themadkat

Yes, I've seen the little Bear and he looks like a fifties throwback. He's cute but also vaguely terrifying. The mistranslation is hilarious - I remember in high-school Spanish us ladies were cautioned about the false phoneme "embarazada," of which the improper use could cause, well, embarassment.

I've seen their bread trucks around town. I laugh every time.

Yeah, we have it on right now. It all seems incredibly speculative.

I suggest Summer Glau for Cheryl Taggart. If anyone doesn't know who she is, she was River in the incredible show Serenity and now has a major role on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. For some bizarre reason I'd love to see Renee O' Connor as Lillian Rearden even though I know her as sweet, spunky Gabrielle - I have this feeling that ROC could pull off sinister and frivolous just perfectly. How about Ioan Grufudd (or however you spell it) for Francisco? And because I'm such a Hugh Jackman fangirl I have to make a plug for him, perhaps as Cuffy Meigs, or perhaps Ellis Wyatt if we want to put him on the side of the angels.

You may be wrong on the first count. From what I understand it is actually men who are more likely to be pro-choice than pro-life by a slim margin. But most men are not nearly as vocal about it on the pro-choice side because they recognize, correctly, that it's not THEIR choice. Most pro-life people I know are actually women. Also I think men are more likely than women to be "agnostic" on the issue since, again, they're not the ones who think about that choice. I'm just now coming out of the time in my life, I believe, where the ability to make that call would have been the most crucial to me. If I were to become pregnant now or in the future I would most likely elect to carry to term, but that was certainly not the case 3 or 4 years ago.

This differs slightly from my understanding of narcissism. I thought that narcissistic personality disorder was simply a near-total focus on oneself and one's personality to the exclusion of nearly anything or anyone else (i.e. it's a focus issue), but that it in no way required high self-esteem or even the faking of it - someone could be constantly self-deprecating and still narcissistic. It really doesn't sound like you had narcissistic personality disorder, it sounds like you were just an insecure teenager who decided to wildly overcompensate.

Yes. They also make it a point to never, never take ideas seriously.

This may be part of the disagreement in perspective, then. To your point, Thales, if someone were to invade America today, regardless of who it is or what their motives are, I would fight them to the death, taking up a rifle on a rooftop if I had to. This is my home and I intend to protect it from any foreign invader, regardless of how "well-intentioned" they are. I suspect many other people, in many nations around the world, would and do make this choice as well. Now, in an extreme dictatorship I might question that logic, but in any country with even a modicum of freedom I do not think it is irrational to repel a military invader at the risk of your own death.

I don't know if it would suit your needs, but check out Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. They are pretty highly regarded. Plus I like to give a plug for my (undergrad) alma-mater.

From what I understand, it is very troop/location dependent.

Heh...well, at least I don't have THAT problem. My IQ is just shy of 190 and thirty seconds or less is not unusual for me, if ya know what I mean. I'm really glad I'm not a guy or I'd be the worst lover EVER. Luckily women just keep goin.

To build on what Maximus said, the problem I have with both Rand and Bowden's arguments on this matter is that they are historically, i.e. factually, incorrect with regards to how Native Americans lived. Especially east of the Mississippi, there were many sedentary and agricultural tribes even AFTER they were decimated by disease, and to suggest that all tribes were like the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains hunting bison from horseback is simply not true. Even west of the Mississippi, many of the tribes on the Pacific Coast had sedentary societies based around aquatic and marine foraging, and in the desert Southwest numerous permanent settlements were built, sometimes right into the cliffside. Many still exist today, vacant of course. I think what this argument needs, in general, is a healthy reexamination of the facts and how people on both sides of the conflicts, both native and European, actually lived and what they actually did. It is not as simple as it is often made out to be on this board. That said, if it were my country, there would be no modern-day reservations and although tribes could own land together if they chose to, for example by forming a corporation, they would be encouraged to integrate with society generally as they'd be a lot better off that way. Preservation of a way of life is not guaranteed to anybody. One other thing - to suggest that Native Americans had no technology or advanced knowledge is ludicrous. Putting the clearly advanced Mayan and Aztec civilizations aside as I believe we're focusing more on tribes found in the modern-day US and Canada, there were many things Native Americans knew that Europeans didn't that could have benefited Europeans if they'd listened. An excellent example is the way the Great Plains were settled and over-farmed, eventually culminating in the monumentally disastrous Dust Bowl (to be fair, government encouragement of rapid settling also caused the Dust Bowl). The tribes knew that the late 1800s, when everyone was rapidly gobbling up the Plains, were a period of above-average rainfall and had warned that the land was, in general, more arid than was currently the case. This turned out to be true and in reality that area is not nearly as good for farming as previously believed. Countless homesteaders were probably foreclosed on and ruined as a result.

