Your ip address is now a black hole. Nothing comes in. Cable modem is a shared medium meaning it is entirely possible that your neighbors could be snooping your hard drive. Not likely, but possible (I have done it in the past... it is fun:)
Wow, a real cyberterr'ist. Why do you hate America so much?
I've got DSL and I'm hiding behind one of those little 4 port Linksys routers. They're essential even if you only have one computer- you'd have to be crazy to connect a machine directly to a broadband modem using the buggy and insecure software that ISPs give out. The only drawback is if something goes wrong with the connection and you have to get past idiot tech support people who are reading from the standard ISP tech support script:
If you can manage to get someone on the phone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground, they're usually relieved to hear you're using one since they make troubleshooting much easier.
I've heard stories about people with default installations of cable company software who are able to open "Network Neighborhood" and actually see all their neighbors' computers. Microsoft has a habit of establishing dumb names for special directories ("My Documents", "My Received Files", "My Music", "My Network Places", etc.) but in this case they chose a term that was right on target!
It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40%
The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 4% which is similar to what we're seeing with SARS. It infected a fifth of the world's population. The U.S. was one of the countries least devastated by the pandemic. But even here 20,000,000 Americans came down with the flu, with 850,000 deaths resulting. Which means that flu killed more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.
Like SARS, this one originated in China as well. It started as a virus passed from birds to pigs. (They know because in 1997 someone exhumed the body of a soldier who died of it in 1918 and sequenced some of the virus from his lungs.)
I see you aren't willing to argue the ethical issues in a serious manner.
That's because I don't see any here.
> "Potential life" is just a ludicrous concept.
Perhaps you should inform the Supreme Court of the United States of America of that.
The same clowns that decided Bush vs. Gore based on the outcome they wanted. So what court case are you talking about? Do you have a legal reference? Your implication, of course, is that Scalia et al are the ultimate arbiters of what is and is not ethical. Ironic, since the current SCOTUS is what you get when you pack the judiciary with right wing nutjobs- which is fundamentally a political process.
If you can't even send so much as a marshmallow peep to these TERRORIST-RUN states, why the heck would you HIRE anybody from there? We should sever all ties with these corrupt regimes.
The corrupt regime or the people over whom it has dominion? They aren't the same thing.
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This is the best planet. There isn't a lot to do there, but it's relatively uncrowded so if you're an introspective person like me you can "get away from it all" and not have to put up with many other tourists. Granted, you can't go around much because the surface is hot enough to melt lead, and the weather is often cloudy. If you have kids you're probably better off taking a look at Mars.
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There is a highly significant difference between the purposeful destruction of an embryo for research purposes and the destruction of unwanted embryos in fertility clinics. The difference is the reason for destruction. If an unborn person, which is potential life, is destroyed for research purposes, that is unethical. The end of that potential life is undignified. The potential human cannot possibly give consent for becoming a research subject. The potential life is unethically treated by society as a means to an end.
OTOH, destruction of an embryo in a fertility clinic is dignified. The potential life does not have the right to be born, and thus may be destroyed. The potential life does have a right against being used or manufactured for research purposes, or as a means to some end. Morality demands that a human life, potential or otherwise, may not ever become merely a means to an end.
OH what nonsense. The rationalization and logic of convenience in those two paragraphs is unbelievable.
The reason for destruction is not the stem cell research, it's the in vitro protocol. The embryo is destroyed whether the stem cell scientists get their hands on it or not. Requiring them to get an embryo's signature on an IRB before they can harvest stem cells from it is unreasonable.
A zygote doesn't instantly get all the rights of a human once it is formed. Sometime between zero and nine months, it does become unethical to end its life for nonessential purposes. People like to identify sharp ethical boundaries, but there are no sharp boundaries during gestation, and certainly none that are close to the most reasonable place- probably somewhere between month 5 and 7. That leaves birth and conception. Birth is clearly too late, so they lock onto conception and pretend that ethical considerations associated with experiments on human beings apply at that point. But they don't. For the first several months there are not even any features that differentiate a human embryo from that of a cow or chicken.
"Potential life" is just a ludicrous concept. An isolated egg and sperm together constitute "potential life". If you're going to argue that real human beings should remain in their wheelchairs, you'll have to do better than comparing them to potential human beings. It's so ridiculous it's offensive.
...starring Ben Affleck as that long thin piece that never shows up when you need it! Studio insiders report that this is a particularly challenging role for Affleck and he is preparing by taking falling and rotating lessons.
I heard Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks are working on a version of MineSweeper. Although they're having trouble signing Drew Barrymore. She thinks the mines are too violent and refuses to be part of the project unless Spielberg replaces them with Walkie-Talkies.
Coming soon... John Travolta in Space Invaders! Pixar is using a rendering farm to realistically display the motions of each of the sixty alien ships as they approach the Earth and ravage its barricades with a murderous barrage of short vertical lines.
Just like, if we prosecute all the drug dealers, the amount of drugs on the streets will drop?
Ummm... no, not really.
First of all, this is just a mathematical statement about the number of spammers that are responsible for 99% of the spam you receive. It isn't some sort of guide for public policy, which was my point.
Also, when we prosecute drug dealers we create a vacuum in the market that is quickly filled with more entrepreneurs. Soon every street corner is spoken for. If we were to stop prosecuting them, the market would quickly saturate and the price of drugs would fall, decreasing the profit motive.
There is no mechanism like that for spam. An existing spammer population doesn't deter more spammers from entering the "occupation"- until everyone just gives up on email. That hasn't quite happened yet.
He means that in theory, if the Internet traffic resulting directly from the activities of these 180 people were to stop, the number of spam emails arriving in your Inbox would drop almost to zero. Only 419s from Nigeria and occasional sporadic one-time spam would remain.
This isn't advocating some sort of lynching or suspension of civil rights- it's just a simple statement of fact. The point is that spam isn't something that a large number of people are doing; it's the activities of a very small number of people making us all miserable, and that small number is approximately 180.
Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.
Your use of even in that sentence implies that you previously had a moderately "devastating" argument in the first place, and you do not. Maybe this will give you an argument that rises above nonsensical (and you sure could use one of those), but to say it's devastating is a stretch.
Your statement contains two factual errors. Embryonic stem cells don't come from a fetus, they're harvested from an embryo. The cells in a fetus are too well differentiated. And the embryo in question is not "destroyed for this purpose". People who go to fertility clinics to undergo in vitro fertilization generally don't want to raise a litter of 10 kids at once. The procedure isolates the most successful of many embryos and dispenses with the rest of them. That is the purpose for which they are destroyed. I don't understand why people make such a fuss about stem cell research when the embryos are destroyed by fertility procedures in the first place. I guess anything that results in more babies in the world is less likely to generate complaints from some people.
