I love how slashdot posts these creationism stories to stir up the flamewars and mock the religious.
I feel that mocking the religious is one of the most noble enterprises that people with working brains can engage in.
IMHO, religion is at the root of many of the world's troubles and stands solidly in the way of mankind's progression to a state of greater understanding, wisdom and gentleness.
That, and Creationism and its many sub-stories are so ludicrous that no additional mockery is required.
To the C# aficionados out there: Something to take into consideration is that the OP is on the eastern side of the Atlantic. VB and C# rule in the US, Java is stronger in Europe.
C++ is good if you want to be hardcore. C is underneath lots of stuff but not so much modern commercial development. And as a former professional FORTRAN programmer, I don't recommend specializing in FORTRAN any more.
Although I agree with your sentiment, I deplore your use of the phrase "they could care less".
Realize it or not, the fact that Government is screwing the people is related to the fact that people accept lies as truth. "Could care less" means caring a lot, which is exactly the opposite of what you mean to say. It's the same kind of thing as instituting a program called the PATRIOT act to screw the citizens, or saying "we do not torture" but vetoing a ban on waterboarding. Democracy is damaged when the truth is; and truth is shaped by language. Call me crazy for taking this seriously, but I do.
Call me a cynic if you want, or an asshole if you prefer. But I consider nuclear terrorism a non-issue.
Preconditions:
The Soviet Union has become a supermarket for fissionable material;
All Western countries have borders that are leaky as a sieve with respect to objects the size of A-bombs or components (or how do billions of Dollars' worth of drugs enter the US annually?);
Information on how to build A-bombs is public knowledge;
Intelligence agencies worldwide uncover a few bomb-assembling operations but can't possibly be 100% effective;
There are millions of people who hate America with a deep passion and would gladly die to harm America, Israel or any other part of the "Western world". They've hated us for decades; and
The War on Terror is a joke. It's mostly show and bravado and bombing the shit out of civilians. It's armed-to-the teeth armored guards in front of a triple-bolted steel door, with an open screen dor in back.
We have, above, a set of opportunities plus a motive and a large group of crazies to act on it. As for the time frame, Soviet Uranium has been available for 16 years. The Arab world has been witness to the unwarranted and brutal "liberation" of Iraq for 5 years. Why the fuck hasn't New York been nuked yet? To be honest, I don't know.
My conclusion is that the foaming-mouth ragheads are too stupid, too disorganized and/or too unlucky to pull this off effectively and quickly. I'm sure that, somewhere, they're working like mad on it but not getting much of anywhere. Also, if they do succeed sometime in the next few years, they'll damage part of one major city, kill maybe a million people or so, and then fail to do it again for another few years. So what?
I live in a major Western city. My life is in mortal danger every time I cross a street on foot here, or venture into traffic in my non-SUV car. My Slashdotter lifestyle is associated with a number of serious health risks. In terms of pure statistics, I'm 1000 times more likely to be killed in an auto accident or by a cardiac arrest than by a terrorist's nuke. And I'll be equally dead in either case. So tell me again why I should worry about a terrorist nuclear attack?
It would suck to be a victim of such an attack, but I don't consider it an immediate danger. Governments and media are whipping the ignorant sheeple into a teeth-gnashing panic about it. I'll abstain, thank you. I'm much more worried about the upcoming wars over energy, drinking water and dry land. And in the short term, that the Chinese government and the RIAA manage to shut down the Internet so the world is plunged back into biblical ignorance.
Even if you don't subscribe to my cynical world view, consider what it would take to make the whole world nuke-safe. Ask yourself if you'd be willing to pay the price. Learn risk assessment and THEN decide what to worry about.
The concept of the crowd thinking what the media tell it to think is one of the most insightful and important in this discussion, IMHO. Too bad I don't have mod points today!
Umm... have you considered the folks who shoot at abortion clinic doctors? Have you considered Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez? Have you seen "Bible Camp" and other displays of Christian militance?
