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The G.O.P. is the party of stupid

The G.O.P. even introduced the term

http://thehill.com/video/in-th...

it's a good strategy: identify something rich people need and want, then wrangle the idiots with fearmongering into supporting that agenda, even if it hurts the poor idiots. they're idiots, they can't even understand they're hurting themselves. so you have people without adequate healthcare for example, screaming low iq fears about obamacare

this doesn't mean there are no intelligent conservative people, they do exist. stupid liberals also exist

but it's just that if you meet a stupid person, they are more likely to be a conservative, because their simplistic dimwitted way of thinking about the world matches conservative ideology more closely

http://www.livescience.com/181...

Tours (and for that matter, the Siege of Vienna) may have saved Western Civilization but Greece was the birthplace of it. We can never say how the Greek cities would have fared as Persian client states but it seems highly unlikely that history would have unfolded as it did if the Greeks hadn't retained their Independence. If you accept Greece as the cradle of Western Civilization then it follows that the Greco-Persian wars were decisive. In that instance it's just a matter of picking the turning point, and Salamis is the best contender. The better known battles of Marathon and Thermopylae weren't turning points, the former bought a ten year reprieve and the latter was a delaying action turned into noble and doomed last stand.

Salamis was also a naval engagement, which may lead to some bias on my part, though the West has traditionally excelled at sea, so..... :)

Lead as a pollutant? Maybe. But that was yesterday's EPA. Today's calls CO2 one. I call EPA unrestrained, unscientific extremists. The fusion of climate science with leftist ideology is a great tragedy of the last 30 years. The end of life on earth will come when tectonics have ceased, volcanism slows to nothing, and CO2 is gradually bound to carbonates in the oceans. Photosynthesis becomes impossible, severing the food chain. About 10^9 years. Enjoy CO2 while we have it.

1. putzing around in a top notch Yacht in paradise is its own reward. the search for the Musashi was just a side part time effort

2. allen is from the west coast, of a certain age. so the battle in the Pacific looms large in his upbringing, and he is likewise motivated. your agenda is not his agenda, nor is your agenda magically better than his. in fact, Atlantis is just a myth with a number of sort-of maybe leads. not something you can actually go look for in a specific small area like the Sibuyan Sea

3. now that he has found Musashi, i hopes he keeps playing around in Southeast Asia, screw the Mediterranean, i wouldn't go, boring. Sulawesi sounds fun, i hope he has security though from pirates. not that his proclivities are my proclivities but the simple point is they aren't yours either. he can do whatever the fuck he wants, and nobody needs some random asshole saying their agenda is superior and must be followed. who the fuck are you?

but along your line of interests, maybe he will head here, it's not far from the Philippines, i would:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

The Iconians did. ;)

If depends on how you define "massive"; Salamis had more ships than Leyte Gulf and was significantly more important to Western history. In fact, it was arguably the most important battle in Western history, but that's a different discussion. :)

Leyte Gulf usually wins the biggest title on the basis of personnel involved and sheer geographical scope, neither of which have a historical analogue.

Yeah, you wouldn't want EPA regulations made from 'settled science' with full transparency. That wouldn't be in these activist's style. Obama went rogue long ago.

This is commonly repeated but it's a false assertion. The Two-Ocean Navy Act was passed in 1940 and explicitly recognized the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier.

Yamato was deployed at Midway. She was part of the body of surface combatants (with one light carrier as escort) kept out of range for the surface action that Spruance wisely declined to permit. The deployment at Midway was a Rube Goldberg contraption that personifies everything that was wrong with IJN thinking in WW2; multiple formations scattered too far apart for mutual support and a requirement that the enemy do what you expect for victory to occur.

Neither ship was used at Guadalcanal for the same reason that the old American battleships weren't used: Neither side had sufficient tanker assets in theater to keep the old battle-wagons fueled. The USN deployed new design battleships (USS South Dakota, North Carolina, and Washington) but kept the Pearl Harbor survivors on the West Coast. The IJN used two older battle cruisers (Kirishima and Fuso) that weren't as fuel hungry as their bigger/newer cousins.

The biggest flaw with the IJN was their inferior fire control technology. This is evidenced both in surface actions (Samar being the best case study) and in the anti-aircraft role. The USN had radar directed fire control in 1942, for both surface targets and aircraft. The Japanese paid an extremely heavy price when attacking our ships with aircraft, the two carrier battles in the Guadalcanal campaign (Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz) were Pyrrhic tactical victories at best, with most of the Japanese aircraft losses coming from AA fire.

Straw man; better one! Bonus points for absolutism.

When you've finished with Atlas Shrugged do yourself a favor and Google "compelling state interest", "strict scrutiny", and "case law." If you're going to rail against the system you might as well understand how it works in the real world.

You'll brook no argument from me on civil forfeiture. The reporting requirements are trickier; they were put in place because ongoing criminal enterprises were using cash to launder the proceeds of their ill gotten gains. There's a history there and if you want to drill down deeper into Constitutional Law the reporting requirements pass a strict scrutiny test. The State has a compelling interest in preventing criminals from laundering money and the policy is narrowly tailored. It does not represent a significant burden on or intrusion into your daily life.

I can see the philosophical objection, but in the hierarchy of infringements (real and imagined) on my personal liberty this ranks pretty damned close to the bottom. Such are the tradeoffs you make for being a member of civilization and I doubt that there are many people in the political mainstream (or even within Libertarianism) that think we should make it easier for criminal enterprises to launder money.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.

His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities

Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001

Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...

now you're changing argument. that's an intellectually dishonest effort. you were trying to say the democrats are as bad as republicans. they clearly are not. if al gore was president, we would not have invaded iraq. if romney or mccain had won versus obama, we would have no ACA. that's just two examples out of thousands of major policy differences

so if changing the subject is the best you can do, that's just your low character way of conceding i am correct. you're welcome for the education

btw, the democrats DO suck. but not nearly as bad as the republicans. that's my point. the lesser of two evils (and there is no such thing as ideological perfection in politics, so grow the fuck up if you think you can actually sit around and wait for that). they are NOT the same. if you believe them to be the same, you are merely announcing your ignorance of the topic. almost every day for the last 2 years, republicans tried to repeal obamacare, and the democrats constantly shaking their heads. they are not the same, in many ways, on many crucial policy points

well said

and it's exactly like the antivaccine morons

have them sit down and talk to an old person from when polio was a constant worry, or heck, just look at tombstones in old cemeteries from the 1800s: read the ages of the dead, how many children would routinely die before age 10... sometimes what killed them is listed: pertussis, whooping cough, measles, etc., regularly killed scores of kids every year

there's people with ignorant beliefs created in the bubble that vital modern protections afford them. vital protections that they are so unaware of the need for (out of being stupid and uneducated), they actually believe the protections are the problem

hordes of these stupid loser douchebags, commenting loudly, everywhere