So this begs the question - Are we winning the war on drugs yet?
Well, let's see. Looking at the past few decades, the supply of illegal drugs is up, prices are significantly lower, and quality/potency is up, in some cases way up.
Source link:
To the contrary the Bible says quiet the opposite at Proverbs 5:18, 19:
Let your water source prove to be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth,a lovable hind and a charming mountain goat. Let her own breasts intoxicate you at all times. With her love may you be in an ecstasy constantly.
That sound like more than just mindless procreation, so the next time some bible thumper insists on ridiculous ideas (such as sex is only for procreation) ask them for scriptural proof because at John 17:17 Jesus said; "... your word is truth," so anyone who speaks truth will have sound scriptural support from God's word; the Bible, to back up their claims (2nd Timothy 2:15).
Wait, that quote scans a bit odd, don't you think? I mean, does "her breasts" and "her love" refer to the charming mountain goat? Or... Surely not the hind, lovable though it may be? Or is it the wife who is being metaphorically referred to as both a goat and a hind? And then there's the literal but clearly wrong (I sure hope!) reading, which is that the "wife of your youth" was in fact literally a hind! Or a goat! Or possibly both at once... It's all so confusing.
You see, this is why I no longer read the bible, it's so filled with contradictions and mistranslations and double meanings. On the other hand, I certainly don't trust the clergy to explain it all and give us the One True Meaning, that's precisely how things like a celibate priesthood and the idea that sex is strictly for procreation crept into Christianity to begin with.
Frankly, it's much easier to just worship Cthulhu. You can be sure He knows what sex is for!
Classic libertarianism asks "how can we do that with a little government as possible". How can we have the set of communal services we want with as little government oversight, as little taxation, as little public ownership as possible and still make it work. How can we ensure free and fair markets with little fraud, but do it with the minimum government presence? Of the many ways we could provide public safety nets and ensure access to health care, which requires the least government participation?
Classic libertarianism may indeed ask all this, but they seem to have trouble coming up with any answers. That is, any answers other than the same old rigid anti-government spew you claim to disavow. We know the questions, libertarians - classic or otherwise - aren't the only ones asking them, but in the absence of concrete and specific sensible answers, well... You're all still just "those crazy libertarians" to me.
But the truth is that the present-day "consensus" is also a myth. The real majority of scientists think we don't know one way or the other.
And this is true because, um, you want it to be? Or maybe you heard it on talk radio? There are certainly more than a few websites that espouse this kind of misleading statement, so perhaps you saw it there?
Seriously, here in the present day there are NO reputable polls showing anything like what you claim amongst scientists in general, let alone climate scientists. But perhaps the many polls that have found precisely the opposite just didn't manage to sample the "real majority"? Yeah, that must be it.
"the thing about software patents is that they are not advancing the useful arts by providing incentives to do hard things.
Instead, they are retarding the useful arts by making it hard to do easy things."
Aside from the other helpful information about the patent details, that's a beautiful quote right there - wish my mod points hadn't just expired. Did you come up with that yourself, AC? If so, very nicely put, it concisely sums up the whole software patent problem. Maybe someone else can mod parent up.
If you read the email 'plan,' it sounds like something a 20 year old college student would write, not a defense contractor
So you're saying the plan is simple and plausible, but doesn't involve developing hi-tech weapons systems and spending massive amounts of taxpayer money.
advised one undercover agent posing as the brother of a violent Mexican drug trafficker to withhold details during a polygraph for a Customs and Border Protection job, prosecutors said.
Which is a crime. He is free to say what he wants but not free from the consequences; which is why I find the whole First Amendment arguement nothing but the defense's attempt to spin in their client's favor.
The usefulness of polygraphs is irrelevant to wether or not he committed a crime.
He "advised" them. So now merely giving your opinion about something dodgy is itself a crime. Welcome to post-9/11 America! Look, the point is not so much that he didn't do something technically illegal - hell, as we know, most people commit 3 federal felonies a day. The problem is that they're prosecuting him as if he were an evil crime lord, when all he did was give an opinion to a potential criminal on how to beat a scientifically debunked pseudo-technology. Not only was he not contemplating committing a crime, the guy he "advised" wasn't either, he was a fake, a government agent. That's pretty removed from any actual crime, and in fact no actual crime ever occurred, but they're going after him like he's Al Capone.
I guarantee you, if you yourself were to have a long conversation with a trained undercover agent, that agent could eventual steer the conversation so that somewhere along the way you would say something just as "criminal" as what the guy in the article is accused of. A passing remark, a random thought, whatever... Technically, it would be illegal, at least under their interpretation of the law. And that's the real problem, we should not be criminalizing conversation. There are all kinds of ways that people enable other people to potentially break the law all the time, think about it... Radar detectors, herbal urinalysis cleansers, hell, what about that video on YouTube that advises everyone to never talk to the police? Should the lawyer who made that video be arrested? What about a driver who flashes his lights to warn those going the other way about a speed trap? I believe the Supreme Court actually said that one was legal, but it sure seems like there's not much distance between that and what the defendant in this case did.
Look, I'm not saying the guy in TFA isn't guilty, that would be kinda difficult since guilty is how he plead (although many innocent people accept plea agreements, but that's a whole separate rant). But the manner in which they went after him, and the demand for jail time, is very telling. It's symptomatic of the depths to which America has fallen to, one more step along the way to a true police state. At some point we have to step back and really look at what we have become. Torture, "rendition", corporate gag orders, forfeiture laws, every citizen under surveillance all the time, and whistle-blowers are traitors. It all adds up to a damn ugly picture. This is not what the USA is supposed to look like, and once upon a time it didn't. Believe it or not, at one time we truly were seen as that proverbial "shining beacon of freedom" to the rest of the world. Once upon a time. What the fuck happened???
And exactly when do you think this was different? When Walter Cronkite was alive? When Ogg told Grog what happened to Paris the other night?
Is this way, was this way, will always be this way.
