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Too bad the facts don't meet your female chauvinist storyline:

Here's those "deadbeat dads". They account for 11% of those custodial mothers who do not receive child support. 11%. With all the ballyhoo, you would think that these make up the majority. Instead, the represent just slightly more than one-tenth of the total.
How about those fathers who run and hide? Well, they are part of that 11% figure. They make up almost 6% of those who do not pay child support. Not quite the exodus that we are led to believe occurs. If we look at the whole population of custodial mothers, we see that "deadbeat dads" account for only 7% of the population. Only 3.5% of fathers cannot be located (which are included in the 7% figure). These are not the figures we think about when we see "deadbeat dad" articles bannered across newspaper headlines.
It is time to stop making policies based on myths and distortions. It is time to recognize that single fathers are like any other group of people out there; the vast majority of them are good, loving people who will happily care for and love their children. Why have we been so willing to believe the worst of these dads? Why have we accepted the negative images without question?

Oh, and a higher percentage of mothers owing child support are "dead beats" than fathers.

And I put "dead beats" in quotes because these people aren't actually dead beats, but dead broke. The majority of those who don't pay, can't pay because they just don't have the money.

How about this - as soon as a majority of non-custodial dads start doing more in terms of child support than legally mandated by the courts, then we'll have sympathy for how "unfair" the family court system is.

No, how about THIS: have automatic consequences for interfering with visitation rights. If a non-custodial parent (usually the father) falls behind on his child support payments, he faces garnished wages, having his car towed or license suspended, or even arrest. And states are very serious about collecting child support as they get matching federal funds. Whereas the automatic penalties for interfering with visitation are: jack and shit, and Jack left town. A custodial parent has the state at his or back for collecting support. A non-custodial parent can look forward to endless court appearances and attorneys fees to enforce visitation.

You have the right to your own opinion "paul", but you don't have the right to your own set of facts. And the fact is that fatherhood is real long on responsibilities yet real short on rights. And that's bullshit, straight up.

Interesting point. I think if they really cared you would not be able to buy Vista OEM from newegg, but you still can and I have. Also, your post motivated me to do a little googling and I found this, which really WTF'ed me. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,248704,00.html An almost informative article on Fox News? Never thought I'd see the day. I guess it's actually written by extremetech, although even then there are a few weird mistakes (eg, if it's really a hash even changing one item would change the hash, or it's some sort of strange hash that I've never heard about). But uh, in the article the MS rep basically says that technically it is for small PC stores or whatever, but technically as long as you provide support for yourself or something, it's fine. Convoluted legalese, to be sure, but I don't think that I would say that this assumption is false completely.

Haven't you heard? The latest and greatest contractor fad is non-lethal weapons. The results of the $400 million pumped in so far are, of course, wildly successful.

Because it would draw attention to the VA. You know, the socialized healthcare system that severely reduced care costs.

...and instituted high quality health care using innovative new techniques and maintaining rigorous quality standards.

If that's what reducing care costs is going to do, I'll keep sucking up the insurance payments.

"Huge difference! Fingerprints are a match or not, period."

Oh, if only that were actually the case.

All of these techniques aren't infallible. False positives happen all the time. In addition, with a genetic test you're potentially opening your entire family to screening too.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,316101,00.html
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/14804724/detail.html

I don't live in the suburbs and I was riding the bus till this stuff started happening. I was born and raised on the mean streets of Baltimore city and that's where I bought my house. I hate driving to work but I like my safety more than I hate driving.

They need to fix this problem before I'll even consider riding the bus again. Maybe it takes a cop on every bus. At that point are you really saving anything with mass transit? You need to pay someone 65-80k a year to babysit students on every bus?

The success of mass transit depends on the riders adhering to the social contract (mainly not beating the crap out of people) and they simply don't so mass transit won't work here for anyone except people that have no other choice.

So blame it on the whiteness and snobbery suburban white people if you like, but I blame it on retards that beat their fellow passengers up. Lets be realistic and stop blaming the victims. They didn't create the atmosphere of fear where you take your life into your hands by simply getting on a bus.

You think a soccer mom is getting on a bus, or letting her kids ride one, where this happens if she can drive her SUV? No fing way.

-Viz

Whoah... No need to jump this over to a debate on lethal force against teenagers. I mentioned the teenage angle to draw a faint parallel to the issue of software / music piracy. Not because I don't think those pirates should have been shot in that situation. I do think lethal force was justified against those perpetrators. And we should continue to shoot hostage takers when given the opportunity.

