FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY. What the *hell* does "management" in this title mean if not "coordinate response?" Bush didn't need the repeal of the Posse Comitatus act to help with Katrina, he just needed someone who could identify what New Orleans would need to recover and how to get things there as soon as possible - and the local government begged for exactly that help! Now, both of your arguments on this subject - first, that the Federal government has no role to play in such local disasters (even though the laws that created FEMA made it clear that FEMA's purpose was to assist and coordinate disaster response), and second, that Bush was hamstrung by the Posse Comitatus Act (as though he needed to Federalize the Guard to get fresh water into New Orleans), are mutually exclusive. But logical inconsistency is one of the hallmarks of today's Republican Party!
You've got your fellow Republicans going on TV saying they're "scared of what America will become if the Democrats win" - like America was so bad a place to live from 1955 to 1994 when the Democrats controlled the House? Let's face it - Iraq was less of a threat than Iran or Korea, and certainly less of a threat than Afghanistan (a country that really was hosting al Qaida, and which indisputably provided material support to the attacks against the United States in September 2001). But we have 145,000 troops in Iraq, and only about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan (by comparison, the Soviets couldn't hold Afghanistan with an occupation force that varied in size between 80,000 and 100,000!!!): and while Saddam Hussein is in custody, neither Bin Laden nor "Mullah Omar," the head of the now resurgent Taliban, was ever captured. Do you know what "Middle Eastern" states are assisting Bin Laden? Along with various groups within and outside the governing coalition in Afghanistan, most of Bin Laden's support is coming from our supposed ally Pakistan (specifically, the Pakistani intelligence service, which supports al Qaida because it helps to train and arm insurgents fighting the Indian government in Kashmir - you know, India, the one with the elected government, unlike Musharraf's coup-imposed government - and whose support for the Taliban goes back to the Soviet invasion). We're wasting the lives of our brave men and women so that Georgie can prove that he's a good boy to his daddy (read the beginning of Woodward's new book on why James Baker was left out in the cold and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advice was heeded in direct contradiction to Powell's, by the way).
I suppose, too, that your side has forgotten that they were trying to impeach Clinton for lying about a blowjob while he was bombing Afghanistan to try to force them to stop assisting Bin Laden, didn't you? (Oh, yeah, I forgot - when a Democrat bombs somebody, it's wag the dog; when a Republican bombs somebody, it's Heroism. All I know is that there were some "radical" Democrats outside the government arguing for an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban because they were a clear and present danger in *March* of 2001, after the destruction of Bamiyan and the beginnings of genocidal actions against non-Muslims and non-Pashtu, but you people only caught up with the program *after* thousands of Americans died). If there had been an impeachment in 2004 instead of 1998, you'd be calling for treason trials. Back then, you were calling for a return to values - values being defined, I suppose, as humiliating young fellows who were born in the US just because they happen to be Indian (as one Conservative hero, the beloved Senator Allen, decided to do), or taking money in exchange for changing legislation to aid a slimy lobbyist who cheated his own clients, or laundering money so they could transfer "soft money" into "hard money" accounts for state legislative campaigns, or covering up the behavior of a borderline pedophile congressman (at least Gerry Studds was censured by the scary Democrat-controlled Congress!).
By DEFINITION, an IED is not a military weapon. The "I" stands for "Improvised." For example, a Molotov cocktail is an IED. (An RPG is a military weapon.) The success of the IED in Iraq and Afghanistan points to something that should have been learned a long time ago in 1940s Russia, 1960s and 1970s Vietnam, and in 1980s Afghanistan: an occupation army will lose if it can't win the hearts and minds of the people of the occupied land, no matter *how* superior their technology.
I'm staying here till the bitter end. Anyone who wants to leave America because they don't like the Republicans or the Democrats or whoever can go - good riddance to them. One is an American not because one was born on a particular patch of land, but because one believes in certain principles, and that those principles are worth fighting for. We CHOOSE to be Americans. The unamerican (dare I say antiamerican) bunch running things now has already overplayed their hand, and those of us who choose to stand our ground and say we're not going quietly will reap the rewards of the freedoms we defend.
