Since when has signing international treaties caused us to abide by them? We'll invent a legal loophole and continue to pretend that everything is justified by the never ending war for Freedom and Democracy.
Everyone knows that only Americans are righteous enough to defend such lofty ideals from lawless barbarians.
In a free trade system U.S. buyers could negotiate with various Chinese suppliers.
In a free trade environment, Lockheed and Boeing could sell their newest stealth bombers to China or anyone who had the cash. But I'll take a wild guess and say that you don't support free trade as much as you think you do.
You state we spend money "proving" global warming. Let's assume you're right - how much is that exactly?
According to the GAO, it's probably around 6 billion a year. Which is about two weeks in Iraq.
Not sure that... we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Yes, we are burning hundreds of millions of years worth of old biomass in less than 150. We're also destroying every old growth forest on the planet. I'm fairly sure these are new events. And even a closed system will have periods of self-regulation that could be very inhospitable to our way of life.
Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.
Virgin is not making money. Virgin has not been to the moon. Virgin hasn't ever placed a satellite. Virgin has never even orbited the earth as the space shuttle has. Virgin has never docked with a space station, or built one. It's performing sub-orbital flights - whoopdedoo!
All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.
If this is true, why are all technologically advanced civilizations run by a strong state government? And I guess rocket technology, information technology, satellites, and every other major advance of the 20th century funded directly by government research have netted us very little.
Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments
I thought you just said government funding was the problem? Would polywell reactors had a chance at private capital investment in the 1980s, so it could develop to the point where it may be viable? Or are you just unable to form a coherent argument if you're allowed to write more than a few sentences?
I agree that there need to be more reasonable restrictions for research and development, but that's more of a function of bad governance than private initiative. All of the programs in Australia and South Korea are sponsored by their federal governments.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Commercial R&D is just like commerce itself. Incredibly short sighted and hamstrung by the requirement of quick return on investment. That's why pure R&D does not exist in the commercial realm, especially since the closure of Bell Labs. Modern corporations are so greedy, they are only allowed by their shareholders to perform product development. Anything that has a good chance of losing money - like pure research and development - is never even put on the table.
No one can "prove" the origin of the universe. But every single religion is man-made, and contains errors of morality and fact. These religions then use their falsely obtained authority to steal and plunder, and to indoctrinate communities to respect hierarchies for no other reason other than the existence of the hierarchy.
Deism is the assertion that there is a God. It's an enormous leap from there is a God, to the God described in this book is the only real God.
Adeism is a logical fallacy. Atheism is a logical conclusion.
What? That's like saying if I truly didn't believe in Zeus, I wouldn't deny his existence and object to you demolishing my house to build him a temple.
If the people who believed in foolish things would keep their mouths shut and their hands out of public coffers, there'd be no reason for us to deny their silly fairy tales. They could ramble on in solitude like the people who are properly sent to a shrink when they claim to speak to invisible, imaginary beings.
Yeah, and that still means nothing for the rest of us. Yeah, he wants Guantanamo bay closed and I applaud him for that, but its still open, its causing a mess because he has no decent proposal on to where to put the people.
It's only been stalled by the idea that it's okay to send young men and women to fight and die in foreign lands to combat terrorism, but it's not okay to house terrorists in a supermax prison because it's too dangerous. This, despite the fact that we've been housing sociopaths there without incident for decades.
Ideally, it should be if you don't have insurance and hit someone you simply pay for their repairs and everything is alright. That, is how it should be done.
Ideally, there should be no car accidents. Ideals are nice to keep in mind, but when you're formulating policies, certain hard line positions are worthless to maintain for the people who live in constant fear of slippery slope arguments.
The real fear is the fact that people are blindly voting for it based on party lines and aren't reading the fucking bill. In Europe it wasn't a political move, it was a reasonable, civilized law passing. Not "oh lets try to force a vote over a major holiday to show how "committed" we are to the American public when even half of us can't understand or haven't read the bill" The last time I looked, the bill was over 700 pages of legal words. I think a drunk college student trying to finish Plato's Republic before a final would have a better understanding over that than our congressmen have over this bill.