The article I linked to wasn't the best for making the parallel, however, because it does focus on the age issue. In the case of this captured pirate, as a taxpayer, I would hope we'd hand him over to Kenya for trial & punishment. If we lock him up for life in an American federal prison where it's going to cost something like $45k per year, I'm not sure how much we're going to accomplish at that cost. Defense Secretary Robert Gates realizes the expense to deal with this issue by capturing, shooting, or imprisoning the pirates will be immense. That's why he's advocating for propping up Somalia's infrastructure in some way so teenagers will be less inclined to become hostile pirates.

Seth

Lawyers are not required by law to take cases except possibly as public defenders. You're right that we shouldn't paint lawyers who defend people with the same brush as their clients. However, when the client in question is filing the charges, when their lawyers are knowingly (or unknowingly and completely incompetently) introducing illegally-obtained evidence, etc., then yes, we should paint the lawyers with the same brush.

There's no grey area here. You either have a sense of morality or you don't. If you choose to represent somebody in suing a 66-year-old grandmother, an 83-year-old dead person, and a 12-year-old girl for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you have the morals of a jellyfish.

We're not talking about going after commercial music piracy---one corporation suing another corporation (or nearly so). We're talking about companies that maliciously use laws intended to prosecute commercial piracy against ordinary people, that frequently sue completely uninvolved people, that have gross disregard for the legal process, etc. The lawyers themselves either hired unlicensed investigators (in which case the lawyers behaved illegally) or accepted evidence from them without looking into the background of the investigators (in which case the lawyers are completely inept). Either way, introducing such evidence should be grounds for disbarment in and of itself, but instead of throwing these dirtbags out on the streets where they belong, Obama is hiring these leaches on society as the highest lawyers in our land....

There's a point at which someone shows such reckless disregard for the law, for right and wrong, and for humanity in general that we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. RIAA lawyers crossed that line many, many years ago and have been sinking progressively farther below that line with every passing day.... I'm appalled that Obama would choose people like this to head the DOJ. You cannot hire people who knowingly violate the law to win cases as our nation's highest lawyers. That's like hiring Hitler to head up the anti-defamation league. It just doesn't make sense, and it is this very sort of practice that causes sleazebags like Ted Stevens to be let off the hook due to prosecutorial misconduct. Unless Obama wants the same crap as the last administration, he needs to seriously rethink his hiring strategy.

Not Ponzi, but scam is a scam - sucker is a sucker...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,453125,00.html

Her family and bank officials told her it was all a scam, she said, and begged her to stop, but she persisted because she became obsessed with getting paid.

And you sure as hell can't put it in your resume as "$400.000 worth invested in master's degree in fraud discovery and prevention".

We will reach the F-451 point when we will still have tons of books in small, dark book stores, and nobody will want to read them.

You mean like this?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275840,00.html

The more they legislate, the more (supposedly) unintended consequences we get. If only they'd agree to be limited by the Constitution's enumerated powers - we'd get far fewer unintended consequences.

How about if we 1) term limit lawmakers, and 2) put mandatory sunset provisions on each law so that it automatically expires after 25 years?

What good would that do? For #1, we'd at least get some new blood in there once in a while. For #2, remember the telephone tax that was imposed to pay for the Spanish - American War, and was still in place 100 years later? Do we really want this law on the books in 100 years?

I don't know, this _is_ anti-obama... Ahem...

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."

The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."

Can't find the story when it made slashdot, but this.

You ask the user a question, transposing letters in the words, and the user must give the answer. Seems hard for a computer to figure out, easier for an actual person than captcha.

That's not much of a study or report.

Hume's telecast had 39 per cent favourable comments for McCain and 28 per cent positive for the Democratic ticket.

It was the second study in two weeks to remark upon negative coverage for the McCain-Palin ticket. The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain's coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama's has been more mixed.

So. What. What if McCain were the antichrist (or, perhaps, not on par with Obama as the case might be)? If that were true, reporting mostly positive things (or at least as many positive things as were reported about Obama) about him would indeed significant bias. It's neither fair nor honest to say one is as good as the other if this is not true.

