catbirdseat

So tell us what you know. Are they basalt? What accounts for the PG/X Ratings? So we're talking about trad on freestanding columns?

Time to stop bashing the South. It won't do any good. Love them or hate them, we're all part of the same country. We have a lot more in common with them than we do with people in other countries. Blue could have won the South with a sound campaign, but "blew" it.

The guy is an incredibly good actor, but very unbalanced. Sounds like he is disintegrating.

In those days I doubt it was against the law.

I believe that Arafat did not serve the best interest of his people regardless of what he believed. His position favoring the destruction of Isreal was one that left no room for negotiation. Even when he renounced that position, he was never believed by the Israelis and why should they with buses and restaurants being blown up? The two sides were moving towards peace at the close of the Clinton Administration, which tried to project an unbiased image to both sides. He had them each believing that we expected them to give up something for peace. But since then, the US has stood back and given either tacit or explicit approval to everything that the Isrealis have done. The result is that the Palastinians have lost hope. I don't know what to expect now that Arafat is gone. It may be he is replace with a strong leader, or there may be prolonged infighting.

I've always felt that there has been an antisemitic undercurrent on this board.

A very astute observation. I am impressed.

Arafat, the Nobel Prize Winner. It really takes the luster off the honor doesn't it?

Says you. That's the thing about conservatives. There is no room in their brains for complexity and nuance. Everything is black and white.

Yes and Jefferson freed his as I recall, though Washington did not.

He'd say, "you have 12 hours to release them or Falluja will become a radioactive pile of rubble."

This one was a non-interview. I had had a phone interview with a Kirkland-based biotech. They liked me so they bought me a plane ticket to fly me up from California where I then lived. The day before the trip, I got a phone call from their HR manager saying that a number of people were out of town at conferences and they wanted to postpone the interview. She said she would call me back to reschedule. A week later no phone call- so I called her. Now she gives me the true story: they had offerred the job to an insider. This person at first turn down the offer but then changed her mind. I told the HR manager that where I come from people don't lie and make up stories and they follow up when they say they will. I ended up in Seattle at a different company and heard numerous stories from past employees about this dishonest person who by now had risen to Vice President of the company. Yet again, it was a good thing I never went to that company. Lately, their stock has been trading between $0.95 and $1.63.

My worst was with a little diagnostics company in Santa Monica. At the time, I was living in Laguna Beach. It took me over an hour and half to drive in in the Santa Monica Freeway into the worst smog I'd ever seen. I get there to find the most overcrowded building I had ever seen. You practically had to turn sideways to walk down the hall for all the filing cabinets they had jammed in there. The first thing they asked me was if I had ever done radioiodinations of proteins before. No I had not. I wanted to tell them, "don't you think I would have put it on my resume if I had"? So even though I had experience working with C14 and H3, they didn't want to train me. Recently, I learned how to do the iodination procedure at the UW and it took like one hour to learn. Jeebus H. Christ! Anyway, it was just as well. The job would have sucked. Second worst job interview. I'll go ahead and name the company- Immunex. I had a severe case of the flu and was home in bed when I got a call from someone in the HR department. Can I come in tomorrow? I told them, "I have the flu, can we make it in three days"? "No, we need to talk to you now!" So I really needed a job and came in. I almost fainted walking down the sidewalk. I get into the building and they don't even offer me so much as a glass of water. I feel like shit. I talk to the one and only chemist who works in a company with hundreds of people. Immediately bells are going off. This is not good. He wants to know if I know how to run a Protein synthesizer. Huh, again, they could have asked me this on the phone or it would have been in my resume. What a F'ing waste of my time. Anyway, there is a very good reason why it took that stupid company 15 years to get its first drug on the market- not enough chemists. Again it was just as well, the job would have sucked.

You share a common vocabulary with whoever it was who wrote that. A good read. He said all the things we liberals think but are too civil to express.

It's rather strange that Scott Harpell has been scarce lately. What do you think?

Shut up with the kool-aid shit. We aren't kowtowing to some Jim Jones cult figure. Quite the opposite.

Hey Mike, who is the hottie?

Jay, it is mighty hard to link to a paper book in a library, otherwise I would.

I agree with you on Gay Marriage. It's not something that I can support, but neither is it something that merits a Constitutional Amendment. This is exactly the sort of thing that the States should be left to decide. I think that the Founding Fathers decided to make it very difficult to amend the Constitution for a very good reason. There needs to be a huge groundswell of support before an amendment is made.

The crimes committed by the nazis could would not have been possible without eager corporate involvement. For example, the german chemical firms Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch that made Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) for fumigation under license from I.G. Farben, continued to supply it for the purpose of exterminating the jews.

Here's some pertinent reading: US Corporations and the Nazis

If you care about your own liberty then you should care about the liberty of others. I have no love for the Taliban. I am sure that, to a man, they'd love nothing better than to kill me. But among them are poor suckers who got swept up with the others and who are relatively innocent. Let an impartial judge decide if there is cause to detain these men.

I think that the differences between the current regime and the earlier ones to which it has been compared are quantitative rather than qualitative. We are a long ways from Nazi Germany to be sure, but we are straining in that direction. The administration has run smack up against the Constitution and is pushing hard. Now it wants to change the Constitution by amendment or by interpretation.

George Bush would be proud of you, Sobo.

The "enemy combatants" are not citizens accused of crimes under US laws. They were classified as not being prisoners of war, either, so International Law and treaties could not apply. No law applies. They are people with no due process and no recourse. Jay is wrong about Nazi Germany. Unlike Communist Russia where industry was taken over by the State, in Germany, Industry took over the State. US corporations were complicit, which helps to explain why the US stayed out of the war for so long.