Such subtleties may be lost on someone like you, but you seem to be well informed on the whole bin Laden thing, yet you ignore the fact that he sees the Saudi monarchy as an illegitimate government propped up by the West (which is to some degree true: go rent Lawrence of Arabia for the background on that). While most reasonable people would see that a Western-supported puppet dictatorship as a far cry from "occupation" - it was standing in the way of bin Laden's Pan-Islamist dream of uniting the Islamic world under a Caliphate, which could pass down sharia law, and stand up against the west as a superpower, obtain a "fair" price for oil, and distribute the wealth among all muslims.
(Personally, I'd love for us (UK/Israel/USA) to have stepped aside, watched him try to build such an empire, and watch it fail miserably: most of his own Al Qaeda followers instead believe in a Pan-Arabism, and wouldn't accept a unification with the likes of Persians (Iran), Africans (Somalia, Libya, etc.) and even Palestinians. Way too much tribal, ethnic, and especially sectarian strife for such a thing to ever work. Bin Laden may be a "true believer" to think that Allah would move to unite his "people" - but he's the very rare exception).
Even with his hatred of the Saudi monarchy, they were probably his best friend, because of the money that individual Saudi royals (of course, never "officially" as a house-of-Saud activity) pumped into madrassas which were used as a worldwide Al Qaeda recruiting network, as well as some well-documented and proven direct support for terror operations, including 9/11.
The question of how we (US/UK/Israel) got wrapped up in this bizzarre internal power struggle is and why we're impacted by this - is pretty obvious; it's all about oil, oil profits. We've drawn boundries, created dictatorships, and propped them up since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Whether or not it was a good thing or a smart thing to do, or our right, is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that when a whack-job like Bin Laden comes along, and is looking for a follower, he's got a completely credible scapegoat for all of his young recruits to focus their range upon. The West set themselves up to be the scapegoat. And the slippery slope of political meddling gets steeper and steeper. And now we're spending (borrowing) $100 Billion per year just trying to maintain a token presence in one country over there. With no end in sight.
Healthcare, pensions, social security and extensive consumer rights comes at a price though; economic efficiency.
Ask a typical Mexican how efficient their economy is without effective public education, without public healthcare, without social security, without pensions, without labor or environmental protections. Ask them why hundreds of thousands of them are fleeing Mexico to come to America. To pick lettuce for $15 a day?
Socialism is the difference between a first-world nation, and a third world bananna-republic shithole. We've benefitted from it in America for 2/3 of a Century. Now we've apparently decided we'd rather revert to third-world status because "Socialism=Stalinism".
...I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist.
Wow, you mean Rush Limbaugh is exaggerating when he compares European countries to the Stalinist Soviet Union? You mean "socialist" is a word whose definition has been twisted and distorted to mean something it doesn't, and therefore is almost useless as a means to describe an economic system (let alone a system of government)? You mean that having a legislature that's wholly owned by giant multinational corporations is not the recipie to protecting our Rights?
At my last theater experience (I went to see Date Movie, because a freind of mine lied and told me there was an Allyson Hannigan tit shot - I realized that wasn't the case when I bought the tickets and it was pg-13, but there was nothing else there, and wifey wanted to see it so we went in anyway).
About ten minutes into the movie (after commercials and other annoyances) I noticed that there were a LOT of kids in the theater. 5 year olds. 8 year olds. An infant. One guy had his pit-bull puppy (who was the best behaved youth in the theater). Now, I know what pg-13 means on paper, and kids can come in accompanied by an adult. But this was absurd. They really pushed the limits on what defines a pg-13 rating. I mean, I enjoy sex-humor as much as the next guy - but with all those kids in the theater, with their parents, holy crap, it was the creepiest thing that has happened to me, ever. I felt violated just sitting in there. They need to really start enforcing these ratings, because that was total bullshit.
This is the real problem with trying to combat terror financing.
SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT.
And it has been the main tool of thugs and dictators since the first tough-guy caveman picked up an antelope thigh, and started smacking around tribe-mates to get them to fork over (if they had any forks) their mammoth stakes (or whatever). Any time you have a hierarchy of power, laws are made with the intent of applying to everyone, but their enforcement is entrusted to a few. And what you get is a million variations on the "protection racket".
So - the Sultan of Bunghoel is the king; but there exist a few religious wackjobs with bombs. He knows that the bombers can choose to blow up his kid on his way to private school, and they might indeed do that because there is jealousy, or zealotry, or whatever. So he has his people meet their people, say: "Israel|The US|The Shiites|The Hindus are the real enemy, go blow them up, here's $500k. Just don't blow up my kids or my palace. I'm with you my brother, let's free our country from evil Western oppression." Of course the Sultan of Bunghoel plays golf with President Shrub, and they used to be partners in an oil company, so when the wackjobs with bombs blows up something that affects President Shrub, he passes laws against terror financing and such, has HIS people go talk to the Sultan's people: "hey dude, chill out or I'll freeze your swiss account, and then you can kiss your Heroin trafficing operation good bye" and then the Sultan says; "throw in a few seaports and you've got a deal!". . . . . But the rest of us don't have the luxury of being President Shrub's golfing buddies. And that's why the Osama bin Ladens of the world still sling huge sums of money around the globe undetected, and you get investigated by the FBI for paying off a credit card too soon.
It's probably a mistake to ignore party affiliation.
When you have a government run by people who do not believe that government can (or should) do anything right - then it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy when things like this come to pass.
On the other hand, those who are on the other side (who believe that government can (and should) do some things right, haven't really shown any spine at all and fought for their constituency, so I'm not inclined to wave a flag for the Democrats either.
Nuclear power has been the convenient club with which to bash tree-huggers over the head, as long as one ignores all the drawbacks of nuclear power (not the least of which deal with waste disposal, leaks and accidents, and the peculiar tendency of US Govt regulators to look the other way when safety rules are violated - damn pansies! we don't need no stinkin' safety rules! We're tough Americans. Not a bunch of goggle-boxed do-gooders going around telling everyone that radiation's bad for them. Pernicious nonsense! A guy could take 400 chest x-rays a year. Oughta have em too.)
It's good that some of the other drawbacks are gaining attention too. But I suspect that this is going to be framed as "radical leftist nonsense" by the media, and dismissed, and soon we'll return to building tons of nuclear plants. Oh what a joyous future we'll have. Can we please build them in Republican neighborhoods?
In fact, it amazes me that any conservative can get behind this sort of "we're going to fix the world 'cause the poor fools are too dumb to fix themselves" nonsense.
It has nothing at all to do with conservatives. It has to do with large numbers of people who like to think of themselves as conservative, who really don't have a clue what conservativism is about, because they've been told by Rush Limbaugh that it's about "pissing off commie terror-loving liberals". For about 90% of the self-proclaimed conservatives I talk to about this, that's what the conversations almost always boils down to. Liberal-bashing.
I'm in a beginning programming class, and the language is C++, and the tools that the teacher is forcing down our throats is MS Visual Studio.
I looked ahead at the programming examples, and it's all basic logic (really, I should have just tested out of this class, but the school's process for that doesn't allow for it due to the program I'm in - anyway. . . ). None of the C++ code relies on win32 libraries. It's all simple basic stuff - so I pasted some of the assignments into XCode on my Mac.
They compile and run just fine, no modifications.
So I was nice enough to post instructions in the class forum on how to do all the homework on a Mac using XCode. At least one other student (besides me) was trying to run Visual Studio in Virtual PC. . . .
This work is clearly too important to Humanity to be entrusted to one single nation.
If the funding in the US dries up, scientists should go elsewhere, like EU, or Japan, or Russia, or Brazil, or India, or China. The US, as a result, will fall behind, and become a backwater bananna republic - which is precisely what it's citizens voted for.
Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
IIRC this is how they busted Tom DeLay.
It was something like a whole bunch of $9000 payments, instead of a lump sum, just under the amount that needs to be reported. Transfered from the corporate donors, to the national party, back to the Texas party. No - I'm sure there was no illegal activity behind the generation of money. Just more criminalization of politics.:)
The other thing that MOST armchair christian eschatologists seem to ignore is that there is a particular Hebrew meaning to to with "on your right hand or on your forhead" - and that is that it will affect your actions (your right hand) and your thoughts (your forhead).
The "Mark of the Beast" is most likely not being referred to as a physical thing, but rather the acceptance of a doctrine that affects how one thinks and behaves. (Like Free Market Fundamentalism).
When I'm selected as Pope, I'm going to issue a divine edict to remove that damn book of Revelation from the Bible. It's a bunch of crap, and gets all the Christians twitchy and freaky every 1000 years or so, thinking that the end of the world is coming - etc. next thing you know, they're seeing Jesus on french toast and electing any damn fool who claims to be Christian.
The main factor, as far as I can tell is: "If we outsource, and lay-off expensive Americans, and hire cheap Indians, will Wall Street love us?" The answer is often yes, and that's pretty much a no brainer for guys who are compensated with a ton of stock options.
We need extensive security measures including better coordinated intelligence, vastly increased inspections at seaports, and carefully measured foreign policy carrots and sticks for rogue states.
. . . and better international banking rules and accounting standards, and transparency, to end all the illicit money laundering, drug and gun running. Unfortunately, Bush and his family and their business partners would be pretty much against such an idea, which is why there's only been a token effort in this area.
The Bush budget also shows that funding for these kinds of "Global Warming Proving" studies to be shrinking at an alarming rate. By 2010, nobody will even know what the words "Global Warming" mean.
Unless they somehow find a way to escape the dome and get back up to the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
Such subtleties may be lost on someone like you, but you seem to be well informed on the whole bin Laden thing, yet you ignore the fact that he sees the Saudi monarchy as an illegitimate government propped up by the West (which is to some degree true: go rent Lawrence of Arabia for the background on that). While most reasonable people would see that a Western-supported puppet dictatorship as a far cry from "occupation" - it was standing in the way of bin Laden's Pan-Islamist dream of uniting the Islamic world under a Caliphate, which could pass down sharia law, and stand up against the west as a superpower, obtain a "fair" price for oil, and distribute the wealth among all muslims.
(Personally, I'd love for us (UK/Israel/USA) to have stepped aside, watched him try to build such an empire, and watch it fail miserably: most of his own Al Qaeda followers instead believe in a Pan-Arabism, and wouldn't accept a unification with the likes of Persians (Iran), Africans (Somalia, Libya, etc.) and even Palestinians. Way too much tribal, ethnic, and especially sectarian strife for such a thing to ever work. Bin Laden may be a "true believer" to think that Allah would move to unite his "people" - but he's the very rare exception).
Even with his hatred of the Saudi monarchy, they were probably his best friend, because of the money that individual Saudi royals (of course, never "officially" as a house-of-Saud activity) pumped into madrassas which were used as a worldwide Al Qaeda recruiting network, as well as some well-documented and proven direct support for terror operations, including 9/11.
The question of how we (US/UK/Israel) got wrapped up in this bizzarre internal power struggle is and why we're impacted by this - is pretty obvious; it's all about oil, oil profits. We've drawn boundries, created dictatorships, and propped them up since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Whether or not it was a good thing or a smart thing to do, or our right, is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that when a whack-job like Bin Laden comes along, and is looking for a follower, he's got a completely credible scapegoat for all of his young recruits to focus their range upon. The West set themselves up to be the scapegoat. And the slippery slope of political meddling gets steeper and steeper. And now we're spending (borrowing) $100 Billion per year just trying to maintain a token presence in one country over there. With no end in sight.
Healthcare, pensions, social security and extensive consumer rights comes at a price though; economic efficiency.
Ask a typical Mexican how efficient their economy is without effective public education, without public healthcare, without social security, without pensions, without labor or environmental protections. Ask them why hundreds of thousands of them are fleeing Mexico to come to America. To pick lettuce for $15 a day?
Socialism is the difference between a first-world nation, and a third world bananna-republic shithole. We've benefitted from it in America for 2/3 of a Century. Now we've apparently decided we'd rather revert to third-world status because "Socialism=Stalinism".
...I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist.
Wow, you mean Rush Limbaugh is exaggerating when he compares European countries to the Stalinist Soviet Union? You mean "socialist" is a word whose definition has been twisted and distorted to mean something it doesn't, and therefore is almost useless as a means to describe an economic system (let alone a system of government)? You mean that having a legislature that's wholly owned by giant multinational corporations is not the recipie to protecting our Rights?
Whoda thunk it?
Get innovative, people -- invent something new and useful that Windows *doesn't* have, and then they will come.
Linux DOES have something innovative that Windows does not have.
Lack of an upgrade treadmill.
This concludes the "street french" lecture of the day, and in my opinion Chirac AND Bush are both "bouches"
Well, in "street American" - they're both "biyatches".
Sounds like you Frenchies have the same problem with presidents we Americans have.
At my last theater experience (I went to see Date Movie, because a freind of mine lied and told me there was an Allyson Hannigan tit shot - I realized that wasn't the case when I bought the tickets and it was pg-13, but there was nothing else there, and wifey wanted to see it so we went in anyway).
About ten minutes into the movie (after commercials and other annoyances) I noticed that there were a LOT of kids in the theater. 5 year olds. 8 year olds. An infant. One guy had his pit-bull puppy (who was the best behaved youth in the theater). Now, I know what pg-13 means on paper, and kids can come in accompanied by an adult. But this was absurd. They really pushed the limits on what defines a pg-13 rating. I mean, I enjoy sex-humor as much as the next guy - but with all those kids in the theater, with their parents, holy crap, it was the creepiest thing that has happened to me, ever. I felt violated just sitting in there. They need to really start enforcing these ratings, because that was total bullshit.
This is the real problem with trying to combat terror financing.
SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT.
And it has been the main tool of thugs and dictators since the first tough-guy caveman picked up an antelope thigh, and started smacking around tribe-mates to get them to fork over (if they had any forks) their mammoth stakes (or whatever). Any time you have a hierarchy of power, laws are made with the intent of applying to everyone, but their enforcement is entrusted to a few. And what you get is a million variations on the "protection racket".
So - the Sultan of Bunghoel is the king; but there exist a few religious wackjobs with bombs. He knows that the bombers can choose to blow up his kid on his way to private school, and they might indeed do that because there is jealousy, or zealotry, or whatever. So he has his people meet their people, say: "Israel|The US|The Shiites|The Hindus are the real enemy, go blow them up, here's $500k. Just don't blow up my kids or my palace. I'm with you my brother, let's free our country from evil Western oppression." Of course the Sultan of Bunghoel plays golf with President Shrub, and they used to be partners in an oil company, so when the wackjobs with bombs blows up something that affects President Shrub, he passes laws against terror financing and such, has HIS people go talk to the Sultan's people: "hey dude, chill out or I'll freeze your swiss account, and then you can kiss your Heroin trafficing operation good bye" and then the Sultan says; "throw in a few seaports and you've got a deal!". . . . .
But the rest of us don't have the luxury of being President Shrub's golfing buddies. And that's why the Osama bin Ladens of the world still sling huge sums of money around the globe undetected, and you get investigated by the FBI for paying off a credit card too soon.
It's probably a mistake to ignore party affiliation.
When you have a government run by people who do not believe that government can (or should) do anything right - then it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy when things like this come to pass.
On the other hand, those who are on the other side (who believe that government can (and should) do some things right, haven't really shown any spine at all and fought for their constituency, so I'm not inclined to wave a flag for the Democrats either.
Fuckers really all ought to be deported.
Latex allergies mean - - no condoms (other materials are definately not as effective).
Therefore, more offspring.
Latex allergy is a genetic condition. So some of those offspring will also be allergic to latex.
Nuclear power has been the convenient club with which to bash tree-huggers over the head, as long as one ignores all the drawbacks of nuclear power (not the least of which deal with waste disposal, leaks and accidents, and the peculiar tendency of US Govt regulators to look the other way when safety rules are violated - damn pansies! we don't need no stinkin' safety rules! We're tough Americans. Not a bunch of goggle-boxed do-gooders going around telling everyone that radiation's bad for them. Pernicious nonsense! A guy could take 400 chest x-rays a year. Oughta have em too.)
