"...the sort of thing they wanted prosecuted and couldn't get to happen"
Most of the crimes I've heard Bush and Gonzales wanted prosecuted by the fired U.S. attorneys were illegal immigration and voter fraud, not corruption by big contractors. The exception is Iglesias in New Mexico. They did want him to pursue a corruption case against a Democrat, for some courthouse contracts. Senator Domenici was pressuring him to do it before the 2006 election so the Republicans could use it as a campaign issue. When he balked because he didn't have a case yet, Domenici called Bush/Rove and he was apparently added to the black list almost instantly.
In at least three other cases, San Diego, Arizona and Nevada, there is a pretty good chance the U.S. attorneys were fired for having the audacity to pursue corruption cases against Republicans so the Bush administration was probably trying to suppress investigations of Republican corruption.
There is at least a 50/50 chance Carol Lam, the San Diego U.S. attorney, was fired precisely because she was aggressively pursuing contractor corruption cases against Duke Cunningham and defense contractor friends. As I recall there was a sudden additional surge in interest in firing her when the case expanded to someone in the top echelon of the CIA who was steering lucrative contractors to his college roommate.
So you are mostly off the mark dude. If anything Bush/Rove/Gonzalez were trying to fire attorneys pursuing corruption cases against Republicans, and failing to pursue them fast enough against Democrats.
A case of the complexity of this kickback scheme has probably been in the work long before the U.S. attorney fiasco came to a head. I imagine Gonzales is glad it was announced today because he needs some smoke and mirrors to divert U.S. Senators of both parties from calling for his head. He can point to this as something great DOJ is doing, at a time many people in the know are of the opinion Bush/Gonzales have nearly wrecked the DOJ.
You left out one. It appears the Bush administration has spent the last 6 years filling the ranks of the executive branch with completely incompetent people, whose main qualifications were being "good Bushies" and rabidly born again Christians. People who had it as a primarily goal to inject their religious views, like a dagger, in to the heart of the supposedly secular U.S. government. The Washington Post recently had an op ed on Monica Goodling, one of Alberto Gonzales' top aides, who recently plead the fifth and resigned over the U.S. attorney scandal. Her law degree is from Pat Robertson's Law school, Regent University which is a 4th tier law school. Regent has apparently been very successful at placing academically marginal lawyers in the Bush administration. Apparently more than a few top career lawyers in the Justice department, from top flight law schools, have been forced out or left in disguest as the Justice Department has been twisted in to a Christian enclave by Ashcroft and then Gonzales.
Patrick Henry College is another rabidly Christian college being used to train born again Christians who are then fast tracked in to top positions in the Bush administration to futher cement domination of a secular government by people who, are entering government in order to shape it to their religious views.
There is a pretty good chance that the Executive branch, especially places like the Justice Department and the Pentagon will be so mortally damaged by the incompetence and religious fixations of the Bush administration that they may not recover for years, or maybe decades, or maybe ever.
I'm all for everyone having freedom of choice in their religious beliefs, but religion really has no place in government. Government should be completely secular and no one should be entering government if they are planning on injecting their religious views in to their job. No one should be getting a government job because of their religious views. This is a principal that Christians should hold as dear as anyone. Once you go down this road you can end up in a place where a "Baptist" government persecutes "Methodists". Religious persecution has frequently been born of state entanglement with religion which is a key reason the founding fathers were so keen on the separation of church and state. Many of the religious refugees who colonized America came to America to escape religious persecution by states who failed to separate church from state. Unfortunately a huge number of Christians have decided separation of church and state was designed to suppress religion. It is in fact very much designed to preserve their religious freedom by preventing the state from favoring one religious sect over another.
"Pretty much every major setback this country (and a lot of other countries, too) has suffered for the last half-century is directly or indirectly attributable to the Republican Party"
I think this is kind of a stretch. I'm no fan of the Republicans but the Democrats were the ones mostly responsible for the Vietnam quagmire. Eisenhower maybe got the ball rolling, but LBJ and a Democratic Congress are the ones that really got it going with the Gulf of Tonkin deception. Kennedy was in there too but there is a fair chance he wanted to get out of it about the time someone capped him, maybe LBJ + the CIA.
The Democrats are also very much to blame for the blank checks they gave George W. to invade Iraq and in passing the Patriot Act(s).
The Republicans have lately gone off a complete deep end as far as dangerous, but your implication the Democrats haven't been involved in a lot of these "setbacks" isn't very accurate.
I'm not sure what point you are making with this one. I want fewer tax exemptions, and I can see why the IRS would want fewer of them too. Everyone should. I would be overjoyed if Congress passed tax reform and wiped out every exemption in the book. The U.S. tax code is hopelessly complex mostly due to all the exemptions. It does nothing but create a massive industry for accountants trying to exploit them all and they are fertile ground for cheating by corporations and the wealthy in particular.
If you wiped out every exemption on the book and then lowered the tax rates you would have a much simpler, cheaper and more efficient system that was much fairer to everyone. The current system rewards people who cheat and punishes people who don't. The exemption system is also a massive case of politicians engaging in social engineering to reward people for doing things they want, and to punish people who do things they don't like. It really isn't government's place to overtax everyone and then hand someone else's money to people for doing things they like (in the form of exemptions).
If you could then get a government in place that started a slash and burn program on discretionary spending and lowered both spending and taxation the U.S. would probably a vastly more prosperous place(after the shock of all the organizations currently dining on pork failed). We could have a military half the size of the one we have and only for defense and it would be better for everyone. Agricultural subsidies likewise are insane. Their are very few federal programs that are actually justifiable or rational. The are mostly just mechanisms for taking money from one group of people and giving it to another in political favor.
"Diebold pounced on a chance to enter the ripe electronic voting market."
And they've also reaped the most profit they are going to reap out of this market during the gold rush of Federal dollars. Now everyone who was going to rush to buy them has, and new buyers are a lot more cautious. The standards for correct operation are also increasing and they have more independent labs doing certification testing (though it remains to be seen if they really test or are a rubber stamp).
Not having RTFA it would be interesting to know what happens to all the precincts who HAVE Diebold machines. Diebold has a huge and inescapable obligation to support those machines so they are going to have to sucker someone else in to doing it, spin off the division to keep support alive, or orphan a lot of machines and make a lot of government organizations very unhappy.
The initial cost of evoting proved to be pretty minor compared to the really steep costs for supporting them year after year, I wager they are much higher than just about any other approach to voting. Once precincts bought in to a sole source provider like Diebold, that provider could extort a lot of money for support services unless the government negotiator nailed down support costs in the contract for the life of the machine.
This whole saga just smacks of everything wrong with the Republican dominated government for the last 6 years. They've been pouring vast quantities of our tax dollars in to the pockets of mostly Republican friendly companies, for shoddy results, where the contractors were mostly out for quick profits and didn't deliver. Iraq is partially in the condition it is today because of all the money squandered on U.S. contractors who delivered bad results or no results at all. The money would have been better spend on just keeping Iraqis employed.
On the news last night there was a brief bit on Vaxgen who was given something like $100 million tax dollars to develop a new Anthrax vaccine despite having no experience in the field. They went no where with it, the contract was cancelled and the money went down a black hole.
The contract for the Coast Guards new ships is another staggering case of incompetence or fraud with most of the new ships being barely sea worthy due to structural defects and will have huge support costs.
The Democrats aren't much better and government contracting has always had a record for bad results, but the last 6 years have let the whole system completely spin out of control with corruption, cost overruns, sole sourcing to Republican friendly companies, tiny campaign contributions rewarded with huge contracts, etc.
"They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. "
And you have to figure those hard core raiders have to feel like complete suckers to have sunk so much of their lives in to getting all that awesome gear to have it turn in to vendor trash overnight. Similarly to all those people who spent months PVP'ing to get a top rank to get all the best PVP gear, and then see Blizzard make it so everyone got it overnight with a little grinding. Good for casual players but it makes hardcore players look like chumps. It did level the playing field for casual and new players who would have never caught up to the hard core. On the down side more than 50% of the real motivation behind MMORPG is outdoing your peers by getting better stuff. You make it so easy to get the best stuff you will destroy they main motivation a lot of people have to be better than their peers. When you come out with an expansion that overnight destroys all that time investment in hard to get gear, anyone with a brain left would have to start kicking themselves for spending all that time on stuff they just sold for 2G or sharded. Fortunately when you are a WOW addict you are adept at blocking out how much of a waste all that time you are sinking in to acquiring meaningless bits is.
I think the Chinese farmers are the only really smart ones playing WOW. They are only going after stuff they can sell and cash out as real money they can spend in the real world.
