There are real U.S. $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000 bills, but they are no longer printed. Binion's Horseshoe Casino (where the World Serier of Poker is held) had a display of 100 of the extant $10,000 bills (actually gold certificates), but sold it to a collector in 2000. Since there are less than 500 of the 10K bills remaining, they are worth far more than the face value.
Because of Federalism, all elections in america are at the State level or lower -- even the election for President is 51 (50 states plus the district of Columbia) separate elections to choose an "Electoral College" the provides the technical vote for President. This is how Al Gore won the majority of votes in the 2000 election, but lost a majority of States: Gore's additional votes were "surplus" in states he'd already won the electoral votes of.
While essentially true, this overlooks one important factor. The number of electoral votes (the ones used to elect the Prez and VP) given to a state is the number of representatives plus the number of senators. Since every state has two senators, regardless of population, that means that the least populous states (e.g. Wyoming) get disproportionate numbers of electoral votes.
2000 perfectly illustrated this point. GWB won most of the small states, especially in the Mountain West region, and won the electoral college, even though he lost the popular vote by about 1/2 %. Of course that <1000 vote margin in Florida (a statistical tie, very few measurements are accurate to 5 decimal places) had something to do with it, too.
I'm sure she's really afraid of losing her job. She's probably got all her credit cards maxed out and with no savings, she'll probably lose her house if she's unemployed for a few months. Then I'll bet she'll wish that Congress had continues the extension of unemployment benefits. It's really tough when you don't have a personal fortune to fall back on.
You don't get the feeling that the Democrats are deliberately posting questions that they KNOW the administration can not answer without exposing some major intelligence gathering mechanisms?
That's really a very good question. I'm sure there is a some of that going on. But this administration is super secretive about everything. What we have here is an administration that, a la Sledge Hammer, always says "Trust me. I know what I'm doing." Do they deserve that trust?
I'm not saying that I believe that Bush Knew(TM). I don't. But, in a vacuum of information, rumor and innuendo spread. But, every conspiracy theory springs up from secrecy. The Clintons learned that the hard way with the Vince Foster suicide. This administration either hasn't learned, or they believe they can continue to use the right-wing media to browbeat the theories back to Crackpotville, an option the Clintons did not have.
Until one of the opposing candidates starts presenting solutions based on the last fifty years of American foreign policy with an equal level of criticism for BOTH parties... and not just on the last TWO years in an effort to diminish their own party's culpability... then I will not have anything but contempt for those people who push today's golden (yet short sighted) candidate down my throat.
I agree that there's much about foreign policy in the last 50 years that can be debated, and that much of the world's current situation directly follow from those policies, which have ben supported (to varying degrees) by both parties.
However, the last two years have seen a huge change in foreign policy from the past 50. I don't recall unilateralism, preventative war, berating and ignoring our allies, unwillingness to compromise, historical ignorance, and stomping all over the planet doing and saying whatever we want just because we're (God Bless) America being an integral part of our foriegn policy until the current administration.
No runoff in the US. If a state chooses to have a runoff to choose it's electors, then fine, but most are simply plurality-take-all. If no candidate gets a majority of electors, the 12th amendment (ratified after the disputed election of 1800) sends the election into the House of Representatives, where, IIRC, they get to choose from the top three votegetters for president and the top two for VP. This has happened once since 1800, in 1824 (John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford were the three, though Henry Clay also got electoral votes). JQA won when Clay threw his support to Adams in the so-called "corrupt bargain" which led to Adams being a one-term president (Jaskson won in 1828).
The main question is, how do we know Bush hadn't gotten a warning when the administration redacts 28 (or so) pages from relevant documents and only allows certain selected members of the 9/11 commission access to the information. I, like Dean, am saying that I don't believe Bush knew, but secrecy begets conspiracy theories, and this administration is easily the most secretive since Nixon. The Nixon conspiracy theories turned out to be true (Watergate, anybody?).
Quoting the link (a Robert Novak column)
In his Dec. 1 interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show," Dean was asked about allegations that President Bush is suppressing information that he was warned about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "The most interesting theory that I have heard so far . . .," Dean responded, "is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis." This received scant media attention (except for Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer), but Democratic politicians shuddered.
Dean was given a chance to back off six days later by Chris Wallace, debuting as "Fox News Sunday's" moderator. "I don't believe that," the candidate said, then added: "But we don't know, and it'd be a nice thing to know." He concluded: "Because the president won't give information to the Kean Commission, we really don't know what the explanation is." After playing to Bush-haters who listen to National Public Radio, Dean repeated the same canard to Fox's Sunday morning mainstream viewers.
The other interesting thing here is to consider the source. Novak was the journalist who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Also, notice how it's the "Bush-haters" who listen to NPR, but "mainstream viewers" who watch Fox News's Sunday morning news.
Krauthammer also misrepresented Dean's interview on Hardball when Chris Matthews asked Dean if Deam would break up Fox. Everybody, including Dean started laughing, and Dean jokingly answered "On an ideological basis, yes." Anybody who was watching the show knew he was joking, plus the transcripts indicated [LAUGHTER]. But Krauthammer used the famous ellipsis (...) to eliminate the [LAUGHTER], and then criticized Dean for being "unhinged", which seems to be the current right-wing meme that is going around.
Actually, If you knew much about economics, you'd know that unemployment is a "lagging economic indicator"...meaning the economy begins to improve before you see a decrease in unemployment. I know it sounds really strange/backward...but that perception can't change this fact.
Thank you for the condescending economics lesson.
A big factor in economic recoveries is how quickly the jobs recover. This recovery has been far slower to regain jobs than the one following the 1990 recession, which was widely considered to be another "jobless recovery" that likely cost George I the 1992 election. Of course it is not literally 'jobless', its just that the jobs take longer to return than normal.
One other thing, I think many people are short-sichted...complaining when war takes longer than a month or the economy takes longer than a year to turn. These things take time. An economic recession or boom feeds more of the same. If you're losing your job, you're spending less, people are making less, and they need to lay off more. It takes a bit of time to turn something like that around (especially since while our economy was in this decline we had the added "insult to injury" of the WTC attacks).
So, when someone is jobless for a year, loses their house, and complains about the economy we should just tell them, "Stop being so short-sighted, these things take time." Maybe we should tell that to the banks that are foreclosing on these homes instead.
And the ironic thing about the rhetoric surrounding the Iraqi war is that those of us who were saying "Give the inspectors time to finish" were brushed off, and now we're being told, "These things take time."
The reason for the recesion is clear. Clinton/Gore kept pumping and pumping the bubble. Where were they when Enron / Worldcom / Wall Street were up to their shenanigans? That's right hitting, up the ChiComs for campaign donations and hitting up interns for BJ's.
Clear to only the hard-line Clinton haters. Do you really think any significant regulation of Wall Street would have made it out of the Republican majority Congress? You can blame Clinton all you want, but hardly anybody outside of Alan "irrational exuberance" Greenspan and Warren Buffett was saying much during the bubble. It was most assuredly a bipartisan bubble.
And James K. Glassman, the author of Dow 36,000, one of the most notorious of the pro-bubble books, is now a "well-respected" fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and making big bucks on the corporate lecture circuit. Your claim about Clinton/Gore causing the bubble is disingenuous at best.
And it seems you right-wingers are just obsessed over this BJ thing. As the advocacy group group said, censure and Move On.
Bush's approval rating is at 61%
As was mentioned in the same article that you quoted, it was a 5 point rise (61-5=56) from the previous poll taken four days before Thanksgiving, and it was probably caused by the pictures from his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad.
And as an added bonus, he's now got new pictures to use on the campaign to replace those discredited "mission accomplished" flight suit photos.
We know what (the Democratic Agenda) is.
1. Raise taxes.
2. Surreder to Hussein.
This so-called recovery has been going on for well over a year, and only now are jobs beginning to be created. That, my friend, is the textbook definition of 'jobless recovery'.
The report also showed the number of unemployed still on the benefit rolls in the Nov. 15 week fell by a sharp 105,000 to 3.37 million, a level not seen since early February -- also from Forbes.
Does that include the number of discourged workers who aren't even counted in the "benefit rolls", because their benefits have run out? No. Unemployment has been understated for a long time because these people aren't counted.
And how does that number of people on the benefit rolls compare what it was at the beginning of George II's reign?
Bush's approval ratings are still extremely high -- and as long as the democrats can't figure out what their agenda is, none of the nine dwarves are going to beat him.
