Actually, this is incorrect. Outside of Bush (and who is very wrong in doing so), calling for the elimination of all 527s, no one even mentioned them at all until the Swift Boat Vets came out. Then all of a sudden, all the Democrats wanted conservative 527s shut down.
Sorry, but this is completely wrong.
After the Swift Boat ads, Kerry never demanded that all 527s be stopped. He just denounced the ones he believed was wrong. So did McCain. They both asked Bush to do the same, yet his response was to say *all* 527s should be stopped.
There is a reason why the Reps want to kill all of these groups: because the RNC is financially stronger, and depends much less on soft money and 527 outfits(1). This link is from Jan 2004, before the Swift Boat Ambush, so the idea of going after 527s did not start with the Swift Boat ads, its just awfully darn convenient that Bush can now use the Swift Boat ads (without ever actually condemning what they said) as an excuse to effectively hurt his opposition much more than his own party.
So no, I don't see the Reps as being stand-up on this issue either. Its just a calculated political decision that losing 527s hurts their opponent more than it hurts them.
I'm not exactly happy with Kerry, but compared to Bush/Cheney he's a Saint.
1: I assume this is because the Reps can get more individual donations for the maximum allowed amount ($2000), whereas the Dems needs many more donors to get the same amount, so the money is on the Reps side (but we already knew that didn't we?).
Except the main parties are starting to change too. The neo-con Reps aren't particularly fiscally-conservative, and the new Deps aren't particulary fiscally socialist anymore. You have old timers on both sides still (D-Kennedy=fiscal liberal, R-McCain=fical conservative), but they are now a minority within their own parties, the real gap that remains between the parties as a whole now is on social issues.
I wouldn't call that rigging. Granted, the representation isn't completely proportional, and redrawing of the district boundaries is sometimes motivated by partisan politics, but that is far from being a widespread issue.
Its called gerrymandering. Look it up. It is a *serious* problem because its creating perpetually "safe" seats, reducing the turnover in any given election, in the Congress. One side gets to hold on to power much longer, and the longer they stay in power, the more damage they do.
No one knows how to do that. The subduction zone isn't 2, 3, or 4 miles down, its more like 30-50 miles down. We don't know how to drill that far down and deposit something.
However, there is another option, less popular because its not as 'kool' as the subduction zone theory, and it doesn't end with the destruction of the nuclear waste, but still effectively a permanent solution. That is the sub-seabed idea. Deposit nuclear waste in long term storage containers (like the ones this article was talking about) below the surface of the sea floor, in the areas to either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge. The Atlantic seabed grows from the (non-violent) upwelling of lava along the ridge and slowly spreads east-west. There is little threat of major geologic activity on either side of the ridge. The seabed will remain undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years as it, and the waste buried in it, slowly slide east or west. The waste doesn't disappear, but it would be in what many scientists think is the safest place on the planet in terms of geological activity, certainly a safer place than Yucca Mountain will ever be.
The grandparent is also wrong. We don't dump anything *on* the sea floor, its buried *under* the seafloor, that is something we can do (although at great cost). Also keep in mind there is very little erosion on the deep ocean sea floor, so we don't have to worry about this stuff becoming uncovered or leaking anytime while its still a radioactive hazard.
We might still need crude for specialty applications,
A lot of people don't realize our plastics industry depends on oil, oil is the main ingredient in making plastic. So oil will still be needed, and lots of it.
I sincerely hope you wrote this before Engineer-Poet made his reply above you.
Seriously, you guys should read up on Integral Fast Reactors. They solve or reduce a lot of problems without adding new ones. With an IFR, your entire argument is rendered practically null, except for the argument over the end-state of the refined fuel. As Engineer-Poet says:
Further, the re-refined fuel would have had sufficient contamination from fission products that it would have been nearly impossible to steal without killing the people trying to steal it. There goes your proliferation threat.
Some extremists of course say making the fuel so highly radioactive itself isn't enough to stop proliferation despite the obvious extreme difficulty anyone would have in moving that stuff around. For reasonable people though this is enough to render proliferation impossible for all but the most advanced countries, and those countries are close enough to having the whole ball of wax that they'll likely solve the problem the old fashioned way.
