Of course it was not complimentary to them -- they are exactly the boring, stubborn, bothering people we all like to complain about. But at least they managed to get the human society running, though with all the hickups, misconceptions, errors and catastrophes that are typical for humans.

The argument against Ayn Rand's philosophy is Douglas Adams' story of the people from Golgafrincham as told in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Class A people try to get rid of all those people that make their life miserable(*) by insisting on rules and procedures and regulations, and to keep only the serfs and drones just like John Galt who withdraws to his island in an attempt to throw out all those pesky socialists out of his life.

The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.

(*) For Class A values of "miserable"

You seem to fail to grasp the difference between criminal law and common law. Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal law concept and doesn't exist in common law. There the general benchmark is preponderance of evidence. And here we have a common law case.

Which is just the same as keeping religion (or church) and state separate. Thanks for supporting.

Making paper out of wood pulp became economic in 1843, when Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a machine to produce groundwood to make paper. The oldest still existing groundwood paper plant was built in 1882 and is located in Verla, Finland.

I wonder what Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; means then. It is probably about Congress giving priviledges to some religions while reigning into the exercise of others and forcing religion down everyone's throat including that of atheists.

The modern image of the angels is a missunderstanding of the greek word angelos, which actually means messenger. An angel surely is not a guardian. While sometimes the Bible mentiones God sending some of his guardians (the seraphim) to earth as messengers, they went there to deliver a message, not to protect someone or fight on your side or whatever. So whoever believes in angels as guardians, his belief is definitely not based on the Bible.

If ever a fault it's still that of the GOP if they can't get their stuff together that just a few switching democrats can flip their primaries.

All your gripes might somehow be true, but are they really a problem? About 100 years ago, everyone knew how to grow their own food. About 50 years ago, everyone know how to cook their own food. Today, to many of us, the knowledge has reduced to how to buy your own food -- and even this gets more complicated with all the warning labels, ingredient lists and dietary requirements.

My car has tire pressure sensors, yes. I have no problems with that. It's a leased car anyway, and the tires are part of the leasing contract. Sometimes after a change, I have to reset the pressure sensor after a few hundred miles. And that's all I have to do about tire maintenance. I'm happy with that, I don't like doing tire maintenance.

If the selfdriving cars become affordable, I'll buy one. I drive with as many automatics as possible right now anyway. Cruise control? Speed limiter? Yeah! I really like those. Sometimes I even adjust speed by changing the settings on these rather than using the pedals. Every repetitive task the car can do itself I don't need to do. And keeping the current speed or getting down from 65 mph to 55 mph because of a speed limit is a boring task I don't want to be involved in more than necessary. I know that makes the car very sophisticated, much more sophisticated than I'll be willing to learn -- I have other things to do, which I like more. And weight gained? My car does 50 mpg. That's what the bord computer tells me after 8000 miles. It includes city driving and long distances and many steep mountain roads. The weight went into large glas sheets, into better crash protection features and a few little amenities like air condition. I'm ok with that.

This is was TFA is about - the french version of BuzzFeed didn't get much clicks for cat videos (about 40,000 was mentioned in the article for the BuzzFeed top stories), while articles about politics were shared much more often.

So a clickbait site in France would have to provide those political stories to get enough clicks.

Because there are people out there using some scientific results to further their agenda, it makes sense to deny the scientific results. And because some of the people apparently have stated things of a completely different topic in a way that can be construed to be not fully true, it is more reason to deny the scientific results. Yeah. Makes sense. Don't accept any results, because there might be someone whose political agenda might be furthered by the result. Deny the fact that high speed lead bullets entering the body might be bad for the health because it could be used to ask for gun control! Deny the fact that double speed means four times the length needed for a complete stop because people might use it to ask for speed limits! And because some people have not fully supported views about the role of meat in your metabolism, better deny the economic problems with anti-competitive behavior of monopolistic companies, because some of the vegetarians might as for the enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation!

The thesis was that after the Great Oxygenation Event 2.1 billion years ago, multicellular life appeared, but when the oxygen levels sank again, it died out without leaving traces. So it was not pressure from future life forms, but from the abiotic conditions that caused the dead-end.

The banches of life appearing during the Franceville era weren't less viable than the ones appearing in the Ediacara fauna. If oxygene levels today would drop below 10%, multicellular life would probably be as endangered than it was 2.1 billion years ago.

What is much more interesting (and widely underreported) is that the Cambrian Explosion was neither an explosion -- we had the Ediacara fauna before --, nor was the Ediacara fauna the first multicellar life on earth.

There have been multicellar livings before, like the Gabonionta, about 2.1 billion years ago, which existed for about 200 million years and have died out again.

You as a Westerner are surely taught: Yes, only the freedom you earn for yourself is true freedom. You might earn it by overthrowing your oppressors or you may earn it by fending off the attempts to take your freedom. And we have seen again and again: Freedom that was brought from somewhere else didn't stay very long. Despite the claims of many ideologues, you can't export freedom. Yes, you can lead by example. Yes, you can overthrow an oppressor. But for a group of people to stay free they have to be able to earn their freedom themselves.

Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.

But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.

If anyone in the U.S. is really interested in what helped to tear down the Wall, look at Helsinki and at the Helsinki Final Act. All the discussions and dissents in the former Communist bloc were based on the Helsinki Final Act, and on the signatures the East European countries put under the agreement on free speech and free travel. This is, what fueled the hope and the struggle. Not a propaganda show by the U.S. president who was in the same moment talking bad about the very documents that were so dear and important to us.