His ratings have been hovering in the 50's for a while now, well under what Clinton's were on the day of the impeachment vote. And some Democrats (Dean, Kucinich) do have an agenda, you just need to get your news from other places than Fox News to find out what it is.
Seriously, do you think that any "right-leaning" independent will face up to the Bush machine after what they did to John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000? Ideologues always browbeat the moderates who support them (to try to bring them to the extreme) more then the enemy, who are always useful as a rallying point for the faithful.
As to the bickering and finger-pointing, it's been a staple of politics since time immemorial. Socrates ("I drank what?") was condemned for corrupting the Athenian youth, an exercise in finger-pointing if I've ever heard one.
What we absolutely have to get past is allowing your opinion of someone to be shaped by what their opponents say about them. We need to become resistant to propaganda. Listen to what the candidates say, and see how it agrees with their actions. We can't continue to allow them to say one thing to the "people", and then turn around and do something else that helps their "interests" to the detriment of the people.
Perhaps you should look at what Howard Dean has really said and done rather that what the left-wing thinks he's said and done. He's had very good ratings from the NRA, and he's certainly a fiscal conservative, in the traditional sense (i.e., deficits are bad).
And he has said he supported the 1991 Gulf War, just not the Iraq War. His reason to not support the Iraq was its unilateralism.
Just think about how GWB and his PNAC puppeteers have treated the military and veterans these past years (e.g. concealing VA medical benefits, reducing payments for disabilities) vs. what they are asking the military to do.
I had heard that some Christian fundamentalists (e.g. Pat Roberton, Jerry Falwell) at one time used the lack of female grandmasters as a sign that women were mentally inferior to men. Unfortunately, I can't find any quotes online, so we'll file that in the "Urban Legend" for now.
Garry Kasparov has also made statements that he doesn't believe that women will ever play at the ability of top men. True, the "intelligence" word is not used, but it is certainly implied.
Just because an airplane does not flap its wings to fly like a bird does, is it really not flying? On the contrary, airplanes are better fliers than birds.
"Better" depends upon the qualities used to define relative worth. Can airplanes fly faster than birds? Of course. Can airplanes take off and land without 5,000-foot long runways? Not many. Can airplanes take off and land on a telephone wire? No. Can airplanes fly using only birdseed as fuel? No. Can airplanes continually avoid becoming Wile E. Coyote's dinner?... Sorry, I got carried away.
Obviously, aeronautical engineers have been successful in designing effective flying machines. But these flying machines are not "artificial birds". Likewise, computer scientists have developed programs that do well-defined tasks like playing chess very well. But I believe that this is not truly "artificial intelligence" precisely because the computer doesn't approach the problem the same way we do. The researchers can solve the problems however they choose to, and that solution will have value. However, unless the solution involves the same processes a human mind would use, it's not what I consider AI.
First of all, irradiating the atmosphere with microwaves is far more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.
Nice asssertion about microwaves vs. nuclear power. Do you have any evidence? My personal unsupported belief is that damage caused by microwaves would be temporary, while nuclear accidents tend to have more long lasting deleterious effects.
Secondly, The Earth is a moving target relative to the Earth. How exactly do these people intend to beam this light to Earth? The Moon is not in a geostationary orbit. It also rotates and thus any given point is not facing the Earth 15 out of 30 days a month.
The moon does not rotate with respect to the earth. It is tidally locked in place. See this page for more info. However, the moon does rotate with respect to the sun. Therefore, those collectors, while still pointing at the earth, will be sitting in the dark half of the time.
That said, I think you're right in that more fundamental research would need to be done, and that the risks/rewards need to be spelled out before embarking on such an expensive project.
Thus we behold the latest right-wing meme. This attempted rebuttal of this poll has shown up throughout the media, including a letter to the editor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and posited by Tony Blankeley of The Washington Times this morning on NPR's The Diane Rehm show. Using the same example of (paraphrased) "Bush didn't personally claim an imminent threat from WMDs, though most liberals think he did."
There's apparently no evidence that GWB made that exact claim, so believing that he did gives you a "misperception." But there was plenty of (mis)information circling around, including the famous British memo about Iraq being able to deploy WMD's 45 minutes after Saddam might order it. It's certainly possible that people might believe those words came from Bush himself, rather than advisors or pundits, which is technically mistaken. But the essential perception remains accurate: The US and UK administrations, led by Bush and Blair, used the idea of WMD's being used sometime in the near fute as a justification for the war.
