La Légion étrangère-C&P at your own risk !!

[phil]

The Pink Flamingos have been defeated
by my army of plastic penguins ...

[phil]

Of course, given the region, I guess I should be glad
he wasn't sentenced to be beheaded.


Or stoned to death ... !!

[Kensterberg]

I figure Phil won't mind if I indulge in some C&P here on his board ... this is from Salon.com ...

The Democrats' best slogan: "Bush lost the war"

He also lowered Paris Hilton's taxes and botched the job of finding Osama. A few last talking points to help the party win back Congress.
By Bill Maher

Nov. 05, 2006 | New Rule: Controlling Congress is for closers. Listen up, Democrats, it's as simple as ABC: Always Be Closing. First prize? Controlling congressional committees, with subpoena power. Second prize: set of steak knives. Third prize? You're fired.

The election is four days away, and I'm through dicking around with you. Here are your talking points:

1) When they say, "Democrats will raise taxes," you say, "We have to, because some asshole spent all the money in the world cutting Paris Hilton's taxes and not killing Osama bin Laden." In just six years the national debt has doubled. You can't keep spending money you don't take in, that's not even elementary economics, that's just called "Don't be Michael Jackson."

2) When they say, "The terrorists want the Democrats to win," you say, "Are you insane? George Bush has been a terrorist's wet dream, and nonpartisan commissions have confirmed that he's a recruiter's dream: theirs, not ours. And, he has exhausted our military without coming away with a win, the worst of both worlds." Bush inflames radical hatred against America and then runs on offering to protect us from it. It's like a guy throwing shit on you and then selling you relief from the flies.

3) When they say, "Cut and Run" or "Defeatocrat," you say, "Bush lost the war -- period." All this nonsense about "the violence is getting worse because they're trying to influence our election." No, it's getting worse because you drew up the postwar plans on the back of a cocktail napkin at Applebee's. And of course Democrats want to win, but that's impossible now that you've ethnically cleansed the place by making it unlivable, just like you did with New Orleans.

4) When they say that actual combat veterans like John Kerry are "denigrating" the troops, you say, "You're completely full of shit." Remember when Al Gore caught all that flak for sighing and moaning during that debate? Yeah, don't do that. Just say, "You're full of shit."

If I was a troop, the support I would want back home would mainly come in the form of people pressuring Washington to get me out of this pointless nightmare. That's how I would feel supported.

So when they say, "Democrats are obstructionists," you say, "You're welcome." Because with a bad administration that has bad ideas, obstruction is a good thing, just as it's a good thing to obstruct a drunk from getting his car keys. I would be happy to frame the debate as a fight between the Obstructionists and the Enablers. There's your talking point: "Vote Republican, and you vote to enable George Bush to keep ruling as an emperor." A retarded, child emperor, but an emperor.

Democrats, you've got two days to get out there and close. It's not about slogans this time. Although when it comes to slogans, accept no other from your opponent except this one: "The Republican Party: We're Sorry."

[phil]

Ken ~ Maher is funny as shit and you are more than welcome
to C&P here anything that caught your fancy ...

As a matter of fact, let's make the "Légion étrangère"
the official Cut & Paste board ...

[rockysigman]

But is drinking still allowed here?

[phil]

That goes without saying !!

You buying ??

[Thorngrub]

phil said:

British believe Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il


· US allies think Washington threat to world peace
· Only Bin Laden feared more in United Kingdom

And here the whole time I've been thinkin' those Brits as being daft!

[Thorngrub]

The Pink Flamingo dead, you say?

Not On My Watch ! ! !! THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WON'T STAND FOR IT!

Just wait 3 days . . . . there'll be a Pink Flamingo Ressurection, just you wait & see...

[Thorngrub]

If We, the American People can get fired up about something, it has GOT to be this!

We will start a campaign immediately that sends out a massive chain-email soliciting anyone & everyone to donate whatever funds they can afford (& we know there's plenty of "cream" to skim off the top!) to give to the good people at Union Products the necessary BOOYA they need to get their company back on its feet!

Right now during early November when there's nothing else of any real lasting importance going on, we need to rally ourselves together and DO THIS THING! Just a few dollars here & there funneled over to Union Products in Leominster, Mass, and we can salvage this impending threat to our national image!

