Yeah, it's bad when you can't open up a newspaper or turn on the TV news shows without seeing some long-haired smelly dude going on about Linux and World Domination or some crap like that.
...if Kenneth Lay dies, we get to see his body so all the ex-Enron employees who were fleeced out of their retirement funds can piss in his cold dead mouth Remind me, did he have an open-casket funeral?
Without any of those records, it would have been a he said she said argument. Despite all of the exculpatory evidence you noted, and much more besides, he was prosecuted anyway. He truly did have nothing to hide, because that was exactly what he had to do with the events of that evening.
I really think that over the next thirty years we will find out whether in fact it was Smith or Marx who was right (my money is on Marx, as an economist you understand) and the laboratory will be China. Heh, mainstreamer. Actually, it's Mises who's right about pretty much everything.
The problem with the NRA is that they say they need guns to fight off tyranny but essentially define tyranny as not having guns. No, it's when only the government has guns. That's tyranny.
Very much agreed. There are plans afoot for returning our fiat currencies into commodity currencies (a la Rothard, Paul, etc) but the trick is to get people to realize that we are in a pickle. The problem is, how does one do that without sowing the seeds of financial panic. My grotesquely simplified guess is, 1) outlaw inflation, or simply pass a law informing the Fed that the existing money supply, in whatever form, is frozen. Demand an accounting. 2) Raise the reserve ratio to 100% in a series of steps. (The reserve ratio is now floating around 3% in some cases. If that doesn't give you the willies, you're not paying attention.) 3) Transfer governmental gold and/or silver reserves to commercial banks to back the currency available for the bank's depositors.
The serious weaknesses in such a plan are 1) panic, which might well happen anyway as soon as the masses figure out what's really going on, and 2) the powers-that-be decide they really like the leverage the have now and don't wish to go along, in which case you're back to the status quo and waiting for the inevitable meltdown.
I've always thought that the best way to create a proper e-voting system would be to run open source voting software from a live CD certified by the election board. Networked computers could transmit votes over the Net, and the results would be available as soon as the polls closed. Paper ballots are always a necessity, of course, but in this case, as a backup. Print two: one for the voter, on for the election board.
If you grant the government the power to borrow or inflate only in time of war, you'll get perpetual war. And if it's not a war against other nations, it will be a war against some social problem, or maybe terrorism or something. Hey, wait a minute...
Your children and grandchildren will really appreciate it. Unless you're a victim of said policy, in which case you won't have any children or grandchildren if you didn't get a chance to reproduce already.
Redhat has enough money to fight it out in court. Ubuntu is based where software patents are not valid so they don't have to worry. Makes me wonder if it wouldn't be best for Red Hat to incorporate a foundation for Fedora in Europe or China or somewhere that software patents are not recognized. Sealand, maybe?:)
I'm an Ubuntu user, but I'd switch back to Fedora if Canonical made a deal like Linspire's.
I'm sure many creationists would say the same thing about science museums. Touché. I'd be more than happy to let the builders of both kinds of museums fund themselves.
Which brings you squarely into the pro-life camp, and makes incubator/slaves of women. I won't bother to ask if that's what you really want. Instead, I'll quote from the paper:
Evictionism is a compromise position. It lies part way between the status quo, where babies are slaughtered with as much compunction as
we would swat a fly, and the present official goal of the pro-life movement, which is to force all pregnant women to carry their unborn child for
nine months and then deliver them. Under evictionism, each side gets half a loaf. The pro-lifers are assured that fetuses are not done away with in a cavaber manner. Had they their 'druthers, they would also insist that the natural mother bring the baby to term after a gestation period of nine months. This, they cannot have, under the terms of the evictionism compromise. Similarly, the pro-choicers obtain some but not all of what they want.
They wish the mother not only the right to cut short the pregnancy term but also to have a life and death say over the fate of the child they bear.
Under evictionism, they could only retain the former; the latter would be denied them. That is, the mother could end the pregnancy any time she
wished, but once she did so, the determination of life or death for her progeny would be out of her hands.
the record for the youngest baby to survive through use of an incubator was delivered at twenty-some-odd weeks Today, this is true. In the future, a doctor might be able to transplant a fertilized ovum at any stage of the pregnancy without harm. But the point of the proposal was simply to render null the idea that abortion was not in fact a killing (as many apologists for D&X procedures would have you believe), and yet maintain the principle that a woman's body is her own property.
In the case of those D&X pocedures, which are few enough in number to make me think that they are done only in extraordinary circumstances,I asked Dr. Block whether they were justified if the baby was, say, not expected to live much past birth due to malformations or illness. He replied, and I believe this is consistent, that one cannot kill the baby, that one may evict it via c-section, but one does not have to go to extraordinary measures to save it or lengthen its life (which would imply positive obligations that the law, properly formulated, does not recognize).
Thak you for your well-considered reply.
But pregnancy isn't even a trespasser or intruder, it is a welcomed guest. Not in all circumstances, even if the baby is either eventually welcomed or merely tolerated. Unless the pregnancy is planned, it's often an "oh, shit" moment for all involved. Besides, the point of the paper is that any intruder, including an unwanted fetus, must be evicted with the minimum amount of harm necessary. Today, except past the point of fetal viability, eviction requires killing. Given the pace of medical advancements however, this may not be the case in the future, and then a woman and her doctors would have no need to kill in order to evict. Anyway, the paper's there if you're interested.
