Most of what companies do makes sense to no one but them. A company is not a single entity, even, but a whole group of idiots with different priorities and different ideas of how to do things, who probably don't talk with each other all that often, and even less often actually agree.
A previous employer shipped their entire business, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of electronics equipment, all over the world in reusable plastic boxes with the companies name on them, sealed with velcro. Every time, at least a half a dozen people who were not their employees handled the boxes and had access to everything in them. They still did credit checks on potential employees.
In the IT industry especially, companies are fine with treating local employees like criminals, but then are more than willing to outsource essential work to god-knows-who in skeezy third-world countries.
Not trusting random people on the street is one thing. But not trusting employees is the sign of a ridiculous, horrible company.
There are several articles lately on all the stupid personal information that employers want to dig up on applicants:
credit report insurance history car type "mode of living"
What do most of these have in common? What do they want to know? They want to know that you keep all of your money in a bank account. They want to know that your retirement is invested in the stock market. They want to know that you vote and that you have a home phone line. They want to know that you have a brand new American car. They want to know that you have credit cards and that you are in debt up to your eyeballs. They want to know that you are a typical sheep.
What does this have to do with doing a job? Absolutely nothing.
Then why do they want to know all of this? Because most companies don't actually pay their employees: their banks do. And banks want to keep their money close to them, circulating in their little system. They don't want to employ anyone who might not hand their wages right back in one way or another. They want to give jobs to people who are fully invested in their little fraud that they have going. They want good little workers who are frightened when government officials talk about the economy collapsing. They want employees who enjoy seeing the government bail out failing companies and failing banks.
They want workers who will pay 10% of their earnings in interest, 25% in taxes, 15% on food, 35% on a mortgage, 10% on consumer goods, 2% on prescription drugs, 8% on a car, and 5% on insurance. They want companies that will hire workers who do so.
And the criminals in the US government take our property and earnings from us by force so they can hand it over to these fraudsters and perpetuate their illegal rackets.
I wonder whether any reduced lifetime or design flaws of new materials like these will be factored-in by those who implement them. There is obviously a lot of room for snake-oil salesmen to set up shop and exploit the world's move towards carbon-neutrality by over-promising on products that would normally last for decades. It would be a very-bad-thing if the shortcomings of more environmentally-friendly products were not priced-in from the outset.
But it would be even more destructive if the move towards environmentally-friendly products and processes turned out to be an extension of the "designed obsolescence" movement of recent past. Cement has a fatal flaw as a product: it lasts a long time. Perhaps an entire lifetime, or more. Bridges and roads last a long time. Houses don't have to be re-built every generation. Mortgages expire. Producers, sellers and governments hate products like this. Producers want to keep producing forever, as long as they don't have too much competition. Sellers want to keep selling forever, earning a tidy profit. Governments don't handle inter-generational wealth transfer well. So-called "consumers" hate long-lasting products too. They constantly want new stuff to replace their old stuff. They want jobs making that new stuff. Sheeple appreciate the stability of going to work every day to get paid less and less, just as long as they are boiled slowly and can pass most of the buck to future generations.
Self-destructing concrete, if more environmentally friendly than the regular kind, could even be government-mandated. Construction jobs would go on forever! Recessions would be a thing of the past! Cyclical fluctuations in the economy would be replaced with one big perma-recession. We could all hold hands and join in one big suicide pact for humanity, that wouldn't come due until all the the easily available energy and mineral resources run out and we're already dead and buried.
People keep talking about the cost to future generations of carbon emissions, caps and taxes. But how does that occur, exactly? It's clear how carbon emissions might affect future inhabitants of Earth. The CO2 will be there in the atmosphere, heating the globe, affecting the Earth. There is debate as to what those effects may be, but it's clear how it occurs. But how do caps and taxes affect future inhabitants? Well there's the lost opportunity-cost of all the cool stuff we could have bought instead of investing in green technologies. We could have more stereos and TVs and bigger houses with copper roofs and stainless appliances. Or we can forego some of that and have renewable energy instead. We can make do with smaller TVs and fewer stereos and smaller houses with tin roofs and less-fancy appliances. And I think many people would choose to do that if given the choice. The choice is fairly straightforward.
But it's an even larger problem when the choice is not so clear. If people are told that they can have the same amenities and live the same lifestyle while also making gains in CO2 emissions, something doesn't add up. If green products come out that make grand promises of equivalence with existing, less green products, consumers will likely believe them. If, or when, those new products fail to live up to the expectations, there is potential for huge economic losses. It is one thing to make a decision to curtail consumption in exchange for a more green, renewable world. It is quite another to trade an existing lifestyle for some crapshoot on vague promises or outright fraud, brought to you by corporations that are only interested in next quarter's profits and governments that are only interested in paying off their cronies before their term expires.
The summary is confusing. The CO2 comes from two places, from the fuel burned to heat the limestone (calcium carbonate), and from the calcium carbonate itself. Simply using renewable heating methods would not eliminate all of the CO2 emissions as the majority result from the chemical reaction of the material itself. The solution is to use a different material that does not emit CO2 or will re-adsorb CO2 over it's lifetime without losing strength.
I think I recall reading that the brain expends a large portion of the body's total energy in processing visual information. Having twice as many eyes might not be worth the extra food required to operate them.
I think you will find that most human reactions that occur "when it's cold outside" exist to help people survive in extremely cold weather. Maintaining a body temperature of 98.6 degrees in anything from 30 to 110 degree environments is quite a feat.
The benefit of a runny nose is to loosen mucous and prevent respiratory infections. This is obviously more important for people with large noses adapted for cold weather and those who spend long periods of time in confined spaces, during a long winter for example.
I think we'll see a point where smart people start to opt out of the education system sooner, merely because they don't want to wade through busywork (and spending money like crazy) until graduate school, where they can actually set themselves apart.
Since I don't want to get into a protracted discussion of what Ms. Sotomayor does and doesn't believe based on wild speculation, here's a quote from her on what rights she recognizes:
Rights by a court are not looked at as "overriding" in the sense that I think a Citizen would think about it.
So yes she recognizes something resembling the Rights in the Constitution. But not in the way they are actually contained in the Constitution, as part of the Supreme law of the land and overriding the laws of Congress that conflict with those Rights. In some other, unconstitutional way which she doesn't really describe very well.
and those weren't defined by Congress.
One glaring detail that modern jurists have completely missed in their zeal to reconcile the foundations of US government with atheism and moral relativism and socialism and some other goofy modern philosophies is that Rights don't actually need to be defined by anyone. They are not defined by government. They are not defined by the Constitution. They are merely recognized and protected by the Constitution. They were "defined" by the "Creator". Not the Christian god. Not the Magna Charta. Not Robespierre or Washington. The nebulous "other", a bullshit pretend made-up entity to give the intractable determinists some source for the sourceless.
In regard to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (or property, depending on whether we're talking Dec. of Ind. or Locke), you're absolutely right that she doesn't consider those "rights". Nor should she, in the sense we're talking about.
First of all, "Life, Liberty and Property" rights are recognized in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, not just "Locke". So if you are now claiming that Sotomayor does not recognize those rights, then you can go ahead and retract your previous assertion.
But, quite frankly, unless you have some source for this, you're just making things up about what Sotomayor does and doesn't believe.
You want to see the jurisprudence that would accumulate after a few years of people suing on the basis of the government denying them their right to pursue happiness? I sure as hell don't.
No, of course not. I want to see government stop fucking with every aspect of people's lives completely. And that is what would happen if we had a functional judiciary with the balls to hold our government to it's original, delegated powers. But we don't. We have a lazy judiciary that doesn't want to deal with any more paperwork than necessary.
The Ninth Amendment doesn't say a thing about what these retained rights are, making it a good aspirational sentiment for how the government should be run, but a terrible basis for jurisprudence.
Yeah, and that might give the courts something to do. But instead the courts don't do a goddamn thing because they are full of worthless shirking government apologists who live on the same VIP mortgages from unconstitutionally-chartered mortgage agencies and the same retirement accounts with fraudulent unregulated banks invested in the same economically destructive human-rights-violating military contractors and getting the same free golf trips from lobbyists and the same lecture fees at unconstitutionally-funded universities as the rest of the worthless government.
Okay, well, here's the thing. And it's kind of a basic thing in regards to US government. And it's kind of a fundamental aspect of what you're arguing too, if you have the intellectual honesty and mental ability to take it to it's ultimate consequences:
I don't recognize the rights of anyone who doesn't recognize mine.
And if the US government is going to continually fail to recognize the rights of US citizens, then we will no longer recognize the US government.
And maybe I didn't go to Princeton because I didn't have the right skin color, unlike Ms. Sotomayor. But I still had better grades and test scores and credentials than she and most of the flunkie retards in the US government. And maybe I was still paid a lot of money to attend university and I fully understand the origins and consequences of moral relativism. Maybe.
Sotomayor: Rights by a court are not looked at as "overriding" in the sense that I think a Citizen would think about it.
This is, flatly, wrong. And troubling. It displays a shocking disconnect between the judiciary and citizenry. In fact, it reveals a disconnect between the judiciary and even the Constitution itself.
Rights certainly override other rights in different situations. Rights are balanced against other rights outside the context of written laws every day by individuals and in the courts. Rights are in fact "overriding" in relation to laws of the Congress, as they were expressly reserved to the people in the US Constitution itself:
Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The only rights and laws that the Supreme Court can rule on are those stated in the Constitution and passed by Congress.
All Rights are stated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court can rule on all of them, and has, and does. And anyone even considered for inclusion on the highest court should at least recognize this fact.
No judge agrees with that.
And that's my point. The US judiciary is currently acting in a wholly unconstitutional, irresponsible manner with regard to individual liberties. And it is being reflected in the wildly irresponsible actions of the other branches and of Americans as a whole. There is a complete breakdown of personal responsibility in this country. And it can be attributed directly to so-called "leaders" like Ms. Sotomayor who shrug their shoulders and claim an inability to so much as recognize the rights of Americans as enshrined in our Constitution.
The distinction is between a theory of natural rights and that of a government defined and created by the those it will govern:
These are not mutually exclusive. I would hope that a nominee to the US Supreme Court would have, you know, actually read the fucking US Constitution and understood this, seeing as how that document is one of the primary examples of such a constitutionally-limited, federalist government with explicit recognition of both natural and civil rights.
There are no inalienable rights in a government by compact.
Sure, there are. There are the rights reserved in the Bill of Rights.
The First Amendment is no more sacrosanct than the Eighteenth - Prohibition.
Actually, yes some Amendments are more "sacrosanct" than others. Amendments must have the ability to alter and override previous sections of the document that conflict with those amendments. If that were not the case, there would be no process of "amendment" whatsoever. The 21st Amendment, for instance, is more sacrosanct than the 18th.
If I wrote up a legal contract for a wedding cake that said "The cake shall be blue" and later added an amendment to say "The cake shall be red", I would be pretty pissed off if the baker brought me a fucking purple cake. I would want my amendment of "red" to override the previous stipulation of "blue". I would not want the baker to "interpret" the contract and come to some bullshit hybrid conclusion, as judges routinely do in order to justify ignoring explicitly protected individual rights written right into the fucking US Constitution.
It can be repealed - and the rules are the same.
But we're not talking about repealing anything so I'm not sure what this has to do with the discussion.
Furthermore, we aren't even talking about Amendments in relation to other sections of the Constitution. We're talking about Amendments in relation to laws passed by the legislature. And in that case, certainly the judiciary has the power and duty to interpret and strike down those laws not in accord with the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution and it's Amendments.
It conflicts with John Marshall's interpretation of the Constitution - but an unequivocal grant of judicial review isn't to be found in the text.
Article III, Section II:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution
Seems fairly explicit to me. Since it was also explicit to the second Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I'd take his word for it and forget what your Civics teacher told you.
The US Constitution is the highest law of the land. The US Constitution includes the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights includes the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I'm not arguing one way or another, because this particular case is irrelevant to me. But the right to "download the latest Brittany Spears record", if it exists, is certainly protected by the Ninth Amendment. All US law is subject to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, even Copyright law.
The judiciary can only throw out laws that are in violation of the Constitution. But the protections of the Constitution are extremely broad. It is certainly not an act of "judicial activism" to throw out laws that violate the un-enumerated rights of Americans.
You're right that my description was both unnecessarily broad and restrictive. Instead of "inalienable" I should have said that Sotomayor expressed her belief that the Supreme Court recognizes no rights whatsoever beyond those defined by the Congress.
