"Troll", hell. It's directly on point of this article. There is no "partisan". There is right, and there is wrong, and it should be possible to judge reality and state the truth without being labelled "partisan", and therefore out of the game. This article is trying to defuse sane debate by ejecting the debaters. It's nihilism.
Republicans are the only people who use this word, they and newscasters. It's a lovely thing, because they only use it as a term for people who call them liars.
As for the "balanced" folk, the newscasters, the majority of Americans: the truth, reality, the right answers, call it what you will, is not determined by looking at the "left" and the "right" and finding with certitute that reality lies somewhere in the middle, with liars hedged all about it on "both" "sides".
There are two sides in today's reality, the rightists with Bush as their titular head, and everyone else in the world, which the rightists term the "left".
That's why the Democrats are such a mess. They're absolutely everyone else that isn't Bush. They aren't a side, they're the majority of us, the contrarians to Bush's view of reality.
The rightists are monomaniacs, magical thinkers, borderline psychopathic personalities. They can't change their minds; it's not a concept they can understand. They have the truth, and everyone else can go to hell. Evidence, science, exposure, error, nothing can reach them. They lack empathy and think it a strength.
Bush and his co-thinkers have been wrong on the environment, tax cuts, terrorism, civil rights, causus belli, voting machines, the Swift Boat and Murtha smears, privacy, education, regulation, disaster relief, military reform, anti-missle tech, reactivating nuke weapon building, the UN, diplomacy, the powers of the executive, secret prisons, torture flights, torture, kidnapping, lying about same, secret executions, unpersoning American citizens in secret, being wrong about damned near every terrorist arrest and imprisonment, having the JAG's turn against him, the CIA turn against him, finally the military turn against him, the destruction of our preparedness for war, hiding personal military misconduct, wilderness preservation, the FCC, the internet(s), the Clinton's stealing furniture (Bush at least admitted they were wrong aboutthat, but who heard the retraction?, redistricting out of turn, bribery, treason in outing CIA ops for revenge, destroying the budget through tax cuts, borrowing from everywhere, on and on and on. He recognizes no error, no mistakes. At the "Q&A" last Monday, a student asked him why he cut education and student loans. He look confused, and denied he did it. Magical thinking. He can lie and not think it lying. This is the worst kind of madness. He enjoys lying. He thinks it artful. He laughs out loud as he fabricates, badly, on the fly.
There is nothing like this list of crimes against sanity on the "other" side. The truth is not in the middle, and both "partisan" sides are not equal in mendacity. The war in Iraq will cost two trillion at the end.We're broke. He's lying. All the 'pubs, even McCain, are lying even to this minute. The "other side" still thinks that they are playing a gentleman's game, as I watched the Alito hearings. They just don't understand what they are up against.
It's easy to play the fallacy of the false middle. It makes one seem wise, and has the advantage of relieving one of the hard work of making judgements based on actual knowledge. Reporters of the new school use it constantly. Thusly:
"Bush said today that the sky is green. Some Democratic spokesmen have said that the President is not being straight with the American people. Here are three talking heads to tell you why they are wrong."
All reporting thereforward is based on the Green Sky world, with occasional fillips of quotes from "partisans" saying that he might not be right. Entire cable networks dedicate there time to Green Sky stories, and it becomes the truth, inextricable. Later, geniuses talk about how both the Blue Sky and Green Sky "proponents" have not told the truth, and that they are addicted to their positions and their combat.
WANT TO QUIT? CHANGE JOBS, AND YOU LOSE COVERAGE FOR YOUR PREEXISTING CONDITION. GO AHEAD. COMPLAIN. QUIT. WE DON'T CARE. DIE.
THERE ARE NO FULL TIME JOBS, THEREFORE NO HEALTH INSURANCE. DON'T LIKE IT? QUIT.
Or the new one:
WORK, AND NO, THERE'S NO HEALTH INSURANCE. WE JUST GOT FAT BONUSES FOR THAT STROKE OF GENIUS.
or,
DON'T LIKE IT? QUIT. WE'VE GOT YOU ALL ON 28 HOUR WORK WEEKS. SO'S EVERY OTHER EMPLOYER IN THE COUNTRY. WE CAN REPLACE YOU IN 15 MINUTES, TOPS. IT'S CALLED ARTIFICIAL LABOR SCARCITY. WE'RE SO COOL.
This is classic governance by psychopathic personalities. They don't care; they maybe even get off on your pain. But they're so dynamic, so go-getting, so successful, these managers. Smiles for everyone. Firm handshakes all around.
But they just don't care about anything in the world except themselves.
Well, then, I'll release my new, artistic interpretations of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in cartoons I'll produce myself.
Would my interpretations of the original cartoons protect me against Disney (and Jobs) suing my butt off?
(Oh God -- Jobs will be the majority shareholder of one of the largest "IP" holding corporations in the world. What is he going to do about DRM after he's one of the "owners" of Disney's and ABC's archives?)
The students in the classrooms can interact and criticize all they like. The professors are probably poli-sci, philosophy, or socology teachers; i'd expect that all that they do is argue with students.
"Without criticism"? This isn't criticism, this is rightist ideological monitoring with intent to intimidate and/or destroy professors who don't espouse rightist viewpoints. This is a program to shut people up. to create a rightist country. to eliminate even the slightist whiff of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan, who is today something of a commie by rightist standards.
students today think that "60 Minutes" is a leftist TV program. They've already been indoctrinated with rightist viewpoints. The spectrum has been slammed to the right by intimidation just like this in the media and the schools. I don't know what an extremist would be, in this climate. Who's to the right of Cheney? What spectrum? It's bivalued: Bush and Cheney on the "right" and everyone else is the "left". The new definitions don't recognize extremism on the right.
America doesn't even have a left, anymore. I don't see many socialists running around. And no, not being a rightist doesn't automatically make one a "socialist".
Brings to mind that other article on slashdot about college students not being literate enough to parse a political argument. Might not be stupidity; might just mean they haven't been exposed to any real political thought besides Limbaugh for the last decade. Semantically mindwrecked, incapable of being reasoned with. Filled with Truthiness.
Germany did this in the thirties. A little nip at a time. Now they come for the professors.
This is fascism. Don't say it's not because a "private" group is doing it. Fascism BY DEFINITION is a partnership of government and private concerns acting in concert. The "non-government" types perform the deeds the government can't yet do; you'll find that the personel switch between government and private employment at will.
