A call which, incidentally, probably wasn't illegal, especially since he paid for it, which is what is always left out of the story. He made the call using a calling card, billing it to the DNC, which incidentally how it was discovered. He just physically used his official phone, but that's not actually that damning, because the president and VP themselves have always had a bit more freedom in using the White House for political work than, say, the Senate or other government buildings. It's the president's residence and political work get done out of said residence, despite it being a government building and having government offices in it. As long as the president is okay with the VP's behavior in the white house, it's presumably okay.
Anyway, it have have been allowed, or might have been prohibited, although as Al Gore pointed out, there didn't actually seem to be anyone to regulate it. That isn't as inane as it sounds, because there actually are lawyers that are supposed to figure out things like that working for the white house, but 'use of the white house property by the president and VP' has, in general, been unregulated, and there literally don't seem to be any laws about it. The big one that stops that sort of behavior, the Hatch Act, specifically doesn't apply to them.
But it's interesting how a call that no one disputes would have been legal and have exactly the same effect for all involved had he walked out into the hall and used a visitor payphone got all the press coverage, yet Bush's politizing of the Department of Justice went unnoticed. And I'm not even talking about the USA scandal, which are, at least, supposed to be political positions. (Although you still can't kick people out because they aren't making up bogus cases against Democrats and investigating Republicans.) I'm talking about partisan hiring of positions protected by civil serivce rules, like AUSAs and district judges.
If we're taking bets, that's what they're tying to hide, BTW. Firing USAs for random reasons looks really bad, and there are a few of them that open them up to charges of obstructing justice if it was to screw up an active investigation, but barring that is at least legal. But some of the irregular hirings at the DoJ, and other places, the ones where they hired partisan operatives for by-law-non-partisan positions, were flatly, undisputably, illegal.
And no, I'm not suggesting that most or all liberals are using blackshirt tactics, just that you don't see conservatives shouting down President Clinton on his speaking tours, or damaging Volvos, Priuses, and Microbusen.
Charles Ray Polk
Sons of Gestapo
Willie Ray Lampley, Cecilia Lampley, and John Dare Baird
Joseph Martin Bailie
Peter Kevin Langan
Ray Hamblin
Larry Wayne Shoemake
Robert Edward Starr III, William James McCranie Jr, and Troy Allen Kayser
Gary Curds Baer and the Viper Team
Eric Robert Rudolph
John Pitner
Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell
Floyd "Ray" Looker and the Mountaineer Militia
Eric Robert Rudolph again
Marine Ricky Salyers
Brendon Blasz
Carl Jay Waskom Jr., Shawn and Catherine Adams, and Edward Taylor Jr
Todd Vanbiber
William Robert Goehler
James Cleaver, Jack Dowell, Ronald Sherman, and Thomas Shafer
Playford Glover
Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace
Eric Robert Rudolph yet again
Dennis McGiffen and The New Order
Ken Carter and the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan
Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean
Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise
Paul T. Chastain
James Charles Kopp
Chris Scott Gilliam
Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Buford Furrow
James Kenneth Gluck
Donald Rudolph, Kevin Ray Patterson, and Charles Dennis Kiles
Donald Beauregard and James Troy Diver
Mark Wayne McCool
Richard Baumhammers
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Steve Anderson
Clayton Lee Wagner
Irving David Rubin
Michael Edward Smith
David Burgert
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr.
Robert J. Goldstein
Larry Raugust
Matt Hale
James D. Brailey
David Wayne Hull
David Roland Hinkson
William Krar
John Noster
Norman Somerville
Sean Gillespie
Ivan Duane Braden
Demetrius "Van" Crocker
Craig Orler
That's the right-wing American terrorists between 1995 and 2005. Of course, they weren't planning on keying cars or yelling at elected officials, they planned to murder people in cold blood, and in a few cases managed to get away with it.
I agree, because I'm the same way: I think I know nothing about baseball, but, on a multiple choice quiz, I bet I could come up with all the rules of baseball, and match most teams up with their cities. I bet I could even calculate ERAs and stuff, just from knowing how they logically work.
But all that stuff is from my childhood. Give me any question that requires me to recently paying attention, like players, and I can't come up with anything unless it's very big. Like Sammy Sosa big.
But if we took the entire baseball domain of knowledge, I bet I could tie on any test with a casual fan. Or at least come within 80% of him.
Yeah, and what if you don't have a Java compiler?! Tests should require you to demonstrate you can compile into bytecode! And what if you don't have a computer?! You should have to be able to execute said bytecode. What if you you're forced to do it in zero-G? Can you do it?
In the real world, 'skill' is 'How well can you use tools to desired effect?', not 'How well can you operate without tools?'. Why? Because when people do things, they use tools. All the tools they can, to make their job easier.
Wait a minute. I want more information here. I want to know EXACTLY what sort of ad this was, because you've managed to be amazingly vague about the content or even type of ad, which you have done because I suspect you realize that it wasn't indecent and your girlfriend was a moron.
Tell me, did this ad contain any images at all? If so, did they contain people wearing less than normal amounts of clothing? Did it contain people wearing less clothing than would be acceptable at the beach? Even naked people are not 'indecent' if you can't see anything.
Technically speaking, listing the Playboy channel in the guide, or on the 'purchase premium channels' screen, could be considered an 'advertisement'. Is that what happened?
And what Comcast aired was not 'porn'. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not checked what the Supreme Court actually said. Most things that people would consider porn, and even call things like 'softcore porn', are not legally porn. To be pornography it has to have no artistic merits at all, and just having a semblance of plot and charactization is enough to have that. The question is if it's indecent, which is a much lower standard the FCC made up, and mainly consists of showing 'naughty bits' and swearing.
So the best solution to this dilemma is to bring the US voting turnout to a majority of the population instead of a mere 10% of registered voters.
But they don't have voter IDs! And when you send out challenges to their addresses, sometimes they don't send the mail back fast enough. And when we put up signs warning criminals not to vote, sometimes felons who've served their crime and are eligible again, and sometimes people who committed misdemeanors who never lost that right, don't show up to vote. And sometimes we have line so long that people that can't work can't make it through them in the hour they have to vote.
It's all completely innocent, I'm sure.
And I agree completely with you. Getting every single eligible person to vote in this courtry would instantly remove 'family value' assholes from office, and the FCC would be fixed a very short time later.
And I'll take your 'by what right' question and apply it to broadcast. The government has, as an obligation it has taken on itself, to show useful content over the airwaves. That's it. It should be making sure that each TV station is using a frequency is, in some manner, useful. (And freely accessible to anyone with a receiver.) It shouldn't be trying to keep from being 'indecent', or whatever, that is completely unrelated to any part of their mission.
The FCC should be out there requiring educational shows, both for children and adults. It should be requiring news broadcasts and traffic reports. It shouldn't being saying 'You cannot say X or who body part Y on the air'. That is entirely outside of any mandate it has been given.
Now, I don't think trying to make broadcast stations 'useful' is that 'useful' an idea unless we've run out of frequencies to broadcast on and need to decide which ones are 'worthy'. We haven't, on TV at least, so I'm in favor of that mission of the FCC being removed entirely. But, even with it in effect, Friends reruns are exactly as 'useful' as porn. They are both entertainment that part of the population likes. TV stations should be able to show whichever one they want.
