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From a Newsweek article in 1995:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

[via Reddit]

Comments

  1. 1

    Halliburton and BJ Services (an appropriate name) are run by a bunch of sociopaths.

    http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2.....90863.html

    Two Oil-Field Companies Acknowledge Fracking With Diesel

    By MIKE SORAGHAN of Greenwire
    Published: February 19, 2010
    Two of the world’s largest oil-field services companies have acknowledged to Congress that they used diesel in hydraulic fracturing after telling federal regulators they would stop injecting the fuel near underground water supplies.

  6. 6

    New Obam-Mao testimony to Mediocrity!!!!!
    From the DEMOCRAT-leaning Rassmussen Poll. Rasmussen had Coakley-Brown a Toss-up…and Brown (R) wins by 5.

    Sunday, February 21, 2010

    The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 22% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. That is the lowest level of strong approval yet recorded for this President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19. The Approval Index has been lower only on one day during Barack Obama’s thirteen months in office. The previous low came on December 22 as the Senate was preparing to approve its version of the proposed health care legislation. The current lows come as the President is once again focusing attention on the health care legislation.

    Currently, 39% of voters nationwide favor the health care plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. Fifty-eight percent (58%) are opposed. Only 35% believe Congress should pass health care reform before the upcoming midterm elections anyway. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Congress should wait until voters select new congressional representatives in November

  7. 7

    @4: Though usually with other men, in an awkward and/or fetishistic way, making the usual adultery of @2 unusual. At least the slimy old on young aspect is consistent with the conservative way.

  8. 8

    The more Obam-Mao, his Henchmen and the Atheist Progressives mock and ridicule Tea Partiers…the worse the polls get.
    Progressivism is a mental illness.
    Incapable of recognizing any negative responses about the Marxist Agenda.

    Watch this Health Care thing.
    If it is rammed thru, it will be overturned when Republicans take control…BY UN-FUNDING IT! It may pass…but it will never get started.

  9. 9

    SurveyUSA sampling of job approval ratings found:

    Obama — 49 percent favorable; 47 percent unfavorable.

    Murray — 43/50.

    Cantwell — 46/45.

    Gregoire — 36/59.

    The poll of 600 adults was taken Feb. 12-14. The margin of error was 4 percent.

    The Democrats are doin’ great with all that “Progressive” nonsense!

  11. 11

    Early adopters usually miss the point of new technologies (i.e., they blow their chance to make zillions).

  12. 12

    Geroge Will said it well on ABC This Week..

    “Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

  13. 13

    @12 Well, Bush was totally wrong about Social Security, wasn’t he? Where would America’s elderly be if Bush had invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market in 2007? Maybe he knew all that mortgage paper was bad and the whole scheme was to force Social Security pensioners to bail out his banker buddies.

  14. 14

    @12 Did George Will mention how many people with health insurance were medically bankrupted last year?

  15. 15

    @12 Did the radicals Bush appointed to SCOTUS serve democracy well by giving corporations a free hand to influence political campaigns?

  16. 16

    @12 Does George Will think Americans would be better off if General Motors had gone under and another 2 million workers were unemployed?

  17. 17

    @ 15

    The moment George Will made reference to the Democratic Party’s, “lockstep movement,” he lost all credibility whatsoever.

  19. 19

    I hoard cash and don’t spend a dime in the consumer economy because I don’t trust the Republicans who say they want to abrogate the social security and pension promises that were made to me.

    If everyone saved 50% of their after-tax income like I do (most of what I do spend goes for health care), the economy would collapse and there’d be so much idle capital sloshing around that investments would pay nothing.

  20. 20

    MSNBC reports that Joseph Stack, who crashed his Piper PA-28 plane into an IRS building on Thursday, had ties to rightwing anti-tax groups.

