Oh, the aliens aren't *that* secret: They have a large office building and a place where they meet in Washington DC with a really nice rotunda. There are tours and everything!
Oh, I thought it was something different: "It looks like we got caught spying on a couple thousand Americans illegally, but if you compare how many times we were caught to how many times we committed the crime, that's a drop in the bucket."
It's similar to how Goldman Sachs is absolutely devastated when they have to pay a $500 million fine with no admission of wrongdoing - it takes them a full 3 days to get that money back.
Impeachment is when the House sends the president to trial by the Senate. The Senate then either acquits him or removes him from office (in addition to referring whatever they find to the Department of Justice for prosecution under the next president).
We've had 2 impeachments in US history (nearly a third, but Nixon quit instead), both ending in acquittals.
Yeah, my first thought was "Great, we'll get the best cryptographers on the planet on the Internet now!" because the Japanese didn't even came close to figuring out what they were saying back in WWII.
But actually that someone ought to be someone who could take a place in the team, not some guy who could never be smart enough to do the job himself.
This is the Great Myth of the MBA: The idea that you can manage somebody without knowing at least the basics of how to do the job that you're managing.
It shows up most commonly in larger organizations, and there's a very clear divide between the people who started in the ranks (as it were) and the people who started at least halfway up the chain of command thoroughly divorced from the actual work of the organization. The best organizational leaders are those who have a thorough understanding of what's going on, and the best way to have that understanding is to do the job for at least a little while. But at some point, an MBA will end up in charge (often by buying their way in as an investor), and then this dynamic will show up quickly.
An example of a career path for someone in the ranks: "Junior Button-pusher"=>"Button-pusher"=>"Senior Button-pusher"=>"Team lead"=>"Project Coordinator" An example of a career path for someone on the management track: "Management Consultant"=>"Vice-President"=>"Director"=>"CxO"=>"CEO"
While I understand your sentiment, the influence of religious leaders in the west is far less than that in the middle east.
In Egypt, roughly 51% of the country voted for Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously-based party that is heavily endorsed by imams and other religious leaders, as you correctly point out, and has the explicit goal of using religious law as the basis of secular law.
In the United States, roughly 48% of the country voted for Republican candidates. The Republican Party is a largely religiously-based party that is heavily endorsed by evangelical pastors and other religious leaders, and many of its candidates have the explicit goal of using their religious law as the basis of secular law.
The war in Afghanistan was supposed to be about capturing Osama bin Laden and destroying Al Qaida.
But when you look at what the US actually did, it was more focused on removing the Taliban and installing Unocal executive Hamid Karzai. Karzai's first and only significant act as the leader of Afghanistan was approving oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea region that various oil companies had been unsuccessfully trying to get the Taliban to agree to for about a decade. Furthermore, when they had reason to believe they had cornered Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, they started withdrawing troops claiming that the problem was they had too many soldiers in the area!
So in Iraq, the claimed reasons for war were a total farce. In Afghanistan, the claimed reasons for war were real, but the actual war aims (if we assume that the US was at least partially successful in achieving their real aims) and the claimed war aims didn't match up.
Jon Huntsman did seem reasonably sane. Which is why I find it very significant that he didn't even come close to winning the Republican primary, and shortly afterwords started talking about the need for a third party (Republican Party response: doing their best to boot him out of the party). And Obama's campaign manager admitted they'd have had a lot of trouble beating Huntsman, whereas they had no real trouble beating Romney and would have by most polls had an even easier time against Perry, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, or Cain.
Colin Powell has also found himself in a similar position: His apparent sanity is seen as a serious liability by the Republican Party.
it's easy for their imams to tell everyone to vote for the same guy
... and that may or may not translate into actual votes. Just because a religious leader tells a believer of that religion to do something doesn't mean the believer actually does so. For proof of that, consider that the vast majority of Catholics in the US and Europe use birth control against the express wishes of their religious leaders.
What do you do when the majority want to take away your freedoms?
