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No smugness there at all. There is this lingering perception that nobody uses Amtrak when in fact they're carrying so many passengers that the limiting factor (for the past few years) is literally the number of passenger cars and locomotives owned by the carrier. Yeah, the sensible thing to do when you have that situation is buy more of both. But it's difficult to invest in fleet expansion when for the past thirty years you literally didn't know if you're going to be around the following year. That was Amtrak's existence since its creation, despite Congress generally being in favor of keeping it around.

No passenger rail network makes a profit. Even during the "golden years" when the freight railroads ran the services. It was mostly a loss leader, but freight railroads were able to shoulder the burden until the combination of federal (over) regulation (pre-Staggersand the nascent trucking industry (aided by of the federally subsidized interstate highway system) and the overall decline in freight business during the latter half of the 20th century brought many of them to the brink of bankrupcy (Witness Penn Central, which never made so much as one cent of profit during it's entire eight-year existence). Some passenger networks come close to covering their operating expenses out-of-pocket, but add in capital expenditures necessary to keep the network going, and they all come out in the red.

As for other modes, the airline industry is no stranger to red ink, and nobody in their right mind expects the interstate system to pay for its own upkeep, let alone turn a profit.

---PCJ

Don't single out China/Asia. Countries have a massive effect upon each other. I live in far north Texas, and have seen haze/smoke from fires in central Mexico. I've always felt a large part of Texas's pollution problem is pollutants coming North. I've heard engineers talk about offering sulfer scrubbers to Eastern european coal-power plants to reduce smog here in the US.

Part of the problem is different countries worry about different types of pollution. In the US, we are more concerned about visible/long-term pollutants than invisible/short-term ones. Some other countries are completely unconcerned about things like leaded gasoline, which is still used in many countries but has been out of the US for decades. America has a bad record, but has gotten some things right in the end. Europeans make a big deal about CO2, but many European

• tourist

beaches have incredibly toxic water, or land which is unfarmable. Thanks to American pollution reforms, life is even returning to New York's harbor.

Everything is a give/take. People are worrying about energy inefficient bulbs, replacing them with their more efficient fluorescent cousins, but are ignoring the problems those bulbs have with mercury. Or with LED bulbs, gallium aresenide. For example, the life returning to New York's harbor happens to be devouring all of the wooden structures built since they last died off.

Depends on whose temperature data you look at. Cherry pickers are everywhere. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/a-spot-check-of-global-warming/

Yes, because consoles are so much bigger and more expensive than PC's.

Partial strawman. The grandparent never mentioned price.

Laptop computers are a lot easier to carry around than a console and TV to plug it in to (bolded for emphasis). The GP didn't explicitly mention laptops, but it was implied. Laptops have outsold desktops since 2003.

Actually, this is a significant problem...

The market has a long-term 12% return, but most people only get 4-6% back on their mutual fund investments on average. In fact, the higher your salary, the less your investments tend to return.

This has been known for quite some time.

Why you're such a lousy investor.

For most people, a pension is better. The problem is a lot of pensions aren't much safer.

How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension

Either way you're taking on significant risk.

In my case, I had the option of investing for myself or having a pension.

Investing for myself is risky, but I know how to invest. While there's almost no way I could invest to the insane level of return that the pension promises, it would require I work at my job for 30 years. I can't guarantee that my job or my pension will be around in 30 years. Moreover, I don't particularly want to be here 30 years.

The problem is, when everyone starts at my job, they get the same options. In the nineties, everyone was picking self investment, because the market was doing insanely well, but now that it's not so good, people can't maintain the value of their investments.

Anyway, to find out more, I highly recommend Frontline's segment Can You Afford to Retire?

Let's make this a short dance: Call me a "fascist", run away and brag to your comrades about "standing up to a pig."

That's a short dance, I don't have comrades.

Dodo would be more accurate.

Don't you mean you're the dodo? But don't let that stop you.

Try this another way, here you said "We had college-aged, playtime anarchists" however only two of the articles linked to says anything about anarchists, and that was the sheriff calling them "self-styled anarchists". Nowhere does it say the protesters themselves call themselves anarchists. However at least one of them says "both journalists and lawyers -- in addition to protesters -- have been detained and arrested even though not a single violent or criminal act has occurred."

So, who's talking shit?

Falcon

Western style bureaucracy isn't so bad (imagine if your 20 layers of government were *not* a joke):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/opinion/16Harford.html

Naomi Klein is a leftist, so of course she is trying to attack free economies

On a related note, it's been shown that from 1948-2005, income growth has grown, on average, significantly higher under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Damn those leftists.

And this article about The Bank Account that Sprang a Leak
about sums up why. My accounts, too, have sprung leaks in the past...

i.dailymail.co.uk

Here she is early in her career as a sportscasterette:

web.me.com

And here she is as Governorette of Alaska, sitting on a Grizzly Bear couch, with a stuffed King Crab on the coffee table, wearing flip flops and red toenail polish to work:

graphics8.nytimes.com

Again, I ask you in all seriousness - what's not to like here?

I'm not even sure that Angelina Jolie is qualified to play this chick in the movie version, and AJ played Lara Croft, for Goodness's sake.

it might take a while for the guilty parties to be held responsible. Eventually the law will catch up with them.

The article you link to describes how "Months or years of continued litigation may lie ahead, unless the Bush administration, or the administration that follows it, reverses course and closes the prison at GuantÃnamo Bay, which now holds 270 detainees."

No mention of guilty parties being held responsible. You really think that's going to happen?!

The only way to change the Constitution is to pass an amendment. No amendments relating to habeas corpus have been passed, and none that I know of are even being considered, and therefore I conclude it hasn't been lost.

Violating the law has no bearing on the law's existence, although it might take a while for the guilty parties to be held responsible. Eventually the law will catch up with them.

Look, I'm not taking the position of the GOP in this matter. I just think that exaggerations are dangerous.

You do understand that none of that matters if we can't export the beef right? You do know that bans on American Beef are only now being lifted in many countries across the world, and that single incident will bring those bans right back, and for a longer time, right? I don't know that I would go around touting the safety of an industry that had to recall 143 million pounds of beef because they were found to be sneaking cattle to sick to stand into the slaughterhouse. Face it, big industry beef is nasty dirty. There seems to be a big e.coli recall every few years, that is polite wording for cow shit mixed into the meat. Is it any wonder that other countries would view US Beef with a few worries about disease? Is there any better way to relieve that worry other than higher levels of testing and stricter quality control? Is the USDA showing any initiative on that? no, no, and no.

"Folks seem to neglect this minor detail that it is ultimately a good thing the USDA is taking measures to prevent mis-information and FUD from affecting beef exports."

This is not about falsely misleading consumers that everything is safe. The FDA cannot with a straight face [well, maybe with the current administration they could) say that testing 1% of all cows and not finding MCD is better and safer for consumers than testing 100% of all cows and not finding MCD.

Quite the opposite. The FDA is worried about someone actually finding a cow with with mad cow disease. If a significant number of cases gets reported, the entire industry goes to hell. All exports from the US drop to zero. Domestic consumption (at least for domestic beef) would drop sharply, particularly if the incubation period was also reported [in that cows could be infected but still test clean].

Sure testing would be expensive, but actually getting a positive would devastate the industry.

As for cost:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9506E6DC1431F934A25750C0A9629C8B63
Tadashi Sato, agricultural attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, The Associated Press reported. ''We test all slaughtered cattle, regardless of age -- not some.''

So this year, the choice is between being a racisist or a sexist.

Hmmm.... If i only I could be both! This will be a tough one this will...

Okay. Please don't even joke about that. There was a really extreme campaign in Florida where Republicans discouraged blacks, Hispanics, and other traditionally Democratic voters from going to the polls by saying things like, "If you have any outstanding traffic tickets, pay them before voting," and, "bring proof of citizenship," (and this discouraged people who WERE legitimately citizens, because they didn't really understand and they were afraid of losing what they had worked so hard to gain), and, of course, "election day changed to Wedsnesday." Many people think that this was a big part of why the Democrats lost Florida. It's not funny, regardless of which side loses. More examples: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A99749-2001May30?language=printer http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E5D6123FF935A2575BC0A9629C8B63 Not funny, not appropriate.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/the-bush-jobs-record/

Hmm, 5 million jobs added under Bush's tenure, OK.

Wait, 23 million (!) jobs added under Clinton's tenure.

Yeah, those tax cuts for the rich sure do "keep jobs in America" (to quote McCain).

Bush happens to have the worst record on jobs created since 1961 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms). Yeah, give me some more of that!

Notice how well "trickle down" economics worked when Reagan tried them, too.

Delusions of grandeur are often accompanies by delusions of persecution. Essentially, if I believe myself to be really great and important, then whenever something goes wrong for me, I'm likely to assume it's because someone is out to get me. That's where the "paranoid" part comes in.

There's actually a very interesting article about that here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/fashion/28truman.html

>>Journalists don't create stories, they document existing events.
I'm sorry, but that's just naive.

Just a few examples to hopefully open your eyes:

Dan Rather's famous forged Air National Guard documents (for which he was fired, but stands behind with his infamous "fake but accurate" quote):
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12526&only
This wasn't just some staff reported in Podunk Arkansas, it was a lead anchor who was willing to end his career in order to further propaganda piece that was obviously fake. Makes me wonder what other pieces he pushed in his many years as news anchor and senior editor.

The New York Times accepts (read: publishes without edit) Barack Obama's Op-Ed but "rejects" a piece by John McCain. No bias there. Nosir. Nope.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/21/mccain.nyt/

Reuters accepts the most amateurish photoshop jobs:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut ...and only after an internet firestorm has to admit it:
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/reuters-caught-blowing-smoke-faking-photos

Tennessee newspaper published blatantly altered photograph to promote political agenda: http://terryfrank.net/?p=2964

Iran gets in on the photoshop act: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/index.html?hp

And then you have the FREQUENT odd Reuters captions: It seems that every time Israel takes out a terrorist with a missile, the area is flooded with "youth" that "inspect" the wreckage. (in reality, they are looking for bits of body parts, for they believe that by touching bits of the dead "martyr", they help secure a spot in heaven. Grisly and repulsive.)
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25627_Palestinian_Car_Swarm_Watch

And I'll finish with the most vile, disgusting example I've ever seen. The Associated (with terrorists) Press publishes staged photographs of dead children arranged by a (so called) palestinian "press agent". Pure propaganda.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22123_Green_Helmet_Admits_Staging_Photos&only

which is promptly carried to the United Nations and presented there:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/22669_Fauxtography_at_the_United_Nations

That's what I was able to put together with 5 minutes of work. I could continue for hours (days?) but hopefully this will open your eyes to the fact that there are people in the "news" that have clear agendas and aren't above creating stories where none exist in order to influence you. Not to mention those who write with bias.

First Sgt. Hatley and the Beauchamp TNR Affair

Updated below
---

A U.S. Army sergeant outed as a murderer in today's NYT seems to be the same one that led the unit involved in last years New Republic / Beauchamp controversy. Then he denied atrocities Beauchamp reported on.

In July 2007 a U.S. soldier under the pseudonym Scott Thomas wrote about the war in Iraq at the The New Republic's Shock Troops blog. Scott Thomas described some disgusting behavior by his fellow soldiers. Such included running over dogs with Bradley fighting vehicles and playing with a child's scull found in a mass grave.

The rightwing media, the Weekly Standard, the National Review and many others, went nuts over these reports. The blogger's name was disclosed as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Alpha Company, 1-18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division, and after some heavy push and pull and an army investigation, The New Republic said it "cannot stand by these stories."

At the time of that controversy, a mil-blogger in the U.S. wrote to Beauchamp's company senior non-commissioned officer, identified as First Sgt. John E. Hatley, and got this response:

My soldiers conduct is consistently honorable. [...] Again, this young man has a vivid imagination and I promise you that this by no means reflects the truth of what is happening here. I'm currently serving with the best America has to offer. [...]