MMORPG in general and WOW in particular is entertaining to me in the team work needed for raiding instances, but the AI's in all games are horribly predictable, and playing against them quickly becomes incredibly boring, whether it be grinding or instances. PVP is the only part of online games that is interesting because playing against real intelligence and real stupidity is where the fun is. Unfortunately PVP in WOW is spectacularly bad.
BC does add a lot of new content that will keep raiding interesting for a while but I doubt the AI's are really any better than they were so once you are through each instance they will turn boring just like all of the pre BC content did.
All in all MMORPG just feels a little to much like time wasted to me. Done in moderation as a diversion, which is what games are supposed to be, its probably fine. Its really sad to see people waste big chunks of their lives on it to no good end, to sacrifice family, friends, social life and jobs chasing meaningless bits, bits Blizzard can flush down the drain overnight. The problem with acquiring things in online worlds is they in fact have no intrinsic value other than what the games authors choose to place on them, they who giveth can taketh away. Online socializing in guilds is wonderful, unfortunately that aspect is effectively countered by never ending guild drama and immature people who can't get along and just have fun.
Well I've been there and done that on both. As I said earlier Kubuntu works out of the box on my laptop way better than Gentoo did after hours of scratching my head. Doing important security updates is also really easy, a lot easier than Gentoo.
I love Gentoo for the total control, and you can get somewhat closer to the original bits for a give application. Its also great for nonstandard architectures like my AMD64 since you can compile for it yourself. And its great to get fairly new versions of stuff.
But Gentoo can get a little tedious to install and maintain. You do have to pay attention to a lot of little details to keep things running properly. You also have to set aside the machine for big chunks of compile time to do installs and updates. Gentoo is best on machines with fast CPU, memory and disk so the builds go fast.
Gentoo emerges also have a tendency to have these little warnings that zip buy during builds that tell you something gigantic has just changed and you need to do something really important or you are screwed and they are really easy to miss. Gentoo desperately needs a little script that collects all these really important warnings from all the builds and sticks them in the face of the user nicely organized and prioritized at the end of the emerge.
" If you do this indicate the new NULL pointer guard prevented a crash:"
Uh, the projected total expenditures on the ISS in its current reduced form is $130 billion dollars, and that's probably not counting all the Shuttle costs, which for a few years now has been almost completely dedicated to the ISS and consumes the lion's share of NASA's budget along with ISS. Not much compared to what we squandered in Iraq but a lot compared to what we spend on a lot of other programs that have yielded a letter more results for a lot less money, JPL interplanetary missions and the great orbiting observatories in particular.
Inadequate funding wasn't the really the problem. Constant redesigns, political meddling by President's and Congress, the astronomical launch costs of the Shuttle, two catastrophic shuttle failures, over a billion dollars to haul up a few thousand pounds of supplies and haul home trash with a shuttle, a complete absence of a useful mission to justify the costs, contractors milking NASA's teat, and the general bureaucratic ineptness of NASA were more the problem than inadequate funding.
The inadequate funding issue only arose because after squandering so much money they still weren't even close to finishing the thing, and there was no discernable purpose for the thing to justify the continuing price tag. When you are fighting for funds in the halls of Congress that is a bad combination.
When it became obvious there was no safe way to bring the ISS to its intended full crew it was doomed. There is no escape vehicle sufficient to insure the safety of a full crew, and due to the Shuttle's problems it a challenge to keep the small crew there supplied. The current crew spends most of their time just maintaining it and not doing any useful research or manufacturing.
Its a simple fact that after the high NASA hit with Apollo, Nixon brought them crashing down to Earth. They then went in search of a new mission and the created a circular one. How about a reusable launch vehicle. OK we need a space station for the reusable launch vehicle to fly to. OK we need a reusable launch vehicle to service the space station. They created two turkeys neither of which can fly.
I think the bottomline for pouring more resources in to ISS, is someone has to propose some activities that can be performed on the ISS that justify the cost. They don't have to be money makers, they can be research efforts that have a fair chance to yield important results and that can compare to all the great results coming out of programs like JPL's and the great observatories. Zero G physiology research is kind if interesting and useful, it just doesn't rise to a level needed to justify the ISS price tag. Until you can list some activities worth doing on the ISS, you are wasting your breath trying to justify its existence.
Thanks...That's good to know but having two things doing kind of the same thing is a little goofy, and I assure you, every average user on the planet is going to try to use Add/Remove Program on the main menu and not something somewhat obscurely named buried in a somewhat obscure submenu. That is something that seriously needs consolidated to get one installer that works well. Adept Manager looks kind of powerful but cryptic, Adept Installer is weak but friendly looking.
Well it is true that the number of people using and developing Kubuntu is dramatically lower than GNOME Ubuntu so that does usually result in a somewhat buggier and less polished distro.
It is the distro of choice on my laptop though and I'm generally very happy with it. I have only a few small complaints I should probably work on some day to resolve or at least file a bug on.
The absolute worst part of it for me is the Adept Installer(Add/Remove programs). It is mostly crashes for me so I can't 100% evaluate it, but the collection of programs it offers seems to be a tiny subset of what the standard Ubuntu GNOME installer offers. It looks like it has potential but it needs to be stable and have the ability to help you actually find ALL the software available for your distribution. I end up using apt-get and its a royal pain figuring out the name of something I want to install.
I had GNOME based Ubuntu installed briefly and its installer was great, but I couldn't stand GNOME so I switched to Kubuntu and the installer is horrible by comparison and the installer is really important. I'm thinking I need to put the GNOME installer on(is it gnome-app-install?) but it probably will bring megabytes of GNOME libraries with it.
One thing I can say about Ubuntu in general is it runs really well on my laptop. I tried Gentoo on it and simply couldn't get all of the hardware to work, there were obscure conflicts between audio, networking and power management. Ubuntu worked great out of the box which is why I switched at least on my laptop.
"And what about the fact that Biodomes have routinely failed.."
Mars isn't a biodome. Its a fairly large planet with a lot of space, resources and breathtaking vistas, certainly a harsh planet but people living there wouldn't be locked in a dome. They can tap resources outside of the habitats, they can make bigger habitats, you get tired of the people your with you can spread out(though it wouldn't be trivial to do). More people would arrive from Earth, not a lot but some, you would have children, it really wouldn't be drastically different from other frontier colonies, more challenging in some respects, but you would also have a lot technology earlier pioneers didn't.
All in all I'd say you're a glass half empty kind of guy.
"Some people are not appeased by the above arguments and point out that our current theory of particle physics may be lacking in some unforseen way, and we will destroy ourselves."... leading me to postulate a new theory on why, to date, we've found no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. There is an unavoidable technology track where civilizations start playing with high energy physics and figure they can in fact produce a micro black hole and that it will be safe. Each time they are proved wrong. If my theory is correct you can look to the stars, and every place there is a black hole there was once intelligent life....snuffed out by hubris.
"who are going to turn a profit off of exporting Martian rocks"
Only a fool would ship rocks to Earth from Mars. Any mining for Eartch that is going to happen in space is going to be from asteroids, ideally ones maneuvered in to a near earth orbit.
One pretty obvious advantage of being a space faring people is you can develop the skills necessary to detect and prevent asteroids and comets from striking earth which regularly devastate our planet. Even your couch wont be safe when that happens. One difference between you and me is you are extremely short sighted, while I'm looking at the long view (i.e. the next couple millenia).
"How will future "frontiersmen" be able to feed themselves?"
The same way most humans feed themselves, gardening, farming and raising livestock. It mostly depends on having enough water, energy(for sunlight, UV light, and temperature regulation), enclosed space and chemical fertilizer. Maybe a little iffy on the Moon but Mars certainly has enough resources to cover breathing, eating and drinking. It would take a lot of work but chances are high you could establish a self sustaining Mars colony at the level frontiersman did, albeit with constraints on going outside. You would be depending on Earth to send industrial products like computers, motors and nuclear reactor components for a long time.
" if living in space is so great, why don't more people want to live in Alaska?"
Applying this same standard a couple hundred years ago, why would anyone want to cross the Atlantic to get to North and South America. Most people who did died. Many colonies failed because it was wicked hard to stay alive. I think you are one of those people who like a nice, safe comfy life. But, there are others people who are frontiersman, who want to go places that are challenging and hard, and look for payoffs when they get there. Being a frontiersman has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, versus sitting on your couch, diddling on your computer, being safe.
I'm not a big fan of colonizing the Moon for the reasons you list, but Mars is a whole different thing. Mars is maybe the only good frontier left to us.
