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Try to live here without buying anything from China. It's gonna be tough, especially if you want to buy shoes or electronics without parts or assembly in the PRC. Here's an interesting article about it.http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1220/p09s01-coop. html

Our discussion boils down to two points:

* Cost

If return-on-investment is not a valid measure, what is? $500 billion dollars (more, with stateside spending) has cost >3000 more lives and has not made us any safer. Partly, we are not safer because the US was already very safe; mostly, Iraq has proved to not have any WMDs or sponsorship of terror, and the resulting chaos has fomented Islamic fundamentalism and terror.

* Rights

These are the facts at the federal level:

- Habeas corpus was suspended at a time without civil unrest. It's black letter in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court did grant the writ over the objections over the administration.

- The NSA surveilled US citizens without a warrant. The court ruled that it violated the First and Fourth Amendments; the ruling is stayed pending appeal.

- The US obtained private telecommunications data without a warrant. The court ruled that the relevant section of the PATRIOT act is unconstitutional, again because it violated the First and Fourth Amendments.

- As discussed, Real ID legislation has passed and merely awaits funding; to date, Bush has received funding for all his domestic security initiatives (TSA, DHS, etc.).

And changes at the local and state levels:

- NYC considered a ban on subway photography for reasons of terrorism (read the article). Even though the MTA relented, there have been incidents of MTA cops harassing photographers.

NYC has had filming permit process for 40+ years, however it's not coincidence that Rakesh Sharma was harassed only last year. This is not even counting the Nepali who was thrown in solitary for 3 months for accidentally photographing an FBI office.

- Similar harassment on the CTA.

- More on the harassment of street photographers.

- Last, but not least, the Ohio Patriot Act, which has clear violations of the First and Fifth Amendments.

Not only would every country near the north pole do the same, they ARE doing the same thing - it's right there in the listed article. Personally, I'm not worried about Denmark becoming a major supplier of gas and oil. I'm pretty sure though that Russia has no problems cutting off oil to exert political pressure. As for modding my comment as flamebait - read some international news, buddy. That stuff is essentially straight from Putin's mouth.

Stop speculating.
The waste per passenger, but most of all the method and place (high in the sky) of combustion ensure that greenhouse effects of aviation fuel are far worse than those of motorcars' combustion engines.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.htm l
If you're planning to travel, want to do it the way that's most environmentally friendly and the consideration whether to drive instead of fly is a realistic option (e.g. both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross), then drive.

Oh really? Explain to me why doctors are leaving Germany in mass then? With such a great system where everything works perfectly, Europe wouldn't be having a serious doctor shortage due to emigration.

How can you support socialized medicine when your own state is out of money? Thus resulting in complete underfunding and pretty much a total disaster where eventually no one will be able to get medical care, thanks!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0607/p07s02-woeu.htm l

What I mean by government protected industry would be a US corn farmer. The US congress gave 190 billion dollars in farm subsidies in 2002. We did't need more corn, but farmers were paid to keep growing more. Yes, we need to have a strong agricultural infrastructure, but 190 billion a year paid out to grow excess food we don't need is a bit ridiculous. That is what I mean by a protected industry. You can't be effected by market forces because Uncle Sam will just take the money from the people and give it to you anyway, regardless of supply and demand.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1031/p17s01-lihc.htm l

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/csmimg/p10b.gif

You Americans have a lot to answer for. Either make more fuel efficient cars or import your cars from anywhere else in the world. The entire rest of the planet has managed to make more fuel efficient cars, so what's your story? Even Australia, who joins your useless government in refusing to join the rest of the developed world in doing something about CO2 emissions, has managed to increase the fuel efficiency of their cars. Oh wait - that's right, America has the bomb and therefore is allowed to do what ever they like - sorry my mistake.

There's still some room for improvement though: "While the average light duty vehicle on US highways gets 21.6 miles per gallon (m.p.g.), according to a study by the Paris based International Energy Agency (IEA), in Paris, its European counterpart manages 32.1 m.p.g."

"European per capita consumption of gas and diesel stood at 286 liters a year in 2001, compared to 1,624 in the US, according to IEA figures."

