This is grossly unsupported by proper engineering analysis and history.
If you read your own link, you'll notice the Indian's powered down their own NPP, just 8 months after it started to use just part of its fuel for their bomb, so they were using "fresh" fuel, and apparently mixing it with "pure" plutoniom they already had. Because of this, I don't think you've proven your point.
But the arguments that RGPU weapons are impractical have been thoroughly discredited
That depends on your definition of RGPU. If we're talking, and this was mentioned earlier in the thread, about Integral Fast Reactors, the answer is no. The fuel from this kind of reactor, is exceedingly difficult to use for weapons. So difficult to use in fact, that any country capable of doing it, is almost certainly technically capable of making even better nuclear bombs the conventional way like everyone else.
We need Bush to put in pro-self-defense US Supreme Court justices
If that was all we had to worry about there wouldn't be nearly as many angry people as there are now after the elections. Unfortunately we all know what those Justices will really be for. pro-gun doesn't worry me, pro-god does.
I don't see how any company thinks it can win by trying to pull this kind of stunt. Well, other than by the fact that companies usually do win by pulling this kind of stunt, because nobody really pursues it, since they expect the company to lie through their teeth anyway.
Amazon is merely taking notes from the Grandmaster.
did you try calling NY or DC on 9/11? I did.. my wife (then friend) was in NY with her mother was in NY and it took morethan 3 hours to get through.. For some reason or another a good number of people were using the phone.
???
Do you really think the POTUS doesn't trump ordinary folk when it comes to telephone usage? The Prez ALWAYS gets through, if that means someone else is kicked off the line, well, too bad, and if its DC he's calling he'll get through because the POTUS doesn't rely on civilian telecommunications to talk to the White House or other government agencies in Washington while he's away (a multi-million dollar telecommunications system follows him around wherever he goes).
No, in the believer's mind it is now a fact, but that doesn't make the fact true, and thus, in my book, it is not a fact. To rationalists listening to the believer it is still *faith*, because the believer has not shown sufficient evidence to make it a 'fact'.
Well, they obviously don't want any part of Bush's crap, however, judging by reaction overseas, if it were Kerry's crap, it may not stink as bad to them.
I love how the antiwar left supports a self admited war criminal, I really really do.
Still stuck in the past, huh, daldredge?
The left supports him because he had the courage to speak the truth at a time when many others remained in denial. Many, 30 years later, are still in denial, like, apparently, you. Try as hard as you might though, Kerry will be far less affected by that 3 decade old war, than Bush will be by the current war he started himself, especially if he stays in denial about the realities on the ground there.
My experience doesn't suggest that Freepers are willing to put up with any sort of uncomfortable questions.
I kinda agree on this, at least for the FR crowd. If you've got some time to waste, try digging up FR's open thread from after the debate (when I looked at it it was over 3100 posts), and it becomes pretty clear there are very few open-minded folk there. A few posters (that seemed to be regulars, not trolls) were just viciously attacked by the others when they criticised Bush, or just admitted they thought Bush "lost" the debate. Believing Bush lost apparently constitutes "treason" to some there. Most of the thread was spent trying to decide who they should blame for Bush looking and acting poorly. Jim Lehrer, the "left wing media", Bush's handlers, the Dems because they somehow got all the questions and prepped Kerry for them, so he'd have smart clever answers for them (the idea that Kerry just might be a smart clever guy naturally was never even mentioned of course), etc, these were all brought up as possible scapegoats, all of course, except Bush himself. You got ridiculous comments like "Kerry lied 6 times per sentence", and "God Bless George W Bush" *after* the debate when it seemed apparent God hadn't actually given him a particularly strong blessing. It was sad, hilarious, and scary at the same time.
Maybe its just the FR demographic, but at the same time, I also get the feeling the country is now more radically polarized than ever before. There is a lot more anger on the left than in the past, and the vitriol from both sides is vicious (to judge even from p.s.o). Its so bad, the subject of Bush is taboo with certain members of my extended family. There are several in my family that voted for Bush who will vote for Kerry this time, plus a few who registered for the first time just so they could vote for A.B.B., but discussing it with the diehard conservatives in the rest of the family is considered.... well.... problematic.:)
It's this same idiotic, naive-but-I-think-I'm-insightful kind of attitude
Frustrating isn't it? The naive parent gets "Insightful", but the truth gets nothing from the mods. So much for a left-bias here, all thats really going on is an overly-idealistic, ostrich-head-in-the-sand anti-government bias which unfortunately doesn't lead to anything positive or constructive. Sure there is some truth to the "Republicrat" theory, at the State and Congressional level there is a lot of truth, but this completely ignores that the individual sitting in the White House could be good or horrible for the country and the reasons may have NOTHING to do with his politics.
We voted a moron into the White House and we are now paying the price, and there is still a few clueless claiming there isn't a difference. LOL! Wake up people, the anger you see here in p.s.o and elsewhere isn't because of the usual Republicrat politics, the issue is about the basic (in)competency of the POTUS. Like it or not, this time, THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. To say otherwise is simply an indirect way of defending Bush, but its too late for that, because too many people have figured out that he wasn't the best man for the job after all.
In that case, in the spirit of your calling me an idiot-drone and my arguments stupid, let me point out that you're living in a world of make believe! With flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats!
Careful, you don't want to send these poor souls into a psychotic state, you need to introduce them to reality gently, one step at a time. Wait a few months into the therapy before you tell them the truth about the hats.... that one always hurts the most....
My affiliations always become painfully self-evident within 2 sentences. For me, a sig would just be redundant.
Well, the sig would be Redundant, but since most folks have usually already tagged the body of my post as Troll or Flamebait, the sig wouldn't get its proper due anyway, so I just leave it out.
combined with putting almost all important laws at the state and not federal level,
Except Federalism lost and Nationalism won, and now the status is reversed. Federal laws have more effect on the average citizen than State laws. Federal power now trumps State power in almost every meaningful way. All of the Federal legislative and judicial power grabs since the end of the Civil War have completely reversed the field, which is why I, for one, don't see the rationale for the EC system to be used for selecting our national leader anymore. The national leader now has (potentially) a much more profound effect on the average citizen than his State's governor, thus every citizen's vote should count equally in deciding the national leader.
It seems to me a lot of the people arguing for the EC in this thread aren't taking into account that the country our Founding Father's created DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE.
It made sense when we were a largely rural, agrarian, lightly-populated federal republic, with a very restrained central government and strong provinces, but we are now a largely urbanized, industrialized and heavily-populated country with a powerful central government and weak provinces. The shoe just don't fit no more, folks.
A system like the Electoral College tries to remove the statistical irrelevence of smaller populations.
NO. It merely *reverses* the unfairness, making smaller populated areas have more power than the larger populated areas. It isn't correcting a wrong, merely replacing one wrong with another.
The question now is, given the state of our country today versus in the 18th century, which wrong hurts us more?
Given that we are now a mainly urbanized nation, EC for the post of President of the entire nation just doesn't make sense any more.
why does Bush always win certain states? because the population in that area has concerns/beliefs that mirror his.
Typically, only 51% to 60% of the population in a given area shares his beliefs. So, the other 40% to 49% simply don't exist? Under Winner-Takes-All, they certainly aren't represented at all.
Of forced feeding of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death in order to escape the daily horror of existence (habitual rape, beatings, mutilation as a deterrent)?
And this is different from locking minimum wage employees in a non-OSHA approved warehouse so that they can't get medical attention when crates fall on them exactly how?
Oh, I don't know, how about the former being legal and common practice then and the later being illegal now? I mean just the reference of a "non-OSHA approved" building tells you something is much better today than 2 centuries ago.
To some degree I tend to agree with you (minimum wage employees being "cheaper" than slave labor so in economic terms the poor are even more exploited now), but please don't try to additionally make the argument that people today are suffering the same kind of physical abuse at the same frequency that slaves suffered in the 19th century, because it simply isn't true, and ends up detracting from the rest of your argument.
face it congress (and John Kerry) dropped the ball..
Congress is controlled by Bush's party, Kerry isn't part of that party, so you can't blame Kerry individually (well you can, but anyone who knows how Congress is being run now, knows its not true).
wow can you point the the part of the authority they gave him in which they said you must meet these conditions?
If you're being honest look up what the final UN resolution actually said, in its last paragraph. It was clear from that the intent of all those countries who voted for it (except the US and maybe UK) was for the question of war to come back to the UNSC for a final up-or-down vote. Obviously, Bush never bothered to bring it back to the UN. His PR folk just started yelling "this gives us authoriztion!", and they kept on yelling that until most everyone in the US started to believe it. The Big Lie.
