your income, and, believe me, it's a shock if you haven't been through it before.

Suppose I have $100K. Presumably, I've already paid all necessary taxes on the $100K. Now, I buy stocks with it, and a few years later they're worth $150K, and I sell them. I pay capital gains taxes on the $50K, not the $100K, and I pay no actual income taxes on it. That's the $50K I haven't paid taxes on yet, so unless you have some sort of obscure point you're bad at getting across, you're wrong.

Do remember that income taxes are not the only taxes that affect people. They're just the most progressive, which means that people of a certain political persuasion tend to talk about them without talking about other taxes.

Look, my family is well off, and we're open to paying more taxes. However, I keep reading about rich people paying less of their income in taxes than we do, proportionately, and I am not happy about that. (Remember the year Warren Buffett described his taxes as proportionally less than his secretary's? They were ludicrously lower than ours.) It seems that, of all the major ways to make money, actually working for it is the most taxed, which I find ridiculous.

Look, at that age, lots of things were sexually suggestive to me, including but not limited to head shorts of attractive women. The ears are not what the problem is between.

Uranus is named after a Greek god (Ouranos), slightly Romanized in spelling.

You have to understand the history. C was designed as a machine-independent system implementation language, which meant that it had to have as good performance as possible for commonly used things like integers, and it ran on a much wider range of processors than you'd expect to run into nowadays. The processors could have ones' complement, twos' complement, or signed magnitude for negative integer values. They could be designed to halt execution and raise some sort of signal on integer overflow, or designed to ignore it. Machine-addressible units of memory could range from one bit to 60 bits. Given the variety in what processors would do, any specific behavior would kill performance for processors that didn't match the behavior, so they left it as "undefined".

There were other sorts of incompletely specified behaviors. "Implementation-defined" usually referred to fairly minor differences, such as how long an "int" was. Unspecified behavior usually referred to cases where there would be a few obvious choices, such as order of evaluation of function parameters. Whether or not it was a good idea, C generally labeled more complex potential incompatibilities as undefined. Personally, I'd like to see less "undefined behavior", substituting "implementation-defined" or "unspecified" as much as possible.

Or it turns out that only the top 5% of minorities get into a position to apply, and therefore all ten minorities are comparable to the top 5% white. Your assumption that the skill lies on the same bell curve is arbitrary and in general unsupported. To figure out what's likely to happen, you have to know why one group is underrepresented.

This is an experimental result. It means something, and it might even mean something interesting. It should be investigated further until we know what's going on.

If it is a reactionless drive, it violates some very fundamental and well-tested physics. That would be an extraordinary claim, and hence requires extraordinary evidence. I haven't seen extraordinary evidence, and am 99% sure it isn't a reactionless drive.

So, what could we do to make the Earth less habitable than, say, Mars? Driving the temperature to something like -50C won't do it. Blasting 90% of the atmosphere wouldn't. Unleashing large amounts of radiation wouldn't do it. I'm really having a hard time thinking of what would.

A relatively small number of people can make a lot of noise. If Apple has sold a million watches so far (which seems likely), and one person in a thousand has tattoos that interfere, that'd be a thousand people. On the net, a thousand people can seem like a multitude.

We already know about photon thrust. As a practical matter, it sucks as a space drive, since the amount of momentum we get from a given amount of energy is pitiful. This engine is claimed to produce a lot more thrust than a photon engine, which means it isn't just transferring momentum to photons.

Are you talking about virtual particle pairs? Where does the momentum go when they vanish? Bear in mind that they appear and vanish faster than we can directly notice them, so how is momentum transferred, and how is it conserved over, say, a millisecond?

Within the realm of laws of physics that people are really, really sure of, it's impossible. Don't be wilfully moronic. This means it's going to take a lot of convincing, and it almost certainly isn't a real effect, but it's going to be a real big thing if it is.

The law is clear, and that's not a matter of opinion. If you can't tell the difference between an office of bureaucrats and a bombardment rocket launcher, well, that's your problem

You do not put actual weapons around child care centers. You do put routine government functions there. Got that?