Democracy can only work when the electorate is educated about the issues; and since the issues center about life itself, they have to be educated about life.
However, in a poor country, education is a premium, and therefore not everyone has a good education. This leaves the field open to opportunists who prey upon the people's ignorance; the clergy here being the opportunistic organization there.
Everywhere there is rampant poverty, and rampant ignorance, the clergy has a stronghold on the people. After all, religion has a 100,000 year headstart against Science.
The rampant poverty is exacerbated by the corrupt political class and the corrupt civil servants, all of them having a vested interest in the status-quo.
The inability of civil society to eradicate poverty has led to the encroachment of radical views, in that case, religious organizations that want to apply simplistic solutions to what appears to be a solution of the problems they claim to address, but as the experience has shown in Iran, they only seek power for it's own sake.
It is nice and well to claim that Egypt should have freedom of speech and democracy, but this cannot happen in the current state of general ignorance and political illiteracy.
The egyptian leaders are walking a very fine line to prevent yet another islamic republic à la Iran. However, their own corruptness cannot insure a progressive solution, as this would mean to properly educate the masses, who would then see how corrupt they are.
The solution would be a communist-like takeover for one generation where people are forcibly governed by a strong State which would educate the younger generations in order to allow them to be able to democratically exert their political power when they come to age, all the while laying down the foundation of a successful economy where opportunity is not the province of a privileged few.
No amount of talking is going to erase the jew-hatred from the quran, and hamas will therefore never stop.
There is no jew-hatred in the coran. Before the sionists appropriated themselves Palestine, over the protests of the established inhabitants, the only place where jews had not suffered systematic persecution was in the islamic countries.
Of course, once the sionists have kicked-out the palestinians and stacked them in camps in neighbouring countries, it is not surprising that jews became a little bit less popular in the region...
If i understand correctly , the problem is the some students cheat by copying over the tests and homework.
Though fucking niggitty-noogies.
If the teacher is **TOO GODDAMMED FUCKING STUPID** to change her tests from year to year, it's **HER GODDAMMED FUCKING CUNT-SUCKING, DONKEY-RAPING, UNCLE-FUCKING PROBLEM**.
She has no **GODDAMMED FUCKING RIGHT** to make it the student's problem, and much less to **STEAL** their notes.
How much more such operations could they conduct if they weren't so clueless by having agents investigate peaceful protesters and non-criminal **HACKERS** (in the original sense, that is, not meaning "cracker")????
That's completely untrue. Say, for instance, I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. I could have diabetes, high blood pressure and had 3 heart attacks, and I'll still get coverage because I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. And I did it without the federal government!
You'd get covered yes, but the moment you claim, bingo! the "pre-existing condition" card gets played, go to jail, do not collect $200.
Please give me one example of the U.S. federal government taking over for a private industry, where the end results were better than if the federal government did not meddle at all.
Sure. Since it was setup in 1971 by Richard Nixon, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation has been running U.S. transcontinental, international and intercity passenger trains. Since then, the rolling stock has been completely replaced (twice) and ridership is soaring.
And believe me, before Amtrak came to be, the service given by private industry was absolutely horrenduous.
First off, I'm all for universal health care. I'm just against having the federal government run it. I'm all for enacting NEEDED health care reform. I'm just against expanding failed or failing government programs like Medicare and especially Medicaid in order to do it. Of course, it seems that you're under the assumption that if you're not pounding the socialization drum, you must be a facist, right?
Why is it always assumed that the government can't to a good job? Up in Canada, it's the government who runs the medical insurance, and the right-wing party which is in power right now is not making the slightest peep in privatizing the system, because he knows damn well that if he were to think about perhaps talking about probably doing it, it would be it's death sentence.
People here are just very happy with the government universal health insurance.
First off, I just don't understand why people insist that universal health care == single payer. The two are completely separate; you can certainly have the former without requiring the latter.
That's because only a compulsory single payer is able to avoid discriminating for pre-existing conditions.
There are MANY reasons to argue against single payer health care.... and that is beyond the scope of this/. discussion. I do, however, have to object to your dumbing down of the issue.
