Are you obtuse? Did you read what I wrote? I am criticizing monotheism as a whole. I probably despise extremism more than you do. I just see the historical context, and I see aspects of extremism in America that are similar to Islamic extremism. That is not being an apologist. It is being a realist.

I think the truly intractable problem is that such a system would centralize control of the educational system. Centralize it right down to every single word that is presented. The true power of the public education system is that it gives teachers a great deal of independence in what they say in the classroom. Imagine a situation when something terrible happens in our democracy. Someone seizes control. The system gets even more perverted than it already is. Then imagine an educational system where children only received "approved" resources. No independent human teacher. Just video and text. If the children don't get information from the media, then they will effectively be blind to reality.

I know this is hypothetical, but I think it demonstrates my point, that independent teachers are an essential buffer against tyranny emerging in our democracy.

I don't say that. I assert that mono-theistic religions have shown themselves capable of equally vile fanaticism, most especially when they are combined with the levers of power of the state.. See my post above.

There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.

In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.

The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo.

When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists and those who can best be described as the American taliban. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.

"Hypatia (born c. AD 350 – 370; died 415[1][3]) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Byzantine Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy."

"One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict."

I hate these islamic extremists at least as much as anyone here. But it isn't just islam that is capable of such things.

I'm talking about states like Arizona, which has enacted a $50/month fee if you want to feed solar electricity back into the grid. If you install a solar panel and a battery system that has absolutely no interaction with the grid, you can they justify charging a fee for your system. They might as well charge you for installing high efficiency appliances, bulbs, or for simply using less energy.

Actually, I think one of the biggest results of this will be to allow homes with solar energy to store ALL the energy they capture with their panels, instead of feeding that energy back into the grid. This will effectively neuter the arguments of power companies who say that grid feed-in is making the grid unstable, thus reducing the impetus for putting punitive fees on houses with solar panels.

I suspect the movie's real "sin" was to make bank a banker like "old man Potter" the greedy villain. Today, the greedy banker/financier is the hero, acting valiantly in the "public interest".

Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life" was largely forgotten in its time. In 1974, possibly due to an error, its copyright lapsed. TV networks, eager for low cost holiday fare, basically had this film running on a loop during certain times of the year. Then, Paramount managed to pull the movie back into copyright. And low and behold, the showings of this great movie slowed to a trickle once again. Public interest indeed. These media industry slime-balls are evil. Literally evil.

Best post I've seen here and its score is zero. It gives actual arguments. The moderators are being rather jingoistic I think.

Parachutes are too heavy for a nine engine rocket, and would either land in corrosive seawater or on land with a hard damaging landing. To be truthful, they have already accomplished the most difficult part, namely bringing a rocket from 140km altitude to a tiny location in the middle of the ocean. They have also already demonstrated the landing part several times. If you notice, those landings come down at pretty much the exact location they began at.

I believe global warming and ocean acidification is a serious threat. I also believe that solar energy has great potential as an energy source. However, I think the question being framed here creates a false dichotomy. Is it not possible that we might have a world where we have renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuels? Just because we reduce the use of something doesn't mean we have to eliminate it. The fact is that modern civilization needs plastics, mechanical lubrication, and other fossil fuel bi-products. Even if we reduce fossil fuel use by 80%, we can still have these things.

Exhibit A: A freshly minted climate denier talking point. It was likely created by a "PR" company and focus group tested. It sounds like it comes from an expert...someone who has studied the climate history of California. However, no references are given. It merely relies on the confident tone to reach its target audience...the sector of society that has little scientific expertise and that doesn't want to believe that the truck in their garage is likely to make the lives of their grandchildren quite difficult.

Really, this all reminds me of Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings. Seriously, watch Petropolis, and tell me you can't see Mordor in the Canadian tar sands.

The car is almost always plugged it at night. It has a computer. It is trivial to program it to warm up before leaving.