I support approval as well, for the same reason. Its as transparent as plurality voting, and it eliminates the perception of a 'throw away vote'. When the time is right to dump the electoral college, moving to approval voting at the same time would be the equivalent to a revolution in politics.
"You're right that Condorcet favours moderate, inclusive candidates. That's a feature. It's inbuilt protection against the absurdities of swing politics."
Who needs protection from swing politics? Thats what democracy is all about - a market of ideas. By your own admission, Condorcet is an obstruction to direct democracy. All Condorcet offers in exchange is a political system that favors populists over idealogues.
"You don't know what "disenfranchise" means.
Really? What do you call it when you remove a persons right to choose and participate in government? I call that disenfranchisement.
"It's a cure to the self-perpetuating two-party duopoly."
The problem is that you accept as gospel that there is such a thing as self perpetuating two-party duopoly. First off, the second part is redundant - a duopoloy already implies "two" (duos). Secondly, one thing I've learned in life is that anytime someone strings a series of two dollar words, they're trying to hide the fact that they are spouting patent bullshit. The reason - as anyone who studies politics already knows (whether they agree with it or not is another matter) - that we have two parties currently is they have done the best job of representing the overall spectrum of the electorate. Parties like the Greens or Socialists represent extreme fringes of American political sentiment. Parties like the Libertarian party formed out of disaffected members of the other two parties, and are a prime example of market-driven evolutoin. Just as the Republicans replaced whigs, and the Democrats replaced the Federalists, so too some day might the Libertarians replace the Republicans. Or, they may go the way of third parties in the past, like the Grangers or Workers party.
Your vote wouldn't be invalidated using the Condorcet method, as you suggest.
Yes. It would. Perhaps you don't understand. Maybe I'm not using the right wording for you,but its plain and simple. In any election method, the winner is simply the one with a margin of votes in excess of another. By not voting for a candidate, you reduce the number of pairings overall, which reduces the number of times a choice is forced between combinations of candidates in which the unlisted candidate wins or loses. That increases the weighted value of the remainder of the votes. I've explained this further in the new story about Condorcet that michael (further proof of Condorcet's evil) posted today.
First off, anyone should automatically suspect a system brought about by a French mathemetician as being the incarnation of true evil that it is.
Outside of that, one has to realize that Condorcet suffers a fundamental flaw in that it makes value judgements that the voter isn't aware of. In Condorcet, you are asked to rank the four candidates in order of preference. The rules don't allow you to not vote for a candidate (and many States consider such a ballot to be invalid), but the rules could be changed to accomodate that. More on this later.
On a condorcet ballot, you rank the four candidates in order of preference. Such a ballot might look like this:
1. Bush 2. Kerry 3. Badnarik 4. Cobb
The problem is that the Condorcet method assumes that the voter sentiment is equally distributed among the four candidates. One person who casts this ballot might not feel strongly either way about Bush or Kerry, but might not want the minor candidates at all, and simply ranks them in the order of least displeasure. Another voter with the same ballot might be an ardent pro-Bush voter, not favor Kerry at all, not know who Badnarik is, and not want Cobb by any stretch of the imagination. The mathematical system of Condorcet erases these value judgements and replaces them with arbitrary ones. Why this is such a huge problem will become evident later.
It is worth mentioning that Condorcet as I've discussed it so far requires you to cast votes for everyone on the ballot. Should the rules of Condorcet and the individual States be altered to allow empty slots, then we run into a new problem. In plurality voting (majority wins, the system most places use), a vote for one candidate is also a vote against the other candidates. This seems counterintuitive until you consider that plurality votes are won by the person with the most votes from of a finite electorate. Even in three and four way ballots, the election only comes down to the number one and number two ranked candidates, and any votes for one cancels votes for the other while simultaneously reducing the available votes for the remaining candidates. However, in Condorcet the failure to rank a candidate actually increases the value of overall voter sentiment by decreasing the number of times it is eliminated in pairwise matching.
That last part - the pairwise scheme - is where Condorcet breaks down and fails to accurately portray voter sentiment. What condorcet effectively does is map voter sentiment to a bell curve, giving greater emphasis to candidates who fail to offend or excite enough voters.
In actual practice, Condorcet doesn't usually produce a different winner than plurality. In situations where the electorate is sufficiently polarized, the two methods will agree. However, in close races Condorcets pairwise matching scheme becomes a problem. Under chaotic conditions governed by cellular automata with three or more candidates, Condorcet nullifies the more popular candidates, and actually awards the election to one of the less popular candidates.
If you can't accept this on the theoretical construct, it is really easy to build a condorcet engine in software. With a basic understanding of the mathematics behind cellular automata, you can generate a series of elections between candidates where the votes cast follow ca rules. Each ballot is cast in condorcet style, but for plurality the number 1 ranked candidate gets the vote. I did this a few years back with a simple php script, and in 2 of every 311 races the least popular candidate by plurality rules actually won under condorcet.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with Condorcet or with IRV for that matter is the same problem presented by the electoral college; it obscures the process and disconnects the electorate from the result. In 2000, Gore did in fact have more votes nationwide than Bush. One has to keep in mind, however, that the lead (some 200,000 votes) was slightly more than 1/10th of 1% of the population, which is f
Under Condorcet, voters are forced to assign an arbitrary value to a candidate. First, second, third and so on. So while I want Bush (R), and wouldn't mind Badnarik (L), I'd not want to see Kerry (D) and would rather have my testicles removed than see Cobb (G) get in to any position of power higher than the post office janitor. But, in such a ballot, My vote would simply be
1. Bush 2. Badnarik 3. Kerry 4. Cobb
In terms of weighted value, this would artificially inflate the value of the lesser candidates on my ballot. The only choice I have is to not even vote for Kerry or Cobb. Under current rules, that would invalidate my ballot. If the laws were changed to allow incomplete ballots to be counted (so called Algore ballots), then you run into the next problem: Condorcet values effectively nullify candidates who enjoy strong support, giving greater weighted values to minor party candidates who enjoy broad yet moderate or even low levels of support.
In short, Condorcet voting forces voter sentiment into an inverse bell curve function, the net result of which it that strongly supported candidates are marginalized and candidates which energize enough of the electorate, or simply fail to offend them, are placed in the middle.
If you cannot accept this on theoretical constructs, then you can build a condorcet engine. You make four artificial candidates. Assign chaotically random votes to a ballot and then tabulate the results. Most often what happens is a near draw between all four candidates, but under chaotic conditions governed by rules of cellular automata (which probably requires higher math than your average bear has taken), the most popular candidates will lose handily to the least popular candidate.
The final and most obvious strike with condorcet is that it lacks transparency. People already have a inherent distrust of the voting system because they didn't know or understand the effect of the electoral college. A condorcet system would completely disenfranchise the electorate. This is the solution you offer to voter disaffection? Sounds to me killing the patient to cure the disease.
Electionmethods.org supports the Condorcet method. Aside from being the creation of a Frenchman, Condorcet suffers from a huge flaw - it forces voter sentiment into a bell curve. The result is that while voters may overwhelmingly support a given candidate, the election will go to the candidate which inspires the least amount of displeasure. It is also more mathematically complex than current majority rules voting, so an electorate already unhappy with how the candidate they didn't vote for actually won, this system will make it appear to the entire electorate that an 'invisible hand' is guiding the election.
This is by far the worst Q&A session yet. Half of the responses are canned boilerplate one-liners. "Transnational corporations", "Cheney and Enron", et al. This candidate offers no answers, just plattitudes and boogey men to blame for the worlds problems. The Green party? They use class warfare and divisive rhetoric to try to isolate vulnerable groups and influence them.
"What African American media? Oh, I see, you meant media directed at African Americans."
No,I mean African American media. Outlets like BET, Def Jam Records, Death Row Records, The Rap Sheet, and so on. These are black-owned and operated institutions.
"But with African American kids that grow up in poor neighborhoods, life is rather different."
It is no different what-so-ever from children of any other race who grow up in poor neighborhoods.
"Hey, what a surprise. We white people are behind this, too."
Enough. Your entire rant here boils down to the same tired argument of white priveledge and cultural paranoia. None of this has jack shit to do with the real plight of blacks in America at this point. The same conditions exist in other countries like England, France, German, and the Netherlands where slaves were imported, and you don't see the same net result of the degradation of black culture there as you do here. In fact, America didn't see a significant rise in this problem until the end of the 1980s when the media began to capitalize on a new wave of black-sploitation movies, gangsta rap, and the black identity movement.
