Now I suspect reading a Right Wing site like the Weekly Standard is probably grounds for expulsion from this blog (or at the least howls of derisive laughter bruce) so I doubt anyone has read this fairly comprehensive debunking of the video above.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/think_progress_msnbc_manufactu.asp
Please read it, follow the links, and note that the "senior republican party operative" is basically a libertarian and furthermore he's been well quoted out of context.
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replying to @39
I'm pretty sure that people tormented bush effigies and pictures in all sorts of protests and it wasn't hard to find this post of Sarah Palin's Effigy being hung in Hollywood - http://cbs2.com/local/Sarah.Palin.mannequin.2.849299.html
Now it is true that you don't seem to see people shooting at republican/conservative/... gatherings. I suspect that may be partly because people know these folk are highly likely to shoot back - ISTR some nutter being killed in a Denver church before he could do much damage fairly recently. [Note I don't say this is the sole reason nor do I have any sympathy for the killers you list]
And finally to go back to my earlier point there's the black guy who was beaten up in St Louis at the Carnahan town hall meeting. He appears to have been attacked by SEIU members since he was distributing "Don't tread on me" flags - http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/08/tea-party-protesters-attacked-1-man.html
I'm sorry it looks pretty much the same to me
http://thenextright.com/jon-henke/protests-2008-vs-2005
Mark @24
But these people aren't heckling Obama because Obama, like Bush, doesn't condescend to talk to hoi polloi in a forum where they can answer back.
What they are doing seems pretty similar to the sorts of things that Code Pink did to disrupt military events for example. And for that matter the persistent heckling of pro-life or anti-immigration speakers on college campuses. The only difference is that the people they are heckling are elected politicians.
Yanno this sounds remarkably like what the Republican supporters said when faced with folks prtesting Bush's policies. Or at least that's my take from across the Atlantic.
And yes it sounds not totally different from the protests against Clinton for that matter.
Both sides (maybe better ALL sides since there are >2 of them) seem to have within them extremists who prefer to harass and heckle rather than debate. In fact with the internet and the availability of cheap (video)cameras these hecklers can easily spread their message wider than they might otherwise.
In the longer run I'm sure harassment will bite them in the ass and I suspect that eventually the moderate folk on all sides will realize that they don't in fact benefit from having their position supported by the hecklers and will take steps to remove them.
But removing the hecklers is one of those things that has to be done in a multilateral fashion and that, like any disarmament process, is a tricky thing to organize
One hopes she'll not have to repeat in 5 years time... but she probably will unless she does something radical like marry a genuine American
I with Simon Bisson on this. I think at root Amazon have hit a scalability problem that has now nastily combined with their perceived monopoly to smack them in the teeth.
More at this blog post I wrote earlier today.
Gag @ 39: Honesty forces me to say that I actually found the Kapo one amusing and quite possibly accurate. Yes it was undiplomatic as hell but Martin Schulz really is a weasel of the highest order.
Giacomo, Anna and others in Italy @18, 20 etc.: What blows me away time and again is how no politician in Italy ever manages to do anything useful. In the North they mostly seem to route around the politicians and ignore them (and the government), in the south they bribe and get kickbacks from them. In neither part do the politicians seem to do anything that would actually reform the Italian state which is crumbling in a way that makes US mortgage CDOs look secure.
As far as I can tell a fair chunk of Italians voted for his group simply because they felt that his inability to do anything was better than the likely active damage that the other group was doing/planning on. To me this seems pretty standard Italian WTF behavior.
I love visiting Italy. I love the food. The wine. The hospitality. Not to mention the wonderful scenery, culture etc. BUT every visit pretty much I find somethign that makes me go WTF were they thinking? Take the Rome Marathon last month. 90% organized perfectly but maybe a little thought about portapotties would have been good. There were 15,000 bladders at the start and about 20 portapotties. Most of the men therefore peed through the railings onto the forum. I hope it rained a couple of days later because that area must have REEKED otherwise (picture). Oh and they forgot to tell anyone where the Pasta party was the night before so I don't think anyone showed up.
The "no response = reject" problem shows me that agents need some kind of query processing email system that automates the reject thing and stuffs the replies to the rejections in the bit bucket where they won't upset. This might also help if it added webpages where authors could track the (lack of) progress of their query and so on. A simple list per agent of query queue length, queries received yesterday, queries read yesterday queries definitively rejected yesterday would help. As would a system that automatically filtered out the obvious "fail to read the instructions" queries.
Of course I fear that most agents are sufficiently non technically minded that they wouldn't use such a tool if it were developed...
PS my ultimate bad query letter when the wonderful Miss Snark was still blogging - http://www.di2.nu/200609/09.htm
bad jim @81
I think you'd be pushed to do it faster by road. You probably could if you had a pair of drivers and no stops apart from fuel and restroom. But it wouldn't be a fun drive and even then you might not.
I've driven, at various times, most of the route you would take - I assume it would be Luxembourg, Mannheim Strasbourg (or just across the border in Germany) Basel Lugano, Milano, Firenze, Roma. The good news is that this is almost all highway. The bad news is that there are frequent jams on them. I've spent hours in jams on the bit down the Rhine, getting into Swtzerland at Basel, getting out of Basel (actually that may now work better they've finished most of the construction there), in the Alpine passes, getting out of Switzerland and into Italy, on the Tangenziale around Milano and most recently just outside Firenze. Any of these could cause you to have an hour long delay at a standstill and that would push your required average speed up significantly.
3 minutes is entirely reasonable for a connection in Switzerland.
30 minutes is cutting it fine in Italy (in my experience).
One thing I found particularly amusing about Rome was the 2 subway lines (one less than Milano).
Line 1 has new and posh trains. Line 2 has trains than are generally 100% graffitied on. This example from my wife's blog is one of the less graffitied ones - http://www.imagesdemiho.com/serendipity/uploads/P200309_14.43-blog.jpg
Rome as a whole does tend make you (well it made the wife and I) a bit blasé about antiquities. "Oh its only 500 years old? not done by Leonardo da Vinci. Boring."
That's completely useless. What you are supposed to do is come to Rome on March 22 and cheer me on as I stagger around the Rome Marathon then go to the Netherlands :)
Abi,
In re #275 and others where you explain the usage
It seems to me that the basic aim is to stop the prudes / thin skinned from being offended by not seeing tags that less prudish/thicker skinned folks have used.
This is good BUT I think you should also have various "opt-in" levels for people who are also less likely to be offended.
In addition to the obvious general, but subjective, "profanity/obscenity/blasphemy/racist/X-phobic" classification of potentially offensive tags I think an obvious addtion that you don't seem to be doing is allow people who use a particular tag to see stuff that other people have tagged with the same tag. So if (for example) I list MILF as a tag for something then I'd like to see stuff tagged MILF by other users.
Some more UK words.
Spunk (== Cum for our ex-colonial friends)
Pikey, Gyppo (== member of the 'traveling community')
Ultimately I think this could be destined for Epic Fail but the comment thread has been fascinating
Do not put Fuk on the list unless you specifically eliminate Fuku* since lots of Japanese names have Fuku in them (it means lucky/fortunate)
My favorite trappiste is Rochefort. There is the lower strength Rochefort 8° which is about 10% ABV and the really yummily dangerous Rochefort 10 which clocks in at a whisker under 12% ABV.
Rochefort 10 is the only 10%+ beer that I have drunk which isn't either disgustingly sweet (there's a Belgian beer called Bush which is 12% and vile) or which smacks you around the head with the alcoholic fumes.
I also think well of Orval but my wife hates the smell of it so YMMV
If you want a Belgian beer you can enjoy over a longer period, and especially one that is great for summer evenings then I recommend a "Witbier" such as Hoegaarden or Brugs (I'm drinking a Hoegaarden as I type this)
I see people have mentioned the Lambics and the Cherry beers I can endorse those comments. And talking of Fruit there is a beer called Verboeden Frucht (sp?) with a Rubens picture of Adam & Eve slightly modified on the label. Its not too far removed from the Chimay taste and the label makes if a good beer to bring to parties
Lee (@28)
I'm a reasonably well off libertarian. Not as rich as creosote perhaps but a long way from "struggling"/ "dirt-poor". Going on the amount of money Ron Paul has managed to raise it seems to me that there are plenty of libertarians in a similar position to me in the USA.
Julia (@22 and earlier)
I'm trying, but failing, to understand your argument here. It seems to me that you claim that under-resourced police forces are more likely to arrest people 'just in case' as opposed to letting them keep on doing their stuff for a bit. And that therefore we should spend even more money on the police.
If that is your argument that pardon me for being ever so slightly sceptical. The way it looks to me from the other side of the pond is that the park police have far too many officers who don't have anything better to do than arrest people for "looking at me in a funny way", "loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing" or similar non-crimes.
Exactly.
The whole process needs to be auditable - and that includes identifying who voted (not who they voted for but whether people voted at all) and ensuring that they onöy voted once. I.e. a voter has to show a reasonable ID.
It is utterly beyond me why Diebold and other vote machine makers do not use open source software and publicise their code so that it can be subject to proper analysis. This applies just as much to optical scan stuff as to more electronic ones.
[Aside: It also blows me away to learn that these machines tend to run an entire windows OS and dedicated stack. What is wrong with a web browser session? ]
re 26: http://www.climateaudit.org/ may help you. Although it has to be said I believe in Cliamte Change, because it's a chaotic system and therefore by definition always changing, what I am considerably more sceptical about is whether it has a human cause and whether it is going to be a bad thing or not and whether it makes sense to fight it instead of work out ways to imrpove life while living with it.
re 29: Excellent quote
Re 30: James P Hogan's Giants series springs immediately to mind for some reason...
PS Now available in Baen ebooks to my great pleasure since I'd mislaid my 2nd hand paper vol 3 (I think 'twas vol 3).
This link to the creationist take on fossil horses may be interesting and relevant.
I find it odd that some of the people who defend creationism and other biblical literalism related BS are also keen to debunk distortions and biases in the media and nail the MSM for staging news, photoshopping photos, failing to analyse fake documents properly (Mind you there are plenty of people like me who criticise both the media AND the creationists).
T H Huxley had a great motto: “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion.†All good investigators follow this principle instictively, but people who have a blind faith in something don't.
Switching gear slightly. Religion gives people an artificial sense of certainty, rather like the (false and simplistic) linear evolution model in the horse article. The reality is that science advances in a "bushy" model and any science that doesn't accept that is destined to be as wrong as any religion. It is why I get annoyed by people who say they "believe" in Evolution or Climate Change. If you believe in it you have neatly joined the ranks of the religious because you won't question whether the foundation for your belief is based on reality or not.
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