Let's check where the GP asserted anything about what 'Republicans' in general think, or what any Democrat think.
...nope, don't see it.
All it says is that the current president, and 'his buddies', think. I'm going with the assumption that 'his buddies' are the neo-cons presently inhabiting the Whitehouse.
Can you please get off your idiotic 'us vs. them' trip and pay attention? Everyone would be happy if we could go back to arguing over socialized medicine or welfare or how much we should fund the arts, okay? But this stopped being a 'liberal vs. conservative' debate about three goddamn years ago, when we started invading other countries willy-nilly and having our rights stepped on.
Hitler got elected. You parse that? I probably just Godwinned myself, but that's what happened, and there are still fools on the right who think because he got elected via what they consider 'their party', they need to support him. Hey, the same thing happened to the National Socialist Party...I have no idea what they stood for before Hitler, but it probably wasn't him. Likewise, the Republicans used to have sane ideas that I agreed with probably 80% of the time.
You people need to leave the party, now. Or remove him from the party, but you don't have enough power to do that. The ignorance excuse will only work for so long, and at some point, if the GOP keeps sucking up, all Republicans are going to get tarred with the same brush. Everyone who supports the current fucker in office is guilty of treason, and getting guiltier by the minute.
If the president orders the release sensitive material to the press, he automatically declassifies it.
I don't know where you got that, but it's just plain wrong. Classification is controlled by laws, and there is a process in place to declassify things.
If that process is not followed, the president is just as much in violation of the law as anyone.
It doesn't matter that he is the president and, in theory, in charge of the people who control the process...he's also in charge of the military, but that doesn't mean he can randomly have someone dishonorably discharged. See, the legislative branch invents laws, including procedures that the executive branch has to follow internally, like the UCMJ and the classified info laws.
This will be your citizenship test when you're ready to take it, but until you understand how the the government of the United States operates, feel free to keep asking questions.
And Germany under Hitler actually successfully invaded some countries, install puppet governments that actually listened to him, and only lost them when other countries re-invaded them.
Hitler's and Dubya's grasp both exceed their reach, but Hitler's reach was for half the world and Dubya's grasp was for two (now three?) pieces of mostly empty desert. Does anyone doubt that Hitler could have held Poland and France if he'd stopped there?
But is it really Fascist? Not yet... We've still got a ways to go to get there-
I don't know about 'fascism', but we entered a police state the second the president asserted the right to break the law, and wasn't impeached. Police state==executive branch can break the law and ignore the courts==government operated by unchecked law enforcement==government can lock people up without trial==government can spy on people without a warrant
I don't know what the defination of 'fascism' or 'dictatorship' is, but we are in a police state right now.
Actually, as the head of the Executive Branch, the President is allowed to declassify just about anything he wants at any given time.
Bzzzt, thank you for playing.
The president has the authority to start the process to declassify things wherever he wants, like, actually, anyone who has access to classified material. If you know it exists, you can ask the right people to review the classification. He does not, however, have the authority to just say things outloud and magically declassify them.
Classification is a law, an ability granted under the law to the government. It's not something the president just invented. It is a legal process that the executive branch does, to classify and declassify information. This legal process is an external law, imposed by the legislative branch. (Because, duh, no one could be subject to criminal penalties for leaking otherwise.)
If anyone who is allowed to handle classifed information (That is, anyone who has signed the document they have to sign to do that.) leaks information that has not been though the procress and offically declassified, they are a criminal, as they have broken that law. Doesn't matter if they are the president, doesn't matter if they are the guy in charge of stamping 'Declassified' on the document and are five seconds away from doing so. The law requires the process, and the fact that the process is controlled by the executive branch doesn't mean people in the executive branch can ignore said process.(1)
Our president, of course, is rather confused about whether or not he has to follow laws passed by other branches of the government, but that's really hilarious when that logic tries to apply to classified data, as the concept of data being classified is, in fact, a concept that was invented by said laws.
This is all an aside to the question at hand here, which is whether or not someone who hasn't signed a documenting saying they won't leak classified info who receives and passes on said info can be punished, aka, an Official Secrets Acts. The US has not only never had one of those, there have been serious constitutional questions raised about such a thing in the past, back when we had a constitution.
1) OTOH, the president could probably alter the process to make it where he can get things declassified in minutes, by putting in people who would rubber-stamp his requests, or via all sorts of ways...but he didn't do that, so the issue is moot.
On the third hand, of course, the executive branch could just refuse to classify anything.
Suits cannot 'lose'. They can be lost, but they are not able to do things, being mere abstract concepts and not actual physical entities.
Assume we're talking about 'suit' in the case of 'lawsuit', that is. An actual wearable 'suit' could, indeed, do things, like 'wrinkle'. It could even 'lose' things if it had a hole in its pockets, although it couldn't 'lose' in the sense of 'not winning', which is the only meaning 'lose' has without an object.
Grammarically, the sentence is fine, with nouns and adjectives and verbs and even verb agreement, but it's like 'The grassy ideas vaguely walked between tall emptiness and over vapid circles'...it isn't actually parsable due to concept mismatches. I forget what kind of error that is.
You can't sue someone for dumping a product, dumbass, because that's not illegal.
You can sue people for a large variety of anti-competative behaviors, which may include dumbing a product, but it's not illegal in and of itself.
Otherwise you'd be able to sue car dealerships for giving away hamburgers and hot dogs, or banks for giving away lollipops.
And you especially can't sue people not making money when they give something out. To be anti-competative, they have to be a for-profit business, you idiot. Otherwise, Scientology could sue free churches, restaurants could sue food kitchens, and maid services could sue people who volunteered their time to help out the elderly.
Basically, if you knew anything at all about this, you'd know you were full of shit by implying people who volunteer their time could be sued for it. So the question is: Are you an idiot, or delibrately spewing FUD?
Because alcohol doesn't kill germs; it's just a sterile medium, they can't live in it - which means that putting it on your hands and washing it off would be pointless!
Immediately washing it off, yes. Duh. There's pretty much nothing you can safely put on your skin that will instantly kill germs and not harm you to stay on there 10 seconds or so.
There are only two ways to kill germs. Drugs or poison. There are two kinds of poison...the 'this chemical kills bacteria by ripping it apart' kind, and 'the bacteria sufficates' kind. All poison rips that bacteria apart hurts humans. We could, in theory, use sulfuric acid, and it would instantly kill any bacteria and even viruses, but take two or three seconds to eat though your dead skin. Or we could microwave our hands. These are obviously not good ideas.(1)
Ergo, we're reduced to sufficating them, because, hey, the sufficating thing stops at our dead skin cells, and we don't breathe via our skin. You can't sufficate people via their hands.
But I was merely pointing out that if you wanted a 'hand sterilizer' at your sink, the best sufficator would be to have some alcohol you can squirt on them as you walk away. (In addition to normal soap.)
As a bonus, alcohol evaporates pretty quickly, so you'd just have to be careful not to touch anything that might be damaged by it for sixty seconds or so while it's killing everything on your hands. And then, poof, it's all gone. No need to wash it off. Just don't adjust your shirt until then, because you might bleach it.
All current 'antibacteria' soap goes with the 'drugs' concept...using drugs that hurt bacteria and not humans. This is damn stupid to do on things that are outside our bodies, because that's the only thing we can use when they are inside our bodies, and using them produces resistant strains.
The reason soap works is because it has surfactants that get the oils off your skin. The oils are where the germs are. You don't need to kill them with antibiotics or disinfectants. Wash them off, and they're no longer a problem. So you ARE crazy for wasting your time standing there with antibiotic soap on your hands. Just wash them thoroughly with regular soap!
There are parts of your hand that you cannot easily scrub, like under your fingernails and cuticles. Doctors have a little routine to do it, but if that was a workable solution, it would already happen.
Antibiotic soap will kill bacteria there, but only if you leave it on long enough to work. (Ironically, it's hard to wash it out of there, so ironically people might be killing germs with the soap because they don't rinse their hands well and leave the soap there for hours.)
Obviously you should additionally make sure you wash them good, because there's stuff on your hands antibiotics can't possible effect, like viruses and pollen and other junk.
