I'm using virtue in a slightly obsolete sense of the term here, which is basically synonymous with "merit."
As for lowered standards, you have to keep in mind that standards can be extremely misleading. Lets say you have two kids with nearly the same numbers. One went to a private school which puts everyone in AP classes in the 10th grade, builds it's curriculum around getting into college (ie: doing well on the SAT/ACT), everyone has a tutor to make sure they do well, and the rich kid took the test multiple times. The poor kid's first language was Spanish. He went to a small school that does not offer AP classes, and designs it's curriculum around getting into a Trade School. He had no tutors. He took the SAT once because it cost money and money was tight.
According to most people's definition of "standard" rich-kid is just as deserving of a slot in school as poor-kid. But the simple fact is you know those numbers from rich-kid are a ceiling, OTOH the numbers from poor-kid are a floor. Ideally you'd take both, charge rich-kid enough to educate both, and let poor-kid learn for free. But if you've only got room for one poor-kid is probably more academically deserving even if his GPA and SAT are slightly lower.
According to it's webpage Clemson is $22k including room and board. Their estimate for tuition, fees, and loan costs is roughly $13k. That $13k number is pretty close to what USNews has. USNews has USC at about $10k.
So if your little darling can get into those schools, but won't qualify for financial aid at someplace like Emory or Harvard, it'll save you money. The Emorys and Harvards of the world tend to be $35-40k in tuition, and located in very expensive towns, so room and board ain't cheap. But even Room and Board in Boston is probably significantly cheaper then $22k a year at Emory, if your darling can be one of those 20% of Harvard's class that gets a full ride due to being on the lowish end of the middle class (300% of poverty is the cutoff, and 300% of poverty is slightly above average), you'll save money.
The number in USNews is pretty deceptive. Most schools quote the cost for in-state tuition plus mandatory fees, and (maybe) some cash for books and computers. As a father you are probably paying for all that, plus room and board, and a little walking-around money. But the only real info you had when deciding which school to apply to was probably USNews list.
As for tuition inflation, I honestly have no idea how these guys are spending their money. It's not sports, sports departments frequently get subsidized from the general budget but they don't get subsidized much. Benefits for college employees are great, but not that great.
It seems of be a combination of state governments cutting their budget deficits by cutting aid to state schools, massive inflation in administrative salaries, and equally massive construction budgets.
Indeed it is. But it's blocked for me. I guess I've read my 10 NYTimes articles for this month.
It's a good thing I specifically downloaded it myself. It's an even better thing that NYTimes.com does not know I have three browsers, so I actually get 30 free articles a month.
You do realize that roughly 60% of 18-year-olds live in households that make less then 300% of poverty, and only 20% of Harvard's class, which means the top 40% claim 80% of the slots?
In other words, assuming virtue is not correlated with parental income, a poor kid has to three times as virtuous as a top 40% kid to get into Harvard, and the top 40% kid can get in if he's only half as deserving. I'd be stunned if the numbers aren't more skewed as you get to more extreme incomes. Roughly 1/10 of 18-year-olds are in sub-50% of poverty households, I'd be stunned if 5% of Harvard's incoming class is that poor; I'd be equally stunned if they turn anyone in the top 0.1% away.
I am glad Harvard let's some poor kids in. I don't blame them for preferring the rich. Without subsidies from rich folks Harvard would not be able to give poor folks a free education. That does not mean college admissions are anything like a fair judgement of the talent-level of the admittees, or that people aren't extremely silly for thinking that Affirmative Action devalues black degrees compared to a white kid named Ford or Walton.
A lot of the reason people complain college is useless is that it doesn't teach you things that can only be taught with actual experience in industry. You can't teach a kid how to maintain a company-wide computer system that's filled with random cruft nobody understands (and you can't delete/fix any of it without breaking things you didn't know were there) if a) all your programmers are PhDs who consider it their life-work to avoid poorly-documented cruft in their computer systems, and b) the Dean pays for major upgrades every few years (students won't go to a school where they have to use outdated software). You can't teach a kid to use every software package he might come across because really old shit shows up in surprising places and you've only got four years to do it. You can't teach kid how to deal with a distracted Pointy-Haired-Boss-type if the kid's paying you $20k in tuition. The kid's just gonna transfer someplace that doesn't charge $20k to deal with a jerk.
The problem here is that most families with $65k have no idea how to turn their 90th percentile kid into the kind of kid who gets into Harvard. They don't know about "SAT Coaches," don't know which extracurricular activities to push, don't have friends who can donate massive amounts to the orphanage little darling just founded in Kenya, etc. If one parent makes $150k, the other makes $60k, and their friends all work at Hedge Funds, it's really easy to look great on a college application.
More importantly they generally don't know that Harvard will be free for their kid. They see the Harvard name, they see the price tag in USNews is astronomical, maybe they google the actual tuition charges of roughly $37k, and instead of pushing their kid to apply to Harvard and spend $0 they push him to apply to [cheap state school] and spend $10,000 or so a year.
There was recently on article on three Latina friends from a small city in Texas. The one who went to Emory had loans, but that was because as a teenager she didn't understand all the paperwork requirements needed to get aid. Her family had nobody who had ever gone to a school like Emory, so they couldn't help very well.
If you're experiencing a true manic episode, including hearing voices, as the OP was, addiction to anti-depressants is definitely an improvement. Yeah your drug company has it's $talons in your for life, but that's a lot better then working 80 hours a week for three months because the voices in your head tell you to, and then disappearing into your man-cave for three weeks because you can't stop crying.
I can confirm anti-depressants work fine if you're correctly diagnosed with depression. I can feel the pills wear off. And if you read your link, you'll note the actual paper you quote says they work better then placebo, too. Only 33% better, but better is better.
