No, it's that one particular right wing group took it even further. Both sides were doing it, the right was just more organized about it. Which seems like a fairly common scenario; the right and left try to swing narratives in their direction, but the right is generally more effective at it. If a group of likeminded users happens to vote up or bury stories, it's mildly damaging. If each of the users registers dozens of accounts, hides behind proxies to circumvent bans, takes orders from a single user as to which stories to bury, etc., it's downright destructive. This particular group was managing to bury 90% of the stories they disagreed with in three hours or less, drastically altering the balance of the front page.
Those first four years are nearly unconstrained. Yeah, you can do a pre-law major, but tons of people study random stuff, then later apply to law school. The three years of law school are quite intensive, but remember, much of the study is in working out how to apply precedents from different states, work within the confines of Supreme Court rulings, etc. The Supreme Court doesn't have to worry about that to the same degree. Someone with a good liberal arts grounding is capable of learning and functioning in a new environment. Like I said, assuming the opposite is assuming that lawyers possess superhuman skills not available to mere mortals.
Which is why, like I said, I wouldn't want a Court that is primarily composed of non-lawyers either. But having 5-7 lawyers/judges to provide the structure and training to guide debate, and 2-4 non-lawyers to provide different viewpoints is fairly safe. Worst case scenario, you run into a case where the law is clear, but the non-lawyers are somehow incapable of applying it correctly, and you end up with a more slim majority. Beyond that, the implication that an intelligent, well read individual is incapable of learning the necessary basics to do the job is ascribing superhuman abilities to lawyers. Lawyers are people. The precedents drilled into law students are not the infallible word of God, they're the opinions of fallible men, and having people more willing to question them is a good thing.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Does the part referencing and establishment of religion mean they:
Can't create a state religion
Can pass no law that even mentions religion (religions are subject to the laws in the same way as any other corporation, profit or non-profit, depending on their income)
Must explicitly exempt religions from all laws
Can't pass a law regarding the physical property of religions
A literal reading of the text would probably come closest to the second or third interpretation. Problem is, now you need to:
Define a religion
Determine if there are limits to said freedom
Defining a religion is tricky. At what point does it change from cult to religion, or should all supernatural belief structures be considered to have a religious nature? What if the tenets of the religion are antithetical to society at large? Murder or slavery might be easy to dismiss as they compromise supposedly inalienable rights, but what about secession from the nation due to a belief that religious dictates must not be compromised by secular government? Belief that property can't be owned (and therefore no compunctions about theft)?
Even on the easier clauses (freedom of speech), literal interpretation is problematic, for example, the old "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception. If the people decide to peaceably assemble on someone else's front yard, is that right to peaceable assembly still protected, or can the property owner force them to leave? Even for the most clear aspects of the Constitution, the real world makes it impractical to interpret them 100% strictly.
And to be clear, this isn't a knock on lawyers in general. They aren't bloodsuckers (in general), but they have been taught a world view that is very narrow. It's the same way serious Computer Science geeks are probably not the best people to design a UI (at least, not without end user input); their idea of usable is not going to match the general populace's. The general populace doesn't see why a corporation is a person, or money is speech. And I'm not saying either of those is necessarily wrong (though I've yet to see a really good argument for the latter), but it's better to have people on the Court willing to question these principles rather than rely on them blindly.
Don't suppose you've noticed, but while lawyers are disproportionately represented in Congress, it isn't a prerequisite. Non-lawyers are at least partially responsible for our laws.
For the record, my opinions on this are solely confined to the Supreme Court. Lower courts need experienced judges and lawyers because they are constrained by Supreme Court precedent as well as the laws as written, and it takes training and study to deal with the multiple layers of ambiguity involved.
The whole point of the Supreme Court is that it takes the tough cases, the ones without a clear answer. In those sorts of cases, legal training isn't a prerequisite. Having people trained how to think, rather than solely how to parse legalese is a good thing. A liberal arts student from, for example, St. Johns with a history of non-profit work, or of managing a business, or a successful career as a psychologist would add some diversity of views. The fact of the matter is that lawyers are indoctrinated with a specific world view in modern law schools (a fairly corporatist world view), and having people who don't have these built in assumptions about how the world works on the Court provides more diversity than any number of minorities, women, etc., if the minorities and women were indoctrinated into the law school mindset.