Sincerely,

1SG Hatley

Today the NYT reports about willful killing of Iraqis who were taken prisoners by the U.S. troops.

In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements.
...

After the killings, the first sergeant -- the senior noncommissioned officer of his Army company -- told the other two to remove the men's bloody blindfolds and plastic handcuffs, according to the statements made to Army investigators, which were obtained by The New York Times.
...
The soldiers, all from Company D, First Battalion, Second Infantry, 172nd Infantry Brigade, have not been charged with a crime.
...
The accounts of and confessions to the killings, by Sgt. First Class Joseph P. Mayo, the platoon sergeant, and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr., Company D's senior medic and an acting squad leader, were made in January in signed statements to Army investigators in Schweinfurt, Germany.

In their statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy each described killing at least one of the Iraqi detainees on instructions from First Sgt. John E. Hatley, who the soldiers said killed two of the detainees with pistol shots to the back of their heads.
...
Last month, four other soldiers from Sergeant Hatley's unit were charged with murder conspiracy for agreeing to go along with the plan to kill the four prisoners, in violation of military laws that forbid harming enemy combatants once they are disarmed and in custody.

Is the First Sgt. John E. Hatley who l

Actually chimps do kill each other, they do seem to do it in tribal groups and it seems to be related to territorial claims. No one knows, or perhaps can know, the true reason behind it, although it does look similar to warfare.

A quick search here turned up plenty of information.

In the 1950s the government set about a huge project to link America's cities and states via high speed road links. The investment has paid off well, and a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely.

Or the states could step up and do it themselves:

Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power (Transmission) Project

The grid can't handle wind power! Now I get it!

It's the gospel truth. I read it in Pravda.

Although it was poorly put, he does have a point. Cities naturally operate more efficiently, so while each citizen can afford to pay more taxes, they don't need as much taxes to operate. Some things the federal government pays for, like the highway system, are more keyed to land area than population. Places that are more sparsely populated will most likely get more money than they give.

Likewise, the Red/Blue State probability is linked to population density: people starting families tend to move to places of low population density, and they are highly correlated with voting Republican.

Now, is it a good thing that some states are supporting others? Ideally, every state would be equally efficient, but realistically they are not; no one is going to build a Manhattan in the Rockies. But could the more efficient states still benefit from subsidizing the less efficient ones? Ostensibly yes. For example: Minnesota and Washington both "pull their weight", but none of the states connecting them do. Still, the two benefit from having federally funded rail lines and highways between them, along with police, an educated populace, a number of national parks, etc.

All that said, "bridges to nowhere" greatly annoy me.

Hmm, New York has always been a bit bizarre about taxes. I remember when they were sending people to New Jersey shopping malls to photograph the license plates of people who were buying things in New Jersey to avoid the high New York state sales tax.

So then the question changes to "what constitutes a physical presence?". The largest online merchants such as Amazon have warehouses all over the country, but don't ever actually sell anything on-site, they just ship from there. So does that count as a retail presence, or not?

And just to make things more difficult, the NY law in question isn't even talking about warehouses. It's talking about affiliates. NewEgg is located in California, but they have an affiliate program. I'm an affiliate of theirs and I live in NY. Does that make NewEgg have a physical location in New York state? Of course not. I'm not an employee of NewEgg, I'm just an affiliate. I post a link to NewEgg on my website and get a small kickback for any sales that it generates. The website that I run is hosted by a company in Texas. Does that mean that NewEgg has a "physical presence" in Texas also and should pay Texas sales tax? The whole "affiliate = physical presence" argument is just a money grab. Then again, we shouldn't be surprised. This is the state that also taxes telecommuters on their full income even if they only work inside NY for a short period of time. (See the story of Scott Smallwood: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/20tax.html )

You (or someone who looks like you) must have done something to piss them off in the past. Apparently, crows (and I suppose their relatives, magpies) can recognize the faces of human enemies.

when the site also supports OSX and Firefox.

