crwtom

Huh? Are you saying that once murderers saw that they couldn't be executed, that they no longer wanted to kill anyone any more? Basically there is no correlation and the concept of deterrence is a smokescreen for retribution...... revenge. I sometimes wonder what is going on in the heads of death penalty supporter who use the deterrece arguement - how they imagine someone becomes a murderer . Apparently they envision some sort of prior decisions process whose outcome depends on what penalty to expect. So Joe thinks it's an interesting idea to kill X because there might be some benefit involved for him. He sits down one evening and states on a piece of paper his overarching goals for this project, makes a list of the undisputable facts and circumstances, and explores the general feasability of a plan of execution. After that, on another piece of paper, he makes two columns. In the left he jots down the Pros of carrying out the murder and on the right the he enteres all the Cons. Then he attributes between one and five asterisques to each of the entered items depending how grave and impactful each of the point is in correlation with his previously stated goals. Additionally Joe will make an approximate risk assessment - that is, he assigns his best etimates of probabilities for best and worst case scenarios. In a final analysis he weighs all factors together and distills from this a decision whether or not to murder X. Now, if the expected penalty was death rather than life this could well have an impact on the outcome. Particularly, if Joe assigned a high priority to staying alive in his initially stated goals, this would presumably cause in the afore mentioned Con-column a jump of the number of asterisques at the penalty item . In a borderline situation this is quite likely to tilt the final analysis towards a negative decision. Quite a comedy I'd say. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

There's not only history - there's also (historical) literature: Sir Thomas More: "This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast. Man's laws, not God's. And if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? " (A Man for All Seasons, R. Bolt) Cheers, T PS: just curious ... how do you work up a 17post/day average and still be able to work for food and skydives? ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Kind of like people who can stir up dirt like that ...

The myth that 9/11 is directly resposible for the recession has practically no basis. You look at SP500 or other indicators you see a steady downslope right before 9/11, a sharp downward spike fo a few dyas and an almost immediate bounce back to the smae level after 9/11 than before (in fact even a little higher). Some time after that the down slope fcontinues after 9/11as you would have projected it from its behaviour before. The only immediate reason that 9/11 could have been economically devastating was that the data of incompleted transactions that was hanging in the computers would have been detroyed in the attacks. This is what cause the intiial sharp downwards (togther with the fear of continued further attacks). When people managed to back-up all the data and it became clear that there were no immeduiate further attacks folowing everything went basically back to normal on the trading side. No assets that were in size large enough to have a significantimpact on the national economy were detroyed in the attacks. The continued decline before and right after 9/11 depended on other factors - overexpansion that was not compensated for in either admisnitration, corporate mistrust after the scandals without any "trustrestoring" regulatory measures by the sdmins, etc. The deline hits its low point fall 2002 and then stay there and flat-lines for over a year. The casue for that time wise pretty obvious - the uncertainties and enormous costs of the iraq war, including the run-up when people were uncertin when if and how it'll come down, the war itself and the long periods of instabilty and uncertain and expanding costs after that. Whatever your philosophy on tax breaks, to introduce a major tax break at the beginning of such a period is nothing short of idiotic. Tax breaks (without compesation by massive cuts in govt spending - which never happened here) is basically the govt gambling with money, putting it into the econoy hoping the increase of volume of the economy will by quantity bring much of the spent money back in. If you know you're at the beginning of a time in which an economic turn-around is nealy impossible b/c of wars and such you're like the roulette player who stubbornly bets on a color that has been glued shut with a chewing gum just - becuas it seemed to work the last time. All the money bet during the time the color is shut down is lost for sure. And here you have your reason for a larger part of the natioanl deficit -sheer stupidity and stubborness in the face of much avise to the contrary. Conseuqneces? Some might say the flush-out of the dollar is good for export - but eventually the may lead to the euro taking over as the major oil/gas currency. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

delightful - and Rummy actually manages to be diplomatic about it calling it Bush's "evolving position". Huhuhu article almost as slick & slippery as Powell's stabbing term of a "parochial debate" for the reelection campaign. Rodents leaving a sinking ship? Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

The Pentgonese wanted to make a point, prove something to the world and history - that the US can invade and control an entire country with basically a light "police force". Tell everyone: "Look at us - it is soooo easy for us - and you may be next". Backfiring would be understandment for the result. They tried to proved that point at the cost of leaving quite a bunch of cities completely uncontrolled and unsecured - for over 1 and1/2 years !! - letting terror cells, extremisms, common crime, etc fester and florish there and humanitarian conditions deteriorate. In itself that sort of negligence is a blatant violation of any standard of international law and resposibility. It's for that sort of "show-off-ideology" that people are getting killed in large numbers now. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... with a little fantasy what you find could be worth a lot of money! ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

and to reiterate what I just posted a little while ago if so - where does the "greater power" come from? is that a product of some other evolution ? Replaceing an unknown X by an undefined, unknown Y doesn't do squat at explining anything. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... and what would you do if you found those unacceptable? Fire all doctors? ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

yup - there was the fear of being suspeceted of wagging-the-dog. Still there was also another side that was more interested in pursuing a moralistic vandetta than having a functional govt. The guilt is certainly not on just one side. whichever - one thing is a fact: In Jan 2001 Clinton told GWB strainght to his face that UBL is the greatest foreign threat to the US that he will be facing. Number one, numero uno, nummer eins..., absolutely unambiguous. Retaliations for the USS Cole attacks were left to GWB. (The connection to UBL became clear after GWB was already presid elect) What happened - nothing. What was number one priority - Saddam right from day one - obsessively. Where did UBL and intl terrorism rank? - low enough that the issue was puhed out of the principals meetings into the deputy meetings (which never happened) - a marignality. Why? - cause those guys hated and defied everything that Clinton said - even it was that the US will be attacked by UBL. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Yeah after Bush finally learned a bunch of foreign names maybe this time around she will teach him ice skating. It is really interesting that a guy who rags about intellectual snobbery picks a lifelong academician, theoretician and pianist. Probably it's her maternal flair that soothens him over the intellectualiserism. Why O'Reilly dreams to have Clinton to be Powel's successor is not unplausible to be. That's give the Bushies an opportunity to make a clown out of him the same way they did it with Powell - - - "hey, Colin why don't you do the hulahula look-at-my-tube dance as a distraction in front of the UN so that we can undistrubedly paste together our invasion." GWB pretty much has the humiliation of one American icon to his credit, and Clinton will be lucid enough not to be the second one. It'd be cute if Rice kept Armitage as deputy - the guy pretty much accused her of incompetence and completely dropping the reins on the principles in the lead up to the war. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

well - it'd give one bit of information and open up a heck lot more questions, like what is god, what is he/she/it made of?, how does he/she/it fit into what we know about science, who created god or is god himself/herself/itself a product of some process of evolution, where is god, why is there only one - any history of a struggle for monopoly against other deity, does free will exist or are we puppets in a deterministic scheme or are we the subjects of some sort-of "free will" experiment to amuse this god, .... etc. IMO, religion doesn't answer anything - it just shifts one thing we don't understand to another thing we don't understand - but this we are not allowed to ask questions about because it'd be blasphemie. So the discussion is finished. Not very satisfactory for the curious mind. Cheers, Thomas ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... on the lighter side: what's the meaning of this after the end of the gold standard Amendment 7: In suits at common law, where the value of in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, ... Can I get my day in federal court over a jump ticket? Cheers ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

That's what everyone said in 2000 - never happened it got worse, despite reassurances of "great uniters", "compassionate conservatives" and lost popular votes. Extrapolating from this, given the past election, there's not much reason for optimism. Division may get so bad it'll paralyze the nation. Cheers ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

i really wonder how the red america would like a secession of the north (though I don't like "US of Canada" - "USNA" US of Nothern America smeems more fitting). Consider that the 9/11 attackts that the Bush Admin made so much political hay with wre on a staunchly blue state. Despite the sucking up of Giuliani Bush lost the district of Manhatten by a 82:17 landslide. These are the people who really have a reason to be scared of terrorits attacks and ought to think the hardest but the best course of prevention is. The various invasions of the Bush Admin as an effort to create a gradious new world order were, of course, also not fought and won by packing a bunch of rednecks with pitchforks on a few shrimp boats and sailing them out to Iraq. Those were done with the technology (aviation, computer systems, etc) that is in vast majority are developed (and also produced) in the coastal, heavily democratic America. Essentially the situation that you have, is that the question how to handle a serious security problem of the blue states by employment of the technology and resources of the blue states is decided by how someone in the red states interprets the psalms in the bible. For many years I wondered why, with all the potentially devastating technology, humanity hasn't yet annihiliated itself. I think it's similar to why not all skydivers have already killed themselves despite the availability of tiny canopies and so many things you can do wrong with your skydiving gear. Capabilities and technology come slowly and in increments and somehow public awarness of the consequences and the possibly complex ramifictions alwasy manage to catch up in the time before the next advance. If "little boy" and "fat boy" had been a bunch of the modern bombs we wouldn't be talking about Hiroshma or Nagasaki but half of Japan. If the first square canopie that came put in the early 70's had been 3.0 loaed velocities we woudn't be talking dozens but 100's of bounces a year. People lhad time to earn before it was too late. Now you have to wonder whether a red America that has seized control over the blue one has the wisdom and resposibility tha parallels the technological adavnec and political/social complexity of this part. I am very very worried. No - it's not a time to leave. It is a time for 48% of Americans to stand up and claim what's rightfully theirs. Cheers ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

