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From a 2006 NYT article:

...The paper industry is not without its impact. Because of its consumption of energy, the industry -- which includes magazines, newspapers, catalogs and writing paper -- emits the fourth-highest level of carbon dioxide among manufacturers, according to a 2002 study by the Energy Information Administration, a division of the Department of Energy. The paper industry follows the chemical, petroleum and coal products, and primary metals industries.

. . .

The most harmful part of the process is paper production. Breaking down wood fiber to make paper consumes a lot of energy, which in many cases comes from coal plants.

That was Amazon: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

Mr. Schmidt's departure comes as the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating whether Mr. Schmidt's membership on the boards of both Apple and Google could raise concerns about competition.

FTC was looking into Schmidt being on the board of two companies that were in the same market. Part of the concern is that this would allow collusion between the two companies. Here is a NYT article:

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

While they aren't stupid, per se(it's not as though they don't have loads of well degreed Jesuits who definitely aren't, if it comes to that), and some of their people definitely have the low, animal cunning that makes a good politician; but, deep down, I think what causes them to keep making these unbelievably tone-deaf moves is ingrained arrogance.

It's hard to respond correctly when you just can't quite bring yourself to believe that great unwashed might, at some point, apply the rules to you. Even harder when you also posses the nigh-unshakable conviction that you are, in fact, the "good guys"(and where goodness is concerned, empiricism seems to run in reverse. Very few "good people" have ever said "Wait. I do bad things, I must not be a good person." Many "good people" have said "Wait. I'm a good person. The things that I do cannot be bad things.").

And that is how you get things like A senior priest saying(in public) that the condemnation being suffered by the Catholic Church was like the persecution of the jews.

Remember Uganda is the country that has the death penalty for homosexuals.

Well, I remember that some Americans went to Uganda claiming to be "experts in homosexuality" and warned "the gay movement is an evil institution". A "previously unknown Ugandan politician" then introduced a bill, which as far as I know has not been passed.

Has it been passed? Could you provide a reference?

California law prohibits the sale of stolen goods and states that a person who uses someone else’s lost property without permission may be guilty of theft.

And since it's over $950, it's a felony. Even if they didn't know it was stolen, they could face a lesser charge of "misappropriation of lost property" which is a crime but not theft. Charges haven't been pressed yet but the police say they're investigating the options.

The anthrax attacks hit the Capitol at the same time legislators were being pressured to pass the PATRIOT Act. The anthrax attacks delivered the unspoken message to our representatives that "nobody is safe from terrorists".

I'm not saying that Vice President Cheney was involved in any way, but you've got to admit that his agenda, formed long before September of 2001, got a big boost from the attacks.

Obviously though, he's far too nice of a guy to ever do anything underhanded.

Yep, just like Barack Obama's far too nice a guy to engineer a financial crisis as a pretext for nationalizing/taking over large banks in the name of "reform", while cozying up to Goldman-Sachs CEO:

While Goldman Sachs' lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times.

Seen the redactions from Blogo's Obama subpeona? The ones that say Obama lied about the sale of his Senate seat and his ties to Tony Rezko?

Or would nice-guy Obama LIE to the public about the cost of Obamacare:

President Obama's health care overhaul law will increase the nation's health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation.

How about this from the NY Times, that suddenly gets run now that we all have magic health care from heaven thanks to the world's biggest celebrity:

New York’s insurance system has been a working laboratory for the core provision of the new federal health care law — insurance even for those who are already sick and facing huge medical bills — and an expensive lesson in unplanned consequences. Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net for people like Ms. Welles is falling apart.

Gee, sure would have been nice of the NY Slimes to run that story a month or so ago, eh? But no, Baracky sure didn't know he was LYING about his claims that Obamacare would reduce health care costs, now did he?

Oh, but tinfoil-hat loons like you get modded up for jumping on the "Cheney and all Rethuglicans are teh eviilll!!!" shit-for-brains bandwagon?

When Obama's lies regarding health care are going to directly cost people about ten thousand dollars each - per year? While the Obama/Pelosi deficits would pay for the ENTIRETY of BOTH wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in about eight months?

