There's nothing deceptive at all. The patients were told it was a placebo. They were told it was inert. They were told that there's a placebo effect whereby people taking placebos have shown improvement just by mind-body self-healing processes.
Injuries and harassment lawsuits cost far more money than proper safety training and equipment
Not really, no. For injuries, businesses are very good at not paying worker's comp, and few people can afford to press a harassment lawsuit.
It's the same reasoning that has companies pollute the air and water and pay lawyers to fight the occasional lawsuit, rather than clean up their processes. Bad actors thrive in our system.
I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, but in cases of law, opinion should be left out. Wikipedia has way too much opinion to be reliably used during legal proceedings. Use an old-fashioned encyclopedia.
Are you suggesting that old-fashioned encyclopedias are opinion-free? Chuckle.
Recall that some wanted to make Washington King of America, but he bared his wooden teeth at them and refused.
And went home to his sumptuous estate (dude was worth half a billion in today's dollars) and his hundreds of slaves. It's not like he was retiring to the simple life...he was fabulously wealthy, and he had helped set running a federal government that was strong enough to protect the wealthy and powerful. Why should he bother with the stress of being a king?
If you are a defendant in a criminal case, do you want the evidence brought against you, the interpretation of the law that is being applied against you, and any questions that the jury cannot decide for themselves based that evidence and interpretation to be available in an accurate record that you can cite in an appeal, or in a juror's cellphone browser history that walks out the door and never sees the light of day?
Most of the jury's information does not come with an accurate record that you can cite in an appeal, but is the mix of information and ignorance, knowledge and prejudice, that the juror walks in with and maintains throughout the process.
A juror asks, "What does X mean?" If the jury looks it up on the wik, it's a mistrial; but if one of the other jurors pulls an answer out of their ass, all's well with the world as far as the legal system goes. I'd certainly prefer them to look it up.
And given the fact that most judge lie to juries about juries rightful role in the process, I don't trust a judge to be a reliable information filter.
The Wikipedia information that the juror brought into deliberations wasn't going to appear in the trial record. So what would happen if it was wrong?
The background "knowledge" that jurors bring into deliberations wasn't going to appear in the trial record. So what would happen if it was wrong?
Maybe juries should be required to prepare a fully-referenced paper explaining their decision.
I'm sorry but saying that 'work' implies 'not having DRM' isn't valid.
Yes, in fact it is valid. A third party trying to control my computer because I might infringe their copyright is not functional, any more than installing a monitor on my guitar to try to enforce songwriter royalties would be.
A guitar that requires me to put in a quarter before I play a cover tune is broken; a computer that prevents me from processing and copying data is broken. DRM breaks computers. Period.
You can say it doesn't work on OS BLAH because it is DRM'd, but saying that DRM makes it completely broken just makes you seem childish, like you always expect to get your way.
No, childish is saying "We have to control your computer, because we're afraid you might share! Wah!"
My concern is if you get a net win in energy. If you do, that's great. If you don't, then it should be scrapped like ethanol should be scrapped
Corn ethanol is not very efficient, but does have a modestly positive energy balance, with estimates ranging from 1.24 to 1.6. Other sources of ethanol -- sugarcane, switchgrass, waste cellulose -- are better.
Corn ethanol is debatable; we might argue over whether it's better to produce a more energy efficient crop, or to stick with one that we already have people growing and that has many uses. And we can argue the relative merits of ethanol versus butanol. But the general statement that "ethanol should be scrapped" is not supportable. It's an easily produced efficient biofuel.
In modern SULEV cars the air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in, due to the catalytic converter neutralizing lung-damaging poisons like NOx and CO as the air passes from intake to exhaust.
But it does not trap CO2, which is the number one problem with burning fossil fuels.
The point is that failure to provide authorized copies that work (and "work" implies "are not DRMed"), is a strong incentive for people to use unauthorized copies.
Illegal espionage against U.N. officials. The U.S. putting pressure on the Spanish government to quash investigations into torture and into the deaths of journalists. War crimes by the U.S. military.
If you don't know what WikiLeak has already exposed, you're disqualified from discussion about the topic. Go read the Guardian's coverage and come back when you're educated.
A certain three-letter agency in the USA experimented at having secure and insecure Xen VMs on the same machine and found that you could transmit data between them at about 30 characters per second by tweaking the network card to control the interrupt frequency in the other. Unless you were specifically looking for this, you'd not see any data.
