If chemical weapons use in Syria becomes widespread, the media PR machine will spin the public up into a frenzy. Americans do not like seeing gassed kids on their TV screens during dinner hour. So if a handful of cruise missiles can send the message "hey, knock this shit off!" and the chemical attacks stop, then don't we avert the whole "boots on the ground regime change" fiasco?
Besides, it's an opinion. Why do I need evidence for my opinion when you do not need it for yours?
Because your opinion leads to military action in Syria, which results in more death, destruction, and US involvement in awful shit.
Rebels faked the gas attack --> don't bomb.
Don't know if attack was real or not --> don't bomb.
Assad did it --> bomb.
So if you want to bomb, you need some evidence, and there really isn't any one way or the other. All I can do is ask cui bono? And the answer is "rebels." Why use gas? You can blow up toddlers by the busload with rockets and bombs and mortars and bazookas. Just don't use gas or else US/NATO/UN bombs your shit. So just don't do that.
In my opinion, I'd give it a 20% chance that Assad did it, and an 80% that the rebels staged it to get the US to bomb Syria, and for general anti-Assad, pro-rebel PR purposes. The propaganda part of the war is probably more important than the bullets and bombs part of the war, and I'm pretty sure Assad is smart enough to know this, as are the rebels.
I think most would agree now that that withdrawal was premature, and the Iraqis could've used several more years of training and support before being left to fend for themselves.
with
If you really dig down into the root cause of instability in this portion of the Middle East, I'd blame the Europeans for carving up the region after they defeated the Ottoman Empire [staticflickr.com] in the first World War. They drew those borders with little to no consideration for the indigenous cultural, lingual, and political boundaries. As a result, you have disparate peoples forced together into the same "country" trying to form a unified government.
The Iraqis were never going to be any kind of fighting force because there's nothing for an Iraqi to fight for, because there's really no such thing as an "Iraqi." The Iraqi soldiers were basically mercenaries (and not like the "I'm a fighter and I want to get paid" type of mercenary, but the "I'm starving, can't do anything else and need money so I guess I'll fight" kind of mercenary) fighting for a brand-new government that doesn't represent their culture, tribe, religion or traditions. Train them all you want, they'd always flee at the first serious opposition because their employer was nothing worth fighting, dying, or killing for.
Twitter is still a private organisation, not a public utility and not subject to carrier regulations.
But companies can't do whatever they want. They can't deny service to blacks or gays or whatever.
Realistically, I'd be more concerned that the government is trying to force Twitter to reveal the name of someone who is merely making fun of the government. We're not talking about threats or attacks, we're talking about parody here.
But the issue isn't the parody, but the fact it's a government employee.
That's not what I meant. ~sinij was making an insinuation that undischargable debt is slavery. Slavery is unconstitutional, as per the 13th amendment. However, the 13th amendment only bans slavery for people who haven't committed crimes. This is how you can still have chain gangs or people sentenced to hard labor.
If you've studied the reconstruction era south, an awful lot of local and state governments got around the "no slavery" law by convicting blacks on trumped-up charges (things like "vagrancy") and then renting out the prisoners for cheap, cheap labor. Many of them found the experience worse than slavery. At least with privately owned slaves there's an investment, and an incentive not to work your slaves to death. Only thing you whip harder than a mule is a rented mule.
So I'm joking that, rather than give up the trillions of dollars worth of college debt slaves the lending industry has accumulated on the ruling that slavery is unconstitutional, the lenders would just find a way to railroad college students into criminal convictions to make it all legal-like.
IOW, when the alarmists start calling for new nuclear construction, I'll start taking them seriously....
Also an end to 3rd world immigration into the first world (increasing the migrants' carbon footprints) and an end to subsidizing the population boom in Africa.
If the alarmists switched their screed to "the Earth is dying, build nukes and fuck foreigners!" an awful lot of their opposition would dry up overnight.
It's the former. The atmosphere has swelled slightly and there's more drag on objects in low earth orbit. Good news is it might help clean out some space junk faster via orbital decay.
Because nothing is more important than climate change. Not even the factors like overpopulation that make climate change a problem in the first place.
Climate change sounds like a pretty good reason to 1) stop all 3rd world immigration into the 1st world, because moving someone from low carbon footprint Somalia to high carbon footprint Minnesota is bad for the planet and 2) stop subsidizing the population boom in Africa. Shouldn't we take these steps before killing our own industries with onerous regulations? Plus these steps don't really on cooperation with the Chinese.
The problem is the left wing nuts' plan is...pay lots of taxes to be redistributed to other countries while the political elite scrape trillions off the top, and we exempt China and India so the planet gets cooked anyway.
Vote for the right wing nuts and we all die. Vote for the left wing nuts and we all die poor. Tough choice.
Also it used to be that only top performers went to college. Somebody with a 120 IQ is probably going to find a way to be successful no matter what. So, both financial success and college attendance were dependent variables where intelligence was the independent variable. For the most part, though, school doesn't make you any smarter, so putting people of average or below average intelligence through college doesn't increase the thing that gives them greater earning potential later. This is like putting short people on a basketball team to make them taller. It will not cause them to dunk more.
So, if you work in a secure facility that someone really wants into... this ensures the bad guys always know where the keys are and how to get them, and you're not going to like it when they do.
Note to self: do not implant secure access microchip in dick.
It's not a new ability though. ISPs have always had the ability, and hadn't been abusing it, so there's no real need to regulate them right now, and if they start, hit up the FTC to stop them.
This is just political bullshit. If the Department of Defense said "nah, we're not going to bother with budgets or the appropriations committee anymore, we're just going to spend money how we like. First up, the Department of Defense Puppy Program where we take care of abandoned cuddly puppies and feed them and love them and pet them!" and congress were to say "no, fuck you, you cannot just spend whatever you want without the approval of Congress, don't care if it's for puppies or kitties or ponies or whatever" I'm pretty sure you wouldn't start screaming about how Congress hates puppies and wants puppies to die!!
Nothing has changed. Your information isn't being sold. You're just hoping to score political points by scaring morons into believing it has. Sad, really.
And the an unelected entity making material changes to the states laws
No, they're not. They're not making any laws. The annotations are not laws. The annotations are links to cases decided about the laws and summaries of them. It's just a reference guide, and does not in any way change the law. Kind of like how Oracle might publish the official documentation for the Java language, but anybody can write "Java for Dummies" and sell it. Even if you're trying to say it's changing the interpretation of the law, no, the judges who decided previous court cases set the interpretation and all the annotators are doing is pointing to those decisions.
Writing about how a judge wrote about the law is not even close to "lawmaking."
Here's the thing: If annotated copies of the law are the official copy
No, they publish the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, they are not the authors of the official code. The authors of the official code is the legislature of the great state of Georgia. LexisNexis compiles the official version of the annotations.
At the end of the day, here are your options:
Option 1) Like (almost?) every other state, private companies like LexisNexis or Thomson West hire lawyers and legal aides to review state laws and make lists and summaries of cases that referenced each law. They they compete to sell these annotated law compilations to attorneys, and since they're useful reference, the state winds up buying them for judges and state attorneys too. Choose this option and the state of Georgia buys expensive annotations from LexisNexis. If you (as a private attorney or private citizen) want a copy of the annotations, you pay LexisNexis thousands of dollars.
Option 2) The status quo, in which the state of Georgia commissions an "official annotated version" and sells that to the private attorneys, recouping the cost of the commission. If you want an annotated copy and you're not an official of the state of Georgia, you're still paying LexisNexis thousands of dollars.
Option 3) The state of Georgia commissions an "official annotated version" and gives that away for free to everyone. Everyone can now read the annotations for free, but this costs the taxpayers a lot of money since the private attorneys who used to pay for the state's copies in Option 2 are now getting it for free as well.
So which option do you want? 1) is a moderate expense to the taxpayers, 2) costs the taxpayers nothing, and 3) costs taxpayers a lot (but they get free unlimited access to the annotations).
If it were up to me, given that extremely few people ever read the laws under which they live, and extremely extremely few people are even aware of the difference between a regular copy and annotated copy of said laws, option 3) doesn't provide that great a value. I would do Option 2, but I would make sure to provide copies of the annotated laws to public libraries and prison libraries. Now they're available for free if citizens really want to see them, but the cost of the legal research for the annotations falls on private attorneys and not the taxpayers, who probably don't care enough to pay for any of this.
What option would you choose?
Oh, and if you're some kind of activist who thinks this is all awful in some way or another, I guess an Option 4) could be make your own damn annotated copy of the laws and give it away for free. Start up a "lawkipedia" where you and volunteers annotate state codes and publish it on the internet for anyone interested.
And calling them the alt-left is bullshit, because they're the opposite of trying to force people to believe what they believe.
No, I'm pretty sure if I go to UC Berkley and say "men and women have real physical biological differences that result in behavioral differences that are not merely socially constructed, and the same is true of different human haplogroups (broadly grouped into "races" or "ethnicities"). I have documented, reproducible scientific studies to prove these things and would like to peacefully make my case so that others can make up their own minds about these issues" I'm pretty sure they will literally beat me to within an inch of my life.
Not only does the ctrl-left want to force people to believe what they believe, what they want to force people to believe is provably untrue.
Slashdot Mirror
Gauntlet
Fastest way to lose 3 friends. "DAMNIT WHY ARE YOU ALL OVER THERE I can't reach the teleporter now!!!!"
Yup, that's how I started. And I miss going to the computer section of the department store when I was 10 and typing
10 PRINT "HELP I AM BROKEN CALL THE REPAIR MAN!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
and then thinking I was so clever and that stupid adults were going to think the computer was actually broken.
If chemical weapons use in Syria becomes widespread, the media PR machine will spin the public up into a frenzy. Americans do not like seeing gassed kids on their TV screens during dinner hour. So if a handful of cruise missiles can send the message "hey, knock this shit off!" and the chemical attacks stop, then don't we avert the whole "boots on the ground regime change" fiasco?
Besides, it's an opinion. Why do I need evidence for my opinion when you do not need it for yours?
Because your opinion leads to military action in Syria, which results in more death, destruction, and US involvement in awful shit.
Rebels faked the gas attack --> don't bomb.
Don't know if attack was real or not --> don't bomb.
Assad did it --> bomb.
So if you want to bomb, you need some evidence, and there really isn't any one way or the other. All I can do is ask cui bono? And the answer is "rebels." Why use gas? You can blow up toddlers by the busload with rockets and bombs and mortars and bazookas. Just don't use gas or else US/NATO/UN bombs your shit. So just don't do that.
In my opinion, I'd give it a 20% chance that Assad did it, and an 80% that the rebels staged it to get the US to bomb Syria, and for general anti-Assad, pro-rebel PR purposes. The propaganda part of the war is probably more important than the bullets and bombs part of the war, and I'm pretty sure Assad is smart enough to know this, as are the rebels.
Good post, but you need to combine
I think most would agree now that that withdrawal was premature, and the Iraqis could've used several more years of training and support before being left to fend for themselves.
with
If you really dig down into the root cause of instability in this portion of the Middle East, I'd blame the Europeans for carving up the region after they defeated the Ottoman Empire [staticflickr.com] in the first World War. They drew those borders with little to no consideration for the indigenous cultural, lingual, and political boundaries. As a result, you have disparate peoples forced together into the same "country" trying to form a unified government.
The Iraqis were never going to be any kind of fighting force because there's nothing for an Iraqi to fight for, because there's really no such thing as an "Iraqi." The Iraqi soldiers were basically mercenaries (and not like the "I'm a fighter and I want to get paid" type of mercenary, but the "I'm starving, can't do anything else and need money so I guess I'll fight" kind of mercenary) fighting for a brand-new government that doesn't represent their culture, tribe, religion or traditions. Train them all you want, they'd always flee at the first serious opposition because their employer was nothing worth fighting, dying, or killing for.
Twitter is still a private organisation, not a public utility and not subject to carrier regulations.
But companies can't do whatever they want. They can't deny service to blacks or gays or whatever.
Realistically, I'd be more concerned that the government is trying to force Twitter to reveal the name of someone who is merely making fun of the government. We're not talking about threats or attacks, we're talking about parody here.
But the issue isn't the parody, but the fact it's a government employee.
That's not what I meant. ~sinij was making an insinuation that undischargable debt is slavery. Slavery is unconstitutional, as per the 13th amendment. However, the 13th amendment only bans slavery for people who haven't committed crimes. This is how you can still have chain gangs or people sentenced to hard labor.
If you've studied the reconstruction era south, an awful lot of local and state governments got around the "no slavery" law by convicting blacks on trumped-up charges (things like "vagrancy") and then renting out the prisoners for cheap, cheap labor. Many of them found the experience worse than slavery. At least with privately owned slaves there's an investment, and an incentive not to work your slaves to death. Only thing you whip harder than a mule is a rented mule.
So I'm joking that, rather than give up the trillions of dollars worth of college debt slaves the lending industry has accumulated on the ruling that slavery is unconstitutional, the lenders would just find a way to railroad college students into criminal convictions to make it all legal-like.
Do you understand the difference between an object narrative and a meta narrative?
How many movies made you care about the enemy bodycount?
Maybe John Wick? I remember that being a selling point. Great movie, too. Haven't seen the sequel yet.
But cap-and-trade (or cap-and-tax in the long run) while exempting India and China won't fix the problem.
Vote Republican and we all die. Vote Democrat and we all die poor.
IOW, when the alarmists start calling for new nuclear construction, I'll start taking them seriously....
Also an end to 3rd world immigration into the first world (increasing the migrants' carbon footprints) and an end to subsidizing the population boom in Africa.
If the alarmists switched their screed to "the Earth is dying, build nukes and fuck foreigners!" an awful lot of their opposition would dry up overnight.
It's the former. The atmosphere has swelled slightly and there's more drag on objects in low earth orbit. Good news is it might help clean out some space junk faster via orbital decay.
Because nothing is more important than climate change. Not even the factors like overpopulation that make climate change a problem in the first place.
Climate change sounds like a pretty good reason to 1) stop all 3rd world immigration into the 1st world, because moving someone from low carbon footprint Somalia to high carbon footprint Minnesota is bad for the planet and 2) stop subsidizing the population boom in Africa. Shouldn't we take these steps before killing our own industries with onerous regulations? Plus these steps don't really on cooperation with the Chinese.
Crash it, and you become free^H^H^H^H fodder for post-apocalyptic desert warlords.
FTFY.
"The #rightwingnuts refuse to fix it".
The problem is the left wing nuts' plan is...pay lots of taxes to be redistributed to other countries while the political elite scrape trillions off the top, and we exempt China and India so the planet gets cooked anyway.
Vote for the right wing nuts and we all die. Vote for the left wing nuts and we all die poor. Tough choice.
Also it used to be that only top performers went to college. Somebody with a 120 IQ is probably going to find a way to be successful no matter what. So, both financial success and college attendance were dependent variables where intelligence was the independent variable. For the most part, though, school doesn't make you any smarter, so putting people of average or below average intelligence through college doesn't increase the thing that gives them greater earning potential later. This is like putting short people on a basketball team to make them taller. It will not cause them to dunk more.
So you're saying we just need to convict college students of a crime, first, eh?
Were the children all slightly above average?
re-invent the wheel (and patent it)
What about a wheel...on a computer?
"Lose unsightly baby fat with this one simple trick! (Nuclear power companies hate it!)"
So, if you work in a secure facility that someone really wants into... this ensures the bad guys always know where the keys are and how to get them, and you're not going to like it when they do.
Note to self: do not implant secure access microchip in dick.
It's not a new ability though. ISPs have always had the ability, and hadn't been abusing it, so there's no real need to regulate them right now, and if they start, hit up the FTC to stop them.
