I have a friend who is only moderately stupid that firmly believes that the moon landings were faked.
I would submit to you that if your friend firmly believes that the moon landings were faked, he's far more than moderately stupid. With all the evidence, believing the moon landing was faked is right up there with believing that the moon is made of gouda cheese. There's a reflector on the moon. If you know the coordinates, you can actually bounce a laser off of it back to Earth.
I don't think "khama" is a thing (real or not).
Karma, on the other hand...
....we have yet to be visited by any other intelligent alien life?
Notice, I said if it's true. I don't know that this makes any sense. I'm not a scientist. But taken together:
You can't go faster than light.
Long-term exposure to radiation does doubleplusungood things to the brain.
seem to suggest that travelling long distances in space is just not a good idea.
I hope that this is wrong, but I do think it'd explain a lot.
Amazon gives you a good enough window into how someone rates items to know if they're pushovers or not. I know, because I've looked through several people's profiles when they rated things I had also rated. Odds are, you were right, and the person in question was too generous in giving out 4 or 5 star reviews. I understand it was difficult to find the one-star review, in the field of reviews she did, but then again, it wasn't really necessary. After the first page or so, you got the idea.
Rating is a very personal thing, and stars are subjective. I've read 4-star reviews that seemed overly-harsh for such a positive rating, and I've read 1-star reviews that praised items to high heaven, but came down on one point, and based the entire rating on that.
The subjectivity of reviews and the star system is why I think Amazon should do away with the stars altogether. I think a more useful system would be something like YouTube has: Thumbs up or down. You could then give the book an overall ranking on how many thumbs up vs. thumbs down it got. That would give buyers a quick view.
But the larger problem is, people shouldn't be looking for the quick view. The important part of an Amazon review is the text, not the stars. The stars are important because they allow some kind of overall measure of what people thought of the book, but the real meat is the text, without which you don't know what the rating means.
Most people are not professional reviewers, and are not reading a book at that level. They're reading to be entertained. So a professional review may be completely irrelevant for them. What they want to know is, "Did most people who read this book like it, and how much did they like it?" That's the kind of question that Amazon's star system is trying to answer.
And yes, criticism is a democratic principle. If 95% of people who read a book think the book sucks, then it sucks. It doesn't matter if the other 5% are credentialed critics. (For reference, look at the movie industry, and how many times critics disagree with a blockbuster movie's status.)
Car accidents are rarely accidents
[Citation needed.]
My long-term plan was simply to get away from Belize, think, and decide what to do.
"Decide what to do"? You don't get to decide what to do when you're looking at a murder charge. You get yourself a lawyer (which I assume he has), turn yourself in, and clam up. That's what you do.
1) We have documented proof that Reagan sold them. It's not documented that Bush did it too, and Bush Jr isn't going to investigate Dad in the middle of a war. He'll ignore it and wait until a Democrat does and bash them for partisan bias.
Read what I said again. I know Reagan sold weapons to Iraq. We were propping up Saddam at the time to keep Iran in check.
2) Yeah, but that doesn't matter. He materially supported known enemies of the state.
Iraq wasn't an enemy of the state at the time he supplied them.
And not just Iraq. Reagan trained Osama bin Laden. We'd not have had 9/11 if not for Reagan's support of our "allies" (who were known then to be hostile to us).
Iraq did have WMDs. We found them. They were all Made in the USA and given/sold to him by Reagan. They were also so old as to be inoperable. But they were there. But that was ignored because now that Reagan is dead, we aren't supposed to talk about his multiple treasons. We are at war with Iraq. Reagan gave/sold weapons to our enemy we are at war with.
Well, two things:
1) IIRC, Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons as late as the 90's, so it's not as if Reagan sold Iraq all of them in the 80's, and they were mothballed after then.
2) You're using the present tense when you shouldn't be. We were at war with Iraq. Once four years after Reagan left office, and again ~ 13 years after. But we weren't at war with them when he sold them, and that's the point. At the time, Hussein was our guy, because he was keeping the power of the Iranians in check (which we seem to be having some trouble with, now that he's gone).
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart
