This is what I'm talking about. For some reason, black men are outliers in: not receiving an education, not getting a job, and landing in jail far more than any other racial group.
These dynamics are partially true in regard to drug offenses, where African Americans are particularly overrepresented in drug arrests. Evidence of racially disparate treatment of drug arrestees is apparent by viewing the rate of reported drug use among African Americans. According to self-report data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans constituted 14% of drug users in 2006, only slightly higher than their percentage in the general population. Yet African Americans represented 35% of those arrested in 2006 for drug offenses, 53% of drug convictions, and 45% of drug offenders in prison in 2004 (the most recent year for which prison data are available)
The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
This is exactly my point. Snigger is a well known word. When there are synonyms for niggardly, why use that obscure word when "stingy" and "miserly" are more well known and thus more effective?
I didn't elucidate my point clearly. If I call a white kid a honkey, he's not going to feel threatened in any way. It's still racist, but the act is going to be meaningless to him in most situations. He does not connect that word with violence. (This is a generalization: if you grew up in a mostly black neighborhood, I don't doubt that the word honkey could carry the threat of violence in certain situations.)
The vast majority of white-looking people have not been subjected to racial discrimination, or if they have, it's been to their benefit. The vast majority of black-looking people have been subjected to racial discrimination, and more often, with far more experience involving actual violence, abuse of authority, etc.
So, when there are many synonyms for the word niggardly, why use it? "Because you want to" seems like a sorry excuse to start shit, like a guy who just happens to like collecting Nazi memorabilia.
I meant to write, "It seems like it's derived from the same place..."
But why use the word? It's going out of your way to use an obscure word than can confuse people in the first place.
Do Italians get to declare a racist epithet when someone yells out "Swap" because it's close to the sound of "wop"? I'm of German descent, can I complain when someone talks about their "route" because it's close to "kraut"?
Calling a german kid a kraut today is meaningless - he doesn't experience any racism due to his German heritage. Same goes for almost any other Euro country, at least in most of the US. Maybe just after the War it would be a different story. Certainly at the turn of the 19th Century, being Irish was almost as bad as being black, but it wasn't institutionalized racism. There weren't separate legal rules for any non-black citizen.
It's only been 50 years since legal racism ended, and less than 20 years since plainly racist attitudes ceased to be tolerated. Go talk to any person from the south over 60, and they can tell you about how they were humiliated by Jim Crow laws, or even humiliated because they were white and enforced them. Talk to their kids, and they can tell you all about the racism they have encountered, even as a kid in the 80s (which I remember.) I worked for people as a teenager who would not allow me to hire black people, even for construction work.
I have never even heard an anecdote about an employer who refused to hire Germans or Italians, unless it was retold from the 1930s.
Words mean things, and even the head of the NAACP said that people who take "niggardly" as a racial slur need to be given a dictionary.
And anyone who uses that word for race baiting purposes should be called a fucking prick, because that's what they are.
And why would black people have a problem with the word niggardly? It's derived from the same place we get the word nigger. And for a stretch of a few hundred years, when white people would say the word nigger, they would then go out and rape, beat, and kill black people.
So, that's why they get upset when a white person says it, and not when a non-white person says it. It's part of their cultural memory. What is so difficult to understand about that?
To be sure, the US now has more power resources relative to other countries than Britain had at its imperial peak. But the US has less power - in the sense of control over other countries' internal behavior - than Britain did when it ruled a quarter of the globe.
For example, British officials controlled Kenya's schools, taxes, laws and elections - not to mention its external relations. America has no such control today. In 2003, the US could not even get Mexico and Chile to vote to support a second resolution on Iraq in the UN Security Council...
In fact, the problem of creating an American empire might better be termed imperial underreach . Neither the US public nor Congress has proven willing to invest seriously in the instruments of nation building and governance as opposed to military force.
At the time this was written by the former Assistant Secretary of Defense, the United States was the de facto ruler of Iraq and Afghanistan, which it had invaded only a few years earlier. It had supported, and nearly pulled off a coup in Venezuela in 2002. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was using secret military agents to kidnap terrorism suspects, dropping them off for torture at secret prisons around the world, and while declaring "war" on terrorism, it used some pathetic legalistic wringing of hands to ignore even it's own standards of detainee treatment in the US Army Field manual.
