Randy Mann is a weatherman for the Spokesman Review, a newspaper out of Spokane Washington, and is known locally for his ant-GW rants. But the real gem here is Cliff Harris. Although, according to the site, he "has been...rated as one of the top ten climatologists in the world for nearly 4 decades", he is entirely self-taught, having studied weather since he was "nine years old". In his predictions,
...he bases his predictions on a wide variety of scientific resources and historical records. "He's also a devout Christian and believes the Bible is loaded with clues on predicting the weather."
The evidence for my case about the relationship between conservatives and reality keeps piling up...
the guy who watches Colbert for news is sad...
...until it overflows! Friend, the fact that you somehow think that I watch Colbert for news, pretty much proves my point. Thanks for playing.
or you could go the route Heinlein outlined in one of his books, where the franchise (voting) only passed to those that served,
This suggestion is remarkably un-American: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". Under the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independance, if only military and ex-military people can vote (a form of military dicatorship, to be sure), then the government has just power only over those people.
Or to put it another way, the franchise had to be earned.
Voting is not a priviledge to be earned. If government is to have any legitamacy, voting must be a fundamental right.
I actually think we ought to have mandatory military service for everyone along with the option of other forms of community service for conscientious objectors (maybe infrastructure development).
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." -- Amendment XIII, United States Constitution
I always turn to Comedy Central for my news and facts.
Ok, friend, let me explain to to you real slow...
Conservatives often complain about a "liberal bias" in the mainstream media. There is no such thing, of course - media outlets are as conservative as the corporations that own them, journalists tend slightly to the right on economic issues (though, like most educated groups, more liberal on social ones), and their coverage features government and business leaders much more than labor leaders or consumer advocates. Still, the meme is well-known, and is a frequent tactic for neoconservative apologists: "Bush's policies are working great. Things just look bad because of that pesky liberal bias in the media."
Stephen Colbert is a very clever man. He knows about this "liberal bias" idea, and that it's a myth. He has made a running joke of neoconservatives' inability to face facts and admit that their reign has been failure after failure. Perhaps you've heard of Colbert's idea of truthiness?
The high point (so far) of this running joke was when Colbert spoke at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last yea. He said "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
I was not citing him as a source. I was quoting his clever summation of how, on issues from the teaching of evolution to climate change to the invasion of Iraq to supply-side economics, the conservative position has been consistently at odds with the facts. They don't pay attention to the polls or to anything else that disagrees with their preconceptions.
Many of the KOSacks wondered about that, but it was a serious post.
Who writes, "The prayers would be different, but we would recite them just as mindlessly as we do today. The sermons would in all likelihood be exactly the same, and wed continue to snore through them." Heck, that sounds like something Twain might write.
It's good satire. Your inability to recognize it as such would sadden me - except that, darn it, you're just helping prove my point.
As opposed to Socialism, which uses the power of the state to concentrate economic power into the hands of the state leaders.
State socialism, yes. The point is that state socialism is not the only form. Libertarian socialism opposes the concentration of power by any means. (Libertarian socialism is a.k.a. anarchism - it's the original "libertarianism", before some capitalists tried to appropriate the term.) It stands opposed both to Big Government and to Big Business.
The term "socialism" has been so demonized in the U.S. since the Red Scares of the earth 20th century,
that most Americans think socialism, Marxism, and Stalinism are all the same thing. They're not. There are many different type of socialist thought.
Explain to me: how will banning guns remove guns from the hands of violent criminals, particularly considering that violent criminals, by definition, will not obey gun control laws? Does reality have a liberal bias on *that* issue, o great liberal avatar?
Positions on gun control correlate more strongly with urban vs. rural geography than directly with liberal or conservative views. Remember that it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who, as governor of California, signed the Mulford Act - which was targeted at gun-toting leftist Black Panthers.