Being misdiagnosed is not unusual. Strokes also have the same symptoms as many other diseases. Women having heart attacks are frequently told they're having a panic attack. That doesn't mean that the numerous diseases that look like strokes are complete BS made up by some idiot, it just means that you have to have a Doctor whose smart enough to tell a stroke from a migraine.
Your example's wrong. Back in the olden days when they still repaired computer boards rather then simply throwing them out, the way they figured out which chip needed to be replaced was by using electrical equipment to test circuits. It took forever even back then, with much simpler circuits, but if you had the right tools you could still do it today. It's not a great way to solve every computer issue, but for some extremely severe problems this is the only solution besides throwing out the hardware.
This is why using pills to treat mental illness has such great results. Most of the dumb criminals you read about in the news are people who have been diagnosed with major psychiatric issues, but stopped taking their meds. I've been on and off anti-depressants for years, and I can tell you I feel tons better when I'm on the pills. I feel better, I focus better, instead of deciding to sit at home and BS on Slashdot I go to work, etc.
Yeah there are many issues that could be better handled with therapy, or simple good parenting, that get into the DSM. But that's because all medical specialties have diagnoses that are silly, or obvious, or not that big a deal. If you check out the Wikipedia page on paper cuts you'll note that Paper Cuts have a Medical Billing Code.
1) You'll note the wiki site you mention specifically calls them Greeks. The Roman Empire's elite was two elites, the ethnic and linguistic Greeks who dominated the East, and the ethnic and Linguistic Latins who dominated the West. In modern history books the Greeks are always called Greek, and the Latins are always called Roman. The wiki article you cite doesn't call them Romans, it calls them Greeks. There's usually a footnote pointing out that the Byzantine Greeks considered themselves the true Romans, but that doesn't change the vocabulary used by actual historians writing in English.
2) If you actually admire Ataturk you should not bring up the destruction of the ethnic Greeks of Western Anatolia. That was an integral part of one of his major accomplishments, getting the Republic of Turkey international recognition as an independent ethnic Turkish nation-state. Without the population exchange between Greece and Turkey there is no secular Turkish state.
In a region where national identity is tied up in religion, anybody who is nationalist is by definition terrible for religious freedom. Depending on the specific circumstances he can be worse for religious freedom then actual religious police. If you don't believe me compare the religious demographics of the last Ottoman census in Anatolia to those of the secular Turkish Republic.
3) I don't know where you're getting Taqiyya from. I'm an Atheist. The Jewish sites I linked to have nothing to do with any Islamic plot to convince Westerners Islam is civilized. One is the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, which is still considered the best English-language reference for Jewish history prior to 1900. The other is part of an initiative to increase promote Israeli and American co-operation.
4) What you're missing is that there're many ways to practice a religion. Rima Fakih ignores most of the restrictions the Koran has placed on women, and many of the ones that it places on everyone (for example, she drinks). Yet she's still Muslim. She's actually closer to the typical Muslim today then the Wahabis, Al Qaeda disciples, or Iranian-allied terrorists. This is why it's legal to buy beer in almost every Muslim country, and possible to do so even in most places where it's banned.
Like every other religion, Islam has it's members who want to return it to it's 8th century roots. That doesn't mean women like Fakih are deep-cover agents, fully intent on destroying Western Civilization from within. It means they're drunken sluts, same as everyone else, including your sister. Probably your mother too, back when she had the figure to pull it off.
The thing about the local or even EU elections in the UK is that very few people vote in them. Westminster election turnout has never been below 60%, EU election turnout has never been above 40%. Local election turnout is frequently below 20%. These most recent were somewhat better (31%), but the UKIP's result of 25% is still only actually 7-8% of the voters and roughly 10% of the people who show up for general elections. I'd guess that if Cameron resigned tomorrow, the UKIP would get 10-15% of the vote. These votes would screw the Tories (thus Cameron won't resign tomorrow).
There's definitely a lot of frustration with the current political system's inability to deal with the recession, particularly Cameron/Clegg's insistence on austerity; but IMO it's much more likely the only result of this is that Labour gets to run the country after the 2015 elections.
I would actually dislike the rise of grassroots Democracy in the UK. One of the things I greatly admire about the Westminster system is that it gives politicians the power to get things done, and then voters get to choose who to punish when things are not done. The problem with direct democracy is that an overwhelming number of voters won't spend 15 hours figuring out exactly what they want from the government. They know they dislike taxes, therefore if you ask them "do you want taxes cut," they say yes. They usually figure out spending is paid for by taxes, so if you ask a general "do you want spending cut," they say yes to that, too.
But they don't actually know anything about the budget, so if you give them a list of programs to cut they invariably say Foreign Aid (which is a rounding error on the Budget), and nothing else. The things that actually cost the government money (the military, pensions, education, and health care) are invariably in line for an increase. This is because things that cost money are used by a lot of people, and all those people think how great it would be if they could just get a nice $500 boost to the voucher they use to pay for school and/or health care.
The result in state like California is that it's illegal to cut spending in bad times, because the Constitution mandates high levels of spending on every government people actually use. It's also de facto illegal to raise taxes because the process requires a supermajoprity in both houses of the State legislature.
Constantinople was never Roman in any meaningful sense of the term. It was ethnically Greek. At the time that wasn't a big distinction, but today everyone makes it. Apparently you didn't know which seems to indicate you don't learn any history you haven't read on an anti-Islam site.
By bringing it up you're actually making the argument that Islam is better for freedom of religion then secular democracy. Why? Because for all the centuries after the Byzantine Empire finally fell the theocratic Ottoman Caliphs allowed Greek Christians to freely practice their faith. The region was so mixed that it's virtually impossible to figure out where the majority Greek area stopped and the majority Turkish area started. It wasn't until the Caliphate fell, was replaced by secularist nationalists, and the Greek Kingdom tried to conquer the region that the ethnic Greeks were expelled.
