it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior
It was not. A general concept was being publicly debated, but not the actual bill, which was being crafted behind closed doors (even though Obama promised in his 2008 campaign that all negotiations would be conducted "live on C-SPAN". What actually happened was the Democrats on capitol hill not only did their work behind closed doors where the citizens could neither see nor hear any of the actual negotiations, but they actually changed the locks on the doors so that no Republicans could get into the rooms to participate... so much for "openness"
it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior
That alone is a reason to run away from it screaming....
oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks
No... one think tank (Heritage Foundation, which is closely tied to republican business interests) suggested the individual mandate as one solution to the problem of Democrats offering "free" healthcare to everybody; like many insular groups seeking a simple answer to a complex problem they latched onto the "personal responsibility" part of the mandate and did not adequately realize what any rank-and-file conservative could easily see: any such mandate would be applied to the middle class, but the poor and illegals (all the people currently getting "free" care) would be exempted and still be getting "free care"...
it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account.
nobody important said it was
Its transparent, you can read it
No, it was put together in secret, voted on without being read, and it granted huge power to a vast army of government bureaucrats, none of whom are elected or in any way accountable to the voters. These bureaucrats, most of whom will never be identified to the American people, are currently writing THOUSANDS of pages of new regulations. They are still writing the regulations that govern the parts of the law that are now in place and what's now in place is just a tiny portion of what will start kicking-in in 2014. They will still be writing the regulations a decade from now. You cannot read something which is still being written or is still in the fanciful imagination of some bureaucrat
its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.
No, it is complicated because an army of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians all sought to bring into reality a century-old wet dream of the Left (free universal health care) while protecting all the self-interests of the lawyers, lobbyists and politicians involved and ignoring the fundamental problem of the promise of "free stuff"... namely that some people must work to make/provide the "free stuff" (in this case, doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, technicians providing care, drugs, devices, supplies, etc) and those people (the providers) have a basic human right to be properly compensated. If this had been a "sincere effort" as you put it, the it would have been done out-in-the-open with all negotiations "live on C-SPAN" and we would not now be learning (news broke yesterday) that the Democrats in the Senate and the Obama administration kept their negotiations with big pharma so secret that they kept the details away even from the house Democrats. The House is currently seeking details of this deal and the administration is refusing to hand them over
Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details.
Half the Democrats in congress got special deals if you include all the exemptions, carve-outs, subsidies, etc that were handed out like candy by Obama and Reid and Pelosi to various Democrat interest groups... and given that the rules are still being written, people are still finding new stuff..
Democrat congressman Charlie Rangle, who WROTE many of the tax laws could not figure them out and ended-up cheating on his taxes
Obama's Treasury Secretary,Timothy Geitner, WHO WOULD HAPPILY SEIZE YOUR PAYCHECKS AND PROPERTY AND TOSS YOU IN JAIL for tax evasion, could not do his taxes, and when caught cheating blamed Turbo Tax (hence his nickname "Turbo Tax Tim")
The tax code is now thousands of pages of legalese written and re-written by full-time staffs of lawyers and lobbyists and is so complex that even lawyers hire other lawyers to help them with their taxes... but you seem to think an engineer with no formal training in the law generally, or tax law specifically, is an idiot if he needs help on his taxes?????
OK, genius, spend the next two days reading the ENTIRE U.S. Tax code and then return here to give a full report on what you have learned... I predict you will have learned that the tax code is so complex, and written in such mind-numbing lingo, that you still have no idea what it says or how to comply with it. Hint: even the IRS admits it does not understand the tax laws and they have argued in court that citizens should not trust the answers they are given by the IRS in response to requests for help. DOH!
When you attack a person's religion, you get a reaction, all the more so when your attack has provable substance
For the left, it is an article of faith that government works and that it can solve problems better than individuals can. As such, when a conservative or a Libertarian highlights government waste or fraud or abuse (particularly of the no-brainer, ANY idiot could see THIS sort ) he might as well be nailing a list to the door of a medieval Catholic church door... there will be some repercussions both from those within the church hierarchy and from their supportive masses.
Actually, he's more correct about this than you seem to think;
There were far fewer abortions before modern birth control, though for more complex reasons; Society frowned on extra-marital sex and single-motherhood, the government social safety net was not there to support single mothers, and with no birth control or legal abortions available, women were simply less likely to engage in extra-marital sex... and also less likely to have illegal abortions in the event they did become pregnant.
There have been something like 40 million abortions in the USA since the practice was legalized. The problem for some on the right is that this is a complex equation that is not directly reversible. They saw the sexual activity ramp-up after "the pill" and legal abortions became available and it seemed a simple relationship... but the culture shifted. If you take away, for example, "the pill" today, it's not likely that extra-marital sex will be reduced (the societal stigmas are gone, and there are other options) nor can you predict the choices pregnant women will make re abortion; the stigmas against both abortion and single motherhood are gone, there is a safety net should they choose not to abort, men are now more willing to marry a woman who already has children (this used to be a barrier), etc.
Personally, I never trust anyone who thinks the Bible say the Earth is 6000 years old... as an engineer I actually believe in something called "reading" and also being informed about a subject before making assumptions about it. The Bible (whether viewed as a religious document, or as a significant bit of literature) NEVER says how old the Earth is... anybody, religious or non-religious who thinks it does is not engaged in rational discussion.
Oh, and I also never trust an Engineer who believes in space aliens; Space aliens are an article of faith without any reputable evidence for their existence...
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here [mediamatters.org].
Epic Fail. MediaMatters is:
Funded by one of the world's last remaining unapologetic Nazi collaborators
Specifically setup to attack Fox News
Tax-exempt (so much for rich liberals "paying their fair share")
Run by a guy who hates conservatives (David Brock is gay and is at war against the religious right, which many think Fox is aligned with)
Part of a vast web of political organizations on the left that help rich liberals funnel un-taxed money into the political fight (move on, NDN, CAP, etc...) and work to intimidate advertisers into pulling ads from any broadcasts they disagree with
The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey
That's correct, and former congressman Dick Armey is NOT Fox news (though he has appeared there, along with Democrats like Lanny Davis, Juan Williams, etc.) but the fact that somebody is invited on to comment on the news does NOT mean that the guest and the network are interchangeable
and promoted relentlessly by Fox News-
No... it was COVERED by Fox news while other networks did their best to ignore it (and Fox covered the degree to which other networks who always cover "movements" were not covering the TEA party, which REALLY upset some on the left). The left gets confused by this because they only think something is legitimate news if it is covered in the media they control
it was never intended to be grass roots.
Wrong. It was specifically setup to be grass-roots, which is why there are no "leaders" and why Dick Armey is only involved with one part of it (his part ran those silly buses around the country)
Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Wrong again. The GOP establishment detests the TEA party and is terrified by it. The GOP establishment has lost several of their senate and house members during GOP primaries... it's actually pretty funny to watch; the GOP establishment types think they can run the world, but they lack any ideas or energy so they NEED the TEA partiers for that... But the TEA partiers have their own ideas (which often don't include letting establishment-types pretend to know how to run the world...)
What does some crazy pope-guy have to do with religion??!?!?!?!?
That's just hillarious! If I had any power to mod that post, I would have modded it to the maximum and tagged it "pure comedy"
Everytime one of the AGW charlatans is exposed as a crazy doodle-bug, people who previously fawned over him say "that guy?!?!? he's nutters! why are you listening to HIM!?!?!?!
Hint: No normal person would have ever HEARD of James Lovelock had it not been for the fact that he and his ideas were elevated to the lofty position he held by supporters of AGW. It would be like a bunch of Catholics shrieking that everybody else was being irrational by associating the Pope with the Catholic Church.
can't stop laughing at your post... thanks! I needed a lift tonight!!!!!
Nuclear is remarkably cheap, nearly in-exhaustible, and carbon-free (this is proven every time some navy launches another nuclear powered ship or submarine). Why does it take decades and billions to build a power plant on land? Simple: In the 1970's the left in the US discovered that they could dissuade utilities from building new plants with the thousand-bee-stings of government regulations/hearings/etc and lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit by which they meant to kill-off the industry they hated so much. They did not succeed in killing the industry; what they succeeded in doing was removing much of the profit and therefore the motivation to design and build cleaner, cheaper, and safer newer models of plants. They succeeded in getting the industry to struggle mightily to keep older more dangerous plants online decade after decade because there was no real (as in: "it works outside of the college campus and internet echo chamber") way to provide the required energy in the US without the nuclear component. In fact, if you wired the whole US to run on windmills and solar panels, you would still need a large number of nuclear and/or gas-fired plants to stabilize the grid (from moment-to-moment, day and night, cloudy and sunny, on superbowl sunday, etc. Solar and wind are not reliable (in the technical sense of being constant,certain, and controllable) and cannot do what nuclear/gas/coal/etc can do (ramp-up and down on-demand to compensate for energy demand) ) Wind turbines are a novelty if you need an energy grid to run a civilization without rolling blackouts everytime some new video game comes out and all the kiddies fire-up their X-boxes at the same time, or everytime half the country cooks a holiday turkey or tunes into some sports event...
