If I were SpaceX founder Elon Musk, I'd be hopping mad right now.
Why? By what right does Elon Musk have any claim to any tax payer money other than for the cargo contract he has?
If Musk, or any other so-called commercial space company, is in reality just another company looking for a taxpayer-funded government nipple to suck on, then he is no better than an inexperienced version of what we already have
Let him prove that he is a commercial success by succeeding with only the revenue he generates from commercial customers and without any taxpayer money
The robot is not new, the "robonaut" has been around for many years... it's what you get when the government throws some R&D cash at the auto industry
Since a robot will be sent, the launch vehicle and lunar lander will not be man-rated, so they are not in the path to sending humans at a later date. The joke is that Obama says we have no need to return to the moon, so then his boys plan a robotic moon landing to show the public that they are doing something in space. If successful, the robot in the moon will give ammunition to Obama's anti-space supporters who have wanted to redirect all NASA money into the welfare system for many years.This mission will signal the end of American manned space exploration.
That drivel may fly on HufPo or Kos where like-minded luddites and marxists sip koolaid together, but on a site like this one it gets challenged
The modern Republican party is the party of sexism and racism, of homophobia and xenophobia, of fear-mongers and war-mongers, of liars and hypocrites, of systemic incompetence and systemic corruption. They are anti-environment, anti-education, anti-science.
The real racists are the liberals who factor race into everything. The Democrats even allocate tickets to their convention based upon factors like race so that they will look diverse on TV. The republicans typically make no significant efforts for people based on race because (quaint idea) it's wrong to do so no matter how good it looks on tv or how many votes you can get by racial pandering.
Sexism? Republicans hire and appoint women, often more than Democrats do... but they pander less to women as a group. The first woman on the Supreme court was put there by a Republican. George W sure had a bunch of women in his administration. Yes, Republicans tend to oppose abortion, which is sometimes portrayed as anti-woman, but half the babies aborted are female (and more are minority than white.... but that gets to the whole Planned-Parenthood was founded by a racist who was big on eugenics and wanted to reduce the number of brown babies thing. Lefties hate going down that road of inquiry) Yes, Republicans have opposed certain laws that masquerade as pro-woman causes (and which Democrats use to buy the votes of some women) generally related to "equal pay" but these positions were taken by a party holding principle over politics. Many Republicans feel that it is wrong for government to inject itself into the workplace in ways that are every bit as unfair as the problems they attempt to remedy. For example: if government says a business must pay a man and a woman the same for doing the same job it sounds fair, until you consider that the woman might have taken years off from the business to raise a family (a laudable choice) while her male co-worker might have spent those same years faithfully working for the company and not getting to see as much of his children as they grow up. With "equal pay", he feels no reward for his longevity with the job.This issue has NO easy resolution that everybody will agree is fair, but it makes a juicy political tool for the simple-minded or the devious.
Homophobia? Never met anybody with an irrational fear of sameness so I cannot address that directly.Many Republicans are opposed to "gay marriage" both because they believe it to be morally wrong and an Orwellian twist of words and law to redefine the term "marriage". Note: this is the traditional view of all of western civilization. People have different beliefs and opinions on these matters and we are all free to disagree but it is NOT a "phobia". Even a liberal state like California had laws in the books (up to even this year) which held homosexuality to be abnormal or even listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. It is therefore, dishonest to argue that there is suddenly a bunch of whacko extremists who have taken over the GOP and made it suffer from a "phobia". The more honest reading of history is that the culture had a particular view of homosexuality based on its religious and moral traditions and that the Democrats have been more friendly to the cause of one of their constituent groups to demand that Americans change their beliefs.I know of not one single Republican who wants to round-up gays the way the socialist workers party of Germany did. It is a dishonest debate technique to misrepresent an honest difference of opinion over an issue of morality and judgment as a matter of irrational fear. Fear has nothing to do with the matter, but the other side must lack a legitimate argument if it must resort to this tactic all the time.
Xenophobia? Irrational fear of aliens? Darn right! Republicans will do their best to fight-off the little green twerps when they show up in their UFO invasion force! Seriou
Yes... Nixon's own investigation finds sloppy record keeping...
The investigation determines that Nixon needs to hire a more professional secretary in the future who will be less prone to accidentally erase tapes and he needs to better communicate with the general public who tend to be so ignorant of politics that they suspect the professionals might be up to something.... that whole "tricky Dick" thing... that just refers to a clever and completely above-board technique... nothing to see here... move along
Looks like that whole "watergate" thing will probably end with a whimper rather than a bang...
Hint to the Climate so-called-scientists:
It's always the cover-up that gets you
Stay tuned for all the prosecutions that may arise as people start to follow the money trails...
Sorry, but these CRU clowns make "creation scientists" look respectable and honest
First, the Willie Horton attack originated in the primary, and was launched by Democrat Al Gore, who lacked the guts to use Horton's name...he attacked the Dukakis program for which "Willie" was the ideal "poster child". When the TV ad naming Horton ran, it was aired by an independent group and all the left-wing protests aside, that level of insulation is the same as the insulation between many Democrat campaigns and many liberal groups
Secondly, most non-black churches in the USA are terrified of bringing-up politics. Approx 20 years ago when an abortion issue was hot a bunch of churches allowed outside "pro-life" groups to hand-out flyers in the parking lots listing candidate positions on abortion No rallies, no speeches, nothing inside the churches... just permission for an outside group to hand-out papers, and as a result liberals attacked with lawsuits and complaints to the federal government and churches had their tax-exempt status threatened. As a result, you do not find politics from the pulpit in white churches. Black churches get more of a pass because no Republicans have the guts to threaten them with legal action and Democrats take advantage of that and openly campaign and collect money there. The so-called evangelical vote in the USA does not vote in such a predictable way because a bunch of preachers are telling them who to vote for... they vote the way they do for the same reason other blocks vote in the ways that they do: groups with common beliefs and values will tend to make similar choices
Did you miss the part where a follower of Jesus complains to him that a woman has wasted resources on Jesus that could have been spent on the poor... and Jesus replies that the woman has done the right thing and that the poor will be with us always? Yeah... all those who worship the poor and use the poor as justification for bizarre robin hood schemes seem to miss that one... just a coincidence I'm sure.
You also hit another note that frustrates the extreme left... the idea that conservative voters are SO DUMB they get talked into voting against their own interests! {GASP!} The simple fact is that SOME people value certain things more than money... Social conservatives will often vote for something because it is the right thing even though voting the other way would benefit them financially. This is NOT dumb, it is admirable, and it's not because they are programmed robots but rather because they have thought about things on more than just a simple money level. Those evangelical you disdain so freely have the most-consistent set of principled positions of any voting block in the country, and they do not shift their positions with the shifting winds because the positions are anchored in principles.
Your post makes as much sense as I would make if I said that people who believe in evolution are all a bunch of mindless morons who believe anything Stephan Jay Gould told them to believe. Dumb and simplistic.
You seem to have completely missed the point of the texts you quoted. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a proclamation to send forth tax collectors to take from one person by force and give to another.
You are correct that Jesus taught about the pointlessness of accumulating vast wealth for yourself while others suffer, BUT he NEVER said your wealth should be taken from you by force and handed out to those who were unwilling to work. INDIVIDUALS are responsible for giving by their own free will as they see fit to those they see as being in legitimate need.
Indeed, you are incapable of being charitable to others if government comes and takes all that you can spare, so it can go buy the votes of the poor by handing it out and taking credit for it.
Do not show how much you "care" for the poor by voting for some jerk who promises to "soak the rich" and give to the poor while leaving you alone...that's NOT Christian, nor is it charity. You get no moral brownie points for supporting the theft of somebody else's stuff to benefit the needy. Instead, look around for somebody in need and then sell your PS3 or XBOX360 and give the proceeds to that person in need. THAT is charity.
Socialism is completely incompatible with Christianity
Reminder: "Thou shalt not covet" (don't desire what others have) and "Thou Shalt not steal" (don't take things that belong to others) and of course you could go to the bits about not feeding people who refuse to work, not placing excessive burdens on those doing the work, etc. etc. etc.
All the New Testament instructions for charity and giving and caring for others are calls to individuals to deal properly with other individuals, and to do so because it is right rather than because of government force
Christianity calls upon individuals to give freely from their own possessions as they see fit to those in need (this is actual charity). Christianity has nothing in common with the idea that the majority will enable a taxman to rob people against their will in order to give to both the poor (who might be poor through no fault of their own) and the lazy (who are poor because they hate work or like drugs and alcohol more than food). The Bible (New Testament) actually lumps tax collectors in with prostitutes and other unpopular sinners. It is true that some left-leaning Christians created a movement called "liberation theology" which attempted to give a moral basis to Marxism, but that appeal only works with people who have not actually read a Bible completely from cover to cover (as one generally does with books one claims are important).
Also, the continual references to a theocracy in the context of Christianity are themselves a laughable display of ignorance. There is simply nothing in Christian theology that would lead to a theocracy The closest thing possible already happened long ago when the former Roman empire converted to Christianity The secular government of the time embraced and used the new faith with a result that was still much less than a pure theocracy but was still much more than anything advocated in the New Testament (which does not have a focus on government or law).