It's good that some of the other drawbacks are gaining attention too. But I suspect that this is going to be framed as "radical leftist nonsense" by the media, and dismissed, and soon we'll return to building tons of nuclear plants. Oh what a joyous future we'll have. Can we please build them in Republican neighborhoods?
I think it's probably good for a first try.
But it would certainly be worth the author's time to try again.
In fact, it amazes me that any conservative can get behind this sort of "we're going to fix the world 'cause the poor fools are too dumb to fix themselves" nonsense.
It has nothing at all to do with conservatives. It has to do with large numbers of people who like to think of themselves as conservative, who really don't have a clue what conservativism is about, because they've been told by Rush Limbaugh that it's about "pissing off commie terror-loving liberals". For about 90% of the self-proclaimed conservatives I talk to about this, that's what the conversations almost always boils down to. Liberal-bashing.
I guess I'm lucky.
I'm in a beginning programming class, and the language is C++, and the tools that the teacher is forcing down our throats is MS Visual Studio.
I looked ahead at the programming examples, and it's all basic logic (really, I should have just tested out of this class, but the school's process for that doesn't allow for it due to the program I'm in - anyway. . . ). None of the C++ code relies on win32 libraries. It's all simple basic stuff - so I pasted some of the assignments into XCode on my Mac.
They compile and run just fine, no modifications.
So I was nice enough to post instructions in the class forum on how to do all the homework on a Mac using XCode. At least one other student (besides me) was trying to run Visual Studio in Virtual PC. . . .
This work is clearly too important to Humanity to be entrusted to one single nation.
If the funding in the US dries up, scientists should go elsewhere, like EU, or Japan, or Russia, or Brazil, or India, or China. The US, as a result, will fall behind, and become a backwater bananna republic - which is precisely what it's citizens voted for.
Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
:)
IIRC this is how they busted Tom DeLay.
It was something like a whole bunch of $9000 payments, instead of a lump sum, just under the amount that needs to be reported. Transfered from the corporate donors, to the national party, back to the Texas party. No - I'm sure there was no illegal activity behind the generation of money. Just more criminalization of politics.
. . . our new telecom monopoly overlords?
No, wait - what I mean to say is; meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Of Course!
The US Attorney General just wants a piece of the action.
Unless mathematical perfection is Satan's work.
That may not be too far from the truth, considering that the bible says Pi = 3.0.
The other thing that MOST armchair christian eschatologists seem to ignore is that there is a particular Hebrew meaning to to with "on your right hand or on your forhead" - and that is that it will affect your actions (your right hand) and your thoughts (your forhead).
The "Mark of the Beast" is most likely not being referred to as a physical thing, but rather the acceptance of a doctrine that affects how one thinks and behaves. (Like Free Market Fundamentalism).
When I'm selected as Pope, I'm going to issue a divine edict to remove that damn book of Revelation from the Bible. It's a bunch of crap, and gets all the Christians twitchy and freaky every 1000 years or so, thinking that the end of the world is coming - etc. next thing you know, they're seeing Jesus on french toast and electing any damn fool who claims to be Christian.
I didn't see any terrain in the video that wasn't negotiable by even a fairly mundane subcompact economy car, let alone a Hummvee or ATV.
The main factor, as far as I can tell is: "If we outsource, and lay-off expensive Americans, and hire cheap Indians, will Wall Street love us?" The answer is often yes, and that's pretty much a no brainer for guys who are compensated with a ton of stock options.
We need extensive security measures including better coordinated intelligence, vastly increased inspections at seaports, and carefully measured foreign policy carrots and sticks for rogue states.
. . . and better international banking rules and accounting standards, and transparency, to end all the illicit money laundering, drug and gun running.
Unfortunately, Bush and his family and their business partners would be pretty much against such an idea, which is why there's only been a token effort in this area.
The Bush budget also shows that funding for these kinds of "Global Warming Proving" studies to be shrinking at an alarming rate. By 2010, nobody will even know what the words "Global Warming" mean.
Unless they somehow find a way to escape the dome and get back up to the surface.