I'd say the right to ethical government arises under the 9th Amendment (arguably as the most important right arising under the 9th, certainly far more important than the rights recognized in existing 9th Amendment cases such as Roe vs. Wade). Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible. As a right to ethical government necessarily requires public oversight over campaign finance, the absence of traceability for donations is a violation of the Bill of Rights.
It follows that any holder of public office requiring an oath to uphold the Constitution, as a precondition to hold that office, who takes advantage of, utilizes, or directly benefits from such money is in violation of that oath (and thus disqualified from holding that office, or any other with a similar oath). Further, any law to the contrary would, of course, be contrary to the Constitution, and thus those passing such a law would themselves be in violation of their oaths, and thus disqualified from holding any such position. Judicial precedents to the contrary would also involve violations of the oaths of the judges involved, and would thus be invalid. This would even (and perhaps especially) be true at the level of the Supreme Court justices, who are most certainly required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution.
No law passed by Congress (and, indeed, no written law beyond the existing Bill of Rights) is thus required to make such conduct illegal: all laws passed by Congress can do is specify reporting procedures and penalties to help implement this right, and even then the laws can not be written in such a way as to make such unethical conduct legal. Similarly the State governments can not evade the public right to ethical government with public oversight, no matter what laws they may pass to the contrary.
Those who have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution have no legal standing to continue in positions that require such oaths as a precondition for such office. Hence, laws passed with oath-breaking legislators participating in the law-making process at any level, and precedents created by oath-breaking judges, have no legal standing.
Similarly, any political party accepting anonymous donations is in violation of the right to ethical government.
The ethics implications of the 9th Amendment are, of course, the reason this amendment is routinely ignored by government, the major political parties, and the legal profession, none of which has much interest in oversight by the public over ethics. Given how much effort has been expended in creating a legal climate that ignores the explicit provisions of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, it is not surprising that a mere implication of something as little known as the 9th Amendment should be routinely ignored.
As the Constitution requires an oath to uphold the Constitution for those taking high public office, those involved in passing (or enforcing, or upholding) such unconstitutional laws are in violation of the most important requirement for holding such office.
Further, if any right at all can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, it is certainly the right to ethical conduct on the part of members of government and legal professionals. This right vastly exceeds in importance the few rights actually upheld by high courts as arising under the 9th Amendment (such as in Roe vs. Wade). Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible.
At a minimum, violation of an oath of office, or of such a right, disqualifies any person so doing from holding any position of public trust or responsibility, or engaging in the practice of law, or receiving a pension or other benefit from the government. Attempting to claim a pension is appropriately viewed as criminal fraud, and attempting to continue in office is appropriately viewed as impersonating a government official.
Isn't it funny how that works? Same with tax-code -- theoretically, everyone is subject to the same tax codes. However, people with several full-time attorneys on staff seems to do a lot better in minimizing their tax bills. Coincidence?
No. Not a coincidence. The US legal system is riddled with ethical conflict of interest to the benefit of the legal profession. It's the reason why we have so many laws on the books, most of which only get enforced sporadically (and are therefore unnecessary). It's the reason all three major areas of "intellectual property" law are badly broken. It's the reason we are the "land of the lawsuit" and most of the rest of the world makes fun of us for being idiots. It's the reason ordinary people get hammered and humiliated for minor offences by the so-called "justice" system while politicians get away with all kinds of stuff.
We probably need to remove legal professionals from all decision making positions in the executive and legislative branches of government, at all levels, and make their role purely advisory. Even then we would have issues with the judges making decisions that benefit their profession at the expense of society (something that seems to happen with dreary regularity). Not likely to happen.
Taking control of legal ethics away from the bar associations might be the best we can hope for.
Unfortunately, very few people outside the legal profession bother to actually read law textbooks or follow court cases, which means that very few people know just how bad things have gotten.
This seems to me to be a result of the society as a whole putting way too much emphasis on the Constitution, and believing that it necessarily must equal all the basic rights.
The protection for privacy in the Constitution is notably rather weak, even more so when compared to many other modern democracies. I cannot say that this is a fault in the Constitution per se: The issues today simply are not the same as those in 1787.
Actually, it's quite the contrary: it's not that society is expecting the written and explicit material of the earlier portions of the Constitution, materially that is admittedly pretty thin, to explicitly deal with these issues, rather it is that society expects the government to acknowledge a whole host of rights that can reasonably be asserted under later portions of the "Constitution" (known as the Bill of Rights).
The Bill of Rights was written to deal with two Anti-Federalist objections to the Constitution that would have almost certainly been FATAL, namely 1) it had no Bill of Rights, and 2) any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. Two states, after all, refused to ratify the earlier document without a Bill of Rights, and in other states promises were made by men of honor (whose integrity was trusted) that an acceptable Bill of Rights would be added. It was clear to all concerned, of course, that if the people of these latter states were to be disappointed in their expectations with respect to a Bill of Rights, then they could simply leave the Union, something that at that point in history it was neither militarily nor politically feasible for other states to prevent.
To address these objections, James Madison deliberately set out to make a Bill of Rights that would limit the authority of government (and in so doing, potentially supersede anything found in the earlier parts of the Constitution), and that would be open-ended. This is why the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "reserved to the people".
Such unspecified rights form the basis of several books, and a number of high court decisions, of which Roe vs. Wade is perhaps the best known. Arguments made with respect to a Constitutional "right to privacy" are actually referring to a right arising under the open-ended aspect of the Bill of Rights, as a right "retained by" or "reserved to" the people. The people, in effect, are asserting that "privacy" is a right retained by them, and therefore superseding the authority of government at any level.
Unfortunately, government at various levels in the US has a long history of finding the existence of such rights inconvenient. Arguably, the legal profession -- as a class in society -- also tends to find these rights inconvenient, which further complicates matters, given how many members of government are legal professionals and how much influence the legal profession has on setting policy. For both groups, the fact that the government has been forced from time to time to acknowledge the existence of such rights clearly demonstrates how weak their position is, but logic seems to have little to do either with decision making by politicians or with the inability of the legal profession to acknowledge problems in their accustomed manner of doing business.
Unfortunately, judging from history, it takes serious and extended public pressure on the Supreme Court to force it to acknowledge the existence of rights "retained by the people" or "reserved to the people". Consider, for example, how long it took to undo the discrimination against African-Americans ("separate but not actually equal"), or to legalize any form of abortion for any reason (even saving the life of the mother).
There are likely ethical conflicts of interest that come into play with respect to the difficulty of getting the Supreme Court to acknowledge its responsibilities with respect to rights "retained by" or "reserved to" the people, since it doesn't seem possible to come up with any other explanation for this particular problem. After all, the Supreme Court justices have all sworn oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights (which REQUIRES them to acknowledge the open-ended aspect of that document).
They're already written in a 'sort of pseudo-code', legalese. Problem is it is very hard to debug and really easy to insert malicious code.
Additional problem: given that most legislators are legal professionals, as are many of their staff members, putting legalese in the laws inherently involves ethical conflict of interest. These people are effectively creating an artificial demand for the services of their profession in general, and for their specific services as individuals should they at some future point choose to leave their staff or legislative position.
Legalese in contracts involves a similar conflict of interest.
If a law or contract , in whole or in part, is indecipherable to an educated, intelligent adult, it should be treated as an illegal law or contract on the basis of legal ethics. We might even assert that a fundamental right to this effect arises under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
If a small amount of specialized terminology is necessary to the practice of law, then we could have a course in the history, philosophy, and practice of law be part of the standard high school curriculum, which would teach people those words as a part of a general education in understanding one's society. Any terminology that couldn't reasonably be taught in such a course should be invalid to include in those laws likely to directly affect the general public.
Or, putting this in different terms, just as a long term public oversight right exists with respect to the conduct of businesses (in order to prevent things like deliberate pollution of the environment, or rats in peanut butter), so too does a long term public oversight right exist with respect to government.
As a consequence of this right, persons or organizations receiving public funding for most types of research must, at some reasonable time after publication, make freely available to the public the results of that research. This rule allows publishers to make money off initial publication, thus supporting editing and review of publications, while ensuring the public eventually gets free and unfettered access to this material.
Even so much as 1 dollar of public funding being used at any point in the research process forces this right to be invoked in full.
In this day and age, making research freely available to the public means putting it on the Web, accessible to search engines, without advertisement, and free for download in some open well-defined format.
Such a right arises naturally under the 9th Amendment within the US legal system. No legislation by Congress or the state governments is required for this right to exist, and in fact, with respect to publicly funded research material, this right supersedes the authority of Congress to make laws infringing the right to copy or any other laws that might infringe this right.
Denial of this right by legal professionals is appropriately viewed as unethical conduct (as the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the authority of the people to assert rights under the 9th Amendment), and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Any existing laws that would contradict this right in whole or in part are illegal laws, and any prosecutor, law enforcement officer, or other government agent involved in the enforcement of such illegal laws is in violation of his or her oath to uphold the Bill of Rights. Similarly, any court orders or precedents that would contradict this right are invalid. Just as we would expect military officers to refuse to recognize the authority of laws that require them to commit crimes against humanity (Nuremberg Precedent), so to do we expect civil government officers to refuse to recognize the authority of laws, orders, and precedents that require or permit them to infringe fundamental rights.
Failure on the part of government to recognize the authority of this right not only removes the transfressing individuals from the government, immediately and permanantly and without any requirement for an Act of Congress or other government action (this is a minimum penalty: additional penalties may apply), but authorizes private citizens to act in place of the government, in a reasonable manner, to correct the situation in whole or in part.
Research on a few topics, such as weapons of mass destruction can be excluded from this rule, in the interests of not providing information to terrorists or rogue governments. Strict scrutiny must be used here to determine whether the research excluded is legitimately excluded.
Research on some military technologies (but not police technologies) may be excluded from publication for a longer time than other topics (at most 20 years, excepting the weapons of mass destruction).
Similarly, while data collected as a part of publicly funded research must generally be made available with the publication, this does not need to be done in cases where doing so would violate other fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy. Similarly, in some cases the amount of data involved may be prohibitive to publish for free: in such cases, if practical, it must be made available at cost.
Even for those topics legitimately excluded, some reasonable mechanism of oversight must exist.
A reasonable time to make the research available to the public after any initial commercial publication is 1 ye
1. There is no theoretical reason why cellphone radiation should be harmful.
The issue here is somewhat more complex than you may be aware.
A conventional view is that wave interaction with a media is a function of frequency. With ultrasound, for example, the high frequencies needed for high resolution do not penetrate deeply into the body. This is why it can be difficult to use ultrasound as a diagnostic tool for overweight people: the lower frequencies needed to penetate the thicker outer layers of the body may not be able to resolve sufficiently to reveal problems.
Just as with ultrasound waves, the traditional view is that electromagnetic waves have a penetration depth that is a function of frequency, and some measurements suggest a rough trend towards decreasing penetration as frequencies increase. I sometimes see people using this fact to assert that the high frequency electromagnetic waves associated with cell phones will not penetrate far enough into the body to be a problem.
The "penetration depth as a function of frequency" idea is a useful model in many situations, however, there are some potential problems with using this idea to understand the interaction of electromagnetic waves with human subjects:
1. The media of the human body is quite diverse. It is the interaction of the wave with the particular medium at a particular point that matters, which may be different from some average tissue measurement made on a laboratory sample. This makes it difficult to generalize from measurements taken on tissue samples to a real body of a living person.
2. The "depth as a function of frequency" model assumes linearity. The real world is non-linear, meaning that interactions of waves with systems can produce energy at frequencies other than the measurement frequency. This effect is taken advantage of in ultrasound systems that use so-called "harmonic imaging" to enhance resolution: it's a real effect, not just some theoretical concept. Similar behavior can be expected from electromagnetic waves. Any measurements of the interaction of waves with the human body must be carefully examined for hidden assumptions of linearity.
3. In Quantum Mechanics there is an idea called wave-particle duality. Measurements that assume a wave model of the underlying phenomena in a system may fail to fully characterize that system because they miss particle effects. The belief that all negative electromagnetic effects are heat-related is a particularly dubious assumption with respect to this issue.
4. Another thing to consider: the measured effects of ultrasound on the body are very different from the measured effects of electromagnetic radiation, and yet, at its core, ultrasound IS electromagnetic. We don't list sound as one of the fundamental forces of the universe, after all. In a sense, the concept of sound is simply a useful abstraction we use for some physics situations where applying Maxwell's equations isn't practical (much like all of chemistry). So, if one essentially electrical phenomena gives us such different results from another, then how much confidence should we have in our understanding of what is actually going on?
In addition to these considerations, it is very difficult to reliably make medical measurements on human subjects: there are many potential confounding variables, and correlation is not causation. The human body is immensely complex and there is still so much we don't know about it. Often people that have never done medical research or worked as a part of a medical research group have a very unrealistic view of what is possible. The absence of data may indicate that we don't have a problem, but it could also indicate that the measurements simply aren't good enough yet to reveal an existing problem.
In short, before we can conclude that there are no theoretical issues with respect to the effect of cellphone radiation on the body, we must carefully consider the question: "To what extent can we trust our measurements and our models?"
Suvorov discusses a whole bunch of evidence that suggests Stalin was actually setting up an invasion of Germany. The movement of troops and equipment associated with setting up this attack made the Soviets extremely vulnerable to the German attack. For example, large numbers Soviet tanks were on trains being moved to the border when the attack occurred, making them very vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.
That's the evidence of the opposite -- that they were not expecting the war until it happened. Only a conspiracy theorist completely detached from reality would turn it into confirmation of something opposite.
You're completely misinterpreting what was actually written in the post. At no point did I claim the Soviets were expecting the attack. Suvorov (a former GRU intelligence officer, who claims to have had access to the relevant records) indicates that Stalin was not, in fact, expecting the German's to attack, as a result of military intelligence indicating that the Germans were not preparing their troops and equipment for winter operations. This, presumably, is why he felt confident in moving his units as he did.
Trains, of course, are the only practical way to deploy tanks long distances on land. There are pictures from the war showing some of these trains, damaged, with the tanks still on them. As the tanks were completely helpless on the damaged trains, the Germans were able to recover many of them (much as they used captured Chek tanks in the invasion of France: just because the train couldn't move due to damage didn't mean the tanks were unusable, if one had time and the right heavy equipment). Note that within the first ten days of the war, the Germans captured 1200 tanks and 600 guns. By day 17, these numbers had more than doubled.
In my experience, there is no such thing as a person that's "not the creative type". Instead, we have people who have learned to be creative, and those who still haven't learned this.
Creativity can be defined as nothing more than putting two ideas together in a way you've never thought of before. It's not some mystical attribute reserved to badly dressed, long-haired, pot smokers. There is no requirement to solve Einstein-level problems to be creative. If you're open minded about this, and practice appropriate activities, you can learn to do it. See Karl Albrecht's book on thinking skills for more details on this.
As a occasional dance teacher, I have seen many students who strongly believed that they were "not the creative type" learn that, in fact, they could be creative. Often, the first time a student learns this is when they screw up, then manage to recover, and in the process discover that they've just done something new! There is nothing magical about this, except perhaps for the smile on someone's face when they realize what they've just done.
Don't get me started about the people that think they have "two left feet", or no "sense of rhythm"...
To be fair, the arguments and evidence presented by the folks that claim the nuclear bombing was a bad decision are themselves problematic.
For example, in such writing we often find a number of well-known public statements that were made by various civilian and military leaders after the fact. These statements can be reasonably supposed to be biased by the public perception of just how horrific the radiation effects of these weapons are, something which wasn't fully understood until after the event. It is not at all clear that these same people would have had any problem with the decision before this was known.
During the war, a single conventional bombing mission could kill over a hundred thousand people. For instance, over 124,000 were killed during the Tokyo mission on the night of March 9-10, 1945. Compare this to the roughly 70,000 deaths associated with the initial blast of the Hiroshima bomb (the total deaths due to the bomb were higher than this, due to the radiation effects, something that they probably didn't realize would happen)...
It is certain that vastly more people were killed by conventional bombing than by atomic weapons in WW2 (even considering the deaths by radiation).
For that matter, the deaths by atomic weapons were less than half a percent of the total numbers of people killed during the war.
It's not particularly reasonable to suppose that these leaders (whose statements are being used to support the argument that the bombing was a bad decision) didn't know something of this, whatever they may have said in public after the fact, which makes anything they say about this issue suspect...
Another point that is often overlooked in the course of these arguments is the high numbers of casualties happening during battles as those battles moved closer to Japan. During the battle for the mere 463 square miles of Okinawa there were roughly 165,000 military casualties, and an estimated 142,000 civilian casualties (compare this to the 3604 casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack). It was not at all unreasonable to suppose that the casualties associated with an invasion of Japan, with its vastly larger population would have been far higher (note that casualties includes both killed and wounded).
Yet another consideration neglected by the authors of these arguments involves thinking about what might have happened had the Soviets invaded and been in a position to claim some of Japan post-war. Stalin was responsible for an estimated tens of millions of deaths outside of battle: it's not unreasonable to suppose he would have killed far more Japanese than the atomic bombs did...
It was an ugly period in history, and hopefully one we will never see again.
France and England stood by and LET Hitler take what he wanted with Chamberlain signing non-aggression pacts and getting autographed night stand pictures of Hitler all because of the sour taste that WWI left in the mouths of Europeans.