You also speak as if you know for a fact that these baby teeth stem cells are as viable as embryonic cells. You don't know that's true at all. In general stem cells from non-embryonic sources are not as viable and are much more difficult to work with.
We have a CVS machine which we connect to (usually) with WinCVS. One day somebody committed a new file that just happened to have the same name as a file that was removed from the same directory two years before. So CVS thought it was the same file. This would ordinarily be fine, except that the case of one of the letters in the name was different in the new name. That caused some confusion between the WinCVS client and the case sensitive CVS server.
The result was a corrupted repository. Any attempt to do a CVS checkout or update after that resulted in a segmentation fault halfway through the process when it would reach this poison file. We tried fixing it in every "kosher" way we could think of- issuing a remove, etc.- and CVS foiled us at every turn (e.g. "File not up to date- do cvs update first.") We eventually resorted to carefully editing the history file and removing the offending entry. That really sucked.
I find it almost painfully hilarious that the Rush-style far-right and the slashdot-style far-left both complain about the SAME media sources as being biased.
Definitely the scariest channel on TV (if you have cable) is the BBC. The UK is a coalition member (they're the rest of the "coalition") so you'd expect the BBC to at least reflect the interests of the pro-war faction. And for the most part they do- the BBC isn't exactly Al-Jazeera. But you see people in Iraqi hospitals, people in Baghdad bitching about the invasion, interviews with human rights leaders in foreign countries, etc.
You can watch BBC news for an hour, and then change the channel back to CNN or Fox. Yikes! It's like another planet! It's as if we've put the kissass entertainment press in charge of covering the war. We cover it like it's a sporting event. (Fox even sets scenes of bombs falling in Baghdad to classical music.) The only scenes from Iraq you'll see are either glitzy shots of soldiers doing their jobs, or a few repeated shots of that Saddam Hussein statue coming down. Then it's back to George Bush said this today, George Bush did that, following his every move like he's a movie star or in the royal family. An earthquake can kill 300 people in some province in China and the BBC is all over it. Here, something dull like that wouldn't even get covered- especially not on a day when Bush makes a speech at a military base. And compared to the BBC, you hear a lot of opinion in American news, masquerading as news. And especially, far fewer opinions from people in the rest of the world. It's really striking. We don't take the rest of the world seriously at all.
Funny. On almost a daily basis you can listen to the rightest-of-the-right-wingers himself, Rush Limbaugh, use the word "partisan" to refer to both liberals and conservatives equally.
I don't listen to Rush, so I may be wrong as far as the word "partisan" goes. All I can tell you is that in the last dozen or so times I personally have heard it used, it's been used to slap down the more clearly reasoned arguments against the war (which excludes "no blood for oil", etc.). If you can't effectively address a person's arguments on their own merits, just label him as "partisan" and be done with it. Most people seem to believe that a biased opinion must be wrong somehow (which is bullshit). If you can convince your audience that your opponent is biased, you win without doing anything. It's a form of rhetorical cheating. Rush does it all the time when he screams about "media bias". (I've talked to enough dittoheads to know at least that much.)
ABSTRACT. Evidence of elevated HIV incidence and relapse to promiscuous fucking among young nonrecovering homosexuals in Vancouver Canada.
Objective: To determine HIV incidence among young faggots and investigate trends in unsafe buttfucking behaviours.
Methods: Beginning May/95, fudgepackers aged 18-30 who had not previously been punished by God for their immoral behavior were enrolled in a prospective study in Vancouver, Canada. At baseline and annually, pole climbers completed a questionnaire on their abhorrent lifestyle choices and had an HIV test. Behaviours pertained to the year prior to baseline, and baseline to first follow-up (mean: 15 mo.). HIV incidence density was calculated. Among bone smokers remaining HIV negative, we compared baseline and follow-up responses for raw poopushing with regular (> or = 1 contact per mo.) and casual (< 1 contact per mo.) poofter partners. Among rimadonnas reporting always using condoms during buttfucking prior to baseline, we defined 'relapse' as any filthy sexual deviant behavior reported at follow-up. Odds ratios (ORs) for relapse were tested using McNemar's test.
Results: Of 386 butthole surfers at follow-up, HIV incidence was 1.96 per 100 pyrs (95% CI: 0.74, 3.18). Of 10 seroconverters, 4 reported paying for hookers and 3 used drugs to support terrorism (including one pretty-boy hustler.). There reported having unprotected buttfucking with a sissy-boy they knew was going to give them AIDS. Among HIV negative poofters with regular partners (n = 266), odds of relapse were elevated for unprotected top (OR = 2.4; 95% CI: 1.5-4.4.) and bottom fudgepacking (OR = 2.1; 95% CI: 1.3-3.3). Among HIV negative men with no morals (n = 261), similar elevations were observed for unprotected top (OR = 1.8; 95% CI: 1.1-3.0) but not bottom anal crapshooting (OR = 1.2; 95% CI: 0.7-2.2). The true extent of incidence and relapse may be under-estimated, since homos who were eligible for follow-up but who had not yet returned were younger (p < 0.001), had less education (p < 0.001), were more likely to be unemployed (p < 0.001), non-white (p = 0.004), voting Democratic (p = 1.0), and were more likely to pay gay hookers for sex (p < 0.001), than queers who returned for follow-up (80% return rate).
Conclusions: We observed elevated HIV incidence among young sexual deviants in Vancouver. Perverts who are also filthy junkies, engage in paying young fuckboys, or who knowingly take risks with AIDS-infected fairies, may be at highest risk. Our analysis is limited by low power, self-reported data, and differential follow-up. However, early indications of a relapse to homosexuality are consistent with early incidence data. Our findings underscore the urgent need for Bibles for young ass pirates, particularly those limp-wristed hookers who shoot up. Further study of attitudes towards abstinence and reasons for not liking girls are required.
If John Ashcroft really wanted to know my real name, he could find me pretty quickly. Like most people here, I shoot my mouth off too much and give away too many details about my identity. And unless you only post as an AC, so do you.
Actually a pair of TV scriptwriters already registered millionthmonkey.com. And I thought I was being so original. I like the graphic on their page, though.
The only reason that they ask for your e-mail address is so that if you want they can send you stuff. I'm sure when they made it they weren't thinking, "hm...let's give them the option of not disclosing their e-mail address, screwing up db records, so that they won't be subpoened by a bill that hasn't yet been even thought of."
