Islam never raped, kidnapped, or stoned anyone. A small number of people, who practice a particular version of Islam, have done those things and justified it using their particular doctrinal interpretation. The same is true of Christianity and Judaism. To blame some fictional, abstract, monolithic "Islam," which doesn't have existence independent from how people interpret it, for the actions of individuals is a logical fallacy.

Huh, I must have missed the part where government welfare programs were actually state control of the means of production. OHHHH, you don't know what the words "socialist" and "communist" mean! Now it makes sense. Carry on.

It is fairly well established among ethicists that offering money to people who are in dire situations can be coercive. Researchers have to deal with this if they want to do research with the homeless or destitute. If someone has an extreme need for money, you can get them to do things that are against their best interests.

Come on, don't be dense. The claim here is precisely that they weren't balancing risk and reward - they were overweighting their own immediate gains and underweighting the future risks, which were mostly to other people.

"Estimates suggest that building a passenger-capable Startram would require 20 years and a construction budget (ignoring inflation and overoptimism) of about $60 billion."

So, triple it for a realistic estimate: $180 billion. Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider that the total amount of money flushed down the toilet for the Iraq war will probably be an order of magnitude above that, it's play money. We just have to convince people that there's oil in LEO.

I was going to say the same thing, but I decided to scroll down to see whether any one else said it before. The fact that I had to scroll down nearly to the bottom of the page before I finally found it depresses me. We should have the right to choose our leaders because no one else should have the right to choose them for us, not because we make the best choices.

No, because it wasn't an argument. It's a statement which is obviously meant to communicate the poster's view of what Canadian values are.

You think it is "logical" that Obama is just itching to pass a federal version of a state decency law written by a bunch of conservative Republicans? That word, "logical", I do not think it means what you think it means.

That sure worked with local control of science standards and creationism, didn't it?