I would never give a blanket 'authorization' you either say yes were going to war or no were not. This was not the examploe of the president making war, congress made it.
Except of course that the Congress was controlled by the Reps, so they ensured no amendments to the war authorization bill were possible, and since the original bill was written by the White House.......
have never seen it in writing *within* the actual autorization.
Naturally, since the authorization was written by the White House, and no changes to it were allowed.
There are a number of disturbing things going on in the Congress now, especially the House, that make me wonder if we really have reached the point of Tyranny of the Majority. After controlling Congress for 20 of 28 years, the Reps have made changes to operational rules and such that have effectivelly rendered the minority in the House absolutely powerless. Yes, Dems have done some similar things when they were in power, but not to the extreme that the Reps have done in the House, partly because the Reps have managed lock-step discipline within their ranks (by threatening to defund any of their own people that don't vote the party line on all major bills) in a way the Dems have never accomplished before.
And once the Reps manage to take away the filibuster from the Dems in the Senate (I heard they were working on that through some procedural scheme) then there will be no breaks on the majority in the Senate either. And considering the enforced discipline the Reps use, every single Rep in Congress simply becomes an extension of a Republican POTUS's will on major issues. Bush isn't just the President anymore, he's also the House and Senate Majority Leaders. That is scary (this kind of lock-step discipline within a party controlled by just one person is part of why a lot of early Americans including Washington were suspicious of political parties).
because Iraq only harbored and supported Al Qaeda,
Huh? You guys really go out of your way to stretch and distort the truth don't you?
Hussein was supporting a lot of cross-border terrorism against Iran, so your statement is not only false for that reason, its also false because "harbored and supported" is not the same as "low level contacts and communications". On that basis, all Muslim countries were guilty (of having low level communications with various terrorist outfits) and we should invade all of them too.
The problem is simple: Bush has never laid out the rationale for attacking Iraq after Afghanistan and not only not attacking others, but why it had to be Iraq first and not Iran or NK or Syria. Every excuse used for Iraq applies to numerous other countries, but we all now they won't be attacked, since some of them are considered allies or even friends. At least by this Administration's definition of a friendly country: "Anyone who sells us oil cheap".
You seem to be ignoring the part where kerry says he was paralized and unable to think for an hour
LOL! And you seem to be ignoring the fact that Kerry wasn't the bloody President at that moment. There *was* nothing for him to do but do what the rest of us did and stare at the TV in disbelief. But hey, a free, cheap shot at Kerry is worth it every time to you guys, and the truth be damned, right?
You'd be amazed how many Iraqis are saying 'yes' to that right now. Maybe they don't really mean it, or maybe they just say it out of frustration, but for many of them life is living hell now.
Copying is easy, cheap, but illegal (except for fair use)
Not any more. Remember the DMCA? Wrap any kind of copy protection around the content and presto: to exercize Fair Use requires violating the DMCA, thus Fair Use is now effectively illegal too.
No, Faith requires that you accept ideas as fact without evidence to prove they are fact. Faith and facts just simply don't mix very well. For Faith, facts just get in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read your own link, you'll notice the Indian's powered down their own NPP, just 8 months after it started to use just part of its fuel for their bomb, so they were using "fresh" fuel, and apparently mixing it with "pure" plutoniom they already had. Because of this, I don't think you've proven your point.
That depends on your definition of RGPU. If we're talking, and this was mentioned earlier in the thread, about Integral Fast Reactors, the answer is no. The fuel from this kind of reactor, is exceedingly difficult to use for weapons. So difficult to use in fact, that any country capable of doing it, is almost certainly technically capable of making even better nuclear bombs the conventional way like everyone else.
See here.
If that was all we had to worry about there wouldn't be nearly as many angry people as there are now after the elections. Unfortunately we all know what those Justices will really be for. pro-gun doesn't worry me, pro-god does.
Not really, they *are* in Texas after all.
Amazon is merely taking notes from the Grandmaster.
???
Do you really think the POTUS doesn't trump ordinary folk when it comes to telephone usage? The Prez ALWAYS gets through, if that means someone else is kicked off the line, well, too bad, and if its DC he's calling he'll get through because the POTUS doesn't rely on civilian telecommunications to talk to the White House or other government agencies in Washington while he's away (a multi-million dollar telecommunications system follows him around wherever he goes).
The parent was right, truly awesome.