1) Comcast is required by law to block any channel you want, including their own programming guide. All cable stations are.
2) Alternately, considering you both sound like adults, you could just take the programming guide off the list of channels and not manually type it in.
3) Alternately, you could not be such idiots and realize that a commercial for porn is not, in fact, porn.
I've seen commercials for Playboy before, and not one of them was 'indecent'...you get more nudity and sex (Which is apparently all that is 'indecent'.) on actual broadcast TV, exactly because they know people are already going to perceive the Playboy commercial as somehow magically obscene to start with. Objecting to the TV saying, 'Porn exists, you can get it by...' is way past any rational moral objection...at that point, it's literal thought policing...objectors don't want people to know certain facts about a perfectly legal product.
So you've got a lot of option there.
But, hey, if you want to make it a bill to make it illegal to show any content on the listing channel besides the actual listings, I'll be right there beside you. Their little TV shows and ads are idiotic. If they can be required to carry public access channels, and broadcast channels, they can be required to carry a plain listing channel without anything else on it. (They, of course, are free to run ads on whatever other channels they want.)
...when we complained about the FCC's censorship, we were told: Oh, you can get cable if you want uncensored stuff.
And they they started labeling everything and building controls into TVs to filter by rating. That was okay, because they told us, with everything labeled, people could complain less about 'inappropriate' things, because, after all, everything's rated.
Look, we've given those fascist 'think of the children' asshats every damn thing they wanted, and, magically, they always want more. It is trivial to filter content from children at this point, via broadcast or cable. We should be reducing such general restrictions, not adding to them, because we've added specific abilities to filter to end users. There's no logical reason we should be extending restrictions them to cable.
The one conclusion is that they wish to keep such content from adults.
You know what? Media companies need to start labeling everything TV-MA. Everything. All channels, all shows, are now listed as bad as possible. You can either live and operate as an adult when interacting with the TV, or you can not ever watch anything ever again. Your choice.
We tired, God knows we tried, but you fascist assholes either mindbogglingly stupid you can't avoid the carefully labelled content we've made, or deliberately don't want to. We're just going to have to draw the line in the sand, and label everything as 'hardcore porn' so you will shut the hell up. If people want cable, or, hell, wish to purchase a TV, they get handed a form that they have to flip past ten pages of porn to sign, and certify that they consent to have the filthiest things possible beamed directly into their and their children's brain.
Of course, TV would remain the same, with different shows aimed at different audiences, but we'd have a lot less assholes whining about it, because there would be huge clear warnings that 'The following show contains every bad thing on earth. Do not watch it under any circumstances.'
...hey, South Park actually has that warning. Hmmm.
I have forgotten Timothy McVeigh because he is dead and Ted Kaczynski because he is safely in prison. Thus, they are no longer credible threats. Compare that to the jihad threat, which may be only a "tiny minority" of 1.5 billion people.
Charles Ray Polk
Sons of Gestapo
Willie Ray Lampley, Cecilia Lampley, and John Dare Baird
Joseph Martin Bailie
Peter Kevin Langan
Ray Hamblin
Larry Wayne Shoemake
Robert Edward Starr III, William James McCranie Jr, and Troy Allen Kayser
Gary Curds Baer and the Viper Team
Eric Robert Rudolph
John Pitner
Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell
Floyd "Ray" Looker and the Mountaineer Militia
Eric Robert Rudolph again
Marine Ricky Salyers
Brendon Blasz
Carl Jay Waskom Jr., Shawn and Catherine Adams, and Edward Taylor Jr
Todd Vanbiber
William Robert Goehler
James Cleaver, Jack Dowell, Ronald Sherman, and Thomas Shafer
Playford Glover
Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace
Eric Robert Rudolph yet again
Dennis McGiffen and The New Order
Ken Carter and the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan
Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean
Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise
Paul T. Chastain
James Charles Kopp
Chris Scott Gilliam
Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Buford Furrow
James Kenneth Gluck
Donald Rudolph, Kevin Ray Patterson, and Charles Dennis Kiles
Donald Beauregard and James Troy Diver
Mark Wayne McCool
Richard Baumhammers
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Steve Anderson
Clayton Lee Wagner
Irving David Rubin
Michael Edward Smith
David Burgert
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr.
Robert J. Goldstein
Larry Raugust
Matt Hale
James D. Brailey
David Wayne Hull
David Roland Hinkson
William Krar
John Noster
Norman Somerville
Sean Gillespie
Ivan Duane Braden
Demetrius "Van" Crocker
Craig Orler
All right-wing terrorists arrested between 1995-2005. All of them planned to kill, or did kill, multiple people, usually by explosives or military-style assault. Some neo-nazis, some traditional KKK, some religious fanatics, some anti-'new world order' loons. Each grouping is a separate plan.
Also, 150 million Muslim terrorists would essentially be half of all Muslim men between ages 20 and 30. I don't know what sort of crazy math you're operating under, but 10% of the entire Muslim population of the world, which includes women, children, old people, is not any sort of logic. And, incidentally, 150 million people could trivially invade and destroy this entire country.
Saddam was certainly our enemy, but Iran has been a much bigger enemy than Iraq ever was since 1979.
I know, it's so sad when respectable Presidents commit treason. The impeachment trial of President Reagan for providing material aid to our enemies was gutwrenching. I've always said he should have merely been imprisoned instead of executed.
Incidentally, if Iran was a bigger threat than Iraq, and Saddam was supporting the mujahedin, which was an Iranian resistance group fighting the Iran government, than that would imply that Saddam was actually helping us, wouldn't it? The enemy of our enemy and all that?
The logic of right-wingnuts is so hard to follow sometimes. Reagan=Iran-helping traitor, Saddam=Iran-fighting hero?
Iran is Shia. We have no problem with 'political Shi'ite Islam' as you would call it. They haven't done anything to us.
We were attacked by Sunni fanatics, supported by that 'political Sunni Islam' entity, Saudi Arabia. Our good and dear friend Saudi Arabia. (I've been watching too much B5, apparently.)
Sunni Islamic nations shelter al qaeada. Sunni Islamic nations support it with money. Sunni Islamic nations are, apparently, also our friends, and we're supposed to be at war, now, with Iran, the one regional power that isn't Sunni.
Is everyone on the right as stupid as this? Your rant is like complaining about 'Christian politics' because the IRA attacked you, and then saying we should be going after England because they are officially Church of England.
If the problem is 'political Islam', why don't we deal with the political aspects of the part of Islam that actually attacked us first, and worry about the rest later?
I'll point out we could have solved Iraq without a war at all. Saddam, when he realized war was actually going to happen regardless of weapon inspections, started making plans to, in essense, 'give' his nation to the Arab League and step down, with a promise of immunity to prosecution for him and his family and the idea they would hold free elections in six months.
The Arab League ultimately refused, and we knew all this was happening. We could have, at any time, offered him the same deal, and gained Iraq completely bloodlessly.
We almost did gain it bloodlessly anyway, but Iraq wouldn't have been in such craptacular shape from all the bombings, and the Baathists would have been much more subdued, and the government would have been perceived as more 'legitimate'.