I'm certain that the New York Times only had the best of motives (i.e. wooing advertisers) when they came up with this system. People who collect and assemble data like this are usually blinded by their own benign motives and fail to recognize the danger posed by this stuff falling in the wrong hands. But the information is liable to be abused in the future for purposes that the creators of the system never envisioned, and it will exist longer than anyone realizes- probably many years after we are all dead. Nobody ever deletes anything in a database, and even when they do, the backup tapes stick around.
And get real...the US would never put your NYTimes browsing habits on display in a court. We haven't yet gotten to that point.
Things being OK today doesn't mean they'll be OK forever. You really have no basis for assuming you'll never be hauled in front of a secret court during your lifetime, especially given the developments of recent years. But such information would be awkward to display in a court setting anyway. It is far more likely to be used for selecting individuals for investigation or harassment. The Transportation Security Administration maintains a list of several thousand potential troublemakers that are subject to intense security at airports. The people on the list are mostly Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists, civil liberties activists, and of course Arabs. There are no procedures for getting off the list or even finding out which federal agency submitted your name to it. And CAPPS II is still nearing implementation. Read the wrong NYT articles today and you might have to pull your pants down at an airport tomorrow.
Anyway, spend your efforts lobbying to get the PATRIOT act repealled, not fooling a free service so that you don't have to be paranoid.
Circumventing NYTimes.com is just dumb. They don't spam you and the least you could do for one of the best pieces of journalism in the nation is at lest tell them that you're reading. There is no reason why you shouldn't sign up. Jesus, it's FUCKING FREE.
You know, there's one nice thing about paper newspapers, and some but not all online newspapers and magazines (this certainly excludes the New York Times). When I read a normal newspaper, I'm not leaving a digital slime trail behind myself that records everything I've read. Most online papers quietly deposit cookies on you and track you using those cookies. I don't know why the NY Times registration process is so much more invasive. They insist on an email address. I read the NYT all the time, and I have a NYT cookie that I never even think about. I just went to my NYT profile page. It's listing an email address I had in 1996. Yikes. And back then I foolishly chose my (rare) last name as my NYT username. I must have accrued a couple thousand rows in their database by now. I can only guess what sort of conclusions could be drawn about me and my reading habits in the past 7 years. Which makes me wonder if the New York Times has ever received subpoenas from the Justice department (which the PATRIOT Act forbids them from even disclosing).
No totalitarian government in history has ever had access to this type of information. Can you imagine if the Nazis had detailed records of every Berlin newspaper article read by any German citizen during the twenties? And they had the computational resources to do data mining and assign a score to each German based on this information? Remaining silent during the actual repression wouldn't even help you anymore! The U.S. isn't exactly Nazi Germany at the moment. But who knows what might happen five, ten, or twenty years from now? People here presume the U.S. will never become a totalitarian state- bring it up and people laugh in your face- but that's a bad sign. It's an indication that we aren't exercising our eternal vigilance. We assume we'll always have this freedom- after all, we're Americans. We'll think we still have it after they've taken it away.
So I sometimes wonder if all my smartass comments on Slashdot will ever come back to haunt me. Maybe this post will be read by the thought police in 2010. Nobody ever deletes anything. (Hopefully Slashdot's lousy search functionality will foil them.) But I don't worry about it anymore. Between my stupid USENET posts during college, sites like this one, and my surfing habits, I figure I've left behind so many indications of being a troublemaker that it would be pointless to shut up now. But I do think about it sometimes.
Anybody who thinks Bush (and his crazy reactionary psycho right-wing henchmen) are anywhere near as bad as Saddam is deluded.
No, they're worse because they control a superpower. When they're both removed from their power, and considered on their own merits as human beings, Saddam is certainly "worse" than Bush and his neocons. I'd be way more upset than I am now if Saddam were president of the United States. But let's get real. As far as most of the world is concerned (including me as a U.S. citizen), a bad president is in a position to do much more harm than an abysmal Third World dictator. There's just no comparison.
The WMD issue is absurd. I'm surprised the administration tried to play that card: It weakens their case.
It presents a plausible fig leaf to cover the real motives for an invasion. The drawback is that after the invasion is over, you have to produce the weapons of mass destruction after you promised them to the world- but that doesn't happen until after the invasion is over! Who cares! According to an American opinion poll I saw two weeks ago, 58% of us are already saying we don't care if no WMD are ever found, so the issue is moot already. (World opinion is reaching a crescendo, now that it's time to call us on this BS, but you wouldn't know it unless you read the foreign press.)
Remove Saddam because he's a brutal oppressive tyrant, and he controls a strategic asset; that's fine. That's justifiable.
But not really. A country doesn't forefeit its sovereignity by controlling a strategic asset that you want to get your hands on. And there are about a hundred countries around the world being run by assholes. Most of them can rest easy because they lack oil, but about a dozen nations in the Mideast must now consider themselves likely invasion targets. The Iraq war has caused more destabilization than seems apparent, because we are proving just how crazy we are.
But haring off after some bunker full o' nasty chemicals...that's a waste of time. And trying to tie this into the "War on Terrorism" is absurd.
Agreed. One thing that really makes me worry about the future is the number of people who have bought into the WMD propaganda, hook, line, and sinker.
When the last US boots leave Iraqi soil, sometime in the next 12-18 months, I'll be waiting for your apology.
WASHINGTON, April 19 -- The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say. American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north.
I suppose that U.S. troops might abandon their boots and start wearing Nikes. Until they do, don't hold your breath waiting for that apology!
The US has no reason to colonize/subjugate Iraq.
Oh I can think of at least one reason... and if you've been paying attention to the news from Iraq, it's becoming evident that we've just uncorked a new Islamic state. That's what happens with "democracy" in that part of the world- it turns into theocracy because the people there are so right wing. (As it is always threatening to do here.)
It would be militarily impossible without using unconscionably brutal tactics, and whatever bad stuff may have happened in Vietnam and Central America, the US Military simply does
That's why I put the word "imperialist" in quotes. It's silly to think that the US is imperialist. Minus fifty points for poor reading comprehension.
Well at first that's what I thought you meant. Then you went into this explanation about how the U.S., like any imperialist power, needs to invade other countries to secure vital resources for itself- so maybe you can forgive me for being confused by your post, Moofie.
Of course, it's always "silly to think the U.S. is X" if X has a negative connotation, evidence be damned.
Noam Chomsky should stick to linguistics. Minus a zillion points for citing that psycho.
Well, Chomsky is the guy who has always accused the U.S. of being imperialist. When I suddenly see a number of pro-war arguments implying that "yes, we're imperialist, big deal, what are you going to do about it?" I have to think that someone has been spinning and modifying the conventional wisdom while I wasn't looking. I was just on vacation for a week, and a week is more than enough time for our new "marketplace of ideas" to turn imperialism into something acceptable. Like I said, you have to pay attention constantly or you won't recognize your country anymore.
