While scientists did contribute to the IPCC panels report the actual report is written by bureaucrats. If they receive conflicting data from different scientists they merely pick the set that best fits their predetermined outcome.
It's this whole process of politicizing a 'scientific' report that has caused several scientists to make attempts to have their names stricken from the list of contributors.
In short, the IPCC report is nothing close to the consensus report it is presented as being. It is merely a cherry picked summary of some of the worlds scientists findings and hypotheses. There aren't even rules as to which scientists reports is accepted over another's so in some cases recognized experts views were being ignored because they did not fit the narrative.
This article gives a few examples but you can Google around to find more. (linking through a blog post because the actual article is now in the pay-per-view archives)
My point was simply that the Democrat filibuster was news simply because it was such a rarity (the fact you had to dig up a 1968 case basically proves my point there) and because it was not about a legislative change (which is the primary function of the 2 Houses so no big deal) but was over a nomination which is seen by most people as being solely the responsibility of the President.
It was made even more new worthy because there was more than enough votes already confirmed for the nominee (in the Abe Fortas case it was never known if he had the votes or not). Harriet Meyers was a totally different political matter as she did not have the votes from either party and basically everyone was fine with delaying until she would feel pressured and quit, thereby saving face.
Filibusters, or more precisely failure of cloture votes, are a pretty routine occurrences in a legislative body where no one party holds a clear majority so to most people it's just boring political speak and not interesting. The news coverage is also directly proportional to the noise made by the losing side. If the losing party makes a big deal over the fact they have enough votes to pass their proposal but their opponents are preventing an open vote then the news agencies start to take notice. Once again, this is easier to do when the vote is over a nominee with an impeccable record as opposed to some piece of legislation, in this case granting Constitutional rights to people many perceive to be terrorists (and no matter what you think of the detainees that is how it will be portrayed to the people by the proposals opponents); not something most representatives want to be known for.
It was filibustering or the threat of filibustering during Presidential nominations which was considered unprecedented (or relatively rare in any case), not during policy debates.
Just a note for future consideration, when you make the statement "conservative estimate of" you should not follow it with one of the most outrageous discredited claims from a far left anti-war group (I'm assuming you're using the Lancet as your source seeing they are the only organization to make a claim anywhere near that).
You may also want to factor in the deaths that over this time period would have been caused directly by Saddam's actions.
Try some place like Iraq Body Count (also anti-war but still honest in their record keeping) or any of the much more scientific studies done by the UN or other aid groups. None of which come anywhere close to the Lancets numbers.
Using "An Inconvenient Truth" as a basis for chastising the media coverage of Global Warming (or cooling, or climate change, or whatever it's being called today) when the very study they used was already 4 years out of date and was based on a survey of reports that are now up to 15 years old (the search was done on papers covering from 1993 to 2003) and done at a time when climate studies were really just starting to get real funding does not give you a very stable ground from which to throw stones.
The fact is that after the exact same search parameters were used on more recent data (examining papers published between 2004 to present) only 7% outright endorsed the Global Warming hypothesis, 38% accepted it without explicit endorsement, 6% rejected it and the rest were neutral. (link)
Even more interesting is that of all the papers published only one predicted catastrophic outcomes due to climate change. That's 1 out of over 500 published papers.
So perhaps in this case the media you've been watching/reading (which from what I've seen are almost too happy to report that all weather related catastrophes as being caused by man-made global warming) are actually closer to the truth than you'd care to admit.
Here in the US we call it Democratism and it hasn't been a nasty..... Oh wait, never mind.
Fixed it for you.
No political party in the US has attempted to use sketchy and unproven science and attempted to demonize dissenting opinions more so that the Democrats with regards to Global Warming. Or maybe you didn't manage to watch that little piece of fiction made by former presidential hopeful Al 'The Goracle" Gore which despite severalcriticisms including admissions by the man himself that some of the numbers he used were hyped for greater effect, has been pushed as the bible for new age climatologist wannabes even to the point of having it made mandatory viewing in some school districts.
Hey, I agree that that whole situation has been pretty poorly run though I'm pretty sure that's as much as we agree on on that front.
I actually think what the US led coalition is trying to accomplish in Iraq is very good, and each poll seems to indicate that the vast majority of the 25 million Iraqis agree, but partly due to poor forward planning and partly due to political infighting, both domestic and foreign, the whole Iraq campaign has repeatedly taken several turns in the wrong direction.
Did I even mention I lived in the US because I get that impression from your snide asinine remarks. For the record, and I've mentioned this in many of my other comments so it's not hard to find out, I don't. 100% Canadian, born and bred.
Now on to your comments.
First off, if you did any analysis above the level of Moore you would realize that to compare a 2 week European heat wave in which almost 10 times the number of people died in one particular country than any other neighboring one to a 4 month heat wave that still had far fewer deaths does not help your case. If anything it makes the US look much much better.
As for me being "perverted by your hatred for anything "non-conservative" that you think all those US deaths were also caused by liberals on holiday? ", I wasn't the one who originally put forward that argument, it was the explanation put forward by the French Government, but once again that would have taken you about 15 secs on Google to find so I know it was asking too much.
Secondly, I live in a country with socialized medicine and while Moore does drop by he makes fun of the issues we are facing by showing a scene of him asking people in clinic how long they've been there. Even here (Ottawa) clinic visits can takes as little as 10 minutes but if you want to find an actual family doctor, well good luck since most have been refusing new patients for at least the last 2 years.
And if you need anything that requires something more than a simple walk-in can provide, say an MRI, well, as has been previously mentioned in other comments, it's faster to go to the vet; their wait list is non-existent, whereas for us humans it's significantly more. But to help pass the time away you can visit the Ontario government wait time lookup site and see such fun facts as it only takes 3 months to schedule a breast cancer surgery, of course that's only after the 1-4 month wait time for the MRI to help diagnose the disease (hopefully the first test is good).
I've actually had one of my neighbors have to get both knees replaced because the stress on her one good knee from having to do the work of two while she was waiting for her other knee surgery (she was given a 1 year wait time) was too much. Lucky for her they were willing to schedule them both for the same time so that was nice. My former neighbor's friend wasn't so lucky however, she was diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live and to add insult to injury the tests that could have given the doctor a better ability to target her specific cancer couldn't be scheduled until months after the date the doctor told her she would be dead by. But Moore didn't have a camera around to capture her Christmas shopping for her kids and husband in June or making videos for them to play as they were growing up because the earliest the tests that could have possibly given her a chance couldn't be scheduled until January, instead he has the camera follow him into a small clinic in the suburbs to make fun of a very real problem.
And despite your assumptions, I've seen every Michael Moore 'documentary' to date, including Sicko. I'm not basing my views of his movie on knee-jerk reactions but actual first hand knowledge.
For 30 minutes he actually breaks with tradition and puts together a pretty good doc, doing a good job of condemning the many shortfalls of the HMO system, but then he starts to let his bias in and from that point on he returns to his all to familiar extremely one-sided, hide all facts to the contrary style of movie making (his view on the Cuban system is especially telling in this regard). The saddest part is that people like you will see this movie and without doing the slightest bit of outside research accept everything he has to offer as fact. He's a great film maker but like all the other Hollywood fiction, his movies should be taken with a very open mind and a huge grain of salt. U571 is about as historically accurate as a Michael Moore 'documentary'.
Just to clear things up, conservatives have no problem giving money to the poor; in fact every study I've seen on the subject put conservative giving in both time and money well above liberal giving. Conservatives just don't appreciate the government taking their money and throwing more and more of it into historically poorly run welfare systems (and I'm not calling for the abolishment of all social welfare programs, just asking they be better run).
Conservatives believe in personal responsibility and that extends to taking it upon yourself to care for ones neighbor when need be.
For an example of what can happen when all responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden is placed on the government just taken a look at the liberal dreamland of France and the heatwave a few years back. 15,000 deaths because people relied solely on the government to taken care of the elderly and instead of calling up grandma or grandpa and check to see how they were doing they went on their 5 week vacations instead (a small fact Moore just happened to leave out of his glowing portrayal of the French medical system).
But your entire argument is based on sociological differences which cannot be measured or controlled. Sports and other physical based events, separate in terms of maximum ability, which can be much more easily measured so despite your earlier 'argument' to the contrary, statistics matter.
A simple example, a la the Michael Moore school of editing: ------ by AK Marc (707885) Alter Relationship on Monday June 18, @05:17PM (#19553071):
(unimportant pretext)
I wanted to kill all Jews.
(unimportant closing)
But I'm sure that's what you meant to say right? They are your words after all.
The Denver NRA meeting was required by state law to be held when it was and could not be legally canceled. There was no "unscheduled appearance". In fact all activities outside of the members meeting, which I repeat, was legally required, were canceled due to the recent shootings.
And his other example of an "unscheduled appearances" at a recent tragedy actually happened months after the event and had absolutely no connection.
But those are facts and not something we should expect Michael Moore fans to be familiar with.
That's all well and good except according to the FISA judges themselves:
"We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."
This was from an earlier decision where they stated:
"that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."
There was also the five former FISA judges who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee who also agreed that under the current law the President has the authority to order such wiretapping with the caveat that only matters of national security are covered and wiretaps for any other reason would probably constitute a violation of the law.
But I guess we can throw out the opinions of all those judges who actually had it as their primary job to understand an interpret these very laws because you've made your decision.
I'll just let an expert independent reviewer settle the argument, and since you've already used his site in trying to back up your claim I'm sure you will acknowledge his expertise in the field.
So here's the Implosion World/Protec review of the collapse of all 3 WTC buildings. WTC7 is specifically dealt with about 2/3's of the way down. But feel free to dismiss all their on site testimonials, seismograph readings, photographic evidence and analysis of the events.
I actually saw all those sites yesterday before I posted but didn't want to bother throwing all that in to prove my point about how utterly unbelievable it is to think this was a man made collapse knowing how difficult such things are to perform in ideal conditions which does not include having the building being pelted with large chunks of debris or being on fire for several hours.
From your own copy and paste job, you even bolded part of it
"This is by far the trickiest type of explosive demolition project, and there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world that possess enough experience--and insurance--to perform these true building implosions."
So if I understand you correctly your argument is that a job that regularly requires weeks of planning and expert drilling, cabling and placement of explosives that by your own research, "there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world" capable of performing was done in a functioning office building in downtown New York without a single person noticing. And that makes more sense to you than a building collapsing under its own weight when part of it's critical support structure was significantly weakened by both a well fueled fire and debris from the collapse of a neighboring building.
I'm amazed at the claim so many people make that "buildings do not collapse in their footprint on their own" as some sort of proof that the collapse of the buildings were controlled. Do you think demolition engineers somehow break the laws of physics in performing their work; no, they simply use their knowledge of physics and engineering to create a situation most likely to result in a clean collapse but that in no way means that those same conditions can not occur in 'the wild', so to speak. Their are even some examples of just such collapses on some 'truther' sites as they have to somehow discredit their similarity to the WTC collapses to make their theory work.
The basic rule for a controlled demo is to weaken the base so that the weight of the building will cause it to fall. Gravity wants it to fall straight down. Buildings tend to topple over when there is still sufficient support in at least part of the lower levels to sustain the weight above the weakened point. When almost the entire weight of the building is above the weakened point, and the building is designed with a very low tolerance to weight distribution, there is simply no way for the lower levels to be able to put up much resistance to gravity and hence it will collapse.
As for other building suffering greater damage, what's your point. Did all of these building share WTC7's unique design? Did they all have large fuel reserves on the premises and high pressure fuel lines running through the building? Were they all over 40 stories and suffer significant damage to their lower levels near one of their primary support trusses?
Call me crazy but maybe the large chunk taken out of the bottom 10-20 stories (which happen to be where the support trusses were located) as well as a building wide fire had something to do with that one.
Just a guess.
But then again the argument that "never in the history of 110 story buildings collapsing into neighboring 40 story buildings with funky architectural design have they ever collapsed" holds up equally well for this case.
Any yet the very first link when searching for WTC7 DAMAGE shows a clear picture of the building with a large chunk taken out of the lower section as well as first hand accounts of the damage from people who saw it first hand.
The fact they also reference the Lancet studies to back up their claims of unreported atrocities clearly shows the authors bias.
Many of their underreported stories are underreported simply because they can't find a second source to back up the claims made. Even in the most politically biased news rooms they like to cover themselves with some verifiable facts.
The UN is not a single entity that has an opinion one way or the other as to what actions should be taken.
The fact is any approval for military action based on repeated violations of the UN's own sanctions was never going to happen in a organization where coutries such as France and Russia have veto power while at the same time are sitting on illegal contracts with Saddam worth billions of dollars if they could simply get those same sanctions lifted.
The UN is now, and has been for a very long time, a symbol of the worst in international politics. Simply glance at the chairs of their human rights panels and their complete inaction in Darfur to see just how messed up they are.
But every President, at least in the last 20, has used this same 'executive power' regardless of any state of war. And coincidentally enough Clinton did use it as part of the 'war on drugs' with actual physical searches and seizures not just for international phone calls.
It only became an issue when an ideologically driven group of reporters chose to make a program the FISA court judges themselves have repeatedly said they have no jurisdiction over, an issue. No one was filing suit. No one was complaining until the story was printed in the papers. Much like the perfectly legal bank tracking program which was also exposed for mainly ideological reasons.
Perhaps the parent could have just said 'average' instead of 'real' but everyone, including you I'm assuming, knows what they meant.
You seem to be stuck on a definition of gamers that only gamers themselves use; 1 system is an average person, all 3 is a gamer. The parent is using the definition as an average person would consider it; own on console = gamer, period.
Gamers are a relatively small specialized subset of the general population and previously the big 3 were content to fight over their share of that market. Nintendo has chosen to break ranks with other game manufacturers and instead of focusing on the biggest, flashiest, fastest system decided to make it the friendliest, thereby allowing them access a market many times the size of their competitors.
By sacrificing graphics for playability they risk losing the bleeding edge gamers which make up a significant portion of gamers on the whole but they are still nothing compared to the number of previously untapped non-gamers out there.
Of all the people I know that have or want a Wii, the majority have never owned any game system before. Most have never played anything more than a few minutes of Donkey Kong or Pac Man when someone handed them a controller to make a snack run but after getting their hands on it at a store demo or a friend/family members place they all want one. I have a friend whose 60+ year old parents stood in line to get a machine a few weeks after it came out because they wanted their own to lower their fitness age in Wii Sports and beat him. These are the people Nintendo was hoping to attract and so far it's worked.
Many of their games may be simplistic and very cartoon like, which you may equate with being for children, but they are also designed that way to make it much easier for a non-gamer to get into and play.
I happen to have a Wii and a 360 and admit I play the 360 much more often (though I'm mostly back to PC right now), but whenever I have non-gaming friends over, almost without hesitation, the Wiimotes come out. I doubt they even know what the large Microsoft branded DVD player next to the Wii even is. With my game playing friends it's about 50/50.
It amazes me that not one thinking person of the liberal persuasion has yet to wonder how Haliburton ever survived the Clinton years. You'd think that they just suddenly appeared once Bush became President.
Haliburton has been given overpriced no-bid contracts under every administration they have existed under. In fact they did quite well under Clinton even receiving contracts in situations when another company held the contract as primary service provider (a competitive contract process which is suppose to determine who gets first dibs on adhoc deals). It's the nature of the business they're in. They fall into a niche market with only 1 or 2 real competitors. It's hard to have a competitive bidding process, which can take years under government rules, when time constraints are looming.
Disaster recovery, international security, these are the type of things you want an experienced company to handle and not the type of things you can take 6-18 months to choose and they have taken full advantage of that; sometimes legally and sometimes not but that has more to do with standard corporate greed than who is in the oval office at the time.
An if they are such an evil Republican company why has Soros bought over $60 million in shares. It's hard to get more idologically left than George Soros (well as long as he's talking about how you spend your money).
If you look at most of the Reuters/AP fauxtography issues it boils down to lazy or partisan photogs and editors, not a lack of technology to verify the authenticity of the pictures.
Bad cloning, the same subjects being shot from different angles and then being used to portray different incidents, or in Times case (it might have been Newsweek originally) an editor taking the photogs own description and then changing it to try and make a accidental tire fire look like a downed Israeli jet. Just look at the Qana and especially the Al-Durah incidents, these were not technological problems but problems with bias reporters in the field (most agencies use local stringers which can owe allegiances to anyone). Anderson Cooper described the situation perfectly when talking about how Hezbollah would drive ambulances up and down the road while eager photographers snapped 'action' shots.
Slashdot Mirror
While scientists did contribute to the IPCC panels report the actual report is written by bureaucrats. If they receive conflicting data from different scientists they merely pick the set that best fits their predetermined outcome.
It's this whole process of politicizing a 'scientific' report that has caused several scientists to make attempts to have their names stricken from the list of contributors.
In short, the IPCC report is nothing close to the consensus report it is presented as being. It is merely a cherry picked summary of some of the worlds scientists findings and hypotheses. There aren't even rules as to which scientists reports is accepted over another's so in some cases recognized experts views were being ignored because they did not fit the narrative.
This article gives a few examples but you can Google around to find more. (linking through a blog post because the actual article is now in the pay-per-view archives)
My point was simply that the Democrat filibuster was news simply because it was such a rarity (the fact you had to dig up a 1968 case basically proves my point there) and because it was not about a legislative change (which is the primary function of the 2 Houses so no big deal) but was over a nomination which is seen by most people as being solely the responsibility of the President.
It was made even more new worthy because there was more than enough votes already confirmed for the nominee (in the Abe Fortas case it was never known if he had the votes or not). Harriet Meyers was a totally different political matter as she did not have the votes from either party and basically everyone was fine with delaying until she would feel pressured and quit, thereby saving face.
Filibusters, or more precisely failure of cloture votes, are a pretty routine occurrences in a legislative body where no one party holds a clear majority so to most people it's just boring political speak and not interesting. The news coverage is also directly proportional to the noise made by the losing side. If the losing party makes a big deal over the fact they have enough votes to pass their proposal but their opponents are preventing an open vote then the news agencies start to take notice. Once again, this is easier to do when the vote is over a nominee with an impeccable record as opposed to some piece of legislation, in this case granting Constitutional rights to people many perceive to be terrorists (and no matter what you think of the detainees that is how it will be portrayed to the people by the proposals opponents); not something most representatives want to be known for.
The key word in you post was "nomination".
It was filibustering or the threat of filibustering during Presidential nominations which was considered unprecedented (or relatively rare in any case), not during policy debates.
Just a note for future consideration, when you make the statement "conservative estimate of" you should not follow it with one of the most outrageous discredited claims from a far left anti-war group (I'm assuming you're using the Lancet as your source seeing they are the only organization to make a claim anywhere near that).
You may also want to factor in the deaths that over this time period would have been caused directly by Saddam's actions.
Try some place like Iraq Body Count (also anti-war but still honest in their record keeping) or any of the much more scientific studies done by the UN or other aid groups. None of which come anywhere close to the Lancets numbers.
Using "An Inconvenient Truth" as a basis for chastising the media coverage of Global Warming (or cooling, or climate change, or whatever it's being called today) when the very study they used was already 4 years out of date and was based on a survey of reports that are now up to 15 years old (the search was done on papers covering from 1993 to 2003) and done at a time when climate studies were really just starting to get real funding does not give you a very stable ground from which to throw stones.
The fact is that after the exact same search parameters were used on more recent data (examining papers published between 2004 to present) only 7% outright endorsed the Global Warming hypothesis, 38% accepted it without explicit endorsement, 6% rejected it and the rest were neutral. (link)
Even more interesting is that of all the papers published only one predicted catastrophic outcomes due to climate change. That's 1 out of over 500 published papers.
So perhaps in this case the media you've been watching/reading (which from what I've seen are almost too happy to report that all weather related catastrophes as being caused by man-made global warming) are actually closer to the truth than you'd care to admit.
Fixed it for you.
No political party in the US has attempted to use sketchy and unproven science and attempted to demonize dissenting opinions more so that the Democrats with regards to Global Warming. Or maybe you didn't manage to watch that little piece of fiction made by former presidential hopeful Al 'The Goracle" Gore which despite several criticisms including admissions by the man himself that some of the numbers he used were hyped for greater effect, has been pushed as the bible for new age climatologist wannabes even to the point of having it made mandatory viewing in some school districts.
Hey, I agree that that whole situation has been pretty poorly run though I'm pretty sure that's as much as we agree on on that front.
I actually think what the US led coalition is trying to accomplish in Iraq is very good, and each poll seems to indicate that the vast majority of the 25 million Iraqis agree, but partly due to poor forward planning and partly due to political infighting, both domestic and foreign, the whole Iraq campaign has repeatedly taken several turns in the wrong direction.
Wow, well I guess I know who took out the copy of the Communist manifesto from the library.
Did I even mention I lived in the US because I get that impression from your snide asinine remarks. For the record, and I've mentioned this in many of my other comments so it's not hard to find out, I don't. 100% Canadian, born and bred.
Now on to your comments.
First off, if you did any analysis above the level of Moore you would realize that to compare a 2 week European heat wave in which almost 10 times the number of people died in one particular country than any other neighboring one to a 4 month heat wave that still had far fewer deaths does not help your case. If anything it makes the US look much much better.
As for me being "perverted by your hatred for anything "non-conservative" that you think all those US deaths were also caused by liberals on holiday? ", I wasn't the one who originally put forward that argument, it was the explanation put forward by the French Government, but once again that would have taken you about 15 secs on Google to find so I know it was asking too much.
Secondly, I live in a country with socialized medicine and while Moore does drop by he makes fun of the issues we are facing by showing a scene of him asking people in clinic how long they've been there. Even here (Ottawa) clinic visits can takes as little as 10 minutes but if you want to find an actual family doctor, well good luck since most have been refusing new patients for at least the last 2 years.
And if you need anything that requires something more than a simple walk-in can provide, say an MRI, well, as has been previously mentioned in other comments, it's faster to go to the vet; their wait list is non-existent, whereas for us humans it's significantly more. But to help pass the time away you can visit the Ontario government wait time lookup site and see such fun facts as it only takes 3 months to schedule a breast cancer surgery, of course that's only after the 1-4 month wait time for the MRI to help diagnose the disease (hopefully the first test is good).
I've actually had one of my neighbors have to get both knees replaced because the stress on her one good knee from having to do the work of two while she was waiting for her other knee surgery (she was given a 1 year wait time) was too much. Lucky for her they were willing to schedule them both for the same time so that was nice. My former neighbor's friend wasn't so lucky however, she was diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live and to add insult to injury the tests that could have given the doctor a better ability to target her specific cancer couldn't be scheduled until months after the date the doctor told her she would be dead by. But Moore didn't have a camera around to capture her Christmas shopping for her kids and husband in June or making videos for them to play as they were growing up because the earliest the tests that could have possibly given her a chance couldn't be scheduled until January, instead he has the camera follow him into a small clinic in the suburbs to make fun of a very real problem.
And despite your assumptions, I've seen every Michael Moore 'documentary' to date, including Sicko. I'm not basing my views of his movie on knee-jerk reactions but actual first hand knowledge.
For 30 minutes he actually breaks with tradition and puts together a pretty good doc, doing a good job of condemning the many shortfalls of the HMO system, but then he starts to let his bias in and from that point on he returns to his all to familiar extremely one-sided, hide all facts to the contrary style of movie making (his view on the Cuban system is especially telling in this regard). The saddest part is that people like you will see this movie and without doing the slightest bit of outside research accept everything he has to offer as fact. He's a great film maker but like all the other Hollywood fiction, his movies should be taken with a very open mind and a huge grain of salt. U571 is about as historically accurate as a Michael Moore 'documentary'.
Just to clear things up, conservatives have no problem giving money to the poor; in fact every study I've seen on the subject put conservative giving in both time and money well above liberal giving. Conservatives just don't appreciate the government taking their money and throwing more and more of it into historically poorly run welfare systems (and I'm not calling for the abolishment of all social welfare programs, just asking they be better run).
Conservatives believe in personal responsibility and that extends to taking it upon yourself to care for ones neighbor when need be.
For an example of what can happen when all responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden is placed on the government just taken a look at the liberal dreamland of France and the heatwave a few years back. 15,000 deaths because people relied solely on the government to taken care of the elderly and instead of calling up grandma or grandpa and check to see how they were doing they went on their 5 week vacations instead (a small fact Moore just happened to leave out of his glowing portrayal of the French medical system).
But your entire argument is based on sociological differences which cannot be measured or controlled. Sports and other physical based events, separate in terms of maximum ability, which can be much more easily measured so despite your earlier 'argument' to the contrary, statistics matter.
------
by AK Marc (707885) Alter Relationship on Monday June 18, @05:17PM (#19553071):
(unimportant pretext)
(unimportant closing)
But I'm sure that's what you meant to say right? They are your words after all.
The Denver NRA meeting was required by state law to be held when it was and could not be legally canceled. There was no "unscheduled appearance". In fact all activities outside of the members meeting, which I repeat, was legally required, were canceled due to the recent shootings.
And his other example of an "unscheduled appearances" at a recent tragedy actually happened months after the event and had absolutely no connection.
But those are facts and not something we should expect Michael Moore fans to be familiar with.
This was from an earlier decision where they stated:
There was also the five former FISA judges who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee who also agreed that under the current law the President has the authority to order such wiretapping with the caveat that only matters of national security are covered and wiretaps for any other reason would probably constitute a violation of the law.
But I guess we can throw out the opinions of all those judges who actually had it as their primary job to understand an interpret these very laws because you've made your decision.
I'll just let an expert independent reviewer settle the argument, and since you've already used his site in trying to back up your claim I'm sure you will acknowledge his expertise in the field.
So here's the Implosion World/Protec review of the collapse of all 3 WTC buildings. WTC7 is specifically dealt with about 2/3's of the way down. But feel free to dismiss all their on site testimonials, seismograph readings, photographic evidence and analysis of the events.
From your own copy and paste job, you even bolded part of it
So if I understand you correctly your argument is that a job that regularly requires weeks of planning and expert drilling, cabling and placement of explosives that by your own research, "there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world" capable of performing was done in a functioning office building in downtown New York without a single person noticing. And that makes more sense to you than a building collapsing under its own weight when part of it's critical support structure was significantly weakened by both a well fueled fire and debris from the collapse of a neighboring building.
I'm amazed at the claim so many people make that "buildings do not collapse in their footprint on their own" as some sort of proof that the collapse of the buildings were controlled. Do you think demolition engineers somehow break the laws of physics in performing their work; no, they simply use their knowledge of physics and engineering to create a situation most likely to result in a clean collapse but that in no way means that those same conditions can not occur in 'the wild', so to speak. Their are even some examples of just such collapses on some 'truther' sites as they have to somehow discredit their similarity to the WTC collapses to make their theory work.
The basic rule for a controlled demo is to weaken the base so that the weight of the building will cause it to fall. Gravity wants it to fall straight down. Buildings tend to topple over when there is still sufficient support in at least part of the lower levels to sustain the weight above the weakened point. When almost the entire weight of the building is above the weakened point, and the building is designed with a very low tolerance to weight distribution, there is simply no way for the lower levels to be able to put up much resistance to gravity and hence it will collapse.
As for other building suffering greater damage, what's your point. Did all of these building share WTC7's unique design? Did they all have large fuel reserves on the premises and high pressure fuel lines running through the building? Were they all over 40 stories and suffer significant damage to their lower levels near one of their primary support trusses?
Call me crazy but maybe the large chunk taken out of the bottom 10-20 stories (which happen to be where the support trusses were located) as well as a building wide fire had something to do with that one.
Just a guess.
But then again the argument that "never in the history of 110 story buildings collapsing into neighboring 40 story buildings with funky architectural design have they ever collapsed" holds up equally well for this case.
Any yet the very first link when searching for WTC7 DAMAGE shows a clear picture of the building with a large chunk taken out of the lower section as well as first hand accounts of the damage from people who saw it first hand.
Funny that.
The fact they also reference the Lancet studies to back up their claims of unreported atrocities clearly shows the authors bias.
Many of their underreported stories are underreported simply because they can't find a second source to back up the claims made. Even in the most politically biased news rooms they like to cover themselves with some verifiable facts.
The UN is not a single entity that has an opinion one way or the other as to what actions should be taken.