1) OTOH, that's how chemotherapy works. Kill everything a little, and hope what we're aiming it at is a bit weaker than everything else. Works great for cancer, because cancer cells are insane. Would suck for bacteria fighting.
You're only supposed to use soap to clean your hands off - remove the stuff which doesn't belong there - remove as in get it off of your hands, not kill some of the bugs and leave a small number of immune ones in place.
Oh, it's much worse than that. Antibiotics take a minimum of 30-45 seconds to work. It's not magic, you know. They actually have to kill the bacteria.
How many people soap their hands with antibiotic soap and stand there for that long to kill the germs before washing it off? None. At all. People look at me like I'm crazy when I do. They splash it on, it kills the extremely weak stuff, then they rinse it off before it can even get 25% of the germs.
Which over the long run is worse than killing 'all but a few', because the slower the evolution has to happen, the more likely it is to happen, whereas if they suddenly get hit with a big blast, they might just all die. (Which is the theory behind antibiotics.) By filtering out the extremely weak, we're completely screwing ourselves up. It's provably not going to work.
And it's fucking stupid, anyway. If we want to kill germs, why don't we put alcohol in soap? It would be exceedingly difficult for any bacteria that's noxious towards us be able to live in that just on a biological level, and they've had millennia to try and have already failed.
Or good old fashioned hydrogen peroxide. And, of course, bleach, although you can't really wash your hands in that safely unless you want to wash your hands after you wash your hands.
The plus of those things is we're extremely unlikely to ever use them as a anti-bacterial medication internally, hydrogen peroxide and bleach because they'd kill you, and alcohol because the level required to kill bacteria internally is way past human tolerance.
But, anyway, don't fight bacteria with drugs unless they're inside you. Poison them if they're outside, you idiots. We can even use stuff poisonious to us, because, hey, they're microsocopic, we have layers of dead skin designed to keep poison from reaching living cells, and we don't breathe via our skin anyway, so it's a hell of a lot easier to kill them.
You're on crack. The Kurds are 'making progress', alright...towards their own state.
And any functioning difference of 'making progress' includes some sort of concept of 'In the past, things were this bad, now they are less bad', which hasn't actually happened in Iraq in the last couple of years.
'Desperately trying to stay in one place, and sometimes managing it, and sometimes managing to take a step or two forward before being blown ten feet backwards' is not 'making progress'. It's just failing slowly.
Terrorism is really, somewhat, a form of extortion, it's just a very very indirect form.
Instead of 'Do X or we'll illegally do Y', it's 'If this group of people doesn't do X in general, we will individually do Y to random members of that group, regardless of whether or not that specific person is doing X'.
So in a sense, it's not extortion, as no one can specifically modify their behavior to be safe. (Safe as in 'not considered a target'. Obviously, they can be 'safer'.)The intent isn't to make someone do X, it's to produce pressure on everyone to get everyone to do X.
It is, I guess, societal extortion. The society must do X, or the society will have Y illegally happen to it.
I would argue that the word 'random' or at least 'apparently random' should be in there. And instead of 'political goals' I would say 'policies'...there have been religious terrorists. Religious in the sense of 'Change the tenants of our religion', or 'Don't you dare change the tenants of our religion', I mean. (The Inquistion was basically 'organized terrorism'.)
In fact, you can argue that Al Qaeda isn't solely looking for political goals, per se. Yes, yes, they want no support for Israel, but some of it is they don't agree with some parts of 'western civiliation' and would like us to change our philosophy.
Actually, government are terrorists when they 'make an example' out of a criminal. That's kinda the whole point.
Terrorism's gotten a rather bad rap these days. It's just a tactic. It's used 'legitimately' against occupying armies, for example.(1) Don't try to wipe them out...just scare people into not supporting them by killing a few people who do. And don't go after the soldiers...go after the policy makers and leaders. They can always get more soldiers, but if you kill every single person who occupies a certain position, soon no one will want to do that.
1) Depending, of course, on whether or not you think the occupying is legitimate or not.
It's only extortion if they demand money to stop, or not start it.
Terrorism, however, is when you commit apparently random illegal acts against 'supporters' of something, in hopes they will influence it to stop. The key is that you cannot possibly harm everyone, or even enough people to change anything...instead, you are hoping they will become so afraid of you in that they will demand the changes you request are made, or at the very least stop supporting the entities you dislike.
