overtone

Anything's better than sacking your aquifers. Even paying extra for imported natural gas. Even dealing with the horrible unAmerican inconvenience of solar. Even making drilling companies do their basic research in advance, not lie to everybody about what they're up to, and pay for their damages. Radical notions, true - but these are unusual times.

I dunno about faster, but on snow and ice I definitely prefer manual - it allows me to feed and let off power to the traction wheels precisely, run in whatever gear works best, etc. All else being equal, a solid mechanical connection will transfer more power than the fluid-mediated connection of an automatic - but that presumes absolutely perfect shifting and so forth by the driver, to match a perfectly set up automatic, which is unlikely. On the freeway for long distances, where shifting skill is not involved, manual's small weight and transfer of power advantages will get you a small gain in gas mileage and/or top end speed. One of the handiest speed advantages of a manual is that it slows down most car thieves.

The notion that the "fracking itself" is not usually the major problem seems a distinction without a difference. If true - and it will be years before we know - so what? The discovery that shallower aquifers do have natural connections with deeper formations in the area, is not evidence for the safety of fracking. And the fact that they didn't know this years before they fracked the first well in the area is proof, (if any were needed after we were informed a few months ago that for the first time they were actually going to collect baseline data on the water supply of the affected area before drilling) that this whole operation was launched without due diligence, without the slightest consideration for the integrity of the aquifers or the welfare of the residents or the health of the environment in the region. Shut it down until after the preliminary research, at least, is done.

If the lack of resistance was useful to others, they have suffered uncompensated harm. This should, at a minimum, be assessed to the costs of the GM product. The risk, even, should be included in the balance sheet. (Especially, if the resistance mechanism is easily both generalized to other products and spread to other places, as antibiotic resistance and herbicide resistance and insecticide resistance commonly are). If the product was instrumental in the creation of an economic dependency - as is clearly the strategy in the international marketing of GM crops, which are proprietary and used to drive out competitive agricultural practices and infrastructure - when it becomes useless one of the possible consequences is hardship among those deprived of the benefits but still shouldering the costs and without good alternatives. As noted above, herbicide resistance to glyphosphate alone, in weeds, is not the end of the resistance concerns: there is also antibiotic resistance in the human gut and general environment (from the marker genetics used in the engineering), generalized herbicide and antibiotic resistance via small modifications of the engineered complex, and so forth.

That assertion requires serious evidence and argument. Meanwhile it is a pretty dubious presumption. We have quite a bit of evidence against that presumption - The historical, geographical, and cultural ubiquity of human homosexual orientation argues against a purely cultural origin and the lack of cultural benefit, both (there are some arguments out there for a predominant role in the founding of cities, trade empires, etc, for example). The historical, geographical, and cultural ubiquity argues against a purely environmental origin - besides, environmental factors are culturally and genetically mediated, filtered. The appearance of homosexual orientation during development in humans, the widespread occurrence of homosexual orientation among all known human populations, and its documented prevalence among many of the higher mammals and more social, long-lived, and intelligent birds, argues strongly for some genetic influence. That also indicates the likelihood - the presumption, unless disproven - of serious reproductive benefit inherent in whatever that genetic influence is. That would be basic Darwinian principle - features (including behavioral tendencies) that vary genetically between individuals and influence reproduction are under selection pressure, for or against.

I am in more or less complete sympathy with Bignose's demurrals concerning the OP, but I fear he may be too optimistic regarding the teaching of grammar and spelling. They have in fact, in realistic assessment, been dropped from serious consideration in many American high schools. And the manner of their dismissal bears on the issue here, and the second quote above: they have been relegated to specialty sections, isolated drill and kill rote memorization stretches of brief duration, no grounding or connection to anything else (such as reasoning, philosophy, historical development of the language, rhetorical influence, anything), no subsequent repetition or application. They are taught, if they are, as technicalities of no relevance to the "content" of one's writing. Whatever students write for history, "social studies", art, philosophy, science, even English other than specifically grammar and spelling class, is not evaluated or corrected or considered for its grammar and spelling. That is for grammar class. In real life, it is apparently assumed (often explicitly), the "word processing" program will fix all that anyway. The intellectual development of the child is presumed to proceed unaffected, or perhaps even freed and abetted, by removing such inherently minor technical obstacles and delays from work of more important "content". The parallels here, with multiplication tables and algebra and the like, seem clear to me. No normal human being can learn grammar and spelling that way, any more than algebra. And as we see, they don't. But the best response is probably not to abandon grammar, or even spelling, and focus on the art and beauty and larger brighter world of literature.