This is just political bullshit. If the Department of Defense said "nah, we're not going to bother with budgets or the appropriations committee anymore, we're just going to spend money how we like. First up, the Department of Defense Puppy Program where we take care of abandoned cuddly puppies and feed them and love them and pet them!" and congress were to say "no, fuck you, you cannot just spend whatever you want without the approval of Congress, don't care if it's for puppies or kitties or ponies or whatever" I'm pretty sure you wouldn't start screaming about how Congress hates puppies and wants puppies to die!!
Nothing has changed. Your information isn't being sold. You're just hoping to score political points by scaring morons into believing it has. Sad, really.
No, I believe they would really beat me with an inch of my life for saying the truth. They do not want to hear it. Do you disagree?
lawmaking position?
And the an unelected entity making material changes to the states laws
No, they're not. They're not making any laws. The annotations are not laws. The annotations are links to cases decided about the laws and summaries of them. It's just a reference guide, and does not in any way change the law. Kind of like how Oracle might publish the official documentation for the Java language, but anybody can write "Java for Dummies" and sell it. Even if you're trying to say it's changing the interpretation of the law, no, the judges who decided previous court cases set the interpretation and all the annotators are doing is pointing to those decisions.
Writing about how a judge wrote about the law is not even close to "lawmaking."
Here's the thing: If annotated copies of the law are the official copy
No, they publish the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, they are not the authors of the official code. The authors of the official code is the legislature of the great state of Georgia. LexisNexis compiles the official version of the annotations.
At the end of the day, here are your options:
Option 1) Like (almost?) every other state, private companies like LexisNexis or Thomson West hire lawyers and legal aides to review state laws and make lists and summaries of cases that referenced each law. They they compete to sell these annotated law compilations to attorneys, and since they're useful reference, the state winds up buying them for judges and state attorneys too. Choose this option and the state of Georgia buys expensive annotations from LexisNexis. If you (as a private attorney or private citizen) want a copy of the annotations, you pay LexisNexis thousands of dollars.
Option 2) The status quo, in which the state of Georgia commissions an "official annotated version" and sells that to the private attorneys, recouping the cost of the commission. If you want an annotated copy and you're not an official of the state of Georgia, you're still paying LexisNexis thousands of dollars.
Option 3) The state of Georgia commissions an "official annotated version" and gives that away for free to everyone. Everyone can now read the annotations for free, but this costs the taxpayers a lot of money since the private attorneys who used to pay for the state's copies in Option 2 are now getting it for free as well.
So which option do you want? 1) is a moderate expense to the taxpayers, 2) costs the taxpayers nothing, and 3) costs taxpayers a lot (but they get free unlimited access to the annotations).
If it were up to me, given that extremely few people ever read the laws under which they live, and extremely extremely few people are even aware of the difference between a regular copy and annotated copy of said laws, option 3) doesn't provide that great a value. I would do Option 2, but I would make sure to provide copies of the annotated laws to public libraries and prison libraries. Now they're available for free if citizens really want to see them, but the cost of the legal research for the annotations falls on private attorneys and not the taxpayers, who probably don't care enough to pay for any of this.
What option would you choose?
Oh, and if you're some kind of activist who thinks this is all awful in some way or another, I guess an Option 4) could be make your own damn annotated copy of the laws and give it away for free. Start up a "lawkipedia" where you and volunteers annotate state codes and publish it on the internet for anyone interested.
And calling them the alt-left is bullshit, because they're the opposite of trying to force people to believe what they believe.
No, I'm pretty sure if I go to UC Berkley and say "men and women have real physical biological differences that result in behavioral differences that are not merely socially constructed, and the same is true of different human haplogroups (broadly grouped into "races" or "ethnicities"). I have documented, reproducible scientific studies to prove these things and would like to peacefully make my case so that others can make up their own minds about these issues" I'm pretty sure they will literally beat me to within an inch of my life.
Not only does the ctrl-left want to force people to believe what they believe, what they want to force people to believe is provably untrue.