BTW, if associating with the Taliban is a crime, why aren't the Texans who were negotiating with them last summer for the pipeline deal in jail? Those same good ol' boys threatened military action if the Tallys didn't cough up permission -- a case could be made that the Taliban thought they were going to be invaded anyway, so then told us to go &*#$ ourselves when some nitwit psycho was holed up there.
Oh. the leader of the delegation said only one of them threatened military action, so it didn't count. Sigh. That bastard is, in my view, responsible for the deaths of thousands.
BTW, those Texas boys are getting their pipeline across Afghanistan. And oil companies are waiting to get the oil fields of Iraq for free really really soon now.
John Walker laid in a steel case with a bullet wound for three days for the crime of being there. The Enron/Worldcom/Haliburton bastards will sip Mai Tais on a beach for the rest of their lives.
Oh, the reason John pleaded guilty to not reading the news (NOT being an enemy soldier) is because the case had been so prejudiced by Ashcroft and the Prez, and so locked up by being tried on the east coast, that taking the chance of winning meant death if he lost. The guvmint's case was in danger of collapsing from lack of evidence, but they knew that a jury would not care - so the poor bastard is going down as a traitor for dealing with the Tallys, whilst the pipeline boys smoke cigars and wait for their billionsto start rolling in, paid for courtesy of the U.S. Guvmint and George Bush Jr.
Is Worldcom going bankrupt from providing bandwidth?
Nope. They make lots o' money from that.
They are going bankrupt because they got greedy. As did Enron, Haliburton, and all the others to come.
Remember, the mantra for the last ten years is to maximize shareholder value. To do so, firing your workers en masse is acceptable. Buying up synergystic businesses at silly prices is okay, too, because no matter what the true value of the company is (read: earnings per share), the perception of the stock market has become the ONLY ruler to measure performance.
So, to keep stock values high, they cooked the books, constantly, and eventually were caught.
The people who ran Worldcom made themselves millionaires. They will never see a real jail. They know this, they knew this.
Alan Greenspan himself, an #1 acolyte of Ayn Rand, has finally grown up and wrote the epitaph for unbridled corporate greed:
"An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community" as stock prices ballooned in the late 1990s, Greenspan said. "It's not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."
If Greenspan can see it, then the end of this madness may be at hand. Sadly, my portfolio agrees as well.
Have these companies created mighty servers and bandwidth for all this trouble? Let's just say I'v spent 10 minutes trying to search for Greenspan's speech online, and I've given up because even on a cable modem, it's too slow, especially on a beautiful sunny day with lots to do outside.
AOL made billions, and should have been a rock-solid stock based on just being rich. But they blew it on acquisitions. Why? To make themselves even richer. To boost stock prices.
Greed, stupid dumbass greed, is causing the collapse of the world economy at the moment. Greed combined with an infectious contempt for the common welfare of all people as well, for greed was GOOD for the businessmen who profited. WE are going to pay for all this mess. We are going to see higher taxes to cover the shortfalls, to pay for the interest on all that lovely new debt incurred by tax cuts for rich people. Our standard of living is going to plumment for the benefit of a couple million rich connected people, one of whom was crowned President by his dad's judges.
Time to get a commune and set up to ride this era out. Peace out, baby:)
802.11 networks are springing up for free, from Maine to Seattle. Well, free as a few hundred bucks per node.
So, inevitably, someone's figuring out how to make us pay 50-100 bucks a month for something we could have for free.
Q: will this wonderful pay network interfere with the free radio nets?
It makes me rather sad. I was hoping an alternative internet would be born in the airwaves without busybodies charging for it and guvmint trying to control it.
Can't we have anything that big business players and government will keep their damned hands off?
Um, the fuel cell runs on gasoline. I read that article in Border's Bookstore last week, and it said so. Converts hydrocarbon gasoline to hydrogen plus other byproducts etc.
So the hydrocarbon industry is A-OK with this concept. No hydrogen economy needs to be established in 8 years -- all gasoline all the time.
The miles-per-gallon for a fuel cell is much better than an ICE. Also, the number of parts required drops by an enormous factor, dropping production costs and increasing profits (you don't think they'd lower the price?). The concept also standardizes parts for their entire line!
The scream you hear is the death of ten thousand Pep Boys.
from what i was taught by the Great Asimov, you can't generalize entropy on a universal scale down on a local scale. The universe as a whole runs down, but areas within it can ramp up.. otherwise life would be impossible.
Imagine the terrorists delight at a city bus carrying a huge bottle of the stuff.
Imagine thousands of rolling tankers of gasoline rolling through our tunnels. Or our neighborhood streets, right by our children's schools! What about the children? Bombs everywhere! We must not let gasoline ever be carried where terraists can ignite them.