Attacking a single antispammer can't and won't do anything. However, it will make people hesitant to support them, it will make hosting companies hestitant to host them, and it has the undertones 'And maybe if you oppose us, we'll come after you next'.
This is the defination of terrorism. This is the lynching of one black man who voted, this is the beating of one man who didn't pay off his bookie, this is trashing one store that refused to pay protection money, this is the blowing up of one building, this is the sniper picking off one collaberator. The act alone is almost completely negligable, but the intent is to scare people into not doing or supporting what that entity did. Terrorism.
In my town, I have exactly one high speed ISP. It is DSL, and the phone company owns the cable and thus far hasn't provided a cable connection to compete with itself.
The other two choices are satelite and dialup.
Satelite costs twice as much, has daily download caps, and is unacceptable to me because of the latency. It is impossible to type over a four second delay, and my job requires that. VoIP would be crappy, too.
Dialup has rather obvious problems, the biggest noting be the obvious speed issue, but thatlocal calling area is very limited, and there are actually no other local ISPs besides the local phone company.(1)
So, tell me, what if the local phone company decides to start restricting sites, to an extent where it didn't piss off so many people that there was a widespread revolt?
Let's say it decided to start restricting political sites to one that would pay for access. Let's further propose that local citizens would be more than willing to donate to make sure their favorite political group was nice and speedy, thus leaving all others out in the cold.
No, I'm sorry. ISPs with competition can do whatever they want. But there are too many communities like mine where there are no choices, at all.
It, basically, is akin to how I feel about discrimination laws, or the current crap about pharmasists not giving out medication based on religious beliefs. I'm fairly libertarian, so sure, privately operated business should, in theory, be able to discriminate against whoever they want, however they want. In reality, however, many people have one or two places they can get, say, food or medicine from, without a lot of hardship.
So it doesn't really matter if this is an 'actual' monopoly or just a 'competing choices cost twice as much' monopoly. If there is just one practical choice for something needed for a large group of people (and, like or not, internet access is 'needed' in the modern world.), then whoever's providing it shouldn't be allowed to fuck with it. They want to fuck with it, they are free to split their business in half and compete with themselves, or offer two competing services from the same business.(2)
1) And, remember, coming in to start up a local ISP that doesn't go though the local phone company is going to cost a good deal more than one that does.
2) This, more than anything, is why I have problems with Walmart and their 'moral' stances they take on things. Do you know how many places I have to buy, say, video games within 50 miles? That's right. Walmart. Any video games not sold at Walmart have almost zero penetration in this community. Or CDs, or DVDs.
Humans didn't evolve 'culture', you lackwit, or all human culture would be the same.
They evolved speech, which let them pass down knowledge from generation to generation. This knowledge, these rules, is partially expressed as 'culture'. Culture is the rules that aren't obvious, and hence tend to differ form social group to social group, unlike other knowledge, like 'Don't play on the edge of cliffs', which is a general rule all humans have come up with the teach their young, assuming they had cliffs nearby.
Other species have the same thing. That is, for example, what whale songs are.
In your example, it seems like intelligence would still be an advantage, a tree-climbing AND tool-using chimp would have a clear advantage, and you don't talk about the possible disadvantages would be... intelligence generally needs a bigger brain, bigger brains need more energy, their big skulls make big heads which complicate the birthing process, maybe the things that make it easier to weld a tool *do* make it more difficult to climb well, etc.
We are amazingly competant sprinters. There are faster animals over medium distances, but we can actually outrun horses for a dozen feet, because we can start running very quickly.
We are amazing swimmers. We can swim longer and faster than basically any mammals except those that live underwater, like whales, or live in the water, like beavers.
If you total up up everyone's swimming and sprinting speed, we are probably the fastest animals on earth.
We are moderately tall, and thus can see far on a plain. A lot of places on this planet have waist-high grass, and you'd be amazed how useful it is to see something moving though it two miles away. There's a reason horses and cows are the height they are, but they have to eat a lot more. We manage to get the height without getting all the extra mass.