This is a. Purely. Republican. Scandal. No Democrats are involved with this immense bribery scandal. They were pointedly excluded from power for the last five years; they are irrelevant. Abramoff has run a GIGANTIC corruption machine moving hundreds of millions in pure bribe money through charities and other fronts. There is nothing like it in the Democratic Party, hell, nothing like it since the Teapot Dome scandal or Grant's administration. And he isn't the only one: Mr. Christian, Ralph Reed, has been pumping the cashola around, as well a dozens of others. They haven't even tried to hide it.
People who don't believe in government, and think it a scam, make lousy administrators and tend to run the government like a cash machine -- because they have no respect for it, and because they think that's how everyone always did it. A clean, efficient government is beyong their ideology. Government is evil, inefficient, and corrupt, they believe, so that's how they run a government. A giant scam machine.
Nice try at damage control. Keep repeating the lie until it is truth. Truthiness!
As for those of you reading, I insist you start reading up on this scandal; avoid CNN, NBC and the other rags trying to smear everyone with the Abramoff brush. Hit Ameriblog, dailykos, huffingtonreport, international herald tribune online, ANYTHING but Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer, FOX News and all the other useless scan lines.
"That's all well and good, but facts speak for themselves: before Republican Lobbyist Jack Abramoff came onto the scene, Democrats got more money from Tribes than Republicans."
Irrelevant.
That would be because Abramoff was selling access to Republican power brokers, while the Democrats had not been selling law for bribes.
Okay? Logical? The Indians went with the guy who was selling law. They went with the guy taking the bribes and distributed the payoffs to the people who wanted the cash.
Whipping the Post The Washington Post put a lid on angry readers by removing a letters blog from its Web site. Now the paper's ombudsman defends her assertion that crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff "directed" money to Democrats.
By Farhad Manjoo
Jan. 22, 2006 | "I was imprecise," Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's ombudsman, says in an interview Friday afternoon. "It was a mistake. I don't consider it a huge mistake, but it was a mistake, and I'll correct it."
Howell is referring to a comment she made in her column on Jan. 15 that the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to corruption charges, gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans. The column spawned a storm of hate mail to Howell. Readers insisted her assertion supports the Republican spin of the scandal -- that Democrats were as deeply in bed with the disgraced lobbyist as Republicans.
On Thursday morning, under an avalance of angry letters, Howell responded on the paper's Web site that what she should have said was Abramoff "directed" money to both parties. Which only incited a new wave of anger. One reader fired back: "As others have stated, there is NO EVIDENCE that Abramoff 'directed' tribes to donate to Democrats. None." Another one said: "Please stop with these weak justifications of your reprinting of GOP spin points."
By Thursday afternoon, the tide of reader hate had grown so strong -- and, according to the Post, so vile -- that Jim Brady, who edits the paper's Web site, decided to shut down the commenting feature on post.blog, a Web page that the Post created as an open forum for readers to express their opinions about the newspaper.
Speaking to Salon from her office at the Post late on Friday, Howell says she intends to set the record straight in a column appearing in Sunday's paper. Her story is that while the Abramoff scandal isn't totally bipartisan, the paper has uncovered documents that show that Abramoff told his Indian tribe clients to donate to Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.
Howell says she stands by the Washington Post's reporting, which shows that Abramoff sent his clients lists of lawmakers whom they ought to give money to; these lists included the names of Democrats. As she noted on post.blog on Thursday, one such list can be seen on the Post Web site here. It shows a document that Abramoff sent to the Louisiana Coushatta tribe, telling them to write checks to organizations and lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum.
What Howell doesn't address, though, and what many readers have pointed out, is that while it may be true that Abramoff told his clients to give money to some Democrats, and it may be true that some of these clients did in fact donate to Democrats, this chain of events doesn't show that Abramoff exerted any influence over these Democrats. In fact, other news outlets have reported that after Abramoff signed on to lobby for specific tribes, their contributions to Democrats fell. At the very least, this indicates that while Abramoff's tribes may have given money to Democrats, it was Republican lawmakers he was pressing them to cultivate.
To begin with, it's not clear the Indian tribes donated to Democrats just because Abramoff told them to -- the tribes may have been meaning to donate to key Democrats anyway. For instance, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who collected $128,000 from Abramoff's tribal clients, maintains that the tribes gave him their money because he's been good to tribes. In 1997, Kennedy co-founded the Congressional Native American Caucus, and he has a personal friendship with Phillip Martin, chief of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe, as his spokesman told the Post in June. In addition, even if Abramoff did "direct" this money to Democrats, as Howell wrote, nobody can say that the Democrats who got money from
But, since we're off topic, lemme point out the Uncertainty Principle applies to prostitution listings on websites -- the very act of noting them collapses the wave function and they cease to exist. this would be eerie and Grant Morrisony, but it's not, because of course the cops can read websites as well as you can.
She, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, is responsible for fact checking and correcting the reporting of the Washington Post. That's her only job. That, and communicating with the readers about her job.
She repeated a lie, a continuing falsehood thats running through the New Balanced Press via Carl Rove and his talking points. She repeated, and remember, she's the fact checker extrordinaire, that the Democrats took Abramov's money. It is absolutely false, and well reported now, that no Democrat was given a farthing by the bribe king.
The entire purpose of the "K Street Project" was to place Republican staffers into all the lobbying groups on K street, and divert all useful monies into the Republican coffers one way or another. The obvious corollary effect was to starve the Democrats. Surely you've all noticed how flush they've been since Gingrich and the Revolution of 1994.
They are out there alone, and they want to take a few Demos down with them, falsely, to taint their enemies and at least get a pass from the voters for being at least equally as vile as the Democrats.
The Democrats, and it is all public record, got not a penny from Abramov. They got money from clients of Abramov, but they weren't getting it for access -- they have NO access -- they have no power in Congress, the courts, the lobbying companies, or the White House. K Street saw to that.
This is the Big Lie technique. And WaPo's ombudsman could have checked the fact out on Nexis-Lexis or Google in three minutes, tops. But, like so many other "Balanced Journalists", she's getting her info from her fellow reporters and right-wing propaganda outlets.. There's no other way to explain it.
And now, instead of simply regretting the error, she's setting a fire and using the smoke as a screen for her now nakedly partisan and/or lazy position.
Case closed: a large number of people now have heard the Big Lie, and it is now "Fact".
Let's be kinder. Let's say he overdesigned it to make really, really sure it wouldn't fail for lack of processor power. Engineers used to overengineer everything in the Olden Days; locomotives, building structures, cars. Those old trains still roll, buildings are sought after for quiet and saftey, and those old 30's cars STILL RUN, if you keep them maintained.
Stretching the metaphor, okay. But then again, in a couple of years it'll be a AMD multicore processor array, 20 terabytes of hard drive and a terabyte of superflash memory, and it'll be in a smaller case and cost half as much. Gonna toss this system into the toxic landfill like all the other plastic unt metal anyway.
What plans? They stated they had a right to a nuclear energy program. CNN mistranslated "energy program" to "nuclear weapon" and lo! the Bushies were off to the races.
CNN has apologized, but the damage is done.
Bush is duplicating, step by step, the EXACT SAME GARBAGE he pumped out to hose Americans up into a war against Iraq. And he's getting away with it! Save us monkey Jesus! Lord, please kill everyone in the New CNN, MS-NBC, the New Right-Friendly NBC news with your Limbaugh-lovin' Brian Williams, Fox News, Disney's new ABC news for Dummies, the new "balanced" NPR, aah crap.
We've no news here in the US. He's going to get away with another unprovoked invasion.
Believe it or not, Red Staters, it's not against international law for a muslim nation to have a nuclear reactor. Really, it isn't. And the Brown People aren't plotting against you, really. Although they WILL IF YOU GOD-DAMNED ATTACK IRAN, YOU IMBECILES!!!
This is crap. The Project for the New American Century is entering phase 2: Iran and those giant oil fields. Then, phase 3: Syria, to secure Israel, a main goal of the PNACers.
Unbelievable. Bush and his crew are so insulated from real news, AMERICA is so insulated from real news, that he thinks Iraq is a success! He's going to try to launch an air war against Iran, and no one, no news organisation, is going to oppose him. We had bereted types sneaking around in Iran last year, scoping out targets on the ground. That alone was an act of war. Bush has declared yet another war; now remains the task of altering reality so that they are the enemy.
Well, the Air Force was the cause, but does not have the blame, if you get the distinction. The blame was in not retiring that fiasco before disaster set, and that blame lies with the American people and their representatives.
Perhaps a different disaster would have befallen a two-stage flyback shuttle. A jet engine might have fallen off, or the heat sink on the belly might have failed. Something ALWAYS goes wrong.
But, the NASA engineers did not like the external tank and unthrottleable SRB's, and they were right to doubt the design. But they were forced to make it so per the Air Force's needs. QED, thanks AF.
But like locomotives or airplanes or cars, development has to proceeed, and quickly. Older models should be retired every ten years or so and new models, better and safer, should replace them. Better and cheaper and faster.
But NASA, builder of the most complex machines in the world, has to build spaceships on a shoestring, then use them until they explode. This is no way to run an airline.
NASA doesn't want to do it this way! There seems to be a deep antipathy for manned space flight in the American mind, excluding enthusiasts. The unmanned space probe community has been indoctrinated in the belief that manned flight saps their field. People are told they can have bread or spaceships, but not both. All false zero sum conclusions. We've enough money for both; we just won't spend it.
And to make wealth, you have to spend wealth. Space could give us hundreds of gigawatts of solar electric power, day and night, beamed via microwave from geosync orbit from solar sats made of lunar material. How much would total energy independence from the oil fields and coal mines be worth? We're to spend two trillion on Iraq alone. How many solar sats could we have build for two trillion? We could have put railgun material launchers on the moon, catchers in L4, processors making aluminum and silicon from the captured material in geosync orbit, built as many powersats as we wanted, once the infrastructure was in place. Two thousand billion dollars, according to official estimates, Iraq and its oil will cost us. We'll spend trillions more buying the oil we commandeered from the oil companies which now own the fields, or at least China and Japan will. We've more than enough money to do anything we want. We are just blowing it on keeping things static so that the oil kings can keep control and make more trillions. That's the bottom line.
We're an extremely militarized society. We spend trillions on weapons we use on goat herders. We've made the wrong choices. Time to step back and remember what Eisenhower warned us about as he left office.
Yep. Washington DC is... amazing. Two blocks from the Capitol Dome, and you're in hell.
It's metaphor drawn in real life. The fact that legislators won't fund the rehab of the neighborhood two blocks from their office -- that they work every day in a slum -- pretty much illustrates what is wrong with America, government and citizenry alike.
The real problem is that India is way, way, WAAAAY too overpopulated. All the capitalism is the world won't save a country doubling in size every thirty years. Poverty can't be reined in when the majority of the population is teenaged, underemployed, and competing for ever-tighter resources. Trees? Almost gone. Burned for fuel. Wildlife, doomed. Political unrest? With half a billion teenagers? Guaranteed.
It's a problem mirrored from Malaysia to Africa to South America. The arguments are always about "socialism" and "capitalism", but the problem is people, way too many people refusing to stop having large families, either for cultural or financial reasons. Humans just have an innate inability to see the damage they can do by overdoing the numbers game. We've moved from 3 billion to more like 7 billion people in my lifetime, and most of them are born in places that are too strained to support them. The world can't all be Manhattan, no matter what real estate salesmen dream. Forests can't all be cut down to make arable land. People can't spread out where the farms used to be. Water -- now, there's the BIGGEST problem. Fresh water is the oil of the 21st century -- Enron was busy buying up wells around the world, no joke.
Tech can help with a lot of this, but it won't be given to the poor - that's the capitalist dilemma -- because they have little to offer for it. Food won't be shipped, water won't be cleaned, because there is no profit in it --
Actually, it the Space Shuttle as it was originally designed. I remember: two stages, the first to bring the joined craft up to high altitude, then release stage two and airbreathe back to earth on a runway. The second stage was supposed to fire up to orbit, then come back down as an airbreather and land on a runway.
The whole concept had to be scrapped because Congress wanted to kill the whole program after Apollo. To survive, NASA shopped the Shuttle to the Air Force. The Air Force had no use for the two-stage, small payload shuttle which was designed for mostly passengers, not freight.
The Air Force wanted something to lift the Keyhole spy satellites, which were pretty damned big -- the Hubble Space Telescope is essentially a Keyhole, just pointing away instead of at the license plates of evil Russians -- so NASA redesigned the Shuttle into a heavy lifter by getting rid of the flyback first stage, adding a disposable external fuel tank, and tacking on two solid rocket boosters to get the whole mess into orbit.
The Air Force signed on to add their weight to lobby for the new system, and lo! the idiot Shuttle, good for nothing but lifting Keyhole telescopes into orbit. NASA engineers probably cried themselves to sleep for years.
