All Star Wars films really skimp on the Sci bit of Sci-Fi partly because it's set far in the past, it's still all about the time when it was made.
Luke is a rebellious teenager who acts just like the rebellious teenagers of the 70s. His family runs a "moisture farm" which really seems more like a water factory or distillery then a farm. The audience is supposed to identify with him because the audience always identifies with the farm boy whose trying to prove he's a man. The Death Star is clearly inspired by nuclear weapons, and shouldn't be that big a deal for a space-going civilization. Build a really big spaceship (at least 2-3 miles wide, so bigger then a Star Destroyer, but orders of magnitude smaller then a Death Star), program the navigation computer to ram the planet when you say "go," get the fuck off, say "go." The planet technically survives. The people, OTOH...
But one thing that I always think is really weird when watching it is that all the cultural references are things that would be familiar to a late 20th century NPR-listening American. One of my favorite book series (Honor Harrington by David Weber) uses a lightly different period. It's references are almost universally to things that would be familiar to people who spend a lot of time with late 18th the early 20th century Western Military History.
It seems weird, but in a lot of ways that's the point. Star Trek isn't a sophisticated imagining of how culture could change if certain technologies appeared. It's about how a polity built on principles every 60s liberal would love (including a fairly muscular, militaristic, foreign policy that a lot of current liberals hate) acts IN SPACE. You don't hear anything about post 20th-century culture, shit that happened outside the main storyline, internal Federation politics (ie: who did Kirk vote for? why?), economic matters (for example once replicator technology exists almost all sectors of the economy are obsolete, because instead of spending months raising a chicken you can spend 2 seconds beaming a perfectly cooked chicken breast into existence, yet half the time they act like the economy is identical to the current US economy and the other half it's a socialist utopia), etc. It is barely Sci-Fi, because (unlike Star Wars) it actually cares how the technology works, and occasionally has story-lines based on said technology (ie: Riker gets cloned by a Transporter, every one of those hateful Holodeck episodes, etc.).
Weber's Honorverse is a bit more Sci-Fi, because he has actually put an awful lot of thought into precisely how the tech affects the culture, but he designed the tech specifically so that he could do things like create a massive ethnic Chinese Empire based on Frederick the Great.
Entrapment is a really tricky defense. The Founding Father's didn't actually recognize it as a defense at all. The first case where it was used Federally did not happen until Prohibition hit. In pop culture it's usefulness is greatly exaggerated. Most people start thinking "entrapment" when a government agent says "hey let's do a crime" and somebody goes along with it, but entire categories of case simply could not be filed if that was all that mattered. For example, pretty much the only way to arrest Johns is to have a cop dress up as a hooker and offer to sell sex.
Entrapment only happens legally if there's some reason to believe the entrapee would not have even considered the possibility of committing the crime absent the government's actions. In the hooker stings they generally happen in areas where people troll for hookers, so the Courts rule that either a) this particular defendant clearly had a predisposition to commit the crime or he wouldn't have been driving through that neighborhood slowly at that time of night, or b) the governments actions were not likely to entice law-abiding citizens to stop and give a hooker money because law-abiding citizens don't drive through that neighborhood slow at that time; depending on whether that particular court system uses the "subjective" or objective" tests.
In this case the defendant can't really use the defense very effectively because in the Federal system they use method a), which means he'd have to prove he was highly unlikely to take money to sell plans in the absence of a government dude offering money. He was very hands-on once they offered the money, doing numerous things that one would do if one really really wanted to sell national security information to a foreign government (such as creating "an elaborate cyber security system which included several one-time use electronic mail boxes with phantom names").
The Cadet probably picked the Bolivian Navy because Bolivia has not had an actual coastline since 1883, but it does have an Navy. They're still bitter about that War of the Pacific thing.
Laws have existed for various odd things in the UK in the past, and certain examples like that and being allowed to kill Scots within York's walls at night were claimed to still be technically valid in widely spread urban legends. IIRC there isn't any law allowing the murder of someone in the UK that is still valid.
It's actually quite common for illegal laws to still be on the books.
In the US Mississippi hadn't bothered to ratify the Constitutional Amendment banning slavery until the mid-90s, then they did it wrong so they had to do it again in 2013. I would not be surprised if other Southern states still had segregation laws on the books. Most states still have abortion laws in violation of Roe vs. Wade, laws banning gay sex, etc. All are totally invalid under various ruling by the Supreme Court, but since actually changing them would require a couple Legislators to spend time convincing their colleagues to vote for the bill, and those colleagues may not agree with the Supreme Court, it just doesn't always happen. Especially on Roe vs. Wade -- most pro-life politicians are convinced the Supreme Court will undo that decision, and if the Supremes ever undo Roe vs. Wade then those laws magically come back to life.
I suspect Texas, Washington State, and Florida are some of the worst states for refusing to repeal bad old laws. It's very difficult to get a proposal through their Legislatures. Texas is part-time, and only meets for 140 days in odd-numbered years, Washington State requires all bills to have a single very clear purpose (so you'd need one repealing the anti-abortion law, you'd need another repealing anti-sodomy, etc.), and Florida restricts the number of Bills a Legislator can sponsor is limited, etc.
Yes: it's a so-called "writ of assistance" or "general warrant". They keep being outlawed, and keep coming back. The RCMP said they retired their last general warrant just a few years ago, but the government of the day seems to trying to recreate a subset for people who use the internet...
Can anybody figure out what this guy meant? This is a very old law, for a very common type of warrant. All investigations of anyone, anywhere, involve getting third parties to turn over information on the suspect. That info could be a safe deposit box, it could be a diary, it could be testimony in open court. They need various kinds of warrant for this, and there are some cases where a third party can refuse to turn over info (ie: in some states a wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband), but in general if your ass has been labeled "suspect" by the cops, and they actually go to the trouble of filling out the warrant paperwork, they can get anything they want that is vaguely related to your "suspect" status.