By God and all His grace willing, but we'll get the Pink Flamingo back on its feet and on our front lawns where it belongs!

[rockysigman]

I think it would help more if we stopped blowing things up.

[Thorngrub]

Well I was gunna get to that: But more importantly (than stopping blowing things up), we as Americans have GOT to stop stealing these things from everyone's lawns, dammit! Let's pool together a nice fundraiser for the Prevention Of The Pink Flamingo's Extinction, and cease & desist w/the late -night lawn raids already!

[phil]

Pink Flamingos are so 50's and passé ...

Penguins are in and hot !!

[phil]

U-turns the neocon way


Simon Tisdall
Monday November 6, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


Battles between US neoconservatives and so-called “liberal media" have hit new depths in the run-up to tomorrow’s midterm elections, sparking claims of U-turns and partisan opportunism. But beneath the froth a more significant question lurks: whether the neocon movement, extraordinarily influential in formulating Bush administration foreign policy since 2001, is disintegrating.

The immediate cause of the furore is last week’s publication by Vanity Fair of excerpts from interviews conducted with leading neocons. Richard Perle, a Pentagon insider known as the Prince of Darkness, is quoted as suggesting that the Iraq intervention, which he previously supported, was mistaken.

David Frum, Mr Bush’s “axis of evil" speechwriter, reportedly believes failure in Iraq is inescapable and the president is to blame. Other well-known neocons also have critical things to say about administration competence.

In a furious response collated online by National Review magazine, several interviewees are now claiming their views were misrepresented. Mr Perle does not deny specific quotes attributed to him, but says a promise not to publish his remarks before the elections was broken. For the record, he says, “we are on the right path" in Iraq.

Mr Frum calls Vanity Fair’s excerpts “dishonest". He says he did not intend to criticise Mr Bush but rather his “malfunctioning" national security council. Contrary to the magazine’s Neo Culpa headline, he is not remorseful about past judgments. “Obviously I wish the war had gone better. It’s true I fear that there is a real danger that the US will lose in Iraq,” he says. “And yes, I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of US policy ... (But) my fundamental views on the war remain as they were in 2003.”

Leaving aside disputes over who said what and what they meant, the row has exposed ganglions of raw nerves among neocon leading lights angry that Mr Bush and others have failed to implement their ideas with sufficient vigour. They appear convinced that official backsliding and bungling, not ideological flaws in their thinking, are to blame.

Most telling, perhaps, is a lament from Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong hawk and neocon icon. “The idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world is dead,” at least for a generation, he says. He, too, is scathing about administration incompetence and Mr Bush’s security advisers - “these are not serious people". But he appears to point to a deeper failure of confidence in the achievability of neocon aims.

According to Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke in their book, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, the project has three themes. One is “a belief deriving from religious conviction that the human condition is defined as a choice between good and evil". The second is “the fundamental determinant of the relationship between states rests on military power and willingness to use it". And finally,“the Middle East and global Islam are the principal theatre for American overseas interests".


The authors conclude that neoconservatism is “an unfortunate detour", a temporary aberration that has undermined traditional international alliance and consensus-building. In their analysis, it belongs to the past.

Even neocons seem to accept that their over-simplified and over-militarised approach, while theoretically defensible, has led not to a new American century but a series of dead ends. Author Francis Fukuyama, a former adherent, says US policy needs a new realism “that better matches means to ends". The midterms, in other words, could be the beginning of history.

[sisyphus]

LMAO! pink flamingos. alas.

"unfortunate detour" - that's the understatement of the century

[strat-0]

Climate consensus and the end of science
National Post (Toronto), June 16, 2006
Column by Terence Corcoran

It is now firmly established, repeated ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere, that the debate over global warming has been settled by scientific consensus. The subject is closed. It seems unnecessary to labour the point, but here are a couple of typical statements: "The scientific consensus is clear: human-caused climate change is happening" (David Suzuki Foundation); "There is overwhelming scientific consensus" that greenhouse gases emitted by man cause global temperatures to rise (Mother Jones).

