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The school board released this statement today.

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/91045839.html

    I particularly appreciated this part "While we deeply regret the mistakes and misguided actions that have led us to this situation"

    The board appears to me to finally realize that this was a horrible thing to do. The board's original position (that everything was fine) shocked me.

Carol Cafiero, who had previously sought to quash a subpoena ordering her to testify, refused to answer questions pertaining to the district's controversial practice of remotely activating webcams on Apple MacBooks issued to high-school students.

It was like a window into "a little LMSD soap opera," a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. "I know, I love it," she is quoted as having replied.

Carol Cafiero, who had previously sought to quash a subpoena ordering her to testify, refused to answer questions pertaining to the district's controversial practice of remotely activating webcams on Apple MacBooks issued to high-school students.

It was like a window into "a little LMSD soap opera," a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. "I know, I love it," she is quoted as having replied.

It's an Associated Press story. Here's the same story hosted on Google if it makes you feel better, oh and Yahoo, too, and Salon, oh and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"A lot of people think this is being blown out of proportion," said senior David Freedman, 18. "I believe the school when they say they only used it to find lost or stolen laptops. People realize this is not a real threat."

"It an invasion of privacy, but I'm sure we signed stuff in waivers [when we got the computers]," said Senior Bonnie McFarland, 17.

How the hell much have we failed our children when they can't even be outraged about this? Are they seriously so used to living their lives in public on myspace and facebook that they don't even realize the value of the privacy that the school district stole from them here?

If main stream news sources in copious quantities isn't sufficient corroboration for you, call the court and ask.

Not my fault the school administrators are monumentally stupid.

Oh, and dial back the paranoia a notch. It got away from you.

Just curious.... Is the company name changing or is this just branding of services?

Only the branding of services... probably because someone sensible in the company knows the new name probably won't last. Email addresses won't change. There's an article from the Philly fishwrap here

I linked to the wrong section of the article - it should've been this:

On July 12, 1993, a United States-led operation was launched on what was believed to be a safe house in Mogadishu where members of Aidid's Habar Gidir clan were meeting.[8] In reality, elders of the clan, not gunmen, were meeting in the house.[9] According to U.N. officials, the agenda, advertised in the local newspaper, was to discuss ways to peacefully resolve the conflict between Aidid and the multinational task force in Somalia,[9] and perhaps even to remove Aidid as leader of the clan.[10]

During the 17-minute combat operation, U.S. Cobra attack helicopters fired 16 TOW missiles and thousands of 20-millimeter cannon rounds into the compound, killing 73 of the clan elders.[9][11] It would also lead to the deaths of four journalists, Dan Eldon, Hos Maina, Hansi Kraus and Anthony Macharia, who were killed by angry Somali mobs when they arrived to cover the incident.[12]

Some believe that this American attack was a turning point in unifying Somalis against the U.S. efforts in Somalia, including moderates and those opposed to the Habar Gidir.

The numbered references are:

[8] Bowden 1999 p. 1.
[9] Bowden 1999 p. 84.
[10] Bowden 1999 pp. 110-116.
[11] Bowden 1999 p. 113.
[12] Bowden 1999 pp. 113-114.

The text referenced seems to be available online here, though correlating the page numbers isn't exactly easy.

I don't think people are arguing that you should get vaccinated for the flu because it will protect you from the grim reaper. But good job debunking that one. Now we no longer have the false hope that the H1N1 vaccine was really a panacea for all disease and death.

5 links to the same story about one person who came down with a rare disorder 10 days after getting a flu shot. Say it with me: "coincidence is not causality".

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/64730177.html

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Miscellaneous/virginia_player_wins_200_million_lottery_jackpot_101020090859.html

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/1285214.html

You don't want to get a flu shot, good for you. Neither do I!

But there's no empirical evidence that it's at all dangerous, and plenty that says it does just what the health officials and doctors suggest: protects against the flu. Every argument I've seen against the H1N1 flu shot (including yours) falls into the FUD category.

