To willfully put yourself in harms way in support of others, the majority of which will never know your sacrifice, is to be a true hero.
That depends on what "others" one is supporting, now, doesn't it?
To put yourself in harm's way in support of innocent people, to defend them against aggression, is indeed heroic.
To put yourself in harm's way to carry out an aggression in support of someone's political or economic interests is to be at best a sucker who mistakenly thinks he's supporting innocents, and at worst a villain who knows exactly what he's doing.
Determining which of these characterizations better fits military enlistees is left as an exercise for the reader. But certainly censoring information received by any group makes it easier to keep them suckers, doesn't it?
I think (true) depression would qualify, being a chemical imbalance.
While the "depression is a chemical imbalance" line is heavily pushed by the companies that make SSRIs, it's not well supported.
If someone does have a demonstrated neurochemical imbalance, it might be appropriate to call that a disease. (Some caveats would still apply, such as "how do you determine what range is normal"?) But "clinical depression" is not diagnosed by chemical analysis, but by judgments of behaviors exhibited and ideas vocalized.
Dude, just tell me that someone who is clinically depressed or with some other severe mental disorder doesn't have a disease to my face, ok?;)
Well, if it makes you happy, I'll tell you to your face that they may not have a disease, depending on how we define it. I'll tell you that clinical depression is a very different sort of entity than physical ailments, since it is diagnosed based on judgments of behavior rather than physical evaluation.
Depression (the disease under discussion) can be very real.
I thought we'd broadened the topic to general "mental illness" by now. And if you don't think anger and depression are linked, ask around. But look, the reality of depression is not in dispute here; what is being questioned is its categorization.
A broken leg is a real problem but is not a disease. (Indeed, I think that the concept of "mental injury" might serve as decent analogy in many cases, such as PTSD.) Various sorts of ignorance are real problems, can even be fatal (e.g., "only gays and drug users get AIDS, so I'm safe!"), but ignorance is not a disease. Depression is a real problem; many people think that categorizing it as a disease is inaccurate and/or not helpful.
One big reason is the sort of interventions it suggests. Diseases don't get better when you learn new skills; but cognitive-behavioral therapies are quite effective at helping people with depression. Labeling depression a disease automatically puts the emphasis on drug therapies (and, gods forbid, on psychosurgery or shock treatment).
Ever seen a person who used to function fine slowly (chemically) imbalance to where they can't get out of bed?
The "chemical imbalance" hypothesis is one of the big questions here. It's pushed by drug companies that make SSRIs, but there's a lack of evidence for it. (Which is not to say that mental activity doesn't have neurochemical correlates, just that they're not as simple as "low serotonin == depression".)
But yes, I've seen people - friends, family members, a housemate of mind - go into serious states of depression where they became unable to function. I fail to see how calling them "sick" would have helped.
Ever felt it yourself?
Self-diagnosis is a minefield. But I will say that years ago, my doctor dropped several gentle hints that I should consider SSRIs. I'm glad I didn't; instead I've made positive changes in my life, and I'm feeling much better now. Probably the most important involved becoming more aware of my body, learning to break the feedback loops of muscular tension. (Which is not to say that some drugs don't help some people.)
Autopsies of people who committed violent suicide, which should hardly be taken as representative; and your linked article notes that "post mortem analyses are complicated by factors other than depression that may change brain chemistry. The mode of death, previous drug history, current therapy, and time between death and autopsy can all affect the results."
It may well be the case that some people who are diagnosed with "clinical depression" have a neurological disorder. But what is being diagnosed by the term "clinical depression" is not that neurological disorder, but a behavioral pattern.
What it seems to have found is that there is an indication that antidepressants do work for people who do have a serious depression
Actually, what they found is more that placebos don't work as well in people with a serious depression: sayeth TFA, "The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication."
You may get various diseases as a result of those activities, but a there is no "Alcoholism" disease which has caused you to unwillingly drink yourself into a stupor every night.
Actually, alcohol is one of the few genuine addictions, where continued use causes changes to the nervous system such that the drug must be present for normal functioning. Alcohol withdrawal can kill, so I'd say that's evidence of a genuine disease.
Now, does having a disease mean that your drinking is "unwilling"? That's a whole different question. Certainly it provides a strong motivation - "if I don't drink, I feel very ill, and indeed might die. Bottoms up!"
But alcoholism is quite likely overdiagnosed, a confusion of alcohol abuse with alcohol addiction.
Placebos / drugs work because they're empowering - I'm doing something, I'm taking something, things will get better.
A friend of mine recently remarked that she feels better just having the prescription for some of these drugs. She never even fills them. It's the ultimate in homeopathy!