You establish and enforce fundamental rules saying that there is no political authority that can do that legally. The First Amendment in the US serves this purpose. The Egyptian constitution is more contradictory on that point: Article 2 says Islam is the official religion, but Articles 4, 6, and 11 are all aimed at preserving religious freedom.
The fact that the write-off was $900bn is actually more of a side-fact on this one.
Umm, it was $900 million, not $900 billion. Microsoft is a big company, but no corporation has $1 trillion. That's still a staggeringly huge amount of money, but it's nowhere near, say, what the US spends on its military every year.
For a lot of kids, Shakespeare is impenetrable, boring and anachronistic.
I agree that this is bad teaching: I mean, Shakespeare plays have everything you could want in great entertainment - sex, songs, gruesome violence, some drug use, stupid teenage romance, clowns, and sometimes epic proportions.
In most polls on the subject, including some internal studies by the Republican Party, younger voters don't exactly like the Democrats, but think the more prominent Republicans are so insanely dangerous that they won't even consider them. I mean, running down the list of everyone who has made it onto the Republican presidential ticket in the last decade:
- George W Bush: Flat-out incompetent, with policies that: bankrupted the US treasury, gutted FEMA and then stood by while a major American city was destroyed, started 2 wars on false pretenses, willfully broke at least 5 of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, ignored counterterrorism until it smacked him in the face with the biggest intelligence failure in US history, and caused the greatest economic mess since the Great Depression. The Republican Party has done its best to minimize his influence on the current campaigns. - Dick Cheney: Admitted war criminal, and the architect of many of the bad policies of George W Bush.
- John McCain: In his first key decision as a would-be president, chose Sarah Palin. If he'd wanted a woman, he could have gotten someone at least competent like Christine Todd Whitman. - Sarah Palin: She was stumped by the question "What magazines and newspapers do you read?" Enough said.
- Mitt Romney: Didn't know where Iran is, which I would think is kinda important if you're president. Announced that he didn't care about the fate of half of the citizens of the country. - Paul Ryan: Produced budget after budget where the numbers, based on ludicrous assumptions (like 20% economic growth), fail to add up. And that's his area of expertise.
As for the last round of Republican primary candidates: - Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich: Both at least appear to be racists, whether intentionally or not. That's a big deal to the growing percentage of young people who aren't white, and also to the significant percentage of white young people who oppose racism. - Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann: Both have made it quite clear that their religious beliefs will trump scientific or statistical or factual evidence where the two conflict. - Herman Cain: Had no actual factual understanding of any of the issues, as anyone who listened to an extended interview figured out pretty quickly. - Ron Paul: Insightful about some stuff, also nuts about some other stuff. By all appearances, he believes the US government should not be in the business of issuing money.
So who is this Republican that is not going to be seen as incompetent, corrupt, or crazy?
By your logic, if an army invades a city, everybody in that city not wearing a Red Cross / Crescent / Crystal is a valid target. That is plainly incorrect: The Fourth Geneva Convention Article 4 defines civilians of an occupied country (which Iraq was at this point) as protected persons, which makes them not a legal target. In addition, Articles 16 and 17 make it clear that you're not supposed to shoot at wounded people who are not attacking you.
What it seems like you're steadfastly ignoring is that everyone getting shot at was in fact a civilian who took no offensive action during the "engagement". Nobody there was a combatant. There may have been other combatants somewhere in the same vicinity, but these folks weren't them.
As far as I can tell, Republican partisans believe that everyone will hate Obamacare once it actually exists, which would mean that the Democrats are trying to avoid having it exist. The Democrats could have cut a deal with the insurance companies to prevent things from rolling out on schedule so they wouldn't have to deal with the negative campaign ads about their support of it.
On the other hand, Democratic partisans believe that everyone will love Obamacare once it actually exists, which would mean that the Republicans are trying to avoid having it exist. The Republicans could have cut a deal with the insurance companies to prevent things from rolling out on schedule so they wouldn't have to deal with the negative campaign ads about their opposition to it.
Or, alternately, gerrymandering has made it almost guaranteed that the House will be controlled by the GOP, and Obama is not up for reelection, so no matter what happens in November of next year nothing will get done. And don't think waiting 2016 will help, because the staunch Republican voters are slowly dying off making the president likely to be a Democrat, but still have a majority in enough congressional districts to keep the House Republican. So there's a good chance that absolutely nothing useful will come out of Washington D.C. for at least another decade.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I'm going to assume 3 candidates here: - Smith. 90% approval from you, third-party candidate with no chance of actually winning. - Jones. 40% approval from you, major party candidate. - Williams. 2% approval from you, major party candidate.
The choice for you is clearly between Smith and Jones. If you vote for Smith, then there's a risk that your effective abstention from Jones-Williams means that Williams could conceivably win by a vote. If you vote for Jones, then you're accepting that 60% of his agenda isn't what you want. A suggested strategy is to base your decision on whether your state / congressional district is considered "safe" for either major party: If it is, you can vote for Smith in full confidence that it in no way changes whether the really bad guy will win. If not, then you have to decide how scared you are of the really bad guy.
The objects being carried by the "civilians" had the same profile as RPGs. Only from post-engagement analysis can you tell what they are. The video is a grainy night-vision camera from miles away. Nor can you identify the "children" in the video, they are literally small white blobs on the screen. If you watch the video, without preconceived notions, you can easily identify that it was legitimate engagement.
Even if I concede those points, you still are in trouble, because of what happened next:
Another group of people showed up and were in the field of fire.
I'm going by my memory of it here, but IIRC the shooting had stopped, and there were a bunch of wounded and dead people on the ground. Some people, without anything remotely shaped like an RPG, drove up in a van and attempted to move the wounded people from the ground to their van. They did nothing that suggested a hostile act towards the helicopter, and were carrying no weapon that would be any kind of threat to a helicopter. The motivation the soldiers in the helicopter were talking about was trying to prevent the van from being used to cart off the weapons that the first set of targets were presumed to have. The way most folks understand the rules of war, the van was acting as an ambulance and thus not a legitimate target, and the people who were trying to retrieve the wounded were doing roughly the same role as a medic and thus also not a legitimate target. Also quite relevant is that absolutely none of the people shot at by the helicopter fired any sort of weapon at the helicopter or the ground units that showed up.
It may be that the people in the helicopter were violating the rules of engagement. It may also be that the soldiers were following the rules of engagement, and the rules of engagement were not following what are generally understood to be the laws of war. But something was clearly out of whack.
In wartime, militaries do some really nasty stuff. Ever since Vietnam, the US military has made it a policy to keep hidden from the public the facts about what they do, because they firmly believe that the US would have won the war had they not gotten into trouble with the US public for walking into villages and killing everybody.
And no, more modern wars have been no different in that regard: For example, the US has used drones to launch missiles at weddings and funerals in Afghanistan. There's the infamous "Collateral Murder" video which shows US soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians trying to rescue wounded unarmed civilians. The US has acknowledged torture (by the definitions the US used before they got caught doing it) of often innocent prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. There have been some very suspicious "suicides" of prisoners of war.
I'm not saying war is never worth it, but you have to remember that in war all conventional morality is thrown out the window pretty quickly.
Also worth noting here is that these guys were not convicted and trying to suppress evidence leading to their conviction. These are completely innocent people, treated like criminals by police solely because they were not white.
Slashdot Mirror
No they don't, that's ridiculous. You see them on TV all the time, and sometimes even in person if you go looking for them.
In case you misunderstood, here's a photo of their meeting building.
STFU, n00bs!
In other words, ignore those kinds of fans: they'll yell and scream and complain, and in the end buy the next version of the game.
Oh, the aliens aren't *that* secret: They have a large office building and a place where they meet in Washington DC with a really nice rotunda. There are tours and everything!
Oh, I thought it was something different: "It looks like we got caught spying on a couple thousand Americans illegally, but if you compare how many times we were caught to how many times we committed the crime, that's a drop in the bucket."
It's similar to how Goldman Sachs is absolutely devastated when they have to pay a $500 million fine with no admission of wrongdoing - it takes them a full 3 days to get that money back.
Impeachment is when the House sends the president to trial by the Senate. The Senate then either acquits him or removes him from office (in addition to referring whatever they find to the Department of Justice for prosecution under the next president).
We've had 2 impeachments in US history (nearly a third, but Nixon quit instead), both ending in acquittals.
The old joke: Hamlet is a lousy play because about half its lines are cliches.
Not that Bill didn't write some other great stuff, but the fact remains that Hamlet is more influential than Lear or The Tempest or Richard III.
Yeah, my first thought was "Great, we'll get the best cryptographers on the planet on the Internet now!" because the Japanese didn't even came close to figuring out what they were saying back in WWII.
Yes, I can think of one: Bradley Manning.
But actually that someone ought to be someone who could take a place in the team, not some guy who could never be smart enough to do the job himself.
This is the Great Myth of the MBA: The idea that you can manage somebody without knowing at least the basics of how to do the job that you're managing.
It shows up most commonly in larger organizations, and there's a very clear divide between the people who started in the ranks (as it were) and the people who started at least halfway up the chain of command thoroughly divorced from the actual work of the organization. The best organizational leaders are those who have a thorough understanding of what's going on, and the best way to have that understanding is to do the job for at least a little while. But at some point, an MBA will end up in charge (often by buying their way in as an investor), and then this dynamic will show up quickly.
An example of a career path for someone in the ranks: "Junior Button-pusher"=>"Button-pusher"=>"Senior Button-pusher"=>"Team lead"=>"Project Coordinator"
An example of a career path for someone on the management track: "Management Consultant"=>"Vice-President"=>"Director"=>"CxO"=>"CEO"
While I understand your sentiment, the influence of religious leaders in the west is far less than that in the middle east.
In Egypt, roughly 51% of the country voted for Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously-based party that is heavily endorsed by imams and other religious leaders, as you correctly point out, and has the explicit goal of using religious law as the basis of secular law.
In the United States, roughly 48% of the country voted for Republican candidates. The Republican Party is a largely religiously-based party that is heavily endorsed by evangelical pastors and other religious leaders, and many of its candidates have the explicit goal of using their religious law as the basis of secular law.
How much of a difference is there, really?
In other words, a verbal commitment is worth the paper it's written on.
The war in Afghanistan was supposed to be about capturing Osama bin Laden and destroying Al Qaida.
But when you look at what the US actually did, it was more focused on removing the Taliban and installing Unocal executive Hamid Karzai. Karzai's first and only significant act as the leader of Afghanistan was approving oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea region that various oil companies had been unsuccessfully trying to get the Taliban to agree to for about a decade. Furthermore, when they had reason to believe they had cornered Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, they started withdrawing troops claiming that the problem was they had too many soldiers in the area!
So in Iraq, the claimed reasons for war were a total farce. In Afghanistan, the claimed reasons for war were real, but the actual war aims (if we assume that the US was at least partially successful in achieving their real aims) and the claimed war aims didn't match up.
Jon Huntsman did seem reasonably sane. Which is why I find it very significant that he didn't even come close to winning the Republican primary, and shortly afterwords started talking about the need for a third party (Republican Party response: doing their best to boot him out of the party). And Obama's campaign manager admitted they'd have had a lot of trouble beating Huntsman, whereas they had no real trouble beating Romney and would have by most polls had an even easier time against Perry, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, or Cain.
Colin Powell has also found himself in a similar position: His apparent sanity is seen as a serious liability by the Republican Party.
Silly rabbit, milk is for kids!
it's easy for their imams to tell everyone to vote for the same guy
... and that may or may not translate into actual votes. Just because a religious leader tells a believer of that religion to do something doesn't mean the believer actually does so. For proof of that, consider that the vast majority of Catholics in the US and Europe use birth control against the express wishes of their religious leaders.
What do you do when the majority want to take away your freedoms?
You establish and enforce fundamental rules saying that there is no political authority that can do that legally. The First Amendment in the US serves this purpose. The Egyptian constitution is more contradictory on that point: Article 2 says Islam is the official religion, but Articles 4, 6, and 11 are all aimed at preserving religious freedom.
The fact that the write-off was $900bn is actually more of a side-fact on this one.
Umm, it was $900 million, not $900 billion. Microsoft is a big company, but no corporation has $1 trillion. That's still a staggeringly huge amount of money, but it's nowhere near, say, what the US spends on its military every year.
For a lot of kids, Shakespeare is impenetrable, boring and anachronistic.
I agree that this is bad teaching: I mean, Shakespeare plays have everything you could want in great entertainment - sex, songs, gruesome violence, some drug use, stupid teenage romance, clowns, and sometimes epic proportions.
In most polls on the subject, including some internal studies by the Republican Party, younger voters don't exactly like the Democrats, but think the more prominent Republicans are so insanely dangerous that they won't even consider them. I mean, running down the list of everyone who has made it onto the Republican presidential ticket in the last decade:
- George W Bush: Flat-out incompetent, with policies that: bankrupted the US treasury, gutted FEMA and then stood by while a major American city was destroyed, started 2 wars on false pretenses, willfully broke at least 5 of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, ignored counterterrorism until it smacked him in the face with the biggest intelligence failure in US history, and caused the greatest economic mess since the Great Depression. The Republican Party has done its best to minimize his influence on the current campaigns.
- Dick Cheney: Admitted war criminal, and the architect of many of the bad policies of George W Bush.
- John McCain: In his first key decision as a would-be president, chose Sarah Palin. If he'd wanted a woman, he could have gotten someone at least competent like Christine Todd Whitman.
- Sarah Palin: She was stumped by the question "What magazines and newspapers do you read?" Enough said.
- Mitt Romney: Didn't know where Iran is, which I would think is kinda important if you're president. Announced that he didn't care about the fate of half of the citizens of the country.
- Paul Ryan: Produced budget after budget where the numbers, based on ludicrous assumptions (like 20% economic growth), fail to add up. And that's his area of expertise.
As for the last round of Republican primary candidates:
- Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich: Both at least appear to be racists, whether intentionally or not. That's a big deal to the growing percentage of young people who aren't white, and also to the significant percentage of white young people who oppose racism.
- Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann: Both have made it quite clear that their religious beliefs will trump scientific or statistical or factual evidence where the two conflict.
- Herman Cain: Had no actual factual understanding of any of the issues, as anyone who listened to an extended interview figured out pretty quickly.
- Ron Paul: Insightful about some stuff, also nuts about some other stuff. By all appearances, he believes the US government should not be in the business of issuing money.
So who is this Republican that is not going to be seen as incompetent, corrupt, or crazy?
By your logic, if an army invades a city, everybody in that city not wearing a Red Cross / Crescent / Crystal is a valid target. That is plainly incorrect: The Fourth Geneva Convention Article 4 defines civilians of an occupied country (which Iraq was at this point) as protected persons, which makes them not a legal target. In addition, Articles 16 and 17 make it clear that you're not supposed to shoot at wounded people who are not attacking you.
What it seems like you're steadfastly ignoring is that everyone getting shot at was in fact a civilian who took no offensive action during the "engagement". Nobody there was a combatant. There may have been other combatants somewhere in the same vicinity, but these folks weren't them.
For who's benefit, though?
As far as I can tell, Republican partisans believe that everyone will hate Obamacare once it actually exists, which would mean that the Democrats are trying to avoid having it exist. The Democrats could have cut a deal with the insurance companies to prevent things from rolling out on schedule so they wouldn't have to deal with the negative campaign ads about their support of it.