Chernobyl is not a good example, because nothing like it was built outside the USSR, and nothing like it will ever be built anywhere else (Chernobyl's plant didn't have a containment structure around it, something every NPP in the western world has - and thats just for starters). Use a more reasonable example, say 3MI. Now ask yourself how many people died from the 3MI accident versus the people dying every year due to problems related to the mining, processing, and burning of coal or oil? While you're discovering that, also ask yourself which is really worse for your health: a NPP or a coal fired plant? You may be really surprised (read the description of what a "modern" coal plant emits to the environment and its effect on people's health).
Conclusion: Chernobyl is a straw man, used by those too lazy to come up with a serious argument against *modern* nuclear power(1), or simply because fearmongering has worked well so far.
1: By modern I'm not referring to the old 1st generation plants we have in the US, but the 3rd and 4th generation plants the rest of the world is still building. New designs which are inheriently safer and more efficient.
You just can't distribute the modified source without permission from the author. Is that a big problem for you?
It is for a lot of people. Take the latest copyright skirmish as an example (just read it here earlier). There is a lot of "orphaned" works out there that can't be released to the public domain because the holder of the copyright isn't known or can't be found, or it is too expensive to go around trying to find the missing author/owner. We're talking about stuff that no one is making money on anymore, old works that have largely disappeared alltogether, and under the old copyright rules would have passed into the public domain because no one would have bothered to maintain the copyright protection on them. Thats why this kind of restriction is considered too restrictive for FOS software.
My personal nit: Because of a similar type of restriction, the roguelike game "Angband" still can't be distributed in Debian's main archive because they can't find the original authors to get clarification on the license. Angband is FOS in every respect except for a "do not sell this for money" clause in the original (which predates the FOS movement). The authors's intent was pretty clear, they didn't want people to sell the game as a closed-source, for profit software, but since their choice of words also legally prevents any redistribution of this game at all (as part of a larger Linux distro), it can't be distributed by anyone, other than by downloading off the net. The original authors would more than likely have agreed to something like a BSD or GPL license, but since we can't find them to get their permission, their software is effectively non-free.
By using a rule like this you're basically saying: "this is only free software once you've tracked me down and got my permission (and this assumes you won't change your mind between the original release and the moment someone asks permission to release a modified version). For a lot of people, simply on principal, this is a non-starter.
I suppose it'd still be legal to distribute patches to djbdns
Yea, they tried that with Minix for a long while despite all the aggravations it caused, then Linux came along with a GPL license, and the rest is history....
Agreed, but next time don't quote the troll in your response. You're doing what the troll wants you to do: transferring his stupidity from a modded down post to one that isn't modded down.
Actually, conservatives are being very careful not to question anybody's patriotism, the Democrats keep accusing them of it.
LOL! You and I aren't living in the same country then. I think you may have that reversed in both ways. Conservatives always question a liberal's patriotism when the liberal opposes the use of military force (whatever the specifics).
I'm conservative. I've never questioned anybody's patriotism.
A rarity indeed. Maybe you're more libertarian than conservative? Or maybe you're one of the few classical conservatives left, and not one of the NeoCon Neanderthals now in power?
I mean, come on. Allawi accused of being a US puppet by a guy who wants the office of President, where he'd likely work with him in rebuilding his country? HELLO? Alienating important allies in the Middle East before he even gets in office? What's John Kerry smoking?
I guess he's smoking the same thing I am, its called 'reality'.
:)
Allawi wouldn't have any power were it not for the US military, so by definition that makes him a US puppet, at least for now. I'm amazed you'd argue against that logic. How long would Allawi stay in office if the US Army withdrew from Iraq? We know that the Iraqi forces still can't stand and fight the Sunni and Shite extremists because of mixed loyalties.
As for alienating our former Mideast allies, I think Bush has already accomplished that admirably. Kerry would actually find some support from Muslim nations who're still angry over Bush's arrogance and stupidity.
That one's as rich as authorizing use of force in Iraq, but voting against funding for the guys on the ground.
Only in Bush's world where everything is cartoon-simple and black and white, and the Good Guys(tm) are easy to spot from the white stetson hats they wear. Only the naive think those 2 votes were about the same thing. Unfortunately, the rest of us know how Congress really works. But hey, who cares what the truth is, as long as the Big Lie gets you the votes?
They don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up.
That's not correct. From http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm
I'm afraid it is correct. I'll give up my chance to mod some people down in this thread to correct this (I would dearly love to mod the guy who said people who give up looking for a job are "people who want to die" as '-5 Idiot'). That link above is an answer to a *different* (false) statement. The parent poster pasted in the answer, but didn't show us the statement the answer was in response to, which was:
The government understates the unemployment rate because they report how many people are collecting unemployment insurance rather than how many people are out of work.
