The science behind global warming doesn't support the doomsday scenarios put forth by Al Gore, the media, or even the IPCC. The claims they have made are unsupported by science, and they refuse to admit the weakness of their arguments. Why? Because they have an agenda they would like to see go forward regardless of whether global warming is a serious problem or not.
The key to understanding temperature trends on earth is the sun, and more particularly the solar wind. Solar wind mediates the global flux of Cosmic Rays. Cosmic rays mediate cloud formation, and clouds mediate incident solar radiation reaching the earth. Go to wikipedia and look up sun spots. Take a look at the nice graph showing solar activity as reflected in sun spot data over the last few hundred years. Note the period of low activity. Now go to the page on the Little Ice Age. Look at the graph showing temperature trends. Note the that period of the little ice age is identical to the period of low solar activity from the previous page. _THIS IS NOT COINCIDENTAL_ There is a proven link.
If you want to learn about the relationship between solar activity, cosmic rays, cloud formation, and global temperature, visit http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
The sun is now ending its most active period since records started, which means we are in for some cooling for the next couple of decades. I guess we will see who is right, who is really interested in science, who is really interested in politics, and who the sheep really are.
According to http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages Iron meteorites can be analyzed to obtain a history of Cosmic Ray Flux. The linked web site shows a correlation between the solar systems spiral arm passages and increased cosmic rays reaching the earth. The periods of increased cosmic rays are also correlated with the ice ages. Every time the Earth makes a passage through one of the Galaxys spiral arms, we have an ice age. The theory appears to have some merit, because of the coinciding periodicity.
Apple has always been super proprietary in everything they do. These guys are the ultimate control freaks and always have been. They could have beat Microsoft the first time around if they weren't locking hardware and sofware developers out of their platform.
Want to tweak your os/x gui? Apple keeps breaking the interface with each update _on purpose_ in order to freeze out customization apps. Backward compatibility through the Apple line is less than stellar, and explains some of their past troubles with regard to market share.
MS on the other hand have had some rational people in their midst who have always seen to it that backwards compatability rules. They almost never break backward compatability for any reason, and when they do it is because it is nearly technically impossible to keep. I can still run my DOS apps in XP.
No. Microsoft is running out of compelling reasons for companies to continue upgrading. Their entire existence lies in convincing you and I to upgrade even when we don't need to. A slow uptake will be agravated if big apps don't run nearly flawlessly from the get go. If your favorite applications aren't there, and the OS itself is really only a minor improvement of the last release, (Albeit with new eye candy) then why bother?
We were going to win the Vietnam war. We could have saved millions of lives. The press misunderstood the situation and lied to us, and we now have to live with the consequences.
Your Iraq war numbers are indeed laughable. Look at the leftist, but still responsible, iraqbodycount.com. And don't try to drag out the bogus Lancet hit piece numbers published as an october surprise just four days before the last Presidential election.
The authority that the President cites IS NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION.
According to Article II Section 2, the President has full command of the armed forces, including collecting intelligence on the enemy. This view has been held and is enshrined in case after case during every administration until this one.
"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes... and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General... It is important to understand, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities." -- Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelicks testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994.
There is heavy precedent. What we see in the current NSA wiretap case is not an unprecedented program of eavesdropping on domestic calls, but an unprecedented power grab by the Judiciary on the war making powers of the Executive branch. The Legislatives power grab came in 1978 with the unconstitutional(according to Gorelick) FISA court.
The distinction was made between information gathering for policy making and prevention, rather than for domestic criminal prosecution. They are not the same thing. Gathering of foreign intelligence during the prosecution of a war is wholly ouside of the authority of the judiciary. If this distinction were recognized, then the silliness of trying to involve the court in every aspect of the war on terror would be made evident.
Lawyers are supposed to value precedent, but lately they are treating existing case law, and the constitution as if they don't exist in order to restrict the President. There are existing checks of executive power without the courts trying to create new ones every other week in tandem with CIA leaks and media blitzes.
You clearly think George Bush is the enemy to this country, and not foreign terrorist who would kill all of us if they could.
Oh yeah, and there were about 28,000 GIs killed in Viet Nam, not to mention about a quarter of a million Vietnamese.
And the Vietnam War was started by... anyone? anyone?
I'll give you a hint: It wasn't Nixon. It wasn't even a republican.