The weirdest bit is the RCMP. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are not necessarily the last people in the world who care about the Fifth Amendment (the Charter of Rights and Freedoms sections 11 and 13 are the self-incrimination rules they have to worry about), but they are pretty high on the list.
This is what I mean by white people who are totally irrational on the issue..
There are 1.8 million people in Wayne County Most of them do not live in Detroit. Oakland and Macomb have roughly 2 million between them. Unless you're assuming that Michigan will get the Federal Constitution amended specifically so the only people who can vote in the new city are the 700k from Detroit, then 3 million of the 3.8 million-odd residents will be non-Detroiters. This guy is smart enough to figure that out all on his own, but rather then actually think through my proposal to it's logical conclusion he goes right into impossible fantasy mode.
There'd be a lot less racial tension if the various sides didn't all have their champions, dedicated entirely to promoting their tiny little box on the map (which just happens to be 75% one race or another). New York City isn't a mecca of racial tolerance, but since the Mayor is responsible to all races he does tend to care what all races think.
Blame the right for a town run by the left. Might as well say it was bush's fault.
So you freely admit that the Right has nobody living in Detroit, and couldn't pronounce Gratiot without a detailed instruction manual written by an Obama-loving Socialist, but you're nonetheless claiming they know why Detroit isn't working? Neither national side knows enough about Detroit to fix the problem.
The basic problem is that the current boxes on the map called Detroit is an incredibly dumb idea. It's per capita income is barely five figures ($12k or less), in a region where per capita income is actually pretty high ($49k). Which means that if local government costs are $700, the other cities have to scrounge up 1.5% of local income, but Detroit has to find almost 6%. The only way to make that math work is a) fire the police department and hope the criminals don't kill everyone before enough rich anti-tax activists move in to solve the per capita income problem; or b) tax rates have to be four times as high. Since a) is obviously unworkable, Coleman Young tries b) when he got the state to approve municipal income taxes. But he couldn't get the full 4 times, so he settled for slightly less then double. Which kinda worked, but also meant taxes were double the neighbors and we still didn't have enough money to deal with crime (the crack epidemic did not help).
Over the long term that meant that the only businessmen who stayed in the City were criminals (they'd be morons to move to some place that actually had the budget to arrest them; everyone else OTOH...), which means your number of capitas goes down but the total cost of policing stays the same. But there's another huge problem if your population is shrinking: 1.5 million could probably support the pension costs for a city that peaked at 2.5 million or so in the mid-50s, but 700k sure as hell can't. Which means the number you now need is more like $1,500...
So Orr could have done a couple things. He could've tried to get state law changed so Detroit could jack-up taxes more, but he was appointed by an anti-tax Republican. The option he took was to get those pensions, and several other major obligations, cut down in bankruptcy. Either taxes or bankruptcy would probably work for a few decades before the money ran out again. Given the resurgence of Detroit's Midtown area, and the continued exodus of the working class (who are expensive to govern and not very lucrative to tax), it's theoretically possible the few decades will be enough.
The way to definitively solve the problem would have been eliminate all of the little Cities in Michigan that make up Metro Detroit. But there's two much racial BS for the local whites to not make that a huge hassle, and said local whites are quite politically connected to both sides nationally.
Thus you have everyone, on both sides, trying to shoe-horn national issues into a very local debate.
There are still real horse enthusiasts who spend thousands a year maintaining animals they literally couldn't give away because they love horses that much. There are several religions that still use horse-drawn transport because they don't see a point in getting cars. That doesn't mean you see a horse-drawn buggy on the highways every day.
That's Manhattan Real Estate prices for ya. In many areas of the country getting rid of the car, and moving to an urban apartment, would be a lot cheaper then living in the 'burbs, if public transit wasn't shitty.
For example when Detroit went bankrupt lots of righties claimed that "of course that happened their tax rates are ridiculous, nobody could afford to live there" but if you read page 11 of the bankruptcy report, you'll note that car insurance costs were two to three times taxes in Detroit and all the neighboring jurisdictions Orr presented data for. In fact car insurance in Detroit alone ($3,993) was as much as taxes for all four cities he mentioned (total of $3,395 per capita).
So if you moved to a $500 or $600 a month apartment in Detroit, and got rid of the car, your tax bill would double, but your car insurance goes down several grand. Add in gas and repairs, and in theory Detroit could triple or quadruple the local tax rate to pay for trains and you still end up ahead. They are really trying to do this -- one of the few new programs that bankruptcy didn't axe was a light rail system up and down the main drag.
The major problem is that if they actually pulled it off you'd have a lot of trouble getting a Detroit apartment for $500 a month.
If it wasn't a time-bomb what was it? It has to be in the cockpit, so it can't be transmitting signals or it would screw up the pilot's insturments and tip them off. It's 5-6 miles up so it can't be receiving signals passively.
And you still haven't addressed the risk/reward problem. If Israel gets caught Israel dies. Period. Therefore a 2% chance of getting caught is only an acceptable risk if the alternative is a 3% chance of the destruction of the country, and that just wasn't gonna happen no matter how bad the blow-back from Gaza.
So an Israeli security contractor put a bomb on the plane, which nobody noticed, and timed it to go off over a very small war-zone, and it worked?
This is an aircraft that travels at 900 kph. If the pilot's a half-hour behind schedule he's over Kiev when the bomb goes off. If it's an hour he's in Poland. If he's 10 minutes ahead of schedule he's well into Russia.
Even if you have an answer for that one you still haven't addressed the risk/reward: if the Israelis get caught doing this they get fucked. All of Europe would ostracize them. That means UN Security Council resolutions requiring everyone to embargo Israel until they've turned half their security services over to the Dutch for prosecution. The US is not gonna veto those resolutions because a couple hundred million Europeans are a lot better alliance-partner then 7-8 million Israelis. The Russians probably wrote the damn resolution, because the Israelis were trying to frame Russia. That means Israel's only hope is China, and the Chinese are not likely to stick their necks out to save the people who just pissed a) their biggest energy supplier, and b) all their customers.
That's a lot to risk for some abstract reward of "distracting" people.
1) We know the rebels were using anti-aircraft weapons in the area because they said they were using anti-aircraft weapons. They got an AN-26, an SU-25, and an IL-76. I never read CNN because they are too damn cheap to do their own research, which means in international news they almost always end up parroting the President's line. But the BBC had extensive coverage of all three shoot-downs, it's quite skeptical of the official line (check out the Hutton Inquiry if you don;t believe me), and all were quite close (150 km or less) to MH17. They themselves repeatedly claimed to have done all three shoot-downs.
2) Your source does not understand how aerial combat works or looks. Canon fire produces lots of identical holes. Identical. The bullets are precisely machined to all be exactly the same size, they are coming in at the exact same angle, and they are hitting the exact same material. You don't get a 2 cm hole right by a 5 mm hole, you get a bunch of 30 mm holes.
Moreover his scenario may be "coherent," but it's stupid. Su-25s are not fighter aircraft, they are ground-attack aircraft. Their systems are not designed to accurately hit a specific part of an aircraft traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, they are designed to pepper a 30 mph tank with as many bullets as possible in the hopes that one will get lucky and hit a weak point in the armor. Moreover they have to be incredibly close to work, (under a km, a couple hundred meters is ideal), aimed straight at the target (the gun is welded onto the nose), and the pilots of a commercial aircraft are damn well gonna notice a military aircraft pointed straight at them, at maximum speed, closing to within a km. If the Ukrainians actually wanted to do this they'd use an actual fighter-jet, like a Mig-29 or Su-27, or they'd sneak a missile battery close to the front and use that.
OTOH, as I said we know the rebels were using anti-aircraft weapons. We know those weapons put a bunch of non-similar-sized holes in the planes cockpit. We know they boasted about shooting down a plane (which they thought was a large Yakovlev transport) at exactly the same time MH17 went down, and they pulled the post pretty much the second they realized the only plane missing in Ukraine was a neutral civilian airliner, etc. Most important we know their attempt to blame it on the other side is ridiculous. It's the kind of thing you think up when you've been caught red-handed and you don;t want to admit it, not the kind of thing you say because you believe it's true.
The problem with plans like that are numerous, sundry, and gi-fucking-normous.
The number one biggest problem is finding a reliable trigger-man. If you use an Israeli (or even a non-Israeli Jew) it's gonna be pretty conspicuous, so you need a reliable gentile. Let me repeat: you're looking for a person who is willing to murder several hundred completely innocent people, but will never betray you. Because if he does betray you you got bigger problems then a bunch of Euro-sissies with no military complaining about your latest Gaza offensive, you've UN resolutions accusing your PM of war crimes, the country you usually depend on to protect (the US and Russia) will not protect your ass, and your back-up (Israel maintains a fairly good relationship with the Russians) is probably sponsoring the damn thing.
Then there's the problem of getting weapons in the right place. You get the right Ukrainian patsy that works fine, but that guy pretty much has to be a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists are not known for their loyalty to the Zionist project. They're also not known for their ability to keep secrets from Russia.You could get around that problem by using an IDF aircraft with an IDF pilot, but getting an IDF aircraft 800+ km across Turkey, the Black Sea, Russian bases in Crimea, etc. without anybody noticing is not an easy task.
Putin has apparently just accidentally killed several hundred civilians, most of whom are part of a nuclear-armed alliance. And he won't even say "oops."
The reason those countries are in that alliance is that they expect us to have their backs when somebody does that kind of shit to them.
Now if we respond militarily, which has the advantage that a) it would target the people who actually blew the plane up, and b) if it worked would work really well; we face the disadvantage that c) our military aim isn't perfect so we'd probably nail a bomb shelter full of civilians, d) much of the Russian military is conscripted, e) invading Russia is historically speaking a really ineffective policy, and f) if we did so Putin might nuke Seattle.
Which leaves sanctions. Sanctions are slow, and they tend to hit a lot of innocents, but military action is worse (ie: Bush's invasion of Iraq ended the sanctions that killed thousands, but only by starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands and refuses to end).
I have no idea why a sane person would suspect Mossad.
Some sane people suspect Mossad of secretly supporting the Russians in their war against Georgia, because they may actually have gotten something they could use out of that (Russian support against the Iranians). But they really don't give two shits about who owns Luhansk and Donetsk, but they definitely give a shit whether the Russians hate them because a nuclear-armed Security Council state could make life very uncomfortable for them. So they are gonna stayt far away from any anti-Russian operation in this conflict.
It's hard to take that possibility very seriously.
Cannon fire is a bunch of bullets that are exactly the same shape and size. This leaves a bunch of identical holes in the wreckage. Frequently they're all in a line.
OTOH, an air-to-air missile blows up before it hits the target, peppering it with shrapnel, The shrapnel puts lots of holes in the plane, but they aren't all exactly the same size, and there's just a mass of them where the missile hit.
The pictures of wreckage we've seen show the latter, not the former.
Just as important, we know the rebels were operating air-to-air batteries in the area because they blew a couple Ukrainian military aircraft out of the sky. It's not uncommon for anti-0aircraft batteries to blow up the wrong plane, particularly if there's a lot of fighting going on and the crew are poorly trained. We did it to an Iranian airliner, the Russians did it to a South Korean jet. The rebel military is quite new so their guys can;t have 20 years experience telli8ng a Boeing from a Sukhoi.
But everyone else knows this is more then a bit fishy. In fact it's ridiculous BS.
And in the long-term it's really, really hard to duck responsibility on something like this for an extended period of time. We blew that Iranian airliner up, gave the dude who did it a medal, but within a decade we had to take responsibility and pay substantial damages. Libya was able to duck responsibility for quite a bit longer after the Lockerbie bombing, but even Gadaffi had to own up eventually.
Because the only thing they could do that would work is sending NATO troops into Ukraine, which would be mighty fucking risky. And not risky as in "we could lose a few thousand troops for no damn good reason and waste a $Trillion or three doing it," risky as in nuclear fucking war.
So they decided on sanctions. Apparently the sanctions are pretty effective, because there's no good economic news out of Russia.
She said the Fourth Amendment bans a policy that resulted in every black man in New York City being frisked, and the Appeals Court removed her. It reprimanded her in extremely strong language, accusing her of major ethical violations (they've changed their tune on this). Then they said the Stop-and-frisk program can continue until a new trial is held under a Judge who hasn't said that stopping all black people is racist and against the Fourth Amendment.
Don't get me wrong. But that's not the ruling you issue if you think the Fourth Amendment is something more thena technicality to be reasoned away.
You are claiming something is a universal right. I am claiming, that regardless of the high-faluting legal principles you're talking about, the Courts will not respect the right. If you prove somebody who is rich enough to drop $50k fighting his kids weed conviction, and you haven;t proven a universal right. You;ve proven that Judges will be really nice to rich people.
If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.
Right, I'll be sure to be a pedantic asshole the next time you say something that isn't 100% precise. Or you could learn to understand simple human language.
And if you find such a slip-up I'll at least acknowledge I was unclear.
Considering the pathetic nature of the one attempt you make in this post I'm not holding my breathe.
and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?
You've revealed your true colors by trivializing the situation. This so-called "metadata" (which is just data) could've been used to find Paul Revere. When you have rights groups all over up in arms about this because the government is unconstitutionally gathering everyone's data, you know there is a problem. This is no less than a mass violation of people's fundamental liberties, and you are an authoritarian to the core to even suggest otherwise.
You know what else right's groups were up in arms about? Reconstruction. Their attempt to increase freedom by decreasing the authority of the Feds ended up turning most of the South into a dystopian hellscape for nearly a century, during which the anti-authoritarian state governments use anti-authoritarian rhetoric to allow private citizens to ethnically cleanse their territory of black people. Note that in a couple of states (SC and either AL or MS) the majority of voters were black during Reconstruction, so it was not easy for the white minority to take over.
That's the thing that makes protecting freedom very complicated in the US, the number one biggest threat to freedom in these united states is not the official authority of the Feds, it's the totally unofficial authority of your next door neighbor, his Gatt, and his 15 best friends.
Oh, and it's not just tweets, you ignorant fucking fool. There, you weren't 100% precise and didn't describe all the sorts of data they're collecting. Should've been more precise, idiot.
So you're demanding that everyone assume a paean to anarchy isn't a paean to anarchy because anarchists don't exist, but a simplification of a complex database topic, which you brought up without explaining which mass surveillance you were trying to oppose, is complete BS.
Whatever you say. I shouldn't have said that it's a database of trivial tweets, I should have assumed that you meant all electronic monitoring of anyone, including the Russian Air Force.
Now, since you've made which database we're talking about a key part of your argument, precisely which database are we talking about.
So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census)
You're bullshitting by comparing the Census to mass surveillance of people's communications.
You realize most American Jews put their ethnicity on the Census in some form -- it isn't asked directly, but quite a few people will write in Israeli, Hebrew, Yiddish, etc. on their census forms when it asks for ethnic background. It's also got income information, social security numbers, all kinds of sensitive information. The Census list is actually the only Federal mass database that's ever been abused -- it was used to find Japanese folks to round up in '42. That took a special act of Congress, an Executive Order from the President, and special orders written by the Army's West Coast commander.
Note that to my knowledge, no authoritarian regime has ever been able to abuse any database of communications. It's much easier for them to go around asking people whether their neighbors are Jewish, then set up a Jew-list in the capital based on an algorithm. After all, if you're actually going to expel/murder/etc. all the Jews you'll need an a
So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?
No, I'm claiming that I think that saying that I'm for anarchy or something similar just because I wasn't absolutely precise is an unreasonable interpretation of my words.
If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.
So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit?
It's both. Why would go in depth about it in an unrelated discussion?
Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.
No clue what you mean.
Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used
The founders couldn't have predicted mass surveillance on this scale. Still, they were opposed to general warrants (and that's with a judge actually providing checks and balances), and likely would have taken measures against it had mass surveillance been used against them (assuming they survived). Given that they took action against other injustices that they knew of at the time, any other interpretation seems unreasonable.
So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census), while failing to put any particularly meaningful checks on data gathering, and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?
Read the actual Amendment. And don't do that thing Americans always do where they read it specifically to find out everyone who has ever disagreed with you is a fucking moron. There are multiple ways the Founders could find everything the NSA does is perfectly legal.
They could declare it "reasonable." They could say the warrant issued by the FISA Court is fine. They could declaim at length on how the Fourth Amendment does not apply because it is restricted to the President's Law Enforcement powers of Search and Seizure, and a Military Signals Intelligence Agency (the NSA) is authorized under his Commander-in-Chief powers, in which case the problem with the program isn't that it exists, it's that the President is wasting everyone's time by getting it repeatedly authorized (and re-authorized) by the FISA Court.
Note that the absolute best bet is that they'd disagree. The Founders were not supermen with intellects millions of times greater then those of modern men, able to easily interpret the Constitution. They were ideological assholes just like us. The Federalists (like Washington and Adams) would almost certainly claim you were a fool for even bringing up the Fourth, because to them the Commander-in-Chief power was second only to God. Jefferson was not quite that enamored of the Commander-in-Chiefship, so he'd probably agree with you, but on the other hand he could easily agree with the current US Court system and say that warrants issued by the FISA Court are perfectly valid.
So the cop says "I knew he was a criminal because I could smell the weed, there was a gun-like bulge in his pants, and he looked at me funny." The wee-dsmelling client goes to fucking jail.
Lawyers obsession technicalities of the legal precedent that never mean anything in the real world would be endearing if they didn't get so self-righteous about said technicalities.
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All Star Wars films really skimp on the Sci bit of Sci-Fi partly because it's set far in the past, it's still all about the time when it was made.
Luke is a rebellious teenager who acts just like the rebellious teenagers of the 70s. His family runs a "moisture farm" which really seems more like a water factory or distillery then a farm. The audience is supposed to identify with him because the audience always identifies with the farm boy whose trying to prove he's a man. The Death Star is clearly inspired by nuclear weapons, and shouldn't be that big a deal for a space-going civilization. Build a really big spaceship (at least 2-3 miles wide, so bigger then a Star Destroyer, but orders of magnitude smaller then a Death Star), program the navigation computer to ram the planet when you say "go," get the fuck off, say "go." The planet technically survives. The people, OTOH...
But one thing that I always think is really weird when watching it is that all the cultural references are things that would be familiar to a late 20th century NPR-listening American. One of my favorite book series (Honor Harrington by David Weber) uses a lightly different period. It's references are almost universally to things that would be familiar to people who spend a lot of time with late 18th the early 20th century Western Military History.
It seems weird, but in a lot of ways that's the point. Star Trek isn't a sophisticated imagining of how culture could change if certain technologies appeared. It's about how a polity built on principles every 60s liberal would love (including a fairly muscular, militaristic, foreign policy that a lot of current liberals hate) acts IN SPACE. You don't hear anything about post 20th-century culture, shit that happened outside the main storyline, internal Federation politics (ie: who did Kirk vote for? why?), economic matters (for example once replicator technology exists almost all sectors of the economy are obsolete, because instead of spending months raising a chicken you can spend 2 seconds beaming a perfectly cooked chicken breast into existence, yet half the time they act like the economy is identical to the current US economy and the other half it's a socialist utopia), etc. It is barely Sci-Fi, because (unlike Star Wars) it actually cares how the technology works, and occasionally has story-lines based on said technology (ie: Riker gets cloned by a Transporter, every one of those hateful Holodeck episodes, etc.).
Weber's Honorverse is a bit more Sci-Fi, because he has actually put an awful lot of thought into precisely how the tech affects the culture, but he designed the tech specifically so that he could do things like create a massive ethnic Chinese Empire based on Frederick the Great.
Entrapment is a really tricky defense. The Founding Father's didn't actually recognize it as a defense at all. The first case where it was used Federally did not happen until Prohibition hit. In pop culture it's usefulness is greatly exaggerated. Most people start thinking "entrapment" when a government agent says "hey let's do a crime" and somebody goes along with it, but entire categories of case simply could not be filed if that was all that mattered. For example, pretty much the only way to arrest Johns is to have a cop dress up as a hooker and offer to sell sex.
Entrapment only happens legally if there's some reason to believe the entrapee would not have even considered the possibility of committing the crime absent the government's actions. In the hooker stings they generally happen in areas where people troll for hookers, so the Courts rule that either a) this particular defendant clearly had a predisposition to commit the crime or he wouldn't have been driving through that neighborhood slowly at that time of night, or b) the governments actions were not likely to entice law-abiding citizens to stop and give a hooker money because law-abiding citizens don't drive through that neighborhood slow at that time; depending on whether that particular court system uses the "subjective" or objective" tests.
In this case the defendant can't really use the defense very effectively because in the Federal system they use method a), which means he'd have to prove he was highly unlikely to take money to sell plans in the absence of a government dude offering money. He was very hands-on once they offered the money, doing numerous things that one would do if one really really wanted to sell national security information to a foreign government (such as creating "an elaborate cyber security system which included several one-time use electronic mail boxes with phantom names").
The Cadet probably picked the Bolivian Navy because Bolivia has not had an actual coastline since 1883, but it does have an Navy. They're still bitter about that War of the Pacific thing.
Laws have existed for various odd things in the UK in the past, and certain examples like that and being allowed to kill Scots within York's walls at night were claimed to still be technically valid in widely spread urban legends. IIRC there isn't any law allowing the murder of someone in the UK that is still valid.
It's actually quite common for illegal laws to still be on the books.
In the US Mississippi hadn't bothered to ratify the Constitutional Amendment banning slavery until the mid-90s, then they did it wrong so they had to do it again in 2013. I would not be surprised if other Southern states still had segregation laws on the books. Most states still have abortion laws in violation of Roe vs. Wade, laws banning gay sex, etc. All are totally invalid under various ruling by the Supreme Court, but since actually changing them would require a couple Legislators to spend time convincing their colleagues to vote for the bill, and those colleagues may not agree with the Supreme Court, it just doesn't always happen. Especially on Roe vs. Wade -- most pro-life politicians are convinced the Supreme Court will undo that decision, and if the Supremes ever undo Roe vs. Wade then those laws magically come back to life.
I suspect Texas, Washington State, and Florida are some of the worst states for refusing to repeal bad old laws. It's very difficult to get a proposal through their Legislatures. Texas is part-time, and only meets for 140 days in odd-numbered years, Washington State requires all bills to have a single very clear purpose (so you'd need one repealing the anti-abortion law, you'd need another repealing anti-sodomy, etc.), and Florida restricts the number of Bills a Legislator can sponsor is limited, etc.
Yes: it's a so-called "writ of assistance" or "general warrant". They keep being outlawed, and keep coming back. The RCMP said they retired their last general warrant just a few years ago, but the government of the day seems to trying to recreate a subset for people who use the internet...
Can anybody figure out what this guy meant? This is a very old law, for a very common type of warrant. All investigations of anyone, anywhere, involve getting third parties to turn over information on the suspect. That info could be a safe deposit box, it could be a diary, it could be testimony in open court. They need various kinds of warrant for this, and there are some cases where a third party can refuse to turn over info (ie: in some states a wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband), but in general if your ass has been labeled "suspect" by the cops, and they actually go to the trouble of filling out the warrant paperwork, they can get anything they want that is vaguely related to your "suspect" status.
The weirdest bit is the RCMP. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are not necessarily the last people in the world who care about the Fifth Amendment (the Charter of Rights and Freedoms sections 11 and 13 are the self-incrimination rules they have to worry about), but they are pretty high on the list.
