Equating making a stink at an airport security checkpoint with the American Revolution is a little idiotic. The founding fathers didn't hassle individual British tax collectors and tell themselves they were fighting the good fight. They had a plan of action with a clear endgame. If you have something like that for our modern situation (for example, the National Opt-Out Day) then that's worth talking about. But suggesting people should screw themselves over with no hope of actually changing things is self-righteous and silly.

I mean, heck, you could go to your nearest airport right now and heckle the TSA goons, and yet somehow I doubt you're about to. Maybe because you don't have any desire to inconvenience yourself for no appreciable gain.

I notice you didn't quote the part of my post where I stated I think the government should force everyone to pay for a space program. Maybe because there wasn't one?

Here's an idea for the politicians out there: if parents are unable or unwilling to monitor and regulate the behavior of their children, IT IS NOT THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM. When an army of porn-addled youngsters starts rioting in the streets, then maybe we should consider drastic measures. In the meantime, please stop couching every idiotic bit of nanny state nonsense in terms of protecting the poor defenseless children.

And yet what would a private company ever get out of a Mars mission? What's the return on investment, and ultimately what is such a venture providing, and who is paying for it? I mean, nothing stops Boeing or Lockheed for building unmanned probes that could be used to investigate the solar system (maybe selling the data to scientific institutions?) but they're not doing it, and compared to a manned flight to Mars, the cost is peanuts.

How much food do you eat a day? Because with so many starving people in the world, the only moral option is to cut yourself down to starvation rations and give the surplus to the needy.

Do you have any evidence to support that point? Because while I think there may be a lot of reasons to focus on airplanes as a target, I don't see any reason to think that seeking synergy with common existing phobias is one of them. By that kind of logic, you may as well argue that terrorists would only attack at night, to capitalize on people's fear of the dark.

I've thought of it in economics terms. Like, for an example, take engagement rings. If you're proposing to a woman, you know you love her, and she knows you love her. A ring is just a way of showing, with cash on the barrelhead, that you're serious about her. You're paying a substantial cost up front to show you mean business. Prayer and ritual is the same thing--god doesn't just want you to love him. He wants you to love him until it costs you something.

Kind of makes you wonder why a supposedly higher being would be such a narcissistic crybaby, doesn't it? Even if he did exist I wouldn't want to kiss his ass.

As I asked someone else above, do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he has grown up in a society dominated by white cultural views, including racism? Or do you believe he has investigated the statistics around mugging and determined that he is much more likely to be victimized by a black person?

Do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he lives in a society that is largely dominated by white cultural views, which include racism?

In the interest of completeness it should be pointed out that one of the kids instructed his buddies to "take him [the victim] down," at which point the victim told them to "Remember Trayvon." It was after that they the beating started and one of the kids reportedly said "this is for Trayvon." The article at the Daily Mail states that the police don't know if the attack was racially motivated or if they interpreted "Remember Trayvon" as a racist remark. So to suggest that this was some kind of reverse lynch mob is a bit of a stretch, which of course does not prevent the Daily Mail from labeling it a 'twisted racial revenge' attack.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126003/Trayvon-Martin-case-6-youths-beat-man-78-twisted-racial-revenge-attack.html

That's a commendable position, and it is premature for anyone to state they know what we ought to do in absence of the facts. Unfortunately, if everyone chooses to sit back and wait for the experts to figure it out, do you really feel confident that what emerges will be the product of the best scientific judgement? Or do you think those with vested interests on both sides of the issue will cherry pick results and promote only the message that benefits them? If nothing else, the public needs to be involved in trying to keep the process as honest as possible.

Please don't say idiotic things. While you will find morons on both sides of the aisle who only object to certain things when the other political party does them, there are plenty of Obama voters who are very unhappy about his trampling of civil liberties. Maybe if the Republicans could field a serious candidate, instead of a religious crank like Santorum, then I would not find myself choosing Obama as the lesser of two evils.

Behe is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, but otherwise you're basically correct. I had him as a professor for basic biochemistry and science writing when I was a student there. He was a perfectly nice guy and didn't push his beliefs in class, but it's true that on the department website there's a statement from the rest of the faculty denouncing his belief in ID. And it's also true that he received a truly embarassing spanking during the Dover trial... I cringed a little when I watched the NOVA reenactment of it.

You should tell Pfizer that there's no money in vaccines, because last time I checked, Prevnar made them about a billion dollars a year. Besides, vaccine-preventable diseases are generally either bacterial or viral. There's not much to do about viruses besides vaccination. And most bacterial diseases (apart from some nasty resistant strains) can be knocked off with generic antibiotics that cost a few cents per pill. So explain to me why Big Pharma would rather sell some cheap antibiotics (and remember, they can't sell anything at all for viral diseases) when they could instead sell you a vaccine subsidized by government cash? I know, conspiracy theories are fun, but try to consider basic economics before you start raving.

Wow, you're remarkably ignorant. You'll notice the we haven't eradicated most of the diseases for which vaccines exist (smallpox is really the only eradicated disease), and yet the old vaccines remain effective. It's almost like, by reducing the number of people who can be infected, you're reducing the opportunity for mutations conveying increased virulence to occur. It's also worth pointing out that mutations don't magically make pathogens super powerful. A mutation that enables a bug to evade an existing immune response might well compromise its fitness in other ways that make it less effectives in unprotected hosts. Further, for bacterial diseases, vaccination greatly reduces the need to treat with antibiotics, which are a much more potent driver of resistance than vaccination is. If you have any actual evidence showing the flu vaccination increases the intensity of flu viruses, by all means, provide it. Of course, you point out that the virus changes with time, so it's not really clear to me how flu virus X gets worse due to vaccination for flu virus Y (technically possible, but not particularly likely). Whether seasonal flu vaccination is worthwhile outside of high risk populations is a topic epidemiologists are divided on, but pretty much everything else about your post was bullshit.