There are branches of the Democratic party that believe in blanket bans, but they're quite small. You may not have encountered them due to living in the wrong part of the country (East coast democrats tend to be more anti-gun, while many otherwise bleeding heart West coast dems have enough of a libertarian streak to drop that aspect of the platform). Most of the party believes in more gun control, though definitions vary (it could mean more rigorous checking and sales monitoring, or they could be in favor of banning specific types of weapons). Personally, I'm mostly a Democrat by affiliation (the issues I tend to disagree on are ones where the Republicans either agree, or pretend to disagree while continuing to pass legislation in favor of it), and while I believe in gun control, it's *way* down on my list of priorities.
It's only recently that it became a major concern, largely because they use it as a proxy for competence to try and fend off ideological attacks. According to Media Matters, out of 111 Supreme Court Justices, 40 of them had no prior judicial experience. Hell, Rehnquist and Warren (relatively recent Chief Justices) had no prior judicial experience, and Rehnquist only died a couple years back. Personally, I'd be happy with a few more non-judges (ideally a couple non-lawyers) on the Court (not a majority, but two or three), just to provide a touch of humanity. Sometimes, the law isn't clear, and the Constitution almost never is, and having people who are inclined to sympathize with people rather than arcane precedents is a good thing. Yeah, it's not calling balls and strikes, but then, if you really believe any Supreme Court Justice is able to do that, you're delusional.
Well, if you're writing entirely in English, the only accented character you're likely to need is é. The extremely rare words that require other keystroke combos can be solved by the method you describe (or by using the Character Map tool). I only really know two of the character codes by heart, Alt-0233 for é, and Alt-789 to make pirate eyepatch emoticons. Unfortunately, the pirate eyepatch character won't display on/. as far as I can tell, but you should be able to replicate it in Notepad or the like.
It perfectly legal to not vote. The founding fathers weren't particularly confident that voters would be smart enough to do their job in the first place, they sure as hell didn't want to force the ignorant or unwilling to screw up the process. Quit making up facts to support your paranoia (there are real facts available, so making facts up makes all people that hold your opinion look like nutjobs).
I don't see any reason why a good programmer couldn't be a poor typist. For every line of code I write (parens and braces not included), I think for at least 20 seconds, and I suspect that counting the elongated breaks planning new sections, I might be closer to a minute on average. "Good" programmers would follow the 90/10 rule and realize that spending time optimizing the task that occupies less than 10% of their time isn't a worthwhile optimization. I happen to be able to touch type, but I never trained to do it, and I don't do it "correctly": no home row, just muscle memory for key positions. For a programmer, traditional home row isn't as useful anyway. Curly braces aren't easy to do while keeping your hands in the home position.
It's such a common misspelling that it may as well be the correct one. Yeah, it's supposed to be fuchsia, but that spelling is so incredibly anti-phonetic that no one remembers it. You can only get away with really arcane spellings on commonly used words (where elementary school Reading and English teachers and early childhood books will imprint the correct spelling on you), and fuchsia isn't in that category.
4>> Subsidized with your tax dollars. I worked in a secure building with access restricted to certain people, and the soda machines in there sold canned brand-name drinks for fifty cents. In the "open" building across the parking lot, they were a buck.
Not necessarily subsidized. They may simply be declining to mark it up all that much. Typical retail prices are 50% over wholesale, give or take. Running a soda machine at-cost to keep the workers happy makes sense. But you can't do that in the "open" area without increasing costs substantially; if the people working in the area are constantly dropping by to buy discount soda, you'll get a lot of complaints from area retailers (you're hitting their bottom line), and you now need to refill the machine far more frequently or let it go empty, which means you need to pay for refills more often, or you don't provide the benefit to your workers.
Beyond that, referring to it as "subsidized" makes it sound like the government is unusually wasteful with money in this instance. Compared to private industry, they're actually being fairly cheap. I'm a software developer (as are a lot of NSA employees). I'm private sector, and every job I've worked in has provided free drinks (including name brand soda) at the very least, and they often provide snacks, candy, and the occasional after work get together with free wine or beer. The federal government pays less than most software development jobs in the private sector (from talking with friends that have had offers from private sector and the feds, the feds always offer about 15-30% less, even when the fed job might actually require more skills), the benefits are less generous (my last two private sector jobs came with automatic health care where my co-pay for just about everything was $5-10 with no deductible, while fed employees have to pay a percentage of their health care and usually have higher co-pays and/or deductibles), and in the case of a jobs requiring clearance, you don't even get public acknowledgment of your contributions. There are three major benefits to working for the federal government:
It's harder to get fired (but by no means impossible)
Their education benefits are more generous (private sector often pays for night classes, but the feds will give you time off with full pay for a limited amount of graduate work)
Pay raises are more reliable (a bad year for a private company might mean stingy 2% or less raises all around, but the feds give guaranteed cost of living adjustment, and step promotions are automatic every few years)
Yes, the feds are less flexible, so sometimes they'll have more people working for them than they need and will have a hard time trimming (though that's what contractors are for; pick up more when you need 'em, drop 'em when you don't). But the cost per software developer to the feds is far less than most reasonable private sectors companies (Microsoft, financial firms, etc.) pay. Even if the feds *were* losing a few cents a can on soda (and I doubt it; soda is cheap, people have just been duped into thinking it should cost $0.75-$1.00 a can), they're still making out like bandits.
Yes, they can. Classification typically lapses after 25 years unless reviewed and extended, and while it's easy to extend classification, in practice it lapses on a lot of stuff. That doesn't mean they put it on a website or in the museum, but it's open to FOIA requests at that point.
Slight correction: The TSA says they *cannot* store or record images. The U.S. Marshals, apparently using the same equipment, *are* storing images. Ergo, the TSA is lying about the capabilities of the machines, and a lawsuit is being filed to prevent them from being used since we clearly can't trust a word the TSA says. To be honest, the fact that the Marshals provided a case in point is somewhat irrelevant; the TSA claims they can't store images, but according to TFA, they require that they be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." Even though they claim that they are delivered for use with this functionality disabled, examples such as the U.S. Marshals case make this claim dubious, thus the lawsuit.
The Washington Post publishes columns by Thiessen because his radical rightwing warmonger faction is the Post's board's favorite tiny sliver of Americans. Who always get whatever they want, especially wars.
So when their other columnists vociferously disagree with Thiessen, does that mean the Washington Post has changed it's views and is now pro-peace and transparency? The WaPo's stable of editorial writers leans slightly to the right (and only slightly), but I suspect this is largely an overreaction to balance perceived liberal bias at the paper. Take a look at the columnists:
Joel Achenbach
Anne Applebaum
David Broder
Jonathan Capehart
Richard Cohen
Petula Dvorak
Jackson Diehl
E.J. Dionne
Michael Gerson
Fred Hiatt
Kevin Huffman
David Ignatius
Robert Kagan
Al Kamen
Colbert King
Ezra Klein
Charles Krauthammer
Ruth Marcus
Robert McCartney
Harold Meyerson
Dana Milbank
Matt Miller
Courtland Milloy
Kathleen Parker
Steven Pearlstein
Eugene Robinson
Robert Samuelson
Greg Sargent
Marc Thiessen
Katrina vanden Heuvel
George Will
Jonathan Yardley
Fareed Zakaria
Of the ones I have read and have a noticed a bias in, I count roughly half a dozen conservative writers (Applebaum, Gerson, Krauthammer, Parker, Samuelson, Thiessen and Will). There are a three or four more that lean right, without being purely conservative (and Parker and Samuelson are unorthodox for conservatives on some issues). I count a similar number of liberal leaning op-ed writers (Achenbach, though he's mostly a humor and science writer, Broder, Capehart, King, Klein, Marcus, Meyerson, Robinson), and a similar number of those that lean left (many of their op-ed writers specializing in economics write with a center left viewpoint). Trying to claim the Post holds a specific viewpoint based on their stable of op-ed writers is being intentionally obtuse.
P.S. I'm sure I got one or two writers' political inclinations wrong, I'm operating from memory here. But if you look at their op-ed writers as a whole, the overall political leanings are fairly moderate. If you read their website, the batshit crazy writers tend to get linked in the Opinion section on the front page more often, but I suspect this is trolling for page views; the more outrageous the viewpoint, the more clicks it gets.
