From what I've seen France really sucks at integrating immigrants. the only French pol I can name with non-French ancestry would be Sarkozy, and Sarko's family has been in the country for roughly a century.
In the US he'd be an old-line blueblood. In France the National Front thought he was un-French.
Europe as a whole seems to suck at integrating immigrants. Which is unfortunate, because basically the entire point of the EU is to allow random Romanians to get jobs in London.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918. If you ask a Swede when his country became independent he'll give you 1523, when the Danes were thrown out. The Chinese, Japanese, and French all claim direct lineage to states founded a long time before that.
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
It looks like his choice of independence year in these cases is based on what the people in that country say.
Swedes say they were conquered by Denmark, and became independent in 1523, therefore that is the year that gets entered on the spreadsheet. The French don't recognize Petain's government as legitimate, therefore the slightly-longer German occupation of France during WW2 doesn't count as France losing it's independence.
The French actually have a legal point. For the entire time they were occupied in the homeland de Gaulle had troops under his command throughout their Empire.
Here's what you don't get: He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state.
Germany, for example, did not actually exist as a nation-state prior to the Prussian defeat of the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Prussian War, and the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War a few years after that. What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
The Greeks existed as a culture, but the last independent Greek state had been conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
The Italians were in exactly the same boat as the Germans. There were the Kings of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the Pope, a Grand Duke of Tuscony, Hapsburgs in Venice, and several smaller states that were absorbed by Piedmont prior to unification.
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
During WW1 Egypt was ruled by a Khedive who was technically a vassal of the British Monarch. The Khedive was actually originally an Ottoman vassal, but in the late 19th the Egyptians decided to join an Empire that didn't suck and switched allegiances. In 1922 the Egyptians became independent of the Brits and the Khedive promoted himself to King.
Somebody who believes that Human Rights have legal standing. How cute.
International law is a deal between the 190-odd nation-states of the world. They have agreed to recognize certain rights in solemn treaties that are not actually legally binding. No court in the US is going to invalidate any death penalty on the basis of international law. Many of these states have included some rights in either their domestic law codes or their Constitutions. In both cases any actual legal case involving those rights will be based on either the local Constitution or the local law codes, not some international treaty.
In other words every nation state has the right to snoop on you. This right is only restricted by other nation-state's ability and desire to stop said snooping. The pieces of paper you are depending on to defend your freedom are roughly as relevant to the actual protection of said freedom as the 15th Amendment was to black voting in South Carolina in 1935.
Keep in mind that if they're reporting on this they're likely privacy advocates, and privacy advocates tend to have a much more expansive view of what is private then the Courts do.
For example state-side you have the right to not talk to the police, but refusing to talk to police can be considered probable cause to get a warrant. It can also be used as evidence against you during your trial. Every privacy advocate hates this, and when the Supremes recently confirmed it there were terrabytes of counter-arguments on the internet; but that didn't change the law.
Western Christians who hear a Muslim is angry, and automatically assume said Muslim could only be angry because he's not living under Sharia. That is exactly the same as saying a white Christian who is angry must be angry that the feudal system has been dismantled.
Check out the prosecution of Bouchra Bagour. She has a terrible sense of humor, but if you want to impose Sharia Law on France generally you don't get a middle class office job, dress like a western woman, etc.
If you'd actually treat them as human beings, with thoughts of their own, you'd probably find out they are actually pissed off because they don;t think that France gives them the same opportunities it gives it's white residents.
In the early 19th century, before mechanical looms got big, many thousands of people made clothe in their homes, and made a decent wage as skilled workers. Then industrialization happened, Mechanical Looms put almost everyone out of business, and everyone else was making starvation wages so the loom-owners could afford gold-plated carriages.
So some of them took to invading factories and destroying the Looms with their clogs. In French a clog is a "sabot," so this was called "sabotage."
Nobody gives a shit about the American public knowing this one because the American public doesn't give a shit about spying on the French government. What they're pissed about is that various other country's public's know about it now, therefore they demand their governments do something to stop it. Nobody actually has the power to stop everyone from spying on everyone else, so basically these idiots have brought the entire international system to a halt for a few months while everyone pitches a really convincing-looking hissy-fit, and then everything goes back to normal.
If you don't believe me about how fucked the international reaction to this is just look at the French. The day of the revelation they throw a press conference condemning it (extremely convincing-looking hissy-fit). The next day they stop President Morales from using their territory to get home because he might have Snowden aboard. Not only did nothing actually change, the French actually punished the guy who spilled the beans. The day after that they apologized profusely, re-starting the hissy-fit.
As for being in Russia, all I have to say is that privacy advocates are so cute. Russia's official paper-laws are great, and Russia does not currently like the US, therefore Russia is a very safe place for somebody who is hated by the US. And yes, on paper that makes sense. Just like on paper South Carolina was a great place to be black in 1930.
