= = = I strongly suspect it's the most-widely-travelled wheeled vehicle on earth actually :) = = =

I believe Rolls Royce has some demo vehicles that have been on the road since the aughts (the 19-aughts that is, not the 20-aughts) and have visited more countries than all US Presidents combined ;-)

sPh

Unfortunate when the thieves cut your hand off to get the phone though.

sPh

= = = Bitcoin is regulated. It is regulated by the users and the protocol rather than a central authority than can be corrupted or one in which sociopaths naturally gravitate to. = = =

Yeah, as I noted that system ("regulated by the users") was tried from 1500-1880. It didn't work so well, for exactly the reasons now afflicting Bitcoin.

sPh

Interesting that this is drawing so much scrutiny because it is a business. Universities - including private universities - in large cities do this all the time. I can think of three large private schools in urban areas where the "campus police" are actually PD deputies and patrol the area around the campus as city police officers as well as patrolling the campus itself. No one complains because it is a traditional "school" doing this, even though some of the large private universities are pretty big money machines.

sPh

I believe it was the Medici family which first documented the need for bank regulation in the 1500s, although it is possible that other civilizations with extensive merchant activity may have realized that earlier but not left records. Bank and banking system failures in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s led all nations with large merchant, industrial, and financial economies to pass and implement banking regulation, oversight, and auditing requirements.

Bitcoin? "Freedom!"

sPh

Actually the environments where computer programming was developed had plenty of men - they just considered the activity too mundane and low-level for their capabilities and put "the girls" (many of whom had MAs in math) on that task.

sPh

So... how was it that women's brains were "wired" for programming from 1940 to 1985 [1], but suddenly around 1990 they stopped being interested in "coding" and "IT"?

sPh

[1] From 1940-1950 approximately 100% of programmers were women; from 1950-1980 the percentage was still very high and probably a majority. 1984 was the peak year for women graduating with engineering degrees since WWII and a large percentage of those women took CS degrees.

= = = Yeah, except that that is the reason that the USA and Iran have had such shitty relations for all that time. = = =

1953 coup and the subsequent torture chambers just flushed down the memory hole, eh?

= = = I am getting pretty tired of reading asserions like "we can't even launch a damn website". What they were trying to launch was not a Website but a very complex, probably too complex, brokerage-type system to mate people with myriad insurance options. -= = =

Megadittos, as a certain demographic likes to say. healthcare.gov was in essence one of the largest EDI projects of all time, with all the transactions going live on the same day rather than phased in. And we all know how much the current generation of Web n.x people loves to work on EDI code. They just run to sign on for EDI projects the way lemmings run to embrace Disney film crews.

Very, very complex project. Certainly some senior management failures all the way to the Oval Office, and probably (as is often the case) a portion of those failures due to arrogance and failure to listen. But at the same time, not working too badly given the size, scope, and hard deadlines, and apparently getting better day-by-day as anyone with megaproject experience would expect.

sPh

= = = On the contrary, they know exactly how an amoral, win-at-any-cost, use-any-means-necessary-to-attain-absolute-political-power cunt like Pelosi works. = = =

Just thought we should memorialize that as the deep, thoughtful, centrist political analysis of the Anonymous Coward at 45521181.

sPh

There is a also a myth that hospitals and hospital emergency rooms are required to provide care for medical conditions. They aren't - they are only required to stabilize and provide palliative care to any patient who arrives at their doors. Colon cancer and no insurance? The ER will give you a diagnosis and some painkillers, then on your way.

sPh

= = = Boehner cannot be Speaker without the Tea Party (libertarian) members of his caucus. = = =

Technically the Speaker of the House serves the entire House, Congress, and Nation, not just his personal political party; the House Majority Leader serves the majority political party. The Speakership hasn't operated that way since before the Civil War, but Boehner always has the option of working with the Minority Leader to obtain a majority of votes to pass anything that truly needs to be passed. Which is what he did with the debt ceiling, actually, once the inability of certain members of his own caucus to count became apparent.

sPh

= = = One of his first moves was to let partisan Nancy Pelosi take the lead = = =

It is always easy to spot the breitbart.com fans in the office:

1) They all subscribe to the "Nancy Pelosi as ultimate evil librul WITCH" theory - despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat. Which is to say, a bit to the left of the DLC/Third Way, a bit more to the left of the neoliberals: just about at the median of US voters.