This is *not* the same as:
They don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up.
Since this statement has another component besides the reference to employment insurance. If we leave out that part and just say "They don't count people who have simply given up.", the answer to that is **TRUE**. From the Department of Labor:
Unemployed persons are:
* All persons who were not classified as employed during the survey reference week, made specific active efforts to find a job during the prior 4 weeks, and were available for work.
* All persons who were not working and were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off.
If you don't qualify under one of those 2 criteria you are not considered "unemployed". The CPS survey only asks if you've tried in the last 4 weeks to get a job, it doesn't ask the people if they've "given up trying" (after looking for a job while they had UI and longer). So, the people who have given up trying are usually referred to as "not in the workforce" (see the definition of this in the same link), because they aren't "actively" trying to find a job.
The unemployment numbers just tell us who is currently trying to find a job now, it doesn't tell us how hard those jobs are to find or that they exist at all. Obviously, if the jobs are rare and hard to find, many people will fail to find one, and a lot of *them*, such as spouses of other employed persons, or those who can fall back on family support, *will* give up, at least for a time.
A consensus (large majority, but not necessarily everyone) of the scientific community does know. They know human kind is having an effect on the environment, and to the extent that these effects are causing significant changes, disturbances and loss of species and wildlife habitat compared to what was here before, then it is considered a negative change. Do they know precisely what the effects will be in the *future*? No, that is what the arguments are about. But if you really believe the scientific community hasn't come to majority agreement that humankind has already had a negative impact on the Earth's environment, then you are just the opposite of those "enviro" lunatics you mentioned, and are just spewing out your own brand of propaganda.
Read the news. We're trying to get the Sudanese to do something on their own, and trying to get the UN involved.
The UN is already involved, Koffi Anan was talking about Sudan before we were.
Iran is going to be a mess, similar to North Korea, because of the UN
UN's fault? Evidence please?
As I understand it, NK is a mess because they might already have nukes, never mind their 4 million man army. Iran is a mess because they might have nukes within a year, they are not the pushover Iraq was, UN support is unlikely because of Russian opposition, and the Middle East would likely blow up in our faces if we attacked Iran so soon after Afghanistan and Iraq.
We're trying to do it "The Right Way"
Like we did with Iraq?
The UN is a broken organization
Yea, yea, funny how the UN is only broken when its standing in the way of a conservative President having his way with the world. When Clinton got NATO on board for an attack on Yugoslavia (which he had to do because everyone knew Russia would block any action against Serbia in the UN), all of a sudden you conservatives were big UN fans. Hypocrisy at its finest.
No single country should be able to stop resolutions with a veto
Except for the US right? We get to keep our veto because we're special, is that it? Ask around, man, you won't find a SINGLE Rep in Congress agreeable to giving up America's veto in the UN, except for the extremists who just want us to pull out and let the world go to hell again.
Your idea of a useful United Nations is one that agrees with the United States all the time. That is just pitiful coming from people who always talk about freedom and the right to disagree, etc, etc. Since when did "Leader of the Free World" become "Dictator of the World" to you guys? Sad, just really sad.
So few voters care about issues that the three most effective paths for a campaign are to push the opposition as either stupid, dishonest, or just unpleasant. Think back a bit- Reagan won on pleasant, Dukasis lost on unpleasant (tank-riding) and stupid (furlough), Bush lost on stupid (economy down) and dishonest ("Read my lips"), then Dole lost on unpleasant (he's a zombie), and finally Gore lost with unpleasant (he's a robot). So the trend is that looks & charm is the dominant "issue". All indications are that Bush will win this year, because he's got pleasantness sewn up, and he's managed to not only neutralize the stupidity area, but actually transform it into a boost to his perceived honesty ("Bush wasn't lying about Iraq- that Saddam tricked him is all")
I want to disagree, but I can't find any fault with your logic. Damn you.
Please provide some actual evidence of this, because judging by the terror acts around the world (Indonesia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Europe), claimed by members of Al Queda, they seem to still be a very *substantial* shell of their former selves.
The mafia comparison is meaningless, since Al Queda's leadership can remain in hiding in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan and just use a cell phone to order sleeper cells into action around the world. Hell, we may have to face the possibilty, maybe the likelyhood, that Al Queda outside of Afghanistan is largely autonomous now. This snake no longer has just one head.
This is meaningless for Iraq, since although Al Qaeda is responsible for a lot of the terrorist bombings, they aren't the forces we are battling in the Sunni triangle (Falluja, Samara) or the Shite controlled areas (Sadr City, southern Iraq).
Oh, this is easy. You see, Bush is an idiot. He thumbs his nose at half the world, calls the UN 'irrelvent', unilaterally invades Iraq with no Muslim support at all, and he was just sure everyone would welcome us with open arms like the Kuwaitis did with his Daddy. You see, he REALLY DID THINK THE WAR WAS OVER THEN! This despite hundreds, if not thousands, of people saying - no, SCREAMING - then that the war against Saddam's army would be *easy*, but the war against the Islamic resistance in Iraq would be *impossible*. But, hey, what do we know, we're just folks who actually stayed awake during history class, or we're Vietnam Vets who can tell you all about good intentions getting you absolutely nowhere, but since we aren't the POTUS, we must be wrong. [grind teeth, and create a few new adjectives for the English language]
Well, now that someone on/. has told me this, I feel a lot better now. Thanks! I'll just ignore Rummy's comment about "some" of Iraq not being able to participate in the elections, which will automatically mean the resistance will declare the results meaningless, and the fighting will just intensify. *You* just told me it won't happen. Whew, for a minute there I was worried.
One of those radical shifts is how we're approaching nation building.
The fact we have a President willing to try a policy that we already knew was a failure is the only 'radical' part of this problem. Because Bush Jr. never paid attention in history class, we're repeating (bad) history. The only question left is how many young men and women are we going to sacrifice before we realize Iraq II is actually Vietnam II?
YOU CAN'T HELP PEOPLE WHO EITHER DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR 'HELP', OR DON'T WANT IT!
NATION BULIDING DOESN'T WORK LIKE A DEMOCRACY, A SUPPORTIVE BUT *SILENT* MAJORITY GUARANTEES FAILURE, NOT SUCCESS!
Not all Americans here have fallen for the conservatives' twisted idea of patriotism, I still like the French, even though they sometimes have an, uhhmm, 'prickly' attitude.:) Besides, I may have been the only American that actually read their plan for reinforcing the WMD inspectors in Iraq with combat troops and realized it would have worked (Saddam would have rejected it outright - he'd already hinted he would, thus forcing Europe to the conclusion that war was now the only option left).
If Bush Jr. had had the patience of his father, he'd be breezing to reelection right now.
Part of the reason why foreigners hate Bush is because Democrats have engaged in international relations sabotage during this presidency.
Now this is priceless. Everyone except Bush Jr's diehard supporters knows that he doesn't need any help at all to sabotage his own presidency, he, and Dick "Haliburton" Cheney and John "Patriot" Ashcroft are doing a bangup job all on their own.:)
He documents how developing nations that adopt free trade are freer, have cleaner environments, less corruption, better health care, and LESS income gap between the rich and poor. I found his book very informative.
But still flawed in some respects:
First, the effect of trans-national corporations interferes with this. Does American companies using cheap labor over the border in Mexico help Mexico as much as if those companies were Mexican?
Second, Johan's book is about the fusion of capitalism and (representative) democracy, not simply a book about capitalism. This means for example that what he documents does not apply to any repressive country that happens to allow a marginally open market economy. China, among many others for example, has lots of capitalism, but none of the other things: they aren't freer, their environments are getting worse (NYT has an article now about rural China becoming a dumping ground for industrial waste), corruption is horrendous, health care outside the cities is abysmal, and the income gap between the new rich and old poor, which mainly breaks down to the cities versus the rural areas, is still massive. Most of China's population is OUTSIDE the cities still, and they are mostly subsistence farmers.
Third, while this may be great for some of the developing countries, including countries opposed to democracy, it sucks for the developed, and largely democratic, world. Census figures in the US show the average American is getting poorer and the income gap between rich and poor is widening. Since the rest of the undeveloped world still has an ENORMOUS amount of work to catch up, this means most American's quality of life is going to slowly ERODE for the next few DECADES. Why am I supposed to be happy about that, especially when many of the beneficiaries are countries that have no interest in any individual's freedom?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since we're repeating the Vietnam tragedy all over again in Iraq, it seems we Americans have a very short national memory.
Sorry, but this is completely wrong.
After the Swift Boat ads, Kerry never demanded that all 527s be stopped. He just denounced the ones he believed was wrong. So did McCain. They both asked Bush to do the same, yet his response was to say *all* 527s should be stopped.
