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Besides, OSC's SF books have nothing to do with his views on a totally orthogonal societal issue.

Not so. Enchantment is about pre-ordained heterosexual marriage and the struggle of the Christian partners against pagan deities. It's a thinly-veiled showcase of his beliefs.

Boycotting the former because of the latter is called an ad hominem. Case in point, a lot of people enjoy Disney movies and Ford cars despite Walt Disney and Henry Ford being nasty antisemitic pro-nazi nutjobs.

No, boycotting the business of someone whose beliefs you despise is called the free market. Christians do it all the time. Whether or not someone can enjoy a movie is incidental to whether or not they choose to do so. Personally, I boycotted the movie Powder because the director was a convicted child molester. I don't give a shit whether or not the movie was any good. Disney knew of his history when they hired him, and I won't give them a dime of my money for that product.

That's true today, because on Jan 18th the legislature passed a gun control bill which made gun permits private data. But as of Christmas every gun-owner in two counties had their names on a paper's website:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/new-york-journal-news-gun-owners-westchester-rockland-counties_n_2362530.html
They did take the list of names and addresses offline when the bill passed, but the map is still online, and despite gun-owners being convinced they're responsible for multiple burglaries there have been no legal consequences to the paper:
http://www.lohud.com/article/20121224/NEWS04/312240045/The-gun-owner-next-door-What-you-don-t-know-about-weapons-your-neighborhood?nclick_check=1
The paper has pointed out that since the list was posted there have been almost 600 burglaries in the two counties:
http://www.lohud.com/article/20130617/NEWS02/306170027
They've only been blamed for three, either gun-ownership in the two counties is below 0.5% or gun-owners are being oparaboid when they claim a list of gun-owners will significantly change criminal behavior.

Maduro denounced an attempt to 'colonize' several European Countries

I hope that should read "Maduro denounced an attempt at 'colonizing' by several European Countries,"

From the Huffington Post

"The European people have seen the cowardice and the weakness of their governments, which now look like colonies of the United States," the Venezuelan president said.

Dear Homo:

The story was in the Washington EXAMINER. I realize that it's easy to make such a mistake, particularly when you have some trucker's penis in your mouth at the same time as you comment here...

But here is a link to a site frequented by homos such as yourself: HTH

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/03/state-department-facebook-likes-spent-630000_n_3541734.html

Something that strikes me as odd is half of all homosexual black men in the US have HIV. I mean think about that - for every 100 black gay men you see, about 50 of them have HIV. Nobody really understands why either, because apparently they don't behave any riskier than any other HIV demographic.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/gay-black-men-hiv-rates-m_n_3368144.html

> It was interesting to see the guy's theory about patents, without checking his numbers.

I don't know what should be interesting about someone's theories. Anyone can have theories. What is interesting is the numbers, the evidence. The same as the Geocentric theory. It's a nice theory but it is totally wrong. That is why I'm so negative about him. If he would have some numbers to back up his theory I would praise him.

That is also why I'm so negative about almost all economists. Hard evidence in a complex world economy is very hard to get but it don't stop economists from postulating theories. It wouldn't be so bad if not for the politicians that then pick one theory that serves their agenda and then with the help of the economists push that agenda.

There was a recent example with Reinhart and Rogoff.
Here is their paper: Growth in a Time of Debt
From the National Bureau of Economic Growth.

When external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP, annual growth declines by about two percent; for higher levels, growth rates are roughly cut in half.

Nice claims no? Problem is, the data is completely bonkus. See Reinhart And Rogoff's Pro-Austerity Research Now Even More Thoroughly Debunked By Studies

Any real scientists would lose any creditability, but not so economists. I guess Reinhart and Rogoff are still call them self economists and they are still used by politicians to push policy.

This isn't about swinging fists. It's about writing about it. This isn't about anything physical. It's about a form of expression. About writing. About typing letters on a keyboard.

It's about threatening to swing a fist, which is no more protected than the actual swinging.

And if you don't think words on a keyboard have very real consequences, the family of Gabrielle Molina would like a word. Along with the family of Erin and Shannon Gallagher. And the family of Megan Meier.

He should have used the SarcMark[!]

Well funded organizations - dealerships - are able to pad politicians pockets. Thus the politicians do what the organized contributors want.

