The NRA does not object to smart gun technologies, and believes that people who wish to be allowed to buy them should be allowed to buy them.

The NRA objects to smart guns becoming mandatory, because the technology for smart guns is nowhere near mature.

The number one desired trait in a firearm, moreso than caliber or capacity or anything else, is reliability. The reason why Glocks are so popular isn't because of caliber, capacity, or aesthetics -- all of which other firearms do better. It's because a Glock is as reliable as gravity. If you chamber a round and pull the trigger, it goes boom. If you don't pull the trigger, it won't.

I have personally seen a Glock get thrown into a bucket of wet, goopy mud and left there for fifteen minutes just so the mud had the opportunity to permeate the whole of the firearm. At the end of the fifteen minutes the owner pulled the Glock out, shook it precisely three times to dislodge mud from the barrel, and fired one hundred seventy rounds through it in the space of about five minutes, just one magazine after another after another... just to prove the weapon was reliable.

Do you believe the current crop of smart gun technologies are equally reliable? The ones I've had the chance to play around with definitely aren't. They can't even agree on whether they need to fail safe or fail deadly.

Do we actually have evidence of that or are you just making assumptions? North Korea is known to have exchanged nuclear technology with Pakistan and Pakistan does have warheads small enough to be mounted to missiles.

This has already happened, sadly.

No, I didn't claim anything of the sort. I only asked how you didn't know that was the case, which is something else entirely. You need new reading glasses. Or remedial reading classes. Or something.

Indiana will simply legislate that all superconductors are performance-invariant.

Problem solved. See how easy that is?

You don't know if they've solved (the last part of) Kryptos. You just know the public hasn't.

The difference between what you think you know, and what you actually know, is often quite significant.

As for the "magic" straw man, not worthy of a response.

Yes. Dropping bombs on a sovereign nation is considered an Act of War under any definition of the phrase. Bonus points for not being bothered to get Congressional approval for the measure.

There are a multitude of different "real" unemployment rates that one can quote; I've never heard of one that includes people who willingly decline to participate in the workforce (i.e., students and homemakers) The traditional definition includes people who desire work but whom have abandoned all hope of finding it. In any case, if you actually believe the <8% number I have a bridge in the Sahara that you might be interested in...

Just so you know, I'm not one of "them." I had very high hopes for BHO, voted for him in 2008 (primary and general), and even campaigned for him against HRC in the primaries. It would require thousands of words to tell you all the reasons why I'm disappointed with him; rather than subject you to that I'll just say that my biggest takeaway from BHO was the loss of all optimism towards politics with resulting massive increase in my cynicism level.

I made no comments about tax policy. As a point in fact I do believe that we need to do something about wealth inequality but that has fuck all to do with the fact that the real unemployment rate is considerably higher than the <8% number being touted by BHO supporters.

And on top of that: Good citizen complies, water supplies get more scarce, mandatory rationing is implemented as it is Every. Single. Time., in the form of "Everybody must cut back on their previous use by x%", bad citizen just waters his lawn three times a week instead of every day, but good citizen is screwed.

Yeah, I really hate "gadzillions and gadzillions of gallons of water" reporting on the water deficit.

Taking their figures, 42 cubic kilometers, and California with an area of 423,970 square km, that's a deficit of about 10cm of rainfall, statewide.

(Assuming I didn't slip a decimal point.)

Yeah, it grossly underestimates the issue, because that much rain all at once would mostly run off, and rainfall is not evenly distributed, but it's more useful than the nutty measurement that was reported in that article.

Frankly I don't know enough about Cuba to give you an informed opinion on the quality or lack thereof of their healthcare. There are two things I'm sure of though:

1) Fidel Castro leaving the country for treatment actually happened, which is very obviously an option not available to the vast majority of Cubans, hence my quote from Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
2) They could have the best healthcare system in the World and I still wouldn't want to live there. Nor would most people who value freedom and liberty...

While starting completely new ones. Hooray!

*cough* bullshit *cough*

Hooray though, we added 300,000 jobs in the last quarter. The economy did that in most years of the 1960s, when the population of the United States was significantly less than today. Success!