And your contention that I'm somehow "spoon fed" my opinion is just ridiculous. You have no idea what information I use to formulate my views, and if you did, you'd know that I have never encountered a similar notion. This idea is mine, and I take full responsibility for it. Minus another zillion points for presumption.
If that's the case then I apologize. I came up with this theory on my own as well- although I certainly haven't thought of it as a justification for what's going on. But you're not the first person I've heard this argument from- plenty of people have been saying the exact same thing which makes me suspect that someone on a Clear Channel station is planting the notion in people's heads that $2 a gallon for gas justifies a war.
Even without concerns about WMD and terrorism, the oil issue is sufficient to justify the US's interests in the region, up to and including the use of military force.
This may be your honest opinion, but most of the world would not agree with you (to put it mildly).
Again, the US is different in that the Iraqi people will retain control over their oil fields, and paid well for it. That would not have happened with any other powerful nation in history.
(Stifling my laughter...:) Like the "weapons of mass destruction", I'll believe this one when I see it.
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Nuke-Lobbing
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So...the operation in Iraq is about oil.
Duh, you think? See, the difference between America and every other "imperialist" nation in the history of the WORLD is that America permits adversarial, even belligerent nations to control a vital strategic resource.
It used to be that only Noam Chomsky referred to the U.S. as an imperialist nation. And now the conventional wisdom has changed- not only are we imperialists now, but even being an imperialist power is an OK thing to be! (Sort of like how massive federal deficits are suddenly OK now too.) Things sure are changing a lot and fast. If you don't pay attention, you won't recognize the country you live in anymore. The language is changing underneath us, too. "Partisan" used to mean something about a bias for one political party or the other. Now it simply means you don't like Bush and therefore shouldn't be listened to. People who do favor Bush are never partisan.
OF COURSE the war in the middle east is about oil. More to the point, it's about protecting the supply of a strategically essential resource.
What exactly is wrong with that?
Well when you put it that way, it sounds so sensible, doesn't it? Which is why it was spoon-fed to you in that form so you could regurgitate it to us here. Something must be wrong with it though, or Bush would have simply told us the truth instead of inventing a crisis about "weapons of mass destruction".
Why can't he just tell us the truth? If there's one thing that I have really disliked about this war, it's the slick glossy marketing, the "psy ops" that are apparently designed to work on us at home instead of people in Iraq, the mounds and mounds of pure bullshit assembled to justify what is essentially an elective war, and the relentless and well orchestrated vitriol aimed at anyone who dares criticize the president during this phony crisis that he insisted on creating in the first place.
I've been trying to figure out for a long time what the motive for this war really is. The official reasons given (9/11, WMD, "he gassed his own people", bringing democracy to the nations in the region, etc.) either make no logical sense, are obvious lies, or are so outlandish that it's clear nobody in the administration takes them seriously. In fact it reminds me of the 2001 tax cut. They wanted the tax cut so badly, but couldn't offer any coherent reason for one. So they proposed the tax cut as a cureall for all sorts of problems. Inflation. Deflation. No matter what it was, the tax cut was going to fix it. The war was the same way. It's always pretty clear what the Bush administration wants, but they never indicate why they want these things. I do know two things about the true motive of the war:
It has something to do with Israel.
It has something to do with oil.
I can at least understand a war designed to undermine OPEC. Why didn't Bush just flat out say it? "We want to invade a country so we can gain access to its oil fields." Spare me the bullshit about WMD, the war on terror, spreading democracy, etc. When a president lacks the political balls to announce to the world why he's starting a war, it's usually a sign that the war is a bad idea in the first place.
i don't know about in the us (you guys have gone a little "security" crazy recently) but in canada, if you're not driving you are not required to carry a driver's licence.
You don't need to carry a driver's license around. You just need one while you're actually driving. And even that varies from state to state. Usually you need to be able to produce the license on demand when you're pulled over. I know that in New Jersey if they catch you driving without the license on your person, you might as well be an unlicensed driver. In other states (e.g. Pennsylvania) the requirement is that you must produce the license within 24 hours of being pulled over.
State governments always like to emphasize that driving is a "privilege, not a right" (which puts driving in the same category as eating). Although it's a privilege that everyone expects. In general, it's very easy to get a diver's license in the U.S. You can be on acid and get one.
Although I lost my license for three years because of epilepsy. Most state governments (e.g. New Jersey, California) require your neurologist to inform the DMV if he knows you had a seizure. While this sounds like a good policy, it creates an enormous incentive to lie to your doctor and underreport seizures, which leaves you dangerously undermedicated. I was unlucky enough to actually have a seizure in the doctor's office, so that's how they busted me. In the intervening period I ended up getting a non-driver ID because there were so many situations where I needed one. Usually they're required by non-state entities- it's hard to open a bank account or rent a video without a photo ID from the state.
Credit cards are quickly acquiring this status of de facto required ID as well- which is really annoying since those three years of not being able to drive effectively destroyed my credit rating. Just last week I was stranded at an airport because I couldn't produce a major credit card at an Alamo car rental counter, despite having had a reservation for weeks. Apparently they've had this policy since June, but their website doesn't mention it. I guess they like surprises.
"now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'" The most of the looters are are expressing their new found freedom after 30 years of suppression and thievery from the regime. I'm pretty sure thats why Iraqi's are doing it too.
If some foreign army came into an American city (like Los Angeles) and wiped out the existing police structure, creating a scene of lawlessness, I'm sure at least a few of us would find some "new found freedom" to behave similarly.
Most Iraqis did not loot their museum. The people who did were among the 1% of the population who can't behave. These people can be found in every nation on earth, including this one. We came into the city and established anarchy, and now we're surprised when criminals in the population take advantage.
Naturally, the apologists have been doing damage control:
We didn't do it, the Iraqis did. This is a variation of the "Slashdot speaks with one voice" fallacy. It misses the point. When looting happens in L.A., we're very good at distinguishing the looters as being separate from the general public. When it happens in Baghdad, we lump the looters and the victims together and say "well, the Iraqi people are looting their own history." Most Iraqis were not a part of the looting. An invading army is responsible for maintaining law and order, and protecting the general population from its own miscreants. This is stipulated by the same Geneva Convention that we pay attention to only when it suits us. We came in, posted guards around the oil ministry, sent guys with chisels to chip away at the infamous "Bush Is Criminal" mosaic on the floor of the Al-Rashid hotel, and left the rest of the city wallow in anarchy. We sure have our priorities straight.
