If you want and insight in to just how dangerous Bush and Ashcroft have become this might be it. It is from the web so you have to take it with a grain of salt, maybe its B.S., but Capitol Hill Blue is mostly ex D.C. newspapermen with stories from current newspaperman who cant get controversial stories in the major papers.
Apparently the new name for Bush and Ashcroft is the Blues Brothers because they are "on a mission from God" and everything they do, no matter how over the top is "God's Will". If there is even a shred of truth in this be afraid, be very afraid:
Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 4, 2004, 06:15
President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be "God's will" and then tells aides to "fuck over" anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
"We're at war, there's no doubt about it. What I don't know anymore is just who the enemy might be," says one troubled White House aide. "We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing."
Aides say the President gets "hung up on minor details," micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.
"This is what is killing us on Iraq," one aide says. "We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items."
Aides who raise questions quickly find themselves shut out of access to the President or other top advisors. Among top officials, Bush's inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration's war against Iraq.
The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.
"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."
Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration's lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and
I'm pretty confident you've never worked in a place that develops real, big commercial software, especially a version 1, or if you did you didn't last very long. Death marches are a near inevitability unless the software you are developing is trivial stupid or your company is willing to ship buggy software.
You could dream the product is going to be perfectly engineered and the bug count is going to taper off perfectly on schedule (only time I've seen this happen is when the management team just futures enough bugs every night to keep the slopes on their bug graphs on projections. They usually start supressing tracking of futured bugs at the same time.
If you think manager take the bullet for missed schedules you are working on a different planet than me. If the manager sees his project's timeline slipping past then end of a make or break quarter he is going to put you on a death march and you are going to march or get laid off at the next opportunity. If you are lucky the manager will give you time off after you ship equal to the extra time you were forced to work though this is usually a small fraction of the amount of extra time you probably did work. You might get a little stock or a bonus if the product is successful. Meanwhile the manager and the executive team who were probably missing in action most of the late nights and weekends, probably busy partying, will get a shit load of options and huge bonuses.
"I've programmed C for 10+ years, but I still make mistakes now and again and can't figure out why the hell I'm leaking memory here or there."
Maybe after 10 years you should have discovered Purify which has been around about that long or its more recent open source equivalent valgrind. There isn't any excuse for a skilled programmer to have memory issues with these tools available especially if you have appropriate test coverage.
"If someone is "undesireable" due to some biological defect, the means would de facto be present to correct the defect (mental defect, physical defect). I couldn't imagine anyone, given the option, would seek to retain a mental defect or some physical defect that a full-blown eugenics program would consider worthy of sterilization or worse. What's the point? Mentally retarded? It can be corrected after the fact and in such a way that it isn't passed on to any offspring that the person may have...even if it did, this supermanipulation ability would render it moot, again, after the fact."
A pretty valid point for some traits that have a specific genetic origin. But in the Eugenics movement there were traits that were being selected out that are not as clearly tied to a specific genetic origin, for example immorality, alcoholism and low intelligence.
If you have an individual that turns bad, and commits a major crime, in an era of immortality what do you do. Give him a life sentence when life might be a 1000 years or do you effectively give him a death sentence by cutting off his genetic treatments.
Genetic engineering as you propose it could also lead to an even more extreme form of eugenics in that a society might use theses techniques to wipe out a wide variety of traits. Once you start where exactly do you stop, and who decides what traits are engineered out of the species. Maybe you correct epilepsy, that would be great, do you also decide big noses are bad and decide to fix that. Do you decide blondes are preferable to brunettes and fix that too. Is being white preferable to being black? You could start gravitating to a monoculture of idealized human beings that could be very dangerous since genetic diversity is generally considered preferable for long term survival of a species.
You could swing to the other extreme and have people engaging in designer evolution in order to attain superior intellect, beauty or athletic ability. Would that really be a good thing.
Unfortunately the main defect we suffer from as a race is the wisdom to use this kind of power wisely.
"Those homes where not great places to be, but for many it was either there or under a bridge."
If you saw the 60 minutes expose on this recently they were also a dumping ground for normal children whose parents didn't want them. They were officially branded as morons by the states, though they had average intelligence and were never able to escape the stigma. It effectively stole their entire lives from them. They were never educated and could never get a decent job. Some of them were so institutionalized that they return to the home in adulthood. The home 60 minutes covered also suffered rampant sexual abuse.
Its a pretty bad thing when governments start sorting people to decide who is and isn't up to society's standards. I'm pretty sure you were outraged when the Nazi's did it. Why do you look the other way when America was doing basically the same thing (just not outright killing people).
"Where did you get that fact from?"
Indiana passed the United States' first forced sterilization law.
These laws didn't apply to just the mentally ill. The law encompassed the "feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed; and dependent" Thirty states ultimately had forced sterilization laws. They were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.
I'll grant you its a little hard to qualify who is a "leader" in the grisly field of Eugenics but the U.S. had some of its great luminaries and pioneers in the early 20th century.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/ess ay 8text.html
As an aside you should look at the history of Indiana in the early 20th century. It is an interesting study in how extreme parts of America were then. The U.S. was actually very heavily tied to the Nazi's economically and philosophically in the 20's and 30's though revisionist history tries to deny it. George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott, was the U.S. banker for Nazi Germany's richest industrialist, Fritz Thyssen who helped put Adolph Hitler in power.
"It seems like there are always people who whine every time the subject of immortality comes up -- overpopulation, interfering with the divine plan, or just, "I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored."
A key question is how much its going to cost for the gene therapy and how often it has to be done. If it becomes a reality its like to promote a new and extreme form of class warfare. The most often cited scenario is affluent members of the affluent nations will seek to acquire a monopoly on the treatment which is easier to do if its expensive, difficult and needs to be done often. You already have a milder form of this in the U.S. where the affluent typically get better medical care and live longer and better lives.
The wealthy are probably going to go to great lengths to make sure that they get the treatment while the poor, hungry and undesirable are denied access because it would place to great a pressure on Earth's resources, unless dramatic advances are made in food production, potable water and energy in particular.
You could also expect a resurgence in eugenics since if people start living hundreds or thousands of years there is going to be a much stronger incentive to prevent reproduction of individuals the society considers inferior. Its a dirty little secret but the U.S. was the worlds leader in eugenics before World War II and the Nazi's were following the U.S. more than leading in this field. It wasn't until the 1960's that "homes" for "morons" and "imbeciles" were shutdown in the U.S. The U.S. was also a leader in forced sterilization of people considered inferior.
Just think how ugly it will be if so the world's upper class achieve immortality while the have nots continue to die. The likely result will be the have nots using violence to break the haves hold on immortality.
As some have argued you might have long lived people who acquire vast knowledge and experience but you also dramatically reduce the motivation to have children. Today mortality is a key motivation for having children since it is the only avenue to a form of immortality. You have to wonder how tired, conservative and unimaginative the world will come if there is a dramatic reduction in the fresh, rebellious and unjaded approach to the world you find only in young people. Most people as they age become jaded, bored, boring and conservative.
Perhaps you would care to provide some point by point rebuttal to make you're case. Until you do you're the one thats ranting.
As for the Republican dictatorship I'd suggest you just watch CSPAN when a major piece of controversial legislation comes up. The gem last year was the so called "Medicare reform". The Republicans have taken to rewriting legislation in secret conference committees, no Democrats allowed which is a blatant trampling of congressional rules, where, rather than reconciling the bills between the House and Senate, they rewrite the legislation at the behest of the White House, usually in the form of Dick Cheney. They then force it through with a party line vote unless the Democrats filibuster. I don't think you will find any scholars on the congressional process who will tell you what the Republicans have been doing the last two years even vaguely resembles how the founding fathers laid out our democracy. They knew their design was fragile and it was just a matter of time before it was trampled, and we have reached that point.
The only three brakes on the Republicans at the moment are the Senate filibuster, the Supreme Court, and the conscience of Republican congressmen. If in the next election the Republicans managed to get 60 senate seats and Bush gets to appoint one or two extremist supreme court judges two of those brakes will be gone and the U.S. is headed for a velvet gloved dictatorship unless Republicans congressman rebel. That is basically what Jeffords of Vermont did in 2001. He was shocked by the extreme track Republicans were taking and switched to Independent to briefly break their control of the Senate and stop them. Thanks to the suspect election in Georgia in 2002 it was a brief respite.
