When Dubya comes for the liberals and a SWAT team with snipers, tear gas, dogs and God knows what kicks down our door in the middle of the night I'll be _so_ much more helpless than I would have been if only, IF ONLY, I had thought to buy a handgun to put under my pillow.
I better run right out and get one. Should I model myself after Sylvester? Or Arnold? Or Claude? Those guys could take on the Chinese Army singlehanded with a 45 and never die.
Let's talk:
A. Look at places that tried to restrict firearms like apartheid South Africa.
1) They didn't succeed. South Africa is still awash with apartheid-era firearms.
2) It wasn't the guns that won the revolution. It was the organizing. With a little help from the car bombs, the restaurant and nightclub bombs, torching the SASOL refinery and sanctions.
B. There are probably enough guns in the U.S. to divide them up among every adult American and they can still shoot two-handed.
C. If it comes to lone households against the troops of a regime you have already lost _everything_ and are trying to fight back from _nothing_. That may be some people's B video mountain cabin fantasy, but, for damn sure, the best thing is to make sure it never comes to that. So if your choice this weekend is to browse a firearms catalog or get politically organized with your neighbors, I would seriously suggest the latter.
[Oh, and coming from a white trash childhood, I _do_ actually possess a handgun packed away somewhere. Thank you for asking.]
If you don't live in the "belly of the beast" as it were, how do you expect to affect change?
How quaint. I read a similar sentiment with my fledgling French in LeMonde online to the effect that "The American people must see some advantage to Mr. Bush's policies or they wouldn't let him continue."
There is no "letting". This is a government out of control run by and for the corporations. It is only the lobbyists and the campaign PR experts who get listened to by Congress. Some specialty interests get "pandered" to but that isn't the same thing.
Unfortunately, there is almost no living history of effective protest in the U.S. Before people howl about Vietnam, ask yourselves, "How many of your parent's neighbors were walking arm-in-arm with you at the anti-war rally? The U.S. did a wonderfully effective propaganda effort of separating the "hippies" from the "patriots". And the "hippies" were draft age students for the most part who had a direct interest in the war.
The last effective age, gender (and perhaps at least worker and lower-middle-class)-spanning protest movements were in the early decades of the 20th century over workers' rights. And any of those remaining activists are probably 90+ years old by now. The idea that Mr. U.S. Suburbanite is going to take a day off work to drive his SUV to a rally to walk around clogging the streets around his capitol protesting is crazy talk. Anything who envisions something like that must surely live in France.
Since the government doesn't need warrants/probable cause/oversight anymore, it would be easy to set up a business to sell "confiscated" laptops second-hand.
Been there, done that? I believe the term is "government auction". You can probably find some with web sites.
You hear about police stations that are furnished with confiscated equipment like third world nations. I wonder whether they purchase them at the auctions to make it all nice and legal, but if anyone has first-hand experience.....
If you are not a US citizen they can pretty much do whatever they bloody well want with the worst case scenario being that you get dragged into a Learjet sporting a fake civil registration which flies you to some US allied country in the Middle East or one of those covert jails in E-Europe
It's hard to keep up. With the new Military Act of a couple weeks back U.S. citizens can be shipped out for indefinite approved "non-tortures" too.
It's just a question of getting the executive commission in place and the channels set up so they can be funneled the names of Americans to be labeled "combattents" for material contribution.
people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape."
Probably because I was dual-booting Coherent unix the first half of the 90s, OS/2 the 2nd half of the '90s and linux now, I often feel like I'm the only person left in the world who can still feel a pure warm feeling for the 80s garage software that was the original McAffee.
Everybody else invariably seems to echo, "Die McAffee, Die! Die! Die!" Which I guess is OK with me since it's just been a corporate brand name for ages anyway.
Wait until the next depression. I bet I can buy Second Life real estate for a bag of non-virtual potatoes. Will there still be added value? Sure. You could turn the bag of potatoes into vodka.
Imagine a message on your TV telling you it's time to start the laundry!
Yikes! You mean this isn't already on the blueprint for MythTV. v. 0.62? Considering it's only at v. 0.20 I expect HAL by version 1.0 [Yes, obviously he would be a.0.]
When people have a few more decades to look back inpartially I think it will be accepted that one of the keys to the last half of the 20th century was an exponentially increasing demographic shift from rural and blue-collar (often union) jobs to urban, pink-collar (almost invariably non-union) jobs. While technological development in these jobs has fantastically increased productivity and profits for corporations, the fact that workers have by-and-large not shared in these profits has been a major factor in destroying the middle class economic sector. And some would argue that societies without a middle class have not shown the ability to sustain a democratic republic.
