Well, while I am against the regulation of speech in any setting,
Fortunately that view is not very popular. Even the right-wing US Supreme Court acknowledges there is a difference between commercial speech and other forms of speech, and that difference is reflected in many legal precedents and court decisions.
how about France's illegal trade of oil with Iraq against the UN sanctions and Oil for Food programs?
Far be it for me to shed some reality on this nationalistic rhetoric, but if you research the issue, you'll find two interesting items about that oil for food scandal: (1) US companies made far more money on the corruption than did companies of any other country, and (2) the US gov't was very aware of Iraq's violations of sanctions in selling oil. The US even tacitly approved the breaking of sanctions by Iraq exporting oil through Jordan and Turkey since it helped two of our "allies" and would have had an adverse economic impact on them if the smuggling was stopped.
Or perhaps their ongoing (since 1975) campaign to outlaw the use of English words in french advertising and government and scientific papers, like the word "email" because it's too English?
The Canadian province of Quebec has a lot of bizarre laws regulating the use of French in commerce, specifying the size of French text vis-a-vis English on billboards, etc. So what? Why should I care what language the people of another country speak?
The way you portray this is as if it's a human rights violation -- they're regulating commercial speech, not torturing people...
Because as the revolt of poor people a few weeks ago brutally showed, many French people still have a spirit of resistance -- and they probably have a few more bottles of gasoline kicking around.:-/
They warred with neighboring enemies just like europeans do, they just sucked at it.
In the example cited, the Arawaks of the Caribbean, they did not wage war. The Spanish invaders recorded this in detail, along with how the Arawaks did not beat their wives (divorce was simply a matter of placing your spouse's shoes outside the home) nor hit their children.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization.
Well, we know that such attitudes certainly are not something Christ would say. Similar attitudes existed in Nazi Germany and were the core of their nationalist belief system. Have we devolved that far?
It's the same one I have now, a link to ReOpen911.org.
To your last point, yes, anyone who believes that the US was complicit in 9/11 is an idiot, regardless of how many people share the delusion.
That's illogical. First, calling millions and millions of people "idiots" speaks for itself. But humanity's basis of defining reality is when people accept something as fact. We have no scientific proof of God, but does that make all religious believers "idiots"? Ignoring the philosophical aspects, there are many, many questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered.
Looking at it historically, we know that the US gov't has deliberately lied to the American people to start wars. We also know that the highest echelons of the US military have advocated killing Americans in large numbers in order to whip up popular support for their desired war.
We know that during the 80s, a pseudo-gov'tal group who Bill Moyers -- he himself involved in LBJ's Vietnam-era lies -- called the "secret" or "shadow" gov't did not hesitate to break US and int'l law to wage a war of terror with mostly surrogates. The shadow gov'ts "punishment" was a presidential pardon.
We know from testimony of some of Bush's highest advisors (e.g. Paul O'Neill) that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq since his first days in office. We also know firsthand (i.e. Richard Clarke) that Bush did not want to go to war against Afghanistan after 9/11, but instead wanted to invade Iraq.
Recent history tells us many things about 9/11: that Bush himself publicly lied about seeing the first plane hit the south tower, that Condi Rice's Sep. 2001 promise to the world to show evidence that Bin Laden committed the attacks is still unfulfilled, and that the WTC leaseholder's claim of accomplishing a demolition of WTC building 7 during a terrorist attack (which is what he claimed in a PBS interview) is highly implausible.
There are dozens and dozens of valid, huge and very important questions which remain about 9/11.
The laughable whitewash of an investigation, the official "9/11 Commission", certainly did not answer any serious questions. That investigation was funded with far less than the gov't spent on Clinton's Whitewater investigation, consisted only of people selected by Bush, and had the scope of their investigation limited to only what Bush wanted investigated.
It's long past time for a fully-funded, independent investigation into 9/11.
I hate it when someone is too lazy to do simple research. But to bolster my "lost credibility":-), I did a few quick searches. A bit of time with Google will turn up many more:
* Japanese peace feelers (note: doesn't mention feelers sent via the Dutch and others)
* Shelling Japanese coast unopposed: I didn't hit the right search keywords to coax a reference out of Google -- ran into too many results about specific ships; you'll have to dig this one up.