    The same article quotes the president of the IRS workers’ union: “This incident brings to light an ongoing concern that the atmosphere in our nation debases and denigrates the work of federal employees and contributes to such actions.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35....._finance//

    “Atmosphere,” of course, refers to the anti-government rhetoric of rightwing extremists.

  21. 21

    Mr. Stack wasn’t too poor to pay taxes. A quick check of online used aircraft listings indicates typical asking prices for 10-year-old PA-28s are in the 140K’s. If he could drop that kind of money on a joyride, he could afford to pay the same taxes the rest of us have to. This terrorist attack was motivated by ideology, not financial pressures.

  23. 23

    Puddy–
    The KLOWNS are wandering thru the fog of Obam-Mao the messiah. They will talk about anything but this–

    Sunday, February 21, 2010

    The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 22% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. That is the lowest level of strong approval yet recorded for this President.
    Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19. The Approval Index has been lower only on one day during Barack Obama’s thirteen months in office. The previous low came on December 22 as the Senate was preparing to approve its version of the proposed health care legislation. The current lows come as the President is once again focusing attention on the health care legislation.

    Currently, 39% of voters nationwide favor the health care plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. Fifty-eight percent (58%) are opposed. Only 35% believe Congress should pass health care reform before the upcoming midterm elections anyway. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Congress should wait until voters select new congressional representatives in November. If the proposed health care plan becomes law, 78% of voters expect it will cost more than projected

  24. 24

    Thanks for information about Everson, although your Heavy SIGHHHHHS were too heavy to lift.

    Wiki shows that Rehnquist shared my concerns about the one-and-one-half decade divide between Jefferson’s 1802 letter to Danbury and the drafting of the Bill of Rights, in which Jefferson didn’t participate.

    Some, including former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, have criticized Everson for its reliance on quotations and views from Thomas Jefferson, who had little to do with the framing of the U.S. Constitution or its Bill of Rights … It has been argued that [KKK Hugo] Black interpreted the Establishment Clause to require a “separation of church and state” in order to limit public funds to parochial schools.[2] Supporters of this theory allege that the phrase itself has an anti-Catholic history,[3] and that legal reasoning in Everson was dubious.[4] Indeed, “[s]ome scholars argue that, even if the Everson court’s use of the ‘wall of separation’ metaphor does reflect Jefferson’s views, those views did not at all represent those of the individuals actually responsible for drafting and ratifying the First Amendment.”[5][6][7]

    Here are notes 2-7:

    #2 PHILIP HAMBURGER, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE (Harvard University Press 2002).

    #3 Hamburger, id.

    #4 HARVARD LAW SCHOOL FORUM, PUBLIC AID TO PAROCHIAL EDUCATION 10-11 (1951); GERALD T. DUNNE, HUGO BLACK AND THE JUDICIAL REVOLUTION 266 (Simon & Schuster 1977).

    #5 Patrick M. Garry, The Myth of Separation: America’s Historical Experience with Church and State, 33 Hofstra L. Rev. 475, 498 (2004) [1]

    #6 Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State 109, 162 (2002) (contending that at the time Jefferson expressed such views, they were not “widely published or even noticed”).

    #7 Michael A. Paulsen, Religion, Equality, and the Constitution: An Equal Protection Approach to Establishment Clause Adjudication, 61 Notre Dame L. Rev. 311, 317 (1986) (“The original intention behind the establishment clause…seems fairly clearly to have been to forbid establishment of a national religion and to prevent federal interference with a state’s choice of whether or not to have an official state religion.”).

    I assume from the patronizing and rather parental tone of your discussion that you are familiar with the cited sources, those that support your opinions and those that don’t. Also note that Black’s own vehement opinions are subjected to the test of original intent: Was he, perhaps, working from the anti-Catholic bigotry of his years in the Klan?

    As Darryl often does, let’s review: Your arguments, despite being shrill or strident, are strong. The Tripoli Treaty is solid. (Years ago I read Stanley Elkins’ Age of Federalism about the 1789-1801 period, but I spaced the 1796-1797 Treaty. You took me by surprise. You used the Treaty to entrap a couple of my brothers here. Apparently they were also taken by surprise.)

