Being free citizens isn't supposed to be comfortable. It involves hard choices about serious issues. To pre-filter the information provided to citizens based on what *you* think they can handle is as patronizing as it is misguided.

As Twain once said something like, "censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak because a baby can't chew it."

Is it unpleasant? Yes. If you can't bear to watch it, don't watch it. But understand that it will take people who are willing to see it for what it is to really understand how hard we need to fight this.

I'd be willing to bet lots of money that farmers still have the option of buying older models with simpler, less fuel-efficient engines, less capabilities, etc.

You can have:
a) super high tech, comfortable, efficient, efficacious equipment, at the price of being a hostage to your vendor
b) old tech, uncomfortable, noisy, manually-controlled equipment that you can mess with all day long.

You get a OR b.

"I'm not worried about Fox doing ISIS's work for them. I'm worried about them influencing the militant "let's glass the whole middle east" segment of America."

Then if I lived in the middle east, I'd be working my ass off to stop the psycho radicals from reaching a level where they annoyed the superpower, no?

Animals need to be treated like animals. No, that's a disservice to animals. Even the most savage wild animal never set its prey on FIRE just to show other animals how tough it was.

I would only amend your point to say that for me anyway, trolling is all about the anticipated response, not the belief of the poster. Fwiw I *do* believe much of global warming is bullshit, but I'm cognizant that dropping it into conversation is guaranteed to generate a piranha-like churn that will solve nothing, resolve nothing, and change nobody's mind. Thus, mentioning it (regardless of what I believe) would be trolling.

I am in absolute admiration of your ability to perfectly, ridiculously satirize today's culture, while leaving me just the teensiest bit terrified that you're entirely serious.

As satire, that was nothin' but net.

Dear Twitter CEO:
If you don't understand the difference between trolling and cyberbullying, you already fail.

Trolling: "Global warming is bullshit"
Cyberbullying: "I'm going to chain you to the radiator and grape you in the mouth for decades and decades.*

*I recognize that I'm out of the norm by having a pretty high standard here limited to libel or actual threats, which ARE illegal already; I have very mixed feelings about the whole American societal thing about bullying in general today (of which "cyber" bullying is just an element). But that's tangential to my point here.

Some might call it 'millenial cognitive dissonance' because they don't seem to understand that you own your public identity, for better or worse.

Every time you put your opinions out into the world, some people are going to disagree with you. Like me posting this.

Some people are going to strongly disagree with you. The bigger or more controversial your opinion, the bigger the reaction. Hell, I get hatemail because I dare to dispute all sorts of conventional wisdoms.

And a certain percentage of the populace are crazy assholes.

Now, if you're a narcissist, and YOU complete the circle by putting your real identity out there, don't you bear some of the blame if a shitstorm falls on you? It's the old public-figure libel issue: if you are a public figure, the CONSEQUENCE of that is that you are voluntarily giving up some protections to which private citizens are otherwise entitled.

That used to be why we used avatars. But I truly believe for the current generation, that doesn't provide the attention and adulation that putting their real selves out there does.

I'm not exonerating her harassers, btw. Being a public-figure doesn't give people a blank check to threaten you. But at a certain point, we have to live in the world as it IS, not as we wish it was.

I'm not sure how the issue got the very Daily Mail headline of "3 person babies". By that same logic anyone with a donor organ is a "monster franken-hybrid of two people!".
Essentially it's a transplant (astonishingly) early in that baby's life. Kind of impressive that we could pull it off, actually. Far better that we do something medically that will terminate that line of mitochondria from being passed on to make more people miserable.

That said, the 'poster mom' for this condition Sharon Bernardi has lost SEVEN children to this condition. (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19648992) "...Each of her first three children died within hours of birth and no-one knew why....At the same time, her mother revealed that she'd had three stillbirths before Sharon had been born. Further investigations by doctors revealed that members of Sharon's extended family had lost another eight children between them."
Her 4th child survived until he was 21, living a life of dysfunction and pain;
"..."In the last year of his life Edward was in chronic pain. He had dystonic spasms caused by things going wrong in his brain. His muscles would go into spasm for up to six hours at a time. Drugs could not help him."
"...Sharon and Neil kept on trying for a healthy baby but without luck. Although three more children were born, none lived beyond the age of two. Each time one of their children died, they told themselves that "the death was a one-off". After their last child had a heart attack and died in 2000 they stopped trying...."

