doesn't it bother you that the White House has power to yank any TV show they don't like? Just by picking up the phone, calling the cable channel, and demanding it be removed or else the channel would be audited.
It would indeed bother me greatly if it were the the case. My question is, can someone provide a reliable source showing that it is the case that the White House has done this?
Please note that even if the organization in question is facing an audit, that doesn't mean that the audit is because Obama called the IRS and said "get these guys!" If an audit is occurring, it could be random, or it could be due to irregularities in their tax paperwork. (I'm guessing good odds that there's a correlation between folks who believe in the FEMA camps and people who believe in wacky tax resister theories.)
It's their choice as to what they sell. It is also not censorship.
Yes, it is censorship. I know apologists for corporatism like to pretend that only the government can censor, but that's not what the word means: when a business says "this is objectionable" rather than "people won't buy this", that's censorship. (And in a self-publishing marketplace, "people won't buy this" doesn't matter.)
And that's not just my opinion, and not just a dictionary definition of the word -- Amazon's own statement describes their current actions as censorship: "Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable."
- Can amazon send cops to raid my house or give me a Rodney King-style beating? Nope.
- Can amazon arrest me and put me in jail? Nope.
Under a capitalist state, corporations like Amazon have the government to raid your house or put you in jail for them, under laws like the DMCA. Adobe had the FBI to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov. The BSA has U.S. marshals to carry guns for them. Why should they bother to have their own cops or jails?
I see. So for example, Adolph Hitler should have been allowed to do as he pleased with the Jews. Is that what your telling me?
That was, in fact, the policy of the U.S. and other Western powers. We did not go to war with the Nazis to save Jews, we did it because they were invading other nations. In fact, reports of the Holocaust were being downplayed as late as 1943.
There are alternatives between letting a nation engage in genocide without comment or penalty, and invading that nation.
What is so difficult to understand about such a simple concept of "right" and "wrong"?
Apparently, it's difficult for you to understand that "right" and "wrong" are not always such simple concepts.
Many aspects of Hitler's programs were based on American policies like the genocide of Native nations and forced sterilization in the name of eugenics. Should other nations have invaded us to stop our actions? Where do you draw the line?
The question of using deadly force is never a "simple" question, and I fear anyone who thinks that it is almost as much as I fear tyrants and dictators -- for such people are all too likely to foolishly support tyrants and dictators who promise simple, black-and-white solutions.
But not in the case of Japan. They worshipped their emperor as a god - to the extent that we had to allow the emperor to retain his figurehead status as a practical matter.
Japan was a fairly functional democracy during the Taisho period. Like Weimar Germany, though -- and perhaps like the contemporary U.S. -- democracy was not strong enough to survive militarism and imperialism.
The perversion of Shinto to make the Emperor a "living god" in the service of ultra-nationalism had its roots in the reaction to the U.S. prying Japan open to trade. The "black ships" in 1853 started the chain of events that led to Pearl Harbor in 1941; we should learn from that before we go mucking about in the internal affairs of other nations.
Wow, must be nice to be able to judge, without reservations, someone in a corrupt, violent, third world country who is trying to weaken a brutal dictator. And to do it from the comfort of your pleasant, suburban existence.
I think that even from my reasonably comfortable suburban existence, I can judge that trying to weaken a brutal dictator via lies and deceit is a highly non-optimal strategy, and gives us reason to suspect that the person engaging in such actions may have their own interests in mind more than the interests of the people living under said dictator.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend; sometime he's just an asshole of a different stripe. Failing to realize this has been one of the reasons that American foreign policy has been so brutal and stupid.
Not in a thread about the Apollo program, no, since that was about Mercury. And Mercury broke no new ground, the USSR had already put Gagarin in orbit.
About a month ago the White House called TRUtv and told them to stop airing Governor Ventura's show about FEMA internment camps* on TV or their website.
I didn't suppose you have anything resembling a reliable source for this claim about pressure from the White House on the wackos at TRUtv? (No, claims by Alex Jones don't count as reliable, sorry.)
The FEMA camps and coffins BS was debunked long ago. Of course, to conspiracy theory dingbats, that just means they got to Popular Mechanics too. That's the beauty of the big conspiracy theory: it's unfalsifiable.
On the other hand. Amazon deciding the the feds are a more profitable customer than WikiLeaks doesn't take any deep conspiracy theory to explain it
Too many people are passive and pliable and waiting for some prominent figure to tell them what, how, and who they should be.
