Politics

Whenever I think of the archetype of patchouli wearing, pot smoking, Capitalism-hating, anarchosyndicalist liberal hippies, George Will is definitely the first person that comes to mind. Oh yeah: George Will in his anal retentive conservative douche disguise. Ingenious! It fooled me! So it was no surprise to see a column where he was ranting against the Bush Administration's attempt at a power grab and the marginization of checks and balances: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003_pf.html

Commercial model top speed 290 kph goes on sale this April in the US market http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Lithiumpowered-super-cars-April-launch/2006/02/16/1140052209543.html April is when Hybrid Technologies says they will start taking orders---at the Car Show in NY. I don't think it is an April Fools: here is a link about Hybrid Technologies http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/company.php This blogger in Japan http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/electric-super-cars-290kph-370kph.html says that they have a non-commercial demo electric that does 370 kph. But the Japanese concept sounds weird, not the sort of thing you could market for peo…

What is it with religious fundamentalists that they feel the need to force their personal religious views onto everyone. If necessary, at the expense of the greater good. From GWB's State of the Union address ... "I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research - human cloning in all its forms: creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. " http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4668320.stm What's wrong with cloning? What's…

http://www.imdb.com/news/sb/2006-02-14/tv/2 Really Bryant? Wanna tell that to 2005 speed skating world champion Shani Davis? Or perhaps he can explain to Sweden's Lina Andersson's gold medal is meaningless because she only had to sprint 1.5 kilometers on nordic skis to win it. What a moron.

Well, a new report explains what you should do: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1 From the Boingboing coverage: "Would you like to be happier? Become a rich, married, religious, Republican, white person from the Sunbelt, says this Pew research report." This is why I'm glad to say that pursuing my own personal happiness is not my most important life goal (although I suppose it can be argued that my pursuits are vicariously for my own happiness) Ultimately, underpinning all of my beautiful, teleological, goal-directed pattern seeking nature is atheistic existentialism. From this the core of my belief can be summed up as: I'm a random f…

Eric Burns, the moderator of FNC's media-watch show "Fox News Watch" raised an interesting question on this past weekend's show, and I thought I'd pass it along here just to see what people think. Is it hypocritical for a media web site to refuse to run pictures for ethical reasons, and yet include a link to a place where the reader can find those pictures? I think it's an interesting question to ponder given the explosion of popularity and importance of web news outlets.

Looks like Bush planted a flunkie in NASA and changed their policies about talking about global warming and making it clear that the Big Bang is "just a theory". This whole nightmare ended when Texas A&M called NASA and told them they've never heard of the guy, so he resigned. The story here:

hello any thought that we maybe seeing less of osama in the near future. thinking, he's not that dumb, he saw what happened in the palestine occupied territories. why not cut back his attack against the u.s. for now. allow them to leave and simply have the iraq people vote his followers into goverment. all very democratically. at some point reappear as a new political leader who has given up on terrorism, well at lease quite as visible, then allow himself to be elected into power. odd how he was mentioning about a truce before that palestine election. perhaps he already knew what the results would be. why not appear a man of peace and simply have the rule o…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/rumsfeld_chavez Hmm, pot calling the kettle black? He was elected legally. Therefore, he is Hitler. Q.E.D.

Still in uproar http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=65780

I've just read a thread where someone labelled a country as uncivilized and I replied by bringing up the topic of methodological individualism. I thought that I might start a thread about the topic. Below is an example of how group thinking leads to fallacious thinking and how reasoning from the micro foundations helps explains contradictions that arise from looking at the world with eyes that see only grand entities (e.g. countries, nations, religions) rather than more fundamental entities (e.g. individuals, atoms, energy): From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Methological Individualism: “Methodological individualism became important, not as a wa…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4679220.stm clouds of dark matter which are not massive enough (less than 30 million solar mass) or which are too small----less than 1000 lightyear diameter----apparently disperse by random motion of the particles, because astronomers do not find them below that size. the assumption is smaller less massive clouds don't have enough gravity to hold themselves together given the random motion characteristics of DM. this allows one to infer the AVERAGE SPEED of dark matter particles, or to put it another way their TEMPERATURE so the estimate is that DM particles are moving on average at a speed of 9 kilometers per second

This is turning out to be a very revealing incident and I think the lessons learned are going to take a while to digest. My initial reaction is that in any free country people have the right to protest and to boycott any paper which offends. If someone dips a crucifix in urine, that is intended to provoke a reaction, and the artist cannot complain if Christians react lawfully. What I'm trying to guage is how widespread are the threats of violence. I can't help but hope that this religion does not flourish. One billion seems quite enough. They seriously need to unclench.

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