I recommend a little less Dave Letterman and Jon Stewart, and a little more serious study... because that line of "We really need to throw away the false dichotomy between Capitalism and Socialism" displays a flabbergasting ignorance of both systems.
The founders lived in a world where the excesses of religion wielding political power was a very present thing.
Um, not so much. The excess was in secular leaders hijacking religion, making their own government-established versions and then using those to justify all of their secular abuses. The Church of England is a good example here, and the one our founders had most-clearly in mind
Thanks to the separation of church and state, we have been afforded the luxury of forgetting this.
No. Thanks to the "establishment clause" we have been spared the nightmare of a "Church of the United States" which everybody would be required to attend, fund, and submit to. The phrase "Separation of church and state" does not appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution; it appears in a letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a Baptist church in which he was telling them it was safe to support the new Constitution because it guaranteed the government would never interfere in their church (a promise now routinely broken and in the eyes of many, the deal is broken if the government forces certain issues like abortion and gay "marriage" i.e. if government gets to interfere in the teachings of the churches, then the doors are open for the churches to equally interfere in government).
But any ideology that deals in absolutes, whether it be secular or religious, will evoke the absolute to disdain lesser goods--and when you think you hold the absolute Truth or Good, all other goods become worthless. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, it is the mortal enemy of all goods
Those absolutist Darwinists, Atheists, Marxists, etc are the most dangerous of all
Good, religious themes... and if you think "reason" and "knowledge" are not "religious" then you have not read any of the writings of numerous religious scholars. Start with the Apostle Paul for a little light reading before you move along to much more recent academic works with really big words in them
and anything that is not held up as absolute will be cast aside, along with all who would defend them. Billions have died, and will die, for the idols of dogma.
Millions, yes, but not billions. And the millions were all at the hands of wealth-redistributing atheists/pagans (Hitler/Stalin/Mao/PolPot...)
If religion has an evolutionary advantage, it is probably in strengthening ingroup solidarity at the expense of outgroup antagonism; effective in prehistory, catastrophic in a world of globalisation.
Religion generally is anti-evolutionary, as are social welfare programs, laws against rape and murder, environmental laws, etc. (Anything that helps the weak survive or limits the reproduction of the strong)
I suspect that religions will, in this century, claim at least a billion victims, and make Stalin, Hitler, and Mao look like amateurs.
It's an old, tired trick to lump all faiths together under the label "religions" so they can share collective blame, but that's like blaming all "political systems" for the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Yes, one particular religion might get the bomb and begin a nuclear holy war... but the other religions would be no more responsible than "science" or "engineering" for what happened
n the aftermath, Richard Dawkins will sound positively mild and conciliatory.
No, he will just keep sounding ignorant, hostile, irrational, and socially toxic
There are almost as many Gods as there are believers, and the first thing you will discover when the state imposes religion is that the state's God is not your God.
Indeed, this is what many conservatives learned in the decades since the left kicked God out of the schools and started re-writing all the books with a left-wing bias... The state God that has proven itself mo
NAZI Ideology was a twisted mix of paganism and Norse mythology (with a few other dazzling bits tossed-in just to keep it confusing, as all cults do), but it was arising in the native land of Martin Luther, so Hitler and his party (decidedly non-Christian) had a policy of gradually absorbing the Christian holidays and traditions (like Christmas and Easter) and secularizing them in a slow conversion of the public. Christmas, for example, was being slowly shifted from a Christ-centered holiday to a patriotic and family-oriented holiday (there are surviving examples of the official party documents outlining all of this which you could easily study if you had any intellectual curiosity). This is well documented in their own words and you can study it in many archives. Hitler was actually introduced as God by his propagandist on several occasions (no actual Christian would ever allow his associates to introduce him this way). Much of the population was indeed culturally "Christian", but a much smaller portion of the population were seriously, personally Christian. The serious Christians were a threat to the Reich and some paid with their lives. As long as a significant portion of his population was culturally Christian, it suited Hitler to use those portions he could control or co-opt, but the plan was in place to eliminate the Christian faith in Germany and replace it with a quasi-religious racial cult of personality and devotion to the state.
Oh, and universal healthcare is indeed socialist. Healthcare requires the work of doctors, nurses, people who make drugs and medical devices etc. Somebody must pay those people to work, pay for the raw materials, processed materials, energy used, etc. You could provide all that for free, at the point of a gun.... or you could force other people to pay those costs, again, at the point of a gun. Taxation is at the point of a gun (if you doubt it, I dare you to not pay your taxes, and then resist when the authorities show-up to take your home away... at some point in the process, a government employee will show up and aim a gun at you. Most of us hand over the tax payments long before the guns are pointed (highly recommended)) Because it involves a finite supply of resources, government-enforced "universal healthcare" always ends-up in government control (direct or indirect) of the means of production and government control of resource allocation.
"healthcare" is not a "right" and is likely to only be "universal" when resources are unlimited. You cannot have a "right" to the fruit of another person's labor, just as nobody else as a "right" to grab the results of your labor. This is why every socialist muckraker always promises universal healthcare; it is the easiest way to trick middle class people into letting the socialist camel's nose under the tent.
The continual stream of false accusations that their opponents are all funded by the oil industry was probably the first thing that got me to suspect something was wrong with AGW. If the sciencee is on your side, then you have no need to ascribe false motives and paymasters to everyone who disagrees with you.
Why is it that nobody assumes all these government-funded people who produce results that say governments should get bigger and more powerful are themselves biased by their funding sources?
Governments have spent billions on AGW research, and are preparing to spend trillions on it. The power and money that governments will control if they can convince everyone of AGW dwarfs anything any corporation ever dreamed of
They do destroy it when they show a pattern of the most basic manipulations of science and the peer review process and of who and what gets published
I am sorry, but a few sympathetic publishers of AGW articles riding in to the rescue of AGW paper writers (who have privately admitted to working very hard to make sure that only people who agree with them can get published or be editors at publications) serves more to raise my eyebrows and ask if these publications were involved in the manipulation of publications. That is just how bad it is when scientists choose to manipulate their peers, the process, and the public
"Character" is the measure of what you do when nobody is looking
By their e-mails, these men have exposed their character and it is rotten to the core
We are now left with no choice but to assume their guilt when we look at the their work products. Had these people done all of their work out in the sunshine, we would have been able to spot any errors or manipulations along the way and if their data was good, their processes solid, and results valid, then we would all be forced to see them as reputable scientists with just, perhaps, some nasty e-mail habits. Since we were not there when the work was done in secret, the peer-review process was manipulated in private, the data was manipulated in private, and the original data was deleted, our only way of knowing what was going on at the time and observing their process is the contemporaneous e-mail which, in court, would probably be seen as silimar to contemporaneous comments at a crime scene (which often get more weight than later reconstructions or recollections)
Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?
Absolutely
These clowns might have set it aside with such a comment to more-easily find it for future manipulations. When you are playing this many games with your code and your data and your published papers and your peer review journals, it probably gets tough to remember where all the tweaks are. Remember: they never thought anybody who was not a sworn Defender of the Faith would see this stuff.
Anybody who wants their work to cause trillions of dollars to be spent and millions of people to be required to alter their lives should be required to open source all of their code and data so that all persons affected can inspect it all. These jerks have been hiding their data and code for decades, always claiming to be pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow, priests of the one true faith of science, and only keeping secrets because of IP rules governing the data which they were using (and whose secrecy they agreed to protect only because by agreeing to the secrecy they got access to even more data to produce better results for the benefit of all). Anybody who reads both the e-mails and the code now knows this to be rubbish. They were hiding everything so that no critics would see and expose all the incompetence and dishonesty. They were working to peer review each-other's work and keep the work of critics from being peer reviewed so they could amplify their lies by claiming to be the only peer reviewed scientists.
They used Bernie Madoff style secrecy to cover a bigger-than-Bernie scam
Remember that these guys were not just claiming that the Earth is warming (many skeptics of AGW, myself included, agree on this point) but they were claiming that human-caused CO2 was causing the warming and that the warming is not part of a normal cycle. They will now be claiming their other data/work shows warming (which is widely accepted), and that anybody who does not agree (with the warming, and by implication the human causation) is "anti-science" and "funded by the oil industry" as an attempt to distract from the whole anthropogenic aspect (which is the part they were working so hard to prove by monkeying with everything).
Time for Jimmie Hansen to dump every last line of code and every byte of source data into the public square for a public review.
Time for all "climate change experts" to open-up or be prosecuted for fraud for the billions of tax dollars they have consumed under false pretense. When the data and code is released, we will need independent proof that it has not been massaged in any way in the time period between this leak and the eventual release, since we now know that this clique of pretend-scientists is a slimy bunch who's word cannot be trusted.
Actually, the "Use tax" is a fraud which some states are pulling on a poorly educated population. If you live in such a state, you should probably pay to avoid legal troubles, but that does not mean you should just passively accept the lies; you should complain continually to your lawless legislators.
The Constitution specifically prohibits states from taxing transactions that cross state lines, but state law makers who are unwilling to control their spending are always looking for something to tax. Those state law makers see vast piles of money in mail/phone/internet sales and claim they need to get a tax on them to make up for "lost sales taxes". To do this, they apply a tax, which they KNOW and ADMIT is a sales tax when explaining why they need it, but which they then name a "use tax" in order to put a fig leaf over the scam and help it get through friendly courts. Note that if you buy a book at your local store, there is no "use tax" on it, and if you buy a book online they will not look to see if you actually use it.