If the president of the US is bad, his enemies can't *really* be all that bad, which is totally untrue.
If there really is a bad enemy out there, (And considering the absurd 'plots' the government foils and touts until forced to admit it captured someone who planned to dismantle the Brooklyn bridge with a blowtorch or something equally absurd, it really doesn't look like there is.) then we need to do something about the fool in office even more.
You know, the fool who gave Iraq to Iran, and now is threating Iran, despite Iran not only not doing a damn thing to harm us, but the one counterbalance to Sunni extremism (You know, the people who attacked us?) in the area? The fool who continues to cozy up to the Saudi (Again, the people who attacked us?) and their big money? The fool who still thinks he can salvage something out of Iraq besides more dead soldiers and more hate from the Iraqi population? The fool who still hasn't managed to try anyone for terrorism because of his pathological need to randomly hurt 'the bad guys' instead of operating like governments are supposed to act by 'arresting' and 'trying' criminals for crimes they've committed? The fool who let bin Laden get away and has let the Taliban take back over Afganistan? The fool who doesn't do anything about Pakistan's support of terrorist groups?
And that's just the foreign stupidity.
We "progressives" are just hoping and praying that the threat is not real. If it's not real, the president is just a criminal, a Nixon who's more organized. If it is real, we're fucked.
His stated reasons for killing american civilians are:
he wants Sharia law across the world (succinctly: 'they hate our freedom')
Lie. He says our entanglement with Muslim countries prevents them from enforcing Sharia law. Not one mention of it in any other place is made.
he wants arab control of Israel (and considers US taxpayers to be military targets because they directly fund the Israeli military)
Lie. He wants Israel to leave Palestine alone, and to leave the Al-Aqsa mosque alone.
he wants to end all lending with interest (a policy which will just make inequality worse)
No, he says that allowing usury has allowed the Jews to take over our country, and points out it's been forbidden by 'all religions'. (He's right WRT Islam and Judaism and Christianity, I don't know about anything else.) This, however, is not one of the reasons he states for attacking us.
he wants to end interventionist US foreign policy
No shit, Sherlock.
he wants to convert or kill believers in false religions
No, he suggests we join Islam, to fix our 'moral decay'. He doesn't say anything about 'converting' us, or that he or we should or will kill non-believers.
Here are his actual reasons stated for attacking the US:
The US attacked first in a) Palestine, b) Somalia, supported Russian atrocities against them in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against them in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against them in Lebanon, c) control their own governments, preventing their own citizens from enacting Sharia (1), humiliate them, steal their wealth, and surrender to the Jews, d) we ourselves steal their oil, e) we keep forces in their lands, f) starved the children of Iraq(2) with sanctions, and g) gave the Jews Jerusalem.(3)
Then he's got some bullshit justification for attacking civilians, and then he moves on to the second question, what he thinks are our root problems of immorality and suggestions how to solve them. The last three of those have vague threats attached, and those last three are the things they listed as reasons for the attack in the first place. The rests have no threats at all.
The entire letter has two parts, defined very very clearly: Why are they attacking us, and what they are 'calling on us to do', with the first part being reasons for the attack, aka, 'crimes', and the second part just being suggestions to 'clean ourselves up' so we start behaving in a better manner.
If you don't understand this concept: If you get caught driving while drunk, the court may sentence you to attend AA. Or even just recommend it. However, failure to attend AA was not your crime.
Now, bin Laden's suggestions are somewhat stupid and naive about how the US works. Trying to imply that he will continue to attack us as long as we don't follow them all, however, is idiotic. He will presumably continue to attack us as long as we continue to do the things he said made him attack us. If he attacked us for some other reason, presumably he'd put it in as a reason. If he wanted to attach threats to the other suggestions, he presumably would have done so.
Pretending that he will continue to attack us until every suggestion is followed is idiotic fearmongering designed to make it look like all his 'reasons' were nonsense. The justification for the attacks were nonsense, the actual reasons really do exist and really are things the US has done, although certainly random people don't deserve to be murdered for that.
The letter is here. Feel free to actually read it. It's not formatted on the website, if you've got Word or another word processor you can paste it in and autoformat it to it laid out in easy to understand sections.
1) Which may be what you were talking about above, but you'd missed the point that he was saying the US supports their governme
Actually, at this point it seems like even if I'm wrong about the desirability of Letters of Marque and privateers, that might not be a bad thing. I wonder if that argument would apply to terrorists then? If Letters or Marque and piracy are illegal and people that have them can are unprotected by inernational law doesn't that leave al Qaeda operatives pretty much screwed?
As non uniformed, non state actors who don't abide by the Geneva Convention it seems like they are have a weird status not unlike pirates used to have. So the US or its allies can just execute or detain them under some suitable domestic law. More to the point the US armed forces could probably prosecute them under the UCMJ, it much the same way the Royal Navy did with pirates and the like. That would then be legal under US and international law. Whether it's a good idea politically is a different question.
I don't know why we'd have to start inventing weird legal theories to make terrorism illegal at this point in time. It already is illegal, and they can already be arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and war crimes. Terrorists that do not have the backing of a state don't have POW status. (Not that being a POW would protect them from being charged with war crimes, but they have to be charged and tried in a special way, we couldn't do it.)
That's not to say we can just execute them, or detain them forever, as, apparently, our illegally-operating government has decided to do. It just means we can charge them with crimes, which they still haven't gotten around to doing, not even in a military tribunal.
The US government has decided to see how many strange legal theories it can come up with to allow it to do whatever it wants to terrorists. Don't help them...it doesn't need any more suggestions when dealing with common criminals that courts have been handling since the dawn of time.
Incidentally, under no circumstances was it legal to just execute pirates either. Piracy was a capital offense, and captured pirates usually ended up being hanged, but after a trial. They were not charged under military law, it was normal maritime law. Often it was in a military port, under a military governor, but it was not military law unless there actually was a war going on. (Granted, there often was a war going on.) The only unique thing about their circumstances is that, because they were captured on a stateless ship, any capturing country had jurisdiction and could act as if the crimes were committed in their own countries, even if all crimes had been committed in international waters and against an entirely different nation's ships.
I.e., if a French ship attacks a Spanish ship in international waters, the English could not arrest the French for that. If the French ship, however, stopped flying the flag and went outlaw, the English could arrest and charge them for their attacks against the Spanish, despite the fact there's no obvious jurisdiction there. Putting yourself outside of any country's legality means that any country can just randomly assert it over you.
That was pretty much the only legal uniqueness of piracy and jurisdiction. If terrorists were truly stateless individuals, you could apply that to them, but, sadly, they usually aren't. They might be criminals in their home state, but they aren't stateless. Almost no human being is stateless.
What does the "International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas" say about non signatories?
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one. The US, as far as I know, is not really forbidden from issuing them by any law, unless the second Hague Convention is talking about that in section VII, which I don't think it is. However, issuing them is generally, for the last 100 years or so, been regarded as a war crime. Also, it's hard to see how issuing letters of marque against other countries not in a time of war would not constitute a violation of the UN charter by 'making war'.
Letters of marque are something that belong in a historical dustbin. Authorizing individuals to use force against others in other countries is something completely unneeded and unwanted in today's world.
