No, there is a lot of dug-in resistance to changing the distribution. Ask an insurance industry executive what he thinks of universal health care. Competence has nothing to do with it. State capitalism, free-market capitalism, it is all the same. So the CEO would instead become Health Minister, and would exercise the same control over capital (probably more so, since he would have the power of the state). I don't think that a handful of CEOs have that much to lose in order to exercise that kind of political power, especially when the biggest insurance providers (like Blue Cross) are non-profit, and companies like GM, Ford, etc are lobbying FOR a nationalized single payer system.
It is more likely that supplying health care for 300 million people spread out over a continent is signicantly more difficult than providing health care to 10,000,000 in a handful of cities in a country the size of Florida. And add to that the decendents of American slaves and victims of imperialism, who now disproportionally make up the uninsured, live in the U.S. and would consume U.S. health care resources... Where as the decendents of European slaves live in Haiti, and Algiers, and India, and the Congo, and Ethiopia, etc, and don't consume any European health resources. It must be nice to have gotten rich exploiting most of the world, and then leaving those people to pay the social cost on their own. And don't forget that we are comparing the richest countries in Europe to the U.S.... We aren't including Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. in our evaluation of the effectiveness of European medical socialism.
Universality has nothing to do with per-capita. $10,000 per capita (made-up number) in a country of 300 million looks like a lot, until you learn that all three trillion dollars was spent on a small subset of the people. The point is that the U.S. government is spending trillions to provide health care. You can argue that they are doing so ineffectively or unfairly, but that is not an issue of left/right. The U.S. is clearly just as socialist, they are just less competent socialists.
Separation of Church and State: Not a left/right issue. Just an issue in the USA because you have a powerful religious group. Sorry about that.
If the U.S. has such a powerful religious group, why aren't they able to get the same benefits as European countries (religion in schools, official state funded churches, banning abortion, banning critism of their religion, etc.). The Religious Right is less vocal in Europe, because they already have eliminated the barrier between church and state such that exists in the U.S... The Religious Right WON in Europe. The Religious Right in Europe might be socialist, but then again so was Hitler.
You must be joking. The USA has the worst public healthcare of the western world. You can talk as much crap as you like about government spending, but most people who have health coverage have private coverage, and many have none whatsoever. In Europe most people (if not all, as in some countries) have government provided heatlhcare.
I have seen both U.S. style public healthcare, and single payer public healthcare, and if I ever get seriously ill I am moving back to the U.S. to get healthcare (depite having no insurance in the U.S.). The "best" public hospitals I have visited under the single payer system were worse than the worst ghetto hospitals in the U.S. that I have visited.
But, even if the U.S. medical system was as bad as you say, the U.S. GOVERNMENT spends more than any other government per capita on health care. The effectiveness of the system has nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. has socialized medicine the same as any European country. If the public health system is failing, it is not because of a lack of will to pour money into the health care system.
Education: Same comment. You spend a lot, according to you, but I see that's mostly by individuals on private schools. Public schools here are a JOKE.
In the U.S., government funding for schooling is in the top 5, per capita. The U.S. has LESS private schools than most European countries. If the U.S. schools are failing, it is not because of a lack of funding or support for public schools.
Trade Unions: No power in the USA compared to Europe
Trade Unions are banned in Cuba... Are you trying to say than Castro is right-wing? The last time I checked, he was a Marxist-Lenninist. Trade Unions have no power in the U.S. because Americans don't like Trade Unions.
You get how much guaranteed vacation time a year here? Two weeks? What about how long a working week is exactly? Is it 40 hours? Nope.
And what is the unemployment rates in Europe again? What are the average wages again? American workers value higher wages and lower unemployment to more vacation time... That is a cultural difference, not a political one.
Freedom of Speech: Not a left/right issue. Red herring again to distract from the real issues.
It is usually presented as a left/right issue... Of course, you are right, both the left and the right are rabid totalitarians - but Europe is still far more totalitarian than the U.S. when it comes to restricting free speech.
So, no, USA IS far right, bordering fascist, by European standards. All you've got a a few isolated examples and red herrings. Piss-poor try there.
Really? Look at immigration (The Republicans are more open to immigration than the far-left in Europe)... Look at the way that European countries restrict foreign works of art and media to "protect their national culture" (in the U.S., it would be considered ultra-right-wing to want to in any way restrict foriegn music, movies, or culture). Look at genocide... it has been well over 100 years since there has been anything like ethnic cleansing in the U.S. that Europe had just in the 1990s. Who gets more votes, David Duke in the U.S., or Le Pen in France? Do you imagine that university professors in the U.S. would vote to ban certain nationalities from teaching positions
How did our economy shift so that being "bought out" or becoming a publicly traded corporation became the end-goal for entrepreneurs? At one time people, like say Henry Ford, fought tooth and nail to keep their companies from becoming publicly traded corporations or being "bought out".
