You want people who are thinking and planning for the best way to keep the most people on your side alive. You certainly don't want anyone thinking all those people dieing is a game.
I didn't say that at all. I said, I wanted people for whom thinking about killing the other people is a game. In other words, you don't want someone in the military who stops and reflects and dwells on the moral implications of every order. You want people of action who reflexively do it. But, the really best soldier is someone who ultimately enjoys hunting other people down and killing them, and to get that, you ultimately need something more of a motivator than just keeping your squad mates alive. You need to have ideology, and, a bit of religious fanaticism will get you that.
Sure, you can make the silly stereotype about religious fanatics dying for their country, but that's much more of a European phenomon from World War I and before than it is and ever has been an American one. The USA has always been a nation of religious fanatics (remember the Pilgrims, Puritans, etc?), but, also ones that rather like living.
Well, does it follow that there might be climate implications from um, having this giant sun literally plugged into the earth? It seems to me that having an electrical current running between two giant celestial bodies ought to have some impact in terms of climate.
a) You met a total nutjob who claimed to be a SR-71 pilot, and you believed him?
Actually, you want fanatics to be your warriors. Let's call it for what it is, and say, you want people in your military that have the ability to make a game out of hunting other people. This is particularly true in the Air Force, where the whole culture is about a solo hunter out there, going out and bagging his or her prey - either other enemy aircraft, or ground targets.
Quite often, this will attract those who might also tend to be religious fanatics.
My son has been fascinated by computers almost since he was born. First he liked to play with the laser mouse, then he liked to tap on the keyboard, and now, at 2, he knows how to arrange the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and plug all in correctly, so that he can ask me to "watch choo choo train"... otherwise known as Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.
He likes the notebook too, and when I'm surfing, he'll use the page up and page down keys to scroll back to a part that he liked on the page. We can spend hours together using google images to look at all the different kinds of animals, trains, things that move. He's fascinated by all of it and it stays with him.
when we hung the phone up on Halliburton telling them that we thought staying alive was more important than big pay checks, the day-rate was going over $2500.
Christ almighty. If Halliburton was hiring programmers in Iraq at that rate, I would go there immediately. That kind of money is the worth the risk of my life. If I live, it means my son is guaranteed an excellent education. Hell, for that kind of money, I could put my brother in law's kids through college too, and he went to Iraq for a hell of a lot less money than that!
5 billion bucks? 7 Shuttle launches? Well, I guess you could do so. Ask NASA.
Unmanned is a lot cheaper. You make one baseline probe design, and you build say, 5 or 10 of them. Spread the design cost over a series of flights. Launch into space at multiple asteroids.
I'm wondering what on Eros would be worth 20 trillion
I've read that some folks say that the asteroid is very purely iron, nickel, platinum, gold... when the dust all settles, the cost of getting that ore back is very high.
there's no reason to believe that there's oil in space
No, but there is a lot of methane to be had, and who knows what's going on Titan. There's all sorts of weird hydrocarbons forming up there. Here's the thing... nuclear stuff is pretty rare, so far, and that's what you need for space. But, if you had like an asteroid base, and could tap a big ball of methane and oxygen your way, you'd have plenty of fuel to move on. It's funny but I think we'll always be burning something, just because there's so much to burn.
I take it that is an Americanism for "low pay"? Yes.
Hmmm, no. Chump change in that context means that the pay would be insignificant compared to the investment return. So, yeah, if I was a billionaire, staring at becoming a trillionaire, because of what you tell me about some rock, paying you a $1000 a day in consulting fees, is really chump change. It's not cheap in the absolute sense, but the value you would be delivering would be so vast, like, why not?
The Workplace Safety people in Australia are currently running a series of ads along the lines of a manager asking a factory worker to do dangerous tasks, eg
Any more, these safety issues raised by liberal workers groups are red herrings. These people simply do not want to work. If it is not safety, its illness. It's always something. These people bitch about not having jobs, and then, they get them, and what's the first thing they do? Complain about safety so they don't have to work, then, they go on worker's comp, so they don't have to work. I mean, why invest in a culture that's so lazy as to be utterly useless?
", there's little doubt Team USA w" Only an ignorant foo believes that. Hint: Look at how will Iran is defended compared to Iraq.
The USA would take Iran apart, and could do so in weeks.
