But if Brown had had the spine to turn round and tell Phony Tony to fuck off, Bliar would have had to back down or risk a huge split in the Neues Arbeit project.
Nice to see Mandelson back, though - cronying up with the KKK (Kikes, KGB and Krooks) as though he never went away.
Well, I don't support the right of any group to break the law, but I do support free speech, no matter who is speaking or what they are saying.
A Jamaican friend of mine summed it up for me - he doesn't care what any bigot says, and will happily tell them so to their faces.
Also, if you reject any and all government censorship, then I assume you are against the censorship of anti-semitic / racist / anti-gay speech under the law.
Speech is not the same as action - if someone goes around beating others up (for whatever reason), there are plenty of laws to deal with it without invoking the 'No Platform' idea.
what on earth makes you think that censorship is not promoted by some "progressives"?
No Platform is exactly that - a bunch of unemployable lefties who think that bad words can hurt their delicate little ears, or perhaps a bunch of fascists who think that denying free speech to those with whom they disagree is somehow "progressive".
You might have missed the part where untold tens of trillions of dollars just vanished from the economy.
No, what happened is that people suddenly realised that what they thought were trillions of dollars was actually smoke and mirrors, and the inevitable revaluation of the sub-prime market and its derivatives led to the illusory money disappearing.
The point is that the value was never there in the first place - it was all an illusion promoted by greed and short sightedness.
That's a lot of inherent value to be taking out of the system
More to the point, if the currency is not backed by tangible assets, then a lot of the 'value' in the system is illusory, created by the slight of hand that is the banking system.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
It's not so much the subprime loans themselves that are at the root of this, but the reselling of the debt without properly accounting for risk.
That's the whole point of TFA - that the repackaged debt was given AAA ratings despite being obviously toxic.
Of course the decision to force institutions to make these loans was stupid, but it's the subsequent repackaging and reselling of the debt, disguising its lack of real value, that was the cause of this crisis, and the methods used to create that false valuation that are the subject of Greenspan's criticism.
Here's a hint - Microsoft's AD is a poor imitation of Novell's Directory Services (now eDirectory).
Novell even offered Microsoft the NDS codebase for free, back in the good old days of Netware 4 and NT4, but Microsoft insisted on writing their own implementation.
In other news, the Magritheans are complining that they haven't been paid because the mice have forgotten why they wanted to build the Earth in the first place.
Yeah - Chris Evans interviewed the artist on the radio yesterday afternoon, and he's usually quite good at matching the following tune to the interview subject.
Guess Mussorgsky must have passed him by in his youth, 'cause he sure missed a trick there (even the ELP version would have done - I'm no snob!):)
Yep - 1974 was the best set of Royal Instiution Christmas lectures ever.
It's time they repeated that series - I was only 10 at the time, but was spellbound, especially by the air-powered gyroscope.
Lest we forget, Laithwaite also helped build the Manchester Mark 1 computer - the first stored-program computer, so we have more than just fancy trains to thank him for.
Not that I like the scheme, but it doesn't sound quite as police-state as some might think. My picture is already taken all over the place if I go to the airport, this would take my picture and cross-check it with a database of known criminals, terrorists and fugitives.
But what about the inevitable false positive problem?
It may not be a problem for you (perhaps you're lucky enough not to match anyone in the database), but for some people it's going to be a royal PITA.
I used to fly quite regularly from Manchester to Dublin on business, and have the unfortunate trait of looking a little like Gerry Adams' kid brother.
Guess who Special Branch wanted a chat with every single time I returned to Ringway?
It turned into a bit of a standing joke after a while - I'm reasonably patient, so a ten minute chat with SB was no problem, but I can imagine some people getting really pissed off.
I wonder how long it will be before this technology is utilized outside the airport gates...like, for example, with all of the myriad CCTV cameras currently infesting London.
A very, very long time indeed, for a simple reason - face recognition technology isn't good enough for what Branchflower wants to use it for, and the system would be swamped with false positives as soon as it is turned on.
Branchflower is Interpol's fingerprint database expert - his experience with fingerprint matching has led him to believe some of the wilder claims from the biometric snake-oil salesmen, which is why he's put foot to mouth in such a spectacular style.
Still, it's hardly surprising given the recent pronouncements by Jaqui Smith, Geoff Hoon and the rest of the Neues Arbeit clique regarding big databases.
Science tests beliefs (hypotheses) against evidence.
Religion tests evidence against belief.
Notice the difference?
Your ridiculous attempts to make the vague wording of a Bronze Age myth fit modern interpretations of the evidence are the wanderings of a deranged mind.
Your points are pretty weak - "Let there be light" invokes a mythical being without adding anything at all to the idea of a big bang, "suspended from nothing" really, really means nothing (think about it carefully), "tells of the continental drift" would really be amazingly prescient if it wasn't based on a weird interpretation of about two sentences in Genesis plus some spurious calcualtions by a Creationist with access to a computer, "makes reference to the world being round" isn't really surprising, as the Babylonians knew that before Genesis was written, "110 civilisations have a flood story" isn't at all surprising given that sea levels rose globally after the last ice age, and finally the assertion that Genesis has an account of the development of plants (rather than 'God made them') is nonsense.
This is true - as a star-struck 9 year old in posession of a Casio Mini (this was 1973 in the UK, and I was the first kid in the school to have one), I spent nights and nights dreaming of screens and screens of green LED numbers.
