Dole Office Clerk: Occupation? Thomas Friedman: Political pundit. Dole Office Clerk: What? Thomas Friedman: Political pundit. I locate socio-historical trends in modern times and try to turn them into a trite and meaningless comprehension. Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a bullshit artist! Thomas Friedman: Grrrrrrrrrr... Dole Office Clerk: Did you bullshit last week? Thomas Friedman: No. Dole Office Clerk: Did you try to bullshit last week? Thomas Friedman: Yes!
There's another value as well: providing incriminating evidence.
For instance, Boss: "Why is task A not completed yet?" Employee: "Your boss told me to drop A and do B. I pointed out that B was more important, but he told me to drop it and do B regardless." Boss's boss: "I did no such thing!" Employee: "Here's the email, cc'd to you, where I explained the importance of A, and here's his reply saying to drop it and do B instead."
And let's also not forget that while Assange was in Sweden, he tried to comply with police requests as much as possible, to the point of saying to the Swedish police, "OK, I'm leaving the country now, is there anything else I have to do to help sort this out?" He left Sweden thinking that this was all over and done with.
In addition, Assange offered to answer questions by Swedish police over video chat or telephone while he was in the UK. He was refused, lending strong evidence to the idea that the purpose of the extradition request was not actually to answer the Swedish charges against him but instead to have him in physical custody so he could be shipped to the United States.
There are at least 4 good reasons to consider this untrue: 1. Obama didn't really stop the war in Iraq. The reason a lot of the troops left is that the US was honoring a treaty between the Maliki government and the US government under George W Bush. The Obama administration tried to convince the Maliki government to adjust things so the US could stay there longer. There are still about 25,000 US personnel in Iraq, and a US soldier was killed there in February after the supposed pullout. 2. The war in Afghanistan is ongoing and shows no signs of stopping. 3. There are regularly drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and several other countries. These kill many civilians. 4. Under Obama, the US military budget has increased by about $100 billion, or roughly 15% over what it was under Bush.
Obama is pro bill-of-rights.
Only if you're talking about the Second, Third, and Seventh Amendments. On every other one, his record is simply atrocious: First Amendment: Writers who have written things critical of Obama administration national security policies have been detained by airport security and their digital storage seized (free press). He's done nothing to stop investigations of every mosque around New York City by the NYPD simply for being Muslim (free religion). His administration appears to also have been involved in organizing the violent crackdown on Occupy protests throughout the country (free assembly). Fourth Amendment: He has, as far as citizens can tell without access to classified information, expanded warrentless Internet surveillance of US citizens dramatically. Those who provide information to citizens about these activities of government are prosecuted for espionage. Fifth Amendment: Obama ordered the killing of an American citizen (Nouri al-Maliki) without even obtaining an indictment (due process). Items seized by the TSA, including cell phones and laptops, are not returned to the citizens they were seized from after the search is performed (seizure without compensation). Sixth Amendment: He had an American citizen (Bradley Manning) imprisoned for the better part of 2 years without charges (speedy trial). Lawyers who represent Manning, Julian Assange, Guantanamo prisoners, and others, have been detained at border crossings and airports and their privileged communications with their clients are seized (right to representation). Arguably the Guantanamo prisoners are required to have a trial by jury for their crimes, which have not occurred (speedy and public trial). Eighth Amendment: Bradley Manning was placed into permanent solitary confinement prior to trial, which was both highly unusual and according to UN officials torturous.
Obama is anti deficit spending
Except that he has engaged in it. I'm actually not against that part of his policies, because Keynesian stimulus would in my opinion be a good idea, but you can't give him credit for balancing the budget, because he hasn't. If he were really anti-deficit, he would have vetoed the bill that extended the Bush tax cuts.
So if you're intellectually honest, the best you could say is that he's probably less bad than Mitt Romney.
1. Those without Internet get no vote. 2. Ballot-stuffers, firewalls, botnets, etc. 3. The most vocal and thus most likely to vote are not necessarily representative of the public's opinion. Case in point: The Parent's Television Council, which represents about 120,000 people, is able to dictate what the other 300 million people in the US are allowed to see on broadcast television. 4. Those without the time to do the research don't vote in a way that makes any sense.
1) I don't think its very important relative to other more pressing concerns. Seriously, it just isn't that important.
How much of an impact does climate change have to have before it will be considered a serious problem? Could you name monetary cost or number of people killed that would make it important enough to do something about?
2) I think there is nothing to do anyway. We've burned at least a majority of the EROEI positive carbon fuels and nothing really bad has happened.
What's your standard for "really bad"? What level of proof would you require to decide that a particular event was caused by climate change? For instance, if climate change was thought by some to be a possible cause of greater hurricane intensity, what kind of evidence would you need supporting this hypothesis to decide that the costs of the more intense hurricane should be considered part of the cost of climate change?
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Source, please?
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
That seems like a pretty dumb way of deciding these things.
Because of course a small number of evil bastards act with the full support of all of the billions of Muslims in the world. By your logic, guys like Anders Breivik and Scott Roeder act with the full support of all Christians.
The Bible in general was a much later creation, of course, but I was referring specifically to the Hebrew text Genesis, which contains that particular creation myth and is considerably older than, say, Paul's epistles. It was quite codified in the Jewish canon long before the Council of Trent, and the Torah was widely used across early Christian communities long before the contents of the Bible were determined.
Of course the English translations have varied over time, but that's not the story, that's the translation. A believer in the NRSV would believe in basically the same story (seven days, Adam + Eve + a snake, etc) of what happened as a believer in the KJV. You wouldn't reasonably say that Hesiod's Theogony is 40 years old just because you're reading a modern translation.
What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.
FYI, that book is older than 400 years: Current scholarship places authorship of Genesis at somewhere around 500 BCE.
Your basic point is correct though: The final line of defence for a dumb idea is refusing to listen to any source of contrary evidence. That sometimes takes different forms like "All the sources are biased" or "This is a test of my faith", but it's the same basic statement of willful ignorance.
The protestors would look at one another, look at these black-clad guys, and then just move on, not rising to the bait. Then the black-clad guys would disappear only to show up later in the march or at some other encounter between protestors and a large force of well-armored police. The efforts to incite would fail and the black-clads would seemingly disappear again, sometimes apparently through a police blockade. It was the strangest behavior I had ever seen at a large protest.
Not strange at all, there are a couple of very likely explanations: 1. They were looking for an excuse to turn the NATO protests into a repeat of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. I'm glad the crowd had the discipline to not follow them, but those were cops trying to turn the protest into a riot. 2. They may have been part of the Black Bloc. Those guys are purported anarchists who go around to left-wing protests and try to smash windows and destroy property and fight with police. The reason I say "purported" is that their behavior is perfectly consistent with a right-wing group trying to discredit and attack left-wing political protesters, and not at all consistent with actual anarchist groups.
Actually, it requires far less savvy than it used to.
For instance, this was the install process I went through earlier this week to install Linux Mint: 1. Download CD image from the Mint website. 2. Burn the CD image. 3. Reboot the machine to boot from the CD. This was the hardest step for the non-techie, because in my case I had to teach the BIOS to try booting from the CD. 4. Wait for the liveCD to start up. 5. Click the big icon on the desktop that said "Install to hard disk". 6. Answer some questions:
A. What language I wanted to use (default was US English)
B. Whether I wanted to do anything weird with disk partitions (I did, but if I didn't have 3 other setups on the same box I could have just accepted the defaults)
C. My name, username, and an initial password 7. Wait 15-20 minutes. The installer showed some slides about what features Mint has that are clearly end-user friendly. 8. When instructed, remove the CD from the tray and reboot the machine. 9. Wait for it to start up, log in and use it. It popped up with some nice instructions on how to use it for those not familiar with Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.
It's hard to make it much simpler than that. And I've put non-techies in front of a Linux machine and they were able to figure it out without much difficulty.
30 minutes of deliberation also says a lot about how crystal clear the whole thing was.
