PS - I looked up the question about why type I diabetes is out but not type II... What concerns them is whether or not you have to take insulin. People with Type I diabetes typically have to take insulin injections whilst Type II usually do not, so while it looks like they object to the diabetes variant itself, but this isn't true.

Anyhow, insulin used to treat diabetes is typically bovine insulin, which is made from the cow pancreas. A lot of bovine insulin is/was produced in the UK and the UK had problems with Mad Cow disease from infected cattle. Blood banks can't easily test for Mad Cow disease in donated blood, so it's easier (and safer) to just exclude people who have injected insulin since 1980 (I guess the date pertains to when animal feed companies began turning cattle into cannibals and started this whole mess).

If you folks were one of the many who caught AIDS or Hepatitis from a blood transfusion, the extra caution would be better understood. I had a friend from college who caught Hep as a result of tainted blood received during open heart surgery as a young girl.

This is one thing I actually do NOT fault the American Red Cross on. And don't get your leather panties in a ringer over the exclusion of homosexual men -- Lesbians are still OK (someone please insert joke here) because they don't have a high incidence of AIDS. There are PILES of other exclusion rules... People who've lived in a number of African countries are out also, regardless of sexual preference because AIDS is rampant there in the general population. They also don't want blood from people who spent "too much" (I think 3 months total) time in the UK during the 1980s-1990s either. That excludes lots of Americans who travel frequently. Also out are people who have ever received a transfusion while in the UK. The concern in both of these is mad cow disease, rather than AIDS, though. In any event, as long as the supply of donors is in fact rather plentiful (despite what they try to make you think), it's cheaper for them to exclude certain classes rather than test every unit for every pathogen with the most accurate (and expensive) tests. The American Red Cross doesn't admit they collect a lot more blood in the US than is really needed here, because sales to overseas markets is one of their biggest sources of income. And, they need a lot of that to support a bloated management structure that includes a CEO getting over $400K per year salary.

Well, the British were able to get them to (largely) stop widow burning. Maybe a return to some good old fashioned colonialism is all that is needed. Here, here!

getting better!

OK, what the heck are "boxies" ? Was this supposed to be "bodies" ?

Great story! What is most profound is that these people drove over 300 miles to have the births done in Great Falls Montana, a US town with a population of just 57,000 instead of their home city (and it’s a real city with a population over 1,000,000) of Calgary, because the hospitals there were too crowded to handle it!

What does that tell you about the state of the Canadian socialized medicine program? They had to drive 6 hours from a modern thriving city like Calgary (I've been there and it's nice, not run-down) to bumpkinville (relatively speaking), Montana in the next COUNTRY in order to get decent health care. Hmmm... What do we learn? Maybe when you make a good like health care "free", the supplies get really low!!!

Straight talk from Sid!

The Oneida Soceity in upstate NY is another good one. It survived for about 30 years (pretty good by comarison to most) and its remants still exist as the Oneida company that makes silverware.

Read about the Oneida Society -- they had some pretty peculiar practices regard plural marriage, sexual practice, eugenics, &c.

Kudos to Steven for the recognition of the USSR's own failed experiment.

Finally, the current planned Free State Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project) is worthy of mention. They've got a tough row to hoe, considering that New Hampshire is already pretty well populated. It's not like Utah which was essential open ('cept for some pesky Indians) for the Mormons. It will be tough for them to attain critical mass, but I'm tempted to sign up :-)

As an engineer who develops emission control systems for a living, I get a bit piqued when folks like 'andrew' confuse carbon dioxide with "pollution". Carbon Dioxode is (along with water vapor) the natural product of PERFECT COMBUSTION. Every species in the animal kindom creates CO2 and exhales it on every breath. Your own CO2 emissions are constant unless you "off" yourself.

If you are burning ANYTHING that contains any carbon atoms, you are going to make CO2, no matter how good your pollution controls are! The only ways to get rid of CO2 are to spend MORE energy making elemental carbon out out it (essentially turning it back into coal -- gobs of energy needed for this!) or compressing it (more energy) and sequestering it into tanks or deep underground (more energy).

