FMBI

Oh, for the golden age of the past, back when depressions took place every 10 years, states exercised nearly-tyrannical authority over their subjects, and the central government barely existed to enforce the very protections of the Constitution. Golden days. As for the "test" - that's pure bullshit. That, and its family of spam letters, have been debunked over and over.

Audry doesn't need skills from violent video games, she got all of her zombie-survival lessons from "Virtual Hooker 2.0: So you wanna be a stripper?" "Hey, Corpsy, you're kinda hot... If you promise not to eat me, I'll let you... 'eat' me."

Link Let's just move on and come together! Let's pretend that this memo, underneath all the "largest attack in American history" fluff, didn't authorize Bush to kill the 1st and 4th amendments, as well as violate Posse Comitatus at will! Sounds good to me. Still think we don't need an investigation?

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Yeah, this is gonna fail for the same reason the "fair" (at 30%?) tax did. It's not only regressive, it's insanely regressive. If you want to keep people in the legal market, you have to make the requirements reasonable - apparently they've never heard of gas bootlegging? Oh, that and the fact that weed still isn't popular enough to reach permanent legalisation in the first place.

My point was that, if the situation was "that bad," he could either leave it altogether, or take more serious passive measures against it, instead of standing out there in the dark and pulling guns on people for the fun of it. Also, I did mention how stupid it was that they were suing him - I fully agree with you on that - but the fact that those laws are still intact, after all the other gun laws that have fallen apart, is very heartening to me.

Talk about intentionally missing the point of the article. And besides, laws like that have been protested against constantly in the UK, with some effect. Another thing that we aren't seeing much of in Iraq.

First of all, I'll repost my post. My point with the political quiz jab was that the WSPQ test (which you apparently have not heard of, somewhat deadening the impact of my figurative blow) says virtually the same thing you did in your first post. Therefore, my statement was intended as somewhere between a joke and a serious comment. Also, you're splitting the wrong hairs on the the second half of my post. My intended statement was that centrist and moderate mean two different things - moderate being the "open to anything" person who may or may not end up having some left- and some right-wing positions, centrist being the person who will have some relatively balanced amount of the two and who will, often reflexively, stick to the center of the political spectrum on whatever issue is being discussed. As for the "conglomerate" question, I never had any intent of pointing it out. Also, just my personal opinion, but it seems to me that many people who point out the problems with self-identification miss the point. The people who state their personal viewpoint are, generally, already aware of the problems inherent in such an undertaking, but they (here I extrapolate from myself and other people I've talked to) feel it is worth it so that others know where they're coming from, so as to facilitate the discussion of deeper arguments - often this is the only way to get to the "heart of the matter," if one or more of the parties is mostly focusing on talking points in a given discussion.

German student accused of throwing shoe at Wen Jiabao released on bail in the UK. This is how a real democracy works. Quick, fair, transparent, bail treatment commensurate with the scope and nature of the offense, and, fascinatingly enough, no torture of the accused. Obviously we can't expect perfection out of Iraq - there are less than two dozen countries in the world with justice systems like the UK's. But it's still interesting to contrast all the individual parts of the process, to keep some perspective when copycat pundits start ragging on about how much Iraq has improved. I'd be shocked to see Iraq end up resembling even Turkey, and that's assuming Iran doesn't gain complete control of the political system.

If they were such a big problem, and if the Border Service knew about it but wasn't dealing with it, then why was he putting so much effort into this, rather than just selling his ranch or putting up a couple rows of barbed wire? My personal guess would be that he had some sort of "Last Man of Freedom" fetish or something, which, I would think, would harm his credibility. Still, though, these cases are always good for a laugh. The justice system is amazingly fun sometimes - I wonder how serious the immigrants really were? Also, something I like, regardless of the stupidity of this particular case, is that they're willing to prosecute people who brandish a weapon and threaten (presumably) unarmed people. Which is good. @Hoch - Arpaio is a nut, and he's a classic example of how "get tough" methods, combined with a healthy dose of racial profiling and Jim Crow-style methods, can make crime worse. The thing that amazes me is that anyone was stupid enough to re-elect him, even when it was obvious, statistically and visually, that he wasn't doing his job.

That's what people like to say - unfortunately, it's neither true nor relevant. Most immigrants (depending on country) have lower crime and drug rates, don't use welfare, and, while they may not pay taxes, they contribute "free" economic activity. Granted, this is a highly centralized benefit, since it goes only to employers dodging the laws and "steals jobs from hardworking Americans etc etc etc", but it's still there - under conservative economic theory, therefore, everyone wins. Also, are you nuts? Illegal immigrants are destroying our education process? I can think of a few reasons that, on the surface, could be used to justify this statement, but there's no way you could possibly justify a drawn out argument for this. @ Veg - No, I'm not saying "let's not do something about them because that's the easiest thing to do," I'm saying "let's not do anything about them because if we do, we're going to fuck Central America, the Caribbean, and our own borders for the next 15 years." Think about the situation. Right now it's virtually stable, even with all our (often hyped up) problems. However, if you deport or otherwise remove, let's say, 500,000 people (which is probably the most it would be possible to do before the end of the recession, even with a police state), but you push 15 million more Latinos in other countries into poverty, what's your long term net benefit? Severe diplomatic pain, destruction of trading partner's economies, 5 million more immigrants as soon as the recession ends - it just makes no sense. Besides, like it or not, immigrants are a part of the economy. You can remove them and fill their jobs differently without an extraordinary amount of effort, but it's always made more sense to say "you're here, now declare yourself, get an education, and move towards a better job." That way, you can simply phase out the bad jobs (toilet cleaning or whatever) altogether, through automation or some other process, while still retaining new labor that, generally, has picked up language and cultural skills that a new tide of immigrants, even legal ones, may not have. But then, that's simply based on the theory that people will do whatever's most efficient and sensible - the way the national debate on this topic has proceeded, unfortunately, suggests otherwise.

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but, aside from the ethical and moral considerations (which would seem to be completely opposite to your stated point of view), is it really a good time to be laughing about sending immigrants back home? The reason they're here in the first place is because of our brilliant banana-republicization economic strategy for Latin America, and if the immigrants - the only ones making any real money, other than the big landowners - go home, then you're likely to see a massive amount of instability and gang violence. This is especially true in the case of Mexico (where most of these "immigrant going home" stories come from) - we're already looking at our first huge cross-border drug war, and you want to make it worse?

If you're the one who knows that this being exists, why don't you tell us what it is? And.... infinity and "god" are not equivalent. Infinity is an extremely useful concept that has done wonders for math and physics. God, in whatever cultural form you choose, has done nothing but set back science for thousands of years. Plus, science and god shouldn't mix, since that gives us things like ICR.

then you are moderate.. neither left nor right How presumptuous of you to assume that this spectrum of liberal to moderate to conservative actually encompasses all perspectives of political philosophies or ideals of governance. Not to mention that moderate would actually be a conglomerate of left and right, not an absence of the two as you imply. *Slaps head* Don't tell me.. you took the WSPQ, didn't you? And you found out that ordinary political quizzes don't really tell you everything about yourself (ie, that every single person in the world is a libertarian)? By the way, moderate doesn't mean "a conglomerate of left and right", it means "moderate." Centrist is the word you're looking for.

I'm still wondering what MTN's post is about.

Link When are these megalomaniacs going to realize that they have no leverage anymore? They can't launch nuclear missiles, their military is one of the worst in the world, and the country is in a state of perpetual starvation. Zzz. Let's just hope Obama gets Kim assassinated and replaces him with a repressive, but less insane, military government. That'd be the best thing for everybody in this case.

Oh yes, the great "Lazy Leftist" conspiracy is afoot. The problem with these stories is that there's nothing to them. Pork? There were thousands of articles written about that during the election, it's been talked to death. Lobbyists / tax evasion? Sure, it's bad, and all - but, seeing as there are more important things supposedly going on (ie, pulling out of Iraq, averting a massive recession, changing our diplomatic policy towards Russia, North Korea, Africa, and the Arab world, etc), I've found it hard to even keep my eyes open when I hear yet another overpaid columnist whine about it on TV. Perhaps you're right, and we would be more active if McCain had been elected - but seeing as how overall board traffic and interest is down so much, that really is just hard to swallow. Besides, what would we talk about? Maybe how he was sending our new VP, Sarah Palin, off to the nation of Africa? Or how he was going to appoint Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State? See, even that's boring.

Technically, every government uses a lot of propaganda (the White House Press Secretary's office does nothing but spit out dozens of pro-administration positions a day, after all), but what I find disturbing about this case is that you can't just say "Oh, there's Dana Perino / Bob Gibbs / Michael Deaver*, spewing more bullshit" - since it's on the internet, you have absolutely no idea of knowing where this stuff is coming from. When you consider how much influence the internet wire-blogs (HuffPo, TPM, Drudge, etc) can have on the "real" media, it can be scary to think that some random government could flood comment sections with some tidbit and call it a "rumor in so-and-so country", get it picked up by a prominent blog, and then transfer it to the MSM. In a week or so, you could completely change your geopolitical position. Ew. *Who, of course, while not the Press Secretary himself, was one of the most effective spin-men of all time, back in the 80s.

After the first two, I could only bring myself to read the titles, instead of the poorly written rants. I agree in principal, but this guy needs to take Humor 101 or something. edit - Agreed 100% with Lynx. Nice picture.

Link Israel's recruiting people to spam online comment sections with pro-Israel opinions. Cool, huh? This isn't the most serious topic in the world, but I figured I'd post it because of the possibility of an interesting discussion on invisible government-generated bias. To start: I think it's bad.

Veggie porn! WTCtGOYKuP0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTCtGOYKuP0 You can also watch this (without the tag) at the PETA site, but I figure it's better to avoid giving an organization of militant vegetarian feminist lesbian homosexual pornographers too many hits. That reminds me, I need to stop reading books by Pat Robertson. edit - and yes, 0:24 is what you think it is. :\

Agreed with Sever on the travel company thing. This particular offer is a stunt, but why would you pay a premium just to save yourself 10 minutes of planning a trip in the first place?

I would take a "quieter, more civilized forum" if that were actually a choice - in reality, this place has just become a graveyard. Gentrification sucks.

Isn't it time to start seriously considering it? The forecasted flood of posts from forum vets has failed to materialize, and in its place, we've been left with what is essentially an 8-person echo chamber. At least when we had the spam forum, we could get a real topic going, instead of the current 2-pages-and-bust model. Even accounting for the fact that it's the school season, I find it hard to believe that the lack of an anarchic, anything-except-porn forum isn't somehow to blame for the falloff in pop. Eh?

Might as well get this out of the way, since we're in a 3-way tie on the other issue. Obama hasn't done anything with abortion funding, he's just restored funding to groups that help with abortions as part of a larger agenda involving reproductive health, contraception, and sexual education. Bush denied funding to these groups, even though they're usually the only ones performing the afore-mentioned non-abortionary functions. Which means he's probably responsible for thousands of AIDS deaths, among other things. Hurrah for Christian zealotry. Zzz.