Which is why, of course, those forests were lucky that we came along to save them from themselves. Good lord, imagine if humanity hadn't shown up? Why, we might have had a global firestorm reducing all around to barren waste within the next 2 or 3 hundred million years.

No, they're not evil. In the grand scheme of things, a forest, even a mostly monoculture forest, is better than a wasteland. But, I would argue that this monoculture is not even remotely the equivalent of the diverse ecosystem that it replaced. Could it eventually become something a bit more diverse, in time? Sure. So could a corn field, if left alone long enough.

The thing that's happening here is that what's becoming more obvious to the general public is the sort of fuzziness of scientific truth. From the scientific perspective, this isn't exactly a huge revelation. You're always sort of struggling towards this "Truth" which is always going to be unreachable and the process of struggling is messy and politicized. Big deal. Happens in physics just as much as in climatology, just that the latter involves way more money and touches directly on areas of public policy.

But the problem is that the public still has this illusion, on some level or another, of what science is, reifying it as this pure pursuit of a knowledge that is, in the end, both perfectly attainable and absolute. When you acknowledge the fuzziness, they see that as an acknowledgement that the whole lot is fallible and sort of useless. It's the whole multiple definition of "theory" thing all over again. The public is a lot less comfortable with doubt, messy processes and fuzzy goals than are scientists.

Similar experience for me. Used to read them all the time. When they went pay, I stuck with it for a bit, using that kind of confusing advertising funded day pass thing. Then I just sort of stopped. Back around the election I started checking them out again, and was surprised to find them totally open. But, even with the openness, and even knowing that they actually have some fairly good articles, I'd gotten into a routine of only really checking a few key news-type sites. Salon wasn't in that routine, so I have to make an effort to remember to look at it. Says more about my own laziness, I suppose, but I doubt I'm the only one.

Words that originate in Latin tend to be seen as of higher status than those with an Anglo-Saxon origin. Hence "defecate" rather than "shit" and "beef" rather than "cow." (For a while beef was even used to refer to living cows, not simply to the end result of killing and butchering one). It is nonsensical and arbitrary (your point, I take it), but that's some of the reasoning behind it.

Easy enough. We simply have to strive to be unworthy of extermination. Good luck with that one.

Probably worth mentioning that, when you say "Muslim" you seem to in fact mean "Arab". And, of course, Irannian != Arab. Iranian = Persian. So there's no great cognitive dissonance in Iranian anti-semitism.

There's also the fact that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab (see Indonesia). And that it's not entirely unreasonable to speak of the Jewish people, when you are examining a shared cultural history. Or even when looking at genetic commonalities - the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe were a fairly self contained community for a good long time.

So there's more than a little confusion evident in your post, and not really any hard facts.

I doubt one could come up with a single such example. And that raises an interesting question: are there no such examples because there were scads of people exercising their 2nd Amendment rights outside of Bush events? Or are there no such examples because there were simply no cases in which anyone happened to openly tote a gun about near such an event?

I'd be inclined to go with the latter, raising a further question: if no one, at any point, decided to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights within shouting distance of a Bush event, why was that so? And furthermore, why might it be the case that so many have decided to now, under a new president, exercise these rights? Is it simply that they didn't feel like doing so earlier, or are they trying to make a further point? If so, what is that point, and how is it served by accompanying it with a weapon?

I don't have an iPhone, but a good friend does, and he's on AT&T. We're located in western North Carolina. Service is pretty good in Asheville - the only largish city, but even a few miles outside, it's just crap. It's pretty rare that I call up my friend and don't immediately get voice mail.

One might also think about how well we have managed to self adapt in the Antarctic, a place that's rather less than 9 months away, but where we tend to require things like planes flying in to drop off food, medicine and porn on a relatively frequent basis. If we manage to pull off self-sufficiency there, then maybe there's a chance of doing it on Mars - otherwise, I don't think this may be the best of arguments.

Agreed. I don't really mind streaming, since it can expose me to music I might not otherwise hear (pretty much the sole benefit, as far as I'm concerned), but I can't see the benefit in paying all that much for it. And frankly, I'd rather do my streaming on my home machine, where the data prices come cheap. If I hear something I like, I can always buy/download and copy it over to the mobile.

I realize, however, that my personal preference here is unlikely to count for much, since more money can be sucked from me under paid streaming.

What about those of us who tend towards pro linux/democrat, anti Apple/republican and guardedly netural on microsoft? Is there no love? I suppose I must blame Bush.