There is a lot of truth to this. However, it is also worth considering the military state of Britain and France at this time. Many British and French units were still organized to fight the kinds of battles that occurred in WW1 or in colonial conflicts. For example, some RAF units were still flying biplanes, while the Germans had been using (and flying in combat) monoplane designs during the Spanish Civil War. While both were re-arming to modern standards, there were very serious problems with French production and the British had started quite late. Further, neither Britain nor France had the ability to directly move troops into Czechoslovakia. These points doubtless would have been known to the leaders of both nations, so there were certainly factors other than the "sour taste" of WWI that can help explain the decisions that were made.
I'd recommend just a few of the more recent documentaries or World at War if you can find it.
There are some excellent documentaries. The veteran interviews are particularly helpful in understanding the history. However, it is necessary to be very careful in relying on video sources on WWII, which frequently contain errors.
That's a good summary, Japan was all but defeated in the Pacific and on the mainland, the nukes just drove the point home.
The casualty numbers were getting very high as the battles moved closer to Japan. The battle for Okinawa, for example, resulted in roughly 165,000 military personnel being killed or wounded, tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and 173 allied ships being damaged or sunk.
While strategically it is reasonable to say that Japan was "all but defeated", in the sense of having no possibility of being able to win the war, that is not the same thing as saying that finishing the war with conventional military forces would have been inexpensive in human lives.
Another thing to consider (often neglected in these kinds of discussions) is what would have happened had the Soviets invaded Japan and held it after the war. Stalin killed millions... Giving the Japanese a reason to surrender may have ultimately saved far more lives than it cost.
In fact, strategic bombing had a minimal impact on German production...
There is a bit of a slippery argument. Germany, unlike Britain, operated for quite a long time with its economy on a peacetime basis, not optimized for war. This meant that once they started getting serious about wartime production, the production levels invariably went up, in spite of the slowly increasing effectiveness of the strategic bombing. It is likely that in the absence of strategic bombing the production numbers would have been even higher.
There was one critical aspect of the strategic bombing that did (eventually) work quite well, and that was the bombing of the German synthetic oil factories. The Germans never did run out equipment, but they did run out fuel for their tanks and aircraft.
During the course of the war, about 1 million Germans ended up working in the air defense system. The air defenses used enormous numbers of planes, pilots, guns, ammunition, and fuel. See Robin Neilland's book "The Bomber War" for more details. These numbers show that Allied Air Power played a very important role: consider, for example, what might have happened on the Eastern Front had all these resources been available for use there...
At the start of the war USSR was poorly prepared for it -- Stalin was convinced that Germany is not interested in attacking USSR because he seen it as a part of Western politics, and Stalin's own doctrine was that USSR must develop Socialism and Communism while keeping itself in isolation from Capitalist countries around it.
This is a classical viewpoint, generated before the end of the Cold War, in an attempt to explain some very puzzling aspects of the history of WW2.
Since the Cold War ended, Russian and other former Soviet researchers, with access to documents that were previously classified and unavailable, have been producing publications that completely contradict some aspects of the earlier histories.
See, for example, Viktor Suvorov's book "Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II".
Suvorov discusses a whole bunch of evidence that suggests Stalin was actually setting up an invasion of Germany. The movement of troops and equipment associated with setting up this attack made the Soviets extremely vulnerable to the German attack. For example, large numbers Soviet tanks were on trains being moved to the border when the attack occurred, making them very vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.
As far as the "warm bodies" issue goes, some Soviet veterans have given interviews in which they described being sent into battle with one rifle between 30 untrained men, so this misconception is understandable if not particularly accurate.
According to Suvorov, in some respects the Soviets were actually far ahead of the West in military equipment and tactics (as they demonstrated against the Japanese shortly before WW2), but much of their equipment was lost in the initial weeks of the invasion, and many of their best units were disorganized or destroyed, leading to a very difficult supply situation and a shortage of trained units.
The key point that you've missed is that engineering is based upon science, which in turn in based upon observation, hypothesis, and experiment. Software engineering is, in fact, engineering, for the simple reason that the typical software engineer is doing many experiments in the course of building a software system. These experiments simply happen to be done on a computer. Not all that different from the simulations of the more traditional engineer, in this day and age.
Activities or government policies can only be called "social engineering" if they involve experiment. This isn't splitting hairs, it's a matter of understanding what engineering (and science) is fundamentally all about.
You make some excellent points about the consequences of a single tax policy.
However, I'm not sure that a policy having consequences means that we're doing engineering. Any policy at all, even no policy, will have consequences.
The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development has defined "engineering" as
"The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination"...
The fact that a policy has consequences does not mean that we are in any sense doing science or applying scientific principles...
It is not at all clear that a single tax policy is unworkable in the same sense as communism. One key reason for the failure of communism is that no human being or group of human beings can predict or manage a complex market with reliable accuracy over the long term (a point Thomas Sowell discusses at more length in his Basic Economics book).
A tax policy, on the other hand, only has to produce the money needed for essential government services, and perhaps a bit more to smooth out changes in income from year to year (much like a capacitor smooths an input signal), a much simpler task. It really doesn't matter how that money is collected, from the point of view of spending it.
This is a rather stupid comment: there's no way to avoid doing social engineering with taxes. Whatever you do with taxation, it's going to affect society somehow.
If a single tax, income based, using a simple and rarely changed formula is social engineering, then folding a piece of paper is aeronautical engineering, and pouring oneself a glass of water is materials science.
You may want to try to spend some time thinking about these issues from a social science perspective. Humans form cultural groups. Often, these cultural groups have ideas, values, perspectives, ways of doing things, and so forth that are not entirely rational, or ethical, or useful, or efficient, even counter-productive. This is something of a norm: it's common and possibly even unavoidable.
Legal professionals in the USA form a cultural group.
It is often difficult for members of a cultural group to realize the extent to which problems exist with their cherished ideas, beliefs, and values. Doing this requires the ability to mentally step outside the shared assumptions and beliefs of the group. Even for trained social scientists, with many years of field experience, this is difficult. Few legal professionals will have this kind of background, which means that doing this will be challenging for them, but it is possible if one is willing to spend the time and be open-minded about questioning one's beliefs. Taking a few years to informally study anthropology, psychology, and sociology can be a useful starting point or tool to help one in learning to think this way, especially if you make a point of interacting with professionals in these fields and asking lots of questions.
With respect to this, and to what you said in your post, there are a few specific things you may want to think about at more length.
First: there are many different forms of "bribes", not all of which involve cash payments. For example, being selected for a particular position in government may constitute a bribe. There is considerable concern as to what, exactly, judges do to get selected for their positions (in the case of judges that are voted into office, a similar concern exists with respect to what they do to get the support of a political party). People wonder if arrangements are being made behind closed doors, at least in some cases. Possible arrangements might not involve constraining the actions of the judges in all of their official actions. This, of course, would have the effect of creating the illusion of impartiality or competence, while retaining for some party the ability to influence the decision of a judge in a particular situation. Arguably, the more complex the legal system, the easier it is to hide this kind of thing. In such cases, it would be in the interests of the parties involved to have as few people as possible in the know, and to have most of the people who work with the judge be entirely innocent and unaware of any wrong-doing.
Second: there is a tendency for legal professionals to claim that when those outside the profession do not understand a decision, then that is result of their ignorance of the law. The public, in other words, is treated like ignorant sheep, whose bleating should be ignored. But there is another way of looking at this. The concept that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" need not just refer to vigilance over the government, but can also refer to the need for vigilance over the legal profession. If the public does not understand the law, does that mean that the public is in the wrong, or should we take that as an indication that there is something wrong with the law, or with the legal system, or with the cultural assumptions the legal profession is making when they engage in the practice of law? Under what circumstances is it legitimate for a legal system to be so complex that it is beyond the understanding of the common person?
Here is a related consideration: the Bill of Rights, which all legal professionals presumably swear oaths to uphold, provides for rights "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people" (9th and 10th Amendments). This was put in the document by James Madison for very important reasons. If our legal professionals get in the habit of assuming that the beliefs of the people are irrelevant to the practice of law, perhaps by means of offering a pretext that the public simply doesn't understand the law and theref
And no, it's perfectly fair, the buyer uses it regardless of where he or she buys from.
It isn't perfectly fair. For a person choosing to make some of their purchases outside some governmental jurisdiction that charges sales taxes, a "use tax" creates a huge documentation and record-keeping burden, in order to keep track of which purchases have had taxes paid on them and which have not.
In other words, people who are making rational purchasing decisions (decisions that in most cases are completely uninfluenced by the tax issue, a point that has been discussed many times on Slashdot) are being unfairly penalized by the government for doing so.