Let's dispense with all of the hype and look at the military reality of Iran. Iran has no navy and no air force. The USAF has just purchased over 100 F-22s, and we have a bunch of aircraft carriers.
Remember, Iraq only got complicated because the USA chose to send soldiers in on the ground. In the case of Iran, there's no reason to necessarily to get ourselves into another messy occupation. We could just as easily establish total air superiority and bomb the country into oblivion, and there's not a damn thing Iran can do about it.
People in the employee of the governemt, elected or otherwise, always need to be under more scrutiny. Regardless of party.
Me thinks they are often under too much. Look, NASA can't take a poop without a multi-million dollar commission to study the problem.
In any case, Wikipedia is either public or it isn't. The moment it starts injecting itself into the political process, it loses all of its objectivity. If only some people can contribute, that means bias, does it not. IF its going to be a liberal propaganda archive, at least be honest and call it that, and don't lie and tell people that its a simple objective thing, when its not. At least when you turn on Fox, you know what you are getting.
Someone in the House of Representatives, most likely a Republican staffer, edited a wikipedia article with their side of the story. What in god's green earth is wrong with that? Certainly, if Wikipedia is going to be everybody, then shouldn't it well, be, open to everyone.
The fault here is that wikipedia has even made an issue of this at all. Or, anyone has. It seems that what's really going on is an attempt to muzzle a certain political party by implying that they have no right to make certain edits.
Sure, one could make the argument that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam never collaborated, blah blah. But I see this as the same sort of thing that existed between Germany and Japan in WWII. They both said they hated the USA, and therefor, once the USA was in a state of war, it only makes sense to go deal with all of its enemies, rather than just anyone. That way, you get the war over with more quickly. Anyone with half a brain knows that US foreign policy is to use any act of aggression against it as an excuse to invade an entire region. We're just doing what the Romans did.
If you then take that approach, its entirely reasonable to believe, even if it could never be proved, that OBL and Saddam talked to each other at least through functionaries. I mean, you have two bad guys, they both know the USA is coming after them, (even prior to 9/11, we were), so, why not exchange a few notes?
Bottom line is, they were both anti-US guys. Had the invasion of Iraq gone more quickly, there's little doubt Team USA would have marched into Iran and Syria as well, and probably would have done something about that idiot in Venezuala.
Of course, it didn't work out that way. But, at least, the USA did accomplish something. There's been no attack against the domestic USA, OBL is on the run and is basically marginalized, and Saddam is dead. We didn't get the hold enchilada, but ultimately, the plan did work.
I wasn't joking, and this is why : In case you hadn't guessed, I work in the industry.
I gathered that, and I apologize for the sharp comment back. It was rude of me and am I'm sorry.
So, really, if I had a navy of my own to defend my claims, plus, a gen 6 or 7, drilling rig, then I could hire you for a $1000 a day? It seems that, for that kind of money - we're talking billions here, really.
Now, here's the question. That kind of money could also drop a probe into an asteroid and do a return mission as well. If you could do a geological assay of say, Eros, and confirm that it really is worth 20 trillion dollars, wouldn't that be a more interesting line of work, plus potentially far more profitable. It seems like the quest for resources and its attendant cost of exploring earth is hitting a critical point where space exploration is actually cheaper.
If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn't be drilling, I'd be flying, that's for sure. And yeah, I'd pay you a $1000 a day to tell me if these rocks that I am looking at indicate the presence of precious metals and an indication of what sort of industrial process would be needed to extract them. It would be chump change.
The free software has been discontinued as of DEC 11.
Well, I guess I'll be filling out my opinions in the form of feature requests to the KDE team, as I continue with my SUSE Linux! Sorry MS, ya had yer chance and blew it!
It's your money. You have the hassle of organising it ; I'll do your wellsite geology. It'll be $1000/day if you're starting in the next 3 years, beyond that I'm not able to commit myself to a price, but it's likely to be higher.
It was a joke, because, commercial exploitation of Antarctica is presently illegal.
You make the flawed assumption that the global warming is all about absolute levels. it is all about rates of change. Sure, the Earth's climate has bounced all over the place. But it hasn't changed on time scales as short as we are seeing now.
I honestly have not seen anyone make that claim. The issue with GW is that we have realized that the climate is not a steady state thing at all, and that worse, we seemed to have kicked it out of that steady state, so scientists are utterly terrified because they have no idea what will happen. Computer models always end in some gloomy scenario, so, it seems more of a miracle that there is a balanced climate at all, and here we are pissing on it.
Let me get this straight. In order to save the climate, we're going to switch from CO2 producing internal combustion engines to something that directly sucks the energy right out of the sky. Has anyone even bothered to computer model the atmosphere when you start extracting gigawatts and then terrawatts from it? If you stop to realize that in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country (which is why you don't see solar powered cars), then, the thought of getting all of our energy from wind power seems to create a gaping energy deficit in the very climate itself. When the dust all settles, we'll probably be in some sort of windmill induced ice age, or, there will be no more rain.
If I own a piece of land in Nevada and declare publicly that I want no government services whatsoever, no justice, no schools, no social security, no defense, nothing, the government will still come and tax me. That is being governed against my will.
Your proposition is immediately absurd because you are still mooching off of the benefits of the US in general and the government in particular. The law is just but it is not optional. Your education was, in some way, subsidized by the taxpayer. Many of the products you buy and services you choose are dependent upon an infrastructure managed by your government. If you do not want to be governed by the USA, then you have a very simple choice - to leave it. There are plenty of places you can go on earth where you can achieve that. If you choose to remain in the USA, and disobey the laws, including taxation, then yes,
Let me state this further. I'm all in favor of individual rights, but, the law is the law. It is the expression of what we the people as whole consider to be a fair society and the exertion of our rights as a people to make it is what sets us apart from other legal systems. A tyrant, could, for example, choose to make whatever law he or she chose, willy nilly, and in the absence of law for all people, tyrants surely follow. Thus, anyone that advocates anarchy ultimately begets tyranny. For that reason, you have to be smacked down by Uncle Sam.
So, for example, while I do not like the Clintons at all, they not only had a right, but a DUTY, to knock down David Koresh and all of these other insurrectionist movements. And yes, if you had your own house on your own land in Nevada, and declared yourself not subject to US law, AND, you used the force of arms to impose your will on your property, then certainly, the government would have the DUTY to use the force of arms to impose its will on you, even if you were otherwise peacable.
Does "white" have the same kind of pejorative negativity, hateful history, and attitude associated with "nigger"? You're right, you'd get modded into oblivion, alright; and justifiably so
A fight! A fight! A black and a white! If the white don't win then we all jump in!
The rest of you that just whined but could take the time to actually help do something:
Well, I did my best to explain to President Bush that Canada was working on weapons of mass destruction and needed to be bombed immediately. However, he merely shrugged and said that would be something for Jenna to deal with when she is President.
Case in point - back in the '70s, a joke article about "Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet" appeared in the April edition of Scientific American (iirc, it was in one of Martin Gardner's columns).
Fuck Britanicca. Overpriced, high-pressure sales tactics ("buy the encyclopedia and it'll help your kids in school"... yeah, right), built-in obsolescence, and a VERY slow update/corrections policy. By one estimate, 10% of all articles are off.
I think Britanica is awesome. Sure, Wikipedia can be useful, but at some point, the bad writing just drives me nuts. In, Britannica the articles are generally well written. Paid, professional editors work wonders, and the lack of them is telling in Wikipedia.
Even the previously mentioned Crapper article, is well, crap. Two immediately horrible things jump out. First, a paragraph begins "Yet another purported explanation is that ". It's a choppy sentence that implies the tail end of an enumeration where none exists.
I disagree. I look at Global Warming as the cause like I look to the latest code change as the cause of a never before seen software bug.
Well, that makes the flawed assumption that the earth's climate behaviors linearly and predictibly. It doesn't and therefor, it can't. There's nothing about our climate that guarantees that we should be in any steady state, and geologically speaking, the earth's climate has bounced all over the place. Sure, you might argue that there is some asthetic utility to balancing out the CO2 level in the air, and correctly so, but you shouldn't argue that doing so will guarantee a more or less habital planet, because it doesn't.
If someone as dedicated, intellectual and powerful as Jefferson had a belief, it should be expected that his actions would reflect those beliefs. So, either he was talking out of the other side of his mouth--believing that slaves were not "men" at all, a truly Evil and humanity corruptung belief which was commonly held at the time--or he was a flaming hypocrite. Neither are good character traits
Sometimes you can see past a time that is better than the one you live in. Sometimes when you do, you can also see that you have to take baby steps to get there. Jefferson's vision of inalienable rights and that all men are created equal stands as a vision that we, even today, have not completely lived up to. So, while his actions are not perfect, by any stretch, the vision remains a worthy goal, and working towards that goal, I like to believe, is one of the reasons and faiths upon which the United States exists.
So, it doesn't matter that Jefferson was a hypocrite that he owned slaves. As a practical matter, had Jefferson tried to put emancipation on the table in 1776, there would have been no revolution and no United States. He had to have the southern states on board, in particular, Virginia.
I mean, come on, we're beating up on Jefferson when almost 200 years later, blacks still couldn't eat at the same places in most of the country, and, it took until -this- generation to have a credible black candidate for President. Even today, you often hear about black quarterbacks being athletic, and white quarterbacks being smart, as if, a white guy can't be athletic and a black guy can't be smart. Instead of pointing at Jefferson's flaws, maybe we should read his words, for that they are, and remind ourselves that we need to live up to them too.
As a de jure geographical monopoly of law (at least), government *is* inherently evil.
Thomas Jefferson would disagree with you. But hey, he just wrote the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
etting rid of governmental institutions (federal or not) is not laziness, it's being ethical. By supporting governmental institutions, you support organizations that routinely engage in theft, extorsion, slavery, kidnapping and murder merely by making their did legal. Don't be an accomplice.
Government isn't innately evil, its the concentration of power that is. If all you do is get rid of a government institution to institute a corporate monopoly in its place, then you haven't solved much of anything. That's why its so important to oppose things like longer copyrights, and longer patents. Both tend to create monopolies when what we want is competition in the private sector to actually work. In an era where the barriers to entry are steep enough, it stands to reason that you don't need to reduce incentives even more for someone else to compete.
If Republicans were so big into private competition, then what is so wrong about legislation that ensures that companies do exactly that?
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You want people who are thinking and planning for the best way to keep the most people on your side alive. You certainly don't want anyone thinking all those people dieing is a game.
I didn't say that at all. I said, I wanted people for whom thinking about killing the other people is a game. In other words, you don't want someone in the military who stops and reflects and dwells on the moral implications of every order. You want people of action who reflexively do it. But, the really best soldier is someone who ultimately enjoys hunting other people down and killing them, and to get that, you ultimately need something more of a motivator than just keeping your squad mates alive. You need to have ideology, and, a bit of religious fanaticism will get you that.
Sure, you can make the silly stereotype about religious fanatics dying for their country, but that's much more of a European phenomon from World War I and before than it is and ever has been an American one. The USA has always been a nation of religious fanatics (remember the Pilgrims, Puritans, etc?), but, also ones that rather like living.
Well, does it follow that there might be climate implications from um, having this giant sun literally plugged into the earth? It seems to me that having an electrical current running between two giant celestial bodies ought to have some impact in terms of climate.
a) You met a total nutjob who claimed to be a SR-71 pilot, and you believed him?
Actually, you want fanatics to be your warriors. Let's call it for what it is, and say, you want people in your military that have the ability to make a game out of hunting other people. This is particularly true in the Air Force, where the whole culture is about a solo hunter out there, going out and bagging his or her prey - either other enemy aircraft, or ground targets.
Quite often, this will attract those who might also tend to be religious fanatics.
My son has been fascinated by computers almost since he was born. First he liked to play with the laser mouse, then he liked to tap on the keyboard, and now, at 2, he knows how to arrange the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and plug all in correctly, so that he can ask me to "watch choo choo train"... otherwise known as Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.
He likes the notebook too, and when I'm surfing, he'll use the page up and page down keys to scroll back to a part that he liked on the page. We can spend hours together using google images to look at all the different kinds of animals, trains, things that move. He's fascinated by all of it and it stays with him.
when we hung the phone up on Halliburton telling them that we thought staying alive was more important than big pay checks, the day-rate was going over $2500.
Christ almighty. If Halliburton was hiring programmers in Iraq at that rate, I would go there immediately. That kind of money is the worth the risk of my life. If I live, it means my son is guaranteed an excellent education. Hell, for that kind of money, I could put my brother in law's kids through college too, and he went to Iraq for a hell of a lot less money than that!
5 billion bucks? 7 Shuttle launches? Well, I guess you could do so. Ask NASA.