No, in the believer's mind it is now a fact, but that doesn't make the fact true, and thus, in my book, it is not a fact. To rationalists listening to the believer it is still *faith*, because the believer has not shown sufficient evidence to make it a 'fact'.
Well, they obviously don't want any part of Bush's crap, however, judging by reaction overseas, if it were Kerry's crap, it may not stink as bad to them.
Still stuck in the past, huh, daldredge?
The left supports him because he had the courage to speak the truth at a time when many others remained in denial. Many, 30 years later, are still in denial, like, apparently, you. Try as hard as you might though, Kerry will be far less affected by that 3 decade old war, than Bush will be by the current war he started himself, especially if he stays in denial about the realities on the ground there.
I kinda agree on this, at least for the FR crowd. If you've got some time to waste, try digging up FR's open thread from after the debate (when I looked at it it was over 3100 posts), and it becomes pretty clear there are very few open-minded folk there. A few posters (that seemed to be regulars, not trolls) were just viciously attacked by the others when they criticised Bush, or just admitted they thought Bush "lost" the debate. Believing Bush lost apparently constitutes "treason" to some there. Most of the thread was spent trying to decide who they should blame for Bush looking and acting poorly. Jim Lehrer, the "left wing media", Bush's handlers, the Dems because they somehow got all the questions and prepped Kerry for them, so he'd have smart clever answers for them (the idea that Kerry just might be a smart clever guy naturally was never even mentioned of course), etc, these were all brought up as possible scapegoats, all of course, except Bush himself. You got ridiculous comments like "Kerry lied 6 times per sentence", and "God Bless George W Bush" *after* the debate when it seemed apparent God hadn't actually given him a particularly strong blessing. It was sad, hilarious, and scary at the same time.
Maybe its just the FR demographic, but at the same time, I also get the feeling the country is now more radically polarized than ever before. There is a lot more anger on the left than in the past, and the vitriol from both sides is vicious (to judge even from p.s.o). Its so bad, the subject of Bush is taboo with certain members of my extended family. There are several in my family that voted for Bush who will vote for Kerry this time, plus a few who registered for the first time just so they could vote for A.B.B., but discussing it with the diehard conservatives in the rest of the family is considered.... well.... problematic.
Frustrating isn't it? The naive parent gets "Insightful", but the truth gets nothing from the mods. So much for a left-bias here, all thats really going on is an overly-idealistic, ostrich-head-in-the-sand anti-government bias which unfortunately doesn't lead to anything positive or constructive. Sure there is some truth to the "Republicrat" theory, at the State and Congressional level there is a lot of truth, but this completely ignores that the individual sitting in the White House could be good or horrible for the country and the reasons may have NOTHING to do with his politics.
We voted a moron into the White House and we are now paying the price, and there is still a few clueless claiming there isn't a difference. LOL! Wake up people, the anger you see here in p.s.o and elsewhere isn't because of the usual Republicrat politics, the issue is about the basic (in)competency of the POTUS. Like it or not, this time, THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. To say otherwise is simply an indirect way of defending Bush, but its too late for that, because too many people have figured out that he wasn't the best man for the job after all.
Careful, you don't want to send these poor souls into a psychotic state, you need to introduce them to reality gently, one step at a time. Wait a few months into the therapy before you tell them the truth about the hats.... that one always hurts the most....
My affiliations always become painfully self-evident within 2 sentences. For me, a sig would just be redundant.
Well, the sig would be Redundant, but since most folks have usually already tagged the body of my post as Troll or Flamebait, the sig wouldn't get its proper due anyway, so I just leave it out.
Except Federalism lost and Nationalism won, and now the status is reversed. Federal laws have more effect on the average citizen than State laws. Federal power now trumps State power in almost every meaningful way. All of the Federal legislative and judicial power grabs since the end of the Civil War have completely reversed the field, which is why I, for one, don't see the rationale for the EC system to be used for selecting our national leader anymore. The national leader now has (potentially) a much more profound effect on the average citizen than his State's governor, thus every citizen's vote should count equally in deciding the national leader.
It seems to me a lot of the people arguing for the EC in this thread aren't taking into account that the country our Founding Father's created DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE.
It made sense when we were a largely rural, agrarian, lightly-populated federal republic, with a very restrained central government and strong provinces, but we are now a largely urbanized, industrialized and heavily-populated country with a powerful central government and weak provinces. The shoe just don't fit no more, folks.
