"That treasure was collected off the backs of thousands of slaves and from the pockets of honest egyptians for thousands of years."
For the most part, the slavery bit is Jewish/Christian/Muslim propoganda. The pyramids were generally built by farmers in the off-season.
The money didn't take "thousands of years" to acquire, it was put together during the lifetime of the that particular pharaoh (for obvious reasons).
And the farmers that built and paid for the pyramids weren't exactly taxed into oblivion; their standard of living was quite a bit higher than anybody else in that part of the world for a long time (e. g. they had off-time to build pyramids).
"that stuff was abandoned the same as a sunken treasure ship."
It's "abandoned" only if you believe that the dead have no use for it. The person entombed and most of the people who built the tomb believed they did.
"What good does it do history yet another Golden mask sitting in some museum somewhere."
For starters, it fills in the gaps we have of who ruled when.
"At least the tomb robbers enjoyed the treasure and put the gold into the economy."
So they melted it down? Do you honestly believe the artifacts ever had less market value than their constituent parts?
"Gold should be used for the living not the dead."
-1 gold standard crackpot. Debts are tough enough to pay down without deflation, thanks.
"Even if Sony is failing to endear itself to the media, to analysts or to gamers at the moment, that's no reason for the reality of the next generation console battle to be ignored."
I can understand leaving out media and analysts, but if not the gamers, just who exactly does the PS3 need to endear itself to?
"This is a partial sentence and not what I said if you compare them to the words shown above."
I directly quoted the sentence in which you stated that a "bachelor's degree isn't worth squat," all I left off was half of the parenthetical. It was the only sentence in the paragraph.
As for your expectation for 12 year-olds to be able to master a vessel, what was the point in bringing up the example of David Farragut to begin with?
And again, you have not answered my question: If officers of post-industrial ships don't need a formal education, where are all the hawsepipers?
"I did not."
Again, quoting you (complete sentences, complete paragraph):
Go get a copy of Cervantes in Spanish. Go get a Spanish language reference. Work your way through the book. By the time you are finished you will know how to read and translate Spanish; all without attending a single class.
Now, forgive me for being an ingernt publik skool graduate, but I see:
Two books listed, and no more
An assertion that the reader will be able to understand Spanish
The assertion that no class is needed
So, yeah, you did.
"Did you major in journalism or something?"
Moving from grandiose, irrelevant anecdotes to ad hominem attacks?
Look, I'm not the one here asserting that post-industrial needs as little (if not less) formal schooling than pre-industrial life. You specifically referred to the example of David Farragut at age 12, using him as an example of what children should be capable of today. I go to the example of the US merchant marine, where it is still possible to become a fully licensed captain of unlimited tonnage (or chief engineer of unlimited horsepower) without any formal education, but where the vast majority today have a bachelor's degree, usually from a state academy or King's Point.
If formal schooling (especially at the hands of a state government or the federal government) is so useless (if not outright damaging), then why the focus on degrees when all that matters is the license? Forget heads of departments and unlimited licenses, where are the mates and assistants on any merchant vessel grossing more than 50,000 tonnes that have no degrees, the ones that worked their way up from seamen?
If it really is proper to draw analogies from pre-industrial times to today, if a 12-year-old can master a ship in the 1800's with so little formal schooling, then why can't a 24-year-old of the 2000's realisticly be a mere second mate without a bachelor's degree?
Today's bachelor's degree isn't worth squat compared to what the average young teen knew in former times (in his young teens Washington was earning $100,000 in real dollars a year as a surveyor.
School is stupid.
You were the one who started this by talking about how one should be expected to take command of a vessel by age 12, and you were the one who claimed that bachelor's degrees "isn't worth squat" (again, your words, as shown above).
So, again: where are all the hawsepipers? Where are all the people who have the word "unlimited" on their Coast Guard license who did not go to college?
This is the question I have been asking since the beginning, the least you could do is pretend to try to answer for once.
"No, I'm afraid that for Spanish I did not."
Blah blah blah. You stated that anybody can go from zero to conversational with two and only two books, with no education beyond those two books. If you didn't do it with Spanish, what language did you do it with? Again, can you back up your statement that "School is stupid?"
"Exactly as the framers of our mandatory schooling system feared. That is what you are in school to learn, not that reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic crap."