More civilized? Philadelphia just had some nice "security" recently.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/cityhall/46491137.html

This approach has been proven to be quite effective.

Here are few links:
Philadelphia Inquirer,
UPI (Two quotes: "Ghostwriters paid by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Wyeth worked on dozens of articles published in medical journals under doctors' names, court documents indicate." and "A Wyeth spokesman said the ghostwritten articles were scientifically sound and subject to peer review by the journals that published them.")
NYT

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/nj/20090417_Cigarette_smuggling_may_be_on_the_rise.html

here in Philly it's possible to get a ticket if you're found to 'too frequently' happen to be parked at broken meters. the assumption is that you're a vandal. if those broken meters happened to actually be vandalized, you may find yourself having a longer conversation than a parking ticket. http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columnists/stu_bykofsky/45599557.html

For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?

It's already on the books, and has been since Elizabethan England. It's starting to be enforced again, at least it is in Pennsylvania.

The law can force adult children to pay their parents' health-care costs. If Mom and Pop can't pay, you pay. If they have the money but refuse to pay, you pay. If you don't, watch your credit rating sink under the weight of a legal judgment that will haunt you for life.

Don't think debt collectors won't try every possible method to squeeze your money out of you and your family for as long as it takes.

Maybe not the credit cards, but the health care industry has:

In Pennsylvania you are responsible for paying off your parents' debts. The 'boomers are going to have a field day farming their debt off on us...

For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?

Maybe he read this article the other day. Basically the son gets sued for a medical bill because mom didn't pay it. Who would think such an arcane law still existed?

Sorry, just got off my sister from South Carolina. Her friend was in the car that was mentioned in this story.

Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.

That's exactly why I hate newspapers - they're so fucking inconvenient. Granted, I grew up with free news online, which beat the hell out of the Philadelphia Inquirer (here is just one extremely bullshitty long-form piece I found on their website in about 2.4 seconds, after wading through the four stories about solid precipitation falling from the sky).

On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that I read more newspaper articles than you. It's amazing how much you miss by only reading one media source. Efficiency and breadth are much more compelling factors for me.

new format found:

http://media.philly.com/images/condom.jpg

Uhm. No, they weren't WMDs, because they were inert. They could not cause Mass Destruction, which is the "MD" part of "WMD". They were just big hunks of steel.

Besides, chemical weapons were not the "mushroom cloud" Bush was talking about to scare us, nor was it the "Yellow cake" or "aluminum centrifuge tubes" they were screaming about. Bush was talking very specifically about Saddam building nukes.

THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ. PERIOD.

I think there's some quote relevant here....something about forgetting history and repeating it....

Uh, didn't a whole bunch of yellow cake just end up in Canada from Iraq? Why YES, yes it did.

And again, when you say that there were NO WMD's found... um, my links prove otherwise. I said they were not in the quantities expected, but they were there. And to say they were inert.... well, I guess that inert YellowCake is going to power those inert Canadian homes this winter. Besides, would you like the inside of one of those shells?

THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ. PERIOD.

So did THESE guys gas themselves? Well, they must have if there were no WMD's in Iraq. Unless, of course, you are wrong, or maybe even lying.

While your point about trying to present a more pithy message is valid, your bullet quote is incorrect.

Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality

The difference might appear minor, but this is what the pols do. They get you to believe they support something, but then come back later with BS like "well, what I said was I believe in the principle of foo" - which gives them plenty of room to claim that they never really supported foo, or that you just have a difference of opinion on what foo is, and what you think of foo, s/he never really understood it to mean bar.

Whether it is drilling for domestic fuel, bailing out people who took out loans for homes they couldn't afford (it isn't a tax-payer-funded "bail-out" my senator claims), bridges to nowhere, peanut museums, etc pols will always, always find a way to spin it and make us seem like we don't know what we we're talking about. How often has Sen. Obama said something like "Well, that's not the person (Rev. Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko, etc) I knew"? He isn't alone in this two-facedness, it comes from both sides, but the expediency of disassociation from notorious Chicago politics in this case is interesting at least.

It just appears to me as someone who is trying to objectively evaluate the options, that his supporters have drunk the kool-aid. He can't do anything wrong, and any criticism of him, his proposed policies, his past, or the company he keeps, is shouted down or met with cries of racism. It isn't about the exchange of ideas with this guy or his campaign. There is no debate, no discussion. If you don't like the direction he wants to take the country, you're a racist, and that is the only possible reason he might lose. Really sad, and makes me very wary of his administration might do to free speech in this country. From what I've been able to gather, WGN inviting on someone from the left to argue for Obama wasn't good enough. The campaign made an obvious effort to muzzle speech they didn't like - instead of arguing against the content and making their case why it was wrong.

Yesterday I saw Sen. Shumer (D-NY) and Sen. Kyle (R-AZ) on one of the talking heads programs. They obviously disagreed on current events, yet it was civil, respectful, and they both made their arguments well.

To the original point, when you quote a pol, quote them exactly - because every word matters, and they'll use that to play the people and the tax payers like a fiddle. To state flat out that Sen. Obama supports net neutrality is simply not correct.

Do you think it hasn't been tried? Ask Comcast about what happened in New York.

depending on the number of users you have, how abusive they are [...]

Well depending on how abusive you are, Mordac, you may declare the letter "e" (the most frequently occuring in English) to be the separator — and punish attempts to use it as "abuse" by refusing service or worse.

entirely plausible to use a delimiter that *is* allowed in usernames

Sorry, I was talking about 99.99% of Unix installations out there. I did not account for yours... My post certainly was system-specific (no e-mail system today can afford to be incompatible with Unix), but trying to be "policy-specific" — accounting for all policies out there — is simply impractical for a generic method.

That article is interesting. I wonder if you could use a similar concept to battle viruses like HIV. Take HIV out of your body since it is good at evading the immune system, edit the payload with anti-HIV genes, and pump back in. The new viruses go infect target cells, but instead of inserting HIV genes, they insert genes to interfere with HIV. That concept is working by extracting cells outside the body and using HIV to deliver an anti-hiv gene.

reference here: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20080207_Study_says_genetic_trick_slows_AIDS_virus_growth.html

But im wondering if inserting such a virus directly would achieve the same thing.

Last week some 18 year-old punk was speeding and hit two women who were in town from St. Louis to see the Cardinals play the Phillies. One of them later died.

The cops found his MySpace page, and it's apparently full of pics of him drinking and smoking pot, and the article even says he used a mugshot from a prior arrest as his default photo. The cops got wind of it and snagged his computer and other stuff from his house with a search warrant, and they'll probably use it to stave off any attempt at the "but he's a good boy who just made a mistake" defense.

After reading the article, I am completely disgusted... especially with his parents, under whose noses it seems much of his bad behavior has been going on. Call me old-fashioned, but I think parents should try to raise their kids to, you know, not be a colossal fuckup.

The best part, IMHO, is that for all his "I'm just Mr. Buster Badass" posturing on his MySpace page, he is apparently throwing up in jail because he's so scared (insert derisive Nelson Muntz laugh here).

~Philly

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board is considering vending machines for wine.

Users will have to register for the ability to use the machine, then put their ID / hand / arm into the machine each time, plus will be remotely monitored during the process.

Check out the pic of it - comical!

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080615_Convenience__LCB-style_.html

Ron

By then either McCain or Obama will be President. The Senate doesn't actually have authority to do anything to Bush once he's out of Office, so the whole thing'll be moot.

Don't worry, His Holiness has indicated he would be glad to investigate Bush, et al after his anointing - I mean inauguration.

There wouldn't be a legal problem with any of this if, as you claim, the Boy Scouts of America were purely a private organization. But that's not the case. They seek out and accept public funding for many of their activities, and chapters have even gone so far as to sue the government when it decides to take the moral and legal high ground and stop subsidizing their exclusionary activities.