I'm sorry, but what the hell? How colossally selfish does someone have to be to just keep pumping out babies that die? There are at least hundreds of thousands of adoptable children *desperate* for parents to love them, your womb is so fucking sacred that you're willing to (essentially) just keep killing babies until you get one that's "of you"?

That's not the most sympathetic figure they could have picked to represent why this was needed.

First, some background. We have 4 kids, in their late teens and early 20s.
A full gamut of personalities - from the artsy kid, to the social diva, to the mathy/introvert, to the football stud. Gross oversimplifications, to be sure, but they hit the archetypes.

Our decision was ultimately *against* homeschooling. Does that mean we were universally happy with our choice to public school our kids? Not entirely. If we knew then what we know now, we'd have looked harder for some sort of private school or charter school that we could have afforded. Our local public schools were terrific in elementary years, mediocre as junior high schools, and pretty nearly horrible as high schools. The high school experience was nearly wasted, with bored unengaged teachers, listless classes, challenges that petered out by 11th grade, and an administration that seemed capable of only making the worst possible choices whenever presented. We should have pulled our kids in junior high and sent them *anywhere* else. Oh, they still did/are doing fine academically - ACTs all 30+ - but this was despite the horrible high school system, not because of it.

The reasons we chose against homeschooling, in no particular order:
- simple expertise: while a reasonably educated parent (we both have Bachelors' degrees) can certainly teach pretty much every elementary and general junior-high subject simply by 'staying ahead of the kid' in the materials, but by high school and certainly in terms of anything advanced placement, nobody's well-rounded enough to be a teacher of everything.
- don't just like what I do: the fact is that if our children developed special interests or things that they loved that we didn't anticipate, there's little we could offer them. We in no way wanted to constrain their interests to our own, which would be natural given our own enthusiasms.
- the "social" thing: humans are social animals. We all exist in a hodgepodge of organizations (formal and informal), status structures, power relationships (formal and informal), with countless others ranging from direct family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. *Fundamental* to the emotional and social development of a child is being involved in those evolving relationships *particularly* at certain stages of maturity with others going through the same learning curve. Generally, this is going to continue through our whole lives - at school, at work, in relationships, clubs, volunteer organizations, churches, etc. Simply put, we felt this was very much a 'time served' sort of thing; an hour playdate once weekly (or whatever) wasn't going to give our kids the sort if intrinsic, long-term give and take that primate children and adolescents need to learn those structures and how to navigate them. To best learn the gamut of situations that they would have to deal with would involve not just social experience, but social immersion. And let's be absolutely candid: the teen years for both boys and girls are awash with hormones and their follow-on effects. Learning to come to terms with this (& themselves) in-context is not something you as a parent can deliver by lecture.
- 'bye mom & dad! - following-on to the reason above, the primary thing a kid needs to learn as they mature? Doing without you. Really, how can you teach that?
- sports: if you're in the US, youth sports at a certain level are pretty much only through schools. I think sports are important to the development of a child, learning about competition, to win, lose, deal with others, trust others, as well as important values about diet, physical fitness, and the pure joy of physical activity when you are at the most perfect physical condition you'll ever be in your life. That choice isn't much available to homeschool kids, or if it is it's in a sort of stilted "we'll let them be on the team" sort of way.
- want to give your kid more intensive, in-depth learning better than what schools offer? Nothing's stopping you. School is really only a teeny part of the day and modern public schools are almost hilariously easy. Spend the rest of the time taking your kids to museums, field trips, or even watching educational television that will challenge your child, and then talk seriously about the things that interest them. They like music? Go to concerts, get them lessons in the Flugelhorn. Heck, learn it yourself with them. Ultimately, like our kids, they'll begin to see that their day *begins* when they get home.
- oh no, they learned something 'bad': depending on your convictions, this may *really* be the driver of why you want to homeschool- you want to put blinkers on your kid and prevent them learning "inappropriate" things. Personally, I find this such an utterly unrealistic view that it's tragic. You can't lock your kid in the 19th century: the fact is that we live in a culture that is pluralistic, multicultural, and variegated - many times in ways that I'm personally uncomfortable with. But you can't build a bloody bubble around your kid and expect them to stay inside "for their own good". Unless they're going to live in an underground barrel their whole lives, they're going to be confronted with things like other religions (or non-religion), sexuality, porn, drugs, the internet, and a host of other things that you might consider "dangerous". They need to learn to *deal* with these things, not hide from them. Yes, I detest the early sexualization of children (particularly girls) in our society, but this just meant that our job as parents was a little harder, explaining earlier than I'd have preferred to our kids about why we feel the way that we do about porn, etc and help them cope with their natural confusion and questions as constructively as possible.