So Iraqi treasures were lost- big deal, the place is a dump anyway! I've heard this one a lot. It's an argument from ignorance. Western civilization began in Iraq, and their museums had stuff that we can all trace our origins to. This is like saying the Kennedy assassination might have been a big story in Dallas but not in the rest of the country.
'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters." The arrogance of that statement is just unbefuckinglievable. As if ripping 'N Sync tunes is even remotely comparable to what happened in Baghdad. What a nation of Philistines we have become.
Slashdot Mirror
Your ip address is now a black hole. Nothing comes in. Cable modem is a shared medium meaning it is entirely possible that your neighbors could be snooping your hard drive. Not likely, but possible (I have done it in the past ... it is fun:)
Wow, a real cyberterr'ist. Why do you hate America so much?
I've got DSL and I'm hiding behind one of those little 4 port Linksys routers. They're essential even if you only have one computer- you'd have to be crazy to connect a machine directly to a broadband modem using the buggy and insecure software that ISPs give out. The only drawback is if something goes wrong with the connection and you have to get past idiot tech support people who are reading from the standard ISP tech support script:
while(!connection.works()) {
blameCustomerSetup();
uninstall();
reinstall();
}
If you can manage to get someone on the phone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground, they're usually relieved to hear you're using one since they make troubleshooting much easier.
I've heard stories about people with default installations of cable company software who are able to open "Network Neighborhood" and actually see all their neighbors' computers. Microsoft has a habit of establishing dumb names for special directories ("My Documents", "My Received Files", "My Music", "My Network Places", etc.) but in this case they chose a term that was right on target!
It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40%
The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 4% which is similar to what we're seeing with SARS. It infected a fifth of the world's population. The U.S. was one of the countries least devastated by the pandemic. But even here 20,000,000 Americans came down with the flu, with 850,000 deaths resulting. Which means that flu killed more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.
Like SARS, this one originated in China as well. It started as a virus passed from birds to pigs. (They know because in 1997 someone exhumed the body of a soldier who died of it in 1918 and sequenced some of the virus from his lungs.)
I see you aren't willing to argue the ethical issues in a serious manner.
That's because I don't see any here.
> "Potential life" is just a ludicrous concept.
Perhaps you should inform the Supreme Court of the United States of America of that.
The same clowns that decided Bush vs. Gore based on the outcome they wanted. So what court case are you talking about? Do you have a legal reference?
Your implication, of course, is that Scalia et al are the ultimate arbiters of what is and is not ethical. Ironic, since the current SCOTUS is what you get when you pack the judiciary with right wing nutjobs- which is fundamentally a political process.
If you can't even send so much as a marshmallow peep to these TERRORIST-RUN states, why the heck would you HIRE anybody from there? We should sever all ties with these corrupt regimes.
The corrupt regime or the people over whom it has dominion? They aren't the same thing.
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There is a highly significant difference between the purposeful destruction of an embryo for research purposes and the destruction of unwanted embryos in fertility clinics. The difference is the reason for destruction. If an unborn person, which is potential life, is destroyed for research purposes, that is unethical. The end of that potential life is undignified. The potential human cannot possibly give consent for becoming a research subject. The potential life is unethically treated by society as a means to an end.
OTOH, destruction of an embryo in a fertility clinic is dignified. The potential life does not have the right to be born, and thus may be destroyed. The potential life does have a right against being used or manufactured for research purposes, or as a means to some end. Morality demands that a human life, potential or otherwise, may not ever become merely a means to an end.
OH what nonsense. The rationalization and logic of convenience in those two paragraphs is unbelievable.
The reason for destruction is not the stem cell research, it's the in vitro protocol. The embryo is destroyed whether the stem cell scientists get their hands on it or not. Requiring them to get an embryo's signature on an IRB before they can harvest stem cells from it is unreasonable.
A zygote doesn't instantly get all the rights of a human once it is formed. Sometime between zero and nine months, it does become unethical to end its life for nonessential purposes. People like to identify sharp ethical boundaries, but there are no sharp boundaries during gestation, and certainly none that are close to the most reasonable place- probably somewhere between month 5 and 7. That leaves birth and conception. Birth is clearly too late, so they lock onto conception and pretend that ethical considerations associated with experiments on human beings apply at that point. But they don't. For the first several months there are not even any features that differentiate a human embryo from that of a cow or chicken.
"Potential life" is just a ludicrous concept. An isolated egg and sperm together constitute "potential life". If you're going to argue that real human beings should remain in their wheelchairs, you'll have to do better than comparing them to potential human beings. It's so ridiculous it's offensive.
...starring Ben Affleck as that long thin piece that never shows up when you need it! Studio insiders report that this is a particularly challenging role for Affleck and he is preparing by taking falling and rotating lessons.
I heard Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks are working on a version of MineSweeper. Although they're having trouble signing Drew Barrymore. She thinks the mines are too violent and refuses to be part of the project unless Spielberg replaces them with Walkie-Talkies.
Coming soon... John Travolta in Space Invaders! Pixar is using a rendering farm to realistically display the motions of each of the sixty alien ships as they approach the Earth and ravage its barricades with a murderous barrage of short vertical lines.
Just like, if we prosecute all the drug dealers, the amount of drugs on the streets will drop?
Ummm... no, not really.
First of all, this is just a mathematical statement about the number of spammers that are responsible for 99% of the spam you receive. It isn't some sort of guide for public policy, which was my point.
Also, when we prosecute drug dealers we create a vacuum in the market that is quickly filled with more entrepreneurs. Soon every street corner is spoken for. If we were to stop prosecuting them, the market would quickly saturate and the price of drugs would fall, decreasing the profit motive.
There is no mechanism like that for spam. An existing spammer population doesn't deter more spammers from entering the "occupation"- until everyone just gives up on email. That hasn't quite happened yet.
He means that in theory, if the Internet traffic resulting directly from the activities of these 180 people were to stop, the number of spam emails arriving in your Inbox would drop almost to zero. Only 419s from Nigeria and occasional sporadic one-time spam would remain.
This isn't advocating some sort of lynching or suspension of civil rights- it's just a simple statement of fact. The point is that spam isn't something that a large number of people are doing; it's the activities of a very small number of people making us all miserable, and that small number is approximately 180.
Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.
Your use of even in that sentence implies that you previously had a moderately "devastating" argument in the first place, and you do not. Maybe this will give you an argument that rises above nonsensical (and you sure could use one of those), but to say it's devastating is a stretch.