now and with all that long list (didn't get far as it started reading like a bland reiteration of the Rovaganda I heard a 1000 times already) with all that GWB only made 51:48 - pretty pittyful. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

better than cutting and running - Regroup, Secede! first draft attached ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

of course not ... but the fact prerequisite and utilized for present US foreign policy. the meaning was for what the south would have been today and I certainly don't equate "morality driven" with "moral". ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... may have decided instead to let things fall where they want to fall and trhat a house divided is .. well, just two houses standing next to each other. A blue one with the north east, great lakes and west coast, and a red one, with the south and the midwest. A secular, industrial urban, and technology driven ones, and an agricultural, religious, rural and morality driven one. Wonder which one, if any, of those two Americas would have risen to a super power over the decades. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

right exactly - and this is in fact a great opportunity for the EU in the transatlantic competition. It is already starting to pull ahead of the US on currency as well as in many areas of research and technology and diplomacy. With a US that is unilaterally and endlessly bogged down in horridly managed wars and occupations in the mideast, getting their resources drained and getting more and more isolated b/c the narrow midededness of the current foreign policy, the EU has a great chance to pull ahead even further on economic, monetary, and technology etc issues. Also the often research-hostile morality driven environment is also already leading in the research comunity to a movement (back) to the old continent. Moreover, the US won't be able to check and deal with the invetiable rise of the super-economy China with its other preoccupations. More likely again is that the EU will take the lead in the cooperation of the western world with China. Sure, foreign policy is a pretty difficult thing in general for the EU, gievn its made up of a lot of indicidula countries. But even with that obstacke they are alreacdy scoring more diplomatic points, e.g., in Iran than the US. If this administrationcontinues its policies the days of the US as a "leader of the free world" are numbered. And 59 mio will have no excuse that they didn't know this was coming - they will have only themselves to blame. This is perocialism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

In fact the reaction among the German governing coalition of social democrats and greens is one of relief. If Kerry had won there would have been some serious pressure on them to get engaged in Iraq money and military wise. Now noone seriously expects them to pick up on issue - they're off the hook and can witness from a distance how an islotaed US and Iraq consume themselves in somethis self-induced new version of a cold (or luke-warm) war. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

most generate random phone numers all over the US. Of course there's the problem with cell phones - but by-and-large it's pretty random. The main problems seem to be - 80-90% of people being called up hang up the phone. You can easily speculate that these are undecided who want their f*** peace of mind when they make up their mind. The pool of undeicdeds might be much larger than we think it is. - everyone has a different definition of what a "likely voter" is. Patterns of behavior used to determine that may have a bias. - even with the registered voters (a much larger pool) it depends how you phrase things .. from "vote for definitely" to "tend towards". Here an interesting article from the same pollingreport site. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

How about cutting off their hands and other body parts, like in Saudi? Absolutely yes! - the death penalty - which is sort-of the maximal possible intrusion into the physical integrity of a criminal as a punishment - has wide acceptance. It would be sheer hypocracy not to accept the lesser such punishments as well. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

of course - it's all about the Florida vote. Keeping the special interest (anit Castro) groups happy. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

OK - working through the painful language of the 12th it's true that if the candidacies and options to vote in the electoral college are the same as they are now the vp has to come from the vp candidates. From what I saw it seems to me though that the electors are pretty much free to vote for whatever they want. Even those pledges are of no legal consequence. I also couldn't discern anything in the constitution where some defined list of candidates with who runs for what has to be submitted to the electoral college. So if after Nov 2nd the congress majorities are clear and the electoral vote is tied, I cannot find a reason why the presidential candidate with house minority but senate majority should notr be able to instruct his electors to vote for him as VP rather than president. Cheers, T PS: There's at least one more "plausible" 269:269 scenarion besides the one that I attached above. This stuff seems to be not anywhere as far fetched as I initially thought. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true