Gotta love how the same people who spent 8 years screaming "Dissent is patriotic!" are now trying to label dissenters as "seditious" and "dangerous".

There was no way to prove if the data had been tampered with because the data was deleted. The only thing that was left was their "value added" data.

You don't know what you're talking about

Coincidentally, the Times is running a a story today about this new generation of "social" media sites like Blippy. Not only does Blippy want to compile a list of your purchases, they'd like to read your e-mail, too, if you don't mind. From the article:

The spirit of sharing has already run into some roadblocks. Amazon.com was so wary of the security ramifications of Blippy's idea of letting consumers post everything they bought that, for several months, it blocked the site from allowing people to publish their Amazon purchases.

In March, Blippy sidestepped Amazon by asking its customers for access to their Gmail accounts, and then took the purchase data from the receipts Amazon had e-mailed them. Blippy says thousands of its users have supplied the keys to their e-mail accounts; Amazon declined to comment.

Sigh....

If you have nothing to hide, then why not?

/sarcasm (see NYT article)

in terms of taste, quality, quantity, and stability

and here's some breaking news for you on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/science/earth/24drill.html

Has anyone checked whether they just did it for comedic effect? It seems quite unlike them to censor long, preachy speeches. I mean hell, they air the rest of South Park...

Yes, people have checked. It was also confirmed on The Daily Show.

I heard anywhere on earth in one hour, (conventional weapons only)unless you believe this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/world/europe/23strike.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw
 

The investigators treated the Havasupai the same way they treat their own families when they look for a genetic disease.

The Times had another story about a doctor, James Lupski, whose family had the colorfully-named Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, who got researchers to do DNA studies of his family. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/health/research/11gene.html In sequencing their DNA, they found that there were related conditions in other members of their family who everybody thought were healthy. They got a lot of useful information for that family.

The investigators explained what they were doing to the Havasupai, as best as they could to subjects who don't speak English that well and who don't understand the science of it that well. This is a common situation with well-established rules. As the TFA explains, they got informed consent to do exactly what they did. This was for the benefit of the Havasupai.

The alternative is to never do studies on poorly-educated people. Is that what you want?

There is no such thing as "just studying diabetes." In DNA studies, they try to get all the useful information they can (or can afford), as they did with Lupski. That way they can look for patterns.

Now a few members of the Havasupai want to complain about it (for their own benefit), so they've convinced the other tribal members that there is something wrong with doing standard medical studies on people with a poorly-understood disease. The subjects agreed, and now they're going back on their word. They got away with it because they were in a position to blackmail the university by getting other tribes to boycott their studies.

If you want to say that the doctors also benefitted professionally and got grants for helping their patients deal with life-threatening diseases and potentially saving a few lives, yeah, OK, they did. What's wrong with that? And what about the lawyer who sued the university?

in return for being assured that nobody else can randomly hunt you down to satisfy a grudge, either.

Except that you are given no such assurance. The only assurance you are given is that the police will try to track down the person who hunted you down after the fact. The police in the United States have no legal duty to protect you. The Supreme Court has said as much.

The police exist for exactly this reason, and the occasional (and even occasionally systemic) abuses aside, they do a reasonable job of it.

Tell that to all the rape/murder victims out there. The sad reality of the situation is that you are the one who is ultimately responsible for your own well being. The police sure as hell aren't.

According to Amazon they do. Link

and ducking re-entering spacecraft

the times has a different spin. it's not chips so much as low-power hardware/software integration google's paying for. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/google-acquires-another-piece-of-the-tablet-puzzle/?hpw

Religion needs to be mocked, but Islam more so than Christianity. The stronger the reaction to parody and ridicule, the more parody and ridicule is required to smack religion into its rightful subdued state (in society).

Not to mention that the KKK are all radical Christians, but we wouldn't want them speaking on behalf of the entire faith, now would we?

This brings up a very good example actually. Part of the way that the KKK was taken down, was through public ridicule by the writer Stetson Kennedy, who used mockery (and Superman!) to knock away the wall of secrecy and intimidation that surrounded the organization.