Your statement contains two factual errors. Embryonic stem cells don't come from a fetus, they're harvested from an embryo. The cells in a fetus are too well differentiated. And the embryo in question is not "destroyed for this purpose". People who go to fertility clinics to undergo in vitro fertilization generally don't want to raise a litter of 10 kids at once. The procedure isolates the most successful of many embryos and dispenses with the rest of them. That is the purpose for which they are destroyed. I don't understand why people make such a fuss about stem cell research when the embryos are destroyed by fertility procedures in the first place. I guess anything that results in more babies in the world is less likely to generate complaints from some people.
You also speak as if you know for a fact that these baby teeth stem cells are as viable as embryonic cells. You don't know that's true at all. In general stem cells from non-embryonic sources are not as viable and are much more difficult to work with.
We have a CVS machine which we connect to (usually) with WinCVS. One day somebody committed a new file that just happened to have the same name as a file that was removed from the same directory two years before. So CVS thought it was the same file. This would ordinarily be fine, except that the case of one of the letters in the name was different in the new name. That caused some confusion between the WinCVS client and the case sensitive CVS server.
The result was a corrupted repository. Any attempt to do a CVS checkout or update after that resulted in a segmentation fault halfway through the process when it would reach this poison file. We tried fixing it in every "kosher" way we could think of- issuing a remove, etc.- and CVS foiled us at every turn (e.g. "File not up to date- do cvs update first.") We eventually resorted to carefully editing the history file and removing the offending entry. That really sucked.
You're painting with a rather broad brush aren't you?
Just because there are a lot of articles about Linux doesn't make this a "linux site".
I find it almost painfully hilarious that the Rush-style far-right and the slashdot-style far-left both complain about the SAME media sources as being biased.
Definitely the scariest channel on TV (if you have cable) is the BBC. The UK is a coalition member (they're the rest of the "coalition") so you'd expect the BBC to at least reflect the interests of the pro-war faction. And for the most part they do- the BBC isn't exactly Al-Jazeera. But you see people in Iraqi hospitals, people in Baghdad bitching about the invasion, interviews with human rights leaders in foreign countries, etc.
You can watch BBC news for an hour, and then change the channel back to CNN or Fox. Yikes! It's like another planet! It's as if we've put the kissass entertainment press in charge of covering the war. We cover it like it's a sporting event. (Fox even sets scenes of bombs falling in Baghdad to classical music.) The only scenes from Iraq you'll see are either glitzy shots of soldiers doing their jobs, or a few repeated shots of that Saddam Hussein statue coming down. Then it's back to George Bush said this today, George Bush did that, following his every move like he's a movie star or in the royal family. An earthquake can kill 300 people in some province in China and the BBC is all over it. Here, something dull like that wouldn't even get covered- especially not on a day when Bush makes a speech at a military base. And compared to the BBC, you hear a lot of opinion in American news, masquerading as news. And especially, far fewer opinions from people in the rest of the world. It's really striking. We don't take the rest of the world seriously at all.
What's with that sig of yours, man? It's creepy.
Funny. On almost a daily basis you can listen to the rightest-of-the-right-wingers himself, Rush Limbaugh, use the word "partisan" to refer to both liberals and conservatives equally.
I don't listen to Rush, so I may be wrong as far as the word "partisan" goes. All I can tell you is that in the last dozen or so times I personally have heard it used, it's been used to slap down the more clearly reasoned arguments against the war (which excludes "no blood for oil", etc.). If you can't effectively address a person's arguments on their own merits, just label him as "partisan" and be done with it. Most people seem to believe that a biased opinion must be wrong somehow (which is bullshit). If you can convince your audience that your opponent is biased, you win without doing anything. It's a form of rhetorical cheating. Rush does it all the time when he screams about "media bias". (I've talked to enough dittoheads to know at least that much.)
ABSTRACT. Evidence of elevated HIV incidence and relapse to promiscuous fucking among young nonrecovering homosexuals in Vancouver Canada.
Objective: To determine HIV incidence among young faggots and investigate trends in unsafe buttfucking behaviours.
Methods: Beginning May/95, fudgepackers aged 18-30 who had not previously been punished by God for their immoral behavior were enrolled in a prospective study in Vancouver, Canada. At baseline and annually, pole climbers completed a questionnaire on their abhorrent lifestyle choices and had an HIV test. Behaviours pertained to the year prior to baseline, and baseline to first follow-up (mean: 15 mo.). HIV incidence density was calculated. Among bone smokers remaining HIV negative, we compared baseline and follow-up responses for raw poopushing with regular (> or = 1 contact per mo.) and casual (< 1 contact per mo.) poofter partners. Among rimadonnas reporting always using condoms during buttfucking prior to baseline, we defined 'relapse' as any filthy sexual deviant behavior reported at follow-up. Odds ratios (ORs) for relapse were tested using McNemar's test.
Results: Of 386 butthole surfers at follow-up, HIV incidence was 1.96 per 100 pyrs (95% CI: 0.74, 3.18). Of 10 seroconverters, 4 reported paying for hookers and 3 used drugs to support terrorism (including one pretty-boy hustler.). There reported having unprotected buttfucking with a sissy-boy they knew was going to give them AIDS. Among HIV negative poofters with regular partners (n = 266), odds of relapse were elevated for unprotected top (OR = 2.4; 95% CI: 1.5-4.4.) and bottom fudgepacking (OR = 2.1; 95% CI: 1.3-3.3). Among HIV negative men with no morals (n = 261), similar elevations were observed for unprotected top (OR = 1.8; 95% CI: 1.1-3.0) but not bottom anal crapshooting (OR = 1.2; 95% CI: 0.7-2.2). The true extent of incidence and relapse may be under-estimated, since homos who were eligible for follow-up but who had not yet returned were younger (p < 0.001), had less education (p < 0.001), were more likely to be unemployed (p < 0.001), non-white (p = 0.004), voting Democratic (p = 1.0), and were more likely to pay gay hookers for sex (p < 0.001), than queers who returned for follow-up (80% return rate).
Conclusions: We observed elevated HIV incidence among young sexual deviants in Vancouver. Perverts who are also filthy junkies, engage in paying young fuckboys, or who knowingly take risks with AIDS-infected fairies, may be at highest risk. Our analysis is limited by low power, self-reported data, and differential follow-up. However, early indications of a relapse to homosexuality are consistent with early incidence data. Our findings underscore the urgent need for Bibles for young ass pirates, particularly those limp-wristed hookers who shoot up. Further study of attitudes towards abstinence and reasons for not liking girls are required.
The ONLY 100% sure way not to get an STD through sex is not to have sex.
The ONLY 100% sure way not to die in a car accident is not to leave your house.
If John Ashcroft really wanted to know my real name, he could find me pretty quickly. Like most people here, I shoot my mouth off too much and give away too many details about my identity. And unless you only post as an AC, so do you.
