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Actually, that's not correct either. The job of The Supreme Court is to determine the validity of laws. Your average Circuit court just decides whether you've broken a law, without regard to the validity of that law. That's why only the Supreme Court can declare a law unconstitutional, and circuit courts aren't blasting acts of Congress left and right.

• Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules NEA Decency Requirement Unconstitutional
• Court strikes down statute blocking gun industry lawsuits
• Appellate court rejects COPA

John Marshall seized the power of Judicial Review in the case of Marbury v. Madison.

Check the graphs in this page. Altough this is not a complete reference, the same data, suggesting the bandwidth of opctical fibers to be growing faster that doubling every 18 months can be found in many other articles.

But I agree that a generalization of fiber capacity to bandwidth must be done with extreme caution.

and here is an interesting link.

Except the accussation is that the US is charging Sklyarov with a bogus crime that they never intend to prosecute - in effect kidnapping him to use in exchange for Tobin. And besides, Tobin was arrested in relation to possession of pot and alleged espionage - two charges that, together, go beyond breaking the DMCA (at least in the US).

Somehow, bogus US accusations get more credit than ones in other countries. When US citizens in foreign countries are charged with espionage (in China, Russia), it's an outrage. When we expell 50+ russians for alleged espionage, we applaud the president for avenging Russia's heinous crime of turning Robert Hansen. Read this to see just how bogus Russia's charges are. Call me crazy, but they seem a little more well-founded than those against Sklyarov. And seeing how the US is pulling out all the stops to get him back, as opposed to say, that kid in Singapore, I'd imagine there is a good chance that he actually was engaging in some form of espionage. And hell, look at his training.

It's always refreshing to see our elected officials so committed to fighting crime.

Obviously, some crimes are more important than others... god forbid we allow teens to hack their poorly run high school webserver and post a nasty comment about an unfavored teacher... that'd be criminal!

Now I'm just waiting for the "Condit Child Intern Protection Act of 2001" to get proposed...

*scoove*

Congress has already mandated airbags in cars. They costs thousands of dollars and kill more kids than school shootings. Congress has also mandated sophisticated oxygen and CO2 sensors be hooked up to your "engine warning light", and go off if your gascap is left loose.

If we can mandate all that, why can't we mandate what I will call "the transponder box". Imagine a burst-mode cell phone and GPS all wrapped up in an embedded black box and mass produced for every car in the country. Think of the traffic solutions we could impose:

- Instant end to speeding and aggressive lane changing. Every time you broke the speed limit you would be billed on a formula, such as (mph over * seconds over). Every time you made an agressive lane change (the system would know where the other cars were, to check your proximity) you would be fined and points assessed to your license.
We could even fine people for not zipper merging!

Today's sprawling traffic jams would be eliminated overnight. Anyone who has seen the results of traffic simulations by the NHRA knows that speeding and agressive lane changing combined with not leaving enough distance is the root cause of bumper to bumper traffic jams.

I'm not talking about an invasion of privacy - throw away everything but a meaningless box id # that only the state can correlate. I'm talking about an end to traffic deaths and that endless sea of brakelights and predatory drivers you swim through every morning.

Personally, it makes me drool.

• A piece from Free Republic
• A paper from Military Information Technology Online

Army accused of cover-up in Kosovar Albanian's death

Government Watchdog Agency for human medical experiments under investigation

Hydrazine Sulfate Cancer Coverup

THE COVER-UP OF GULF WAR SYNDROME -- A QUESTION OF NATIONAL INTEGRITY

The United States and Biological Warfare

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1968

MKUltra, Uranium, Unsolved Homicide, Possible Genocide

My bad everyone must be wrong the government is such a great watcher and keeper of the peace. Maybe if you took the time to see things in an unbiased way you would actually have a clue. Me on the other hand I love government, and I truly love many of the policies they've created, but I would never turn a blind eye because they did one good thing so this enables them to perform 20 bad things in return. Fsck that.