If Tesla wants to do this, he needs to grease some politicians' palms. Not directly of course, but through the legalized channels - buying things for family members, contributing to shell entities which funnel money to politicians, that sort of thing. There are many ways to effect this.

Do that and Tesla's problems should go away.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/europes-record-youth-unemployment-the-scariest-graph-in-the-world-just-got-scarier/276423/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/youth-unemployment-rate

http://now.msn.com/youth-unemployment-rate-twice-that-of-any-other-age-group

Perhaps you are not looking in the right place.

What's idiotic about those comparisons?

Everything. Again, see the link.

They all involve redefining marriage to include the unnatural, some more extreme than others.

More unnatural than getting it on with your son? A table condiment? "Marrying" the girl you just raped who's land you've invaded? Knocking up your sister-in-law because your brother died before they had kids? With your 700 wives and 300 concubines?

but I wouldn't call it idiotic -- the argument has merit

The argument is asinine. None of the problems of polygamy - see again the lost boys - have anything to do with what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Polygamy inherently devalues women and prevents poor men from having families of their own. And homosexuals wont be free to engage in polygamy either, so WYFP again?

Or are you trying to claim permanent homosexual coupling is not unnatural? Nature certainly disagrees

Oh, it certainly does - with you. Long term homosexual relationships have been observed in everything from penguins to flamingos.

This is the same bigotry that banned inter-racial marriage. Same bigoted BS, different pile.

Actually, the Ptolemaic system was much more accurate than the Copernican system, and was based on observation. It explained the observation that there was no parallax when observing the fixed stars. Only better technology, and truly mind-bending conceptions of the size of the universe could correct that flawed observation and change everybody's mind about it. The system also explained the fact that the earth did not appear to be moving. That was a huge hurtle for the ancient, since they believed Aristotle's view that for something to keep moving, something had to keep pushing it.

The Ptolemaic system was used for 1500 years to predict events in the heavens. It may not have been 'right', but nobody cared. That is similar to the quantum dynamics, where nobody really knows why it works, but can use it to make accurate predictions about things like quantum tunneling.

However, the ideas of relativity are of a different kind. They are much deeper, in the sense that science thinks they know what is going on, at least at some level. Relativity provides an explanation, as opposed to just a way to compute the result.

Also, relativity already allows FTL, in a sense; if you take a spaceship, and accelerate it at 1g continually towards the Andromeda galaxy, the space between you and Andromeda will contract, and your clocks will slow. You still won't be able to measure your speed relative to the galaxy (or anything else) as anything faster than the speed of light, but you'll get there in your lifetime.

However, if you decide to turn around and return to tell your friends about it, you'll come back to where the earth was, but millions of years in earth's future. That will happen due to the fact that your clock (and the atoms in your body) will be slowed by the accelerations, effectively taking a shortcut through spacetime.

People have thought of ways to use this 'hack' to move faster than light. Here is a fluff piece on some work in that direction.

Yeah, uh...

I think your second paragraph is kind of a given. Your first paragraph is actually only ideally true anyway... i'm sure you've seen examples of corporations dictating the status quo, and sometimes that does extend to legal matters.

for example (after a cursory goog, so i'm not all that sure about the credibility...): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/jeff-olson-california-banks_n_3499177.html?1372199922&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

It's my understanding that it was proven they are scrutinizing some groups with specific ideologies and rubber-stamping groups with the opposite ideology.

That's certainly the Fox News understanding of the story.

Does it reflect reality? Not so much. "Progressive", "Occupy", and "Green Energy" groups got the hairy eyeball too.

"While the Tea Party did have a good grassroots structure behind it at one point,"
false.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms-tea-party-_b_2663125.html

wait.. you think the Tea Party was created recently? *points at mmcxii "HAHAHAHAHahahahahahha!"
Next you will be telling me you think some women in 2009 created it..*wipes tear from eye.

All Twinkie production has been outsourced to Foxconn where trade unions are opaque and you live in collective apartment complexes 8 to a room, complete with safety nets for works who try to commit suicide.

Yeah, those Unions are really bad for American workers.

And, we should believe her why? Because she is a woman? Because women don't lie about rape?

These results are from a poll of Muslim students:
â" 33% claim that killing is justified if done to protect religion.
â" 40 percent support the introduction of sharia for British Muslims.
â" 33 percent support a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia.

