You can talk about rights all you want, but the bottom line is that nations hold territory through force or the threat of it, until they've been there long enough to be considered historically justified.
The creation of Israel wasn't about giving it back to some original inhabitants. It was about the presence of Jews in Palestine agitating for a homeland and pointing to the Holocaust as a reason they needed one, at a time when almost every ethnic group in the area was agitating for the same, and the people in charge generally agreed that everyone should have a homeland. At the time, the British were controlling what used to be the Ottoman Empire, and there was a variety of efforts to negotiate a partition of Palestine that would give both the Palestinians and Jews a homeland.
The history of those negotiations is long and tortured, and involves bad acts by all around: Zionists at the time were what we call terrorists today; Arab nations were deliberately obstructionist, believing they could prevent any land being given to the Jews who were already there, and also believing that they could destroy any Jewish partition if it happened.
It's one of the many ironies of Palestine that if the Arabs had accepted any of several partitions that were acceptable to the Zionists, they would have the majority of Palestine under clear control.
Regardless, you have an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries, followed by the British, and an attempt to settle partitions that would be agreeable to everyone who was right there. Negotiations failed, neighboring Arab countries invaded, and got their asses kicked. Repeat in 1967 and 1972. Each time, Israel took territory from the attackers (the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan). The Palestinians were run over by everyone.
So it's a huge shitpile of wrong, and the Palestinians are on the bottom of that pile, but talk of Israel's right to exist is a non-starter in teasing it out and finding a peaceful solution, mostly because every nation is legitimated in the same way as Israel: force and history. Everyone involved has dirty hands, and legitimate grievances.
Peace in Northern Ireland was achieved by starting from the point of trying to placate each side's core concerns, not trying to clear up a backlog of injustices.
So your issue with discussing the cost effectiveness of Air Force One is really that government, existing outside the free market, has no profit-loss function by which cost effectiveness can be calculated?
That's fine as a point of dogma, but it's still not that hard to create a reasonably accurate spreadsheet saying "we spend this much right now, and if we upgrade the plane, that'll go down to this much, saving us some money." At the end of the day, there's still fuel costs, part costs, and labor costs that can be added up.
You're massively underinformed about the history of that specific region and the formation of Israel. Rather than type it up here, I'll refer you to Wikipedia for the (very contentious) history of Palestine, which gives a reasonably balanced view.
I'll address your analogy, though: Israel's right to exist is inherent in the same right to exist that most nations have. They have successfully defended their territory in three wars (and it's in those wars that were launched against them that they expanded their territory). It's not noble, it's not morally right (or wrong), it's just how most nations come into existence and stay there. The U.S. was founded by settlers who moved in on the natives, took over their land, and used force to marginalize them on reserves. If, by your argument, you're saying that Israel has no "right to exist", then neither does the U.S.
As a general matter of history, the early 20th century was dominated by the idea that every distinct people should have a homeland. Much of the border drawing following WWI was done with that in mind, and Zionism is only the most successful of a wide variety of ethno-nationalist movements from the early 20th century, largely because they were able to defend themselves in those three wars.
If the current operating budget for flying your current plane is X, and the operating budget and amortized costs of switching to a new plane is Y, and X is greater than Y, then continuing to fly the X plane incurs an ongoing opportunity cost of X-Y. If the plane you're flying has an opportunity cost associated with it, it's no longer the most cost effective plane to fly, is it?
I don't disagree with anything you say, but I think you're missing the point. Today's admirers of the cult of personality have also matured, and have recognized that having a bastard in charge is usually the only way out of the swamp of corporate mediocrity. Farhad Manjoo's recent article in Slate about Macworld hits it: The problem with Jobs's departure will be that Apple will become another HP or Dell, selling it's particular thing that's not really distinguishable from anything else.
Apple fanbois these days aren't the "Apple will change the world" fanbois of yesterday. They're yuppies with cash who appreciate a name brand worth displaying prominently, and they're worried about it losing its social cachet.
AES does not come from the NSA. "AES" stands for "Advanced Encryption Standard", and the algorithm selected, Rijndael, comes from two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted it to the AES selection process. All algorithms that took part were publicly evaluated for five years by the cryptography community at large, and Rijndael was selected pretty much by public acclaim.