NO. It merely *reverses* the unfairness, making smaller populated areas have more power than the larger populated areas. It isn't correcting a wrong, merely replacing one wrong with another.
The question now is, given the state of our country today versus in the 18th century, which wrong hurts us more?
Given that we are now a mainly urbanized nation, EC for the post of President of the entire nation just doesn't make sense any more.
Typically, only 51% to 60% of the population in a given area shares his beliefs. So, the other 40% to 49% simply don't exist? Under Winner-Takes-All, they certainly aren't represented at all.
Oh, I don't know, how about the former being legal and common practice then and the later being illegal now? I mean just the reference of a "non-OSHA approved" building tells you something is much better today than 2 centuries ago.
To some degree I tend to agree with you (minimum wage employees being "cheaper" than slave labor so in economic terms the poor are even more exploited now), but please don't try to additionally make the argument that people today are suffering the same kind of physical abuse at the same frequency that slaves suffered in the 19th century, because it simply isn't true, and ends up detracting from the rest of your argument.
Congress is controlled by Bush's party, Kerry isn't part of that party, so you can't blame Kerry individually (well you can, but anyone who knows how Congress is being run now, knows its not true).
If you're being honest look up what the final UN resolution actually said, in its last paragraph. It was clear from that the intent of all those countries who voted for it (except the US and maybe UK) was for the question of war to come back to the UNSC for a final up-or-down vote. Obviously, Bush never bothered to bring it back to the UN. His PR folk just started yelling "this gives us authoriztion!", and they kept on yelling that until most everyone in the US started to believe it. The Big Lie.
Except of course that the Congress was controlled by the Reps, so they ensured no amendments to the war authorization bill were possible, and since the original bill was written by the White House.......
Naturally, since the authorization was written by the White House, and no changes to it were allowed.
There are a number of disturbing things going on in the Congress now, especially the House, that make me wonder if we really have reached the point of Tyranny of the Majority. After controlling Congress for 20 of 28 years, the Reps have made changes to operational rules and such that have effectivelly rendered the minority in the House absolutely powerless. Yes, Dems have done some similar things when they were in power, but not to the extreme that the Reps have done in the House, partly because the Reps have managed lock-step discipline within their ranks (by threatening to defund any of their own people that don't vote the party line on all major bills) in a way the Dems have never accomplished before.
And once the Reps manage to take away the filibuster from the Dems in the Senate (I heard they were working on that through some procedural scheme) then there will be no breaks on the majority in the Senate either. And considering the enforced discipline the Reps use, every single Rep in Congress simply becomes an extension of a Republican POTUS's will on major issues. Bush isn't just the President anymore, he's also the House and Senate Majority Leaders. That is scary (this kind of lock-step discipline within a party controlled by just one person is part of why a lot of early Americans including Washington were suspicious of political parties).
Huh? You guys really go out of your way to stretch and distort the truth don't you?
Hussein was supporting a lot of cross-border terrorism against Iran, so your statement is not only false for that reason, its also false because "harbored and supported" is not the same as "low level contacts and communications". On that basis, all Muslim countries were guilty (of having low level communications with various terrorist outfits) and we should invade all of them too.
The problem is simple: Bush has never laid out the rationale for attacking Iraq after Afghanistan and not only not attacking others, but why it had to be Iraq first and not Iran or NK or Syria. Every excuse used for Iraq applies to numerous other countries, but we all now they won't be attacked, since some of them are considered allies or even friends. At least by this Administration's definition of a friendly country: "Anyone who sells us oil cheap".
LOL! And you seem to be ignoring the fact that Kerry wasn't the bloody President at that moment. There *was* nothing for him to do but do what the rest of us did and stare at the TV in disbelief. But hey, a free, cheap shot at Kerry is worth it every time to you guys, and the truth be damned, right?
Only if we also agree to mod all Fox News posts down for the same reason.
You'd be amazed how many Iraqis are saying 'yes' to that right now. Maybe they don't really mean it, or maybe they just say it out of frustration, but for many of them life is living hell now.
And Bush used the same tactic to get all the way to the White House, just look at his character assasination of John McCain in the Rep primaries.
Not any more. Remember the DMCA? Wrap any kind of copy protection around the content and presto: to exercize Fair Use requires violating the DMCA, thus Fair Use is now effectively illegal too.
No, Faith requires that you accept ideas as fact without evidence to prove they are fact. Faith and facts just simply don't mix very well. For Faith, facts just get in the way.