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Throwing motions and throwing are separated by the release as you pointed out. If people are actually releasing the WiiMote when throwing, then they're misusing the product.

Or they're bowling in Wii Sports. Have you played it? As I pointed out in another comment, you're intended to make a whole bowling motion toward the TV. It starts when you begin holding down the trigger (B) button on the back, then you do a backward and forward swing, treating the controller like the bowling ball. At the point you would release a real ball, you have to release the B button, taking one of the four fingers gripping it completely off. You're likely to at least loosen your grip with the remaining three fingers at that point. And let me point out that this is the exact moment you would release a bowling ball to make it go flying forward.

Oh, and they're trying to get a broader market with this thing. Younger kids and older adults. On top of that, people who don't otherwise play video games and won't have as much coordination. See a problem yet?

I'm not trying to ruin anyone's fun. I'm not saying the Wii shouldn't exist, or it shouldn't have bowling, or anything close to that. To the contrary, I love the Wii. I bought the system as soon as I could find it in stock. I have four controllers, a dozen retail games, and a bunch of WiiWare on top of that. And I have an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, GBA, and DS. I'm not trying to ruin anything. All I'm saying is that the strap shouldn't break. That's all.

Of course that hasn't stopped other similar frivolous lawsuits from coming forth, like putting your RV on cruise control and going to make a sandwich.

That never happened. It was an urban legend created when the reflexive anti-lawsuit point of view couldn't be supported with true stories. 1 2

The same happened with the supercar project, a joint venture with the big three US auto makers in the US to create an affordable 80mpg car. And, in part, it's a result of the Bush Administration that the project failed.

Ironically, the supercar project likely would have saved the big three US auto makers. Instead, they went for the short-term, big-sale of gas-guzzling SUVs. Such very much seems to be the hallmark of the reign of Bush, in companies who are big enough to easily make quick cash but who don't care or don't think well enough about long-term viability; or perhaps it's true of all companies, but the bigger a company is, the less nimble it is to change and the ability to exploit every new cash flow for the short term it's profitable.

Perhaps if the Americans weren't so self-centered, all of the above would be a non-issue: businesses could fail, even those directly or indirectly employing millions, and people would gladly accept taxes going up to support those millions under welfare until new companies formed to fill the glut of cheap labor. Realistically, of course, regulation is considered a more acceptable form of stability even if it's not necessarily as efficient*. Unfortunately, regulation is pretty worthless if it's not followed (enforcement hopefully helps with that). And that just leads to the worst of both worlds.

But, then, nearly 50% of the voting public is for dismantling regulation and leaving the unemployed to starve. I think it all goes back to Americans being so self-centered. Maybe the rest of the world will learn from this and enforce sanctions against the US to force them to change. Certainly, attempts to enlighten the population haven't been working.

*It might lead to more efficient outcomes, due to externalities, but that whole discussion is really besides the point.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but that dream, while nice, just isn't true. The government is getting ever more efficient about controlling the populace and defining "center" and "extreme" points of view. (hint: if the leaders don't approve, its extreme.) There will come a time when Americans are brainwashed into forgetting that America was created by bloodthirsty revolutionaries. Americans will start to care more about a government handout than a violation of civil rights. Americans will believe to ever-greater extents that if the Government does it, it must have been a good thing. Dissent will lose popularity and the dissenting will be quietly imprisoned or marginalized. God forbid, it will happen.

Don't worry, you're doing a heckuva job!.

Why not repeal the subsidies to oil companies? Some direct, some indirect. That would level the playing field, stop skewing the market and then we would see where alts to oil stand in terms of economics. Then a decision on what to do about alt energy and transport will be easier to make.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/6/122829/2907

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/vehicle_impacts/cars_pickups_and_suvs/subsidizing-big-oil.html

http://cleantech.com/news/node/554

http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0401-12.htm

http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm

@jester:

"Was it because CNN doesn't show that kind of thing as policy, or was it just because it was too close to home and they didn't want to upset people further?"

I'd say you pretty much answered your own question. For a more balanced perspective than U.S. corporate MSM I'd recommend:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ (center left by European standards hard left by American standards)

http://antiwar.com/ (Libertarian anti imperialist excellent tracking of conflict around the world)

http://commondreams.org/ (Liberal/left compilation of news from around the world)

http://counterpunch.org/ (Hard left with occasional Libertarianesque essays)

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ ("anti state, anti war, pro market" essays)

Yeah this list is slanted to the left if you go to all these sites and balance it with the BBC and our center right to hard right corporate MSM, you can ALMOST figure out what's going on in the world. Good luck having a life though. :(

That's probably mostly the case in the US, with Coke's Dasani crap owning market. I once bought a bottle as soon as I arrived at the airport. That stuff tasted foul. On closer inspection of the bottle I found the words: "purified water". Not very well purified it seems.