The Air Force later stopped using the Shuttle for spysats, leaving NASA with the flying boxcar that no one wanted to use.
Most of the above is from the book Enterprise, by Jerry Grey.
And remember this: it was the solid rocket boosters, and later the external tank, that destroyed two shuttles. Air Force: our thanks...
We never got an actual cheap shuttle, because Congress (the american people) didn't care about it, and the Air Force barely got a bastardized version built. They've been underfunded and unused by an American public who doesn't understand about what could have been done -- read The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill to get an idea of what we've lost -- and the funds to build a successor went into an insanely expensive scramjet program in the nineties that merely made aerospace companies richer by a few billion bucks. There have been shoestring programs, like the Delta Clipper DC-X single-stage to orbit prototype that never was developed, as well as rotor-landing concepts that never got past the testing stage, because Congress (that's us, in toto) constantly whittles NASA down to a state where only ONE development program can proceed at one time. It's a fake zero-sum game, where decades go by while NASA is chastised for it's "waste" while the military and new off-shoots like Halliburton drain trillions withut stay or let. NASA would love to have multiple programs testing different systems, like railguns supplanting the first stage, or winged dual stages like India's concept, or Pournelle's Delta Clipper one-stage vertical launch and land, or laser assisted takeoffs, or an advanced spaceplane, or just dirty old Saturn V's to get jobs done... but the US does not have a citizenry that has the education, the imagination, or the spirit necessary to fund even one program thru final operations, let alone multiple concepts.
The US is just not the country to do this. We did Apollo because we hated the Russkies so much that price was no object. After Apollo reached 17 (there were supposed to be 20, then the Selene permanent lab on the moon along with the Zeus Mars missions -- atomic powered, that one) there simply was no political pressure to keep going. Even today, NASA tries to get one-off Mars manned landers because they think that that is all the public will buy -- and they're right. Americans won't finance space colonization or L5/L2/L4 space industry. They don't even know what an ORBIT is, much less what all the rest means. And "sci-fi" in movies and TV sure as hell didn't help. Without the science, it's just WW II in space. Space has advantages for industry and solar energy transmission to ground, but you have to have a special kind of education and imagination to understand what the ideas mean -- and we don't have it
Judge Penfield Jackson's finding of fact declared Microsoft a monopoly. The issue is settled. Done. Finished.
The only issue is how the Department of Justice will enforce monopoly oversight. They simply won't, being composed of regulators chosen for the ideological hatred of monopoly regulation. THAT case is closed as well for at least twelve years, given that a Democratic administration is at least two years away AND they'd require ten years to bring a new case to its conclusion. The Republicans could take back the Presidency and the Congress in ten years (given that they will lose both in the next four), so ten years is pretty impossible as a target for case settlement. AND the democrats are pretty Republican in their business oversight, anyway. And the courts are packed solid with Federalist Society judges and their ideological fellow travellers; hell, Alito alone makes antitrust dead in this country for the next thirty years -- maybe longer, if you consider life extension tech will come out in the next thirty years as well. We may see some of the current younger members of the Supreme Court stick around for fifty years or more.
Microsoft may be a monopoly, but they might as well pretend that they aren't, because the law is a dead letter now.
After the relentless pounding and smearing of Gibson, Microsoft quietly disabled the raw sockets code, whatever the hell it was.
Gibson was right. They fixed the problem. He was right, The Reg was wrong.
Jesus, it's like arguing with 20,000 Bill O'Reilly's. Truthiness! Gibson is a maaaaadddmaaaannn!
And since people rarely followup to what they think is truthy, they missed the fact that the only reason the Raw Sockets disaster didn't happen is because MICROSOFT QUIETLY FIXED THE PROBLEM, JUST. LIKE. GIBSON. SAID. THEY. SHOULD.
And as for being a top security professional, something he never claimed to be - he's a developer - what makes you all think that the very best security people at the NSA and Microsoft don't already know all about the exploit, because it's one of the many that they placed there in the first place?
Listen, everyperson, Microsoft has cooperated with Justice, the FBI, the NSA and all the other alphabet boys since the beginning. Windows and Office are monitored at will, you can bet your last god damned dollar. Can you imagine MS refusing to cooperate, especially during a ten year monopoly trial??
(originally posted as AC because I'd moderated; however, even posting as an AC, the code retroactively undid my moderation. Didn't know that would happen. A little warning, Slashcode?)
Let's call it by the real name. "Metaphysics" is to "magic" as "not being straight" is to "lying". Politeness which unfortunately obscures the real argument.
There are people who use the methodology of science, and people who believe in magic. One takes discipline and a willingness to let delusions go; the other gives people what they want, a personal connection to the world, a feeling that it's all about them. One values truth, the other values "truthiness".
Most Americans value truthiness. *
* Okay, okay: a Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report, Comedy Central) neologism. Truthiness: A quality of feeling true rather than actually being true. Facts get in the way of getting at the nub of an argument: rely rather on the truthiness of your gut feelings.
In the U.S., we have at least three TV "news" networks giving us 24/7 truthy facts. The rest are joining the Truthiness in Reporting bandwagon soon. CBS will at last be Truthy when Katie Couric becomes the anchor for the news. Truthiness will have dominion over all...
It's fun watching the moderation in progress on posts that call out to Bush supporters. It's like watching a WW II sea battle on an old newsreel. The ship is being shelled on all sides, but the fearless crew keeps the pumps running, hoping to keep the battleship afloat until it reaches the harbor of a closed post...
US currency is dropping like a rock. I think it's now $1US = 1.12 euros. We started out even; it's a fine, easy metric of how our economy is tanking.
The Chinese have announced that they are moving their foreign reserves into anything but US dollars, real soon now. Then, watch the $/Euro meter start spinning like the altimeter on that plane Bugs Bunny and that Gremlin almost crashed... hope it runs out of gas before it hits the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
"Troll", hell. It's directly on point of this article. There is no "partisan". There is right, and there is wrong, and it should be possible to judge reality and state the truth without being labelled "partisan", and therefore out of the game. This article is trying to defuse sane debate by ejecting the debaters. It's nihilism.
"Partisan".
Republicans are the only people who use this word, they and newscasters. It's a lovely thing, because they only use it as a term for people who call them liars.
As for the "balanced" folk, the newscasters, the majority of Americans: the truth, reality, the right answers, call it what you will, is not determined by looking at the "left" and the "right" and finding with certitute that reality lies somewhere in the middle, with liars hedged all about it on "both" "sides".