My response to all this, and the snivelling about how their rights were being trampled upon was that I'm unsympathetic to their plight primarily because the Muslim community has brought this upon themselves. I stand by that statement. We never hear the Muslim community being up in arms about a Muslim suicide bomber smearing the good (?) name of Islam
Does the fact that you haven't heard about Muslims condemning suicide bombers mean it doesn't happen?
I think this is the crucial flaw in your position that the Muslim community has brought this on themselves. I've seen some condemnations, but I've also seen complaints that the media doesn't give the same coverage to moderate Muslim statements against radical Islamists as they do to the actions of terrorists. Think about the nature of media coverage, and I'm sure you'll see the bind that both reporters and moderate Muslims are in. "If it bleeds it leads" is the saying in the news business, and a moment's reflection tells you that fearmongering coverage will almost always trump reassuring statements about how not all Muslims are trying to blow you up.
Here's some of the results from a quick google search for "muslims condemn suicide bombings". The first link is a list of public condemnations by Muslim leaders and groups.
They get some coverage, but no stories get multiple days/outlets to repeat the message the way an event like a bombing does. The problem isn't that Muslims don't condemn suicide attacks, it's that their condemnations don't get enough play, so people like you think that the Muslim community silently condones the actions of the extremists.
Apparently, yes. Or haven't you noticed that the number of (suicide or not) bombings has been steadily rising?
When the increased rate still comes in under a hundredth of a percent, so what? Or have you added a lightning rod to the clothes you wear every day? Besides, virtually all those bombings occur in 1) Iraq, 2) Israel, or 3) Sri Lanka. Your odds of preventing a terrorist attack on the flight from Boston to Miami just dropped another couple orders of magnitude.
Perhaps, but it's far higher than the likelihood of sitting next to a Christian/Jewish/Hindu bomber. This is the issue at hand, you may choose to ignore the threat, but that policy is just plain dumb, don't you think ?
No, I don't. I think it's dumb to harass innocent Muslims on the infinitesimal chance that you might prevent a terrorist attack. If nothing else, all you're accomplishing is making the perspective of radicalized Muslims more accurate. The cure is worse than the statistical disease.
When was the last time a suicide bomber was actually caught by someone overhearing him rehearsing his plans out loud as he boarded the plane? Why aren't people such as yourself concerned about just how counterproductive most of our security theater is?
Really? Just attending a Madrasa, or listening to your government's foreign policy stance, is sufficient to make someone strap on a bomb and blow themselves up?
Ask yourself this: If suicide bombers are so easily made, then why aren't there more of them? Think of what you could accomplish with 100 suicide bombers in the U.S. if you just sent them to low security areas like mall food courts, bus stations, theaters, and crowded shopping areas during the Christmas rush. If 100 suicide bombers exploded all at once, the U.S. would quite understandably lose its mind, and carry out the exact sort of war on terror that bin Laden and his ilk want.
Yet the U.S. has seen only 19 on its own territory in the last decade, and less than a hundred in the first world in the same period. If we include Iraq since 2003, we're still under 1,100. If there really are millions of people who are a real threat to commit a suicide bombing, shouldn't we have seen more of them by now?
Besides, even granting tens of millions of them, that's still less than a hundredth of a percent odds that the Muslim you're sitting next to is a terrorist.
Let's be generous and say that there are 1,000,000 Muslim suicide bombers or potential bombers out there. That's how many out of 1.2 billion? Less than 0.0001%. Does that seem like a risk you need to address with idiotic airplane security measures? You're more likely to be struck by lightning, but how many people wear lightning rods around?
You're absolutely right, and next time the 1.2 billion strong Muslim community gets together for its annual meeting where they discuss how to prevent any of them from acting in a way to reflects badly on the rest, it should totally be on the agenda.
The traditional barrier to implementation of rail systems is the initial investment costs
No, the traditional barrier to consumer rail is the airline industry, who's powerful lobby prevents any public funds from going towards those high initial investment costs. The airlines depend upon short hop feeder routes--Washington to New York, for example--because their consistent volume makes it easy to optimize those routes. Consumer rail would directly compete, especially now with air travel requiring hours at each end for security, only to leave you with a cab or bus ride to get into the city.
