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NYTimes Year in Ideas
jonbrewer writes "The New York Times is back again with their "Year in Ideas" and one that Slashdot missed this year was the RatBot. As featured in the BBC and Business 2.0 earlier this year, these critters are trained to navigate mazes based on remote stimuli. Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Yes."
America is the Future, Europe is the Past
By Anonymous Coward
The Marquis de Lafayette who came here to fight in our Revolution said, "The welfare of America is closely bound up with the welfare of mankind." Today, however, I suspect he would reverse that to say that the welfare of mankind is bound up with the welfare of America.
In a recent column about Europe, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, wrote of "the new anti-Americanism, a blend of jealousy and resentment of America's overwhelming economic and military power." One German editor calls it the "Axis of Envy." The bottom line, said Friedman, is that "Many Europeans today fear, or detest, America more than they fear Saddam."
For some time now, whenever we have read or heard a news story about Europe, it is usually about its refusal, nation by nation, to cooperate with the United States, to berate the United States, and to cling to some very outdated and unrealistic notions. We used to think the Europeans were our allies, but they are really more like our spiteful, poor relations.
The resentment Europeans feel reflects the fact that America is the future and Europe is the past.
This is brought into sharp focus in a brilliant analysis, "Old and In the Way", by Karl Zinsmeister. It appears in the December edition of The American Enterprise (www.TAEmag.com). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine and has the happy facility of taking very complicated subjects and clarifying them. The magazine is published by the American Enterprise Institute and is devoted to politics, business, and culture.
"If Europeans want to ban the death penalty," writes Zinsmeister, "that's fine with Americans; but don't ask us to follow the same dictate. If Europeans think selling military technology to North Korea and Iran, and helping Libya and Iraq with their oil industries is a good idea, expect not a shred of support from the US. If Europeans believe their determination to send billions of dollars to Yasser Arafat is likely to speed peace in the Middle East, we won't stop them."
This is, of course, precisely what the Europeans have been doing in the face of every indication that the nations with whom they are doing business want an Islamic Europe or, in the case of North Korea, have demonstrated once again that no Communist nation can be trusted.
Zinsmeister points out that the elites who run Europe have an exaggerated belief in the power of diplomacy. This is odd considering the last century's history in which European diplomacy failed to deter two World Wars. If war is simply a different form of diplomacy (we've tried talking to Saddam) then we are soon to apply it to the one man who has given the United Nations the opportunity to prove beyond any doubt its utter impotence and irrelevance. The UN is the world's epicenter of blather.
A number of key factors have consigned Europe to stagnation and most of them reflect its love affair with Socialism. Its embrace of statism was undeterred by the long years of the Cold War when the then-Soviet Russia threatened to impose Communism on the whole of Europe. It had seized or was ceded Eastern Europe after World War II and it took nearly fifty years for the Poles to cast them out. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its captive states rapidly breathed free air again, but then decided to create its own Soviet in the form of the European Union, thinking that was the way to compete with the United States.
The EU is a bunch of bureaucratic elites and Europeans have little or no say in their dictates. Socialists to the core, they think they will be able to compete with the US if they just pass a few more thousand rules, regulations, and, of course, trade restrictions.
The Europeans, however, cannot compete with Americans and Zinsmeister tells us why. "The locomotive of Europe is the German economy, which has been in a serious mess for more than a decade. Germany's annual growth rate over the past ten years has been a limp 1.4 percent." The answer is just too obvious. "The German labor market has become one of the most inflexible and uncompetitive in the world, which is why unemployment has been stuck at 9-10 percent for years, even amid a global economic boom." Ours, by contrast, is about five percent. If we stop importing high tech and other workers, unemployed Americans with comparable skills will be able to get back to work.
To state it plainly, Europeans don't work as hard or as long as Americans. We are far more productive. Unlike America's immigrants who assimilate, Europe's immigrant population tends to end up on welfare. The European Union estimates that it will take fifty million immigrants over the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the programs for those who are retired or soon will be. Most of those immigrants will come from North Africa and the Middle East. Since Europeans are not reproducing, the native born Germans, Italians, French and others are becoming nations of old people with too few to replace them. If this continues, Europe is a generation away from becoming an Islamic continent.
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Come on Michael, everyone already hates you, so the fact that the parent got modded to -1 means you did it. You are such a loser, I don't even know why you still hang around slashdot. All anyone knows about you is the gay ass comments you post at the end of your stories and you are universally hated just from that. I imagine if any of us actually met you, you'd probably be dead within minutes.
Nuts itch you!
I am very sorry for posting this.
M I C R O S O F T
77 73 67 82 79 83 79 70 84 - as ASCII values
5 1 4 1 7 2 7 7 3 - digits added
\_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_/
6 5 9 5 3 - digits added
Thus, "Microsoft" is 65953.
Add 1957, the year DEC was founded - the result is 67910.
Turn the number backwards, subtract 21 - the symbol of the greater sin. The number is now 1955.
Subtract 1591 from the number - this is the year the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death for spying by the US, written backwards. It gives 364.
Turn the number backwards, multiply by 3 - the symbol of fulfillment. The number is now 1389.
Add 64, the year of the Great Fire of Rome - the result is 1453.
This, when read backwards, gives 3541. This is 1889 in octal, the year Adolf Hitler was born...
Evil, QED.
If you want Slashdot to stop posting reg-required NY Times links, please respond to this comment with comments and suggestions. They could get a partnership with NYTimes, they could simply not post NYTimes links, etc. Keep in mind that the editors have stated that they have a policy of not linking to reg-required sites. So why then do they insist on posting all the NYTimes links?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
My dick is purple
Your shit is brown
Put it all in your mouth
Amd swirl it around!
rat remote controls YOU!
This message brought to you by the beadork cluster.
Bah! How is this off-topic? This is funny. Man you moderators are lame.
there is ALMOST ALWAYS another source for a news item. I suggest that they find it and sub that in. Fuck the new york times.
**** THE PROOF THAT michael sims IS EVIL ****
M I C H A E L S I M S
77 73 67 72 65 69 76 83 73 77 83 - as ASCII values
5 1 4 9 2 6 4 2 1 5 2 - digits added
\_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_________/
6 4 8 6 8 - digits added
Thus, "michael sims" is 64868.
Turn the number backwards, subtract 1937 - the year Saddam Hussein twins were born. The number is now 84909.
Add 4391 to it - this is the year Shirley Temple starred in her first movie, written backwards - you will get 89300.
Subtract 17, the symbol of domination. The result will be 89283.
Subtract 1792, the year guillotine was first used. The result will be 87491.
Subtract 4091 from the number - this is the year Oppenheimer, the man who created the atomic bomb, was born, written backwards. It gives 83400.
This number, when read backwards, gives 00438. This, written in octal, gives 666 - the number of the Beast.
Enough said - QED.
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An unidentified Pentagon official had this to say about the newest gizmo in the war on terror, "In efforts to win the global war on terror we have implemented new countermeasures against the terrorist threat. Terrorist suspects are taken to a room and shown pictures of G.W. and the rest of the US government, then they have their pleasure centers stimulated until just the name G.W. brings them to climax. Then they become willing allies in the war against terror!"
Maybe you should look at his history of posting. He mixes -1 Trolls and Flamebaits with blathering vague garbage that he knows the moderators will mod up. I also believe that he mods himself under a different username.