Slashdot Mirror

And why would the Palestinians need Israel approval when Israel didn't need to ask permission to the Palestinians to exist?

Israel has existed as a nation in that region for at least 1,200 years, first as a kingdom, and now as a democracy. There was a bit of a gap between the prior kingdom and the current democracy while the Jewish population made its way back after captivity in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and in Europe and Africa courtesy of the Romans. (Disappearing and reappearing nations aren't that unusual, ask Poland.) In a way it worked out better for them while they were spread out as it was harder to oppress and kill them all.

Their continued existence has even been pointed to as evidence of miracles.

Now, some find it convenient that they are back in Israel -

UAE Professor Says Jews in One Place for Easy Killing

The whole "negotiated solution" is propaganda for Israel to keep the Palestinians stateless forever, and continue the colonization. The longer they wait, the larger their state will be.

The Palestinians would have a state now if they could accept the existence of Israel, but they prefer to live with the fantasy that they will destroy Israel.

The Palestinians Want Peace -- Just Not With a Jewish State

I wouldn't get too comfy though even if you are tempted to throw the Jewish people under the bus, the Palestinians also teach their children that they must reclaim Spain after the Muslims were driven out 521 years ago.

Dreaming of Al-Andalus

If they are successful in that, they will eventually try to redress that whole nasty business at the Gates of Vienna.

They will have help.

And why would the Palestinians need Israel approval when Israel didn't need to ask permission to the Palestinians to exist?

Israel has existed as a nation in that region for at least 1,200 years, first as a kingdom, and now as a democracy. There was a bit of a gap between the prior kingdom and the current democracy while the Jewish population made its way back after captivity in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and in Europe and Africa courtesy of the Romans. (Disappearing and reappearing nations aren't that unusual, ask Poland.) In a way it worked out better for them while they were spread out as it was harder to oppress and kill them all.

Their continued existence has even been pointed to as evidence of miracles.

Now, some find it convenient that they are back in Israel -

UAE Professor Says Jews in One Place for Easy Killing

The whole "negotiated solution" is propaganda for Israel to keep the Palestinians stateless forever, and continue the colonization. The longer they wait, the larger their state will be.

The Palestinians would have a state now if they could accept the existence of Israel, but they prefer to live with the fantasy that they will destroy Israel.

The Palestinians Want Peace -- Just Not With a Jewish State

I wouldn't get too comfy though even if you are tempted to throw the Jewish people under the bus, the Palestinians also teach their children that they must reclaim Spain after the Muslims were driven out 521 years ago.

Dreaming of Al-Andalus

If they are successful in that, they will eventually try to redress that whole nasty business at the Gates of Vienna.

They will have help.

Muslims like Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Eric Rudolph?

The phrase you are looking for is "pressure cooker bomb." It is a technique taught by and identified with Al Qaida and affiliates.

Fixed your bigoted American exceptionalism for you.

You don't know what you're talking about. And that is really quite astonishing since the information has been widely available for some time.

The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants

If you think this is ultimately about anything America has done, you're uninformed. If you think it will stop if America is destroyed, you're willfully blind. Ultimately they will come for Europe and the rest of the world as they believe they are both entitled and destined to rule every nation.

And the kicker is that they will have help:

The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures
The Left's Unlikely Alliance with Islam
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Leftist's Ironic Unholy Alliance with Islamists
A dangerous alliance: Faux liberals and Islamists
Islamist-Left Alliance A Growing Force

I'll save you the suspense - you aren't getting it. The site exists to collect reports of defensive gun use by citizens. This phenomenon is claimed to not exist by some people, probably like you. Guns do more than protect people from other people with guns. They protect 80 year old men confronted by gangs, 89 year old women from home invaders, women fighting off multiple rapists, and enable a boy to save his family from kidnapping and sexual assault. This sort of thing happens regularly, but is often unreported. If you ban guns, then everyone is at the mercy of the strong and vicious. Things don't get nicer if you ban guns, you simply get more innocent victims. In fact, gun crime can increase. But then violent crime in much of Europe, including the UK, and Australia occurs at a much higher rate than in the United States anyway. The United States does have a higher murder rate than much of Europe, but there is some subtlety in that. European Americans commit murder at rates similar to other Europeans. Where do the rest come from? And no, the United States murder rate is not among the worst in the world, its actually in the middle overall, and much lower in many place in the US. Guns are a useful tool, make for pleasant sport, but they not magic as you seem to believe. I think you have a number of unexamined assumptions that aren't true.

The word 'strawman' is like a meme on slashdot. Not everything is a strawman argument.

Yes, but you set a strawman argument, claiming I'm a racist when I made no mention of race. You don't even know what race I am. So stop protecting your bullshit strawman argument - which you are doing because you are intellectually lazy and closed minded - you would rather dismiss my argument out of hand without even looking at the citations I have given and justify this dismissal with your strawman. I suggest instead you use the Scientific Method, hear what I have to say (the links I gave), and then see whether it matches the evidence or not. What you are doing is illogical and un-scientific (dismissing the facts that are counter to the delusion you'd like to believe).

