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There is no reason to lament the fact that most Russians prefer to be bankers instead of cosmonauts. Russia is simply not at the right economic stage to splurge on space programs. During the Cold War, the Russians spent heavily on space projects, but that situation is due to government intervention (in the economy) against the will of the people. That intervention wrecked the economy.

When Russia becomes rich like the rest of the West, then the Russians will return to space. Given the the incredible accomplishments of Russian mathematicians, I expect that a Russian genius will decipher and advance the work of Burkhard Heim. In so doing, he shall develop the first working prototype of a warp drive. (The Americans have already developed phasers, which can be deployed on a jet fighter. Are the Japanese working on shields?)

However, that is just an illusion for now. Right now, we must concentrate on steering Russia towards developing a true democracy and a real economy not based solely on commodities. The current pathetic state of Russia is partially due to the shenanigans of the Harvard elite.

What I'm tired of is people following Al Gore around because he *says* the politically correct thing to excite the left in America. If you think Al Gore has the environment at heart then I suggest you read up on your Gore family history before your next post about what kind of environmentalist Al exactly is. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000522/silverstein

I'm living in China, and the doctors here have a vested interest in selling me the most expensive drugs they have in stock.

Unfortunately, this is also often the case in the U.S.

It's not as direct, since the doctors generally aren't selling you the drugs directly, but Big Pharma waves a lot of temptation in front of physicians to prescribe their products - so much so that a few years back, the New England Journal of Medicine gave up on finding independent expert reviewer who haven't been paid off in some way by the industry. (NEJM's "solution" was to allow reviewers to have received up to $10,000 from companies whose work they judge.)

Wikipedia also has a lot of interesting stuff about other people, groups and States looking at the same issue.

Yes, we know Fox News never has reports or correspondents that criticize the current administration.

Sorry, you're going to have to move your dissenting opinion to a free speech zone or face arrest.

Indeed scary.

Wow. This is inane. I didn't think I needed to specify that Bush wasn't personally wiretapping US phone calls without a warrant. But it was done on his orders. Or are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy to wiretap without Bush's approval? I did forgot to mention that the problem with the wiretapping was that the wiretapping wasn't being approved by the Judicial Branch as required by law. Remember the Judicial Branch? Remember the checks-and-balances-thing to prevent the abuse of power by one branch of government?

Bush has paid journalists to repeat his propaganda? Bullshit. Show me your source for that.

• WASHINGTON - Columnist Armstrong Williams has reached a settlement with prosecutors regarding payments he received by the Education Department to promote President Bush's agenda.
• Education and Medicare policies...
• 1.4 billion dollars spent on spin.. also regarding "the global war on terrorism" and the "dangers of buying drugs from non-US sources"
• Wherein Bush is 'concerned' about reports that the US military is writing propaganda in occupied Iraq. (Either he knew about it, or he has double-standards.)

Routinely censors scientific reports? Strike 2. Source, please.

• Climate research..
• Cosmology...
• Sex education...
• Endangered salmon..
• Medical benefits.."
• Reproductive medicine.."

BUSH delayed the federal response? Strike 3. Bush didn't delay anything.

• House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.

Osama Bin Laden is still at large? Yes, he is. Why? Because he has multiple Middle-Eastern states cooperating with him and Al-Queda. The search for Bin Laden is still ongoing. We haven't forgotten at all.

• "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." - G.W. Bush, 3/13/02"
• "I am truly not that concerned about him." - G.W. Bush, repsonding to a question about bin Laden's whereabouts, 3/13/02 (The New American, 4/8/02)
• "I don't spend much time on him." -G.W. Bush, six months after 9/11 event. [video]
• Bush withdrew the majority of our troop

So Milosovich was valiant anti-imperialist?
Right.

One theory is that Milosovich was winning his war-crimes trial at the Hague, and was going to call Bill Clinton as a hostile witness in his defense. Mighty convenient that he died of a 'heart attack'. But what do I know, I'm just the jester on the sidelines.

And the Islamists are striking a blow against imperialism? By stoning women to death? Or chanting Islam is a religion of peace!! and shooting a 75 year old nun?

The controlled media picks up on the worst-of-the-worst in the islamic world, to make sure 'we' look down on 'them' as primitive. There are plenty of examples of nasty people in our own midst - who are we to look down on bad-apple islamists shooting a nun, when two American Highschoolers slaughtered 10 buddhist monks in a petty war game/robbery?

NAFTA is the least of Clinton's transgressions: Who Said Clinton Didn't Kill Anybody?

An we still can't precisely hit the right target with >90% accuracy.

CBS and Paramount are tied up in the same megacorp. You do realize that only half a dozen distinct corporations control 99% of the entertainment industry, don't you?

Actually, It's only ten.

And Olbermann and John Stewart are the centrist voice on television today, right?

Both conservative. The only liberal press we have are the likes of The Nation and CounterPunch.

So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly.

This is why the flap about illegal immigration in the U.S. is so insidious. The only way to "secure the border" is to require all people on U.S. soil to carry ID all the time. Otherwise the border becomes a single point of failure, and once you're in you can get away with anything because in a free country everything that is not forbidden is permitted.

In the old Soviet Union everything that was not permited was forbidden, leaving people in a situation where they had to ask permission to do almost anything. I worked with a Soviet Georgian in the early '90's whom at first didn't understand that there was no form you had to fill out to make a long distance phone call. In the Soviet lab he'd worked in previously the procedure for making a long distance call was to file for permission, specifying who you were going to call and why, and then you were allowed access to the phone when (if) permission was granted.

This kind of routine intervention and restriction of citizen's lives is the eyes of some the only way to keep the country "safe". But others might ask: is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be bought at the price of chains and slavery?.

The dems are people on my side while the republicans stand for the big aristocracy of the wealthy and corrupt.

Democrats are every bit in the pockets of the "big aristocracy" as the Republicans.

Personally, I think it's because 93% of Americans don't spend their entire lives on the Internet and as such they don't feel like Internet neutrality is an issue worth as much attention as other issues. I don't think it has to do with "megacorporations" owning the news media.

Look, just take a look at this and tell me if I'm being paranoid. I am not kidding when I say that ten companies own virtually all of the major media outlets, and most of the minor ones. The simple fact is that the job of news outlets is theoretically to report the news, but they are beholden to their corporate interests and as such are hogtied. You think ABC's going to report on some nasty goings-on at Disney? Not until someone else breaks the story open first.

Here people are trying to paint this guy as a hero for getting information out, while at the same time we've had a multi-year snow job over a CIA "leak"

When it's governments versus individuals, I'm in favor of the individuals, excepting when those individuals have been proven to be very bad.

Tomlinson's is a case of one person revealing inconvenient truths about how his government operates. By default, I'm in favor of that.

Joseph Wilson also revealed inconvenient truths about his government, showing that the Bush administration was either lying or incompetent. (Not an exclusive or, of course.) In response to this, political operatives of that administration ruined his wife's career. I'm in favor of exposing government lies and incompetence, and opposed to political dirty tricks.

Then you must have something to hide? If you do not have violent pornography, you would not need encryption or stegnagrophy.

Here in America, we are allowed to do what we want.

Except when whatever it is harms another person.

Violent pornography hurts poeple so it should be illegal.

Encryption can hide pornography, but has no use if you're not doning anything illegal.

What I was a bit surprised to read in this ruling was that the judge said the President of the United States had willfully and knowingly broken the Fourth Amendment.

You may be interested in this impeachment story. The author was on the Committee to impeach President Nixon, so her opinion ought to be worth something...

I'm getting sick of the "We went to war because of WMD // George Bush lied" rational for the war. WMDs were, granted, a small part of our involvment, but the causes of the war were MUCH more complex than the threat of the presence of WMD.

No one is going argue that WMD were the only reason that Bush wanted to invade - but it is indisputable that the threat of WMD was the way they chose to sell the war to the American public. So, really, I don't care if you're sick of it or not, there needs to be accountability for starting a war on false pretenses.

That said, the whole thing is still a bungled mess thanks to the lack of strategy on behalf of the DoD.

Where does that buck stop again?

PS - If you honestly believe that humanitarian concern for Iraqis was a high priority in Bush's mind... wow. I have no words.

