sporadically produced odds, ends, and essaylets on any number of topics from programming to politics, paramecia to puff pastries.
Government is not a service we buy, it's a process we participate in. Many of us in my generation have forgotten this, and in outsourcing our government we've allowed a lot of the process to go wrong. As long as we treat it as a service, we've no standing for complaining when it's provided to us as a service, just as the Coca Cola corporation provides us soft drinks that may not be terribly healthy for us but taste good at the time.
For his part, Bush has hinted that he may treat the Supreme Court’s [recent Guantanamo] ruling as more of an advisory opinion than a binding decision.
Responding to a reporter’s question shortly after the court’s decision, Bush rhetorically put quote marks around the word “ruling.”
“Yeah, I – thank you for the question,” Bush said, “on a quote, ‘ruling’ that literally came out in the midst of my meeting with the prime minister [of Japan], and so I haven’t had a chance to fully review the findings of the Supreme Court.”
Between the quote marks around “ruling” and the later reference to the court’s “findings,” Bush conveyed a sense that he didn’t necessarily consider the decision to be binding on his actions.
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
I still can't understand why Middle America thinks the threat of terrorism warrants the loss of our inalienable rights. We live with all these risks...you live in a fantasy land. We are not afraid. We would give up no rights to protect ourselves. You call us coddlers of terrorists and tell us the NSA must spy without warrants. Fuck you.[thanks Medley, for the tip]
The justice minister demanded Tuesday that the U.N. Security Council ensure that a group of U.S. troops are punished in the alleged rape and murder of a young Iraqi and the killing of her family, calling the attack "monstrous and inhuman."
Well, I really only have one thing to say -- duh.
Fat people are not more jolly, according to a study that found obesity is strongly linked with depression and other mood disorders.
Whether obesity might cause these problems or is the result of them is not certain, and the research does not provide an answer, but there are theories to support both arguments.
Depression often causes people to abandon activities, and some medications used to treat mental illness can cause weight gain. On the other hand, obesity is often seen as a stigma and overweight people often are subject to teasing and other hurtful behaviour.
Salt marsh is more rare than rainforest, and is important to people, particularly as a flood and storm defence, and to wildlife.
The YouGov survey found that only 12 per cent of Britons trusted Americans to deal wisely with current world problems - half the number who had faith in the 1975 White House.
Geneva - The United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday unanimously approved an international treaty that would ban states from abducting perceived enemies and hiding them in secret prisons or killing them.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance would require states to keep registers of detainees and tell their families the truth about their disappearance, as well as paying compensation.
It still has to be adopted in the UN General Assembly, and then individual governments would need to approve it.
Rights experts say the United States, in the spotlight over allegations that it has been transferring terrorism suspects to secret jails in other countries, is not expected to ratify the pact.
Bush is insulated -- his staff smiles a lot and only gives him the news that he wants to hear. Unfortunately, they still have this delusion that they create their own reality. As George Orwell wrote, we human beings are capable of convincing ourselves of something that's not true long after the accumulated evidence would convince any reasonable person that it's wrong. And when leaders persist in that error, sooner or later they have a collision with reality, often on a battlefield. That, in essence, is exactly what happened in Iraq. But we have to keep that from happening with the climate crisis. Because by the time the worst consequences begin to unfold, it would be too late.
In every religion, it seems, you'll find a group loudly proclaiming its allegiance and submission to the dictates of scripture -- the Bible, the Koran, the Pentateuch, Dianetics, it doesn't matter which. Their every action, every aspect of their lives, they say, is shaped and determined by the commands of their holy book.
Such sternly obedient believers face an epistemological dilemma. How can they know, with certainty, precisely what it is that their scripture demands? Most of us believer types, in every religion, tend to interpret our holy books through the lenses of reason, tradition and experience. But for these biblicists, reason, tradition and experience must all also "submit" to the dictates of the scripture. The meaning of scripture, therefore, has to be treated as self-evident and unambiguous -- two things which scripture tends self-evidently and unambiguously not to be.
Suggest any form of scholarship, textual, literary or linguistic criticism and the biblicists tend to get angrily defensive. These are all useful and important tools for determining what it is that scripture says and means and requires of its adherents. But the biblicists aren't interested in refining or clarifying their supposedly self-evident interpretations. They reject all such study as a potential threat to their own preferred interpretation.
And that, right there, tells you all you need to know about their supposed allegiance and obedience to their scripture. The scripture is not their true starting point after all. Their starting point is their own preferred interpretation, their own preference. They, and not their supposed Word of God, are the ultimate arbiters of truth, reality and meaning.
That's why whenever you hear someone say that the Bible is "inerrant" and "infallible," what they're really saying is that "My reading of the Bible is inerrant and infallible." What they're really claiming is, "I am inerrant and infallible."
What they're really claiming is, "I am God."