dan2100

Nope.

I think you have a lazy side, Dan. --Brant Why do you think that?

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/06/08/free-bradley-manning/ Comments?

Another overlooked masterpiece is "Død snø." See the trailer at: http://www.deadsnow.com/

I wouldn't equate "most-watched" with "favorite." In my favorite hundred films, I'd include "The Human Condition" and "The 47 Ronin," but I've only seen each of these once.

Actually, no. Even mass school shootings go back a ways. If my memory's correct, there was even one in Germany before WW1. But on mass shootings in general, I'm not so sure about any of them being totally random, but where did the term "going postal" come from? Even my grandfather used that one -- so it likely predate me and might even predate you. My guess is what's going on here is kind of like people who report on a Full Moon causing something or other. They're not remembering all the times that the same thing happened and the Moon wasn't full. (And isn't news usually reported this way? If there's a recent plane crash that somehow has "legs," then, suddenly, every minor incident with an aircraft is reported. And then the talk becomes focused on aircraft disaster as if these rarely happened before, are only now on the rise, and just about every jet is ready to fall out of the sky.) All that said, how would you test your idea? One would have to measure stress and then try to see if it correlates at all with such incidents.

I haven't counted how many times I've watched films I will watch over and over, but here's a list of films I've seen more than once -- probably a lot more than once: Accident Alien Aliens Andrei Rublev The Birds Blowup Chinatown Citizen Kane Come and See Dawn of the Dead (both versions) Day of Wrath Dollars Trilogy The Exorcist Fahrenheit 451 Forbidden Games The Grand Illusion Grizzly Man Hara-Kiri Hiroshima Mon Amor Hour of the Wolf (The Bergman one) Images Ivan's Childhood Key Largo The Killers Koyaanisqatsi L'Avventura L'Eclisse Lone Star Macbeth (Roman Polanski version) Midnight Cowboy My Best Fiend The Mirror Night of the Hunter Night of the Living Dead Nosferatu (The silent version) Once Upon a Time in the West Paper Moon The Passion of Joan of Arc Persona Ran Rivers and Tides Rosemary's Baby Sansho the Bailiff Seance on a Wet Afternoon The Servant The Seventh Seal The Shining The Silence Solaris (Tarkovsky version) The Star Wars Trilogy Sword of Doom Sunset Blvd. Targets The Thing (John Carpenter version) The Third Man Three Women Through a Glass Darkly Touch of Evil The Treasures of the Sierra Madre The Trial 28 Days Later 2001: A Space Odyssey Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla version) The Virgin Spring What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The Wicker Man Winter Light Zardoz A handful of these were "osmosis viewing" -- that is, my former roommates would be watching them and, of course, used mind control techniques to force me to watch them. At least, that's the excuse I'll use until I can think of a better one.

I'm not so sure this is a "suicide." I mean the donkey probably didn't know in any sense that it was going die. Tactically there is no difference so the nomenclature is good enough. We could call it a "sentient mobile IED" (SMIED) for no good reason. --Brant Not really. The old nomeclature -- before "suicide bombing" became a "household word" would've likely been "bombing," no? Slapping "suicide" to the front of this adds what? In the case of the usual suicide bombing, the meaning is, to me, much more clear: someone who is willing to blow herself or himself up to take out a target. The use of "suicide" in this case seems very clear and would distinguish the suicide bombing from the handiwork of Ted Kaczynski, the Volunteers of Ireland, and most military bombing raids.

I agree with the good trend. I'm talking about partying to excess and general lack of respect. Again, my take on it is that it's a parental issue. With both mom and dad largely part of the workforce, there is less of a hands-on rearing of children. ~ Shane Is there a trend there too? And, if so, in what time frame? And what exactly is this? Are you sure that this particular incident -- which it seems you're saying is part of this trend -- can be traced back to that cause?

I'm not so sure this is a "suicide." I mean the donkey probably didn't know in any sense that it was going die.

