I know all that. What I'm saying is that if Einstein is off by 0.05%, that's pretty big. Einstein's extra terms on Newton's equations are a much smaller improvement on Newton, and an improvement on Einstein to cover that 0.05% would be a much bigger improvement on Einstein.
It's all relative (pun intended), and the news that Einstein is off by so much is not so flattering to Einstein.
I think it can, unless the US uses the unacceptable "Iraq" situation the Kurds are sort of opting out of as an excuse to back the Turks into "securing" that Kurdistan.
OTOH, if the Kurds can leverage free their Iranian province, that could be the lynchpin for stabilizing the region, after a period of intense violent turmoil. Ditto their Syrian province. And even Turkey, though I don't see that giant oil chunk of EU Turkey going without overwhelming repercussions. Even better would be (Iraqi) Kurdistan joining Turkey in a "free trade zone", giving momentum to similar possibilities with Syria, if it joined. The best possible transformation would be Lebanon and Jordan joining a free trade zone, and Turkey/Kurdistan, leveraging Syria into a larger (and more attractive) association with either one. That would also open the chances for Israel's connections with both Jordan and Turkey to include Israel, and unite them all.
There's surely a lot of the standard show stoppers in the way of any of that. But a free Kurdistan is exactly the demonstration of democracy and self-determiniation in the region that the US pretends we're creating in federal Iraq. The economics are so compelling, even compared to the familiar war economies that have driven those countries for millennia. Probably we'll have to see the oil run out in those relatively small producing countries before we can see any progress based on rational interests, rather than murder, greed and fear.
But any way I look at it. the Kurds are the only ones doing anything right in the region.
I think the main factor in the USA is that Bush is financing his crimes by sending us $45-69 TRILLION into debt while cutting taxes. That makes it a lot harder for Americans to see how these crimes are screwing us, as opposed to just Iraqis, or people who volunteered for the National Guard or military because they needed the benefits.
Germans were suffering though a postwar depression in the 1920s, then even worse in the 1930s. While that pit of despair spawned a lot of the "nothing to lose, everything to gain" attitude, it also kept a lot of Germans connected to reality. Americans have little reality but "reality TV". And we're trained to believe that our political system lets us solve differences without revolutions, while most of Europe is new at that game.
I'm really not enjoying the USA learning the lessons of fascism that we just watched during the mid 20th Century.
GoDaddy's IPO attempt failed last month, as their Net company continues to lose money. They're spinning as "we didn't want to go public, anyway". But maybe they've got bigger problems.
After all, GoDaddy is owned by a Conservative making his fortune from domain squatting. I expect there's quite a lot going on under the hood. I'm looking forward to his explanation, as are many, many people who registered with GoDaddy who expect due process before sudden shutdown.
Interestingly, alkaline solutions offer greater power density than hydrogen. So maybe the "new standard" alkaline batteries will be fuelcells.
What I really want to see is "plastic" catalyst membranes in these fuelcells. That will make the cells cheap and easily replaceable, lowering the TCO consistent with the cheap fuel. It might need to be "new standard" plastic, carbon fullerenes with nanoscale features catalyzing the process. But if we can avoid the rare earth and precious metal elements fuelcells often require, we can more easily switch our power systems over to the cleaner, smaller, cheaper systems. Someday, a phone that can talk longer than I can.
Isn't Einstein's relativity just a much smaller magnitude extra term on Newton's mechanics? Negligible at human scales. Einstein's correction to Newton was much less than 0.05%. If relativity is really as much as 0.05% off, that leaves a vast amount of unexplained phenomena in our big Universe.
I'm confused by your saying that 7960/SIP/Asterisk requires an expensive Cisco license. I thought you can just buy a "spare" phone without a bundled license for relatively cheap, then use Asterisk as the server, without needing any $ Cisco licenses. That's what the story we're discussing about SHSU is about, isn't it?
I'd like to use the builtin SCCP, because I'd like to offer services to people already running these phones with SCCP.
But I also want SIP on my own 7970. I tried to follow the voip-info.org wiki pages, but they're incomplete, and there's apparently some incompatability problems with some recent firmware. I can't even tell how exactly to find out which versions of the files are currently installed on the phone.
If you'd like to help me get up, I'd love to pick your brain a little. Maybe I could email you, rather than drilling really offtopic in this thread?
SCCP might be crappy, but it's already installed on many thousands of Cisco phones out in the field and in their sales pipeline. So it represents an installed base - a target audience/market for development that doesn't require them to change much. Better Asterisk support for SCCP can compensate for its problems, while giving us control over the innards of the system.
Getting off Cisco CM is just the first step into freedom.
The Cisco 7970G uses XML for its configs and customizable GUI (and HUI) connected to selectable features. Its startup screen has the Java logo. What OS is it running? How do I get it to download and run Java applets? How can I code, install and run native apps?
These little touchscreen phones should offer complete portable offices that even a PHB can use anywhere, without having to search for the "any key". Now that the server is open, how do we open the clients that run on the local HW?
Deduce from the Republican Congress under both Clinton and Bush Jr, and the differences in the debt between the two presidents.
The president makes the budget, Congress passes it. Funny how you Republicans claim the president can fix the economy when you're running for that office, but disclaim all responsibility when you've blown it with the office.
I don't give Bush any credit for lying us into Iraq, turning it into a neverending bloodbath, while letting us lose Afghanistan and leave bin Laden to roam free. I blame him for that, like I blame him for the $45 TRILLION debt he's given us. I blame him for letting Osama go at Tora Bora, and then again two weeks ago while his Pakistani allies surrendered N Waziristan to Osama and his Taliban, and Bush backed them up. And I blame him for the Republican Drug Push called "Medicare Part D" that you'd like to pretend is some kind of exception.
Your post is out of some delusional 2002. "The entire world believed Saddam to have WMD"? How about the thousands of Americans in the streets saying he didn't, the dozens of Democratic Congressmembers, the people in the CIA and State Department saying we don't believe it?
Everything you're prattling is off the corporate TV shows. "Islamic fascism"? Iraq making me "proud to be an American"? Iraq is better off? We're better off? Only on your Republican TV shows. You vidiots have disgraced America with every touch of your fool fingers. That O'Reilly jingoism isn't fooling many anymore. Don't make me sick by wagging it around me.
I should have just repeated your insane statement about Iraq that "people over there aren't oppressed any more", and laughed in your face. You and the rest of your dwindling zombie Bushworshipper army make me ashamed to be "American", so long as that term describes you too.
IRV would encourage lots of candidates outside the parties to run. The popular "throwing away your vote" threat would disappear. Once the duopoly is broken, the parties will also finally react to "coopt the positions" of these alternate candidates. So while IRV might keep the same parties in power, it would change them to represent a much broader spectrum of positions. Which is what I care about.
Of course there's a chicken/egg problem - the parties won't give up their duopoly on the choices. But American politics does often change structure after a crisis. We're in a crisis now. The recent Lieberman/Lamont Democratic primary in Connecticut gave value for even powerful incumbents to IRV. And for primaries, where power is kept "in the family" is the place to start. IRV has already got momentum.
That's how politics works. It's a statistical game of incremental changes in one scope that lead to tipping points which push sudden changes into other, usually larger, scopes. That's why the essential work of politics is keeping the discussions going, flipping every little opportunity until it builds a wave that washes the whole town clean.
George Bush appointed the Chair of the FCC which is shredding the report, which gave away the media control the report indicts. He's been president with a Republican Congress for over 6 years - of course he's responsible for the policies of his appointees and lockstep partisans, especially when they're identical to his own policies. It's not "Flamebait" to call a crook a crook.
News != surprise is a "duh" point ignored by the original post, but certainly worth mentioning other than in sarcasm, which I did. Hardly "Flamebait" to assert the nonsarcastic truth.
Bush said he creates low expectations to succeed, and is meeting them. Quoting him and backing him up isn't "Flamebait".
I never said the FCC is up for election, but throwing out the Republicans who legislate in cooperation with their Bush FCC is certainly a way to get them to stop selling us out and shredding the truth. Saying that we're heading into an election to change the problem we're discussing isn't "Flamebait".
I got mod'ed "Flamebait" by exactly the kind of Republican worshippers as you, except they're too scared to even post with a userID. They're Republicans, they're TrollMod'ing me to produce nothing useful in the discussion but the predictable response of suppressing my post. While you try to dismiss Bush's responsibility for his government by the flimsiest assertions. You Republican apologists are coming out of the woodwork with "they're both to blame" now that it's undeniable that Republicans are to blame for these messes. Some of you TrollMod, some of you come out with loads of crap like the one you just posted.
All you've got is blather about how my reasonable post is "foaming at the mouth". It's "Flamebait" to you the same way Iraq was begging for invasion. Peddle your fake coverups for Bush's Republicans while you can. You've only got less than 7 weeks now to make it count.
No, you're the only one of us who failed American history. I got a perfect score on my AP History test, and have learned (and lived) much more in the decades since.
"Pure democracy" doesn't even mean "mob rule", even if we had the Athenian democracy that lasted about 200 years.
America has one of the many kinds of "people powered" democracies, constitutional republican democracy. It's not like we went to the government store and picked "democracy" out of the "ideologies" rack. Despite the "Republican" work on destroying elections and gaming the counterdemocratic Electoral College, we are primarily democratic, to produce a republic, according to a constitution that defines further complex interactions and differences from "pure" forms.
So I'm not interested in your weird notion that we're replacing our system with the mob rule that you fantasize about. Or your failure to not only recognize American history, but that you're talking about polticial science, which is very distinct from that other subject you failed.
You want to split hairs on the wrong dog, make sarcastic comments about nonsense, try it on someone who thinks your screaming wrong politics is right because you scream it the loudest.
Funny how you don't think that Powell's FCC wrote the report and that Martin is shredding it along with his "purge". Especially since Martin changed the rules under the projections contradicted by this report. And funny how you don't match Bush's appointment of Martin as chief and Clinton's of Powell as a mere member with the differences between their FCCs. Some how "it's Clinton's fault".
That's rooted in some truth. Powell's term chairing the FCC was defined by the Republican Congress whose laws it had to work. Enhanced by Clinton's own right-of-center corporate policies, and his "seeking the middle" even as it was dragged further rightwards by extreme rightwing activism.
You are a victim of the "Overton Window". It's a political technique used to great effect mainly by rightist activists. People like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh (among many, like James Dobson and Fred Phelps) demand extreme positions that serve not to deliver those positions in reality. Rather they just drag the limited window of public acceptance across the entire political spectrum further towards their positions. It's the political mechanics of the "straw man" argument in action, fake arguments designed only to make alternatives look better than what is being argued.
Your example of MoveOn.org and Net Neutrality is related. Telcos, cablecos and other monopolistic ISPs are paying Congress and Hollywood/MadisonAve millions to legislate destroying the "level playing field" of the Internet. MoveOn.org, which survives only on that openness, takes a position to keep it open. The dispute starts out extremely unbalanced, as Net Neutrality is in the center of the possibilities (100% free, mandatory, universal Internet use is the other extreme from the ISPs' position). MoveOn.org arrived after Net Neutrality was already threatened (even doomed, if left on course) by Republicans like Senator Ted Stevens and the rest of his Congressional controlling majority. Somehow MoveOn.org is demonized for making the already-partisan debate "partisan" by opposing the target of their standard mission, which was now threatening their existence. It's related to the Overton Window because the debate is reduced to some fake "balance" between the center and the extreme right, dragging it far right of center. No one of consequence in America even takes the far left position, because even the center is demonized as being "far left".
The fact is that Bush's Republican Party has polarized the country as much as in the depths of the Vietnam War, rolling towards Civil War proportions. When Democrats and their allies respond within that polarized context they were thrust into, they are framed as the polarizers. When they get "vitriolic" about things like the Iraq War, letting Osama run loose, $45 TRILLION debts, illegal eavesdropping, torture, they're somehow the ones making it hard to get the truth.
I suggest you look closer at the partisan boundaries created by the Republican Party. Including John McCain, now dropping like a hot potato his "moderate" positions not only with theocrats, but also with torturers. While Lieberman's crass abuse of Connecticut Democrats and his Democrat brand reveals a man interested only in power, ready to discard his constituents and allies whenever he wants more. "Bipartisan" through collaboration with an unacceptable policy. Those two Republicans (despite their pandering to get the "moderate" crumbs left over by the Party) are betrayers, even of the "core values" they most stand for. If you're that distracted by them as "moderate", when they'd be obvious rightwingers without the Overton Window to distort the scene, then you need to open the window and look directly at these awful fakes.
As "social security" it was not invented by FDR (or his policy staff). As "Social Security", the specific program by name, it certainly was.
The universal application to all American labor, whether or not formally organized, was also a sensible way to introduce some of the socialism Americans wanted after WWII (like most people did), without leaving it as a draw to only unions, which would compete with the government.
We have a constitutional democratic republic (if we can keep it). If you understand our kind of democracy, you understand that the main benefit of it is producing the consent of the governed, by which government derives its right to exist. Everyone must vote. What we lose in quality we make up in quantity - quantity of people included in the system, who won't split off to an ungovernable mass that threatens everyone's rights. That's democracy.
The gradual opening of America's voting entitlement to nearly universal adult inclusion reflects the gradual increase in power of the gradually included classes of people. That shows how our system started as a compromise with an aristocratic class of white male landowners, but grew into a broader compromise and greater stability. The more those neighbors vote, the more stable our country is, modifying itself to reflect itself. That's the Constitution at work.
The place for smart people with more power is in the representative jobs. That means the three branches of government, which need smart Congressmembers, executives and justices. Who set policies that affect billions of people, for decades or centuries. Those people need the kind of intelligence that is a model of the real world and the people who live in it. A republic, whose representatives of the public must represent the public in interests, though smart enough to represent only our best interests as often as possible. That's our republic.
If we can keep it. We can elect "Republicans" in contradictary name only, who misrepresent us. We can discard the Constitution as these Republicans continually strive to do, through violation and debased amendments like flagburning and homophobia. But that is the bad work of others. The part where the people can directly throw away our republic is by ignoring our role of the "demo" in "democracy". When we don't vote, when we stop each other from voting, when we don't help each other vote, we have already discarded the democracy. Mere constitutional republics all over the world front for tyranny, like the Shah's Iran and so many others ruled for and by some people, not all of the people.
We've already lost so much of our Constitutional democratic republic. The most irreparable damage is to throw away the democracy from which the Constitution and the representatives derive their power.
How have Democrats distracted us from terrorism even one tiny bit? If anything, they're too pussy to call bullshit on all the fake terrorism the Republicans create as "reality" for their media manipulation.
All your crap about how Democrats are somehow pulling my strings, the strings of the media and the government - what are you talking about? Every charge I make against Bush is specific, substantiated, and true. You think Karl Rove is some kind of coatcheck girl at the White House? He's the stringpuller, the election gamer. What kind of insanity compels you to spit the name of John Murtha in response, except your own indoctrination by rightwing talkradio? Because nothing else has the power to make that kind of association. Certainly not anything to do with Murtha.
Down to the FCC. The current FCC has been shaken up since Bush's administration - very much for the worse. That shakeup by the new administration is exactly how the FCC is run. It's Bush's FCC that's shredding the antimonopoly report we're talking about, because it contradicts the handover Bush's FCC ordered under predictions contrary to the facts in the shredded document.
Come back with some facts showing that any of what you spewed has any basis in fact. Because all you just threw at the page is just an elaborate "it's not Bush's fault, because there's someone else in the phonebook to blame".
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I know all that. What I'm saying is that if Einstein is off by 0.05%, that's pretty big. Einstein's extra terms on Newton's equations are a much smaller improvement on Newton, and an improvement on Einstein to cover that 0.05% would be a much bigger improvement on Einstein.
It's all relative (pun intended), and the news that Einstein is off by so much is not so flattering to Einstein.
I think it can, unless the US uses the unacceptable "Iraq" situation the Kurds are sort of opting out of as an excuse to back the Turks into "securing" that Kurdistan.
OTOH, if the Kurds can leverage free their Iranian province, that could be the lynchpin for stabilizing the region, after a period of intense violent turmoil. Ditto their Syrian province. And even Turkey, though I don't see that giant oil chunk of EU Turkey going without overwhelming repercussions. Even better would be (Iraqi) Kurdistan joining Turkey in a "free trade zone", giving momentum to similar possibilities with Syria, if it joined. The best possible transformation would be Lebanon and Jordan joining a free trade zone, and Turkey/Kurdistan, leveraging Syria into a larger (and more attractive) association with either one. That would also open the chances for Israel's connections with both Jordan and Turkey to include Israel, and unite them all.
There's surely a lot of the standard show stoppers in the way of any of that. But a free Kurdistan is exactly the demonstration of democracy and self-determiniation in the region that the US pretends we're creating in federal Iraq. The economics are so compelling, even compared to the familiar war economies that have driven those countries for millennia. Probably we'll have to see the oil run out in those relatively small producing countries before we can see any progress based on rational interests, rather than murder, greed and fear.
But any way I look at it. the Kurds are the only ones doing anything right in the region.
I'll explain how it's relevant if you'll explain how just mentioning it is "trolling".
I think the main factor in the USA is that Bush is financing his crimes by sending us $45-69 TRILLION into debt while cutting taxes. That makes it a lot harder for Americans to see how these crimes are screwing us, as opposed to just Iraqis, or people who volunteered for the National Guard or military because they needed the benefits.
Germans were suffering though a postwar depression in the 1920s, then even worse in the 1930s. While that pit of despair spawned a lot of the "nothing to lose, everything to gain" attitude, it also kept a lot of Germans connected to reality. Americans have little reality but "reality TV". And we're trained to believe that our political system lets us solve differences without revolutions, while most of Europe is new at that game.
I'm really not enjoying the USA learning the lessons of fascism that we just watched during the mid 20th Century.
GoDaddy's IPO attempt failed last month, as their Net company continues to lose money. They're spinning as "we didn't want to go public, anyway". But maybe they've got bigger problems.
After all, GoDaddy is owned by a Conservative making his fortune from domain squatting. I expect there's quite a lot going on under the hood. I'm looking forward to his explanation, as are many, many people who registered with GoDaddy who expect due process before sudden shutdown.
I backed it all up. You're the one making merely asserted lies.
"I'd like to respond to the Pakistan thing, but I simply don't have time as I have to be somewhere."
How convenient.
Enough typing at you. You're the kool-aid man; you'll never face reality. Go drink yourself.
Interestingly, alkaline solutions offer greater power density than hydrogen. So maybe the "new standard" alkaline batteries will be fuelcells.
What I really want to see is "plastic" catalyst membranes in these fuelcells. That will make the cells cheap and easily replaceable, lowering the TCO consistent with the cheap fuel. It might need to be "new standard" plastic, carbon fullerenes with nanoscale features catalyzing the process. But if we can avoid the rare earth and precious metal elements fuelcells often require, we can more easily switch our power systems over to the cleaner, smaller, cheaper systems. Someday, a phone that can talk longer than I can.
Isn't Einstein's relativity just a much smaller magnitude extra term on Newton's mechanics? Negligible at human scales. Einstein's correction to Newton was much less than 0.05%. If relativity is really as much as 0.05% off, that leaves a vast amount of unexplained phenomena in our big Universe.
I'm confused by your saying that 7960/SIP/Asterisk requires an expensive Cisco license. I thought you can just buy a "spare" phone without a bundled license for relatively cheap, then use Asterisk as the server, without needing any $ Cisco licenses. That's what the story we're discussing about SHSU is about, isn't it?
I'd like to use the builtin SCCP, because I'd like to offer services to people already running these phones with SCCP.
But I also want SIP on my own 7970. I tried to follow the voip-info.org wiki pages, but they're incomplete, and there's apparently some incompatability problems with some recent firmware. I can't even tell how exactly to find out which versions of the files are currently installed on the phone.
If you'd like to help me get up, I'd love to pick your brain a little. Maybe I could email you, rather than drilling really offtopic in this thread?
"Asterisk", the GPL PBX, is spelled with an "sk", not an "x". "Asterix" is a comic strip.
SCCP might be crappy, but it's already installed on many thousands of Cisco phones out in the field and in their sales pipeline. So it represents an installed base - a target audience/market for development that doesn't require them to change much. Better Asterisk support for SCCP can compensate for its problems, while giving us control over the innards of the system.
Getting off Cisco CM is just the first step into freedom.
The Cisco 7970G uses XML for its configs and customizable GUI (and HUI) connected to selectable features. Its startup screen has the Java logo. What OS is it running? How do I get it to download and run Java applets? How can I code, install and run native apps?
These little touchscreen phones should offer complete portable offices that even a PHB can use anywhere, without having to search for the "any key". Now that the server is open, how do we open the clients that run on the local HW?
Deduce from the Republican Congress under both Clinton and Bush Jr, and the differences in the debt between the two presidents.
The president makes the budget, Congress passes it. Funny how you Republicans claim the president can fix the economy when you're running for that office, but disclaim all responsibility when you've blown it with the office.
I don't give Bush any credit for lying us into Iraq, turning it into a neverending bloodbath, while letting us lose Afghanistan and leave bin Laden to roam free. I blame him for that, like I blame him for the $45 TRILLION debt he's given us. I blame him for letting Osama go at Tora Bora, and then again two weeks ago while his Pakistani allies surrendered N Waziristan to Osama and his Taliban, and Bush backed them up. And I blame him for the Republican Drug Push called "Medicare Part D" that you'd like to pretend is some kind of exception.
Your post is out of some delusional 2002. "The entire world believed Saddam to have WMD"? How about the thousands of Americans in the streets saying he didn't, the dozens of Democratic Congressmembers, the people in the CIA and State Department saying we don't believe it?
Everything you're prattling is off the corporate TV shows. "Islamic fascism"? Iraq making me "proud to be an American"? Iraq is better off? We're better off? Only on your Republican TV shows. You vidiots have disgraced America with every touch of your fool fingers. That O'Reilly jingoism isn't fooling many anymore. Don't make me sick by wagging it around me.
I should have just repeated your insane statement about Iraq that "people over there aren't oppressed any more", and laughed in your face. You and the rest of your dwindling zombie Bushworshipper army make me ashamed to be "American", so long as that term describes you too.
IRV would encourage lots of candidates outside the parties to run. The popular "throwing away your vote" threat would disappear. Once the duopoly is broken, the parties will also finally react to "coopt the positions" of these alternate candidates. So while IRV might keep the same parties in power, it would change them to represent a much broader spectrum of positions. Which is what I care about.
Of course there's a chicken/egg problem - the parties won't give up their duopoly on the choices. But American politics does often change structure after a crisis. We're in a crisis now. The recent Lieberman/Lamont Democratic primary in Connecticut gave value for even powerful incumbents to IRV. And for primaries, where power is kept "in the family" is the place to start. IRV has already got momentum.
That's how politics works. It's a statistical game of incremental changes in one scope that lead to tipping points which push sudden changes into other, usually larger, scopes. That's why the essential work of politics is keeping the discussions going, flipping every little opportunity until it builds a wave that washes the whole town clean.
George Bush appointed the Chair of the FCC which is shredding the report, which gave away the media control the report indicts. He's been president with a Republican Congress for over 6 years - of course he's responsible for the policies of his appointees and lockstep partisans, especially when they're identical to his own policies. It's not "Flamebait" to call a crook a crook.
News != surprise is a "duh" point ignored by the original post, but certainly worth mentioning other than in sarcasm, which I did. Hardly "Flamebait" to assert the nonsarcastic truth.
Bush said he creates low expectations to succeed, and is meeting them. Quoting him and backing him up isn't "Flamebait".
I never said the FCC is up for election, but throwing out the Republicans who legislate in cooperation with their Bush FCC is certainly a way to get them to stop selling us out and shredding the truth. Saying that we're heading into an election to change the problem we're discussing isn't "Flamebait".
I got mod'ed "Flamebait" by exactly the kind of Republican worshippers as you, except they're too scared to even post with a userID. They're Republicans, they're TrollMod'ing me to produce nothing useful in the discussion but the predictable response of suppressing my post. While you try to dismiss Bush's responsibility for his government by the flimsiest assertions. You Republican apologists are coming out of the woodwork with "they're both to blame" now that it's undeniable that Republicans are to blame for these messes. Some of you TrollMod, some of you come out with loads of crap like the one you just posted.
All you've got is blather about how my reasonable post is "foaming at the mouth". It's "Flamebait" to you the same way Iraq was begging for invasion. Peddle your fake coverups for Bush's Republicans while you can. You've only got less than 7 weeks now to make it count.
No, you're the only one of us who failed American history. I got a perfect score on my AP History test, and have learned (and lived) much more in the decades since.
"Pure democracy" doesn't even mean "mob rule", even if we had the Athenian democracy that lasted about 200 years.
America has one of the many kinds of "people powered" democracies, constitutional republican democracy. It's not like we went to the government store and picked "democracy" out of the "ideologies" rack. Despite the "Republican" work on destroying elections and gaming the counterdemocratic Electoral College, we are primarily democratic, to produce a republic, according to a constitution that defines further complex interactions and differences from "pure" forms.
So I'm not interested in your weird notion that we're replacing our system with the mob rule that you fantasize about. Or your failure to not only recognize American history, but that you're talking about polticial science, which is very distinct from that other subject you failed.
You want to split hairs on the wrong dog, make sarcastic comments about nonsense, try it on someone who thinks your screaming wrong politics is right because you scream it the loudest.
Funny how you don't think that Powell's FCC wrote the report and that Martin is shredding it along with his "purge". Especially since Martin changed the rules under the projections contradicted by this report. And funny how you don't match Bush's appointment of Martin as chief and Clinton's of Powell as a mere member with the differences between their FCCs. Some how "it's Clinton's fault".
That's rooted in some truth. Powell's term chairing the FCC was defined by the Republican Congress whose laws it had to work. Enhanced by Clinton's own right-of-center corporate policies, and his "seeking the middle" even as it was dragged further rightwards by extreme rightwing activism.
You are a victim of the "Overton Window". It's a political technique used to great effect mainly by rightist activists. People like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh (among many, like James Dobson and Fred Phelps) demand extreme positions that serve not to deliver those positions in reality. Rather they just drag the limited window of public acceptance across the entire political spectrum further towards their positions. It's the political mechanics of the "straw man" argument in action, fake arguments designed only to make alternatives look better than what is being argued.
Your example of MoveOn.org and Net Neutrality is related. Telcos, cablecos and other monopolistic ISPs are paying Congress and Hollywood/MadisonAve millions to legislate destroying the "level playing field" of the Internet. MoveOn.org, which survives only on that openness, takes a position to keep it open. The dispute starts out extremely unbalanced, as Net Neutrality is in the center of the possibilities (100% free, mandatory, universal Internet use is the other extreme from the ISPs' position). MoveOn.org arrived after Net Neutrality was already threatened (even doomed, if left on course) by Republicans like Senator Ted Stevens and the rest of his Congressional controlling majority. Somehow MoveOn.org is demonized for making the already-partisan debate "partisan" by opposing the target of their standard mission, which was now threatening their existence. It's related to the Overton Window because the debate is reduced to some fake "balance" between the center and the extreme right, dragging it far right of center. No one of consequence in America even takes the far left position, because even the center is demonized as being "far left".
The fact is that Bush's Republican Party has polarized the country as much as in the depths of the Vietnam War, rolling towards Civil War proportions. When Democrats and their allies respond within that polarized context they were thrust into, they are framed as the polarizers. When they get "vitriolic" about things like the Iraq War, letting Osama run loose, $45 TRILLION debts, illegal eavesdropping, torture, they're somehow the ones making it hard to get the truth.