The rights I am concerned about are the subset of those inalienable rights defined by the Declaration of Independence (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness) which were expressly reserved in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
I will not enter into a discussion of the specific boundaries of those rights as I stated my primary concern is the fact that the US judiciary currently denies their existence in complete contradiction with the Constitution of the United States and most of the several states.
Lawyers (and judges) these days have literally zero concept of a law being "wrong". They are trained and selected through years of education to bring cases to an equitable resolution. No party actually wins or loses. They settle. The lawyers win.
They have evolved to this point through natural selection and their own best interests.
Laws are no longer scrutinized for logical consistency or correctness or even adherence to any type of higher law. They are merely accepted as the will of the legislature and added to the growing pile of regulations to be forced on the plebes.
The old stereotypes of Perry Mason or Matlock getting at the truth of a legal question are long gone. There is no more truth. There is only a vast gray area in which to bring both parties to some type of agreement. And if they can't agree, well then just rig the system by disallowing any argument that might lead to resolution of the conflict at hand.
Listen to this judge. Even allowing the defendant to utter such a phrase as "fair use" to a jury would be somehow unfair to the Congress, who after all worked very hard to try to make a fair Copyright law. We wouldn't want to offend them with the possibility that twelve citizens might find their laws to be fundamentally flawed, through anything resembling a fair trial or due process or anything.
Our latest Supreme Court nominee didn't even like Perry Mason. She preferred the prosecutor who continually brought half-assed wrongful prosecutions of innocent citizens before the court and lost every week. She probably felt sorry for him. She probably went into law in order to bring some equity to the system, and give him a chance to win more often. Surely the fact that he lost every time meant that there was some inherent flaw in the system, right? Wasn't he being discriminated against somehow?
Actually judges can (and should) over-rule the law. The judiciary exists as a check on both the executive in the application of the laws as written, and on the legislature in the drafting of laws that are in accord with constitutions and with individual rights.
If the judiciary isn't going to over-ride unconstitutional laws, no one else will. It is arguably the most important function of a judiciary in a free society.
As an aside, one of the more telling exchanges in the recent hearings for Judge Sotomayor was when the new Senator Franken naively asked her whether individuals have a free-speech right to unfiltered internet access. Her response was basically that individuals have no inalienable rights and that the Supreme Court exists to interpret laws as passed by Congress. This is a patently false, legal positivist notion in direct conflict with the US Constitution that has infected the judicial system within the US and has led directly to the recent wholesale approval of human rights violations that we have seen in this country.
Interpreting individual rights in deference to acts of Congress or to claimed executive privileges has neutered the concept of individual freedom and human rights in the US, in cases involving everything from individual property seized by governments for the benefit of private developers, to the war on drugs, gun control, illegal wiretapping and habeas corpus violations of US citizens. We have reached the point that now not only do we have judges ignoring rights enumerated in the Constitution which they are sworn to uphold, but also ordering defendants not to defend themselves on the basis of these rights and denying them due process as well!
The judiciary as an enforcement arm of the sovereign was a notion we as a country should have cast aside with the Declaration of Independence. The fact that we have not is prima facie evidence of a need for the tree of liberty to be again refreshed in this country.
How could you not believe there's an energy crisis? The average American uses the energy equivalent of 60+ personal slaves. 90% of that is provided by limited fossil fuels that are having an irreversible impact on global climate.
We have zero viable plans to replace any of it any time soon.
And in case you haven't been paying attention to the current breeding-age generation, a pregnant girlfriend is a ticket to 20 years of government cheese. It's not a crisis at all.
Datacenters need reliable power and water. They will likely be able to outbid other users for the foreseeable future. They don't want to have to move their datacenter if a coal or nuclear power plant is scrapped.
I realize it wasn't obvious, but the part you don't care about having destroyed is all the peasant farmland between the border and your fortress. The cruise missiles are there so you can destroy it yourself if you need to. And yes the point of this setup is that you can completely wipe out the compromised virtual machines as necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the absolute best one.
This isn't bad either.
Most of what companies do makes sense to no one but them. A company is not a single entity, even, but a whole group of idiots with different priorities and different ideas of how to do things, who probably don't talk with each other all that often, and even less often actually agree.
A previous employer shipped their entire business, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of electronics equipment, all over the world in reusable plastic boxes with the companies name on them, sealed with velcro. Every time, at least a half a dozen people who were not their employees handled the boxes and had access to everything in them. They still did credit checks on potential employees.
In the IT industry especially, companies are fine with treating local employees like criminals, but then are more than willing to outsource essential work to god-knows-who in skeezy third-world countries.
Not trusting random people on the street is one thing. But not trusting employees is the sign of a ridiculous, horrible company.
There are several articles lately on all the stupid personal information that employers want to dig up on applicants:
credit report
insurance history
car type
"mode of living"
What do most of these have in common? What do they want to know? They want to know that you keep all of your money in a bank account. They want to know that your retirement is invested in the stock market. They want to know that you vote and that you have a home phone line. They want to know that you have a brand new American car. They want to know that you have credit cards and that you are in debt up to your eyeballs. They want to know that you are a typical sheep.
What does this have to do with doing a job? Absolutely nothing.
Then why do they want to know all of this? Because most companies don't actually pay their employees: their banks do. And banks want to keep their money close to them, circulating in their little system. They don't want to employ anyone who might not hand their wages right back in one way or another. They want to give jobs to people who are fully invested in their little fraud that they have going. They want good little workers who are frightened when government officials talk about the economy collapsing. They want employees who enjoy seeing the government bail out failing companies and failing banks.
They want workers who will pay 10% of their earnings in interest, 25% in taxes, 15% on food, 35% on a mortgage, 10% on consumer goods, 2% on prescription drugs, 8% on a car, and 5% on insurance. They want companies that will hire workers who do so.
And the criminals in the US government take our property and earnings from us by force so they can hand it over to these fraudsters and perpetuate their illegal rackets.
I wonder whether any reduced lifetime or design flaws of new materials like these will be factored-in by those who implement them. There is obviously a lot of room for snake-oil salesmen to set up shop and exploit the world's move towards carbon-neutrality by over-promising on products that would normally last for decades. It would be a very-bad-thing if the shortcomings of more environmentally-friendly products were not priced-in from the outset.
But it would be even more destructive if the move towards environmentally-friendly products and processes turned out to be an extension of the "designed obsolescence" movement of recent past. Cement has a fatal flaw as a product: it lasts a long time. Perhaps an entire lifetime, or more. Bridges and roads last a long time. Houses don't have to be re-built every generation. Mortgages expire. Producers, sellers and governments hate products like this. Producers want to keep producing forever, as long as they don't have too much competition. Sellers want to keep selling forever, earning a tidy profit. Governments don't handle inter-generational wealth transfer well. So-called "consumers" hate long-lasting products too. They constantly want new stuff to replace their old stuff. They want jobs making that new stuff. Sheeple appreciate the stability of going to work every day to get paid less and less, just as long as they are boiled slowly and can pass most of the buck to future generations.
Self-destructing concrete, if more environmentally friendly than the regular kind, could even be government-mandated. Construction jobs would go on forever! Recessions would be a thing of the past! Cyclical fluctuations in the economy would be replaced with one big perma-recession. We could all hold hands and join in one big suicide pact for humanity, that wouldn't come due until all the the easily available energy and mineral resources run out and we're already dead and buried.
People keep talking about the cost to future generations of carbon emissions, caps and taxes. But how does that occur, exactly? It's clear how carbon emissions might affect future inhabitants of Earth. The CO2 will be there in the atmosphere, heating the globe, affecting the Earth. There is debate as to what those effects may be, but it's clear how it occurs. But how do caps and taxes affect future inhabitants? Well there's the lost opportunity-cost of all the cool stuff we could have bought instead of investing in green technologies. We could have more stereos and TVs and bigger houses with copper roofs and stainless appliances. Or we can forego some of that and have renewable energy instead. We can make do with smaller TVs and fewer stereos and smaller houses with tin roofs and less-fancy appliances. And I think many people would choose to do that if given the choice. The choice is fairly straightforward.
But it's an even larger problem when the choice is not so clear. If people are told that they can have the same amenities and live the same lifestyle while also making gains in CO2 emissions, something doesn't add up. If green products come out that make grand promises of equivalence with existing, less green products, consumers will likely believe them. If, or when, those new products fail to live up to the expectations, there is potential for huge economic losses. It is one thing to make a decision to curtail consumption in exchange for a more green, renewable world. It is quite another to trade an existing lifestyle for some crapshoot on vague promises or outright fraud, brought to you by corporations that are only interested in next quarter's profits and governments that are only interested in paying off their cronies before their term expires.
