The criteria are odd, though... Canada, Canada, UK... Estonia?
I submit that a survey of "intelligent" cities that did not include Boston, easily the world's pre-eminent center of higher education, would have to have been designed that way deliberately. It wouldn't be the first time.
that problably because Bush is aware that anyone who refers to the rapture as a real and upcoming vent will be seen as a nutter except by fundementalist christians.
The "Rapture" thing, aka pre-tribulation/pre-millenial dispensationalism, is a modern notion propounded by Pentecostal holy rollers and others on the extreme charismatic and fundamentalist fringe of Protestant Christianity. There are some Baptists (like Jerry Falwell) who believe in it, but not all do.
It is not a part of the mainstream Methodism to which the President subscribes, as that was formulated a hundred years before the Rapture idea was cooked up.
during the '04 campaign they had Chaney and the other guy had a debate at csu they had to ship republicans up from Columbus cheer and shit i ate there pizza until the chick at the table noticed my bush Chaney shirt had fuck across the top in black marker
Assuming that your verbal skills and personal hygiene are of a piece with your writing ability and unimaginative vulgarity, would you do us right-wingers a favor? Please do this in every election for the rest of your life. Make sure everybody around you knows you are voting for the Democrat. Don't skimp on the piercings, tattoos, patchouli, and blond dreadlocks.
As evidence I suggest you look at historical supply/demand ratios in the international grain, livestock, seafood and fruit markets, particularly the historical stocks/use ratio's as seen in the second graph in this disscussion on wheat, that ratio in particular is a measure of how long before the cupboard is empty of that particular comodity and there won't be anymore if we decided to eat our seed crop.
I note from the first graph in that story that worldwide wheat production in 2006 was higher than in all but three prior years. The fluctuations are mere statistical noise overlaid on the general trend of increasing grain production. I also note that the stocks/use ratio in the second graph was almost as low in 1965 and 1972 as it is today, and yet worldwide food production is vastly greater since then. In fact, just this week I read that last year was the first time ever that the world had more overweight people than malnourished people.
Also, the article you cited makes the point that US farmers produced 8% less wheat last year in large part because they were growing significantly more corn to make ethanol. If it comes down to the choice between filling one's fuel tank, and putting bread on one's table, the prices of the various commodities will reflect it instantly. Farmers will return to growing wheat in the twinkling of an eye if they can make more money doing so.
Your talk of "our own extinction" is laughable twaddle. Mankind and our descendants will outlast the cockroaches.
So Africa can finally go down the drain (since most arable land there would become useless).
Actually, some models of climate change suggest that the Sahara Desert could see increased rainfall and return to its former status as a relatively lush savanna. Ought to be just the thing for growing crops where nothing grew before.
After all the abundancy of food in the US today has not solved the food distribution problems.
We have solved it quite handily within our own country, thanks to capitalism. You can buy oranges in Fairbanks and king crab in Miami any day of the year.
"Food distribution problems" in the Third World are typically a function of the degree to which a nation adheres to socialist economic principles. We will be reading about them in Venezuela any day now, mark my words.
The global harvest is declining, and it's only going to get worse. Since most westeners have never grown or slaughtered thier own food, the biggest problem they can imagine is adapting to rising sea levels.
Whatever other consequences of global warming may be, this is not one of them.
Number one, I call bullshit on the "declining harvest" allegation. Prove it.
Number two, global warming would open up vast new tracts of land in Siberia and Canada to farming. Look at any globe.
the current US government continues doing things which shouldn't even be remotely constitutional
This went on under Clinton too, and before that probably for as long as credit reports have been available. So did many other intelligence-gathering activities for which Bush is uniquely blamed by indignant but ignorant left-wingers.
Why does it name Feinstein and Biden but not Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander, instead just calling them "two GOP senators"?
