Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

So what's to become of the below avarage? A program of eugenics?

Let them eat cake, is what Timber is implying.

Timber would never say such a thing! Of course not. But there is a wide range of reality between unregulated communism and unregulated capitalism...............or out of control capitalism, as is the present state of affairs in the good ole USA today.

and who didn't see this lovely coming? http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/09/14/patriot/index.html

Many ignorant people in this country still think Bush is doing a good job. That's the irony of a democracy; the citizens could be duped into believing they're safer while our Constitutional Rights are being violated.

One thing that worries me is that the far right has been pushing for more death penalties for crimes involving "terrorism." These are not for crimes like placing bombs, but for contributing to terror organizations, or for "disrupting" terror investigations. Think about it. The far right wants to be able to execute people who send money to relatives in Afghnanistan via a hawalla that is also used by terror members. They also want to be able to execute you for not turning in your neighbors. This is a little frightening, don't you think?

A little? Mexico looks better every day.

As I said on another thread, once I finish the PhD I will probably look for teaching posts in Europe or Canada.

I'd consider Canada too, but with my old dried up skin, I wouldn't survive up there in the winter time.

I'm sorta liking the idea of Canada......enticing in more ways than one

It is evident that Timber has read his Darwin and commentators of Darwin carefully.
Those who have characteristics which enable them to survive longer to get more genes into the next generation are the winners in the long run.

I've read a bit over the years ... some of it I even remember ... like just what "cake" Marie Antoinette suggests in that apocryphal quote to which Infrablue refers. "let them eat cake" was never uttered by M. Antoinette, and actually means something very different from the popular connotation it has acquired since the French Revolution. In 1766, Rousseau wrote, in his Confessions, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", attributing it to an unnamed princess. As at that time Marie was around 10 years old, and more or less cloistered in her native Austria, in the palace of her father the emperor (making her an archduchess, not a princess), she wasn't the source cited. The quote itself refers not to a desert pastry, but a specialty bread. In the context in which it was written, it called for the enforcement of widely ignored laws which required bakers who ran out of plain bread before the end of the market day to sell their costlier specialty breads at the far lower, tightly regulated price of the ordinary staple; the purpose being to prevent bakers from concentrating on more profitable products to the detriment of the poor. Too, the term "cake", in Marie Antoinette's time, referred to the flour and oil mix used to coat ("cake") ovens, pans, and baking sheets to prevent bread or pastry dough from sticking to the utensils. Commonly, the baked residue was brushed off finished product and scraped from utensils, to be set in the alleyways every evening for the poor to scavenge. It is true the statement was attributed to Marie Antoinette, however, the assertion, among many such lies and calumnies directed against the nobility, came from anonymous broadsides, or flyers, distributed specifically to inflame The Mob. Something Marie Antoinette did say is "I know they have come from Paris to demand my head, but I learned from my mother not to fear death, and I shall await it with firmness". Months later, as she mounted the scaffold to surrender her head to the guillotine, she accidently stepped on the foot of the executioner. Her last recorded words were "Monsieur, I ask your pardon; I did not do that on purpose".

But then, that's not the only time intellectual laziness, academic dishonesty, and partisan politics have cheaply libled someone of prominence.

Care to share a couple credible, mainstream, cross-checkable sources for that?

On Ashcroft and the expansion of Patriot
RMN
Guardian
Herald Tribune

One such egregious use of the Patriot Act!!!
In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims they would receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on their winnings.

Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to retrieve the cash, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.

I am interested in the expansion of the Patriot Act that will result in "EXECUTION" of people.

Would Professor Hobibob have a source?

I mean a real source like the New York Times or the Washington Post not

The Guardian( Good lord) or
the Herald Tribune (what's that?)

Yes, it was a positive outcome in the end, but one wonders at using anti-terrorism statutes for such a case.

Professor Hobitbob tells us that he is thinking of going to teach in Canada.

Good Luck!

A friend of mine could only makes ends meet by getting a job at the University of Michigan. He lives in Windsor, right across from Detriot.

Does Hobitbob know what the exchange rate is now?

Sofia:

I am sure that you are aware that the Senate of the United States voted for the Patriot Act, 98-1.

It did not spring completed from the Ashcroft brow.

If, pray God it would never happen, the Muslim crazies would strike us again in the USA, I am sure that the left wing extremists like Molly Ivins and Krugman would excoriate the president for not properly setting up defenses.

The prominent being, of course, quite free of any comparable slanders.

I had the good fortune of doing a wonderful course in primate studies with Birute Galdikas. There is an enormous amount of variation in the ways different species organize themselves in their social units, and in how they interact. Two quick examples... when baboon males of the same troup meet, they give each others' penis a tug. This behavior may or may not have a human corollary within the Marine Corps, I don't know. In another case involving a particular monkey, the males spend the majority of their lives outside of the home territory, hanging with the other guys and getting in fights and doing the 'my dad can beat up your dad' thing. The home territory holds the females and the growing offspring, and they don't let the males in. Except, for a short time each season when the males bulk up and become significantly larger than the females. Then they come in and do the rape and pillage thing until their weight drops, and when the females boot them all out again.

But a universal amongst primate groups is the competition for status, and the perks that attend high status. Once achieved, such status is not readily relinquished, but of course, is frequently contested by others who are compelled by the same urges as the fellow presently on top.

It seems futile to consider or hope that we humans are much different. When we achieve some level of desired dominance, we can bring to bear more than just muscle and bravado to the task of convincing others that they and we are in the proper relationship to each other. We have a bag of cognitive tricks that language and other distinctly human characteristics allow. We, for example, tell stories. We tell stories about how God has chosen us uniquely to be on top. Or we tell stories about how jews are just like rats and so should clearly not be in positions of status. Or, and this is one of my favorites, we tell the story that we landed on top not because our daddy was already there, but because we merit our position.

blatham, Very insightful - as usual. Thx, c.i.