Seriously, hydrogen is a safer material than gasoline. It doesn't evaporate the same way, so it's harder to ignite in some ways. -- and no, the Hindenburg wasn't a hydrogen disaster, it was a metallic oxide paint disaster. The Hindenburg's paint job burned like a fireworks show, which caused the insane flamage you see in the pictures.
Hydrogen, when ignited, tends to burn upwards, unlike gasoline, which spreads like napalm, which is just a more jellied form of gasoline.
If gasoline did not exist, and were an alternative fuel, it would never be approved for general use.
It's not the actual danger, but the perception of danger that drives human choice. So gasoline is next to the Fritos display at gas stations. And a million parents a day strap their babies into super-safe car seats set inches from a colossal tank of liquid napalm, and no one ever notices the incredible irony.
I think the answer to your question was given in Piers' answer to the pedophilia question.
He's not trying to write a book about it, or he'd probably mention it. Also, there isn't a mainstream publisher who'd go anywhere near a book about "pedophiles", especially if written by Anthony. It wouldn't sell, bring enormous insane social energy down on the publisher's business, and not incidentally ruin Piers' other book sales as the forces of the Christian Coalition and the Concerned Mothers of Texas boycott bookstores, not to mention getting his books pulled out of libraries everywhere. Hell, he's flying under their radar now. No sense getting their specific attention in a national manner. If he thinks our little e-book scans would ruin his career, he should try taking on Oprah and Rush's mass audience.
And a word, if I may, about "pedophiles" in prison. I'd guess a goodly chunk of them are there for sex with teenagers. If every man over 20 who's had sex with a teenaged girl was sent to prison, there wouldn't be enough male population in the world left to man a softball league, much less guard the prisons holding the sinners.
Sex with-a-pubescent-girls has been widely winked at, if not at by the fathers involved, in the U.S. for our entire history. Like Anthony said, males are geared that way. It's only been of late that former teen girls have been informed, to their surprise, that the bad men have destroyed their entire lives, and that they now need expensive counselling, coincidentally by the same people who are making the diagnoses.
I *am not* talking about young girls, or children, which is an evil par excellance. "Pedophilia" is defined as sex with such.
By the way, that term was not used for teenaged girls, especially late teen, until recently. (There's another term for it, some -philia, but blowed if I can remember. Driving me crazy now. Mental cookie for anyone who posts the term!)
Sex with under-18's is a mess that can slide from evil-badness to why-is-this-an-issue. What is so distasteful, to me, is the redefinition of such and enernally old situation in black-and-white terms. It's an abandonment of sanity, or more to the point, intelligent analysis. This is this and that is that, no exceptions. No brains required. If she's 17 years, eleven months, and 27 days old, he goes to the rape farm, and when he gets out, he won't even get a job as a port-o-potty cleaner. If she's 18 at midnight, she can work in a strip club and have sex with a football team. This is not-sane.
The root of this reaction, of course, is parents, and particularly in the U.S., the truly bizarre pretense that teenagers should not ever know about sex until they're 18, despite all memories to the contrary.
A friend of mine put it this way: Do you actually expect to give the keys to a Ferrari to a 16-17 year old girl and expect her to keep it in the garage?
Back to point: the guys that Anthony are speaking to in prison are the guys that I am talking about. Anthony is a very intelligent and sane man, and knows BS when he sees it; and some of the "pedophiles" in prison are not such, but just victims of impassioned judgement and a not-sane schizophrenic culture. Piers is probably the only person willing to correspond with the "monsters", and that is a kindness indeed. After all, they are just men who made out with teens -- they didn't kill them. Frankly, a killer would get out sooner, and wouldn't have a web page listing his name and whereabouts.
And finally, I don't see much outrage about over-18 women sleeping with under-18 guys... amazing how that's not an issue. Insanity, anyone? Girls are supposed to be virginal and naive, boys conquerers and explorers.
Nah, the missles contained conventional military-grade explosives. Easy to get for a billionaire with no scruples. The missles were just there to soften Superman up a bit while Bruce watched in the shadows, clad in strength-enchanced armor he had charged up with the entire city's power grid.
Whilst Batman tried a bit of Ali on Supes, getting his ribs caved in, old Oliver Queen, former billionaire and current anarcho-socialist terrorist, otherwise known as the Green Arrow, fired a kryptonite arrowhead at Clark's noggin.
Distracted by trying not to kill his old friend, Clark spun a bit too slow when he heard the arrow arrive, instinctively snatching the shaft in mid-trajectory.