In short, by trying to kill nuclear with armies of lawyers and bureaucrats, the environmentalists only succeeded in making all of us less safe and making our lives more expensive. Nothing the left-wing activists do is ever subjected to cost-benefit-analysis...
And it's a standard AGW tactic to label all criticism as "denialist" (a dishonest tactic meant to associate AGW skeptics with Hitler and the holocaust)
Notably, when you labelled the previous poster a "denier", you provided no rational input to undercut what he posted... so readers ought to presume that the actual information stands as unchallenged.
Rhetoric is no substitute for rational dialog, logic, and the scientific method...
The more one studies AGW the more it appears to be a religion:
It is defended as dogma, rather than with science.
it has two dieties (Gaia and the flying spaghetti monster) and its adherents feel compelled to attack other belief systems (I note you link to "the God movie")
It is loaded with results which either cannot be verified or cannot be reproduced. (no climate models being used to predict the future also work to explain all known past events, and "researchers" in the field have a proven record of data hiding, data manipulation, and data loss)
There are sacred scrolls (hidden computer codes and data)
There are saints who may not be challenged by the unwashed (Hansen, Al Gore, etc.)
There are heretics (many scientists, engineers, meteorologists, etc have been denounced for not accepting the teachings)
There are "wise men" who block acceptance/publication of other scrolls that disagree (climate researchers manipulated the peer review process so that no skeptical papers would be published... and then they criticised all skeptical writings as "not peer reviewed")
They have a collection plate for offerings (carbon taxes)
They sell indulgences (carbon offset purchasing)
They grant salvation to the poor and needy (exemptions from carbon regulations for third-world countries even though their carbon in no different from anybody else's and therefore as dangerous to mother Earth)
The have started an inquisition (with government panels calling "polluters" to testify at hearings and explain how they will reform themselves and various government leaders pledging to destroy certain industries...)
The leaders of the faith exempt themselves from the rules (this is more from the cult-end of the religious spectrum) which they apply to others (they fly on private and chartered planes, ride in limos, and live in multiple excessive residences. Indeed, governments are some of the largest polluters and consumers of carbon fuels while they turn the screws on "the little people" jacking-up the prices for the energy they need to get to work and heat their homes)
The similarities go on, and on, and on, as far as they eye can see... Oh, and none of the above applies to any real and valid field of science
Everytime a scientist or engineer who is not a "climate scientist" speaks out against anthropogenic global warming, the AGW fanboys (most of whom are not themselves scientists or engineers) flood internet message boards with shrieks that the skeptics are not qualified to speak on the subject because their degrees are not in climate science...
Hansen has degrees in physics, math, and astronomy...
He lacks a degrees in the following applicable fields:
1. Geology
2. Chemistry
3. Petroleum engineering
4. Climate science
He is, therefore (by AGW fanboy standards), speaking outside his field and his input is not valid.
Let's compare all those highly-accurate satellite temperature measurements with the satellite data from only 200 years ago when Ben Franklin lofted the first earth observing satellite.... oh, wait,....nope.... I guess we have no such data. Oh, alright, lets use the highly-calibrated thermometer data from way back 200 years ago when some sea captain measured the temperature somewhere (plus or minus 200 miles from a point in the mid-Atlantic) using his very accurate mercury thermometer that was carefully calibrated to the NIST standards.... oh, wait, nope.... no such traceable calibration and the candle-light made reading that thermometer within 1/10th of a degree relative to a scratch in the brass frame a bit tough.... not to mention that the guy was tired and did not see any reason to worry too much about being too precise...
That was not working too well... let's use the hyper-accurate temperature measuring device all Americans prefer to use when they can afford it: tree rings. Yes, a thermometer from 200 years ago has a few calibration issues and the satellites were not very good 200 years ago, but everybody who believes in science knows that a tree ring or some muck from the bottom of a river is accurate to within 1% of a degree! Why, I for one, chop down a tree and check the tree rings for every morning....why bother with a thermometer when an axe and a precise temperature tree are available?
All the hype about "record" and "all-time" high or low temp data is manipulative and speculative. There were no humans (not scientists, nor even amateurs) taking and recording temperature data on 80% of the North American continent before 300 years ago, and the planet is at least 6000 years old (Grin) so we are statistically blind to most of the temperatures for world history. If you plug-in the actual age of the Earth, you know that we know, with calibrated precision, next to nothing about the long-term "global temperature". Comparing data from highly-accurate, calibrated and traceable, modern scientific instruments to creative and imaginative speculation about past temperatures is extremely dishonest and anti-science, but a great way to write a paper and get more taxpayer funds for another year of "research", which beats the hell out of flipping burgers
I'm no luddite... I used to design and build scientific instruments and now work in aerospace, but I am outraged but the so-called scientific climate studies that are done by people who have (and I will be charitable here) apparently forgotten some of the most-basic rules of science in order to score political points or stay popular with their peers. Rules like:
1. Different data sets measured two different ways with two different types of instrument cannot be honestly compared without a common calibration.
2. Data collected with two identical instruments still cannot be compared if one of them lacks traceable calibration
3. You can never gain absolute precision by using additional imprecise data. (in other words: if you sum-average or in other ways lump-together a bunch of data that is accurate to 1 percent, you may get a more-precise idea of what your imprecise measuring device thought it saw, but you have absolutely not obtained a better-than 1 percent measurement of what was actually there... and such data manglng actually reduces absolute precision)
They used to teach this stuff in first-year science classes several decades ago...
Yes, it was a record setting warm winter in the contiguous 48 states... but it was an extremely cold winter in Alaska (see ABC news story for example) and in parts of the former Soviet Union.
If somebody wanted to select just those parts of the global temperature data for this past winter, he could honestly write a story with a bold headline shrieking about record cold weather and then warning about the potential nightmare of a new ice age, lamentations about man's impact of the planet, etc. all designed to manipulate the public (the story would be honest about the data subset, but would obviously be misleading and manipulative in the larger sense). The point is that one should always be wary of anybody on any side of an argument when they run with a data subset whose boundaries are political lines on a map rather than some boundary that isolates the data within the boundary from affecting or being affected by things outside the boundary.
"Data" is only valid/important/relevant when it is not manipulated, adjusted, pre-selected, etc.
The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves
First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:
Install super-buggy and annoying, very slow but ideologically-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow video driver people say usually works as long as you do nothing serious and do not care about performance video driver [x]
I originally thought this project sounded admirable and wished the developers well, but I now despise this driver.
Part of the problem is the oft-cited and completely dishonest use of the word "free" by some open-source advocates. "Freedom" is not, and never should be: "freedom for me to demand that you do things my way". Open source advocates often rant about "freedom", particularly for the users of software... but then they erect completely unnecessary barriers/annoyances to try to manipulate those very same users into only using certain software, or only using it in certain ways. I use Linux precisely because I value my freedom, and that includes my freedom to do anything I want with that software... but that includes one of the most important freedoms of all: running proprietary code. When somebody does something that blocks my use of proprietary code, or prevents that code from doing certain things, or reports proprietary code as "tainted" (an act that serves no legitimate purpose other than to scare less-educated users away from proprietary code) he perverts the very notion of "freedom". Installing a marginal open source driver automatically (without asking at install time) in a manner that makes it just an annoying extra task to get rid of it (and keep it from continually rising from the grave to attack again) is an act that just baits users to hate the auto-installed thing.
I run multiple proprietary and very specialized CAD applications which run perfectly on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia drivers... we get a better user experience on Linux than on Windows (for non-video driver related reasons). With the Nouveau drivers, the applications are essentially unusable, therefore Nouveau harms the reputation of Linux... it makes newer releases of Linux look buggy and in need of manual tweaking and fixing. The Nouveau driver must be manually removed and replaced with real Nvidia drivers that actually work. Then, when the systems auto-update certain components, things break and we have to re-install the proprietary drivers (again, making Linux look buggy, when it never was before). This is a new pain-in-the-butt we never used to have to deal with. Ever since Nouveau went into the build, nearly every IT problem we have (and all the wasted time solving it) is tied directly to the presence of Nouveau. I now want the project to die a fast and painful death.... though I am open to it rising again and re-entering the distros someday when it is fully functional (speed and compatability are a very basic part of functionality). Video drivers are very unlike many other drivers; they can have a critical impact on everything in the system in ways that a printer driver, for example, does not. It's a major screw-up to auto-install a known-bad driver into a system by default. Note: bad in this context means "does not function properly and with the proper speed on all associated hardware" rather than "waaaaahhhhh! the programmers would not give me their source code! waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!"
