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So then, should we look at what the atheists of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries produced in the last 100 years? That would be 100,000,000 dead and unimaginable suffering.

"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

Oh, well then, never mind. At least there is truth in your disclaimer.

"Correlation doesn't imply causation." is a truism since not even controlled experiments imply causation. This is true of all natural sciences of which the social sciences are a subset. It is increasingly recognized in the social sciences that the important thing to do is pay attention not only to "the weight of the evidence", rather than "proof" but to, as described in the discourse in "implication analysis" in the social sciences: "try harder to find relevant natural experiments".

So not only is it a truism that "correlation doesn't imply causation" it is a sophomoric barrier to scientific progress which understands not only that there is no "proof" but that some "correlations" are more relevant to evaluation of causal hypotheses in the social sciences than are other correlations.

The question comes down to the word "evaluation" since we're trying to place a "value", indeed a numeric value, on a causal hypothesis rather than "test" it in a logical sense. To the Monetary Man, this numeric "value" is quantified in money as a net present value adjusted for future risk. The Monetary Man is, however, not the Natural Man from whom Natural Rights derive.

How in the world are we, unachored from the operational definition of "value" as embodied in money, to place value on which correlations, hence which "natural experiments" to study (hence which such experiments to actively promote)?

My answer, that is friendly to civilization while upholding the individual, is directly hostile to Monetary Man since I place Natural Man above Money:

Provide an inalienable and equal monetary stream to each individual so that individual may, through the subordinate anarcho capitalist system, construct his own world in cooperation with others. In such a world many "natural experiments" will be conducted and they will be conducted in proportion to value determined from a founding notion of sovereign individuals who, in exchange for their inalienable monetary dividend from civilization, agree that the ultimate appeal in dispute processing will not be force, but money.

The source of revenue is therefore obvious:

The property rights that would not exist in the absence of that agreement, properly called "artificial property rights" as opposed to "natural property rights" such as a homestead supporting an individual and his immediate family, are subject to that agreement and are, therefore, as with any partner's profit stream from a business venture, optimally divided between payout and retention. The payout is the individual sovereign's profit from the partnership which is limited by the expectation of future value from the partnership. Of course, if the future value of the partnership (ie: civilization) falls to zero, then the partnership is dissolved, the wealth distributed equally and we go back to natural duel as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing until another partnership again restrains individual sovereignty.

Social scientists and their politicians deny that the individual is preeminent over civilization and hence is to be asked for what terms he demands of civilization and its artificial property rights prior to suspending his true, forceful, individual sovereignty. They simply take from the sovereign individual his natural right to use force and they do so by forming a group (usually called a "government") that takes it from him -- a group that has volumes upon volumes of words from the "social sciences" to justify their crimes against humanity.

...especially since so many prominent formally atheist societies have been such successes.

Communists have never been atheists. They've always had the deity in form of Marxism-Leninism. It's just like Abrahamic religions (authoritarian, dogmatic, expansionistic etc.), only the deity isn't antropomorphic. But that's about it.

A language that can't be used for bible translations is a win in my book (pun intended).

I guess that would be "winning", especially since so many prominent formally atheist societies have been such successes.

Alas, it is your destiny to be frustrated.

Ok no "ifs", I am going to explain exactly what the article did, and why they way you characterized the principal components ("they're components that let you get a visually distinct separation between groups that you've already clustered.") is wrong.

The figure I linked to is figure S3B. The supplementary material describes the construction of this figure as follows

We computed the Identity-by-State (IBS) matrix among the 938 individuals by using PLINK (12), producing a 938-by-938 matrix. We then performed a Principal Component Analysis on this IBS matrix for all samples and for seven regions separately, and used the top components to illustrate the genetic relatedness among individuals. We show the PC1-PC2 plots for all samples in Fig. S3B and six of the seven regions in Figs. 2 and S4.

Now what you need to know about the IBS matrix, is that it is computed without reference to any prior clustering of the data. In case someone else decides to argue this point without doing their own research, here are the definitions:

[The IBS matrix is a] square, symmetric matrix of the IBS distances for all pairs of individuals
and further

The [IBS] distance between two samples is returned as the proportion of allele comparisons which are not IBS.

and finally

For each pair of subjects the [number of allele comparisons which are IBS is] the total number of alleles which are IBS. For autosomal SNPs, each locus contributes 4 comparisons, since each subject carries two copies. For SNPs on the X chromosome, the number of comparisons is also 4 for female:female comparisons, but is 2 for female:male and 1 for male:male comparisons.

source

What is important here is that at no point as we trace through the definitions needed to understand how the principal components were constructed, is any data other than the DNA of the individuals used. So from these quotes, even the most reluctant reader can see that the graph I originally linked to was constructed without any prior knowledge of the races of the 938 individuals (except of course for the color of the dots).

Now you are of course free to argue what the principal componets do and do not represent. But you are no longer in a position to argue that they were constructed in order to visualize a clustering that we had already assumed. They were not.

http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/Phys253.html

Even if you don't understand them.

Here is a good read, and it's free:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k29669&pageid=icb.page135336

About measure, I disagree, I know EQ, but I don't like too much the principle.
I'm for the zen approach, which is to let your thoughts pass, we are unhappy because of our thoughts.
As long as we are in the instant present, we live fully.
I like the zen quote: "When I eat, I eat, and when I sleep, I sleep".
Whatever (positive or negative) happens at me is a lesson, what can I learn from it ?
Can I unlearn my bad thoughts' habits, that took so much time to acquire ?
This is the secret of happiness.

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

Let's see what some other sources say:

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

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

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

The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism

The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule

The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth

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

a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.

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

What do you do when the answer is "YOU'RE RESISTING ARREST!!!" and they beat the shit out of you, taze you, then 'lose your phone down the sewer in the struggle'?

And don't count on any dashcam footage to help you. Here's an example where nine independent dashcams mysteriously "failed" to record an incident where a reporter, who was coincidentally (of course it's just a coincidence, am I right?) covering a series of corruption scandals within the local government, was pulled out of her car by a dozen officers, along with her cameraman, and roughed up on the side of the road.

Here's a nice passage:

Although I was the first journalist in the United States known to be subjected to a felony traffic stop while on the job, some officers said I was "lucky it wasn't a real one." Had it been, they claimed, I would have been "eating the pavement." One police official told Washingtonian magazine, "McCarren should quit her whining. She wasn't shot."

America! Fuck Yeah!!

if you find a way to make North Korea actually follow an international law, pleas let the world know ASAP.

International law does not prohibit a nation state from building nuclear weapons, missiles etc., nor does it regulate what form of government nation states should have. They may be guilty of crimes against humanity, but for their actions to fall into that class, it would have to be shown that the actions were the result of a systematic policy of murder, genocide, torture etc. rather than these being individual acts. Some lawyers have made the case that North Korea has a policy of genocide and infanticide, both of which would qualify. On the other hand, people have made similar allegations of forced abortion and infanticide against the government of China, and yet very few have argued that constitutes a crime against humanity.

Actually there is a tool that does all of that already: JHOVE - JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment.

http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/

It's used in the digital preservation field, for example in an archive to try to figure out what they've got and what state it's in.

The JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment:

http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/

It's specifically designed to first probabilistically identify files, then attempt to verify their format.

Disclaimer: I haven't worked on it directly, but I did spend a number in the digital preservation space, so I probably know some of the people who have contributed to it.

Scratching the surface: Terrorism and the Soviet Union

Review of The Black Book of Communism

Scratching the surface: Terrorism and the Soviet Union

Review of The Black Book of Communism

Googling "shareholder lawsuits maximize value" gives a whole bunch of results.

It looks to me like many of the suits (in these results) are about mergers and acquisitions, and this link is to a study about such suits: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2012/03/04/developments-in-ma-shareholder-litigation/

But it doesn't look like ALL are about mergers, and it seems to me like such a suit you propose wouldn't automatically be thrown out of court. (IANAL)

Strongly suggested by experiments, borked the link.

however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.

First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].

Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].

Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.

CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf

Not sure what advice your ex-wife gave but judging from the USA experience much of the diet advice in the past 20 years was wrong and even harmful.

Most dietitians can probably be replaced with a website: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid/

We shouldn't read Florian Mueller because he takes money from Oracle. OK. Does that mean that we shouldn't listen to the FSF and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society because they take money from Google?

That's funny, just last night I was looking at the stars. And admiring these choice shots from the Spitzer space telescope.

I don't think getting rid of what was supposed to be like a pickup truck but ended up with the cost structure of a fighter jet represents ceasing to look towards the stars.

> "He got a million in 12 days, how is is not gaining money?"
Just so you know, bringing in $1 million revenue does not automatically mean you're "making money". Making money means paying all your expenses and then having a profit. Louis C.K. says he, "$250,000 will go to pay off expenses related to the website. Another $250,000 is going to his staff and the people who helped work on the show.". Louis C.K. did make money from the show, but that's because of the other $500,000 ($280,000 of which he gave to charity).

Also, I tried to lookup the quote by following links from the Techdirt article. God, I hate techdirt - not just because Masnik and Techdirt loves to spin anything related to copyright (Masnik believes filesharing should be fully legal and has a hand-waving explanation as to how to make money on digital content, his Techdirt sidekick, Nina Paley, argues copyright shouldn't exist in any form and anyone should be able to sell anyone else's copyrighted material), but also because all the links lead right back to Techdirt and you can't verify the quotes or find the context. Here's a link to the quote (thanks to Google, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2012/04/10/hollywood-comes-to-brooklyn/ ) if you want to verify it like I did. The link is to a story where someone summarized Al Perry's speech (it's not a direct quote) - ugh, I hope he summarized it fairly otherwise were on a crappy witchhunt. For all I know, Perry might've said that Louis C.K. didn't monetize well (e.g. charge more and do more advertising or something).

It's funny, but I don't recall that the NKVD, KGB, SMERSH, or other secret police organs of Soviet Power in the USSR worried about blood feuds from torture, or any of that. They simply tortured and killed in staggering numbers.

The KGB prison in Vilnius at The Museum of Genocide Victims

solitary confinement cell, KGB style.

Surprise!

And the Gulags?

What Were Their Crimes? Living in the Gulag Stalin World - Lithuania

The Great Terror: A Reassessment

- - - - -

Torture is ineffective and diminishes the society that condones torture. I still think that the stories that came out last decade are a big part of why American society is so psychotic today.

Some small segments of American society did become unhinged, yes, but not anything close to all of American society.

Keep in perspective that: Only Three Have Been Waterboarded by CIA The most recent of which was about 9 years ago.

Many people are also mistaken regarding what went on at Abu Ghraib. The Army put a stop to abuse by a handful of rogue soldiers who were abusing prisoners, court martialed them, and sent them to jail. All the news media really did was report the news of the Army investigation, and what had gone on. Of course it is more profitable, poltically and financially, to spin dark conspiracy theories when the reality is closer to Jackass: The Movie.

Iraq abuse photos were `just for fun'

Private Lynndie England, the woman who has become the emblem of the US' shame over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, on Tuesday showed little expression aside from an occasional nervous giggle at a hearing to determine whether she should face the full weight of a court martial.

When first confronted with pictures of her gloating over naked and cowering Iraqi prisoners, England had shown no alarm, telling the officer who led the investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq: "It was just for fun."

That lack of comprehension returned to haunt her yesterday as the prevailing view of the US military -- that England and the handful of other lowly reservists charged in the abuse were rogue soldiers -- began to emerge more fully.

"They didn't think it was that serious. They were just joking around and having some fun during the night shift," Chief Warrant Officer Paul Arthur told the court.

He added later: "From the get-go, it was jokes and frustration." . . . .

If England is convicted on all 19 charges, she could face 38 years in the brig. Some 25 witnesses are to appear including Specialist Joseph Darby, the soldier who first came forward about the abuse, and Specialist Jeremy Sivitz, who was granted relative leniency for cooperating with the investigation.
Much of the prosecution's evidence is from photographs, with more than 280 images of abuse of detainees, . . . The images first came to the attention of the authorities last January.

Arthur, a member of the military CID, was at Abu Ghraib when a soldier in England's military police

For almost all astronomical objects, it matters not one bit at all whether the observations are simultaneous or separated by a few hours. Even supernovae last for weeks.

Off the top of my head, objects which show interesting variation on timescales of hours or less:

• pulsars
• stellar pulsars
• gamma-ray bursts
• Lorimer bursts/perytons
• rapidly-rotating radio transients
• high-energy particle cascades
• scattering events in the interstellar medium

Even pulsars alone are one of the most interesting classes of object in radio astronomy: there are radio telescopes (Parkes, Arecibo) that spend most of their time studying them.

Cordes et al. (2004) did a nice review of the different types of observed and theorised variable radio objects. Even supernovae, which you dismissed as being too slow, are expected to produce a 1-second broad-band radio pulse right at the start of their explosion - this is one of the things that we might be able to see with the SKA.

Cardio is basically pointless when it comes to weight loss (but still extremely beneficial to your general health!). 'Exercise' is a far too general term here. The way in which exercise can induce weight loss is by increasing your non-fatty tissue and subsequently your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). A couple of weeks of strength training can achieve that: http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/2001/04000/Effect_of_strength_training_on_resting_metabolic.5.aspx.

This graph or Wikipedia shows why increasing your RMR can be effective in aiding in losing weight.

Additionally, high spikes in blood sugar levels (insert carbohydrates/HFCS-rant here) and the associated insulin spikes are very suspect when it comes to losing fatty tissue (and generally: weight), see: http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/pancreas/insulin_phys.html (CTRL+F: lipid metabolism).

I will agree with you that the total amount of energy intake is also important. Not eating that extra pound is not a bad idea at all. But it is misleading to imply that merely eating less is the way to go. In fact, if not combined with daily activity (I'm avoiding the word exercise here), it can leave you as unhealthy as your visibly obese neighbour. See, f.i.: http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/Abdominal-fat-and-what-to-do-about-it.shtml (btw, 'visceral fat' is the more correct term as it doesn't conjure up associations with 'love handles' and such). Or Google 'dr jimmy bell fat' for some popular media coverage on the subject.

Sorry, but in the USA you don't have left and right. You have right and further-right. (On a world scale, anyway.)

Americans are often derided for their perceived or actual ignorance about the world, but this time it looks like the shoe is on the other foot. The United States does indeed have a genuine left, including hard core dedicated Communist movements. The difference is that in the United States most people tend towards the center to center right. They tend to shy away from the extremes so popular in Europe and other places.

Internationalist Socialists - AKA: Communists
Nationalist Socialists - AKA Nazis - far weaker than they were 60-70 years ago.
Fusion: American Nazi Party Endorses Occupy Wall Street‘s ’Courage,‘
Naked protests

Shying away from Communism is the smart and right thing to do . . . if you value your life.
Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

People have been claiming that HFCS is one of the root causes of the obestiy epidemic. Is fructose bad for you?

What if one of them has a Stinger launcher left over from when we gave them to the then-"freedom-fighter" Taliban to fight the then-"evil-communists"?

The Stinger missiles are all past their expiration date. . . long past.

However, that sort of thing has happened.

It isn't "evil-communists", it is evil communists. Communism killed 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years. Read some reviews if you don't read the book.

Depends on the plastic. Some are tested pretty carefully and have various certifications.

Of course you could take the word of internet chain letters over the Harvard Medical School.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/HEALTHbeat_081606.htm

It's your choice as to whether or not you want to behave rationally.

"In order to make the process easier, Microsoft included in Windows 95, and now has in Windows 98, an Internet referral Server", link

"Everything .. about NT security .. was purely about .. already authenticated LAN users", styrotech

Then please describe how people were supposed to run eCommerce platforms on NTs Internet Server?

Demonstrate NTServer as THE Internet platform
* NTServer as Internet platform whitepaper done
* Analyst/lab press tour by 3/30/95
* Internet World show: mid-April
* Momentum: demonstrate 10 of the top 12 Internet sites now running on NTServer platforms

* External Beta of Internet Server: 7/1/95
* RTM: before end of 1995

We are spying but.....we don't do the same kind of spying they do. Our spying is okay, theirs is evil.

Since the Communists of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China managed to kill about 100,000,000 people between them in about the last 80 years, you could state that pretty much literally, yes.

The Gruesome Consequences of a Political Idea
Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
A Tale of Red Guards and Cannibals

We are spying but.....we don't do the same kind of spying they do. Our spying is okay, theirs is evil.

Since the Communists of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China managed to kill about 100,000,000 people between them in about the last 80 years, you could state that pretty much literally, yes.

The Gruesome Consequences of a Political Idea
Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
A Tale of Red Guards and Cannibals

What you've suggested is, unsurprisingly, very controversial in the medical and legal communities.

