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People like you are so fucking obviously stupid. Being ignorant is OK, but stupidity is posting as if you knew anything.

Why in Sam Hill didn't you just Google before posting bullshit?

Which is exactly why lots of people wonder about the intelligence of hiring on the lowest bidder to clean out and stock commercial aircraft.

So I guess in your world the employees at McDonalds will all have TS clearances?

Pay has nothing to do with integrity, or even going nuts some days.

Look, every time something like this happens, people like you cry out for "This Must Never Happen Again!", and we must enact something to make sure This Will Never Happen Again!"

Problem is, your bond the whole world approach simply won't work, and might make things worse. There are certain regions of the world where lopping off people's heads and digging holes, popping a person in and throwing rocks at them until they die is standard procedure for minescule infractions. They just happen to be the most lawless places on earth.

There is a connection.

Which is exactly why lots of people wonder about the intelligence of hiring on the lowest bidder to clean out and stock commercial aircraft. You know, those people who scrunch down everywhere in the cabin with no supervision. Who load baggage in the hold after the TSA 'screens' it. Who deliver boxes and boxes of stuff to all manner of aircraft.

Sure thing:

• "The 9 page, extensive report has since been vindicated many times over with revelations of US, NATO, and Persian Gulf complicity in raising armies of extremists within Libya and along Syria's borders. ISIS itself, which is claimed to occupy a region stretching from northeastern Syria and across northern and western Iraq, has operated all along Turkey's border with Syria, "coincidentally" where the US CIA has conducted years of "monitoring" and arming of "moderate" groups.

   
  In fact, the US admits it has armed, funded, and equipped "moderates" to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. In a March 2013 Telegraph article titled, "US and Europe in âmajor airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb'," it was reported that a single program included 3,000 tons of weapons sent in 75 planeloads paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States. The New York Times in its article, "Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid," admits that the CIA assisted Arab governments and Turkey with military aid to terrorists fighting in Syria constituting hundreds of airlifts landing in both Jordan and Turkey."

And for our "allies"

• "But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISISâ(TM)s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime."

Terrorist groups have absolutely changed their behaviors and communications patterns to increase obfuscation and move attention away from their important operations.

Right, like when Snowden revealed how the USG was listening in on Al Qaeda conference calls.

Oh wait. That was the USG flippantly divulging state secrets to brag about their capabilities.

Authoritarian trolls need a new storyline when the USG did more to clue in Al Qaeda than anything Snowden or Manning did in your wildest dreams.

I was so looking forward to it.

This coming Thursday the Scots will vote on whether to make Scotland an independent nation. And I hope they do because it will be a disaster.

I don’t say this as a prejudiced Irishman. Even though the thistle-arse sheep-shagger Scots swiped Ulster and sent a herd of Presbyterian proddy dogs and porridge wogs to squat on our land and won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 by using unfair—indeed, unheard of —- organization, discipline, and tactics on an Irish battlefield. We Micks only hold a grudge about such things for 300 years or so.

Nor is Scottish independence a misery-loves-company moment for us Irish. True, Irish independence has been no bed of shamrocks, what with the Easter Rebellion, the black-and-tans, the civil war, the IRA, and the Celtic Tiger turning out to be a mangy barn cat drowned in the well.

We Irish don’t hate the Scots per se. They’re too much like us Irish, who all hate each other. So we’re just looking for a fine entertainment from across the Irish Sea as Highland Scots have a donnybrook with Lowland Scots, Glaswegians dust up with Edinburghians, and Clan Dewers unsheathes its claymores for battle with Clan Johnny Walker.

I, however, have a personal reason for wanting an independent Scotland. I’m an ex-foreign correspondent, vintage 1983-2003, who retired after the Iraq War, too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground.

Yet once foreign correspondenting gets in your blood

Ah, there’s nothing like a primitive, quarrel-torn, disastrous Third World country. And Scotland has everything it needs to be what old-school foreign correspondents fondly call a “shit-hole.”

Plus Scotland is conveniently located for aging journos like myself. It can be “covered” from the comforts of The Ritz in London, and there will be plenty of unemployed Scottish unionist refugees hanging around waiting to be hired as drivers and translators.

Scotland’s economy will be the requisite Third World shambles. Scotland’s two dominant political parties are the leftist Scottish National Party and the leftist Scottish Labor Party. These can be counted on to vie in out-lefting each other. Cuba-with-chilblains, here we come!

...

[UNRWA spokesman Chris] Gunness said he didn’t see an issue with the handover, because the local authorities who took control of the rockets reported to the Palestinian government in Ramallah, not to Hamas, which heads the government and runs the police force in Gaza.

