Politics

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4695376.stm Wikipedia is a great site, but this kind of thing is the only possible fault.

with deficit spending skyrocketing, we have to ask ourselves whether it matters. my stance is that it doesn't really matter so long as the national income is not surpassed by the interest we pay on our debt and so long as other nations keep buying our bonds. this not only means that the possible extent of our deficit spending is limited, but also means that we are putting ourselves at the mercy of other nations. and, even if other nations are merciful, we are also in the position where we're screwed if those kind nations are to run into economic difficulty. it's an issue i thought of today during my econ class. your thoughts?

Recently, George W. Bush gave NASA a 1% increase in funding for 2007, but I still don't think that is enough. After the hurricanes, NASA needs to rebuild some facilities, on top of working on missions to go to the moon, mars, and beyond. In fact, the Europa Mission may even be canceled if NASA does not recieve the funding it needs. So, I believe more money needs to go to NASA, and the U.S. government needs to stop spending so much money on other less important things like paying farmers to not grow food, etc. Please tell me your thoughts.

No story on this yet, but top of http://CNN.com has: BREAKING NEWS: Senate office building evacuated when test indicated presence of "possible nerve agent," sources say. Up to 200 staffers and 8 senators may be exposed

In the science classroom it is widely agreed that the teacher must provide factual information. It is not okay for the science teacher to gives lies to his or her students. If a small child asks a science teacher whether Santa is real, should the teacher lie and tell the child that Santa clause is real? When I talk about Santa I refer not to some real person who happens to posses physical characteristics similar to the Santa Clause marketed on December but the supernatural Santa Clause who can read minds (omniscient) and fly around the world at the speed of light.

I have to admit I'm tired of investing time and thought in a subject only to have it get closed because someone determines one or two people (perhaps myself, I don't know) have gotten emotional.

It is perhaps not exactly surprising that they weren't early adopters, but apparently our politicians have discovered the Wikipedia, which is now the 19th busiest site on the Internet according to Alexa.com. There were more than 1,000 changes to entries in the Wikipedia for US House and Senate members in the second half of last year. What's amusing about this is that apparently they're not only putting in good stuff about themselves, they're also putting in bad stuff about each other. One congressman got the note "smells like cow dung" added to his bio, and the IP address of the changer turned out to belong to the House of Representatives! At one point in Nove…

Child pornography is banned. However, a child molestor or pedophile can get around this by looking for nudist sites. Since many nudists beaches in Europe contain not only nude adults but also nude children, pedophiles can use these nudist pictures as a substitute for child porn. For this reason, should nudism be banned?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/04/syria.cartoon/index.html?section=cnn_topstories Yes, the sh*t is hitting the fan... all this over a little cartoon, WTF?

I spent about 5 minutes on Lexis.com and skimmed a single lawreview article. This is not an issue I've researched. It may be that the legal research that predates the 2002 Order argued that the 1978 law was not applicable to this new war. Therefore, they might argue, we are in the second category described here where existing law is silent and Bush did run this buy Congress who remained inert, a few possible letters notwithstanding. Alternatively, the article seems to say that there are very narrow areas of Presidential power where the president can act contrary to existing law. To answer this issue you need to be a Constitutional scholar and spend about a we…

So is this broken nuclear seal stuff freaking anyone else the f*ck out?

http://physorg.com/news10336.html It has been "confirmed" many times before, wonder how it will turn out this time - comments anyone? Cheers, Ryan Jones

A major problem that faces the nation is the rising cost of health care. The rising costs actually have three aspects. The first two are connected to economics and the law of supply and demand. On the supply side are the economic needs of all the middle men. The middle men are helping to drive innovation but they are also responsible for excessive redundancy and marketing hype, during the process of supplying new and improved drugs and technology. On the demand side are the people using the health care system. Medical insurance is like another tax on living. To help make economic sense of this disguised tax, one needs to seek value for their money. The result is over…

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/31/gonzales-misled-congress/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001318_pf.html

NY Times' take. I love winning.