Beats me. I could care less about that specific event. I care about the trend. That's my takeaway from it. But it is their business what they do and media is not the venue to showcase this. It smells like agenda to me. ~ Shane Is there a trend? The link with trends Ian posted seem to show the trend is actually in a good direction: lower murder rates, less violence, and less bullying.

Okay, so some people behave irresponsibly somewhere. And, yes, this is an injustice. But why should this matter to anyone outside the immediate parties affected and their friends and families? Why should it become a national news item?

How do you know here? Not being sarcastic. I'm just curious on how one would find out what's more prevalent.

It sounds more like one of those stories made for a slow news day. Also, why should this matter to anyone else -- save for the people involved, maybe the owners, and the students' families? Why is it a national news item? I'm also not surprised by the statistics...

Even more frightening is figuring inflation into the mix. Inflation is another hidden tax -- though, in this case, the wealth is being redistributed from holders of money in general and creditors to debtors with the large debtors (such as the government itself) getting a larger than proportional take.

And why am I not invited to these parties?

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/how-to-create-the-illusion-of-low-taxes/ Comments?

Yeah, you're right here. I've not done enough research on Beck to be truly informed about him. Yes, my mistake -- especially in regards to his promotion of Paine. This makes him a bit rare among conservatives -- most of whom hardly mention Paine. Even so, regarding his take on atheism and religion, I think it's safe to say he's extremely if not dangerously pro-religion -- at least based on the on air clips I've seen of him. And one has merely to google to find other clips of him actually attacking atheists. In other words, blaming the murder on Godlessness or lack of religion (while also mentioning an atheist group -- so the connection is pretty obvious here) is not the only example of this. E.g., see: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=JJJlgNf06ek and http://www.youtube.c...h?v=0y3x_cJyRqI Granted, this makes him no different than mainstream religious conservatives who think that not being able to have religious stuff in government institutions is the same as abolishing their religion. (And, to be sure, as others have pointed out, the problem here is having public institutions in the first place. They only politicize these issues because some people will be forced to pay for what other people control or use.) For what it's worth, my information about Beck comes from seeing him on air or hearing clips of him -- not from some other source. Any mistakes I've made here have been ones of omission -- particularly, not looking at his books and such.

Dan, I got to this point and I almost stopped reading. There's no common ground I have with this view. I can't force you to respond, but why do you have such a high opinion of the first president? How do you account for many of his big government policies and the like? Or do you disagree that he supported these? Or do you balance these against something else? Then I got to this point and I actually did stop reading. That's quite a statement of causality you just made. Here is a book that was a New York Times bestseller a few months ago, and it stayed on the charts for quite a while. It currently sits at no. 374 in the Amazon ranking of best sellers. The entire text of Paine's Common Sense is the last part of the book. And Beck asks people to please read it. Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine You don't need to read Beck's book like I did. Just the title... (I read the rest of your post, but I lost the urge to comment on it. I feel we are not going to have a serious discussion when the word "Beck" arises.) Michael I was thinking more Paine's anticlerical The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, but I must admit to missing that in the title of his book. I might be overstating my case against Beck, but your parenthetic comment and your refrain about not reading and then reading my post are not, I feel, deserved.

It's a rough day in the world when one must survive on one's own savings. Some might say Armageddon. I call it life. ... but to be fair, he was probably overtaxed during his working days in the first place. This is all the more reason to dismantle these welfare states now -- to move these people to more sustainable retirement and support systems... Some fear it might be too late -- that the present systme is so enmeshed in this that almost everyone has a stake in keeping it going as is rather than risking any fundamental changes. I, however, believe free markets and free people can turn things around rather quickly. One need only look at some limited cases to see how quickly things can change. Think of Germany and Japan after World War Two, especially under Allied occupation which seems to foisted as bad or worse market interventions that during the war. Once, however, even minor market-oriented reforms were made, such as lifting some price controls, the societies started to bounce back. To be sure, if you'd just turn off the Western part of Eurasia to me...