Possible reasons:
1) The Republicans are now out of power and therefore insignificant to the bill's likelihood of success
2) The writer is trying to make the point that, contrary to uninformed popular opinion, the Democrats are fellating the Hollywood big shots even more cravenly and corruptly than the Republicans used to.
I guess those things happen. But at least it wasn't an error converting units, like the other Mars spacecraft that was lost. That is just incredibly stupid. Glad I'm not the "engineer" who wasted thousands of man-years and hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars because I was too stupid or lazy to convert between meters and feet.
On a positive note, it has provided me an instructive example for when I help my teenagers with their math homework. If they say it's "almost" correct, I tell them that the guy who screwed up the Mars mission probably said the same thing.
I'm happy to see that the GW crowd is reaching religious proportions, though. I've long said a lot of the junk science wrapped into global warming was a skip and a jump away from becoming its own religion that cannot be questioned.
Hear, hear. The climate change crowd are behaving exactly like pious little old church ladies. It is religion for people who scoff at religion. What is the difference between the sole survivor of an airplane crash attributing his luck to "God's will", and the smug Prius driver attributing a normal spell of winter weather 25 degrees warmer than normal to "climate change" that can explain (at most) a tenth of that?
Global warming has its prophets, Pharisees, charlatans, and cultists. And boy, does it have its heretics. Lately some true believers have even begun calling for the organs of the State to suppress dissenting opinions.
Whatever the truth of global warming may be, nobody can deny it is also a gigantic grab for power and money by statists and socialists who know their harebrained, coercive policies would otherwise be repudiated at the ballot box.
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits... [C]limate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
--Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister.
...that 'outdated and irrelevant business model' would be the government, seeing as they are, according to TFA, pissed off that the VOIP companies are not paying their taxes.
Well, there's a simple answer to that. Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes, and burn down their building. Rinse and repeat as necessary. The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently.
If it's free healthcare, why do we have to pay for it?
Like much that is "free", it's not free. It's included.
Car salesmen, socialist politicians, and many other kinds of pond scum depend for their livelihoods on the average man's ignorance of this distinction.
What a damn stupid comment. You have got it into your head that Muslim == terrorist; utterly wrong.
Number one, I was not necessarily advocating profiling. I was only pointing out the correct definition of the term to the grandparent poster, whose grasp of the concept is obviously shaky, but who nonetheless thinks it firm enough to use as a cudgel with which to bash America.
Number two, profiling is a game of percentages and probabilities, not an exact science. It is not portrayed as a means to catch every terrorist, nor is it capable of doing so. Profiling means distributing limited resources in the (theoretically) most efficient manner, so that there is the highest mathematical likelihood of catching a terrorist.
I don't know (and neither do you) what the percentage of would-be terrorists from among any given country's citizens would be. But I do know that the number is significantly greater, most probably by many orders of magnitude, among young bearded men of Yemeni origin than among widows from Switzerland. Among some groups, the likelihood of terrorist involvement may be so high that a sovereign nation may reasonably decide that it is not worth the risk of admitting even a single one of them.
If there is only one in a million citizens of a given origin that comes to another country with the means, motive, and opportunity to commit mass terrorist atrocities, then efforts to catch that one at the border are likely futile. However, if that number is one in ten, or one in a hundred, or perhaps even one in ten thousand, then an advocate of profiling would very much be in favor of singling them out for special scrutiny before the privilege of entering the country is granted.
Each nation, and each individual, must decide where to draw this line. All nations do, or otherwise there would be no such thing as passports and visas. You may be a die-hard leftist with a dewy-eyed perception of absolute racial and religious equality, so much so that you might even refuse to countenance profiling or visa restrictions if there were only one in a million visitors from another country who were NOT likely terrorists. Good for you, pat yourself on the back for your adherence to principle. But I assure you that your fellow voters, and hence your government, would draw the line at some level of potential terroristic inclination or intention.
