Why do you feel you have to defend yourself against accusations like this? Have they been leveled at you? Perhaps if they have, you should "defend" yourself by knocking that shit off?

Well, AC, the answer to that question entirely depends on when you stopped beating your wife.

Smallpox sent in soldiers to burn crops and kill women and children in villages? Wiped out entire tribes or forced them to travel hundreds of miles on death marches?

I trust you'll be relieved to read this paper: Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric

Reading? How'd you manage to take all those propaganda electives at Imperialist Psychopath High School without nailing down basic reading comprehension? Nobody's talking about infecting tribes with smallpox but you and your fellow genocide excuser, HornWumpus. Smallpox wasn't paying bounties on the scalps taken from natives with a "discount" for children under the age of 12. Smallpox didn't send the cavalry off to massacre tribes that had been allies, much less ones that fought back in response to having their land and lives taken by force.

And which "holocaust" was that? You'll have to be more explicit about which faÃade you are referring to.

Doubling down on insulting your own intelligence as well as mine? The formation and expansion of the United States was impossible without the organized mass slaughter of any native tribe that dared to try and hold onto their lands in the face of colonialist aggression.

Are you perchance "rabidly anti-Zionist"? You certainly seem to have a sort of European slant to your thinking on these matters.

You mean you'd like to deflect from your racist colonialism and imperalism. Too bad, as I am always for the oppressed: the Seminoles that were first slaughtered by the Spanish and then English settlers; the Africans taken as slaves, the Jews that were forced into ghettos by the Popes; the Palestinians murdered by Zionists wanting their lands. I am always against the oppressor: the rich taking all the land and charging rent from the poor; the slavemaster; the Inquisition; the IDF occupation that has even used starvation as a collective punishment alongside it's many many other crimes against humanity.

Which is why I have a problem with you, cold fjord: you are one evil fuck who makes it his personal business to defend the worst actions of humanity.

To make solar cost competitive with fossil fuels you have to do some massive number fudging

False.

by exaggerating the cost of every single externality beyond all logical bounds

You mean "count them at all". Every penny in solar must be counted, from mining materials through installation. But the side effects of fossil fuels - ones that have been with us for some time now, not future hypotheticals - are discounted. Floods, droughts, fires, famine, pollution - are not allowed into the storyline.

As I said, I'm talking about other people that have kids, Slick. People that use "because I said so" at the end of the conversation instead of at the beginning, because they know they're raising kids and not robots.

Which (gasp) didn't exist when I was a child and yet somehow we managed without.

And (gasp) cars only got 15 mpg back then so why would anyone (gasp) want something with (gasp) higher mileage today? Gasp gasp gasp gasp!

The first vehicles recognizable as a modern minivan came on the market in 1984 and I was close to driving age by then.

And for thousands of years people got around by horseback. WYFP.

We owned an econoline van when

Yuppie snobs for not driving a bus, which predate the ecoline by decades!

A minivan is a convenience for hauling a family, not a necessity.

Your choices for hauling more than 5-6 people with gear are a van, a three row SUV, or two vehicles. But maybe taking two 30 mpg cars instead of a single 25 mpg vehicle makes more sense in this willfully obtuse bubble of snobbery you've constructed.

A tip usually isn't enough for a search warrant. ...which would require an arrest warrant, with an even higher burden of proof, and a prosecutor that thinks they can make a case on more than just a few pictures of you not even taken in your house. That's not very Scottish, either.

Except cops and prosecutors do worse than that, with less evidence to start with, on a regular basis. With "tips" based on information the cops either made up or acquired illegally, and the judge signs off on the warrant using the "confidential informant" excuse.

Except that was the point to begin with: warrants are limited in scope for a reason.

Which (gasp) you don't need to do if you have, say......a minivan. And it's still odd that you chuckle at people saying they need a van immediately after laying out reasons why some people need a pickup instead of an SUV.

netflix listened to customer feedback when they tried to spin off their disc rentals to another company. so call them and give them feedback. they are easy to reach by phone. if you dont complain to them please dont whine on slashdot

Whining about whining. It's not likely that Netflix is announcing this degradation in service with a great deal of fanfare or customer notification, so at least a portion of those customer service phone calls will not happen without said Netflix customer reading about this change from a different source.

Like Slashdot.

Every time some authoritarian parent is questioned about their actions, the first thing out of their mouths is "well, do you have kids?"

you can rest assured that they've never had any children or taken care of them for any length of time

Or they assuredly have, which is why they can tell that the three year old isn't necessarily the one being childish, stubborn, selfish or petty.

A Jeep Grand Cherokee with the diesel option will get around 30mpg on the highway and seat up to 7.

Unfortunately, a third row seat is not an option on the Cherokee, so the max seating is five. Unfortunate because the engine provides good towing capacity in addition to mileage, so it would be nice if Chrysler made it an option for the Durango, which does have a third row.

I kind of laugh when I hear people say they "need" a minivan. Amazing how those of us who predate minivans somehow managed to survive. They're a great tool but hardly a necessity. The car my family had when I was growing up was a sports coupe. We took all the family trips and got all our gear in it too.

Do you do said laughter right after highlighting the different capabilities of trucks and SUV's, as you just did above? You weren't hauling 7 people plus gear in that sports coupe, at least not safely.

It always seems like you're on the side of the government, whether it's the NSA or what have you.

Often, yes. You see, I actually understand the design of the US government. It's built to continually revise and improve, and it's been doing so for over 200 years.

Sounds like a statist. But having secret laws, secret courts, and vast portions of the government operate outside the consent of the governed isn't an improvement, it's anti-ethical to a democracy.

How would your neighbors feel about it, knowing that you could be seen kidnapping their children, and the police could do nothing because they wouldn't know what room they're being held in? Sure, the examples are hypothetical

Example isn't Scottish. Let's fix it: a nosy neighbor reports you to the police for luring the underaged to your house, and so the cops get a warrant and search it. You produce the receipt for your recently purchased Girl Scout cookies, footage from the CCTV camera installed at your front door, and the girl's mother verifies your story: Sally was there to give you your Thin Mints and never set foot inside your house.

But they had a warrant! So they remove all your photo albums and find the pictures of you sitting on a couch made out of bags filled with marijuana, and bring you up on drug charges. Case is dismissed after you prove the photos were taken in Amsterdam three years ago, but by then your house and possessions were sold under asset forfeiture laws.

The White House should respond by providing links to state and federal representatives if they want the law changed.

And I would respond that state and federal representatives aren't leaders of the Democratic Party - Obama is. The president is also free to submit any legislation he wants to Congress, and then use the bully pulpit - only held by the sitting president - to urge it's passing.

Or if he wants to play hardball, threaten Congress that he'll start vetoing legislation until he gives in or they do. It's one of the ways Bush pushed telecom immunity through Congress when said immunity was deeply unpopular with the public.

That is a very simplistic view of a very complex subject.

Just because you want to dismiss it out of hand doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

That would mean that anything that is produced out of state would be federally regulated and that is completely untrue.

The trading of said goods can be regulated by the feds, that's the entire purpose of the Commerce Clause. To prevent states from screwing around blocking trade across state lines for petty protectionist reasons....like states blocking direct sales of cars to consumers.

For example California has certain emission standards and they are applied to all vehicles sold in California.

Standards set by California, not the feds. And no, that's not a petty protectionist reason, but a technical one. Still, the feds could step in and tell California that they'll take their smog and like it - but they've chosen not to.