That's no moon

You think that is frighting?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/16tier.html?_r=1

Researches are looking for ways to go straight from the seeing the ads to be compulsion to buy it part of the brain, and they are making headway.*

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/16tier.html?_r=1

*see what I did there?

I mean, really, I feel like a moron for ever knowing that they allowed price fixing -- even promoted it -- inside their borders and then believing that stopped at the rim of the continent. Right now the only question is how many markets is this happening in?

Yeah! We need them to stop artificially raising prices through fixing so we can artificially raise them through tariffs!

Eat Cheese or Die

Unfortunately this suggestion did not survive. I believe the time is ripe to try again to implement this new motto.

If you think I invented phony "facts," see http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/us/wisconsin-s-license-plates-won-t-say-eat-cheese-or-die.html

It is axiomatic that humans can dual-task well? Since when? Citation needed. In fact University of Utah researcehrs that is the rare 2.5% of the population that can truly "supertask" two activities without any loss in efficinecy. For example, drive and talk on a mobile. Citation needed?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/only-a-few-can-multi-task/?ref=technology

Look, the reality is that the U.S. economy currently depends almost exclusively on shenanigans in the high-finance industry.

There. That's better. cf. here..

Hollywood can go hang for as much as it'll do to the economy.

From the NYT Crotone Journal, NATO base http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/28/world/crotone-journal-new-us-base-city-boon-or-nato-boondoggle.html not too much talk of nukes - more talk of jobs.

P.S. sorry for the poor formatting, i guess firefox is the culprit? also, here is the link I forgot: http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/07/08/magazine/1154680995049.html

Maybe because in addition to removing racial bias and social fear it also removes around 40 IQ points on average?

The NYT review at the time had it right: "Sorry Uma, there's only ONE Emma..."

A paragraph of my post last week about Opera Software, which makes browsers for cellphones and PCs, got a lot of notice on tech blogs. But, as often happens, the retelling of the story has created an odd snowball of misunderstanding.

...

The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store.

So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.

IOW you are wrong

A paragraph of my post last week about Opera Software, which makes browsers for cellphones and PCs, got a lot of notice on tech blogs. But, as often happens, the retelling of the story has created an odd snowball of misunderstanding.

...

The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store.

So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.

IOW you are wrong

You see, in theory socialism means that everyone owns the means of production. In practice it means that the state controls/owns the means of production.

What, you mean like AIG or GM?

Do you vote for the guy who honestly acts in the interests of the voters of the other party? Or the corrupt guy who may be in "your" party, but only helps his contribitors? How much does character matter?

The fundamental problem is that politics in America has become a spectator sport: we want "out team" to win, regardless of consequences, and we turn a blind eye to corruption as long as it's on "our team".

If we could stop this insane "red team / blue team" nonsense, and starting caring about the actual man or woman even if we might disagree with him on some things, we'd fix the more serious problems. People rant all the time here that because we have a two-party system they can't vote for a candidate that exactly matches their views on every issue. How about instead we start favoring candidates who might not be lying about what they support? Candidates who are intelligent, honest, and good-hearted over agreeing exactly with ourselves?

We just passed the most contentions piece of legislation since the Civil War, and no one in Congress freaking read it, not even their staffers! None of them care about actually governing, because governing well is not what the voters care about! (And, yes, we know none of the read it, or they would have realized that they just terminated their own health care!)

From TFA and two links deep, the NY Times posted this clarification.

"So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an "internal project" of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple's software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.
" 'We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license," Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message.' "

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/why-you-will-not-see-opera-on-your-iphone/

The rejection was an assumption. Now you even know more.

All I can say is Jackass!

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/07/business/canadian-lumber-penalized.html?pagewanted=1

Canadian Lumber penalized

http://www.google.ch/search?hl=en&ei=J0PES87yPOiXOP3XjdkP&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAcQBSgA&q=American+steel+tariffs&spell=1

"American steel tarriffs"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/apr/28/brazil.usnews

"American Cotton Subsidies illegal"

My point is that America is neither better nor worse with respect to breaking the trade rules games.

But because of jackass's like you, you think that it is poor poor America that always suffers! BS!