In retrospect, every parent would do some things differently. This is not one of them. We're happy we chose not to homeschool our kids.

Finally, yeah, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(WKUK Homeschool skit)

Global search: "utilize"
Replace with: "use"

Global search: "baited breath"
Replace with: "bated breath"

I could do this ALL day, man.

(peers closely at bottle) ...are you saying that this isn't GENUINE snake oil?

...and when the "FAA-decreed" property rights conflict with, say, the property rights "granted" by Putin to his oligarch friends, or that Beijing gave to the company in China that'a a front for the PLA?

At least we'll finally see what combat in space looks like.

"Non scientists need to accept that scientists are flawed people just like them but that science still works."
Personally, I think you've got that backwards. SCIENTISTS need to accept that they are just people, not endowed with some sort of special cosmic powers of understanding above those of anyone else.

Who is more qualified to discuss the ramifications of, say, gay marriage: a physicist or a plumber? Trick question: they're both people whose expertise has nothing to do with the subject of discussion, ergo, they're equivalent and their opinions should carry equal weight.

A harder one: who's more qualified to discuss what we should do about climate change: a climatologist, or a day-care worker? Oops, trick question again. I didn't ask IF climate change is a thing (for that, a climatologist is clearly better trained and more acquainted with the systems and data relevant to the question), I asked WHAT should we do about it? In that case, the answer really has nothing to do with climatology and both again should have equal weight in the discussion.

Scientists (previously) held a moral credibility in most peoples' minds *because* of their perceived objectivity. Maybe it's unfair, but the public perception of the blinkered guy in the lab coat that cares more about his titration results than getting lunch contributed to this. It's likely that if that man has data, he'll give you the straight analysis precisely because he is (perceived to be) detached from the results and context that the rest of us swim in.

The moment someone says "listen to be BECAUSE I'm a scientist" he/she has just wagered their credibility. When the next thing out of their mouths is some nakedly biased political opinion, is anyone surprised that the perceived value of the subsequent words from a 'scientist' falls?

Further, we live in a technocratic era of celebrity. "Celebrity" scientists have been co-opted - cheerfully, willingly in many cases - to advance POLITICAL goals wielding their scientific credibility - sometimes in their field, sometimes not. Noam Chomsky? James Hansen? Richard Dawkins?

No, I'd say it's nearly the opposite of what you stated. It's scientists asserting broadly their voices should carry more weight, and getting all hurt that people dare to evaluate their pronouncements because we're starting to ascribe to them the simple venalities that motivate normal people from politicians to movie stars to insist that they "need to be heard".

You mean, like "losing" all your critical raw data in a massive "dog at my homework" moment?

Because I'm sure it's not "...government and industry associations, sensational journalists..." or, say, politicians that are winning nobel prizes, oscar awards, etc for telling us that the climate is changing and man is to blame?

You folks are hilarious.

It's not just reporting.
The FDA and medical community has told us with all seriousness for decades that there is a link between cholesterol and heart disease - there really isn't.
"Scientists" told us in the 60s that nursing babies was stupid; animals and poor people nursed. Smart, civilized people used "scientifically formulated" synthetic formulas!
Scientists said "DDT is killing baby birds, stop using it!" when in fact it was poorly designed experiments that left birds calcium deficient and thus - yes - laying fragile eggs.
Scientists have said things like "stop using baby talk to speak to children, it hinders their development", while others cheerfully opined (using their "sciency" wisdom) on the geopolitics of the Cold War (Union of Concerned Scientists) - something for which they were no more qualified to comment than Kissenger would have been qualified to design a moon rocket.

I agree with Adams, I've been saying it for years: science is critical to the success of our society, but the moment (around the early 1950s) that scientists started opening their yaps on political subjects, they were trading their credibility for politics. Now they've spent that currency, they can't understand why people question their motivations (as if they were like "normal" people motivated by power, ego, money, etc. - right?).

Eisenhower famously warned us about the military-industrial complex, he was absolutely right.
Of course, the NEXT BIT of that same speech is less-often quoted:

"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."