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If you actually care, this: http://www.zompist.com/spell.h... provides some slight counter arguments.

I think you stated it correctly... you ARE a "crackpot". You allude to extreme self-interest and libertarianism in you political and economic leanings which in large part contributes to a dysfunctional society and government. http://www.zompist.com/liberto... http://www.hughlafollette.com/... I'm as free to use meaningless ad hominen attacks as any "crackpot".

Mumble mumble, this guy seems to get it, therefore blame Reaganism.

You may want to read this, but I'd recommend waiting until your blood pressure goes down.

Is not that the governments in latin america aren't stable. Is that US makes sure that they aren't, specially pushing dictatorship goverments.

There's one more component I think you need to add: violence. Mark Rosenberg wrote a piece based on discussions of fascism by twentieth-century historians, and the key feature that distinguished Hitler and Mussolini from other merely despotic dictatorships was the use of scare tactics and targeted assassinations. This is why the "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy is so appealing; because it would be a perfect parallel to the bombing of the Reichstag. Gestapo-style wanton thuggery is also essential—and while the DHS and TSA may be obscene and annoying, dissidents don't get rounded up easily enough for that to be valid either. It does, however, appear that perhaps there is an internal struggle within the federal government between fascists and democratists.

That having been said, Bloomberg simply doesn't have the authority to enact fascist policies, and is nowhere near patient enough to trick people into electing him into a position where he could. (Regardless of whether or not he really wants to, which seems doubtful for the reasons you and others stated.)

I've spent time in socialist countries and it was miserable. And the closer a country gets to socialism, the more miserable and poor people end up being, the more their liberties end up being restricted, and the more corrupt government becomes.

The same could be said of capitalism.

Most libertarians would be happy to turn back the clock on government regulations and government taxes to more traditionally American levels, for the simple reason that the current situation is not sustainable. Progressives are so much into sustainability, why don't you start with finances?

Define "traditionally American levels" - taxes today are lower than at any point from 1933 to the mid-eighties, yet median income, as a percentage of GDP per capita, has been trending downwards since the '80s; meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed. Do you call that sustainable?

I've spent time in socialist countries and it was miserable. And the closer a country gets to socialism, the more miserable and poor people end up being, the more their liberties end up being restricted, and the more corrupt government becomes.

The same could be said of capitalism.

Most libertarians would be happy to turn back the clock on government regulations and government taxes to more traditionally American levels, for the simple reason that the current situation is not sustainable. Progressives are so much into sustainability, why don't you start with finances?

Define "traditionally American levels" - taxes today are lower than at any point from 1933 to the mid-eighties, yet median income, as a percentage of GDP per capita, has been trending downwards since the '80s; meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed. Do you call that sustainable?

Yes, noise levels. Open this page and search for "easter".

We know that all of the natural languages come from one common root because they have a lot of words that are related.

I'm not sure that we do know that. See for instance the paragraph beginning "the first problem" in this Language Log post; also this page from the site you referred to has a good explanation as to why seemingly related words don't necessarily imply any connection.

Languages evolve phonological abberations all the time; just because some are weird doesn't mean it isn't possible! We know that all of the natural languages come from one common root because they have a lot of words that are related. This page is a great place to start if you're interested in the topic further.

As for the use of native American languages in World War II, those languages happened not to be ones that used any clicks. When the code talker idea was first thought up in World War I, it was in the middle of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler actually prepared to deal with code talking, even going so far as to send thirty anthropologists in the 1930s to acquaint themselves with native American languages, but there were simply too many to study all of them. Nevertheless, the strategy wasn't employed as ubiquitously as, say, the Enigma machines.

I've made the argument that "Linux" should be pronounced "Lye-nucks" based on the proper English pronunciation of "Lye-nus Tor-valdz." In fact the man himself used to pronounce it "Lee-nooks" but since then he's apparently changed his name from "Lee-noose" to "Lin-is." The /ee/-to-/ai/ shift is normal for Anglicizing the pronunciation of words and dates back to the sixteenth century, during the Great Vowel Shift. (As they say, every time you pronounce the letter "i" as "eye," God kills a Roman orator.)

>And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.

Sure. There are still hunter-gatherer societies out there.

>...all those "choices" being inferior to the standards one would expect in other societies, thanks to governments pandering to businesses, monopolies, runaway cost-cutting and "creative" kinds of outsourcing.

