Others have mentioned the taxes. How about this one: Bush will conduct an offensive campaign against rogue states and terrorist organizations, while Kerry will only respond to attacks against us? Kerry sees the bombing of the USS Cole, the World Trade Center (at least the first one, maybe both), Khobar Towers, and our African embassies as "a nuisance" (his words, not mine.) while Bush sees them as acts of war against the United States conducted by rogue states using terrorist groups as proxies.
Or how about this one: Bush won't rely on approval of the corrupt and dictatorial-regime-supporting UN (France, Germany and Russia getting Oil-for-Food kickbacks from Saddam to block us in the security council is BIG NEWS.) and Kerry will use these same thieves and fools as a litmus test to decide whether or not we should use our armed forces to defend ourselves. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, 'If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no.' " link to story.
Kerry will guide our course in the world based primarily on input from people who want to see America weaker, who happily accept bribes from mass-murdering dictators, and who would rather not see the 50,000,000 million Muslims that We have liberated in the past three years... uh... liberated. How's that for a start?
Actually, the differences are enormous in many important areas. In fact, about half the important areas. Your being only halfway informed explains why you can't see it.
Actually, I said "In China" because of the awesome allegiance Chinese scientists often pay to their mother country when here. The Chinese got MIRV nuclear missile tech from a Chinese scientist working at Los Alamos and smuggling data to the ChiComs. It's gotten so bad, Chinese scientists have had to set up apoogist/propoganda sites So, as you can see, the problem with a melting pot is that some bits refuse to melt.
For the folks out there who can't see how this could lead to massive voter fraud, let me explain how it's going to cause that:
1) lots of people cast provisional ballots who aren't registered
2) the losing party in an election (not just president, but any of the offices and referenda being voted on) will point to provisional ballots that have a) been rejected and b) support the loser's cause to say that "These people were denied the right to vote!" and imply that either the registration system lost their registrations or is just plain crooked and c) the media that support that side (cnn/nbc/cbs/npr/abc for democrats, fox and the conservative talk shows for republicans) will run with it. d) Either the election officials get pressured into reversing their stance or it goes to an activist judge.
And remember these two things about the last election in Florida:
1) George Bush run every re-count conducted by investigative journalists after the SUpreme COurt decision.
2) Lawyers for Gore and Lieberman had military absentee ballots thrown out for post office errors, not voter errors. So let's not pretend that it's just Republicans that play games.
And there's another advantage: job security. If you can port an existing mission critical system to this or develop a new on with this, you've got a real hostage:)
Oh, come on. You can't use some atheist blog to defend your position; and I'm speaking as an atheist. You can, however, use this: link here as a persuasive argument. You're right. These folks were just exercising their rights and were arrested at the direction of an overzealous secret service agent. Now, what this has to do with metal detector use by local police at a mass demonstration adjacent to a U.S. military base escapes me. But you're absolutely right; these folks were treated shabbily. And their rights were unlawfully abridged. And they were owed the apologies they received. And it needs to not happen again.
It's not a right at a private function. As far as rights are concerned, we have a freedom of association that includes the right to call together a private group that excludes certain people from it. A ticketed event is one of those things. I'm sorry you refuse to see that distinction, and to acknowledge that you're crossing the line between exercising your rights and trampling on other people's. Once again, you're calling people "victims" who deliberately broke the law for the purpose of getting arrested. If that's the best you can do, I don't see how someone can attach validity to the point you're trying to make.
Wow. You got me. Golly, you're right: there's nothing at all aggressive (let alone, wrong) about you going to a ticketed-admission gay rights event and asking gay men about the weather just to trick them into seeing the "I shoot fags and laugh as they burn in hell" t-shirt you're wearing. Nope, nothing at all. And you're right, t-shirts can't talk... to illiterate people or blind people. The article implies (but, I admit, does not explicitly state) that some of the people at the event... uh... could see. And read. But since I can't PROVE that, well, you got me. You winner, you.
