They believe it because buildings blew up and their President, along with EVERY SINGLE NEWS SOURCE in the mainstream media, has repeated the meme until it became a really real fact.
War exists between nations. Anything else is a metaphor, OR a lie. In the war on "terror", it's a lie. Terror is a name we give to guerilla warfare practiced against civilians by anational networks. If someone we like practices it, it's freedom fighting. If not, they're terrorists.
The cool thing about a war against unspecified enemies located in no particular place (if they exist at all; find and watch "The Power of Nightmares") is that it begins when Bush says it does, and ends when he declares it "over". Give it two seconds of thought: how in hell do you win against "terror"? This is a Forever War.
The neocons have stated - categorically -- that war gives the President unlimited powers not only over the military as CinC, but over the civilian population as well. And no law applies to him if he deems it a hindrance. No exaggeration. Lookee at the recent anti-torture bill; after signing, Bush signed an addendum -- an understanding, sort of an opinion piece -- stating that he would disregard the law if it suits his needs. The Forever War gives us a Forever King. I'd use the term dictator, but it's so loaded that the rightists moderating would bury this post immediately...
We ain't at war with Afghanistan either. They didn't attack us; they just hosted the attackers, and wouldn't let us take them without proof, which Bush categorically denied them. He wanted "bombs falling in 30 days", and Afghanistan volunteered for the sacrificial lamb position. What we did was not war, and it was not moral. And we've made a mess of it.
We ain't at war with Iraq, as it never attacked and did not threaten to. We just lied, invaded, occupied, and stole the oil fields and are building a Pentagon-like embassy forthe long haul. We're fighting an insurgency from many fronts, united only in their belief that we are lying a-holes and need to get the hell out. You don't war with insurgents, you try to kill or imprison them. The only way to kill a real insurgency is to murder everyone -- because anyone left alive is just a seed waiting to sprout new insurgency. Fallujah, anyone?
We may soon attack Iran and then perhaps Syria, also under false pretenses. Bush has been delivering "Iran is a pack of terrorists" packets to Arab leaders for the past month or so, so his boys haven't given up on their Project for the New American Century yet. It's the Domino Theory all over again, only they want to be the domino players. It was a silly theory in the 50s and 60s, and it's doubly silly now. Counties aren't domino pieces, and they don't "fall" when you push them. And beware what you wish for, neocons, because people might really want a democratically elected religious dictatorship that will ally itself with other Godly dictatorships. People LIKE dictators, if they agree with them.
Thinking about it, the Forever War generates the fantasy enemy it proclaims existed in the first place, even if it really didn't. It's self-renewing. And like the first Forever War against "communism", it is making a lot of people so very, very rich and others so very, very powerful.
Offtopic? The topic was corporate control vs. user control of a web based service. I'm responding within the thread. Government and corporations are merging into a fluid control structure, so corporate and government censorship are the same nowadays.
Disagreeing with the point doesn't make the point "off-topic".
Nope. Only about 600 revolted out of 30 million, firstly. The rest of the crowd never noticed until it hit the news.
And the corporation still won't explain why it censored, or what the criteria for censorship is.
And the corporation deleted the blogs covering the subject. No explanation. One can only conclude that any content that the corporation interprets as objectionable will be deleted, with no notice and no explanation.
A state of terror doesn't exist when everyone is being nailed. It can happen to only a few, and then everyone else learns the lesson, internalizes the fact that they must watch what they say, watch what they do, or SOMEthing might happen. People automagically line up in ranks for very little reason, something Goebbels and Hitler knew well. McCarthy knew how it worked, and so did Nixon and Bush II.
The users are NOT in control there.
Huey Long, I think, once said that fascism would come to America (extend it to the world, same idea), but people would call it democracy. If there's no place to speak, freedom of speech is de facto curtailed, if not dead.
Boots marching, boots marching...
Murdoch was this administration's Hearst. He doesn't enjoy freedom of speech when others are practicing it. He thinks it so precious that he thinks only he can use it safely.
Sure there can be a censor-free zone. Handheld, or smaller, PC's with wireless mesh networking capabilities, creating on-the-move sneakernets. All content encrypted. Maybe with a display polarized so that one has to look directly at it while wearing special lenses.
And a memory destruct button for when they grab you for whatever excuse they have that year.
If all goes as I think it will, the sneakernets will be the last holdout in the coming prison state. And they will quickly become illegal. But they will be hard or impossible to censor.
Good going, you political hack. You think a couple dozen hits is a felony? You've just opened up that server to millions of hits. I might just take a few dozen shots at it myself. Thanks to that idiot, that school will never have an operational server again.
And are WE felons now? Golly gosh.
I'm thinking that Ohio is possibly the stupidest, most corrupt state in the U.S. Poor Ohio. Scandals and Diebold and creationism, oh my.
Paper ballots. Counted by hand, in public, in a goldfish bowl. Representatives of both parties watching the counter. After the tally is done, rotate the ballot stacks to different counting tables, and recount. Check the tallies. If they don't match, investigate the table counts. Redo. If they match, all three, interested parties and counter, move to the head table. Enter tally, in plain view, on a master list. After the tallies are totalled for the site, the totals are phoned in. The paper ballots, labeled with approporate tags, are placed in containers with one-time-only interior latches. Close latch. To recount, you must cut the box apart with power tools. No PICKABLE LOCKS. Ballot boxes are labeled and stored -- forever.
If these steps are followed, the vote count is impeccable, 100% accurate, and 100% verifiable (cut open the boxes, recount as necessary, reseal into new boxes).
And it would only take 3-6 hours. do the math.
Canada does something like this, and they have no problems. Using Occam's Razor, the only reason you'd want to use something as laughably alterable as a computer system is to alter the totals. Everything else is sophistry.
They tested the paint's combustablity under normal circimstances. What if it were on giant bags of hydrogen that had already caught fire? I doubt if the paint burned "slowly". I'd guess that the paint under very high temperatures acted as an accelerant at the very least.
Why not just test the idea? We know the conditions and materials involved. Bags, paint, aluminium, hydrogen; just add electricity, see what happens.
In the same vein, don't forget about the hundreds, even thousands of bomb-balloons that were lofted by Japan late in the second world war. They drifted east over the Pacific following the prevailing winds, and mostly landed in the forests of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. Just a little something to keep us hopping.
Every once in a while, someone runs across interesting hardware hanging from a tree, even to this day. Don't touch the flying mines, kids...
So, why are you bothering to comment? You're just cluttering things up.
It's like those kids on "Ain't It Cool News" constantly bitching about how lame the articles are, how much of a sellout Harry Knowles is, and how everyone there should get out of their basements. Without the slightest sense of irony.
Why not just post on an article you do care about?
The real Christians are out in force tonight, whipping out their mod points. Offtopic, whatever -- what can you say about the topic, "origin of volcano's effluvium unknown". ANYthing is on the table with a subject like that. Might as well be Infernal Leakage.
Do not mock the Texan Pope. He establishes Jesus' kingdom on Earth.
Global warming?!? Feh! It doesn't matter what we do to the Earth; God said so. And it's going to be destroyed in our lifetime, anyway. The Pope from Crawford is pretty certain of this, and his adherents as well. Seriously, Pope Bush believes the Earth will die and be reborn soon.
Kinda explains why he vetoed rebuilding the barrier islands around New Orleans this last month, despises "environmentalism" in general. It doesn't matter what the scientists say. The Earth is a giant Kleenex, absorbing the Boogers of God's People, and will be tossed away this century. It's all nonsense; we're all gonna fly into the sky, well, 144K of us, and the rest hit the trash compactor of Jesus' righteous hatred. What is "pollution" and "conservation" but blandishments of Satan, trying to convince us that the world is permanent and needs care, rather than the field of righteous trial, weeding out the saved from the damned.
Sinner, I ain't singling out Joliet's school system. It's just that, as a Chicagoan, it's extremely noticable that as you cross Joliet's lattitude the radio suddenly and permanently offers country music, all-christian all-the-time hellfire-laden sermonizing, and Rush-is-too-liberal-for-us talk radio, where Bush is seen as suspiciously soft on satan's people.
Infernal Leakage will PLAY down there. Makes as much sense as anything else.
Have you actually seen plate moving against plate? A fault line slip in progress? Theories, all theories.
It's HAAAAYYYYLLLLLLL! About a mile down, and hook a sharp right angle turn against all the other three spatial dimensions.