The Egyptians are another problematic one for you. Did you know that the entire reason Egypt was conquered by the Muslims was that the Greek Christians who ran the place refused to stop feeding Egyptian Christians to the Lions? This pissed the Egyptian Christians off, so they stabbed the Greeks in the back. Early on it was actually illegal to convert from one religion to the other, but eventually more fundamentalist Islamic forces took over and 250 or so years after the original conquest Egypt was majority Islamic. So you basically just proved that Islam can live in perfect harmony with Christianity.
You'd have been best-off going with the Persians Zoroastorian religion, which went from major world religion to minority religion believed by a couple thousand Parsis in Gujarat when they lost a war. But if you'd done that I just would have brought the many, many civilizations destroyed by Christians over the years. The Spanish alone probably destroyed more religions then all of Islam in the century or two after Columbus. We'll never know because the Spanish weren't very good about keeping track of heathen religions.
As for Jewish law, you're just wrong. Under the letter of Jewish law you are supposed to be married at puberty: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10435-marriage-laws There is no minimum age for marriage, there is a maximum age for not being married, which is below the Age of Consent in several states (16 seems to be consensus, but 14 and 18 are also mentioned; at 20 you're "cursed by God Himself"). http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/marriage.html Is somewhat less draconian, but they still say "The minimum age for marriage under Jewish law is 13 for boys, 12 for girls; however, the kiddushin can take place before that, and often did in medieval times. The Talmud recommends that a man marry at age 18, or somewhere between 16 and 24."
What happens on these Anti-Islam sites is simple: Over the years every religion has done things we don't approve of now. Most of them find ways to change those attitudes (for example, it would be virtually impossible to find a Rabbi who says a 12-year-old is a valid marriage partner, despite the Talmud). As a religion believed by living people, Islam is no different.
But the anti-Islam forces assume that every word of the Koran is believed literally. Every Sura, every Hadith. They are all as evil as they sound when translated to English, removed totally from the context of the rest of the religion, and every Muslim who has ever lived will always follow each and every single one. None of them acknowledge each branch of Islam acknowledges different Hadiths as authoritative, or that context matters.
It gets even weirder when those guys get at history books. Anyone with a vaguely Islamic name who does anything bad to Christians is evidence that Islam itself is anti-Christian, even when the Christians of the day preferred Islamic rule (Egypt), or the I
Here's your problem: You're not looking at the World, you're watching the News.
Look at it this way: When I grew up (in the 80s) there were no Democracies in South America. The Caribbean was so economically backward nobody would have thought of opening a bank account there, much less using it to dodge US Taxes. Apartheid South Africa was in many ways the freest country in Africa because a) the white minority (at the time almost 20%) was fairly free, and b) the rest of the continent was dominated by Military governments and Communists. A few US allies in Asia were doing well, but much of the rest of the continent had trouble buying food for everyone. Japan was the only actual Democracy. The Iron Curtain meant dozens of European countries were de facto puppets of Brehznev in Moscow. Southern Europe was economically poor, and just getting over the Fascists-are-way-better-then-Communists phase of it's political development. Instead of being confident, independent states insisting on getting fair value for their taxes at EU summits, Finland and Germany spent all their time praying the Soviets would refrain from vaporizing them. Ireland was an economic backwater obsessed with a nationalist anti-British ideology. The British themselves refused to negotiate even on purely symbolic points because they didn't want to give in to IRA terrorism.
Yeah if you move the ball forward to about 1995 you can get past most of the really bad stuff I've mentioned. But Africa/South America/etc. were a lot poorer. Per capita most of these countries were in the dollar a day category. Ireland and the UK were only half-way to fixing their problems. Egypt was run by an extremely-tyranical un-elected Secularist rather then today's somewhat-tyranical elected Islamist. The Taliban had consolidated their rule in Afghanistan.
In UK polls her approval rating is in the 80s. At one point last year she hit 90% approval. Even in the US she typically polls 10-15 points ahead of every American politicians, with virtually no disapproval. Last I saw was 62-7 approval.
A big part of the reason she's loved is that the monarchy's hereditary. She is considered an ordinary woman who has fallen into extra-ordinary responsibilities. Anytime she does anything normal everyone gushes at how humble she is. Anytime she does anything that's slightly imperious everyone gives her the benefit of the doubt. She is, in a very real sense, grandma to everyone in 16 countries. And she wouldn't be grandma if she was an extremely distinguished politician selected solely because of her talents.
Spend some time with Brits. They don't forgive people who beat them politically like us Americans (or even the Canadians) do. They don't play nice at Reagan's funeral. They make "Ding-dong the Witch is Dead" a top-40 hit just to spite the dead guy. They revel in the fact that they are causing great distress to the family because 30 years ago the deceased really pissed off their parents.
If you can find some non-political (ie: no involvement by either voters or elected officials) way to select a head of state it might work. More likely the Unions would back somebody to the hilt (and the the Labour candidate), the traditionalists would back someone else (becoming the Tory candidate), the wimpy-can't-we-all-get-along faction (aka: the LibDems) would back a third guy; and whomever won would immediately become a lightning rod for every controversy.
I can see Australia or Canada coming together behind a newly minted President for the national interest. I doubt they will (Republicanism is strongest in both countries among the baby boomers, and if the Baby Boomers couldn't/wouldn't do it back in the 90s before they started dying of old age they ain't gonna pull it off when HM finally dies in 10-15 more years), but if they decided to have Presidents selected by merit the countries would continue to function.
The UK? No, hell no, fuck no, never. The day they fire the Queen and hire a President counties will start to secede.
I had forgotten that little clause. Regardless, the Courts wouldn't let the Queen walk off a plane and replace the PM with Swiss Cheese. If she tried, the Court decision would probably rest heavily on a single sentence in the Preamble which says that the Canadian government is supposed to be "similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom." In any Constitutional tradition where the exact text of the Constitution is important, preambles are simply irrelevant.
