Re:The Reichstag fire and Chancellor Hitler's rise
on
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No, I'm not. I'm trying to teach idiots some history.
It's a thankless, although not always pointless task.
After all, Buritto boy, you now have an exposure to the idea of "Reichstag fire" - if you didn't know about it already, at least you'll know it happened, that it's something to do with faking attacks on the nation to stir sentiment up and grab power.
And, if at some point evidence of collusion or criminal incompetence arises, and people begin to make the comparison more widely, you might know what it means.
As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.
By the time you total grid inefficency, battery inefficency and so on, the total CO2 emissions advantage is negligable. You'd do better to add more insulation to your house and drive a little Honda.
The Hybrids, though, are another kettle of fish entirely - they generate their electricity from gasoline, in situ, and that actually (surprisingly) turns out to be a smart thing to do for a long list of reasons.
So, over-all, no great loss and wait for Hypercars - cars that think they are power stations..... (no, I'm not making this up).
1 Gore Won. 2 The Interned American is Padilla
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The newspapers' review also discovered that canvassing boards in Palm Beach and Broward counties threw out hundreds of ballots that had marks that were no different from ballots deemed to be valid.
The papers concluded that Gore would be in the White House today if those ballots had been counted.
In a nutshell, if you count all the votes, Gore won. Plain and simple, and possibly the most under-reported story of the year.
A lot of the links to the primary sources have rotted - it's been a year. However, here is Votes aren't sacred which is pretty much the whole story.
Now on to the interments.
The american who's been grabbed and held without access to a lawyer or even a military tribunal is Jose Padilla. And you can read all about him in places like Time.
A little while back, I linked to this LA Times op-ed by Jonathan Turley discussing John Ashcroft's plans to build internment camps for American citizens, a plan which, according to Turley, had been "disclosed...but little publicized."
Well, this blogging thing is kind of hit and run, and of course I don't have the resources to fact check the LA Times. But a few readers wrote in puzzled at their inability to find anything further on the topic via Google. I have occasional access to Lexis and I've had it in the back of my mind to do more research, but as it turns out, a conservative blogger whose site is named, straightforwardly, Right Wing News, is on the case (found via Instapundit). And leaving aside ideological differences, this one does appear to be, well, pretty much nonsense. (Afterthought: I mean the concentration camp rhetoric here, not Turley's larger point about unconstitutionally detaining American citizens, which any regular reader of this blog knows I've been ranting about for quite some time.)
This writer, John Hawkins, contacted Turley directly, and as it turns out, Turley's entire op-ed was based on this paragraph from an article in the Wall Street Journal:
The White House is considering creating a high-level committee to decide which prisoners should be denied access to federal courts. The Goose Creek, S.C., facility that houses Mr. Padilla -- mostly empty since it was designated in January to hold foreigners captured in the U.S. and facing military tribunals -- now has a special wing that could be used to jail about 20 U.S. citizens if the government were to deem them enemy combatants, a senior administration official said."
Hawkins goes on to note, I think correctly:
First off, whatever you may think of possibly jailing 20 "enemy combatants" without trial, doing so certainly does not in any way, shape, or form mean you've created a "camp." Furthermore, how does imprisoning 20 men in one Navy brig somehow constitute creating "camps", much less having a "camp plan?" Worse yet, to compare jailing less than two dozen people believed to be connected to terrorist organizations to putting 120,000+ Americans in camps based on their ethnicity goes beyond gross exaggeration into what many people would call deliberate deception.
It seems to me that there's enough really troubling stuff going on right now to keep us all busy wailing and weeping and gnashing our teeth twenty-four-goddamn-seven, without resorting to these kinds of tactics. The Padilla case is horrifying on its own merits, particularly now that it's been revealed that the government has no real evidence against him. An American citizen has been arbitrarily stripped of his rights, on little more than John Ashcroft's say-so. There's no need to gild this particular lilly--the case speaks for itself. (Or at least it should. I don't follow the right-leaning blogosphere closely, so as always I could be wrong(TM), but I haven't seen a lot of outrage over this. In fact, what I see far more often are snarky dismissive put-downs directed toward people who are worried about these self-evident threats to civil liberties. But that's probably another rant.)