In Europe and Australia at least the vast majority is from natural springs. In fact, when Coke tried to bring Dasani to the UK, they were laughed out of the country.

You can buy bottled, purified, tap water in UK supermarkets, but that is always clearly labeled "table water" and a fraction of the cost of spring water. Dasani, on the other hand, cost as much as Evian!

Weather I drink the tap water or not mainly depends on taste. The water in the Netherlands and Germany is absolutely fine and Evian doesn't taste any better. Same with Scandinavia and Iceland. (they have spring water from the tap it seems!)

The UK is absolutely putrid - tastes like raw sewage. Australia and the US are over chlorinated - like drinking a swimming pool.

I have a special filtered tap next to my normal one here in Australia. This is what I use for drinking and cooking. More expensive to install, but more convenient than a table-top filter and cheaper in the long run because of lower filter costs.

Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space

Funny, I thought it was the US stance of space dominance that was accelerating militarisation of space.

Other than Clinton, could you enlighten me on some of the picks that you think are "fantastic"? I've personally been very disappointed in Obama's nominations thus far, for exactly the reason you say you're happy with them, cronyism.

I don't want to drag this out into a long-winded rant or anything, so I'll just post what I believe to be an excellent summation of just the cronyism I'm leery of. The article I'm talking about is actually about worries over the possibility of a hawkish Obama foreign policy, but when reading that list of names, you'll find Clintonites and others who walk the halls of power both on Capitol Hill and Wall Street.

I'm not trying to bash Obama, just wondering what you see that I don't, and trying to tap into a little of that optimism you have. :-)

I mean seriously, all those paranoid big chiefs sitting in powerful seats within government organizations? They have careers to protect. Why not make whoever gets into power fearful of the "outside world and it's dangers" before they even get into office? Sure would help get their policy in line with the policy of aforementioned big chiefs in government seats.

s/government/corporate

War or no war, we will have government. Halliburton and Blackwater are the prime suspects according to the "follow the money" school of investigation which was employed to discover the Watergate crimes. Beware the military-industrial complex.

there also many gun owners who are not with us today, because in a confrontation, things escalated to deadliness that did not have to escalate to deadliness, had there been no gun around

I hate to say this, but [citation], please. While your logic here seems sound, I don't believe that the number of confrontations that have escalated to shoot-outs even registers as a blip compared to the number of gun owners. There are millions of legally owned firearms in the US and you can count the home invasion turned OK Corral shoot-out as less than a few dozen in years [citation].

Assuming that 1% of all gun owners were involved in such shootouts, there would need to be about 2.5 million shootouts (assuming 250M legally owned firearms (first link I could find)

Sigh. Nice job conflating Iraq and 9/11. As has been shown time and time again, there was no plausible link between the two.

The invasion of Iraq will no doubt be regarded as the USA's worst foreign policy disaster of the modern era. The Bush administration still has not given a consistent reason for it. In the words of Kevin Tillman:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

My personal belief is that the whole thing stems from Bush trying to settle a family score, gain some political capital as a "wartime president", and (while he was at it) grab a lot of Iraqi oil for his buddies.

I just don't understand why a good paper ballot is so hard to accept...

It's because elections are so much harder to steal if you have a "good paper ballot".

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel actually owned the company that controlled the elctronic voting in the election that he won, in a stunning upset, in every demographic, including many black communities that had never voted Republican before. Nebraska hadn't voted for a Republican for Senate in 24 years.

In Georgia, Democratic Senator Max Cleland (who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, after he jumped on a grenade to save his fellow troops), was defeated by a Republican that alleged that Cleland was not patriotic enough. Even after the polls indicated that the voters did not actually believe this, the Diebold machines announced the Republican the winner. Surprise! And in another surprise, while the polls indicated that Democractic Governor Roy Barnes was winning, the Diebold machies announced that he lost as well to his Republican challenger. A whistleblower revealed that secret patches were applied to the machines late in the race, violating state law.

Here are other instances of Republicans winning through voting machine irregularities.