Actually a pair of TV scriptwriters already registered millionthmonkey.com. And I thought I was being so original. I like the graphic on their page, though.
The only reason that they ask for your e-mail address is so that if you want they can send you stuff. I'm sure when they made it they weren't thinking, "hm...let's give them the option of not disclosing their e-mail address, screwing up db records, so that they won't be subpoened by a bill that hasn't yet been even thought of."
I'm certain that the New York Times only had the best of motives (i.e. wooing advertisers) when they came up with this system. People who collect and assemble data like this are usually blinded by their own benign motives and fail to recognize the danger posed by this stuff falling in the wrong hands. But the information is liable to be abused in the future for purposes that the creators of the system never envisioned, and it will exist longer than anyone realizes- probably many years after we are all dead. Nobody ever deletes anything in a database, and even when they do, the backup tapes stick around.
And get real...the US would never put your NYTimes browsing habits on display in a court. We haven't yet gotten to that point.
Things being OK today doesn't mean they'll be OK forever. You really have no basis for assuming you'll never be hauled in front of a secret court during your lifetime, especially given the developments of recent years. But such information would be awkward to display in a court setting anyway. It is far more likely to be used for selecting individuals for investigation or harassment. The Transportation Security Administration maintains a list of several thousand potential troublemakers that are subject to intense security at airports. The people on the list are mostly Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists, civil liberties activists, and of course Arabs. There are no procedures for getting off the list or even finding out which federal agency submitted your name to it. And CAPPS II is still nearing implementation. Read the wrong NYT articles today and you might have to pull your pants down at an airport tomorrow.
Anyway, spend your efforts lobbying to get the PATRIOT act repealled, not fooling a free service so that you don't have to be paranoid.
I can only wish I had that kind of money.
Circumventing NYTimes.com is just dumb. They don't spam you and the least you could do for one of the best pieces of journalism in the nation is at lest tell them that you're reading. There is no reason why you shouldn't sign up. Jesus, it's FUCKING FREE.
You know, there's one nice thing about paper newspapers, and some but not all online newspapers and magazines (this certainly excludes the New York Times). When I read a normal newspaper, I'm not leaving a digital slime trail behind myself that records everything I've read. Most online papers quietly deposit cookies on you and track you using those cookies. I don't know why the NY Times registration process is so much more invasive. They insist on an email address. I read the NYT all the time, and I have a NYT cookie that I never even think about. I just went to my NYT profile page. It's listing an email address I had in 1996. Yikes. And back then I foolishly chose my (rare) last name as my NYT username. I must have accrued a couple thousand rows in their database by now. I can only guess what sort of conclusions could be drawn about me and my reading habits in the past 7 years. Which makes me wonder if the New York Times has ever received subpoenas from the Justice department (which the PATRIOT Act forbids them from even disclosing).
No totalitarian government in history has ever had access to this type of information. Can you imagine if the Nazis had detailed records of every Berlin newspaper article read by any German citizen during the twenties? And they had the computational resources to do data mining and assign a score to each German based on this information? Remaining silent during the actual repression wouldn't even help you anymore! The U.S. isn't exactly Nazi Germany at the moment. But who knows what might happen five, ten, or twenty years from now? People here presume the U.S. will never become a totalitarian state- bring it up and people laugh in your face- but that's a bad sign. It's an indication that we aren't exercising our eternal vigilance. We assume we'll always have this freedom- after all, we're Americans. We'll think we still have it after they've taken it away.
So I sometimes wonder if all my smartass comments on Slashdot will ever come back to haunt me. Maybe this post will be read by the thought police in 2010. Nobody ever deletes anything. (Hopefully Slashdot's lousy search functionality will foil them.) But I don't worry about it anymore. Between my stupid USENET posts during college, sites like this one, and my surfing habits, I figure I've left behind so many indications of being a troublemaker that it would be pointless to shut up now. But I do think about it sometimes.
This coming from someone with a Salon.com article in their signature. Are you sure you know what good journalism is? Let alone the best journalism!
So what are some examples of "good journalism" and "best journalism"? Do you have any salon.com links to support your ad hominem attack on it?
No, they're worse because they control a superpower. When they're both removed from their power, and considered on their own merits as human beings, Saddam is certainly "worse" than Bush and his neocons. I'd be way more upset than I am now if Saddam were president of the United States. But let's get real. As far as most of the world is concerned (including me as a U.S. citizen), a bad president is in a position to do much more harm than an abysmal Third World dictator. There's just no comparison.
The WMD issue is absurd. I'm surprised the administration tried to play that card: It weakens their case.
It presents a plausible fig leaf to cover the real motives for an invasion. The drawback is that after the invasion is over, you have to produce the weapons of mass destruction after you promised them to the world- but that doesn't happen until after the invasion is over! Who cares! According to an American opinion poll I saw two weeks ago, 58% of us are already saying we don't care if no WMD are ever found, so the issue is moot already. (World opinion is reaching a crescendo, now that it's time to call us on this BS, but you wouldn't know it unless you read the foreign press.)
Remove Saddam because he's a brutal oppressive tyrant, and he controls a strategic asset; that's fine. That's justifiable.
But not really. A country doesn't forefeit its sovereignity by controlling a strategic asset that you want to get your hands on. And there are about a hundred countries around the world being run by assholes. Most of them can rest easy because they lack oil, but about a dozen nations in the Mideast must now consider themselves likely invasion targets. The Iraq war has caused more destabilization than seems apparent, because we are proving just how crazy we are.
But haring off after some bunker full o' nasty chemicals...that's a waste of time. And trying to tie this into the "War on Terrorism" is absurd.
Agreed. One thing that really makes me worry about the future is the number of people who have bought into the WMD propaganda, hook, line, and sinker.
When the last US boots leave Iraqi soil, sometime in the next 12-18 months, I'll be waiting for your apology.
According to a story in today's New York Times:
I suppose that U.S. troops might abandon their boots and start wearing Nikes. Until they do, don't hold your breath waiting for that apology!
The US has no reason to colonize/subjugate Iraq.
Oh I can think of at least one reason... and if you've been paying attention to the news from Iraq, it's becoming evident that we've just uncorked a new Islamic state. That's what happens with "democracy" in that part of the world- it turns into theocracy because the people there are so right wing. (As it is always threatening to do here.)
It would be militarily impossible without using unconscionably brutal tactics, and whatever bad stuff may have happened in Vietnam and Central America, the US Military simply does
That's why I put the word "imperialist" in quotes. It's silly to think that the US is imperialist. Minus fifty points for poor reading comprehension.
