The distances only seem insurmountable because of the limit of human life spans. If we could develop a way to extend our life span indefinitely, then taking a trip to another star might be an interesting 50,000 year vacation.

Yes, it is difficult. Corporations are owned and operated by flesh-and-blood human beings. Anyone who owns stock is an owner of a corporation and practically all of us are employees of corporations. If I make a political statement, am I expressing my own opinion or the opinion that my corporation pays me to express? If I get paid $100k/year and just happen to give $50k/year to political candidates, am I making political contributions based on my personal beliefs or am I a bagman for the corporation I work for?

Creating a campaign and funding it themselves is practically the definition of a PAC. That's what the Citizens United controversy is all about. It does nothing to mitigate the problem of a candidate being indebted to a collective that helps get them elected.

Even if you fund campaigns from public money, what's to stop an unaffiliated party from expressing political views that may influence voter decisions? Are you going to ban Micheal Moore or Jon Steward from making political statements in the media? That's what the Citizens United decision was really about.

Those are fine slogans for a bumper sticker, but difficult boundaries to make into enforceable law. You have to walk a fine line between closing every possible loophole and still protecting legitimate free speech. I have yet to hear any proposal that would actually achieve that balance.

When elections are won or lost based a few percentage points, then giving a 8.7% boost to a campaign can certainly sway the outcome.

A single paper with a novel result is just the beginning of the scientific process. If someone published a paper that claims X kills cancer cells in vitro, then the next step is to check if X kills cancer cells in mice. If the original paper is bogus, then follow up research is unlikely to yield any results. So the original paper doesn't get any citations and the next time that researcher makes a similar claim, they will be met with more skepticism.

It's true that the system can be gamed in the short run. And sometimes someone can be game it enough to get tenure. But without follow up and citations, they'll just end up in academic limbo of being an associate professor with no funding.

The follow-up papers aren't just repeating the previous experiment, but building on it. If I publish a paper that claims a method that accelerates stem cell development, that might get a splashy publication. But if other people try the method and their stem cells die, they're not going to cite my paper. Next time I submit a paper on stem cell development, someone who got burned using my previous method might be on the panel of reviewers and they won't take a favorable view.

There's never a point where someone officially stamps the work as "wrong", but unreproducible results gradually end up in the dust bin.

Sad to see someone swear off temptation and not even make it to the end of the sentence before giving in.

How convenient that everything that disagrees with your narrow worldview is propaganda.

The concept of states keeping the Federal government in check hasn't been relevant since the Civil War, which demonstrated why the concept was flawed in the first place.

As for education, we have the most educated populace is the history of this nation. The college graduation rate today is twice as high as the literacy rate was 1820.

When Socrates talked about a Republic, he was thinking of governing a city of about 150,000 people. Looking to him for answers of how to govern a continent spanning country of 300 million people is exactly the scaling problem GP is talking about.

In that particular instance, the alien battle fleet ran away as part of their ruse. The Doctor's arrogance was used against him.

There are a lot of complaints you can level at new NuWho, particularly deus ex machina resolutions, but the writing is a tad more sophisticated than you seem to think.

That mechanism has already failed. Modern scientific research is so expensive that even tenured professors have to carter to the whims of funding agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) in order to continue working. Intellectually autonomy doesn't keep the rat colony alive, pay the electric bill for servers or purchase chemical reagents.

You're dealing with a self-selected sample set. Of course, the ones who seek help are not homeless by choice. But some of the most visible "homeless" are Rastafarian twenty-somethings pan-handling in front of trendy bars.

Just because a college education is free to the student doesn't mean that admission standards have to be lowered.

I have to agree. This is a 3 minute cartoon that was stretched out over much longer for no particular reason. Nothing that would be considered 'epic'.