It's true that most of the Republicans are chickenhawks, and couldn't commit any such war crimes in person. But they certainly put others in a position to do so, and bear responsibility.
Do you really think none of the kids who faught in Najaf or Falluja are entitled to hold political office when they get home? What the hell? Should we prosecute Ollie North and Colin Powell for Vietnam-era war crimes? Or just the guy who spoke up to stop it? Do you insist on moral blindness from all your political candidates, or is Kerry a special case?
(Powell, by the way, had a role in attempting to cover up the My Lai Massacre, so maybe prosecution is in order. Ollie got off on technicalities for later crimes - damn liberals and their criminal-friendly laws!)
One of Kerry's points in opposition to the war was that it was leading Americans to commit attrocities.
one...two...three...
HE WAS RIGHT! The Swift Boat Liars are pissed at him for dishonouring servicemen by saying what were amply documented facts. Truth doesn't dishonour anybody.
Look - the historical verdict is in: Vietnam was a mistake. Anybody who thinks differently should cancel their cable subscription and quit watching Rambo movies. It was a war of occupation, not liberation. It might not have been intended that way by the dumbasses who led us into it, but that's what it turned into. Wars of occupation soil those who have to fight them.
Now - we have a president whose administration defines torture as something that can only happen on thursdays to left handed martians. Who excercised no leadership on the question of prisoner abuse, unless it was to encourage it. This may have cost us the war, all by itself. 80% of detainees not previously involved. I imagine a few of them are now, as well as their friends and relations. This dimwit has turned a war of liberation into an occupation. Now is a WONDERFUL time to get another president, one who has firsthand experience with an occupation and a clue about what it'll take to move it back to liberation.
Hawaii, Mexico, Phillipines were all more than the 100 years that you specified, but they are significant.
The U.S. has an extensive record of indisputable imperialism. In the 19th Century, not many were ashamed of that. Mark Twain was ahead of his time. The Mexican War was pretty naked aggression and we took about half of the country. In the Phillipines U.S. forces faught an insurgency with brutality, including torture. Against a democratic movement that had opposed the Spanish.
Since then, the U.S. has maintained an empire in fact in Latin America. We have overthrown dozens of governments this century, usually to protect commercial interests. This is historical fact. The goons we put in place were not democrats. Those they replaced often were. I grant that the Sandinistas were thugs, but they weren't any worse than Somoza. And it took MASSIVE US influence on the elections to keep them from winning election after the U.S. proxy war drove them out. Big time money and threats.
Arguments here usually devolve into the personal really quickly. I'll try hard to avoid that. But I think we both need to get off our butts. I have not heard any evidence that the U.S.-led Iraqi forces have performed well. Bush wildly exaggerated the numbers of troops trained. Maybe 100,000 are in uniform, but far fewer have been through even rudimentary training. In April, it appears Bush ordered the Marines into Falluja, contrary to ground commanders' wishes, and then ordered them to stop a couple of weeks later, contrary to even the grunts' wishes. This is the type of behavior the civilian leadership exhibited in Vietnam. It's also vacillation. The Iraqi government force sent in has been disbanded.
The U.S. picked the Council that picked Allawi. I'm not sure we'd actually know the extent of U.S. influence. This administration controls information flow like none before. Soldiers are disciplined for expressing their opinions.
It's true that the U.S. can win every battle it fights there (if not ordered to stop by vacillating politicians). The trick is to stop having to fight battles. I think when we kill an Iraqi fighter, two of his cousins take up arms. When we kill a civilian, half a dozen do so. There is not some finite number of "terrorists and dead-enders" that we have to put through a meat-grinder to attain peace. The actions we take affect the numbers of the opposition, and sometimes killing them has the opposite effect.
And regardless of whether the war is now (or ever was) winnable, it's definitely time to replace the leadership. Nobody fired over 9/11? Come on. Rice and Ashcroft, at a minimum. Nobody fired over the chaos in Iraq? Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, report to Human Resources for your exit interview. They went in cheap, let the thugs run wild, and the place was trashed. To the surprise of NOBODY who thought about it for 10 minutes. And whoever is in charge of reconstruction - if anybody is - should not be responsible for managing anything more complex than a hot dog cart. Fired big-time, with overkill. They should be fired from whatever job they have after being fired from this one from the remaining fired-ness.
Nobody is under indictment for the Halliburton corruption. This sends a mixed message. "We're here to liberate you" and "Your country is spoils for connected corporations". Well, every time they go through a checkpoint manned by U.S. troops, they feel less liberated. But when they see nothing being done with reconstruction money, well, that lends strength to the other message.
This has been a clusterfuck, and there has been zero accountability. So it's time to fire the boss. It's not going to get better unless the administration is voted out.
I admit I've only met one NCAA div I male cheerleader, and he was straight.
But his activity was gay. And so it was when W was a cheerleader rather than an infielder like his dad. (Kerry fuckin' plays HOCKEY with PROS! Which is not like a pro-am golf tournement. For one thing, hockey is an actual sport.)
Lots of gays hang with chicks. Lots of shared interests. In glamour. And men.
ignored the guy or given him lucrative trading agreements and attacked some other house.
It WAS the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But it's ours now. Bush should be fired for starting it. Based on the conduct of the war, he should be fired for how he waged it.
We have decide whether to continue with the doctor who's sawing away at the liver during a heart transplant. Now that he's started, someone has to finish the liver operation. But I don't think we go with the guy who started it.
Other posters have pointed out there are worse monsters in the world. Many of them are U.S. allies. This little fable is horseshit. It's also widely spread - do a google on ""WHAT DO YOU DO SON?" Our son starts to cry."
It has about as much basis in reality as "the Matrix" It's propaganda and wishful thinking, along with terrible acting. FICTION
If this letter is genuine, and the Major isn't kidding, I fear for his troops (and his sanity). He might as well refer to the Errol Flynn "They Died with Their Boots On" for an understanding of Native American affairs. Or "Little Mermaid", for that matter.
And let's face it: John Wayne was a fag. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/quotes
Your argument is that his freezing had no effect on the day's outcome, so it was o.k. SO it's o.k. for a prez to freeze in a crises. I suspect there's a clause in your thinking - 'so long as it's my preferred candidate'
And do you think he was processing information? What was there to process? He needed to get out of there and in communication to get some information to process.
Face it - he was lost. He froze. He was the antithesis of leadership. He was irresolute, unless he was so determined to finish "My Pet Goat" that an act of war couldn't pull him away. As I understand the man, he's not a big reader.
He definitely is in near-catatonic withdrawal. Out of his depth.
And keep holding your breath. That may help. Are you suggesting that it's not a problem when the CIC freezes when informed of an attack? Somehow I don't think I'd hear that argument if the Other Candidate had been in office.
The CIC is supposed to lead, even when his underlings don't tell him what to do.
You know, God hit Virginia Beach, home of Pat Robertson's 700 Club, with a hurricane shortly after he threatened God's wrath - including hurricanes - on Disneyworld for extending benefits to same-sex partners of employees.
Recently, the hurricane tracks in Florida hit predominantly "red" areas, while avoiding "blue" ones. http://kimosabe.cryptic.org/GODvsBUSH.gif It's pretty clear God is telling us something, and some of us AREN'T LISTENING. (Though what God might be trying to say is, "Do not presume to speak for Me." In which case I have offended. Sorry, God! My bad!)
Poor folks pay a higher proportion of income in taxes than do the rich. Sales, payroll, etc. They really aren't lucky duckies for not paying much in income taxes.
Yes, the taxes were taken from the rich. And government services are also given to them. It's that weird disconnect between them I don't get. When you talk about a tax cut, and none of the consequences, or you invent a fairy tale about offsetting gains, you are being irresponsible.
Let's face it - beginning with Reagan the Republicans have never seriously proposed offsetting spending cuts. The current administration has taken budgetary forcasting to new levels of dishonesty. For example, the big tax cuts were heavily back-loaded toward the last five years of a 10 year cycle, but the budget projections were shortened to a 5 year horizon. Currently, the administration vastly inflated the spring deficit forecast so that they could revise it this Fall and claim an improvement.
We were riding for a fall, sure. But it was made longer by an ineffective response. Lowering payroll taxes and extending unemployment benefits would have been a much more effective boost.
Finally, I think we have a demand-driven economy. The jobs are there because someone has money to buy stuff, not because there is investment capital to rearrange. If we have a hot economy, people will find the money to invest. Money's cheap now. Increasing the supply of investment capital through these tax cuts just makes it a little cheaper. It is pushing on a string.
His point in 9/11, that the Iraq War is a stupid move, is correct.