As the other post says, there are extremist screwballs in every camp. The Muslim nutjobs strap on a dynamite belt; the Christian ones infiltrate the US government and push for an Armageddon in our lifetime. To be honest, given the US stockpile of WMD, I consider the Christians far more dangerous than the Muslims. Until recently, I wouldn't have thought I'd say this, but I'm far more frightened of our government than of the terrorists.
Unlike you, I do have a big problem with faith-based initiatives. I'll explain:
As you may or may not know, Bush is using his muscle to channel foreign aid to faith-based initiatives, contrary to all that "just a piece of paper" separation of church and state. This administration sees to it that foreign aid money goes (more) to groups who profess to be Christian. No big problem there yet.
The problem is here: Money is consistently refused to foreign aid institutions who condone or practice sex education, especially birth control.
As a result of US faith-based policy, poor black people in Africa (and South America, and...) are practicing unprotected sex, having more offspring than they can feed and keeping deadly diseases in circulation.
Put in starkly simple terms, I think it could be demonstrated that together, with their stance on condoms, George Bush and the Pope are responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
Quibble about numbers or details; people are dying because of political decisions poorly informed by faith. If you were aware of this and don't have a problem with it, then you're not a caring human being.
Some people aren't bothered at all about this. Fine.
Of those who are bothered, many are considering moving to PostgreSQL. That's not a dumb move to make. But for those still in limbo or teetering on some fence, I think this is a good time to mention an alternative, Firebird, FKA Interbase. Interbase/Firebird is an industrial-strength, standards-compliant, highly performing DB, and was way ahead of its time back in the day. I heard that Oracle just recently copied its update versioning mechanism. Interbase failed in the market solely due to Borland's incompetent marketing.
One of its big pluses is the low maintenance - the DB reorganizes itself periodically and can run indefinitely without losing performance so long as it doesn't run out of space.
No, I'm not affiliated with Interbase or Firebird in any way, just a happy user who would like to see the product get some more exposure.
No idea why the parent poster, kcbrown, was modded as "funny:3", because I view his post as the most insightful I've seen so far in the thread. Please mod him up if you have the points!
OK ArcherB, you're not a sick fool. What you are in fact is a patriotic, loyal, good-hearted, well-intentioned fool.
Thanks to your efforts and the efforts of thousands of others like you, death rates in Iraq have more than doubled; many thousands of Iraqis have fled the country, and life for those who remain has been horribly disrupted by the constant fear of violence. Yes, Saddam was an evil dictator who used of torture and violence. But if you look at the bottom line, most Iraqi citizens were better off before the US invasion than after.
The thankful Kuwaitis you rescued are exactly the affluent, self-serving egotists you rant against. They bless you for having rescued their material comforts, and saving their corrupt government from the consequences of drilling laterally into Iraqi territory. Furthermore, when they're not being rescued, they hate Americans every bit as much as the Iraqis do.
The fact that you risked your life does not automatically make you a better person than those who know better. You followed your evil, bumbling President into the greatest disaster in American history and are still blind enough to feel all righteous about it. If you ever come to see the truth, I hope it doesn't hurt you too badly.
The parent comment voices my concerns perfectly. I wish I had mod points!
Given the sorry state of public education, the vacuum in children's heads can easily be filled with garbage. This museum is a giant garbage funnel planned and funded by the fundamentalist nutjobs. It's not harmless, it IS an attack on science.
In very positive terms, religions advocate following unproveable assertions.
In less positive terms, religions are simply ancient myths.
In brutally objective terms, religions are masses of deluded people following and acting upon lies.
In my world, if you believe in and act on falsehoods, chances are good that you can be led to do things that would not be done by clearly thinking, well informed people. This fact, and this fact alone, is easily sufficient for me to consider religion as evil.
mapkinase, you take yourself and your silly adherence to myth and superstition far too seriously.