"Dumbing down", as opposed to **OBFUSCATING** in order to maintain the status-quo, so that people keep believing that "the government is **BAAAAD**" so private insurer can continue to gouge the public???
While one of the main goals of HIPAA was to insure privacy of health care with respect to portability of insurance (the H, I, and P in HIPAA), there is far more to HIPAA than just dealing with private insurance companies.
Bullshit. What happens is that insurance companies are looking at all possible ways of weaseling out of their contracts in order to increase their profits, and to do this, they have armies of "investigators" who social-engineered their ways into medical records.
For instance, what if a prospective employer wants to take a look at your EMR to see if you have chronic medical conditions that would require you to take days off in the future?
This is an unacceptable invasion of privacy. If you believe that croporations shall have the right of life or death to people, you are truly a fascist.
Or you have been sorely misinformed and swallowed the whole hook line and sinker of fascists arguments.
If you were a millionnaire whose fortune would depend on maintaining the status-quo, as you are pitifully trying to do, you would not hang on Slashdot on a sunday morning.
Of course, that's not important for you. What's important for you seems to be inserting a rant supporting your political viewpoint. Kudos, my friend, kudos, for trying to distract a real argument with your strawman.
How about you? Why are you so hell bent on preseving the "liberty" you have been led to believe you have? Why are you thinking like a zillionnaire???
The reason for the requirement of stringent privacy requirements for health-record keeping is solely due to the sheer number of unregulated, unaccountable organizations dealing with them.
I am talking, of course, of private health-insurance companies.
The obvious cost-effective solution is to get rid of them, and implement an universal, single-payer insurer that would cover absolutely everyone (no opting-out) with exactly the same coverage (no more time wasted to figure out if some procedure is covered or not).
Since coverage of everyone will be compulsory, there will be no more need to discriminate for pre-existing conditions, thus removing the need for intrusive record snooping in the first place.
In fact, such a solution is currently in place in **ALL** the industrialized countries, except in the USA.
There shall be no more pussyfooting around the bush with this issue, the bull's apple need to be bitten by the horns right now.
In addition to finally covering everyone, the USA will no longer be a turd-world country and a laughingstock in respect to health-care, and in bonus, all the rotten parasites that fester in and around private health-insurance companies will be forced to find an honourable way of paying the bills.
Youâ(TM)re obviously american, and therefore culturally unable to understand other cultures, so it is pointless to argue with you as your mind is already set in concrete.
Perhaps a good question to ask is, would you tolerate Israel randomly bombing Gaza?
The West apparently does. The US has said nothing to disparage the savagely disproportioned sionist retaliation against Gaza, and instead has blamed the victim (as is usual for extreme right-wingers).
The fact is that it is the sionists who violated the cease-fire by shutting down supplies to Gaza, then by sending commandos to kill militants. It is only after that time that the rockets were fired.
You should get your information through non-jewish-controlled media, say though the CBC or the BBC or even Al-Jazira.
How is it that the other Anglo-Saxon countries are all WORSE than the US when it comes to digital rights and freedoms? Canada's version of the DMCA is worse, NZ has this, Australia has its wonderful new Great Barrier Firewall planned, and don't even get me started on Britain and encryption. Seriously?
That's because anglo-saxon countries have this notion, derived from the magna-carta, that anything that comes from the State is bad, wrong, corrupted and whatnot.
The net result is that, since the Industrial Revolution, where the bourgeois have attained unprecedented wealth, to the point of eclipsing nobility itself, the effective political power has shifted to the bourgeois themselves. At the origin, democracies would only let rich landowners (bourgeois) to vote, and even though more and more people have been enfranchised over the centuries, the cultural notion that the Government/State is bad keeps bright people from seeking public office, leaving essentially failed businessmen into politics.
Being failed businessmen, they absolutely depend on wealthy contributors for re-election (elections cost money) so they are quite ready to listen only to their "benefactors" and not their true electors, the general public.
The "entertainment" "industry" is a master at bullshit and deception (it's their trade, after all), so it is no surprise that it has a disproportionate ear amongst lawmakers, hence the disproportionately lopsided laws that have been passed lately to unilelaterally give that "industry" an unfair advantage over everything else.