Our feet can stand and walk for hours while we hold something, especially if we brace it on our shoulders. Yes, four-legged animals can do this, too, and other primates and other animals can stand on two legs, but we're the only ones who balance effortlessly without a tail.
Our fingers are small and thin. Very useful at tool making. We aren't unique in this, but it did thin down from chimps.
All of this makes us worse at climbing trees than a chimp.
And, in turn, those meaningless things are usually to demonstrate some other trait that it's hard to see, like 'I will be more compatant at finding food' or 'I have more free time than anyone else' (And, hence, get the same amount done in less time.)
This exact same thing happens in humans. Just look at tans. Tans used to be undesirable because it meant you worked out in the sun all day. The attractive folks were the pale people who got to live indoors all day.
Now being tan mean you have free time to get a tan, and you care about how you look enough to do so, both of which, in modern society, are 'good' things in a mate.
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All it says is that the current president, and 'his buddies', think. I'm going with the assumption that 'his buddies' are the neo-cons presently inhabiting the Whitehouse.
Can you please get off your idiotic 'us vs. them' trip and pay attention? Everyone would be happy if we could go back to arguing over socialized medicine or welfare or how much we should fund the arts, okay? But this stopped being a 'liberal vs. conservative' debate about three goddamn years ago, when we started invading other countries willy-nilly and having our rights stepped on.
Hitler got elected. You parse that? I probably just Godwinned myself, but that's what happened, and there are still fools on the right who think because he got elected via what they consider 'their party', they need to support him. Hey, the same thing happened to the National Socialist Party...I have no idea what they stood for before Hitler, but it probably wasn't him. Likewise, the Republicans used to have sane ideas that I agreed with probably 80% of the time.
You people need to leave the party, now. Or remove him from the party, but you don't have enough power to do that. The ignorance excuse will only work for so long, and at some point, if the GOP keeps sucking up, all Republicans are going to get tarred with the same brush. Everyone who supports the current fucker in office is guilty of treason, and getting guiltier by the minute.
And that everyone opposed to him is a 'Lib'.
They are not, however, as bad as the neo-cons, or Bush specifically.
I don't know where you got that, but it's just plain wrong. Classification is controlled by laws, and there is a process in place to declassify things.
If that process is not followed, the president is just as much in violation of the law as anyone.
It doesn't matter that he is the president and, in theory, in charge of the people who control the process...he's also in charge of the military, but that doesn't mean he can randomly have someone dishonorably discharged. See, the legislative branch invents laws, including procedures that the executive branch has to follow internally, like the UCMJ and the classified info laws.
This will be your citizenship test when you're ready to take it, but until you understand how the the government of the United States operates, feel free to keep asking questions.
Hitler's and Dubya's grasp both exceed their reach, but Hitler's reach was for half the world and Dubya's grasp was for two (now three?) pieces of mostly empty desert. Does anyone doubt that Hitler could have held Poland and France if he'd stopped there?
I don't know about 'fascism', but we entered a police state the second the president asserted the right to break the law, and wasn't impeached. Police state==executive branch can break the law and ignore the courts==government operated by unchecked law enforcement==government can lock people up without trial==government can spy on people without a warrant
I don't know what the defination of 'fascism' or 'dictatorship' is, but we are in a police state right now.
Period.
Bzzzt, thank you for playing.
The president has the authority to start the process to declassify things wherever he wants, like, actually, anyone who has access to classified material. If you know it exists, you can ask the right people to review the classification. He does not, however, have the authority to just say things outloud and magically declassify them.
Classification is a law, an ability granted under the law to the government. It's not something the president just invented. It is a legal process that the executive branch does, to classify and declassify information. This legal process is an external law, imposed by the legislative branch. (Because, duh, no one could be subject to criminal penalties for leaking otherwise.)
If anyone who is allowed to handle classifed information (That is, anyone who has signed the document they have to sign to do that.) leaks information that has not been though the procress and offically declassified, they are a criminal, as they have broken that law. Doesn't matter if they are the president, doesn't matter if they are the guy in charge of stamping 'Declassified' on the document and are five seconds away from doing so. The law requires the process, and the fact that the process is controlled by the executive branch doesn't mean people in the executive branch can ignore said process.(1)
Our president, of course, is rather confused about whether or not he has to follow laws passed by other branches of the government, but that's really hilarious when that logic tries to apply to classified data, as the concept of data being classified is, in fact, a concept that was invented by said laws.