“According to longstanding UN practice in UN humanitarian operations worldwide, incidents involving unexploded ordnance that could endanger beneficiaries and staff are referred to the local authorities,” Gunness told The Daily Beast in a statement. “Local authorities fall under the government of national consensus in Ramallah. They pledged to pass a message to all parties not to violate UNRWA neutrality.”

“As far as we are concerned, the government that we are dealing with now is the government of national consensus and they have authority over the organization that we dealt with for getting rid of these rockets from our school,” he said. “We handed them over to the relevant authorities, and that organization, as it were, the experts that came and did it, are under the government of national consensus in Ramallah.”

Citation.

From that same article:

The fate of the rockets is now unknown. While the Gaza police is almost certainly under Hamas’ sway, it’s an open question to what degree any individual police unit cooperates with Hamas’ irregular army. An Israeli official said the Israeli government is working now to try to confirm that Hamas had taken back the rockets and put them back into circulation.

Israeli officials and experts told The Daily Beast there is no doubt that local authorities in Gaza, including but not limited to the police, are loyal to Hamas.

See? Perhaps you've only been reading the Israeli side of the news, as their politicians are tripping over each other to continue these baseless accusations, trying to spin suspicion as fact. Their authorities are still trying to confirm their suspicions, but they have "no doubt" about what happened. This further illustrates the need to consult a wide variety of news sources if one seeks to learn objective truth about any controversial subject. Now, perhaps you have some inside information that would shed some light on this issue. If so, you haven't presented it yet. This seems like a good time for me to mention that it's incredibly sad that The Daily Beast (of Newsweek fame) is offering some of the most comprehensive coverage of this issue (as far as mainstream media goes, at least).

The second incident where rockets were found at a vacant UNRWA is indeed problematic, as UN staff were evacuated before the rockets could be properly disposed of. I haven't seen much information about that event in the press, but nothing I've seen would suggest that anyone at the UN gave rockets to Hamas.

The World Tribune article you link to contains factual errors ("The UN did not say how many rockets were found or what was done with them" is inconsistent with the quote from the UNRWA spokesman I provided above), and it seems likely that John Baird's comments refer to reports issued by Israeli politicians. If you're aware of any reports from unbiased third parties that corroborate the Israeli claims, I'm eager to see them.

You might remember that the author is affectionately referred to as Charles Kraphammer for a reason. Israel "negotiated" a cease fire with Egypt, who, as you know, they aren't at war with. It's like your neighbor coming across your property line to beat the shit out of you, and then making an agreement to stop beating the shit out of you with your other neighbor across the street. Oh, and then demanding that you give up almost half your remaining property for a buffer zone in response to a conflict he started.

From a biography of Alan Turing:

Alan could not stand social chat or what he was pleased to call "vapid conversation". What he really liked was a thoroughly disputatious exchange of views. It was pretty tiring, really. You could take a safe bet that if you ventured on some self evident proposition, as for example, the earth was round, Alan would produce a great deal of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it was almost certainly flat, ovular, or much the same shape as a Siamese cat which had been broiled for fifteen minutes at a temperature of one thousand degrees Centigrade.Alan's hatred of "vapid conversation", his fear of "unsafe" women, and the value he placed on the importance of time--that is to say, his own--did not make him the most amiable or helpful of guests.

The author, Sara Turing, his mother, does not suppose Alan Turing to be misogynist. But it sounds as Alan was not terribly interested in understanding the female sex, much less understanding the "ways of women" well enough to imitate them. I may be doing a disservice in quoting a source that infamously does not grapple with Turing's homosexuality but given that the (original) Turing Test can be misconstrued as analogous to a transgenderist exercise, I feel it's appropriate to question whether Turing was even interested in that sort of thing.

And what, exactly, were his options...
... joining Bradley Manning (aka Chelsea Manning) in Extreme Solitary Confinement that has been described as cruel, inhuman and degrading by the United Nations and many others such as this very detailed report on The Torture Of Bradley Manning by Andrew Blake, or this article by Jesselyn Radack that catalogues exactly How the US Military Tortured Bradley Manning

Russia is the last place that I would have thought of seeking refuge... but I think that we must all trust that Snowden probably knew better than all of us which countries would have succumbed to US pressure to hand him back and which would have taken great pleasure in not doing so.

Now, if Snowden is a true patriot, he will fight for the right to come back home and have a fair hearing before a jury of his peers... and seek to be recognised and judged as a whistleblower.

How is it that you think she had enough influence to convince people to not vaccinate their kids but at the same time, but somehow her change of heart on the matter hasn't affected anyone?

LK

Because she's a fucking lying murderess who is personally responsible for a lot of dead children, rotting in their graves becase of dim witted people who believe a porn star rather than scientists. Her path to forgiennes starts with her bearing the responsibility for those dead children. She is not changing her mind, she's trying to rewrite history

http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

Agreed. Iran has some pretty intelligent people there, and much of the population is college educated.

Indeed.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/n...
The Star Students Of The Islamic Republic
Aug 8, 2008 8:00 PM EDT
Forget Harvard—one of the world's best undergraduate colleges is in Iran.
In 2003, a group of students from Sharif University of Science and Technology in Iran aced the Stanford U EE Department's PhD entrance exam, getting some of the highest scores ever. Bruce A. Wooley said Sharif has one of the best undergrad EE programs in the world, among MIT, Caltech, Stanford. Tsinghua and Cambridge. Other top schools are U. Tehran and Isfahan U. of Technology. They are major players in the international Science Olympics, in physics, mathematics, chemistry and robotics, and =90% go to graduate school or work abroad. Silicon Valley companies including Google and Yahoo employ hundreds of Iranian grads. Iranian parents push their children into medicine and engineering, rather than other fields like law, and entrance is extremely selective. Sharif U. was founded in 1965 by the Shah, under the guidance of MIT advisers. Iranian high-school system also stresses science, with subjects taught in the U.S. only to undergraduates. Education is also a way out of the country, but Iran is suffering a brain drain. Iran's history includes Avicenna, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, and Omar Khayyam.

What I find sad is that so many people feel like they are doing something when they tweet.

- Ms. Obama could have taken action against radical Islamic organizations. Instead, a sharpie, a piece of paper, a tweet - and she's done. Thanks, Michelle, good job.

- Ms. Obama could have a chat with her hubby about the way the USA supports terrorist organizations even giving aid to organization like Al Qaeda that the US is supposedly fighting.

But no, that would require actual effort and taking a genuine stand. Whereas Twitter costs nothing, risks nothing and does nothing - but you can pretend otherwise.

this study is terrible because the psychiatrist has not actually
linked the issue to mental illness and he doesn't mention once mental
health drugs causing the problems. in fact studies have been done that
show it's mental health drugs causing a drop in the average life
expectancy by 25 years on average:
http://www.oregonstatehospital...

also a study done and published in the American Medical Association
showed that on average pharamacuticels were causing 100,000 deaths per
year when correctly prescribed and not due to side effect issues or
misprescribing:
http://themindunleashed.org/20...

Direct link to study publication:
http://www.oregonstatehospital...

Anti-anxiety and sleep aids are also tied to causing a 17.5% increased
chance for instant death in your sleep, as well as increases in
cancer. In these two studies:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

There's a reason the United Nations and World Health Organization also
are calling for a ban on forced psychiatric treatment and consider
treatment forms of torture:
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
http://oregonstatehospital.net...

Scientists "Antipsychotic drugs are schizophrenia's hidden gulag":
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Drugs like Prozac also cause a 12 fold increase in risk of suicide and
homicidal tendencies. Zyprexa also causes mania in bipolar people and
induces first time psychotic episodes. How could it not be that when
all this is known they don't mention it once in an article about
people with mental illness having reduced life spans?

More articles and videos about medications causing severe illness and
the over diagnosing of people. BTW, another cause of death for people
with mental illness is the chronic abuse and neglect they face in
forced treatment programs and treatment in general, and also
experimentation and abuse by the government. More details on this
here: http://www.oregonstatehospital...

Documentary video covering the abusive history of psychiatry here:
http://cdn.oregonstatehospital...

Looks like the study linking the drop in life expectancy to mental
illness and recommending that people receive medications as treatment
is heavily flawed. :)

-Todd Giffe

As an emergency physician and former IT engineer with Unix system administration background, I'll say that most of the important software and hardware choices are made by the IT department and C-level executives without any input by physicians what-so-ever. I'll reply to your points line by line:

> 1) Over emphasis on the needs of the physicians over the needs of the patients and the other areas of the healthsystems. Many important IT choices are > made by doctors and not the professionals who were hired to be experts in these areas. That and the physicians are notorious for having almost no respect > for other professionals who are not a doctor.

The healthsystem SHOULD EMPHASIS the need of the PHYSICIAN over that of the patient when we are the ones using the EMR, PACS (picture archiving and communication system), network drive, intranet, and other features day in and day out. The needs of the patient come into play when interfacing with these systems to retrieve their laboratory and imaging results, physician communication, and others when at home or elsewhere. If the IT department doesn't like this, then too bad as the users needs outweigh yours -- remember that this is coming from a practicing clinician.

Just keep trotting out the old-line about how physicians have no respect for any other professionals as there's no basis for it in the real world. If you look around at the landscape of healthcare in the US, you'll see that it's the physicians that are dis-respected every day at the hands of the administration, fellow professionals, and patients.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

> 2) Easy money. Money comes easy to these organizations. This plus...

Money does not come easy to any of these organizations unless your are a huge health system such as Mount Sinai in NYC or Mayo Clinic or any of the other health systems around the country. If you're that big, you can tell the insurance companies how much they will need to pay up. However, the majority of hospitals are 1-2 hospitals and have a very limited budget for many things including EMRs, IT staff and departments, and ultimately hardware and software. It's not like they have money to burn...

> 3) Non-profit tax status and requirements to spend or invest profits earned. This creates an environment of plentiful budgets where waste runs rampant, and > concern over things such as nepotism and incompetence aren't as important as they would be in other companies

IT departments in hospitals are rampant with nepotism, incompetence, and wastefullness. The heads of the security, network, and support divisions have no clue when it comes to support clinicians including physicians, nurses, LPNs, or any other staff that requires using the computer for any health related work.

Very informative, well done, you should feel proud.

While you're sitting there feeling all proud, you may want to educate yourself on CJD (the thing you're calling 'mad cow disease') since you will not be getting it from eating steak: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

A liberal administration isnt going to crack down on porn

Liberals aren't anti-porn? Seriously? You really wanna go there?

Earlier this month, 42 senators signed a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder to step up enforcement of federal obscenity laws. Among the cast of mostly Republican signers, one name stood out: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a staunch liberal from California, the de-facto porn capital of America. (Feinstein wasn’t available to comment for this story.)

She wasn’t alone: five other Senate Democrats, including Minnesota’s left-wing warrior, Amy Klobuchar, also signed the letter, and they were applauded by feminists, leftist lawyers, and liberal academics. Together, this increasingly vocal segment of progressives is making the case that hardcore porn flies in the face of cherished liberal causes—and that Democrats should be leading the charge to take down its distributors.

“To be anti-porn is a progressive principle.”

Liberals have no problem going after porn. They just frame it differently than Conservatives. They're upholding women's rights (except of course for the right of women to consent to star in pornography) rather than Christian morals.

If anything the Liberal position is more hypocritical than the Conservative one.

Happy to.
First, we could start with the absurdities in every Farm Bill, ever - in which $billion$ to giant agro industries are sustained for no good reason, barriers to imports of sugar, etc are lifted/strengthened to defend US agro firms, etc.

Second, we could look at the US Schools Lunch Programs which are largely mandated by the USDA...hence the furious lobbying going on there. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_...

Heck, even the "Food Pyramid" we all learned about in school was the product of lobbyists and special interests, not nutritionists:
http://healthwyze.org/index.ph...
(I have no idea if this site is a tinfoil hat one, etc - but the comments there from nutritionists about the gov't handling of the issue are instructive.)

Finally, the failure of our government to understand that one cannot spend more than one makes on an extended basis, means that "marginal" entities are defunded, despite widespread agreement that it's one of the core functions of the Federal government: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

From Eli Lake at The Daily Beast: Sorry, Snowden: Putin Lied to You About His Surveillance State—And Made You a Pawn of It

He is right to contrast Whole Foods with Walmart:

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05...

http://www.thetasteoftomorrow....

http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

In short, stupid people shop at both Walmart and Whole Foods. It's just that the Whole Foods stupid people are trying to let other people think for them, where as the Walmart stupid people don't particularly care.

Bill Clinton says Aliens May Exist

With the absolute global meltdown of religion that would likely happen in the event of the world learning that life exists beyond our planet, literally shattering damn near every major religion's core belief of a sky daddy/master creator/Adam and Eve, I really do wonder if we would ever hear such a confirmation out of NASA.

Needless to say I'm not holding my breath, for the same reason you've never heard a (real) confirmation about Roswell, and likely due to my theory above.

Bill Clinton says Aliens May Exist

True enough... while we are both obviously even-tempered and rational, many others are not ;-). My conservative parents often say things (or more often, forward me emails) that make me want to cringe. It's not a one-sided thing though; for every person that thinks Obama is a secretly Muslim Kenyan, there's probably someone out there that thinks GWB planned 9/11. Reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute discussion with the average voter."

I agree with you on the Pauls... sometimes I think they're the only sane ones out there, but then in other areas they really redefine crazy. I mean, just think if GWB suggested that he had the authority to unilaterally order the assasination of American citizens---but Obama does it, and Rand's the only one that makes fuss. But then I look at some of his other positions, like foreign policy, and I really wonder.

I didn't know that about M&M colorings... scary. On the other hand, the EPA hasn't done a lot to make people trust it lately, like this and this and this. I think the liberal vision would be fine if government could be trusted to always be efficient and impartial, and the conservative vision would be fine if business people, while seeking to maximize profit, agreed to always play by the rules when doing so. But obviously neither of those conditions is anywhere close to being true in reality.

I've enjoyed our conversation as well, thanks!

And yet, homeschooled kids tend to outperform their bricks-and-mortar peers.

Homeschooled kids who volunteer to take tests administered by their own parents tend to outperform public school students...bit of the ol' selection bias there.

The vast majority of homeschooled kids in the U.S. are being taught by religious fundamentalists, ignorant of the most basic facts about science.

Actually what he doesn't realize is that affirmative action is very much applying to Asians. A) It shits on them B) It is working as intended.

Don't believe me? Here you go:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

There's a certain irony in the fact that white students usually bring these affirmative action lawsuits (and that defenses of affirmative action are often framed in terms of white privilege). The evidence seems to show that if completely race-neutral admissions policies were adopted at colleges and universities, the admissions rates for blacks and hispanic would fall dramatically . . . but the admissions rates for whites wouldn't change much. The primary beneficiaries would be Asian students, who would fill nearly four out of five of the extra admissions slots.

So in other words, the research shows that if affirmative action was removed, whites would be unaffected, but Asians would replace blacks and hispanics in big numbers.

So what is the end result of affirmative action? Asians get fucked, and a sizable number of hispanics and blacks who are given these position in their place really shouldn't be there. No matter how you slice it, everybody loses here, even if you believe in white guilt and that white people need to be punished (affirmative action doesn't currently appear to punish them.)

So I still stand by my statement that the claim that "95% of people think affirmative action is to help Asians" has got to be incorrect.

I didn't make that claim. What I said was 95% of the ones I argue with about it say that.

On the other hand, there have been multiple reports about known Swedish neonazis recruiting and travelling to Ukraine to aid the nationalist Svoboda 'to help keep Ukraine from turning into something like Sweden'. Some of who just after returning to Sweden promptly got in a fight and stabbed a couple of antifascists in a streetfight.

So frankly I don't think Russia needs to work particularly hard to stage anything; there may certainly be spetsnaz units pretending to be nazis there, but there is also a bunch of actual real violence prone neonazis there. Unless you're suggesting the Swedish neonazis are spetsnaz as well.

If you want, here's a summary article on the situation at least: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

The only picture of a synagogue being vandalized is this one [thedemocrate.com] (and its variations from different angles).

Why are you posting information that is easily proven false? Do you need more links to show that you are a liar? Here is another, and another. And of course the number of synagogues being vandalized is low, there are not many in these areas.

I don't know who that "nobody" is, because the pictures and videos number in the thousands. Here [youtube.com] is a video from Kerch where guys in Russian uniform (sans chevron with a flag) try to weasel out from answering the question, but eventually admit that they're from Russia. There are many others like it.

Showing people in military uniforms with no markings of Russian makes them Russian, got it. More false information, not surprising. The only place that saw any Russian troops was Crimea near the bases. There is more proof of Blackwater being in Kiev than there is for Russian troops being in unauthorized locations in the Ukraine. Neither side is rock solid either.

One point I made is, and was, that there is a ton of propaganda being set up on both sides, and you are simply proving my point. Thanks for playing!

The other point is, and was, that claiming the US is wrong is not the same as claiming Russia is right. You can't seem to comprehend that point, at all, so there is no sense trying to continue dialogue.

Neither of those are at all true. Plenty of pediatricians (like ours) refuse to treat willfully unvaccinated kids because of the high risk they present to other patients. If you're taking a two week old baby into the doctor's office for a well baby checkup, the last thing you want to see is some moron's measles vector sitting in the same waiting room. "First, do no harm" nicely dovetails with "by condoning and tolerating anti-science Luddites spreading disease through your office."

This isn't uncommon and most doctors who feel this way make no attempt to hide it. If nothing else, if a patient doesn't trust their doctor when recommending safe, prudent vaccinations, will they trust that same doctor to recommend emergency surgery or other invasive treatments? If there's not a trust relationship, why even bother with it?

Anti-vaxxers should come to expect that their rejection of science leaves them to see only homeopaths and other witch doctors because science-based ones won't touch them with a 10 foot pole. If they want to practice voodoo, why should they want or expect to receive all the other benefits of legitimate medicine?

Well, we're talking about budgets, so the number of soldiers and their cost is certainly still a key factor.

This article says: "For the U.S. Army in particular, between 42 and 45 percent of its total budget goes to salaries and benefits."

So that's pretty huge. If you pay your troops 1/5 as much as the other guy, that's more money to spend on weapons development, etc.

You are right about the US, India, and China not needing to fear each other, but it's not because they are nuclear powers. Nuclear is useless as a deterrent, unfortunately. Who is afraid of attacking the US because of our nukes? Iraq didn't lay down and submit in Gulf War 1 or 2. Pakistan harbored Bin Laden for a decade. Iran took over our embassy.. we had nukes and didn't use them. Iran took over a British war ship a few years ago... and did not get nuked. Pakistan continues to sponsor terrorism against India directly and via Kashmir. India does not nuke them. They have border skirmishes all the time and do not nuke each other.

I don't see why we should be afraid of India and China though. Both are awesome countries that are going to be focused on developing internally for quite some time.

The NFL’s Super Bowl Con: Hosting the Big Game Isn’t an Economic Score For Cities

In your first link:

C. A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board.

It's been made clear that teachers are permitted to bring Bibles into the science class as "other instructional materials." Bobby Jindal stated as much:

I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’

It's all about devolving the responsibility to the local school board, where rule changes happen without much accountability and things happen with a wink and a nudge. If you were a teacher a few years ago and brought your Bible into science class, you could be disciplined. Now, though, your boss can't do anything and parents complaints would be unavailing, at least until they tried to take it to court. Thus, a common sight in a Louisiana public school now:

Paintings of Jesus Christ, Bible verses, and Christian devotional phrases adorn the walls of many classrooms and hallways, including the main hallway leading out to the bus pick-up area. A lighted, electronic marquee placed just outside the building scrolls Bible verses every day. “In the main foyer of the school, one display informs students that “ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS.” It includes several posters urging students to “Pray,” “Worship,” and “Believe,” while a poster displayed near the waiting area of the main office announces that “[i]t’s okay to pray.

All "supplemental materials" brought in from home, bought with the teacher's own money, and thus protected by state law and encouraged by the state government.

Your second link:

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

What it's about is making it impossible to discipline a teacher for teaching religion -- the overt teaching is left up to the teachers, and it's illegal to fire a teacher for teaching the Bible.

In the past (Canada) locked up people who arrived from parts of the world the country or its allies were at war with (Ukrainians and other 'former subjects of Austria-Hungary'), likewise Japanese during the second world war (Germans were under suspicion). The US did similar things during world War 2. People acting as 'soldiers of fortune' during the Spanish civil war were treated with suspicion, and those fighting in wars in the middle east clearly have strong intentions for one side or the other, and if they return to a peaceful country and keep their warring ways, the peaceful country is no longer peaceful. Take for example the two men that --at random-- beheaded a British Soldier . Clearly its in the public interest to stop people from acting in a war-like manner, and if they are returning from a war zone, they are either do-gooders, or soldiers. Do-gooders, show us what you did, we can support you. Go to war? Please don't mind if we detain you.

What a stark contrast. The Daily Beast article speaks of "prison" and "bizarre hybrid" and "wires and nodes" and "forced medication", while the promotional clip for the movie posted on Wired shows the supposed victims of this cruel outrage sitting around in a decent environment playing cards, happily shooting the BS, and generally enjoying their leisure time.

I think I'll put more weight on the video and less on the sensationalist Beast article.

What are you talking about? China was the first place Snowden ran to. Clearly that means they wouldn't spy on their citizenry because Snowden did it all based on his principles, otherwise he'd be a lying hypocrite, and we know that can't be true! Not OUR Ed!

By the way, I saw that story in the Firehose. Funny it never made it onto the site. Nice open discussion we foster around here: Ed is our hero; burn the heretics and their lies!!

Snowden specifically requested that the documents be released slowly, and only after careful analysis, rather than all at once. This is not to protect the police state, but for Snowden's own personal safety. Greenwald and other journalists are respecting the wishes of their source, and not throwing Snowden under the bus after he trusted them. You can read a bit about the reasoning behind their release method here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html

There were only about 613 fatal gun accidents in 2007

"In 2007, the United States suffered some 15,000-19,000 accidental shootings. More than 600 of these shootings proved fatal."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/20/why-does-the-gun-lobby-fear-science-and-safety.html

The same number you quoted... but interesting that you left out the injuries and just quoted the fatalities.

Then there's another 20,000 DEATHS from suicide by gun. (Now some people are just determined to die and will find another way if they don't have their gun at hand in their darkest hour, but a LOT of people will choose less effective means of suicide and fail and get help, a LOT of those people will have second thoughts about suicide on the trip to the jumping bridge, a LOT of those people will just get over it and choose to live if they don't end up dead because gun suicide is just literally a finger flick away. Suicide by gun is the suicide equivalent of an impulse buy at the candy store.

"That compared to at least 67,740 incidents of self-defense with a firearm a year and possibly far more..."

Yes, I've read that stat. No context whatsoever. Just that guns happened to be around in a 'self-defense' capacity or behavior. It counts pulling a gun on the neighbors dog. It counts pulling a gun when your hear strange noises outside while you called the police. It even counts cases where the victims were still successfully victimized (ie they pulled a gun but were still robbed anyway, and probably robbed of the gun too.)

So... 20,000 dead by suicide, another 20000 injured in accidents, 600 of those dead, 150+ of those children.

And that's offset by 67k 'defensive' actions? In many cases where the gun was neither required nor effective in any capacity.

You must not have read the article closely.

Loewen, 58, had been under investigation since this past summer after making threats to engage in a terrorist act of jihad against the United States. Loewen intended to kill himself in the process. ....

He frequently expressed his admiration of Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida leader who was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. Al-Awlaki emerged as an influential preacher among militants living in the West, with his English language Internet sermons calling for jihad against the U.S.

Authorities said Loewen spent months studying the airport’s layout, flight patterns and other details to maximize fatalities and damage. During that time, he developed a plan along with undercover FBI agents to use his access card to airport grounds and eventually thrust the vehicle loaded with explosives into the terminal. He planned to die in the explosion, a fate that he said was inevitable after convincing himself to become a martyr in a jihad against America, according to court documents.

Who is it that engages in Jihad again?

Maybe this will help: Terry Lee Loewen, the Mellow Kansas Man Who Dreamed of Jihad

There are many fine Muslim people in the world that are willing to live in peace. But there are also extremists who will not.

It's like the history revisionists that deny the Holocaust ever happened trying to debate actual bona-fide historians, trying to present an "alternate" view of events. Mind you, we still have people around that lived or were eyewitnesses to it. What will happen in 100 years? Anyone can challenge anyone else's assertions regardless of the historical record. Creationists, and I would guess more than a few people still confuse the scientific theory term with the normal definition of the word theory - stating often times that "it's just a theory." Given this belief in the Bible, which is claimed to be the absolute truth (thus, there really is no debate for believers. It is because God says it is, it says so in the Bible), I don't see what good is there in this event. Faith, according to some, has no need for science. Why legitimize their position with a debate? It will just make people think that there's actually is another side to the story, when there isn't. It baffles me to meet very well educated technologists who nonetheless believe (or claim to do so) that the Earth (nay, the Universe) is less than 10,000 years old, that dinosaurs walked alongside men, or that the fossil record was planted by "the devil." I think it's fine for people to believe in a higher power, but why force that on everyone else, why make children at school "learn" about alternate theories ("Intelligent" design.) I hear a lot of these folks lecture on how oppressive some Muslim non-secular governments can be, how there's no freedom of, well, anything, how they impose their beliefs on their poor people. What about this? The government (in the form of school boards, representatives, even governors) dictating what is taught in school, regardless of fact, but based purely on belief. Not sure if I can post links, as this is about my fifth time commenting ANYWHERE in 20 years, but here goes: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/02/2013-was-a-terrible-year-for-evolution.html

More people have been persecuted, hounded, ruined, tortured, burned, murdered, and just exterminated en-masse because of a book called the Bible than any other document in human history including Mein Kampf and Das Capital put together.

Just sayin' .

As long as your meaning is, "They were persecuted for believing in Judaism or Christianity," or for owning a Torah or Bible, very possibly.

Beginnings of Christian Martyrdom

In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights. Nero offered his own garden players for the spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the dress of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot. For this cause a feeling of compassion arose towards the sufferers, though guilty and deserving of exemplary capital punishment, because they seemed not to be cut off for the public good, but were victims of the ferocity of one man."

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

League of Militant Atheists
North Korea Ranked No. 1 for Christian Persecution
Persecuted and forgotten: Egypt's Christians
A Global Slaughter of Christians, but America’s Churches Stay Silent
Christian Persecution in China Despite Supposed Religious 'Freedom'
The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS HISTORY

The list is obviously much longer.

Since someone is practically certain to object along two lines, lets dispose of them now.

Yes, the Spanish Inquisition was terrible, it was also limited in scope.
The Crusades were a long delayed response to Muslim invasion of the Holy Land.

nuts -- left out the citation:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/02/fbi-director-hoover-s-dirty-files-excerpt-from-ronald-kessler-s-the-secrets-of-the-fbi.html

An article about the book: The Secrets of the FBI By Ronald Kessler

Unfortunately I think most of us are bastards to him.

The treachery of Julian Assange
Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review

What Does Julian Assange Want?
Exclusive: Former WikiLeaks Employee James Ball Describes Working With Julian Assange
Wikileaks are for-hire mercenaries - Cryptome

Unfortunately I think most of us are bastards to him.

The treachery of Julian Assange
Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review

What Does Julian Assange Want?
Exclusive: Former WikiLeaks Employee James Ball Describes Working With Julian Assange
Wikileaks are for-hire mercenaries - Cryptome

The US food supply is "safe" in terms of quantity, for example, and the FDA does a reasonably good job keeping deadly diseases out of the food supply (though it's far from perfect). The biggest problem is that the food industry, and in particular fast food, engineers and sells food that is quite unhealthy, making us literally sick. The human body is designed to crave things (e.g. sugar, salt, fat) that were needed but rare in the natural diet, but now modern food manufacturing provides in unlimited quantities. Add in that they flood food with chemicals and hormones and other processing that we don't understand the long term effects of, and the result is that modern man is in terrible health. And many countries (e.g. the EU. Japan) are much more conservative about what they allow in their food supply, and as a result have much better health.

To quote:

"The 3,000 annual deaths and 130,000 hospitalizations due to foodborne illness, though tragic, are miniscule compared with other deaths related to our diet. Every year at least 310,000 Americans go to an early grave and many more are sickened because of largely preventable diet-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, strokes, and some cancers. The big problem with our food supply isn’t pathogens, it is processed food. We’re being killed not by E. coli, salmonella, or campylobacter, but by the nutritionally hollow contents of the bags, boxes, and fast-food clamshells that have managed to pass as nourishment in our society."

"Over the last century, our diet has undergone unprecedented change. Some 70 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from highly processed foods—loaded up with salt, sugar, fat, strange additives, and refined grains and bereft of naturally occurring nutrients and antioxidants. We’ve outsourced so much of our cooking to highly efficient food companies that “cook” very differently than we do in our home kitchens."

"The fact is that much of our food supply is not safe, and the FDA, despite its new powers of oversight, doesn’t have anywhere near the authority or the political will it needs to help change this. The agency has done nothing to set controls on the massive quantities of sodium going into processed food, especially restaurant food, and still allows trans fat, an acknowledged poison, into products. And its oversight of the vast number of ingredients going into our food is much less reassuring than we might hope."

"Of the roughly 5,000 substances that can be directly added to food, the FDA has no knowledge whatsoever of an estimated 1,000 of them. And more disturbingly, fewer than half of those 4,000 substances known to the FDA have ever gone through the sort of testing you might hope something you’re feeding yourself and your kids would be subjected to, namely toxicology tests on mice or rats. On top of that, a scant few additives have been tested according to the way they’re actually consumed—that is, in combination with a multitude of other additives."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/01/our-unsafe-food-supply-is-killing-us.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/25/yes-we-should-study-duck-penises.html

This is for just the one study. There were others in the same field. And yes I read and linked to a Daily Beast article to explode your brain about people who care enough to look into the Federal Budget.

You mean the one in utah? http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304441404579119490744478398 Meltdowns Hobble NSA Data Center http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/10/08/2-Billion-NSA-Spy-Center-Going-Flames http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2013/10/08/fiery-explosions-rock-nsa-data-center.html 10 fiery explosions, known as arc-fault failures, have ripped apart machinery, melted metal and destroyed circuits. No because the govt couldn't design and implement a billion dollar data storage center. they could show what happen when you have an arc-fault failure. Arc Flash is the result of a rapid release of energy due to an arcing fault between a phase bus bar and another phase bus bar, neutral or a ground. During an arc fault the air is the conductor. Arc faults are generally limited to systems where the bus voltage is in excess of 120 volts. Lower voltage levels normally will not sustain an arc. An arc fault is similar to the arc obtained during electric welding and the fault has to be manually started by something creating the path of conduction or a failure such as a breakdown in insulation. So why did we except anything less from the website?

Actually, yes: Tea Party = Religious Right. It's not one-to-one, but the two are closely linked.

According to this report (PDF), there are three distinct groups within the Republican party: the Tea Party, evangelicals (the Religious Right), and moderates. There are stark differences between the three groups, but another poster mentioned "the power of cognitive dissonance" - no matter which of the three Republican subgroups you belong to, you're going to have a natural tendency to WANT to agree with the other two, because you're a Republican. For example, Evangelicals think the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because abortion is murder, and the Tea Party thinks the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because it's wasteful government spending, but Evangelicals are going to adopt "smaller government" as part of their argument and Tea Partiers will adopt the moral case as part of their argument.

Actually, yes: Tea Party = Religious Right. It's not one-to-one, but the two are closely linked.

Between this, and the news that Mick Jagger is becoming a great-grandfather, there's just no hope anymore.

A prevailing attitude in Europe is with a decline of civilization, government, and social order, people will turn to animalistic barbarism within days.

No, it isn't cultural, other than a form of "elite panic" where the rich and powerful believe that society is only held together by the institutions that they themselves are in charge of. It is really self-fullfilling prophecy that tends to wreck the natural instinct of most humans to help each other in times of crisis.

Here's a taste of the problem:
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-people-t.html

Some discussion of what did and did not happen in Haiti after the earthquake, by Slashdot's own Johnathan Katz:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/30/what-haiti-can-teach-us-about-the-storm.html

Other people in this thread pointed out that SYG laws indeed WERE considered in this case: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4173251&cid=44779213

So I repeat, were these black boys left loose? Or were they arrested and are awaiting a trial, which will almost certainly find them guilty?

Oh, here's a real reverse Zimmerman case: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/16/the-reverse-travyon-martin-case-and-the-other-george-zimmerman.html - a man in a car shot another man whom he deemed to be threating.