If I go to a Gay Rights event, and put on a tee shirt that says, "I'm gonna murder all you fags and laugh as you burn in hell" and then walk up to people there and try to engage them in conversation about the weather to trick them into looking at me and reading the shirt, then I'm accosting them. Oh, sure, theoretically they don't HAVE to read the shirt, but they're gonna.
While you like to maintain the facade that you haven't thought this through, I think the real issue here is that you're being deliberately obtuse because you support the views of the people being arrested. But I've got to tell you: if a bunch of libertarians bought tickets to a Kerry (or Nader) rally, put on shirts that said, "Kerry (or Nader) is a Goddamned Commie Dirtbag and I'm Going To Kill Him and Laugh as He Burns In Hell," then went around and asked people about the weather, then got invited to leave or be arrested, then refused to leave, then got arrested, I would not hold them up as victims of the police state. And I would not do that because it would be so obviously dumb as to make negative implications about my intelligence. Even though I agree that Kerry and Nader are filthy crypto-Socialists who lie about their true ideology to get their slimy tentacles on the power of the presidency.
If I go to a Gay Rights event, and put on a tee shirt that says, "I'm gonna murder all you fags and laugh as you burn in hell" and then walk up to people there and try to engage them in conversation about the weather to trick them into looking at me and reading the shirt, then I'm accosting them. Oh, sure, theoretically they don't HAVE to read the shirt, but they're gonna.
While you like to maintain the facade that you haven't thought this through, I think the real issue here is that you're being deliberately obtuse because you support the views of the people being arrested. But I've got to tell you: if a bunch of libertarians bought tickets to a Kerry (or Nader) rally, put on shirts that said, "Kerry (or Nader) is a Goddamned Commie Dirtbag and I'm Going To Kill Him and Laugh as He Burns In Hell," then went around and asked people about the weather, then got invited to leave or be arrested, then refused to leave, then got arrested, I would not hold them up as victims of the police state. And I would not do that because it would be so obviously dumb as to make negative implications about my intelligence. Even though I agree that Kerry and Nader are filthy crypto-Socialists who lie about their true ideology to get their slimy tentacles on the power of the presidency.
They weren't jailed for non-violent protest. They were arrested and released (no jail time) for trespassing. They were given a chance to conduct their protest in a public space instead and they chose not to, knowing full well that arrest was the only alternative left to the police; police who were protecting the rights of the other people at the rally. You holding up people who get arrested on purpose as evidence of the police arresting protestors is positively Orwellian.
As for the argument that anyone can buy a ticket so it's public? Please. I don't like the musical "Cats". It sucks. But if I buy a ticket to "Cats" and then walk around the audience and tell people "You know, this play sucks" and then refuse to leave the theater when the people running the theater ask me to, then I subject myself to arrest because I am (wait for it) breaking the law.
You seem to feel that a person's right to speak is a person's right to accost whomever he pleases. It's not the same thing.
So, who was jailed at the protest for wearing a T-Shirt? I didn't see anything at all about it in the article. Oh! The link you sent! Hmmm...
So two people infiltrated a private meeting (yes, though you won't admit it, an event that requires TICKETS to get into is a private meeting) under false pretenses, refused to leave when asked, and were... charged with trespassing (which they were admittedly doing) and released. And you claim that's an assault on our civil liberties instead of a protection of them. My Lord. "Please loosen your sphincter?" Please practice what you preach.
It's actually a sign of how healthy our society is and how secure our liberties are that people have to turn a couple of obnoxious protesters into the canaries in the mineshaft. Thank you for reassuring all of us.
Saying it has prevented terrorist attacks is like Bush holding up a stick and declaring the stick repels Gorillas. -- Well you don't see any gorillas do you??
No, it isn't. Some banks that have security guards in them never get robbed. So, using your "logic" those security guards are an unnecessary expense that increases my bank fees.
Is using metal detectors on these protesters a waste of time? Yes. Did the local authorities try to do it just to be a nuisance to people being a nuisance to them? Yes. Did President Bush call the local authorities and say, "As part of my War on Terror, please unreasonably search all those Goddamned stupid hippies who have been annually gathering to stink up the Georgia countryside lo, this past quarter century?" Of course not.
As for your "Waning faith in America," well, you can emigrate to any of a number of places any time you want. No, really, you can. Please.
How can we trust any article that uses an old SDI graphic from Reagan's presentation to congress and photoshops in Mars for Earth and Spaceship for Commie ICBM?
But it does tell you to take a look. The problem with chemical sensors is that you may not get meaningful feedback about the quantity of a pollutant... So you don't know if it's at a dangerous level or not. As for animal cruelty, if I've got to pick between a fish drinking water that causes distress and a person, I pick a fish. Do you wait until the toxins have reached such a level that hundreds or thousands of fish float up to the top in a terminal state of distress, or do you use a few you can actually monitor cost-effectively? And chemical sensors can break in ways you can't detect that render them useless or, worse, cause them to deliver a false sense of security. Fish, on the other hand, are obviously healthy or obviously not.
Okay, okay. First they invent a language where you DON'T SAY MOST OF THE LETTERS IN A WORD. Then they sell nuclear reactors to Iraq. Then they infiltrate Burger King with criossandwiches. But THIS is going too damned far.
Our IT folks made the time to get a Linux business productivity system in place (in parallel to their regular support of 2K/XP) so they could 1) demonstrate it to people (the compatibilities and the look and feel) and 2) package it up so our non-IT folks could be set up and supported easily. And re-set up when they broke something. If you hire IT people who actually like what they do, it makes this kind of thing a lot easier. Most of our departments are still MS, but the ones that have switched like it and aren't going back.
I still don't understand how gerrymandering is a bad thing. There is a group of people. They get to vote on the representative of their choice. Their votes are all counted. What's the problem?
It's designed to keep incumbents in power, but if your representative is a failure, there's a primary to defeat him in. Complaining about this problem makes one heck of a case against representative democracy: the poor, poor pitiful people can't pick decent representatives. They're all just girls who can't say "no!"
But this doesn't answer the fundamental question associated with embryonic stem cell research: does a human life have intrinsic value? Is that intrinsic value higher or lower than the value of the stem cells that result when an embryo is destroyed?
Yes, yes. I know that some high proportion (10%? 50%? pick the study that best supports your point of view) of embryos do not implant in the womb and are lost. Does that mean we can treat embryos as analogous to acorns?
Yes, yes. There are hundreds of thousands of embryos in cryogenic storage that are going to be discarded anyway. But at what point does it cease to be disposable parts of my wife and me and start being a separate human?
If you're an atheist (as I am) how can you defend any view other than "as soon as it's a zygote (a DNA pattern separate from the mother's and the father's) it's a person"? If you're the final arbiter of morality (as an atheist is to himself) how can you fudge this one?
Like any good leader, I bet he gets to say, "Your input is valued even when it's not followed." The Internet has such a lopsided sampling (and groups out there cruising for polls to skew ("Hey! Skew you, poll!")) that it shouldn't be consulted like this. I mean, the Internet works best when the individual surfers are the consumers, not the producers (as the always sterling quality of Slashdot discussions makes clear.) And, yes: I'm an elitist scumbag who thinks most people shouldn't be allowed to vote on anything, so anyone who wants to respond with that can save their keystrokes.
Even when the features are there, they are still crippled by hype. Black and White was billed as a deeply philosophical exploration of choosing good and evil. And in the end, the high point of the game revolves around slapping around your ape... Spanking your monkey? Yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
Others have mentioned the taxes. How about this one: Bush will conduct an offensive campaign against rogue states and terrorist organizations, while Kerry will only respond to attacks against us? Kerry sees the bombing of the USS Cole, the World Trade Center (at least the first one, maybe both), Khobar Towers, and our African embassies as "a nuisance" (his words, not mine.) while Bush sees them as acts of war against the United States conducted by rogue states using terrorist groups as proxies.
Or how about this one: Bush won't rely on approval of the corrupt and dictatorial-regime-supporting UN (France, Germany and Russia getting Oil-for-Food kickbacks from Saddam to block us in the security council is BIG NEWS.) and Kerry will use these same thieves and fools as a litmus test to decide whether or not we should use our armed forces to defend ourselves. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, 'If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no.' " link to story.
Kerry will guide our course in the world based primarily on input from people who want to see America weaker, who happily accept bribes from mass-murdering dictators, and who would rather not see the 50,000,000 million Muslims that We have liberated in the past three years... uh... liberated. How's that for a start?
Actually, the differences are enormous in many important areas. In fact, about half the important areas. Your being only halfway informed explains why you can't see it.
Actually, I said "In China" because of the awesome allegiance Chinese scientists often pay to their mother country when here. The Chinese got MIRV nuclear missile tech from a Chinese scientist working at Los Alamos and smuggling data to the ChiComs. It's gotten so bad, Chinese scientists have had to set up apoogist/propoganda sites So, as you can see, the problem with a melting pot is that some bits refuse to melt.
When he said "The Blue Screen of Death" he REALLY meant it.
For the folks out there who can't see how this could lead to massive voter fraud, let me explain how it's going to cause that:
1) lots of people cast provisional ballots who aren't registered
2) the losing party in an election (not just president, but any of the offices and referenda being voted on) will point to provisional ballots that have a) been rejected and b) support the loser's cause to say that "These people were denied the right to vote!" and imply that either the registration system lost their registrations or is just plain crooked and c) the media that support that side (cnn/nbc/cbs/npr/abc for democrats, fox and the conservative talk shows for republicans) will run with it. d) Either the election officials get pressured into reversing their stance or it goes to an activist judge.
And remember these two things about the last election in Florida:
1) George Bush run every re-count conducted by investigative journalists after the SUpreme COurt decision.
2) Lawyers for Gore and Lieberman had military absentee ballots thrown out for post office errors, not voter errors. So let's not pretend that it's just Republicans that play games.
And there's another advantage: job security. If you can port an existing mission critical system to this or develop a new on with this, you've got a real hostage :)
Oh, come on. You can't use some atheist blog to defend your position; and I'm speaking as an atheist. You can, however, use this: link here as a persuasive argument. You're right. These folks were just exercising their rights and were arrested at the direction of an overzealous secret service agent. Now, what this has to do with metal detector use by local police at a mass demonstration adjacent to a U.S. military base escapes me. But you're absolutely right; these folks were treated shabbily. And their rights were unlawfully abridged. And they were owed the apologies they received. And it needs to not happen again.
It's not a right at a private function. As far as rights are concerned, we have a freedom of association that includes the right to call together a private group that excludes certain people from it. A ticketed event is one of those things. I'm sorry you refuse to see that distinction, and to acknowledge that you're crossing the line between exercising your rights and trampling on other people's. Once again, you're calling people "victims" who deliberately broke the law for the purpose of getting arrested. If that's the best you can do, I don't see how someone can attach validity to the point you're trying to make.
Wow. You got me. Golly, you're right: there's nothing at all aggressive (let alone, wrong) about you going to a ticketed-admission gay rights event and asking gay men about the weather just to trick them into seeing the "I shoot fags and laugh as they burn in hell" t-shirt you're wearing. Nope, nothing at all. And you're right, t-shirts can't talk... to illiterate people or blind people. The article implies (but, I admit, does not explicitly state) that some of the people at the event... uh... could see. And read. But since I can't PROVE that, well, you got me. You winner, you.
If I go to a Gay Rights event, and put on a tee shirt that says, "I'm gonna murder all you fags and laugh as you burn in hell" and then walk up to people there and try to engage them in conversation about the weather to trick them into looking at me and reading the shirt, then I'm accosting them. Oh, sure, theoretically they don't HAVE to read the shirt, but they're gonna. While you like to maintain the facade that you haven't thought this through, I think the real issue here is that you're being deliberately obtuse because you support the views of the people being arrested. But I've got to tell you: if a bunch of libertarians bought tickets to a Kerry (or Nader) rally, put on shirts that said, "Kerry (or Nader) is a Goddamned Commie Dirtbag and I'm Going To Kill Him and Laugh as He Burns In Hell," then went around and asked people about the weather, then got invited to leave or be arrested, then refused to leave, then got arrested, I would not hold them up as victims of the police state. And I would not do that because it would be so obviously dumb as to make negative implications about my intelligence. Even though I agree that Kerry and Nader are filthy crypto-Socialists who lie about their true ideology to get their slimy tentacles on the power of the presidency.
If I go to a Gay Rights event, and put on a tee shirt that says, "I'm gonna murder all you fags and laugh as you burn in hell" and then walk up to people there and try to engage them in conversation about the weather to trick them into looking at me and reading the shirt, then I'm accosting them. Oh, sure, theoretically they don't HAVE to read the shirt, but they're gonna.
While you like to maintain the facade that you haven't thought this through, I think the real issue here is that you're being deliberately obtuse because you support the views of the people being arrested. But I've got to tell you: if a bunch of libertarians bought tickets to a Kerry (or Nader) rally, put on shirts that said, "Kerry (or Nader) is a Goddamned Commie Dirtbag and I'm Going To Kill Him and Laugh as He Burns In Hell," then went around and asked people about the weather, then got invited to leave or be arrested, then refused to leave, then got arrested, I would not hold them up as victims of the police state. And I would not do that because it would be so obviously dumb as to make negative implications about my intelligence. Even though I agree that Kerry and Nader are filthy crypto-Socialists who lie about their true ideology to get their slimy tentacles on the power of the presidency.
They weren't jailed for non-violent protest. They were arrested and released (no jail time) for trespassing. They were given a chance to conduct their protest in a public space instead and they chose not to, knowing full well that arrest was the only alternative left to the police; police who were protecting the rights of the other people at the rally. You holding up people who get arrested on purpose as evidence of the police arresting protestors is positively Orwellian.
As for the argument that anyone can buy a ticket so it's public? Please. I don't like the musical "Cats". It sucks. But if I buy a ticket to "Cats" and then walk around the audience and tell people "You know, this play sucks" and then refuse to leave the theater when the people running the theater ask me to, then I subject myself to arrest because I am (wait for it) breaking the law.
You seem to feel that a person's right to speak is a person's right to accost whomever he pleases. It's not the same thing.
Throwing Monkeys at Technology????? Will this outsourcing nightmare never end???????
So, who was jailed at the protest for wearing a T-Shirt? I didn't see anything at all about it in the article. Oh! The link you sent! Hmmm...
So two people infiltrated a private meeting (yes, though you won't admit it, an event that requires TICKETS to get into is a private meeting) under false pretenses, refused to leave when asked, and were... charged with trespassing (which they were admittedly doing) and released. And you claim that's an assault on our civil liberties instead of a protection of them. My Lord. "Please loosen your sphincter?" Please practice what you preach.
It's actually a sign of how healthy our society is and how secure our liberties are that people have to turn a couple of obnoxious protesters into the canaries in the mineshaft. Thank you for reassuring all of us.
Saying it has prevented terrorist attacks is like Bush holding up a stick and declaring the stick repels Gorillas. -- Well you don't see any gorillas do you??
No, it isn't. Some banks that have security guards in them never get robbed. So, using your "logic" those security guards are an unnecessary expense that increases my bank fees.
Is using metal detectors on these protesters a waste of time? Yes. Did the local authorities try to do it just to be a nuisance to people being a nuisance to them? Yes. Did President Bush call the local authorities and say, "As part of my War on Terror, please unreasonably search all those Goddamned stupid hippies who have been annually gathering to stink up the Georgia countryside lo, this past quarter century?" Of course not.
As for your "Waning faith in America," well, you can emigrate to any of a number of places any time you want. No, really, you can. Please.
How can we trust any article that uses an old SDI graphic from Reagan's presentation to congress and photoshops in Mars for Earth and Spaceship for Commie ICBM?
But it does tell you to take a look. The problem with chemical sensors is that you may not get meaningful feedback about the quantity of a pollutant... So you don't know if it's at a dangerous level or not. As for animal cruelty, if I've got to pick between a fish drinking water that causes distress and a person, I pick a fish. Do you wait until the toxins have reached such a level that hundreds or thousands of fish float up to the top in a terminal state of distress, or do you use a few you can actually monitor cost-effectively? And chemical sensors can break in ways you can't detect that render them useless or, worse, cause them to deliver a false sense of security. Fish, on the other hand, are obviously healthy or obviously not.
I think Prince said it best when he sang "I only want to see you landing in the Methane Rain."
Okay, okay. First they invent a language where you DON'T SAY MOST OF THE LETTERS IN A WORD. Then they sell nuclear reactors to Iraq. Then they infiltrate Burger King with criossandwiches. But THIS is going too damned far.
Our IT folks made the time to get a Linux business productivity system in place (in parallel to their regular support of 2K/XP) so they could 1) demonstrate it to people (the compatibilities and the look and feel) and 2) package it up so our non-IT folks could be set up and supported easily. And re-set up when they broke something. If you hire IT people who actually like what they do, it makes this kind of thing a lot easier. Most of our departments are still MS, but the ones that have switched like it and aren't going back.
I still don't understand how gerrymandering is a bad thing. There is a group of people. They get to vote on the representative of their choice. Their votes are all counted. What's the problem?
It's designed to keep incumbents in power, but if your representative is a failure, there's a primary to defeat him in. Complaining about this problem makes one heck of a case against representative democracy: the poor, poor pitiful people can't pick decent representatives. They're all just girls who can't say "no!"
But this doesn't answer the fundamental question associated with embryonic stem cell research: does a human life have intrinsic value? Is that intrinsic value higher or lower than the value of the stem cells that result when an embryo is destroyed?
Yes, yes. I know that some high proportion (10%? 50%? pick the study that best supports your point of view) of embryos do not implant in the womb and are lost. Does that mean we can treat embryos as analogous to acorns?
Yes, yes. There are hundreds of thousands of embryos in cryogenic storage that are going to be discarded anyway. But at what point does it cease to be disposable parts of my wife and me and start being a separate human?
If you're an atheist (as I am) how can you defend any view other than "as soon as it's a zygote (a DNA pattern separate from the mother's and the father's) it's a person"? If you're the final arbiter of morality (as an atheist is to himself) how can you fudge this one?
Like any good leader, I bet he gets to say, "Your input is valued even when it's not followed." The Internet has such a lopsided sampling (and groups out there cruising for polls to skew ("Hey! Skew you, poll!")) that it shouldn't be consulted like this. I mean, the Internet works best when the individual surfers are the consumers, not the producers (as the always sterling quality of Slashdot discussions makes clear.) And, yes: I'm an elitist scumbag who thinks most people shouldn't be allowed to vote on anything, so anyone who wants to respond with that can save their keystrokes.
Even when the features are there, they are still crippled by hype. Black and White was billed as a deeply philosophical exploration of choosing good and evil. And in the end, the high point of the game revolves around slapping around your ape... Spanking your monkey? Yeah.
Seems awfully hypocritical to me, since Cornel accepts public money and runs a 2-tier tuition scheme for in-state and out-of-state students. But the libertarians were happy to attend a debate there. Hmmm...