Not at all. They provide ongoing column space to a number of writers with wildly different viewpoints. Their regular Op-Ed writers hold wildly different views. As long as the Op-Ed writers don't go wildly out of line (unambiguous libel, unambiguous lies, unjustifiable profanity), most newspapers generally print it as is. No one on the WaPo editorial board is signing off on the content of these columns. It's the same at other newspapers too. Op-Ed columnists are signed to contracts and produce a regular column which is edited largely for spelling and grammar, not for content. The Post does publish editorials that represent the views of the Post's editorial staff, but those editorials don't have a byline. Personally, I think Thiessen (and to an even greater extent, Gerson) are intellectually bankrupt windbags, but some of the other conservative writers occasionally raise good points, or at least lay out a conservative argument in an intellectually sound manner, even if I frequently disagree with their conclusions. But those Op-Eds reflect solely on their authors; both credit and blame lay with the writer, not the Washington Post itself.
Of course, those same effects mean all sorts of diseases, insects and hostile plants migrating from the equatorial regions outward. I'm not looking forward to needing a malaria vaccination to visit California. Doubling up on our "tropical, biologically hostile regions" in exchange for a pittance of additional temperate climate in the upper latitudes doesn't sound like a great trade-off. After all, the bulk of the land mass is further from the poles. If you think otherwise, it's because you've forgotten that your flat maps make the polar regions look huge (Greenland is actually quite small, but in order to make the longitude bars parallel, they screw up the scale as they approach the poles). The net change in arable, temperate land is negative.
Well we just had the coldest winter in a veeery long time, most snow since '56, and i think coldest since like 1930s or something like that. Just like now is hottest in 70 years or so here.
So yet, this is the coldest year in ages, while being also the hottest year in ages. How does it average out?
Umm... You do realize that this past winter was quite warm? It wasn't the coldest anything.
Beyond that, lots of snow requires the temperature to be below 32 degrees, but you don't get more snow the colder it gets. Snow requires three things, a warm area to evaporate water and lift moisture into the air to form clouds, a cold area to produce the necessary temperatures, and somewhere for the two air masses to meet and produce the snow. Global warming would actually increase snowfall under certain circumstances; the higher temperatures where the moisture enters the air would increase the amount of water available to produce snow. If the water content of the clouds increases by a greater amount than the percentage of below freezing days decreases in a particular area, then, while you'll have fewer storms, each storm will drop more snow. It's not a particularly complicated concept. Hell, where I grew up (D.C. area), the big snow storms were typically in late February and early March; those aren't the coldest months, but when it was cold enough, the additional precipitation made for a *lot* of snow.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's that one particular right wing group took it even further. Both sides were doing it, the right was just more organized about it. Which seems like a fairly common scenario; the right and left try to swing narratives in their direction, but the right is generally more effective at it. If a group of likeminded users happens to vote up or bury stories, it's mildly damaging. If each of the users registers dozens of accounts, hides behind proxies to circumvent bans, takes orders from a single user as to which stories to bury, etc., it's downright destructive. This particular group was managing to bury 90% of the stories they disagreed with in three hours or less, drastically altering the balance of the front page.
Given that even water would deflect these lasers, peeing yourself should be a sufficient means of blocking them.
Those first four years are nearly unconstrained. Yeah, you can do a pre-law major, but tons of people study random stuff, then later apply to law school. The three years of law school are quite intensive, but remember, much of the study is in working out how to apply precedents from different states, work within the confines of Supreme Court rulings, etc. The Supreme Court doesn't have to worry about that to the same degree. Someone with a good liberal arts grounding is capable of learning and functioning in a new environment. Like I said, assuming the opposite is assuming that lawyers possess superhuman skills not available to mere mortals.
Which is why, like I said, I wouldn't want a Court that is primarily composed of non-lawyers either. But having 5-7 lawyers/judges to provide the structure and training to guide debate, and 2-4 non-lawyers to provide different viewpoints is fairly safe. Worst case scenario, you run into a case where the law is clear, but the non-lawyers are somehow incapable of applying it correctly, and you end up with a more slim majority. Beyond that, the implication that an intelligent, well read individual is incapable of learning the necessary basics to do the job is ascribing superhuman abilities to lawyers. Lawyers are people. The precedents drilled into law students are not the infallible word of God, they're the opinions of fallible men, and having people more willing to question them is a good thing.