And the best part about being American? Most of the time, defending our freedoms at home means using a ballot and our voices and our pens: not standing in front of tanks.
No serious political observer, conservative or liberal, believes that the US was complicit in 9/11, so your bizarre attempt to assert that Democrats would be looking for this is at best problematic. However, nearly everyone believes that Bush did, indeed, lie about the intelligence on WMDs. Putting these two together is an attempt to tain the second idea with the lunacy of the first. This is what America is like under the far-right neo-Republicans: if we can't make a valid argument, at least we can make a divisive one.
I'm looking forward to the days when you and your kind have to crawl back under the rock where the Bush family found you, and we can have real Republicans again. I'm hoping it will be a Tuesday, a November, and a year that ends with a six.
Well, there's a semantic problem there. A perosn who is "gay" is someone who is attracted to *adults* of the same sex; a heterosexual is someone who is attracted to *adults* of the opposite sex. A child molester is a pederast, most are males who prey on girls, some are males who prey on boys, some are males who prey on either boys or girls, a few are females who prey on boys, girls, both, or get off by watching male pederasts. You can be both gay and a pederast, and you can be both heterosexual and a pederast; and oddly enough, you can even be both a heterosexual male and a pederast who preys partially or mostly on boys, is attracted to adult females, but no interest in adult males. This last is a lot more common than you'd think; there are probably as many or more of them than there are gay pederasts, simply because there are a lot more heterosexuals. Homosexuality is defined as not (psychologically) dysfunctional; but pederasty is very clearly dysfunctional.
I'm sure he has; beginning with claiming that the US government had absolute proof that Iraq had an ongoing and widespread WMD program, when the evidence suggests that there was nothing of the kind: the worst even the most apologetic can come up with is evidence that they once had a widespread WMD program, and that they might have had tiny ongoing kitchen projects. The whole "preemption doctrine" was dependent upon that absolute proof, but every single non-radical-neocon in the intelligence community was telling him the evidence was very unreliable.
Royalties on a patent are in a vague way analogous to residuals. So are stock options: something that is giving to an employee as part of his compensation that will continue to earn additional money for him in the future, perhaps long after he has left the employer.
If CBS had any brains, they'd offer Moore complete creative control over the Star Trek franchise to leave BSG when his contract with NBC is up. DS9 is the only Star Trek series that really holds up well after all these years, and Moore was an assistant producer on that (and the writer of some of its greatest episodes); and there he was constrained by the Berman junta.
This is China. They have a mandatory limit on how many children you can have (ok, maybe Hong Kong doesn't; not sure how much of the legal system on the mainland has been asserted at HK so far). I think they know what a condom is.
Re:Newer company might have more room for advancem
on
Microsoft or Google?
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· Score: 1
I wrote "the same reputation that Microsoft had in the early 80s." Reputation is a very slippery thing, and it does not have a very direct relationship to reality. Back in the early 80s the popular media was full of stories about how working at Microsoft was about only hiring very smart people, working a lot of 100 hour weeks, free junk food, pool tables, and pinball and video game machines in the work areas, lots of leeway to try new things, &c. That was the perception, and that perception helped people move on from Microsoft to great positions at other workplaces in the industry. Windows wasn't released until 1985, and soon after that (and in part because of that, and the obvious derivativeness of Windows -- most assumed it was directly and entirely derived from the Macintosh, not knowing the whole messy history), the perception of Microsoft had changed to the "We did it Second!" reputation it had until the Windows 3 "We Are Microsoft. You will be assimiliated." behemoth days.
Newer company might have more room for advancement
on
Microsoft or Google?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Google is still in its early days, and it has a reputation for innovation and intelligence (the same reputation that Microsoft had in the early 80s). If you like Google and stay for a long time, you might have a lot of room to move up the ladder. Microsoft is where IBM was in the 80s, but with cheaper tailors: they dominate the industry, but not the mind share, and it's a mature organization with less room for advancement.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).