Nope. Some states have imposed safeguards in the procedures of use, the most important of which is establishing an independent paper trail of the votes so there is some way to audit the machine vote, but the machines themselves remain inherently insecure. The most telling detail is the vigorous opposition of the makers to publishing the operating code - the software that counts and tabulates the actual votes. That should be routine, a no-brainer. There are many better systems of paper balloting than chad punching. Besides: The ability to audit the vote was the problem with the chads - not the chads themselves. And the whole thing was a consequence of vote rigging by the Florida Republican Party - the malfunctioning machines and misprinted ballots were both assigned to heavily Democratic districts. Among many other places, in the exit polls - if you recall, in 2000 and 2004 exit polls in key electronic voting machine districts sometimes failed to predict the machine vote count, for reasons never explained (the history of such polls had at the time established a disturbing degree of accuracy for them, so much that there was a movement to ban announcing their results until after the polls had closed). Wiki overviews: http://en.wikipedia....g_controversies http://en.wikipedia....ser:Pedant/Vote And so forth. Not proof, of course - but plenty of reason to require better safeguards than allowing obviously partisan voting machine execs to monopolize vote counting with secret software and proprietary technology. Here's some links re 2004: http://mediastudy.com/election.html#papers http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/issue-16-autumn-2006/joel-bleifuss-and-steven-f-freeman-us-electoral-fraud-ldquocritical and a quote from a statistical analyst:

The neonicotinoids were developed precisely because they are more effective pesticides in an industrial farming context - i.e. potentially more dangerous to bees - than nicotine itself. Organic farming was ordinary farming for many decades, with no recorded harm to bees. So the use of nicotine as a pesticide is no reason to avoid organic farming or its produce. And the avoidance of neonicotinoids, GM incorporated toxins, industrial habitat destruction, and so forth, are some ancillary benefits of organic techniques, for bees.

Given the absence of any specific objection or counterargument, I am just going to refer you to the past two or three posts of mine, above, as they respond to the OP. That is the standard presumption when considering ubiquitous, high frequency, cross-culturally extant and persistant, reproductive-age onset genetic disorders, yes. When inbreeding has been ruled out, etc. Sickle cell is the famous one, but there are a few others. None as prevalent or directly influential (as the OP feels needs explanation) as homosexual orientation, but that level of indication is unnecessary - overkill.

Obama's somewhat to the right of Eisenhower, overall (corporate based health insurance and health care, other large public works, Veteran's benefits, warnings about the "military/industrial complex", etc.). That's the part that's hard to "admit", I think. If things are close in my State, I'll vote for Obama - Romney, like W and Reagan, is one of those obvious disasters that middle aged white guys somehow never see coming. Otherwise, some likely looking 3rd party.

The question of what to presume' date=' what is the likely state of affairs given Darwinian theory and observed reality, appears to be a significant concern in this thread - possibly the single most important relevant issue, to the OP. We have a body of posts and posters apparently presuming that there are no significant Darwinian benefits to whatever the genetic component of homosexuality is eventually found to be. I am pointing out that the presumption should be otherwise, given our current state of knowledge. To the extent that there are reproductive disadvantages - and the OP asserts them as the main source of the "mystery" of homosexuality. to the extent that homosexuality has a genetic component - and its presence among all known human societies in recorded history argues for a least some factor not dependent on purely cultural factors alone - the OP claims this as a mystery, an odd and inexplicable circumstance contrary to Darwinian theory. My posts have been in response to the OP, and the following discussion. If you wish the discussion to have been different, one in which no one is making such claims, then you have my sympathy. In this discussion, the observation that the indicated presumption about the Darwinian effects of homosexuality in intelligent, social mammals and birds (including humans) should be that there are some, and that they are significant, is perfectly appropriate, and so far unaddressed by you, btw. This, for example, overlooks the major factors in the assessment: Typo? I am not asserting high penetrance. I am asserting that it should be the presumption, in the OP of a thread like this, based on the evidence we have. The opposite, at least, should not be presumed, since it is highly unlikely given the facts at hand. My term was "apparent", duly qualified. And: Maybe not, but such extreme unlikelihoods, such long shots, are not to be presumed for argument. And: It is the case in theory, given the presumptions of the OP and the theory we have. If in reality it is not so, then we have something in need of explanation - in particular a correction in the OP, and new relevant facts, that show us where this standard but underinformed application of Darwinian theory has let us down. Meanwhile, my point stands: if as seems likely (cultural, geographical, and historical ubiquity, cross cultural ineradicablity, physical and developmental occurrence ) homosexual behavior has an underlying genetic component; if as asserted it imposes at least some significant visible reproductive penalty; then: any presumption that this genetic component delivers no reproductive benefit capable of countering the asserted penalty is manifestly unlikely on Darwinian grounds. The presumption should be that it does, and that evidence and argument are required before presuming that it does not. And has noted, we have no such evidence or argument.

This is possible, but very unlikely for several reasons: 1) Unlike with the appendix, no formerly valuable and ubiquitous but currently missing function of the characteristic has ever even been suggested. If it used to have a role it no longer has, something that would explain its Darwinian emergence in the past but not apply to current circumstances, no one can think of what it might have been - there aren't even any plausible guesses out there AFAIK. The farther back in evolutionary times we consider, the less likely the evolutionary emergence of such a huge and direct reproductive hit seems to be. 2) Most people don't feature the characteristic. So there is a large population of non-expressers to select for, and a much smaller population of expressers to select against, and no apparent reason that Darwinian mechanism would not be in rapid and decisive force. There is no such population of appendix-free people, enjoying the reproductive advantages of invulnerability to appendicitis (a major cause of pre-reproductive death and disability until very recently), so the failure of Darwinian mechanism to select for them is easily explained. 3) Rather than being a holdover from a distant evolutionary past, say with examples in extant older branches of evolutionary trees (as with the appendix), homosexual behavior seems to characterize especially the very most recently evolved entities - the intelligent and socially complex mammals and birds. This is also possible, in theory. But the selection against such combinations, and Darwinian pressure to ensure their impossibility (by gene linkage, suitable mutation, etc) would have been severe for millions of years - some explanation for the failure, the universal failure planetwide among all populations of humans known, to reduce the likelihood of them (with all the opportunity various founder effects and genetic bottlenecks have provided) would be necessary. And then there are all those other animals - - - - .

Dialogue is fine - just don't expect adult political discourse from them' date=' and most importantly don't pretend they are engaging in it when they are not. And don't erode your own country's political world by treating what you do get as respectable politics - they're human beings, fine, they get all the rights of citizens etc, but they don't get respect for political views and public behaviors that are infantile, violent, corrosive, ignorant, vile, and corrupt fantasies inculcated by a massive propaganda campaign in the service of the wealthy and powerful corporate elite. Acknowledging and respecting them as human beings is not the issue. The issue is granting respect to political views and behaviors that one cannot respect if they wish to maintain honest and reasonable political institutions. I use no tricks. None. And no one who is "diverse"' date=' who doesn't fit my description, is being painted by my brush - it's an explicit brush. Find an example of my "version" that is not simply and physically accurate, first. Then instruct me on my rights. No. I said it's dangerous to grant them respect' date=' or pretend to be engaging in adult political discourse with their adherents. I'm in favor of discussing them - honestly, openly, in full and explicit recognition of what they are. This will be the third time that I have been forced to point out to you that I said no such thing. I recommended that this faction be ostracized, laughed at, treated with contempt, by everyone - not just "liberals", but anyone with a sense of decency and adult political responsibility. What I said liberals would not do is deny civil rights, deny free speech, disenfranchise and abuse and oppress in the manner you pulled out of your ass to put into my posts. I am advocating enforcing respectful democratic political discourse, maintaining it, defending it from its enemies. Allowing these people to take over the airwaves, by the pretense of respectful democratic discourse with people who are interested in no such thing, is succumbing to mob mentality - it's happened. That's what Fox News is, that's what the hate radio is, that's what's happened to the "news" analysis programs that run the likes of David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter out on stage week after week after week. Nothing you have posted resembles a request for - or an example of - intellectual integrity. I do not, for example, "recognize" that the tactics I actually recommend - please quote, in the future, if listing them - are wrong or unhealthy for a democracy. I think they are absolutely necessary, and always have been. This continual bait and switch you are running, between what I recommend - social pressure, shaming and ostracizing, recognizing the contemptible honestly and treating it as it should be treated by sane adults - and your accusatory nonsense about denying civil rights, denying free speech, treating the neo-Confederates as they treat foreigners they despise, has run long enough.

The appendix is presumed to be left over from a formerly useful organ (and is not completely useless now) - it persists despite its costs because there is no incremental and likely evolutionary way to remove it. (Smaller and less functional appendixes are more, not less, prone to lethal appendicitis.). It was selected for its advantages, at one time, by presumption (and several plausible functions have been suggested). That is the normal presumption for such features. That would be the normal presumption for any genetic component of homosexuality. Any other presumption would require strong evidence and solid argument. There is, apparently, a clear and visible path to evolutionary reduction and long term removal of whatever the genetic component of homosexual behavior is - through the obvious reproductive hit incurred in a population of non-breeders. So we are not talking about a leftover from former times of advantage - the advantage has to be available now, to explain the apparent situation. Homosexuality is not disappearing, from any human population known.

Based on what I referenced above, in that post you are replying to - unread? - or if you need more, what has happened to the country every single time that faction has got itself some power - the last two hundred years of American history, the Reagan and W administrations, what exactly is obscure to you? Disenfranchise? Moi? No. They are already insular and cultish' date=' by their own hand, deliberately. You can't do anything about that: The core membership cannot be reached by argument, discussion, etc. And the point is to make that core as small a segment of the population as possible, by shame and mockery and disrespect in the full view of the undecided and noncommittal, by holding it in deserved, reasoned, open contempt. Nobody is talking about disenfranchisement except you - and the Tea Party folks, of course, who are not only talking, but doing (vote suppression, etc). Ostracizing is the normal and expected, respectable, adult response to their kind of behavior. The magic number for such response is one, in the case of (for example) inviting Ann Coulter on to national TV and presenting her as some sort of respectable pundit or acceptable commentator. Are you advocating we all pretend that situation does not exist? I don't, and posted nothing that a reasonable person could honestly interpret as implying any such thing. So why the accusation? Please. That kind of playing dumb is a waste of everyone's time. Liberals and the like, decent Americans in the old school sense, do not deliberately and openly treat people as you described. So you don't have to worry about the bad effects of accurately labeling and describing the neo-Confederates in the US - the ones who would abuse them and revoke their rights and so forth in that fashion are they themselves.

None of those countries are currently at war with each other, or even threatening violence, despite the rise of circumstances that there in the past would have threatened (at least) to set them at each other's throats. For this new situation of peace, a prize is not completely out of line. Although my own preference would be that such awards go to individual people. As far as its value since Obama's award (which was deserved perhaps a bit more than those within the US news bubble can really appreciate), it would be greater than its value immediately after its award to Henry "carpet bomb Hanoi on Christmas to show them you're crazy" Kissinger. Obama represented an upgrade of credibility - although we must remember, as Gore Vidal put it, to never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor.

It's very important that these people be rhetorically isolated, and labeled, and held accountable for their behaviors (that is, publicly shamed), and thereby kept away from power as much as possible. It is not productive to treat them with respect, or bring them into political discussion on their terms, or allow their violence and ignorance and batshit fantasies to influence US politics any more than can be helped. How many abortion clinics do you need to see firebombed, doctors assassinated, by Tea Party political supporters and allies? How many homosexual people run out of jobs and homes, shot, beaten to death, hung on barb wire fences? How many Tea Party spokesmen do you need to hear say - in public, on the official record - that we should restore the death penalty for political crimes, so that "liberals know they can be killed" (Ann Coulter)? The Tea Party faction is violent, and always has been, to whatever extent they can get away with. There is nothing new here - this is the latest incarnation of the faction that once found its political representation in the Klu Klux Klan, and before that the Confederacy. Read the letters and manifestos of the intellectual supporters of Jefferson Davis's political movement, and you will find rhetoric and analysis that could be lifted almost verbatim and pasted into Tea Party rhetorical efforts today. They are a fact of American political life. That isn't liberal foreign policy. That isn't standard American foreign policy. That is foreign policy we inherited from the last time the American Taliban got hold of some political power, and influenced US foreign policy according to their ideology and approach. You don't have to worry about labeling these folk "The American Taliban" costing them their rights, because they are the ones who would react like that to such a label. The effort to elicit self-awareness and adult political discourse from this faction is not only wasted, but dangerous - you cannot afford to grant respect and influence and power to these people. You must, as a public duty, mock and despise them, laugh at their nonsense and dismiss their lies without pretension of taking them seriously. Make them as much has possible pariahs, defensive, unsure of their reception among normal, decent folk. The last time these people got hold of real power, it took the Union Army four bloody years and the destruction of half the country to restore governance and sanity. The last time they even got close to the White House, defending their precious honor and reflexive cult of vengeance buried us in two land wars in Asia on the credit card and set the bankers in lordship over our economy ( they loves them the credit cards, also casinos). That should never be allowed to happen again.