Yeah but those numbers are similar to the numbers Christian post in our well developed, secular democracy_

- 33% believe Christianity should be the state religion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/06/christianity-state-religion_n_3022255.html

oh, and about those 33%....

http://www.theocracywatch.org/

You can pretty much rest assured that they would answer the first two questions in the affirmative if they were ever permitted to come to the kind of power they seek.

Radical Islam is no joke, but it's not that different from the 33% of Americans who are merely held in check by the fact of being embedded within the context of a civil, secular society ...

This Economic Hydra Effect is nasty. I'm just trying to figure out how Goldman-Sucks, et.al. got away with things like "robo signing," and "conflict of interest issues." I wonder, "how could a group of people do this, and get away with it?" A possible solution was, "put your attorney in the mix, and all communications are privileged."

The DoJ freely admits that they have plenty of evidence to prosecute them...they just don't want to.

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/too-big-to-jail-obama-justice_n_3322824.html:

DOJ officials have previously defended the lack of criminal charges against banks suspected of wrongdoing in large part by pointing to the so-called “collateral consequences” associated with filing a criminal indictment against a leading financial institution.

For actual disaster scenarios, there is abundant evidence that ad-hoc groups of strangers often cooperatively self-organize moderately effectively rather than degenerate into massive murderous brawls. There have been lots of disasters that cast groups of hundreds to thousands of people into resource-limited refugee situations; these rarely turn into bloodbath riots --- typically, you'll see far more efficient and egalitarian distribution of resources (regardless of race/gender/socioeconomic status) than you're likely to encounter in "normal" society. You'll always have a few especially obnoxious assholes, but they rarely succeed in much more than turning the crowds' antipathy towards themselves. Rude, self-entitled behavior is far more likely to be tolerated over "frivolous" resources like a concert ticket than over food, water, shelter, and communications in an emergency with a crowd of strangers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Katrina_in_New_Orleans#Civil_disturbances
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/31/hurricane-sandy-looting-brooklyn-coney-island_n_2047183.html

Which big disasters in the USA *didn't* result in looting and other public disturbances?

Nanex presented a video that shows 0.5 seconds worth of High Frequency Trading for the stock Johnson and Johnson. Pretty revealing.

I think you're confusing Apple with Google.

I don't think so...

I think you're confusing Apple with Google.

I don't think so...

I think you're confusing Apple with Google.

I don't think so...

I think you're confusing Apple with Google.

I don't think so...

Oh bullshit. The US is the #1 manufacturing country on the planet, or damn close to it.

http://shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/finance/2011/January/US-Manufacturing-Remains-No-1-in-World/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/china-us-manufacturing_n_835470.html

In terms of worker productivity it isn't close. The average US worker produces almost 10 times as much value as the average Chinese worker.

well..
you use a lot of the produce. that production isn't at risk by the chinese. but it's not leaving the USA that much either.
which is also a bit why you shouldn't be that worried about the current situation as it is amassing wealth(physical goods!) into usa. if you default on the debts to china or whoever you end up with the net gain of physical stuff.

but I guess my original point was aimed more at stealing yer seeeecreeeets. look, if I can't buy an american made cisco router anyhow what the fuck does it matter if I buy a huawei? what does it matter for usa if they're stealing manufacturing secrets from ford when ford should really be worried about them stealing manufacturing secrets from VAG, like ford should be doing? if I couldn't buy an american made iPhone even if I tried what does it matter for usual american if I buy a chinese android pos phone? chances are even if I bought a ford it would be made in germany! If I wanted to buy American made high tech I'd have to buy a weber grill or a leatherman. I don't think the room I am in has _anything_ with a made in USA stamp on it(_some_ of the souvenirs might be - but just might).

OK, I thought of one thing that's assembled in USA, the makerbot replicator I got here - but I don't think any of it's parts were made in USA and certainly not the only certified part of it(the psu) - electronics on it certainly aren't american and neither are the stepper motors(arduino based electronics aren't exactly high tech anyways).

Oh bullshit. The US is the #1 manufacturing country on the planet, or damn close to it.

http://shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/finance/2011/January/US-Manufacturing-Remains-No-1-in-World/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/china-us-manufacturing_n_835470.html

In terms of worker productivity it isn't close. The average US worker produces almost 10 times as much value as the average Chinese worker.

The ends do not justify the means.

Your fantasy futuristic free-content utopian vision does not justify breaking IP laws that society has agreed are valid for 230 years (and longer). We have a system for changing laws if the majority of society agreed with you. It doesnt, which is why those laws arent changed.