I might not actually be joking about Infernal Leakage. I just had a slight shiver. I'm afraid to Google for anti-Geologism websites.
They might be out there. And there might be more IL adherents in the U.S. than Geologists.
Carl Sagan was right... the Age of Enlightenment is kept alive by damned few Candles in the Dark. Isaac Asimov knew it, and spent his life fighting to keep the candles lit. Heinlein, who grew up in the Bible Belt in Missouri, knew the U.S. was on a tightrope, fighting a century-old battle against fundamentalist takeover. Pity he (and everyone else) was obsessed with commies. The real enemy was always with us, growing by one baby at a time.
The plain fact is, fundies all over the world have one, insurmountable superpower that the rationalists don't use (being rational) -- they're having huge numbers of babies. They're outnumbering us the old fashioned way, one giant family at a time.
Democracies, if you are listening, Mr. Bush, can be as totalitarian and violent as any dictatorship. They are no guarantee against tyranny. If enough people are fundamentalist and unbending, they will inevitable take power. They can't not take power. They see it as their duty.
They have it overseas, and we call it Islamofascism. In the US, they have a name for themselves: Dominionists.
We christen this theory "Infernal Leakage". Soon to be taught in every school south of Joliet, Illinois.
Mess with us, and we'll sue! WE know who's behind all this Geologyist perversion of the Truth, and we'll be soon beating them nearly to death on the sides of the road, not to mention getting them canned from their posts for uttering blsphemy against Go- -er- Infernal Leakage theory.
To get on the no-fly list, all you really have to do is criticize the government, be a politial opponent of the government, have a name similar to the previous, say Bush is a wanker in public, show up at anti-Bush rallies, read the wrong books in college... pretty simple. Watch what you say, watch what you do, or you don't get to leave the planet.
There are no terrorists on that list. Otherwise they'd never be allowed on the planes.
This is it, the big one. The data warehouse, the meta-file system to rule them all, one system to bind us.
Are any of you desperate enough for money to take on the task of coding us all into a worldwide virtual prison?
I hope, i really do, that the truly excellent coders and designers stay away from this nightmare project, and leave the details to the marginally incompetent. A badly designed prison is better than a perfect one.
There is no such thing as "Darwinism" outside the minds of fundamentalists.
There also is no such belief system as "Newtonism", "Galileoism", or "Einsteinism".
Words have power. Suffixing Darwin's name with an "-ism" clamps the scientist's name to a belief system, a religion. Fundies think of the world in terms of belief and absolutism, so it's natural for them to consider people who don't think as they do to be members of an opposing religion -- by definition evil and wrong, since only they are correct and righteous.
Science isn't a belief system, and doesn't do "-isms". It's a methodology and a collection of theories that describe known data. It is ultimately self-correcting, which religion IS NOT. Creationism is an -ism. It is predicated on the always-correct Bible, and cannot correct itself. It is not a science.
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. And that means the government has had to spend more time focusing on the processes that drug companies ordinarily follow in developing new medicines and bringing them to market.
"We had to spend some time and energy paying attention to those aspects of development because the private side isn't picking it up," Dr. Edmund Tramont testified in a deposition in a recent employment lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press.
Tramont is head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, and he predicted in his testimony that the government will eventually create a vaccine. He testified in July in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein.
"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."
"They will eventually - if it works, they won't have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit," he said.
An official of the group representing the country's major drug companies took sharp exception to Tramont's comments. "That is simply not true. America's pharmaceutical research companies are firmly committed to HIV/AIDS vaccine research and development with 15 potential vaccines in development today," said Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
"Godwinning": Calling cliche and quits on any comparison, valid or invalid, to either the ramp-up to power or the actual government of the Nazi party in post-Weimar Germany, and the ascension of fascism in both the U.S. and Russia.
Usefulness: shutting off discussion of actual similarities between the fascist takeovers of Italy and Germany to the fascist takeovers of Russia and the United States. Takes away the most powerful arguments of those who must use the comparison to bring home the fact that Americans gravitate naturally towards a superpowerful, unconstitutional dictator coupled with hypermilitarism, suppression of dissent, and directed fear against a faceless adversary. Oh, like in the last five years.
