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Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:17 AM
My latest submission to slashdot.
No doubt it will be rejected.... LOL!

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SPENGLER'S SLACKERS. Are you one? Enlightenment
aqk writes -Young American slashdotter! Are you possibly one of Spengler's Slackers ?
This modern-day journalist descendant of Oswald Spengler has almost as much a dark vision of Western Society (i.e. the USA) as the philosopher.
To wit: "America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American.

Huh. You're comfortably ensconced in your parents' basement, penning arguments on your Ubuntu system to slashdot, on why "XP is sooo much better than Vista".
Maybe you're the beer-swilling undergrad in his fully-paid-for dorm using your Macintosh to rant about how you'll replace all those Windows systems, when (and if) you join the business world?

Nevertheless, Spengler ( a scribe for The Asia Times â" yes, another offshore corporation) may have given you some kind of wake-up call. Perhaps you should take note. Do you agree with the above SLACKER article? Indeed: where is the USA going?

Well, to play the devil's advocate, terrorism in India is a much more realistic threat than terrorism in the US is (a democracy surrounded by Pakistan, an Islamic dictatorship and China, an aggressive communist state).

Not that that gives the government the right to do what they are trying to do, but just that do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to idiocy, or desperation.

Just last week, there were several bomb blasts that killed over 80 people and injured hundreds more.

I don't necessarily think they are trying to fight modern technology, as much as try to prevent the bad guys from using it to their benefit. I do not necessarily agree with the way they are going about it, but I can certainly see where they are coming from.

Unlike the US where the state seems to use one incident as the bugaboo for massive invasion of privacy, countries like India and Israel face terrorism on a daily basis, and for them, this is a real, hard problem that needs to be addressed.

This is also a debate that has been going on for a long time, and it is too early to make a call.

Yes, it would be a welcome change from what we have now. Hopefully the San Diego arm of the Republican Party won't lose their emails detailing how to do more regime changes.

Do you think this guy is going to have any trouble understand WHY net neutrality should even be a question?

No, he understands it perfectly. But that won't make the large donations from telecoms to the Republican Party any less important.

Do you think it would be hard to explain to this guy why what the RIAA and MPAA are doing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money?

Considering how much money my party has wasted these last 7.3 years, I don't think being fiscally responsible enters into the equation.

When are we going to free Uighurstan?

Follow this link about halfway down to see a list of officers, including generals, as of late 2005, who were forced out because of their honest views. Since that time, others, including the most recent resignation of Admiral Fallon, can be added to the list.

Certainly there are those in the above list who retired rather than wait to be forced out but the concept was the same: these were people who had long, distinguished track records of getting the job done but when they gave their honest opinions, they were told to leave or were forced out.

Have you been reading the news? The Taliban have reconstituted themselves in Afghanistan to the point where they are now causing problems in Pakistan. It's one thing to have some crazy mullah demanding that cell services be taken offline for some arbitrary about of time, but seeing as how the Taliban are once again seizing territory and conducting suicide attacks, it does not matter whether the cell companies give in or not. The point is the Taliban has come back under our watch and likely has the ability to follow through with their threats.

And your assertation that the Taliban are losing because they are worried about cell towers, well..ha ha...hahahaha. My boy, you need to stop watching American Idol with that Bill O'Reilly chaser.

Perhaps my original post wasn't as clear as it should have been, but the endgame I put forth remains the same. Our Middle East adventure is a micromanaged political war, just like Vietnam. During Vietnam, the peoples' concerns regarding the wisdom of such a war were kept in check by the government telling then the commies will get them. Only today it's terrorists. Even in the unlikely event we do "win", the whole region will slide back to square one because of our inability to follow through. When we kicked the Russians out of Afghanistan we didn't want to confront them directly, so we armed and trained local freedom fighters - One of whom was Osama bin Laden. But once the Reds were gone we had no reason to stick around and help the Afghanis rebuild. So the seedling Taliban took root to fill the vacuum and Osama went on his merry way to begin his illustrious future career as our favorite boogeyman. Ta daaa! Do you see how this works now?

> Contrast with these our modern, pinpoint strikes and massive restraint seeking to minimize civilian casualties.

hahaha .. pinpoint ?! .. hahaha.. by the people that brought you the "daisy-cutter" bomb ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-82. If you meant pinpoint carpet bombing then yeah, I'll agree with you.

Try out this article I read a few days back http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JB01Ak02.html.

Also, a bit of googling shows that maybe your definition of "pinpoint" might be off a bit: http://loveandsubversion.net/?p=101. If this is just a case of cherry picking what to believe, fine. If there's controversy then the truth might not be so obvious. I'm really,really suspicious about alternative news sources but from them I suspect reading our own local news reporting may be a bit more umm, "patriotic" about our behaviour and achievements.

Actually, it's worse than that... I recently saw an article here http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA24Ak04.html which discusses a term "Military Keynesianism." The problem is that blowing money on military goods doesn't have any secondary benefits like taking that same money and giving it over to another good, like say, a car manufacturer... This would (hopefully) allow Joe Sixpack to buy a cheaper car to get to work easier / quicker / more reliably and produce another product (cycle continues).