Don't forget, some people live close to state or local government borders, and have the majority of their available local shopping on the far side of those borders. It's not even close to rational to make people drive a long distance to make purchases in their own state when there is convenient shopping that might be, for example, 5 minutes away on the far side of the border.
If we allow "use taxes", then these people must keep track of almost all of their purchases, recording what was purchased, and which of potentially multiple jurisdictions (city government, county government, state government) have and need to receive sales tax payments (an item that local government places sales tax on may not necessarily also be taxed at the state level, and vice-versa), how much sales tax was paid at time of purchase, what is still owed to each of the different governments having jurisdiction at the location where one lives, and must be prepared to provide all that information to one or possibly multiple levels of government for audit purposes (a huge violation of privacy rights in itself: the list of personal possessions of an individual is not something government at any level has any business knowing). Then we also have the situation where purchases are made on federal land, such as national parks or military bases, or overseas, thus requiring one to know any federal policies that may be applicable...
It's hard enough for businesses to keep track of all the details of sales tax changes from one jurisdiction to another, and from one year to another, let alone requiring this of everyone! This is an absurd situation that clearly violates a number of fundamental rights, and there is clearly something wrong with the people in government that are even considering doing this.
If we don't allow "use taxes" on some people, as a result of these considerations, then we can't put them on anyone.
To make things more complicated, it's not really clear that government at any level has the legal authority to tax the purchase or use of some types of items. For example, non-fiction educational materials are the primary means by which citizens learn enough about the world they live in to make intelligent decisions about their government. Does it really make sense to tax the purchase of these items?
Actually, the unresolved issues with sales tax are not just limited to mail-order situations.
Delaware, for existence, has no sales tax. No legitimate mechanism of law can be used to prevent folks living near the Delaware border from crossing the border, and making purchases without paying sales taxes in their home states (thus exercising their strict-scrutiny-protected right to travel, which naturally includes the right to make purchases while traveling without being subject to excessive bureaucracy while doing so).
Of course, this is much less convenient for folks living far from appropriate state borders, and thus the amount of sales tax one ends up paying depends upon where one lives.
In other words, sales taxes are not just taxes that discriminate against the poor, they are also taxes that discriminate based upon where one lives. It's an absurd situation, like so much associated with government.
This isn't a new problem caused by the internet either.
It's not just old fashioned snail mail orders, only. The issue is far more fundamental for that. Anybody living near the border between two states poses a problem for the whole concept of sales tax, particularly when the travel time to stores in the other state is considerably less than it is to stores in one's own state, and the tax rates are less in the other state.
Expecting people to keep track of the location for every purchase they make for some sort of "use tax" is blatantly a violation of fundamental rights.
Unfortunately, government at many levels in the US is willing to pass laws that violate the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights.
Creating contradictions in the legal system increases the long term demand for the services of legal professionals. Hence, it should be no surprise that our legislators (most of whom are legal professionals), continue to create laws that do exactly this, and our judges (most of whom are also legal professionals) choose to uphold laws that contradict the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Both parties in acting in violation of their oaths of office, of course, when they do this, but there doesn't seem to be enough people in with system with integrity for this to matter, and so long as "we the people" don't pay attention to this issue, this problem will continue.
The big problem with the sales tax issue is not specifically a Constitutional one, but a fundamental issue of freedom. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose, in the pre-internet days, a person was to live near the border of a state. Across the border, in a state with no sales tax, are stores providing the necessities of life, within a five minute drive of this person's home. Within his or her state, the nearest store is a 1 hour drive in each direction. Under these circumstances, any rational individual would clearly choose to make their purchases at the nearby stores (not only would this save substantial amounts of time from their life, but it would be environmentally the right thing to do).
Further, it would clearly not be a legitimate act of government to force the individual to make a lengthy drive simply to shop: a right to not have one's time wasted must necessarily be a fundamental freedom.
Similarly, it would clearly not be a legitimate act of government to force the individual to keep track of every purchase made, and whether or not it was made locally, in order to then force that person to pay taxes: a right to not be subject to excessive bureaucracy is certainly a fundamental freedom.
Now take this thought experiment to the present day. The Internet is simply a form of technology that has effectively moved this border closer to every person: if it was not legitimate to tax out of state purchases before, then it can not be so now.
There are two ethically sound options here: 1) Have a national sales tax, and bar state sales tax entirely, and 2) have no sales taxes at all, making up the lost revenue in income taxes.
Eliminating sales tax entirely is the more intelligent policy, as sales taxes represent both a) double taxation on earned income, always a legally and ethically suspect policy, and b) sales taxes are biased against those who least afford to pay them: it is not possible to ethically justify the extra complexity this creates in the legal system when we are also having progressive income taxation.
Also, in the fertile crescent lands (Egypt especially), beer was one of the few (health-wise) safe means of hydrating yourself.
Beer in Nubia (south of Egypt) was also a likely source of the anti-biotic tetracycline, according to research by George Armelagos and Mark Nelson. This was originally discovered when large amounts of tetracycline were found in mummies from that area.
WW2 technology may look primitive by today's standards, but from an engineer's perspective, a lot of it was far from simple to produce, especially in large quantities. Neither Britain nor the Soviets would have lasted over the long term during WW2 without massive amounts of US aid.
This is not to denigrate the courage, sacrifices, and skill exhibited by the British and Soviets in fighting the Germans, but none of these was enough by itself to win a war on the scale of WW2, a war that required massive quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, high technology, fuel, and people, plus the means of getting all this stuff to the front lines.
Equipment, munitions, and people were subject to very high attrition rates during the war. While both the Soviets and the British had some very capable scientists and engineers, neither nation was able to produce, by itself, the items needed in the quantities required to keep up with attrition. For example, the production of Hurricane and Spitfire fighters (in large quantities) depended upon a wide variety of critical parts imported into Britain (at one point including, ironically, some parts imported from Germany prior to the war!).
In the case of Britain, the USA supplied all three (equipment, munitions, and people) over the course of the war.
In the case of Russia, the USA directly supplied equipment and munitions to the Soviets (or the means the build them, such as huge numbers of machine tools, ball bearings, and key chemical processing equipment needed for things like aviation fuel). The USA also helped with the manpower problem (indirectly) by sending huge amounts of things like food and clothing, which in turn freed up large numbers of workers in the textile and food production sectors of the economy to fight (ironically, the Soviets were getting winter clothing when many US soldiers didn't have it!).
The Soviets also had enormous problems in getting raw materials to factories, getting components from one factory to another, and getting finished goods and other supplies to the front. Everyone had these problems, of course, but they were particularly bad for the Soviets. The solution involved massive amounts of rail stock and trucks, both of which the USA supplied (a recent estimate from a Russian scholar suggests that most of the trains running in the Soviet Union by the end of the war were using US equipment). Trains, of course, are the most efficient way of transporting large quantities of goods long distances on land, and trunks are essential for moving those goods from the rail heads to the front lines. Without both, your soldiers have no replacement food, clothing, ammunition, artillery, planes, tanks, etc to replace the losses and expenditures of combat.
If your WW2 education came from older sources, or from television, some of this may not have been discussed. Television presentations on the war tend to be superficial and often inaccurate, with especially little attention paid to issues like supply and logistics (which only professional soldiers and us engineering nerds seem to care about).
Even in the case of books, the older sources are often incomplete. Much has been learned since the end of the Cold War, with a lot of the research into what was actually happening in Russia being done by post-Cold War Russian scholars, and it is likely that this will be an active research area for many years to come.
If you want to learn more about the Soviet situation, you might start with Albert Weeks book (for an English language introduction). British military historian Corelli Barnett (The Audit of War) is a good starting point for learning about the issues Britain faced. Martin Creveld's book on military logistics may also be useful as a means of filling the gaps in your education concerning this important topic.
The USA could not have won WW2 alone (and without a doubt the British and Russians provided substantial aid in winning the war), but without the USA it certainly would have been lost.
Having programming C for many years, I can say that there are certainly some good things going for it, and it can be a fun language to use.
However, in many projects, with somewhat more modern languages (not necessarily just C++: Java and C# are good examples) I find that I get a substantial benefit in programming efficiency from the information hiding mechanisms and compile-time type checking. This is particularly important when working with large numbers of other people, but I find it helpful even when just rolling my own code.
The amount of "stuff" that I have to remember not to do when I'm programming in C (and can do almost anything) gets in the way of the amount of stuff I can simply modify with full confidence that it won't break anything because of the tools provided by the more modern languages (although, as Ada supported this kind of thing also, its probably not right to think of it as a "modern" language feature). This is particularly useful when I have to come back to code after a long time of not looking at it.
Mostly I avoid the more complex language features of C++, because that let's me reduce the amount of stuff other people have to know to be able to read my code. It would be nice to be able to simply turn off a lot of the language features that I don't expect to use, perhaps with some sort of "customizable" compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the right to ethical government arises under the 9th Amendment (arguably as the most important right arising under the 9th, certainly far more important than the rights recognized in existing 9th Amendment cases such as Roe vs. Wade). Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible. As a right to ethical government necessarily requires public oversight over campaign finance, the absence of traceability for donations is a violation of the Bill of Rights.
It follows that any holder of public office requiring an oath to uphold the Constitution, as a precondition to hold that office, who takes advantage of, utilizes, or directly benefits from such money is in violation of that oath (and thus disqualified from holding that office, or any other with a similar oath). Further, any law to the contrary would, of course, be contrary to the Constitution, and thus those passing such a law would themselves be in violation of their oaths, and thus disqualified from holding any such position. Judicial precedents to the contrary would also involve violations of the oaths of the judges involved, and would thus be invalid. This would even (and perhaps especially) be true at the level of the Supreme Court justices, who are most certainly required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution.
No law passed by Congress (and, indeed, no written law beyond the existing Bill of Rights) is thus required to make such conduct illegal: all laws passed by Congress can do is specify reporting procedures and penalties to help implement this right, and even then the laws can not be written in such a way as to make such unethical conduct legal. Similarly the State governments can not evade the public right to ethical government with public oversight, no matter what laws they may pass to the contrary.
Those who have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution have no legal standing to continue in positions that require such oaths as a precondition for such office. Hence, laws passed with oath-breaking legislators participating in the law-making process at any level, and precedents created by oath-breaking judges, have no legal standing.
Similarly, any political party accepting anonymous donations is in violation of the right to ethical government.
The ethics implications of the 9th Amendment are, of course, the reason this amendment is routinely ignored by government, the major political parties, and the legal profession, none of which has much interest in oversight by the public over ethics. Given how much effort has been expended in creating a legal climate that ignores the explicit provisions of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, it is not surprising that a mere implication of something as little known as the 9th Amendment should be routinely ignored.
As the Constitution requires an oath to uphold the Constitution for those taking high public office, those involved in passing (or enforcing, or upholding) such unconstitutional laws are in violation of the most important requirement for holding such office.
Further, if any right at all can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, it is certainly the right to ethical conduct on the part of members of government and legal professionals. This right vastly exceeds in importance the few rights actually upheld by high courts as arising under the 9th Amendment (such as in Roe vs. Wade). Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible.
At a minimum, violation of an oath of office, or of such a right, disqualifies any person so doing from holding any position of public trust or responsibility, or engaging in the practice of law, or receiving a pension or other benefit from the government. Attempting to claim a pension is appropriately viewed as criminal fraud, and attempting to continue in office is appropriately viewed as impersonating a government official.
Isn't it funny how that works?
Same with tax-code -- theoretically, everyone is subject to the same tax codes. However, people with several full-time attorneys on staff seems to do a lot better in minimizing their tax bills.
Coincidence?
No. Not a coincidence. The US legal system is riddled with ethical conflict of interest to the benefit of the legal profession. It's the reason why we have so many laws on the books, most of which only get enforced sporadically (and are therefore unnecessary). It's the reason all three major areas of "intellectual property" law are badly broken. It's the reason we are the "land of the lawsuit" and most of the rest of the world makes fun of us for being idiots. It's the reason ordinary people get hammered and humiliated for minor offences by the so-called "justice" system while politicians get away with all kinds of stuff.
We probably need to remove legal professionals from all decision making positions in the executive and legislative branches of government, at all levels, and make their role purely advisory. Even then we would have issues with the judges making decisions that benefit their profession at the expense of society (something that seems to happen with dreary regularity). Not likely to happen.
Taking control of legal ethics away from the bar associations might be the best we can hope for.
Unfortunately, very few people outside the legal profession bother to actually read law textbooks or follow court cases, which means that very few people know just how bad things have gotten.
This seems to me to be a result of the society as a whole putting way too much emphasis on the Constitution, and believing that it necessarily must equal all the basic rights.
The protection for privacy in the Constitution is notably rather weak, even more so when compared to many other modern democracies. I cannot say that this is a fault in the Constitution per se: The issues today simply are not the same as those in 1787.
Actually, it's quite the contrary: it's not that society is expecting the written and explicit material of the earlier portions of the Constitution, materially that is admittedly pretty thin, to explicitly deal with these issues, rather it is that society expects the government to acknowledge a whole host of rights that can reasonably be asserted under later portions of the "Constitution" (known as the Bill of Rights).
The Bill of Rights was written to deal with two Anti-Federalist objections to the Constitution that would have almost certainly been FATAL, namely 1) it had no Bill of Rights, and 2) any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. Two states, after all, refused to ratify the earlier document without a Bill of Rights, and in other states promises were made by men of honor (whose integrity was trusted) that an acceptable Bill of Rights would be added. It was clear to all concerned, of course, that if the people of these latter states were to be disappointed in their expectations with respect to a Bill of Rights, then they could simply leave the Union, something that at that point in history it was neither militarily nor politically feasible for other states to prevent.
To address these objections, James Madison deliberately set out to make a Bill of Rights that would limit the authority of government (and in so doing, potentially supersede anything found in the earlier parts of the Constitution), and that would be open-ended. This is why the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "reserved to the people".
Such unspecified rights form the basis of several books, and a number of high court decisions, of which Roe vs. Wade is perhaps the best known. Arguments made with respect to a Constitutional "right to privacy" are actually referring to a right arising under the open-ended aspect of the Bill of Rights, as a right "retained by" or "reserved to" the people. The people, in effect, are asserting that "privacy" is a right retained by them, and therefore superseding the authority of government at any level.
Unfortunately, government at various levels in the US has a long history of finding the existence of such rights inconvenient. Arguably, the legal profession -- as a class in society -- also tends to find these rights inconvenient, which further complicates matters, given how many members of government are legal professionals and how much influence the legal profession has on setting policy. For both groups, the fact that the government has been forced from time to time to acknowledge the existence of such rights clearly demonstrates how weak their position is, but logic seems to have little to do either with decision making by politicians or with the inability of the legal profession to acknowledge problems in their accustomed manner of doing business.
Unfortunately, judging from history, it takes serious and extended public pressure on the Supreme Court to force it to acknowledge the existence of rights "retained by the people" or "reserved to the people". Consider, for example, how long it took to undo the discrimination against African-Americans ("separate but not actually equal"), or to legalize any form of abortion for any reason (even saving the life of the mother).
There are likely ethical conflicts of interest that come into play with respect to the difficulty of getting the Supreme Court to acknowledge its responsibilities with respect to rights "retained by" or "reserved to" the people, since it doesn't seem possible to come up with any other explanation for this particular problem. After all, the Supreme Court justices have all sworn oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights (which REQUIRES them to acknowledge the open-ended aspect of that document).
They're already written in a 'sort of pseudo-code', legalese. Problem is it is very hard to debug and really easy to insert malicious code.
Additional problem: given that most legislators are legal professionals, as are many of their staff members, putting legalese in the laws inherently involves ethical conflict of interest. These people are effectively creating an artificial demand for the services of their profession in general, and for their specific services as individuals should they at some future point choose to leave their staff or legislative position.
Legalese in contracts involves a similar conflict of interest.
If a law or contract , in whole or in part, is indecipherable to an educated, intelligent adult, it should be treated as an illegal law or contract on the basis of legal ethics. We might even assert that a fundamental right to this effect arises under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
If a small amount of specialized terminology is necessary to the practice of law, then we could have a course in the history, philosophy, and practice of law be part of the standard high school curriculum, which would teach people those words as a part of a general education in understanding one's society. Any terminology that couldn't reasonably be taught in such a course should be invalid to include in those laws likely to directly affect the general public.
Or, putting this in different terms, just as a long term public oversight right exists with respect to the conduct of businesses (in order to prevent things like deliberate pollution of the environment, or rats in peanut butter), so too does a long term public oversight right exist with respect to government.
As a consequence of this right, persons or organizations receiving public funding for most types of research must, at some reasonable time after publication, make freely available to the public the results of that research. This rule allows publishers to make money off initial publication, thus supporting editing and review of publications, while ensuring the public eventually gets free and unfettered access to this material.
Even so much as 1 dollar of public funding being used at any point in the research process forces this right to be invoked in full.
In this day and age, making research freely available to the public means putting it on the Web, accessible to search engines, without advertisement, and free for download in some open well-defined format.
Such a right arises naturally under the 9th Amendment within the US legal system. No legislation by Congress or the state governments is required for this right to exist, and in fact, with respect to publicly funded research material, this right supersedes the authority of Congress to make laws infringing the right to copy or any other laws that might infringe this right.
