Harry Reid would like to think that everyone but him is stupid. He "does not accept the phrasology" that taxes are involuntary.
You boys are lucky down in the states with great deals on everything. Just browse over to bestbuy Canada and have a look at the video card prices... This is a statement someone just made on a tech forum I frequent @ anandtech.com I read pretty much an identical statement several times a week. I hear it often from relatives or friends in other countries... Always how Americans are so "lucky" to make so much money, to have such cheap electronics, to have such cheap housing, etc etc e...
I have observed that naming something greatly influences how people perceive it without doing an in depth investigation. I am not the only one who has noticed that, it is a very often exploited tactics. "Big brother in your computer" has been named "trusted computing" (cia joke, you can only trust systems you have subverted); "Big brother in your cameras and phones" has been renamed "digital manners" (because they can enforce good manners by shutting your phone for you in the theater... of cours...
it is pretty ironic that the thing that pushed me most towards conservatism was that my liberal indoctrination as a child included: 1. The principles of science. And disdain towards blind faith & religion (liberalism is a religion: http://soviet-overlords.joeuser.com/article/369367/Liberalism_is_a_religion ) 2. The notion that good people (liberals) are open minded, and evil people (conservatives) are closed minded and bigoted. Lo and behold, actually listening to conser...
The inevitable collapse of socialized healthcare in Israel is now taking the country by a storm. If you check the link you can see patients lined up in beds sitting in the hallways. Every empty space has an extra bed crammed in it, to fill the overflowing hospitals. Waiting times are unbearable, even for true emergencies in the ER. Some hospitals are actually no longer receiving new patients, because their rooms, walkways, and every spare spot are full of patients and they don't want to sit them...
Censorship... it's not just for authoritarian states anymore. Such issues are increasingly part of the discourse in democracies, including Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority democracy. The government there is working up Internet censorship rules to crack down on sites that offend "public decency," including pornography (child and otherwise). In a sign that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has rather peculiar views on freedom of speech, he complained at...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs#United_States http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/energy-environment/01iht-bulb.html?_r=1 Various governments around the world are banning Incandescent light bulbs in favor of "greener alternatives" such as CFLs. Specifically: Philippines, European Union, Ireland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Canada, Cuba, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Venezuela, and the USA. In the USA, California, Connecti...
How many of you own an amazon kindle, sony ereader, or the barns and nobles nook? Even to the wealthier of taxpayers the expense seems far too high. Not so to Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) who wants to use your tax dollars to ensure every "poor" kid gets a government (codeword: taxpayer) paid for ebook reader; meanwhile taxpayers use the amazingly cheap and reliable "book" technology, which boasts infinite battery times, infinite contrast ratios, and faster page turning rates.
The great firewall of australia is a bipartisan move in australia to erect a firewall similar to china. The rallying call is "for the children", the claimed purpose is to stop child pornography. Any politician who opposes it is labeled a child pornography supporter. One of the chief private proponents of it is a high ranking manager in australian telcom, his boss received a personal letter from the minister of communication to shut him up. (instead they published the letter). Recent...
I can hardly believe it, it is as if a huge weight lifted off of my chest. I had already written off america, certain it is doomed to fall into a third world communist country due to the people wanting such "change". I was listening to the radio and heard that martha coakley was defeated in Massachusetts. A republican in victory in that state is amazing enough, but it finally sealed the deal with the horrible healthcare nationalization bill. Democrats are jumping ship left and...
People have discovered that people are naive, trusting fools... you just need to frame something the right way to gain instant support. This is why the american "creationist" movement have renamed themselves "intelligence design" and later "scientific critique"... (see the book "of people and pandas", the book on which the movement is based and the 3 crazy leaders of the movement. the book has had several editions where the term creationism was simply replaced with intelligent desig...
DRM as a whole is not meant to stop piracy; no form of DRM has ever been effective in stopping piracy, nor has any of it ever been designed in a way that could be effective in stopping piracy. DRM is nothing but a trick to force customers to purchase the same product again and again; which several big DRM advocates (such as the CEO of sony BGM) have publicly declared as their ultimate goal. DRM pushers also came on records as saying that libraries are nothing but massive scale piracy by the gov...
I wonder what soldiers who were waterboarded to be "toughened up" think about this whole "waterboarding is torture and should be illegal to use on terrorists" crap. To quote wikipedia: All special operations units in all branches of the U.S. military and the CIA's Special Activities Division [ 14 ] employ the use of a form of waterboarding as part of survival school ( Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape ) training, to psychologically prepare soldiers...
I wonder if I will get banned from wikipedia for this. In the water boarding article, waterboarding is declared torture (if looking to edit, there is a warning that a "wikipedia discussion" declared it to be so. Only evidence supporting such a claim is presented. If you go through the entire article, way near the bottom, is a short section that details the use of waterboarding on american troops to toughen them up... yap, its a training exercise for the military. Well, lets do a little experi...
Our President has started out as a lawyer, he should know better than that! Obama is setting out to have terrorists, enemy combatants, tried in a criminal case instead of military tribunal. Military Tribunal law in the USA meets or exceeds all international laws and protections, it has a variety of protections against abuse set out by congress over more than 200 years in this country. Every country has military courts, criminal courts, and civil courts that are separate entities, and for a good ...