The documentary Outfoxed provides a worthy counterpoint here. Specifically they pointed out a few internal Fox News memos that required broadcasters to use loaded words instead of more neutral semantics (abortion clinic vs health clinic, homicide bombers vs suicide bombers, etc). The problem isn't that Fox is leaning one way or another, but the fact that Fox is leaning further than the other networks.

Have you ever seen the movie Broadcast News? There was a point in time when it was considered uncouth for reporters to editorialize. In fact you see Albert Brooks' character lambast William Hurt's character for injecting tidbits about himself into a story, and later for faking tears in another. Yet this is what Fox News does every single day.

I'd love to find a Fox News article to demonstrate my point. Unfortunately, most of the articles I could find on the top FN page were human interest pieces. As Brooks' character said "you really blew the lid off of nookie."

Lemmie give you an example of quality FN journalism. Look for all the uses of "some people", "some users", and the like. Clearly a newspaper isn't an academic article (and, yes, I pity the person writing an academic article about 4chan, but...). However, FN seemingly pulls most of this stuff out of their ass by deferring to "some people" for most of its points without ever backing a single thing up.

Fox News is not centrist news, it's garbage.

    The unfortunate downside to that is, local news is usually boring. In traveling around the US and Canada, watching the local news is amazingly boring. The "best" parts are frequently the fluff pieces.

    "Local firefighters saved 56 kitties from trees this month"

    "Martha's Pancake house goes for world record flapjack"

    With some luck, something exciting will have happened, and they always stretch it out. On broadcast news, they announce it at the beginning, repeat the fact that it's coming up throughout the broadcast, and finally do the 30 second spot just before the end.

    For quite a few years now, local news that would be remotely interesting has made national news (via wire services, of course), so even when I've gone to a new city, I was already caught up. Sometimes I will have read it first online, so by the time it makes print or radio, it's already old news.

    I have a story up in my office, clipped out of a local tabliod.

    It's this photo (from AP, of course). At least our local headline was better than average. "Can't help but notice the cig still in his mouth" :) The text on my print copy is the same as on the story with the link.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

Roger Friedman is by far a better entertainment columnist than you find on most sites. His "411" column is one of the best columns on the Web.

He's covered everything from Motown musicians not getting their dues to the Tom Cruise disaster to why Mel Gibson shouldn't be considered normal. And then there's the whole Michael Jackson drama.

Drudge is saying he's been terminated. I hope he's brought back.

And whats to stop them from driving down the street your house is on and doing the same thing?

Maybe they live in another city. Maybe they judge that the cost of performing that check is not worth it. Maybe it doesn't even occur to them to check out the neighborhood except for the fact that Google makes it trivial for them to do so, without leaving their chairs.

Yes, I am aware that it is counterintuitive to a lot of people that what Google should be restricted* from doing in the large scale is something that anybody is allowed to do in a small scale. Nobody's arguing that it should be forbidden to take a photo of somebody's house. The argument is that systematically taking a full-coverage photo set of every street and every house amounts to systematic surveillance of the whole population, and that putting that geo-tagged database online amounts to indiscriminate disclosure of facts about others.

*And when I say "restricted," I don't necessarily mean "prohibited." I am perfectly willing to consider relatively narrow restrictions that protect people's privacy.

You are talking about a problem of discrimination that is not solved by not allowing Google to take pictures of residential streets for Streetview.

I never claimed that restricting Street View would solve the problem. My claim is that its existence aggravates problems we already have, in countless, unexpected ways.

If you want to conceal the side of your property facing a public street, then get a fence. Your neighborhood could also organize to make the street privately maintained and gated. You have given no justifiable reason to restrict another entity's rights.

Or, as an alternative, my neighborhood could organize to change the laws to forbid Google from freely disseminating the results of their systematic surveillance of our community. Basically, I don't think Google has the right to do that, and that the law, which was written before this problem came into being, needs to change to reflect this (just like the law has needed to change for new problems like upskirt photography and texting while driving).

You also seem to be unaware that the internet has sources for every piece of idiocy

No, I am well aware of that

providing sources doesn't settle anything

I disagree with that statement. If the original poster were to actually respond with sources (though I'm not holding my breath), it would show the source of their opinion. Often just seeing the domain of their sources tells a lot; if they cited these idiots or these other idiots as sources then we know they aren't thinking much about the actual science. On the other hand if they cited an academic or scientific source to support their claims, then there would be reason to believe the poster actually does think before spouting off rhetoric.