Uh-oh. Looks like /. has attracted the attention of a Scientologist. Will the nefarious Scientology legal team follow? Let's hope so. I'd be DAMN interested in watching that combat play itself out.

Look man, this guy has no history of violent behavior, he didn't have any weapons in his possession, and the only thing he is guilty of is speaking out of his ass. But if you've spent any time at all in Usenet you know that this stuff happens ALL THE TIME. If he had been saying these things directly to you then I might sympathize with you a bit. But he didn't. He said it in a newsgroup. Newsgroupies are exactly as threatening as you let them become.

The last statement proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Slashdot.org is dominated by people who want to help destroy Scn.

Wrong again, m'friend. /. is dominated by skeptics who virulently detest any quelshing of speech under damn-near ANY circumstances. There is more rancor directed towards the CoS because of their past (and current!) actions against netizens. But they're (we're) equananimous in our loathing of such behavior, whether it comes from the CoS or the Mormons or the government of Paraguay. Doesn't matter. What DOES matter is that Scientology goes way over the top, moreso than almost all other groups, when it comes to trying to silence criticism.

BTW: You might want to go check out the Freepers for some really crazy stuff that is much worse than this.

Even if you have a pile of diamonds equal to the weight of this earth there is no way to compare the peace it provides to the peace afforded by inner development. The owner of the jewels is still beset by mental problems like anger, attachment and so forth. If someone insults him, anger starts to rise, followed by, thoughts to give harm, to insult, to hurt. The man of inner development reacts quite differently. He thinks: "If he got angry with me, insulted me and hurt MY mind, how upset I would be, how unhappy I would become; so I shouldn't do negative things to him. If I am angry with him and insult him, he will be terribly upset and unhappy. I become unhappy when he is negative with me so of course he will be very unhappy and his peace will be disturbed if I am negative with him. How dare I do this to him?"

When you think like this, the anger disappears like a popped water bubble. At first the bubble seems to be as solid as stone but suddenly it disappears. At first it seems to us that we can't change the mind; yet when we use the correct method, when we meditate like this, the anger goes like a water bubble. You don't see the point of getting angry. You simply practice patience, try not to let anger arise, try to remember that what disturbs your mind and destroys your happiness also disturbs the other's happiness and doesn't help at all. Then how beautiful your face becomes! Anger makes us completely ugly. When anger enters a beautiful face, no amount of make-up can hide the complete ugliness and terror that manifest.

For example, the original purposes of the mental health industry were to help government and big business control populations and to control markets. The classic historical example of this is Nazi Germany.

After the war, many companies wanted to make use of the techniques to improve their markets, politicians wanted to advance their causes etc, all taking a page or two for the Nazi play book. But they did not want the stench of the association.

Now we all know that these are honorable men, and that these end goals of control and manipulation have been set aside by the vast majority of governments and organizations around the world.

But here and there we see a hint of the old technique. You redefine the word. You include just enough of the truth, and twist it with a lie, that it requires a sophisticated understanding to spot what is wrong.

to quote Hitler (full chapter here): given variously as (depending on translation:" ... all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan." (or alternatively) "... an effective propaganda has to limit itself to just a few points and must keep repeating them in the form of catch phrases for as long as it takes to have ascertained that even the very last person understands under these words what one wants him to understand." The full chapter makes fascinating reading, especially when comparing it to MS Marketing FUD and tactics.

Ultimately a lie *will* backfire, however, because people see through it and hate you for it. It may take a while, a long time.

Therefore the best PR campiagn is not based in lies, but is uses real truths.

But the MS marketroids resort to twisting and distorting the facts

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

That's right. It's as easy to get as candy, and even goes by the street name "skittles". And there's no nasty underground or illegal connotations to go along with it. For $1 to $5, you get the tablet, crush it up, and snort away.