And then your sig quotes Einstein, prominent scientist. Ah, irony.
It's a total rejection of the individual freedom for which our ancestors fought and died.
The vast majority of the fighting and dying that's taken place on this planet has had much more to do with the glory or benefit of various prominent figures -- kings, priests, presidents, capitalists -- than with any sort of individual freedom.
Not quite true. If I don't like the way "big business" is regulating the Internet, I'm free to start my own business to compete with "big business," one which is less expensive and provides more features to customers. This is still possible even in today's heavily regulated free market economy.
No, it's not possible to start your own business to compete with multinational megacorporations, not in any meaningful or useful sense. Everybody hates all of the cell phone carriers, everybody hates their cable company, but very few people have meaningful choice available -- at best it's giant douche vs. turd sandwich. Why? Because big business doesn't compete on cost and features; it "competes" on controlling the market. As James K. Galbraith, explaining his father's work, put it, "Corporations exist to control markets, and often to replace them. Business leaders reduce uncertainty not through clairvoyance (or 'perfect foresight,' as the economics textbooks call it), nor by confident exploitation of probability ('portfolio diversification'). They do it by forming organizations large enough to forge the future for themselves."
On the other hand, I am not free to start a competing government and remain an American citizen.
But you can take over the existing government, if you get a majority of voters to back you. You can't take over an existing megacorporation, or compete with one, unless you get a majority of the dollars to back you.
If you're from Europe, where everything is left or far left, America does indeed look like it is right or far right. It all depends upon where you stand on the "left vs right" line. But America has always had a strong individual streak compared to old Europe, and its perpetual caste system.
I know that this data does not fit with American mythology, and so will probably be discarded by most of my fellow Americans.
Being leftist -- that is, in favor of the interests of working people as opposed to aristocrats or capitalists -- is far more compatible with a strong individualist streak than right-wing thought. There's nothing "individualist" about favoring a system that leaves most individuals few degrees of freedom, enthralled to their corporate masters.
We don't have a strong left in the U.S. because for much of the 20th century we deported socialists, or outright criminalized talking about leftism, for the years of "Red Scares", and because the flow of information remains dominated by right-wing corporate media.
So you would have preferred that Congress remained deadlocked, and not passed the 9/11 first responders health care legislation? If so, fsck you and the horse you rode in on, buddy. Not to mention the repeal of DADT, where a deadlocked Congress would have meant the persistence of legally enshrined bigotry and dishonor in our armed forces.
I know "government is the problem, not the solution" has been an axiom of the far right since the Reagan era and the start of our decline into plutocracy and idiocracy, but I'd hoped that such a shining example of inactive government being a negative outcome would have temporarily restored some sense.
Citation needed. Moveon.org has millions of members (according to the wik, it claims over 5 million) who are not George Soros, and the majority of its funding has come form non-George Soros members. It was founded by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, neither of whom are George Soros. George Soros is, AFAIKT, not a member of MoveOn.org's board of directors or anything.
One may like or dislike MoveOn.org and/or Soros, but to state them as equivalent is inaccurate, even dishonest.
For all the/. whining about camera's in public places not one word of protest is raised about the many hundreds of thousand private security cameras installed in the same type of places.
Acutally I've been complaining about those for years, thanks. Steve Mann's been talking about them for at least 15 years.
Criminals are by definition cowards given courage by anonymity, remove that and they revert to their craven state.
No, actually criminals are by definition those who violate laws. Depending on the law in question, violating it may be a cowardly act, or an act of bravery, or neither.
B) To encourage this behavior, we're going to incentivize marriage at the government-subsidy level, the employee benefit level, and others.
And here is where this argument falls completely flat. Infertile couples are permitted to marry, and that has been the case for centuries -- elderly couples could marry long before birth control. The legal institution of civil marriage has nothing to do with bearing children.
Same network, same phone, just a whole lot more expensive.
Not the same network, though, since Virgin's plans have no roaming and leave you with dead air when you're off Sprint's network, while Sprint's plans will let you roam on to Verizon's network.
Shame, because otherwise the Virgin plan looks great for my needs. But I need my phone to work when I'm outside of major metropolitan areas. I don't need it to work there often, and would even pay roaming changes, but even that's not an option with Virgin, unless I'm missing something.
I do not need to fool myself into thinking cows are not conscious in order to enjoy eating them. Enjoy your lies.
Interesting. Most people who slaughter non-human animals for their pleasure (since flesh eating is not required for survival or health, pleasure is the only reason for it in any modern society) simply deny that they are conscious.
If you understand that non-human animals are indeed conscious, I'd be curious to know why you find it acceptable to slaughter them but not human animals. (Assuming, of course, that humans are off your menu, and that you wouldn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.) What is the quality possessed exclusively by human animals that causes you to treat them so specially? Thanks.
It wasn't that somebody just decided "You know, we should just not have fun!", but there are reasons why these things are considered bad.
And most of them revolve around "that's something the tribe over the hill does, not something we do." Opium is something the heathen Chinese use, and marihuana is for Mexicans and for (gasp!) jazz musicians; us white folks drink whiskey. Taboos are an irrational social phenomenon, not the result of reasoned consideration of the effects of various behaviors.
I'm surprised that this article is being presented as news. Animal drug-seeking behavior has been know about for a long time. Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel wrote an excellent book about it over twenty years ago.
Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage
No matter how fast you can type, you still have to hit those curly braces with your right pinky and that grinds you straight to a halt!
Actually, no, you can hit that key with any finger and it still works. And that's why standard "touch typing" is broken for computers, especially for coding: it's meant for English text that makes very rare use of characters like {}[]/\, whereas code uses them frequently; and futhermore it's meant for a keyboard without cursor control keys.
I mostly I type with two fingers on each hand. I took my first programming class in 1981, and have been making a living at it since 1991. I've also written probably a million words of BBS, USENET, email, and web forum postings, plus a book of significant length. Four finger typing has gotten me by so far, because it takes me much longer to figure out what to type than to type it.
Alternative energy would probably be coming along a lot more quickly, if oil wasn't subsidized and oil companies were required to pay the full cost of the externalities that their product creates.
I caught this story on the radio a few days ago. Part of the issue is that natural gas is getting "cheap" -- the story (on capitalist cheerleader Marketplace, the show that best demonstrates that public radio's supposed "leftist bias" is no such thing) didn't mention that this is because of the hideously dirty practice of fracking, that when external costs are included there's absolutely nothing cheap about this gas.
The other problem is that Pickens is apparently an idiot, and was going to place his wind power turbines in areas where not only weren't there transmission lines, but where he didn't have approval to build transmission lines. When he didn't get that approval, he was fscked.
Maybe not, but it isn't difficult to find another way to pay for it. Ask your employer, ask your family, pay for it with student loan money, save up $30/week for ten weeks... etc.
You know, that sounds a like the response I got when I pointed out to a recruiter from the "Landmark Forum" (widely labeled a cult) that their classes were awfully expensive. Just sayin'.
Placebos might work, but the theory is pure bunkum.
If a theory works in application, is it bunkum?
Everyone who's taken a physics or electronics class has used the bunkum theory of conventional current. Franklin had a 50/50 shot of guessing which charge the moving carriers had, and he got it wrong; but we still use that model of current flowing from positive to negative, because it works.
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It would indeed bother me greatly if it were the the case. My question is, can someone provide a reliable source showing that it is the case that the White House has done this?
Please note that even if the organization in question is facing an audit, that doesn't mean that the audit is because Obama called the IRS and said "get these guys!" If an audit is occurring, it could be random, or it could be due to irregularities in their tax paperwork. (I'm guessing good odds that there's a correlation between folks who believe in the FEMA camps and people who believe in wacky tax resister theories.)
Yes, it is censorship. I know apologists for corporatism like to pretend that only the government can censor, but that's not what the word means: when a business says "this is objectionable" rather than "people won't buy this", that's censorship. (And in a self-publishing marketplace, "people won't buy this" doesn't matter.)
And that's not just my opinion, and not just a dictionary definition of the word -- Amazon's own statement describes their current actions as censorship: "Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable."
Under a capitalist state, corporations like Amazon have the government to raid your house or put you in jail for them, under laws like the DMCA. Adobe had the FBI to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov. The BSA has U.S. marshals to carry guns for them. Why should they bother to have their own cops or jails?
That was, in fact, the policy of the U.S. and other Western powers. We did not go to war with the Nazis to save Jews, we did it because they were invading other nations. In fact, reports of the Holocaust were being downplayed as late as 1943.