Confusing CO2 with real pollutants like hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, aldehydes, &c. minimizes the effects of these and just marks one as somebody who never took (or passed!) chemistry. If you want yourself taken seriously be people who know better, it's a good idea to stop doing this.

Analyze the issue like a trained scientist or engineer. Concurrence does not imply causality. People are looking at one tiny (miniscule!) little sliver of time (the 200 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution) on an earth that has been heating and cooling (in swings much longer & at often at MUCH faster rates!) for an estimated 4.5 BILLION years. Do that math! 200/4,500,000,000 = 0.0000044%! The earth's temperature has almost never been flat; it's always been in a cycle up or down.

It is fine to study and learn more, but there's no reason to go crazy on the advice of people like AL Gore -- he's a lawyer and politician with zero training in science or the scientific method. Everyone is free to have hunches, but to treat a theory extrapolated from such a tiny (in the epoch of time) piece of data as fact and threaten and name-call skeptics is a different matter... it's poor science, frankly.

Oh, I'm not implying that there is a "vast global warming conspiracy" but I think almost all of the leaders in the movement have either money or power to gain. The loyal "foot soldier" masses are largely sincere, yet scientifically-naive environmentally conscious folk (Ed Begley types). I don't condemn these people, but miss no opportunity to attmept to educate them as to their folly.

Straight talk from Sid.

I'm 41, so I remember it better than you :-)

Try actually reading that Newsweek article from 1975. It WAS being taken VERY seriously then. Experts were "united" on veracity of the cooling taking place.

Regardless, you still can't refute my primary assertion:
"The earth has had dramatic heating and cooling cycles for millions of years before mankind. The contemporaneous presence of mankind for a couple hundred year during one of of the swings IN NO WAY establishes causality !!! "

Let's hope she doesn't start stocking up on adult diapers, tear gas spray, and BB guns.

Sure, anyone who attended gradeschool or highschool in the 1970s remembers the "coming Iceage" Global Cooling scare that was drilled into our heads constantly. It served as a fitting replacement for the "Duck and Cover" drills.

The fact that today's "esteemed experts" have completely reversed the warnings of the last generation's "esteemed experts" belies the fact that none of these alarmists really know what they are talking about. It's all a scam to extract money for government sponsored research, sale of carbon indulgences (errr... I meant "credits"), &c.

The earth has had dramatic heating and cooling cycles for millions of years before mankind. The contemporaneous presence of mankind for a couple hundred year during one of of the swings IN NO WAY establishes causality !!! It's a boondoggle aimed at grabbing your wallets and handicapping Western civilization for the benefit of the 3rd World. If the the last couple hundred years had been on a cooling swing (like they thought it was 30 years ago), they would have blamed that on mankind as well. Pure hokum.

Straight talk from Sid.

It looks to me like an early starter's pistol. You can see a where the psitol's hammer is -- looks like it takes a percussion cap like early 19th century firearms. I am guessing the big lever is a foot operated release, but I'm not certain of that.

(I actually like the booby trap answer better, but I got beaten to that).

Sounds like they need to take another "Great Leap Forward"

How about funny REAL slogans that maybe are a bit dated now?

My all-time favorite is for Schaefer Beer, a once-popular U.S. swill beer. The tagline in the jingle went:

"Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one!"

What could be more hilarious than that?!!? "Our beer really sucks, but it's cheap, so it's a fine choice when you really want to get plastered and quantity is better than quality"

Many years later (this slogan was around for years), after public consciousness about "responsible drinking" became raised, they changed the slogan to "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're out to have some fun" Very very lame.

Newsflash: Japan is a bunch of islands! The ocean and REAL waves are not that far away from wherever you are!

This is really disgusting ... amazing that they will think Westerners are dirty for not having special bathroom flipflops to wear in their own house, yet pack themselves belly-to-ass into this petri dish. Yecch.