" the longer we throw resources at it the more resources we're going to waste."
Of course at some point, on our current trajectory, we are going to use up the planet we are on. There is a fair chance we are going to eventually need off planet resources, presumably from asteroids in particular. Or we are going to need to become a lot better at population control and recycling for example, or willing to live without a lot of things we take for granted now.
In particular you will need to either get rid of Capitalism as our economic model, plan on an eventual crash, or Capitalism will push us in to space. Capitalism is ravenous in demanding perpetual, never ending growth and we are rapidly approach the capacity of our planet to sustain that.
"This begs the question of why we are sending people into space instead of refining machines and robots."
Because chances are high a machine doing any kind of serious work over any period of time is going to break. I suppose you can just keep sending in new ones when the old ones break, but there is probably a point where having a human there to keep everything working is probably beneficial.
There is a lot to be said for robots, but in their current incarnation at least, they are deadly slow, very limited in what they can do and limited in their ability to adapt to adversity, though they will probably improve with time and money. The one area robots will probably be challenged for a long time is that AI is very hard, so they will always be tethered to human controllers and in the case of Mars those controllers are a long ways away and its very cumbersome to try to remotely control something with a 15 minute ping.
Robots are certainly preferred for Mars at present because of economics but you could probably do vastly more with some well equipped humans there if you could afford them and keep them alive. There isn't really much reason we shouldn't be able to put people on the Moon nearly 40 years after Apollo 11, though there is a question whether there is anything on the Moon worth putting people there for.
For me the one compelling reason for manned space exploration is a permanent colony on Mars, though it will be very hard and very expensive to do. I'm talking a one way trip, not a goofy multi year round trip which is about the same kind of meaningless stunt Apollo was.
"NASA's current archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong type for a Mars expedition"
NASA's current astronaut office is viewed by many as wrong for just about every mission.
First off their are way to many astronauts. There are over 100, they spend their lives in pursuit of this one goal, and even if they get in to the office they may never fly, or if they do, most fly once. The approaching end of life of the Shuttle is further aggravating a bad situation. Unless you are already scheduled for one of the remaining missions chances are your space faring career is over, unless you are young enough to last the decade until the Moon ramps up if it ever does.
Today's astronauts come across as a politically correct bunch of over achievers with some screws loose in general. These people have to be somewhat nuts to jump through all the hoops they have to jump through, to spend the prime of their lives chasing a one week flight on the Shuttle, and spend years trapped in the horrible NASA bureaucracy as the price they pay.
The best solution we could get is to make space flight really routine, and relagate the current astronaut corp to pilots where they belong. Everyone else should be specialists and experts in the fields you need to colonize the Moon or Mars, with a heavy emphasis on handymen who can repair stuff when it breaks with limited resources, green thumbs who can keep people fed, geologists who can find and tap raw materials, etc.
It would be nice if people could routinely travel in space without being a fracking Astronaut/Cosmonaut in the first place.
As for dealing with the sex issue.... good luck. Its nearly impossible to prevent people losing it one way or another over sex. It is one of those areas where our primal instincts still exist, and are nearly impossible to completely suppress or control.
"but they are also not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed"
But if you put a green house in their ship and overlook the seeds they have in their pocket when boarding....
Stoners might be very well suited for the very long and boring space flight as long they don't do something stupid while high and kill everyone. Not sure they would be so great when they get to Mars and have to do stuff though. They probably would excel at botany.
Unfortunately Were Rabbit, IMHO, just wasn't a very good movie so I kind of see why it could have been buried. Haven't seen Flushed Away.
I'm guessing there were a lot of problems with Nick working with a big American studio which is what another post here suggests. That just couldn't be good for the artist. The Wallace and Grommit shorts were a lot faster paced, fresher, and more entertaining. Maybe going to a full length movie wasn't entirely a good idea too.
It may also be that "Wallace and Grommit" is developing sequelitis. The characters have been pretty heavily milked by now and they just aren't as novel to people, who have seen them all, as they once were. Nick could well come out with a great one next time around though if he has full control again.
I tend to agree with the grand parent. Unless the box is under warranty or relatively new, repairing a 2+ year old system is usually not worth the hassle, unless you are a hard core tinkerer or know someone who is willing to work for free. Technology advances at a pace, you know Moore's law, denser memory, higher capacity drives, new GPU's etc, that you could buy a low end machine now that will probably dust your old high end machine. If you can use some of the peripherals off the old box and not buy them on the new one, all the better. By the time a human being diagnoses that you need a new motherboard, you find, order, ship, and install it, hope everything works, have hassles with Windows like this you probably would have been ahead in the game getting a new box, that is probably faster and better, and is under a nice warranty for a while. You also wont have been without a computer for a week or weeks. If the old box failed because of some power spike and absence of surge protection, then everything else in it is going to be a little suspect too. The one challenge is if you have a ton of apps that it might be a problem to move over.
I've also stopped buying high end desktops and laptops all together for personal use. They just aren't worth the money any more since they are obsolete in a year or two. The cheap low end machines do all most people need, the exception is hard core 3D gaming, where at least a mid level box is advised. If you buy a cheap low end machine you can upgrade much more often than if you spend a couple grand on a high end machine that stops looking high end in a year but you cling to it far to long because it cost you so much in the first place, This is especially true for laptops.
I almost never buy memory upgrades for old machines either. Too much hassle and expense. Buy plenty of RAM when its new and when you reach the point its not enough its time to get a new machine.
I think you just restated the caveat I already had in my post. The fact that the fundamental states right issue was tested on slavery was an act of genius on the part of Lincoln and friends if you were trying to dismantle the 10th amendment. Slavery was such an inflammatory issue and so hard to defend, that coupling it to state's rights permanently associated State's rights with racism, rebellion and brutality, Our republic and Constitution was designed to have powerful states to check Federal power but the term State's rights became derogatory thanks to the Civil War and became and enabler for the expansion of Federal power.
Using 20/20 hindsight I almost wish the South had unilaterally freed the slaves, shipped them back to Africa....and still gone to war with the North over their power grab.
The forgetten aspect of abolition was it had almost no economic impact on the North. The North was rapidly industrializing and had little or no dependence on slave labor. Unfortunately the South was economically completely dependent on plantation agriculture. Freeing the slaves overnight was effectively a form of economic warfare by the North on the South that would inevitably lead to economic devastation in the South as cotton and tobacco production cratered. Southerners were upset for a reason, the mandate from Washington was going to wipe out the whole region economically, and they were facing financial ruin.
Again, with 20/20 hindsight a more rational approach to the slavery issue would have been a massive expenditure of resources by the industrial North and agricultural South to mechanize the labor intensive aspects of plantations. The machinery to do this was in early development, and if all the resources squandered on the Civil War had been invested in farm machinery instead of weapons, the slaves could have been freed without devastating the South economically. But, a bunch of religious extremists coupled with the Republican party, pushed abolition so far and fast conflict was inevitable. One wonders if Lincoln's ulterior motive was to use abolition as a tool to devastate the South to the North's benefit, to precipitate an excuse for a massive expansion of Federal power, and to strip the South of its power. When the U.S. was founded there was a lot of wrangling over the structure of the government to insure the South wasn't steamrolled by the North, the 10th amendment was a key part of that, but ultimately the South was steamrolled and is just now recovering.
"Oh, and the next 50 years or so of cruelty to blacks in the south didn't help much either. "
You might want to read up on "carpetbaggers". There was a lot of cruelty and economic retaliation by Northerners directed at Southern whites during the same period. When you wipe out a whole region economically and militarily, push millions of people in to poverty and powerlessness, there is going to be a lot of barbarity by both sides for a long, long time. There are a lot of parallels between the situation Sunnis are in, in Iraq today, and where Southerners were after the Civil War.
"...the Tenth Amendment will continue to be spat at, and government will be allowed to grow bigger and bigger until we have no freedoms and no economy."
Actually we fought a war on this subject, more Americans died than in any other war in American history. The side backing the Tenth Amendment lost so we've had expansion of Federal power ever since. Interestingly the Republican party was also in power then and the one advocating massive expansion of Federal power in defiance of the Constitution. The Republicans also first suspended habeas corpus during this war, and they instituted the first Federal income tax, though it was repealed when the war ended.
The unfortunate part of all this was the inflammatory issue which was used as the test of Federal versus State power and the tenth amendment was slavery which permanently damaged the states rights cause, and along with it the individual liberties cause. We've had expansion of Federal power ever since. The real villain here was a Republican president who was elevated to near god status though he, more than anyone began the dismantling of our Constitution.
A key point here is the dismantling of state and individual rights has been going on since soon after the Bill of Rights was made part of our Constitution. This latest assault is neither new or unique. The Civil War, World War I and World War II all resulted in massive encroachment on our liberties. The Bush administration has routinely used the excesses perpetrated during these periods as precedent to justify the things they do now. In World War II we put U.S. citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps and seized all their property using Pearl Harbor as an excuse. Its not surprising 9/11 has led to similar excesses. Chances are we will claw back some of our rights, but the erosion will continue. Computers and networks are accelerating both the trend towards totalitarianism and resistance to it. It is unfortunate, but governments and politicians always seek to expand their power, and it requires active resistance to stop the trend. Americans are mostly too weak willed to oppose the trend though.
A footnote, much of the expansion of Executive power you've seen in the past 6 years is almost entirely due to Dick Cheney. He worked in the Ford administration, and teethed on politics during a time when executive powers were savaged, mostly by the Democrats in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. Cheney has had it as a goal to restore and expand Executive power ever since, and many of the excesses you've seen in the past 6 years are directly attributable to him. Gonzo is just a foot solider in Cheney's war to make an all powerful executive.
"Our system breaks down not when one branch takes an outlandish position, but when the other branch fails to call them on it."
Well for most of the last six years the Congress has been controlled by the same extremist party that controls the Executive. Why would you think they were going to call a President from their own party on anything. The price you pay of putting one party in complete power is that party can perpetrate massive excesses unchecked by anything but the courts. If that party packs the courts over time.....
The failure here mostly lies with the American people for electing this particular group of people in 2000, 20002, and 2004, though a somewhat broken election system helped in 2000 and 9/11 gave the party in power a massive tool to manipulate the electorate until the shock wore off some 5 years later. You mostly have to blame all this on the gullability of the American people, most of whom don't have a clue when it comes to civics and politics. A little blame falls on the two party system, and the fact the Democrats have routinely sucked so bad the some how managed to make Fascist look desirable by comparison.
I would expect the Democrat's control of the Congress will rein in some of the excesses we've seen in the last six yeas but never underestimate the Democrats for their stupidity and their own fondness for Federal power.
"...the Democrats still won't end the Iraq War because they're afraid a "spin machine" will make them look anti-soldier."
That is an extreme oversimplification. The Democrats CAN'T "end" the Iraq War. All they could do would be to cut funding and force the U.S. to withdraw as was done in Vietnam. That wouldn't "end" the Iraq War. It would probably just move it in to a new phase where the Sunni and Shia could start a full fledged civil war unchecked by the presence of the U.S. military. There is a high probability the Iranians would openly back the Shia, the Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians would back the Sunni. The Kurds would probably seek an independent Kurdistan which would probably trigger a Turkish military response since the Turks wont tolerate a Kurdistan with designs on the Kurdish parts of Turkey. There is a fair chance the entire Middle East would explode in to a war that would massively disrupt the global economy. If the oil in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq all goes off the market due to a full scale war the consequences will be dire. If Iran and the Shia acquire nukes then chances are the Saudis will get their own to protect Sunni interests.
If you ever watched the old Matthew Broderick flick "War Games", the punch line is basically the same. The only way to "win" was to not play the game. Saddam sucked, but Iraq has been a power keg since it was cobbled together by the British. The wiser George H.W. Bush knew this in the first gulf war which is why he left Saddam in power. His foolish son, clueless to history, world politics and cultures other than Texan didn't grasp this. He lit a fuse on a power keg and its almost certainly going to explode now. Vietnam had no vital importance to the U.S. so there was little price for abandoning it. Abandoning Iraq now that we've kicked the ant pile is unfortunately not going to solve anything. The one saving grace may be that the Middle East is so vital to the entire global economy that if the U.S. does withdraw, the rest of the world's actors may have to step in to try to keep it from exploding.
In most respected Iraq is a no win scenario so you can't really blame the Democrats for not having a "fix". No win scenario is what you get when you elect a clueless, spoiled preppy, who had no clue how the world work, as President of the world's biggest military power and give him a blank check to do something stupid.
"and who believe the United Nations was founded in order to prevent another World War II..."
The UN is better than nothing but not much. The UN has done almost nothing to prevent World War III or even war in general. The one and only thing that's stopped another World War is the presence of nuclear weapons. The devastation that would come with a large scale nuclear exchange is the only true brake on a global war at the moment. As more and less stable countries get nukes, that may not be true much longer.
Since the U.S. and U.S.S.R couldn't openly wage war against one another they launched a long and horrible series of proxy wars in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America and most of Africa. The plus side of these wars is they didn't do any physical damage to the 1st world, though the toll in all the places they were fought has been horrible. As a bonus they were all great for arms sales especially from the U.S. and Russia.
The results from UN peacekeeping efforts have been routinely dismal. U.N. peacekeepers in places like Lebanon and Bosnia have been completely ineffective, they most stand by and watch while the warring parties do their thing because they seldom have any mandate to use force to intervene and everyone knows it (Korea in the 50's being the one exception). The UN has completely failed to stop genocidal campaigns in places like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan. Not sure I can think of a case where the UN has actually ever stopped a war, they mostly just come in and pick up the pieces after the parties are tired of fighting already.
The security council in particular is pretty much useless because the permanent members can veto any resolution that runs counter to their interests, so for example the security council will never do anything concreate about Israeli excesses, likes the devastation it bestowed on Lebanon over a few kidnappings(more than a thousand people were killed and the kidnapped soldiers were still never released). The permanent members will veto almost any resolution that has teeth, so they mostly pass ineffective resolutions that never seem to actually resolve anything. Economic sanctions are the most they can manage and those routinely do more harm than good.
"How dare a nation annex land belonging to foreign invaders "
I think you gloss over the fact that a large percentage of Israel's Jewish population hails from other places, Europe and Russia in particular. Their return Palestine started in the early 20th century when their was an organized effort, under the term Zionism, to buy land in Palestine and immigrate there with the ultimate goal of returning Palestine to being a Jewish nation.
With the end of World War II there was an "invasion" of sorts when large numbers of Jews illegally landed in Palestine, formed armed insurgent groups that would probably be referred to as "terrorist" if they you used the same standard we apply to similar Palestinian groups today, and started pushing hard against the Arabs that had lived there for centuries.
The problem with Israel/Palestine is it depends on what time frame you choose to look at for you to establish who the place belongs to. There are millions of Arabs living in squalid refugee camps, who still have keys to the homes they were driven out of decades ago. These are people who are living as stateless persons in the occupied territories or neighboring Arab countries who might be of the opinion that they were invaded and that their nation was "obliterated" by what is now Israel.
All I ask is you try not to oversimplify the situation there and pretend like Israel Jews are the only party who has been wronged or threatened in the region. All sides there have suffered great injustice at various times.
"Outside of Fox News, the only time you see a 'conservative talking head' is if they are a guest. CNN, MSNBC news, CBS, etc all lean to the left of American Politics."
Bullshit....
Glen Beck on CNN Headline news, very right wing, though he calls himself conservative and disavows the Republican party, doesn't everyone these days?
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, who was hard core conservative but has moved center lately because he saw which way the wind blows.
Lou Dobbs on CNN. He was conservative Republican but has moved to independent populist, though I think it was more a case of the Republican party abandoned conservativism, turned Fascist, and left him,.
Nancy Grace on CNN Headline news though she is hard right on law and order, not really political.
Brian Williams, NBC news anchor, is apparently an avid fan of Rush Limbaugh though not sure that means he subscribes to Rush's BS.
I'd be hard pressed to call Katie Couric liberal. She is more entertainer than anything. She has been accused of both liberal bias, and lately of being sympathetic to the Bush administration and suppressing liberal viewpoints on the CBS news.
Charles Gibson, also pretty neutral in my opinion. Brit Hume, Fox anchor is a close friend, and praised ABC for making him anchor.
Network news in general moved substantially right post 9/11. Dan Rather at CBS was a liberal hold out for a while but you noticed he was sacked by CBS right, and replaced with a much more neutral Couric? The news networks did for the most part fall for the Iraq war and embeds hook, line and sinker and sure didn't look very liberal to me until very recently on the subject.
As for movies, lets see...."Red Dawn", you would be hard pressed to find a more blatant piece of Reagan administration propaganda posing as entertainment, John Wayne in the Green Berets? Rambo?
