The problem is not religion. Yes, there are some religion people who hate science, but they are on the fringe. There are some fundamentalist Christians who are very anti-evolution, but they do not reject science. I have a friend who works as a chemical engineer and he rejects evolution, but he certainly doesn't disbelieve the general principles of chemistry. In fact, his company is desperate to keep him that they basically let him take however much vacation he wants every year just to keep him happy and his company is one of the largest in its industry. Arguments against evolution denying are a whole other subject and not really the issue here.

There is a saying that "all politics in local" and in America that's really true. For my whole life Congress has had members, usually in the House of Representatives which is voted on in a district level in the individual states, who are just wildly out of step with the rest of the country. People who hold crazy beliefs sometimes get elected because they just happen to live in a part of the country that accepts those beliefs. Sometimes people get elected simply because of party affiliation. It may be that they are a stupid and horrible candidate, but at least they aren't a member of the other political party. I'd guess that maybe 70-80% of voters vote simply on party affiliation and for no other reason. Climate change denial plays big in the Republican Party right now as does religious belief, but the two things are not sets with 100% the same members in each. For example, Newt Gingrich is religious and has bona fide conservative credentials yet he certainly believes in climate change. Various members of Congress, particularly in the House, are just huge embarrassments but they keep going back because very few voters will ever consider voting for a member of what they consider to be "the other party", so if an idiot wins the nomination of his/her party in the primary, the regular election victory is almost assured. For most of my life I have lived in wildly uncompetitive districts for both parties where the winner of the primary never had to worry about his/her general election opponent because the voters would simply never vote in large numbers for the "other party" candidate.

I see a different possible reason for this than "bad totalitarian government gets scared of loss of control", but my sample size is small so I may be very wrong here. I know some Chinese citizens and they are unusually interested in the stock market and money making schemes. They don't really understand even a little bit how the stock market works, yet they remain convinced that it's easy to invest a pittance and come out rich. It may be simply that the government is tired of dealing with citizens who don't have even the faintest understanding of how markets work and they don't want to see a bunch of dummies investing their life savings into bitcoin and maybe going bust because I guarantee you that if that happens, the same people who lost their money would demand that the government make them whole.

It's even worse than that. There/their/they're confusion has been around a long time, but what just baffles me is that younger people today actually think that "prolly" is a real word. I talked to a relative who is in college right now and pointed out to him that "prolly" wasn't a real word and it was "probably" and he looked just shocked as he replied to me that he did not ever recall seeing the word "probably" in his life.

My guess is it's this and right now Amazon seems to be betting that people want what is basically a Roku with a whole lot less video options and a whole lot more game options. Seems like a strange bet to me and not what I would think as the people I know who have Roku (including me) aren't interested in the game part of it, which isn't much.

As an American, I can assure you that simply do not understand what you are talking about. While I have no idea whether any US agency cares any about government change in Brazil, I can tell you that Lula was no problem at all. The man was rational and competent and if he and the US had different ideas from time to time, at least there was some logic to what he was doing. Dilma Rousseff is a completely different story. Early on she came on with the same anti-US ranting and ravings that are quite popular in South America these days. Geez, I don't think I've ever seen anything more embarrassing from a national leader than her photo with Fidel where she looked like an aging rock groupie wanting to suck him off at the first chance she got. If the US is trying to support opposition to her presidency, well, that is a fight that she started. Most of South America seems obsessed right now with electing anybody who espouses anti-US slogans, even if they end up running their own countries into the ground. Hey, it doesn't matter if we don't have jobs as long as our president hates the US, right? You can ask Venezuela and Argentina how that is working out for them right now.

That crap gets rated as Insightful and gets 5 points? Wow. Tell you what. Name ONE, just one, UN resolution considered to be against North Korea that they have willingly obeyed. In fact, to be blunt, the whole reason that there are two Koreas instead of one unified and horribly backwards united Korean under Kim family despotism is because the UN Security Council authorized the use of force against North Korea's invasion when the Soviet Union infamously boycotted the meeting, only to find out the Security Council actually could take a vote without them there.