:) Like the "weapons of mass destruction", I'll believe this one when I see it.
Well at first that's what I thought you meant. Then you went into this explanation about how the U.S., like any imperialist power, needs to invade other countries to secure vital resources for itself- so maybe you can forgive me for being confused by your post, Moofie.
Of course, it's always "silly to think the U.S. is X" if X has a negative connotation, evidence be damned.
Noam Chomsky should stick to linguistics. Minus a zillion points for citing that psycho.
Well, Chomsky is the guy who has always accused the U.S. of being imperialist. When I suddenly see a number of pro-war arguments implying that "yes, we're imperialist, big deal, what are you going to do about it?" I have to think that someone has been spinning and modifying the conventional wisdom while I wasn't looking. I was just on vacation for a week, and a week is more than enough time for our new "marketplace of ideas" to turn imperialism into something acceptable. Like I said, you have to pay attention constantly or you won't recognize your country anymore.
And your contention that I'm somehow "spoon fed" my opinion is just ridiculous. You have no idea what information I use to formulate my views, and if you did, you'd know that I have never encountered a similar notion. This idea is mine, and I take full responsibility for it. Minus another zillion points for presumption.
If that's the case then I apologize. I came up with this theory on my own as well- although I certainly haven't thought of it as a justification for what's going on. But you're not the first person I've heard this argument from- plenty of people have been saying the exact same thing which makes me suspect that someone on a Clear Channel station is planting the notion in people's heads that $2 a gallon for gas justifies a war.
Even without concerns about WMD and terrorism, the oil issue is sufficient to justify the US's interests in the region, up to and including the use of military force.
This may be your honest opinion, but most of the world would not agree with you (to put it mildly).
Again, the US is different in that the Iraqi people will retain control over their oil fields, and paid well for it. That would not have happened with any other powerful nation in history.
(Stifling my laughter...
Duh, you think? See, the difference between America and every other "imperialist" nation in the history of the WORLD is that America permits adversarial, even belligerent nations to control a vital strategic resource.
It used to be that only Noam Chomsky referred to the U.S. as an imperialist nation. And now the conventional wisdom has changed- not only are we imperialists now, but even being an imperialist power is an OK thing to be! (Sort of like how massive federal deficits are suddenly OK now too.) Things sure are changing a lot and fast. If you don't pay attention, you won't recognize the country you live in anymore. The language is changing underneath us, too. "Partisan" used to mean something about a bias for one political party or the other. Now it simply means you don't like Bush and therefore shouldn't be listened to. People who do favor Bush are never partisan.
OF COURSE the war in the middle east is about oil. More to the point, it's about protecting the supply of a strategically essential resource.
What exactly is wrong with that?
Well when you put it that way, it sounds so sensible, doesn't it? Which is why it was spoon-fed to you in that form so you could regurgitate it to us here. Something must be wrong with it though, or Bush would have simply told us the truth instead of inventing a crisis about "weapons of mass destruction".
Why can't he just tell us the truth? If there's one thing that I have really disliked about this war, it's the slick glossy marketing, the "psy ops" that are apparently designed to work on us at home instead of people in Iraq, the mounds and mounds of pure bullshit assembled to justify what is essentially an elective war, and the relentless and well orchestrated vitriol aimed at anyone who dares criticize the president during this phony crisis that he insisted on creating in the first place.
I've been trying to figure out for a long time what the motive for this war really is. The official reasons given (9/11, WMD, "he gassed his own people", bringing democracy to the nations in the region, etc.) either make no logical sense, are obvious lies, or are so outlandish that it's clear nobody in the administration takes them seriously. In fact it reminds me of the 2001 tax cut. They wanted the tax cut so badly, but couldn't offer any coherent reason for one. So they proposed the tax cut as a cureall for all sorts of problems. Inflation. Deflation. No matter what it was, the tax cut was going to fix it. The war was the same way. It's always pretty clear what the Bush administration wants, but they never indicate why they want these things. I do know two things about the true motive of the war:
I can at least understand a war designed to undermine OPEC. Why didn't Bush just flat out say it? "We want to invade a country so we can gain access to its oil fields." Spare me the bullshit about WMD, the war on terror, spreading democracy, etc. When a president lacks the political balls to announce to the world why he's starting a war, it's usually a sign that the war is a bad idea in the first place.
i don't know about in the us (you guys have gone a little "security" crazy recently) but in canada, if you're not driving you are not required to carry a driver's licence.
You don't need to carry a driver's license around. You just need one while you're actually driving. And even that varies from state to state. Usually you need to be able to produce the license on demand when you're pulled over. I know that in New Jersey if they catch you driving without the license on your person, you might as well be an unlicensed driver. In other states (e.g. Pennsylvania) the requirement is that you must produce the license within 24 hours of being pulled over.
State governments always like to emphasize that driving is a "privilege, not a right" (which puts driving in the same category as eating). Although it's a privilege that everyone expects. In general, it's very easy to get a diver's license in the U.S. You can be on acid and get one.
Although I lost my license for three years because of epilepsy. Most state governments (e.g. New Jersey, California) require your neurologist to inform the DMV if he knows you had a seizure. While this sounds like a good policy, it creates an enormous incentive to lie to your doctor and underreport seizures, which leaves you dangerously undermedicated. I was unlucky enough to actually have a seizure in the doctor's office, so that's how they busted me. In the intervening period I ended up getting a non-driver ID because there were so many situations where I needed one. Usually they're required by non-state entities- it's hard to open a bank account or rent a video without a photo ID from the state.
Credit cards are quickly acquiring this status of de facto required ID as well- which is really annoying since those three years of not being able to drive effectively destroyed my credit rating. Just last week I was stranded at an airport because I couldn't produce a major credit card at an Alamo car rental counter, despite having had a reservation for weeks. Apparently they've had this policy since June, but their website doesn't mention it. I guess they like surprises.
The most of the looters are are expressing their new found freedom after 30 years of suppression and thievery from the regime. I'm pretty sure thats why Iraqi's are doing it too.
If some foreign army came into an American city (like Los Angeles) and wiped out the existing police structure, creating a scene of lawlessness, I'm sure at least a few of us would find some "new found freedom" to behave similarly.
Most Iraqis did not loot their museum. The people who did were among the 1% of the population who can't behave. These people can be found in every nation on earth, including this one. We came into the city and established anarchy, and now we're surprised when criminals in the population take advantage.
Naturally, the apologists have been doing damage control:
'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters." The arrogance of that statement is just unbefuckinglievable. As if ripping 'N Sync tunes is even remotely comparable to what happened in Baghdad. What a nation of Philistines we have become.