This is all an aside to the question at hand here, which is whether or not someone who hasn't signed a documenting saying they won't leak classified info who receives and passes on said info can be punished, aka, an Official Secrets Acts. The US has not only never had one of those, there have been serious constitutional questions raised about such a thing in the past, back when we had a constitution.
1) OTOH, the president could probably alter the process to make it where he can get things declassified in minutes, by putting in people who would rubber-stamp his requests, or via all sorts of ways...but he didn't do that, so the issue is moot.
On the third hand, of course, the executive branch could just refuse to classify anything.
Assume we're talking about 'suit' in the case of 'lawsuit', that is. An actual wearable 'suit' could, indeed, do things, like 'wrinkle'. It could even 'lose' things if it had a hole in its pockets, although it couldn't 'lose' in the sense of 'not winning', which is the only meaning 'lose' has without an object.
Grammarically, the sentence is fine, with nouns and adjectives and verbs and even verb agreement, but it's like 'The grassy ideas vaguely walked between tall emptiness and over vapid circles'...it isn't actually parsable due to concept mismatches. I forget what kind of error that is.
You can sue people for a large variety of anti-competative behaviors, which may include dumbing a product, but it's not illegal in and of itself.
Otherwise you'd be able to sue car dealerships for giving away hamburgers and hot dogs, or banks for giving away lollipops.
And you especially can't sue people not making money when they give something out. To be anti-competative, they have to be a for-profit business, you idiot. Otherwise, Scientology could sue free churches, restaurants could sue food kitchens, and maid services could sue people who volunteered their time to help out the elderly.
Basically, if you knew anything at all about this, you'd know you were full of shit by implying people who volunteer their time could be sued for it. So the question is: Are you an idiot, or delibrately spewing FUD?
Immediately washing it off, yes. Duh. There's pretty much nothing you can safely put on your skin that will instantly kill germs and not harm you to stay on there 10 seconds or so.
There are only two ways to kill germs. Drugs or poison. There are two kinds of poison...the 'this chemical kills bacteria by ripping it apart' kind, and 'the bacteria sufficates' kind. All poison rips that bacteria apart hurts humans. We could, in theory, use sulfuric acid, and it would instantly kill any bacteria and even viruses, but take two or three seconds to eat though your dead skin. Or we could microwave our hands. These are obviously not good ideas.(1)
Ergo, we're reduced to sufficating them, because, hey, the sufficating thing stops at our dead skin cells, and we don't breathe via our skin. You can't sufficate people via their hands.
But I was merely pointing out that if you wanted a 'hand sterilizer' at your sink, the best sufficator would be to have some alcohol you can squirt on them as you walk away. (In addition to normal soap.)
As a bonus, alcohol evaporates pretty quickly, so you'd just have to be careful not to touch anything that might be damaged by it for sixty seconds or so while it's killing everything on your hands. And then, poof, it's all gone. No need to wash it off. Just don't adjust your shirt until then, because you might bleach it.
All current 'antibacteria' soap goes with the 'drugs' concept...using drugs that hurt bacteria and not humans. This is damn stupid to do on things that are outside our bodies, because that's the only thing we can use when they are inside our bodies, and using them produces resistant strains.
The reason soap works is because it has surfactants that get the oils off your skin. The oils are where the germs are. You don't need to kill them with antibiotics or disinfectants. Wash them off, and they're no longer a problem. So you ARE crazy for wasting your time standing there with antibiotic soap on your hands. Just wash them thoroughly with regular soap!
There are parts of your hand that you cannot easily scrub, like under your fingernails and cuticles. Doctors have a little routine to do it, but if that was a workable solution, it would already happen.
Antibiotic soap will kill bacteria there, but only if you leave it on long enough to work. (Ironically, it's hard to wash it out of there, so ironically people might be killing germs with the soap because they don't rinse their hands well and leave the soap there for hours.)
Obviously you should additionally make sure you wash them good, because there's stuff on your hands antibiotics can't possible effect, like viruses and pollen and other junk.