OTOH Russia has a lot of interests in countries that are not the US, no particular interest in not shooting Snowden for the hell of it, and just re-elected Putin mostly because future generations will refer to him as "Vladimir the Terrifying." What do you think will happen if the Saudis threaten to re-start the Caucasian Jihad if Snowden doesn't disappear? Or any of another 40 countries, who are all pretty pissed at Snowden, threatens to do any of 100 other things that Putin wouldn't like? Make no mistake about it, Snowden is not in Russia today because Vladimir Putin's soul yearns to give Snowden hugs and puppies. He's there because he's a useful chip on the board of international politics, and Putin will gladly trade that chip.
If Snowden wanted safe he should have gone to Venezuala as planned. I suspect the reason he didn't is that the venezualans can't trade anything to Putin that's more valuable then having physical control of Snowden. If he wanted free he should have gone to Iceland instead of Hong Kong in the first place. He definitely should not have said anything about anything involving diplomacy because (as Assange found out) the guy who reveals diplomatic secrets is despised by everyone.
Read the link in the OP. The allegation he was referring to was that the US spies on embassies, not PRISM. PRISM does piss those countries off, it should piss them off, and it will definitely be an issue going forward, but it's not what the OP was talking about.
Unfortunately for privacy advocates instead of getting to the bottom of PRISM Wikileaks has completely changed the subject. All governments are forced into fake outrage mode (because all governments pretend to think that their embassies aren't constantly spied on), which means the people who actually run those governments are extremely unhappy that Assange and Snowden stopped them from getting actual work done, such as the actual work of fixing PRISM...
Basically at this point I have a very strong suspicion that Julian Assange is an agent provocateur paid by Obama to render the privacy-rights-movement totally ineffective. I just can't believe anyone would be this inept and still remember to breathe. OTOH, stupid is as stupid does.
I'm having trouble figuring out how spying on an Embassy, where zero government ministers work, would allow you to find out which government minister hates your country. If some Cabinet Secretary is arguing for an anti-You-stance he will do in Cabinet meetings, memos to the PM, and private meetings in the capital. The only way you could figure that out from the Embassy would be if Cabinet Secretaries routinely ask for information directly from embassies in your country, and you've got phenomenal psychic powers to deduce that the Secretary of Agriculture's interest in your Automotive engine technology has to do with his belief that the Chinese have superior tanks, and not his desire to figure out where he should be buying tractors. What spying on an embassy lets you find out is whether the Ambassador is deceiving you. If the Embassy in question is smart it won't even give you info on what the government really thinks, because the government is lying to the Ambassador. And that's pretty much it.
Spying on negotiating missions might get you some of the internal dynamics you're talking about, but those missions are even more limited then Embassy missions. Just because the Secretary of Agriculture opposes letting US Wheat onto the national market without concessions a, b, and c that does not mean he'd buy wheat from China with no concessions. The Canadian PM in 2001, for example, absolutely hated our position on Softwood Lumber tariffs but sent troops to Afghanistan. The opposition was even more pissed at our lumber tariffs (they represented the rural lumberjacks who were hurt by those tariffs) but were so pro-US in terms of foreign policy they actually wanted to help us invade Iraq.
Skullduggery of the type you mention is quite rare because that kind of thinking is incredibly common. Since the Cold War is over even pro-US pols on some issues will decry the US on others. The times they oppose the US will generally be related to their own country's economic interests. If you shoot an Agriculture Secretary for being thew anti-American guy his replacement will generally be as bad (or worse) because the economic interests stay the same, and if you get caught everything blows up in your face. For example, if Bush hadn't tried that coup in Venezuala Chavcez would have been a lot easier to deal with.
For one thing Air Force One won't ever have this problem because it's a 747. It does not need to stop in Portugal to refuel to make it all the way to DC. "Closed air-space" is what the Bolivians say happened, everyone else says they refused Morales permission to land and refuel. Given Morales doesn't have a 747 there isn't much practical difference here, but unless you're claiming UN membership = a right to free jet fuel I think you've conceded the legal argument.
For another I don't think you understand Americans very well if you think we give a shit whether inconveniencing the President was illegal or not. Sovereignty means you (by definition) have the right to be completely unreasonable. That is the entire point of being sovereign. For something this petty we probably wouldn't bother taking any explicit action against the transgressors, or rather we would take action but it would not be directly related to the closing of airspace. Trade deals would not be made, military sales would be unapproved, the state department has dozens of lists of bad boys the transgressors would subtly move up on. There'd be a snippy press release, but nobody in any official position with the US Government would ever admit any of this had anything to do with airspace.
What makes you think any of the opposition parties would have acted differently? The French are governed by the left wing, the others the right, so they didn't do it to satisfy some ideology. To a large extent the Portuguese and Spanish are dependent on French and German goodwill, but none of the three actually needs the US for anything.
