The US has three equal branches of government at State and Federal level. At the Federal level they'd be Executive (President), Legislative (Congress - House and Senate) and Judicial (Federal Courts, Appeals Courts other misc courts and the United States Supreme Court).
The two houses of Congress have to agree on a bill, the President can sign or veto. Then its a law. However a challenge or appeal can be filed, which is happening in 19 or states, this case is the second or third one of these challenges and is the first one upheld by a Federal Court.
Now this will go to a Federal Appeals Court and may end up at the United States Supreme Court, if the courts rule this is unconstitutional then it's no longer a law. They won't be able to pass the same bill as a law because that too would be unconstitutional.
Judges have always had this power in the United States, its not a new thing.
Completely wrong on that it takes huge capital to reach the masses without the Internet.
Humans invented something called a "book" and one can write a book without capital and one can find a publisher to publish said book without the author having to spend huge capital.
Of course your book or manifesto has to say something coherent and interesting enough that anyone out there would be interested in reading it. Of course even the neo-luddite writings of the Unibomber were published. Hitler did a good job at getting his book written, Barak Obama wasn't all that well known or wealthy when he started getting his books published.
Exactly how many people in the United States can you say have been jailed for insulting the Catholic Church, Islam, Scientology or Mormonism in the last 50 years?
Where is Wikileaks being censored? The newspapers in the United States and abroad continue to publish the leaks they get, I've yet to see or hear about Federal agents going after the New York Times or anyone else.
Google - "Latest Wikileaks" and right now there are new headlines from 3 hours ago.
Is the US going after Wikileaks for distributing thousands of stolen documents? Yes but those documents were classified and stolen. Is the US going to put the guy who stole the documents, Bradley Manning, in a deep dark hole for a long time? Yes they are, he had a security clearance and knew what the rules were, he broke those rules.
As far as censoring and hunting Wikileaks down, the US Government is doing a pretty poor job of it.
The late periods of the Wisconsin Glaciation in North America were anything but slow. Massive glacial advancement in 10-50 years, then retreats, repeat over and over. The coasts would have rose and fallen over and over.
Things like the filling of Glacial Lake Missoula happened 40-45 times over 2000 years. A lake half the size of Superior being dammed, filling and then breaking lose to flood over eastern Washington, then repeat.
When you look at American Indian cultural regions like the Pacific Northwest or the western Alaska Natives and then look at maps of how far out the coasts went 8-12,000 years ago, how could there not have been dramatic cultural changes and cultures lost from the end that glacial period?
Hell the Bering Land Bridge, Beringia, was up to a thousand miles wide
As for the justice system or the political system of the United States being one where the most money always wins, there are a ton of rich people found guilty in the United States. Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Michael Vick, Rae Carruth are some just off the top.
The largest spenders of personal wealth in the 2010 campaign cycle, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman both lost after spending tens of millions of dollars.
The politicians and journalists who have called for Assange's assassination don't have the positions or power to actually have their words have any meaning.
For the record, I said months ago it'd be in the best interest of Western intelligence agencies to silence him and that if Wikileaks ever pushed out data like this on Israel, the Russians or China Assange will get killed.
No, as this has been covered here and on Wired over the last few months, people started leaving Wikileaks after the Apache gun camera came out and Assange started trying to grab headlines and put himself out as Wikileaks.
Assange is not willing to take anything for his cause, I've not seen Wikileaks do anything put push it's agenda regarding Assange's innocence. Assange has been hunting for places to go where the US can't extradite him from, not really a shining example of being willing to take it for a cause.
There are no dry or alcohol prohibited counties or communities in the state of Utah. While the laws make it harder to get alcohol, it's not prohibited anywhere.
Only some areas with large American Indian or Alaska Native populations are dry, here in Alaska we have 80-83 of the 500 dry communities in the United States. The Navaho Nation is the largest area in the US with a prohibition on alcohol.
It's not the Deep South that has the majority of dry communities or counties, while there are some stand outs like Mississippi, most are mixed, Alabama has 14 dry counties and 53 where it's allowed. Arkansas, Kansas and Texas have more of a prohibition mentality than the Deep South does.
I grew up at an airport (civil aviation, Cessna's, Piper Cubs, spray planes) that was directly under the SAC bomber and tanker routes out of Ellsworth.
I think of space first with NASA, but aviation and aerospace are close seconds, hell it's first in their name.
A diplomatic case or bag is different than what Manning got ahold of.
If the United States was really trying to keep this crap secret, why were hundreds of thousands of files accessible to a Private First Class assigned to an infantry division stationed in Iraq?
I'm still in favor of transparency for diplomacy.
Look at 1990, right before Iraq attacked Kuwait, Saddam hinted very heavily to the US Ambassador that they were going to attack and they might even keep going into Saudi Arabia and Saddam took an American lack of reaction as a tact "OK". Had that interaction been in the open and a public US government reaction been made, well then hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved and hundreds of billions of dollars would have not been wastes.
Much of the "big" things, I knew or had read as being rumored. My grad degree is in Middle Eastern military history so I keep up on whats going on geopolitically, so most of Wikileaks dump hasn't been a shock.
The fact that all these cables were only Top Secret or Classified really shows how much over secrecy the United States does and how unimportant these documents really are.
Best one I've read so far were the notes of a meeting with the British Embassy and Prince Andrew.
No it should be public. Secrets in international relationships had always been something the United States was against, from the XYZ Affair through Wilson's 14 Points, the United States was for transparency.
Now your example of aid convoys and warlords, thats not a diplomatic issue, thats a military issue, there is and always has been a good reason to keep those secret and operational security has never been frowned upon in the United States.
So as far as 2010, the big Wikileaks information dumps have been a military intelligence and operational security dump, that was bad. And now the diplomatic cables dump, not as bad.
Not really, the DPRK has alot of artillery and alot of that artillery has most of the RoK's main population centers in range. So for SC terms, the North's Siege Tanks can hit alot of the South's SRVs, supply depots and refineries.
Both sides have alot of infantry, the North hasn't spent money upgrading their Banshees while the South nearly every tech building and unit built.
The North has alot of Ghosts and some Reapers, the South has Ghosts, but no nukes but the south has an ally, the United States, they have a bunch of Battlecruisers built and like 10 Siege Tanks sitting beside the South's infantry bunkers. The US has a cheat that lets some of their Banshees get past the North's missile turrets.
The North's ally is China, they've got a lot of Marines, some Banshees, a couple Battlecruisers but they are content farming Vespine from the United States and don't have any units in the North's area.
So you are saying if someone goes to work for Lockheed Martin, EADS, SAAB/BAe they really don't know they are working on weapons programs for money?
Bull. Good friend of mine did EE school, they had a senor project of designing a ROV that could detect and report metal or plastic objects underwater. He knew damn well it was for the US Navy, and while he is a pacifist it was an interesting project because it was a challenge. They completed the project and the Navy offered everyone a contract to take that demonstrator to the next level, he signed up and now he's working in a Navy affiliated lab.
People that work on defense projects know what they are working on.
The United States was willing to sign onto the land mine ban as long as the US/RoK got an exemption for the DMZ on the inter-Korean border. I think the biggest stumbling block was the getting rid of them in 10 years, no way the DMZ could be demined even with DPRK cooperation in 10 years.
And the Ottawa Treaty doesn't impact anti-tank, command detonated mines like the Claymore.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has three equal branches of government at State and Federal level. At the Federal level they'd be Executive (President), Legislative (Congress - House and Senate) and Judicial (Federal Courts, Appeals Courts other misc courts and the United States Supreme Court).
The two houses of Congress have to agree on a bill, the President can sign or veto. Then its a law. However a challenge or appeal can be filed, which is happening in 19 or states, this case is the second or third one of these challenges and is the first one upheld by a Federal Court.
Now this will go to a Federal Appeals Court and may end up at the United States Supreme Court, if the courts rule this is unconstitutional then it's no longer a law. They won't be able to pass the same bill as a law because that too would be unconstitutional.
Judges have always had this power in the United States, its not a new thing.
Sarah Palin for one. She's from Wasilla but shopped at my Costco, that close enough for you?
Explain though how exactly books and widely published manifestos aren't capable of distributing ideas without huge capital?
Completely wrong on that it takes huge capital to reach the masses without the Internet.
Humans invented something called a "book" and one can write a book without capital and one can find a publisher to publish said book without the author having to spend huge capital.
Of course your book or manifesto has to say something coherent and interesting enough that anyone out there would be interested in reading it. Of course even the neo-luddite writings of the Unibomber were published. Hitler did a good job at getting his book written, Barak Obama wasn't all that well known or wealthy when he started getting his books published.
That really describes speech in Canada.
Exactly how many people in the United States can you say have been jailed for insulting the Catholic Church, Islam, Scientology or Mormonism in the last 50 years?
Where is Wikileaks being censored? The newspapers in the United States and abroad continue to publish the leaks they get, I've yet to see or hear about Federal agents going after the New York Times or anyone else.
Google - "Latest Wikileaks" and right now there are new headlines from 3 hours ago.
Is the US going after Wikileaks for distributing thousands of stolen documents? Yes but those documents were classified and stolen. Is the US going to put the guy who stole the documents, Bradley Manning, in a deep dark hole for a long time? Yes they are, he had a security clearance and knew what the rules were, he broke those rules.
As far as censoring and hunting Wikileaks down, the US Government is doing a pretty poor job of it.
The late periods of the Wisconsin Glaciation in North America were anything but slow. Massive glacial advancement in 10-50 years, then retreats, repeat over and over. The coasts would have rose and fallen over and over.
Things like the filling of Glacial Lake Missoula happened 40-45 times over 2000 years. A lake half the size of Superior being dammed, filling and then breaking lose to flood over eastern Washington, then repeat.
When you look at American Indian cultural regions like the Pacific Northwest or the western Alaska Natives and then look at maps of how far out the coasts went 8-12,000 years ago, how could there not have been dramatic cultural changes and cultures lost from the end that glacial period?
Hell the Bering Land Bridge, Beringia, was up to a thousand miles wide
Every human living near a coast line 8-12000 BCE would have a flood event.
Even here in North America, the coast lines were 50-200 miles further out than they are now.
Naw, I'm past the corral days, up here in Alaska now.
Plastics suck for road material. They are too soft, break down from the weather and UV, salts, sand, gravel will erode it.
We use concrete, asphalt and gravel for a reason, the price and durability are right.
Plus for damage like cracks and gouges, it's not magic, there will still have to be materials brought in
Yes it is.
Whats an Iran-cop?
As for the justice system or the political system of the United States being one where the most money always wins, there are a ton of rich people found guilty in the United States. Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Michael Vick, Rae Carruth are some just off the top.
The largest spenders of personal wealth in the 2010 campaign cycle, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman both lost after spending tens of millions of dollars.
The politicians and journalists who have called for Assange's assassination don't have the positions or power to actually have their words have any meaning.
For the record, I said months ago it'd be in the best interest of Western intelligence agencies to silence him and that if Wikileaks ever pushed out data like this on Israel, the Russians or China Assange will get killed.
No, as this has been covered here and on Wired over the last few months, people started leaving Wikileaks after the Apache gun camera came out and Assange started trying to grab headlines and put himself out as Wikileaks.
Assange is not willing to take anything for his cause, I've not seen Wikileaks do anything put push it's agenda regarding Assange's innocence. Assange has been hunting for places to go where the US can't extradite him from, not really a shining example of being willing to take it for a cause.
Exactly, if you are law and order authoritarian, then you'll want judicial panels.
If you are innocent, then you want a jury trial, judicial panels are more likely to find guilty.
If you want judicial panels, then by all means live in a country with them.
Jury trials have a much higher rate of acquittal than judicial panels
There are no dry or alcohol prohibited counties or communities in the state of Utah. While the laws make it harder to get alcohol, it's not prohibited anywhere.
Only some areas with large American Indian or Alaska Native populations are dry, here in Alaska we have 80-83 of the 500 dry communities in the United States. The Navaho Nation is the largest area in the US with a prohibition on alcohol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dry_communities_by_U.S._state
It's not the Deep South that has the majority of dry communities or counties, while there are some stand outs like Mississippi, most are mixed, Alabama has 14 dry counties and 53 where it's allowed. Arkansas, Kansas and Texas have more of a prohibition mentality than the Deep South does.
I grew up at an airport (civil aviation, Cessna's, Piper Cubs, spray planes) that was directly under the SAC bomber and tanker routes out of Ellsworth.
I think of space first with NASA, but aviation and aerospace are close seconds, hell it's first in their name.
Aerospace and Space ;)
You missed aviation, NASA doesn't just do space, they do R&D for aircraft and have since the 1920s.
They even had a B-52 and the last two SR-71s
A diplomatic case or bag is different than what Manning got ahold of.
If the United States was really trying to keep this crap secret, why were hundreds of thousands of files accessible to a Private First Class assigned to an infantry division stationed in Iraq?
I'm still in favor of transparency for diplomacy.
Look at 1990, right before Iraq attacked Kuwait, Saddam hinted very heavily to the US Ambassador that they were going to attack and they might even keep going into Saudi Arabia and Saddam took an American lack of reaction as a tact "OK". Had that interaction been in the open and a public US government reaction been made, well then hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved and hundreds of billions of dollars would have not been wastes.
Much of the "big" things, I knew or had read as being rumored. My grad degree is in Middle Eastern military history so I keep up on whats going on geopolitically, so most of Wikileaks dump hasn't been a shock.
The fact that all these cables were only Top Secret or Classified really shows how much over secrecy the United States does and how unimportant these documents really are.
Best one I've read so far were the notes of a meeting with the British Embassy and Prince Andrew.
No it should be public. Secrets in international relationships had always been something the United States was against, from the XYZ Affair through Wilson's 14 Points, the United States was for transparency.
Now your example of aid convoys and warlords, thats not a diplomatic issue, thats a military issue, there is and always has been a good reason to keep those secret and operational security has never been frowned upon in the United States.
So as far as 2010, the big Wikileaks information dumps have been a military intelligence and operational security dump, that was bad. And now the diplomatic cables dump, not as bad.
Not really, the DPRK has alot of artillery and alot of that artillery has most of the RoK's main population centers in range. So for SC terms, the North's Siege Tanks can hit alot of the South's SRVs, supply depots and refineries.
Both sides have alot of infantry, the North hasn't spent money upgrading their Banshees while the South nearly every tech building and unit built.
The North has alot of Ghosts and some Reapers, the South has Ghosts, but no nukes but the south has an ally, the United States, they have a bunch of Battlecruisers built and like 10 Siege Tanks sitting beside the South's infantry bunkers. The US has a cheat that lets some of their Banshees get past the North's missile turrets.
The North's ally is China, they've got a lot of Marines, some Banshees, a couple Battlecruisers but they are content farming Vespine from the United States and don't have any units in the North's area.
So you are saying if someone goes to work for Lockheed Martin, EADS, SAAB/BAe they really don't know they are working on weapons programs for money?
Bull. Good friend of mine did EE school, they had a senor project of designing a ROV that could detect and report metal or plastic objects underwater. He knew damn well it was for the US Navy, and while he is a pacifist it was an interesting project because it was a challenge. They completed the project and the Navy offered everyone a contract to take that demonstrator to the next level, he signed up and now he's working in a Navy affiliated lab.
People that work on defense projects know what they are working on.
The United States was willing to sign onto the land mine ban as long as the US/RoK got an exemption for the DMZ on the inter-Korean border. I think the biggest stumbling block was the getting rid of them in 10 years, no way the DMZ could be demined even with DPRK cooperation in 10 years.
And the Ottawa Treaty doesn't impact anti-tank, command detonated mines like the Claymore.