There are two sides in today's reality, the rightists with Bush as their titular head, and everyone else in the world, which the rightists term the "left".
That's why the Democrats are such a mess. They're absolutely everyone else that isn't Bush. They aren't a side, they're the majority of us, the contrarians to Bush's view of reality.
The rightists are monomaniacs, magical thinkers, borderline psychopathic personalities. They can't change their minds; it's not a concept they can understand. They have the truth, and everyone else can go to hell. Evidence, science, exposure, error, nothing can reach them. They lack empathy and think it a strength.
Bush and his co-thinkers have been wrong on the environment, tax cuts, terrorism, civil rights, causus belli, voting machines, the Swift Boat and Murtha smears, privacy, education, regulation, disaster relief, military reform, anti-missle tech, reactivating nuke weapon building, the UN, diplomacy, the powers of the executive, secret prisons, torture flights, torture, kidnapping, lying about same, secret executions, unpersoning American citizens in secret, being wrong about damned near every terrorist arrest and imprisonment, having the JAG's turn against him, the CIA turn against him, finally the military turn against him, the destruction of our preparedness for war, hiding personal military misconduct, wilderness preservation, the FCC, the internet(s), the Clinton's stealing furniture (Bush at least admitted they were wrong aboutthat, but who heard the retraction?, redistricting out of turn, bribery, treason in outing CIA ops for revenge, destroying the budget through tax cuts, borrowing from everywhere, on and on and on. He recognizes no error, no mistakes. At the "Q&A" last Monday, a student asked him why he cut education and student loans. He look confused, and denied he did it. Magical thinking. He can lie and not think it lying. This is the worst kind of madness. He enjoys lying. He thinks it artful. He laughs out loud as he fabricates, badly, on the fly.
There is nothing like this list of crimes against sanity on the "other" side. The truth is not in the middle, and both "partisan" sides are not equal in mendacity. The war in Iraq will cost two trillion at the end.We're broke. He's lying. All the 'pubs, even McCain, are lying even to this minute. The "other side" still thinks that they are playing a gentleman's game, as I watched the Alito hearings. They just don't understand what they are up against.
It's easy to play the fallacy of the false middle. It makes one seem wise, and has the advantage of relieving one of the hard work of making judgements based on actual knowledge. Reporters of the new school use it constantly. Thusly:
"Bush said today that the sky is green. Some Democratic spokesmen have said that the President is not being straight with the American people. Here are three talking heads to tell you why they are wrong."
All reporting thereforward is based on the Green Sky world, with occasional fillips of quotes from "partisans" saying that he might not be right. Entire cable networks dedicate there time to Green Sky stories, and it becomes the truth, inextricable. Later, geniuses talk about how both the Blue Sky and Green Sky "proponents" have not told the truth, and that they are addicted to their positions and their combat.
But the sky is fucking BLUE. It's not blue-green.
Bad form to post again, but the last sign should read
ARTIFICIAL *JOB* SCARCITY
I'll fire that signmaker. We've got some illegals to make them for 2 bucks an hour, anyway, so it's time to cut that cord...
"WORK OR HAVE NO HEALTH INSURANCE"
You forgot the new signs:
WANT TO QUIT? CHANGE JOBS, AND YOU LOSE COVERAGE FOR YOUR PREEXISTING CONDITION. GO AHEAD. COMPLAIN. QUIT. WE DON'T CARE. DIE.
THERE ARE NO FULL TIME JOBS, THEREFORE NO HEALTH INSURANCE. DON'T LIKE IT? QUIT.
Or the new one:
WORK, AND NO, THERE'S NO HEALTH INSURANCE. WE JUST GOT FAT BONUSES FOR THAT STROKE OF GENIUS.
or,
DON'T LIKE IT? QUIT. WE'VE GOT YOU ALL ON 28 HOUR WORK WEEKS. SO'S EVERY OTHER EMPLOYER IN THE COUNTRY. WE CAN REPLACE YOU IN 15 MINUTES, TOPS. IT'S CALLED ARTIFICIAL LABOR SCARCITY. WE'RE SO COOL.
This is classic governance by psychopathic personalities. They don't care; they maybe even get off on your pain. But they're so dynamic, so go-getting, so successful, these managers. Smiles for everyone. Firm handshakes all around.
But they just don't care about anything in the world except themselves.
Well, then, I'll release my new, artistic interpretations of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in cartoons I'll produce myself.
Would my interpretations of the original cartoons protect me against Disney (and Jobs) suing my butt off?
(Oh God -- Jobs will be the majority shareholder of one of the largest "IP" holding corporations in the world. What is he going to do about DRM after he's one of the "owners" of Disney's and ABC's archives?)
The students in the classrooms can interact and criticize all they like. The professors are probably poli-sci, philosophy, or socology teachers; i'd expect that all that they do is argue with students.
"Without criticism"? This isn't criticism, this is rightist ideological monitoring with intent to intimidate and/or destroy professors who don't espouse rightist viewpoints. This is a program to shut people up. to create a rightist country. to eliminate even the slightist whiff of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan, who is today something of a commie by rightist standards.
students today think that "60 Minutes" is a leftist TV program. They've already been indoctrinated with rightist viewpoints. The spectrum has been slammed to the right by intimidation just like this in the media and the schools. I don't know what an extremist would be, in this climate. Who's to the right of Cheney? What spectrum? It's bivalued: Bush and Cheney on the "right" and everyone else is the "left". The new definitions don't recognize extremism on the right.
America doesn't even have a left, anymore. I don't see many socialists running around. And no, not being a rightist doesn't automatically make one a "socialist".
Brings to mind that other article on slashdot about college students not being literate enough to parse a political argument. Might not be stupidity; might just mean they haven't been exposed to any real political thought besides Limbaugh for the last decade. Semantically mindwrecked, incapable of being reasoned with. Filled with Truthiness.
Germany did this in the thirties. A little nip at a time. Now they come for the professors.
This is fascism. Don't say it's not because a "private" group is doing it. Fascism BY DEFINITION is a partnership of government and private concerns acting in concert. The "non-government" types perform the deeds the government can't yet do; you'll find that the personel switch between government and private employment at will.
This is a. Purely. Republican. Scandal. No Democrats are involved with this immense bribery scandal. They were pointedly excluded from power for the last five years; they are irrelevant. Abramoff has run a GIGANTIC corruption machine moving hundreds of millions in pure bribe money through charities and other fronts. There is nothing like it in the Democratic Party, hell, nothing like it since the Teapot Dome scandal or Grant's administration. And he isn't the only one: Mr. Christian, Ralph Reed, has been pumping the cashola around, as well a dozens of others. They haven't even tried to hide it.