OK so you have on e example. Here's a slightly different one; engaging in misdemeanor activities involving illicit drugs supports terrorism. At least that's what the GOP would have you believe.

These guys simply want further consolidation of their power and will obviously use any underhanded legal loophole they can find to reach that goal.

Remember when you fold your hat, you want the shiny side of the foil OUT, or it won't work to protect you from Karl Rove's Mind Control Rays.

Before you start implying that someone is paranoid, you may want to do a little fact checking. Going over the grandparent post line by line:

• Would it surprise you to learn that these doctored photos were placed by someone on the far Right trying to discredit the centrist media?

  Note that he's not saying that it's true, just suggesting that it might be. And, given that this is a well known technique in spin control / psyops, it isn't an unreasonable questions.

• Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.

  Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.

• The goons on the Right in this country are playing a very deep game.

  Goons is subjective, and pejorative, but the rest of this point is darned hard to argue with. When a party rises from the mat to take control of all three branches of the federal Government, is a coordinated effort lasting decades, you'd be hard pressed to call it luck.

• They're sophisticated enough to data mine,

  Widely known

• and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.

  His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.

• It's just fascinating that the paste-eaters at LGF are always the ones who find these doctored photos,

  "Always" is an exaduration, and "paste-eaters" is (probably) unjustified, but other than that it is an interesting point. They certainly have found a number of them, and always leaning to the right.

• but never say a word about the ones on GOP web sites that show too much smoke on the destroyed World Trade Center.

  This did happen, and so far as I know none of them raised a stink, so he's spot on.

• With a news media that's run by press agents,

  Also well known.

• and a government run by lobbyists,

  Well, they write the laws, and

• you should just be prepared to only believe your own experience, and the media that you absolutely trust.

  If you want to, go ahead and argue that you should believe sources you don't trust.

• Other than that, expect it to be lies.

  Thing that aren't true, are...lies. Again, pretty hard to argue with.

• Then, get ready for the struggle to save our freedom that is inevitable.

  Everyone from Ben "A Republic, if you can keep it" Franklin has agreed with this.

I agree. The oil companies and right-wing have poured millions for many years into discrediting global warming and environmentalists in general. This has been profusely documented.

  The history of the Gore family and Occidental Petroleum have been intertwined for generations. Al Gore Sr. was such a loyal political ally that Occidental's founder and longtime CEO, Armand Hammer, liked to say that he had Gore "in my back pocket." When Gore Sr. left the Senate in 1970, Hammer gave him a half a million dollar a year job at an Occidental subsidiary and a seat on the company's board of directors. Money from Occidental and its subsidiaries formed the basis of the Gore family fortune.

But it is not only the land of Indigenous Colombians that Occidental is drilling against the wishes of the residents and indigenous inhabitants. In late 1997, Al Gore supported the federal government's three and a half billion dollar sale of the Elk Hills oil field in Bakersfield, California, to Occidental Petroleum. This was the largest privatization of federal property in US history. Occidental's plans to drill for oil in Elk Hills will disturb traditional burial sites for the Yokuts indigenous peoples of southern California. At stake are at least 100 ancient sites in the Buena Vista Lake region where Yokuts peoples once lived.

sure that they would be able to recover thoses costs by haveing the right to control how and by whom it is produced
This is a fallacy. Revenue is not magically generated by having control over production, nor is control over production a guarantee of profit.

Explain to me how even the current patent system hurts the inventor.

In many ways, but mainly because the patent system has become a game for the Big Guys who can afford the law suits or defend themselves by using their own patents. Small inventors with one or two patents don't stand a chance. This article is but one example of this scenario. The way the multi-nationals use cross-licensing as a legal way of creating cartels is also pretty sickening (I recommend the excellent book Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite for more on that).