I suggest you look closer at the partisan boundaries created by the Republican Party. Including John McCain, now dropping like a hot potato his "moderate" positions not only with theocrats, but also with torturers. While Lieberman's crass abuse of Connecticut Democrats and his Democrat brand reveals a man interested only in power, ready to discard his constituents and allies whenever he wants more. "Bipartisan" through collaboration with an unacceptable policy. Those two Republicans (despite their pandering to get the "moderate" crumbs left over by the Party) are betrayers, even of the "core values" they most stand for. If you're that distracted by them as "moderate", when they'd be obvious rightwingers without the Overton Window to distort the scene, then you need to open the window and look directly at these awful fakes.
All ACs weigh exactly the same. Try saying something provocative with an ID for a change. It's fun and educational.
As "social security" it was not invented by FDR (or his policy staff). As "Social Security", the specific program by name, it certainly was.
The universal application to all American labor, whether or not formally organized, was also a sensible way to introduce some of the socialism Americans wanted after WWII (like most people did), without leaving it as a draw to only unions, which would compete with the government.
We have a constitutional democratic republic (if we can keep it). If you understand our kind of democracy, you understand that the main benefit of it is producing the consent of the governed, by which government derives its right to exist. Everyone must vote. What we lose in quality we make up in quantity - quantity of people included in the system, who won't split off to an ungovernable mass that threatens everyone's rights. That's democracy.
The gradual opening of America's voting entitlement to nearly universal adult inclusion reflects the gradual increase in power of the gradually included classes of people. That shows how our system started as a compromise with an aristocratic class of white male landowners, but grew into a broader compromise and greater stability. The more those neighbors vote, the more stable our country is, modifying itself to reflect itself. That's the Constitution at work.
The place for smart people with more power is in the representative jobs. That means the three branches of government, which need smart Congressmembers, executives and justices. Who set policies that affect billions of people, for decades or centuries. Those people need the kind of intelligence that is a model of the real world and the people who live in it. A republic, whose representatives of the public must represent the public in interests, though smart enough to represent only our best interests as often as possible. That's our republic.
If we can keep it. We can elect "Republicans" in contradictary name only, who misrepresent us. We can discard the Constitution as these Republicans continually strive to do, through violation and debased amendments like flagburning and homophobia. But that is the bad work of others. The part where the people can directly throw away our republic is by ignoring our role of the "demo" in "democracy". When we don't vote, when we stop each other from voting, when we don't help each other vote, we have already discarded the democracy. Mere constitutional republics all over the world front for tyranny, like the Shah's Iran and so many others ruled for and by some people, not all of the people.
We've already lost so much of our Constitutional democratic republic. The most irreparable damage is to throw away the democracy from which the Constitution and the representatives derive their power.
We must keep it, and each other.
Antitrolls weigh exactly the same as trolls, but spin in the opposite direction. That makes them smell different.
How have Democrats distracted us from terrorism even one tiny bit? If anything, they're too pussy to call bullshit on all the fake terrorism the Republicans create as "reality" for their media manipulation.
All your crap about how Democrats are somehow pulling my strings, the strings of the media and the government - what are you talking about? Every charge I make against Bush is specific, substantiated, and true. You think Karl Rove is some kind of coatcheck girl at the White House? He's the stringpuller, the election gamer. What kind of insanity compels you to spit the name of John Murtha in response, except your own indoctrination by rightwing talkradio? Because nothing else has the power to make that kind of association. Certainly not anything to do with Murtha.
Down to the FCC. The current FCC has been shaken up since Bush's administration - very much for the worse. That shakeup by the new administration is exactly how the FCC is run. It's Bush's FCC that's shredding the antimonopoly report we're talking about, because it contradicts the handover Bush's FCC ordered under predictions contrary to the facts in the shredded document.
Come back with some facts showing that any of what you spewed has any basis in fact. Because all you just threw at the page is just an elaborate "it's not Bush's fault, because there's someone else in the phonebook to blame".
If I read your post even a little carefully, I can see that you have crafted the perfect antitroll.
I know you are, but what am I?
I know you are, but what am I?
I know you are, but what am I?
I note that the fortune at the bottom of the page in which I post this comment says "To teach is to learn twice. -- Joseph Joubert "