A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser says:
============
Just look at places like
Denmark, where the marginal tax rates are above 50%, and half the
nation is
on the dole, paid by the other half.
==========

why then do the danes keep electing governments that support what you
purport to be the case?

Because, as someone famous once said, (I paraphrase) Democracy will survive
only until the citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse out
of the public treasury. Once that happens, the person promising the greatest
amount of largesse will always be elected. When you give the 50+% of leeches
who are on the dole the right to vote, of course they are going to vote for
whomever will continue the dole.

Now, if you *remove* the right to vote from those on welfare, I'd be a bit
more willing to grant them largesse from the public treasury...but not much.

have you ever been there? great education
system. great healthcare system. great elder care. clean streets.
relatively few ghettos. all in all a pretty awesome place to live.

Unless you happen to be a working stiff who has to fork over half your
income to pay for free drugs and healthcare for addlepated zombies and
useless leeches.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser says:
======
Giving money to the poor is like giving a fish to a hungry man. He'll
eat
the fish and be hungry again in six hours
.====

give a corporation a subsidy, and it will only operate and provide job
creation so long as the subsidy is in place. as soon as the subsidy
stops, the firm packs up and moves to mexico.

That's why the subsidies are necessary. If a business can't compete against
Mexican crops raised by people who get paid 50 cents an hour, then it's
unsurprising they would seek to cut costs when their labor costs ten times
that.

And once the firm moves, and the land is developed, it's gone forever.

Thanks for making my case so clearly.
--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

Michael Daly wrote:

On 12-Feb-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:


get the offenders to fix the problem
themselves


But they're only offenders in your eyes. Extraterritorial enforcement
of laws is against international law.

If Canada decriminalizes pot possession, it has no direct effect on the
US. However, they keep getting cranky and threatening every time the
topic comes up. Most countries treat drug addiction as a medical problem;
the US holds to obsolete ideas about it being a criminal problem. Fix
it in your own country and stop trying to export your backward problems.

They can't fix it, Michael. It's an integral part of their system to
criminalize use of soft drugs, to hand out ridiculous sentences to those
who use soft drugs, so that those people can be used in the
commercialised prison industry as a kind of legalised slave labour.

Of course, this very ineffective symptom solving keeps the drug trade
alive, while the U.S. DEA keeps pointing fingers everywhere, without
anyone in their right mind thinking about what does lessen the problem.

That would be done by taking the drug users out of the criminal system,
educating people about drugs, trying to setup a system to provide clean
needles, medical care and medically prescribed drugs to those who fail
to detox time and again. By making it possible for the drug addicts to
have a somewhat normal life in which they can live and be in touch with
their family and freinds and have a job instead of having to live with
the ever present fear of where they will have to find money (usually by
commiting some crime) to pay for their next shot.

The enormous amounts of money wasted by the DEA and other agencies to
try to stem the flow of drugs have not worked at all in the past
decades, and I doubt that the so called "War on drugs" has been
beneficial for anyone but the increasing budget of the DEA and the
increased income of the drug cartels due to the very high price of drugs
on the street.

--
Wilko van den Bergh wilko(a t)dse(d o t)nl
Eindhoven The Netherlands Europe
---Look at the possibilities, don't worry about the limitations.---
http://wilko.webzone.ru/

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser says:
=========
"If you have two operating feet, get up and walk
out of the ghetto.
=========

did i say something about a ghetto here?

No, I did.


and, frankly, i don't give a **** about what the people in kansas want
to teach their kids. but from where i sit, their actions and similar
"ban the books" from literature classes actions in the US bible belt
look awfully similar to what the taliban was up to.

Except that I think you'll find that in almost every case, certainly in
those which have come to public attention, those calling for book banning
have been soundly thrashed by the press and the ACLU has come to the defense
of the First Amendment and those book bans have been quickly
reversed...often times with the offending public official being ejected in
disgrace.

Nobody's going around chopping the heads off of people reading Catcher in
the Rye in Kansas.

great! have your
regious freedom (if that's what you think it is)! i think it's a
purposeful dumbing down of your children.

Well, there is some purposeful exclusion of so-called "educational
materials" going on, but it mostly has to do with sex, deviant sex and
drugs, and I'm not sure that protecting children (whom I define as young
persons under about age 16) from the potentially harmful effects of
out-of-context sex and drug information that may actually cause them to
experiment before they understand the consequences of doing so.

This is certainly within the purview of the parents, through their
elementary school boards and curriculum control. Once a student goes to
college, they can, and should, study these things carefully. But giving 10
year olds instructions on how to use condoms and engage in oral sex is not
something that most middle-America parents want their schools engaged in.
Those are strictly matters for families to deal with.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser:
=========
Don't discount the effectiveness of insurgents.
============

shouldn't that read "freedom fighters"?

One man's freedom fighter is another's insurgent.