I suspect what's going on is that everybody in NATO spies on everybody else. The only way for Estonia to really know the US isn't selling them to Putin en exchange a free hand in Syria is for Estonia to steal secrets from us. Spying on us in DC would be really hard, so what they've probably done is bug our embassy in Talinn. That way they at least know if our Ambassador is lying to them. Everybody understands this except the voters, which means that what Wikileaks and Snowden accomplished is basically to put a freeze on everyone's relationship with the US for the immediate future. And they did this a couple days before major free trade talks formally started.
Somebody (I'd guess the Germans or French, nobody else can close Portuguese airspace) is clearly not happy that this happened, and is sending a message to Latin America that they had better cut down on the pro-Wikileaks crap or many non-American states will be kinda pissed at them.
That was my first reaction. Did they not read what Snowden revealed? Seriously, wtf is USA providing them for these countries to do this for USA? Does the CIA have some secrets on these world leaders on something? It does not make sense. Yesterday all these leaders were complaining about US surveillance.
What Snowden revealed is probably the reason they are pissed at Snowden.
Every US Ally has to know what the US actually thinks. Not what the US says in it's press releases, or what Dubya/Obama say during the State of the Union, they have to know what we actually think. That means spies. Otherwise they have no way of knowing we aren't about to sign a Molotov-Kerry Treaty divvying up their country with the Russians. Which in turn means they can't actually take any serious actions against us when they discover we're spying on them. After all they do the same damn thing.
But voters don't understand that, so the French will be lucky if they can get away with a symbolic 15-day-pause in the big free trade negotiations that everyone's been prepping for for literally years, so Snowden/wikileaks/etc. just seriously fucked up the entire foreign policies of all Europe, and they did mostly so that Assange could bitch about the US on TV some more.
If you're surprised that the French are hypocrites you don't pay much attention to France's actions. The Rainbow Warrior incident is downright civilized compared to their treatment of Africans. In particular you should research Operation Torquoise, which allowed genocidaires to flee Rwanda and set up bases in what was then Zaire. Much of the current DRCongo's problems are due to France's involvement in that little operation.
You also don't understand international law very well. No country is required under international law to let anyone enter it's territory. Diplomatic immunity applies to people who have been already allowed to enter, and granted formal accreditation by the hosting state. It allows diplomats to leave the country, but it does not mean they can go anywhere they want in it or over-fly it. Morales is actual Head of State, so he's not accredited by anybody, which means he actually has fewer rights to travel then either his embassy staff or ordinary citizens. Generally that doesn't matter, because generally pissing off a head of state by refusing him transit rights is a lot of trouble for very little gain, but that doesn't mean he's got an inalienable right to cross foreign territory.
This actually doesn't feel like a favor to me. It's too petty. There's no gain in being one of three countries owed a tiny favor by Obama, but there's plenty of gain in the opinion polls if you're the guy who stood up to Obama after the spying leak from Snowden. It feels like the French/Spanish/Portuguese/etc. know everyone spies on everyone else, and they greatly resent that Snowden has forced them to stop talking to the US for a few months while the situation cools down, so they're letting Morales know they're pissed.
Probably because they don't give a shit about their diplomatic missions being spied on by the US. They're our allies. They need to know what we think is important, not just what we say we think is important when the cameras are rolling, therefore they almost certainly spy on us at every opportunity. Which means they can't really blame us for doing the same damn thing to them.
Look at it this way: if you were Estonia would you rather know the US Ambassador to Estonia's official instructions were "defend Estonian sovereignty from the Russians by any means necessary," because your spies read those instructions, or would you prefer to trust him when he told you that?
But voters don't understand that because voters think like you, so now instead of spending the next few months negotiating a free trade agreement, or pressuring Netanyahu/Abbas to fucking talk to each-other, Europe's diplomats will be forced to spend them in self-righteous hypocritic outrage.
His problem is he's a geek and doesn't understand how social relations work between people, much less countries. For example everyone spies on everyone-else's diplomatic missions, but everyone also pretends that no such thing ever happens. In a lot of ways these spy-missions-between-allies are actually in everyone's best interest because if French spies tell the the French government the UK really is serious about issue #47, the French know that pressing the Brits too hard on Issue #47 is likely to lead to big problems in other areas. But it's considered rude to talk about this stuff openly because the voters don't understand this, and the Brits will have to do something if anyone ever points out to those voters that the French spies got all Britain's documents on Issue #47.
Snowden and co. just did that to the US. Instead of doing whatever they were actually planning on doing today, the Foreign ministers of multiple countries have to be self-righteous hypocrites for the next three months. They know they are being hypocrites, they do not like it, and they blame Snowden/Wikileaks for forcing their hands. Therefore they are sending a message to Evo Morales. Helping Snowden is going to have repercussions with his relationships with them. I'm not sure whether Morales cares one way or the other about that, but now he knows.