The one time I served on a jury (albeit criminal, not civil), after 2 weeks of the defendant trying to drag things out, we went into the jury room and promptly determined that the guy was so obviously guilty that we could discount everything the victim had to say and still be comfortable convicting him. That took us about 45-60 minutes, a lot of which was us lounging around so that the other jurors could finish their free coffee.
We also can't forget the important goal of protecting West Germany from the USSR. Because that's obviously a very relevant goal 20 years after neither of those countries exist.
I'm sure to these clowns, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
My guess is that what's really going on is that somebody said something mean about this guy or one of his political allies on the New York Times website.
The New Hampshire House is probably the most functional state legislature in the country, for 2 major reasons: 1. Each representative only represents about 4,000 people, so their constituents usually either know them or know somebody who knows them. (When I was growing up in NH, I knew about a half-dozen) 2. They get paid $100 per year. That means everybody in the House is really your everyday citizen, and not a professional politician. For instance, a former Speaker runs a day care center, another rep I knew worked as an elevator operator.
They also have a well-established culture of putting good governance ahead of partisanship. That makes a big difference when the questions are things like "Is this constitutional?" and "Is this idea something that might work?" and focuses the disagreements more on "Is this the right priority for the state?"
I'm not sure if you're a Free-Stater, but my impression was that a lot of Free-Staters showed up in NH, got elected, geared up for all sorts of political battles, and instead got mostly handshakes, smiles, and a genuine interest in their ideas.
Depends where you are: The southwest US is already having serious water problems, while all the Great Lakes cities are doing just fine in terms of overall supply. It bothers me that anyone would think that growing turf grass in a desert was a good idea, but that is in fact what we're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like this, I would hope:
Dole Office Clerk: Occupation? ...
Thomas Friedman: Political pundit.
Dole Office Clerk: What?
Thomas Friedman: Political pundit. I locate socio-historical trends in modern times and try to turn them into a trite and meaningless comprehension.
Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a bullshit artist!
Thomas Friedman: Grrrrrrrrrr
Dole Office Clerk: Did you bullshit last week?
Thomas Friedman: No.
Dole Office Clerk: Did you try to bullshit last week?
Thomas Friedman: Yes!
You should give proper credit to J Michael Straczynski for that line.
There's another value as well: providing incriminating evidence.
For instance,
Boss: "Why is task A not completed yet?"
Employee: "Your boss told me to drop A and do B. I pointed out that B was more important, but he told me to drop it and do B regardless."
Boss's boss: "I did no such thing!"
Employee: "Here's the email, cc'd to you, where I explained the importance of A, and here's his reply saying to drop it and do B instead."
And let's also not forget that while Assange was in Sweden, he tried to comply with police requests as much as possible, to the point of saying to the Swedish police, "OK, I'm leaving the country now, is there anything else I have to do to help sort this out?" He left Sweden thinking that this was all over and done with.
In addition, Assange offered to answer questions by Swedish police over video chat or telephone while he was in the UK. He was refused, lending strong evidence to the idea that the purpose of the extradition request was not actually to answer the Swedish charges against him but instead to have him in physical custody so he could be shipped to the United States.
None of your claims are correct:
Obama is anti-war
There are at least 4 good reasons to consider this untrue:
1. Obama didn't really stop the war in Iraq. The reason a lot of the troops left is that the US was honoring a treaty between the Maliki government and the US government under George W Bush. The Obama administration tried to convince the Maliki government to adjust things so the US could stay there longer. There are still about 25,000 US personnel in Iraq, and a US soldier was killed there in February after the supposed pullout.
2. The war in Afghanistan is ongoing and shows no signs of stopping.
3. There are regularly drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and several other countries. These kill many civilians.
4. Under Obama, the US military budget has increased by about $100 billion, or roughly 15% over what it was under Bush.
Obama is pro bill-of-rights.
Only if you're talking about the Second, Third, and Seventh Amendments. On every other one, his record is simply atrocious:
First Amendment: Writers who have written things critical of Obama administration national security policies have been detained by airport security and their digital storage seized (free press). He's done nothing to stop investigations of every mosque around New York City by the NYPD simply for being Muslim (free religion). His administration appears to also have been involved in organizing the violent crackdown on Occupy protests throughout the country (free assembly).
