Radioactive wild boars roam Germany. I'm calling it as the first sign of the Apolcalypse!

You are correct that restoring the species successfully (assuming we can make viable breeding PPs) is a long shot. One of the problems is their colony-style breeding behavior. The aren't solitary nesters, but live and breed in large groups. Attempts to breed them in captivity failed.

The collapse of the population to zero seems to have proceeded in phases (3, I count): loss of forest food sources from cutting, extermination efforts (hunting and simple pest-control killing) which capitalized on the dense groups that made easy pickings, but then after PP extermination was circumscribed, the population continued to collapse since they were below the natural breeding population size. In its last couple of decades efforts to save them were being made, but they were unsuccessful. The genetically documented population "bottleneck", when the breeding population dropped to 50,000, might have been a single colony.

A similar situation occurred with the cheetah, which once dropped to fewer than a dozen individuals within the last 10,000 years. There is also evidence of humans bottlenecking with populations in the low thousands within the last 100,000 years.

The enormous numbers of the Passenger Pigeon actually suggest that they were the beneficiaries of an extreme environmental disruption that occurred a few centuries earlier: the sudden and dramatic disappearance on the large scale agricultural and horticultural societies of Native Americans when ~90% of the population died from successive onslaughts of pandemic disease brought by the arrival of populations from the Old World (Europeans and Africans).

European observers only ever got a look at pre-pandemic North America along the east coast, and the evidence there is of stunning change in the ecology.

Genetic studies of Passenger Pigeons have shown that the subabundance was a transient, new phenomenon. In the last million years the breeding population only averaged about 1/3 of a million, and sometimes as few as 50,000, and began a population upsurge 6,000 years ago. The enormous explosion to billions was much more recent than that.

The ecosystem for the PP were forests of nut-bearing trees, which the super-population of PPs could be seen to be damaging in their locust-like swarming and foraging, an unsustainable situation. These forests were not "natural" though, they were managed for thousands of years by Native America horticulturists who encouraged the development of large dense stands of edible nut trees.

When the Native American populations suddenly disappeared that left large stands of unexploited nut-food that allowed the PPs to break-out into the vast populations that were observed. Their habit of long distance migration in large groups was well suited for such an explosion, exploiting all of the nut-tree resources on North America.

Come again? Current typical PWR fuel usage is to take fuel that contains 4.5% U-235, and discharge after a fuel burn-up of 50,000 megawatt-days/tonne, spent fuel containing 1.02% U-235, which would be using 77% of the U-235 in the fuel rods, not 5%.

Also it is not clear whether your "1%" number refers to the theoretical fissile energy from the originally mined fuel (including the safely stored, easily accessible depleted uranium, which is not in the fuel rod) or just the actinides in the fuel rod itself. In the latter case, not only is U-235 burned, but a significant amount of U-238 is transmuted and burned as well (a bonus of going to higher fuel burn-ups), so about 5% of the total actinide content in the fuel is burned, a lot more than "1%".

Right - it is the unburned transuranics that comprise nearly all of the long-term hazard. Reburning spent fuel in specially designed reactors can extract power and keep the size of this spent fuel actinide inventory stable. Active reuse of the fuel will also prevent it from being seen as a permanent burden, eventually it will be taken away and burned.

The problem is that only heavy subsidies will build these burner reactors - they will never compete with once-through U-235 burning because the capital and fuel cost of these is lower.

Mining and enriching U-235 is actually cheaper that reprocessing spent fuel. Regular enriched uranium fuel is not "hot". It is easy to handle without special hot cells for everything. The U-235 is easier to burn. You can't even argue that eventually they will have to build them because the natural uranium will run out. It will be cheaper to extract U-235 from seawater than use transuranic fuel, in which case we will have a 10,000 year supply of once-through burning.

Transuranic burners will require government intervention to bring them into existence, to subsidize their operation in some fashion. Perhaps tying the spent fuel tax will to this is how to do it, but it looks like the tax is too low currently. If this is going to happen maybe someone should start making it happen - real development plans - now so they will actually exist in 25 years, instead of still being fiction in 75.

Nope they do not produce "weapons-grade plutonium" (which can only be made in low burn-up reactors, far below the burn-ups of current power reactors). It does produce extremely dirty weapons-useless plutonium*, but then it burns it too, so the net effect should be to reduce it.

Please cite the legal vehicle through which Carter "banned" them? (You can't because this is fantasy.)

What Carter did do was veto funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project one year, since it was growing into a colossal boondoggle, but the veto had no effect since it was over-ridden and the project continue unabated. The project was eventually killed by Congress in the Reagan Years (1983) because as Carter argued, it was a colossal boondoggle. The cost had grown from $400 million (with industry kicking in $257 million) to a project coasting $8 billion (with government covering all of that cost increase). That, and there was no wast processing facility to handle its fuel, that having been shutdown during the Ford Administration.

There is no "breeder ban".

*It is possible to make nuclear explosives with any combination of the transuranics, they are all fissile. But trying to make a practical munition out of the very hot (thermally and radioactively) transuranics is impossible. The weapon would require special cooling at all times, no one could service them unless using a hot cell, service life would be very short, requiring constant rebuilds.