I heard a tremendously interesting episode of Radiolab a few days ago dealing with the placebo effect, worth checking out.
Telling someone who is suffering from mental illness that the pain they feel is not their fault, but a disease which can be cured, can oftentimes be comforting.
The problem is there are two distinct messages: "it's a disease" and "it's not your fault". The one has nothing to do with the other. For example, if despite knowing full well the risks and having resources to help quit, you smoke three packs a day and get lung cancer, it is a disease and it's your fault. And of course, having a disease doesn't imply that it can be cured.
Also implicit in the disease model is that the treatment comes from outside: take this pill or have this surgery to get fixed. But if these conditions are regarded as "problems of living", this introduces the possibility of the sufferer being the primary problem-solver, of taking positive action (with therapist as guide and assistant) rather than being a passive patient.
Is it a "disease" if someone lacks normal and usual cognitive and behavioral skills to deal with, say, anger? I don't think it's useful to categorize such a lack alongside clear biological dysfunctions like the flu and coronary artery disease. Is it their fault if they lack these skills? No, not unless they've been given full opportunity to acquire them and have chosen not to.
"It's not your fault, you haven't done anything wrong" and "there are solutions, and you can get help to find them" are good messages. Very good messages indeed. But "your condition is a disease" doesn't really encompass either of those.
all the labs working on this are either in the psychology departments of their schools, or in consumer advocacy groups with a some kind of agenda. The psychoanalysts want you on their couch.
And of course drug companies have no agenda at all in promoting their use of their products, which they make no profit on and produce solely out of their wish to alleviate human suffering.
Depression is not illusionary, it's a real disease.
Depression is certainly not illusionary, and is certainly a real problem.
Whether it is helpful to call depression, and other "problems in living" that are not directly diagnosed as neurological lesions or malfunctions, "diseases" or "illnesses", is questionable. I suggest reading Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness (available also in an expanded book form, but the original paper gives the gist of it):
...In actual contemporary social usage, the finding of a mental illness is made by establishing a deviance in behavior from certain psychosocial, ethical, or legal norms. The judgment may be made, as in medicine, by the patient, the physician (psychiatrist), or others. Remedial action, finally, tends to be sought in a therapeutic -- or covertly medical -- framework, thus creating a situation in which psychosocial, ethical, and/or legal deviations are claimed to be correctible by (so-called) medical action. Since medical action is designed to correct only medical deviations, it seems logically absurd to expect that it will help solve problems whose very existence had been defined and established on nonmedical grounds. I think that these considerations may be fruitfully applied to the present use of tranquilizers and, more generally, to what might be expected of drugs of whatever type in regard to the amelioration or solution of problems in human living.
I'm not sure whether I agree with him entirely or not. I do think that "mental illness" is at least in part a social construct - but the same is true of a lot of physical illness.
There's nothing "inspiring" about evolution. Those are just your personal judgement calls and subjective opinions
Of course. Inspiration is a subjective experience. Thus, "I've got to say I find the scientific account not only more rational, but orders of magnitude more inspiring." If you don't find it inspiring, fine, it's a aesthetic judgment.
Beyond that, sorry but I don't think I see your point...do you think I'm arguing in favor of eugenics or something? Absolutely not. The best thing we can do to "help" evolution is promote diversity.
One secondary effect of using an HSA is that it makes routine healthcare decisions economic decisions. I think that's a good thing. Others might not agree.
It is a horrible idea, because market conditions do not apply to health care - there can be external costs when you decide not to seek care.
Because many diseases are contagious, your failure to seek care can affect not just you but everyone in the community. It is very bad policy to have a healthcare system that discourages you from seeking care - if you might have SARS, bird flu, TB, hepatitis, AIDS, herpes, or any infectious disease, it's in everyone's interest that you get your ass to a doctor before you spread your germs around. But high deductible plans encourage subscribers to not seek care: "Oh, it's probably just a cold, why pay for an office visit to find out for sure?"
The potential costs only get higher as the threat of bioterrorism grows. I can see it now: "We would have known about the attack sooner, but the vector was released at a Libertarian Party meeting. The first infected group all had HSAs and high deductible health plans, and most decided to save the cost of an doctor's office visit and tough it out...now the epidemic is raging out of control..."
I would like to point out that I think there should be at least some reward for people who take good care of themselves.
There is. It's called "health".
I don't care if you start doing coronary bypasses for free, paying for the sick leave, and giving away movie tickets with every surgery; I still would rather avoid being the experience of being sick enough to need one, and the experience of having my chest cracked open.
