Actually, it's a really great lesson on groupthink. If you listen to even the most *educated* people from both sides of the conflict--the ones who know every detail since the '47 war and before--it is AMAZING how different their story is based on which side they're on. And it's (usually) not that they're wrong, it's just that their vision is so incredibly polarized.

I once listened to a lecture by the director of the Israeli counter-terror institute and then a lecture by a Palestinian Professor from either NYU or Columbia. They talked about the same peace treaties and the same events, but the stories they told and the perspectives they had on those events were *radically* different. Obi Wan Kenobi was right--a great many of the truths we cling to depend a great deal on our own point of view.

Both sides do things that are really uncool, and both sides have things done to them that are really terrible. It makes it easy for both sides to perpetuate their narratives of hate. As long as that happens--as long as there is no real incentive and genuine effort on *both* sides to see the conflict from the other's point of view and to *stop* it--the conflict will continue.

It has continued for fifty years so far.

It's evidence. You expect the FBI to tell them to destroy the evidence?

Do you really want national intelligence agencies to be focusing their efforts on linux spyware?

First, it was by comparison to Voyager. Second, B5 broke a *lot* of ground, but TNG was also quite good, just a very different sort of show. And for its time it was excellent--just not as revolutionary from a sci-fi perspective. (E.g. the broad story arcs of B5, and Stracynski's talent at the best moments). On the Trek side, there was the Wounded, the Measure of a Man, Chain of Command... there were quite a few good episodes in there. One lesson from both, of course, is get a Shakespearean actor in there. Andreas Katsulas and Patrick Stewart did great jobs. But there were also strong casts, especially on the B5 side. (On the TNG side, even Marina Sirtis had one particularly good episode, Face of the Enemy.)

Well, to a businessman, he *does* look like the victim. He's not, but he looks like it, because the FCPA basically makes the company responsible for every bribe one of their employees pays to get something done. This results in many companies greatly curtailing the business they do overseas, especially in countries where bribery is the rule rather than the exception. I'm sure it costs the US billions every year--effectively, a price of morality. As it turns out, most businesses are more concerned about profits--it's very easy, when you're looking at making money, to overlook the broader policy concerns with bribery.

And that's in addition to the "screwed because of what one guy in Britain did"

But... only after you'd finished B5 and TNG, right?

It's a harvest festival. The genocide was incidental.

Actually, it is okay, up to a point. Constitutional Law has rules about what you're allowed to do at a limited public forum. And about what you're allowed to do in a fully public forum, like a sidewalk. Sidewalks are also taxpayer funded resources, but they still enjoy constitutional protection. The same goes for a plaza or public park, like Boston Common. There are limit on free speech that apply even in those places, but the rule isn't a cut-and-dried taxpayer funding issue.

Of course not! The people who "work" for the "CIA" aren't really operatives at all, they're just there to dupe us into thinking the rest of the government isn't clandestine operatives. Actually, the real intelligence arm of the United States Government is the Department of Agriculture. Anyone can do SIGINT work, but what really matters is who controls the milk.

*Cue X-files theme*

Because sneaking behind your boss's back to post on slashdot isn't the same as selling company information to a competitor.

Fundamentalist, categorical thinking is fundamentally and categorically closedminded! =) Seriously, though, the fact is that lots of people will lie in one context to one person, but not in another or to another. Even in courts, the question you look at to determine credibility of a witness is the habit of lying under oath--you can't just bring in evidence willy nilly saying that the witness happened to lie to her friend about her age so she must have been willing to lie about [topic]

Because there is so much more corruption on the federal level than the state level. Oh, wait....

Fair, although the observation has been made about highly destructive hurricanes in the past, and is a result of certain established weather patterns and geography. When those weather patterns change and two years in a row of hurricanes do something which has always been unusual, it's enough to take notice.

The hurricane that came in in the forties was disasterous--a woman swam across the sound and announced long island was sinking. A man went to the post office to return his new barometer, which he though twas defective, and while he was gone his house blew away. The National Weather Service thought the storm wouldn't be any problem because it left Miami relatively unscathed, and then downtown Providence was under water.

It's not the same behavior, albeit similar in many respects. North Carolina is not New York--the coast is a different shape, the weather patterns are different, and the chance of a storm going inland are different. This was New York, where storms are much less likely to turn inland.

North Carolina is not the NE. Hurricanes don't turn inland at NY. Except when they do. Which is almost never.

Even a Cat 1 hurricane that turns inland around NY happens maybe once a century. (Three times, now, two in the last two years.) They generally go up the coast. If that weren't concerning enough, we have the storm surge, together with the threat of rising oceans. It's not we're-all-gonna-die territory. But it's not good, and NY should be spending billions building seawalls capable of holding back the ocean.