Wherever you get your degree, don't run up a fortune in debt to pay for it. It would be better to not get it at all then to run up, say, $30,000 or more of debt to pay off - in my opinion. I do agree with you that it probably really is harder and harder to get jobs without a 4 year degree. I've seen this happen to IT people I know who don't have 4 year degrees and get laid off.

And he forgot to call Obama a "socialist". Also some kind of shot at "Obamacare" is always called for in such matters.

Here's the truth about Beowufl. The poem sucks. Even if it's in a language you can read, it still sucks. When I was in college I read some of the great historical works of the past in Europe, some in translations, some in the original language (if I knew it), and Beowulf was by far the least interesting "classic" work I have ever read. The fact that Tolkien cared about it means nothing to me nor most people. Want proof that while this is of interest to the Tolkien fan boys, nobody else cares? Some years ago Robert Zemeckis, who is a directory I generally like, decided that everybody was just dying to see an adaptation of the film. It made about 60% of what it cost to make it. The truth is, most people don't care. The story sucks and few are interested in it.

And exactly how much, fan boys, do you think his translation is going to bring to the table any way? If it's vastly different than what came before it, then somebody blew it. Either Tolkien's is different because the people before him were really bad at translation and botched it, his is different because he is taking massive liberties with his translation and making assumptions that the original text may not actually support, or it's going to be barely different at all because there's just not that much difference between proper translations. I've done some translation work in my day and if done properly, there just shouldn't be all that much variation between different translations. I suppose Tolkien might use a word order better suited for modern readers or use less complicated words that convey the same meaning as previous translations, and I'd praise him for that, but such things should really be fairly minor versus previous translations.

One of the problems is that the number of people who are actually eager to work under these conditions is quite large. I've found that some people like startups because they cannot handle working for large companies at all. Also, I've found that some people who work for a startup that actually made it get very arrogant and decide that it succeeded because they were geniuses and any old company they join in the future simply cannot fail because they'll be part of it. It's been a little amusing to watch from a distance as some of these people have to keep looking for new jobs because the new startups they went to don't make it.

Fox does whatever it takes to get viewers/readers, including playing both sides of the issue. This was vividly demonstrated to me a few years ago when a guy I knew in high school and is a Facebook friend was posting some anti-vaccine nut job article to support his view. He posted a link to an article on Fox News from a NY pediatrician who was warning parents that the flu vaccine (this when during the flu scare of a few years ago when the government recommended getting children immunized against the flu) was likely to lead to autism and all kinds of nasty things. At the exact same time there was a different article written by Fox New's own Dr. Manny touting the benefits of the flu vaccine for everybody, including children.

Unfortunately our question has been modded way down and he'll probably never see it because it's more important for him to have 50 questions on Bab5 trivia.

Here's my question - What's the deal with the Forbidden Planet prequel/sequel/remake/reimagining/whatever your name was linked with some years ago? I've heard all kinds of rumors. One was that you finished a script but it got stolen and posted on the internet and that killed the project, Other rumors have this being a prequel, a sequel, a film set in the same universe and all kinds of things. I love the original film so if there's ever a chance of you being involved in something related, I'd love to know whatever you can tell, even if it's not much.

I know you are joking, but actually Jesse and others have an ongoing issue with MLB (Major League Baseball) that Blacks are "underrepresented" right now. What they fail to mention is that there are actually plenty of Blacks and Latinos in MLB right now. If anything, they are maybe overrepresented, but many Blacks in MLB are not American, they are from other countries, mostly the Dominican Republic. MLB leaders take Jesse seriously and they throw up their hands and cry "Woe is us! We must fix this heinous problem!" but people have looked into it and nobody really knows what is going on. There doesn't seem to be any discrimination at all going on with the players and all anybody can figure is that young Black guys in the US simply don't play baseball in large numbers any more. But MLB has a program to "change this" so it seems for the moment to have pacified Jesse and his buds. If I remember correctly, a few years ago the Atlanta Braves were specifically mentioned as an example of this kind of supposed discrimination but at the time they had plenty of players of color on the team, it's just that none of them were American born. That is not currently true as they have several American born Black players on the current team.

Correct. And the scientist in question said it may indicate the presence of waves, giving him some wiggle room if a future mission goes there and finds that basically everything is frozen solid.