You dismiss the idea that some successful people might be bullies too ?

Lol.

Actually a LOT of people talk about that, its one of the most common topics of conversation... among feminists. I'm a member of a feminist group on facebook (many men are feminists too) - though I mostly prefer to just lurk - and that's one of the things female feminists talk about the most. The urgency of giving male rape victims the same support - because the lack of support for male rape victims come from the SAME patriarchal sexist ideas that punish female rape victims and the unjustness of a court system that assumes women to be more nurturing - a role any feminist will protest having foisted on her. Some women are very nurturing. Some men are very nurturing. Custody cases ought to be determined SOLELY based on the individuals concerned with no regard for their genders - THAT is the feminist position loud spoken by them ALL THE TIME.
And child support should be paid by the higher earning parent - that this is mostly a man is a consequence of that paygap I bet your about to deny exists.

Except that every empirical experiment proves you are wrong about that.
Vet schools on average admit 4 males for ever female student admitted. But when the personal details on applications are obscured, so that the selection committees do not know the gender of applicants - it switches to 60/40 female selection !

What this means is that every woman who does become a vet had to work 4 times as hard and be 4 times as talented as the men who became vets. No amount of bullshit will make that NOT sexism or something the students can control.
3 quarters of the women who would be great vets are excluded to allowed in twice as many men who will at best be mediocre vets.

That's sexism in action.

>we control how many throws of the dice we get. Successful people are those who are smart, hard-working and persistent

Which is, in fact, believe it or not the number one advantage of a solid social safety net. If you look at businesses - 80% fail in their first year. More importantly - looking at the successful ones the average owner of a successful business has had 3 failed businesses in the past (remember that's an average so for half of them it's twice that).

What this means is that entrepreneurship is an incredibly high risk investment one you can only make if you can afford to lose -repeatedly before you win. Without a social safety net, the only people who can afford that are the ones who are already rich (which is why so many of America's rich folk started with large chunks of inherited wealth. Gates had rich parents, Trump - in fact of the top 10 richest American business founders the only one who didn't have rich parents were Steve Jobs and that's only because he was adopted - his adoptive parents were not poor).
For everybody else - entrepreneurship is basically a near-guarantee of being destitute. If you'll be destitute after trying once, no way are you able to try enough times to get it right. It makes is almost impossible for somebody who is poor to ever be a successful entrepreneur.

But if you have a solid social safety net, you change the risk factor. Now - you can try a business, fail at a business, and not be destitute. You can fall back on the safety net, rebuild your capital and try again - you can be a successful entrepreneur without being rich BEFORE you start.

The link was shared with me on social media several months ago, I didn't save it unfortunately. But google found it really quickly: http://www.scientificamerican....

Quoting the article in Scientific American: "The risk of a febrile seizure following the MMR is approximately one case in 3,000 doses for children aged 12 to 15 months but one case in 1,500 doses for children aged 16 to 23 months"

Double the risk of the most common side effect.

Actually some people did do what you ask. Their findings were that spreading vaccines out actually INCREASES the risk of negative complications.

To answer your question - because it's more dangerous. A recent study compared incidences of side effects and injuries between those who got the usual schedule and children who had delayed or spread-out schedules - and found 80% more injuries in the latter group. Spreading vaccines out actually INCREASES the risks. They are extremely minor risks, but when spread out - they become much more significant.
Furthermore it increases the risk of actually getting one of the diseases the vaccines are meant to protect against by a huge margin as the delay period extends how long you are vulnerable before being vaccinated.

Those laws do not, in fact, exist. What DOES exist is laws that say if you think your child was injured by a vaccine and the injury is anywhere on a long list of things which we know MIGHT happen, even if they only happen on a one in a billion cases - you don't have to prove your claim, you get paid. No need for lawyers, no need for expensive court cases, no need to deal with the incredible scientific complexity of actually proving causality - you win, guilt by the vaccine producer is ASSUMED.