Back to first principles:
Sales taxes are levied on local businesses in order for the locals to get revenue from each sale in order to help pay for all the local services that benefit the business (like fire, police, etc). By taxing the sale, the government gets its cut off-the-top, and therefore collects revenue even from a business that is making no profits (but which still consumes services). The Online/Phone/Mail retailer perhaps should pay sales taxes on ALL transactions WHERE THEY ARE LOCATED since they get services there, but it is wrong to allow a state where the business lacks a presence to get in on the transaction without providing the associated services. The reason so many states would oppose just having businesses collect and pay the tax locally at the local rate on all transactions (which would be easy for all parties, and reasonably rational since no sales would then be seen as interstate) is that states with Democrat legislatures and the associated stupidly-high sales taxes, would be crippling their businesses even more than they already do.
The further we get from the system our founders setup, the more bloated, inefficient, expensive, and dishonest our government gets
Glenn Beck plays lots of videos of Obama officials ranting and raving in praise of mass murderers and dictators, then invites team Obama to explain themselves... and the left is so outraged that they respond by playing videos of him raping and murdering.... no... wait... they have no such videos for him to explain....
The website was not a valid parody of Beck at all. It was just another nasty Obama hugger trying to distract from the questions Beck asked using video of Obama's own people ranting like lunatics It is not Beck's fault that so many on team Obama are on video that way... it's their own fault. The Obama vetting people allowed these people to be hired with, apparently, less background checking than a circus clown using google was able to do. This is a classic case of getting mad at the messenger when you do not like the message.
Beck at least loudly proclaims himself to be a circus clown and he has no governmental power or authority to do anything to anybody. He did not just make-up a bunch of ugly accusations about criminal offenses by Obama and then demand a response. Beck played videos of Obama people who were making, or advising on, government policy and some of whom were overseeing billions of tax dollars raving like certifiable lunatics and he then asked the administration to provide an alternate explanation for what was said that would be less nasty than the actual words uttered by team Obama.
There is no video of Beck bragging about a rape and a murder I would have hoped that the brainier-than-normal crowd who hang-out on slashdot would have seen the invalid comparison immediately and even the liberals here would rise above their biases to see that. The day Beck or anybody else on Fox accuse Obama of rape and murder with no evidence whatsoever, I will join the left in being outraged.
Well, it really depends on what one considers a news organization. I've tried to watch Fox... I really have (and no, I'm not a liberal). However, Fox News is news in the way Jon Stewart is... they use a "news format" but they have an obvious agenda. Obvious enough that I would call them an editorial organization that occasionally reports on the news.
Golly, I guess we should depend on CBS for real news... oops, wait, they used falsified documents to try to harm the re-election chances of George W Bush...
Oh, perhaps we can trust NBC... um, wait, aren't they the ones who rigged a pickup truck gas tank with model rocket motors to scare Americans into fearing that their big US pickup trucks would explode?
Well, there's always ABC... but didn't they spend a bunch of time hyping the idea that Reagan was responsible for downing KAL-007? Did they ever even tell their audience that one of the people they used was in fact an angry old Jimmy Carter administration member?
I guess there's always trusty CNN... wait, nope, didn't they make deals with Saddam Hussein to not report certain things in exchange for access?
Ah... the New York Times... the lode-star of progressive/liberal journalism... wait, aren't they the ones who wrote glowing stories about how wonderful life was in Stalin's Russia while neglecting to tell their readers about the massacre of millions of civilians which the paper knew about?
Ooooh, Fox is evil because they have Beck (a guy who calls himself a "circus clown") running one of their editorial shows, and he's a right-winger... but PBS, for example, is wonderful because they have LBJ's political hack, Bill Moyers, running one of their editorial programs. Fox is evil because they had Bush press guy Tony Snow run a talking-head Sunday news show, but ABC is wonderful because they have Clinton's chief of staff George Stephanopoulos running their Sunday talking head show. Yup. THAT seals it! there's NOTHING on Fox that can be trusted...
I could go on, but why bother...
Because people are "only human", they all have opinions and they all have the potential to surrender to the temptation to use any power they have to push their own biases and agendas. The answer to that problem is to have enough outlets with enough different views so that individuals can watch the various sources and decide which are most credible for themselves. For many years, there were so few news outlets (ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS) and those were all soaked in the same left-of-center group-think that some people (particularly liberals who were happy and comfortable with the situation) thought what they were getting was unbiased. Conservatives were not fooled, they watched network after network hire Democrat political activists and plug them into their "news shows" as supposedly neutral reporters and were just forced to listed to the propaganda. Conservatives watched and counted as all the political shows always stacked their panels with 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 ratios of liberals to conservatives and claimed to be balanced. When PBS had a two-man "balance", they used liberal Democrat Mark Shields and Independent (to the left of a Republican) David Gergen. Now that ONE network (not even broadcast but just on satellite and cable), Fox, has a Conservative bent to its EDITORIAL programs, and requires its NEWS people to be neutral (rather than left-of-center) people on the left are outraged. Conservatives are used to having to watch liberal news and editorial content, but liberals are not used to even seeing conservative editorial content. Nobody is forcing liberals to watch Fox; if they do not like it they can just change the channel, or turn it off (that's what they always said about conservatives when conservatives complained about TV shows...) Liberals have a choice that conservatives never had: they can turn to all the other networks for "news" they like.
Fox is still too far to the left, but it's probably the best one can hope for given that its parent is a giant multi-national corporation just lik
For one thing, nearly every US residence is wired for 220 and Americans have 220V standard wiring, plugs and sockets. Americans only waste the extra resources on beefier wiring, plugs, sockets, and breakers where actually needed: between the main panel and large items like ovens, washers, dryers, table saws, etc. We do not need to run 220 lines and use massive plugs for our MP3 players, Televisions, radios, etc.Rather than putting a fuse into every power cord, Americans have been moving from an already good combination of fuses/breakers in devices and breakers in the main panel to arc-fault breakers in the main panel. With arc-fault breakers in the main panel, Americans have safer wiring in their homes than they would have with fused plugs; Arc-fault breakers protect against normal shorts (like fuses or normal breakers), ground faults (like the GFI breakers) and arcing (like from frayed wires, nails driven through wires in the walls etc.)
Americans can get sockets with safety shutters in them if they choose to, rather than because their government forces them to... we call this freedom; most of us are smart enough not to kill ourselves with our plugs and outlets.
British plugs with their massive prongs and built-in fuses are more akin to weapons used in the Roman circus than to consumer-friendly, low-cost, easy to store, and easy to use American plugs:-P
American buildings are also not wired in loops like many European buildings. The simple robust scheme in the US makes it so that people in the US can be trusted to do their own wiring work, which is something many Europeans (including the UK article author) are not legally permitted to do. An American can wire his basement with rugged but inexpensive parts and check the work with a simple $10 circuit checker; A Brit must hire somebody to wire his basement and then the installation must be certified with an expensive professional test device
Gay activists published a list of supporters of the anti-gay-marriage ammendment in California in the hope of getting their opponents to be punished (some were fired from their jobs) or intimidated (so they would not participate in such political action in the future), but they ought to have thought this through. Nothing but self-restraint will now keep their opponents from publishing lists of pro-gay-bill supporters in the future which will in-turn help people fire and intimidate them.
This stuff (publishing lists to help people intimidate/retaliate against political opponents) has the potential to get very nasty indeed and both sides would be well-advised to think before pulling the trigger.
If you want something on a ballot, you should be able to try to put it there without fear (nobody needs to know who you are), and each voter should feel free to vote for or against it without fear (it should stand or fall on the merits rather than because of who sponsored it/supported it/opposed it)
The USPS can take any random sheet of paper across the country to a specific person for less than the price of a coke, with door-to-door service.
That piece of mail is heavily subsidized and carried at a loss. The USPO is deeply in debt, and considering closing facilities and stopping saturday deliveries. Coke delivers a clean, safe product anywhere in America and, indeed much of the world, seven days per week with consistent quality... and pound-for-pound the Coke is probably cheaper. Coke makes the can, makes the contents, puts them together, and delivers them to vending machines and stores, even stocking the shelves. The post office just carries what somebody else made, and while they usually deliver successfully, they assume no responsibility when they fail. If Coke fails to deliver a safe product, they get sued and are made to take responsibility. If Coke fails to deliver the product to its destination, THEY and not the customer, take the loss.
Enjoy your cheap tainted meat!
We get tainted meat WITH all the regulations in place. What works quite well is INFORMATION and market forces; if Consumer Reports or TV or Radio news report tells consumers that company X is selling cheap tainted meat the consumers run away from it and company X goes belly-up.
Microsoft is clearly on it's last legs.
Another failure of government to do even the simple things we pay them Trillions to do... like block the occasional giant monopoly, or deliver checks (using that amazing postal service) to the proper old people while they are actually alive and not every month for ten years after they've begun pushing up daisies.
Remember when a poorly regulated free market destroyed the US economy?