Now if the BSA were to stop accepting any public money for their activities, the legal problems would go away. Granted, a private organization that excludes homosexuals is still no less despicable than one which denies Jews or Blacks; I and others would continue to criticize them, in the same way that most people criticize, e.g., the KKK, while fully recognizing their right to express their own views. But the gross injustices to tax-paying atheists and gays are what must be addressed, and they can easily be addressed without interfering with the organization's "moral values".

Our new head honcho, Mayor Nutter... yes, that it is real name... just implemented this on the 5th.

There are two methods [to sign up]: Either online at www.ReadyNotifyPA.org, or on a cell phone by texting your county code (BUCKS, CHESCO, DELCO, MONTCO or PHILA) and dialing 411911.

In February, when FBI agents and local police arrived at his door with a search warrant, they acted cautiously, they testified, because they believed he legally owned a dozen or more weapons.

Vosburgh didn't answer their knock. For the next 27 minutes, authorities tried to talk him into opening the door.

When authorities finally entered the apartment, they said they found a computer pried open, its hard drive smashed into several parts, strewn elsewhere. They also found smashed thumb drives, one of which lay in the toilet, they said.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/11075356.html

When authorities entered Vosburgh's apartment, they found broken and bent parts of the computer in the kitchen trash and in a bathroom toilet. A hammer was found on the floor outside the bathroom, and scissors nearby.

Vosburgh told authorities that the computer had been destroyed earlier to get rid of a virus. Still, agents were able to recover an external hard drive from his desk.

During the 2 1/2-day trial, prosecutors showed jurors images of five nude prepubescent girls found on the external hard drive that showed the girls with their legs spread apart exposing their genitals.

The hard drive also contained more than 2,000 images of a 13-year-old girl

Authorities alleged that Vosburgh also tried three times to download images from a hardcore kiddie-porn message board known as "Ranchi" in October 2006.

"Being convicted of charges like this is sort of career-ending,"

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/11074616.html

In February, when FBI agents and local police arrived at his door with a search warrant, they acted cautiously, they testified, because they believed he legally owned a dozen or more weapons.

Vosburgh didn't answer their knock. For the next 27 minutes, authorities tried to talk him into opening the door.

When authorities finally entered the apartment, they said they found a computer pried open, its hard drive smashed into several parts, strewn elsewhere. They also found smashed thumb drives, one of which lay in the toilet, they said.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/11075356.html

When authorities entered Vosburgh's apartment, they found broken and bent parts of the computer in the kitchen trash and in a bathroom toilet. A hammer was found on the floor outside the bathroom, and scissors nearby.

Vosburgh told authorities that the computer had been destroyed earlier to get rid of a virus. Still, agents were able to recover an external hard drive from his desk.

During the 2 1/2-day trial, prosecutors showed jurors images of five nude prepubescent girls found on the external hard drive that showed the girls with their legs spread apart exposing their genitals.

The hard drive also contained more than 2,000 images of a 13-year-old girl

Authorities alleged that Vosburgh also tried three times to download images from a hardcore kiddie-porn message board known as "Ranchi" in October 2006.

"Being convicted of charges like this is sort of career-ending,"

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/11074616.html

How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.

I think the problem is that of now, everyone breaks the law every now and then without really thinking about it. If the world got to a state where you got punished every time you broke the law even slightly then such issue would get quite serious.

In fact, I'd wager (if you have a car) that you broke the speed limit somewhere the last time you drove even if it was simply 1 to 5mph over the limit.

The real problem is that many local and state government gets a great deal of revenue from speeding and parking tickets so rather than to alleviate the core problem of they encourage quotas and sometimes post arbitrary low speed limits in order to increase revenue. I mentioned parking tickets because there was story a while back where an Apple Store offered to buy two parking meters outside their store to mark as no-parking zone for aesthetics (you know Apple) at the theoretical price of what those parking meters could provide if they were maned 24/7 365 days a year, but the city refused on the grounds it had never been done but moreover they made more money from parking tickets than the actual meters. Its the same with speeding... They don't want reduction but they want the violations.

