Thanks, I was worried that I would get vicious responses about how all Christians don't think all the Bible should be followed word for word, when of course I didn't say that.
If a Christian's position is that their duty is to, for example, love the Lord with all their heart, and love their neighbor as themselves, then it isn't hypocritical for them to condemn people who spread vicious rumors (Condemn in a loving manner, that is.) while they, for example, shave their sideburns, despite the latter being explicitly prohibited in the Bible and the former, as far as I know, not.
They feel rumors are not showing any sort of kindness, and in fact are showing spite, towards others, thus you should not do it. As long as they don't walk around showing spite, their behavior is perfectly consistent.
OTOH, it is perfectly valid for someone who thinks the Bible is the rules you must follow, and thus, for example, homosexual acts are a sin, to have pointed out that they have shaved their sideburns, which is also a sin.(1)
All religious have people who rules-lawyer, and they have people who are attempting to get closer to god. These are almost never the same people, and it perfectly reasonable to leap on the rules-lawyer's case when they start screaming at people.
1) First person to say 'only the New Testament is valid' crap gets bitchslapped. There are three references to homosexuality in the NT, and two of them are recent mistranslations, made in the past 200 years, of a made up word that probably means something like 'men who sleep with male temple prostitutes'. The early Church discussed homosexualiy, even quoted verses about it, and mysteriously didn't bother to mention these 'outright condemnation' of it, because they knew what was being talked about and it was not a general prohibition of homosexuality.
And the other isn't 'condemning' anything, it's merely describing a idol-worshiping drug-induced orgy to Paul with him claiming that God 'punished' people by making them couple with people of their own gender, which they found distasteful. (And they didn't like it because it was wrong or even nasty, but because being the 'catcher' implied a loss of masculity and social status. It was perfectly okay to go the other way around.) The result of punishment of God != sin. If someone lives in a house full of frogs, do we condemn them because of the Plague of Frogs? That's just idiotic.
Picture of the Prophet are illegal because of the risk someone might worship them. This is exactly the problem that Protestants have with some Catholics depictions of Mary, and in fact that's where Muslims thinks Christians went wrong WRT to Jesus. Depictions of Muhammad are forbidden because of the risk of idol worship, not because he's holy or whatever.
It's rather akin to how alcohol is forbidden because of the risk of the behaviors associated with it, or why women wear burkas to keep men from getting ideas. Muslims are big into the idea of removing temptation, whereas the Western worlds is mostly okay with temptation as long as people don't act on it. You can argue about these approachs to fighting sin all you want, but they exist and are real. (1)
This 'temptation removal' has even been applied to graven images of any living thing by fanaicts Wahhabis. (Pretending that's the right word.) Hence the destruction of Buddhas in Afganistan a few years ago.
But this is why this outrage is fucking stupid. No one is going to worship these cartoons. It's rules-lawyering, and what's more, these aren't even rules in the Koran, these are rules some parts of Islam came up centuries later to remove a possible temptation.
It's akin to the Orthodox Jewish rule about not using electricity on the Sabbath, when the point of that is a day of rest that they have made much harder with their refusal. Except, of course, this instance of rules-lawyering is hurting others.
1) This, incidentally, is the real issue the fanatics have with the West. They see, quite rightly, that parts of us openly tempt them into sin. Hence some of the hijackers visiting a strip club before the hijacking. It wasn't they were hypocrites, it was that they were proving to themselves how far we had sunk, and possibly that they could still resist the temptation. Or maybe that they couldn't resist it, and thus needed to destroy it, I dunno.
The people demanding everyone follow certain religious rules are the people who, first, have to follow those rules. (In fact, in Christianity, that is itself a rule, get the plank out of your own eye, etc.)
People who are not demanding people follow certain religious rules do not, obviously have any rules they need to follow 'first'.
To restate: Anyone demanding a person do X first must do X, or it is completely reasonable for other people to refuse to listen until they do that.
What trips people up is this works at any level. If you say, you must do X solely because the Bible says so, you are actually saying 'You must follow the exact letter of the Bible', and thus is it valid to point out where they are not.
OTOH, feel free to critize non-religious people for not following other standards they hold people up to. Almost everyone who comdems anyone else in any way has stated some standard they expect people to follow, so there should almost always be some way they could act hypocritically. (At the very least, they have stated that, at minimum, hypocrisy is bad, and thus all you have to do is find a time when they, themselves, were okay with hypocrisy.)