With the exception of the death penalty, there is no major difference between the government policies of the U.S. and Europe.
Abortion? Illegal in Ireland and Portugal.
Seperation of Church and State? Official state funded churches in Finland, and the same thing in Sweden until a couple years ago. Religious education is a manditory part of British schooling. Italy only recently removed crusifixs from public schools.
"Universal Medicine"? The U.S. government spends more per capita on public health and health care than any country in the world.
Invading other countries? Um, we invaded Iraq with big help from England, as well as troops from Denmark, Holland, Poland, Romania, etc. And the Europeans and Canadians have pretty much been fighting the war in Afganistan for us. That is, of course, ignoring things like the war in Chechnia, or the recent conflict in the Balkans, etc. And what the hell do you think the French Foriegn Legion is doing all the time in Africa and South America?
Freedom of Speech? Insulting a religion is a crime in most European countries... Most European countries have far more speech regulations than the U.S..
Education? The U.S. is in the top 5 spenders per capita when it comes to education... and things like "School Choice" which are considered right-wing conspiracies in the U.S. are common place in Europe.
No, in many of the most meaningful ways, Europeans would be considered far-right compared to the U.S...
Yes, that's true. But there is an important difference between paper voting and electronic voting: paper voting is more amenable to oversight. Impartial or bipartisan observers can oversee the process from vote to counting to result. With electronic voting machines used today, you have a black box. Who knows what happens to a particular vote, and whether it is counted correctly? Is paper voting more amenable to "oversight"? It is easier for someone without technical knowledge to view the result of a specific ballot... but it works both ways: it is also easier for someone without technical knowledge to change a ballot. Fraud, under the old system, involved having an army of election "volunteers", usually hardcore activists of a political party, manually altering large amounts of paper ballots (filling out ballots on behalf of non-voters or dead people, usually). Fraud, under the new system, involves a single person or handful of people with highly technical knowledge to manipulate the machine.
Geeks think electronic systems are weak, because geeks know all the ways to exploit such a system. But any good accountant can tell you a million ways to commit fraud with paper, just as easy.
The new electronic system simply takes fraud away from large groups of unskilled people, and puts it in the hand of a handful of technologically skilled people (or those who can afford to hire them). It shifts the balance of election fraud, and it upsets the status quo... but it isn't any more prone to fraud.
Classifying them as drugs just means that the same testing and quality assurance guarantees that exist for pharmaceuticals exist for herbal medicines. Except that it costs a billion dollars plus to get a drug proved effective by the FDA. Because plants that have been grown and harvested for thousands of years are not patentable, there is no way anyone could possibly recouperate the astronomical costs of approval.
Regulating herbal remedies is essentially the same as banning them.
You want equality, but you're not going to get it by keeping herbs untested and unproven. I don't want equality. I don't want the government to subsidize herbal remedies. I don't want insurance companies to pay for herbal remedies. I don't want hospitals to dispense herbal remedies. I don't want doctors to prescribe them as an alternative to scientificly proven effective drugs. I simply want it to remain legal for people to be able to buy and consume any herb and vegetable they choose - and you want to make it illegal for anyone to purchase or consume a herb or vegetable unless the government desides it is OK.
This is the same FDA that banned stevia as a food additive in the U.S. (stevia, is of course not only approved as a food additive in every other industrialized country, but encouraged as a healthy alternative to sugar... years of testing have shown absolutly no negative side effects), because it recieved ONE ANONYMOUS EMAIL from someone who claimed it gave them a stomach ache (yes, the FDA openly admits that they banned it because of one anonymous email!!!)... while at the same time allowing corn syrup to be widely used as a food additive despite the fact that there are mountains of evidence of its negative effects on the human body.
Science and safety have nothing, zero, nada, zilch, to do with FDA approval. There is absoluty no safety requirements or scientific testing for a plant product to be approved for consumption by the FDA, nor is there any scientific requirements or testing for a plant product to be banned. The corn growing lobby is more politically and economicly powerful than the stevia lobby, therefore corn syrup is "healthy" and stevia is not.