This has been how DC has operated for a long time. Why wasn't this an issue for certain media outlets when the PATRIOT Act was signed the day it was first printed? It's an issue of hypocrisy. Unfortunately, there's no money to be made in maintaining basic legal rights, so it's a non issue in American politics. So, a bill that is meant to provide social service improvements to the vast majority of Americans is communist, and a bill that removes our basic rights and assigns all power to a single branch of government is democratic.
A) It should be an option to pay for care out of your own pocket. Hospitals should recognize this and give emergency care with the promise of paying back later. For example, I don't walk onto the car lot with $30K in my pocket, I have a bit of money to pay a down payment, then I pay for the rest of the car. What hospitals should do in this case is go for no down payment, then work with the person to pay off the rest of the bills plus perhaps a bit of interest.
It's already an option. The hospitals never get their money. The patient is bankrupted for life. Everyone loses.
B) This legislation is being passed during a recession which is a -bad thing- for example, if someone was making $25,000 a year working for X Corporation, and suddenly X Corporation had to spend $5,000 more on each employee because of healthcare and lets say that X Corporation had about $100,000 to pay employees, suddenly they can't afford 4 employees and have to cut one of them. Yeah, it might be a good thing for the 3 who stayed, but for the one person who had to be let go, it sucks.
There's only one way to stop the race to the bottom of living standards, and that's to stop allowing corporations to abuse people; to enforce minimum wage; to enforce sensible immigration policies so people can get work visas and pay taxes, own property, and buy insurance; and to stop giving tax breaks to the Fortune 500 when they are the ones who own the assets and have the means to pay more than the 10% they pay now (after loopholes).
C) I believe that the bill also requires (or did) even low-wage, family or full-time part time (such as students) to receive health care. This is a bad thing for young people who are trying to pay their way through college, tech school, or simply trying to make ends meet. Yeah, it
How many more freedoms do we have now that Obama is president? Zero.
Uhh, not so. You now have the right to habeas corpus, even if you're a terrorism suspect. This is one of the most important individual freedoms that separates democracies from dictatorships. And yes, everyone deserves it, because without this principle, the only thing separating us from fundamentalist religious fanatics is our weaponry. From the order signed by Obama the day he was inaugurated:
The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention.
How many freedoms have been taken away? Lets see here... Obama wants to eliminate economic freedom of choice in the health care plan (I should have the right to choose my health care plan, be it an expensive plan, or I also have the right to have no health care)
You don't have the right to drive without auto insurance in most states. The real fear from the lobbyists generating the massively misinformed hysteria is that we will have the same efficient, mostly socialized systems that they've had in Europe for decades. I know of no country where you are not allowed to pay extra for your own private health insurance, and even on top of the taxes they pay, is probably less per capita than Americans pay.
Follow me on this thought experiment: an uninsured woman, 55 years old, shows up to a hospital dying of kidney failure from diabetes. In a model where you must have have insurance to receive care, the hospital would have to let her die in the parking lot. In our current model where only emergency services are covered, we spend a few hundred thousand on dialysis, various medications, possibly a transplant, and take up space in the ICU. In a model where all care is covered, she has no incentive to wait to see the doctor, and hopefully they'd catch the problem early and we'd all pay far less for her care.
So, unless you are really going to allow uninsured car accident victims and the chronically ill to expire in view of a hospital, no one is serious about the first option. So which of the two left should we move to?
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression...
And this separates them from Republicans in what way?
Good move from a marketing standpoint. They pick out users who are more likely to be technologically savvy, and those users won't flood the internet with complaints like "TEH PHONE DOSNT WORK W/ITUNES... WOULD NOT BY AGAIN"
By the time it launches widely, there will be some very interesting projects they can show off. I'm waiting to see what if there will be an SDK and what kind of access users will have to the phone. Hopefully it will be wide open.
All this "green" tech is fine and dandy, until some adverse weather shows up. Then you're wishing you still had that SUV, or proper stoplight bulbs, or whatever it was that you gave up to save 2 cents with "green" tech.
What? Heavy SUVs are extremely bad choices for winter weather. Light cars with AWD are vastly superior.
If you want to dump 80% energy savings because it's less convenient during blizzard conditions, I'm fairly sure you don't understand what ROI means.
The solution to high energy costs is not always conservation, often it's to create a larger supply
If you think it's cheaper to build a power plant than to purchase LED stoplights with some sort of simple heating element, I'm also fairly sure you're delusional.
Listen up, pal. I don't know who you've been talking to, but the media isn't here to report facts or put news in perspective. We're here to sell ads. If we don't blow everything out of proportion around the clock, what is going to keep you glued to our 24 hour news^W entertainment cycle?
One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
Airplanes a little more than aluminum pressurized tubes with fins on them that are tens of thousands of feet in the air. Trains are a much better place to have armed guards with hollow points patrolling the cars. Also, trains cannot be used as weapons, since they are on tracks.
I used the train system in France several years ago. I was totally amazed that I could walk on a train, pay the ticketing agent on board (though prepaying is cheaper) and enjoy a cup of coffee while it took me 300 miles in 3 hours - including stops. Once the auto and road construction lobbyists lose their death grip on our infrastructure funding, we could have the same thing.
We said, "Hand over these people who are terrorists." They said, "No, unless you provide us with evidence." And someone with your mentality said, "They're non westerners, so their lives are worthless. Let's tell the public that there's no way they would accept the evidence, even if we had any. Proceed with the invasion."
First of all, the car analogy is terrible. If you spend $5 on a book, and it sucks, oh well. Spending tends of thousands on a car is a different sort of investment.
Secondly, you're ignoring how all of these bloggers are getting book deals: peer popularity. As soon as you have a community of writers openly reviewing each other's work, it will be just like Netflix. "Hey, you liked the book that so and so recommended - here's another they enjoyed." Click. $5 spent. It sucked! Oh well. If they were really smart they'd charge $3. People would just start buying on a whim.
Traditional bookstores will always exist as tepid mating grounds for nerds, and somewhere to pull out your latest Apple product to impress the girls wearing UGG boots, and as community centers for book signings for the dead tree faithful. However, I don't expect to see the continued domination of publishing houses either way. If something sells tens of thousands of copies online, and it receives good critical reviews from some schmaltzy lit mag, it doesn't matter if no one published it. It will get printed and downloaded and sold.
When Yamamoto struck at Pearl Harbor, he knew exactly what the response would be.
When Yamamoto struck Pearl Harbor, he was flying a Japanese flag on a Japanese warship made in Japan. It's pretty easy to find the bud and nip it.
When the hijackers attacked, most of them were from Saudi Arabia, all from the middle east, all had proper Visas, all had been in the country for at least weeks if not months or years. They did not fly any flag and did not represent any country. They used box cutters and airplanes as weapons.
Both groups knew the effect of their attacks. I can promise you that bin Laden got exactly what he wanted. A cosmic war of Good and Evil, with Bush even saying as much on television, between Islam and the West. He got us to give up the liberty we fought and won over hundreds of years in less than two hours, with the loss of a lot property and 3,000 lives.
Imagine if instead of torturing people and invading two countries and starting two wars we had produced evidence, fought hard to extradite bin Laden from Afghanistan, tried him at the world court, and locked him up for the rest of his life. We would have said that the West is not barbaric, fundamentalist religious fanatics are. We are constitutionalists - we believe in the rule of law, equally applied to everyone. We may not achieve perfection, but we're the closest thing the world has got. We are genuinely here to make the world a better place, and we have learned from the mistakes of former world super powers.