Here is an interesting paper on the subject: http://www.leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/data/547/Flannery.html

A good way to compare these countries, given that we're talking about a radio astronomy project, is to look at their radio astronomy facilities. Trimble & Ceja did a study of the citation rates of papers based on data from different telescopes (as a measure of how significant the rest of the world thinks the results from those telescopes are). Numbers 2 and 3 are the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Parkes Radio Telescope, also in Australia. (Number 1, by a large margin, is the Very Large Array in the US.) There's only one South African radio telescope, and it's lumped under "Other".

It's also a bit surprising that you cite South Africa's strengths in mining (when Australia is China's primary source of raw materials), heavy engineering (Australia's shipyards are busier than South Africa's) and defence (Australia is collaborating on the JSF). It's particularly amusing when you say that Australian universities have a few hand-me-down computers - presumably like the Pawsey Centre, which is on the top500 supercomputer list - and that's only stage 1, with 7% of the final installed capacity. And what's it being used for? Radio astronomy.

The only cogent point in your post is Australia's limited nuclear experience - which would be really relevant if the SKA were nuclear-powered. (Hint: it's not.)

That mostly what VRM - Vendor Relationship Management - is about: giving people the software to manage their relationships with companies and other organizations. ProjectVRM talks a lot about those issues.

We're already receiving that same kind of attention from the USA, to the extent that they're choosing our political leadership for us.

You seem confused about the facts. Some Australians may have given notice to US diplomats that this was happening, but that doesn't mean that the US decided who was going to be the Australian PM any more than you complaining to your neighbor about a bad boss at work makes the neighbor responsible when the boss gets fired.

It was Australians who made the choice, and Australians who voted on who would be the PM, not the US.

Australian coup: the rise and fall of Kevin Rudd

The boy-faced former diplomat was unceremoniously dumped by senior Labour Party power brokers after failing to secure a lift in the opinion polls and angering MPs by his refusal to consult on important policies.

America, China, neither have real Australians interests in mind, so what does it matter who's meddling most?

Based on the content that is at the link, I think I might see where you are going wrong on this point:

. . . the recent Four Corners program has revealed further evidence that the U.S. Government had advance notice of the coup against Rudd. I highly recommend the following article and others on the World Socialist Website to get the real story about Australian politics - make no mistake there is far more than a clash of personalities going on in Canberra right now

Maybe these will help:

How to Kill Poverty
The Black Book of Communism - - - One of the reviews
Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
The Road from 1989

We're already receiving that same kind of attention from the USA, to the extent that they're choosing our political leadership for us.

You seem confused about the facts. Some Australians may have given notice to US diplomats that this was happening, but that doesn't mean that the US decided who was going to be the Australian PM any more than you complaining to your neighbor about a bad boss at work makes the neighbor responsible when the boss gets fired.

It was Australians who made the choice, and Australians who voted on who would be the PM, not the US.

Australian coup: the rise and fall of Kevin Rudd

The boy-faced former diplomat was unceremoniously dumped by senior Labour Party power brokers after failing to secure a lift in the opinion polls and angering MPs by his refusal to consult on important policies.

America, China, neither have real Australians interests in mind, so what does it matter who's meddling most?

Based on the content that is at the link, I think I might see where you are going wrong on this point:

. . . the recent Four Corners program has revealed further evidence that the U.S. Government had advance notice of the coup against Rudd. I highly recommend the following article and others on the World Socialist Website to get the real story about Australian politics - make no mistake there is far more than a clash of personalities going on in Canberra right now

Maybe these will help:

How to Kill Poverty
The Black Book of Communism - - - One of the reviews
Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
The Road from 1989

According to this, I drive at superluminal speeds every morning.

It only matters what gets bought and sold and for what price. If some entity is paying people to do a job, regardless on how useful or useless the job is, that money gets accounted in the GDP

This is the kind of thinking that causes people to think mortgage backed securities filled with NINJA loans are a good idea.

Incidentally, I did some searching, and found an economist (Robert J Barro) who estimates the WW2 to be 0.8. He's probably right.

I've been drinking coffee for 50 years. No grandchildren yet, and I intend to be around to watch them grow up.