As it is, the poster is essentially just gossipping. They have provided nothing but noise, and I am asking them to support their statements (if they can).

I can't take anyone seriously who puts "truth" and a link to Fox news in the same signature.

Uh huh. And that makes him an idiot, or a kook, right? Before you answer: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2008/05/15/obama-faith-flier-hints-at-general-election-strategy/

...are disgusted with this crap. The creationism shit is stirred up by an extreme right-wing group of legislators that don't represent the entire state (but are obviously voted in by some very ignorant Texans). The /. headline makes it appear that we're like...well, like Kansas or something. I'm a high school teacher, and most teachers I know think this creationism movement is a farce.

That said, it's important to understand that the bill is simply working to exempt "private, non-profit educational institutions to be exempt from the board's authority." The Coordinating Board would have the final say in determining whether science courses from this institution would be counted towards teacher certification requirements. At this point, THECB demonstrates no inclination towards allowing this to happen.

This all appears to be a lot of grandstanding by a right-wing nutcase.

Exactly. It's not like they've never censored anything else:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,507244,00.html
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91114

Wikipedia is as politicized as anything else. They don't want to make a fuss when it doesn't suit them, and they're more than willing to make a fuss when it does.

Of course, explaining the "mentality" of Wikipedia is like explaining the "mentality" of Slashdot. There are different groups and cultures involved, and it can look a bit schizophrenic on the outside looking in.

Overall, though, the pattern is as clear there as everywhere else: say one thing, do another, and accuse your opponent of whatever it is you're doing behind closed doors.

Of course, with as soft as the population has gotten lately and so indifferent to the affairs of its government, such a call to action is all but futile...

As always, we must look to Chuck Norris to set us straight.

Don't worry. There's still one or maybe two smart people left in the USA. The rest left ages ago when it became a nation of fundamentalist christians.

USA; 90%+ believes in God. ( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html )

lol

"lol" to you too, you humanoid ass. All right, here goes:

A. you're quoting Fox News, so any credibility you might have had is shot right there, and

B. mere belief in a supreme being of some sort cannot (by any stretch of your obviously overworked imagination) be equated to fundamentalist Christianity, and

C. Let's see. Places where lots of people believe in God ... I know! Why don't you bitch about Italy! Would you guess that the percentage of Italians who believe in God is: a. above 90, or b. above 90%. The answer, of course, is c. above 90%. Are all Italians stupid? Is that what you're trying to say?

Assuming your facts are correct (and I'm not granting that at this point) the fact that 90% of American believe in something beyond themselves is absolutely no reason to be insulting. I mean, you assholes complain endlessly about the American people (with no apparent real knowledge of us) and yet, you're behaving in the same uncivilized, uncouth manner you ascribe to us. You have hissy fits if an American says anything about you that you deem derogatory or misinformed (and I'm not just talking about fundamentalist Muslims: some of you European Slashdotters have some growing up to do as well) yet have no problem spouting absolute garbage about us. Dude, just grow up. Seriously.

Personally, I have no belief in any deity, religion or dogma of any kind, but I still found your remark to be irrational and misinformed, and about as cultured and sensitive as a rock. If you're not from the United States (and given how, well, wrong you are I'm guessing you're not) I sincerely hope that you're never allowed to set foot here. The moment that happens our collective IQ will drop by a substantial amount.

Don't worry. There's still one or maybe two smart people left in the USA. The rest left ages ago when it became a nation of fundamentalist christians.

USA; 90%+ believes in God. ( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html )

lol

For the record, I generally recognize the authority of the FCC to impose the doctrine at its discretion, but wish that it didn't have that power and instead focused on increasing diversity of ownership.

For what it's worth, Pres. Obama has stated (via press release, at least), and recently reiterated that this is the approach he prefers as well.

From the press release referenced in the first link above: "That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets."

For the record, I oppose reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, and I think "media-ownership caps" and "increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets," will probably translate in practice into "pretty much like the fairness doctrine, but with a different name." With that in mind, however, I would have no objection to government oversight intended to ensure that *anybody* wanting to own/operate a media outlet has the chance to do so, and is allowed to succeed or fail in the market on the merits of the content they produce & distribute.

If there aren't enough people in your market who want to listen to the programming you choose to broadcast, then find a better business model.

That's OK.. he lost me when he said terrorism was a real and immediate risk.

Can you list the name of the people who have been killed by global warming over the past 10 years?