Oops, thought Clark as the payload detonated. Queen was well pleased -- he wanted Wayne to beat nine kinds of holy hell out of the Big Blue Schoolboy, who had been the agent of a fascistic U.S. regime which had rounded all of the superheroes years before. Ollie lost his right arm fighting the guvmint, and blamed Supes for that.
After the arrow went off, Bruce proceeded to slam thousands of foot-pounds of force via fist and feet into Supes weakened nads. This didn't kill the Big Cheese, but it gave Wayne the chance to pretend to die at the moment he had Clark on his knees with Wayne's hand around his throat.
Payback was Batman's for all the hell Clark had put them all through by cooperating with the people who locked up or deported the heroes.
where W. is painted with the same brush that Reagan was in DK (Reagan was painted as a reckless warmonger who was the first to head to his bomb shelter when the Russians launched a nuclear counter-attack)
Picture nine-eleven in your mind... picture Bush hearing about the Catepiller, then hearing about some "really bad piloting" (his joke, really), then sitting still for 23 more minutes, then making like the Road Runner for a bunker in the midwest, while Cheney stayed in the White House and actually ran the tactical response.
Miller wouldn't have to work hard to paint Dubya as a warmongering coward.
As I said, gamers don't walk, at least in my experience. They get driven in minivans. The older ones drive '86 Nissan Sentras with a big rusted-out hole where the floor used to be under the gas pedal.
Any walking distance greater than that from the car to the mall tends to inspire panic and cardiac arrest.
A guy named Keith Henson responded to a thread joking about about firing Tom Cruise missles at a Scientology compound in California.
He was convicted of making terror threats and had to flee the country before he was sent to prison!
Hell, in CANADA the psychos sicced anti-terrorist police on him. And he is still trying to claim political refugee status so the Canadians don't deport him back to the U.S. to serve his sentence for adding to a joke.
So, careful: perhaps not in this instance, but in future ones, we are not allowed to speak, or joke, if the target is big enough and rich enough and fanatical enough.
Cops labeled the armor piercing bullets "cop killers", not the "media".
Since cops are the ones wearing body armor in the U.S. as a matter of daily habit, they understandably think the bullets are primarily purchased in the hopes of killing them.
JULY 02, 2002 2 Editors Out After Political Disputes Publishers Allegedly Sought Coverage Changes
By Joe Strupp
NEW YORK -- The election season has barely begun and already allegations that publishers have succumbed to political candidates seeking favorable treatment have led at least two editors to abruptly leave their jobs.
The first departure occurred June 19 when the Brown Publishing Co., owner of the weekly Vandalia (Ohio) Drummer News, fired Editor Kevin O'Boyle. The termination came nearly two months after Brown Publishing CEO and President Roy Brown lost a Republican congressional primary to former Dayton Mayor Mike Turner.
During Brown's campaign, O'Boyle had spoken out against some of the campaign's tactics, which O'Boyle said included forcing the Brown papers to run campaign press releases and sending campaign flyers to editors for distribution. "It wasn't ethical," O'Boyle, who spent seven years at the paper, told E. "It bothered me as a Christian and a newsperson."
Brown Publishing executives have denied any illegal campaign practices.
The Turner campaign claimed the Brown coverage went beyond regular news reporting and should have been treated as a campaign contribution. Complaints by Turner to the Federal Election Commission sparked an ongoing FEC investigation.
Joel Dempsey, Brown Publishing's general counsel, would not discuss details of O'Boyle's firing, but said it had nothing to do with his criticism of the Brown campaign. "A personnel decision was made concerning the quality of the newspaper and his ability to work for his publisher," he said.
On June 21, Tom McDonald, editor of the 18,716-daily-circulation Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial, quit his job after two years to protest the paper's endorsement procedures in a local congressional race.
McDonald claimed the paper's parent company, Stephens Media Group of Las Vegas, improperly directed the paper to support former Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican, in his campaign against incumbent Democrat Mike Ross. And, he told E, "I was also told to keep my disagreements in-house."
McDonald claimed that Stephens Media executives and Commercial Publisher Charles A. Berry allowed Dickey to influence them with a list of demands for favorable coverage, which included requests for halting letters to the editor from a pro-Ross reader, less comment from Ross on Dickey press releases, and more coverage of Dickey's plans to help black voters.
The former editor also objected to the paper's plans to announce its endorsement this summer, instead of waiting until weeks before the election -- and accused Stephens Media of ordering it because Dickey is a friend of the Stephens family.
Sherman Frederick, Stephens Media CEO and president, denied that Dickey influenced the newspaper's coverage and said no endorsement had been made -- but admitted that Dickey has had a longtime relationship with the Stephens family. He also pointed out that newspaper owners have always directed endorsements, and added, referring to McDonald's objections: "He's living in a world that doesn't exist."
Good point. I go to those sites for accurate analysis of U.S. news.
Seems to be a rule of thumb that the homeland press cannot see clearly what happens on the street in front of their offices, but have laser-sharp resolution of other countries' faults.
Walter Cronkite, who stood up to the prevailing idea that the Vietnam war was just and right, and who opposes the administration and the slant of the media today; the White Papers; and most of the 60 minutes pieces; those are the best that journalist could do in the Post-Hearst era, when corporate network bosses kept their hands off of the editors and the writers of the news departments. New operations were run at a loss to the networks.
Now the news departments are considered entertainment, and are expected to show a profit. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered, and even CNN has become New and Improved with more Opinions Worth Knowing from young anchors.
News is supposed to enlighten, not entertain.
Remember, TV news, run as a loss-leader for networks for decades, was the result of a bargain the networks made for the use of the public airwaves. Make a mint, but keep hands off the news departments.
Now, everything, according to neocon rote, exists to make a profit. The problem is, the bargain has been jettisoned. Public service in exchange for professional and universal news coverage is now a laughable relic of the past.
If it wasn't for the web, I wouldn't know where the hell to get information anymore!
As for Dan Rather, ad hominem. Who cares about him: he is not CBS. A for publicity, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, and others made the rounds of talk shows years before Rather did.
Rather annoyed me on Letterman after 9/11 with his "if the President says jump, I jump" comment. That was unworthy of a newsman. But then again, he merely said out loud what the corp bosses and other managers at news networks are implicitly doing every day -- avoiding criticism of U.S. policy and Bush in particular. It's pathetic.
About 4 years ago, during the height of the Clinton hate pander, a 12 year old kid called the on-air host of an MS-NBC program. I was watching: it was about a minute before 1 PM. The kid got through the call screeners somehow.
The kid asked why the immense coverage of so inconsequentual an act as Clinton-Lewinski, when so many more imporant things were happening -- especially the 24/7 coverage of the MonicaStain-NBC network.
The host, John Gibson, who is on FoxNews now (of course), looked the camera straight in the eye, and said:
Kid? (disbelieving shake of head) You're watching this show right now, aren't you? We put on the air what you want to watch. If you didn't watch, we wouldn't show it. We have to make a profit. We have to make money, and this makes money. We have to go to the news now.
(exit, with kid trying to respond as he was drowned out by Gibson).
--
I knew news was dead in the U.S. when I heard that said so blatantly on the air.
I respect the old guard at CBS news. They still hold the line on credibility. The others have become, as Katz said, magazines to sell stuff to rich people. And to impress their neoconservative bosses, the news journalists are censoring themselves every day. It's the only way to get promotions, and money.
News, as a profession, used to be low-paying work, with the ownership separate from the editors. Now the head of GE wanders into the NBC election coverage headquarters on election night to make his wishes known. Journalists are being canned for criticizing the president, and need I remind you all that criticizing the President was a 24/7 religion 3-10 years ago?
As for the kidnapping cases, you bet. Here in Chicago, kids are kidnapped every month on the south side. News will not cover that, not the innumerable shootings, stabbings, and rapes that occur. But a single beautiful white teenage girl from the suburbs, if SHE'S hurt, there is endless concern. It's so obvious.
Actually the BuffyBot was commissioned by Spike the vamp, for the purpose of being his animatronic sex toy.
After the real Buffy found out, she confiscated it. Vampires don't have property rights, it seems.
After she died, the Scoobies (actually CS student Willow did the programming, Xander the hardware) brought the BuffyBot back for the purpose of posing as the real Slayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, if only I hadn't posted, I'd mod you up.
He ain't no troll, he's telling the truth.
BTW, if associating with the Taliban is a crime, why aren't the Texans who were negotiating with them last summer for the pipeline deal in jail? Those same good ol' boys threatened military action if the Tallys didn't cough up permission -- a case could be made that the Taliban thought they were going to be invaded anyway, so then told us to go &*#$ ourselves when some nitwit psycho was holed up there.
Oh. the leader of the delegation said only one of them threatened military action, so it didn't count. Sigh. That bastard is, in my view, responsible for the deaths of thousands.
BTW, those Texas boys are getting their pipeline across Afghanistan. And oil companies are waiting to get the oil fields of Iraq for free really really soon now.
John Walker laid in a steel case with a bullet wound for three days for the crime of being there. The Enron/Worldcom/Haliburton bastards will sip Mai Tais on a beach for the rest of their lives.
