“Last year, 91 Texas parolees were returned to prison after being charged with a new crime, even though the charges against them were later dropped or they were acquitted in court.

“The real problem with our Asia policy is not the Bush administration but the U.S. political system. Congress is in a narrow-minded and protectionist mood, unlikely to see the need for trade agreements, foreign aid and far greater engagement with a crucial country like Vietnam. Minor issues, ideological obsessions and small but tenacious domestic lobbies hold back sustained strategic movement in foreign policy.

“[To circumvent pdf DRM] send the pdf as an attachment to your Gmail account, and click the ‘view as html’ option within gmail.

“..menopause and post-menopausal life do not confer evolutionary benefits in themselves, but rather evolved by antagonistic pleiotropy because of selection operating.. to maintain regular ovarian cycles at young adult ages.

“..encryption does not prevent you from copying a file. Copying a file is just a matter of moving a series of ones and zeroes from one digital device to another, and you can copy an encrypted file
just as easily as you can copy an unencrypted one. ..instead, encryption prevents access to the content of a file

“The 9/11 Commission Report is created by the federal government and therefore has no copyright; it is in the public domain. Nevertheless, when I selected some text and try to copy it, I get this lovely message: “You do not have permission to copy portions of this document.

“Any preliterate human societies that included individuals old enough to remember the last great catastrophe had a much better chance of surviving the next one than did societies without such old people. The old men were not at risk from childbirth or from exhausting responsibilities of lactation and child care, so they did not evolve protection by menopause. But old women who did not undergo menopause tended to be eliminated from the human gene pool because they remained exposed to the risk of childbirth and the burden of child care.

“..the Attorney General has a right to recommend to me to replace U.S. attorneys. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President. ..we have named them, and I have the right to replace them with somebody else. ..as the hearings went forward, it was clear that the Attorney General broke no law, did no wrongdoing.

“..about 350 B.C., Aristotle summarized the reasons the flat-earth theory was unsatisfactory. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth’s shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.

“..from now on I’m going to just hit ‘hide’ on every one of my comics that gets posted reddit and stop reading these threads. Feel free to do the same.