If Snowden had stayed in Hong Kong, and avoided Assange religiously he'd be a lot better off. Since he's with Wikileaks he's burned his entire stock of moral authority with all people who have legal authority, he's also guaranteed that his information is worthless to those people because Wikileaks always tells everyone everything eventually. But he fled to Russia with Wikileaks help, now the Russians don't know what to do with him, and the Latin American countries that might shield him as a FU to the US are finding out that they'd be telling a lot of other countries FU2.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see that one slashdotter has confirmed his girlfriend let her a phone to call the police. Another has confirmed that she's not the type to make false rape charges. The only evidence that we have saying she lied is that a) Gont was not arrested, and b) that Gont called her crazy (but did not actually deny that this happened). If she hadn't even gone to the cops Gont would have mentioned it in his non-denial denial. As I pointed the fact the police chose not to press charges doesn't really prove anything, because it's very difficult to make a claim of attempted rape stick without either a witness (besides the victim) or video.
In this case either a totally stable woman snapped, started a fight with this guy for no reason, and was still rational enough to come up with a story that covered all the facts; or Gont's lying. Ocam's Razor condemns Gont because crazy bitches take days to come up with a story that makes sense, and Weidman's apparently made sense immediately.
As for your experience, just because one woman is a crazy bitch that does not mean that every woman is a crazy bitch. Most studies put the false-rape-claims rate in the 2-8% range. A handful have it as high as 40-50%, but even at 45% most rape claims are true. You actually have to look at the evidence to make a judgement.
Under ObamaCare the IRS has no record of anything that happens to you medically.
What it does have is proof you own health insurance that qualifies, or a tax penalty (starting at $95 and running up to $600-$700). Saying the IRS will have records of your actual medical history under ObamaCare is precisely like saying the police will magically know every place you've driven in the past three weeks if you show them your proof of auto insurance.
All words are generally defined by common usage. Political words have the additional wrinkle that the people who claim a political label define it.
This means that if someone is elected to Congress by 750,000 people, and receives 60+ Million votes for VP he's got a pretty damn compelling for any label he chooses to adopt. Since his adoption of the title "libertarian" has been copied by millions of tea party activists, and the actual Libertarian Party only got 1% of the popular vote, I have to say the LP just doesn't have the right to claim all self-identified libertarians.
Political terms are very complicated, and it's very difficult to figure out which groups legitimately own them. That's why I made a point of always using the small-l libertarian. Big-L Libertarians would be devotees of the political party of that name.
That doesn't mean that they get a monopoly on the term, particularly the small-l version of the word. Otherwise it would impossible for any Canadian to support democracy because no Canadian party is the Democratic Party (altho they do have a New Democratic Party, which I am fairly fond of). Every American is republican in the sense that we don't want the Queen back, but only 40-45% is Republican in the sense they always vote for the Republican Party. Most French people at this very moment seem to consider themselves socialists in some sense of the term, because they either love Hollande (capital S-Socialists) or they're protesting that he's not left-wing enough (which in France, means they want him to be small-s socialist).
Oracle and Microsoft spend a lot of money on software development. If that development could be turned over to a 501c that would be a huge tax write-off. Pretty much the only way for them to do that would be create a ridiculously restrictive fake open source license.
To prevent that, the IRS has some guys who understand software development well enough to tell an advanced tax avoidance strategy from a legitimate non-profit. Since that team is special all open source 501 applications get sent up to a manager as soon as the level 1 guy reads them, and then the manager sends them to those guys.
If the IRS were actively opposing open source 501s some of those 501s would probably have complained already, and we'd have read it all on Slashdot.
I do taxes in the early bits of the year, and I've never had a nightmare story about how their clearly legitimate tax return was mangled by incompetent IRS agents. I've had plenty who screwed up and ended up in closer contact with the IRS then they wanted, but nobody who thought the IRS Agents who called them on it were incompetent. You'll note even the anti-IRS Tea Party-guys currently complaining about these BOLO lists eventually got approved. They had to jump through a bajillion hoops to get approved, but they got approved, and none of them sent any extra money to the Feds.
I'm sure it happens, and the IRS does lose in Tax Court with some regularity, but I've personally done 80-100 tax returns and have given tax advice to dozens of other people who were having trouble with the IRS, and I personally have never encountered someone who had a legitimate gripe against the IRS. Plenty have had legitimate gripes against their tax preparers, but none against the IRS.
In this case it actually seems like it's a search for competence that causes open source applications to be sent up to management. Level 1 guys in the IRS aren't hired for their ability to tell legitimate open source projects from Tim Cook's Advanced Tax Avoidance Strategies, so open source applications get sent to managers who send them to guys who are trained to tell that difference.
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From what I've seen France really sucks at integrating immigrants. the only French pol I can name with non-French ancestry would be Sarkozy, and Sarko's family has been in the country for roughly a century.