Godwin! 9-11! Terrorism! War! 9-11! Muslism with nukes! Crazed enemies without provocation! Godwin! Must take out the treacherous Poles, er, Iraqis, before they strike first! No similarities between the Nazi's methodology and the current admin's. Nothing to see here, move along, Godwin, 9-11. Thank you, and 9-11.
I've been speculating on the Mafia-RIAA connection for years. How else does such a weenie interest group get such favorable legislation from Congress? The consumer electronics industry and the PC manufacturing companies make far more money than all the record companies combined. Yet the congressmen roll over for the RIAA every time. Why? It isn't money -- the RIAA can easily be outspent (outbribed, whatever).
The Mafia's been connected with record companies for decades. Is it uncommon knowledge that to oppose the RIAA is to oppose people who can have you disappeared into a blast furnace?
Why do we need states? Why do we need fifty separate miniature countries, each with its own tax system? We bitch about how complicated the EU is, for godssake.
The union of independent states was important for the original thirteen colonies, each of which was its own little fiefdom/nation, and damned jealous of their power.
Why not put 50 units of government out of business? What good is the division doing us? From what I see, I see business playing the states against each other, reducing wages and getting tax breaks in a giant "race to the bottom", the winner getting tax-exempt, 5.75/hour superstores, and the losers empty factories and high crime rates.
Honestly. One sales tax, one income tax, one of everything. "If you don't like it, leave", as the apologists always say.
Hell, with our new Homeland Secret Police, law enforcement is going national. What's the use of pretending anymore?
I've noticed the real reason the fifty separate units were popular was that it was a lot easier to hide out from the law and your own past since information was pretty much walled up in each individual state. It made it a lot easier to be crooked; wear out your welcome in Tulsa, and move operations to Santa Fe. But it's not that easy anymore. Frankly, I've always liked the fact that you could move around the country and lose a little of your past with each move. But that's not an option anymore. We're just supporting fifty moneysucking units of government.
Slashdot Mirror
They believe it because buildings blew up and their President, along with EVERY SINGLE NEWS SOURCE in the mainstream media, has repeated the meme until it became a really real fact.
War exists between nations. Anything else is a metaphor, OR a lie. In the war on "terror", it's a lie. Terror is a name we give to guerilla warfare practiced against civilians by anational networks. If someone we like practices it, it's freedom fighting. If not, they're terrorists.
The cool thing about a war against unspecified enemies located in no particular place (if they exist at all; find and watch "The Power of Nightmares") is that it begins when Bush says it does, and ends when he declares it "over". Give it two seconds of thought: how in hell do you win against "terror"? This is a Forever War.
The neocons have stated - categorically -- that war gives the President unlimited powers not only over the military as CinC, but over the civilian population as well. And no law applies to him if he deems it a hindrance. No exaggeration. Lookee at the recent anti-torture bill; after signing, Bush signed an addendum -- an understanding, sort of an opinion piece -- stating that he would disregard the law if it suits his needs. The Forever War gives us a Forever King. I'd use the term dictator, but it's so loaded that the rightists moderating would bury this post immediately...
We ain't at war with Afghanistan either. They didn't attack us; they just hosted the attackers, and wouldn't let us take them without proof, which Bush categorically denied them. He wanted "bombs falling in 30 days", and Afghanistan volunteered for the sacrificial lamb position. What we did was not war, and it was not moral. And we've made a mess of it.
We ain't at war with Iraq, as it never attacked and did not threaten to. We just lied, invaded, occupied, and stole the oil fields and are building a Pentagon-like embassy forthe long haul. We're fighting an insurgency from many fronts, united only in their belief that we are lying a-holes and need to get the hell out. You don't war with insurgents, you try to kill or imprison them. The only way to kill a real insurgency is to murder everyone -- because anyone left alive is just a seed waiting to sprout new insurgency. Fallujah, anyone?
We may soon attack Iran and then perhaps Syria, also under false pretenses. Bush has been delivering "Iran is a pack of terrorists" packets to Arab leaders for the past month or so, so his boys haven't given up on their Project for the New American Century yet. It's the Domino Theory all over again, only they want to be the domino players. It was a silly theory in the 50s and 60s, and it's doubly silly now. Counties aren't domino pieces, and they don't "fall" when you push them. And beware what you wish for, neocons, because people might really want a democratically elected religious dictatorship that will ally itself with other Godly dictatorships. People LIKE dictators, if they agree with them.