    But your previous condition of certitude about Jefferson’s 1802 letter doesn’t carry the weight you pile on it. A little bit of Wiki shows that school’s not out on this. Let’s spend some time with the pro-and-con sources, cited above, and continue our conversation.

    Everson, by the way, was an incorporation case. Something to keep in mind while doing review — assuming again that you’re totally familiar with cited sources and others — or research.

  25. 25

    For about a generation, the Western world has been coping with a politicized attack on science by the very people who should have been guarding its integrity. …

    Here, the betrayers of science have found that public opinion is easily manipulated, especially with press cooperation. The principles that, starting in the 17th century, turned science into one of the great human enterprises can be subverted. …

    Today, many scientists and opinion leaders think that if an elite consensus in favor of certain “policies” can be generated, the underlying science must be right. The corrupt system of “peer review” will reliably exclude dissenters, and if the naysayers continue making themselves heard they will be called denialists, tools of right-wing talk radio, etc.

    This is where climate science has been heading. It is also where other major fields of science stand today—at the mercy of a contrived consensus. “Climate change” has attracted major attention not because its methods of subversion are much different from now-standard practice, but because literally trillions of dollars are at stake.

    Those who promoted the bogus certainties of global warming not only sought to upend a whole way of life but came close to doing so. They have been aided by hundreds of well-known politicians, writers, reporters, and politicized scientists. Among politicians, Al Gore is only the best known. In the last category, James Hansen and Michael Mann are among the major U.S. culprits. …

    Government funding has been the major subversive force. … journals feel obliged to keep up a drumbeat of articles that sustain the mood of crisis surrounding a given issue. Climate change is the leading illustration today … The scientists who promote these self-serving scares are employed by government agencies or by universities. The latter are under constant pressure to attract grants …

    The government has now spent about $25 billion of our money in promoting climate scares. Oil companies have been reduced, pathetically, to telling us how “green” they are. By the way, climate change used to be called global warming. But the globe has not warmed over the past decade, even by the warmists’ inflated numbers. So they relabeled it, and climate “change” will be confirmed by whatever happens. …

    – via Tom Bethell

  26. 26

    [Karl Popper] made two key points. First, a theory must include the falsifiability principle. It must be susceptible to empirical tests and, if it fails to meet them, be scrapped. …

    Popper argued that prima facie evidence of a bogus theory was the practice of altering or enlarging it, by its authors, to accommodate new evidence since its original formulation. This, he argued, had happened in the case of Marxism and, still more, Freudianism. Scientific theories, he argued, must be very precise and scientific to be of any use. Marxism and Freudianism were just portmanteau notions into which virtually any kind of phenomena could be made to fit. Hence Marxism led to political and economic disaster areas like the Soviet Union, and Freudianism to a stupendous waste of time and money.

    It is a pity Popper did not live to see that Global Warming fit perfectly into his model of a pseudo-theory. It is vaguely and imprecisely formulated. It fails the falsifiability test, because all new evidence is made to fit by enlarging the theory. …

    GLOBAL WARMING NOW HAS a powerful, worldwide institutional substructure. If a media outlet has an environment correspondent, or a university a Department of Climate Studies, or a government a Ministry of Global Warming, those involved are certain to be not just believers but fanatical propagandists for the cause. Their livelihood depends on it.- via Paul Johnson

  27. 27

    Liberals at the dawn of the Progressive era believed that the traditional American system of checks and balances–with its mechanisms of indirect democracy, and its dispersion of power among state and federal governments and between Congress and the president–led to corrupt, inefficient, and unaccountable government that was unsuited to the social and economic challenges of post–Civil War industrial society. …

    These alterations changed the “living” Constitution, Wilson later argued, for “the underlying understandings of a constitutional system are modified from age to age by changes of life and circumstance and corresponding alterations of opinion.” The contemporary Constitution, properly understood, should centralize power in national administrative institutions under the control of an agenda-setting president who alone, in virtue of his national election, embodied the national interest. …

    Liberals approved or tolerated the theories of presidential power on which [Lincoln’s and FDR’s wartime] acts rested, because that power had been used to preserve and extend liberty and equality.

    They continued to approve when … [Truman] without congressional authorization or consultation, he dispatched American troops to defend South Korea from North Korean attack and announced his intention to send four divisions (about 100,000 men) to a NATO force in Europe.

    -via Jack Goldsmith, TNR, current issue

    Excellent article about the steroid presidency. Read the rest.

    Rabbit implies that the unconstitutional hyperpresidency was built by Republicans since 1969, but Goldsmith sets the record straight. It’s part of the progressive project. Liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger hailed hyperpower when Democrats FDR and HST (Hunter S. Thompson?) were doing it against the objections of Robert Taft, but that was deplored as an imperial presidency when Republicans threw presidential power right back at you.

    Same old Democrat hypocrisy, in other words. Different day.

  28. 28

    It’s part of the progressive project.

    No progressive today would defend the internment of Japanese-Americans unlike Michelle Malkin.

    And prehaps the befuddled HNMT depending on which side of the “progessive project” bed he wakes up on?

  29. 29

    Read Goldsmith’s article, little sister. Nothing about FDR’s Executive Order 9066 in it.

    Read Garry Wills’ book Bomb Power, reviewed by Goldsmith at TNR. Nothing about FDR’s Executive Order 9066 in it.

    So your spitball at Ms. Malkin comes out of left field, as usual.

    More apropos than Malkin, who isn’t apropos to Goldsmith or Wills, is J. Edgar Hoover. Since you brought up the abrogation of the rights of American citizens by a liberal progressive imperial president, recall that J. Edgar tried to talk him out of it. Hoover, maligned and slimed by the left, tried to defend a racial minority against progressive tyranny.

  32. 32

    @12 Did the radicals Bush appointed to SCOTUS serve democracy well by giving corporations a free hand to influence political campaigns?

    Whatamoron… Kelo decision was from Bush appointments?

    Whatamoron!

  33. 33

    Stack’s writings suggest – AP

    had ties to rightwing anti-tax groups. – Dumb Bunny

    Where Dumb Bunny? It’s not there. Just speculation. More crap from the libtardo slobbering run AP. Rush Limbaugh was right on Friday. He called the AP would make this reference. And……… they did.

  34. 34

    29 – Merely reaching back to the days of yore when an hysterical, marginalized, pseudo-pundit feverishly proclaimed internment as a “progressive project”. Could have been you, could have been someone else…

    the abrogation of the rights of American citizens by a liberal progressive imperial president,

    Most likely it was… Sorry feverish one, it is right wing fools like Malkin who are defending the indefensible today..

  35. 35

    gorebasm–
    Here is the latest in the Progressive incompetence & ideology—UNCOVERED!

    The paper – entitled “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change” – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

    In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

    “One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”

  36. 36

    OBAM-MAO in the shitter 2 days in a row!
    That attack the Tea Partiers is really working out well for the dead Progressives–

    Monday, February 22, 2010

    The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 22% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. That matches yesterday’s result as the lowest level of strong approval yet recorded for this President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19.

    The only day that Barack Obama’s Approval Index ratings were lower than today was last December 22. Like today, that came at a time when the President was making a strong push for his proposed health care legislation. Most voters have consistently opposed that plan.

  37. 37

    Remember, OBAM-MAO was at +32 post-inauguration. Seems like a country thrilled with this KLOWN has finally connected the dots and concluded he is a bullshitter, a liar and a far-left ideologue.
    Watch Obam-Mao run to the center….away from you KLOWNS, to save his own “legacy”.