The summary is confusing. The CO2 comes from two places, from the fuel burned to heat the limestone (calcium carbonate), and from the calcium carbonate itself. Simply using renewable heating methods would not eliminate all of the CO2 emissions as the majority result from the chemical reaction of the material itself. The solution is to use a different material that does not emit CO2 or will re-adsorb CO2 over it's lifetime without losing strength.
I think I recall reading that the brain expends a large portion of the body's total energy in processing visual information. Having twice as many eyes might not be worth the extra food required to operate them.
You can pick your friends. And you can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friend's nose.
I think you will find that most human reactions that occur "when it's cold outside" exist to help people survive in extremely cold weather. Maintaining a body temperature of 98.6 degrees in anything from 30 to 110 degree environments is quite a feat.
The benefit of a runny nose is to loosen mucous and prevent respiratory infections. This is obviously more important for people with large noses adapted for cold weather and those who spend long periods of time in confined spaces, during a long winter for example.
For a start the typical IQ for a university student is 125, 100 or less really don't even get a look in.
In the US, that's closer to the average IQ of the professors.
I think we'll see a point where smart people start to opt out of the education system sooner, merely because they don't want to wade through busywork (and spending money like crazy) until graduate school, where they can actually set themselves apart.
That point was years ago, if not decades.
She recognizes the rights in the Constitution,
Since I don't want to get into a protracted discussion of what Ms. Sotomayor does and doesn't believe based on wild speculation, here's a quote from her on what rights she recognizes:
Rights by a court are not looked at as "overriding" in the sense that I think a Citizen would think about it.
So yes she recognizes something resembling the Rights in the Constitution. But not in the way they are actually contained in the Constitution, as part of the Supreme law of the land and overriding the laws of Congress that conflict with those Rights. In some other, unconstitutional way which she doesn't really describe very well.
and those weren't defined by Congress.
One glaring detail that modern jurists have completely missed in their zeal to reconcile the foundations of US government with atheism and moral relativism and socialism and some other goofy modern philosophies is that Rights don't actually need to be defined by anyone. They are not defined by government. They are not defined by the Constitution. They are merely recognized and protected by the Constitution. They were "defined" by the "Creator". Not the Christian god. Not the Magna Charta. Not Robespierre or Washington. The nebulous "other", a bullshit pretend made-up entity to give the intractable determinists some source for the sourceless.
In regard to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (or property, depending on whether we're talking Dec. of Ind. or Locke), you're absolutely right that she doesn't consider those "rights". Nor should she, in the sense we're talking about.
First of all, "Life, Liberty and Property" rights are recognized in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, not just "Locke". So if you are now claiming that Sotomayor does not recognize those rights, then you can go ahead and retract your previous assertion.
But, quite frankly, unless you have some source for this, you're just making things up about what Sotomayor does and doesn't believe.
You want to see the jurisprudence that would accumulate after a few years of people suing on the basis of the government denying them their right to pursue happiness? I sure as hell don't.
No, of course not. I want to see government stop fucking with every aspect of people's lives completely. And that is what would happen if we had a functional judiciary with the balls to hold our government to it's original, delegated powers. But we don't. We have a lazy judiciary that doesn't want to deal with any more paperwork than necessary.
The Ninth Amendment doesn't say a thing about what these retained rights are, making it a good aspirational sentiment for how the government should be run, but a terrible basis for jurisprudence.
Yeah, and that might give the courts something to do. But instead the courts don't do a goddamn thing because they are full of worthless shirking government apologists who live on the same VIP mortgages from unconstitutionally-chartered mortgage agencies and the same retirement accounts with fraudulent unregulated banks invested in the same economically destructive human-rights-violating military contractors and getting the same free golf trips from lobbyists and the same lecture fees at unconstitutionally-funded universities as the rest of the worthless government.
Okay, well, here's the thing. And it's kind of a basic thing in regards to US government. And it's kind of a fundamental aspect of what you're arguing too, if you have the intellectual honesty and mental ability to take it to it's ultimate consequences:
I don't recognize the rights of anyone who doesn't recognize mine.
