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It would probably be more accurate to say that I dislike the West Coast. It's just not somewhere I would choose to go to live. As far as California specifically goes it's just too easy to make fun of you. Recall election followed by electing this guy your governor? Of course, maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones ;)

Then again, you did give us Reagan. My state gave the country Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. So on balance I suppose I can still make fun of California ;) All in good humor of course -- I'd happily live in California before I'd live in Texas or the deep south.

If that's your cup of tea you could do it in New York City. Those are probably the only two cities in the country though -- hard pressed to think of any others.

Albany, though "really any big city" still applies.

We got that covered too -- largest state park in the United States.

I'll grant you this one. Not really any place to get 'consistent weather' on the East Coast. Florida I suppose, but who the hell would want to live in that humiliation of a state? ;) *duck* Besides, if I had to choose between earthquakes and hurricanes I'd take the earthquakes any day of the week.

I'm sure it does. You can leave New York City and drive about an hour and be out in the country. I've always loved that. Is it like that with the bigger cities in CA?

That's probably not anymore available in New York than California if you take New York City out of the calculation. Our mass transit in other large cities sucks ass. In NYC it's great -- if you can afford to live there you don't even need a car. The 'if you can afford to live there' is the tricky part though.

Use the fucking Google. I'm not expressing any idea that isn't accepted by the vast majority of modern historians. It's even on Wikipedia for chrissake. Here are some keywords:

Islamic Revolution
Anglo-Persian/Anglo-Iranian/British Petroleum

Here's a link to TIME's coverage of the new oil policy that directly benefits American and British oil companies:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1576593,00.html

There's more information out there that you can shake a stick at, it's all easily available, and it's not very hard to understand the pattern.

Learn from this:

Microsoft, or one of their marketing partners is employing a technique called "cognitive exhaustion" to try to break down the perception that Vista is a failure.

Whenever there is criticism of Vista, one of their team will ALWAYS respond by raising doubt about the veracity of the criticism, despite the overwhelming evidence that the software IS a dog.

You can learn about the technique in the (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 419).

Even Time magazine has notice Microsoft is "an Empire in rapid decline".

Who's this message directed at? The last people he's going to fool are corporate users. Home users continue to avoid buying new computers because what they have is working just fine. Even if he could convince them to go buy, they have a giant selection of $500 and less Vista failure laptops to chose from if they don't just buy a $300 EEE PC with GNU/Linux.

They have admitted they need ODF and that will kill OOXML, Office and them. That's because everyone knows OOXML is not ready and will never be good enough. The usual trick of making ODF difficult will not work because people can simply download Open Office. People might do that anyway because Office is not worth the money [look a twitter reference]. If they don't really become an honest company, and they won't, things will get worse. Despite drastic measures they already have a hard time moving their new software. When they lose the document franchise, they lose the OS monopoly. The curtian is falling fast on their heads.

BTW I suggest all the other worshipers of the charlatan known as Bob Barefoot to read this great article: http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,433084,00.html

"Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices"

Yep, it is the fat people, not the fact that we are turning food into fuel (ethanol) or that the cost of oil is skyrocketing (double whammy of promoting ethanol use and increasing harvesting and transportation costs of food).

Read about it here:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1717572,00.html

Believe it or not what is termed as "economic progress" (industrialization) is a greater cause than the fatties.

I don't know whether this is properly informed, but it suggests that incitement to suicide is a crime in parts of the US at least.

"The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence."

"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

"The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God,"

"There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."

Not even when Ross Perot wanted to do house-by-house drug sweeping in poor neighborhoods? http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975891-5,00.html

Gosh, you're right, none of those people deserve to live.

Prey tell, when did I say they didn't deserve to live?

Any real-world examples of a "free market in health care" actually leading to lower prices and better outcomes?

Yes, just as outsourcing lowers salaries and wages, a free market in health insurance would lower health care costs.

Or are you just hoping that if we disband the FDA, things will magically get better?

I think you misunderstand what I mean. There is no freemarket in health insurance. Employers and employees get a tax break when employers offer insurance to employees. This is from WWII. Back then the government had wage control laws which prevented employers from paying employees more, but to allow employers to attract employees employers were given tax breaks if they offered employees health insurance. If the government allowed employers to pay employees more, without taxing them more, so they could get insurance on their own then you'd have a free market in health insurance and care.