Or even more correctly Evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity into schools. The Fundamentalist bloc is a political powerful sect in the U.S., but fairly unimportant in world Christianity; but has managed to misappropriate the term "Christianity" to only apply to themselves in practice. We shouldn't propagate this erroneous usage.

What we can say is that following the trials or Giordano Bruno (executed) and Galileo (imprisoned for life, forced to recant) the Counter-Reformation shut down science where ever it held sway. Cremonini refused to look through Galieo's telescope, so afraid was he of being tainted by accusations of heresy. Copernicus's books were banned, until the 19th century. Cardano was prosecuted for heresy.

During the Age of Enlightenment that lands that languished under the Inquisition produced no important scientists. They didn't have to kill anyone else, they simply shut down critical thinking.

The portion of the Dept of Education you are complaining about, the appropriations part, comes to 65 billion dollars a year, out of total U.S. education spending of about 850 billion a year, so it is a grand total of 7.5% of that; the vast majority of U.S. education spending is already local -- exactly what you want. Happy?

And people in New York are not paying for students in California. The people in the wealthy states are, by and large, helping to educate people in poorer states, who otherwise have fewer resources with which to educate their poorer citizens (local funding has a devastating effect on education in poor counties). And what is wrong with the wealthy helping the poor?

Remember how the Constitution starts?

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

This is part of that vision thing: forming a more perfect Union by promoting the general welfare of the nation.

Let me correct that for you: Europeans like to imagine that Europe is a continent, since Eurocentric thinking is endemic to Europeans (perhaps even more than the citizens of the United States are subject to USA-centric thinking). But Europe is actually a peninsula of the Eurasian continent, with adjacent regions, and comprises only 20% of the continent, and only 15% of its population.

The United States is 40% of the North American continent, and 60% of its population, so the U.S. comes much closer to "being a continent" than does Europe.

I would put it this way - the concept of a "free man" did not exist.

It isn't that Herodotus was biased, it is that he really did not know anything at all about Khufu, who had lived 2000 years earlier. Herodotus was simply passing on the sorts of tales that travelers hear about events that occurred thousands of years earlier in a culture where historical scholarship as we think of it was unknown.

Did you read this article you linked to? It refutes this theory:

"However, even though this method is feasible and workable, it is unlikely that the GP's builders used it. The segments used by Bush had holes drilled into them to accommodate ropes which held the segments onto the block, yet none of the ancient segments found have such holes in them. How these alternative proposals fail is most clearly seen by considering the extreme case. Neither theory accounts for the movement of the fifty-ton granite slabs used in constructing the internal chambers of the GP. Considering the immense size of these monoliths, the flexible pole method would be rendered even more awkward. Forward motion would be extremely tedious--assuming that these monoliths could even be lifted by this method. Bush's idea would also be problematic. The dimensions of these slabs are not uniform, so each slab would have needed specialized circle segments. The largest monolith is about 27' x 4' x 8' at its ends.

The key failing of the cradle and the (actually extremely similar) pole theory is that it does not explain how they moved the far larger slabs that were not square blocks.

Also we have actual evidence of their methods - dragging on sledges. We have sledges, sledge tracks, and pictures of giant statues being dragged on sledges. They took the time to draw us a diagram, and people still look for other answers.

How about the edges of the stone blocks that would have rotated about 500 times on their way to the pyramid? There should be systematic chipping on the edges of all of the blocks if this was used. Also, this method of movement looks suspiciously like a wheel, which Egypt did not get until many centuries after the great pyramids were constructed. In a pre-wheel culture this mode of transport might not be at all evident.

No, you can't - although the belief that you can is apparently what has kept the hemp business shut down in the U.S. for 80 years (and led to Governor Arnold to veto a hemp cultivation measure in California.

The cultivation patterns are completely different. The hemp crop is grown in dense plantings that lead to tall stalks and few leaves, and then the crop is either harvested before it flowers (if an all-fiber farm) or is allowed to go to seed (if hemp seed is also harvested).

Either way there is no way that a successful drug crop, however small, can be snuck in there. (Not so drug cannabis and, say, field corn though - hiding pot among corn is an old trick).

A naval blockade is indeed an act of war. I guess you threw the word "terrorist" in there because - you like to abuse what words mean?

But the U.S. had imposed no naval blockade on Japan before the Pearl Harbor attack. The U.S. had halted U.S. trade with Japan in oil and scrap metal (but nothing else), but this is not what the word "blockade" means. A blockade is using armed force to prevent shipping (or other forms of transport) from third parties from getting entering the blockaded nation. Nothing like that was happening. The U.S. had also closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, but again, not a blockade. Japan was free to go 'round the Horn and on to Japan without interference.

Straight-up barter is not money. "Money" arises when there comes into being a standardized unit of exchange that is independent of the commodity being exchanged. Evidence for that only shows up around 3000 BCE at the earliest, at which point the world human population amounted to tens of million, not "less than a million". The early records of exchange though only involved standardized weights and measures of commodities, not an actual currency of any kind. This shows up around 1000 BC for the first time, and at that point there were on the order of 100 million people in the world.

Current world population growth is about 400,000 per day.