jryan

I wouldn't want anyone near the White House who can accidentally have articles about race wars show up in their own personal one page news letters. He is either incredibly negligent or as big a liar as any other politician in Washington. We've tried exporting by example, ParanoiA. I want no part of aworld view that would have us trade with England, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as a way of showing them how nice it is to be capitalist. It is a form of naivete that has been punished over and over again throughout human history. I'm glad we agree there. I think Romney would have been a better choice than McCain and Obama in 2008.... but at this point he is saddled with Massachusetts Health care on his watch, and no real alternatives or ideas beyond that. In fact, he used Massachusetts Health Care as a selling point in the 2008 primaries. I don't know that the average American is savvy enough to realize the constitutional differences between the state program and the federal one... so he can easily be painted a hypocrite by the left. I'm still a fan of Fred Thompson, but he has no will to run, I don't think.

Not until there is evidence.

Well, firstly, That's not behavior. Secondly, don't look now, but most of the world still ARE illiterate serfs. Either, so long as you are willing to not focus on what YOU have and focus rather on the whole of humanity. I never said that. I like my creature comforts as much as the next person. But they haven't changed humanity, and the vast majority of the humans on the planet don't live as you and I do... nor can they. Hell, we have a movement now to pay the third world to remain serfs to conserve energy for the minority. As a sobering figure, the world GDP in 2009 was $51 trillion. If we were to achieve true equity amongst all the people of the world that would mean each person would be entitled to.... $8,500 annually. While there would be some adjustment downward to the cost of essentials, many of the luxuries that you and I take for granted would disappear as the capital simply wouldn't exist to provide equal access to the comforts you and I enjoy.... nor would the infrastructure exist to create it, even if we were to settle on a sufficient price that would differentiate the cost of air conditioning from the cost of a loaf of bread. I will see if I can find one, but I am at a disadvantage in this as I can easily point out that anti-slavery in the MODERN world is in the minority... and even that stretch in the demographically small western world is a blip on the human time line. And few ancient civilizations were free of anti-slavery movements (Spartacus, Egyptian Jews, and so on) Huh? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged But we audit against what we already know. Well, I'm not entirely sure about that either. The abilities of profiling are greatly overplayed in the modern media. I know this because my father was in the FBI and was good friends with the guy who invented profiling, he was a family friend, and he would be quick to point out the limitations of the field. If you were to try and expand profiling into the cartoonish version you see in Silence of the Lambs (Fosters teacher was modeled after my dad's friend) or Criminal Minds you would wind up with far more Richard Jewells than Theodore Kaczynskis. In reality, the majority of serial killers are caught for reasons completely unrelated to profiling (parking tickets at crime scenes, foul odors reported by neighbors, etc.) When, you say... When will that be?

Sorry, Ron Paul is a cancer on the conservative movement. He has some good ideas and a lot of bad ones, and more skeletons in his basement than a Romanian monastery. His newsletters of the 90s warning of the coming race wars is enough to sink him in any national election, and don't think for a minute that the Democrats wouldn't plaster the television with ads educating the public on those very troubling documents. Ron Paul is a 1930s isolationist Republican, and he would be just as disastrous as a national leader. Luckily the chances of that happening are slim.

I don't think there is evidence that human behavior has changed either, quite frankly, as a whole. Technology has done little but accentuate our age old drives to both preserve ourselves and kill others and I see no reason to believe that the future holds any more promise than that. It is pessimistic, I know, but it is also realistic. And they didn't do that in liberal societies 2000 years ago, either.

Hint: No it's not. We have learned more about the universe around us and how to build nifty gadgets along the way but it has not changed human nature in the slightest. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged We don't? Seriously? Take a look around the world and tell me honestly that you believe that.

I find this rather ironic. If the composition of the Tea Parties were as this website says, and as some here seem to believe, then why would they need to perform this stunt at all? I don't, for instance, feel the need to infiltrate a G8 protest and throw bricks through shop windows and light cars on fire as I know the G8 protesters are already prone to do that anyway.