Just saying. I like technology as much as the next guy, but the social effects of how it was implemented.....
Couldn't have said it better if he had been a British upper-crust eugenics buff in the Victorian era. In other words, the sort of belief system at the robber baron culmination of the _first_ industrial revolution that H.G. Wells was exploring. Quite the opposite to this guy's vision, I have heard a scientist at a sci fi con speculate that future people would be designed as midgets (little green men?) for the efficiency in space travel and residence.
Seriously though, how do these people get gigs as "futurists" without reading science fiction? Or perhaps I should say science fiction that isn't 100 years old? Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix was a far more profound vision. If speciation arises from isolation and adaptation, even human-directed evolution may arise the same way as we spread over the solar system and choose among various adaptation choices to various conditions.
I guess that's my core beef with the occasional stories in this thread: why are "futurists" so often so lame?
I have to see how my body is affected by a new product, and if I don't feel right, I'll not consume that product. I'm a very healthy individual, so eating something unhealthy tends to immediately make me feel a little weaker or a little out of whack.
Remember the Married with Children episode where Peg kills the TV Exercise show host when she wins a week of in-home consultation? Without resistence, a person is helpless today.
There was a time when I was in that state where I could quickly sense what was bad. About the only thing that gave me the immediate sense that it was _good_ was 100% WW bread from a bakery that claimed to personally grind the berries daily.
But can we really trust the genetic value of taste much beyond poisoning to something like carcinogens where the effects may not be felt until after reproduction?
There is nothing but net loss in hydrogen since any energy that can be extracted from it must be put in it the first place - and the Second Law wins.
Yeah, but they'll make it up in quantity. When they build up the currently non-existent distribution network they've got it made. Sure, gasoline has the lead but does any other energy source like electricity have a distribution network? Oh, wait....
Sure, it's one thing to come to/. and visualize the day when there is one linux computer for every person but even rooting for underdog technologies has its limits.
precipitation = indoors = TV AND (if and only if cable AND children's programming) = autism in susceptible people.
Who knows? Maybe people who can afford cable are more likely to panel the house in formaldehyde-treated fine woods or any of a thousand other things.
Being older, I find it amusing that they assume parents before cable didn't routinely plop their infants in front of the TV because there wasn't enough children's programming. Nonsense. TV probably accounts for half my infant memory images circa 1952-3. They could as plausibly have said that Big Bird causes autism and Captain Kangaroo and 50s westerns didn't.
I think you have hit one of the key points. A given Ph.D. may not, in fact, qualify for Mensa. I believe the mean I.Q. in one study was just shy of 1-in-50. Varies by discipline as well. But they KNOW STUFF and are DOING STUFF. And, yes, their skills in depth investigation of their discipline often puddle over into well-developed passions in fascinating hobbies. [I've had a couple opportunities to work and party with concentrations of Ph.D.s myself.]
Local Mensa groups differ of course, but, in contrast, there is often a strong GIGO factor. Remember, the _only_ qualification is a good IQ score so you might meet a cleverly pleasant punster whose idea of quality media is Rush Limbaugh, Reader's Digest and Discover. And this is strongly reflected in the national magazine. Our local group goes out of the way to make a statement that "we're just folks" with the bible study group, the knitting group, the camping group, etc. and I could only hope they might host a symposium on an intellectually stimulating topic before I die.
On the other hand, I met my wife of 21 years at a Mensa "First Friday" of the month.
My wife and I have been running Windows virtualized on linux since 2002. I guess this means we better get a couple copies of XP running in qemu pretty soon and figure the event horizon is about another five years of useful Windows interoperability.
That's quite a long time and should work out about right considering the steady advance of crossover office, transgaming and the remaining niche programs in development on linux.
I was initially shocked too but I glossed over that it is a _private_ university and it is in _Texas_.
I graduated from a Lutheran college in Minnesota where women couldn't smoke my first year, nobody could drink on or off campus regardless of age, they closed the campus for daily chapel, no dancing during lent, obviously no men and women together in the dorms, and RAs master keyed your door on Friday and Saturday nights to see that you were there.
If the internet had been up, they probably would have censored that too. It's all part of the mindset of in loco parentis where college students are assumed not to be adults and where the administration feels justified in promoted the advertised bias. Whether you're a professor looking for a job or a student exploring admission, I would ask someone at the college about their policy on in loco parentis because it will have a huge effect on the campus atmosphere you experience.
Substantial revenues from the energy sector coupled with a small population give Libya one of the highest per capita GDPs in Africa, but little of this income flows down to the lower orders of society.
Qadhafi sees himself as a player in pan-African politics. This is the sort of thing he can afford to do for "his" people and the neighboring countries. Cynicism aside, it's good to see an African purchase.
(As a side note, I thought there was recently an article that the price was going up to $140? Discount on million unit sales?)
Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization (WTO) moved toward upholding the ruling that the European Union has violated international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods.
* Research by the Russian Academy of Sciences released in December 2005 found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy. Six times as many offspring fed GM soy were also severely underweight.
* In November 2005, a private research institute in Australia, CSIRO Plant Industry, put a halt to further development of a GM pea cultivator when it was found to cause an immune response in laboratory mice.1
* In the summer of 2005, an Italian research team led by a cellular biologist at the University of Urbino published confirmation that absorption of GM soy by mice causes development of misshapen liver cells, as well as other cellular anomalies.
* In May of 2005 the review of a highly confidential and controversial Monsanto report on test results of corn modified with Monsanto MON863 was published in The Independent/UK.
On the "Old Fashioned" taunt. The guy who brought macrobiotics to the U.S. made a stopover of some years in Paris. People would occasionally say, "From China? Oh, how primitive." And he would say "Thank you!" To him primitive was something like "primal" with that Asian orientation toward living in harmony with nature. (And to him, cannibals dancing around a camp fire weren't "primitive", they were decadent -- which is an insightful reminder in itself that a society need not pass through technology to become decadent.)
When a futuristic supplemented diet has shown itself to double lifespan in both mice and the first human trials without serious side effects, I'll be first at the door for a mass release. Until then, "old fashioned"? Thank you!
He must not care about himself then, because he put himself at risk of being sent into war for over 5 years as a young man.
Ahistorical. The National Guard was the way to have your cake and eat it too during Vietnam if you could get in. You could appear all acquiescently "patriotic" and not have to take a stand against your government's insane war yet the act of joining the National Guard meant you were very unlikely to actually _go_ to Vietnam. LIke, because it was the "Guard" of the nation. (if you understand?) Unlike W as President where the "Guard" is doing extended tours on the front lines. I think the appropriate term is "spoiled little rich hypocrite" of a president who got to party in Alabama and take time off to work on a political campaign but as president sends today's "weekend warriors" who would otherwise have lives in the real world to the front lines of _his_ insane war.
the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
I think you are repeating a popularly fatuous nihilism.
I praise sources like the British Guardian or Independent, for instance, when George Bush talks about a bioweapons site in Iraq and a paper runs an article with photos like, "Here we are on site at the CHICKEN FARM the U.S. recently called a bioweapens facility." I do demand facts from primary sources as an educated liberal. I see far too many people on the other side in the U.S. only requiring a talking head spouting groundless opinion. No one would say the New England Journal of Medicine "flatters the prejudices" of rational people but political discussion in the U.S. has completely gone down the rabbit hole of insubstantiality. Paul Krugman's judgement of the currnet state of our media is sadly on the point, "If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline 'Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.'"
But that nihilism is quite literally deranged. And there are consequences. A doubt an insane country functions any better in the world than an insane individual in society.
I know a kid who went bankrupt in high school so I see the problem. But this is a good point. In today's economy, _shouldn't_ a teenager have access to credit in order to participate?
The question is how to do it. Being old, I remember when credit card companies had "learner's" college accounts with limits like $200-$400. Maybe the companies have become so insanely greedy sending out applications for $10K-$20K limits for people's dogs that they just don't want to be bothered with miniscule accounts that train young people to be responsible? But they should.
Assault is the _threat_ of violence. Battery is committing the violence. Why shouldn't the threat of violence to a _group_ be a crime?
This is an instance where the U.S. should probably learn from the sad experience of "Old Europe". The U.S. hasn't experienced a Hitler yet and is simultaneously more fragile and dangerous for the innocence.
Slashdot Mirror
OH, WOW! Could I have been wrong all these years?
When Dubya comes for the liberals and a SWAT team with snipers, tear gas, dogs and God knows what kicks down our door in the middle of the night I'll be _so_ much more helpless than I would have been if only, IF ONLY, I had thought to buy a handgun to put under my pillow.