Fanboys who say the Nouveau drivers work great ( as long as you only do certain things, or only use certain cards, and as long as you do not care about performance, etc... ) should just go back to their e-mail, twitter, and web browsing (and other tasks so simple they can be done on a tablet) and let those of us who need our systems to really work, in a stable manner, with excellent performance, decide when a driver is finally minimally acceptable.
Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)
Why is it ethical for hundreds or perhaps thousands of people who do not even know you (most of whom will never even say "thanks", some of whom might even hate you if they met you) to use the product of your work for free? Why is it unethical for you to be compensated for thousands of hours of work?
Giving something away for free may well be a laudable act of personal generosity, (unless you are a huge software company attempting to kill your smaller competitor by giving away a free web browser, in which case some of the very people on Slashdot who say this is ethical will blast you as evil) but that does not make the choice to not give your work away for free unethical in any locale I am aware of that does not have Rod Serling standing in the corner smoking.
I suspect that a large number of the people who are always saying everything should be open-sourced and handed out for free are living in mom's basement on an allowance, or living on government assistance, and have therefore never become familiar with the basic laws of economics. 5-year-olds always think everything ought to be free because they have never had to work and people have always provided everything to them for free. Adults know that food, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. all cost money (because the people who provide those things also need money for the things they need) and it is therefore honest and ethical for one man to compensate another man for the products of his labor. In ancient practice, people spent most of their time struggling to provide themselves with the things they needed to survive. In advanced societies we specialize; I do not hunt and kill animals or plant and harvest crops or make clothes or build shelters.... I do narrow very technical things for which I receive "money" which i then give to people who specialize in providing me with meat and grain and a house, etc. This is not unethical.... this is extremely ethical as it respects each person according to his/her talents and work and advances civilization. This system has fed, clothed, housed, and healed more people than any other system in the history of planet Earth.
(a) NBC parent company GE is is bed with Obama, NBC gives positive press coverage to Obama
(b) The GE CEO is on Obama's jobs council and got NO public heat from Obama as he exported jobs to China
(c) under Obama GE pays no taxes (how much money is this worth to them?)
(d) Obama will not get re-elected unless the "black vote" is energized and turns-out for him this fall
(e) A good whitey-kills-innocent-black-child story can rev-up the black voters, re-elect Obama, and keep the tax breaks for GE/NBC flowing...
It's a tidy-little corrupt crony story... And NBC will not tell us who made the very deliberate edits to the tape... maybe it was a secretary leaning back in her chair answering the phone while operating the tape machine with her foot...
get the sponsorship out of television news entirely
Yeah... that sure led to honest news with Pravda...
The kind of standard that explicitly keeps fox out of canada.
No, leftist politics keeps Fox news out of Canada... and bans freedom of speech there too. Down here in the states we have the 1st ammendment and we generally do not bring "human rights tribunal" prosecutions against people for saying things we don't like. I used to like to visit Canada but I no longer consider it a safe place to visit; I could be prosecuted for "offending" somebody, however nobody would prosecute the "human rights tribunal" for saying things that offend me...
Apparently, in Canada, only offenses against liberals and muslims are legitimate and offenses against conservatives/Christians/Jews are perfectly fine... sorta like a typical US news room...
Actually, some left-leaning news outlets have created a new "race" to which they claim zimmerman belongs: "white hispanic"
If you are getting your news from anybody who is calling zimmerman a "white hispanic" or is showing you pictures of a 12 or 13-year-old victim instead of a current pic of him (like the one with gold teeth and flipping-off the viewer/reader) or editing-out part of the 911 audio to make you think zimmerman had an issue with "black" people then you are getting your news from somebody who wants you to have a false perception of the story.
NONE of us out here on the intertubes knows what happened...that's for police, state prosecutors (and optionally a grand jury and possibly a regular jury) to decide as they examine ALL of the facts, in context. ALL of us, however, have a duty to filter-out propaganda and refuse to be manipulated by people in the journalist business; they are not un-biased super-humans. Something like 90% are democrats and this is an election year in which energizing the black vote is going to be vital to re-electing a democrat president
the foxnewslies site is a joke that's every bit as twisted as MSNBC. Seriously. Their sources are factcheck (run by democrat journalists) and mediamatters (funded by one of the planet's last surviving unrepentant Nazi collaborators)
Fox is imperfect, but I've never seen Fox rig a truck to blow-up (like NBC) in order to scare consumers away from US trucks, or phony-up military records on a Presidential candidate just before an election (CBS) or give a prime-time show to a world famous race hustler (MSNBC) nor is their sunday morning politics talk show hosted by (without proper disclosure) the former chief of staff of president Clinton (ABC)... of course, there's always PBS where former LBJ propagandist Bill Moyers is treated like a demigod and his history of helping LBJ during that whole vietnam kerfuffle is not mentioned...
As I said, no network is perfect, but the "fox news lies" theme is a democrat political effort to get their followers to not listen to any info that comes from a not-democrat-friendly news source. They'd say other networks lie too... if other networks refused to parrot the party talking points
...than a bunch of mis-informed liberals on Slashdot trying to explain conservatives to each other, and rating all of the the back-and-forth pseudo-intelectual analysis posts as "Score:5 Insightful"
First, we are in a presidential election year, so all the usual left-wing outlets are starting to roll-out the standard attacks (Republicans are anti-science, Republicans wanna push grannie off a cliff, Republicans are dumb, pro-war, anti-child, anti-woman, etc. etc.) and this is just part of that.
Second, many posters here seem to have no education in history. Example: The term "Liberal" as used by this nation's founders and indeed most Americans up until the 1960s was the same as in Europe; it meant (simplistic here to save space) favoring the individual over the crown. In the 60s in the US, however, left-wingers called themselves Liberal while burning flags, attacking many societal norms (which were mostly socially "conservative") and so on, so it people who opposed the left and saw themselves trying to preserve the social/cultural norms adopted the label "Conservative". This is why Americans from the founders through Lincoln who were on both the left and the right called themselves "liberal" and why today even Conservatives embrace terms like "liberal democracy" which to the poorly-educated would seem to make conservatives appear conflicted
Third, many posters here equate having religious beliefs with being "anti-science". This is delusional. A great deal of the science we all depend upon was performed by serious Christians and Jews. Serious and sustained scientific effort only really took hold in monotheistic cultures where the underlying principles and philosophies cultured both the possibility that the universe had a design and an order and that man had the ability duty to study and understand it. Newton was a Christian. Copernicus was a Christian. The "Big Bang" was proposed by a Christian and initially opposed by "scientific consensus" because it seemed to support the idea of creationism. Yes, the Catholic church persecuted Gallileo, but one church is not "all religion" (and actually the details are not a simple as most people think... the leaders of the Church at the time agreed that Galileo was right on the science and their fight with Galileo was more complex. reading the documents from the time is quite an education for anybody who was, as I was, taught the simplistic version) The reader is free to study all the famous men of science and see just how many were religious and then come back and re-score many of the posts here as something less than "5 Insightful"
Fourth, opposing pseudo-sciences, various "social-sciences", political policies that pretend to be science etc. is not the same thing as opposing "SCIENCE". There is a huge difference between the hard sciences where objective reality and the scientific method rule, and the soft sciences where subjectivity, statistics, poor analysis of poorly selected "data" from poorly selected sources pre-determined to drive a political narrative and agenda rule.