Remember some 6-7 years ago when the entertainment cartel was pushing to have every single storage device to be equipped with special circuitry that would ensure that it would not copy copyrighted information? I'm sure banks would have been thrilled to have less responsive disk drives to put in their transaction-processing mainframes, and doctors would have been glad to have less-performing CAT scanners to make sure that the profits margins of Hymiewood be preserved against pirates of the non-Carribean type.
Big business has nothing to gain from Democracy; a truly concerned Democratic government will follow the concerns of the population, one of which is not being ripped-off by croporate con artists. So it is therefore in the interest of the great bourgeois (billionnaires) to suppress Democracy as much as possible. For the last 30 years, they have embarked on a unprecedented smear campaign against democracy, one tactic of them being planting failed businessmen that make inept decisions, thus furthering the alienation the electorate feels for politicians. They have done wonders: 30 years later, the public trusts policicians less than used car salesmen!!! The general idea being that the electorate (that's YOU, citizens!) will gladly elect the fist politicians that will promise to streamline all that process by eliminating the inefficiencies.
This is exactly how Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
Anglo-saxon countries stand at a particular disadvantage there, since the anglo-saxon culture is rooted around the concept of an inept government, and it is virtually impossible to remove such key cultural concepts from a culture.
The late A. E. Van-Vogt said that "people get the government they deserve". Well, as long as anglo-saxons will elect failed businessmen in extremely expensive elections, they will be ruled by the puppets of big croporations, and there will be such intensely assinine laws passed.
It will take more than a depression to wean americans from their cars.
For at least four generations, they have been thoroughly brainwashed into having the perceived "freedom" a car gives them.
Public transportation is no longer in the collective psyche, and has been depicted by marketing agencies as for "losers".
People will sacrifice their health in order to pay for their car repairs, as it is virtually impossible to live without a car, unless one lives in a metropolis with a less than abysmal transit system.
However, several steps could be taken.
The first, of course, is to offer an alternative. No need for high-speed lines for a start, mere passenger service on existing rail lines would be a good start.
Those services could be run at an "intermediate" speed, on the order of 130 km/h (~80 mph -- simply because operation above 80 mph in the US requires expensive automatic train stop signalling).
But 80 mph operation on heavy freight lines is problematic, as the freight trains run at 60 mph, and unless you have double-track and extensive "high-speed" (that's 40 mph) crossovers and a very astute dispatcher that can weave the passenger trains around the freights, you will not be able to operate the passenger trains significantly faster than the freights.
The only case where a totally new high-speed (>120 mph) line is warranted is when the traffic density warrants it. France built their TGV network when their 4 track "imperial line" between Paris and Lyon was being totally saturated.
So, for the time being, one could only count on regional trains to meet the demand.
Then how will this be implemented? As of now, going the Amtrak route is the best option available, as only Amtrak has the legal power to force (private) railroads to let them use their tracks; it also has more than 35 years of experience in operating intercity trains (an art private railroads lost almost 50 years ago). Right now, individual states routinely contract with Amtrak to provide regional services.
The problem, however, is the lack of rolling stock, precluding the expansion that could be effected.
Right now, there is only one railcar builder that can offer north-american "track legal" passenger rolling stock, Bombardier (The european-built northwestern "Cascade Talgos" and the Ottawa "Talents" are not "track legal", and operate the first operates under a special FRA waver, and the second on a physically-enforced time-segregated rail line along with german train control INDUSI signalling. As of the Via Rail "Renaissance" chunnel cars, they have been expensively retrofitted to become "track-legal"), and they cannot easily ramp-up their production, as their facilities are already busy with the fulfilment of New-York City car orders.
You cannot realistically expect automakers to build trains, if only because the end product is significantly larger than autos. Carbuilding facilities are geared for small production runs (1000 cars is a **HUGE** order), and every production run is heavily customized, as various rail operators have different needs. Perhaps the only thing that can be reused form automakers is the workers, and that is doubtful, as carbulding is hardly an assembly line operation, calling for specialized trademen, so here you are calling for extensive manpower training. It is not for nothing that the last time an auto-builder tried to make a train, the effort was a fiasco...
