Well, all I know about them is what I hear on the news, including Fox (I hit Google News every morning). Of course, they could all be real Christians, just woefully misguided.

This is a definition of a free market that even Adam Smith would not have recognized. It was not regulation per se that he was opposed to, but mercantilism and state granted monopolies. He looked favorably regulations which protected workmen (citation Wealth of Nations I.10.121). He was also in favor of regulating banks where their actions endanger society, even at the expense of curtailing natural liberties (citation: Wealth fo Nations II.2.94
).

The free market is free of price or supplier choice regulations. It's not necessarily free of regulation per se, such as regulations of weights and measures, of worker or consumer safety, or even of public morality (e.g. drugs and prostitution).

In any case you can't use the actions of states to indict the federal government for hypocrisy, although there is plenty of other material for that.

While I agree that kids need downtime, a two or two-and-a-half month break means schools waste time refreshing material they've forgotten at the start of the year. If the summer break were shorter you could give kids *more* vacation, more frequently through the year.

A typical US school years is 180 days or 36 weeks. This leave 16 weeks off, of which about two are holidays. This leaves 14 weeks of vacation, of which it's customary to divide up into three one week vacations and one eleven week vacation.

You could give kids four weeks off in January and July, and eight one week vacations distributed through the rest of the year mostly coinciding with holidays.

Only if you define "conservativism" to be "Godless, quasi-aristocratic swine"

That describes Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, etc, none of whom seem any more spiritual to me than the religious leaders who had Jesus executed.

No, it doesn't say that at all. The conservatives were trying to "to catch him in his words" and get him to say something against Roman law, and asked him directly if one should pay taxes. "Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give?"

Roman tax collectors were corrupt, they were thieves, and people hated them. The Jewish religion demanded animal sacrifice.

"But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar's. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Mark 12:14-17) There wasn't a word about the futility of life (That would be the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind")

The cost *is* minimal, since they aren't actually doing anything about the byproducts these days. The folks in Nevada who wanted to store that stuff in Yucca Mountain are still working on that plan, while the nasty stuff itself sits on the power plant properties in temporary storage. Paralysis costs nothing (as long as there's no disaster on a power plant site).

I'm not going to deny that people have been herded for centuries in the name of Christianity; however, I would point out that a reading of the actual words of Jesus of Nazareth (a Jew's Jew) does not require such. In fact, the Gospel, as written, drives quite a different direction.

Indeed. I, for one, don't understand "conservative Christians" because Jesus was decidedly liberal, while the men who demanded his torture and execution were conservatives.

Examples of Jesus' politics...
Taxes: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"
Free health care: He supplied it himself.
Free education: He supplied that as well.
Free food? Ditto. All things that today's conservatives rail against.
"The Meek shall inherit the Earth" but I have yet to see a meek televangelist. Those guys are exactly like the Jewish church leaders who hated Jesus for exposing their hypocrisy.

It depends on whether the particles are accumulating faster than they are leaving the system. If the figures we're talking about represent an equilibrium that will continue indefinitely into the future, surely we are not doomed. But if the concentration of particles is increasing and people need to do something about this before it becomes a problem, we might be.

Eventually something's going to get our species. Either changes in the Sun will make the Earth uninhabitable to anything recognizably human, or we'll do ourselves in before then.

Thanks, just did a little checking and it appears the Kindle doesn't support ePub, so I've added Amazon's AZW3. Actually, it looks like since Mars, Ho! will be an Amazon eBook, AZW3 will probably be the "officially" supported version.

Here are AZW3s for the two finished ones:
Nobots
The Paxil Diaries

I just now updated my web site to add these.

Amazon gets $.99, so I'll get a dollar and a penny from each sale. It will probably be quite a while before I'm done editing "Mars", though.

Well, it probably makes no difference to the clean-up, but it does add to the take-away lessons from the disaster. It's an ongoing theme that TEPCO knew less about what was going on at the time than they thought or led us to believe. You have to set that against the overall good news that the failsafe designs of even this relatively primitive reactor mostly contained the accident. The principles of engineering are sound; management, not so much; at least not in a disaster.

What's your favorite eBook format? What reader are you using?

It just happens to be denominated in dollars.

You don't seriously think when the Fed decides to add a trillion dollars to the US money supply that they call up the Treasury Department and tell them to fire up the printing presses? There's only about $4000 of physical currency for every US citizen, and a majority of the physical currency is being held overseas.

Most dollars "exist" as part of aggregate numbers sitting in databases. There's no reason to create an elaborate cryptographic algorithm for identifying each individual unit of currency for a centrally controlled money supply. The whole bitcoin thing, the interesting thing about it, is an attempt to create decentralized money.