There is no such thing as an "undocumented worker." We already have a phrase for that, and it's "illegal alien."

That's like calling a drug dealer an Unlicensed Pharmacist

All sillyness aside, take a look at this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0420/p03s01-usec.htm l
about programmer Michael Emmons, who worked for Siemens ICN in Florida.
The company imported Indian workers to sit at the fired American's former desks, and do their jobs.
Not as employees, but as contract employees hired through an Indian agency.
The agency paid their salaries back in India, they made no money in the US, but were paid "expenses" which were then tax free.

So here you have people living here in the US, using our roads, sewage system, police services, etc.
Paying no taxes whatsoever since they made no money here. The company had to pay no social security or medicare taxes as they did for their American workers. They saved a bundle, even if the salary were the same (but I'm sure it's not).
That's a distortion of the way the system is supposed to work. Outrageous.

I've discussed the data and the theories with a number of people. It's useful to remember that global warming caused by CO2 is just a theory, based on two observations: First, the world is warming up. Second: observations of prior world temperature changes commensurate with observations of CO2 levels, and notably higher CO2 with higher temperatures. There is some evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, however there are much stronger greenhouse gases (i.e. methane) which we now produce at industrial levels.

The consequences are numerous. First, we may not address the actual problem that is causing global warming. Second, we may cause huge social and economic consequences for no benefit. Third, if there is no benefit, any future notion of relying upon "scientific evidence" may be viewed skeptically by the masses.

We know information cannot travel faster than the speed of light

According to the figures in the report mentioned here:
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
with an executive summary here:
    http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm
here in 2002 dollars is the cost per student in the USA:

Year Cost Fourth Grade Reading Scores
1984 $5400 211
1988 $6100 212
1992 $6800 211
1996 $6950 213
1999 $7300 212
2002 $8977 217

Again from the DOE:
    http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index .html
"Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation. By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02."

Those figures don't quite agree with the ones you list -- the DOE claims 24% increase adjusted for inflation and enrollment in public schools over that time period. I'm not sure where the difference is (perhaps more money spent in private schools?)

According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?

As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
    "To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.

The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
      "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
      http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.

That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation
    http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.

Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
    "The Alternative Education Resource Organization"
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And a related article by the leader of that organization:
    "Sustainable Education "
    http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
He writes: "Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate."

Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu,
    http://www.edubuntu.org/
and so on).

Ah, I'll bet you're talking about the area northwest of campus at Northside and 14th, with the McDonalds, BK, and Krystal? The area I'm talking about is southwest of campus, on the "wrong side of the tracks" (literally!). As bad as northwest of campus is, southwest is even worse. In fact, it's where this happened.

Not really -- a 140 billion dollar Israeli economy is not kept solvent by 2.4 billion in military aid and 50 million dollars in other aid.

Sell this shit somewhere else. The total amount of aid Israel receives from the U.S. every year in in the tens of billions, and that doesn't even count little gifts like the trillion we're going to spend killing Iraqis and Iranians so Israel can feel safe as it torments Palestinians.

Stories like this are the tip of the iceberg.

It's the loans. A tiny fraction of the money we give them finds its way back to America in the form of campaign donations/bribes to our elected officials, who then sign on to legislation guaranteeing loans to Israel, a tiny fraction of which once again finds its way back to American legislators, who then pass legislation forgiving these loans.

BTW, Israel is a major copyright violator. They are also always at the top of nations implicated in criminal activity over the Internet.

The Christian Science Monitor article link I submitted five days ago has more details on the actual device: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0419/p13s01-sten.htm l. It is 3 meters tall and captures about 18 kg of CO2 a year or about 4.5 kg of carbon. At this scale, it is probably not so good as a tree. These devices need to be much larger to compete with plants on the rate of carbon capture per unit area.
--
Get off carbon: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The key thing is that the middle class is going away. You are either rich or poor. No in between as the US manufacturing base has gone to the orient. Yeah, there are tons of jobs clerking in stores or flipping burgers. Those count towards the employment statistics. Real wages and buying power are dropping, and have been since 1979 according to the CS Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0211/p03s01-usec.htm l
I used to work in telecom (MCI), now I work in the medical field and make less money. Not only that, all my recurring bills have gone up. I know I have way less disposable income than I had 8 years ago.