Compare that to the misperceptions that were polled.
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq (3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war
Either there was a link betwen Al Qaeda and Iraq, or not. WMD's were found, or not. The world has a positive opinion of the Iraq war, or not. No selective parsing of who said what when.
To use a favorite right-wing term, this type of painful parsing (like the meaning of "slog") to make words mean what you want them to mean, seems positively "Clintonian."
Perhaps we would hold them in less "contempt" if they were to listen to their IT staffs instead of overpaid outside "consultants" when it comes to technical issues.
Or maybe we would hold them in less "contempt" if they would look at the long term costs of their decisions, especially in terms of outsourcing/offshoring, instead of making short-term bottom-line decisions without regard to who might get hurt.
Or perhaps we would hold them in less "contempt" if they didn't surround themselves with cronies on the corporate boards, giving themselves astronomical salaries regardless of corporate performance, while simultaneously laying off workers and sending our best jobs overseas.
Need I go on? While there are certainly many techies who show "contempt" to the PHB's, the "contempt" (e.g., lack of decision making input, lack of training budgets, predatory hiring and outsourcing policies, etc.) shown by the PHB's towards the techies far exceeds any the techies have ever shown.
At most (if not all) state schools, the government support has been cut significantly. Therefore the colleges are forced to raise tuition to cover both the cost of inflation and the loss of taxpayer support.
The stock market debacle has significantly reduced the endowment of colleges, reducing the amount of earnings they can use to subsidize tuitions. Once again, students are forced to make up the difference.
And don't forget that cutting edge research is becoming more and more expensive. If tuition increases and endowment earnings can't support it, and the government can't or won't (e.g. embryonic stem cells), then private foundations and corporations (i.e. external money) are all that's left.
This actually shouldn't be that surprising, for a few reasons.
The first is that both movements are extreme, and many times extremists will move from one extreme to the other. Sam Kinison and David Horowitz are two examples of this phemomenon. Think about how many hard partier types suddeny "See God" and become exterme evangelicals.
Also, both movements share a proclivity for authoritarianism. Both have a "We're right, you're wrong so just shut up" attitude. Both have a tendency to ignore inconvenient facts (e.g. global warming, Lysenko Genetics). So it seems natural for people who want to assert authority one way to smoothly transition to another, with only the change of a few core beliefs.
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Indeed. Christianity though, is based on the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Wow, "fact" is the worst misspelling of the word "myth" that I've ever seen.
There are real U.S. $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000 bills, but they are no longer printed. Binion's Horseshoe Casino (where the World Serier of Poker is held) had a display of 100 of the extant $10,000 bills (actually gold certificates), but sold it to a collector in 2000. Since there are less than 500 of the 10K bills remaining, they are worth far more than the face value.
You can go to the bank and ask for a $2 bill, just don't try to use it at a Taco Bell.
Read the short story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril Kornbluth for a science-fiction treatment of that very problem.
The problem is, the smart people know when to stop having more kids and how to prevent it.
One nitpick:
Because of Federalism, all elections in america are at the State level or lower -- even the election for President is 51 (50 states plus the district of Columbia) separate elections to choose an "Electoral College" the provides the technical vote for President. This is how Al Gore won the majority of votes in the 2000 election, but lost a majority of States: Gore's additional votes were "surplus" in states he'd already won the electoral votes of.
While essentially true, this overlooks one important factor. The number of electoral votes (the ones used to elect the Prez and VP) given to a state is the number of representatives plus the number of senators. Since every state has two senators, regardless of population, that means that the least populous states (e.g. Wyoming) get disproportionate numbers of electoral votes.
2000 perfectly illustrated this point. GWB won most of the small states, especially in the Mountain West region, and won the electoral college, even though he lost the popular vote by about 1/2 %. Of course that <1000 vote margin in Florida (a statistical tie, very few measurements are accurate to 5 decimal places) had something to do with it, too.
I'm sure she's really afraid of losing her job. She's probably got all her credit cards maxed out and with no savings, she'll probably lose her house if she's unemployed for a few months. Then I'll bet she'll wish that Congress had continues the extension of unemployment benefits. It's really tough when you don't have a personal fortune to fall back on.
Pollsters give people a way to make their opinion heard. Telemarketers keep talking after you give them your opinion.