You seem to be under the impression that the US has the best health care in the world.

We, the US, does have the best health care. For those who can afford it. However even those who don't have insurance can still get health care.

Quality of care does not "always" decrease from socialization... in fact, it appears that the exact opposite occurs in most cases.

A man who gets cancer in France, and France is recognized as having one of the best social medicine systems in the world, has a worse 5 year survival chance than one in the US according to a special report on CNN by Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. Also he mentioned briefly why health care is as expensive as it is in the US. There is no free market in health insurance. During WWII the government passed wage control laws. Employers weren't allowed to pay employees more. However the government allowed employers to offer health insurance, and gave them tax breaks for doing so, so they could encourage people to work for them. Those employer provided health insurance incentives are still there. If government got rid of the incentives and allowed employers to pay employees more without raising the taxes they paid then there would be a free market in health insurance. Just as outsourcing does to salaries and wages, the competition would drive health care costs down.

The minute the government stops subsidizing the production of ethanol, not only will farmers start moving back to wheat and other foods that the world needs, but ethanol will be forced to survive on its own next to gasoline, and it will vanish in the puff of bad logic that brought it into existence. Let's not forget the recent story about increases in beer cost as farmers switch over to corn for ethanol. Also informative is this recent Time magazine article debunking the benefits of ethanol. This is just another political stunt at the expense of the world's food crops and my inebriation. When will Congress learn that manipulating the economy never has the desired effects.

Is this the same bunch of democrats that FDR and old hickory led?

Is this the same bunch of democrats who enforced Gold and Silver coinage and made sure republican weenies never controlled economy in early 1800s?

You do know that FDR took the US off the gold standard and http://www.the-privateer.com/1933-gold-confiscation.html">confiscated it?

Take the republicans now: They are a unified lot, show a lot of initiative, make sure to take the fight to the enemy camp, and generally destroy their enemy even when their forces are weak.

So why might there be a civil war in the Republican Party?

Not so extreme as you think, where a pharmacist refused to process a birth control prescription because of his beliefs. With cases like that already on record, I wonder how long it will be before a fundamentalist pharmacist or doctor refuses service to an HIV positive patient due to some ill conceived notion that only homosexuals can contract HIV.

My choice? Great! I want SciFi HD and Speed HD please!

That's what Comcast is counting on. You will pay for SD disguised as HD for 2-6 channels for $80/month for the package. These aren't in basic cable are they? For many people it's 80+ channels of crap with only 2-6 that they pay for. I dropped cable when it went over 12.95/month. I'm still waiting for a-la-carte so I can get just Discovery without subsidizing all the ESPN crap that runs up the price for those who have no interest in armchair sports.

Have you noticed that ESPN has lobbied very hard to get their line-up in the basic package and charge for it? ESPN is the same as buying a non-Apple computer. You pay for Windows even though you think it's too expensive and raises the cost of a new computer.
http://media.www.lsureveille.com/media/storage/paper868/news/2004/01/20/News/Espn-Costs.Endanger.Service-2048194.shtml
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040223-591332,00.html

In a nutshell, basic cable is mostly for the sports network just like a new PC is mostly an IE and MS Office platform. If I could cut that cost, basic may be a consideration again.

I just checked the schedule. Dirty Jobs and How it is made are both available online. I work nights. Online the shows are all on demand. On cable, they are on only at scheduled times. Re-run's are the pits. Online another missed episode are easly found. HD is no longer in HD. HD is incompatible with most TiVo boxes. Why spend the money.

I don't see anything as hyped (and as mostly living up to the hype) as the iPhone. If Time magazine is any indicator, it did phenomenally well last year. To top that, some cheap knock-offs would be needed, but I'm not even sure how far that would fare given that Apple has at least 300 patents on it. Could someone fill me in please? Disclaimer: I've never owned a product of Apple and don't intend to buy any of their products until they become more transparent.

The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.

It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.

As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."

I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.

If you are a nation state and want one then you probably already have the knowledge required to build one and just need the materials. Building the facilities to refine them without the international community noticing is likely to be very hard, however.

My first introduction to their practices was a Time magazine article my friend dug up from 1991, when I was trying to figure out what they were all about. It won an award, and is worth a look for those folks to don't understand the vitriol. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865,00.html

Wasn't Gore proposing this back before 2008?

I bought the special edition with 64MB and a clear green case (as seen here http://www.time.com/time/digital/reports/mp3/hrdware2.html ). I still have the parallel port adapter with pass through. This was before USB and it took forever to load songs on it! It still works.

Stunningly ironic is that the party that goes on about those "poor minorities that need our help" has a black man making a damned good run. Seems kinda counter to the nonsense about the minorities need our help and handouts

I'm happy that slashdot continues to have some sort of respect for the intellect of the reader. I'm pretty sure that everybody here made the mental connection to Italy, and if they didn't, they should be reading Geography 101 instead of slashdot. Espicially with the "Google Translate" link. And the original document in Italian.

Crafications such as 'London, England' are only necessary when it is likely that the reader could be confused. Hence there is no need to write 'Beijing, China', for example

The "dumbing down" of American media isn't really apparent until you compare similar publications from the US to their closest British counterparts. Compare Newsweek or Time Magazine to The Economist or The New York Times to The Guardian. And this isn't just my opinion, it has been validated in studies of the matter.

Well, a quick Google search for 'bounty hunter kills wrong person' yielded this one and this one. The 'getting community service' statement I made was just hyperbole, but still.....

We always worry about what will happen if the robots aren't able to discern combatants and non combatants well enough, but what if we turn out to build robots that are better at it than us? Ones that can pinpoint the source of gunfire from a crowd. Ones of infinite calm, whom won't be startled, fatigued, or angered into making a terrible mistake or committing outright murder. Yes that technology has far to go, yes tele-communication as it currently stands is insufficient to replace ground patrol units, but those are challenges that I think can be met. Challenges that will be met, and will result in fewer casualties in war than ever before; for both our soldiers and innocent civilians.

The chemical reactions in the brain thagt cause depression are pretty well known. It's chemical issue.

No, sorry. Read the study. We don't know what causes depression. Hell, even the TV commercials for anti-depressents tell you that. The chemical imbalance theory is just that. Its just as likely that the chemical imbalance is a symptom, not the cause. We don't know.

Just because it's in your brain, doesn't mean it's really in your control.

To some extent that's true, to a large extent not. Certainly our mood is under our control. Some have been known to control their heartbeat.

You would be suprised at the number of things people do everyday and never know it.

I did say part of it was subconcience; the trick it to make yourself aware of it.

People EAT without knowing it. Snack really. All kinds of things that take a consious outside effort to change.

Nonsense. You know how I know its BS? Because they know RIGHT AWAY when they are out of snack. They choose to pretend they aren't eating as much. There's a reason why writing down what you eat works when you're trying to lose weight... it makes it so you can't lie to yourself, but there's certainly no external force in that... you need to CHOOSE to lose weight, and write down your diet.

pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter or
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827454,00.html

"You can survive a few holes then (hell, a plane coming in to Florida some years ago lost a good part of the upper fuselage, and other than one flight attendant being sucked out, nobody else was killed.)"

It sounds like you are thinking of this.

I would estimate there has been about 10x inflation from the mid-60s to today. Your 30 cent gas now costs $3.00. Your $1800 car is now $18,000. Your $5 doctor's visit is now $50. Oh shit.. wait a second.

Which of these industries is backed by a government program paying suppliers/providers of the good/service a set amount? Oh yes. That's right. Health care. The medicare/medicaid have maximum amounts they will pay for a given procedure. That is, they set a price ceiling. But what happens is that no provider (i.e. doctor) in his right mind will set his price any lower than what the government will pay. If the customer (i.e. patient) complains, he can simply say that the government is willing to pay that much, why isn't his insurance company?

The government health-care programs we have have thus created an effective price floor by setting a price ceiling.

Now.. to explain the inflation you really need look no further than the Johnson administration. I just did a quick Google on this so I could have something to back this up. I found this gem from Time magazine in 1966. Everyone with any brains knew what he was doing was going to lead to massive inflation. It did. Yet for some reason the reporters and journalists of today are very hush hush about this clear correlation between massive government spending and inflation. The economic theories predict it as a cause-effect relationship and we have historical evidence clearly showing the correlation. Yet no one wants to talk about that.

You also clearly fail to note that the minimum wage is and always has been a bullshit number. It is federally mandated and totally fails to reflect the price differences between regions. States or even smaller localities like cities are of course free to set their own minimum wages and if it's such a great idea then you'd think more of them would be doing it. Granted some have.

