Orange County is the unwashed armpit of Southern California. Especially Irvine, Anaheim and Fullerton.

Try the Bay Area. Or San Diego. Or one of the nice coastal cities between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. Sure, you can't afford a house there! But you get to live near where dirt meets water!

Actually I had a dream about moving inland last night. It was more of a nightmare, but that's only because I was moving back to my old town, a place where I'd built many of my worst and most painful memories.

Just keep in mind that if you move, you'll be exchanging one kind of problem for another. You'll be out of earthquake zone and into tornado zone. You'll be away from misinformed hippies and coastal meth heads, but nearer to uneducated racists and...inland meth heads.

That said, you will be able to afford a house -- especially if you built your nest egg while in California. Salaries are lower in many inland states.

and then go at it like sea otters.

That is all.

....and yet Salon keeps publishing the ramblings of Camille Paglia, who dismisses Al Gore but doesn't even have the spine to explain what her arguments are or why she doubts the conclusions of 99% of the scientific community.

The whole "no flag pin" thing was based on a Druge report that linked to some interview from 2 years ago.

The real story here is -- why are major news outlets getting their bogus news tips from Drudge?

Somebody needs to follow up on this. What the hell is going on? Why is CNN, or AP, or ABC following some little nothing story from Drudge?

Heads should roll over that alone.

The subject was just to get your attention, Grisscoat.

You wrote this: "Pinker couples faith with alchemy in foolish fashion, presumably unaware that the intellectual believer claims no certainty about God's existence. It's a faith claim. Pinker's lightweight pairing of alchemy and faith reveals a deeply untutored mind where religion is concerned."

You're overzealous in criticizing Pinker's analogy. In case you missed it, he was objecting to the way the class put "reason" and "faith" on equal footing while suggesting they formed a dichotomy.

I also do not think it's true that "the intellectual believer claims no certainty about God's existence." Quite a few religious figures would disagree with that, many of whom have pretenses of intellectualism.

Though you try to claim on behalf of others that they're making a "faith claim" (what, really, is a "faith claim" at all?), the word faith becomes meaningless and disingenuous when you consider that people regularly attempt to persuade others to share their faith, as well as indoctrinating children with that faith. If faith really suggests a full admission of uncertainty, then many believers are behaving in an immoral fashion when they strongly promote their beliefs to others.

Lastly, I think you're a hilarious nitwit when you attempt to call Pinker an "untutored mind." If anybody's a well-tutored mind, he's a top contender, as you can see by the careful articulation of his ideas throughout the rest of the interview. When I was taking a linguistics class a few years back, I had the pleasure of Pinker visiting as a guest lecturer (mind you, this is in a class of about 20 students) and he was a gregarious, inspiring teacher.

Not a very good one at that.

Don't feed the troll!