For a while, it was thought that what distinguished humans from other animals was the ability to reason. It turns out this difference is only a matter of degree: For example, there have been recent experiments with ravens which indicate the bird's ability to look at a situation and reason out a solution without resorting to the more animal-typical process of learning from trial and error. Tests with apes have shown that they have a clear concept of self, which they can communicate. And of course quite a few other species use tools of some sort. Humans are only more advanced in these matters.
What seems to have really made a difference is the development of language, both spoken and written. Language gives humans a mental handle by which to grip abstract concepts. Human brains have areas devoted to language which seem to be unique to humans - although I'm not sure what to make of parrots who construct situationally appropriate sentences.
There's been some speculation on the genetic background of spirituality, but no conclusion has been reached. My personal take is that spirituality is nothing but an annoying side effect of the otherwise beneficial mutations to the human brain.
From an evolutionary standpoint, I find it regrettable that stupid people breed more than smart people; this is the most likely explanation for your existence.
To answer your question, I'm advocating legal or fringe-legal measures in lieu of other measures which, under rule of law, are too costly to the perpetrator. Apart from the modern legal aspect, evolution also doesn't favor overreaction.
This is a long and contentious thread full of trolls, but I won't let that stop me from adding my own 2c.
I submit that celebrating a person's death by (e.g.) pissing on his grave, and doing so in as public a fashion possible, or at least inciting others to do so, is perfectly justifiable and a good thing to do for the good of society as a whole. Explanation:
Anger is an ancient human emotion, and revenge an ancient societal mechanism. In a tribe of monkeys, if one steals food from the others, the others gang up on him and beat him up. Primitive? Sure. Effective? Hell yes. That monkey quickly learns to deal fairly with the other monkeys. Usually, he doesn't get killed before learning. Those of you who understand Darwin will understand what this is about: revenge is a form of behavior that is beneficial to the survaval of a species or it would not have entered and endured in the gene pool. Revenge keeps individuals from acting like assholes to the detriment of the group. Some people are honest and fair because of their high moral standard. Others are honest and fair because they're afraid of being beaten up. In other words, the expectation of revenge helps keep people from being assholes.
Jack Valenti is dead, and good riddance to him. There are six billion humans alive, and most of them at least have not affected my life in a negative way like he has; so I dislike him more than billions of other humans. There are six billion people alive, and I don't mourn his passing. If I mourned people passing, I'd be a busy mourner indeed. That's the way the cookie crumbles: Life is shit and then you die. I fully believe that Jack is nothing more than worm fodder now, and is completely oblivious to the fact of people pissing on his grave. Whatever you do to Jack's corpse is in my view a victimless crime. His family? Fuck his family! Did they try to persuade him to not be a crummy bastard? If they've inherited his personality traits along with his wealth, then I hope they see people pissing on his grave, go crazy and commit suicide. Good riddance to bad genes.
Bringing together the last two paragraphs: I encourage people to piss on Jack Valenti's grave, not because of Jack Valenti but because of all the assholes who are still alive. I want them to be aware that when they die, people will likely piss on their graves too if they continue to act as assholes. The judicial system has taken away almost all recourse against assholes, but I think we all should all use whatever means of revenge are available, even including posthumous revenge. It's our only chance to keep assholes from dominating the gene pool.
Your post is so stupid and so lame that it offends me to read it.
1. Recruitment
No, recruitment is not the primary goal. The primary goal of any political group - and that includes countless political groups posing as religious groups - is to gain power relative to other groups. There are two ways to accomplish this:
Obviously, one way to gain power is to gain recruits and other resources. This could also involve merging with other, similarly aligned groups. Fund raising is certainly a vital activity here too.
The other way, at least in a relative way, is to weaken the other groups. Reduce their numbers, or reduce their effectiveness, do whatever it takes to hurt them. Blow up their stuff or their people, or do a Swift Boat campaign on them. But remember, from a David vs. Goliath perspective, the most harm can usually be accomplished if you can get the other guys to hurt themselves.
