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Solar, wind, and batteries combined are about 2% of the world's energy needs. We would have to ramp up a factor of 70 or so (to provide for excess capacity in some areas to cover for those with less) at a minimum.

$18 billion per year divided by 3.8 million births per year = about $4,700 per new family. Give it to them as a tax credit, let them use it to defray medical costs, take unpaid time off to recover from birth, etc, etc, etc.

Defense spending has dropped significantly as percent of the budget since the 1960s. The bulk of the budget is now Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements. We already spend $2.6 trillion dollars per year on the types of programs you're advocating. Adding $18 billion would hardly make a difference. At this point you're advocating removing sand from a molehill to try to make a mountain bigger.

Point being, there are ways to spend the money that don't involve building murder weapons.

Point out one country which doesn't spend money on a military. There isn't, because everyone country which tried it was invaded and conquered by another country. Like it or not, the world is not unicorns and rainbows. The bottom line is that it's nearly always cheaper to forcibly take resources away from a neighbor than it is to cultivate/harvest/mine/develop them yourself. So there will always be an incentive for countries to invade and conquer other countries.

Having a military to defend yourself with is the most economically sound way to dissuade a potential invader. You have $200 billion in assets, but no defense. An invader figures they can spend $5 billion to invade you and take away your $200 billion, for a net profit (to them) of $195 billion.

But if you spend $5 billion of your assets on a military which can inflict $200 billion in damage, that changes the math. Now the invader estimates it will lose $205 billion from invading you, for a net loss of $5 billion. So they leave you alone. Yes you had to spend $5 billion, but it resulted in you not losing $200 billion.

This is an unfortunate oversight in a lot of people's thinking. They assume the status quo would continue to exist even if they eliminated one factor, ignoring how that factor contributes to the status quo. Like people who think because the air is clean, we don't need clean air regulations. The country being free from invasion is not its natural state. If you eliminate military spending and the "murder weapons" as you put it, someone else would simply waltz in and take away everything you own, probably murdering several or most of your family in the process. I know because it's what happened to my country (Korea).

No, all we need to do is a system like most other countries have: "Loser pays".

I looked up the price and got $3978 for a 90-day supply. Which seems like a reasonable price when a new drug costs over one billion dollars to develop.

http://www.manhattan-institute...

Rather than complaining about the drug companies you should be complaining about the high costs the FDA imposes on drug companies in order to obtain FDA approval.

BTW, a generic will be available in 2021.

It seems like 3D printing will become the "on a smartphone" version of patents.

Not until the loving, caring, and omniscient folks at the FDA approve. And each would-be "app" will need a separate approval, of course.

http://www.manhattan-institute...

Here's a hint, the vast majority of pipelines are protected for hundreds of miles. They are buried underground! Trains travel above the ground where they are subject to weather, traffic, etc. Also, pipeline releases are easier to recover and clean up than rail accidents. The data doesn't lie.

http://www.manhattan-institute...

Plenty of studies done... According to this one rail is about 4x more likely to have an incident per weight-mile. Which is still ahead of the 40x more likely when transported by road!

California (and New York) are hemorrhaging population and business. Often (but not only) heading to Texas according to numerous articles and analysis over the past year as well as the last census.

Texas appears to be the largest recipient of the migrations but so are Arizona and Florida. Coincidentally Texas was also named the 2012 Top State for business. Every few weeks I see more and more business headlines of companies (namely tech) moving to or starting a branch in Texas such as Apple, Facebook, PayPal, Catepillar and so on

There had been, however, some controversy over the years of TX Gov Perry's use of the Texas Enterprise Fund to woo companies to relocate. While the deal-landing results appear to be evident, some worry about the taxpayer cost, total incentive packages, and net gain of these deals. The fund seems to be perfectly suited to situations like this, where California tax laws cause some turmoil thereby increasing the opportunity to woo away industry. Recently Texas AG Greg Abbott has also been advertising to New Yorkers to move to Texas on account of gun control issues.

I wonder how long Texas can remain "Texas" if it becomes stuffed with people who are accustomed to living like Californians and New Yorkers.

Uh, yeah. We should trust a two-bit blog run by a heavy Romney-backer, supporter of voter suppression and global warming denier? You Fox apologists truly do live in your own reality.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mills.htm?csort=y
http://www.campaignfreedom.org/

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It seems that bankruptcy is no cure for broke states:

[...]states like New York run up “their” debt indirectly. They issue bonds through tens of thousands of separate legal entities. New York “state” doesn’t owe all of that $78.4 billion in debt -- it owes only $3.5 billion in “general-obligation” debt. [...] Who owes the rest? The MTA, the Dormitory Authority, the Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority and so on. [...] So, if we let New York go “bankrupt,” does that mean that the TFA should go bankrupt? How ’bout the MTA? Should they all go bankrupt? Should a judge be able to take a big pile of money that the MTA, as a corporation working on behalf of the state, has committed to transit retirees and give it to, say, Dormitory Authority bondholders?

According to this list, 2006 Virginia SAT was 512/513/500 (R/M/W) and ACT was 21.1.

US Average is 503/518/497 and 21.1. So Virginia doesn't look particularly different than the US average, a little worse at math and better at reading and writing.

SAT and ACT test results are of course highly self-selective because not every student takes them. I think more important metrics include actual drop-out rates. Virginia's graduation rate is 74%, which is near the median. Plenty of states with mandatory teacher union bargaining have lower graduation rates.

I will concur that Texas has both low SAT/ACT scores and a low graduation rate (67%)...although Newsweek's best public high school 2010 is Talented and Gifted, Dallas, TX, and #4 is Science/Engineering Magnet, Dallas, TX.

H-B Woodlawn, Arlington, VA is Newsweek's #28 top high school, and George Mason, Falls Church , VA is #45.

Wisconsin has a high graduation rate (85%) - if you are not black (Wisconsin black graduation rate is 40%, compared to 64% in Virginia and 59% in Texas).

Unlike prior immigrants, some (many?) have no desire to assimilate.

Cultural assimilation is a lot more complicated than you make it out to be.

which provides up to three consecutive years of bilingual education--and like prior efforts it tends to fail.

Mandating certain education strategies in legislation is always bound to fail. Is it the goal or the method you are against? You can't learn in a classroom surrounded by a language you don't speak.

Surely this subset of people is so much of a minority, that it doesn't justify the costs.

Tell that to these places

Yet every damn government publication is produced in English and Spanish.

Well Puerto Rico is a US territory that has Spanish as its primary language, so for that reason alone you really don't have a point. On a side note, it would definitely put an end this discussion if Puerto Rico became a state.

Or, it shows the (far, far more likely scenario) that some people simply hit the accelerator hard instead of the brake. I bet the same thing happens with other brands too, but the only accidents being sensationalised right now are ones involving a Toyota.

I am not surprised.... Same thing happened to Audi back in the day.

One thing for me that was a dead giveaway was that every single report regarding the Toyota sudden acceleration issue happened in the good old United States (Same for Audi, by the way). Statistically, it's very unlikely that such a problem would only happen in a single country even though these cars do not differ significantly between different countries. You'd expect a few deaths in Japan, France, German, the United Kingdom where Toyota cars are also very popular.

Too bad for Toyota that their brand has been permanently damaged in the US. (Just ask Audi how well it went for them the years after the accusations). GM, Ford and Chrysler are probably very happy about this.

Good thing Texas has a low graduate rate. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo_t1.htm

Yup, the cause of unintended acceleration is unintended pressing of the accelerator.

+1
This is what ruined Audi in the 80s. 60 Minutes had some ambulance chasers do a story for them, and they couldn't reproduce the problem so they had to modify the accelerator to get the problem on camera (of course there was no notice about it being a reenactment). Source: Manufacturing the Audi Scare

In the 90s a few people in Jeep SUVs pressed the accelerator instead of the brake when taking the car out of "park". Jeeps were recalled to require pressing the brake in order to put the car in gear, and a lot of other carmakers subsequently implemented this change. Source: Chrysler Corporation to Offer Free 'Brake-Park' Shift Interlock Retrofit On Older Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee Vehicles

Actually, there isn't. The mortality rate for common cancers such as prostate and breast cancer are almost twice as high in the UK. You don't even have to cherry pick search results! You will be satisfied that they do mention the early screening in the US, they also mention that 20% of treatable cancers become untreatable while sitting on waiting lists. Sadly I couldn't find the article I was looking for that also shows that the UK has more deaths caused by coronary disease as well. Shucks.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649#_edn1

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_wsj_american_cancer_care_beats_the_rest.htm

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=4442

http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/21/news/companies/drug_patents/index.htm

That and I personally know a pharmacists who keeps up with all of the latest news concerning this.

* According to the BLS, the average public school teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005.

* The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker.

* Full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week during weeks that they are working. By comparison, white-collar workers (excluding sales) work 39.4 hours, and professional specialty and technical workers work 39.0 hours per week. Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week.

* Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less.

* Compared with public school teachers, airplane pilots earn 186% more; physicians, 80% more; lawyers, 49% more; nuclear engineers, 17% more; actuaries, 9% more; and physicists, 3% more.

* Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide.

* The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.

* We find no evidence that average teacher pay relative to that of other white-collar or professional specialty workers is related to high school graduation rates in the metropolitan area.

From here.

Ok, in the 30 seconds I googled I found a cached Palm Beach Post artcile at Common Dreams that mentions that 20 of the 67 districts outright ignored the list (including Palm Beach itself) and also according to the Post and Miami Herald between 5000 and 6500 felons did in fact vote illegally in at least 20 other districts in the the state (can't find a cached version of those articles, just several other sites referencing the issue such as this paper on overall disenfranchisment.

And as for the poll closing, even the Wiki page has the fact that the major networks all announced poll closing times to be 1 hour earlier that they actually were in the heavy Republican Pan Handle.

Peter Huber in his book on energy policy introduces the concepts of the "energy pyramid" and "energy refining". The thesis that new forms of energy technology use more technology and are subsequently more useful. The pyramid levels include wood, coal, petroleum, electricity, computing and optical. When I read the book a few years ago I always found it curious that he included computing in the pyramid. But I hear about aggregate gigawatts of hundreds of mass server farms in the world, it may start making sense. The web has transformed human technology and the server farms are the battery of the web. When Huber wrote the book he used the example of the automobile as it started being mostly petroleum energy, then acquired more electricity sub systems, and now more computing.

Peter Huber in his book on energy policy introduces the concepts of the "energy pyramid" and "energy refining". The thesis that new forms of energy technology use more technology and are subsequently more useful. The pyramid levels include wood, coal, petroleum, electricity, computing and optical. When I read the book a few years ago I always found it curious that he included computing in the pyramid. But I hear about aggregate gigawatts of hundreds of mass server farms in the world, it may start making sense. The web has transformed human technology and the server farms are the battery of the web. When Huber wrote the book he used the example of the automobile as it started being mostly petroleum energy, then acquired more electricity sub systems, and now more computing.

Two good things that would prevent cases like this from wasting people's time:

1. Patent reform.
2. Loser pays.

Patent reform only works if unfair cases are being brought to court, argued, and won in a way that is contrary to the intent of the system. It is premature to say that this suit is anything more than a paper tiger. Bring up the patent on the Patent Application Information Retrieval system. Look at the rejections, amendments, and arguments. Significant changes were made to the patent claims, gutting much of their scope. The company bringing these suits is delusional if they think they have a case that can settle for anything more than nuisance tribute, especially from such high profile veterans of more balanced legal battles. What kind of patent reform would keep someone from trying to enforce a weak and narrow patent? Would they be less likely to try to enforce it if it was even weaker and narrower? Should we only allow patents that are strong and broad? Should it matter that many patent applicants only want very narrow patents, and many dont' really care if they would have much valuable in litigation?

As for loser pays...what makes you think that is such a good idea? Record companies use the threat of attorney fees to press defendants into early settlements. Would it be alright for Google or Microsoft to sue smaller companies, or individuals, based on flimsy patent claims, but win because their potential attorneys fees could be astronomical...perhaps significantly more than any reasonable royalty for the patent? How about if they faced smaller companies with strong patents and potentially good cases, but those smaller companies decided not to try to enforce their rights because of the possibility of being bankrupted if the suits failed?

There are advocates of loser-pay, but loser-pay skeptics seem to be well-versed in the pros and cons of loser-pay systems. While loser-pay could have a positive effect on the American legal system, it is by no means a common-sense no-brainer.

While I'm a big fan of McWhorter's books on linguistics, I find myself usually disagreeing with his opinions on race, which I do here as well. That is a nice find, however - a well thought-out counterargument.

Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.

The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population.

Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.

Yeah, part time. Let's see, 7:30 AM to 3:00 PM, then extra-curricular duties, lesson planning, grading papers, and taking the continuing education courses required of them at their own expense. Yeah, any job that takes only 70 hours a week out of 168 is definitely part-time. Then, of course, there's the three months of the year the kids are out. Only one and a half to two and a half months of which are, for teachers, typically taken up by meetings, room setup, conferences, and often teaching summer school. So they really only work that 70 hours about 45 weeks a year after you figure in breaks during the school year. Nobody else gets vacation, personal days, holidays, and sick days of course.

Then of course there's the fact that it's wonderful to deal with disrespectful pukes in the classroom, parents who think the school should favor their kids over order and education, crony school boards selected from the parents of the students with little or no training in education as bosses, and administrations willing to sacrifice any teacher's career to keep the district from getting a bogus lawsuit filed against it.

Hell, for $45k that's cake!

</sarcasm>

Jay P. Greene's little yellow article only accounts for time spent in the classroom. Who the fuck do you think does all the work for a teacher outside the classroom? Nine months at seven hours a day is only the time the teacher spends instructing the kids. Do you really think they just show up and wing the whole thing? He also has a nice little blurb about retirement benefits being so nice. Hell, I interviewed for a teaching position, and I'm sure I'd have plenty of retirement money saved after 40 years or so considering the district requires the teachers to place 11% of their pay directly into the fund. Where he sees over $30 an hour someone who knows any teachers personally can easily see about $14-$17 an hour, which is quite competitive with managing a shift at McDonald's but not so much with the nuclear engineers he's talking about. Oh, and since when does it take a Master's to fight fires? Most school districts require one or a set amount of work towards one of beginning teachers or require one within a few years of starting.

The nationwide average starting pay for a teacher with a Bachelor's degree is about $31k, BTW, if you can find a district that accepts a Bachelor's without at least 12 additional credit hours.

For a little more realistic picture, try on for size any one of these pages. This blog post at Education and Technology is especially nice for the comments.

Oh, and at what point are most programmers, opticians, radiology techs, factory workers, and biologists regularly responsible for the health and safety of 30 minors (whom they often are not allowed to even discipline) at a time?

I made a mistake above. According to the hard copy school report card for my school district, the average teacher salary is $43,200. I don't know the district's median. I can't find the figures on-line.

As of 2002, the average salary for teachers nationwide was about $44,600 not counting benefits. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_nypost_teacher_pay_myth.htm

Quoting the article:
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average public elementary school teacher in the United States earns about $30.75 an hour. The average hourly pay of other public-service employees - such as firefighters ($17.91) or police officers ($22.64) - pales in comparison.

Indeed, teachers' hourly rate exceeds even those in professions that require far more training and expertise. Compare the schoolteacher's $30.75 to the average biologist's $28.07 an hour - or the mechanical engineer's $29.76 or the chemist's $30.68.

Whose hourly pay is competitive with that of teachers? Computer scientists ($32.86), dentists ($35.51) and even nuclear engineers ($36.16).

Note, too, that these hourly figures exclude benefits, such as health coverage and retirement accounts, which are typically more generous for government employees, such as teachers, than for private-sector workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average public school teacher puts in 36.5 hours per week while school is in session. More info here.

Perhaps the entire premise is incorrect. Could it be true that "teachers are underpaid" is a fable to begin with?

Here is question one from an interview ( http://www.ednews.org/articles/7535/1/An-Interview -with-Jay-P-Greene-About-Teacher-Salaries/Page1.ht ml ) with Jay P. Greene who co-authored a report called "How much are teachers paid"( http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm )

1. You have recently released a report about teacher salaries. What was your MAIN finding?

There are two main findings. The first simply repeats a finding from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - that public school teachers on average made $34.06 per hour in 2005. This is 36% more than the average non-sales white collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker, which are the categories in which teachers are placed by the BLS.

The second finding is that there does not appear to be a relationship between higher relative pay for teachers and higher student achievement.That is, areas with higher public teacher pay relative to white collar and professional workers do graduate a higher percentage of their students.This suggests that simply raising teacher pay across the board is not a promising strategy for raising student achievement.It doesn't mean that we shouldn't want to raise teacher pay for some other reason or that we couldn't use additional pay in more clever ways that actually would be more likely to contribute to student achievement.

9 out of 10 people reading this won't believe me, but there really are people out there who might want to copy their friends music, but who don't know how to, or simply don't want to install a P2P program to get it. Yes, yes, I know -- these people are obviously not people that you would associate with, but they're out there. And they have money.

There are a few. Very few. Your average teenager (the source of the bulk of music spending) not only knows about P2P, but probably knows about a dozen P2P programs that you haven't even heard of yet. That's not saying that they've figured out that you don't have to buy ringtones yet---phone hacking is a little beyond the average level still---but people who can't figure out a P2P client are few and far between, at least in the target demographic for most corporate music.

The reality is that a little protection goes a long way. Auto security systems are an effective deterrent against the casual car thief, despite the fact that there's a certain subset of the population that has the means and the motive to help themselves to your car. Likewise, there's a certain subset of the population whose moral guidance and technical aptitude facilitate their acquisition of music via P2P, yet DRM is a deterrent to casual pirates.

That's a common misconception. When is the last time you heard a car alarm going off and ran to help? Do most casual thieves instinctively know which cars have alarms and which don't? Probably not. Do they care? Usually not. Even people planning to steal a radio know how to pop the hood and disconnect the battery (or in some cases, they just yank the right fuse from the fuse box beside the driver's knees). All fixed. And unless there's somebody nearby who sees it, the alarm going off really isn't a deterrent at all. Of course, if there were someone around to see it, chances are, they couldn't have picked the lock to begin with, and thus, the alarm really does nothing.

In fact, it has generally been observed that with the exception of tracking systems like LoJack, car alarms are predominantly a nuisance and are not particularly useful. Indeed, a 1997 study by a non-profit insurance industry research group found that car alarms had absolutely zero discernible impact on theft.

It will be a great day when a record company adopts the "encourage piracy" model and totally blows the doors off of the industry. With all this brain power here, why doesn't some enterprising Slashdotter do just that?

I know you're being sarcastic, but... some of us are working on it.

1 - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june0 6/dropout_06-27.html
2 - If there are 300,000,000 Americans evenly distributed between ages 1 and 100, this number is realistic.
3 - http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/dropout.h tml
4 - http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_08.htm

If punitive damages are not damages, what are they? They are fines, intended to punish or deter.

An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who makes an error "is expected to promptly correct it in the column." That's the established policy of Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Her written policy encourages "a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece." Two weeks have passed since my previous post spelled out the errors made by columnist Paul Krugman in writing about news media recounts of the 2000 Florida vote for president. Mr. Krugman still hasn't been required to comply with the policy by publishing a formal correction. Ms. Collins hasn't offered any explanation.

As questions about compliance with the corrections policy for The Times' Op-Ed columnists continue to arise, Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, told me in an e-mail Tuesday that she will "address the issue in a forthcoming letter from the editor" in the paper. Ms. Collins' comment came in response to my Monday query about the handling of an error by columnist Frank Rich. That mistake has turned out to be the latest of five appearances that versions of the same "college roommates" error have made in The Times this month. While minor in normal times, the mistake has been made a total of four times by three Op-Ed columnists attacking cronyism--and once in a news article. In all five instances, Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's 2000-campaign manager and a former head of FEMA, and Michael Brown, his successor at FEMA, were described variously as college roommates, college buddies or college friends. In fact, the two men didn't even attend the same college. While they have been friends for 25 years, a spokeswoman for Mr. Allbaugh said they didn't know each other during their years at different Oklahoma colleges. With partisan charges of cronyism hanging over the Bush administration's handling of hurricanes, of course, it's not surprising that the college roommates description seems to have become more sensitive.

Businesses should never get into these kinds of arguments. I would not want to be the Microsoft Rep responsible for selling into Utah or Idaho tomorrow. (huge generalization, I know)

As Sandeep Kaushik reported in the April 21st iss of The Stranger
The list of high-profile companies that endorsed the bill this year reads like a who's who of the Pacific Northwest corporate world. It includes the Boeing Company, Nike, Coors Brewing, Qwest Communications, Washington Mutual, Hewlett-Packard, Corbis, Battelle Memorial Institute, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., and others. And as late as February 1, Microsoft, which issued a letter in support of the bill last year, appeared poised to do so again.

Notice that there's been nary a peep about any of these other comapanies. Perhaps it's the waffling and ham-handed handling of the issue that is Microsoft's real problem.

One of the biggest problems we've created for ourselves is making companies simply about making money. I think Chuck Palahniuk's Tyler Durden best expressed the inhuman calculations that leads to. Sure, investors deserve to know that the financial instrument they're investing in is out to make money, but if Google hasn't been delisted for it's preface to the company's S1 document perhaps other comapnies can profess something beyond "doing the right thing" only in the narrowest of definitions for its shareholders.

Further, it is in Microsoft's best interest, talent pool-wise, to make sure that Washington State is and remains attractive to gays, bohemians, and ethnic minorities because they are also the places where creative workers - the kind who start and staff innovative, fast-growing companies - want to live.

if such a crime ever happened to you or your child

That right there usually marks the end of rational discussion. As soon as someone says "it'll happen to YOU!" rationality flies out the window and everyone becomes emotional. Once rationality is gone, civility is sure to follow, and once we've lost civility, why bother with trials, we can go hunt down that sick pediatrician and give him what he's got coming.

The freedom of speech is not a freedom to be a shithead.

Quote from the article:

In all the movies of recent years, there have been few surer audience-pleasing scenes than the moment in Jurassic Park where the dinosaur eats the lawyer. In my theater and I suspect yours too, the audience burst into laughter and cheers.

* We have enacted countless new laws, we use them to try to control more of life, and these laws are often vague, not clearly spelling out what conduct is wrongful and what the legal consequences might be of overstepping the line.

* We have expanded damage theories to the point that we are willing to countenance the mulcting of defendants of amounts that all previous American generations and the citizens of all foreign countries would consider sheerly fantastic.

* We have liberalized procedure. As long ago as the 1930s we began to embrace the system of notice pleading, in which you can drag someone to court without saying what he may have done wrong. In the 1970s we drastically liberalized discovery, making it far easier to demand the filing cabinets of your opponent. Through the "long-arm" jurisdiction revolution, we liberalized forum-shopping so that you could shop around for whichever judge or jurisdiction is most hostile to your opponent or most slanted toward your own ideological view.

* We liberalized the admission of expert testimony to allow lawyers to keep a scientifically weak case alive by introducing the testimony of partisan, fringe experts whether or not they reflect mainstream thinking in the relevant discipline.

Heh. Only in America can you blame Audi because you were too dumb to tell the gas from the brake.

> The first paint to go on sale will of course be white

someone notify Al Sharpton!

Ah yes, Heather MacDonald. She's a piece of work. "...Frequent commentator on Fox and CNN", no doubt.
The egregious mistake of conservatism is the requirement of its lock-step, top-down mentality.

The powers that be have decided what needs to be done, do not dare question us or we will destroy you.

The irony of this home-grown fascism has not been missed by the rest of the world. Not dissimilar to the Taliban it found so offensive..and uncooperative (ask Unocal how that pipeline is working out now).

Stand up to these venal idealogues while you still can. Time is running out.

There appear to be two addresses for Heather MacDonald in New York, NY (her bio says she lives and works there, so perhaps those are the two addresses).

Clicking on the "Find out more about Heather Macdonald" link, it says the resident at both addresses is 28 years old. From her picture in the bio link, it appears that this could be her (she looks to be in her 30s but perhaps all that negative thinking has taken a toll on her appearance).

I tried finding the address of the Manhattan Institute from their web site, but it appears not to be listed. Another Google search ("Manhattan Institute address") found the following page with their address on it, which differs from the two previous addresses, so apparently Ms. MacDonald owns two residences.

Here are maps for both locations .

Note that this took all of a 5-minute search (it is taking longer to write this post than it took to do the digging).

