No, we should be promoting a having healthy BMI as a body image. Being too thin or too fat (obviously the latter is far more common in western society) is unhealthy, and would should not be trying to teach our kids that it's OK to be fat, because it's not if we care about their long-term health and longevity.
Maybe (except for these girls) the female programmers know better than to waste their time with RoR, and instead concentrate on serious languages and platforms like C, C++, Java, Javascript, and even Python and PHP.
You would probably call ME right wing, yet I am more liberal socially than most of you. The republicans would call me... I don't know what, a Martian? I am more conservative than most of them economically.
That's because you're an extremist libertarian. Basically, you want almost no government at all. There's more than two camps when it comes to political opinions. However, most American voters do seem to fall into the left-wing/right-wing axis. How many Republicans (the non-libertarian kind) do you know who support gay marriage, for instance? Or better yet, getting the government out of the marriage business altogether and just letting people set up whatever kind of civil union contracts they desire (which would allow polyamory)? Most of them seem to want a theocratic state. And how many social liberals (the non-libertarian kind again) do you know who want low taxes and fewer government services?
vote in only libertarians, but that would take a huge effort because the majority of people are quite set in their beliefs.
As I said before, most people simply don't believe that way. People on the left want a "great society", and people on the right want a theocracy.
There's different kinds of "right wing"; most right-wingers these days seem to be all in favor of a police state (just look at the Republicans' actions; this surveillance crap was started by Bush after all). Rand and Ron are really a lot closer to the Libertarians (Ron actually ran as a Libertarian many years ago, IIRC), though they definitely have some right-wing leanings on some issues (abortion, etc.) But there's likely no politician you'll agree with on everything; or worse, if you do agree with them, when they get elected, they do an about-face and do exactly the opposite, as we found with Obama. With the Pauls, agree or disagree with them, they definitely seem to be men of their word, so you're probably going to get what you expected with them.
But yeah, I'd love to have one of those two as President for one term, perhaps two, just to clean things up in Washington. There's only so much they can do to shrink government (the Pres doesn't really have that much power), but in that position they could certainly downsize the drug war, reduce military involvement, shut down PRISM, etc, plus veto a lot of other crap that Congress keeps trying to push.
Wrong. Obama has the unilateral power to make lots of changes: 1) wars. As commander-in-chief, he decides if troops are to be deployed or not. He hasn't exercised his option to avoid going to war at all. 2) the drug war. The AG (who is Obama's stooge) has the unilateral power to decide which drugs are on the "banned" list. If they wanted to legalize marijuana, Obama/Holder could do so tomorrow. But instead they've stepped up anti-marijuana enforcement at the federal level. 3) prosecuting whistleblowers and being transparent: Congress has no power here, it's all on him.
Stop being an apologist for Obama. Yes, there's many things that he has little to no power over, but there's lots of things he has absolute power over, and he consistently does the wrong thing.
Sounds good, but what this has to do with Obama being Bush's protege and Obama apologists I don't know. Obama sucks not because he hasn't figured out how to get us out of a recession/depression (lots of Presidents wouldn't figure that out, plus it's not the President's job to write the budget, it's Congress's). He sucks because he made a lot of good-sounding promises, such as to have a transparent administration and to stop warrantless wiretapping and spying on American citizens, and as soon as he was elected he did a U-turn and just copied Bush's policies on surveillance, wars, and marijuana enforcement (actually, marijuana enforcement was more lax under Bush; Obama's been much worse), plus he's gone after whistleblowers with a vengeance.
Who knows, maybe things just happened to work out that way, maybe he had a work assignment that took him there, etc. Either way, he should be fairly safe there for the time being, I would think. Much more so than say, Sweden, where they allow US military to come do "extraordinary renditions" whenever they want.
Of course it was! Attempting to take over two continents and umpteen countries,
No, it wasn't. As I said before, they bit off more than they could chew, and made some serious military blunders, but they did come pretty close to succeeding. If they had left Russia alone, they might have succeeded. Yes, it was megalomaniacal, but every country that engages in wars of conquest meets this definition to some degree. Only a couple decades before this, most of the European countries did the exact same thing: they got involved in WWI, which was nothing more than a giant land-grab attempt by all parties involved.
Checked the size of your prison population lately?
The US prison population isn't driven by irrational hatred of specific ethnic groups. Of course, certain groups are certainly overrepresented there, but those groups also happen to be highly overrepresented in the economic underclasses; the prison population and the economic classes coincide almost perfectly, most likely: quite simply, poor people are far more likely to wind up in prison than richer people. The US prison population size isn't driven by hatred, it's driven by greed: various groups, including the private prison corporations, law enforcement agencies, and more, profit by sending as many people to prison as possible. They're just as happy to send poor white trailer-park residents there as they are blacks and hispanics.
Bradley Manning screwed up by coming out when he was in the US. This guy is smarter: he waited until he was in Hong Kong before admitting responsibility. He could still have an "accident" there, but the Chinese government would not take kindly to US agents conducting such operations within their borders.
Obama's no centrist, he's thoroughly right-wing. Unfortunately, the Republicans are extreme right-wing, so your choices are 1) right-wing, and 2) even more right-wing.
I don't know about the OP specifically, but some people did have some alternatives, early in the primaries process, IIRC. There were one or two other Democrat challengers to Obama in the primaries, I think one was Darcy Richardson. People could have voted for him, but they didn't.
Now this doesn't apply to everyone; by the time the primaries got around to the state I was living in at the time, I guess the challengers had all dropped out, because there wasn't even a primary election for the Democrats in that state.
Also, on the Republican side, there were other challengers to Romney (though it's debateable whether any were any good, but there was Ron Paul, who while he has problems, would at least have shut down this surveillance nonsense, plus a lot of other stuff, if he had been elected).
Well the EU for one seems to be up in arms about this NSA spying revelation. They've long had very strong laws about privacy, which the US has lacked. If anything, I see the EU becoming a major power that opposes the US.
That won't work: thanks to global warming, those "extremely cold" places are actually getting to be pretty nice.
However, unlike in the old days, the US doesn't seem to be bent on conquest of nearby territory any more, only on implementing a police state within its borders and conquering strategically-located resource-rich middle eastern countries, so moving North is probably a safe move. What's more, people are a lot friendlier up there. IME, at least within North America, the farther south you go, the bigger assholes people are.
Now, if only the USA can re-learn what folly was Nazi Germany...
It wasn't folly at all. The Germans nearly won. Their problem was that Hitler was a terrible military strategist, and they also bit off more than they could chew, trying to take over all of Europe and worst of all, Russia (which was their real undoing). The USA doesn't have these problems: it already controls tons of land (e.g., the entire US itself; it has far more land area than Germany ever had), and these days controlling land directly isn't so important anyway. As long as they don't create death camps (which they won't, because they don't have any irrational hatred of specific ethnic groups like Hitler and his henchmen did), and don't try to start a giant war with the rest of the developed world, they'll succeed quite handily in turning the USA into a militarized police state.
So you are saying that the US is running concentration camps for people who believe in strong civil rights?
Not yet, but Obama has shown over and over that he hates whistleblowers and leakers, and anyone who protests against him. It's not going to be any better after Obama's term is over, because he's nothing more than a puppet for the powers-that-be who selected him and control him, so the next guy is going to be more of the same, and probably worse, as they're going to keep tightening the screws.
Just like things went from bad to worse during the Nazi Party's reign in Germany, it's going to happen like that here too. The main difference AFAICT is that they haven't (yet) found an ultra-charismatic leader to push it through. Maybe that was part of the idea with Obama, because he had charisma and was great at giving speeches, but that seems to have mostly worn off. But now they've probably realized they don't need that: the American public is so apathetic and easily divided and distracted that there isn't going to be any resistance to their plans.
It wasn't the Jews that GTFO before the SHTF; lots of smart Germans GTFO out too when they saw what was happening. It wasn't just Jews who were persecuted during the Nazi regime (though they certainly got the shaft in bigger numbers than anyone else); lots of others were murdered too: Gypsies, homosexuals, and various intellectuals.
It's ingenious satire for the thought process which most Americans share. Remember the journalists' coverage of the event? They didn't give a shit about the rape victim, they just whined about how these vile rapists' careers were destroyed. Worse yet, the journalists who said this were women themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
or we should promite thinness as a body image
No, we should be promoting a having healthy BMI as a body image. Being too thin or too fat (obviously the latter is far more common in western society) is unhealthy, and would should not be trying to teach our kids that it's OK to be fat, because it's not if we care about their long-term health and longevity.
Maybe (except for these girls) the female programmers know better than to waste their time with RoR, and instead concentrate on serious languages and platforms like C, C++, Java, Javascript, and even Python and PHP.
Obama's statements about marijuana enforcement have been complete lies:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/obamas-drug-war-medical-marijuana_n_2546178.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obamas-war-on-pot-20120216
Oh, we're still in Afghanistan BTW. So I'm 3 for 3.
Nope, wrong Richardson. I was talking about this one.
Ask anyone in Europe if they think Obama is left-wing. They'll say "no". There's more to the world than the US population.
You would probably call ME right wing, yet I am more liberal socially than most of you. ... I don't know what, a Martian? I am more conservative than most of them economically.
The republicans would call me
That's because you're an extremist libertarian. Basically, you want almost no government at all.
There's more than two camps when it comes to political opinions. However, most American voters do seem to fall into the left-wing/right-wing axis. How many Republicans (the non-libertarian kind) do you know who support gay marriage, for instance? Or better yet, getting the government out of the marriage business altogether and just letting people set up whatever kind of civil union contracts they desire (which would allow polyamory)? Most of them seem to want a theocratic state. And how many social liberals (the non-libertarian kind again) do you know who want low taxes and fewer government services?
vote in only libertarians, but that would take a huge effort because the majority of people are quite set in their beliefs.
As I said before, most people simply don't believe that way. People on the left want a "great society", and people on the right want a theocracy.
There's different kinds of "right wing"; most right-wingers these days seem to be all in favor of a police state (just look at the Republicans' actions; this surveillance crap was started by Bush after all). Rand and Ron are really a lot closer to the Libertarians (Ron actually ran as a Libertarian many years ago, IIRC), though they definitely have some right-wing leanings on some issues (abortion, etc.) But there's likely no politician you'll agree with on everything; or worse, if you do agree with them, when they get elected, they do an about-face and do exactly the opposite, as we found with Obama. With the Pauls, agree or disagree with them, they definitely seem to be men of their word, so you're probably going to get what you expected with them.
But yeah, I'd love to have one of those two as President for one term, perhaps two, just to clean things up in Washington. There's only so much they can do to shrink government (the Pres doesn't really have that much power), but in that position they could certainly downsize the drug war, reduce military involvement, shut down PRISM, etc, plus veto a lot of other crap that Congress keeps trying to push.
Wrong. Obama has the unilateral power to make lots of changes:
1) wars. As commander-in-chief, he decides if troops are to be deployed or not. He hasn't exercised his option to avoid going to war at all.
2) the drug war. The AG (who is Obama's stooge) has the unilateral power to decide which drugs are on the "banned" list. If they wanted to legalize marijuana, Obama/Holder could do so tomorrow. But instead they've stepped up anti-marijuana enforcement at the federal level.
3) prosecuting whistleblowers and being transparent: Congress has no power here, it's all on him.
Stop being an apologist for Obama. Yes, there's many things that he has little to no power over, but there's lots of things he has absolute power over, and he consistently does the wrong thing.
Sounds good, but what this has to do with Obama being Bush's protege and Obama apologists I don't know. Obama sucks not because he hasn't figured out how to get us out of a recession/depression (lots of Presidents wouldn't figure that out, plus it's not the President's job to write the budget, it's Congress's). He sucks because he made a lot of good-sounding promises, such as to have a transparent administration and to stop warrantless wiretapping and spying on American citizens, and as soon as he was elected he did a U-turn and just copied Bush's policies on surveillance, wars, and marijuana enforcement (actually, marijuana enforcement was more lax under Bush; Obama's been much worse), plus he's gone after whistleblowers with a vengeance.
So you'd prefer we just never talk about it again? Pretend it doesn't exist? Yeah, that'll fix the problem.
Who knows, maybe things just happened to work out that way, maybe he had a work assignment that took him there, etc. Either way, he should be fairly safe there for the time being, I would think. Much more so than say, Sweden, where they allow US military to come do "extraordinary renditions" whenever they want.
Of course it was! Attempting to take over two continents and umpteen countries,
No, it wasn't. As I said before, they bit off more than they could chew, and made some serious military blunders, but they did come pretty close to succeeding. If they had left Russia alone, they might have succeeded. Yes, it was megalomaniacal, but every country that engages in wars of conquest meets this definition to some degree. Only a couple decades before this, most of the European countries did the exact same thing: they got involved in WWI, which was nothing more than a giant land-grab attempt by all parties involved.
Checked the size of your prison population lately?
The US prison population isn't driven by irrational hatred of specific ethnic groups. Of course, certain groups are certainly overrepresented there, but those groups also happen to be highly overrepresented in the economic underclasses; the prison population and the economic classes coincide almost perfectly, most likely: quite simply, poor people are far more likely to wind up in prison than richer people. The US prison population size isn't driven by hatred, it's driven by greed: various groups, including the private prison corporations, law enforcement agencies, and more, profit by sending as many people to prison as possible. They're just as happy to send poor white trailer-park residents there as they are blacks and hispanics.
Bradley Manning screwed up by coming out when he was in the US. This guy is smarter: he waited until he was in Hong Kong before admitting responsibility. He could still have an "accident" there, but the Chinese government would not take kindly to US agents conducting such operations within their borders.
It's called "black humor". It's funny, but in a horrible way, and reminds us what horrible and inhumane places US prisons are.
Good luck with that; he's apparently in Hong Kong, which is part of China. China would not take well to drone bombings in its territory.
Obama's no centrist, he's thoroughly right-wing. Unfortunately, the Republicans are extreme right-wing, so your choices are 1) right-wing, and 2) even more right-wing.
Yeah, the black guy who not only didn't do anything to stop it, but helped make it worse.
You Obama apologists disgust me. Obama's had 4.5 years now to fix Bush's problems, and he not only hasn't fixed them, he's made them all worse.
I don't know about the OP specifically, but some people did have some alternatives, early in the primaries process, IIRC. There were one or two other Democrat challengers to Obama in the primaries, I think one was Darcy Richardson. People could have voted for him, but they didn't.
Now this doesn't apply to everyone; by the time the primaries got around to the state I was living in at the time, I guess the challengers had all dropped out, because there wasn't even a primary election for the Democrats in that state.
Also, on the Republican side, there were other challengers to Romney (though it's debateable whether any were any good, but there was Ron Paul, who while he has problems, would at least have shut down this surveillance nonsense, plus a lot of other stuff, if he had been elected).
He should have, but the very first thing Ford did upon taking over was to pardon Nixon.
Maybe the President shouldn't have the power to pardon people for any arbitrary crime.
Well the EU for one seems to be up in arms about this NSA spying revelation. They've long had very strong laws about privacy, which the US has lacked. If anything, I see the EU becoming a major power that opposes the US.
That won't work: thanks to global warming, those "extremely cold" places are actually getting to be pretty nice.
However, unlike in the old days, the US doesn't seem to be bent on conquest of nearby territory any more, only on implementing a police state within its borders and conquering strategically-located resource-rich middle eastern countries, so moving North is probably a safe move. What's more, people are a lot friendlier up there. IME, at least within North America, the farther south you go, the bigger assholes people are.
Now, if only the USA can re-learn what folly was Nazi Germany ...
It wasn't folly at all. The Germans nearly won. Their problem was that Hitler was a terrible military strategist, and they also bit off more than they could chew, trying to take over all of Europe and worst of all, Russia (which was their real undoing). The USA doesn't have these problems: it already controls tons of land (e.g., the entire US itself; it has far more land area than Germany ever had), and these days controlling land directly isn't so important anyway. As long as they don't create death camps (which they won't, because they don't have any irrational hatred of specific ethnic groups like Hitler and his henchmen did), and don't try to start a giant war with the rest of the developed world, they'll succeed quite handily in turning the USA into a militarized police state.
So you are saying that the US is running concentration camps for people who believe in strong civil rights?
Not yet, but Obama has shown over and over that he hates whistleblowers and leakers, and anyone who protests against him. It's not going to be any better after Obama's term is over, because he's nothing more than a puppet for the powers-that-be who selected him and control him, so the next guy is going to be more of the same, and probably worse, as they're going to keep tightening the screws.
Just like things went from bad to worse during the Nazi Party's reign in Germany, it's going to happen like that here too. The main difference AFAICT is that they haven't (yet) found an ultra-charismatic leader to push it through. Maybe that was part of the idea with Obama, because he had charisma and was great at giving speeches, but that seems to have mostly worn off. But now they've probably realized they don't need that: the American public is so apathetic and easily divided and distracted that there isn't going to be any resistance to their plans.
It wasn't the Jews that GTFO before the SHTF; lots of smart Germans GTFO out too when they saw what was happening. It wasn't just Jews who were persecuted during the Nazi regime (though they certainly got the shaft in bigger numbers than anyone else); lots of others were murdered too: Gypsies, homosexuals, and various intellectuals.
It's ingenious satire for the thought process which most Americans share. Remember the journalists' coverage of the event? They didn't give a shit about the rape victim, they just whined about how these vile rapists' careers were destroyed. Worse yet, the journalists who said this were women themselves.