Pulling out of vietnam when we did was a monumental mistake, that cost the lives of approximately 2,270,000 in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I'm sure if you knew your history you would care about these lives as much as those you've already listed. The media were giddy at the time because the successfully propagated the lie that we were losing, and over time turned the fiction into reality. They then turned a blind eye to the terror and destruction they helped to create.
Your Iraq war numbers are farcical as well. More people died per year under Saddam Hussiens rule than have died each year during the current war. You didn't see the killing, so I guess it didn't exist. There were >400,000 in mass graves in Iraq. You do the math. That doesn't sound like 'peace' to me.
Now about the wiretapping. The wiretapping is of foreign phone calls to and from the U.S. The creation of the FISA court back in 1979 was a power grab by congress, that even the Clinton Administration stated had no real authority. No one seemed too concerned when the eschelon program was announced during that administration. Al Gore was championing it.
Experts in constitutional law have stated that this ruling will not stand. The authority the President cites is present in the constitution. I know that here on slashdot I am not arguing with constitutional scholars, but please learn the issues before going off half cocked.
The untenability of the majority position in this particular forum will be born out when this opinion is overturned. I don't expect anyone here to actually understand the issue when that time comes either.
I have read the RFP's on these programs. They were not limited tapping for terrorism. It was tapping everything everywhere all the time and forever.
Bull.
Datamining phone records is different from wiretapping. I can get phone records of the internet already. How in the world do you suppose you could possibly record every conversation taking place in the U.S. Your assertions are the very definition of the word proposterous. I can only ignore the rest of your comments after seeing such a lack of common sense.
Only on slashdot, and certain leftwing blogs, can your post be modded insightful. What a waste of electrons.
Hollywood thinks they can force crude junk on us. We try to edit it out, while not effecting them financially and they _spend_ money trying to stop us.
Someone tries to make a point by modifying a post, making it crude, and thus beautifully illustrates the real issue.
The issue isn't really copyright law, the issue is who can make who do what. There are two sides to the culture wars, one which says anything goes and tries to force it on everybody, and one that says a certain amount of decency should be expected but who allow each his own.
The smut merchants are against freedom, the decent people are for it.
>>I absolutely care about getting a good release. I have a very hard unit. eveyone gets properly paid.
Yes, and there is the problem. We can make things uplifting or crude. The editing you did to the aforementioned post made it crude, when it was originally uplifting.
Hollywood chooses to make things crude. People would rather have uplifting. So just as you had a right to edit, so do they, but I fail to see how doing so harms the original poster. Would you like some judge to say you just broke the law? It's not like we are going to be quoting movie scenes in court anyway.
Give me a break, it was thanks to Bush One's blessing that Saddam felt that he could invade Kuwait with American support in the first place.
Funny.
Finish the job? Bush I should never have started it. The entire Iraq fiasco from the beginning has been a bow to the military industrial complex and the circle of capital at the top of US economic and military policy.
From your previous statements it appeared you preferred there be no sanctions. If Bush1 has finished the job, which was procluded by the U.N., then sanctions would never have been necessary. I suppose you found the annexation of Kuwait acceptable.
For those who didn't want war in Iraq, what did you think was going on before? Kurdish guerrillas were fighting on the north, and American and British planes were enforcing a no fly zone in order to keep Saddam from committing another act of genocide. Where do you think the mass graves came from? Do you really believe that in such a situation the world should stand idly by and watch in order to preserve the "peace"?
What peace? There was no peace. Amnesty international used to champion the cause of the Kurdish north, as long as nobody actually did anything about it. Now that fewer people are dieing in Iraq than at any time since Saddam gained power everyone is jumping on the 'beat up America' bandwagon.
Now everyone expects the USA to carry the water in Iran, and Sudan, while at the same time getting ready to jump all over anything that is done at the same time. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Stop drinking the Hannitized kool-aid and realize that not only are the numbers already much higher than those the administration give to you
When you can't debate the issues at hand, resort to name calling.
Iraqbodycount.org is not the Bush administration. It is based in the UK and associated with PeaceUK. Go and take a look, read how they actually verify their numbers. They counted all of the lives lost under the sanctions too, only they hid them when it was pointed out that fewer people were dying since the U.S. invaded. Did you even read the content of my last post?
but they will accumulate for many years to come--and that blood is on your hands, the hands of every American, and the hands of US soldiers and administrations.
The hands of every American? It is only because of America that the body count even has a chance to go down, as it has already done. Those 24,000 lives saved so far are real lives.
Leave emotion out of it, and only accept that which can be proven.
IraqBodyCount.org is not the Bush administration. The 100K number is BS. I know exactly where it comes from, and the motives of those behind it.
Your personal burden of proof must be set on low.
I'm astounded you would bring up sanctions after seeing the fallout from the Oil For Food program. By your logic, Bush1 should have finished the Job.
I dare you to use widely accepted, and honest numbers and come up with a scenario where things were better under Saddam. I know you cannot honestly do it.
Because the administration claims to want to track down leakers...until it turns out the leak originated with Cheney, then it's okay. That's the working definition of a hypocrite. Do as I say not as I do.
But it's Ok for Wilson to leak? And to lie? Has it been proven that Valerie Plame was covert? If she was the why wasn't Libby charged with leaking?
If Plame was covert, then Wilsons trip was cover and his conclusions reported in the New York Times were BS because he wasn't on a real mission anyway.
Why don't you care about the veracity of all the players involved? Why target Cheney only? If Wilson lied, as has been proven, then why not allow those smeared by him to point it out?
Was Plame covert or not? If so then why did she drive to Langley each day to do non-covert work? If her non-covert identity was leaked, then was it a leak? Is it only a leak because now she can't perform covert work in the future? Again why didn't Fitzgerald charge anyone with leaking? It has to be because he can't.
If there was a leak, then the leak was created by the charge, because until then no one suspected she was covert. I haven't seen any proof that she is or was, and if that fact is unknown there was no crime.
How does anyone know if this is a real story or not? What we have so far is just hearsay, trumped up by a bunch of reporters who want to believe it, or want you to believe it based on last weeks story. This confidential source may in fact be made up. Who believes a single confidential source cited in a news story anyway? Apparently most slashdot readers do.
I don't necessarily believe it's true, nor do I believe it's beyond the realm of possibility. The point is I won't believe it until my own personal burden of proof has been met. What is your personal acceptable burden of truth? Right now all I can do is rule it a possibility, which is what it was last week without the story, which means this is not news... yet.
What amazes me is that there can be so much emotion and/or vitreol based on "No Provable Facts". Why comment on a story, until you know (yes actually know) whether its primary point is true? So many people leap to conclusions these days that it may soon be considered as a new Olympic event.
If Government would get out of the way then we could find out what the free market can do. What did people do before the 60s when government became involved? Government pays for 45% of health care, which is one reason there is limited competition in the medical field.
"Government intervenes in the form of tax subsidies and costly regulations on private insurers. Regulations imposed on medical practitioners are oppressive. According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, for every four hours that a physician devotes to caring for a Medicare patient, hospital administrators spend 30 minutes on Medicare paperwork. For emergency room care, it's one hour spent on paperwork per one hour spent caring for a patient." - Walter Williams.
Our health care crisis in a modern development. Why do you think that is?
To say that the free market wouldn't have an effect on health care costs is ludicrous. If everyone paid their own bills, and weren't restricted to certain doctors, pretty soon everyone in town would know who was charging too much. They would use this knowledge the next time they needed emergency care, or any other kind of care.
Government regulated health insurance has set up a system where we never directly pay the doctor or health care provider. People don't have any incentive to find the most honest, non price gouging doctors because they never have to directly pay for their own health care. If it costs too much I'm covered anyway. If I'm restricted to this doctor or hospital, then financial concerns are out the window. Someone else is going to pay the majority of the bill, so why worry about it. Well, now we are all paying the bill because we are insulated from the market.
One more way we are insulated from the market is the American Medical Associations quota on medical school graduates. They claim to be limiting the number of new doctors in order to keep quality high, but the result is consistently high salaries. Lets have more doctors.
People like you, who have an irrational and factually wrong belief in the universal applicability of free market economics are at the source of a lot of our economic ills.
I know you weren't replying to me, but:
Bull. People who believe the government should manage every aspect of the economy, peoples choices, and peoples lives are the source of almost all of our economic ills, and much of societies ills as well.
Ok, but what is Moore wrong about in this particular article?
Will building nuclear power plants reduce emissions and global warming? How will nuclear power damage the environment? How does this compare to the emissions from the burning of coal and Oil.
Lets deal with the substance please, because I would like to know.
And you posted your "information" anonymously why?
Because I couldn't remember my password. I don't live on slashdot.
As for it being an "official" time of war, that seems convenient.
Convenient? What the hell are you talking about? What do you think the motivation is behind gathering this intelligence if it isn't to remove a real threat?
Downloading copyrighted works alone isn't dishonest, and this BS is getting on my nerves.
That the real dishonesty and/or lawbreaking is sharing copyrighted works wityhout permission.
That goes without saying. "Without permission" is implied, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. Perhaps I should use "Does not", you might not understand "doesn't" since the "o" is implied. Please don't make the default assumption that everyone is stupid.
File sharing isn't a crime. Stealing is.
This makes as much sense as suing crowbar manufacturers for home break-ins.
Just be honorable and don't steal.
Downloading copyrighted music is not some sort of protest, it is dishonesty pure and simple, with the added effect of causing rubbish like this to happen. The DMCA wouldn't exist if people had used common sense and a little restraint and not copied music that didn't belong to them. Now we have threats every other day regarding issues of fair use which were settled years ago, but now are considered gray areas because of the RIAA, DMCA, and broadcast flag proponents. We created an opening for them to change the law, and so they did, and are continuing to do.
Grokster should have taken advantage of the precedent set by Gun makers and refused to give in. If people continue to lose their nerve, we will have fewer rights than we did before this whole mess.
The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things? If so, please be more detailed.
The censure was purely political. Since when is an off the cuff remark equal to the actual text of the resolution. The resolution doesn't include what some French politician though, or told reporters. What kind of negotiating would have been possible without the threat found in 1441? You can't just say please Saddam, let us in without saying 'or else'.
Why argue about it at this point though, except to show that you don't understand what U.N. resolutions actually are. History is history, what about the here and now? Those who objected to the Iraq war on Humanitarian ground don't seem to find 400,000 bodies in mass graves interesting. Apparently the peace Iraq had was only peace if you were lucky enough to be outside of Iraq. I don't know, but mass graves peace to me. How can anyone believing himself/herself to be a humanitaries continue to defend the status quo now that we know how ugly it was?
Why was Amnesty International so concerned about the plight of the Kurds before the war, but isn't interested now? What we need to discuss is what needs to be done at this point? Phony peaceniks need not apply.
Who is in Iraq helping Iraqi women's organizations combat fundamentalism. Who is helping to unearth mass graves, and cosole the relatives of those who are found in them. Who is helping the Iraqi press and media acquire modern equipment on which to debate their future?
Beating up on the U.S. might be fun, but while your doing it, don't pretend to have anyones best interests, other than your own, at heart.
Slashdot Mirror
The science behind global warming doesn't support the doomsday scenarios put forth by Al Gore, the media, or even the IPCC. The claims they have made are unsupported by science, and they refuse to admit the weakness of their arguments. Why? Because they have an agenda they would like to see go forward regardless of whether global warming is a serious problem or not.
The key to understanding temperature trends on earth is the sun, and more particularly the solar wind. Solar wind mediates the global flux of Cosmic Rays. Cosmic rays mediate cloud formation, and clouds mediate incident solar radiation reaching the earth. Go to wikipedia and look up sun spots. Take a look at the nice graph showing solar activity as reflected in sun spot data over the last few hundred years. Note the period of low activity.
Now go to the page on the Little Ice Age. Look at the graph showing temperature trends. Note the that period of the little ice age is identical to the period of low solar activity from the previous page. _THIS IS NOT COINCIDENTAL_ There is a proven link.
If you want to learn about the relationship between solar activity, cosmic rays, cloud formation, and global temperature, visit http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
The sun is now ending its most active period since records started, which means we are in for some cooling for the next couple of decades. I guess we will see who is right, who is really interested in science, who is really interested in politics, and who the sheep really are.
According to http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages Iron meteorites can be analyzed to obtain a history of Cosmic Ray Flux. The linked web site shows a correlation between the solar systems spiral arm passages and increased cosmic rays reaching the earth. The periods of increased cosmic rays are also correlated with the ice ages. Every time the Earth makes a passage through one of the Galaxys spiral arms, we have an ice age. The theory appears to have some merit, because of the coinciding periodicity.
Apple has always been super proprietary in everything they do. These guys are the ultimate control freaks and always have been. They could have beat Microsoft the first time around if they weren't locking hardware and sofware developers out of their platform. Want to tweak your os/x gui? Apple keeps breaking the interface with each update _on purpose_ in order to freeze out customization apps. Backward compatibility through the Apple line is less than stellar, and explains some of their past troubles with regard to market share. MS on the other hand have had some rational people in their midst who have always seen to it that backwards compatability rules. They almost never break backward compatability for any reason, and when they do it is because it is nearly technically impossible to keep. I can still run my DOS apps in XP.
No. Microsoft is running out of compelling reasons for companies to continue upgrading. Their entire existence lies in convincing you and I to upgrade even when we don't need to. A slow uptake will be agravated if big apps don't run nearly flawlessly from the get go. If your favorite applications aren't there, and the OS itself is really only a minor improvement of the last release, (Albeit with new eye candy) then why bother?
Your Iraq war numbers are indeed laughable. Look at the leftist, but still responsible, iraqbodycount.com. And don't try to drag out the bogus Lancet hit piece numbers published as an october surprise just four days before the last Presidential election.
The authority that the President cites IS NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION.
According to Article II Section 2, the President has full command of the armed forces, including collecting intelligence on the enemy. This view has been held and is enshrined in case after case during every administration until this one.
"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes... and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General... It is important to understand, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities." -- Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelicks testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994.
There is heavy precedent. What we see in the current NSA wiretap case is not an unprecedented program of eavesdropping on domestic calls, but an unprecedented power grab by the Judiciary on the war making powers of the Executive branch. The Legislatives power grab came in 1978 with the unconstitutional(according to Gorelick) FISA court.
The distinction was made between information gathering for policy making and prevention, rather than for domestic criminal prosecution. They are not the same thing. Gathering of foreign intelligence during the prosecution of a war is wholly ouside of the authority of the judiciary. If this distinction were recognized, then the silliness of trying to involve the court in every aspect of the war on terror would be made evident.
Lawyers are supposed to value precedent, but lately they are treating existing case law, and the constitution as if they don't exist in order to restrict the President. There are existing checks of executive power without the courts trying to create new ones every other week in tandem with CIA leaks and media blitzes.
You clearly think George Bush is the enemy to this country, and not foreign terrorist who would kill all of us if they could.
And the Vietnam War was started by... anyone? anyone?
I'll give you a hint: It wasn't Nixon. It wasn't even a republican.
Pulling out of vietnam when we did was a monumental mistake, that cost the lives of approximately 2,270,000 in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I'm sure if you knew your history you would care about these lives as much as those you've already listed. The media were giddy at the time because the successfully propagated the lie that we were losing, and over time turned the fiction into reality. They then turned a blind eye to the terror and destruction they helped to create.
Your Iraq war numbers are farcical as well. More people died per year under Saddam Hussiens rule than have died each year during the current war. You didn't see the killing, so I guess it didn't exist. There were >400,000 in mass graves in Iraq. You do the math. That doesn't sound like 'peace' to me.
Now about the wiretapping. The wiretapping is of foreign phone calls to and from the U.S. The creation of the FISA court back in 1979 was a power grab by congress, that even the Clinton Administration stated had no real authority. No one seemed too concerned when the eschelon program was announced during that administration. Al Gore was championing it.
Experts in constitutional law have stated that this ruling will not stand. The authority the President cites is present in the constitution. I know that here on slashdot I am not arguing with constitutional scholars, but please learn the issues before going off half cocked.
The untenability of the majority position in this particular forum will be born out when this opinion is overturned. I don't expect anyone here to actually understand the issue when that time comes either.
Bull.
Datamining phone records is different from wiretapping. I can get phone records of the internet already. How in the world do you suppose you could possibly record every conversation taking place in the U.S. Your assertions are the very definition of the word proposterous. I can only ignore the rest of your comments after seeing such a lack of common sense.
Only on slashdot, and certain leftwing blogs, can your post be modded insightful. What a waste of electrons.
Hollywood thinks they can force crude junk on us. We try to edit it out, while not effecting them financially and they _spend_ money trying to stop us.
Someone tries to make a point by modifying a post, making it crude, and thus beautifully illustrates the real issue.
The issue isn't really copyright law, the issue is who can make who do what. There are two sides to the culture wars, one which says anything goes and tries to force it on everybody, and one that says a certain amount of decency should be expected but who allow each his own.
The smut merchants are against freedom, the decent people are for it.
>>I absolutely care about getting a good release. I have a very hard unit. eveyone gets properly paid.
Yes, and there is the problem. We can make things uplifting or crude. The editing you did to the aforementioned post made it crude, when it was originally uplifting. Hollywood chooses to make things crude. People would rather have uplifting. So just as you had a right to edit, so do they, but I fail to see how doing so harms the original poster. Would you like some judge to say you just broke the law? It's not like we are going to be quoting movie scenes in court anyway.
Funny.
Finish the job? Bush I should never have started it. The entire Iraq fiasco from the beginning has been a bow to the military industrial complex and the circle of capital at the top of US economic and military policy.
From your previous statements it appeared you preferred there be no sanctions. If Bush1 has finished the job, which was procluded by the U.N., then sanctions would never have been necessary. I suppose you found the annexation of Kuwait acceptable.
For those who didn't want war in Iraq, what did you think was going on before? Kurdish guerrillas were fighting on the north, and American and British planes were enforcing a no fly zone in order to keep Saddam from committing another act of genocide. Where do you think the mass graves came from? Do you really believe that in such a situation the world should stand idly by and watch in order to preserve the "peace"?
What peace? There was no peace. Amnesty international used to champion the cause of the Kurdish north, as long as nobody actually did anything about it. Now that fewer people are dieing in Iraq than at any time since Saddam gained power everyone is jumping on the 'beat up America' bandwagon.
Now everyone expects the USA to carry the water in Iran, and Sudan, while at the same time getting ready to jump all over anything that is done at the same time. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Stop drinking the Hannitized kool-aid and realize that not only are the numbers already much higher than those the administration give to you
When you can't debate the issues at hand, resort to name calling.
Iraqbodycount.org is not the Bush administration. It is based in the UK and associated with PeaceUK. Go and take a look, read how they actually verify their numbers. They counted all of the lives lost under the sanctions too, only they hid them when it was pointed out that fewer people were dying since the U.S. invaded. Did you even read the content of my last post?
but they will accumulate for many years to come--and that blood is on your hands, the hands of every American, and the hands of US soldiers and administrations.
The hands of every American? It is only because of America that the body count even has a chance to go down, as it has already done. Those 24,000 lives saved so far are real lives.
Leave emotion out of it, and only accept that which can be proven.
Your personal burden of proof must be set on low. I'm astounded you would bring up sanctions after seeing the fallout from the Oil For Food program. By your logic, Bush1 should have finished the Job. I dare you to use widely accepted, and honest numbers and come up with a scenario where things were better under Saddam. I know you cannot honestly do it.
400,000+ in mass graves / 20 years = 20,000 lives lost per year under Saddam Hussien.
36,000 (IraqBodyCount) / 3 years = 12,000 lives lost per year since the war started.
So Bush and Blair are saving 8,000 lives per year. I would think any humanitarian would be happy that more people are living longer lives.
I suppose that status quo was Ok with you then?
The status quo was not peace. 20,000 lives lost per year was not peace.
It's only because of men like Bush and Blair that there is any hope for peace in the future... and there is hope where there wasn't any before.
But it's Ok for Wilson to leak? And to lie? Has it been proven that Valerie Plame was covert? If she was the why wasn't Libby charged with leaking?
If Plame was covert, then Wilsons trip was cover and his conclusions reported in the New York Times were BS because he wasn't on a real mission anyway.
Why don't you care about the veracity of all the players involved? Why target Cheney only? If Wilson lied, as has been proven, then why not allow those smeared by him to point it out?
Was Plame covert or not? If so then why did she drive to Langley each day to do non-covert work? If her non-covert identity was leaked, then was it a leak? Is it only a leak because now she can't perform covert work in the future? Again why didn't Fitzgerald charge anyone with leaking? It has to be because he can't.
If there was a leak, then the leak was created by the charge, because until then no one suspected she was covert. I haven't seen any proof that she is or was, and if that fact is unknown there was no crime.
How does anyone know if this is a real story or not? What we have so far is just hearsay, trumped up by a bunch of reporters who want to believe it, or want you to believe it based on last weeks story. This confidential source may in fact be made up. Who believes a single confidential source cited in a news story anyway? Apparently most slashdot readers do. I don't necessarily believe it's true, nor do I believe it's beyond the realm of possibility. The point is I won't believe it until my own personal burden of proof has been met. What is your personal acceptable burden of truth? Right now all I can do is rule it a possibility, which is what it was last week without the story, which means this is not news... yet. What amazes me is that there can be so much emotion and/or vitreol based on "No Provable Facts". Why comment on a story, until you know (yes actually know) whether its primary point is true? So many people leap to conclusions these days that it may soon be considered as a new Olympic event.