* Estimated casualties: a quick look turns up the Wikipedia giving several figures, including Adm. Leahy's estimate of 268k. I didn't bother to find the War Dept's estimate.
Wow, it must be hard on you if you write off anyone who thinks that the US gov't should reopen the 9/11 investigation, or who thinks that the official story of 9/11 has many holes and questions in it.
I mean, one nationwide survey in Canada found that a majority of Canadians felt the US gov't was complicit (could mean anything from "had foreknowledge and stood by and did nothing" to "helped plan and carry out the attacks") in 9/11.
A 2004 Zogby poll found that 49% of NYC residents felt the US gov't was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
A former (West) German Minister of Defense and some British Members of Parliament are on record as saying that the US gov't was behind the attacks.
Gee, that's a lot of people who have no credibility because of their views on one subject.
You feel good now that you've got that off your chest, don't you?!:-)
if nothing else to prove that things are fucked up everywhere
Considering that the US House of Representatives just passed the Patriot[sic] Act today, your timing is impeccable.:-(
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism
Sorry, I've just gotta run this into the ground a little bit more.:-)
If you're in the mood for some research, you can read some of the journals by Spanish priests of the culture and life of the Arawak people of the Caribbean in Columbus' time.
The Spanish documented that the Arawak practices of agriculture yielded far more food per acre than any technique used in Europe. Additionally, the Arawak's amount of labor that they put into raising food was trivial. The Arawak raised their food by planting it in mounds which needed no tilling or weeding, and they used detailed knowledge of "companion crops" which mitigated pests and diseases.
Those "uncivilized" people may not have had Spanish swords and cannons, but they weren't idiots.
Uncivilized man by and large had to spend all of their time on eating, with a little left over [...]
Anthropology books and courses are a very good thing.:-)
If you tried some, you'd discover that hunter-gatherers spent (and spend) far less time focused on getting food than us "civilized" people do working at our jobs.
I'm glad it was Harry Truman and not you who made that decision in 1945.
Why? We're not really going to trot out that rubbish about needing to use nukes against Japan, are we? A few points to consider:
* Before the US dropped nukes, Japan was already sending out requests for peace through several countries. The sticking point was that the Japanese wanted to keep Hirohito as a figurehead emperor -- the exact same deal the US privately agreed to.
* Before the US dropped nukes, Japan was so defeated that the US could park battleships off the Japanese coast and shell at will -- without response.
* The much quoted figure of "1 million" US casualties in the event of a Japanese invasion is sheer fiction. The War Department put the figure at two hundred thousand casualties (horrific yes, but certainly not 1 million).
* General Leslie Groves, military commander of the WWII Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, said bluntly, "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
Nutshell summary:
We dropped nukes on Japan in WWII for two reasons: to see them work in action and, more importantly, to show the USSR that we can and would use them.
Is it just me, or didn't we almost go through a milder version of this with Intel and the Pentium III CPU serial number rubbish?!
The solution is the same: Avoid and boycott any idiot companies who push this, rattle the cages of politicians and see if they'll wake up, and scream to any and every media outlet that will listen.
The only question which remains to be answered is if the combination of state-corporate power is too strong to overcome.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism
I'm amazed that no one has bothered to note the inherent biased assumption that privatization will save money.
There are tons of examples that suggest that privatization, far from being the be-all/end-all cure to gov't bureaucracy, results in even shoddier service and actually costs more in the end.
One can pick out tons of examples: States that have privatized the investigation of welfare fraud find that it costs more. Privatized prisons not only cost dearly, but result in barbaric treatment for the inmates (not that state-run prisons are any prize!).
The US military has privatized many combat tasks to private mercenary corporations -- but does anyone think that privately hiring now-ex Green Berets and Rangers and paying them hundreds of dollars per day as mercenaries is really cheaper and more effective than paying them $30K/year as members of the US Army?! The Army is having to pay out huge bonuses to elite troops just to keep them from leaving the service to go work for the private mercenary corporations -- taxpayers pay to train them, then we pay through the nose because of privatization. Halliburton and mercenary corporation stockholders may benefit by military privatization, but the taxpayers certainly do not!
