The mandate was pretty much a deal breaker for us "liberals" as well. Taxing me to help other people, that's fine. Taxing me to 'help' me, that's paternalism. I'd much rather have a minimal level of single payer government health insurance. If you want more, you can buy it on the open market. Ironically, from what I've heard, the individual mandate was originally something the Republicans wanted to add to the Clinton health care plan. Obama threw it in to get the health insurance industry on board. They took it, then screwed him over anyway. The health care deal is a compromise in a way - *everybody* is equally unhappy, as far as I can tell.

Sure, wikilinks is biased. According to their Wikipedia article, they eavesdropped on a TOR exit node that Chinese hackers were using to gather intelligence from various foreign governments and organizations. Wikileaks released some of the information on foreign governments, but privately warned non-governmental organizations (such as Tibetan associations) that they were being spied on, didn't release that data. I suppose that the "fair and balanced" thing to do would have been to release everything?

As for "Where are the reports on what the Taliban do to innocents in the name of their unholy war?," I would suggest looking at the rest of Western propo^H^H^H^H^Hjournalism. Where are the reports on the benefits of Taliban rule? (Hey, we're restoring family values!)

To probably mis-quote Heinlein, "The government lies. The media lies. But in a free country, they aren't the *same* lies."

Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)

Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.

Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.

"Why is the US so stubborn about adopting the International System of Units? Even the country where the "Imperial" units come from did."

That's a very good question. Does this Metrication Matters guy have any answers? If we want to metrify the US, a good first step would be to figure out why we haven't already, and not just bitch and moan about Americans being stubborn. The only other countries that haven't switched to metric are Burma and Liberia, but maybe we could compare America with countries that were slow to switch? One hypothesis that comes to mind is that America is the largest economy of the world. The products Americans use are either made by Americans, or by companies who suck it up and provide "imperial" measurements. Other countries didn't have so much economic pull, and were faced with products labeled in "foreign" measurements. So there was some incentive to switch to some single measuring system. Ways of testing this hypothesis: I think the UK used to be a much larger economy (in terms of percentage of global GDP) than it is now. When did the UK switch? If this hypothesis is right, autarkies should be less likely to switch. This might explain why Burma hasn't switched yet. When did the DPRK switch?

I'll admit that this hypothesis is probably BS, but does anybody have a better one?

In the meantime, switching to consumption rather than mileage makes a lot of sense, even if we do it using "Imperial" units instead of metric. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the better than what we have.

The tragedy of democracy is that you get the government you deserve.

A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...) China (and, arguably, Russia) would have to become democratic first. This would good for the US, since we'd be able to offload our World Policeman responsibilities, while everyone else would get the ability to say how it gets used.

>The idea that technological advance is as inevitable as a law of nature is a fallacy. It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. [...] American Indians never discovered a wheel, by the way.

Actually, the Aztecs *did* invent the wheel. It's just that they only used it for toys. Why? No horses. Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Technological advances do rely on *somebody* *somewhere* getting lucky, as well as a social/economic/technological system that can exploit it. With as large as the world is now, that might not be much of a problem. There is a lot of room for new memetic mutations, and we have a very complex ecosystem where new advances can take root.

>Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.

Not quite. Moore's Law is about number of transistors per area, not clock speed. I realize I'm slightly out of touch with computer technology, but last I checked, Moore's Law is still holding, even though clock speeds have topped out. Hence the drive towards parallelism.