They've never actually done what they were supposed to, anyway. Letter of Marque are supposed to, in theory, protect people captured who are holding them from being charged with piracy and/or murder, because they were operating under their legal authorization, and should be treated like POWs. However, this did not actually ever work...capturing forces always treated them as criminals. And all later treaties, like the Genevas, which set even more specific rules about the treatment of captured military forces, and the labeling of warships and military operations, completely ignored even the possibility of privateers. There's no nation in the world that would recognize John Q. Public standing over a dead body with a letter of marque against that person as anything but a murderer.
So, in fact, there's little point in Ron Paul's stunt in issuing them. Just ask US citizens to murder al qaeada operatives whenever possible, and pass a law saying it's legal. It would still be illegal in any other country, but it'd be illegal there anyway, regardless if they're carrying a piece of paper that wasn't even recognized even when they were commonly issued.
As a body of ratified international law, it trumples national constitutions, including that USA's, so Uncle Sam can no longer issue letters of marque.
Um, no. Treaties do not trump any constitution. Treaties are exactly the same as laws, except that, unlike laws, other laws cannot be passed to alter them, they, in theory, have to be withdrawn from completely.
The level of ignorance about how the laws of the US function continues to amaze me.
Hey, it's historically accurate behavior. And at least we're eating some of it. Later on, people would shoot buffalo from trains for no reason at all. Seriously.
It's not like you had a lot of choice, anyway. You shot whatever you could whenever it wandered by.
Ithaca Hours do not count. They are specified in dollars. Having non-dollar currencies is what, apparently, the government does not like.
Incidentally, the liberty dollar is not 'backed' money. They are backed by some silver, but it is not the amount that is the value they are purchased for. I.e., if you were to purchase a 20, and redeem it for silver instantly, you would not get 20 dollars. (You can tell because you can purchase them at a discount, which is completely nonsensical for backed currency.) They also change value based on the value of the dollars. They are, indeed, fiat money, not 'real money' as the issuers proclaim.
But they are also in dollars, and the US government doesn't appear to take issue with tiny schemes that use US dollars as the base. Because those are not, in any meaningful sense, 'alternate currency'...they are gift certificates. All the gift certificates in the world won't change the value of US currency, and in fact, printing those up and having someone else back them with currency will help remove currency from circulation as the certificate remains unused but the issuer continues to hold the money. Like pennies do now. Even if they're unbacked, they aren't hurting anything except possibly the people who got them in the first place.
It's the same with Ithaca Hours. Those can never compete with US dollars, because they are US dollars.
What the US government actually cares about, and what is legal but always mysteriously runs into all sorts legal difficulties, are a) fiat money not tied to the dollar, and b) backed currency not tied to the dollars. (Incidentally, a) is nearly impossible to set up outside a single community.) Any legal difficulties seem to be related to how widely they are used...until there is a large group of people who get paid entirely in this alternate currency and buys their goods and services using it, it's not really going to effect the economy.
eGold is the only company I can think of that would qualify for that...and, hey, look. eGold is, right now, under indictment on completely made up charges. Because eGold was smart enough not to print paper, which is what previous 'dollar competitors' have been hassled about, the government had to assert that, apparently, transfering ownership and letting people redeem that ownership at banks, is somehow 'money laundering', despite the fact that the stock market has been doing it for decades. Hell, the commodities market has even been doing it in gold.
Oh, look, they even threw in some 'child pornography' nonsense, despite the fact that eGold is the only closed and completely recorded monetary system in the universe. I.e., it's completely impossible to do anything with eGold that the company does not know about and maintain records of, including getting money out and in. Considering that eGold cooperates fully with any warrants, handing over all records, and keeps said records forever, it would be the stupidest system in the world to commit any illegal activity over. (Of course, they transfered their money in and out via wire transfer to banks, which don't keep records forever, but that wouldn't be eGold's fault, and criminals could have presumably just wired money directly between banks and had no trace, instead of using eGold and having a record in the middle but not at one or both ends.)
Yet, there they are, in court, for no apparent reason. Apparently, the FBI had, as policy, not to alert eGold to child porn payments tracked into its system, despite the fact eGold would have cooperated, and despite the fact that said transfers could then be tracked to the originating bank account. No, much better to keep quite about all this to use it in court to take down eGold. Which, I guess, is like letting a murderer go free so that you can indict a trash pickup company for being an accessory after the fact after they take away the murder's trash and bury it after he's thrown the murder weapon away. But the trash pickup company is competing with the government's trash pickup services, and the murderer isn't.
No they don't. They put fractional cent values on them.
They do that not because it's illegal to print your own money, which it technically is not.(1) At least, not if it's backed by something of value, aka, real money, not fiat money.(2)
They print a fractional cent value on them so that you can't show up at their headquarters and demand you give them money in exchange for the coupons. Aka, they only pay the big value on the coupons if you are a retail establishment and you hand them in with some evidence that a customer turned them in and you gave them that discount. Anyone else, they'll give you 1/20th or 1/100th of a cent per non-expired coupon. (Which no one actually does, because that would be stupid. It would be more efficient to stand around in a store waiting for someone pick up the item to purchase it, and sell them the coupon for half price.)
1) Although try telling that to the people who have created their own money and been illegally shut down by the government. eGold seems to be operating with no problems, but, OTOH, they haven't tried printing any notes, which is what the laws are aimed at. Although, like I said, the laws only prohibit printing unbacked money...notes that promise something of value, like gold, are as legal to print as concert tickets and coat check receipts. (That is, as legal to print by a company that will actually fulfill the promise. Obviously, anything else would be fraud of some sort.)
2) Coupons, if they were legally 'real', would presumably fall under the same category as money orders, traveler's checks, and bearer bonds, they are merely promises a company will pay dollars, and aren't 'their own tender', so wouldn't be illegal under any theory of anything. But they are not even that.
In addition, as Blizzard restricts selling of in-game items, the only actual 'value' an account has is the subscription fee. It doesn't matter if he put in months of work on his character, without the ability to transfer that or items to real money, it legally has about as much legal protection as a high score on an arcade machine, aka, none at all. (Yes, in reality, Blizzard doesn't care about trivial item sales, and only goes after companies that actually try to make money, as opposed to someone who finds themselves with a somewhat valuable item they don't need and throws it up on eBay. But sale aren't technically allowed at all under the account contract, IIRC.)
All anyone could possibly sue Blizzard for is the loss of their account and all in-game assets is the money they actually spent on the physical game (Which is worthless without an account.) and whatever time was left on their account.
Second Life is another matter altogether, like you said. They takes exactly the opposite stance on resell of their items.
Hilton hotels subsiduary in Norway (Refused to do business with a Cuban delagation because, as a subsidiary of a US company it's illegal for them to do so, but in Norway it's illegal for them to refuse to do business for no reason other than nationality. The problem being that neither country would give up its juristiction to allow the hotel to comply with the other's laws.)
The joke is it's illegal to discriminate based on country of origin in the US, too.
Regardless of whether or not you can hear a difference in 128kps encoded mp3s (And I really can't.), you can certainly tell the difference between the crap they're doing to music in the studio to make it play at maximum volume in all frequences and what the music actually sounds like.
Slashdot Mirror
A call which, incidentally, probably wasn't illegal, especially since he paid for it, which is what is always left out of the story. He made the call using a calling card, billing it to the DNC, which incidentally how it was discovered. He just physically used his official phone, but that's not actually that damning, because the president and VP themselves have always had a bit more freedom in using the White House for political work than, say, the Senate or other government buildings. It's the president's residence and political work get done out of said residence, despite it being a government building and having government offices in it. As long as the president is okay with the VP's behavior in the white house, it's presumably okay.
Anyway, it have have been allowed, or might have been prohibited, although as Al Gore pointed out, there didn't actually seem to be anyone to regulate it. That isn't as inane as it sounds, because there actually are lawyers that are supposed to figure out things like that working for the white house, but 'use of the white house property by the president and VP' has, in general, been unregulated, and there literally don't seem to be any laws about it. The big one that stops that sort of behavior, the Hatch Act, specifically doesn't apply to them.
But it's interesting how a call that no one disputes would have been legal and have exactly the same effect for all involved had he walked out into the hall and used a visitor payphone got all the press coverage, yet Bush's politizing of the Department of Justice went unnoticed. And I'm not even talking about the USA scandal, which are, at least, supposed to be political positions. (Although you still can't kick people out because they aren't making up bogus cases against Democrats and investigating Republicans.) I'm talking about partisan hiring of positions protected by civil serivce rules, like AUSAs and district judges.
If we're taking bets, that's what they're tying to hide, BTW. Firing USAs for random reasons looks really bad, and there are a few of them that open them up to charges of obstructing justice if it was to screw up an active investigation, but barring that is at least legal. But some of the irregular hirings at the DoJ, and other places, the ones where they hired partisan operatives for by-law-non-partisan positions, were flatly, undisputably, illegal.
Charles Ray Polk
Sons of Gestapo
Willie Ray Lampley, Cecilia Lampley, and John Dare Baird
Joseph Martin Bailie
Peter Kevin Langan
Ray Hamblin
Larry Wayne Shoemake
Robert Edward Starr III, William James McCranie Jr, and Troy Allen Kayser
Gary Curds Baer and the Viper Team
Eric Robert Rudolph
John Pitner
Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell
Floyd "Ray" Looker and the Mountaineer Militia
Eric Robert Rudolph again
Marine Ricky Salyers
Brendon Blasz
Carl Jay Waskom Jr., Shawn and Catherine Adams, and Edward Taylor Jr
Todd Vanbiber
William Robert Goehler
James Cleaver, Jack Dowell, Ronald Sherman, and Thomas Shafer
Playford Glover
Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace
Eric Robert Rudolph yet again
Dennis McGiffen and The New Order
Ken Carter and the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan
Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean
Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise
Paul T. Chastain
James Charles Kopp
Chris Scott Gilliam
Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Buford Furrow
James Kenneth Gluck
Donald Rudolph, Kevin Ray Patterson, and Charles Dennis Kiles
Donald Beauregard and James Troy Diver
Mark Wayne McCool
Richard Baumhammers
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Steve Anderson
Clayton Lee Wagner
Irving David Rubin
Michael Edward Smith
David Burgert
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr.
Robert J. Goldstein
Larry Raugust
Matt Hale
James D. Brailey
David Wayne Hull
David Roland Hinkson
William Krar
John Noster
Norman Somerville
Sean Gillespie
Ivan Duane Braden
Demetrius "Van" Crocker
Craig Orler
That's the right-wing American terrorists between 1995 and 2005. Of course, they weren't planning on keying cars or yelling at elected officials, they planned to murder people in cold blood, and in a few cases managed to get away with it.
I agree, because I'm the same way: I think I know nothing about baseball, but, on a multiple choice quiz, I bet I could come up with all the rules of baseball, and match most teams up with their cities. I bet I could even calculate ERAs and stuff, just from knowing how they logically work.
But all that stuff is from my childhood. Give me any question that requires me to recently paying attention, like players, and I can't come up with anything unless it's very big. Like Sammy Sosa big.
But if we took the entire baseball domain of knowledge, I bet I could tie on any test with a casual fan. Or at least come within 80% of him.
Yeah, and what if you don't have a Java compiler?! Tests should require you to demonstrate you can compile into bytecode! And what if you don't have a computer?! You should have to be able to execute said bytecode. What if you you're forced to do it in zero-G? Can you do it?
In the real world, 'skill' is 'How well can you use tools to desired effect?', not 'How well can you operate without tools?'. Why? Because when people do things, they use tools. All the tools they can, to make their job easier.
Wait a minute. I want more information here. I want to know EXACTLY what sort of ad this was, because you've managed to be amazingly vague about the content or even type of ad, which you have done because I suspect you realize that it wasn't indecent and your girlfriend was a moron.
Tell me, did this ad contain any images at all? If so, did they contain people wearing less than normal amounts of clothing? Did it contain people wearing less clothing than would be acceptable at the beach? Even naked people are not 'indecent' if you can't see anything.
Technically speaking, listing the Playboy channel in the guide, or on the 'purchase premium channels' screen, could be considered an 'advertisement'. Is that what happened?
And what Comcast aired was not 'porn'. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not checked what the Supreme Court actually said. Most things that people would consider porn, and even call things like 'softcore porn', are not legally porn. To be pornography it has to have no artistic merits at all, and just having a semblance of plot and charactization is enough to have that. The question is if it's indecent, which is a much lower standard the FCC made up, and mainly consists of showing 'naughty bits' and swearing.
So the best solution to this dilemma is to bring the US voting turnout to a majority of the population instead of a mere 10% of registered voters.
But they don't have voter IDs! And when you send out challenges to their addresses, sometimes they don't send the mail back fast enough. And when we put up signs warning criminals not to vote, sometimes felons who've served their crime and are eligible again, and sometimes people who committed misdemeanors who never lost that right, don't show up to vote. And sometimes we have line so long that people that can't work can't make it through them in the hour they have to vote.
It's all completely innocent, I'm sure.
And I agree completely with you. Getting every single eligible person to vote in this courtry would instantly remove 'family value' assholes from office, and the FCC would be fixed a very short time later.
And I'll take your 'by what right' question and apply it to broadcast. The government has, as an obligation it has taken on itself, to show useful content over the airwaves. That's it. It should be making sure that each TV station is using a frequency is, in some manner, useful. (And freely accessible to anyone with a receiver.) It shouldn't be trying to keep from being 'indecent', or whatever, that is completely unrelated to any part of their mission.
The FCC should be out there requiring educational shows, both for children and adults. It should be requiring news broadcasts and traffic reports. It shouldn't being saying 'You cannot say X or who body part Y on the air'. That is entirely outside of any mandate it has been given.
Now, I don't think trying to make broadcast stations 'useful' is that 'useful' an idea unless we've run out of frequencies to broadcast on and need to decide which ones are 'worthy'. We haven't, on TV at least, so I'm in favor of that mission of the FCC being removed entirely. But, even with it in effect, Friends reruns are exactly as 'useful' as porn. They are both entertainment that part of the population likes. TV stations should be able to show whichever one they want.
1) Comcast is required by law to block any channel you want, including their own programming guide. All cable stations are.