It's one thing to say you want to "tax the rich" to fund the government, it's another when you want to do it to give other people the money, i.e., "Spread the Wealth".

Uh, sorry but that's a distinction without a difference. All graduated tax policies "spread the wealth". For the last 8 years the wealth has been spread upwards. The middle class "spread" it up to the rich. It was not accidental. Here's an article from 2001 saying that's exactly what Bush's tax policy was doing.

Obama's policy is about spreading the wealth back to the middle class as opposed to spreading it to the top 1%. This results in overall job growth and a stronger economy. A rising tide lifts all boats, not just yachts as Warren Buffett put it.

I don't get the fear about Obama, though.

Agreed. I'd like to see a list of fears that your average registered republican voter has of Obama getting into office. I'd bet that a huge portion of them are along the lines of "He's Muslim!"/"He's gonna take away our guns!"/"He pals around with terrorists!"/"He's going to raise taxes on me!" (of course, this is true for people who make over $250K/yr, but plenty of people not in that bracket who are voting against him believe this to be true). Bleh.

In October 2001, polls indicated that about 88% of Americans and about 65% of Britons backed military action in Afghanistan.[148] On the other hand, a large-scale 37-nation poll of world opinion carried out by Gallup International in late September 2001, found that large majorities in most countries favoured a legal response, in the form of extradition and trial, over a military response to 9/11: Only in just 3 countries out of the 37 surveyed - the United States, Israel, and India - did majorities favour military action in Afghanistan. In 34 out of the 37 countries surveyed, the survey found many clear and sizeable majorities that did not favour military action: in the United Kingdom (75%), France (67%), Switzerland (87%), Czech Republic (64%), Lithuania (83%), Panama (80%), Mexico (94%), etc.

Believe it or not, USA != "the civilised world".

The war in Afghanistan was illegal and illegitimate. There are international agreements which the US is subject to and promptly ignored in 2001 when it was attacked, not by a country (though Bin Laden and most of the highjackers were Saudi's), but by a terrorist organisation. The "Bush Doctrine" is not a "Good Reason" for anything - it was just something dreamed up by that administration to establish military supremacy over one of "the greatest material prizes in world history".

I don't think your perspective is very libertarian - it's not just a trendy word, you know?

when your political enemies run the media as a propaganda arm of their party, then whistle innocently or cry "tinfoil hat" when anyone points out the obvious.

Citation, please? Certainly a lot of room for debate that the media is performing propaganda solely for either party, or that there is a monolithic bias to the entire industry. Yes, conventional wisdom says that Fox News slants conservative, and PBS slants liberal, and shame on BOTH of them for it.

When your political enemies start arresting people for wearing "give peace a chance" t-shirts in the mall.

I assume you're referring to the case of Mr. Stephen Downs, in Guilderland, NY? Yes, the dispute reportedly arose from his wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" t-shirt. However, the facts of the case are that he was arrested for refusing to leave private property, and charged with trespassing. The charges were later dropped against him, and the guard who signed the trespass complaint was fired. You can read a good summary of the case law, and why malls aren't considered public property in the sense of free speech protections over at Slate.

When your political enemies create "free speech zones", and their partisan court appointees uphold the obvious constitutional breach

The same free speech zones used repeatedly by both the Democrats and Republicans at their conventions? Let's be intellectually honest at least - neither party is interested in having their elaborately planned proceedings disrupted by minor inconveniences like disagreements.

When your political enemies engage in domestic surveillance which makes watergate look like piss in the ocean.

I assume you're talking about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program here? Which was, rightfully, exposed & subjected to intense scrutiny & oversight? I'll agree that these programs were disgraceful - but to pretend that nobody in the democratic-controlled congress knew about the programs (or indeed, has continued to vote for bills that support them, such as the recent FISA amendment) is flat-out dishonest.

When your political enemies give rise to a multi-billion dollar industry of astroturfing campaign firms trying to "manufacture" "public support" for their intolerant, totalitarian positions.

Yes, because Democrats never astroturf in the interests of winning a campaign, right? The name David Axelrod sound familiar? (Hint: Chief media strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.) Again, let's not pretend that one side does it, and the other doesn't.

You have to fight dirty too. The age of honor is over.