Since the line exists in all nations, the matter of where that line should be drawn is something over which reasonable people ought to be able to debate without shrill accusations of racism or religious bigotry. I myself would draw the line more stringently than now. Of course I realize that not all Muslims are terrorists, but the percentage who are is high enough to earn them special scrutiny.
I fear the time is coming when the sons of post-Christian Europe will beg on their knees for some "profiling" that would allow them to immigrate to the wicked terrorist nation of America and leave the Muslims of Eurabia out in the cold. Not in my lifetime, perhaps, but certainly in my son's. It will not be because all European Muslims are terrorists, or even a majority, but because enough of them are that everyone else is too frightened and weak to resist the imposition of Sharia law. To the extent that liberal democracy, the rights of women and homosexuals, and the very edifice of Western civilization survive the next hundred years, it will do so upon the soil of North America and Australia, and not in Europe.
So, for example, my white-middle-class university co-graduate (and his Venuzuelan wife) would have problems getting into America because they live in Saudi Arabia?
No; in fact, as gainfully employed non-Muslims they would be ushered in promptly under any system of "profiling" worthy of the name. That's why I said "essentially all" and not "all."
Riiight. How to give the impression of a confident superpower and dispel rumours of being a paranoid, close-bordered police state.
If I were in charge, we'd be profiling for sanctimonious left-wing Euro-trash whose perception of America is based on little more than their exposure to Hollywood movies, the Guardian opinion page, and articles on IndyMedia.
After the treatment I received in O'Hare, I wish never to return to America. And I am as white and middle class as can be. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a profiled minority.
It is precisely because the TSA is bending over backwards NOT to profile that you ran into such difficulty. If they were doing an efficient job of profiling, you would have sailed through in a few moments, and there would be essentially nobody from Muslim countries allowed to set foot here.
America has made the decision that she is going to beef up her border security, which is good common sense and her sovereign right, but she has done so in the most color-blind way conceivable. You'd think the supercilious liberals of Canada and Europe would applaud this, instead of trying to have it both ways and bitching when they have to stand in line with Abdul.
The "idiots with the taser" were sworn police officers acting totally appropriately. I think they should have beat the living shit out of this punk with their nightsticks, but no, they were nice and just gave him a little harmless tasing.
And if any would-be hero pulled a gun on them, I would hope they would empty the magazines of their sidearms into his center of mass and kill him stone dead on the spot.
The Chinese are taking power away from corporations and giving it to their people, by making public services available for free. That is almost the opposite of what happens in the West.
Really? When did the US establish fees to use GPS? And more to the point, how do they bill and collect them?
A statistical probability that there isn't an even distribution of ignorance? Just goes to show you that statistics isn't always right.;)
It's indisputable that the distribution is unequal. As you say, "probability" doesn't even enter into it, unless the probability of an unequal distribution is 1.0.
High school graduates are roughly evenly distributed between the parties. Republicans have a majority among those with a bachelor's degree, or some college but no degree. Democrats have a more bimodal distribution; there are more Democrats among those with graduate degrees, but also many more among high school dropouts.
Who says you have to fly? Why not hitch hike. You meet friendly people.
Great advice, if you're a bum or a college student on summer break. The rest of us have jobs and families and responsibilities that preclude such self-centered aimlessness.
Before you can say this stuff isn't happening go up there and look for yourself. Talk to the natives see what they have to say. Just get out of your shells and look at the world yourself; 100 travel books aren't worth 1 real trip.
Funny you should say that, when a lot of the global warming alarmists (especially in Europe) are calling for strict limits on air travel as a way to decrease emissions.
If I'm only allotted one flight every three years by a government carbon commissar, I sure as hell am not going to waste it on a trip to some shit-hole Eskimo village.
can we really say that we're not going to be on the extinction list this time around?
Global warming would make vast swathes of northern Canada and Siberia suitable for growing grain, in quantities that would put the American Midwest to shame.
There are many foreseeable consequences of global warming that are undesirable, such as flooding of islands and coastal cities, but a worldwide food shortage is not among them.
quit implying that he's somehow the good guy and Clinton is the bad guy.
My broader point is that Bush is routinely blamed by the Left for things that took place before he became President. Hell, I've even seen Bush blamed for corporate monkeyshines that took place in the early 90's, before he held any public office at all.
It's not just that Bush had Enron blow up in his face almost immediately after his inauguration, and then was pilloried by the Democrats for not doing anything sooner about corporate greed, when Clinton's crew had eight years to do something about it and did zip. No, he was also blamed loudly and repeatedly for a recession that was already under way in 2000, and was only reinforced by 9/11. Remember the way Kerry hammered him for all the jobs lost in the recession? A recession that started under Clinton? Now that the recovery is well under way and more than 6 million jobs have been gained thanks to Bush policies (especially on taxes), the media circus has moved on and it's no longer news.
It pisses me off, and I refuse to let half-baked perceptions manufactured by a biased media trump reality. Bush has performed admirably, under circumstances far more difficult than anything party boy Clinton ever faced. Like Truman, he will be regarded far more highly by history than by the lazy, selfish, ill-informed chattering classes of his own times.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. But that has to do with crooked politicians, who are quite smart indeed when it comes to finding means of fleecing the taxpayer.
-ccm
I submit that a survey of "intelligent" cities that did not include Boston, easily the world's pre-eminent center of higher education, would have to have been designed that way deliberately. It wouldn't be the first time.
The "Rapture" thing, aka pre-tribulation/pre-millenial dispensationalism, is a modern notion propounded by Pentecostal holy rollers and others on the extreme charismatic and fundamentalist fringe of Protestant Christianity. There are some Baptists (like Jerry Falwell) who believe in it, but not all do.
It is not a part of the mainstream Methodism to which the President subscribes, as that was formulated a hundred years before the Rapture idea was cooked up.
-ccm
Assuming that your verbal skills and personal hygiene are of a piece with your writing ability and unimaginative vulgarity, would you do us right-wingers a favor? Please do this in every election for the rest of your life. Make sure everybody around you knows you are voting for the Democrat. Don't skimp on the piercings, tattoos, patchouli, and blond dreadlocks.
Thanks!
-ccm
I note from the first graph in that story that worldwide wheat production in 2006 was higher than in all but three prior years. The fluctuations are mere statistical noise overlaid on the general trend of increasing grain production. I also note that the stocks/use ratio in the second graph was almost as low in 1965 and 1972 as it is today, and yet worldwide food production is vastly greater since then. In fact, just this week I read that last year was the first time ever that the world had more overweight people than malnourished people.
Also, the article you cited makes the point that US farmers produced 8% less wheat last year in large part because they were growing significantly more corn to make ethanol. If it comes down to the choice between filling one's fuel tank, and putting bread on one's table, the prices of the various commodities will reflect it instantly. Farmers will return to growing wheat in the twinkling of an eye if they can make more money doing so.
Your talk of "our own extinction" is laughable twaddle. Mankind and our descendants will outlast the cockroaches.
-ccm
Actually, some models of climate change suggest that the Sahara Desert could see increased rainfall and return to its former status as a relatively lush savanna. Ought to be just the thing for growing crops where nothing grew before.
After all the abundancy of food in the US today has not solved the food distribution problems.
We have solved it quite handily within our own country, thanks to capitalism. You can buy oranges in Fairbanks and king crab in Miami any day of the year.
"Food distribution problems" in the Third World are typically a function of the degree to which a nation adheres to socialist economic principles. We will be reading about them in Venezuela any day now, mark my words.
Whatever other consequences of global warming may be, this is not one of them.
Number one, I call bullshit on the "declining harvest" allegation. Prove it.
Number two, global warming would open up vast new tracts of land in Siberia and Canada to farming. Look at any globe.
This went on under Clinton too, and before that probably for as long as credit reports have been available. So did many other intelligence-gathering activities for which Bush is uniquely blamed by indignant but ignorant left-wingers.
-ccm
Possible reasons:
1) The Republicans are now out of power and therefore insignificant to the bill's likelihood of success
2) The writer is trying to make the point that, contrary to uninformed popular opinion, the Democrats are fellating the Hollywood big shots even more cravenly and corruptly than the Republicans used to.
-ccm
On a positive note, it has provided me an instructive example for when I help my teenagers with their math homework. If they say it's "almost" correct, I tell them that the guy who screwed up the Mars mission probably said the same thing.
-ccm
Hear, hear. The climate change crowd are behaving exactly like pious little old church ladies. It is religion for people who scoff at religion. What is the difference between the sole survivor of an airplane crash attributing his luck to "God's will", and the smug Prius driver attributing a normal spell of winter weather 25 degrees warmer than normal to "climate change" that can explain (at most) a tenth of that?
Global warming has its prophets, Pharisees, charlatans, and cultists. And boy, does it have its heretics. Lately some true believers have even begun calling for the organs of the State to suppress dissenting opinions.
Whatever the truth of global warming may be, nobody can deny it is also a gigantic grab for power and money by statists and socialists who know their harebrained, coercive policies would otherwise be repudiated at the ballot box.
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits... [C]limate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
--Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister.
Well, there's a simple answer to that. Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes, and burn down their building. Rinse and repeat as necessary. The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently.
-ccm
Like much that is "free", it's not free. It's included.
Car salesmen, socialist politicians, and many other kinds of pond scum depend for their livelihoods on the average man's ignorance of this distinction.
-ccm
Number one, I was not necessarily advocating profiling. I was only pointing out the correct definition of the term to the grandparent poster, whose grasp of the concept is obviously shaky, but who nonetheless thinks it firm enough to use as a cudgel with which to bash America.
Number two, profiling is a game of percentages and probabilities, not an exact science. It is not portrayed as a means to catch every terrorist, nor is it capable of doing so. Profiling means distributing limited resources in the (theoretically) most efficient manner, so that there is the highest mathematical likelihood of catching a terrorist.
I don't know (and neither do you) what the percentage of would-be terrorists from among any given country's citizens would be. But I do know that the number is significantly greater, most probably by many orders of magnitude, among young bearded men of Yemeni origin than among widows from Switzerland. Among some groups, the likelihood of terrorist involvement may be so high that a sovereign nation may reasonably decide that it is not worth the risk of admitting even a single one of them.
If there is only one in a million citizens of a given origin that comes to another country with the means, motive, and opportunity to commit mass terrorist atrocities, then efforts to catch that one at the border are likely futile. However, if that number is one in ten, or one in a hundred, or perhaps even one in ten thousand, then an advocate of profiling would very much be in favor of singling them out for special scrutiny before the privilege of entering the country is granted.
Each nation, and each individual, must decide where to draw this line. All nations do, or otherwise there would be no such thing as passports and visas. You may be a die-hard leftist with a dewy-eyed perception of absolute racial and religious equality, so much so that you might even refuse to countenance profiling or visa restrictions if there were only one in a million visitors from another country who were NOT likely terrorists. Good for you, pat yourself on the back for your adherence to principle. But I assure you that your fellow voters, and hence your government, would draw the line at some level of potential terroristic inclination or intention.
Since the line exists in all nations, the matter of where that line should be drawn is something over which reasonable people ought to be able to debate without shrill accusations of racism or religious bigotry. I myself would draw the line more stringently than now. Of course I realize that not all Muslims are terrorists, but the percentage who are is high enough to earn them special scrutiny.