At any rate, I don't think it does anyone any good to, basically, make shit up out of thin air. It only undermines your case, gives people cause to write you off as a goofball. If anyone has any actual information here, any real evidence of Ashcroft's plans to start building concentration camps, please feel free to let me know. But I'm not interested in paranoid fantasies with no basis in reality. Reality is scary enough by itself these days.
posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:26 AM| link
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
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Next point? OK: the supreme court which gave the job to Bush is ruled republican appointees. And I note you dodge the issue about striking black, poor democratic voters from the rolls by classifying them as felons from Texas....
And the fact that a complete recount, of all votes, gave the job to Gore.
Bottom line: being able to take an American off the street, class them as an enemy combatant on *NO* public evidence, lock them up without access to a lawyer for as long as the President likes, is the current state of the game.
It is against everything this country has ever stood for and must be changed.
IF THERE ARE FREE ELECTIONS IN 2004. IF NOT....
on
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Excuse the caps.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you say.
However, you are making the assumptions that there will be free elections in 2004.
There won't be: pure and simple, Bush came to power through electoral fraud, and he's going to attempt to stay in the Whitehaus using every trick in the book.
Expect carefully scheduled wars, PR events and more of the kinds of tricks (stripping black democrats off the voter's rolls) that were pulled in Florida.
We're in deep trouble, IMHO.
Great post, but Kirsanow quote is out of context.
on
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Kirsanow, who was appointed by Bush and finally took his seat in May after a heated legal fight with the commission chairwoman, said if there was another attack by Arabs on U.S. soil, ``not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops and more profiling.''
``There will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights,'' Kirsanow added. ``So the best thing we can do to preserve them is by keeping the country safe.''
In general Rand is full of crap, but....
on
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"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one "makes" them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on the guilt."
I agree with you.
The Reichstag fire and Chancellor Hitler's rise.
on
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For the historically inept, like BurritoWarrior here, check out the early machinations of Chancellor Hitler - a democratically elected leader (puts him one up on Bush) with a Rather Special Agenda (world domination through force, rather than securing our oil supply).
Faking terrorism and creating national emergencies is not a new political trick, fake Caesar quotes notwithstanding.
We do not know, for sure, that BushCo had any foreknowledge of 9/11, but there is ample evidence that they have not told the full truth to us about the various and sundry procedural problems of the defense response to 9/11.
There are unanswered questions.
John Ashcroft camps: phony, dead story
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It appears there never were any camps. The entire thing got started when people looked at a "Request for Bids" type document for "emergency housing" made by some outfit like FEMA (can't quite remember the details).
Lindh plead guilty, without trial, and is serving 20 years. Last time I checked, Padilla was still being held without trial.
Both are American citizens. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, but had not fought or in any way threatened American lives.
(tho is presence there, under the circumstances, may have warranted a treason trial).
Padilla was caught in the USA and has clear terrorist links.
None the less, the handling of both cases as been blatantly unconstitutional and unlawful.
Paranoid? I think not.
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
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Blah, blah, blah.
Boring, boring.
Get a clue: in case you hadn't noticed, there's been **VERY** significant abridgement of your constitutional rights: being able to hold an american citizen, without trial or access to a lawyer, indefinitely on the sole judgement of the executive branch is a FACT.
It's happening today, and you, buddy, need to get your head out of your ass and read the news.
We have a problem. Pointing to the rights which have not yet been abridged and saying "well, we still have that one, so everying is fine" is just stupid.
Deal.
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
We also have:
1> "enemy combatants" - american citizens held without due process, completely spitting on a thousand years of civil law.
2> more "enemy combatants" - people who should clearly be prisoners of war
So, yes, Bush is really a figurehead for a massive executive branch power grab, but how's about have a clue?
Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin Niemöller
Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
I've got flamebait 2, and I'm trying to raise a serious point here: electoral fraud is a real concern in US elections, and computerizing the process is not going to make it more transparent.
Moderation is supposed to be for post quality, not for political or other content.
With a computer voting system, there profile of risk for election fraud changes so radically that the folks used to policing these systems will never know what hit them.
We've already had one US election stolen by outright electoral fraud (I'll let y'all verify that Gore won from your own preferred, trustworthy news source).
This just opens up the door for more trouble ahead.
Do you see any avenue for cutting cost and improving availability using peer to peer technologies? Particularly, systems which are self-certifying (i.e. filename == md5 checksum of the file) would seem to offer some promise for huge distributed storage, but centralized indexing.
True, true.... but there are a lot of american services companies which are developing those skills and running offshore firms to do the work, and thats working pretty damn well.
I've actually done this for a living at times, and it's not easy, but it's cheaper by far than employing yanks.
Err.... welcome to globalization: you either have to keep darkie out with barbed wire (look at our Southern border vs. our Northern one) or accept that we're one world now, and poor forigners are often just as bright and twice as hard working as the children of the Imperium.
Bright spark, eh? You're confusing micro and macro economics.
Basically, if the world functioned as a single economic unit, there might be some truth in that. But it doesn't: restrictions on availability of goods (shipping), language, plus governments, get in the way.
In practice, though, all that happens is that the folks making $20K US in India look like millionaires.
You either bring Adit over here on an H1B, or send the software to India to be written by his company in Bangalore.
Either way, it's supply and demand, chumpolas - the service economy runs on Mexicans and other south american immigrants, mostly illegal.
Why would software be any different?
It's a global market, folks - if you want to keep your jobs and their 80K salaries, you've got to be better at something than your international competition, just like a steel manufacturer or anybody else who competes in the global economy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm not. I'm trying to teach idiots some history.
It's a thankless, although not always pointless task.
After all, Buritto boy, you now have an exposure to the idea of "Reichstag fire" - if you didn't know about it already, at least you'll know it happened, that it's something to do with faking attacks on the nation to stir sentiment up and grab power.
And, if at some point evidence of collusion or criminal incompetence arises, and people begin to make the comparison more widely, you might know what it means.
Mission accomplished, dimwit.
As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.
By the time you total grid inefficency, battery inefficency and so on, the total CO2 emissions advantage is negligable. You'd do better to add more insulation to your house and drive a little Honda.
The Hybrids, though, are another kettle of fish entirely - they generate their electricity from gasoline, in situ, and that actually (surprisingly) turns out to be a smart thing to do for a long list of reasons.
So, over-all, no great loss and wait for Hypercars - cars that think they are power stations..... (no, I'm not making this up).
Would you take it from CNN?
Here's the CNN story entitled "Bush Won".
However, the article says:
The newspapers' review also discovered that canvassing boards in Palm Beach and Broward counties threw out hundreds of ballots that had marks that were no different from ballots deemed to be valid.
The papers concluded that Gore would be in the White House today if those ballots had been counted.
In a nutshell, if you count all the votes, Gore won. Plain and simple, and possibly the most under-reported story of the year.
Things get even clearer if you broaden the questions somewhat. Some general background on the Gore victory.
A lot of the links to the primary sources have rotted - it's been a year. However, here is Votes aren't sacred which is pretty much the whole story.
Now on to the interments.
The american who's been grabbed and held without access to a lawyer or even a military tribunal is Jose Padilla. And you can read all about him in places like Time.
Tom Tomorrow spells it out
Saturday, August 24, 2002
Fair and balanced
A little while back, I linked to this LA Times op-ed by Jonathan Turley discussing John Ashcroft's plans to build internment camps for American citizens, a plan which, according to Turley, had been "disclosed...but little publicized."
Well, this blogging thing is kind of hit and run, and of course I don't have the resources to fact check the LA Times. But a few readers wrote in puzzled at their inability to find anything further on the topic via Google. I have occasional access to Lexis and I've had it in the back of my mind to do more research, but as it turns out, a conservative blogger whose site is named, straightforwardly, Right Wing News, is on the case (found via Instapundit). And leaving aside ideological differences, this one does appear to be, well, pretty much nonsense. (Afterthought: I mean the concentration camp rhetoric here, not Turley's larger point about unconstitutionally detaining American citizens, which any regular reader of this blog knows I've been ranting about for quite some time.)
This writer, John Hawkins, contacted Turley directly, and as it turns out, Turley's entire op-ed was based on this paragraph from an article in the Wall Street Journal:
The White House is considering creating a high-level committee to decide which prisoners should be denied access to federal courts. The Goose Creek, S.C., facility that houses Mr. Padilla -- mostly empty since it was designated in January to hold foreigners captured in the U.S. and facing military tribunals -- now has a special wing that could be used to jail about 20 U.S. citizens if the government were to deem them enemy combatants, a senior administration official said."
Hawkins goes on to note, I think correctly:
First off, whatever you may think of possibly jailing 20 "enemy combatants" without trial, doing so certainly does not in any way, shape, or form mean you've created a "camp." Furthermore, how does imprisoning 20 men in one Navy brig somehow constitute creating "camps", much less having a "camp plan?" Worse yet, to compare jailing less than two dozen people believed to be connected to terrorist organizations to putting 120,000+ Americans in camps based on their ethnicity goes beyond gross exaggeration into what many people would call deliberate deception.
It seems to me that there's enough really troubling stuff going on right now to keep us all busy wailing and weeping and gnashing our teeth twenty-four-goddamn-seven, without resorting to these kinds of tactics. The Padilla case is horrifying on its own merits, particularly now that it's been revealed that the government has no real evidence against him. An American citizen has been arbitrarily stripped of his rights, on little more than John Ashcroft's say-so. There's no need to gild this particular lilly--the case speaks for itself. (Or at least it should. I don't follow the right-leaning blogosphere closely, so as always I could be wrong(TM), but I haven't seen a lot of outrage over this. In fact, what I see far more often are snarky dismissive put-downs directed toward people who are worried about these self-evident threats to civil liberties. But that's probably another rant.)
At any rate, I don't think it does anyone any good to, basically, make shit up out of thin air. It only undermines your case, gives people cause to write you off as a goofball. If anyone has any actual information here, any real evidence of Ashcroft's plans to start building concentration camps, please feel free to let me know. But I'm not interested in paranoid fantasies with no basis in reality. Reality is scary enough by itself these days.
posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:26 AM| link
Quashing of protest: try this for size peaceful Anti-Bush demonstrators in Portland getting the shit kicked out of them by riot police.
Next point? OK: the supreme court which gave the job to Bush is ruled republican appointees. And I note you dodge the issue about striking black, poor democratic voters from the rolls by classifying them as felons from Texas....
And the fact that a complete recount, of all votes, gave the job to Gore.
Bottom line: being able to take an American off the street, class them as an enemy combatant on *NO* public evidence, lock them up without access to a lawyer for as long as the President likes, is the current state of the game.
It is against everything this country has ever stood for and must be changed.
Excuse the caps.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you say.
However, you are making the assumptions that there will be free elections in 2004.
There won't be: pure and simple, Bush came to power through electoral fraud, and he's going to attempt to stay in the Whitehaus using every trick in the book.
Expect carefully scheduled wars, PR events and more of the kinds of tricks (stripping black democrats off the voter's rolls) that were pulled in Florida.
We're in deep trouble, IMHO.
Kirsanow, who was appointed by Bush and finally took his seat in May after a heated legal fight with the commission chairwoman, said if there was another attack by Arabs on U.S. soil, ``not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops and more profiling.''
``There will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights,'' Kirsanow added. ``So the best thing we can do to preserve them is by keeping the country safe.''
Source
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one "makes" them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on the guilt."
I agree with you.
For the historically inept, like BurritoWarrior here, check out the early machinations of Chancellor Hitler - a democratically elected leader (puts him one up on Bush) with a Rather Special Agenda (world domination through force, rather than securing our oil supply).
The burning of the Reichstag
Faking terrorism and creating national emergencies is not a new political trick, fake Caesar quotes notwithstanding.
We do not know, for sure, that BushCo had any foreknowledge of 9/11, but there is ample evidence that they have not told the full truth to us about the various and sundry procedural problems of the defense response to 9/11.
There are unanswered questions.
It appears there never were any camps. The entire thing got started when people looked at a "Request for Bids" type document for "emergency housing" made by some outfit like FEMA (can't quite remember the details).
Embarrased retractions
These americans have been held without trials.
Jose Padilla
John Walker Lindh
Lindh plead guilty, without trial, and is serving 20 years. Last time I checked, Padilla was still being held without trial.
Both are American citizens. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, but had not fought or in any way threatened American lives.
(tho is presence there, under the circumstances, may have warranted a treason trial).
Padilla was caught in the USA and has clear terrorist links.
None the less, the handling of both cases as been blatantly unconstitutional and unlawful.
Paranoid? I think not.
Blah, blah, blah.
Boring, boring.
Get a clue: in case you hadn't noticed, there's been **VERY** significant abridgement of your constitutional rights: being able to hold an american citizen, without trial or access to a lawyer, indefinitely on the sole judgement of the executive branch is a FACT.
It's happening today, and you, buddy, need to get your head out of your ass and read the news.
We have a problem. Pointing to the rights which have not yet been abridged and saying "well, we still have that one, so everying is fine" is just stupid.
Deal.
We also have:
1> "enemy combatants" - american citizens held without due process, completely spitting on a thousand years of civil law.
2> more "enemy combatants" - people who should clearly be prisoners of war
So, yes, Bush is really a figurehead for a massive executive branch power grab, but how's about have a clue?
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin Niemöller
Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
Unanswered Questions about 9/11
I'd switch on the spot.
Bullshit.
Control of the US government changed hands by ELECTORAL FRAUD and you don't think that's relevant to a story about e-voting.
You, sir, are a nitwit, and idiot and a fool.
I've got flamebait 2, and I'm trying to raise a serious point here: electoral fraud is a real concern in US elections, and computerizing the process is not going to make it more transparent.
Moderation is supposed to be for post quality, not for political or other content.
This is good stuff.
has power."
- Joeseph Stalin
With a computer voting system, there profile of risk for election fraud changes so radically that the folks used to policing these systems will never know what hit them.
We've already had one US election stolen by outright electoral fraud (I'll let y'all verify that Gore won from your own preferred, trustworthy news source).
This just opens up the door for more trouble ahead.
Do you see any avenue for cutting cost and improving availability using peer to peer technologies? Particularly, systems which are self-certifying (i.e. filename == md5 checksum of the file) would seem to offer some promise for huge distributed storage, but centralized indexing.
Is this an area worth persuing, in your opinion?
Skilled project management in the USA, programming in India, and longer development cycles.
True, true.... but there are a lot of american services companies which are developing those skills and running offshore firms to do the work, and thats working pretty damn well.
I've actually done this for a living at times, and it's not easy, but it's cheaper by far than employing yanks.
Err.... welcome to globalization: you either have to keep darkie out with barbed wire (look at our Southern border vs. our Northern one) or accept that we're one world now, and poor forigners are often just as bright and twice as hard working as the children of the Imperium.
Immigration is THE issue of the next millenium.
Bright spark, eh? You're confusing micro and macro economics.
Basically, if the world functioned as a single economic unit, there might be some truth in that. But it doesn't: restrictions on availability of goods (shipping), language, plus governments, get in the way.
In practice, though, all that happens is that the folks making $20K US in India look like millionaires.
You either bring Adit over here on an H1B, or send the software to India to be written by his company in Bangalore.
Either way, it's supply and demand, chumpolas - the service economy runs on Mexicans and other south american immigrants, mostly illegal.
Why would software be any different?
It's a global market, folks - if you want to keep your jobs and their 80K salaries, you've got to be better at something than your international competition, just like a steel manufacturer or anybody else who competes in the global economy.