Viruses aren't as good as bacteria in mutating to avoid treatment, anyway. Bacteria reproduce all the frickin time, a virus has to be inside a cell.
Once in the cell, they turn out a lot of copies, but these copies have a very low amount of mutation, because they are produced by human cells, and human cells like to copy things correctly, even when they're copying the wrong thing, vs. bacteria which don't give a damn.
Except instead of the homeowner, it's the home manufacturer. Their window does not latch right.
The issued a recall, and if you pay them money, you can get in first. Otherwise, you have to wait past when you would reasonably expect people to break in. (There isn't a good analogy for a worm trigger in RL, but maybe the nearby prison lets everyone out at the same time every year.)
That, indeed, sounds like extortion.
The whole point of 'once a month' was so people who updated a bunch of machines with testing could do it without having to worry about the patches being out in advance, because patches soon equals expoits.
However, this should never apply to patches that already have exploits, which should be released immediately. And there should not be any sort of 'pay and get it early' concept, as that entirely defeats of the purpose.
I mean, the Administration is claiming that there are laws--and Constitutional obligations, even--that clearly and properly justify these wiretaps.
Okay, we'll try this is simply as possible: This is a lie.
The president must, at all times, follow the law, even with regard to the military. It is his job to execute the law, not decide what the law is, or what it means, or whether it's constitutional or not. He has no power, whatsoever, to break the law, as passed by Congress, as filtered through the courts, in any way, shape, or form. Got it?
Now, because the President is in such an important position, he cannot be arrested. (In addition, he'd have to be arrested by his own branch, which is unlikely.) He must be impeached first. However, this does not affect the legality of his actions.
This 'Constitutional oblications' is a lie. He doesn't even have the power to 'make war', as some lunatics keep saying. He is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, and that's it. Someone in command does not have the authority to do whatever they want, they must still follow laws. He does exactly the same thing he does for civilian government, execute decisions made by Congress.
Congress, in recent decades, has granted the president limited authority to use the military without their permission for a short of amount of time for 60 days, but don't confuse that with a 'right'. The president has no more constutitional authority to invade Canada than I do.
So there's the 'constitutional obligations' out the window. Let's look at FISA.
FISA forbids spying outside of that authorized by law. Everyone agrees with this. So let's see if the resolution to invade Afghanistan authorized anything under FISA. Well, no. Let's see if it authorized wiretapping in general. Hrm, nope. What did it authorize?
Well, first of all, it clearly says military force, but, more to the point, it says 'all necessary and appropriate force'. That is, in fact, legal code. Necessary is the opposite of excessive. Appropriate is the opposite of inappropriate. What is 'inappropriate'? Well, part of the legal meaning is 'within the law'. (Among other things.)
I.e., like many things, authorization of force is require within the law.
I think you are right that true oppression is like that in 1984, where the proletariat is not even aware of it. However, I do not think we are there yet. The Republicrats are still at least doing lip service to ideas like ear-mark reform and campaign finance reform. If this were an Orwellian regime, they would not even bother because things like campaign finance scandals would not see the light of day.
The fact you think the Democrats have anything to do with current scandal shows that it, at least, is not seeing the light of day correctly.
Um, we could deal with it the legal way. You know, with the special court we set up to grant wiretaps 24/7, and even gave ourself the ability to set up the tap and then come to it within 72 hours?
There are three ways to do this: The legal way, the illegal way, and the Bush way, which is just the illegal way with some talking points thrown in to confuse the issue.
Its not the the republicans want to screw everyone over for the sake of it, many honestly believe that a little freedom (or privacy) should be given up to make America more secure. Many democrats feel the opposite.
They can 'honestly' believe that all they want, and they would be fucking morons. This Administration isn't doing a damn thing to make this country safer. It's apparently so incompetant it had no idea that Hamas was about to win so many election, it had no idea the leves in New Orleans could fail despite having warnings(1), it says stupid-ass things like 'Crusade' and 'Axis of Evil' that piss off our allies, and, of course, it invades Iraq for no logical reason which has made our position in the rest of the middle east incredibly bad, like in Iran.