Anyway, to get to the point. Currency does not necessarily have to be backed by a generally useless resource to be valuable. Those pushing for a silver or a gold standard fail to note that when new deposits are found the prices of those resources drops dramatically. Consider the ads on TV that tell you how much silver has risen in value over the last 20 years. What they fail to tell you is that it had a significantly higher value just before their chart begins.

I appreciate Ron Paul for his steadfast refusal to compromise his ideals but I don't appreciate him for the same reason. He looks at the Iraq war and claims it is an unjustifiable military expense. He doesn't even consider the potential benefits of it. Some would say that Bush & Co. didn't appreciate the economic impact that waging a war would have. That may be true and if it is, Ron Paul's position is actually no better or worse than Bush's. I personally feel though that Bush is keenly aware of the cost of his war yet passionately feels that waging it is in our country's best interests. Plenty of people don't see it that way. I'm not even necessarily sure I see it that way. But I am not so foolish as to discount every reason Bush had as obviously unimportant. He has said it time and again that he felt allowing Saddam to break his peace treaty would send the wrong message to the world, and particularly to that region, that you can break an agreement with us and get away with it. That, to me, is just good sense unless of course the cost of standing up is too high. And that's where you can maybe fault Bush for probably low-balling the cost estimate. It wouldn't be the first time a leader (governmental, business, or otherwise) made a bad decision, and it won't be the last. The world will keep turning, trust me.

As for Ron Paul's other positions. Well, again, what can I say. In principle I like the idea of getting rid of a whole slew of bullshit social programs. But in practice to do so overnight as Ron Paul has proposed would like

I'd be much more impressed with EU anti-trust efforts if they weren't pretty much aimed at non-EU companies. They're mostly a trade barrier rather than a legitimate regulatory body.

Yeah, Neil Armstrong was stuck in Gemini 8 at about 360 degrees per second...interesting, that the end of the Time Magazine article which describes it:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840655-2,00.html

Shaken by the near tragedy, but determined to put its lessons to good use on the remaining four Gemini flights, NASA officials last week continued to sift telemetry data to pinpoint the location and determine the cause of Gemini 8's short circuit. They indicated that they will probably include new attitude-thruster instrumentation on future flights. And as if to demonstrate their confidence that the U.S. space program will continue on schedule, they designated Space Veterans Virgil Grissom and Edward White and Rookie Roger Chaffee as crew members on the first three-man U.S. space mission--an earth-orbiting flight late this year in the Apollo moonship.

Have you seen the numbers for youth turnout in Obama's favor in the primaries? It's huge; the youth vote is what won him Iowa, and that's in a primary -- young people never vote in primaries, if the consensus has it right. See TIME's take on the subject.

Barack represents something different -- considerate consensus-building rather than win-at-any-cost, an opportunity to heal the country's political divides rather than dig them deeper while still getting big things done -- and to the generation that recognized their own thoughts in John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change", that difference is huge.

The RIAA has come a long way since they were setup to regulate and maintain the technical standards on how vinyl records should be manufactured. Hopefully they will go the way of the vinyl record real soon...

What, you want to RIAA to make revival? While CD sales are declining vinyl record sells are increasing. More and more stores are starting to carry vinyl turntables. Yes, I've noticed this as I'd like to get one myself.

However . . . . vinyal seems to be making a comeback and may be returning.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1702369,00.html

• The Obama campaign has renewed my sense of patriotism, long buried under the cynical misuse of patriotism as a cudgel to suppress honest debate and dissent. If you haven't seen it yet, this video captures in four minutes much of the feelings his campaign has rekindled for me.
  
• After the last seven years, I want to feel proud of America again, and help send a message that we as a nation reject torture, fear-based authoritarianism, an unaccountable executive, ideologically-driven anti-science policies, and indefinite war with a constantly changing mission.
  