Real science, which Conservatives trust, put a man on the moon, gave us modern materials, computers, medicine, helps us find oil and coal and uranium, make solar panels, nuclear-powered ships, and cities, gives us cell phones, space shuttles, airliners, lets us predict weather, etc. Real science uses the scientific method. Real science is open, peer-reviewed, testable, repeatable, and completely reproducible. The giants of real science are men like Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman, Kepler, etc
Junk science, has no data, hides data, blocks or manipulates peer review, pre-selects samples to drive a desired conclusion, uses statistics in place of the scientific method, cannot be repeated, cannot be reproduced, etc. Junk science gave us cold fusion, piltdown man, a universe with no "big bang", anthropogenic global warming, and drunks-outside-bars-prove-conservatives-are-dumb studies. Junk science said the C-17 would never fly because the wing was too complex, t
You're right... the meltdown hit in 2008 when President Obama was a US Senator and Vice president Biden was also a US Senator.... but it actually started long before that with the mortgage derivatives moving through the government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a wild and uncontrolled manner. Sadly, as GSE's Fannie and Freddie were not executive branch entities... the President had no authority over them, they were overseen by congress and had an implicit guarantee of access to the taxpayers' money. In 2007, the Bush administration was worried about what was going on at Fannie and Freddie but they had no legal authority to do anything about it.... so they went to congress to ask for the legal authority to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The Democrats, who controlled the senate, voted unanimously (for those of you who were edumacated by unionized publik skool teachers, this means "all the Democrats in the Senate including Obama and Biden") voted to not to let the Bush administration regulate the behaviour of Fannie and Freddie. If you are paying attention to history at this point, you realize that Bush (who has many OTHER faults) had NO VOTE on the Fannie and Freddie mess, but Obama and Biden each had a vote before the meltdown and they both voted in a way that led to the meltdown. They also, as US Senators, had access to the same budget and economic data as Bush (which makes it laughable now that they keep insisting the meltdown was deeper than they were aware of when they were elected). Over in the House of Representatives where the Democrats were in control, Barney Frank actually lambasted the Bush administration officials who said trouble was brewing at Fannie and Freddie; Frank insisted that everything was just fine at Fannie and Freddie (which is why he later ended-up on national TV in a shouting fest with TV bloviator Bill OReilly... probably on youtube somewhere)
The problem as I see it is that Americans, or at least American politicians, would rather pander to the portion of the religious right who claim that evolution isn't real, the rapture is near, the Bible contains everything man is meant to know, and science is an instrument of the Satan
pot meet kettle
While attempting to ridicule a portion of the population as ignorant, you display your ignorance
Most of the American population in the 1960s when we put a man on the moon were Christian, and that includes most of the people who built and flew the rockets. Further, NO Christian denomination teaches that "the Bible contains everything man is meant to know" or that "science is an instrument of the Satan". Indeed most of the basic science you probably embrace was done by Christians ( heard of the Biblical Scholar named Newton? of "gravity" fame? or perhaps that Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus of "the Earth goes around the sun" fame? Perhaps you are rejecting "the Big Bang" which was initially proposed by a Christian and rejected by scientific consensus because the scientists of the day feared it would support the religious beliefs of common people). Even Oppenheimer ("of I can build a bigger bomb than you can" fame who was not a Christian himself) said that modern science would not have arisen without Christianity.
You have been propagandized. In 2003/2004 there was fear in democrat political circles that a post-911 GW Bush would be too tough to defeat and a series of political efforts were organized to undercut him. One was the "bush lied us into war" meme, and the other was the "Republicans are anti-science" meme. The Republicans are anti-science idea was good for the Democrats at that time in particular because Al Gore was very prominent and his anthropogenic global warming was a dividing line between right and left. It was also a good theme because of some of the fights raging in some schools over evolution. AGW and Evolution are, however, not purely science in the US... they are tightly-bound to politics. Nobody is anti-physics, or anti-chemistry in the US... It is untrue to argue that anybody in the US is "anti-science" Even the most un-high-tech people in the US (the Amish) do not oppose science (is is also completely ignorant to presume that they think technology is "evil", that's not why they shun it). It is only true to say that there are portions of the population who are opposed to two very-specific sets of scientific claims being presented as proven facts. Even most Creationists are ok with evolution being taught in their schools as long as its presented as "theory" (just as relativity is properly taught as "theory") rather than as established fact. And no, that does not mean they also oppose Einstein... most of them actually do understand the idea of "scientific theory" and know it's not the same thing as "wild unsupported guess". It means they demand that the school teachers also understand the idea and stop equating "scientific theory" with "established, proven, verified, fully-documented fact". This is the sort of dumb political fight you get when too many teachers go political-activist and johnny comes home from school saying "my teacher told me science proves there is no God"
Wow. wait for the pot to wear-off before posting, dude
"neocons" and "SLS" in the same sentence? REALLY? That's just....wow
The "neocons" tend to be north-eastern intellectuals (often Jewish, as opposed to the stereotype of evangelical Christian right-wing) who in earlier decades would have been Democrats, but who crossed the aisle to become Republicans primarily over matters related to strong defense and international posture (because the Democrats become so anti-military and foreign-policy dove-ish in the post-LBJ years). As a result, the neocons typically oppose all non-defense big government programs like NASA. In fact I have never met a neocon who preferred to support NASA over, say, a private alternative.
That's ok,, though, go right-on worrying about every left-wing-boogeyman that Kos, Huffpo, etc. hold up for their readers to hate....... just don't confuse the irrational hatred with intellectual argument. Support for the SLS comes from an interesting and unlikely alliance of both Republicans and Democrats, some of whom are undoubtably concerned about pork and jobs in their districts, but some of whom also think Obama is trying to eliminate a vital national asset (NASA) with a slow death. For these people, the SLS is almost certainly a place-holder to keep progress moving on the 5-seg SRB, J-2X upper-stage engine, and tank structure work of the shuttle-derived launcher idea through the remainder of the anti-manned-spaceflight Obama admin. Note: I did NOT label Obama "anti-NASA".... he seems to be just fine with a bloated, ineffective government agency full of government workers (who probably mostly vote Democrat) as long as it is not doing anything to make the USA look exceptional, and as long as it's not employing lots of private sector aerospace workers (who probably mostly vote Republican). Note That when the shuttle shut-down, the civil servants kept their jobs while the thousands of private sector contractors lost theirs.
Manned space exploration != Mars. Obama wants industry to handle LEO, and NASA instead to focus on solving the hard problems of manned deep space exploration (with the implication that he expects industry to ride their coat tails to the Asteroid Belt). This is perfectly consistent with his stated goals.
Um, actually Obama cancelled all NASA manned spacecraft development in 2010 (consistent with his 2008 promise to teachers unions to gut NASA and shift the funds to education) but the congress rebelled and demanded he keep two manned programs (the Orion capsule and SOME bit rocket to lift it). He slow-walked the selection of a rocket design for a year and keeps trying to shift the funds from these two items an an apparent attempt to kill them slowly. The capsule, for example, is being slow-walked so much that it will make a single unmanned flight in two years, and will then not fly with a crew before about 2020. This means that a simple capsule derived from Apollo will be in development for nearly twice as long as the extremely complex and ground-breaking space shuttle was.
To put it another way, if we needed to leave the planet in a hurry, Mars is utterly impractical. It will take centuries to terraform it, if it's even feasible. On the other hand, if industry can be persuaded to work out how to knock the kinks out of ground to LEO travel, and to learn how to build safe long-term habitats (for instance, hotels) with materials gathered from deep space, then we might just stand a chance.
Mars is the best practical place in space to even TRY living off-Earth in the reasonably close future. Obama's "commercial space" is just a trick. He is using Bush's commercial orbital transport services idea (COTS - which the Bush admin started as a way to lower cargo costs for government to/from ISS) to get space fans to support him as he guts NASA.... it is illegal (by treaty) for anybody to own any property off of the Earth, so there are no destinations and no harvest-able resources off-Earth for anything other than billionaire-tourists sight-seeing If Obama had really wanted to foster "Commercial Space" (i.e. use it for anything more than ISS support), he would have pulled the US out of the treaty that blocks the colonization of space.
For his first two years in office, Obama and the Democrats controlled the White House, the House of Representatives (by nearly 2-to-1 margins... which means they controlled everything including schedules, debates, everything), and the Senate (by a fillibuster-proof majority... which means the Republicans lacked the power to block anything in the Senate. If the Republicans tried to stop anything, Harry Reid could call a quick vote and with his super-majority he would win).
This means that for his first two years in office Obama, aided by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, could do ANYTHING he wanted and the Republicans were powerless to stop him. This is a simple fact that his more liberal fanboys simply do not want to face. If he did not do some particular thing for you during that time period, then he did not have it as a priority. The fanboys need to grow-up. Obama and his campaign people want you to blame the Republicans; they are counting on you Hating the Republicans and not thinking things through enough to hold him accountable for his own actions. The man spent $800+ Billion dollars on that 2009 stimulus bill (ALL of which was borrowed money which you will pay interest on for the rest of your life), NONE of which went to hiring scientists, engineers and technicians for Mars missions, or Manned spaceflight, or aeronautics research, etc. Hell, even keeping space shuttles flying (3 or 4 missions a year) would have only been a $3 billion dollar cost. Ask yourself a question: If he did not do something for you when he had total power... how will he do it when he lacks total power? Obama and his team do not want you to ask that question, because they want to be re-elected to keep their jobs for another 4 years. 4 more years of pay and benefits, fatter resumes, followed by books deals, speaking tours, jobs on corporate boards or at universities, etc.
There's another little question they don't want you to ask: We used to fly several space shuttles per year, and during the Bush years the agency was simultaneously developing a space capsule (Orion) and a rocket for it (Ares I). Obama cancelled Constellation, though Congress forced him to keep the Orion Capsule (now renamed "MPCV") and demanded he build a new rocket (named "SLS") but remember that we are no longer flying the shuttles and NASA's budget is actually higher now than it was several years ago........ so where is the money going? We used to be developing rockets, flying shuttles, AND launching Mars missions, but now we are slow-walking the rocket development, storing shuttles, and cancelling Mars on essentially the same budgets
Sales tax - this is a state tax that provides zero revenue (not a single penny) to the federal government
Payroll tax - this is your contribution to Social Security which, for decades, liberals have insisted was not a tax but actually a contribution to your own retirement plan
And, because some Obama drone will eventually raise the issue, Property tax (payed by owners of residences and arguably passed-on to renters) is also not a source of revenue to the federal government. (Property taxes are state and local matters)
It is absolutely true that nearly half of all Americans now pay absolutely nothing to the federal government for things like the national defense (one of the few things the government does that the Constitution actually requires it to do), the national parks, the courts, the diplomats, the space program, the FDA, the EPA, NIST, DOE, FAA, FCC, NTSB, etc.
