#6 Birdshot fired out of a 12 gauge has a maximum effective range of around 40 yards, when shooting birds. I can guarantee there was no danger posed to anyone on that highway, the birdshot never even got close.
That helicopter was WAY over 40 yards up, and the shooter had to have been way over 40 yards away. There was thick tree cover I'd say for 200 feet between the highway and the closest part of the clearing. There is no way that they were shooting bird shot. Watch the video, it sounded like a small caliber rifle. There were 8 separate reports heard. The helicopter was also directly above a US Highway. Where I grew up it is a pretty serious crime to shoot a gun over a highway or towards a highway when you are within range of it. There was nothing excusable and nothing safe about what they were doing.
Watch the video (linked on several places on this page). Those sounded like.22 rifle reports to me. I counted 8 reports. It would be unlikely for a shotgun to be effective at that range. Since the helicopter was hovering directly above a highway, they were firing across that highway, a crime.
At my company before a board or shareholder's meeting the exec committee, the financial guy, and others usually prepare documents for the meeting. A few years back they woudl out print lots of copies and hand them out, now they pdf them and email them out a day before the meeting. Anything that is intended to be confidential would not be shared at a board meeting because it is then part of the official record and is very discoverable.
So an underling of one of the board members get's cc'd all the board handouts. Later the underling sees a copy of the inflammatory memo, and being shocked at it's content quickly throws it on the scanner and makes a copy and then decides to release it and some supporting documentation.
So what's your solution: don't let kids ride bikes or do anything else that might be potentially dangerous?
Did you overlook the OP's, "even with increased use of helmets"?
No I didn't. Increased use of helmets has reduced childhood head injuries significantly. Unfortunately there are lots of idiots out there that still don't put their kids in helmets and terrible head injuries are still too common. And tragically sometimes the hit is too strong for the helmet. But overwhelmingly if a kid is wearing a helmet he/she is radically more likely to come through it with only superficial injuries.
There is no liberty that is lost by requiring parents to put helmets on their kids during certain high risk activities. The kids still have a blast, and when reckless still get scraped up and learn their lessons. But the benefits are clear and proven. Helmets save lives, and helmets prevent debilitating injuries. Maybe not perfectly and maybe not every time, but nothing is perfect. That shouldn't prevent us from taking reasonable and sensible steps, to protect our children, and to require morons to protect their children.
Let's imagine I have a home printer that prints these microdots. I use it for printing birthday cards, kids' homework, letters to my bank, and other miscellany.
So are you saying that if you have nothing to hide....
Imagine this easy to imagine scenario, you printed up fliers an Occupy rally and put them up all over town. Then during the rally some black bloc assholes set a cop car on fire. Now if the police can connect your printer to the fliers and you are a terrorist organizer. No one ever hears from you again, because you have been indefinitely detained without trial or hearing.
It *sounds* bad to be putting 3000 different chemicals into the ground until you actually start taking geology into account. Having been on-site and spoken with engineers, I am *EXTREMELY* dubious that when fraccing zones more than 10,000 feet underground that it can affect the water table thousands of feet above it.
Remember that the hole they drill starts a ZERO feet underground and goes all the way down to your 10,000 feet. So this is not a process that is completely isolated at extreme depths.
Plus, fraccing is required when the permeability of your zone is low. That means, by definition, it would not be a water table or any other kind of zone in which those chemicals could be moving around. If it is that permeable already and connected to a water table you would be tasting the natural hydrocarbons already.
Once you start hydraulic fracturing the rock, the permeability CHANGES doesn't it. That's the whole point.
If water tables are being affected it is because the engineers are idiots and not doing it right.
If the engineers and idiots get it right 99% of the time, and a few hundred wells go into a new area, then goodby clean water table, hello cancer cluster.
Fracking does get us a cheap hydrocarbon fix just when supplies were getting tight. To me the widespread and completely unregulated adoption of the process proves that we are sick desperate petroleum junkies. We'll do anything to get our fix. We'll even lay waste to our home and ruin our water. It's so very sad to watch a junkie self-destruct. It's the worst tragedy ever when it happens to an entire species.
If all of the pro-fracking arguments are true, and it can be done safely, but there are sometimes mistakes, that is the best argument ever for REALLY STRICT REGULATION. Instead we have the opposite. The industry got an exemption from the clean water act during the Bush administration.
