I have the right to use my property as I see fit, so long as I don't violate the rights of others. That includes trading it with others.
You don't have the right to demand cheap electricity if the production of that cheap electricity infringes on my right to clean air and water.
We live on the same planet. But my property is not yours, and vice versa.
I don't care what you do with your property. I do care if you demand the right to destroy the common areas of the planet for your own short term benefit.
If I pollute their water, they/you can sue me. What was your point?
If you've killed everything down stream and you're dead, how did the market hold you accountable for your actions?
Britain also taxes the hell out of gasoline, and they use a tiny fraction of the average American. Consumption taxes can be fair, logical, and effective. I know reducing consumption is anti-American, but tough shit.
Since when is access to cheap and dirty energy a right? We share the same planet. My grandkids have the right to enjoy clean air, water, and a healthy environment that far outweighs your right to pollute it.
This is one of those holes in free market theory that we have to plug. The value of having a biosphere that supports human life is not zero.
Oh. Well then we shouldn't have done anything at all.... EVER.
Yes, let's get dramatic. You're late to the exasperation party.
I mean, if we installed the guy (which is BS) and supplied him with weapons (which is more BS), then we shouldn't do anything about it all at any point EVER.
A nice quote: Records available from the supplier for the period from 1985 until the present show that during this time, pathogenic (meaning "disease producing"), toxigenic (meaning "poisonous"), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Records prior to 1985 were not available, according to the supplier. These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction. According to the Department of Defense's own Report to Congress on the Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, released in April 1992: "By the time of the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq had developed biological weapons. It's advanced and aggressive biological warfare program was the most advanced in the Arab world... The program probably began late in the 1970's and concentrated on the development of two agents, botulinum toxin and anthrax bacteria... Large scale production of these agents began in 1989 at four facilities in Baghdad. Delivery means for biological agents ranged from simple aerial bombs and artillery rockets to surface-to-surface missiles."
How's that for a "moral exercise"?
You actually succeeded. Unless you want other countries meddling in our sovereign affairs, we should not EVER mess with theirs. That's how principles work.
Good idea! When can we expect our $UNGODLY med school student loans to be socialized?
No disagreement there. But isn't a bigger problem the cost of malpractice insurance?
Anyone claiming that you won't get the best qualified people unless you pay them obscenely must have very little respect for our military service members.
First, drop the appeal to emotion crap. Second, my wife (the doctor) and I are both vets. Third, our house wasn't that expensive and we're both driving used cars to scrape by. Fourth, becoming and continue to be a doctor is obscenely expensive. Figure out a way to make it cheaper to become a doctor before you complain about their salaries.
That's not an appeal to emotion. That's pointing out that fanatical rants against anything government run ignore the military because it would disprove their argument. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent and driven individuals who would sign up for 10 years of service to their country's social medicine system if their medical education were free.
I imagine her biggest single expense is malpractice. Well, let's compromise: let's do away with private and non-regulated malpractice insurance in exchange for caps on lawsuits to an arbitrarily high number, like 20 million dollars. Let's require private health insurance companies and hospitals to have limits on how much they can mark up toilet paper.
Much as I hate to admit it, I know that when I build a machine, install windows, install anti-virus, and make an image of it to revert to in an emergency, the cost of the license and the time it would take still ends up being cheaper than screwing with xorg.conf - if your time is worth $25 an hour, I mean.
Extract that over 2 years and the costs are quite minimal. The fact that Apple can charge anything for OS upgrades when their hardware is so obscenely overpriced is the real ripoff.
I think the simple solution is that we need more doctors who will work for less money. Heavily investing in one person to be a tiny god in his practice who only sees patients for 4 or 5 minutes makes far less sense than training several more competent people to listen to their patients and develop care that is effective for that person.
I think one of the reasons medicine is so much more effective and cheaper in other western countries is that being a doctor still holds prestige and dignity, and it's not a career path chosen only to make money. I'd much rather have a person happy to be a doctor helping me with my health than a person who can only see the dollar signs when I walk through the door.
Anyone claiming that you won't get the best qualified people unless you pay them obscenely must have very little respect for our military service members.