"...learn how not to underestimate your opponent. "
Big mouth, small penis, and an overriding desire to compensate. I suggest you shut up on this issue and take your own advice. You're being incredibly immature on the one hand, and on the other you're letting your fingers write checks that will get your ass bounced.
"...you're the one with a problem, since I was asking questions.."
You were making assertions and citing a discredited source.
"For your information, Toxic Mixing Zones had been COMPLETELY closed for about 20 years."
Then perhaps you can explain why in 1995 the EPA had to sue to be allowed to close mixing zones in the Great Lakes region, if they have been...in your words "COMPLETELY closed for 20 years"? Or why in 2000 the Chesapeake Bay Foundation decided to work to reduce the number of toxic mixing zones in the Chesapeake Bay region?
I suggest you look up what a useful idiot is; you may find your picture next to the definition.
"The EPA under Bush has changed that to allow "Toxic Mixing Zones".
Again, this information is simply incorrect. "Toxic Mixing Zones" have been around for decades; they were established in the Clean Water Act in the 1970s. Previously however, the toxicity of the dumping zone was based on the overall size of the waterway or airspace, and the distance to non-commercial property (schools, homes, etc). The 1,000 yard limit actually places tighter limits on toxic dumping by recognizing that toxic elements - particularly heavy metals - fixate close to the dumping point, and do not evenly distribute into the environment. Under the old rules, if toxicity were measured at any given point along a waterway and were found to be at acceptable levels, then the dumping was permitted. Under new rules (and I believe its actually 1,000 meters, which is just slightly closer), if toxicity levels inside that area exceed EPA safe standards, the company is fined, dumping activity regulated, and cleanup funds become available.
"And I don't believe that Kennedy is an idiot either. How he came up with those numbers I'm not sure, but I'd rather find out that he's exaggerated them rather than find out he's underestimated them."
Perhaps I should say he is a "useful idiot" (ref: Lenin). I don't know why you would want to be comfortable with a person lying, except to say that their lie agrees with your politics, but his brand of disinformation and fear mongering is precisely why political debate on issues like environmentalism has become completely ineffective. Rather than presenting facts and letting people make informed decisions, Kennedy wants to scare the bejesus out of people so they'll rush to support him.
"Kennedy's best quote that night was "80% of the Republicans are Democrats that don't know what's going on." And quite honestly, I think he's right. Americans in general have a bad tendency of trusting their media and not their senses. I grew up overseas, and I know what I mean when I say that American media sucks and does not tell you what you need to know."
Could you be any more arrogant? You assume because you were brought up outside of the American mainstream that you somehow have an insight the rest of us aren't privy to? That's why I don't trust people like you. You think that the rest of us need people like you to think for us, and to make decisions that will better our life. It shows in your attitudes, in your ideaologies, and in your disdain for the proletariat.
"And PLEASE don't tell me that Fox News are the most objective news services because I'd have to punch you in the face."
Where in the hell did you come up with Fox news? Who the hell said anything about them? Why is it that when one of you people get into a debate, you always have to find some way to bash either Fox News, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, National Review, or some other icon of conservatism? If you can't stick to the issues, then just don't say anything. And speaking of when to keep your mouth shut, you can feel free to punch me in the face. It's obvious that this kind of impulsive behavior and lack of restraint pervades your personality. However, rest assured that you will only get one chance to hit me, after which I can and will legally defend myself in such a way that you will spend the rest of your life eating your meals through a straw and blinking your eyelids to change channels from your wheelchair. If you wish to continue your male egotistical pissing contest with me, I suggest you do so directly instead of mucking up perfectly good discourses like this.
...they're too balanced. However, I'd be instrumental in creating a network which has nothing but news from the Conservative Libertarian viewpoint. I'd call it "fuck off and let me live my life" news.
African American media glorifies the criminal lifestyle while casting the stigma of an "Uncle Tom" or "House Negro" on African Americans who seek paths of education and career development. What would your administration do to endorse positive black role models for African Americans who emphasize honesty and hard work of the 'thug life'.
The governor of Texas does not have any control over executions what-so-ever.
The Commandment is not "thou shalt not kill". It is "thou shalt do no murder". Killing is all well and good if the killee deserves it. Jesus himself riterated this commandment. He also spoke of restraint, as in "those who live by the sword shall die by the sword", so obviously it is not copasthetic for you to go stab the hell out of your neighbor for not returning your weedeater.
