Well, one has to ask, why did horses go out of fashion in warfare in the first place? The supplanting of draft animals with gasoline vehicles happened extremely rapidly as such things go. Consider the gasoline powered military vehicles of WW1, and that these all came into use less than a decade after the introduction of the first successfully mass produced automobile.

The reason for the rapid changeover to internal combustion was that the logistical demands of supporting draft animals is overwhelming. Pre-mechanized warfare was seasonal. You could mount small guerrilla actions on foot, but winter mobility was severely limited, particularly for cavalry and artillery. Lack of winter forage is why the powerful British army could not successfully put down the American Revolution right away. Not (as I was mendaciously taught) because the Brits were too stupid to hide behind rocks in a firefight.

What's worse is that a draft animal has to eat even when it's not in use, unlike a gasoline powered vehicle. Moving and protecting hay took up a huge share of a pre-mechanized army's time and effort.

Now the idea of a draft animal in *limited* modern use is an intriguing one. I could easily imagine squads patrolling Afghanistan with specially trained mules or mountain ponies to carry extra gear. But the casualty rate for the animals would be high, and I think it would be politically impossible to sustain as soon as the first video of a screaming, wounded horse was released -- ironic though that may be.

A gasoline powered horse might well fit the bill for the kinds of asymmetrical warfare situations US troops are now facing, where they have a fortified forward base that's practically impenetrable to the insurgent enemy, but are forced to patrol outside that base. The mystery to me is, why not some kind of autonomous wheeled vehicle? You could put the wheels on legs to give it the ability to move its wheels over obstacles.

Wow. Not only would I feel utterly embarrassed to do that to a waiter, but where I live a lot of restaurants won't do it. It's not uncommon to see signs saying they won't split between more than two or three credit cards, either.

Maybe it's a factor of my age, too? As in, I'm not fresh out of school and most of the people I go out to eat with are going to be from more or less the same economic class as me, so we all just split the bill, or one person picks it up because they're feeling generous.

Your method just seems so petty and trifling to me, making way more work for the waitstaff than is necessary. If everybody wants to pay their own check, you should go somewhere where everyone can order individually, too. Like McDonald's.

He paid someone $80,000 for the torture and murder of a federal witness. The government tends to frown on that sort of thing. But I supposed to you that's a "victimless crime," because the person he paid was an undercover agent and nobody was actually tortured or murdered.

I think you'll find I've been there more recently than you. But the fact that you drive to the Cliff House (personally, I take the bus) doesn't change the fact that every single last square foot of the restaurant is on public land, owned by the National Park Service. The restaurant operates solely under a license from the National Park Service. If you look at its website, it says quite plainly that even the prices of its food are subject to approval by the National Park Service.

If you don't know, why boast about your ignorance as if it helps to prove your point? The currents on the coastline near the Cliff House are very hazardous to all but the strongest swimmers, and there are strong "rip currents" in the shallow areas that can pull unaware people out into deeper waters. People drown near there every year. The Park Service does employ lifeguards, but they're not the Baywatch kind that sit in towers and watch the surf. They mostly do visitor education and respond to rescue calls. In addition, among the agencies that respond when rescues are needed in the area are the San Francisco Fire Department, the US Coast Guard, and the US Park Police. Some of these agencies are still funded, while others aren't. So you tell me -- with the government shutdown, is it better to have the parks closed, or have them open but more dangerous to visitors due to diminished patrol capacity?

That's incorrect. Again, check the website. The restaurant offers valet parking after 5pm. There are also parking lots nearby -- which, though they may abut city streets, are also on National Park Service land. (The one up the hill from the Cliff House may be city-owned; I'm not sure.)

Yes yes yes, and a Muslim, and a Kenyan, and he eats babies for dinner. I heard he was monitoring some woman via radio waves so he could broadcast her life on TV, too. Now you're showing your true colors.

OK, fine, start here. It's a list of marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area that's maintained by the local free weekly newspaper. These are not "drug dens," they are licensed businesses, and if you're capable of a little logic, you will put two and two together and realize that you can't get a license if there is no law governing it. Since there is a law, that makes it ... with me so far?