No, what you should do is throw every stinking, corrupt one of the bunch - Democrats & Republicans - out of office. They represent YOU, so what does it say about you that you turn a blind eye towards ugly tactics in the support of your own principles, and decry them when used by your "political enemies"? The ends do not justify the means. The ends should be achieved by honorable men & women representing their constituents in a conscientious manner. "Eye for an eye" tactics sure don't seem to be the "change" and "reform" both candidates are promising us.

CNN trended left in the early 90's

...Yet remains right wing to those outside the US. Like all of your popular media, CNN falls far short, in questioning government and policy, of what ordinary attention to public interest, and common ethics, would require.

FOX, as we all know, is Murdoch, who murdered mainstream journalistic discourse in Australia and the UK long before he started attacking it in the USA.

None of this is new. Real journalism doesn't get air time in the conglomerates. You still have NPR... for now.

"MONOPOLY IS a terrible thing--until you have it." Those were the words of right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox TV, Fox News, Century Fox studios and the New York Post, among many others media outlets.

... Murdoch sounded as innocent as a lamb when he told the Senate Commerce Committee that relaxing regulations would be a great thing for consumers--and swore that he wasn't about to add to his empire. "I have no plans for anything other than the what I have before you today," said Murdoch--prompting several senators to burst out laughing.

... FCC Chair Reed Hundt warned that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would allow "a few companies to buy all the radio licenses in the country."

Hundt was right. Since the law passed, Clear Channel Communications has expanded from owning about 40 radio stations in 1995 to approximately 1,200 outlets today--almost 1,000 more than its closest competitor. All told, Clear Channel controls the audience share in 100 of 112 radio markets in the U.S.

I've done a little bit of work with control systems (Honeywell) that are used to run a power plant. The author of the article is a bit disconnected from reality. You can't exactly just take one of those systems offline to patch it. Shutting the powerplant down is a complex operation that takes time. Starting it back up takes time.

Why do you need to shut things down to patch? The phone system, to take an example, is designed from the ground up to be redundant. Every component has an 'A' side and a 'B' side running in parallel.

If you need to do maintenance you bring down the 'A' side, do maintenance, and check that everything is working. Once you're sure everything went well, you do the maintenance on the 'B' side.

If you don't have this redundancy, what happens when your component fails? What happens if, after deployment, a serious bug is discovered? Seems kind of stupid not to have redundancy.

They are all running Windows Server 2003 on HP Proliant ML370s with redundant everything (RAID drives, power supplies, UPSes, etc).

Do you have multiple Proliants so that if one goes belly-up things will continue to work?

Security in an industrial environment needs to be handled at the physical/network layer, not at the box.

Until there's an insider attack. Or until Greenpeace breaks into your control centre.

Things need to be secure at all levels, cf., chain and weakest link.

That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.

That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so thereâ(TM)s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!

That Jonathan Bushâ(TM)s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.

That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.

That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osamaâ(TM)s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.

That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.

That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations.

The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.

That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.

That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbo

Then you really need to peek outside your door. Maybe you haven't noticed, under Bush's tenure: extraordinary rendition, torture, a $3 trillion+ war of aggression, colossal hypocrisy, illegal wiretapping, disgusting cronyism and profiteering, a million dead civilians, galloping environmental destruction ... Need I go on. Bush (and his cabal) has earned the absolute hatred of every civilised individual on the planet. We wait for their Nuremberg.

what about all the free venezuelan oil that goes into the usa to support anti-bush venezuelan policies?

i'm not going to pretend the usa doesn't like chavez. i'm also not going to pretend the usa doesn't meddle in the internal affairs of caribbean countries. and i'm also not going to pretend gw bush is anything but a retard, and i'd like to see him out of office just as much as chavez

so you owe it to me to stop pretending the usa is the only country in the world that does dirty tricks, you have to stop pretending chavez doesn't fund the farc, you have to stop pretending that every crime you can lay at the doorstep of washington dc does not also fall at the doorstep of caracas

do we have an understanding?

The police and FBI have a long, sordid history of intimidation, harassment and disruption of dissident groups and activists (up to and including murder). Any state surveillance of people should require a warrant—both to provide some oversight (which isn't much, considering the way some courts like to rubber-stamp these requests) and make a record of the state's activities against its own citizens.

BTW, when you mention Fox News as a bad site for news, I'm willing to bet that your more misinformed then anyone who has ever viewed fox news. There hasn't been any studies claiming Fox news puts out erroneous information any more then any other station including PBS AND BBC.

Oh, how about this one ? In fairness, this measures the effect of watching TV news and Fox in particular, not their content.