If a cell phone system allowed them to charge violators instantly it would result in more of this at the extreme not to mention possible corruption. Recently in Philadelphia, there is a big spat between city hall and the Parking Authority about revenue and where it is going and complaints about corruption the the Authority organization.

My first suggestion would be to either have revenues earn not go to the gathering organization itself but possibly elsewhere like education or charity.

And if they want a technical solution, then I would argue that make it so cars can't break the posted limit rather than fining them money every time they violate the speed (and or parking). Now keep in mind, I'm probaly one of the more slower drivers out there you'll meet and you'll never see me park in a place I'm not supposed to (I'm that anal) but the issue that these organizations being allowed another way to squeeze money and make things arbitrarily "more illegal" in order to increase revenue bothers me.

None of these government bodies actually want to curb speeding. Their livelihood depends on it.

Look at the demographics yourself.

http://inquirer.philly.com/graphics/homicide_map_2007/

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Phila. leads big cities in murder rate

We had 406 MURDERS in our city of about 1.5 million for 2006. (The gamer in me wants to scream NEW HIGH SCORE!) This doesn't even include the suicides. If all you're working with is 300 gun related deaths in a population of 7.5 million, most of which were suicides, allow me to say that I'm more than a bit jealous.

It's not quite enough to get me to move, (I still love this area, and roots are all here) but it seems to me y'all got it pretty good.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/11910042.html A Penn student who was arrested in connection with AKILL

Their new skyscraper headquarters in Philadelphia isn't going to pay for itself, people!

black rappers are not having to pay for their freedom of expression from their own pockets.

Umm, yes they do, whether it's by using credit cards to generate inventory that is sold out of their trunks, or via record company "advances".

if we take this into account, we can say that freedom of expression was hampered.

Again, I still don't see it. Imus can start a daily podcast for a couple of thousand dollars that would have world-wide reach. Given that he was reportedly paid $8 million per year, he has the resources. He certainly has the built-in audience.

its like democracy - everyone can be candidates, but only the rich can get elected. just like this is a democracy in appearances only, that type of freedom of expression is also one that is in appearances. whatever you say, if you dont have the means to reach people, it wont matter.

I agree 100%. However, Don Imus certainly has the means to reach people.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/d aily/16395390.htm

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - U.S. album sales continued to decline in 2006, down nearly 5 percent from the previous year, but total music sales were up thanks to a huge increase in digital downloads.

About 588.2 million albums were sold in 2006 - a 4.9 percent decline from 2005, according to year-end sales figures released Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan.

But digital sales increased by 65 percent over the previous year, with 582 million tracks sold, and digital album sales more than doubled, with nearly 33 million sold. ...

And for the first time ever a digital song - "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter - sold more than two million copies in one year, thanks to the play it got as the send-off song on American Idol.

Next time some nut starts to explain how "Jesus saved" or "God's love will guide you". Call them on it. Explain to them that what they believe is a fairy tale with zero evidence.

Okay, I'll take you up on that. =) The "zero evidence" schtick is a pet peeve of mine.

You state that Christianity is a "fairy tale with zero evidence." I gather you mean that no claim should be believed unless it's verifiable by evidence. This is naturally a popular refrain here on Slashdot.

But it doesn't work very well. For instance, what evidence would establish that the universe exists? If that's too academic, let me rephrase: what evidence could possibly establish that we don't live in the Matrix? Yet, most people consider belief in a real universe to be quite rational. And they are correct, even though this falls decidedly into your category of "fairy tale[s] with zero evidence."

Your position is called positivism, and it was very popular for a very short time, until we suddenly realized that it makes no sense. The belief that "no claim should be believed unless it is verifiable by evidence," is not verifiable by evidence. It's self-refuting. Accordingly, this philosophy died a rapid death at its own hands... but not before the natural sciences had adopted these notions as (oops!) unquestioned dogma.

