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Some facts about the U.S. justice system:

* Judges are elected, subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.

Actually, judges in the U.S. justice system are appointed for life. State and municipal systems differ (some are elected, some are hired under civil service rules), but judges in the federal government are, in fact, appointed.

Mind you, that doesn't make any of the rest of your points invalid, I just wanted to correct the record.

Some facts about the U.S. justice system:

* The Reid technique is widely used for interrogations, a technique notorious for its effectiveness in enticing false confessions.
* Only 5 % of convicted felons had their case tried in court; the rest make a plea bargain (typically under threats of excessively long prison sentences and/or the death penalty).
* Judges are elected, subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.
* At least 4 % of people sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent.
* The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, not just relative to the population size, but in absolute numbers.
* U.S. private prisons sees $3+ billion in annual revenue... Not that that has anything to do with the above issues, I'm sure.

The U.S. justice system is broken in so many ways, I'm certainly forgetting some things.

can you legitimize that accusation please?

Well, going down the list of signers http://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8... I notice

GIlbert Ross, M.D.
President (Acting) and Executive Director
American Council on Science and Health

I am not completely for or against ACSH. Elizabeth Whelan, their founder, was an advocate for some issues I agreed with and some issues I disagreed with. I met Whelan a couple of times. I liked her. She was adding information about some controversial debates, and she was particularly useful in taking on some politically correct positions that had a weak science base. As I recall she was defending GM food, and also taking money from Monsanto.

Most admirably, she was taking on the cigarette industry when it was still a "controversy," especially in magazines that were getting a lot of cigarette advertising, notably almost all the major women's magazines.

But Whelan was also trying to round up "unrestricted" grants from industry to write supposedly unbiased or objective reports on major controversies. To her credit, they tried to give all the scientific evidence, although they seem to have run into problems with that.

The one I remember was their report on that fat substitute, Olestra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This was not a life-or-death issue, but olestra had a few side effects, the most noticeable of which was diarrhea. Procter & Gamble managed to get the FDA to allow them to refer to "diarrhea" by the euphemistic term, "loose stools," which I thought was misleading. At any rate, when I read that report I realized why you can't get an objective report sponsored by a corporation with a financial interest. Whelan couldn't even use straightforward language and arguments to defend olestra, because P&G's lawyers made them follow the FDA-approved wording.

Whelan's big disappointment was that the industry wouldn't support her (the way they do for the more partisan think tanks like the Manhattan Institute), so she gave up that economic model. I don't know where they get their money from now, but I assume they disclose it. In a way it's a shame, because Whelan failed because she was too honest (but not completely candid). Or to put it less flatteringly, you can't be a little bit of a prostitute.

But let's go to the signers at the top.

Henry I. Miller, M.D.
Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy
& Public Policy
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

Scott W. Atlas, M.D.
David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

Hoover did not deign to include its funding sources in the "About Us" section of its web site, and I'm not going to track it down. But as I recall, when Hoover was first created, the Stanford faculty complained that they were an independent institution using Stanford's name but without academic accountability to Standford, and they were funded by corporations that had a financial stake in some of the areas of their research.

Miller was one of the founding members of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition which was founded by Philip Morris to challenge the evidence of harm from tobacco http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

I remember reading Miller's defenses of GM food. I happen to think that GM food is (probably, mostly) pretty safe. But if Miller believes in the free market, he ought to let consumers know which foods are GM and which aren't, so they can make their own free-market decisions. I don't know if Miller takes any money directly from those corporations. But the organizations he works for, like the Hoover Institution, ACSH, and ASSC, do. So that's where his paycheck ultimately comes from. So in that sense the parent's accusation is true.

Oz has

Let us not forget about the issues with mailing lists either.

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~d...

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/...

Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male). And I actually like looking at pretty girls. But at what cost? Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Things like Booth Babes drive people away. For those of you interested, it is illuminating to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to what I'm sure will turn into a flame war..... (Complete disclosure: I posed something similar a few weeks ago, but it's such interesting stuff, I posted it again!)

One thing is different this time though.

ISIS is dumb.
And because of that they are actually losing. No really. They are trying to use media and social media to prevent this image of them as this scary and violent group, but it's both backfiring, turning everyone against them, and a mask for for their losses.