This study aside, Rupert Murdoch has flat out said that he doesn't think it's his company's responsibility to be objective.

I've heard that even the best organic crops only deliver half of what regular crops do, so if we can produce food for 8 billion today (there's enough but not in the right places) then say we could grow organic food for 4 billion.

Then you have heard incorrect information.

A 22 year study by Cornell, a survey of research by Berkeley (the longest of which is a 150 year study), and a study by the University of Michigan all say that organic farming techniques are at least as good as conventional techniques in terms of yield and often better. In addition to better yields, the organic techniques required less energy inputs, used less water/irrigation, improved soil conditions over time, and retained additional carbon in the ground!

To present a balanced view, this is not true for all crops. Notably potatoes and certain fruits have better results with petro-chemical methods (organic potato yield is roughly 60-65% compared to conventional). However, organic yields are approximately equal for important staples such as corn, wheat and soybeans, as well as many others crops like apples and tomatoes.

On the low end of the studies, a 20 year Swiss study concluded that organic farms produce 80-90% yields compared to conventional farms. And all the studies show that organic techniques have greater yields during drought years.

If placing a wind generator on a piece of land would produce enough electricity to pay for itself and make a profit then you can bet that the land owner will put one up.

Erecting a wind genie isn't all it takes, the electricity has to be transmitted as well. Do you recall those rolling blackouts in California several years ago? A wind farm capable of producing 10 megawatts of power sat idle because the power cables were not strung up to deliver the power.

If a technology is truly worth implementing then it will stand on its own and not need to be subsidized.

Does that also apply to all other energy sources? Bush and McCain want to subsidize nuclear power. McCain doesn't want to subsidize solar but he will nuclear. I agree subsidies distort markets, that includes subsidies for nuclear power.

Falcon

Forbes mentions that Mojave Desert real estate is becoming more valuable because many companies want to build solar facilities there.

It's not just solar farms that are sprouting up in the Mojave, wind farms are as well. Actually there's one wind farm that virtually sat there silent back when CA had those rolling blackouts because the transmission capability wasn't there.

Falcon

That's a very good way of putting it.

Why thank you. :)

At the same time you're ignoring that money and convenience are intimately connected with life, and quality of life, at least in today's world... I'm curious which you support in the specific situation of China.

Now you're asking a huge question at the soul of politics. I think most people acknowledge that it's not either/or here either - if you only do welfare, everyone stays poor; if you only focus on the economy, the rich trample the poor. I don't have a good answer to that question because 1) I know very little about China and 2) I'm just not that wise.

You're right that money and convenience are related to life; there could come a point at which spending more money to, for example, keep a terminally ill patient alive, when that money could be used for helping others, would be unjust. Once again, that's a very difficult question to determine, and I wouldn't pretend to have the definite answer.

All I'm trying to argue against here is the idea that some people are genetically inferior and should be actively weeded out. I don't want any government to have the power to make that decision. Nor do I think that genetic fitness is even a good measure of "utility." I would have died of various illnesses as a child without modern medicine (though I am very healthy now). Am I inferior and a burden to society? Should I be killed or forcibly sterilized? Could you be next?

Eugenics, from what little I know of history, has often started with a nice vision of "pure genes" and led to cruelty. Even in the U.S.: based on memories of school, I just Googled this article.

It's only partly about vengeance. It's also largely about profit, and disenfranchising the poor (particularly if they're also black).

The profit part is particularly scummy. Slave labor! Seriously:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

a copy that doesn't need a NYT login is here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0705-10.htm

The market has been evolving over the past couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Cite&page=Prison-industrial_complex&id=223976554 [note graphic]

And to think, 28 years ago, comedy films like Airplane! used to joke about the Turkish prison system. Of course, that was before 9/11.

Actually, the B2 has been retrofitted (sans rotary munition magazine) to hold a really really really big *something* supposedly called the 'M.O.P.':
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1915871/posts
Excerpt: "$88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP. The MOP is the the military's largest conventional bomb, a super "bunker-buster" capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground."
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/7/26/212543.shtml

I can see Kucinich running around screaming 'the sky is falling' and 'Impeach' in the same sentience... (Personally, Mr. Kucinich, I am not too keen on Iran *EVER* having *ANY* nukes, despite potential for local Iranian nuclear contamination to their environment!!! The idea is to to keep the radiation contained OVER THERE not to have a big boom OVER HERE!! ). http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1108-21.htm

It was becoming more and more obvious that Saddam's WMD program was an elaborate bluff, primarily targeted at Iran and Israel.