Everyone says if you want to change the world, start with yourself. How about reminding everyone that freedom isn't free, not because you have to invade and sacrifice the lives of soldiers, but because sometimes you have to obey laws that your enemy does not. Sometimes you have to recognize that liberty and security are mutually exclusive.
If you let emotion and hate dictate your actions, not only do the terrorists get a recruiting tool to attract more followers, they remove the moral high ground where you once stood. Then it's just two barbarians at each other's throat, one with satellite guided weapons and tanks, and the other with suicide bombers and IEDs.
Yes, for all of the hopelessly stupid people out there. If you feel like you are sick and you don't have a cold, go to a doctor to find out what it is. If your lymph nodes stay swollen for some reason, go to the doctor. If you have unexplainable pain, go to the doctor. When you get to a certain age, turn and cough. However, if you come down with the sniffles, suck it up and don't run to get Tamiflu and antibiotics shoved up your ass just because.
Christ almighty. I hope they never take the warning labels off small electronics. Otherwise you'll probably end up trying to use your Bagelator in the bathtub.
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor. I'll bet most of the people who are missing these microbes have been exposed to a lot of antibiotics. This may also explain why staph infections are turning deadly, and I know it's why Western kids have lots of strange allergies.
The Hadza are the last hunter gatherers in the world, probably. They seem to be doing alright. (Not saying I'd give up my lifestyle, but there are lessons to be learned.)
After receiving the authority to smite the tribes of Islam, Christ joins the eighty deuces and gets his revenge on vegetarians, homosexuals, eaters of shellfish, and of course, unbelievers and blasphemers. Armed with a robe and the wrath of Yahweh, step into the sandals of He Who Is Righteous as he transforms from the Prince of Peace to the Prince of Blowing Motherfuckers to Pieces. Use conventional weapons to kill the wicked or send plague upon plague to the unfortunate souls dumb enough to defy you. Raise past holy warriors from the dead to join your army of brutal goodness, and get bonus points for killing Arab leaders and sending them to Hell.
Feel the rage of the righteous! Coming Spring 2010...
I thought the tongue in cheek was pretty clear. Yesterday's Freedom Fighter is today's Islamo-Fascist Terrorist. Anyway...
I've read a bunch about what lead to the conflict in Afghanistan, even the interviews with Brzezinski on how the CIA plotted to draw Russia in. What is your source stating that the Afghan government told the Soviets that they didn't want support?
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Comparing our voluntary invasion of sovereign nations to WWII and the Revolutionary War is completely ridiculous. Afghanistan's government requested Soviet military support to quell the fundamentalist Islamo-Fascists from overthrowing their secular Marxist government. We decided to punish the CCCP by "giving them their own Vietnam." We gathered every crazy Islamic fundamentalist we could lay our hands on, trained them, and showed that it was possible to defeat a world superpower. We poured billions of dollars of weapons into the country, and Russia poured billions in, and we had a proxy war that completely destroyed Afghanistan, and killed possibly millions of people. Then, as soon as the Russians left, refused to give a dime to build anything.
If it was just limited to Afghanistan, I could say it was an honest, one time mistake. However, we have invaded and overthrown so many democratic governments that it's almost a farce at this point to claim that we support freedom. It's obvious that we support whatever entity follows our orders. The only thing that will make the US care about your freedom is if you have some resource under your feet and a governent that is not playing ball.
And here's the amazing part about your post:
And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.
Now, who decided that Britain's imperial claim to whatever they wanted was moral? Because if all you need to justify taking the lives of foreign nationals is the desire to have their stuff, then apparently you do not subscribe to any sort of value system, other than might makes right.
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Since when has signing international treaties caused us to abide by them? We'll invent a legal loophole and continue to pretend that everything is justified by the never ending war for Freedom and Democracy.
Everyone knows that only Americans are righteous enough to defend such lofty ideals from lawless barbarians.
In a free trade system U.S. buyers could negotiate with various Chinese suppliers.
In a free trade environment, Lockheed and Boeing could sell their newest stealth bombers to China or anyone who had the cash. But I'll take a wild guess and say that you don't support free trade as much as you think you do.
You state we spend money "proving" global warming. Let's assume you're right - how much is that exactly?
According to the GAO, it's probably around 6 billion a year. Which is about two weeks in Iraq.
Not sure that... we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Yes, we are burning hundreds of millions of years worth of old biomass in less than 150. We're also destroying every old growth forest on the planet. I'm fairly sure these are new events. And even a closed system will have periods of self-regulation that could be very inhospitable to our way of life.
Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.
Virgin is not making money. Virgin has not been to the moon. Virgin hasn't ever placed a satellite. Virgin has never even orbited the earth as the space shuttle has. Virgin has never docked with a space station, or built one. It's performing sub-orbital flights - whoopdedoo!
All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.
If this is true, why are all technologically advanced civilizations run by a strong state government? And I guess rocket technology, information technology, satellites, and every other major advance of the 20th century funded directly by government research have netted us very little.
Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments
I thought you just said government funding was the problem? Would polywell reactors had a chance at private capital investment in the 1980s, so it could develop to the point where it may be viable? Or are you just unable to form a coherent argument if you're allowed to write more than a few sentences?
I agree that there need to be more reasonable restrictions for research and development, but that's more of a function of bad governance than private initiative. All of the programs in Australia and South Korea are sponsored by their federal governments.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Commercial R&D is just like commerce itself. Incredibly short sighted and hamstrung by the requirement of quick return on investment. That's why pure R&D does not exist in the commercial realm, especially since the closure of Bell Labs. Modern corporations are so greedy, they are only allowed by their shareholders to perform product development. Anything that has a good chance of losing money - like pure research and development - is never even put on the table.
Since so many children starve to death every day, a more logical conclusion would be that God hates children.
No one can "prove" the origin of the universe. But every single religion is man-made, and contains errors of morality and fact. These religions then use their falsely obtained authority to steal and plunder, and to indoctrinate communities to respect hierarchies for no other reason other than the existence of the hierarchy.
Deism is the assertion that there is a God. It's an enormous leap from there is a God, to the God described in this book is the only real God.
Adeism is a logical fallacy. Atheism is a logical conclusion.
What? That's like saying if I truly didn't believe in Zeus, I wouldn't deny his existence and object to you demolishing my house to build him a temple.
If the people who believed in foolish things would keep their mouths shut and their hands out of public coffers, there'd be no reason for us to deny their silly fairy tales. They could ramble on in solitude like the people who are properly sent to a shrink when they claim to speak to invisible, imaginary beings.
Hopefully the first in a long line of realizations that when you do something stupid publicly, you can't harass or sue someone for pointing that out.
Yeah, and that still means nothing for the rest of us. Yeah, he wants Guantanamo bay closed and I applaud him for that, but its still open, its causing a mess because he has no decent proposal on to where to put the people.
It's only been stalled by the idea that it's okay to send young men and women to fight and die in foreign lands to combat terrorism, but it's not okay to house terrorists in a supermax prison because it's too dangerous. This, despite the fact that we've been housing sociopaths there without incident for decades.
Ideally, it should be if you don't have insurance and hit someone you simply pay for their repairs and everything is alright. That, is how it should be done.
Ideally, there should be no car accidents. Ideals are nice to keep in mind, but when you're formulating policies, certain hard line positions are worthless to maintain for the people who live in constant fear of slippery slope arguments.
The real fear is the fact that people are blindly voting for it based on party lines and aren't reading the fucking bill. In Europe it wasn't a political move, it was a reasonable, civilized law passing. Not "oh lets try to force a vote over a major holiday to show how "committed" we are to the American public when even half of us can't understand or haven't read the bill" The last time I looked, the bill was over 700 pages of legal words. I think a drunk college student trying to finish Plato's Republic before a final would have a better understanding over that than our congressmen have over this bill.
This has been how DC has operated for a long time. Why wasn't this an issue for certain media outlets when the PATRIOT Act was signed the day it was first printed? It's an issue of hypocrisy. Unfortunately, there's no money to be made in maintaining basic legal rights, so it's a non issue in American politics. So, a bill that is meant to provide social service improvements to the vast majority of Americans is communist, and a bill that removes our basic rights and assigns all power to a single branch of government is democratic.
A) It should be an option to pay for care out of your own pocket. Hospitals should recognize this and give emergency care with the promise of paying back later. For example, I don't walk onto the car lot with $30K in my pocket, I have a bit of money to pay a down payment, then I pay for the rest of the car. What hospitals should do in this case is go for no down payment, then work with the person to pay off the rest of the bills plus perhaps a bit of interest.
It's already an option. The hospitals never get their money. The patient is bankrupted for life. Everyone loses.
B) This legislation is being passed during a recession which is a -bad thing- for example, if someone was making $25,000 a year working for X Corporation, and suddenly X Corporation had to spend $5,000 more on each employee because of healthcare and lets say that X Corporation had about $100,000 to pay employees, suddenly they can't afford 4 employees and have to cut one of them. Yeah, it might be a good thing for the 3 who stayed, but for the one person who had to be let go, it sucks.
There's only one way to stop the race to the bottom of living standards, and that's to stop allowing corporations to abuse people; to enforce minimum wage; to enforce sensible immigration policies so people can get work visas and pay taxes, own property, and buy insurance; and to stop giving tax breaks to the Fortune 500 when they are the ones who own the assets and have the means to pay more than the 10% they pay now (after loopholes).
C) I believe that the bill also requires (or did) even low-wage, family or full-time part time (such as students) to receive health care. This is a bad thing for young people who are trying to pay their way through college, tech school, or simply trying to make ends meet. Yeah, it
US citizens can be declared enemy combatants. F for effort, buddy.
How many more freedoms do we have now that Obama is president? Zero.
Uhh, not so. You now have the right to habeas corpus, even if you're a terrorism suspect. This is one of the most important individual freedoms that separates democracies from dictatorships. And yes, everyone deserves it, because without this principle, the only thing separating us from fundamentalist religious fanatics is our weaponry. From the order signed by Obama the day he was inaugurated:
The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention.
How many freedoms have been taken away? Lets see here... Obama wants to eliminate economic freedom of choice in the health care plan (I should have the right to choose my health care plan, be it an expensive plan, or I also have the right to have no health care)
You don't have the right to drive without auto insurance in most states. The real fear from the lobbyists generating the massively misinformed hysteria is that we will have the same efficient, mostly socialized systems that they've had in Europe for decades. I know of no country where you are not allowed to pay extra for your own private health insurance, and even on top of the taxes they pay, is probably less per capita than Americans pay.
Follow me on this thought experiment: an uninsured woman, 55 years old, shows up to a hospital dying of kidney failure from diabetes. In a model where you must have have insurance to receive care, the hospital would have to let her die in the parking lot. In our current model where only emergency services are covered, we spend a few hundred thousand on dialysis, various medications, possibly a transplant, and take up space in the ICU. In a model where all care is covered, she has no incentive to wait to see the doctor, and hopefully they'd catch the problem early and we'd all pay far less for her care.
So, unless you are really going to allow uninsured car accident victims and the chronically ill to expire in view of a hospital, no one is serious about the first option. So which of the two left should we move to?
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression...
And this separates them from Republicans in what way?
Good move from a marketing standpoint. They pick out users who are more likely to be technologically savvy, and those users won't flood the internet with complaints like "TEH PHONE DOSNT WORK W/ITUNES... WOULD NOT BY AGAIN"
By the time it launches widely, there will be some very interesting projects they can show off. I'm waiting to see what if there will be an SDK and what kind of access users will have to the phone. Hopefully it will be wide open.