And we ignore actual security problems, like the fact both Iran and North Korea. And problems to be, like Pakistan. And, oh yeah, bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the 'freedom' removals are things like no wiretapping, when any wiretaps were easily gettable, trial by jury, when of course any jury would convict terrorists, free speech around the president, when no protestor has ever attacked a president, freedom from torture, which doesn't get us anything except the loss of moral ground when others torture us, etc. None of these makes us safer in any logical way, they just remove our freedoms.
Trading freedom for security is a lie, it is not actually happening. Due to the actions of the Bush Administration, we are losing security and freedom. We have gained no security at all.
1) No, I refuse to be drawn into an argument whether local authorities should have done more. They should have, but their failure does not excuse the failure of the Administration.
And incidentally is a very funny joke, because the amount of the music tax assumes standard CDs.
You can fill a music CD to the brim with MP3s and give it away, and it's legal.
Even if you don't like lossy compression, thanks to the amount of waste on a normal CD, and FLAC compression, you can often fit three or four CDs on one, and legally give them to a friend.
Who can decompress them and burn them in their right place on data CDs, which is completely legal format shifting. And they can legally burn them onto new music CD-Rs and give them out, while keeping their original.
Frankly, I've always thought it might be a neat idea to start a legal CD trading service via music CDs. Have people list the CDs they want, have a counter of CD in vs. CD out so people could see who was pulling their weight (For legal reason, you don't want to require a ratio, but, of course, people can choose not to help others for whatever reason they want.), make them burn a number on each music CD-R so that they can't forward received CDs to other people, but instead have to burn another, have printable wrappers, give them an application to rip to FLAC, etc.
Hell, the recording studios would still exist, and I assure people they'd figure out some way of operating.
Maybe they'd come up with some sort of loan thingy, which is basically what the music industry does, but they'd be a good deal more honest about it and couldn't charge artists for all sorts of hidden costs.
If fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some music business didn't spring up. 'Here is your band credit card, you have a limit of X dollars. Pay for whatever studio you want, and whatever you need. When you are done, give us a CD, which can be sold solely through our store and your concerts and half the money will go to us until we make 105% of the money you spent. After that, you can leave and sell your CD wherever you wish. If at any point you need help, come by and ask us what to do next, and we've got this nice pamphlet about promotional options we can do for cheap you can read on the way out.'
You know, some sort of honest loan, instead of the system where record companies spend your money on themselves and you have to pay it back. They get away with it because you have to go through them to get into the business, but once that's gone, there's no reason that sane contracts won't spring up.
Yes, there is often stupid accounting going on, but things like social security and the post office are supposed to be self-sufficent.
If they are not, it is not the fault of the people making the main budget. It is the fault of the people who set up the rules for those things.
And arguing about that is rather moot because we were technically nowhere close to a balanced budget thanks to the interest on the debt. If the interest is more than the surplus, the debt will still grow.
Regardless, Clinton did make the expenditures covered in 'the budget' less than in the income from taxes. (Without, I might add, raising taxes, or any tricks like moving stuff around.) Other expenditures, sadly, were not covered by what was left over, but it was a start, especially for someone who increased spending on social services.(1)
This trick is something the Republicans are currently not willing to do. And stopped being willing to do before 9/11, in case anyone get in ideas in that regard.
I'm really just mentioning the Republicans because various people have claimed that, as the Republicans controlled the House, and actually passed the budget, that they were the ones who should get credit for it...but it was Clinton who wrote the budget for them, and the second he left they undid all that work.
1) And when I say 'start', I actually thought Bush would continue this, which is why I was slightly happy he got in. I would have rather had Gore, but I was thinking 'Well, at least we'll keep trimming the pork from the government. The liberals started it, but the conservatives, especially as they have legistlative too, will really strip spending down, probably too much for my liking, but oh well. We can always elect a Democrat next and get back our social services.'.
This was possibly the stupidest thought that has ever passed through my brain.
Many politicians have offical bios that are true, listing all the good things they've done. Someone putting that in isn't immediately suspicious. Yes, it's a PR thing, but it's hopefully true.
Removing things is suspicious. Either it was a lie, and there should be some sort of comment about that demonstrates it is so, or it just made them look bad so they got rid of it.