Now, if you're going deny that Islam is confined to a few distinct races (i.e. skin tones, as we tend to know them), then you're just playing ignorant.

This is another strawman you have constructed. You are again wrong. I always take pains to state that Islam is an evil political ideology (the evil of which you would clearly like to excuse). An *ideology* has zero to do with race. Even if it did, rational people would still be able to debate it in a logical manner. Only the weak minded politically correct fools censor free thought.

The basis for your list is that Islam == Terrorism. It doesn't. It's just that Muslims happen to live in impoverished countries that we keep declaring war against, or threatening to.

False. Islam is not equal to terrorism, statistically it just happens to be the motivation for over 90%. Stop projecting your own ignorance onto me. The second part of your statement are falsehoods promoted by the political Left who would like that to be the reason for Islamic terrorism. If you stop listening to the falsehoods and delusions of the Left you would instead have enough of an open mind to accept reality - the jihadis themselves say what their motivation is, and that motivation is Islam, eg. Sura 9:5 and 9:29 (please go an read them so you are less ignorant than you are now, and so you don't repeat the falsehoods of the political Left).

So just as people like you have learned to fear Muslims,

The reason rational people fear Muslims is because they deliberately strike at civilians, any time and any place. Contrary to the leftists propaganda you subscribe to the US does not do the same thing - it simply isn't economic to waste million dollar weapons on random killing. Now often in drone strikes today a jihadi will be in a compound with his family or other human shields. That is not the fault of the US and is in-fact the fault of the jihadi (it is immoral and internationally illegal for combatants to hide behind civilians).

Not to mention you're overly paranoid. If some population of Muslims in the U.S. wants to enact Sharia law in their city or state, they've got a huge obstacle: the U.S. Constitution. We don't even need to implement anti-sharia laws to enforce it, it's already there. We don't need such laws specifically targeting Muslims because they would (1) violate the constitution, (2) needlessly provoke the sort of violence those laws are trying to protect us against.

Dude, you really are quite ignorant of the facts, aren't you? No surprise, the left-leaning media are careful to hide reality for you, lest you stumble on the stated aims of the Islamists (which the immoral Left have common cause with). Here are some court cases where the Constitution has given was to Sharia:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/sharias_encroachment_into_american_courts.html
So please get a clue. I'm not a racist, I'm trying to shake you out of the Matrix you are in (fed lies by the leftist media and academia) and get you clued up on what is really going on.

Actually, I was reading about it at google news just a few minutes ago, and slashdot tends to be a bit late to the party in reporting stories like this.. . . So /. shouldn't bother.

I think something slipped past you. Strictly speaking, Slashdot isn't a news reporting site, it is a news aggregator and discussion site (although that generally works better if the news isn't stale as in weeks or years old). That is the point of the forums with each story, and posting - to discuss the news. Or are your posts completely random? (Topic? I don't need no stinking topic! I want to discuss chocolate sundaes! (That should really be hot grits.))

OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time...

Strike two. Oklahoma City is constantly dragged out in discussions and policy debates, especially to denegrate the political right and Christians despite the fact that McVeigh was an atheist on his own tangent. On the other hand, the Obama administration has been actively suppressing use of phrases by the government such as "War on Terror" and Jihadi.

By the way - it would be great if you would just spell foreigner as foreigner. That sort of feigned misspelling makes for tedious commentary.

First, you are an idiot if you don't understand what the MRAP is. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle. Did I say they purchased Tanks? No, I said very clearly "armored vehicles". The name MRAP shows clearly that the vehicle is armored. Will it stop a tank round? Not a KE or AP round, but it will not be bothered by small arms, or home made explosive devices and even smaller HE rounds like 25mm.

So since you back what I stated regarding the Patriot act perhaps you simply misread what I wrote previously. But...

Your numbers regarding bullet purchases are absolutely wrong. As is the reason for them purchasing killing bullets vs. target bullets. Here is an article showing 1.4 billion rounds. This includes sniper rounds as well as 9mm and 5.56 rounds so is higher than what I quoted. The reason DHS claims to need that many bullets is for target practice. Hollow points cost nearly 3 times what target rounds cost, so obviously this is either 1) a lie or 2) a waste of tax payer money. Since they continue to lie about the purchase, I have no reason to believe that they are honest with their intentions for use.

You also gave a fabrication for the number of armored vehicles being purchased by DHS. Here is a link that is not Alex Jones, showing that the purchase is for 2,700 but of course a good number of those have not been delivered yet.

When you fabricate information to prove someone wrong, you appear to be a government shill. It is possible that you are just absolutely misinformed. You use the term "conspiracy theorist" just like the media teaches people to use the term through propaganda. So as I started with, you are either a shill or ignorant.