They're aren't fighting an asymmetrical battle. They have essentially discarded or ignored the basic playbook of the past few decades. They are attempting to engage us in traditional and conventional methods, rather than an insurgency, which is why we, and the Jordanians and Kurds, are beating them back soundly. ISIS hasn't made or kept any gains since late September, when they lost their initial momentum the had built up through surprise and the time it took us to organize a response.

But then ISIS also isn't like the other militant groups in the past.

This is a group of True Believers.

They truly believe they are the inheritors of the caliphate, and that their victory is assured by God. And that belief has lead them to (so far) forgo an insurgency and instead fight conventional battles, conventional battles in the open in which they are getting stomped, because they are utterly assured of their eventual victory. And then there's the apocalyptic aspect of their beliefs. And that they are so violent and crazy that even Al Qaeda doesn't want anything to do with them; that they are alienating all their potential allies, turning friends into enemies (which is one BIG reason why we need to keep the RWNJ's from getting their way and turning this into a "war on islam" instead of a "war on extremists"...ISIS WANTS it to be a war on Islam).

This group may eventually realize that they are going to fall apart and be destroyed unless they change their tactics.
But again, as a group of True Believers who doesn't accept the potential to lose as a real possibility, that change may not happen.

http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8...

So I'm a white male that's actually done a little reading on the issue of women and STEM. Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male), and it was illuminating for me to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to a flame war.....

The Falcon 9 is made up of two parts: a 138-foot-tall first stage, which burns for the first few minutes of flight, lifting the craft up to an altitude of about 50 miles before separating and falling back to Earth, and a smaller, 49-foot-tall second stage, which burns for another five minutes or so, carrying the spacecraft into orbit before disconnecting and falling back down to earth as well.

Normally, both of these stages — as well as the stages that make up other rockets in general — break up into pieces as they plummet downward, eventually sinking in the ocean and becoming unusable. But on Sunday, as the first stage falls back to earth, SpaceX will fire its engines in order to stabilize and guide it in for a controlled landing.

The plan is to land it on an autonomous uncrewed barge, which is being stationed about 370 miles east of Cape Canaveral. As the rocket descends, steerable fins affixed to its outside will help guide it and slow it down. As it nears the barge, a set of legs will unfold from the bottom of the rocket, and if all goes to plan, it'll slow down to a speed of about 4.5 miles per hour before gently landing on them, fully upright.

To solve the problem from the last attempt, the rocket will be carrying more hydraulic fluid.

http://www.vox.com/2015/2/8/79...

It is important that people know who the 'hero of Vincennes' is. Way too many people are looking for an excuse to indulge their bigotry and attack muslims. Which is pretty much what the terrorists hope to make happen.

This is definitely a case of picking the worst summary of the source article possible. When I looked at the /. summary, I immediately thought "3D is going out in movies and TV, and haven't we been there with the HTC Evo 3D?". Obviously a lot of other people did too.

So I clicked on TFA. Ahhhhhhhh... Now it makes more sense! From TFA:

We're used to our gadgets being passive objects. They respond to typed or tapped commands, but we don't expect them to be aware of their surroundings.

... As our devices have more and better sensors, they're going to be increasingly aware of the world around them, and will interact with the world and with us in more sophisticated ways.

So other than the really gimmicky "personal drones that can take breathtaking aerial shots", this is primarily talking about computer vision, such as gesture recognition, local environment evaluation, etc.

Just looking at the trends in oil and gas prices over the last century there is a steady upward trend in prices.

Looking at the demand curves for China, India and other countries that are catching up to the Western World, their demand for oil and gas is going up - along with their demand for autos.

See, this relatively cheap gas and oil prices will not last because it never has in the past. This is just a small dip in a long term trend. Why some oil speculators are renting out oil tankers and just parking them off-shore waiting for the inevitable increase in prices.

Anyone who thinks this oil and gas boom is permanent and low oil and gas prices is will stay is a short sighted fool.

See, all these people are going to panic when oil prices shoot up again. .

The only thing worse and with less sense of humor than the CIA is ... the Korean dictatorship. Had they not wigged out over a freaking B-list movie than their Supreme A-Hole would have garnered some degree of sympathy form the American public but instead they decided to shoot themselves in their foot once again.

