(damn)

Lance Mannion

Duke status
Mar 7, 2009
26,513
2,401
113
In Gods Country
"George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times."

Damn!

Since the Obama bin Biden administration have refused-despite previous promises, to close Gitmo and release the "innocents", the only logical conclusion that one could come to is that they too are in on the whole Iraq War Conspiracy.

First it was the Clinton/Gore admins lies about Iraqi "WMD's" and then their "regime change" policy vis-a-vis Iraq which was dutifully carried out by the Bushitler/Cheney-Halliburton Prison- Walmart Industrial Complex......and now Obama is covering for Clinton/Gore/Bushitler!

Damn, what a tangled web they've woven!
 

sirfun

Duke status
Apr 26, 2008
17,868
7,070
113
U.S.A.
Damn!

Since the Obama bin Biden administration have refused-despite previous promises, to close Gitmo and release the "innocents",
link?


I may have an alternate to your "only logical conclusion".
 

sirfun

Duke status
Apr 26, 2008
17,868
7,070
113
U.S.A.
Life has never been so good for our species
Sure, the future looks gloomy if you focus on environmental problems or world hunger, but in many ways, things have never been better for us.
April 30, 2010|Michael Shermer

It is fashionable among environmentalists today to paint a gloomy portrait of our future. Although there are many environmental issues yet to be solved, too many species endangered, more pollution than most of us would like and far too many people still going hungry each day, let's not forget how far we've come, starting 10,000 years ago.

Before that time, all people lived as hunter-gatherers in relative poverty compared with today. How poor were they? If you walk into a Yanomamö village in Brazil today — a good analogue for how our ancestors lived — and count up the stone tools, baskets, arrow points, arrow shafts, bows, hammocks, clay pots, assorted other tools, various medicinal remedies, pets, food products, articles of clothing and the like, you would end up with a figure of about 300. Before 10,000 years ago, this was the approximate material wealth of each village on the planet
By contrast, if you walk into the Manhattan village today and count up all the different products available at retail stores and restaurants, factory outlets and superstores, you would end up with an estimated figure of about 10 billion (based on the UPC bar code system count). Economic anthropologists estimate the average annual income of hunter-gatherers to have been about $100 per person and the average annual income of big-city dwellers to be about $40,000 per person.

If ever there was a great leap forward, this is evidence of it. It has been estimated by Eric Beinhocker in his book, "The Origin of Wealth," that the $100-per-person annual income rose to only about $150 per person by 1000 BC and did not exceed $200 per person until after 1750 and the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Today the average is $6,600 per person per year for the entire world. Of course, the magnitude of the increase is much higher for the wealthiest people in the richest nations.
As Gregg Easterbrook shows in "The Progress Paradox," over the last 50 years, standards of living have risen dramatically. The 1950 gross domestic product per capita, computed in 1996 dollars, was only $11,087, compared with the 2000 figure of $34,365. And more people are moving up the economic hierarchy. Way up. In 2000, 1 in 4 Americans earned at least $75,000 a year, putting them in the upper middle class, compared with 1890, when only 1% earned the equivalent of that figure. That is a 25-fold expansion of the upper middle class, redrawing class boundaries and redefining what it means to be average. And rich. Since 1980, the percentage of people earning $100,000 or more per year, in today's dollars, has doubled. What we can buy with that money has also grown significantly. A McDonald's cheeseburger cost 30 minutes of work in the 1950s, three minutes of work today, and in 2002, Americans bought 50% more healthcare coverage per person than they did in 1982.
We also have more material goods — SUVs, DVDs, PCs, TVs, designer clothes, name-brand jewelry, home appliances and gadgets of all kinds. The homes in which we keep all of our goodies have doubled in size in just the last half a century, from about 1,100 square feet in the 1950s to more than 2,200 square feet today. And 95% of these homes have central heating, compared with 15% a century ago, and 78% have air conditioning, compared with the number in our grandparents' generation — zip.

That's not all. Crime is down. Most crime rates everywhere tumbled throughout the 1990s. Easterbrook found that homicides, for example, plummeted between 50% and 75% in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore and San Diego. Domestic violence against women dropped 21%, while teen criminal acts fell by more than 66%.