There are alternatives between letting a nation engage in genocide without comment or penalty, and invading that nation.
Apparently, it's difficult for you to understand that "right" and "wrong" are not always such simple concepts.
Many aspects of Hitler's programs were based on American policies like the genocide of Native nations and forced sterilization in the name of eugenics. Should other nations have invaded us to stop our actions? Where do you draw the line?
The question of using deadly force is never a "simple" question, and I fear anyone who thinks that it is almost as much as I fear tyrants and dictators -- for such people are all too likely to foolishly support tyrants and dictators who promise simple, black-and-white solutions.
Japan was a fairly functional democracy during the Taisho period. Like Weimar Germany, though -- and perhaps like the contemporary U.S. -- democracy was not strong enough to survive militarism and imperialism.
The perversion of Shinto to make the Emperor a "living god" in the service of ultra-nationalism had its roots in the reaction to the U.S. prying Japan open to trade. The "black ships" in 1853 started the chain of events that led to Pearl Harbor in 1941; we should learn from that before we go mucking about in the internal affairs of other nations.
I think that even from my reasonably comfortable suburban existence, I can judge that trying to weaken a brutal dictator via lies and deceit is a highly non-optimal strategy, and gives us reason to suspect that the person engaging in such actions may have their own interests in mind more than the interests of the people living under said dictator.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend; sometime he's just an asshole of a different stripe. Failing to realize this has been one of the reasons that American foreign policy has been so brutal and stupid.
Not in a thread about the Apollo program, no, since that was about Mercury. And Mercury broke no new ground, the USSR had already put Gagarin in orbit.
I didn't suppose you have anything resembling a reliable source for this claim about pressure from the White House on the wackos at TRUtv? (No, claims by Alex Jones don't count as reliable, sorry.)
The FEMA camps and coffins BS was debunked long ago. Of course, to conspiracy theory dingbats, that just means they got to Popular Mechanics too. That's the beauty of the big conspiracy theory: it's unfalsifiable.
On the other hand. Amazon deciding the the feds are a more profitable customer than WikiLeaks doesn't take any deep conspiracy theory to explain it
And then your sig quotes Einstein, prominent scientist. Ah, irony.
The vast majority of the fighting and dying that's taken place on this planet has had much more to do with the glory or benefit of various prominent figures -- kings, priests, presidents, capitalists -- than with any sort of individual freedom.
No, it's not possible to start your own business to compete with multinational megacorporations, not in any meaningful or useful sense. Everybody hates all of the cell phone carriers, everybody hates their cable company, but very few people have meaningful choice available -- at best it's giant douche vs. turd sandwich. Why? Because big business doesn't compete on cost and features; it "competes" on controlling the market. As James K. Galbraith, explaining his father's work, put it, "Corporations exist to control markets, and often to replace them. Business leaders reduce uncertainty not through clairvoyance (or 'perfect foresight,' as the economics textbooks call it), nor by confident exploitation of probability ('portfolio diversification'). They do it by forming organizations large enough to forge the future for themselves."
UnitedHealth Group's revenues are about the same as the total GDP of the nation of Bangladesh. Exxon-Mobil's profits -- not gross receipts, but profits -- are several times the budget for the entire EPA. The idea that corporations of this magnitude are controlled by market forces or are subject to competition from entrepreneurs is sheer fantasy.
But you can take over the existing government, if you get a majority of voters to back you. You can't take over an existing megacorporation, or compete with one, unless you get a majority of the dollars to back you.
America's caste system is stronger than most European nations -- we have lower intergenerational economic mobility than France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, or and Denmark; another source has us even lower then the U.K.
I know that this data does not fit with American mythology, and so will probably be discarded by most of my fellow Americans.
Being leftist -- that is, in favor of the interests of working people as opposed to aristocrats or capitalists -- is far more compatible with a strong individualist streak than right-wing thought. There's nothing "individualist" about favoring a system that leaves most individuals few degrees of freedom, enthralled to their corporate masters.
We don't have a strong left in the U.S. because for much of the 20th century we deported socialists, or outright criminalized talking about leftism, for the years of "Red Scares", and because the flow of information remains dominated by right-wing corporate media.
So you would have preferred that Congress remained deadlocked, and not passed the 9/11 first responders health care legislation? If so, fsck you and the horse you rode in on, buddy. Not to mention the repeal of DADT, where a deadlocked Congress would have meant the persistence of legally enshrined bigotry and dishonor in our armed forces.
I know "government is the problem, not the solution" has been an axiom of the far right since the Reagan era and the start of our decline into plutocracy and idiocracy, but I'd hoped that such a shining example of inactive government being a negative outcome would have temporarily restored some sense.
Citation needed. Moveon.org has millions of members (according to the wik, it claims over 5 million) who are not George Soros, and the majority of its funding has come form non-George Soros members. It was founded by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, neither of whom are George Soros. George Soros is, AFAIKT, not a member of MoveOn.org's board of directors or anything.
One may like or dislike MoveOn.org and/or Soros, but to state them as equivalent is inaccurate, even dishonest.
What does an economic system based on labor rather than state-backed ownership of capital have to do with violent nationalism and authoritarianism?
Acutally I've been complaining about those for years, thanks. Steve Mann's been talking about them for at least 15 years.
No, actually criminals are by definition those who violate laws. Depending on the law in question, violating it may be a cowardly act, or an act of bravery, or neither.
And here is where this argument falls completely flat. Infertile couples are permitted to marry, and that has been the case for centuries -- elderly couples could marry long before birth control. The legal institution of civil marriage has nothing to do with bearing children.
Not the same network, though, since Virgin's plans have no roaming and leave you with dead air when you're off Sprint's network, while Sprint's plans will let you roam on to Verizon's network.
Shame, because otherwise the Virgin plan looks great for my needs. But I need my phone to work when I'm outside of major metropolitan areas. I don't need it to work there often, and would even pay roaming changes, but even that's not an option with Virgin, unless I'm missing something.
Interesting. Most people who slaughter non-human animals for their pleasure (since flesh eating is not required for survival or health, pleasure is the only reason for it in any modern society) simply deny that they are conscious.
If you understand that non-human animals are indeed conscious, I'd be curious to know why you find it acceptable to slaughter them but not human animals. (Assuming, of course, that humans are off your menu, and that you wouldn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.) What is the quality possessed exclusively by human animals that causes you to treat them so specially? Thanks.
Ah, anthropocentrism. The old enemy of science, but how strongly it still holds to any consideration of our fellow vertebrates.
And most of them revolve around "that's something the tribe over the hill does, not something we do." Opium is something the heathen Chinese use, and marihuana is for Mexicans and for (gasp!) jazz musicians; us white folks drink whiskey. Taboos are an irrational social phenomenon, not the result of reasoned consideration of the effects of various behaviors.
I'm surprised that this article is being presented as news. Animal drug-seeking behavior has been know about for a long time. Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel wrote an excellent book about it over twenty years ago.
And it's also perfectly fine outside of it.
Actually, no, you can hit that key with any finger and it still works. And that's why standard "touch typing" is broken for computers, especially for coding: it's meant for English text that makes very rare use of characters like {}[]/\, whereas code uses them frequently; and futhermore it's meant for a keyboard without cursor control keys.
I mostly I type with two fingers on each hand. I took my first programming class in 1981, and have been making a living at it since 1991. I've also written probably a million words of BBS, USENET, email, and web forum postings, plus a book of significant length. Four finger typing has gotten me by so far, because it takes me much longer to figure out what to type than to type it.
I caught this story on the radio a few days ago. Part of the issue is that natural gas is getting "cheap" -- the story (on capitalist cheerleader Marketplace, the show that best demonstrates that public radio's supposed "leftist bias" is no such thing) didn't mention that this is because of the hideously dirty practice of fracking, that when external costs are included there's absolutely nothing cheap about this gas.
The other problem is that Pickens is apparently an idiot, and was going to place his wind power turbines in areas where not only weren't there transmission lines, but where he didn't have approval to build transmission lines. When he didn't get that approval, he was fscked.
You know, that sounds a like the response I got when I pointed out to a recruiter from the "Landmark Forum" (widely labeled a cult) that their classes were awfully expensive. Just sayin'.
If a theory works in application, is it bunkum?
Everyone who's taken a physics or electronics class has used the bunkum theory of conventional current. Franklin had a 50/50 shot of guessing which charge the moving carriers had, and he got it wrong; but we still use that model of current flowing from positive to negative, because it works.
The people in the control arm of this study were also having attention paid to them by doctors.