Don't fall victim to the false narrative of NK being run by nutjobs. No one runs a country, especially not for 50+ years without being extremely shrewed and cunning. They clearly don't give a fuck about regular citizens, but they sure know how to play other countries given the tiny amount of real power they have. Don't let them play you too.

I've been idling watching the DPRK's actions over the last 15 years, and this article is the first one about the Sony hack that matches up with what all the serious scholars have been saying about the DPRK for decades.

Here's the real reason North Korea hacked Sony. It has nothing to do with The Interview.

Scientists can use these mutations as markers to piece together how the Ebola virus has traveled from person to person. Because they know the general mutation rate of the virus, they can also pin down the dates of when the disease spread

First artical I found with a good overview of the process: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6...

Science is awesome.

I know it sounds crazy at first blush, but I think it would make sense to totally get rid of corporate taxes. (Replaced by other forms of taxation.)

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you tax the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

Some references:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/59...

I'm been having a hard time with Wilson's story, too. And I'm not the only one.

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/...

How is Brown "leaning" into the cop car? If Wilson is in the driver seat, there's no room for anyone's body to come through the window, especially not as big a person as Brown.
And the photos of Wilson's "injuries"? If he can take several punches from an almost 300 lb Hulk Hogan-like "demon" and come out looking like that, he should consider professional boxing. He should have had massive swelling.

Well, no mention of missile system here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
This one suggests a different platform: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/...
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/18/5... references other aircraft shot down at ranges requiring BUK or Pantsir missiles.

So it does look like someone was using a missile system capable of taking down an airliner to shoot down other Ukrainian aircraft, although it could be a Pantsir rather than a BUK.

I'd rather have a Pantsir myself, the missile is nice but those autocannon are multipurpose hotness. No pictures of a Pantsir being spirited back across the border into Russia just after shooting down the wrong aircraft though.

Don't panic

Really, this notion of "commercially reasonable" scares me the most. I'm guessing you could cover a lot of very very bad behavior by companies if the regulatory standard is "commercially reasonable".

Remember, this is the FCC head and former cable executive who was appointed by someone who people on the Right call a "Marxist". Tom Wheeler should be shown the door immediately. In fact, he never should have been allowed anywhere near a regulatory agency. Whenever tells me they want people in government who have real-world business experience, I think how that's the last thing we want. Government and regulatory agencies should under no circumstances be run like a business world and experience as a business executive is the last thing we should look for in political leaders. It's like hiring a bank teller based on his experience as a former embezzler. Which reminds me, this is every bit as big a scandal as the recent story of the banking regulators who had the cozy relationship with Goldman Sachs.

If you don't know about the recent Goldman Sachs story, you really ought to take a look:

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6...

Meet Carmen Segarra, whose 46 hours of damning audio tape make her sort of the Edward Snowden of the financial world. And she's every bit as heroic as Snowden. I'm sure the lawbreaking at Goldman could be said to have been "commercially reasonable" too.

Living in an oligarchy sucks balls. Godspeed to any future whistleblowers who decide to make the personal sacrifice to give us these glimpses into the lives of our not-so-benevolent overlords.

Good summary by Ezra Klein, who has been tracking health care reform since at least 2008:

In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working.

"On the whole, though, costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn't have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them"

Wow - a very large attack of hard right wing hide raters today.

http://www.vox.com/cards/obama...

Americans who purchased coverage are paying for it (payment rates running a bit higher than privately-placed insurance, so yes "they paid for it"). Americans who could not previously afford any health insurance and therefore were essentially locked out from most health care are now being subsidized at a level about 40% of all the US' G8 peers. With that subsidy they are able to obtain reasonably-priced basic medical service thus greatly enriching their lives and - it is believed by 97.3% of health care economists - lowering the overall cost of medical care to the entire nation.

Your complaint is?

sPh

Well, sort of. Apple did promote it. They ended up releasing their watch with it and had some videos of the phones with it.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/61...

People vastly misunderestimate the riskiness of various occupations in the US.

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/22/6...

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6...

As someone else put it, Putin is aspiring to be a Dune character. Or more prosaically, he's learned a lot from watching US corporations and the US government manipulate the news cycle. Do something that will outrage the public, wait for the new furor, pull back a little, wait for the news to move on to some other subject, and try again.

"The Olkiluoto project in Finland is three times over budget and 9 years late, while the Flamanville project in France is 4 years late." http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/59...

US elections are rigged. But Canada knows how to fix them.

"When Americans voted for the House of Representatives in 2012, Democratic candidates won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans. Yet after the dust settled, the GOP ended up with a 234-201 majority in the chamber. And several recently-gerrymandered states had particularly odd results — for instance, in Pennsylvania, Republicans won 49 percent of the votes, but 69 percent of the seats."

4th generation is much more expensive than once through and nuclear power is in decline so the wait will be forever. http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/59...

Correct: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/31/5...

The "fun" part is that being anti-Israel currently is less antisemitic than it is antifascist...

The "fun" part is how thin that beard is, especially when European Jews are being threatened and attacked as part of the rioting and violence in various European countries when the object of the protests is supposedly Israel.

‘Gas the Jews!’: European anti-Semitism during the Gaza crisis

"They are not screaming 'death to the Israelis' on the streets of Paris, " Roger Cuikerman, head of French Jewish political group CRIF, said. "They are screaming ‘death to the Jews.'" ....

According to the Associated Press, anti-Semitic slogans have popped up in protests inside Germany. "Gas the Jews," has been chanted at some protests, according to the Associated Press

Well, many people have a hard time "thinking straight" when it comes to Israel.

For quite some time now, according to data from the NCTA:

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5...

If 23andme can't sell a tiny vial for you to spit into, there's no way the FDA will allow this Cue device to be sold. Unless they spend the next 5 years and a couple hundred million dollars testing it.

That's the government protecting you from knowing your vitamin-D levels or whether you're at risk for hereditary diseases.

Haha, sounds like you need to read: why politics makes us stupid.

From a story on today's soylentNews. Posted here because it hits on a couple of things I already mentioned in this thread.

"But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren't held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don't typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don't want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth - purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don't piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn't put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side."

"This will make sense to anyone who's ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It's filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It's a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in it end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven't spent much time studying the issue. More information, in this context, doesn't help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away."

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/55...

"This will make sense to anyone whoâ(TM)s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. Itâ(TM)s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. Itâ(TM)s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in it end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who havenâ(TM)t spent much time studying the issue. More information, in this context, doesnâ(TM)t help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away."

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/55...

Courtesy of Nat Torkington of O'Reilly and BoingBoing, video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel.

there's this one carpenter who's so famous that he is literally worshipped as a god by billions of people, a feat that has not yet been achieved by any musician I'm aware of ...

O Rly?.

With a 4"'er, you're not going to get any detail out of Jupiter or Saturn. No cloud bands on Jupiter -- just the moons as points of light. Saturn will look like this or this if you're lucky.

But the moon looks great at any magnification.

Timothee Besset of Id says:

"As far as idTech 5 (the Rage engine), it runs on PS3 and Mac already. Setting up idTech 5 to run on those platforms early on in our development cycle was a direct result of carrying Linux/Mac support in idTech 4 beforehand. It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

http://ttimo.vox.com/

Splash Damage was the company that did the port of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars to Linux. The port was good and I still play quite a bit.

Incorrect, Splash Damage was the one that created and developed the game. A Linux software programmer/specialist, of which is an id Software employee, is who did the actual Linux port known by the name of TTimo. Now from the discussion on the forums it seems Splash Damage might be doing their own Linux port this time around for BRINK.

Ooops, 404. Try this one.

Image is here personally i really do not care about this whole censorship issue as in my opinion the whole world/society is doomed and is going to come crashing down pretty soon. Good luck with creating a better world/society, but i think your all doomed to failure and we will soon be forced into just worrying about survival nothing else as you roam the waste lands. Good luck

All the ads they need are already in the games, but these companies aren't selling the products they advertise.

I played 'the world ends with you' and thought it'd be neat to have a player pin. I haven't seen one in stores anywhere but some random guy setup a cafe press shop where he's selling them and I'm buying! The advertising worked like a charm, but Square Enix isn't getting the money for it because they haven't made it easier for me to get what I wanted from them then it was to stumble upon the goods elsewhere. Given the choice, I'd pay MORE to get an official product from them than take my chances on some guy's website.

if game makers are looking for ways to increase the money they are making this is one place they could easily get it. I picked up this Cactuar cell phone charm (not mine in the pic tho) while I was in japan, but I'd have picked one up years ago if I'd seen it in a store here.

If game companies took advantage of the marketing power they already have it would turn the used game market into a win for them as more fans == more merchandise sold. The age of the game does not detract from that at all. It's been decades now and I'd still buy a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle if I saw one!

Don't forget that this is all what Obama collectively called the "Civil Security Force." I was ridiculed for pointing this out and told that it was merely an expansion of the Peace Corp and other organizations. But "Civil Security Force" are Obama's words and to my knowledge the Peace Corp doesn't "secure" anything. Like most agendas like this these things sound great on paper (who can argue with "serving" your country?) but there's a creepiness to it as well not to mention ominous possibilities. What happens if one wishes to exercise the freedom to abstain? Shouldn't such a freedom exist in a "free" society?

Oh, please, this has been debunked to the moon and back. The entire rumor is based on two sentences occupying about 15 seconds of a half-hour speech which were removed from context and splashed onto youtube. If you start listening so much as 10-15 seconds prior to the supposed call for a "Civilian National Security Force", it is immediately clear that Obama was in fact calling for an expansion of the Peace Corps and other civil service organizations, combined with an increased emphasis on diplomacy and international relations, in order to (in part) improve America's image abroad. This rumor has pissed me off so much I actually updated my blog for the first time in 11 months so I could point people to an explanation (with link to video evidence): Obama's Civilian National Security Force, Revealed

'Introducing the Book'

Feb. 24, 2007...

http://billsnyder.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251f31f3f21900d414217eb96a47.html

The income tax is to pay the interest on the money supply. Nothing more, nothing less. Some radicals say it makes more sense to have the money supply be interest free. Then we'd reward those who want to work and save, and we couldn't have that.

Here's everything the parent said in flowchart form.

If you want to spot a terrorist, Look for someone that has a hat like this or this. If he has a shirt like this he's not a terrorist, but if the shirt looks like this he is.

If he's drinking this look out for car bombs!

this guy would have ME calling the Department of Homeland Cowardice in a New York minute! And how about this guy?

Look at da bomb in that terrorist's hand!

this asshat is not a terrorist.

SCARY TERRORIST! ANOTHER SCARY TERRORIST! EVEN SCARIER TERRORIST! And OMFG the scariest one of al!!!!

RUN! RUN! RAISE THE THREAT LEVEL FROM YELLOW TO "SCARED SHITLESS!"

The fact that 40,000 people that die on the American highways every year tells me some of that damned Homeland Security money should go to highway safety improvements. You want to spot a terrorist? Look in a tobacco company boardroom; half a million Americans die every year from cancer.

Terrorism is a tool of the US government to take away Americans' liberties. You, sir, are part of the problem.

No, really. Citation needed.

Here is a blog where someone's mentioned a lot of the statistics. The number of gun accidents, as he discovered, is somewhere around 1150/year. The number of crimes prevented is apparently somewhere around 1.5 MILLION per year.

So, yes. Citation needed. Your gut feeling that guns are evil is not, in any way, proof.

Not to mention the potential for Obamasms by pointing out that Barrack Obama has a blog while W doesn't (well, not a real one anyway) or that Obama has a MySpace page, etc.

Why, I can just see people modding me up +5, Informative right now! ;)

Actually I largely agree with you -- now that this thing has gone so far, packing up and going home may not solve things. There is too much bad blood. If we had let them alone in the first place we probably wouldn't have a terrorism problem. But now we do, and heck if I know how to properly solve it.

I posted to my political-ish blog the other day that if we had spent the money we're spending on Iraq on instead rebuilding the tsunami ravaged countries (several of which were strongly Muslim), that would have done a lot more good. Actually, if we had spent even 10% of that money it probably would have done more good.

Of course, that won't happen. People love tough dramatic "solutions" even when they prove to be ineffective. People have little interest in careful measured actions that actually work.

Unless someone can provide a clearly better idea, I do think we should still get out as soon as we can (which I don't have the knowledge to precisely define). But I agree that alone would not solve the problem. It might be a start, but it would take a lot more than that to turn the tide.

Cheers.