Unmanned is a lot cheaper. You make one baseline probe design, and you build say, 5 or 10 of them. Spread the design cost over a series of flights. Launch into space at multiple asteroids.
I'm wondering what on Eros would be worth 20 trillion
I've read that some folks say that the asteroid is very purely iron, nickel, platinum, gold... when the dust all settles, the cost of getting that ore back is very high.
there's no reason to believe that there's oil in space
No, but there is a lot of methane to be had, and who knows what's going on Titan. There's all sorts of weird hydrocarbons forming up there. Here's the thing... nuclear stuff is pretty rare, so far, and that's what you need for space. But, if you had like an asteroid base, and could tap a big ball of methane and oxygen your way, you'd have plenty of fuel to move on. It's funny but I think we'll always be burning something, just because there's so much to burn.
I take it that is an Americanism for "low pay"? Yes.
Hmmm, no. Chump change in that context means that the pay would be insignificant compared to the investment return. So, yeah, if I was a billionaire, staring at becoming a trillionaire, because of what you tell me about some rock, paying you a $1000 a day in consulting fees, is really chump change. It's not cheap in the absolute sense, but the value you would be delivering would be so vast, like, why not?
The Workplace Safety people in Australia are currently running a series of ads along the lines of a manager asking a factory worker to do dangerous tasks, eg
Any more, these safety issues raised by liberal workers groups are red herrings. These people simply do not want to work. If it is not safety, its illness. It's always something. These people bitch about not having jobs, and then, they get them, and what's the first thing they do? Complain about safety so they don't have to work, then, they go on worker's comp, so they don't have to work. I mean, why invest in a culture that's so lazy as to be utterly useless?
", there's little doubt Team USA w"
Only an ignorant foo believes that. Hint: Look at how will Iran is defended compared to Iraq.
The USA would take Iran apart, and could do so in weeks.
Let's dispense with all of the hype and look at the military reality of Iran. Iran has no navy and no air force. The USAF has just purchased over 100 F-22s, and we have a bunch of aircraft carriers.
Remember, Iraq only got complicated because the USA chose to send soldiers in on the ground. In the case of Iran, there's no reason to necessarily to get ourselves into another messy occupation. We could just as easily establish total air superiority and bomb the country into oblivion, and there's not a damn thing Iran can do about it.
End of story.
People in the employee of the governemt, elected or otherwise, always need to be under more scrutiny. Regardless of party.
Me thinks they are often under too much. Look, NASA can't take a poop without a multi-million dollar commission to study the problem.
In any case, Wikipedia is either public or it isn't. The moment it starts injecting itself into the political process, it loses all of its objectivity. If only some people can contribute, that means bias, does it not. IF its going to be a liberal propaganda archive, at least be honest and call it that, and don't lie and tell people that its a simple objective thing, when its not. At least when you turn on Fox, you know what you are getting.
Someone in the House of Representatives, most likely a Republican staffer, edited a wikipedia article with their side of the story. What in god's green earth is wrong with that? Certainly, if Wikipedia is going to be everybody, then shouldn't it well, be, open to everyone.
The fault here is that wikipedia has even made an issue of this at all. Or, anyone has. It seems that what's really going on is an attempt to muzzle a certain political party by implying that they have no right to make certain edits.
Sure, one could make the argument that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam never collaborated, blah blah. But I see this as the same sort of thing that existed between Germany and Japan in WWII. They both said they hated the USA, and therefor, once the USA was in a state of war, it only makes sense to go deal with all of its enemies, rather than just anyone. That way, you get the war over with more quickly. Anyone with half a brain knows that US foreign policy is to use any act of aggression against it as an excuse to invade an entire region. We're just doing what the Romans did.
If you then take that approach, its entirely reasonable to believe, even if it could never be proved, that OBL and Saddam talked to each other at least through functionaries. I mean, you have two bad guys, they both know the USA is coming after them, (even prior to 9/11, we were), so, why not exchange a few notes?
Bottom line is, they were both anti-US guys. Had the invasion of Iraq gone more quickly, there's little doubt Team USA would have marched into Iran and Syria as well, and probably would have done something about that idiot in Venezuala.
Of course, it didn't work out that way. But, at least, the USA did accomplish something. There's been no attack against the domestic USA, OBL is on the run and is basically marginalized, and Saddam is dead. We didn't get the hold enchilada, but ultimately, the plan did work.
I wasn't joking, and this is why :
In case you hadn't guessed, I work in the industry.
I gathered that, and I apologize for the sharp comment back. It was rude of me and am I'm sorry.
So, really, if I had a navy of my own to defend my claims, plus, a gen 6 or 7, drilling rig, then I could hire you for a $1000 a day? It seems that, for that kind of money - we're talking billions here, really.
Now, here's the question. That kind of money could also drop a probe into an asteroid and do a return mission as well. If you could do a geological assay of say, Eros, and confirm that it really is worth 20 trillion dollars, wouldn't that be a more interesting line of work, plus potentially far more profitable. It seems like the quest for resources and its attendant cost of exploring earth is hitting a critical point where space exploration is actually cheaper.
If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn't be drilling, I'd be flying, that's for sure. And yeah, I'd pay you a $1000 a day to tell me if these rocks that I am looking at indicate the presence of precious metals and an indication of what sort of industrial process would be needed to extract them. It would be chump change.
The free software has been discontinued as of DEC 11.
Well, I guess I'll be filling out my opinions in the form of feature requests to the KDE team, as I continue with my SUSE Linux! Sorry MS, ya had yer chance and blew it!
It's your money. You have the hassle of organising it ; I'll do your wellsite geology. It'll be $1000/day if you're starting in the next 3 years, beyond that I'm not able to commit myself to a price, but it's likely to be higher.
It was a joke, because, commercial exploitation of Antarctica is presently illegal.
I went through the survey, and I've seen nothing on the site about a free Vista...
Ok, if scientists are allowed to dig for dinosaurs, I'd like go set myself up with an oil well for, ummm, "research purposes"...
You make the flawed assumption that the global warming is all about absolute levels. it is all about rates of change. Sure, the Earth's climate has bounced all over the place. But it hasn't changed on time scales as short as we are seeing now.
I honestly have not seen anyone make that claim. The issue with GW is that we have realized that the climate is not a steady state thing at all, and that worse, we seemed to have kicked it out of that steady state, so scientists are utterly terrified because they have no idea what will happen. Computer models always end in some gloomy scenario, so, it seems more of a miracle that there is a balanced climate at all, and here we are pissing on it.
Let me get this straight. In order to save the climate, we're going to switch from CO2 producing internal combustion engines to something that directly sucks the energy right out of the sky. Has anyone even bothered to computer model the atmosphere when you start extracting gigawatts and then terrawatts from it? If you stop to realize that in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country (which is why you don't see solar powered cars), then, the thought of getting all of our energy from wind power seems to create a gaping energy deficit in the very climate itself. When the dust all settles, we'll probably be in some sort of windmill induced ice age, or, there will be no more rain.
If I own a piece of land in Nevada and declare publicly that I want no government services whatsoever, no justice, no schools, no social security, no defense, nothing, the government will still come and tax me. That is being governed against my will.
Your proposition is immediately absurd because you are still mooching off of the benefits of the US in general and the government in particular. The law is just but it is not optional. Your education was, in some way, subsidized by the taxpayer. Many of the products you buy and services you choose are dependent upon an infrastructure managed by your government. If you do not want to be governed by the USA, then you have a very simple choice - to leave it. There are plenty of places you can go on earth where you can achieve that. If you choose to remain in the USA, and disobey the laws, including taxation, then yes,
Let me state this further. I'm all in favor of individual rights, but, the law is the law. It is the expression of what we the people as whole consider to be a fair society and the exertion of our rights as a people to make it is what sets us apart from other legal systems. A tyrant, could, for example, choose to make whatever law he or she chose, willy nilly, and in the absence of law for all people, tyrants surely follow. Thus, anyone that advocates anarchy ultimately begets tyranny. For that reason, you have to be smacked down by Uncle Sam.
So, for example, while I do not like the Clintons at all, they not only had a right, but a DUTY, to knock down David Koresh and all of these other insurrectionist movements. And yes, if you had your own house on your own land in Nevada, and declared yourself not subject to US law, AND, you used the force of arms to impose your will on your property, then certainly, the government would have the DUTY to use the force of arms to impose its will on you, even if you were otherwise peacable.
Does "white" have the same kind of pejorative negativity, hateful history, and attitude associated with "nigger"? You're right, you'd get modded into oblivion, alright; and justifiably so
A fight! A fight! A black and a white! If the white don't win then we all jump in!