So, in all, there is no "glaring discrepancy", though you desperately would like there to be one.
"Most of what he said was that President Bush is the worst president the United States have ever had for the environment."
Kennedy, a radical environmentalist and highly-left-leanign Democrat would say that about a Republican? No. This is strike 1 - a logical fallacy which is based on an appeal to authority.
"He also said that in a real free market companies do NOT pollute,"
Kennedy is a dumbass. A true free market economy would cause rampant pollution. Some limited controls are necessary to tax companies who pollute in order to make the cost-saving benefit of polluting go away. The only thing other than environmental legislation that has ever prevented companies from polluting like crazy is conscience.
"..and cited the case of 1100 coal burning plants to produce electricity which produce about 60% of the mercury contaminating the US's waterways today."
Once again you were willfully misled by your idealogical idolatory. According to the National Resources Defense Council, 100 tons of mercury are put into the environment each year through chlorine production. By contrast, coal burning power plants put 50 tons of mercury into the environment each year. Simple math will tell you that coal fired plants account for 33 1/3% of Mercury emissions. That's if you ignore the other top methods of mercury production, such as chemical manufacturing and electronics production. Thats strike 2.
"Or do you favor the coal plants more because they donated over $100 million to your campaign?"
The Kerry-Edwards campaign has claimed that the Bush campaign got $300,000 from the coal industry. Kennedy's claim is about $1.7 million short of the truth. Strike 3.
"...the mercury contamination in water will be responsible for up to 30,000 deaths a year."
Yet another moronic statement. I can predict with equal certainty that nobody will die from mercury poisoning due to contamination in the waterways of the US this year. Thats because so-called "estimates" are based on populations and "risk factors". So 30,000 people out of a population of 280,000,000 people equates to a.00107% risk per unit (person) of death by mercury contamination. I'll try not to stay up late at night.
That, however, is not your strike 4. Your strike 4 is blaming Bush for allegedly relaxing standards for mercury emission at all. The truth is that there has never been a standard for mercury emissions. Bush's 'Clear Skies' plan placed the first ever cap on mercury emissions, and mandated a 54% reduction in emissions by 2010. Clear Skies also mandates a 73% reduction in SO2, which is what is killing our forests - those forests being essential to carbon fixation and sequestration, reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Clear Skies will also reduce NOx emissions by 63%. Bush also fronted an energy plan which would encourage the construction of newer designs for coal plants which would produce zero mercury emissions, and reduced CO2 emissions. Additionally, it would allow new safe nuclear plants to be brought online so we can decommission and clean up the 50 year old designs which are now posing a tremendous imminant threat. Lastly - and most importantly - Bush will commite $1.7 billion to developing hydrogen fuels for power production and automobile transportation. Kerry's answer? He fought the Clear Skies initiative, and the Energy Plan whose provisions he claimed to support. In turn, Kerry wants to offer $10 billion in corporate welfare for car companies - including non-us companies - to develop alternate fuel vehicles. The problem is they are already doing this without one dime of taxpayer money. So for blatently misrepresenting the Bush record,
IT salaries are up, US employment in the IT sector is on the rise (as covered by slashdot yesterday), and the net number of jobs has increased over the last four years. Have fun over at www.bls.gov
You and your surrogates at MoveOn.org, CBS News, and Texans for Truth have attacked President Bush's service in the Alabama Air National Guard, claiming without any evidence what-so-ever that he was AWOL from service, and even going so far as to manufacture falsified memos (which may prove to be a felony violation of Federal Election Law and Federal Wire Fraud Laws). You have demanded that Bush release his records, which he has complied with. However, you and your campaign have released no such records to counter the allegations that you were AWOL from your Naval Reserve obligations.
How do you account for the 17 days of active duty and 47 drills over two years you failed to attend as you had agreed to do when you were given an early release from your Naval Officers Commission? Additionally, how do you account for the fact that you have been absent from 32 Senate votes since November of 2003?
50 barrels of yellow cake, mined at the Al Akashat mining facility, are stored at Al Tuwaitha south of Baghdad. That is a matter of public record, they've been there since the Gulf War, the UN inspectors including Muhammed Al Baradai (sp) have reported on them for years.
