On Religion:

The number of Creators of The Universe is somewhere between zero and one. At some point we're all going to have to learn to share..........

Someone somwhere.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the notion that someone somwhere is getting something they don't deserve drives 90% of our discourse.

Re: Iraq

For me, the number 1 lesson of Iraq remains, "A large number of people believing something to be true does not constitute evidence in its favor"
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Any time anyone defends a propostion based on it's popularity, we can point to Saddam's WMD's for instant refutation.

On a discussion about the "Ground Zero Mosque"

It's threads like these that remind me that for many people, religion isn't about worshiping the Creator of the Universe but rather just identifying who you're supposed to hate. I have news. The number of Creators of the Universe is somewhere between zero and one. At some point, we're going to have to learn to share.

Original link has gone bad.

I've always kept a link to John Ashcroft's diatribe against the clipper chip, because it serves as a healthy reminder that the desire to spy on people is a fully bipartisan impulse. That link no longer works but here's a copy:

http://www.badattitudes.com/AshWeb.html

Re: any time Israel/Palastine comes up.......

I just enjoy how the same entity can be a fierce aggressor with no moral compunction whatsoever and a whimpering powerless victim cowering before it's enemies simultaneously. (Notice that I don't even need to specify which entity I could be referring to)
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Just another demonstration of the irrelevance of reality when it comes to tribal/political debates.

Re: BP CEO "I Want My Life Back"

Just as I ask those who insist that "the government is inherently inefficient" to look at the lines of accountability to determine why they might think that and to identify where the real problems lie, we can perform the same exercise on BP. There were problems with the well that caused significant concerns among personnel there. But the lines of accountability, the determination of what sort of behavior is rewarded and what sort of behavior is punished, determined that the best course of action was to shove the problems under the rug.
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The nature of Corporate organization almost guarantees the response. Would the CEO have approved had he been informed? Probably not. That's why he wasn't informed

Regarding Arizona

Everyone arguing about the law, pretends that it only affects resident aliens. This is simply false. The law as written (yes, I've read it) creates unequal treatment under the law for Hispanic citizens. This is directly counter to the forteenth amendment which guarantees equal protection under the law for all citizens regardless of race. Simply stating that the cops can't use race to base their targeting decisions when they in fact have no other basis BUT race to do so, is to deny simple reality.

Thought For The Day

The only people who participate in deciding whether a certain Military action was "worth it" are the people who survived the result. Sort of a skewed dataset if you ask me!