And if the US government is going to continually fail to recognize the rights of US citizens, then we will no longer recognize the US government.
And maybe I didn't go to Princeton because I didn't have the right skin color, unlike Ms. Sotomayor. But I still had better grades and test scores and credentials than she and most of the flunkie retards in the US government. And maybe I was still paid a lot of money to attend university and I fully understand the origins and consequences of moral relativism. Maybe.
Sotomayor: Rights by a court are not looked at as "overriding" in the sense that I think a Citizen would think about it.
This is, flatly, wrong. And troubling. It displays a shocking disconnect between the judiciary and citizenry. In fact, it reveals a disconnect between the judiciary and even the Constitution itself.
Rights certainly override other rights in different situations. Rights are balanced against other rights outside the context of written laws every day by individuals and in the courts. Rights are in fact "overriding" in relation to laws of the Congress, as they were expressly reserved to the people in the US Constitution itself:
Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The only rights and laws that the Supreme Court can rule on are those stated in the Constitution and passed by Congress.
All Rights are stated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court can rule on all of them, and has, and does. And anyone even considered for inclusion on the highest court should at least recognize this fact.
No judge agrees with that.
And that's my point. The US judiciary is currently acting in a wholly unconstitutional, irresponsible manner with regard to individual liberties. And it is being reflected in the wildly irresponsible actions of the other branches and of Americans as a whole. There is a complete breakdown of personal responsibility in this country. And it can be attributed directly to so-called "leaders" like Ms. Sotomayor who shrug their shoulders and claim an inability to so much as recognize the rights of Americans as enshrined in our Constitution.
Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
They are expressly reserved.
The distinction is between a theory of natural rights and that of a government defined and created by the those it will govern:
These are not mutually exclusive. I would hope that a nominee to the US Supreme Court would have, you know, actually read the fucking US Constitution and understood this, seeing as how that document is one of the primary examples of such a constitutionally-limited, federalist government with explicit recognition of both natural and civil rights.
There are no inalienable rights in a government by compact.
Sure, there are. There are the rights reserved in the Bill of Rights.
The First Amendment is no more sacrosanct than the Eighteenth - Prohibition.
Actually, yes some Amendments are more "sacrosanct" than others. Amendments must have the ability to alter and override previous sections of the document that conflict with those amendments. If that were not the case, there would be no process of "amendment" whatsoever. The 21st Amendment, for instance, is more sacrosanct than the 18th.
If I wrote up a legal contract for a wedding cake that said "The cake shall be blue" and later added an amendment to say "The cake shall be red", I would be pretty pissed off if the baker brought me a fucking purple cake. I would want my amendment of "red" to override the previous stipulation of "blue". I would not want the baker to "interpret" the contract and come to some bullshit hybrid conclusion, as judges routinely do in order to justify ignoring explicitly protected individual rights written right into the fucking US Constitution.
It can be repealed - and the rules are the same.
But we're not talking about repealing anything so I'm not sure what this has to do with the discussion.
Furthermore, we aren't even talking about Amendments in relation to other sections of the Constitution. We're talking about Amendments in relation to laws passed by the legislature. And in that case, certainly the judiciary has the power and duty to interpret and strike down those laws not in accord with the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution and it's Amendments.
It conflicts with John Marshall's interpretation of the Constitution - but an unequivocal grant of judicial review isn't to be found in the text.
Article III, Section II:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution
Seems fairly explicit to me. Since it was also explicit to the second Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I'd take his word for it and forget what your Civics teacher told you.
The US Constitution is the highest law of the land. The US Constitution includes the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights includes the Ninth Amendment:
I'm not arguing one way or another, because this particular case is irrelevant to me. But the right to "download the latest Brittany Spears record", if it exists, is certainly protected by the Ninth Amendment. All US law is subject to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, even Copyright law.
The judiciary can only throw out laws that are in violation of the Constitution. But the protections of the Constitution are extremely broad. It is certainly not an act of "judicial activism" to throw out laws that violate the un-enumerated rights of Americans.
You don't even live in the United States. You are a Subject of the British crown.
What makes you think your opinion of US Constitutional law is at all relevant?
Shut the fuck up. No one cares what you think.