These are called covert channels, and there are many of them.
You make soldiers that are good killers by teaching them to dehumanize the enemy.
The problem is that to actually accomplish anything more than carnage, you need soldiers who are not just good killers. You can't win "hearts and minds" at the same time you're dehumanizing "the enemy", especially not in a civil war or anti-insurgency. A local boy might forgive a U.S. soldier for shooting his Uncle Ali, who's in the Taliban; he'll never forgive a soldier who shoots his Uncle Ali and then laughs about it, and instead is much more likely to join the Taliban himself.
It may be distasteful to the general public, but failing to do so results in troops that can't carry out offensives or end up with psychological problems.
That someone is currently in jail, because, physical means or no, it was still illegal...
Correction: someone accused of that is currently in jail. Whether PFC Manning was in fact the leaker, and whether leaking information about criminal activities by the U.S. government is a crime (citizens have a common-law obligation to raise a "hue and cry" when they discover a crime), remain open questions.
See, you are free to do what you want with YOUR body. But when you have an abortion, you are harming someone else. See, the baby inside you is NOT your body. Go ahead, DNA test it if you want proof, but it is NOT your body.
No, you are not harming someone else. An embryo is not a person. Personhood requires a functioning forebrain, which does not arise until well after birth.
Forcing a woman via threat of violence to carry that embryo to term, out of sentimentality about babies or on the basis of some superstition about a ghost entering the zygote at conception, is not compatible with liberty.
See, the baby inside you is NOT your body. Go ahead, DNA test it if you want proof, but it is NOT your body.
If it's "inside you", it's not a "baby", it's fetus or an embryo or a zygote. Yes, in popular usage the term are conflated, but if we are to arrive at useful conclusions we must be precise in our language.
DNA testing tells us nothing: a cancerous tumor has a different genetic code, while it will soon be possible for a woman to be carrying an embryo that is her genetic clone.
Personhood is about brains. DNA has nothing to do with it.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.
A great deal of his faux-libertarianism is about removing federal safeguards against state governments and big business fscking you over. Ron Paul wouldn't know personal freedom if it bit him in the ass.
The fact that he still makes more sense than most of the G.O.P. is an indictment of the conservative movement, not an endorsement of Paul.
Service guarantees citizenship, after all. None of this "all people are created equal but some are more equal than others" crap I'm getting sick of in modern society.
Wait...so you want to make people who agree to serve in the military -- i.e., to hand their moral judgment over to the U.S. government for some period of time -- more equal than others?
As much as I hate the canard about "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", there is a valid corollary: "If you've done nothing wrong, you won't get caught".
Tell that to Liu Xiaobo.
The true version is, "If you don't do anything to upset the authorities (including, if you happen to fall into certain classes, existing), and you don't fall afoul of a whim of someone with authority to exercise it, then you won't get caught."
Of course you have to ration 'sugar pops', I got one bowl a week, oatmeal was the standard breakfast of the middle class.
I think your family's frugality has given you an inaccurate perception of "standard" middle class ways.
Let's take my own experience of growing up in the Baltimore suburbs as a different perspective. Neither of my parents had a four-year degree -- my mom went to a 3 year nursing program, my dad took classes at a "junior college" but had no degree. So we were middle class but by no means well off.
When I was a kid in the 70s we had a black and white TV, until we got a color hand-me-down from the grandparents. My brother and I shared a room until I was 12 or so. We did a lot of our shopping at K-mart.
But there was always breakfast cereal, usually sugar-laden, for breakfast. I don't recall anyone for whom bulk oatmeal was the standard breakfast. And we had cable once it was available. And the thermostat was certainly about 62 F in the winter. This was all pretty typical.
I don't mean to say that was (or was not) the wisest way to spend money; but I dispute your picture of widespread frugality in the 80s.
Now it seems that even welfare moms feel entitled to cell phones, cable TV, mid-range sedans, 70-degree apartments, and endless subsidized premium cereal for their already obese children.
Pre-paid cell phones are easier to get then landlines, and more suited to a mobile population. A phone is a near-necessity to function in this society, not just socially but economically. ("Thanks for coming in for the interview, we'll call you. What's your number?")
The poor folks I know might be driving a mid-range sedan if its 20 years old. In many areas, a car is a near-necessity to function in this society, not just socially but economically. ("Do you have reliable transportation to the jobsite?The bus? [chuckle] O-kay, then. We'll be in touch.")