"By the way, if the purpose of goverment is to perpetuate policy, then do you think it was wrong for the US government to abolish slavery? After all, if perpetuation of policy is what they are supposed to do, then discontinuing this policy would be something they shouldn't have done."

Given the interest of slaveowners - factual and prospective, don't forget them - and given that the govt represented them as well, it definitely should have continued support for slavery. Which it did, until it was forced by northern military not to. In our eyes that was evil. In their eyes, complicated and bizarre explanations were made why it was justified.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB10Aa03.html

"The first lie addresses a glaring question: If the South fought the war to preserve chattel slavery, what possessed the 80-90 percent of southerners who owned no slaves to die for a practice from which they drew no immediate benefit? Professor Gary W Gallagher (The Confederate War, Cambridge 1997) represents the scholarly side of this myth, while popular fiction and films such as Gods and Generals dish it out to the broad public. That does not wash; one does not register 40 percent casualty rates for sentimental reasons. Catastrophic casualties pile up when a conqueror rallies greedy men to his banner. Ask the half-million men who marched to Moscow in 1812 under Napoleon Bonaparte's banner why they fought for an emperor, although they had no empire of their own. Napoleon said it best: Every soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his rucksack. The same apples to Alexander of Macedonia, Mohammed and his successors, the Thirty Years' War General Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634), Francisco Villa during the Mexican civil war of 1910-18, the Germans during World War II, and so forth.

The unpleasant fact is that Southerners who had no slaves hoped eventually to get some, and fought for the Confederacy for the same reason that Napoleon's freebooters fought for the emperor. In fact, Southerners had been fighting for the right to bring slaves to new territories for a generation prior to the outbreak of war, in Kansas and elsewhere. Cotton, their principal cash crop, exhausted the soil in a decade's planting, and the planter took his slaves and moved on. Slavery and the Southern economic system would choke to death without expansion. Had the South formed an independent state, it would have embarked on a campaign of conquest and imposed slavery on the whole southern half of the Western Hemisphere. "

Where else but China can we get lead toys for our kids? How else can we outsource pollution to a nation which believes it's its right to release carbon to make stuff for us? And what better than having all that junk shipped to us by fume-belching ships?

Seriously, ending trade with China would most likely do more to cut particulate pollution (25% of LA's comes from China), and cut global warming from coal burning. Sure, there'd be short-term disruption of American corporate manufacturing patterns. But what we've learned in the process of outsourcing industries to China is how to build new factories quickly. We could use that knowledge again here.

...but it's Bush who is warmongering while impoverishing his people. I'd say that Putin was above the both of them, though he will soon be ending his career with that horrific assault against the... arctic circle on his record. Oh the humanity.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll wash my hands after partaking in one of Slashdot's redmeat xenophobe stories. Call me when you all have something positive to post about Russians or Chinese for a change: Until then, the usual Anglosphere "coverage" of the other major powers is best taken with a large grain of salt.

Honestly, this image tells the story about population density. You only need to drop towers where the lights are in Canada, which is practically nowhere. Most of the country is wilderness, other than towns every 60km or so along major highways, at most of which enough people are concentrated that it's worthwhile to drop a tower anyway.

By improving education, equality, and economic opportunity the population will reduce.

A blank assertion which (without significant elaboration) is unlikely to be correct.

From the CDC:

"National Center for Health Statistics"
Mother's Educational Level Influences Birth Rate"
... "Educational attainment is a very critical factor in accounting for lifetime fertility differentials. Women with 1 or more years of college have sharply lower lifetime fertility than less educated women, regardless of race or Hispanic origin. Women with college degrees can be expected to complete their childbearing with 1.6-2.0 children each; 1.7 for non-Hispanic white, 1.6 for non-Hispanic black, and 2.0 for Hispanic women. For women with less education the total expected number of children are: 3.2 children for those with 0-8 years of education; 2.3 children for those with 9-11 years of education and 2.7 for high school graduates."

"Japan birth rate off record low as economy improves"

"Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.--Why the Difference?"
...
"In these nations, societal openness and comfort in dealing with sexuality, including teen sexuality, and pragmatic governmental policies create greater, easier access to sexual health information and services for all people, including teens. Easy access to sexual health information and services leads to better sexual health outcomes for French, German, and Dutch teens when compared to U.S. teens."

"Study urges action to raise birth rate"

FERTILITY: While most Taiwanese are married by the time they reach 40, well educated women are more likely to stay single, the latest study shows"

"California Reduces Teen Birth Rate Through Sex Education"[pdf]

Associated Press (05.10.04)
California's teen birth rate has fallen from 11th nationwide in 1991 to 21st in 2002. The drop of more than 40 percent is attributed to a state-sponsored program that provides information about abstinence and birth control. The pregnancy figures cited by California Wellness Foundation, which runs a statewide teen pregnancy initiative, were included in a brief the foundation gave California lawmakers last week in Washington. The drop exceeds the 30 percent decline in teen pregnancies nationally during the same period.