It's too easy to marginalize so take this as a lesson. "Supports" is where you get buggered on this one.

JUST like nbcolympics.com, it works on some OSX, but not an intel mac from a couple of years ago. And exactly how many users are *actually* going to go download firefox just for the occasion? My wife just closed safari and never went back.

You are really screwed if you are on PowerPC and Linux. Nothing works. Not even wine.

So, "compatible" is needlessly complicated and as recent news indicates aggressively minimizes their audience to the point that mostly static content drew the same audience numbers. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/sports/olympics/25online.html?ref=technology

Microsoft bought video delivery privileges to force silverlight downloads. Some people call that a conspiracy. For me, that's just business. But there's still *something* wrong with that.

Margaret Thatcher has dementia at 82 and has had it at least 8 years according to the news report today.

That means she's had it from the age of at least 74. And she is in roughly the same if not better class for nutrition and health care, no? So the possibility can not be ruled out from a "social status" standpoint.

Of course, it is also possible Mr. Obama could choke on a pretzel one day and lose oxygen to his brain for just long enough to cause brain damage. But what are the odds of that ever happening to a president?

The link on TFS which refers to this page describing "the way [Google] treats its employees" only details how Google raised the charge for in-house daycare by 75%.

Parents lose big when a company downsizes or restructures their benefits. This is an indirect form of age discrimination because older folks are more likely to have families.

A company I worked for in the past restructured their benefits by changing employees more for their health and dental insurance and "offset" the losses by giving every employee a flat pay raise but after some calculation I found that employees with no dependents benefited from a good raise and only slightly higher insurance payments while those with families(who insured their families, at least) suffered net losses.

Actually I did. Just how stupid are you? Try reading. it. again.

The link is there now. It wasn't when I responded to your posting earlier. Why? I don't know. My account is configured to insert the domain name after linked text (to avoid the URL trolls), and it wasn't there when I pasted your quote into my reply.

But, I went to look at your link. To be clear, WSWS.org is the World Socialist Web Site. I prefer to avoid citation of clearly partisan sources, but I read through the article and found the assertion you quoted:

The top .1% of Americans earned almost as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.

Based on other data I've seen, something didn't add up. So, I went to look at the actual report. I was only able to find the version dated through 2002, but the home page of one of the authors has the Excel data, updated through 2006. I wasn't able to find the statement in question in the report. I also wasn't able to find the NY Times article that the WSWS article cites. So, I don't know the source for the statement.

But, we should be able to verify it ourselves. Download the Excel workbook and take a look at the worksheet named "Table0". There, you can see the average income (including capital gains) for the top 0.1% is $3.7M. Multiply that by the number of families (133,325) and you get a total of $495B. In the same table, the total number of families is 148M. Dividing 495B by 74M (1/2 of 148M) yields an average income per family for the bottom 50% that must be less than $6,672, if the statement in question were correct.

The workbook doesn't contain information by percentile, for less than 90%. But, this graph was derived from Table A-3: Selected Measures of Household Income Dispersion: 1967 to 2003. The table on the same page shows the same data, and in 2003, the average income of the lowest quintile is $10,536 -- substantially higher than the implied average of $6,672 for the lowest 50% that is claimed above.

I'm not claiming that the report is in error, although there is certainly some controvery about it. However, it appears that someone's interpretation doesn't meet the smell test. You might want to take some time reading the entire report and corroborate it against other sources.

The graph from Wikipedia (derived from a US Census report) appears to support part of your claim: the gap between the 95th percentile and the 10th percentile has certainly gotten wider since 1967. The gap between the 10th and 50th percentiles also has gotten wider, although to a lesser extent. However, the gap has leveled off or even declined slightly since 1999 -- ironically since Bush 43 took office.

I looked carefully through your cited article and noticed that his concern is based on a forecast of "the combined Federal cost of Social Security and Medicare", whereas the more recent article I cited has Krugman pointing out that most of these huge projections comes from Medicare. Krugman goes on to argue that Medicare costs are far more speculative. Here is one of his columns on Medicare being more of a concern than Social Security.

