Politics

Gee. He went on to "clarify" his remarks, finding plenty of things to criticize, particularly in the lack of political solidity in the government. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ibDeMEMDEYv4V-eqfWH0lbqZe6RwD8T8CL702 He's quite right, of course. But I suspect he will now feel the wrath of the far-left portion of the blogosphere, which he so pandered to earlier. ABC News reported last night that in the month of November Iraq was actually safer for troops, by twice, than Afghanistan.

Iran No Nukes Looks like the carrot/stick approach works with Iran. Maybe there is hope in that region after all.

Excuse the Le Tigre inspired thread title... A man recently called Rudy Giuliani on the failures of his "workfare" program... and called him literally, on a radio program. Under the program his access to food stamps and medicare had been cut off. Giuliani laughed him off and questioned his mental health: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMzPvSpJ1Z8 After 27 years of being a working member of society, he developed Parkinsons, which rendered him wheelchair bound and incapable of performing his job. This is sickening. To quote Le Tigre again: F*ck Giuliani. He's such a f*cking jerk...

This thing has been amusing to me, the notion that Hollywood writers, who make a LOT of money (hundreds of thousands per year or more), would go on strike over money. It's akin to the baseball players going on strike a few years ago. Oddly enough, it hasn't generated the same adverse reaction in the media. I guess entertainment writers are more politically correct than steroid-chomping baseball jocks. But now the strike is starting to cost much-lower-paid-entertainment workers their jobs. This article talks about NBC workers getting laid off. The article linked above headlines the fact that the laid-off workers are mad at Jay Leno, because he promised them…

For those of you who don't know, it's the republican debate tonight, at 8 o'clock EDT... I recommend everyone watch it, at least in part. My problem is that I don't have anywhere to watch it Does anyone know if it'll be streamed live onto the internet anywhere? I briefly looked through the CNN website, but I couldn't find it.

Judge Andrew Napolitano proceeds to issue a rather nasty diatribe on the Patriot Act and its usurpation of our Constitutionally guaranteed liberties. "Is it time to become wolves and fight for our rights?" he asks. The facts, according to him: if the FBI shows up with a self-written search warrant to seize items from your home, the Patriot Act stipulates that you are not legally allowed to tell anyone about it. And... well... the guy is outraged, and so am I! Isn't writing search warrants the Judicial branch's responsibility, not the Executive's, and how the hell can they unconstitutionally silence you after your home has been unconstitutionally searched?! …

Joseph Ellis wrote the fabulous 2002 book "Founding Brothers", which took the unusual approach of pairing off famous figures from the American revolutionary period and showing their differences. It was interesting in the way it challenged the standard, high-school-history-class belief that the founding fathers were perfect people with perfect goals and perfect arguments. His new book is called "American Creation", and it just came out a couple of weeks ago. I haven't read it yet (darned holiday -- I have to actually wait to see if someone buys it for me! What a nuissance!), but the "buzz" on it is really interesting. Take this New York Times review, for example, …

Anybody heard of Real ID. Pretty much, this is another proposition by the US government to give it 1 more excuse to strip away and intrude on someones privacy. It is intended to be required to go in any facility ranging from government buildings to national parks. In addition, the information is required to be kept in massive data banks. Needless to say, many states are already revolting against this. Here is some info on it right here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/16/real.id/index.html So, what do you Americans think? Coming soon in 2013, Big Brother I mean, if we really are that paranoid about terrorists, why not just start bar-coding our citize…

Surprise surprise... the war on terror is f*cked http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2215380,00.html Why is it we're drumming up war with Iran when the Saudis are and have always been the problem? Oh right, oil...

I just finished watching "Hell House" - a documentary about the Evangelical play "Hell House": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_house And I am still quite in shock. I wasn't raised in America, so the concept of widely-available "pushed-to-the-public" Evangelical stuff is new to me. This, however, seems to be worse than anything else I've seen. They're more than ignorant, they're teaching their children that questions would get them into hell (and show it quite vividly, what hell is). They're building a very vivid settings of what hell should be like, building scenes that are supposed to "represent" the lives of nonbelievers. Just a few "facts": 1. Date…

One of the persistent claims of fiscal conservatives is that so-called "progressive" policies like graduated income tax, welfare, or social security are unfair and harmful to the economy by punishing economic success and rewarding failure. Like most broad, provocative generalizations in politics, this claim is (by my statistical analysis) about 80% bullshit. If it were actually true, nobody would try to become rich, because it would be more advantageous to be poor. Obviously we don't have that problem, nor would we even if we managed to cut off "corporate welfare" or close all the various loopholes those with a lot of money can take advantage of to pay far less than you …

Or so he claims: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7105001.stm I've hoped this festering sore of a case would finally break open and something would come of it, but so far we've seen little beyond the trial and subsequent pardon of Scooter Libby. This is direct confirmation by a White House insider that the President sought to directly deceive the American people by asking his press secretary to lie. Well, there's my spin, I'm sure there's others who will try to spin it the opposite direction somehow.

Over 70,000 patients in the US now need kidney transplants, but less than 16,000 donations are found each year. The waiting list has grown to five years, and each year 5,000 waiting list patients die. An American doctor has proposed a solution -- allowing people to sell their kidneys for money. The plan involves psychological screening and government regulation, and the recipient receives a large cash payment (maybe $60,000) and free medical care for life (probably some sort of insurance plan). The article below sketches things out a little differently from the TV story, but it's from the same source. (I've seen odd discrepencies between their TV stories an…

The Australian media has attacked the LDP because of its policy of legalizing incest. The LDP claims incest is a victimless crime. Suppose we were to adopt a capitalist system of morality. The reason why capitalists should believe incest should be legalized is the same reason why free trade should be legalized. Evident in the failure of communism, politicians are not good at running your life. Under a capitalist system, you as an individual choose what car to buy, what stocks to buy, or whom you have sex with. If a man decides through his own contemplation that buying a Ford is his choice, then capitalists believe in the consumer given the right to choose rather than …

Choose the (main) candidate for United States President you would like to see get the nomination from the Republican and Democratic Parties. If you feel like nominating a candidate from each party because you support both or would like to see a particular race (like me), then feel free, but obviously nominating a candidate from the party you oppose just because you think he/she is weak misses the point a bit. Let this be a vehicle for discussion and what-not. If your candidate isn't listed feel free to make a bitter, rejected post to that effect. EDIT: Don't select multiple candidates from the same party if you can help it. That sort of distorts the results.

Is it me, or most of the time when the expression "political correctness" is used in a debate, it's simply a fallacious argument to discredit an idea with minimal effort ? In short, it's a straw man. Not that "political correctness" doesn't exist, but it's not, in itself, an argument. It's just amazing to see how far people are ready to go just to avoid a debate of substance.

I had a conversation over at dinner last night about this and the one conclusion that despite all claims and all forms of propaganda out there, most people and most nearly all institutions (e.g. colleges, corporations, governments, etc) seem to be inherently racist or intolerant to some degree. For example, take the various "diversity" and other affirmative action programs upheld in many colleges. Though I am supported by such programs myself (and I know I probably shouldn't be complaining especially since I have a huge scholarship from those programs, but I'm not a person who takes things for granted or a person who believes in ideology), one observation I see is th…

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/law/10/31/funeral.protests.ap/index.html BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals in the belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality. Albert Snyder of York, Pennsylvania, sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned later in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 mi…

Pat Robertson, televangelist and southern baptist who proclaimed 9/11 God's punishment for tolerance of gays and abortion, has given his official endorsement to Rudy Giuliani: non-practicing Catholic, thrice-divorced, conspicuously Italian-American, New Yorker, supporter of gay marriage, abortion rights, and harsh gun-control laws. Thoughts?

I've been following this "Kid Nation" controversy for a while now, trying to form an opinion. Or rather trying to find a reason not to believe that the end of western civilization has arrived. As you may know, CBS put together this thing as a reality show featuring children who were basically at a run-amok summer camp without adult supervision. A kind of real-life Lord of the Flies scenario. For money -- a $5,000 stipend, with a chance to win more. Children as young as EIGHT were allowed to participate. And the parents willingly signed their children up for this. The same sort of parents who would probably bring a lawsuit if the nearby public school were to se…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7090901.stm Sound familiar to anyone?

Our success is killing us The aims of technology are achieved and our chances for survival are fatally diminished. The fault is not in our technology but in us. The fault lies within human society. McLuhan made us aware of the fact that technology is an extension of our self. I would say that we and also our ecosystem are both gestalts, a whole, wherein there are complex feedback loops that permit self healing and various means that protect us from our self. The dictionary defines gestalt as meaning a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties no…

CorporateSexOffenders.com has labelled YouTube as the most dangerous site for harboring pedophiles. See http://www.corporatesexoffenders.com/?archive=159 Don't you think this disgust at pedophiles is good reason to limit free speech?

MIT student arrest for "fake bomb" at Logan Airport. (The news sites I perused don't actually show the device. Great reporting) http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/09/21/star_simpson/ http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/woman_arrested.html http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html People, don't carry anything that has blinking LEDs, or exposed wiring in Boston. Ever. Apparently crude electronics = explosive. They apparently don't understand that a real bomb probably wouldn't look like a cartoon- or MacGuyver-ish-TV bomb. It would be disguised to look like a cell phone, or an ipod, or in a book, or something else …

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/11/cast_your_vote_for_real_scienc.php Conservative bloggers (more here) have helped push Steve McIntyre's pseudoscience blog http://climateaudit.org to the top of the vote for the 2007 Science Weblog Awards. Here's a writeup on some of the pseudoscience Steve McIntyre has tried to push, for those interested: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/the_mcintyre_factor.php Steve McIntyre is a former mining executive with no climate science background. His writing on climate science has thus far been limited to his blog and the non-peer reviewed conservative journal Energy & Environment: http://pubs.acs.org…