But believers demonstrably don't use the word of their god (or its earthy incarnation) as a moral compass. They all use their own morality and that of the culture they live in to judge which bits of their holy texts to ignore because they are immoral. The revulsion most humans have for genocide and slavery certainly does not come from the desert god Yahweh, who advocates both of those things in the New Testament and the Old. I would say that the opposite of what Harvey says is true: that using the Bible as a moral compass without tempering it with human morality is risky, and people who do so should be avoided.

Man, Nabokov's prose could punch the balls off of anything Dickens ever wrote. You're seriously gonna hold up the language of Dickens as a shining example? The guy who wrote such memorable purplitudes as:
"And in this particular period, the skiey influences seem to tincture the animal life with their own mysterious and wayward spirit of change. The birds desert their summer haunts; an unaccountable inquietude pervades the brute creation; even men in this unsettled season have considered themselves, more (than at others) stirred by the motion and whisperings of their genius. And every creature that flows upon the tide of the Universal Life of Things, feels upon the ruffled surface, the mighty and solemn change, which is at work within its depths."

Ahhh ... one of my desert island tunes! Also heard in two of my all time favorite movies, The Boat That Rocked and The Commitments. A delight to up-vote this.

Your video, Extreme Rainfall Fills Utah Desert with Waterfalls, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

For you

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/09/07/back-from-the-desert/

I'd love to go to Burning Man someday...but I'm reasonably certain it would be the last thing I ever do. Desert heat in the summer would end me.

I love this kind of art
*related= http://videosift.com/video/Desert-Breath-Land-Art-Installation-By-D-A-ST-Arteam

Please do give us a closer look at ISIS is doing. Massacres, torture, rape, collective punishment and on, correct? Maybe killing what, 100 people at a time in the worst instances? That doesn't distinguish them from Saddam. Within Saddam's rule those crimes are what guys like yourself colloquially referred to as Saddam's 'firm' hand. They are his, so to speak, lesser and more routine crimes. I'd left them beneath mention thus far.

If you must insist on parroting your ignorance of Saddams al-Anfal campaign I'll resort to posting excerpts as evidence that the gassing was but a small part of it.

4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed by Saddam, that's entire villages turned to rubble.
182,000 dead civilians by counts gleaned from Saddam's own records of how many Kurds his forces had succeeded in eliminating.
The concentration camps Saddam ran were pretty clearly modeled after Hitler's:
With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together.

The conditions within the camp were terrible and torture, abuse and beatings were routine. The men of fighting age though were sorted for the express purpose to later drive them out into the desert by bus or truck for mass execution. This is how Saddam carried his genocide of the inhabitants of the 4,500 villages he'd destroyed.

Anyone interested in more or questioning the veracity of the above account can find more and endless references and evidence here:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/index.htm#TopOfPage

As for American policy, I don't quite see where I suddenly bear personal responsibility to clean up the world if I choose to form my opinions on world events independently of it's 'fit' to American policy.

I don't care much if it was Bush or Putin that took Saddam out of power aside from hedging on which would leave a better Iraq, either would be tough not to be an improvement from Saddam. Similarly for Sudan or the Congo, I'd be rather glad if world powers finally cared enough to try and spare the people there suffering under brutal military repression and endless war crimes. I'm not quite sure why you wouldn't share such a view?

I feel like I can take a middleground on the whole tailgating issue, as a commuting biker I tend to experience both ends of the equation quite regularly and IMHO the problem lies in the extremes in attitude.

On the one hand if you drive/ride a lot and have good confidence in the vehicle and roadcraft in general (frequently the case with professional van and truck divers) it can be extremely frustrating when people don't practice good lane and speed discipline. I don't mean people maintaining a decent pace (it's your problem if you want to go faster than posted limits and they don't) I mean people either:
A. Driving below the posted limit (within reason)
B. Accelerating to speed absurdly slowly or slowing to 2mph to take a corner you could hit at 10-20 comfortably
C. Hogging the outside/passing lane because THEY are going as fast as THEY want to go so why should they speed up or slow down to get out of everybodys way? (C**TS!)

Under the above circumstances I understand why people end up tailgating, in fact I think it happens without much of a conscious effort most of the time. They are going so far below the pace the seems reasonable that you close the gap without realising. Getting to this stage is understandable/inevitable, it's what you do next that defines you as a responsible road user:

A responsible driver/rider at this point backs off, the point has already been made to the driver in front. They know they are going slower than you want to go or that you want to pass in the passing lane they are hogging. Sitting on their bumper is not only dangerous to both of you but it's obnoxious and likely to be counter productive. When you see someone driving too close your natural response is to slow down for safety or simply as a fuck you to the other guy. Even if you were about to get out of their way you might change your mind and think "screw you buddy I got the hint but now your just being rude".

When I back away I find people let me through far more often, wheras in the past when i've just tail gated them like a dick it's got me nothing but two angry motorists (and a hugely elevated chance of an incident). The lorry driver could have left a bigger gap but it didn't look that unreasonable (plus lorries have a hard time gaining speed and are naturally inclined (and taught) to preserve it where possible).

It might not be that unfair to suggest he was antagonising the car infront, but it pales into insignificance compared to...

.....the other side of the equation (which blue peugeot falls squarely into) who are generally IMHO far worse/more dangerous. The one's that adopt an imperious and selfish attitude to speed and road position. "I'm going as fast as I want to go and there's car on the inside that I'll pass in about 30seconds so I'm just going to sit in the outside lane going 2mph faster than slow lane traffic, because why should I have to go to the trouble of changing lanes to let someone else go faster than I want to go!"