On the other hand, Democratic partisans believe that everyone will love Obamacare once it actually exists, which would mean that the Republicans are trying to avoid having it exist. The Republicans could have cut a deal with the insurance companies to prevent things from rolling out on schedule so they wouldn't have to deal with the negative campaign ads about their opposition to it.
Or, alternately, gerrymandering has made it almost guaranteed that the House will be controlled by the GOP, and Obama is not up for reelection, so no matter what happens in November of next year nothing will get done. And don't think waiting 2016 will help, because the staunch Republican voters are slowly dying off making the president likely to be a Democrat, but still have a majority in enough congressional districts to keep the House Republican. So there's a good chance that absolutely nothing useful will come out of Washington D.C. for at least another decade.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I'm going to assume 3 candidates here:
- Smith. 90% approval from you, third-party candidate with no chance of actually winning.
- Jones. 40% approval from you, major party candidate.
- Williams. 2% approval from you, major party candidate.
The choice for you is clearly between Smith and Jones. If you vote for Smith, then there's a risk that your effective abstention from Jones-Williams means that Williams could conceivably win by a vote. If you vote for Jones, then you're accepting that 60% of his agenda isn't what you want. A suggested strategy is to base your decision on whether your state / congressional district is considered "safe" for either major party: If it is, you can vote for Smith in full confidence that it in no way changes whether the really bad guy will win. If not, then you have to decide how scared you are of the really bad guy.
The objects being carried by the "civilians" had the same profile as RPGs. Only from post-engagement analysis can you tell what they are. The video is a grainy night-vision camera from miles away. Nor can you identify the "children" in the video, they are literally small white blobs on the screen. If you watch the video, without preconceived notions, you can easily identify that it was legitimate engagement.
Even if I concede those points, you still are in trouble, because of what happened next:
Another group of people showed up and were in the field of fire.
I'm going by my memory of it here, but IIRC the shooting had stopped, and there were a bunch of wounded and dead people on the ground. Some people, without anything remotely shaped like an RPG, drove up in a van and attempted to move the wounded people from the ground to their van. They did nothing that suggested a hostile act towards the helicopter, and were carrying no weapon that would be any kind of threat to a helicopter. The motivation the soldiers in the helicopter were talking about was trying to prevent the van from being used to cart off the weapons that the first set of targets were presumed to have. The way most folks understand the rules of war, the van was acting as an ambulance and thus not a legitimate target, and the people who were trying to retrieve the wounded were doing roughly the same role as a medic and thus also not a legitimate target. Also quite relevant is that absolutely none of the people shot at by the helicopter fired any sort of weapon at the helicopter or the ground units that showed up.
It may be that the people in the helicopter were violating the rules of engagement. It may also be that the soldiers were following the rules of engagement, and the rules of engagement were not following what are generally understood to be the laws of war. But something was clearly out of whack.
In wartime, militaries do some really nasty stuff. Ever since Vietnam, the US military has made it a policy to keep hidden from the public the facts about what they do, because they firmly believe that the US would have won the war had they not gotten into trouble with the US public for walking into villages and killing everybody.
And no, more modern wars have been no different in that regard: For example, the US has used drones to launch missiles at weddings and funerals in Afghanistan. There's the infamous "Collateral Murder" video which shows US soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians trying to rescue wounded unarmed civilians. The US has acknowledged torture (by the definitions the US used before they got caught doing it) of often innocent prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. There have been some very suspicious "suicides" of prisoners of war.
I'm not saying war is never worth it, but you have to remember that in war all conventional morality is thrown out the window pretty quickly.
Also worth noting here is that these guys were not convicted and trying to suppress evidence leading to their conviction. These are completely innocent people, treated like criminals by police solely because they were not white.
The good news about the Diet Book Diet is that you don't have to worry about a lack of fiber!