Thinking about it, the Forever War generates the fantasy enemy it proclaims existed in the first place, even if it really didn't. It's self-renewing. And like the first Forever War against "communism", it is making a lot of people so very, very rich and others so very, very powerful.
Offtopic? The topic was corporate control vs. user control of a web based service. I'm responding within the thread. Government and corporations are merging into a fluid control structure, so corporate and government censorship are the same nowadays.
Disagreeing with the point doesn't make the point "off-topic".
Nope. Only about 600 revolted out of 30 million, firstly. The rest of the crowd never noticed until it hit the news.
And the corporation still won't explain why it censored, or what the criteria for censorship is.
And the corporation deleted the blogs covering the subject. No explanation. One can only conclude that any content that the corporation interprets as objectionable will be deleted, with no notice and no explanation.
A state of terror doesn't exist when everyone is being nailed. It can happen to only a few, and then everyone else learns the lesson, internalizes the fact that they must watch what they say, watch what they do, or SOMEthing might happen. People automagically line up in ranks for very little reason, something Goebbels and Hitler knew well. McCarthy knew how it worked, and so did Nixon and Bush II.
The users are NOT in control there.
Huey Long, I think, once said that fascism would come to America (extend it to the world, same idea), but people would call it democracy. If there's no place to speak, freedom of speech is de facto curtailed, if not dead.
Boots marching, boots marching...
Murdoch was this administration's Hearst. He doesn't enjoy freedom of speech when others are practicing it. He thinks it so precious that he thinks only he can use it safely.
Sure there can be a censor-free zone. Handheld, or smaller, PC's with wireless mesh networking capabilities, creating on-the-move sneakernets. All content encrypted. Maybe with a display polarized so that one has to look directly at it while wearing special lenses.
And a memory destruct button for when they grab you for whatever excuse they have that year.
If all goes as I think it will, the sneakernets will be the last holdout in the coming prison state. And they will quickly become illegal. But they will be hard or impossible to censor.
Ah, bitter old people.
Who's the bigger losers: the people who post on MySpace, or the people who take the time to troll around MySpace for pictures of people to ridicule?
Good going, you political hack. You think a couple dozen hits is a felony? You've just opened up that server to millions of hits. I might just take a few dozen shots at it myself. Thanks to that idiot, that school will never have an operational server again.
And are WE felons now? Golly gosh.
I'm thinking that Ohio is possibly the stupidest, most corrupt state in the U.S. Poor Ohio. Scandals and Diebold and creationism, oh my.
Paper ballots.
Counted by hand, in public, in a goldfish bowl.
Representatives of both parties watching the counter.
After the tally is done, rotate the ballot stacks to different counting tables, and recount.
Check the tallies.
If they don't match, investigate the table counts. Redo.
If they match, all three, interested parties and counter, move to the head table. Enter tally, in plain view, on a master list.
After the tallies are totalled for the site, the totals are phoned in.
The paper ballots, labeled with approporate tags, are placed in containers with one-time-only interior latches. Close latch. To recount, you must cut the box apart with power tools. No PICKABLE LOCKS.
Ballot boxes are labeled and stored -- forever.
If these steps are followed, the vote count is impeccable, 100% accurate, and 100% verifiable (cut open the boxes, recount as necessary, reseal into new boxes).
And it would only take 3-6 hours. do the math.
Canada does something like this, and they have no problems. Using Occam's Razor, the only reason you'd want to use something as laughably alterable as a computer system is to alter the totals. Everything else is sophistry.
A quick analysis:
They tested the paint's combustablity under normal circimstances. What if it were on giant bags of hydrogen that had already caught fire? I doubt if the paint burned "slowly". I'd guess that the paint under very high temperatures acted as an accelerant at the very least.
Why not just test the idea? We know the conditions and materials involved. Bags, paint, aluminium, hydrogen; just add electricity, see what happens.
In the same vein, don't forget about the hundreds, even thousands of bomb-balloons that were lofted by Japan late in the second world war. They drifted east over the Pacific following the prevailing winds, and mostly landed in the forests of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. Just a little something to keep us hopping.
Every once in a while, someone runs across interesting hardware hanging from a tree, even to this day. Don't touch the flying mines, kids...
So, why are you bothering to comment? You're just cluttering things up.