Touching the brakes to give a tailgater a shock done properly is fine (I might even go so far as to recommend it) but holy shit! I think it'd be dangerous to scrub more than 1 or 2mph never mind an illegal stop on a dual carageway. Even if there was a mechanical reason for stopping it's still illegal to stop there without pulling off to the side.

Either way 45k in damages feels like pretty just deserts. I dearly hope he got at least a 12 month ban to boot. There's slipping up and then there's premeditated dangerous driving!

I usually try to see things from everybody's perspective when it comes to stuff like this but the Peugot driver is so disproportionately stupid and reckless than I can't really even try to defend him/her. I get why they might have been annoyed but that all became irrelevant the moment they tried to cause an accident!

Eh, she got her just deserts.

You're missing the forest for your own trees concerning these government agencies and how they are used by special interests, people-Lands declared federally-owned then 'managed' in this country have been historically for public use. According to the Sierra Club: "Public lands are used in the production of oil, gas, coal, hardrock minerals, timber, and livestock in addition to being used for roads, power and gas lines, and communication facilities just to mention a few. Likewise, the Public lands are an environmental treasure house for recreation and wildlife and scenic wonder from desert to seacoast, mountain top to prairie, grassland to forest -- a shared heritage for now and the future."

Most generational ranchers don't fuck-up the land, they don't abuse it , it's their goddamn livelihood. They know it's vibe way better than the feds and their little friends....

Bundy was paying to, and had a preexisting deal with Clark County and his damn family had been cattlemen on these lands for a few generations, living in harmony with the goddamn turtles, and not trashing the place like newtbox (god you think you know what the fuckit is you know nothing about except what the TV tells you) here and others use in defense of the encroaching and over-reaching bureaucracy whose ONLY goal is to save their own interests in the rights of this land for their nefarious personal good-ol' boy club purposes.

Urbanization and ominous government with peeps with votes never getting involved in righteous decisions during the process of being ASS-RAPED from behind tomes legislation with special interest laws piggy-backed within legislation has ALWAYS been the method of politicians, licking the asses of the money-men.

If people would get an ACTUAL clue abut how the government works to benefit these cunts, they'd start to sound like people who did their homework instead of self-righteous cunts trying to sound smart.

I am happy to accommodate the cries of 'ignorance' and 'fail', heard all this shit before, so go fuck yourselves unless you have anything else to spew but scripted 'what you think you know' horse-shit. I understand that certain types of dum-basses are quite satisfied with themselves to talk a lot and say nothing but whats fed them.

The United States government fucked the Native Americans, now they're fucvkng cowboys and ranchers......No digression with land and money drunk robber-barons, especially when they have dutiful putties to interpret history to suit their delusions.

Wanna fix the situation America? Stop eating their meat. Try turtle soup, the shits awesome.

Didn't we know he was nuts when he claimed to be a patriot, but to not believe in the federal government? Does he not realize that would make him live in the S.A., not the U.S.A.?
I love how fast the rats are deserting the sinking ship though. D'OH!

I've just been reading up on this a bit and it's sort of interesting. I don't think anyone is doing serious investigative work on this whole thing because I keep reading that these are either just local families who own cattle, or they're corporate entities.

Also the disturbing thing is that apparently these people owe the government a lot of money and they refuse to pay. In order to get out of being harassed they got a lot of Militia friends from other states to come armed and stand with them. So this doesn't seem to me like it's being handled very well at all, and it probably is something to do with local law enforcement not interested in causing trouble on a big local name.

Either way this hasn't become all that clear, and it always annoys me that I have to wait a long time before someone gets to the bottom of these things.

EDIT: I totally forgot to talk about the video which I couldn't get through because this guy is a moron. He cites the Federal Government not caring about a tortoise because we detonated tons of nuclear bombs in the desert. That was before the environment and conservation because a large issue, now it is and it isn't just about tortoises it's about the land as a whole. Land that if we destroy we don't get back for generations.

Also imagine if this became violent...just imagine how quickly helicopters would've destroyed everyone and everything in the desert. You cite that we test nuclear weapons yet you don't think we can take on a bunch of fat useless farmers that have AR-15s?

I can hardly listen to this idiot, I can certainly see how the federal government acted inappropriately (although I think I need more information) it's pretty much a common occurrence. But my god this smug little cunt just pisses me off the way he presents his arguments. I would take great pleasure beating him with a pipe until he drowned in his own blood.

My last thought on this is I hope it doesn't come of like I'm defending the government or their idiocy. If they're idiots which they usually are they don't get what they want. However I can't take stupid attacks on the government when there are so much better ones to be had. I love steak but there's too much of it, too many cows and our environment is being wrecked because of it. Red meat feeds cancer and destroys your health if you have too much of it, take it easy on the red meat. Global Warming is a serious issue, and apparently not one that InfoWars agrees with so as far as I'm concerned they're anti-science and anti-humanity. Fuck them.

Water is a serious issue for China. They can produce enough food for themselves at the moment, but it's estimated that the population of the country will increase by 200 million before it actually plateaus. The growing cities are eating up the best farmland in the nation, which has caused concerns. And desertification has been growing the Gobi desert too...

I used to get lots of swelling and extreme itch from a normal mosquito bite, but after living in Thailand for 7 years and getting much more frequent exposure (read: I get bit a lot more here than I did in near-desert Kansas, which isn't that surprising), my reactions to mosquito bites seem to be a lot smaller than they used to be.

Do we develop a tolerance/lessening in allergic reactions to mosquito saliva with frequent exposure?