Comment Re:What about 'mainstream economists'? (Score 1) 139
So, basically, we should criminally prosecute anyone whose views disagree with your political biases?
So, basically, we should criminally prosecute anyone whose views disagree with your political biases?
Yes, that is actually before the US entered WWII and long before the invention of the cyclotron.
Huh? The cyclotron was invented in 1932. Obviously a relatively primitive instrument (it would easily fit on my kitchen table), but the underlying design is still in use.
All he does is pushing corporate interests
What corporate interests are involved in curing malaria? The entire reason that Bill Gates is subsidizing these efforts is that there isn't much financial incentive for Big Pharma to develop drugs for diseases that primarily afflict people in Third World nations.
this is natures way of making sure the world doesn't get overcrowded. It's a sad fact but people NEED to die.
Then how do you explain the fact that some of the countries with the highest life expectancies, and almost no severe endemic diseases, are also the ones with the slowest-growing (or even shrinking) populations?
Reduce the rate of people, and especially children, dying and there will just be a lot more dying a generation down the road when they exceed what they can feed/house/employ/etc. again.
Actually, this has it almost exactly backwards: reducing infant mortality has been a major cause of stabilizing population growth. Increasing prosperity also helps a great deal, and there's a strong argument that malaria is a huge economic drain.
If you are messing with a complex system and do not understand its inner workings, you are on the road to hell. Or maybe he just does not care.
Or maybe he doesn't share your misanthropic view of humanity, and your insistence that "those people" need to stop breeding before they can enjoy the comforts of Western civilization?
But isn't this the same reason that evangelicals have traditionally distrusted Catholicism, and one of the main selling points of fundamentalist Christianity? Catholicism is pretty much the exemplar of organized religion: doctrine is determined by the church hierarchy rather than the text of the Bible, which of course has been prone to all kinds of abuse, and the dependency on church membership for salvation gives the institution immense secular power. With fundamentalism, on the other hand, all that matters is accepting Jesus as lord and savior, and following the text of the Bible, which has been static for many centuries (ignoring the translation issue for now) and isn't prone to tampering by present-day authorities. (My understanding was that this is one of the same attractions of Islamic law elsewhere in the world.) Given the history of the Catholic church in medieval Europe, I can see why this would be attractive to the spiritually-minded (which I am definitely not).
The Chinese launch failure was especially disastrous because it crashed in a populated (civilian) area. At least most of the launch failures haven't been fatal (Challenger being the obvious exception).
The whole "commercial" launch thing is a misnomer. It's business as usual, except that this time NASA does less micromanagement, and there are some new faces at the table. That's all.
And the contracts won't be cost-plus, meaning the contractors don't have a blank check and projects will actually have to stay on budget. There may be legitimate arguments why this is a bad idea for a national space program (personally, I disagree), but it does represent a rather large change from the way launches were done in the past.
What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution", and how is that different from the mere criteria for "reproduction"?
To start with, any time the change was brought about by deliberate, external intervention. For example, Bt-expressing corn, or glyphosphate-resistant crops, are obvious examples of "intelligent design" in the literal, non-pseudoscientific sense. We know this because "we" (i.e. humans) made these modifications ourselves, by a known and reproducible mechanism. I would argue that conventional breeding isn't really "evolution" either, although it relies on more natural phenomena rather than direct genome manipulation.
The fact that these biological changes are genuinely intelligent design does not prove the general case, however, because we've only had the technology for direct genetic manipulation for a few decades, and only know about selective breeding for a few millennia. For other biological changes, we assume evolution, because the directly observed mechanisms by which evolution operates rely on processes that we know have been possible for hundreds of millions of years (if not billions). If you want us to start considering intelligent design, you need to demonstrate a mechanism that predates human civilization.
we have not actually observed it happening
Um, wrong.
Just shows what big pharma actually does for the money they get. Not much it seems.
Why would Big Pharma waste time trying to cure Ebola? It's a disease that affects a relatively tiny number of people in (mostly, until the past month) Third World nations. It is only notable due to the terrifyingly (and unusual) high mortality rate, but there is absolutely no financial incentive to go after it right now.
everyone bowing down before Obama
Uh, who is bowing before Obama? A large fraction of the Democratic legislators running for re-election this year are actively avoiding mentioning his name.
I remember in 2012 when there was a Congressional hearing to decide if Muslims should be illegal.
The links you provided do not support this description. Moreover, the way our system of government works, any moron congressman with an agenda can hold hearings to discuss his bedwetting problems. That doesn't necessarily make it representative of popular sentiment, and it certainly doesn't make it official government policy.
please give me citation of a country where Democracy brought freedom to the masses.
I think most of the citizens of former Warsaw Pact nations would agree that they're freer now that they can elect their own leaders instead of being de-facto provinces of Greater Russia.
few lately meet the original criteria of fostering peace and reducing war,
I think it's been very broad for the last 50 years, and what they also now recognize is nonviolent resistance to tyranny. That's why MLK and Lech Walesa won the prize (among others), and I have a hard time thinking of anyone more deserving.
"Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"