A literal reading of the text would probably come closest to the second or third interpretation. Problem is, now you need to:
Defining a religion is tricky. At what point does it change from cult to religion, or should all supernatural belief structures be considered to have a religious nature? What if the tenets of the religion are antithetical to society at large? Murder or slavery might be easy to dismiss as they compromise supposedly inalienable rights, but what about secession from the nation due to a belief that religious dictates must not be compromised by secular government? Belief that property can't be owned (and therefore no compunctions about theft)?
Even on the easier clauses (freedom of speech), literal interpretation is problematic, for example, the old "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception. If the people decide to peaceably assemble on someone else's front yard, is that right to peaceable assembly still protected, or can the property owner force them to leave? Even for the most clear aspects of the Constitution, the real world makes it impractical to interpret them 100% strictly.
And to be clear, this isn't a knock on lawyers in general. They aren't bloodsuckers (in general), but they have been taught a world view that is very narrow. It's the same way serious Computer Science geeks are probably not the best people to design a UI (at least, not without end user input); their idea of usable is not going to match the general populace's. The general populace doesn't see why a corporation is a person, or money is speech. And I'm not saying either of those is necessarily wrong (though I've yet to see a really good argument for the latter), but it's better to have people on the Court willing to question these principles rather than rely on them blindly.
Don't suppose you've noticed, but while lawyers are disproportionately represented in Congress, it isn't a prerequisite. Non-lawyers are at least partially responsible for our laws.
For the record, my opinions on this are solely confined to the Supreme Court. Lower courts need experienced judges and lawyers because they are constrained by Supreme Court precedent as well as the laws as written, and it takes training and study to deal with the multiple layers of ambiguity involved.
The whole point of the Supreme Court is that it takes the tough cases, the ones without a clear answer. In those sorts of cases, legal training isn't a prerequisite. Having people trained how to think, rather than solely how to parse legalese is a good thing. A liberal arts student from, for example, St. Johns with a history of non-profit work, or of managing a business, or a successful career as a psychologist would add some diversity of views. The fact of the matter is that lawyers are indoctrinated with a specific world view in modern law schools (a fairly corporatist world view), and having people who don't have these built in assumptions about how the world works on the Court provides more diversity than any number of minorities, women, etc., if the minorities and women were indoctrinated into the law school mindset.
Sorry, this story is "Stuff that Matters". You wanted this story.
There are branches of the Democratic party that believe in blanket bans, but they're quite small. You may not have encountered them due to living in the wrong part of the country (East coast democrats tend to be more anti-gun, while many otherwise bleeding heart West coast dems have enough of a libertarian streak to drop that aspect of the platform). Most of the party believes in more gun control, though definitions vary (it could mean more rigorous checking and sales monitoring, or they could be in favor of banning specific types of weapons). Personally, I'm mostly a Democrat by affiliation (the issues I tend to disagree on are ones where the Republicans either agree, or pretend to disagree while continuing to pass legislation in favor of it), and while I believe in gun control, it's *way* down on my list of priorities.
It's only recently that it became a major concern, largely because they use it as a proxy for competence to try and fend off ideological attacks. According to Media Matters, out of 111 Supreme Court Justices, 40 of them had no prior judicial experience. Hell, Rehnquist and Warren (relatively recent Chief Justices) had no prior judicial experience, and Rehnquist only died a couple years back. Personally, I'd be happy with a few more non-judges (ideally a couple non-lawyers) on the Court (not a majority, but two or three), just to provide a touch of humanity. Sometimes, the law isn't clear, and the Constitution almost never is, and having people who are inclined to sympathize with people rather than arcane precedents is a good thing. Yeah, it's not calling balls and strikes, but then, if you really believe any Supreme Court Justice is able to do that, you're delusional.
Oh, and a lot of laptops have numpads. You just need to hold down Fn to activate them. So you need to hold two modifier keys instead of one.
Well, if you're writing entirely in English, the only accented character you're likely to need is é. The extremely rare words that require other keystroke combos can be solved by the method you describe (or by using the Character Map tool). I only really know two of the character codes by heart, Alt-0233 for é, and Alt-789 to make pirate eyepatch emoticons. Unfortunately, the pirate eyepatch character won't display on /. as far as I can tell, but you should be able to replicate it in Notepad or the like.
