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I am not sure which boycotts of BoA you have in mind, because I don't recall a major boycott, and my searches on CNN, BBC and Reuters don't turn up any relevant news. I'll say that if there was such a boycott, it was pretty much a failure.

For what it's worth, there was a call for a boycott, and they did rescind their debit-card fee. Whether you can credit the call for the boycott for that is another matter.

They have this guy, too:
Chris Dodd, Ex-Senator, Named MPAA Chairman
at $1.3 million/year.

Stretching the truth to pass SOPA:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/04100017081/chris-dodd-resorting-to-outright-lying-desperate-attempt-to-get-sopa-passed.shtml

More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/24/christopher-dodd-as-mpaa-chairman-can-he-save-hollywood.html

This came out during the week, but was overshadowed by the news that Falcone And Friends got Wells Letters, SEC notices that are basically game-over. Investors in Harbinger Capital Partners, Falcone's hedge fund, are likely to flee, but they'll be limited in their ability to withdraw funds. This has happened before to Harbinger in 2009, and Goldman Sachs seems to have gotten preferential treatment in exiting.

The LightSquared bit is juicier, though, because of the hints of corruption that have squeaked out through the press. Air Force General William Shelton, testifying before Congress about LightSquared and the interference that its plans could cause GPS, complained that the White House had told him to change his testimony to make it seem that he was less opposed to LightSquared's plans. There are also allegations of $30,400 donations being given to the Democratic Party by Falcone and LightSquared's CEO on the days of meetings and on days when meetings were arranged.

I think these researchers should look at outsourcing these efforts, and China now has bragging rights to the fastest computer.

After all most of our electronics are all imported. It's sad, but what do you do when "...the ability to determine DNA sequences is starting to outrun the ability of researchers to store, transmit and especially to analyze the data..." as the intro to this submission says?

This sounds very familiar - http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/26/206252/china-to-cancel-college-majors-that-dont-pay

And a link within http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/19/smart-young-and-broke.html

"Guo and an estimated million others like him represent an unprecedented and troublesome development in China: a fast-growing white-collar underclass. Since the ’90s, Chinese universities have doubled their admissions, far outpacing the job market for college grads. This year China’s universities and tech institutes churned out roughly 6.3 million graduates. Many grew up in impoverished rural towns and villages and attended second- or third-tier schools in the provinces, trusting that studying hard would bring them better lives than their parents had. But when they move on and apply for jobs in Beijing or Shanghai or any of China’s other booming metropolises, they get a nasty shock."

So, this Hungarian man this article is about probably belonged to the same class, unemployed with a specialized degree.

Europe and the US have had this situation for thirty years, but for China it must be some shocking news. How many Chinese cyber-crimes more do we (or Chinese hotels) want? We have enough of the Hungarians.

The more interesting data mining is currently implemented as trade secrets. Apparently, the credit card companies can predict, with 99% accuracy, if you are going to get a divorce within the next two years.

They could do useful little tricks like reminding you about the yeast at the checkout counter, but that would be creepy to most people and not as profitable for the company with the data.

They've done worse...

Oh, if you just want one link of a climatologist going all apocalyptic, that's easy enough: Hurricane Irene’s dangerous power can be traced to global warming

Now, please stop shouting and swearing. It does make you look like a dumbass.

You know what makes you look like a dumbass? Linking to a column written by a journalist and claiming that it is the opinion of a climatologist.

Oh, if you just want one link of a climatologist going all apocalyptic, that's easy enough: Hurricane Irene’s dangerous power can be traced to global warming

Now, please stop shouting and swearing. It does make you look like a dumbass.

The Dept. of Education never educated one single child

Do you just pull these useless nuggets out of your ass randomly, or did someone spoon-feed this propaganda into your eager little right-wing brain?

HUD, by failing to oversee Freddy and Fanny, got us into the mortgage mess we're in now

NO, FUCKTARD, the mortgage mess was caused first and foremost by the securitzation of bad loans, which were MASSIVELY ENCOURAGED by the Republican administration at the time via Bush's Ownership Society. Hell, if you were even being a tiny bit intellectually honest you could bother yourself to google Bush Touts Home Ownership and see the numerous articles of the GOP drooling all over each other about how great fantastic it is that every 'murkin is gonna have a house.

IT WAS THOSE bad loans that collapsed the mortgage industry, moron. PLEASE DO bother your lazy ass to get the facts straight before you just FART OUT some ignorant propaganda that you're rebreathing out of Rush Limbaugh's diseased asshole.

While I'm sure there are lonely people who are not on Facebook, them going on facebook is not going to stop them being lonely.

This is exactly my point. It will often make them feel more lonely.

I think that part of this is that what lonely people crave isn't acquaintances, but friends. Social networking sites really aren't the ideal places for that; comparing who you think of as friends to the number others claim as friends doesn't do much for the self esteem. Neither does unfortunate occurrences of finding out that who you thought of as friends really only are acquaintances who value you slightly less than 137 others.

I'm sure there must be a backlash to social networking one day - I can't believe that the human mind is suited for spreading so thin or caring so little. The days when you got introduced to people and knew more than their nick before jumping into a conversation are over, but I think there's room for the pendulum to swing back a little. Cause there have never been more lonely people than now, when they have more "friends" than ever.

At some point we need to stop protecting people from mind-boggling levels of stupidity, or it just allows people to get away with being even *dumber*.

We're all stupid at something no matter how much knowledge and experience we acquire. (In fact, it's a well known adage that smart people are the most likely to fall for a scam".)

While your statement is appealingly righteous, the downside is that the unscrupulous run up costs for the rest of us, no matter what intelligence level they target. I'd rather they not get away with it, even if it spares people the hard-knocks education you advocate. For a society to function anywhere near optimal, the vast majorities of its transactions must be conducted in good faith by all parties.

Or so says Casey Schwartz of Brown University http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/07/why-it-s-smart-to-be-bilingual.html My three children were raised speaking their mother's tongue (French). And like the kids in the article, they seem smarter.

On the flip side, I'm also bilingual, but sort of like an Apple "Power PC", speaking both languages seems to make me worse at either.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone

You're advocating treating people differently based on nothing more than their skin color.

Please quote the specific statement of mine that you are referring to.

THAT is racism, and that makes you a racist.

I am saying is that people are being treated differently based on their race, and any solution to that problem will have to acknowledge that. Consideration of race is not the same as treating people differently based on race. Ignoring race doesn't work..

Sorry, I don't have a pat answer for that, but I'm sure that no solution I'd advocate would be racist in nature

I for one would love to see a solution to a racism problem that doesn't involve race. If you come up with a solution, let me know, I'll be here (seriously).

Oooh, you know what's even more ironic?

Your source, OpenSecrets.org, linked an article from Friday that analyzes Newscorp political spending in the US and comes to the opposite conclusion. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/15/how-rupert-murdoch-s-money-helps-him-makes-friends.html Newscorp spends far, far more in soft money than they do in campaign contributions.

So, not only am I having trouble identifying the purpose of your non sequitur, I'm also finding it pretty funny that your factoid is meaningless in the context of how much money Newscorp spends on political activities.

according to an interview with an kidnapping negotiator one of the main reasons for the Somalis becoming pirates is overfishing - most of the economy crashed because they cannot compete with the sophisticated trawler fleet. A FAO paper claims that illegal foreign ships are one of the main reasons for the depletion of maritime resources.

Without a government and while illegal fishing is profitable (pirating started with selling bogus fishing licenses to foreign ships, see here) the problems cannot solved; one proposal was an export embargo but this wasn't successful in the UN security council.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/

This is getting rather comical. My birth year is right there in my nick. Intel value? Maybe you need to look and see how much valuable intel we got from our waterboarding. Rummy can tell you better than that idiot Cheney, and his cheerleaders.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-republican-spin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+andrewsullivan/rApM+(The+Daily+Dish)

Or, maybe you think that Osama was going to surrender information with the "nice guy" approach? What was the nice guy going to offer him? A silk rope for his hanging? A nice pork pie for his last meal?

Interrogations in this country have gone to shit since the day Bush took office. I'm not sure there are enough people in power to ensure that proper interrogation techniques would be used on Osama. It would have likely been more of those silly-assed "enhanced interrogation" techniques that were used, and those yield complete garbage.

Phht. Whatever. Again, we got his hard drives, and his dead tree journals. Osama was very unlikely to contribute anything or value in person.

The USA Today article that first broke the story about the secret smear campaign: http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-05-06-google_n.htm

The Daily Beast article that broke the story that the client paying for the campaign was Facebook: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/?cid=topic:mostrecent1#

The actual email string between the reporter and a Burson employee that started this whole thing: http://pastebin.com/zaeTeJeJ

-David
david44357.com

Here's a link to the original article if anyone wants to read about it without the inventive grammar and composition of the awful linked blog post:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/

Yes, and it should link to the original source of the story, not this crappy write-up on some unknown blog.

Original: [link]

Except that waterboarding gave us nothing, and it was the tried and true non-coercive interrogation methods that provided us with that information, contrary to what Fox News would have you believe.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-republican-spin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+andrewsullivan/rApM+(The+Daily+Dish)

Maybe (1) http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/716/what-is-the-true-source-of-the-kennedy-familys-wealth and maybe not (2) http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-26/the-kennedy-bootlegging-myth or as Candace Bergen once put it "twelve arrests, no convictions" [T.R. Baskin] (not that old Joe was ever arrested, mind).

Communist nuclear reactors are built nothing like real nuclear reactors (not to take anything away from the heroism of the guys at Chernobyl). But here's the analysis from an MIT professor of this stuff; don't take my word for it. The MIT profs in this field have been doing their best to spread actual information, but sadly it's just not newsworthy.

The Japanses guy who went into the dark reactors in suits to carry the hoses in to flood the hot cores with seawater were also pretty heroic - it must have been a heck of a scary situation, and those suits are claustrophobic enough without crawling through tunnels in the dark - but they weren't like the Russian guys who were basically throwing their lives away.

Godzilla always comes in times of nuclear crisis. It's what she does. Get over yourself.

Not to mention that the "nuclear crisis" exists only in the minds of the media. Here's a realistic assessment from an MIT prof. Some heroic Japanese workers pumped enough seawater on the overheated core to keep the problem from becoming any worse than Three Mile Island. With any luck the death toll will be the same. here's a real-time Geiger counter in Tokyo if you want to follow along.

Meanwhile, real relief efforts are needed for areas struck by the tsunami, where thousands were killed.

How about video of people being murdered in Lybia, you sicko? In all seriousness, I know it's newsworthy but nobody wants to watch stuff like this. I didn't hit play on any of these but if the captions are at all accurate: EXTREMELY NSFW
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-22/libya-protests-shocking-photos-and-video/

Asked why WikiLeaks did not review all of the Afghan war logs before releasing them last month to make sure that no Afghan informants or other innocent people were identified, Schmitt said that the volume of the material made it impossible.

This article gives an overview of what Goldman Sachs will be giving investors and it isn't pretty.

The investor needs to put in at least $2mil and GS will take 4.5% in fees and another 5% of any profit earned. The real kicker is the investors can't sell until 2013, while GS reserves the right to cash out whenever they want without giving any warning. If the share price drops, GS will happily bail out, leaving their customers holding the bag. Again.

Overall it's an awful deal, unless you have a lot of cash to burn and somehow think that the Facebook of 2013 will be worth more than its currently overpriced 2011 version.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-02/punking-jerry-brown/

“Sure, the Jerry Brown theory was something I came up with all by my little self, but it turned out to be wrong.”

i'm not really into politics, much more american ones, but from what i have read, jerry brown actually turned out to be one of the most sane politicians you might have there

Cue the Bubble Machine!

Facebook and Goldman Sachs unleashed a tech investing mania this week compared far and wide with the euphoric 1990s dot-com run-up. By arranging a $500 million private investment, at a staggering $50 billion valuation, Goldman at once delayed a Facebook public offering (now expected in 2012), prompted a likely LinkedIn IPO, and thrilled its clients, who clamored for a piece of Mark Zuckerberg's behemoth.

But for all the nostalgia for pre-IPO "friends and family" stock in Pets.com, the dot-com era comparisons are off base. Instead, Goldman's Facebook deal mirrors the subprime collateralized debt obligation deals that blew up entire companies, as well as crater-size hole in our economy. In fact, what Goldman just engineered might well be worse...

the Facebook phenomenon shows us that nothing has changed. Goldman again moved aggressively to get the business--investing $75 million into Facebook early, at a low valuation, through one of its hedge funds, in the same way it used to get CDOs rolling--again will rake in the fees (to the tune of $60 million--upfront) and again will pawn off the overvalued results to its clamoring clients, who don't have nearly as much information as Goldman.

If you're one of those investors, here's the deal in a nutshell: You get to buy shares, forking over 5 percent of any possible gains, on top of a 4 percent placement fee and a 0.5 percent expense reserve fee (so you're down 10 percent before the game starts) in a private company that doesn't have to disclose any pertinent financial information to you or any regulator for 15 months. For the privilege, Goldman gets its eight-digit windfall.

The rich Goldman clients aren't allowed out until 2013. But Goldman is. ...The rich Goldman clients who must pony up a minimum $2 million investment aren't allowed out until 2013. No exceptions. Ditto Facebook employees (although they were allowed to cash out about $100 million last year). But Goldman is. Whenever it wants "without notice to the fund or investors in the fund."

CDOs were private, unregulated, overvalued, disclosure-lite, fee-intensive deals. The Facebook deal is private, unregulated, overvalued, disclosure-lite, and fee intensive. CDOs sold like mad-- until they didn't. That can happen here. At the end of the holding period, there may be no bid for Facebook shares anywhere near the price paid. Plus, by that time all the enthusiastic global users of Facebook may have dropped it for thenextgreatfad.com taking the advertiser money along with them.

The Facebook deal sucks so badly that one of Goldman Sachs' own funds didn't want a single share of it. Richard Friedman, who runs the money for past and present Goldman partners, among others, said, thanks, but no thanks. That should tell everyone something...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-07/goldmans-facebook-voodoo-why-its-social-media-deal-is-worse-than-toxic-mortgages/?cid=columnists

Two things:
1) Both left-wingers and right-wingers work incrementally. For examples: (Right-wing) the loosening of handgun laws (where many states now allow concealed carry) has been done gradually. (Left-wing) The program that provides kidney dialysis to all people started small in the early 70's but has grown in scope significantly since then.
2) Care to elaborate on the liberal bandwagon issues that your friends cannot think for themselves about? Surveys have consistently shown that right-wingers (especially Fox News Viewers) are more mis-informed about the issues than are left-wingers. And since the left tends to be much more fragmented, it's understandable that any one particular liberal might be uninformed about some issue that's near and dear to another set of liberals. Conservatives tend to be more unified, because it's much easier to argue for "No!" than to argue for "We must do [insert pet project here]".

Probably.
The difference is that MSNBC management hasn't, (or at least hasn't been caught) sending orders to staff to:

"refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004

or to use the phrase "government option" instead of "public option" when reporting about the health care plan, because more people react negatively to the former.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-09/how-fox-news-spun-the-health-care-debate/

While quite a few people compare Keith Olbermann to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, I don't think there's any comparison over how much news bias is shown at the two networks overall.

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

Free speech is causing harm!

Just like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or releasing the names and addresses of informants against Mafia hit men, or the names and locations of informants against Al Qaeda & Taliban cut-throats & beheaders like Wikileaks is doing.

Dead informants mean fewer people to pass on information on scum like Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square with a bomb like this.

Calling himself a Muslim soldier, Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts. He said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.

Would even a Wembley stadium type attack convince even most people many on Slashdot that terrorism is a serious problem? I wonder.

Bin Laden's demand to the United States (The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.) is that we all convert to his brand Islam, change our governments to observe Sharia, or he and his minions will continue to try to kill us. Their ultimate goal is to conquer the world for Islam, not simply get the US out of anywhere, destroy Israel, or anything else. Al Qaeda believes it is justified in killing 4,000,000 Americans in pursuit of its goal. As it is, Al Qaeda's world wide body count must be easily in the tens of thousands by now.

Meanwhile, planning continues for the next Al Qaeda assault in Europe, following up on the successful mass attacks in London and Madrid, various assassinations, and the failed attacks in Germany, France, and other places. (Hopefully there is a well placed informant or two that will survive the Wikileaks releases.)

I wonder how many on Slashdot are members of the Internet Jihad, or are otherwise radicalized and trying to influence opinion?

“I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads another Internet posting from Mr. Abdulmutallab.

This is not the secular, political language of resistance against foreign occupation. It is the language of apocalyptic salvation. It has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinians, although countless young Muslims identify passionately with stories of perceived injustice. Radical Islam claims that martyrdom is the ultimate act of faith – the highest duty of a believer, next to the worship of Allah itself.

“

Interesting. I had heard of, and didn't care about, the Aqua Buddha thing--I did stuff in college, too, though usually it was just tossing people in the creek on their birthdays. I thought it was silly that Conway made a big deal about it, though I cared even less for Paul's manufactured indignance in his response.