The fact is any approval for military action based on repeated violations of the UN's own sanctions was never going to happen in a organization where coutries such as France and Russia have veto power while at the same time are sitting on illegal contracts with Saddam worth billions of dollars if they could simply get those same sanctions lifted.
The UN is now, and has been for a very long time, a symbol of the worst in international politics. Simply glance at the chairs of their human rights panels and their complete inaction in Darfur to see just how messed up they are.
But every President, at least in the last 20, has used this same 'executive power' regardless of any state of war. And coincidentally enough Clinton did use it as part of the 'war on drugs' with actual physical searches and seizures not just for international phone calls.
It only became an issue when an ideologically driven group of reporters chose to make a program the FISA court judges themselves have repeatedly said they have no jurisdiction over, an issue. No one was filing suit. No one was complaining until the story was printed in the papers. Much like the perfectly legal bank tracking program which was also exposed for mainly ideological reasons.
Perhaps the parent could have just said 'average' instead of 'real' but everyone, including you I'm assuming, knows what they meant.
You seem to be stuck on a definition of gamers that only gamers themselves use; 1 system is an average person, all 3 is a gamer. The parent is using the definition as an average person would consider it; own on console = gamer, period.
Gamers are a relatively small specialized subset of the general population and previously the big 3 were content to fight over their share of that market. Nintendo has chosen to break ranks with other game manufacturers and instead of focusing on the biggest, flashiest, fastest system decided to make it the friendliest, thereby allowing them access a market many times the size of their competitors.
By sacrificing graphics for playability they risk losing the bleeding edge gamers which make up a significant portion of gamers on the whole but they are still nothing compared to the number of previously untapped non-gamers out there.
Of all the people I know that have or want a Wii, the majority have never owned any game system before. Most have never played anything more than a few minutes of Donkey Kong or Pac Man when someone handed them a controller to make a snack run but after getting their hands on it at a store demo or a friend/family members place they all want one. I have a friend whose 60+ year old parents stood in line to get a machine a few weeks after it came out because they wanted their own to lower their fitness age in Wii Sports and beat him. These are the people Nintendo was hoping to attract and so far it's worked.
Many of their games may be simplistic and very cartoon like, which you may equate with being for children, but they are also designed that way to make it much easier for a non-gamer to get into and play.
I happen to have a Wii and a 360 and admit I play the 360 much more often (though I'm mostly back to PC right now), but whenever I have non-gaming friends over, almost without hesitation, the Wiimotes come out. I doubt they even know what the large Microsoft branded DVD player next to the Wii even is. With my game playing friends it's about 50/50.
It amazes me that not one thinking person of the liberal persuasion has yet to wonder how Haliburton ever survived the Clinton years. You'd think that they just suddenly appeared once Bush became President.
Haliburton has been given overpriced no-bid contracts under every administration they have existed under. In fact they did quite well under Clinton even receiving contracts in situations when another company held the contract as primary service provider (a competitive contract process which is suppose to determine who gets first dibs on adhoc deals). It's the nature of the business they're in. They fall into a niche market with only 1 or 2 real competitors. It's hard to have a competitive bidding process, which can take years under government rules, when time constraints are looming.
Disaster recovery, international security, these are the type of things you want an experienced company to handle and not the type of things you can take 6-18 months to choose and they have taken full advantage of that; sometimes legally and sometimes not but that has more to do with standard corporate greed than who is in the oval office at the time.
An if they are such an evil Republican company why has Soros bought over $60 million in shares. It's hard to get more idologically left than George Soros (well as long as he's talking about how you spend your money).
If you look at most of the Reuters/AP fauxtography issues it boils down to lazy or partisan photogs and editors, not a lack of technology to verify the authenticity of the pictures.
Bad cloning, the same subjects being shot from different angles and then being used to portray different incidents, or in Times case (it might have been Newsweek originally) an editor taking the photogs own description and then changing it to try and make a accidental tire fire look like a downed Israeli jet. Just look at the Qana and especially the Al-Durah incidents, these were not technological problems but problems with bias reporters in the field (most agencies use local stringers which can owe allegiances to anyone). Anderson Cooper described the situation perfectly when talking about how Hezbollah would drive ambulances up and down the road while eager photographers snapped 'action' shots.
Nothing Adobe can put out will fix that mess.