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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (8414)	12/27/2001 7:19:58 AM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 93284

I had a nice response to this one...I wonder where it went. <LOL> I've spotted a flaw in your thinking on this terrorist matter. You've stated repeatedly that nothing can be done to dissuade a terrorist who is willing to die for his cause, hence the US effort in Afghanistan is useless. We've had terrorism for a couple of millenium. You think it's going to be stopped now! ...hence the US effort in Afghanistan is useless If I said that [which I don't think I have] your omitting context. In the big scheme of things the conflict in Afghanistan probably does much less than the freezing of terrorist accounts. Al Qaeda is a distributed organization; terrorist activities are generally planned in the cells outside of Afghanistan. I haven't seen anything that indicates that we have eliminated more than a fraction of Al Qaeda. But did you notice that OBL and his mullah were not in those hijacked planes? I've never heard anyone claim that OBL was stupid. maybe it will be quite adequate to dissuade those who brainwash and finance them- -with the knowledge that their actions will lead to their certain deaths. Didn't stop the dude with the shoes. The brainwashing for this group occurs in the right wing Islam religious schoold. Do you see us shutting them down or bombing religious schools. While we can't stop the guys with the shoes, we have stopped the Secret Service. nytimes.com WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 — An Arab-American member of President Bush's security detail was denied passage on an American Airlines flight from Baltimore to Dallas Tuesday evening after the flight's pilot questioned the validity of the agent's credentials, a spokesman for the Secret Service said tonight. Physics? Physics is the most basic of the sciences, in some sense the mother of the rest (except mathematics, if you wish to call that a science. Mathematics isn't an "art form". It is THE mother of all sciences. <s> Now: physics Nobels? I'd say their a pretty good representation of the state of science in a nation and a civilization. It took a LOT more than 50 people to put those 50 there- -and you know it. You know quite well that while Einstein derived E=mc^2,.... You realize of course that this subject started out as a claim on "innovation" on your part, which was not defended; then turned to "science"; and now we're reduced to Nobel Prizes in Physics as the only proxy of "innovation". Ignoring of course the earlier point of security products and innovation, which is a much larger statistical sample. While I still contend that your proxy is a statistically insignificant sampling. Why not look at the trend over the yearly distribution of prizes? Perhaps because one cannot find a trend? Why pick summation of 25 years as the data point? If you look were to look at the last 10 years of your sampling, you would find that the percentage of US awards is actually decreasing compared to the percentage of US awards in the last quarter century. One could therefore easily argue that the US has peaked out and is in decline; which is consistent with the other data that I've seen that shows US children continuing to show more poorly in science and math when compared with other western countries. Surely you are not going argue that it's coincidental that (my estimate) 95+% of Nobels in the sciences go to countries with Western cultures? You think this is statistical accident? I'll wager that there is a pretty good correlation between access to higher education and nobel physics prizes. I wasn't surprised that Somalia and Afghanistan don't have any Nobel prizes in Physics for example. But going beyond access to higher education and making global claims about a specific country being more "innovative", or is a reasonable proxy for "innovation" is not very credible IMO. The fact that a country can garner so many Nobels IS indicative of its scientific prowess. In part. It could also be indicative of a country's propensity to nominate itself. The more nominations are made, the greater the chances of receiving an award. We could also examine the validity/accuracy of the Nobel prize process. Arafat and Kissinger received Nobel Peace Prizes [The North Vietnamese counterpart to Kissinger also was awarded a Peace Prize, but he had the decency to not accept it.] I've got your link bookmarked; I haven't gone through it yet. If your point is that the Reagan administration argued voodoo economics, tell me something I didn't know. It's not voodoo economics. Just plain and simple lying about the budget and expenditures. Neocon missed it, btw. You can assume that the numbers in the table are accurate numbers. jttmab