The reason you get paid from a big fund is so that the vaccine producers can actually afford to pay these "guilty with no chance to prove innocence" claims against them. The reason the claimants get these "assumption that the other guy is guilty" benefits is because vaccines are often mandatory - and like all medicine they do have risks. Those risks may be incredibly minor but they exist and may hit some people - so those people are simply given the benefit of the doubt.

Linus used to say "Don't make backups, just stick your stuff on an FTP server and let the world copy it"... I don't think he meant that it was supposed to happen without your consent or knowledge however.

Actually yes. A few years ago a number of gun runners in South Africa we're caught smuggling weapons to the LRA. They defended their actions not by saying "we are greedy gunrunners happy to supply child soldiers" but by saying "we are christians who armed fellow christians in a war against evil Muslims". They got huge public sympathy and people were furious when the fortunately secular court system found them guilty of violation of the countries constitutional prohibition against trading arms to human rights violaters.

Where one is found the other is sure to follow.

See the post below by the beekeeper's son. A beekeeper considers colony death an incredibly rare event. Many retire with most of their first colonies still alive..

As we speak Budhists are murdering Muslims on at least 2 islands in a vast religiously driven ethnic cleansing war that's been going on for over a year now.

You do actually have examples of ALL the above murdering every OTHER of the above for exactly that reason - in fact the single deadliest religious terrorist group on the planet is the Christian Lord's Resistance Army. Islamic extermists could take lessons - those guys kill more people in a month than all Islamic groups combined have managed in a decade !
You just don't HEAR about the others very much, because they don't make the news, because the places where they happen don't have oil.

The vast majority of atheists in America, particularly those who live in conservative areas report hiding their beliefs from neighbours (often claiming to be agnostic) for fear of discrimination and reprisal.

It would appear that even in the US of A atheists feel legitimately scared of religious people who are decidedly NOT Muslims. 3 Atheist murders in a short period is distressing but hardly above average, it COULD be just a random statistically clump which has no deeper meaning. There is nothing to suggest that this happens more frequently there than among Christians in the USA.
In fact, there isn't even any proof yet that this particular person's murder (or any of them) were even related to their writings - no trials yet, no evidence or motives known. The country is in a state of significant civil upheaval where murders are a frequent ocurrence. That these three victims happen to be atheist may be entirely unrelated to their deaths.
A good atheist should not form opinions before evidence is available and ought to know about statistical clumping fallacies and selective reporting.

Of course it's also possible that these WERE religiously motivated murders - we don't have enough evidence ot judge yet, we don't EVEN have a signficant enough statistical clump to consider it an unlikely coincidence
To get a valid sample you must EXCLUDE the data that originally drew your attention from your data-set, then make a prediction of what would happen if there was a NON-random event, and only if that prediction holds can you rule out randomness. So we now suspect that atheist bloggers may be getting targeted for their writings. We can predict that more deaths will follow, in quick sucession. If another happens -then we can NOT say "4 deaths now" - we say 1 death matching the prediction, if another 3 happen in a reasonable timeframe THEN you've got something MORE than mere coincidence.

Oh - and Muslim extermists are hardly the most violent religious lot around. That title is actually held by a Christian group. The Lords Resistance Army kills about as many people every month as all the Islamic terrorists in the world combined do in a decade - and that was in the decade that include 9/11, in a typical decade it's about a 5th of what the LRA does monthly.

The reason you don't HEAR about the LRA murders is because they don't happen where there is oil or, indeed, any resource of importance to America. They just happen somewhere in Africa, which as far as America is concerned is basically this big country full of children with distended bellies where everybody dies by age 10 anyway.

Hercules doesn't really offer much. That other middle-eastern miracle worker son-of-god guy is promissing an afterlife, which is quite an appealing offer but Kwankwaka the goat-headed god of mice in Papa New Guinea is offering pigs and all the wheat I can carry ! Bacon and Beer man ! Bacon and Beer !