In other words, we all believe lots of things that cannot be proven. And we are rationally justified in doing so. But more than that, Godel showed us that some of these propositions will actually be true. There is no good reason to equate the set of true propositions with the set of empirically verifiable propositions.

--

Okay, so your position and mine are both grounded in unprovable assumptions. We know what these are called: axioms. So here's my point.

God is an axiom.

The stereotype of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is one who ardently lives by certain axioms, such as the reliability of logic, or the existence of the universe -- but not others, such as the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural bias, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.

How should one choose an axiom system, then? Logically, they can't be distinguished; yet we know that exactly one (or zero) of them will be true. Fortunately, we have the real world as a guide. It is not the only guide, but it's a good clue. In other words,

Faith is the choice between two plausible alternatives.

Not a blind faith, but judgment leading to confidence. Faith is the unavoidable gap between plausibility and belief -- of anything. I judge that the theistic axiom system is far more complete and plausible than the atheistic one.

First, let's clarify: the Christian axiom system contains all the axioms of science, and always has (though not always followed). I have no objection to evolution, or to the Bible; in the proper axiom system, they are not in conflict. So the Christian model encompasses science, in contrast to your other post claiming that Christians cannot be scientists.

Second, the Christian model encompasses more than the atheistic model. Let's take one example: universal equality, and other such human rights. Under atheistic axioms, human rights are a social construction. This isn't because they necessarily are a construction; the atheistic model simply has no better explanation. This is problematic, because you can't really have a "universal right" that some society invented, can you? We can only apply these ideas within our own culture, which means they're not human rights at all, but (say) Canadian rights. But in reality, we do in fact go around accusing other countries of "human rights violations" like slavery or racial genocide. Of course we do, because most of us really believe that universal rights exist -- just because t

Here's a column published in Philly by someone thinking Democrats were harassing her with robocalls. Even though they sensibly asked why Democrats would do such a thing when it would turn voters off, they thought it was the Democratic candidate. Pretty typical reaction.

Their untypical reaction was to call the Democrat's office demanding an explanation. Which turned out to be "it's a Republican dirty trick". But how many people will find out before voting? And how many people will believe it's not Democrats lying to blame Republicans, when they already believe Democrats have been harassing them with robocalls?

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Republicans have followed up their 2002 phonejamming of Democrats' lines (preventing Democrats from getting voters to polls) with enough illegal robocalls to cost $100 MILLION in fines. Of course, those 2002 robocalls got John Sununu Jr (R-NH) into the Senate, where he controls the FCC, and he hasn't given up the job he DDoS'ed his way into. So I don't expect Republicans to cough up the $100M they'd owe for this year's attack on the election process.

Unless maybe enough Republicans get fired in the election tomorrow that they can't do these crimes unpunished anymore. Go to the polls and do your part.

We still have "investigative reporting" (e.g. Bob Woodward et al). My point is most average joes would not normally have the kind of clout with the press that a Woodward-type has, but scandals like the guard memos and such have elevated bloggers to the point where the major cable outlets regularly devote segments to "the blogosphere." My favorite crossover is when the beat reporters get into the blog game - even getting their blogs promoted by the major media outlets (as is the case with my local paper's website, philly.com). Some of the reporter blogs are extremely readable, providing better coverage where the regular constraints of daily publication are not applied.

See e.g. Dick Polman or Howard Kurtz - great reporters with great blogs. When traditional media embraces this kind of outlet, I think you can make an argument that "new media" has arrived, yes.

"They have those sinks that you just put your hands like that and the water comes out," said Sandra Nelson, 14.

"Toilets flush by themselves. It's all just so nice," agreed Bianca Gibson, 14. "I want to give a shout out to Bill Gates and tell him, 'Thank you, so much.' "

You should use Google to watch the videos of insurgent snipers using rifles against US troops. The fact those videos exist pretty much guts your entire argument.

Also, do you think the group you are referring to as "gun nuts" is entirely devoid of military experience? Don't you think it is possible that "gun nuts" have a higher than average likelihood of having military experience?

