As another poster pointed out, one at the wrong time and place could trigger nuclear war. His example was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... which to quote,

The Asian immigrants were motivated to begin with which is why they're here whereas the American blacks were dragged over. Around here the black people are generally immigrants from Africa and seem to do almost as well as the Asians who generally come from wealthy backgrounds.

There's the cosmic background radiation which is considered to be the echo of the big bang as it fits and there are a few other independent things that imply the big bang. When you measure the age of the Universe using unrelated observations and coming up with close to the same numbers give or take it lends credibility to a theory.

Vaccinations aren't that safe (there's only been a couple of cases of people getting hit by meteoroids), just much safer then not being vaccinated. An extreme example from just before vaccinations was variolation to inoculate against smallpox, one study found 2% mortality for those properly inoculated vs 16.6% mortality for the ones that weren't variolated. Much better odds of survival not to mention the other problems from having smallpox such as being really sick and ending up scarred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's hard to do. We've tried in Canada, campaign limits (including only real people allowed to donate) with publicly funded elections. The Conservatives as soon as they got a majority got rid of the public funded election part. Then every time Elections Canada called them out on breaking the rules they acted hurt, ignored and /or appealed and are now trying to push through a law to neuter Elections Canada as they're "obviously biased", introduce another couple of loop holes to work around the limits and even cut of funding to tell people where to vote or teach students about voting (see sig). Meanwhile the revolving door that was supposed to have been closed continues to operate, media is bribed and threatened (surprising how many reporters are now senators and then there was the inviting Verizon into the country thing).

Didn't Harris privatize Ontario Hydro? Anyways if it is like here the idea is to break the government control of electricity by driving up costs so it can be given to campaign contributors, the essence of crony capitalism and saying they shouldn't give insane contracts to their friends does little to stop them.
And to only pick on the Liberal party seems weird though they do do a good job of screwing people over, around here they're the right wing party that is sucking billions out of hydro each year to make up for the budget shortfalls caused by their tax cuts, consider $1.45 a litre too cheap for gas so suck another 7 cents a litre for carbon taxes and all the other shit that successful politicians do everywhere.

Much as a broken clock is right twice a day, Velikovsky was the only one who predicted that Venus would be a furnace.

And how do you avoid capitalism growing into crony capitalism?
The best way to win the game is always to be in charge of the rule book and the refereeing..

They'll also protect the previous President regardless of political affiliation. Just as there has been no repercussions for Bush, there won't be for Obama.

Gravity is also a theory and yet hardly anybody argues about its existence.

Venus is still in the Goldilocks zone, which is why it was expected that Venus would be covered with steaming jungles and inhabitable until we actually measured the temperature and it was such a surprise that it was so hot. This would have been even more true early in the Solar Systems history when the Sun itself was 25% cooler.
BTW, even the Earth would be an iceball at our distance from the Sun without the greenhouse effect which raises temperatures something like 40K

The idea of Confederation started with a plan to unite the Maritime colonies (Charlottetown accord 1864), then Canada showed up and wanted in. Politically the Province of Canada was deadlocked due to the way it was designed and that was one motivation, internally there were others such as trade and such. Externally there was the horror of the American Civil war, American manifest destiny, cancellations of free trade agreements, terrorists attacks (Fenians) based in America and England losing interest.
As for the Confederate States rejoining the crown, I doubt that it would have ever happened. They were Americans, believed in the Republic and Constitution, just interpreted it differently then the north. IIRC their Constitution was mostly the same as the Norths as well.

You should read the American Constitution. It features a democratically elected House of Representatives, A Senate appointed by the democratically elected States governments and a President elected by people appointed by the democratically elected States government. This makes it a representative democracy which having a President also makes it a Republic.
China is also a Republic but doesn't have the democratic elected part and yet all you fixate on is that your country is like China, a Republic.

You can quit funding the government without being thrown in jail any time you want. It just means losing the benefits of funding the government like having a good job. Shit if everyone decided to sit down, not work and not fund the government, government would respond as fast as Google would respond to everyone boycotting them.

It's all relative, some States thinking the Federal government of the time was too strong does not mean that it was strong enough to prevent a civil war and it obviously wasn't as the civil war happened.
First time I've heard that the South was about to become a monarchy to get help from the British. At that my understanding is that at the beginning they expected British help as Britain was so dependent on cotton that they couldn't afford to not get involved. Instead the British seeing the war coming stocked up on cotton, planted it in other places such as India to assure a supply and stubbornly remained neutral.
What the Fathers of Confederation were scared of was the American Norths war machine turning north and annexing the British N. American colonies so they formed a Confederation to be stronger and attempted to work around what they saw as weaknesses in the American system of the time.