His point, that contrary to the image managers, that W is a lightweight, vaccilating incompetent, is spot-on. Damn! It was unpleasant watching him pretend to read "My Pet Goat" when he was waiting for Rove or Cheney to tell him what to do.
The concern is not with natural monopolies whose existance serves the public good. Electric utilities, for example. Multiple installations of power lines serving the same neighborhood makes no economic sense.
But when you have a predatory monopoly, that's a problem. Would IE have taken over without the desktop monopoly? No. Would ANYONE use windows media player if it weren't bundled with windows (and difficult to remove!)
The advantage a monopolist enjoys is not total. Just because an MS product is on every windows machine doesn't mean the game is over. They are still a predatory monopoly because of the tactics used, but if their offering in a particular market is bad enough then that if it is utter crap, a bigger and more torrid security hole than the goatse guy - well, that leaves an entirely more wholesome opening (if you'll excuse the expression) for an open source project.
But seriously: would any VC invest in a browser company? Or an office productivity suite? IE vs. Firefox represent a perfect storm of incredibly shitty software vs. a decent alternative + monopoly immunity by an amorphous, untargetable development entity. But any standard, commercial company is toast. That's a monopoly, and one to be concerned about.
Even as a monolithic entity the intramural competition is savage. Individuals there don't hesitate to piss all over shareholder value if, by undermining a competitor/colleague they climb a little higher up the corporate ladder. Politics.
The current schooling model (US k-12+) is actually intended to make people dumber. Literacy and math skills can be learned in very little time, but they usually aren't. So why is school done that way? Hmm. Probably the real lessons are in conforming to the demands of arbitrary authority. There's some history to this - as the U.S. education system developed, it copied Prussia, which CONSCIOUSLY lifted elements from Sparta.
The way people learn is by copying models that solve problems. They adapt those solutions to other things, and ka-BAM! Subject matter expertise. This is part of perl's success - there is a vast repository of stuff that does stuff, and the duffer/dillitante (me) can learn a lot very quickly by seeing what's up.
I took a program in network administration - almost entirely useless. But when I started solving problems in an internship, I picked up mad skeelz.
I think man pages would be more powerful if they routinely included examples of the most common usages of the command the man page describes. Some do.
I took an MS Authorized/Authored course along the standard 1 week lines (is it likely that every subject would fit into a 1 week module? Or is there procrustean marketing going on?). Good teacher, interesting war stories, course = teh sux0r.
I went to SANS, and had a great time in the IDS course. The difference was the orientation toward solving problems. Do things with tcpdump - grab every packet where the foo bit of the bar byte-offset-from-zero is flipped. Do things with Snort. I had a decent grounding in IP, and it got a lot stronger because rather than an abstraction, the knowledge let me answer questions - what is this traffic trying to do? What is weird about it?
So if you can find a class where the elements answer questions and solve problems, it will be worth doing. Something that is just an overview is useless. I think a "install a file server with proper regard for security and maintainability" is a good problem to solve.
I think it would have to include the deliberate targetting of non-combatants. Otherwise, it's just another buzzword used to make an enemy's actions seem worse than they are. I hate that debasement of language and reason. The fsking Soviets using a laundry list of "bandit-imperialist-terrorists" like a schizophrenic. And the right-wing thugs in Latin America labelling any labor leader a "communist". Or calling environmentalist sabotage "ecoterrorism" Might as well start trotting out "double-plus-ungood!"
I think political leadership is a legit target, too.
It occurred to me the other night that it's kind of an odd conceit, that civilians have nothing to do with the fight. I definitely support the conceit, but it's a minority position in world affairs. Hell, in "Red Dawn" it was civilians turned guerillas that turned the tide! An awful movie, but a good point about the legitimacy of resisting occupation. The Iraqi Shiites are basically Patrick Swayze.
In 1933 the Nazi's actually were in decline, which was what made them tractable in the negotiations with the industrialists who preferred him to socialists and chaos. He got about a third in the previous round, and slightly less, as I recall. Then Hindenburg, a very sick puppy by that point, was encouraged to give him a shot at forming a government. The Nazis got the Interior Ministry, where the cops are, and consolidated from there.
You can blame the Germans for not revolting (which is called treason). You can't blame them for voting for the guy- most didn't.
He was fairly popular for the first few years after he took power, but he didn't test it with real elections.
Note that 680 late ballots favoring Bush were counted. Gore didn't challenge these were largely from military voters. You don't see that kind of scruple from the Bushies, who OPPOSED the counting of late, overseas, largely military ballots headed to Democratic-leaning counties.
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive "dimpled chad" standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin."
The article says that election officials would not have uniformly applied any of the 7, so the most perfect recount - which I define not by the result, as the Supreme Court did, but as the most consistent effort to determine the expressed intent of the voter - would not have happened.
That's funny, the Miami Herald, NYTimes, and other sponsors of the election post-mortem, concluded the opposite. It was spun the other way in the ra-ra atmosphere of 9/11, but that was the plain conclusion. The headlines were along the lines of "Bush would have won recount", but the stories don't support the headlines. As you may know, headline writers are generally not the ones who write the articles.
The Gore strategy of only recounting undervotes was not a winner. But a ballot where someone punches the wrong button, then writes in "I actually meant candidate 'foo' " is a legal vote for Foo.
Even Drudge reports Gore would have narrowly won. http://www.drudgereport.com/mattv.htm
NYTimes: "An approach Mr. Gore and his lawyers rejected as impractical -- a statewide recount -- could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
Didn't know that netnanny has transparent lists. That's an improvement over the other sleazebags, but they are still unworthy to exist.
I think that this has to work much closer to perfection than other stuff. If you are worried that your kids might see a pornographic image, this won't save you. Might not even slow them down. The effectiveness discussion is essentially "by what number do we divide infinity?" It divides an infinity of obscenity by N. So why bother? And as a practical matter, blocking mainstream, softcore stuff leads the browser to the dodgier stuff set up to get around censorware.
The product should be shunned for its codified culture alone, the company bankrupt, and the developers & staff unemployed. You get one chance to lose trust, they did.
I guess I just don't buy the false dichotemy. I don't want an ISP or government, and I won't have one of these products on my machines. The question resolves to "do you want government/ISP restricting your information or a corrupt corporation founded and run by the type of fuckwit attracted to the idea of censorship?" Ick.
I have kids. They will have some serious limits on what they do with computers. I will probably be fairly permissive, but I'll be there. That's the only way. At some point, they'll be big enough to go downtown by themselves. At that point, they can surf unsupervised.
1) it fails to block effectively (false negatives) 2) it fails to pass properly (false positives)
There is a further problem, philisophical or political in nature:
almost every one of these products uses a proprietary block list, the contents of which are not available for review. With the products exhibiting this behavior, you can override specific domain or keyword blocks, but the list as a whole is protected. This is itself a problem. What makes the problem especially bad is that there is generally a political agenda woven into the block lists. For example, National Organization for Women might be blocked for obscenity or something. Peacefire.org, an anti-censorware site, has been blocked under multiple categories including "hate speech"! So you are putting your access - or your kids access - in the hands of those who are unscrupulous about shading the experience to their political beliefs.
Opec failed to hold the line on prices, the economy adjusted. Reagan reaped the benefit. It's interesting that you mention Carternomics, and say nothing about Fordnomics, (those "WIN" buttons sure squeezed the inflation out of the system!) or the wage&price freeze of Nixon. Or the voodoo econ of Reagan. It was just like the Vice-Toady Bush the Elder said, until he felt compelled to scrap his principles for a job. I will grant that the fantasist Reagan did have a distant, but existant relationship with reality in that he raised taxes when his experiment busted the budget.
And I know there's not much point in this discussion, but:
if you decide that the winner is whoever the referee says it is, then you are right, Bush won. Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, followed by the Supreme Court, said W. won.
if you feel that whoever received the most legal votes under Florida and Federal law won, then Gore won Florida by thousands of votes. It took a finely tuned machine to exclude enough Democratic votes while admitting Republican votes under the same criteria.
W took office, gotta grant that. Sure helped that his brother was in charge of the vote count, though, din't it!
It's interesting to see what happens to Republican rioters interfering with the democratic process, and compare it to the treatment of center/left-of-center demonstrators who are participating in the democratic process. The thugs sent by DeLay to stop the vote count are not even questioned, much less detained. Try to exercise free speech in Manhattan this week - and no, it doesn't count if you are limited to a free-speech pen.
Slashdot Mirror
and I'm inclined to cut them some slack.
It's true that most of the Republicans are chickenhawks, and couldn't commit any such war crimes in person. But they certainly put others in a position to do so, and bear responsibility.
Do you really think none of the kids who faught in Najaf or Falluja are entitled to hold political office when they get home? What the hell? Should we prosecute Ollie North and Colin Powell for Vietnam-era war crimes? Or just the guy who spoke up to stop it? Do you insist on moral blindness from all your political candidates, or is Kerry a special case?
(Powell, by the way, had a role in attempting to cover up the My Lai Massacre, so maybe prosecution is in order. Ollie got off on technicalities for later crimes - damn liberals and their criminal-friendly laws!)
One of Kerry's points in opposition to the war was that it was leading Americans to commit attrocities.
one...two...three...
HE WAS RIGHT! The Swift Boat Liars are pissed at him for dishonouring servicemen by saying what were amply documented facts. Truth doesn't dishonour anybody.
Look - the historical verdict is in: Vietnam was a mistake. Anybody who thinks differently should cancel their cable subscription and quit watching Rambo movies. It was a war of occupation, not liberation. It might not have been intended that way by the dumbasses who led us into it, but that's what it turned into. Wars of occupation soil those who have to fight them.
Now - we have a president whose administration defines torture as something that can only happen on thursdays to left handed martians. Who excercised no leadership on the question of prisoner abuse, unless it was to encourage it. This may have cost us the war, all by itself. 80% of detainees not previously involved. I imagine a few of them are now, as well as their friends and relations. This dimwit has turned a war of liberation into an occupation. Now is a WONDERFUL time to get another president, one who has firsthand experience with an occupation and a clue about what it'll take to move it back to liberation.
Hawaii, Mexico, Phillipines were all more than the 100 years that you specified, but they are significant.
The U.S. has an extensive record of indisputable imperialism. In the 19th Century, not many were ashamed of that. Mark Twain was ahead of his time. The Mexican War was pretty naked aggression and we took about half of the country. In the Phillipines U.S. forces faught an insurgency with brutality, including torture. Against a democratic movement that had opposed the Spanish.
Since then, the U.S. has maintained an empire in fact in Latin America. We have overthrown dozens of governments this century, usually to protect commercial interests. This is historical fact. The goons we put in place were not democrats. Those they replaced often were. I grant that the Sandinistas were thugs, but they weren't any worse than Somoza. And it took MASSIVE US influence on the elections to keep them from winning election after the U.S. proxy war drove them out. Big time money and threats.
Arguments here usually devolve into the personal really quickly. I'll try hard to avoid that. But I think we both need to get off our butts. I have not heard any evidence that the U.S.-led Iraqi forces have performed well. Bush wildly exaggerated the numbers of troops trained. Maybe 100,000 are in uniform, but far fewer have been through even rudimentary training. In April, it appears Bush ordered the Marines into Falluja, contrary to ground commanders' wishes, and then ordered them to stop a couple of weeks later, contrary to even the grunts' wishes. This is the type of behavior the civilian leadership exhibited in Vietnam. It's also vacillation. The Iraqi government force sent in has been disbanded.
The U.S. picked the Council that picked Allawi. I'm not sure we'd actually know the extent of U.S. influence. This administration controls information flow like none before. Soldiers are disciplined for expressing their opinions.
It's true that the U.S. can win every battle it fights there (if not ordered to stop by vacillating politicians). The trick is to stop having to fight battles. I think when we kill an Iraqi fighter, two of his cousins take up arms. When we kill a civilian, half a dozen do so. There is not some finite number of "terrorists and dead-enders" that we have to put through a meat-grinder to attain peace. The actions we take affect the numbers of the opposition, and sometimes killing them has the opposite effect.
And regardless of whether the war is now (or ever was) winnable, it's definitely time to replace the leadership. Nobody fired over 9/11? Come on. Rice and Ashcroft, at a minimum. Nobody fired over the chaos in Iraq? Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, report to Human Resources for your exit interview. They went in cheap, let the thugs run wild, and the place was trashed. To the surprise of NOBODY who thought about it for 10 minutes. And whoever is in charge of reconstruction - if anybody is - should not be responsible for managing anything more complex than a hot dog cart. Fired big-time, with overkill. They should be fired from whatever job they have after being fired from this one from the remaining fired-ness.
Nobody is under indictment for the Halliburton corruption. This sends a mixed message. "We're here to liberate you" and "Your country is spoils for connected corporations". Well, every time they go through a checkpoint manned by U.S. troops, they feel less liberated. But when they see nothing being done with reconstruction money, well, that lends strength to the other message.
This has been a clusterfuck, and there has been zero accountability. So it's time to fire the boss. It's not going to get better unless the administration is voted out.
I admit I've only met one NCAA div I male cheerleader, and he was straight.
But his activity was gay. And so it was when W was a cheerleader rather than an infielder like his dad.
(Kerry fuckin' plays HOCKEY with PROS! Which is not like a pro-am golf tournement. For one thing, hockey is an actual sport.)
Lots of gays hang with chicks. Lots of shared interests. In glamour. And men.
http://www.bettybowers.com/isbushgay.html
He does say "fabulous" an amazing amount.
"It's been a fabulous year for Laura and me."
-- George W. Bush., three months after the World Trade Center towers went down.
ignored the guy or given him lucrative trading agreements and attacked some other house.
It WAS the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But it's ours now. Bush should be fired for starting it. Based on the conduct of the war, he should be fired for how he waged it.
We have decide whether to continue with the doctor who's sawing away at the liver during a heart transplant. Now that he's started, someone has to finish the liver operation. But I don't think we go with the guy who started it.
Other posters have pointed out there are worse monsters in the world. Many of them are U.S. allies. This little fable is horseshit. It's also widely spread - do a google on ""WHAT DO YOU DO SON?" Our son starts to cry."
It has about as much basis in reality as "the Matrix" It's propaganda and wishful thinking, along with terrible acting. FICTION
If this letter is genuine, and the Major isn't kidding, I fear for his troops (and his sanity). He might as well refer to the Errol Flynn "They Died with Their Boots On" for an understanding of Native American affairs. Or "Little Mermaid", for that matter.
And let's face it: John Wayne was a fag.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/quotes
Mmmm...
Just be on best behavior and DON'T forget an anniversary.
Trust me on this.
Your argument is that his freezing had no effect on the day's outcome, so it was o.k. SO it's o.k. for a prez to freeze in a crises. I suspect there's a clause in your thinking - 'so long as it's my preferred candidate'
Any Dem would have been impeached.
That would have covered it, nicely.
And do you think he was processing information? What was there to process? He needed to get out of there and in communication to get some information to process.
Face it - he was lost. He froze. He was the antithesis of leadership. He was irresolute, unless he was so determined to finish "My Pet Goat" that an act of war couldn't pull him away. As I understand the man, he's not a big reader.
He definitely is in near-catatonic withdrawal. Out of his depth.
And keep holding your breath. That may help. Are you suggesting that it's not a problem when the CIC freezes when informed of an attack? Somehow I don't think I'd hear that argument if the Other Candidate had been in office.
The CIC is supposed to lead, even when his underlings don't tell him what to do.
You know, God hit Virginia Beach, home of Pat Robertson's 700 Club, with a hurricane shortly after he threatened God's wrath - including hurricanes - on Disneyworld for extending benefits to same-sex partners of employees.
Recently, the hurricane tracks in Florida hit predominantly "red" areas, while avoiding "blue" ones.
http://kimosabe.cryptic.org/GODvsBUSH.gif
It's pretty clear God is telling us something, and some of us AREN'T LISTENING. (Though what God might be trying to say is, "Do not presume to speak for Me." In which case I have offended. Sorry, God! My bad!)
Poor folks pay a higher proportion of income in taxes than do the rich. Sales, payroll, etc. They really aren't lucky duckies for not paying much in income taxes.
Yes, the taxes were taken from the rich. And government services are also given to them. It's that weird disconnect between them I don't get. When you talk about a tax cut, and none of the consequences, or you invent a fairy tale about offsetting gains, you are being irresponsible.
Let's face it - beginning with Reagan the Republicans have never seriously proposed offsetting spending cuts. The current administration has taken budgetary forcasting to new levels of dishonesty. For example, the big tax cuts were heavily back-loaded toward the last five years of a 10 year cycle, but the budget projections were shortened to a 5 year horizon. Currently, the administration vastly inflated the spring deficit forecast so that they could revise it this Fall and claim an improvement.
We were riding for a fall, sure. But it was made longer by an ineffective response. Lowering payroll taxes and extending unemployment benefits would have been a much more effective boost.
Finally, I think we have a demand-driven economy. The jobs are there because someone has money to buy stuff, not because there is investment capital to rearrange. If we have a hot economy, people will find the money to invest. Money's cheap now. Increasing the supply of investment capital through these tax cuts just makes it a little cheaper. It is pushing on a string.
Gotta grant that not everything holds up.
His point in 9/11, that the Iraq War is a stupid move, is correct.
His point, that contrary to the image managers, that W is a lightweight, vaccilating incompetent, is spot-on. Damn! It was unpleasant watching him pretend to read "My Pet Goat" when he was waiting for Rove or Cheney to tell him what to do.
Anything besides nitpicking ?
The concern is not with natural monopolies whose existance serves the public good. Electric utilities, for example. Multiple installations of power lines serving the same neighborhood makes no economic sense.
But when you have a predatory monopoly, that's a problem. Would IE have taken over without the desktop monopoly? No. Would ANYONE use windows media player if it weren't bundled with windows (and difficult to remove!)
The advantage a monopolist enjoys is not total. Just because an MS product is on every windows machine doesn't mean the game is over. They are still a predatory monopoly because of the tactics used, but if their offering in a particular market is bad enough then that if it is utter crap, a bigger and more torrid security hole than the goatse guy - well, that leaves an entirely more wholesome opening (if you'll excuse the expression) for an open source project.
But seriously: would any VC invest in a browser company? Or an office productivity suite? IE vs. Firefox represent a perfect storm of incredibly shitty software vs. a decent alternative + monopoly immunity by an amorphous, untargetable development entity. But any standard, commercial company is toast. That's a monopoly, and one to be concerned about.
Even as a monolithic entity the intramural competition is savage. Individuals there don't hesitate to piss all over shareholder value if, by undermining a competitor/colleague they climb a little higher up the corporate ladder. Politics.
The current schooling model (US k-12+) is actually intended to make people dumber. Literacy and math skills can be learned in very little time, but they usually aren't. So why is school done that way? Hmm. Probably the real lessons are in conforming to the demands of arbitrary authority. There's some history to this - as the U.S. education system developed, it copied Prussia, which CONSCIOUSLY lifted elements from Sparta.
The way people learn is by copying models that solve problems. They adapt those solutions to other things, and ka-BAM! Subject matter expertise. This is part of perl's success - there is a vast repository of stuff that does stuff, and the duffer/dillitante (me) can learn a lot very quickly by seeing what's up.
I took a program in network administration - almost entirely useless. But when I started solving problems in an internship, I picked up mad skeelz.
I think man pages would be more powerful if they routinely included examples of the most common usages of the command the man page describes. Some do.
I took an MS Authorized/Authored course along the standard 1 week lines (is it likely that every subject would fit into a 1 week module? Or is there procrustean marketing going on?). Good teacher, interesting war stories, course = teh sux0r.
I went to SANS, and had a great time in the IDS course. The difference was the orientation toward solving problems. Do things with tcpdump - grab every packet where the foo bit of the bar byte-offset-from-zero is flipped. Do things with Snort. I had a decent grounding in IP, and it got a lot stronger because rather than an abstraction, the knowledge let me answer questions - what is this traffic trying to do? What is weird about it?
So if you can find a class where the elements answer questions and solve problems, it will be worth doing. Something that is just an overview is useless. I think a "install a file server with proper regard for security and maintainability" is a good problem to solve.
I think it would have to include the deliberate targetting of non-combatants. Otherwise, it's just another buzzword used to make an enemy's actions seem worse than they are. I hate that debasement of language and reason. The fsking Soviets using a laundry list of "bandit-imperialist-terrorists" like a schizophrenic. And the right-wing thugs in Latin America labelling any labor leader a "communist". Or calling environmentalist sabotage "ecoterrorism" Might as well start trotting out "double-plus-ungood!"
I think political leadership is a legit target, too.
It occurred to me the other night that it's kind of an odd conceit, that civilians have nothing to do with the fight. I definitely support the conceit, but it's a minority position in world affairs. Hell, in "Red Dawn" it was civilians turned guerillas that turned the tide! An awful movie, but a good point about the legitimacy of resisting occupation. The Iraqi Shiites are basically Patrick Swayze.
I ramble. Excuse me.
In 1933 the Nazi's actually were in decline, which was what made them tractable in the negotiations with the industrialists who preferred him to socialists and chaos. He got about a third in the previous round, and slightly less, as I recall. Then Hindenburg, a very sick puppy by that point, was encouraged to give him a shot at forming a government. The Nazis got the Interior Ministry, where the cops are, and consolidated from there.
You can blame the Germans for not revolting (which is called treason). You can't blame them for voting for the guy- most didn't.