Get that into your head, and you've got world politics in a nutshell.
9/11 was aimed at weakening the enemy (us) by putting the USA into a state of threshing around in chaos, as they are now. A resounding success, so far.
The clumsily executed attacks that followed - the second of which was not even in response to 9/11 - then helped the terrorists massively with their other goal of gaining recruits and other resources.
2. Keeping us vulnerable
The War on Drugs has raised the prices - and profit margins - of drugs far beyond what the drug czars could have hoped to achieve without government assistance. Similarly, the War on Terror has disrupted the life and economy of the USA, i.e. weakened this political counter-group, far better than many activities of Al Quaeda & co. could hope to do. Given this, the Republicans and the DHS are playing into their hands, and it is in the best interests of those terrorist groups to keep them active. This is not about "vulnerable". Any country is always vulnerable against terrorism. This is about "weak and ineffective".
3. Why 9/11
I think I've adequately explained that. 9/11 was an activity aimed at "weakening". Members and supporters of terrorist groups expect their outfits to do this kind of thing, like the Boards of Directors and shareholders of a company expect that company to make a profit. So was it necessary? Sure.
In terms of population and resources, it was comparable to a mosquito bite - annoying but harmless. In terms of the effect on the US, it was more like a major allergic reaction - the country is in a state of shock and threatening to fall into a coma. There's very little any terrorist organization could do to appreciably heighten that state from its current level. So it makes sense to concentrate on the other vital activity, human and material resources.
4. Democrats = more attacks
From the above, yeah, I believe that a saner, calmer USA would be a more eligible target for terrorist activity. Simply because the same amount of terrorist activity would have a more noticeable effect. On the other hand, a saner, calmer USA would not have as severe an allergic reaction as one run by the Republican administration, and thus the effect on US lives and living would not be as severe.
Just because he's foaming at the mouth doesn't mean he's wrong.
The richest country in the world should be devoting considerable resources to the solution of global problems like our dependency on fossil fuel. Instead, that money is going to empire building and pork barrelling. These days I am not at all proud to be a US citizen.
I had a discussion about this "living organisms"/"basic rights" thing with a religious nutjob.
I asked her if she didn't have a problem with eating beef, or eggs. No, she didn't. "So what makes an embryo different?" I asked.
*Drum roll* "But a human embryo has a soul!"
The same whackos who are in favor of sending more thinking, living soldiers to bomb, shoot and be shot at by thinking, living Iraquis and who kill living, (somewhat) thinking animals (literally) for breakfast have qualms about terminating insentient, barely living clumps of cells.
Me, I'm in favor of killing all religious fundamentalists and harvesting their organs to help people who aren't demonstrably insane hipocrytes.
So, in units people feel comfortable with, there's at least half a pound of gold in two pounds of shit? And under favorable circumstances, shit is 5600% gold? Something smells around here, and it's not fishy.
just today I came across a solution to your problem with EE: It's Platypus, a script for GreaseMonkey, which is an addon for Firefox. Briefly, Platypus allows you to repair a Web page/site in a point-and-click way, creating a script that is then run everytime you re-visit that page. So essentially, if you are a Firefox user, you can customize other peoples' Web sites to your satisfaction, including style changes to make them more readable. Highly recommended!
@Toby: Living in Europe, I handily pay more taxes than you, yet I don't go whining about it. If you pay taxes, that means you have a job and an income and a means to feed yourself, plus a bunch of comforts probably far beyond the necessary. This being the case, how much have you donated to the cause of feeding poor people on the other side of the planet? Nothing? OK, so now that we know your motivation is largely simple greed, let's proceed to talk about priorities.