We can also have ample evidence that privatization doesn't work in health care. The US has the world's most expensive health care, yet Canadians live 4+ years longer and the cheaper Canadian system outperforms the US privatized health care system in almost every measure. (Standard disclaimers: The US system performs great -- expensive, but great -- if you're rich and/or have good insurance, and the Canadian system is far from perfect; but on a national scale there is no comparison -- Canada's public system is cheaper and far more effective than the US private system.)
I think there are very, very few people that will claim that Bush's privatization of FEMA resulted in an effective Hurricane Katrina response.
Privatization may be effective in some rare instances, but it is far, far from the cost-saving, effectiveness-creating cure-all that the article's lead-in portrays it to be.
But for the record, my own experience is completely different. I'm constantly hammered with telemarketing calls. My opinion is that this type of an "opt out" law is deliberately designed by business for business.
Thinking back to years ago when the corporate powers-that-be had a teenager arrested for merely figuring out CSS, I wonder if those corporate bureaucrats realize that they were creating a monster?
I mean, if they had just left the kid alone, his curiousity might have waned and today he might be a stodgy coder writing finance apps.
Instead, they pissed him off, highlighted the system's corruption and injustice, and created a monster.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we lost the Vietnam war -- big time.
Sure, like Iraq, the US could hold a piece of ground when it wanted to and had semi-control of most of the cities. But the people there hated the US (with the exception of the quislings we bought and some French-speaking Vietnamese Catholics).
The US fought to keep Vietnam under our thumb and the Vietnamese fought for their own independence. In the course of that fighting the US gov't committed obscene atrocities and for years lied through its teeth to its own people. Those lies caused huge problems in the US, as some people actually want to believe that stuff written in famous US documents about this being a gov't "of, for and by the people".
The Vietnames won their independence. We lost. Accept reality.
And for Iraq? the US isn't losing that war either. As a matter of fact, as soon as thier government is stable and they can defend themselves, we are pulling out.
Whew! If what we see in Iraq today is "winning" the war, I would really hate to see "losing" it.
There will never be a stable US puppet gov't in Iraq -- not unless the US starts killing millions of Iraqis instead of "only" tens of thousands. But hey, the US military has used so much depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq, maybe that plan is already underway...:-(
And if the US gov't is so honest and honorable about eventually leaving Iraq -- like Bush and his fellow liars claim -- why are we busy building multiple permanent military bases in Iraq? And why won't the US gov't and military publicly state that we will not retain military bases in Iraq?
(Answers for slow thinkers: 'Cause there's lots of oil under the ground there!:-)
So, the US sending weapons to the Dominican Republic, where those weapons were diverted to former Haitian death squads does not have US fingerprints on it?
President Aristide being refused additional bodyguards from the US mercenary contractor at a critical time doesn't hint that the US gov't might be involved?
The US bodyguards which Aristide had in Haiti who mysteriously "disappeared" right about the time the US Marines showed up are only a concincidence, huh?
The US Marines forcing Aristide out of his home and onto a US Air Force transport and taking him to a destination that the US gov't refused to tell him -- that was somehow not a "US thing"?
The US has invaded Haiti numerous times and at various times has militarily occupied the country for years. The US gov't supported and backed brutal dictatorships in Haiti. The latest incident is unusual only in that the US conned the French and Canadians -- shame on them -- to go along with the coup, and then later semi-successfully dumped the whole mess onto the UN.
Korea and Vietnam were really a case of helping another nation defend itself.
Let's be serious. After the Japanese were defeated, a Korean gov't rose to power in Seoul. It was only a matter of days after US troops arrived that they overthrew that gov't -- it was too leftist for the US' tastes.
The US then put in a puppet dictator, Syngman Rhee -- a guy who lived in the US and who had lived in the US for 40 years. Once in power, Rhee -- with US backing -- started to undermine the northern gov't. Before the "attack" by the north, there were battalion-sized battles going on along the 38th parallel and fighters were dogfighting daily.
Please, the Korean war was nowhere near the black-and-white issue that whitewashed US history and propaganda makes it out to be. That's reflected even today. A Gallup/Chosun Ilbo poll conducted this summer found that fully 2/3 of South Koreans of military age would side with the north in the event of a war between the United States and North Korea.
In the case of Vietnam, no qualifications have to be made. The US was just dead, tyrannically wrong in that war.
During the Eisenhower administration, when the Vietnamese kicked the French out, the peace agreement temporarily divided the country until free and fair elections were to be held.
But the US refused to hold any elections. Why?
Well, declassified CIA documents show that the CIA reported to the US gov't that any fair election would be easily won by the Vietnamese national hero -- their version of George Washington -- Ho Chi Minh. The US could not hold elections because they knew that the US puppets would lose any fair election hands down.
Let's be clear: the Vietnam war was not in any way related to "democracy" -- the US refused to hold elections and backed South Vietnamese dictators. Similarly, the only "freedom" the South Vietnamese enjoyed was the "freedom" of capitalism, as dictated by the US.
Doesn't the US military have the so-called terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere massively outgunned? Doesn't the US already have several different non-lethal means of breaking up crowds?
The people of Vietnam did not want US domination and neo-colonialization, and the US lost that war.
The people of Iraq do not want US domination and neo-colonialization of their country, and the US is losing that war.
Afghanistan is rapidly sliding downhill. After overthrowing a democratic gov't in Haiti, the Haitian people are still resisting the US/UN troops.
Does anyone see a pattern here?
All the high-tech gizmos in the world will not help the US to pacify a country when the people of that country hate you with a passion.
Some people will not support the foreign domination and US puppet governments that are placed on them -- all in the name of some noble cause like "freedom and democracy"; and even worse for the US imperialists, some of those people will fight to the death to protect their country. Lightning bolts or microwaves aren't about to turn them into quislings.
Okay, that's your position. But let's remember the big picture here. Remember these points:
* Lifelong Republican, and Bush's former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill went on CBS and told 60 Minutes plainly that the Bush administration wanted to go to war against Iraq from its first days in office. Remember the map of Iraq already divided up among the oil companies that O'Neill showed on 60 Minutes and the Bush admin's threatened legal action for revealing that map?!
* Remember lifelong Republican and terrorist expert Richard Clarke's remarks that Bush himself basically told him to find evidence to go to war on Iraq immediately after 9/11?
These are not Hillary Clinton types -- they're two lifelong Republicans who have served multiple Republican (and, for the record, Clarke also worked for Clinton) presidents.
Now, keeping those points in mind, answer one question: How do you explain the Downing Street Memo?
Remember, the Downing Street Memo is an internal British gov't document. It was created after high-level meetings of British gov't officials with their US gov't counterparts. The meeting minutes plainly state that Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq using rhetoric of WMD and terrorism as the excuse (this was mid-2002, when Bush claims he still had not made up his mind). It also bluntly states that the US was "fixing the intelligence" to fit the war policy.
With that memo in mind, someone has to be lying -- either the British gov't is lying to themselves after meeting with the highest levels of the American gov't, or the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American public.
Is there a hole in that logic? Which do you think is more likely?
Also, factor in that the US and UK started launching massive air strikes on Iraq in the spring/early summer of 2002 -- long before Congress approved a war and long before Bush said he made up his mind to go to war. Some of those air strikes -- publicly confirmed by the Pentagon -- were 100+ plane bombing missions. They, of course, were done under the guise of the "no fly zones" and the size of those strikes were hidden from the US and British public at the time they were going on.
Now, consider all this. Do you really live in la-la land or on Planet Earth? I don't mean to be insulting, but get real -- there is more than enough evidence to convince a jury that Bush deliberately lied through his teeth to get the war he wanted.
Sadly, this isn't the first time a US president lied through his teeth to start a war (see LBJ/Gulf of Tonkin, Reagan saying that American medical students were threatened in Grenada, etc., etc., etc.). Worse still, with the half-reporting and mass media propaganda which is commonplace in the US, it won't be the last.:-(
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Well, while I am against the regulation of speech in any setting,
Fortunately that view is not very popular. Even the right-wing US Supreme Court acknowledges there is a difference between commercial speech and other forms of speech, and that difference is reflected in many legal precedents and court decisions.
how about France's illegal trade of oil with Iraq against the UN sanctions and Oil for Food programs?
Far be it for me to shed some reality on this nationalistic rhetoric, but if you research the issue, you'll find two interesting items about that oil for food scandal: (1) US companies made far more money on the corruption than did companies of any other country, and (2) the US gov't was very aware of Iraq's violations of sanctions in selling oil. The US even tacitly approved the breaking of sanctions by Iraq exporting oil through Jordan and Turkey since it helped two of our "allies" and would have had an adverse economic impact on them if the smuggling was stopped.