OTOH, it might be smart to make a distrinction between 'knowledge' and 'information'. Something like a Wikipedia article on Quantum Mechanics is about knowledge. It is explaining things. These are articles on abstract nouns and events and verbs and stuff.
Most articles on concrete nouns, like places, people, objects, etc, however, merely contain information.
It might be an interesting idea to create a WikiFact for things that are true. No explanations, no commentary on what these mean, just facts. On the Civil War article, for example, no comments on the cause of it, just 'The first shot was fired on this date' and 'Here is the text of the surrender signed by Lee'.
With the idea that you can flip back and forth between it and WikiPedia, and see, if not the complete truth, at least the boundaries where the truth has to be between.
The Democrats balanced the budget, you fucktard. Clinton singlehandedly pushed though a balanced budget when he was in office.
Granted, the Republicans were still pretending to be fiscally conservative at that point, so they claimed some credit, but the second they didn't have to get it past a Democratic president, suddenly balancing the budget went out the window, and it was unneed tax cuts for upper incomes at the same time as a war they decided we needed, something we've never tried in history.
And, no, I'm not just looking at this in hindsight. The second Bush started handing out 'future tax rebates' or whatever that shit was in 2001 at the start of his first term, I said 'What the hell? How about we use the extra money to reduce the deficit? Like the 'tax-and-spend' liberal was doing with his surpluses.'.
I used to be like some people, thinking both parties were equally bad. My opinion of the Democratic party has not gone up any, and in fact has slightly dipped with their inability to get on message and take as stand.
My option of the Republicans, however, is slightly below...I actually have no political comparisons that can go that low. They consist of the most incompetant, greedy, vicious, petty, amoral bastards in the history of politics.
That said...editing Wikipedia to remove bad facts about yourself is just incredibly stupid behavior, no matter who does it, because if you knew anything about Wikipedia that is a good way to get your ass kicked, PR-wise. However, the staff of politicians is large and often does PR stuff without their knowledge, and many of them are young idiots.
No, there are no 'ferries' in the traditional sense of the word. There are cheap ways to ship your car, but as any boat ride to Hawaii takes at least a two days at 45 knots, you have to spend at least one night on the boat, and there's nothing you can spend the entire trip in your car, or sit in your seat, and hence it's not a 'ferry'.
Not that those car-carrying boats can even get up to 45 knot anyway. Or go that distance.
Any, no you can't charter a boat without an ID, and you can't show up in port in California without an ID either.
Asking to see identification is not a violation of the constitution.
Um, no one said it is. Requiring ID, however, is.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There are places in Alaska that cannot be reached except by plane. They are harder to get to than Hawaii, because you cannot boat.
In fact, you can combine the ideas. Relocate them to an Alaskan island. ON the northern coast. Sure, it may only be twenty miles instead of several thousand, but people can't swim across two hundred feet of ice water, much less twenty miles. Sure...95% of the twenty miles might be solid ice...have fun figuring out, specifically, which parts are not.
Be sure to run an offical helo service to that island...that checks ID. For free, so no one will compete with it. And, of course, neither boats nor snow vehicles can manage the broken ice.
And the helo runs to one of those middle-size Alaskan towns that only has air access. To other parts of Alaska. (This is how it usually works.) Run this air access for free, also, so there's no competition, no one will bother cutting a road.
At which point they will be able to drive into the rest of the US...through Canada. Or get on another airline.
We could set up a really nice small Federal prison there. Anyone we don't like, we transfer them there right before we release them...and we release them, of course, out of the front door.
You could make it a month long ordeal to reach civilization, with two border crossing, and two internal checkpoints and hassles, for anyone you could get on one felony. And you don't even need absurd sentences or anything, because you've figured out how to harrass them once they get out of jail.
Be sure to 'accidentally' lose their driver's license on way out the door.
And if you were really clever, you could figure out how to get people there who were just charged with felonies. Of course, you immediately release them out of the front door...
Of course, the real danger here is that Alaska only has 500,000 people, and a lot of them are very libertarian. Start sending large amounts of people who take issue with the Administration there, and you could end up with, heh, 'a rogue state'.
massive and sudden cabin depressurisation is pretty much a myth. Everyone will have time to get to their air masks, and no one will get sucked out of the plane. If there are two two holes, someone might get blown out via a crosswind, or they might just fall out of the plane, but they won't get sucked out unless they're standing right by a door as it suddenly and inexplicably falls off the plane.