• I believe Barack Obama is the strongest candidate, with the best chance of garnering enough support across parties, races, genders, religions (including us atheists!), and regions to actually credibly claim a mandate for change. He has a proven record of bringing diverse interests together to get meaningful legislation passed: when he authored a law that required the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases, prosecutors and police adamantly opposed the bill, as well as the governor and most legislators who wanted to look tough on crime. But Obama led a campaign to get it passed, and a key element of that was to quietly but effectively bring together prosecutors, public defenders, police organizations, and death penalty opponents work out an agreement that all groups could endorse. Eventually, the bill was passed unanimously and became law. (the American Bar Association later unanimously adopted a similar resolution)
  
• Despite being considered a visionary, Obama is very conservative (in the traditional Burkean sense), with a pragmatic, minimalist, and consensus-based approach to government.

Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything.

I think maybe you haven't studied much of either. The conclusions of logic are axiomatic conclusions, which means you have to assume the axioms for the conclusions to be true.

It's a word-game. That's what philosophy is, a word-game. The conclusions of philosophy are true only by assumption, they generally bear no relationship to reality. There's no rigor at all in the field of philosophy.

Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case.

Except that it is the case, I can construct examples that prove that it's the case, and both Hitches and Dawkins have done so. Atheism doesn't "get" people to believe anything except in the power of reason and scrutiny to get at probable truths about the universe.

Which certainly makes a lot more sense than what religion offers - make-believe. In a world where religion has the power to take 19 educated architects, engineers, and teachers and compel them to kill themselves and 3000 other innocent people - not because a gun was put to their heads, but because words were said to them - that's a power that we have to inspect and investigate. When you say that Dawkins claims religion doesn't "change how people act", I know I'm talking to someone who hasn't really investigated his argument. It's religion's power to make people act worse than they normally would - say, when a Chinese man murders two women to sell them as "ghost brides" instead of as living slaves - that leads to the conclusion that it's a net negative, especially when the statistics prove that religion doesn't have the reciprocal power to make people act better than they would. (If you believe otherwise then you have a lot of explaining to do, like the fact that high divorce rates are associated with high religiosity. Or the fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison.)

There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.

There is a contradiction, or at least a looming caveat, when someone says "I've pledged my life to putting claims about the universe and reality to intense scrutiny - except for these specific claims, which I set beyond all inspection for no good reason at all."

Are we going to inspect claims, or accept them without testing? I don't understand someone who refuses to decide, and seemingly lives two lives - a professional life where they search for rigorous knowledge, and a personal life where they simply believe whatever they'd like to believe.

It doesn't make sense to me. It should be one or the other. Somebody who tries to have it both ways is living a lie - one of those two lives is a lie.

This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.

I'm horrified at the idea that you've swallowed the advertising that says morality and ethics are the sole province of religion. I don't see why it's necessary to believe claims about reality on the basis of no good evidence in order to be a good person. That's nonsense. I'm all in favor of ethics and morality informing scientific progress and the use of scientific advancements. The problem is that religion doesn't actually have anything to do with ethics. It's more often the case that religion is an "out" for people to ignore morality and ethics, and that's why it's a net force for bad in human societies, and has always been.

Where is the Mother Theresa of the atheists?

You idiot. Mother Theresa was an atheist.

He also hates his own dog.

Read that linked story made me ill.

What's on his iPod: "Who Let The Dogs Out" ...and whatever else he thinks might be popular with the electorate.

That's not what's on his ipod. That's a question he really wants the answer to. Mitt Romney wants to know who let the dogs out, because Mitt Romney believes the dog(s) should be firmly locked on top of his station wagon, and covered in feces.

The first link on my search returned TIME magazine's article from skylab a good read.

I suppose this being a spy satellite the "final orbit" is likely to be over populated areas and a maybe a bit less likely to land in the ocean, unless they were primarily spying on boats.

Anyways, it's a good read and puts aside several of my original optimisms.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002414.htm?chan=search
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576854-1,00.html

Granted, this e-hissy from Anonymous is unlikely to take down the cult or even deal it serious damage, but it does serve to highlight how the traditional big media outlets have been legally hogtied.

For real. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. For one example, check out the cover of Time magazine's issue of May 6, 1991.

Can you imagine a major national newsmagazine running this cover today?

According to Wikipedia:

On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, President Bill Clinton granted Rich a presidential pardon. Since Rich's former wife and mother of his three children, socialite Denise Rich, had made large donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library during Clinton's time in office, Clinton's critics alleged that Rich's pardon had been bought. Rich had also made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations. Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to investigate. She stepped down before the investigation was finished and was replaced by James Comey. Though Comey was critical of Clinton's pardons, he could not find any grounds on which to indict him.