Or perhaps their ongoing (since 1975) campaign to outlaw the use of English words in french advertising and government and scientific papers, like the word "email" because it's too English?
The Canadian province of Quebec has a lot of bizarre laws regulating the use of French in commerce, specifying the size of French text vis-a-vis English on billboards, etc. So what? Why should I care what language the people of another country speak?
The way you portray this is as if it's a human rights violation -- they're regulating commercial speech, not torturing people...
The French gov't had better pay attention.
:-/
Because as the revolt of poor people a few weeks ago brutally showed, many French people still have a spirit of resistance -- and they probably have a few more bottles of gasoline kicking around.
They warred with neighboring enemies just like europeans do, they just sucked at it.
In the example cited, the Arawaks of the Caribbean, they did not wage war. The Spanish invaders recorded this in detail, along with how the Arawaks did not beat their wives (divorce was simply a matter of placing your spouse's shoes outside the home) nor hit their children.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization.
Well, we know that such attitudes certainly are not something Christ would say. Similar attitudes existed in Nazi Germany and were the core of their nationalist belief system. Have we devolved that far?
What was it?
It's the same one I have now, a link to ReOpen911.org.
To your last point, yes, anyone who believes that the US was complicit in 9/11 is an idiot, regardless of how many people share the delusion.
That's illogical. First, calling millions and millions of people "idiots" speaks for itself. But humanity's basis of defining reality is when people accept something as fact. We have no scientific proof of God, but does that make all religious believers "idiots"? Ignoring the philosophical aspects, there are many, many questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered.
Looking at it historically, we know that the US gov't has deliberately lied to the American people to start wars. We also know that the highest echelons of the US military have advocated killing Americans in large numbers in order to whip up popular support for their desired war.
We know that during the 80s, a pseudo-gov'tal group who Bill Moyers -- he himself involved in LBJ's Vietnam-era lies -- called the "secret" or "shadow" gov't did not hesitate to break US and int'l law to wage a war of terror with mostly surrogates. The shadow gov'ts "punishment" was a presidential pardon.
We know from testimony of some of Bush's highest advisors (e.g. Paul O'Neill) that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq since his first days in office. We also know firsthand (i.e. Richard Clarke) that Bush did not want to go to war against Afghanistan after 9/11, but instead wanted to invade Iraq.
Recent history tells us many things about 9/11: that Bush himself publicly lied about seeing the first plane hit the south tower, that Condi Rice's Sep. 2001 promise to the world to show evidence that Bin Laden committed the attacks is still unfulfilled, and that the WTC leaseholder's claim of accomplishing a demolition of WTC building 7 during a terrorist attack (which is what he claimed in a PBS interview) is highly implausible.
There are dozens and dozens of valid, huge and very important questions which remain about 9/11.
The laughable whitewash of an investigation, the official "9/11 Commission", certainly did not answer any serious questions. That investigation was funded with far less than the gov't spent on Clinton's Whitewater investigation, consisted only of people selected by Bush, and had the scope of their investigation limited to only what Bush wanted investigated.
It's long past time for a fully-funded, independent investigation into 9/11.
I hate it when someone is too lazy to do simple research. But to bolster my "lost credibility" :-), I did a few quick searches. A bit of time with Google will turn up many more:
* Japanese peace feelers (note: doesn't mention feelers sent via the Dutch and others)
* Shelling Japanese coast unopposed: I didn't hit the right search keywords to coax a reference out of Google -- ran into too many results about specific ships; you'll have to dig this one up.
* Estimated casualties: a quick look turns up the Wikipedia giving several figures, including Adm. Leahy's estimate of 268k. I didn't bother to find the War Dept's estimate.
* Leslie Groves quote: summary including quote
You lost all your credibility with your sig.
Wow, it must be hard on you if you write off anyone who thinks that the US gov't should reopen the 9/11 investigation, or who thinks that the official story of 9/11 has many holes and questions in it.