You should probably read at least "Blackhawk Down" before you post any more foolishness.

All 3 countries spied heavily on their citizens in a means to control them. In each case, the countries used human spies/traitors as well as listening in private conversation. This is well documented on all 3 groups. And yes, there are other examples of countries that do the same. But not in free societies.

Indeed that was the case. But I have heard little of American citizens disappearing from their homes in the dead of night only to undergo later show trials on trumped-up charges followed by public executions. The only situation remotely approaching the kind of actions described by Solzhenitsyn and others is the treatment of terror suspects captured abroad, and I'd say Gitmo's got a ways to go before approaching "gulag" status, regardless of what Amnesty International or the UN Human Rights Commission says. A prison riot, for example, in any of these totalitarian societies would have resulted in mass executions. The only mass executions in Cuba, AFAIK, have been on the other side of the fence, as it were.

Isn't it a bit foolish to ignore what is happening today and offer simple spin and FUDon everything? But we seem to revel in that these days. If nothing else, examine the case of Sibel Edmunds and/or Valerie Plame.

I don't want to open that particular can of worms any farther than to simply say that it saddens me that the focus on Plame has shifted from her and her husband's actions to undermine her employer (which would have gotten her fired had she worked outside of the government) to the leak of her name by Libby/Novak. Suffice it to say that the government, regardless of party affiliation, is full of small people with smaller personalities.

Why nickel and dime people with simple cons, when a good con man can quintuple his earnings all while pulling down a government paycheck, health plan, paid for car and phone?

Like in Pennsylvania, the legislators had a secret 2:00 AM meeting to vote themselves all massive raises in pay and benefits. And here is the sweet kickback deal sealer - all the judges get pay raises too. What judge would overturn a multi-tens of thousands of dollars pay raise against himself?
  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_General_ Assembly )

And that is just the cream off the top - making deals, invisible contracts, after office 'insider consultant' positions, that's the real grease on the wheels of the American 'just-us' system.

Get rid of 'em Poly-tick-ians:
http://www.pacleansweep.com/

Upcoming election:
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/145 50980.htm

Not that voting matters in Pennsylvania - twice the city of Pittsburgh put 'new stadiums' up for vote - twice the massive construction project was voted down, NO by the people, NO for the people, NO way said the people. The government said 'forget you, who the hell are you peasants anyway?' and built themselves two brand new stadiums, and blew up the old Three Rivers Stadium - still owing millions on it!

(Oh and now they are evicting families with children, widows, and senior citizens out of their homes because they can't pay the tripled property taxes to pay for the millionaires playground stadiums. )

Real con-men always are on the side of the law - if you write the rules - you can do whatever the hell you want to do.

Come on. Tell us something we didn't know.

OK. OLN has hired a man named Stanley Cup to promote the NHL playoffs this year.

I guess I stand corrected then. I just can't imagine it happening though - emergency is such a subjective label. Maybe it's because I live in a big city, but that would never fly here. Here in Philadelphia, we have trouble with people who are too scared to speak with police. Its becoming a real problem, here's one example: http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/137 90386.htm Every time I see a "Stop Snitching" shirt it makes me sick.

World Congress on IT @Texas, Unisys for Biometrics

The Philadelphia Inquirer presses within the new week (first week of the fifth Month of 2006), that there will be a 15th World Congress on Information Technology to convene at the town of Austin, conversing among the Republic of Texas. Among the pre-tendered exhibits is one specific scruteny of the agents of that Unisys Corp. According to The Philidelphia Inquirer article,, there concluded and wil

World Congress on IT @Texas, Unisys for Biometrics

The Philadelphia Inquirer presses within the new week (first week of the fifth Month of 2006), that there will be a 15th World Congress on Information Technology to convene at the town of Austin, conversing among the Republic of Texas. Among the pre-tendered exhibits is one specific scruteny of the agents of that Unisys Corp. According to The Philidelphia Inquirer article,, there concluded and wil