I know plenty of liberals with guns - the more progressive, the more likely to have a gun, or at least support the RKBA. I'm an armed leftist myself, and I agree with noted socialist writer George Orwell that "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
Since you probably fancy yourself both educated and informed, tell me why single women tend to vote Democrat while married women tend to vote Republican.
Uh, do you have to ask?
People who are socially conservative, believe in traditional gender roles and are more likely to get married young and less likely to get divorce. Therefore they spend more of their lives married. People who believe they have their own value outside of a breeding couple (just joshin' ya, married friends) are more likely to delay marriage, or not marry at all, and to leave a unhappy marriage; even those who do marry are likely to spend more of their lives single than their more conservative peers.
And again, education comes into it: women with higher education - which correlates well with more liberal views - are more likely to delay marriage, staying longer in the "single" column.
An additional factor is that single mothers also tend to rely more on the "social safety net", an issue that gives an advantage to Democrats. But I'd guess that most of the difference comes from conservatives putting more importance on mating and being more likely to believe that they need the sanction of the Church and the state to sleep together, while liberals are more willing to make their own life, or to partner up without a licence from the government.
Your data shows no connection between the faulty "Iraq-9/11" meme and conservatism
Editing error, mea culpa. I had an additional paragraph in there that I must have accidently deleted, which pointed out (from the same article I linked to above) that 40 percent of Republicans believe Saddam was involved in 9/11, while just 27 percent of Democrats do.
Actually, I was citing Stephen Colbert, source of the "liberal bias" soundbite.
actually ran a story saying that we could end all wars with Islamic countries if we just submitted to the will of Allah and became a Muslim country....(and no, it was not a joke)
It wasn't a joke, no; it was just a modest proposal. You need to get your satire detector re-calibrated.
I believe you mean Capitalism as practiced in the U.S. uses the power of the state, etc. But to me, that's not Capitalism
What is capitalism without state-issued land and resource deeds, state-issued corporate charters, state-issued patents and copyrights? Without the state to enforce rent and mortgage payments, to keep the workers from taking over the factory? To enforce the priviledge of the few?
The defining characteristic of capitalism is the private, rather than democratic, control of capital. That takes the power of the state to create and defend artificial property rights. It's natural that a human being control his home, his tools, his toys, the stored fruits of his labor represented as currency; it's not natural that he contol huge tracts of land, large amounts of wealth generated by the labor of others, or the tools that others use to perform their labor.
It happened 90 years ago. I wish people would just get on with their lives we got more problems today with other wars which are killing people but we never spend the time to think about them.
WWI created the conditions for the Russian Revolution and formation of the Soviet Union. The treatment of Germany at its end set the stage for WWII; the aftermath of WWII lead to the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which led to U.S. support for Iraq and the Taliban...
We are still in the aftershocks of World War One. Indeed, I would not be surprised if future historians just call the period from 1914 to, maybe, 2064 as "the World War Age" or something. (Assuming, and hoping, that there will be human historians far enough into the future to get perspective on it all.)
So much for "progressives" being about the "common man"!..."Progressives" represent the wealthy, the white, and the privileged.
Because reality has a well-known liberal bias, educated and informed people tend to be more liberal - for example, being against the Iraq invasion, understanding the illegitimacy of the Bush administration and its actions, and being in favor of public policy based on sound science.
economic and political self determination, the hallmarks of laissez faire capitalism.
Capitalism uses the power of the state to concentrate economic power into the hands of a few. Political power rapidly follows. Talk of "self determination" in the presense of radical imbalances in power and wealth is meaningless. Capitalism is inconsistent with economic and political self determination for the majority of citizens.
The GP is correct, though fascism is really somewhat of a subset of socialism.
Not so much.
Socialism is an economic system based on the exchange of labor and the democratic control of economic resources (capital). It contrasts with capitalism, an economic system based on the control of capital by a state-designated and backed minority of "owners". It comes in libertarian and authoritarian, free-market and command-economy, flavors. The "state socialism" of Stalin and Mao was authoritarian, command-economy, stupid, and brutal; that doesn't mean it was the only sort possible - see Proudhon and Bakunin.
Fascism is an authoritarian, nationalist, anti-individualist, and anti-democratic political system. According to Mussolini,
Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.... The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.... Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number
In term of concentration and centralization of power into the hands of the government, fascism and state socialism trend the same way, but the goals of that power concentration are different. Marx believed - and this would be cutely naive if it hadn't caused so much misery - that once the workers have revolted and tossed out the parasitic capitalists and formed a government of the workers, the state will wither away. (He didn't understand that once a group of workers form a powerful government, they're not workers anymore.) Fascism would never even dream about removing the state. And Marxism is more universal than nationalist - "Workers of the world, unite!"
[Nazis] were socialists, not communists, though.
Only in the same way that the German Democratic Republic (Google it, kids, if you're too young to remember) was "democratic" and a "republic". Nations and political movements lie in self-description all the damn time.
The Nazis were nationalists and totalitarians first and foremost; they believed in an international banking cabal run by the Jews, and so rejected a lot of the world of capitalist finance. And they were savvy enough to understand that making a lot of noise about "the workers" would get them more popular support. But they were quite happy to leave German corporations in private hands - they didn't nationalize BMW or Krupp, but instead provided them with slaves. Quite a public/private partnership.
1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.
Using people's personal information in advertising is a violation of this policy. So, yes, you will have good luck in fighting it.
Facebook, for the most part, is a place to post information about yourself for the community to see. That is fundamentally in contrast with the practice of privacy.
Nonsense. Facebook is purported to be a place to post information that you choose to post about yourself for the members of the community you choose to see. Social networking doesn't mean telling the world every detail of your life (unless that's what you want to do); it's about telling the people you choose, what you choose.
Facebook's privacy policy says "You should have control over your personal information." If they were to use people's images in advertising without permission, they would be in violation of that policy, and ought to be sued into oblivion.
This is why every US slashdotter over the age of 18 needs to register and vote in 2008. Just griping about the current situations won't change anything.
And neither will voting, so long as the current system gives us crappy candidates, and prevents any decent ones who get into office from being able to do anything.
Yes, register and vote. It's like basic hygiene for democracies - brush your teeth twice a day, shower daily, vote biennially. Write in folks if you don't like anyone listed. (Feel free to write me in for President, I'm Constitutionally eligible now.) At least vote on bond issues and ballot questions.
But if you've got a serious disease, you need more than basic hygiene. A bunch of folks voted in 2006 - but nothing really changed. We washed off some of the stink, but the rotting inside remains.
Felons (not necessarily convicts) could work to elect a local Sheriff that was lax on enforcement.
Yes. That's democracy. Citizens who don't like the way the government is doing things work to change that government.
Let's consider at various points in our history what "felonies" might people have commited. Bootlegging. Helping slaves escape. Helping women get to doctors who'll perform abortions. I'd say it was a damn good thing that people who did these things were able to vote and change the system.
You see, when you add the idea of fossil "Co2" emmisions to the mix, you have to consider the same for production on the clean energy devices and transportation.
Of course. Eventually, though, renewable energy can be self-supporting. It's sort of like make a new operating system self-hosting; you need another system to start the development, until the infrastructure is build. We'll need to keep using fossil energy to build the infrastructure for renewables. As the sticker cost of fossil energy increases towards its true cost, that has to get factored into decisions made in building the renewable energy infrastructure.
I read once the only way ethanol production is profitable is because it uses fossil fuels for energy in the production cycles that increase the already small gain in energy seen from using it.
Ethanol from corn is a completely stupid idea, having more to do with profits for agribusiness than sustainable energy. Sensible biofuels use waste biomass, or easy-care weed crops. Even so, even though it is just about a worse-case example of biofules, corn ethanol still produces more energy than is put it.
We do not go to war over oil. Never have.
Har de har har. Nations go to war over natural resources all the time. Ideology and religion are used to whip up the masses, but the base cause is much more often about land or stuff that can extracted from it.