That became a common position held after the war when no WMD was found. People's memories are very squishy, and I find it extremely unlikely you held this position before the war. Could you cite a single "foreign media" news source or "anti-war" page that held this position before the war? We have plenty of news archives on the web, and there is also the archive.org.

We'd had the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger reports debunked.

First of all, I can't find any news source that "debunked" the Niger yellowcake reports before the war. The big article that started the press rolling was after the war had started. I think this points to the memory problem.

As for the tubes, this did get some press, but not much. At any rate, this points to bad evidence by the Bush administration, but doesn't mean people thought the opposite of Saddam (that he wasn't interested in nukes), and doesn't address issues of biological or chemical weapons.

The idea that none of us were skeptical is just wrong.

There's a difference between skepticism of the evidence or motives vs claiming the belief that Saddam had no WMD. I completely refuted the argument of the original poster that inspectors had come to that conclusion, citing sources and using quotes.

Please provide a citation proving your assumption in order to further an already disproven argument is anything other than an assumption made to further an already disproven point.
 
...did you even read what you wrote?

Anyway, if you read this reprint of an article from the Washington Post (the original is only available in the physical paper, not online), you will note that George Schultz (Reagan's Secretary of State in 1983) knew that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons on Iranians almost daily.

No, not MY logic, JUST LOGIC. Giving someone a tool doesn't make you responsible for someone else using it.

Do not try to pass off your logic as true logic. While I would contend that chemical weapons are not tools, you forget that we knew what they were going to do with those weapons.

Your "logic" (i.e. opinion) is that you can sell an illegal weapon to someone knowing full well that they will use that weapon to kill people, and that you can claim plausible deniability in order to avoid accountability.

Chemical warfare was outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Convention, almost 60 years before we sold chemical weapons to Iraq. Why would we sell illegal weapons to a dictator who has been using them almost daily?

Because it was more important for us to make sure Iran lost. That's like giving your wife's ex-husband (who has a history of spousal abuse) a loaded gun and dropping him off at your house before you went to get a cup of coffee, and then saying it's not your fault when he uses that gun to shoot her even though it was public knowledge that you wanted to get rid of her. No logic can justify that.

Bush took his primary Presidential philosophy from Nixon ("If the President does it, then that means that it is not illegal."), and most of his cabinet too. To paraphrase Newton, if Bush has been able to damage this country so badly, it is only because he has stood on the shoulders of ogres.

So Ron Paul was right after all. If we just BUTT OUT of the world militarily and politically, ...and stop pulling tigers tails everywhere we find them, ...and stop leaving our military everywhere ...and stop promising to be in Iraq for another 100 years... and stop building military bases and a US Embassy bigger than the VATICAN... then maybe with a few years gone by after all that... maybe then we could trade and have commerce and live peaceably in the world.

ahh but WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE, profitable for government that it is, there will be no chance of that...

American Dollars are less than worthless right now- "Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall "below zero". - Telegraph.co.uk

One of my favorite sites for center-left opinion is CommonDreams.org While they do have some original content, a lot of their headline opinion pieces are copied in full from the original source and wrapped in the site's design template. If not for the small print identifying the original source, the article would look like copy produced and owned by CommonDreams.org. I wonder how they have gotten by so long without being served these notices... Or are they getting permission? (seems unlikely, as the opinion pieces are taken the same day they appear in print).

Here are the actual "subsidies" that US oil companies get:

Domestic manufacturing tax deduction: business engaged in a qualifying
production activity are eligible to take a tax deduction of 6% of net
income in 2007. The "loophole" is that domestic oil and gas production
was made qualifying in 2004. Obviously plenty of other companies take
this mildly trade protectionist deduction as well.

Five-year amortization of geological and geophysical expenditures:
This amortization period was made available starting in 2006 only to
"major oil companies" that have daily worldwide production of over
500,000 barrels. Evidently there is talk of making this a seven-year
amortization period.

(source)

Royalties "not paid" for drilling on public land: It is a bit
unclear, but there is some evidence that the federal government is not
always properly collecting royalties for gas and oil production on
public land. (FYI, for offshore extraction, the royalty rate varies
between 12%-16%, and total government royalty revenue is ~$11
billion/yr.)

source 1
source 2
source 3

Of course, the Feds just made $3.7 billion on new offshore leases.