You will need a recommendation from a doctor, which might set you back a couple hundred bucks. That's between you and your doctor. To get one, you may be required to be a California resident. Once you have a medical marijuana card and a valid picture ID, you can legally -- yes, legally -- buy marijuana in various forms from any of these places. Thanks to the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996, you may also be able to grow a fairly generous amount of marijuana for your own personal use, depending on which city you live in. Exact laws regarding the amounts you are legally allowed to possess and grow vary by municipality. You're welcome.

The link above is to a story that largely repeats claims made by the Washington Times, a far-right newspaper run by the Reverend Moon's Unification Church (aka the Moonies).

The quote from the so-called "angry park ranger" is completely unsourced: the ranger is never named, and the paper never even establishes who supposedly told him to "make life difficult." His cousin, maybe? His wife? A real newspaper would have called up the National Park Service and asked whether this was its policy. The Washington Times, unfortunately, is not a real newspaper.

Then the Examiner, which is not a newspaper but a blogging network, comes along and basically repeats everything the Washington Times says and throws in some comments from Fox Business to spice it up. Only Fox Business never actually mentions the word "dictatorship" -- that was the Examiner reporter's own color commentary.

Show me a legitimate news source that backs up these claims and we can talk about it.

That's weird. Whats this photograph of, then?

But it's on National Park Service land which is currently closed. The entirety of Ocean Beach, which the Cliff House overlooks, is closed to visitors. How are customers supposed to go to the restaurant when they can't even set foot on the land? Your grossly slanted article makes it sound like Barack Obama himself called up the restaurant and told all the waiters and busboys to go home. He didn't. It was the private business that did that, because it doesn't make any sense to pay service staff when there are no customers to serve.

As for the other reply to your message, anyone who cites an article from the Washington Times, a newspaper owned and operated by the Unification Church -- which you and I know as the Moonies cult -- doesn't need me to debunk their claims.

As a matter of fact, I do. It's not like outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are rare. Major outbreaks happen in the US every year or two, and smaller outbreaks are contained all the time before they get big. If there's an E. coli outbreak in lettuce or listeria in hamburger, who do you think tracks it down to the source and tells all the supermarkets which food to take off the shelves? The food safety fairies?

You can be complacent about food borne illness because government bureaucrats (and scientists, engineers and information technologists) keep contamination in American food to manageable levels. Worldwide, the third most common cause of death is diarrhoeal diseases, most of which are food or water borne,

I've never worked with the FDA, but I've worked with the CDC as a contractor. I happened to be at the Fort Collins DVBID one time when they were scrambling a team to investigate an outbreak of some mysterious hemorrhagic fever in Africa. People were fleeing the area but the CDC's team was going in. Why do they do that kind of thing? So whatever it was that had people bleeding out of their eyeballs never finds its way over here. People just *assume* that things like Yellow Fever, Dengue or Malaria just don't happen here in the US. They never stop to consider that this is not a natural state of affairs. We used to have that stuff all the time. You just don't see all the hard work that goes into making Yellow Fever something most Americans have never heard of. I have -- the zoologists, epidemiologists,physicians and veterinarians who provide this "non-essential service."

I've had this very same argument with a guy who was blase about losing one of our meteorological satellites. "Hurricanes don't kill many people," he said. I wanted to grab the blockhead by the collar and shake him. What would have happened if people only had two days notice with Sandy? Or with Katrina or Hurricane Andrew? Complacent idiot.

That's fine for you, if you've got plenty of cash sitting in the bank. The people who empty the trash bins and wash the floors probably aren't sitting on a couple of months of living expenses in cash.

And what about the "essential" employees? The police and the park rangers and animal keepers at the zoo? Just what are they getting out of this?

There's nothing for Obama to compromise with here; we're talking about a "continuing resolution", whose function is to keep things running *as-is* until Congress works out a new budget. If the Tea Party wants to de-fund Obamacare, they can put that into the *budget*. Nothing is stopping them, except their lack of votes.