patrick.net

She's probably right, this nation is probably that stupid to be afraid of the rise of the Soviet Union.

Dan8267 says

and our loss militarily going forward

So is she proposing we should be militarily (???) going forward against China, Inda, and the Soviet Union. Just out of curiosity didn't the Soviet Union dissolve officially on 26 December 1991 and return to being Russia? Nothing like keeping up with current events Michele.

bob2356 says

So is she proposing we should be militarily (???) going forward against China

Who knows? She's a nutcase.

In any event, China could win a war against the U.S. without firing a single shot. All China would have to do is dump all of its U.S. treasuries and the run on treasuries would collapse our ability to fight any war. It turns out that smart weapons and stealth bombers cost a lot of money to use. Human cannon fodder is cheap.

Maybe it's intentional.

There are a lot of average to below average intelligence people in this country that aren't comfortable with a President that's way more intelligent than they are. They would rather have someone they would "like to have a beer with." Someone they feel is just like them, or even less intelligent than they are.

I find it to be very strange. I'm not saying that extreme intelligence is all that I want in a President, but it's a good start. And being an idiot is a deal breaker for me.

marcus says

There are a lot of average to below average intelligence people in this country that aren't comfortable with a President that's way more intelligent than they are.

It's that attitude that is going to get Sarah Palin elected the next President. People are less comfortable with people that THINK they are smarter, than constituents in other states, and towns, that are a world apart from their socioeconomic demographic.

marcus says

There are a lot of average to below average intelligence people in this country

I'd estimate about 50%.

Note to the mathematically literate: Yes, I know that would actually only be true if he used the term "median" rather than "average". But you take the setups you get.

marcus says

There are a lot of average to below average intelligence people in this country that aren't comfortable with a President that's way more intelligent than they are.

That's the big problem with hick voters. People should want an intelligent president. The problems the country and the world are facing are hard are require intelligence, if only do be able to properly evaluate the advice of domain experts.

I, for one, would want a president who was more intelligent than me. But, alas, I am unable to convince Steven Hawkings to run.

shrekgrinch says

"Professor Gore"

I never considered Gore to be highly intelligent except in comparison to the idiots in Washington. However, he did win the election once you discount all the electoral fraud, and had he served as president, the state of the country would be far better.

But really, I still am bitter that Picard-Riker lost the '92 election.

Dan8267 says

I'd estimate about 50%.

more actually, since ideology can make one stupider than one already is.

shrekgrinch says

No he didn't.

Dude, I live in Palm Beach county, the county in Florida that screwed up the 2000 elections. I can absolutely assure you that all the old Jews down here did NOT vote for that anti-semitic Pat Buchanan. You count those votes for Al Gore and that would mean he carried Florida and thus won the election.

In case you doubt that Jews who lived through WWII don't like Buchanan, consider this:

Buchanan wrote that it was impossible for 850,000 Jews to be killed by diesel exhaust fed into the gas chamber at Treblinka. When George Will challenged him about it last week on TV (it is, alas, all too possible), he ducked. Buchanan's long battle with Nazi-hunters is shy of loony but still conspicuous. In 1983 he criticized the U.S. government for expressing regret over its postwar protection of Klaus Barbie. In 1985, he advocated restoring the citizenship of Arthur Rudolph, an ex-Nazi rocket scientist accused of employing slave labor at a V-2 plant. ref

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great courage" ref

No 60-90 year-old Jew living in South Florida voted for Buchanan.

And if you have any doubt that a fair counting of the voter's intentions would have left Gore president, read this wonderful mathematical proof that Gore won. It's conclusion:

Evidently, the number of votes that were intended for Gore but that went to Buchanan because of the butterfly ballot is large enough to have
changed the election outcome given any of several reasonable standards that might have been used to count the votes in Florida.

I'd trust mathematics over politicians and newsmen any day. But the great thing about mathematics is that you don't have to trust it. You just have to understand it.

Just out of curiosity, how did a conversation about Bachmann end up being about Obama?

Because Sherk posted. Shrek can't get through a long sentence without ranting about Obama.

Here's my take on what people's opinions about Bush and Obama really mean...