It's like those kids on "Ain't It Cool News" constantly bitching about how lame the articles are, how much of a sellout Harry Knowles is, and how everyone there should get out of their basements. Without the slightest sense of irony.
Why not just post on an article you do care about?
The real Christians are out in force tonight, whipping out their mod points. Offtopic, whatever -- what can you say about the topic, "origin of volcano's effluvium unknown". ANYthing is on the table with a subject like that. Might as well be Infernal Leakage.
Go, find a party, O God's defenders...
Do not mock the Texan Pope. He establishes Jesus' kingdom on Earth.
Global warming?!? Feh! It doesn't matter what we do to the Earth; God said so. And it's going to be destroyed in our lifetime, anyway. The Pope from Crawford is pretty certain of this, and his adherents as well. Seriously, Pope Bush believes the Earth will die and be reborn soon.
Kinda explains why he vetoed rebuilding the barrier islands around New Orleans this last month, despises "environmentalism" in general. It doesn't matter what the scientists say. The Earth is a giant Kleenex, absorbing the Boogers of God's People, and will be tossed away this century. It's all nonsense; we're all gonna fly into the sky, well, 144K of us, and the rest hit the trash compactor of Jesus' righteous hatred. What is "pollution" and "conservation" but blandishments of Satan, trying to convince us that the world is permanent and needs care, rather than the field of righteous trial, weeding out the saved from the damned.
Sinner, I ain't singling out Joliet's school system. It's just that, as a Chicagoan, it's extremely noticable that as you cross Joliet's lattitude the radio suddenly and permanently offers country music, all-christian all-the-time hellfire-laden sermonizing, and Rush-is-too-liberal-for-us talk radio, where Bush is seen as suspiciously soft on satan's people.
Infernal Leakage will PLAY down there. Makes as much sense as anything else.
Have you actually seen plate moving against plate? A fault line slip in progress? Theories, all theories.
It's HAAAAYYYYLLLLLLL! About a mile down, and hook a sharp right angle turn against all the other three spatial dimensions.
I might not actually be joking about Infernal Leakage. I just had a slight shiver. I'm afraid to Google for anti-Geologism websites.
They might be out there. And there might be more IL adherents in the U.S. than Geologists.
Carl Sagan was right... the Age of Enlightenment is kept alive by damned few Candles in the Dark. Isaac Asimov knew it, and spent his life fighting to keep the candles lit. Heinlein, who grew up in the Bible Belt in Missouri, knew the U.S. was on a tightrope, fighting a century-old battle against fundamentalist takeover. Pity he (and everyone else) was obsessed with commies. The real enemy was always with us, growing by one baby at a time.
The plain fact is, fundies all over the world have one, insurmountable superpower that the rationalists don't use (being rational) -- they're having huge numbers of babies. They're outnumbering us the old fashioned way, one giant family at a time.
Democracies, if you are listening, Mr. Bush, can be as totalitarian and violent as any dictatorship. They are no guarantee against tyranny. If enough people are fundamentalist and unbending, they will inevitable take power. They can't not take power. They see it as their duty.
They have it overseas, and we call it Islamofascism. In the US, they have a name for themselves:
Dominionists.
The lava is coming from HAAAYYYYLLLL.
We christen this theory "Infernal Leakage". Soon to be taught in every school south of Joliet, Illinois.
Mess with us, and we'll sue! WE know who's behind all this Geologyist perversion of the Truth, and we'll be soon beating them nearly to death on the sides of the road, not to mention getting them canned from their posts for uttering blsphemy against Go- -er- Infernal Leakage theory.
To get on the no-fly list, all you really have to do is criticize the government, be a politial opponent of the government, have a name similar to the previous, say Bush is a wanker in public, show up at anti-Bush rallies, read the wrong books in college... pretty simple. Watch what you say, watch what you do, or you don't get to leave the planet.
There are no terrorists on that list. Otherwise they'd never be allowed on the planes.
This is it, the big one. The data warehouse, the meta-file system to rule them all, one system to bind us.
Are any of you desperate enough for money to take on the task of coding us all into a worldwide virtual prison?
I hope, i really do, that the truly excellent coders and designers stay away from this nightmare project, and leave the details to the marginally incompetent. A badly designed prison is better than a perfect one.
