How will the troops live without lutefisk?

The problem with all of those is that there are a limited number of locales where they can work well, and all of them except for geothermal are transient. That means power storage, which means batteries, which means toxic chemical waste. It may or may not be as dangerous on a per-volume basis as nuclear waste (someone more knowledgeable than me would have to answer that), but there would certainly be a hell of a lot more of it.

I presume they mean the Holtzman Effect.

"Learn about this one weird bug that Verizon doesn't want you to know!"

In a fundamental sense, aren't all weapons used against chemicals? Well, except weapons used against energy beings, I guess.

I don't exactly smile when paying my property tax, but it's probably the one I dislike the least, especially when it comes to the funding of law-enforcement agencies. How well I view a given such agency is more or less inversely-proportional to how many people are within their jurisdiction. For instance, when I lived in California, my encounters (both when being stopped myself, and when I was a passenger in someone else's car who was being stopped) with the local suburb's PD or the county sheriffs were quite reasonable and understanding, while those with the California Highway Patrol were very negative. After moving to Vegas, the local vs. state quality difference has held true, though it's much less striking, and the Nevada Highway Patrol seem much nicer guys than the CHP -- but then, Nevada is a much smaller state than California, so that fits the "bigger = worse" pattern. As to the federal-level agencies like the DEA and the BATF, I'd disband almost all of them in an instant, and limit the FBI to providing support (fx. forensics) and coordination to more-local agencies.

Famous but probably-apocryphal conversation between a visiting German general and his Swiss counterpart, prior to WW2:

German: How many men are under your command?
Swiss: I can mobilize one million men in less than twenty-four hours.
German: What would happen if I marched five million men through that pass tomorrow?
Swiss: I would call up my men. Each man would fire five shots. Then I would send them home.

They were doing similar things even during WWII. JFK's older brother Joe Jr. was killed along with another crewman in a mishap with an explosives-loaded B-24 Liberator. They were supposed to get the plane airborne, arm it, then bail out, but the explosives (equivalent to about 14kt) went off prematurely.

Trusting government is generally a worse idea. Remind me again, was it Exxon or BP that was setting off above-ground nuclear explosions, a while back? Heck, mushroom clouds from the Nevada desert tests were such a common sight in Las Vegas that one of the casinos (the Stardust) had a sign partly inspired by them.

Yes, I would rather live longer and die from those things than to die earlier from malnutrition or related problems.

I'm sure having readily-available food has caused average weight to rise, but I'm skeptical about how much of a factor that is compared to reduction in exercise. Until quite recently (in the evolutionary and historical scheme of things), humans have had to burn a lot of calories just to stay alive -- food, shelter, and protection all required heavy exercise to acquire, produce, and/or maintain. Even after the advent of agriculture, the vast majority of the population spent their time doing manual labor to grow food, and the rest of the population tended to do manual labor that was just as intensive. Staying alive required you to plow a field, or chop wood, or haul stones, etc. Today, most of us here on Slashdot (and a lot of other people around us) gain our food, shelter, and protection by making little motions with our fingers, talking, and every so often moving a short distance within a building. We don't have to exercise to survive (in the day-to-day sense). Exercise is something we have to deliberately seek out.

Shorter version: I think the problem is more our lack of caloric output than our excessive caloric input.

Until human beings cease to be mortal, by definition something will be killing us in vast numbers. And unless those causes of death are evenly spread out, some things will always be glaring problems compared to everything else. All we can do is change what those things are, and hopefully make them happen later in life.

Or an inability on your part to back up your views with facts and logic. As close as I can tell, what you consider "tangential and irrelevant" is the questioning of your underlying assumptions. "Everyone knows X is true, therefore Y is true." "Err, X isn't true, for these reasons." "That's irrelevant, we're talking about Y."

That is itself a claim. Back it up, please.

Enjoy straining definitions to the point where they can cover anything you don't like, and enjoy begging the question. Also, enjoy apparently being unable to address any of my criticism of your views.

If by "feminism" you mean "women should have the same legal rights as men", then I wouldn't call that feminism, I'd just call it not being misogynist. We don't call someone who opposes discrimination against blacks an "Africanamericanist." But if by "feminist" you mean the beliefs like "the Patriarchy deliberately oppresses women" and "all men are rapists" of the Andrea Dworkin crowd, forget it. There are many women whom I admire, but academic feminists are not among them. I'd give a thousand Naomi Wolfs or Susan Faludis for one Margaret Thatcher or Anousheh Ansari.

I absolutely do, but there are two things I've noticed over the years. First, women who oppose abortion tend to be far, far more vehement about it than men who oppose it, and second, the women who shout "objectification! sexist! demeaning!" the most loudly also tend to be nasty and hateful towards women who receive such attention and don't object. One instance from a previous job sticks in my mind. Our front-desk receptionist (call her Alice) had a boyfriend (call him Bob) who worked in tech support. The tech receptionist (call her Candace) tended to wear short skirts and such, to the obvious approval of the (all male at the time) techs. Alice, angry that Bob's eyes might be wandering, complained to our HR director whom she was friends with (call her Debbie), who immediately instituted a more-restrictive dress code. Candace, presumably finding the atmosphere around the place rather uncomfortable, left shortly afterwards. Most ideological feminists would have complained that Bob and the other techs were "generating a hostile work environment", but to me that much better describes Alice and Debbie's actions.

Among people in the Grievance Studies majors and similar folks prone to using terms like "objectification" and "<something>-justice", yes. In the real world, not so much.

Perhaps they're implying it, and perhaps you're merely inferring it. There is a difference, and people of the above-mentioned mindset tend both to ignore or to not realize the difference, and to be downright eager to detect it if they aren't already to the point where they see it in everything 24/7 already.

It's not sexism, because an -ism is a belief system. What belief system were the two Australian guys espousing, beyond the perfectly-normal "I like boobs"? Unless you're a telepath (in which case, contact James Randi and collect your million dollars), the evil beliefs you might attribute to the speakers are going to be conjured from your brain and from others who also carry the "men who openly express attraction to women they find attractive, are bad" meme.

And yes, I mean normal. Most of the things men and women find attractive about members of the opposite sex are cues about how good of a job that person will do in enabling you to produce healthy offspring that will survive to adulthood. Your viewpoint is the sexual equivalent of veganism -- an attempt to impose a behavior pattern completely contrary to human nature.