There is a reason why the Reps want to kill all of these groups: because the RNC is financially stronger, and depends much less on soft money and 527 outfits(1). This link is from Jan 2004, before the Swift Boat Ambush, so the idea of going after 527s did not start with the Swift Boat ads, its just awfully darn convenient that Bush can now use the Swift Boat ads (without ever actually condemning what they said) as an excuse to effectively hurt his opposition much more than his own party.
So no, I don't see the Reps as being stand-up on this issue either. Its just a calculated political decision that losing 527s hurts their opponent more than it hurts them.
I'm not exactly happy with Kerry, but compared to Bush/Cheney he's a Saint.
1: I assume this is because the Reps can get more individual donations for the maximum allowed amount ($2000), whereas the Dems needs many more donors to get the same amount, so the money is on the Reps side (but we already knew that didn't we?).
Huh? The DNC and RNC only ran ads in contested states too. *No one* can afford to run their ads *everywhere*.
Except the main parties are starting to change too. The neo-con Reps aren't particularly fiscally-conservative, and the new Deps aren't particulary fiscally socialist anymore. You have old timers on both sides still (D-Kennedy=fiscal liberal, R-McCain=fical conservative), but they are now a minority within their own parties, the real gap that remains between the parties as a whole now is on social issues.
Maybe one day when MS has real competition, they might do that. But not until then.
Its called gerrymandering. Look it up. It is a *serious* problem because its creating perpetually "safe" seats, reducing the turnover in any given election, in the Congress. One side gets to hold on to power much longer, and the longer they stay in power, the more damage they do.
No one knows how to do that. The subduction zone isn't 2, 3, or 4 miles down, its more like 30-50 miles down. We don't know how to drill that far down and deposit something.
However, there is another option, less popular because its not as 'kool' as the subduction zone theory, and it doesn't end with the destruction of the nuclear waste, but still effectively a permanent solution. That is the sub-seabed idea. Deposit nuclear waste in long term storage containers (like the ones this article was talking about) below the surface of the sea floor, in the areas to either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge. The Atlantic seabed grows from the (non-violent) upwelling of lava along the ridge and slowly spreads east-west. There is little threat of major geologic activity on either side of the ridge. The seabed will remain undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years as it, and the waste buried in it, slowly slide east or west. The waste doesn't disappear, but it would be in what many scientists think is the safest place on the planet in terms of geological activity, certainly a safer place than Yucca Mountain will ever be.
The grandparent is also wrong. We don't dump anything *on* the sea floor, its buried *under* the seafloor, that is something we can do (although at great cost). Also keep in mind there is very little erosion on the deep ocean sea floor, so we don't have to worry about this stuff becoming uncovered or leaking anytime while its still a radioactive hazard.
A lot of people don't realize our plastics industry depends on oil, oil is the main ingredient in making plastic. So oil will still be needed, and lots of it.
Seriously, you guys should read up on Integral Fast Reactors. They solve or reduce a lot of problems without adding new ones. With an IFR, your entire argument is rendered practically null, except for the argument over the end-state of the refined fuel. As Engineer-Poet says:
Some extremists of course say making the fuel so highly radioactive itself isn't enough to stop proliferation despite the obvious extreme difficulty anyone would have in moving that stuff around. For reasonable people though this is enough to render proliferation impossible for all but the most advanced countries, and those countries are close enough to having the whole ball of wax that they'll likely solve the problem the old fashioned way.
Chernobyl is not a good example, because nothing like it was built outside the USSR, and nothing like it will ever be built anywhere else (Chernobyl's plant didn't have a containment structure around it, something every NPP in the western world has - and thats just for starters). Use a more reasonable example, say 3MI. Now ask yourself how many people died from the 3MI accident versus the people dying every year due to problems related to the mining, processing, and burning of coal or oil? While you're discovering that, also ask yourself which is really worse for your health: a NPP or a coal fired plant? You may be really surprised (read the description of what a "modern" coal plant emits to the environment and its effect on people's health).
Conclusion: Chernobyl is a straw man, used by those too lazy to come up with a serious argument against *modern* nuclear power(1), or simply because fearmongering has worked well so far.
1: By modern I'm not referring to the old 1st generation plants we have in the US, but the 3rd and 4th generation plants the rest of the world is still building. New designs which are inheriently safer and more efficient.