2) They have no understanding of how a legislature that intends to endure for many years and which uses parliamentary rules of procedure, actually works

3) They have no understanding of what the Speaker of the House's job actually is.

sPh

Pelosi is, to be sure, a very good political manager (and therefore a very effective Speaker of the House). Perhaps that is what makes her unforgivable compared to Boehner and - particularly - Cruz.

No, you are specifically claiming (1) that this "uncertainty" about Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons was a justification for the United States to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and (2) that that was the reason that the Bush/Cheney did in fact order the invasion of Iraq. #1 is false under international law and just about every system of nation-state interaction since the Babylonian Empire [1], and #2 was very clearly false even at the time and as the author indicates wasn't believed in any way shape or form by the Bush Administration itself.

You're also conveniently leaving out PNAC and the entire "stir the beehive" theory, of which one Richard Cheney was a leading proponent in the 1995-2000 time frame. And you are gliding right by the false intelligence that Cheney and Bolton worked very hard to introduce into the system. It doesn't matter a whit what Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator or anyone else since the actual facts on the ground in Iraq (whether true or deceptive) /were never a factor in the decision to invade/.

sPh

[1] So given that it was reported this week that a certain nation is not only bankrolling Pakistan's nuclear weapon development but has one on order for themselves, is the US now justified in invading that nation? Why or why not?

Yeah, no. You are reciting the story that Cheney's handlers developed and pushed into the Washington DC media when things really started to go bad in Iraq (around 2005). And Cheney is very, very good at that kind of thing (managing his image and stroking the egos of DC "thought leaders"). The story was then revised and expanded during the trial of traitor Irving Libby (I'm surprised you haven't worked the name Armitage into your hard right fantasy narrative) and re-pushed very hard during 2008 and 2009 in an attempt to set the narrative and pre-write the history.

Here's what a reporter who spent five years researching the Bush/Cheney Administration had to say:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/07/why-did-we-go-to-war-in-iraq-an-interview-with-peter-baker/
EK: But it wasn’t hijacked by Iraq. The Bush administration chose that war. And, to be honest, that’s what I read the book to understand. I’ve never felt like I understood the reason the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. Once that decision was made, I feel like I can track the arguments for and against it. But the fundamental choice to make that the project is a mystery to me. Now that you’ve written the book, do you feel like you understand it?

PB: I have a better understanding, but I think it’s one of these questions that will be revisited and re-debated for decades to come. My guess is 20 years from now we’ll still be seeing more books on that question. It is the essence of this presidency: Why go to war in Iraq? Some mention Bush’s father. Some mention Cheney’s sense of unfinished business in the Gulf War. There’s the false intelligence.

And overlaying all that is what it felt like in that moment. They were operating in an atmosphere of fear and anger and uncertainty. They were seeing these threat reports every day -- including episodes we didn’t even know about, like the botulism scare. When they come into office, they had thought, at the time, that Iraq was a top threat. Then once 9/11 happens it sort of removes all constraints that they might have had prior to that in their interest and inclination to use force. There’s a quote in the book from a senior administration official who was really involved in the decision to invade Iraq and who regrets it now who says we went into Iraq because Afghanistan was so easy. We needed someone harder to beat; 9/11 felt like such a signal event that it required action and response beyond simply toppling the Taliban.

EK: That quote is amazing. But it sounds like he also doesn’t know why they went into Iraq. And he was there! That’s less an explanation of the policy than of the psychology. And that’s something the book details really well. I think people can remember what it felt like to be scared after 9/11. But the amount of fear there is in the White House and the degree to which fear of a worse attack drives the decisions after 9/11 -- it’s a really psychologically unusual administration.

PB: That’s absolutely right. Every day they receive a briefing telling them 100 ways bad guys around the world are trying to kill Americans, Some are real, and some are fanciful. But in that moment the intelligence agencies, having missed the dots on 9/11, begin throwing everything they have at the White House.

Cheney has this history in continuity-of-government issues. He has for years contemplated the notion of an apocalyptic attack on the United States -- 9/11 convinces him his fears are real. Nineteen guys with box cutters, to him, are only a scratch on the surface compared to what could have happened. And that makes a lot of things seem more reasonable. Eventually, Frances Townsend becomes head of the Homeland Security Advisor and begins taking some of these threats out of the briefings because she felt it was so skewed towards danger and it was warping everyone’s mindset to be so exposed to every piece of raw data like that.

Lots more at that link.

sPh