The version of that rule of thumb handed to me, helping with some field research in ecology, was 29, not 30. Just an anecdote. It was presented as a lesson from experience in that particular field, to guide the rookie when planning a research program and uncertain of the number of repetitions or data collection events or whatever would be likely to yield the magic 95% confidence level for the answers to normal questions. That kind of estimate was important for budgeting money, time, effort, etc. When we collected census data for tree species distribution across a series of islands and nearby mainlands in our research area, for example, we planned census visits to 29 islands and nearest mainlands. That turned out to be a small overkill - around 25 or 26 we had it - but impressively close - saved us from wasting a lot of work on too few, without costing us much extra effort.

PubMed? No access , and not the first place to look – AFAIK no one has found a medical problem with that particular aspect. Here is a decent description of the mechanism of resistance, as it is currently understood: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165874/ And a quote from its abstract: This accumulation of glyphosate is what I was referring to, above – that it happens occasionally in unexpected (food) parts of some individual plants , can survive the stomach and reach the bacteria in the small intestine, and can be digested there, I leave to your own Googling (IIRC I ran across it in Science News several years ago). It was just an example. Here are some more from casual web search hits, from the first page of my efforts (I'm lazy), actually more threatening: Stuff about the gene transfer problem in the gut , and the extra spraying accumulation, and the auxiliary chemicals employed in real life, and so forth, with traceable sources : Intro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/authorisation/docs/soybean_40_3_2_public_comments_en.pdf http://natureinstitute.org/nontarget/reports/soybean_006.php http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_geneticfood24.htm the assessment that it is safe comes from research like this: http://cera-gmc.org/docs/articles/09-215-002.pdf and this is the best case I can find for the assessment of safety of glyphosate (pardon my earlier mental spasms spelling) resistant GM crops. http://www.kehoe.org/owen/soybean/ Notice the description: the expressed modified protein (and therefore all – all, always – of the effects of the introduced genetics) is naturally present only in chloroplasts, and therefore never – never, at all – found in the soybeans harvested for food. The enzymes and so forth likewise introduced (and their genetics) do one thing and one thing only, after which they are cleaved perfectly and their parts completely disassembled by cellular machinery, in each and every plant modified, without exception and without side effects. Auxiliary chemicals and genetics and so forth are largely ignored, however necessary or unavoidable in real life. The fate of the glyphosphate that is incompletely bound by ESPS is ignored. By this description, bacterial uptake of active (culturable) resistance genetics in the human small intestine would be extremely unlikely. The genetic string is squelched, the transfer and insertion enzyme(s) is not present, there is no glysphosate to defend from and no threat from the herbicide anyway, digestion would cleave the genetics at random rather than in complete and active chunks, and so forth. These are some of the presumptions underlying the assessment of safety by the industry regulators. Here is a pretty decent description indicating the tech complexity of the procedure. Read critically and with a paranoid eye, some of the holes are visible. http://www.biotech-info.net/felsot1.html

OK, so maybe no definite, actual, reality contradicting, etc, lie at all, but the point is made - what point was it? The nature and blatancy of the dishonesty from the last few Republican Presidential campaigns is in a class by itself. If you notice, the general assertion (with various particulars) that: all politicians are continual and habitual liars, it makes no difference what they say or have said, and there is no difference between them in what they will do once elected; is a Republican campaign and rightwing faction talking point, heard from pundits favoring them and agents of that agenda. That might seem strange, but the reason is simple: they more than anyone else have to deny what they've said and done, to win elections, and they have to do that without looking like unusually blatant and odious liars who will continue to do damage if elected, in comparison with their opponents. Since even on US media they own they can't completely avoid looking like blatant and odious liars who have done serious damage to the country over the past generation, they need to put some effort into the part about "in comparison with their opponents" - it's what they have to work with. Like a drunk who has smashed his car into the side of a school bus talking about how everybody drinks beer, look at how much beer bus drivers drink. Fortunately the main side effect - general voter discouragement and political apathy - also benefits them, in that their important source of political power ( corporate wealth) is immune. When the fight is a power struggle between people and money, discouraging everyone is one way for the money to win.

And I see no basis for your assumption that "gay genes" offer no such selective advantages in a reproductive context of evolved complexity in social nature (even those limited, as you presume for some reason, to the Y chromosome in humans). The major evidence we have is all against such an assumption: homosexual behavior is universal and pervasive among humans, common and robust many other evolved and evolving animals and birds - especially, we note, the more intelligent and socially complex ones. The direct reproductive penalty is obvious, so the automatic presumption would naturally be - under the precepts of Darwinian theory - that to the extent homosexual behavior is genetically influenced there is some serious reproductive benefit to those genetic influences. Otherwise, as several people have noted, these alleles or whatever would have vanished long ago, from the gene pools of all those animals and birds as well as humans. Any claims otherwise would require thorough research, overwhelming evidence, and excellent argument.