HERE is a partial list of those killed by terrorism. I think you will find that mine is bigger, proving that terrorism is a real and immediate threat when compared to global warming.

Do they not teach math before the 10th grade?

Actually, eleven voted to block a amendment to prevent reinstatement, but 57 voted for an alternative method to 'encourage' 'minority ownership', which means they will try to force local ownership by Democrat friendly minorities, who will then boot conservative shows off the air.

It is a troll because the Obama administration doesn't support a return to the Fairness Doctrine.

Does 'attempted obstruction of justice' by refusing to answer their questions until you can obtain legal counsel count?

Not likely, our country may have gone pretty far down a dark road, thanks to the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror"; however, we're not quite that far gone, yet.

And since police are allowed to lie to you [transformcolumbusday.org], what's to keep them from lying that the undercover policeman that just entered the room is in fact an attorney, a public defender, and is there to help advise you on your rights? The police could lie at that point and say this 'attorney' can fill in for your attorney until yours actually gets there. Of course, anything said in confidence to this 'attorney' probably wouldn't be covered by any attorney-client priviledge since the 'attorney' is really a cop.

Again, we've gotten bad, but not likely that bad. While I don't doubt that this type idea has crossed the minds of some of the worst of the police, I think they realize the absolute smack down which a judge would hit them with for it. There isn't much which still pisses off judges enough to throw out evidence, but I have no doubt that this would fall well within that realm.

Are you paranoid enough yet?

Being careful is not being paranoid. The police, in this country, have become so emboldened with the War on Drugs that they are willing to Kick in a mayor's door and kill his dogs based on very thin pretenses. They are also willing to gun down elderly ladies in their homes, and plant evidence to cover up their crime.

You can call me paranoid all day long, if you like. It's a free country after all, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how stupid. But until we stop seeing botched drug raids on a regular basis, I am going to continue to assume that the police are not my friend.

127.0.0.1

Speaking of old people, Biden was right about that since he probably dosen't use the internet at home but instead learns about it through NSA briefings involving I.P. addresses(which are numbers) and whatnot.

So in that case it's the public, and not Biden, who are fucking clueless idiots.

Only right wing wackos care about the fairness doctrine these days. I wonder why that is.

Because it's not just right wind wackos who care about the fairness doctrine, left wing wackos also care about it. For instance Al Franken. Bill Clinton and other Democrats want to bring it back.

Falcon

And then the aggregators will aggregate...What, exactly?

The news gathering organizations would sell their feeds to Google Premium News for $/month, $/eyeball, or whatever. Google would use their ability to host payment systems to collect from the subscribers. Google's free news.google.com aggregator would still scoop up the stories from the Bloomington Suburban Coffee Shop News, The Wright County Urinal Press, and whatever smaller news organizations don't mind providing free news. But the papers with AP and Reuters feeds would stop publishing free news in the plain aggregator, or at least no more than the first paragraph. You want to read it, sign up with The Google. Or the Yahoo!, or the MSN Live. But pay you must.

No papers are making money in the current model. They're all scared shitless. If the big feeds figure out how to get out of the current free-news trap, any for-profit newspaper is going to jump immediately to follow them into the revenue boat. They just need a leader to follow.

What could make this problematic would be the effect of truly public news sources: public radio and public television, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, etc., or any organization that is duty bound to distribute their news for free. For-profit news sources that obtain their revenue from other streams (such as TV news) will likely be slow to participate, but once they see the money's there they'll dive in with both feet. And biased news organizations with almost limitless money and an agenda (such as Faux News) will also give away their propaganda for free, and that'll be good enough for a large chunk of the undereducated world.

(Rupert Murdoch really is just a Persian cat and a monocle away from becoming a Bond villain, isn't he? I mean they all but used his name in Tomorrow Never Dies.)

But I think they have to try something now, because they're all within a year or two of Chapter 11. And they may have to collude to do it, but since we're on the other side of the newsprint they'll probably never tell us!

If there is any discrepancy between data sets, those folks are going to use it as proof that Global Warming is a hoax. Like this businessman, well he is in the business of climate, I guess that makes him an "expert" to some people and qualifying him to call Global Warming a hoax.

In this case the beatles have chosen not to put their work online and you are violateing their rights by not accepting their choice.

Actually, the Beatles don't own their catalog, it belongs to Michael Jackson, IIRC...