Personally, I'd like to see the government get out of many of the things it is involved in (and therefore I'd like to see nobody taxed to support them) but It's rather amusing to me that many of the people who want the government involved in everything are simultaneously avoiding paying for any of it while ignorantly insisting that they are paying more than their "fair share" (i.e. somebody else who actually is paying should pay even more than he is)
Slashdot Mirror
it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior
It was not. A general concept was being publicly debated, but not the actual bill, which was being crafted behind closed doors (even though Obama promised in his 2008 campaign that all negotiations would be conducted "live on C-SPAN". What actually happened was the Democrats on capitol hill not only did their work behind closed doors where the citizens could neither see nor hear any of the actual negotiations, but they actually changed the locks on the doors so that no Republicans could get into the rooms to participate... so much for "openness"
it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior
That alone is a reason to run away from it screaming....
oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks
No... one think tank (Heritage Foundation, which is closely tied to republican business interests) suggested the individual mandate as one solution to the problem of Democrats offering "free" healthcare to everybody; like many insular groups seeking a simple answer to a complex problem they latched onto the "personal responsibility" part of the mandate and did not adequately realize what any rank-and-file conservative could easily see: any such mandate would be applied to the middle class, but the poor and illegals (all the people currently getting "free" care) would be exempted and still be getting "free care"...
it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account.
nobody important said it was
Its transparent, you can read it
No, it was put together in secret, voted on without being read, and it granted huge power to a vast army of government bureaucrats, none of whom are elected or in any way accountable to the voters. These bureaucrats, most of whom will never be identified to the American people, are currently writing THOUSANDS of pages of new regulations. They are still writing the regulations that govern the parts of the law that are now in place and what's now in place is just a tiny portion of what will start kicking-in in 2014. They will still be writing the regulations a decade from now. You cannot read something which is still being written or is still in the fanciful imagination of some bureaucrat
its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.
No, it is complicated because an army of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians all sought to bring into reality a century-old wet dream of the Left (free universal health care) while protecting all the self-interests of the lawyers, lobbyists and politicians involved and ignoring the fundamental problem of the promise of "free stuff"... namely that some people must work to make/provide the "free stuff" (in this case, doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, technicians providing care, drugs, devices, supplies, etc) and those people (the providers) have a basic human right to be properly compensated. If this had been a "sincere effort" as you put it, the it would have been done out-in-the-open with all negotiations "live on C-SPAN" and we would not now be learning (news broke yesterday) that the Democrats in the Senate and the Obama administration kept their negotiations with big pharma so secret that they kept the details away even from the house Democrats. The House is currently seeking details of this deal and the administration is refusing to hand them over
Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details.
Half the Democrats in congress got special deals if you include all the exemptions, carve-outs, subsidies, etc that were handed out like candy by Obama and Reid and Pelosi to various Democrat interest groups... and given that the rules are still being written, people are still finding new stuff..
Well, let's see now...
Democrat congressman Charlie Rangle, who WROTE many of the tax laws could not figure them out and ended-up cheating on his taxes
Obama's Treasury Secretary ,Timothy Geitner, WHO WOULD HAPPILY SEIZE YOUR PAYCHECKS AND PROPERTY AND TOSS YOU IN JAIL for tax evasion, could not do his taxes, and when caught cheating blamed Turbo Tax (hence his nickname "Turbo Tax Tim")
The tax code is now thousands of pages of legalese written and re-written by full-time staffs of lawyers and lobbyists and is so complex that even lawyers hire other lawyers to help them with their taxes... but you seem to think an engineer with no formal training in the law generally, or tax law specifically, is an idiot if he needs help on his taxes?????
OK, genius, spend the next two days reading the ENTIRE U.S. Tax code and then return here to give a full report on what you have learned... I predict you will have learned that the tax code is so complex, and written in such mind-numbing lingo, that you still have no idea what it says or how to comply with it. Hint: even the IRS admits it does not understand the tax laws and they have argued in court that citizens should not trust the answers they are given by the IRS in response to requests for help. DOH!
When you attack a person's religion, you get a reaction, all the more so when your attack has provable substance
For the left, it is an article of faith that government works and that it can solve problems better than individuals can. As such, when a conservative or a Libertarian highlights government waste or fraud or abuse (particularly of the no-brainer, ANY idiot could see THIS sort ) he might as well be nailing a list to the door of a medieval Catholic church door... there will be some repercussions both from those within the church hierarchy and from their supportive masses.
Actually, he's more correct about this than you seem to think;
There were far fewer abortions before modern birth control, though for more complex reasons; Society frowned on extra-marital sex and single-motherhood, the government social safety net was not there to support single mothers, and with no birth control or legal abortions available, women were simply less likely to engage in extra-marital sex... and also less likely to have illegal abortions in the event they did become pregnant.
There have been something like 40 million abortions in the USA since the practice was legalized. The problem for some on the right is that this is a complex equation that is not directly reversible. They saw the sexual activity ramp-up after "the pill" and legal abortions became available and it seemed a simple relationship... but the culture shifted. If you take away, for example, "the pill" today, it's not likely that extra-marital sex will be reduced (the societal stigmas are gone, and there are other options) nor can you predict the choices pregnant women will make re abortion; the stigmas against both abortion and single motherhood are gone, there is a safety net should they choose not to abort, men are now more willing to marry a woman who already has children (this used to be a barrier), etc.
Personally, I never trust anyone who thinks the Bible say the Earth is 6000 years old... as an engineer I actually believe in something called "reading" and also being informed about a subject before making assumptions about it. The Bible (whether viewed as a religious document, or as a significant bit of literature) NEVER says how old the Earth is... anybody, religious or non-religious who thinks it does is not engaged in rational discussion.
Oh, and I also never trust an Engineer who believes in space aliens; Space aliens are an article of faith without any reputable evidence for their existence...
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here [mediamatters.org].
Epic Fail. MediaMatters is:
The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey
That's correct, and former congressman Dick Armey is NOT Fox news (though he has appeared there, along with Democrats like Lanny Davis, Juan Williams, etc.) but the fact that somebody is invited on to comment on the news does NOT mean that the guest and the network are interchangeable
and promoted relentlessly by Fox News-
No... it was COVERED by Fox news while other networks did their best to ignore it (and Fox covered the degree to which other networks who always cover "movements" were not covering the TEA party, which REALLY upset some on the left). The left gets confused by this because they only think something is legitimate news if it is covered in the media they control
it was never intended to be grass roots.
Wrong. It was specifically setup to be grass-roots, which is why there are no "leaders" and why Dick Armey is only involved with one part of it (his part ran those silly buses around the country)
Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Wrong again. The GOP establishment detests the TEA party and is terrified by it. The GOP establishment has lost several of their senate and house members during GOP primaries... it's actually pretty funny to watch; the GOP establishment types think they can run the world, but they lack any ideas or energy so they NEED the TEA partiers for that... But the TEA partiers have their own ideas (which often don't include letting establishment-types pretend to know how to run the world...)
What does some crazy pope-guy have to do with religion??!?!?!?!?
That's just hillarious! If I had any power to mod that post, I would have modded it to the maximum and tagged it "pure comedy"
Everytime one of the AGW charlatans is exposed as a crazy doodle-bug, people who previously fawned over him say "that guy?!?!? he's nutters! why are you listening to HIM!?!?!?!
Hint: No normal person would have ever HEARD of James Lovelock had it not been for the fact that he and his ideas were elevated to the lofty position he held by supporters of AGW. It would be like a bunch of Catholics shrieking that everybody else was being irrational by associating the Pope with the Catholic Church.
can't stop laughing at your post... thanks! I needed a lift tonight!!!!!