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

Food is non scarce today. Plenty of food is grown so nobody has to starve.

It's all about money and power over others when it comes down to it.

This is why so many people die from lack of food daily. There are 3 things working against the hungry, all rooted in money, politics, and or power. First there's conflict, such as in the Congo. Farmers take risks farming in conflict zones, if they themselves aren't killed they may find it hard to grow food. Then if they do they may find it stolen from them. Politics has damaged a lot of farming areas as well. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, now it's a basket case. When President Robert Mugabe came to power he kicked a lot of farmers, many Whites, off their farms. He then gave those farms to his cronies, and those cronies didn't know how to farm. So the farms sat fallow, little if anything was grown on them. Next is money. Europe, Japan, and the US have subsidized their farmers to the tune of billions of dollars. In the US alone, congress approved a farm bill that would give US agricultural businesses almost 300 Billion US taxpayer dollars. With the large subsidies they will get, companies like Archer Daniels Midland, ADM, and Cargill can ship corn to Mexico and Central America and sell it cheaper than it costs farmers there to grow corn. And the US isn't the worst offender, the EU gives it's farmers a lot more whereas Japan gives them a little more.

What, you think because YOU say we have no right to privacy, it doesn't exist? Sorry, that doesn't wash. Privacy certainly is an interaction with the government; the goverment is examining you or your life.

If YOU really want some factual basis for your arguement, READ WHAT OUR FOUNDERS WROTE ON THE MATTER. I already have, which is why I understand your argument is garbage. RIGHTS DO NOT COME FROM THE CONSTITUTION, THEY ARE INHERENT IN EVERY HUMAN. Once you get that point, you'll better understand the Constitution. It's called Classic Liberalism.

This article also summarizes your errors: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0703-09.htm.

Seriously, stop posting on /. and educate yourself. If you find you don't like the ideas in Classical Liberalism, please find another country to live in.

Does a former corporate securities attorney with 23 years experience qualify as a reputable source?

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0119-04.htm

http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02july-aug/july-aug02corp4.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/042000-01.htm

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/29/america/29prison.php

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=2

http://www.jbs.org/node/7846

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.prisons29feb29,0,2057053.story

LOOK HOW SHORT IT TOOK! SIX YEARS!

http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aaprisonpop.htm

NO! ONE!

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3321586

6) The fact that Donald Rumsfeld even created his own intelligence unit because the CIA was still unable to uncover anything supporting, what the administration was believing to be true.

Just another Team B, complete with agenda intact and the same rhetoric. Are we having fun yet? And of course, Team B is famous for gerabbing the credit for any percieved 'victories'. Nothing to see here, move along, and leave your tax money in the plate...

Yeah - no one would be arrested for voicing their opinions. Like in NYC during the Republican convention. Or just standing next to someone who was...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html

The FBI wouldn't spy on you for being in a peaceful anti-war group, right?
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MIL20060127&articleId=1835

No one would be arrested because they wore an anti-Bush Tshirt, right?
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/17/3243/

And you accuse others of not seeing? Look the f*ck around.

=tkk

It isn't just Volvo working on it. There's also a hyrdolic system that promises to be even more efficient than electric versions.

Cost just needs to come down a bit...

This headline assumes that the pro-war faction brought onto the corporate so-called "news" were analysts to begin with and didn't just gain the "analyst" label by the fact that they were featured on the corporate news. They were not impartial experts. They were merely pundits, sent to lie to drum up popular support for an illegal and immoral war. As Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explained on today's Democracy Now! (transcript, video, high-quality audio, smaller size audio):

One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, "We actually don't have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that's exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

What the Pentagon did is conspire with the media and over seventy-five retired military officers to spread lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq; propaganda which continues to this day. The pundits weren't being manipulated, the public was. The pundits participated with their consent. Since one expects the Pentagon to get their story out (I don't excuse it, I merely expect it), one might wonder why the media didn't do their job and challenge those in power to justify their case for war? It would be far better to headline this story a failure of media to do their job as reporters. Again, Hart explains:

I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn't care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn't care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

The New York Times didn't cover the media aspect of this problem probably because the Times was a willing participant in the lying. Apparently it still is.

The number with problems with medical care and with access to a computer would both be greater - and both are more fuzzy.

Eivind.

There are other examples of totalitarian capitalist countries.

capitalist!=free

So, in other words, you're saying, "Bring them on."? Which team are you batting for again?