For a more general discussion around the patent system and some of it's problems, I direct you to a few references on the topic:

http://wiki.ffii.org/Martin041109En
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,73 69,665969,00.html
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman200207 25
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/21/business/wh o.php
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm
http://www.cepr.net/publications/intellectual_prop erty_2004_09.htm

If you go back in American history and read period documents, you will find people who always thought that the world was ending and the USA was being taken over by a dictator. If it weren't for these people ranting about everything, the general population would be much more receptive to actual threats. TFA does not describe us becoming a totalitarian state, although most /. posts in the Politics section seem to hint that we are. Like the other response to your post says, this is just a case of police following their SOP (standard operating proceedure) because they have to. When detectives are on a case they carefully look for anything that is out of place or odd. From the actions of one overzealous manager in Vegas to "a CNN summary of a [biased] Time cover story", /. is not the right place for political news. For biased politics, give me National Review Townhall.com or the aforementioned The Nation.

Of course, big telecom lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail to eliminate these programs, and have already helped to create laws in 14 states making it illegal for cities to build their own wireless grids.
source: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=77928
I can't say what grandparent post meant, but it seems pretty clear that Ma'Bell and others have been quietly getting legislation passed making it illegal for local governments to set up their own networks. It seems that we're no longer against telco monopolies like we were 20 years ago.

>I'm not american and have never lived in America

The problem here is that laws aren't being enforced. From your post, it sounds like you might say 'well, all you have to do is enforce the laws and everyone will know their place'.

Sadly, it seems that the U.S. has changed from a a nation of laws to a nation of influence peddling. If it was ever the former is up for debate.

The only laws that are enforced are those that congresspeople are paid good money to enforce (usually by the wealthy and/or corporations). Sometimes laws are decided in favor of the poor, but only if the issue is played out in the press in a manipulative manner. There is an entire industry devoted to this: spin.

If you limit the power of corporations, you limit the effect money can have on the political process. The only way to stop this is to prevent corporations from having legal rights. See this article for an excellent treatment of that subject: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=89125

Hmmm, perhaps this will appease you Vanishing Votes.

Backbone.
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/29/b3587124.htm

You knew they would try this. If you didn't then you are stupid.

Cringley had a piece on this. I guess it doesn't make sense for them pay for a network that cannibalizes their long distance which voip does.http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit2005 0303.html

Unlike this article. The phone companies DO own the net.
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/20 06/05/big_money_boys.html

This is the end of the internet.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester

We need LOWER prices and faster speeds. I don't the phone companies with their history and now their attack on this network are going to be for that.

Ultimately we need a public municipal lowcost network with backbone owned by NO ONE.

This administration is doing everything it can to erode our privacy rights, take away due process and legal protections, increase governmental secrecy and decrease governmental accountability. All this ironically in the name of our saftey and freedom.
        The Bush administration is eroding our privacy rights through warantless wiretapping of American Citizens phone calls, and we dont know if its only international phone calls because there has been no investigation of this, we only have the people who are violating the FISA statue's word on this. FISA was set up for exactly this purpose. Not only that, they have a database of nearly every phonecall made in America, and they are using it to monitor phonecalls made by reporters to find leaks in their own administration without warrants.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=83880
      As for our legal protections, this administration wants to be able to detain indefinitely without trial anyone suspected of terrorism, Jose Paddilla is a American born citizen and though he will now be tried as a criminal due to the threat of his case going to the supreme court. This administration wished to detain him indefinitely without trial prior to that threat. That is scary and unprecedented. Were not talking about legal resident aliens, or people who illegal gained entry into the country, this guy was born here as a citizen and under the constitution he deserves a trial, every citizen deserves a trial, thats a fundamental right.
        As for increased government secrecy and decreased accountability we have documents being reclassified under the freedom of information act, and non-compliance for freedom of informaiton act requests. Its not just security related concerns, but corrupt things like whether a power plant is up to code and is likely to have an accident, hand outs to his industrialist buddies. Another nice tidbit hidden from the public for a long time by Bush's rewritting of the Freedom of Information act is a memo from Exxon mobil to the Bush white house demonstrating the influence of oil companies on this administration's global warming policy's. All of this having nothing to do with national security but being withheld from the public just because it protects monied interests or can embarrass elected officials.

if there was an authoritarian government who was hell bent on crushing people who think out of line

IF?!?!?!

The points I am making are that Enron's collapse was as bad as it was in significant (if not exclusive) part because a number of finicial companies (J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers according to this) were telling investors to buy Enron stock at the same time they were heavily invested in Enron. This is a clear conflict of interest. The auditors (Arthur Anderson) were caught an a different conflit of interest - they started thinking their fiduciary responsibility was to their client (Enron) instead of their investors (who got screwed when Arhtur Anderson got wiped out by the market, a punishment it richly deserved).

