"We should first distinguish between science with practical applications, such as technology which streamlines and accelerates output (and thus facilitates capital accumulation) and science with purely intellectual consequences. Repubtards, of course, love the first variety but are ambivalent about the second,"

We've already established that flat-earth liberals hate the first, but yes - having prevented technology from advancing in the US and Europe, they are now moving in on pure science. I invite you to see for yourself under "Mt. Graham protests" (opposition to the pure science of astronomy, for the usual constantly shifting set of reasons). Now for some real fun: go to "Large Hadron Collider". The Luddite position is that this European physics research facility will literally destroy the universe. KInd of makes belief in creation pale into insignificance, doesn't it? Then we find out that all the arguments against the LHC were lifted verbatim from the opposition to its predecessor, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, built on Long Island a few years ago. Last time I checked the universe, and New York, were still there.

"I'm somewhat further left than your average liberal, I'm sure. More like an FDR socialist, actually."

This raises an interesting point. I see Obama's mandate last year as being similar to that of FDR: print a trillion, spend it on craeting jobs and getting the economy moving again. After all, the Republicans had just gotten through printing a similar pile of cash and giving it away to the bad guys. Not one job created, jut vague promises that confidence in the economy would be restored by making French hedge funds whole after their losses in our mortgage market. So the public brought in Obama on the strength of those promises to put people to work building the twenty-first century equivalent of Hoover Dam.

Today's disappointment comes from the fact that Obama wussed out on confronting his own party's old hippie element. He could have made the stimulus popular by making energy independence its unifying theme. By boldly saying "Screw Harry Ried, we're going to drill for oil (the most popular plank in the GOP platform), start a hundred new reactors, build the wind and solar farms, drill for geothermal wherever there is hot rock to be found, and generate biodiesel from algae, Obama could have won the same place in the public's heart that FDR once had.

But no - we get a stimulus that consists of a bunch of miscellaneous road widenings, to which the public rightfully reacts with a resounding "Meh!" Perhaps you people can generate energy from burning straw men. It's all you have left.

What's the difference between the flaming on "hate radio" and any Stalinista letters thread on some article that does not precisely fit into their theology? I have been around long enough to have first become acquainted with your type in 1968, at University of California. I was in those audiences when you shouted down speakers and grabbed mikes out of the hands of people officially charged with imparting an actual education to you. Apparently it's still 1968 on your planet today.

"This story is so one sided it can only be called propaganda. Are you kidding me with this garbage? "

But notice how even when Paglia bends over backwards to be nice to liberals in one of the most conciliatory columns of recent months, they are still angrily calling for her head? Liberals don't want to debate - they can't stand opposition. If they can't shout it down in Salon letters threads, they will mobilize their lawyers to crush it. Liberals own print media and television, except for that one channel they love to hate, but it galls them that conservatives own talk radio. They're itching to shut it down with their so-called "fairness doctrine."

This, not anything to do with Obama, is why we right-wingers are stockpiling the Black Talon rounds.

That perhaps Obama will turn out to more Clinton-like than we of the dark side have been expecting.

...The incredibly low salaries you cite for pilots. How much aviation expertise are they going to get from Walmart greeters?

With an monopolistic, arrogant, overpriced medical system that can't even be bothered to respond to e-mails, people are going to grab for information wherever they think they can find out. There may be a world of bunk out there, but a few unexpected new treatments are going to emerge.

"Every scientist I've known has been more than willing to accept new theories when those theories are accompanied with evidence. Also, the idea that scientists are unwilling to upset the status quo is rediculous."

Science is not the problem here. Medicine - as practiced by doctors, housed in hospitals, and directed by the minimum wage file clerks at insurance companies who make life-and-death decisons for us - is the problem. Is there any way to convince these people to be as willing to test new ideas and question their standardized beliefs as scientists are?

"For roughly two hundred thousand years humans were able to thrive and expand from a corner of east Africa to cover the planet without benefit of the medical profession. What have we done to ourselves to place us in need of these successors to the high priests of ancient Egypt?"

Not wanting to die at age 35 of appendicitis or vitamin deficiency or

"diverse diseases", that's what.