The ACLU markets itself as a defender of civil liberties, but then explicitly comes out in favor of arms-control policies that are ideally suited to a police state.
The ACLU has never, to my knowledge, come out in favor of any legislation restricting the ownership of guns. They basically are neutral on a legislative level, but actively pro-individual-liberty on all other amendments. I agree it's a strange position, but even they acknowledge that the NRA has tons of money and resources to through at the gun debate so their resources aren't really needed to argue for the second amendment anyways.
Also, and something that's not been adequately explained to me, but where is the line? M-16s OK? What about RPGs? AA Missiles? Nukes? There's either a line that most people can get behind, and shut your griping, or it's all in or all out. Make up your minds.
Though to be fair, every amendment is vague like that, and deliberately so. Sure, we have freedom of speech, but the courts (and most people) accept that there are limitations to that. There's rarely a specific line you can point to and say "that's exactly where the boundary is", the most obvious example being in pornography where centuries of case law have produced nothing more precise than the laughable vague "community standards" that was barely digested by the lower courts before the internet came along and completely redefined what a community is as well as what publication and distribution mean.
So just because we can't state which caliber or rate of fire is the specific line not to be crossed, it can be taken for granted that personal tactical nukes will never be legal even if the courts decide to interpret the second amendment as a very broad individual right.
The lack of a hard-line rule is no impediment to reasonably interpreting the second amendment as an individual right any more than the ability to print documents without a "press" is an impediment to interpreting the first amendment as applying to new technologies.
I think it's a sign of spending too much time on the internet when you assume any link labeled "she certainly gets around" will go to a naked picture of someone.
If someone views themselves as a politician then, yes, I agree. However, I would like to think, and until I research enough, I would like to think that most of the Founding Fathers were pure and noble. At least magnitudes more so than any politician in the last 100 years.
While I don't think many people are "pure and noble", you're right that the essential difference is the people today who view themselves as professional politicians. To them it's about winning or losing, fulfilling a lifelong dream of being elected to some office.
Every one of the Founding Fathers basically got involved in politics because they had no choice, and got out as soon as possible afterwards. Benjamin Franklin, for all his achievements, wanted his gravestone to say that he was a printer. Because to him, being a printer was important, honest work. Washington couldn't wait to finally get back to being a farmer. Everything else was a necessary evil.
there hasn't been one person except bush bashers claiming that the wiretapping was going on outside international calls with suspected terrorist.
President Bush (as well as Gonzales) publicly acknowledged that the taps are listening in on Americans. I'm pretty sure they aren't Bush-Bashers.
Of course, the whole program is classified, as well as the "other programs" that have been acknowledged to exist (again, by Gonzales) but not discussed at all, so we simply have to take their word for it that it's only being used in certain ways. And considering they've already admitted this one program is being used to listen in on Americans, I'm almost afraid to find out what the still-secret stuff is being used for.
As to everything else, you're ok with "the executive will still do what it's always done" so long as "it just won't try to do it the macho pseudo-legitimacy the Bush Administration tried to do it with."?
I read that as: "I don't care what Bush does, I just don't like how he does it". In other words, if Bush was a Democrat, you'd be happy with everything he did?
I think the more appropriate way to interpret it is that most adults understand that any intelligence agency or military commander will sometimes be required to break the rules for the sake of getting something done that needs to be done to save lives RIGHT NOW, but we don't need to make it an acceptable POLICY for anyone in authority to just break the rules whenever they like simply because they find them inconvenient.
It's like the whole absurd "debate" about torture that took place publicly in this country. Neocons constantly brought up extreme situations like "What if we know this guy is the only person who can stop a nuclear bomb from going off in NYC in 20 minutes, but our interrogators can't do anything more than ask pretty please?". Hey, if that happens, give me a call, I'll happily torture the information out of the guy and risk being prosecuted for saving NYC. These situations are so unusual, so extraordinary, that I can't imagine very many people who have given their lives over to public service would be so hung up on the rules they'd let millions die if they knew for sure they could prevent it. If such a situation legitimately comes up, the President has the ability to pardon any such interrogator and give him a medal. The only thing you accomplish by rewriting the laws to make such treatment officially acceptable in such "extreme" circumstances is that more and more situations will be considered "extreme" because it's easier to call someone an Enemy Combatant than it is to investigate. All of a sudden everyone is "certain" that their particular prisoner has critical information they could get at if they could just ignore a few parts of the Constitution.