My problem here is, again, that he blames this on atheism. Here he is no different than other religious conservatives -- and no more trustworthy. (Think of Gina Cobb, if my memory's correct, blaming the Virginia Tech murders on prevailing atheism and recommended religious training to prevent further outbreaks.) Also, as to your view, I'm not sure about people why people brutally kill each other -- or what reasons prevail over the course of human history. I doubt, though, atheism per se has much to do with this. (Of course, in some seemingly religiously motivated killings, it might be the case that the killers see their victims as atheists.) My comment was "This measure only means getting people to buy these biographies. It doesn't necessarily presage, I fear, the kind of cultural change I presume you desire." The Amazon measure only tells us people are buying those books. It doesn't tell us exactly what's happening with them. Let me provide another example. I have a friend and to avoid giving his identity away, I'll call him Aidan. Aidan is a libertarian, admirer of Rand, and has been involved with both the libertarian and Objectivist movements now for, he's told me, about 25 years. He's a big fan of books like The Real Lincoln. He's actually purchased about 20 copies of this to pass around to his family, friends, and colleagues. (He tried to give me a copy, but I'd already bought one at that time. He did foist off a copy of Blowback on me -- for which I thanked him.) Now his family and colleagues are mostly what could be called statists of the Left -- many of them are big Obama supporters and were Kerry supporters the last election cycle. I seriously doubt -- and he has yet to prove me wrong -- that a single one of them read these books he's passed along to them and changed their basic views. (In fact, he's told me as much. Some people gobbled up Blowback, which he gave out many copies of, but read it not as a critique of interventionist foreign policy, but merely of the Bush Administration. I know this partly because he's related back dicussions to me he's had with the same people once Obama was elected and showed he was basically doing four more years of Bush in terms of foreign adventures.) Of course, this doesn't mean you're totally wrong here. It just means that one can't read sales being up as cultural change per se. Some of the sales increases might be people like my friend Aidan. Others might be people buying the book because Beck said so, but never actually reading it. Let's call these non-readers. Still others might buy it, read it, and not change in the direction you'd want them to change -- i.e., I think toward a more libertarian, rational society. Let's call these non-changers. I don't know the exact numbers here, but I doubt it's around 99% are doing what you think and the rest are divided among people like Aidan, non-readers, and non-changers. Finally, I don't know about the books in particular. I don't have a high opinion of the first president, especially reinforced by reading books such as The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America by Colin G. Calloway, The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War by Fred Anderson, and The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland. (Granted, in that last book, Washington looks less like the villain and more like just a dupe going along with Hamilton's whacked out policies.) I don't know, but, then, I'm not familiar with biography sales over the last century. Are you? I'd like to see some actual research here as my guess is the Founding Fathers make it up the charts. Also, why isn't he pushing books by Thomas Paine -- the forgotten founder? Because Paine questioned religion! My guess is Beck's agenda here is not so much less government as more religion. I don't know. You might be right here. After all, most people are probably not ready to take the plunge and adopt a radical political philosophy like libertarianism. They'll have to go through stages and maybe you're right in that one of those stages for some of them will be looking back at some of the Founders. (Not all. I actually don't think much of Washington. He presided over a pretty large expansion of the federal government and put down a rebellion. Also, I'm suspicious of many of the others founders, especially Hamilton -- and for good reason and he's probably more the Founding Father of big government for America -- but also of many of the ones pushing for a stronger central government.) One has to select when writing history, I presume. One can't report everything. I'm not a historian by any means, though Jeff's was not the first book I read on the subject. (Another one I'd recommend is David Hackett Fischer's Historians Fallacies. The title alone caught my attention in college -- even though I wasn't a history major.) That said, though, I do recommend it and enjoyed it. Back to Beck, doesn't Beck's recommending the Lillback book only make my case here? Was he recommending it just to shrink government? Or was he recommending it to promote religious views acceptable to him? What's the take away from a book like this? That Americans have an oppressive government? It seems more likely to me that the reason to promote this book -- though it's a guess on my part as I didn't hear where Beck promoted it, what he said and such -- was to boost religion.

So sad. I was really shocked to see this. I only wish I knew him better.