Then you should start drinking coffee. It has a lot of health benefits, including warding off dementia and slowing the brain's aging process. Of course, if you have a medical condition that precludes it, you shouldn't drink it, but barring that, coffee is good for you.

Cancer. Coffee might have anti-cancer properties. Last year, researchers found that coffee drinkers were 50% less likely to get liver cancer than nondrinkers. A few studies have found ties to lower rates of colon, breast, and rectal cancers. Several studies have shown that caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee have different health effects (see chart).

Cholesterol. Two substances in coffee â" kahweol and cafestol â" raise cholesterol levels. Paper filters capture these substances, but that doesnâ(TM)t help the many people who now drink non-filtered coffee drinks, such as lattes. Researchers have also found a link between cholesterol increases and decaffeinated coffee, possibly because of the type of bean used to make certain decaffeinated coffees.

Diabetes. Heavy coffee drinkers may be half as likely to get diabetes as light drinkers or nondrinkers. Coffee may contain ingredients that lower blood sugar. A coffee habit may also increase your resting metabolism rate, which could help keep diabetes at bay.

Gallstones. Coffee drinkers are less likely to suffer symptomatic gallstone disease, possibly because coffee alters the cholesterol content of the bile produced by the liver.

Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease. Coffee seems to protect men but not women against Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease. One possible explanation for the sex difference may be that estrogen and caffeine need the same enzymes to be metabolized, and estrogen captures those enzymes.

Your post would have been considerably shortened if you had simply summarized it as the US fought Communism around the globe. That is why so many countries are free today. It is a good thing too or else the bloody, oppressive march of communism would have continued. Contrary to what you wrote, Communism was a world wide conspiracy, and a bloody one at that. Sadly I don't have enough time at the moment to correct all of the twisted renderings of facts in your post, as it would be a Herculean task. I think just comparing the history of the Berlin Wall to what you wrote might give a sense of how twisted the history you give is.

More information about: The Berlin Wall

Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin, from where they could then travel to West Germany and other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between

And lets provide some background material:

Communism killed ~ 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

What Were Their Crimes?

Have you ever been late to work?

In the Stalin era, a person who arrived late to work three times could be sent to the Gulag for three years.

Have you ever told a joke about a government official?

In the Stalin era, many were sent to the Gulag for up to 25 years for telling an innocent joke about a Communist Party official.

If your family was starving, would you take a few potatoes left in a field after harvest?

In the Stalin era, a person could be sent to the Gulag for up to ten years for such petty theft.

Living in the Gulag

Some claim that the US is militarist, but it has no custom like the annual military parade through Red Square.
Soviet Military Parade 1984

Stalin World - Lithuania

The KGB Museum - (the Museum of Genocide Victims)

The Soviet Union conquered Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and annexed them. At the ends of WW2 it took part of Poland as its own territory. The Soviets turned the governments of East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the rest of Eastern Europe into not merely client states, but puppet states.

Revelations from the Russian Archives - UKRAINIAN FAMINE

The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants' will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industri

On this we strongly agree; would that it were not so. I think we've caused more humans living on this planet to suffer in real terms through our actions.

You are so desperately wrong.

Communism kill 100,000,000 people.

The Gruesome Consequences of a Political Idea

In his introduction, Stephane Courtois himself a former communist, breaks with the postwar taboo on comparing the Gulag with the Holocaust. He notes that the communist body count of more than 100 million exceeds that of the Nazis. He compares the "class genocide" of communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism and states that both were "crimes against humanity."
So controversial was this comparison that two of Mr. Courtois's editor-collaborators--Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin--later distanced themselves from what he wrote. And predictably, the French left lashed itself into a frenzy, denouncing the book's contributors for traducing the noble communist fight against fascism.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Q&A: Greek debt crisis

Why is Greece in trouble?

Greece has been living beyond its means since even before it joined the euro. After it adopted the euro, public spending soared and public sector wages practically doubled.

However, while money has flowed out of the government's coffers, its income has been hit by widespread tax evasion.

When the global financial downturn hit, Greece was ill-prepared to cope.

On this we strongly agree; would that it were not so. I think we've caused more humans living on this planet to suffer in real terms through our actions.

You are so desperately wrong.

Communism kill 100,000,000 people.