I’m sorry, no. Things most definitely were NOT always like this. When Walter Cronkite told you “that’s the way it is,” you could believe that he was reporting as accurately as he could, using material gathered by some of the best investigative journalists in the business, and most importantly, with little or no thought to whether the news he was reporting would negatively affect or offend the corporate bosses at CBS. There was a reason he was called “the most trusted man in America,” because he literally was just that, continually ranked in polls for trustworthiness above presidents, clergymen, fellow pundits, you name it. You don’t get that kind of reputation unearned.
Hard to imagine today, but back then the networks genuinely competed against each other for viewers, and news departments quickly became the most prestigious part of that struggle. There was very little editorializing, and almost none that wasn’t clearly labeled as such. The networks simply didn’t try to spin things a certain way as we see now. I suspect enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine had a lot to do with that, certainly it seems like the long decline of the American media began soon after the FCC decided to do away with the FD, along with many other existing useful regulations, such as the ones preventing industry consolidation into exactly the kind of huge media conglomerates we have today. Those long forgotten regulations were perhaps a big part of why the media in those days was so much more trustworthy than what we have now, although I can‘t prove this.
The end result is that today when I access any of the big American news organizations, I no longer believe I am getting the best information possible. Everything has to be taken with a grain of salt and a dollop of serious consideration regarding the parent company’s corporate stance on a given issue. More and more I find myself having to look at overseas sources (BBC, etc) to get any real feel for how things truly stand. It’s a sad state of affairs, and one that is very hard to convey to those born and raised in post-Reagan America. The news media in those days was far from perfect, but for trustworthiness, believability, accuracy, and absence of pervasive editorial slant, it was in general far superior to anything existing today.
"(1) A computer program is not an invention and not a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act."
This guy Florian Mueller who may or may not be a corporate shill has got everyone confused by focusing on the legal subtleties of a subsection, but the fact remains that computer programs by themselves are no longer patentable, because the law states they are not considered to be inventions! Don't believe the FUD.
Sounds true to me. An apex infestation of bedbugs has 100s of thousands of em. Easy enough to see once they're active.
Bedbugs hitchhike in luggage, but only a few. If the bedbugs dropped off in the hotel room, it would be days before a guest noticed.
You're reaching to quite an extreme to try not to blame the hotel that had bedbugs. Why?
Sorry for the late reply, but if anyone is still interested... You are quite correct about the blatant obviousness of an apex infestation, but I discounted that possibility for several reasons. Such a large infestation would almost certainly have spread to neighboring rooms, if not the entire building, but the hotel maintains that bugs were only found in the one room. Also, big infestations like you describe take a long time to get to that point, it would have meant that guests in the room were being bitten for months, but not a single guest noticed or complained. Remember, a bedbug colony can only grow if there are humans present for the bugs to feed on. It's possible, I suppose, but in this case I just didn't think a huge infestation was very likely given the circumstances. But a small infestation would mean the bugs would be much harder to locate and trap, thus my suspicion when I read that he easily captured several bedbugs.
As for him feeling the bites, it's true different people react differently, but usually this just means variations in the strength of the delayed reaction. It's very rare for someone to actually feel the bite as it happens. Bedbugs have evolved very effective mechanisms for keeping their presence unnoticed by the host during feedings. They wait until the host is asleep, their saliva contains a powerful anesthetic, and they are so small and lightweight even a fully awake human cannot feel a bedbug crawling on his or her skin. So yes, a guy claiming to have felt the bite did make me wonder if he's telling the whole truth. But I was not trying to stand up for the hotel in any way! It's totally plausible that there were indeed bedbugs in the room and that this guy got bit. I was merely suggesting that his story be given extra scrutiny because there were a couple of elements to it that I found suspicious.
I am not 100% convinced that this guy is on the level. First of all, you don't feel bedbug bites when they bite you, you feel them hours or even days later. Because of this, it's common for people with bedbug infestations to never actually see a living bedbug. It seems very suspicious to me that this guy not only claims to have felt the bite immediately, but then was able to actually capture several bedbugs. It doesn't smell quite right to me. Not saying it's not on the level, but I'm definitely skeptical. It's so easy these days to mess with a small business simply by posting a few choice negative reviews online, a situation which can lead to all kinds of opportunities for minor extortion attempts by amateurs. And don't think that because the hotel admitted the presence of bedbugs that this automatically means there really was a preexisting infestation, the guy could have released any number of bugs into the room. Not saying that's what happened, just that you have to keep an open mind about these things, and his story doesn't quite ring true.
The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it
Well, sort of. From the article you link to:
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had earlier informed government officials that other copies of the files existed outside the country and that the Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward of the files leaked by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor. But the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered.
So basically they were asked to turn the machines over to government thugs, and when they refused to do that the thugs ordered them to destroy the equipment. It's not like they trashed stuff in a brave last-minute attempt to keep it out of government hands, they were told to do it by the cops, who no doubt watched gleefully as the order was being carried out.
Very doubtful. Groklaw doesn't represent sensitive communications on the scale that the NSA or CIA would care about. PJ is delusional if she really thinks anyone in the government gives a damn about her site and the emails between her and her collaborators.
Delusional, eh? Well, maybe. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of thing that was said about the people ranting about massive government surveillance and secret NSA rooms at the telcos. It sounded paranoid, sure, such things were unthinkable in a free country like the US. Well, think again. After all the revelations of the past few years, I for one am not prepared to state categorically that the government isn't specifically interested in the communications of Groklaw's contributors. Frankly, it's scary that it's gotten to the point where you can't dismiss such claims out of hand, but it is what it is. Putting one's head in the sand and pretending such things could never happen here is no longer a viable option.
OK, I get that they aren’t claiming the teaching of the technique itself is illegal (not yet, anyway, it sounds like they’d like it to be, so that may be next on their agenda), what they’re actually claiming is that it’s criminal fraud to knowingly help someone lie to the government. I will take their word that lying to the feds on an application or during a job interview is indeed a criminal offense, but even granting that morally dubious proposition, is beating a notoriously ineffective and scientifically unsound technology really the same thing as telling an outright lie? It seems to me that equating the two would be a pretty tough sell in a courtroom where the technology itself is banned because it’s so unreliable. Wouldn’t what was proposed by the undercover operatives in this case more accurately be called deception rather than lying? There is a subtle difference between deception and telling an outright lie. And if we’re really going to make deception a crime, where does it end? What about prevarication? Misdirection? Simple undecided-ness? This is a dangerous slope we are treading with this type of prosecution. Hopefully it will eventually be declared an unconstitutional overreach by prosecutors.
When minorities stop committing a disproportionate amount of crime the police will leave them alone.
This has been demonstrably false for a very long time. Every study that has ever been conducted, going back to the beginning of the War On Drugs, has found that, percentage wise, drug use by whites is the same as for blacks. That is, a certain percentage of the population uses drugs, and that percentage stays the same across color lines, in fact it's remarkably stable. So if drug arrests were race-neutral, you would expect to see vastly more whites than blacks in prison for drugs crimes, it should roughly be a mirror of the existing black/white demographics. So how is it that our prisons are overwhelmingly filled with black people convicted of drug possession? Regardless of where you look, blacks vastly outnumber whites jailed for the same crime. Last time I checked, whites were still a majority in this country, so if your premise were true there should be more whites than blacks doing time for low-level drug offenses. Clearly there are not. There are complex reasons for this state of affairs, but it's difficult to see how racism doesn't play a big part.
The bottom line is this: Black people use drugs at the same rate as white people, but the police manifestly do NOT leave them alone. Your premise is flawed.
Obama's own radio ads were what convinced me he'd be very bad for the country. Until he started running ads were I lived, I was hopeful he'd be inspiring ala JFK.
I pay attention to people who have managed to get something I want, who have succeeded in something I want to do. I ask them "how did you do that"?
So for me, Obama's message of attacking success was alarming. I see that people who show up ten minutes early, so I TRY to follow their example. Obama's message indicated if he punctual people who dress nice get ahead, he'd put an 80% tax on watches to knock down those selfish punctual people. He SHOULD look at the presidential portraits and ask "what would Kennedy do?". In the campaign, he seemed more likely to look at the Kennedy portrait and flip Kennedy off for doing better than him. So that's how I knew he'd pull a bunch of crap.
Ah, I see it now, all is explained!
It's funny though, I saw a lot of campaign ads but I guess I missed the ones where Obama promised to attack success, tax watches at 80% if the owner is well dressed and punctual, all the while flipping off Kennedy's portrait. I'm so glad you explained that. But now I feel all stupid for missing those things... Perhaps the ads only ran on Fox? That would explain it, I never watch Fox, but I would to see all that. Who knew?
The article is propaganda, plain and simple. In the first few sentences the author is already using words like “success” and “a miracle” to describe 12-step programs. I was interested in the article at first because the headline seemed to promise coverage of a genuine scientific assessment into the efficacy of the 12-step approach, something that is badly needed here in the USA where the 12-steps are frequently treated as The One True Religion by the established addiction treatment community. But the piece is just fluff, apparently written by a true believer who seems only interested in research aimed at retroactively determining just how 12-step programs accomplish such great things... The greatness is just assumed to already be a settled matter. The fact that AA and especially NA don’t work for the overwhelming majority of addicts is something that is just glossed over.
And that’s really too bad, because AFAIK most studies find only marginally better outcomes when evaluating 12-step program performance, on the order of a couple of percentage points when compared with alternative treatment methods, particularly over the long term where the numbers are barely statistically significant. The sad fact is that something like 99% of the addicts who walk in to a NA meeting for the first time will relapse in a matter of weeks or even days, and often just hours. As for the long term outlook, there are studies showing no measurable difference in sobriety levels after 5 years of NA versus no treatment at all. Even when the 12-step rules are scrupulously adhered to and all meetings are faithfully attended by the recovering addict, it remains a method of dealing with addiction that works only for very, very few people, although admittedly when it does work it can be a godsend. The question that needs to be asked in the USA, a country still obsessed with the patently un-winnable War On Drugs, is this: why is a program with such abysmal success rates still considered the gold standard in addiction therapy by treatment providers? Too bad you won‘t find any such question in the article.
Smith vs Maryland 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland) states that there is no reason or expectation of privacy when you hand over information voluntarily to a third party. So no, they are not bypassing the 4th Amendment. You may THINK they are, but according to LAW they are not.
Only an AC who's likely also a lawyer or politician of some kind would possibly bring this particular argument up. The average person does not consider an email to be "given to a third party" when they hit send. They assume, quite reasonably, that the email goes to the person it's addressed to and no one else. And in this case it's the expectations of the average person that determines whether there is a right to privacy or not. With regards to whether or not it's being given over to a third party, the law is by no means settled regarding email or even cellphone metadata, and it's dishonest to suggest that this is established law - especially by citing a pre-internet 1979 decision! On the contrary, it's simply one possible legal argument among many, and not a very good one at that.
The fourth/fifth amendments does not exist for the purpose of protecting criminals. The fourth/fith amendments exist to protect innocent citizens...
This, this right here. It's just astounding how many people seem to think that all those rights exist for the benefit of criminals. But they're wrong, the framers of the constitution weren't trying to make it easier for criminals at all, those rights were meant to protect, and pretty much exist solely for the benefit of, the innocent, the average everyday citizen, precisely the people who are always claiming they have "nothing to hide". Our civil rights exist because the founders recognized that a society can only be truly free if the government accepts and abides by the presumption of innocence, the idea that the average person should not be subject to random searches and/or mass fishing expedition type investigations. This is bedrock stuff, exactly the principles our country was founded upon, and that so many people seem so willing to just toss it all away is truly one of the saddest things about the current American decline.
You could have just thrown everything in big black plastic trash bags tied to be airtight, and then left the bags in your car with the windows up for those 5 hours of summer sun. It would have been just as effective and much cheaper.
RTFA, it says the DEA submits requests for money for the program in budget documents and its a well known program for coordinating inter-state and international investigations
And yet in the article we find this:
"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."
Seems pretty clear that there were aspects of the program that they really wanted to keep deeply hidden, which is pretty much the definition of secret.
Well, I don't know about you, but if the police show up, act in a courteous and polite fashion, ask a few questions, and then leave satisfied nothing bad is going on, I consider that a job well done.
As a thought experiment, imagine that the couple had been Muslim, but otherwise exactly the same people. Does anyone honestly still think the visit by police would have been so courteous and polite? And yet in the USA we supposedly have freedom of religion, which should guarantee equal treatment by law enforcement whatever one's beliefs.
And it doesn't matter where the tip came from, this kind of thing is wrong, potentially dangerous, and not the way I want my Country to be. So it's just civilians spying on other civilians, that somehow makes it OK for a squad of armed police to show up at someone's home on the basis of a Google search term? Seriously??? Is this really the kind of society you want to live in? This is simply NOT acceptable police behavior, and never will be, regardless of who sends in the tip. A society in which an online search for anything at all, legal or otherwise, causes the police to knock on the door is simply not a free society, no matter how you want to spin it.
So not only did some idiot do this with his own money as a "guerilla art project", but he posts it on a public website, that was located by the/. reading public in no time at all? So this guy wants to go to jail, pay likely some enormous fines, plus be required to pay (no doubt exhorbitant) State costs for removal of said signs? How is it that someone with obviously less than an IQ of 50 can operate a website, take pictures, formulate a plan like this, etc?
Regardless of IQ, the fact is still that all publicity is good, especially for a relatively unknown artist.
That's bullshit. Technically, you're right, since it wasn't a right they ever had, the campaign wasn't to strip the rights.
But, that's overly pedantic.Ultimately, people don't get married solely because they want to be married, there's a ton of rights that are granted to go along with that.
As for the 7 wives thing, why is it that bigots keep trotting that out? That, bestiality and pedophilia will never be legalized because there are serious problems with it. Polygamy and Polygny lead to people being unable to get a spouse because all of a sudden you need only a fraction of the partners you needed to to fill the need for women or men, while the remaining men and women are unable to marry.
In the cast of bestiality and pedophilia, there's no ability of the animals and children to engage in informed consent.
Completely different from consenting adults getting married.
There's a better argument against the "bestiality and polygamy will be next" crowd, and that is that unlike homosexuality, no statistically significant percentage of the population is born with an urge to exclusively desire sex with animals or multiple human partners. It's been pretty clear for years that most homosexuals are indeed born that way, that it is a genetic trait rather than a learned behavior. AFAIK nobody is born with a genetic predisposition to molest animals, and while there are many men who would probably prefer to have more than one wife if they could, most are not actively repulsed at the thought of living with just one. Homosexuality should be accommodated equally by the law simply because failure to do so penalizes a significant percentage of the population for something that is completely beyond their control. This is obviously not the case with other types of sexual deviancy, which either affect a vanishingly small number of people, or involve behavior that is non-consensual by its very nature (e.g. pedophilia). Homosexuality is different in that it is affects large numbers of people, involves only consenting adults, and is primarily a condition that one is born with and can't change. That should be the key test, IMO. If a sexual behavior meets these criteria and otherwise causes no harm, then those affected should not be legally discriminated against. And if they want to marry each other, why not let them, since it really doesn't affect the rest of us in any meaningful way.
Which is precisely why the government officials that are required to swear into the office are required to uphold and protect the CONSTITUTION.
NOT THE PEOPLE.
Not the government, not the white house, not the justice system but the LAW. The US Founders knew that relying on people making right choices is a terrible idea, democracy doesn't work at all, it quickly dissents into authoritarian nightmare because it promises too everything to everybody for nothing (actually it promises to subsidize the unproductive majority by stealing from the productive minority). Eventually you destroy what you tax and this includes all types of taxes.
From just the tax rates on income and property, to various rules, laws and regulations that government imposes upon business to buy votes (be it minimum wage, various laws that give employees special powers to sue employers for any perceived 'wrongdoing', any kind of entitlement to the employers and customers that end up being obligations upon the employers and producers).
Eventually the mob eats and chases away the part of the society that actually is productive and pays for all of this conspicuous consumption by the mob and then the society is doomed to failure because of the failing economy. So the principles are the same for anything else that concerns rule of law - equal justice under the law, privacy from government intrusion, transparency of government in the first place.
ALL democracies are destined to failure, that is not an option, it's an inevitable consequence of the rule of mob. That's why to keep working the system is supposed to set those types of feelings and desires aside and concentrate on constantly and vigilantly protecting the rule of law, equality before law, equality of opportunity by providing equal application of law, prevention of discrimination by the mob, by the government. Once those concepts are breached, the society is on the path to self destruction and unfortunately I have never found an example in history where the society actually stopped short of destroying itself this way once it became democratic, AFAIC history shows that the destruction is imminent.
So then, you apparently believe the USA is not a democracy and never has been, which seems to me to be a bit disingenuous. Democracy does not have to mean pure mob rule, it's a principle and guiding philosophy that can be implemented in various different ways, with varying degrees of power being given over to the populace. The US constitution and the system of government it created currently stand as the most enduring in history, so we must be doing something right. As for the notion that pure democracy must always self-destruct, history doesn't support that even if you are indeed referring strictly to mob rule. Historically there have been precious few examples of pure democracy to go by, but I would wager that in terms of longevity democracies fare no better or worse than any number of other forms of government. In fact I would go further, and say that a certain degree a democracy is absolutely necessary for a post-industrial society to be both successful and enduring. Your viewpoint seems to be that the majority of the people are just too stupid or too greedy to rule themselves successfully, but where's the proof? Even animals often act altruistically in social situations, why are you so sure humans can't do the same? Until you show me some research to back up your assertions that democracies must inevitably implode, I will choose to put my faith in democracy. True, the USA does seem to be headed down the tubes at the moment, but this seems to be happening precisely because we have become less democratic than we used to be, not more. Furthermore, your thesis that high taxes always destroy
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So this begs the question - Are we winning the war on drugs yet?
Well, let's see. Looking at the past few decades, the supply of illegal drugs is up, prices are significantly lower, and quality/potency is up, in some cases way up. Source link:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-international-war-illegal-drugs-curb.html
On the other hand, many millions of people have been jailed or otherwise had their lives ruined.
I don't know, even granting that it depends on how you define "winning," it's still kinda hard to see any win here whatsoever.
To the contrary the Bible says quiet the opposite at Proverbs 5:18, 19:
Let your water source prove to be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth,a lovable hind and a charming mountain goat. Let her own breasts intoxicate you at all times. With her love may you be in an ecstasy constantly.
That sound like more than just mindless procreation, so the next time some bible thumper insists on ridiculous ideas (such as sex is only for procreation) ask them for scriptural proof because at John 17:17 Jesus said; "... your word is truth," so anyone who speaks truth will have sound scriptural support from God's word; the Bible, to back up their claims (2nd Timothy 2:15).
Wait, that quote scans a bit odd, don't you think? I mean, does "her breasts" and "her love" refer to the charming mountain goat? Or... Surely not the hind, lovable though it may be? Or is it the wife who is being metaphorically referred to as both a goat and a hind? And then there's the literal but clearly wrong (I sure hope!) reading, which is that the "wife of your youth" was in fact literally a hind! Or a goat! Or possibly both at once... It's all so confusing.
You see, this is why I no longer read the bible, it's so filled with contradictions and mistranslations and double meanings. On the other hand, I certainly don't trust the clergy to explain it all and give us the One True Meaning, that's precisely how things like a celibate priesthood and the idea that sex is strictly for procreation crept into Christianity to begin with.
Frankly, it's much easier to just worship Cthulhu. You can be sure He knows what sex is for!
Classic libertarianism asks "how can we do that with a little government as possible". How can we have the set of communal services we want with as little government oversight, as little taxation, as little public ownership as possible and still make it work. How can we ensure free and fair markets with little fraud, but do it with the minimum government presence? Of the many ways we could provide public safety nets and ensure access to health care, which requires the least government participation?
Classic libertarianism may indeed ask all this, but they seem to have trouble coming up with any answers. That is, any answers other than the same old rigid anti-government spew you claim to disavow. We know the questions, libertarians - classic or otherwise - aren't the only ones asking them, but in the absence of concrete and specific sensible answers, well... You're all still just "those crazy libertarians" to me.
But the truth is that the present-day "consensus" is also a myth. The real majority of scientists think we don't know one way or the other.
And this is true because, um, you want it to be? Or maybe you heard it on talk radio? There are certainly more than a few websites that espouse this kind of misleading statement, so perhaps you saw it there?
Seriously, here in the present day there are NO reputable polls showing anything like what you claim amongst scientists in general, let alone climate scientists. But perhaps the many polls that have found precisely the opposite just didn't manage to sample the "real majority"? Yeah, that must be it.
"the thing about software patents is that they are not advancing the useful arts by providing incentives to do hard things. Instead, they are retarding the useful arts by making it hard to do easy things."
Aside from the other helpful information about the patent details, that's a beautiful quote right there - wish my mod points hadn't just expired. Did you come up with that yourself, AC? If so, very nicely put, it concisely sums up the whole software patent problem. Maybe someone else can mod parent up.
If you read the email 'plan,' it sounds like something a 20 year old college student would write, not a defense contractor
So you're saying the plan is simple and plausible, but doesn't involve developing hi-tech weapons systems and spending massive amounts of taxpayer money.
Not quite. Per the article he:
advised one undercover agent posing as the brother of a violent Mexican drug trafficker to withhold details during a polygraph for a Customs and Border Protection job, prosecutors said.
Which is a crime. He is free to say what he wants but not free from the consequences; which is why I find the whole First Amendment arguement nothing but the defense's attempt to spin in their client's favor.
The usefulness of polygraphs is irrelevant to wether or not he committed a crime.
He "advised" them. So now merely giving your opinion about something dodgy is itself a crime. Welcome to post-9/11 America! Look, the point is not so much that he didn't do something technically illegal - hell, as we know, most people commit 3 federal felonies a day. The problem is that they're prosecuting him as if he were an evil crime lord, when all he did was give an opinion to a potential criminal on how to beat a scientifically debunked pseudo-technology. Not only was he not contemplating committing a crime, the guy he "advised" wasn't either, he was a fake, a government agent. That's pretty removed from any actual crime, and in fact no actual crime ever occurred, but they're going after him like he's Al Capone.
I guarantee you, if you yourself were to have a long conversation with a trained undercover agent, that agent could eventual steer the conversation so that somewhere along the way you would say something just as "criminal" as what the guy in the article is accused of. A passing remark, a random thought, whatever... Technically, it would be illegal, at least under their interpretation of the law. And that's the real problem, we should not be criminalizing conversation. There are all kinds of ways that people enable other people to potentially break the law all the time, think about it... Radar detectors, herbal urinalysis cleansers, hell, what about that video on YouTube that advises everyone to never talk to the police? Should the lawyer who made that video be arrested? What about a driver who flashes his lights to warn those going the other way about a speed trap? I believe the Supreme Court actually said that one was legal, but it sure seems like there's not much distance between that and what the defendant in this case did.
Look, I'm not saying the guy in TFA isn't guilty, that would be kinda difficult since guilty is how he plead (although many innocent people accept plea agreements, but that's a whole separate rant). But the manner in which they went after him, and the demand for jail time, is very telling. It's symptomatic of the depths to which America has fallen to, one more step along the way to a true police state. At some point we have to step back and really look at what we have become. Torture, "rendition", corporate gag orders, forfeiture laws, every citizen under surveillance all the time, and whistle-blowers are traitors. It all adds up to a damn ugly picture. This is not what the USA is supposed to look like, and once upon a time it didn't. Believe it or not, at one time we truly were seen as that proverbial "shining beacon of freedom" to the rest of the world. Once upon a time. What the fuck happened???
And exactly when do you think this was different? When Walter Cronkite was alive? When Ogg told Grog what happened to Paris the other night?
Is this way, was this way, will always be this way.
I’m sorry, no. Things most definitely were NOT always like this. When Walter Cronkite told you “that’s the way it is,” you could believe that he was reporting as accurately as he could, using material gathered by some of the best investigative journalists in the business, and most importantly, with little or no thought to whether the news he was reporting would negatively affect or offend the corporate bosses at CBS. There was a reason he was called “the most trusted man in America,” because he literally was just that, continually ranked in polls for trustworthiness above presidents, clergymen, fellow pundits, you name it. You don’t get that kind of reputation unearned.
Hard to imagine today, but back then the networks genuinely competed against each other for viewers, and news departments quickly became the most prestigious part of that struggle. There was very little editorializing, and almost none that wasn’t clearly labeled as such. The networks simply didn’t try to spin things a certain way as we see now. I suspect enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine had a lot to do with that, certainly it seems like the long decline of the American media began soon after the FCC decided to do away with the FD, along with many other existing useful regulations, such as the ones preventing industry consolidation into exactly the kind of huge media conglomerates we have today. Those long forgotten regulations were perhaps a big part of why the media in those days was so much more trustworthy than what we have now, although I can‘t prove this.
The end result is that today when I access any of the big American news organizations, I no longer believe I am getting the best information possible. Everything has to be taken with a grain of salt and a dollop of serious consideration regarding the parent company’s corporate stance on a given issue. More and more I find myself having to look at overseas sources (BBC, etc) to get any real feel for how things truly stand. It’s a sad state of affairs, and one that is very hard to convey to those born and raised in post-Reagan America. The news media in those days was far from perfect, but for trustworthiness, believability, accuracy, and absence of pervasive editorial slant, it was in general far superior to anything existing today.
For crying out loud, they did indeed ban software patents, and if you don't believe me you can read all about it in that bastion of liberal OSS-using freethinkers, Forbes. Here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/05/08/new-zealand-government-announces-that-software-will-no-longer-be-patentable/ The critical part of the law is not the subsection everyone is arguing over, but what comes before it, which seems to me unequivocal about what is no longer allowed:
"(1) A computer program is not an invention and not a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act."
This guy Florian Mueller who may or may not be a corporate shill has got everyone confused by focusing on the legal subtleties of a subsection, but the fact remains that computer programs by themselves are no longer patentable, because the law states they are not considered to be inventions! Don't believe the FUD.
Sounds true to me. An apex infestation of bedbugs has 100s of thousands of em. Easy enough to see once they're active.
Bedbugs hitchhike in luggage, but only a few. If the bedbugs dropped off in the hotel room, it would be days before a guest noticed.
You're reaching to quite an extreme to try not to blame the hotel that had bedbugs. Why?
Sorry for the late reply, but if anyone is still interested... You are quite correct about the blatant obviousness of an apex infestation, but I discounted that possibility for several reasons. Such a large infestation would almost certainly have spread to neighboring rooms, if not the entire building, but the hotel maintains that bugs were only found in the one room. Also, big infestations like you describe take a long time to get to that point, it would have meant that guests in the room were being bitten for months, but not a single guest noticed or complained. Remember, a bedbug colony can only grow if there are humans present for the bugs to feed on. It's possible, I suppose, but in this case I just didn't think a huge infestation was very likely given the circumstances. But a small infestation would mean the bugs would be much harder to locate and trap, thus my suspicion when I read that he easily captured several bedbugs.
As for him feeling the bites, it's true different people react differently, but usually this just means variations in the strength of the delayed reaction. It's very rare for someone to actually feel the bite as it happens. Bedbugs have evolved very effective mechanisms for keeping their presence unnoticed by the host during feedings. They wait until the host is asleep, their saliva contains a powerful anesthetic, and they are so small and lightweight even a fully awake human cannot feel a bedbug crawling on his or her skin. So yes, a guy claiming to have felt the bite did make me wonder if he's telling the whole truth. But I was not trying to stand up for the hotel in any way! It's totally plausible that there were indeed bedbugs in the room and that this guy got bit. I was merely suggesting that his story be given extra scrutiny because there were a couple of elements to it that I found suspicious.
I am not 100% convinced that this guy is on the level. First of all, you don't feel bedbug bites when they bite you, you feel them hours or even days later. Because of this, it's common for people with bedbug infestations to never actually see a living bedbug. It seems very suspicious to me that this guy not only claims to have felt the bite immediately, but then was able to actually capture several bedbugs. It doesn't smell quite right to me. Not saying it's not on the level, but I'm definitely skeptical. It's so easy these days to mess with a small business simply by posting a few choice negative reviews online, a situation which can lead to all kinds of opportunities for minor extortion attempts by amateurs. And don't think that because the hotel admitted the presence of bedbugs that this automatically means there really was a preexisting infestation, the guy could have released any number of bugs into the room. Not saying that's what happened, just that you have to keep an open mind about these things, and his story doesn't quite ring true.
The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it
Well, sort of. From the article you link to:
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had earlier informed government officials that other copies of the files existed outside the country and that the Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward of the files leaked by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor. But the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered.
So basically they were asked to turn the machines over to government thugs, and when they refused to do that the thugs ordered them to destroy the equipment. It's not like they trashed stuff in a brave last-minute attempt to keep it out of government hands, they were told to do it by the cops, who no doubt watched gleefully as the order was being carried out.
Very doubtful. Groklaw doesn't represent sensitive communications on the scale that the NSA or CIA would care about. PJ is delusional if she really thinks anyone in the government gives a damn about her site and the emails between her and her collaborators.
Delusional, eh? Well, maybe. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of thing that was said about the people ranting about massive government surveillance and secret NSA rooms at the telcos. It sounded paranoid, sure, such things were unthinkable in a free country like the US. Well, think again. After all the revelations of the past few years, I for one am not prepared to state categorically that the government isn't specifically interested in the communications of Groklaw's contributors. Frankly, it's scary that it's gotten to the point where you can't dismiss such claims out of hand, but it is what it is. Putting one's head in the sand and pretending such things could never happen here is no longer a viable option.
OK, I get that they aren’t claiming the teaching of the technique itself is illegal (not yet, anyway, it sounds like they’d like it to be, so that may be next on their agenda), what they’re actually claiming is that it’s criminal fraud to knowingly help someone lie to the government. I will take their word that lying to the feds on an application or during a job interview is indeed a criminal offense, but even granting that morally dubious proposition, is beating a notoriously ineffective and scientifically unsound technology really the same thing as telling an outright lie? It seems to me that equating the two would be a pretty tough sell in a courtroom where the technology itself is banned because it’s so unreliable. Wouldn’t what was proposed by the undercover operatives in this case more accurately be called deception rather than lying? There is a subtle difference between deception and telling an outright lie. And if we’re really going to make deception a crime, where does it end? What about prevarication? Misdirection? Simple undecided-ness? This is a dangerous slope we are treading with this type of prosecution. Hopefully it will eventually be declared an unconstitutional overreach by prosecutors.
When minorities stop committing a disproportionate amount of crime the police will leave them alone.
This has been demonstrably false for a very long time. Every study that has ever been conducted, going back to the beginning of the War On Drugs, has found that, percentage wise, drug use by whites is the same as for blacks. That is, a certain percentage of the population uses drugs, and that percentage stays the same across color lines, in fact it's remarkably stable. So if drug arrests were race-neutral, you would expect to see vastly more whites than blacks in prison for drugs crimes, it should roughly be a mirror of the existing black/white demographics. So how is it that our prisons are overwhelmingly filled with black people convicted of drug possession? Regardless of where you look, blacks vastly outnumber whites jailed for the same crime. Last time I checked, whites were still a majority in this country, so if your premise were true there should be more whites than blacks doing time for low-level drug offenses. Clearly there are not. There are complex reasons for this state of affairs, but it's difficult to see how racism doesn't play a big part.
The bottom line is this: Black people use drugs at the same rate as white people, but the police manifestly do NOT leave them alone. Your premise is flawed.
Obama's own radio ads were what convinced me he'd be very bad for the country. Until he started running ads were I lived, I was hopeful he'd be inspiring ala JFK. I pay attention to people who have managed to get something I want, who have succeeded in something I want to do. I ask them "how did you do that"? So for me, Obama's message of attacking success was alarming. I see that people who show up ten minutes early, so I TRY to follow their example. Obama's message indicated if he punctual people who dress nice get ahead, he'd put an 80% tax on watches to knock down those selfish punctual people. He SHOULD look at the presidential portraits and ask "what would Kennedy do?". In the campaign, he seemed more likely to look at the Kennedy portrait and flip Kennedy off for doing better than him. So that's how I knew he'd pull a bunch of crap.
Ah, I see it now, all is explained!
It's funny though, I saw a lot of campaign ads but I guess I missed the ones where Obama promised to attack success, tax watches at 80% if the owner is well dressed and punctual, all the while flipping off Kennedy's portrait. I'm so glad you explained that. But now I feel all stupid for missing those things... Perhaps the ads only ran on Fox? That would explain it, I never watch Fox, but I would to see all that. Who knew?
The article is propaganda, plain and simple. In the first few sentences the author is already using words like “success” and “a miracle” to describe 12-step programs. I was interested in the article at first because the headline seemed to promise coverage of a genuine scientific assessment into the efficacy of the 12-step approach, something that is badly needed here in the USA where the 12-steps are frequently treated as The One True Religion by the established addiction treatment community. But the piece is just fluff, apparently written by a true believer who seems only interested in research aimed at retroactively determining just how 12-step programs accomplish such great things... The greatness is just assumed to already be a settled matter. The fact that AA and especially NA don’t work for the overwhelming majority of addicts is something that is just glossed over.
And that’s really too bad, because AFAIK most studies find only marginally better outcomes when evaluating 12-step program performance, on the order of a couple of percentage points when compared with alternative treatment methods, particularly over the long term where the numbers are barely statistically significant. The sad fact is that something like 99% of the addicts who walk in to a NA meeting for the first time will relapse in a matter of weeks or even days, and often just hours. As for the long term outlook, there are studies showing no measurable difference in sobriety levels after 5 years of NA versus no treatment at all. Even when the 12-step rules are scrupulously adhered to and all meetings are faithfully attended by the recovering addict, it remains a method of dealing with addiction that works only for very, very few people, although admittedly when it does work it can be a godsend. The question that needs to be asked in the USA, a country still obsessed with the patently un-winnable War On Drugs, is this: why is a program with such abysmal success rates still considered the gold standard in addiction therapy by treatment providers? Too bad you won‘t find any such question in the article.
Smith vs Maryland 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland) states that there is no reason or expectation of privacy when you hand over information voluntarily to a third party. So no, they are not bypassing the 4th Amendment. You may THINK they are, but according to LAW they are not.
Only an AC who's likely also a lawyer or politician of some kind would possibly bring this particular argument up. The average person does not consider an email to be "given to a third party" when they hit send. They assume, quite reasonably, that the email goes to the person it's addressed to and no one else. And in this case it's the expectations of the average person that determines whether there is a right to privacy or not. With regards to whether or not it's being given over to a third party, the law is by no means settled regarding email or even cellphone metadata, and it's dishonest to suggest that this is established law - especially by citing a pre-internet 1979 decision! On the contrary, it's simply one possible legal argument among many, and not a very good one at that.
The fourth/fifth amendments does not exist for the purpose of protecting criminals. The fourth/fith amendments exist to protect innocent citizens...
This, this right here. It's just astounding how many people seem to think that all those rights exist for the benefit of criminals. But they're wrong, the framers of the constitution weren't trying to make it easier for criminals at all, those rights were meant to protect, and pretty much exist solely for the benefit of, the innocent, the average everyday citizen, precisely the people who are always claiming they have "nothing to hide". Our civil rights exist because the founders recognized that a society can only be truly free if the government accepts and abides by the presumption of innocence, the idea that the average person should not be subject to random searches and/or mass fishing expedition type investigations. This is bedrock stuff, exactly the principles our country was founded upon, and that so many people seem so willing to just toss it all away is truly one of the saddest things about the current American decline.
You could have just thrown everything in big black plastic trash bags tied to be airtight, and then left the bags in your car with the windows up for those 5 hours of summer sun. It would have been just as effective and much cheaper.
RTFA, it says the DEA submits requests for money for the program in budget documents and its a well known program for coordinating inter-state and international investigations
And yet in the article we find this:
"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."