Oh, the reason John pleaded guilty to not reading the news (NOT being an enemy soldier) is because the case had been so prejudiced by Ashcroft and the Prez, and so locked up by being tried on the east coast, that taking the chance of winning meant death if he lost. The guvmint's case was in danger of collapsing from lack of evidence, but they knew that a jury would not care - so the poor bastard is going down as a traitor for dealing with the Tallys, whilst the pipeline boys smoke cigars and wait for their billionsto start rolling in, paid for courtesy of the U.S. Guvmint and George Bush Jr.
Who said life ain't hysterically funny?
Is Worldcom going bankrupt from providing bandwidth?
:)
Nope. They make lots o' money from that.
They are going bankrupt because they got greedy. As did Enron, Haliburton, and all the others to come.
Remember, the mantra for the last ten years is to maximize shareholder value. To do so, firing your workers en masse is acceptable. Buying up synergystic businesses at silly prices is okay, too, because no matter what the true value of the company is (read: earnings per share), the perception of the stock market has become the ONLY ruler to measure performance.
So, to keep stock values high, they cooked the books, constantly, and eventually were caught.
The people who ran Worldcom made themselves millionaires. They will never see a real jail. They know this, they knew this.
Alan Greenspan himself, an #1 acolyte of Ayn Rand, has finally grown up and wrote the epitaph for unbridled corporate greed:
"An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community" as stock prices ballooned in the late 1990s, Greenspan said. "It's not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."
If Greenspan can see it, then the end of this madness may be at hand. Sadly, my portfolio agrees as well.
Have these companies created mighty servers and bandwidth for all this trouble? Let's just say I'v spent 10 minutes trying to search for Greenspan's speech online, and I've given up because even on a cable modem, it's too slow, especially on a beautiful sunny day with lots to do outside.
AOL made billions, and should have been a rock-solid stock based on just being rich. But they blew it on acquisitions. Why? To make themselves even richer. To boost stock prices.
Greed, stupid dumbass greed, is causing the collapse of the world economy at the moment. Greed combined with an infectious contempt for the common welfare of all people as well, for greed was GOOD for the businessmen who profited. WE are going to pay for all this mess. We are going to see higher taxes to cover the shortfalls, to pay for the interest on all that lovely new debt incurred by tax cuts for rich people. Our standard of living is going to plumment for the benefit of a couple million rich connected people, one of whom was crowned President by his dad's judges.
Time to get a commune and set up to ride this era out. Peace out, baby
802.11 networks are springing up for free, from Maine to Seattle. Well, free as a few hundred bucks per node.
So, inevitably, someone's figuring out how to make us pay 50-100 bucks a month for something we could have for free.
Q: will this wonderful pay network interfere with the free radio nets?
It makes me rather sad. I was hoping an alternative internet would be born in the airwaves without busybodies charging for it and guvmint trying to control it.
Can't we have anything that big business players and government will keep their damned hands off?
It's called rain.
Um, the fuel cell runs on gasoline. I read that article in Border's Bookstore last week, and it said so. Converts hydrocarbon gasoline to hydrogen plus other byproducts etc.
So the hydrocarbon industry is A-OK with this concept. No hydrogen economy needs to be established in 8 years -- all gasoline all the time.
The miles-per-gallon for a fuel cell is much better than an ICE. Also, the number of parts required drops by an enormous factor, dropping production costs and increasing profits (you don't think they'd lower the price?). The concept also standardizes parts for their entire line!
The scream you hear is the death of ten thousand Pep Boys.
from what i was taught by the Great Asimov, you can't generalize entropy on a universal scale down on a local scale. The universe as a whole runs down, but areas within it can ramp up.. otherwise life would be impossible.
take it away, physicists...
Imagine the terrorists delight at a city bus carrying a huge bottle of the stuff.
Imagine thousands of rolling tankers of gasoline rolling through our tunnels. Or our neighborhood streets, right by our children's schools! What about the children? Bombs everywhere! We must not let gasoline ever be carried where terraists can ignite them.
Seriously, hydrogen is a safer material than gasoline. It doesn't evaporate the same way, so it's harder to ignite in some ways. -- and no, the Hindenburg wasn't a hydrogen disaster, it was a metallic oxide paint disaster. The Hindenburg's paint job burned like a fireworks show, which caused the insane flamage you see in the pictures.
Hydrogen, when ignited, tends to burn upwards, unlike gasoline, which spreads like napalm, which is just a more jellied form of gasoline.
If gasoline did not exist, and were an alternative fuel, it would never be approved for general use.
