Ostrich Runs Loose in Saudi Arabia has been added as a related post - related requested by mxxcon.

You don't need high speed internet either, technically (I do, but I am a robot). Technically, you don't need a lot of things, it is all pretty much arbitrary when you talk in those terms. When you make people have to sign up for certain rights via some sort of process, it is the beginning of a real erosion of rights. I'll even meet people half way to say if you want to be in public areas with a gun, some kind of permit is needed like cars...I don't like it, but Ill give you that. But as long as I am not using it to commit crimes, your right to restrict my behavior is over...period. It might be that freedom comes with a hefty prices of dead people, innocent people, innocent people that we could of protected with ever increasing restrictions of social liberties. I mean, look at Saudi Arabia, lower murder rates than even some European countries of pretty good order. But they live in a totalitarian dictatorship, and I am not trying to make a scarecrow argument about totalitarian dictatorships and whatnot, what I am trying to say is people dying isn't the only important metric when talking about rights to do things.


It might be true that more people will die with lacks gun laws, it might be true that more people die because of lacks drug lacks, lots of things might be true about how freedom serves to make economics weak, countries less secure, more prone to internal strife and faction, it might be true that the seeds of freedom and the ability to self regulate cause harms that extend beyond ones self. Even so, I still don't think a better framework exists for conducting ourselves that doesn't cripple and stifle people who have done no wrong. If the price for a drunk driver is abolition, the price of a murder disarmament, the price of wreck less driving horse drawn carriage, then we have failed to address the underlying problem and snub out freedoms ability to creatively deal with complex social challenges via the creative process of problem solving.

I think history has shown that any attempts to snub out action instead of guide it fail miserably. Gun control starts and ends with people, not laws, I suggest we start there. Starting neighborhood gun responsibility programs, safety education for youths, ect...whatever, I don't know, I can't pretend to know what is the best way to address the complex issue of gun control for every community, the point is that is their bag, it can be done without force given the context of the USA. Not every country has that luxury, children roaming the streets with AK-47s is not a real problem in this country, nor would it be if gun control laws were more lacks. We do have problems, I don't want there to be any mistake about that, but I don't think the solution is wholesale elimination of thing that only CAN be dangerous, I mean, anything can be dangerous, ask the folks in Oklahoma about ammonia nitrate...you don't even need a licence to buy that stuff.

Point is, the world is dangerous, and I think freedom allows for a certain amount of that danger to exist. It is the price we pay. We should look to the unwritten code that manages us, the code of culture and community.

"The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace."

Pericles' Funeral Oration from the Peloponnesian War

When anyone points to Iran as a horrible authoritative regime, I point them to one of our greatest allies, Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia... they have been and remain a real threat... yet they are our allies...

edit: keep your enemies closer, they say... indeed

What's interesting is I constantly see articles about how Iran is horrible to women, yet I don't hear very much about Saudi Arabia our Allie. Weird that.

>> ^Morganth:

I'm guessing Morocco. Can anyone verify this?
youtube comment says:

This happened in Jeddah , Saudi Arabia it's happened nine mothe ago . Also king Abdullah give the two brave guys one million for each of them.

Yes, and...

You really think this whole affair is about questioning someone in a sexual assault case in Sweden? Really? And it's a coincidence that the target just happens to be arguably the most dangerous man in the world to the corporate-government establishment? Nobody is that naive.>> ^Babymech:

Also, messenger: No the questioning is in regards to sexual assault. I don't care if what he's accused of would be called consensual sex in the US, or Saudi Arabia - if committed in Sweden it can be classified as sexual assault.

Hybrid, don't be ridiculous. It would be illegal for Sweden to extradite him to the US. It would be political suicide for any Swedish politician or authority to be anywhere near involvement in an extradition to a country that practices the death penalty. Barbarians.

Also, messenger: No the questioning is in regards to sexual assault. I don't care if what he's accused of would be called consensual sex in the US, or Saudi Arabia - if committed in Sweden it can be classified as sexual assault.

So, Russia is going to go the way of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other backwards nations by punishing a non-existing crime (blasphemy) eh? *shakes head is sadness*

Presumably this guy is manning a loaded machine gun.
Maybe explains a few of those 150,000 Iraqi women & children killed in revenge for the 20 guys from Saudi Arabia who knocked down the trade towers.. still at least the Bush family got their oil, and Cheney's Halliburton get to charge for his 3 meals a day!

I feel this rant that I didn't read needs to be quoted.
>> ^RFlagg:

@bobknight33 I never said to tax the rich out their ass or take all corporate revenue. I think another 3% isn't going to hurt to hurt the top 1% or even the top 2% of wage earners (most of whom are not job creators anyhow, but lawyers and surgeons and the like, not a single real small business owner among them), and punishing the people who can't make a living wage isn't the solution, but it is the only one the conservatives consider. As @KnivesOut pointed out, and as I noted in the part you didn't quote, there is a huge military spending that the Republicans refuse to cut spending on. I don't know if I would cut 70%, but at the very least 50%. Last figures I saw we were spending more than the next 19 countries combined, and most of them are allies or neutral, that leaves China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and perhaps Brazil... Cutting out budget in half still leaves us spending more than the next 6 combined, and again, most are allies. Even as a percentage of GDP, we are far above and beyond what most countries spend, we'd probably have to get down to that 70% mark to get even close to the average of the top 20. Conservatives love to complain about NASA wasting money, but NASA's entire budget for a year is less than what we spend on air conditioning our troops in Afghanistan alone.
My only comparison to other countries had nothing to do with their finances, but with the fact that the US was the only industrialized country in the world that wasn't communist or Islamic to not let gays server openly.
How is Obama a liberal? What has he done that is remotely liberal? Did he give us the health care plan he promised, which was a single payer health insurance? No. We ended up with what the Republicans would allow, which was Mittcare on a national level. A program that favors Big Pharma and the Insurance Companies and while it does help some people, it does no where near as good for the vast majority of Americans that the single payer would have been. Sure the insurance companies would have gone from making hundreds of billions of dollars off people's suffering to just tens of billions or hundreds of millions at worst, and big pharma the same, but aside from that, for everyday people, they would be better off.
How did we turn our back on Israel? And even if we did, who cares? We should just leave the middle east alone. It isn't our business. That is why they hate us you know, not our so called freedoms that we gave up after the attacks, or any other such BS, it is because we interfear with their business.
As to Obamacare... I already stated, it isn't Obamacare. Obamacare would have been a nationalized health insurance, what we got is Mittcare on a national level which is a mandate to buy insurance from a for-profit insurance company. The only positives is that they can no longer deny people based on pre-existing conditions, extended coverage for children... this compares to what Obamacare would have done had it passed, which would create an insurance that is cheaper and just as good as and in many if not most cases better than the private insurance that most Americans had. It would have been cheaper, meaning far less money taken out of their paychecks and more money to spend. Millions of uninsured and under-insured workers would have finally have access to affordable health care, not just have to show up at the ER when things reach a level that could have been prevented had they been able to see a regular doctor and been able to cover any lab fees...they then end up not being able to pay said ER visits, which raises the cost of health care for everyone else, and many others file bankruptcy to get out of medical bills, which in the US is the number one reason for bankruptcy for individuals, which again adds to overall medical costs for everyone. Conservatives like to blame lawsuits, which do raise the cost of surgery, and is an issue, but the real cause of high medical costs, beyond greed, is the fact that so many people end up not being able to pay for what services they got the medical community then passes those costs on.
One of the primary reasons I am not a Christian anymore is because so many Christians spoke out against taking care of the sick and the needy. Even though Jesus' main commandment was love. Most Christians are full of hate for those who they don't like. They hate the gays and want to revoke the free-will god gave them, and not let them get married. They don't want to help the sick and the poor and want to give the money those sick and poor people earned and turn it over to the money lenders. They basically want to be the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. It is like Gandhi said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Obama hasn't been allowed to put his economic policies in effect becaouse the Republicans have refused. What we have is a continuation of Bush's economic policies because the Republicans promised they would never negotiate and do everything they can to make his Presidency a failure. We have been running a Republican budget for years now... and we've been foolishly thinking it will trickle down for over 30 years now. The rich keep getting richer and richer at a faster and faster pace, while the poor get poorer and the middle class dissolves to the poor. Yet the Republicans still keep saying it will work. Yeah, it works for 2%, while everyone else suffers for it.
Know why jobs aren't being created? Because the rich don't care. They don't want to make jobs, they want private jets and mansions and will fuck over everyone to do it. The place I used to work at, in 2010 fired 350 people and then told everyone else they weren't getting raises because they said the cost of living went down. He then went out and purchased a private jet and another mansion in an exclusive gated community in town, already have the second largest there wasn't enough apparently... he could have closed his Miami Beach office, which is literally on the beach, he walks out the door he is on the beach, and there is only one employee there, but no, he destroyed the lives of 350 families and basically everyone else who worked for him to get his stuff. The next year, 250 more fired, and still no raises. This year, 350 more and still no raises, and just recently another 100 or so more fired. So over 1000 families put out, and those still working for him haven't had raises for 3 years just so he can have his stuff. He could have kept those people on and not have got that stuff, he could have closed the Miami Beach office and let one person go, he could have made other cuts (like not buying a $5 Million software that as I understand it after 4 years of work still doesn't work as promised, it wasn't working when I left and it was already 2 years of that money spent and was no where near working) but no, he chose to sacrifice the lives of people under his care. The so called job creators haven't been in the business of creating jobs simply because they choose to outsource, they choose to take for themselves rather than care for those under them. It isn't Obama's fault... hell it isn't even Bush's or Reagan's fault. It is the rich's fault. They could create jobs, but they choose not to. They choose to widen the gap between the haves and the have not's at a rate nobody has ever seen anywhere. The CEO of Wal-Mart could be given a total package of $250,000, then with that as the top line, drawing from the minimum wage workers (so the line would look like "/") and spending the same amount of money on all salary, HR expenses, compensation and all that jazz hire hundreds of thousands more, or give everyone more to live on, or actually provide health insurance... but no, they and nearly every company in America is setup to have a salary structure that looks like "˩". I firmly believe the owner should make a fair salary above and beyond everyone else, but it shouldn't be so far out of proportion to everyone else in the company that they sacrifice people under their care just so they can get ahead. The fact Republicans think that is okay is what is sickening. The fact Christians think that is okay is sickening.

@bobknight33 I never said to tax the rich out their ass or take all corporate revenue. I think another 3% isn't going to hurt to hurt the top 1% or even the top 2% of wage earners (most of whom are not job creators anyhow, but lawyers and surgeons and the like, not a single real small business owner among them), and punishing the people who can't make a living wage isn't the solution, but it is the only one the conservatives consider. As @KnivesOut pointed out, and as I noted in the part you didn't quote, there is a huge military spending that the Republicans refuse to cut spending on. I don't know if I would cut 70%, but at the very least 50%. Last figures I saw we were spending more than the next 19 countries combined, and most of them are allies or neutral, that leaves China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and perhaps Brazil... Cutting out budget in half still leaves us spending more than the next 6 combined, and again, most are allies. Even as a percentage of GDP, we are far above and beyond what most countries spend, we'd probably have to get down to that 70% mark to get even close to the average of the top 20. Conservatives love to complain about NASA wasting money, but NASA's entire budget for a year is less than what we spend on air conditioning our troops in Afghanistan alone.

My only comparison to other countries had nothing to do with their finances, but with the fact that the US was the only industrialized country in the world that wasn't communist or Islamic to not let gays server openly.

How is Obama a liberal? What has he done that is remotely liberal? Did he give us the health care plan he promised, which was a single payer health insurance? No. We ended up with what the Republicans would allow, which was Mittcare on a national level. A program that favors Big Pharma and the Insurance Companies and while it does help some people, it does no where near as good for the vast majority of Americans that the single payer would have been. Sure the insurance companies would have gone from making hundreds of billions of dollars off people's suffering to just tens of billions or hundreds of millions at worst, and big pharma the same, but aside from that, for everyday people, they would be better off.

How did we turn our back on Israel? And even if we did, who cares? We should just leave the middle east alone. It isn't our business. That is why they hate us you know, not our so called freedoms that we gave up after the attacks, or any other such BS, it is because we interfear with their business.

As to Obamacare... I already stated, it isn't Obamacare. Obamacare would have been a nationalized health insurance, what we got is Mittcare on a national level which is a mandate to buy insurance from a for-profit insurance company. The only positives is that they can no longer deny people based on pre-existing conditions, extended coverage for children... this compares to what Obamacare would have done had it passed, which would create an insurance that is cheaper and just as good as and in many if not most cases better than the private insurance that most Americans had. It would have been cheaper, meaning far less money taken out of their paychecks and more money to spend. Millions of uninsured and under-insured workers would have finally have access to affordable health care, not just have to show up at the ER when things reach a level that could have been prevented had they been able to see a regular doctor and been able to cover any lab fees...they then end up not being able to pay said ER visits, which raises the cost of health care for everyone else, and many others file bankruptcy to get out of medical bills, which in the US is the number one reason for bankruptcy for individuals, which again adds to overall medical costs for everyone. Conservatives like to blame lawsuits, which do raise the cost of surgery, and is an issue, but the real cause of high medical costs, beyond greed, is the fact that so many people end up not being able to pay for what services they got the medical community then passes those costs on.

One of the primary reasons I am not a Christian anymore is because so many Christians spoke out against taking care of the sick and the needy. Even though Jesus' main commandment was love. Most Christians are full of hate for those who they don't like. They hate the gays and want to revoke the free-will god gave them, and not let them get married. They don't want to help the sick and the poor and want to give the money those sick and poor people earned and turn it over to the money lenders. They basically want to be the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. It is like Gandhi said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Obama hasn't been allowed to put his economic policies in effect becaouse the Republicans have refused. What we have is a continuation of Bush's economic policies because the Republicans promised they would never negotiate and do everything they can to make his Presidency a failure. We have been running a Republican budget for years now... and we've been foolishly thinking it will trickle down for over 30 years now. The rich keep getting richer and richer at a faster and faster pace, while the poor get poorer and the middle class dissolves to the poor. Yet the Republicans still keep saying it will work. Yeah, it works for 2%, while everyone else suffers for it.

Know why jobs aren't being created? Because the rich don't care. They don't want to make jobs, they want private jets and mansions and will fuck over everyone to do it. The place I used to work at, in 2010 fired 350 people and then told everyone else they weren't getting raises because they said the cost of living went down. He then went out and purchased a private jet and another mansion in an exclusive gated community in town, already have the second largest there wasn't enough apparently... he could have closed his Miami Beach office, which is literally on the beach, he walks out the door he is on the beach, and there is only one employee there, but no, he destroyed the lives of 350 families and basically everyone else who worked for him to get his stuff. The next year, 250 more fired, and still no raises. This year, 350 more and still no raises, and just recently another 100 or so more fired. So over 1000 families put out, and those still working for him haven't had raises for 3 years just so he can have his stuff. He could have kept those people on and not have got that stuff, he could have closed the Miami Beach office and let one person go, he could have made other cuts (like not buying a $5 Million software that as I understand it after 4 years of work still doesn't work as promised, it wasn't working when I left and it was already 2 years of that money spent and was no where near working) but no, he chose to sacrifice the lives of people under his care. The so called job creators haven't been in the business of creating jobs simply because they choose to outsource, they choose to take for themselves rather than care for those under them. It isn't Obama's fault... hell it isn't even Bush's or Reagan's fault. It is the rich's fault. They could create jobs, but they choose not to. They choose to widen the gap between the haves and the have not's at a rate nobody has ever seen anywhere. The CEO of Wal-Mart could be given a total package of $250,000, then with that as the top line, drawing from the minimum wage workers (so the line would look like "/") and spending the same amount of money on all salary, HR expenses, compensation and all that jazz hire hundreds of thousands more, or give everyone more to live on, or actually provide health insurance... but no, they and nearly every company in America is setup to have a salary structure that looks like "˩". I firmly believe the owner should make a fair salary above and beyond everyone else, but it shouldn't be so far out of proportion to everyone else in the company that they sacrifice people under their care just so they can get ahead. The fact Republicans think that is okay is what is sickening. The fact Christians think that is okay is sickening.

Shit oh howdy.

Where the bloody hell did I use the word "homophobe" in the video description?

And he didn't try to kiss him on the mouth, he went for his cheek, which is the culture in France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries. Will said he went for his mouth, but he didn't. At least, I didn't see it. He kissed him on the cheek.

What is interesting to me is that the first description I wrote did use the word "homophobe" but then I removed it. Because it was too strong. Will Smith does promote gay marriage. He clearly isn't a homophobe.

And -- man, did he react strongly to being kissed by a man. Instinctively. As an American man, not as a French man, or a Saudi. I don't believe a French man or a Saudi would have slapped a man who kissed him. I don't think that Will Smith would slap a woman who kissed him on the cheek. But he is an American man and there are strong boundary issues between American men.

You can be angry at me for pointing that out. It doesn't make it any less true.

What I find remarkable -- as I noted in the video description -- is how difficult it must be to be a celebrity and people want to touch you. Hug you. And yes, kiss you. That takes courage to allow all these strangers into your personal space like that. Will Smith is a courageous man who respects his fans and allows them into his personal space.

And he reacted instinctively as an American man when kissed by a man.

Man, it is sooooo tiring to be accused of things I don't do. Tiring.

>> ^longde:

Reading the trolling video description, I really wish I would have downvoted.
Not wanting to be kissed on the mouth by a perfect stranger makes one a homophobe? Not being gay = homophobia? Just like with your "saying 'girl' makes you a sexist" shtick, you are drawing the lines too tightly.

"Saudi Arabia, ... the absolute moral anus of the universe." HAHAHAHA

ChasoEngine said:those that have disagree with you. Appeal to authority? Yes, but I wouldn't ask a climate scientist to write software.

I'd ask you to be very specific about what I've said which relevant experts disagree with me on. Go back and look at the very first article I linked to. It is the relevant experts on statistics disagreeing with and correcting the climate scientists that went off and tried to work too far outside their area of expertise and wound making a mistake that seriously altered their results. The short version is the method they applied was well known to be biased for zero if the constraints were not met, which in the situation used was exactly the case. It is EXACTLY why Mann's original hockey stick graph showed very flat temperature anomalies in his reconstruction from 1000-1800AD. You can verify this by using google scholar to look at Mann's own new work following some of the advice of the article I linked and applying a more appropriate method. It's flagged as the EIV line on the graphs, and it shows several times in the last 1k years where the temperature anomaly from the reference date exceeds what we've experienced recently.

Chaos Engine said:Emphasis mine. Do you have a source for that figure? I don't know if you read the link I posted but it would seem to contradict that figure. Besides, even if CO2 is a small contribution, sometimes a small sway can dramatically affect a system.

I'm glad to hear that you believe in reducing our dependence on coal and oil. Frankly, I think it will run out before we stop using it (and it will run out in my lifetime).

I can't find the article I went off originally but here's a different one. It does vary from the range I gave a little but I think it still is consistent with the spirit of everything I've said. It pegs H2O at 71% and CO2 at 29%, the consistent thing I've seen in the multiple journal based estimates I've seen though is that H2O at a minimum carries double the influence of CO2.

We aren't going to run out of coal anytime soon. Even oil we won't run out of soon. What we may run out of soon is cheap oil, but once a certain price point is hit up here in Canada we've got more oil than Saudi Arabia stored up in the tar sands. It's messy, dirty, expensive and a much greater concern to the environment IMHO than CO2 emissions, but it's a big supply. I am hopeful though, as I said before, that in 20 years nobody is going to want gas powered cars anymore because electric will be cheaper, more reliable, more powerful and basically better in every meaningful way.