Americans also now enjoy a shorter workweek, with the total hours of life spent working steadily declining for the last 15 decades. In the mid-19th century, for example, the average person invested 50% of his waking hours in the year working, compared with a mere 20% before the current recession. Fewer working hours translates into more leisure time. In 1880, the average American enjoyed just 11 hours per week in leisure time, compared with the 40 hours per week average today. And those working environments are cleaner, safer and more pleasant.
And despite the environmental impact of our more prosperous lifestyle, on balance things really are getting better, as documented by Matt Ridley in his forthcoming book, "The Rational Optimist." For instance, over the last half a century, pollution is down in most cities, even in my own Los Angeles. When I took up bicycle racing in 1979, the air was so bad that summer training rides had to be completed well before noon to avoid the pain caused by fine particulate matter — dirt, dust, mold, ash, soot, aerosols, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides — becoming deeply embedded in your lungs. Today, I can ride practically any time of the day on most days of the year and feel no ill effects.
Despite the American Lung Assn.'s report this week that L.A. is the smoggiest city in America, thanks to the Clean Air Act and improved engine and fuel technologies, the trend line has been and continues to be moving in the direction of cleaner air. In fact, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, during the 1980s L.A. averaged 150 "health advisory" days per year and 50 "stage one" ozone alerts, but in 2000 there were only 20 health advisory days and zero stage one ozone alerts.

Given these facts, and many more quantitative measures, it would be perfectly sane to decline a trip in a time machine to any point in the past if you had to actually live out your life there. These are the good old days, and without neglecting problems that still need solving, it's high time we recognized that it is a better life for more people in more places more of the time.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and the author of "The Mind of the Market."
 

sirfun

Duke status
Apr 26, 2008
17,868
7,070
113
U.S.A.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/10/montana.medical.marijuana/?hpt=Sbin

the comments are priceless

(CNN) -- The Billings, Montana, City Council will take up the issue of regulating medical marijuana on Monday night in a meeting expected to be intense in the wake of the firebombings of two of the city's medical marijuana storefronts in the last two days.

The southern Montana city's dispensaries legally provide marijuana to medical patients who use it for maladies from glaucoma to nausea to lack of appetite. In the latest incidents, the phrase "Not in our town" was spray-painted on the businesses, police say.


Police Sgt. Kevin Iffland said Big Sky Patient Care was hit early Sunday morning and Montana Therapeutics was the target early Monday. Both had a rock thrown through the front door, followed by a Molotov cocktail. In both cases, Iffland said, the fire was put out swiftly and damage was not extensive.

Iffland said Billings police are working with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and that the two firebombs are being handled as felony arsons carrying sentences of up to 20 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

The attacks on the storefronts come as the Billings City Council considers a moratorium on licensing new dispensaries while it works up a regulatory ordinance.

Sixty-two percent of Montanans voted in 2004 to allow caregivers to grow marijuana for qualified patients, but the state law said nothing about distribution. In that absence, municipalities and county governments began licensing the establishments on their own.

But, Iffland said, Billings was ill-prepared for the number of applications and has very little regulation in place. Billings, he said, is a town of about 100,000 and has had nearly 90 applications for medical marijuana storefronts -- and some residents are angry. He fully expected a heated council meeting.

Meanwhile, investigators are still reviewing evidence in the firebombings and are working with one of the businesses that has surveillance video but is reluctant to hand over the tape because of privacy concerns.

While the investigation is ongoing, police have stepped up patrols in the areas where the medical marijuana storefronts are located, Iffland said.
 

Lance Mannion

Duke status
Mar 7, 2009
26,513
2,401
113
In Gods Country
The "gotcha" moment.

Another tired staple of "Liberal" "journalists".....or whatever the fcuk this hack calls himself.

I'd be curious to know what exactly qualifies him to determine what are, or are not "extremist" views with
respect to civil rights?

Rand Paul is libertarian and probably believes that a business owner has a right to be a racist and do business according to his racist beliefs. It's against the law since the '64 Civil Rights Act, I can live with that but I also agree with him.

I'm a sexist/ageist (which in this case is illegal btw). If I owned a childrens day care business I would not hire a 45 year old single male to care for young children. I don't give a flying fcuk how impeccable his credentials appeared.
This is illegal and I'd happily break sex/age discrimination laws in this case.

I discriminate based on appearance all the time, and so do you, whether you like it or not. We may not always be correct in our appearance based judgements but they're not to be dismissed out of hand either.

The reasons may noble- like trying to prevent kids from being buttfucked by deviants, or they may hateful, like not hiring a black man because you're an asshole and hate nigga's.


I assume that Rand Paul believes it should be your choice who to do business with and not the governments.
 

sirfun

Duke status
Apr 26, 2008
17,868
7,070
113
U.S.A.
I discriminate based on appearance all the time, and so do you, whether you like it or not. We may not always be correct in our appearance based judgements but they're not to be dismissed out of hand either.
I can live with that
...........................................................

I assume that Rand Paul believes it should be your choice who to do business with and not the governments.
I assume you read the link above


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/weekinreview/23tanenhaus.html

But Mr. Paul’s position is complicated. He has emerged as the politician most closely identified with the Tea Party movement. Its adherents are drawn to him because he has come forward as a kind of libertarian originalist, unbending in his anti-government stance. The farther he retreats from ideological purity, the more he resembles other, less attractive politicians.

In this sense, Mr. Paul’s quandary reflects the position of the Tea Partiers, whose antipathy to government, rooted in populist impatience with the major parties, implies a repudiation of politics and its capacity to effect meaningful change.

In an essay in The New York Review of Books, the historian Mark Lilla noted a distinction between traditional populist movements, which “use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that ‘the people’ can exercise it for their common benefit,” and today’s insurgents, who favor “individual opinion, individual autonomy and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power.”


It’s not surprising that there should be tension between Republican officials, who want to guide Mr. Paul closer to the center, and libertarians who have said Mr. Paul’s criticism of the Civil Rights Act is in line with the doctrine.

“The foundation of libertarian thinking is private property as a limit on state action,” David Bernstein, a libertarian law professor, explained to Talking Points Memo, the popular political blog. “So if a private business chooses to discriminate, a typical libertarian would say that’s a business owner’s right to do so.”

This is precisely the case Barry Goldwater, the leader of the Republicans’ conservative wing, made on the Senate floor just before the final vote on the Civil Rights Act. “I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort,” Mr. Goldwater said, even as he attacked provisions of the bill that “would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action with regard to private enterprise and in the area of so-called ‘public accommodations’ and in the area of employment.”

Public accommodations included gas station rest rooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, hotels, movie houses and sports arenas. It is hard to imagine a candidate today making the case that discrimination in such places should be allowed. Indeed Mr. Paul has said he favors the “public accommodations” provision. But in advancing the autonomy of private businesses, he is reviving libertarian thought in its peak period. In his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom,” Milton Friedman, the right’s most influential economist, equated the Fair Employment Practices Commissions — created to prevent workplace discrimination — with “the Hitler Nuremberg laws.” But he also applied the comparison to “the Southern states imposing special disabilities upon Negroes.” In other words, he recognized that Jim Crow was itself a form of intrusive government, only enacted at the state level.

This points to the bind Mr. Paul is in. However attractive it may be just now to depict all political conflict as a neatly bifurcated either/or, with the heroic individual pitted against the faceless federal Leviathan, the truth is that legislative battles over civil rights laws were waged within government, and between competing incarnations of it, federal vs. state. Passage of the Civil Rights Act, as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina observed last week, hinged on the Interstate Commerce Clause, which “was properly used by the courts and the Congress.”

The reasoning was clear: since the federal government built the highways that goods were shipped on and created tax codes favorable to businesses, it had jurisdiction over how businesses operated. Even Mr. Friedman acknowledged that racial discrimination could not be interpreted in the exclusive terms of individual choice. “When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community,” he wrote.

But he stopped short of noting the obvious, that in such instances the white community’s “taste” had made it the enemy of individual African-Americans who were forbidden to sit at a luncheonette or take their children into a Woolworth’s rest room.

Mr. Paul has tangled himself up in a similar contradiction. His championing of private businesses, ignoring the rights of just about everyone else, places him on the wrong side of history, just like the first opponents of the Civil Rights Act. One fierce opponent of civil rights legislation, William F. Buckley Jr., admitted as much. “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow,” Mr. Buckley said in 2004. “I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.”
 

sirfun

Duke status
Apr 26, 2008
17,868
7,070
113
U.S.A.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/96682394.html
Opinion
E-mail
James E. Causey

I have a confession. I'm 40 years old and I can't swim.

Not only can't I swim, I start to hyperventilate whenever I get into a pool and the water comes up to my neck.

You see, when I was 6, I nearly drowned while on a family vacation in Wisconsin Dells. While I was splashing in an inner tube in the shallow end of water, a teenage girl thought it would be funny to pull me out to the deeper end. When she snatched the inner tube away, I sank like a rock in about 8 feet of water.

A lifeguard rescued and resuscitated me. After that experience, I never overcame my fear.

As an adult, I've taken three adult swim classes, but when the water creeps up to my chest - I panic. I fail.

I'm not proud of my fear but for the most part I've managed to avoid stressful situations. At pool parties, my excuse is usually that I forgot my bathing suit or the chlorine burns my eyes.

My parents can't swim either; nor can most of my friends.

But I'm going to set a goal today. I will learn how to swim before year's end. I owe that to myself. I hope I can motivate others who can't swim to take on this challenge as well. I will keep you posted on my progress in a future column.

But here's the thing: I'm not alone. And people are dying. Needlessly.

There have been four drownings in less than three weeks in our area.

With summer here, we know that a lot of kids will be going to the pools, lakes and lagoons, so it's important that they know how to swim, and to swim safely. The Boys & Girls Club of Milwaukee along with Milwaukee County needs to continue to offer affordable swimming lessons for those at most risk.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that drowning is the second leading cause of injury-related death among kids between the ages of 11 and 14. And black children are 2.3 times more likely to drown than their white peers.

Simply put, 64% of America's minority children can't swim a stroke. I have no confidence, given what we've experienced in drownings, that those stats are any better locally.

In the last three weeks: Kamonie Slade, 12, died after being pulled from Mauthe Lake, where he was attending his seventh-grade class trip on June 14; Myah Tijerina, 2, died in a hot tub at a Kenosha motel on June 12; Ron Edmonds, 15, drowned playing in a lake at a Franklin condominium complex with his friends on May 29; and authorities have called off their search for 9-year-old Sofia Khan, who fell from a kayak into Lake Michigan June 9 near Sheboygan.

Some of these victims knew how to swim - and I know that a 2-year-old in a hot tub is not likely a case of lack of swimming skills - but they all demonstrate the dangers posed by water and why we need to equip our children with the skills they need. One lesson: Swimming in an open body of water is different than swimming in an indoor pool. Lakes, rivers and streams are colder and more treacherous.

Even good swimmers' body temperatures can drop fast, making it more difficult for them to breathe. Their bodies can cramp up and they can quickly find themselves in trouble.

Learning what to do when you get in trouble in the water is just as important as learning the breaststroke, aquatics director Todd Jackson told me.

Jackson, a swimming instructor for 35 years, teaches kids swimming at Don & Sallie Davis Boys & Girls Club on the city's south side. He told me the main reason young people don't learn how to swim is that they are simply not exposed to water all that much. I know, this might sound strange when you consider that Milwaukee sits right next to the lake.

Swimming, which was once a Milwaukee Public Schools requirement in high school, is an elective in most schools today.

Even in the 1980s, some students found ways to get around the swimming requirement. Trust me, I know. In high school I, along with a number of my friends, managed to skip swimming.

Jackson told me that parents should accept some responsibility and sign their kids up for swimming lessons. He's right; with all the free and reduced-rate resources available today, there's really no excuse. I gained more confidence after watching a group of beginning swimmers at the Boys & Girls Club last week.

Intermediate swimmers practiced water safety in the deep end, as the beginners practiced floating and retrieving objects at the shallow end of the pool.

I'm going to need help to get over this fear, but swimming is a lifelong skill we all must master. Wish me luck.
 

Lance Mannion

Duke status
Mar 7, 2009
26,513
2,401
113
In Gods Country
Weird.

I knew how to swim instinctively and I was entirely comfortable in water before I knew it was dangerous...yeah, I'm bragging but it's true.

When I was about 6 I was playing with some kid in a backyard with a pool, the kid falls in the pool (no assholes, I didn't push him in)and about one micro-second later his mom comes literally flying by me into the pool to rescue the poor lad- scared the shite outta' me seeing an adult human in total panic- 'save the offspring' mode.

At the time I had no idea that there were people that couldn't swim- I still find it kinda' strange.
 

Lance Mannion

Duke status
Mar 7, 2009
26,513
2,401
113
In Gods Country
The more that "Liberal" "journalists" attempt to demonstrate their superiority with lame attempts at denigrating Sarah Palin, the more I love her.

Q:Who is Hillary Clinton without President William Jefferson Clinton?

A: At best an unknown law professor by the name of Hillary Rodham.

Q: Who made Sarah Palin- a chick that put herself through college and simultaneously pumped out 5 puppies...(try asking your average mommy w/more than 1 kid if she's got time to run for and get elected Governor, my guess is that you'll get hearty laugh in response).

A: Sarah Palin made herself......and "Liberals" (especially the feminazi's and their "male" enablers)hate her for it- which makes her a hero in my book.