Sometimes, telemarketing disguises itself as polling in so-called push polls, which are used for both political and commercial purposes.
You don't get the feeling that the Democrats are deliberately posting questions that they KNOW the administration can not answer without exposing some major intelligence gathering mechanisms?
That's really a very good question. I'm sure there is a some of that going on. But this administration is super secretive about everything. What we have here is an administration that, a la Sledge Hammer, always says "Trust me. I know what I'm doing." Do they deserve that trust?
I'm not saying that I believe that Bush Knew(TM). I don't. But, in a vacuum of information, rumor and innuendo spread. But, every conspiracy theory springs up from secrecy. The Clintons learned that the hard way with the Vince Foster suicide. This administration either hasn't learned, or they believe they can continue to use the right-wing media to browbeat the theories back to Crackpotville, an option the Clintons did not have.
Until one of the opposing candidates starts presenting solutions based on the last fifty years of American foreign policy with an equal level of criticism for BOTH parties... and not just on the last TWO years in an effort to diminish their own party's culpability... then I will not have anything but contempt for those people who push today's golden (yet short sighted) candidate down my throat.
I agree that there's much about foreign policy in the last 50 years that can be debated, and that much of the world's current situation directly follow from those policies, which have ben supported (to varying degrees) by both parties.
However, the last two years have seen a huge change in foreign policy from the past 50. I don't recall unilateralism, preventative war, berating and ignoring our allies, unwillingness to compromise, historical ignorance, and stomping all over the planet doing and saying whatever we want just because we're (God Bless) America being an integral part of our foriegn policy until the current administration.
No runoff in the US. If a state chooses to have a runoff to choose it's electors, then fine, but most are simply plurality-take-all. If no candidate gets a majority of electors, the 12th amendment (ratified after the disputed election of 1800) sends the election into the House of Representatives, where, IIRC, they get to choose from the top three votegetters for president and the top two for VP. This has happened once since 1800, in 1824 (John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford were the three, though Henry Clay also got electoral votes). JQA won when Clay threw his support to Adams in the so-called "corrupt bargain" which led to Adams being a one-term president (Jaskson won in 1828).
So that's taken care of.
Quoting the link (a Robert Novak column)
The other interesting thing here is to consider the source. Novak was the journalist who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Also, notice how it's the "Bush-haters" who listen to NPR, but "mainstream viewers" who watch Fox News's Sunday morning news.
Krauthammer also misrepresented Dean's interview on Hardball when Chris Matthews asked Dean if Deam would break up Fox. Everybody, including Dean started laughing, and Dean jokingly answered "On an ideological basis, yes." Anybody who was watching the show knew he was joking, plus the transcripts indicated [LAUGHTER]. But Krauthammer used the famous ellipsis (...) to eliminate the [LAUGHTER], and then criticized Dean for being "unhinged", which seems to be the current right-wing meme that is going around.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Actually, If you knew much about economics, you'd know that unemployment is a "lagging economic indicator"...meaning the economy begins to improve before you see a decrease in unemployment. I know it sounds really strange/backward...but that perception can't change this fact.
Thank you for the condescending economics lesson.
A big factor in economic recoveries is how quickly the jobs recover. This recovery has been far slower to regain jobs than the one following the 1990 recession, which was widely considered to be another "jobless recovery" that likely cost George I the 1992 election. Of course it is not literally 'jobless', its just that the jobs take longer to return than normal.
One other thing, I think many people are short-sichted...complaining when war takes longer than a month or the economy takes longer than a year to turn. These things take time. An economic recession or boom feeds more of the same. If you're losing your job, you're spending less, people are making less, and they need to lay off more. It takes a bit of time to turn something like that around (especially since while our economy was in this decline we had the added "insult to injury" of the WTC attacks).
So, when someone is jobless for a year, loses their house, and complains about the economy we should just tell them, "Stop being so short-sighted, these things take time." Maybe we should tell that to the banks that are foreclosing on these homes instead.
And the ironic thing about the rhetoric surrounding the Iraqi war is that those of us who were saying "Give the inspectors time to finish" were brushed off, and now we're being told, "These things take time."
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
The reason for the recesion is clear. Clinton/Gore kept pumping and pumping the bubble. Where were they when Enron / Worldcom / Wall Street were up to their shenanigans? That's right hitting, up the ChiComs for campaign donations and hitting up interns for BJ's.
Clear to only the hard-line Clinton haters. Do you really think any significant regulation of Wall Street would have made it out of the Republican majority Congress? You can blame Clinton all you want, but hardly anybody outside of Alan "irrational exuberance" Greenspan and Warren Buffett was saying much during the bubble. It was most assuredly a bipartisan bubble.
And James K. Glassman, the author of Dow 36,000, one of the most notorious of the pro-bubble books, is now a "well-respected" fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and making big bucks on the corporate lecture circuit. Your claim about Clinton/Gore causing the bubble is disingenuous at best.
And it seems you right-wingers are just obsessed over this BJ thing. As the advocacy group group said, censure and Move On.
Bush's approval rating is at 61%
As was mentioned in the same article that you quoted, it was a 5 point rise (61-5=56) from the previous poll taken four days before Thanksgiving, and it was probably caused by the pictures from his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad.
And as an added bonus, he's now got new pictures to use on the campaign to replace those discredited "mission accomplished" flight suit photos.
We know what (the Democratic Agenda) is. 1. Raise taxes. 2. Surreder to Hussein.
Ann Coulter? Is that you?
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
the claims of a 'jobless recovery' are pure BS
This so-called recovery has been going on for well over a year, and only now are jobs beginning to be created. That, my friend, is the textbook definition of 'jobless recovery'.
The report also showed the number of unemployed still on the benefit rolls in the Nov. 15 week fell by a sharp 105,000 to 3.37 million, a level not seen since early February -- also from Forbes.
Does that include the number of discourged workers who aren't even counted in the "benefit rolls", because their benefits have run out? No. Unemployment has been understated for a long time because these people aren't counted.
And how does that number of people on the benefit rolls compare what it was at the beginning of George II's reign?
Bush's approval ratings are still extremely high -- and as long as the democrats can't figure out what their agenda is, none of the nine dwarves are going to beat him.
His ratings have been hovering in the 50's for a while now, well under what Clinton's were on the day of the impeachment vote. And some Democrats (Dean, Kucinich) do have an agenda, you just need to get your news from other places than Fox News to find out what it is.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Actually, the number is "one hundred one". You don't use "and" until you get to the decimal point.
7301.4 = seven thousand three hundred one and four tenths.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
If I knew all these answers, I'd be running :-)
Seriously, do you think that any "right-leaning" independent will face up to the Bush machine after what they did to John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000? Ideologues always browbeat the moderates who support them (to try to bring them to the extreme) more then the enemy, who are always useful as a rallying point for the faithful.
As to the bickering and finger-pointing, it's been a staple of politics since time immemorial. Socrates ("I drank what?") was condemned for corrupting the Athenian youth, an exercise in finger-pointing if I've ever heard one.
What we absolutely have to get past is allowing your opinion of someone to be shaped by what their opponents say about them. We need to become resistant to propaganda. Listen to what the candidates say, and see how it agrees with their actions. We can't continue to allow them to say one thing to the "people", and then turn around and do something else that helps their "interests" to the detriment of the people.
Perhaps you should look at what Howard Dean has really said and done rather that what the left-wing thinks he's said and done. He's had very good ratings from the NRA, and he's certainly a fiscal conservative, in the traditional sense (i.e., deficits are bad).
And he has said he supported the 1991 Gulf War, just not the Iraq War. His reason to not support the Iraq was its unilateralism.
Just think about how GWB and his PNAC puppeteers have treated the military and veterans these past years (e.g. concealing VA medical benefits, reducing payments for disabilities) vs. what they are asking the military to do.
Do you want this to continue?
There have been academic studies that show that the "plurality wins" method of voting we (in the USA) use will naturally lead to a two party system.
I had heard that some Christian fundamentalists (e.g. Pat Roberton, Jerry Falwell) at one time used the lack of female grandmasters as a sign that women were mentally inferior to men. Unfortunately, I can't find any quotes online, so we'll file that in the "Urban Legend" for now.
Garry Kasparov has also made statements that he doesn't believe that women will ever play at the ability of top men. True, the "intelligence" word is not used, but it is certainly implied.
"Better" depends upon the qualities used to define relative worth. Can airplanes fly faster than birds? Of course. Can airplanes take off and land without 5,000-foot long runways? Not many. Can airplanes take off and land on a telephone wire? No. Can airplanes fly using only birdseed as fuel? No. Can airplanes continually avoid becoming Wile E. Coyote's dinner? ... Sorry, I got carried away.