Ahh one of the old standards of the Republicans, the "liberal media" myth.

Here's the fact. There's never was, there definately isn't now, a "liberal media." How do we know this? The Republican strategists that invented the myth, have admitted it.

Rich Bond, 1992 Chairman of the GOP, famously said, "There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media].... If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."

Former Reagan Chief of Staff, GHWB Secretary of State, and head of GWB's recount team, said of the media, "There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don't think we had anything to complain about," he explained to one writer.

Nixon speechwriter, now professional fringe pundit, Pat Buchanan, said of the coverage of his 1996 presidential run, "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage--all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that."

Finally, Weekly Standard founder, and chief neo-con, William Kristol, said most damningly of all "I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."

You've been played, and lose by the most powerful schoolyard rule of all. Your own guy said so.

[references]

That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you some information about how...God has called me to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country."

For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality.

...

"I don't think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. "But," she says, "the people around me said, 'Well, you've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'" So Davis commenced with family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and Jonathan, in 1979.

Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis's. A close friend of Davis's remembers her calling long distance when she found out: "She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out."

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple's single checking account was in Hager's name only, which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often angrily summoning her to account for the money she'd spent that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's friend of twenty-five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager's financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in her own name. "I was not willing to face reality about money," she admits. "I thought, 'Well, money can't buy happiness, but it buys the

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."

I'd be disappointed if NSA ever resorted to anything so crude.

I hate to burst your bubble, but the NSA already *was* that crude, and IMHO they will be so crude again. And getting traffic data by asking carriers to hook the NSA up to billing records as they do now is crude... but not *that* crude.

You could ask yourself: "does anyone follow the same ingenuity standards when solving a math problem as when preventing people from blowing themselfs up in de subway?". (The same question works for groups that worked to prevent the Soviet union from nuking New York all together... along with the rest of the US.)

I dont think they would want to backdoor windows with a full covert channel though. They would get caught and China doesn`t trust US communication equipment anyway. (Though China must love equipment that comes with plenty of FBI and ETSI mandated "lawfull interception" functionality.) Ofcourse the US would be smart if more people cared even a tiny bit as much about who manufactures and operates their critical communications infrastructure as they do about who owns the companies that own the ports. (Not that I have anything against Israel, but lets say the 8200 branch isn`t as crude as the NSA once was.)

Maybe the NSA will have someone add an intentionally, but denyably, crappy random generator. (Kind of like the flawed stream crypto in the GSM specs.)

Read up on "the crypto wars" to see just how breathtakingly blunt the NSA is when it fights together with the FBI.

If you pick up body of secrets your disapointment might be mixed with exitement over how blunt tricks can be cool just the same. Cant crack soviets codes? sounds like a great reason to research TEMPEST and traffic analyses. Wanna know what soviet sigint people are up to? Parachute on a North Pole ice berg used as eavesdropping base after its abandoned by the Soviets... because the wheather is to dangerous.

On a good day, the NSA does what just works... on a bad day they spend billions trying to build something that just works ;-)

Unfortunately, getting quality human intel isn't simple, and there can be problems with overvaling it, too. There are problems when you start only looking for evidence supporting what you expect to find.

Tech-based intel is too limited in coverage; humans go places machines don't. Human intel has low accuracy; machines don't lie for their own benefit (yet). You need a mix of both.

All that is true, yet it doesn't matter, here's why. The reason is the U.S. has two center right parties that don't vary even an angstrom in the policies they support:

Does a 99-1 vote in favor of the Patriot act ring a bell?

Does Hilary Clinton calling for 60,000 more troops last summer ring a bell?

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050829 &s=berman

Does a bi-partisan Washington consensus in favorite of corporate globilization that hurts both American and Third World workers and the environment, not mention supporting the DMCA, WIPO, and other "intellectual property" laws ring a bell?

Does Kerry calling for more troops ring a bell?