Only a knuckle-dragging halfwit would get incensed about his government's expenditures in research while staying silent about the uncalled-for, counterproductive and outrageously expensive war his country chooses to blow his taxes on. Please note, Mr. Economist, that
the US' war^H^H^Hdefense budget is greater than that of all other countries in the world combined;
that the War on the People of Iraq is costing more every day than the entire project lifecycle associated with this satellite; and, on a totally unrelated topic also near and dear to your wallet,
that you possibly pay more for health insurance than taxes, yet on average per capita your country has some of the worst health care in the world.
I wouldn't object so much to your foolish rant if it didn't make it obvious that you have no idea of the difference between major costs and minor, important and unimportant.
Never mind, I'm sure I'm not reaching you. I hope you contribute generously to the abolishment of science education in schools. You know, science has been known to get in the way of teaching the Truth about Creation.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel that mocking the religious is one of the most noble enterprises that people with working brains can engage in.
IMHO, religion is at the root of many of the world's troubles and stands solidly in the way of mankind's progression to a state of greater understanding, wisdom and gentleness.
That, and Creationism and its many sub-stories are so ludicrous that no additional mockery is required.
I agree with the parent too.
To the C# aficionados out there: Something to take into consideration is that the OP is on the eastern side of the Atlantic. VB and C# rule in the US, Java is stronger in Europe.
C++ is good if you want to be hardcore. C is underneath lots of stuff but not so much modern commercial development. And as a former professional FORTRAN programmer, I don't recommend specializing in FORTRAN any more.
Although I agree with your sentiment, I deplore your use of the phrase "they could care less".
Realize it or not, the fact that Government is screwing the people is related to the fact that people accept lies as truth. "Could care less" means caring a lot, which is exactly the opposite of what you mean to say. It's the same kind of thing as instituting a program called the PATRIOT act to screw the citizens, or saying "we do not torture" but vetoing a ban on waterboarding. Democracy is damaged when the truth is; and truth is shaped by language. Call me crazy for taking this seriously, but I do.
Preconditions:
We have, above, a set of opportunities plus a motive and a large group of crazies to act on it. As for the time frame, Soviet Uranium has been available for 16 years. The Arab world has been witness to the unwarranted and brutal "liberation" of Iraq for 5 years. Why the fuck hasn't New York been nuked yet? To be honest, I don't know.
My conclusion is that the foaming-mouth ragheads are too stupid, too disorganized and/or too unlucky to pull this off effectively and quickly. I'm sure that, somewhere, they're working like mad on it but not getting much of anywhere. Also, if they do succeed sometime in the next few years, they'll damage part of one major city, kill maybe a million people or so, and then fail to do it again for another few years. So what?
I live in a major Western city. My life is in mortal danger every time I cross a street on foot here, or venture into traffic in my non-SUV car. My Slashdotter lifestyle is associated with a number of serious health risks. In terms of pure statistics, I'm 1000 times more likely to be killed in an auto accident or by a cardiac arrest than by a terrorist's nuke. And I'll be equally dead in either case. So tell me again why I should worry about a terrorist nuclear attack?
It would suck to be a victim of such an attack, but I don't consider it an immediate danger. Governments and media are whipping the ignorant sheeple into a teeth-gnashing panic about it. I'll abstain, thank you. I'm much more worried about the upcoming wars over energy, drinking water and dry land. And in the short term, that the Chinese government and the RIAA manage to shut down the Internet so the world is plunged back into biblical ignorance.
Even if you don't subscribe to my cynical world view, consider what it would take to make the whole world nuke-safe. Ask yourself if you'd be willing to pay the price. Learn risk assessment and THEN decide what to worry about.
The concept of the crowd thinking what the media tell it to think is one of the most insightful and important in this discussion, IMHO. Too bad I don't have mod points today!
Umm... have you considered the folks who shoot at abortion clinic doctors? Have you considered Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez? Have you seen "Bible Camp" and other displays of Christian militance?