The source you linked says "Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years..." So, yea, no difference.

Well, if you look past the abstract, the report estimates that Obama's proposals would raise the debt by $3.5 trillion, and McCain's proposals would raise it by $5 trillion. Neither is good, but there is certainly a difference.

The sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts alone will cut my income, and I am barely middle class.

Obama's plan does not call for sunsetting of the middle-class provisions of the Bush tax cuts. Paul Krugman's column last Friday has a more thorough analysis of how the middle-class is affected by the two candidates' tax proposals. As for the payroll tax increase not included in the analysis I cited, it would only affect those earning over $250 thousand, hardly the middle class, however I won't deny that it may be quite large.

Of course, that's just a scheme to extend the viability of Social Security for a few more years, so people will ignore its impending collapse for a while longer. McCain isn't really addressing it at all.

The impending demise of social security has been greatly exaggerated. I will refer you to another article by Paul Krugman. When that article was written, the very conservative estimates of the Social Security Administration had the trust fund running out in 2042.

It appears that your main concern is the national debt. Based on recent history, the Democrats and Republicans are hardly the same when it comes to national debt.

In 10 years most of those cells would already be your own for several cell generations.
If there is going to be rejection, that would have to happen much sooner than 10 years.

It was 1989 all over again as well:

In two small Illinois towns, a one-page fax newspaper called Fax Today has challenged the local daily with some success, prompting predictions that similar fax papers could spread like a virus across the country and pose a threat to newspapers.
What makes Fax Today different is that it is free to subscribers and supported by advertising. It was started in 1989 in Effingham, Ill., by Jack M. Schultz, an entrepreneur with no newspaper experience. He expanded the service to Bloomington in 1990. The enterprise is profitable, Mr. Schultz said, and he sees significant potential for growth.
The last two years have seen a flurry of experiments in delivering news by fax. For instance, The Chicago Tribune, The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune abandoned fax papers that charged a subscription fee for a one-page afternoon update of business news.
The Los Angeles Times provides a free summary of news via fax to government officials and diplomats in Moscow as a promotional vehicle.
The New York Times has three fax news products aimed at areas where the newspaper is not readily available: a six-page fax newspaper for hotels in Japan, which emphasizes Japanese news; a six-page international edition for Australia and other foreign countries, and an eight-page edition for cruise ships. Small Fax Newspaper Shakes Up Its Press Rivals [August 12, 1991]

The RCA Radio Fax receiver is fascinating and provocative.

In 1939 for small print runs you cut a stencil for a mimeograph machine - the tech from hell - or you bought a letterpress out of the back pages of Popular Science.

The dry paper home fax machine that can deliver legible 7 pt. text and halftoned photographs is pure science fiction.

You might not want be able to justify a $260 radio fax machine for your home - but it's not hard to see what it brings to the Chris-Craft cabin cruiser or the branch office.

30 miles at 30 MHz. 100 watts. Perhaps ten times that range at lower frequencies and higher power. The thing ran off a clock. There were no external controls whatever.

That alone had to be an eye-opener for the shortwave hobbyist.

I'll give you botches.

Don't count on the ammo box too, guns are useless against an army with tanks, snipers and airplanes.

Tell that to the Chinese. At the Tiananmen Square protests the 38th Army, responsible for security in Beijing, and other local units refused to fire on demonstrators. So the People's Army had to send in the 27th Army, based outside of Beijing. Chinese officials were afraid the army would split into warring factions because of this. It would be even worse in the US military. I don't know about you but I served in the US Army and just as happened in Viet Nam when soldiers fragged officers and others when they gave bad orders, plenty of people in the US military would do the same if they were ordered to fire on people in the US.

Falcon

I would love to believe that you are correct, but "tell that to" the Germans when they allowed, no voted in, Hitler (and I am of German decent), or "tell that to" the Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on unarmed protesting students (you are old enough to remember that if you were in Veitnam). I am becoming more and more concerned for the future of our once great country. Our Congress, Presidents and bleeding-heart liberals can't give our rights and money and soldiers' lives away fast enough. I am often reminded of the old saying "Charity begins at home". If we aren't strong at home, how can we help others? If we don't wake up very, very soon, we will have tipped over the point of no return. Oh, and BTW, I know a Chinese, now American citizen, and she has warned me not to ever trust the Chinese government - "They hate America". Your thoughts?