Its not that simple. Otherwise gays would be getting married and MJ would be legal. :/
Government is always slow to react.

How times change. And to think that the US Government once prosecuted WWII Japanese Officers over the war crime of waterboarding. We executed some of those convicted, and others spent a long time in prison. Cheney and his ilk though(*), they profit from the chest thumping book sales.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/yes-inational-reviewi-we_b_191153.html

(*) I include those who excuse such War Crimes, such as Obama, in that "ilk"

on that note

Interesting, and if I hadn't posted that is how I would mod it.

on that note

Bullshit: charities are an example of failure in action all too often.

Once again you quote Huffington. It seems to be your goto place for facts.

I wonder what happens when you lose your job and need help. I for one do not trust the bible-fuckers of the christian charities to treat me fairly.

You would take their charity in an heartbeat all the while sneering at them for being religious bible fuckers and thinking you would have got more if you weren't a black man.. You make me sick. You are a worthless sack of parasitic shit.

Next step will be to accuse him of treason and put him to death before he can damage the country further while continuing to discredit him to make the issues he's brought to light irrelevant.

It's already happening.

captcha: oblivion

If I give you a bag of marbles every day and you do not discard them, then you are still collecting them. It doesn't matter whether you took them from me or whether I give them to you willingly.

Well... I'm collecting bags that happen to contain marbles. You collected the marbles and placed them into the bags. Unfortunately, a lot of things in the legal sense can depend on semantics.

In the case of James Clapper, the senator questioning him was Ron Wyden (D - Oregon) who is currently on the Select Committee on Intelligence and (I imagine) already very well knows all about PRISM and such. According to this Huffington Post article (and probably others), Clapper was given the list of Sen. Wyden's questions prior to the meeting so Clapper would have a chance to give a "straight answer" - about a classified program in a public meeting - to a question Wyden already knew the answer. Clapper said he gave the most truthful untruthful answer he could given the situation. Wyden should be bitch slapped for asking the question in the first place. I understand they're trying to cover their asses, but what part of "classified" don't elected officials understand.

"The US... can't even detain people without trail in the US."

NDAA-2013, signed into law the first of this year, says otherwise.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/ndaa-obama-indefinite-detention_n_2402601.html

And Dianne Feinstein and every Senate and House Intelligence Committee member who's voted for the budget and specifically been briefed on these programs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/09/dianne-feinstein-nsa_n_3412026.html

Democratic Dianne Feinstein of California, contends the program helped disrupt a 2009 plot to bomb New York City's subways and played a role in the case against an American who scouted targets in Mumbai, India, before a deadly terrorist attack there in 2008.

She knew about it and trust me most of the members of congress all knew about this so if they show surprise now, trust me it's probably an act.

All the purse strings are controlled by congress and this $80 Billion we spend on intelligence gathering starts over there at that little domed place on the hill. Sure, the administration puts budget requests together and says "mother may I" from congress to get the money to spend. The whole provisions around the FISA court should also be scrutinized since it's "Secret" and it failed to not approve any request from any Intelligence agency last year, at all. A system like that doesn't sound to me like a valid check against authoritarian motives of collecting information even in the name of "The war on terror."

Like this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/jalonta-freeman-fake-ipad_n_2100587.html

Bullshit: charities are an example of failure in action all too often. They enrich others while only claiming to help.

You are presuming (a) that there will always be enough charitable giving to go around (not the case, (b) that it will be directed efficiently and not embezzled (yet it is, (c) that there will not be a significant free-rider problem with those capable of contributing not doing so (and yet there always is).

"The gun of government tyranny", you rail about. I wonder what happens when you lose your job and need help. I for one do not trust the bible-fuckers of the christian charities to treat me fairly.

Also, point of order for people like you who can't seem to get a clue:

We can't even get these cousin-humping inbred white supremacists out of the dark ages in regards to marriage equality of a heterosexual kind if they're not the same race!.

It should be pointed out that most of those gatherings were open to anybody willing to listen, and that included nut jobs, communists, professional agitators ... liberal wannabes ...

You're working really, really hard on your "no true scotsman" level of defining a tea partier there.

