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POPSModern-day canaries in the coal mine "Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds’ cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return."
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POPSTroy's Poision Pill Please read this entire article in Mother Jones. It explains how a Bush appointee made it next to impossible for a person to sue a drug or pharmaceutical company, or medical device manufacturer for injuries sustained from use of their product. The claim goes that if the FDA approves a drug or device, that that should be the end of the line. As long as the product meets FDA approval, not judge or jury should be able to determine that said product could be responsible for someones injury. This is another example of how the Bush administration has put big business over human lives. Is it any wonder he demands preemptive immunity for communications companies, when he already had the FDA preempt medical liability lawsuits? This just gets disgustinger and disgustinger.
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POPSPersonal nuclear reactors? These things are hot! I'm still not sure if these things are real or not - I'm going to have to do a bit more research. If they are safe, economical, and at least environmentally justifiable, it could make for an interesting few decades.
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POPSThe Great Silence His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.
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POPS“Scientific Consensus” That Paves The Road To Nowhere Now maybe all of this - and there’s lots more - isn’t enough for Gore, but it is producing results, many of which could be important for anti-pollution, oil-conserving purposes beyond any possible curtailing of global warming, and we have meanwhile learned from the Kyoto Protocol that ill-considered grandiosity doesn’t produce anything but braggadocio about good intentions that pave the road to nowhere. Supposedly, there’s a “scientific consensus” that human-induced warming will deliver a series of enormous catastrophes if left untreated, but the extent of concurrence has never been what it has mostly been made out to be. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) recently released a list of 400 of the growing number of reputable scientists from all over the world who have voiced serious doubts about one aspect or another of the thesis.
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POPSNo Such Thing as 'Cultural Elite' In the UK, 62.5 percent of survey respondents were univores when it came to taking in the theater, dance or movies, while 37.5 percent were omnivores. For music, 65.7 percent were univores, 34.3 percent were omnivores. For the visual arts, 58.6 percent were inactives, 34.4 percent were paucivores and just 7 percent were omnivores.