Fortunately, Budweiser is not representative. Lager comprises the Bavarian pale lagers, including Maerzen, i.e. the Oktoberfest beer. Heck, bock beer is a subcategory of Lager - not exactly incredible weak there...

You are doing a fine impression of the persecuted hegemon.... Just don't expect anyone to be sorry for you because of your self-inflicted persecution complex, "freeman".

Same here. German city, around 1.4 million people. Never heard a gun being fired outside of a hunting trip. A shooting on the street would be headline news, possibly national, too. How do you get yourself into a state where you have 40 dead a weekend and consider it a normal week?

And your scientific references for your assertion are.... where?

Oh, at the moment, I am just dabbling in Kanji reading - just to see if I can get a hang of it at all. Consider me a language nerd. Just being curious when it comes to any language that catches my fancy. I neither have a professional interest in Japan nor in China - it is just a general cultural and linguistic curiosity on my part. Getting my hands on a cheap version of Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" in a local bookstore pushed me in one direction for now.

That summary page is called the IPCC report. Or at least, that is the plan behind it. Good summaries for the generally scientific literate person are also to be found on realclimate.org.

Optimist indeed. Here's to hope, though!

I actually don't think that Mandarin is as hard as it is always made out - structurally, it looks quite friendly to me. I'd mostly struggle with the tones, I guess. But three months is good lol-material, indeed. I want to give it a try one of these days, but I am kinda stuck up with French, Swedish and refreshing my Latin these days. With a dose of Kanji reading practice on the side :P

The group has, unfortunately, created a near-perfect echo chamber - and it's exposing their offspring to it full force. I don't think this will be gone within a generation.

Your run-of-the-mill literalist is "King James Version"-only, though. Textual analysis of the sources with common methods of literary science and interpretation is generally the realm of educated theologians, which generally don't happen to be literalists.