Once the supreme court decided money=speech and therefore you cant make laws restricting the buying and selling of political influence, it was all over.

Yes, and it's astounding to me that the whole "money=speech" argument got so much traction. The obvious conclusion being that it grants the rich rights to much more (and influential) speech than the poor.

He acted like he didn't think anyone was qualified to criticize him, even if they actually practiced medicine or performed science (he doesn't)

He doesn't? He has.

I hope your list of criticizing people he should have taken more seriously includes more than just Rand Paul.

Maybe I'm just being petty...

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

This was not the allegation, neither by the "whistleblower" nor by the House in their impeachment.

Here is a copy of the whistleblower complaint. You will note it begins with "This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals."

That's called "diplomacy" you incompetent retard. When the president bombs another country or gives them weapons just what do you think he is doing? The president has a wide variety of tools at his disposal to enforce American foreign policy abroad.

"Diplomacy" is something you do for the sake of the country you represent. Not something you do to try to acquire dirt on a political opponent.

Exactly. And the things we lose from the past become things we even don't even remember as being lost.

Don't get me wrong, not having to deal so much with some random "Oops, I got an infection. Perhaps I will die now," is a big plus. But it feels like modern civilization has a lot to do with trading our humanity for security and petty distractions.

This is a bit more general, but just to add to yours this is an excellent source as well. There is a fair amount of math involved, but it's simple enough for the layman interested in the equations behind QM, how to use them, and (a bit) on how they were derived.

It's almost as if people stopped defining their "quality of life" in such shallow ways they, and everyone around them, would be happier.

Unless your dinner last night consisted of a well-done steak dipped in with ketchup washed down with Diet Coke, you probably ate better than him. His wife looks too plastic to be attractive, and her personality is too plastic for her to be anything more than your average, shallow, boring twat otherwise. All the great places he's been to he's stupid to appreciate, and none of the people around him like him nor can be counted on for deep, fulfilling, meaningful relationships.

Jealousy? Honestly, if I were stuck in his life for a week I'd end up hanging myself from the gaudiest golden chandelier I could find in a tower bearing my name. How you can think being him is something to be envied is beyond me.

Strictly speaking the parent is just arguing that the Taliban was worse than Saddam Hussein, not that this is enough justification for an invasion.

...all the other things they attacked as conspiracy theories which turned out to be true...

Right. All none of them.

Those things are the f'ing worst.

"Well, hello! It appears you had a rare chance at a quiet reflective moment. Allow us to replace that wasted time with advertising."

Give Linus Torvalds a link to Stroustrup explaining why you shouldn't use linked lists and he'll likely just respond with his own explanation on why you shouldn't use C++. I doubt he'd value his opinion all that much.

That's a very fair analysis in my opinion. To narc's original point it should be noted that the solutions to the actual liberal hot-button issues PPH named are all really really flippin' boring to implement. It still doesn't make for exciting news.

For general information on the microbiome, and how it interacts with us and other animals, it's hard to do better than Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes

One of the points in the book is that instead of just viewing the immune system as a military defense system ready to destroy malicious microbial invaders, it might be more correct to see it as series of park rangers working to maintain a healthy microbiome ecosystem that works best for the host. As the exact same species of microbes can be beneficial in one context and harmful in another, it kind of makes sense.

And of course, antibiotics are overused nowadays as they kill huge swaths of bacteria that can be beneficial or just plain in the way of what can be nasty, resistant strains taking hold. Hospitals are kept so sterile that patients better recover from infections just by keeping some windows open.