There is no such thing as "Darwinism" outside the minds of fundamentalists.
There also is no such belief system as "Newtonism", "Galileoism", or "Einsteinism".
Words have power. Suffixing Darwin's name with an "-ism" clamps the scientist's name to a belief system, a religion. Fundies think of the world in terms of belief and absolutism, so it's natural for them to consider people who don't think as they do to be members of an opposing religion -- by definition evil and wrong, since only they are correct and righteous.
Science isn't a belief system, and doesn't do "-isms". It's a methodology and a collection of theories that describe known data. It is ultimately self-correcting, which religion IS NOT. Creationism is an -ism. It is predicated on the always-correct Bible, and cannot correct itself. It is not a science.
Does your boss know that you're typing all this?
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12262005/world/ 79889.htm
No incentive for AIDS vaccine, researcher says
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. And that means the government has had to spend more time focusing on the processes that drug companies ordinarily follow in developing new medicines and bringing them to market.
"We had to spend some time and energy paying attention to those aspects of development because the private side isn't picking it up," Dr. Edmund Tramont testified in a deposition in a recent employment lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press.
Tramont is head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, and he predicted in his testimony that the government will eventually create a vaccine. He testified in July in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein.
"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."
"They will eventually - if it works, they won't have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit," he said.
An official of the group representing the country's major drug companies took sharp exception to Tramont's comments. "That is simply not true. America's pharmaceutical research companies are firmly committed to HIV/AIDS vaccine research and development with 15 potential vaccines in development today," said Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
"Godwinning": Calling cliche and quits on any comparison, valid or invalid, to either the ramp-up to power or the actual government of the Nazi party in post-Weimar Germany, and the ascension of fascism in both the U.S. and Russia.
Usefulness: shutting off discussion of actual similarities between the fascist takeovers of Italy and Germany to the fascist takeovers of Russia and the United States. Takes away the most powerful arguments of those who must use the comparison to bring home the fact that Americans gravitate naturally towards a superpowerful, unconstitutional dictator coupled with hypermilitarism, suppression of dissent, and directed fear against a faceless adversary. Oh, like in the last five years.
Godwin! 9-11! Terrorism! War! 9-11! Muslism with nukes! Crazed enemies without provocation! Godwin! Must take out the treacherous Poles, er, Iraqis, before they strike first! No similarities between the Nazi's methodology and the current admin's. Nothing to see here, move along, Godwin, 9-11. Thank you, and 9-11.
I've been speculating on the Mafia-RIAA connection for years. How else does such a weenie interest group get such favorable legislation from Congress? The consumer electronics industry and the PC manufacturing companies make far more money than all the record companies combined. Yet the congressmen roll over for the RIAA every time. Why? It isn't money -- the RIAA can easily be outspent (outbribed, whatever).
The Mafia's been connected with record companies for decades. Is it uncommon knowledge that to oppose the RIAA is to oppose people who can have you disappeared into a blast furnace?
Is it?
Okay:
Fox becomes GOP-TV.
MS-NBC becomes GOP-NBC.
Simple!
GOP-TV.
You just quoted my argument back at me as tho I had argued the opposite, and then claim a zing? Okaaaaaay.
Why do we need states? Why do we need fifty separate miniature countries, each with its own tax system? We bitch about how complicated the EU is, for godssake.
The union of independent states was important for the original thirteen colonies, each of which was its own little fiefdom/nation, and damned jealous of their power.
Why not put 50 units of government out of business? What good is the division doing us? From what I see, I see business playing the states against each other, reducing wages and getting tax breaks in a giant "race to the bottom", the winner getting tax-exempt, 5.75/hour superstores, and the losers empty factories and high crime rates.
Honestly. One sales tax, one income tax, one of everything. "If you don't like it, leave", as the apologists always say.
Hell, with our new Homeland Secret Police, law enforcement is going national. What's the use of pretending anymore?
I've noticed the real reason the fifty separate units were popular was that it was a lot easier to hide out from the law and your own past since information was pretty much walled up in each individual state. It made it a lot easier to be crooked; wear out your welcome in Tulsa, and move operations to Santa Fe. But it's not that easy anymore. Frankly, I've always liked the fact that you could move around the country and lose a little of your past with each move. But that's not an option anymore. We're just supporting fifty moneysucking units of government.