Phi for All

Please look at the way you set this thread up for failure. You appeal to us to write to our political officials to propose aggressive action on a sovereign nation with nothing but heresay. You should know better than to do that here at SFN. Next time at least lay out some evidence and back it up with credible articles before you make assumptions or make an appeal of this magnitude. You are acting injured and oppressed when so far you have only given us a rant. Everyone is more than willing to listen to assertions but please give us more to work with next time. This time you have come off as quatumcrackpot, no offense.

Use "Search", try "science project".

You're the CEO of Lockheed Martin, aren't you?

it just sounded like you were saying saving American lives justifies torture. It sounded a lot like it. In fact you said exactly that. Patriotism is very powerful. It should be the glue that unites a country and helps its citizens remember the ideals they stand for. It should never be used to justify evil acts.

What makes this different than torturing any POW you think might know about enemy troop movements or battle plans? Are soldiers different than US citizens? Is attacking civilians what makes one a terrorist? And how can you possibly decide before you torture someone that their information is at least 97% accurate? It's nice that you have these definitions so ready to hand, but who will make these decisions in the field? What list of criteria will they go by to determine accuracy of information that has yet to be tortured out of someone? You are arguing for torture on the principal of saving civilian lives, but why are those lives so special if we've sacrificed our principals to save them? If we want to wear the white hat we have to be willing to wear the white gloves as well. This is a complete myth. The drugs we have are hardly the "truth serums" Hollywood and popular fiction says we have. If they were so reliable, we wouldn't be having this discussion. I don't know anyone who would consider it torture to give someone a hypo and then start the tape recorder. As for resisting torture, how do you get "reliable" information under duress from someone who is willing to be blown up for what they believe in?

Oooh, great point. Having been an HVAC tech installing heating systems, then a property manager overseeing retail property, and now dealing with architects I can tell you it really helps to have that broad experience. No one should get to design a building that hasn't built one or worked in one before. The things some architects put into a space frustrate the contractor's and the end-users to tears. Looks good artistically but sucks in practical application and usage. They could really benefit from a broader experience in the trenches.

It's not a bill unto itself, the language was added to the $440B military spending bill that's up before the Senate. Bush has threatened to veto it if the language was included. It's quite a slap in his face that 90 senators voted to include the language.

Gotcha, and you're 100% right. Every military failure, every miscommunication, every toe shot off would be blamed on the unification for a while. But I think 3-4 years of saving tens or hundreds of billions of dollars would eventually earn it's praise.

Oh, so when Perot turned out to be wrong about Mexico, you just turn the blame onto China. And NAFTA affects them how? Is this lame strawman all you can bring to bear? Can you make a connection for me between government deficit spending and offshoring? How does someone lose their experiences? Doesn't a rich job experience make someone a more attractive employee? I know I wouldn't have my present job if I couldn't combine sales, computer databasing and a healthy dose of acting I learned in high school and college. People who've trained for different positions usually end up managing those who haven't. I don't think I've heard the economists mention that part either. More strawman, let's stick to the offshoring argument. You're all over the place here, CEO's didn't make it possible for offshoring to happen, computers, telecommunications, robotics and arbitrage are more likely candidates. Stop trying to turn this into another Bush-bash thread. I like to bash him too, but he's not responsible for everything, just some things, and certainly not for the popularity of offshoring. You are using a few worst case scenarios to paint the entire offshoring controversy with the same wide brush. I know Indian offshoring first hand, and the people who are getting the jobs I bring to them are all college educated people who mostly own their own homes. How is that slave labor? The companies using arbitrage between differing economies pay the offshore companies great wages, that's why the demand is there, why the workers line up, why only the best get to compete for these jobs.

I thought NAFTA bankrupted us. Oh, that's right, nationalist thinkers only thought it would bankrupt us. They, like you, don't give enough credit to free market economic structures. I don't know how this would happen, considering that improving the economies of third world countries creates more markets for consumer goods. "A lot of education and expense"? Now who is oversimplifying? Retraining HAS been taken into consideration, and it's one of the things I give kudos to Bush for. He has expanded Trade Adjustment Assistance to workers who have been displaced by the movement of production facilities abroad. Buying products is not a problem for manufacturers today. Global markets are expanding so rapidly that it's hard for most to keep pace with demand. What is a problem is insistence on "more than market" wage by US workers for increasingly sloppy and inferior work habits. I'm appalled by the number of people in service jobs in the US (the kind that can't be outsourced, like clerks, wait staff, mechanics, etc) who don't care about the job or it's performance as long as they get paid. This will destroy the middle class, not offshoring. You are looking for a nineteenth century solution to a twenty-first century problem. Henry Ford may have shown us how mass production could improve lives, but the Japanese showed us how it could rebuild whole countries. We need to keep pace instead of holding on to the past.

And on the flip-side, hybrid and small car sales are going through the roof. Toyota announced at the end of September that they only had a 20-hour supply on their Prius hybrid. They are coming out soon with a Camry hybrid that is expected to outsell every hybrid model to date. I'm so glad it looks like the oil crunch has curbed the automaker's plans for fuel cell designs. When I found out that the hydrogen cells would be using petroleum anyway I just shook my head. Ford and GM have always mispredicted the market on economy cars. They were late to join the compact revolution and when they did they fell short with the Pinto and the Vega. Crappy cars that even had crappy names, like they were ashamed of them for being small (pinto = multi-colored pony, vega = lowland). They've come a long way on quality but they still want to sell big gas-guzzlers over economy cars.

Actually I think it would help control those types of situations. Less lines to cross and simpler chains of command would make for better communications. And they could all wear the same uniforms, with slightly different insignia! Where I think the idea is weak is in security. Right now spies have to go through the military compartmentalization to find out much of value. If the military branches were consolidated it might make secrets less secret. But the benefits of unity far outweigh the security risks, imo.

The JSF is a good example of how a plane made for multifunctionality can be made less expensively because demand and mass production is going to keep the price down. Definitely a step in the right direction, but how much extra did we have to pay to have three different sets of staff input go through three different and compartmentalized procedures for operations? And how much extra money had to be alloted for Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, BAE and all the rest to deal with input from the three seperate branches?

I really miss the options we used to have for checking new posts. Checking the new posts every 3 hours really rocked.

I feel that a great deal of military spending can be curbed by unifying the military under a single command. Right now we have four hands out, vying for every dollar in the military budget. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all have seperate structures which compete in appropriations. Senator Stuart Symington tried to change this during the Kennedy administration but met with stiff resistance from SecDef Robert McNamara. I've often wondered what the 60's would have been like if JFK hadn't reneged on his promise to make Symington his VP instead of Lyndon Johnson. How much less would we spend and how much more effective would our forces be if we had soldiers who knew about ships and soldiers who knew about tanks and soldiers who knew how to fly planes, and they were all United States Defenders, instead of having internal rivalries, redundant administration and lack of fiscal cohesion between Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines?

Cool! Is that the suit your going to wear to court? You clean up nice, Da!

I can see where someone being threatened in their own home by an intruder could expect the worst. You can't be certain it's just a burglar who has only theft on his mind. Given the nature of the crime, pacifist though I am, I would more than likely jump to the conclusion that someone who has broken into my home poses a threat to the lives therein. And I would like to be able to end that threat without fear of ending up in prison myself for defending my family. But it sounds like this new law extends outside the home. Florida's old laws required residents of a home to make an attempt to flee from an intruder. This new law empowers them to stand their ground, but it goes too far, imo, by extending this privilege to any situation where the citizen feels threatened as long as they are in a place they have a right to be. It seems to me that this bill got out of hand, starting out by protecting your rights in your home, then in your vehicle, then got extended to anywhere you just happened to be, as long as your presence is legitimate. This is going to be a police nightmare, a lawyers dream, and a social travesty. Fear-mongering is getting out of hand in the US and I'm afraid this new law in Florida is going to have everyone there packing heat and looking for their space to be threatened.

Do anything other than ignore him and he wins again. If you take the time to come up with some snappy comeback then he knows how much this means to you. The more you let it show that it bugs you, the more he's going to keep doing it. Take a poke at him or soemthing stupider that lands you in jail and he really wins big. Do yourself a favor, the next time he starts in on you just smile like he said something really stupid. Never respond verbally to anything he says, just pretend it's all jibberish. If he keeps talking, just smile bigger, laugh and act like he's one of those TV charicatures of the dumbest guy on the planet. Look incredulous, shake your head and just smile like you can't believe natural selection hasn't wiped this guy off the face of the planet. Picture him with a tremendous overbite, drool on his chin and flies buzzing around his head. He'll look like the jerk he is as long as you DON'T SAY A WORD!

Because Photoshop makes it easy to be on the cover of Time Magazine.

I had heard that many hospitals have taken grapefruit and grapefruit juice off their menus because it contains compounds which may inhibit certain pathways in the intestinal walls. This was the reason it became popular with some dieters, but I believe it may decrease the effectiveness of certain medications. I have not heard whether all citrus products do this, only grapefruit was mentioned in the articles I saw.

That's not a scientific article, that's a marketing pitch for Randy Alcorn's book! Those quotes are all cover quotes to sell more copies.

But this doesn't mean sound isn't generated, and that is stated specifically. "He detonates the accelerating ball in mid-air..." Is this a red herring or is it a key to the solution? Also, why an exploding bowling ball instead of just a bomb? And if he doesn't want to waste it why set it off? Does flying over the ocean have any significance or is it just so the bomblets won't hurt anyone?