Yes, Prv8eye, a lot of people were misled by crazy propaganda about "imprisoning" people for being "sick", as tho mental "illness" is equivalent to a cold - rather than tuberculosis, typhoid, or something else that required quarantine. What enabled naive people's delusions about insanity, to advocate closing mental hospitals was psychoactive medications. What they forgot is that when crazy people became moderately better while taking their meds, they stopped taking their meds!, and then returned to madness. The cure to "deinstitutionalization" is obvious: "reinstitutionalization", and, in the case of people released from mental institutions with medications they HAVE to take to stay reasonably sane, FOLLOWUP by nurses and social workers to make sure they keep taking their meds. If they stop, it should be right back to the mental hospital for them. Perhaps science can create a device, like a breathalyzer linked to a house-arrest leg collar, that detects whether a released lunatic has taken his/her meds, and if not. sends out a signal to the authorities to send someone to compel them to take their meds or force them back into custody. Instead, we have just consented to live with the consequences of a failed policy of deinstitutionalization, and consigned tens or hundreds of thousands of insane people to life on their own, hopeless and miserable on the streets. Then decent people are made to feel that we are a heartless society, when we are the opposite: a society with more sympathy than common sense. We need "tuf luv" for crazy people, not empty-headed concern for their "civil rights". We also need anti-parasitization statutes that forbid people to panhandle, and make arrests for panhandling a way to bring lunatics into a diagnostic setting in which they can be helped, whether, in their deluded state, they want to be helped or not. A humane society does not let people live on the streets in freezing weather.

Man-made "global warming" is plainly NOT happening. The substituted term, "climate change", is so vague as to be meaningless, and seems to cover both warming AND cooling!, as tho both could be happening at the same time from the same cause. Tellingly, the greatest changes have been at the poles, where NOBODY LIVES. In the Arctic and Antarctic circles put together reside only about 2 MILLION of the planet's 7 BILLION people. If human activity were responsible for "climate change"/"global warming", one should expect to see greater effects where there are a great many people, and much smaller effects where there are no people. Exactly the opposite is the case. The poles are where the greatest changes are seen, and there are essentially no people there. What distinguishes the poles from other regions is the magnetic field that intercepts solar radiation from mid-latitudes and redirects it to high latitudes (the poles). Desertification is one way in which human activity might have LOCAL effects, but not planet-wide effects. And there are natural limits to global warming from anything but long-term solar variations (such as the Ice Ages, which people had nothing to do with). Warmer temperatures mean more evaporation from the oceans, lakes, etc., and what goes up must come down, as rain and snow over not just the oceans and lakes, but also lands long dry, which cools them. And the more clouds there are in the atmosphere, the more solar radiation is reflected back into space.

It's interesting to see that, once again, a vast inpouring of Rightwing money FAILED to win in Massachusetts. Scott Brown should be a spokesmodel. He's beautiful, but that's not enuf to justify a place in the U.S. Senate. It might do to sell us clothing, electronics, or other products or services, however.

Petitions that cannot be taken seriously should be answered uniformly: "The White House will not waste taxpayer money answering nonsense."

High-tech firms are shoveling b.s. to get Congress to import cheap labor. There is NO shortage of good people in the United States, just a shortage of good people who will work for bad wages and few benefits.

I hope whoever wrote that White House response did it on his own time. No way should paid employees waste taxpayer money on NONSENSE.

Prisoners should NOT be wandering around unsupervised, for ANY activity. They are supposed to lose their freedom, and be rehabilitated. They should be in educational programs, psychological programs, etc., to rework their minds to positive behavior, not engaging in rote prayers of no substance, to a nonexistent 'God'.

When will astronomers admit that they have NO actual images for these asserted phenomena? When will media stop publishing internally self-confuting NONSENSE from astronomers? First the planet is said to be only a dust cloud; now it's supposed to be an actual planet, 3x the size of Jupiter, and there's supposed to be a dust cloud only 10,000 years old. Why does anybody BELIEVE such nonsense? There is NO WAY anyone could know the age of a dust cloud. Stop reporting FICTION as fact.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:21 PM