I fear the time is coming when the sons of post-Christian Europe will beg on their knees for some "profiling" that would allow them to immigrate to the wicked terrorist nation of America and leave the Muslims of Eurabia out in the cold. Not in my lifetime, perhaps, but certainly in my son's. It will not be because all European Muslims are terrorists, or even a majority, but because enough of them are that everyone else is too frightened and weak to resist the imposition of Sharia law. To the extent that liberal democracy, the rights of women and homosexuals, and the very edifice of Western civilization survive the next hundred years, it will do so upon the soil of North America and Australia, and not in Europe.
-ccm
No; in fact, as gainfully employed non-Muslims they would be ushered in promptly under any system of "profiling" worthy of the name. That's why I said "essentially all" and not "all."
Riiight. How to give the impression of a confident superpower and dispel rumours of being a paranoid, close-bordered police state.
If I were in charge, we'd be profiling for sanctimonious left-wing Euro-trash whose perception of America is based on little more than their exposure to Hollywood movies, the Guardian opinion page, and articles on IndyMedia.
-ccm
It is precisely because the TSA is bending over backwards NOT to profile that you ran into such difficulty. If they were doing an efficient job of profiling, you would have sailed through in a few moments, and there would be essentially nobody from Muslim countries allowed to set foot here.
America has made the decision that she is going to beef up her border security, which is good common sense and her sovereign right, but she has done so in the most color-blind way conceivable. You'd think the supercilious liberals of Canada and Europe would applaud this, instead of trying to have it both ways and bitching when they have to stand in line with Abdul.
-ccm
Oderint, dum metuant.
-ccm
And if any would-be hero pulled a gun on them, I would hope they would empty the magazines of their sidearms into his center of mass and kill him stone dead on the spot.
-ccm
Public policy should be based on real events and risks, not on how many credulous left-wing dimwits believe every conspiracy theory they hear.
-ccm
Really? When did the US establish fees to use GPS? And more to the point, how do they bill and collect them?
-ccm
It's indisputable that the distribution is unequal. As you say, "probability" doesn't even enter into it, unless the probability of an unequal distribution is 1.0.
High school graduates are roughly evenly distributed between the parties. Republicans have a majority among those with a bachelor's degree, or some college but no degree. Democrats have a more bimodal distribution; there are more Democrats among those with graduate degrees, but also many more among high school dropouts.
-ccm
Great advice, if you're a bum or a college student on summer break. The rest of us have jobs and families and responsibilities that preclude such self-centered aimlessness.
-ccm
Funny you should say that, when a lot of the global warming alarmists (especially in Europe) are calling for strict limits on air travel as a way to decrease emissions.
If I'm only allotted one flight every three years by a government carbon commissar, I sure as hell am not going to waste it on a trip to some shit-hole Eskimo village.
-ccm
Global warming would make vast swathes of northern Canada and Siberia suitable for growing grain, in quantities that would put the American Midwest to shame.
There are many foreseeable consequences of global warming that are undesirable, such as flooding of islands and coastal cities, but a worldwide food shortage is not among them.
-ccm
My broader point is that Bush is routinely blamed by the Left for things that took place before he became President. Hell, I've even seen Bush blamed for corporate monkeyshines that took place in the early 90's, before he held any public office at all.
It's not just that Bush had Enron blow up in his face almost immediately after his inauguration, and then was pilloried by the Democrats for not doing anything sooner about corporate greed, when Clinton's crew had eight years to do something about it and did zip. No, he was also blamed loudly and repeatedly for a recession that was already under way in 2000, and was only reinforced by 9/11. Remember the way Kerry hammered him for all the jobs lost in the recession? A recession that started under Clinton? Now that the recovery is well under way and more than 6 million jobs have been gained thanks to Bush policies (especially on taxes), the media circus has moved on and it's no longer news.
It pisses me off, and I refuse to let half-baked perceptions manufactured by a biased media trump reality. Bush has performed admirably, under circumstances far more difficult than anything party boy Clinton ever faced. Like Truman, he will be regarded far more highly by history than by the lazy, selfish, ill-informed chattering classes of his own times.
-ccm