If the Republicans don't get 60 senate seats I wager they will try to change the Senate rules to defang the filibuster next year. They were already hinting at it in the floor debates over the fact the Dems were using it to block extremist judicial nominees.
As for kleptocrats what else would you call all the companies that are currently feeding at the Federal trough, whether it be insurance and drug companies feeding off the travesty of a medicare bill, Haliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater war profiteering in Iraq, energy companies waiting their turn if the Energy bill ever passes, defense contractors raking in money from a sky rocketing defense budget. Republican's may talk the talk about free markets but when the U.S. government is redistributing the massive sums it is, much of it borrowed, there isn't any free market in sight. It is a kleptocracy where the backers of the people in power get to engage in wholesale theft of tax dollars.
Not sure I follow your point. Just because electronic voting can be rigged doesn't mean it will be. If it is rigged it doesn't necessarily have be the ruling party that does it. It is thouroughly possible to make electronic voting reliable by tightly controlling the source, the builds and the signs on the binaries as well as having a paper trail to allow a recount. Unfortunately the U.S. machines have none of this. Does Brazil, or India?
Who manufacturers Brazil's machines and do they have poltical leanings? Did Brazil's voting machines produce a paper trail and has there been a recount using that paper. If not how do you know if Brazil's elections were honest. The same applies to India's recent election where the party out of power won.
In the U.S. it happens that most of the companies that are manufacturing electronic voting machines are controlled by rabid Republicans, Diebold in particular, so the Republicans have a much easier go if they want to tamper with the election using these machines. The 2002 Georgia election sets off all kinds of alarm bells that someone may well have tampered with the election to the benefit of the Republican candidate. The victory of the Republican Senate candidate in particular was crucial to Republican control of the Senate which dramaticly improved their ability to implement their agenda without interference from the Democrats(though the Democrats can use the filibuster to stop the worst of the Republican agenda).
Its also a weakness in the American case for "Freedom and Democracy" that the CIA in particular has had a long and well documented history of rigging and influencing elections outside the U.S. CIA veterans have in fact already attempted to influence U.S. elections, that was at the root of Watergate, though everyone seems to have forgotten about that.
Since the current administration has some really disturbing totalitarian tendencies its not a huge leap to posit they might be willing to apply the CIA's methods domestically to cement their hold on power.
Maybe it is a farfetched conspiracy theory, but the only way to make sure it doesn't happen and to protect real democracy is constant vigilance, healthy distrust of those in power and a grassroots effort to insure elections are tamperproof. Since American elections have historically been tampered with by both major parties you know its always a possibility. The introduction of electronic voting machines without a paper trail just made it vastly easier to do on a large scale.
"the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it."
A correct statement but in need of a slight clarification. The only people who are likely to know about intentional rigging are the ones who do the build that actually gets installed in the machines. I imagine most of the geeks who developed the software in Diebold's machine would have no clue about any wrongdoing. The rigging is more likely to be done by a group resembling Nixon's plumbers who are highly loyal, believe what they are doing is right in some twisted way and able to keep secrets.
Thats why its extremely disturbing to hear about massive last minute changes in the software loads on Diebold's machines in the eleventh hour before the 2002 election in Georgia, which resulted in a stunning Republican upsets for the Senate and Governor, or in the last election in California.
Its unfortunate the U.S. is just waking up to the massive threat evoting poses to democracy. As slowly as most local governments move I wager most of them are going to go in to the next election with machines that are easily rigged. I would now lob out the conspiracy theory that the Republican's are going to use them to steal the next election but I'm starting to have my doubts. If the Republican's hold the White House and both houses of Congress, and even better achieve their holy grail of a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, which is where I think rigged voting machines is most likely to come in to play, the next election will be meaningless because the Republican's will have a defacto dictatorship in place by then, especially if they are blessed with another 9/11 they can use as an excuse to trash whats left of the constitution.
The doubts I have about this scenarios is that I'm of the opinion the election was really stolen when the media, the DNC and DLC moved Kerry from also ran to front runner and all the Democratic primary voters followed along like so many lemmings.
With Kerry as the Democratic nominee we are faced with a situation where Bush may win no matter how awful a job he does, or how dangerous he is, because no one can stand Kerry, especially after the Republican's shred him with $200 million in attack ads. He is unfortunately a two faced hypocrite and totally unlikable. I'm pretty sure Karl Rove danced a jig in the White House when Kerry moved to front runner status. I find myself hoping that the Democrats will come to their senses at the convention in Boston and realize what a loser he is and throw the nomination to Edwards. He may be inexperienced but at least he is likable in a Clintonesque sort of way.
If Kerry does win I doubt the establishment will mind, he is after a spoiled rich kid and member of Skull and Bones so he will look out for the establishment interests first, and the people's interest not at all(except to get reelected). He really doesn't seem to differ all that much from Bush. He's pretty much a fan of the war in Iraq, the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. He seems to be a fan of the Patriot act and intrusive big brother government, again the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. As soon as he had the nomination sowed up he rushed to the center and his first proposal was for a tax cut for corporations. He is a man in the pocket of the establishment if there ever was one.
I hate to say it but democracy is in a state of complete collapse in the U.S. There is a very small group of powerful people who decide who will be on the ballot, the media en masse anoints them and by the time it gets to the voters they are little more than a rubber stamp.
Rigged, closed source evoting is just another level of control to make sure the American people don't make a mistake and elect somebody that might upset the apple cart.
You can look at Iraq at the moment and see this same process in action. Iraq was supposed to get sovereignty and a U.N. representative was supposed to choose an interim government. Instead the U.S. appointed Iraqi governing council suddenly picked the government with massive back stage manipulation from the U.S. and surprise, surprise they are picking a man who has been on the CIA payroll for years as prime minister. He is a carbon copy of Chalibi who was the U.S. man until he fell in to disfavor. The U.S. is even interfering in the choice of the figurehead president to make sure he is pro U.S. versus the previous frontrunner who wasn't entirely a fan of U.S. occupation.
Our government is great with the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy but if we ever found a way to actually get it they would freak and the current plutocracy would put a stop to it in a heartbeat. I find myself truly wishing Nader had a shot at the Presidency. He would be a train wreck but it would upset a very entrenched and corrupted kleptocracy. I'd just like to see it and we could start a pool on how long he would last before he was assassinated.
Forgot to comment on your last point. This product line isn't being marketed to consumers. Its being marketed to EE's who are balancing horsepower, cost, heat and power consumption to get the best fit for the appliance they are building.
The consumer probably wont even know what CPU is inside the box they are getting from their cable company or are buying from the electronics department in a department store.
Not entirely sure why you are ranting about high end desktop/notebook CPU's in a thread about embedded CPU's. These CPU's ARE focused on lower power consumption, fanless operation (cooler) and lower price point.
These CPU's are targeted at set top boxes in particular so they may need either enough CPU horsepower or a coprocessor to process digital video. That's not so demanding at NTSC/PAL resolutions but it is fairly demanding for HDTV.
If you get down to the old National Geode line which is the bottom of this new produce line up they are dirt cheap in quantity, very low power and don't have a lot of horsepower.
I'm pretty sure your safe too. Your criticisms and your arguements in general aren't really interesting enough for anyone to care. I know I've lost interest at this point.
Well I don't think I would say BBC was outright lieing in their story on "sexing up" the WMD case or the death of Dr. Kelly, especially now that its been established that there were in fact no WMD's in Iraq and that the U.S. and Britain did in fact "sex up" the case to justify the invasion with a lot of help from the lieing defectors Chalibi was feeding them.
I guess you can claim that since the Hutton report cleared the Blair administration and the BBC fell on its sword that that is some kind of proof that the BBC was entirely in the wrong.
Some problems are:
- Hutton, as in "Lord" Hutton is as much a part of the British establishment as you can get. Its not to surprising that the estbalishment investigated the establishment and found it innocent and nailed the BBC instead.
- The actual testimony I read from hearings sure made it sound like Blair's government did in fact sex up the WMD case and they did exert a lot of pressure on Kelly before he committed suicide.
- Gilligan did make mistakes in his reporting, he admits that, but much of his story was true and that fact seems to have been forgotten. When he resigned he didn't go quietly:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ ne ws/2004/01/31/ngill31.xml
Horton was a black rapist. If you want to deeply effect the psyche of whites the image of the black rapist is a timeless classic. Dukakis did deserve a lot of criticism over his rehabilitation policies but it was about as low as you can go with an attack ad designed to stoke fear. That election had a lot in common with this one, Bush was a horrible alternative and the liberal from Massachusetts was just as bad. You have to wonder how bad is our two party system that they've managed a near rerun.
"Please, get a life! Your pretending to be on the side of martyrs isn't funny. Yes, there are prisoners of Gitmo, and yes, they may be there for the wrong reasons, but none of them are there for criticizing the President. Save your persecution complex for when you're being persecuted. Otherwise when it really happens no one will believe you."
Chill friend. I wasn't talking about Gitmo so please stop putting words in my mouth. I was thinking more of:
- the retribution they applied to Joe Wilson for revealing the President lied about Saddam seeking Yellowcake in Niger. In that case they destroyed his wife's career in the CIA by blowing her cover, something resembling treason for which no one in the White House has been held accountable to date.
- They were going to charge Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill with revealing classified documents over his tell all book, until they established every document he used had been given to him by the white house in the clear.
- The Senate Majority leader was threatening Dick Clark with perjury charges because he appeared before Congress and said the Bush administration was doing a good job on terrorism when it really wasn't. They seem to think he should have told the truth back then and gotten instantly fired. I think they backed off when they realized they would have to charge half the people who testify before congress for being less than truthful when they say everything is wonderful when its not.
- There is a good chance the Bush Administration is putting some of its vocal critics on the No Fly list so they will be shaken down everytime they go to the airport:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel08062003.html
- An antiwar conference was held at Drake University. The DOJ swept in and attempted to indentify everyone who attended and everything that was said. They tried to do this using a secret Grand Jury and gag everyone involved including the University. It did eventually leak out and the outrage compelled them to back down.
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02102004.html There are a few more but I'm tired.
Dream on, just curious, are you American to be so naive of the situation? You seem like a good candidate to work in the Bush administration since you are as much of a sucker as they are.
The place where your grand neocon vision of changing the Mideast falls down is that the Shia's, the same sect of Islam which also are the majority in Iran's are 60% of Iraq's population and they are probably going to be a very unified voting block. The day the U.S. gives Iraq real sovereignty and there is a real democratic election in Iraq the Shia's win. When the Shia's win they can throw out your secular democracy in a heartbeat. That is the beauty of democracy, the majority rules, and the Iranians and the Shia's know it. Another heartbeat later the Shia government can tell the U.S. to get the hell out. Rather than destabilizing Iran its more likely you are going to dramatically stengthen their position in the region and they have a friend on their western border instead of a bitter enemy. The Shia's also have a much greater leverage over the worlds oil supply.
How does the U.S. get out of this conundrum? The only solution is they either install a puppet government in Iraq, rig the elections in perpetuity, or pervert the constitution in a way that precludes the majority Shia's from ruling as is their right of a majority in a democracy, and also block them from changing the constitution. Any of these leave the pretense that the U.S. is there to install democracy in tatters. It will also probably lead to a never ending occupation by the U.S. and the resulting inevitable insurgency, which leads to a lot of dead soldiers and a lot of wasted money.
I wouldn't be surprised if this conundrum was a key factor in why George H.W. Bush left Saddam in power after the first gulf war. They preferred Saddam in a lot of ways over growing the Shia Iranian power base in the region which is the near inevitable result of democracy in Iraq.
As for what a shining example the U.S. is to the world over torturing Iraq prisoners, I'll agree with you if Bush, Rumsfeld and Cambone are charged, convicted and imprisoned over it. This New Yorker article sourced by digruntled people in the CIA and DOD asserts that the torture was a product of a top secret program called Copper Green which approved use of these extreme measures on Al Qaeda and was then turned on Iraqi taxi drivers using Army Reserves where it ran amuck:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_ fa ct
If this article is accurate the current show trials to try and blame it all on a few enlisted "bad apples" is a travesty of justice and just adding insult to injury.
I'm not sure you've heard but the Iraqi media wont be celebrating sovereignty June 30th unless U.S. plans change before then. The U.S. will still dominate everything related to security and the new government was, last I heard, precluded from making any decisions that would tie the hands of a future elected government. All Iraq is getting is the chance to run the bureaucracy and even there they will have 200 American "consultants" watching everything they do. There wont be anything resembling sovereignty until the end of 2005, at the earliest, unless the U.S. dramatically changes the current plan.
"Now the Americans are in a great place to... inspect... for whatever else might have gone missing from Iraq. A few hunderd tons of chemical werapons maybe?"
Wake up man, you're still dreaming. The U.S. has been looking for a year, spent a billion dollars, used every technology available and is apparently using torture in a secret prison at Baghdad airport on anyone that might know where they are. The hundreds of tons of weapons aren't there. I guess you can just keep telling yourself that they were shipped across the border to a neighboring country and use that as an excuse to topple every government in the world, one by one. That is the beauty of WMD's as an excuse for aggressive warfare. You can always lay the accusation and its impossible for your target to prove they don't have them, even when you occupy the country and can't find them.
Just curious, buy were you equally outraged when Rush Limbaugh equated the torture of prisoners in Iraq with fraternity hazing, or do you only notice bias when its "liberal" bias.
Its sad fact the whole world, and the U.S. in particular, has been so polarized by George "I'm a uniter and not a divider" Bush, that just about everyone is tilting off the deep end in one direction or another. Passions are so high its not surprising to see people saying things like those this reporter is saying. I hate to say it but I want to see Bush fail in Iraq too. Its the only way to get rid of him and he is probably the most dangerous leader the world has seen since World War II. If they had succeeded in Iraq they would have immediately attacked Syria and Iran and who knows who else after that. Its better they fail early and are made to stop.
After a string of revelations that suggest Bush and his "team" are incompetent like these:
you can't blame sane people for being desperate them to fail and be thrown out. When governments are making bad decisions its kind of normal for the opposition to root for their failures. The right was rooting for Clinton to fail at every turn. So what if liberals are doing the same thing now.
The next election is especially complicated by the fact that the Dems have thrown up Kerry against Bush so Bush has to fail really badly before enough people will bite the bullet and vote for Kerry. Kerry will be bad too but we all pray not as bad as Bush.
How many tell all books have to come out from Bush Administration insiders pointing out the fact that Bush is both dumb and dangerous before you see the light too? General Zinni turned on Bush on 60 minutes tonight and has a tell all book coauthored by Tom Clancy. Actually he was mostly turning on Rumsfeld and the neocons that got us in to the mess in Iraq while Bush was asleep at the wheel.
At least 3 > senators have turned on Bush in speeches or interviews this week which is a major tell that everyone is figuring out he has to go.
That doesn't exactly make it "fiction". He is using creative editing to make his message more powerful, yes, and is it misleading, yes. I don't think you are going to find many people with strongly held views who are going to go out of their way to make a weak case. Most of the things you are talking about are creative license. Fact is Bush senior did make those ads and Heston did say all those things whether it was all in one speech or not.
As for the Willie Horton ad are you also equally outraged at how George H.W. Bush's campaign used this ad in the first place, to use the race card to destroy Dukakis. They too were being pretty creative in their use of the facts and it worked really well.
Its you're prerogative to dismiss all of Moore's work and message over the places he is pushing the edge but its your loss. He does have some points that deserve to be considered unless you just want to buy the crap the establishment is selling you.
You also have to give Moore a lot of credit for being willing to take on big business and big government. They put out a lot of "fiction" posing as fact too and they have a lot bigger budgets. The world would be a sadder and scarier place if there weren't people willing to challenge them so publicly and make people consider more than one side to the way things work. Its why we have free speech. What's the point of having free speech if no one ever dissents or creates controversy.
I wouldn't be surprised if Moore is being blessed with all kinds of extra scrutiny from the FBI or assorted other agencies now that he is going after the Bush administration's jugular. It does take balls to go after an administration with a reputation for savaging its critics.
Why the hell should ANYONE care what their wants and needs were. If no American's were flying, no Saudi's should have either. Its a giant flashing light indicating these people had special influence and were getting special treatment by the Bush administration.
The flights were so poorly screened the Saudi's could have been using them to fly out co-conspirators in the 9/11 attack. The fact is the Saudi's, not the Iraqi's, were knee deep in complicity in 9/11, and its just as disturbing that the Bush administration has consistently sought to suppress any information on these special flights. Letting them rush their nationals out without some thoughtful investigation was simply inappropriate.
It reminds you of a similar incident where the Pakistani's were also allowed to secretly fly their intelligence people out of Afghanistan after the Taliban fell, though Pakistani's intelligence was knee deep in complicity with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and some of them could well have been co-conspirators in 9/11 planning.