Personally, despite several layers of clothes, my hands start to get stiff if the indoor temperature gets below about 68-70 degrees F. You may be more cold-hearty, but I find nothing admirable about enduring temperatures that make my body cease functioning properly. (Now, cranking the air conditioning down to 70 is another matter...)
$20 a month -- less than $5 a week -- for basic cable isn't going to make much difference; a human being needs some small luxuries. Or if you want a more cynical take, if the plebs don't have circuses to go with their bread, there might be an uprising. My roommates and I had basic cable when I was a grad student, rolling nickels to get lunch money; I'm not going to begrudge it to anyone.
As for breakfast cereal, Americans of all income levels have dietary habits that continue to amaze me; there's an issue about our relationship with food that goes way beyond poverty and welfare. But I'd hardly call the store brand of corn pops or whatever "premium".
In summary, then, regarding the
"can you believe poor people think they need/are entitled to X" argument: many of those Xs (like phones and cars) are, because of public policy choices or market forces beyond the control of the individual, a practical necessity. And many of those Xs (TVs, computers) are available cheaply second-hand -- or freely as cast-offs or hand-me-downs.
That's not to say that our whole culture of infinite consumption doesn't need serious re-alignment
You mean cue the dishonest scumbags who hate libertarianism but know they aren't mentally competent to make an intelligent argument against it, and as such are willing to settle for implying that it means something entirely different from what it actually is.
The Filipino people were being exploited by the Spanish and the Japanese before Americans arrived...I would hardly count the situation in the Philippines in the same category as what occurred with the Native Americans or the Africans.
I'm sorry, but your history is not correct. Japan wasn't significantly involved in the Philippines until WWII. The U.S. was fucking things up there long before that -- read up on the Philippine-American War. We used scorched-earth tactics, summary execution, and torture; we killed over 10% of the population of the Philippines.
The only way that our genocide in the Philippines was not in the same category as our genocide of Native Americans or the Africans was that it only went on for a few years. Otherwise it demonstrates all of the hallmarks of the thinking that has dominated American foreign policy for a long time: "They are on land we want to control. They are not white. Kill 'em all."
America became "great" for exactly the reason specified earlier:
"not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country."
It is highly debatable that the U.S. did a good job of "giving individuals the power to control their own destinies" for individuals other than well-off white males, for most of its history. And as I've pointed out, the U.S. did in fact have unique natural resources at the time of its founding; and we continue to have remarkable access to arable land and to oil, as well as the world's largest coal reserves and significant natural gas.
But putting that aside, if "giving individuals the power to control their own destinies" is the way to become a power in the world, how did China, Japan, and Russia/U.S.S.R all rise to become world powers in the 20th century?
In just a few decades, from the 1860s to the 1940s, Japan went from a feudal nation that didn't even use firearms, to a world power capable of rivaling the empires of Europe and the U.S. for control of the Pacific. They did not do this by focusing on empowering individuals.
In 1861, Russia still had widespread serfdom. By 1961, they were the core of the U.S.S.R, an industrial and military superpower, the second nuclear power, and the first spacefaring nation. They were not famous for focusing on the empowerment of individuals.
China spend most of the 19th century under British domination. In the early 20th century, it still had an Emperor and slaves. It's now rising to become the nation that will, in all probability, dominate the 21st century. China's authoritarian government is not noted for focusing on empowering individuals.
My point, to be clear, is not that we should sacrifice empowering individuals in order to gain power on the world stage. It is rather the opposite: a nation that actually empowers individuals is likely to be a humble actor on the world stage.
I will stand by that statement until death (even though I did not originally utter it).
Well, that's a pretty fine example of stupid emotional nationalism. "I will not consider any reasoned arguments about history, but would rather die than change my treasured mythology about my country." Whether I'm wrong or right, your statement displays an alarming disinterest in truth.
How about the work the army is doing on the streets with police inside the US? WTF?!? How about a battalion stationed here in the US, official listed duty is "for civil unrest". WTF!?!
Citation needed. The militarization of policing is a concerning trend, but it's been going on since the end of WWII, and picked up stream with the step-up in the "War On Drugs" under Bush I. But I'm not aware of an Army battalion being deployed at home tin preparation for "civil unrest": please provide a reliable citation for this.
Communications Director Linda Douglass says, "we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov." What we attack people who don't agree with what you say or think differently? Wow, what are we becoming? Citizens reporting on each other for what they think? Sounds like old Soviet Russia.