Denial of this right by legal professionals is appropriately viewed as unethical conduct (as the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the authority of the people to assert rights under the 9th Amendment), and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Any existing laws that would contradict this right in whole or in part are illegal laws, and any prosecutor, law enforcement officer, or other government agent involved in the enforcement of such illegal laws is in violation of his or her oath to uphold the Bill of Rights. Similarly, any court orders or precedents that would contradict this right are invalid. Just as we would expect military officers to refuse to recognize the authority of laws that require them to commit crimes against humanity (Nuremberg Precedent), so to do we expect civil government officers to refuse to recognize the authority of laws, orders, and precedents that require or permit them to infringe fundamental rights.
Failure on the part of government to recognize the authority of this right not only removes the transfressing individuals from the government, immediately and permanantly and without any requirement for an Act of Congress or other government action (this is a minimum penalty: additional penalties may apply), but authorizes private citizens to act in place of the government, in a reasonable manner, to correct the situation in whole or in part.
Research on a few topics, such as weapons of mass destruction can be excluded from this rule, in the interests of not providing information to terrorists or rogue governments. Strict scrutiny must be used here to determine whether the research excluded is legitimately excluded.
Research on some military technologies (but not police technologies) may be excluded from publication for a longer time than other topics (at most 20 years, excepting the weapons of mass destruction).
Similarly, while data collected as a part of publicly funded research must generally be made available with the publication, this does not need to be done in cases where doing so would violate other fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy. Similarly, in some cases the amount of data involved may be prohibitive to publish for free: in such cases, if practical, it must be made available at cost.
Even for those topics legitimately excluded, some reasonable mechanism of oversight must exist.
A reasonable time to make the research available to the public after any initial commercial publication is 1 ye
1. There is no theoretical reason why cellphone radiation should be harmful.
The issue here is somewhat more complex than you may be aware.
A conventional view is that wave interaction with a media is a function of frequency. With ultrasound, for example, the high frequencies needed for high resolution do not penetrate deeply into the body. This is why it can be difficult to use ultrasound as a diagnostic tool for overweight people: the lower frequencies needed to penetate the thicker outer layers of the body may not be able to resolve sufficiently to reveal problems.
Just as with ultrasound waves, the traditional view is that electromagnetic waves have a penetration depth that is a function of frequency, and some measurements suggest a rough trend towards decreasing penetration as frequencies increase. I sometimes see people using this fact to assert that the high frequency electromagnetic waves associated with cell phones will not penetrate far enough into the body to be a problem.
The "penetration depth as a function of frequency" idea is a useful model in many situations, however, there are some potential problems with using this idea to understand the interaction of electromagnetic waves with human subjects:
1. The media of the human body is quite diverse. It is the interaction of the wave with the particular medium at a particular point that matters, which may be different from some average tissue measurement made on a laboratory sample. This makes it difficult to generalize from measurements taken on tissue samples to a real body of a living person.
2. The "depth as a function of frequency" model assumes linearity. The real world is non-linear, meaning that interactions of waves with systems can produce energy at frequencies other than the measurement frequency. This effect is taken advantage of in ultrasound systems that use so-called "harmonic imaging" to enhance resolution: it's a real effect, not just some theoretical concept. Similar behavior can be expected from electromagnetic waves. Any measurements of the interaction of waves with the human body must be carefully examined for hidden assumptions of linearity.
3. In Quantum Mechanics there is an idea called wave-particle duality. Measurements that assume a wave model of the underlying phenomena in a system may fail to fully characterize that system because they miss particle effects. The belief that all negative electromagnetic effects are heat-related is a particularly dubious assumption with respect to this issue.
4. Another thing to consider: the measured effects of ultrasound on the body are very different from the measured effects of electromagnetic radiation, and yet, at its core, ultrasound IS electromagnetic. We don't list sound as one of the fundamental forces of the universe, after all. In a sense, the concept of sound is simply a useful abstraction we use for some physics situations where applying Maxwell's equations isn't practical (much like all of chemistry). So, if one essentially electrical phenomena gives us such different results from another, then how much confidence should we have in our understanding of what is actually going on?
In addition to these considerations, it is very difficult to reliably make medical measurements on human subjects: there are many potential confounding variables, and correlation is not causation. The human body is immensely complex and there is still so much we don't know about it. Often people that have never done medical research or worked as a part of a medical research group have a very unrealistic view of what is possible. The absence of data may indicate that we don't have a problem, but it could also indicate that the measurements simply aren't good enough yet to reveal an existing problem.
In short, before we can conclude that there are no theoretical issues with respect to the effect of cellphone radiation on the body, we must carefully consider the question: "To what extent can we trust our measurements and our models?"
Suvorov discusses a whole bunch of evidence that suggests Stalin was actually setting up an invasion of Germany. The movement of troops and equipment associated with setting up this attack made the Soviets extremely vulnerable to the German attack. For example, large numbers Soviet tanks were on trains being moved to the border when the attack occurred, making them very vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.
That's the evidence of the opposite -- that they were not expecting the war until it happened. Only a conspiracy theorist completely detached from reality would turn it into confirmation of something opposite.
You're completely misinterpreting what was actually written in the post. At no point did I claim the Soviets were expecting the attack. Suvorov (a former GRU intelligence officer, who claims to have had access to the relevant records) indicates that Stalin was not, in fact, expecting the German's to attack, as a result of military intelligence indicating that the Germans were not preparing their troops and equipment for winter operations. This, presumably, is why he felt confident in moving his units as he did.
Trains, of course, are the only practical way to deploy tanks long distances on land. There are pictures from the war showing some of these trains, damaged, with the tanks still on them. As the tanks were completely helpless on the damaged trains, the Germans were able to recover many of them (much as they used captured Chek tanks in the invasion of France: just because the train couldn't move due to damage didn't mean the tanks were unusable, if one had time and the right heavy equipment). Note that within the first ten days of the war, the Germans captured 1200 tanks and 600 guns. By day 17, these numbers had more than doubled.
In my experience, there is no such thing as a person that's "not the creative type". Instead, we have people who have learned to be creative, and those who still haven't learned this.
Creativity can be defined as nothing more than putting two ideas together in a way you've never thought of before. It's not some mystical attribute reserved to badly dressed, long-haired, pot smokers. There is no requirement to solve Einstein-level problems to be creative. If you're open minded about this, and practice appropriate activities, you can learn to do it. See Karl Albrecht's book on thinking skills for more details on this.
As a occasional dance teacher, I have seen many students who strongly believed that they were "not the creative type" learn that, in fact, they could be creative. Often, the first time a student learns this is when they screw up, then manage to recover, and in the process discover that they've just done something new! There is nothing magical about this, except perhaps for the smile on someone's face when they realize what they've just done.
Don't get me started about the people that think they have "two left feet", or no "sense of rhythm" ...
To be fair, the arguments and evidence presented by the folks that claim the nuclear bombing was a bad decision are themselves problematic.
For example, in such writing we often find a number of well-known public statements that were made by various civilian and military leaders after the fact. These statements can be reasonably supposed to be biased by the public perception of just how horrific the radiation effects of these weapons are, something which wasn't fully understood until after the event. It is not at all clear that these same people would have had any problem with the decision before this was known.
During the war, a single conventional bombing mission could kill over a hundred thousand people. For instance, over 124,000 were killed during the Tokyo mission on the night of March 9-10, 1945. Compare this to the roughly 70,000 deaths associated with the initial blast of the Hiroshima bomb (the total deaths due to the bomb were higher than this, due to the radiation effects, something that they probably didn't realize would happen) ...
It is certain that vastly more people were killed by conventional bombing than by atomic weapons in WW2 (even considering the deaths by radiation).
For that matter, the deaths by atomic weapons were less than half a percent of the total numbers of people killed during the war.
It's not particularly reasonable to suppose that these leaders (whose statements are being used to support the argument that the bombing was a bad decision) didn't know something of this, whatever they may have said in public after the fact, which makes anything they say about this issue suspect ...
Another point that is often overlooked in the course of these arguments is the high numbers of casualties happening during battles as those battles moved closer to Japan. During the battle for the mere 463 square miles of Okinawa there were roughly 165,000 military casualties, and an estimated 142,000 civilian casualties (compare this to the 3604 casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack). It was not at all unreasonable to suppose that the casualties associated with an invasion of Japan, with its vastly larger population would have been far higher (note that casualties includes both killed and wounded).
Yet another consideration neglected by the authors of these arguments involves thinking about what might have happened had the Soviets invaded and been in a position to claim some of Japan post-war. Stalin was responsible for an estimated tens of millions of deaths outside of battle: it's not unreasonable to suppose he would have killed far more Japanese than the atomic bombs did ...
It was an ugly period in history, and hopefully one we will never see again.
France and England stood by and LET Hitler take what he wanted with Chamberlain signing non-aggression pacts and getting autographed night stand pictures of Hitler all because of the sour taste that WWI left in the mouths of Europeans.
There is a lot of truth to this. However, it is also worth considering the military state of Britain and France at this time. Many British and French units were still organized to fight the kinds of battles that occurred in WW1 or in colonial conflicts. For example, some RAF units were still flying biplanes, while the Germans had been using (and flying in combat) monoplane designs during the Spanish Civil War. While both were re-arming to modern standards, there were very serious problems with French production and the British had started quite late. Further, neither Britain nor France had the ability to directly move troops into Czechoslovakia. These points doubtless would have been known to the leaders of both nations, so there were certainly factors other than the "sour taste" of WWI that can help explain the decisions that were made.
I'd recommend just a few of the more recent documentaries or World at War if you can find it.
There are some excellent documentaries. The veteran interviews are particularly helpful in understanding the history. However, it is necessary to be very careful in relying on video sources on WWII, which frequently contain errors.
That's a good summary, Japan was all but defeated in the Pacific and on the mainland, the nukes just drove the point home.
The casualty numbers were getting very high as the battles moved closer to Japan. The battle for Okinawa, for example, resulted in roughly 165,000 military personnel being killed or wounded, tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and 173 allied ships being damaged or sunk.
While strategically it is reasonable to say that Japan was "all but defeated", in the sense of having no possibility of being able to win the war, that is not the same thing as saying that finishing the war with conventional military forces would have been inexpensive in human lives.
Another thing to consider (often neglected in these kinds of discussions) is what would have happened had the Soviets invaded Japan and held it after the war. Stalin killed millions ... Giving the Japanese a reason to surrender may have ultimately saved far more lives than it cost.
In fact, strategic bombing had a minimal impact on German production...
There is a bit of a slippery argument. Germany, unlike Britain, operated for quite a long time with its economy on a peacetime basis, not optimized for war. This meant that once they started getting serious about wartime production, the production levels invariably went up, in spite of the slowly increasing effectiveness of the strategic bombing. It is likely that in the absence of strategic bombing the production numbers would have been even higher.
There was one critical aspect of the strategic bombing that did (eventually) work quite well, and that was the bombing of the German synthetic oil factories. The Germans never did run out equipment, but they did run out fuel for their tanks and aircraft.
During the course of the war, about 1 million Germans ended up working in the air defense system. The air defenses used enormous numbers of planes, pilots, guns, ammunition, and fuel. See Robin Neilland's book "The Bomber War" for more details. These numbers show that Allied Air Power played a very important role: consider, for example, what might have happened on the Eastern Front had all these resources been available for use there...
At the start of the war USSR was poorly prepared for it -- Stalin was convinced that Germany is not interested in attacking USSR because he seen it as a part of Western politics, and Stalin's own doctrine was that USSR must develop Socialism and Communism while keeping itself in isolation from Capitalist countries around it.
This is a classical viewpoint, generated before the end of the Cold War, in an attempt to explain some very puzzling aspects of the history of WW2.
Since the Cold War ended, Russian and other former Soviet researchers, with access to documents that were previously classified and unavailable, have been producing publications that completely contradict some aspects of the earlier histories.
See, for example, Viktor Suvorov's book "Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II".
Suvorov discusses a whole bunch of evidence that suggests Stalin was actually setting up an invasion of Germany. The movement of troops and equipment associated with setting up this attack made the Soviets extremely vulnerable to the German attack. For example, large numbers Soviet tanks were on trains being moved to the border when the attack occurred, making them very vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.
As far as the "warm bodies" issue goes, some Soviet veterans have given interviews in which they described being sent into battle with one rifle between 30 untrained men, so this misconception is understandable if not particularly accurate.
According to Suvorov, in some respects the Soviets were actually far ahead of the West in military equipment and tactics (as they demonstrated against the Japanese shortly before WW2), but much of their equipment was lost in the initial weeks of the invasion, and many of their best units were disorganized or destroyed, leading to a very difficult supply situation and a shortage of trained units.
The key point that you've missed is that engineering is based upon science, which in turn in based upon observation, hypothesis, and experiment. Software engineering is, in fact, engineering, for the simple reason that the typical software engineer is doing many experiments in the course of building a software system. These experiments simply happen to be done on a computer. Not all that different from the simulations of the more traditional engineer, in this day and age.
Activities or government policies can only be called "social engineering" if they involve experiment. This isn't splitting hairs, it's a matter of understanding what engineering (and science) is fundamentally all about.
You make some excellent points about the consequences of a single tax policy.
However, I'm not sure that a policy having consequences means that we're doing engineering. Any policy at all, even no policy, will have consequences.
The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development has defined "engineering" as
"The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination" ...
The fact that a policy has consequences does not mean that we are in any sense doing science or applying scientific principles ...
It is not at all clear that a single tax policy is unworkable in the same sense as communism. One key reason for the failure of communism is that no human being or group of human beings can predict or manage a complex market with reliable accuracy over the long term (a point Thomas Sowell discusses at more length in his Basic Economics book).
A tax policy, on the other hand, only has to produce the money needed for essential government services, and perhaps a bit more to smooth out changes in income from year to year (much like a capacitor smooths an input signal), a much simpler task. It really doesn't matter how that money is collected, from the point of view of spending it.
This is a rather stupid comment: there's no way to avoid doing social engineering with taxes. Whatever you do with taxation, it's going to affect society somehow.
If a single tax, income based, using a simple and rarely changed formula is social engineering, then folding a piece of paper is aeronautical engineering, and pouring oneself a glass of water is materials science.
You may want to try to spend some time thinking about these issues from a social science perspective. Humans form cultural groups. Often, these cultural groups have ideas, values, perspectives, ways of doing things, and so forth that are not entirely rational, or ethical, or useful, or efficient, even counter-productive. This is something of a norm: it's common and possibly even unavoidable.
Legal professionals in the USA form a cultural group.
It is often difficult for members of a cultural group to realize the extent to which problems exist with their cherished ideas, beliefs, and values. Doing this requires the ability to mentally step outside the shared assumptions and beliefs of the group. Even for trained social scientists, with many years of field experience, this is difficult. Few legal professionals will have this kind of background, which means that doing this will be challenging for them, but it is possible if one is willing to spend the time and be open-minded about questioning one's beliefs. Taking a few years to informally study anthropology, psychology, and sociology can be a useful starting point or tool to help one in learning to think this way, especially if you make a point of interacting with professionals in these fields and asking lots of questions.
With respect to this, and to what you said in your post, there are a few specific things you may want to think about at more length.
First: there are many different forms of "bribes", not all of which involve cash payments. For example, being selected for a particular position in government may constitute a bribe. There is considerable concern as to what, exactly, judges do to get selected for their positions (in the case of judges that are voted into office, a similar concern exists with respect to what they do to get the support of a political party). People wonder if arrangements are being made behind closed doors, at least in some cases. Possible arrangements might not involve constraining the actions of the judges in all of their official actions. This, of course, would have the effect of creating the illusion of impartiality or competence, while retaining for some party the ability to influence the decision of a judge in a particular situation. Arguably, the more complex the legal system, the easier it is to hide this kind of thing. In such cases, it would be in the interests of the parties involved to have as few people as possible in the know, and to have most of the people who work with the judge be entirely innocent and unaware of any wrong-doing.
Second: there is a tendency for legal professionals to claim that when those outside the profession do not understand a decision, then that is result of their ignorance of the law. The public, in other words, is treated like ignorant sheep, whose bleating should be ignored. But there is another way of looking at this. The concept that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" need not just refer to vigilance over the government, but can also refer to the need for vigilance over the legal profession. If the public does not understand the law, does that mean that the public is in the wrong, or should we take that as an indication that there is something wrong with the law, or with the legal system, or with the cultural assumptions the legal profession is making when they engage in the practice of law? Under what circumstances is it legitimate for a legal system to be so complex that it is beyond the understanding of the common person?
Here is a related consideration: the Bill of Rights, which all legal professionals presumably swear oaths to uphold, provides for rights "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people" (9th and 10th Amendments). This was put in the document by James Madison for very important reasons. If our legal professionals get in the habit of assuming that the beliefs of the people are irrelevant to the practice of law, perhaps by means of offering a pretext that the public simply doesn't understand the law and theref
And no, it's perfectly fair, the buyer uses it regardless of where he or she buys from.
It isn't perfectly fair. For a person choosing to make some of their purchases outside some governmental jurisdiction that charges sales taxes, a "use tax" creates a huge documentation and record-keeping burden, in order to keep track of which purchases have had taxes paid on them and which have not.
In other words, people who are making rational purchasing decisions (decisions that in most cases are completely uninfluenced by the tax issue, a point that has been discussed many times on Slashdot) are being unfairly penalized by the government for doing so.
Don't forget, some people live close to state or local government borders, and have the majority of their available local shopping on the far side of those borders. It's not even close to rational to make people drive a long distance to make purchases in their own state when there is convenient shopping that might be, for example, 5 minutes away on the far side of the border.
If we allow "use taxes", then these people must keep track of almost all of their purchases, recording what was purchased, and which of potentially multiple jurisdictions (city government, county government, state government) have and need to receive sales tax payments (an item that local government places sales tax on may not necessarily also be taxed at the state level, and vice-versa), how much sales tax was paid at time of purchase, what is still owed to each of the different governments having jurisdiction at the location where one lives, and must be prepared to provide all that information to one or possibly multiple levels of government for audit purposes (a huge violation of privacy rights in itself: the list of personal possessions of an individual is not something government at any level has any business knowing). Then we also have the situation where purchases are made on federal land, such as national parks or military bases, or overseas, thus requiring one to know any federal policies that may be applicable ...
It's hard enough for businesses to keep track of all the details of sales tax changes from one jurisdiction to another, and from one year to another, let alone requiring this of everyone! This is an absurd situation that clearly violates a number of fundamental rights, and there is clearly something wrong with the people in government that are even considering doing this.
If we don't allow "use taxes" on some people, as a result of these considerations, then we can't put them on anyone.
To make things more complicated, it's not really clear that government at any level has the legal authority to tax the purchase or use of some types of items. For example, non-fiction educational materials are the primary means by which citizens learn enough about the world they live in to make intelligent decisions about their government. Does it really make sense to tax the purchase of these items?
Actually, the unresolved issues with sales tax are not just limited to mail-order situations.
Delaware, for existence, has no sales tax. No legitimate mechanism of law can be used to prevent folks living near the Delaware border from crossing the border, and making purchases without paying sales taxes in their home states (thus exercising their strict-scrutiny-protected right to travel, which naturally includes the right to make purchases while traveling without being subject to excessive bureaucracy while doing so).
Of course, this is much less convenient for folks living far from appropriate state borders, and thus the amount of sales tax one ends up paying depends upon where one lives.
In other words, sales taxes are not just taxes that discriminate against the poor, they are also taxes that discriminate based upon where one lives. It's an absurd situation, like so much associated with government.
This isn't a new problem caused by the internet either.
It's not just old fashioned snail mail orders, only. The issue is far more fundamental for that. Anybody living near the border between two states poses a problem for the whole concept of sales tax, particularly when the travel time to stores in the other state is considerably less than it is to stores in one's own state, and the tax rates are less in the other state.
Expecting people to keep track of the location for every purchase they make for some sort of "use tax" is blatantly a violation of fundamental rights.
Unfortunately, government at many levels in the US is willing to pass laws that violate the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights.
Creating contradictions in the legal system increases the long term demand for the services of legal professionals. Hence, it should be no surprise that our legislators (most of whom are legal professionals), continue to create laws that do exactly this, and our judges (most of whom are also legal professionals) choose to uphold laws that contradict the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Both parties in acting in violation of their oaths of office, of course, when they do this, but there doesn't seem to be enough people in with system with integrity for this to matter, and so long as "we the people" don't pay attention to this issue, this problem will continue.
The big problem with the sales tax issue is not specifically a Constitutional one, but a fundamental issue of freedom. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose, in the pre-internet days, a person was to live near the border of a state. Across the border, in a state with no sales tax, are stores providing the necessities of life, within a five minute drive of this person's home. Within his or her state, the nearest store is a 1 hour drive in each direction. Under these circumstances, any rational individual would clearly choose to make their purchases at the nearby stores (not only would this save substantial amounts of time from their life, but it would be environmentally the right thing to do).
Further, it would clearly not be a legitimate act of government to force the individual to make a lengthy drive simply to shop: a right to not have one's time wasted must necessarily be a fundamental freedom.
Similarly, it would clearly not be a legitimate act of government to force the individual to keep track of every purchase made, and whether or not it was made locally, in order to then force that person to pay taxes: a right to not be subject to excessive bureaucracy is certainly a fundamental freedom.
Now take this thought experiment to the present day. The Internet is simply a form of technology that has effectively moved this border closer to every person: if it was not legitimate to tax out of state purchases before, then it can not be so now.
There are two ethically sound options here: 1) Have a national sales tax, and bar state sales tax entirely, and 2) have no sales taxes at all, making up the lost revenue in income taxes.
Eliminating sales tax entirely is the more intelligent policy, as sales taxes represent both a) double taxation on earned income, always a legally and ethically suspect policy, and b) sales taxes are biased against those who least afford to pay them: it is not possible to ethically justify the extra complexity this creates in the legal system when we are also having progressive income taxation.
Also, in the fertile crescent lands (Egypt especially), beer was one of the few (health-wise) safe means of hydrating yourself.
Beer in Nubia (south of Egypt) was also a likely source of the anti-biotic tetracycline, according to research by George Armelagos and Mark Nelson. This was originally discovered when large amounts of tetracycline were found in mummies from that area.
WW2 technology may look primitive by today's standards, but from an engineer's perspective, a lot of it was far from simple to produce, especially in large quantities. Neither Britain nor the Soviets would have lasted over the long term during WW2 without massive amounts of US aid.
This is not to denigrate the courage, sacrifices, and skill exhibited by the British and Soviets in fighting the Germans, but none of these was enough by itself to win a war on the scale of WW2, a war that required massive quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, high technology, fuel, and people, plus the means of getting all this stuff to the front lines.
Equipment, munitions, and people were subject to very high attrition rates during the war. While both the Soviets and the British had some very capable scientists and engineers, neither nation was able to produce, by itself, the items needed in the quantities required to keep up with attrition. For example, the production of Hurricane and Spitfire fighters (in large quantities) depended upon a wide variety of critical parts imported into Britain (at one point including, ironically, some parts imported from Germany prior to the war!).
In the case of Britain, the USA supplied all three (equipment, munitions, and people) over the course of the war.
In the case of Russia, the USA directly supplied equipment and munitions to the Soviets (or the means the build them, such as huge numbers of machine tools, ball bearings, and key chemical processing equipment needed for things like aviation fuel). The USA also helped with the manpower problem (indirectly) by sending huge amounts of things like food and clothing, which in turn freed up large numbers of workers in the textile and food production sectors of the economy to fight (ironically, the Soviets were getting winter clothing when many US soldiers didn't have it!).
The Soviets also had enormous problems in getting raw materials to factories, getting components from one factory to another, and getting finished goods and other supplies to the front. Everyone had these problems, of course, but they were particularly bad for the Soviets. The solution involved massive amounts of rail stock and trucks, both of which the USA supplied (a recent estimate from a Russian scholar suggests that most of the trains running in the Soviet Union by the end of the war were using US equipment). Trains, of course, are the most efficient way of transporting large quantities of goods long distances on land, and trunks are essential for moving those goods from the rail heads to the front lines. Without both, your soldiers have no replacement food, clothing, ammunition, artillery, planes, tanks, etc to replace the losses and expenditures of combat.
If your WW2 education came from older sources, or from television, some of this may not have been discussed. Television presentations on the war tend to be superficial and often inaccurate, with especially little attention paid to issues like supply and logistics (which only professional soldiers and us engineering nerds seem to care about).
Even in the case of books, the older sources are often incomplete. Much has been learned since the end of the Cold War, with a lot of the research into what was actually happening in Russia being done by post-Cold War Russian scholars, and it is likely that this will be an active research area for many years to come.
If you want to learn more about the Soviet situation, you might start with Albert Weeks book (for an English language introduction). British military historian Corelli Barnett (The Audit of War) is a good starting point for learning about the issues Britain faced. Martin Creveld's book on military logistics may also be useful as a means of filling the gaps in your education concerning this important topic.
The USA could not have won WW2 alone (and without a doubt the British and Russians provided substantial aid in winning the war), but without the USA it certainly would have been lost.
Having programming C for many years, I can say that there are certainly some good things going for it, and it can be a fun language to use.
However, in many projects, with somewhat more modern languages (not necessarily just C++: Java and C# are good examples) I find that I get a substantial benefit in programming efficiency from the information hiding mechanisms and compile-time type checking. This is particularly important when working with large numbers of other people, but I find it helpful even when just rolling my own code.
The amount of "stuff" that I have to remember not to do when I'm programming in C (and can do almost anything) gets in the way of the amount of stuff I can simply modify with full confidence that it won't break anything because of the tools provided by the more modern languages (although, as Ada supported this kind of thing also, its probably not right to think of it as a "modern" language feature). This is particularly useful when I have to come back to code after a long time of not looking at it.
Mostly I avoid the more complex language features of C++, because that let's me reduce the amount of stuff other people have to know to be able to read my code. It would be nice to be able to simply turn off a lot of the language features that I don't expect to use, perhaps with some sort of "customizable" compiler.