As the other post says, there are extremist screwballs in every camp. The Muslim nutjobs strap on a dynamite belt; the Christian ones infiltrate the US government and push for an Armageddon in our lifetime. To be honest, given the US stockpile of WMD, I consider the Christians far more dangerous than the Muslims. Until recently, I wouldn't have thought I'd say this, but I'm far more frightened of our government than of the terrorists.
Unlike you, I do have a big problem with faith-based initiatives. I'll explain:
As you may or may not know, Bush is using his muscle to channel foreign aid to faith-based initiatives, contrary to all that "just a piece of paper" separation of church and state. This administration sees to it that foreign aid money goes (more) to groups who profess to be Christian. No big problem there yet.
The problem is here: Money is consistently refused to foreign aid institutions who condone or practice sex education, especially birth control.
As a result of US faith-based policy, poor black people in Africa (and South America, and...) are practicing unprotected sex, having more offspring than they can feed and keeping deadly diseases in circulation.
Put in starkly simple terms, I think it could be demonstrated that together, with their stance on condoms, George Bush and the Pope are responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
Quibble about numbers or details; people are dying because of political decisions poorly informed by faith. If you were aware of this and don't have a problem with it, then you're not a caring human being.
Some people aren't bothered at all about this. Fine.
Of those who are bothered, many are considering moving to PostgreSQL. That's not a dumb move to make. But for those still in limbo or teetering on some fence, I think this is a good time to mention an alternative, Firebird, FKA Interbase. Interbase/Firebird is an industrial-strength, standards-compliant, highly performing DB, and was way ahead of its time back in the day. I heard that Oracle just recently copied its update versioning mechanism. Interbase failed in the market solely due to Borland's incompetent marketing.
One of its big pluses is the low maintenance - the DB reorganizes itself periodically and can run indefinitely without losing performance so long as it doesn't run out of space.
No, I'm not affiliated with Interbase or Firebird in any way, just a happy user who would like to see the product get some more exposure.
No idea why the parent poster, kcbrown, was modded as "funny:3", because I view his post as the most insightful I've seen so far in the thread. Please mod him up if you have the points!
OK ArcherB, you're not a sick fool. What you are in fact is a patriotic, loyal, good-hearted, well-intentioned fool.
Thanks to your efforts and the efforts of thousands of others like you, death rates in Iraq have more than doubled; many thousands of Iraqis have fled the country, and life for those who remain has been horribly disrupted by the constant fear of violence. Yes, Saddam was an evil dictator who used of torture and violence. But if you look at the bottom line, most Iraqi citizens were better off before the US invasion than after.
The thankful Kuwaitis you rescued are exactly the affluent, self-serving egotists you rant against. They bless you for having rescued their material comforts, and saving their corrupt government from the consequences of drilling laterally into Iraqi territory. Furthermore, when they're not being rescued, they hate Americans every bit as much as the Iraqis do.
The fact that you risked your life does not automatically make you a better person than those who know better. You followed your evil, bumbling President into the greatest disaster in American history and are still blind enough to feel all righteous about it. If you ever come to see the truth, I hope it doesn't hurt you too badly.
The parent comment voices my concerns perfectly. I wish I had mod points!
Given the sorry state of public education, the vacuum in children's heads can easily be filled with garbage. This museum is a giant garbage funnel planned and funded by the fundamentalist nutjobs. It's not harmless, it IS an attack on science.
In very positive terms, religions advocate following unproveable assertions.
In less positive terms, religions are simply ancient myths.
In brutally objective terms, religions are masses of deluded people following and acting upon lies.
In my world, if you believe in and act on falsehoods, chances are good that you can be led to do things that would not be done by clearly thinking, well informed people. This fact, and this fact alone, is easily sufficient for me to consider religion as evil.
This guy knows where his towel is. A voice of sanity in a chorus of confused monkeys.
mapkinase, you take yourself and your silly adherence to myth and superstition far too seriously.