History is written by the winner.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

weiser on:
========
theories of intelligent design
==========

look, you seem to know something about this. at some level of inquiry,
it may make for an interesting debate.

but you likely heard the kansas school board officials as i did. most
(all?) of them wouldn't recognize theories of intelligent design if
they jumped up and bit them in the ass! as you well know, the agenda
was not about broadening the intellectual base. this was about
religious dogma.

Perhaps the issue has never been posited to them.


if the people of that community think religion is important, i say go
ahead and have religion classes where you can promote this doctrine. it
very clearly does not belong in the science class.

When religion and science touch on the same issue, why is it inappropriate
to address it in either or both? Presenting information about various
theories is never harmful, so long as it's done in an objective manner.


when it is accepted as part of the science canon (determined by the
science community), then by all means. I don't think your local school
board officials who have a background in, say, used car sales, farming,
insurance, or whatever, are in any position to determine what is or is
not "scientific".

You put "science" up on too high a pedestal and you discount religion too
much. Again, presenting opposing theories does not constitute
indoctrination, it is an academic necessity if students are to learn
critical thinking. Indoctrinating them into the cult of secular scientism is
a bad as indoctrinating them into the cult of Scientology...or Catholicism.

All sides of the debate must be presented openly, accurately and
objectively, and students must be taught to sift through the available
evidence to reach a reasoned conclusion. Excluding religion from discussions
of evolution is merely anti-religious bias and censorship.

next we'll be asking them to write revisionist
history for the history classes. recommend projects for shop class,
perhaps? decide which language ought to be taught in computer classes?

Amphigory.
--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself Michael Daly wrote:

On 12-Feb-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

Since when does providing students with more information rather than less
make things worse?

Unless you're providing more time to teach, they are getting less. You can't
teach two things in the space of one.

Sometimes, less is more. Teaching critical thinking by presenting all sides
of an argument is much more valuable than indoctrination into *either* side
of the issue.

Creationism also blinds them from the
truth.

Again, you make the erroneous presumption that the theory of evolution is
"the truth."

If it is, care to explain why sharks are still sharks 400 million years
later? It only took 2 million years or so for man to evolve from monkey,
according to evolutionary theory, so why haven't sharks changed appreciably
in 400 million years. If evolution is "the truth," then the world should be
being run by incredibly intelligent sharks, who ought to have evolved far
beyond what they are today. They haven't.

Interesting conundrum, isn't it?
--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself Michael Daly wrote:

On 12-Feb-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

The key word is "allow."

You silly, naive little man. Your precious constitutional right
to bear arms is an _amendment_.

You silly, naïve little nitwit, you don't even understand our Constitution,
so how would you know?

American history shows that
constitutional amendments can come and go - e.g. the prohibition.

You might want to note that this was the ONLY amendment ever overturned.

So in reality, your "right" to bear arms is at the discretion
of the "majority" of the citizens and the politicians you elect
(and elect typically by minority, since so many Americans don't
bother to vote).

No, it's not. You don't understand the nature of rights or the function of
the Constitution. Rights are not granted by the Constitution, government
powers are limited by it.


If that constitutional amendment is revoked, you and your pop
gun buddies will be hiding in the woods.

True, but it's extremely unlikely to be repealed, and if it is, repealing it
does not impeach the RIGHT to keep and bear arms, which pre-exists, and
exists independently of the Constitution.

Should the 2nd Amendment ever be repealed, that would likely be the trigger
for revolution to restore the rights of the citizenry and put down a tyrant.
That's why the 2nd Amendment exists. The Framers recognized the fundamental
right to keep and bear arms and enacted constitutional restrictions on
government infringement of that right specifically to ensure that the
citizenry always would have the physical capacity to put down a domestic
enemy or tyrant.

And, "hiding in the woods" is a fine tactic for removing tyrants and their
sycophants, particularly with silenced, long-range firearms. Just ask any
USMC sniper.


Don't discount the effectiveness of insurgents. Just look at what perhaps
20,000 hard-core insurgents are doing in Iraq.

More like 100-200,000.

Still a small fraction of 18 million.


BTW, do you know where your local National Guard armory is?

There is no National Guard in this country. It's a US thing.

Well, there you go. You're a slave who doesn't even know where to find the
arms needed to put down a tyrant. Ipse dixit, quod erat demonstrandum.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself Michael Daly wrote:

On 12-Feb-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

Thus, we rarely have to exercise
military force, because the threat is usually sufficient.

Name one other country that has been involved in more wars and
invasions than the US since WWII.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.


--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser

A Usenet persona calling itself Michael Daly wrote:

On 12-Feb-2005, Scott Weiser wrote:

science-fiction book

You get your information from science fiction? No wonder you
don't understand anything in the real world.

Ever wonder why they call it "science" fiction? There's often a lot of
science woven into the fiction.



BTW - creationism isn't an alternative theory; it's bull****.
"Intelligent design" is just a refusal to accept reality.

Many scholars and other people on the upside of the bell curve from you
disagree.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser