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The true 1984 will come, when all your health records will be known to the Federal Government so that it can monitor both the health care you are getting and whether you are complying with the mandate to carry health insurance.

It sure is "Orwellian" and it is true... Republicans may have skirted some laws (although no more than Democrat Roosevelt did, when arresting thousands of Americans of Japanese, German, or Italian origin) in their "war on terror", but to establish a true Big Brother, a nation needs an Illiberal in office...

There is no other word for the rule of Berlusconi than a smoothly veiled dictatorship...
An example of the abuse of his media empire: http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/11/10/italy-the-latest-fashion-%E2%80%93-blue-socks-against-berlusconi/
It sounds stupid, and it really is... but this is the only country in Europe where politicians can get away with smear campaigns, and only because this politician owns or influences most media in the country.

Something a little more scary is the immunity Berlusconi gave himself to prevent any convictions of his crimes... but that was ruled unconstitutional: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8295716.stm

Nope.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1103/p02s02-ussc.html
"We found dozens of breaches throughout the levee system," says Peter Nicholson, who leads the American Society of Civil Engineers' levee-assessment team."

ASCE senate testimony: http://www.ewrinstitute.org/files/pdf/katrinalevees.pdf
"Rather than a few breaches through the floodwalls in
the city caused largely by overtopping, we found literally dozens of breaches throughout
the many miles of levee system. A number of different failure mechanisms were
observed, including scour erosion caused by overtopping, seepage, soil failure, and
piping."

"Where the storm surge was most severe, causing massive overtopping, the levees
experienced a range of damage from complete obliteration to intact with no signs of
distress."

Two specific breaches were investigated and failed in the way you describe:
"Finally, three major breaches, and at least one significantly distressed levee-floodwall
section, were investigated at sites along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals
which, as explained before, were clearly not overtopped.
Obvious soil failures within the embankment or foundation soils at or below the bases of
the earthen levees had occurred at two of the breaches. At the distressed section,
seepage and piping were evident. These types of soil instabilities appear likely to have
been responsible for failure of these wall systems."

Because two breaches failed in the way you described doesn't mean there were only two breaches, or that the sewer company ruined everything for everyone. It's possible the root cause was the panels weren't sunk low enough in the first place. It's definitely the case that there were other failures with other failure reasons.

Wikipedia looks like a decent place to start for an overview, but as always you'll need to check their sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_levee_failures_in_Greater_New_Orleans

Also, China and Russia have plans to develop their own GPS systems as well. This indicates that there is plenty of squabbling behind the scenes.

They are not saying they are denied medical treatment. They are being denied insurance.

That's what I said here.

Lies? The republican party did NOTHING for 6 years when they had total control of both houses.

Republican did nothing for 6 year while they had control of congress? How do yo explain GOP Congress Moves Ahead on Ryan White Care Act then? Or this, Bush Unveils Health Care Plan. How about this, Republicans Propose Medicare HMO Payment Increases. My google fu isn't that good but it didn't take long to find those. Less than a minute later and I found this, A Massachusetts Republican aims for 'universal healthcare'.

So yes, to say Republicans did noting is either ignorant or lying.

Am I really defending Republicans?

I don't need FUD. The facts speak for themselves.

And your facts are no more factual than other FUD.

Falcon

Well, you make profits here in America? Pay taxes in America. Take the factories anywhere you want. But pay tariff when you bring your goodies here.

That's still too easy. How about this: the execs that move all their factories, jobs, and capital out of America get to move their plush headquarters and themselves to the same place. I mean it is good enough for us peasants, it should be good enough for them too.

That'd be why telecos are gearing up for big business including cellular banking in Africa http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p07s01-woaf.html.

Troll? I'm not the one comparing people who legitimate reasons against ESC with those who bomb abortion clinics. Who's flame-baiting here?

The first article you gave me showcased using IVF leftovers (which I addressed in my post). Using stem cells harvested in this way has the major problem that they are only suited to academic research where tissue rejection is not a problem, because their genetic material cannot match the patient. I covered this in my post already.

The second article you sent me showcases a modified form of standard SCNT, where they add the twist of crippling the embryo, because they think that people will object less to destroying a crippled human embryo rather than one that is created with normal SCNT.

Do you want to see how the public ethic responds to stuff like this? Imagine the KFC headless chicken scenario, only with humans instead of chickens. Yeah, that'll fly like a lead balloon.