For a while, it was thought that what distinguished humans from other animals was the ability to reason. It turns out this difference is only a matter of degree: For example, there have been recent experiments with ravens which indicate the bird's ability to look at a situation and reason out a solution without resorting to the more animal-typical process of learning from trial and error. Tests with apes have shown that they have a clear concept of self, which they can communicate. And of course quite a few other species use tools of some sort. Humans are only more advanced in these matters.
What seems to have really made a difference is the development of language, both spoken and written. Language gives humans a mental handle by which to grip abstract concepts. Human brains have areas devoted to language which seem to be unique to humans - although I'm not sure what to make of parrots who construct situationally appropriate sentences.
There's been some speculation on the genetic background of spirituality, but no conclusion has been reached. My personal take is that spirituality is nothing but an annoying side effect of the otherwise beneficial mutations to the human brain.
From an evolutionary standpoint, I find it regrettable that stupid people breed more than smart people; this is the most likely explanation for your existence.
To answer your question, I'm advocating legal or fringe-legal measures in lieu of other measures which, under rule of law, are too costly to the perpetrator. Apart from the modern legal aspect, evolution also doesn't favor overreaction.
This is a long and contentious thread full of trolls, but I won't let that stop me from adding my own 2c.
I submit that celebrating a person's death by (e.g.) pissing on his grave, and doing so in as public a fashion possible, or at least inciting others to do so, is perfectly justifiable and a good thing to do for the good of society as a whole. Explanation:
Anger is an ancient human emotion, and revenge an ancient societal mechanism. In a tribe of monkeys, if one steals food from the others, the others gang up on him and beat him up. Primitive? Sure. Effective? Hell yes. That monkey quickly learns to deal fairly with the other monkeys. Usually, he doesn't get killed before learning. Those of you who understand Darwin will understand what this is about: revenge is a form of behavior that is beneficial to the survaval of a species or it would not have entered and endured in the gene pool. Revenge keeps individuals from acting like assholes to the detriment of the group. Some people are honest and fair because of their high moral standard. Others are honest and fair because they're afraid of being beaten up. In other words, the expectation of revenge helps keep people from being assholes.
Jack Valenti is dead, and good riddance to him. There are six billion humans alive, and most of them at least have not affected my life in a negative way like he has; so I dislike him more than billions of other humans. There are six billion people alive, and I don't mourn his passing. If I mourned people passing, I'd be a busy mourner indeed. That's the way the cookie crumbles: Life is shit and then you die. I fully believe that Jack is nothing more than worm fodder now, and is completely oblivious to the fact of people pissing on his grave. Whatever you do to Jack's corpse is in my view a victimless crime. His family? Fuck his family! Did they try to persuade him to not be a crummy bastard? If they've inherited his personality traits along with his wealth, then I hope they see people pissing on his grave, go crazy and commit suicide. Good riddance to bad genes.
Bringing together the last two paragraphs: I encourage people to piss on Jack Valenti's grave, not because of Jack Valenti but because of all the assholes who are still alive. I want them to be aware that when they die, people will likely piss on their graves too if they continue to act as assholes. The judicial system has taken away almost all recourse against assholes, but I think we all should all use whatever means of revenge are available, even including posthumous revenge. It's our only chance to keep assholes from dominating the gene pool.
If this can help prevent the birth of another GWB, I'm all for it!
1. Recruitment
No, recruitment is not the primary goal. The primary goal of any political group - and that includes countless political groups posing as religious groups - is to gain power relative to other groups. There are two ways to accomplish this:
Get that into your head, and you've got world politics in a nutshell.
9/11 was aimed at weakening the enemy (us) by putting the USA into a state of threshing around in chaos, as they are now. A resounding success, so far.
The clumsily executed attacks that followed - the second of which was not even in response to 9/11 - then helped the terrorists massively with their other goal of gaining recruits and other resources.