In the US he'd be an old-line blueblood. In France the National Front thought he was un-French.
Europe as a whole seems to suck at integrating immigrants. Which is unfortunate, because basically the entire point of the EU is to allow random Romanians to get jobs in London.
He's using political dates for all countries.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918. If you ask a Swede when his country became independent he'll give you 1523, when the Danes were thrown out. The Chinese, Japanese, and French all claim direct lineage to states founded a long time before that.
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
It looks like his choice of independence year in these cases is based on what the people in that country say.
Swedes say they were conquered by Denmark, and became independent in 1523, therefore that is the year that gets entered on the spreadsheet. The French don't recognize Petain's government as legitimate, therefore the slightly-longer German occupation of France during WW2 doesn't count as France losing it's independence.
The French actually have a legal point. For the entire time they were occupied in the homeland de Gaulle had troops under his command throughout their Empire.
Here's what you don't get:
He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state.
Germany, for example, did not actually exist as a nation-state prior to the Prussian defeat of the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Prussian War, and the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War a few years after that. What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
The Greeks existed as a culture, but the last independent Greek state had been conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
The Italians were in exactly the same boat as the Germans. There were the Kings of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the Pope, a Grand Duke of Tuscony, Hapsburgs in Venice, and several smaller states that were absorbed by Piedmont prior to unification.
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
During WW1 Egypt was ruled by a Khedive who was technically a vassal of the British Monarch. The Khedive was actually originally an Ottoman vassal, but in the late 19th the Egyptians decided to join an Empire that didn't suck and switched allegiances. In 1922 the Egyptians became independent of the Brits and the Khedive promoted himself to King.
Somebody who believes that Human Rights have legal standing. How cute.
International law is a deal between the 190-odd nation-states of the world. They have agreed to recognize certain rights in solemn treaties that are not actually legally binding. No court in the US is going to invalidate any death penalty on the basis of international law. Many of these states have included some rights in either their domestic law codes or their Constitutions. In both cases any actual legal case involving those rights will be based on either the local Constitution or the local law codes, not some international treaty.
In other words every nation state has the right to snoop on you. This right is only restricted by other nation-state's ability and desire to stop said snooping. The pieces of paper you are depending on to defend your freedom are roughly as relevant to the actual protection of said freedom as the 15th Amendment was to black voting in South Carolina in 1935.
Good luck.
I'll agree the French are hypocrites on these issues. But the French Republic is pretty unique that way. The French are incredibly Machiavellian.
I'll be stunned if the Swedes, Germans, or any other northern European state gets caught up in this dragnet.
Keep in mind that if they're reporting on this they're likely privacy advocates, and privacy advocates tend to have a much more expansive view of what is private then the Courts do.
For example state-side you have the right to not talk to the police, but refusing to talk to police can be considered probable cause to get a warrant. It can also be used as evidence against you during your trial. Every privacy advocate hates this, and when the Supremes recently confirmed it there were terrabytes of counter-arguments on the internet; but that didn't change the law.
You know what pisses them off?
Western Christians who hear a Muslim is angry, and automatically assume said Muslim could only be angry because he's not living under Sharia. That is exactly the same as saying a white Christian who is angry must be angry that the feudal system has been dismantled.
Check out the prosecution of Bouchra Bagour. She has a terrible sense of humor, but if you want to impose Sharia Law on France generally you don't get a middle class office job, dress like a western woman, etc.
If you'd actually treat them as human beings, with thoughts of their own, you'd probably find out they are actually pissed off because they don;t think that France gives them the same opportunities it gives it's white residents.
I'm stunned everyone doesn't know this story.
In the early 19th century, before mechanical looms got big, many thousands of people made clothe in their homes, and made a decent wage as skilled workers. Then industrialization happened, Mechanical Looms put almost everyone out of business, and everyone else was making starvation wages so the loom-owners could afford gold-plated carriages.
So some of them took to invading factories and destroying the Looms with their clogs. In French a clog is a "sabot," so this was called "sabotage."
Nobody gives a shit about the American public knowing this one because the American public doesn't give a shit about spying on the French government. What they're pissed about is that various other country's public's know about it now, therefore they demand their governments do something to stop it. Nobody actually has the power to stop everyone from spying on everyone else, so basically these idiots have brought the entire international system to a halt for a few months while everyone pitches a really convincing-looking hissy-fit, and then everything goes back to normal.
If you don't believe me about how fucked the international reaction to this is just look at the French. The day of the revelation they throw a press conference condemning it (extremely convincing-looking hissy-fit). The next day they stop President Morales from using their territory to get home because he might have Snowden aboard. Not only did nothing actually change, the French actually punished the guy who spilled the beans. The day after that they apologized profusely, re-starting the hissy-fit.
As for being in Russia, all I have to say is that privacy advocates are so cute. Russia's official paper-laws are great, and Russia does not currently like the US, therefore Russia is a very safe place for somebody who is hated by the US. And yes, on paper that makes sense. Just like on paper South Carolina was a great place to be black in 1930.
OTOH Russia has a lot of interests in countries that are not the US, no particular interest in not shooting Snowden for the hell of it, and just re-elected Putin mostly because future generations will refer to him as "Vladimir the Terrifying." What do you think will happen if the Saudis threaten to re-start the Caucasian Jihad if Snowden doesn't disappear? Or any of another 40 countries, who are all pretty pissed at Snowden, threatens to do any of 100 other things that Putin wouldn't like? Make no mistake about it, Snowden is not in Russia today because Vladimir Putin's soul yearns to give Snowden hugs and puppies. He's there because he's a useful chip on the board of international politics, and Putin will gladly trade that chip.
If Snowden wanted safe he should have gone to Venezuala as planned. I suspect the reason he didn't is that the venezualans can't trade anything to Putin that's more valuable then having physical control of Snowden. If he wanted free he should have gone to Iceland instead of Hong Kong in the first place. He definitely should not have said anything about anything involving diplomacy because (as Assange found out) the guy who reveals diplomatic secrets is despised by everyone.
Read the link in the OP. The allegation he was referring to was that the US spies on embassies, not PRISM. PRISM does piss those countries off, it should piss them off, and it will definitely be an issue going forward, but it's not what the OP was talking about.
Unfortunately for privacy advocates instead of getting to the bottom of PRISM Wikileaks has completely changed the subject. All governments are forced into fake outrage mode (because all governments pretend to think that their embassies aren't constantly spied on), which means the people who actually run those governments are extremely unhappy that Assange and Snowden stopped them from getting actual work done, such as the actual work of fixing PRISM...
Basically at this point I have a very strong suspicion that Julian Assange is an agent provocateur paid by Obama to render the privacy-rights-movement totally ineffective. I just can't believe anyone would be this inept and still remember to breathe. OTOH, stupid is as stupid does.
I'm having trouble figuring out how spying on an Embassy, where zero government ministers work, would allow you to find out which government minister hates your country. If some Cabinet Secretary is arguing for an anti-You-stance he will do in Cabinet meetings, memos to the PM, and private meetings in the capital. The only way you could figure that out from the Embassy would be if Cabinet Secretaries routinely ask for information directly from embassies in your country, and you've got phenomenal psychic powers to deduce that the Secretary of Agriculture's interest in your Automotive engine technology has to do with his belief that the Chinese have superior tanks, and not his desire to figure out where he should be buying tractors. What spying on an embassy lets you find out is whether the Ambassador is deceiving you. If the Embassy in question is smart it won't even give you info on what the government really thinks, because the government is lying to the Ambassador. And that's pretty much it.
Spying on negotiating missions might get you some of the internal dynamics you're talking about, but those missions are even more limited then Embassy missions. Just because the Secretary of Agriculture opposes letting US Wheat onto the national market without concessions a, b, and c that does not mean he'd buy wheat from China with no concessions. The Canadian PM in 2001, for example, absolutely hated our position on Softwood Lumber tariffs but sent troops to Afghanistan. The opposition was even more pissed at our lumber tariffs (they represented the rural lumberjacks who were hurt by those tariffs) but were so pro-US in terms of foreign policy they actually wanted to help us invade Iraq.
Skullduggery of the type you mention is quite rare because that kind of thinking is incredibly common. Since the Cold War is over even pro-US pols on some issues will decry the US on others. The times they oppose the US will generally be related to their own country's economic interests. If you shoot an Agriculture Secretary for being thew anti-American guy his replacement will generally be as bad (or worse) because the economic interests stay the same, and if you get caught everything blows up in your face. For example, if Bush hadn't tried that coup in Venezuala Chavcez would have been a lot easier to deal with.
For one thing Air Force One won't ever have this problem because it's a 747. It does not need to stop in Portugal to refuel to make it all the way to DC. "Closed air-space" is what the Bolivians say happened, everyone else says they refused Morales permission to land and refuel. Given Morales doesn't have a 747 there isn't much practical difference here, but unless you're claiming UN membership = a right to free jet fuel I think you've conceded the legal argument.
For another I don't think you understand Americans very well if you think we give a shit whether inconveniencing the President was illegal or not. Sovereignty means you (by definition) have the right to be completely unreasonable. That is the entire point of being sovereign. For something this petty we probably wouldn't bother taking any explicit action against the transgressors, or rather we would take action but it would not be directly related to the closing of airspace. Trade deals would not be made, military sales would be unapproved, the state department has dozens of lists of bad boys the transgressors would subtly move up on. There'd be a snippy press release, but nobody in any official position with the US Government would ever admit any of this had anything to do with airspace.
What makes you think any of the opposition parties would have acted differently? The French are governed by the left wing, the others the right, so they didn't do it to satisfy some ideology. To a large extent the Portuguese and Spanish are dependent on French and German goodwill, but none of the three actually needs the US for anything.