But even on a practical level, the technique listed in the second article suffers from the issue that there are simply not enough IVF leftovers to fuel widespread ESC-based treatments. There just aren't enough eggs.

Neither of the articles you quoted address the criticisms referenced in my original post, and all of the arguments remain untouched.

ESC-based treatments remain as unviable as the Whitehead Institute's crippled embryos, and there are no answers on the horizon that solve both the issues of tissue rejection and human egg supply.

If you're going to troll this obviously (Outstrip the supply? Of something that reproduces indefinately in a lab? REALLY?) you can go spend 3 minutes on google inbetween ad hominems.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22594571/
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1017/p02s01-ussc.html

Here's some random starter articles just from 30 seconds on google. My citation is "GO fucking google it", i'm not your nanny. You're supposedly an adult, put some of that to use and actually research something instead of expecting everyone to hand it to you on a silver platter even when you bring nothing to the table but "I disagree, you are a liar!" without any proof yourself.

Here is another article, with brief explanations about the heliosphere

It's far from clear that Hezbollah started the war (and even less to suggest that it was done because of Iran's insistence), unless you discount repeated, almost daily, incursions by the Israeli military into Lebanese territory, repeated violations of Lebanese airspace, and Israel's occupation of the Shebba farms.

It's a couple of months old so it might have been superseded, but here (by way of Nate Silver).

It's not like the right isn't offering any positive ideas, they're just being ignored by the left. Senator Baucus's panel took up 61 amendments this week. They accepted 4 from Republicans and rejected 28. They accepted 20 from Democrats and rejected 1. source

The reason you don't hear much about this is obvious to me. If you're a news director or editor, which do you think will play better among your news consumers -- "DEATH PANELS" or a list of 28 rejected Republican amendments?

That has nothing to do with philanthropy. If you want to use a anonymity proxy, you're free to do so. And that would give you better protection than Scroogle, which only hides your IP from Google. If you're not bothered by other web servers logging your IP, then why would you be concerned with Google? Of all the online megacorporations out there to fear having your privacy invaded by, you're worried about Google?

If you don't want to be tracked by your credit card purchases, then pay for your purchases with cash. It would be unreasonable (and unwise) to ask that banks and credit firms store no digital records of your financial activities. Likewise, in age of information and with the ubiquity of the world wide web, you can't expect there to be no trace of your online activities anywhere (unless you live completely off the grid). You can't go frolicking through the snow and then get mad at the snow for preserving your footprints. Now, you can take care to conceal your tracks, or even create misleading tracks to fool anyone who might be following you. But the only way to ensure there's no trace of your presence is to not tread on the snowy ground.

So, instead of expecting search providers to keep no server logs, store no cookies, and store no session data (things that all modern websites do), perhaps it'd make more sense to focus on other areas of privacy protection that actually matter. For instance:

• Use secure connections when sending & receiving sensitive and/or confidential data.
• Take care to keep your computer free of spyware, trojans, keyloggers, and other types of malware, and just being security conscious in general.
• When you see a luxury car sitting in the lobby of a movie theater with a kiosk next to it asking you to fill out your personal info to be entered into the sweepstakes, DO NOT ENTER INTO THE SWEEPSTAKES. This also applies to online freebies, like free magazine subscriptions, iPods, thumbdrives, etc., that require you to submit your personal info. That's how you end up on the "prospects" lists used by spammers and telemarketers.
• Make sure your ISP, cellphone provider and any other businesses you may have a contract with, are respecting your privacy and not selling your info to 3rd parties as many of them do.
• Lastly, choose your online services (e.g. e-mail, personal blog, search engine, photo sharing service, etc.) carefully. Read the privacy policy of websites you give your personal info to. Don't sign up for an account at or give your email address to shady websites that don't have a reasonable privacy policy available for reading.

IMO, it's much more important to choose a search provider you can trust than to try to obtain perfect anonymity (which is simply unrealistic). The reason people like Google is because they provide the best search results as well as many innovative/useful auxiliary services. Now, if they couldn't collect search data, then they wouldn't be able to analyze them to identify search trends, usage patterns, etc. that have helped them to optimize their search algorithm over the years. Likewise, it's only by collecting this type of anonymized search data that they're able to offer many of their useful derivative services or user-friendly features incorporated into Google search or Gmail.

