I'm not sure if you can't read, if you are just senseless, or going out of your way to obtuse. So in response, let me sum up your argument
"I hate whitey and he is the source of all pain and suffering in the world, we should all have laws to protect us from the evil white man". I truely don't understand how the hell you equate my disagreement that committing a crime for "hate" reasons is any different than committing THE SAME CRIME for non "hate" reasons with approval of genocide. Or that you would be such a fool to think that things like genocide aren't already crimes without "hate crime" nonsense.
That being said, you obviously live in your own little world where the Holocaust happened AFTER the introduction of silly hate crime legislation. Further, the people responsible for it were convicted of their crimes against humanity and were sentenced to rot away in prison, contrary to your assertion that they got away with it. In fact you prove my exact point in that the system did a fine job of convicting those psychotic murderers and locking them up forever without the nonsense hate crime legislation we have seen in the last dozen years.
The authorties have been alerted that you did not indeed drink the kool-aid. America has always been at war with Saddam and Bin Laden, to suggest that they were ever our allies is unpatriotic. You must hate freedom! Now if we could just find a way to convince the Iraqis to forget that we uhm "didn't" support Saddam then maybe they would be more happy that we got rid of him for them.
Cry me a river will you? Ahh yes, of course its all because I'm stupid that I don't fall for the bleeding heart crap. Do you really think that there are no laws to handle harassment? That I can legally go burn crosses or terrorize people without consequences without hate crime laws? You act like all KKK members are criminals, while they may be a rather loathesome and disgusting bunch, they most certainly are not all criminals, and thus enters the double edged sword of freedom of speech, the same applies for the kill whitey groups and the hate the jews groups. The hurdles are already there, their actions are already crimes, tacking on "thoughtcrime" as motivation to a crime is pointless. You act like I don't think they should be punished or charged with the crimes they committed. I am so fucking sick of hearing "its because I'm *some minority group*" These people need to fuck off and grow up already, oh my lord no...noone but minorities face opposition, and its only certain "protected" minorities that do!
I am so fucking sick of hearing this slavery bullshit. Yes it was horrible, it also happened a long fucking time ago, and why don't we go out together and count how many blacks came here in chains on boats today. Go listen to Bill Cosby (shock, a successful black man) talk about this stupid victim culture that we promote. Where are the Irish or Italians waving their flags of victim culture over being shit on as second class citizens? I'm not saying racism doesn't exist, I'm saying that over time people get over that stupid shit. Holding on to that victim culture crap only makes it drag on longer and further fans the flames of discontent. Did Martin Luther King whine about how they should get special protection and handouts? NO! He said treat us as equals. I don't care that idiot asshole redneck committed a crime against you because you were *insert minority*, I care that he committed a crime against you as a person, and the fact that we are both talking about committing crimes pretty much means that it was ALREADY A CRIME without this "hate crime" crap tacked on.
Your own racism is actually a bit shocking. "many whites came here because they were well off" Uhm...would that be the ones driven here by the potato famine? Or maybe the ones escaping from religious persecution (ironically to become the persecutors, but that is an entirely different issue), or maybe all the ones that came here to escape the concentration camps, the list goes on and on. What about the poor white kid college fund? Or do you believe that there are no impoverished white children that deserve an education. Even your example about Shaniqua and Jodie is based on Equal Opportunity which is a good idea with piss poor implementation, but the company in question is already in violation without any other hate crime nonsense involved.
Strong men and women who overcome all adversity in their path make history, they are the shining examples of how to be for all races and lifestyles. Those getting on soapboxes and crying about victimhood make them a pathetic joke and a disgrace to their *insert minority* and cause. The ones who give the bigots and the doubters the silent "fuck off" and proceed to greatness despite any obstacles put in their path by the small minded are the greatest people of all. Hate crime laws only continue to define various things as "that type of group" when the path to success is removing all definitions of those groups. I think the constitutional amendments for blacks and women are some of the dumbest pieces of legislation out there, because, while certainly well intentioned, it establishes that some minority group needs an amendment to be treated like everyone else. The original documents already claimed everyone was equal, why do we need amendments saying "yeah we fucked up, I guess everyone really is equal...oh...and I guess girls too", why not just enforce the original intent of all men are created equal and not be morons splitting hairs about the word "Man" as it has been widely accepted to mean all of mankind. We don't need more legislation, we need to enforce what we have.
I wasn't repeating how clever it was, I was repeating that it was a pun because through two posts you still haven't figured out while there is an element of truth the whole thing is still fairly tongue in cheek. I mean...do you really think I am honestly advocating for the volunteer walmart bullet execution squad too? Not that I wouldn't be amused by it...but since you haven't caught on: homeless want to go to jail, luxury prison, and fast and easy executions are over exaggerated versions of the common right wing things. I don't really think homeless want to go to jail, but in a pinch they can use it to their advantage, I don't really think prisons are luxury hotels, but I think they have far to many creature comforts on my tax dollar (screw cable TV, internet access, and a gym...force their asses through distance education classes if they want out of their cell, use my tax dollars to make them productive, not comfortable), and while the idea of shooting this guy and others like him and saving myself a ton in tax dollars is very very appealing, I do have some qualms about the government being able kill its citizens.
No, your weak defense of their insane response actions is what is assinine. The march of technology being better technology to do the same thing for less cost and faster results(ie copy tapes). P2P only increased the ease and speed while lowering the cost of the same exact thing, making unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work.
These assholes have made the claim that we should stop going after bank robbers and the like and instead focus on movie downloaders because they steal more money. Which if you have had ANY schooling in economics you will immediately realize how stupid of a statement that is for them to make. Now they are trying to pass laws to criminilize movie downloads...they have highjacked our government and judicial system, and our government and judicial system have far more important things to be doing than chasing kids downloading movies just because a bunch of techniphobes don't understand it is the same freaking thing that has been going on the whole time, technology just made it easier.
My alternative to breaking the law is not buy the shit and fund their crusade against movie downloading kids. Screw them and everything they stand for, if they are too stupid to build a better business model that isn't my problem, artificial scarity and high prices is their attempt to squeeze more money and its failing miserably. They spend enough of my money when I pay taxes with their government hijacking. Further, this frequently isn't about kids who steal because there are no consequences, which again relies on their moronic definition of theft assuming that every download would have indeed been a purchase. It is about the next generation that uses computers to do everything, and the last generation so afraid of that that they spend billions of dollars on an industry dedicated to preventing the computer from doing what the user wants (DRM, Trusted Computing, etc). It is stupid and is a doomed endeavor and a monumental waste of my tax dollars.
It is a growth problem, I think computers and the net will allow that. But it is a pretty new way of doing things...until it matures you won't see alot of quality. Suddenly 10,000,000 amatures show up...well over time at least some of those amatures through practice and learning will become professionals, but at day 1 almsot everyone is amature and the products suck:)
Stealing (in the traditional sense, not the moronic IP theft sense) is also illegal. However, if if my child were to steal something from the store (think how little children tend to wander off with things they want in a store without meaning to steal), the store does not have to charge my child with any crime, and if they DO charge my child with stealing for wandering out with a toy or candy they didn't pay for you can bet your ass I will higher a good lawyer and make a damned media circus out of it and cost them thousands for their stupid arrogance. The idea that this should go in front of a judge and jury is moronic to say the least and this idiot manager should be fined a serious ammount for putting even more of a burden on our already straining judicial system. I hope to god they get a judge with an ounce of common sense and they toss this shit out and fine the theater.