No, but I DO remember Congressman Barney Frank pushing government workers to back-off from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack (pseudo-government entities) and publicly talking about how safe they were (his statement having greater authority because of his government position). I remember government oversight powers being used to push bankers to make lots of reckless loans. If the government had not signaled that it was backing-up all the fannie/freddie loans, and if government had not used its oversight authority to pressure the banks, then all the bad loans at the heart of the 2008 meltdown would likely not have happened. Indeed, without fannie/freddie, the damage from the meltdown probably would have been better limited to only the reckless banks who would have been punished for their bad behaviour by being driven out of business withe their assets and customers being absorbed by the better-behaved solvent banks. The 2008 meltdown had government written all over it. In 2001 when Bush admin officials saw fannie and freddie as impending train-wrecks, they asked congress for the executive authority to deal with the situation. A Republican congress said "no" (this was before 9/11). For a few years, while everybody was distracted by the middle-east, the federal oversight of fannie and freddie remained with the congress. When Democrats took over the congress 3 years ago, fannie and freddie had become 5 years worse of a problem but the new overseers (Frank in the House and Dodd in the Senate) used their government powers to push fannie and freddie to be even more reckless. In 2007, one year before the meltdown, the Republicans in congress could finally see the approaching problem, so they proposed a law to give the Bush admin the power to oversee fannie/freddie madness, but every single senate Democrat, including then-senators Biden, and Obama (who took campaign money from fannie/freddie) voted "no", leaving oversight in congressional hands and Bush with no authority to avert the impending collapse. For that last year and a half before the collapse, Democrats controlled both houses of congress and they pushed to make the problem worse rather than working to make things better. Both parties were involved and the result was a typical bi-partisan GOVERNMENT mess
If using sneakernet, and a guy copies data to a floppy (the physical layer), walks to another guy's machine (wearing a brand of sneakers that are not licensees, of course) and copies the data into that machine while that user is looking away from his machine, is sneakernet in violation?
I hate patents on broad concepts that anybody would have come up with if he had needed to. Patents should only cover things that anybody in the field could NOT have come up with if he needed them. We need some tech-savy lawyers and judges to put some real muscle into the "obviousness" test.
Half the wizards on the network are evil, but they are the ones that pop-up on connected Microsoft desktops.Having once been a noble idea, they are now consigned to a half-dead existence and have assumed the appearance of an animated paperclip or a four-legged beast who is constantly searching.
A jury in East Texas will be composed of at least 10 people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that Jesus rode to work on a brontosaurus.
Well, I see the hate-speech and bigotry against Christians is on display again. This is one of the easiest attacks to make, because Christians do not kill people who draw cartoons.
I personally do not believe in the concept of "hate speech", being a supporter of free speech, but I am always impressed by its use by the left who seem so obsessed with it.
Nobody claims that Jesus rode a dinosaur. Indeed, while there are a few who think that dinos and humans may have coexisted, I have encountered an atheist who had that particular belief and there are probably a few more like him, so I guess it would be okay to say that Darwin ran a T-rex ranch. It is also true that SOME Christians believe in a "young Earth", many believe in an "old Earth". Of those who DO believe in a "young Earth", most believe the system was created with an apparent age and everything functioning (fully grown plants and animals, the light photons from stars already in transit, geologic layers, fossils, etc.) You may certainly reject their argument, but if it is true then there is simply never going to be a way to prove or disprove it. If they are correct, then they are not as nutty as you imply and indeed their confused critics are the presumably gullible ones who should be feared on a jury.
Since neither science nor religion will ever truly solve that question, I prefer that we all settle for the jury qualifications our founders gave us: a group of one's peers (in the traditional sense of the word) who are mentally sound (though perhaps not philosophically sound, or well acquainted with the issues). The results are not always great, but they are as fair as we can get. If the people who understand technology-related issues are unhappy with the results produced by their fellow citizens on juries, then they should look in the mirror and ask themselves the following question: what could I do better to help my friends and neighbors better understand these issues? If the lawyers on the side of the issues we support are losing, then we should ask ourselves and them to think about why they are failing so badly in the task of explaining their cases to the juries. No jury can be expected to know all about the subject of a court case; our system of justice relies upon competent advocates providing good information to juries, which is one of the reasons we have lawyers in the court.
Before the United States was founded, one of its founders, John Adams, took the case of some British soldiers who had shot some American colonists before a jury of American colonials. Every one of the colonials on that jury, if asked, would likely have been a "young Earth" type of Christian (and not even the type who believe in an apparent age) who you would have denounced as a fool and they likely all had reasons to hate the British soldiers... but Adams won the case.
There was a time when an ice sheet covered most of North America. Then a serious case of global warming set in (oddly, this began before the car was invented, and before Al Gore started to speak, so massive levels of man-made CO2 could not have been the culprit... ) The amount of Ice in the northern hemisphere has been shrinking ever since (albeit with some occasional variability) and its no surprise that the remaining ice would shrink even faster with so little of it left. How is this unusual to anybody with a sufficiently mature view of things to not evaluate all climate relative to conditions during his personal childhood years? Tanking the long view, who is to say what the "right" climate for the Earth is? Sure, man may have caused some warming within an overall warming cycle (which will most-likely be followed by some distant future ice age).
Let us assume that mankind switched to technologies that have a cooling impact instead of a warming one. Let us further assume that mankind does not wipe itself out before the start of the next ice age. Should those people alive then go crazy over global cooling and risk seriously damaging their economies and harming possibly millions of their individual citizens in order to stop global cooling? Perhaps it is best to develop the technologies to allow people all over the world to live comfortably in ANY climate (which has the happy side effect of opening up much more of the planet's surface to people to reduce crowding) and left the Earth warm and cool as it happens. If you do not know with precision what causes the natural warming/cooling cycles, what limits they go to, why they go to those limits, and what causes the rebounds, you cannot honestly measure man's impacts. Furthermore, since man is just an evolved animal, everything man does is just as natural as everything a bear does... so if global warming is caused by man, then it is natural.
Switch-off the auto pilot and spew something other than liberal talking points
the gop has for the last 20 years engaged in an antiscience crusade
The GOP has NOT engaged in any anti-science crusade. Reagan, for instance pushed SDI claiming American Scientists who created "the bomb" were fully-capable of an equally challenging task of making it obsolete, while liberals claimed it was too hard. Republicans have been pro-nuclear, and many Democrats are terrified of it. Republicans tend to like the space program (Bush#2 told NASA to build new rockets capable of moon and mars missions and had a NASA administrator with multiple science and engineering degrees) while many Democrats see NASA as a department to be cut to get money for social programs (Obama promised to gut it, and put a PR hack in charge of reviewing it; she's now been nominated to an associate admin post). There was an active political movement on the left to make a political attack using that claim and to get certain scientists in more liberal fields to claim they were being muzzled. Notice how many times a certain lefty scientist at Goddard held press briefings to claim he was being muzzled? ( I seem to recall the count at over a hundred, which has got to be some sort of record for a person who is being muzzled)
They're the party that tries to teach creationism
No, the GOP never tries to teach creationism... what it DOES do, is assert the rights of parents in communities to have control over their schools (and that includes the rights of those people in those communities to have their schools not tell johnie and suzy that science has proven their religion false). The GOP ALWAYS favored local control of schools which the rare exception of when GW Bush went off-the-rails and teamed-up with Ted Kennedy on the big-government "no child left behind" malfunction. I, for one, have no problem with the schools teaching the theory of evolution as a theory just as I have no problem with the schools teaching various economic theories as theories, and I certainly do not want the school teaching some particular religion. I consider it totally unacceptable for some elementary school teacher to denigrate ANY kid in class, and certainly not MY kid, with some of the hostile God-is-dead and your-religion-is-an-emotional-crutch rhetoric that has been pushed in some classrooms in the country who then hides behind claims of academic freedom and claims critics are "anti-science". I am equally opposed to any teacher advancing communist economic theories as facts.
They're the party that band[sic] the creation of useful stem cell lines for research.
False. The federal government had not yet formulated policies on this before Bush, and Clinton/Gore had not been funding it. Bush did not ban ANY research. What Bush DID do, was say that the federal government would fund stem cell research (unlike previous presidents whom I presume you think were all "anti-science") but NOT FUND the creation of NEW lines using discarded embryos (an act that many taxpayers consider the taking of innocent life). Bush left it to states and private interests to spend THEIR money if they so chose on such research. THERE IS NO BAN ON THE RESEARCH, Bush was just not going to take money at gunpoint from taxpayers to fund research that those taxpayers consider murder.
They're the party that denies the overwhelming evidence of man made global warming.
Sorry, but this over-simplification of a very complex issue is getting tiresome. The evidence is NOT so overwhelming; there are MANY scientists who do not buy into this and many others who do, but who think there are smarter ways to deal with it than the Al Gore way. When anybody who disagrees is called a "denier", is denied grants, is denied tenured teaching positions, is accused of being in the hip pocket of evil polluters, and is shouted-down, SCIENCE is not at work. I learned long ago, that the person with the weakest argument is usually the one who resorts to shouting and name c
Slashdot Mirror
If I were SpaceX founder Elon Musk, I'd be hopping mad right now.
Why? By what right does Elon Musk have any claim to any tax payer money other than for the cargo contract he has?