You're right that my description was both unnecessarily broad and restrictive. Instead of "inalienable" I should have said that Sotomayor expressed her belief that the Supreme Court recognizes no rights whatsoever beyond those defined by the Congress.
The rights I am concerned about are the subset of those inalienable rights defined by the Declaration of Independence (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness) which were expressly reserved in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
I will not enter into a discussion of the specific boundaries of those rights as I stated my primary concern is the fact that the US judiciary currently denies their existence in complete contradiction with the Constitution of the United States and most of the several states.
Lawyers (and judges) these days have literally zero concept of a law being "wrong". They are trained and selected through years of education to bring cases to an equitable resolution. No party actually wins or loses. They settle. The lawyers win.
They have evolved to this point through natural selection and their own best interests.
Laws are no longer scrutinized for logical consistency or correctness or even adherence to any type of higher law. They are merely accepted as the will of the legislature and added to the growing pile of regulations to be forced on the plebes.
The old stereotypes of Perry Mason or Matlock getting at the truth of a legal question are long gone. There is no more truth. There is only a vast gray area in which to bring both parties to some type of agreement. And if they can't agree, well then just rig the system by disallowing any argument that might lead to resolution of the conflict at hand.
Listen to this judge. Even allowing the defendant to utter such a phrase as "fair use" to a jury would be somehow unfair to the Congress, who after all worked very hard to try to make a fair Copyright law. We wouldn't want to offend them with the possibility that twelve citizens might find their laws to be fundamentally flawed, through anything resembling a fair trial or due process or anything.
Our latest Supreme Court nominee didn't even like Perry Mason. She preferred the prosecutor who continually brought half-assed wrongful prosecutions of innocent citizens before the court and lost every week. She probably felt sorry for him. She probably went into law in order to bring some equity to the system, and give him a chance to win more often. Surely the fact that he lost every time meant that there was some inherent flaw in the system, right? Wasn't he being discriminated against somehow?
Actually judges can (and should) over-rule the law. The judiciary exists as a check on both the executive in the application of the laws as written, and on the legislature in the drafting of laws that are in accord with constitutions and with individual rights.
If the judiciary isn't going to over-ride unconstitutional laws, no one else will. It is arguably the most important function of a judiciary in a free society.
As an aside, one of the more telling exchanges in the recent hearings for Judge Sotomayor was when the new Senator Franken naively asked her whether individuals have a free-speech right to unfiltered internet access. Her response was basically that individuals have no inalienable rights and that the Supreme Court exists to interpret laws as passed by Congress. This is a patently false, legal positivist notion in direct conflict with the US Constitution that has infected the judicial system within the US and has led directly to the recent wholesale approval of human rights violations that we have seen in this country.
Interpreting individual rights in deference to acts of Congress or to claimed executive privileges has neutered the concept of individual freedom and human rights in the US, in cases involving everything from individual property seized by governments for the benefit of private developers, to the war on drugs, gun control, illegal wiretapping and habeas corpus violations of US citizens. We have reached the point that now not only do we have judges ignoring rights enumerated in the Constitution which they are sworn to uphold, but also ordering defendants not to defend themselves on the basis of these rights and denying them due process as well!
The judiciary as an enforcement arm of the sovereign was a notion we as a country should have cast aside with the Declaration of Independence. The fact that we have not is prima facie evidence of a need for the tree of liberty to be again refreshed in this country.
How could you not believe there's an energy crisis? The average American uses the energy equivalent of 60+ personal slaves. 90% of that is provided by limited fossil fuels that are having an irreversible impact on global climate.
We have zero viable plans to replace any of it any time soon.
And in case you haven't been paying attention to the current breeding-age generation, a pregnant girlfriend is a ticket to 20 years of government cheese. It's not a crisis at all.
Hydroelectric is used for peak power production, which coincides with the cooling power profile of a typical datacenter.
What makes you think it's carbon negative?
Datacenters need reliable power and water. They will likely be able to outbid other users for the foreseeable future. They don't want to have to move their datacenter if a coal or nuclear power plant is scrapped.
Since the bills are paid by accounting, I'd say approximately one month.
I realize it wasn't obvious, but the part you don't care about having destroyed is all the peasant farmland between the border and your fortress. The cruise missiles are there so you can destroy it yourself if you need to. And yes the point of this setup is that you can completely wipe out the compromised virtual machines as necessary.