"Check the murder rate since the year 1200 in the world. The fact that this is huge news means we do a lot right."

You have murder stats going back over 800 years?

I'll assume you meant 2001. The United States has much higher murder rates than Canada and European Union countries. It also has both the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and, in absolute numbers, the most people in jail.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.htm l

More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world.

More prisons, tougher jail sentences ... they don't work. There's something about American culture that makes people think a gun is a solution instead of an accident waiting to happen, and we're seeing this attitude bleed over into other countries ...

Guns make people safer! That's why America, with the highest guns per capita of any first-world nation, is the safest nation on Earth, right alongside such sterling examples of crime-free zones like Costa Rica and Colombia.

Get a goddamned grip. The US has more guns -- and more gun deaths -- than any other developed nation.

Clearly the solution to today's situation would have been for everyone to have guns, then people could have started firing recklessly into the fray and that would have been really fucking great!

"We, in the USA, lock up our criminals, not our politically undesireable."

Every society defines its own crime. The "political undesirable" were criminals, in Soviet Russia. What is wrong with American society that we have so many criminals? Are there more criminals, or more *crimes* -- behaviors that in the past did not result in imprisonment, but now do?

Are things really getting worse on the street, or are three-strikes laws and 0-tolerance drug policies for non-violent offenders locking up people who are otherwise productive members of society?

This CS Monitor article says that we now lead the world in incarceration: "More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world."

" We don't send entire families to gulags. We don't execute or exile our Jews, gays, and minorities. Were exiles (internal) counted in your prison figures? I bet not."

You know what? You might be right. We might not actually have worse incarceration rates than Soviet Russia. But I'm sick of not being the worst. I believe that America is the greatest country on Earth. I think we should have the lowest incarceration rate in the world, right now, not just lower than Soviet Russia.

This ABC article says that "The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000, for France 91 and for Japan 58. " Why are we getting beaten by Japan, France, and England? Why aren't we on top?

Thanks, I've already added a couple of those sites to my bookmarks, too bad they don't have RSS feeds. Ill look at some of the rest of them in a bit.

As for me, being Canadian, (but living in Europe) and using a lot of politics with my teaching (English teacher), I try and keep a diversified list. I'll try and list them more by theme than amount visited.

Canadian:
The CBC - Dissapointing RSS feed, they don't have too much/day, but it's always good to see what they have to say on Canadian politcs.
The Globe and Mail - The best site for at least a bit thoughtful Canadian news.
The CTV - OK, pulp, but once in awhile it's interesting to see what pulp has to say about things.
TSN - Sports, got to keep up with hockey and curling, none better.
Macleans - The Canadian equivalent of Time, some of their stuff is really great.

International:
The BBC - Probably the best English language news in the world, enough said.
The Guardian - Better analysis than the BBC, but not the sheer volume.
Al Jazeera - More balanced than what you'd think, at least the English version ... well, except for the editorial cartoons.
NY Times - Amazingly crummy RSS feed, seeing as it's one of the biggest newspapers in the US (but probably still better than the CBC).
Deutche Welle - Not the best site, either, but as I'm living in Germany ...

For actually thinking:
The Christian Science Monitor - I'm not religious, and except for a few things (see their "about us"), neither are they. What they are is the most balanced news in the US I've ever seen. They are thoughtful, honest and as far as I can see don't pander to any particular point of view.
Sign and Sight - This is only if you want to spend some time actually reading, as it's not meant for the masses. It takes articles by thinking people from across Europe and translates them into English.

Others: The Register - Tech news with a British sense of humour, and people think they are biased because of it.
Neil Gaiman's Blog - Not as interesting as it used to be, but I've learnt a lot about the book/publishing world through his blog.

