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Ahh, but I never disagreed with that.

Magic fairy dust.

Actually the harmonic does follow an attenuation curve of 6db/oct exactly as I claimed. We were not discussing partials but yes, psychoacoustic studies show our brains will compensate for a missing fundamental. That is a completely different discussion.

Seriously? I posted a link to actual measurements. Explain how harmonics attenuate at 6 db/Octave when the 2nd and 3rd harmonics are above the fundamental. Furthermore look at the graphs themselves and you'll see quite a bit of variation from a pure 6 dB/octave curve - sometimes being 3 dB/octave, sometimes being 18 dB/octave. You've presented nothing other than your own claim, whereas I actually included a link to actual measurements. You're simply wrong.

However the other thing the human ear is sensitive to is harmonic frequencies, and if they are missing, it sounds weird.

Magic fairy dust

No, actually he is correct about spectral content of harmonics affecting perception of the sound. Take a look at any of the papers from Louis Fielder, for example - harmonics not only affect our perception of what the instrument is, but also if it's a preferred sound. When you get into the world of preference, it's no longer just absolute numbers - there's quite a bit of "soft stuff" that goes on in our wetware. Do not make the rookie mistake of confusing objective accuracy with perception!

My theory is

Your theory is in line with every engineer who cannot step over the edge into pseudoscience without being ridiculed. There's no "musical" fundamental that would have an identifiable audible harmonic above 16kHz (B7 is below 8k and harmonic amplitude decreases along a 6db/oct curve) - but if you really played with it then you already know you can put any crap up there.

Please see the lowly oboe. It is a rather pedestrian instrument, but one that has a rather more-common-than-not peculiarity: the fundamental is often lower in level than the 2nd and 3rd (and sometimes, 4th) harmonics! Meaning the harmonics do NOT decrease along the 6 dB/octave curve as you claim, but rather create unique signatures.

Additionally, if you look through this paper on oboe output (and there are many other such papers on lots of instruments) you'll see that the sonic harmonic differences between a wood and plastic oboe are readily apparent - and would go back to the first point, it's those harmonics that make it possible to hear the difference between oboes. A wood oboe will sound "weird" if you are used to plastic oboes, and vice versa. Harmonic structure and all.

Perhaps you were using AC status to hide your own ignorance, but hopefully you've now learned a little bit...

No, the "bowl of skittles" thing originates from a Nazi children's book about Jews.

A few years back there was a Ben Grelle posted the skittles version as part of a blog post in the wake of the Elliot Rodger misogynist murder spree. He claims it was taken out of context, it's up to you if you believe him but given that it was a response to what Rodger did his explanation seems reasonable.

How did you get from "10% of them are poison" to "all men are rapists"? At most you could say he was suggesting that 10% of men are rapists.

And by the way, the origin of the "all men are rapists" thing is a play. In the story the mother of a woman who was raped says the line, but her daughter then strongly disagrees despite what happened to her. So in fact, even the originator of the quote (the author of the play) was saying the exact opposite of what people now imply.

Come on. How many acronyms do we need. NIT????? FBI, you lose. This is not some super awesome software skill you have. You have a one time a one time usage, if the lawyer you are up against is clueless.

It's Fedspeak for "malware" or "exploit." But you can't call it that because it won't sound good in front of a judge. They're not trying to play it up as something super-awesome-hackerish. They're trying to play it down as something normal and official and businesslike. It's nothing special, it's just a technique. For investigating. Over a network. We're not into malware or cracking, those are things that cyber-criminals do. I mean, there's a crime, there's a network, and we're in the business of investigation. What did you expect us to do, Your Honor?

Just like enhanced interrogation procedures aren't torture; torture is bad. What we're doing are just enhancements of existing techniques. They're better ways to use the interrogation techniques - just techniques, mind you, not torture - that we've always done.

Recommended reading from 1946 :Politics and the English Language

WTF does this mean?

It means bad use of metaphor. Not entirely unlike exclaiming "what the fuck", when no romance (much less sexual intercourse) is anywhere near the topic.

It's called "unspoken implications", which may or may not be true, but which are nonetheless implied by a statement. Stock market advice--such as all that you cover here--is littered with it.

Suggesting so flippantly that laymen should be in a "diversified portfolio" without qualifying the statement with a disclaimer of skill and strategic considerations is suggesting they take up a strategy, with the implication that "diversified, long-term holdings" are a strategy for making money. The greatest armor in this sort of lie is the ability to come back and show that you are *technically* correct, even though you've made fertile ground for people to make exactly one and only one conclusion from your statements.

I've taken the route of shaping information myself to control my parents. That's how I dealt with them growing up: I said things which all suggested, iron-clad, whatever I needed them to believe, unless they were in possession of specific other information. They made up their own conclusions, consistently incorrect. This is the same way legal con artists work, and the basic foundation for diplomatic circumlocution.

At what time point do you think stocks became completely bad idea as a part of "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" ?

The entirety of your original post heavily and directly suggested to the lay-person--to the person who would find something new in your advice, instead of seeing tripe that any experienced investor has heard again and again--that just buying up a bunch of diverse stocks and sitting on them for years creates an income.

To a lay-person, "long-term investment" means "buy and hold" and "don't cash out until you're ready to spend it; just let it grow."

To a skilled investor, the term "long-term investment" has little meaning. The only investments bought on term are term investments--bonds, CDs, etc.--intended to mature and pay a fixed rate of return; stocks are bought and sold on market sentiment, buying when it's opportune and selling when it's opportune. Your "long-term investment" may suddenly be a bad investment in 3 days's time when company news comes out that sends the stock rocketing up 60%, and you immediately know it's going to sharply come back down in the next day if not the next few hours, so you sell out of that immediately. Markets turn around: what's good this month might not be good in 3 months or 2 years, hence why I got out of basic materials after making a tidy profit--I was buying and selling every several days (I used to swing trade to handle the 3 days settlement time), but eventually got out of that market entirely.

I'm so aggressively against bad investment advice because I know how the market works. I stopped trading long ago, and won't just stick my money in "long-term investments" and hold a "diversified portfolio" and hope for the best. When I was trading, I was looking at the market for 18 hours every fucking day, waking up at 4am to inspect foreign markets, and carrying out technical analysis using online tools and some additional techniques not currently in practice (which, really, took up time not well spent; paper analysis to use special techniques didn't give me an advantage). I'd hold a stock for about a five-day, or else when I sold I'd have to wait 3 days for the funds to settle before I could buy again; no margin or day trading. My return was approximately 1% per day, with a peak at 29% gain in one month.

Never again. That shit drives me bat shit crazy; it's not worth the money.

Now my money sits in 1-2% guaranteed income accounts. The rest of you are all playing a form of lottery with more money in the pot and less lost to failure. You might come out ahead much of the time--most people do, eventually, and the market mostly biases inflation toward the better players--but a lot of people just lose their ass taking all this generic advice and packing their 401(k) money i

Anyone buying the "busy weekend" excuse? Can't say I am, since the story broke near the middle of last week, and we've seen /. willfully ignore the community so many times. Look at the amount of pushback it took to defeat Beta and Bennet Hasselton.

Wonder if they'll ever drop the anti-Gamergate narrative too (probably not, since they have most of the tech media circling wagons with them on the pro-corruption side)?

The Sans Culottes will wrest control over Slashdot!

You don't prove your point by mentioning people who have steroid rage. Normal people can absolutely get their anger out by spending some time with a punching bag.

Wrong.

Don't tow the "Climate Change" line, don't get funded

Exactly! Without scientists to move it, the "climate change" line, or for that matter, any line marking the boundaries of current human knowledge, it stays stagnant and fixed. Towing the lines helps our society prosper and grow...

And to think that George Orwell thought it a Dying Metaphor!

"Politics and the English Language", George Orwell.

Mod this up!:

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad...

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

His parody of a 'translation' of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into pretentious and imprecise modern jargon is priceless:

"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

        I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

        Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

I like the Stirling solar engines, myself.
Image of a field of them.

-l

Or we could at least attempt to maintain sufficient precision in our language to be able to communicate cogently...

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

As a european we distrust the Russian's a lot more than the American's [sic]

As another European, I disagree. I don't trust any rich and powerful country that could blot out my country any time it felt like it, and whose government is strictly interested in looking after those people who look after it (clue: not necessarily the voters). Either Russia or the USA (or China or the UK or France or Israel or India...) could be bad news for the citizens of another nation, and anyone who trusts the powerful to act against their own interests out of sheer altruism needs his head examined. It may be true, of course, that Russians are more inclined to tell it as they see it, and less inclined to dress things up in fancy moral terms, than Americans (or many other "Westerners").

Thucydides nailed this more than 2400 years ago:

"...[R]ight, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".

If you haven't read about the Melian Dialog, you really should: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melian_dialogue (the complete text is at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm). It tells you almost everything you need to know about international politics.

Some other, rather more reliable indications that this guy may indeed be full of crap:

Brian Switek's commentary on the story on his Laelaps palaeontology blog

P. Z. Myers' view of the story on his Pharyngula blog

Discussion of the story on an archive of geologists' conversations on Twitter

The professor's own profile page, which shows he has quite a history of making far-reaching claims.

United States Military Spending since WWII:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~jephrean/classweb/United%20States.html

Vocabulary isn't everything
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.

Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.

More specifically the Palestinians are the descendants of the so-called "ten lost tribes" - it's not even conjecture, it's

... complete and utter horseshit.

The "lost tribes" of Israel are not lost in the way that your car keys get lost. They are lost in the way that your great-great-grandmother is lost.

Assyria got ticked at them and killed every fighting man in the country. Then they sacked what was left, and carted the remaining people up to Assyria as slaves. People don't breed well in captivity, and any descendents they did have after a few generations would be so diluted by assyrian material (which really isn't all that differnt to start with), that it effectively no longer existed as a spearate entity anymore.

[cue the parrot sketch]

Your 'quote' is bogus. It is a heavily edited version of a speech Ike gave in public in 1953, when all of Eastern Europe was occupied by the USSR. You edited it to change the meaning entirely. This was a speech about how to keep the free world free, not about metals.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,858151,00.html

It was included in one edition of the Pentagon Papers but was never secret.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/ps7.htm

Here's the part you deliberately left out:

"But all India would be outflanked. Burma would certainly, in its weakened condition, be no defense. Now, India is surrounded on that side by the Communist empire. Iran on its left is in a weakened condition. I believe I read in the paper this morning that Mossadegh's move toward getting rid of his parliament has been supported and of course he was in that move supported by the Tudeh, which is the Communist Party of Iran. All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing."

You're one of those revisionists who claim the Cold War never happened, tight? Or it was all America's fault?
Communism killed around 100 million people in the 20th century. There's books about it, read one.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another."

Politics and the English Language should be required reading in schools.

(Yes, you may have seen me saying this elsewhere. It's worth repeating.)

There are parallels to the Pentagon Papers. When those were released, the NY Times came out with a cherry-picked compilation for biased consumption. The 4100 pages of originals contain a more accurate description of how government officials communicate and act, are more interesting to independent individuals, and more embarrassing for government and military officials and contractors than dangerous to spies.

Earlier this evening, I finished Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which was published in 1952 (and actually written in 1937-8). George Orwell was a great believer in clarity in writing, and Homage is a great example of his success in that area. It is a book about events that took place in a very specific cultural and historical context, but it remains extremely accessible for readers many decades later. The only archaic-seeming construction that I noticed in the whole book (for an American reader, at least) was his frequent use of "bomb" as a synonym for "hand grenade." That usage, though perfectly logical and correct, has lost its specificity over time.

Would you also contend that we should corrupt the spelling of "loses" to "looses" just because people on the Internet are ignorant?

There's a quote that's often attributed to him along those lines, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" (and variants), but I can't find any good documentation that he actually said it, or where it might be from (it's only mentioned, as far as I can find, in poorly sourced quote collections, both online and in books).

There is a fictional scientist in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle who says something similar:
"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."

Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language echoes some similar sentiment.

Looks like maybe Baidu was also hacked. By different people, for different reasons. Anyone able to confirm?

That's because the corporations don't have the power to (a) steal money directly from my wallet or (b) send me to jail if I refuse to pay or (c) use an involuntary military draft to make me die in some shithole in Vietnam or Iraq.

But of course they do. Where do your tax dollars end up? The military-industrial complex, or the prison-industrial complex. Why did we go to war in Vietnam and Iraq? Because war is good for the military-industrial complex, communism must be contained (because it tends to make workers uppity), and American industry needs cheap oil and cheap tungsten and tin.

Don't think corporations can send you to jail? Take another look at the headlines about the RIAA.

Corporations are government entities. They are created by government fiat ("charters"), and when they grow large enough, they exert disturbing levels of control on their environment, including governments.

Big business is big government. "Anarcho-capitalism" is a self-contradiction.

Hello, Homeland Security? Yes, this is a cynical citizen here, totally disgusted with our trashing what our Founding Fathers intended with your tyrannical intent to create a police state. May I suggest a better solution rather than destroy relations with friends and give more people abroad to make fun of America's Security Theater? I don't have the space to fully explain the concept here but please visit these following web pages for a primer on doing your job:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_psychology
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologycareerprofiles/a/forensicpsych.htm
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~mlyount/MySites/ForensicPsychology/CriminalProfiling.html

In a nutshell the principle is this: if one does not fit into a "psychology profile" then one is very likely (probability approaches 1) not going to be a ter'rist. The concept is called "profiling," and guess what? It's not based on skin color so tell the political correctness bleeding hearts to fuck off and start practicing actual forensic science! There is no need for a protestant minister or 75-yr-old jewish or hindu woman to be harassed and documented like a criminal. Here in America we have welcomed both visitors and (legal) immigrants from the very beginning. Please do not make it any less desirable to foreigners. As it is most already hate us thanks to the likes of you.

Signed,

An American citizen loyal to the thirteen stars and stripes who is descended from Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants.

Provoking Japan to get the USA in WW2 early WAS actually long term thinking on FDR's part (and sneaky.)

I agreed with everything else you said but this line is conspiracy theory bs. FDR didn't have to provoke Japan to get the USA into WW2 -- he was already in the process of provoking Germany. He had already agreed with Churchill that the European Front would be the priority if Japan couldn't be kept out of the war. Our Navy was escorting Atlantic convoys as early as March 1941 and even had orders to sink German U-boats on sight. The USS Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk over a month before Pearl Harbor. For all practical purposes we were already at war with Germany before Pearl Harbor even happened.

FDR tried to bully Japan into giving up her ambitions in China but the notion that he desired a war with them doesn't survive a serious examination of the historical evidence. His focus was always on Europe and Nazi Germany. FDR even sent a note to Emperor Hirohito the day before Pearl Harbor trying to restart diplomatic talks.

Your comments are written to answer questions that the people reading your code cannot readily answer for themselves.

Your procedure is:

1. Anticipate those questions.
2. Rewrite your code, completely, until as few questions as possible remain. If you skip this step, you're a poser hack.
3. Answer those questions.
4. Now go back and do it again, treating your comments as you did the code.
5. • Eschew excess verbiage!
   • Eschew excess verbiage!
   • Eschew excess verbiage!

Needless words are a complete and utter waste of time. If you're stuck in some PHB-driven environment that insists your comments provide unneeded answers, find some way of marking what matters. Right-justify the real comments, whatever works.

Whitespace is a language. Find the arbitrary parts in whatever style you're matching and make your use of them mean something that helps readers. Indent variable definitions differently, to subtly highlight them. One blank line or two?

Make it mean something. Don't document that meaning, because (a) if you have to document it, it's raising questions not answering them and (b) you're not perfect and the poor you will always have with you.

re the verbiage rule: the rest of Strunk & White is gospel also. Likewise Orwell's "Politics and the English Language".

I think the real question is not whether Jabber's open-source status will be impacted

...whether Jabber's open-source status will be affected . This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.

it's hardly impacting my productivity.

It's hardly affecting your productivity. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.

it only impacts INTRANET sites

It only affects intranet sites. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.

it impacts the other guys

It affects the other guys. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.

My personal favorite novels were "Animal Farm" and "Coming up for air".

And this rather nice instructive rant on English language usage by this master thinker and word smith;

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

wabi-sabi
matthew

That's a pretty pathetic excuse. If they wanted in badly enough they'd have it. I know, I know, the all powerful US hegemony would shut them down, just like in Vietnam and Korea before that.

There's a big difference between what happened with gunboat diplomacy before WWII and what happened after. There wasn't much standing in the way of the US before. However afterwards China and the Soviet Union supported North Korea and Viet Nam. Actually one of Stalin's conditions for supporting the Chinese Communists in their fight against the Kuomintang or KMT and Nationalists was that they in turn support the communists in Korea. As for Viet Nam, notice I didn't spell it "Vietnam" it was originally two words not one, the US entered it when President Eisenhower sent Col Edward Lansdale to arm, support, and train Viet Namese who opposed democracy. France and North and South Viet Nam had reached an agreement, the Geneva Accords, in 1954 for both parts of the country to hold an election on whether the north and south would reunify. Col Lansdale was sent to Viet Nam in 1955 to prevent this vote. And the thing is is at first Ho Chi Min first asked the US's help in expelling the French, but when the US refused to he turned to the Soviets. France then decided to withdraw while Eisenhower decided to send in troops.

Then again the US did the same with China, Mao Tze Tong asked the US's support but the US refused. Though Stalin didn't like the Chinese Communists, he called them Margarine Communists because whereas the Russian brand of communism was about industrial workers, "soviet" means "worker" in English, China's brand was about the peasantry or farm workers., he gave them aid. From the 1800s, with the Opium Wars or as the British called it the Boxer Rebellion, to the 1930s and '40s China was controlled by other nations. Mao wanted to end the foreign domination.

Please stop typing words like "utilization" when you mean "use". You sound like a PHB trying to sound smarter than he really is and you make it a pain for people to read what you write, especially non-Anglophones. Read George Orwell's essay on this topic.

"No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."

Like in any constantly changing system, the pressures matter. One of Warren's other papers say that in a two-party state, the two parties have to show opinions that look similar to that of the usual voter (with one party slightly on the left and another slightly on the right). But since the parties aren't made of usual voters, that means they have to lie, and often quite severely, to affect that picture.

It's also easier for third parties to appear when the voters know that their vote aren't wasted, and the results inform others that third parties can be a viable choice. This is what happened in New York in 1936 when they introduced the Single Transferable Vote; prior to it, the democrats pretty much controlled everything, but afterwards, many parties appeared. (It was eventually repealed - the main parties' Red Scare tactics with regards to elected Communists worked.)

The point here is that a shift does not only change the situation today, but it changes the preconditions for the situation tomorrow. Changing the method could lead to more parties, and more parties would mean it's harder to bribe them all, weakening the power of capital, for instance.

pliCAAWW! (He's Right. It is Monty Python.)
qu'kcuUH! (They found me out. I'm NOT dead!)
chthkqWA! (I'm a Avian Ventriloquist!)

http://orangecow.org/pythonet/pet-shop.html
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-parrot.html
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

because i'm a nice guy and have been your google proxy today

merry christmas

> Clear now?

Yes. It's obvious.;-)

Seriously, almost nothing is obvious to all people. Even something as basic as counting is not obvious to everyone ( http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=1207 ). Even the old cliche "The only intuitive interface is the nipple" is false, since it ignores the fact that some new mothers have breast feeding problems.

On top of that, many of the "obvious" things we know are wrong in some situations. It's "obvious" that when you drop a ball, it falls down....except if you're in space or your ball is more buoyant than its environment or.....

So "obvious" only has a meaning when referring to an audience in a particular context. For anyone in the computer world, it's "obvious" that if something exists in the real world that it's also possible for the same thing to exist in the virtual world. In this case, the real world analogy of "pointing to an item and saying 'put it on my tab'" is exactly equivalent to the computer implementation of the 1-click patent. It's "obvious" even though the technology for implementation might not be for a person who's unfamiliar with Java-script, HTML, cookies, and sessions (which sound more like a cooking show than a patent application).

BTW, your quote shows precisely the problem of most patent application. They use complex wordings to describe simple concepts in order to make that patent sound like something that should be patented. As Orwell pointed out, that's intellectual dishonesty ( http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm ).

If I were in charge of the patent office (and if I believed patenting was justified, which I don't), I'd reject any patent application that couldn't be phrased in a way that could be understood by a 10 year old, yet get solicit a "cool, why didn't I think of that!" response from anyone that looked at it.

Bush's and Clinton's speeches were virtually identical. The only instance of an administration official even relating Iraq and 9/11 happened well after the war had been approved and had begun, I believe it was Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld related Iraq and 9/11 days after it happened when he suggested we should attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan. As far as public statements, they never explicitly said Saddam caused 9/11, they only mentioned the two things constantly within the same sentence. Dick Cheney went so far as to actually imply a causal relationship, saying Mohammad Atta had met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just months prior to 9/11. And he even started by saying "I'm not saying that Saddam was involved in plotting 9/11 for certain, but..." What's this article about? How even negating a myth can cause it to be reinforced? Well how about just not saying it's specifically true, just here's a bunch of statements that suggest so?

Strange how if they never said it, so many people believed it. Of course the whole point was to create the connection in people's minds, but to do it in such a way that they couldn't technically be accused of lying.

P.S. I don't care that Clinton used some of the same justifications for his make-Congress-happy-take-attention-from-my-problem s bullshit. He's a lying bastard too. At least he managed get us stuck in a war.

The truth is, Hussein had an obligation to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs. He did possess them before, and by the terms of the ceasefire for Desert Storm, he had to prove to weapons inspectors that they had been neutralized. He failed to do this. For more than a decade. That alone was proper justification for the invasion.

Don't use the weapon inspectors as justification for the invasion when the weapon inspectors' opinion was ignored. The statements made by the admin, particularly Rumsfeld when he said that not only did Iraq have weapons as a certainty, we also "know where they are". No, they didn't. And according to the inspectors, Saddam's weapons program was disabled.

The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.

Oh, right, it was a strawman invention of Bush's opponents. And those clever bastards somehow forced Dick Cheney to keep repeating it!

No, the "Iraq is part of the war on terror -- remember 9/11" justification is what the administration started to push harder after the "Iraq has WMDs!" justification fell through. It was part of it all along, it was just second fiddle to the WMD claims which were what were truly effective in gaining support from the populace.

Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected.

Enjoy. Try searching for "specific allegation" to get to the part where he can't exactly say Iraq caused 9/11, he just has "credible" intelligence that might imply it.

"Maybe it's not economically feasible for Walmart to pay rates that union employees demand. If that's their business model, then fine."

What a crock of shit, in modern market society many "business models" are little more then mathematical slavery. People do not have an independent resource base (food,shelter, etc) outside of the market. If people were truly resource independent many businesses would go belly up, or not even be possible. Right now private industry and families hold all the carrots and for many depending on where they are they simply must work or produce value to get things that are not local, we've created machine that never stops, never stopping to question how this effects society and the quality human life.

You can devalue human life towards zero because businesses do not bear the full cost and risk of producing people and supporting them. Imagine having truckloads of free bread simply show up at your business everyday. That's what it's like to be an employer in regards to people.

People do not like making wage progress only to have it backslide and taken away from them and have their time and abilities devalued. We're talking about human lives here, not things, not objects. Not to mention the psychological principle of investment: People hate investing all their time and life into their workplace only to be treated a disposable unit of production. And it's not just the bottom feeding industries like wal-mart, there's a reason many early US presidents were protectionist, as not to get into trade-wars of attrition that suck the wealth out of their economies and fuel unrest.

Most modern economic liberals forget that wealth is just transferred, and if you're one of the millions that wealth is being transferred from because you've been replaced or have been FORCED into redundancy, that's hardly 'the persons fault'. The system has many negative aspects and that's why George Soros is doing what he can because of the threats capitalism poses to itself.

"The Capitalist threat"

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/soros.htm

I wholeheartedly agree with you; I was focusing more upon how we let it get to the point that it has. We, as a whole, let our vigilance lapse long ago; otherwise, we would have enacted a multitude of necessary changes. You are right in that it generally does not matter who you vote for, or indeed whether you vote or abstain. The plurality voting system does an absolutely horrible job of representing everyone in a populous nation. Of course, full representation happens to be one of the main tenets of representative democracy.

The first thing that we need to do, in my view, is relegate plurality voting to the dustbin of history, and institute a system of proportional representation. Everyone would have an infinitely greater chance of finding either a candidate or party (depending upon the version of PR used) that holds beliefs similar to their own. This has the potential to do away with the brunt of voter apathy, and would also result in more change, due to the multitude of views being expressed. Ironically, one of the main arguments against PR is that ballots would be "too complicated." This has been found to be untrue, and I recommend reading up on the history of proportional representation in the United States to see why.

Another issue, which I see as allowing unrivaled corruption just as you do, is lobbyists. We need to completely abolish corporate lobbying. Along with this, two things need to be done. Real campaign finance reform. I stand behind banning any and all donations, and financing campaigns purely from public funds, with a (very low) cap. Of course candidates running independently would need a certain number or percentage of constituents behind them in order to benefit from this. With PR in place, however, it would not be so much of an issue as it is now. Also, we need to do something about corporations having our public "servants" in their back pockets. I propose setting a required timeframe, both before and after being elected to hold office, in which it is not possible to hold high managerial positions within a corporation. Say ten years or so. Some may say that this is unfair, but hell. What is more unfair? Someone not being able to be a CEO and receive a salary of millions for ten years, or the collective fucking of 300 million people? At least those running for office can choose whether or not to do so.

Yet another staple of the current system that needs to go is "career politicians." Quite frankly, it is disgusting that this has been allowed for so long within a supposedly democratic country. Relatively short term limits need to be set for every elected official, and there needs to be a requirement that one may only serve in a particular branch of government once. If a truly corrupt asshat somehow makes it into office, and for some reason we cannot get rid of him or her, the saving grace will be that term limit. The office of president comes to mind. Imagine if Bush was able to be reelected perpetually. Zany antics would ensue, of that I am certain.

Of course, all of this is just for starters, and it is very questionable as to whether half of it could even be instituted, considering how far gone we are already. Whether evolutionary or revolutionary, though, the fact remains that it does need to happen. As for me, I'm not holding out any sort of hope. I am currently planning to finish college, put in some time with the Peace Corps (or an alternative of some sort), and then get the hell out of the country. I will pursue my graduate degrees elsewhere. Unless something goes drastically right within the next four years or so, my views and those of this country (if I may anthropomorphize it) are diametrically opposed to one another.

Why use "utilize" instead of "use"? It adds nothing but pretention to whatever you're trying to say. Read George Orwell's short essay Politics and the English Language.

1. The number #1 : Toma ya!
2. The woman's defence!
3. Clever students women with brilliant teeth!
4. 29% are women!, 2003.
5. Dangerous! Women in Black-White!
6. women as web-designers!
7. women in IT more than men because of cheap salaries!

I cannot distill hundreds of pages of history to one or two sentences or paragraphs. And second do not become a smartass. I own that book, and read it from cover to coverm how else did I scan it? Reading one book of 340 pages is plenty to get a huge perspective on the simple single issue of what kind of support in early America there was for Greek Independence. Which is certainly more perspective than the average American or person I am debating with has on this issue.

>>You:>>"Like I said, an irrational reason. Independence should be supported irrespective of religion."

Oh, wow you are some expert. You get arrogant to me, when at least I present some factual sources while you do the tea leave readings of history and get arrogant to me? When you grow up and are willing to look up what Americans of the time thought and how and why they thought that way you will not understand why they supported "Greek Fire". Tell then you are just imposing nothing but ignorant assumptions, with zero sources upon history. Maybe you should do the looking up so then you cite things.

As to the Turkish nationalism that evolved from the Ottoman times see this other post I made:
Turkish nationalism only wants West's science
Here is asummary of that post:

Ayse Kadioglu, "The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, no. 2
 
... "The theme that a patriotic Turk should try to achieve a balance between the benefits of the West and the East by opting for adopting the science and technology of the former and the spirituality of the latter is repeated quite often in the schooling system designed by the educational establishment in Turkey. This difficult endeavour is almost like a mission for every patriotic Turk." ...

"Ziya Gokalp (Turkish nationalist theorist) was influenced by all of these trends. Yet, he envisaged a middle road in the tradition of Namik Kemal: `that only the material civilization of Europe should be taken and not its non-material aspects'.(21)" ...

Yeah, that is a real respectable nation and society to support in foreign policy matters. This recent Turkish legislation just proves what they want and do not want from their interactions with the Western world.

Ayse Kadioglu, "The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1996)
 
... "The theme that a patriotic Turk should try to achieve a balance between the benefits of the West and the East by opting for adopting the science and technology of the former and the spirituality of the latter is repeated quite often in the schooling system designed by the educational establishment in Turkey. This difficult endeavour is almost like a mission for every patriotic Turk." ...

"Ziya Gokalp (Turkish nationalist theorist) was influenced by all of these trends. Yet, he envisaged a middle road in the tradition of Namik Kemal: `that only the material civilization of Europe should be taken and not its non-material aspects'.(21)" ...

"The superior material qualities of the West, its science and technology, however, can only be synthesized with the spirituality of the East with a project from without' which necessarily involves the intellectuals who take upon themselves the task of transforming a popular consciousness `steeped in centuries of superstition and irrational folk religion'.(31)" ...

(21.)Niyazi Berkes (ed.), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gokalp (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1959), p.21.
(31.)Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, p.51

So the Turks only want some of the superior science and organization of the Western world. They do not want any of its fundamental values. I say we do not allow Turks or any other muslims with the same ideas access to our "superior material civilization" until they start to accept our values.

All the legislation in Turkey aimed toward not criticizing Turkishness and Ataturk just points to what kind of modernization this country wants.

I have been very impressed with how well E.O.Wilson is able to communicate some rather complex ideas. His style follows well the rules suggested by good old Eric Blair:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Another scientist to master of this very effective style was mythologist Joseph Campbell. The best conveyors or knowledge have always managed to say the most with the least effort by keeping it as clean, simple and culturally neutral as possible. I find that most my favorite writers tend to have this in common, Eric Blair himself (AKA George Orwell), Papa Hemingway, Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vongut, Michio Kaku among others. A lot of journalists, authors, politicians and even /. posters could benefit from applying those 6 simple rules, myself included, sometimes ;)

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

Source:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Google for democracies don't make war. For instance this. It is, afaik, dogma in conflict research.

But you might of course be correct that it is not as well known as I think. :-)

I will state that if it isn't well known, it should be.

Really interesting link, btw. Thanks.