Seems pretty clear that there were aspects of the program that they really wanted to keep deeply hidden, which is pretty much the definition of secret.
Well, I don't know about you, but if the police show up, act in a courteous and polite fashion, ask a few questions, and then leave satisfied nothing bad is going on, I consider that a job well done.
As a thought experiment, imagine that the couple had been Muslim, but otherwise exactly the same people. Does anyone honestly still think the visit by police would have been so courteous and polite? And yet in the USA we supposedly have freedom of religion, which should guarantee equal treatment by law enforcement whatever one's beliefs.
And it doesn't matter where the tip came from, this kind of thing is wrong, potentially dangerous, and not the way I want my Country to be. So it's just civilians spying on other civilians, that somehow makes it OK for a squad of armed police to show up at someone's home on the basis of a Google search term? Seriously??? Is this really the kind of society you want to live in? This is simply NOT acceptable police behavior, and never will be, regardless of who sends in the tip. A society in which an online search for anything at all, legal or otherwise, causes the police to knock on the door is simply not a free society, no matter how you want to spin it.
So not only did some idiot do this with his own money as a "guerilla art project", but he posts it on a public website, that was located by the /. reading public in no time at all? So this guy wants to go to jail, pay likely some enormous fines, plus be required to pay (no doubt exhorbitant) State costs for removal of said signs? How is it that someone with obviously less than an IQ of 50 can operate a website, take pictures, formulate a plan like this, etc?
Regardless of IQ, the fact is still that all publicity is good, especially for a relatively unknown artist.
That's bullshit. Technically, you're right, since it wasn't a right they ever had, the campaign wasn't to strip the rights.
But, that's overly pedantic.Ultimately, people don't get married solely because they want to be married, there's a ton of rights that are granted to go along with that.
As for the 7 wives thing, why is it that bigots keep trotting that out? That, bestiality and pedophilia will never be legalized because there are serious problems with it. Polygamy and Polygny lead to people being unable to get a spouse because all of a sudden you need only a fraction of the partners you needed to to fill the need for women or men, while the remaining men and women are unable to marry.
In the cast of bestiality and pedophilia, there's no ability of the animals and children to engage in informed consent.
Completely different from consenting adults getting married.
There's a better argument against the "bestiality and polygamy will be next" crowd, and that is that unlike homosexuality, no statistically significant percentage of the population is born with an urge to exclusively desire sex with animals or multiple human partners. It's been pretty clear for years that most homosexuals are indeed born that way, that it is a genetic trait rather than a learned behavior. AFAIK nobody is born with a genetic predisposition to molest animals, and while there are many men who would probably prefer to have more than one wife if they could, most are not actively repulsed at the thought of living with just one. Homosexuality should be accommodated equally by the law simply because failure to do so penalizes a significant percentage of the population for something that is completely beyond their control. This is obviously not the case with other types of sexual deviancy, which either affect a vanishingly small number of people, or involve behavior that is non-consensual by its very nature (e.g. pedophilia). Homosexuality is different in that it is affects large numbers of people, involves only consenting adults, and is primarily a condition that one is born with and can't change. That should be the key test, IMO. If a sexual behavior meets these criteria and otherwise causes no harm, then those affected should not be legally discriminated against. And if they want to marry each other, why not let them, since it really doesn't affect the rest of us in any meaningful way.
Which is precisely why the government officials that are required to swear into the office are required to uphold and protect the CONSTITUTION.
NOT THE PEOPLE.
Not the government, not the white house, not the justice system but the LAW. The US Founders knew that relying on people making right choices is a terrible idea, democracy doesn't work at all, it quickly dissents into authoritarian nightmare because it promises too everything to everybody for nothing (actually it promises to subsidize the unproductive majority by stealing from the productive minority). Eventually you destroy what you tax and this includes all types of taxes.
From just the tax rates on income and property, to various rules, laws and regulations that government imposes upon business to buy votes (be it minimum wage, various laws that give employees special powers to sue employers for any perceived 'wrongdoing', any kind of entitlement to the employers and customers that end up being obligations upon the employers and producers).
This eventually ends up destroying the productive class of people and destroys incentives for people even trying to become productive, here is a good satirical overview of the problem.
Eventually the mob eats and chases away the part of the society that actually is productive and pays for all of this conspicuous consumption by the mob and then the society is doomed to failure because of the failing economy. So the principles are the same for anything else that concerns rule of law - equal justice under the law, privacy from government intrusion, transparency of government in the first place.
ALL democracies are destined to failure, that is not an option, it's an inevitable consequence of the rule of mob. That's why to keep working the system is supposed to set those types of feelings and desires aside and concentrate on constantly and vigilantly protecting the rule of law, equality before law, equality of opportunity by providing equal application of law, prevention of discrimination by the mob, by the government. Once those concepts are breached, the society is on the path to self destruction and unfortunately I have never found an example in history where the society actually stopped short of destroying itself this way once it became democratic, AFAIC history shows that the destruction is imminent.
So then, you apparently believe the USA is not a democracy and never has been, which seems to me to be a bit disingenuous. Democracy does not have to mean pure mob rule, it's a principle and guiding philosophy that can be implemented in various different ways, with varying degrees of power being given over to the populace. The US constitution and the system of government it created currently stand as the most enduring in history, so we must be doing something right. As for the notion that pure democracy must always self-destruct, history doesn't support that even if you are indeed referring strictly to mob rule. Historically there have been precious few examples of pure democracy to go by, but I would wager that in terms of longevity democracies fare no better or worse than any number of other forms of government. In fact I would go further, and say that a certain degree a democracy is absolutely necessary for a post-industrial society to be both successful and enduring. Your viewpoint seems to be that the majority of the people are just too stupid or too greedy to rule themselves successfully, but where's the proof? Even animals often act altruistically in social situations, why are you so sure humans can't do the same? Until you show me some research to back up your assertions that democracies must inevitably implode, I will choose to put my faith in democracy. True, the USA does seem to be headed down the tubes at the moment, but this seems to be happening precisely because we have become less democratic than we used to be, not more. Furthermore, your thesis that high taxes always destroy