" May 28 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called for increasing the U.S. military by 40,000 troops, probably for a decade, in order ``to match its new missions'' in the war on terror and homeland security."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=71000001&re fer=us&sid=apQHTegvEtDo

Does Bill Clinton's Joint Terrorism Task forces spying on non-violent anti-war activists ring a bell? Note the JTTFs were created as part of Clinton's anti terrorism act in response to Oklahoma city and are the genesis of the Patriot Act, and NSA spying abuses.

"Names and license numbers of peaceful demonstrators protesting NATO's bombing of Serbia In April, 1999, JTTF agent Tom Fisher, joined by two members of the Denver Intelligence Unit, monitored two peaceful demonstrations protesting the bombing of Serbia. According to the report, detectives followed one participant to her car three blocks away, apparently to get her license number so she could be identified."

http://www.aclu-co.org/spyfiles/fbifiles.htm

Does Madeline Albright saying 500,000 Iraqis dying from the sanctions ring a bell?

While the Republicans ARE more vicious in their campaign tactics, the victory of a Democrat gains you almost no real policy change. BOTH the Dems and Repigs are documented on record as supporting the same war mongering constitution violating policies. At this point we would be far better off uniting Libertarians, Pat Buchanan small republic supporting Paleo-Cons, Greens and lefty radicals to get BOTH the DNC supported Dems and the Republicans out of D.C. while we still have a Republic at all. If we don't hang together we will all hang seperatly.

I do protest the U.N., WTO, etc when I think they are fucking up. Clinton's sanctions against Iraq killed an estimated, 350,000 children under 5 by the conservative estimate:

"David Cortright's "A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions" [Dec. 3] was a slick attempt to defend a ten-year war against innocent civilians. Cortright charges that the number of dead is commonly overestimated by critics of sanctions, usually alleged to be a million. He claims the most reliable studies estimate that the number of Iraqi children under 5 who died is actually 350,000. Curiously, he makes no attempt to estimate the number of children over 5 who perished, or the elderly who died of malnutrition or the sick adults finished off by lack of medicine."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020121/letter

Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously said that the death of the number of children killed even by war criminal Bush II x 10 in Iraq was worth it:

"In 1996, she made highly controversial remarks in an interview with Leslie Stahl on CBS's Sixty Minutes. Asked by Stahl with regards to effect of sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." [2]. When asked about this remark in 2005 she said "I never should have made it, it was stupid", but she still supported the concept of tailored sanctions [3]."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_Albright

Those of you who think the U.S. was a more moral country during the Clinton years are deluding yourselves. Clinton attacked more countries than Bush, (Sudan, Somalia, Serbia, Iraq), and through the sanctions was responsible for more civilian deaths than even evil war criminal Bush II. Further Clinton's draconian "anti-terrorism" legislation in the wake of Oklahoma city with it's joint terrorism task forces was the genesis of the "Patriot Act" and unconstitutional NSA spying we see today. And lets not even get started on the massacre of civilians at Waco under Clinton's "justice" department.

No the Democrats are not going to save us, only a grass roots coalition of true small government conservatives paleo-cons & Libertarians, Greens, anti-war activists, etc can stop the Washington establishment and it's bipartisan enthrallment to the military industrial complex. We aren't just looking at a traditional left right division anymore but the people standing to bullies BOTH Democrat and Republican (to get back to the original topic). I would say decentralist Greens have more in common with Pat Buchanan's "a republic not an empire," than with Democrats who consistently vote for imperialist war and an ever expanding Federal police state.

"All the more reason to develop wireless access through municipalities. Why bother with the Telco's in the first place? It's been discussed before, but providing this type of service to residents could bypass those money-grubbing corporations. Also, whatever happened to all the fiber that Google supposedly owns? More at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester"

And who will route packets between municipalities?

All the more reason to develop wireless access through municipalities. Why bother with the Telco's in the first place? It's been discussed before, but providing this type of service to residents could bypass those money-grubbing corporations. Also, whatever happened to all the fiber that Google supposedly owns? More at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester

Mesh networks ... threaten the entire status quo

According to this recent article from The Nation, that would be a good thing. If the telecoms are trying to co-opt the net, WIFI could be our savior.

Also, this sounds somewhat like my ISP's wifi sharing plan.