Back when modern science was born, the battle between consensus and new science worked the other way around. More often than not, the consensus of the time -- dictated by religion, prejudice, mysticism and wild speculation, false premises -- was wrong. The role of science, from Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, has been to debunk the consensus and move us forward. But now science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats.

As a mass phenomenon, repeated appeals to consensus to support a scientific claim are relatively new. But it is not new to science. For more than a century, various philosophical troublemakers have been trying to undermine science and the scientific method. These range from Marxists who saw science as a product of class warfare and historical materialism -- Newton was a lackey of the ruling classes and pawn of history -- to scores of sociological theorists and philosophers who spent much of the 20th century attempting to subvert the first principles of modern, Enlightenment science.

Reproduced on this page is the latest Wikipedia entry titled "Consensus Science." It sets out a bit of context for one aspect of the use of consensus in science. While the Wikipedia item is a useful, if rough, polemical introduction to the issue, it doesn't begin to plumb the ocean of dense philosophical discourse behind the movement to turn science -- the pursuit of fact, knowledge and truth through the scientific method, based on reason and experiment -- into a great social swamp of beliefs marked by consensus, social arrangements and customarily accepted ideas.

Throughout the 20th century, science was overwhelmed by the sociology of science and "sociological explanations of knowledge." At the extreme, we end up with the idea that there are no facts and nothing is verifiable. "Customs and conventions are seen as the creations of human agents, actively negotiated and actively sustained, under the collective control of those who initially negotiate them.... Scientific knowledge is seen as customarily accepted belief."

This is from "Sociological Theories of Scientific Knowledge," an essay by Barry Barnes, University of Edinburgh, in the Routledge Companion to the History of Modern Science (1990). Most of the recent history-of-science theory is a series of attempts by one camp after another to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism. While early hard-core Marxist views on science were too crazy to gain support, various "New Marxists" came along with more subtle forms of subversion. "This New Marxism," said Roy Porter of London's Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, "has aimed to depriviledge science, restoring it to the same plane as other belief systems."

If science were to become a belief system, then the belief with the greatest number of followers would become established fact and received knowledge. Knowledge based on observation and rational inference would play second fiddle to what Barnes calls "customarily accepted belief." This belief is "sustained by consensus and authority."

This is not just one science writer proposing a theory. Barnes is reporting on the mainstream elements of new-science thought over more than a century. Ideas come from such well-known brand names such as Marx and Kant, but mostly from a procession of philosophers even most scientists have never heard of. It's a jungle, to be sure, filled with impenetrable language and philosophical jargon. But the trend is clear.

Global warming science by consensus, with appeals to United Nations panels and other agencies as authorities, is the apotheosis of the century-long crusade to overthrow the foundations of modern science and replace them with collectivist social theories of science. "Where a specific body of knowledge is recognized and accepted by a body of scientists, there would seem to be a need to regard that acceptance as a matter of contingent fact," writes Barnes. This means that knowledge is "undetermined by experience." It takes us "away from an individualistic rationalist account of evaluation towards a collectivist conventionalist account."

In short, under the new authoritarian science based on consensus, science doesn't matter much any more. If one scientist's 1,000-year chart showing rising global temperatures is based on bad data, it doesn't matter because we still otherwise have a consensus. If a polar-bear expert says polar bears appear to be thriving, thus disproving a popular climate theory, the expert and his numbers are dismissed as being outside the consensus. If studies show solar fluctuations rather than carbon emissions may be causing climate change, these are damned as relics of the old scientific method. If ice caps are not all melting, with some even getting larger, the evidence is ridiculed and condemned. We have a consensus, and this contradictory science is just noise from the skeptical fringe.

Jasper McKee, professor of physics at the University of Manitoba and editor of Physics in Canada, asked recently: "Is scientific fact no longer necessary?" Apparently it's not. "In the absence of hard scientific fact or causal relationships, a majority vote of scientists can determine scientific truth."

Perhaps, says Mr. McKee, the great scientific revolution begun in the Renaissance of the 17th century is over and the need for science is gone. "The prospects," he says, "are alarming." In the end, though, real science can only win. If real science produces truth that the consensus method cannot, any consensus will inevitably fail to hold. Until then, however, we will have to live with the likes of David Suzuki.