Yes, I'm an information hound, and I like to see as many points of view as possible. I've tried fox news a couple of times, but most of the topics I'm interested in they've just taken things off the wire, so nothing new. What I also do is search google news when I find an article I want to get more points of view on. I don't use the service itself, but they are great for finding out who is saying what about a particular topic - you might even find a new angle that hadn't been said 100 times before.

Check the wx forecast
Google headlines plus local content
Mea culpa
One of the few remaining exponents of in-depth journalism

If slack time presents itself, I'll trawl around Gizmodo, some aggregator-type sites related to ongoing r&d, and see if there's anything cool on TradeMe.

Christian Science Monitor had a commentary about this ruling. To sum it up for the /. crowd -- age-verification laws exist for pretty much any other pornography sold in the United States, the internet should not be an exception. Fundamentally she's correct, although, IMO, COPA itself would realistically have a trivial effect on kids seeing porn, since it just pushes providers off-shore.

Additionally, here's SCOTA's case summary and opinions on this law. The ruling on this was 5-4, same votes per judge as in United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group (which struck down a much broader version of the same law). Basically... you guys are one justice away from a very different internet. Consider yourself lucky it was Rehnquist that died and not Kennedy.

Personally, I have a problem with the fact that our obscenity laws revolve around Ginzburg vs United States -- a ruling from 40 years ago during the middle of the sexual revolution.

Which is one reason the US isn't a democracy. What the majority of people think is not necessarily the best course of action -- the will of the people can be a very dangerous thing.

Too true, which is why the framers of your constitution put in a section entitled Limits on Congress that says, amongst other things, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

This provides a nice empirical test of the claim "the US isn't a democracy." So long as Congress does not pass a law like the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends Habeas Corpus for non-citizens the US could plausibly be claimed to not be a democracy. Now that the law has been passed, it is much more difficult to make that claim. Note that the language of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous and says nothing about the citizenship of the people for whom Habeas Corpus may be suspended.

The fact that Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 suggests that they know the voters will reward them despite the unconstitutional nature of the law. That sounds like a democracy to me.

As time passes, the US looks less and less like a democratic republic and more and more like a democratic oligarchy, in which a small clique of the ultra-wealthy ruling class both court and manipulate the unrestrained will of the populace, usually in the name of security of some kind. The Republicans focus on security against drugs and porn and terrorism; the Democrats focus on security against poverty and unemployment and porn (remember Tipper Gore?). This is a far cry from the republic your founders envisioned and to an extent achieved, in which the constitution put limits on the will of the people in the name of liberty.

From this essay I wrote:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.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.htm l
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. ...

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
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

... he was trained by Hamas in order to assassinate a senior Israeli official visiting the US and to attack members of the US and Canadian Jewish communities. Hamas-trained terrorist, Canadian national, arrested by ISA

One of those charged -- an Edmonton, Alberta, man who used the screen name "Big_Daddy619" -- allegedly distributed live videos of himself molesting the four children younger than 12. 27 charged in child porn sting

Disclaimer: I don't either.

Some people have to drive a while to get to their job and own a house. For this large chunk of the population, I'm sure they would be interested in starting to reduce their environmental impact. For the ones that don't care, it'll be interesting to see what happens when $5 to $10/gal gas hits.

The corn growers lobby is HUGE...

HUGE I tell ya...

As a person who hates TV and doesn't own one, it really pisses me off that my tax dollars are being spent on this boondoggle.

They "leak" this every year, about this time. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p01s02-uspo.htm l
Budget renewal, I guess.

You should not worry about it, Advise generates so many positives that it's useless, except as a way to keep friends of a bunch of former high level State Department employees flush with with wads of disposable cash for developing it, and to keep the civil servant deadwood in the intelligence community occupied until they retire. One bright spot, however, at least someone found a way to make money off of Jini technology.

Look, all this alarmism over government surveillance is silly. The only thing that anyone in government actually pays attention to is good old fashioned fieldwork and human intelligence (i.e developing a network of informers). One competent case officer is worth a hundred of these systems.

The fact of the matter is, in the past fifty years, human fecundity has rendered even the most sophisticated electronic surveillance system useless, there is just too many people to keep track of. Our courts are backlogged, our prisons are overflowing, and we can't even control our own borders or cities.

Lets assume this system was 100% accurate. What exactly could the government DO with that information? Law Enforcement organizations can't even cope with the threats we know about...for example, there are 200,000 gang members in California alone, and we KNOW they do far more damage in a year than every terrorist in the world combined could ever hope to achieve.

The PRC (China) has the best signals intelligence they can buy, and no laws to hamper them. They still only manage to detect 1% of the crimes committed in their nation, and the ones they miss have lead to riots involving tens of thousands of peasants and will eventually cause the downfall of the Communist Chinese government in a few years.

Our government doesn't want to believe that answer doesn't lie in technology, it wants an "easy button" to solve it's problems. The answer lies in social engineering, in creating a culture where this technology is not needed. We could do it easily, for a fraction of the cost of even one of these systems.

But that doesn't involve bending others to their will (at least not directly) and to some decision makers, thats far more important than a better future.

This is old old old old old news, and debunked long ago:
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_artic les/v12n02_AI_gone_awry.html

Why does the media pass off bunk like this as news?
Answer here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0305/p09s01-coop.htm l

* FYI, the term "free range" (when applied to poultry) can be used arbitrarily. Look for "cage free", which is something that chicken farms need auditing for. Not sure if the same applies for beef (about "free range", that is)

Point of fact: Cage free is not necessarily an improvement. In fact, the chickens often end up pecking each other to death at awful rates.

This is much like the argument against farrowing crates for pigs. Food animals will often kill each other in ways that we would classify as "cruel and unusual."

Constitution

Maybe not but at least one USSC ruled Habeas Corpus is a right and that denying it is unconstitutional:

1861: Abraham Lincoln detains thousands, ignores court
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus, arresting anyone who expresses sympathy with the South and holding them without presenting evidence against them or giving them a trial. Hundreds of draft resisters are imprisoned, along with newspaper editors, judges, lawyers, and legislators. By some estimates, more than 13,000 people are arrested overall. When Chief Justice Roger Taney declares the president's actions unconstitutional, Lincoln blatantly ignores the ruling. He also shuts down newspapers that express pro-South views.

Nor the right to privacy.

Again, at least one USSC ruling affirmed privacy is a Constitutional right. I don't have a handy link but in the early 1800s the USSC ruled that the right to anonymity is an important part of the freedom of speech, if people couldn't remain anonymous then they weren't able to enjoy political speech freely, that if they had to give up anonymity what they say could be used against them they couldn't enjoy free speech.

Scientists have been doing research on this off the coast of Oregon as well.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0915/p02s02-usgn.htm l

There are Jews in the Iranian parliament. Sorry to burst your bubble little guy. Try again.

"Kylie Kenney explained how some kids at her school had created a web site that called for her death, then harassed her for several years with phone calls and e-mails, even after she transferred schools."

I call bullshit! Come on! Kids with an attention span of less than thirty seconds harass a girl
for years after she left the school??! Get real and spare us the "They threw the babies out of
the incubator"- PR-spin.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.htm l

There has been a polling effort about attitudes toward terrorism worldwide.

One question was about attitudes toward "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians". Here are percentages of people who considered such things "never justified", in the most populous Muslim countries:
Indonesia, 74%
Pakistan, 86% (and that's home to some high-profile crazies)
Bangladesh, 81%.

Do you see a problem in those numbers not being higher? Compare them to another nation in the survey.
Guess Where, 46%

Where is this place, where 54% think terrorism can be justified? Is it Iran? Saudi Arabia?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0223/p09s01-coop.htm l

There are 1.5 billion Muslims. If something about their religion caused people to blow themselves up in crowds we'd see far more of that particular crime.

The problem with this argument is that it requires making the case that intelligent design is not science. And the intelligibility of that task depends on the possibility of drawing a line between science and non-science. The prospects for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that.

...

I think there are two reasons why people shy away from this way of viewing the matter. First, if you call intelligent design "poor science," then it seems you've allowed intelligent design a foot in the door by accepting that it's science. Science versus non-science seems like a much sharper dichotomy than better versus worse science. The first holds out the prospect of an "objective" test, while the second calls for "subjective" judgment. But there is no such test, and our reliance on judgment is inescapable. We should be less proprietorial about the unhelpful moniker "science" but insist that only the best science be taught in our schools.

It's well worth a read.

Sagan mentioned it in "Cosmos", some other scientist came up with it in the 1970s. The environmental data collected on 9/12/01 supports the theory.

We make additive for our jet fuel that makes the contrails more reflective to bounce the sun's rays back into space. It's cheap, easy to do, and people won't even notice. If a couple European governments (I know the U.S. won't do it...) required all aircraft that land in their country to use that kind of fuel, I think it could be implemented very quickly.

Here are a few links:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.htm l http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2002/2002-08- 08-contrails.htm http://why.michaelpatrick.org/2004/12/jet-contrail s-artificial-clouds-affect.html

The CSM doesn't have a shelf full of Pulitzer Prizes for being a slanted fundie rag. They're one of the best sources of real journalism in the world. They do have a small section that's pro Christian-Science, which is even printed on a different color newsprint (yellow, ironically enough). The name is something they can't do anything about.

http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor .html

I presume this is this is a possible story being mentioned, but this one mentions something more likely (Ms Austin's gnome). I hope they're true.

Why are you posting red herrings?

How about actually disputing that Cuba does indeed conduct cutting edge biotech development?

Or are you just determined to prove my point about brain-washing by your own example?

It shouldn't necessarily be about fairness but truth in advertising. These networks should not masquerade as "news" outlets. They are propaganda machines, selling machines, entertainment etc. not news. They should just have classifications of such so that people would know (even if they like it) that they are not actually watching news, but boxed propaganda made to get them to think a certain way, back a certain position or consume merchandise.

The only way people are going to get real "news" is through independantly funded, independant groups that are funded by individuals, a few sources I can think of that do quite well in this model and remain more independant than the others are PBS, NPR and in print the CS Monitor.

Bad analagy. How about if China invaded the UK. Then a bunch of Germans and Frenchies snuck across the chunnel and started bombing/killing UK civilians. That's a more appropriate situation.

Only if you believe the lies. In reality, less than 10% are foreign, with most estimates putting the figure at less than 5%. Here are two articles on this subject:

Among Insurgents in Iraq, Few Foreigners Are Found

Iraq's foreign fighters: few but deadly

The myth that many are foreign is merely to continue the false belief that the War in Iraq is in some way connected to the War on Terrorism. It's not and it never has been. Planning for the Iraqi invasion was started in 1998 by Cheney and Rumsfeld, three years prior to 9/11. The attacks on New York merely gave them the political currency to promote the attack. The literally took a big dump on ground zero and wiped their arse with the US flag then handed it back to the 3,000+ victims families.

This is a very good point, given that in Germany only 5 percent of goods sold are bought with the cards, compared with 13 percent globally.

although residences consume only about two-fifths of this as electricity, because electrical generation is inherently inefficient, it accounts for 71 percent of household emissions. A home's electrical use may be responsible for more CO2 emissions than the two cars in the driveway.

In Chicago, it seems that it is forbidden to take pictures of a sculpture in a public park as you would be infringing the intellectual property rights of the artist: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0330/p15s01-usju.htm l

Well, I doubt that they are using their Wells Fargo student checking accounts to do these transactions.

There is this whole criminal world out there where people, I don't know, "buy things that are illegally acquired." I believe that it is called a black market, and you can buy anything from weapons to people to drugs to, well, botnet systems. Shoot, there is even a baby formula black market that is valued at 7 billion dollars. There is this whole world of organized crime, one which is becoming more and more technically savvy.

Underground is, well, underground. This isn't just some highschool kid with an "underground h@x0r link" that can get you a cracked version of some software. That's the faux-underground. This stuff that they are talking about is real, is hugely profitable, and mysterious to the uninitiated. A 50,000 dollar transfer, especially with foreign accounts, isn't as tricky as you might imagine.