You undermine your argument when you compare political rumor control -- and let's be frank. there was (and still is) a hell of a lot of untrue rumor-mongering about health insurance reform -- to Stalinist "turn in your neighbors" tactics.
Democrats have been blasting people who don't agree with them calling them unhinged, crazy, racist, bigoted and other terms. The Tea Party and conservative Republicans don't agree with them, so now they are evil and threat to America? They completely forget how hard and heavy they blasted Bush/Republicans, and no one called them that.
Both your memory and your grasp of current events is faulty.
Those of us who opposed Bush were in fact called unpatriotic, "on the side of the terrorists," and a threat to America.
Within the "Tea Party" you've got people you showed up to demonstrations brandishing guns and talking about "the blood of tyrants": that's
unhinged and crazy. And there have in fact been many racist and bigoted comments made about Obama.
Is every conservative unhinged or racist? Of course not.
Let's not even get started talking about how much the government has grown and how Obama and the current government has spent more in 2 years than any other presidency, not including the bailouts.
Not true. Total 2009 + 2010 spending -- including bailouts -- was less than that last three years of Bush II's final term.
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There's nothing deceptive at all. The patients were told it was a placebo. They were told it was inert. They were told that there's a placebo effect whereby people taking placebos have shown improvement just by mind-body self-healing processes.
Not really, no. For injuries, businesses are very good at not paying worker's comp, and few people can afford to press a harassment lawsuit.
It's the same reasoning that has companies pollute the air and water and pay lawyers to fight the occasional lawsuit, rather than clean up their processes. Bad actors thrive in our system.
Most definitely -- a recently poll found that 58% of Americans believe God has granted America a special role in human history. You can't get more mythological than that. You don't count the dead when God's on your side, and you don't worry about troublesome "facts" either.
Are you suggesting that old-fashioned encyclopedias are opinion-free? Chuckle.
And went home to his sumptuous estate (dude was worth half a billion in today's dollars) and his hundreds of slaves. It's not like he was retiring to the simple life...he was fabulously wealthy, and he had helped set running a federal government that was strong enough to protect the wealthy and powerful. Why should he bother with the stress of being a king?
Most of the jury's information does not come with an accurate record that you can cite in an appeal, but is the mix of information and ignorance, knowledge and prejudice, that the juror walks in with and maintains throughout the process.
A juror asks, "What does X mean?" If the jury looks it up on the wik, it's a mistrial; but if one of the other jurors pulls an answer out of their ass, all's well with the world as far as the legal system goes. I'd certainly prefer them to look it up.
And given the fact that most judge lie to juries about juries rightful role in the process, I don't trust a judge to be a reliable information filter.
The background "knowledge" that jurors bring into deliberations wasn't going to appear in the trial record. So what would happen if it was wrong?
Maybe juries should be required to prepare a fully-referenced paper explaining their decision.
Yes, in fact it is valid. A third party trying to control my computer because I might infringe their copyright is not functional, any more than installing a monitor on my guitar to try to enforce songwriter royalties would be.
A guitar that requires me to put in a quarter before I play a cover tune is broken; a computer that prevents me from processing and copying data is broken. DRM breaks computers. Period.
No, childish is saying "We have to control your computer, because we're afraid you might share! Wah!"
Corn ethanol is not very efficient, but does have a modestly positive energy balance, with estimates ranging from 1.24 to 1.6. Other sources of ethanol -- sugarcane, switchgrass, waste cellulose -- are better.
Corn ethanol is debatable; we might argue over whether it's better to produce a more energy efficient crop, or to stick with one that we already have people growing and that has many uses. And we can argue the relative merits of ethanol versus butanol. But the general statement that "ethanol should be scrapped" is not supportable. It's an easily produced efficient biofuel.
But it does not trap CO2, which is the number one problem with burning fossil fuels.
The point is that failure to provide authorized copies that work (and "work" implies "are not DRMed"), is a strong incentive for people to use unauthorized copies.
Illegal espionage against U.N. officials. The U.S. putting pressure on the Spanish government to quash investigations into torture and into the deaths of journalists. War crimes by the U.S. military.
If you don't know what WikiLeak has already exposed, you're disqualified from discussion about the topic. Go read the Guardian's coverage and come back when you're educated.
These are called covert channels, and there are many of them.
The problem is that to actually accomplish anything more than carnage, you need soldiers who are not just good killers. You can't win "hearts and minds" at the same time you're dehumanizing "the enemy", especially not in a civil war or anti-insurgency. A local boy might forgive a U.S. soldier for shooting his Uncle Ali, who's in the Taliban; he'll never forgive a soldier who shoots his Uncle Ali and then laughs about it, and instead is much more likely to join the Taliban himself.
Dehumanizing people is a psychological problem.
Correction: someone accused of that is currently in jail. Whether PFC Manning was in fact the leaker, and whether leaking information about criminal activities by the U.S. government is a crime (citizens have a common-law obligation to raise a "hue and cry" when they discover a crime), remain open questions.
No, you are not harming someone else. An embryo is not a person. Personhood requires a functioning forebrain, which does not arise until well after birth.
Forcing a woman via threat of violence to carry that embryo to term, out of sentimentality about babies or on the basis of some superstition about a ghost entering the zygote at conception, is not compatible with liberty.
If it's "inside you", it's not a "baby", it's fetus or an embryo or a zygote. Yes, in popular usage the term are conflated, but if we are to arrive at useful conclusions we must be precise in our language.
DNA testing tells us nothing: a cancerous tumor has a different genetic code, while it will soon be possible for a woman to be carrying an embryo that is her genetic clone.
Personhood is about brains. DNA has nothing to do with it.
Ron Paul is anti-science, anti-choice, anti-separation of church and state, a liar (in that he's given two contradictory stories about the controversial racist statements that appeared in his newsletter), and either a racist or incompetent to run a 'zine.
A great deal of his faux-libertarianism is about removing federal safeguards against state governments and big business fscking you over. Ron Paul wouldn't know personal freedom if it bit him in the ass.
The fact that he still makes more sense than most of the G.O.P. is an indictment of the conservative movement, not an endorsement of Paul.
Wait...so you want to make people who agree to serve in the military -- i.e., to hand their moral judgment over to the U.S. government for some period of time -- more equal than others?
Tell that to Liu Xiaobo.
The true version is, "If you don't do anything to upset the authorities (including, if you happen to fall into certain classes, existing), and you don't fall afoul of a whim of someone with authority to exercise it, then you won't get caught."
I think your family's frugality has given you an inaccurate perception of "standard" middle class ways.
Let's take my own experience of growing up in the Baltimore suburbs as a different perspective. Neither of my parents had a four-year degree -- my mom went to a 3 year nursing program, my dad took classes at a "junior college" but had no degree. So we were middle class but by no means well off.
When I was a kid in the 70s we had a black and white TV, until we got a color hand-me-down from the grandparents. My brother and I shared a room until I was 12 or so. We did a lot of our shopping at K-mart.
But there was always breakfast cereal, usually sugar-laden, for breakfast. I don't recall anyone for whom bulk oatmeal was the standard breakfast. And we had cable once it was available. And the thermostat was certainly about 62 F in the winter. This was all pretty typical.
I don't mean to say that was (or was not) the wisest way to spend money; but I dispute your picture of widespread frugality in the 80s.
Pre-paid cell phones are easier to get then landlines, and more suited to a mobile population. A phone is a near-necessity to function in this society, not just socially but economically. ("Thanks for coming in for the interview, we'll call you. What's your number?")
The poor folks I know might be driving a mid-range sedan if its 20 years old. In many areas, a car is a near-necessity to function in this society, not just socially but economically. ("Do you have reliable transportation to the jobsite?The bus? [chuckle] O-kay, then. We'll be in touch.")
Personally, despite several layers of clothes, my hands start to get stiff if the indoor temperature gets below about 68-70 degrees F. You may be more cold-hearty, but I find nothing admirable about enduring temperatures that make my body cease functioning properly. (Now, cranking the air conditioning down to 70 is another matter...)
$20 a month -- less than $5 a week -- for basic cable isn't going to make much difference; a human being needs some small luxuries. Or if you want a more cynical take, if the plebs don't have circuses to go with their bread, there might be an uprising. My roommates and I had basic cable when I was a grad student, rolling nickels to get lunch money; I'm not going to begrudge it to anyone.
As for breakfast cereal, Americans of all income levels have dietary habits that continue to amaze me; there's an issue about our relationship with food that goes way beyond poverty and welfare. But I'd hardly call the store brand of corn pops or whatever "premium".
In summary, then, regarding the "can you believe poor people think they need/are entitled to X" argument: many of those Xs (like phones and cars) are, because of public policy choices or market forces beyond the control of the individual, a practical necessity. And many of those Xs (TVs, computers) are available cheaply second-hand -- or freely as cast-offs or hand-me-downs.
That's not to say that our whole culture of infinite consumption doesn't need serious re-alignment
'
You mean like the dishonest scumbags who started the Libertarian Party, who implied that "libertarianism" meant some form of capitalism when the term had a long history of use by socialists opposed to both direct government power and state-backed private power?
If you are treating your employees as professionals, you judge them on the eventual results.
If you are treating your employees as serfs, then perhaps your track their every movement.
I'm sorry, but your history is not correct. Japan wasn't significantly involved in the Philippines until WWII. The U.S. was fucking things up there long before that -- read up on the Philippine-American War. We used scorched-earth tactics, summary execution, and torture; we killed over 10% of the population of the Philippines.
The only way that our genocide in the Philippines was not in the same category as our genocide of Native Americans or the Africans was that it only went on for a few years. Otherwise it demonstrates all of the hallmarks of the thinking that has dominated American foreign policy for a long time: "They are on land we want to control. They are not white. Kill 'em all."
It is highly debatable that the U.S. did a good job of "giving individuals the power to control their own destinies" for individuals other than well-off white males, for most of its history. And as I've pointed out, the U.S. did in fact have unique natural resources at the time of its founding; and we continue to have remarkable access to arable land and to oil, as well as the world's largest coal reserves and significant natural gas.
But putting that aside, if "giving individuals the power to control their own destinies" is the way to become a power in the world, how did China, Japan, and Russia/U.S.S.R all rise to become world powers in the 20th century?
In just a few decades, from the 1860s to the 1940s, Japan went from a feudal nation that didn't even use firearms, to a world power capable of rivaling the empires of Europe and the U.S. for control of the Pacific. They did not do this by focusing on empowering individuals.
In 1861, Russia still had widespread serfdom. By 1961, they were the core of the U.S.S.R, an industrial and military superpower, the second nuclear power, and the first spacefaring nation. They were not famous for focusing on the empowerment of individuals.
China spend most of the 19th century under British domination. In the early 20th century, it still had an Emperor and slaves. It's now rising to become the nation that will, in all probability, dominate the 21st century. China's authoritarian government is not noted for focusing on empowering individuals.
My point, to be clear, is not that we should sacrifice empowering individuals in order to gain power on the world stage. It is rather the opposite: a nation that actually empowers individuals is likely to be a humble actor on the world stage.
Well, that's a pretty fine example of stupid emotional nationalism. "I will not consider any reasoned arguments about history, but would rather die than change my treasured mythology about my country." Whether I'm wrong or right, your statement displays an alarming disinterest in truth.
Citation needed. The militarization of policing is a concerning trend, but it's been going on since the end of WWII, and picked up stream with the step-up in the "War On Drugs" under Bush I. But I'm not aware of an Army battalion being deployed at home tin preparation for "civil unrest": please provide a reliable citation for this.
You undermine your argument when you compare political rumor control -- and let's be frank. there was (and still is) a hell of a lot of untrue rumor-mongering about health insurance reform -- to Stalinist "turn in your neighbors" tactics.
Both your memory and your grasp of current events is faulty.
Those of us who opposed Bush were in fact called unpatriotic, "on the side of the terrorists," and a threat to America.
Within the "Tea Party" you've got people you showed up to demonstrations brandishing guns and talking about "the blood of tyrants": that's unhinged and crazy. And there have in fact been many racist and bigoted comments made about Obama.
Is every conservative unhinged or racist? Of course not.
Not true. Total 2009 + 2010 spending -- including bailouts -- was less than that last three years of Bush II's final term.
Except, you know, for the part about illegal spying on U.N. officials. And the hints about how our policy toward Iran is being crafted to keep our "friends" in Saudi Arabia happy. And the stuff about the U.S. leaning on Spain to quash the criminal investigation of torture, "extraordinary rendition", and the killing of journalists. And the monkey business with money sent by Germany and other allies intended to build up the Afghani army.
"Ringing vindication of American policies"? In a pig's eye.
Transporting hydrogen is so easy you can actually use hydrogen to transport stuff, though there are some risks. But I think automated or drone balloons with solar-powered engines could be made cheaply enough that occasionally losing one to fire would still be practical.