During hearings after Rich's pardon, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages [3]. In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable [4]. In the same letter Clinton listed Libby as one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported Rich's pardon. His pardon was curiously supported also by the king of Spain, Juan Carlos I.

Time Magazine has an article from February, 2001, on the case here:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,99302,00.html

The reality is that there is little doubt Rich was guilty - he was alleged to be subject to up to 400 years in prison time if he came back to the US, and the DoJ has been trying to seize him all over Europe, which is why he has carloads of ex-Israeli mercenaries protecting him when he travels in Europe. There is no doubt that Clinton lied when he said he based his decision solely on the recommendations of some attorneys and law professors. The money did it - any idiot can see that.

The BBC also lists this case of an obviously bought or colluded pardons:

Carlos Vignali, 30, had his 15-year sentence for conspiracy to sell cocaine reduced to time served, and walked free on Mr Clinton's last day in office. His father, Horacio, is a rich and powerful leader in the Los Angeles Hispanic community who has made large donations to the Democratic party. A number of high-profile Los Angeles figures, including the archbishop, the man who is now sheriff and two current mayoral candidates appealed for clemency for Vignali, but several have now said they should not have done so.

Almon Glenn Braswell, a Miami-based businessman, was convicted in 1983 of fraud and perjury in connection with a mail-order treatment for baldness he sold. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, where his business is based, were stunned by the pardon because it could throw a spanner into the works of the current investigation of Braswell on new charges. Mr Clinton said he was not aware that Braswell was facing a new investigation, and that his pardon was only intended to apply to the 1983 conviction. Braswell's lawyers argue it applies to the present circumstances as well, but LA prosecutors say they will proceed with their investigation anyway.

Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton's younger brother and a Miami lawyer, accepted nearly $400,000 from Braswell and the Vignali family to act on their behalf. When news of the payments became public, he returned the money at the Clintons' insistence. Bill Clinton denied knowing Mr Rodham had taken money for the clemency work, but not having discussed the cases with him. Senator Clinton denied any involvement in t

The first Saturn V rockets for the Apollo program had a similar problem with pogo oscillations. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902216,00.html . Engineers were able to solve the problem back then, I'm sure they can come up with solutions again.

I'm no fan of Time Magazine, but every now and then I notice the rare article and raise an eyebrow.

What about this?

"Did Chess Make Him Crazy?"

a short quote from the article before you click to read it all:
"Why such proximity between genius and madness in chess? There are three possible explanations. One is that chess is a monomania. You study it intensively day and night from childhood if you are going to rise to the ranks of the greats, and that kind of singular focus constricts your reality and makes you more vulnerable to distortions of it. "A chess genius," wrote George Steiner, "is a human being who focuses vast, little understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality." Plausible, perhaps, but there are lots of folks who are monomaniacal in other "trivial" spheres and who come out psychically intact. Tiger Woods was raised from infancy to be a great golfer and is not just intact but graceful and charming. The ranks of great golfers, swimmers and Dominican shortstops are not more noticeably skewed to the deranged than the general population."

The Pope was invited to the university by its rector.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1703692,00.html

According to "the letter", the scientists are still pissy about something Benedict said 17 years ago. That's a long time to hold a grudge.

Also, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/17/2140251.htm?section=world

Disagreeing with the Pope is fine. Not being interested in what he has to say is fine. Boycotting a popular leader because you disagree with his views? That's really lame, and yes, shameful. If you don't want to hear him speak then don't go to his speech. It's not fucking rocket science.

We have a problem with obesity--increasingly with children.

Disappointment Level One: Someone, somewhere decided that it is one single factor contributing to this, not a combination. Blame is absolute and illogically must be placed on one thing.

Disappointment Level Two: The media reinforces Lvl 1 idea and is on a witch hunt.

Disappointment Level Three: Each alleged witch further exacerbates by shifting blame to another witch, none of them ever admitting to being part of the problem. Once a new target is acquired, they escape the public eye.

Disappointment Level Four: Lvls 1-3 act as a free pass to parents. There are so many witches to point at, surely nothing they have done resulted in this. Again, no responsibility is taken.

And all the while, we're setting ourselves up for a diabetes explosion. Although many have claimed it's been on the horizon for a long time, the numbers are starting to creep. Enjoy eating through all four layers of that cake!