I agree natural resources are not going to last forever. But the proposed "solutions" do nothing significant to fix the "problem" while allowing India and China a free pass.

WRT to links, here is one sowing how raw data is adjusted http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/fig_7-ghcn-averages.jpg

And here is one on how data sets keep changing:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/09/nasas_rubber_ruler.html#ixzz27YZRxqIW

Here is a little animation showing some modifications:
http://klimaforskning.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=825.0;attach=2823;image

Changing past data just seems sketchy to me. Especially if it is not transparent on your modeling and methodology.

Basically two reasons: (1) Failure to stop the aggressor, and (2) Multiple aggressors

You really are a closed-minded wanker aren't you? I will provide references showing that although your view is true for the last century, over the last two decades there has been a massive regression in many areas. I will provide citations

There are been great progress in the West. This is probably where you are making your statements about, yeah? However, you are completely *ignorant* (or chose to ignore) several facts: 1) anti-Semitism is increasing in the West (correlated strongly with massive immigration from OIC countries), 2) honor-crime and rape are increasing in countries where formerly it was never heard of (eg. Scandinavia, and again strongly and geographically correlated with OIC immigration), 3) the amount of terrorism has increased massively in the last decade, most of it is Muslim-on-Muslim (so if one is not paying attention, like you, then it is easy to miss: ), 4) the United Nations is OIC dominated and they are actively working to inhibit Free Speech across the globe, eg. see UN HRC Resolution 16/18 (where Hilliary Clinton very stupidly agreed to punish US First Amendment Free Speech rights against her own citizens in her own country - completely craven, shameful and anti-Constitutional).

In the last two decades Human Rights have been going backward for the 1.3 billion people in OIC countries (that's a lot of people). Example analyses: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/the_lamps_are_going_out_all_over_the_islamic_world.html
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/study-finds-worsening-conditions-for-democracy-and-human-rights-in-central-asia.aspx?pageID=438&n=study-finds-worsening-conditions-for-democracy-and-human-rights-in-central-asia-2002-08-20
Sudan going backwards: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3130234.stm
Consider the cases of the following countries: Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, Chechnya/Dagestan. Have human rights and tolerance gone forward in these countries with the dismantling of secular, socialist or moderate regimes and replaced with increasingly Islamist or repressive ones? Even in Britain, Canada and the US there is regression with an increasing rate of 'dishonor killings' that were unheard of a few years back (and the killing of any number innocent girls by their families for trying to life a liberal Western lifestyle is completely unacceptable, yes? or are you a fascist too?). There are now also places (eg. in France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden) were non-Muslims and even the police fear to go. Even Russia has experienced significant regressing with respect to human and civil rights. And as I mentioned, "useful idiot" Hilliary Clinton has just made the US agreed to UN Resolution 16/18 to suppress the Free Speech rights that US citizens have had for several centuries. These regressions are significant.

It is not all doom and gloom. The World just might be sorted out eventually (although there is also a good chance it won't be), but to say it is all forward progress is delusional and contrary to the facts if you look outside the Western/Free World. For a substantial chunk of the World's population there may have been material growth has been noticeable regression in human and civil rights.

So get out of your cozy neighborhood and start looking at the entire globe. For the last decade or so there has been significant regression for a large chunk of the World's population. It is indeed "it is incredible how backward the world has become". Oh yeah, if you are going to be a moron through ignorance, at least try not to be such a jerk about it. k?

That, and I want a smaller government:

No standing army.

No standing army? That strategy pretty much ran its course in the 1700s. Same for the navy.

Head Start: Can a Failed Program Ever Be Killed?
Marriage, Family Structure, and Children's Educational Attainment

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/02/claims-increasing-switched-votes-in-ohio/
http://www.northwestohio.com/news/story.aspx?id=819850
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/can_democratleaning_voting_machines_win_election_for_obama_1.html
Of course lib sites like nbc, cbs, abc, pbs, cnn, etc aren't discussing this, and communist sites like huffingtonpost say Romney is controlling the voting machines.

All arabs? Who said anything about all arabs? Oh, but wait:

"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion

You asked for only one, but there a literally hundreds by prominent Israelis.

You should probably start looking for a different quote, that one is fraudulent.

A Chameleon, Nevertheless

. . . But Morris doesn't stop here. Having stigmatized the Zionist founding fathers as quintessential European-type colonialists, he would not discard the other part of this Arab canard, which he has been peddling for decades, namely, that they were also unreconstructed ethnic cleansers "intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs."

I have been battling this defamation of Zionism's very essence for quite some time, showing time and again the extraordinary lengths to which Morris would go by way of fabricating Israeli history (see here, here, here, here, and here). I will therefore confine myself to one telling example of his professional misconduct.