If you believe in science and not voodoo, you'd want them to be tested for efficacy. Herbal remedy producers (corporations, just not as big as Big Pharma) don't want testing because then the vast majority of them will be shown to be ineffective. All drugs, and remedies, have benefits and risk. Some are quite obvious, but most benefit/risk calculations really require a certain level of expertise, which the American public simply does not have. Thus, the snake oil people can sell you unregulated dreck and you feel you're in control. Meanwhile, you waste money. But why are you concerned if I waste money, or snake oil people sell me unregulated dreck? That doesn't stop you from purchasing government approved medicines!? No one is forcing you to take unregulated herbal remedies! Whatever the social costs you might claim to bear because people are injured by unregulated herbal remedies are insignificant compared to the social costs from risky sexual activity, or from risky extreme sports, or any other activities you wouldn't dream of the government regulating.
Why, out of all the risky behavior that people engage in, that are completly unregulated, would you choose to go after something like unregulated herbal remedies, which harms very very few people. (people killed by herbal rememdies are statisticly insignificant compared to STDs, diabetis, murders, etc.)?
Clearly there is powerful financial interests who stand to gain by banning medicinal plants, but there are not powerful financial interests pushing to ban unprotected sex or snowboarding despite the equal or greater danger... and your fear and paranoia of things that grow in your garden are a product of the media blitz being waged on natural remedies.
Wow, all drugs made by big corporations cause heart attacks? Oh man, I guess I better stop taking all of my commercial meds for high blood pressure, because it would be bad if I had a heart attack, right? I know, I'll switch to all natural medicines, because everything natural must be good and cannot possibly be bad. Lets see here, what looks like it would make me feel good? OH! Look! Cocaine! Why yes, it is ALL NATURAL!!! It can't possibly have any detrimental affects! Noone is saying that natural remedies have no side effects, or that they are particularly effective. What we are saying is that people should be allowed to take them or use them without them having to spend billions of dollars and 15 years of clinical testing in order to be approved (which would, for all practicle purposes, make them illegal - because they cannot be patented, so there is no way to recover the costs of the testing).
What is so terribly frightening to you that you need the government to regulate natural remedies? I mean, I see why the big corporations and financial interests want to ban herbal remedies: Why would you want people to drink of cup of Chamomile tea before bed, when they can pop an expensive patented sleep pill instead? But why are *YOU* so terrified of herbal remedies? The government isn't subsidizing herbal rememdies like it is patented big-pharma drugs... people are not dying from overdose and misuse in large numbers, the way they are from legal prescription drugs... why can't you simply not purchase herbal remedies if you don't like them? Why do you need to force people not to use them?
If you believe that, you are likely to have a short and miserable life. If you get a chance, ask your friendly neighborhood pharmacist about all the ways you can damage your body or kill yourself with 100% organic, all-natural herbs and vitamins. Pharmacists know more about drugs, and their effects, than physicians. They certainly know more than the "experts" at your local vitamin or health food store. So what? Watching too much TV can be dangerous (it causes obesity)! Eating too much chocolate can be dangerous! Skateboarding can be dangerous! There is any number of dangerous activity that people can choose to engage in.
The question is why you feel the need for the government to regulate unprocessed plants and vegetables the same way it does synthetic drugs? Why do you feel the need for the government to have absolute authority on the plants and vegetables you are allowed to consume? Why do you feel that the government has the right to micromanage my body? Why not let people who want to experiment with traditional herbal medicines, do so at their own risk?
Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to eat a candy bar sweetened with stevia instead of corn syrup? Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to drink Chamomile tea to help me sleep? Why not just lay off?
One doesn't have to give up modern medicine in order to want to be allowed to consume plants and vegetables of their choice. If someone wants to sell a chinese herb, that has been grown and cultivated for thousands of years for a medicinal purpose, what is the logic of stopping it?
Why is it so important, so critical to our nation, to forcefully prevent people from eating plant or vegetable - especially when the number of people who die from that plant are insignificant compared to the number of people who die from complications or overdose of legal prescription drugs.
What we are seeing is a coalition: Authoritarians and Totalitarians such as yourself who believe that all human behavior should be severly restricted by the government, working hand in hand with the big pharma corporations who want to eliminate competition. You get the benifit of the government spanking you and telling you "bad boy" like your dad used to do when you were a kid, and the big pharma corporations get the benifit of a patent monopoly on health products.
No one forces you to use drugs. Having alternative cures fall under the same regulations as drugs wouldn't deter the use of them. Except that it costs BILLIONS of dollars to get a drug approved in the United States... only a handful of huge multinational companies are able to produce drugs for the U.S. market. Regulating herbal remedies the same way as manufactured drugs would essentially eliminate herbal remedies from the market, as the costs for getting herbal remedies approved would be the same, except there would be no patent to ensure a company would get their money back.