I really should not have forgotten that provincial assent was required for changing anything to do with the monarchy. A major reason I think Clegg/Cameron's quest to get a gender-blind Royal succession is doomed to failure is that I strongly doubt the Parti Quebecois will go along without significant concessions from Canada's Federal government, which they ain't getting.
No she did not veto anything, because the veto does not exist under the British Constitution.
She withheld Royal Assent, which is not a Veto because there is no formal procedure for over-riding it. If you have to compare this to an American Constitutional Practice you should compare it to the Pocket Veto. But the whole exercise is stupid. It's like trying to figure out whether a non-American Football Striker is anything like an American Football Quarterback. The answer is a) no, and b) you're an idiot.
If the PM thought the public would have sided with him on any of the 39 alleged "vetoes" all he had to do was make his case. If the public had sided with him she would have either been ignored, or bypassed.
Of those five German leaders, which has an approval rating higher then Queen's?
Moreover we'll have to agree to disagree about Merkel. She's done an OK job of being a Steward of the German Economy (they are actually in a shallow recession today, so it's only a good job when compared to the rest of Europe), but what the world has needed is a Steward of the European Economy. Spain and Cyprus were doing exactly what they were supposed to do before the Finance industry crashed. People like Merkel were telling them they were wonderful.
Now they need some Keynesian stimulus, and Merkel prefers a shallow German recession to spending German tax money on anything in Spain.
Of course everyone out of government opposes it. It's easy to talk about in such a way that the other guy sounds Fascist.
Of course everyone in government (except the LibDems) support it. It's their job to police the country, and privacy for private citizens makes that hard to do because criminals are private citizens.
The reason I'm not addressing your point that more Muslims want to force conversions is that it's fantasy. Nobody has ever made a Sharia law code apply to people they agreed were not Islamic. Nobody, including Bin Laden, has ever said he wants to convert Norway to Islam with the sword. Anti-Islam activists make this shit up, say it really confidently in Youtube videos, and then you assume it's true.
As for Christians and Jews, your standard is way too specific to be useful. Jewish assholes do not want you convert. They want it to be impossible for you to convert because Judaism has a strong ethnic element, and us poor WASPs clearly aren't loved by God because God didn't choose us. Thus a fairly significant proportion of the current Israeli government walks right up to saying flat-out they want to ethnically cleanse the entire former British Mandate of Palestine, notices that American Jews would disown them for saying that shit flat-out, and settles for blather about loyalty oaths and public worries that aforementioned American Jews are marrying too many gentiles. That is a categorically different form of evil then Bin Ladenism. I respectfully submit to you that it is just as bad as Bin Ladenism, and is just as Un-American. But you're giving all of those guys a pass because you've specifically defined evil in such a way that no Jew can ever be evil.
You're also forgetting the reason we have a First Amendment is too restrain Christianity. The founders weren't worried that the Arabs would all immigrate, win the Presidential election of 1804, and impose Sharia on unwilling states. They were worried that South Carolina's Baptists would win a bunch more states, declare an official Baptist Church, and start oppressing their fellow Protestants. Given that the previous 200 or so years of white history was basically Christians killing each-other because they disagreed about the Bible, this was a fairly important thing to have written into the Constitution.
Nowadays the First Amendment and the increasing secularization of everything have calmed them down some, but they're still trying to get Creationism into the Schools. If the Courts let them do that they'd probably make it illegal to teach the big Bang at all. They're still insisting the Conservative Christian version of marriage is the only one, so they try to make it hard to get a divorce.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to get medals in the military.
State-side you get the National Defense Service Medal for showing up to Basic. Depending on the service, and which form of basic training you go to, you may get another Medal before you even join a unit.
Prince Charles' medals don't seem to come from that source, but what did you expect? 16 countries have made him deputy-commander-in-chief of their armies. He frequently goes on State Visits, and in countries that are not America part of a state visit is giving everyone in the entire visiting delegation a fancy-ass Medal from an Order with precisely five degrees (the US actually has such an order, the Legion of Merit, but we only used it this way for guys who helped us in WW2). He's gonna get a lot of medals, and if he gives his Canadian Forces Decoration to the first soldier who asks him for a Medal Canada isn't gonna be very happy with him.
Generally in a Republic when one refers to "the Queen," one is referring to the Queen of a) the mother country or b) a neighboring country, or c) the former ruling family. Elizabeth II is Queen of the mother country (Britain), several of our neighbors (Canada, Jamaica and other Caribbean states), and is the closest thing we have to a claimant to the US Throne. The summary clearly referenced a British Bill, and the British Deputy Prime Minister, so it's clearly referencing Elizabeth II in her role as Queen of the UK.
Hell, who else could it be talking about? Queens Consort don't give speeches before Parliament, so it's clearly not referencing Maxima of the Netherlands or Sylvia of Sweden. The Dutch ruling Queen just quit because the Dutch think having a 90-year-old monarch and a 60-something heir is silly. That leaves Margaret of Denmark, and what are the odds the Danes have an important politician named Nick Clegg AND refer to a bill as the "Snooper's Charter?" They do have their own language, after all.
It's basically their equivalent of the State of the Union, except instead of having their elected Head of Government deliver it they have the unelected Head of State do the job.
How'd every family farm in the entire world come by it's land: inheritance.
It's unusual that the UK has kept political power formally tied to heredity, and that they haven't reformed land laws to make it clear the Queen owns nothing of the Crown Estate, but in principle the only difference between HM inheriting most of the UK and a Texas rancher inheriting a bunch of grazing rights from his father is scale.
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I'm using virtue in a slightly obsolete sense of the term here, which is basically synonymous with "merit."