I better run right out and get one. Should I model myself after Sylvester? Or Arnold? Or Claude? Those guys could take on the Chinese Army singlehanded with a 45 and never die.
Let's talk:
A. Look at places that tried to restrict firearms like apartheid South Africa.
1) They didn't succeed. South Africa is still awash with apartheid-era firearms.
2) It wasn't the guns that won the revolution. It was the organizing. With a little help from the car bombs, the restaurant and nightclub bombs, torching the SASOL refinery and sanctions.
B. There are probably enough guns in the U.S. to divide them up among every adult American and they can still shoot two-handed.
C. If it comes to lone households against the troops of a regime you have already lost _everything_ and are trying to fight back from _nothing_. That may be some people's B video mountain cabin fantasy, but, for damn sure, the best thing is to make sure it never comes to that. So if your choice this weekend is to browse a firearms catalog or get politically organized with your neighbors, I would seriously suggest the latter.
[Oh, and coming from a white trash childhood, I _do_ actually possess a handgun packed away somewhere. Thank you for asking.]
If you don't live in the "belly of the beast" as it were, how do you expect to affect change?
How quaint. I read a similar sentiment with my fledgling French in LeMonde online to the effect that "The American people must see some advantage to Mr. Bush's policies or they wouldn't let him continue."
There is no "letting". This is a government out of control run by and for the corporations. It is only the lobbyists and the campaign PR experts who get listened to by Congress. Some specialty interests get "pandered" to but that isn't the same thing.
Unfortunately, there is almost no living history of effective protest in the U.S. Before people howl about Vietnam, ask yourselves, "How many of your parent's neighbors were walking arm-in-arm with you at the anti-war rally? The U.S. did a wonderfully effective propaganda effort of separating the "hippies" from the "patriots". And the "hippies" were draft age students for the most part who had a direct interest in the war.
The last effective age, gender (and perhaps at least worker and lower-middle-class)-spanning protest movements were in the early decades of the 20th century over workers' rights. And any of those remaining activists are probably 90+ years old by now. The idea that Mr. U.S. Suburbanite is going to take a day off work to drive his SUV to a rally to walk around clogging the streets around his capitol protesting is crazy talk. Anything who envisions something like that must surely live in France.
Since the government doesn't need warrants/probable cause/oversight anymore, it would be easy to set up a business to sell "confiscated" laptops second-hand.
Been there, done that? I believe the term is "government auction". You can probably find some with web sites.
You hear about police stations that are furnished with confiscated equipment like third world nations. I wonder whether they purchase them at the auctions to make it all nice and legal, but if anyone has first-hand experience.....
I've been using a junk laptop for years. Who knew I was in the avant-garde?
FedEx the _data_.
Could be the ticket.
If you are not a US citizen they can pretty much do whatever they bloody well want with the worst case scenario being that you get dragged into a Learjet sporting a fake civil registration which flies you to some US allied country in the Middle East or one of those covert jails in E-Europe
It's hard to keep up. With the new Military Act of a couple weeks back U.S. citizens can be shipped out for indefinite approved "non-tortures" too.
It's just a question of getting the executive commission in place and the channels set up so they can be funneled the names of Americans to be labeled "combattents" for material contribution.
How many old people do you see with cell phones?
Now you know why they call it generational warfare.
You've all fallen into our clever plan.
people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape."
Probably because I was dual-booting Coherent unix the first half of the 90s, OS/2 the 2nd half of the '90s and linux now, I often feel like I'm the only person left in the world who can still feel a pure warm feeling for the 80s garage software that was the original McAffee.
Everybody else invariably seems to echo, "Die McAffee, Die! Die! Die!" Which I guess is OK with me since it's just been a corporate brand name for ages anyway.
Wait until the next depression. I bet I can buy Second Life real estate for a bag of non-virtual potatoes. Will there still be added value? Sure. You could turn the bag of potatoes into vodka.
But the value of Second Life is mighty rarified.
Imagine a message on your TV telling you it's time to start the laundry!
.0.]
Yikes! You mean this isn't already on the blueprint for MythTV. v. 0.62? Considering it's only at v. 0.20 I expect HAL by version 1.0 [Yes, obviously he would be a
When people have a few more decades to look back inpartially I think it will be accepted that one of the keys to the last half of the 20th century was an exponentially increasing demographic shift from rural and blue-collar (often union) jobs to urban, pink-collar (almost invariably non-union) jobs. While technological development in these jobs has fantastically increased productivity and profits for corporations, the fact that workers have by-and-large not shared in these profits has been a major factor in destroying the middle class economic sector. And some would argue that societies without a middle class have not shown the ability to sustain a democratic republic.
Just saying. I like technology as much as the next guy, but the social effects of how it was implemented.....
And that's different from the real world how?
Just saying. Speaking from the U.S. and all.
Couldn't have said it better if he had been a British upper-crust eugenics buff in the Victorian era. In other words, the sort of belief system at the robber baron culmination of the _first_ industrial revolution that H.G. Wells was exploring. Quite the opposite to this guy's vision, I have heard a scientist at a sci fi con speculate that future people would be designed as midgets (little green men?) for the efficiency in space travel and residence.
Seriously though, how do these people get gigs as "futurists" without reading science fiction? Or perhaps I should say science fiction that isn't 100 years old? Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix was a far more profound vision. If speciation arises from isolation and adaptation, even human-directed evolution may arise the same way as we spread over the solar system and choose among various adaptation choices to various conditions.
I guess that's my core beef with the occasional stories in this thread: why are "futurists" so often so lame?
I have to see how my body is affected by a new product, and if I don't feel right, I'll not consume that product. I'm a very healthy individual, so eating something unhealthy tends to immediately make me feel a little weaker or a little out of whack.
Remember the Married with Children episode where Peg kills the TV Exercise show host when she wins a week of in-home consultation? Without resistence, a person is helpless today.
There was a time when I was in that state where I could quickly sense what was bad. About the only thing that gave me the immediate sense that it was _good_ was 100% WW bread from a bakery that claimed to personally grind the berries daily.
But can we really trust the genetic value of taste much beyond poisoning to something like carcinogens where the effects may not be felt until after reproduction?
There is nothing but net loss in hydrogen since any energy that can be extracted from it must be put in it the first place - and the Second Law wins.
/. and visualize the day when there is one linux computer for every person but even rooting for underdog technologies has its limits.
Yeah, but they'll make it up in quantity. When they build up the currently non-existent distribution network they've got it made. Sure, gasoline has the lead but does any other energy source like electricity have a distribution network? Oh, wait....
Sure, it's one thing to come to
Basically, they seem to be saying that:
precipitation = indoors = TV AND (if and only if cable AND children's programming) = autism in susceptible people.
Who knows? Maybe people who can afford cable are more likely to panel the house in formaldehyde-treated fine woods or any of a thousand other things.
Being older, I find it amusing that they assume parents before cable didn't routinely plop their infants in front of the TV because there wasn't enough children's programming. Nonsense. TV probably accounts for half my infant memory images circa 1952-3. They could as plausibly have said that Big Bird causes autism and Captain Kangaroo and 50s westerns didn't.
My, oh my. Which message to reply.
I think you have hit one of the key points. A given Ph.D. may not, in fact, qualify for Mensa. I believe the mean I.Q. in one study was just shy of 1-in-50. Varies by discipline as well. But they KNOW STUFF and are DOING STUFF. And, yes, their skills in depth investigation of their discipline often puddle over into well-developed passions in fascinating hobbies. [I've had a couple opportunities to work and party with concentrations of Ph.D.s myself.]
Local Mensa groups differ of course, but, in contrast, there is often a strong GIGO factor. Remember, the _only_ qualification is a good IQ score so you might meet a cleverly pleasant punster whose idea of quality media is Rush Limbaugh, Reader's Digest and Discover. And this is strongly reflected in the national magazine. Our local group goes out of the way to make a statement that "we're just folks" with the bible study group, the knitting group, the camping group, etc. and I could only hope they might host a symposium on an intellectually stimulating topic before I die.
On the other hand, I met my wife of 21 years at a Mensa "First Friday" of the month.
My wife and I have been running Windows virtualized on linux since 2002. I guess this means we better get a couple copies of XP running in qemu pretty soon and figure the event horizon is about another five years of useful Windows interoperability.
That's quite a long time and should work out about right considering the steady advance of crossover office, transgaming and the remaining niche programs in development on linux.
I was initially shocked too but I glossed over that it is a _private_ university and it is in _Texas_.
I graduated from a Lutheran college in Minnesota where women couldn't smoke my first year, nobody could drink on or off campus regardless of age, they closed the campus for daily chapel, no dancing during lent, obviously no men and women together in the dorms, and RAs master keyed your door on Friday and Saturday nights to see that you were there.