Note that the best choice for both fiscal conservatives and socialists is to simply hate them both.

"Most of Bush's evil came out of his second term"

nah, NCLB, Medicare Part D, the tax cuts, deregulation, and wars were all launched 2001-2003.

The last two years of his term were gated by the Dem takeover in 2006.

What did Bush do in 2005-2006 compared to 2001-2004?

"Left-leaning fool"

PATRIOT is a stupidly-named law but is not a big deal. I don't "Love" Obama, but my opinion is better than indifference. . . "Kinda OK so far" I guess. Well, I guess that is ambivalent and thus indifferent.

"Not much difference between the two"

LOL. Bush appointed two clowns to the Supreme Court, Obama appointed two lesbians. Bush put into place the twin financial catastrophes of the housing bubble and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Libya thus far is demonstrative of how to run a liberation. You need the people themselves to rise up and earn their liberty. You just can't crash in with Abrams and Strykers and expect to lay down the law.

shrekgrinch says

Claiming OBL is dead...but doesn't have a body or even photos proving it....no check.

The word of the men and women of our armed forces isn't good enough for you? Did you even bother to read how they ID'ed the body or why they made the decisions they did?

It's a pretty thin line between where you are now and a tin foil hat my friend.

Stay classy.

Bellingham Bob says

What did Bush do in 2005-2006 compared to 2001-2004?

Guantanamo Bay

Bellingham Bob says

PATRIOT is a stupidly-named law but is not a big deal.

The act legalized kidnapping, torture, and murder, or as the Republicans like to call it, "enhanced interrogation." The act also removed the right of Habeas Corpus, which we got from the Magna Carta. The act literally set Western Civilization back eight hundred years. I'd call that a big deal, but then again, I'm a witch.

rewrew7 says

shrekgrinch says

Claiming OBL is dead...but doesn't have a body or even photos proving it....no check.

The word of the men and women of our armed forces isn't good enough for you?

Their word isn't good. Neither is any other military since the first casualty of war is always the truth. However, Shrek is clearly wrong on this.

If Bid Laden were not dead and the United States government tried to convince the world that he was, then Bid Laden would simply release a video of himself and make the U.S. government look really, really stupid.

As such, any Bid Laden is still alive conspiracy simply makes no sense.

Bellingham Bob says

"Not much difference between the two"

LOL.

I could write down a comprehensive list of dozens of examples of how the two presidents policies are essentially the same, but my time is too valuable. Instead I'll give you a link. Read the first page of results.

Here you go.

shrekgrinch says

Dude, that is what fell into the margin of error -- which all election systems have. It just happens to be really bad in Florida.

If the libs who went with Nader instead hadn't, it wouldn't have fell into the margin of error and hence there would have been no recount.

Nadar is irrelevant, as is the "margin or error" you bring up.

Read the paper I linked. It explains in precise, mathematical detail why Gore carried Florida when the ballots are read as intended by the voters who cast them.

I really can't dumb down the math for you. But if you are a reasonably rational and intelligent person, you should be able to follow it. It may be hard, but it's not that hard. Consider it exercise for your brain.

Wow. That was informative.

Thing is, Obama has to win Virginia again, and about 10 other red states.

So he's got to trim his sails to what the most idiotic of reachable voters (the non-40% Republican diehards) in these states want to see.

You can say there's no difference between the Bush and Obama admins, but you're really really wrong.

The former was essentially a "bust out", and the latter has been damage control and backing out of the shitty situations he's inherited.

Like I said above, it's my thesis that Obama has to pander to the "independents" in the Red states he needs to win in 2012. This results in non-liberal policy and the occasional hippy-punching.

But to confuse this with Bush's active malfeasance is, in fact, comical to me, and thus the LOL.

I don't want to assert here that Obama has done a particularly good job with anything. The HSR stuff is a boondoggle, we'd be better off putting all that effort into PV or even just nukes IMO. I can't find fault in his Mideastern policies, what a clusterf- he inherited there and I don't pretend to be some FP expert.

So I am cautiously awaiting his 2nd term (if he gets it) to see the true colors, but I'm not necessarily expecting any major direction change. The situation we're in now is pretty bad, and as Jack Nicholson said, we can't handle the truth.

Dan8267 says

The act legalized kidnapping, torture, and murder, or as the Republicans like to call it, "enhanced interrogation." The act also removed the right of Habeas Corpus, which we got from the Magna Carta. The act literally set Western Civilization back eight hundred years.

I think you're thinking of some other law with all that.

Shrek, don't get your panties in the bunch.

First, we thought you were implying that Bin Laden is not dead because you said, "Claiming OBL is dead...but doesn't have a body or even photos proving it....no check." If you can't figure out why people would think that you are implying he's still alive when saying this then you should be paying more attention to your own words.

Second, don't ever quote Wikipedia. It makes you look stupid. I know that all the lazy boys and girls think that quoting Wikipedia makes them look smart, but it doesn't. Quoting an encyclopedia has always been the sign of intellectual and academic laziness. That's why your elementary and high school teachers told you NOT to use the encyclopedia and instead get your ass to a library.

Furthermore, Wikipedia has been repeatedly shown to be not only inaccurate, but deliberately so as organizations including governments and corporations hijack articles to use Wikipedia as a platform for propaganda.

Really, the only good use for Wikipedia is to filter out forum responses not worth reading. -- And no, I am not going to entertain a discussion of Wikipedia in this thread. I've said enough on this issue.

shrekgrinch says

Your 'paper' was an article written by Pat Buchanan. You saying that magically qualifies as 'political science'?

Third, it is not my paper.

Fourth, it was written by

How the fuck you got "Buchanan wrote the paper" out of that is beyond me, but such a conclusion really makes me question your sanity.

Fifth, I don't believe in magic, a god, or the human soul. However, I do believe that The American Political Science Review is a credible source. You are free to disagree with this, but your counter-evidence is a pseudo-encyclopedia that once claimed "Plato was an ancient Hawaiian weather man and surfer, writer of cosmo girls and founder of the Punahou in Ancient Florida." I'm not making this shit up.

Click here to see full image on Flickr

Finally, if you actually RTFP -- I'll let you guess what that stands for -- you will learn that the evidence does not rely on any mystical "percentage of error" that you keep pulling out of your ass.

@Dan8267 while I disagree with you assessment on the level of usefulness of wikipedia. (yeah, not worth getting into)

This was a "HOLY SHIT maybe he is crazy, and not just some paid propagandist" moment for me...
Dan8267 says

How the fuck you got "Buchanan wrote the paper" out of that is beyond me, but such a conclusion really makes me question your sanity.

For obvious reasons I always check the authors when I read referenced sources, I did a double check when shrek wrote that. What makes it even funnier is that the paper, no magic involved, is from the "American Political Science Review".

Perhaps science and mathematics are "magic" to the illiterate. I always wondered how people could not be in a constant state of mysticism living in the modern world if they did not understand how the electro-magnetic force worked. Without that understanding, isn't everything in modern society "magic"?

And isn't it scary that people are content to live in a world in which they cannot explain how the most mundane things work?

We seriously need another Carol Sagan.

So as to not end the world. Let me correct my typo in the above posting. The correct spelling of his name is Carl Sagan.

I think I made Shrek angry. He's turned green and now is ranting with all the rhetorical skills of the Hulk. I'd response to his latest batshit ravings, but what could I possible say to make them sound more ridiculous than they do by themselves?

My only request is that this forum adds a like/dislike voting mechanism.

shrekgrinch says

Dan8267 says

First, we thought you were implying that Bid Laden is not dead because you said, "Claiming OBL is dead...but doesn't have a body or even photos proving it....no check." I

No, I wasn't implying that nor can anyone logically make the case that I was. That was all in your head. Work on your reading comprehension skills.

All the other posters got the impression you were implying OBL wasn't dead. Maybe everyone else doesn't have a reading problem, maybe you should work on your writing skills.

shrekgrinch says

Yeah. And I read crap in my daily horoscope and even more worthless crap on the forums of patrick.net, too.

You must stop reading your own posts.