Court is supposed to be a last resort, not a first resort. This is how America has gotten so totally fucked and the lawyers so damned rich.
No, the MPAA stared screaming because they are control freaks with a failing business model that can't adapt and have resisted the inevitable march of technology from day 1 even with earlier technology. So lets look at your assinine comment about make 1 sale vs 1000 thefts...how many years has the movie industry survived with the ease of copying tapes? Oh wait...you mean it didn't utterly destroy them as they screamed about...the government didn't step in and create a bunch of nonsense like the DMCA to protect them from the evil pirate consumer? In a nutshell, 1 sale vs 1000 thefts...what the hell ever, get a clue.
If I was in the MPAAs position I would do a number of things differently. First I would fire each and every last techniphobe bastard in a position of power over technology decisions, kick their asses right out the door, I don't need backwards thinking fools wasting my money, I need forward thinking people to better leverage technology to help me. Second, I would fire every last moron that spends one penny of my organizations money on DRM in any fashion, its a waste of time and money and has cost more than it has ever returned, it doesn't stop the people it was designed to stop, and most consumers are going to pay for the disk DRM or not. Third, I would fire everyone that has wasted my money by lobbying congress for stupid protection laws that don't actually solve the problem anyways. So there we go...with a few firings I have already increased my bottom line by a HUGE amount with out significantly affecting the consumer or even having to bother with dealing with the piracy issue at all.
Next step. I start dealing with hardware and makers to build "special" MPAA approved DVD burners and DVD-R-MPAA disks. (Copyright violation is already a crime, so we can skip any stupid DMCA bullshit). "Special" meaning I slap a sticker on each one of those burners software/hardware and every DVD-R-MPAA that says MPAA Approved for easy to use movie backups without copyright violation maybe using SCSM style technolgy if anything at all and I collect a percentage of every sale! Once again, most consumers not being criminals and prefering the easy way out, are going to purchase these devices instead of doing it themselves, sure, it doesn't reduce copying my movies, but hey precious little will, but it DOES get me some money for every movie copied that I otherwise would not have recieved. Once again, copyright violation is already illegal so I don't need any additional stupid legislation for this, I just say "I grant thee right to copy doth DVD on my approved media" Score again! My total cost of this, probly some lawyer fees involved in drawing up contracts with the vendors where I get paid a percentage, some advertising costs to make sure everyone knows "MPAA Approved is the only way to go!" and then probably some sticker production fees, and rather than paying some overpaid graphic artist to make a stupid logo, I go to the local College/High School and put out a design competition thing, give a prize, fund some new media equipment for the school, and come out a fucking hero with tons of PR for my new "MPAA Approved" equipment. Damn...honest business sure is hard work...I'm glad it pays so much better than dirty business.
Lastly...I create a P2P network that I have a reasonable amount of control over (IE, it only shares files that I introduce to the network), and then include advertisements for the appropriate places to buy "MPAA Approved" burning media, and charge them a fraction of what a store bought copy would cost. After all, I'm not paying for the jacket, the CD, or any of that stuff, and to be clever I include a coupon for $X off the purchase of the hard copy in the store! Since it is P2P my bandwidth costs are reduced (I still have my own servers participate so there is no could not be downloaded issues, and I can exert reasonable control over manipulations so hashes of files for security and whatnot) Triple Score!. Oh and then for good measure to send a strong message, I sue the
I never said it was fun. I imagine it is a rather horrible place. The kill to get in was more of a pun than anything, however, no my argument is not a fallacy because guess what...it happens all the freakin time. Now not to the extent that my joke entailed, but get arrested, spend the night in a jail cell vs sleep in the park while its snowing all night...well you can bet your ass I would get my self arrested. This doesn't mean I have to kill someone...it means I have to get drunk and pee on a cop...pretty much gaurontees a warm night. That being said...what is a fallacy is that you would ever hear "homeless person commited a crime to go to prison" anyways, you would hear "homeless person commited a crime" at best and more likely "person commited a crime" and in all likely hood you wouldn't hear either and would only see a statistic like X number of people spending Y number of years in prison for drug related offenses. Also..."our prisons aren't filled with the homeless" is both a bit "duh" and redundant...1. Well duh, their home is prison. 2. They frequently don't exactly have a real home other than prison so they are kinda homeless. There are plenty of other crimes that get you sent to prison other than kill (once again, clever pun) there are many forms of robbery, of theft, of drug possession (not just dealers are in prison, remember thats the main argument against War on Drugs that its stupid and pointless to lock up so many users), then there is also contempt of court, and repeat offenses of minor crimes. Most of these smaller offenses are the ones that get you sent to the cushier prisons...I mean...county lockup is going to be a FAR cry nicer (specially in a county that isn't a major crime infested city) than say a federal prison.
How very interesting... I had never heard that, and after digging around it seems that that is indeed the case. Which sorta makes me wonder how in the freaking hell it has been working for me. Typically I don't reburn the DVDs as that sorta defeats the purpose of backing them up to a more safe media, but all of the ones I have reburned have played just fine. I suppose that it could just be that the DVDs that I burned were not encrypted, or maybe I just have a super cheap old magic DVD player, but still all in all very wierd.
I suppose it could also be that most of the things that I deem worthy of the HDD space of keeping a backup is rarely the mass produced hollywood crap, that even if a good movie, I can go nearly anywhere and get a new copy of the movie case, book, and all for $3-$10. Lucky for me the majority of the movie watching populace seems to have absolutely horrific taste and Yet Another Cheesy Action SFX Flick XXVIII will stay $20 for ages while Rather Good Movie will be in the $5-7 range a few months after its release.
I think its terribly unfair. First his sentence should be much longer given the list of shit he pulled...MUCH longer. Second...now I am going to be stuck footing the bill for 30 years of keeping this worthless piece of crap alive in a prison where bleeding heart pansies have demanded that criminals be treated better than the average citizen. So he will have cable, a gym, free food, a place to sleep, etc...I'm sure plenty of homeless would kill for that (and probably have because we have set up such a sweet deal for them). For all your "prison is a rough place" people...I imagine living on the street, not eating, and frequently being beaten or killed by moron teens for sport, or maybe mauled for insurance fraud reasons, is probably a bit worse. That said I propose that we handle people like this cheaper. A box of.40 cal is 100 rounds for about $20. I imagine we could find MORE than enough citizens to handle the scum of the earth people like this, rapists, murders, and child molestors and I bet most of them would even pay the $20 themselves and bring their own gun, which makes me happy as a productive tax paying member of society, and quite possibly a volunteer trigger man for every bastard convicted of crimes against children.:)
I don't know how this is informative because I have never cracked DVD encryption to burn a DVD. I am also going to guess you probably haven't used a *nix based system. dd if=/dev/dvd of=/home/me/exact-bit-for-bit-copy-of-dvd.iso Then you can mount it, watch it, or burn it. This is why that DVD jon bit was so freaking retarded...I can mass produce DVDs using nothing more than a DVD burner and a basic *nix install and not have to crack anything, but to watch the DVD in linux I have to crack the damned encryption. So MPAA starts screaming about how he is trying to let the world pirate DVDs by cracking the encryption and everyone believes that little bit of stupidity. WE CAN ALREADY COPY YOUR SILLY DVDS WITHOUT DECSS!!! We just want to be able to watch the stupid things.
I think his point is that people are sitting in basements playing with computers to make music, where before, people used to sit in garages get high and play music together and record it on analog tapes. The upshot is artists from all across the world can collaborate easily, the downside is that the "human" touch of that colaboration is lessened because its all just bits on a wire.