Regulating herbal remedies like drugs = banning herbal remedies. This is why the big drug manufactures are the biggest force lobbying for the regulation of herbal remedies.
This is of course ignoring the moral arguement, that in a free society I shouldn't need to get anyone's permission to consume a fucking plant.
That doesn't mean they work. It means they are not dangerous. It means that there is no reason for the government to ban them.
Why are ATMs easy to use, ubiquitous, and for the most part free of fraud, despite the fact that ATMs have less government oversight than elections and there is every incentive to commit fraud?
Why are companies (like Diebold), well respected manufacturers of ATMs, yet are laughing stocks when it comes to election equipment?
You can't blame the problems with electronic voting on one party, or one manufacturer, because these problems happen in multiple countries with multiple manufactures and many political parties. You can't blame the problems on electronic record keeping itself, as electronic record keeping has improved reliability in financial institutions, and have greatly improved government services. No one would suggest that their government health system replace computer records with paper bookkeeping. No one would suggest that their bank, or the NYSE, switch to paper bookkeeping.
Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about elections, that makes fraud far more easy and desirable than in other sorts of human transactions. There is something unique about elections that make them especially prone to criminal manipulation.
Now, the real question is, why do we assume that paper elections are any more trustworthy? The social patterns that cause election fraud are a fundamental part of the election process itself, and don't have anything necessarily to do with the technology (like I said, there are many economic institutions and functions of government that run fine without fraud and use electronic record keeping). Perhaps that the real reason is that electronic voter fraud changes who has the advantage in election fraud?
Where as, in the past, labor unions, religious groups, and political groups with well-organized masses of people were able to vote more than once by using the identities of the deceased or identities of voters who moved without filing a change of address... where as now, election fraud tends to favor groups that have the money or are particularly technologically savvy. While elections aren't any more prone to fraud than they used to be, the status and power of the old school status quo is being challenged, and that is scary to most people (and especially offensive to the elite who have power in the current situation). It isn't so much that people oppose election fraud, as election fraud on a pretty large scale has been happening for generations - It is that people oppose the redistribution of power from the old-school political elite to the new school political elite. In the end, people love their Kings and Queens, and don't want to see any upsurpers steal the crown.
They are 70s vintage analog gear "lo-fi"... as in $200,000 tape machine and tube processing equipment "lo-fi"... You can't really call it lo-fi so much as retro: it is an impecable deliberate sound.
Real lo-fi would be recording on your laptop mike jack, or those little all-in-one Yamaha digital recorders.
What you say is true about rational people. Ever tried to debate irrational people? Logic and common sense do not prevail. Anyone who disagrees with me is obviously irrational, and hateful. Lock those bastards up!
Considering that there are more guns in America than people, I would say a lot of people want to own guns. If owning a gun was such an undesirable thing to do, then it would fade away from popularity, like snuff tobacco or accordians. The fact you feel there needs to be a coordinated effort to stop guns, means that you realize there are plenty of good reasons for wanting to own one.
Of course, the main reason for gun ownership (which has been lost in the discussion about gun control), is to avoid having a professional standing army. Switzerland is a good example of what the founding fathers intended when they created the second amendment. An armed people's militia, instead of a full time professional army, has kept Switzerland out of any real major warfare for generations and generations, as well as protected their democracy and made them very rich.
You're missing my point. My point was never about the people who are willing to buy guns on the black market -- those will always get them, with regulation or not. It's about people who lose control of themselves and grab for a gun before they have the time to realize what they're doing. Those people would never do anything illegal to get a gun, but they might have one nearby and see an opportunity to use it.
What makes you think that they would never do anything illegal to get a gun? When guns are illegal, buying a gun will become more of a casual and low-risk activity as the black market expands to fill the market void left by the legal gun industry. Gun are going to get CHEAPER when they become fully illegal, as the unregulated black market fills the void left by the highly-regulated market now. No licences, no taxes, no liability insurance, no product safety concerns, no marketing, no government approval process, and guns get to be dirt cheap. Do you think the people in the warzones in Congo, or Somalia have a lot of money to spend on guns? Guns cost nothing. The actual physical manufacturing of weapons is not the primary cost you are paying when you buy a legal gun. For every person who won't buy a gun because it is now illegal, there will be someone who buys a gun because it suddenly has become dirt cheap.