1) OTOH, that's how chemotherapy works. Kill everything a little, and hope what we're aiming it at is a bit weaker than everything else. Works great for cancer, because cancer cells are insane. Would suck for bacteria fighting.
Oh, it's much worse than that. Antibiotics take a minimum of 30-45 seconds to work. It's not magic, you know. They actually have to kill the bacteria.
How many people soap their hands with antibiotic soap and stand there for that long to kill the germs before washing it off? None. At all. People look at me like I'm crazy when I do. They splash it on, it kills the extremely weak stuff, then they rinse it off before it can even get 25% of the germs.
Which over the long run is worse than killing 'all but a few', because the slower the evolution has to happen, the more likely it is to happen, whereas if they suddenly get hit with a big blast, they might just all die. (Which is the theory behind antibiotics.) By filtering out the extremely weak, we're completely screwing ourselves up. It's provably not going to work.
And it's fucking stupid, anyway. If we want to kill germs, why don't we put alcohol in soap? It would be exceedingly difficult for any bacteria that's noxious towards us be able to live in that just on a biological level, and they've had millennia to try and have already failed.
Or good old fashioned hydrogen peroxide. And, of course, bleach, although you can't really wash your hands in that safely unless you want to wash your hands after you wash your hands.
The plus of those things is we're extremely unlikely to ever use them as a anti-bacterial medication internally, hydrogen peroxide and bleach because they'd kill you, and alcohol because the level required to kill bacteria internally is way past human tolerance.
But, anyway, don't fight bacteria with drugs unless they're inside you. Poison them if they're outside, you idiots. We can even use stuff poisonious to us, because, hey, they're microsocopic, we have layers of dead skin designed to keep poison from reaching living cells, and we don't breathe via our skin anyway, so it's a hell of a lot easier to kill them.
If not, no, it won't run any faster.
What are you talking about? Isn't it supposed to be five to six months?
The Iraqi people not only don't think we should be there, but a majority of them have no problem with other Iraqis killing us.
The Iraqi government thinks we should be there.
And any functioning difference of 'making progress' includes some sort of concept of 'In the past, things were this bad, now they are less bad', which hasn't actually happened in Iraq in the last couple of years.
'Desperately trying to stay in one place, and sometimes managing it, and sometimes managing to take a step or two forward before being blown ten feet backwards' is not 'making progress'. It's just failing slowly.
Instead of 'Do X or we'll illegally do Y', it's 'If this group of people doesn't do X in general, we will individually do Y to random members of that group, regardless of whether or not that specific person is doing X'.
So in a sense, it's not extortion, as no one can specifically modify their behavior to be safe. (Safe as in 'not considered a target'. Obviously, they can be 'safer'.)The intent isn't to make someone do X, it's to produce pressure on everyone to get everyone to do X.
It is, I guess, societal extortion. The society must do X, or the society will have Y illegally happen to it.
Ah, okay, let me clarify. It's random from the POV of the people being terrorized. Obviously the terrorists would be knowing what they're doing.
In fact, you can argue that Al Qaeda isn't solely looking for political goals, per se. Yes, yes, they want no support for Israel, but some of it is they don't agree with some parts of 'western civiliation' and would like us to change our philosophy.
Terrorism's gotten a rather bad rap these days. It's just a tactic. It's used 'legitimately' against occupying armies, for example.(1) Don't try to wipe them out...just scare people into not supporting them by killing a few people who do. And don't go after the soldiers...go after the policy makers and leaders. They can always get more soldiers, but if you kill every single person who occupies a certain position, soon no one will want to do that.
1) Depending, of course, on whether or not you think the occupying is legitimate or not.
Terrorism, however, is when you commit apparently random illegal acts against 'supporters' of something, in hopes they will influence it to stop. The key is that you cannot possibly harm everyone, or even enough people to change anything...instead, you are hoping they will become so afraid of you in that they will demand the changes you request are made, or at the very least stop supporting the entities you dislike.
Attacking a single antispammer can't and won't do anything. However, it will make people hesitant to support them, it will make hosting companies hestitant to host them, and it has the undertones 'And maybe if you oppose us, we'll come after you next'.