Fourth Amendment: He has, as far as citizens can tell without access to classified information, expanded warrentless Internet surveillance of US citizens dramatically. Those who provide information to citizens about these activities of government are prosecuted for espionage.
Fifth Amendment: Obama ordered the killing of an American citizen (Nouri al-Maliki) without even obtaining an indictment (due process). Items seized by the TSA, including cell phones and laptops, are not returned to the citizens they were seized from after the search is performed (seizure without compensation).
Sixth Amendment: He had an American citizen (Bradley Manning) imprisoned for the better part of 2 years without charges (speedy trial). Lawyers who represent Manning, Julian Assange, Guantanamo prisoners, and others, have been detained at border crossings and airports and their privileged communications with their clients are seized (right to representation). Arguably the Guantanamo prisoners are required to have a trial by jury for their crimes, which have not occurred (speedy and public trial).
Eighth Amendment: Bradley Manning was placed into permanent solitary confinement prior to trial, which was both highly unusual and according to UN officials torturous.
Obama is anti deficit spending
Except that he has engaged in it. I'm actually not against that part of his policies, because Keynesian stimulus would in my opinion be a good idea, but you can't give him credit for balancing the budget, because he hasn't. If he were really anti-deficit, he would have vetoed the bill that extended the Bush tax cuts.
So if you're intellectually honest, the best you could say is that he's probably less bad than Mitt Romney.
1. Those without Internet get no vote.
2. Ballot-stuffers, firewalls, botnets, etc.
3. The most vocal and thus most likely to vote are not necessarily representative of the public's opinion. Case in point: The Parent's Television Council, which represents about 120,000 people, is able to dictate what the other 300 million people in the US are allowed to see on broadcast television.
4. Those without the time to do the research don't vote in a way that makes any sense.
Some questions for you, then:
1) I don't think its very important relative to other more pressing concerns. Seriously, it just isn't that important.
How much of an impact does climate change have to have before it will be considered a serious problem? Could you name monetary cost or number of people killed that would make it important enough to do something about?
2) I think there is nothing to do anyway. We've burned at least a majority of the EROEI positive carbon fuels and nothing really bad has happened.
What's your standard for "really bad"? What level of proof would you require to decide that a particular event was caused by climate change? For instance, if climate change was thought by some to be a possible cause of greater hurricane intensity, what kind of evidence would you need supporting this hypothesis to decide that the costs of the more intense hurricane should be considered part of the cost of climate change?
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Source, please?
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
That seems like a pretty dumb way of deciding these things.
If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do.
Exodus 21:7
And this is hardly the only instance of this sort of sexism in Judaism and Christianity. What's your point?
Because of course a small number of evil bastards act with the full support of all of the billions of Muslims in the world. By your logic, guys like Anders Breivik and Scott Roeder act with the full support of all Christians.
The Bible in general was a much later creation, of course, but I was referring specifically to the Hebrew text Genesis, which contains that particular creation myth and is considerably older than, say, Paul's epistles. It was quite codified in the Jewish canon long before the Council of Trent, and the Torah was widely used across early Christian communities long before the contents of the Bible were determined.
Of course the English translations have varied over time, but that's not the story, that's the translation. A believer in the NRSV would believe in basically the same story (seven days, Adam + Eve + a snake, etc) of what happened as a believer in the KJV. You wouldn't reasonably say that Hesiod's Theogony is 40 years old just because you're reading a modern translation.
What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.
FYI, that book is older than 400 years: Current scholarship places authorship of Genesis at somewhere around 500 BCE.
Your basic point is correct though: The final line of defence for a dumb idea is refusing to listen to any source of contrary evidence. That sometimes takes different forms like "All the sources are biased" or "This is a test of my faith", but it's the same basic statement of willful ignorance.