If Musk, or any other so-called commercial space company, is in reality just another company looking for a taxpayer-funded government nipple to suck on, then he is no better than an inexperienced version of what we already have
Let him prove that he is a commercial success by succeeding with only the revenue he generates from commercial customers and without any taxpayer money
The robot is not new, the "robonaut" has been around for many years... it's what you get when the government throws some R&D cash at the auto industry
Since a robot will be sent, the launch vehicle and lunar lander will not be man-rated, so they are not in the path to sending humans at a later date. The joke is that Obama says we have no need to return to the moon, so then his boys plan a robotic moon landing to show the public that they are doing something in space. If successful, the robot in the moon will give ammunition to Obama's anti-space supporters who have wanted to redirect all NASA money into the welfare system for many years.This mission will signal the end of American manned space exploration.
That drivel may fly on HufPo or Kos where like-minded luddites and marxists sip koolaid together, but on a site like this one it gets challenged
The modern Republican party is the party of sexism and racism, of homophobia and xenophobia, of fear-mongers and war-mongers, of liars and hypocrites, of systemic incompetence and systemic corruption. They are anti-environment, anti-education, anti-science.
The real racists are the liberals who factor race into everything. The Democrats even allocate tickets to their convention based upon factors like race so that they will look diverse on TV. The republicans typically make no significant efforts for people based on race because (quaint idea) it's wrong to do so no matter how good it looks on tv or how many votes you can get by racial pandering.
Sexism? Republicans hire and appoint women, often more than Democrats do... but they pander less to women as a group. The first woman on the Supreme court was put there by a Republican. George W sure had a bunch of women in his administration. Yes, Republicans tend to oppose abortion, which is sometimes portrayed as anti-woman, but half the babies aborted are female (and more are minority than white.... but that gets to the whole Planned-Parenthood was founded by a racist who was big on eugenics and wanted to reduce the number of brown babies thing. Lefties hate going down that road of inquiry) Yes, Republicans have opposed certain laws that masquerade as pro-woman causes (and which Democrats use to buy the votes of some women) generally related to "equal pay" but these positions were taken by a party holding principle over politics. Many Republicans feel that it is wrong for government to inject itself into the workplace in ways that are every bit as unfair as the problems they attempt to remedy. For example: if government says a business must pay a man and a woman the same for doing the same job it sounds fair, until you consider that the woman might have taken years off from the business to raise a family (a laudable choice) while her male co-worker might have spent those same years faithfully working for the company and not getting to see as much of his children as they grow up. With "equal pay", he feels no reward for his longevity with the job.This issue has NO easy resolution that everybody will agree is fair, but it makes a juicy political tool for the simple-minded or the devious.
Homophobia? Never met anybody with an irrational fear of sameness so I cannot address that directly.Many Republicans are opposed to "gay marriage" both because they believe it to be morally wrong and an Orwellian twist of words and law to redefine the term "marriage". Note: this is the traditional view of all of western civilization. People have different beliefs and opinions on these matters and we are all free to disagree but it is NOT a "phobia". Even a liberal state like California had laws in the books (up to even this year) which held homosexuality to be abnormal or even listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. It is therefore, dishonest to argue that there is suddenly a bunch of whacko extremists who have taken over the GOP and made it suffer from a "phobia". The more honest reading of history is that the culture had a particular view of homosexuality based on its religious and moral traditions and that the Democrats have been more friendly to the cause of one of their constituent groups to demand that Americans change their beliefs.I know of not one single Republican who wants to round-up gays the way the socialist workers party of Germany did. It is a dishonest debate technique to misrepresent an honest difference of opinion over an issue of morality and judgment as a matter of irrational fear. Fear has nothing to do with the matter, but the other side must lack a legitimate argument if it must resort to this tactic all the time.
Xenophobia? Irrational fear of aliens? Darn right! Republicans will do their best to fight-off the little green twerps when they show up in their UFO invasion force! Seriou
Yes... Nixon's own investigation finds sloppy record keeping...
The investigation determines that Nixon needs to hire a more professional secretary in the future who will be less prone to accidentally erase tapes and he needs to better communicate with the general public who tend to be so ignorant of politics that they suspect the professionals might be up to something.... that whole "tricky Dick" thing... that just refers to a clever and completely above-board technique... nothing to see here... move along
Looks like that whole "watergate" thing will probably end with a whimper rather than a bang...
Hint to the Climate so-called-scientists:
It's always the cover-up that gets you
Stay tuned for all the prosecutions that may arise as people start to follow the money trails...
Sorry, but these CRU clowns make "creation scientists" look respectable and honest
Your entire post is drivel
First, the Willie Horton attack originated in the primary, and was launched by Democrat Al Gore, who lacked the guts to use Horton's name...he attacked the Dukakis program for which "Willie" was the ideal "poster child". When the TV ad naming Horton ran, it was aired by an independent group and all the left-wing protests aside, that level of insulation is the same as the insulation between many Democrat campaigns and many liberal groups
Secondly, most non-black churches in the USA are terrified of bringing-up politics. Approx 20 years ago when an abortion issue was hot a bunch of churches allowed outside "pro-life" groups to hand-out flyers in the parking lots listing candidate positions on abortion No rallies, no speeches, nothing inside the churches... just permission for an outside group to hand-out papers, and as a result liberals attacked with lawsuits and complaints to the federal government and churches had their tax-exempt status threatened. As a result, you do not find politics from the pulpit in white churches. Black churches get more of a pass because no Republicans have the guts to threaten them with legal action and Democrats take advantage of that and openly campaign and collect money there. The so-called evangelical vote in the USA does not vote in such a predictable way because a bunch of preachers are telling them who to vote for... they vote the way they do for the same reason other blocks vote in the ways that they do: groups with common beliefs and values will tend to make similar choices
Did you miss the part where a follower of Jesus complains to him that a woman has wasted resources on Jesus that could have been spent on the poor... and Jesus replies that the woman has done the right thing and that the poor will be with us always? Yeah... all those who worship the poor and use the poor as justification for bizarre robin hood schemes seem to miss that one... just a coincidence I'm sure.
You also hit another note that frustrates the extreme left... the idea that conservative voters are SO DUMB they get talked into voting against their own interests! {GASP!} The simple fact is that SOME people value certain things more than money... Social conservatives will often vote for something because it is the right thing even though voting the other way would benefit them financially. This is NOT dumb, it is admirable, and it's not because they are programmed robots but rather because they have thought about things on more than just a simple money level. Those evangelical you disdain so freely have the most-consistent set of principled positions of any voting block in the country, and they do not shift their positions with the shifting winds because the positions are anchored in principles.
Your post makes as much sense as I would make if I said that people who believe in evolution are all a bunch of mindless morons who believe anything Stephan Jay Gould told them to believe. Dumb and simplistic.
You seem to have completely missed the point of the texts you quoted. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a proclamation to send forth tax collectors to take from one person by force and give to another. You are correct that Jesus taught about the pointlessness of accumulating vast wealth for yourself while others suffer, BUT he NEVER said your wealth should be taken from you by force and handed out to those who were unwilling to work. INDIVIDUALS are responsible for giving by their own free will as they see fit to those they see as being in legitimate need.
Indeed, you are incapable of being charitable to others if government comes and takes all that you can spare, so it can go buy the votes of the poor by handing it out and taking credit for it.
Do not show how much you "care" for the poor by voting for some jerk who promises to "soak the rich" and give to the poor while leaving you alone...that's NOT Christian, nor is it charity. You get no moral brownie points for supporting the theft of somebody else's stuff to benefit the needy. Instead, look around for somebody in need and then sell your PS3 or XBOX360 and give the proceeds to that person in need. THAT is charity.
Socialism is completely incompatible with Christianity
Reminder: "Thou shalt not covet" (don't desire what others have) and "Thou Shalt not steal" (don't take things that belong to others) and of course you could go to the bits about not feeding people who refuse to work, not placing excessive burdens on those doing the work, etc. etc. etc.
All the New Testament instructions for charity and giving and caring for others are calls to individuals to deal properly with other individuals, and to do so because it is right rather than because of government force
Christianity calls upon individuals to give freely from their own possessions as they see fit to those in need (this is actual charity). Christianity has nothing in common with the idea that the majority will enable a taxman to rob people against their will in order to give to both the poor (who might be poor through no fault of their own) and the lazy (who are poor because they hate work or like drugs and alcohol more than food). The Bible (New Testament) actually lumps tax collectors in with prostitutes and other unpopular sinners. It is true that some left-leaning Christians created a movement called "liberation theology" which attempted to give a moral basis to Marxism, but that appeal only works with people who have not actually read a Bible completely from cover to cover (as one generally does with books one claims are important).
Also, the continual references to a theocracy in the context of Christianity are themselves a laughable display of ignorance. There is simply nothing in Christian theology that would lead to a theocracy The closest thing possible already happened long ago when the former Roman empire converted to Christianity The secular government of the time embraced and used the new faith with a result that was still much less than a pure theocracy but was still much more than anything advocated in the New Testament (which does not have a focus on government or law).
I recommend a little less Dave Letterman and Jon Stewart, and a little more serious study... because that line of "We really need to throw away the false dichotomy between Capitalism and Socialism" displays a flabbergasting ignorance of both systems.