Or perhaps you were referring to the Yellow Cake Iraq was reportedly exporting, as evidenced by the Jordanian flagged freighter owned by the Iraqi P3 agency which was found in a Dutch scrap yard with copious amounts of uranium dioxide (yellow cake) in one of its holds.
That's not a mistake. It's not even alleged by anyone to be a mistake. If you're going to make allegations, at least stick to the allegations that others are making. Don't tool up your own specious assumptions.
If another terrorist attack occurs and it has a financial impact, say terrorist blow up Wall Street or nuke or a US city, then you would be completely justified in pointing the figure squarely at Bush and the US congress for ruining the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I support approval as well, for the same reason. Its as transparent as plurality voting, and it eliminates the perception of a 'throw away vote'. When the time is right to dump the electoral college, moving to approval voting at the same time would be the equivalent to a revolution in politics.
If you're going to argue condorcet with me, at least know what you're talking about.
Who needs protection from swing politics? Thats what democracy is all about - a market of ideas. By your own admission, Condorcet is an obstruction to direct democracy. All Condorcet offers in exchange is a political system that favors populists over idealogues.
Really? What do you call it when you remove a persons right to choose and participate in government? I call that disenfranchisement.
The problem is that you accept as gospel that there is such a thing as self perpetuating two-party duopoly. First off, the second part is redundant - a duopoloy already implies "two" (duos). Secondly, one thing I've learned in life is that anytime someone strings a series of two dollar words, they're trying to hide the fact that they are spouting patent bullshit. The reason - as anyone who studies politics already knows (whether they agree with it or not is another matter) - that we have two parties currently is they have done the best job of representing the overall spectrum of the electorate. Parties like the Greens or Socialists represent extreme fringes of American political sentiment. Parties like the Libertarian party formed out of disaffected members of the other two parties, and are a prime example of market-driven evolutoin. Just as the Republicans replaced whigs, and the Democrats replaced the Federalists, so too some day might the Libertarians replace the Republicans. Or, they may go the way of third parties in the past, like the Grangers or Workers party.
Yes. It would. Perhaps you don't understand. Maybe I'm not using the right wording for you,but its plain and simple. In any election method, the winner is simply the one with a margin of votes in excess of another. By not voting for a candidate, you reduce the number of pairings overall, which reduces the number of times a choice is forced between combinations of candidates in which the unlisted candidate wins or loses. That increases the weighted value of the remainder of the votes. I've explained this further in the new story about Condorcet that michael (further proof of Condorcet's evil) posted today.
First off, anyone should automatically suspect a system brought about by a French mathemetician as being the incarnation of true evil that it is.
Outside of that, one has to realize that Condorcet suffers a fundamental flaw in that it makes value judgements that the voter isn't aware of. In Condorcet, you are asked to rank the four candidates in order of preference. The rules don't allow you to not vote for a candidate (and many States consider such a ballot to be invalid), but the rules could be changed to accomodate that. More on this later.
On a condorcet ballot, you rank the four candidates in order of preference. Such a ballot might look like this:
1. Bush
2. Kerry
3. Badnarik
4. Cobb
The problem is that the Condorcet method assumes that the voter sentiment is equally distributed among the four candidates. One person who casts this ballot might not feel strongly either way about Bush or Kerry, but might not want the minor candidates at all, and simply ranks them in the order of least displeasure. Another voter with the same ballot might be an ardent pro-Bush voter, not favor Kerry at all, not know who Badnarik is, and not want Cobb by any stretch of the imagination. The mathematical system of Condorcet erases these value judgements and replaces them with arbitrary ones. Why this is such a huge problem will become evident later.
It is worth mentioning that Condorcet as I've discussed it so far requires you to cast votes for everyone on the ballot. Should the rules of Condorcet and the individual States be altered to allow empty slots, then we run into a new problem. In plurality voting (majority wins, the system most places use), a vote for one candidate is also a vote against the other candidates. This seems counterintuitive until you consider that plurality votes are won by the person with the most votes from of a finite electorate. Even in three and four way ballots, the election only comes down to the number one and number two ranked candidates, and any votes for one cancels votes for the other while simultaneously reducing the available votes for the remaining candidates. However, in Condorcet the failure to rank a candidate actually increases the value of overall voter sentiment by decreasing the number of times it is eliminated in pairwise matching.