Now, if I wanted to do more damage I could follow the "Search Public Records" link from the White Pages page. This allows you to download Online Detective 3.0, which allows you to search various databases (marriage/divorce, criminal records, DMV records, social security number traces, federal/state records, driver's license reports, asset search, and more). I downloaded this and installed in a roll-backable VM (trust noone) and nowhere on the site does it mention this but (as I assumed) you have to pay for the service. However, for just $9.95 I could have access to the service for 1 day. Imagine the kind of damage you could do in 24 hours, for under ten bucks.

She's gotta be out of her freakin' mind when she says we don't need to worry about privacy. I suppose she has a point -- why worry about what the government can do, when for under ten bucks any Tom, Dick or Harry can do it themselves?

What the homelessness industry really wants is total exemption from the law for street vagrants, so that they can remain publicly visible until the final throes of alcoholism and schizophrenia drive them to the hospital or the grave.

... the Manhattan Institute, a CIA initiated "think tank" funded by far right Eugenics advocates like the Pioneer Fund and corporations such as the Rockefeller's Chase Bank which have historically promoted the Eugenics agenda. The Manhattan Institute has sponsored research projects and books like the Bell Curve, Fixing Broken windows and numerous others which propose the idea that blacks are mentally inferior. While the Manhattan Institute is not publicly advocating mass extermination or mass relocation of minorities the policies it does promote are mostly about targeting black and Latino inner City populations in such a way as to make relocation an attractive option and elimination a day to day reality. ...

The corporations, banks and far right race-obsessed groups that fund the Manhattan Institute today were in many cases backing Hitler's rise to power just 70 years ago. They are also the same groups behind Giuliani's Senate campaign and GW Bush's Presidential bid. Chase Bank, the Manhattan Institute's main sponsor, has publicly apologized on numerous occasions for its avid support of Hitler and its enthusiasm to turn over Jewish Bank accounts to the Nazis before they were ever asked to do so. ...

The Manhattan Institute's founder, former CIA director William Casey, ... ...

Along with ongoing subsidies from a number of large conservative foundations, the Manhattan Institute has gained funding from such corporate sources as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and State Farm Insurance, as well as the Lilly Endowment and philanthropic arms of American Express, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CIGNA and Merrill Lynch. Boosted by major firms, the Manhattan Institute budget reached $5 million a year by the early 1990s."

What the homelessness industry really wants is total exemption from the law for street vagrants, so that they can remain publicly visible until the final throes of alcoholism and schizophrenia drive them to the hospital or the grave.

... the Manhattan Institute, a CIA initiated "think tank" funded by far right Eugenics advocates like the Pioneer Fund and corporations such as the Rockefeller's Chase Bank which have historically promoted the Eugenics agenda. The Manhattan Institute has sponsored research projects and books like the Bell Curve, Fixing Broken windows and numerous others which propose the idea that blacks are mentally inferior. While the Manhattan Institute is not publicly advocating mass extermination or mass relocation of minorities the policies it does promote are mostly about targeting black and Latino inner City populations in such a way as to make relocation an attractive option and elimination a day to day reality. ...

The corporations, banks and far right race-obsessed groups that fund the Manhattan Institute today were in many cases backing Hitler's rise to power just 70 years ago. They are also the same groups behind Giuliani's Senate campaign and GW Bush's Presidential bid. Chase Bank, the Manhattan Institute's main sponsor, has publicly apologized on numerous occasions for its avid support of Hitler and its enthusiasm to turn over Jewish Bank accounts to the Nazis before they were ever asked to do so. ...

The Manhattan Institute's founder, former CIA director William Casey, ... ...

Along with ongoing subsidies from a number of large conservative foundations, the Manhattan Institute has gained funding from such corporate sources as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and State Farm Insurance, as well as the Lilly Endowment and philanthropic arms of American Express, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CIGNA and Merrill Lynch. Boosted by major firms, the Manhattan Institute budget reached $5 million a year by the early 1990s."

She looks fairly young judging by her photograph. I wonder if she's ever read about COINTELPRO, as just one example of government snooping gone too far.

There are a bunch of posts farther down that nobody is going to see about this, so I'll go ahead and post here anyway.