The image still pops up now and again after a suitably herbal evening:)
Slashdot Mirror
But if Brown had had the spine to turn round and tell Phony Tony to fuck off, Bliar would have had to back down or risk a huge split in the Neues Arbeit project.
Nice to see Mandelson back, though - cronying up with the KKK (Kikes, KGB and Krooks) as though he never went away.
Or it could be because they were all part of a great Masonic conspiracy ;P
That's obdamnation to you, Mr Pottymouth!
He's not a politician.
Therefore he knows better.
QED.
Well, their mastery of the search market makes Microsoft seem positively Lilliputian, so I guess they can choose whichever tribe they like :)
A Jamaican friend of mine summed it up for me - he doesn't care what any bigot says, and will happily tell them so to their faces.
Also, if you reject any and all government censorship, then I assume you are against the censorship of anti-semitic / racist / anti-gay speech under the law.
Speech is not the same as action - if someone goes around beating others up (for whatever reason), there are plenty of laws to deal with it without invoking the 'No Platform' idea.
No Platform is exactly that - a bunch of unemployable lefties who think that bad words can hurt their delicate little ears, or perhaps a bunch of fascists who think that denying free speech to those with whom they disagree is somehow "progressive".
No, what happened is that people suddenly realised that what they thought were trillions of dollars was actually smoke and mirrors, and the inevitable revaluation of the sub-prime market and its derivatives led to the illusory money disappearing.
The point is that the value was never there in the first place - it was all an illusion promoted by greed and short sightedness.
More to the point, if the currency is not backed by tangible assets, then a lot of the 'value' in the system is illusory, created by the slight of hand that is the banking system.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
©Dr Strangelove 2002
That's the whole point of TFA - that the repackaged debt was given AAA ratings despite being obviously toxic.
Of course the decision to force institutions to make these loans was stupid, but it's the subsequent repackaging and reselling of the debt, disguising its lack of real value, that was the cause of this crisis, and the methods used to create that false valuation that are the subject of Greenspan's criticism.
Here's a hint - Microsoft's AD is a poor imitation of Novell's Directory Services (now eDirectory).
Novell even offered Microsoft the NDS codebase for free, back in the good old days of Netware 4 and NT4, but Microsoft insisted on writing their own implementation.
Astroturfing asshat.
In other news, the Magritheans are complining that they haven't been paid because the mice have forgotten why they wanted to build the Earth in the first place.
But does that mean that there are sufficient "pit bull with lipstick" soccer moms to sway the vote for the Repugnicans?
Guess Mussorgsky must have passed him by in his youth, 'cause he sure missed a trick there (even the ELP version would have done - I'm no snob!) :)
Yep - 1974 was the best set of Royal Instiution Christmas lectures ever.
It's time they repeated that series - I was only 10 at the time, but was spellbound, especially by the air-powered gyroscope.
Lest we forget, Laithwaite also helped build the Manchester Mark 1 computer - the first stored-program computer, so we have more than just fancy trains to thank him for.
Offtopic?
There never was a more on-topic place to quote that song - it's one of my earliest memories of the problems of unintended consequences.
But then, mods is mods...
But I'm a snarky meme, you insensitive clod!
But what about the inevitable false positive problem?
It may not be a problem for you (perhaps you're lucky enough not to match anyone in the database), but for some people it's going to be a royal PITA.
I used to fly quite regularly from Manchester to Dublin on business, and have the unfortunate trait of looking a little like Gerry Adams' kid brother.
Guess who Special Branch wanted a chat with every single time I returned to Ringway?
It turned into a bit of a standing joke after a while - I'm reasonably patient, so a ten minute chat with SB was no problem, but I can imagine some people getting really pissed off.
"And this is my receipt for your receipt".
Also from the film, and sort of on-topic:
Dr Lewis Jaffe: Faces are a doddle compared to tits and ass. No hairline.
So the tits and ass recognition software is even further off than we thought :)
A very, very long time indeed, for a simple reason - face recognition technology isn't good enough for what Branchflower wants to use it for, and the system would be swamped with false positives as soon as it is turned on.
Branchflower is Interpol's fingerprint database expert - his experience with fingerprint matching has led him to believe some of the wilder claims from the biometric snake-oil salesmen, which is why he's put foot to mouth in such a spectacular style.
Still, it's hardly surprising given the recent pronouncements by Jaqui Smith, Geoff Hoon and the rest of the Neues Arbeit clique regarding big databases.
Science tests beliefs (hypotheses) against evidence.
Religion tests evidence against belief.
Notice the difference?
Your ridiculous attempts to make the vague wording of a Bronze Age myth fit modern interpretations of the evidence are the wanderings of a deranged mind.
Your points are pretty weak - "Let there be light" invokes a mythical being without adding anything at all to the idea of a big bang, "suspended from nothing" really, really means nothing (think about it carefully), "tells of the continental drift" would really be amazingly prescient if it wasn't based on a weird interpretation of about two sentences in Genesis plus some spurious calcualtions by a Creationist with access to a computer, "makes reference to the world being round" isn't really surprising, as the Babylonians knew that before Genesis was written, "110 civilisations have a flood story" isn't at all surprising given that sea levels rose globally after the last ice age, and finally the assertion that Genesis has an account of the development of plants (rather than 'God made them') is nonsense.
Go and troll somewhere else, please.
"Studies have shown that ice-cream is good for you.
I heard it on the radio this morning!
Full of calcium..."
Here's a handy hint - don't take shrooms while reading Alice in Wonderland.
Worst trip I ever had, and that includes Stockport!
The image still pops up now and again after a suitably herbal evening :)