Well a few days ago I predicted that ExxonMobil would post a new corporate record profit and become the world's largest corporation. I appears I was right on both counts. Wal-Mart's total came in just under $300 billion in FY2005 according to Wikipedia, and ExxonMobil managed to rake in about $371 billion, and set a record profit of just over $36 billion (just under ten percent, which is a whopper compared with Wal-Mart's sub-4% margin). http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/30/business/exxon.php

My gosh, I was just looking at politics threads from the September 2004 period... what a feisty bunch here! I thought it was crazy now, check it out then. Most of this I believe being attributable to the upcoming national election.

What is your reaction to Google's decision? http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/01/24/google.china.ap/index.html My initial reaction is highly negative.

Nature is running a story about a physicist who claims that black holes do not exist. George Chapline, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says that he believes the collapse of stars does not lead to black holes. Instead, the space time contained within the star becomes filled with dark energy, which causes intruiging gravitational effects. "If the dark-energy star is big enough, Chapline predicts, any electrons bounced out will have been converted to positrons, which then annihilate other electrons in a burst of high-energy radiation. Chapline says that this could explain the radiation observed from the centre of our galaxy, previously interpret…

(I know that's not correct to call it "Palestine", but I got halfway through typing that title in and realized that I lacked an appropriate noun, and then I realized it was actually kinda interesting to leave it in error like that, if you see what I mean.) I was just curious what the reaction here might be. Two things about this strike me as being of particular interest at the moment: 1) The level of vehemence amongst the supporters of Fatah is amazing to me. Demonstrating in the streets and angrily denouncing leaders and threatening violence is something I normal associated with Hamas supporters, not Fatah. What's interesting about that to me is that whil…

The only book I've read of any real substance is Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong. Lewis, an 85+ year old professor emeritus at Princeton, has been described as "the only genuinely acknowledged dean of Middle East studies in the West." His views seem generally supportive of my own: Or, perhaps, my views have been influenced by the one genuine intellectual I've read on the subject. So, I ask you, what authors do you recommend on this subject? I'm not really looking for authors with an agenda or talking heads from Fox, CNN or the NYTs. I'm looking for genuine academics who have spent their lives trying to understand this culture. FWIW, here's a New Yorker a…

The war on drugs is there to create jobs. Consider how many jobs it creates. There are high paying tax free jobs for the inner city. There are many jobs for lawyers, law enforcement, criminal justice system, the prison system, the rehab system, etc., plus the multiplier effect that results as this seed money goes back into the economy. If we decided the drug war was another Viet Nam, that was a non righteous money pit that could never be won (WWI, WWII, Korean, Viet Nam, Persian Gulf all combined took less time to complete), many jobs would be lost. To me it does not seem fair that we enslave (inprison) a good fraction of the American people to justify all these jobs.…

Here's why I think socialism works, and why it's better than capitalism. I'll keep this short and informative. Health-care, education, and housing should be free, Because the country needs smart and healthy people to prosper. Because health, education, and a home are the bare minimums for a normal life. Because people should be free to choose what to spend their earnings on. Socialism doesn't need a tax system, because government already owns all businesses/firms. Any money the people spend will go to the government, and the government will then use it to pay the people who work for it. The flow of money balances out, nobody makes any profits, and thus j…

Finally the Bush administration has gone on the offensive and started arguing it received implied authority when authorized to conduct a war. It kind of makes you want to say "well, yeah, duh" when you hear Atty. Gen. Gonzales say that the power to fight a war includes the power to detain and/or seek intelligence from the enemy. "Duh" is an equally valid response to the notion that Congressional limitations on the executive gathering intelligence might not apply in war. As I expected, Gonzales argued that the FISA procedure was cumbersome and did not give the NSA the necessary agility to deal with modern communications. He also said, as I also expected, that he was…

Hey ! We have an election in Canada, nobody cares ?