In an October 1937 letter to his son David Ben-Gurion said: "We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built on the assumption - proven throughout all our activity - that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." In The Birth Morris represents Ben-Gurion as saying precisely the opposite: "We must expel Arabs and take their places."

Tellingly, in his Hebrew language writings, Morris rendered Ben-Gurion's words accurately, perhaps because he knew his readers could check the original for themselves.)

- - -

Now, for more relevant to the topic at hand, I suggest you google 'Israel threatens Iran'. You'll find plenty, with specific threats and timelines ("within months").

Here is an interesting question: Why are there hostilities at all between Iran and Israel? You do know that Iran and Israel had good relations between them into the 1970s, right? You do know that Iran didn't take part in the Arab-Israeli wars and so never fought against Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, or 1973, right? It was only after Iran underwent the Islamic revolution of 1979 that it declared itself to be an enemy of Israel. Israel has no reason to be an enemy of Iran other than Iran's behavior. Iran's current behavior is to train and arm Hezbollah and other terrorists with tens of thousands of artillery rockets, antitank missiles, and other weapons, to use in attacking Israel, not to mention suicide bomb attacks and assassinations. Iran itself is engaged in a world-wide series of assassination attempts against Israeli diplomats. That is before we even get into the whole, wipe Israel from the pages of history thing, and Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Is there no aspect of Iran's behavior, including its support of terrorism, that troubles you?

Is questioning Israel's foreign policy 'jew hatred'?

There might be a point where it would be a reasonable suspicion when you ignore Iran's hatred of choice, aggression of choice, and terrorism of choice while painting Israel as the aggressor against Iran, in defiance of the facts, while using forged quotes.

Why do you hate Persians?

Why do you support them? Wouldn't their campaigns of terrorism and barely veiled threats of genocide be enough to make you reconsider?

Knowledge is power, and science as an institution makes no bones about who gets it. That's why the Dark Ages happened, and why we're just one major disaster or war away from it happening again.

Sorry, but no. The Dark Ages happened as a result of the fall of Rome and the invasions of barbarians, and the Muslim conquests.

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The Epilogue
The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism
The Church Educates Europe

Pharmaceuticals spend billions developing new versions of dick hardening pills, while research into HIV, cancer, and other serious quality of life diseases languish.

Languish at their current high levels of research funding? HIV and cancer research seem to do especially well.

Curing a patient means denying yourself all that profit from name-brand life-saving drugs. I could come up with a hundred more examples from every industry in every country worldwide -- but you get the point.

I think the point is that you have an exaggerated sense of what is possible - the "Man on the moon syndrome", maybe? Modern medicine offers wonders, but it isn't even close to being able to cure everything. If anything the trend is the reverse - there are more and more antibiotic resistant diseases. Finding new ones that work is expensive, time consuming, and filled with all manner of difficulties posed by law and regulation. Changing social mores drop various former barriers to the spread of disease. The future of medicine, especially where infectious disease is considered, looks a bit grim at the moment.

Will humans lose the battle with microbes?

Obviously this sampling will reflect only the aggregate opinion of people involved with Twitter. Which way do you suppose that bias will lean?

Better than fabricating a polling bias, anyhow. Especially since it isn't likely to appear as a credible in mainstream news.

Anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases (0.28%) are a drop in the bucket compared to natural sources(99.72%).

Volcanoes are only a small part of nature's contribution to greenhouse gases. Forests and decaying vegetation are far more significant contributors.

Whats left for 300 million people to do?

They could spend their time reading about economic fallacies. Prosperity and economic growth come from more efficient production of goods and services. Not from "keeping people busy."

This will simply result in increased competition for resources, in this case - jobs. Those who can compete successfully will, those who can't ... will have more babies. But don't worry, socialism will make sure their children will have a comfortable life and continue to extract resources through forced wealth transference thanks to economic fairness which eventually results in the the shifting of sound principles to mob rule.

Of course, this won't continue indefinitely

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/07/03/melinda-gates-admits-stop-peoples-lives-from-existing/
Cited here:
http://www.dailypaul.com/243131/eugenicist-melinda-gates-stop-the-poor-from-reproducing

Or:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/melinda_gates_talks_eugenics.html
"Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""

I am just shocked at how most slashdotters have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the overpopulation myth.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

As Julian Simon suggests, more people means more imagination, which can mean more wealth for everyone:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

And in any case, the world is suffering more from a demographic pea

our economy is in ruins thanks to fighting two unnecessary wars based on our President deciding to finish what his daddy started rather than leave well enough alone

Please educate yourself. Bush asked congress for approval to fight the war in Iraq and received it (with a vote total that is more bipartisan than certain contemporary "signature" bills claimed to have been passed with broad bipartisan support). He also asked for, and received, approval to conduct operations in Afghanistan.