I suspect what's going on is that everybody in NATO spies on everybody else. The only way for Estonia to really know the US isn't selling them to Putin en exchange a free hand in Syria is for Estonia to steal secrets from us. Spying on us in DC would be really hard, so what they've probably done is bug our embassy in Talinn. That way they at least know if our Ambassador is lying to them. Everybody understands this except the voters, which means that what Wikileaks and Snowden accomplished is basically to put a freeze on everyone's relationship with the US for the immediate future. And they did this a couple days before major free trade talks formally started.
Somebody (I'd guess the Germans or French, nobody else can close Portuguese airspace) is clearly not happy that this happened, and is sending a message to Latin America that they had better cut down on the pro-Wikileaks crap or many non-American states will be kinda pissed at them.
That was my first reaction. Did they not read what Snowden revealed? Seriously, wtf is USA providing them for these countries to do this for USA?
Does the CIA have some secrets on these world leaders on something? It does not make sense. Yesterday all these leaders were complaining about US surveillance.
What Snowden revealed is probably the reason they are pissed at Snowden.
Every US Ally has to know what the US actually thinks. Not what the US says in it's press releases, or what Dubya/Obama say during the State of the Union, they have to know what we actually think. That means spies. Otherwise they have no way of knowing we aren't about to sign a Molotov-Kerry Treaty divvying up their country with the Russians. Which in turn means they can't actually take any serious actions against us when they discover we're spying on them. After all they do the same damn thing.
But voters don't understand that, so the French will be lucky if they can get away with a symbolic 15-day-pause in the big free trade negotiations that everyone's been prepping for for literally years, so Snowden/wikileaks/etc. just seriously fucked up the entire foreign policies of all Europe, and they did mostly so that Assange could bitch about the US on TV some more.
If you're surprised that the French are hypocrites you don't pay much attention to France's actions. The Rainbow Warrior incident is downright civilized compared to their treatment of Africans. In particular you should research Operation Torquoise, which allowed genocidaires to flee Rwanda and set up bases in what was then Zaire. Much of the current DRCongo's problems are due to France's involvement in that little operation.
You also don't understand international law very well. No country is required under international law to let anyone enter it's territory. Diplomatic immunity applies to people who have been already allowed to enter, and granted formal accreditation by the hosting state. It allows diplomats to leave the country, but it does not mean they can go anywhere they want in it or over-fly it. Morales is actual Head of State, so he's not accredited by anybody, which means he actually has fewer rights to travel then either his embassy staff or ordinary citizens. Generally that doesn't matter, because generally pissing off a head of state by refusing him transit rights is a lot of trouble for very little gain, but that doesn't mean he's got an inalienable right to cross foreign territory.
This actually doesn't feel like a favor to me. It's too petty. There's no gain in being one of three countries owed a tiny favor by Obama, but there's plenty of gain in the opinion polls if you're the guy who stood up to Obama after the spying leak from Snowden. It feels like the French/Spanish/Portuguese/etc. know everyone spies on everyone else, and they greatly resent that Snowden has forced them to stop talking to the US for a few months while the situation cools down, so they're letting Morales know they're pissed.
Probably because they don't give a shit about their diplomatic missions being spied on by the US. They're our allies. They need to know what we think is important, not just what we say we think is important when the cameras are rolling, therefore they almost certainly spy on us at every opportunity. Which means they can't really blame us for doing the same damn thing to them.
Look at it this way: if you were Estonia would you rather know the US Ambassador to Estonia's official instructions were "defend Estonian sovereignty from the Russians by any means necessary," because your spies read those instructions, or would you prefer to trust him when he told you that?
But voters don't understand that because voters think like you, so now instead of spending the next few months negotiating a free trade agreement, or pressuring Netanyahu/Abbas to fucking talk to each-other, Europe's diplomats will be forced to spend them in self-righteous hypocritic outrage.
His problem is he's a geek and doesn't understand how social relations work between people, much less countries. For example everyone spies on everyone-else's diplomatic missions, but everyone also pretends that no such thing ever happens. In a lot of ways these spy-missions-between-allies are actually in everyone's best interest because if French spies tell the the French government the UK really is serious about issue #47, the French know that pressing the Brits too hard on Issue #47 is likely to lead to big problems in other areas. But it's considered rude to talk about this stuff openly because the voters don't understand this, and the Brits will have to do something if anyone ever points out to those voters that the French spies got all Britain's documents on Issue #47.
Snowden and co. just did that to the US. Instead of doing whatever they were actually planning on doing today, the Foreign ministers of multiple countries have to be self-righteous hypocrites for the next three months. They know they are being hypocrites, they do not like it, and they blame Snowden/Wikileaks for forcing their hands. Therefore they are sending a message to Evo Morales. Helping Snowden is going to have repercussions with his relationships with them. I'm not sure whether Morales cares one way or the other about that, but now he knows.