Again I am not saying America is good, nor bad. America is dealt bad cards at times, and deals bad cards as well. So if you are going to complain please keep the argument to Google and the ISP's and not "America" and "Europe"

We already know that expensive placebo can bring pain relief. Now we can completely eliminate the pill, save all the expenses related to drug development testing and production. All we need to do is charge people more for nothing and they will feel better. Isn't this a perfect business plan.

He didn't say he'd hire zero lobbyists. He said he wouldn't hire a lot of lobbyists.

Weaselese...

As in, of the field of lobbyists, most would not be getting a job offer in the Obama administration.

Meaningless. There are tens of thousands of lobbyists in the US. Even if Obama staffed (stuffed?) his White House only with lobbyists, most of the the lobbyists would not have a job offer from him.

Here is, what he declared on the first day in the office though — already a change of tone from the election campaign:

In what ethics-in-government advocates described as a particularly far-reaching move, Mr. Obama barred officials of his administration from lobbying their former colleagues "for as long as I am president." He barred former lobbyists from working for agencies they had lobbied within the past two years and required them to recuse themselves from issues they had handled during that time.

That policy was immediately violated:

Mr. Obama's nominee for deputy secretary of defense, William Lynn, has been a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and his nominee for deputy secretary of health and human services, William V. Corr, lobbied for stricter tobacco regulations as an official with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

And the list keeps growing...

It would've all been fine, of course — the President is entitled to pick anyone for his Administration (save for a few posts, which must be approved by Congress), but his pre-election grandstanding is now hurting him — despite your and yours best efforts.

They already know it isn't safe to drive while talking on the phone.

>>The more available information is on contraception, the less teen pregnancy occurs. I'd give you a cite, but you haven't given any so I assume you're into researching things yourself.

Johns Hopkins research cited here and many other studies show that the more sex ed data the kids have, the better their decisions (later onset of sexual activity, fewer pregnancies, fewer partners, more condom use). Kids aren't stupid, you know...

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/10/garden/school-project-cuts-pregnancy-rates.html

SCHOOL PROJECT CUTS PREGNANCY RATES

By NADINE BROZAN
Published: July 10, 1986

CAN school programs that offer teen-agers comprehensive sex education, counseling and referrals for contraceptives stem the tide of adolescent pregnancies? Or do such programs only provoke greater sexual activity among the young?

According to a new study published yesterday, an experimental project at two inner-city schools in Baltimore has decisively lowered pregnancy rates. The project has provided pupils with lectures and open discussions linked with contraceptive services at a nearby clinic.

The project, conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, also raised the age when the pupils began sexual activity and significantly promoted attendance by both boys and girls at birth-control clinics. The findings were published in Family Planning Perspectives, the journal of the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Commenting on them, Dr. Laurie Schwab Zabin, director of the project and also of the social science fertility research unit at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, said, ''I hope that the critics will be as relieved as I am to see that good professional counseling and services can protect those who are sexually active, can cut down the rate of conception among them and at the same time help those who are not sexually active to say 'no.' ''

Encouraging teen-agers to say ''no'' ought to be at the core of any educational plan, according to Jo Ann Gasper, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, who has jurisdiction over the Federal adolescent family life program. Mrs. Gasper is considered to hold conservative views on reproductive issues.

Although Mrs. Gasper said she had not read the report, she said in a telephone interview: ''Anything that delays sexual activity is good. When we look at the numbers, we see that increases in teen pregnancy are directly related to increases in sexual activity.''

In the opinion of Alice Radosh, coordinator of adolescent pregnancy and parenting services in the office of the Mayor of New York, ''The most important finding of the study is that rather than increasing sexual activity, the dissemination of information in the schools actually delays the age of onset'' of sexual activity.

There are 78 such clinics operating or planned on the premises of high schools or junior high schools around the country, according to Sandra Orwitz Ludlow, executive director of Education, Training and Research Associates, in Santa Cruz Calif., which trains teachers and community-service professional in sex education. ''This study replicates the good effects of other clinic programs,'' she said.

''There will be additional programs formed,'' she added, ''but only in areas for which there is considerable support. The opposition to the development of clinics in schools that have any birth-control related services is becoming more organized.''