If the internet had been up, they probably would have censored that too. It's all part of the mindset of in loco parentis where college students are assumed not to be adults and where the administration feels justified in promoted the advertised bias. Whether you're a professor looking for a job or a student exploring admission, I would ask someone at the college about their policy on in loco parentis because it will have a huge effect on the campus atmosphere you experience.
From the CIA factbook:
Substantial revenues from the energy sector coupled with a small population give Libya one of the highest per capita GDPs in Africa, but little of this income flows down to the lower orders of society.
Qadhafi sees himself as a player in pan-African politics. This is the sort of thing he can afford to do for "his" people and the neighboring countries. Cynicism aside, it's good to see an African purchase.
(As a side note, I thought there was recently an article that the price was going up to $140? Discount on million unit sales?)
Oh, well. When University of Phoenix opens a Second Life branch, he can always go back to college. Good chance for a sports scholarship.
From the current Project Censored list:
x .htm
Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization (WTO) moved toward upholding the ruling that the European Union has violated international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods.
* Research by the Russian Academy of Sciences released in December 2005 found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy. Six times as many offspring fed GM soy were also severely underweight.
* In November 2005, a private research institute in Australia, CSIRO Plant Industry, put a halt to further development of a GM pea cultivator when it was found to cause an immune response in laboratory mice.1
* In the summer of 2005, an Italian research team led by a cellular biologist at the University of Urbino published confirmation that absorption of GM soy by mice causes development of misshapen liver cells, as well as other cellular anomalies.
* In May of 2005 the review of a highly confidential and controversial Monsanto report on test results of corn modified with Monsanto MON863 was published in The Independent/UK.
http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/inde
On the "Old Fashioned" taunt. The guy who brought macrobiotics to the U.S. made a stopover of some years in Paris. People would occasionally say, "From China? Oh, how primitive." And he would say "Thank you!" To him primitive was something like "primal" with that Asian orientation toward living in harmony with nature. (And to him, cannibals dancing around a camp fire weren't "primitive", they were decadent -- which is an insightful reminder in itself that a society need not pass through technology to become decadent.)
When a futuristic supplemented diet has shown itself to double lifespan in both mice and the first human trials without serious side effects, I'll be first at the door for a mass release. Until then, "old fashioned"? Thank you!
He must not care about himself then, because he put himself at risk of being sent into war for over 5 years as a young man.
Ahistorical. The National Guard was the way to have your cake and eat it too during Vietnam if you could get in. You could appear all acquiescently "patriotic" and not have to take a stand against your government's insane war yet the act of joining the National Guard meant you were very unlikely to actually _go_ to Vietnam. LIke, because it was the "Guard" of the nation. (if you understand?) Unlike W as President where the "Guard" is doing extended tours on the front lines. I think the appropriate term is "spoiled little rich hypocrite" of a president who got to party in Alabama and take time off to work on a political campaign but as president sends today's "weekend warriors" who would otherwise have lives in the real world to the front lines of _his_ insane war.
the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
I think you are repeating a popularly fatuous nihilism.
I praise sources like the British Guardian or Independent, for instance, when George Bush talks about a bioweapons site in Iraq and a paper runs an article with photos like, "Here we are on site at the CHICKEN FARM the U.S. recently called a bioweapens facility." I do demand facts from primary sources as an educated liberal. I see far too many people on the other side in the U.S. only requiring a talking head spouting groundless opinion. No one would say the New England Journal of Medicine "flatters the prejudices" of rational people but political discussion in the U.S. has completely gone down the rabbit hole of insubstantiality. Paul Krugman's judgement of the currnet state of our media is sadly on the point, "If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline 'Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.'"
But that nihilism is quite literally deranged. And there are consequences. A doubt an insane country functions any better in the world than an insane individual in society.
I know a kid who went bankrupt in high school so I see the problem. But this is a good point. In today's economy, _shouldn't_ a teenager have access to credit in order to participate?
The question is how to do it. Being old, I remember when credit card companies had "learner's" college accounts with limits like $200-$400. Maybe the companies have become so insanely greedy sending out applications for $10K-$20K limits for people's dogs that they just don't want to be bothered with miniscule accounts that train young people to be responsible? But they should.
Assault is the _threat_ of violence. Battery is committing the violence. Why shouldn't the threat of violence to a _group_ be a crime?
This is an instance where the U.S. should probably learn from the sad experience of "Old Europe". The U.S. hasn't experienced a Hitler yet and is simultaneously more fragile and dangerous for the innocence.