No, the public schools were started on this continent explicitly for reading and writing, particularly Scripture
Got any direct quotes from any of them to back up your claims, especially considering how the document they wrote left education as a Tenth Amendment issue?
"In early 1800s Massachussets... Six year olds were not reading Dick and Jane. They were reading... Hawthorne with relish"
Neat trick, since Hawthorne didn't publish his first successful novel until 1850. He was 46 (a bit older than 12) and had graduated college. If you insist on continuing to drop these increasingly irrelevant bits of information, you might want to check your facts now and again.
"Most of them were dirt poor farmers, farming dirt, with not a schoolroom in sight."
But it is by the attention it pays to Public Education that the original character of American civilization is at once placed in the clearest light. "It being," says the law, "one chief project of Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the Scripture by persuading from the use of tongues, to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. . .." Here follow clauses establishing schools in every township, and obliging the inhabitants, under pain of heavy fines, to support them.
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chapter II
Considering he was writing about what he saw in Massachusetts in the 1830's, and was quoting from and describing the results of legislation from 1650, it seems you're now making things up to try to support your argument.
"Having the same text in different languages is a wonderful learning tool for picking things up with."
It's also something a devout Protestant of the Nineteenth Century would not do. Latin verse was for the much maligned Catholics. Or are we forgetting the 95 Theses?
"With a bit of instruction any child whose language is written in a phonetic alphabet can learn to read in a matter of weeks"
Again with the interesting qualifiers. Your earlier posts (and even earlier paragraphs in this post) insist that no instruction is needed, that any school-aged child can do this on their own, and that this can be and has been done in English.
At the rate you keep drifting from and modifying your original assertions, you'll be agreeing with me by the end o
"Exactly" what? Have you been aboard any modern ships? Have you met any merchant seamen? Do you know what a "hawsepiper" is and the fact that such a path to promotion is still open in modern times? If your "you don't need college" statement holds any water, why is it that the vast majority of the captains of modern US merchant vessels attended an academy in spite of the availability of an alternate path to advancement?
"If you somehow think "technology" makes a difference, it doesn't take a bachelor's degree to command a tank battlion either."
David Farragut never went to OCS either, so your comparison fails. And cavalry != navy, unless you make a very strained connection through the USMC.
"In his day George Washington was considered woefully uneducated."
And, amazingly enough, he was a poor strategist. He didn't win because he was good at war, he won because he managed to convince people to follow him in spite of how bad he was at war.
"Today's bachelor's degree isn't worth squat compared to what the average young teen knew in former times"
The "average young teen in former times" had time to spend on such esoteric subjects as Cicero because he wasn't learning how to operate a car or access the internet.
"(in his young teens Washington was earning $100,000 in real dollars a year as a surveyor. The mathematics of this calling were the same then as they are now. He had a total of two years of school)."
The mathematics may be the same, but the requirements are much more stringent today. Washington may have been able to plot the border between two farms, but I wouldn't trust him to certify that a particular parcel of ground was level enough for a skyscraper.
"I'm not sure if you're aware that that is all it was really originally designed for, to reduce the number of able bodied workers available; and eventually spit them out suited for factory work."
Then why did the public education system predate North American factories by centuries? Mercantilism means that you keep manufacturing in the mother country, all the colonialists were allowed to do is produce raw material.
Besides, history shows that factory work, especially in the Nineteenth Century, didn't require much education at all. We had such problems with child labor in the past because the children were dropping out of schools to work.
As Tocqueville pointed out, public education was introduced to the North American continent by the Puritans in New England, and certainly not for the warehousing you suggest.
"You learned to speak a language with no experience of language at all, no experience of anything really, almost entirely on your own, simply through observation and imitation."
"Speak?" Perhaps. But reading and writing are a completely different matter. Aristrocratic Washington could read, but the majority of his future fellow citizens could not.
"Go get a copy of Cervantes in Spanish. Go get a Spanish language reference. Work your way through the book. By the time you are finished you will know how to read and translate Spanish; all without attending a single class."
You're not paying attention. Each district is carefully drawn in such a way that the majority of voters in it are die-hard party faithful and will vote for the incumbent come rain or shine. You can vote against the incumbent if you'd like, but in each and every House district in this country there's a hundred thousand people who will vote for the incumbent no matter what (otherwise they'd be drawn into a different district). Those who would dare vote against an incumbent are a diaspora, dispersed into meaninglessness across as many districts as possible.