The ignorance of history is a major factor here.
indeed
The founders lived in a world where the excesses of religion wielding political power was a very present thing.
Um, not so much. The excess was in secular leaders hijacking religion, making their own government-established versions and then using those to justify all of their secular abuses. The Church of England is a good example here, and the one our founders had most-clearly in mind
Thanks to the separation of church and state, we have been afforded the luxury of forgetting this.
No. Thanks to the "establishment clause" we have been spared the nightmare of a "Church of the United States" which everybody would be required to attend, fund, and submit to. The phrase "Separation of church and state" does not appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution; it appears in a letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a Baptist church in which he was telling them it was safe to support the new Constitution because it guaranteed the government would never interfere in their church (a promise now routinely broken and in the eyes of many, the deal is broken if the government forces certain issues like abortion and gay "marriage" i.e. if government gets to interfere in the teachings of the churches, then the doors are open for the churches to equally interfere in government).
But any ideology that deals in absolutes, whether it be secular or religious, will evoke the absolute to disdain lesser goods--and when you think you hold the absolute Truth or Good, all other goods become worthless. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, it is the mortal enemy of all goods
Those absolutist Darwinists, Atheists, Marxists, etc are the most dangerous of all
Life, liberty, happiness, charity, tolerance, knowledge, reason,...
Good, religious themes... and if you think "reason" and "knowledge" are not "religious" then you have not read any of the writings of numerous religious scholars. Start with the Apostle Paul for a little light reading before you move along to much more recent academic works with really big words in them
and anything that is not held up as absolute will be cast aside, along with all who would defend them. Billions have died, and will die, for the idols of dogma.
Millions, yes, but not billions. And the millions were all at the hands of wealth-redistributing atheists/pagans (Hitler/Stalin/Mao/PolPot...)
If religion has an evolutionary advantage, it is probably in strengthening ingroup solidarity at the expense of outgroup antagonism; effective in prehistory, catastrophic in a world of globalisation.
Religion generally is anti-evolutionary, as are social welfare programs, laws against rape and murder, environmental laws, etc. (Anything that helps the weak survive or limits the reproduction of the strong)
I suspect that religions will, in this century, claim at least a billion victims, and make Stalin, Hitler, and Mao look like amateurs.
It's an old, tired trick to lump all faiths together under the label "religions" so they can share collective blame, but that's like blaming all "political systems" for the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Yes, one particular religion might get the bomb and begin a nuclear holy war... but the other religions would be no more responsible than "science" or "engineering" for what happened
n the aftermath, Richard Dawkins will sound positively mild and conciliatory.
No, he will just keep sounding ignorant, hostile, irrational, and socially toxic
There are almost as many Gods as there are believers, and the first thing you will discover when the state imposes religion is that the state's God is not your God.
Indeed, this is what many conservatives learned in the decades since the left kicked God out of the schools and started re-writing all the books with a left-wing bias... The state God that has proven itself mo
Your knowledge of history is shockingly bad.
NAZI Ideology was a twisted mix of paganism and Norse mythology (with a few other dazzling bits tossed-in just to keep it confusing, as all cults do), but it was arising in the native land of Martin Luther, so Hitler and his party (decidedly non-Christian) had a policy of gradually absorbing the Christian holidays and traditions (like Christmas and Easter) and secularizing them in a slow conversion of the public. Christmas, for example, was being slowly shifted from a Christ-centered holiday to a patriotic and family-oriented holiday (there are surviving examples of the official party documents outlining all of this which you could easily study if you had any intellectual curiosity). This is well documented in their own words and you can study it in many archives. Hitler was actually introduced as God by his propagandist on several occasions (no actual Christian would ever allow his associates to introduce him this way). Much of the population was indeed culturally "Christian", but a much smaller portion of the population were seriously, personally Christian. The serious Christians were a threat to the Reich and some paid with their lives. As long as a significant portion of his population was culturally Christian, it suited Hitler to use those portions he could control or co-opt, but the plan was in place to eliminate the Christian faith in Germany and replace it with a quasi-religious racial cult of personality and devotion to the state.
Oh, and universal healthcare is indeed socialist. Healthcare requires the work of doctors, nurses, people who make drugs and medical devices etc. Somebody must pay those people to work, pay for the raw materials, processed materials, energy used, etc. You could provide all that for free, at the point of a gun.... or you could force other people to pay those costs, again, at the point of a gun. Taxation is at the point of a gun (if you doubt it, I dare you to not pay your taxes, and then resist when the authorities show-up to take your home away... at some point in the process, a government employee will show up and aim a gun at you. Most of us hand over the tax payments long before the guns are pointed (highly recommended)) Because it involves a finite supply of resources, government-enforced "universal healthcare" always ends-up in government control (direct or indirect) of the means of production and government control of resource allocation.
"healthcare" is not a "right" and is likely to only be "universal" when resources are unlimited. You cannot have a "right" to the fruit of another person's labor, just as nobody else as a "right" to grab the results of your labor. This is why every socialist muckraker always promises universal healthcare; it is the easiest way to trick middle class people into letting the socialist camel's nose under the tent.
Overtly-political pseudo-scientific claptrap "science" deserves overtly-political pseudo-analytical claptrap "analysis".
The continual stream of false accusations that their opponents are all funded by the oil industry was probably the first thing that got me to suspect something was wrong with AGW. If the sciencee is on your side, then you have no need to ascribe false motives and paymasters to everyone who disagrees with you.
Why is it that nobody assumes all these government-funded people who produce results that say governments should get bigger and more powerful are themselves biased by their funding sources?
Governments have spent billions on AGW research, and are preparing to spend trillions on it. The power and money that governments will control if they can convince everyone of AGW dwarfs anything any corporation ever dreamed of
They do destroy it when they show a pattern of the most basic manipulations of science and the peer review process and of who and what gets published
I am sorry, but a few sympathetic publishers of AGW articles riding in to the rescue of AGW paper writers (who have privately admitted to working very hard to make sure that only people who agree with them can get published or be editors at publications) serves more to raise my eyebrows and ask if these publications were involved in the manipulation of publications. That is just how bad it is when scientists choose to manipulate their peers, the process, and the public
"Character" is the measure of what you do when nobody is looking
By their e-mails, these men have exposed their character and it is rotten to the core
We are now left with no choice but to assume their guilt when we look at the their work products. Had these people done all of their work out in the sunshine, we would have been able to spot any errors or manipulations along the way and if their data was good, their processes solid, and results valid, then we would all be forced to see them as reputable scientists with just, perhaps, some nasty e-mail habits. Since we were not there when the work was done in secret, the peer-review process was manipulated in private, the data was manipulated in private, and the original data was deleted, our only way of knowing what was going on at the time and observing their process is the contemporaneous e-mail which, in court, would probably be seen as silimar to contemporaneous comments at a crime scene (which often get more weight than later reconstructions or recollections)
Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?
Absolutely
These clowns might have set it aside with such a comment to more-easily find it for future manipulations. When you are playing this many games with your code and your data and your published papers and your peer review journals, it probably gets tough to remember where all the tweaks are. Remember: they never thought anybody who was not a sworn Defender of the Faith would see this stuff.
Anybody who wants their work to cause trillions of dollars to be spent and millions of people to be required to alter their lives should be required to open source all of their code and data so that all persons affected can inspect it all. These jerks have been hiding their data and code for decades, always claiming to be pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow, priests of the one true faith of science, and only keeping secrets because of IP rules governing the data which they were using (and whose secrecy they agreed to protect only because by agreeing to the secrecy they got access to even more data to produce better results for the benefit of all). Anybody who reads both the e-mails and the code now knows this to be rubbish. They were hiding everything so that no critics would see and expose all the incompetence and dishonesty. They were working to peer review each-other's work and keep the work of critics from being peer reviewed so they could amplify their lies by claiming to be the only peer reviewed scientists.
They used Bernie Madoff style secrecy to cover a bigger-than-Bernie scam
Remember that these guys were not just claiming that the Earth is warming (many skeptics of AGW, myself included, agree on this point) but they were claiming that human-caused CO2 was causing the warming and that the warming is not part of a normal cycle. They will now be claiming their other data/work shows warming (which is widely accepted), and that anybody who does not agree (with the warming, and by implication the human causation) is "anti-science" and "funded by the oil industry" as an attempt to distract from the whole anthropogenic aspect (which is the part they were working so hard to prove by monkeying with everything).
Time for Jimmie Hansen to dump every last line of code and every byte of source data into the public square for a public review.
Time for all "climate change experts" to open-up or be prosecuted for fraud for the billions of tax dollars they have consumed under false pretense. When the data and code is released, we will need independent proof that it has not been massaged in any way in the time period between this leak and the eventual release, since we now know that this clique of pretend-scientists is a slimy bunch who's word cannot be trusted.
Actually, the "Use tax" is a fraud which some states are pulling on a poorly educated population. If you live in such a state, you should probably pay to avoid legal troubles, but that does not mean you should just passively accept the lies; you should complain continually to your lawless legislators.