So why not let the brightest teach the "special-needs"?
Because they're just kids supposed to be getting an education? Pulling a Jedi mind trick is not going to accomplish anything.
"No Timmy, I know you're interested in Algebra and want to discuss the implications of the Enlightenment era on modern politics, but what would REALLY be fun is for you to spend the next seven weeks trying to teach Billy how to do long division!"
they both gave the very strong impression that they believed themselves to be too smart.
Yes, thank God we wound up with Bush, who never smirks or talks down to his audience as if lecturing a bunch of retarded 6-year olds. "we're fighting terror, y'see -- what that means is that terror is out there, and we're fighting it. know you don't understand, but there's bad people, and they want to hurt us, in other words, hurting us is what they want to do."
Who needs actual facts, research, or open debate when you have gut feelings and a close relationship with God to guide all your decisions?
The result was that the good teachers fought to teach the classes with the good students, because the classes with the bad students were rowdy. The low and mid level students got left further and further behind. This is pretty much what no-child-left-behind was designed to defeat.
But the practical reality is that the best teachers don't have to put up with being told who to teach. When more and more crap like NCLB started coming down the pike, many of the best teachers I enjoyed from my education moved on to private schools because they wouldn't have to put up with that kind of idiocy anymore.
Making a brilliant teacher work with a room full of kids who don't give a shit is no more productive than making a brilliant pupil go through school in classes designed entirely for remedial students.
On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.
I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.
I would definitely agree that such rigid tracking is a bad idea. Doing it per subject and based on both grades and teacher evaluations is how most of the school districts I attended divvied up the kids into gifted/talented programs and the regular classes.
I experienced both sides of the program myself due to a move -- I had been in the g/t classes since 4th or 5th grade, but moved to a district that had a slightly different schedule. I wound up being almost a half-year behind in math, so they put me in the regular classes. I struggled for about a week trying to catch up to the class, then spent a month or two driving the teacher crazy because I had learned everything she was going to be teaching for the whole year and was bored and acting up -- fortunately she recognized that was the case and didn't just think I was a little asshole:)
She had to go to the principal and beg him to get me out of her class because I was causing problems, and they stuck em in the g/t class. Another couple weeks of catching up and I never had trouble again. But there definitely has to be mobility in both directions every year.
For a site without those advantages, say one just starting out, people costing bandwidth without contributing ad hits might make the difference between being in the black and being in the red.
Wow, so new web sites aren't going to be profitable within 24 hours? We'd better solve this brand new problem or nobody will build web sites anymore.
As long as the RI.... Record Companies lose, I'm OK with that.
That's pretty much the point of the class action statutes. Theres no effective way to remedy 20 million people who were all ripped off for 12 cents each by a megacorp, yet doing so would be incredibly profitable for said megacorp. So you simply make such behavior have a huge financial penalty for the megacorp to try and set an example that ripping off lots of people a little at a time is not a wise business decision, because in aggregate the sums involved are very attractive to an attorney working on contingency for the class.
Unfortunately, neither gentleman holds the copyright to the shows, so their opinions might not carry much weight in this case. They may be the stars in front of the camera, but they are still basically employees
That's not necessarily correct, nor is it entirely the point. First, the contract details aren't known about either show, but the Colbert Report was created by Stewart's production company and the degree of their ownership may well be significant.
The point of them testifying, though, is to undercut the notion that Viacom is acting to defend the ability of creative people to get compensated for their work -- the entire purpose of copyright.
Yes, we're all used to the cynicism of the RIAA/MPAA saying they're standing up for "the artists" while none of the money they collect actually goes to the artists, but it is an important thing to knock that moral high ground out from under their feet in the legal proceedings. If all the creators involved actually state for the record that they have no problem with YouTube, then Viacom has to argue strictly from the financial angle, and there the waters are much, much murkier as they'd be dealing with a lot more unknowns about what real damage is being done to the market for their product.
Not only did he say there "ought to be limits to freedom" (in reference to the gwbush.com site used to parody him), he also said that he didn't think Atheists should be considered Americans. This was all before he was elected the first time, and quite widely reported. He made quite clear for years in advance that he had no concern whatsoever with the rights or lives of anyone who disagrees with him.
What does any of that have to do with a free economy? If you go to Somalia, you can buy anything, sell anything, and charge whatever you like (and can get someone to pay).
Being called names or having other countries boycott your product are parts of free markets. In a free market, you don't get to force people to buy your goods or force them to say only nice things about you.
You can buy or sell whatever you like -- 12 year-old boys, stinger missiles, untested medicine, etc. You can perform surgery without any training or worrying that somebody will sue. You don't need insurance to drive a car, or an inspection or registration. there's no building inspector to tell you your slab has to be so far from the curb or so thick, you can build a high-rise out of toothpicks and rent out apartments in it with no smoke alarms. It's a free market, a libertarian paradise.
It has the lowest overhead of any health "insurance" program in the country. That's the opposite of what the original message claimed would happen. So yeah, by that standard measure of (economic) efficiency, it is the most efficient health insurance system in the country, by a HUGE, GIGANTIC margin. This isn't some small-scale experimental system that has yet to be hit by government bureaucracy, it's already larger than some state governments and has been for decades. It's no worse to deal with than the dozens of private insurances any provider will have to deal with on a daily basis, and in many ways it is better since they have standardized a lot of the paperwork and electronic recordkeeping in a way that has been long overdue.
If you want to argue about rationing, that's a totally different issue. Every insurance program is going to ration, it's a matter of picking your poison. Do you want to spend more on health care, or less? If your big problem with Medicare is that it doesn't pay enough to doctors, I'm sure they'd be happy to raise taxes to cover it, but for some reason I suspect that's not what you want. No private insurer has doctors bragging about reimbursements, either. That's the economic power of negotiating billions of dollars of care in one contract rather than forcing each patient to dicker over the price of their heart transplant.
For a couple of mod point, please point to a truly free economy
Somalia right now has a pretty free economy. Of course, the warlords with private armies who take anything worth having kind of put a damper on the entrepreneurial spirit, but it is very much a free marketer's dream land. Truly, much of Africa is very free of any government regulation -- it constantly amazes me that all these extreme libertarians haven't moved there yet.
In such a system, in the interests of "fairness", the bureaucracy will become ever larger and more controlling. Eventually it will become both the largest line item on the budget and immersed in its own internal politics. Again, this is an observed fact. One need look no further than the bureaucrat-politician-and-protocolist to doctor-and-nurse ratio of Britain's NHS.
Or you could look at the US Medicare system, which is almost an order of magnitude more efficient than any private health insurer in the entire country.
Anyone who thinks that having a single system could possibly generate MORE bureaucracy than our existing private health care system has obviously never worked in health care.
There are approximately 18 billion different private insurance programs in the US, each of which has arbitrary rules that serve no purpose other than to deny coverage to the most patients possible (what, your doctors didn't read all 14,372 pages of our plan's guidelines before performing the emergency surgery? sorry, not our fault you used a 6mm staple instead of a 5mm when closing the incision -- we're not paying for the procedure! Plus we're canceling the patient's coverage.)
In the US, every time the topic of Universal Health Care comes up, "they" trot out the bogeymen of long lines, poor service, unmotivated poorly paid doctors, etc. Then one goes to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" and those bad things don't appear to be there - it actually does seem to work.
It's generally true that socialized systems have longer waits for elective procedures and shorter waits for required procedures and primary/preventative care. Which I would imagine to most sane people is the sensible way to allocate resources. Yeah it sucks to wait a few extra months for a hip replacement, but it sucks even more to live in the US and have to wait 3+ weeks to see your private doctor so he can examine a skin spot to find out if it cancerous or not when that 3 weeks can make a big difference in treatment options.
that doesn't mean that BMI is not the best one. BMI is quick, cheap and standardized. More health care professionals use BMI vs. other methods for medical decision making for their patients.
yes, it does mean that BMI is not the best one. BMI is a meaningless figure invented in the 19th century that has only marginal meaning in modern healthcare. The only thing a REAL doctor does with an out-of-range BMI is run tests to see if it is meaningless in this case or not, they don't ever use BMI to actually apply health care more advanced than giving generic diet advice that applies to everyone ("eat less sugar, more vegetables and try to get the weight down, OK?".
This is just another example of American "health insurance" companies who are more interested in having some number they can get cheaply to point at and justify why they want to charge some people more money than providing actual, you know, health care. Whether that number is your ZIP code, credit rating, or BMI, it is meaningless to your actual health status, but they're perfectly happy to charge you more or deny you benefits for having the wrong number.
Mythbusters did a good experiment with this, and of course it's true that water from the toilet does spray, as you'd expect. But fecal matter is pretty much everywhere whether you close the lid or not. Your immune system can handle it, else you would be dead already.
Am i the only person to notice that their big, uncensored image hosting site lasted about 2 days before they started removing images by the thousand with no explanation? Entire categories disappeared. I'd like to see slashdot or somebody ask them what the heck the point of the site is even supposed to be, since it certainly isn't a place to put things to link to, even generic LOL forum-type images. There's no indication on their FAQ or anywhere else why or how or who will just decide to remove stuff on a whim.
Slashdot Mirror
The ACLU has never, to my knowledge, come out in favor of any legislation restricting the ownership of guns. They basically are neutral on a legislative level, but actively pro-individual-liberty on all other amendments. I agree it's a strange position, but even they acknowledge that the NRA has tons of money and resources to through at the gun debate so their resources aren't really needed to argue for the second amendment anyways.
Though to be fair, every amendment is vague like that, and deliberately so. Sure, we have freedom of speech, but the courts (and most people) accept that there are limitations to that. There's rarely a specific line you can point to and say "that's exactly where the boundary is", the most obvious example being in pornography where centuries of case law have produced nothing more precise than the laughable vague "community standards" that was barely digested by the lower courts before the internet came along and completely redefined what a community is as well as what publication and distribution mean.
So just because we can't state which caliber or rate of fire is the specific line not to be crossed, it can be taken for granted that personal tactical nukes will never be legal even if the courts decide to interpret the second amendment as a very broad individual right.
The lack of a hard-line rule is no impediment to reasonably interpreting the second amendment as an individual right any more than the ability to print documents without a "press" is an impediment to interpreting the first amendment as applying to new technologies.
I think it's a sign of spending too much time on the internet when you assume any link labeled "she certainly gets around" will go to a naked picture of someone.
While I don't think many people are "pure and noble", you're right that the essential difference is the people today who view themselves as professional politicians. To them it's about winning or losing, fulfilling a lifelong dream of being elected to some office.
Every one of the Founding Fathers basically got involved in politics because they had no choice, and got out as soon as possible afterwards. Benjamin Franklin, for all his achievements, wanted his gravestone to say that he was a printer. Because to him, being a printer was important, honest work. Washington couldn't wait to finally get back to being a farmer. Everything else was a necessary evil.
President Bush (as well as Gonzales) publicly acknowledged that the taps are listening in on Americans. I'm pretty sure they aren't Bush-Bashers.
Of course, the whole program is classified, as well as the "other programs" that have been acknowledged to exist (again, by Gonzales) but not discussed at all, so we simply have to take their word for it that it's only being used in certain ways. And considering they've already admitted this one program is being used to listen in on Americans, I'm almost afraid to find out what the still-secret stuff is being used for.
I think the more appropriate way to interpret it is that most adults understand that any intelligence agency or military commander will sometimes be required to break the rules for the sake of getting something done that needs to be done to save lives RIGHT NOW, but we don't need to make it an acceptable POLICY for anyone in authority to just break the rules whenever they like simply because they find them inconvenient.
It's like the whole absurd "debate" about torture that took place publicly in this country. Neocons constantly brought up extreme situations like "What if we know this guy is the only person who can stop a nuclear bomb from going off in NYC in 20 minutes, but our interrogators can't do anything more than ask pretty please?". Hey, if that happens, give me a call, I'll happily torture the information out of the guy and risk being prosecuted for saving NYC. These situations are so unusual, so extraordinary, that I can't imagine very many people who have given their lives over to public service would be so hung up on the rules they'd let millions die if they knew for sure they could prevent it. If such a situation legitimately comes up, the President has the ability to pardon any such interrogator and give him a medal. The only thing you accomplish by rewriting the laws to make such treatment officially acceptable in such "extreme" circumstances is that more and more situations will be considered "extreme" because it's easier to call someone an Enemy Combatant than it is to investigate. All of a sudden everyone is "certain" that their particular prisoner has critical information they could get at if they could just ignore a few parts of the Constitution.
Because they're just kids supposed to be getting an education? Pulling a Jedi mind trick is not going to accomplish anything.
"No Timmy, I know you're interested in Algebra and want to discuss the implications of the Enlightenment era on modern politics, but what would REALLY be fun is for you to spend the next seven weeks trying to teach Billy how to do long division!"
Yes, thank God we wound up with Bush, who never smirks or talks down to his audience as if lecturing a bunch of retarded 6-year olds. "we're fighting terror, y'see -- what that means is that terror is out there, and we're fighting it. know you don't understand, but there's bad people, and they want to hurt us, in other words, hurting us is what they want to do."
Who needs actual facts, research, or open debate when you have gut feelings and a close relationship with God to guide all your decisions?
But the practical reality is that the best teachers don't have to put up with being told who to teach. When more and more crap like NCLB started coming down the pike, many of the best teachers I enjoyed from my education moved on to private schools because they wouldn't have to put up with that kind of idiocy anymore.
Making a brilliant teacher work with a room full of kids who don't give a shit is no more productive than making a brilliant pupil go through school in classes designed entirely for remedial students.
I would definitely agree that such rigid tracking is a bad idea. Doing it per subject and based on both grades and teacher evaluations is how most of the school districts I attended divvied up the kids into gifted/talented programs and the regular classes.
I experienced both sides of the program myself due to a move -- I had been in the g/t classes since 4th or 5th grade, but moved to a district that had a slightly different schedule. I wound up being almost a half-year behind in math, so they put me in the regular classes. I struggled for about a week trying to catch up to the class, then spent a month or two driving the teacher crazy because I had learned everything she was going to be teaching for the whole year and was bored and acting up -- fortunately she recognized that was the case and didn't just think I was a little asshole
She had to go to the principal and beg him to get me out of her class because I was causing problems, and they stuck em in the g/t class. Another couple weeks of catching up and I never had trouble again. But there definitely has to be mobility in both directions every year.
Wow, so new web sites aren't going to be profitable within 24 hours? We'd better solve this brand new problem or nobody will build web sites anymore.
That's pretty much the point of the class action statutes. Theres no effective way to remedy 20 million people who were all ripped off for 12 cents each by a megacorp, yet doing so would be incredibly profitable for said megacorp. So you simply make such behavior have a huge financial penalty for the megacorp to try and set an example that ripping off lots of people a little at a time is not a wise business decision, because in aggregate the sums involved are very attractive to an attorney working on contingency for the class.
Is this reply part of the reading comprehension program of an ESL course?
That's not necessarily correct, nor is it entirely the point. First, the contract details aren't known about either show, but the Colbert Report was created by Stewart's production company and the degree of their ownership may well be significant.
The point of them testifying, though, is to undercut the notion that Viacom is acting to defend the ability of creative people to get compensated for their work -- the entire purpose of copyright.
Yes, we're all used to the cynicism of the RIAA/MPAA saying they're standing up for "the artists" while none of the money they collect actually goes to the artists, but it is an important thing to knock that moral high ground out from under their feet in the legal proceedings. If all the creators involved actually state for the record that they have no problem with YouTube, then Viacom has to argue strictly from the financial angle, and there the waters are much, much murkier as they'd be dealing with a lot more unknowns about what real damage is being done to the market for their product.
Ah, so it was, thanks for the correction!
Not only did he say there "ought to be limits to freedom" (in reference to the gwbush.com site used to parody him), he also said that he didn't think Atheists should be considered Americans. This was all before he was elected the first time, and quite widely reported. He made quite clear for years in advance that he had no concern whatsoever with the rights or lives of anyone who disagrees with him.
What does any of that have to do with a free economy? If you go to Somalia, you can buy anything, sell anything, and charge whatever you like (and can get someone to pay).
Being called names or having other countries boycott your product are parts of free markets. In a free market, you don't get to force people to buy your goods or force them to say only nice things about you.
You can buy or sell whatever you like -- 12 year-old boys, stinger missiles, untested medicine, etc. You can perform surgery without any training or worrying that somebody will sue. You don't need insurance to drive a car, or an inspection or registration. there's no building inspector to tell you your slab has to be so far from the curb or so thick, you can build a high-rise out of toothpicks and rent out apartments in it with no smoke alarms. It's a free market, a libertarian paradise.
It has the lowest overhead of any health "insurance" program in the country. That's the opposite of what the original message claimed would happen. So yeah, by that standard measure of (economic) efficiency, it is the most efficient health insurance system in the country, by a HUGE, GIGANTIC margin. This isn't some small-scale experimental system that has yet to be hit by government bureaucracy, it's already larger than some state governments and has been for decades. It's no worse to deal with than the dozens of private insurances any provider will have to deal with on a daily basis, and in many ways it is better since they have standardized a lot of the paperwork and electronic recordkeeping in a way that has been long overdue.
If you want to argue about rationing, that's a totally different issue. Every insurance program is going to ration, it's a matter of picking your poison. Do you want to spend more on health care, or less? If your big problem with Medicare is that it doesn't pay enough to doctors, I'm sure they'd be happy to raise taxes to cover it, but for some reason I suspect that's not what you want. No private insurer has doctors bragging about reimbursements, either. That's the economic power of negotiating billions of dollars of care in one contract rather than forcing each patient to dicker over the price of their heart transplant.
I think you'll find with 12 seconds of research that you're wrong. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good stereotype!
Somalia right now has a pretty free economy. Of course, the warlords with private armies who take anything worth having kind of put a damper on the entrepreneurial spirit, but it is very much a free marketer's dream land. Truly, much of Africa is very free of any government regulation -- it constantly amazes me that all these extreme libertarians haven't moved there yet.
Or you could look at the US Medicare system, which is almost an order of magnitude more efficient than any private health insurer in the entire country.
Anyone who thinks that having a single system could possibly generate MORE bureaucracy than our existing private health care system has obviously never worked in health care.
There are approximately 18 billion different private insurance programs in the US, each of which has arbitrary rules that serve no purpose other than to deny coverage to the most patients possible (what, your doctors didn't read all 14,372 pages of our plan's guidelines before performing the emergency surgery? sorry, not our fault you used a 6mm staple instead of a 5mm when closing the incision -- we're not paying for the procedure! Plus we're canceling the patient's coverage.)
It's generally true that socialized systems have longer waits for elective procedures and shorter waits for required procedures and primary/preventative care. Which I would imagine to most sane people is the sensible way to allocate resources. Yeah it sucks to wait a few extra months for a hip replacement, but it sucks even more to live in the US and have to wait 3+ weeks to see your private doctor so he can examine a skin spot to find out if it cancerous or not when that 3 weeks can make a big difference in treatment options.
yes, it does mean that BMI is not the best one. BMI is a meaningless figure invented in the 19th century that has only marginal meaning in modern healthcare. The only thing a REAL doctor does with an out-of-range BMI is run tests to see if it is meaningless in this case or not, they don't ever use BMI to actually apply health care more advanced than giving generic diet advice that applies to everyone ("eat less sugar, more vegetables and try to get the weight down, OK?".
This is just another example of American "health insurance" companies who are more interested in having some number they can get cheaply to point at and justify why they want to charge some people more money than providing actual, you know, health care. Whether that number is your ZIP code, credit rating, or BMI, it is meaningless to your actual health status, but they're perfectly happy to charge you more or deny you benefits for having the wrong number.
Mythbusters did a good experiment with this, and of course it's true that water from the toilet does spray, as you'd expect. But fecal matter is pretty much everywhere whether you close the lid or not. Your immune system can handle it, else you would be dead already.
Am i the only person to notice that their big, uncensored image hosting site lasted about 2 days before they started removing images by the thousand with no explanation? Entire categories disappeared. I'd like to see slashdot or somebody ask them what the heck the point of the site is even supposed to be, since it certainly isn't a place to put things to link to, even generic LOL forum-type images. There's no indication on their FAQ or anywhere else why or how or who will just decide to remove stuff on a whim.