So what's your solution: don't let kids ride bikes or do anything else that might be potentially dangerous?
No. Duh. The solution is simple, put a helmet on kids when they ride bikes/skateboards/razor scooters/etc. so that when they fall and get hurt it is limited to scrapes, bruises, or maybe broken bones. Kids can recover from all of these things. A serious head injury can cause lifelong disability or death. Children are not old enough to make sound risk analyses so parents have a responsibility to do it for them. Unfortunately too many victims of childhood brain injuries are out there (like yourself I presume). These poor souls have impaired judgement even as adults and society has to force them to take basic steps to protect their children so that they do not become burdens for the taxpayers.
Which pretty much points out that helmets are useless and the govt shouldn't intervene where it isn't wanted.
WRONG. It could also mean that the increased use of helmets is not yet universal and therefore pediatric head injuries still occur with tragic, but substantially reduced, frequency. It's funny I thought that a basic understanding of formal logic was a prerequisite for being a nerd. You know this is/. news for nerds, not news for dorks.
Have you ever tried to switch from GoDaddy? I'm sure they're just having difficultly figuring out HOW to unregister from GoDaddy. It took me about 5 tries over the course of three months and I only had one domain to deal with.
I got my first smartphone in mid-December. It's a T-mobile Galaxy S2. I was not aware that crashing was a problem with smartphones. Mine hasn't ever crashed or locked up. I do have one app that crashes sometimes, Waze. It's a little annoying but they fixed the main problem in the recent update. It's not like I'm not willing to try apps out. I think I have about 52 installed right now.
So I hate to seem smug, but the big news of this article to me was that apparently many smartphones have instability issues. I'm terribly sorry to hear that.
Both parties have voters that they regularly court and win. Republicans go after and get the social conservatives and the small government crowd. Democrats go after and get the liberals, several minority groups, women's rights, union, etc. BUT neither party actually represents the real interests of these groups. Each party in actuality represents different factions of corporate culture. The republicans represent the defense industry, rich individuals, and private equity. Democrats represent insurance, law firms, and hollywood/music publishing. Neither party acts in your interests. Neither party acts in my interests. When was the last time Republicans actually did something substantial about abortion? It's a huge issue for them nearly every election, and they win elections because of it, but if they actually banned abortion, they couldn't use it as an issue, so nothing happens. Democrats use the union's fear of republican anti-union policies to get union voters, but then consistently do things that are really damaging to worker's well being.
Listen carefully, boys and girls. The US is not a real democracy anymore. It is a reality-tv democracy. The democratic/representative elements are for show. Our so-called representatives are almost always pre-screened. If they are not acceptable to the corporate elite then they don't get campaign money which means they cannot compete in the media for attention. Once you get your final two candidates, it doesn't really matter who you choose. Of course there are some exceptions, occasionally a candidate actually does gather enough grass-roots support to get elected to congress. These people are usually dangerous demagogues, so even then we are screwed.
So slump in your seat so the cops behind you can't see, cover your phone with your hand like you're scratching your ear so the cops to your left can't see, and keep your mind on the road.
Or you could get a handsfree bluetooth headset, mount the phone on the dash and comply with the law. Imagine that!
His methods all sound nice, "don't take notes!". Well, he should go and try that in engineering. Lets see how long he'll last.
I have a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering. I was inducted as a member of Pi Tau Sigma (the ME Honor Society) I rarely took notes. I found that taking notes forced me to concentrate on writing down what the lecturer said. Listening let me focus on understanding what he said. There were exceptions of course, and I wouldn't presume to tell others that my study methods are for them, but they worked for me.
When I was a freshman in college I discovered Der Spiegel in the stacks of the school library. I had taken German in high school and was minimally competent. I was blown away at the depth of the coverage, the breadth of the subjects covered, and the perspectives in the coverage. It was a revelation, and it was a big step in my education about American media. Here in the US, ALL our news coverage is written from an extremely narrow band of the political spectrum of ideas (Republican to Democrat), and an even narrower band of the economic spectrum of ideas (the so called Western Consensus). As far as our media is concerned anything to the left of conservative democrats is socialist/communist and anything to the right of Republicans is simply not discussed. So at least on the news front, magazines from Europe are better.
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
A walled-garden app store like Apple's basically implements the first part of this. This is fine for a lot of people.
To also cater to those who want more freedom, without opening the flood gates, all you have to do is allow them to shop at other app stores, as well.
That's what I thought we had with android. There is the main android market, which I assumed had software that had been vetted in some way, and there are other markets, which could have lots of scary stuff. I do know from reading that the various malware scanners are almost worthless. So the iPhone model of the walled garden isn't used, and since virus scanners are useless, the PC model isn't used, what is an end user supposed to do?
So is there somewhere online that I can search to learn at least which apps are known malware?
Free lesson -> if your competitors are busy cutting a feature that has their customers up in arms, feel free to lure them away by offering the service they actually want. It's how you grow your customer base, and it doesn't require paying someone to get you more customers (you just need to make sure you keep upgrading your towers / keep your data transit costs low, but then, you should be doing that already...).
You forget that AT&T is hurting for bandwidth. They haven't been keeping their network up to date. That's why they wanted to buy T-Mobile (thank god that failed, says the content T-Mobile customer). So why would they offer an unlimited plan to gain market share? That would be incredibly foolish. The customers they would gain from their competitors are exactly those customers who use tons of bandwidth. That is the exact opposite of what they want. What they need is a way of making more money on their current network load, so they can afford to start doing upgrades again. Hence the new plans.
Because it has become an article of nigh-religious faith among a large number of otherwise rational people to insist that it's not happening"
I have to object to that "otherwise rational people" bit. Come-on these people are the same evangelical, poor white republican, the rapture is near types that dominate so much of our discourse these days.
First, if the ocean currents cease because there is no ice at the poles and poles freeze over, won't that cause the currents to start back up again. See, the currents are caused by freezing water, not frozen water. When salt water freezes, it loses its salt, making the rest of the unfrozen water saltier. That water falls and has nowhere to go but toward the equator. These currents help balance the climate, keeping the tropics from overheating and keeping the northern latitudes from freezing over too much. Which brings me back to my main point; if the poles freeze over due to no current, won't that kick start the currents again? And to YOUR point, glaciers melting over land will have little to no impact on ocean currents, because, as has been previously, stated, GreenLAND is LAND.
This paragraph broke the world record for highest density of inaccuracies, misconceptions, and stoner logic.
But by far the best sentence in the whole spiel is:
And to YOUR point, glaciers melting over land will have little to no impact on ocean currents, because, as has been previously, stated, GreenLAND is LAND.
Where does this loon think that the melting ice will go? Heaven forbid it might flow downstream and eventually into the ocean! OMG! I think the fact that this entry was modded up to a 4 is proof that/. has jumped the shark.
No. Because his "reasoned and well written opinion" is not backed up by the policies actually supported by Democratic legislatures and presidents, which have also enriched a lot of people "at the top." What he ascribes to the Republicans is actually a fairly universal consensus in both parties: called, variously, "neoliberalism," the "American consensus," etc.
Lemmy Caution describes well, the policies and the power bases of the two parties. So why do we vote for either of them when neither of them represent any of the overwhelming majority of us?
The Republicans use social issues to motivate poor and middle class religious people to vote for them. God, Guns, and Gays. This is the propaganda program they embarked on in the 1970s and it has been spectacularly successful in getting people to vote directly against their economic interests. BR
The Democrats use the mask of populism to garner votes. They claim to be the people's party and they manipulate people like me to vote for them because their economic and social policies aren't quite as terrifying as the Republicans.
When someone breaks the mold, like Ron Paul, he is vilified from both sides and huge sums of money are spent (and elections are probably rigged) to defeat such people. Paul was in the lead in Iowa, but the private money that was spent there in the last few weeks was dizzying, and there was ample evidence of vote manipulation.
Our democracy is theater. At/. most people realize now that the TSA is all about security theater and nothing about real security. We also have to realize that our democracy is hollow, and is there as a show to keep us from really trying to change things for the better. 2012 is looking like a year when we can really make a difference. Do sit this one out! Fuck voting, take to the streets!!
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#6 Birdshot fired out of a 12 gauge has a maximum effective range of around 40 yards, when shooting birds. I can guarantee there was no danger posed to anyone on that highway, the birdshot never even got close.
That helicopter was WAY over 40 yards up, and the shooter had to have been way over 40 yards away. There was thick tree cover I'd say for 200 feet between the highway and the closest part of the clearing. There is no way that they were shooting bird shot. Watch the video, it sounded like a small caliber rifle. There were 8 separate reports heard. The helicopter was also directly above a US Highway. Where I grew up it is a pretty serious crime to shoot a gun over a highway or towards a highway when you are within range of it. There was nothing excusable and nothing safe about what they were doing.
And notice how they fail to show any pictures of the "gunshot damage".
That's funny, in the video I saw, they showed damage to both blades of one of the rotors.
My guess is that in addition to being anti-hunting, they are also anti-gun (those two often go together).
Maybe you call holding a pigeon in a cage, letting it out, and shooting at with a shotgun it while it tries to escape "hunting" but I don't.
Watch the video (linked on several places on this page). Those sounded like .22 rifle reports to me. I counted 8 reports. It would be unlikely for a shotgun to be effective at that range. Since the helicopter was hovering directly above a highway, they were firing across that highway, a crime.
At my company before a board or shareholder's meeting the exec committee, the financial guy, and others usually prepare documents for the meeting. A few years back they woudl out print lots of copies and hand them out, now they pdf them and email them out a day before the meeting. Anything that is intended to be confidential would not be shared at a board meeting because it is then part of the official record and is very discoverable.
So an underling of one of the board members get's cc'd all the board handouts. Later the underling sees a copy of the inflammatory memo, and being shocked at it's content quickly throws it on the scanner and makes a copy and then decides to release it and some supporting documentation.
See that's not too far fetched.
So what's your solution: don't let kids ride bikes or do anything else that might be potentially dangerous?
Did you overlook the OP's, "even with increased use of helmets"?
No I didn't. Increased use of helmets has reduced childhood head injuries significantly. Unfortunately there are lots of idiots out there that still don't put their kids in helmets and terrible head injuries are still too common. And tragically sometimes the hit is too strong for the helmet. But overwhelmingly if a kid is wearing a helmet he/she is radically more likely to come through it with only superficial injuries.
There is no liberty that is lost by requiring parents to put helmets on their kids during certain high risk activities. The kids still have a blast, and when reckless still get scraped up and learn their lessons. But the benefits are clear and proven. Helmets save lives, and helmets prevent debilitating injuries. Maybe not perfectly and maybe not every time, but nothing is perfect. That shouldn't prevent us from taking reasonable and sensible steps, to protect our children, and to require morons to protect their children.
Let's imagine I have a home printer that prints these microdots. I use it for printing birthday cards, kids' homework, letters to my bank, and other miscellany.
So are you saying that if you have nothing to hide....
Imagine this easy to imagine scenario, you printed up fliers an Occupy rally and put them up all over town. Then during the rally some black bloc assholes set a cop car on fire. Now if the police can connect your printer to the fliers and you are a terrorist organizer. No one ever hears from you again, because you have been indefinitely detained without trial or hearing.
It *sounds* bad to be putting 3000 different chemicals into the ground until you actually start taking geology into account. Having been on-site and spoken with engineers, I am *EXTREMELY* dubious that when fraccing zones more than 10,000 feet underground that it can affect the water table thousands of feet above it.
Remember that the hole they drill starts a ZERO feet underground and goes all the way down to your 10,000 feet. So this is not a process that is completely isolated at extreme depths.
Plus, fraccing is required when the permeability of your zone is low. That means, by definition, it would not be a water table or any other kind of zone in which those chemicals could be moving around. If it is that permeable already and connected to a water table you would be tasting the natural hydrocarbons already.
Once you start hydraulic fracturing the rock, the permeability CHANGES doesn't it. That's the whole point.
If water tables are being affected it is because the engineers are idiots and not doing it right.
If the engineers and idiots get it right 99% of the time, and a few hundred wells go into a new area, then goodby clean water table, hello cancer cluster.
Fracking does get us a cheap hydrocarbon fix just when supplies were getting tight. To me the widespread and completely unregulated adoption of the process proves that we are sick desperate petroleum junkies. We'll do anything to get our fix. We'll even lay waste to our home and ruin our water. It's so very sad to watch a junkie self-destruct. It's the worst tragedy ever when it happens to an entire species.
If all of the pro-fracking arguments are true, and it can be done safely, but there are sometimes mistakes, that is the best argument ever for REALLY STRICT REGULATION. Instead we have the opposite. The industry got an exemption from the clean water act during the Bush administration.
So what's your solution: don't let kids ride bikes or do anything else that might be potentially dangerous?
No. Duh. The solution is simple, put a helmet on kids when they ride bikes/skateboards/razor scooters/etc. so that when they fall and get hurt it is limited to scrapes, bruises, or maybe broken bones. Kids can recover from all of these things. A serious head injury can cause lifelong disability or death. Children are not old enough to make sound risk analyses so parents have a responsibility to do it for them. Unfortunately too many victims of childhood brain injuries are out there (like yourself I presume). These poor souls have impaired judgement even as adults and society has to force them to take basic steps to protect their children so that they do not become burdens for the taxpayers.
Which pretty much points out that helmets are useless and the govt shouldn't intervene where it isn't wanted.
WRONG. It could also mean that the increased use of helmets is not yet universal and therefore pediatric head injuries still occur with tragic, but substantially reduced, frequency. It's funny I thought that a basic understanding of formal logic was a prerequisite for being a nerd. You know this is /. news for nerds, not news for dorks.
Have you ever tried to switch from GoDaddy? I'm sure they're just having difficultly figuring out HOW to unregister from GoDaddy. It took me about 5 tries over the course of three months and I only had one domain to deal with.
I'm sorta new to this.
I got my first smartphone in mid-December. It's a T-mobile Galaxy S2. I was not aware that crashing was a problem with smartphones. Mine hasn't ever crashed or locked up. I do have one app that crashes sometimes, Waze. It's a little annoying but they fixed the main problem in the recent update. It's not like I'm not willing to try apps out. I think I have about 52 installed right now.
So I hate to seem smug, but the big news of this article to me was that apparently many smartphones have instability issues. I'm terribly sorry to hear that.
Both parties have voters that they regularly court and win. Republicans go after and get the social conservatives and the small government crowd. Democrats go after and get the liberals, several minority groups, women's rights, union, etc. BUT neither party actually represents the real interests of these groups. Each party in actuality represents different factions of corporate culture. The republicans represent the defense industry, rich individuals, and private equity. Democrats represent insurance, law firms, and hollywood/music publishing. Neither party acts in your interests. Neither party acts in my interests. When was the last time Republicans actually did something substantial about abortion? It's a huge issue for them nearly every election, and they win elections because of it, but if they actually banned abortion, they couldn't use it as an issue, so nothing happens. Democrats use the union's fear of republican anti-union policies to get union voters, but then consistently do things that are really damaging to worker's well being.
Listen carefully, boys and girls. The US is not a real democracy anymore. It is a reality-tv democracy. The democratic/representative elements are for show. Our so-called representatives are almost always pre-screened. If they are not acceptable to the corporate elite then they don't get campaign money which means they cannot compete in the media for attention. Once you get your final two candidates, it doesn't really matter who you choose. Of course there are some exceptions, occasionally a candidate actually does gather enough grass-roots support to get elected to congress. These people are usually dangerous demagogues, so even then we are screwed.
So slump in your seat so the cops behind you can't see, cover your phone with your hand like you're scratching your ear so the cops to your left can't see, and keep your mind on the road.
Or you could get a handsfree bluetooth headset, mount the phone on the dash and comply with the law. Imagine that!
If SF is waging a war on cars... Based on the number of pedestrians killed each year in the city, I'd say the cars are winning.
Somehow I can get past the way you keep saying "local store" when you are talking about Staples, Walmart, and Best Buy.
His methods all sound nice, "don't take notes!". Well, he should go and try that in engineering. Lets see how long he'll last.
I have a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering. I was inducted as a member of Pi Tau Sigma (the ME Honor Society) I rarely took notes. I found that taking notes forced me to concentrate on writing down what the lecturer said. Listening let me focus on understanding what he said. There were exceptions of course, and I wouldn't presume to tell others that my study methods are for them, but they worked for me.
When I was a freshman in college I discovered Der Spiegel in the stacks of the school library. I had taken German in high school and was minimally competent. I was blown away at the depth of the coverage, the breadth of the subjects covered, and the perspectives in the coverage. It was a revelation, and it was a big step in my education about American media. Here in the US, ALL our news coverage is written from an extremely narrow band of the political spectrum of ideas (Republican to Democrat), and an even narrower band of the economic spectrum of ideas (the so called Western Consensus). As far as our media is concerned anything to the left of conservative democrats is socialist/communist and anything to the right of Republicans is simply not discussed. So at least on the news front, magazines from Europe are better.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601111205,00.html
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
A walled-garden app store like Apple's basically implements the first part of this. This is fine for a lot of people.