Don't count on the ammo box too, guns are useless against an army with tanks, snipers and airplanes.

Tell that to the Chinese. At the Tiananmen Square protests the 38th Army, responsible for security in Beijing, and other local units refused to fire on demonstrators. So the People's Army had to send in the 27th Army, based outside of Beijing. Chinese officials were afraid the army would split into warring factions because of this. It would be even worse in the US military. I don't know about you but I served in the US Army and just as happened in Viet Nam when soldiers fragged officers and others when they gave bad orders, plenty of people in the US military would do the same if they were ordered to fire on people in the US.

Falcon

I used the same article as a component of a short essay on artistic taste.

As if we needed another reason.

But if we were to generate our energy locally, with renewable resources, not only would we leave a nicer place for our kids, grandkids, and their offspring, we'd also improve our national sovereignty. Rather than fund deadly radicals, we'd fund the nice guy down the street. Rather than ship our cash to entities who threaten us at every turn, we'd fund your next-door neighbors. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, no matter how wealthy you happen to be, this is a good idea.

Hear, hear. I suggest you forward your post to Senator Edward Kennedy and RFK2 and the Cape Cod liberals who, while saying that we need to embrace alternative energy sources, actively blocked a wind farm project because, partly, the 400 foot turbines placed 6 miles offshore would "steal the stars and nighttime views".

It seems that the high priests of the "green movement," led by such illuminaries as Gore and Kennedy, fully embrace the "do as I say, not as I do" principle of life.

No, nothing drastic will occur in the next 10 years due to global warming. There will be increased droughts, but we always have droughts. Hurricanes will have increased strength, but there will always be hurricanes. Sea level will be a bit higher, but due to tides, the sea level is always changing anyway.

If you're expecting a disaster like you see in a movie, it will never come. If you can deny global warming today, I see no reason you wouldn't deny it 20 years from today.

If you want to see signs of global warming, you might want to keep your eye on the Arctic ice. It's already melting, and the Arctic is expected to be ice free in the summer in 20 years. You'll also want to watch for drought and problems with fresh water supplies in the American southwest. On the other hand, if you can dismiss the current Arctic ice melt and droughts, I don't see any reason you wouldn't dismiss them in twenty years, even if they're noticeably worse.

I only recently saw An Inconvenient Truth, where Gore likens us to a frog in a slowly boiling pot, that will let himself boil as long as the temperature rises slowly enough. You've just demonstrated this point very well.

European aircraft design is elegant...

    http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-06-13-a-380-usat_x.htm

Whereas American aircraft design is clunky and not timeless:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/opinion/25mon3.html?th&emc=th

In NYC on Aug 10th, some protesters projected a film onto the Chinese Consulate in NYC.

Here's video on YouTube [Warning, there are some graphic scenes].

Not a laser, but interesting trick nonetheless.

An advantage for younger gymnasts is that they are lighter and, often, more fearless when they perform difficult maneuvers, said Nellie Kim, a five-time Olympic gold medalist for the former Soviet Union who is now the president of the women's technical committee for the Swiss-based International Gymnastics Federation.

(NYT article).

Younger people are more flexible, more slender hips and less BMI give younger gymnasts a better center of gravity, and it's easier to control lighter, shorter limbs in spins, and they don't land as hard on the dismounts.

Don't worry, you'll be voting regularly after you've died...

You don't need E-Voting machines for that. We use paper ballots here in Alabama, and every single election, there's always a scandal in some counties because according to the voting rolls, people showed up to vote who've long been dead. The dead seem to particularly love voting by absentee ballot in some of our counties.