Until the airline industry in the U.S. stops actively blocking the development of rail, the U.S. will never get the rail system it deserves.
When OJ Simpson was arrested for Nicole Simpson's murder, some believed that he was being framed by the government for his part in the movie Capricorn One, which was about a faked Mars landing--they thought it was revenge for obliquely revealing that the moon landing was a hoax.
If the Bush Administration wanted to suppress the movie, why wait until it's already filmed, gotten a lot of pre-release publicity, and has a lot of people excited about it? Why do it when the movie has sparked renewed interest in the comic book? Why not just tie it up in the development hell it's been in since the comic was first released?
One wonders why Amazon bothers spending money on lawyers to defend a patent that's irrelevant now. All loss of the patent means is that competitors can create 1-click features on their sites, something that's far from a selling point in Amazon's favour now. Back in the day when ecommerce was the realm of pornographers, it was a slick feature to offer, but nowadays it would seem almost quaint to tout that as a reason to use one site over another.
Except if they take it off the shelf because you can't do what you want with it, then you're effectively denying it to everyone else. Where would they be if they had to please every single potential consumer, and couldn't sell it otherwise?
Besides, it's not you that they're saying is restricted, it's a third party who's making money modifying their product and reselling it. Years ago there was a copyright case where a Christian Evangelical organization was reselling DVDs of popular movies with the sex and profanity removed; the court found against them because they were modifying a creative work, eviscerating the creator's control over it. That's the point of copyright. How would you feel if the novel you wrote was resold by someone else in an "improved" way? Or the software you wrote was resold with a bunch of features you explicitly didn't add?
Those medical doctors have also completed a reasonably rigorous education and internship in a field grounded in the scientific method, whatever their personal failings are. And being a "true geek" is no guarantee of being right, either--witness the number of flame wars in tech circles.
Doctors aren't the only ones patting themselves on the back excessively.
From someone who's a published author, I expect better grammar in a book review.
In the chapter, the authors reiterate the concept that the plural of data is not anecdote. Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims.
The aphorism is mis-stated (it's "the plural of anecdote is not data"), and directly contradicts the next sentence. I actually read it over several times because I thought it might be deliberately reversed to make a point. Nope, it's just wrong.
Contrary to what common sense and basic science, in homeopathy, a solution that is more diluted is considered stronger and as having a higher potency.
Either the third word, "what", shouldn't be there, or there's some missing word(s) after "basic science", such as "assert" or "claim" or "would say".
Chapter 5 concludes with on why smart people believe such odd things?
Either "on" is not supposed to be there, or should be something like "the question of".
Overall, it reads like a high school student's book review. Get a proofreader.
Presumably, the £2.5MM are the bottom line costs of the improved functionality that the new system provides. Given the life cycle of nuclear submarines, the replaced C&C systems were probably several decades old.
It's just you thinking that they're blaming Linux. They built their system, found some roadblocks in memcache and the Linux kernel, and fixed or worked around them. Then they publicized their fixes like good OSS users should.
It's only "blaming" Linux if you think Linux is perfect and can do no wrong.
You're getting a lot of "you're a bad person" because you're repeating lies, half-truths, distortions, and mendacious interpretations that make us all dumber for reading them. It's difficult to believe that you're not doing so with ill intent, to simply smear a political figure that you dislike. It's difficult to believe that you take those points seriously when they're the intellectual equivalent of arguments that the moon landing was a hoax.
Perhaps it's wrong to assume that your intent is perverse, but from the perspective of the vast majority with some minimal standards for logic and plausibility, it's the simplest explanation.
My question was asked to see if you had a serious motive, which it would seem you do. Yes, the story of how Obama got to be president is remarkable (or so implausible as to be suspicious), but if you follow it without looking for conspiracy markers, you can see how it happened. A lot of it was hard work, a lot of it was luck and knowing the right people at the right time, and a lot of it was intelligent political strategizing. Not a little bit of it was his opponents underestimating him--Clinton lost to him because her campaign was awful, full of competing egotists expecting a coronation to precede cushy administration posts.
There'll be more than enough real stuff to criticize Obama on once he's sworn in. The conspiracy crap just obscures that fact.
BTW, the answer to how Obama paid for Harvard is: student loans. It happens all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
You can talk about rights all you want, but the bottom line is that nations hold territory through force or the threat of it, until they've been there long enough to be considered historically justified.
The creation of Israel wasn't about giving it back to some original inhabitants. It was about the presence of Jews in Palestine agitating for a homeland and pointing to the Holocaust as a reason they needed one, at a time when almost every ethnic group in the area was agitating for the same, and the people in charge generally agreed that everyone should have a homeland. At the time, the British were controlling what used to be the Ottoman Empire, and there was a variety of efforts to negotiate a partition of Palestine that would give both the Palestinians and Jews a homeland.
The history of those negotiations is long and tortured, and involves bad acts by all around: Zionists at the time were what we call terrorists today; Arab nations were deliberately obstructionist, believing they could prevent any land being given to the Jews who were already there, and also believing that they could destroy any Jewish partition if it happened.
It's one of the many ironies of Palestine that if the Arabs had accepted any of several partitions that were acceptable to the Zionists, they would have the majority of Palestine under clear control.
Regardless, you have an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries, followed by the British, and an attempt to settle partitions that would be agreeable to everyone who was right there. Negotiations failed, neighboring Arab countries invaded, and got their asses kicked. Repeat in 1967 and 1972. Each time, Israel took territory from the attackers (the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan). The Palestinians were run over by everyone.
So it's a huge shitpile of wrong, and the Palestinians are on the bottom of that pile, but talk of Israel's right to exist is a non-starter in teasing it out and finding a peaceful solution, mostly because every nation is legitimated in the same way as Israel: force and history. Everyone involved has dirty hands, and legitimate grievances.
Peace in Northern Ireland was achieved by starting from the point of trying to placate each side's core concerns, not trying to clear up a backlog of injustices.
So your issue with discussing the cost effectiveness of Air Force One is really that government, existing outside the free market, has no profit-loss function by which cost effectiveness can be calculated?
That's fine as a point of dogma, but it's still not that hard to create a reasonably accurate spreadsheet saying "we spend this much right now, and if we upgrade the plane, that'll go down to this much, saving us some money." At the end of the day, there's still fuel costs, part costs, and labor costs that can be added up.
You're massively underinformed about the history of that specific region and the formation of Israel. Rather than type it up here, I'll refer you to Wikipedia for the (very contentious) history of Palestine, which gives a reasonably balanced view.
I'll address your analogy, though: Israel's right to exist is inherent in the same right to exist that most nations have. They have successfully defended their territory in three wars (and it's in those wars that were launched against them that they expanded their territory). It's not noble, it's not morally right (or wrong), it's just how most nations come into existence and stay there. The U.S. was founded by settlers who moved in on the natives, took over their land, and used force to marginalize them on reserves. If, by your argument, you're saying that Israel has no "right to exist", then neither does the U.S.
As a general matter of history, the early 20th century was dominated by the idea that every distinct people should have a homeland. Much of the border drawing following WWI was done with that in mind, and Zionism is only the most successful of a wide variety of ethno-nationalist movements from the early 20th century, largely because they were able to defend themselves in those three wars.
If the current operating budget for flying your current plane is X, and the operating budget and amortized costs of switching to a new plane is Y, and X is greater than Y, then continuing to fly the X plane incurs an ongoing opportunity cost of X-Y. If the plane you're flying has an opportunity cost associated with it, it's no longer the most cost effective plane to fly, is it?
I don't disagree with anything you say, but I think you're missing the point. Today's admirers of the cult of personality have also matured, and have recognized that having a bastard in charge is usually the only way out of the swamp of corporate mediocrity. Farhad Manjoo's recent article in Slate about Macworld hits it: The problem with Jobs's departure will be that Apple will become another HP or Dell, selling it's particular thing that's not really distinguishable from anything else.
Apple fanbois these days aren't the "Apple will change the world" fanbois of yesterday. They're yuppies with cash who appreciate a name brand worth displaying prominently, and they're worried about it losing its social cachet.
Totally. In OSX, open the terminal and enter "offer Jesus-juice to McCauley Culkin". Then burn your MacBook.
AES does not come from the NSA. "AES" stands for "Advanced Encryption Standard", and the algorithm selected, Rijndael, comes from two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted it to the AES selection process. All algorithms that took part were publicly evaluated for five years by the cryptography community at large, and Rijndael was selected pretty much by public acclaim.