I don't agree with him that its killing music, I do agree with him that the human touch is being reduced, but I think its just a growing pains issue and it will eventually work itself out. Sequencing notes on a computer is all grand, but the computer will play it perfectly every time with each note sounding exactly the same. I am going to go ahead and guess that you have never actually played with a band because playing with a group of people is ENTIRELY different...you can feel the music...literally. Drums, Amps, etc put out quite a bit of vibration, there is sweat and strain because you are relying on your eyes and ears and feeling (physical not emotional) to keep all of the music together. So he is 100% correct that the human touch is definetly being reduced by more people doing it online instead of in person, but I don't think its killing it. I don't think what he is saying has anything to do with "his lost ability" to do anything, nor do I think it has anything to do with the industry of recording and publishing and distributing, it has to do with creating.
I have a huge problem with it and I have mentioned it previously. I simply don't understand this stupid wimpering about "its all about getting innocent people in jail". You are exactly right, any lawyer regardless of moral quality, who throws his innocent clients under busses like that will very quickly find himself without clients. It is a stupid complaint against the plea bargin system, HOWEVER, I still think it is an entirely unjust and corrupt system. FAR FAR FAR more often than an innocent person having to take a deal, is the fact that disgusting slime pieces of shit get off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Sex offenders probably being the worst. Molestation and such happens FAR more than most people would like to admit or are aware of, and most of the offenders get to walk away with little more than a "ya shouldnta done that" only to wind up back in court months or years later (if they even get caught) for doing it again. Plea bargins disgust me, its not about innocent people going to jail which is the rare case of this, it is the guilty people walking free that is unfortunately all too common.
Hate crime is such a laughably stupid concept I don't even know where to begin. First of all it puts us in the situation where you have to assume that every crime involving more than one race is now racially motivated. He robbed the store because it was a white owner and not a black owner. It blows my mind that court case after court case involving multiple races turns into this stupid racial issue and then the actual crime is left alone. We get lawyers doing the song and dance about how it was or wasn't racially motivated and that it deserves more or less punishment. Murder is Murder is Murder. Self defense is not murder, accidental death is not murder. I can't even count the number of court cases that turned a street brawl between black idiot A and white idiot B into some racial issue. Prove to me that EVERYONE in America that says "Thats gay" or "You are a fag" or "Don't be a jew" or "hey nigger" actually hates homosexuals, is antisemetic, and hates blacks and then we can discuss the sanity behind hate crime legislation. The fact is this hate crime shit totally detracts from the actual crime committed and it quickly becomes an argument about whether or not it was racial totally ignoring the fact that someone is dead or injured or whatever. This is little more than the guilty white syndrome shit that brought us such stunning victories as affirmative action and is just a continuation of thinly veiled racism. You want to hear some people pissed about affirmative action...you might here some racist rednecks bitch...but if you REALLY want to hear some pissed off people...go talk to successful blacks about how they are treated in college or on the job when everyone thinks they are there due to government programs. Treat all people as people and all crime as crime and don't allow anyone to play these stupid race cards if you want justice.
I am waiting for "The hackers put the blood and gore in the game" Our original game was about raising puppies, cute little harmless puppies, those evil hackers made it about violence and murder...
You actually proved my point and I think you misundersood what I was getting at. Homicide (self defense) vs Murder (not self defense). My point is that we already have the laws to deal with the difference between various types of deaths. You die in a car wreck because a trucks brakes fail and crush your car. You are dead, and the trucker MIGHT get charged with some form of involentary manslaughter if there was negligence or something. You die because you break into my house and I shoot you. Odds are I will not be charged because of self defense. I stab you in the face for irritating me one day. I am going to get charged with some degree of murder/manslaughter. I hunt you down and kill you because I don't like you for some reason and I plan out your murder. I am going to get charged with a higher degree of murder. My point is the reason I hunt you down and kill you is irrelevant.
Whether Mr.Killer hunts down blacks for dating whites, or maybe for because you drink Coke instead of pepsi it should be treated the same. The real crime is that Mr.Killer is hunting people down and murdering them, the fact that it was because they were black, white, asian, pepsi drinkers, coke drinkers, hookers, etc is completely and totally outside the fact that he committed murder. Hate crimes are just a PC way of prosecuting thought crime. It is entirely legal for someone to hate someone else for being a black pepsi drinking hooker or whatever, the illegal part is murdering them regardless of why you decided to do it. The ONLY difference it should make is that when you put the guy who killed people for drinking coke in jail you think "what the hell was that about" and when you put the guy who was killing blacks in jail "damn skippy, now maybe prison sex will cure hate like American History X taught us". The crimes they are charged with and the sentencing should be the same. (Honestly, just for a chuckle at the absurdity of our current system, the guy killing coke drinkers might acually get sentenced harsher because he is sending the message don't drink coke, which could cause people to drink pepsi instead, and then he could be charged with the plethora of corporate protection laws that have been purchased as of late).
Oh the right wingers certainly do...just ask them about "the liberal media" sometime. Which is interesting because they actually go one step farther in that claim, basically saying that the ENTIRE WORLD has banded together in a liberal controlled media to make good God fearing American republicans look bad. Listening to them talk about how its all just Bush bashing driven by the liberal media is funny... You could sit for days demonstrating that global media is saying roughly the same thing and they will still tell you its some super vast organized "liberal media". They honestly believe that Fox news is "fair and balanced" and that Oreilly is "no spin".
At least the lefties generally keep their conspiracy theories limited down to America with the occasional foreign involvement rather than insisting that the entire world is united in a vast "liberal media" conspiracy out to get Bush and the other good God fearing conservatives.
The left wingnut bias comes from turning every stupid decision made by ANYONE in the last years into a right wing conspiracy and attempting to draw lines to blame it on the administration. I dislike these clowns as much as the next, I think their policy on damn near everything is horrible to say the least, but I will simply not give them so much credit to believe that they are evil masterminds manipulating everything Bad(tm) that happens. It goes against my basic belief that they are incompetent clowns with superiority complexes. kdawson always seems to try and find the "Bush is to blame" tie in on damn near every story. When quite frankly Bush isn't to blame for much of this...it is the collective of us that allowed half of this crap to get this far, we were driven by fear to give them the reigns, we still buy on credit, we still refuse to vote, we still refuse to spend responsibly (oh...I don't care that it is made in sweatshops, its $5 cheaper than that other brand).
In closing I will give you my most loathed behavior that leads to 90% of the horrible decisions made in damn near any field. "We are going to do it this way because you know they won't let us do it that way". The Lazy Psychic defense...rather than going to leadership, presenting a valid solution, people will use their own opinions of their superiors to fill in the gaps of the will of their superiors to avoid having to present their own or their subordinates ideas to leadership, also in their mind removing any responsibility from them for screwups based on their decisions because the phantom of their boss approved it in their mind.
I have come to the realization a while back that the Republican party is not my fathers party anymore. The old school Rs were fiscal conservatives, political conservatives, and by the very nature of those two social LIBERALs. You can't be a fiscal and political conservative and advocate the "daddy knows best" style of government we have had lately. I don't give a crap about what people say, Democrats are NOT social liberals by any stretch...they want to legislate on a different class of issues, but its still "protect the children" nonsense, and frequently some of their crap about hate speech is dangerously close to "thoughtcrime". Should it matter if I killed you because you were black...I still killed you right? We already have laws to deal with murderers...thoughtcrime... On top of this...there is the insane notion that the government should take care of the people...which is another one of those critical flaws that put us in this situation...R and D alike believe that the government should take care of us, they just have different ideals as to what that means...the REALITY is that the people should take care of the government and the government should be leaving us the hell alone to succeed or fail without their interference.
I think the key to successful deregulation is to ensure that the corporate world is no longer above the law and CEOs and whatnot cannot hide behind the legal shielding it provides, which is pretty much his exact stance on things. He frequently talks about how the rule of law is critical to our freedom and that corporations and government have been ignoring this. His fiscal policy scares me, but it scares me the same way an invasive surgery does. The idea of going through a dramatic procedure that is going to be very painful, require rehab, and could possibly kill me, yet is ultimately better for me in the long run is certainly better than just letting a serious condition continue to get worse until death is inevitable. I would rather take the risk to try and fix things than to face the inevitable collapse that we are looking at today.
Our way of life simply cannot be sustained for a significant amount of time on this path we are on...you can only borrow so much...credit only goes so far. Do you think prices of housing, cars, or even basic convenience items would be so fucking high if it weren't so easy for people to accumulate huge amounts of debt purchasing them? Low interest rates! Buy now pay later! etc, etc, this type of spending has screwed us and it is only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down. Windows is being offered for $3 in china and people are crying about how its not fair that they get a better deal...well...then don't fucking pay $300 for it...if no one is willing to pay $300 the price will come down until it reaches a point where people are willing to pay for it. Simple freaking economics and basic math skills can show all of this...but we get the current crop of R and D telling horror stories about aweful it would be if they didn't control everything and people (who are frequently poor at math and have a horrible understanding of economics) run to them for help. Go look at the average debt for most Americans and compare that to the number of people who have retirement funds and the like...it certainly isn't because everyone is out to get them...its because they think lower payments means they are saving money and have no concept of how compound interest works. Go look at almost every single American millionaire that didn't get his from an inheritance..they have a damned fine understanding of compound interest and investment and you won't see them paying $40,000 over 10 years for a car worth $20,000 that will devalue down to $2,000 in 10 years.
As for Reagan...well...his VP was the director of the CIA and he was an actor... Maybe I am paranoid...but uhm...CIA director VP + Actor P certainly seems a little frightening. But, while some of this may lead you to more conspiracy theory things, the facts are out there and you can
If you read his stuff you will see that he actually has answers forhe Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" most of this, namely the poor starving on the streets. He points out the fiscal insanity of the government out of control we have is what is causing the evergrowing divide that cause the poor and lower middle class to suffer. Roads, water, and parks I will agree with, but your tuition is really your problem, and honestly would be much less of a problem to deal with if you weren't forking over so much money to the government in the first place, nevermind that the government is frequently the cause of rising tuition rates through assinine legislation and requirements. The Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" Extortion is what that is normally called.
The problem is people don't understand the opportunity cost involved with letting the government handle half of the crap that it does. Government contracting is a VERY lucrative business because the government is rarely concerned with the price or quality...and they certainly aren't spending any of their money...they are spending yours...to pay their political contributers, relatives, and friends...through various deals. Go back and look how often people are getting busted for corruption and bribes in these contracts. Realistically the only ones getting caught are the ones that don't have enough friends in high places to otherwise bail them out of the hotseat.
And while I certainly want my roads paved and clean water and all of that...I will point out that none of that is a "right", especially the tuition. The interstate doesn't exist for the people, it exists for the military. Now certainly many of these things are conductive to a healthy and prosperous nation, but they most certainly are not rights. I personally believe that many of these things would be handled infinitely better by private industry IF AND ONLY IF the private industry actually is forced to comply with the rule of law (which is another of Ron Paul's key points, is that the corporations and government view themselves as above the law). The real bitch is that so many of our problems are so interelated (credit cards, insurance, poverty, medical care, etc) that we really are at a point where you can't solve one and not cause a collapse without having to tackle a whole host of things all at once.
I find the 6 minute thing hard to believe, I would have thrown my laptop off the desk a dozen or so times by now if I was waiting 6 minutes (actually this did happen once and I about lost my freaking mind...Evolution starting up caused the system to hang and lock up at 98% CPU...turns out that it was actually an infinite loop problem in part of the perl that spamassassin uses during an Evolution startup...This all stemmed from an update that didn't recompile the appropriate dependancies.)
The 10-30 seconds Firefox takes to come up sometimes is enough to irritate the bejesus out of me on some days. Evolution does tend to take a bit to come up, 20 seconds seems pretty long, I would say mine usually comes up in 5-10 tops. The main thing to remember is that Evolution isn't just an email client, it has all that calender hoohah and palm syncing and integrated whatnots much like Outlook. Outlook is not exactly a quickstart email app either compared to simple pop/imap email clients.
Bravo Bravo. In the most amusing form of irony your post is now considered copyright violation as fair use effectively no longer exists. So your copyright infringement post to explain the mentality of copyright infringement claims by the RIAA is incredible. You get +1 Irony and +1 Slashdot Analogy and yet another +1 Shoulda been Fair Use. I am however sad to inform you that you also get a -1 Harry Potter Reference. But all in all good show.
I'm glad you are so well informed to have researched his past, his record, his writings, his speeches...oh wait...you just made a decision based on a media appearance... He is also one of the few politicians that has a solid record of voting based on the constitution rather than all the other nonsense. This is EXACTLY the mindset that got us stuck in this situation...stupid kneejerk reactions to media appearances. Certainly by your logic everything the current administration has done is the best possible path because the offending members of the administration make regular appearances on 'legitimate' media outlets... We are under attack by Islamofascists who hate our freedoms because President "you gotta catapult the propoganda" Bush said so on all the major outlets right?
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that The Alex Jones show is any worse than Fox News about going overboard and making sensationalist shit up?
Incidentally, not that I agree with much of Jones' ideas...look up The Big Lie. Telling a lie so implausibly huge that it could not be anything but the truth... Welcome to modern American government. Go research the people in office, where they have been, the positions they held. Robert Gates our current SecDef was also head of the CIA during the Iran Contra business, Donald Rumsfeld swore to have the ban on aspertame lifted while he was Chairman of G.D Searle (the makers of) sure enough reapplied the day after Reagan entered office, and eventually was approved by a Reagan appointee who then quit under allegations of impropriety. Dick Cheney SecDef during Gulf War I, Bush Sr CIA Director, the list goes on and on and on and these are only the well known household names. If you actually bothered to read the history of these things it has been a select cast of a few in key positions of power in our government for the past 20+ years. We elect new figureheads yet all of these people just shift around appointed to new positions and park in some of the most criminal corporations in between. Monsanto, G.D. Searle, Halliburton, again the list goes on. None of this is conspiracy theory...it is clearly written and documented history that people are too god damned lazy to bother looking up. So grab your flag, sing your song, and bomb the infade...err...bomb the terrorist...sorry the justifications are so similar I get them confused sometimes.
Yeah...damn the fact that he made his career as a successful doctor before his run in politics. Oh and there is that whole retired veteran thing...then there is that pesky business of being a fiscal conservative. But he says we hold some responsibility for the attacks (go read your history book please, we have been screwing with the governments of the middle east for AGES) and that criminal scum Ghouliani (worth $7k at divorce but $30 million after 9/11) says he hates America and receives rounds of applause from moron kneejerk "towelhead" hating nutjobs.
It is depressing to me that the media spins him as some psycho conspiracy nut and even more that people believe it. In the meantime we readily cheer on our warhawks who dodged the service and then vote for war, and then call those who served a full 20 cowards for voting against it.
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I'm not sure if you can't read, if you are just senseless, or going out of your way to obtuse. So in response, let me sum up your argument "I hate whitey and he is the source of all pain and suffering in the world, we should all have laws to protect us from the evil white man". I truely don't understand how the hell you equate my disagreement that committing a crime for "hate" reasons is any different than committing THE SAME CRIME for non "hate" reasons with approval of genocide. Or that you would be such a fool to think that things like genocide aren't already crimes without "hate crime" nonsense.
That being said, you obviously live in your own little world where the Holocaust happened AFTER the introduction of silly hate crime legislation. Further, the people responsible for it were convicted of their crimes against humanity and were sentenced to rot away in prison, contrary to your assertion that they got away with it. In fact you prove my exact point in that the system did a fine job of convicting those psychotic murderers and locking them up forever without the nonsense hate crime legislation we have seen in the last dozen years.
The authorties have been alerted that you did not indeed drink the kool-aid. America has always been at war with Saddam and Bin Laden, to suggest that they were ever our allies is unpatriotic. You must hate freedom! Now if we could just find a way to convince the Iraqis to forget that we uhm "didn't" support Saddam then maybe they would be more happy that we got rid of him for them.
Cry me a river will you? Ahh yes, of course its all because I'm stupid that I don't fall for the bleeding heart crap. Do you really think that there are no laws to handle harassment? That I can legally go burn crosses or terrorize people without consequences without hate crime laws? You act like all KKK members are criminals, while they may be a rather loathesome and disgusting bunch, they most certainly are not all criminals, and thus enters the double edged sword of freedom of speech, the same applies for the kill whitey groups and the hate the jews groups. The hurdles are already there, their actions are already crimes, tacking on "thoughtcrime" as motivation to a crime is pointless. You act like I don't think they should be punished or charged with the crimes they committed. I am so fucking sick of hearing "its because I'm *some minority group*" These people need to fuck off and grow up already, oh my lord no...noone but minorities face opposition, and its only certain "protected" minorities that do!
I am so fucking sick of hearing this slavery bullshit. Yes it was horrible, it also happened a long fucking time ago, and why don't we go out together and count how many blacks came here in chains on boats today. Go listen to Bill Cosby (shock, a successful black man) talk about this stupid victim culture that we promote. Where are the Irish or Italians waving their flags of victim culture over being shit on as second class citizens? I'm not saying racism doesn't exist, I'm saying that over time people get over that stupid shit. Holding on to that victim culture crap only makes it drag on longer and further fans the flames of discontent. Did Martin Luther King whine about how they should get special protection and handouts? NO! He said treat us as equals. I don't care that idiot asshole redneck committed a crime against you because you were *insert minority*, I care that he committed a crime against you as a person, and the fact that we are both talking about committing crimes pretty much means that it was ALREADY A CRIME without this "hate crime" crap tacked on.
Your own racism is actually a bit shocking. "many whites came here because they were well off" Uhm...would that be the ones driven here by the potato famine? Or maybe the ones escaping from religious persecution (ironically to become the persecutors, but that is an entirely different issue), or maybe all the ones that came here to escape the concentration camps, the list goes on and on. What about the poor white kid college fund? Or do you believe that there are no impoverished white children that deserve an education. Even your example about Shaniqua and Jodie is based on Equal Opportunity which is a good idea with piss poor implementation, but the company in question is already in violation without any other hate crime nonsense involved.
Strong men and women who overcome all adversity in their path make history, they are the shining examples of how to be for all races and lifestyles. Those getting on soapboxes and crying about victimhood make them a pathetic joke and a disgrace to their *insert minority* and cause. The ones who give the bigots and the doubters the silent "fuck off" and proceed to greatness despite any obstacles put in their path by the small minded are the greatest people of all. Hate crime laws only continue to define various things as "that type of group" when the path to success is removing all definitions of those groups. I think the constitutional amendments for blacks and women are some of the dumbest pieces of legislation out there, because, while certainly well intentioned, it establishes that some minority group needs an amendment to be treated like everyone else. The original documents already claimed everyone was equal, why do we need amendments saying "yeah we fucked up, I guess everyone really is equal...oh...and I guess girls too", why not just enforce the original intent of all men are created equal and not be morons splitting hairs about the word "Man" as it has been widely accepted to mean all of mankind. We don't need more legislation, we need to enforce what we have.
I wasn't repeating how clever it was, I was repeating that it was a pun because through two posts you still haven't figured out while there is an element of truth the whole thing is still fairly tongue in cheek. I mean...do you really think I am honestly advocating for the volunteer walmart bullet execution squad too? Not that I wouldn't be amused by it...but since you haven't caught on: homeless want to go to jail, luxury prison, and fast and easy executions are over exaggerated versions of the common right wing things. I don't really think homeless want to go to jail, but in a pinch they can use it to their advantage, I don't really think prisons are luxury hotels, but I think they have far to many creature comforts on my tax dollar (screw cable TV, internet access, and a gym...force their asses through distance education classes if they want out of their cell, use my tax dollars to make them productive, not comfortable), and while the idea of shooting this guy and others like him and saving myself a ton in tax dollars is very very appealing, I do have some qualms about the government being able kill its citizens.
No, your weak defense of their insane response actions is what is assinine. The march of technology being better technology to do the same thing for less cost and faster results(ie copy tapes). P2P only increased the ease and speed while lowering the cost of the same exact thing, making unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work.
These assholes have made the claim that we should stop going after bank robbers and the like and instead focus on movie downloaders because they steal more money. Which if you have had ANY schooling in economics you will immediately realize how stupid of a statement that is for them to make. Now they are trying to pass laws to criminilize movie downloads...they have highjacked our government and judicial system, and our government and judicial system have far more important things to be doing than chasing kids downloading movies just because a bunch of techniphobes don't understand it is the same freaking thing that has been going on the whole time, technology just made it easier.
My alternative to breaking the law is not buy the shit and fund their crusade against movie downloading kids. Screw them and everything they stand for, if they are too stupid to build a better business model that isn't my problem, artificial scarity and high prices is their attempt to squeeze more money and its failing miserably. They spend enough of my money when I pay taxes with their government hijacking. Further, this frequently isn't about kids who steal because there are no consequences, which again relies on their moronic definition of theft assuming that every download would have indeed been a purchase. It is about the next generation that uses computers to do everything, and the last generation so afraid of that that they spend billions of dollars on an industry dedicated to preventing the computer from doing what the user wants (DRM, Trusted Computing, etc). It is stupid and is a doomed endeavor and a monumental waste of my tax dollars.
It is a growth problem, I think computers and the net will allow that. But it is a pretty new way of doing things...until it matures you won't see alot of quality. Suddenly 10,000,000 amatures show up...well over time at least some of those amatures through practice and learning will become professionals, but at day 1 almsot everyone is amature and the products suck :)
Stealing (in the traditional sense, not the moronic IP theft sense) is also illegal. However, if if my child were to steal something from the store (think how little children tend to wander off with things they want in a store without meaning to steal), the store does not have to charge my child with any crime, and if they DO charge my child with stealing for wandering out with a toy or candy they didn't pay for you can bet your ass I will higher a good lawyer and make a damned media circus out of it and cost them thousands for their stupid arrogance. The idea that this should go in front of a judge and jury is moronic to say the least and this idiot manager should be fined a serious ammount for putting even more of a burden on our already straining judicial system. I hope to god they get a judge with an ounce of common sense and they toss this shit out and fine the theater.
Court is supposed to be a last resort, not a first resort. This is how America has gotten so totally fucked and the lawyers so damned rich.
No, the MPAA stared screaming because they are control freaks with a failing business model that can't adapt and have resisted the inevitable march of technology from day 1 even with earlier technology. So lets look at your assinine comment about make 1 sale vs 1000 thefts...how many years has the movie industry survived with the ease of copying tapes? Oh wait...you mean it didn't utterly destroy them as they screamed about...the government didn't step in and create a bunch of nonsense like the DMCA to protect them from the evil pirate consumer? In a nutshell, 1 sale vs 1000 thefts...what the hell ever, get a clue.
If I was in the MPAAs position I would do a number of things differently. First I would fire each and every last techniphobe bastard in a position of power over technology decisions, kick their asses right out the door, I don't need backwards thinking fools wasting my money, I need forward thinking people to better leverage technology to help me. Second, I would fire every last moron that spends one penny of my organizations money on DRM in any fashion, its a waste of time and money and has cost more than it has ever returned, it doesn't stop the people it was designed to stop, and most consumers are going to pay for the disk DRM or not. Third, I would fire everyone that has wasted my money by lobbying congress for stupid protection laws that don't actually solve the problem anyways. So there we go...with a few firings I have already increased my bottom line by a HUGE amount with out significantly affecting the consumer or even having to bother with dealing with the piracy issue at all.
Next step. I start dealing with hardware and makers to build "special" MPAA approved DVD burners and DVD-R-MPAA disks. (Copyright violation is already a crime, so we can skip any stupid DMCA bullshit). "Special" meaning I slap a sticker on each one of those burners software/hardware and every DVD-R-MPAA that says MPAA Approved for easy to use movie backups without copyright violation maybe using SCSM style technolgy if anything at all and I collect a percentage of every sale! Once again, most consumers not being criminals and prefering the easy way out, are going to purchase these devices instead of doing it themselves, sure, it doesn't reduce copying my movies, but hey precious little will, but it DOES get me some money for every movie copied that I otherwise would not have recieved. Once again, copyright violation is already illegal so I don't need any additional stupid legislation for this, I just say "I grant thee right to copy doth DVD on my approved media" Score again! My total cost of this, probly some lawyer fees involved in drawing up contracts with the vendors where I get paid a percentage, some advertising costs to make sure everyone knows "MPAA Approved is the only way to go!" and then probably some sticker production fees, and rather than paying some overpaid graphic artist to make a stupid logo, I go to the local College/High School and put out a design competition thing, give a prize, fund some new media equipment for the school, and come out a fucking hero with tons of PR for my new "MPAA Approved" equipment. Damn...honest business sure is hard work...I'm glad it pays so much better than dirty business.
Lastly...I create a P2P network that I have a reasonable amount of control over (IE, it only shares files that I introduce to the network), and then include advertisements for the appropriate places to buy "MPAA Approved" burning media, and charge them a fraction of what a store bought copy would cost. After all, I'm not paying for the jacket, the CD, or any of that stuff, and to be clever I include a coupon for $X off the purchase of the hard copy in the store! Since it is P2P my bandwidth costs are reduced (I still have my own servers participate so there is no could not be downloaded issues, and I can exert reasonable control over manipulations so hashes of files for security and whatnot) Triple Score!. Oh and then for good measure to send a strong message, I sue the
I never said it was fun. I imagine it is a rather horrible place. The kill to get in was more of a pun than anything, however, no my argument is not a fallacy because guess what...it happens all the freakin time. Now not to the extent that my joke entailed, but get arrested, spend the night in a jail cell vs sleep in the park while its snowing all night...well you can bet your ass I would get my self arrested. This doesn't mean I have to kill someone...it means I have to get drunk and pee on a cop...pretty much gaurontees a warm night. That being said...what is a fallacy is that you would ever hear "homeless person commited a crime to go to prison" anyways, you would hear "homeless person commited a crime" at best and more likely "person commited a crime" and in all likely hood you wouldn't hear either and would only see a statistic like X number of people spending Y number of years in prison for drug related offenses. Also..."our prisons aren't filled with the homeless" is both a bit "duh" and redundant...1. Well duh, their home is prison. 2. They frequently don't exactly have a real home other than prison so they are kinda homeless. There are plenty of other crimes that get you sent to prison other than kill (once again, clever pun) there are many forms of robbery, of theft, of drug possession (not just dealers are in prison, remember thats the main argument against War on Drugs that its stupid and pointless to lock up so many users), then there is also contempt of court, and repeat offenses of minor crimes. Most of these smaller offenses are the ones that get you sent to the cushier prisons...I mean...county lockup is going to be a FAR cry nicer (specially in a county that isn't a major crime infested city) than say a federal prison.
How very interesting... I had never heard that, and after digging around it seems that that is indeed the case. Which sorta makes me wonder how in the freaking hell it has been working for me. Typically I don't reburn the DVDs as that sorta defeats the purpose of backing them up to a more safe media, but all of the ones I have reburned have played just fine. I suppose that it could just be that the DVDs that I burned were not encrypted, or maybe I just have a super cheap old magic DVD player, but still all in all very wierd.
I suppose it could also be that most of the things that I deem worthy of the HDD space of keeping a backup is rarely the mass produced hollywood crap, that even if a good movie, I can go nearly anywhere and get a new copy of the movie case, book, and all for $3-$10. Lucky for me the majority of the movie watching populace seems to have absolutely horrific taste and Yet Another Cheesy Action SFX Flick XXVIII will stay $20 for ages while Rather Good Movie will be in the $5-7 range a few months after its release.
I think its terribly unfair. First his sentence should be much longer given the list of shit he pulled...MUCH longer. Second...now I am going to be stuck footing the bill for 30 years of keeping this worthless piece of crap alive in a prison where bleeding heart pansies have demanded that criminals be treated better than the average citizen. So he will have cable, a gym, free food, a place to sleep, etc...I'm sure plenty of homeless would kill for that (and probably have because we have set up such a sweet deal for them). For all your "prison is a rough place" people...I imagine living on the street, not eating, and frequently being beaten or killed by moron teens for sport, or maybe mauled for insurance fraud reasons, is probably a bit worse. That said I propose that we handle people like this cheaper. A box of .40 cal is 100 rounds for about $20. I imagine we could find MORE than enough citizens to handle the scum of the earth people like this, rapists, murders, and child molestors and I bet most of them would even pay the $20 themselves and bring their own gun, which makes me happy as a productive tax paying member of society, and quite possibly a volunteer trigger man for every bastard convicted of crimes against children. :)
I don't know how this is informative because I have never cracked DVD encryption to burn a DVD. I am also going to guess you probably haven't used a *nix based system. dd if=/dev/dvd of=/home/me/exact-bit-for-bit-copy-of-dvd.iso Then you can mount it, watch it, or burn it. This is why that DVD jon bit was so freaking retarded...I can mass produce DVDs using nothing more than a DVD burner and a basic *nix install and not have to crack anything, but to watch the DVD in linux I have to crack the damned encryption. So MPAA starts screaming about how he is trying to let the world pirate DVDs by cracking the encryption and everyone believes that little bit of stupidity. WE CAN ALREADY COPY YOUR SILLY DVDS WITHOUT DECSS!!! We just want to be able to watch the stupid things.
I think his point is that people are sitting in basements playing with computers to make music, where before, people used to sit in garages get high and play music together and record it on analog tapes. The upshot is artists from all across the world can collaborate easily, the downside is that the "human" touch of that colaboration is lessened because its all just bits on a wire.
I don't agree with him that its killing music, I do agree with him that the human touch is being reduced, but I think its just a growing pains issue and it will eventually work itself out. Sequencing notes on a computer is all grand, but the computer will play it perfectly every time with each note sounding exactly the same. I am going to go ahead and guess that you have never actually played with a band because playing with a group of people is ENTIRELY different...you can feel the music...literally. Drums, Amps, etc put out quite a bit of vibration, there is sweat and strain because you are relying on your eyes and ears and feeling (physical not emotional) to keep all of the music together. So he is 100% correct that the human touch is definetly being reduced by more people doing it online instead of in person, but I don't think its killing it. I don't think what he is saying has anything to do with "his lost ability" to do anything, nor do I think it has anything to do with the industry of recording and publishing and distributing, it has to do with creating.
I have a huge problem with it and I have mentioned it previously. I simply don't understand this stupid wimpering about "its all about getting innocent people in jail". You are exactly right, any lawyer regardless of moral quality, who throws his innocent clients under busses like that will very quickly find himself without clients. It is a stupid complaint against the plea bargin system, HOWEVER, I still think it is an entirely unjust and corrupt system. FAR FAR FAR more often than an innocent person having to take a deal, is the fact that disgusting slime pieces of shit get off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Sex offenders probably being the worst. Molestation and such happens FAR more than most people would like to admit or are aware of, and most of the offenders get to walk away with little more than a "ya shouldnta done that" only to wind up back in court months or years later (if they even get caught) for doing it again. Plea bargins disgust me, its not about innocent people going to jail which is the rare case of this, it is the guilty people walking free that is unfortunately all too common.
Hate crime is such a laughably stupid concept I don't even know where to begin. First of all it puts us in the situation where you have to assume that every crime involving more than one race is now racially motivated. He robbed the store because it was a white owner and not a black owner. It blows my mind that court case after court case involving multiple races turns into this stupid racial issue and then the actual crime is left alone. We get lawyers doing the song and dance about how it was or wasn't racially motivated and that it deserves more or less punishment. Murder is Murder is Murder. Self defense is not murder, accidental death is not murder. I can't even count the number of court cases that turned a street brawl between black idiot A and white idiot B into some racial issue. Prove to me that EVERYONE in America that says "Thats gay" or "You are a fag" or "Don't be a jew" or "hey nigger" actually hates homosexuals, is antisemetic, and hates blacks and then we can discuss the sanity behind hate crime legislation. The fact is this hate crime shit totally detracts from the actual crime committed and it quickly becomes an argument about whether or not it was racial totally ignoring the fact that someone is dead or injured or whatever. This is little more than the guilty white syndrome shit that brought us such stunning victories as affirmative action and is just a continuation of thinly veiled racism. You want to hear some people pissed about affirmative action...you might here some racist rednecks bitch...but if you REALLY want to hear some pissed off people...go talk to successful blacks about how they are treated in college or on the job when everyone thinks they are there due to government programs. Treat all people as people and all crime as crime and don't allow anyone to play these stupid race cards if you want justice.
I am waiting for "The hackers put the blood and gore in the game" Our original game was about raising puppies, cute little harmless puppies, those evil hackers made it about violence and murder...
You actually proved my point and I think you misundersood what I was getting at. Homicide (self defense) vs Murder (not self defense). My point is that we already have the laws to deal with the difference between various types of deaths. You die in a car wreck because a trucks brakes fail and crush your car. You are dead, and the trucker MIGHT get charged with some form of involentary manslaughter if there was negligence or something. You die because you break into my house and I shoot you. Odds are I will not be charged because of self defense. I stab you in the face for irritating me one day. I am going to get charged with some degree of murder/manslaughter. I hunt you down and kill you because I don't like you for some reason and I plan out your murder. I am going to get charged with a higher degree of murder. My point is the reason I hunt you down and kill you is irrelevant. Whether Mr.Killer hunts down blacks for dating whites, or maybe for because you drink Coke instead of pepsi it should be treated the same. The real crime is that Mr.Killer is hunting people down and murdering them, the fact that it was because they were black, white, asian, pepsi drinkers, coke drinkers, hookers, etc is completely and totally outside the fact that he committed murder. Hate crimes are just a PC way of prosecuting thought crime. It is entirely legal for someone to hate someone else for being a black pepsi drinking hooker or whatever, the illegal part is murdering them regardless of why you decided to do it. The ONLY difference it should make is that when you put the guy who killed people for drinking coke in jail you think "what the hell was that about" and when you put the guy who was killing blacks in jail "damn skippy, now maybe prison sex will cure hate like American History X taught us". The crimes they are charged with and the sentencing should be the same. (Honestly, just for a chuckle at the absurdity of our current system, the guy killing coke drinkers might acually get sentenced harsher because he is sending the message don't drink coke, which could cause people to drink pepsi instead, and then he could be charged with the plethora of corporate protection laws that have been purchased as of late).
Oh the right wingers certainly do...just ask them about "the liberal media" sometime. Which is interesting because they actually go one step farther in that claim, basically saying that the ENTIRE WORLD has banded together in a liberal controlled media to make good God fearing American republicans look bad. Listening to them talk about how its all just Bush bashing driven by the liberal media is funny... You could sit for days demonstrating that global media is saying roughly the same thing and they will still tell you its some super vast organized "liberal media". They honestly believe that Fox news is "fair and balanced" and that Oreilly is "no spin".
At least the lefties generally keep their conspiracy theories limited down to America with the occasional foreign involvement rather than insisting that the entire world is united in a vast "liberal media" conspiracy out to get Bush and the other good God fearing conservatives.
The left wingnut bias comes from turning every stupid decision made by ANYONE in the last years into a right wing conspiracy and attempting to draw lines to blame it on the administration. I dislike these clowns as much as the next, I think their policy on damn near everything is horrible to say the least, but I will simply not give them so much credit to believe that they are evil masterminds manipulating everything Bad(tm) that happens. It goes against my basic belief that they are incompetent clowns with superiority complexes. kdawson always seems to try and find the "Bush is to blame" tie in on damn near every story. When quite frankly Bush isn't to blame for much of this...it is the collective of us that allowed half of this crap to get this far, we were driven by fear to give them the reigns, we still buy on credit, we still refuse to vote, we still refuse to spend responsibly (oh...I don't care that it is made in sweatshops, its $5 cheaper than that other brand).
In closing I will give you my most loathed behavior that leads to 90% of the horrible decisions made in damn near any field. "We are going to do it this way because you know they won't let us do it that way". The Lazy Psychic defense...rather than going to leadership, presenting a valid solution, people will use their own opinions of their superiors to fill in the gaps of the will of their superiors to avoid having to present their own or their subordinates ideas to leadership, also in their mind removing any responsibility from them for screwups based on their decisions because the phantom of their boss approved it in their mind.
I have come to the realization a while back that the Republican party is not my fathers party anymore. The old school Rs were fiscal conservatives, political conservatives, and by the very nature of those two social LIBERALs. You can't be a fiscal and political conservative and advocate the "daddy knows best" style of government we have had lately. I don't give a crap about what people say, Democrats are NOT social liberals by any stretch...they want to legislate on a different class of issues, but its still "protect the children" nonsense, and frequently some of their crap about hate speech is dangerously close to "thoughtcrime". Should it matter if I killed you because you were black...I still killed you right? We already have laws to deal with murderers...thoughtcrime... On top of this...there is the insane notion that the government should take care of the people...which is another one of those critical flaws that put us in this situation...R and D alike believe that the government should take care of us, they just have different ideals as to what that means...the REALITY is that the people should take care of the government and the government should be leaving us the hell alone to succeed or fail without their interference.
I think the key to successful deregulation is to ensure that the corporate world is no longer above the law and CEOs and whatnot cannot hide behind the legal shielding it provides, which is pretty much his exact stance on things. He frequently talks about how the rule of law is critical to our freedom and that corporations and government have been ignoring this. His fiscal policy scares me, but it scares me the same way an invasive surgery does. The idea of going through a dramatic procedure that is going to be very painful, require rehab, and could possibly kill me, yet is ultimately better for me in the long run is certainly better than just letting a serious condition continue to get worse until death is inevitable. I would rather take the risk to try and fix things than to face the inevitable collapse that we are looking at today.
Our way of life simply cannot be sustained for a significant amount of time on this path we are on...you can only borrow so much...credit only goes so far. Do you think prices of housing, cars, or even basic convenience items would be so fucking high if it weren't so easy for people to accumulate huge amounts of debt purchasing them? Low interest rates! Buy now pay later! etc, etc, this type of spending has screwed us and it is only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down. Windows is being offered for $3 in china and people are crying about how its not fair that they get a better deal...well...then don't fucking pay $300 for it...if no one is willing to pay $300 the price will come down until it reaches a point where people are willing to pay for it. Simple freaking economics and basic math skills can show all of this...but we get the current crop of R and D telling horror stories about aweful it would be if they didn't control everything and people (who are frequently poor at math and have a horrible understanding of economics) run to them for help. Go look at the average debt for most Americans and compare that to the number of people who have retirement funds and the like...it certainly isn't because everyone is out to get them...its because they think lower payments means they are saving money and have no concept of how compound interest works. Go look at almost every single American millionaire that didn't get his from an inheritance..they have a damned fine understanding of compound interest and investment and you won't see them paying $40,000 over 10 years for a car worth $20,000 that will devalue down to $2,000 in 10 years.
As for Reagan...well...his VP was the director of the CIA and he was an actor... Maybe I am paranoid...but uhm...CIA director VP + Actor P certainly seems a little frightening. But, while some of this may lead you to more conspiracy theory things, the facts are out there and you can
If you read his stuff you will see that he actually has answers forhe Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" most of this, namely the poor starving on the streets. He points out the fiscal insanity of the government out of control we have is what is causing the evergrowing divide that cause the poor and lower middle class to suffer. Roads, water, and parks I will agree with, but your tuition is really your problem, and honestly would be much less of a problem to deal with if you weren't forking over so much money to the government in the first place, nevermind that the government is frequently the cause of rising tuition rates through assinine legislation and requirements. The Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" Extortion is what that is normally called.
The problem is people don't understand the opportunity cost involved with letting the government handle half of the crap that it does. Government contracting is a VERY lucrative business because the government is rarely concerned with the price or quality...and they certainly aren't spending any of their money...they are spending yours...to pay their political contributers, relatives, and friends...through various deals. Go back and look how often people are getting busted for corruption and bribes in these contracts. Realistically the only ones getting caught are the ones that don't have enough friends in high places to otherwise bail them out of the hotseat.
And while I certainly want my roads paved and clean water and all of that...I will point out that none of that is a "right", especially the tuition. The interstate doesn't exist for the people, it exists for the military. Now certainly many of these things are conductive to a healthy and prosperous nation, but they most certainly are not rights. I personally believe that many of these things would be handled infinitely better by private industry IF AND ONLY IF the private industry actually is forced to comply with the rule of law (which is another of Ron Paul's key points, is that the corporations and government view themselves as above the law). The real bitch is that so many of our problems are so interelated (credit cards, insurance, poverty, medical care, etc) that we really are at a point where you can't solve one and not cause a collapse without having to tackle a whole host of things all at once.
I find the 6 minute thing hard to believe, I would have thrown my laptop off the desk a dozen or so times by now if I was waiting 6 minutes (actually this did happen once and I about lost my freaking mind...Evolution starting up caused the system to hang and lock up at 98% CPU...turns out that it was actually an infinite loop problem in part of the perl that spamassassin uses during an Evolution startup...This all stemmed from an update that didn't recompile the appropriate dependancies.)
The 10-30 seconds Firefox takes to come up sometimes is enough to irritate the bejesus out of me on some days. Evolution does tend to take a bit to come up, 20 seconds seems pretty long, I would say mine usually comes up in 5-10 tops. The main thing to remember is that Evolution isn't just an email client, it has all that calender hoohah and palm syncing and integrated whatnots much like Outlook. Outlook is not exactly a quickstart email app either compared to simple pop/imap email clients.
Bravo Bravo. In the most amusing form of irony your post is now considered copyright violation as fair use effectively no longer exists. So your copyright infringement post to explain the mentality of copyright infringement claims by the RIAA is incredible. You get +1 Irony and +1 Slashdot Analogy and yet another +1 Shoulda been Fair Use. I am however sad to inform you that you also get a -1 Harry Potter Reference. But all in all good show.
I'm glad you are so well informed to have researched his past, his record, his writings, his speeches...oh wait...you just made a decision based on a media appearance... He is also one of the few politicians that has a solid record of voting based on the constitution rather than all the other nonsense. This is EXACTLY the mindset that got us stuck in this situation...stupid kneejerk reactions to media appearances. Certainly by your logic everything the current administration has done is the best possible path because the offending members of the administration make regular appearances on 'legitimate' media outlets... We are under attack by Islamofascists who hate our freedoms because President "you gotta catapult the propoganda" Bush said so on all the major outlets right?
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that The Alex Jones show is any worse than Fox News about going overboard and making sensationalist shit up? Incidentally, not that I agree with much of Jones' ideas...look up The Big Lie. Telling a lie so implausibly huge that it could not be anything but the truth... Welcome to modern American government. Go research the people in office, where they have been, the positions they held. Robert Gates our current SecDef was also head of the CIA during the Iran Contra business, Donald Rumsfeld swore to have the ban on aspertame lifted while he was Chairman of G.D Searle (the makers of) sure enough reapplied the day after Reagan entered office, and eventually was approved by a Reagan appointee who then quit under allegations of impropriety. Dick Cheney SecDef during Gulf War I, Bush Sr CIA Director, the list goes on and on and on and these are only the well known household names. If you actually bothered to read the history of these things it has been a select cast of a few in key positions of power in our government for the past 20+ years. We elect new figureheads yet all of these people just shift around appointed to new positions and park in some of the most criminal corporations in between. Monsanto, G.D. Searle, Halliburton, again the list goes on. None of this is conspiracy theory...it is clearly written and documented history that people are too god damned lazy to bother looking up. So grab your flag, sing your song, and bomb the infade...err...bomb the terrorist...sorry the justifications are so similar I get them confused sometimes.
Yeah...damn the fact that he made his career as a successful doctor before his run in politics. Oh and there is that whole retired veteran thing...then there is that pesky business of being a fiscal conservative. But he says we hold some responsibility for the attacks (go read your history book please, we have been screwing with the governments of the middle east for AGES) and that criminal scum Ghouliani (worth $7k at divorce but $30 million after 9/11) says he hates America and receives rounds of applause from moron kneejerk "towelhead" hating nutjobs.
It is depressing to me that the media spins him as some psycho conspiracy nut and even more that people believe it. In the meantime we readily cheer on our warhawks who dodged the service and then vote for war, and then call those who served a full 20 cowards for voting against it.