As for TV, lets see... "24", apparently one of Dick Cheney's favorite shows, and often described as a neoconservative's fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
"...the sort of thing they wanted prosecuted and couldn't get to happen"
Most of the crimes I've heard Bush and Gonzales wanted prosecuted by the fired U.S. attorneys were illegal immigration and voter fraud, not corruption by big contractors. The exception is Iglesias in New Mexico. They did want him to pursue a corruption case against a Democrat, for some courthouse contracts. Senator Domenici was pressuring him to do it before the 2006 election so the Republicans could use it as a campaign issue. When he balked because he didn't have a case yet, Domenici called Bush/Rove and he was apparently added to the black list almost instantly.
In at least three other cases, San Diego, Arizona and Nevada, there is a pretty good chance the U.S. attorneys were fired for having the audacity to pursue corruption cases against Republicans so the Bush administration was probably trying to suppress investigations of Republican corruption.
There is at least a 50/50 chance Carol Lam, the San Diego U.S. attorney, was fired precisely because she was aggressively pursuing contractor corruption cases against Duke Cunningham and defense contractor friends. As I recall there was a sudden additional surge in interest in firing her when the case expanded to someone in the top echelon of the CIA who was steering lucrative contractors to his college roommate.
So you are mostly off the mark dude. If anything Bush/Rove/Gonzalez were trying to fire attorneys pursuing corruption cases against Republicans, and failing to pursue them fast enough against Democrats.
A case of the complexity of this kickback scheme has probably been in the work long before the U.S. attorney fiasco came to a head. I imagine Gonzales is glad it was announced today because he needs some smoke and mirrors to divert U.S. Senators of both parties from calling for his head. He can point to this as something great DOJ is doing, at a time many people in the know are of the opinion Bush/Gonzales have nearly wrecked the DOJ.
"...the most obvious sign of rot..."
You left out one. It appears the Bush administration has spent the last 6 years filling the ranks of the executive branch with completely incompetent people, whose main qualifications were being "good Bushies" and rabidly born again Christians. People who had it as a primarily goal to inject their religious views, like a dagger, in to the heart of the supposedly secular U.S. government. The Washington Post recently had an op ed on Monica Goodling, one of Alberto Gonzales' top aides, who recently plead the fifth and resigned over the U.S. attorney scandal. Her law degree is from Pat Robertson's Law school, Regent University which is a 4th tier law school. Regent has apparently been very successful at placing academically marginal lawyers in the Bush administration. Apparently more than a few top career lawyers in the Justice department, from top flight law schools, have been forced out or left in disguest as the Justice Department has been twisted in to a Christian enclave by Ashcroft and then Gonzales.
Patrick Henry College is another rabidly Christian college being used to train born again Christians who are then fast tracked in to top positions in the Bush administration to futher cement domination of a secular government by people who, are entering government in order to shape it to their religious views.
There is a pretty good chance that the Executive branch, especially places like the Justice Department and the Pentagon will be so mortally damaged by the incompetence and religious fixations of the Bush administration that they may not recover for years, or maybe decades, or maybe ever.
I'm all for everyone having freedom of choice in their religious beliefs, but religion really has no place in government. Government should be completely secular and no one should be entering government if they are planning on injecting their religious views in to their job. No one should be getting a government job because of their religious views. This is a principal that Christians should hold as dear as anyone. Once you go down this road you can end up in a place where a "Baptist" government persecutes "Methodists". Religious persecution has frequently been born of state entanglement with religion which is a key reason the founding fathers were so keen on the separation of church and state. Many of the religious refugees who colonized America came to America to escape religious persecution by states who failed to separate church from state. Unfortunately a huge number of Christians have decided separation of church and state was designed to suppress religion. It is in fact very much designed to preserve their religious freedom by preventing the state from favoring one religious sect over another.
"Pretty much every major setback this country (and a lot of other countries, too) has suffered for the last half-century is directly or indirectly attributable to the Republican Party"
I think this is kind of a stretch. I'm no fan of the Republicans but the Democrats were the ones mostly responsible for the Vietnam quagmire. Eisenhower maybe got the ball rolling, but LBJ and a Democratic Congress are the ones that really got it going with the Gulf of Tonkin deception. Kennedy was in there too but there is a fair chance he wanted to get out of it about the time someone capped him, maybe LBJ + the CIA.
The Democrats are also very much to blame for the blank checks they gave George W. to invade Iraq and in passing the Patriot Act(s).
The Republicans have lately gone off a complete deep end as far as dangerous, but your implication the Democrats haven't been involved in a lot of these "setbacks" isn't very accurate.
"IRS wants fewer tax exemptions."
I'm not sure what point you are making with this one. I want fewer tax exemptions, and I can see why the IRS would want fewer of them too. Everyone should. I would be overjoyed if Congress passed tax reform and wiped out every exemption in the book. The U.S. tax code is hopelessly complex mostly due to all the exemptions. It does nothing but create a massive industry for accountants trying to exploit them all and they are fertile ground for cheating by corporations and the wealthy in particular.
If you wiped out every exemption on the book and then lowered the tax rates you would have a much simpler, cheaper and more efficient system that was much fairer to everyone. The current system rewards people who cheat and punishes people who don't. The exemption system is also a massive case of politicians engaging in social engineering to reward people for doing things they want, and to punish people who do things they don't like. It really isn't government's place to overtax everyone and then hand someone else's money to people for doing things they like (in the form of exemptions).
If you could then get a government in place that started a slash and burn program on discretionary spending and lowered both spending and taxation the U.S. would probably a vastly more prosperous place(after the shock of all the organizations currently dining on pork failed). We could have a military half the size of the one we have and only for defense and it would be better for everyone. Agricultural subsidies likewise are insane. Their are very few federal programs that are actually justifiable or rational. The are mostly just mechanisms for taking money from one group of people and giving it to another in political favor.
"Diebold pounced on a chance to enter the ripe electronic voting market."
And they've also reaped the most profit they are going to reap out of this market during the gold rush of Federal dollars. Now everyone who was going to rush to buy them has, and new buyers are a lot more cautious. The standards for correct operation are also increasing and they have more independent labs doing certification testing (though it remains to be seen if they really test or are a rubber stamp).
Not having RTFA it would be interesting to know what happens to all the precincts who HAVE Diebold machines. Diebold has a huge and inescapable obligation to support those machines so they are going to have to sucker someone else in to doing it, spin off the division to keep support alive, or orphan a lot of machines and make a lot of government organizations very unhappy.
The initial cost of evoting proved to be pretty minor compared to the really steep costs for supporting them year after year, I wager they are much higher than just about any other approach to voting. Once precincts bought in to a sole source provider like Diebold, that provider could extort a lot of money for support services unless the government negotiator nailed down support costs in the contract for the life of the machine.
This whole saga just smacks of everything wrong with the Republican dominated government for the last 6 years. They've been pouring vast quantities of our tax dollars in to the pockets of mostly Republican friendly companies, for shoddy results, where the contractors were mostly out for quick profits and didn't deliver. Iraq is partially in the condition it is today because of all the money squandered on U.S. contractors who delivered bad results or no results at all. The money would have been better spend on just keeping Iraqis employed.
On the news last night there was a brief bit on Vaxgen who was given something like $100 million tax dollars to develop a new Anthrax vaccine despite having no experience in the field. They went no where with it, the contract was cancelled and the money went down a black hole.
The contract for the Coast Guards new ships is another staggering case of incompetence or fraud with most of the new ships being barely sea worthy due to structural defects and will have huge support costs.
The Democrats aren't much better and government contracting has always had a record for bad results, but the last 6 years have let the whole system completely spin out of control with corruption, cost overruns, sole sourcing to Republican friendly companies, tiny campaign contributions rewarded with huge contracts, etc.
"They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. "
And you have to figure those hard core raiders have to feel like complete suckers to have sunk so much of their lives in to getting all that awesome gear to have it turn in to vendor trash overnight. Similarly to all those people who spent months PVP'ing to get a top rank to get all the best PVP gear, and then see Blizzard make it so everyone got it overnight with a little grinding. Good for casual players but it makes hardcore players look like chumps.
It did level the playing field for casual and new players who would have never caught up to the hard core. On the down side more than 50% of the real motivation behind MMORPG is outdoing your peers by getting better stuff. You make it so easy to get the best stuff you will destroy they main motivation a lot of people have to be better than their peers. When you come out with an expansion that overnight destroys all that time investment in hard to get gear, anyone with a brain left would have to start kicking themselves for spending all that time on stuff they just sold for 2G or sharded. Fortunately when you are a WOW addict you are adept at blocking out how much of a waste all that time you are sinking in to acquiring meaningless bits is.
I think the Chinese farmers are the only really smart ones playing WOW. They are only going after stuff they can sell and cash out as real money they can spend in the real world.
MMORPG in general and WOW in particular is entertaining to me in the team work needed for raiding instances, but the AI's in all games are horribly predictable, and playing against them quickly becomes incredibly boring, whether it be grinding or instances. PVP is the only part of online games that is interesting because playing against real intelligence and real stupidity is where the fun is. Unfortunately PVP in WOW is spectacularly bad.
BC does add a lot of new content that will keep raiding interesting for a while but I doubt the AI's are really any better than they were so once you are through each instance they will turn boring just like all of the pre BC content did.
All in all MMORPG just feels a little to much like time wasted to me. Done in moderation as a diversion, which is what games are supposed to be, its probably fine. Its really sad to see people waste big chunks of their lives on it to no good end, to sacrifice family, friends, social life and jobs chasing meaningless bits, bits Blizzard can flush down the drain overnight. The problem with acquiring things in online worlds is they in fact have no intrinsic value other than what the games authors choose to place on them, they who giveth can taketh away. Online socializing in guilds is wonderful, unfortunately that aspect is effectively countered by never ending guild drama and immature people who can't get along and just have fun.
Well I've been there and done that on both. As I said earlier Kubuntu works out of the box on my laptop way better than Gentoo did after hours of scratching my head. Doing important security updates is also really easy, a lot easier than Gentoo.
I love Gentoo for the total control, and you can get somewhat closer to the original bits for a give application. Its also great for nonstandard architectures like my AMD64 since you can compile for it yourself. And its great to get fairly new versions of stuff.
But Gentoo can get a little tedious to install and maintain. You do have to pay attention to a lot of little details to keep things running properly. You also have to set aside the machine for big chunks of compile time to do installs and updates. Gentoo is best on machines with fast CPU, memory and disk so the builds go fast.
Gentoo emerges also have a tendency to have these little warnings that zip buy during builds that tell you something gigantic has just changed and you need to do something really important or you are screwed and they are really easy to miss. Gentoo desperately needs a little script that collects all these really important warnings from all the builds and sticks them in the face of the user nicely organized and prioritized at the end of the emerge.
" If you do this indicate the new NULL pointer guard prevented a crash:"
Uh, the projected total expenditures on the ISS in its current reduced form is $130 billion dollars, and that's probably not counting all the Shuttle costs, which for a few years now has been almost completely dedicated to the ISS and consumes the lion's share of NASA's budget along with ISS. Not much compared to what we squandered in Iraq but a lot compared to what we spend on a lot of other programs that have yielded a letter more results for a lot less money, JPL interplanetary missions and the great orbiting observatories in particular.
Inadequate funding wasn't the really the problem. Constant redesigns, political meddling by President's and Congress, the astronomical launch costs of the Shuttle, two catastrophic shuttle failures, over a billion dollars to haul up a few thousand pounds of supplies and haul home trash with a shuttle, a complete absence of a useful mission to justify the costs, contractors milking NASA's teat, and the general bureaucratic ineptness of NASA were more the problem than inadequate funding.
The inadequate funding issue only arose because after squandering so much money they still weren't even close to finishing the thing, and there was no discernable purpose for the thing to justify the continuing price tag. When you are fighting for funds in the halls of Congress that is a bad combination.
When it became obvious there was no safe way to bring the ISS to its intended full crew it was doomed. There is no escape vehicle sufficient to insure the safety of a full crew, and due to the Shuttle's problems it a challenge to keep the small crew there supplied. The current crew spends most of their time just maintaining it and not doing any useful research or manufacturing.
Its a simple fact that after the high NASA hit with Apollo, Nixon brought them crashing down to Earth. They then went in search of a new mission and the created a circular one. How about a reusable launch vehicle. OK we need a space station for the reusable launch vehicle to fly to. OK we need a reusable launch vehicle to service the space station. They created two turkeys neither of which can fly.
I think the bottomline for pouring more resources in to ISS, is someone has to propose some activities that can be performed on the ISS that justify the cost. They don't have to be money makers, they can be research efforts that have a fair chance to yield important results and that can compare to all the great results coming out of programs like JPL's and the great observatories. Zero G physiology research is kind if interesting and useful, it just doesn't rise to a level needed to justify the ISS price tag. Until you can list some activities worth doing on the ISS, you are wasting your breath trying to justify its existence.
Thanks...That's good to know but having two things doing kind of the same thing is a little goofy, and I assure you, every average user on the planet is going to try to use Add/Remove Program on the main menu and not something somewhat obscurely named buried in a somewhat obscure submenu. That is something that seriously needs consolidated to get one installer that works well. Adept Manager looks kind of powerful but cryptic, Adept Installer is weak but friendly looking.
Well it is true that the number of people using and developing Kubuntu is dramatically lower than GNOME Ubuntu so that does usually result in a somewhat buggier and less polished distro.
It is the distro of choice on my laptop though and I'm generally very happy with it. I have only a few small complaints I should probably work on some day to resolve or at least file a bug on.
The absolute worst part of it for me is the Adept Installer(Add/Remove programs). It is mostly crashes for me so I can't 100% evaluate it, but the collection of programs it offers seems to be a tiny subset of what the standard Ubuntu GNOME installer offers. It looks like it has potential but it needs to be stable and have the ability to help you actually find ALL the software available for your distribution. I end up using apt-get and its a royal pain figuring out the name of something I want to install.
I had GNOME based Ubuntu installed briefly and its installer was great, but I couldn't stand GNOME so I switched to Kubuntu and the installer is horrible by comparison and the installer is really important. I'm thinking I need to put the GNOME installer on(is it gnome-app-install?) but it probably will bring megabytes of GNOME libraries with it.
One thing I can say about Ubuntu in general is it runs really well on my laptop. I tried Gentoo on it and simply couldn't get all of the hardware to work, there were obscure conflicts between audio, networking and power management. Ubuntu worked great out of the box which is why I switched at least on my laptop.
"And what about the fact that Biodomes have routinely failed.."
Mars isn't a biodome. Its a fairly large planet with a lot of space, resources and breathtaking vistas, certainly a harsh planet but people living there wouldn't be locked in a dome. They can tap resources outside of the habitats, they can make bigger habitats, you get tired of the people your with you can spread out(though it wouldn't be trivial to do). More people would arrive from Earth, not a lot but some, you would have children, it really wouldn't be drastically different from other frontier colonies, more challenging in some respects, but you would also have a lot technology earlier pioneers didn't.
All in all I'd say you're a glass half empty kind of guy.
"Some people are not appeased by the above arguments and point out that our current theory of particle physics may be lacking in some unforseen way, and we will destroy ourselves." ... leading me to postulate a new theory on why, to date, we've found no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. There is an unavoidable technology track where civilizations start playing with high energy physics and figure they can in fact produce a micro black hole and that it will be safe. Each time they are proved wrong. If my theory is correct you can look to the stars, and every place there is a black hole there was once intelligent life....snuffed out by hubris.
"who are going to turn a profit off of exporting Martian rocks"
Only a fool would ship rocks to Earth from Mars. Any mining for Eartch that is going to happen in space is going to be from asteroids, ideally ones maneuvered in to a near earth orbit.
One pretty obvious advantage of being a space faring people is you can develop the skills necessary to detect and prevent asteroids and comets from striking earth which regularly devastate our planet. Even your couch wont be safe when that happens. One difference between you and me is you are extremely short sighted, while I'm looking at the long view (i.e. the next couple millenia).
"How will future "frontiersmen" be able to feed themselves?"
The same way most humans feed themselves, gardening, farming and raising livestock. It mostly depends on having enough water, energy(for sunlight, UV light, and temperature regulation), enclosed space and chemical fertilizer. Maybe a little iffy on the Moon but Mars certainly has enough resources to cover breathing, eating and drinking. It would take a lot of work but chances are high you could establish a self sustaining Mars colony at the level frontiersman did, albeit with constraints on going outside. You would be depending on Earth to send industrial products like computers, motors and nuclear reactor components for a long time.
" if living in space is so great, why don't more people want to live in Alaska?"
Applying this same standard a couple hundred years ago, why would anyone want to cross the Atlantic to get to North and South America. Most people who did died. Many colonies failed because it was wicked hard to stay alive. I think you are one of those people who like a nice, safe comfy life. But, there are others people who are frontiersman, who want to go places that are challenging and hard, and look for payoffs when they get there. Being a frontiersman has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, versus sitting on your couch, diddling on your computer, being safe.
I'm not a big fan of colonizing the Moon for the reasons you list, but Mars is a whole different thing. Mars is maybe the only good frontier left to us.
" the longer we throw resources at it the more resources we're going to waste."
Of course at some point, on our current trajectory, we are going to use up the planet we are on. There is a fair chance we are going to eventually need off planet resources, presumably from asteroids in particular. Or we are going to need to become a lot better at population control and recycling for example, or willing to live without a lot of things we take for granted now.
In particular you will need to either get rid of Capitalism as our economic model, plan on an eventual crash, or Capitalism will push us in to space. Capitalism is ravenous in demanding perpetual, never ending growth and we are rapidly approach the capacity of our planet to sustain that.
"This begs the question of why we are sending people into space instead of refining machines and robots."
Because chances are high a machine doing any kind of serious work over any period of time is going to break. I suppose you can just keep sending in new ones when the old ones break, but there is probably a point where having a human there to keep everything working is probably beneficial.
There is a lot to be said for robots, but in their current incarnation at least, they are deadly slow, very limited in what they can do and limited in their ability to adapt to adversity, though they will probably improve with time and money. The one area robots will probably be challenged for a long time is that AI is very hard, so they will always be tethered to human controllers and in the case of Mars those controllers are a long ways away and its very cumbersome to try to remotely control something with a 15 minute ping.
Robots are certainly preferred for Mars at present because of economics but you could probably do vastly more with some well equipped humans there if you could afford them and keep them alive. There isn't really much reason we shouldn't be able to put people on the Moon nearly 40 years after Apollo 11, though there is a question whether there is anything on the Moon worth putting people there for.
For me the one compelling reason for manned space exploration is a permanent colony on Mars, though it will be very hard and very expensive to do. I'm talking a one way trip, not a goofy multi year round trip which is about the same kind of meaningless stunt Apollo was.
"NASA's current archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong type for a Mars expedition"
NASA's current astronaut office is viewed by many as wrong for just about every mission.
First off their are way to many astronauts. There are over 100, they spend their lives in pursuit of this one goal, and even if they get in to the office they may never fly, or if they do, most fly once. The approaching end of life of the Shuttle is further aggravating a bad situation. Unless you are already scheduled for one of the remaining missions chances are your space faring career is over, unless you are young enough to last the decade until the Moon ramps up if it ever does.
Today's astronauts come across as a politically correct bunch of over achievers with some screws loose in general. These people have to be somewhat nuts to jump through all the hoops they have to jump through, to spend the prime of their lives chasing a one week flight on the Shuttle, and spend years trapped in the horrible NASA bureaucracy as the price they pay.
The best solution we could get is to make space flight really routine, and relagate the current astronaut corp to pilots where they belong. Everyone else should be specialists and experts in the fields you need to colonize the Moon or Mars, with a heavy emphasis on handymen who can repair stuff when it breaks with limited resources, green thumbs who can keep people fed, geologists who can find and tap raw materials, etc.
It would be nice if people could routinely travel in space without being a fracking Astronaut/Cosmonaut in the first place.
As for dealing with the sex issue.... good luck. Its nearly impossible to prevent people losing it one way or another over sex. It is one of those areas where our primal instincts still exist, and are nearly impossible to completely suppress or control.
"but they are also not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed"
But if you put a green house in their ship and overlook the seeds they have in their pocket when boarding....
Stoners might be very well suited for the very long and boring space flight as long they don't do something stupid while high and kill everyone. Not sure they would be so great when they get to Mars and have to do stuff though. They probably would excel at botany.
Unfortunately Were Rabbit, IMHO, just wasn't a very good movie so I kind of see why it could have been buried. Haven't seen Flushed Away.
I'm guessing there were a lot of problems with Nick working with a big American studio which is what another post here suggests. That just couldn't be good for the artist. The Wallace and Grommit shorts were a lot faster paced, fresher, and more entertaining. Maybe going to a full length movie wasn't entirely a good idea too.
It may also be that "Wallace and Grommit" is developing sequelitis. The characters have been pretty heavily milked by now and they just aren't as novel to people, who have seen them all, as they once were. Nick could well come out with a great one next time around though if he has full control again.
I tend to agree with the grand parent. Unless the box is under warranty or relatively new, repairing a 2+ year old system is usually not worth the hassle, unless you are a hard core tinkerer or know someone who is willing to work for free. Technology advances at a pace, you know Moore's law, denser memory, higher capacity drives, new GPU's etc, that you could buy a low end machine now that will probably dust your old high end machine. If you can use some of the peripherals off the old box and not buy them on the new one, all the better. By the time a human being diagnoses that you need a new motherboard, you find, order, ship, and install it, hope everything works, have hassles with Windows like this you probably would have been ahead in the game getting a new box, that is probably faster and better, and is under a nice warranty for a while. You also wont have been without a computer for a week or weeks. If the old box failed because of some power spike and absence of surge protection, then everything else in it is going to be a little suspect too. The one challenge is if you have a ton of apps that it might be a problem to move over.
I've also stopped buying high end desktops and laptops all together for personal use. They just aren't worth the money any more since they are obsolete in a year or two. The cheap low end machines do all most people need, the exception is hard core 3D gaming, where at least a mid level box is advised. If you buy a cheap low end machine you can upgrade much more often than if you spend a couple grand on a high end machine that stops looking high end in a year but you cling to it far to long because it cost you so much in the first place, This is especially true for laptops.
I almost never buy memory upgrades for old machines either. Too much hassle and expense. Buy plenty of RAM when its new and when you reach the point its not enough its time to get a new machine.
I think you just restated the caveat I already had in my post. The fact that the fundamental states right issue was tested on slavery was an act of genius on the part of Lincoln and friends if you were trying to dismantle the 10th amendment. Slavery was such an inflammatory issue and so hard to defend, that coupling it to state's rights permanently associated State's rights with racism, rebellion and brutality, Our republic and Constitution was designed to have powerful states to check Federal power but the term State's rights became derogatory thanks to the Civil War and became and enabler for the expansion of Federal power.
Using 20/20 hindsight I almost wish the South had unilaterally freed the slaves, shipped them back to Africa....and still gone to war with the North over their power grab.
The forgetten aspect of abolition was it had almost no economic impact on the North. The North was rapidly industrializing and had little or no dependence on slave labor. Unfortunately the South was economically completely dependent on plantation agriculture. Freeing the slaves overnight was effectively a form of economic warfare by the North on the South that would inevitably lead to economic devastation in the South as cotton and tobacco production cratered. Southerners were upset for a reason, the mandate from Washington was going to wipe out the whole region economically, and they were facing financial ruin.
Again, with 20/20 hindsight a more rational approach to the slavery issue would have been a massive expenditure of resources by the industrial North and agricultural South to mechanize the labor intensive aspects of plantations. The machinery to do this was in early development, and if all the resources squandered on the Civil War had been invested in farm machinery instead of weapons, the slaves could have been freed without devastating the South economically. But, a bunch of religious extremists coupled with the Republican party, pushed abolition so far and fast conflict was inevitable. One wonders if Lincoln's ulterior motive was to use abolition as a tool to devastate the South to the North's benefit, to precipitate an excuse for a massive expansion of Federal power, and to strip the South of its power. When the U.S. was founded there was a lot of wrangling over the structure of the government to insure the South wasn't steamrolled by the North, the 10th amendment was a key part of that, but ultimately the South was steamrolled and is just now recovering.
"Oh, and the next 50 years or so of cruelty to blacks in the south didn't help much either. "
You might want to read up on "carpetbaggers". There was a lot of cruelty and economic retaliation by Northerners directed at Southern whites during the same period. When you wipe out a whole region economically and militarily, push millions of people in to poverty and powerlessness, there is going to be a lot of barbarity by both sides for a long, long time. There are a lot of parallels between the situation Sunnis are in, in Iraq today, and where Southerners were after the Civil War.
"...the Tenth Amendment will continue to be spat at, and government will be allowed to grow bigger and bigger until we have no freedoms and no economy."
Actually we fought a war on this subject, more Americans died than in any other war in American history. The side backing the Tenth Amendment lost so we've had expansion of Federal power ever since. Interestingly the Republican party was also in power then and the one advocating massive expansion of Federal power in defiance of the Constitution. The Republicans also first suspended habeas corpus during this war, and they instituted the first Federal income tax, though it was repealed when the war ended.
The unfortunate part of all this was the inflammatory issue which was used as the test of Federal versus State power and the tenth amendment was slavery which permanently damaged the states rights cause, and along with it the individual liberties cause. We've had expansion of Federal power ever since. The real villain here was a Republican president who was elevated to near god status though he, more than anyone began the dismantling of our Constitution.
A key point here is the dismantling of state and individual rights has been going on since soon after the Bill of Rights was made part of our Constitution. This latest assault is neither new or unique. The Civil War, World War I and World War II all resulted in massive encroachment on our liberties. The Bush administration has routinely used the excesses perpetrated during these periods as precedent to justify the things they do now. In World War II we put U.S. citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps and seized all their property using Pearl Harbor as an excuse. Its not surprising 9/11 has led to similar excesses. Chances are we will claw back some of our rights, but the erosion will continue. Computers and networks are accelerating both the trend towards totalitarianism and resistance to it. It is unfortunate, but governments and politicians always seek to expand their power, and it requires active resistance to stop the trend. Americans are mostly too weak willed to oppose the trend though.
A footnote, much of the expansion of Executive power you've seen in the past 6 years is almost entirely due to Dick Cheney. He worked in the Ford administration, and teethed on politics during a time when executive powers were savaged, mostly by the Democrats in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. Cheney has had it as a goal to restore and expand Executive power ever since, and many of the excesses you've seen in the past 6 years are directly attributable to him. Gonzo is just a foot solider in Cheney's war to make an all powerful executive.
"Our system breaks down not when one branch takes an outlandish position, but when the other branch fails to call them on it."
Well for most of the last six years the Congress has been controlled by the same extremist party that controls the Executive. Why would you think they were going to call a President from their own party on anything. The price you pay of putting one party in complete power is that party can perpetrate massive excesses unchecked by anything but the courts. If that party packs the courts over time.....
The failure here mostly lies with the American people for electing this particular group of people in 2000, 20002, and 2004, though a somewhat broken election system helped in 2000 and 9/11 gave the party in power a massive tool to manipulate the electorate until the shock wore off some 5 years later. You mostly have to blame all this on the gullability of the American people, most of whom don't have a clue when it comes to civics and politics. A little blame falls on the two party system, and the fact the Democrats have routinely sucked so bad the some how managed to make Fascist look desirable by comparison.
I would expect the Democrat's control of the Congress will rein in some of the excesses we've seen in the last six yeas but never underestimate the Democrats for their stupidity and their own fondness for Federal power.
"...the Democrats still won't end the Iraq War because they're afraid a "spin machine" will make them look anti-soldier."
That is an extreme oversimplification. The Democrats CAN'T "end" the Iraq War. All they could do would be to cut funding and force the U.S. to withdraw as was done in Vietnam. That wouldn't "end" the Iraq War. It would probably just move it in to a new phase where the Sunni and Shia could start a full fledged civil war unchecked by the presence of the U.S. military. There is a high probability the Iranians would openly back the Shia, the Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians would back the Sunni. The Kurds would probably seek an independent Kurdistan which would probably trigger a Turkish military response since the Turks wont tolerate a Kurdistan with designs on the Kurdish parts of Turkey. There is a fair chance the entire Middle East would explode in to a war that would massively disrupt the global economy. If the oil in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq all goes off the market due to a full scale war the consequences will be dire. If Iran and the Shia acquire nukes then chances are the Saudis will get their own to protect Sunni interests.
If you ever watched the old Matthew Broderick flick "War Games", the punch line is basically the same. The only way to "win" was to not play the game. Saddam sucked, but Iraq has been a power keg since it was cobbled together by the British. The wiser George H.W. Bush knew this in the first gulf war which is why he left Saddam in power. His foolish son, clueless to history, world politics and cultures other than Texan didn't grasp this. He lit a fuse on a power keg and its almost certainly going to explode now. Vietnam had no vital importance to the U.S. so there was little price for abandoning it. Abandoning Iraq now that we've kicked the ant pile is unfortunately not going to solve anything. The one saving grace may be that the Middle East is so vital to the entire global economy that if the U.S. does withdraw, the rest of the world's actors may have to step in to try to keep it from exploding.
In most respected Iraq is a no win scenario so you can't really blame the Democrats for not having a "fix". No win scenario is what you get when you elect a clueless, spoiled preppy, who had no clue how the world work, as President of the world's biggest military power and give him a blank check to do something stupid.
"and who believe the United Nations was founded in order to prevent another World War II..."
The UN is better than nothing but not much. The UN has done almost nothing to prevent World War III or even war in general. The one and only thing that's stopped another World War is the presence of nuclear weapons. The devastation that would come with a large scale nuclear exchange is the only true brake on a global war at the moment. As more and less stable countries get nukes, that may not be true much longer.
Since the U.S. and U.S.S.R couldn't openly wage war against one another they launched a long and horrible series of proxy wars in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America and most of Africa. The plus side of these wars is they didn't do any physical damage to the 1st world, though the toll in all the places they were fought has been horrible. As a bonus they were all great for arms sales especially from the U.S. and Russia.
The results from UN peacekeeping efforts have been routinely dismal. U.N. peacekeepers in places like Lebanon and Bosnia have been completely ineffective, they most stand by and watch while the warring parties do their thing because they seldom have any mandate to use force to intervene and everyone knows it (Korea in the 50's being the one exception). The UN has completely failed to stop genocidal campaigns in places like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan. Not sure I can think of a case where the UN has actually ever stopped a war, they mostly just come in and pick up the pieces after the parties are tired of fighting already.
The security council in particular is pretty much useless because the permanent members can veto any resolution that runs counter to their interests, so for example the security council will never do anything concreate about Israeli excesses, likes the devastation it bestowed on Lebanon over a few kidnappings(more than a thousand people were killed and the kidnapped soldiers were still never released). The permanent members will veto almost any resolution that has teeth, so they mostly pass ineffective resolutions that never seem to actually resolve anything. Economic sanctions are the most they can manage and those routinely do more harm than good.
"How dare a nation annex land belonging to foreign invaders "
I think you gloss over the fact that a large percentage of Israel's Jewish population hails from other places, Europe and Russia in particular. Their return Palestine started in the early 20th century when their was an organized effort, under the term Zionism, to buy land in Palestine and immigrate there with the ultimate goal of returning Palestine to being a Jewish nation.
With the end of World War II there was an "invasion" of sorts when large numbers of Jews illegally landed in Palestine, formed armed insurgent groups that would probably be referred to as "terrorist" if they you used the same standard we apply to similar Palestinian groups today, and started pushing hard against the Arabs that had lived there for centuries.
The problem with Israel/Palestine is it depends on what time frame you choose to look at for you to establish who the place belongs to. There are millions of Arabs living in squalid refugee camps, who still have keys to the homes they were driven out of decades ago. These are people who are living as stateless persons in the occupied territories or neighboring Arab countries who might be of the opinion that they were invaded and that their nation was "obliterated" by what is now Israel.
All I ask is you try not to oversimplify the situation there and pretend like Israel Jews are the only party who has been wronged or threatened in the region. All sides there have suffered great injustice at various times.
"Outside of Fox News, the only time you see a 'conservative talking head' is if they are a guest. CNN, MSNBC news, CBS, etc all lean to the left of American Politics."
Bullshit....
Glen Beck on CNN Headline news, very right wing, though he calls himself conservative and disavows the Republican party, doesn't everyone these days?
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, who was hard core conservative but has moved center lately because he saw which way the wind blows.
Lou Dobbs on CNN. He was conservative Republican but has moved to independent populist, though I think it was more a case of the Republican party abandoned conservativism, turned Fascist, and left him,.
Nancy Grace on CNN Headline news though she is hard right on law and order, not really political.
Brian Williams, NBC news anchor, is apparently an avid fan of Rush Limbaugh though not sure that means he subscribes to Rush's BS.
I'd be hard pressed to call Katie Couric liberal. She is more entertainer than anything. She has been accused of both liberal bias, and lately of being sympathetic to the Bush administration and suppressing liberal viewpoints on the CBS news.
Charles Gibson, also pretty neutral in my opinion. Brit Hume, Fox anchor is a close friend, and praised ABC for making him anchor.
Network news in general moved substantially right post 9/11. Dan Rather at CBS was a liberal hold out for a while but you noticed he was sacked by CBS right, and replaced with a much more neutral Couric? The news networks did for the most part fall for the Iraq war and embeds hook, line and sinker and sure didn't look very liberal to me until very recently on the subject.
As for movies, lets see...."Red Dawn", you would be hard pressed to find a more blatant piece of Reagan administration propaganda posing as entertainment, John Wayne in the Green Berets? Rambo?
As for TV, lets see... "24", apparently one of Dick Cheney's favorite shows, and often described as a neoconservative's fantasy.