2) Alternately, considering you both sound like adults, you could just take the programming guide off the list of channels and not manually type it in.
3) Alternately, you could not be such idiots and realize that a commercial for porn is not, in fact, porn.
I've seen commercials for Playboy before, and not one of them was 'indecent'...you get more nudity and sex (Which is apparently all that is 'indecent'.) on actual broadcast TV, exactly because they know people are already going to perceive the Playboy commercial as somehow magically obscene to start with. Objecting to the TV saying, 'Porn exists, you can get it by...' is way past any rational moral objection...at that point, it's literal thought policing...objectors don't want people to know certain facts about a perfectly legal product.
So you've got a lot of option there.
But, hey, if you want to make it a bill to make it illegal to show any content on the listing channel besides the actual listings, I'll be right there beside you. Their little TV shows and ads are idiotic. If they can be required to carry public access channels, and broadcast channels, they can be required to carry a plain listing channel without anything else on it. (They, of course, are free to run ads on whatever other channels they want.)
...when we complained about the FCC's censorship, we were told: Oh, you can get cable if you want uncensored stuff.
And they they started labeling everything and building controls into TVs to filter by rating. That was okay, because they told us, with everything labeled, people could complain less about 'inappropriate' things, because, after all, everything's rated.
Look, we've given those fascist 'think of the children' asshats every damn thing they wanted, and, magically, they always want more. It is trivial to filter content from children at this point, via broadcast or cable. We should be reducing such general restrictions, not adding to them, because we've added specific abilities to filter to end users. There's no logical reason we should be extending restrictions them to cable.
The one conclusion is that they wish to keep such content from adults.
You know what? Media companies need to start labeling everything TV-MA. Everything. All channels, all shows, are now listed as bad as possible. You can either live and operate as an adult when interacting with the TV, or you can not ever watch anything ever again. Your choice.
We tired, God knows we tried, but you fascist assholes either mindbogglingly stupid you can't avoid the carefully labelled content we've made, or deliberately don't want to. We're just going to have to draw the line in the sand, and label everything as 'hardcore porn' so you will shut the hell up. If people want cable, or, hell, wish to purchase a TV, they get handed a form that they have to flip past ten pages of porn to sign, and certify that they consent to have the filthiest things possible beamed directly into their and their children's brain.
Of course, TV would remain the same, with different shows aimed at different audiences, but we'd have a lot less assholes whining about it, because there would be huge clear warnings that 'The following show contains every bad thing on earth. Do not watch it under any circumstances.'
I have forgotten Timothy McVeigh because he is dead and Ted Kaczynski because he is safely in prison. Thus, they are no longer credible threats. Compare that to the jihad threat, which may be only a "tiny minority" of 1.5 billion people.
Charles Ray Polk
Sons of Gestapo
Willie Ray Lampley, Cecilia Lampley, and John Dare Baird
Joseph Martin Bailie
Peter Kevin Langan
Ray Hamblin
Larry Wayne Shoemake
Robert Edward Starr III, William James McCranie Jr, and Troy Allen Kayser
Gary Curds Baer and the Viper Team
Eric Robert Rudolph
John Pitner
Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell
Floyd "Ray" Looker and the Mountaineer Militia
Eric Robert Rudolph again
Marine Ricky Salyers
Brendon Blasz
Carl Jay Waskom Jr., Shawn and Catherine Adams, and Edward Taylor Jr
Todd Vanbiber
William Robert Goehler
James Cleaver, Jack Dowell, Ronald Sherman, and Thomas Shafer
Playford Glover
Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace
Eric Robert Rudolph yet again
Dennis McGiffen and The New Order
Ken Carter and the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan
Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean
Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise
Paul T. Chastain
James Charles Kopp
Chris Scott Gilliam
Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Buford Furrow
James Kenneth Gluck
Donald Rudolph, Kevin Ray Patterson, and Charles Dennis Kiles
Donald Beauregard and James Troy Diver
Mark Wayne McCool
Richard Baumhammers
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Steve Anderson
Clayton Lee Wagner
Irving David Rubin
Michael Edward Smith
David Burgert
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr.
Robert J. Goldstein
Larry Raugust
Matt Hale
James D. Brailey
David Wayne Hull
David Roland Hinkson
William Krar
John Noster
Norman Somerville
Sean Gillespie
Ivan Duane Braden
Demetrius "Van" Crocker
Craig Orler
All right-wing terrorists arrested between 1995-2005. All of them planned to kill, or did kill, multiple people, usually by explosives or military-style assault. Some neo-nazis, some traditional KKK, some religious fanatics, some anti-'new world order' loons. Each grouping is a separate plan.
Also, 150 million Muslim terrorists would essentially be half of all Muslim men between ages 20 and 30. I don't know what sort of crazy math you're operating under, but 10% of the entire Muslim population of the world, which includes women, children, old people, is not any sort of logic. And, incidentally, 150 million people could trivially invade and destroy this entire country.
That's nothing, the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, aired in 2001, had a plane almost being crashed into the World Trade Center.
Saddam was certainly our enemy, but Iran has been a much bigger enemy than Iraq ever was since 1979.
I know, it's so sad when respectable Presidents commit treason. The impeachment trial of President Reagan for providing material aid to our enemies was gutwrenching. I've always said he should have merely been imprisoned instead of executed.
Incidentally, if Iran was a bigger threat than Iraq, and Saddam was supporting the mujahedin, which was an Iranian resistance group fighting the Iran government, than that would imply that Saddam was actually helping us, wouldn't it? The enemy of our enemy and all that?
The logic of right-wingnuts is so hard to follow sometimes. Reagan=Iran-helping traitor, Saddam=Iran-fighting hero?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Iran is Shia. We have no problem with 'political Shi'ite Islam' as you would call it. They haven't done anything to us.
We were attacked by Sunni fanatics, supported by that 'political Sunni Islam' entity, Saudi Arabia. Our good and dear friend Saudi Arabia. (I've been watching too much B5, apparently.)
Sunni Islamic nations shelter al qaeada. Sunni Islamic nations support it with money. Sunni Islamic nations are, apparently, also our friends, and we're supposed to be at war, now, with Iran, the one regional power that isn't Sunni.
Is everyone on the right as stupid as this? Your rant is like complaining about 'Christian politics' because the IRA attacked you, and then saying we should be going after England because they are officially Church of England.
If the problem is 'political Islam', why don't we deal with the political aspects of the part of Islam that actually attacked us first, and worry about the rest later?
I'll point out we could have solved Iraq without a war at all. Saddam, when he realized war was actually going to happen regardless of weapon inspections, started making plans to, in essense, 'give' his nation to the Arab League and step down, with a promise of immunity to prosecution for him and his family and the idea they would hold free elections in six months.
The Arab League ultimately refused, and we knew all this was happening. We could have, at any time, offered him the same deal, and gained Iraq completely bloodlessly.
We almost did gain it bloodlessly anyway, but Iraq wouldn't have been in such craptacular shape from all the bombings, and the Baathists would have been much more subdued, and the government would have been perceived as more 'legitimate'.
If the president of the US is bad, his enemies can't *really* be all that bad, which is totally untrue.
If there really is a bad enemy out there, (And considering the absurd 'plots' the government foils and touts until forced to admit it captured someone who planned to dismantle the Brooklyn bridge with a blowtorch or something equally absurd, it really doesn't look like there is.) then we need to do something about the fool in office even more.
You know, the fool who gave Iraq to Iran, and now is threating Iran, despite Iran not only not doing a damn thing to harm us, but the one counterbalance to Sunni extremism (You know, the people who attacked us?) in the area? The fool who continues to cozy up to the Saudi (Again, the people who attacked us?) and their big money? The fool who still thinks he can salvage something out of Iraq besides more dead soldiers and more hate from the Iraqi population? The fool who still hasn't managed to try anyone for terrorism because of his pathological need to randomly hurt 'the bad guys' instead of operating like governments are supposed to act by 'arresting' and 'trying' criminals for crimes they've committed? The fool who let bin Laden get away and has let the Taliban take back over Afganistan? The fool who doesn't do anything about Pakistan's support of terrorist groups?
And that's just the foreign stupidity.
We "progressives" are just hoping and praying that the threat is not real. If it's not real, the president is just a criminal, a Nixon who's more organized. If it is real, we're fucked.
His stated reasons for killing american civilians are:
he wants Sharia law across the world (succinctly: 'they hate our freedom')
Lie. He says our entanglement with Muslim countries prevents them from enforcing Sharia law. Not one mention of it in any other place is made.
he wants arab control of Israel (and considers US taxpayers to be military targets because they directly fund the Israeli military)
Lie. He wants Israel to leave Palestine alone, and to leave the Al-Aqsa mosque alone.
he wants to end all lending with interest (a policy which will just make inequality worse)
No, he says that allowing usury has allowed the Jews to take over our country, and points out it's been forbidden by 'all religions'. (He's right WRT Islam and Judaism and Christianity, I don't know about anything else.) This, however, is not one of the reasons he states for attacking us.
he wants to end interventionist US foreign policy
No shit, Sherlock.
he wants to convert or kill believers in false religions
No, he suggests we join Islam, to fix our 'moral decay'. He doesn't say anything about 'converting' us, or that he or we should or will kill non-believers.
Here are his actual reasons stated for attacking the US:
The US attacked first in a) Palestine, b) Somalia, supported Russian atrocities against them in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against them in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against them in Lebanon, c) control their own governments, preventing their own citizens from enacting Sharia (1), humiliate them, steal their wealth, and surrender to the Jews, d) we ourselves steal their oil, e) we keep forces in their lands, f) starved the children of Iraq(2) with sanctions, and g) gave the Jews Jerusalem.(3)
Then he's got some bullshit justification for attacking civilians, and then he moves on to the second question, what he thinks are our root problems of immorality and suggestions how to solve them. The last three of those have vague threats attached, and those last three are the things they listed as reasons for the attack in the first place. The rests have no threats at all.
The entire letter has two parts, defined very very clearly: Why are they attacking us, and what they are 'calling on us to do', with the first part being reasons for the attack, aka, 'crimes', and the second part just being suggestions to 'clean ourselves up' so we start behaving in a better manner.
If you don't understand this concept: If you get caught driving while drunk, the court may sentence you to attend AA. Or even just recommend it. However, failure to attend AA was not your crime.
Now, bin Laden's suggestions are somewhat stupid and naive about how the US works. Trying to imply that he will continue to attack us as long as we don't follow them all, however, is idiotic. He will presumably continue to attack us as long as we continue to do the things he said made him attack us. If he attacked us for some other reason, presumably he'd put it in as a reason. If he wanted to attach threats to the other suggestions, he presumably would have done so.
Pretending that he will continue to attack us until every suggestion is followed is idiotic fearmongering designed to make it look like all his 'reasons' were nonsense. The justification for the attacks were nonsense, the actual reasons really do exist and really are things the US has done, although certainly random people don't deserve to be murdered for that.
The letter is here. Feel free to actually read it. It's not formatted on the website, if you've got Word or another word processor you can paste it in and autoformat it to it laid out in easy to understand sections.
1) Which may be what you were talking about above, but you'd missed the point that he was saying the US supports their governme
Actually, at this point it seems like even if I'm wrong about the desirability of Letters of Marque and privateers, that might not be a bad thing. I wonder if that argument would apply to terrorists then? If Letters or Marque and piracy are illegal and people that have them can are unprotected by inernational law doesn't that leave al Qaeda operatives pretty much screwed?
As non uniformed, non state actors who don't abide by the Geneva Convention it seems like they are have a weird status not unlike pirates used to have. So the US or its allies can just execute or detain them under some suitable domestic law. More to the point the US armed forces could probably prosecute them under the UCMJ, it much the same way the Royal Navy did with pirates and the like. That would then be legal under US and international law. Whether it's a good idea politically is a different question.
I don't know why we'd have to start inventing weird legal theories to make terrorism illegal at this point in time. It already is illegal, and they can already be arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and war crimes. Terrorists that do not have the backing of a state don't have POW status. (Not that being a POW would protect them from being charged with war crimes, but they have to be charged and tried in a special way, we couldn't do it.)
That's not to say we can just execute them, or detain them forever, as, apparently, our illegally-operating government has decided to do. It just means we can charge them with crimes, which they still haven't gotten around to doing, not even in a military tribunal.
The US government has decided to see how many strange legal theories it can come up with to allow it to do whatever it wants to terrorists. Don't help them...it doesn't need any more suggestions when dealing with common criminals that courts have been handling since the dawn of time.
Incidentally, under no circumstances was it legal to just execute pirates either. Piracy was a capital offense, and captured pirates usually ended up being hanged, but after a trial. They were not charged under military law, it was normal maritime law. Often it was in a military port, under a military governor, but it was not military law unless there actually was a war going on. (Granted, there often was a war going on.) The only unique thing about their circumstances is that, because they were captured on a stateless ship, any capturing country had jurisdiction and could act as if the crimes were committed in their own countries, even if all crimes had been committed in international waters and against an entirely different nation's ships.
I.e., if a French ship attacks a Spanish ship in international waters, the English could not arrest the French for that. If the French ship, however, stopped flying the flag and went outlaw, the English could arrest and charge them for their attacks against the Spanish, despite the fact there's no obvious jurisdiction there. Putting yourself outside of any country's legality means that any country can just randomly assert it over you.
That was pretty much the only legal uniqueness of piracy and jurisdiction. If terrorists were truly stateless individuals, you could apply that to them, but, sadly, they usually aren't. They might be criminals in their home state, but they aren't stateless. Almost no human being is stateless.
What does the "International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas" say about non signatories?
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one. The US, as far as I know, is not really forbidden from issuing them by any law, unless the second Hague Convention is talking about that in section VII, which I don't think it is. However, issuing them is generally, for the last 100 years or so, been regarded as a war crime. Also, it's hard to see how issuing letters of marque against other countries not in a time of war would not constitute a violation of the UN charter by 'making war'.
Letters of marque are something that belong in a historical dustbin. Authorizing individuals to use force against others in other countries is something completely unneeded and unwanted in today's world.
