For Iran, not a whole lot. They're kinda linked to al-Qaeda, through Hezbollah operative Imad Mugniyah (admittedly, he's like the Kevin Bacon of Islamic terrorism). There's sketchy accounts from men like Ali Mohamed or Jamal al-Fadl linking Iran to earlier embassy bombings and the '93 WTC attack. Egypt has publicly blamed Iran for funding the al-Zawahiri (bin Laden's second-in-command) backed Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Then there's the 9/11 commission allegations that 8 to 10 of the 19 hijackers were in Iran a year before the attack, and that Iran has sheltered top Taliban officials after the collapse of Afghanistan. I'll level with you, I don't know how reliable any of this info is, or whether or not most of it was made up. I thought I'd just put it up on the table for dissection.
Nixon deserved to be impeached, only for the fact that he was using illegal methods to undermine the electoral campaign of George frickin' McGovern. That's like taking steroids and doping your blood to win a foot race against Richard Stallman.
Different symptom, same disease. Sadly, when one of our misguided attempts at aid actually goes somewhere, it ends up in the pockets of the men with the guns.
I'm not anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel, but I've heard a lot of conflicting information about the status of Jewish/Palestinian settlements between the Balfour Declaration and 1948. Ultimately, I just think that's probably one of those things that should have been cleared up ahead of time, and in any case, the statement above was meant to be an indictment of our hypocrisy for helping to establish the state of Israel, then holding Israel back whenever somebody decides to attack it.
That's just a kid who needed a good dose of the strap. Although, if he was tough enough and ballsy enough to punch out a cop, it might be too late. Chris Rock said it best, whip your kid's ass before the government whips it for him.
Good points, and ones that I think may cost the Dems in the upcoming election cycle. The way the winds are blowing, the Democrats will be putting someone who has been in the middle of all this mud up against someone who's been sitting on the sidelines. (The only real "insiders" up for it are the irrelevant McCain and the sig block guy). How they handle this may become a significant talking point against someone who can easily wriggle out of what are already tenuous connections to the current mockery of a Chief Executive.
Really, it just boils down to the Left's basic principles. At heart, they're pragmatists (ie, they don't have any). Sure, there's some remnant of the old socialist guard in there, but for the most part they're just a weather vane. They're for "enviornmentalism" because the average voter is vaguely concerned about the future. They're for "protectionism" because the image of jobs going overseas to India strikes fear into the heart of the public, regardless of the actual economics of the situation. They backed this war in 2002, because they thought it would be over soon and they'd have brownie points for being for "national defense". And they're against it now for the simple reason that it is unpopular. Bush tried playing against this tactic in 2000, and it lost him the popular vote and may or may not have cost him the electoral vote. In the 2002 and 2004 races, the Republicans were more firmly entrenched in the neocon and Christianist camps, and it won them voters among those who share those principles. Even if those principles are irrational and evil, in the long run, the party who stands for *something* will triumph over the party who falls for *anything*.
Since you brought up WWII, how well did we make out? Really? We freed Western Europe from one dictator (who political and philisophical factors across the entire continent had practically forced into the driver's seat) only to lose Eastern Europe to another without so much as a shot being fired. We curbed Japan's empire-building, and drove them out of China, only to see China fall to the Maoists. We fell into the Wilsonian trap of "self-determination of nations", joining a world organization that put jack-booted thugs on an equal footing with the elected leaders of free nations. We became the deal-makers of the world (the American Left, while freely admitting the excesses of the CIA during this time, blanks out the fact that Wilsonian realpolitik is at the heart of their own foreign policy). We fight half-war after half-war, trying to win by not losing. We give land we didn't own to the Jews, then do everything in our power to prevent them from defending it. The moral code we had on Dec 8, 1945 is the only foreign policy we have ever needed: Fuck up our shit, and we will kill you.
I've got no sympathy for Hussein, or any other dictator; the sooner they're given the Mussolini treatment, the better. But it's not our part to sacrifice for the sake of others, giving money and lives for alleviating suffering. Prosperity in this world isn't an automatic; it's the product of a rational mind fully engaged in one's reality to serve one's goals. The prosperity enjoyed by the European states, and later America, is a direct product of the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the ideals of *objective reality*, of *reason*, in the concrete form of the Industrial Revolution. We can rebuild Iraq, but will it do any good? The ultimate drive behind jihad (and it's counterpart/antagonist, the Arab nationalism that led to Hussein and is still strong in Egypt and Syria (to the extent that the latter isn't an Iranian proxy)) is ultimately that the fundamentalist Muslims want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the prosperity and the cultural dominance we have (Islamic culture peaked around the time of the Abbasids and has been going downhill ever since) while continuing to blank out reality and live according to the whims of their sky-god. They're not alone, either; show me an impoverished country, and I'll show you people who have thrown their reason to the curb and are praying for grain to fall into their hands. To the extent that we provide aid, we help them to continue this evasion (yeah, we do it here too, hopefully *that* reckoning isn't too far off).
MoveOn isn't capable of supporting anyone but the Democrats. If the Dems piss them off in hope of capturing swing voters, what are they going to do? Vote Republican? Vote Green (essentially the same thing)?
At this point I'm counting on it. The problems with our money go well beyond Bush, he's simply aggravating them and bringing them to the forefront. If the dollar goes, it'll hopefully do two things: 1.) Show the infeasability of the current welfare-statist policies (If the American people had to bear the actual burden of government spending, as opposed to inflating it away or selling more pieces of scrap to China, it'd probably start a wide-scale riot), and 2.) Show the value of real money, hard money over bullshit money. It's all just paper, and burning off that paper doesn't evaporate the values it's supposed to represent, the goods, services, and intellectual capital of the American people (long abused, long neglected, but still there).
True. Too bad there haven't been any real liberals in American politics since Goldwater. I think I see a few on the 'Net here and there. Maybe they oughta sue the progressives for trademark infringement.
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now. The only valid reason we have to be anywhere else in the world is to deal with threats to our own defense. This entire war has been worse than doing absolutely nothing would have been in that respect. We've lost 3000+ of our own troops in a pointless nation-building exercise, spent billions of dollars, handed off the oilfields to China and Vietnam (instead of using them to pay for the occupation or even returning them to whoever the hell the Iraqis looted them from in the first place), allowed the Iraqis to vote themselves into theocracy, given Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood the apparatus of statehood to carry out their murderous plans (cos hey, it's democracy, right? Democracies *never* do anything bad), allowed Saudi Arabia and Iran to even more brazenly indoctrinate upon the glories of dying for Islam, and forcing me to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life. To top it all off, we're no safer than we were six years ago, despite onerous violations of privacy and ludicrous security regulations, and we're no more likely to actually deal with these nutjobs who want to kill us until the next national landmark falls down and goes boom. (if even then) Fuck this stay-the-course nonsense. Just think of it as a strategic retreat.
Sadly, this is what passes for conservatism these days. Any party that simultaneously endorses religion and capitalism is ultimately mired in a contradiction between faith and reason, and the Republicans threw the wrong one out.
I'm not suggesting a filibuster. Filibusters only delay or kill legislation on the floor. I'm suggesting that unless Bush conceded the point and pulled out, *no* legislation should have been brought to the floor. Ultimately the same thing the Republicans pulled back in the day. If they "compromise", it means they don't do the job the American people elected them to do, and more US troops die in a self-sacrificial boondoggle to let Iraq vote itself into theocracy. True, the Republicans don't compromise. And guess what? They won here.
The House controls the purse strings. Funding for troops, funding for materials, even the lights and catering bills. Nancy Pelosi could quite simply have frozen Bush out, debating "America's National Color" or somesuch bullshit, and ground the whole Washington machine to a halt until Bush agreed to a concession.
True enough. Congress seriously dropped the ball on the troop funding issue. Bush can only sign or veto what Congress puts in front of him. Ultimately, however, if they had stopped the war, what would be their talking point for 2008?
Libertarians aren't Objectivists, although some might think that they are. In any case, this is a serious moral failing on behalf of the parties involved. The right to "make money" is not a right to initiate force against others, and by aiding and abetting the CCCP thugs in a crackdown of this sort, this is exactly what Yahoo has done.
I'm in Albany on business right now. "Free Public WiFi" shows up on my list of available networks, but I can't connect to it at all. Guess I'll just have to settle with the wireless networks in my workplace, my motel room, the coffee shop down the street, etc.
Intel is in the Top Ten of patent receiving organizations according to the USPTO (and has been for some time), being awarded over 1,000 patents per year. (Oddly enough, almost all of the top patentrs are electronics companies, and virtually none of them are pharma).
As far as the earnings thing, if you want to determine where a company's revenues go, form your own (or buy one out). Agree on the patent thing, oddly enough. It's hard to be a defender of patents and watch the USPTO fall asleep on shit like that.
Naturally, being right, you were modded "Troll". I wonder if these people walk into neighbor's houses and take away the things they won't "allow" them to have.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, by offering a browser for free to compete with a browser offered for free?
Ever tried to put a nuclear reactor, shielding, and a steam plant on a sportbike?
For Iran, not a whole lot. They're kinda linked to al-Qaeda, through Hezbollah operative Imad Mugniyah (admittedly, he's like the Kevin Bacon of Islamic terrorism). There's sketchy accounts from men like Ali Mohamed or Jamal al-Fadl linking Iran to earlier embassy bombings and the '93 WTC attack. Egypt has publicly blamed Iran for funding the al-Zawahiri (bin Laden's second-in-command) backed Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Then there's the 9/11 commission allegations that 8 to 10 of the 19 hijackers were in Iran a year before the attack, and that Iran has sheltered top Taliban officials after the collapse of Afghanistan. I'll level with you, I don't know how reliable any of this info is, or whether or not most of it was made up. I thought I'd just put it up on the table for dissection.
Nixon deserved to be impeached, only for the fact that he was using illegal methods to undermine the electoral campaign of George frickin' McGovern. That's like taking steroids and doping your blood to win a foot race against Richard Stallman.
Different symptom, same disease. Sadly, when one of our misguided attempts at aid actually goes somewhere, it ends up in the pockets of the men with the guns.
I'm not anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel, but I've heard a lot of conflicting information about the status of Jewish/Palestinian settlements between the Balfour Declaration and 1948. Ultimately, I just think that's probably one of those things that should have been cleared up ahead of time, and in any case, the statement above was meant to be an indictment of our hypocrisy for helping to establish the state of Israel, then holding Israel back whenever somebody decides to attack it.
That's just a kid who needed a good dose of the strap. Although, if he was tough enough and ballsy enough to punch out a cop, it might be too late. Chris Rock said it best, whip your kid's ass before the government whips it for him.
Good points, and ones that I think may cost the Dems in the upcoming election cycle. The way the winds are blowing, the Democrats will be putting someone who has been in the middle of all this mud up against someone who's been sitting on the sidelines. (The only real "insiders" up for it are the irrelevant McCain and the sig block guy). How they handle this may become a significant talking point against someone who can easily wriggle out of what are already tenuous connections to the current mockery of a Chief Executive.
Really, it just boils down to the Left's basic principles. At heart, they're pragmatists (ie, they don't have any). Sure, there's some remnant of the old socialist guard in there, but for the most part they're just a weather vane. They're for "enviornmentalism" because the average voter is vaguely concerned about the future. They're for "protectionism" because the image of jobs going overseas to India strikes fear into the heart of the public, regardless of the actual economics of the situation. They backed this war in 2002, because they thought it would be over soon and they'd have brownie points for being for "national defense". And they're against it now for the simple reason that it is unpopular. Bush tried playing against this tactic in 2000, and it lost him the popular vote and may or may not have cost him the electoral vote. In the 2002 and 2004 races, the Republicans were more firmly entrenched in the neocon and Christianist camps, and it won them voters among those who share those principles. Even if those principles are irrational and evil, in the long run, the party who stands for *something* will triumph over the party who falls for *anything*.
Since you brought up WWII, how well did we make out? Really? We freed Western Europe from one dictator (who political and philisophical factors across the entire continent had practically forced into the driver's seat) only to lose Eastern Europe to another without so much as a shot being fired. We curbed Japan's empire-building, and drove them out of China, only to see China fall to the Maoists. We fell into the Wilsonian trap of "self-determination of nations", joining a world organization that put jack-booted thugs on an equal footing with the elected leaders of free nations. We became the deal-makers of the world (the American Left, while freely admitting the excesses of the CIA during this time, blanks out the fact that Wilsonian realpolitik is at the heart of their own foreign policy). We fight half-war after half-war, trying to win by not losing. We give land we didn't own to the Jews, then do everything in our power to prevent them from defending it. The moral code we had on Dec 8, 1945 is the only foreign policy we have ever needed: Fuck up our shit, and we will kill you.
I've got no sympathy for Hussein, or any other dictator; the sooner they're given the Mussolini treatment, the better. But it's not our part to sacrifice for the sake of others, giving money and lives for alleviating suffering. Prosperity in this world isn't an automatic; it's the product of a rational mind fully engaged in one's reality to serve one's goals. The prosperity enjoyed by the European states, and later America, is a direct product of the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the ideals of *objective reality*, of *reason*, in the concrete form of the Industrial Revolution. We can rebuild Iraq, but will it do any good? The ultimate drive behind jihad (and it's counterpart/antagonist, the Arab nationalism that led to Hussein and is still strong in Egypt and Syria (to the extent that the latter isn't an Iranian proxy)) is ultimately that the fundamentalist Muslims want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the prosperity and the cultural dominance we have (Islamic culture peaked around the time of the Abbasids and has been going downhill ever since) while continuing to blank out reality and live according to the whims of their sky-god. They're not alone, either; show me an impoverished country, and I'll show you people who have thrown their reason to the curb and are praying for grain to fall into their hands. To the extent that we provide aid, we help them to continue this evasion (yeah, we do it here too, hopefully *that* reckoning isn't too far off).