It's a merry-go-round. Kids spin around, laugh, and spin some more all the time at local parks in the States. Even in China and Malaysia, when they're not manufacturing Nikes for pennies per hour, I'm sure they might like to feel like normal children, and play outside on a merry-go-round.
If it suits you to be a non-contributing little shit and sneer at anyone who tries, then so be it. But at least stay quiet while you're doing it.
It's a blatant ripoff of a letter sent by MLK. Some say it was a good device to demonstrate the feeling of oppression - which I believe is inherent in military invasion. As an English major, you should probably understand that dogmatic adherence to grammar will net you nothing but a by-the-numbers Grisham novel, which in my opinion, is soulless and not worth the advertising budget it was sold with.
He's quite a bit more eloquent:
"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
The private corporate environment has given us similar investments in really useful things, like erectile dysfunction cures, flavored cigarettes, ringtones, and the iPhone. Truly world changing technologies!
If the internet had been a sure fire moneymaker, it could have had private funding. Just like computers. We know what those stupid government investments have wrought.
Or maybe large energy players like Shell and Exxon actively seek out to destroy any competition to their products and have warped the market place due to their anti-competitive business practices... nah! Sounds like hippy speak to me!
The taxpayers aren't making any money. All of the private military contractors are making a killing, so to speak.
You're just too fanatically patriotic to understand why we "care" about democracy in Iraq, which just happens to sit on top of trillions of dollars worth of oil and the related geopolitical power it's control represents, but we don't "care" about democracy anywhere else.
Control over oil means power. America has sought power at an unprecedented scale since the end of WWII. It's behaving exactly as every other imperial power has before it. Read just a little critically, and you may be able to comprehend that.
The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time.
"I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them," he told me.
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.
You have no idea of how politics work between the two if you believe that. We told them if they didn't follow us into a Iraq, they would be a debating society, right? Do you think the UN does anything the United States vetoes? Are you fucking serious?
Are you really saying that there were no atrocities?
I'm saying we gave him the weapons to complete the atrocities, and that we didn't say anything about it while we watched them happen.
Try some elementary moral exercises in your brain, if you can. Very quickly you'll discover that "the enemy of the enemy is my friend" has come back to haunt us so many times it's now sheer irony to watch any international political event involving the United States.
I'll forgive nothing. The absence of perspective from your second comment is more revealing.
I'm suggesting that an invading army, who has invaded on a foundation of lies and profiteering, has no right to be there, and should be attacked viciously until they leave. You believe in the same principle, unless the invading country is us. You fail the most basic moral principle there is, and that is to expect out of others what you expect out of yourself.
A more direct comparison would be to say that Afghanistan had no right to attack the Russians who invaded in 1980. Forget the fact that the Afghan government requested Moscow's help in defeating militant fundamentalist muslims, a cause we seem somewhat attached to these days. In a country with zero moral compass, these details are simply insignificant.
And if the country invading us had put that dictator into power and then strangled our country with sanctions for a decade, suddenly accused him of atrocities they had allowed while they were sponsoring him, bombed our entire nation into pieces under pretense and lies, destroyed our national security by dismissing the entirety of our former armed forces, allowed terrorists to flood in from every direction, stood by idly while mobs destroyed our infrastructure, bombed our streets and cities so no one had access to clean water, proper sewage, or electricity, took control of our local natural resources and handed them over to private corporations from their home country, invited foreigners to buy up our land while it was cheap, built over seven permanent military bases worth over billion dollars each from border to border, and had mercenaries with no legal oversight roaming the streets with machine guns and RPGs, I guess you'd just sit there and take it?
I didn't dismiss any facts. I pointed out that you didn't have any. I consider that ignorance.
All of the raw data available has been released. The GAO just clarified it. You are wrong, unless you want to believe that the sample of guns given to the ATF is an obscenely misrepresented sample. And if you believe that, what evidence do you have of it?
The American networks don't cover democratic movements in Saudi Arabia. Does that mean they are unimportant? They don't cover undercover operations within Iran by the CIA, and all of their timelines for the history of Iran conveniently begin in 1979. They are reporting on celebrity news and how to make a summer salad. What does this have to do with the fact, as far as anyone can tell, that guns smuggled into Mexico from America are a huge problem contributing to the drug war?