Google has shown that they can be trusted with user data (at least with regards to Google Search. Orkut and YouTube may be a different matter.) by being the only major search provider to outright refuse to hand over search records to the DoJ. They have also expended considerable resources lobbying for intellectual property reform, green technology, net neutrality, open w

"Voicing support" doesn't mean jack squat. Put your money where your mouth is or sit down.

Yep, and the backlash has already started.

" They are simply stating that it will generate power equivalent to two average nuclear power plants."

That's good, so if I'm helping them pay for two nuclear power plants, I'm getting paid for the use of my basement, or at least getting it for free, right?

FTFA: "Households would pay around $7,250 to have the generators set up along with an appropriate heating system."

W...T....F.... so, I save them the billions it costs to build a nuclear power plant, and they want me to pay them to save them money? How stupid does that sound "Hi, I want you to save me money, and I want you to pay me for the privilege to save me money". That's like your boss laying you off and asking you to pay him to do it.

Someone explain how this works, why would anyone sign-up for this?

From an essay I wrote almost three years ago:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
""" ... With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. Consider for
example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_Holt
From there: "After many years of working within the school system, Holt became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that reform of the school system was not possible because it was fundamentally flawed. Thus, he became an advocate of homeschooling. It was not helpful, however, to simply remove children from the school environment if parents simply re-created it at home. Holt believed that children did not need to be coerced into learning; they would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources. This line of thought became known as unschooling." ...
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in Ind

After a quick Google search:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1203/p06s01-woam.html:
"Since president Chávez was elected in 1998, the homicide rate in the capital has more than doubled from 63 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants to 130 today. The country has experienced a parallel spike: from 20 to 48. That compares with a homicide rate in the US of 5.6, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)."

http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor.html Is 7 Pulitzer Prizes, including one for uncovering the death camps in Bosnia, serious enough?

Calderon is a conservative politician who hates the drug business. He hates it so much that he actually unleashed the Mexican army against the drug cartel. Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States) and fought the army in the streets. The army hurt the dominant cartels just enought to splinter them. Now, the splinters are fighting each other.

Calderon is probably rethinking whether he can actually win the drug war. This decriminalization may be the first sign that he is accepting the fact that narcotics is an integral part of Mexican culture.

It will be a total sham and a waste of time.

Votes are being sold for $10 a pop, nobody expects the elections to be fair so whoever wins election results will be contested, election ink safeguard is washable (then again, that may save some people's fingers), 13-year-olds vote, there are reports of people being hanged for voting and somehow Britney Spears is registered to vote.

But yeah. Sure...
A map and a bunch of anonymous SMS messages will SURELY fix all that.

From any practical standpoint, you're quite wrong. I just spent a couple of hours going through the massive FOIA disclosure of the Air Force's internal emails dealing with the aftermath of the Air Force One flyby of the Statue of Liberty back in April. Much of the 553-page document is concerned with detailed observations of bloggers' reactions, even to the point of discussing the rate of change in "tweets per minute" criticizing the White House and USAF.

The US government, at least, takes amateur online journalism very seriously. It's safe to say other governments do as well.

That makes them a "proper source."

In this day and age, I would have thought that you would have also already posted a link to their RSS feeds page:

    http://www.csmonitor.com/rss

not just like "Soviet Russia". (It's just Russia now, FYI)

Yes, but "just Russia" turned to a capitalist market after the USSR crumbled. Thus GPP was correct to say "Soviet Russia", since it was the Soviet Union that was socialist.

When a 12 trillion dollar economy cannot provide basic health care to all...there's a...problem.

Agreed, although I am not convinced that bigger government is the answer to the health care problem.

Regardless, revamping the health care system isn't the only thing that has people like GPP and myself concerned. How about dumping $13-17 BILLION into failing auto companies, then wanting to pour more money down the black hole when that didn't fix things as expected? How about trying to dictate how these companies do business? Or perhaps $13-17 billion isn't enough to raise any red flags, so how about another $700 billion to bail out America's banks? Does that seem Socialist to you? 'Cause it sure does to me.

As we've recently seen, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing since the markets aren't rational after all.

Yeah, sometimes the markets have to adjust themselves, and yes, it's frequently painful when that happens. FWIW, I do believe that government needs to intervene by setting laws on what companies can and cannot do -- thus we get things like the E.P.A., like child-labor laws, like minimum-wage laws, and I suppose even like SOX and SEC. But quite frankly, I don't like the direction that Obama seems to be taking the country (not that I was too thrilled with W's leadership, either...)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0629/p02s07-usju.html

The fact that they censor this act between consenting adults, made for consenting adults, where nobody is injured, and they allow these people to propagate their hate speech is abhorrent.