The U.S. is not an exception. We stuck our nose into Vietnam to keep tungsten and tin coming and fought with Japan over who would get to colonize the Pacific in WWII (how do you think we ended up with a naval base in Pearl Harbor, sugar?).
Our foreign policy interest in the Middle East is to keep the oil flowing to us and away from our rivals. It's not to promote democracy - we knocked over a democratic government in Iran to install a friendly Shah, stayed buddies with the Saudis, even supported Saddam Hussein for years. This foreign policy has tremendous costs, including wars and other military spending, foreign aid, and intangibles such as looking like an ass to the rest of the world. If you paid for those at the pump and on your heating oil bill, the picture would look very different.
Virtualization is the wave of the future there is no reason for me to have a computer on my desk, truly a waste of resources.
So you have no data you wish to keep private and off of other people's computers? And you have a completely reliable network conenction that is so blindingly fast you can do, say, video editing over the net?
Sure, a lot of business computing makes more sense with a centalized virtualized setup and a bunch on thin clients. But there's also plenty of call for Personal Computers.
Suddenly, it's no longer gospel who your TOP x-number of friends are. The volume, density/depth, duration, constancy, and such of your communications will determine publicly or privately who your REAL best friends are.
Sorry, but this is a very silly idea. Friendship is related to the depth of communication, not the amount of data exchanged. And e-messaging is only a small part of communication.
If I don't e-message somebody much, it might be because I actually spend time with them because they are a good friend. I don't need Google to tell me who my best friends are - and to get it wrong.
Which is why we don't need a standing army beyond state militias. (Aka, the National Guard.)
I agree that standing armies are ungood (and with your other points as well); however, the Guard is an Army reserve body, not really state militias, since the National Guard Mobilization Act in 1933 and the post-Vietnam "Total Force Policy".
Yes, they call it both militia and reserve in various laws, but here's how to tell the difference: the feds can call on the militia only to "execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." They can't send the militia to go invade another country. If they can send your ass to Iraq, you ain't in a militia, you're in the Army.
That you're just going to wake up one day and live in a police state?
Police state? Dude, you're soaking in it.
Forget the "War on Terror". The "War on Drugs" brought us to police-state levels a long time ago. We have the largest prison population - raw numbers and per-capita - in the world. The Bill of Rights was shredded in the 1980s to go after drug dealers - no-knock warrants, civil forfeiture, the normalization of chemical drug screens, censorship of information and opinions at odds with "just say no" - indeed the very idea that the state can regulate your body, your nervous system.
If you're white, in the social and political mainstream, and your lifestyle choices lean more toward Budweiser and Camels than cannabis and psilocybin, until recently it's been a mostly-benign dictatorship. But Americans interested in exercising their freedom to explore political, social, and neurological alternatives have been enduring heavy-handed abuses of police power for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
The guys behind that site are cranks of the first order:
The evidence for my case about the relationship between conservatives and reality keeps piling up...
...until it overflows! Friend, the fact that you somehow think that I watch Colbert for news, pretty much proves my point. Thanks for playing.
This suggestion is remarkably un-American: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". Under the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independance, if only military and ex-military people can vote (a form of military dicatorship, to be sure), then the government has just power only over those people.
Voting is not a priviledge to be earned. If government is to have any legitamacy, voting must be a fundamental right.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." -- Amendment XIII, United States Constitution
Ok, friend, let me explain to to you real slow...
Conservatives often complain about a "liberal bias" in the mainstream media. There is no such thing, of course - media outlets are as conservative as the corporations that own them, journalists tend slightly to the right on economic issues (though, like most educated groups, more liberal on social ones), and their coverage features government and business leaders much more than labor leaders or consumer advocates. Still, the meme is well-known, and is a frequent tactic for neoconservative apologists: "Bush's policies are working great. Things just look bad because of that pesky liberal bias in the media."