Racism is subtle and pernicious. My father is a racist. I am a conditioned racist, though I make a concerted effort to keep things in perspective. I suspect you are the same, because in a conversation concerning to places you'd like to live, "not having an immigration problem" apparently scores very high for you.
And I'm sorry to say that ignorance, fear, superstition, and violence often go hand in hand. Look at any theocratic government and the resulting society.
At this point I don't think you are even ready for a Jr. High level debate. You have consistently provided flippant replies and immediately dismiss any opposing viewpoints as ignorant and now feeble. At this point my reply isn't for you, it is for people who are more open-minded that might read the words you spew.
Aww. I dismiss your viewpoint because it's untenable, due to your ignorance. You shouldn't take it personally.
Your so called fact has been disproven repeatedly.
Au contraire, my petite friend. Reading Fox and Libertarian news for gun control and expecting an unbiased report is like reading Interfax and expecting it to have a balanced view of Putin.
Obama and the ATF arrive at their numbers by the following fact: of all the guns submitted to the ATF for tracing, between 90 and 95% of them are traced to the United States. These, of course, are not all of the guns collected by Mexico. Fox wants you to assume that the guns not submitted for tracing were "obviously" not from America, but that's simply malicious lying or simple stupidity. From FactCheck, who disputes both numbers:...The Fox reporters come up with a figure of 5,114 guns traced to U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 2008. That figures to 17.6 percent of the 29,000 figure for guns seized in Mexico, as given by the country's attorney general.
The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: "3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008." Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell's testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico's attorney general is correct.
Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.
The mistake the Fox News reporters made was to focus on some numbers given by Newell and Hoover in separate testimony, regarding numbers of guns traced to specific states. But not all guns traced to the U.S. can be traced to specific states. The Fox numbers are "a subset" of the actual total traced to U.S. sources, one official said.
Further, from the BBC concerning the GAO report released a few days ago:
The GAO acknowledges that there is insufficient data for a comprehensive study but concludes that the US, in particular the border states of Texas, California and Arizona, are the source of most of the weapons smuggled into Mexico. "While it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally trafficked into Mexico in a given year, over 20,000 or around 87% of firearms seized by the Mexican authorities and traced over the past five years originated in the United States," GAO investigator Jess Ford says.
there is absolutely no reason to not allow new machines guns to be owned by civilians.
The next time you see a police officer, ask him what he thinks about your idea.
Of course I'm sure you use the made up definition of an assault weapon and consider any of the AR15's in my gun safe one. An assault weapon must be capable of burst or automatic operation.
You're confusing assault weapon and assault rifle.
You seem to view firearms as evil incarnate. I view them as tools, hobbies such as sporting clays, competition
How did I stumble into a debate at a local junior high?
But let's look at your argument, feeble as it may be.
The largest group of illegal immigrants are from Mexico and the root cause is the social-economic envrionment in Mexico which the US has no right to interfere with.
Corruption within the Mexican government is the biggest problem. The rules instituted by NAFTA and the exploitation of trade rules for the benefit and profit of US corporations have exacerbated this problem, which was preceded and founded by US meddling in Mexican affairs since the time of Andrew Jackson. You probably don't know it, but we did invade and conquer about half of Mexico in the middle of the 19th century.
Recently Mexico was going to legalize marijuana, cocaine, hash, and perhaps even opiates and LSD in order to head off the failing drug war. However, the United States basically told them we would cut all aid if they did that. So they are stuck with our drug war, our failed policies, which in another amazing coincidence, also provides excellent profits for our private prison system, security consultants, and other contracted companies who are being paid to develop technologies to monitor the southern border.
Another interesting fact is that a vast majority of the arms used to kill people in Mexico are purchased in the United States, illegally, because our gun registration system is practically meaningless. I know as you do that having the right to buy assault weapons is more important than life itself, and you can be sure the residents of northern Mexico understand that as well these days.
Another leading cause is the Reagan amnesty in 1986.
Reagan cared only about business. Businesses love illegal immigrants because they help push down wages for other workers. This is why you will never see illegal immigration reform, unless the drug war spirals totally out of control.
There is nothing bigoted or racist to require people follow the laws in order to immigrant to the US. I have yet to see any proposed modern immigration have anything to do with race or religion and I could not support such proposals. If in your world view it is racist to make a factual statement that most illegal immigrants are Mexican then you have a problem.
You know as well as I do that minutemen are not lining up on the southern border to look for white people coming back without a passport, and there is zero discussion of securing the Canadian border, or spending money in a far more important area, which is the inspection of incoming shipments to the United States.
If your problem is that they don't contribute taxes to American society, the solution is to provide amnesty, give them a social security number and a long term work visa, and go on about your business. I'm afraid, despite all of your rhetoric, that your dislike of them has more to do with their heritage than their drain on the economic system. And unfortunately, you have no chance of success, since businesses will never allow illegal immigration to be shut down.
Let's see... California has an economy roughly forty times larger than that of Alaska. California has thirty six million people, and Alaska has six hundred thousand. Take away energy resources, and Alaska would likely be dead least in every metric imaginable. I'd bet without even looking at the statistics that California spends more on road signs than Alaska does on it's entire highway system.
My point being that it's trivially easy to manage state who's fifth largest town has less than 10,000 people, if that state is also floating in oil revenues.
And no, you aren't blowing my mind, whether you actually are as open minded as you claim or not. I made a joke, not in the best taste for sure, but it doesn't really matter. Some people laughed. Some people didn't. You got your nuts in a twist because I associated you with other people who defend the right to maintain the world's highest homicide rate, for reasons which I will never understand.
If you don't like California, fine. Keep yourself and your guns outside the state line. Don't consume any products developed in California - you wouldn't miss out on much, right? Also, you should stop pretending that states whose entire budgets would fit in the margins of California's are run by economic wizards. Least of all, Alaska, which is run by someone who thinks God wanted her to be the governor, and still wants her to be the President.
Without the state oil revenues, Alaska would be having as much trouble as any other state.
But, if you want to get away from hispanics and blacks with your guns and your bible, Alaska is probably your best bet. There are still some surviving native American tribes, but I'm sure they're well away from where the "real" Americans live. Try to take as many like minded people as you can with you, and be sure to tell Jesus I said hello when he shows up for the rapture.
And don't worry. We won't let the Russians nuke Wasilla from orbit. Sure we won't...
400 grand is less than a minute of military spending the United States. But no one is allowed to mention that fact in the "liberal" media.
Can anyone explain to me how killing a suspected terrorist and their neighbors with a few hundred thousand dollars of ammunition is a better investment than this study? Anyone?
No one is saying that every person should be forced to pay for internet service. Small local governments have a long track record of running utilities effectively. If you don't want county water or sewer, you don't have to pay for it, but then you won't get service. The same thing can be done for internet service.
My suggestion is what it is: a well run, policed, open, self-supporting internet utility is not a bad thing, especially when the local community wants it.
If you think public universities are doing so poorly, why are we consistently behind the UK and other countries that have only public education, all the way through university levels? There are several reasons, but this report from OECD made me chuckle:
The US has a comparatively large proportion of poor performers. 24.4% of US 15-year-olds do not reach Level 2, the baseline level of achievement on the PISA scale at which students begin to demonstrate the science competencies that will enable them to participate actively in life situations related to science and technology (Table 2.1a). To reach Level 2 requires competencies such as identifying key features of a scientific investigation, recalling single scientific concepts and information relating to a situation, and using results of a scientific experiment represented in a data table as they support a personal decision. In contrast, students at Level 1 often confuse key features of an investigation, apply incorrect scientific information, and mix personal beliefs with scientific facts in support of a decision.
Translation: religious fundamentalism is making our population quite stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey buddy. That's what happens when you attack the right to get wealthy in America. It's the only thing our culture cares about.
Anything other than unbridled greed is Stalinism.
I have the right to use my property as I see fit, so long as I don't violate the rights of others. That includes trading it with others.
You don't have the right to demand cheap electricity if the production of that cheap electricity infringes on my right to clean air and water.
We live on the same planet. But my property is not yours, and vice versa.
I don't care what you do with your property. I do care if you demand the right to destroy the common areas of the planet for your own short term benefit.
If I pollute their water, they/you can sue me. What was your point?
If you've killed everything down stream and you're dead, how did the market hold you accountable for your actions?
Seriously, you think there is no problem when we are slowly killing the only planet known to sustain life. That scares the hell out of me.
I had no idea a study confirmed that cap and trade would lead to forced starvation. Link?
Britain also taxes the hell out of gasoline, and they use a tiny fraction of the average American. Consumption taxes can be fair, logical, and effective. I know reducing consumption is anti-American, but tough shit.
Since when is access to cheap and dirty energy a right? We share the same planet. My grandkids have the right to enjoy clean air, water, and a healthy environment that far outweighs your right to pollute it.
This is one of those holes in free market theory that we have to plug. The value of having a biosphere that supports human life is not zero.
Oh. Well then we shouldn't have done anything at all.... EVER.
Yes, let's get dramatic. You're late to the exasperation party.
I mean, if we installed the guy (which is BS) and supplied him with weapons (which is more BS), then we shouldn't do anything about it all at any point EVER.
Here's a load of the BS you speak of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Iraq
Here's a source document discussing the fact that Carter gave the green light to Saddam to invade Iran through a crowned prince of Saudi Arabia.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/haig-docs.html
Here's a congressional report detailing the biological agents we sent to Iraq.
http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/report/riegle1.html
A nice quote: Records available from the supplier for the period from 1985 until the present show that during this time, pathogenic (meaning "disease producing"), toxigenic (meaning "poisonous"), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Records prior to 1985 were not available, according to the supplier. These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction. According to the Department of Defense's own Report to Congress on the Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, released in April 1992: "By the time of the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq had developed biological weapons. It's advanced and aggressive biological warfare program was the most advanced in the Arab world... The program probably began late in the 1970's and concentrated on the development of two agents, botulinum toxin and anthrax bacteria... Large scale production of these agents began in 1989 at four facilities in Baghdad. Delivery means for biological agents ranged from simple aerial bombs and artillery rockets to surface-to-surface missiles."
How's that for a "moral exercise"?
You actually succeeded. Unless you want other countries meddling in our sovereign affairs, we should not EVER mess with theirs. That's how principles work.
Good idea! When can we expect our $UNGODLY med school student loans to be socialized?
No disagreement there. But isn't a bigger problem the cost of malpractice insurance?
Anyone claiming that you won't get the best qualified people unless you pay them obscenely must have very little respect for our military service members.
First, drop the appeal to emotion crap. Second, my wife (the doctor) and I are both vets. Third, our house wasn't that expensive and we're both driving used cars to scrape by. Fourth, becoming and continue to be a doctor is obscenely expensive. Figure out a way to make it cheaper to become a doctor before you complain about their salaries.
That's not an appeal to emotion. That's pointing out that fanatical rants against anything government run ignore the military because it would disprove their argument. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent and driven individuals who would sign up for 10 years of service to their country's social medicine system if their medical education were free.
I imagine her biggest single expense is malpractice. Well, let's compromise: let's do away with private and non-regulated malpractice insurance in exchange for caps on lawsuits to an arbitrarily high number, like 20 million dollars. Let's require private health insurance companies and hospitals to have limits on how much they can mark up toilet paper.
Or we can pretend that everything is fine.
Much as I hate to admit it, I know that when I build a machine, install windows, install anti-virus, and make an image of it to revert to in an emergency, the cost of the license and the time it would take still ends up being cheaper than screwing with xorg.conf - if your time is worth $25 an hour, I mean.
Extract that over 2 years and the costs are quite minimal. The fact that Apple can charge anything for OS upgrades when their hardware is so obscenely overpriced is the real ripoff.
I think the simple solution is that we need more doctors who will work for less money. Heavily investing in one person to be a tiny god in his practice who only sees patients for 4 or 5 minutes makes far less sense than training several more competent people to listen to their patients and develop care that is effective for that person.
I think one of the reasons medicine is so much more effective and cheaper in other western countries is that being a doctor still holds prestige and dignity, and it's not a career path chosen only to make money. I'd much rather have a person happy to be a doctor helping me with my health than a person who can only see the dollar signs when I walk through the door.
Anyone claiming that you won't get the best qualified people unless you pay them obscenely must have very little respect for our military service members.
It's a merry-go-round. Kids spin around, laugh, and spin some more all the time at local parks in the States. Even in China and Malaysia, when they're not manufacturing Nikes for pennies per hour, I'm sure they might like to feel like normal children, and play outside on a merry-go-round.
If it suits you to be a non-contributing little shit and sneer at anyone who tries, then so be it. But at least stay quiet while you're doing it.
It's a blatant ripoff of a letter sent by MLK. Some say it was a good device to demonstrate the feeling of oppression - which I believe is inherent in military invasion. As an English major, you should probably understand that dogmatic adherence to grammar will net you nothing but a by-the-numbers Grisham novel, which in my opinion, is soulless and not worth the advertising budget it was sold with.
He's quite a bit more eloquent:
"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
How dare we invest in technology!
The private corporate environment has given us similar investments in really useful things, like erectile dysfunction cures, flavored cigarettes, ringtones, and the iPhone. Truly world changing technologies!
If the internet had been a sure fire moneymaker, it could have had private funding. Just like computers. We know what those stupid government investments have wrought.
Or maybe large energy players like Shell and Exxon actively seek out to destroy any competition to their products and have warped the market place due to their anti-competitive business practices... nah! Sounds like hippy speak to me!
The taxpayers aren't making any money. All of the private military contractors are making a killing, so to speak.
You're just too fanatically patriotic to understand why we "care" about democracy in Iraq, which just happens to sit on top of trillions of dollars worth of oil and the related geopolitical power it's control represents, but we don't "care" about democracy anywhere else.
Control over oil means power. America has sought power at an unprecedented scale since the end of WWII. It's behaving exactly as every other imperial power has before it. Read just a little critically, and you may be able to comprehend that.
Tell me again how we played a part in this?
Try 1963.
The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time.
"I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them," he told me.
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/2694885.stm
UN != US.
You have no idea of how politics work between the two if you believe that. We told them if they didn't follow us into a Iraq, they would be a debating society, right? Do you think the UN does anything the United States vetoes? Are you fucking serious?
Are you really saying that there were no atrocities?
I'm saying we gave him the weapons to complete the atrocities, and that we didn't say anything about it while we watched them happen.
Try some elementary moral exercises in your brain, if you can. Very quickly you'll discover that "the enemy of the enemy is my friend" has come back to haunt us so many times it's now sheer irony to watch any international political event involving the United States.
I'll forgive nothing. The absence of perspective from your second comment is more revealing.
I'm suggesting that an invading army, who has invaded on a foundation of lies and profiteering, has no right to be there, and should be attacked viciously until they leave. You believe in the same principle, unless the invading country is us. You fail the most basic moral principle there is, and that is to expect out of others what you expect out of yourself.
A more direct comparison would be to say that Afghanistan had no right to attack the Russians who invaded in 1980. Forget the fact that the Afghan government requested Moscow's help in defeating militant fundamentalist muslims, a cause we seem somewhat attached to these days. In a country with zero moral compass, these details are simply insignificant.
And if the country invading us had put that dictator into power and then strangled our country with sanctions for a decade, suddenly accused him of atrocities they had allowed while they were sponsoring him, bombed our entire nation into pieces under pretense and lies, destroyed our national security by dismissing the entirety of our former armed forces, allowed terrorists to flood in from every direction, stood by idly while mobs destroyed our infrastructure, bombed our streets and cities so no one had access to clean water, proper sewage, or electricity, took control of our local natural resources and handed them over to private corporations from their home country, invited foreigners to buy up our land while it was cheap, built over seven permanent military bases worth over billion dollars each from border to border, and had mercenaries with no legal oversight roaming the streets with machine guns and RPGs, I guess you'd just sit there and take it?
Interesting.
Unfortunately, if we are invaded, we wouldn't have the right to attack the invaders. At least that's the principle we live by in Iraq.
I didn't dismiss any facts. I pointed out that you didn't have any. I consider that ignorance.
All of the raw data available has been released. The GAO just clarified it. You are wrong, unless you want to believe that the sample of guns given to the ATF is an obscenely misrepresented sample. And if you believe that, what evidence do you have of it?
The American networks don't cover democratic movements in Saudi Arabia. Does that mean they are unimportant? They don't cover undercover operations within Iran by the CIA, and all of their timelines for the history of Iran conveniently begin in 1979. They are reporting on celebrity news and how to make a summer salad. What does this have to do with the fact, as far as anyone can tell, that guns smuggled into Mexico from America are a huge problem contributing to the drug war?
Racism is subtle and pernicious. My father is a racist. I am a conditioned racist, though I make a concerted effort to keep things in perspective. I suspect you are the same, because in a conversation concerning to places you'd like to live, "not having an immigration problem" apparently scores very high for you.
And I'm sorry to say that ignorance, fear, superstition, and violence often go hand in hand. Look at any theocratic government and the resulting society.
At this point I don't think you are even ready for a Jr. High level debate. You have consistently provided flippant replies and immediately dismiss any opposing viewpoints as ignorant and now feeble. At this point my reply isn't for you, it is for people who are more open-minded that might read the words you spew.
Aww. I dismiss your viewpoint because it's untenable, due to your ignorance. You shouldn't take it personally.
Your so called fact has been disproven repeatedly.
Au contraire, my petite friend. Reading Fox and Libertarian news for gun control and expecting an unbiased report is like reading Interfax and expecting it to have a balanced view of Putin.
Obama and the ATF arrive at their numbers by the following fact: of all the guns submitted to the ATF for tracing, between 90 and 95% of them are traced to the United States. These, of course, are not all of the guns collected by Mexico. Fox wants you to assume that the guns not submitted for tracing were "obviously" not from America, but that's simply malicious lying or simple stupidity. From FactCheck, who disputes both numbers: ...The Fox reporters come up with a figure of 5,114 guns traced to U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 2008. That figures to 17.6 percent of the 29,000 figure for guns seized in Mexico, as given by the country's attorney general.
The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: "3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008." Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell's testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico's attorney general is correct.
Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.
The mistake the Fox News reporters made was to focus on some numbers given by Newell and Hoover in separate testimony, regarding numbers of guns traced to specific states. But not all guns traced to the U.S. can be traced to specific states. The Fox numbers are "a subset" of the actual total traced to U.S. sources, one official said.
Further, from the BBC concerning the GAO report released a few days ago:
The GAO acknowledges that there is insufficient data for a comprehensive study but concludes that the US, in particular the border states of Texas, California and Arizona, are the source of most of the weapons smuggled into Mexico. "While it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally trafficked into Mexico in a given year, over 20,000 or around 87% of firearms seized by the Mexican authorities and traced over the past five years originated in the United States," GAO investigator Jess Ford says.
there is absolutely no reason to not allow new machines guns to be owned by civilians.
The next time you see a police officer, ask him what he thinks about your idea.
Of course I'm sure you use the made up definition of an assault weapon and consider any of the AR15's in my gun safe one. An assault weapon must be capable of burst or automatic operation.
You're confusing assault weapon and assault rifle.
You seem to view firearms as evil incarnate. I view them as tools, hobbies such as sporting clays, competition
According to merriam-webster:
How did I stumble into a debate at a local junior high?
But let's look at your argument, feeble as it may be.
The largest group of illegal immigrants are from Mexico and the root cause is the social-economic envrionment in Mexico which the US has no right to interfere with.
Corruption within the Mexican government is the biggest problem. The rules instituted by NAFTA and the exploitation of trade rules for the benefit and profit of US corporations have exacerbated this problem, which was preceded and founded by US meddling in Mexican affairs since the time of Andrew Jackson. You probably don't know it, but we did invade and conquer about half of Mexico in the middle of the 19th century.
Recently Mexico was going to legalize marijuana, cocaine, hash, and perhaps even opiates and LSD in order to head off the failing drug war. However, the United States basically told them we would cut all aid if they did that. So they are stuck with our drug war, our failed policies, which in another amazing coincidence, also provides excellent profits for our private prison system, security consultants, and other contracted companies who are being paid to develop technologies to monitor the southern border.
Another interesting fact is that a vast majority of the arms used to kill people in Mexico are purchased in the United States, illegally, because our gun registration system is practically meaningless. I know as you do that having the right to buy assault weapons is more important than life itself, and you can be sure the residents of northern Mexico understand that as well these days.
