Rule one: once the US has declared a country their enemy that country becomes very cautious. Some defensive sabre rattling but no adventures.

This I can agree with. The fact that North Korea gets the blame is a political process that has little to do with truth but a lot to do with people thinking it's in their interest to go along with it. It doesn't mean people have some secret knowledge about what happened. For some it's an external scapegoat for others it's useful to pin it on the enemy, for some it's just automatic.

When something is pinned on the bad guy(Saddam, Assad,Qadaffi, Iran,Putin) there is very little motivation to challenge that. I know many cases where it's almost certainly wrong but it still has a huge impact on history. And often it assumes suicidal and evil attitudes from the bad guy rather than self interest. In other words people's brains switch to cartoon level.

Bollocks. It was some kind of internal conflict until everyone decided they'd be better off by blaming North Korea. Which is standard fare really. We've got a long tradition of accusing our enemies of just about anything when it suits us and then meting out endless punishment for it. And feeling very justified in it too.

The New Yorker has very good factcheckers. Maybe they don't work on everything (they don't, articles that get them in trouble get priority) but their reputation on factchecking is excellent.

well, graphene lends itself especially well to hype. Yet another addition to its extensive array fascinating properties.

The main problem is not whether they're really good guys. The main problem is that when a system of checks and balances gets skewed you don't even need really bad guys to make the system turn ugly.

I would not reduce someone like Eric Schmidt to someone who's just in it for the money. This underestimates how ideology and interests tend to blend. I suspect that for someone like Schmidt working together with the NSA just feels morally right. And people who want to hide things from the NSA well, they're doing something they oughtn't to be doing.

They will be immediately forced to hand over everything and be silent about it.

Who says they need to be forced? They'll protect their interests but they seem to be fully in sync with the state. You know, the good guys.

Careful though. After a few cases of spontaneous human combustion scientists admitted their fat burning pills may still need some adjustment.

So how do we know for certain that this so called expert wasn't put here by Roko's basilisk so enable it? Hm? Hm?

This is missing the point. The legality always mattered. If you keep torture strictly illegal the CIA still does it but in only few cases or in foreign countries while avoiding direct involvement.All with a good amount of fluctuations of course.

But after 2001 it was made clear that the rules were going to be made as loose as possible and supervision was going to be minimal. So everyone went all out. NSA, CIA, security firms, everything.

the sentence CIA Lied Over Brutal Interrogations felt redundant and I got the idea of removing the tautological elements word by word but each time I ended up with an empty sentence. I had to start over 3 times before I realized I had to keep the first word.

Why is it that astrophysicists always think that biogenesis and evolution have to come at the point of a comet or asteroid?

I also think this is a persistent and not very justified pattern of thinking. The hypothesis is a legitimate subject for investigation, but to quote an old post of mine: there's this assumption that the earth needed some kind of external kickstarter to get life going which originates in the conception that there was no way life could start from scratch so it had to come from elsewhere.

Let's take the idea seriously instead that the earth never needed the external kickstarter. Instead, and that any potential external kickstarter would have been drowned out by what's already present.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

That would suggest those people all have in common that doubts inhibit action, and that they just have different and not very good approaches to resolving that conflict. The best way is have action without removing the doubts.

And that is relevant for the climate change debate. Because for instance a blocker is "nothing can be done unless we agree there is human made climate change". But you don't need to be blocked by that and the engineering approach that for instance Freeman Dyson advocates(global soil management) does not rely on proof that humans are the cause or even that the climate predictions will all come true. It just offers control over whatever happens.

I checked that for one of the previous posts: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2... lists the declination and ascension of its axis of rotation so the wobble must be modest.

And here's asteroid Toutasis. It wobbles. http://www.solarviews.com/raw/...