At least on Windows, one way of doing so is to hold Alt and then tap 0233 on the number pad (then release Alt).
It perfectly legal to not vote. The founding fathers weren't particularly confident that voters would be smart enough to do their job in the first place, they sure as hell didn't want to force the ignorant or unwilling to screw up the process. Quit making up facts to support your paranoia (there are real facts available, so making facts up makes all people that hold your opinion look like nutjobs).
I don't see any reason why a good programmer couldn't be a poor typist. For every line of code I write (parens and braces not included), I think for at least 20 seconds, and I suspect that counting the elongated breaks planning new sections, I might be closer to a minute on average. "Good" programmers would follow the 90/10 rule and realize that spending time optimizing the task that occupies less than 10% of their time isn't a worthwhile optimization. I happen to be able to touch type, but I never trained to do it, and I don't do it "correctly": no home row, just muscle memory for key positions. For a programmer, traditional home row isn't as useful anyway. Curly braces aren't easy to do while keeping your hands in the home position.
It's such a common misspelling that it may as well be the correct one. Yeah, it's supposed to be fuchsia, but that spelling is so incredibly anti-phonetic that no one remembers it. You can only get away with really arcane spellings on commonly used words (where elementary school Reading and English teachers and early childhood books will imprint the correct spelling on you), and fuchsia isn't in that category.
It's not hard to figure out. A quick Google search for:
Dundee Orange Marmalade jar NSA
came up with this link, right on the NSA's website.
4>> Subsidized with your tax dollars. I worked in a secure building with access restricted to certain people, and the soda machines in there sold canned brand-name drinks for fifty cents. In the "open" building across the parking lot, they were a buck.
Not necessarily subsidized. They may simply be declining to mark it up all that much. Typical retail prices are 50% over wholesale, give or take. Running a soda machine at-cost to keep the workers happy makes sense. But you can't do that in the "open" area without increasing costs substantially; if the people working in the area are constantly dropping by to buy discount soda, you'll get a lot of complaints from area retailers (you're hitting their bottom line), and you now need to refill the machine far more frequently or let it go empty, which means you need to pay for refills more often, or you don't provide the benefit to your workers.
Beyond that, referring to it as "subsidized" makes it sound like the government is unusually wasteful with money in this instance. Compared to private industry, they're actually being fairly cheap. I'm a software developer (as are a lot of NSA employees). I'm private sector, and every job I've worked in has provided free drinks (including name brand soda) at the very least, and they often provide snacks, candy, and the occasional after work get together with free wine or beer. The federal government pays less than most software development jobs in the private sector (from talking with friends that have had offers from private sector and the feds, the feds always offer about 15-30% less, even when the fed job might actually require more skills), the benefits are less generous (my last two private sector jobs came with automatic health care where my co-pay for just about everything was $5-10 with no deductible, while fed employees have to pay a percentage of their health care and usually have higher co-pays and/or deductibles), and in the case of a jobs requiring clearance, you don't even get public acknowledgment of your contributions. There are three major benefits to working for the federal government:
Yes, the feds are less flexible, so sometimes they'll have more people working for them than they need and will have a hard time trimming (though that's what contractors are for; pick up more when you need 'em, drop 'em when you don't). But the cost per software developer to the feds is far less than most reasonable private sectors companies (Microsoft, financial firms, etc.) pay. Even if the feds *were* losing a few cents a can on soda (and I doubt it; soda is cheap, people have just been duped into thinking it should cost $0.75-$1.00 a can), they're still making out like bandits.
Yes, they can. Classification typically lapses after 25 years unless reviewed and extended, and while it's easy to extend classification, in practice it lapses on a lot of stuff. That doesn't mean they put it on a website or in the museum, but it's open to FOIA requests at that point.
Slight correction: The TSA says they *cannot* store or record images. The U.S. Marshals, apparently using the same equipment, *are* storing images. Ergo, the TSA is lying about the capabilities of the machines, and a lawsuit is being filed to prevent them from being used since we clearly can't trust a word the TSA says. To be honest, the fact that the Marshals provided a case in point is somewhat irrelevant; the TSA claims they can't store images, but according to TFA, they require that they be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." Even though they claim that they are delivered for use with this functionality disabled, examples such as the U.S. Marshals case make this claim dubious, thus the lawsuit.