But even in the Senate races, where the "district" lines are set in stone, incumbency rates are all the way down at 90%, showing both the undue influence incumbents have on the elections.
No matter what happens, the only way elections in this country will have any meaning is if we change the way we draw districts and the way we vote, and that will never happen, as it threatens the entrenched incumbency of the very people who'd have to enact the new measures.
"but even loyal party pundits are admitting that a certain number of Reps are in for a real fight this time around."
"Certain number?" How many is that, three? Four? Are we now looking at an inumbency rate as low as 92% as opposed to the 98% we saw in 2004?
I really don't see how fighting for scraps here and there will accomplish wide-reaching social change, especially when the Democrats have been just as willing as the Republicans to support the president.
"The Republicans are also up against a very real general rule - the one that notes that the party in the White House almost always looses Congressional seats in the off year - that hasn't happened only twice in the last hundred years. Add to that the amount of opposition Bush faces among not only independants, but the dissaffected in his own party, and the Grand Ole Party has its work cut out for it before November."
So you're completely ignoring the example of 2002?
"Admiral Farragut was given his first command (a prize ship) during the War of 1812 when he was twelve years old."
You don't need a bachelor's degree to command a pre-industrial ship, especially when you're not going very far. It's also easier to inspire respect when you have a contingent of US Marines with rifles trained on the crew (as you noted, it was a prize ship).
David Farragut didn't need anybody with a knowledge of thermodynamics to make the ship move, and shipboard meteorology consisted of "Gee, I hope we don't run into any storms." 99.9% of shipboard life in the early Nineteenth Century was manual labor, requiring no more knowledge beyond understanding how to pull a rope when told. There are reasons why you never see hawsepipers any more, and they're related to why people need a whopping 12 years of education to even begin to function after the Industrial Revolution.
"Arguably worthy choices to spend scientific $$$ on."
And all excuses to spend federal money on state responsibilities. Federal legislators get to tell voters how much pork they brought home, state legislators won't have to do something drastic like raise taxes, and something that far better fits the definition of "general Welfare" than a spotty distribution of funds based on whose Congresscritter is on which committee goes unfunded.
"We are teenagers but that doesn't mean we don't watch our health/well being."
So things like teen smoking and drug use are a thing of the past now that the teenagers of today have this new-found health awareness? Or, like all teenagers of generations past, do they still have the "Alcohol poisoning? Pfft, I'm gonna live forever!" mentality?
"I'd watch out his/her food intake at home."
So you are trying to advocate more rigorous parental oversight at home in the same breath as you are trying to deny it outside of the home? Make up your mind.
You're forgetting that the House of Representatives is divided into 435 carefully crafted districts where nobody but the incumbent has any hope of getting more than 15% of the vote. Vote, don't vote, the only difference it makes is a slight change in the incumbent's victory margin.
"Man, we've been building stuff for like 5 thousand years. Stuff we built 5 thousand years ago is still standing."
Some of the things we built 5000 years ago is still standing. Consider, for example, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; only one of them is left, wich gives us a 14.2% success rate. I'm not sure I like that number when it comes to something to be used on a daily basis.
"You also come close to one other point that I thought when I read the article, why let children use a computer on their own in their own house but not in a public place..."
But then you'd make life more difficult for the people who actually vote. The people who will be most affected by this are ones that either don't vote (because they have far more pressing, hand-to-mouth concerns) or they're afflicted by some sort of Stockholm Syndrome and nod their heads in agreement as they read about this in said libraries.
"And I don't mean you should flip a coin, pick the red team or the blue team, and blindly follow them."
OK, should I go with the party that overwhelmingly voted in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act, or the party that overwhelmingly voted in favor of the USA PATRTIOT Act? Where are the distinguishing characteristics?
"I mean that you should get active in holding your elected officials accountable for their actions, regardless of their party affiliation."
That will accomplish nothing thanks to our system of entrenching incumbents, thanks to gerrymandered safe districts and our system of party primaries that favors the extremes.
"Keep up on the issues and be vocal about them."
Because if those staffers don't have vaguely relevant form letters to send out in response, they'll have nothing to do all day.
"Read and listen to opposing points of view and try to form and propagate valid opinions."