It is for a lot of people. Take the latest copyright skirmish as an example (just read it here earlier). There is a lot of "orphaned" works out there that can't be released to the public domain because the holder of the copyright isn't known or can't be found, or it is too expensive to go around trying to find the missing author/owner. We're talking about stuff that no one is making money on anymore, old works that have largely disappeared alltogether, and under the old copyright rules would have passed into the public domain because no one would have bothered to maintain the copyright protection on them. Thats why this kind of restriction is considered too restrictive for FOS software.
My personal nit: Because of a similar type of restriction, the roguelike game "Angband" still can't be distributed in Debian's main archive because they can't find the original authors to get clarification on the license. Angband is FOS in every respect except for a "do not sell this for money" clause in the original (which predates the FOS movement). The authors's intent was pretty clear, they didn't want people to sell the game as a closed-source, for profit software, but since their choice of words also legally prevents any redistribution of this game at all (as part of a larger Linux distro), it can't be distributed by anyone, other than by downloading off the net. The original authors would more than likely have agreed to something like a BSD or GPL license, but since we can't find them to get their permission, their software is effectively non-free.
By using a rule like this you're basically saying: "this is only free software once you've tracked me down and got my permission (and this assumes you won't change your mind between the original release and the moment someone asks permission to release a modified version). For a lot of people, simply on principal, this is a non-starter.
Yea, they tried that with Minix for a long while despite all the aggravations it caused, then Linux came along with a GPL license, and the rest is history....
Agreed, but next time don't quote the troll in your response. You're doing what the troll wants you to do: transferring his stupidity from a modded down post to one that isn't modded down.
Just an FYI.
LOL! You and I aren't living in the same country then. I think you may have that reversed in both ways. Conservatives always question a liberal's patriotism when the liberal opposes the use of military force (whatever the specifics).
A rarity indeed. Maybe you're more libertarian than conservative? Or maybe you're one of the few classical conservatives left, and not one of the NeoCon Neanderthals now in power?
I guess he's smoking the same thing I am, its called 'reality'.
Allawi wouldn't have any power were it not for the US military, so by definition that makes him a US puppet, at least for now. I'm amazed you'd argue against that logic. How long would Allawi stay in office if the US Army withdrew from Iraq? We know that the Iraqi forces still can't stand and fight the Sunni and Shite extremists because of mixed loyalties.
As for alienating our former Mideast allies, I think Bush has already accomplished that admirably. Kerry would actually find some support from Muslim nations who're still angry over Bush's arrogance and stupidity.
Only in Bush's world where everything is cartoon-simple and black and white, and the Good Guys(tm) are easy to spot from the white stetson hats they wear. Only the naive think those 2 votes were about the same thing. Unfortunately, the rest of us know how Congress really works. But hey, who cares what the truth is, as long as the Big Lie gets you the votes?
I'm afraid it is correct. I'll give up my chance to mod some people down in this thread to correct this (I would dearly love to mod the guy who said people who give up looking for a job are "people who want to die" as '-5 Idiot'). That link above is an answer to a *different* (false) statement. The parent poster pasted in the answer, but didn't show us the statement the answer was in response to, which was:
This is *not* the same as:
Since this statement has another component besides the reference to employment insurance. If we leave out that part and just say "They don't count people who have simply given up.", the answer to that is **TRUE**. From the Department of Labor:
If you don't qualify under one of those 2 criteria you are not considered "unemployed". The CPS survey only asks if you've tried in the last 4 weeks to get a job, it doesn't ask the people if they've "given up trying" (after looking for a job while they had UI and longer). So, the people who have given up trying are usually referred to as "not in the workforce" (see the definition of this in the same link), because they aren't "actively" trying to find a job.
The unemployment numbers just tell us who is currently trying to find a job now, it doesn't tell us how hard those jobs are to find or that they exist at all. Obviously, if the jobs are rare and hard to find, many people will fail to find one, and a lot of *them*, such as spouses of other employed persons, or those who can fall back on family support, *will* give up, at least for a time.
A consensus (large majority, but not necessarily everyone) of the scientific community does know. They know human kind is having an effect on the environment, and to the extent that these effects are causing significant changes, disturbances and loss of species and wildlife habitat compared to what was here before, then it is considered a negative change. Do they know precisely what the effects will be in the *future*? No, that is what the arguments are about. But if you really believe the scientific community hasn't come to majority agreement that humankind has already had a negative impact on the Earth's environment, then you are just the opposite of those "enviro" lunatics you mentioned, and are just spewing out your own brand of propaganda.