Frankly, depressurizing the cabin when terrorists show up might be a good idea, except for the fact it can kill a very few weak and elderly people. It'd certainly hinder any attempts to break into the cockpit.
We kept having kids get cited for that in high school.
Of course, what they actually were doing was driving down the road, and then swerving off when the cops passed.
Luckily, the lawmakers had already figured this out, and there was apparently some sort of law or court decision that said if you had a dirtbike on the road or shoulder of the road, to be 'crossing' you had to be within 15 degrees of perpendicular to the actual road.
Please explain a manner of travel from Hawaii to Washington that doesn't requires someone showing ID and is legal.
And, no, purchasing your own boat or airplane doesn't work. That is prohibitedly expensive for most residents, but, more to the point, you can't purchase operate either of those without IDs.
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If a Christian's position is that their duty is to, for example, love the Lord with all their heart, and love their neighbor as themselves, then it isn't hypocritical for them to condemn people who spread vicious rumors (Condemn in a loving manner, that is.) while they, for example, shave their sideburns, despite the latter being explicitly prohibited in the Bible and the former, as far as I know, not.
They feel rumors are not showing any sort of kindness, and in fact are showing spite, towards others, thus you should not do it. As long as they don't walk around showing spite, their behavior is perfectly consistent.
OTOH, it is perfectly valid for someone who thinks the Bible is the rules you must follow, and thus, for example, homosexual acts are a sin, to have pointed out that they have shaved their sideburns, which is also a sin.(1)
All religious have people who rules-lawyer, and they have people who are attempting to get closer to god. These are almost never the same people, and it perfectly reasonable to leap on the rules-lawyer's case when they start screaming at people.
1) First person to say 'only the New Testament is valid' crap gets bitchslapped. There are three references to homosexuality in the NT, and two of them are recent mistranslations, made in the past 200 years, of a made up word that probably means something like 'men who sleep with male temple prostitutes'. The early Church discussed homosexualiy, even quoted verses about it, and mysteriously didn't bother to mention these 'outright condemnation' of it, because they knew what was being talked about and it was not a general prohibition of homosexuality.
And the other isn't 'condemning' anything, it's merely describing a idol-worshiping drug-induced orgy to Paul with him claiming that God 'punished' people by making them couple with people of their own gender, which they found distasteful. (And they didn't like it because it was wrong or even nasty, but because being the 'catcher' implied a loss of masculity and social status. It was perfectly okay to go the other way around.) The result of punishment of God != sin. If someone lives in a house full of frogs, do we condemn them because of the Plague of Frogs? That's just idiotic.
It's rather akin to how alcohol is forbidden because of the risk of the behaviors associated with it, or why women wear burkas to keep men from getting ideas. Muslims are big into the idea of removing temptation, whereas the Western worlds is mostly okay with temptation as long as people don't act on it. You can argue about these approachs to fighting sin all you want, but they exist and are real. (1)
This 'temptation removal' has even been applied to graven images of any living thing by fanaicts Wahhabis. (Pretending that's the right word.) Hence the destruction of Buddhas in Afganistan a few years ago.
But this is why this outrage is fucking stupid. No one is going to worship these cartoons. It's rules-lawyering, and what's more, these aren't even rules in the Koran, these are rules some parts of Islam came up centuries later to remove a possible temptation.
It's akin to the Orthodox Jewish rule about not using electricity on the Sabbath, when the point of that is a day of rest that they have made much harder with their refusal. Except, of course, this instance of rules-lawyering is hurting others.
1) This, incidentally, is the real issue the fanatics have with the West. They see, quite rightly, that parts of us openly tempt them into sin. Hence some of the hijackers visiting a strip club before the hijacking. It wasn't they were hypocrites, it was that they were proving to themselves how far we had sunk, and possibly that they could still resist the temptation. Or maybe that they couldn't resist it, and thus needed to destroy it, I dunno.
People who are not demanding people follow certain religious rules do not, obviously have any rules they need to follow 'first'.
To restate: Anyone demanding a person do X first must do X, or it is completely reasonable for other people to refuse to listen until they do that.