The Gruesome Consequences of a Political Idea

In his introduction, Stephane Courtois himself a former communist, breaks with the postwar taboo on comparing the Gulag with the Holocaust. He notes that the communist body count of more than 100 million exceeds that of the Nazis. He compares the "class genocide" of communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism and states that both were "crimes against humanity."
So controversial was this comparison that two of Mr. Courtois's editor-collaborators--Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin--later distanced themselves from what he wrote. And predictably, the French left lashed itself into a frenzy, denouncing the book's contributors for traducing the noble communist fight against fascism.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Q&A: Greek debt crisis

Why is Greece in trouble?

Greece has been living beyond its means since even before it joined the euro. After it adopted the euro, public spending soared and public sector wages practically doubled.

However, while money has flowed out of the government's coffers, its income has been hit by widespread tax evasion.

When the global financial downturn hit, Greece was ill-prepared to cope.

Google around a bit for "Vector potential waves" - a (presumably PhD level) professor and his wife are doing work on this very subject at McMaster U. in Canada. this is the basis for it. This really messes with the classical interpretation of the double slit experiment - add a solenoid and all bets are off!

A Modern Physics Letters B Paper on the subject at hand.

I read about it first in the Amateur Radio publication QEX.

happy to be living in a rich country...

It isn't a question of wealth. It is a question of being ruled by cruel, sadistic despot with nearly unlimited power and a cult of personality - the very thing that seems to be a regular outcome of Communist governments.

I talked to a 60-something woman who used to have extreme fibromyalgia problems last weekend. Estrogen came up, and she said her doctors had put her on it years ago. She was in the hospital within a week.

There's a PDF floating about the Estrogen Scam... Let's see... Ah, here it is:
The Rise and Fall of Estrogen Therapy: The History of HRT

This was written by a harvard law student, and basically finds that the estrogen hucksters are criminally negligent.

My most recent blog post is the start of a series about problems with chemical birth control pills. I thought it'd be good to start out with why they're so expensive, but I've since realized that staying baby-free is much more important to most women than the cost, or the side effects...

Running an SSH tunnel to a proxy won't get you expelled, arrested, and branded an untouchable by the corporate world. If anyone cares, you'll get told off by NetOps; In the worst case and as a repeat-offender, they might disconnect your dorm room's network access.

Did you read my post? I did say the correct approach was to try something like this when I talked about VPN. I was thinking that the person I replied to would take more drastic action to bypass his universities restriction.

As quite a few others have already pointed out, many unis require you to live on-campus.

To be honest, I still have a hard time believing this. Here in the UK not a single university in the country operates such a restriction, most have less accommodation than they need so force some (most, in many cases) students to live off campus.

I just did a quick search and found that Harvard does seem to let you live off campus apart from in your first year, judging by the link here: http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/about/faq.html#11

As I said, I spent a year in university halls then got the hell out as quick as I could, but I am surprised the force you to live on campus even in your freshman year.

New Hubble observations confirm the atmosphere of the exoplanet is rich in water, comprising up to 50% of the atmosphere's mass.

Actually, they do nothing of the sort. They just make water a more probable explanation for the observations. It says as much in the article.

These abstracts both state that the data indicates an atmosphere high in hydrogen and helium, but (taken from the second abstract):

Our observations disfavour a water-world composition, but such a composition will remain a possibility until observations reconfirm our deeper Ks-band transit depth or detect features at other wavelengths.

Not yet - http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/research/body

We've known for years that Doctors have over prescribed Antibiotics for many ailments,

NO WE DO NOT KNOW THAT, please shut the fuck up and keep your popular culture non science views to your self, asshole.,

I guess the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health are now qualifying as non-science, huh
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/11.10/11-sore.html

Or how about this study, in which 44% of doctors "admitted sometimes prescribing antibiotics to patients who may not need them"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18196886

Is Intellectual Property Good or Bad? Lots of people on this thread seem to come down pretty hard on one side or another (mostly the latter). But I think when pressed most would agree that sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. For a good introduction on fleshing out the good and the bad of intellectual property, I highly recommend Fisher's "Theories of Intellectual Property," available for free online here: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/iptheory.html

It goes through the justifications for intellectual property and can help you think clearly about when it is bad. It can help you justify the feeling that most people have that a patent troll is "bad" but a lone inventor that patents his invention is "good." Even if you don't think the lone inventor should get the patent, I think the article can help you explain why.