Bullshit.
It was the Blair/Brown government that signed the treaty, and if they had bent over any further to gratify Blair's wish to be seen as loyal lapdogs, they'd have won a Nobel for limbo dancing.
The shower we have now aren't much better, but at least they're trying.
owing to the serial incompetence of British managements
Not forgetting, of course, the wonderful job the British Trades Union movement did in making a success of car manufacturing in the UK.
Yes - the management were crap, but it seems that only by building new plants and making sure the workforce understood that striking every couple of months was counterproductive could Honda, Toyota, Nissan and to an extent Ford and GM make UK production competitive.
Ah, but without the ideal of minimal government, there is no yardstick with which to measure how bad the excess of government is - realism tells us that a certain amount of government is a necessary evil, while socialism tries to convince us that too much government is good for us and that nanny knows best.
I prefer the honesty of the position that all government is bad, but that some is necessary to the arrogance of those who would govern my every move for my own good.
If you believe that the CIA needed to "counter fiascos such as the Bay of Pigs" in 1953, then you must be even more retarded than the average Zionist stooge.
I think you'll find the Bay of Pigs was almost a decade later, but then that's history for you - always throwing goddamned timelines at your dumbass theories.
Even in the most "liberal" cities Khameini won 2/3rds of the seats.
That's because none of the liberal candidates were standing in the elections - there was a straight choice between Khameni's ultra-conservatives, and Ahmedinejad's slightly less nutty brand of conservatism.
It's analogous to having the choice between David Duke or Rick Santorum in the US, or Kach vs Likud in Israel.
Anyway - it's Purim in a couple of days, so I'd expect some sort of evil to flourish once more.
Shhh!
Quoting Thoreau marks you out as a dangerous libertarian type, and will result in you being flagged as an extremist by those who should know better!
Er - because they had no need or desire for it?
Besides, some African societies did have things like bronze casting, gold mining, the building of large and complicated structures - they just didn't survive long after Whitey came along looking for slaves / land / gold / whatever.
All knowledge that is actually achievable begins with "How", not "Why".
Once "Why" enters the question, the existence of a sentient entity is presupposed in the answer.
That's why "why" questions tend to lead to deities or other nonsense.
I may be biased here - I first came across operator overloading a good decade and a half ago, when C++ was used in the first iterations of object-oriented databases.
It was a proper mess back then, and I fear it still is - if I want the sort of behaviour you wish to enforce, then Scala would be my language of choice - I still view C++ as C with object wrappings, templates and lots of stuff that gets in the way of efficient code.
I'm one of those who detests operator overloading, for the simple reason that if you want a new operator behaviour, then you should define a new operator - it makes code easier to read and maintain, and avoids confusion.
But that's just my experience - you may differ.
Good laws aren't based on beliefs - or more to the point they have a justification that lies outside any belief system.
Murder is against the law because if it was not, it would be an acceptable solution to lots of life's problems, and would leave a lot of people significantly worse off either materially or emotionally.
If the only justification for a law is a belief system, then that law is automatically bad for those who do not subscribe to that belief system.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