What trips people up is this works at any level. If you say, you must do X solely because the Bible says so, you are actually saying 'You must follow the exact letter of the Bible', and thus is it valid to point out where they are not.
OTOH, feel free to critize non-religious people for not following other standards they hold people up to. Almost everyone who comdems anyone else in any way has stated some standard they expect people to follow, so there should almost always be some way they could act hypocritically. (At the very least, they have stated that, at minimum, hypocrisy is bad, and thus all you have to do is find a time when they, themselves, were okay with hypocrisy.)
Once in the cell, they turn out a lot of copies, but these copies have a very low amount of mutation, because they are produced by human cells, and human cells like to copy things correctly, even when they're copying the wrong thing, vs. bacteria which don't give a damn.
Except instead of the homeowner, it's the home manufacturer. Their window does not latch right.
The issued a recall, and if you pay them money, you can get in first. Otherwise, you have to wait past when you would reasonably expect people to break in. (There isn't a good analogy for a worm trigger in RL, but maybe the nearby prison lets everyone out at the same time every year.)
That, indeed, sounds like extortion.
The whole point of 'once a month' was so people who updated a bunch of machines with testing could do it without having to worry about the patches being out in advance, because patches soon equals expoits.
However, this should never apply to patches that already have exploits, which should be released immediately. And there should not be any sort of 'pay and get it early' concept, as that entirely defeats of the purpose.
Or did someone else write your copy of Windows?
Okay, we'll try this is simply as possible: This is a lie.
The president must, at all times, follow the law, even with regard to the military. It is his job to execute the law, not decide what the law is, or what it means, or whether it's constitutional or not. He has no power, whatsoever, to break the law, as passed by Congress, as filtered through the courts, in any way, shape, or form. Got it?
Now, because the President is in such an important position, he cannot be arrested. (In addition, he'd have to be arrested by his own branch, which is unlikely.) He must be impeached first. However, this does not affect the legality of his actions.
This 'Constitutional oblications' is a lie. He doesn't even have the power to 'make war', as some lunatics keep saying. He is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, and that's it. Someone in command does not have the authority to do whatever they want, they must still follow laws. He does exactly the same thing he does for civilian government, execute decisions made by Congress.
Congress, in recent decades, has granted the president limited authority to use the military without their permission for a short of amount of time for 60 days, but don't confuse that with a 'right'. The president has no more constutitional authority to invade Canada than I do.
So there's the 'constitutional obligations' out the window. Let's look at FISA.
FISA forbids spying outside of that authorized by law. Everyone agrees with this. So let's see if the resolution to invade Afghanistan authorized anything under FISA. Well, no. Let's see if it authorized wiretapping in general. Hrm, nope. What did it authorize?
Well, first of all, it clearly says military force, but, more to the point, it says 'all necessary and appropriate force'. That is, in fact, legal code. Necessary is the opposite of excessive. Appropriate is the opposite of inappropriate. What is 'inappropriate'? Well, part of the legal meaning is 'within the law'. (Among other things.)
I.e., like many things, authorization of force is require within the law.
The fact you think the Democrats have anything to do with current scandal shows that it, at least, is not seeing the light of day correctly.
There are three ways to do this: The legal way, the illegal way, and the Bush way, which is just the illegal way with some talking points thrown in to confuse the issue.
They can 'honestly' believe that all they want, and they would be fucking morons. This Administration isn't doing a damn thing to make this country safer. It's apparently so incompetant it had no idea that Hamas was about to win so many election, it had no idea the leves in New Orleans could fail despite having warnings(1), it says stupid-ass things like 'Crusade' and 'Axis of Evil' that piss off our allies, and, of course, it invades Iraq for no logical reason which has made our position in the rest of the middle east incredibly bad, like in Iran.
And we ignore actual security problems, like the fact both Iran and North Korea. And problems to be, like Pakistan. And, oh yeah, bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the 'freedom' removals are things like no wiretapping, when any wiretaps were easily gettable, trial by jury, when of course any jury would convict terrorists, free speech around the president, when no protestor has ever attacked a president, freedom from torture, which doesn't get us anything except the loss of moral ground when others torture us, etc. None of these makes us safer in any logical way, they just remove our freedoms.
Trading freedom for security is a lie, it is not actually happening. Due to the actions of the Bush Administration, we are losing security and freedom. We have gained no security at all.