School Nurses across the country trot from class to class, handing this stuff out like an afternoon snack. It's closely related to Methamphetamines, and has an almost identical list of side effects and warnings.

In addition, it is interesting to note that Ciba Geigy (now part of Novartis), which manufactures the stuff, has done a wonderfully covert job of marketing this stuff at parents across the country, by funnelling about a million dollars through the supposedly "grass roots" organization CHADD, which aims to "educate" the public about ADD. In much the same way that the manufacturers of Listerine "educated" the populus about a "disease" called halcytosis. AKA bad breath, about a hundred years ago.

So pop a few tablets in your kids, cure them of their impulsivity, and creativity. Drop them in front of the nearest Cathode Ray Tube, and voila! Parenting can be done even by idiots. And so it is (not that they were prevented from doing it before mind you...)

It's soma. Pure and simple. Brave new world, here we come...

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tagline

Grrr...
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He never revealed to his gang that there was never any "counterclaim" against anyone but FR. There was no counterclaim against FAB or against any individuals.

And, as we pointed out to him, his Counterclaim against FR was fatally flawed. We moved to dismiss it in its entirety.

That's not reporting ... that's vitriol. Can anyone supply an actual impartial view, or at the very least a balanced one that includes biased views from both parties? I would have expected a link to a counterview in the so-called "story" on the front page of Slashdot, in fact....

Anybody who wants to get a feel for the mindset of the site's inhabitants need only browse one article to understand.

This has been moderated "Offtopic"? Am I the only one who read the linked material from the article? Hello?

Perhaps a review of the moderation guidelines is in order.

--

Let me guess..
You are
a)a student
b)live at home with your parents

Don't forget, Gates does not pay taxes!
I am one of the people who will benifit from this tax cut, house,kid and we just get by. No SUV for me, I drive a 97 civic. When the reality of life sets in, space is well... just so much space.

Absolutely false. In fact, right-wing republicans proposed the constitutional amendment ratifying an income tax thinking it would never pass. Shock horror all the states ratified it -- classic case of what here in Italy we call autogol, the kicking of the ball into one's own goal.

Maybe, maybe not. There is actually a considerable body of evidence that it was not properly ratified. If you are interested here is a place to start.

There are also a couple of completely separate arguments for the same conclusion - if you are interested I am sure you are capable of doing your own research.

At any rate, the income tax originally took a tiny percentage of the top couple of percent of wage-earners income - and of course the politicians that came up with it swore it would never get bigger. Yeah, right. Anyhow...

Now tell me, how quickly will this thread head off-topic?

Rather quickly, I imagine... I wonder if someone has posted that they own all your italian bases yet?

But seriously, if topic is x, and x leads to y, and y leads to z, is z off-topic? Of course not. This is a discussion site isn't it?

But I really want to know: do you love my English? I've been studying it for many years now. If I make a mistake, please alert me. I'll correct it. I'm very obsessive about these things. It's gorgeous here in Sardinia -- I'm on vacation, dreaming up my next book --

Your english is fine, at least in this post - remembering that most native speakers are atrocious at it these days. I believe you misused the colon (":") - should have been a semicolon (";") but that's one most natives seem to get wrong so don't feel too bad...

Ah, taxes. Do you you that a century ago in America it was your farmers who demanded taxes on the rich? Times so change. Now neo-peasants like Eric Raymond want to abolish taxes. In Italy we'd say zitto, stronzo and tax his guns.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Como se "zitto" y "stronzo" en ingles?

That's spanish, not italian, but I've been told they are close enough that an italian will generally understand at least the simpler stuff... in case I was told wrong I was asking what "zitto, stronzo" means...

Sardinia in the spring... beautiful no? Enjoy it...