The Manhattan Institute (hereafter the MI) made a name for itself with some books in the late 80's which changed the face of political debate on welfare reform and community policing. They used this fame to continue to get a lot of publishing attention -- endorsing law and order (and police violence) in their City Journal rag; skewing the meaning of statistics on race and intelligence in the infamous Bell Curve; pandering to naive religious simpletons by stating that the counterculture caused all our problems (in Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare).

But their problems start from the very beginning. The MI has always pushed the neoconservative agenda, and their entire agenda has tried to make room for negative stereotypes of people in poverty, plus loads of police profiling, violence, and brutality. A quick googling will show various allegations of connections to the CIA, from conspiracy theories to proven facts. Some of this you'd better believe, given that a Boston Globe article mirrored on their own website mentions how their founder went on to be Reagan's chief CIA spook (warning: this article crashes my mozilla for some reason; use lynx). I don't want to invoke godwin's law here, but with eerie similarities like these it's hard not to. And apart from the article linked from this /. story there's enough fearmongering there to make ready.gov look honest and tame.

Incidentally, our favorite simpleton George "Dubya" Bush is a big fan of their work (notice how "faith-based initiatives" are prominent on their front page) since he swallowed up Magnet's pandering, but that's another story. Remember, when economic conservatism is around, social intolerance is never far away.

There are a bunch of posts farther down that nobody is going to see about this, so I'll go ahead and post here anyway.

The Manhattan Institute (hereafter the MI) made a name for itself with some books in the late 80's which changed the face of political debate on welfare reform and community policing. They used this fame to continue to get a lot of publishing attention -- endorsing law and order (and police violence) in their City Journal rag; skewing the meaning of statistics on race and intelligence in the infamous Bell Curve; pandering to naive religious simpletons by stating that the counterculture caused all our problems (in Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare).

But their problems start from the very beginning. The MI has always pushed the neoconservative agenda, and their entire agenda has tried to make room for negative stereotypes of people in poverty, plus loads of police profiling, violence, and brutality. A quick googling will show various allegations of connections to the CIA, from conspiracy theories to proven facts. Some of this you'd better believe, given that a Boston Globe article mirrored on their own website mentions how their founder went on to be Reagan's chief CIA spook (warning: this article crashes my mozilla for some reason; use lynx). I don't want to invoke godwin's law here, but with eerie similarities like these it's hard not to. And apart from the article linked from this /. story there's enough fearmongering there to make ready.gov look honest and tame.

Incidentally, our favorite simpleton George "Dubya" Bush is a big fan of their work (notice how "faith-based initiatives" are prominent on their front page) since he swallowed up Magnet's pandering, but that's another story. Remember, when economic conservatism is around, social intolerance is never far away.

or just go to her employer's website

Here she is, it's pretty clear from her articles she's more than just a running dog lackey of the neo-conservative conspiracy. Think, her tuition fees alone have granted her wisdom and insight beyond our means. Joking of course ;)

I have driven VWs (almost) exclusively since I got my license, and one of the vehicles I had was an '85 Quantum. The VW Quantum was very similar to the Audis with the suspected uncontrolled acceleration. However, I never crashed through any garage doors because the problem does not exist.

In 1986 a young child was killed when struck by an Audi 5000 his mother was driving. She claimed her foot was firmly on the brake, yet the car lurched forward. 60 Minutes hired the mother for an interview and turned the news story into a sensational account of how all Audis were flawed and dangerous.

Other accounts of similar occurrences were given. In each circumstance the drivers claimed that despite fully and firmly depressing the brake pedal, the car was still able to accelerate. This situation is extremely unlikely, except in the event of a brake failure. If you drive an automatic car and you don't care about your transmission, try it: floor the accelerator with one foot on the brake and the car in drive. The engine will not overcome the stopping power of the brakes.

The tremendous amount of bad publicity nearly forced Audi to end US operations. Owners of Audi 5000's saw the resale value of their cars plummet. Sales did not recover until the mid-90's, a decade after the 60 Minutes episode was aired. Despite all of this, 60 Minutes was never held liable for the economic damage they inflicted with their yellow journalism.

Of course, I am a bit partial to VW/Audi (the same company in case you didn't know). Here's a 1989 Wall Street Journal article on the subject, mentioning how 60 Minutes modified their test vehicle to exhibit the symptoms of uncontrolled acceleration. A more complete explanation of the story can be found here.