What a really stupid non-argument. Since guns in the US are legal to get hold of, if someone wants to blow away a class full of students what's the point of that person skulking around on the black market for a weapon? Does it make any difference to the victims whether a gun is legal, or sold on the black market? You are the moron who imagines that like when god commands "let the sea part", and the sea parts, that the government will command "guns disapear", and all the economic and social cercumstances for gun ownership will magicly fade away and guns will disappear. I know you may worship government, but it is not a diety.
Why buy a hunting rifle for $1000+, that you will have to register with the government, wait 3 days for, fill out a bunch of forms for, and pay taxes on, when for half the price you can get a black market full-auto Tec-9 perfect for shooting up a classrooom and you can get it in 1/2 an hour delivered to your home?
You do realize that there are any number of places in this country were you can purchase illegal drugs, openly on the street? Most high schools have several drug dealers, and it is easier and cheaper for kids to get illegal drugs than booze or cigarrettes? Do you imagine that it is somehow different when it comes to guns?
No. It makes them less accepted in society and all the easier to identify who has firearms illegally. How are you going to identify people with conceilled weapons? By random searching them!!! Of course, white middle aged bankers aren't going to allow themselves to get randomly searched by police, soccer moms with their kids aren't going to be allowing their minivan to be searched for weapons. Those kinds of things don't happen in rich suburbs. The people who are going to be searched for weapons are going to be young people, poor people, ethnic minorities and immigrants, and the people who are going to go to prison for gun crimes are the people who get searched. People like you don't give a shit that the War on Drugs is essentially a War on Poor People and a War on Black People, I don't expect you to give a shit when a War on Guns turns out the same way.
In fact, THAT IS THE REAL AGENDA OF GUN CONTROL!!! Another law that can only be enforced by giving up civil liberties!!! Another excuse for a domestic warfare system! Another excuse for throwing millions of disadvantaged people in prison! This is what the REAL agenda of people like you!
Give that gun controls would make such an incident far less likely, then there is no reason for point B and no reason to carry a gun. Gun control wouldn't have any more effect on gun violence than the War on Drugs stops people from doing drugs.
Because guns are legal, and as long as there are guns, bad people will get ahold of them. How do you plan to get rid of guns? Have you ever heard of the "War on Drugs"? Suspending civil liberties, creating the largest prison population in history of any country, supporting right-wing maniacs in Latin America hasn't put a dent on the U.S. illegal drug trade... how far are you willing to go for guns?
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It is more likely that supplying health care for 300 million people spread out over a continent is signicantly more difficult than providing health care to 10,000,000 in a handful of cities in a country the size of Florida. And add to that the decendents of American slaves and victims of imperialism, who now disproportionally make up the uninsured, live in the U.S. and would consume U.S. health care resources... Where as the decendents of European slaves live in Haiti, and Algiers, and India, and the Congo, and Ethiopia, etc, and don't consume any European health resources. It must be nice to have gotten rich exploiting most of the world, and then leaving those people to pay the social cost on their own. And don't forget that we are comparing the richest countries in Europe to the U.S.... We aren't including Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. in our evaluation of the effectiveness of European medical socialism.
Separation of Church and State: Not a left/right issue. Just an issue in the USA because you have a powerful religious group. Sorry about that.
If the U.S. has such a powerful religious group, why aren't they able to get the same benefits as European countries (religion in schools, official state funded churches, banning abortion, banning critism of their religion, etc.). The Religious Right is less vocal in Europe, because they already have eliminated the barrier between church and state such that exists in the U.S... The Religious Right WON in Europe. The Religious Right in Europe might be socialist, but then again so was Hitler.
You must be joking. The USA has the worst public healthcare of the western world. You can talk as much crap as you like about government spending, but most people who have health coverage have private coverage, and many have none whatsoever. In Europe most people (if not all, as in some countries) have government provided heatlhcare.
I have seen both U.S. style public healthcare, and single payer public healthcare, and if I ever get seriously ill I am moving back to the U.S. to get healthcare (depite having no insurance in the U.S.). The "best" public hospitals I have visited under the single payer system were worse than the worst ghetto hospitals in the U.S. that I have visited.
But, even if the U.S. medical system was as bad as you say, the U.S. GOVERNMENT spends more than any other government per capita on health care. The effectiveness of the system has nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. has socialized medicine the same as any European country. If the public health system is failing, it is not because of a lack of will to pour money into the health care system.
Education: Same comment. You spend a lot, according to you, but I see that's mostly by individuals on private schools. Public schools here are a JOKE.
In the U.S., government funding for schooling is in the top 5, per capita. The U.S. has LESS private schools than most European countries. If the U.S. schools are failing, it is not because of a lack of funding or support for public schools.
Trade Unions: No power in the USA compared to Europe
Trade Unions are banned in Cuba... Are you trying to say than Castro is right-wing? The last time I checked, he was a Marxist-Lenninist. Trade Unions have no power in the U.S. because Americans don't like Trade Unions.
You get how much guaranteed vacation time a year here? Two weeks? What about how long a working week is exactly? Is it 40 hours? Nope.
And what is the unemployment rates in Europe again? What are the average wages again? American workers value higher wages and lower unemployment to more vacation time... That is a cultural difference, not a political one.
Freedom of Speech: Not a left/right issue. Red herring again to distract from the real issues.
It is usually presented as a left/right issue... Of course, you are right, both the left and the right are rabid totalitarians - but Europe is still far more totalitarian than the U.S. when it comes to restricting free speech.
So, no, USA IS far right, bordering fascist, by European standards. All you've got a a few isolated examples and red herrings. Piss-poor try there.
Really? Look at immigration (The Republicans are more open to immigration than the far-left in Europe)... Look at the way that European countries restrict foreign works of art and media to "protect their national culture" (in the U.S., it would be considered ultra-right-wing to want to in any way restrict foriegn music, movies, or culture). Look at genocide... it has been well over 100 years since there has been anything like ethnic cleansing in the U.S. that Europe had just in the 1990s. Who gets more votes, David Duke in the U.S., or Le Pen in France? Do you imagine that university professors in the U.S. would vote to ban certain nationalities from teaching positions
How did our economy shift so that being "bought out" or becoming a publicly traded corporation became the end-goal for entrepreneurs? At one time people, like say Henry Ford, fought tooth and nail to keep their companies from becoming publicly traded corporations or being "bought out".
No... Not this myth again...
With the exception of the death penalty, there is no major difference between the government policies of the U.S. and Europe.
Abortion? Illegal in Ireland and Portugal.
Seperation of Church and State? Official state funded churches in Finland, and the same thing in Sweden until a couple years ago. Religious education is a manditory part of British schooling. Italy only recently removed crusifixs from public schools.
"Universal Medicine"? The U.S. government spends more per capita on public health and health care than any country in the world.
Invading other countries? Um, we invaded Iraq with big help from England, as well as troops from Denmark, Holland, Poland, Romania, etc. And the Europeans and Canadians have pretty much been fighting the war in Afganistan for us. That is, of course, ignoring things like the war in Chechnia, or the recent conflict in the Balkans, etc. And what the hell do you think the French Foriegn Legion is doing all the time in Africa and South America?
Freedom of Speech? Insulting a religion is a crime in most European countries... Most European countries have far more speech regulations than the U.S..
Education? The U.S. is in the top 5 spenders per capita when it comes to education... and things like "School Choice" which are considered right-wing conspiracies in the U.S. are common place in Europe.
No, in many of the most meaningful ways, Europeans would be considered far-right compared to the U.S...
Geeks think electronic systems are weak, because geeks know all the ways to exploit such a system. But any good accountant can tell you a million ways to commit fraud with paper, just as easy.
The new electronic system simply takes fraud away from large groups of unskilled people, and puts it in the hand of a handful of technologically skilled people (or those who can afford to hire them). It shifts the balance of election fraud, and it upsets the status quo... but it isn't any more prone to fraud.
Regulating herbal remedies is essentially the same as banning them. You want equality, but you're not going to get it by keeping herbs untested and unproven. I don't want equality. I don't want the government to subsidize herbal remedies. I don't want insurance companies to pay for herbal remedies. I don't want hospitals to dispense herbal remedies. I don't want doctors to prescribe them as an alternative to scientificly proven effective drugs. I simply want it to remain legal for people to be able to buy and consume any herb and vegetable they choose - and you want to make it illegal for anyone to purchase or consume a herb or vegetable unless the government desides it is OK.
Yeah, FDA approval... GREAT!
This is the same FDA that banned stevia as a food additive in the U.S. (stevia, is of course not only approved as a food additive in every other industrialized country, but encouraged as a healthy alternative to sugar... years of testing have shown absolutly no negative side effects), because it recieved ONE ANONYMOUS EMAIL from someone who claimed it gave them a stomach ache (yes, the FDA openly admits that they banned it because of one anonymous email!!!)... while at the same time allowing corn syrup to be widely used as a food additive despite the fact that there are mountains of evidence of its negative effects on the human body.
Science and safety have nothing, zero, nada, zilch, to do with FDA approval. There is absoluty no safety requirements or scientific testing for a plant product to be approved for consumption by the FDA, nor is there any scientific requirements or testing for a plant product to be banned. The corn growing lobby is more politically and economicly powerful than the stevia lobby, therefore corn syrup is "healthy" and stevia is not.
Why, out of all the risky behavior that people engage in, that are completly unregulated, would you choose to go after something like unregulated herbal remedies, which harms very very few people. (people killed by herbal rememdies are statisticly insignificant compared to STDs, diabetis, murders, etc.)?
Clearly there is powerful financial interests who stand to gain by banning medicinal plants, but there are not powerful financial interests pushing to ban unprotected sex or snowboarding despite the equal or greater danger... and your fear and paranoia of things that grow in your garden are a product of the media blitz being waged on natural remedies.
What is so terribly frightening to you that you need the government to regulate natural remedies? I mean, I see why the big corporations and financial interests want to ban herbal remedies: Why would you want people to drink of cup of Chamomile tea before bed, when they can pop an expensive patented sleep pill instead? But why are *YOU* so terrified of herbal remedies? The government isn't subsidizing herbal rememdies like it is patented big-pharma drugs... people are not dying from overdose and misuse in large numbers, the way they are from legal prescription drugs... why can't you simply not purchase herbal remedies if you don't like them? Why do you need to force people not to use them?
The question is why you feel the need for the government to regulate unprocessed plants and vegetables the same way it does synthetic drugs? Why do you feel the need for the government to have absolute authority on the plants and vegetables you are allowed to consume? Why do you feel that the government has the right to micromanage my body? Why not let people who want to experiment with traditional herbal medicines, do so at their own risk?
Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to eat a candy bar sweetened with stevia instead of corn syrup? Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to drink Chamomile tea to help me sleep? Why not just lay off?
One doesn't have to give up modern medicine in order to want to be allowed to consume plants and vegetables of their choice. If someone wants to sell a chinese herb, that has been grown and cultivated for thousands of years for a medicinal purpose, what is the logic of stopping it?
Why is it so important, so critical to our nation, to forcefully prevent people from eating plant or vegetable - especially when the number of people who die from that plant are insignificant compared to the number of people who die from complications or overdose of legal prescription drugs.
What we are seeing is a coalition: Authoritarians and Totalitarians such as yourself who believe that all human behavior should be severly restricted by the government, working hand in hand with the big pharma corporations who want to eliminate competition. You get the benifit of the government spanking you and telling you "bad boy" like your dad used to do when you were a kid, and the big pharma corporations get the benifit of a patent monopoly on health products.
Regulating herbal remedies like drugs = banning herbal remedies. This is why the big drug manufactures are the biggest force lobbying for the regulation of herbal remedies.
This is of course ignoring the moral arguement, that in a free society I shouldn't need to get anyone's permission to consume a fucking plant. That doesn't mean they work. It means they are not dangerous. It means that there is no reason for the government to ban them.
Why are ATMs easy to use, ubiquitous, and for the most part free of fraud, despite the fact that ATMs have less government oversight than elections and there is every incentive to commit fraud?
Why are companies (like Diebold), well respected manufacturers of ATMs, yet are laughing stocks when it comes to election equipment?
You can't blame the problems with electronic voting on one party, or one manufacturer, because these problems happen in multiple countries with multiple manufactures and many political parties. You can't blame the problems on electronic record keeping itself, as electronic record keeping has improved reliability in financial institutions, and have greatly improved government services. No one would suggest that their government health system replace computer records with paper bookkeeping. No one would suggest that their bank, or the NYSE, switch to paper bookkeeping.
Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about elections, that makes fraud far more easy and desirable than in other sorts of human transactions. There is something unique about elections that make them especially prone to criminal manipulation.
Now, the real question is, why do we assume that paper elections are any more trustworthy? The social patterns that cause election fraud are a fundamental part of the election process itself, and don't have anything necessarily to do with the technology (like I said, there are many economic institutions and functions of government that run fine without fraud and use electronic record keeping). Perhaps that the real reason is that electronic voter fraud changes who has the advantage in election fraud?