You've got it all wrong. Business does not mean meeting other people's needs. Business is about producing a value and then trading that value. You first need to 1) identify what, in your judgment, is a value; 2) create that value, and then lastly 3) convince others that they ought to trade for your value because it would benefit them. None of this is second-handed and businesses that depend solely on the whims and irrational behavior of others are destined only for short-term success. Creating real value means creating OBJECTIVE value, and because these values are objective enough other rational individuals should value them enough to trade with you. Depending on how optional the value you create is (food vs. a Bentley), your market will be larger or smaller, but you as a businessman need to take that into consideration.

I think I see it as an opportunity because I'm not sure what better way there would be to pursue my career goals. Unlike you (based on what you mentioned in my reply to DavidOdden), I do not view my career as a way to make money to achieve my "real" goals. My career is my "real" goal, or at least one of the major ones in my life. I can't make do with just a computer, like you can. I need funding, which is nearly impossible to get outside of an institutional association. I need at least a little bit of lab space, although that's not so much of a major concern unless I start doing some genetics as part of my larger project. I need equipment which, again, easier to get through an institution. But I think the major difference between me and you with regards to wanting to be in academia is that teaching is important to me and I look forward to it, whereas I don't see you mention teaching at all. Certainly if you don't want to teach or want to actively avoid it then academia may not be the best choice, but I am all about the teaching. As for politics and jumping through hoops, there is no guarantee of any more freedom for yourself in a corporation than in academia. I don't know how it works in Germany, but here in the States I have a lot of programmer friends who constantly complain to me how nothing they create while working for a given company belongs to them - in fact, sometimes what they create AFTER they quit belongs to their company, for a period of a few years even. Having worked in a corporation myself for a couple years, a tech company actually, I was constantly fighting with management both over the treatment of my employees (I was a supervisor) and the quality of the product, which I bent over backwards to maintain in the face of their poor planning and corner-cutting. They kept wanting to avoid taking the time to make the product right the first time, not understanding that when the customer gets their product and it's wrong, we just have to do it again anyway, or even if a team further down the line at the company gets it and says they can't work with it because it doesn't meet quality. I kept trying to explain how much time and money is wasted by redoing things, sometimes more than once, and although they claimed to understand it they would never actually allow us to take the time to make it right on the first try, or would allow other departments to undo some of our work. It was maddening. At least the pay was good.

I am going to be a lifelong academic and I consider it both a rational and moral choice.

Some are and some aren't. There were four, and one was recently made to leave the ranks of the trustees. While he was undoubtedly railroaded, I'm not sure I'm sad to see him go as he was probably the least effective dissenter based on some of his other views. My favorite "dissenter" trustee is undoubtedly TJ Rodgers '70, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. I don't suppose it will be long before Dartmouth finds a way to silence him as well.

I cannot see how a pedophile who never touches a child in his life can be considered immoral. He certainly isn't a rights-violator. I think someone in that sorry state of affairs is sick and needs help, unless he does decide to act on his desires in which case then he needs to go to the big house PDQ. To a certain degree I think pedophilia is unchosen, but so are many other personality traits that may make you more prone to committing a crime, for example a violent temper or the absence of empathy (I mean a pathological absence as with sociopaths or psychopaths, where one can't feel empathy even where appropriate or if they wanted to). Nonetheless, whether it is chosen or not is really irrelevant to the act of child rape, which is always a choice and should always be punished when it occurs. I'm really not sure how pedophilia has anything to do with homo/bisexuality, as the latter concerns the activities of two consenting adults whereas the former by definition does not, hence its immorality. But just to clarify my position (which may or may not be the position of other posters here), I don't think sexual orientation is a choice but even if it is, and this is important, even if homosexuality is a choice I would consider it a moral choice to make, so long as your lover represents your highest values and being with him brings you happiness and satisfaction that you won't find with anyone else. That said, I could try as hard as I possibly can not to find men or the male anatomy attractive tomorrow, and I guarantee you I'm still gonna find them hot.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/21/barack-ob...=rss_popstories This article is about Clifford Asness and his willingness to speak out against what is going on, in favor of capitalism, despite the chilling effect on the business community in general. The author, Peter Robinson, is one of the "dissenting", alumni-nominated trustees of my alma mater Dartmouth College, for anyone who has been following the Dartmouth governance controversy.

Cursorily. She's really not interested. Like I said, she's a mystic.

Nah, my mom's pretty sophisticated actually. It's more that she's a full-out mystic, which is strange for such an intelligent woman who has spent so much of her life using her rational mind in academic and professional pursuits - I think it's a reaction to the stress and pain she perceives as associated with a life of achievement and striving and the deep-seated fear that ultimately she just can't do it. Mental illness and lack of coping are common refrains in my mom's mind and I think this is her way of coping, by becoming "spiritual" and selectively evading certain facts. I don't like it but she is my mother and I love her a lot, and we have a great relationship now whereas before we didn't used to, so my mom is valuable enough to me that while it hurts me that she is a mystic, I won't value her less because of it.

It wasn't a general, it was Donald Rumsfeld. And most likely what he was doing by putting those quotes on there was trying to manipulate Bush himself through his belief, to help convince the president of his own righteousness.

No, I know what she meant. She meant those who would be "weaker" on a one-on-one level get together and gang up on the "stronger" folks with regulation and law and such.

This may not exactly be on topic, but this makes me think of a conversation I had on the phone with my mom a few weeks ago, and I forget how we got to talking about politics but we did, and I said something about how it was nothing more than pure unvarnished force how the government was trying to right the economy by taking from some and giving to others, and she didn't disagree with me, and I asked her how it is that she can possibly defend the many enslaving the few, and she said pretty much direct quote that it was OK as long as it was the weak restraining the strong. It was at that point that we both decided it was better that we just not talk about it, after I started to respond that anyone who thought they would get in my way or hold me down was in for a nasty surprise. I was a little angry at my mom, especially considering that she has me as a daughter, but mostly I was just very, very sad because I know there are some ways in which we'll never understand each other.

Because it seems to me a reasonable analogue for how people would generally feel about those they greatly admire in the sex they are not attracted to, in general. Just to pick on JASKN, since he's actively posting to this thread, if the most amazing incredible woman in the world that shared all his values became his friend, he would probably feel the same way about her as you would feel about your best guy pal - there's just no switch that can be flipped to make those thoughts sexual, even if for some reason he WANTED them to be. I mean, shoot, I hear straight people dating the opposite sex have this problem all the time. "Oh, he's so nice, and I really like him, but there's just no CHEMISTRY, so we'll only be friends." I know chemistry is a metaphor for sexual spark and connection but sometimes I take it literally, as well - people's scent can be attractive, for instance. As for me, the reasons I'm attracted to men are pretty much all physical. Although I have a very broad tolerance for male looks and what I find attractive, you could say if I had a type it could be described as "scruffy" or "rugged" - think Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. There's not some concept of "maleness" about the person that I'm after, so much as it's just the male body itself that gets me going. I'm not looking for a "male personality", if there even is such a thing, except insofar as I seem to get along better with men than women especially in casual everyday interaction. Attraction is a physical thing. The relationship is built on much more than that, of course, but the "spark" is all physical.

CapFo, I have a question for you...do you believe it's possible to meet a wonderful person of the sex you are most attracted to who you deeply care for and admire and who shares many if not most of your values, and not be sexually attracted to them? I am not talking about someone with a horrible deformity here...I mean a basically normal looking guy or girl who you are capable of being fantastically good friends with.