As for the cost of those wars, look closely at this chart and tell me that our current deficits resulted from two wars. (yes, yes, pedants, I know, it only includes the Iraq costs - I'm hoping you'll actually look that up yourself and see that spending in Afghanistan from 2001-2011 is less than a single year deficit now, and that those 8 years under Bush resulting in decreasing deficits up to 2008 while the bulk of that $1.3T in war costs was spent)

because a couple of our sand castles got kicked over by a bully

If by "sand castles" you mean the 2977 people who died in the 9/11 attacks, the 17 victims in the Cole attack, or the 223 dead in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi prior to that. I hope you can at least appreciate that your language is extremely offensive at best. You can oppose the wars without trivializing those who died at the hands of the instigators.

Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.

Let's see what some other sources say:

'Tyranny of Clichés' Excerpt: The Truth About the Crusades

. . . Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineff ectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).5 Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”6

At first the larger Muslim world didn’t much care about the Christian reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The jihad to repel the crusaders didn’t start in earnest until the European forces pressed on into the Muslim Holy Lands approaching Mecca and Medina. Even then the Muslim world considered the fight to reclaim Jerusalem a sideshow. The real fight was in the East, where caliphs were rolling up victory after victory in the old Byzantine Empire. In 1291, the Muslims expelled the last of the crusaders, and all remaining Christians and Jews in the Islamic world lived as second-class citizens (though often better than Muslims or Jews might have in many parts of Christendom). By the sixteenth century, Islam’s empire covered all of North Africa, Asia Minor, Arabia, and much of southern Europe. Had Islamic forces not been turned back outside the Gates of Vienna, Christianity itself may not have survived. (The battle ended in victory for the Christians on September 12, but it was the day before, marking the apex of Muslim rule, that would stick in the minds of many Muslims for the next 318 years.)
   

The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism

The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule

The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth

Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.

a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.

The atheist Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.

News that Stratfor, the "private intelligence service," has been whacked by Anonymous has brought the former organization and its reputation into sharp focus. The fact that Stratfor hadn't bothered to fulfill one of the lowest requirements of cybernetic security -- encrypting sensitive client data -- is one of the most damaging things that can be said about any company in the digital age, much less an "international security organization." This intrusion went quite a bit farther than most -- the Guy Fawkes boys actually managed to extract funds (a reported $500,000 worth) from Stratfor's clients (whom the company insists on calling "members"), which they then gave to charities. The humiliation here is total, and Stratfor will be lucky to survive.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/the_stratfor_scandal.html

Apparently you're referring to the notion that Ron Paul is a great admirer of Ayn Rand and/or follows her philosophy. I hadn't heard that before, and a brief search turned up no real support for that view*. Your post is at best woefully incomplete and at worst simply irrelevant. How you got so many up-mods is beyond me.

* One site implies that Ron Paul's son Rand Paul was named in Ayn's honor, but his actual name is Randal and his wife shortened it to Rand from Randy. Another article says "Dr. Paul has said he is a great admirer of Ayn Rand", though I was unable to locate any direct quote to support this statement. This article is similar. I was unable to locate anything short of a few fringe views. Libertarians and libertarianism was apparently influenced by Ayn, but by no means exclusively.

People got alarmist over global cooling. I never said that there was scientific consensus, I am well aware that there wasn't. My argument concerns public perception, and that argument stands. The present media hype over climate change is harming environmental needs in terms of public perception. Focus on pollution, living sustainably, things that can be quantified, measured and reported on.

I stand by my statements about carbon being over-rated. There have been times with much higher levels of C02 than we have now. I believe things like coal power plants are far worse for the environment than carbon emissions. Research needs to put into things like bringing up Thorium power plants to replace Coal power plants.

Climate change is absolutely inevitable, I have already provided citations for this. The continents will drift, Antarctica will move away from it's polar position and into a warmer climate. The ice will melt from that alone. The sun will continue to slowly get closer to the earth changing our spot in the Goldilocks zone. Climate change is the only thing consistent about the earths history, from snowball earth to a large desert filled continent. I live two thousand miles from an ocean find sea shells in my back yard from time to time.

This doesn't mean that I advocate that we should be wreck-less with the environment. This means that were focusing on trying to preserve our world in the state it was for before the industrial revolution. There couldn't be a more unnatural position to take with regards to our environment. Climate change will happen and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We need to focus on being good planetary stewards, reducing pollution and ways to live sustainably.

You mean the way the police reacted in this story. I know that wasn't a neighborhood watch story. It was much worse, it was a group known for illegal behavior.

I also mail letters with the US Postal Service, which is a nice example of how efficient a government organization can be without partisan politics interfering.

The USPS now faces a budget crisis because Congress dropped 75 years of employee benefit funding on the organization, due in a span of only 10 years

You see how these contradict and back up my point, don't you? Do you think any government program is going to be different?