This is what I mean by white people who are totally irrational on the issue..
There are 1.8 million people in Wayne County Most of them do not live in Detroit. Oakland and Macomb have roughly 2 million between them. Unless you're assuming that Michigan will get the Federal Constitution amended specifically so the only people who can vote in the new city are the 700k from Detroit, then 3 million of the 3.8 million-odd residents will be non-Detroiters. This guy is smart enough to figure that out all on his own, but rather then actually think through my proposal to it's logical conclusion he goes right into impossible fantasy mode.
There'd be a lot less racial tension if the various sides didn't all have their champions, dedicated entirely to promoting their tiny little box on the map (which just happens to be 75% one race or another). New York City isn't a mecca of racial tolerance, but since the Mayor is responsible to all races he does tend to care what all races think.
Blame the right for a town run by the left. Might as well say it was bush's fault.
So you freely admit that the Right has nobody living in Detroit, and couldn't pronounce Gratiot without a detailed instruction manual written by an Obama-loving Socialist, but you're nonetheless claiming they know why Detroit isn't working? Neither national side knows enough about Detroit to fix the problem.
The basic problem is that the current boxes on the map called Detroit is an incredibly dumb idea. It's per capita income is barely five figures ($12k or less), in a region where per capita income is actually pretty high ($49k). Which means that if local government costs are $700, the other cities have to scrounge up 1.5% of local income, but Detroit has to find almost 6%. The only way to make that math work is a) fire the police department and hope the criminals don't kill everyone before enough rich anti-tax activists move in to solve the per capita income problem; or b) tax rates have to be four times as high. Since a) is obviously unworkable, Coleman Young tries b) when he got the state to approve municipal income taxes. But he couldn't get the full 4 times, so he settled for slightly less then double. Which kinda worked, but also meant taxes were double the neighbors and we still didn't have enough money to deal with crime (the crack epidemic did not help).
Over the long term that meant that the only businessmen who stayed in the City were criminals (they'd be morons to move to some place that actually had the budget to arrest them; everyone else OTOH...), which means your number of capitas goes down but the total cost of policing stays the same. But there's another huge problem if your population is shrinking: 1.5 million could probably support the pension costs for a city that peaked at 2.5 million or so in the mid-50s, but 700k sure as hell can't. Which means the number you now need is more like $1,500...
So Orr could have done a couple things. He could've tried to get state law changed so Detroit could jack-up taxes more, but he was appointed by an anti-tax Republican. The option he took was to get those pensions, and several other major obligations, cut down in bankruptcy. Either taxes or bankruptcy would probably work for a few decades before the money ran out again. Given the resurgence of Detroit's Midtown area, and the continued exodus of the working class (who are expensive to govern and not very lucrative to tax), it's theoretically possible the few decades will be enough.
The way to definitively solve the problem would have been eliminate all of the little Cities in Michigan that make up Metro Detroit. But there's two much racial BS for the local whites to not make that a huge hassle, and said local whites are quite politically connected to both sides nationally.
Thus you have everyone, on both sides, trying to shoe-horn national issues into a very local debate.
So?
There are still real horse enthusiasts who spend thousands a year maintaining animals they literally couldn't give away because they love horses that much. There are several religions that still use horse-drawn transport because they don't see a point in getting cars. That doesn't mean you see a horse-drawn buggy on the highways every day.
That's Manhattan Real Estate prices for ya. In many areas of the country getting rid of the car, and moving to an urban apartment, would be a lot cheaper then living in the 'burbs, if public transit wasn't shitty.
For example when Detroit went bankrupt lots of righties claimed that "of course that happened their tax rates are ridiculous, nobody could afford to live there" but if you read page 11 of the bankruptcy report, you'll note that car insurance costs were two to three times taxes in Detroit and all the neighboring jurisdictions Orr presented data for. In fact car insurance in Detroit alone ($3,993) was as much as taxes for all four cities he mentioned (total of $3,395 per capita).
So if you moved to a $500 or $600 a month apartment in Detroit, and got rid of the car, your tax bill would double, but your car insurance goes down several grand. Add in gas and repairs, and in theory Detroit could triple or quadruple the local tax rate to pay for trains and you still end up ahead. They are really trying to do this -- one of the few new programs that bankruptcy didn't axe was a light rail system up and down the main drag.
The major problem is that if they actually pulled it off you'd have a lot of trouble getting a Detroit apartment for $500 a month.
If it wasn't a time-bomb what was it? It has to be in the cockpit, so it can't be transmitting signals or it would screw up the pilot's insturments and tip them off. It's 5-6 miles up so it can't be receiving signals passively.
And you still haven't addressed the risk/reward problem. If Israel gets caught Israel dies. Period. Therefore a 2% chance of getting caught is only an acceptable risk if the alternative is a 3% chance of the destruction of the country, and that just wasn't gonna happen no matter how bad the blow-back from Gaza.
So an Israeli security contractor put a bomb on the plane, which nobody noticed, and timed it to go off over a very small war-zone, and it worked?
This is an aircraft that travels at 900 kph. If the pilot's a half-hour behind schedule he's over Kiev when the bomb goes off. If it's an hour he's in Poland. If he's 10 minutes ahead of schedule he's well into Russia.
Even if you have an answer for that one you still haven't addressed the risk/reward: if the Israelis get caught doing this they get fucked. All of Europe would ostracize them. That means UN Security Council resolutions requiring everyone to embargo Israel until they've turned half their security services over to the Dutch for prosecution. The US is not gonna veto those resolutions because a couple hundred million Europeans are a lot better alliance-partner then 7-8 million Israelis. The Russians probably wrote the damn resolution, because the Israelis were trying to frame Russia. That means Israel's only hope is China, and the Chinese are not likely to stick their necks out to save the people who just pissed a) their biggest energy supplier, and b) all their customers.
That's a lot to risk for some abstract reward of "distracting" people.
Two points:
1) We know the rebels were using anti-aircraft weapons in the area because they said they were using anti-aircraft weapons. They got an AN-26, an SU-25, and an IL-76. I never read CNN because they are too damn cheap to do their own research, which means in international news they almost always end up parroting the President's line. But the BBC had extensive coverage of all three shoot-downs, it's quite skeptical of the official line (check out the Hutton Inquiry if you don;t believe me), and all were quite close (150 km or less) to MH17. They themselves repeatedly claimed to have done all three shoot-downs.
2) Your source does not understand how aerial combat works or looks. Canon fire produces lots of identical holes. Identical. The bullets are precisely machined to all be exactly the same size, they are coming in at the exact same angle, and they are hitting the exact same material. You don't get a 2 cm hole right by a 5 mm hole, you get a bunch of 30 mm holes.
Moreover his scenario may be "coherent," but it's stupid. Su-25s are not fighter aircraft, they are ground-attack aircraft. Their systems are not designed to accurately hit a specific part of an aircraft traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, they are designed to pepper a 30 mph tank with as many bullets as possible in the hopes that one will get lucky and hit a weak point in the armor. Moreover they have to be incredibly close to work, (under a km, a couple hundred meters is ideal), aimed straight at the target (the gun is welded onto the nose), and the pilots of a commercial aircraft are damn well gonna notice a military aircraft pointed straight at them, at maximum speed, closing to within a km. If the Ukrainians actually wanted to do this they'd use an actual fighter-jet, like a Mig-29 or Su-27, or they'd sneak a missile battery close to the front and use that.
OTOH, as I said we know the rebels were using anti-aircraft weapons. We know those weapons put a bunch of non-similar-sized holes in the planes cockpit. We know they boasted about shooting down a plane (which they thought was a large Yakovlev transport) at exactly the same time MH17 went down, and they pulled the post pretty much the second they realized the only plane missing in Ukraine was a neutral civilian airliner, etc. Most important we know their attempt to blame it on the other side is ridiculous. It's the kind of thing you think up when you've been caught red-handed and you don;t want to admit it, not the kind of thing you say because you believe it's true.
The problem with plans like that are numerous, sundry, and gi-fucking-normous.
The number one biggest problem is finding a reliable trigger-man. If you use an Israeli (or even a non-Israeli Jew) it's gonna be pretty conspicuous, so you need a reliable gentile. Let me repeat: you're looking for a person who is willing to murder several hundred completely innocent people, but will never betray you. Because if he does betray you you got bigger problems then a bunch of Euro-sissies with no military complaining about your latest Gaza offensive, you've UN resolutions accusing your PM of war crimes, the country you usually depend on to protect (the US and Russia) will not protect your ass, and your back-up (Israel maintains a fairly good relationship with the Russians) is probably sponsoring the damn thing.
Then there's the problem of getting weapons in the right place. You get the right Ukrainian patsy that works fine, but that guy pretty much has to be a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists are not known for their loyalty to the Zionist project. They're also not known for their ability to keep secrets from Russia.You could get around that problem by using an IDF aircraft with an IDF pilot, but getting an IDF aircraft 800+ km across Turkey, the Black Sea, Russian bases in Crimea, etc. without anybody noticing is not an easy task.
What else can we do?
Putin has apparently just accidentally killed several hundred civilians, most of whom are part of a nuclear-armed alliance. And he won't even say "oops."
The reason those countries are in that alliance is that they expect us to have their backs when somebody does that kind of shit to them.
Now if we respond militarily, which has the advantage that a) it would target the people who actually blew the plane up, and b) if it worked would work really well; we face the disadvantage that c) our military aim isn't perfect so we'd probably nail a bomb shelter full of civilians, d) much of the Russian military is conscripted, e) invading Russia is historically speaking a really ineffective policy, and f) if we did so Putin might nuke Seattle.
Which leaves sanctions. Sanctions are slow, and they tend to hit a lot of innocents, but military action is worse (ie: Bush's invasion of Iraq ended the sanctions that killed thousands, but only by starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands and refuses to end).
I have no idea why a sane person would suspect Mossad.
Some sane people suspect Mossad of secretly supporting the Russians in their war against Georgia, because they may actually have gotten something they could use out of that (Russian support against the Iranians). But they really don't give two shits about who owns Luhansk and Donetsk, but they definitely give a shit whether the Russians hate them because a nuclear-armed Security Council state could make life very uncomfortable for them. So they are gonna stayt far away from any anti-Russian operation in this conflict.
It's hard to take that possibility very seriously.
Cannon fire is a bunch of bullets that are exactly the same shape and size. This leaves a bunch of identical holes in the wreckage. Frequently they're all in a line.
OTOH, an air-to-air missile blows up before it hits the target, peppering it with shrapnel, The shrapnel puts lots of holes in the plane, but they aren't all exactly the same size, and there's just a mass of them where the missile hit.
The pictures of wreckage we've seen show the latter, not the former.
Just as important, we know the rebels were operating air-to-air batteries in the area because they blew a couple Ukrainian military aircraft out of the sky. It's not uncommon for anti-0aircraft batteries to blow up the wrong plane, particularly if there's a lot of fighting going on and the crew are poorly trained. We did it to an Iranian airliner, the Russians did it to a South Korean jet. The rebel military is quite new so their guys can;t have 20 years experience telli8ng a Boeing from a Sukhoi.
In the short term in Russia proper that's true.
But everyone else knows this is more then a bit fishy. In fact it's ridiculous BS.
And in the long-term it's really, really hard to duck responsibility on something like this for an extended period of time. We blew that Iranian airliner up, gave the dude who did it a medal, but within a decade we had to take responsibility and pay substantial damages. Libya was able to duck responsibility for quite a bit longer after the Lockerbie bombing, but even Gadaffi had to own up eventually.
Because the only thing they could do that would work is sending NATO troops into Ukraine, which would be mighty fucking risky. And not risky as in "we could lose a few thousand troops for no damn good reason and waste a $Trillion or three doing it," risky as in nuclear fucking war.