To also cater to those who want more freedom, without opening the flood gates, all you have to do is allow them to shop at other app stores, as well.
That's what I thought we had with android. There is the main android market, which I assumed had software that had been vetted in some way, and there are other markets, which could have lots of scary stuff. I do know from reading that the various malware scanners are almost worthless. So the iPhone model of the walled garden isn't used, and since virus scanners are useless, the PC model isn't used, what is an end user supposed to do?
So is there somewhere online that I can search to learn at least which apps are known malware?
Free lesson -> if your competitors are busy cutting a feature that has their customers up in arms, feel free to lure them away by offering the service they actually want. It's how you grow your customer base, and it doesn't require paying someone to get you more customers (you just need to make sure you keep upgrading your towers / keep your data transit costs low, but then, you should be doing that already...).
You forget that AT&T is hurting for bandwidth. They haven't been keeping their network up to date. That's why they wanted to buy T-Mobile (thank god that failed, says the content T-Mobile customer). So why would they offer an unlimited plan to gain market share? That would be incredibly foolish. The customers they would gain from their competitors are exactly those customers who use tons of bandwidth. That is the exact opposite of what they want. What they need is a way of making more money on their current network load, so they can afford to start doing upgrades again. Hence the new plans.
Because it has become an article of nigh-religious faith among a large number of otherwise rational people to insist that it's not happening"
I have to object to that "otherwise rational people" bit. Come-on these people are the same evangelical, poor white republican, the rapture is near types that dominate so much of our discourse these days.
First, if the ocean currents cease because there is no ice at the poles and poles freeze over, won't that cause the currents to start back up again. See, the currents are caused by freezing water, not frozen water. When salt water freezes, it loses its salt, making the rest of the unfrozen water saltier. That water falls and has nowhere to go but toward the equator. These currents help balance the climate, keeping the tropics from overheating and keeping the northern latitudes from freezing over too much. Which brings me back to my main point; if the poles freeze over due to no current, won't that kick start the currents again? And to YOUR point, glaciers melting over land will have little to no impact on ocean currents, because, as has been previously, stated, GreenLAND is LAND.
This paragraph broke the world record for highest density of inaccuracies, misconceptions, and stoner logic. But by far the best sentence in the whole spiel is:
And to YOUR point, glaciers melting over land will have little to no impact on ocean currents, because, as has been previously, stated, GreenLAND is LAND.
Where does this loon think that the melting ice will go? Heaven forbid it might flow downstream and eventually into the ocean! OMG! I think the fact that this entry was modded up to a 4 is proof that /. has jumped the shark.
No. Because his "reasoned and well written opinion" is not backed up by the policies actually supported by Democratic legislatures and presidents, which have also enriched a lot of people "at the top." What he ascribes to the Republicans is actually a fairly universal consensus in both parties: called, variously, "neoliberalism," the "American consensus," etc.
Lemmy Caution describes well, the policies and the power bases of the two parties. So why do we vote for either of them when neither of them represent any of the overwhelming majority of us?
/. most people realize now that the TSA is all about security theater and nothing about real security. We also have to realize that our democracy is hollow, and is there as a show to keep us from really trying to change things for the better. 2012 is looking like a year when we can really make a difference. Do sit this one out! Fuck voting, take to the streets!!
The Republicans use social issues to motivate poor and middle class religious people to vote for them. God, Guns, and Gays. This is the propaganda program they embarked on in the 1970s and it has been spectacularly successful in getting people to vote directly against their economic interests.
BR The Democrats use the mask of populism to garner votes. They claim to be the people's party and they manipulate people like me to vote for them because their economic and social policies aren't quite as terrifying as the Republicans.
When someone breaks the mold, like Ron Paul, he is vilified from both sides and huge sums of money are spent (and elections are probably rigged) to defeat such people. Paul was in the lead in Iowa, but the private money that was spent there in the last few weeks was dizzying, and there was ample evidence of vote manipulation.
Our democracy is theater. At
What I can't figure out is why cracks are developing so soon in a "non-load bearing" rib. If there is no load, there would be no fatigue. Right?
Maybe the wing won't break, but in another year will we reading about an Airbus that crashed because the skin of the wing peeled off?