This is false
Nuclear is remarkably cheap, nearly in-exhaustible, and carbon-free (this is proven every time some navy launches another nuclear powered ship or submarine). Why does it take decades and billions to build a power plant on land? Simple: In the 1970's the left in the US discovered that they could dissuade utilities from building new plants with the thousand-bee-stings of government regulations/hearings/etc and lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit by which they meant to kill-off the industry they hated so much. They did not succeed in killing the industry; what they succeeded in doing was removing much of the profit and therefore the motivation to design and build cleaner, cheaper, and safer newer models of plants. They succeeded in getting the industry to struggle mightily to keep older more dangerous plants online decade after decade because there was no real (as in: "it works outside of the college campus and internet echo chamber") way to provide the required energy in the US without the nuclear component. In fact, if you wired the whole US to run on windmills and solar panels, you would still need a large number of nuclear and/or gas-fired plants to stabilize the grid (from moment-to-moment, day and night, cloudy and sunny, on superbowl sunday, etc. Solar and wind are not reliable (in the technical sense of being constant,certain, and controllable) and cannot do what nuclear/gas/coal/etc can do (ramp-up and down on-demand to compensate for energy demand) ) Wind turbines are a novelty if you need an energy grid to run a civilization without rolling blackouts everytime some new video game comes out and all the kiddies fire-up their X-boxes at the same time, or everytime half the country cooks a holiday turkey or tunes into some sports event...
In short, by trying to kill nuclear with armies of lawyers and bureaucrats, the environmentalists only succeeded in making all of us less safe and making our lives more expensive. Nothing the left-wing activists do is ever subjected to cost-benefit-analysis...
And it's a standard AGW tactic to label all criticism as "denialist" (a dishonest tactic meant to associate AGW skeptics with Hitler and the holocaust)
Notably, when you labelled the previous poster a "denier", you provided no rational input to undercut what he posted... so readers ought to presume that the actual information stands as unchallenged.
Rhetoric is no substitute for rational dialog, logic, and the scientific method...
The more one studies AGW the more it appears to be a religion:
The similarities go on, and on, and on, as far as they eye can see... Oh, and none of the above applies to any real and valid field of science
Everytime a scientist or engineer who is not a "climate scientist" speaks out against anthropogenic global warming, the AGW fanboys (most of whom are not themselves scientists or engineers) flood internet message boards with shrieks that the skeptics are not qualified to speak on the subject because their degrees are not in climate science...
Hansen has degrees in physics, math, and astronomy...
He lacks a degrees in the following applicable fields:
1. Geology
2. Chemistry
3. Petroleum engineering
4. Climate science
He is, therefore (by AGW fanboy standards), speaking outside his field and his input is not valid.
Live by the sword, die by the sword
Ahhhh yes....
Let's compare all those highly-accurate satellite temperature measurements with the satellite data from only 200 years ago when Ben Franklin lofted the first earth observing satellite.... oh, wait, ....nope.... I guess we have no such data. Oh, alright, lets use the highly-calibrated thermometer data from way back 200 years ago when some sea captain measured the temperature somewhere (plus or minus 200 miles from a point in the mid-Atlantic) using his very accurate mercury thermometer that was carefully calibrated to the NIST standards.... oh, wait, nope.... no such traceable calibration and the candle-light made reading that thermometer within 1/10th of a degree relative to a scratch in the brass frame a bit tough.... not to mention that the guy was tired and did not see any reason to worry too much about being too precise...
That was not working too well... let's use the hyper-accurate temperature measuring device all Americans prefer to use when they can afford it: tree rings. Yes, a thermometer from 200 years ago has a few calibration issues and the satellites were not very good 200 years ago, but everybody who believes in science knows that a tree ring or some muck from the bottom of a river is accurate to within 1% of a degree! Why, I for one, chop down a tree and check the tree rings for every morning....why bother with a thermometer when an axe and a precise temperature tree are available?
All the hype about "record" and "all-time" high or low temp data is manipulative and speculative. There were no humans (not scientists, nor even amateurs) taking and recording temperature data on 80% of the North American continent before 300 years ago, and the planet is at least 6000 years old (Grin) so we are statistically blind to most of the temperatures for world history. If you plug-in the actual age of the Earth, you know that we know, with calibrated precision, next to nothing about the long-term "global temperature". Comparing data from highly-accurate, calibrated and traceable, modern scientific instruments to creative and imaginative speculation about past temperatures is extremely dishonest and anti-science, but a great way to write a paper and get more taxpayer funds for another year of "research", which beats the hell out of flipping burgers
I'm no luddite... I used to design and build scientific instruments and now work in aerospace, but I am outraged but the so-called scientific climate studies that are done by people who have (and I will be charitable here) apparently forgotten some of the most-basic rules of science in order to score political points or stay popular with their peers. Rules like:
1. Different data sets measured two different ways with two different types of instrument cannot be honestly compared without a common calibration.
2. Data collected with two identical instruments still cannot be compared if one of them lacks traceable calibration
3. You can never gain absolute precision by using additional imprecise data. (in other words: if you sum-average or in other ways lump-together a bunch of data that is accurate to 1 percent, you may get a more-precise idea of what your imprecise measuring device thought it saw, but you have absolutely not obtained a better-than 1 percent measurement of what was actually there... and such data manglng actually reduces absolute precision)
They used to teach this stuff in first-year science classes several decades ago...
Yes, it was a record setting warm winter in the contiguous 48 states... but it was an extremely cold winter in Alaska (see ABC news story for example) and in parts of the former Soviet Union.
If somebody wanted to select just those parts of the global temperature data for this past winter, he could honestly write a story with a bold headline shrieking about record cold weather and then warning about the potential nightmare of a new ice age, lamentations about man's impact of the planet, etc. all designed to manipulate the public (the story would be honest about the data subset, but would obviously be misleading and manipulative in the larger sense). The point is that one should always be wary of anybody on any side of an argument when they run with a data subset whose boundaries are political lines on a map rather than some boundary that isolates the data within the boundary from affecting or being affected by things outside the boundary.
"Data" is only valid/important/relevant when it is not manipulated, adjusted, pre-selected, etc.
The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves
First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:
Install super-buggy and annoying, very slow but ideologically-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow video driver people say usually works as long as you do nothing serious and do not care about performance video driver [x]
I originally thought this project sounded admirable and wished the developers well, but I now despise this driver.
Part of the problem is the oft-cited and completely dishonest use of the word "free" by some open-source advocates. "Freedom" is not, and never should be: "freedom for me to demand that you do things my way". Open source advocates often rant about "freedom", particularly for the users of software... but then they erect completely unnecessary barriers/annoyances to try to manipulate those very same users into only using certain software, or only using it in certain ways. I use Linux precisely because I value my freedom, and that includes my freedom to do anything I want with that software... but that includes one of the most important freedoms of all: running proprietary code. When somebody does something that blocks my use of proprietary code, or prevents that code from doing certain things, or reports proprietary code as "tainted" (an act that serves no legitimate purpose other than to scare less-educated users away from proprietary code) he perverts the very notion of "freedom". Installing a marginal open source driver automatically (without asking at install time) in a manner that makes it just an annoying extra task to get rid of it (and keep it from continually rising from the grave to attack again) is an act that just baits users to hate the auto-installed thing.
I run multiple proprietary and very specialized CAD applications which run perfectly on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia drivers... we get a better user experience on Linux than on Windows (for non-video driver related reasons). With the Nouveau drivers, the applications are essentially unusable, therefore Nouveau harms the reputation of Linux... it makes newer releases of Linux look buggy and in need of manual tweaking and fixing. The Nouveau driver must be manually removed and replaced with real Nvidia drivers that actually work. Then, when the systems auto-update certain components, things break and we have to re-install the proprietary drivers (again, making Linux look buggy, when it never was before). This is a new pain-in-the-butt we never used to have to deal with. Ever since Nouveau went into the build, nearly every IT problem we have (and all the wasted time solving it) is tied directly to the presence of Nouveau. I now want the project to die a fast and painful death.... though I am open to it rising again and re-entering the distros someday when it is fully functional (speed and compatability are a very basic part of functionality). Video drivers are very unlike many other drivers; they can have a critical impact on everything in the system in ways that a printer driver, for example, does not. It's a major screw-up to auto-install a known-bad driver into a system by default. Note: bad in this context means "does not function properly and with the proper speed on all associated hardware" rather than "waaaaahhhhh! the programmers would not give me their source code! waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!"
Fanboys who say the Nouveau drivers work great ( as long as you only do certain things, or only use certain cards, and as long as you do not care about performance, etc... ) should just go back to their e-mail, twitter, and web browsing (and other tasks so simple they can be done on a tablet) and let those of us who need our systems to really work, in a stable manner, with excellent performance, decide when a driver is finally minimally acceptable.
Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)
Why is it ethical for hundreds or perhaps thousands of people who do not even know you (most of whom will never even say "thanks", some of whom might even hate you if they met you) to use the product of your work for free? Why is it unethical for you to be compensated for thousands of hours of work?
Giving something away for free may well be a laudable act of personal generosity, (unless you are a huge software company attempting to kill your smaller competitor by giving away a free web browser, in which case some of the very people on Slashdot who say this is ethical will blast you as evil) but that does not make the choice to not give your work away for free unethical in any locale I am aware of that does not have Rod Serling standing in the corner smoking.