"And why is it you think the Iranians are so dumb?"
You apparently didn't understand much of my post. I didn't say the Iranians were dumb. I said the Bush administration was dumb for being had by them and especially Chalibi apparently working for them. Chalibi is a convicted extortionist in Jordan and would be locked up for life if they can ever get him extradited. He's spent all his life using others to enrich himself. With the vast intelligence resources of the U.S. its pretty embarrassing to be had by a con man. How did you misinterpret my post so badly.
Don't think I made ANY statement about the intellect of Iraq's scientists.
Since I said the American's were dumb and not the Iranians and you seem to be ranting at me for exactly the opposite of what I said I'd appreciate it if you read, and understand before entering rant mode and putting a bunch of words in my mouth I didn't say.
I know you Bush fans are hurting right now because its pretty obvious he is in over his head and you are getting desperate to salvage all the misplaced faith you've put in him, but I think calling Moore's work "fiction" is pretty weak. Its a viewpoint. Extremists in both wings can't tolerate the fact that there are viewpoints that don't agree with theirs so, like you, they resort to calling them lies and fiction, when more likely there is some truth, some speculation and probably some errors in both of Moore's major films. You can't actually refute these films on substance so you just resort to calling it a lie and pretend like you don't need to substantiate your position.
There wasn't much in Bowling for Columbine that could be called fiction. It was mostly speculation that America's obsessions with war, guns and violence are intertwined and aren't particularly healthy. Fact is America is one of the world's most violent developed nations. There were some specific things in it he severely stretched to make his point, not like anyone on the right would ever do that... Coulter..cough..Limbaugh..cough.
When you get to subject matter of Fahrenheit 9/11 its pretty hard for anyone to be sure of what the truth is. Moore is presenting his take on it which may or may not be accurate. One of the problems is the Bush administration has been actively classifying and suppressing just about everything about the Saudi role in 9/11 and the Bush family's excessively close ties to the Saudi's and the Bin Laden family. If you recall they blacked out the entire section on Saudi Arabia's complicity in the congressional report on 9/11 and there were a lot of pages on it. They have also aggressively suppressed all information about the fact that they let airplanes spirit members of the Bin Laden family and other unidentified Saudi's out of the U.S. right after 9/11 at a time when no American could get off the ground.
It is a simple fact that the Bush family has long running ties to people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait including the Bin Laden family and it colors their dealings in the area, in the opinion of some it clouds their judgment. George H.W. Bush had active business dealings with them when he was at Zapata Oil. He has an active relationship with them today in his role as spokesman for the Carlysle group which is one of Saudi Arabia's major defense contractors.
To be honest I don't know how anyone continues to defend the Bush family especially the current administration. All indications are that they were completely had by Iran, who through Ahmed Chalibi suckered them in to invading Iraq which is now doing massive damage to America's standing in the world, is making the world more dangerous and is costing the U.S. dearly in blood and money. THe Truth about Chalibi.
How do you keep supporting an administration dumb enough to be had by the Iranian's. What are you going to say when the Shia's take power in Iraq as soon as they get a fair election and Iraq turns into an Iranian influenced theocracy and all of America's sacrifice was for worse than nothing.
At LSU commencement Bush joked about being a "C" student. He is proof anyone can be President in America, even someone as intellectually challenged as he is, of course it helps to be from a wealthy and influential family so you can get elected on name only. Bush is great on rhetoric but he simply lacks the intellectual depth to make good decisions when it comes to the enormously complex areas like foreign affairs and economics. The fact that his administration was had by Iran is a case in point. It was his job to take Chalibi skepticially especially considering a long string of red flags about his ethics and motives, but he, Cheney, Perl and Wolfowitz fell for it hook, line and sinker and its costing the U.S. dearly.
Enjoy. This insignia is about as close as NASA will get to the Moon or Mars.
It will be interesting to see what happens to this program after the election. The cynic in me sees Karl Rove sitting in his office at the white office toting up electoral college votes. Florida, of course, comes out at the top of lists in play he has to win. Its likely it will close in 2004. If you want to swing a few hundred thousand votes in Florida your way, look to the space coast around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne which is extremely dependent on the manned and unmanned space programs for its economic existence. Would Karl rather they were:
A. Facing unemployment and economic collapse when the manned space program craters after the Shuttle and ISS are end of lifed
B. Drooling over the prospects of a decades long manned program to the Moon and Mars which will be a huge boon to the local economy, and Florida as a whole, and keep all the NASA employees and contractors employed for life working on a very cool project.
Its pretty easy to announce this program, put next to no money in it and cement the vote of everyone who's livelihood directly or indirectly depends on the manned space program. The space program is a prestige thing for all of Florida supporting it is the smart move if you want their votes. After the election and at the point they might have to bend metal and start spending real money on it is when you will see how much the Bush administration really cares about this.
Its a pretty strong tell that they completely ignored this program in the State of the Union address. If it mattered to them they would have put it there front and center instead of goofy things like dealing with steroids in athletics.
If the program does stay funded after the election and in fact starts to see some serious funding then the fallback rationale for this program is its another payoff to the big aerospace companies which are big backers of the republican party. They are giving them a lot through missile defense and other defense programs so I'm not sure this is a likely explanation especially as slow as the money ramps up. If it was like the huge payoffs to the drug companies, the energy contracts and the likes of Halliburton they would be throwing billions in to it right away.
This programs fatal flaw is that it is so slow and it will take so long to achieve any interesting milestone that the political climate is certain to change. This changing climate is one of the key contributors to the disaster that ISS turned in to. One thing Kennedy did right was to set the goal early in his administration and set the major milestones, and the major expenditures to occur within his potential eight year term. That was a sign he was serious. The fact both Bush's waited until late in their administration to set the goal and the goal is so far out that they wouldn't have to fund when it got expensive is another tell that this initiative is another one of their many sucker plays.
Not sure about that when you are using sentences like:
"by the introduction of atypical antipsychotics into my daily regimen"
Not sure there are many creative free spirits who think about theirs lives with terms like "daily regimen".
But, if being on drugs for the remainder of your life works for you then go for it, as long as you take them of your own volition, they work for you, and you are confident that they aren't hurting you.
I'm more concerned about the alarming increase in use of psychiatric drugs on children and on adults against their will. It just smacks of THX-1138. Its getting to convenient to deal with people, especially children, who don't conform or behave by pumping them full of pacifying drugs.
The drug companies are also spending way to much money selling psychiatric drugs like soap. They bombard people daily with suggestions that maybe the have Social Anxiety Disorder so you will go to a doctor and insist they have SAD and get a lifetime prescription for Zoloft resulting in an improved profit margin for the drug company.
You have to wonder if the fact that we are using medication as the solution to every personality disorder these days is making the problem better or worse. I find it deeply disturbing to see TV adds for Zoloft in which they encourage you to self diagnose yourself as needing their product.
Seeing a rising tide of indicators that the wonder drugs being used to treat personality disorders are, in at least some cases, triggering suicides and extreme behavior is one alarm bell. Are theses rare side effects or an indicator these drugs are not as safe as the manufacturers would have you believe. Its an unfortunate problem that the companies who are developing the drugs to treat mental disorder have an incentive to get as many people as possible to use them, whether they should or not, so they improve their profit margins. Its a really dangerous side to medicine for profit. I'm not sure but I suspect the U.S. is the only country that is letting drug companies engage in the massive advertising campaigns for prescription drugs. Its tolerable for allergy medication and maybe Viagra but its truly scary when you see massive ad campaigns for powerful psychiatric medications.
We humans don't yet have the knowledge to successfully alter the chemistry of the brain without grave risk of doing more harm than good. Yes we can identify some specific chemical imbalances and maybe treat specific things but we simply don't have the holistic understanding of what will happen when we start to dramatically alter the brain's chemistry on the large scale we are doing it today.
As another post said one of their family members committed suicide when their medication was abruptly removed. It appears that when you go down the "medication is the answer to everything" route you end up with people who become completely dependent on medication to function, and when they loose that crutch, they might be in worse shape than if they hadn't started taking it in the first place. That was, at least a possibility in the Beautiful Mind. He was constantly battling with the consequences of taking or not taking medication.
The other angle of this is societal. While there are certainly people with severe mental illness that need to be dealt with one way or another, you have to wonder if we are not a little to eager to make everyone conform to a simplistic ideal of normalcy, and are intolerant of allowing people to be different. Its a lot easier from the view of the herd if everyone thinks and acts like the rest of the herd.
It is more than possible that genius and insanity are intertwined. What happens if we drug everyone who isn't "normal" and conformant in to a stupor. Will we destroy all our genius and all the great artists by trying to suppress their abnormality so they will sit quietly in class and not be a nuisance to the "normal" people.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides By DOUG THOMPSON Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue Jun 4, 2004, 06:15
President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be "God's will" and then tells aides to "fuck over" anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
"We're at war, there's no doubt about it. What I don't know anymore is just who the enemy might be," says one troubled White House aide. "We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing."
Aides say the President gets "hung up on minor details," micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.
"This is what is killing us on Iraq," one aide says. "We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items."
Aides who raise questions quickly find themselves shut out of access to the President or other top advisors. Among top officials, Bush's inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration's war against Iraq.
The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.
"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."
Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration's lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and
I'm pretty confident you've never worked in a place that develops real, big commercial software, especially a version 1, or if you did you didn't last very long. Death marches are a near inevitability unless the software you are developing is trivial stupid or your company is willing to ship buggy software.
You could dream the product is going to be perfectly engineered and the bug count is going to taper off perfectly on schedule (only time I've seen this happen is when the management team just futures enough bugs every night to keep the slopes on their bug graphs on projections. They usually start supressing tracking of futured bugs at the same time.
If you think manager take the bullet for missed schedules you are working on a different planet than me. If the manager sees his project's timeline slipping past then end of a make or break quarter he is going to put you on a death march and you are going to march or get laid off at the next opportunity. If you are lucky the manager will give you time off after you ship equal to the extra time you were forced to work though this is usually a small fraction of the amount of extra time you probably did work. You might get a little stock or a bonus if the product is successful. Meanwhile the manager and the executive team who were probably missing in action most of the late nights and weekends, probably busy partying, will get a shit load of options and huge bonuses.
Welcome to capitalism, ain't it grand.
"I've programmed C for 10+ years, but I still make mistakes now and again and can't figure out why the hell I'm leaking memory here or there."
Maybe after 10 years you should have discovered Purify which has been around about that long or its more recent open source equivalent valgrind. There isn't any excuse for a skilled programmer to have memory issues with these tools available especially if you have appropriate test coverage.
"If someone is "undesireable" due to some biological defect, the means would de facto be present to correct the defect (mental defect, physical defect). I couldn't imagine anyone, given the option, would seek to retain a mental defect or some physical defect that a full-blown eugenics program would consider worthy of sterilization or worse. What's the point? Mentally retarded? It can be corrected after the fact and in such a way that it isn't passed on to any offspring that the person may have...even if it did, this supermanipulation ability would render it moot, again, after the fact."
A pretty valid point for some traits that have a specific genetic origin. But in the Eugenics movement there were traits that were being selected out that are not as clearly tied to a specific genetic origin, for example immorality, alcoholism and low intelligence.
If you have an individual that turns bad, and commits a major crime, in an era of immortality what do you do. Give him a life sentence when life might be a 1000 years or do you effectively give him a death sentence by cutting off his genetic treatments.
Genetic engineering as you propose it could also lead to an even more extreme form of eugenics in that a society might use theses techniques to wipe out a wide variety of traits. Once you start where exactly do you stop, and who decides what traits are engineered out of the species. Maybe you correct epilepsy, that would be great, do you also decide big noses are bad and decide to fix that. Do you decide blondes are preferable to brunettes and fix that too. Is being white preferable to being black? You could start gravitating to a monoculture of idealized human beings that could be very dangerous since genetic diversity is generally considered preferable for long term survival of a species.
You could swing to the other extreme and have people engaging in designer evolution in order to attain superior intellect, beauty or athletic ability. Would that really be a good thing.
Unfortunately the main defect we suffer from as a race is the wisdom to use this kind of power wisely.
"Those homes where not great places to be, but for many it was either there or under a bridge."
s ay 8text.html
If you saw the 60 minutes expose on this recently they were also a dumping ground for normal children whose parents didn't want them. They were officially branded as morons by the states, though they had average intelligence and were never able to escape the stigma. It effectively stole their entire lives from them. They were never educated and could never get a decent job. Some of them were so institutionalized that they return to the home in adulthood. The home 60 minutes covered also suffered rampant sexual abuse.
Its a pretty bad thing when governments start sorting people to decide who is and isn't up to society's standards. I'm pretty sure you were outraged when the Nazi's did it. Why do you look the other way when America was doing basically the same thing (just not outright killing people).
"Where did you get that fact from?"
Indiana passed the United States' first forced sterilization law.
These laws didn't apply to just the mentally ill.
The law encompassed the "feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed; and dependent"
Thirty states ultimately had forced sterilization laws. They were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.
I'll grant you its a little hard to qualify who is a "leader" in the grisly field of Eugenics but the U.S. had some of its great luminaries and pioneers in the early 20th century.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/es
As an aside you should look at the history of Indiana in the early 20th century. It is an interesting study in how extreme parts of America were then. The U.S. was actually very heavily tied to the Nazi's economically and philosophically in the 20's and 30's though revisionist history tries to deny it. George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott, was the U.S. banker for Nazi Germany's richest industrialist, Fritz Thyssen who helped put Adolph Hitler in power.
"It seems like there are always people who whine every time the subject of immortality comes up -- overpopulation, interfering with the divine plan, or just, "I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored."
A key question is how much its going to cost for the gene therapy and how often it has to be done. If it becomes a reality its like to promote a new and extreme form of class warfare. The most often cited scenario is affluent members of the affluent nations will seek to acquire a monopoly on the treatment which is easier to do if its expensive, difficult and needs to be done often. You already have a milder form of this in the U.S. where the affluent typically get better medical care and live longer and better lives.
The wealthy are probably going to go to great lengths to make sure that they get the treatment while the poor, hungry and undesirable are denied access because it would place to great a pressure on Earth's resources, unless dramatic advances are made in food production, potable water and energy in particular.
You could also expect a resurgence in eugenics since if people start living hundreds or thousands of years there is going to be a much stronger incentive to prevent reproduction of individuals the society considers inferior. Its a dirty little secret but the U.S. was the worlds leader in eugenics before World War II and the Nazi's were following the U.S. more than leading in this field. It wasn't until the 1960's that "homes" for "morons" and "imbeciles" were shutdown in the U.S. The U.S. was also a leader in forced sterilization of people considered inferior.
Just think how ugly it will be if so the world's upper class achieve immortality while the have nots continue to die. The likely result will be the have nots using violence to break the haves hold on immortality.
As some have argued you might have long lived people who acquire vast knowledge and experience but you also dramatically reduce the motivation to have children. Today mortality is a key motivation for having children since it is the only avenue to a form of immortality. You have to wonder how tired, conservative and unimaginative the world will come if there is a dramatic reduction in the fresh, rebellious and unjaded approach to the world you find only in young people. Most people as they age become jaded, bored, boring and conservative.
Perhaps you would care to provide some point by point rebuttal to make you're case. Until you do you're the one thats ranting.
As for the Republican dictatorship I'd suggest you just watch CSPAN when a major piece of controversial legislation comes up. The gem last year was the so called "Medicare reform". The Republicans have taken to rewriting legislation in secret conference committees, no Democrats allowed which is a blatant trampling of congressional rules, where, rather than reconciling the bills between the House and Senate, they rewrite the legislation at the behest of the White House, usually in the form of Dick Cheney. They then force it through with a party line vote unless the Democrats filibuster. I don't think you will find any scholars on the congressional process who will tell you what the Republicans have been doing the last two years even vaguely resembles how the founding fathers laid out our democracy. They knew their design was fragile and it was just a matter of time before it was trampled, and we have reached that point.
The only three brakes on the Republicans at the moment are the Senate filibuster, the Supreme Court, and the conscience of Republican congressmen. If in the next election the Republicans managed to get 60 senate seats and Bush gets to appoint one or two extremist supreme court judges two of those brakes will be gone and the U.S. is headed for a velvet gloved dictatorship unless Republicans congressman rebel. That is basically what Jeffords of Vermont did in 2001. He was shocked by the extreme track Republicans were taking and switched to Independent to briefly break their control of the Senate and stop them. Thanks to the suspect election in Georgia in 2002 it was a brief respite.
If the Republicans don't get 60 senate seats I wager they will try to change the Senate rules to defang the filibuster next year. They were already hinting at it in the floor debates over the fact the Dems were using it to block extremist judicial nominees.