That last part - the pairwise scheme - is where Condorcet breaks down and fails to accurately portray voter sentiment. What condorcet effectively does is map voter sentiment to a bell curve, giving greater emphasis to candidates who fail to offend or excite enough voters.
In actual practice, Condorcet doesn't usually produce a different winner than plurality. In situations where the electorate is sufficiently polarized, the two methods will agree. However, in close races Condorcets pairwise matching scheme becomes a problem. Under chaotic conditions governed by cellular automata with three or more candidates, Condorcet nullifies the more popular candidates, and actually awards the election to one of the less popular candidates.
If you can't accept this on the theoretical construct, it is really easy to build a condorcet engine in software. With a basic understanding of the mathematics behind cellular automata, you can generate a series of elections between candidates where the votes cast follow ca rules. Each ballot is cast in condorcet style, but for plurality the number 1 ranked candidate gets the vote. I did this a few years back with a simple php script, and in 2 of every 311 races the least popular candidate by plurality rules actually won under condorcet.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with Condorcet or with IRV for that matter is the same problem presented by the electoral college; it obscures the process and disconnects the electorate from the result. In 2000, Gore did in fact have more votes nationwide than Bush. One has to keep in mind, however, that the lead (some 200,000 votes) was slightly more than 1/10th of 1% of the population, which is f
Under Condorcet, voters are forced to assign an arbitrary value to a candidate. First, second, third and so on. So while I want Bush (R), and wouldn't mind Badnarik (L), I'd not want to see Kerry (D) and would rather have my testicles removed than see Cobb (G) get in to any position of power higher than the post office janitor. But, in such a ballot, My vote would simply be
1. Bush
2. Badnarik
3. Kerry
4. Cobb
In terms of weighted value, this would artificially inflate the value of the lesser candidates on my ballot. The only choice I have is to not even vote for Kerry or Cobb. Under current rules, that would invalidate my ballot. If the laws were changed to allow incomplete ballots to be counted (so called Algore ballots), then you run into the next problem: Condorcet values effectively nullify candidates who enjoy strong support, giving greater weighted values to minor party candidates who enjoy broad yet moderate or even low levels of support.
In short, Condorcet voting forces voter sentiment into an inverse bell curve function, the net result of which it that strongly supported candidates are marginalized and candidates which energize enough of the electorate, or simply fail to offend them, are placed in the middle.
If you cannot accept this on theoretical constructs, then you can build a condorcet engine. You make four artificial candidates. Assign chaotically random votes to a ballot and then tabulate the results. Most often what happens is a near draw between all four candidates, but under chaotic conditions governed by rules of cellular automata (which probably requires higher math than your average bear has taken), the most popular candidates will lose handily to the least popular candidate.
The final and most obvious strike with condorcet is that it lacks transparency. People already have a inherent distrust of the voting system because they didn't know or understand the effect of the electoral college. A condorcet system would completely disenfranchise the electorate. This is the solution you offer to voter disaffection? Sounds to me killing the patient to cure the disease.
Electionmethods.org supports the Condorcet method. Aside from being the creation of a Frenchman, Condorcet suffers from a huge flaw - it forces voter sentiment into a bell curve. The result is that while voters may overwhelmingly support a given candidate, the election will go to the candidate which inspires the least amount of displeasure. It is also more mathematically complex than current majority rules voting, so an electorate already unhappy with how the candidate they didn't vote for actually won, this system will make it appear to the entire electorate that an 'invisible hand' is guiding the election.
This is by far the worst Q&A session yet. Half of the responses are canned boilerplate one-liners. "Transnational corporations", "Cheney and Enron", et al. This candidate offers no answers, just plattitudes and boogey men to blame for the worlds problems. The Green party? They use class warfare and divisive rhetoric to try to isolate vulnerable groups and influence them.
The US Military has (had for years now) glass which detects laser light (by its coherence) and instantly goes opaque.
No,I mean African American media. Outlets like BET, Def Jam Records, Death Row Records, The Rap Sheet, and so on. These are black-owned and operated institutions.
It is no different what-so-ever from children of any other race who grow up in poor neighborhoods.