People who don't believe in government, and think it a scam, make lousy administrators and tend to run the government like a cash machine -- because they have no respect for it, and because they think that's how everyone always did it. A clean, efficient government is beyong their ideology. Government is evil, inefficient, and corrupt, they believe, so that's how they run a government. A giant scam machine.
Nice try at damage control. Keep repeating the lie until it is truth. Truthiness!
As for those of you reading, I insist you start reading up on this scandal; avoid CNN, NBC and the other rags trying to smear everyone with the Abramoff brush. Hit Ameriblog, dailykos, huffingtonreport, international herald tribune online, ANYTHING but Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer, FOX News and all the other useless scan lines.
"That's all well and good, but facts speak for themselves: before Republican Lobbyist Jack Abramoff came onto the scene, Democrats got more money from Tribes than Republicans."
Irrelevant.
That would be because Abramoff was selling access to Republican power brokers, while the Democrats had not been selling law for bribes.
Okay? Logical? The Indians went with the guy who was selling law. They went with the guy taking the bribes and distributed the payoffs to the people who wanted the cash.
Which were not Democrats. Case closed.
Hammer, pounding nail...
Salon, the only place for news:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/01/21/ombud sman/
Whipping the Post
The Washington Post put a lid on angry readers by removing a letters blog from its Web site. Now the paper's ombudsman defends her assertion that crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff "directed" money to Democrats.
By Farhad Manjoo
Jan. 22, 2006 | "I was imprecise," Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's ombudsman, says in an interview Friday afternoon. "It was a mistake. I don't consider it a huge mistake, but it was a mistake, and I'll correct it."
Howell is referring to a comment she made in her column on Jan. 15 that the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to corruption charges, gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans. The column spawned a storm of hate mail to Howell. Readers insisted her assertion supports the Republican spin of the scandal -- that Democrats were as deeply in bed with the disgraced lobbyist as Republicans.
On Thursday morning, under an avalance of angry letters, Howell responded on the paper's Web site that what she should have said was Abramoff "directed" money to both parties. Which only incited a new wave of anger. One reader fired back: "As others have stated, there is NO EVIDENCE that Abramoff 'directed' tribes to donate to Democrats. None." Another one said: "Please stop with these weak justifications of your reprinting of GOP spin points."
By Thursday afternoon, the tide of reader hate had grown so strong -- and, according to the Post, so vile -- that Jim Brady, who edits the paper's Web site, decided to shut down the commenting feature on post.blog, a Web page that the Post created as an open forum for readers to express their opinions about the newspaper.
Speaking to Salon from her office at the Post late on Friday, Howell says she intends to set the record straight in a column appearing in Sunday's paper. Her story is that while the Abramoff scandal isn't totally bipartisan, the paper has uncovered documents that show that Abramoff told his Indian tribe clients to donate to Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.
Howell says she stands by the Washington Post's reporting, which shows that Abramoff sent his clients lists of lawmakers whom they ought to give money to; these lists included the names of Democrats. As she noted on post.blog on Thursday, one such list can be seen on the Post Web site here. It shows a document that Abramoff sent to the Louisiana Coushatta tribe, telling them to write checks to organizations and lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum.
What Howell doesn't address, though, and what many readers have pointed out, is that while it may be true that Abramoff told his clients to give money to some Democrats, and it may be true that some of these clients did in fact donate to Democrats, this chain of events doesn't show that Abramoff exerted any influence over these Democrats. In fact, other news outlets have reported that after Abramoff signed on to lobby for specific tribes, their contributions to Democrats fell. At the very least, this indicates that while Abramoff's tribes may have given money to Democrats, it was Republican lawmakers he was pressing them to cultivate.
To begin with, it's not clear the Indian tribes donated to Democrats just because Abramoff told them to -- the tribes may have been meaning to donate to key Democrats anyway. For instance, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who collected $128,000 from Abramoff's tribal clients, maintains that the tribes gave him their money because he's been good to tribes. In 1997, Kennedy co-founded the Congressional Native American Caucus, and he has a personal friendship with Phillip Martin, chief of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe, as his spokesman told the Post in June. In addition, even if Abramoff did "direct" this money to Democrats, as Howell wrote, nobody can say that the Democrats who got money from
I've heard of this thing somewhere else.
But, since we're off topic, lemme point out the Uncertainty Principle applies to prostitution listings on websites -- the very act of noting them collapses the wave function and they cease to exist. this would be eerie and Grant Morrisony, but it's not, because of course the cops can read websites as well as you can.
She, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, is responsible for fact checking and correcting the reporting of the Washington Post. That's her only job. That, and communicating with the readers about her job.
She repeated a lie, a continuing falsehood thats running through the New Balanced Press via Carl Rove and his talking points. She repeated, and remember, she's the fact checker extrordinaire, that the Democrats took Abramov's money. It is absolutely false, and well reported now, that no Democrat was given a farthing by the bribe king.
The entire purpose of the "K Street Project" was to place Republican staffers into all the lobbying groups on K street, and divert all useful monies into the Republican coffers one way or another. The obvious corollary effect was to starve the Democrats. Surely you've all noticed how flush they've been since Gingrich and the Revolution of 1994.
They are out there alone, and they want to take a few Demos down with them, falsely, to taint their enemies and at least get a pass from the voters for being at least equally as vile as the Democrats.
The Democrats, and it is all public record, got not a penny from Abramov. They got money from clients of Abramov, but they weren't getting it for access -- they have NO access -- they have no power in Congress, the courts, the lobbying companies, or the White House. K Street saw to that.
This is the Big Lie technique. And WaPo's ombudsman could have checked the fact out on Nexis-Lexis or Google in three minutes, tops. But, like so many other "Balanced Journalists", she's getting her info from her fellow reporters and right-wing propaganda outlets.. There's no other way to explain it.
And now, instead of simply regretting the error, she's setting a fire and using the smoke as a screen for her now nakedly partisan and/or lazy position.
Case closed: a large number of people now have heard the Big Lie, and it is now "Fact".
Let's be kinder. Let's say he overdesigned it to make really, really sure it wouldn't fail for lack of processor power. Engineers used to overengineer everything in the Olden Days; locomotives, building structures, cars. Those old trains still roll, buildings are sought after for quiet and saftey, and those old 30's cars STILL RUN, if you keep them maintained.
Stretching the metaphor, okay. But then again, in a couple of years it'll be a AMD multicore processor array, 20 terabytes of hard drive and a terabyte of superflash memory, and it'll be in a smaller case and cost half as much. Gonna toss this system into the toxic landfill like all the other plastic unt metal anyway.
"Iran's nucular plan"
Nuclear.
What plans? They stated they had a right to a nuclear energy program. CNN mistranslated "energy program" to "nuclear weapon" and lo! the Bushies were off to the races.
CNN has apologized, but the damage is done.
Bush is duplicating, step by step, the EXACT SAME GARBAGE he pumped out to hose Americans up into a war against Iraq. And he's getting away with it! Save us monkey Jesus! Lord, please kill everyone in the New CNN, MS-NBC, the New Right-Friendly NBC news with your Limbaugh-lovin' Brian Williams, Fox News, Disney's new ABC news for Dummies, the new "balanced" NPR, aah crap.
We've no news here in the US. He's going to get away with another unprovoked invasion.
Believe it or not, Red Staters, it's not against international law for a muslim nation to have a nuclear reactor. Really, it isn't. And the Brown People aren't plotting against you, really. Although they WILL IF YOU GOD-DAMNED ATTACK IRAN, YOU IMBECILES!!!
This is crap. The Project for the New American Century is entering phase 2: Iran and those giant oil fields. Then, phase 3: Syria, to secure Israel, a main goal of the PNACers.
Unbelievable. Bush and his crew are so insulated from real news, AMERICA is so insulated from real news, that he thinks Iraq is a success! He's going to try to launch an air war against Iran, and no one, no news organisation, is going to oppose him. We had bereted types sneaking around in Iran last year, scoping out targets on the ground. That alone was an act of war. Bush has declared yet another war; now remains the task of altering reality so that they are the enemy.
I'm reactivating my Candian evac plan.
Well, the Air Force was the cause, but does not have the blame, if you get the distinction. The blame was in not retiring that fiasco before disaster set, and that blame lies with the American people and their representatives.
Perhaps a different disaster would have befallen a two-stage flyback shuttle. A jet engine might have fallen off, or the heat sink on the belly might have failed. Something ALWAYS goes wrong.
But, the NASA engineers did not like the external tank and unthrottleable SRB's, and they were right to doubt the design. But they were forced to make it so per the Air Force's needs. QED, thanks AF.
But like locomotives or airplanes or cars, development has to proceeed, and quickly. Older models should be retired every ten years or so and new models, better and safer, should replace them. Better and cheaper and faster.
But NASA, builder of the most complex machines in the world, has to build spaceships on a shoestring, then use them until they explode. This is no way to run an airline.
NASA doesn't want to do it this way! There seems to be a deep antipathy for manned space flight in the American mind, excluding enthusiasts. The unmanned space probe community has been indoctrinated in the belief that manned flight saps their field. People are told they can have bread or spaceships, but not both. All false zero sum conclusions. We've enough money for both; we just won't spend it.
And to make wealth, you have to spend wealth. Space could give us hundreds of gigawatts of solar electric power, day and night, beamed via microwave from geosync orbit from solar sats made of lunar material. How much would total energy independence from the oil fields and coal mines be worth? We're to spend two trillion on Iraq alone. How many solar sats could we have build for two trillion? We could have put railgun material launchers on the moon, catchers in L4, processors making aluminum and silicon from the captured material in geosync orbit, built as many powersats as we wanted, once the infrastructure was in place. Two thousand billion dollars, according to official estimates, Iraq and its oil will cost us. We'll spend trillions more buying the oil we commandeered from the oil companies which now own the fields, or at least China and Japan will. We've more than enough money to do anything we want. We are just blowing it on keeping things static so that the oil kings can keep control and make more trillions. That's the bottom line.
We're an extremely militarized society. We spend trillions on weapons we use on goat herders. We've made the wrong choices. Time to step back and remember what Eisenhower warned us about as he left office.
Yep. Washington DC is... amazing. Two blocks from the Capitol Dome, and you're in hell.
It's metaphor drawn in real life. The fact that legislators won't fund the rehab of the neighborhood two blocks from their office -- that they work every day in a slum -- pretty much illustrates what is wrong with America, government and citizenry alike.
The real problem is that India is way, way, WAAAAY too overpopulated. All the capitalism is the world won't save a country doubling in size every thirty years. Poverty can't be reined in when the majority of the population is teenaged, underemployed, and competing for ever-tighter resources. Trees? Almost gone. Burned for fuel. Wildlife, doomed. Political unrest? With half a billion teenagers? Guaranteed.
It's a problem mirrored from Malaysia to Africa to South America. The arguments are always about "socialism" and "capitalism", but the problem is people, way too many people refusing to stop having large families, either for cultural or financial reasons. Humans just have an innate inability to see the damage they can do by overdoing the numbers game. We've moved from 3 billion to more like 7 billion people in my lifetime, and most of them are born in places that are too strained to support them. The world can't all be Manhattan, no matter what real estate salesmen dream. Forests can't all be cut down to make arable land. People can't spread out where the farms used to be. Water -- now, there's the BIGGEST problem. Fresh water is the oil of the 21st century -- Enron was busy buying up wells around the world, no joke.
Tech can help with a lot of this, but it won't be given to the poor - that's the capitalist dilemma -- because they have little to offer for it. Food won't be shipped, water won't be cleaned, because there is no profit in it --
But the problem is too many people.
Actually, it the Space Shuttle as it was originally designed. I remember: two stages, the first to bring the joined craft up to high altitude, then release stage two and airbreathe back to earth on a runway. The second stage was supposed to fire up to orbit, then come back down as an airbreather and land on a runway.
The whole concept had to be scrapped because Congress wanted to kill the whole program after Apollo. To survive, NASA shopped the Shuttle to the Air Force. The Air Force had no use for the two-stage, small payload shuttle which was designed for mostly passengers, not freight.
The Air Force wanted something to lift the Keyhole spy satellites, which were pretty damned big -- the Hubble Space Telescope is essentially a Keyhole, just pointing away instead of at the license plates of evil Russians -- so NASA redesigned the Shuttle into a heavy lifter by getting rid of the flyback first stage, adding a disposable external fuel tank, and tacking on two solid rocket boosters to get the whole mess into orbit.
The Air Force signed on to add their weight to lobby for the new system, and lo! the idiot Shuttle, good for nothing but lifting Keyhole telescopes into orbit. NASA engineers probably cried themselves to sleep for years.