Obviously, aeronautical engineers have been successful in designing effective flying machines. But these flying machines are not "artificial birds". Likewise, computer scientists have developed programs that do well-defined tasks like playing chess very well. But I believe that this is not truly "artificial intelligence" precisely because the computer doesn't approach the problem the same way we do. The researchers can solve the problems however they choose to, and that solution will have value. However, unless the solution involves the same processes a human mind would use, it's not what I consider AI.
First of all, irradiating the atmosphere with microwaves is far more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.
Nice asssertion about microwaves vs. nuclear power. Do you have any evidence? My personal unsupported belief is that damage caused by microwaves would be temporary, while nuclear accidents tend to have more long lasting deleterious effects.
Secondly, The Earth is a moving target relative to the Earth. How exactly do these people intend to beam this light to Earth? The Moon is not in a geostationary orbit. It also rotates and thus any given point is not facing the Earth 15 out of 30 days a month.
The moon does not rotate with respect to the earth. It is tidally locked in place. See this page for more info. However, the moon does rotate with respect to the sun. Therefore, those collectors, while still pointing at the earth, will be sitting in the dark half of the time.
That said, I think you're right in that more fundamental research would need to be done, and that the risks/rewards need to be spelled out before embarking on such an expensive project.
Thus we behold the latest right-wing meme. This attempted rebuttal of this poll has shown up throughout the media, including a letter to the editor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and posited by Tony Blankeley of The Washington Times this morning on NPR's The Diane Rehm show. Using the same example of (paraphrased) "Bush didn't personally claim an imminent threat from WMDs, though most liberals think he did."
There's apparently no evidence that GWB made that exact claim, so believing that he did gives you a "misperception." But there was plenty of (mis)information circling around, including the famous British memo about Iraq being able to deploy WMD's 45 minutes after Saddam might order it. It's certainly possible that people might believe those words came from Bush himself, rather than advisors or pundits, which is technically mistaken. But the essential perception remains accurate: The US and UK administrations, led by Bush and Blair, used the idea of WMD's being used sometime in the near fute as a justification for the war.
Compare that to the misperceptions that were polled.
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Qaeda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war
Either there was a link betwen Al Qaeda and Iraq, or not. WMD's were found, or not. The world has a positive opinion of the Iraq war, or not. No selective parsing of who said what when.
To use a favorite right-wing term, this type of painful parsing (like the meaning of "slog") to make words mean what you want them to mean, seems positively "Clintonian."
Perhaps we would hold them in less "contempt" if they were to listen to their IT staffs instead of overpaid outside "consultants" when it comes to technical issues.
Or maybe we would hold them in less "contempt" if they would look at the long term costs of their decisions, especially in terms of outsourcing/offshoring, instead of making short-term bottom-line decisions without regard to who might get hurt.
Or perhaps we would hold them in less "contempt" if they didn't surround themselves with cronies on the corporate boards, giving themselves astronomical salaries regardless of corporate performance, while simultaneously laying off workers and sending our best jobs overseas.
Need I go on? While there are certainly many techies who show "contempt" to the PHB's, the "contempt" (e.g., lack of decision making input, lack of training budgets, predatory hiring and outsourcing policies, etc.) shown by the PHB's towards the techies far exceeds any the techies have ever shown.
Two places:
And don't forget that cutting edge research is becoming more and more expensive. If tuition increases and endowment earnings can't support it, and the government can't or won't (e.g. embryonic stem cells), then private foundations and corporations (i.e. external money) are all that's left.
Wow, I didn't realize George W. Bush read slashdot!
And you expect the media and Joe Q. Public to understand the significance of 31337?
This actually shouldn't be that surprising, for a few reasons.
The first is that both movements are extreme, and many times extremists will move from one extreme to the other. Sam Kinison and David Horowitz are two examples of this phemomenon. Think about how many hard partier types suddeny "See God" and become exterme evangelicals.
Also, both movements share a proclivity for authoritarianism. Both have a "We're right, you're wrong so just shut up" attitude. Both have a tendency to ignore inconvenient facts (e.g. global warming, Lysenko Genetics). So it seems natural for people who want to assert authority one way to smoothly transition to another, with only the change of a few core beliefs.