This is going a little afield of the topic, but I think your last paragraph deserves a documented response.

As you probably know, when Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, it became the supreme law of the land, as described in Article VI of the United States Constitution:

all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now, you may be saying to yourself "but a treaty is not self-executing - Congress still has to make a law for it to be United States Law!" This is true:

Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998.

The Act also required relevant agencies to promulgate and enforce regulations to implement CAT, subject to the understandings, declarations, and reservations made by the Senate resolution of ratification.

This quotation is from a (PDF) 2004 report that discusses the United States' obligations with respect to the CAT (Convention Against Torture)

So, since waterboarding is torture (your training example involves consent of the subject and I don't think applies here), there was a law against it, and it was done by the United States, it was and is a crime. The Convention not only outlaws torture in all the participant states, but requires them to investigate and prosecute any incidences of torture found within the borders of any participant states. The Convention creates a universal jurisdiction as well - any participant state has jurisdiction to pursue torturers found in any other participant state. This goes some way towards explaining what's going on in Spain.

But we need to look forward not backward.

There's less detail about the second incident. The safety board said it "became aware of another possibly similar incident" that occurred on a June 23 Northwest A330 flight between Hong Kong and Tokyo.

From the parent post:

>> This from a friend and NWA pilot I flew the B-757
>> with out of our Tokyo base.........Now obviously on the A-330
>>
>> Well, I'm sure you have all heard of the Air France accident. I fly
>> the same plane, the A330.
>>
>> Yesterday while coming up from Hong Kong to Tokyo , a 1700nm
>> 4hr. flight, we experienced the same problems Air France had while
>> flying thru bad weather.
>> I have a link to the failures that occurred on AF 447. My list is
>> almost the same.
>> http://www.eurocockpit.com/images/acars447.php

[...]

>> Synopsis;
>> Tuesday 23, 2009 10am enroute HKG to NRT. Entering Nara Japan
>> airspace.

Last time I checked the air france black box recorder hasn't been located let alone pulled out of the ocean. Without having the black box how can the NTSB be making speculations as to the cause of the downed flight? Others are speculating things like the Rudder had problems, Turbulence, this computer bug.

Until they know what the actual cause is they should avoid speculation because it does absolutely nothing other then fill media headlines with non-sense.

And that's where Ahmadinejad got his 60% of the vote. It might be interesting to enable the 'intellectual elite' of Iran living in the big cities to make their displeasure known to the rest of the world. But as long as they have a semblance of a democratic system, their fundies are going to run the place.

It is also where more than 100% of the people voted (you'll have to scroll down on that link, I don't know why I can't get a static link directly to that article), and somehow Ahmadinejad got a lot of new support since the previous election. Seems a bit unlikely, don't you think? If Ahmadinejad does have such huge support, why does he have to photoshop his crowds?

The people in the countryside are religious, but so are the people in the city, and so are the reformists. In fact, the entire basis for this democratic push is based on Islamic religious principles. Notice also that Mousavi is not trying to force himself to become president, he is merely asking for fair elections. This must be something even people in mud huts must want, otherwise they wouldn't have voted. There was a poll taken before the election that confirms this point: nearly 4 out of 5 said they wanted to elect even the supreme leader.

While none of us can go to Iran and ask people what they think, and while it is possible that Ahmadinejad won the election and might possibly even win a revote, it is hard to find a reason to think that most Iranians don't support Mousavi's ideas of fair, honest elections. Who votes and then doesn't want their vote counted?

Millions of little smog reducing machines stuck under millions of cars, which have to meet stringent weight/price/space requirements to be practical - or gigantic smokestack scrubbers like algae biofuel this one?

Trying to mop up all the problems from millions of cars is the real problem here.

Instead, let's work on moving to all electric cars. This will centralize the pollution at the power generators and then you can take whatever steps are necessary to minimize it without having to worry about catalytic converters and artificial trees.

I mean really, artificial tree/plants to remove CO2? Come on. There are easier solutions out there. Here's another one: Algae biodiesel.

If you don't like electric, go diesel. Then use algae farms to press for oil. It's a closed-loop CO2 system. Car burns fuel, CO2 goes into air. Biodiesel farm collects CO2 and sunshine in photosynthesis, makes fuel. Lather rinse repeat. Closed loop to CO2, just like mother nature does in a forest.