As for lowered standards, you have to keep in mind that standards can be extremely misleading. Lets say you have two kids with nearly the same numbers. One went to a private school which puts everyone in AP classes in the 10th grade, builds it's curriculum around getting into college (ie: doing well on the SAT/ACT), everyone has a tutor to make sure they do well, and the rich kid took the test multiple times. The poor kid's first language was Spanish. He went to a small school that does not offer AP classes, and designs it's curriculum around getting into a Trade School. He had no tutors. He took the SAT once because it cost money and money was tight.
According to most people's definition of "standard" rich-kid is just as deserving of a slot in school as poor-kid. But the simple fact is you know those numbers from rich-kid are a ceiling, OTOH the numbers from poor-kid are a floor. Ideally you'd take both, charge rich-kid enough to educate both, and let poor-kid learn for free. But if you've only got room for one poor-kid is probably more academically deserving even if his GPA and SAT are slightly lower.
According to it's webpage Clemson is $22k including room and board. Their estimate for tuition, fees, and loan costs is roughly $13k. That $13k number is pretty close to what USNews has. USNews has USC at about $10k.
So if your little darling can get into those schools, but won't qualify for financial aid at someplace like Emory or Harvard, it'll save you money. The Emorys and Harvards of the world tend to be $35-40k in tuition, and located in very expensive towns, so room and board ain't cheap. But even Room and Board in Boston is probably significantly cheaper then $22k a year at Emory, if your darling can be one of those 20% of Harvard's class that gets a full ride due to being on the lowish end of the middle class (300% of poverty is the cutoff, and 300% of poverty is slightly above average), you'll save money.
They ask the colleges for their costs.
The number in USNews is pretty deceptive. Most schools quote the cost for in-state tuition plus mandatory fees, and (maybe) some cash for books and computers. As a father you are probably paying for all that, plus room and board, and a little walking-around money. But the only real info you had when deciding which school to apply to was probably USNews list.
As for tuition inflation, I honestly have no idea how these guys are spending their money. It's not sports, sports departments frequently get subsidized from the general budget but they don't get subsidized much. Benefits for college employees are great, but not that great.
It seems of be a combination of state governments cutting their budget deficits by cutting aid to state schools, massive inflation in administrative salaries, and equally massive construction budgets.
Indeed it is. But it's blocked for me. I guess I've read my 10 NYTimes articles for this month.
It's a good thing I specifically downloaded it myself. It's an even better thing that NYTimes.com does not know I have three browsers, so I actually get 30 free articles a month.
You do realize that roughly 60% of 18-year-olds live in households that make less then 300% of poverty, and only 20% of Harvard's class, which means the top 40% claim 80% of the slots?
In other words, assuming virtue is not correlated with parental income, a poor kid has to three times as virtuous as a top 40% kid to get into Harvard, and the top 40% kid can get in if he's only half as deserving. I'd be stunned if the numbers aren't more skewed as you get to more extreme incomes. Roughly 1/10 of 18-year-olds are in sub-50% of poverty households, I'd be stunned if 5% of Harvard's incoming class is that poor; I'd be equally stunned if they turn anyone in the top 0.1% away.
I am glad Harvard let's some poor kids in. I don't blame them for preferring the rich. Without subsidies from rich folks Harvard would not be able to give poor folks a free education. That does not mean college admissions are anything like a fair judgement of the talent-level of the admittees, or that people aren't extremely silly for thinking that Affirmative Action devalues black degrees compared to a white kid named Ford or Walton.
A lot of the reason people complain college is useless is that it doesn't teach you things that can only be taught with actual experience in industry. You can't teach a kid how to maintain a company-wide computer system that's filled with random cruft nobody understands (and you can't delete/fix any of it without breaking things you didn't know were there) if a) all your programmers are PhDs who consider it their life-work to avoid poorly-documented cruft in their computer systems, and b) the Dean pays for major upgrades every few years (students won't go to a school where they have to use outdated software). You can't teach a kid to use every software package he might come across because really old shit shows up in surprising places and you've only got four years to do it. You can't teach kid how to deal with a distracted Pointy-Haired-Boss-type if the kid's paying you $20k in tuition. The kid's just gonna transfer someplace that doesn't charge $20k to deal with a jerk.
The problem here is that most families with $65k have no idea how to turn their 90th percentile kid into the kind of kid who gets into Harvard. They don't know about "SAT Coaches," don't know which extracurricular activities to push, don't have friends who can donate massive amounts to the orphanage little darling just founded in Kenya, etc. If one parent makes $150k, the other makes $60k, and their friends all work at Hedge Funds, it's really easy to look great on a college application.
More importantly they generally don't know that Harvard will be free for their kid. They see the Harvard name, they see the price tag in USNews is astronomical, maybe they google the actual tuition charges of roughly $37k, and instead of pushing their kid to apply to Harvard and spend $0 they push him to apply to [cheap state school] and spend $10,000 or so a year.
There was recently on article on three Latina friends from a small city in Texas. The one who went to Emory had loans, but that was because as a teenager she didn't understand all the paperwork requirements needed to get aid. Her family had nobody who had ever gone to a school like Emory, so they couldn't help very well.
If you're experiencing a true manic episode, including hearing voices, as the OP was, addiction to anti-depressants is definitely an improvement. Yeah your drug company has it's $talons in your for life, but that's a lot better then working 80 hours a week for three months because the voices in your head tell you to, and then disappearing into your man-cave for three weeks because you can't stop crying.
You what's interesting?
I had the exact same teachers as my sister. She ended up being diagnosed with Dyslexia, I didn't.
I can confirm anti-depressants work fine if you're correctly diagnosed with depression. I can feel the pills wear off. And if you read your link, you'll note the actual paper you quote says they work better then placebo, too. Only 33% better, but better is better.
Being misdiagnosed is not unusual. Strokes also have the same symptoms as many other diseases. Women having heart attacks are frequently told they're having a panic attack. That doesn't mean that the numerous diseases that look like strokes are complete BS made up by some idiot, it just means that you have to have a Doctor whose smart enough to tell a stroke from a migraine.
Your example's wrong. Back in the olden days when they still repaired computer boards rather then simply throwing them out, the way they figured out which chip needed to be replaced was by using electrical equipment to test circuits. It took forever even back then, with much simpler circuits, but if you had the right tools you could still do it today. It's not a great way to solve every computer issue, but for some extremely severe problems this is the only solution besides throwing out the hardware.
This is why using pills to treat mental illness has such great results. Most of the dumb criminals you read about in the news are people who have been diagnosed with major psychiatric issues, but stopped taking their meds. I've been on and off anti-depressants for years, and I can tell you I feel tons better when I'm on the pills. I feel better, I focus better, instead of deciding to sit at home and BS on Slashdot I go to work, etc.
Yeah there are many issues that could be better handled with therapy, or simple good parenting, that get into the DSM. But that's because all medical specialties have diagnoses that are silly, or obvious, or not that big a deal. If you check out the Wikipedia page on paper cuts you'll note that Paper Cuts have a Medical Billing Code.
A couple points:
1) You'll note the wiki site you mention specifically calls them Greeks. The Roman Empire's elite was two elites, the ethnic and linguistic Greeks who dominated the East, and the ethnic and Linguistic Latins who dominated the West. In modern history books the Greeks are always called Greek, and the Latins are always called Roman. The wiki article you cite doesn't call them Romans, it calls them Greeks. There's usually a footnote pointing out that the Byzantine Greeks considered themselves the true Romans, but that doesn't change the vocabulary used by actual historians writing in English.
2) If you actually admire Ataturk you should not bring up the destruction of the ethnic Greeks of Western Anatolia. That was an integral part of one of his major accomplishments, getting the Republic of Turkey international recognition as an independent ethnic Turkish nation-state. Without the population exchange between Greece and Turkey there is no secular Turkish state.
In a region where national identity is tied up in religion, anybody who is nationalist is by definition terrible for religious freedom. Depending on the specific circumstances he can be worse for religious freedom then actual religious police. If you don't believe me compare the religious demographics of the last Ottoman census in Anatolia to those of the secular Turkish Republic.
3) I don't know where you're getting Taqiyya from. I'm an Atheist. The Jewish sites I linked to have nothing to do with any Islamic plot to convince Westerners Islam is civilized. One is the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, which is still considered the best English-language reference for Jewish history prior to 1900. The other is part of an initiative to increase promote Israeli and American co-operation.
4) What you're missing is that there're many ways to practice a religion. Rima Fakih ignores most of the restrictions the Koran has placed on women, and many of the ones that it places on everyone (for example, she drinks). Yet she's still Muslim. She's actually closer to the typical Muslim today then the Wahabis, Al Qaeda disciples, or Iranian-allied terrorists. This is why it's legal to buy beer in almost every Muslim country, and possible to do so even in most places where it's banned.
Like every other religion, Islam has it's members who want to return it to it's 8th century roots. That doesn't mean women like Fakih are deep-cover agents, fully intent on destroying Western Civilization from within. It means they're drunken sluts, same as everyone else, including your sister. Probably your mother too, back when she had the figure to pull it off.
The thing about the local or even EU elections in the UK is that very few people vote in them. Westminster election turnout has never been below 60%, EU election turnout has never been above 40%. Local election turnout is frequently below 20%. These most recent were somewhat better (31%), but the UKIP's result of 25% is still only actually 7-8% of the voters and roughly 10% of the people who show up for general elections. I'd guess that if Cameron resigned tomorrow, the UKIP would get 10-15% of the vote. These votes would screw the Tories (thus Cameron won't resign tomorrow).
There's definitely a lot of frustration with the current political system's inability to deal with the recession, particularly Cameron/Clegg's insistence on austerity; but IMO it's much more likely the only result of this is that Labour gets to run the country after the 2015 elections.
I would actually dislike the rise of grassroots Democracy in the UK. One of the things I greatly admire about the Westminster system is that it gives politicians the power to get things done, and then voters get to choose who to punish when things are not done. The problem with direct democracy is that an overwhelming number of voters won't spend 15 hours figuring out exactly what they want from the government. They know they dislike taxes, therefore if you ask them "do you want taxes cut," they say yes. They usually figure out spending is paid for by taxes, so if you ask a general "do you want spending cut," they say yes to that, too.
But they don't actually know anything about the budget, so if you give them a list of programs to cut they invariably say Foreign Aid (which is a rounding error on the Budget), and nothing else. The things that actually cost the government money (the military, pensions, education, and health care) are invariably in line for an increase. This is because things that cost money are used by a lot of people, and all those people think how great it would be if they could just get a nice $500 boost to the voucher they use to pay for school and/or health care.
The result in state like California is that it's illegal to cut spending in bad times, because the Constitution mandates high levels of spending on every government people actually use. It's also de facto illegal to raise taxes because the process requires a supermajoprity in both houses of the State legislature.
You read JihadWatch too much.
Constantinople was never Roman in any meaningful sense of the term. It was ethnically Greek. At the time that wasn't a big distinction, but today everyone makes it. Apparently you didn't know which seems to indicate you don't learn any history you haven't read on an anti-Islam site.
By bringing it up you're actually making the argument that Islam is better for freedom of religion then secular democracy. Why? Because for all the centuries after the Byzantine Empire finally fell the theocratic Ottoman Caliphs allowed Greek Christians to freely practice their faith. The region was so mixed that it's virtually impossible to figure out where the majority Greek area stopped and the majority Turkish area started. It wasn't until the Caliphate fell, was replaced by secularist nationalists, and the Greek Kingdom tried to conquer the region that the ethnic Greeks were expelled.
The Egyptians are another problematic one for you. Did you know that the entire reason Egypt was conquered by the Muslims was that the Greek Christians who ran the place refused to stop feeding Egyptian Christians to the Lions? This pissed the Egyptian Christians off, so they stabbed the Greeks in the back. Early on it was actually illegal to convert from one religion to the other, but eventually more fundamentalist Islamic forces took over and 250 or so years after the original conquest Egypt was majority Islamic. So you basically just proved that Islam can live in perfect harmony with Christianity.
You'd have been best-off going with the Persians Zoroastorian religion, which went from major world religion to minority religion believed by a couple thousand Parsis in Gujarat when they lost a war. But if you'd done that I just would have brought the many, many civilizations destroyed by Christians over the years. The Spanish alone probably destroyed more religions then all of Islam in the century or two after Columbus. We'll never know because the Spanish weren't very good about keeping track of heathen religions.
As for Jewish law, you're just wrong. Under the letter of Jewish law you are supposed to be married at puberty:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10435-marriage-laws
There is no minimum age for marriage, there is a maximum age for not being married, which is below the Age of Consent in several states (16 seems to be consensus, but 14 and 18 are also mentioned; at 20 you're "cursed by God Himself").
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/marriage.html
Is somewhat less draconian, but they still say "The minimum age for marriage under Jewish law is 13 for boys, 12 for girls; however, the kiddushin can take place before that, and often did in medieval times. The Talmud recommends that a man marry at age 18, or somewhere between 16 and 24."
What happens on these Anti-Islam sites is simple:
Over the years every religion has done things we don't approve of now. Most of them find ways to change those attitudes (for example, it would be virtually impossible to find a Rabbi who says a 12-year-old is a valid marriage partner, despite the Talmud). As a religion believed by living people, Islam is no different.
But the anti-Islam forces assume that every word of the Koran is believed literally. Every Sura, every Hadith. They are all as evil as they sound when translated to English, removed totally from the context of the rest of the religion, and every Muslim who has ever lived will always follow each and every single one. None of them acknowledge each branch of Islam acknowledges different Hadiths as authoritative, or that context matters.
It gets even weirder when those guys get at history books. Anyone with a vaguely Islamic name who does anything bad to Christians is evidence that Islam itself is anti-Christian, even when the Christians of the day preferred Islamic rule (Egypt), or the I
Here's your problem: You're not looking at the World, you're watching the News.
Look at it this way:
When I grew up (in the 80s) there were no Democracies in South America. The Caribbean was so economically backward nobody would have thought of opening a bank account there, much less using it to dodge US Taxes. Apartheid South Africa was in many ways the freest country in Africa because a) the white minority (at the time almost 20%) was fairly free, and b) the rest of the continent was dominated by Military governments and Communists. A few US allies in Asia were doing well, but much of the rest of the continent had trouble buying food for everyone. Japan was the only actual Democracy. The Iron Curtain meant dozens of European countries were de facto puppets of Brehznev in Moscow. Southern Europe was economically poor, and just getting over the Fascists-are-way-better-then-Communists phase of it's political development. Instead of being confident, independent states insisting on getting fair value for their taxes at EU summits, Finland and Germany spent all their time praying the Soviets would refrain from vaporizing them. Ireland was an economic backwater obsessed with a nationalist anti-British ideology. The British themselves refused to negotiate even on purely symbolic points because they didn't want to give in to IRA terrorism.
Yeah if you move the ball forward to about 1995 you can get past most of the really bad stuff I've mentioned. But Africa/South America/etc. were a lot poorer. Per capita most of these countries were in the dollar a day category. Ireland and the UK were only half-way to fixing their problems. Egypt was run by an extremely-tyranical un-elected Secularist rather then today's somewhat-tyranical elected Islamist. The Taliban had consolidated their rule in Afghanistan.
In UK polls her approval rating is in the 80s. At one point last year she hit 90% approval. Even in the US she typically polls 10-15 points ahead of every American politicians, with virtually no disapproval. Last I saw was 62-7 approval.
A big part of the reason she's loved is that the monarchy's hereditary. She is considered an ordinary woman who has fallen into extra-ordinary responsibilities. Anytime she does anything normal everyone gushes at how humble she is. Anytime she does anything that's slightly imperious everyone gives her the benefit of the doubt. She is, in a very real sense, grandma to everyone in 16 countries. And she wouldn't be grandma if she was an extremely distinguished politician selected solely because of her talents.
Spend some time with Brits. They don't forgive people who beat them politically like us Americans (or even the Canadians) do. They don't play nice at Reagan's funeral. They make "Ding-dong the Witch is Dead" a top-40 hit just to spite the dead guy. They revel in the fact that they are causing great distress to the family because 30 years ago the deceased really pissed off their parents.
If you can find some non-political (ie: no involvement by either voters or elected officials) way to select a head of state it might work. More likely the Unions would back somebody to the hilt (and the the Labour candidate), the traditionalists would back someone else (becoming the Tory candidate), the wimpy-can't-we-all-get-along faction (aka: the LibDems) would back a third guy; and whomever won would immediately become a lightning rod for every controversy.
I can see Australia or Canada coming together behind a newly minted President for the national interest. I doubt they will (Republicanism is strongest in both countries among the baby boomers, and if the Baby Boomers couldn't/wouldn't do it back in the 90s before they started dying of old age they ain't gonna pull it off when HM finally dies in 10-15 more years), but if they decided to have Presidents selected by merit the countries would continue to function.
The UK? No, hell no, fuck no, never. The day they fire the Queen and hire a President counties will start to secede.