MoveOn isn't capable of supporting anyone but the Democrats. If the Dems piss them off in hope of capturing swing voters, what are they going to do? Vote Republican? Vote Green (essentially the same thing)?
At this point I'm counting on it. The problems with our money go well beyond Bush, he's simply aggravating them and bringing them to the forefront. If the dollar goes, it'll hopefully do two things: 1.) Show the infeasability of the current welfare-statist policies (If the American people had to bear the actual burden of government spending, as opposed to inflating it away or selling more pieces of scrap to China, it'd probably start a wide-scale riot), and 2.) Show the value of real money, hard money over bullshit money. It's all just paper, and burning off that paper doesn't evaporate the values it's supposed to represent, the goods, services, and intellectual capital of the American people (long abused, long neglected, but still there).
Wouldn't Johnson have been acquitted by at least one-third of the Senate votes?
True. Too bad there haven't been any real liberals in American politics since Goldwater. I think I see a few on the 'Net here and there. Maybe they oughta sue the progressives for trademark infringement.
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now. The only valid reason we have to be anywhere else in the world is to deal with threats to our own defense. This entire war has been worse than doing absolutely nothing would have been in that respect. We've lost 3000+ of our own troops in a pointless nation-building exercise, spent billions of dollars, handed off the oilfields to China and Vietnam (instead of using them to pay for the occupation or even returning them to whoever the hell the Iraqis looted them from in the first place), allowed the Iraqis to vote themselves into theocracy, given Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood the apparatus of statehood to carry out their murderous plans (cos hey, it's democracy, right? Democracies *never* do anything bad), allowed Saudi Arabia and Iran to even more brazenly indoctrinate upon the glories of dying for Islam, and forcing me to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life. To top it all off, we're no safer than we were six years ago, despite onerous violations of privacy and ludicrous security regulations, and we're no more likely to actually deal with these nutjobs who want to kill us until the next national landmark falls down and goes boom. (if even then) Fuck this stay-the-course nonsense. Just think of it as a strategic retreat.
Sadly, this is what passes for conservatism these days. Any party that simultaneously endorses religion and capitalism is ultimately mired in a contradiction between faith and reason, and the Republicans threw the wrong one out.
I'm not suggesting a filibuster. Filibusters only delay or kill legislation on the floor. I'm suggesting that unless Bush conceded the point and pulled out, *no* legislation should have been brought to the floor. Ultimately the same thing the Republicans pulled back in the day. If they "compromise", it means they don't do the job the American people elected them to do, and more US troops die in a self-sacrificial boondoggle to let Iraq vote itself into theocracy. True, the Republicans don't compromise. And guess what? They won here.
The House controls the purse strings. Funding for troops, funding for materials, even the lights and catering bills. Nancy Pelosi could quite simply have frozen Bush out, debating "America's National Color" or somesuch bullshit, and ground the whole Washington machine to a halt until Bush agreed to a concession.
True enough. Congress seriously dropped the ball on the troop funding issue. Bush can only sign or veto what Congress puts in front of him. Ultimately, however, if they had stopped the war, what would be their talking point for 2008?
American units were involved in the failed Operation Market Garden, but I'm not sure about anything else.
Libertarians aren't Objectivists, although some might think that they are. In any case, this is a serious moral failing on behalf of the parties involved. The right to "make money" is not a right to initiate force against others, and by aiding and abetting the CCCP thugs in a crackdown of this sort, this is exactly what Yahoo has done.
I'm in Albany on business right now. "Free Public WiFi" shows up on my list of available networks, but I can't connect to it at all. Guess I'll just have to settle with the wireless networks in my workplace, my motel room, the coffee shop down the street, etc.
Intel is in the Top Ten of patent receiving organizations according to the USPTO (and has been for some time), being awarded over 1,000 patents per year. (Oddly enough, almost all of the top patentrs are electronics companies, and virtually none of them are pharma).
As far as the earnings thing, if you want to determine where a company's revenues go, form your own (or buy one out). Agree on the patent thing, oddly enough. It's hard to be a defender of patents and watch the USPTO fall asleep on shit like that.
Naturally, being right, you were modded "Troll". I wonder if these people walk into neighbor's houses and take away the things they won't "allow" them to have.