I mean, one nationwide survey in Canada found that a majority of Canadians felt the US gov't was complicit (could mean anything from "had foreknowledge and stood by and did nothing" to "helped plan and carry out the attacks") in 9/11.
A 2004 Zogby poll found that 49% of NYC residents felt the US gov't was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
A former (West) German Minister of Defense and some British Members of Parliament are on record as saying that the US gov't was behind the attacks.
Gee, that's a lot of people who have no credibility because of their views on one subject.
Well here's a big fat FUCK YOU BACK
:-)
:-(
You feel good now that you've got that off your chest, don't you?!
if nothing else to prove that things are fucked up everywhere
Considering that the US House of Representatives just passed the Patriot[sic] Act today, your timing is impeccable.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism
Sorry, I've just gotta run this into the ground a little bit more. :-)
If you're in the mood for some research, you can read some of the journals by Spanish priests of the culture and life of the Arawak people of the Caribbean in Columbus' time.
The Spanish documented that the Arawak practices of agriculture yielded far more food per acre than any technique used in Europe. Additionally, the Arawak's amount of labor that they put into raising food was trivial. The Arawak raised their food by planting it in mounds which needed no tilling or weeding, and they used detailed knowledge of "companion crops" which mitigated pests and diseases.
Those "uncivilized" people may not have had Spanish swords and cannons, but they weren't idiots.
Uncivilized man by and large had to spend all of their time on eating, with a little left over [...]
:-)
Anthropology books and courses are a very good thing.
If you tried some, you'd discover that hunter-gatherers spent (and spend) far less time focused on getting food than us "civilized" people do working at our jobs.
I'm glad it was Harry Truman and not you who made that decision in 1945.
Why? We're not really going to trot out that rubbish about needing to use nukes against Japan, are we? A few points to consider:
* Before the US dropped nukes, Japan was already sending out requests for peace through several countries. The sticking point was that the Japanese wanted to keep Hirohito as a figurehead emperor -- the exact same deal the US privately agreed to.
* Before the US dropped nukes, Japan was so defeated that the US could park battleships off the Japanese coast and shell at will -- without response.
* The much quoted figure of "1 million" US casualties in the event of a Japanese invasion is sheer fiction. The War Department put the figure at two hundred thousand casualties (horrific yes, but certainly not 1 million).
* General Leslie Groves, military commander of the WWII Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, said bluntly, "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
Nutshell summary:
We dropped nukes on Japan in WWII for two reasons: to see them work in action and, more importantly, to show the USSR that we can and would use them.
Is it just me, or didn't we almost go through a milder version of this with Intel and the Pentium III CPU serial number rubbish?!
The solution is the same: Avoid and boycott any idiot companies who push this, rattle the cages of politicians and see if they'll wake up, and scream to any and every media outlet that will listen.
The only question which remains to be answered is if the combination of state-corporate power is too strong to overcome.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism
I'm amazed that no one has bothered to note the inherent biased assumption that privatization will save money.
There are tons of examples that suggest that privatization, far from being the be-all/end-all cure to gov't bureaucracy, results in even shoddier service and actually costs more in the end.
One can pick out tons of examples: States that have privatized the investigation of welfare fraud find that it costs more. Privatized prisons not only cost dearly, but result in barbaric treatment for the inmates (not that state-run prisons are any prize!).
The US military has privatized many combat tasks to private mercenary corporations -- but does anyone think that privately hiring now-ex Green Berets and Rangers and paying them hundreds of dollars per day as mercenaries is really cheaper and more effective than paying them $30K/year as members of the US Army?! The Army is having to pay out huge bonuses to elite troops just to keep them from leaving the service to go work for the private mercenary corporations -- taxpayers pay to train them, then we pay through the nose because of privatization. Halliburton and mercenary corporation stockholders may benefit by military privatization, but the taxpayers certainly do not!
We can also have ample evidence that privatization doesn't work in health care. The US has the world's most expensive health care, yet Canadians live 4+ years longer and the cheaper Canadian system outperforms the US privatized health care system in almost every measure. (Standard disclaimers: The US system performs great -- expensive, but great -- if you're rich and/or have good insurance, and the Canadian system is far from perfect; but on a national scale there is no comparison -- Canada's public system is cheaper and far more effective than the US private system.)
I think there are very, very few people that will claim that Bush's privatization of FEMA resulted in an effective Hurricane Katrina response.