A study published last year by the Guttmacher Institute showed that American teen-agers become pregnant at significantly higher rates than their counterparts in five other industrialized nations. The lower rates in the other countries were attributed in large measure to extensive sex education and to accessible contraception. In this country, both sex education and contraception programs have caused considerable dissension.

For those of you not paying attention a couple years ago, our current President spent (invested) two decades of his life building the Chicago Public School system up (as a community organizer and local politician) to what it is now - from the NY Times:

One of the biggest lessons Mr. Obama drew from his experiences in Chicago, associates said, is that student achievement is highly dependent on teacher quality.

In the two decades since Mr. Obama arrived in Chicago, its public schools have undergone a sweeping turnaround, from an education wasteland to a district that, while still facing major challenges, is among the most improved in the nation. The city has closed many failing schools and reopened them with new staffs, making it an important laboratory for one of the country’s most vexing problems

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/us/politics/10educate.html

Remeber, improvement is easy, if you're already at rock-bottom...

Lewis Black, on President Clinton's educational achievements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7axLyrK12ms

Can this robot hold a position, or return to a position upon surfacing and learning its position? Or is at the mercies of the ocean currents as to where it ends up?

No, it can't. It can adjust its depth; that's all.

Compare the Wave Glider, from Liquid Robotics. This is a privately funded product. It has two parts, a surface "floater" that looks like a surfboard, and a tethered "glider", which hangs below it, about 10m underwater. Wave action on the floater pulls the glider up, and gravity brings it down. Spring-loaded ailerons move the glider forward, powered by the wave motion, and it tows the floater. A rudder on the glider allows steering. The floater has solar panels, a GPS, and an Iridium satellite data link.

The Wave Glider is not only autonomous and self-powered, but can make long trips under control. First they sent one all the way around the Big Island in Hawaii. Worked fine. Then they sent it from Hawaii to California. This took a while; it averages around 1 knot; more in storms, less in calm weather. In storms, the floater is pulled through waves, like a surfboard, and comes out unharmed. They picked it up in Monterey Bay, saw that it was in good condition, and sent it back out again. They parked it in Monterey Bay for a while, circling in a 50 meter circle. Then they sent it back out again on an trip to Alaska and back.

The Wave Glider generally stays within about 50m of its programmed course. The Coast Guard treats it as "floating debris", and it doesn't show lights. If something hits it, it's like running over a surfboard. The control center on shore (a laptop with an Iridium phone) gets ship tracking data, and they guide the Wave Gliders out of the way of large ships.

What bank CEOs did was idiotic and a byproduct of Greenspan's Randian/laissez faire outlook on "self-regulation".

Because it was God Himself who ordered the banks to give loans to people with low income, bad credit, and no down payment. Or maybe it was Barney Frank... Just stop. Stop blaming capitalism. If you hate capitalism, there are about 100 socialist countries you can go suck off of.

Actually, what some of these CEO's did was pretty plainly illegal. See - Lehman Brothers and the use of Repo 105. NY Times has a good breakdown. You can find it here: http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/the-british-origins-of-lehmans-accounting-gimmick/ Even their own internal legal review determined that the practice was illegal in the US, hence the need to do it secretly in England.

The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates.

But all these groups will face the same basic problem. Deep down, Americans tend to believe that more care is better care. We recoil from efforts to restrict care. ...

From an economic perspective, health reform will fail if we can't sometimes push back against the try-anything instinct. The new agencies will be hounded by accusations of rationing, and Medicare's long-term budget deficit will grow.

So figuring out how we can say no may be the single toughest and most important task facing the people who will be in charge of carrying out reform. "Being able to say no," Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford says, "is the heart of the issue." ...

None of these steps will allow us to avoid the wrenching debates that are an inevitable part of health policy. Eventually, we may well have to decide against paying for expensive treatments with only modest benefits.

A reader comments:

...So there WILL be rationing?....doctors controlled by a monopoly payer in all but name?....private medicine outlawed as in Canada?...

So does this mean that Sarah Palin was actually right?....about the death panels...er, Medicare Practice Advisory Commission?

When do the liars apologize to her?

Don't hold your breath on that one. James Taranto adds:

Having taken on, over the objections of the public, the responsibility for everyone's medical care, the federal government may not be able to keep its promise: "Eventually, we may well have to decide against paying for expensive treatments with only modest benefits."

Oops, sorry about that, Gramps!

It seems as though this is a pretty strong argument against ObamaCare. But we need to encapsulate it in a pithy phrase. What would you call governmental institutions that empower bureaucrats to decide when to deny medical treatment--panels, as it were, that have the authority to determine when a patient's death is necessary for the health of the fisc?

Why are the Democrats determined to ration health care? Because, having sold endless health care at someone else's expense as an "entitlement," government at all levels is going broke. The Democrats need rationing to free up government funds for the social programs they yearn to implement, but can't afford. Your mother's hip replacement is standing in their way, so she has to go. That, in a nutshell, is what Obamacare is all about.

I'd probably invest in an ipad if I could get some sort of package deal for $25/month of

• The New York Times
• Washington Post
• The Economist

Barring that, I'll probably pony up $15/mo for the NYT when their android app is released, so long as it has true offline reading capability so I can use it with my (non-touchscreen) netbook.

I think that your defense of the pilots' actions is fairly reasonable from a military perspective. And indeed, firing on that group of men also seems reasonable, from a military perspective, given that the Bradley patrol was a block away and ostensibly threatened.

But don't you think that you jumped to the defense "it's a war, in a war zone," a bit quickly? The "war" ended a long time ago, and now we are conducting an occupation. Only, we are not quite even conducting an occupation. We are theoretically assisting the Iraqi security forces, apparently in the application of martial law--a very harsh martial law, in which (Coalition) force protection is given paramount priority. Is effectively turning Bagdhad into a warzone for an indeterminate period really going to bring us "victory", or indeed accomplish anything but keep the fires of resentment and resistance aflame for as long as occupation continues? The "problem" could be that the military units are continually put into a position where they must make hard choices like this to ensure their own safety.

For another example of this, consider General McChrystal's remarks (originally reported in part by the NYT) about how basically everyone shot at checkpoints in Afghanistan turns out to be a civilian. It is all done in the name of force protection, but do you think that is going to make the Afghan civilian population any less resentful? Do you think that they will just understand that the soldiers had to kill their family members because they couldn't be sure they weren't suicide bombers? The irrationality and excitability of the American public on the subject of terrorism is axiomatic; in Afghanistan much of the public doesn't even have the benefit of a high school education.

After two presidents and a number of changes in policy, we still haven't found the magic formula that will make the natives welcome our "peacekeeping efforts," so there is ample reason to be cynical about the future efficacy of our occupations. A "surge" in Afghanistan will inevitably result in even more civilian casualties, whatever its effect on the forces of the "Taliban," so I think I can be justified in wondering if our continuing Iraq/Afghanistan policy is based on nothing more than a massive Concorde fallacy.

Seriously? You link to two posts - one by a blogger and another by someone from the American Trucking Association - on financial derivatives?

You are totally right to call me out. I had read a much better article , i think by Krugman, in the NYTimes but i couldn't find it in the 10 seconds that i tried.

This is a bit better

"I'm willing to bet that the Vatican would be most interested in hearing about/excommunicating those involved. Suffice to say that's not even SLIGHTLY kosher (for lack of a better word)."

Pedophilia isn't technically approved either, yet Church payoffs to shut up victims are totalling around a BILLION dollars in the US alone, the scandal is spreading, and the shell game of hide-the-pedo (as opposed to the duty to instantly turn over such predators to the police for public prosecution) is continually being exposed.

http://www.americancatholic.org/News/ClergySexAbuse/

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Sex-Abuse-Scandal-Threatens-Popes-Focus-on-Europes-Chritian-Roots-90097932.html

http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2010/03/17/sex_scandal_embroiling_catholic_church_in_brazil/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/opinion/25thur1.html

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/ireland/091126/abuse-report-catholic-church-dublin

I'd like to see all priests get what Father Geoghan got in prison. The enablers are as guilty as the predators.

It's interesting that the video linked in parent is from RT = Russia Today = Russian government's English language propaganda channel for the West. A Voice of Mother Russia.