So they decided on sanctions. Apparently the sanctions are pretty effective, because there's no good economic news out of Russia.
The Appeals Court removed Judge Scheindlein.
She said the Fourth Amendment bans a policy that resulted in every black man in New York City being frisked, and the Appeals Court removed her. It reprimanded her in extremely strong language, accusing her of major ethical violations (they've changed their tune on this). Then they said the Stop-and-frisk program can continue until a new trial is held under a Judge who hasn't said that stopping all black people is racist and against the Fourth Amendment.
Don't get me wrong. But that's not the ruling you issue if you think the Fourth Amendment is something more thena technicality to be reasoned away.
BTW, if any word you were saying was tue, the Federal Appeals Court would not have upheld stop-and-frisk.
You got an example of a case like this?
Ideally with someone using a public defender.
You are claiming something is a universal right. I am claiming, that regardless of the high-faluting legal principles you're talking about, the Courts will not respect the right. If you prove somebody who is rich enough to drop $50k fighting his kids weed conviction, and you haven;t proven a universal right. You;ve proven that Judges will be really nice to rich people.
If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.
Right, I'll be sure to be a pedantic asshole the next time you say something that isn't 100% precise. Or you could learn to understand simple human language.
And if you find such a slip-up I'll at least acknowledge I was unclear.
Considering the pathetic nature of the one attempt you make in this post I'm not holding my breathe.
and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?
You've revealed your true colors by trivializing the situation. This so-called "metadata" (which is just data) could've been used to find Paul Revere. When you have rights groups all over up in arms about this because the government is unconstitutionally gathering everyone's data, you know there is a problem. This is no less than a mass violation of people's fundamental liberties, and you are an authoritarian to the core to even suggest otherwise.
You know what else right's groups were up in arms about? Reconstruction. Their attempt to increase freedom by decreasing the authority of the Feds ended up turning most of the South into a dystopian hellscape for nearly a century, during which the anti-authoritarian state governments use anti-authoritarian rhetoric to allow private citizens to ethnically cleanse their territory of black people. Note that in a couple of states (SC and either AL or MS) the majority of voters were black during Reconstruction, so it was not easy for the white minority to take over.
That's the thing that makes protecting freedom very complicated in the US, the number one biggest threat to freedom in these united states is not the official authority of the Feds, it's the totally unofficial authority of your next door neighbor, his Gatt, and his 15 best friends.
Oh, and it's not just tweets, you ignorant fucking fool. There, you weren't 100% precise and didn't describe all the sorts of data they're collecting. Should've been more precise, idiot.
So you're demanding that everyone assume a paean to anarchy isn't a paean to anarchy because anarchists don't exist, but a simplification of a complex database topic, which you brought up without explaining which mass surveillance you were trying to oppose, is complete BS.
Whatever you say. I shouldn't have said that it's a database of trivial tweets, I should have assumed that you meant all electronic monitoring of anyone, including the Russian Air Force.
Now, since you've made which database we're talking about a key part of your argument, precisely which database are we talking about.
So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census)
You're bullshitting by comparing the Census to mass surveillance of people's communications.
You realize most American Jews put their ethnicity on the Census in some form -- it isn't asked directly, but quite a few people will write in Israeli, Hebrew, Yiddish, etc. on their census forms when it asks for ethnic background. It's also got income information, social security numbers, all kinds of sensitive information. The Census list is actually the only Federal mass database that's ever been abused -- it was used to find Japanese folks to round up in '42. That took a special act of Congress, an Executive Order from the President, and special orders written by the Army's West Coast commander.
Note that to my knowledge, no authoritarian regime has ever been able to abuse any database of communications. It's much easier for them to go around asking people whether their neighbors are Jewish, then set up a Jew-list in the capital based on an algorithm. After all, if you're actually going to expel/murder/etc. all the Jews you'll need an a
So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?
No, I'm claiming that I think that saying that I'm for anarchy or something similar just because I wasn't absolutely precise is an unreasonable interpretation of my words.
If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.
So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit?
It's both. Why would go in depth about it in an unrelated discussion?
Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.
No clue what you mean.
Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used
The founders couldn't have predicted mass surveillance on this scale. Still, they were opposed to general warrants (and that's with a judge actually providing checks and balances), and likely would have taken measures against it had mass surveillance been used against them (assuming they survived). Given that they took action against other injustices that they knew of at the time, any other interpretation seems unreasonable.
So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census), while failing to put any particularly meaningful checks on data gathering, and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?
Read the actual Amendment. And don't do that thing Americans always do where they read it specifically to find out everyone who has ever disagreed with you is a fucking moron. There are multiple ways the Founders could find everything the NSA does is perfectly legal.
They could declare it "reasonable." They could say the warrant issued by the FISA Court is fine. They could declaim at length on how the Fourth Amendment does not apply because it is restricted to the President's Law Enforcement powers of Search and Seizure, and a Military Signals Intelligence Agency (the NSA) is authorized under his Commander-in-Chief powers, in which case the problem with the program isn't that it exists, it's that the President is wasting everyone's time by getting it repeatedly authorized (and re-authorized) by the FISA Court.
Note that the absolute best bet is that they'd disagree. The Founders were not supermen with intellects millions of times greater then those of modern men, able to easily interpret the Constitution. They were ideological assholes just like us. The Federalists (like Washington and Adams) would almost certainly claim you were a fool for even bringing up the Fourth, because to them the Commander-in-Chief power was second only to God. Jefferson was not quite that enamored of the Commander-in-Chiefship, so he'd probably agree with you, but on the other hand he could easily agree with the current US Court system and say that warrants issued by the FISA Court are perfectly valid.
So the cop says "I knew he was a criminal because I could smell the weed, there was a gun-like bulge in his pants, and he looked at me funny." The wee-dsmelling client goes to fucking jail.
Lawyers obsession technicalities of the legal precedent that never mean anything in the real world would be endearing if they didn't get so self-righteous about said technicalities.