I suspect that a large number of the people who are always saying everything should be open-sourced and handed out for free are living in mom's basement on an allowance, or living on government assistance, and have therefore never become familiar with the basic laws of economics. 5-year-olds always think everything ought to be free because they have never had to work and people have always provided everything to them for free. Adults know that food, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. all cost money (because the people who provide those things also need money for the things they need) and it is therefore honest and ethical for one man to compensate another man for the products of his labor. In ancient practice, people spent most of their time struggling to provide themselves with the things they needed to survive. In advanced societies we specialize; I do not hunt and kill animals or plant and harvest crops or make clothes or build shelters.... I do narrow very technical things for which I receive "money" which i then give to people who specialize in providing me with meat and grain and a house, etc. This is not unethical.... this is extremely ethical as it respects each person according to his/her talents and work and advances civilization. This system has fed, clothed, housed, and healed more people than any other system in the history of planet Earth.
It's less innocent that you imply
(a) NBC parent company GE is is bed with Obama, NBC gives positive press coverage to Obama
(b) The GE CEO is on Obama's jobs council and got NO public heat from Obama as he exported jobs to China
(c) under Obama GE pays no taxes (how much money is this worth to them?)
(d) Obama will not get re-elected unless the "black vote" is energized and turns-out for him this fall
(e) A good whitey-kills-innocent-black-child story can rev-up the black voters, re-elect Obama, and keep the tax breaks for GE/NBC flowing...
It's a tidy-little corrupt crony story... And NBC will not tell us who made the very deliberate edits to the tape... maybe it was a secretary leaning back in her chair answering the phone while operating the tape machine with her foot...
Wow.
get the sponsorship out of television news entirely
Yeah... that sure led to honest news with Pravda...
The kind of standard that explicitly keeps fox out of canada.
No, leftist politics keeps Fox news out of Canada... and bans freedom of speech there too. Down here in the states we have the 1st ammendment and we generally do not bring "human rights tribunal" prosecutions against people for saying things we don't like. I used to like to visit Canada but I no longer consider it a safe place to visit; I could be prosecuted for "offending" somebody, however nobody would prosecute the "human rights tribunal" for saying things that offend me...
Apparently, in Canada, only offenses against liberals and muslims are legitimate and offenses against conservatives/Christians/Jews are perfectly fine... sorta like a typical US news room...
Actually, some left-leaning news outlets have created a new "race" to which they claim zimmerman belongs: "white hispanic"
If you are getting your news from anybody who is calling zimmerman a "white hispanic" or is showing you pictures of a 12 or 13-year-old victim instead of a current pic of him (like the one with gold teeth and flipping-off the viewer/reader) or editing-out part of the 911 audio to make you think zimmerman had an issue with "black" people then you are getting your news from somebody who wants you to have a false perception of the story.
NONE of us out here on the intertubes knows what happened...that's for police, state prosecutors (and optionally a grand jury and possibly a regular jury) to decide as they examine ALL of the facts, in context. ALL of us, however, have a duty to filter-out propaganda and refuse to be manipulated by people in the journalist business; they are not un-biased super-humans. Something like 90% are democrats and this is an election year in which energizing the black vote is going to be vital to re-electing a democrat president
Oh, please...
the foxnewslies site is a joke that's every bit as twisted as MSNBC. Seriously. Their sources are factcheck (run by democrat journalists) and mediamatters (funded by one of the planet's last surviving unrepentant Nazi collaborators)
Fox is imperfect, but I've never seen Fox rig a truck to blow-up (like NBC) in order to scare consumers away from US trucks, or phony-up military records on a Presidential candidate just before an election (CBS) or give a prime-time show to a world famous race hustler (MSNBC) nor is their sunday morning politics talk show hosted by (without proper disclosure) the former chief of staff of president Clinton (ABC)... of course, there's always PBS where former LBJ propagandist Bill Moyers is treated like a demigod and his history of helping LBJ during that whole vietnam kerfuffle is not mentioned...
As I said, no network is perfect, but the "fox news lies" theme is a democrat political effort to get their followers to not listen to any info that comes from a not-democrat-friendly news source. They'd say other networks lie too... if other networks refused to parrot the party talking points
...than a bunch of mis-informed liberals on Slashdot trying to explain conservatives to each other, and rating all of the the back-and-forth pseudo-intelectual analysis posts as "Score:5 Insightful"
First, we are in a presidential election year, so all the usual left-wing outlets are starting to roll-out the standard attacks (Republicans are anti-science, Republicans wanna push grannie off a cliff, Republicans are dumb, pro-war, anti-child, anti-woman, etc. etc.) and this is just part of that.
Second, many posters here seem to have no education in history. Example: The term "Liberal" as used by this nation's founders and indeed most Americans up until the 1960s was the same as in Europe; it meant (simplistic here to save space) favoring the individual over the crown. In the 60s in the US, however, left-wingers called themselves Liberal while burning flags, attacking many societal norms (which were mostly socially "conservative") and so on, so it people who opposed the left and saw themselves trying to preserve the social/cultural norms adopted the label "Conservative". This is why Americans from the founders through Lincoln who were on both the left and the right called themselves "liberal" and why today even Conservatives embrace terms like "liberal democracy" which to the poorly-educated would seem to make conservatives appear conflicted
Third, many posters here equate having religious beliefs with being "anti-science". This is delusional. A great deal of the science we all depend upon was performed by serious Christians and Jews. Serious and sustained scientific effort only really took hold in monotheistic cultures where the underlying principles and philosophies cultured both the possibility that the universe had a design and an order and that man had the ability duty to study and understand it. Newton was a Christian. Copernicus was a Christian. The "Big Bang" was proposed by a Christian and initially opposed by "scientific consensus" because it seemed to support the idea of creationism. Yes, the Catholic church persecuted Gallileo, but one church is not "all religion" (and actually the details are not a simple as most people think... the leaders of the Church at the time agreed that Galileo was right on the science and their fight with Galileo was more complex. reading the documents from the time is quite an education for anybody who was, as I was, taught the simplistic version) The reader is free to study all the famous men of science and see just how many were religious and then come back and re-score many of the posts here as something less than "5 Insightful"
Fourth, opposing pseudo-sciences, various "social-sciences", political policies that pretend to be science etc. is not the same thing as opposing "SCIENCE". There is a huge difference between the hard sciences where objective reality and the scientific method rule, and the soft sciences where subjectivity, statistics, poor analysis of poorly selected "data" from poorly selected sources pre-determined to drive a political narrative and agenda rule.
Real science, which Conservatives trust, put a man on the moon, gave us modern materials, computers, medicine, helps us find oil and coal and uranium, make solar panels, nuclear-powered ships, and cities, gives us cell phones, space shuttles, airliners, lets us predict weather, etc. Real science uses the scientific method. Real science is open, peer-reviewed, testable, repeatable, and completely reproducible. The giants of real science are men like Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman, Kepler, etc
Junk science, has no data, hides data, blocks or manipulates peer review, pre-selects samples to drive a desired conclusion, uses statistics in place of the scientific method, cannot be repeated, cannot be reproduced, etc. Junk science gave us cold fusion, piltdown man, a universe with no "big bang", anthropogenic global warming, and drunks-outside-bars-prove-conservatives-are-dumb studies. Junk science said the C-17 would never fly because the wing was too complex, t
You're right... the meltdown hit in 2008 when President Obama was a US Senator and Vice president Biden was also a US Senator.... but it actually started long before that with the mortgage derivatives moving through the government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a wild and uncontrolled manner. Sadly, as GSE's Fannie and Freddie were not executive branch entities... the President had no authority over them, they were overseen by congress and had an implicit guarantee of access to the taxpayers' money. In 2007, the Bush administration was worried about what was going on at Fannie and Freddie but they had no legal authority to do anything about it.... so they went to congress to ask for the legal authority to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The Democrats, who controlled the senate, voted unanimously (for those of you who were edumacated by unionized publik skool teachers, this means "all the Democrats in the Senate including Obama and Biden") voted to not to let the Bush administration regulate the behaviour of Fannie and Freddie. If you are paying attention to history at this point, you realize that Bush (who has many OTHER faults) had NO VOTE on the Fannie and Freddie mess, but Obama and Biden each had a vote before the meltdown and they both voted in a way that led to the meltdown. They also, as US Senators, had access to the same budget and economic data as Bush (which makes it laughable now that they keep insisting the meltdown was deeper than they were aware of when they were elected). Over in the House of Representatives where the Democrats were in control, Barney Frank actually lambasted the Bush administration officials who said trouble was brewing at Fannie and Freddie; Frank insisted that everything was just fine at Fannie and Freddie (which is why he later ended-up on national TV in a shouting fest with TV bloviator Bill OReilly... probably on youtube somewhere)
The problem as I see it is that Americans, or at least American politicians, would rather pander to the portion of the religious right who claim that evolution isn't real, the rapture is near, the Bible contains everything man is meant to know, and science is an instrument of the Satan
pot meet kettle
While attempting to ridicule a portion of the population as ignorant, you display your ignorance
Most of the American population in the 1960s when we put a man on the moon were Christian, and that includes most of the people who built and flew the rockets. Further, NO Christian denomination teaches that "the Bible contains everything man is meant to know" or that "science is an instrument of the Satan". Indeed most of the basic science you probably embrace was done by Christians ( heard of the Biblical Scholar named Newton? of "gravity" fame? or perhaps that Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus of "the Earth goes around the sun" fame? Perhaps you are rejecting "the Big Bang" which was initially proposed by a Christian and rejected by scientific consensus because the scientists of the day feared it would support the religious beliefs of common people). Even Oppenheimer ("of I can build a bigger bomb than you can" fame who was not a Christian himself) said that modern science would not have arisen without Christianity.