Enough. Your entire rant here boils down to the same tired argument of white priveledge and cultural paranoia. None of this has jack shit to do with the real plight of blacks in America at this point. The same conditions exist in other countries like England, France, German, and the Netherlands where slaves were imported, and you don't see the same net result of the degradation of black culture there as you do here. In fact, America didn't see a significant rise in this problem until the end of the 1980s when the media began to capitalize on a new wave of black-sploitation movies, gangsta rap, and the black identity movement.
I think the dictionary does a fine job.
Big mouth, small penis, and an overriding desire to compensate. I suggest you shut up on this issue and take your own advice. You're being incredibly immature on the one hand, and on the other you're letting your fingers write checks that will get your ass bounced.
You were making assertions and citing a discredited source.
Then perhaps you can explain why in 1995 the EPA had to sue to be allowed to close mixing zones in the Great Lakes region, if they have been...in your words "COMPLETELY closed for 20 years"? Or why in 2000 the Chesapeake Bay Foundation decided to work to reduce the number of toxic mixing zones in the Chesapeake Bay region?
I suggest you look up what a useful idiot is; you may find your picture next to the definition.
...and salt water is not a liquid, its a solution. This is a pure chemical substance this article discusses.
I'd also like to ask who is the mod who gave this an extra point and said "interesting"? More proof of slashdots failure as a moderating system.
Again, this information is simply incorrect. "Toxic Mixing Zones" have been around for decades; they were established in the Clean Water Act in the 1970s. Previously however, the toxicity of the dumping zone was based on the overall size of the waterway or airspace, and the distance to non-commercial property (schools, homes, etc). The 1,000 yard limit actually places tighter limits on toxic dumping by recognizing that toxic elements - particularly heavy metals - fixate close to the dumping point, and do not evenly distribute into the environment. Under the old rules, if toxicity were measured at any given point along a waterway and were found to be at acceptable levels, then the dumping was permitted. Under new rules (and I believe its actually 1,000 meters, which is just slightly closer), if toxicity levels inside that area exceed EPA safe standards, the company is fined, dumping activity regulated, and cleanup funds become available.
Perhaps I should say he is a "useful idiot" (ref: Lenin). I don't know why you would want to be comfortable with a person lying, except to say that their lie agrees with your politics, but his brand of disinformation and fear mongering is precisely why political debate on issues like environmentalism has become completely ineffective. Rather than presenting facts and letting people make informed decisions, Kennedy wants to scare the bejesus out of people so they'll rush to support him.
Could you be any more arrogant? You assume because you were brought up outside of the American mainstream that you somehow have an insight the rest of us aren't privy to? That's why I don't trust people like you. You think that the rest of us need people like you to think for us, and to make decisions that will better our life. It shows in your attitudes, in your ideaologies, and in your disdain for the proletariat.
Where in the hell did you come up with Fox news? Who the hell said anything about them? Why is it that when one of you people get into a debate, you always have to find some way to bash either Fox News, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, National Review, or some other icon of conservatism? If you can't stick to the issues, then just don't say anything. And speaking of when to keep your mouth shut, you can feel free to punch me in the face. It's obvious that this kind of impulsive behavior and lack of restraint pervades your personality. However, rest assured that you will only get one chance to hit me, after which I can and will legally defend myself in such a way that you will spend the rest of your life eating your meals through a straw and blinking your eyelids to change channels from your wheelchair. If you wish to continue your male egotistical pissing contest with me, I suggest you do so directly instead of mucking up perfectly good discourses like this.
...and a pitiful listener.
...they're too balanced. However, I'd be instrumental in creating a network which has nothing but news from the Conservative Libertarian viewpoint. I'd call it "fuck off and let me live my life" news.
African American media glorifies the criminal lifestyle while casting the stigma of an "Uncle Tom" or "House Negro" on African Americans who seek paths of education and career development. What would your administration do to endorse positive black role models for African Americans who emphasize honesty and hard work of the 'thug life'.
The governor of Texas does not have any control over executions what-so-ever.
The Commandment is not "thou shalt not kill". It is "thou shalt do no murder". Killing is all well and good if the killee deserves it. Jesus himself riterated this commandment. He also spoke of restraint, as in "those who live by the sword shall die by the sword", so obviously it is not copasthetic for you to go stab the hell out of your neighbor for not returning your weedeater.
So, in all, there is no "glaring discrepancy", though you desperately would like there to be one.
Kennedy, a radical environmentalist and highly-left-leanign Democrat would say that about a Republican? No. This is strike 1 - a logical fallacy which is based on an appeal to authority.