The Constitution specifically prohibits states from taxing transactions that cross state lines, but state law makers who are unwilling to control their spending are always looking for something to tax. Those state law makers see vast piles of money in mail/phone/internet sales and claim they need to get a tax on them to make up for "lost sales taxes". To do this, they apply a tax, which they KNOW and ADMIT is a sales tax when explaining why they need it, but which they then name a "use tax" in order to put a fig leaf over the scam and help it get through friendly courts. Note that if you buy a book at your local store, there is no "use tax" on it, and if you buy a book online they will not look to see if you actually use it.
Back to first principles:
Sales taxes are levied on local businesses in order for the locals to get revenue from each sale in order to help pay for all the local services that benefit the business (like fire, police, etc). By taxing the sale, the government gets its cut off-the-top, and therefore collects revenue even from a business that is making no profits (but which still consumes services). The Online/Phone/Mail retailer perhaps should pay sales taxes on ALL transactions WHERE THEY ARE LOCATED since they get services there, but it is wrong to allow a state where the business lacks a presence to get in on the transaction without providing the associated services. The reason so many states would oppose just having businesses collect and pay the tax locally at the local rate on all transactions (which would be easy for all parties, and reasonably rational since no sales would then be seen as interstate) is that states with Democrat legislatures and the associated stupidly-high sales taxes, would be crippling their businesses even more than they already do.
The further we get from the system our founders setup, the more bloated, inefficient, expensive, and dishonest our government gets
Glenn Beck plays lots of videos of Obama officials ranting and raving in praise of mass murderers and dictators, then invites team Obama to explain themselves... and the left is so outraged that they respond by playing videos of him raping and murdering.... no... wait... they have no such videos for him to explain....
The website was not a valid parody of Beck at all. It was just another nasty Obama hugger trying to distract from the questions Beck asked using video of Obama's own people ranting like lunatics It is not Beck's fault that so many on team Obama are on video that way... it's their own fault. The Obama vetting people allowed these people to be hired with, apparently, less background checking than a circus clown using google was able to do. This is a classic case of getting mad at the messenger when you do not like the message.
Beck at least loudly proclaims himself to be a circus clown and he has no governmental power or authority to do anything to anybody. He did not just make-up a bunch of ugly accusations about criminal offenses by Obama and then demand a response. Beck played videos of Obama people who were making, or advising on, government policy and some of whom were overseeing billions of tax dollars raving like certifiable lunatics and he then asked the administration to provide an alternate explanation for what was said that would be less nasty than the actual words uttered by team Obama.
There is no video of Beck bragging about a rape and a murder I would have hoped that the brainier-than-normal crowd who hang-out on slashdot would have seen the invalid comparison immediately and even the liberals here would rise above their biases to see that. The day Beck or anybody else on Fox accuse Obama of rape and murder with no evidence whatsoever, I will join the left in being outraged.
Well, it really depends on what one considers a news organization. I've tried to watch Fox... I really have (and no, I'm not a liberal). However, Fox News is news in the way Jon Stewart is... they use a "news format" but they have an obvious agenda. Obvious enough that I would call them an editorial organization that occasionally reports on the news.
Golly, I guess we should depend on CBS for real news... oops, wait, they used falsified documents to try to harm the re-election chances of George W Bush...
Oh, perhaps we can trust NBC... um, wait, aren't they the ones who rigged a pickup truck gas tank with model rocket motors to scare Americans into fearing that their big US pickup trucks would explode?
Well, there's always ABC... but didn't they spend a bunch of time hyping the idea that Reagan was responsible for downing KAL-007? Did they ever even tell their audience that one of the people they used was in fact an angry old Jimmy Carter administration member?
I guess there's always trusty CNN... wait, nope, didn't they make deals with Saddam Hussein to not report certain things in exchange for access?
Ah... the New York Times... the lode-star of progressive/liberal journalism... wait, aren't they the ones who wrote glowing stories about how wonderful life was in Stalin's Russia while neglecting to tell their readers about the massacre of millions of civilians which the paper knew about?
Ooooh, Fox is evil because they have Beck (a guy who calls himself a "circus clown") running one of their editorial shows, and he's a right-winger... but PBS, for example, is wonderful because they have LBJ's political hack, Bill Moyers, running one of their editorial programs. Fox is evil because they had Bush press guy Tony Snow run a talking-head Sunday news show, but ABC is wonderful because they have Clinton's chief of staff George Stephanopoulos running their Sunday talking head show. Yup. THAT seals it! there's NOTHING on Fox that can be trusted...
I could go on, but why bother...
Because people are "only human", they all have opinions and they all have the potential to surrender to the temptation to use any power they have to push their own biases and agendas. The answer to that problem is to have enough outlets with enough different views so that individuals can watch the various sources and decide which are most credible for themselves. For many years, there were so few news outlets (ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS) and those were all soaked in the same left-of-center group-think that some people (particularly liberals who were happy and comfortable with the situation) thought what they were getting was unbiased. Conservatives were not fooled, they watched network after network hire Democrat political activists and plug them into their "news shows" as supposedly neutral reporters and were just forced to listed to the propaganda. Conservatives watched and counted as all the political shows always stacked their panels with 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 ratios of liberals to conservatives and claimed to be balanced. When PBS had a two-man "balance", they used liberal Democrat Mark Shields and Independent (to the left of a Republican) David Gergen. Now that ONE network (not even broadcast but just on satellite and cable), Fox, has a Conservative bent to its EDITORIAL programs, and requires its NEWS people to be neutral (rather than left-of-center) people on the left are outraged. Conservatives are used to having to watch liberal news and editorial content, but liberals are not used to even seeing conservative editorial content. Nobody is forcing liberals to watch Fox; if they do not like it they can just change the channel, or turn it off (that's what they always said about conservatives when conservatives complained about TV shows...) Liberals have a choice that conservatives never had: they can turn to all the other networks for "news" they like.
Fox is still too far to the left, but it's probably the best one can hope for given that its parent is a giant multi-national corporation just lik
For one thing, nearly every US residence is wired for 220 and Americans have 220V standard wiring, plugs and sockets. Americans only waste the extra resources on beefier wiring, plugs, sockets, and breakers where actually needed: between the main panel and large items like ovens, washers, dryers, table saws, etc. We do not need to run 220 lines and use massive plugs for our MP3 players, Televisions, radios, etc.Rather than putting a fuse into every power cord, Americans have been moving from an already good combination of fuses/breakers in devices and breakers in the main panel to arc-fault breakers in the main panel. With arc-fault breakers in the main panel, Americans have safer wiring in their homes than they would have with fused plugs; Arc-fault breakers protect against normal shorts (like fuses or normal breakers), ground faults (like the GFI breakers) and arcing (like from frayed wires, nails driven through wires in the walls etc.)
Americans can get sockets with safety shutters in them if they choose to, rather than because their government forces them to... we call this freedom; most of us are smart enough not to kill ourselves with our plugs and outlets.
British plugs with their massive prongs and built-in fuses are more akin to weapons used in the Roman circus than to consumer-friendly, low-cost, easy to store, and easy to use American plugs :-P
American buildings are also not wired in loops like many European buildings. The simple robust scheme in the US makes it so that people in the US can be trusted to do their own wiring work, which is something many Europeans (including the UK article author) are not legally permitted to do. An American can wire his basement with rugged but inexpensive parts and check the work with a simple $10 circuit checker; A Brit must hire somebody to wire his basement and then the installation must be certified with an expensive professional test device
Turn the tables, indeed!
Gay activists published a list of supporters of the anti-gay-marriage ammendment in California in the hope of getting their opponents to be punished (some were fired from their jobs) or intimidated (so they would not participate in such political action in the future), but they ought to have thought this through. Nothing but self-restraint will now keep their opponents from publishing lists of pro-gay-bill supporters in the future which will in-turn help people fire and intimidate them.
This stuff (publishing lists to help people intimidate/retaliate against political opponents) has the potential to get very nasty indeed and both sides would be well-advised to think before pulling the trigger.
If you want something on a ballot, you should be able to try to put it there without fear (nobody needs to know who you are), and each voter should feel free to vote for or against it without fear (it should stand or fall on the merits rather than because of who sponsored it/supported it/opposed it)
The USPS can take any random sheet of paper across the country to a specific person for less than the price of a coke, with door-to-door service.
That piece of mail is heavily subsidized and carried at a loss. The USPO is deeply in debt, and considering closing facilities and stopping saturday deliveries. Coke delivers a clean, safe product anywhere in America and, indeed much of the world, seven days per week with consistent quality... and pound-for-pound the Coke is probably cheaper. Coke makes the can, makes the contents, puts them together, and delivers them to vending machines and stores, even stocking the shelves. The post office just carries what somebody else made, and while they usually deliver successfully, they assume no responsibility when they fail. If Coke fails to deliver a safe product, they get sued and are made to take responsibility. If Coke fails to deliver the product to its destination, THEY and not the customer, take the loss.
Enjoy your cheap tainted meat!
We get tainted meat WITH all the regulations in place. What works quite well is INFORMATION and market forces; if Consumer Reports or TV or Radio news report tells consumers that company X is selling cheap tainted meat the consumers run away from it and company X goes belly-up.
Microsoft is clearly on it's last legs.
Another failure of government to do even the simple things we pay them Trillions to do... like block the occasional giant monopoly, or deliver checks (using that amazing postal service) to the proper old people while they are actually alive and not every month for ten years after they've begun pushing up daisies.