Even after proposing to close 3,700 offices over the next year, the U.S. postal service has a $9.2 billion deficit and is near a default.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/09/do-we-need-the-postal-service/

But you blame it on the same government that you want to run insurance? You do see the hypocrisy in that, don't you? Are you trying to support my point that government run services are no better (in fact, in this case worse) than private sector? Politics can just as easily kill a business as a CEO. And don't even get started saying that Healthcare is failing in the private sector. It's arguably one of the most regulated (ie: ah, those politics again) sectors of industry today.

You can go back 10 years and find out why it's failing... hard. And of course, they don't consider themselves accountable for any of that. That's definitely what I want my life entrusted to... and since we are on the USPS: Why is it that UPS and FedEx are doing so well? Is it because the USPS cannot deliver packages? No. They deliver packages. What must it be then? Efficiency? Customer Service? Reliability? What is the USPS failing on so hard that it can't compete with these private companies? I think the CATO report sums it nicely: "the Postal Service decided to improve mail service by delaying letter delivery" They delay. So let's push our healthcare under that same "efficient" system. Let's just say, "Hold on sir, we'll get you that heart... when we are damn well ready."

Yeah, let's keep stamp prices artificially low. It makes them look good. (whopping 55%...)

So what about that USPS? Do we still need it?

“Heck, the only thing I need a physical mailing address for these days is to get physical packages from Amazon, UPS and FedEx do just fine and do it with lower labor costs (53% of its expenses for UPS, 32% for FedEx compared with 80% with the USPS)—the private delivery services just run more efficiently as a business,” Chan writes.

From 2008 to 2010, sales revenue in the mailing industry, which includes private mailers and printing companies, grew by 10 percent to $1.1 trillion and increased jobs by 16 percent.

Yes, spam ... spam is saving the USPS. Not efficiency.

So... why is it that:

Postal services in the Netherlands and Germany have been privatized...

And about those markups. Since you cherry picked a single (highly regulated) business that's failed you, let me point out a few government programs that have/are failing as well:
Cash for Clunkers
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac
TARP
Heck, there was just an article the other day about Solar Energy in America and how it's being exploited by China ...

More devastating than direct efficiency comparisons is the tendency for government to eventually bankrupt everything it manages, including itself. Amtrak, the Postal Service, Social Security, Medicare, Fannie and Freddie, FHA, FDIC, FSLIC, Student Loans, etc. are some examples.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/government_gone_wild.html

And yet, China continues to cheat at everything that WTO stands for. Basically, giving them WTO, constrains the west, but China just flaunts it. And having given them perm. MFN is destroying America. At this point, America should implement scaled tariffs, esp. against China. Interestingly, WTO not only makes it legal, but encourages it. Only fools, or those wanting to destroy either America or the west, would oppose it.

We are LONG overdue for America to implement a scaled tariff. Basically, These are tariffs that target nations that we have large deficits with, but in particular, those that manipulate their money and markets against us: This would not only restore manufacturing, but it would also improve our tax base, rather quickly. Finally, it would force nations that we have supposed open markets with that manipulate against us to change their behaviors.

Right - add a deadweight loss to our economy and make people pay more for goods so their net purchasing power goes down. A tarrif isn't going to bring manufacturing back; all it will do is reduce overall demand and leave consumers worse off.

• China - 36%
• Venezuela - 28%
• Italy - 25%
• Germany - 24%
• India - 22%
• Japan - 16%
• South Africa - 14%
• Mexico - 13%
• France - 12%
• Taiwan - 8%

While giving other nations like Canada a pass:

• Argentina,
• Australia,
• Belgium,
• Brazil,
• Canada,
• Hong Kong,
• Luxembourg,
• Netherlands,
• Singapore,
• South Korea,
• United Kingdom

Interestingly, this is legal PER WTO. WTO's position is that when a nation's trade deficit is larger than 10% with another, than you may take action.

The trick here is to convince the neo-cons that are attached to China's pants to let go and back America instead. Right now, far too many neo-cons are the ones blocking efforts at a balanced trade. In addition, without a budget deficit below 500 billion (or so), this probably becomes impossible to do.

NOAA use to have a site showing a graphic similar to this one (of the decrease in weather stations, no comparison to observations):

http://www.americanthinker.com/DAleo_Station_Dropout.jpg

But they removed it and setup a FAQ explaining away the drop.

http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/weather_stations.html

Anyway, as sample size decreases, the confidence interval increases and by power law the mean of a sample will increase as well typically inverse to the general trend.

Once Senator Palpatine's bill is passed they'll be able to revoke your citizenship and throw you in Gitmo (or a domestic camp) as well.

So you can now be detained at anytime for any reason - so long as the "terrorist" label is applied.

Meanwhile, the feds have been taking bids from companies who can setup and run large scale "relocation" camps in 72 hours or less.

The bid is right here: FedBizOps.gov

More info here.