OK, let's expand on this a bit...

The FCC doctrine (pre Y2K) was summed up in what they referred to as Computer 2 and Computer 3. These documents described the telephone system as being a "Public Network" and dramatically limited what telephone companies could do with their networks when it came to transmitting data. The feds wanted to foster competition and increase the pace of technological expansion by making sure that Ma Bell didn't ace out all the other players in data communication by leveraging their monopoly status. They were afraid of things like the Bell companies owning all the computers that were allowed to be connected to their network (Don't laugh, they used to own all the phone handsets that were allowed to connect to their network, and you paid to rent them by the month, it was even a crime to wire in your own phone extension...)

Now much of this is being pulled up by the roots, and I think it's going to end badly for consumers. Not only are the regional phone companies carving up their own networks to offer new "digital living" services but they are talking about how to kill the peer to peer nature of the Internet all together. According to this article http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester their plan is to provide preferred transoprt of partner (paid) content while restricting and degrading the performance of other general Internet traffic to the customer. It also mentions their "management" of non-sanctioned traffic, like p2p and VoIP. This really is propelling us down the slippery slope of large corporations owning all possible information channels. I'd make a rough guess that 9 or 10 corporations already supply the broadband services to 80 to 90% of the population. If they get their way, and if the merger fever of the telecom and cable industries keeps up it's current rate, I think that this could shrink to 4 or 5 companies in the next 4 years. It's going to be a bumpy ride for those of us who enjoy the current freedoms of the Internet.

According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out. Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

Bigger story that /. missed (Digg got it):

The End of the Internet?

If only it were true. He seems to be able to lie us into a war, shred the constitution, hand out important government jobs like stocking stuffers to incompetent nitwits, give aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war, suppress political descent, and run up enormous debt in our name to enrich his backers, and there doesn't seem to be anything the hand wringing "opposition" party can do to stop him.

If only he sucked , he's be out of there so fast his head would spin.

--MarkusQ

Parents keep secrets from children because that's better for them.

There's really no correlation between Bush's position and a parent's position. If we accept your premise that there are cases where the president should be allowed to keep secrets, then you might reasonably argue that it can do so because it knows more than the public. However, one of the following is true:

1. Bush really believed the intel he was given about Iraq, intel which was entirely fucked. In which case, he doesn't know more than the public, and he has no justifiable reason to keep secrets.
2. Bush didn't care about the intel; he was going to go do whatever he wanted anyway. In which case, he was lying, and has no justifiable reason to keep secrets.

After this, though, your logic becomes truly baffling.

If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you care if somebody knows about it.

Last i knew, leaking government secrets was treason and they still executed people for that. We can only hope.

I often have the same feeling about Slashdot. it's like a big haystack, but the needles are larger and easier to find. I have noticed that the Roland Piquepaille needles happen to the most worthless. The obvious solution for finding the proverbial needle in the haystack of data is to make it up. It's not like there's any real world examples.

We could be better prepared for a flu pandemic if pharmacos didn't ignore vaccines because they're not profitable enough.

These are actions Google has actually taken:

Helped Chinese authorities to censor their subjects' Internet access.
(http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx ?NewsId=14130)

Selectively approved and refused ads, based on political content.
(http://www.unknownnews.net/google.html)
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040830/reilly)

Permanently collected search history for everyone who has ever used their site.
(http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html)
(http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/161500535)

Permanently collected/indexed the email history and content of all gmail users, for marketing and law-enforcement use.
(http://mail.google.com/mail/help/privacy.html)

Filed obvious software patents.
(Refer to this slashdot story.)

For me, when people's actions directly contradict their words, I reduce my trust in them accordingly. Google can keep claiming to "do no evil," but the words are becoming more and more empty.

"How is it evil? It could be evil because its very powerful but in the right hands.. it could be good for everyone."

There's a simple way to tell if someone is likely to abuse power. When someone collects power over you, and states that it's for a purpose which doesn't require that power, you are being misled.

And I just run across of this little piece of in-depth analysis of Waltons' activities to better illustrate the extensive efforts of the billionaire's in support of various etxreme right-wing causes and the fillantropic disguises they employ to do so.