Where as, in the past, labor unions, religious groups, and political groups with well-organized masses of people were able to vote more than once by using the identities of the deceased or identities of voters who moved without filing a change of address... where as now, election fraud tends to favor groups that have the money or are particularly technologically savvy. While elections aren't any more prone to fraud than they used to be, the status and power of the old school status quo is being challenged, and that is scary to most people (and especially offensive to the elite who have power in the current situation). It isn't so much that people oppose election fraud, as election fraud on a pretty large scale has been happening for generations - It is that people oppose the redistribution of power from the old-school political elite to the new school political elite. In the end, people love their Kings and Queens, and don't want to see any upsurpers steal the crown.
The "waste" only has a 10,000 year half life, because recycling the stuff is illegal.
Or do you think all that Uranium naturally sitting in the ground, or dissolved into the ocean, is harmless?
Vinyl record sales come from two sources:
1. Dance music and Hip Hop DJs who need vinyl records to properly mix.
2. Limited edition collectors items for indie (or pseudo-indie) bands.
Vinyl isn't making a comeback as an alternative to modern formats.
They are 70s vintage analog gear "lo-fi"... as in $200,000 tape machine and tube processing equipment "lo-fi"... You can't really call it lo-fi so much as retro: it is an impecable deliberate sound.
Real lo-fi would be recording on your laptop mike jack, or those little all-in-one Yamaha digital recorders.
What are you talking about? It happens all over the world!
Considering that there are more guns in America than people, I would say a lot of people want to own guns. If owning a gun was such an undesirable thing to do, then it would fade away from popularity, like snuff tobacco or accordians. The fact you feel there needs to be a coordinated effort to stop guns, means that you realize there are plenty of good reasons for wanting to own one.
Of course, the main reason for gun ownership (which has been lost in the discussion about gun control), is to avoid having a professional standing army. Switzerland is a good example of what the founding fathers intended when they created the second amendment. An armed people's militia, instead of a full time professional army, has kept Switzerland out of any real major warfare for generations and generations, as well as protected their democracy and made them very rich.
You're missing my point. My point was never about the people who are willing to buy guns on the black market -- those will always get them, with regulation or not. It's about people who lose control of themselves and grab for a gun before they have the time to realize what they're doing. Those people would never do anything illegal to get a gun, but they might have one nearby and see an opportunity to use it.
What makes you think that they would never do anything illegal to get a gun? When guns are illegal, buying a gun will become more of a casual and low-risk activity as the black market expands to fill the market void left by the legal gun industry. Gun are going to get CHEAPER when they become fully illegal, as the unregulated black market fills the void left by the highly-regulated market now. No licences, no taxes, no liability insurance, no product safety concerns, no marketing, no government approval process, and guns get to be dirt cheap. Do you think the people in the warzones in Congo, or Somalia have a lot of money to spend on guns? Guns cost nothing. The actual physical manufacturing of weapons is not the primary cost you are paying when you buy a legal gun. For every person who won't buy a gun because it is now illegal, there will be someone who buys a gun because it suddenly has become dirt cheap.
Why buy a hunting rifle for $1000+, that you will have to register with the government, wait 3 days for, fill out a bunch of forms for, and pay taxes on, when for half the price you can get a black market full-auto Tec-9 perfect for shooting up a classrooom and you can get it in 1/2 an hour delivered to your home?
You do realize that there are any number of places in this country were you can purchase illegal drugs, openly on the street? Most high schools have several drug dealers, and it is easier and cheaper for kids to get illegal drugs than booze or cigarrettes? Do you imagine that it is somehow different when it comes to guns? No. It makes them less accepted in society and all the easier to identify who has firearms illegally. How are you going to identify people with conceilled weapons? By random searching them!!! Of course, white middle aged bankers aren't going to allow themselves to get randomly searched by police, soccer moms with their kids aren't going to be allowing their minivan to be searched for weapons. Those kinds of things don't happen in rich suburbs. The people who are going to be searched for weapons are going to be young people, poor people, ethnic minorities and immigrants, and the people who are going to go to prison for gun crimes are the people who get searched. People like you don't give a shit that the War on Drugs is essentially a War on Poor People and a War on Black People, I don't expect you to give a shit when a War on Guns turns out the same way.
In fact, THAT IS THE REAL AGENDA OF GUN CONTROL!!! Another law that can only be enforced by giving up civil liberties!!! Another excuse for a domestic warfare system! Another excuse for throwing millions of disadvantaged people in prison! This is what the REAL agenda of people like you! Give that gun controls would make such an incident far less likely, then there is no reason for point B and no reason to carry a gun. Gun control wouldn't have any more effect on gun violence than the War on Drugs stops people from doing drugs.
But my comment, like burritos, is something I indulge in without guilt, because it is just too tasty to resist.