Kennedy is a dumbass. A true free market economy would cause rampant pollution. Some limited controls are necessary to tax companies who pollute in order to make the cost-saving benefit of polluting go away. The only thing other than environmental legislation that has ever prevented companies from polluting like crazy is conscience.
Once again you were willfully misled by your idealogical idolatory. According to the National Resources Defense Council, 100 tons of mercury are put into the environment each year through chlorine production. By contrast, coal burning power plants put 50 tons of mercury into the environment each year. Simple math will tell you that coal fired plants account for 33 1/3% of Mercury emissions. That's if you ignore the other top methods of mercury production, such as chemical manufacturing and electronics production. Thats strike 2.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign has claimed that the Bush campaign got $300,000 from the coal industry. Kennedy's claim is about $1.7 million short of the truth. Strike 3.
Yet another moronic statement. I can predict with equal certainty that nobody will die from mercury poisoning due to contamination in the waterways of the US this year. Thats because so-called "estimates" are based on populations and "risk factors". So 30,000 people out of a population of 280,000,000 people equates to a .00107% risk per unit (person) of death by mercury contamination. I'll try not to stay up late at night.
That, however, is not your strike 4. Your strike 4 is blaming Bush for allegedly relaxing standards for mercury emission at all. The truth is that there has never been a standard for mercury emissions. Bush's 'Clear Skies' plan placed the first ever cap on mercury emissions, and mandated a 54% reduction in emissions by 2010. Clear Skies also mandates a 73% reduction in SO2, which is what is killing our forests - those forests being essential to carbon fixation and sequestration, reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Clear Skies will also reduce NOx emissions by 63%. Bush also fronted an energy plan which would encourage the construction of newer designs for coal plants which would produce zero mercury emissions, and reduced CO2 emissions. Additionally, it would allow new safe nuclear plants to be brought online so we can decommission and clean up the 50 year old designs which are now posing a tremendous imminant threat. Lastly - and most importantly - Bush will commite $1.7 billion to developing hydrogen fuels for power production and automobile transportation. Kerry's answer? He fought the Clear Skies initiative, and the Energy Plan whose provisions he claimed to support. In turn, Kerry wants to offer $10 billion in corporate welfare for car companies - including non-us companies - to develop alternate fuel vehicles. The problem is they are already doing this without one dime of taxpayer money. So for blatently misrepresenting the Bush record,
IT salaries are up, US employment in the IT sector is on the rise (as covered by slashdot yesterday), and the net number of jobs has increased over the last four years. Have fun over at www.bls.gov
You and your surrogates at MoveOn.org, CBS News, and Texans for Truth have attacked President Bush's service in the Alabama Air National Guard, claiming without any evidence what-so-ever that he was AWOL from service, and even going so far as to manufacture falsified memos (which may prove to be a felony violation of Federal Election Law and Federal Wire Fraud Laws). You have demanded that Bush release his records, which he has complied with. However, you and your campaign have released no such records to counter the allegations that you were AWOL from your Naval Reserve obligations.
How do you account for the 17 days of active duty and 47 drills over two years you failed to attend as you had agreed to do when you were given an early release from your Naval Officers Commission? Additionally, how do you account for the fact that you have been absent from 32 Senate votes since November of 2003?
Guess what petition was going around at the same time the Nader petition was going around.
50 barrels of yellow cake, mined at the Al Akashat mining facility, are stored at Al Tuwaitha south of Baghdad. That is a matter of public record, they've been there since the Gulf War, the UN inspectors including Muhammed Al Baradai (sp) have reported on them for years.
Or perhaps you were referring to the Yellow Cake Iraq was reportedly exporting, as evidenced by the Jordanian flagged freighter owned by the Iraqi P3 agency which was found in a Dutch scrap yard with copious amounts of uranium dioxide (yellow cake) in one of its holds.
That's not a mistake. It's not even alleged by anyone to be a mistake. If you're going to make allegations, at least stick to the allegations that others are making. Don't tool up your own specious assumptions.
...leftists, however, do. Just one more sign of Google's superiority over other obviously biased search engines.
Uhm yeah...stunning logic Waldo.
Your salary isn't decided by who is in the white house, it is decided by the skillsets you bring to market and the demand for those skill sets.