They've never actually done what they were supposed to, anyway. Letter of Marque are supposed to, in theory, protect people captured who are holding them from being charged with piracy and/or murder, because they were operating under their legal authorization, and should be treated like POWs. However, this did not actually ever work...capturing forces always treated them as criminals. And all later treaties, like the Genevas, which set even more specific rules about the treatment of captured military forces, and the labeling of warships and military operations, completely ignored even the possibility of privateers. There's no nation in the world that would recognize John Q. Public standing over a dead body with a letter of marque against that person as anything but a murderer.
So, in fact, there's little point in Ron Paul's stunt in issuing them. Just ask US citizens to murder al qaeada operatives whenever possible, and pass a law saying it's legal. It would still be illegal in any other country, but it'd be illegal there anyway, regardless if they're carrying a piece of paper that wasn't even recognized even when they were commonly issued.
Cohen said a tip-off on fake CDs is that they will have 20 to 24 tracks each, instead of 12 or 14...
ROTFLMAO
As a body of ratified international law, it trumples national constitutions, including that USA's, so Uncle Sam can no longer issue letters of marque.
Um, no. Treaties do not trump any constitution. Treaties are exactly the same as laws, except that, unlike laws, other laws cannot be passed to alter them, they, in theory, have to be withdrawn from completely.
The level of ignorance about how the laws of the US function continues to amaze me.
Hey, it's historically accurate behavior. And at least we're eating some of it. Later on, people would shoot buffalo from trains for no reason at all. Seriously.
It's not like you had a lot of choice, anyway. You shot whatever you could whenever it wandered by.
Legally, yes.
But the government will shut you down anyway.
Ithaca Hours do not count. They are specified in dollars. Having non-dollar currencies is what, apparently, the government does not like.
Incidentally, the liberty dollar is not 'backed' money. They are backed by some silver, but it is not the amount that is the value they are purchased for. I.e., if you were to purchase a 20, and redeem it for silver instantly, you would not get 20 dollars. (You can tell because you can purchase them at a discount, which is completely nonsensical for backed currency.) They also change value based on the value of the dollars. They are, indeed, fiat money, not 'real money' as the issuers proclaim.
But they are also in dollars, and the US government doesn't appear to take issue with tiny schemes that use US dollars as the base. Because those are not, in any meaningful sense, 'alternate currency'...they are gift certificates. All the gift certificates in the world won't change the value of US currency, and in fact, printing those up and having someone else back them with currency will help remove currency from circulation as the certificate remains unused but the issuer continues to hold the money. Like pennies do now. Even if they're unbacked, they aren't hurting anything except possibly the people who got them in the first place.
It's the same with Ithaca Hours. Those can never compete with US dollars, because they are US dollars.
What the US government actually cares about, and what is legal but always mysteriously runs into all sorts legal difficulties, are a) fiat money not tied to the dollar, and b) backed currency not tied to the dollars. (Incidentally, a) is nearly impossible to set up outside a single community.) Any legal difficulties seem to be related to how widely they are used...until there is a large group of people who get paid entirely in this alternate currency and buys their goods and services using it, it's not really going to effect the economy.
eGold is the only company I can think of that would qualify for that...and, hey, look. eGold is, right now, under indictment on completely made up charges. Because eGold was smart enough not to print paper, which is what previous 'dollar competitors' have been hassled about, the government had to assert that, apparently, transfering ownership and letting people redeem that ownership at banks, is somehow 'money laundering', despite the fact that the stock market has been doing it for decades. Hell, the commodities market has even been doing it in gold.
Oh, look, they even threw in some 'child pornography' nonsense, despite the fact that eGold is the only closed and completely recorded monetary system in the universe. I.e., it's completely impossible to do anything with eGold that the company does not know about and maintain records of, including getting money out and in. Considering that eGold cooperates fully with any warrants, handing over all records, and keeps said records forever, it would be the stupidest system in the world to commit any illegal activity over. (Of course, they transfered their money in and out via wire transfer to banks, which don't keep records forever, but that wouldn't be eGold's fault, and criminals could have presumably just wired money directly between banks and had no trace, instead of using eGold and having a record in the middle but not at one or both ends.)
Yet, there they are, in court, for no apparent reason. Apparently, the FBI had, as policy, not to alert eGold to child porn payments tracked into its system, despite the fact eGold would have cooperated, and despite the fact that said transfers could then be tracked to the originating bank account. No, much better to keep quite about all this to use it in court to take down eGold. Which, I guess, is like letting a murderer go free so that you can indict a trash pickup company for being an accessory after the fact after they take away the murder's trash and bury it after he's thrown the murder weapon away. But the trash pickup company is competing with the government's trash pickup services, and the murderer isn't.
No they don't. They put fractional cent values on them.
They do that not because it's illegal to print your own money, which it technically is not.(1) At least, not if it's backed by something of value, aka, real money, not fiat money.(2)
They print a fractional cent value on them so that you can't show up at their headquarters and demand you give them money in exchange for the coupons. Aka, they only pay the big value on the coupons if you are a retail establishment and you hand them in with some evidence that a customer turned them in and you gave them that discount. Anyone else, they'll give you 1/20th or 1/100th of a cent per non-expired coupon. (Which no one actually does, because that would be stupid. It would be more efficient to stand around in a store waiting for someone pick up the item to purchase it, and sell them the coupon for half price.)
1) Although try telling that to the people who have created their own money and been illegally shut down by the government. eGold seems to be operating with no problems, but, OTOH, they haven't tried printing any notes, which is what the laws are aimed at. Although, like I said, the laws only prohibit printing unbacked money...notes that promise something of value, like gold, are as legal to print as concert tickets and coat check receipts. (That is, as legal to print by a company that will actually fulfill the promise. Obviously, anything else would be fraud of some sort.)
2) Coupons, if they were legally 'real', would presumably fall under the same category as money orders, traveler's checks, and bearer bonds, they are merely promises a company will pay dollars, and aren't 'their own tender', so wouldn't be illegal under any theory of anything. But they are not even that.
In addition, as Blizzard restricts selling of in-game items, the only actual 'value' an account has is the subscription fee. It doesn't matter if he put in months of work on his character, without the ability to transfer that or items to real money, it legally has about as much legal protection as a high score on an arcade machine, aka, none at all. (Yes, in reality, Blizzard doesn't care about trivial item sales, and only goes after companies that actually try to make money, as opposed to someone who finds themselves with a somewhat valuable item they don't need and throws it up on eBay. But sale aren't technically allowed at all under the account contract, IIRC.)
All anyone could possibly sue Blizzard for is the loss of their account and all in-game assets is the money they actually spent on the physical game (Which is worthless without an account.) and whatever time was left on their account.
Second Life is another matter altogether, like you said. They takes exactly the opposite stance on resell of their items.
Hilton hotels subsiduary in Norway (Refused to do business with a Cuban delagation because, as a subsidiary of a US company it's illegal for them to do so, but in Norway it's illegal for them to refuse to do business for no reason other than nationality. The problem being that neither country would give up its juristiction to allow the hotel to comply with the other's laws.)
The joke is it's illegal to discriminate based on country of origin in the US, too.
Regardless of whether or not you can hear a difference in 128kps encoded mp3s (And I really can't.), you can certainly tell the difference between the crap they're doing to music in the studio to make it play at maximum volume in all frequences and what the music actually sounds like.