Every accident which has been my fault has happened while I was stone sober, and driving like an asshole. That doesn't happen if I'm stoned. Your first citation gives no indication that drugs were involved, while your second citation says that the suspect had five drugs in his system, and one of them was Xanax, which by any measurement is a stronger impediment to driving than marijuana — and the other driver was also intoxicated, and they don't tell us what they were on. Perhaps it was alcohol. Your citations are shit, which is not surprising because your argument is shit.

The standard for DUI/DWI should be obviously impaired. But the standard for a moving violation varies by offense, as it should.

That is a lie, and you are a liar. It is legal to drive under the influence of legal psychoactive compounds so long as your driving ability is not impaired.

The great injustice is that studies so far show that the typical driver may actually be safer under the influence of marijuana, because of the effect on driving styles.

Citation please? Your link to Noam Chomsky's 40-second video has nothing to do with your claim.

And what if, God forbid, someone rapes and murders someone you love? Do you and your weapon have the resources to find justice? If your answer is yes, then you are truly scary. The rest of us have evolved beyond your vigilante philosophy.

Uh ... nowhere? You can't have everything the way you want it.

Mod parent up. Guns, Germs, and Steel is an awesome book. It has its detractors (see amazon.com for the spectrum of reviews) but it's definitely an insightful analysis of the history of our species.

And in capitalism, winning means you acquire more power. Which makes capitalism a social system as well.

Nope. Those are just a private shuttle. The Greyhound model is that anyone can buy a ticket. Some other countries have nicer buses like that, though. Mostly places where people can't afford cars.

Develop some self-control. Then you, too can own a chest freezer, shop sales at the discount store, and eat well for pauper's money.

I personally supplementary shop. Sometimes at the actual store, but sometimes the farmer's market. But having a pantry and a freezer is wonderful. Going out back to "shop" FTW.

Yep, it's a simple issue of mineral hardness. A material of a lower hardness can *break* a material of a higher hardness if hit hard enough, but it can't scratch it.

Yeah, tungsten is up to hardness 8, it's harder than steel, glass, even quartz. It's as hard as emerald. But that's not a typical material one enounters except in specialty applications like that.

What's unrealistic is believing one strategy is always favored by evolution. Evolution tries everything, so you get all strategies tried.

The substantive argument here should be over this question: what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species? The vast majority of discourse on this, unfortunately, is tainted by ideological bias.

I think what makes us successful can't be boiled down to one strategy without being simplistic. The minimum number of strategies that's interesting, in my opinion, is two, because realistic strategies have to interact. Personally the two I'd go with would be cooperation and behavioral flexibility, noting especially that behavioral flexibility sometimes works *against* cooperation. People cooperate to build a successful village, but during a disaster having a few selfish bastards who grab what they can and run is good for the survival of the species. But just because a *little* bit of something is good, doesn't mean a *lot* of it is good. So much selfishness people can't cooperate efficiently is too much selfishness. So little selfishness that nobody saves themselves when they can't save anyone else is too much selflessness.

One more thing to chew on: nature doesn't owe you a justification for your behavior, and it's certainly not going to provide you a logically complete and non-contradictory ideology. It doesn't even give us that for arithmetic.

Trust me, I've done this over and over and over. No scratches. Nor does shaving it boucing about in my purse with all sorts of metal objects. It does not scratch from steel, period. At all. Its Mohs hardness is clearly too high.

Only if you qualify "selfish" to mean something specific that may or may not be what people mean when they use "selfish" in general discourse.

Just to clarify, I believe Kip Thorne is the physicist who was a consultant on Interstellar, who made efforts to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own, and he's defending the movie to some extent. It's Lee Billings who is complaining that it's not scientifically accurate.