Privatization may be effective in some rare instances, but it is far, far from the cost-saving, effectiveness-creating cure-all that the article's lead-in portrays it to be.
I guess this just goes to show that the guys at FunReports.com were right -- they listed the 3rd worst science job as a Kansas Biology Teacher.
:-(
The US is making distinct moves to turn into the Christian[sic] version of Iran...
I'm glad that's been your experience.
But for the record, my own experience is completely different. I'm constantly hammered with telemarketing calls. My opinion is that this type of an "opt out" law is deliberately designed by business for business.
It's as momentous as anything I've ever done in my technical career, but I won't say more since I despise vaporware.
While I make it a point not to fawn over capitalists, he'll be my hero if he holds to that mindset.
Thinking back to years ago when the corporate powers-that-be had a teenager arrested for merely figuring out CSS, I wonder if those corporate bureaucrats realize that they were creating a monster?
I mean, if they had just left the kid alone, his curiousity might have waned and today he might be a stodgy coder writing finance apps.
Instead, they pissed him off, highlighted the system's corruption and injustice, and created a monster.
The US didn't lose that war. We pulled out.
:-(
:-)
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we lost the Vietnam war -- big time.
Sure, like Iraq, the US could hold a piece of ground when it wanted to and had semi-control of most of the cities. But the people there hated the US (with the exception of the quislings we bought and some French-speaking Vietnamese Catholics).
The US fought to keep Vietnam under our thumb and the Vietnamese fought for their own independence. In the course of that fighting the US gov't committed obscene atrocities and for years lied through its teeth to its own people. Those lies caused huge problems in the US, as some people actually want to believe that stuff written in famous US documents about this being a gov't "of, for and by the people".
The Vietnames won their independence. We lost. Accept reality.
And for Iraq? the US isn't losing that war either. As a matter of fact, as soon as thier government is stable and they can defend themselves, we are pulling out.
Whew! If what we see in Iraq today is "winning" the war, I would really hate to see "losing" it.
There will never be a stable US puppet gov't in Iraq -- not unless the US starts killing millions of Iraqis instead of "only" tens of thousands. But hey, the US military has used so much depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq, maybe that plan is already underway...
And if the US gov't is so honest and honorable about eventually leaving Iraq -- like Bush and his fellow liars claim -- why are we busy building multiple permanent military bases in Iraq? And why won't the US gov't and military publicly state that we will not retain military bases in Iraq?
(Answers for slow thinkers: 'Cause there's lots of oil under the ground there!
So, the US sending weapons to the Dominican Republic, where those weapons were diverted to former Haitian death squads does not have US fingerprints on it?
President Aristide being refused additional bodyguards from the US mercenary contractor at a critical time doesn't hint that the US gov't might be involved?
The US bodyguards which Aristide had in Haiti who mysteriously "disappeared" right about the time the US Marines showed up are only a concincidence, huh?
The US Marines forcing Aristide out of his home and onto a US Air Force transport and taking him to a destination that the US gov't refused to tell him -- that was somehow not a "US thing"?
The US has invaded Haiti numerous times and at various times has militarily occupied the country for years. The US gov't supported and backed brutal dictatorships in Haiti. The latest incident is unusual only in that the US conned the French and Canadians -- shame on them -- to go along with the coup, and then later semi-successfully dumped the whole mess onto the UN.
Korea and Vietnam were really a case of helping another nation defend itself.
Let's be serious. After the Japanese were defeated, a Korean gov't rose to power in Seoul. It was only a matter of days after US troops arrived that they overthrew that gov't -- it was too leftist for the US' tastes.
The US then put in a puppet dictator, Syngman Rhee -- a guy who lived in the US and who had lived in the US for 40 years. Once in power, Rhee -- with US backing -- started to undermine the northern gov't. Before the "attack" by the north, there were battalion-sized battles going on along the 38th parallel and fighters were dogfighting daily.
Please, the Korean war was nowhere near the black-and-white issue that whitewashed US history and propaganda makes it out to be. That's reflected even today. A Gallup/Chosun Ilbo poll conducted this summer found that fully 2/3 of South Koreans of military age would side with the north in the event of a war between the United States and North Korea.
In the case of Vietnam, no qualifications have to be made. The US was just dead, tyrannically wrong in that war.
During the Eisenhower administration, when the Vietnamese kicked the French out, the peace agreement temporarily divided the country until free and fair elections were to be held.
But the US refused to hold any elections. Why?
Well, declassified CIA documents show that the CIA reported to the US gov't that any fair election would be easily won by the Vietnamese national hero -- their version of George Washington -- Ho Chi Minh. The US could not hold elections because they knew that the US puppets would lose any fair election hands down.
Let's be clear: the Vietnam war was not in any way related to "democracy" -- the US refused to hold elections and backed South Vietnamese dictators. Similarly, the only "freedom" the South Vietnamese enjoyed was the "freedom" of capitalism, as dictated by the US.
Doesn't the US military have the so-called terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere massively outgunned? Doesn't the US already have several different non-lethal means of breaking up crowds?
The people of Vietnam did not want US domination and neo-colonialization, and the US lost that war.
The people of Iraq do not want US domination and neo-colonialization of their country, and the US is losing that war.
Afghanistan is rapidly sliding downhill. After overthrowing a democratic gov't in Haiti, the Haitian people are still resisting the US/UN troops.
Does anyone see a pattern here?
All the high-tech gizmos in the world will not help the US to pacify a country when the people of that country hate you with a passion.
Some people will not support the foreign domination and US puppet governments that are placed on them -- all in the name of some noble cause like "freedom and democracy"; and even worse for the US imperialists, some of those people will fight to the death to protect their country. Lightning bolts or microwaves aren't about to turn them into quislings.
Forgive me, but I'm still trying to figure out if this hype is "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters".
Because to me, it simply seems like feel-good PR rubbish that corporations spew every day...
Hey, what's up with posting this on Saturday?
/. routinely post political and privacy/civil liberties-type articles on the weekend?
:-(
Is it just me, or does
IMHO, this should have been a "Monday morning" article.
The title of this article immediately makes me think of that old saying -- what was it? Oh yeah:
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
I don't buy the whole "lie" argument.
:-(
Okay, that's your position. But let's remember the big picture here. Remember these points:
* Lifelong Republican, and Bush's former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill went on CBS and told 60 Minutes plainly that the Bush administration wanted to go to war against Iraq from its first days in office. Remember the map of Iraq already divided up among the oil companies that O'Neill showed on 60 Minutes and the Bush admin's threatened legal action for revealing that map?!
* Remember lifelong Republican and terrorist expert Richard Clarke's remarks that Bush himself basically told him to find evidence to go to war on Iraq immediately after 9/11?
These are not Hillary Clinton types -- they're two lifelong Republicans who have served multiple Republican (and, for the record, Clarke also worked for Clinton) presidents.
Now, keeping those points in mind, answer one question: How do you explain the Downing Street Memo?
Remember, the Downing Street Memo is an internal British gov't document. It was created after high-level meetings of British gov't officials with their US gov't counterparts. The meeting minutes plainly state that Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq using rhetoric of WMD and terrorism as the excuse (this was mid-2002, when Bush claims he still had not made up his mind). It also bluntly states that the US was "fixing the intelligence" to fit the war policy.
With that memo in mind, someone has to be lying -- either the British gov't is lying to themselves after meeting with the highest levels of the American gov't, or the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American public.
Is there a hole in that logic? Which do you think is more likely?
Also, factor in that the US and UK started launching massive air strikes on Iraq in the spring/early summer of 2002 -- long before Congress approved a war and long before Bush said he made up his mind to go to war. Some of those air strikes -- publicly confirmed by the Pentagon -- were 100+ plane bombing missions. They, of course, were done under the guise of the "no fly zones" and the size of those strikes were hidden from the US and British public at the time they were going on.
Now, consider all this. Do you really live in la-la land or on Planet Earth? I don't mean to be insulting, but get real -- there is more than enough evidence to convince a jury that Bush deliberately lied through his teeth to get the war he wanted.
Sadly, this isn't the first time a US president lied through his teeth to start a war (see LBJ/Gulf of Tonkin, Reagan saying that American medical students were threatened in Grenada, etc., etc., etc.). Worse still, with the half-reporting and mass media propaganda which is commonplace in the US, it won't be the last.