Even turning to the two examples he provided - Mexico and Chile - is even more illustrative of his ignorance, feigned or not.
Possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin, cocaine and marijuana is now decriminalized in Mexico... A similar decriminalization bill passed Mexico’s Congress in 2006 but the Fox administration decided not to sign it, reportedly because of opposition in the United States. http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/pr082109a.cfm
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Chile
something the various armed forces of the world are actively prepared to do again.
The actions we guard against are exactly the actions we execute every single day across the world. We're not scared of Russia or China or Cuba trying to invade the homeland. We're scared of someone we're abusing fighting back.
Sounds great!! Let's turn over the rest of our health care to the same governing body!!!
Oh wait..
The VA benefits from externalizing veteran care to other providers. If there were universal health care, there is nowhere to externalize the costs. Furthermore, there would be no incentive to pad the costs of single pills of aspirin to $15 or for $5 Q-tips. The government would get the lowest price, or even manufacture their own supplies if it makes economic sense.
That's the reason private insurance doesn't want to compete with government insurance. They simply can't.
Why don't you sell the computer and donate the money to charity?
Because that, like your question, would be incredibly stupid, shortsighted, and entirely besides the point.
If America is broke, we should be rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthy and withdrawing our troops from around the world, or at least preparing our allies for the eventuality. But we're not broke - people are just hoodwinking the populace into accepting that without any evidence, and using the resulting hysteria for their own purposes.
Since 1960, we've spent 25 trillion in today's dollars on "defense" spending, not counting interest. If we had reduced that expenditure by a third or even less, we would have little to no national debt. We also could have cut the Department of Education or refused to pay people for the social security they deserved, but I think that would have more dire consequences for the economy than less guns, less tanks, and less war.
How many times in the past fifty years has the US navy been threatened by missile or aircraft attacks? And besides Pearl Harbor, have they ever been attacked when they aren't milling around in international waters near sworn enemies?
The weapon is designed not for protecting American soil, but for making it so it's easier to deploy those ships for military action for "American interests."
Next, as a former soldier myself, I can tell you that we are very appreciative of the best equipment money can buy. You know, because it saves our lives and all. I figure that paying for that is very least I and the rest of the tax payers can do for those that are willing to lay down their lives so you can complain about it freely.
First of all, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's service. I know many people feel that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are justified, and I blame myself as much as I blame the politicians and businessmen who exploit our armed forces for their own goals and benefits.
But what if you had been asked to perform your duty to your country by educating poor children (in foreign lands or at home), or to help build roads or work with communities to reduce drug problems, mentor troubled teens, or become a surgeon and work for a lower wage in a government hospital?
It seems odd to me that the same people who think using force and violence to impose our will on foreign nationals - and putting their own life at risk in the process - is patriotic, while any of the previous paragraph gets relabeled as communism or some other misnomer. A battlefield medic is a hero, while a government paid surgeon would be considered incompetent, even though they are the same thing. The whole thing seems nonsensical to me.
Well, if you want to invest in more war instead of, say, better infrastructure, or more education, that's a choice you can make. A stupid one, in my opinion, but a choice nonetheless.
Nice. So, we don't have money for the unemployed, for the ill, or even for veterans benefits, but we can afford laser systems to shoot down planes for imaginary invasions.
Seventy percent of the defense industry is a private set of corporations whose economic incentive is to discover (or invent) threats, and then sell the government the contract to fight this imaginary enemy. Sounds like a nice recipe for solutions that exacerbate the underlying problems, and not by accident.
Not really sure what link Iraq and Afghanistan have with ending oil addiction. First, Afghanistan doesn't even import crude oil into the US. We're there due to war.
We're there because of the proximity of oil. We have bases surrounding what's left of the world's oil, not so we can have all of it, but so we have diplomatic power over other nations, as well as the leverage to get prices lower. US military planners have long said they were going to switch to more reliable North Atlantic and nearby partners.
Information, tolerance, and compromise are keys to eroding terrorism; not simply packing up and saying, "Good luck with that military power vacuum!" in a couple of invaded countries.
