Who's building those new yachts? Could it be, perhaps, a whole bunch of people all making 50k? I'm with you - let's tax away that yacht money. Those guys building them didn't actually need jobs anyway!
As for the "portfolio", where the money is amassed? Unless by "portfolio" you meant "buried in a box in the back yard", that money is making its way into the hands of businesses to help them expand their workforce and purchase new equipment (which must be run by new workers and which was built by workers, all of whom will buy food and other necessities in support of their local economy with the money they make from their jobs). If you want to take that money away too, then I guess those businesses just won't be able to hire new workers or purchase new equipment. Which will then reduce the number of people required to make the equipment, cut the number of people needed to make the parts, hit all the connected local economies, etc.
It isn't about trickle-down or trickle-up or any of that. It's about recognizing the path every dollar takes as it moves through the economy and understanding the impact that any given action (or lack of action) has on everyone else surrounding it. You see yachts and luxury jets as frivolous and worthless things rich people throw money away to get. I see people building, operating, and maintaining those things receiving middle class incomes to support families. I say that not as a rich guy taking weekend trips to the Hamptons but as a middle class nobody driving to work every day in a Honda.
The US government cannot print money. That ability has been granted exclusively to the Federal Reserve by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States Treasury may request money be printed, but the ultimate authority to do so (or to refuse) lies with the Federal Reserve. This was done intentionally under the assumption that it would remove monetary policy from the hands of politicians and protect the value of the currency of the United States from political meddling (exactly the kind you mention).
Now, whether the Federal Reserve has done that job or not is certainly debatable. Either way, the US government cannot print a single US Dollar on its own without a complete reversal of the Federal Reserve Act.
Is your tinfoil hat on too tight? I just want to know if it hurts while wearing it.... Remember shiny side out...
That tactic only works when someone is critical of government. I'm being critical of anti-government extremists on the right.
Maybe you should tell your buddies in the Tea Party to remove their tin foil hats. Aren't they the ones collecting guns and forming militias across the country?
No, they aren't. You seem to think that everyone on the economic right of the political spectrum is preparing for military conflict against the United States government. This is roughly the same as thinking that President Obama is conspiring with Keith Olbermann and Al Franken to use the US military to turn the entire world into a pot-smoking hippie commune.
The various 'Tea Party' groups certainly do have some off-color people and probably a very small number of militia types among their ranks, but the vast majority are average Americans who have long believed that the Federal government is doing too many things and spending too much money in doing them and who've decided to cease being quiet about their beliefs since things like the Bush bailouts and the economic policies of President Obama have become reality. It's just people expressing political opinions. And if people can't peacefully amass to express their shared political opinions without eliciting fear and horror in you, perhaps you need to reconsider the type of society you want. Because it's pretty obvious that one in which citizens may express their opinions openly is not for you.
You submit nothing but anti-nuclear nonsense from ridiculously biased sources.
That leads many on Slashdot who recognize your name from previous stories to associate you with ridiculously biased fact-twisting FUD. If you don't like that, stop submitting crap stories.
I think (b) follows automatically from (a). If drugs are legal, there is no basis for most of the criminality anymore. As the profit is out of the market, the drug cartels will dissolve, and the local pushers will need to go into other petty crime, burglary for instance. All in all, the number of criminals will considerably drop, as there is no longer a market to support them. You seem to assume crime is constant, but opportunity makes the thief. Get rid of the opportunity, and the thief will need to find honest employ or starve.
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You think that if you make drugs legal that all the cartel employees who've lived the life of doing whatever they want, whenever they want while making tons of money doing so will suddenly get jobs at Hardees working 30 hours a week for minimum wage?
Regardless of whether you think the drug war is - as a whole - working against the interest of the public good, don't hold (or worse - spread) the idiotic notion that all these criminals will do anything other than branch out into other profitable criminal activities. They're already doing so in many cases (kidnapping, extortion, mass thievery, government official corruption, murder for hire) as they find things that are easier or more profitable than the drug trade, or in cases where their particular market is saturated.
If you legalized drugs tomorrow all around the world, the first thing most of the drug cartels would do is start shopping their growing, processing, shipping, and distribution resources around to corporations looking to enter the trade so that they (the cartels) can use those funds to step up other activities with a more profitable future. You may reduce the criminal activity immediately surrounding the drug trade (certainly you'll not eliminate it), but you'll also find tens of thousands of people whose only work history is robbing, raping, and murdering people seeking a new revenue source.
I don't have an easy solution (other than the 4th Infantry Division), but my point is that you don't either. What this ultimately is is a problem involving poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, and perhaps worst of all: a lack of anything to lose. Unless and until you solve those issues in places like Mexico, much of Central America, and many parts of South America, you'll always have enormous corrupt organizations making a profit from harming others and finding no shortage of people ready and eager to sign up for a cut of the cash.
Rather than an overabundance of meat in general, perhaps a larger contributing factor is the fact that what meat people do get these days often looks more like fat than meat when held under a microscope. Anyone eating typical supermarket meat is mostly consuming pure fat.
The meat I buy from Whole Foods is typically completely grass-fed (in the case of the beef) and has a 4 or higher on their scale (meaning it spends most of its time outdoors grazing and has no hormones or antibiotics used). The chicken I buy from there is raised in similar conditions (no cages, no weird food, no antibiotics, etc). It most certainly doesn't cost me 6x what it did when I shopped at the typical chain stores. At most, I'm paying ~20% more. On average, it's closer to 10%. The milk I buy (no hormones, all organic, etc) is about 20 cents cheaper per gallon than the milk at the chain store down the street and literally lasts 2 - 3x as long.
I couldn't care less about how 'happy' my food is before it's slaughtered. What I care about is that I'm eating an animal that was healthy and normal while it was alive and that nothing weird (chlorine baths, ammonia injections, etc) happened along the way to it hitting my kitchen. You see, when the cow isn't being fed crap that turns it from newborn to market weight in 10 months (as opposed to 3-5 years), isn't spending its entire life standing in one place (causing most of the muscle to atrophy), and isn't jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with a thousand other cows 24/7 covered in its own shit and the shit of others nearby to the point that it needs constant antibiotic flows just to keep it alive long enough to kill it, you don't have the same problems with disease and such that you do with meat from a factory farm. And when your chicken doesn't come from a place where the chickens have been altered to the point where they can't support their own weight and where they're kept packed so tightly together that they're literally resting on the rotting corpses of the ones that didn't make it, you don't need to worry about a lot of the problems you typically find in store-bought chicken these days.
I understand that not everyone can afford to push another 10% into their meat purchases, but honestly, I think we'd all be a whole lot better off if we weren't being fed Clorox/Mr. Clean-sanitized products from sick and dying animals kept in the most monumentally unsanitary conditions imaginable their entire lives. Human beings are dying because they've been fed food that's filled to the brim with lethal pathogens that weren't killed during preparation. Every time we start actually testing the food on our supermarket shelves, it looks worse and worse in terms of what we find living on it. So perhaps some across-the-board labeling actually does make sense so that individuals can know what their purchase options are. Do you give up a movie night a month so you can afford to spend the extra 10% on hamburger that could save your child's life? That's a personal call, but it's one that ought to be made by informed consumers.
I don't recall the founding fathers advocating the right of people (most especially foreign citizens) to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, thereby putting numerous lives in grave danger.
And I think you might feel a little differently about "censoring of websites in the US" if the website in question advocated the murder of you and your family while providing real-time tracking of each member of your family with a reward amount stamped on each head.
Just because it's a "website" doesn't mean it can do illegal things that put people in danger. You can argue that publishing some of the diplomatic cables was harmless, but most certainly not all of them. In particular, the publishing of the list of strategically vital sites around the world puts scores of civilian lives in direct danger.
According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.
(highlighted for your enjoyment)
Whether you believe their claims personally or not is entirely irrelevant. The point of criminal investigations is to see whether there's sufficient evidence to take a case to trial. The point of a trial is to establish facts and render a verdict on the findings. If you believe the entire Swiss criminal justice system is that horribly corrupt, I'd love to see evidence that you believed that before this one particular person found himself under investigation by them. "They accused my hero, therefore they are corrupt!" is simply not a valid argument.
As for INTERPOL's actions, they simply responded to a request from a participatory member state. INTERPOL merely requires that such requests not be for political or religious crimes. Otherwise, they simply process the request and move along.
Apparently there's no need to investigation allegations of criminal actions so long as we've got you around. It's a shame we can't simply appoint you to a place where you could declare everyone's guilt or innocence on the spot.
Me? I'm inclined not to believe that the entire Swiss criminal justice system is corrupt to the point that it will randomly persecute people. I'm also inclined not to believe that the US has some unseen power with which it controls women, police, and prosecutors in perfectly decently functioning western democracies. Sounds absolutely just as paranoid as claiming international conspiracies of Jews controlling the world, to be honest.
Not speaking to this case in particular at all, but study after study has shown that the overwhelming vast majority of rapes never get reported.
I'm certainly not calling Assange guilty, but I don't think there's a single person posting here who's in a position to declare his innocence either. The fact that there are accusations from two different women doesn't diminish the credibility of either accusation. If anything, the fact that similar activity is being independently reported by otherwise unconnected individuals actually bolsters the claims.
In cases where battle or insurrection has made it impossible for the normal criminal justice system to operate in a given area (typically defined as the courts being closed/destroyed/otherwise unable to hear cases), that given area effectively operates under military law and the laws of war. Thus, your usual rights and privileges protected under the US Constitution go out the window and the military is free to step in and be used against the civilian population.
Perhaps there was no budget for such systems. Often the higher-ups have no understanding of why they should ever want to purchase extra equipment which isn't (visibly) doing anything to make things go.
But if we just give people the means to raise themselves up, they might not choose to put in the work necessary to make it happen. Then where would we be? Right back to unfair, that's where! To make sure everyone's equal, the only sensible solution is to punish anyone who tries to get ahead of whoever's at the bottom.
We obviously just need TSA screeners at the entrance to every classroom and hallway performing Freedom Fondling to make sure no weapons get passed around.
What I'm curious about though, is why the teacher felt this memo was necessary in the first place; TFA doesn't mention this.
Isn't it obvious, they're worried about weapons. If they bring in pencils they have graphite. All they need to do is purify uranium and they can use this to moderate an atomic pile. Next thing they will have weapons-grade plutonium.
But what could they use for the implosion device? Possibly some pizza crust from the lunch room for the casing and synchronized wrist watches for timers?
You're being intellectually dishonest by giving only half the story.
The Republicans stopped the bill for two reasons. First, because it contained a number of other provisions they could never agree to. Second, it had no chance of passing this year and would do nothing but further clutter the already overdrawn legislative schedule in the Senate.
Bringing the bill up was nothing more than political theatre designed to score some cheap political points with those too ignorant to see through it. That means you're either a shill for the Democratic Party regurgitating their talking points on the Internet or you're so utterly ignorant of the ridiculous games BOTH major parties play that you fell for the Democrats' talking points hook, line, and sinker.
They are more accurate than your handwaving. And yes, historical CO2 levels support the position that high CO2 levels will lead to a warmer climate - they would even if we didn't have the physics to assume it, which we do.
Historical records seem to indicate that, rather than higher CO2 causing a warmer climate, it's instead a warmer climate which causes higher CO2.
Of course, you have the option of simply restricting what data you allow to exist out there on social media sites. I have a Facebook page and a Myspace profile, but I seriously doubt any employer would ever be able to locate either one. Even if I handed them direct links, they'd see essentially blank pages. Even if they somehow got on my friends list, they wouldn't see anything of consequence.
I think what it really comes down to is taking responsibility for the fact that stuff you post online is available for anyone and everyone to see. If you don't want people like your mother or a potential employer to see it, you should either post it under a name which cannot be connected to the real you or just not post it at all. And if someone else posts something like a picture with you in it that you don't wish to have out there, remove the tags of you (and if it's really bad, ask them to take it down and edit it).
Seriously, invest a small bit of time in protecting information you want protected. It's not like places like Facebook don't make it shit simple to do.
Income disparity and wealth concentration began growing against in the 1970s, long before President Reagan was elected.
It has continued to accelerate through 2.5 Democratic presidencies and many years of Democratic control of Congress.
The income gap is growing because of things like the Internet, globalization, illegal immigration, and advances in robotics. The work that can be done anywhere is being sent to places around the world where people are so poor they can be treated like slaves and still be better off than they were. The unskilled work that has to be done here is having its wages and benefits artificially limited by the vast supply of dirt cheap and easy to exploit illegal immigrant workers. What's left over are jobs with so many applications scrambling for them that employers can freeze or lower wages and benefits while continuing to have a huge pool of qualified employees ready and willing to step in and take what they can get.
We aren't going to close the gap until we cut off the supply of cheap labor here (immigration enforcement and reform), cut off the supply of cheap labor elsewhere (outsourcing reform), and find other work for all those who've been replaced by machines.
Gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel do make up most of our current uses of oil, but there's also home heating oil (why not just use electric from the nuclear plant?), electricity generation, heavy factory fuels, etc. All of those applications could easily be replaced by electricity if it were coming from cheap, clean, reliable sources (like nuclear).
From what I can tell, that's somewhere in the range of about 12% (conservatively) of the US's total oil usage. Using 2008 numbers, that'd be about 36 Billion gallons of oil a year. To me, eliminating that (or even half that) would be enormous.
But we can't, because a bunch of hippies in the 70s convinced America that nuclear plants randomly explode like Hiroshima and will annihilate the entire planet in a magical chain reaction.
It's really not that much of a spin. The GP's point is completely correct. If self-described environmentalists (actually just anti-nuclear activists) hadn't scared the American public away from a nuclear-based energy policy with scientifically bankrupt scare tactics, the United States would rely far, far less on fossil fuels today (probably almost exclusively for cars by now) and the chances of oil rigs exploding would be lessened by the fact that there would be far less oil rigs in the first place.
Not only that, but extracting oil from deep-water drill sites would probably not yet (if ever) be cost-effective for the prices wrought by demand and so the major Gulf spill of 2010 quite possibly would never have happened either.
So while they're not directly to blame, it's not a huge stretch to draw a line between the lies and ignorant actions of past anti-nuclear activists and the environmental disasters happening all the time in our fossil fuel draining little world.
Make no mistake, so long as the American people are as armed as they are, the US government will only ever be allowed to go as far as We the People allow it to go in trampling our rights. It's unfortunate that we already allow our government to walk all over us in many respects, but if you think the US government wouldn't be held accountable because it has a large military and police force at its disposal, ask yourself what'd happen if the Federal government outlawed all private firearm ownership tomorrow and ordered immediate collection.
By Monday we'd have a whole lot of dead cops and politicians, and likely a new, transitional Federal government headed by the military while plans for a meeting of popular leaders to discuss creating another government began.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's building those new yachts? Could it be, perhaps, a whole bunch of people all making 50k? I'm with you - let's tax away that yacht money. Those guys building them didn't actually need jobs anyway!
As for the "portfolio", where the money is amassed? Unless by "portfolio" you meant "buried in a box in the back yard", that money is making its way into the hands of businesses to help them expand their workforce and purchase new equipment (which must be run by new workers and which was built by workers, all of whom will buy food and other necessities in support of their local economy with the money they make from their jobs). If you want to take that money away too, then I guess those businesses just won't be able to hire new workers or purchase new equipment. Which will then reduce the number of people required to make the equipment, cut the number of people needed to make the parts, hit all the connected local economies, etc.
It isn't about trickle-down or trickle-up or any of that. It's about recognizing the path every dollar takes as it moves through the economy and understanding the impact that any given action (or lack of action) has on everyone else surrounding it. You see yachts and luxury jets as frivolous and worthless things rich people throw money away to get. I see people building, operating, and maintaining those things receiving middle class incomes to support families. I say that not as a rich guy taking weekend trips to the Hamptons but as a middle class nobody driving to work every day in a Honda.
The US government cannot print money. That ability has been granted exclusively to the Federal Reserve by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States Treasury may request money be printed, but the ultimate authority to do so (or to refuse) lies with the Federal Reserve. This was done intentionally under the assumption that it would remove monetary policy from the hands of politicians and protect the value of the currency of the United States from political meddling (exactly the kind you mention).
Now, whether the Federal Reserve has done that job or not is certainly debatable. Either way, the US government cannot print a single US Dollar on its own without a complete reversal of the Federal Reserve Act.
Is your tinfoil hat on too tight? I just want to know if it hurts while wearing it.... Remember shiny side out...
That tactic only works when someone is critical of government. I'm being critical of anti-government extremists on the right.
Maybe you should tell your buddies in the Tea Party to remove their tin foil hats. Aren't they the ones collecting guns and forming militias across the country?
No, they aren't. You seem to think that everyone on the economic right of the political spectrum is preparing for military conflict against the United States government. This is roughly the same as thinking that President Obama is conspiring with Keith Olbermann and Al Franken to use the US military to turn the entire world into a pot-smoking hippie commune.
The various 'Tea Party' groups certainly do have some off-color people and probably a very small number of militia types among their ranks, but the vast majority are average Americans who have long believed that the Federal government is doing too many things and spending too much money in doing them and who've decided to cease being quiet about their beliefs since things like the Bush bailouts and the economic policies of President Obama have become reality. It's just people expressing political opinions. And if people can't peacefully amass to express their shared political opinions without eliciting fear and horror in you, perhaps you need to reconsider the type of society you want. Because it's pretty obvious that one in which citizens may express their opinions openly is not for you.
You submit nothing but anti-nuclear nonsense from ridiculously biased sources.
That leads many on Slashdot who recognize your name from previous stories to associate you with ridiculously biased fact-twisting FUD. If you don't like that, stop submitting crap stories.
I think (b) follows automatically from (a). If drugs are legal, there is no basis for most of the criminality anymore. As the profit is out of the market, the drug cartels will dissolve, and the local pushers will need to go into other petty crime, burglary for instance. All in all, the number of criminals will considerably drop, as there is no longer a market to support them. You seem to assume crime is constant, but opportunity makes the thief. Get rid of the opportunity, and the thief will need to find honest employ or starve.
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You think that if you make drugs legal that all the cartel employees who've lived the life of doing whatever they want, whenever they want while making tons of money doing so will suddenly get jobs at Hardees working 30 hours a week for minimum wage?
Regardless of whether you think the drug war is - as a whole - working against the interest of the public good, don't hold (or worse - spread) the idiotic notion that all these criminals will do anything other than branch out into other profitable criminal activities. They're already doing so in many cases (kidnapping, extortion, mass thievery, government official corruption, murder for hire) as they find things that are easier or more profitable than the drug trade, or in cases where their particular market is saturated.
If you legalized drugs tomorrow all around the world, the first thing most of the drug cartels would do is start shopping their growing, processing, shipping, and distribution resources around to corporations looking to enter the trade so that they (the cartels) can use those funds to step up other activities with a more profitable future. You may reduce the criminal activity immediately surrounding the drug trade (certainly you'll not eliminate it), but you'll also find tens of thousands of people whose only work history is robbing, raping, and murdering people seeking a new revenue source.
I don't have an easy solution (other than the 4th Infantry Division), but my point is that you don't either. What this ultimately is is a problem involving poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, and perhaps worst of all: a lack of anything to lose. Unless and until you solve those issues in places like Mexico, much of Central America, and many parts of South America, you'll always have enormous corrupt organizations making a profit from harming others and finding no shortage of people ready and eager to sign up for a cut of the cash.
Rather than an overabundance of meat in general, perhaps a larger contributing factor is the fact that what meat people do get these days often looks more like fat than meat when held under a microscope. Anyone eating typical supermarket meat is mostly consuming pure fat.
The meat I buy from Whole Foods is typically completely grass-fed (in the case of the beef) and has a 4 or higher on their scale (meaning it spends most of its time outdoors grazing and has no hormones or antibiotics used). The chicken I buy from there is raised in similar conditions (no cages, no weird food, no antibiotics, etc). It most certainly doesn't cost me 6x what it did when I shopped at the typical chain stores. At most, I'm paying ~20% more. On average, it's closer to 10%. The milk I buy (no hormones, all organic, etc) is about 20 cents cheaper per gallon than the milk at the chain store down the street and literally lasts 2 - 3x as long.
I couldn't care less about how 'happy' my food is before it's slaughtered. What I care about is that I'm eating an animal that was healthy and normal while it was alive and that nothing weird (chlorine baths, ammonia injections, etc) happened along the way to it hitting my kitchen. You see, when the cow isn't being fed crap that turns it from newborn to market weight in 10 months (as opposed to 3-5 years), isn't spending its entire life standing in one place (causing most of the muscle to atrophy), and isn't jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with a thousand other cows 24/7 covered in its own shit and the shit of others nearby to the point that it needs constant antibiotic flows just to keep it alive long enough to kill it, you don't have the same problems with disease and such that you do with meat from a factory farm. And when your chicken doesn't come from a place where the chickens have been altered to the point where they can't support their own weight and where they're kept packed so tightly together that they're literally resting on the rotting corpses of the ones that didn't make it, you don't need to worry about a lot of the problems you typically find in store-bought chicken these days.
I understand that not everyone can afford to push another 10% into their meat purchases, but honestly, I think we'd all be a whole lot better off if we weren't being fed Clorox/Mr. Clean-sanitized products from sick and dying animals kept in the most monumentally unsanitary conditions imaginable their entire lives. Human beings are dying because they've been fed food that's filled to the brim with lethal pathogens that weren't killed during preparation. Every time we start actually testing the food on our supermarket shelves, it looks worse and worse in terms of what we find living on it. So perhaps some across-the-board labeling actually does make sense so that individuals can know what their purchase options are. Do you give up a movie night a month so you can afford to spend the extra 10% on hamburger that could save your child's life? That's a personal call, but it's one that ought to be made by informed consumers.
I don't recall the founding fathers advocating the right of people (most especially foreign citizens) to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, thereby putting numerous lives in grave danger.
And I think you might feel a little differently about "censoring of websites in the US" if the website in question advocated the murder of you and your family while providing real-time tracking of each member of your family with a reward amount stamped on each head.
Just because it's a "website" doesn't mean it can do illegal things that put people in danger. You can argue that publishing some of the diplomatic cables was harmless, but most certainly not all of them. In particular, the publishing of the list of strategically vital sites around the world puts scores of civilian lives in direct danger.
Is it normal in Europe to have sex without someone's consent? Because that's what he's accused of doing. Twice. With two different women.
The New York Times
According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.
(highlighted for your enjoyment)
Whether you believe their claims personally or not is entirely irrelevant. The point of criminal investigations is to see whether there's sufficient evidence to take a case to trial. The point of a trial is to establish facts and render a verdict on the findings. If you believe the entire Swiss criminal justice system is that horribly corrupt, I'd love to see evidence that you believed that before this one particular person found himself under investigation by them. "They accused my hero, therefore they are corrupt!" is simply not a valid argument.
As for INTERPOL's actions, they simply responded to a request from a participatory member state. INTERPOL merely requires that such requests not be for political or religious crimes. Otherwise, they simply process the request and move along.
Apparently there's no need to investigation allegations of criminal actions so long as we've got you around. It's a shame we can't simply appoint you to a place where you could declare everyone's guilt or innocence on the spot.
Me? I'm inclined not to believe that the entire Swiss criminal justice system is corrupt to the point that it will randomly persecute people. I'm also inclined not to believe that the US has some unseen power with which it controls women, police, and prosecutors in perfectly decently functioning western democracies. Sounds absolutely just as paranoid as claiming international conspiracies of Jews controlling the world, to be honest.
Not speaking to this case in particular at all, but study after study has shown that the overwhelming vast majority of rapes never get reported.
I'm certainly not calling Assange guilty, but I don't think there's a single person posting here who's in a position to declare his innocence either. The fact that there are accusations from two different women doesn't diminish the credibility of either accusation. If anything, the fact that similar activity is being independently reported by otherwise unconnected individuals actually bolsters the claims.
That's not entirely true.
In cases where battle or insurrection has made it impossible for the normal criminal justice system to operate in a given area (typically defined as the courts being closed/destroyed/otherwise unable to hear cases), that given area effectively operates under military law and the laws of war. Thus, your usual rights and privileges protected under the US Constitution go out the window and the military is free to step in and be used against the civilian population.
Ex Parte Milligan
Perhaps there was no budget for such systems. Often the higher-ups have no understanding of why they should ever want to purchase extra equipment which isn't (visibly) doing anything to make things go.
But if we just give people the means to raise themselves up, they might not choose to put in the work necessary to make it happen. Then where would we be? Right back to unfair, that's where! To make sure everyone's equal, the only sensible solution is to punish anyone who tries to get ahead of whoever's at the bottom.
We obviously just need TSA screeners at the entrance to every classroom and hallway performing Freedom Fondling to make sure no weapons get passed around.
This was after several kids got knives and guns pulled on them by the library...
That's a pretty tough library, pulling knives and guns on kids like that.. ;)
What I'm curious about though, is why the teacher felt this memo was necessary in the first place; TFA doesn't mention this.
Isn't it obvious, they're worried about weapons. If they bring in pencils they have graphite. All they need to do is purify uranium and they can use this to moderate an atomic pile. Next thing they will have weapons-grade plutonium.
But what could they use for the implosion device? Possibly some pizza crust from the lunch room for the casing and synchronized wrist watches for timers?
You're being intellectually dishonest by giving only half the story.
The Republicans stopped the bill for two reasons. First, because it contained a number of other provisions they could never agree to. Second, it had no chance of passing this year and would do nothing but further clutter the already overdrawn legislative schedule in the Senate.
Bringing the bill up was nothing more than political theatre designed to score some cheap political points with those too ignorant to see through it. That means you're either a shill for the Democratic Party regurgitating their talking points on the Internet or you're so utterly ignorant of the ridiculous games BOTH major parties play that you fell for the Democrats' talking points hook, line, and sinker.
They are more accurate than your handwaving. And yes, historical CO2 levels support the position that high CO2 levels will lead to a warmer climate - they would even if we didn't have the physics to assume it, which we do.
Historical records seem to indicate that, rather than higher CO2 causing a warmer climate, it's instead a warmer climate which causes higher CO2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program#Conspiracy_theories
Are you sure the weather patterns you're seeing are being caused by the aliens inside your brain?
Of course, you have the option of simply restricting what data you allow to exist out there on social media sites. I have a Facebook page and a Myspace profile, but I seriously doubt any employer would ever be able to locate either one. Even if I handed them direct links, they'd see essentially blank pages. Even if they somehow got on my friends list, they wouldn't see anything of consequence.
I think what it really comes down to is taking responsibility for the fact that stuff you post online is available for anyone and everyone to see. If you don't want people like your mother or a potential employer to see it, you should either post it under a name which cannot be connected to the real you or just not post it at all. And if someone else posts something like a picture with you in it that you don't wish to have out there, remove the tags of you (and if it's really bad, ask them to take it down and edit it).
Seriously, invest a small bit of time in protecting information you want protected. It's not like places like Facebook don't make it shit simple to do.
Income disparity and wealth concentration began growing against in the 1970s, long before President Reagan was elected.
It has continued to accelerate through 2.5 Democratic presidencies and many years of Democratic control of Congress.
The income gap is growing because of things like the Internet, globalization, illegal immigration, and advances in robotics. The work that can be done anywhere is being sent to places around the world where people are so poor they can be treated like slaves and still be better off than they were. The unskilled work that has to be done here is having its wages and benefits artificially limited by the vast supply of dirt cheap and easy to exploit illegal immigrant workers. What's left over are jobs with so many applications scrambling for them that employers can freeze or lower wages and benefits while continuing to have a huge pool of qualified employees ready and willing to step in and take what they can get.
We aren't going to close the gap until we cut off the supply of cheap labor here (immigration enforcement and reform), cut off the supply of cheap labor elsewhere (outsourcing reform), and find other work for all those who've been replaced by machines.
Gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel do make up most of our current uses of oil, but there's also home heating oil (why not just use electric from the nuclear plant?), electricity generation, heavy factory fuels, etc. All of those applications could easily be replaced by electricity if it were coming from cheap, clean, reliable sources (like nuclear).
From what I can tell, that's somewhere in the range of about 12% (conservatively) of the US's total oil usage. Using 2008 numbers, that'd be about 36 Billion gallons of oil a year. To me, eliminating that (or even half that) would be enormous.
But we can't, because a bunch of hippies in the 70s convinced America that nuclear plants randomly explode like Hiroshima and will annihilate the entire planet in a magical chain reaction.
It's really not that much of a spin. The GP's point is completely correct. If self-described environmentalists (actually just anti-nuclear activists) hadn't scared the American public away from a nuclear-based energy policy with scientifically bankrupt scare tactics, the United States would rely far, far less on fossil fuels today (probably almost exclusively for cars by now) and the chances of oil rigs exploding would be lessened by the fact that there would be far less oil rigs in the first place.
Not only that, but extracting oil from deep-water drill sites would probably not yet (if ever) be cost-effective for the prices wrought by demand and so the major Gulf spill of 2010 quite possibly would never have happened either.
So while they're not directly to blame, it's not a huge stretch to draw a line between the lies and ignorant actions of past anti-nuclear activists and the environmental disasters happening all the time in our fossil fuel draining little world.
Make no mistake, so long as the American people are as armed as they are, the US government will only ever be allowed to go as far as We the People allow it to go in trampling our rights. It's unfortunate that we already allow our government to walk all over us in many respects, but if you think the US government wouldn't be held accountable because it has a large military and police force at its disposal, ask yourself what'd happen if the Federal government outlawed all private firearm ownership tomorrow and ordered immediate collection.
By Monday we'd have a whole lot of dead cops and politicians, and likely a new, transitional Federal government headed by the military while plans for a meeting of popular leaders to discuss creating another government began.