"maybe the US flag is also racist? "

Maybe it is. Do you think so? The "don't tread on me" flag was raised by slave holders to fight other slave holders because they were getting taxed too hard. The confederate battle flag was raised by slave holders to fight non-slaveholders because those non-slaveholders elected a president who wouldn't let slavery spread into the western territories. The racism there is a bit more direct.

Of course the relationship between southerners and the flag is complicated, but whether the flag should be flown, or whether they should be proud of it is not complicated in anyway. The Southern states committed treason, started a war, and murdered hundreds of thousands of american soldiers. They did this because they saw the writing on the wall. They knew that without slavery's spread, the end of slavery was near at hand in the United States.

Yes, there's a strong heritage there. A heritage of a monumental mistake for an evil cause that lead to mass murder on an industrial scale. After 150 years of white washing in the schools, and speechifying, and saying "it's complicated", it's time just say what really happened.

Southerners don't think about it much because it's not talked about, but the North, from The great lakes east all the way up to Maine have their own heritage, too, and they have note forgotten it.

The battle flag of traitors and terrorists who murdered hundreds of thousands of american soldiers!? That battle flag?

I guess it's good to see Republicans trying to disown it.

Americans also don't whine. Make your own damn site. Jesus Christ.

There are all kinds of things going on in a beehive besides bees stinging and making honey. The bees spend a fair amount of time keeping out undesirable organisms.

The real question is, if human beings never existed, would bumble bees have developed intelligence and civilization, as no other species filled that niche.

This really gets to the heart of the debate.

Most slashdotters are already married to their computers.

That harmonica

Recently a friend passed away. He knew he was dying, had no family, and wanted to donate all his fortune (a few million). He spent his last months researching which charities actually did a lot of good for the money. In the end, he could only find four. He split his estate equally among them.

Unfortunately I cannot remember three of them, but one of them was Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders). He was a smart guy. Worked for Nasa doing risk analysis among other cool jobs.

In most species adults die off after reproducing, probably because it helps evolution if all the old experiments are cleanly washed away.

This is pretty incoherent. The authors of the Constitution were rightly afraid of corruption in government power, but their solution, as you point out, was to set government power in opposition to itself.

This still doesn't address the problem that good government comes from people governing well, not from more or less of a quantity of "government". Thinking along those terms is merely replacing the relevant question with a nonsensical one.

That's not what revelation means.

"Most people learn what they were taught and then grow from there. "

Most people learn how major discoveries in science were reached. This is above and beyond learning of just the results of the discovery.

"Thus, scientific understanding is very much built upon the shoulders of giants just as religious beliefs are."

Giants aren't necessary for religion and are unwanted anyway, since there isn't anywhere for them to stand.

  "IMO, the only conflict between those two philosophies lies in the minds and hearts of those who reject religion. "

The history of science is a centuries long displacement of religion as the dominant mode of thought. The conflict, such as it is, is an utter rout. It's just slower moving than anything you can follow, apparently. It's also still on-going. How many people still believe in a soul? Almost everyone, I expect. Probably about the same fraction of people who believed humans were created and not evolved in 1850.

"So spare me the "scientists know it all" mantra. Science without morals and ethics is just a path to destruction."

Strawman much?

"National Socialism and Communism as examples of political systems driven almost exclusively by scientific considerations"

Quite the contrary. Like most political leaders, they were enthusiastic about scientific concepts that fit their world view, but Nazis and Communists were extremely antagonistic to any science which might threaten it.

The most scientific oriented government, both in policy and origin, is undoubtedly the modern democracies, created by men who were careful to study the flaws of the powerful, to account for them, and to allow for change should future generations gain more wisdom on the subject.

You write like government is a thing to be weighed and parceled out instead of an activity people do.

These kind of events often follow a power law for how bad they get. It's notoriously (maybe impossible) to guess the magnitude of a power law event in advance. Also, my guess is they are not able to accurately account for adaptation in behavior of normal people in the disease zone. That's the sort of factor that will almost by definition be under-predicted.

Declaring bankruptcy is a time honored American tradition, and a good one.