What most middle easterners want is for America to stop supporting dictatorships and repressing democratic movements. We overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953. We supported the Shah there, as well as Saddam in Iraq, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, and in Egypt as well. We constantly interfere in their affairs, and then invade when our old friends turn out to be enemies.
"We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans," [Colin Powell] said in a statement, "including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome."
China constantly threatens Taiwain. They invaded India in the 60s. They supported north vietnam. They supported North Korea. They gave the tech for the nuke to North Korea and are currently helping Burma to get it. They currently pull the same garbage that the Cold war had earlier which is using proxies.
China and Taiwan just signed a treaty to further tie their economies together. Most observers see it as a first step towards a formal peace, and eventual reintegration, just as they did with Hong Kong. As far as the border skirmish with India, it lasted for exactly a month, and KIA was under two thousand. As far as who was at fault, you'll have to read the evidence for yourself.
As far as North Korea goes, they have been pretty adept at getting nuclear technology from others, probably including. The more modern centrifuges are from AQ Khan in Pakistan according to US intelligence, though he later denied it. They have nuclear tech from Russia, and even a bit from the US during the Clinton years. I doubt it shocks you that the Chinese and the Russians fought a proxy war against America on their own border. We'd do the same thing, if they had ever come near ours.
Heck, America has not directly invaded another nation EXCEPT that invaded us
The occasional nut they do catch or the millions inconvenienced every day just trying to get on a plane? Secret lists... I could go on, the point is stop cowering and be Free again.
You're missing the New American Dictionary.
Promoting Democracy is invading another nation to impose your will on them. National Defense is giving up your liberties for the security provided by Promoting Democracy. And Patriotism is outrage at public money spent on helping your neighbors, unless it's for National Defense or Promoting Democracy.
Trust us. It all makes sense once you throw your principles out the window.
Quite honestly, the leadership there sees themselves in a cold war with the west, and are trying to take advantage of the west's not wanting to be in one.
Let's see... when's the last time China invaded another nation? When is the last time a Western nation invaded another nation?
But let's forget history for a moment. What does the Air Force see in our future? And, consider you aren't American for a moment, and what your rational response to this policy would be.
As we implement our vision to fully exploit space as a space combat command, AFSPC [Air Force Space Command] will become a significant force provider of CS [counter space], conventional and strategic prompt global strike capabilities with even greater force enabler capabilities. As depicted in Figure 2-2, our space capabilities are built upon a structure where the uppermost portions of SFE [Space Force Enhancement] and SFA [Space Force Application] depend on a solid foundation. While our ultimate goals are truly to “exploit” space through SFE and SFA missions, as with other mediums, we cannot fully “exploit” that medium until we first “control” it. The needed foundation, therefore, consists of the assured space access and infrastructure provided by the SS and MS areas along with the CS capabilities (SSA, Defensive Counterspace (DCS), and OCS) required to control space and ensure Space Superiority...
3.2.2 MID-TERM (FY12--17) In the Mid-Term, AFSPC will deploy a new generation of responsive space access, prompt global strike, and space superiority capabilities. Our Weapons Officers and other space professionals will integrate and operate these capabilities into joint and task force operations. In practical terms, AFSPC will continue to prioritize efforts that support SFE transformation to include Transformational Communications and space-based Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) capabilities. Responsive spacelift capabilities become more important in this timeframe due to their support of both Global Strike and DCS (Responsive replenishment of space assets). Such work will increase support to the terrestrial warfighter while protecting US space assets and demonstrating space combat capabilities.
3.2.3 FAR-TERM (FY18--30) In the Far-Term, AFSPC will target resources toward fielding and deploying space and missile combat forces in depth, allowing us to take the fight to any adversary in, from, and through space, on-demand. Based on previous development efforts, AFSPC will focus on Battlespace Awareness (space and terrestrial), OCS and DCS, and prompt global strike and LBSD capabilities. Many of these will be supported by responsive spacelift and payload capabilities. We will continue to explore advanced technologies to revolutionize and transform our operations beyond 2025. The result will be a space combat command that is organized, trained, and equipped to rapidly achieve decisive results on or above the battlefield, anywhere, anytime.
When one of your major obstacles to adoption is that the customer actually has to pay for the product, you don't have a very good product.
Currently there are huge subsidies for oil companies and for the oil economy. What I'm suggesting is that we cease the subsidies for the oil economy and put it toward subsidies for mostly solar/geothermal/whatever economy that we control, instead of having to rely on third parties for our way of life.
A vast majority of the software programs you pick up in Staples, Best Buy, etc are going to be made for Windows. Once hardware gets a bit faster and makes virtualization relatively transparent, this will cease to matter. You'll just optionally buy Windows software support for another $150.
I'm hoping for some badass sandboxing. Imagine automatically launching an entire OS for untrusted operations, like web browsing, or having a few virtual machines running concurrently to provide different levels of access to certain data or hardware. I know some of the features of modern OSs make that a bit redundant, but it's a cool idea nonetheless.
Also, that same high-octane gas was the one Standard Oil of New Jersey was still delivering to Nazi Germany as late as 1941, even after the Nazis had bombed London.
Why is that? Could it have something to do with the fact that petroleum is an energy dense substance that's easy to suck out of the ground? No amount of money is going to change that -- unless all of our knowledge of chemistry and physics is wrong.
It has nothing to do with finding the technology. The technology is already there. In fact, they DoE did an excellent study in 2006:
The issue is that there is a huge amount of inertia for dirty power, because the costs are purposefully hidden from consumers. Toss in the cost of oil wars and environmental impact and see how much a gallon of gas is. And how did America become so dependent on cars? Because cars are less efficient than mass transit and therefore more profitable. The purchase and subsequent dismantling of rail and bus lines in the 50s and 60s was no accident.
Hell, we could have built nearly 20 million $40,000 electric vehicles instead of waging the Iraq war, and used them with no impact on our electrical grid in the Northeast. And I can tell you I'd rather spend my tax dollars on American technology investment creating American jobs, rather than literally blowing the money on another oil war. (Oh, we get more terrorism too? Awesome!) You wouldn't even have to spend that much money - just subsidize the difference in cost from an average car, and you're talking 40 million vehicles or more.
This isn't about isolationism, it's about independence. We can act more rationally when most of what we need is created domestically. Let's be frank here: the US could no more tell OPEC to go fuck itself than we could say the same thing to China, because "the market" decided to sell American independence in exchange for the pleasure of sacrificing our moral principles and enriching Islamic theocracies in order to keep our oil cheap.
Government subsidies to enrich oil corporations and military contractors are terrible investments. Government subsidies to enrich responsible American corporations to allow us to be energy independent, and as a bonus, reduce the financing of terrorist organizations, are good investments. The trouble is that the old guard has all the money and all of the lobbyists. All of this neo-Libertarian anti-government propaganda is doing is falsely convincing people that once you decouple and deregulate corporations from the government, somehow they are going to stop putting their own profits above the interests of the vast majority of Americans.
Paranoid terrorism is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The only difference between Osama bin Laden threatening to destroy America and the United States threatening to destroy Iran is that we can actually do it.
Islamic fundamentalists love the US War on Terror. They get to train against our soldiers, drum up support from places where they had none before, like Iraq, and use our degraded moral standards in their propaganda. The moment we kidnapped and tortured a single human being, we lost the war on terror. We proved that we are no different from any other totalitarian state. We may claim to support human rights and democracy, but if your vote includes someone we don't approve of, we've got no problem with assassinations, economic warfare, or outright war.
"But, that's the only thing 'these people' understand!" Yeah, right.
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 1
If this is "success", then what would failure look like?
Freedom of the people.
Freedom of which people? Oh, just the ones with the better weapons systems? I'm so glad we're not terrorists!
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I'm talking about. For some reason, black men are outliers in: not receiving an education, not getting a job, and landing in jail far more than any other racial group.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_reducingracialdisparity.pdf
These dynamics are partially true in regard to drug offenses, where African Americans are particularly overrepresented in drug arrests. Evidence of racially disparate treatment of drug arrestees is apparent by viewing the rate of reported drug use among African Americans. According to self-report data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans constituted 14% of drug users in 2006, only slightly higher than their percentage in the general population. Yet African Americans represented 35% of those arrested in 2006 for drug offenses, 53% of drug convictions, and 45% of drug offenders in prison in 2004 (the most recent year for which prison data are available)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html
The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
This is exactly my point. Snigger is a well known word. When there are synonyms for niggardly, why use that obscure word when "stingy" and "miserly" are more well known and thus more effective?