Recently there have been lots of "anti-terrorist" domestic military exercises taking place in major US cities, as well as the escalating usage of military weapons/personnel against protest efforts by peaceful American citizens during events such as the WTO conference recently in Seattle, constituting possible violations against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

The increasing use of military force right here in America lends weight to the idea that "non-lethal weaponry" is being deployed more as a domestic deterrent rather than as true war weaponry for use against other countries. Obviously they don't want to kill American citizens if they don't have to, but a zap from something like this would, apparently, be acceptable to the People In Charge...

__

Let me first start by saying that the issue of drugs is probably the only area on which I have anyway conservative views - but even I can see that the 'War on Drugs' launched by America is not only a failure, but a catastrophy.

I would almost say world-wide catastrophy.
Sites like november.org give a smattering of alarming statistics about the effects in America of the war on drugs(for example "The average sentence for a first time, non-violent drug offender is longer than the average sentence for rape, child molestation, bank robbery or manslaughter..."). Walter Cronkite takes a dim view of the war here. Also, some surprising 'mistakes' of the war on drugs can be found here.

But here's where the international aspect comes in: most of the War on Drugs aid that is being sent to foreign(i.e. non-US) nations is being mainly used to support regiemes that otherwise might topple. For instance Marxist rebels in Columbia have found themselves pitted against a regieme supported by War on Drugs money and soldiers trained by American 'advisors'. As freerepublic.com puts it :"Formally, all U.S. aid to Colombia, which produces most of the world's cocaine and most of the heroin consumed in the United States, is intended for anti-drug rather than counter-insurgency efforts. But in practical terms, the distinction is fading...". Ironic, considering it's pro-government paramilitaries that control the larger proportion of the drugs trade...the very same paramilitaries that routinely commit genocidal raids on villages that have tried to remain neutral...the very same paramilitaries that wander Columbia armed with American made weaponary such as MP-5s and secure in their training from American soldiers...oops! I mean advisors. No-one's saying that the rebels are angels - they too have participated in the drugs trade and kidnapping and so on. I'm just saying when a policy has got it so wrong, both on the American domestic front and on the foreign front, why is the policy persued so fanactically by certain Americans?
Anyway....just to be more on topic, I saw C4's 'Traffikk', pretty good. I hope the film 'Traffic' hasn't dulled the message too much so as to render the message unreadable to the vast majority of people(i.e. non-slashdotters 8).

8)

You see, there are these three branches. The judges may interpet a law, but they have limited enforcement powers. The President can always refuse to enforce a court decision, and Congress can always change the law. And unless it is a Supreme Court decision, there is always appellate court...

I'm sorry, but that isn't the case. The Emergency War Powers Act suspends this system of checks and balances in times of national crisis or emergency, making the Prez the de facto despot... and we've been in a state of national emergency since the run on the banks in the back in the 1930's.

Here are some sources on this...

Some more surrounding information

There is a plethora of information available on this. A simple Google search has proven extremely helpful.

I'm not going to comment on the veracity of the story as such, but the idea isn't that farfetched. SH has a fetish for high tech. If he wants vector hardware and 64-bit CPUs, he can't just place an order with Hitachi or MIPS. The obvious alternative is consumer technology, which is much easier to buy under the counter.

You know, it's this sort of thing that makes me wonder if SH isn't a plant, or at least propped up by his ostensible enemies. If the extremists in that part of the world had some semi-intelligent leadership, they'd be really dangerous. They could buy plans for V2s and such from the Smithsonian and do some serious damage to their enemies.

But what's the use of Obliterating the Spawn of Satan if you have to do it with UnKewl Gizmos? So SH spends big bucks on silly toys like customized SCUDs,superguns, zirconium bombs, etc., etc. Which, even if he had the industrial base to support them, he can't actually use — he has to stay under the western political radar to survive, and dropping nerve gas and fallout on large numbers of people is inconsistent with that constraint.

__________________

Not that these folks are necessarily right, but the topic has a long and detailed history with exobiologists, many of whom do consider it possible, if not likely.

Just because your imagination doesn't stretch that far, doesn't mean it's not possible. Maybe college will open your eyes a little, huh? (When you get there.)

---

And how many people do you know that use proper English in normal conversations? Bush is also apparently fluent in Spanish. The citizens of Texas apparently like the job he did as governor for that state. He won healthy percentages of every demographic segment of the population. There were even Democrats from the TX state legislature campaigning for Bush in other states because they thought he did a great job in that state and could do the same for the country. I don't recall any Republicans campaigning for Gore.

Also check out this Washington Post story& lt;/a> . Although Gore's SAT scores were better than Bush's (1355 vs 1206), he did worse in college. He got a D in Earth Science (poor in Science overall) and a C- in economics. Most of his improvements in his junior & senior years have been attributed to grade inflation by anti Vietnam war professors. Bush also got an MBA from Harvard while Gore got five Fs before dropping out of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Also given his big lies about his sister, tobacco, Love Canal, campagin fund raising, the polution generated by his properties in TN, etc., I'd hardly consider Gore a model of character and integrity.

the Free Republic

[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]

Dear US Citizen,

I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.

I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.

[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]

The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.

Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.

It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.

• When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny, executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
• When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states, large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.

Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.

"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.

Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.

When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.

Yours,

Alejandro Gómez de Argüello

a highly inflationary tax cut,

Now that is an interesting state of affairs. Letting citizens keep their own money is inflationary. He have to take it away via taxes to "save the economy" from the ravages of inflation. Has anyone stopped to think that inflation exists because of hte federal reserve? Inflation is actually devaluation of the currency, and is a consequence of there being "too much money" available. Of course, the reason there is too much money available is because the fractional-reserve banking system, lead and controlled by the Federal Reserve, has created too much money. The Fed buys government debt and gives the treasury credits in its Fed accounts. This acts as "reserves" for lending and as backing for the issusance of currency. It is money created from nothing. Commercial banks borrow money at the Discount Window at the Fed -- again, a debt-for-credit swap. This creates more money out of nothing. Banks make more loans based on deposits and Discount Window loans, making more money from nothing.

The sad thing is, because the U.S. has had a debt-based monetary system since 1933 (and earlier, but only partially), we can never get out of debt because it would destroy the money supply. Before the advent of debt-based money, there was usually little debt on national, corporate or personal scales (wars excepted; they simply printed money to finance early wars). 70% of all business growth was self-financed (financed without borrowing from banks) in the 20s. The Fed put a stop to that by offering loans at below market rates with money created out of thin air.

To pay off the national debt, we will first have to switch back to a commodity-based money system, such as the original silver-backed money system. Commodity money systems don't let the government inflate the money supply at will. The other thing we'd have to do is reform banking. Banks should protect your money, offer useful services, and charge fees for doing so. If you want to invest your money, then do that. Currently, a bank invests 97% or more of your money when you deposit it. This is what causes bank runs; if more than 3% of depositors want to withdraw their money, the bank runs out, because it's given it away to other people. Essentially, when you deposit money at a bank, the bank issues to several people the right to withdraw it. It does this by telling you that you can get it back out, and then loaning the very same money to someone else, who immediately withdraws it to pay for their house or whatever. If the bank runs low on "liquid funds," it borrows from another bank. It may also borrow from the Fed's Discount Window. All the loaning out of the money promised to depositors creates more money on the fly. This process gets recycled several times. I borrow $100k to buy a house. I deposit it at my bank to pay for the construction. The bank then loans it back out to someone else. I write checks; the builder deposits them; his bank loans the money out. Repeat. Because of reserve-fraction regulations made by the Fed, this process has a terminus; but it creates nine dollars for every dollar put into the system (approximately). This is the deposit multipler.

It is, however, a terrible tool used by police snitchs and clerical errors, and some instances of political revenge. "Dynamic Entry" home invasions are causing increasingly more deaths of completely innocent people from wrong addresses and delibrate malice.

Here is a link from a recent FreeRepublic thread on the rising innocent body count. 8(

Well, be have been declared the enemy since 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a number of national emergencies (banking, agriculture, etc) as part of his New Deal program and obtained sweeping, dictato ria l powers under Title 50, also known as the War Powers Act of 1917. Section 5b provides for expanded presidential powers. This act has been amended several times. We're still in that state of emergency, officially; in fact, Clinton extended it. FDR didn't assign the new powers to existing agencies, but created new "temporary" agencies, many of which still exist today. No president has been willing to end it, because they give up their special powers when that happens.

It's the national emergency that lets the President legislate via executive order. The power of legislation is supposed to rest in congress, not the President. Since 1933, the President has been able to legislate on his own without oversight from any part of the government. We have been living in a nation of Public Policy, not Common Law, since then.

Ask your favorite candidate if they plan to end all national emergencies, including the big, old one.

(previous post due to slipup with "submit" vs "preview")

________________________________________

I mentioned that Gore Sr was Oxy's VP, but guess who the president was? Armand Hammer, the founder of the Communist Party and close friend of Joseph Stalin! (Free Republic)

Anybody still want to vote for Gore? Wait, there's more!
Last year, greedy Gore wanted Oxy to drill for oil in the jungles of Colombia, despite protests by the U'wa People who live there. Here is the Rainforest Action Network's anti-Gore/Oxy campaign.

I guess no one has heard of the FISA courts. (No, NOT soccer. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was expanded after the OK City bombings. Funny thing? The 'experts' claimed foreigners did it, whereas a spook who spoke at H2K predicted 'disgruntled postal employee.' He was right, but Congress heard 'bin Laden' instead of 'John Smith.') These courts ARE the DoJ's 'rubber stamp'. Their proceedings are private, no records are available to the public, and In the 20 years since FISA, the court has not
turned down any of the government's
approximately 10,000 surveillance requests. Additional links are here, here, and here.
"And they said onto the Lord.. How the hell did you do THAT?!"

since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III

I think this is far from a fargone conclusion.

I can't find the link I want with more specific information on this topic, so this weak one will have to do, unforuntately.

It is only because both sides have nuclear weapons as a deterrent that people like you and me haven't been nuked on the whim of a politician.

thanks to the Randite social policies of the US,

The US doesn't have Randite social policies, if it did, it would be hard to find a starving person on the streets.

On the other hand, if the US government had socialist social policies, they'd be trillions of dollars in debt... (hey wait a minute)

...despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.

Learn to read. The US Constitution doesn't guarantee free food or free (as in beer) services of any kind. It guarantees free (as in libre) speech and press and things like that (which unfortunately current US leadership doesn't guarantee either).

OBOnTopic: as far as the use for this computer, I'll take a simulation of anything fission-related rather than have the actual reaction any closer than 8 light minutes or so away.

Spam comes to your mail box, usually is large quantities. Jon Katz stories, on the other hand, are posted infrequently, and on slashdot which YOU choose to frequent. There is a large difference. It's like going to freerepublic and complaining about all of the right-wing slanted articles.


He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man

Oh, more numbers. The NEA contributed $1,853,390 during that same cycle, 95% of it to Democrats. That's the PAC itself to Federal candidates, and doesn't count individual members donating on their own. That's almost UAW-scale of $1,915,460 for the same cycle (98% to Democrats). The aforementioned numbers all come from opensecrets.org, a VERY slow site...

In 1996, 40% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention came from the NEA, as reported in an Investor's Business Daily article.

Please don't claim that teachers do not have clout -- not if you want anybody to take you seriously.

You can read more about it on WIRED.

France has also complained about PROMIS.

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation who was going after the government for stealing PROMIS gave this document to each member of the House Judicary Committee.

and we must not forget that Crypto AG supplied encryption machines to over 120 countries. Officials from Iran, Iraq, and the Vatican, to name a few, relied on Crypto's tech for top secret dispatches and the NSA had a deal with Crypto, which gave them a backdoor that made those encrypted messages easy to decipher and they were not even a US company.

Also what about Lotus Notes' NSA backdoor that is in international versions of the software.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

For a conservative discussion forum I can recommend the Freepers site the Free Republic. There are many interesting articles posted there every day.

The author of a new book on the Clinton impeachment, Jeffrey Toobin, uploaded the documents to the Random House website, then deleted them a few hours later. I managed to download them before he deleted them, and I uploaded them to a Geocities web site. I also uploaded some secret evidence from the Senate Impeachment Trial that was obtained from the House Judiciary Committee before that evidence was disposed of.

Apparently, Geocities deleted the Paula Jones files yesterday.

But we will keep uploading them because the public has a right to know that Bill Clinton is a rapist, and these secret documents must be available to the public, whether they are sealed or not. If you want your own copy of the sealed files, watch FreeRepublic.com for details of the new location. We should have that tonight.

Ironically, by a complete coincidence, I met Paula Jones the day after posting the documents. I told her that I had published the sealed documents, and she did not indicate any problems with that. There is no recent activity on the official docket sheet for the case at Judge Wright's office. So I must assume that Bill Clinton and his goat-blowing attorney Bob Bennett are the ones demanding the deletion of the documents.

Paula Jones had the courage to demand justice from the most powerful, corrupt person in the world. Her courage inspired me to post the sealed documents, and I will continue to do so.

The public also has the right to see these documents in the DeCSS case, so keep uploading that file. (The CSS attorneys must be related to Bob Bennett.)

Best regards from "HAL9000" at www.freerepublic.com

C.D.B.'s nose is no longer than Howard Stern's. Steve Martin's in Roxanne, on the other hand...

So why didn't they call it Pinocchio? He had a big nose too.
(Sorry, that was Clinton. Look halfway down this page.)

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Don't click here.

OVER 8,500,000 PEOPLE OFFICIALLY MURDERED during Bill Clinton's tenure as president, funded by your taxes without your consent. (abortion)

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF CIVILIANS MURDERED by official, senseless military strikes in Kosovo (mainly), Sudan (official reason: anti-terrorist strike; reality: we bombed an aspirin factory), and Afghanistan during Clinton's presidency.

~90 SUSPICIOUS DEATHS/"SUICIDES"/MURDERS of people associated with Clinton (partial list and info) during his political life.

Note: Generally, people who get the Death Penalty CHOSE to break a law that put them in that situation; they are GUILTY! In contrast, unborn people and civilians minding their own business are INNOCENT! My views are not hypocritical.

I think you have a valid concern for most parts of the world. However, I think GB does have a consistent record of violating their peoples rights for their saftey. One such saftey factor actually might make this a little bit better than the situation you describe above though... that is GB's TOUGH gun laws...

Here is some history.
Here is a pretty damn frightening article.
Here is some more interesting discussion.
Here is a chart.

#include "disclaimer.h"

www.freerepublic.com a conservative news discussion site is being sued by the LA Times and the Washington Post for copying news stories for discussion. Sort of like Slashdot without the links. The judge ruled that this was not free use. A final ruling in the case has not been reached.

Linking to content is likely to be much safer than copying it or framing it, although copying headlines might be safe.

Remember it is not whether someone can sue you that is the important question. Anyone can sue you. It is a question of whether you will piss them off enough they might sue you, and whether it is easy to get the lawsuit dismissed.


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It exists, beyond question. It is also incredibly naive to imagine that amateur attempts to "jam" this system will be more than a minor nuisance to its operators.

Now, more victims are thinking about coming forward, and there are rumors they are going to join forces and file a class-action against President Clinton.

For latest developments, watch FreeRepublic.com. By the way, Free Republic had the story about this Executive Order last Friday.