Stephen Colbert is a very clever man. He knows about this "liberal bias" idea, and that it's a myth. He has made a running joke of neoconservatives' inability to face facts and admit that their reign has been failure after failure. Perhaps you've heard of Colbert's idea of truthiness?
The high point (so far) of this running joke was when Colbert spoke at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last yea. He said "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
I was not citing him as a source. I was quoting his clever summation of how, on issues from the teaching of evolution to climate change to the invasion of Iraq to supply-side economics, the conservative position has been consistently at odds with the facts. They don't pay attention to the polls or to anything else that disagrees with their preconceptions.
Evidence, please. You expect serious posts from the nym "Yacka Jah Yacka"? Who posts a poll on their page with two answers, both "yes"? Who posts a comment which links to an image from a Monty Python film?
Who writes, "The prayers would be different, but we would recite them just as mindlessly as we do today. The sermons would in all likelihood be exactly the same, and wed continue to snore through them." Heck, that sounds like something Twain might write.
It's good satire. Your inability to recognize it as such would sadden me - except that, darn it, you're just helping prove my point.
State socialism, yes. The point is that state socialism is not the only form. Libertarian socialism opposes the concentration of power by any means. (Libertarian socialism is a.k.a. anarchism - it's the original "libertarianism", before some capitalists tried to appropriate the term.) It stands opposed both to Big Government and to Big Business.
The term "socialism" has been so demonized in the U.S. since the Red Scares of the earth 20th century, that most Americans think socialism, Marxism, and Stalinism are all the same thing. They're not. There are many different type of socialist thought.
Positions on gun control correlate more strongly with urban vs. rural geography than directly with liberal or conservative views. Remember that it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who, as governor of California, signed the Mulford Act - which was targeted at gun-toting leftist Black Panthers.
I know plenty of liberals with guns - the more progressive, the more likely to have a gun, or at least support the RKBA. I'm an armed leftist myself, and I agree with noted socialist writer George Orwell that "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
Uh, do you have to ask?
People who are socially conservative, believe in traditional gender roles and are more likely to get married young and less likely to get divorce. Therefore they spend more of their lives married. People who believe they have their own value outside of a breeding couple (just joshin' ya, married friends) are more likely to delay marriage, or not marry at all, and to leave a unhappy marriage; even those who do marry are likely to spend more of their lives single than their more conservative peers.
And again, education comes into it: women with higher education - which correlates well with more liberal views - are more likely to delay marriage, staying longer in the "single" column.
An additional factor is that single mothers also tend to rely more on the "social safety net", an issue that gives an advantage to Democrats. But I'd guess that most of the difference comes from conservatives putting more importance on mating and being more likely to believe that they need the sanction of the Church and the state to sleep together, while liberals are more willing to make their own life, or to partner up without a licence from the government.
Editing error, mea culpa. I had an additional paragraph in there that I must have accidently deleted, which pointed out (from the same article I linked to above) that 40 percent of Republicans believe Saddam was involved in 9/11, while just 27 percent of Democrats do.
Actually, I was citing Stephen Colbert, source of the "liberal bias" soundbite.
It wasn't a joke, no; it was just a modest proposal. You need to get your satire detector re-calibrated.
What is capitalism without state-issued land and resource deeds, state-issued corporate charters, state-issued patents and copyrights? Without the state to enforce rent and mortgage payments, to keep the workers from taking over the factory? To enforce the priviledge of the few?
The defining characteristic of capitalism is the private, rather than democratic, control of capital. That takes the power of the state to create and defend artificial property rights. It's natural that a human being control his home, his tools, his toys, the stored fruits of his labor represented as currency; it's not natural that he contol huge tracts of land, large amounts of wealth generated by the labor of others, or the tools that others use to perform their labor.
Ahem. World War I led to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the British Mandates of Mesopotamia and Palestine,. The former became Iraq. With the later, the British cut backroom deals where they double-crossed the Arabs living in Palestine and promised the land to the Zionist movement. A bit relevant today, no?
WWI created the conditions for the Russian Revolution and formation of the Soviet Union. The treatment of Germany at its end set the stage for WWII; the aftermath of WWII lead to the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which led to U.S. support for Iraq and the Taliban...
We are still in the aftershocks of World War One. Indeed, I would not be surprised if future historians just call the period from 1914 to, maybe, 2064 as "the World War Age" or something. (Assuming, and hoping, that there will be human historians far enough into the future to get perspective on it all.)
Because reality has a well-known liberal bias, educated and informed people tend to be more liberal - for example, being against the Iraq invasion, understanding the illegitimacy of the Bush administration and its actions, and being in favor of public policy based on sound science.
Take the purported connection between Iraq and 9/11. There wasn't one. Educated people are likely to know this, while ignorant people are more likely to believe there was such a link. Eighty percent of college graduates know there's no link, while only 56% percent of people with a high school education or less understand this.
Capitalism uses the power of the state to concentrate economic power into the hands of a few. Political power rapidly follows. Talk of "self determination" in the presense of radical imbalances in power and wealth is meaningless. Capitalism is inconsistent with economic and political self determination for the majority of citizens.
Not so much.
Socialism is an economic system based on the exchange of labor and the democratic control of economic resources (capital). It contrasts with capitalism, an economic system based on the control of capital by a state-designated and backed minority of "owners". It comes in libertarian and authoritarian, free-market and command-economy, flavors. The "state socialism" of Stalin and Mao was authoritarian, command-economy, stupid, and brutal; that doesn't mean it was the only sort possible - see Proudhon and Bakunin.
Fascism is an authoritarian, nationalist, anti-individualist, and anti-democratic political system. According to Mussolini,
In term of concentration and centralization of power into the hands of the government, fascism and state socialism trend the same way, but the goals of that power concentration are different. Marx believed - and this would be cutely naive if it hadn't caused so much misery - that once the workers have revolted and tossed out the parasitic capitalists and formed a government of the workers, the state will wither away. (He didn't understand that once a group of workers form a powerful government, they're not workers anymore.) Fascism would never even dream about removing the state. And Marxism is more universal than nationalist - "Workers of the world, unite!"
Only in the same way that the German Democratic Republic (Google it, kids, if you're too young to remember) was "democratic" and a "republic". Nations and political movements lie in self-description all the damn time.
The Nazis were nationalists and totalitarians first and foremost; they believed in an international banking cabal run by the Jews, and so rejected a lot of the world of capitalist finance. And they were savvy enough to understand that making a lot of noise about "the workers" would get them more popular support. But they were quite happy to leave German corporations in private hands - they didn't nationalize BMW or Krupp, but instead provided them with slaves. Quite a public/private partnership.
Great. I'll be by this evening to install all the webcams in your home and car. Some voyeurs will pay to watch anyone.
Of course, they'll be paying me, not you; just like these Facebook ads benefit it, not members.
But hey, you don't care, so why shouldn't I profit?
From their Privacy Policy:
Using people's personal information in advertising is a violation of this policy. So, yes, you will have good luck in fighting it.
Nonsense. Facebook is purported to be a place to post information that you choose to post about yourself for the members of the community you choose to see. Social networking doesn't mean telling the world every detail of your life (unless that's what you want to do); it's about telling the people you choose, what you choose.
Facebook's privacy policy says "You should have control over your personal information." If they were to use people's images in advertising without permission, they would be in violation of that policy, and ought to be sued into oblivion.
And neither will voting, so long as the current system gives us crappy candidates, and prevents any decent ones who get into office from being able to do anything.
Yes, register and vote. It's like basic hygiene for democracies - brush your teeth twice a day, shower daily, vote biennially. Write in folks if you don't like anyone listed. (Feel free to write me in for President, I'm Constitutionally eligible now.) At least vote on bond issues and ballot questions.
But if you've got a serious disease, you need more than basic hygiene. A bunch of folks voted in 2006 - but nothing really changed. We washed off some of the stink, but the rotting inside remains.
Yes. That's democracy. Citizens who don't like the way the government is doing things work to change that government.
Let's consider at various points in our history what "felonies" might people have commited. Bootlegging. Helping slaves escape. Helping women get to doctors who'll perform abortions. I'd say it was a damn good thing that people who did these things were able to vote and change the system.
Just wanted to say congratulations, and rock on.
BMI, scales, even body fat percentage don't tell the tale nearly as well as how you feel and what you can do.
Of course. Eventually, though, renewable energy can be self-supporting. It's sort of like make a new operating system self-hosting; you need another system to start the development, until the infrastructure is build. We'll need to keep using fossil energy to build the infrastructure for renewables. As the sticker cost of fossil energy increases towards its true cost, that has to get factored into decisions made in building the renewable energy infrastructure.
Ethanol from corn is a completely stupid idea, having more to do with profits for agribusiness than sustainable energy. Sensible biofuels use waste biomass, or easy-care weed crops. Even so, even though it is just about a worse-case example of biofules, corn ethanol still produces more energy than is put it.
Har de har har. Nations go to war over natural resources all the time. Ideology and religion are used to whip up the masses, but the base cause is much more often about land or stuff that can extracted from it.
The U.S. is not an exception. We stuck our nose into Vietnam to keep tungsten and tin coming and fought with Japan over who would get to colonize the Pacific in WWII (how do you think we ended up with a naval base in Pearl Harbor, sugar?).
Our foreign policy interest in the Middle East is to keep the oil flowing to us and away from our rivals. It's not to promote democracy - we knocked over a democratic government in Iran to install a friendly Shah, stayed buddies with the Saudis, even supported Saddam Hussein for years. This foreign policy has tremendous costs, including wars and other military spending, foreign aid, and intangibles such as looking like an ass to the rest of the world. If you paid for those at the pump and on your heating oil bill, the picture would look very different.
Cash payments to energy companies are a tiny part of the subsidies.
Being permitted to pollute - including fossil CO2 emissions - is a tremendous subsidy.
A foreign policy - including going to war - aimed at keeping the oil flowing is also a tremendous subsidy.
So you have no data you wish to keep private and off of other people's computers? And you have a completely reliable network conenction that is so blindingly fast you can do, say, video editing over the net?
Sure, a lot of business computing makes more sense with a centalized virtualized setup and a bunch on thin clients. But there's also plenty of call for Personal Computers.
Sorry, but this is a very silly idea. Friendship is related to the depth of communication, not the amount of data exchanged. And e-messaging is only a small part of communication.
If I don't e-message somebody much, it might be because I actually spend time with them because they are a good friend. I don't need Google to tell me who my best friends are - and to get it wrong.
I agree that standing armies are ungood (and with your other points as well); however, the Guard is an Army reserve body, not really state militias, since the National Guard Mobilization Act in 1933 and the post-Vietnam "Total Force Policy".
Yes, they call it both militia and reserve in various laws, but here's how to tell the difference: the feds can call on the militia only to "execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." They can't send the militia to go invade another country. If they can send your ass to Iraq, you ain't in a militia, you're in the Army.
Some states have State Defense Forces, which are militias.
Police state? Dude, you're soaking in it.
Forget the "War on Terror". The "War on Drugs" brought us to police-state levels a long time ago. We have the largest prison population - raw numbers and per-capita - in the world. The Bill of Rights was shredded in the 1980s to go after drug dealers - no-knock warrants, civil forfeiture, the normalization of chemical drug screens, censorship of information and opinions at odds with "just say no" - indeed the very idea that the state can regulate your body, your nervous system.
If you're white, in the social and political mainstream, and your lifestyle choices lean more toward Budweiser and Camels than cannabis and psilocybin, until recently it's been a mostly-benign dictatorship. But Americans interested in exercising their freedom to explore political, social, and neurological alternatives have been enduring heavy-handed abuses of police power for decades.