I didn't elucidate my point clearly. If I call a white kid a honkey, he's not going to feel threatened in any way. It's still racist, but the act is going to be meaningless to him in most situations. He does not connect that word with violence. (This is a generalization: if you grew up in a mostly black neighborhood, I don't doubt that the word honkey could carry the threat of violence in certain situations.)
The vast majority of white-looking people have not been subjected to racial discrimination, or if they have, it's been to their benefit. The vast majority of black-looking people have been subjected to racial discrimination, and more often, with far more experience involving actual violence, abuse of authority, etc.
So, when there are many synonyms for the word niggardly, why use it? "Because you want to" seems like a sorry excuse to start shit, like a guy who just happens to like collecting Nazi memorabilia.
I meant to write, "It seems like it's derived from the same place..."
But why use the word? It's going out of your way to use an obscure word than can confuse people in the first place.
Do Italians get to declare a racist epithet when someone yells out "Swap" because it's close to the sound of "wop"? I'm of German descent, can I complain when someone talks about their "route" because it's close to "kraut"?
Calling a german kid a kraut today is meaningless - he doesn't experience any racism due to his German heritage. Same goes for almost any other Euro country, at least in most of the US. Maybe just after the War it would be a different story. Certainly at the turn of the 19th Century, being Irish was almost as bad as being black, but it wasn't institutionalized racism. There weren't separate legal rules for any non-black citizen.
It's only been 50 years since legal racism ended, and less than 20 years since plainly racist attitudes ceased to be tolerated. Go talk to any person from the south over 60, and they can tell you about how they were humiliated by Jim Crow laws, or even humiliated because they were white and enforced them. Talk to their kids, and they can tell you all about the racism they have encountered, even as a kid in the 80s (which I remember.) I worked for people as a teenager who would not allow me to hire black people, even for construction work.
I have never even heard an anecdote about an employer who refused to hire Germans or Italians, unless it was retold from the 1930s.
Words mean things, and even the head of the NAACP said that people who take "niggardly" as a racial slur need to be given a dictionary.
And anyone who uses that word for race baiting purposes should be called a fucking prick, because that's what they are.
And why would black people have a problem with the word niggardly? It's derived from the same place we get the word nigger. And for a stretch of a few hundred years, when white people would say the word nigger, they would then go out and rape, beat, and kill black people.
So, that's why they get upset when a white person says it, and not when a non-white person says it. It's part of their cultural memory. What is so difficult to understand about that?
I live in a reality based on historical fact, not on wish-thinking and jingoism. So I imagine that's quite disconnected from your reality.
Here's an argument for your belief system that is reasonably rounded, but wrong. Here's why:
To be sure, the US now has more power resources relative to other countries than Britain had at its imperial peak. But the US has less power - in the sense of control over other countries' internal behavior - than Britain did when it ruled a quarter of the globe.
For example, British officials controlled Kenya's schools, taxes, laws and elections - not to mention its external relations. America has no such control today. In 2003, the US could not even get Mexico and Chile to vote to support a second resolution on Iraq in the UN Security Council...
In fact, the problem of creating an American empire might better be termed imperial underreach . Neither the US public nor Congress has proven willing to invest seriously in the instruments of nation building and governance as opposed to military force.
At the time this was written by the former Assistant Secretary of Defense, the United States was the de facto ruler of Iraq and Afghanistan, which it had invaded only a few years earlier. It had supported, and nearly pulled off a coup in Venezuela in 2002. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was using secret military agents to kidnap terrorism suspects, dropping them off for torture at secret prisons around the world, and while declaring "war" on terrorism, it used some pathetic legalistic wringing of hands to ignore even it's own standards of detainee treatment in the US Army Field manual.
Even turning to the two examples he provided - Mexico and Chile - is even more illustrative of his ignorance, feigned or not.
Possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin, cocaine and marijuana is now decriminalized in Mexico... A similar decriminalization bill passed Mexico’s Congress in 2006 but the Fox administration decided not to sign it, reportedly because of opposition in the United States.
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/pr082109a.cfm
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Chile
something the various armed forces of the world are actively prepared to do again.
The actions we guard against are exactly the actions we execute every single day across the world. We're not scared of Russia or China or Cuba trying to invade the homeland. We're scared of someone we're abusing fighting back.
Sounds great!! Let's turn over the rest of our health care to the same governing body!!!
Oh wait..
The VA benefits from externalizing veteran care to other providers. If there were universal health care, there is nowhere to externalize the costs. Furthermore, there would be no incentive to pad the costs of single pills of aspirin to $15 or for $5 Q-tips. The government would get the lowest price, or even manufacture their own supplies if it makes economic sense.
That's the reason private insurance doesn't want to compete with government insurance. They simply can't.
Why don't you sell the computer and donate the money to charity?
Because that, like your question, would be incredibly stupid, shortsighted, and entirely besides the point.
If America is broke, we should be rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthy and withdrawing our troops from around the world, or at least preparing our allies for the eventuality. But we're not broke - people are just hoodwinking the populace into accepting that without any evidence, and using the resulting hysteria for their own purposes.
Since 1960, we've spent 25 trillion in today's dollars on "defense" spending, not counting interest. If we had reduced that expenditure by a third or even less, we would have little to no national debt. We also could have cut the Department of Education or refused to pay people for the social security they deserved, but I think that would have more dire consequences for the economy than less guns, less tanks, and less war.
What is so hard to understand about that concept?
How many times in the past fifty years has the US navy been threatened by missile or aircraft attacks? And besides Pearl Harbor, have they ever been attacked when they aren't milling around in international waters near sworn enemies?
The weapon is designed not for protecting American soil, but for making it so it's easier to deploy those ships for military action for "American interests."
Next, as a former soldier myself, I can tell you that we are very appreciative of the best equipment money can buy. You know, because it saves our lives and all. I figure that paying for that is very least I and the rest of the tax payers can do for those that are willing to lay down their lives so you can complain about it freely.
First of all, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's service. I know many people feel that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are justified, and I blame myself as much as I blame the politicians and businessmen who exploit our armed forces for their own goals and benefits.
But what if you had been asked to perform your duty to your country by educating poor children (in foreign lands or at home), or to help build roads or work with communities to reduce drug problems, mentor troubled teens, or become a surgeon and work for a lower wage in a government hospital?
It seems odd to me that the same people who think using force and violence to impose our will on foreign nationals - and putting their own life at risk in the process - is patriotic, while any of the previous paragraph gets relabeled as communism or some other misnomer. A battlefield medic is a hero, while a government paid surgeon would be considered incompetent, even though they are the same thing. The whole thing seems nonsensical to me.
Well, if you want to invest in more war instead of, say, better infrastructure, or more education, that's a choice you can make. A stupid one, in my opinion, but a choice nonetheless.
Nice. So, we don't have money for the unemployed, for the ill, or even for veterans benefits, but we can afford laser systems to shoot down planes for imaginary invasions.
Seventy percent of the defense industry is a private set of corporations whose economic incentive is to discover (or invent) threats, and then sell the government the contract to fight this imaginary enemy. Sounds like a nice recipe for solutions that exacerbate the underlying problems, and not by accident.
Not really sure what link Iraq and Afghanistan have with ending oil addiction. First, Afghanistan doesn't even import crude oil into the US. We're there due to war.
We're there because of the proximity of oil. We have bases surrounding what's left of the world's oil, not so we can have all of it, but so we have diplomatic power over other nations, as well as the leverage to get prices lower. US military planners have long said they were going to switch to more reliable North Atlantic and nearby partners.
Information, tolerance, and compromise are keys to eroding terrorism; not simply packing up and saying, "Good luck with that military power vacuum!" in a couple of invaded countries.
What most middle easterners want is for America to stop supporting dictatorships and repressing democratic movements. We overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953. We supported the Shah there, as well as Saddam in Iraq, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, and in Egypt as well. We constantly interfere in their affairs, and then invade when our old friends turn out to be enemies.
"We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans," [Colin Powell] said in a statement, "including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome."
China constantly threatens Taiwain. They invaded India in the 60s. They supported north vietnam. They supported North Korea. They gave the tech for the nuke to North Korea and are currently helping Burma to get it. They currently pull the same garbage that the Cold war had earlier which is using proxies.
China and Taiwan just signed a treaty to further tie their economies together. Most observers see it as a first step towards a formal peace, and eventual reintegration, just as they did with Hong Kong. As far as the border skirmish with India, it lasted for exactly a month, and KIA was under two thousand. As far as who was at fault, you'll have to read the evidence for yourself.
As far as North Korea goes, they have been pretty adept at getting nuclear technology from others, probably including. The more modern centrifuges are from AQ Khan in Pakistan according to US intelligence, though he later denied it. They have nuclear tech from Russia, and even a bit from the US during the Clinton years. I doubt it shocks you that the Chinese and the Russians fought a proxy war against America on their own border. We'd do the same thing, if they had ever come near ours.
Heck, America has not directly invaded another nation EXCEPT that invaded us
That's an outright lie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations
Your history seems to be based on something you believe about America, rather than what America actually is.
The occasional nut they do catch or the millions inconvenienced every day just trying to get on a plane? Secret lists... I could go on, the point is stop cowering and be Free again.
You're missing the New American Dictionary.
Promoting Democracy is invading another nation to impose your will on them. National Defense is giving up your liberties for the security provided by Promoting Democracy. And Patriotism is outrage at public money spent on helping your neighbors, unless it's for National Defense or Promoting Democracy.
Trust us. It all makes sense once you throw your principles out the window.
The GP said:
Quite honestly, the leadership there sees themselves in a cold war with the west, and are trying to take advantage of the west's not wanting to be in one.
The words. They mean things.
Let's see... when's the last time China invaded another nation? When is the last time a Western nation invaded another nation?
But let's forget history for a moment. What does the Air Force see in our future? And, consider you aren't American for a moment, and what your rational response to this policy would be.
As we implement our vision to fully exploit space as a space combat command, AFSPC [Air Force Space Command] will become a significant force provider of CS [counter space], conventional and strategic prompt global strike capabilities with even greater force enabler capabilities. As depicted in Figure 2-2, our space capabilities are built upon a structure where the uppermost portions of SFE [Space Force Enhancement] and SFA [Space Force Application] depend on a solid foundation. While our ultimate goals are truly to “exploit” space through SFE and SFA missions, as with other mediums, we cannot fully “exploit” that medium until we first “control” it. The needed foundation, therefore, consists of the assured space access and infrastructure provided by the SS and MS areas along with the CS capabilities (SSA, Defensive Counterspace (DCS), and OCS) required to control space and ensure Space Superiority...
3.2.2 MID-TERM (FY12--17)
In the Mid-Term, AFSPC will deploy a new generation of responsive space access, prompt global strike, and space superiority capabilities. Our Weapons Officers and other space professionals will integrate and operate these capabilities into joint and task force operations. In practical terms, AFSPC will continue to prioritize efforts that support SFE transformation to include Transformational Communications and space-based Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) capabilities. Responsive spacelift capabilities become more important in this timeframe due to their support of both Global Strike and DCS (Responsive replenishment of space assets). Such work will increase support to the terrestrial warfighter while protecting US space assets and demonstrating space combat capabilities.
3.2.3 FAR-TERM (FY18--30)
In the Far-Term, AFSPC will target resources toward fielding and deploying space and missile combat forces in depth, allowing us to take the fight to any adversary in, from, and through space, on-demand. Based on previous development efforts, AFSPC will focus on Battlespace Awareness (space and terrestrial), OCS and DCS, and prompt global strike and LBSD capabilities. Many of these will be supported by responsive spacelift and payload capabilities. We will continue to explore advanced technologies to revolutionize and transform our operations beyond 2025. The result will be a space combat command that is organized, trained, and equipped to rapidly achieve decisive results on or above the battlefield, anywhere, anytime.
When one of your major obstacles to adoption is that the customer actually has to pay for the product, you don't have a very good product.
Currently there are huge subsidies for oil companies and for the oil economy. What I'm suggesting is that we cease the subsidies for the oil economy and put it toward subsidies for mostly solar/geothermal/whatever economy that we control, instead of having to rely on third parties for our way of life.
A vast majority of the software programs you pick up in Staples, Best Buy, etc are going to be made for Windows. Once hardware gets a bit faster and makes virtualization relatively transparent, this will cease to matter. You'll just optionally buy Windows software support for another $150.
I'm hoping for some badass sandboxing. Imagine automatically launching an entire OS for untrusted operations, like web browsing, or having a few virtual machines running concurrently to provide different levels of access to certain data or hardware. I know some of the features of modern OSs make that a bit redundant, but it's a cool idea nonetheless.
Also, that same high-octane gas was the one Standard Oil of New Jersey was still delivering to Nazi Germany as late as 1941, even after the Nazis had bombed London.
http://ww2f.com/wwii-general/9798-lend-lease-major-supplies-western-allies-russia.html
Soviet net imports and GNP (in 1937 rubles):
1941: imports 0.3 billion; GNP 218.7 billion
1942: imports 7.8 billion; GNP 166.8 billion
Note that this are all imports.
Soviet Defense outlays (in 1937 rubles):
1941: 61.8 billion (July-Dec. 41: 44.3)
1942: 101.4 billion
(sources: Mark Harrison: Accounting for War, 1996)
Why is that? Could it have something to do with the fact that petroleum is an energy dense substance that's easy to suck out of the ground? No amount of money is going to change that -- unless all of our knowledge of chemistry and physics is wrong.
It has nothing to do with finding the technology. The technology is already there. In fact, they DoE did an excellent study in 2006:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/40116.pdf
The issue is that there is a huge amount of inertia for dirty power, because the costs are purposefully hidden from consumers. Toss in the cost of oil wars and environmental impact and see how much a gallon of gas is. And how did America become so dependent on cars? Because cars are less efficient than mass transit and therefore more profitable. The purchase and subsequent dismantling of rail and bus lines in the 50s and 60s was no accident.
Hell, we could have built nearly 20 million $40,000 electric vehicles instead of waging the Iraq war, and used them with no impact on our electrical grid in the Northeast. And I can tell you I'd rather spend my tax dollars on American technology investment creating American jobs, rather than literally blowing the money on another oil war. (Oh, we get more terrorism too? Awesome!) You wouldn't even have to spend that much money - just subsidize the difference in cost from an average car, and you're talking 40 million vehicles or more.
This isn't about isolationism, it's about independence. We can act more rationally when most of what we need is created domestically. Let's be frank here: the US could no more tell OPEC to go fuck itself than we could say the same thing to China, because "the market" decided to sell American independence in exchange for the pleasure of sacrificing our moral principles and enriching Islamic theocracies in order to keep our oil cheap.
Government subsidies to enrich oil corporations and military contractors are terrible investments. Government subsidies to enrich responsible American corporations to allow us to be energy independent, and as a bonus, reduce the financing of terrorist organizations, are good investments. The trouble is that the old guard has all the money and all of the lobbyists. All of this neo-Libertarian anti-government propaganda is doing is falsely convincing people that once you decouple and deregulate corporations from the government, somehow they are going to stop putting their own profits above the interests of the vast majority of Americans.
Paranoid terrorism is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The only difference between Osama bin Laden threatening to destroy America and the United States threatening to destroy Iran is that we can actually do it.
Islamic fundamentalists love the US War on Terror. They get to train against our soldiers, drum up support from places where they had none before, like Iraq, and use our degraded moral standards in their propaganda. The moment we kidnapped and tortured a single human being, we lost the war on terror. We proved that we are no different from any other totalitarian state. We may claim to support human rights and democracy, but if your vote includes someone we don't approve of, we've got no problem with assassinations, economic warfare, or outright war.
"But, that's the only thing 'these people' understand!" Yeah, right.
If this is "success", then what would failure look like?
Freedom of the people.
Freedom of which people? Oh, just the ones with the better weapons systems? I'm so glad we're not terrorists!