OK, not exactly a third way, but there is a libertarian compromise that respects, as far as is practicable, both positions. (Granted, anyone who finds themselves in one camp or the other will disagree, but hear me out.) This compromise was worked out by Loyola professor Walter Block. It recognizes that abortion is two things: eviction of an unwanted intruder from a woman's body, and the murder of a unique human being. A woman has the perfect right to evict any intruder from her property, that is, her own body, at any time, for any reason. (Self-ownership is the first principle of liberty.) Block maintains that if the fetus can be evicted without killing it, there is a moral obligation to do so. To kill it when there are other avenues of eviction available is murder. Fetal viability comes into play, but not in the way that pro-lifers think: they think it has to be brought to term inside an unwilling woman's body once it is viable. Not so. Do a c-section and move the baby to an incubator. Happens all the time these days. Nor is anyone obligated to care for a baby so evicted, but people seem to be lining up to do just that, and good for them. Anyway, the paper is here.
It's much more an affront to their worldview to think that god didn't just snap its fingers and suddenly modern-day humans with their SUVs appeared. They have a need to believe that everything was planned and that their golf game will improve because it's their destiny. It's an interesting coincidence that Creationism seems to be an almost purely American phenomenom, as far as I can tell. One wonders if this is somehow connected with the fact that it's such a young culture as well.
If people were given more information about civil rights curtailment, they'd be more interested. I hope so, but I honestly don't know, and won't know until the mass media actually begins reporting on what's really going on. I suspect, though, that most of them won't care much until they see their friends and relatives shipped off to Guantanamo, thanks to a couple of ill-considered emails. Meanwhile, those that care can plug in to phenomenal news resources on the Internet. It's there for everyone else, too.
Yes, it is. He's the executive, he could have vetoed this if he found anything in there he did not support. Apparently he did not, and neither did the legislators who voted in favor of it. It's their fault, too.
Marshal Zhukov used to clear minefields by lining up soldiers along one side and ordering them to march across...Zhukov was...the Soviet Union's greatest general. The US army has the opposite problem, so it's always willing to trade equipment for people.
Uh-huh. Which general would you rather serve under?
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It's 2007. If you make a PDF out of your resume, they can read it. Better, they can't mess with it. Try PDF Creator.
Yeah, it's bad when you can't open up a newspaper or turn on the TV news shows without seeing some long-haired smelly dude going on about Linux and World Domination or some crap like that.
...if Kenneth Lay dies, we get to see his body so all the ex-Enron employees who were fleeced out of their retirement funds can piss in his cold dead mouth Remind me, did he have an open-casket funeral?Man, do I wish I had some mod points!
Very much agreed. There are plans afoot for returning our fiat currencies into commodity currencies (a la Rothard, Paul, etc) but the trick is to get people to realize that we are in a pickle. The problem is, how does one do that without sowing the seeds of financial panic. My grotesquely simplified guess is, 1) outlaw inflation, or simply pass a law informing the Fed that the existing money supply, in whatever form, is frozen. Demand an accounting. 2) Raise the reserve ratio to 100% in a series of steps. (The reserve ratio is now floating around 3% in some cases. If that doesn't give you the willies, you're not paying attention.) 3) Transfer governmental gold and/or silver reserves to commercial banks to back the currency available for the bank's depositors.
The serious weaknesses in such a plan are 1) panic, which might well happen anyway as soon as the masses figure out what's really going on, and 2) the powers-that-be decide they really like the leverage the have now and don't wish to go along, in which case you're back to the status quo and waiting for the inevitable meltdown.
I've always thought that the best way to create a proper e-voting system would be to run open source voting software from a live CD certified by the election board. Networked computers could transmit votes over the Net, and the results would be available as soon as the polls closed. Paper ballots are always a necessity, of course, but in this case, as a backup. Print two: one for the voter, on for the election board.
Well, bless your heart! (one of my favorite Southern sayings...)
If you grant the government the power to borrow or inflate only in time of war, you'll get perpetual war. And if it's not a war against other nations, it will be a war against some social problem, or maybe terrorism or something. Hey, wait a minute...
...so no way in hell!
I'm an Ubuntu user, but I'd switch back to Fedora if Canonical made a deal like Linspire's.
OK, not exactly a third way, but there is a libertarian compromise that respects, as far as is practicable, both positions. (Granted, anyone who finds themselves in one camp or the other will disagree, but hear me out.) This compromise was worked out by Loyola professor Walter Block. It recognizes that abortion is two things: eviction of an unwanted intruder from a woman's body, and the murder of a unique human being. A woman has the perfect right to evict any intruder from her property, that is, her own body, at any time, for any reason. (Self-ownership is the first principle of liberty.) Block maintains that if the fetus can be evicted without killing it, there is a moral obligation to do so. To kill it when there are other avenues of eviction available is murder. Fetal viability comes into play, but not in the way that pro-lifers think: they think it has to be brought to term inside an unwilling woman's body once it is viable. Not so. Do a c-section and move the baby to an incubator. Happens all the time these days. Nor is anyone obligated to care for a baby so evicted, but people seem to be lining up to do just that, and good for them. Anyway, the paper is here.
Excellent, if profane, summary. The dog was distributing, but the owner was conveying the dog to your lawn.
Yes, it is. He's the executive, he could have vetoed this if he found anything in there he did not support. Apparently he did not, and neither did the legislators who voted in favor of it. It's their fault, too.