The UN is already involved, Koffi Anan was talking about Sudan before we were.
UN's fault? Evidence please?
As I understand it, NK is a mess because they might already have nukes, never mind their 4 million man army. Iran is a mess because they might have nukes within a year, they are not the pushover Iraq was, UN support is unlikely because of Russian opposition, and the Middle East would likely blow up in our faces if we attacked Iran so soon after Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like we did with Iraq?
Yea, yea, funny how the UN is only broken when its standing in the way of a conservative President having his way with the world. When Clinton got NATO on board for an attack on Yugoslavia (which he had to do because everyone knew Russia would block any action against Serbia in the UN), all of a sudden you conservatives were big UN fans. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Except for the US right? We get to keep our veto because we're special, is that it? Ask around, man, you won't find a SINGLE Rep in Congress agreeable to giving up America's veto in the UN, except for the extremists who just want us to pull out and let the world go to hell again.
Your idea of a useful United Nations is one that agrees with the United States all the time. That is just pitiful coming from people who always talk about freedom and the right to disagree, etc, etc. Since when did "Leader of the Free World" become "Dictator of the World" to you guys? Sad, just really sad.
I want to disagree, but I can't find any fault with your logic. Damn you.
Oh, this is easy. You see, Bush is an idiot. He thumbs his nose at half the world, calls the UN 'irrelvent', unilaterally invades Iraq with no Muslim support at all, and he was just sure everyone would welcome us with open arms like the Kuwaitis did with his Daddy. You see, he REALLY DID THINK THE WAR WAS OVER THEN! This despite hundreds, if not thousands, of people saying - no, SCREAMING - then that the war against Saddam's army would be *easy*, but the war against the Islamic resistance in Iraq would be *impossible*. But, hey, what do we know, we're just folks who actually stayed awake during history class, or we're Vietnam Vets who can tell you all about good intentions getting you absolutely nowhere, but since we aren't the POTUS, we must be wrong. [grind teeth, and create a few new adjectives for the English language]
Well, now that someone on
The fact we have a President willing to try a policy that we already knew was a failure is the only 'radical' part of this problem. Because Bush Jr. never paid attention in history class, we're repeating (bad) history. The only question left is how many young men and women are we going to sacrifice before we realize Iraq II is actually Vietnam II?
"I won't do things the way Bush has been doing them" is the only plan I need to hear.
Not all Americans here have fallen for the conservatives' twisted idea of patriotism, I still like the French, even though they sometimes have an, uhhmm, 'prickly' attitude. :) Besides, I may have been the only American that actually read their plan for reinforcing the WMD inspectors in Iraq with combat troops and realized it would have worked (Saddam would have rejected it outright - he'd already hinted he would, thus forcing Europe to the conclusion that war was now the only option left).
If Bush Jr. had had the patience of his father, he'd be breezing to reelection right now.
Now this is priceless. Everyone except Bush Jr's diehard supporters knows that he doesn't need any help at all to sabotage his own presidency, he, and Dick "Haliburton" Cheney and John "Patriot" Ashcroft are doing a bangup job all on their own.
But still flawed in some respects:
First, the effect of trans-national corporations interferes with this. Does American companies using cheap labor over the border in Mexico help Mexico as much as if those companies were Mexican?
Second, Johan's book is about the fusion of capitalism and (representative) democracy, not simply a book about capitalism. This means for example that what he documents does not apply to any repressive country that happens to allow a marginally open market economy. China, among many others for example, has lots of capitalism, but none of the other things: they aren't freer, their environments are getting worse (NYT has an article now about rural China becoming a dumping ground for industrial waste), corruption is horrendous, health care outside the cities is abysmal, and the income gap between the new rich and old poor, which mainly breaks down to the cities versus the rural areas, is still massive. Most of China's population is OUTSIDE the cities still, and they are mostly subsistence farmers.
Third, while this may be great for some of the developing countries, including countries opposed to democracy, it sucks for the developed, and largely democratic, world. Census figures in the US show the average American is getting poorer and the income gap between rich and poor is widening. Since the rest of the undeveloped world still has an ENORMOUS amount of work to catch up, this means most American's quality of life is going to slowly ERODE for the next few DECADES. Why am I supposed to be happy about that, especially when many of the beneficiaries are countries that have no interest in any individual's freedom?