Actually, no, my friend holds the copyright on the performance, and the television station on the broadcast, and part of the agreement they signed indicated that he had distribution rights for the clip we tried to post. Copyright is fine, as long as you don't go nuts in enforcement.
Funny, on my computer, it only goes above 50% for a moment while actually rendering a loaded page, and is only using 34MB of ram (though I'd like to think it could be smaller than that).
Re:Deleted Scenes from the Interview
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, I tried to post a video for a friend, under his account, that he had the right to distribute - it was a television broadcast of his own performance. Google Video refused to post it because he was not the legal copyright holder. I'm guessing that YouTube will end up with this model.
Then I've got bad news for you, Alex. I haven't played any video game in over a year: in my life, I've bought perhaps 10 or 12 video games (going back to my old Intellivision, but including SimEarth, SimCity, and The Sims), and *I'm* planning on buying Spore at release. That's hype.
Actually, no, saying that NASCAR fans cannot enjoy Serenity is nothing like saying something about black people. Enjoying Serenity is a taste; enjoying NASCAR is a taste. Confusing these categories with "racial," ethnic, sectarian, or sexual categories is simply wrong. Mind you, I'm sure that there are many brilliant NASCAR fans out there. (As for WWE, well, that's another story...)
Your argumentation here is so flawed that Leo Strauss, were he alive to see his name taken ad verecundiam in this manner, would cry out in sorrow. There was no democratic government of Iraq until we imposed one (if the government we imposed even is democratic, a dubious assertion at best; though certain Iraq could use a little democracy right now); on the other hand, there were existing colonial governments in America in the 1770s, and even a precedent for their unification in the United Colonies. By the way, my original argument was not that Republican views on "values" are invalid because al Qaeda also holds them, but that claiming that Americans who oppose the Republican agenda are opponents of "American values" is false because those same "values" are also held by the enemy we are supposed to be fighting (though from the looks of Afghanistan it seems that your Rochambaud has managed to give our real enemies a free hand), and against whom we are defining "Americanism." It's a subtle argument, I'm afraid, and probably not within your intellectual scope.
First you accuse me of a fallacious argument, and then proceed to provide the most perfect example of argumentum in circulo I've ever seen: tell me, how could the attack of al Qaeda in Iraq against the "democratic" government of Iraq have justified the original invasion of Iraq that was necessary to create said "democratic" government in the first place? Does the RNC have a time machine?
As for your specious analogy between Iraq and the American colonies, the French did not invade the Colonies in 1775 - they waited for an invitation from the original government, and only provided enough force to keep the British from getting reinforcements in on the ground. But with your trite equation of Rochambeau and RUMSFELD, I suppose the details of history do not matter much to you.
All of your "wedge" issues: gay marriage - al Qaeda is against gay marriage, too. Abortion: al Qaeda is fundamentally against a woman's right to choose - and not just whether or not to have a child. Divorce: al Qaeda has many of the same views about divorce that you'll hear from a lot of right-wing radio commentators. Children born out of wedlock. Prayer in schools - al Qaeda simply goes further and says it should be mandatory, five times a day, and in Arabic. All the things that you Repugnicans (anyone who refers to the "Democrat" party will get called a "Repugnican" from now on) tell the poor semi-educated blue collar folks are "American values" or family values. However, the real American values of democracy, freedom of thought, belief, assembly, and speech, bipartisanship, going to war only when attacked and only against the people who directly attacked us or our allies - things al Qaeda would disagree with, that is - don't seem to be a part of your platform anymore. Used to be that Republicans were conservatives who understood that, back in the good old days of Bush 39 - hell, even Reagan understood a lot of that. But not today.
