Virtually all of the people who have visited "Antarctica" are SCIENTISTS. And the rest are GOVERNMENT WORKERS.

Can we really believe people who have a vested interest in grant money to accurately report on this place?

Pretty soon now we'll find the set in Alaska where "South pole research station" news segments are filmed.

Missing steps:

4.5 No One Could Have Foreseen This Problem. Let us not point fingers and play the blame game.

5.5 Fine, we're in a fix. It is time for the ideologues to step aside and the Level Heads and Professionals and People Who Have a Stake in the Game to take over and provide reality-based solutions. We'll start by proposing tax credits for owners of shore front vacation homes to move their properties, because summer recreation is a vital part of our economy. And cancel Social Security to incentivize Honored Citizens to get healthy exercise filling sandbags to protect oil industry facilities in the Gulf. And annex Canada to provide homes for citizens displaced by the Texas Hell-Cyclone. After all, Canadians sold us a lot of that oil . . . remember the XL pipeline they forced us to build?

There was an interesting piece on Radiolab* last year about some guys who'd found an protein-rich insect whose larva at almost anything, including agricultural waste and pig manure. They reduced the amount of waste that had to be dealt with and result in copious quantities of nutritious bug flesh.

One of the suggested uses was food for farmed fish.

* I think . . . I'm having trouble finding the segment in the archives.

Was that a hit song in an alternate universe where the wealthiest people were actually getting less rich and getting taxed more?

"evolutionary criticism . . . is completely forbidden in US schools."

Well, unless you go to school in one of those states where the school boards also don't think children should be trusted to learn about puberty, carbon dating, and history that wasn't vetted by the Club for Growth and the Daughters of Confederate Heroes.

Based on these comments, Slashdotters are also experts on moving goal posts.

Any number of novels by John Brunner, but Stand on Zanzibar if you have to choose one.

Fred Pohl's short-short "Day Million," about a cyborg spaceman and a transgendered otter-woman meeting, falling in love, exchanging virtual reality sex profiles and never meetin again.

Freeman Dyson's essay "The Greening of the Galaxy."

I sometimes hear the effects of climate change blown off with glib remarks about longer growing seasons.

The truth is, good hard winters are good for certain types of agriculture. Freezing and thawing churns up the soil. Hard frosts kill off weeds and pests.

Now we have another data point.

Mmmm.

Everybody inherits a 3 x 8 foot plot of earth.

It might be concealed under tons of vanity, but in the end, that is all you get.

I used to run into you at trade shows . . . gosh, going on 24 years ago.

Do you still have that big red jacket with the gold coins?

Is your comic book a collector's item?

"Flesh stripped from their bones, like they were attacked by a super-powerful vacuum."

"Damn. Third one this week."

"Place sure is tidy, though."

If you can't anonymously donate to a political campaign, your voice can't be heard!

Um, wait . . .

Build ships which vaccuum up jellyfish, puree them, and use the proteins as feed stock for 3D printing of food. The stingers can get filtered out, or just left into the low-grade product used in prisons and orphanages.

I'm sure that Red Lobster can come up with some clever marketing term for this stuff. After the actual lobsters, cod, and king crabs die off they'll have plenty of motivation.

Interesting Geek-culture historical note: In the 1973 movie "Soylent Green," the titular product is supposed to be made from krill scooped from the oceans. The underlying horror of the movie isn't that the crackers are made of dead people, but that the ocean ecosystem has collapsed due to pollution. The movie also has Edward G. Robinson bitching about how the greenhouse effect has made it hot and damp year-round.

I don't recall if I saw this scene in the theater, during "Jedi's" initial run, or in preview clips shown on TV, but:

There's a scene in Return of the Jedi in which Luke goes mano a mano with a storm trooper riding one of those cycles used to zip around Endor.

Luke knocks the guy's helmet off, revealing a dark haired guy with a rather skinny face.

I do know that this brief reveal was cut out of the sky cycle chase as it was shown on the Laserdisc.

Could it be on this new find?

. . . and suddenly masks will be deemed a threat to Free Enterprise, and wearing one will put you on a terrorism watch list.

Anyway, you'd better wear gloves too, because shopping cart handles will eventually have DNA sensors and galvanic skin response detectors.