This is not an uncommon thing at tea party rallies or in the tea party generally. Far from it, the movement - whatever it claims its stated goals to be - has attracted some of the worst of the worst of society, and they have inevitably had an outsized influence on the tenor, tone, and at times direct verbage that comes from the movement.

The larger problem for the Tea Party is people like you, who want to pretend that your movement doesn't have problems and hasn't attracted these people to show up time and again. But I was downtown when Dale Robertson had his infamous sign on the street, and I can tell you personally from viewing the attendees to that particular event, he was not abnormal compared to the rest of the attendees. While other movement members tried to throw him under the bus later, there's a reason he was the one who had owned teaparty.org, there is a reason he was there, and there is no question that he and those like him were welcomed with open arms and continue to be welcomed with open arms by the Tea Party movement.

It worked well for McAfee and Gary Glitter didn't it? Eventually they will catch up with you and you'll have to face the music. Unfortunately now with bigger and bigger "fishing nets" that the governments have, you'll get caught eventually.

Shit, even Whitey Bulger was caught and nobody ever thought they'd catch him.

A lot of tough talk, but what can everyday Americans do to change their government?

Join a militia to do some group violence? Hear that--that's a drone coming, you've got about 10 seconds...

Go solo against the government? Enjoy your one-way ticket to a secret prison somewhere.

Civil disobedience? How does spending the rest of your life in prison sound?

March in protest? Worked in the 60s, not anymore, unless you like a mouthful of pepper spray and a tear gas canister shot into your skull.

Vote? LOL

Obama's statements about marijuana enforcement have been complete lies:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/obamas-drug-war-medical-marijuana_n_2546178.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obamas-war-on-pot-20120216

Oh, we're still in Afghanistan BTW. So I'm 3 for 3.

"For the record - did you know that the Koch Brothers support":

Financed a fake grass-roots movement to undermine the democratically elected government of the United Stated of America.

`Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers'

"On January 5th, it was announced that Koch Industries had sued a Utah web host, Bluehost, seeking names of pranksters who had put out a spoof press release and then posted it on a website made to look like Koch's" link
--

anybody can buy OCP's stock .. what could be more democratic than that?, OCP

no way to protect yourself on the Internets except to be a law-abiding person.

Ain't gonna help you... Phone- and video-sex are still legal, for just one example. But, if you've ever any of that, a dedicated law-enforcer may use that as a leverage to blackmail you later in life. Or pass the embarrassing records to some non-government organization. IRS have already done that.All for the Greater Good, of course.

It does not even have to be ordered from the top: recall the Joe the Plumber incident. The man asked Obama — then merely a presidential candidate — an inconvenient question and a government official (those guys always favor the party of bigger government) leaked his personal information so as to make it easier to spin things Obama's way. The three officials involved merely lost their jobs for it — but none even paid a fine, much less served jail time.

The reality is that they are at odds in practice, especially in the United States. Otherwise we would not be in a circumstance where the majority of Americans disbelieve in one the of central scientific theories of our day.This state of affairs is directly attributable to the dominant religion and the anti-scientific mindset it must engender in order to survive in its current form.

But your comment has a troubling confusion embedded which might explain why you don't see the conflict. Religious believers need not exercise "faith" that science works, because there is evidence that science works. The mindset of faith is to encourage belief regardless of evidence. That is why faith-based belief systems are indeed in conflict with science -- they are impervious to evidentiary challenges.

It's true that science is not inherently incompatible with any specific truth-claim (e.g. the existence of a god), but it is incompatible with faith-based thinking. That is the point of this article -- the only reason someone "in a foxhole" would change their belief about the nature of the world is because they are influenced by the emotions of the circumstance. It's not like some new information about the existence of god suddently becomes evident because one's life is in danger.

Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.

Then why did so few republicans cast "No" votes? Apparently they voted how their constituents wanted them to vote, otherwise they could have just voted "no" since they were assured that their votes wouldn't make a difference anyway.

Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.

um... no.

I am unsure to which of my two statements that is referring to as neither was a question

Last time there were tweets of this nature, Wall Street had a flash crash.

um... no.

So are you saying that this event didn't take place? [citation needed]

I wonder if the 1.4% drop in the S&P500 today is related in any way.

um... no.

So are you saying I am NOT wondering if the drop is related

While I am somewhat confused, I do have one very strong argument to put across - and it goes a little something like this:
um... whatever.

Even weirder
http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/woman-arrested-for-having-sex-with-pit-bull-517679696