As for kleptocrats what else would you call all the companies that are currently feeding at the Federal trough, whether it be insurance and drug companies feeding off the travesty of a medicare bill, Haliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater war profiteering in Iraq, energy companies waiting their turn if the Energy bill ever passes, defense contractors raking in money from a sky rocketing defense budget. Republican's may talk the talk about free markets but when the U.S. government is redistributing the massive sums it is, much of it borrowed, there isn't any free market in sight. It is a kleptocracy where the backers of the people in power get to engage in wholesale theft of tax dollars.
Not sure I follow your point. Just because electronic voting can be rigged doesn't mean it will be. If it is rigged it doesn't necessarily have be the ruling party that does it. It is thouroughly possible to make electronic voting reliable by tightly controlling the source, the builds and the signs on the binaries as well as having a paper trail to allow a recount. Unfortunately the U.S. machines have none of this. Does Brazil, or India?
Who manufacturers Brazil's machines and do they have poltical leanings? Did Brazil's voting machines produce a paper trail and has there been a recount using that paper. If not how do you know if Brazil's elections were honest. The same applies to India's recent election where the party out of power won.
In the U.S. it happens that most of the companies that are manufacturing electronic voting machines are controlled by rabid Republicans, Diebold in particular, so the Republicans have a much easier go if they want to tamper with the election using these machines. The 2002 Georgia election sets off all kinds of alarm bells that someone may well have tampered with the election to the benefit of the Republican candidate. The victory of the Republican Senate candidate in particular was crucial to Republican control of the Senate which dramaticly improved their ability to implement their agenda without interference from the Democrats(though the Democrats can use the filibuster to stop the worst of the Republican agenda).
Its also a weakness in the American case for "Freedom and Democracy" that the CIA in particular has had a long and well documented history of rigging and influencing elections outside the U.S. CIA veterans have in fact already attempted to influence U.S. elections, that was at the root of Watergate, though everyone seems to have forgotten about that.
Since the current administration has some really disturbing totalitarian tendencies its not a huge leap to posit they might be willing to apply the CIA's methods domestically to cement their hold on power.
Maybe it is a farfetched conspiracy theory, but the only way to make sure it doesn't happen and to protect real democracy is constant vigilance, healthy distrust of those in power and a grassroots effort to insure elections are tamperproof. Since American elections have historically been tampered with by both major parties you know its always a possibility. The introduction of electronic voting machines without a paper trail just made it vastly easier to do on a large scale.
"the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it."
A correct statement but in need of a slight clarification. The only people who are likely to know about intentional rigging are the ones who do the build that actually gets installed in the machines. I imagine most of the geeks who developed the software in Diebold's machine would have no clue about any wrongdoing. The rigging is more likely to be done by a group resembling Nixon's plumbers who are highly loyal, believe what they are doing is right in some twisted way and able to keep secrets.
Thats why its extremely disturbing to hear about massive last minute changes in the software loads on Diebold's machines in the eleventh hour before the 2002 election in Georgia, which resulted in a stunning Republican upsets for the Senate and Governor, or in the last election in California.
Its unfortunate the U.S. is just waking up to the massive threat evoting poses to democracy. As slowly as most local governments move I wager most of them are going to go in to the next election with machines that are easily rigged. I would now lob out the conspiracy theory that the Republican's are going to use them to steal the next election but I'm starting to have my doubts. If the Republican's hold the White House and both houses of Congress, and even better achieve their holy grail of a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, which is where I think rigged voting machines is most likely to come in to play, the next election will be meaningless because the Republican's will have a defacto dictatorship in place by then, especially if they are blessed with another 9/11 they can use as an excuse to trash whats left of the constitution.
The doubts I have about this scenarios is that I'm of the opinion the election was really stolen when the media, the DNC and DLC moved Kerry from also ran to front runner and all the Democratic primary voters followed along like so many lemmings.
With Kerry as the Democratic nominee we are faced with a situation where Bush may win no matter how awful a job he does, or how dangerous he is, because no one can stand Kerry, especially after the Republican's shred him with $200 million in attack ads. He is unfortunately a two faced hypocrite and totally unlikable. I'm pretty sure Karl Rove danced a jig in the White House when Kerry moved to front runner status. I find myself hoping that the Democrats will come to their senses at the convention in Boston and realize what a loser he is and throw the nomination to Edwards. He may be inexperienced but at least he is likable in a Clintonesque sort of way.
If Kerry does win I doubt the establishment will mind, he is after a spoiled rich kid and member of Skull and Bones so he will look out for the establishment interests first, and the people's interest not at all(except to get reelected). He really doesn't seem to differ all that much from Bush. He's pretty much a fan of the war in Iraq, the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. He seems to be a fan of the Patriot act and intrusive big brother government, again the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. As soon as he had the nomination sowed up he rushed to the center and his first proposal was for a tax cut for corporations. He is a man in the pocket of the establishment if there ever was one.
I hate to say it but democracy is in a state of complete collapse in the U.S. There is a very small group of powerful people who decide who will be on the ballot, the media en masse anoints them and by the time it gets to the voters they are little more than a rubber stamp.
Rigged, closed source evoting is just another level of control to make sure the American people don't make a mistake and elect somebody that might upset the apple cart.
You can look at Iraq at the moment and see this same process in action. Iraq was supposed to get sovereignty and a U.N. representative was supposed to choose an interim government. Instead the U.S. appointed Iraqi governing council suddenly picked the government with massive back stage manipulation from the U.S. and surprise, surprise they are picking a man who has been on the CIA payroll for years as prime minister. He is a carbon copy of Chalibi who was the U.S. man until he fell in to disfavor. The U.S. is even interfering in the choice of the figurehead president to make sure he is pro U.S. versus the previous frontrunner who wasn't entirely a fan of U.S. occupation.
Our government is great with the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy but if we ever found a way to actually get it they would freak and the current plutocracy would put a stop to it in a heartbeat. I find myself truly wishing Nader had a shot at the Presidency. He would be a train wreck but it would upset a very entrenched and corrupted kleptocracy. I'd just like to see it and we could start a pool on how long he would last before he was assassinated.
Forgot to comment on your last point. This product line isn't being marketed to consumers. Its being marketed to EE's who are balancing horsepower, cost, heat and power consumption to get the best fit for the appliance they are building.
The consumer probably wont even know what CPU is inside the box they are getting from their cable company or are buying from the electronics department in a department store.
Not entirely sure why you are ranting about high end desktop/notebook CPU's in a thread about embedded CPU's. These CPU's ARE focused on lower power consumption, fanless operation (cooler) and lower price point.
These CPU's are targeted at set top boxes in particular so they may need either enough CPU horsepower or a coprocessor to process digital video. That's not so demanding at NTSC/PAL resolutions but it is fairly demanding for HDTV.
If you get down to the old National Geode line which is the bottom of this new produce line up they are dirt cheap in quantity, very low power and don't have a lot of horsepower.
Yawn.
I'm pretty sure your safe too. Your criticisms and your arguements in general aren't really interesting enough for anyone to care. I know I've lost interest at this point.
Well I don't think I would say BBC was outright lieing in their story on "sexing up" the WMD case or the death of Dr. Kelly, especially now that its been established that there were in fact no WMD's in Iraq and that the U.S. and Britain did in fact "sex up" the case to justify the invasion with a lot of help from the lieing defectors Chalibi was feeding them.
/ ne ws/2004/01/31/ngill31.xml
I guess you can claim that since the Hutton report cleared the Blair administration and the BBC fell on its sword that that is some kind of proof that the BBC was entirely in the wrong.
Some problems are:
- Hutton, as in "Lord" Hutton is as much a part of the British establishment as you can get. Its not to surprising that the estbalishment investigated the establishment and found it innocent and nailed the BBC instead.
- The actual testimony I read from hearings sure made it sound like Blair's government did in fact sex up the WMD case and they did exert a lot of pressure on Kelly before he committed suicide.
- Gilligan did make mistakes in his reporting, he admits that, but much of his story was true and that fact seems to have been forgotten. When he resigned he didn't go quietly:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
"They were not racist."
Horton was a black rapist. If you want to deeply effect the psyche of whites the image of the black rapist is a timeless classic. Dukakis did deserve a lot of criticism over his rehabilitation policies but it was about as low as you can go with an attack ad designed to stoke fear. That election had a lot in common with this one, Bush was a horrible alternative and the liberal from Massachusetts was just as bad. You have to wonder how bad is our two party system that they've managed a near rerun.