"Government intervenes in the form of tax subsidies and costly regulations on private insurers. Regulations imposed on medical practitioners are oppressive. According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, for every four hours that a physician devotes to caring for a Medicare patient, hospital administrators spend 30 minutes on Medicare paperwork. For emergency room care, it's one hour spent on paperwork per one hour spent caring for a patient." - Walter Williams.
Our health care crisis in a modern development. Why do you think that is?
To say that the free market wouldn't have an effect on health care costs is ludicrous. If everyone paid their own bills, and weren't restricted to certain doctors, pretty soon everyone in town would know who was charging too much. They would use this knowledge the next time they needed emergency care, or any other kind of care.
Government regulated health insurance has set up a system where we never directly pay the doctor or health care provider. People don't have any incentive to find the most honest, non price gouging doctors because they never have to directly pay for their own health care. If it costs too much I'm covered anyway. If I'm restricted to this doctor or hospital, then financial concerns are out the window. Someone else is going to pay the majority of the bill, so why worry about it. Well, now we are all paying the bill because we are insulated from the market.
One more way we are insulated from the market is the American Medical Associations quota on medical school graduates. They claim to be limiting the number of new doctors in order to keep quality high, but the result is consistently high salaries. Lets have more doctors.
People like you, who have an irrational and factually wrong belief in the universal applicability of free market economics are at the source of a lot of our economic ills.
I know you weren't replying to me, but:
Bull. People who believe the government should manage every aspect of the economy, peoples choices, and peoples lives are the source of almost all of our economic ills, and much of societies ills as well.
Ok, but what is Moore wrong about in this particular article? Will building nuclear power plants reduce emissions and global warming? How will nuclear power damage the environment? How does this compare to the emissions from the burning of coal and Oil. Lets deal with the substance please, because I would like to know.
Because I couldn't remember my password. I don't live on slashdot.
As for it being an "official" time of war, that seems convenient.
Convenient? What the hell are you talking about? What do you think the motivation is behind gathering this intelligence if it isn't to remove a real threat?
Downloading copyrighted works alone isn't dishonest, and this BS is getting on my nerves. That the real dishonesty and/or lawbreaking is sharing copyrighted works wityhout permission. That goes without saying. "Without permission" is implied, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. Perhaps I should use "Does not", you might not understand "doesn't" since the "o" is implied. Please don't make the default assumption that everyone is stupid.
File sharing isn't a crime. Stealing is. This makes as much sense as suing crowbar manufacturers for home break-ins. Just be honorable and don't steal. Downloading copyrighted music is not some sort of protest, it is dishonesty pure and simple, with the added effect of causing rubbish like this to happen. The DMCA wouldn't exist if people had used common sense and a little restraint and not copied music that didn't belong to them. Now we have threats every other day regarding issues of fair use which were settled years ago, but now are considered gray areas because of the RIAA, DMCA, and broadcast flag proponents. We created an opening for them to change the law, and so they did, and are continuing to do. Grokster should have taken advantage of the precedent set by Gun makers and refused to give in. If people continue to lose their nerve, we will have fewer rights than we did before this whole mess.
Why argue about it at this point though, except to show that you don't understand what U.N. resolutions actually are. History is history, what about the here and now? Those who objected to the Iraq war on Humanitarian ground don't seem to find 400,000 bodies in mass graves interesting. Apparently the peace Iraq had was only peace if you were lucky enough to be outside of Iraq. I don't know, but mass graves peace to me. How can anyone believing himself/herself to be a humanitaries continue to defend the status quo now that we know how ugly it was?
Why was Amnesty International so concerned about the plight of the Kurds before the war, but isn't interested now? What we need to discuss is what needs to be done at this point? Phony peaceniks need not apply.
Who is in Iraq helping Iraqi women's organizations combat fundamentalism. Who is helping to unearth mass graves, and cosole the relatives of those who are found in them. Who is helping the Iraqi press and media acquire modern equipment on which to debate their future?
Beating up on the U.S. might be fun, but while your doing it, don't pretend to have anyones best interests, other than your own, at heart.