The NFL normally plays commercials during the national anthem and, to the best of my knowledge, never or rarely covered any players kneeling or sitting on the bench until the President made it a political issue.

I am a veteran and a 49ers fan who thought that Kaepernick’s protest was disrespectful. I have not been watching as much football lately, but it has nothing to do with whether people kneel during the national anthem.

That is across all the fires burning in California right now. Sadly, people have died all across the State. Last I read, a little over 20 people died in Sonoma and a few more in Napa.

Trees have bark and are filled with water. Some trees, like redwoods, are very flame resistant.

The San Francisco Bay Area is a little over a hundred miles in latitude, from San Jose to Santa Rosa. The air in San Jose, 100 miles south of the fire, has been unhealthy to breath for a lot of the week. Until now, I think that the Oakland Hills fire was the worst wildfire in the State, with 25 deaths and over 3000…

I agree it is a concern. I am more concerned with how the current President would respond in an actual crisis as opposed to just unilaterally ordering a nuclear attack that everyone around him would likely agree was unwarranted.

The US’s policy is to only use nuclear weapons in response to a WMD attack; however, it is know that during the Cold War at least, the US had an unpublicized policy of advising the launching of a nuclear first-strike if a Soviet attack seemed imminent, to ensure that we were actually able to get off the bulk of our…

Well, there is also the oath that all federal employees, including military officers, to obey the constitution. The constitution requires congressional approval to levy war. While congress has abdicated some of their power to the President in various bills they have passed, there is a pretty strong case to make that…

Yes, but it is also a feature that the President doesn’t have a big red button that just launches the nukes. The order has to go through the military chain of command and anyone from the top of the cabinet to a just-commissioned Air Force officer in a bunker in Montana can shut down a nuclear launch.

Distance is an arbitrary measurement that is defined in physics by an arbitrary quantity. The meter, for instance, was originally a mathematical abstraction of an ellipsoid (which is a mathematical, not a scientific construct) to a physical measurement of the earth’s surface. It is currently defined by the number of…

Criticizing intelligence for being “subjective” is as meaningless as criticizing a meter or a parsec for being “subjective”. Like many things in science, intelligence is what scientists define it to be. Scientists create definitions to be useful. IQ is defined as an indirect measurement of intelligence because it is a…

It’s hard to say what someone’s IQ is without examining them. I think Trump is probably smarter than a lot of liberals give him credit for, but I doubt he has a high IQ.

If correlation is not a valid basis for concluding causation, then you have to throw out pretty much all science, because pretty much everything in modern science is established through statistical correlation tests of some sort.

IQ is not actually a measure of intelligence, at least not directly. Rather it is a comparative measure of performance at tasks that are thought to be highly correlative of intelligence. Often in science we cannot measure something directly, so we measure a correlative factor. Intelligence is even trickier because the…

Yeah, but you cannot just cut down a whole ecosystem and replace it overnight with California-native species. It is a very slow process. A lot of the parks in the Bay Area are trying to get rid of invasive species, but it could take centuries.

At this time, my understanding is that there were 2-4 ignition sources. The fires were spread around by the wind, often leapfrogging from one place to another by embers landing on something flammable. It does not take much to start a fire in California in October.

The Pacific Northwest is a lot wetter than the San Francisco Bay Area. It pretty much does not rain here between the end of April and the end of October.

The hurricane stories either squeezed in slow news days between the toddler’s twitter meltdowns or were directly mentioned in his tweets.

IQ tests are still widely used to judge intelligence, because IQ is the only measure scientists have that correlates highly to intelligence (g factor). IQ measures are not perfect, but they are very useful and continue to be widely used in social science and medicine that study.

Which is a bit ironic, since so much of Voyager was largely a hackneyed reworking of ideas from better Star Trek shows that had come before it. But Equinox was quite original and one of the better episodes.