"Please, get a life! Your pretending to be on the side of martyrs isn't funny. Yes, there are prisoners of Gitmo, and yes, they may be there for the wrong reasons, but none of them are there for criticizing the President. Save your persecution complex for when you're being persecuted. Otherwise when it really happens no one will believe you."
Chill friend. I wasn't talking about Gitmo so please stop putting words in my mouth. I was thinking more of:
- the retribution they applied to Joe Wilson for revealing the President lied about Saddam seeking Yellowcake in Niger. In that case they destroyed his wife's career in the CIA by blowing her cover, something resembling treason for which no one in the White House has been held accountable to date.
- They were going to charge Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill with revealing classified documents over his tell all book, until they established every document he used had been given to him by the white house in the clear.
- The Senate Majority leader was threatening Dick Clark with perjury charges because he appeared before Congress and said the Bush administration was doing a good job on terrorism when it really wasn't. They seem to think he should have told the truth back then and gotten instantly fired. I think they backed off when they realized they would have to charge half the people who testify before congress for being less than truthful when they say everything is wonderful when its not.
- There is a good chance the Bush Administration is putting some of its vocal critics on the No Fly list so they will be shaken down everytime they go to the airport:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel08062003.html
- An antiwar conference was held at Drake University. The DOJ swept in and attempted to indentify everyone who attended and everything that was said. They tried to do this using a secret Grand Jury and gag everyone involved including the University. It did eventually leak out and the outrage compelled them to back down.
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02102004.html
There are a few more but I'm tired.
Dream on, just curious, are you American to be so naive of the situation? You seem like a good candidate to work in the Bush administration since you are as much of a sucker as they are.
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The place where your grand neocon vision of changing the Mideast falls down is that the Shia's, the same sect of Islam which also are the majority in Iran's are 60% of Iraq's population and they are probably going to be a very unified voting block. The day the U.S. gives Iraq real sovereignty and there is a real democratic election in Iraq the Shia's win. When the Shia's win they can throw out your secular democracy in a heartbeat. That is the beauty of democracy, the majority rules, and the Iranians and the Shia's know it. Another heartbeat later the Shia government can tell the U.S. to get the hell out. Rather than destabilizing Iran its more likely you are going to dramatically stengthen their position in the region and they have a friend on their western border instead of a bitter enemy. The Shia's also have a much greater leverage over the worlds oil supply.
How does the U.S. get out of this conundrum? The only solution is they either install a puppet government in Iraq, rig the elections in perpetuity, or pervert the constitution in a way that precludes the majority Shia's from ruling as is their right of a majority in a democracy, and also block them from changing the constitution. Any of these leave the pretense that the U.S. is there to install democracy in tatters. It will also probably lead to a never ending occupation by the U.S. and the resulting inevitable insurgency, which leads to a lot of dead soldiers and a lot of wasted money.
I wouldn't be surprised if this conundrum was a key factor in why George H.W. Bush left Saddam in power after the first gulf war. They preferred Saddam in a lot of ways over growing the Shia Iranian power base in the region which is the near inevitable result of democracy in Iraq.
As for what a shining example the U.S. is to the world over torturing Iraq prisoners, I'll agree with you if Bush, Rumsfeld and Cambone are charged, convicted and imprisoned over it. This New Yorker article sourced by digruntled people in the CIA and DOD asserts that the torture was a product of a top secret program called Copper Green which approved use of these extreme measures on Al Qaeda and was then turned on Iraqi taxi drivers using Army Reserves where it ran amuck:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa
If this article is accurate the current show trials to try and blame it all on a few enlisted "bad apples" is a travesty of justice and just adding insult to injury.
I'm not sure you've heard but the Iraqi media wont be celebrating sovereignty June 30th unless U.S. plans change before then. The U.S. will still dominate everything related to security and the new government was, last I heard, precluded from making any decisions that would tie the hands of a future elected government. All Iraq is getting is the chance to run the bureaucracy and even there they will have 200 American "consultants" watching everything they do. There wont be anything resembling sovereignty until the end of 2005, at the earliest, unless the U.S. dramatically changes the current plan.
"Now the Americans are in a great place to... inspect... for whatever else might have gone missing from Iraq. A few hunderd tons of chemical werapons maybe?"
Wake up man, you're still dreaming. The U.S. has been looking for a year, spent a billion dollars, used every technology available and is apparently using torture in a secret prison at Baghdad airport on anyone that might know where they are. The hundreds of tons of weapons aren't there. I guess you can just keep telling yourself that they were shipped across the border to a neighboring country and use that as an excuse to topple every government in the world, one by one. That is the beauty of WMD's as an excuse for aggressive warfare. You can always lay the accusation and its impossible for your target to prove they don't have them, even when you occupy the country and can't find them.
Just curious, buy were you equally outraged when Rush Limbaugh equated the torture of prisoners in Iraq with fraternity hazing, or do you only notice bias when its "liberal" bias.
n y- uschal0522,0,340595.storyo m/fact/content/?040524fa_fa ct
Its sad fact the whole world, and the U.S. in particular, has been so polarized by George "I'm a uniter and not a divider" Bush, that just about everyone is tilting off the deep end in one direction or another. Passions are so high its not surprising to see people saying things like those this reporter is saying. I hate to say it but I want to see Bush fail in Iraq too. Its the only way to get rid of him and he is probably the most dangerous leader the world has seen since World War II. If they had succeeded in Iraq they would have immediately attacked Syria and Iran and who knows who else after that. Its better they fail early and are made to stop.
After a string of revelations that suggest Bush and his "team" are incompetent like these:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/
http://www.newyorker.c
you can't blame sane people for being desperate them to fail and be thrown out. When governments are making bad decisions its kind of normal for the opposition to root for their failures. The right was rooting for Clinton to fail at every turn. So what if liberals are doing the same thing now.
The next election is especially complicated by the fact that the Dems have thrown up Kerry against Bush so Bush has to fail really badly before enough people will bite the bullet and vote for Kerry. Kerry will be bad too but we all pray not as bad as Bush.
How many tell all books have to come out from Bush Administration insiders pointing out the fact that Bush is both dumb and dangerous before you see the light too? General Zinni turned on Bush on 60 minutes tonight and has a tell all book coauthored by Tom Clancy. Actually he was mostly turning on Rumsfeld and the neocons that got us in to the mess in Iraq while Bush was asleep at the wheel.
At least 3 > senators have turned on Bush in speeches or interviews this week which is a major tell that everyone is figuring out he has to go.
That doesn't exactly make it "fiction". He is using creative editing to make his message more powerful, yes, and is it misleading, yes. I don't think you are going to find many people with strongly held views who are going to go out of their way to make a weak case. Most of the things you are talking about are creative license. Fact is Bush senior did make those ads and Heston did say all those things whether it was all in one speech or not.
As for the Willie Horton ad are you also equally outraged at how George H.W. Bush's campaign used this ad in the first place, to use the race card to destroy Dukakis. They too were being pretty creative in their use of the facts and it worked really well.
Its you're prerogative to dismiss all of Moore's work and message over the places he is pushing the edge but its your loss. He does have some points that deserve to be considered unless you just want to buy the crap the establishment is selling you.
You also have to give Moore a lot of credit for being willing to take on big business and big government. They put out a lot of "fiction" posing as fact too and they have a lot bigger budgets. The world would be a sadder and scarier place if there weren't people willing to challenge them so publicly and make people consider more than one side to the way things work. Its why we have free speech. What's the point of having free speech if no one ever dissents or creates controversy.
I wouldn't be surprised if Moore is being blessed with all kinds of extra scrutiny from the FBI or assorted other agencies now that he is going after the Bush administration's jugular. It does take balls to go after an administration with a reputation for savaging its critics.
Why the hell should ANYONE care what their wants and needs were. If no American's were flying, no Saudi's should have either. Its a giant flashing light indicating these people had special influence and were getting special treatment by the Bush administration.
The flights were so poorly screened the Saudi's could have been using them to fly out co-conspirators in the 9/11 attack. The fact is the Saudi's, not the Iraqi's, were knee deep in complicity in 9/11, and its just as disturbing that the Bush administration has consistently sought to suppress any information on these special flights. Letting them rush their nationals out without some thoughtful investigation was simply inappropriate.
It reminds you of a similar incident where the Pakistani's were also allowed to secretly fly their intelligence people out of Afghanistan after the Taliban fell, though Pakistani's intelligence was knee deep in complicity with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and some of them could well have been co-conspirators in 9/11 planning.
"And why is it you think the Iranians are so dumb?"
You apparently didn't understand much of my post. I didn't say the Iranians were dumb. I said the Bush administration was dumb for being had by them and especially Chalibi apparently working for them. Chalibi is a convicted extortionist in Jordan and would be locked up for life if they can ever get him extradited. He's spent all his life using others to enrich himself. With the vast intelligence resources of the U.S. its pretty embarrassing to be had by a con man. How did you misinterpret my post so badly.
Don't think I made ANY statement about the intellect of Iraq's scientists.
Since I said the American's were dumb and not the Iranians and you seem to be ranting at me for exactly the opposite of what I said I'd appreciate it if you read, and understand before entering rant mode and putting a bunch of words in my mouth I didn't say.
Another reference on the Carlisle Group, the Bush family and Saudi Arabia:
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http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair05222004.htm
There wasn't much in Bowling for Columbine that could be called fiction. It was mostly speculation that America's obsessions with war, guns and violence are intertwined and aren't particularly healthy. Fact is America is one of the world's most violent developed nations. There were some specific things in it he severely stretched to make his point, not like anyone on the right would ever do that... Coulter..cough..Limbaugh..cough.
When you get to subject matter of Fahrenheit 9/11 its pretty hard for anyone to be sure of what the truth is. Moore is presenting his take on it which may or may not be accurate. One of the problems is the Bush administration has been actively classifying and suppressing just about everything about the Saudi role in 9/11 and the Bush family's excessively close ties to the Saudi's and the Bin Laden family. If you recall they blacked out the entire section on Saudi Arabia's complicity in the congressional report on 9/11 and there were a lot of pages on it. They have also aggressively suppressed all information about the fact that they let airplanes spirit members of the Bin Laden family and other unidentified Saudi's out of the U.S. right after 9/11 at a time when no American could get off the ground.
It is a simple fact that the Bush family has long running ties to people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait including the Bin Laden family and it colors their dealings in the area, in the opinion of some it clouds their judgment. George H.W. Bush had active business dealings with them when he was at Zapata Oil. He has an active relationship with them today in his role as spokesman for the Carlysle group which is one of Saudi Arabia's major defense contractors.
To be honest I don't know how anyone continues to defend the Bush family especially the current administration. All indications are that they were completely had by Iran, who through Ahmed Chalibi suckered them in to invading Iraq which is now doing massive damage to America's standing in the world, is making the world more dangerous and is costing the U.S. dearly in blood and money. THe Truth about Chalibi.
How do you keep supporting an administration dumb enough to be had by the Iranian's. What are you going to say when the Shia's take power in Iraq as soon as they get a fair election and Iraq turns into an Iranian influenced theocracy and all of America's sacrifice was for worse than nothing.
At LSU commencement Bush joked about being a "C" student. He is proof anyone can be President in America, even someone as intellectually challenged as he is, of course it helps to be from a wealthy and influential family so you can get elected on name only. Bush is great on rhetoric but he simply lacks the intellectual depth to make good decisions when it comes to the enormously complex areas like foreign affairs and economics. The fact that his administration was had by Iran is a case in point. It was his job to take Chalibi skepticially especially considering a long string of red flags about his ethics and motives, but he, Cheney, Perl and Wolfowitz fell for it hook, line and sinker and its costing the U.S. dearly.
Enjoy. This insignia is about as close as NASA will get to the Moon or Mars.
It will be interesting to see what happens to this program after the election. The cynic in me sees Karl Rove sitting in his office at the white office toting up electoral college votes. Florida, of course, comes out at the top of lists in play he has to win. Its likely it will close in 2004. If you want to swing a few hundred thousand votes in Florida your way, look to the space coast around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne which is extremely dependent on the manned and unmanned space programs for its economic existence. Would Karl rather they were:
A. Facing unemployment and economic collapse when the manned space program craters after the Shuttle and ISS are end of lifed
B. Drooling over the prospects of a decades long manned program to the Moon and Mars which will be a huge boon to the local economy, and Florida as a whole, and keep all the NASA employees and contractors employed for life working on a very cool project.
Its pretty easy to announce this program, put next to no money in it and cement the vote of everyone who's livelihood directly or indirectly depends on the manned space program. The space program is a prestige thing for all of Florida supporting it is the smart move if you want their votes. After the election and at the point they might have to bend metal and start spending real money on it is when you will see how much the Bush administration really cares about this.
Its a pretty strong tell that they completely ignored this program in the State of the Union address. If it mattered to them they would have put it there front and center instead of goofy things like dealing with steroids in athletics.
If the program does stay funded after the election and in fact starts to see some serious funding then the fallback rationale for this program is its another payoff to the big aerospace companies which are big backers of the republican party. They are giving them a lot through missile defense and other defense programs so I'm not sure this is a likely explanation especially as slow as the money ramps up. If it was like the huge payoffs to the drug companies, the energy contracts and the likes of Halliburton they would be throwing billions in to it right away.
This programs fatal flaw is that it is so slow and it will take so long to achieve any interesting milestone that the political climate is certain to change. This changing climate is one of the key contributors to the disaster that ISS turned in to. One thing Kennedy did right was to set the goal early in his administration and set the major milestones, and the major expenditures to occur within his potential eight year term. That was a sign he was serious. The fact both Bush's waited until late in their administration to set the goal and the goal is so far out that they wouldn't have to fund when it got expensive is another tell that this initiative is another one of their many sucker plays.
Not sure about that when you are using sentences like:
"by the introduction of atypical antipsychotics into my daily regimen"
Not sure there are many creative free spirits who think about theirs lives with terms like "daily regimen".
But, if being on drugs for the remainder of your life works for you then go for it, as long as you take them of your own volition, they work for you, and you are confident that they aren't hurting you.
I'm more concerned about the alarming increase in use of psychiatric drugs on children and on adults against their will. It just smacks of THX-1138. Its getting to convenient to deal with people, especially children, who don't conform or behave by pumping them full of pacifying drugs.
The drug companies are also spending way to much money selling psychiatric drugs like soap. They bombard people daily with suggestions that maybe the have Social Anxiety Disorder so you will go to a doctor and insist they have SAD and get a lifetime prescription for Zoloft resulting in an improved profit margin for the drug company.
You have to wonder if the fact that we are using medication as the solution to every personality disorder these days is making the problem better or worse. I find it deeply disturbing to see TV adds for Zoloft in which they encourage you to self diagnose yourself as needing their product.
Seeing a rising tide of indicators that the wonder drugs being used to treat personality disorders are, in at least some cases, triggering suicides and extreme behavior is one alarm bell. Are theses rare side effects or an indicator these drugs are not as safe as the manufacturers would have you believe. Its an unfortunate problem that the companies who are developing the drugs to treat mental disorder have an incentive to get as many people as possible to use them, whether they should or not, so they improve their profit margins. Its a really dangerous side to medicine for profit. I'm not sure but I suspect the U.S. is the only country that is letting drug companies engage in the massive advertising campaigns for prescription drugs. Its tolerable for allergy medication and maybe Viagra but its truly scary when you see massive ad campaigns for powerful psychiatric medications.
We humans don't yet have the knowledge to successfully alter the chemistry of the brain without grave risk of doing more harm than good. Yes we can identify some specific chemical imbalances and maybe treat specific things but we simply don't have the holistic understanding of what will happen when we start to dramatically alter the brain's chemistry on the large scale we are doing it today.
As another post said one of their family members committed suicide when their medication was abruptly removed. It appears that when you go down the "medication is the answer to everything" route you end up with people who become completely dependent on medication to function, and when they loose that crutch, they might be in worse shape than if they hadn't started taking it in the first place. That was, at least a possibility in the Beautiful Mind. He was constantly battling with the consequences of taking or not taking medication.
The other angle of this is societal. While there are certainly people with severe mental illness that need to be dealt with one way or another, you have to wonder if we are not a little to eager to make everyone conform to a simplistic ideal of normalcy, and are intolerant of allowing people to be different. Its a lot easier from the view of the herd if everyone thinks and acts like the rest of the herd.
It is more than possible that genius and insanity are intertwined. What happens if we drug everyone who isn't "normal" and conformant in to a stupor. Will we destroy all our genius and all the great artists by trying to suppress their abnormality so they will sit quietly in class and not be a nuisance to the "normal" people.