Alabama county accused of voter fraud

Officials Investigate 3 Alabama Counties in Voter Fraud Accusations

VOTER FRAUD SPREADING IN ALABAMA, CRADLE OF CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

At least our officials are finally doing something about it. Of course, this wouldn't be a much of a problem if we made them purge the voter rolls more often. This seems to go on in a lot of states with an electronic database of voters, but with paper balloting for election day. Mississippi purged 100,000 dead voters from their rolls earlier this year to try and eliminate some of this zombie voting.

this suggests that it's not really a huge worldwide scandal, rather annoyance from the countries who could have won

Just to be clear (and I'm not sure whether or not you are suggesting this), a lot of people have been saying this is only a sour grapes thing from the US since we lost. However, this topic has been an issue since before the games even began. The earlist reference I can find to it was the following article, posted July 27 (2 days after China announced who their gymnasts would be).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sports/olympics/27gymnasts.html

It's not just being smaller or shorter (although being short, you have a lower center of balance.) When a girl starts to mature into a woman and gains breasts and her hips widen, it throws her center of balance off. This makes a big difference when it comes to performing on things like the balance beam.

Bella Karolyi has been stating openly all along that he's certain that several girls on the Chinese team were under age. (It's fun to watch Bob Costas squirm when he does.) But he's been coaching girls in gymnastics for decades, so he ought to know. And he's said it's nothing new, especially with authoritarian, governments controlling the countries so it's easy to change their documentation:

He recalled Kim Gwang Suk, a North Korean gymnast who showed up at the 1991 world championships with two missing front teeth. Karolyi, who said he thought Kim must have been younger than 11 at the time, and others contended that those front teeth had been baby teeth and that permanent teeth had not yet replaced them. Her coaches said she had lost them years before, during an accident on the uneven bars.

At those world championships, Kim was 4 feet 4 inches and about 62 pounds, and she claimed to be 16. At one point, the North Korean Gymnastics Federation listed her at 15 for three straight years; the federation was later barred from the 1993 world championships for falsifying ages.

"Oh, come on, she was just in diapers and everyone could see that, just like some of the Chinese girls are now," Karolyi said. "If you look close, you can see they still have their baby teeth. Little tiny teeth!"

I'm waiting for the charges of bribery to the judges. They've got the judging now so that anyone who has a player in the event does not have someone from that country judging things. Sounds good. But something is up because the Chinese have scored consistently higher even with major stumbles in their routine while Americans (and other countries) perform practically flawless routines and consistently get scored just below the Chinese. And these are routines with the same or close difficulty levels. The other day an American tied with the Chinese on the uneven parallel and instead of both getting a gold medal, the "computer" automatically ranked the American second.

Oh, and you might find this NY Times article enlightening, especially the following:

.

âoeThere is still a lot of oil to develop out there, which is why we donâ(TM)t call this geological peak oil, especially in places like Venezuela, Russia, Iran and Iraq,â said Arjun Murti, an energy analyst at Goldman Sachs. âoeWhat we have now is geopolitical peak oil.â

Oil shortages are not from lack of desire by the oil companies, or lack of technology or existing resources. Oil shortages - and the corresponding high prices - are because Governments, who overwhelmingly control the oil resources (87%) are restricting supply.

And countries with huge resources - like the US - are sitting by, fiddling as the economy burns to the ground.

This conspiracy theory has been put forward before and disproven.

There is no way in God's green Earth that SOMEONE, with these TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars to be made by increasing to a (virtually) unlimited supply something as indefensible, WOULD NOT have brought these things to market.

You can't convince me that GREED is that powerless a motivator. Whether by countries, or individuals.

.
âoeThere is still a lot of oil to develop out there, which is why we donâ(TM)t call this geological peak oil, especially in places like Venezuela, Russia, Iran and Iraq,â said Arjun Murti, an energy analyst at Goldman Sachs. âoeWhat we have now is geopolitical peak oil.â

Oil shortages are not from lack of desire by the oil companies, or lack of technology or existing resources. Oil shortages - and the corresponding high prices - are because Governments, who overwhelmingly control the oil resources (87%) are restricting supply.

And countries with huge resources - like the US - are sitting by, fiddling as the economy burns to the ground.