99.99% of the "opposing viewpoints" in political debate are "My opponent is a facist who hates freedom." What sort of "valid opnions" can I form from that?
"Make sure your representatives know that someone is watching them, and follows what they do."
Why should they care if they're being watched? 65% of the people in your district will still vote for them, otherwise you'd be moved over into another district. Please forgive the "in Soviet Russia" cliche, but in the United States the representative chooses the voter, not the other way around.
"If they lie, cheat, steal, or sell you down the river, nail them."
If they lie, cheat, steal, etc, 65% of the district will still vote them back into office. Period.
"Cross party lines if you need to, because you are far better off with an honest member of the opposing party than one of "your own party" who is willing to sell you to the devil for a few hookers."
You're assuming that there's anybody on any ballot, anywhere, that can both be considered "more honest" and "has a chance in hell in unseating an incumbent."
"And your local ballot boxes."
For the umpteenth time, the ballot boxes don't matter. Elections are decided in the state legislatures.
But in general, how can this regurgitated idea of "Work within the system to change the system" accomplish anything when the system in question is designed with the sole purpose of isolating any possible dissent? The system is created especially to resist you.
"But for now, the first step is denying Bush the convenience of a rubber stamp congress.
That means holding your nose and voting Democratic this fall."
How does B follow A? How does giving Congress to the other party that voted overwhelmingly in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act (twice!), the other party that can't even bother censuring (let alone impeaching) the man, the other party that has been moving in lockstep with the Republicans deny Bush anything?
The only thing that might change things in DC is if everybody voted against all incumbents, regardless of party (which simply won't happen, thanks to gerrymandering). But voting straight Democrat? Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I still caught myself being surprised by seeing the same, tired old comments about the electoral college dragged out, some crackpots' pet theories about how the Electoral College "really works" and what the "Founding Fathers" intended with it, etc.
First off, enough with the "We're not a democracy we're a republic!" bullshit. If you can't grasp the mathematical concept of "republic" being a subset of "democracy," it's time to go back to your high school civics class. Don't worry, we'll still be here (saying the same things, most likely) when you get back.
Secondly, it wasn't the intent of the Framers to use the mechanism of the Electoral College to "give small states a louder voice," "prevent tyranny of the majority" or any other such statement that only describes the effect of the institution rather than any actual desires behind it. In fact, anybody who says they "know" what the Framers were thinking when they created it is lying, because the Framers didn't think much about it at all; anybody who's even glanced at the Federalist Papers knows that. The matter had almost no debate, and for the most part the Federalist takes the attitude of "It wasn't discussed much in the Convention, there's no real complaint about in among the public, so we won't bother mentioning it here."
The only reason the Electoral College gives a disproportionate number of electors to smaller states is because each state gets as many electors as they have members of Congress, and the Senate gives disproportionate representation to the samller states. This is referred to as the "Connecticut Compromise," and it was very hotly debated in the Convention (unlike, again, the Electoral College). It is disingenuous to repeat comments about how the Framers didn't trust the people, believed the states should have disproportionate representation, etc, when even the authors of the Federalst Papers were against the idea (they bit the bullet and argued in favor of the idea only as part of their broader effort to argue in favor of the ratification of the constitution as a whole).
The aspect of the Senate that did not receive any real debate (because everybody was happy with it) was the idea of legislative appointment of Senators, but that's the part of it we threw out the window 80 years ago. However, if you want to complain about disproportionate representation, your argument is primarily with the Senate, not the Electoral College; a "simple" solution for the Electoral College would be to increase the size of the House of Representatives (set by act of Congress, not the Constitution) so that the two free electors each state gets are given less weight.
The important part of the Electoral College isn't the number of the members; nobody cared about that in 1787, whether they were involved in the Convention or not. The two main features that were touted in the Federalist Papers, that were considered important by the "Founding Fathers" that everybody likes to treat like religious figures, are:
It is a select body of people, chosen solely for the task of selecting a president. While practice and perception of the process has changed in the past 220 years or so, the fact remains that the states are not given votes so much as seats, and those seats are to be filled by representatives of the people (not "elected leaders," this is a republic, after all), who in turn would come together and have real discussion and debate among each other about who to cast their votes for. And because they have no other task than choosing a president, there is little temptation to broker political deals among each other as there is nothing to exchange ("Hmm, Elector B says if I vote for his favorite candidate, he'll vote in favor of my pork barrel project..."). This was meant to avoid the perceived problems of parliamentarian systems, where the law-makers are asked to choose an executive.