He was fairly popular for the first few years after he took power, but he didn't test it with real elections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE. html?ex=1094270400&en=69aeb3734cc007ee&ei=5070
Note that 680 late ballots favoring Bush were counted. Gore didn't challenge these were largely from military voters. You don't see that kind of scruple from the Bushies, who OPPOSED the counting of late, overseas, largely military ballots headed to Democratic-leaning counties.
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive "dimpled chad" standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin."
The article says that election officials would not have uniformly applied any of the 7, so the most perfect recount - which I define not by the result, as the Supreme Court did, but as the most consistent effort to determine the expressed intent of the voter - would not have happened.
That's funny, the Miami Herald, NYTimes, and other sponsors of the election post-mortem, concluded the opposite. It was spun the other way in the ra-ra atmosphere of 9/11, but that was the plain conclusion. The headlines were along the lines of "Bush would have won recount", but the stories don't support the headlines. As you may know, headline writers are generally not the ones who write the articles.
The Gore strategy of only recounting undervotes was not a winner. But a ballot where someone punches the wrong button, then writes in "I actually meant candidate 'foo' " is a legal vote for Foo.
Even Drudge reports Gore would have narrowly won.
http://www.drudgereport.com/mattv.htm
NYTimes: "An approach Mr. Gore and his lawyers rejected as impractical -- a statewide recount -- could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
Didn't know that netnanny has transparent lists. That's an improvement over the other sleazebags, but they are still unworthy to exist.
I think that this has to work much closer to perfection than other stuff. If you are worried that your kids might see a pornographic image, this won't save you. Might not even slow them down. The effectiveness discussion is essentially "by what number do we divide infinity?" It divides an infinity of obscenity by N. So why bother? And as a practical matter, blocking mainstream, softcore stuff leads the browser to the dodgier stuff set up to get around censorware.
The product should be shunned for its codified culture alone, the company bankrupt, and the developers & staff unemployed. You get one chance to lose trust, they did.
I guess I just don't buy the false dichotemy. I don't want an ISP or government, and I won't have one of these products on my machines. The question resolves to "do you want government/ISP restricting your information or a corrupt corporation founded and run by the type of fuckwit attracted to the idea of censorship?" Ick.
I have kids. They will have some serious limits on what they do with computers. I will probably be fairly permissive, but I'll be there. That's the only way. At some point, they'll be big enough to go downtown by themselves. At that point, they can surf unsupervised.
There are two functional problems with it:
1) it fails to block effectively (false negatives)
2) it fails to pass properly (false positives)
There is a further problem, philisophical or political in nature:
almost every one of these products uses a proprietary block list, the contents of which are not available for review. With the products exhibiting this behavior, you can override specific domain or keyword blocks, but the list as a whole is protected. This is itself a problem. What makes the problem especially bad is that there is generally a political agenda woven into the block lists. For example, National Organization for Women might be blocked for obscenity or something. Peacefire.org, an anti-censorware site, has been blocked under multiple categories including "hate speech"! So you are putting your access - or your kids access - in the hands of those who are unscrupulous about shading the experience to their political beliefs.
Opec failed to hold the line on prices, the economy adjusted. Reagan reaped the benefit. It's interesting that you mention Carternomics, and say nothing about Fordnomics, (those "WIN" buttons sure squeezed the inflation out of the system!) or the wage&price freeze of Nixon. Or the voodoo econ of Reagan. It was just like the Vice-Toady Bush the Elder said, until he felt compelled to scrap his principles for a job. I will grant that the fantasist Reagan did have a distant, but existant relationship with reality in that he raised taxes when his experiment busted the budget.
And I know there's not much point in this discussion, but:
if you decide that the winner is whoever the referee says it is, then you are right, Bush won. Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, followed by the Supreme Court, said W. won.
if you feel that whoever received the most legal votes under Florida and Federal law won, then Gore won Florida by thousands of votes. It took a finely tuned machine to exclude enough Democratic votes while admitting Republican votes under the same criteria.
W took office, gotta grant that. Sure helped that his brother was in charge of the vote count, though, din't it!
It's interesting to see what happens to Republican rioters interfering with the democratic process, and compare it to the treatment of center/left-of-center demonstrators who are participating in the democratic process. The thugs sent by DeLay to stop the vote count are not even questioned, much less detained. Try to exercise free speech in Manhattan this week - and no, it doesn't count if you are limited to a free-speech pen.
I haven't seen the finale yet.