Does the fact that you haven't heard about Muslims condemning suicide bombers mean it doesn't happen?
I think this is the crucial flaw in your position that the Muslim community has brought this on themselves. I've seen some condemnations, but I've also seen complaints that the media doesn't give the same coverage to moderate Muslim statements against radical Islamists as they do to the actions of terrorists. Think about the nature of media coverage, and I'm sure you'll see the bind that both reporters and moderate Muslims are in. "If it bleeds it leads" is the saying in the news business, and a moment's reflection tells you that fearmongering coverage will almost always trump reassuring statements about how not all Muslims are trying to blow you up.
Here's some of the results from a quick google search for "muslims condemn suicide bombings". The first link is a list of public condemnations by Muslim leaders and groups.
Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks
Landmark Islamic Ruling Unequivocally Condemns Suicide Bombings
Minister: Muslim decree to condemn suicide bombings
U.K. Sunnis condemn London suicide attacks
Grand Sheikh condemns suicide bombings
Suicide Bombing
INDONESIA: Muslim leaders condemn suicide bombing
A sampling of fatwas and other statements by Muslim individuals and groups condemning terrorist attacks
Muslim Scholars Condemn Terror U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Edict Against Attacks On Civilians
They get some coverage, but no stories get multiple days/outlets to repeat the message the way an event like a bombing does. The problem isn't that Muslims don't condemn suicide attacks, it's that their condemnations don't get enough play, so people like you think that the Muslim community silently condones the actions of the extremists.
When the increased rate still comes in under a hundredth of a percent, so what? Or have you added a lightning rod to the clothes you wear every day? Besides, virtually all those bombings occur in 1) Iraq, 2) Israel, or 3) Sri Lanka. Your odds of preventing a terrorist attack on the flight from Boston to Miami just dropped another couple orders of magnitude.
No, I don't. I think it's dumb to harass innocent Muslims on the infinitesimal chance that you might prevent a terrorist attack. If nothing else, all you're accomplishing is making the perspective of radicalized Muslims more accurate. The cure is worse than the statistical disease.
When was the last time a suicide bomber was actually caught by someone overhearing him rehearsing his plans out loud as he boarded the plane? Why aren't people such as yourself concerned about just how counterproductive most of our security theater is?
Like what? Seriously, I keep hearing about 16 bit programs people still need to run, but I don't know of any.
Really? Just attending a Madrasa, or listening to your government's foreign policy stance, is sufficient to make someone strap on a bomb and blow themselves up?
Ask yourself this: If suicide bombers are so easily made, then why aren't there more of them? Think of what you could accomplish with 100 suicide bombers in the U.S. if you just sent them to low security areas like mall food courts, bus stations, theaters, and crowded shopping areas during the Christmas rush. If 100 suicide bombers exploded all at once, the U.S. would quite understandably lose its mind, and carry out the exact sort of war on terror that bin Laden and his ilk want.
Yet the U.S. has seen only 19 on its own territory in the last decade, and less than a hundred in the first world in the same period. If we include Iraq since 2003, we're still under 1,100. If there really are millions of people who are a real threat to commit a suicide bombing, shouldn't we have seen more of them by now?
Besides, even granting tens of millions of them, that's still less than a hundredth of a percent odds that the Muslim you're sitting next to is a terrorist.
Let's be generous and say that there are 1,000,000 Muslim suicide bombers or potential bombers out there. That's how many out of 1.2 billion? Less than 0.0001%. Does that seem like a risk you need to address with idiotic airplane security measures? You're more likely to be struck by lightning, but how many people wear lightning rods around?
What do you call this, a martyr troll? "Oh why, oh why do I even waste my anonymous coward breath on you poor, benighted fools?"
You're absolutely right, and next time the 1.2 billion strong Muslim community gets together for its annual meeting where they discuss how to prevent any of them from acting in a way to reflects badly on the rest, it should totally be on the agenda.
You just got spammed by an ad-farm. Moron.
No, the traditional barrier to consumer rail is the airline industry, who's powerful lobby prevents any public funds from going towards those high initial investment costs. The airlines depend upon short hop feeder routes--Washington to New York, for example--because their consistent volume makes it easy to optimize those routes. Consumer rail would directly compete, especially now with air travel requiring hours at each end for security, only to leave you with a cab or bus ride to get into the city.
Until the airline industry in the U.S. stops actively blocking the development of rail, the U.S. will never get the rail system it deserves.
When OJ Simpson was arrested for Nicole Simpson's murder, some believed that he was being framed by the government for his part in the movie Capricorn One, which was about a faked Mars landing--they thought it was revenge for obliquely revealing that the moon landing was a hoax.
If the Bush Administration wanted to suppress the movie, why wait until it's already filmed, gotten a lot of pre-release publicity, and has a lot of people excited about it? Why do it when the movie has sparked renewed interest in the comic book? Why not just tie it up in the development hell it's been in since the comic was first released?
One wonders why Amazon bothers spending money on lawyers to defend a patent that's irrelevant now. All loss of the patent means is that competitors can create 1-click features on their sites, something that's far from a selling point in Amazon's favour now. Back in the day when ecommerce was the realm of pornographers, it was a slick feature to offer, but nowadays it would seem almost quaint to tout that as a reason to use one site over another.
Except if they take it off the shelf because you can't do what you want with it, then you're effectively denying it to everyone else. Where would they be if they had to please every single potential consumer, and couldn't sell it otherwise?
Besides, it's not you that they're saying is restricted, it's a third party who's making money modifying their product and reselling it. Years ago there was a copyright case where a Christian Evangelical organization was reselling DVDs of popular movies with the sex and profanity removed; the court found against them because they were modifying a creative work, eviscerating the creator's control over it. That's the point of copyright. How would you feel if the novel you wrote was resold by someone else in an "improved" way? Or the software you wrote was resold with a bunch of features you explicitly didn't add?
No one's saying your desires are irrational, but Apple is under no obligation to sell you what you want.
Those medical doctors have also completed a reasonably rigorous education and internship in a field grounded in the scientific method, whatever their personal failings are. And being a "true geek" is no guarantee of being right, either--witness the number of flame wars in tech circles.
Doctors aren't the only ones patting themselves on the back excessively.
From someone who's a published author, I expect better grammar in a book review.
The aphorism is mis-stated (it's "the plural of anecdote is not data"), and directly contradicts the next sentence. I actually read it over several times because I thought it might be deliberately reversed to make a point. Nope, it's just wrong.
Either the third word, "what", shouldn't be there, or there's some missing word(s) after "basic science", such as "assert" or "claim" or "would say".
Either "on" is not supposed to be there, or should be something like "the question of".
Overall, it reads like a high school student's book review. Get a proofreader.
Presumably, the £2.5MM are the bottom line costs of the improved functionality that the new system provides. Given the life cycle of nuclear submarines, the replaced C&C systems were probably several decades old.
It's just you thinking that they're blaming Linux. They built their system, found some roadblocks in memcache and the Linux kernel, and fixed or worked around them. Then they publicized their fixes like good OSS users should.
It's only "blaming" Linux if you think Linux is perfect and can do no wrong.
You're getting a lot of "you're a bad person" because you're repeating lies, half-truths, distortions, and mendacious interpretations that make us all dumber for reading them. It's difficult to believe that you're not doing so with ill intent, to simply smear a political figure that you dislike. It's difficult to believe that you take those points seriously when they're the intellectual equivalent of arguments that the moon landing was a hoax.
Perhaps it's wrong to assume that your intent is perverse, but from the perspective of the vast majority with some minimal standards for logic and plausibility, it's the simplest explanation.
My question was asked to see if you had a serious motive, which it would seem you do. Yes, the story of how Obama got to be president is remarkable (or so implausible as to be suspicious), but if you follow it without looking for conspiracy markers, you can see how it happened. A lot of it was hard work, a lot of it was luck and knowing the right people at the right time, and a lot of it was intelligent political strategizing. Not a little bit of it was his opponents underestimating him--Clinton lost to him because her campaign was awful, full of competing egotists expecting a coronation to precede cushy administration posts.
There'll be more than enough real stuff to criticize Obama on once he's sworn in. The conspiracy crap just obscures that fact.
BTW, the answer to how Obama paid for Harvard is: student loans. It happens all the time.