All this "green" tech is fine and dandy, until some adverse weather shows up. Then you're wishing you still had that SUV, or proper stoplight bulbs, or whatever it was that you gave up to save 2 cents with "green" tech.
What? Heavy SUVs are extremely bad choices for winter weather. Light cars with AWD are vastly superior.
If you want to dump 80% energy savings because it's less convenient during blizzard conditions, I'm fairly sure you don't understand what ROI means.
The solution to high energy costs is not always conservation, often it's to create a larger supply
If you think it's cheaper to build a power plant than to purchase LED stoplights with some sort of simple heating element, I'm also fairly sure you're delusional.
AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Ahh. Your sig explains everything...
Listen up, pal. I don't know who you've been talking to, but the media isn't here to report facts or put news in perspective. We're here to sell ads. If we don't blow everything out of proportion around the clock, what is going to keep you glued to our 24 hour news^W entertainment cycle?
One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
Airplanes a little more than aluminum pressurized tubes with fins on them that are tens of thousands of feet in the air. Trains are a much better place to have armed guards with hollow points patrolling the cars. Also, trains cannot be used as weapons, since they are on tracks.
I used the train system in France several years ago. I was totally amazed that I could walk on a train, pay the ticketing agent on board (though prepaying is cheaper) and enjoy a cup of coffee while it took me 300 miles in 3 hours - including stops. Once the auto and road construction lobbyists lose their death grip on our infrastructure funding, we could have the same thing.
We said, "Hand over these people who are terrorists." They said, "No, unless you provide us with evidence." And someone with your mentality said, "They're non westerners, so their lives are worthless. Let's tell the public that there's no way they would accept the evidence, even if we had any. Proceed with the invasion."
First of all, the car analogy is terrible. If you spend $5 on a book, and it sucks, oh well. Spending tends of thousands on a car is a different sort of investment.
Secondly, you're ignoring how all of these bloggers are getting book deals: peer popularity. As soon as you have a community of writers openly reviewing each other's work, it will be just like Netflix. "Hey, you liked the book that so and so recommended - here's another they enjoyed." Click. $5 spent. It sucked! Oh well. If they were really smart they'd charge $3. People would just start buying on a whim.
Traditional bookstores will always exist as tepid mating grounds for nerds, and somewhere to pull out your latest Apple product to impress the girls wearing UGG boots, and as community centers for book signings for the dead tree faithful. However, I don't expect to see the continued domination of publishing houses either way. If something sells tens of thousands of copies online, and it receives good critical reviews from some schmaltzy lit mag, it doesn't matter if no one published it. It will get printed and downloaded and sold.
When Yamamoto struck at Pearl Harbor, he knew exactly what the response would be.
When Yamamoto struck Pearl Harbor, he was flying a Japanese flag on a Japanese warship made in Japan. It's pretty easy to find the bud and nip it.
When the hijackers attacked, most of them were from Saudi Arabia, all from the middle east, all had proper Visas, all had been in the country for at least weeks if not months or years. They did not fly any flag and did not represent any country. They used box cutters and airplanes as weapons.
Both groups knew the effect of their attacks. I can promise you that bin Laden got exactly what he wanted. A cosmic war of Good and Evil, with Bush even saying as much on television, between Islam and the West. He got us to give up the liberty we fought and won over hundreds of years in less than two hours, with the loss of a lot property and 3,000 lives.
Imagine if instead of torturing people and invading two countries and starting two wars we had produced evidence, fought hard to extradite bin Laden from Afghanistan, tried him at the world court, and locked him up for the rest of his life. We would have said that the West is not barbaric, fundamentalist religious fanatics are. We are constitutionalists - we believe in the rule of law, equally applied to everyone. We may not achieve perfection, but we're the closest thing the world has got. We are genuinely here to make the world a better place, and we have learned from the mistakes of former world super powers.
Everyone says if you want to change the world, start with yourself. How about reminding everyone that freedom isn't free, not because you have to invade and sacrifice the lives of soldiers, but because sometimes you have to obey laws that your enemy does not. Sometimes you have to recognize that liberty and security are mutually exclusive.
If you let emotion and hate dictate your actions, not only do the terrorists get a recruiting tool to attract more followers, they remove the moral high ground where you once stood. Then it's just two barbarians at each other's throat, one with satellite guided weapons and tanks, and the other with suicide bombers and IEDs.
Yes, for all of the hopelessly stupid people out there. If you feel like you are sick and you don't have a cold, go to a doctor to find out what it is. If your lymph nodes stay swollen for some reason, go to the doctor. If you have unexplainable pain, go to the doctor. When you get to a certain age, turn and cough. However, if you come down with the sniffles, suck it up and don't run to get Tamiflu and antibiotics shoved up your ass just because.
Christ almighty. I hope they never take the warning labels off small electronics. Otherwise you'll probably end up trying to use your Bagelator in the bathtub.
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor. I'll bet most of the people who are missing these microbes have been exposed to a lot of antibiotics. This may also explain why staph infections are turning deadly, and I know it's why Western kids have lots of strange allergies.
The Hadza are the last hunter gatherers in the world, probably. They seem to be doing alright. (Not saying I'd give up my lifestyle, but there are lessons to be learned.)
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text
Christ is risen, and boy, is He pissed.
After receiving the authority to smite the tribes of Islam, Christ joins the eighty deuces and gets his revenge on vegetarians, homosexuals, eaters of shellfish, and of course, unbelievers and blasphemers. Armed with a robe and the wrath of Yahweh, step into the sandals of He Who Is Righteous as he transforms from the Prince of Peace to the Prince of Blowing Motherfuckers to Pieces. Use conventional weapons to kill the wicked or send plague upon plague to the unfortunate souls dumb enough to defy you. Raise past holy warriors from the dead to join your army of brutal goodness, and get bonus points for killing Arab leaders and sending them to Hell.
Feel the rage of the righteous! Coming Spring 2010...
I thought the tongue in cheek was pretty clear. Yesterday's Freedom Fighter is today's Islamo-Fascist Terrorist. Anyway...
I've read a bunch about what lead to the conflict in Afghanistan, even the interviews with Brzezinski on how the CIA plotted to draw Russia in. What is your source stating that the Afghan government told the Soviets that they didn't want support?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
January 1998
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
Comparing our voluntary invasion of sovereign nations to WWII and the Revolutionary War is completely ridiculous. Afghanistan's government requested Soviet military support to quell the fundamentalist Islamo-Fascists from overthrowing their secular Marxist government. We decided to punish the CCCP by "giving them their own Vietnam." We gathered every crazy Islamic fundamentalist we could lay our hands on, trained them, and showed that it was possible to defeat a world superpower. We poured billions of dollars of weapons into the country, and Russia poured billions in, and we had a proxy war that completely destroyed Afghanistan, and killed possibly millions of people. Then, as soon as the Russians left, refused to give a dime to build anything.
If it was just limited to Afghanistan, I could say it was an honest, one time mistake. However, we have invaded and overthrown so many democratic governments that it's almost a farce at this point to claim that we support freedom. It's obvious that we support whatever entity follows our orders. The only thing that will make the US care about your freedom is if you have some resource under your feet and a governent that is not playing ball.
And here's the amazing part about your post:
And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.
Now, who decided that Britain's imperial claim to whatever they wanted was moral? Because if all you need to justify taking the lives of foreign nationals is the desire to have their stuff, then apparently you do not subscribe to any sort of value system, other than might makes right.
Welcome to the 21st Century. The Golden Rule is now, "Sucks to be you!"
That's one thing the Catholic Church will never support. How dare someone else swindle people out of their money with silly fairy tales.