It's not the actual danger, but the perception of danger that drives human choice. So gasoline is next to the Fritos display at gas stations. And a million parents a day strap their babies into super-safe car seats set inches from a colossal tank of liquid napalm, and no one ever notices the incredible irony.
I think the answer to your question was given in Piers' answer to the pedophilia question.
He's not trying to write a book about it, or he'd probably mention it. Also, there isn't a mainstream publisher who'd go anywhere near a book about "pedophiles", especially if written by Anthony. It wouldn't sell, bring enormous insane social energy down on the publisher's business, and not incidentally ruin Piers' other book sales as the forces of the Christian Coalition and the Concerned Mothers of Texas boycott bookstores, not to mention getting his books pulled out of libraries everywhere. Hell, he's flying under their radar now. No sense getting their specific attention in a national manner. If he thinks our little e-book scans would ruin his career, he should try taking on Oprah and Rush's mass audience.
And a word, if I may, about "pedophiles" in prison. I'd guess a goodly chunk of them are there for sex with teenagers. If every man over 20 who's had sex with a teenaged girl was sent to prison, there wouldn't be enough male population in the world left to man a softball league, much less guard the prisons holding the sinners.
Sex with-a-pubescent-girls has been widely winked at, if not at by the fathers involved, in the U.S. for our entire history. Like Anthony said, males are geared that way. It's only been of late that former teen girls have been informed, to their surprise, that the bad men have destroyed their entire lives, and that they now need expensive counselling, coincidentally by the same people who are making the diagnoses.
I *am not* talking about young girls, or children, which is an evil par excellance. "Pedophilia" is defined as sex with such.
By the way, that term was not used for teenaged girls, especially late teen, until recently. (There's another term for it, some -philia, but blowed if I can remember. Driving me crazy now. Mental cookie for anyone who posts the term!)
Sex with under-18's is a mess that can slide from evil-badness to why-is-this-an-issue. What is so distasteful, to me, is the redefinition of such and enernally old situation in black-and-white terms. It's an abandonment of sanity, or more to the point, intelligent analysis. This is this and that is that, no exceptions. No brains required. If she's 17 years, eleven months, and 27 days old, he goes to the rape farm, and when he gets out, he won't even get a job as a port-o-potty cleaner. If she's 18 at midnight, she can work in a strip club and have sex with a football team. This is not-sane.
The root of this reaction, of course, is parents, and particularly in the U.S., the truly bizarre pretense that teenagers should not ever know about sex until they're 18, despite all memories to the contrary.
A friend of mine put it this way: Do you actually expect to give the keys to a Ferrari to a 16-17 year old girl and expect her to keep it in the garage?
Back to point: the guys that Anthony are speaking to in prison are the guys that I am talking about. Anthony is a very intelligent and sane man, and knows BS when he sees it; and some of the "pedophiles" in prison are not such, but just victims of impassioned judgement and a not-sane schizophrenic culture. Piers is probably the only person willing to correspond with the "monsters", and that is a kindness indeed. After all, they are just men who made out with teens -- they didn't kill them. Frankly, a killer would get out sooner, and wouldn't have a web page listing his name and whereabouts.
And finally, I don't see much outrage about over-18 women sleeping with under-18 guys... amazing how that's not an issue. Insanity, anyone? Girls are supposed to be virginal and naive, boys conquerers and explorers.
Tres amusing, if not for all the ruined lives.
try eBay for a cheap paperback reprint, or go to any Barnes and Noble or Borders... or even Amazon. The joy is still out there.
Nah, the missles contained conventional military-grade explosives. Easy to get for a billionaire with no scruples. The missles were just there to soften Superman up a bit while Bruce watched in the shadows, clad in strength-enchanced armor he had charged up with the entire city's power grid.
Whilst Batman tried a bit of Ali on Supes, getting his ribs caved in, old Oliver Queen, former billionaire and current anarcho-socialist terrorist, otherwise known as the Green Arrow, fired a kryptonite arrowhead at Clark's noggin.
Distracted by trying not to kill his old friend, Clark spun a bit too slow when he heard the arrow arrive, instinctively snatching the shaft in mid-trajectory.
Oops, thought Clark as the payload detonated. Queen was well pleased -- he wanted Wayne to beat nine kinds of holy hell out of the Big Blue Schoolboy, who had been the agent of a fascistic U.S. regime which had rounded all of the superheroes years before. Ollie lost his right arm fighting the guvmint, and blamed Supes for that.
After the arrow went off, Bruce proceeded to slam thousands of foot-pounds of force via fist and feet into Supes weakened nads. This didn't kill the Big Cheese, but it gave Wayne the chance to pretend to die at the moment he had Clark on his knees with Wayne's hand around his throat.
Payback was Batman's for all the hell Clark had put them all through by cooperating with the people who locked up or deported the heroes.
where W. is painted with the same brush that Reagan was in DK (Reagan was painted as a reckless warmonger who was the first to head to his bomb shelter when the Russians launched a nuclear counter-attack)
Picture nine-eleven in your mind... picture Bush hearing about the Catepiller, then hearing about some "really bad piloting" (his joke, really), then sitting still for 23 more minutes, then making like the Road Runner for a bunker in the midwest, while Cheney stayed in the White House and actually ran the tactical response.
Miller wouldn't have to work hard to paint Dubya as a warmongering coward.
As I said, gamers don't walk, at least in my experience. They get driven in minivans. The older ones drive '86 Nissan Sentras with a big rusted-out hole where the floor used to be under the gas pedal.
Any walking distance greater than that from the car to the mall tends to inspire panic and cardiac arrest.
A guy named Keith Henson responded to a thread joking about about firing Tom Cruise missles at a Scientology compound in California.
He was convicted of making terror threats and had to flee the country before he was sent to prison!
Hell, in CANADA the psychos sicced anti-terrorist police on him. And he is still trying to claim political refugee status so the Canadians don't deport him back to the U.S. to serve his sentence for adding to a joke.
So, careful: perhaps not in this instance, but in future ones, we are not allowed to speak, or joke, if the target is big enough and rich enough and fanatical enough.
Another alternative, and perhaps one closer in functionality to your old Accord, is the 2002 Honda Civic Hybrid:
The Honda Civic Hybrid home page
The Edmunds Review
It has four seats, four doors, gets mileage somewhere between 40-70 MPG, can get out of its own way, and is only US$20,000.
It runs on gasoline, but uses a dual electric motor/gas engine setup. So refueling will be infrequent and convenient.
Until a breakthrough in battery tech happens, this is the almost-best we can do. And you can buy it today.
Cops labeled the armor piercing bullets "cop killers", not the "media".
Since cops are the ones wearing body armor in the U.S. as a matter of daily habit, they understandably think the bullets are primarily purchased in the hopes of killing them.
By 2005, the Guvmint wants GPS installed in ALL cell phones, whethere you the consumer want one or not.
Forget about GPS in your rental car -- think of the targeted ads for everything you visit.
We need laws, and fast. But we aren't going to get any. Business uber alles.
even though I loved the U.S. space program all of my life, I hope the Europeans and the Russians freeze us out of the Mars mission.
Why? To get out from under American dictation of goals. To get away from our shortsightedness. To...
get something DONE.
2 Editors Out After Political Disputes
In full:
JULY 02, 2002
2 Editors Out After Political Disputes
Publishers Allegedly Sought Coverage Changes
By Joe Strupp
NEW YORK -- The election season has barely begun and already allegations that publishers have succumbed to political candidates seeking favorable treatment have led at least two editors to abruptly leave their jobs.
The first departure occurred June 19 when the Brown Publishing Co., owner of the weekly Vandalia (Ohio) Drummer News, fired Editor Kevin O'Boyle. The termination came nearly two months after Brown Publishing CEO and President Roy Brown lost a Republican congressional primary to former Dayton Mayor Mike Turner.
During Brown's campaign, O'Boyle had spoken out against some of the campaign's tactics, which O'Boyle said included forcing the Brown papers to run campaign press releases and sending campaign flyers to editors for distribution. "It wasn't ethical," O'Boyle, who spent seven years at the paper, told E. "It bothered me as a Christian and a newsperson."
Brown Publishing executives have denied any illegal campaign practices.
The Turner campaign claimed the Brown coverage went beyond regular news reporting and should have been treated as a campaign contribution. Complaints by Turner to the Federal Election Commission sparked an ongoing FEC investigation.
Joel Dempsey, Brown Publishing's general counsel, would not discuss details of O'Boyle's firing, but said it had nothing to do with his criticism of the Brown campaign. "A personnel decision was made concerning the quality of the newspaper and his ability to work for his publisher," he said.
On June 21, Tom McDonald, editor of the 18,716-daily-circulation Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial, quit his job after two years to protest the paper's endorsement procedures in a local congressional race.
McDonald claimed the paper's parent company, Stephens Media Group of Las Vegas, improperly directed the paper to support former Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican, in his campaign against incumbent Democrat Mike Ross. And, he told E, "I was also told to keep my disagreements in-house."
McDonald claimed that Stephens Media executives and Commercial Publisher Charles A. Berry allowed Dickey to influence them with a list of demands for favorable coverage, which included requests for halting letters to the editor from a pro-Ross reader, less comment from Ross on Dickey press releases, and more coverage of Dickey's plans to help black voters.
The former editor also objected to the paper's plans to announce its endorsement this summer, instead of waiting until weeks before the election -- and accused Stephens Media of ordering it because Dickey is a friend of the Stephens family.
Sherman Frederick, Stephens Media CEO and president, denied that Dickey influenced the newspaper's coverage and said no endorsement had been made -- but admitted that Dickey has had a longtime relationship with the Stephens family. He also pointed out that newspaper owners have always directed endorsements, and added, referring to McDonald's objections: "He's living in a world that doesn't exist."
Source: Editor & Publisher Online
Good point. I go to those sites for accurate analysis of U.S. news.
Seems to be a rule of thumb that the homeland press cannot see clearly what happens on the street in front of their offices, but have laser-sharp resolution of other countries' faults.
Frightening. I go to the Beeb, the Guardian, and the Times daily to get real news!
If you hate the UK press, you should see what we get here.
Walter Cronkite, who stood up to the prevailing idea that the Vietnam war was just and right, and who opposes the administration and the slant of the media today; the White Papers; and most of the 60 minutes pieces; those are the best that journalist could do in the Post-Hearst era, when corporate network bosses kept their hands off of the editors and the writers of the news departments. New operations were run at a loss to the networks.
Now the news departments are considered entertainment, and are expected to show a profit. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered, and even CNN has become New and Improved with more Opinions Worth Knowing from young anchors.
News is supposed to enlighten, not entertain.
Remember, TV news, run as a loss-leader for networks for decades, was the result of a bargain the networks made for the use of the public airwaves. Make a mint, but keep hands off the news departments.
Now, everything, according to neocon rote, exists to make a profit. The problem is, the bargain has been jettisoned. Public service in exchange for professional and universal news coverage is now a laughable relic of the past.
If it wasn't for the web, I wouldn't know where the hell to get information anymore!
As for Dan Rather, ad hominem. Who cares about him: he is not CBS. A for publicity, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, and others made the rounds of talk shows years before Rather did.
Rather annoyed me on Letterman after 9/11 with his "if the President says jump, I jump" comment. That was unworthy of a newsman. But then again, he merely said out loud what the corp bosses and other managers at news networks are implicitly doing every day -- avoiding criticism of U.S. policy and Bush in particular. It's pathetic.
Why, precisely, is this flamebait? It was perfectly on topic.
Saying something that makes people angry is not trolling for flames. The fault lies not in the poster, but in the flamers.
I liked the first moderation: +3, Insightful.
Astounding that posting about a group concerned with civil liberties is now possibly "radical".
It's hard to add to the pile, but here goes:
About 4 years ago, during the height of the Clinton hate pander, a 12 year old kid called the on-air host of an MS-NBC program. I was watching: it was about a minute before 1 PM. The kid got through the call screeners somehow.
The kid asked why the immense coverage of so inconsequentual an act as Clinton-Lewinski, when so many more imporant things were happening -- especially the 24/7 coverage of the MonicaStain-NBC network.
The host, John Gibson, who is on FoxNews now (of course), looked the camera straight in the eye, and said:
Kid? (disbelieving shake of head) You're watching this show right now, aren't you? We put on the air what you want to watch. If you didn't watch, we wouldn't show it. We have to make a profit. We have to make money, and this makes money. We have to go to the news now.
(exit, with kid trying to respond as he was drowned out by Gibson).
--
I knew news was dead in the U.S. when I heard that said so blatantly on the air.
I respect the old guard at CBS news. They still hold the line on credibility. The others have become, as Katz said, magazines to sell stuff to rich people. And to impress their neoconservative bosses, the news journalists are censoring themselves every day. It's the only way to get promotions, and money.
News, as a profession, used to be low-paying work, with the ownership separate from the editors. Now the head of GE wanders into the NBC election coverage headquarters on election night to make his wishes known. Journalists are being canned for criticizing the president, and need I remind you all that criticizing the President was a 24/7 religion 3-10 years ago?
As for the kidnapping cases, you bet. Here in Chicago, kids are kidnapped every month on the south side. News will not cover that, not the innumerable shootings, stabbings, and rapes that occur. But a single beautiful white teenage girl from the suburbs, if SHE'S hurt, there is endless concern. It's so obvious.
Actually the BuffyBot was commissioned by Spike the vamp, for the purpose of being his animatronic sex toy.
After the real Buffy found out, she confiscated it. Vampires don't have property rights, it seems.
After she died, the Scoobies (actually CS student Willow did the programming, Xander the hardware) brought the BuffyBot back for the purpose of posing as the real Slayer.