It is not "Crony Capitalism". The thing that is often referred to as "Crony Capitalism" is just the inevitable result of a centrally planned economy (whether that centrally planned economy is called fascism, socialism, communism, or something else is irrelevant). When you give certain people the power to plan the economy, the end result is that sooner or later, and usually sooner, those people will start to manipulate things to favor their friends and associates. I just came across an article this morning that talked about this and reviewed a book on the subject titled "Throw Them All Out".

"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "

Yes indeed. And anyone who claims otherwise--such as the parent--is either ignorant or dishonest. Here are some sources, but it feels unfair to only list these few.

The Hockey Stick Illusion (book about the "hockey stick")
The Delinquent Teenager (book about IPCC being infiltrated by extreme advocates)
"Understanding Climategate's hidden decline" (article about "hide the decline")
Watts Up With That? (leading blog)
Letter to the Science and Technology Committee (on fraud)

Etc. Etc.

They might only profit 2% of every device, but the sheer scale of the whole manufacturing industry more than makes up for that.

That 2% figure is somewhat distorted. Here's something from a researcher at the same university as the other authors. Basically the 2% doesn't reflect currency manipulation that artificially deflates the numbers by 40%, it doesn't reflect externalized costs like pollution, it doesn't reflect governments supports like *free* factories, etc.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/china_trade_policy_and_the_fallacy_of_idea-land.html

It did get at least one person the Presidency: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/obama_the_affirmative_action_president.html

Fair enough, it's a multi-step problem:

1. CDL required for farm tractors
2. Disqualification for CDL if convicted of a felony
3. Sexual offender felony charges for 'indecent exposure' if caught urinating in public. Here's a man in Arizona charged with a felony for public urination. Only two of the 13 states with such laws restrict it to requiring a child to be present

There are enough absurd laws on the books that any new regulation has far-reaching consequences. At least part of the reason that administrative rulemaking is a public evil.

This one is a gift to agribusiness as it will surely cause many family farms to fail, through one consequnce or another. Hopefully this rule will ultimately fail, but it's unproductive folly to pretend that Democrats don't pander to the corporatocracy.

.
You don't need e-Voting to steal elections - just "find" new ballots as needed. And when in doubt (remember the infamous write-in for Chris Rossi that was counted as a vote for Christine Gregoire over Dino Rossi?) just decide it the way you want...

It's not the messenger, it's the message.

It's a little hard to take seriously a message from a web site that argues that Hitler was a "green" and that "Nazi SS doctrine (was) an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II." Seriously, what? The Nazi SS doctrine was environmentalism? Environmentalism and eco-imperialism were responsible for the Eastern Front in WWII? Crazy.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

Because now that Osama is dead, this abomination is now to protect from mysterious random people....

Lets clarify this a bit, shall we?

Yes, it will help protect us from mysterious people - currently unknown people who are in contact with terrorist groups, as well that people plotting attacks. That is the point after all, isn't it?

Although most people on Slashdot seem to oppose spying on anyone, most Americans are OK with spying on people in direct contact with terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda (organizations trying to kill large numbers of people, not Dennis Kucinich/Ron Paul voters ... unless they happen to be eco-terrorists engaged is actual terrorism).

And maybe you've forgotten, the Patriot Act has been amended in the past to address civil rights concerns.

As to Osama being dead... let's try a thought experiment.....

If Steve Jobs were to die tomorrow,... would Apple computer vanish? Would the board of directors and senior executives vanish? The tens of thousands of employees and contractors? The factories that make Apple products? The thousands and thousands of stores that sell their products? The tens or hundreds of millions of customers that own or are buying Apple products? Would the products vanish? Would any of it vanish anytime soon if Steve Jobs died tomorrow? The answer is: No. The Apple board of directors would name a new CEO and the company would continue. Apple might ultimately fail and vanish after some years due to lack of vision, or drive, or by losing its iconic chief visionary, but it wouldn't vanish immediately. It is also possible that they would benefit from Jobs exiting the scene... it would take time, probably years, to determine.

So, what about Al Qaeda? Now that Bin Laden is dead,... has it vanished? Has Al Qaeda's world-wide leadership vanished? Have the tens of thousands of varied terrorists and insurgents around the world swearing loyalty to Al Qaeda vanished? Have the caches of weapons and cash vanished? Have the tens or hundreds of thousands of people that they trained vanished? Have the hundreds of thousands or millions of active supporters around the world vanished? Have the tens of millions of Muslims that approve of them vanished? The answer is: No. Al Qaeda has named successors to Bin Laden, and they are carrying on in their various plots and campaigns of destruction, murder, and mayhem. In a sense they may even be more lethal now --- Al Qaeda's leadership has vetoed some planned attacks in the past since they projected that it wouldn't meet the Al Qaeda standard for body counts. The new leadership may take what they can get. Of course, if you have enough incidents killing dozens or hundreds at a time, you can still reach a total body count in the thousands. So, yes, Al Qaeda is still dangerous.