No, the US has really painted itself in a corner with it's infatuation with automobiles. It cannot realistically bring back yesteryear's passenger rail system overnight, it simply does not have the necessary manufacturing capability.
It will take more than a recession to do so; perhaps nothing short of a revolution will do...
already. universal healthcare, other public services, or other services that are held by private sector in other countries work very well in europe, but SOMEHOW, goverment is always 'inefficient' in united states.
... i have to say this here - if, you are unable to make your government work more efficiently than european countries, its YOUR fault.
...
and no, blabbering 'government is inefficient' and selling your butt to private sector WONT help, just like we saw what happened with healthcare, and credit crisis.
Darn right.
It is all cultural. It really started in 1215, when wimpy monarch King John was bullied by his barons to sign the magna carta, an abomination that limited the power of the King (the State) towards the barons.
Out of this, grew the vague notion that whaever the State (the King) does is bad, corrupted, wrong, etc. And when the bourgeoisie took power at the turn of the nineteenth century, the path was well-cleared for the "laissez-faire" victorian government that saw, amongst an unprecedented buildup of wealth, abysmal amounts of poverty and social exclusion.
The well-to-do anglo-saxon bourgeois certainly did not need a State to provide them with what they could pay for.
As the anglo-saxon culture calls for the State to be bad, by extension, no good person would want to work for the State, as the bright people would be culturally expected to work for themselves alone. So it is natural to expect in such a cultural environment that whatever the State does is bad.
Never mind that the State does very well many things that the private sector doesn't do at all; like policing, road-building, justice, national defence and whatnot. The thing is that anglo-saxons perceive the State to not do things properly.
Googling the phrase "drive off the lot" returned the factoid that "With a hybrid car, buyers do not always immediately lose that 30 percent of the value the minute they drive off the lot." People who aren't extolling the virtues of hybrids quote slightly lower numbers, some 10-15%, some 15-20%. Still, do you really think that there is that much mechanical wear associated with driving 500 feet?
This is Texas. After all, the kids have to learn to be good ignorami rednecks somewhere, no? Better it to be in school than in some disreputable hovel where you don't know what kind of bad redneckness they'll learn...
Nothing new there. Railroaders have known for more than 150 years that steam locomotives had "personnalities"; within any given class of identical engines, there was the smooth runner, the good steamer, the rough rider and so on...
Someone who HATES people of faith for no other reason than they are people of faith is a religious bigot. Sound familiar? That's you. YOU ARE A BIGOT.
Look who's talking, a church deacon spitting his hate of others who don't share it's simplistic world view...
Many people of conscience and faith around the state of California voted for Proposition 8 because they disagreed with the idea of changing the definition of a traditional cultural institution to include homosexual unions.
They do not have conscience by denying a basic civil right to people their churches tell them to hate for no other reason that they love someone of the same sex. definition of a traditional cultural institution to include homosexual unions.
FAR from religious people trying to force their views on Gays, it was the EXACT OPPOSITE: The Gays have been FOR YEARS trying to force THEIR worldview down the throats of people of faith and conscience.
Total oxdung. No one has been forcing you to suck dick or take it up the arse (although it may do you some good). However, religious douchebags like you have been busy shoving their bigoted and retarded religious ways by telling them that they cannot love someone as much as they can do.
Proposition 8 is nothing but shoving hate to gay people by depriving them of the same degree of love heteros have been able to get.
To FORCE people of faith to accept a lifestyle choice they find abhorrent. To FORCE them to teach their children that it is OK to live a life of (what people of faith think is,) perversion.
Hey, look at the religious bigot talking! Now who's shoving his way down the throats of others????
That, and many MANY people voted for Prop 8 to send a message to the CA activist judiciary to back off and let DEMOCRACY take care of it, rather than trying to legislate from the bench. This was simply the people of California PROTECTING THEMSELVES and protecting democracy.
Democracy cannot go backwards; it only can go towards greater progress; this is why there are charter of rights and constitutions: to prevent the democratic progress from turning into a fascist dictature. This is why it is absolutely necessary to legislate from the bench, to undo the damage bigoted politicians do.
It's too bad you are too bigoted and prejudiced against people of faith to understand.
I have as much obligation towards "people of faith" as they have towards me. They do not take account of me? Fine, I will definitely take no goddammed fucking account of them either.
I'll leave you to your little hate fest now, you disgusting bigot.
The LDS church donated precisely 0$ to the Prop 8 campaign.
INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS of the LDS church donated rather large amounts. But NONE of that was from the LDS church organization proper.
Oxdung. Those people gave at the urging of their bigoted, stupid, retarded church. Therefore the church is responsible.
Your other comments about the LDS church are just religious bigotry.
It cannot be religious bigotry because I am an atheist.
Prop 8 is the will of the people, picking on the Mormons won't make you right, it just makes you a bigoted jerk.
It is impossible for an atheist to be bigoted, since bigotry emanates from religion.
On the other hand, Morons are bigot because their religion tells them to have gays for absolutely no scientific, rational reason.
The way you get ballistic over that clearly shows that you are incapable of independant, logical thought and you espouse the extremist views of a tiny minority that thinks nothing at shoving down it's lopsided interpretation of reality down the throat of others.
Tells me, what the fuck does it matters to others if two men or two women marry each other?
It only matters if those others are sick bigoted religious assholes who think that their duty is to enforce upon others their religious views.
...behold the behavior of leftist and activist Gays in California over the Prop 8 dispute. Despite the fact that Mormons make up less than 3% of the CA voting bloc that voted Prop 8 in, and Blacks and Latinos voted FOR Prop 8 in overwhelming numbers, the gays are ONLY targeting the Mormons.
The Morons are fair-game. Their intolerant, bigoted, retrograde church donated a disproportionate amount of money to promote the intolerant, bigoted retrograde proposition 8.
As a result, their tax-free status is being challenged in court, which should serve those intolerant, bigoted, retrograde morons right.
Obama's got big-ol' ears. Makes him look JUST as "chimpy" as Bush.
a recent seminar on the event I also found out an interesting fact: most estimates put the average daily caloric intake necessary for a neanderthal at around 7000. Cromagnum man (ie, us) can get along quite fine with 2000.
They are therefore perfectly suited to the average american diet, then...
Slashdot Mirror
However, in a poor country, education is a premium, and therefore not everyone has a good education. This leaves the field open to opportunists who prey upon the people's ignorance; the clergy here being the opportunistic organization there.
Everywhere there is rampant poverty, and rampant ignorance, the clergy has a stronghold on the people. After all, religion has a 100,000 year headstart against Science.
The rampant poverty is exacerbated by the corrupt political class and the corrupt civil servants, all of them having a vested interest in the status-quo.
The inability of civil society to eradicate poverty has led to the encroachment of radical views, in that case, religious organizations that want to apply simplistic solutions to what appears to be a solution of the problems they claim to address, but as the experience has shown in Iran, they only seek power for it's own sake.
It is nice and well to claim that Egypt should have freedom of speech and democracy, but this cannot happen in the current state of general ignorance and political illiteracy.
The egyptian leaders are walking a very fine line to prevent yet another islamic republic à la Iran. However, their own corruptness cannot insure a progressive solution, as this would mean to properly educate the masses, who would then see how corrupt they are.
The solution would be a communist-like takeover for one generation where people are forcibly governed by a strong State which would educate the younger generations in order to allow them to be able to democratically exert their political power when they come to age, all the while laying down the foundation of a successful economy where opportunity is not the province of a privileged few.
There is no jew-hatred in the coran. Before the sionists appropriated themselves Palestine, over the protests of the established inhabitants, the only place where jews had not suffered systematic persecution was in the islamic countries.
Of course, once the sionists have kicked-out the palestinians and stacked them in camps in neighbouring countries, it is not surprising that jews became a little bit less popular in the region...
What about tenure???
Though fucking niggitty-noogies.
If the teacher is **TOO GODDAMMED FUCKING STUPID** to change her tests from year to year, it's **HER GODDAMMED FUCKING CUNT-SUCKING, DONKEY-RAPING, UNCLE-FUCKING PROBLEM**.
She has no **GODDAMMED FUCKING RIGHT** to make it the student's problem, and much less to **STEAL** their notes.
How much more such operations could they conduct if they weren't so clueless by having agents investigate peaceful protesters and non-criminal **HACKERS** (in the original sense, that is, not meaning "cracker")????
500 years is still "limited"...
You'd get covered yes, but the moment you claim, bingo! the "pre-existing condition" card gets played, go to jail, do not collect $200.
Sure. Since it was setup in 1971 by Richard Nixon, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation has been running U.S. transcontinental, international and intercity passenger trains. Since then, the rolling stock has been completely replaced (twice) and ridership is soaring.
And believe me, before Amtrak came to be, the service given by private industry was absolutely horrenduous.
Why is it always assumed that the government can't to a good job? Up in Canada, it's the government who runs the medical insurance, and the right-wing party which is in power right now is not making the slightest peep in privatizing the system, because he knows damn well that if he were to think about perhaps talking about probably doing it, it would be it's death sentence.
People here are just very happy with the government universal health insurance.
That's because only a compulsory single payer is able to avoid discriminating for pre-existing conditions.
"Dumbing down", as opposed to **OBFUSCATING** in order to maintain the status-quo, so that people keep believing that "the government is **BAAAAD**" so private insurer can continue to gouge the public???
Bullshit. What happens is that insurance companies are looking at all possible ways of weaseling out of their contracts in order to increase their profits, and to do this, they have armies of "investigators" who social-engineered their ways into medical records.
This is an unacceptable invasion of privacy. If you believe that croporations shall have the right of life or death to people, you are truly a fascist.
Or you have been sorely misinformed and swallowed the whole hook line and sinker of fascists arguments.
If you were a millionnaire whose fortune would depend on maintaining the status-quo, as you are pitifully trying to do, you would not hang on Slashdot on a sunday morning.
How about you? Why are you so hell bent on preseving the "liberty" you have been led to believe you have? Why are you thinking like a zillionnaire???
I am talking, of course, of private health-insurance companies.
The obvious cost-effective solution is to get rid of them, and implement an universal, single-payer insurer that would cover absolutely everyone (no opting-out) with exactly the same coverage (no more time wasted to figure out if some procedure is covered or not).
Since coverage of everyone will be compulsory, there will be no more need to discriminate for pre-existing conditions, thus removing the need for intrusive record snooping in the first place.
In fact, such a solution is currently in place in **ALL** the industrialized countries, except in the USA.
There shall be no more pussyfooting around the bush with this issue, the bull's apple need to be bitten by the horns right now.
In addition to finally covering everyone, the USA will no longer be a turd-world country and a laughingstock in respect to health-care, and in bonus, all the rotten parasites that fester in and around private health-insurance companies will be forced to find an honourable way of paying the bills.
In Canada, 100% of music downloads are legal. The law is clear: it is perfectly legal to download music without paying for it.
Youâ(TM)re obviously american, and therefore culturally unable to understand other cultures, so it is pointless to argue with you as your mind is already set in concrete.
The West apparently does. The US has said nothing to disparage the savagely disproportioned sionist retaliation against Gaza, and instead has blamed the victim (as is usual for extreme right-wingers).
The fact is that it is the sionists who violated the cease-fire by shutting down supplies to Gaza, then by sending commandos to kill militants. It is only after that time that the rockets were fired.
You should get your information through non-jewish-controlled media, say though the CBC or the BBC or even Al-Jazira.
Like the prejudices that assume that the jews can do no bad? (Hint: go look what is happenning right now in Gaza).
That's because anglo-saxon countries have this notion, derived from the magna-carta, that anything that comes from the State is bad, wrong, corrupted and whatnot.
The net result is that, since the Industrial Revolution, where the bourgeois have attained unprecedented wealth, to the point of eclipsing nobility itself, the effective political power has shifted to the bourgeois themselves. At the origin, democracies would only let rich landowners (bourgeois) to vote, and even though more and more people have been enfranchised over the centuries, the cultural notion that the Government/State is bad keeps bright people from seeking public office, leaving essentially failed businessmen into politics.
Being failed businessmen, they absolutely depend on wealthy contributors for re-election (elections cost money) so they are quite ready to listen only to their "benefactors" and not their true electors, the general public.
The "entertainment" "industry" is a master at bullshit and deception (it's their trade, after all), so it is no surprise that it has a disproportionate ear amongst lawmakers, hence the disproportionately lopsided laws that have been passed lately to unilelaterally give that "industry" an unfair advantage over everything else.
Remember some 6-7 years ago when the entertainment cartel was pushing to have every single storage device to be equipped with special circuitry that would ensure that it would not copy copyrighted information? I'm sure banks would have been thrilled to have less responsive disk drives to put in their transaction-processing mainframes, and doctors would have been glad to have less-performing CAT scanners to make sure that the profits margins of Hymiewood be preserved against pirates of the non-Carribean type.
Big business has nothing to gain from Democracy; a truly concerned Democratic government will follow the concerns of the population, one of which is not being ripped-off by croporate con artists. So it is therefore in the interest of the great bourgeois (billionnaires) to suppress Democracy as much as possible. For the last 30 years, they have embarked on a unprecedented smear campaign against democracy, one tactic of them being planting failed businessmen that make inept decisions, thus furthering the alienation the electorate feels for politicians. They have done wonders: 30 years later, the public trusts policicians less than used car salesmen!!! The general idea being that the electorate (that's YOU, citizens!) will gladly elect the fist politicians that will promise to streamline all that process by eliminating the inefficiencies.
This is exactly how Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
Anglo-saxon countries stand at a particular disadvantage there, since the anglo-saxon culture is rooted around the concept of an inept government, and it is virtually impossible to remove such key cultural concepts from a culture.
The late A. E. Van-Vogt said that "people get the government they deserve". Well, as long as anglo-saxons will elect failed businessmen in extremely expensive elections, they will be ruled by the puppets of big croporations, and there will be such intensely assinine laws passed.
And itâ(TM)s full of idiots!
No.
It will take more than a depression to wean americans from their cars.
For at least four generations, they have been thoroughly brainwashed into having the perceived "freedom" a car gives them.
Public transportation is no longer in the collective psyche, and has been depicted by marketing agencies as for "losers".
People will sacrifice their health in order to pay for their car repairs, as it is virtually impossible to live without a car, unless one lives in a metropolis with a less than abysmal transit system.
However, several steps could be taken.
The first, of course, is to offer an alternative. No need for high-speed lines for a start, mere passenger service on existing rail lines would be a good start.
Those services could be run at an "intermediate" speed, on the order of 130 km/h (~80 mph -- simply because operation above 80 mph in the US requires expensive automatic train stop signalling).
But 80 mph operation on heavy freight lines is problematic, as the freight trains run at 60 mph, and unless you have double-track and extensive "high-speed" (that's 40 mph) crossovers and a very astute dispatcher that can weave the passenger trains around the freights, you will not be able to operate the passenger trains significantly faster than the freights.
The only case where a totally new high-speed (>120 mph) line is warranted is when the traffic density warrants it. France built their TGV network when their 4 track "imperial line" between Paris and Lyon was being totally saturated.
So, for the time being, one could only count on regional trains to meet the demand.
Then how will this be implemented? As of now, going the Amtrak route is the best option available, as only Amtrak has the legal power to force (private) railroads to let them use their tracks; it also has more than 35 years of experience in operating intercity trains (an art private railroads lost almost 50 years ago). Right now, individual states routinely contract with Amtrak to provide regional services.
The problem, however, is the lack of rolling stock, precluding the expansion that could be effected.
Right now, there is only one railcar builder that can offer north-american "track legal" passenger rolling stock, Bombardier (The european-built northwestern "Cascade Talgos" and the Ottawa "Talents" are not "track legal", and operate the first operates under a special FRA waver, and the second on a physically-enforced time-segregated rail line along with german train control INDUSI signalling. As of the Via Rail "Renaissance" chunnel cars, they have been expensively retrofitted to become "track-legal"), and they cannot easily ramp-up their production, as their facilities are already busy with the fulfilment of New-York City car orders.
You cannot realistically expect automakers to build trains, if only because the end product is significantly larger than autos. Carbuilding facilities are geared for small production runs (1000 cars is a **HUGE** order), and every production run is heavily customized, as various rail operators have different needs. Perhaps the only thing that can be reused form automakers is the workers, and that is doubtful, as carbulding is hardly an assembly line operation, calling for specialized trademen, so here you are calling for extensive manpower training. It is not for nothing that the last time an auto-builder tried to make a train, the effort was a fiasco...
No, the US has really painted itself in a corner with it's infatuation with automobiles. It cannot realistically bring back yesteryear's passenger rail system overnight, it simply does not have the necessary manufacturing capability.
It will take more than a recession to do so; perhaps nothing short of a revolution will do...
Darn right.
It is all cultural. It really started in 1215, when wimpy monarch King John was bullied by his barons to sign the magna carta, an abomination that limited the power of the King (the State) towards the barons.
Out of this, grew the vague notion that whaever the State (the King) does is bad, corrupted, wrong, etc. And when the bourgeoisie took power at the turn of the nineteenth century, the path was well-cleared for the "laissez-faire" victorian government that saw, amongst an unprecedented buildup of wealth, abysmal amounts of poverty and social exclusion.
The well-to-do anglo-saxon bourgeois certainly did not need a State to provide them with what they could pay for.
As the anglo-saxon culture calls for the State to be bad, by extension, no good person would want to work for the State, as the bright people would be culturally expected to work for themselves alone. So it is natural to expect in such a cultural environment that whatever the State does is bad.
Never mind that the State does very well many things that the private sector doesn't do at all; like policing, road-building, justice, national defence and whatnot. The thing is that anglo-saxons perceive the State to not do things properly.
It's just like diamonds. Ever tried to resell a diamond before for more than 10% of it's value?
This is Texas. After all, the kids have to learn to be good ignorami rednecks somewhere, no? Better it to be in school than in some disreputable hovel where you don't know what kind of bad redneckness they'll learn...
Nothing new there. Railroaders have known for more than 150 years that steam locomotives had "personnalities"; within any given class of identical engines, there was the smooth runner, the good steamer, the rough rider and so on...
Look who's talking, a church deacon spitting his hate of others who don't share it's simplistic world view...
They do not have conscience by denying a basic civil right to people their churches tell them to hate for no other reason that they love someone of the same sex.
definition of a traditional cultural institution to include homosexual unions.
Total oxdung. No one has been forcing you to suck dick or take it up the arse (although it may do you some good). However, religious douchebags like you have been busy shoving their bigoted and retarded religious ways by telling them that they cannot love someone as much as they can do.
Proposition 8 is nothing but shoving hate to gay people by depriving them of the same degree of love heteros have been able to get.
Hey, look at the religious bigot talking! Now who's shoving his way down the throats of others????
Democracy cannot go backwards; it only can go towards greater progress; this is why there are charter of rights and constitutions: to prevent the democratic progress from turning into a fascist dictature. This is why it is absolutely necessary to legislate from the bench, to undo the damage bigoted politicians do.
I have as much obligation towards "people of faith" as they have towards me. They do not take account of me? Fine, I will definitely take no goddammed fucking account of them either.
Go back to your pulpit, you hatemonger.
Oxdung. Those people gave at the urging of their bigoted, stupid, retarded church. Therefore the church is responsible.
It cannot be religious bigotry because I am an atheist.
It is impossible for an atheist to be bigoted, since bigotry emanates from religion.
On the other hand, Morons are bigot because their religion tells them to have gays for absolutely no scientific, rational reason.
The way you get ballistic over that clearly shows that you are incapable of independant, logical thought and you espouse the extremist views of a tiny minority that thinks nothing at shoving down it's lopsided interpretation of reality down the throat of others.
Tells me, what the fuck does it matters to others if two men or two women marry each other?
It only matters if those others are sick bigoted religious assholes who think that their duty is to enforce upon others their religious views.
The Morons are fair-game. Their intolerant, bigoted, retrograde church donated a disproportionate amount of money to promote the intolerant, bigoted retrograde proposition 8.
As a result, their tax-free status is being challenged in court, which should serve those intolerant, bigoted, retrograde morons right.
That's nothing compared to Prince Charles.
They are therefore perfectly suited to the average american diet, then...
We don't need any more republican voters.