2. Keeping us vulnerable
The War on Drugs has raised the prices - and profit margins - of drugs far beyond what the drug czars could have hoped to achieve without government assistance. Similarly, the War on Terror has disrupted the life and economy of the USA, i.e. weakened this political counter-group, far better than many activities of Al Quaeda & co. could hope to do. Given this, the Republicans and the DHS are playing into their hands, and it is in the best interests of those terrorist groups to keep them active. This is not about "vulnerable". Any country is always vulnerable against terrorism. This is about "weak and ineffective".
3. Why 9/11
I think I've adequately explained that. 9/11 was an activity aimed at "weakening". Members and supporters of terrorist groups expect their outfits to do this kind of thing, like the Boards of Directors and shareholders of a company expect that company to make a profit. So was it necessary? Sure.
In terms of population and resources, it was comparable to a mosquito bite - annoying but harmless. In terms of the effect on the US, it was more like a major allergic reaction - the country is in a state of shock and threatening to fall into a coma. There's very little any terrorist organization could do to appreciably heighten that state from its current level. So it makes sense to concentrate on the other vital activity, human and material resources.
4. Democrats = more attacks
From the above, yeah, I believe that a saner, calmer USA would be a more eligible target for terrorist activity. Simply because the same amount of terrorist activity would have a more noticeable effect. On the other hand, a saner, calmer USA would not have as severe an allergic reaction as one run by the Republican administration, and thus the effect on US lives and living would not be as severe.
A divorce-lawyering robot?
Just because he's foaming at the mouth doesn't mean he's wrong.
The richest country in the world should be devoting considerable resources to the solution of global problems like our dependency on fossil fuel. Instead, that money is going to empire building and pork barrelling. These days I am not at all proud to be a US citizen.
Mod parent up!!
I had a discussion about this "living organisms"/"basic rights" thing with a religious nutjob.
I asked her if she didn't have a problem with eating beef, or eggs. No, she didn't. "So what makes an embryo different?" I asked.
*Drum roll* "But a human embryo has a soul!"
The same whackos who are in favor of sending more thinking, living soldiers to bomb, shoot and be shot at by thinking, living Iraquis and who kill living, (somewhat) thinking animals (literally) for breakfast have qualms about terminating insentient, barely living clumps of cells.
Me, I'm in favor of killing all religious fundamentalists and harvesting their organs to help people who aren't demonstrably insane hipocrytes.
So, in units people feel comfortable with, there's at least half a pound of gold in two pounds of shit? And under favorable circumstances, shit is 5600% gold? Something smells around here, and it's not fishy.
Micrograms, perhaps?
Hi Bugmaster,
just today I came across a solution to your problem with EE: It's Platypus, a script for GreaseMonkey, which is an addon for Firefox.
Briefly, Platypus allows you to repair a Web page/site in a point-and-click way, creating a script that is then run everytime you re-visit that page. So essentially, if you are a Firefox user, you can customize other peoples' Web sites to your satisfaction, including style changes to make them more readable. Highly recommended!
@Toby: Living in Europe, I handily pay more taxes than you, yet I don't go whining about it. If you pay taxes, that means you have a job and an income and a means to feed yourself, plus a bunch of comforts probably far beyond the necessary. This being the case, how much have you donated to the cause of feeding poor people on the other side of the planet? Nothing? OK, so now that we know your motivation is largely simple greed, let's proceed to talk about priorities.
Only a knuckle-dragging halfwit would get incensed about his government's expenditures in research while staying silent about the uncalled-for, counterproductive and outrageously expensive war his country chooses to blow his taxes on. Please note, Mr. Economist, that
and, on a totally unrelated topic also near and dear to your wallet,
I wouldn't object so much to your foolish rant if it didn't make it obvious that you have no idea of the difference between major costs and minor, important and unimportant.
Never mind, I'm sure I'm not reaching you. I hope you contribute generously to the abolishment of science education in schools. You know, science has been known to get in the way of teaching the Truth about Creation.