I believe the content providers and Hulu are one and the same?

  I found this link in one of the boxee forums.

  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305877,00.html

I believe all the huffing/puffing from the Boxee community is not going to make the house fall down.

http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=6814

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312132,00.html

http://cannazine.co.uk/cannabis-news/united-states/marijuana-can-prevent-cancer-not-cause-it.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3655586.stm

Now who looks stupid?

Fuck the Captains of U.S. Industry.

Seditously As Always,
Kilgore Trout

Fortunately, he hasn't much moved past whether God wants him to believe in evolution or not.

The word is in: here is proof of god's existence and disproof of evolution.

Joking. But hot on the heels of Darwin's birthday is this survey which says that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution.

" These two activities (protecting RIAA and superimposing Christian morality) are more like a Republican tactic."

Gosh, Republicans NEVER take up the cause against the RIAA, right?

And Democrats NEVER claim that their candidacy is god's will", right?

    You are ignorant, uninformed, and silly.

I'm sure you've heard John Gibson'sradio rant. The rant is caused by his cocaine addiction. Wait. There's more. Recent troubling developments prompt me to revisit a subject I've discussed in the past: John Gibson and his plan to redefine humanity as alienated machines/beasts and then convince everyone that they were never human to begin with. In the first place, I defy the snippy, pea-brained ninnies who confiscate other people's rightful earnings and I defy the powers of darkness that they represent. I, hardheaded cynic that I am, have this advice to offer: The world has changed, Gibson; get used to it. He has been known to "prove" statistically that a plausible excuse is a satisfactory substitute for performance. As you might have suspected, his proof is flawed. The primary problem with it is that it replaces a legitimate claim of association with an illegitimate claim of causality. Consequently, Gibson's "proof" demonstrates only that he wants to exhibit a deep disdain for all people who are not heartless vagrants. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis.

Gibson's thralls seem to be caught up in their need for enemies. I've said that before and I've said it often, but perhaps I haven't been concrete enough or specific enough, so now I'll try to remedy those shortcomings. I'll try to be a lot more specific and concrete when I explain that Gibson's favorite buzzword these days is "crisis". He likes to tell us that we have a crisis on our hands. He then argues that the only reasonable approach to combat this crisis is for him to make us less united, less moral, less sensitive, less engaged, and more perversely muddleheaded. In my opinion, the real crisis is the dearth of people who understand that I sincerely don't believe that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. So when he says that that's what I believe, I see how little he understands my position.

Unless we drive off and disperse the sex-crazed psychics who encourage men to leave their wives, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become imperious nutters, our whole social structure will gradually disintegrate and crumble into ruins. The poisonous wine of simplism had been distilled long before Gibson entered the scene. Gibson is merely the agent decanting the poisonous fluid from its bottle into the jug that is world humanity. Like other nugatory phonies, he has a finely honed ability to require religious services around the world to begin with "Gibson is great; Gibson is good; we thank Gibson for our daily food". He will almost certainly tiptoe around that glaringly evident fact because if he didn't, you might come to realize that I can easily see him performing the following homicidal, misinformed acts. First, Gibson will acquire public acceptance of his censorious grievances. Then, he will confuse, befuddle, and neutralize public opposition. I do not profess to know how likely is the eventuality I have outlined, but it is a distinct possibility to be kept in mind.

Under these conditions, Gibson's plan is to scorn and abjure reason. Gibson's grunts are moving at a frightening pace toward the total implementation of that agenda, which includes preventing me from sleeping soundly at night. But this is something to be filed away for future letters. At present, I wish to focus on only one thing: the fact that that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence.

To put it another way, Gibson's prevarications are as predictable as sunrise. Whenever I confront and reject all manifestations of irreligionism, his invariant response is to depressurize the frail vessel of human hopes. Gibson keeps telling us that his blessing is the equivalent of a papal imprimatur. Are we also supposed to believe that all literature that opposes officialism was forged by unscrupulous sad sacks? I didn't think so.

Gibson is simply incapable of

"As one of my old bosses used to say so frequently, "Fuck you, sue me."

Which is great advice unless your boss is Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Getting a blowjob is one thing. Conspiracy to commit murder is something entirely different. Do you seriously think he had nothing to do with this?

Yes, it's not like 97% of American teens play computer games or over 50% of American adults

I'm all for the argument being pro gamers, but your talking about Fox News here...