Another leading cause is the Reagan amnesty in 1986.
Reagan cared only about business. Businesses love illegal immigrants because they help push down wages for other workers. This is why you will never see illegal immigration reform, unless the drug war spirals totally out of control.
There is nothing bigoted or racist to require people follow the laws in order to immigrant to the US. I have yet to see any proposed modern immigration have anything to do with race or religion and I could not support such proposals. If in your world view it is racist to make a factual statement that most illegal immigrants are Mexican then you have a problem.
You know as well as I do that minutemen are not lining up on the southern border to look for white people coming back without a passport, and there is zero discussion of securing the Canadian border, or spending money in a far more important area, which is the inspection of incoming shipments to the United States.
If your problem is that they don't contribute taxes to American society, the solution is to provide amnesty, give them a social security number and a long term work visa, and go on about your business. I'm afraid, despite all of your rhetoric, that your dislike of them has more to do with their heritage than their drain on the economic system. And unfortunately, you have no chance of success, since businesses will never allow illegal immigration to be shut down.
Let's see... California has an economy roughly forty times larger than that of Alaska. California has thirty six million people, and Alaska has six hundred thousand. Take away energy resources, and Alaska would likely be dead least in every metric imaginable. I'd bet without even looking at the statistics that California spends more on road signs than Alaska does on it's entire highway system.
My point being that it's trivially easy to manage state who's fifth largest town has less than 10,000 people, if that state is also floating in oil revenues.
And no, you aren't blowing my mind, whether you actually are as open minded as you claim or not. I made a joke, not in the best taste for sure, but it doesn't really matter. Some people laughed. Some people didn't. You got your nuts in a twist because I associated you with other people who defend the right to maintain the world's highest homicide rate, for reasons which I will never understand.
If you don't like California, fine. Keep yourself and your guns outside the state line. Don't consume any products developed in California - you wouldn't miss out on much, right? Also, you should stop pretending that states whose entire budgets would fit in the margins of California's are run by economic wizards. Least of all, Alaska, which is run by someone who thinks God wanted her to be the governor, and still wants her to be the President.
The guy said:
not much of an immigration problem up there either
That's a more socially acceptable form of actual bigotry and racism. I just gave him a little taste of his own ignorance.
Without the state oil revenues, Alaska would be having as much trouble as any other state.
But, if you want to get away from hispanics and blacks with your guns and your bible, Alaska is probably your best bet. There are still some surviving native American tribes, but I'm sure they're well away from where the "real" Americans live. Try to take as many like minded people as you can with you, and be sure to tell Jesus I said hello when he shows up for the rapture.
And don't worry. We won't let the Russians nuke Wasilla from orbit. Sure we won't...
400 grand is less than a minute of military spending the United States. But no one is allowed to mention that fact in the "liberal" media.
Can anyone explain to me how killing a suspected terrorist and their neighbors with a few hundred thousand dollars of ammunition is a better investment than this study? Anyone?
No one is saying that every person should be forced to pay for internet service. Small local governments have a long track record of running utilities effectively. If you don't want county water or sewer, you don't have to pay for it, but then you won't get service. The same thing can be done for internet service.
My suggestion is what it is: a well run, policed, open, self-supporting internet utility is not a bad thing, especially when the local community wants it.
If you think public universities are doing so poorly, why are we consistently behind the UK and other countries that have only public education, all the way through university levels? There are several reasons, but this report from OECD made me chuckle:
The US has a comparatively large proportion of poor performers.
24.4% of US 15-year-olds do not reach Level 2, the baseline level of achievement on the PISA scale at which students begin to demonstrate the science competencies that will enable them to participate actively in life situations related to science and technology (Table 2.1a). To reach Level 2 requires competencies such as identifying key features of a scientific investigation, recalling single scientific concepts and information relating to a situation, and using results of a scientific experiment represented in a data table as they support a personal decision. In contrast, students at Level 1 often confuse key features of an investigation, apply incorrect scientific information, and mix personal beliefs with scientific facts in support of a decision.
Translation: religious fundamentalism is making our population quite stupid.