It has been understood by anyone interested that this is a problem that will almost certainly last decades - that was being discussed not long after 9/11. Here is something from 2007: Pace Says War on Terror Will Require Decades of Effort. What is the alternative? Give in the their demands? Bin Laden's demands are that the United States convert is Islam, throw away the Constitution, and govern by harsh Sharia law. In case you are wavering about which way to go, here are the top ten reasons this may not be a good thing from the previous link:

10. Islam commands that drinkers and gamblers should be whipped.
9. Islam allows husbands to hit their wives even if the husbands merely fear highhandedness in their wives.

Perhaps the joke is that in 3 years of filthy rich private aircraft travel they only found one filthy rich person using their plane to go to a tropical island for a holiday. Clearly all the other private aircraft owners are only using them for humanitarian aid.

The best joke is the congresscritters taking a trio of Air Force jets to a climate change conference.

In Hawaii, nearly all electricity is generated by burning imported oil and naphtha. Geothermal is tiny and unreliable and they must sell power at the same price as the fossil-fuel plants. Wind turbines are rusting away unused: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html. Solar is too expensive.

So, here is what we hear from the proponents of government run socialized medicine:

I would like to second what you said. I'm currently in Venezuela, and the health care here is way better than what I had available when I lived in the US. First of all, it's really cheap, the doctors are top of the line, and maybe the only thing you can complain here is that when they actually see somebody here with insurance they really squeeze them dry, but you still get your medical attention. If you don't have insurance you can still pay the bills since they have a different rate so to speak.

And here is the reality:

Healthcare suffers in Venezuela

Palacios, Venezuela's largest public maternity hospital and once the nation's beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut.

On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.

The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said.

He and others say the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period.

Poorly paid doctors regularly demonstrate at hospitals from Puerto La Cruz in the northeast to Maracay in the industrial heartland, demanding back pay and protesting the lack of equipment and supplies. Others are leaving in droves for Spain, Australia or the Middle East, where they make 10 times the $600 monthly average salary they earn in public hospitals.

More: WikiLeaks Embassy Cables Reveal Venezuela's Health-Care System Collapsing

And the UK?

US surgery safer than under NHS

By Thair Shaikh 12:00AM BST 07 Sep 2003
Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study.

The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds.

The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them.

Thousands of NHS operations cancelled because of blunders as complaints about standard of treatment rise

10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care

The Grass Is Not Always Greener - A Look at National Health Care Systems Around the World

However, a closer look at countries with national health care systems shows that those countries have serious problems of their own, including rising costs, rationing of care, lack of access to modern medical technology, and poor health outc

As an outsider looking in, it's obvious to me the government really needs to cut military funding.

It's only "obvious" if you're only listening to the people who absolutely refuse to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. Don't listen to them, don't listen to me, listen to the Congressional Budget Office - the division of the U.S. government tasked with predicting what is going to happen to the budget and how to fix it:

"In the past several decades, the country paid for increases in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending through cuts in defense spending relative to the size of the economy. That approach is not feasible in the future. Instead, significant changes will be needed in taxes or spending directly visible to many Americans." - CBO - Fiscal Policy Choices March 8, 2010 (PDF)

The graph that illustrates the minimal impact that cutting defense would have on the problem is on page 12 of this CBO report from Jan 10, 2010 (PDF). Here's a link to just the graph if you dislike PDFs. Basically, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from 2000-2020 is about equivalent to adding a second entire defense budget. In terms of the graphic you linked to, the entire defense budget with Iraq and Afghanistan funding included accounts for only about half the deficit in your graphic. You could eliminate all defense spending right now and we'd still be almost a trillion dollars short this year.

The CBO has been saying basically the same thing since before 2000. We need to rethink and restructure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to get the budget under control. Paying for increases in those by cutting other parts of the budget is a losing battle. At the rate these are projected to grow, do nothing and by about 2050 they will consume 20% of GDP (the historical average of all Federal tax revenue). They must be cut in order to balance the budget.

Higher marginal tax rates are proven not to raise significantly more federal revenue. If your sense of moral justice requires the successful be punished, public floggings would do just as much to increas federal revenues as "raising taxes on the rich". Federal revenues have been close to 19% of GDP ever since WWII, through a variety of tax schemes. Here is a nice presentation (it references its sources).

Taxing wealth, rather than income, is also known as "asset seizure by government", and would destroy us, because people would leave. We tax tangible wealth such as land because you can't move it to a different country, but intangible wealth would be moved to other markets in a hurry, and as that started to destroy the capital markets, there would be a race for the exits that would basically destroy the US stock and bond markets. Just the rumor that the government was pondering siezing 401k assets Venezuela-style caused people with a bunker mentality to transfer all assets out of their 401K and pay all the associated penalties. Remember - it does not require participation by the smartest investors for the rest to destroy a market.