If Snowden had stayed in Hong Kong, and avoided Assange religiously he'd be a lot better off. Since he's with Wikileaks he's burned his entire stock of moral authority with all people who have legal authority, he's also guaranteed that his information is worthless to those people because Wikileaks always tells everyone everything eventually. But he fled to Russia with Wikileaks help, now the Russians don't know what to do with him, and the Latin American countries that might shield him as a FU to the US are finding out that they'd be telling a lot of other countries FU2.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see that one slashdotter has confirmed his girlfriend let her a phone to call the police. Another has confirmed that she's not the type to make false rape charges. The only evidence that we have saying she lied is that a) Gont was not arrested, and b) that Gont called her crazy (but did not actually deny that this happened). If she hadn't even gone to the cops Gont would have mentioned it in his non-denial denial. As I pointed the fact the police chose not to press charges doesn't really prove anything, because it's very difficult to make a claim of attempted rape stick without either a witness (besides the victim) or video.
In this case either a totally stable woman snapped, started a fight with this guy for no reason, and was still rational enough to come up with a story that covered all the facts; or Gont's lying. Ocam's Razor condemns Gont because crazy bitches take days to come up with a story that makes sense, and Weidman's apparently made sense immediately.
As for your experience, just because one woman is a crazy bitch that does not mean that every woman is a crazy bitch. Most studies put the false-rape-claims rate in the 2-8% range. A handful have it as high as 40-50%, but even at 45% most rape claims are true. You actually have to look at the evidence to make a judgement.
Umm...
Under ObamaCare the IRS has no record of anything that happens to you medically.
What it does have is proof you own health insurance that qualifies, or a tax penalty (starting at $95 and running up to $600-$700). Saying the IRS will have records of your actual medical history under ObamaCare is precisely like saying the police will magically know every place you've driven in the past three weeks if you show them your proof of auto insurance.
All words are generally defined by common usage. Political words have the additional wrinkle that the people who claim a political label define it.
This means that if someone is elected to Congress by 750,000 people, and receives 60+ Million votes for VP he's got a pretty damn compelling for any label he chooses to adopt. Since his adoption of the title "libertarian" has been copied by millions of tea party activists, and the actual Libertarian Party only got 1% of the popular vote, I have to say the LP just doesn't have the right to claim all self-identified libertarians.
Political terms are very complicated, and it's very difficult to figure out which groups legitimately own them. That's why I made a point of always using the small-l libertarian. Big-L Libertarians would be devotees of the political party of that name.
That doesn't mean that they get a monopoly on the term, particularly the small-l version of the word. Otherwise it would impossible for any Canadian to support democracy because no Canadian party is the Democratic Party (altho they do have a New Democratic Party, which I am fairly fond of). Every American is republican in the sense that we don't want the Queen back, but only 40-45% is Republican in the sense they always vote for the Republican Party. Most French people at this very moment seem to consider themselves socialists in some sense of the term, because they either love Hollande (capital S-Socialists) or they're protesting that he's not left-wing enough (which in France, means they want him to be small-s socialist).
You've got it backwards.
Oracle and Microsoft spend a lot of money on software development. If that development could be turned over to a 501c that would be a huge tax write-off. Pretty much the only way for them to do that would be create a ridiculously restrictive fake open source license.
To prevent that, the IRS has some guys who understand software development well enough to tell an advanced tax avoidance strategy from a legitimate non-profit. Since that team is special all open source 501 applications get sent up to a manager as soon as the level 1 guy reads them, and then the manager sends them to those guys.
If the IRS were actively opposing open source 501s some of those 501s would probably have complained already, and we'd have read it all on Slashdot.
You'd be surprised.
I do taxes in the early bits of the year, and I've never had a nightmare story about how their clearly legitimate tax return was mangled by incompetent IRS agents. I've had plenty who screwed up and ended up in closer contact with the IRS then they wanted, but nobody who thought the IRS Agents who called them on it were incompetent. You'll note even the anti-IRS Tea Party-guys currently complaining about these BOLO lists eventually got approved. They had to jump through a bajillion hoops to get approved, but they got approved, and none of them sent any extra money to the Feds.
I'm sure it happens, and the IRS does lose in Tax Court with some regularity, but I've personally done 80-100 tax returns and have given tax advice to dozens of other people who were having trouble with the IRS, and I personally have never encountered someone who had a legitimate gripe against the IRS. Plenty have had legitimate gripes against their tax preparers, but none against the IRS.
In this case it actually seems like it's a search for competence that causes open source applications to be sent up to management. Level 1 guys in the IRS aren't hired for their ability to tell legitimate open source projects from Tim Cook's Advanced Tax Avoidance Strategies, so open source applications get sent to managers who send them to guys who are trained to tell that difference.