I disagree. If I want to eat twinkies for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, that is one option I have. I can also buy an incredible variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats - either industrially raised or organic - and cook myself dinner every night. Many places don't have nearly this many options. The former Soviet Union certainly didn't.

>...and this is why (plus the above as applied to food) obesity is both common and the most common reason for social ostracism.

I'm not arguing that any of these things are necessarily good or bad, only that they are definitely US culture. Most people don't even consider these things, but they are not constants around the world by any means.

>This is not acceptable in any culture. In US recently arrived foreigners are often late to their appointment because they don't have a car yet (something that in other countries is not strictly necessary to get anywhere).

Nope, see Turkish and Indian cultures, where an hour late is still acceptable. In China, it depends on your sex.

>In USSR the only place one would be haggling is a farmers' market and maybe when buying a used car (from the previous owner).

Yes, but in many cultures, haggling for everything is the norm.

>And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.

Sure. There are still hunter-gatherer societies out there.

>...all those "choices" being inferior to the standards one would expect in other societies, thanks to governments pandering to businesses, monopolies, runaway cost-cutting and "creative" kinds of outsourcing.

I disagree. If I want to eat twinkies for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, that is one option I have. I can also buy an incredible variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats - either industrially raised or organic - and cook myself dinner every night. Many places don't have nearly this many options. The former Soviet Union certainly didn't.

>...and this is why (plus the above as applied to food) obesity is both common and the most common reason for social ostracism.

I'm not arguing that any of these things are necessarily good or bad, only that they are definitely US culture. Most people don't even consider these things, but they are not constants around the world by any means.

>This is not acceptable in any culture. In US recently arrived foreigners are often late to their appointment because they don't have a car yet (something that in other countries is not strictly necessary to get anywhere).

Nope, see Turkish and Indian cultures, where an hour late is still acceptable. In China, it depends on your sex.

>In USSR the only place one would be haggling is a farmers' market and maybe when buying a used car (from the previous owner).

Yes, but in many cultures, haggling for everything is the norm.

>And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.

Sure. There are still hunter-gatherer societies out there.

>...all those "choices" being inferior to the standards one would expect in other societies, thanks to governments pandering to businesses, monopolies, runaway cost-cutting and "creative" kinds of outsourcing.

I disagree. If I want to eat twinkies for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, that is one option I have. I can also buy an incredible variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats - either industrially raised or organic - and cook myself dinner every night. Many places don't have nearly this many options. The former Soviet Union certainly didn't.

>...and this is why (plus the above as applied to food) obesity is both common and the most common reason for social ostracism.

I'm not arguing that any of these things are necessarily good or bad, only that they are definitely US culture. Most people don't even consider these things, but they are not constants around the world by any means.

>This is not acceptable in any culture. In US recently arrived foreigners are often late to their appointment because they don't have a car yet (something that in other countries is not strictly necessary to get anywhere).

Nope, see Turkish and Indian cultures, where an hour late is still acceptable. In China, it depends on your sex.

>In USSR the only place one would be haggling is a farmers' market and maybe when buying a used car (from the previous owner).

Yes, but in many cultures, haggling for everything is the norm.

I agree with you to some extent. There are simply so many little things that we take for granted that are what define our culture. See this page for a long list. Here are some examples:

    You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.

    You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.

    The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.

    You don't care very much what family someone comes from.

    If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're five minutes late, and apologize profusely if it's ten minutes. An hour late is almost inexcusable.

    If you're talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about two feet.

    About the only things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, and antiques. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that's the buyer's minimum.

If we want to be the world police, we need to act with consistent morality. We turn a blind eye to abuses world wide. Only when our interests are at stake will we attack, and we don't need an excuse. We'll make one up later. So don't try to pretend we are some kind of good guys selflessly spreading democracy and freedom. Try selling that to the East Timorese, or anyone in Central or South America, or most of Africa, you'll either get laughed at or punched.

But I'm sure this will all simply pass unnoticed through your mind, as it contradicts your view of the US, and it is obvious you base your sense of self on the idea that you are a citizen of a 'good' country. If the US was not, in fact, good, then you would probably feel guilty, and might even feel like doing something about it. And that would be difficult, so you continue to believe what is easy and makes you feel good.

Afghanistan did not attack us. The Taliban did. Maybe we should invade the country that harbored and trained Tim McVeigh, if that is such a winning strategy.

At least we had some kind of a pretext for invading Afghanistan. Invading Iraq destroyed any chances we had of bringing those responsible to justice.

My response wasn't just about Iraq. We've invaded many, many other countries. Usually, not so openly. Here's a list of our interventions in Central and South America alone: http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

I will not 'get the fuck over' my country's war crimes. You 'get the fuck over' it, shut the fuck up, and let the adults bring the criminals to justice, okay? That's what adults do: we take responsibility for our actions, and for actions carried out in our names. Pansy ass children like yourself demand that everyone simply forget about their wrongdoing, all the while hypocritically whining about 'personal responsibility,' which evidently means 'everyone else should be responsible for their actions, but I won't be held responsible unless someone forces me to.'

I was referring to the US deposing Allende in Chile. However, there are many, many other cases of extreme US interventionism. Here's a partial list for you to suck on:

http://www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/interventions.html

Here's another, because I know how much you love having the facts regarding US interventionism shoved in your face:

http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

Here's a general list of interventions, not Latin America specific:

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

We are not the good guys. We are not the global police. We are a nation of brutal, arrogant, power hungry thugs, destroying anything that displeases us. You want to know why socialism fails? US. We do it. We infiltrate, kill, lie, steal, rape, and do whatever we have to to "protect" our interests, which really means protecting the interests of rich, owning class Americans, not the peons.

The thing is, we could be the shining beacon of freedom and democracy we pretend to be if it weren't for people like you sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" every time someone constructively criticizes the US.

Oh, silly me. I was referring to the actual present. I keep forgetting that it's OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life, shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him, and all of that cool stuff now, because in the past, something else happened.

Would it be OK if he were declaring himself the dictatorial head of a non-socialist fascist regime?

Seemed like a good question to ask, given that the "socialist" part is pretty much entirely orthogonal to the rest, to the extent that the term has any particular meaning at all these days.

But that's really not the GP's point, which is that given the U.S.'s record of interventions in Latin America during recent history (including support for Murderous Thugs(TM)), we don't exactly have a clear moral high ground or unquestioned credibility on the local street.

It may still be that it's against the interest of either the U.S. or Venezuelan citizens to have Chavez in charge, but the point that our record there is arguably pretty blemished itself is germane to the discussion.

"Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
--Mark Twain, on English as She Is Spoke

We have bested the Portuguese masters of muddle! It took the brilliance of a near-passing grade on the Turing test.

Perhaps you government should worry about not supporting Latin American dictatorships first: http://wais.stanford.edu/USA/us_supportforladictators8303.html http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

There are some huge problems with the libertarian philosophy. Unregulated markets produce some of the worst abuses possible. Libertarians should consider that currently one of the least regulated markets (for manufacturing, not political) in the world is China - the US used to be like that, so why did it change? Some examples:

No environmental regulations. Companies/people should be free to pollute as they wish. Example: factories in China have practically no restrictions chemical dumping. Result: drinking water gets polluted and people die.

No trademark regulations, no intellectual property (or not enforced). Result: pirated goods are everywhere, consumers can't tell the difference between legit goods and pirated.

No safety regulations. Equivalent of FDA is corrupt or useless. Result: pirated drugs are everywhere. Nobody can tell the difference. Thousands of people have died. Lead paint in baby toys.

No restrictions on manufacturing or owning weapons. No ATF. Result: Rich people (like Osama bin Laden) could legitimately buy any biological or nuclear weapon.

No government restrictions on publishing. Absolutely no censorship. Result: child pornography becomes legalised.

No government interference in financial markets. Result: Enron. Inability to government finance short-term problems eg. post 9/11 bankruptcy of all airlines.

No restrictions on monopolies. Result: large companies dominate and destroy all competition. You buy gasoline from Standard Oil. Your software is from Microsoft. Your phone service is provided by Ma Bell. Since competitors are crushed or absorbed before becoming established in the marketplace, you will never have any other choice.

No restrictions on drugs. Result: drugs become as common as sweeties. In fact, some manufacturers start adding morphine, heroin, etc. to sweets. Coca-cola reverts back to cocaine.

Those are just my thoughts. You might also like to read What's wrong with libertarianism.

It's always been this way.

This is silly bickering. All nations contain people, which all suck just as bad. Europe's histroty is nothing but countless wars, most of which were pointless. The US has a history shorter but comparably bad (wiping out natives, proxy wars, etc.). The only completely true statement one can make about one being better than the other is that the US is more involved with the world right now, so we fuck up more, but also do more good things. Europe doesn't do much anymore, so they fuck up less, but also don't do as much good. The US is alot bigger than most other nations (in terms of power and money) so all of the charicteristics that all nations have are simply very exaggerated in the US. For an interesting site on how countries and other groups view themselves, see http://zompist.com/amercult.html. As a Texan, please look at the Texas part of it, we do get a VERY unfair international image (Since when was being a cowboy bad? They were supposed to be heroes, fearless enforcers of peace in a land of lawlessness).

Well given that people ask these dumb questions It's no wonder we all get the shits with everyone else.

wheras THIS is closer to it ;-)

I absolutely agree, while often RT doesn't apply to my groups style of play there are some real gems in it. Another nice source is http://www.gamegrene.com/, though they update slowly...
On a related note I'd like to point any worldbuilders out there to http://www.zompist.com/, Mark Rosenfelder's "Virtual Verduria", one of the most complete worlds, especially on language and culture, that I've ever seen.

Actually, a systematic set of rules covers about 85% of the words, and most of the rest are former loan words. *wry grin* Although, as someone who learned French in school, it's still kind of bizarre that "canapé" is pronounced "canopy" and "forte" is pronounced as a two-syllable word that rhymes with "Court A."

Or is it your contention that some deeper game was being played... a second level psychohistory that had to be kept secret from the Foundation...

Try looking at these English pronunciation rules. They will cover about an 85% solution with the rest of the words largely being ones we borrowed from other languages and kept their pronunciation. Admittedly, 56 rules may seem a bit excessive but if you read through it, most don't actually apply for a particular word. *wry grin* At that, dialect will change things greatly. Technically speaking, "bother," "father," and "caught" should all have distinct pronunciations in the US. In actuality, they seldom are.

For those interested in the link between spelling and pronunciation, Mark Rosenfelder, the maintainer of the sci.lang FAQ has a great article on his homepage:

Hou tu pranownse Inglish

You might also be interested in:
Writing English Chinese-style

For those interested in the link between spelling and pronunciation, Mark Rosenfelder, the maintainer of the sci.lang FAQ has a great article on his homepage:

Hou tu pranownse Inglish

You might also be interested in:
Writing English Chinese-style

Somewhat off-topic in some ways, but I was amused by a story I read some years ago in a magazine, some mention made here and here, about a UN translator who, stymied by a Russian idiom which defied literal translation, drew from Shakespeare and translated it to "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark" which of course led to protests from the representative from Denmark, etc. The core idea part of the story stays intact, but the location, date, and details of the Russian idiom vary (I remember the first time reading it, it was "something about a cow and two piles of hay" and the links I've included talk about "an orange tree, a backyard, Moscow" and "an elder-bush in the garden and an uncle in Kiev"), so there's a decent chance this is an urban legend.

Personally, I'm curious less about the idioms than I am about the MT's parsing of grammar. Not all languages use Subject-Verb-Object grammar and the rules from adding adjectives, adverbs, suffixes, and the like vary greatly between languages and often aren't all that consistent. For instance, Russian doesn't have articles like English does, instead relying on order of words in the sentence to indicate whether one is referring to a generic instance of an object or a specific instance. The grammar section of Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit provides several examples of differing grammars in other languages. I'm currently taking ASL courses (which admittedly do not have a written form for this kind of translation) and I will freely admit that learning to express sentences in a "Timeframe-object-subject-verb-time signifier-query word" structure is kicking my ass, despite having done some studying of other languages in the past. Heck, just learning when and where to place adjectives before or after words usually takes years for most people. (That's one place where English does seem to shine. Adjectives are always in front of nouns, as best I can recall. Adverbs, on the other hand...)

Anyhow, I'll be eagerly watching the progress here, inasmuch as my scattered attention span will ocasionally provoke me to check my bookmarks list...

I am majoring in Computational Linguistics. I recently came across an interesting article involving language acquisition. It talks about academic research and conclusions and then gives practical ways to overcome hinderances to learning a language or helping someone else learn a language other than those that are spoken natively in one's country.

The basic assumption is that children don't necesarilly learn languages more easily than adults. Most studies compare children learning a first language to adults learning a second language. It turns out that most children take at least ten years to master their mother tongue. Most adults in a completely foreign nation without any way to fall back on their mother tongue will have better mastery of the second language in seven years than most ten year old children do of their first.

According to the article it's very difficult to "encourage" a child to retain a language unless they have a close friend or a relative with whom they interact often that is not able to understand them otherwise. Once the child finds out that Dad speaks English to everyone else it all falls apart. That said, it's not impossible, just extremely difficult.

Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*. But then again, people do love to think of life as predictable, because whether you sell toys or insurance, nothing is scarier than not knowing what's going to happen to you. :)

* Yeah, I know there are some who say Hari Seldon himself secretly didn't believe psychohistory in the stories, but then that forces you to accept that a bunch of otherwise intelligent fellows (the Foundation) knew nothing of basic chaos theory, etc.

I think it's pretty well written and interesting, but YMMV.

well, my university (Aachen, Germany) requires me to display read-only capability in Latin, English and French. For the latter one I write a test today, concluding a six week intensive course. I expect to pass, but, here comes the twist: At the beginning I swore that if I passed, I would go learn Esperanto (which I consider interesting, but utterly useless :-). I also had ("had", because it's been a long time since I used it) some basic understanding of Klingon back when I was still running around in my uniform (no, I don't do that anymore. Grown-up, I guess. No, Ah! Stop the bashing! "Fire at Will!" :-) After that I guess I could finally learn Russian which I started a few years ago, because a good friend of mine is from St. Petersburg, but let slip because other things were more important... Japanese would be cool too... Jeesh, so many languages and so little time :-)

For those interested in ConLangs, BTW, I have these links:

www.langmaker.com

www.zompist.com/kit.html

These are of good use if you want to create your own languages for a novel, or a nice game of Caverns & Creatures :-)

even better:

http://www.zompist.com/libertos.html

SF does it again :D

If you still need a DFC fix, though...

Call this flamebait or troll, but we don't need no stinkin' supercomputers!

The primary uses of supercomputers that I've read about are to perform simulations of real-world phenomena. It might be possible to contruct circuitry that makes a computer more efficient at a series of specialized computing tasks. It's arguably more efficient to not use supercomputers.

(DANGER - intentional lack of sentitivity below)

Examples:

1. Genomic research - inject experimental drugs into real-live humans. If a higher percentage live or improve, great. If not, the world has too many people anyway. Mutants rule!

2. Nuclear simulations - find a large desert or remote tropical island and nuke it. For studies of effects of radiation on humans - see 1.

3. Weather prediction - use a desktop computer and a weatherman's intuition to give 80% accuracy for what's reported. If your weatherperson is entertaining or easy on the eyes, people won't care about the 20% of the time that they're dead wrong. (Eg: www.nakednews.com)

4. Chess - Watching two people play chess is dull. Watching a person play a computer is dull and pointless. Watching two computers play each other is merely a senseless benchmark test.

5. America's Cup Sailboats - A sailboat is a hole in the water into which you pour money. The faster the sailboat, the faster you pour money into it. Arrrr, matey!

6. SETI - If there's intelligent life out there, it will either take thousands of years for them to reach us (normal sublight travel) or they will arrive here faster than any of their radio signals ever will. Let future generations tackle the problem when we can use orbital or lunar radio telescopes after we solve our own problems on Earth.

7. Cryptography - Social engineering is the most effective breaker of computer codes. Never underestimate the power of a wooden stick to extract secret keys from unbreakable coiphers.

8. Energy resource discovery - If it weren't for the damned environmentalists, we wouldn't care about drilling holes wherever the oil companies want to.

9. Video games - Oh wait, this would actually be a great use for a supercomputer. We'll call it the Metaverse or "The Matrix". <drool>

I'm insensitive, you insensitive clod!

If your culture is anti-intellectual, highly authoritarian, unfair based on race, religion or gender, brutal in law-enforcement... then I think Western civilization is better, thank you very much.

Firstly, that is your opinion -- who are you to impose those views on others? That sounds very discriminatory to me. It is also very narrow-minded and hubristic. You seem to assume that your value system is the only valid system in this world, and that everyone else is wrong. This is despite the fact that you know relatively nothing about other cultures or their histories. Secondly, what cultures are you referring to that are "anti-intellectual, highly authoritarian, unfair based on race, religion or gender, brutal in law-enforcement"? The largest world cultures aren't any of these things, so you must be misinformed (or you're referring to some tiny obscure culture that is statistically insignificant). Many of these things have been introduced by dictatorial governments to maintain control -- they were never part of people's culture.