1) No, I refuse to be drawn into an argument whether local authorities should have done more. They should have, but their failure does not excuse the failure of the Administration.
You can fill a music CD to the brim with MP3s and give it away, and it's legal.
Even if you don't like lossy compression, thanks to the amount of waste on a normal CD, and FLAC compression, you can often fit three or four CDs on one, and legally give them to a friend.
Who can decompress them and burn them in their right place on data CDs, which is completely legal format shifting. And they can legally burn them onto new music CD-Rs and give them out, while keeping their original.
Frankly, I've always thought it might be a neat idea to start a legal CD trading service via music CDs. Have people list the CDs they want, have a counter of CD in vs. CD out so people could see who was pulling their weight (For legal reason, you don't want to require a ratio, but, of course, people can choose not to help others for whatever reason they want.), make them burn a number on each music CD-R so that they can't forward received CDs to other people, but instead have to burn another, have printable wrappers, give them an application to rip to FLAC, etc.
Maybe they'd come up with some sort of loan thingy, which is basically what the music industry does, but they'd be a good deal more honest about it and couldn't charge artists for all sorts of hidden costs.
If fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some music business didn't spring up. 'Here is your band credit card, you have a limit of X dollars. Pay for whatever studio you want, and whatever you need. When you are done, give us a CD, which can be sold solely through our store and your concerts and half the money will go to us until we make 105% of the money you spent. After that, you can leave and sell your CD wherever you wish. If at any point you need help, come by and ask us what to do next, and we've got this nice pamphlet about promotional options we can do for cheap you can read on the way out.'
You know, some sort of honest loan, instead of the system where record companies spend your money on themselves and you have to pay it back. They get away with it because you have to go through them to get into the business, but once that's gone, there's no reason that sane contracts won't spring up.
You bastard, you verbed nouny!
If they are not, it is not the fault of the people making the main budget. It is the fault of the people who set up the rules for those things.
And arguing about that is rather moot because we were technically nowhere close to a balanced budget thanks to the interest on the debt. If the interest is more than the surplus, the debt will still grow.
Regardless, Clinton did make the expenditures covered in 'the budget' less than in the income from taxes. (Without, I might add, raising taxes, or any tricks like moving stuff around.) Other expenditures, sadly, were not covered by what was left over, but it was a start, especially for someone who increased spending on social services.(1)
This trick is something the Republicans are currently not willing to do. And stopped being willing to do before 9/11, in case anyone get in ideas in that regard.
I'm really just mentioning the Republicans because various people have claimed that, as the Republicans controlled the House, and actually passed the budget, that they were the ones who should get credit for it...but it was Clinton who wrote the budget for them, and the second he left they undid all that work.
1) And when I say 'start', I actually thought Bush would continue this, which is why I was slightly happy he got in. I would have rather had Gore, but I was thinking 'Well, at least we'll keep trimming the pork from the government. The liberals started it, but the conservatives, especially as they have legistlative too, will really strip spending down, probably too much for my liking, but oh well. We can always elect a Democrat next and get back our social services.'.
This was possibly the stupidest thought that has ever passed through my brain.
Many politicians have offical bios that are true, listing all the good things they've done. Someone putting that in isn't immediately suspicious. Yes, it's a PR thing, but it's hopefully true.
Removing things is suspicious. Either it was a lie, and there should be some sort of comment about that demonstrates it is so, or it just made them look bad so they got rid of it.
OTOH, it might be smart to make a distrinction between 'knowledge' and 'information'. Something like a Wikipedia article on Quantum Mechanics is about knowledge. It is explaining things. These are articles on abstract nouns and events and verbs and stuff.
Most articles on concrete nouns, like places, people, objects, etc, however, merely contain information.
It might be an interesting idea to create a WikiFact for things that are true. No explanations, no commentary on what these mean, just facts. On the Civil War article, for example, no comments on the cause of it, just 'The first shot was fired on this date' and 'Here is the text of the surrender signed by Lee'.
With the idea that you can flip back and forth between it and WikiPedia, and see, if not the complete truth, at least the boundaries where the truth has to be between.
Granted, the Republicans were still pretending to be fiscally conservative at that point, so they claimed some credit, but the second they didn't have to get it past a Democratic president, suddenly balancing the budget went out the window, and it was unneed tax cuts for upper incomes at the same time as a war they decided we needed, something we've never tried in history.
