Okay, they got the Nazi thing wrong. But they definitely got the Scientology thing RIGHT.

Almost all animals will do this. Some nutball recently tried to release a family of zoo-raised apes back into the wild in Africa. The second they encountered a rival male and his females, the wild-raised male killed the zoo ape and his offspring and took his females as his own.

Nature is ugly. Humans may be the best killers, but we're FAR from the most brutal, remorseless, or vicious ones.

No, mostly because we like to eat meat and survive. And killing your prey with tools is a shit-ton lot easier than having to hunt it down and do it by hand. The ability to defend that meat against other primates who didn't have tools was just a nice bonus.

How the fuck am I supposed to get my daily "Pontiff's Postings" and "Cardinal Glick's Fav Flicks" newsletters now, you Turk cocksuckers??

If they'll forcibly ground the Presidential plane from a sizable country, do you really think they wouldn't stoop to trumping up some rape charges and put a little pressure on Sweden too?

The problem is that we don't just use fossil fuels for fueling our cars and power pants. It makes the polymers used in almost every electrical component. It fuels the industrial mining of almost every metal and mineral used in those components (good luck hand-panning for rare earth minerals, or removing millions of tons of earth using only steam engines). It fuels the entire shipping industry that moves everything around (enabling modern industrial processing of raw materials).

Oil and coal do a fuckload lot more these days than make gasoline for our little cars and run our power plants. That's just the obvious use that most of us see every day. Odds are that every single thing your own today is either made from petrochemicals or somehow heavily dependent on them. I myself own exactly one piece of wood furniture made by a local artisan and a few books left by my great-grandmother that may be exceptions to this. Everything else was shipped using petrol, created with coal-based power, or contains petrochemical based polymers. Even the food I eat is mostly shipped in from large farms and ranches in another part of the country.

It goes much deeper than that. Even something as basic as modern wiring has become heavily dependent on petrochemicals and oil. We would have to relearn a whole new way of making wires with old-fashioned rubber insulation and hand-mined copper. And that's the SIMPLEST thing. Every single component that goes into modern electrical components is heavily dependent on petroleum. We used diesel powered machinery to mine for all the metals. We use petrochemicals and oil dependent polymers to make the insulators and many other parts. To construct a modern electrical grid without petroleum would require a complete re-engineering of our entire manufacturing infrastructure from the ground up (with engineers having to rethink almost almost everything they know).

To a 19th century standard of living, absolutely! To a late-20th/early-21st century standard of living, probably not.

It sure seems to be winning them a lot of disaffected teenage losers from the West lately, though I dare say this benefit pales in comparison with all the money that our "friend" Saudi Arabia is sending them.

I doubt any Apple execs know what the phrase "doing the right thing" even means.

I hear it's almost as large as the manufacturing plants where they make all of Apple's devices and computers.

It's also easy to be poor when you sit on your ass at the beach all day and won't get a job.

Yeah, my first thought when reading this story was that whoever was building that observatory didn't know that any building project in Hawaii has to start with a big bribe to the natives.

I used to live in Hawaii. And I can tell you that native Hawaiians are always bitching. They also live on the beach and have nothing better to do all day than bitch, moan, and protest shit. It's just what they do.

Even if U.S. STEM grads could get work, H1B's artificially drive down the wages so much that they wouldn't get paid shit even if they found work.

It's like farm labor back in the 90's in my hometown. When I was in high school and college (early 90's), you could make good money cutting tobacco for local farmers during the summer. They paid $7/hr. back when the minimum wage was around $3. A few years after that I went back to my hometown and asked some old buddies if they still cut tobacco in the summers. They told me that all the local farmers had started hiring illegals. And now all the tobacco cutting jobs only paid $4/hr.