How has human behavior changed throughout history? No, but human innovation is not the same as human behavior. What we always endeavor to change is behavior. No, no more than an adult should take exceptional pride in dressing themselves. When you learn history, and pay attention to everything around you you realize that there are a lot of people burning excessive mental cycles of calculating the outcome for things that common sense and wisdom could tell you at immediately. "Sophisticated insights of modern man" is simply a needlessly complicated endeavor to avoid learning what past experience has already taught us. Like watching an abused spouse bend over backwards trying to justify returning to the abuser. Not all of it, no. But there is much of the Enlightenment and it's aftermath that you'd be willing to accept as unfortunate (eugenics, for example), and the problem is, in his view, that the troubling portion of the Enlightenment has superseded the good in Western societies. We are casting aside liberties in the hopes of the Utopia... giving away the guarantee in exchange for the unreachable promise. Understanding the human condition isn't hard. We have thousands of years of direct observation to prove the simplicity of it. No, he is not arguing against innovation. He is simply arguing that innovation is not the means to all of our desired ends.. or most, for that matter.

The Newcomer is a fellow gamester, I see. I shall call his raise contingent upon the appropriate establishment of Triskelion/Ferengi exchange rates. In the mean time I shall gaze upon Shahna through a Vaseline smudged lens... hmmm.. She still appears to be a cross between Tanya Harding and a guitarist for an 80s hair band.

I wager 4,200 Quatloos on Seventy Five threads.

I don't believe they are, not in the way it offered, anyway. He is stating that humanity has had no real progress beyond the technical throughout human history. Human weaknesses are still the same human weaknesses that thwarted Utopia 100, 500 or 2000 years ago. Basing any goal on a time where humanity is not prone to such weakness is folly. We can't even see and avoid duplication of CURRENT failure, much less that of 30, 60 or 100 years ago. That we fail to see it well into our 70s rather than 50s, or fail to find in in our iPads rather than our New Reels is irrelevant. The more desirable circumstance has and always will be more freedoms to make of our life what we will... but that has never changed and that can be achieved with the stroke of a pen over night and requires no research or development to arrive at. Government provided "freedom" is really Government exercised freedom at the expense of individual freedoms.

I would have to ask whether we should take anyone seriously who chooses to use bias "gotcha!" videos as the basis of their political opinion.

I figured I would pass this on for all to read as I think it does a very good job of stating the conservative ideology without cluttering it too heavily with whatever planks happen to be on the plate for a given generation. http://www.conservativeforum.org/EssaysForm.asp?ID=6046

This will get.. interesting.. if he nominates Holder.

Just a small note to toastywomble: "Wading into a discussion" is a completely different phrase than "weighing in on a discussion". I used the former and it is perfectly acceptable.

No, because this thread is about the political parties roles in public protest and seeding such protest with anger. The other thread is about levels of party corruption. In both cases you try to make the point that the Republicans are worse. In both cases you are wrong, or fail to make your point adequately. Ironically, here you wade into a thread about which party is more responsible for riling the masses by being the most offensive poster in the thread. So unless you are a Republican, you yourself are contradictory evidence to your claim.

The first article has an update that reopens the question of which came first. For example, that the 0.1% rule is not hard and fast for even old galaxies. And I would say that 4 galaxies is a rather small sample size for a statistical analysis of that type. Such a small sample size would be adversely effected by unrelated sample errors like these massive galaxies being bright enough that we can see them while the vast majority of these early galaxies are too dark for us to see... or more hard for us to find. I don't find that article a deal breaker or my assumption to be "not good" because of it. I find their conclusion to be both early and incredibly odd. I don't think their study is sufficiently robust for such a bizarre conclusion beyond "boy wouldn't that be weird?".

How about you go over to that thread and prove that point there. At this point you have done a poor job of supporting your position in either thread... which isn't a justification for derailing this one.

I think most people here agree that both parties are equally to blame for riling up crowds. Somehow that was spun into arguing the validity of the two protest movements rather than a discussion about the initial topic. I'd suggest a moratorium on the "teabagger" pejorative moving forward as it is meant to serve no purpose beyond inciting anger or imparting ridicule.

You think 9/11 had nothing to do with the recession? Are you serious? Your worthless comment is self defeating. Spending freezes with a record setting budget and gigantic new entitlements? Oh... you mean the spending freeze on a few small departments while the overall spending grows? I never thought I would actually meet someone who actually bought that line. Who here claimed he did? That's not a knock on the Tea Party movement, bascule, just the opportunism of politics. Republican leaders are late comers to the movement. Care to provide examples to show that they refer to themselves that way, and in numbers great enough to establish it's a common term among them? It lessons the discussion, and you.

He didn't do a thing. That was the smart thing to do. When an industry starts hemorrhaging value due to poor management you don't bail it out, you let it die. What Bush did was simply send everyone a check and let them spend that money on whatever they wanted to, thereby stimulating the economy organically. Obama's targeted incentives only serve to reward bad behavior and prolong a bankruptcy or closing that is inevitable. It's bad for the economy and bad for the business itself in many cases. Why should I really care? If they want to question the validity of the Heritage graph they can feel free to, but I would guess they wouldn't because it does show a major increase in federal spending under Bush. So "non right wing" people can cast out the Heritage graph if they choose due to their own biases... but that's their own problem to deal with. I would assume they were fine with the left leaning USA Today article?

You seem to forget Bush dealt with his own recession following the .COM bust that had an almost identical hit to tax revenue. Where I fault bush is in his spending in general, but his explosion in spending after 2007 when Medicare Part D, TARP, and a few other programs went into full bloom. I'd be happy to repeal Medicare Part D and the new Health Insurance reform and replace them both with something sane... as well as finally let the markets sort through their troubled assets and stop inflating them with incentives. But Obama didn't cut spending by a dime... for as bad as Bush's spending was, Obama took that and piled more bailouts and entitlements on top of it. Had McCain won in 2008 and done the same things that Obama did there would still be a Tea Party movement today... it would just be lead by Democrats. Also, keep using the "teabagger" line, bascule. It helps put your points in proper context.

You've never heard of "enough's enough"? Your argument could be made whenever a population reaches it's last straw... but your argument is never reasonable. You might as well be asking why a table broke when you put 400 lbs on it when it didn't break when I put 200 lbs on it. The reason is simple: it could handle 200 lbs, but not 400 lbs. The more important question is why were Democrats complaining about deficit spending in 2004, but now find 7 times that spending rate perfectly fine. The Republicans are rational here, the Democrats are irrational. Not to mention, Republicans weren't all on board with Bush's spending. .. How soon the left conveniently forgets.... Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedFrom that first article: "The deficit is going to be a symbol of their credibility problem, and the budget is going to be the document we use" to make that argument, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill. Oh Rahm...

I like to read CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post and Fox News Online. Generally I try to avoid the news stories that they aren't all covering, and then drill into each report to find the nuggets they all agree on. I figure at that point I at least have the best facsimile of the facts in a given story that I can get. From there I form my own opinion. I will also get an aggregate of sorts by coming to forums like this, and a few others, where people will direct me to breaking stories on various other sites and blogs. I don't know that there is a good single source for news.

I have been wondering what the big mystery is regarding super massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. I was watching a documentary last night where cosmologists kept referring to the finding as a "mystery". What confuses me is that I always saw this as a given... though, for very uncomplicated reasons. Since galaxies have a center of mass I would assume that the galaxies develop somewhat similar to a solar system, with the bulk of the central mass being close enough together that over time it all was pulled together. The sheer mass of the matter was creating a black hole. (speaking of which: would a super massive black hole develop without burning it's nuclear fuel light a standard black hole? I assume it could as the mass could create a gravitational pull stronger than the counter pressure from nuclear fusion) The remaining mass on the cusp of that critical distance then ends in an orbit around the black hole itself (in the same way that the planets are formed in a solar system).... in this case the orbiting mass is the rest of the galaxy.