Slashdot Mirror
Let us know when the web becomes "barely legal."
"That treasure was collected off the backs of thousands of slaves and from the pockets of honest egyptians for thousands of years."
For the most part, the slavery bit is Jewish/Christian/Muslim propoganda. The pyramids were generally built by farmers in the off-season.
The money didn't take "thousands of years" to acquire, it was put together during the lifetime of the that particular pharaoh (for obvious reasons).
And the farmers that built and paid for the pyramids weren't exactly taxed into oblivion; their standard of living was quite a bit higher than anybody else in that part of the world for a long time (e. g. they had off-time to build pyramids).
"that stuff was abandoned the same as a sunken treasure ship."
It's "abandoned" only if you believe that the dead have no use for it. The person entombed and most of the people who built the tomb believed they did.
"What good does it do history yet another Golden mask sitting in some museum somewhere."
For starters, it fills in the gaps we have of who ruled when.
"At least the tomb robbers enjoyed the treasure and put the gold into the economy."
So they melted it down? Do you honestly believe the artifacts ever had less market value than their constituent parts?
"Gold should be used for the living not the dead."
-1 gold standard crackpot. Debts are tough enough to pay down without deflation, thanks.
And I'm sure you believe that UTC stands for "Universal Time Coordinated."
"Even if Sony is failing to endear itself to the media, to analysts or to gamers at the moment, that's no reason for the reality of the next generation console battle to be ignored."
I can understand leaving out media and analysts, but if not the gamers, just who exactly does the PS3 need to endear itself to?
"In Australia/New Zealand, we regularly pay $100-120 for games,"
In real money, or those funny-colored things you folks like to call "dollars?"
The AUD is worth less than even the CAD these days, and the NZD is worth les than that.
I directly quoted the sentence in which you stated that a "bachelor's degree isn't worth squat," all I left off was half of the parenthetical. It was the only sentence in the paragraph.
As for your expectation for 12 year-olds to be able to master a vessel, what was the point in bringing up the example of David Farragut to begin with?
And again, you have not answered my question: If officers of post-industrial ships don't need a formal education, where are all the hawsepipers?
"I did not."
Again, quoting you (complete sentences, complete paragraph):Now, forgive me for being an ingernt publik skool graduate, but I see:
- Two books listed, and no more
- An assertion that the reader will be able to understand Spanish
- The assertion that no class is needed
So, yeah, you did."Did you major in journalism or something?"
Moving from grandiose, irrelevant anecdotes to ad hominem attacks?
Look, I'm not the one here asserting that post-industrial needs as little (if not less) formal schooling than pre-industrial life. You specifically referred to the example of David Farragut at age 12, using him as an example of what children should be capable of today. I go to the example of the US merchant marine, where it is still possible to become a fully licensed captain of unlimited tonnage (or chief engineer of unlimited horsepower) without any formal education, but where the vast majority today have a bachelor's degree, usually from a state academy or King's Point.
If formal schooling (especially at the hands of a state government or the federal government) is so useless (if not outright damaging), then why the focus on degrees when all that matters is the license? Forget heads of departments and unlimited licenses, where are the mates and assistants on any merchant vessel grossing more than 50,000 tonnes that have no degrees, the ones that worked their way up from seamen?
If it really is proper to draw analogies from pre-industrial times to today, if a 12-year-old can master a ship in the 1800's with so little formal schooling, then why can't a 24-year-old of the 2000's realisticly be a mere second mate without a bachelor's degree?
Quoting you:
You were the one who started this by talking about how one should be expected to take command of a vessel by age 12, and you were the one who claimed that bachelor's degrees "isn't worth squat" (again, your words, as shown above).
So, again: where are all the hawsepipers? Where are all the people who have the word "unlimited" on their Coast Guard license who did not go to college?
This is the question I have been asking since the beginning, the least you could do is pretend to try to answer for once.
"No, I'm afraid that for Spanish I did not."
Blah blah blah. You stated that anybody can go from zero to conversational with two and only two books, with no education beyond those two books. If you didn't do it with Spanish, what language did you do it with? Again, can you back up your statement that "School is stupid?"