And, no, I'm not just looking at this in hindsight. The second Bush started handing out 'future tax rebates' or whatever that shit was in 2001 at the start of his first term, I said 'What the hell? How about we use the extra money to reduce the deficit? Like the 'tax-and-spend' liberal was doing with his surpluses.'.
I used to be like some people, thinking both parties were equally bad. My opinion of the Democratic party has not gone up any, and in fact has slightly dipped with their inability to get on message and take as stand.
My option of the Republicans, however, is slightly below...I actually have no political comparisons that can go that low. They consist of the most incompetant, greedy, vicious, petty, amoral bastards in the history of politics.
That said...editing Wikipedia to remove bad facts about yourself is just incredibly stupid behavior, no matter who does it, because if you knew anything about Wikipedia that is a good way to get your ass kicked, PR-wise. However, the staff of politicians is large and often does PR stuff without their knowledge, and many of them are young idiots.
Not that those car-carrying boats can even get up to 45 knot anyway. Or go that distance.
Any, no you can't charter a boat without an ID, and you can't show up in port in California without an ID either.
Asking to see identification is not a violation of the constitution.
Um, no one said it is. Requiring ID, however, is.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Yeah, I really want to grab that end. Give me the handle, you idiot.
And I'm amazed by the number of people who have really dull knifes and try to use them.
I guess these two issues really counter each other out. It's okay to wave knifes around if they aren't sharp.
Of course, you'll cut your damn hand off when trying to actually use them because you have to apply so much force.
So maybe there should be knife licenses. The practical: Sharpen this knife, and cut this piece of plastic in half with it.
There are places in Alaska that cannot be reached except by plane. They are harder to get to than Hawaii, because you cannot boat.
In fact, you can combine the ideas. Relocate them to an Alaskan island. ON the northern coast. Sure, it may only be twenty miles instead of several thousand, but people can't swim across two hundred feet of ice water, much less twenty miles. Sure...95% of the twenty miles might be solid ice...have fun figuring out, specifically, which parts are not.
Be sure to run an offical helo service to that island...that checks ID. For free, so no one will compete with it. And, of course, neither boats nor snow vehicles can manage the broken ice.
And the helo runs to one of those middle-size Alaskan towns that only has air access. To other parts of Alaska. (This is how it usually works.) Run this air access for free, also, so there's no competition, no one will bother cutting a road.
At which point they will be able to drive into the rest of the US...through Canada. Or get on another airline.
We could set up a really nice small Federal prison there. Anyone we don't like, we transfer them there right before we release them...and we release them, of course, out of the front door.
You could make it a month long ordeal to reach civilization, with two border crossing, and two internal checkpoints and hassles, for anyone you could get on one felony. And you don't even need absurd sentences or anything, because you've figured out how to harrass them once they get out of jail.
Be sure to 'accidentally' lose their driver's license on way out the door.
And if you were really clever, you could figure out how to get people there who were just charged with felonies. Of course, you immediately release them out of the front door...
Of course, the real danger here is that Alaska only has 500,000 people, and a lot of them are very libertarian. Start sending large amounts of people who take issue with the Administration there, and you could end up with, heh, 'a rogue state'.
Frankly, depressurizing the cabin when terrorists show up might be a good idea, except for the fact it can kill a very few weak and elderly people. It'd certainly hinder any attempts to break into the cockpit.
When a driver's license expires, you no longer can drive with it. It doesn't magically stop being ID.
I was gong to get one of those, but I opted for one with a web browser in the center of the steering wheel.
We kept having kids get cited for that in high school.
Of course, what they actually were doing was driving down the road, and then swerving off when the cops passed.
Luckily, the lawmakers had already figured this out, and there was apparently some sort of law or court decision that said if you had a dirtbike on the road or shoulder of the road, to be 'crossing' you had to be within 15 degrees of perpendicular to the actual road.
HAWAII.
Please explain a manner of travel from Hawaii to Washington that doesn't requires someone showing ID and is legal.
And, no, purchasing your own boat or airplane doesn't work. That is prohibitedly expensive for most residents, but, more to the point, you can't purchase operate either of those without IDs.
It is illegal to walk across interstates.