Naming it Columbia didn't help either. I can't think what might be the problem.
The Washington Post publishes columns by Thiessen because his radical rightwing warmonger faction is the Post's board's favorite tiny sliver of Americans. Who always get whatever they want, especially wars.
So when their other columnists vociferously disagree with Thiessen, does that mean the Washington Post has changed it's views and is now pro-peace and transparency? The WaPo's stable of editorial writers leans slightly to the right (and only slightly), but I suspect this is largely an overreaction to balance perceived liberal bias at the paper. Take a look at the columnists:
Of the ones I have read and have a noticed a bias in, I count roughly half a dozen conservative writers (Applebaum, Gerson, Krauthammer, Parker, Samuelson, Thiessen and Will). There are a three or four more that lean right, without being purely conservative (and Parker and Samuelson are unorthodox for conservatives on some issues). I count a similar number of liberal leaning op-ed writers (Achenbach, though he's mostly a humor and science writer, Broder, Capehart, King, Klein, Marcus, Meyerson, Robinson), and a similar number of those that lean left (many of their op-ed writers specializing in economics write with a center left viewpoint). Trying to claim the Post holds a specific viewpoint based on their stable of op-ed writers is being intentionally obtuse.
P.S. I'm sure I got one or two writers' political inclinations wrong, I'm operating from memory here. But if you look at their op-ed writers as a whole, the overall political leanings are fairly moderate. If you read their website, the batshit crazy writers tend to get linked in the Opinion section on the front page more often, but I suspect this is trolling for page views; the more outrageous the viewpoint, the more clicks it gets.
Not at all. They provide ongoing column space to a number of writers with wildly different viewpoints. Their regular Op-Ed writers hold wildly different views. As long as the Op-Ed writers don't go wildly out of line (unambiguous libel, unambiguous lies, unjustifiable profanity), most newspapers generally print it as is. No one on the WaPo editorial board is signing off on the content of these columns. It's the same at other newspapers too. Op-Ed columnists are signed to contracts and produce a regular column which is edited largely for spelling and grammar, not for content. The Post does publish editorials that represent the views of the Post's editorial staff, but those editorials don't have a byline. Personally, I think Thiessen (and to an even greater extent, Gerson) are intellectually bankrupt windbags, but some of the other conservative writers occasionally raise good points, or at least lay out a conservative argument in an intellectually sound manner, even if I frequently disagree with their conclusions. But those Op-Eds reflect solely on their authors; both credit and blame lay with the writer, not the Washington Post itself.
Of course, those same effects mean all sorts of diseases, insects and hostile plants migrating from the equatorial regions outward. I'm not looking forward to needing a malaria vaccination to visit California. Doubling up on our "tropical, biologically hostile regions" in exchange for a pittance of additional temperate climate in the upper latitudes doesn't sound like a great trade-off. After all, the bulk of the land mass is further from the poles. If you think otherwise, it's because you've forgotten that your flat maps make the polar regions look huge (Greenland is actually quite small, but in order to make the longitude bars parallel, they screw up the scale as they approach the poles). The net change in arable, temperate land is negative.
Well we just had the coldest winter in a veeery long time, most snow since '56, and i think coldest since like 1930s or something like that. Just like now is hottest in 70 years or so here. So yet, this is the coldest year in ages, while being also the hottest year in ages. How does it average out?
Umm... You do realize that this past winter was quite warm? It wasn't the coldest anything.
Beyond that, lots of snow requires the temperature to be below 32 degrees, but you don't get more snow the colder it gets. Snow requires three things, a warm area to evaporate water and lift moisture into the air to form clouds, a cold area to produce the necessary temperatures, and somewhere for the two air masses to meet and produce the snow. Global warming would actually increase snowfall under certain circumstances; the higher temperatures where the moisture enters the air would increase the amount of water available to produce snow. If the water content of the clouds increases by a greater amount than the percentage of below freezing days decreases in a particular area, then, while you'll have fewer storms, each storm will drop more snow. It's not a particularly complicated concept. Hell, where I grew up (D.C. area), the big snow storms were typically in late February and early March; those aren't the coldest months, but when it was cold enough, the additional precipitation made for a *lot* of snow.