Remember when a poorly regulated free market destroyed the US economy?
No, but I DO remember Congressman Barney Frank pushing government workers to back-off from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack (pseudo-government entities) and publicly talking about how safe they were (his statement having greater authority because of his government position). I remember government oversight powers being used to push bankers to make lots of reckless loans. If the government had not signaled that it was backing-up all the fannie/freddie loans, and if government had not used its oversight authority to pressure the banks, then all the bad loans at the heart of the 2008 meltdown would likely not have happened. Indeed, without fannie/freddie, the damage from the meltdown probably would have been better limited to only the reckless banks who would have been punished for their bad behaviour by being driven out of business withe their assets and customers being absorbed by the better-behaved solvent banks. The 2008 meltdown had government written all over it. In 2001 when Bush admin officials saw fannie and freddie as impending train-wrecks, they asked congress for the executive authority to deal with the situation. A Republican congress said "no" (this was before 9/11). For a few years, while everybody was distracted by the middle-east, the federal oversight of fannie and freddie remained with the congress. When Democrats took over the congress 3 years ago, fannie and freddie had become 5 years worse of a problem but the new overseers (Frank in the House and Dodd in the Senate) used their government powers to push fannie and freddie to be even more reckless. In 2007, one year before the meltdown, the Republicans in congress could finally see the approaching problem, so they proposed a law to give the Bush admin the power to oversee fannie/freddie madness, but every single senate Democrat, including then-senators Biden, and Obama (who took campaign money from fannie/freddie) voted "no", leaving oversight in congressional hands and Bush with no authority to avert the impending collapse. For that last year and a half before the collapse, Democrats controlled both houses of congress and they pushed to make the problem worse rather than working to make things better. Both parties were involved and the result was a typical bi-partisan GOVERNMENT mess
sooo....
If using sneakernet, and a guy copies data to a floppy (the physical layer), walks to another guy's machine (wearing a brand of sneakers that are not licensees, of course) and copies the data into that machine while that user is looking away from his machine, is sneakernet in violation?
I hate patents on broad concepts that anybody would have come up with if he had needed to. Patents should only cover things that anybody in the field could NOT have come up with if he needed them. We need some tech-savy lawyers and judges to put some real muscle into the "obviousness" test.
Half the wizards on the network are evil, but they are the ones that pop-up on connected Microsoft desktops.Having once been a noble idea, they are now consigned to a half-dead existence and have assumed the appearance of an animated paperclip or a four-legged beast who is constantly searching.
A jury in East Texas will be composed of at least 10 people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that Jesus rode to work on a brontosaurus.
Well, I see the hate-speech and bigotry against Christians is on display again. This is one of the easiest attacks to make, because Christians do not kill people who draw cartoons.
I personally do not believe in the concept of "hate speech", being a supporter of free speech, but I am always impressed by its use by the left who seem so obsessed with it.
Nobody claims that Jesus rode a dinosaur. Indeed, while there are a few who think that dinos and humans may have coexisted, I have encountered an atheist who had that particular belief and there are probably a few more like him, so I guess it would be okay to say that Darwin ran a T-rex ranch. It is also true that SOME Christians believe in a "young Earth", many believe in an "old Earth". Of those who DO believe in a "young Earth", most believe the system was created with an apparent age and everything functioning (fully grown plants and animals, the light photons from stars already in transit, geologic layers, fossils, etc.) You may certainly reject their argument, but if it is true then there is simply never going to be a way to prove or disprove it. If they are correct, then they are not as nutty as you imply and indeed their confused critics are the presumably gullible ones who should be feared on a jury.
Since neither science nor religion will ever truly solve that question, I prefer that we all settle for the jury qualifications our founders gave us: a group of one's peers (in the traditional sense of the word) who are mentally sound (though perhaps not philosophically sound, or well acquainted with the issues). The results are not always great, but they are as fair as we can get. If the people who understand technology-related issues are unhappy with the results produced by their fellow citizens on juries, then they should look in the mirror and ask themselves the following question: what could I do better to help my friends and neighbors better understand these issues? If the lawyers on the side of the issues we support are losing, then we should ask ourselves and them to think about why they are failing so badly in the task of explaining their cases to the juries. No jury can be expected to know all about the subject of a court case; our system of justice relies upon competent advocates providing good information to juries, which is one of the reasons we have lawyers in the court.
Before the United States was founded, one of its founders, John Adams, took the case of some British soldiers who had shot some American colonists before a jury of American colonials. Every one of the colonials on that jury, if asked, would likely have been a "young Earth" type of Christian (and not even the type who believe in an apparent age) who you would have denounced as a fool and they likely all had reasons to hate the British soldiers... but Adams won the case.
There was a time when an ice sheet covered most of North America. Then a serious case of global warming set in (oddly, this began before the car was invented, and before Al Gore started to speak, so massive levels of man-made CO2 could not have been the culprit... ) The amount of Ice in the northern hemisphere has been shrinking ever since (albeit with some occasional variability) and its no surprise that the remaining ice would shrink even faster with so little of it left. How is this unusual to anybody with a sufficiently mature view of things to not evaluate all climate relative to conditions during his personal childhood years? Tanking the long view, who is to say what the "right" climate for the Earth is? Sure, man may have caused some warming within an overall warming cycle (which will most-likely be followed by some distant future ice age).
Let us assume that mankind switched to technologies that have a cooling impact instead of a warming one. Let us further assume that mankind does not wipe itself out before the start of the next ice age. Should those people alive then go crazy over global cooling and risk seriously damaging their economies and harming possibly millions of their individual citizens in order to stop global cooling? Perhaps it is best to develop the technologies to allow people all over the world to live comfortably in ANY climate (which has the happy side effect of opening up much more of the planet's surface to people to reduce crowding) and left the Earth warm and cool as it happens. If you do not know with precision what causes the natural warming/cooling cycles, what limits they go to, why they go to those limits, and what causes the rebounds, you cannot honestly measure man's impacts. Furthermore, since man is just an evolved animal, everything man does is just as natural as everything a bear does... so if global warming is caused by man, then it is natural.
Switch-off the auto pilot and spew something other than liberal talking points
the gop has for the last 20 years engaged in an antiscience crusade
The GOP has NOT engaged in any anti-science crusade. Reagan, for instance pushed SDI claiming American Scientists who created "the bomb" were fully-capable of an equally challenging task of making it obsolete, while liberals claimed it was too hard. Republicans have been pro-nuclear, and many Democrats are terrified of it. Republicans tend to like the space program (Bush#2 told NASA to build new rockets capable of moon and mars missions and had a NASA administrator with multiple science and engineering degrees) while many Democrats see NASA as a department to be cut to get money for social programs (Obama promised to gut it, and put a PR hack in charge of reviewing it; she's now been nominated to an associate admin post). There was an active political movement on the left to make a political attack using that claim and to get certain scientists in more liberal fields to claim they were being muzzled. Notice how many times a certain lefty scientist at Goddard held press briefings to claim he was being muzzled? ( I seem to recall the count at over a hundred, which has got to be some sort of record for a person who is being muzzled)
They're the party that tries to teach creationism
No, the GOP never tries to teach creationism... what it DOES do, is assert the rights of parents in communities to have control over their schools (and that includes the rights of those people in those communities to have their schools not tell johnie and suzy that science has proven their religion false). The GOP ALWAYS favored local control of schools which the rare exception of when GW Bush went off-the-rails and teamed-up with Ted Kennedy on the big-government "no child left behind" malfunction. I, for one, have no problem with the schools teaching the theory of evolution as a theory just as I have no problem with the schools teaching various economic theories as theories, and I certainly do not want the school teaching some particular religion. I consider it totally unacceptable for some elementary school teacher to denigrate ANY kid in class, and certainly not MY kid, with some of the hostile God-is-dead and your-religion-is-an-emotional-crutch rhetoric that has been pushed in some classrooms in the country who then hides behind claims of academic freedom and claims critics are "anti-science". I am equally opposed to any teacher advancing communist economic theories as facts.
They're the party that band[sic] the creation of useful stem cell lines for research.
False. The federal government had not yet formulated policies on this before Bush, and Clinton/Gore had not been funding it. Bush did not ban ANY research. What Bush DID do, was say that the federal government would fund stem cell research (unlike previous presidents whom I presume you think were all "anti-science") but NOT FUND the creation of NEW lines using discarded embryos (an act that many taxpayers consider the taking of innocent life). Bush left it to states and private interests to spend THEIR money if they so chose on such research. THERE IS NO BAN ON THE RESEARCH, Bush was just not going to take money at gunpoint from taxpayers to fund research that those taxpayers consider murder.
They're the party that denies the overwhelming evidence of man made global warming.
Sorry, but this over-simplification of a very complex issue is getting tiresome. The evidence is NOT so overwhelming; there are MANY scientists who do not buy into this and many others who do, but who think there are smarter ways to deal with it than the Al Gore way. When anybody who disagrees is called a "denier", is denied grants, is denied tenured teaching positions, is accused of being in the hip pocket of evil polluters, and is shouted-down, SCIENCE is not at work. I learned long ago, that the person with the weakest argument is usually the one who resorts to shouting and name c