I applaud these guys for pitching a solution that works with what we have, but if we really want a solution that speaks to the future we need to ditch what we have and try for better. Mopping up the water from the sink overflowing is a temporary solution - we should be working on turning the sink off.

This is a very important world and tech development.
See, my point exactly. It's important for self-important douchebags - it's actually not very important for the people on the ground in Iran. Heat is not the same as light. Fashionable causes are nothing new...heck, you don't see anyone helping out the Peruvians revolting against their government with proxies and well-formatted quotations including attributions.

Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.

Gaming a badly/partially deregulated system, which IIRC they were involved in determining the structure of the not-quite-deregulation (I think it was something like, fixed retail prices and deregulated wholesale prices, because they (incorrectly) predicted that wholesale prices would drop significantly). There were other states that did things properly and it worked fairly well, or at least didn't cause problems like in CA.

This article from 2006 indicate that deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.

Although I don't have proof, I believe those numbers released are contrary to what was initially reported officially, I think that the picture is changing as days go by. One of the arguments by Mousavi was that he didn't even win his home province, those numbers show that he did win by the narrowest of margins. I think the numbers are being made up as we go, I don't any actual ballots were even counted (or saved), so it doesn't really matter which numbers get released. What I'm reporting here is what I've heard from other sources. Including here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0617/p06s01-wome.html

I'll reply anon to myself with a link to a good article about the questions around the election:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0617/p06s01-wome.html

...Might ask themselves whether the annual $650 billion military budget (fully half of the world's total military expenditure) might be better spent on things other than raining death on other countries.

You know, like schools, hospitals, roads, fire stations, police, ... and oh yeah, the manned space programme.

I dunno about a nutter, but someone who desperately wants to convince himself that the Bush fairytale was the truth despite all the evidence to the contrary which outed before, during and since. There are a handful still out there, thankfully they're well away from the big red button.

Lol.. The problem here is that I didn't claim iraq was behind 9/11, I said their actions emboldened Al Qaeda because of the culture in the middle east and Al Qaeda admitted that it thought our response would be meaningless saber rattling instead of a full blown war. If you somehow think that is supporting bush then you have some problems.

Now, I did point to some links to what Bush has said. It seems the big problem there is again, people like you who only take what you want to hear and confound that into something else. Bush and Cheney both said that Iraq and Al Qaeda was working together and had ties. That much is true and verifiable. But you and many like you want to take that to mean Bush and Cheney was saying Iraq was behind 9/11 which is completely wrong. SO pull your head out of your ass and actually pay attention to what is being said and not what you think or want to think is being said.

I do believe Iraq and Al Queda had a connection. One of the people claiming to be part of Al Queda was in Iraq at some point; that's it. Nothing more. By that same strength of conviction almost EVERY country can be linked to Al Queda, including the UK and US.

Read above, the 9/11 report said high level Iraqi officials had meetings with ranking Al Qaeda personnel. They said those meeting didn't link Iraq to 9/11 though.

Sadaam had as much to fear from Al Queda as every other secular government. Al Quaeda and other groups with the same ideology want a hard line Islamic rule, not unlike Saudi Arabia or Iran. It's why Afghanistan was a prime spot for a base.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That saying comes out of the middle east. Saddam had much to fear but most of those fears could be put to rest as long as there was a common enemy. That too is part of the middle east culture.

Rewriting history works as well as the US learning from it's mistakes and knowing when not to repeat them. Perhaps two failed wars in a generation will be a better teacher than just one. You'd imagine for a country who want to be seen as world leaders and examples to follow wouldn't need an extra lesson but.....well, sometimes it takes people a little longer to pass the test.

Not knowing it or understanding current events give the later impression of rewriting history when it isn't. You spent a paragraph railing from the wrong assumption. One was simply my opinion with is supported by events, the other was the actual claims made by bush and cheney.