The protestors would look at one another, look at these black-clad guys, and then just move on, not rising to the bait. Then the black-clad guys would disappear only to show up later in the march or at some other encounter between protestors and a large force of well-armored police. The efforts to incite would fail and the black-clads would seemingly disappear again, sometimes apparently through a police blockade. It was the strangest behavior I had ever seen at a large protest.
Not strange at all, there are a couple of very likely explanations:
1. They were looking for an excuse to turn the NATO protests into a repeat of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. I'm glad the crowd had the discipline to not follow them, but those were cops trying to turn the protest into a riot.
2. They may have been part of the Black Bloc. Those guys are purported anarchists who go around to left-wing protests and try to smash windows and destroy property and fight with police. The reason I say "purported" is that their behavior is perfectly consistent with a right-wing group trying to discredit and attack left-wing political protesters, and not at all consistent with actual anarchist groups.
Actually, it requires far less savvy than it used to.
For instance, this was the install process I went through earlier this week to install Linux Mint:
1. Download CD image from the Mint website.
2. Burn the CD image.
3. Reboot the machine to boot from the CD. This was the hardest step for the non-techie, because in my case I had to teach the BIOS to try booting from the CD.
4. Wait for the liveCD to start up.
5. Click the big icon on the desktop that said "Install to hard disk".
6. Answer some questions:
A. What language I wanted to use (default was US English)
B. Whether I wanted to do anything weird with disk partitions (I did, but if I didn't have 3 other setups on the same box I could have just accepted the defaults)
C. My name, username, and an initial password
7. Wait 15-20 minutes. The installer showed some slides about what features Mint has that are clearly end-user friendly.
8. When instructed, remove the CD from the tray and reboot the machine.
9. Wait for it to start up, log in and use it. It popped up with some nice instructions on how to use it for those not familiar with Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.
It's hard to make it much simpler than that. And I've put non-techies in front of a Linux machine and they were able to figure it out without much difficulty.
30 minutes of deliberation also says a lot about how crystal clear the whole thing was.
The one time I served on a jury (albeit criminal, not civil), after 2 weeks of the defendant trying to drag things out, we went into the jury room and promptly determined that the guy was so obviously guilty that we could discount everything the victim had to say and still be comfortable convicting him. That took us about 45-60 minutes, a lot of which was us lounging around so that the other jurors could finish their free coffee.
We also can't forget the important goal of protecting West Germany from the USSR. Because that's obviously a very relevant goal 20 years after neither of those countries exist.
You need more than a few marines to protect it - you should really put in a few siege tanks and goliaths.
Lynx? Luxury. We had to do everything with telnet.
Actually, yes it is a moon. But it can definitely be a harsh mistress.
I'm sure to these clowns, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
My guess is that what's really going on is that somebody said something mean about this guy or one of his political allies on the New York Times website.
The New Hampshire House is probably the most functional state legislature in the country, for 2 major reasons:
1. Each representative only represents about 4,000 people, so their constituents usually either know them or know somebody who knows them. (When I was growing up in NH, I knew about a half-dozen)
2. They get paid $100 per year. That means everybody in the House is really your everyday citizen, and not a professional politician. For instance, a former Speaker runs a day care center, another rep I knew worked as an elevator operator.
They also have a well-established culture of putting good governance ahead of partisanship. That makes a big difference when the questions are things like "Is this constitutional?" and "Is this idea something that might work?" and focuses the disagreements more on "Is this the right priority for the state?"
I'm not sure if you're a Free-Stater, but my impression was that a lot of Free-Staters showed up in NH, got elected, geared up for all sorts of political battles, and instead got mostly handshakes, smiles, and a genuine interest in their ideas.
On a serious note, what right does the MPAA have to place 'undercover' agents?
Title IV, Section 407 (right before the Authorization to use Deadly Force.
Well, obviously, trickle-down economics would work.
... time to put those beavers to work!
Must ... resist ... obvious ... joke
Depends where you are: The southwest US is already having serious water problems, while all the Great Lakes cities are doing just fine in terms of overall supply. It bothers me that anyone would think that growing turf grass in a desert was a good idea, but that is in fact what we're doing.