    The funny thing about this Health Care debate is that it is all much ado about nothing.
    You KLOWNS may see it get passed, but it won’t be effective for a few years. In the meantime, Republicans will be voted in and simply not fund it. So you KLOWNS got all lathered up and made all this fuss and lost power for….NOTHING!
    Idiots.

  38. 38

    Check this out re: BI-PARTISAN Governor’s Think Tank on how to balance the Budget–

    The governors’ think tank, its Center for Best Practices, has drafted a 15-page report detailing how they can go about “redesigning state government for the new normal.” During one of the closed sessions, Republican Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Democrat Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, both from Midwest states that have felt the brunt of the auto-industry collapse, will lead a discussion of the steps that will be required.

    Scheppach told me that the realization is beginning to spread that this is no ordinary downturn and there will be no quick bounce-back. Therefore, “the states will have to downsize permanently,” he said. As the Center for Best Practices put it, this means going beyond “the traditional tools of budget cutting: targeted and across-the-board program cuts, reductions to local aid, layoffs, benefit cuts, furloughs and salary reductions.”

    Some states already are selling assets, including toll roads and office buildings. They are consolidating and coordinating services and combining agencies.

    Just like I’ve been Saying–
    Salary & Benefit Cuts for State Workers.
    20% reduction in Benefits and Paid Time-off with Layoffs resulting from less time-off and other efficiencies and Program Cuts PLUS 10% across the Board Salary Cuts.

    There is a good BILLION plus!
    Had this been done 5 years ago by “fiscal conservative” Gregoire, we wouldn’t be in this fiscal dilemma.

  39. 39

    @38: Another great idea…..moron. In a time of job losses and failure of private industry…..we should cut jobs in the state.

    Of course, this also fails to take into account that those states are losing population and industrial base ….while Washington is growing.

    Are we supposed to cut our teachers out and decrease education…the only thing that is keeping us competitive in the world market?

    Wow, you are so simple minded and shallow….do you have any higher learning functions?

    Thanks for demonstrating how right wing fools have no new ideas, can’t understand anything complex and make inappropriate and inaccurate analogies.

    You are the poster child for ignorance and stupidity on the right ….keep up the good work!

  40. 40

    My goodness! It looks like the KLOWN has the batshit crazy firing on all cylinders this morning.

  41. 41

    proclaimed internment as a ‘progressive project’

    Reminds me of me. At least we finally agree on something: the concentration-camp imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans was ordered by your boy. Although Democrat media try to absolve FDR of responsibility for internment by shifting the blame to our racist nation, the inconvenient truth about FDR is the truth.

    This is a good time to remind you of another progressive project, Ex Parte Quirin. “President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a secret military tribunal on July 2, 1942 which sentenced the eight men to death.” Here’s the rest of the story. Note that six of eight defendants went from death sentence to death in about one month. Those were the days when liberals really knew how to get things done.

    Now is also a good time to note the passing of Giuseppe Zangara. Zangara shot at FDR on 15 February 1933. Missed Roosevelt, hit Cermak. Zangara was sparked to death by Old Sparky on 20 March 1933.

    Malkin’s internment book, I think, made the case that there was a strong fifth column in Hawaii that probably needed to be put away for the duration. You clearly have a strong Malkin jones on, so let me know if I got that wrong.

    Bottom line: Thanks to liberal radical left-wing FDR, many good Americans and a few bad ones got interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, a fate almost worse than death.

  42. 42

    Those of us with long memories for useless information, Mr. C, remember the Kenyatta years. Perhaps these are the years of Obamao-mao.

  43. 43

    Rabbit, our own beloved fat man, ran his mouth about Fat Man being a semi-demi-quasi dud that had not been Trinity tested.

    Have heard or read there was no test of the plutonium-239 device because there was only one device, Fat Man. Have heard that the detonations of Little Boy and Fat Man expended our arsenal. That’s why no demonstration detonations were possible. Our monopoly had gone up in smoke and fallout.

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