So let me get this straight. When its the US being imperialistic, its not imperialistic? Oh yeah, its to stop the "other" imperialistic countries. Wow, the arrogance. Just say what it really is, we could all at least respect that a little more.
Please actually make the case for your characterization of the US as "imperialistic." You know, like naming the governors of the colonies we've been establishing around the world. Or the way that, rather than spending tons of cache on goods made overseas, that we're just marching in and taking over those economies. Or the countries to which we used to supply enormous amounts of financial aid and have stopped because we now own those territories. You know, actual imperialistic type stuff.
Note: saying that you'll defend your assets in space, or on the open seas, is not "imperialism."
as if they were able to defend u.s. against 9/11 with all the resources they had...
Now they are going to waste shitload of taxpayer money for stuff in space - just to please their arms-industry backers
Right, because the area of intel and defensive weapons and technology that would be focused on not having our communications and surveilance birds taken out by the Chinese on the same day they decide to physically take over Taiwan would be the same as what we should have used to stop suicidal religious nuts from carrying box-cutters on commercial aircraft. Gotcha.
The US and its allies can have nuclear power, but not other countries it chooses to put on a list. You can enforce that sort of mindset through force, but it doesn't make it morally right,
Sure it does. Why, other than while suffering from an acute case of moral relativity, should we consider it good to allow a country like Iran, that speaks in terms of wiping out other countries, to develop nukes? Why is it morally reasonable to support a country like North Korea, which runs a hideously repressive, retro-grade regime funded by illicit traffic in counterfeit foreign currency, drug trafficking, and weapons sales to places like Iran, in their pursuit of deployable nukes? If you can't see the very real, objective, philosophical shortcomings of regimes like those, then you are in no position to opine on morality in the first place.
childish colonial imperialism and it's complete bullshit.
Er, no. It's about asserting the (very reasonable) right to make sure that someone who actually is imperialistic in their behavior understands that we and the other major players in space-based commerce, research, and security aren't going to allow actually hostile postures to threaten those activities. As usual, the other (mostly western, but also Asian) nations will get to act smug about the US's willingness to actually say and do the things necessary for such a deterrent while actually benefitting from not spending that money or artificial social friction cost themselves.
The point of all this is to measure numbers. There are millions of people who disagree with you too, that's why it's an "issue", and not a human right.
The difference, though, is that one perspective points to the liberty to own a tool and to enable self defense, and the other perspective seeks to remove that liberty, but only from law-abiding people. It is a "rights" issue, to the core.
You'll see that assaults using firearms tallied 11,920. And I say that as someone who owns a lot more than three, and has never been assaulted with one, only brandished one to prevent an assault on my family. I have used them, hundreds of times, to put food on the table or eliminate varmints, but that's another conversation.
Actually, you cannot buy spray paint from Home Depot without proof of age. They keep the spray paint in a locked display case.
Which would be, of course, that private business's policy - not the law of the land (whew!). I'm betting Home Depot makes those decisions on a regional basis, since the one near me has it all sitting out on an open shelf, and has self-checkout lanes that take cash! All depends on the local demographic, I'd guess. Which is interesting, since my town is infested with gangs and their spray-painted 'tags' all over the place.
I know what you're thinking. Did he take six swings or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a Gerber Polymid Sport Axe handle, the most powerful axe handle in the world, and would take your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?
You should know that you, er... just Made My Day.
We'd reach new heights of absurdity...
on
School Bans 'Tag'
·
· Score: 4, Funny
... but we can't, because that would involve taking the stairs, and someone might get hurt.
And how many kids (and their families) are killed by drunk drivers? Or people wielding machetes?
Have you ever kept a very crazy guy with a pipe from beating down your back door in the middle of the night while your terrorized spouse frantically dials 911 for a long-delayed response? I have, with a gun. I couldn't have done the same thing by drinking a beer and then driving my car at him, but the beer/car combo is wildly more dangerous, and results in many more deaths-by-idiots.
Are you also tallying up kids that die from other poorly-supervised activities? Like, drowning in family pools, eating foods they're allergic to, sucking down carbon monoxide from a car idling in the garage, falling out of trees, etc? Or are you just talking about kids killed by people who are deliberately shooting children with guns? If so, are you also comparing that to kids that are stabbed, beaten, strangled, shaken, burned, tossed off of bridges, etc? Are you going to start talking about crazies invading Amish school houses? Then you'd better also talk about crazies that walk into schools and cut the throats of a bunch of kids with a knife (in Japan, for example... since a gun wasn't easily available to the guy who was planning on killing kids anyway).
A little more context will make your comments seem a little less... shrill.
there would likely have been a fatality here
How do you know that? There are beatings all the time in areas where guns are readily available, and no one gets shot. It seems more likely to me that the guy was specifically looking to deliver a beating and then walk away with the other guy "taught a lesson" or humiliated. Doesn't matter, because he's a loon, and should be locked up. And that guy (in the US) wouldn't be able to buy a gun legally anyway, if that's how he conducts himself.
Police report that this guy owns not just one, but several ax-handles! He's an ax-handle nut! I wish the ax-handle lobby would own up to the fact that these things are not just dangerous, but potentially DEADLY!
Effective ax-handle control legislation is long overdue! Think of the children!
Look, nobody wants to take away axe handles from legitimate, country-side axe users. It's only the urban areas that don't need them. We just need to close all the loopholes at the farm shows and flea markets. The real problem, though, is the glorification of axe handle swinging in popular media. Because once people think it's OK to inappropriately use just one piece of wood, then our Home Depots and other lumber yards are no better than arms markets.
Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?
This helps people to understand what our galaxy will look like right about the time that they send their last check to Capital One, paying off that 30" display they used to enjoy looking at the high-res version of the picture in question.
If this directive passes, it will severely restrict freedom of speech and expression among deaf sign language users. In the past year or so, sign language videos and video blogs have exploded in popularity and are well on their way to become the primary means of sharing information across the Internet among the deaf.
I have no numbers to go on here, but... SURELY the written word continues to be the primary way that deaf people communicate online? IMs, e-mail, and web content? I have a hard time imagining that people would rather fire up the webcame and sign at each other to send an asynchronous message to someone... in the same way that increasingly FEWER non-deaf people that I know are more likely to drop a TXT message or an e-mail than they are to pick up the phone.
my live is swamped with advertising, on television, radio, roadside bill boards, on the sides of buildings, in the various stores i shop at, etc...
with the above paragraph so plainly true dont you think it would be natural for users with the knowledge to set up their web browsers to block as much advertising and web bugs as possible? (i think so and i did so)...
Except... when you visit a topical web site that's providing information or content that's very specific to your tastes, the odds now are the ads you'd see there are not the random noise that you see on billboards or hear on the radio. They're more likely to be very closely tied to the content you're looking at, and may actually represent some vendor, or product, or service you actually like. And when that advertisor strikes a supporting deal with the person who's producing the content you're sitting there reading, and have come there to see, why would you discourage that relationship? It's part of what allows that content to be there for you in the first place.
You can't say that about most of the other advertising forms you mentioned... so what you're doing is taking out your frustrations about mass-market, impersonal advertising on the very people who are trying the hardest to bring you things you might actually want to see. You've got it backwards!
While I think this specific case is somewhat asinine, the general rational has always been that enough public information, when compiled, can be considered "sensitive" or "classified".
You don't have to have a lot of information to reach that point... just the identity of one undercover LEO is enough to jeopardize him, his team, or even everyone that might be a victim of what that officer is in the middle of trying to catch/prevent. Clandestine activities are part and parcel of some law enforcement and defense activities, and even your local county or municipal agencies have some need of that - especially if they want to be able to retain quality people (who will insist on not having their names splashed all over the internet while they're doing things like infiltrating MS-13 in your kid's school zone, etc).
Which isn't to say that emergency response people are doing something clandestine, but someone looking to, say, attract medics/cops to a scene where they've planted a bomb, or any other technique as we've seen polished in the Middle East lately, might still be able to leverage real-time 911 info.
There is no longer any reason for works of "art" to be "lost to the ravages of time", by my definition. If it is "good", there will be many copies, because it has the essence of what makes it "good". Some copies are sure to survive.
Look, when a fine art printmaker personally draws an image on a stone or plate, and produces a texture that lays semi-reflective ink onto a particular texture of hand-made paper using a certain density of ink... and then hand-registers the print while pressing the paper against another half-dozen litho stones to produce a very specific finished result... that cannot be photographically reproduced. Or mechanically so. Or digitally so... not in any way that produces the same results to the eye. Especially when the artist wraps up the print run by hand-coloring with other media, or applying Chine-colle, etc., however many of that particular piece have been produced are as many as will ever be produced. And some of them will not be kept as well as others. Scarcity ensues, and value (if the work is worth anything to its audience/appreciators) does go up. Looking at a high-res scan of the thing is NOT the same.
Exactly the same thing applies to a limited run of castings from a sculpture. The process is destructive, the original may be lost... these are things that are not the same, when seen photographically. Do you really think that seeing a full-sized copy of "David" is the same as walking into the room that contains the original one that Michelangelo personally touched with his own hands? It's not.
Is a unique "artistic statement" lessened because it is not the original embodiment of the idea?
Maybe, maybe not. But the experience of actually seeing (or touching) the work may very well not be the same, and that's between the artist and his audience - not between scam artists and a scammed audience. Someone being told they're looking directly at the piece of work produced by the artist, and seeing something like a Giclee or other reproduction, will either know they're being lied to, or suddenly think a lot less of the artist.
Don't be an ass. People of regular means sometimes actually choose to purchase an original piece of art for about the same price that some other people spend on yet another hopped-up gaming PC which they'll plug in right next to their other five in their Mom's basement. Poor rich game-worthy-PC collectors? When someone who is not rich chooses to, say, spend $750 on a hand-pulled lithograph by Malcolm Lipke because they think it's beautiful and likely to become more valuable over the years, a person producing fake pieces interferes with that. The artist has chosen to make one (or some other limited number) of his vision, and someone ripping him and his audience off tends to impact a lot more people than just "rich art collectors."
In both cases we're talking about things that can't cover their announced value just for what they are. Instead you're told they own some sort of authenticity, and thus cost X dollars.
A thing commands whatever price someone is willing to pay. If their willingness is based on a fraud (a fake painting, for example), then that blows the viability of that marketplace.
Whether you, personally, can imagine paying a lot of money for, say, a canvas that Picasso personally touched and applied paint to - well, it just doesn't matter. Some people really, really, really would like to have (and show to people) something completely unique that Georgia O'Keeffe or Titian etc personally created, with their own hands. It's literally a piece of history. When someone passes off a fraud as a piece of history, that's... fraud.
Lol... He probably didn't account for them because he didn't want to admit his IT infrastructure and record keeping was so bad he didn't know where half of them were either. Sadly I'm only half joking...
Actually, it seems that his own weapons programs people were so scared of him (and his family) that they were actually doing a fair amount of lying to him about his inventory. He appears to have thought he had more toys, in better repair, than he actually did.
Huh. I must've missed that press release. I'd have thought that they'd still be trumpeting that one as loud as they could. You wouldn't happen to have a link to an article on that, would you? I'm really curious how I missed it...
You've just already forgotten that bit of news from back in June. It's not surprising that 500+ late 1990s Mustard and Sarin gas artillery shells would be sitting around in Iraq. Saddam had thousands and thousands of such munitions, and refused to account for the disposition of most of them.
More or less randomly, here's a link to a blog with more links.
They never bothered with it before, why bother with it now? I mean evidence just detracts from the issues they are pushing.
So let's see... you're saying that if we got back a first round of air samples, and the only way you heard one way or the other about it was through some leak, you wouldn't be complaining about the lack of transparency? Well, which is it? Do you want the data as it comes, NASA-style, or do you want to wait while the DoD and DoE and other agencies chew on it for some indeterminate time and make what may never be a conclusive conclusion? For everyone here that bitches about not getting enough raw info from the government about what's happening with crazies like NK, it seems that no good deed goes unpunished. Or, were you just looking to bash, no matter what happened or didn't?
I was criticizing the notion that only government censorship meets the definition
And that's exactly what I was responding to. Unless a government (say, Cuba's) actually does control what private people can publish or broadcast (or post/see online), then it isn't censorship. There's no penalty to paid for publishing something contrary to what some other private party would publish for you, there's no ability for such a third party to limit what you can say... so "censorship" truly is the wrong word for anything other than government action/limits. Whether you personally think the YouTube issue at hand is or isn't censorship isn't my point: it's that you think a private entity, in the land of the 1st amendment, can censor... that's what I'm debating. They can't, because you can just walk away and talk somewhere else.
And, aren't you glad that I'm not screaming that, by calling me an idiot, you're censoring me, you fascist blah blah blah...? But when you trivialize words like that by proposing that they're meaningful in a context in which they're not, it's exactly what fuels the absurd use of those concepts when someone simply, really, means "I don't like you because you don't agree with me." I'd just be happier if we didn't prop up people who feel more and more inclined to trot out the high-power words describing totalitarianism and the like just because they can't fend off an argument that's over their heads or simply shows them to be wrong or pointlessly whining.
Censorship is the control of speech and other forms of human expression
Then thank you for pointing out how the case in question is not censorship. YouTube's flagging system may be subject to user whim, and may be enforced by customer services people with idealogical axe to grind, but it's not censorship. Because they are not "controlling human expression." Humans have all sorts of outlets for expression, and can start their own, if they want to. Or, they can here in the US. In China, though, your ability to use a site like YouTube, or to start your own if you don't like their own audience/policies IS controlled. That is censorship. You're confusing "editorial policy" or "audience preferences" in a particular, private venue with some that it's not. What is your agenda, exactly, that you have an interest in diluting the word "censorship" and taking away its real meaning by misusing it in the way you do?
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So let me get this straight. When its the US being imperialistic, its not imperialistic? Oh yeah, its to stop the "other" imperialistic countries. Wow, the arrogance. Just say what it really is, we could all at least respect that a little more.
Please actually make the case for your characterization of the US as "imperialistic." You know, like naming the governors of the colonies we've been establishing around the world. Or the way that, rather than spending tons of cache on goods made overseas, that we're just marching in and taking over those economies. Or the countries to which we used to supply enormous amounts of financial aid and have stopped because we now own those territories. You know, actual imperialistic type stuff.
Note: saying that you'll defend your assets in space, or on the open seas, is not "imperialism."
as if they were able to defend u.s. against 9/11 with all the resources they had ...
Now they are going to waste shitload of taxpayer money for stuff in space - just to please their arms-industry backers
Right, because the area of intel and defensive weapons and technology that would be focused on not having our communications and surveilance birds taken out by the Chinese on the same day they decide to physically take over Taiwan would be the same as what we should have used to stop suicidal religious nuts from carrying box-cutters on commercial aircraft. Gotcha.
The US and its allies can have nuclear power, but not other countries it chooses to put on a list. You can enforce that sort of mindset through force, but it doesn't make it morally right,
Sure it does. Why, other than while suffering from an acute case of moral relativity, should we consider it good to allow a country like Iran, that speaks in terms of wiping out other countries, to develop nukes? Why is it morally reasonable to support a country like North Korea, which runs a hideously repressive, retro-grade regime funded by illicit traffic in counterfeit foreign currency, drug trafficking, and weapons sales to places like Iran, in their pursuit of deployable nukes? If you can't see the very real, objective, philosophical shortcomings of regimes like those, then you are in no position to opine on morality in the first place.
childish colonial imperialism and it's complete bullshit.
Er, no. It's about asserting the (very reasonable) right to make sure that someone who actually is imperialistic in their behavior understands that we and the other major players in space-based commerce, research, and security aren't going to allow actually hostile postures to threaten those activities. As usual, the other (mostly western, but also Asian) nations will get to act smug about the US's willingness to actually say and do the things necessary for such a deterrent while actually benefitting from not spending that money or artificial social friction cost themselves.
The point of all this is to measure numbers. There are millions of people who disagree with you too, that's why it's an "issue", and not a human right.
The difference, though, is that one perspective points to the liberty to own a tool and to enable self defense, and the other perspective seeks to remove that liberty, but only from law-abiding people. It is a "rights" issue, to the core.
And a little more research will make your comments sound a little less... ignorant.
Try here.
You'll see that assaults using firearms tallied 11,920. And I say that as someone who owns a lot more than three, and has never been assaulted with one, only brandished one to prevent an assault on my family. I have used them, hundreds of times, to put food on the table or eliminate varmints, but that's another conversation.
Actually, you cannot buy spray paint from Home Depot without proof of age. They keep the spray paint in a locked display case.
Which would be, of course, that private business's policy - not the law of the land (whew!). I'm betting Home Depot makes those decisions on a regional basis, since the one near me has it all sitting out on an open shelf, and has self-checkout lanes that take cash! All depends on the local demographic, I'd guess. Which is interesting, since my town is infested with gangs and their spray-painted 'tags' all over the place.
Have you ever told an anecdote to support an argument for a national policy?
What I've done is echoed the voices of millions of other people who think exactly the same thing, but have done so with my own personal experience.
I know what you're thinking. Did he take six swings or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a Gerber Polymid Sport Axe handle, the most powerful axe handle in the world, and would take your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?
You should know that you, er... just Made My Day.
... but we can't, because that would involve taking the stairs, and someone might get hurt.
How many lives is your hobby worth?
And how many kids (and their families) are killed by drunk drivers? Or people wielding machetes?
Have you ever kept a very crazy guy with a pipe from beating down your back door in the middle of the night while your terrorized spouse frantically dials 911 for a long-delayed response? I have, with a gun. I couldn't have done the same thing by drinking a beer and then driving my car at him, but the beer/car combo is wildly more dangerous, and results in many more deaths-by-idiots.
Are you also tallying up kids that die from other poorly-supervised activities? Like, drowning in family pools, eating foods they're allergic to, sucking down carbon monoxide from a car idling in the garage, falling out of trees, etc? Or are you just talking about kids killed by people who are deliberately shooting children with guns? If so, are you also comparing that to kids that are stabbed, beaten, strangled, shaken, burned, tossed off of bridges, etc? Are you going to start talking about crazies invading Amish school houses? Then you'd better also talk about crazies that walk into schools and cut the throats of a bunch of kids with a knife (in Japan, for example... since a gun wasn't easily available to the guy who was planning on killing kids anyway).
A little more context will make your comments seem a little less... shrill.
there would likely have been a fatality here
How do you know that? There are beatings all the time in areas where guns are readily available, and no one gets shot. It seems more likely to me that the guy was specifically looking to deliver a beating and then walk away with the other guy "taught a lesson" or humiliated. Doesn't matter, because he's a loon, and should be locked up. And that guy (in the US) wouldn't be able to buy a gun legally anyway, if that's how he conducts himself.
Police report that this guy owns not just one, but several ax-handles! He's an ax-handle nut! I wish the ax-handle lobby would own up to the fact that these things are not just dangerous, but potentially DEADLY!
Effective ax-handle control legislation is long overdue! Think of the children!
Look, nobody wants to take away axe handles from legitimate, country-side axe users. It's only the urban areas that don't need them. We just need to close all the loopholes at the farm shows and flea markets. The real problem, though, is the glorification of axe handle swinging in popular media. Because once people think it's OK to inappropriately use just one piece of wood, then our Home Depots and other lumber yards are no better than arms markets.
Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?
This helps people to understand what our galaxy will look like right about the time that they send their last check to Capital One, paying off that 30" display they used to enjoy looking at the high-res version of the picture in question.
If this directive passes, it will severely restrict freedom of speech and expression among deaf sign language users. In the past year or so, sign language videos and video blogs have exploded in popularity and are well on their way to become the primary means of sharing information across the Internet among the deaf.
... in the same way that increasingly FEWER non-deaf people that I know are more likely to drop a TXT message or an e-mail than they are to pick up the phone.
I have no numbers to go on here, but... SURELY the written word continues to be the primary way that deaf people communicate online? IMs, e-mail, and web content? I have a hard time imagining that people would rather fire up the webcame and sign at each other to send an asynchronous message to someone
I've gone from tall, slim, attractive, creative and intelligent to my current state just in the last 10 years.
Turning 40 is the Mordock-Tipping-Point.
my live is swamped with advertising, on television, radio, roadside bill boards, on the sides of buildings, in the various stores i shop at, etc...
with the above paragraph so plainly true dont you think it would be natural for users with the knowledge to set up their web browsers to block as much advertising and web bugs as possible? (i think so and i did so)...
Except... when you visit a topical web site that's providing information or content that's very specific to your tastes, the odds now are the ads you'd see there are not the random noise that you see on billboards or hear on the radio. They're more likely to be very closely tied to the content you're looking at, and may actually represent some vendor, or product, or service you actually like. And when that advertisor strikes a supporting deal with the person who's producing the content you're sitting there reading, and have come there to see, why would you discourage that relationship? It's part of what allows that content to be there for you in the first place.
You can't say that about most of the other advertising forms you mentioned... so what you're doing is taking out your frustrations about mass-market, impersonal advertising on the very people who are trying the hardest to bring you things you might actually want to see. You've got it backwards!
While I think this specific case is somewhat asinine, the general rational has always been that enough public information, when compiled, can be considered "sensitive" or "classified".
... just the identity of one undercover LEO is enough to jeopardize him, his team, or even everyone that might be a victim of what that officer is in the middle of trying to catch/prevent. Clandestine activities are part and parcel of some law enforcement and defense activities, and even your local county or municipal agencies have some need of that - especially if they want to be able to retain quality people (who will insist on not having their names splashed all over the internet while they're doing things like infiltrating MS-13 in your kid's school zone, etc).
You don't have to have a lot of information to reach that point
Which isn't to say that emergency response people are doing something clandestine, but someone looking to, say, attract medics/cops to a scene where they've planted a bomb, or any other technique as we've seen polished in the Middle East lately, might still be able to leverage real-time 911 info.
There is no longer any reason for works of "art" to be "lost to the ravages of time", by my definition. If it is "good", there will be many copies, because it has the essence of what makes it "good". Some copies are sure to survive.
Look, when a fine art printmaker personally draws an image on a stone or plate, and produces a texture that lays semi-reflective ink onto a particular texture of hand-made paper using a certain density of ink... and then hand-registers the print while pressing the paper against another half-dozen litho stones to produce a very specific finished result... that cannot be photographically reproduced. Or mechanically so. Or digitally so... not in any way that produces the same results to the eye. Especially when the artist wraps up the print run by hand-coloring with other media, or applying Chine-colle, etc., however many of that particular piece have been produced are as many as will ever be produced. And some of them will not be kept as well as others. Scarcity ensues, and value (if the work is worth anything to its audience/appreciators) does go up. Looking at a high-res scan of the thing is NOT the same.
Exactly the same thing applies to a limited run of castings from a sculpture. The process is destructive, the original may be lost... these are things that are not the same, when seen photographically. Do you really think that seeing a full-sized copy of "David" is the same as walking into the room that contains the original one that Michelangelo personally touched with his own hands? It's not.
Is a unique "artistic statement" lessened because it is not the original embodiment of the idea?
Maybe, maybe not. But the experience of actually seeing (or touching) the work may very well not be the same, and that's between the artist and his audience - not between scam artists and a scammed audience. Someone being told they're looking directly at the piece of work produced by the artist, and seeing something like a Giclee or other reproduction, will either know they're being lied to, or suddenly think a lot less of the artist.
Don't be an ass. People of regular means sometimes actually choose to purchase an original piece of art for about the same price that some other people spend on yet another hopped-up gaming PC which they'll plug in right next to their other five in their Mom's basement. Poor rich game-worthy-PC collectors? When someone who is not rich chooses to, say, spend $750 on a hand-pulled lithograph by Malcolm Lipke because they think it's beautiful and likely to become more valuable over the years, a person producing fake pieces interferes with that. The artist has chosen to make one (or some other limited number) of his vision, and someone ripping him and his audience off tends to impact a lot more people than just "rich art collectors."
In both cases we're talking about things that can't cover their announced value just for what they are. Instead you're told they own some sort of authenticity, and thus cost X dollars.
A thing commands whatever price someone is willing to pay. If their willingness is based on a fraud (a fake painting, for example), then that blows the viability of that marketplace.
Whether you, personally, can imagine paying a lot of money for, say, a canvas that Picasso personally touched and applied paint to - well, it just doesn't matter. Some people really, really, really would like to have (and show to people) something completely unique that Georgia O'Keeffe or Titian etc personally created, with their own hands. It's literally a piece of history. When someone passes off a fraud as a piece of history, that's... fraud.
Lol... He probably didn't account for them because he didn't want to admit his IT infrastructure and record keeping was so bad he didn't know where half of them were either. Sadly I'm only half joking...
Actually, it seems that his own weapons programs people were so scared of him (and his family) that they were actually doing a fair amount of lying to him about his inventory. He appears to have thought he had more toys, in better repair, than he actually did.
Huh. I must've missed that press release. I'd have thought that they'd still be trumpeting that one as loud as they could. You wouldn't happen to have a link to an article on that, would you? I'm really curious how I missed it...
You've just already forgotten that bit of news from back in June. It's not surprising that 500+ late 1990s Mustard and Sarin gas artillery shells would be sitting around in Iraq. Saddam had thousands and thousands of such munitions, and refused to account for the disposition of most of them.
More or less randomly, here's a link to a blog with more links.
... so the Bush Administration says.
They never bothered with it before, why bother with it now? I mean evidence just detracts from the issues they are pushing.
So let's see... you're saying that if we got back a first round of air samples, and the only way you heard one way or the other about it was through some leak, you wouldn't be complaining about the lack of transparency? Well, which is it? Do you want the data as it comes, NASA-style, or do you want to wait while the DoD and DoE and other agencies chew on it for some indeterminate time and make what may never be a conclusive conclusion? For everyone here that bitches about not getting enough raw info from the government about what's happening with crazies like NK, it seems that no good deed goes unpunished. Or, were you just looking to bash, no matter what happened or didn't?
I was criticizing the notion that only government censorship meets the definition
And that's exactly what I was responding to. Unless a government (say, Cuba's) actually does control what private people can publish or broadcast (or post/see online), then it isn't censorship. There's no penalty to paid for publishing something contrary to what some other private party would publish for you, there's no ability for such a third party to limit what you can say... so "censorship" truly is the wrong word for anything other than government action/limits. Whether you personally think the YouTube issue at hand is or isn't censorship isn't my point: it's that you think a private entity, in the land of the 1st amendment, can censor... that's what I'm debating. They can't, because you can just walk away and talk somewhere else.
And, aren't you glad that I'm not screaming that, by calling me an idiot, you're censoring me, you fascist blah blah blah...? But when you trivialize words like that by proposing that they're meaningful in a context in which they're not, it's exactly what fuels the absurd use of those concepts when someone simply, really, means "I don't like you because you don't agree with me." I'd just be happier if we didn't prop up people who feel more and more inclined to trot out the high-power words describing totalitarianism and the like just because they can't fend off an argument that's over their heads or simply shows them to be wrong or pointlessly whining.
Censorship is the control of speech and other forms of human expression
Then thank you for pointing out how the case in question is not censorship. YouTube's flagging system may be subject to user whim, and may be enforced by customer services people with idealogical axe to grind, but it's not censorship. Because they are not "controlling human expression." Humans have all sorts of outlets for expression, and can start their own, if they want to. Or, they can here in the US. In China, though, your ability to use a site like YouTube, or to start your own if you don't like their own audience/policies IS controlled. That is censorship. You're confusing "editorial policy" or "audience preferences" in a particular, private venue with some that it's not. What is your agenda, exactly, that you have an interest in diluting the word "censorship" and taking away its real meaning by misusing it in the way you do?