1) Why do teachers always rank as an all important metric? There are good teachers and bad teachers.. even lousy teachers, there's nothing that special about their profession compared to many others. They are not beneficent deities, shaping our future via our children, though the rhetoric would have you believe that. It's just another angle for the whole, "think of the children" routine.
2) My sister-in-law is a teacher for a high school in NJ, and makes over $80k a year. And that's for 9 months out of the year. I just don't see public school teachers who belong to the NJEA doing all that badly. Private catholic school teachers maybe, but public teachers in a union have it pretty good around here.

or Syndrome, defeating the Incredibles.
Anyway, I'm not aware of many other instances where particles wink in and out of existence (virtual particles)

The zero point field?

We're in agreement there, political journalism has gotten so yellow it looks like it's got a terminal case of jaundice. But when Obama stated his administration would be more transparent, it was in the context of the laws and executive orders he would sign/pass, the initiatives he would undertake regarding defense, the wars, the Patriot Act, the economy, and that's how most of us understood it. That's the important stuff of actual consquence. If the media wants to go all tabloid, that's on them, but I don't believe it absolves Obama from essentially reneging on his campaign rhetoric.

No, "explicit" counter example is a strawman. No one seriously fucking cares about the first lady's workout schedule, that has no bearing whatsoever on the running of this country. That's not the kind of transparency we're talking about and you know it.

Great, so he can tell us all about his golf score, but cover up actually significant stuff, the political shannigans? - y'know, the shit that actually matters, like he'd said he'd do when he campaigned for office. The only ones who care about pointless handwaving personal details are the tabloids.

BeOS? Wow.. I haven't heard a mention of that OS in over ten years, blast from the past.
I would be game for this change: where HBO is concerned, I only care to watch Game of Thrones, and I don't see the point of paying for a full subscription for one show, because nothing else interests me, honestly (well, True Blood, but that's over now). But then I have to wait, and be a year behind everyone else in buying the BluRay when it's finally released.

Technically, hazardous waste can still be used as a weapon though. I have a neighbor two doors down who was in Iraq during the Iraq war, and said they'd even found yellow cake uranium.

Wow.. just, massive logic fail. That's not even a comparison. Advocating for the right to make your own choice regarding your life is nothing like being forced to kill yourself. I guess here we see some insight into the twisted perceptions of greenpeace whackos.

Well, ultimately, yes, they are. Tacitly for now, more explicitly in the future.

This. Exxon used to be called Esso, I remember the gas station downtown as a kid, and the big sign.. and the old coke machine too.

Politically, I'm probably similar to you, (personally I lean slightly right yet am not pro-life, and anti-contraception is just insanely stupid, but hey, catholics) but I never got why using contraception requires special education and how that's an excuse. How friggin' hard is it to put on a condom, insert a diaphragm, or get birth control pills from a doctor? That requires lessons??
Or is that someone is that clueless or stupid that they are totally unaware that sex can cause pregnancy- in which case we may have even more serious problems. You'd have to be cut off from the Internet, TV, classmates and friends, and live in a bubble. I don't buy it. I don't think the problem is (lack of) education, it's just simple willful disregard. And to be fair, I remember well what raging hormones feels like, so I can sort of understand how the heat of the moment trumps their better sense in some cases.

Hollywood hasn't had a habit recently of depicting military brass as having any heart. Maybe a rebel, lower down in rank, but usually the military is depicted as shoot first ask questions later knuckle dragging neanderthals.

This was the example I going to bring up, Star Trek TNG was all about how great technology would make life.
Up until a point though; from what I've read, after a few seasons, they started to realize this was a bit too "pie in the sky", and this is precisely why the Borg were introduced to the show, to illustrate that even technology can have a dark side.

Sorry, that's faulty thinking, and belies the underying issue with such ideology. Nothing like that can simply fix human nature, and until we evolve further, become less self-centered, less egotistical, less fanatical, etc.. that won't change.
Technology is not a panacea, it's a tool, like any other in the sense that it can be used for good or evil at the whim of human nature.