"The Chinese Economy"

Desperate for a baby boom
By Kalinga Seneviratne

SINGAPORE - Alarmed by a falling birth rate and its impact on the economy, Singapore badly wants its well-educated, career-oriented women to have more babies.

So, at 2.1-something children per female (your figure), that would class America as not being a developed nation.

The US is a special case, as I said "As the US is becoming more religious I wonder how much religion influences this as some of them call their followers to "multiply"."

Going through the rest of your reply, I see more arguments and one "table", I wish /. would allow html tables, you ran off on a spreadsheet with numbers you made up, without any real data. As I provided links to data as well as links to articles on how some governments are concerned about declining birthrates due to improvements in economic opportunities, educations, and or equality c

In China, there seems to be a trend that financial compensation to the victims will mitigate punishment in criminal cases. This is not common in the US, except for restitution-based payments for property crimes.

See here for an extreme example

My analogy does not directly apply, since presumably any recovery by the workers would be had in US court rather than Chinese court. I just chime in to say that financial compensation might seem more appropriate to people from a different legal system.

Maybe I can put out a request for advice from a Chinese(!) lawyer on slashdot, that might provoke an interesting collection of responses.

this map needs a lot of interpretation: the southern hemisphere looks dark compared to the north, but that's because of the way population is distributed. In the US, there's town after town, and that's why mid-to-north US looks so bright, and we know that in the left, it isn't so. Europe is the same. Lots of people crammed in relatively small territories. But then you see Brazil and Argentina, and we look dim. Too dim. Well, that's because we have vast extensions of nothing. Wild rainforest, the wonderful pampas... sure, these places are "disconnected". But then again, nobody lives there (keep in mind, for example, Argentina is 2/3 the size of the US and 1/10 the population). But look closely: central america is bright. Why? Easy: small countries, many cities together. They look brighter in the map. I mean, south america isn't "disconnected", it's just not so densely connected, and I guess there's an important factor too:

This map was, I guess, made with some sort of "geolocation" database. I happen to be a customer of a large ISP, they don't assign a whole netblock to my city, so it's registered as part of Buenos Aires . So the data may lie a little (I know that hundreds, if not thousands of Latin American small towns have -paid- wi-fi. Some of them through satellite links, others, the luckier, through leased lines. I happen to be in the industry and have set up 4 wi-fi ISPs, and I know of at least another 10 in my province alone). I think the "world at night" ( http://www.atimes.com/atimes/images/earth_night.jpg ) map represents what I'm trying to mean. I bet that if the data was completely precise, it would look a lot like this map.

How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?

You use fallacy of composition: just because some, formally Muslim, probably not very devout, people are not serial killers screaming jihad all the time, doesn't mean their ideology and purpose is not what it demonstrably is.

Plus, they are peaceful only because they are in minority. For now.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-turkey/article_ 679.jsp

"Thus, the democratic culture of conflict implies the sceptical idea of duality, as against the optimistic idea of unity. Since no one owns the truth, regulated forms of dispute must be established. Islamicist dissatisfaction with this model is based on its predisposition to discord, strife, and sham conflicts.

Against this, they evoke the dream of a scholars' republic. Conflicts that arose were to be solved by reference to the Koran, by obtaining a legal report, a fatwa. The weight of such a report is substantially dependent on the personal authority of the issuer. Thus, unlike a court judgment, the legal opinion given is only binding on someone who acknowledges this authority. But personal authority develops out of the free play of forces. What political Muslims have in mind, therefore, is a scholars' republic or a legal opinion state."

Christianity is doctrinally about love, Islam is doctrinally about submission:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD16Aa02.h tml

" Less important than the differences in content - "audience" rather than "dialogue", "submission" rather than "love" - is the difference in emphasis. With this perfunctory preface, Sistani begins a lengthy treatise on when, where, with what clothing, and in what bodily positions prayers may be said. His concern is not the spiritual experience of prayer, but establishing communal norms for prayer. Where the Christians and Jews gush with loquacity on the subject, Muslims have remarkably little to say about the experience of prayer. Reading through Muslim sources, I am at loss to find anything remotely resembling Ratzinger's quite typical discourse on prayer.

In fact, virtually all of Sistani's writings address communal norms for behavior, including the most intimate. Ritual impurity (janabat) is a central concern, especially in the case of sexual relations. He writes, for example:

[...]
In calling attention to these portions of Sistani's theology I do not mean to deprecate him. On the contrary, he addresses the inhabitants of traditional society for whom spiritual experience means submission, that is, submission to communal norms, whence the individual derives a lasting sense of identity. In the most intimate details of daily life, culture and religion become inseparable. For traditional society it is the durability of communal norms that lends a sense of immortality to the individual, a life beyond mere physical existence. That is why prayer in the Judeo-Christian sense, the lovers' exchange between God and the individual soul, does not come into consideration within Muslim theology. Allah is the all-powerful sovereign of the world before whom the individual dissolves; the individual's submission to the ummah, the community of Islam, is a spiritual experience of an entirely different order.

To this the Americans can only come as destroyers, not saviors. America by its nature disrupts traditional order. It is the usurper of the Old World, the agency of creative destruction, the Spirit that Denies, to whom "everything that arises goes rightly to its ruin" (Goethe) - in short, the Great Satan. America is the existential threat to Islam."

In short, there can be no peace with Islam, as two ideologies underpinning the reflective lifestyles - Islam, the traditional and developed world, the modernist lifestyle, which more or less can be reconciled with Christianity - are in fundamental and irreconci

They have a bit more relaxed laws when it comes to family planing than they did, but forced abortion all the way up to 9th month.... That is MADNESS no mater what your stand is on the matter of abortion...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=9766870
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-6-22/43051.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IE31Ad01.html

Boikot the Beijing Olympics you say? We'll I'm for sure not buying anything from any one calling them self an official sponsor of the 2008 games....

Hey, your point of view is fine, and I'm not trying to take it away from you. Sure, it certainly could be racism. I wasn't there and I'll never know. All I'm saying is that there are always multiple ways to read the signs, and based on the story the way you told it, I can read that as possible jury nullification. I'm just reading your words and interpreting, which is all I can do anyway. And as I'm in a verbal mood, let me tell you why I think so.

Have you ever seen Rashomon ? What you saw in the courtroom differs from what your fellow jurors saw. Each one's view is refracted by the lenses of our upbringing, social context, desires, and so on. This distorts our perceptions of reality; it affects our observations and opinions. So it's easy for me to imagine hypothetical fellow jurors wearing lenses such that they would literally see the trial differently, say the words you quoted, and argue for acquittal, yet without being too motivated by racism -- even if they could not spell ``nullification.''

For one, a lot of people know that the war on drugs is a hypocritical monstrosity. Why does the CIA get to deal cocaine in Los Angeles, and produce opium in Central Asia, but that right is not extended to the citizens themselves? And seriously, how does the Commerce Clause apply to homegrown, home-smoked pot? Common sense revolts. If you ask me, the war on drugs is a perverse load of vile unconstitutional bunkum. No, I do not want to live near a crackhouse, but also I won't complicitly abet this absurd ``war.'' I don't have to accept one or the other: I want constitutional justice and social justice. I don't believe I have to give up one to get the other.

I could write a screed about the three-strikes rule also, but I'm less passionate about that one (I agree with SCOTUS, it's within states' rights). I think it's unjust too. If I had friends and relatives locked up for decades under three-strikes I would probably be hot under the collar about it as well.

There are a lot of people, even among the poorly educated and underclass, who are aware of the injustices of the present system. The idea of nullification is very simple: give the verdict that you think is right, regardless. When you report that one juror said, ``This is his third strike and I don't want to put him away for a long time,'' then nullification is one way to explain that statement (and so is racism). A juror doesn't have to know the term ``nullification'' to do it.

Drugs (you know what I mean. Illegal Drugs) are NOT legal.

Agreed, illegal things are not legal. But who makes the laws? As a slashdot reader I'm sure you are aware that not everyone gets equal representation in legislatures. Why does minor-league crack possession get you an average sentence of 10.5 years, whereas after $400M of fraud, Dennis Kozlowski might be free after less than 9 years of prison? There's a gap between what's lawful and what's right. How big is the gap? Depends on your lenses.

Drugs are illegal. And so, their sale and use causes problems. Society has a Right, no- a Duty- to try to eliminate these problems.

I agree crack and heroin cause problems. I even think those drugs should be illegal. But everyone is gaming the system, and the people with power game the system the most. Disney extends the copyright term. The RIAA games the judicial system.* Enron and Worldcom cooked their books, till finally they went too far. The FBI abuses USAPATRIOT. Libby gets pardoned, and Rove doesn't even get charged. The President games Article II and the Attorney General denies the existen

State-run media reported that some online shoppers began using QQ coins to buy real-world items such as CDs and makeup. So-called QQ Girls started accepting the coins as payment for intimate private chats online. Gamblers caught wind, too, and started using the currency to get around China's anti-gambling laws, converting wins in online mahjong and card games back into cash. Dozens of third-party trading posts sprouted up to ease transactions, turning the QQ coin into a kind of parallel currency.

Xinhua also reports that the operators of some Internet forums are now paid in QQ coins rather than the official currency. And there is evidence that other online sites not associated with Tencent also accept QQ coins.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned"

Which is more important for law enforcement to deal with -- copyright infringement or ACTUAL piracy on the high seas? The latter does exist, and was an increasing problem of late, but has subsided somewhat as governments have given it more attention. Should resources be redirected from the Coast Guards and navies of the world to combat copyright infringement instead? How can anybody advocate the claim that copyright infringment is more important for law enforcement to deal with than violent crimes?

Besides the fact the quoted numbers are bogus, this lawyer is an idiot for thinking the relative importance of everything can and should be measured in terms of dollars, and even if it were done, if you did a realistic cost analysis of violent crime, inclusive of its effect on victims and insurance, I'm sure that copyright infringement costs wouldn't look all that impressive anymore.

RSS's mother organization (ABHM, Godse) killed Gandhi.

And rightly so. Gandhi was a racist (remember what he wrote about Africans), a totalitarian dictator, an anti-Semite (read what he wrote about Jews), a pedophile and a fool. He would have dragged our country back to the middle ages with his "ruralization" nonsense instead of industrializing and modernizing our armies and today we would all be under the authority of the Beijing Politburo. You should be thanking Godse for what he did, get rid of the leader of a personality cult (again, much like Stalin or Mao).

RSS activists indulge in arson, without ANY provocation on every valentines day.

Your tangible that RSS was involved in all those things is... where? Remember, fabricated reports from Communist propaganda outlets and their derivatives don't count, you know. Most of those incidents were
the work of disorganized groups of morons. It is very chic in India today to blame all the ills of society on Hindus. I place as much credibility on them as I would on "Zionist Conspiracy theories".

They participate in every hindu-muslim riot.

In response to Islamist gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawood_Ibrahim), Islamil Latif, the Deobandi clerics and the JIH (The Indian division of the REAL fascist Jamaat-e-Islami : http://idp.world-citizenship.org/idp/index.php/wp- archive/50, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/DJ26Df02.h tml)/SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India: http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/terr oristoutfits/simi.htm) nexus of hatemongers who burn babies alive in trains, bomb other trains in cities and blow up temples of parishioners. For the most part, RSS actually tries to intervene in Muslim-Hindu riots to try to rescue it's victims, but get bashed in the fray. Or is it a lie that the RSS rescued numerous militancy-hit Muslim children in Kashmir, or rescued poor Muslims from floods in Surat while the Islamic Ulema of India watched and laughed because the poor Muslim were lower-caste Dalit Arzal Muslims and the Ashraf upper-caste dominated Islamic Ulema didn't give a rat's ass about them? WHere was the "eternal and all-powerful and all-forgiving Allah" for the Surat flood victims? Nowhere...

Here is an interesting article about a paper written by a Roman Catholic priest (ie a non-Hindu, so there is just about Zero chance of a pro-Hindu bias) on the RSS:

http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19980823/2355 0294.html


Note, in particular, this paragraph.

The conclusion drawn by Fr Kundukulam is that RSS cannot be considered as a nationalist organisation in the sense in which the term `nationalism' is generally interpreted in India. Nationalism represents the collective consciousness of the people transcending all barriers of caste, religion, etc. A nationalist is one who is primarily indebted to the nation. Religion has no place in nationalism. In this sense, Fr Kundukulam argues, RSS whose primary loyalty is to the Hindus can hardly be called a nationalist organisation. In his view, RSS is a multi-faceted organisation which is political, cultural, religious and voluntary in nature and approach. Different facets gain upperhand at different times depending on social and political exigencies.

At the same time, Fr Kundukulam argues against branding the RSS ideology as fascism, Nazism, fun

1. Why would a President concentrate so much power into the position of the President less than a year before he is supposed to leave office? It is clear that there is absolutely no chance of Bush regaining his presidency in a free and fair election and neither is he standing for election. So why Bonus is Bush doing this?
2. Why does he specifically bring in directives which hand over power to the Homeland Security and not to the congress in times of catastrophe? Read this: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/01/america/ NA-GEN-US-Bush-Cheney-Secrecy.php?page=1
3. Why is Bush opting to use "signed statements" as the way to subvert the bills which have been passed? When the president does not approve of a bill, he has the option of vetoing the bill and it will go back to the house for discussions. However, Bush has opted to use a "signed statement" which is just a statement appended to the bill which he signs off on. This statement can be used to completely change the meaning and purpose of the bill - and this does not come up for review. This is not an action of a stupid person - this is the action of someone who clearly understands the process by which bills will be discussed in the house; so he has opted to use a mechanism which can get around this process and allow him the leeway he wants. This is a cunning move and Bush is the *ONLY* person other than Thomas Jefferson to never veto a bill.
   
   http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04 /30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/
4. Why a private army? and why is Bush unwilling to release details on the number of people deployed from these private armies (Blackwater etc)? Why are private armies being deployed within the continental US when there are specific directives against such a deployment? Why is he preventing even the law enforcement from having any jurisdiction over these private armies? Did you know that during the Katrina relief, Blackwater was allowed to go in huge numbers with assault rifles when ordinary citizens were being disarmed by the administration? Why was Blackwater used during this crisis in the first place since civilian law enforcement and other search and rescue teams were available?
   
   http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/scahill
5. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Why are the Democrats not raising this issue? Why do they seem so ineffective? One hint - It is clear that it is not just the Republicans who are privy in this game, but it appears that the Democrats are equally complicit.
   
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Inquiry_into_In telligence_Community_Activities_before_and_after_t he_Terrorist_Attacks_of_September_11%2C_2001
   
   Senator Bob Graham (Democrat) was one of the primary movers behind the 911 commission. and he and Porter Goss (Republican - who later on headed the CIA) were the people who cleared Bush of any prior knowledge of the 911 event. But these are the same people who sat in for a meeting with the Head of the Pakistani ISI days prior to the 911 attack and who knew that the ISI were funding the perpetrators of the attack.
   
   http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD08Aa01.h tml
   
   And

Count on it.

India is planning on a Moon Mission and a Mars Mission and discussing Manned Space Flight.

From the article: "The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report."

Spengler from Asia Times has repeatedly argued that Middle Eastern countries face a different type of population problem, namely a large increase of the number aged. For example, Spengler says that "although the Muslim birth rate today is the world's second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birth rate of any other culture."

The demographics of radical Islam: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH23Aa01.h tml

Crises of Faith in the Muslim World: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK01Aa01.h tml

From the article: "The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report."

Spengler from Asia Times has repeatedly argued that Middle Eastern countries face a different type of population problem, namely a large increase of the number aged. For example, Spengler says that "although the Muslim birth rate today is the world's second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birth rate of any other culture."

The demographics of radical Islam: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH23Aa01.h tml

Crises of Faith in the Muslim World: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK01Aa01.h tml

All complex systems have bugs that need to be ironed out....

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB10Ak05. html
"Keys notes, however, that the electronic spectrum around Baghdad is polluted by the myriad jamming devices that coalition forces primarily employed to thwart remote detonations of the improvised explosive devices that have inflicted 70% of all US fatalities in that war." ...
"The potential problem was discovered when the first F-22s were operating near US Navy ships off the Atlantic coast. Navy radars overwhelmed the F-22's automated sensors. Even now, larger, multi-station, purpose-built electronic-intelligence-gathering airplanes encounter difficulties around the Iraqi capital because of the extreme density of jamming devices."

As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, there are numerous blogs, articles and whatnot out there which describe how people like Dennis Feith and other hawks are manipulating things to make the U.S. the sole power in the world. Not just superpower, militarily, but power as in "We'll tell you what to do" power.

Certainly some of these writings are from conspiracy wackos but others are written by seasoned journalists who document and provide evidence for everything they write. In fact, this article from Asia Times Online, discusses Bush's willingness to ignore both the Study Group recommendations and his avoidance of talking with Syria and Iran.

Let me put it this way. When I first heard Bush say that Iraq had wmds I knew he was lying. I knew Iraq didn't have all these tons of weapons lying around nor have the capacity to produce any such weapons on a moments notice.

Which begs the question: if I knew there were no weapons there, how could this administration not have known there were no weapons there? Further, even when the UN inspectors were doing their inspections (contrary to what some people have said never took place), the U.S. was giving them specific sites to inspect because we "know that he [Saddam] has them" yet not one facility ever produced any evidence that banned weapons were there. That should have sent red flags up all over the place so either Bush ignored these warnings and was determined to "stay the course" or he had already made up his mind to invade Iraq before this whole thing started and the case for wmds was simply a front.

What is really disturbing is that by January or February of 2007, more american lives will have been lost in Iraq than were killed on September 11th. Put another way, Bush, by his actions, will have killed more americans than did Bin Laden. You do remember Bin Laden, don't you? The guy Bush has called irrelevant.

I will make this prediction. Before Bush leaves office, the vast majority of troops will have been pulled from Iraq so Bush will be able to (again) declare, "Mission Accomplished". It will then be left for the incoming president to figure out a way to extract the remaining troops, under fire no less, and not make it look like a retreat. Thus, the onus of failure will not taint Bush's record for posterity, regardless of the facts.

• The article is in Australian IT, connected to The Australian newspaper.
• The report in question is a draft of a confidential briefing. So it hasn't been published, and so can't be "cited" in the conventional sense, by The Australian or anyone else.
• It's quite common for newspapers to mention that they've seen unpublished material that they're writing about, usually with the phrase "seen by"
• However, in Australia/NZ the phrase "sighted by" seems to be more common in this context.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FK24Dg03.html

For three years the government argued that he was actually on a scouting mission to set off a dirty bomb somewhere in the U.S yet failed to charge him with any criminal activity.

After those three years, and after spending who knows how much money trying to defend their case, they dropped all charges against him, released him from military jail and sent him to the civilian court system where they finally charged him, along with four others, with "conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country ... for the purpose of opposing existing governments and civilian factions and establishing Islamic states under Sharia (Islamic law), and material support for terrorism," according to the indictment. CNN link

My point was not whether the guy was guilty or not, but rather that government didnt' charge him with anything, simply held the guy for three years, and then spent money defending its actions against lawsuits filed by not only his attorney, but the ACLU and other organizations, then finally relented because the courts were starting to rule against its position. In other words, just like the crux of this article, they knew they couldn't win and so changed their position to make it seem like they had a victory but only after spending taxpayer dollars doing so.

I could just have easily used the issue of no-bid contracts by Halliburton and its subsidiaries which are costing the taxpayers millions, if not billions, of dollars in cost overruns, missing equipment, unsubstantiated work and other related matters. In fact, Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official at the US Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted because she spoke out about the abuses of the bidding contract. Asia Times Online link and International Herald Tribune link.

I was only tyring to come up with other cases in which the U.S. government spent tons of money defending their actions and finally dropped the case which is similar to what the ACLU supposedly did to the taxpaer. Also, that the government doesn't need the ACLUs help in wasting taxpayer dollars considering that the Republican-led House, Senate and White House are doing very well on their own.

http://www.atimes.com/koreas/BL13Dg02.html

The Clinton Administration tried to reduce tension by getting some reactors sent to North Korea, and Rumsfeld was on the board of the company that sold reactors to North Korea (ABB). Not too long after, North Korea was part of the axis of evil. This is equivilent to shop-owner selling a gun to someone, joining the police, and then complaining about the criminal they sold the gun to. I guess when you lack any sort of moral integrity, the only important fact is whose signature is on your paycheck.

Yet even FOX News is typical of the coverage on Iran. They repeat deliberate mis-interpretations of what Iranian leaders say, and the scare over "wipe Israel off the map" is no different than the one about Iran legislating a dresscode for Jews. In the former case, we had the Iranian president saying that the Zionist regime must disappear from the page of time. Since Zionism can objectively be considered similar to Apartheid in crucial respects (not the least of which are its results).

I won't condone Iran's (or Israel's) theocracy, regardless of the particular style. Their involvement with Hizballah is questionable. But they are not a bunch of complete extremists. Iran is a country where women can get an education, show their faces, drive cars, and have access to birth control (compare that to our fascist allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). Iran has a limited, nascent form of democracy and a great deal of technical sophistication.

They are independant of the West and that fact lands them squarely on the "must demonize" list. Iran is targeted for dehumanization all the more for its relative modernity, which gains them moral and cultural influence that makes it difficult for the West to propagandize the Middle East.

For our "civilized" western media, railing against a Zionist regime is eagerly mis-interpreted as a genocidal rant against Jews and an entire country. AND they do this at a time when the US is floating the idea of a "preventative" war and nuclear attack on Iran. Meanwhile, in the middle of all this self-righteous hyperventilating, our leaders get carte blanche to lie and spill vast amounts of blood elsewhere.

The Complete Spengler

Older Essays

They made a democracy and called it peace

SPENGLER'S forum

The Complete Spengler

Older Essays

They made a democracy and called it peace

SPENGLER'S forum

The Complete Spengler

Older Essays

They made a democracy and called it peace

SPENGLER'S forum

For those interested, here is the original article. Compare for yourself the various comments.

Still a good reading and it explains why Hezbollah could say they had killed X number of troops or destroyed Y tanks before the Israeli military admitted to the losses. They were listening to the Israeli transmissions from the battlefield!

For those interested, here is the original article. Compare for yourself the various comments.

Still a good reading and it explains why Hezbollah could say they had killed X number of troops or destroyed Y tanks before the Israeli military admitted to the losses. They were listening to the Israeli transmissions from the battlefield!

Why would US administration be hostile to Lenovo?

What used to be castes are now communities which tend to restrict marriages to between their own members.

The supposed advantages that the upper caste enjoyed are long gone.

Sociologists have argued that a person born in a highly educated upper-caste family will have a totally different universe of knowledge, social contacts and elite acceptability, and wholly different access to information about the availability of courses, colleges and private tuition, career options and professional advice."

Additionally, the private sector (non-government, privately owned industries) has always been a meritocracy. If you apply for a job, you aren't even asked your caste or religion. So a question of casteism does not arise.

Mmm. And what about representation? Take a look at this.

Bullshit!

What is also amusing is that China does not have a legal basis. Technically by international law, Taiwan is still under a US Military Government from World War 2! We just haven't gotten around to officially determining its sovereignty (mostly because of the political situation with China).

Should singles who deliberately choose that lifestyle to be frugal receive less benefits?

They wanted to bring the country into a civil war with the Golden Mosque bombings and related attacks, they have failed.

What news sources are you consuming? The amount of violence in Iraq certainly qualifies as low intensity civil war by any conventional measure. And the situation has been continuously deteriorating. Denying this will just set us up for a colossal failure. Even Alawi who has been the US most favorite Iraqi politician (not counting Chalabi) has said as much. Now even Basra is starting to come unglued. A trend that started last year when militias infiltrated the police force is now playing out. A development that was entirely predictable when the US failed to unarm and disband the Shia militias while dissolving the old Iraqi army (probably the worst blunder of the whole occupation saga - and there have been so many!).

The Basra security situation is very bad news.

Sorry my friend, but I will certainly take the former Iraqi PM's assement over yours. You may want to check out some broader spectrum of news sites to protect yourself from falling for spin.

China has them... so why don't democrats support us getting them?

My response to reading the article: duh!

Here are some recent articles on the developments in China. The US is not starting this race, but it'd be nice to keep up regardless.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-07 -27-china-satellites_x.htm
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD20Ad03.html
http://www.house.gov/coxreport/chapfs/ch4.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-01c.html
http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/84-no3.htm
http://www.afio.com/sections/wins/1998/notes48.htm l

The world is, a dangerous place. As with Sudan and Iran, the UN is no deterrent to aggression. Enlightened self-interest directs us to investigate these types of systems for the same reasons we investigate lethal pathogens. Surviving them requires understanding them even if we never intend to use them.

First of all, I want to state that I think Wikipedia is the single greatest achievement of our age. and to thank everyone involved for it. Even with all the controversies, it has been a learning tool beyond my wildest dreams.

I learned higher math from it (It is the single greatest higher math textbook ever, in my opinion) and for those following the Chinese American economic war, the discussion areas on Chinese topics are often the equivalent of the Daily Show.

But I think they do give themselves a bit too much credit for the why of the Chinese blocking. I doubt that the Chinese cared all that much about massacre articles, the information is all over the net, and half the rumors about the massacre circulating China are far worse than the article. From the PRC's point of view, the article was actually good publicity, comparatively speaking.

What they were probably worried about was the Asian Cup 2004, scheduled to start a few weeks later. In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Asian Cup is the world series of soccer games for the middle and far east countries, with the usual rioting afterwards. Add in the fact that the list of participating countries is a superset of a list of countries supporting terrorism, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions a few months earlier igniting cultural tensions, and you get one hypergolic mix ready to explode.

Now toss in the fact that it was being held in China, and Chinese Japanese relations were at their lowest since the Japanese invasion, and you have some very worried politicians in the PRC. They probably looked at incidents like the 1.2 million signature petition against Japan organized by seven Chinese web sites a year earlier http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3118850.st m and ordered a block on all potentially disruptive web sites until they could figure out what threat to stability the web sites posed and how to prevent it from exploding into riots (which it did, in spite of everything they did to prevent it. http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FH10Dh01.html) To their credit, it was a fairly civilized riot, by soccer standards.

When the PRC officials were contacted, they got around to looking at Wikipedia (it was probably just another website on the list, and somewhere near the bottom) and decided it wasn't a threat and immediately removed it from the list.

When you consider how much damage, say, the Danish cartoons have caused, it is not all that unreasonable for authorities to try and delay publication until they can prepare for the possible effects...It's their equivalent of parade permits, not mind control.

As economic convergence and class gaps cause the PRC to be stressed to it's breaking point, the PRC officials are trying to deny the inevitable political instability as best they can, but it is far beyond their abilities to do much. Remember, the vast amount of people and country involved...the riots due in a few years will be the equivalent of a 100 Katrina's all at once.

In addition, remember, Wikipedia is far vaster than most web sites and changes rapidly, and I imagine the PRC spends a lot of time trying to figure out what articles may cause a riot and where. The blocks seem to be when they start falling behind, or some critical event is about to happen and they want some time to catch up with the backlog.

And it is critical for China to manage Japanese relations; the Chinese and Japanese governments need each other, but the Chinese people are still fighting the Japanese in a lot of the PRC. The Chinese government is doing its best to avoid wide scale riots over the Japanese.

It is also important because China is hosting the Olympics in 2008, and class tensions in China are going to be near the flash point by then. It was announced recently that China
is training sharpshooters(!) for crowd protection for the Olympics, (probably to prevent a Japanese version of what happened when Germany hosted the Olympics) so this should probably be the first sporting event to come under the Geneva convention...

Hello Rob Squared:

I hope the answer to your question is: never. Surely, going to war over internet censorship and freedom of speech is silly to say the least.

An open war with China, for whatever reason, would definitely result heavy damages in US and in China. Even if the US manages to defeat China militarily, I doubt that the US would have the strength to be the global super-power afterward.

At the end of the day, everything can be measured in terms of economic power, i.e. money. China has been buying a large proportion of US Treasury bonds. An estimate put half of US T-bonds being own by Asian countries.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/FA23Dj 01.html

Imagine that the US goes to war with China. The Chinese sell US T-Bond holdings, resulting in a free-fall of those bonds... Overnight, many people's and financial companies at home and abroad would be bankrupted. In one move, the US economic power would be heavily damaged before there is even a missile fired...

B.Pascal.

According to this link. [url]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FG28Dh01.h tml%5B/url%5D 27 out of every 100,000 Japanese are taking thier lives. Still higher than the U.S Murder/Suicide rate. So much for your Utopia. "Based on provisional data for 2003, Japanese male and female suicide rates per 100,000 people are now roughly 40.2 for men and 14.9 for women, approaching levels normally witnessed in countries suffering severe economic hardships such as Russia, Latvia or Lithuania."