The opthamologist certification was news to me, so I looked it up, and it's a little shady. For anyone interested, a detailed writeup (with opinions included) is here. His stated reason for creating his own cert board was that he shouldn't be required to re-certify if people who were certified before 1992 don't have to. I understand the sentiment, but..if you're going to take a stand on something like that, you should make it very public, which he hasn't done. And recertification consists of an exam every decade--that's not THAT much of a pain. This seems quite self-serving, which lines up with your accusations.

I am not from KY--why is Harlan famous, other than being the setting for the fantastic show Justified?

Rand never struck me as the same kind of man his father, Ron Paul, is. He has the look and manner of a groomed politician which I find inherently mistrustful, and some of what's coming out is proving that impression to be correct. I like some of his platform, and I like that he has pledged to DownsizeDC to introduce in the Senate a few very important bills that would do more to clean up Congress than anything done in the past hundred years.

The more I find out about stuff like what you listed, the less I trust him, but I think the fact that he is a darling of the Tea Party works in the public's favor: they're not known for ignoring things they don't like. The post I linked is one I wrote previously, and it details the DownsizeDC bills as well as how much public pressure matters. Paul is a first-term senator and will be watched very carefully by the people who put him there. If he's as self-serving as you make him out to be, he's going to run into problems very quickly.

What would you call this then? - it was even linked to? You do know the meaning of the work "conspiracy", don't you? i.e. "a plot involving two or more actors to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially a political plot)"

My immediate reaction was "they've been leant on". I'd imagine the US government has been putting pressure directly on any individual involved in the hope of a) weakening Wikileaks and b) causing dissent and reducing their credibility.

NYT:'The civilian also said that the Army had offered him “a considerable amount of money if I were to keep my ear to the ground and be an in with them with WikiLeaks.” He said that he had turned the Army down'

So there is some precedence, there is a plan and a 120 strong department working around the clock to make it happen. Does not sound far fetched to me.

Domscheit-Berg: what are the agreements re iraq? i need to understand what the plan is there, and what the constraints are Assange: "A person in close contact with other WikiLeaks activists around Europe, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive topic, says that many of them were privately concerned that Assange has continued to spread allegations of dirty tricks and hint at conspiracies against him without justification. Insiders say that some people affiliated with the website are already Assange: brainsorming whether ther e might be some way to persuade their front man to step aside, or failing that, even to oust him." Domscheit-Berg: what does that have to do with me? Domscheit-Berg: and where is this from? Assange: Why do you think it has something to do with you? Domscheit-Berg: probably because you alleg this was me Domscheit-Berg: but other than that just about nothing Domscheit-Berg: as discussed yesterday, this is an ongoing discussion that lots of people have voiced concern about Domscheit-Berg: you should face this, rather than trying to shoot at the only person that even cares to be honest about it towards you Assange: No, three people have "relayed" your messages already. Domscheit-Berg: what messages? Domscheit-Berg: and what three people? Domscheit-Berg: this issue was discussed Domscheit-Berg: [Redacted] and i talked about it, [Redacted] talked about it, [Redacted] talked about it, [Redacted] talked about it Domscheit-Berg: lots of people that care for this project have issued that precise suggestion Domscheit-Berg: its not me that is spreading this message Domscheit-Berg: it would just be the natural step to take Domscheit-Berg: and thats what pretty much anyone says Assange: Was this you? Domscheit-Berg: i didnt speak to newsweek or other media representatives about this Domscheit-Berg: i spoke to people we work with and that have an interest in and care about this project Domscheit-Berg: and there is nothing wrong about this Domscheit-Berg: it'd actually be needed much more, and i can still only recommend you to finally start listening to such concerns Domscheit-Berg: especially when one fuckup is happening after the other Assange: who, exactly? Domscheit-Berg: who exactly what? Assange: Who have you spoken to about this issue? Domscheit-Berg: i already told you up there Assange: those are the only persons? Domscheit-Berg: some folks from the club have asked me about it and i have issued that i think this would be the best behaviour Domscheit-Berg: thats my opinion Domscheit-Berg: and this is also in light to calm down the anger there about what happened in 2007 Assange: how many people at the club? Domscheit-Berg: i dont have to answer to you on this j Domscheit-Berg: this debate is fuckin all over the place, and no one understands why you go into denial, especially not the people that know about other incidents Assange: How many people at the club? Assange: In what venue? Domscheit-Berg: in private chats Domscheit-Berg: but i will not answe

Last night I watched My Trip to Al Qaeda. Lawrence Wright has spent more time with hands on research than anyone I have seen. It seemed, to me, his main point was the fact that radicalism feeds entirely on humiliation and anger - including the humiliation of the Islamic faith by the West. What really is the point here on burning a pile of Korans on 9/11 than to humiliate and anger the moderate and extreme Muslims. It's very distasteful. Trying not to sound like I am just quoting the movie (yet whole hardily agreeing to the message that) we should stand up for what America believes in - and stop playing our role in the story Bin Laden narrates - one of a holy war against the Muslim faith.

Whatever your point of view on the subject - this documentary is definately a must see.

For starters, no matter what our actions are, the story that Bin Laden narrates will not change.

Next, on your point that burning the Koran will humiliate and anger the moderate and extreme Muslims, the problem is that NOT doing stuff has the same effect. For example, the guy who wants to build the Ground Zero mosque is saying that denying the mosque will produce the same reaction as the Danish Mohamed cartoons. What's next? Can we expect violent protests if one day we reject Sharia law Dearborn Mi? So, it's no longer what we do that can incite Muslims to violence, but we are encouraging them to the point where they are attempting to dictate our actions under the threat of the same violent actions.

"If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse," Rauf told CNN. "The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack."
--Imam Rauf

Last night I watched My Trip to Al Qaeda. Lawrence Wright has spent more time with hands on research than anyone I have seen. It seemed, to me, his main point was the fact that radicalism feeds entirely on humiliation and anger - including the humiliation of the Islamic faith by the West. What really is the point here on burning a pile of Korans on 9/11 than to humiliate and anger the moderate and extreme Muslims. It's very distasteful. Trying not to sound like I am just quoting the movie (yet whole hardily agreeing to the message that) we should stand up for what America believes in - and stop playing our role in the story Bin Laden narrates - one of a holy war against the Muslim faith.

Whatever your point of view on the subject - this documentary is definately a must see.

Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and get locked away indefinitely with no habeas corpus rights?

Please do not refer to what the US did that way.

The question is:

Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and tortured to death?

The goals of the highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, is to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace.

I don't know about nuclear weapons so rebuttals are welcome, but what does that matter to some rogue, nationless terrorist organization who acquired fissile material from some obscure (possibly closed) Russian nuke-plant that had poor accountability of its product? Even if we could determine the origin of a terrorist dirty-bomb's yucky stuff, does that mean we'd go and nuke Russia?

More likely we'd say its from Pakistan and go all Iraq on their ass, especially in light of the recent embarrassing Wikileaks about ISI's double-crossing us.

Ahh, scaremongering. A desperate, futile make-work program for an America whose only business model (besides sending it all to those evil Commies) is sicc'ing half the population against the other half a la the Stazi aka the DHS.

The news was the court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald reporting that Bush, through Vice President Cheney, had authorized I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak sensitive intelligence information in July 2003 to discredit claims made by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Earlier this week Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that his party would not cooperate with the Democrats for the rest of the year.

So if they stick to that, how could it end? Well, badly. I just hope common sense breaks out at some point.

Every conspircay theorist in the world just simultaneously orgasmed. All those messages to pick through; I'm sure they'll be able to prove it was the US Government/Al-Qaeda/Joseph Fritzel/The Cookie Monster/Scientologists all along.

The NORAD tapes, which were released long ago proved that there was a conspiracy by The Pentagon to lie to the 9/11 Commission and the American people. The 9/11 Commission had a closed meeting deciding whether or not to charge Air Force officials with perjury but chose not to because "it wouldn't be good for the country."

John Farmer, senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission said, "at some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [during 9/11]"

6 of the 10 Commissioners have come out saying that they were lied to and that the report is not accurate.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/

“More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques,” writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem in The Daily Beast. “In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.”

We've been lied to about 9/11 from day one. It needs to be investigated further. If 6 out of the 10 Commissioners are distancing themselves from the report by saying they were lied to something isn't right. Burying your head deeper into the sand won't help.

IANAL, but I'd never before heard of a law that explicitly required software to behave in a very specific way, and display very specific warnings. That alone tips this bill into the "big deal" category for me.

Add to this the tendency of prosecutors to misuse Federal statutes in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent, and this law seems to open the door for prosecution of any government-targeted "bad guy" who also happens to have such 'illegal' network software.

And, of course, the original reason for this bill also stinks: it's almost certainly an RIAA-bought-and-paid-for law clearly designed to eliminate the "I didn't know" defense when suing file-sharers.

In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit this year of $1.2 trillion before Obama took office, with no estimate for actions he might take. To a large extent, the CBO's estimate simply represented the $482 billion deficit projected by the Bush administration in last summer's budget review, plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which George W. Bush rammed through Congress in September over strenuous conservative objections. Thus the vast bulk of this year's currently estimated $1.8 trillion deficit was determined by Bush's policies, not Obama's.

The GOP's Misplaced Rage by Bruce Bartlett

Personally I am checking The Guardian and BBC News, CNN.com (which I agree is pretty horrible),MSNBC, The Independent, Wikinews, The Daily Beast (and Slashdot of course) and some random ones. I'd be interested to know which sources people are using to get news about the situation in Iran, or for that matter other international events of interest. Also I find it helpful to try to read around to get news and articles from different perspectives and not rely too heavily on one single source.

I'll pick a few here:

Teh GAYS are coming to steal yer marriages!!!!11

Never heard this from a Republican

You are a liar. Bush's "re-election" (his first actual election) was won primarily because they snuck so many anti-equality laws on the ballots. The bigoted wingnuts came out of the woodwork and voted for Bush while they were there.

We're the party of fiscal responsibility!

I would have agreed with this last year. But since the current party has tripled the deficit, it turns out that it's true!

Yes, I am absolutely certain that Obama, in 100 days, managed to triple the deficit, compared to 8 years of Bush spending like a drunken frat boy.

I totally believe that, because, apparently, I am an idiot.

They're not prisoners of war, so the Geneva Convention doesn't apply!

Were any of these guys wearing a uniform? No? then the Geneva Convention does not apply. Why is this so hard to understand?

Because I have a soul, and the idea of shoving flashlights up little kid's asses in front of the kid's mother is abhorrent to me.

Oh, and here's a POW being waterboarded:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-13/cheneys-role-deepens/

Iraq had something, anything to do with 9/11!

I have never heard a Republican say this, yet it keeps getting repeated over and over as if it's true. And what do you know, many of the exceedingly ignorant and borderline retarded believe it.

Liar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/21/bush-on-911/
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/bush-team-peddles-911-iraq-link-torture
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/lieberman-peddles-the-old_b_77198.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00247.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0321-02.htm

Not only that, it turns out we were torturing people to death and shoving flashlights up children's bums specifically to try and GET a fake link between Iraq and 9/11. Whoops!

I'll pick a few here:

Teh GAYS are coming to steal yer marriages!!!!11

Never heard this from a Republican

You are a liar. Bush's "re-election" (his first actual election) was won primarily because they snuck so many anti-equality laws on the ballots. The bigoted wingnuts came out of the woodwork and voted for Bush while they were there.

We're the party of fiscal responsibility!

I would have agreed with this last year. But since the current party has tripled the deficit, it turns out that it's true!

Yes, I am absolutely certain that Obama, in 100 days, managed to triple the deficit, compared to 8 years of Bush spending like a drunken frat boy.

I totally believe that, because, apparently, I am an idiot.

They're not prisoners of war, so the Geneva Convention doesn't apply!

Were any of these guys wearing a uniform? No? then the Geneva Convention does not apply. Why is this so hard to understand?

Because I have a soul, and the idea of shoving flashlights up little kid's asses in front of the kid's mother is abhorrent to me.

Oh, and here's a POW being waterboarded:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-13/cheneys-role-deepens/

Iraq had something, anything to do with 9/11!

I have never heard a Republican say this, yet it keeps getting repeated over and over as if it's true. And what do you know, many of the exceedingly ignorant and borderline retarded believe it.

Liar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/21/bush-on-911/
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/bush-team-peddles-911-iraq-link-torture
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/lieberman-peddles-the-old_b_77198.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00247.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0321-02.htm

Not only that, it turns out we were torturing people to death and shoving flashlights up children's bums specifically to try and GET a fake link between Iraq and 9/11. Whoops!