What would that context be?
The rest of you that just whined but could take the time to actually help do something:
Well, I did my best to explain to President Bush that Canada was working on weapons of mass destruction and needed to be bombed immediately. However, he merely shrugged and said that would be something for Jenna to deal with when she is President.
Case in point - back in the '70s, a joke article about "Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet" appeared in the April edition of Scientific American (iirc, it was in one of Martin Gardner's columns).
... yeah, right), built-in obsolescence, and a VERY slow update/corrections policy. By one estimate, 10% of all articles are off.
Thomas Crapper craps up Wikipedia
Fuck Britanicca. Overpriced, high-pressure sales tactics ("buy the encyclopedia and it'll help your kids in school"
I think Britanica is awesome. Sure, Wikipedia can be useful, but at some point, the bad writing just drives me nuts. In, Britannica the articles are generally well written. Paid, professional editors work wonders, and the lack of them is telling in Wikipedia.
Even the previously mentioned Crapper article, is well, crap. Two immediately horrible things jump out. First, a paragraph begins "Yet another purported explanation is that ". It's a choppy sentence that implies the tail end of an enumeration where none exists.
I disagree. I look at Global Warming as the cause like I look to the latest code change as the cause of a never before seen software bug.
Well, that makes the flawed assumption that the earth's climate behaviors linearly and predictibly. It doesn't and therefor, it can't. There's nothing about our climate that guarantees that we should be in any steady state, and geologically speaking, the earth's climate has bounced all over the place. Sure, you might argue that there is some asthetic utility to balancing out the CO2 level in the air, and correctly so, but you shouldn't argue that doing so will guarantee a more or less habital planet, because it doesn't.
If someone as dedicated, intellectual and powerful as Jefferson had a belief, it should be expected that his actions would reflect those beliefs. So, either he was talking out of the other side of his mouth--believing that slaves were not "men" at all, a truly Evil and humanity corruptung belief which was commonly held at the time--or he was a flaming hypocrite. Neither are good character traits
Sometimes you can see past a time that is better than the one you live in. Sometimes when you do, you can also see that you have to take baby steps to get there. Jefferson's vision of inalienable rights and that all men are created equal stands as a vision that we, even today, have not completely lived up to. So, while his actions are not perfect, by any stretch, the vision remains a worthy goal, and working towards that goal, I like to believe, is one of the reasons and faiths upon which the United States exists.
So, it doesn't matter that Jefferson was a hypocrite that he owned slaves. As a practical matter, had Jefferson tried to put emancipation on the table in 1776, there would have been no revolution and no United States. He had to have the southern states on board, in particular, Virginia.
I mean, come on, we're beating up on Jefferson when almost 200 years later, blacks still couldn't eat at the same places in most of the country, and, it took until -this- generation to have a credible black candidate for President. Even today, you often hear about black quarterbacks being athletic, and white quarterbacks being smart, as if, a white guy can't be athletic and a black guy can't be smart. Instead of pointing at Jefferson's flaws, maybe we should read his words, for that they are, and remind ourselves that we need to live up to them too.
Said a fat white man born into a wealthy family, no less one who kept slaves and concubines.
There's nothing wrong with being white, Jefferson wasn't fat, and it was common to own slaves and concubines back in those days.
The thing is, are the words true or not? I mean, if you don't want a government, you could always move to Antarctica. No one will stop you...
As a de jure geographical monopoly of law (at least), government *is* inherently evil.
Thomas Jefferson would disagree with you. But hey, he just wrote the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
etting rid of governmental institutions (federal or not) is not laziness, it's being ethical. By supporting governmental institutions, you support organizations that routinely engage in theft, extorsion, slavery, kidnapping and murder merely by making their did legal. Don't be an accomplice.
Government isn't innately evil, its the concentration of power that is. If all you do is get rid of a government institution to institute a corporate monopoly in its place, then you haven't solved much of anything. That's why its so important to oppose things like longer copyrights, and longer patents. Both tend to create monopolies when what we want is competition in the private sector to actually work. In an era where the barriers to entry are steep enough, it stands to reason that you don't need to reduce incentives even more for someone else to compete.
If Republicans were so big into private competition, then what is so wrong about legislation that ensures that companies do exactly that?