Slashdot Mirror
FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY. What the *hell* does "management" in this title mean if not "coordinate response?" Bush didn't need the repeal of the Posse Comitatus act to help with Katrina, he just needed someone who could identify what New Orleans would need to recover and how to get things there as soon as possible - and the local government begged for exactly that help! Now, both of your arguments on this subject - first, that the Federal government has no role to play in such local disasters (even though the laws that created FEMA made it clear that FEMA's purpose was to assist and coordinate disaster response), and second, that Bush was hamstrung by the Posse Comitatus Act (as though he needed to Federalize the Guard to get fresh water into New Orleans), are mutually exclusive. But logical inconsistency is one of the hallmarks of today's Republican Party!
You've got your fellow Republicans going on TV saying they're "scared of what America will become if the Democrats win" - like America was so bad a place to live from 1955 to 1994 when the Democrats controlled the House? Let's face it - Iraq was less of a threat than Iran or Korea, and certainly less of a threat than Afghanistan (a country that really was hosting al Qaida, and which indisputably provided material support to the attacks against the United States in September 2001). But we have 145,000 troops in Iraq, and only about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan (by comparison, the Soviets couldn't hold Afghanistan with an occupation force that varied in size between 80,000 and 100,000!!!): and while Saddam Hussein is in custody, neither Bin Laden nor "Mullah Omar," the head of the now resurgent Taliban, was ever captured. Do you know what "Middle Eastern" states are assisting Bin Laden? Along with various groups within and outside the governing coalition in Afghanistan, most of Bin Laden's support is coming from our supposed ally Pakistan (specifically, the Pakistani intelligence service, which supports al Qaida because it helps to train and arm insurgents fighting the Indian government in Kashmir - you know, India, the one with the elected government, unlike Musharraf's coup-imposed government - and whose support for the Taliban goes back to the Soviet invasion). We're wasting the lives of our brave men and women so that Georgie can prove that he's a good boy to his daddy (read the beginning of Woodward's new book on why James Baker was left out in the cold and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advice was heeded in direct contradiction to Powell's, by the way).
I suppose, too, that your side has forgotten that they were trying to impeach Clinton for lying about a blowjob while he was bombing Afghanistan to try to force them to stop assisting Bin Laden, didn't you? (Oh, yeah, I forgot - when a Democrat bombs somebody, it's wag the dog; when a Republican bombs somebody, it's Heroism. All I know is that there were some "radical" Democrats outside the government arguing for an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban because they were a clear and present danger in *March* of 2001, after the destruction of Bamiyan and the beginnings of genocidal actions against non-Muslims and non-Pashtu, but you people only caught up with the program *after* thousands of Americans died). If there had been an impeachment in 2004 instead of 1998, you'd be calling for treason trials. Back then, you were calling for a return to values - values being defined, I suppose, as humiliating young fellows who were born in the US just because they happen to be Indian (as one Conservative hero, the beloved Senator Allen, decided to do), or taking money in exchange for changing legislation to aid a slimy lobbyist who cheated his own clients, or laundering money so they could transfer "soft money" into "hard money" accounts for state legislative campaigns, or covering up the behavior of a borderline pedophile congressman (at least Gerry Studds was censured by the scary Democrat-controlled Congress!).
By DEFINITION, an IED is not a military weapon. The "I" stands for "Improvised." For example, a Molotov cocktail is an IED. (An RPG is a military weapon.) The success of the IED in Iraq and Afghanistan points to something that should have been learned a long time ago in 1940s Russia, 1960s and 1970s Vietnam, and in 1980s Afghanistan: an occupation army will lose if it can't win the hearts and minds of the people of the occupied land, no matter *how* superior their technology.
Kagi is the first solution I thought of when I saw this title. Do like the man says.
I'm staying here till the bitter end. Anyone who wants to leave America because they don't like the Republicans or the Democrats or whoever can go - good riddance to them. One is an American not because one was born on a particular patch of land, but because one believes in certain principles, and that those principles are worth fighting for. We CHOOSE to be Americans. The unamerican (dare I say antiamerican) bunch running things now has already overplayed their hand, and those of us who choose to stand our ground and say we're not going quietly will reap the rewards of the freedoms we defend.
And the best part about being American? Most of the time, defending our freedoms at home means using a ballot and our voices and our pens: not standing in front of tanks.
No serious political observer, conservative or liberal, believes that the US was complicit in 9/11, so your bizarre attempt to assert that Democrats would be looking for this is at best problematic. However, nearly everyone believes that Bush did, indeed, lie about the intelligence on WMDs. Putting these two together is an attempt to tain the second idea with the lunacy of the first. This is what America is like under the far-right neo-Republicans: if we can't make a valid argument, at least we can make a divisive one.
I'm looking forward to the days when you and your kind have to crawl back under the rock where the Bush family found you, and we can have real Republicans again. I'm hoping it will be a Tuesday, a November, and a year that ends with a six.
I can only hope that no one else dies or is injured in this needless, unjustified conflict. No one.
Well, there's a semantic problem there. A perosn who is "gay" is someone who is attracted to *adults* of the same sex; a heterosexual is someone who is attracted to *adults* of the opposite sex. A child molester is a pederast, most are males who prey on girls, some are males who prey on boys, some are males who prey on either boys or girls, a few are females who prey on boys, girls, both, or get off by watching male pederasts. You can be both gay and a pederast, and you can be both heterosexual and a pederast; and oddly enough, you can even be both a heterosexual male and a pederast who preys partially or mostly on boys, is attracted to adult females, but no interest in adult males. This last is a lot more common than you'd think; there are probably as many or more of them than there are gay pederasts, simply because there are a lot more heterosexuals. Homosexuality is defined as not (psychologically) dysfunctional; but pederasty is very clearly dysfunctional.
I'm sure he has; beginning with claiming that the US government had absolute proof that Iraq had an ongoing and widespread WMD program, when the evidence suggests that there was nothing of the kind: the worst even the most apologetic can come up with is evidence that they once had a widespread WMD program, and that they might have had tiny ongoing kitchen projects. The whole "preemption doctrine" was dependent upon that absolute proof, but every single non-radical-neocon in the intelligence community was telling him the evidence was very unreliable.
Royalties on a patent are in a vague way analogous to residuals. So are stock options: something that is giving to an employee as part of his compensation that will continue to earn additional money for him in the future, perhaps long after he has left the employer.
If CBS had any brains, they'd offer Moore complete creative control over the Star Trek franchise to leave BSG when his contract with NBC is up. DS9 is the only Star Trek series that really holds up well after all these years, and Moore was an assistant producer on that (and the writer of some of its greatest episodes); and there he was constrained by the Berman junta.
Best. Slashdot. Joke. Ever.
It's a Windows virus, and Apple eats their own dogfood; and the article says it happened at a subcontractor.
This is China. They have a mandatory limit on how many children you can have (ok, maybe Hong Kong doesn't; not sure how much of the legal system on the mainland has been asserted at HK so far). I think they know what a condom is.
I wrote "the same reputation that Microsoft had in the early 80s." Reputation is a very slippery thing, and it does not have a very direct relationship to reality. Back in the early 80s the popular media was full of stories about how working at Microsoft was about only hiring very smart people, working a lot of 100 hour weeks, free junk food, pool tables, and pinball and video game machines in the work areas, lots of leeway to try new things, &c. That was the perception, and that perception helped people move on from Microsoft to great positions at other workplaces in the industry. Windows wasn't released until 1985, and soon after that (and in part because of that, and the obvious derivativeness of Windows -- most assumed it was directly and entirely derived from the Macintosh, not knowing the whole messy history), the perception of Microsoft had changed to the "We did it Second!" reputation it had until the Windows 3 "We Are Microsoft. You will be assimiliated." behemoth days.
Google is still in its early days, and it has a reputation for innovation and intelligence (the same reputation that Microsoft had in the early 80s). If you like Google and stay for a long time, you might have a lot of room to move up the ladder. Microsoft is where IBM was in the 80s, but with cheaper tailors: they dominate the industry, but not the mind share, and it's a mature organization with less room for advancement.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).
Actually, no, my friend holds the copyright on the performance, and the television station on the broadcast, and part of the agreement they signed indicated that he had distribution rights for the clip we tried to post. Copyright is fine, as long as you don't go nuts in enforcement.
Funny, on my computer, it only goes above 50% for a moment while actually rendering a loaded page, and is only using 34MB of ram (though I'd like to think it could be smaller than that).
Well, I tried to post a video for a friend, under his account, that he had the right to distribute - it was a television broadcast of his own performance. Google Video refused to post it because he was not the legal copyright holder. I'm guessing that YouTube will end up with this model.
Every Apple user would notice immediately: Quartz, the 2D rendering engine for OS X, uses PDF: , and
Then I've got bad news for you, Alex. I haven't played any video game in over a year: in my life, I've bought perhaps 10 or 12 video games (going back to my old Intellivision, but including SimEarth, SimCity, and The Sims), and *I'm* planning on buying Spore at release. That's hype.
Actually, no, saying that NASCAR fans cannot enjoy Serenity is nothing like saying something about black people. Enjoying Serenity is a taste; enjoying NASCAR is a taste. Confusing these categories with "racial," ethnic, sectarian, or sexual categories is simply wrong. Mind you, I'm sure that there are many brilliant NASCAR fans out there. (As for WWE, well, that's another story ...)
Your argumentation here is so flawed that Leo Strauss, were he alive to see his name taken ad verecundiam in this manner, would cry out in sorrow. There was no democratic government of Iraq until we imposed one (if the government we imposed even is democratic, a dubious assertion at best; though certain Iraq could use a little democracy right now); on the other hand, there were existing colonial governments in America in the 1770s, and even a precedent for their unification in the United Colonies. By the way, my original argument was not that Republican views on "values" are invalid because al Qaeda also holds them, but that claiming that Americans who oppose the Republican agenda are opponents of "American values" is false because those same "values" are also held by the enemy we are supposed to be fighting (though from the looks of Afghanistan it seems that your Rochambaud has managed to give our real enemies a free hand), and against whom we are defining "Americanism." It's a subtle argument, I'm afraid, and probably not within your intellectual scope.
First you accuse me of a fallacious argument, and then proceed to provide the most perfect example of argumentum in circulo I've ever seen: tell me, how could the attack of al Qaeda in Iraq against the "democratic" government of Iraq have justified the original invasion of Iraq that was necessary to create said "democratic" government in the first place? Does the RNC have a time machine?
As for your specious analogy between Iraq and the American colonies, the French did not invade the Colonies in 1775 - they waited for an invitation from the original government, and only provided enough force to keep the British from getting reinforcements in on the ground. But with your trite equation of Rochambeau and RUMSFELD, I suppose the details of history do not matter much to you.
All of your "wedge" issues: gay marriage - al Qaeda is against gay marriage, too. Abortion: al Qaeda is fundamentally against a woman's right to choose - and not just whether or not to have a child. Divorce: al Qaeda has many of the same views about divorce that you'll hear from a lot of right-wing radio commentators. Children born out of wedlock. Prayer in schools - al Qaeda simply goes further and says it should be mandatory, five times a day, and in Arabic. All the things that you Repugnicans (anyone who refers to the "Democrat" party will get called a "Repugnican" from now on) tell the poor semi-educated blue collar folks are "American values" or family values. However, the real American values of democracy, freedom of thought, belief, assembly, and speech, bipartisanship, going to war only when attacked and only against the people who directly attacked us or our allies - things al Qaeda would disagree with, that is - don't seem to be a part of your platform anymore. Used to be that Republicans were conservatives who understood that, back in the good old days of Bush 39 - hell, even Reagan understood a lot of that. But not today.