What the hell is this? It starts nowhere, it goes nowhere, it stops but never ends. And it has NOTHING to do with YouTube or television or money. Why is this here?

I'm not even going to apologize for casting a dash of cold water on this scary article. The fact is, if you wanted to find out how much radiation is reaching the West Coast, you could test for it. Easily. Nobody has done that. Why?

I'm going to be taking a nap until I see (on this science and technology site) that some real Scientists have conducted some real scientific tests and have recovered some real scientific data, that leads to some real scientific description of the problem -- in Scientific terms. Really. Wake me when you do the job.

Ayn Rand's Atlas and Fountainhead are literature in the same sense that Harriet Beacher Stowe's "uncle Tom's Cabin" is literature. These three pulp novels address important topics, but in shamefully oversimplified ways that almost defame the topics they present. Their authors both caught lightening in a bottle by accident.

West Point has no business assigning either book to any class presented to a future Army Officer. I mean it: None.

I would get rid of any instructor who required students to read either Atlas or Fountainhead. The heroes in both books behave immorally by any sane standard, in terms of what West Point Cadets are being taught in their other classes. Howard Roark commits a violent rape in Chapter Two -- later, he blows up a sky scraper. John Galt would simply be considered a terrorist today.

So you want them only to read what has been "approved"? At that rate they should stop reading Noam Chomsky because he may have writings not favorable to the US Military. The idea of education (even at a US Military Academy) is let students read a diverse group of authors in order to make well informed moral decisions once they get into the field. Saying a book has "dangerous" ideas is akin to a people wanting to burn books because they object to what is being written.