Yes, they do, and no, they're not.

It has been theorized, but entirely discredited. Another planet breaking up would have left a lot more debris behind than exists in the asteroid belt. There's not even enough there to make Mercury or the Moon, much less a gas giant. Even if there were some unknown cosmic vacuum cleaner that sucked up the majority of mass the missing planet would have left its signature on the orbital dynamics of the rest of the planets, and there's nothing.

I'm just wondering how anyone noticed. It's Philly, most of the area looks like a train wreck . . .

I still find frelling **security** equipment without the ability to change the default password on it. Obviously we don't install it, but the stuff is sold as "professional grade" and costs big piles of money.

My kingdom for a mod point . . .

lack of cheap (coal fired) electricity is holding back Africa

Lack of cheap energy, yes, but that certainly wouldn't be coal in Africa because they don't have any really large easy-to-exploit deposits of it. They don't have a lot of sites appropriate for hydro power, but they get plenty of sun. They could import coal to burn give electricity today, or import solar panels to give electricity for the next two decades. Best would be to build their own solar panel fabs, but the investment is too risky for most companies.

We can see the T-Mobile headquarters from our front yard, but when my wife had T-Mobile service she had to stand in one particular spot in the house in order to have one bar and there was no signal anywhere else inside (but 4 bars from my work ATT phone).

I've supported mission-critical security applications for most of a decade, my previous employer made it understood that 1) the position was salary, and 2) I was always on-call. They threw lots of money at me, handed me a free phone, and gave me interesting work so I felt the trade-off was worth it. On the other hand, I've never had to support fanbois, that would have required more money.

If you're an 'On Call' employee they can make it a condition of your employment. How thoroughly that can be enforced depends on the state of course, YMMV.

A strong Russian Orthodox church, incidentally run by a former KGB functionary . . .

Since the KGB ceased to exist years ago the existence of a time machine would certainly be a National Security issue. . .

Agreed, because perhaps the gods will make carbon dioxide and methane work differently in Earth's atmosphere than everywhere else in the observable universe so increasing their concentration won't cause anything to happen here.

It's the bedbug/spider ecosystem in his mom's basement.

Hidden heat? Wrong, it's well known where the heat is going. The oceans have been sucking up the excess heat instead of the atmosphere for reasons that currently are not well understood but which may have to do with the excess fresh water from melting glaciers forcing the warmer but denser salt water deeper (which is being observed in both the Arctic and Antarctic).

They're generally not actual conservatives, either. Most of the time they're extreme radicals. Grover Norquist's web site used to have a position paper where he proposed to run the US government debt so high that there would be no budget left for anything but the military and debt servicing. The effect would be to reduce the US government to the size where he "could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub."