The Hall of Fire

I'm pickier. I don't want another warhawk in power. This rules out all the Republicans (unless one of them stops toeing the party line, but the GOP is too disciplined for such shenanigans) and a smattering of the Dems. Elections make me depressed. The fact that campaigns now begin two years before t...

axordil wrote:Furriners.

Oh yeah. Those.

They're all over the world! They're in this country! There's one in my living room!!!

OMG!! We're all gonna die!!!!!

I can't help but wonder what this says about the US public in general, that these rumours are even being put into play. It's kind of racist. Well, maybe that's the wrong word since religion and genetic background are different things. Religionist, maybe. What does it say about us and our politics th...

Next they'll want cell phones? "They" already have cell phones. The poorest Third World country I've ever been to was Tanzania. Guess what. There were cell phones all over the place. Granted, most of them were pretty basic, but they were cell phones. Same with Bolivia and Ecuador. Putting ...

I am not at all convinced that a PC and the internet are such wonderful additions to any child's life. Really? In a society as dominated by technology as ours, you don't see why it's important for kids to learn how to use a PC? You don't see the value in the amount of information a person can acces...

How? Everyone looks the same on the inside.

Those were beautiful Brian. I read The Guns of August this summer because I wanted to know why WWI even happened. My boyfriend likes to claim it was all because of the Serbs, but I had a feeling that was just his latent Serbian nationalism kicking in. And, in fact, it was not the Serbs. The Serbs we...

Clinton is a hawk. I can't support that. At a visceral level, I can't support it. In fairy land, I support Kucinich. In reality, I'll take Obama. Just out of curiosity, why Clinton typically called Hillary but all the other candidates called by their last names? And as an aside to the Hillary presid...

I guess that's a solution.

I'm going to have to face the family/career issue. I'm not looking forward to it at all.

Law is sounding depressingly similar to science. What's really sad is that there've been some studies done (yes, there have been studies; this is what science types do) and it's been found that not only do male advisors tend to have a subtle bias against their female students, but the FEMALE advisor...

Wow. Just wow. I don't shrug off feminism. Those that do are fortunate to live and work in arenas where the problem is either very subtle or just not there. But I'm in science and there is still a weird undercurrent of sexism women have to fight against, especially as you move further up the ladder....

Whether or not people ought to have taken out variable-rate mortgages or stretched themselves to the limit, A false dilemma- they should have bought less house. I'm sorry: ARMs are a sucker's game. We are indeed facing a debt crisis- built largely on the fact that Americans seem unable to live with...

When faced with an impending disaster, most people choose one of three responses: shove their heads in the sand and deny it, run away, or try to somehow fend it off. You can't run away from climate change for obvious reasons, so you can either pretend it's not happening or try to stop or blunt it so...

There's been a cultural shift since WWII, Griff. Nowadays, people feel very entitled to whatever extravagance they feel like having. Instant gratification has become the norm. Rewards without sacrifice, and so on. If you point out that to someone that maybe they don't need a big new car, or that put...

The others issues that you talk about are well spotted, though. The deficit (public and private) and struggling mortgage market are especially worrying given the low savings rates. I wouldn’t be too concerned about the low dollar, though. But vison sells stuff to the US. I'm sure the low dollar is ...

Fact is the the biggest source of CO2 in the world comes out of the backsides of cows. Wrong. The biggest source of CO2 is burning carbon. Farting cows produce methane (CH4), which is an even more potent greenhouse gas. The earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles, true, but the current wa...

And now we are just getting utterly side-tracked from my (and everyone else's) main points...

I seem to recall a court case.

Our incredible foreign policy decisions have been eroding faith in our government. As a result, our currency is in decline. If it sinks too low, the Saudis will move off the petrodollaar and onto the petroeuro (or something else) and then we are hosed. The continued refusal to dicuss any real means ...