This is the defination of terrorism. This is the lynching of one black man who voted, this is the beating of one man who didn't pay off his bookie, this is trashing one store that refused to pay protection money, this is the blowing up of one building, this is the sniper picking off one collaberator. The act alone is almost completely negligable, but the intent is to scare people into not doing or supporting what that entity did. Terrorism.
In my town, I have exactly one high speed ISP. It is DSL, and the phone company owns the cable and thus far hasn't provided a cable connection to compete with itself.
The other two choices are satelite and dialup.
Satelite costs twice as much, has daily download caps, and is unacceptable to me because of the latency. It is impossible to type over a four second delay, and my job requires that. VoIP would be crappy, too.
Dialup has rather obvious problems, the biggest noting be the obvious speed issue, but thatlocal calling area is very limited, and there are actually no other local ISPs besides the local phone company.(1)
So, tell me, what if the local phone company decides to start restricting sites, to an extent where it didn't piss off so many people that there was a widespread revolt?
Let's say it decided to start restricting political sites to one that would pay for access. Let's further propose that local citizens would be more than willing to donate to make sure their favorite political group was nice and speedy, thus leaving all others out in the cold.
No, I'm sorry. ISPs with competition can do whatever they want. But there are too many communities like mine where there are no choices, at all.
It, basically, is akin to how I feel about discrimination laws, or the current crap about pharmasists not giving out medication based on religious beliefs. I'm fairly libertarian, so sure, privately operated business should, in theory, be able to discriminate against whoever they want, however they want. In reality, however, many people have one or two places they can get, say, food or medicine from, without a lot of hardship.
So it doesn't really matter if this is an 'actual' monopoly or just a 'competing choices cost twice as much' monopoly. If there is just one practical choice for something needed for a large group of people (and, like or not, internet access is 'needed' in the modern world.), then whoever's providing it shouldn't be allowed to fuck with it. They want to fuck with it, they are free to split their business in half and compete with themselves, or offer two competing services from the same business.(2)
1) And, remember, coming in to start up a local ISP that doesn't go though the local phone company is going to cost a good deal more than one that does.
2) This, more than anything, is why I have problems with Walmart and their 'moral' stances they take on things. Do you know how many places I have to buy, say, video games within 50 miles? That's right. Walmart. Any video games not sold at Walmart have almost zero penetration in this community. Or CDs, or DVDs.
The obvious example here are the occasional fertile mules that nature sometimes throws at us. Very well documented.
They evolved speech, which let them pass down knowledge from generation to generation. This knowledge, these rules, is partially expressed as 'culture'. Culture is the rules that aren't obvious, and hence tend to differ form social group to social group, unlike other knowledge, like 'Don't play on the edge of cliffs', which is a general rule all humans have come up with the teach their young, assuming they had cliffs nearby.
Other species have the same thing. That is, for example, what whale songs are.
We are amazingly competant sprinters. There are faster animals over medium distances, but we can actually outrun horses for a dozen feet, because we can start running very quickly.
We are amazing swimmers. We can swim longer and faster than basically any mammals except those that live underwater, like whales, or live in the water, like beavers.
If you total up up everyone's swimming and sprinting speed, we are probably the fastest animals on earth.
We are moderately tall, and thus can see far on a plain. A lot of places on this planet have waist-high grass, and you'd be amazed how useful it is to see something moving though it two miles away. There's a reason horses and cows are the height they are, but they have to eat a lot more. We manage to get the height without getting all the extra mass.
Our feet can stand and walk for hours while we hold something, especially if we brace it on our shoulders. Yes, four-legged animals can do this, too, and other primates and other animals can stand on two legs, but we're the only ones who balance effortlessly without a tail.
Our fingers are small and thin. Very useful at tool making. We aren't unique in this, but it did thin down from chimps.
All of this makes us worse at climbing trees than a chimp.
This exact same thing happens in humans. Just look at tans. Tans used to be undesirable because it meant you worked out in the sun all day. The attractive folks were the pale people who got to live indoors all day.
Now being tan mean you have free time to get a tan, and you care about how you look enough to do so, both of which, in modern society, are 'good' things in a mate.