You have been propagandized. In 2003/2004 there was fear in democrat political circles that a post-911 GW Bush would be too tough to defeat and a series of political efforts were organized to undercut him. One was the "bush lied us into war" meme, and the other was the "Republicans are anti-science" meme. The Republicans are anti-science idea was good for the Democrats at that time in particular because Al Gore was very prominent and his anthropogenic global warming was a dividing line between right and left. It was also a good theme because of some of the fights raging in some schools over evolution. AGW and Evolution are, however, not purely science in the US... they are tightly-bound to politics. Nobody is anti-physics, or anti-chemistry in the US... It is untrue to argue that anybody in the US is "anti-science" Even the most un-high-tech people in the US (the Amish) do not oppose science (is is also completely ignorant to presume that they think technology is "evil", that's not why they shun it). It is only true to say that there are portions of the population who are opposed to two very-specific sets of scientific claims being presented as proven facts. Even most Creationists are ok with evolution being taught in their schools as long as its presented as "theory" (just as relativity is properly taught as "theory") rather than as established fact. And no, that does not mean they also oppose Einstein... most of them actually do understand the idea of "scientific theory" and know it's not the same thing as "wild unsupported guess". It means they demand that the school teachers also understand the idea and stop equating "scientific theory" with "established, proven, verified, fully-documented fact". This is the sort of dumb political fight you get when too many teachers go political-activist and johnny comes home from school saying "my teacher told me science proves there is no God"
Wow. wait for the pot to wear-off before posting, dude
"neocons" and "SLS" in the same sentence? REALLY? That's just....wow
The "neocons" tend to be north-eastern intellectuals (often Jewish, as opposed to the stereotype of evangelical Christian right-wing) who in earlier decades would have been Democrats, but who crossed the aisle to become Republicans primarily over matters related to strong defense and international posture (because the Democrats become so anti-military and foreign-policy dove-ish in the post-LBJ years). As a result, the neocons typically oppose all non-defense big government programs like NASA. In fact I have never met a neocon who preferred to support NASA over, say, a private alternative.
That's ok,, though, go right-on worrying about every left-wing-boogeyman that Kos, Huffpo, etc. hold up for their readers to hate....... just don't confuse the irrational hatred with intellectual argument. Support for the SLS comes from an interesting and unlikely alliance of both Republicans and Democrats, some of whom are undoubtably concerned about pork and jobs in their districts, but some of whom also think Obama is trying to eliminate a vital national asset (NASA) with a slow death. For these people, the SLS is almost certainly a place-holder to keep progress moving on the 5-seg SRB, J-2X upper-stage engine, and tank structure work of the shuttle-derived launcher idea through the remainder of the anti-manned-spaceflight Obama admin. Note: I did NOT label Obama "anti-NASA" .... he seems to be just fine with a bloated, ineffective government agency full of government workers (who probably mostly vote Democrat) as long as it is not doing anything to make the USA look exceptional, and as long as it's not employing lots of private sector aerospace workers (who probably mostly vote Republican). Note That when the shuttle shut-down, the civil servants kept their jobs while the thousands of private sector contractors lost theirs.
Manned space exploration != Mars. Obama wants industry to handle LEO, and NASA instead to focus on solving the hard problems of manned deep space exploration (with the implication that he expects industry to ride their coat tails to the Asteroid Belt). This is perfectly consistent with his stated goals.
Um, actually Obama cancelled all NASA manned spacecraft development in 2010 (consistent with his 2008 promise to teachers unions to gut NASA and shift the funds to education) but the congress rebelled and demanded he keep two manned programs (the Orion capsule and SOME bit rocket to lift it). He slow-walked the selection of a rocket design for a year and keeps trying to shift the funds from these two items an an apparent attempt to kill them slowly. The capsule, for example, is being slow-walked so much that it will make a single unmanned flight in two years, and will then not fly with a crew before about 2020. This means that a simple capsule derived from Apollo will be in development for nearly twice as long as the extremely complex and ground-breaking space shuttle was.
To put it another way, if we needed to leave the planet in a hurry, Mars is utterly impractical. It will take centuries to terraform it, if it's even feasible. On the other hand, if industry can be persuaded to work out how to knock the kinks out of ground to LEO travel, and to learn how to build safe long-term habitats (for instance, hotels) with materials gathered from deep space, then we might just stand a chance.
Mars is the best practical place in space to even TRY living off-Earth in the reasonably close future. Obama's "commercial space" is just a trick. He is using Bush's commercial orbital transport services idea (COTS - which the Bush admin started as a way to lower cargo costs for government to/from ISS) to get space fans to support him as he guts NASA.... it is illegal (by treaty) for anybody to own any property off of the Earth, so there are no destinations and no harvest-able resources off-Earth for anything other than billionaire-tourists sight-seeing If Obama had really wanted to foster "Commercial Space" (i.e. use it for anything more than ISS support), he would have pulled the US out of the treaty that blocks the colonization of space.
For his first two years in office, Obama and the Democrats controlled the White House, the House of Representatives (by nearly 2-to-1 margins... which means they controlled everything including schedules, debates, everything), and the Senate (by a fillibuster-proof majority... which means the Republicans lacked the power to block anything in the Senate. If the Republicans tried to stop anything, Harry Reid could call a quick vote and with his super-majority he would win).
This means that for his first two years in office Obama, aided by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, could do ANYTHING he wanted and the Republicans were powerless to stop him. This is a simple fact that his more liberal fanboys simply do not want to face. If he did not do some particular thing for you during that time period, then he did not have it as a priority. The fanboys need to grow-up. Obama and his campaign people want you to blame the Republicans; they are counting on you Hating the Republicans and not thinking things through enough to hold him accountable for his own actions. The man spent $800+ Billion dollars on that 2009 stimulus bill (ALL of which was borrowed money which you will pay interest on for the rest of your life), NONE of which went to hiring scientists, engineers and technicians for Mars missions, or Manned spaceflight, or aeronautics research, etc. Hell, even keeping space shuttles flying (3 or 4 missions a year) would have only been a $3 billion dollar cost. Ask yourself a question: If he did not do something for you when he had total power... how will he do it when he lacks total power? Obama and his team do not want you to ask that question, because they want to be re-elected to keep their jobs for another 4 years. 4 more years of pay and benefits, fatter resumes, followed by books deals, speaking tours, jobs on corporate boards or at universities, etc.
There's another little question they don't want you to ask: We used to fly several space shuttles per year, and during the Bush years the agency was simultaneously developing a space capsule (Orion) and a rocket for it (Ares I). Obama cancelled Constellation, though Congress forced him to keep the Orion Capsule (now renamed "MPCV") and demanded he build a new rocket (named "SLS") but remember that we are no longer flying the shuttles and NASA's budget is actually higher now than it was several years ago........ so where is the money going? We used to be developing rockets, flying shuttles, AND launching Mars missions, but now we are slow-walking the rocket development, storing shuttles, and cancelling Mars on essentially the same budgets
It's not a lie
Sales tax - this is a state tax that provides zero revenue (not a single penny) to the federal government
Payroll tax - this is your contribution to Social Security which, for decades, liberals have insisted was not a tax but actually a contribution to your own retirement plan
And, because some Obama drone will eventually raise the issue, Property tax (payed by owners of residences and arguably passed-on to renters) is also not a source of revenue to the federal government. (Property taxes are state and local matters)
It is absolutely true that nearly half of all Americans now pay absolutely nothing to the federal government for things like the national defense (one of the few things the government does that the Constitution actually requires it to do), the national parks, the courts, the diplomats, the space program, the FDA, the EPA, NIST, DOE, FAA, FCC, NTSB, etc.
Personally, I'd like to see the government get out of many of the things it is involved in (and therefore I'd like to see nobody taxed to support them) but It's rather amusing to me that many of the people who want the government involved in everything are simultaneously avoiding paying for any of it while ignorantly insisting that they are paying more than their "fair share" (i.e. somebody else who actually is paying should pay even more than he is)