"Exactly as the framers of our mandatory schooling system feared. That is what you are in school to learn, not that reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic crap."
"In early 1800s Massachussets... Six year olds were not reading Dick and Jane. They were reading ... Hawthorne with relish"
Neat trick, since Hawthorne didn't publish his first successful novel until 1850. He was 46 (a bit older than 12) and had graduated college. If you insist on continuing to drop these increasingly irrelevant bits of information, you might want to check your facts now and again.
"Most of them were dirt poor farmers, farming dirt, with not a schoolroom in sight."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chapter II
Considering he was writing about what he saw in Massachusetts in the 1830's, and was quoting from and describing the results of legislation from 1650, it seems you're now making things up to try to support your argument.
"Having the same text in different languages is a wonderful learning tool for picking things up with."
It's also something a devout Protestant of the Nineteenth Century would not do. Latin verse was for the much maligned Catholics. Or are we forgetting the 95 Theses?
"With a bit of instruction any child whose language is written in a phonetic alphabet can learn to read in a matter of weeks"
Again with the interesting qualifiers. Your earlier posts (and even earlier paragraphs in this post) insist that no instruction is needed, that any school-aged child can do this on their own, and that this can be and has been done in English.
At the rate you keep drifting from and modifying your original assertions, you'll be agreeing with me by the end o
"Yes. I've also been aboard square riggers."
You're dodging the issue. If the schools are so useless, why are there so few officers on modern merchant ships that didn't go to an academy?
"I left the public schools when I was 11."
It's interesting how you added the qualifier "public" in there, but, again, not the point; have you followed your own advice on how to learn Spanish?
"Exactly!"
"Exactly" what? Have you been aboard any modern ships? Have you met any merchant seamen? Do you know what a "hawsepiper" is and the fact that such a path to promotion is still open in modern times? If your "you don't need college" statement holds any water, why is it that the vast majority of the captains of modern US merchant vessels attended an academy in spite of the availability of an alternate path to advancement?
"If you somehow think "technology" makes a difference, it doesn't take a bachelor's degree to command a tank battlion either."
David Farragut never went to OCS either, so your comparison fails. And cavalry != navy, unless you make a very strained connection through the USMC.
"In his day George Washington was considered woefully uneducated."
And, amazingly enough, he was a poor strategist. He didn't win because he was good at war, he won because he managed to convince people to follow him in spite of how bad he was at war.
"Today's bachelor's degree isn't worth squat compared to what the average young teen knew in former times"
The "average young teen in former times" had time to spend on such esoteric subjects as Cicero because he wasn't learning how to operate a car or access the internet.
"(in his young teens Washington was earning $100,000 in real dollars a year as a surveyor. The mathematics of this calling were the same then as they are now. He had a total of two years of school)."
The mathematics may be the same, but the requirements are much more stringent today. Washington may have been able to plot the border between two farms, but I wouldn't trust him to certify that a particular parcel of ground was level enough for a skyscraper.
"I'm not sure if you're aware that that is all it was really originally designed for, to reduce the number of able bodied workers available; and eventually spit them out suited for factory work."
Then why did the public education system predate North American factories by centuries? Mercantilism means that you keep manufacturing in the mother country, all the colonialists were allowed to do is produce raw material.
Besides, history shows that factory work, especially in the Nineteenth Century, didn't require much education at all. We had such problems with child labor in the past because the children were dropping out of schools to work.
As Tocqueville pointed out, public education was introduced to the North American continent by the Puritans in New England, and certainly not for the warehousing you suggest.
"You learned to speak a language with no experience of language at all, no experience of anything really, almost entirely on your own, simply through observation and imitation."
"Speak?" Perhaps. But reading and writing are a completely different matter. Aristrocratic Washington could read, but the majority of his future fellow citizens could not.
"Go get a copy of Cervantes in Spanish. Go get a Spanish language reference. Work your way through the book. By the time you are finished you will know how to read and translate Spanish; all without attending a single class."
Have you tried practicing what you preach yet?
"Then vote against the incumbent."
You're not paying attention. Each district is carefully drawn in such a way that the majority of voters in it are die-hard party faithful and will vote for the incumbent come rain or shine. You can vote against the incumbent if you'd like, but in each and every House district in this country there's a hundred thousand people who will vote for the incumbent no matter what (otherwise they'd be drawn into a different district). Those who would dare vote against an incumbent are a diaspora, dispersed into meaninglessness across as many districts as possible.
But even in the Senate races, where the "district" lines are set in stone, incumbency rates are all the way down at 90%, showing both the undue influence incumbents have on the elections.
No matter what happens, the only way elections in this country will have any meaning is if we change the way we draw districts and the way we vote, and that will never happen, as it threatens the entrenched incumbency of the very people who'd have to enact the new measures.
"but even loyal party pundits are admitting that a certain number of Reps are in for a real fight this time around."
"Certain number?" How many is that, three? Four? Are we now looking at an inumbency rate as low as 92% as opposed to the 98% we saw in 2004?
I really don't see how fighting for scraps here and there will accomplish wide-reaching social change, especially when the Democrats have been just as willing as the Republicans to support the president.
"The Republicans are also up against a very real general rule - the one that notes that the party in the White House almost always looses Congressional seats in the off year - that hasn't happened only twice in the last hundred years. Add to that the amount of opposition Bush faces among not only independants, but the dissaffected in his own party, and the Grand Ole Party has its work cut out for it before November."
So you're completely ignoring the example of 2002?
"Admiral Farragut was given his first command (a prize ship) during the War of 1812 when he was twelve years old."
You don't need a bachelor's degree to command a pre-industrial ship, especially when you're not going very far. It's also easier to inspire respect when you have a contingent of US Marines with rifles trained on the crew (as you noted, it was a prize ship).
David Farragut didn't need anybody with a knowledge of thermodynamics to make the ship move, and shipboard meteorology consisted of "Gee, I hope we don't run into any storms." 99.9% of shipboard life in the early Nineteenth Century was manual labor, requiring no more knowledge beyond understanding how to pull a rope when told. There are reasons why you never see hawsepipers any more, and they're related to why people need a whopping 12 years of education to even begin to function after the Industrial Revolution.
"Arguably worthy choices to spend scientific $$$ on."
And all excuses to spend federal money on state responsibilities. Federal legislators get to tell voters how much pork they brought home, state legislators won't have to do something drastic like raise taxes, and something that far better fits the definition of "general Welfare" than a spotty distribution of funds based on whose Congresscritter is on which committee goes unfunded.
"Ah, nothing beats the love and care put into making your child's lunch... ...checklist."
Mom now has to worry about her own lunch before she goes off to work.
"We are teenagers but that doesn't mean we don't watch our health/well being."
So things like teen smoking and drug use are a thing of the past now that the teenagers of today have this new-found health awareness? Or, like all teenagers of generations past, do they still have the "Alcohol poisoning? Pfft, I'm gonna live forever!" mentality?
"I'd watch out his/her food intake at home."
So you are trying to advocate more rigorous parental oversight at home in the same breath as you are trying to deny it outside of the home? Make up your mind.
OK, so parents controlling their child's video game purchases is good (if not outright demanded), but controlling school lunch purchases is bad?
Gotta love Slashdot.
You're forgetting that the House of Representatives is divided into 435 carefully crafted districts where nobody but the incumbent has any hope of getting more than 15% of the vote. Vote, don't vote, the only difference it makes is a slight change in the incumbent's victory margin.
"I can see China overtaking the US in space exploration within the next decade or so because of all the beurocratic nonesense"
Because China has no bureaucracy to speak of?
"Man, we've been building stuff for like 5 thousand years. Stuff we built 5 thousand years ago is still standing."
Some of the things we built 5000 years ago is still standing. Consider, for example, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; only one of them is left, wich gives us a 14.2% success rate. I'm not sure I like that number when it comes to something to be used on a daily basis.
You underestimate the weight of these male players.
"I don't get it, why on earth are people talking about "Saving" Nintendo."
We've all read the Netcraft confirmation.
"You also come close to one other point that I thought when I read the article, why let children use a computer on their own in their own house but not in a public place..."
But then you'd make life more difficult for the people who actually vote. The people who will be most affected by this are ones that either don't vote (because they have far more pressing, hand-to-mouth concerns) or they're afflicted by some sort of Stockholm Syndrome and nod their heads in agreement as they read about this in said libraries.
"And I don't mean you should flip a coin, pick the red team or the blue team, and blindly follow them."
OK, should I go with the party that overwhelmingly voted in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act, or the party that overwhelmingly voted in favor of the USA PATRTIOT Act? Where are the distinguishing characteristics?
"I mean that you should get active in holding your elected officials accountable for their actions, regardless of their party affiliation."
That will accomplish nothing thanks to our system of entrenching incumbents, thanks to gerrymandered safe districts and our system of party primaries that favors the extremes.
"Keep up on the issues and be vocal about them."
Because if those staffers don't have vaguely relevant form letters to send out in response, they'll have nothing to do all day.
"Read and listen to opposing points of view and try to form and propagate valid opinions."
99.99% of the "opposing viewpoints" in political debate are "My opponent is a facist who hates freedom." What sort of "valid opnions" can I form from that?
"Make sure your representatives know that someone is watching them, and follows what they do."
Why should they care if they're being watched? 65% of the people in your district will still vote for them, otherwise you'd be moved over into another district. Please forgive the "in Soviet Russia" cliche, but in the United States the representative chooses the voter, not the other way around.
"If they lie, cheat, steal, or sell you down the river, nail them."
If they lie, cheat, steal, etc, 65% of the district will still vote them back into office. Period.
"Cross party lines if you need to, because you are far better off with an honest member of the opposing party than one of "your own party" who is willing to sell you to the devil for a few hookers."
You're assuming that there's anybody on any ballot, anywhere, that can both be considered "more honest" and "has a chance in hell in unseating an incumbent."
"And your local ballot boxes."
For the umpteenth time, the ballot boxes don't matter. Elections are decided in the state legislatures.
But in general, how can this regurgitated idea of "Work within the system to change the system" accomplish anything when the system in question is designed with the sole purpose of isolating any possible dissent? The system is created especially to resist you.
"But for now, the first step is denying Bush the convenience of a rubber stamp congress.
That means holding your nose and voting Democratic this fall."
How does B follow A? How does giving Congress to the other party that voted overwhelmingly in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act (twice!), the other party that can't even bother censuring (let alone impeaching) the man, the other party that has been moving in lockstep with the Republicans deny Bush anything?
The only thing that might change things in DC is if everybody voted against all incumbents, regardless of party (which simply won't happen, thanks to gerrymandering). But voting straight Democrat? Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
First off, enough with the "We're not a democracy we're a republic!" bullshit. If you can't grasp the mathematical concept of "republic" being a subset of "democracy," it's time to go back to your high school civics class. Don't worry, we'll still be here (saying the same things, most likely) when you get back.
Secondly, it wasn't the intent of the Framers to use the mechanism of the Electoral College to "give small states a louder voice," "prevent tyranny of the majority" or any other such statement that only describes the effect of the institution rather than any actual desires behind it. In fact, anybody who says they "know" what the Framers were thinking when they created it is lying, because the Framers didn't think much about it at all; anybody who's even glanced at the Federalist Papers knows that. The matter had almost no debate, and for the most part the Federalist takes the attitude of "It wasn't discussed much in the Convention, there's no real complaint about in among the public, so we won't bother mentioning it here."
The only reason the Electoral College gives a disproportionate number of electors to smaller states is because each state gets as many electors as they have members of Congress, and the Senate gives disproportionate representation to the samller states. This is referred to as the "Connecticut Compromise," and it was very hotly debated in the Convention (unlike, again, the Electoral College). It is disingenuous to repeat comments about how the Framers didn't trust the people, believed the states should have disproportionate representation, etc, when even the authors of the Federalst Papers were against the idea (they bit the bullet and argued in favor of the idea only as part of their broader effort to argue in favor of the ratification of the constitution as a whole).
The aspect of the Senate that did not receive any real debate (because everybody was happy with it) was the idea of legislative appointment of Senators, but that's the part of it we threw out the window 80 years ago. However, if you want to complain about disproportionate representation, your argument is primarily with the Senate, not the Electoral College; a "simple" solution for the Electoral College would be to increase the size of the House of Representatives (set by act of Congress, not the Constitution) so that the two free electors each state gets are given less weight.
The important part of the Electoral College isn't the number of the members; nobody cared about that in 1787, whether they were involved in the Convention or not. The two main features that were touted in the Federalist Papers, that were considered important by the "Founding Fathers" that everybody likes to treat like religious figures, are: