An average high school student from middle class India is an honor student in the USA.
Actually, no.
The difference is, by the time they're in high school, the indians have already weeded out the morons. Their "best and brightest" come here (and do average to poor) in our colleges, while the ones that never passed their "high school" are the ones sitting in the call centers.
If you want an accurate comparison, take the performance of all Indians of (say) age 16, in high school or not, and compare to the US (compulsory ed) 16-year-old population. You'll get quite a different result than the one you quoted.
There isn't a shortage at all, in any industry - if you're willing to pay a fair and competitive wage.
This is true in IT, true in agriculture, true in housing, true anywhere.
Where the US worker is getting fucked over is by countries that lack our labor protections and environmental protections, that treat their people like slaves, who then sell "services" to fat-cat CEOs and undercut what ought to be a fair market wage. And of course, this actually amounts to the real inflation we've been feeling for years - instead of monetary, we get shit for services when jobs are moved to third-world crap countries.
Bought a new home and found that all sorts of repairs - roofing, supports, improperly laid foundation - were needed? Congratulations. An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs, and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name.
The person whose SSN he stole, who will have their lives and credit ruined when he skips out on the bills later? Congratulations - that could be YOU or YOUR kid. The kid killed by his friends or his kids in gangs? Congratulations - that could be YOUR friend or family member.
Tried to call tech support any time in the past few years? Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose and who can't actually address the problem, just keep yammering from a script? Congratulations, you're a victim of this.
They're wasting your time, and giving you substandard service. Oftentimes, I call in for a warranty only to run into the cultural problem that the indians don't understand what a warranty is or, worse yet, they are simply instructed to ignore the warranty terms. And forget asking for a supervisor - they just hand you off to someone else from the cubicle next to them, who then hangs up. Getting their name? Good luck - they all give lying fake names, to avoid someone actually managing to complain about them specifically should someone get to the person in the US who's supposed to check up on customer service.
Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof) at all, I usually spend 20 minutes on hold with a looped tape of "you can get self service on our website"... well guess what sherlock, if your website was any good, if my question was actually answered, I wouldn't be on the phone calling.
isn't restricted just to the Olympics - though it's sad to see it happening.
Look at all (american) professional sports. Every time they're in a slump, some "rule change" comes along to bump scores. Basketball got laxer and laxer on obvious rules violations (watch any of the running leaps a "slam dunk" guy takes). Football implemented letting q-backs throw the ball into the stands. Baseball juiced up the ball itself, but thankfully drew the line on allowing metal bats.
And it's not even restricted to physical sports. Look at a pinball table today - you could easily chop off the last 3 digits of the score, because they never read anything meaningful anyways. Look at the numbers for damage ratings in "rpgs" like the Final Fantasy series - you used to start with characters doing 5-6 points of damage a hit, now you do 500-1000 and go from there.
I'd try ripping, then try cleaning and ripping again. He mentioned bad things about the Skip-Doctor series and he's only half right: the hand-crank models suck, but if you can find the old heavy-duty one (SkipDR MD Pro) you're far better off, it does a great job. The heavy motor helps you get a very smooth and reliable buffing; the hand-crank gives you an intermittent and unreliable-speed motion, which is what gave so many people problems.
Now we split crystals. And get quasicrystals. Which were supposed to be unusual.
And now we have quasi-quasicrystals. And then they're "not usual."
And next we can get something somewhere between a quasicrystal and a quasiquasicrystal.
I'd rather hear about what interesting/new discoveries come out of this strange material than just hear about the possibility of its existence.
In 10 years' time you'll be hearing about the quasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasicrystal, but we still won't know what the heck to do with them.
"We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual," Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do. Now they just have to figure out what those properties are.
Property #1: the ability to endow a grad student with his PhD and a sizable chunk of grant money.
The Presidency of the United States is not to be taken lightly,
No shit.
I would gladly elect a 'corrupt' official if I wholeheartedly believed that they were qualified for the office.
Well that explains a lot.
but at least Mr. Obama has his entire career (political and otherwise, quite impressive) under his belt.
Hmm... multiple years of race-baiting ambulance chasing, deplorably abysmal "constitutional scholarship" that would have the founding fathers spinning in their graves, and then fraudulent legal tactics to get himself launched in his first IL senate campaign.
What was that you were saying about "gladly " voting for someone corrupt? Here's your chance, put a doozy of a corrupt motherfucker in office by voting for Obama.
personally wouldn't mind a Democrat as Commander in Chief.
I know better than to let any one party have control of all three legislative-related portions of the government (President, Senate, House). That's way too much power for any one party to have, especially the corrupt two parties in the US. Put the Republicans in control of congress again, and I'll vote Democrat for Prez.
While I'm not a lawyer, I believe both sides of the case suffer from "unclean hands" problems - the coder for having gov't employees test his privately produced code on gov't time, the USAF for hiring someone to do a DMCA violation on their say-so.
"in-person accounts" of things either - even if it's Wired.
Look at what happened to the two border patrol agents the Bush Administration is holding as political prisoners for arresting a drug runner who has ties to the Mexican Mafia and therefore to Bush.
The court of appeals said verbally that they were aghast, the prosecution ADMITTED that their star witness (the drug runner) lied under oath. The court of appeals in open court said that they couldn't see possibly how this was a valid prosecution under the law.
10 months later, after the Bush admin / Mexican mafia threaten the judges, they "somehow" now see how preventing the defense from showing that the drug runner had been caught running multiple loads even while under his "immunity agreement" with the prosecution - while the drug runner was claiming it was a "one time only thing" because "he needed money for his grandmother's operation" - was legally valid and no new trial is warranted.
My prediction: the judge who said this, will get a phone call from the Prez or several Congresscritters, or a visit from certain branches of covert government and/or MafiAA stooges, and will "magically" put off the ruling for 6 months and then issue the opposite opinion when he thinks nobody is looking.
Ergo, this man is a conspiracy theorist. I'd love to hear his stories about who really is "responsible" for 9/11.
I'm personally leaning towards Al-Qaeda as ordered by Osama bin Laden. Why, are you one of these "the jews did it to frame the arabs" nutbags?
Ergo, he is at the very least a conservative or an Obama opponent.
Libertarian, both upper- and lower-case L actually.
There are plenty of outlets reporting this, there just aren't that many compared to those putting the cameras and mikes on the Presidential election.
Except that what I'm referring to is news outlets (e.g. the MSM) who spend their time appending any story on the Republicans with "and by the way, the President's approval rating is down below X%" to demonstrate that they hate Republicans and think they suck, while failing to mention the same that the democrat-run congress's approval rating is even further down the shit-o-meter.
I would agree with the critical mods that his posts no longer seem "Insightful".
I would say that I think you need a lot more education, specifically in how media bias is accomplished, with a focus on the following ways: - Undue weight - Omission - "Virtual Omission" (printing libel on page 1 in 72-pt font, printing the retraction/apology on page 347Q between the DBF and SWM relationship want ads). - Leading words and phrases - Cherry-picking and counting the hits/forgetting the misses, aka "lying with statistics."
Oh, you mean by correctly predicting the energy crisis and proposing serious workable solutions, anticipating Peak Oil by three decades?
Actually, I mean by screwing up the economy (far worse than when he started), and by prohibiting us from having a responsible and sustainable nuclear energy policy that would have virtually eliminated our need for heating oil and gasoline for transit.
Remember, Carter is the credulous moron who thought that if we didn't refine (read: RECYCLE) nuclear waste back into fuel, then nations like North Korean, India, Pakistan, and Iran would follow our lead and not make nuclear weaponry.
And we can all see how far that policy got. Now, instead of generating our energy from clean power (and if you recycled all the waste we store today, the remaining "non-recyclable" material could easily fit inside a single drum) we still have dirty coal and oil doing it.
Face it. Carter didn't pay attention to what he needed to pay attention to.
What they do is sent out practitioners of this chi gung to sit out on the streets, pour gasoline over themselves, and light themselves on fire. And they'll sit there and wait for the authorities to come extinguish the fire and pick them up.
Interesting. Monks in other nations have done the same thing as a form of protest before.
They are also not pacifist, as they claim to be. What they are, are passive-agressive and two-faced.
I suppose those who held lunch-counter sit-ins with MLK Jr were the same?
Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left.
I should point out George W...
You don't have to convince me here. All I want to know is how much Mexican bribery money he and his cronies like Johnny Sutton get every year to keep the border open and turn our border patrol agents into political prisoners when they actually do make drug busts.
Rather was the only one he tried to make an issue out of it and he was destroyed...
Actually, Rather was destroyed by his own hubris and inability to double-check his source. He ran with a bad story, and rather than admit that he'd been snookered, he kept screaming about how obvious forgeries were "genuine" till CBS had no choice but to axe him.
We could switch to Hillary though she has shady dealings...
Again, you don't have to convince me there.
So I suspect the "media bias" you see these days is the "liberal" media is biting the bullet and embracing Obama because there just isn't anyone better.
Actually, there are many. Bob Barr would make a decent candidate. A number of the candidates on the Republican and Democrat stages would have been better, but the Media were caught up in the star power of just a few and wouldn't give the others equal time and exposure to make their case to the American people.
At least he is very smart, charismatic, a good speaker and is a complete change from the disaster of the last eight years.
Somewhat like driving a car that's on fire with the doors welded shut from the heat, and driving it off a pier into 50-foot deep water, but yes, a "change"...
If we keep playing the gotcha politics you are going to end up with someone with a squeaky clean record but who is totally incompetent
You mean like Jimmy Carter? Obama is dangerously close to him both in policies and experience level. And you remember the damage Carter did to us in just four years.
I don't like McCain, but I like even less someone whose response to an economic crisis is to hike my taxes.
And think about it this way: the last thing I should want is to let the Democrats have control of both the Congress and the Presidency. I mean seriously, the last time they had that, we had two years of fright (the "glory days" of the Clinton years didn't start until after the Republicans were in power in Congress). And before that, I grew up in them, so I can remember the Carter days quite well thank you very much.
I have, however seen plenty of them having peaceful protests (literally doing a variant of tai chi in public) getting the shit beat out of them by Chinese police.
Anyone able to get themselves elected president should on no account be allowed to have the job.
While I heartily agree - seriously, we can't do better than Obama or McCain? I mean shit, I wouldn't trust either of them to be able to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much less actual policy.
On the other hand, it's interesting watching the mod scores go up and down as the obamabots desperately try to downmod anything that speaks a bit of truth about their candidate.
Actually, he did them a favor. He got in and didn't nuke any systems, which a savvier hacker could easily have done (log in, snoop around, leave a nice timebomb to erase the evidence...)
When they claim it was "$900,000 damages", that's the money they should have spent fucking securing the systems in the first place - after all, he got into machines with the username 'administrator' and a blank fucking password.
I mean, seriously. They're just trying to make an example because he got dangerously close to something they don't want released - like, say, the amount of $$$ the Mexican mafia is paying Bush to have his buddy Sutton railroad border patrol agents who actually do their job and arrest drug traffickers.
I think their criticisms of the Israeli government/army are overblown, but they're certainly not the rabid "apartheid states" lunatics you get elsewhere.
Where I find fault with AI is their failure to likewise criticize the Palestinian groups - for the ill treatment of their own gay population, for deplorable treatment of prisoners and criminals in their jails, for deliberately using civilians as shields (in violation of the Geneva Conventions), for indoctrinating children and dressing them up as military, for the use of tactics to deliberately hide arms and disguise soldiers as civilians (again in violation of the Geneva Conventions), for attacking humanitarian convoys and stealing the food and supplies meant for civilians and using them for the military instead, for assassinating foreign diplomats, for routinely forcing hostages to make propaganda statements and then murdering them, and so on...
When you cover the Olympics, one thing you cover is how having an event like that affects the local population. That has been true for every Olympics in recent memory. One reason that cities compete like hell to GET the Olympics is for the effect it can have on the local economy, just as a start.
This Olympics is a test - to see if a Communist shithole like China can even run a facsimile of the open setup necessary to make the Games a success.
China may be hosting, but the Olympics is an international, not Chinese, event. If China can't behave in a civilized manner for the bare minimum amount of time the Games are present, then I think we should know. If they can't stand the fact that people might actually have something to say about how they treat their citizens? Well, that's their problem, and they don't have the right to impose their nonsense on the people who are present for the international event that is the Games.
Just blocking a few websites that they had no business going to in the first place doesn't seem unreasonable.
"Just a few websites"... that's how it starts. "Just a little bit..." "oh look, that wasn't bad, a little more isn't unreasonable..." "Well since we've gone this far, we might as well..."
NO. Starting down that road is non-negotiable. How the hell do you think China turned into such a shithole in the first place?
So, he knew a guy who had a company that had one big financial issue, and did 5 hours of work for him in the 6 years he was in office. And this suddenly makes him a huge criminal?
No, he: -actually refuses to release the records showing how much work he actually did. -is on record as naming the guy as one of his "best friends." -Got nearly a million dollars' "discount" from the guy on his house in two deals, in addition to extremely sizable donations to every one of his campaigns.
So he went out there and checked to make sure that their signitures on the ballots were taken in a legal method?
No, he tied up the petitions to get on the ballot in legal maneuvering till the due-date expired. Plus, keeping people off the ballot is what they do in socialist/communist countries like China and Cuba and Venezuela, not civilized countries.
I have no problem with a potential president who wants rule by law.
I'd love to have one. Too bad neither the Democrats nor Republicans are running one.
How does that make him dirtier than a guy who takes openhanded bribes and hides them in his freezer?
It makes him just as dirty. And you should, as the above responder mentions, instead be asking the question: why are the democrats running a guy this dirty?
Interesting how the obamabots are desperately now downmodding my original post to try to hide even this. Imagine what would happen if more people actually knew the truth about their candidate?
For starters, his corrupt close relationship with a slumlord who's now in prison for bribery of Illinois officials, who just "happened" to then give Obama a $300,000 "deal" on a house and later another $600,000 "deal" on a plot of land next door to expand Obama's yard space.
And then there's the borderline illegal tactics Obama used to get into political office in the first place by preventing his opponents' names from being on the ballot, while Rezko was bankrolling his first campaign...
I've lived an hour from Obama's house. Trust me when I say I know him from the days before he went on this big campaign: the man is dirtier than a Lousiana mayor.
Kinda sad that the press is the only one able to enforce this,
On the flipside, it's always unfortunate when the media are complicit with the government anywhere.
Kind of like in America. Is anyone reporting on Obama's shady dealings during his state and senate careers? No? I wonder why.
How is it that the press is all over a Republican who might-be-gay, but is amazingly silent on a Louisiana congresscritter who was caught on tape taking a bribe, then with marked bills in his freezer, during an FBI bribery sting?
Is anyone reporting on the fact that the US Congress has only a 14% job approval rating while Bush is at least above 25%? No? I wonder why - maybe it doesn't fit the biased story the MSM wants to portray.
How come the press isn't reporting on two latino political prisoners in US jail, who've been railroaded by the corrupt Bush administration and his cronies, for arresting a known Mexican drug smuggler? How come the financial and connective records of all the administration officials, the DA, the judge who illegally suppressed exculpatory evidence and prevented the jury from hearing that this smuggler had been caught more than a dozen times (including twice during his immunity agreement!), haven't been put through the microscope by the press?
Where is the "responsible" press anyways? I agree the press plays a vital role in exposing corruption... but let's face it, the MSM is itself corrupt beyond measure today.
If you're making a complete report (instead of the biased nonsense the chinese want), you want to check what the current status is with the various reputable groups who are doublechecking on them.
And despite their horrible record on Israel/Palestine, Amnesty International are pretty reputable on almost all other issues.
Likewise, you'll want to check up on other sources - outside dissident groups (which Falun Gong is, not an "evil fake religion" as the chinese propaganda dept labeled them), Taiwanese gov't, etc.
That is, if you're doing fair and honest reporting. And not just being a chinese shill.
Slashdot Mirror
An average high school student from middle class India is an honor student in the USA.
Actually, no.
The difference is, by the time they're in high school, the indians have already weeded out the morons. Their "best and brightest" come here (and do average to poor) in our colleges, while the ones that never passed their "high school" are the ones sitting in the call centers.
If you want an accurate comparison, take the performance of all Indians of (say) age 16, in high school or not, and compare to the US (compulsory ed) 16-year-old population. You'll get quite a different result than the one you quoted.
And if you want to know why racism is growing here in the west,it is because folks see the game is rigged.
"Racism" is the cry of somebody who can't refute an argument with facts. It's the modern equivalent of Godwinning yourself.
There isn't a shortage at all, in any industry - if you're willing to pay a fair and competitive wage.
This is true in IT, true in agriculture, true in housing, true anywhere.
Where the US worker is getting fucked over is by countries that lack our labor protections and environmental protections, that treat their people like slaves, who then sell "services" to fat-cat CEOs and undercut what ought to be a fair market wage. And of course, this actually amounts to the real inflation we've been feeling for years - instead of monetary, we get shit for services when jobs are moved to third-world crap countries.
Bought a new home and found that all sorts of repairs - roofing, supports, improperly laid foundation - were needed? Congratulations. An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs, and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name.
The person whose SSN he stole, who will have their lives and credit ruined when he skips out on the bills later? Congratulations - that could be YOU or YOUR kid. The kid killed by his friends or his kids in gangs? Congratulations - that could be YOUR friend or family member.
Tried to call tech support any time in the past few years? Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose and who can't actually address the problem, just keep yammering from a script? Congratulations, you're a victim of this.
They're wasting your time, and giving you substandard service. Oftentimes, I call in for a warranty only to run into the cultural problem that the indians don't understand what a warranty is or, worse yet, they are simply instructed to ignore the warranty terms. And forget asking for a supervisor - they just hand you off to someone else from the cubicle next to them, who then hangs up. Getting their name? Good luck - they all give lying fake names, to avoid someone actually managing to complain about them specifically should someone get to the person in the US who's supposed to check up on customer service.
Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof) at all, I usually spend 20 minutes on hold with a looped tape of "you can get self service on our website"... well guess what sherlock, if your website was any good, if my question was actually answered, I wouldn't be on the phone calling.
But remember - "open borders" and "free trade" are good things. And you can keep repeating that to yourself as YOUR job gets shipped out to trash heap india, communist china or mexshithole.
isn't restricted just to the Olympics - though it's sad to see it happening.
Look at all (american) professional sports. Every time they're in a slump, some "rule change" comes along to bump scores. Basketball got laxer and laxer on obvious rules violations (watch any of the running leaps a "slam dunk" guy takes). Football implemented letting q-backs throw the ball into the stands. Baseball juiced up the ball itself, but thankfully drew the line on allowing metal bats.
And it's not even restricted to physical sports. Look at a pinball table today - you could easily chop off the last 3 digits of the score, because they never read anything meaningful anyways. Look at the numbers for damage ratings in "rpgs" like the Final Fantasy series - you used to start with characters doing 5-6 points of damage a hit, now you do 500-1000 and go from there.
I'd try ripping, then try cleaning and ripping again. He mentioned bad things about the Skip-Doctor series and he's only half right: the hand-crank models suck, but if you can find the old heavy-duty one (SkipDR MD Pro) you're far better off, it does a great job. The heavy motor helps you get a very smooth and reliable buffing; the hand-crank gives you an intermittent and unreliable-speed motion, which is what gave so many people problems.
we used to just split hairs.
Now we split crystals. And get quasicrystals. Which were supposed to be unusual.
And now we have quasi-quasicrystals. And then they're "not usual."
And next we can get something somewhere between a quasicrystal and a quasiquasicrystal.
I'd rather hear about what interesting/new discoveries come out of this strange material than just hear about the possibility of its existence.
In 10 years' time you'll be hearing about the quasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasicrystal, but we still won't know what the heck to do with them.
"We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual," Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do. Now they just have to figure out what those properties are.
Property #1: the ability to endow a grad student with his PhD and a sizable chunk of grant money.
The Presidency of the United States is not to be taken lightly,
No shit.
I would gladly elect a 'corrupt' official if I wholeheartedly believed that they were qualified for the office.
Well that explains a lot.
but at least Mr. Obama has his entire career (political and otherwise, quite impressive) under his belt.
Hmm... multiple years of race-baiting ambulance chasing, deplorably abysmal "constitutional scholarship" that would have the founding fathers spinning in their graves, and then fraudulent legal tactics to get himself launched in his first IL senate campaign.
What was that you were saying about "gladly " voting for someone corrupt? Here's your chance, put a doozy of a corrupt motherfucker in office by voting for Obama.
personally wouldn't mind a Democrat as Commander in Chief.
I know better than to let any one party have control of all three legislative-related portions of the government (President, Senate, House). That's way too much power for any one party to have, especially the corrupt two parties in the US. Put the Republicans in control of congress again, and I'll vote Democrat for Prez.
You talk about how the supposed "Justice" system really operates, and they call you a "troll."
Truly amazing.
While I'm not a lawyer, I believe both sides of the case suffer from "unclean hands" problems - the coder for having gov't employees test his privately produced code on gov't time, the USAF for hiring someone to do a DMCA violation on their say-so.
"in-person accounts" of things either - even if it's Wired.
Look at what happened to the two border patrol agents the Bush Administration is holding as political prisoners for arresting a drug runner who has ties to the Mexican Mafia and therefore to Bush.
The court of appeals said verbally that they were aghast, the prosecution ADMITTED that their star witness (the drug runner) lied under oath. The court of appeals in open court said that they couldn't see possibly how this was a valid prosecution under the law.
10 months later, after the Bush admin / Mexican mafia threaten the judges, they "somehow" now see how preventing the defense from showing that the drug runner had been caught running multiple loads even while under his "immunity agreement" with the prosecution - while the drug runner was claiming it was a "one time only thing" because "he needed money for his grandmother's operation" - was legally valid and no new trial is warranted.
My prediction: the judge who said this, will get a phone call from the Prez or several Congresscritters, or a visit from certain branches of covert government and/or MafiAA stooges, and will "magically" put off the ruling for 6 months and then issue the opposite opinion when he thinks nobody is looking.
Ergo, this man is a conspiracy theorist. I'd love to hear his stories about who really is "responsible" for 9/11.
I'm personally leaning towards Al-Qaeda as ordered by Osama bin Laden. Why, are you one of these "the jews did it to frame the arabs" nutbags?
Ergo, he is at the very least a conservative or an Obama opponent.
Libertarian, both upper- and lower-case L actually.
There are plenty of outlets reporting this, there just aren't that many compared to those putting the cameras and mikes on the Presidential election.
Except that what I'm referring to is news outlets (e.g. the MSM) who spend their time appending any story on the Republicans with "and by the way, the President's approval rating is down below X%" to demonstrate that they hate Republicans and think they suck, while failing to mention the same that the democrat-run congress's approval rating is even further down the shit-o-meter.
I would agree with the critical mods that his posts no longer seem "Insightful".
I would say that I think you need a lot more education, specifically in how media bias is accomplished, with a focus on the following ways:
- Undue weight
- Omission
- "Virtual Omission" (printing libel on page 1 in 72-pt font, printing the retraction/apology on page 347Q between the DBF and SWM relationship want ads).
- Leading words and phrases
- Cherry-picking and counting the hits/forgetting the misses, aka "lying with statistics."
Oh, you mean by correctly predicting the energy crisis and proposing serious workable solutions, anticipating Peak Oil by three decades?
Actually, I mean by screwing up the economy (far worse than when he started), and by prohibiting us from having a responsible and sustainable nuclear energy policy that would have virtually eliminated our need for heating oil and gasoline for transit.
Remember, Carter is the credulous moron who thought that if we didn't refine (read: RECYCLE) nuclear waste back into fuel, then nations like North Korean, India, Pakistan, and Iran would follow our lead and not make nuclear weaponry.
And we can all see how far that policy got. Now, instead of generating our energy from clean power (and if you recycled all the waste we store today, the remaining "non-recyclable" material could easily fit inside a single drum) we still have dirty coal and oil doing it.
Face it. Carter didn't pay attention to what he needed to pay attention to.
Really.
Please see here thank you.
What they do is sent out practitioners of this chi gung to sit out on the streets, pour gasoline over themselves, and light themselves on fire. And they'll sit there and wait for the authorities to come extinguish the fire and pick them up.
Interesting. Monks in other nations have done the same thing as a form of protest before.
They are also not pacifist, as they claim to be. What they are, are passive-agressive and two-faced.
I suppose those who held lunch-counter sit-ins with MLK Jr were the same?
Media bias cuts both ways now, get over it.
Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left.
I should point out George W...
You don't have to convince me here. All I want to know is how much Mexican bribery money he and his cronies like Johnny Sutton get every year to keep the border open and turn our border patrol agents into political prisoners when they actually do make drug busts.
Rather was the only one he tried to make an issue out of it and he was destroyed...
Actually, Rather was destroyed by his own hubris and inability to double-check his source. He ran with a bad story, and rather than admit that he'd been snookered, he kept screaming about how obvious forgeries were "genuine" till CBS had no choice but to axe him.
We could switch to Hillary though she has shady dealings...
Again, you don't have to convince me there.
So I suspect the "media bias" you see these days is the "liberal" media is biting the bullet and embracing Obama because there just isn't anyone better.
Actually, there are many. Bob Barr would make a decent candidate. A number of the candidates on the Republican and Democrat stages would have been better, but the Media were caught up in the star power of just a few and wouldn't give the others equal time and exposure to make their case to the American people.
At least he is very smart, charismatic, a good speaker and is a complete change from the disaster of the last eight years.
Somewhat like driving a car that's on fire with the doors welded shut from the heat, and driving it off a pier into 50-foot deep water, but yes, a "change"...
If we keep playing the gotcha politics you are going to end up with someone with a squeaky clean record but who is totally incompetent
You mean like Jimmy Carter? Obama is dangerously close to him both in policies and experience level. And you remember the damage Carter did to us in just four years.
I don't like McCain, but I like even less someone whose response to an economic crisis is to hike my taxes.
And think about it this way: the last thing I should want is to let the Democrats have control of both the Congress and the Presidency. I mean seriously, the last time they had that, we had two years of fright (the "glory days" of the Clinton years didn't start until after the Republicans were in power in Congress). And before that, I grew up in them, so I can remember the Carter days quite well thank you very much.
Interesting.
I've never heard of the Falun Gong trying to drive someone to suicide.
I have, however seen plenty of them having peaceful protests (literally doing a variant of tai chi in public) getting the shit beat out of them by Chinese police.
Anyone able to get themselves elected president should on no account be allowed to have the job.
While I heartily agree - seriously, we can't do better than Obama or McCain? I mean shit, I wouldn't trust either of them to be able to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much less actual policy.
On the other hand, it's interesting watching the mod scores go up and down as the obamabots desperately try to downmod anything that speaks a bit of truth about their candidate.
Near as I can tell, there was no "damage."
Actually, he did them a favor. He got in and didn't nuke any systems, which a savvier hacker could easily have done (log in, snoop around, leave a nice timebomb to erase the evidence...)
When they claim it was "$900,000 damages", that's the money they should have spent fucking securing the systems in the first place - after all, he got into machines with the username 'administrator' and a blank fucking password.
I mean, seriously. They're just trying to make an example because he got dangerously close to something they don't want released - like, say, the amount of $$$ the Mexican mafia is paying Bush to have his buddy Sutton railroad border patrol agents who actually do their job and arrest drug traffickers.
I think their criticisms of the Israeli government/army are overblown, but they're certainly not the rabid "apartheid states" lunatics you get elsewhere.
Where I find fault with AI is their failure to likewise criticize the Palestinian groups - for the ill treatment of their own gay population, for deplorable treatment of prisoners and criminals in their jails, for deliberately using civilians as shields (in violation of the Geneva Conventions), for indoctrinating children and dressing them up as military, for the use of tactics to deliberately hide arms and disguise soldiers as civilians (again in violation of the Geneva Conventions), for attacking humanitarian convoys and stealing the food and supplies meant for civilians and using them for the military instead, for assassinating foreign diplomats, for routinely forcing hostages to make propaganda statements and then murdering them, and so on...
When you cover the Olympics, one thing you cover is how having an event like that affects the local population. That has been true for every Olympics in recent memory. One reason that cities compete like hell to GET the Olympics is for the effect it can have on the local economy, just as a start.
This Olympics is a test - to see if a Communist shithole like China can even run a facsimile of the open setup necessary to make the Games a success.
China may be hosting, but the Olympics is an international, not Chinese, event. If China can't behave in a civilized manner for the bare minimum amount of time the Games are present, then I think we should know. If they can't stand the fact that people might actually have something to say about how they treat their citizens? Well, that's their problem, and they don't have the right to impose their nonsense on the people who are present for the international event that is the Games.
Just blocking a few websites that they had no business going to in the first place doesn't seem unreasonable.
"Just a few websites"... that's how it starts. "Just a little bit..." "oh look, that wasn't bad, a little more isn't unreasonable..." "Well since we've gone this far, we might as well..."
NO. Starting down that road is non-negotiable. How the hell do you think China turned into such a shithole in the first place?
And to answer the PP:
So, he knew a guy who had a company that had one big financial issue, and did 5 hours of work for him in the 6 years he was in office. And this suddenly makes him a huge criminal?
No, he:
-actually refuses to release the records showing how much work he actually did.
-is on record as naming the guy as one of his "best friends."
-Got nearly a million dollars' "discount" from the guy on his house in two deals, in addition to extremely sizable donations to every one of his campaigns.
So he went out there and checked to make sure that their signitures on the ballots were taken in a legal method?
No, he tied up the petitions to get on the ballot in legal maneuvering till the due-date expired. Plus, keeping people off the ballot is what they do in socialist/communist countries like China and Cuba and Venezuela, not civilized countries.
I have no problem with a potential president who wants rule by law.
I'd love to have one. Too bad neither the Democrats nor Republicans are running one.
How does that make him dirtier than a guy who takes openhanded bribes and hides them in his freezer?
It makes him just as dirty. And you should, as the above responder mentions, instead be asking the question: why are the democrats running a guy this dirty?
Wow. The obamabots are in fine form today.
I pointed out two more in a response above.
Interesting how the obamabots are desperately now downmodding my original post to try to hide even this. Imagine what would happen if more people actually knew the truth about their candidate?
For starters, his corrupt close relationship with a slumlord who's now in prison for bribery of Illinois officials, who just "happened" to then give Obama a $300,000 "deal" on a house and later another $600,000 "deal" on a plot of land next door to expand Obama's yard space.
And then there's the borderline illegal tactics Obama used to get into political office in the first place by preventing his opponents' names from being on the ballot, while Rezko was bankrolling his first campaign...
I've lived an hour from Obama's house. Trust me when I say I know him from the days before he went on this big campaign: the man is dirtier than a Lousiana mayor.
Kinda sad that the press is the only one able to enforce this,
On the flipside, it's always unfortunate when the media are complicit with the government anywhere.
Kind of like in America. Is anyone reporting on Obama's shady dealings during his state and senate careers? No? I wonder why.
How is it that the press is all over a Republican who might-be-gay, but is amazingly silent on a Louisiana congresscritter who was caught on tape taking a bribe, then with marked bills in his freezer, during an FBI bribery sting?
Is anyone reporting on the fact that the US Congress has only a 14% job approval rating while Bush is at least above 25%? No? I wonder why - maybe it doesn't fit the biased story the MSM wants to portray.
How come the press isn't reporting on two latino political prisoners in US jail, who've been railroaded by the corrupt Bush administration and his cronies, for arresting a known Mexican drug smuggler? How come the financial and connective records of all the administration officials, the DA, the judge who illegally suppressed exculpatory evidence and prevented the jury from hearing that this smuggler had been caught more than a dozen times (including twice during his immunity agreement!), haven't been put through the microscope by the press?
Where is the "responsible" press anyways? I agree the press plays a vital role in exposing corruption... but let's face it, the MSM is itself corrupt beyond measure today.
If you're making a complete report (instead of the biased nonsense the chinese want), you want to check what the current status is with the various reputable groups who are doublechecking on them.
And despite their horrible record on Israel/Palestine, Amnesty International are pretty reputable on almost all other issues.
Likewise, you'll want to check up on other sources - outside dissident groups (which Falun Gong is, not an "evil fake religion" as the chinese propaganda dept labeled them), Taiwanese gov't, etc.
That is, if you're doing fair and honest reporting. And not just being a chinese shill.