The Air Force later stopped using the Shuttle for spysats, leaving NASA with the flying boxcar that no one wanted to use.
Most of the above is from the book Enterprise, by Jerry Grey.
And remember this: it was the solid rocket boosters, and later the external tank, that destroyed two shuttles. Air Force: our thanks...
We never got an actual cheap shuttle, because Congress (the american people) didn't care about it, and the Air Force barely got a bastardized version built. They've been underfunded and unused by an American public who doesn't understand about what could have been done -- read The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill to get an idea of what we've lost -- and the funds to build a successor went into an insanely expensive scramjet program in the nineties that merely made aerospace companies richer by a few billion bucks. There have been shoestring programs, like the Delta Clipper DC-X single-stage to orbit prototype that never was developed, as well as rotor-landing concepts that never got past the testing stage, because Congress (that's us, in toto) constantly whittles NASA down to a state where only ONE development program can proceed at one time. It's a fake zero-sum game, where decades go by while NASA is chastised for it's "waste" while the military and new off-shoots like Halliburton drain trillions withut stay or let. NASA would love to have multiple programs testing different systems, like railguns supplanting the first stage, or winged dual stages like India's concept, or Pournelle's Delta Clipper one-stage vertical launch and land, or laser assisted takeoffs, or an advanced spaceplane, or just dirty old Saturn V's to get jobs done... but the US does not have a citizenry that has the education, the imagination, or the spirit necessary to fund even one program thru final operations, let alone multiple concepts.
The US is just not the country to do this. We did Apollo because we hated the Russkies so much that price was no object. After Apollo reached 17 (there were supposed to be 20, then the Selene permanent lab on the moon along with the Zeus Mars missions -- atomic powered, that one) there simply was no political pressure to keep going. Even today, NASA tries to get one-off Mars manned landers because they think that that is all the public will buy -- and they're right. Americans won't finance space colonization or L5/L2/L4 space industry. They don't even know what an ORBIT is, much less what all the rest means. And "sci-fi" in movies and TV sure as hell didn't help. Without the science, it's just WW II in space. Space has advantages for industry and solar energy transmission to ground, but you have to have a special kind of education and imagination to understand what the ideas mean -- and we don't have it
You all do realize that Gibson found the flaw in Windows 2000, not Windows 3.0?
Microsoft said that the flaw DATES from Windows 3.0, and is present in all versions since then.
NOT JUST WINDOWS 3.0! (Sheesh!!!)
No.
Judge Penfield Jackson's finding of fact declared Microsoft a monopoly. The issue is settled. Done. Finished.
The only issue is how the Department of Justice will enforce monopoly oversight. They simply won't, being composed of regulators chosen for the ideological hatred of monopoly regulation. THAT case is closed as well for at least twelve years, given that a Democratic administration is at least two years away AND they'd require ten years to bring a new case to its conclusion. The Republicans could take back the Presidency and the Congress in ten years (given that they will lose both in the next four), so ten years is pretty impossible as a target for case settlement. AND the democrats are pretty Republican in their business oversight, anyway. And the courts are packed solid with Federalist Society judges and their ideological fellow travellers; hell, Alito alone makes antitrust dead in this country for the next thirty years -- maybe longer, if you consider life extension tech will come out in the next thirty years as well. We may see some of the current younger members of the Supreme Court stick around for fifty years or more.
Microsoft may be a monopoly, but they might as well pretend that they aren't, because the law is a dead letter now.
ENOUGH. Gibson was right about raw sockets.
After the relentless pounding and smearing of Gibson, Microsoft quietly disabled the raw sockets code, whatever the hell it was.
Gibson was right. They fixed the problem. He was right, The Reg was wrong.
Jesus, it's like arguing with 20,000 Bill O'Reilly's. Truthiness! Gibson is a maaaaadddmaaaannn!
And since people rarely followup to what they think is truthy, they missed the fact that the only reason the Raw Sockets disaster didn't happen is because MICROSOFT QUIETLY FIXED THE PROBLEM, JUST. LIKE. GIBSON. SAID. THEY. SHOULD.
And as for being a top security professional, something he never claimed to be - he's a developer - what makes you all think that the very best security people at the NSA and Microsoft don't already know all about the exploit, because it's one of the many that they placed there in the first place?
Listen, everyperson, Microsoft has cooperated with Justice, the FBI, the NSA and all the other alphabet boys since the beginning. Windows and Office are monitored at will, you can bet your last god damned dollar. Can you imagine MS refusing to cooperate, especially during a ten year monopoly trial??
(originally posted as AC because I'd moderated; however, even posting as an AC, the code retroactively undid my moderation. Didn't know that would happen. A little warning, Slashcode?)
"Metaphysics"? Nope. "Magic".
Let's call it by the real name. "Metaphysics" is to "magic" as "not being straight" is to "lying". Politeness which unfortunately obscures the real argument.
There are people who use the methodology of science, and people who believe in magic. One takes discipline and a willingness to let delusions go; the other gives people what they want, a personal connection to the world, a feeling that it's all about them. One values truth, the other values "truthiness".
Most Americans value truthiness. *
* Okay, okay: a Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report, Comedy Central) neologism. Truthiness: A quality of feeling true rather than actually being true. Facts get in the way of getting at the nub of an argument: rely rather on the truthiness of your gut feelings.
In the U.S., we have at least three TV "news" networks giving us 24/7 truthy facts. The rest are joining the Truthiness in Reporting bandwagon soon. CBS will at last be Truthy when Katie Couric becomes the anchor for the news. Truthiness will have dominion over all...
What are the Creationist proposing? MAGIC holds the bees in the air? I mean, call it by the proper name. Magic, or Godpower, same thing...
It's fun watching the moderation in progress on posts that call out to Bush supporters. It's like watching a WW II sea battle on an old newsreel. The ship is being shelled on all sides, but the fearless crew keeps the pumps running, hoping to keep the battleship afloat until it reaches the harbor of a closed post...
flunking math... okay, okay, reverse that bloody statement. The idea is sound, I just can't spot obvious mistakes when I type them. I need an editor.
1 Euro = 1.2094 U.S. dollar
US currency is dropping like a rock. I think it's now $1US = 1.12 euros. We started out even; it's a fine, easy metric of how our economy is tanking.
The Chinese have announced that they are moving their foreign reserves into anything but US dollars, real soon now. Then, watch the $/Euro meter start spinning like the altimeter on that plane Bugs Bunny and that Gremlin almost crashed... hope it runs out of gas before it hits the ground.