Another part of my opinion is that if Clinton would have went into Iraq back in 1995 when the UN inspectors were kicked out and Iraq started firing on patrols in the no fly zone, 9/11 would never have happened because we wouldn't have been seen as a weak blowhard that is more bark then bite. Saddam was actually running around saying he won the first gulf war, not the US and Allied forces, then when he obstructed inspections, we did nothing but launched some sanctions that corrupt UN officials used as leverage to make lucrative oil deals in violation of them. In other words, we effectivly responded with absolutely nothing at all. It's no wonder Al Qaeda thought it could attack with impunity.

and, the original source: Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wideUrban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari PDF file

I'll pick a few here:

Teh GAYS are coming to steal yer marriages!!!!11

Never heard this from a Republican

You are a liar. Bush's "re-election" (his first actual election) was won primarily because they snuck so many anti-equality laws on the ballots. The bigoted wingnuts came out of the woodwork and voted for Bush while they were there.

We're the party of fiscal responsibility!

I would have agreed with this last year. But since the current party has tripled the deficit, it turns out that it's true!

Yes, I am absolutely certain that Obama, in 100 days, managed to triple the deficit, compared to 8 years of Bush spending like a drunken frat boy.

I totally believe that, because, apparently, I am an idiot.

They're not prisoners of war, so the Geneva Convention doesn't apply!

Were any of these guys wearing a uniform? No? then the Geneva Convention does not apply. Why is this so hard to understand?

Because I have a soul, and the idea of shoving flashlights up little kid's asses in front of the kid's mother is abhorrent to me.

Oh, and here's a POW being waterboarded:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-13/cheneys-role-deepens/

Iraq had something, anything to do with 9/11!

I have never heard a Republican say this, yet it keeps getting repeated over and over as if it's true. And what do you know, many of the exceedingly ignorant and borderline retarded believe it.

Liar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/21/bush-on-911/
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/bush-team-peddles-911-iraq-link-torture
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/lieberman-peddles-the-old_b_77198.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00247.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0321-02.htm

Not only that, it turns out we were torturing people to death and shoving flashlights up children's bums specifically to try and GET a fake link between Iraq and 9/11. Whoops!

Bits and pieces of the moon come up for sale every once in a while. Sometimes legitimate, usually less so. A couple of links on the subject

http://www.geotimes.org/sept02/NN_moon.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0617/p14s02-stss.html

mention a Sotheby's auction of (very small) Russian rocks; the "Goodwill Rocks" which the United States gave to each country in the world which have sometimes ended up "for sale;" and a short length of adhesive tape with moondust stuck to it. I also recall reading of a bag used to carry some Apollo mission's moon rocks from some point A to point B - the bag was sold as surplus, and the owner realized that the black dirt inside it was legally acquired moon dust.

Taken together, there's some ability to determine the going price. A million dollars a gram (as the CS Monitor article suggests) seems a bit high to me, but it is in line with these other sales and attempted sales.

TSG

Now YOU are being misleading. The Koran does promise these rewards, it just doesn't make reference to the specific NUMBER.

Another thing that is ignored by most people is that you get access to virgin boys, not just virgin women. It's pretty disgusting. It's a great insight into the culture though and helps explain why saudi men seem to love holding hands so much. (e.g. check out Bush in this article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0426/dailyUpdate.html)

Like, for instance, the NSA...

The NSA doesn't need an opportunistic vulnerability. They just secretly order one put in.

---

Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.

Why would they hire a physicist who dabbles in earthquake detection when they've got seismologists who do this full-time around, who know that radon levels are not an accurate predictor of earthquakes?

Because the many many seismologists who are paid to do their jobs obviously did not.

The earthquake science community looked at it and dismissed it decades ago as insufficiently reliable--some earthquakes aren't preceded by a spike in radon levels, and some spikes aren't followed by an earthquake,/quote> ...yeah, right, because all, these reports are obviously written by sci-fi writers

Have YOU even thought about what you are blabbering?

Well... lets not dignify your question with a response, shall we?

If Chinese people do it, it's spying. If westerners do it (such as via twitter, or even wikileaks) it's just social media.

Nah, it's more than twitter; GP made it sound like the "informers" are more innocent than they actually are. It sounds like he's talking about cases like that of Chi Mak (which is sort of an archetypal case). Yes, he wasn't particularly professional, but he did know damn well that he was passing along secrets he wasn't supposed to:

At one point, Chiu said to her husband that the "things" his brother was asking him to take "are certainly against the law," states an FBI affidavit.

I don't know what the story is with brazil, but as of 2003, russian men were 6 times more likely to commit suicide than russian women (and both numbers are too high), so I'd say russia has a problem that other parts of the world want none of.

oh yeah, and they beat up foreigners. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0123/p07s02-woeu.html

oh russia, what're you doing...

Oh wow, guess I should have kept reading. The previous articles are from: LA times, Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, the fucking Voice of America. This is in order, motherfucker! Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek! Not one fucking article that wasn't written by an old school media outlet!

Independent journalism my ass.

My comments almost three years ago on the Shuttleworth foundation also trying to reform schools, and applicable here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397

Also, a related essay I wrote:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools.
Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving
compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the
information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch
this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory
schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

Gates' initiatives for small schools are probably just more of the same, to make digital slave laborers. Even the more radical reform in the news still puts the emphasis is still on making kids fit into the needs of business:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html

At least Shuttleworth's initiatives are trying to empower kids, but that group too can't get past seeing schooling as the solution, instead of realizing it is a big part of the problem disempowering the next generation.

In twenty to thirty years computers will be about another million times faster, and we'll have better 3D printers and smarter dexterous seeing robots, and most humans just won't be employable in any sense we now understand. A previous related post by me to Slashdot on computing and education and the mindset of the class of 2029:
"Ignores the big picture on exponential computing
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279703&cid=20354965

Marshall Brain on that theme:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A bigger generalization on that theme by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, in general on this:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
-- Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History

Two Social Revolutions Become One

Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom y

Sorry, that is not what I am reading. Some are stating, quite plainly, that they do not deserve any protection. Until people are charged, which I have not seen happening, their identities should be obscured as they may be innocent or found innocent.

There are two possibilities:
(1) They are government agents acting lawfully in their official capacity, in which case neither the acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny and accountability (barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done"), or
(2) They are government agents acting unlawfully and contrary to their official responsibilities, in which case neither their acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny (again, barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done").

They are entitled to protection from retaliation in the same way that all citizens are entitled to protection from violent crime, but not in any other way.

[citation needed]
I have seen no investigations as yet, only the threat of same.

Then you haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention, which is hardly anyone's fault but your own. The amount of media attention the various investigations and prosecutions received was immense.

Here's just a few bits:
Military prosecution in Abu Ghraib scandal ends (01/11/2008)
For Abu Ghraib, a limited prosecution (03/29/2006)
The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib (10/19/2006)
Iraq prison report details lax discipline (5/8/2004)
CIA personnel, civilians cited in abuse (8/20/2004)
Trial Starts in Abu Ghraib Death (5/25/2005)
C.I.A. to Avoid Charges in Most Prisoner Deaths (10/23/2005)

I'm posting this story and this here because I see a very important trend. Not only the convergence of the Internet and TV. But the passiveness of TV being replaced with a more active process. these two simply reenforce that but from the "my computer is a TV" rather than the aforementioned "my TV is a computer".

While I agree with most of what you stated you might be surprised to find out that in 2007 the ratio of women in college versus men in the US was 60/40.
CSMonitor.com

While I agree with the sentiment I cannot go so far as to be guilted into not using Google. This craziness stretches into other areas. Large plasma TVs are facing face being banned in the EU. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/giant-plasma-tvs-face-ban-in-battle-to-green-britain-1299665.html

There is talk about heavily taxing the airline industry to bring down the number of miles flown.

There seems to be no middle ground. Either its denial of global warming or banning major economic and social activity in the name of the environment.

Of course we can solve the problem. We need to use non carbon emitting sources such as nuclear power, solar and wind power. Instead the greenies on Europe want to guilt anyone who uses energy. In the end all that does is to depress the economy, raise unemployment and lower standards of living.

Its also ironic that the greenies always try to inhibit the green power they always go on about. The have stopped wind power on top of mountains in Vermont ( http://www.windaction.org/news/3653 )and filed lawsuits against solar power in the Nevada desert. http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/09/25/are-some-solar-projects-no-longer-%E2%80%98green%E2%80%99/ They even oppose wind power out at sea - Nantucket sound. http://www.nesea.org/publications/NESun/cape_controversy.html Why? Because it's development and they hate ALL development. They always have some objection.

The irony is that we cannot address global warming BECAUSE of the opposition to environmentalists. Indeed if we are to use electric cars we are going to need many more (non carbon emitting) power stations which the experimentalists fight against tooth and nail.

And then I am always amazed by how so many people seem to forge that China is the number one emitter now and that India will soon be number two. If you cannot get these countries on board you are wasting your time. So while the EU impoverishes itself trying to reduce its carbon emissions by 1% China happily adds 10 times that every year anyway.