I had forgotten that little clause. Regardless, the Courts wouldn't let the Queen walk off a plane and replace the PM with Swiss Cheese. If she tried, the Court decision would probably rest heavily on a single sentence in the Preamble which says that the Canadian government is supposed to be "similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom." In any Constitutional tradition where the exact text of the Constitution is important, preambles are simply irrelevant.
I really should not have forgotten that provincial assent was required for changing anything to do with the monarchy. A major reason I think Clegg/Cameron's quest to get a gender-blind Royal succession is doomed to failure is that I strongly doubt the Parti Quebecois will go along without significant concessions from Canada's Federal government, which they ain't getting.
No she did not veto anything, because the veto does not exist under the British Constitution.
She withheld Royal Assent, which is not a Veto because there is no formal procedure for over-riding it. If you have to compare this to an American Constitutional Practice you should compare it to the Pocket Veto. But the whole exercise is stupid. It's like trying to figure out whether a non-American Football Striker is anything like an American Football Quarterback. The answer is a) no, and b) you're an idiot.
If the PM thought the public would have sided with him on any of the 39 alleged "vetoes" all he had to do was make his case. If the public had sided with him she would have either been ignored, or bypassed.
Of those five German leaders, which has an approval rating higher then Queen's?
Moreover we'll have to agree to disagree about Merkel. She's done an OK job of being a Steward of the German Economy (they are actually in a shallow recession today, so it's only a good job when compared to the rest of Europe), but what the world has needed is a Steward of the European Economy. Spain and Cyprus were doing exactly what they were supposed to do before the Finance industry crashed. People like Merkel were telling them they were wonderful.
Now they need some Keynesian stimulus, and Merkel prefers a shallow German recession to spending German tax money on anything in Spain.
Of course everyone out of government opposes it. It's easy to talk about in such a way that the other guy sounds Fascist.
Of course everyone in government (except the LibDems) support it. It's their job to police the country, and privacy for private citizens makes that hard to do because criminals are private citizens.
The reason I'm not addressing your point that more Muslims want to force conversions is that it's fantasy. Nobody has ever made a Sharia law code apply to people they agreed were not Islamic. Nobody, including Bin Laden, has ever said he wants to convert Norway to Islam with the sword. Anti-Islam activists make this shit up, say it really confidently in Youtube videos, and then you assume it's true.
As for Christians and Jews, your standard is way too specific to be useful. Jewish assholes do not want you convert. They want it to be impossible for you to convert because Judaism has a strong ethnic element, and us poor WASPs clearly aren't loved by God because God didn't choose us. Thus a fairly significant proportion of the current Israeli government walks right up to saying flat-out they want to ethnically cleanse the entire former British Mandate of Palestine, notices that American Jews would disown them for saying that shit flat-out, and settles for blather about loyalty oaths and public worries that aforementioned American Jews are marrying too many gentiles. That is a categorically different form of evil then Bin Ladenism. I respectfully submit to you that it is just as bad as Bin Ladenism, and is just as Un-American. But you're giving all of those guys a pass because you've specifically defined evil in such a way that no Jew can ever be evil.
You're also forgetting the reason we have a First Amendment is too restrain Christianity. The founders weren't worried that the Arabs would all immigrate, win the Presidential election of 1804, and impose Sharia on unwilling states. They were worried that South Carolina's Baptists would win a bunch more states, declare an official Baptist Church, and start oppressing their fellow Protestants. Given that the previous 200 or so years of white history was basically Christians killing each-other because they disagreed about the Bible, this was a fairly important thing to have written into the Constitution.
Nowadays the First Amendment and the increasing secularization of everything have calmed them down some, but they're still trying to get Creationism into the Schools. If the Courts let them do that they'd probably make it illegal to teach the big Bang at all. They're still insisting the Conservative Christian version of marriage is the only one, so they try to make it hard to get a divorce.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to get medals in the military.
State-side you get the National Defense Service Medal for showing up to Basic. Depending on the service, and which form of basic training you go to, you may get another Medal before you even join a unit.
Prince Charles' medals don't seem to come from that source, but what did you expect? 16 countries have made him deputy-commander-in-chief of their armies. He frequently goes on State Visits, and in countries that are not America part of a state visit is giving everyone in the entire visiting delegation a fancy-ass Medal from an Order with precisely five degrees (the US actually has such an order, the Legion of Merit, but we only used it this way for guys who helped us in WW2). He's gonna get a lot of medals, and if he gives his Canadian Forces Decoration to the first soldier who asks him for a Medal Canada isn't gonna be very happy with him.
I wasn't confused.
Generally in a Republic when one refers to "the Queen," one is referring to the Queen of a) the mother country or b) a neighboring country, or c) the former ruling family. Elizabeth II is Queen of the mother country (Britain), several of our neighbors (Canada, Jamaica and other Caribbean states), and is the closest thing we have to a claimant to the US Throne. The summary clearly referenced a British Bill, and the British Deputy Prime Minister, so it's clearly referencing Elizabeth II in her role as Queen of the UK.
Hell, who else could it be talking about? Queens Consort don't give speeches before Parliament, so it's clearly not referencing Maxima of the Netherlands or Sylvia of Sweden. The Dutch ruling Queen just quit because the Dutch think having a 90-year-old monarch and a 60-something heir is silly. That leaves Margaret of Denmark, and what are the odds the Danes have an important politician named Nick Clegg AND refer to a bill as the "Snooper's Charter?" They do have their own language, after all.
It's basically their equivalent of the State of the Union, except instead of having their elected Head of Government deliver it they have the unelected Head of State do the job.
How'd every family farm in the entire world come by it's land: inheritance.
It's unusual that the UK has kept political power formally tied to heredity, and that they haven't reformed land laws to make it clear the Queen owns nothing of the Crown Estate, but in principle the only difference between HM inheriting most of the UK and a Texas rancher inheriting a bunch of grazing rights from his father is scale.