Western civilisation is not fully devoid of similar traits. Class is an issue in Western society, and it is deepening as the rich-poor gap widens. Many statistics show a gradual decline in the overall quality of life in the USA since the 1970s. Poverty does exist in western nations, and those in lower strata of society have far fewer opportunities than those in higher social positions. Religion dictates many laws in the West, particularly in the USA where strong religious-based lobby groups exist.

You also ignore history. Only a hundred or so years ago, Western society exhibited many of the traits that are today seen as characteristic of the developing world. These include poor education and health amongst the majority of people, high birth rates, less democratic and even brutal governments, and discriminatory laws and policies based on race, gender and class. As time passed, economic growth and urbanisation rose. Social movements and the middle class grew. When the middle class was large enough, people were able to demand more say in governmental matters, and democratisation increased.

This is a process that takes a long time to evolve. As social factors improve, people become more empowered, leading to democratisation and more stable, pluralistic societies.

How do you propose to get rid of these thugs? By dropping supplies at them? By somehow convincing them to let their poor citizens have said supplies and let us give them a proper education?

I explained above how this is all a process. To take an example, look at the development of Taiwan and South Korea in the latter half of the 20th century. In any nation, governments need a basis for legitimacy to prevent a rebellion. Initially in these two countries the basis was simple military force. Eventually the basis became economic growth. Businesses, many being owned by ordinary citizens and not a rich elite, grew. Ordinary people developed their own economy and a middle class grew. As people became empowered economically, they began to want political power as well. Through popular pressure, the military governments of South Korea and Taiwan gave up their power and held democratic elections. The process was so smooth and relatively trouble-free that the party which once held authoritarian powers over the nation remained a powerful political force even in the new democratic system. It can be argued that similar processes are in various stages of progress in other places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Malaysia.

How about use our military to force a regime change? No, that would be "Imperialism".

History has shown that political and military actions taken in other countries by the USA have been done for the sole benefit of the USA. The wellbeing of the local populations have been totally ignored. Why should anybody trust them now? Note that the USA isn't the first country to act in such a manner.

I believe you forgot all the liberations that didn't go well, notably those where you "liberated" some of those poor south americans from socialism. What a betterment of their life! What great morals you people have!

Yep, exactly!

The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.

UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.

Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.

For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.

Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.

The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.

UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.

Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.

For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.

Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.

...are still the "Customer Reviews" of just about anything by Bil Keane. For example, check out The Family Circus by Request, which was reviewed just this past August.

Some days, I really miss the DFC. These Amazon reviews kinda help. :-)

Probably because Psychohistory and the foundation series in general have so many faults...

Probably because Psychohistory and the foundation series in general have so many faults...

I just finished Kindergarten, where we learned our ABC's, and I've invented an alphabet that can be read 7 times as fast, with only one third the effort. Why didn't some PhD come up with this before?

There are alphabets that are better than Latin in some respect. Take Tengwar for instance. The script is designed along sound phonological principles (no pun intended): voiced consonants, fricatives, and nasals have a predictable change in shape from the basic voiceless stops (p, t, c, q). It's been adapted to at least English, Sindarin, Quenya, Polish, Lojban, Esperanto, and Toki Pona. On the other hand, some people have expressed increased dyslexia due to use of Tengwar.

and forces the corporations to pay a massive financial tribute to the government (corporate taxes far exceeed corporate welfare).

For more details read this, what's that? Shall I quote it? Mmmmmmkay

the federal budget is top-heavy with corporate welfare. Counting tax breaks and expenditures, corporations and the rich snuffle up over $400 billion a year-- compare that to the $1400 billion in total expenditures, or to the $116 billion spent on programs for the poor.

Where's all that money go? There's direct subsidies to agribusiness ($18 billion a year), to export companies, to maritime shippers, and to various industries-- airlines, nuclear power companies, timber companies, mining companies, automakers, drug companies. There's billions of dollars in military waste and fraud. And there's untold billions in tax credits, deductions, and loopholes. Accelerated depreciation alone, for instance, is estimated to cost the Treasury $37 billion a year-- billions more than the mortgage interest deduction. (Which itself benefits the people with the biggest mortgages. But we should encourage home ownership, shouldn't we? Well, Canada has no interest deduction, but has about the same rate of home ownership.)