You ever see somebody in the cardiac ICU right after open heart surgery? It's a real incentive to take good care of yourself.
Consider that the National Association for the Self-Employed...
...is a front for MEGA Life and Health. Though they certainly try to hide it, NASE is not an actual indepentent "association", but the marketing arm of MEGA. Fortunately, the high-pressure sale techniques of the agent I encountered were enough to tip me off that something was wrong, and I Googled before I bought and so learned how bad the "coverage" MEGA provides actually is.
If Nader runs, don't waste your vote on him. He doesn't have a shot and those votes are better off with the lesser of two evils, the democrats.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is truly wasting your vote.
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."
--from So Long And Thanks for All The Fish, Douglas Adams
It's a question of semantics and context. Many terms have technical scientific usages that are different from their use by educated native speakers.
In a biology class, yes, absolutely, we, chimps, and our common great-great-great....great-grandparents are all, biologically, apes. But in a lay discussion, to John and Jane Q. Public, "ape" means a non-human primate, a chimp or gorilla. As Wikipedia notes, "[A]lthough the superfamily of Hominoidea has always included great apes such as humans, as well as the Hylobatidae, a different connotation of the word 'ape' exists in the vernacular. The historical, common usage of the word often excludes humans when referring to apes."
When I try to play amateur biologist and explain to folks we all evolved from an ape-like ancestor, it's to counter-act the common mistaken notion that we evolved from chimps; IMHO it's more important to get that clear than to get all taxonomic or cladistic on their ass.
Not that any candidate would have the balls to say something like that but if they did, I'd get online and make a donation once I got up off the floor I was rolling and laughing on.
Well, feel free to write me in (I'm Constitutionally qualified, as a native born citizen over 35), and send those donations donation to tms@infamous.net via PayPal...:-)
That's one rather large difference between science and religion: science still works when you don't believe in it.
Not so much. If you don't "believe" in science, it won't work for you because you'll simply disregard any observations that disagree with what you do believe.
Science is a method of arranging observations into patterns. The problem is that our observations are heavily biased by our beliefs - this can even be seen in the way science is done, for example the develpment of the measured value of the charge of a electron. The creationist disregards the observations of fossil evidence just as Millikan threw out observations he thought were too far off.
The real "trick" in science is to overcome this selection bias as much as one can. You can find this in some artistic, and even religious (certainly not mainstream Western ones, though) practices also.
You would never say that unless you wanted to get the "I didn't come from no monkey!" camp riled up, or you were an uneducated buffoon.
Or you were tossing a softball.
"Why, yes, O'Brien, according to our best evidence we did descend from apes - mor precisely, we and modern apes descended from a common, ape-like ancestor. And I'm proud of how far our species has developed, how far up from the muck we've come, how far towards grace we've climbed; and I hope that our umptity-great grandchildren will be as far above us as we are above the Australopithecines. My opponent the Biblical literalist, on the other hand, seems to hold that we're all the fallen result of incestuous inbreeding from a single original pair of idiots dumb enough to be fooled by a talking snake. I've got to say I find the scientific account not only more rational, but orders of magnitude more inspiring."
The decision was that there would be no case, on the basis that only people who could prove that they'd been spied on had standing to bring a case to prove that they'd been spied on.
The reason why SCOTUS refused the case is because the ACLU doesn't have standing.
The problem here is that under the prevailing theory, no one has standing.
especially a group on a fishing expedition to sue them.
No one was on a fishing expedition. The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation believed the NSA was snooping on them because the government accidentally sent them a copy of call logs during a court case regarding their alleged ties to Al Qaeda.
Those who are performing the wiretaps would be really, really stupid to show the list of those they are tapping to anyone else
Sure, criminals would be really stupid to come forth with a list of their victims. But people performing legitimate surveillance show the list before the begin the wiretaps. They show it to a court, one target at a time, in a process called "getting a warrant."
TSP no longer exists, and hasn't since 17 January 2007.
Irrelevant. "I know I shot that guy last year, your honor, but I haven't shot anyone since then, so let's just forget the whole thing."
In a sane country, we would be able to have the court cases to figure out what happened, which laws were broken, and which Bush administration officials should be jailed for it and for how long.
But as the ACLU pointed out, here in Bizzaro America the Bush administration could easily restart their snooping, since they voluntarily ended the warrantless wiretapping and have not been smacked by the courts.
the Protect America Act, which was designed exclusively to allow foreign intelligence collection without a warrant when the traffic travelled through the United States, whether incidentally or by design. Foreign intelligence collection is always allowed without court oversight...
Sorry, but the government doesn't get to do an end run around the Constitution by calling its surveillance "foreign intelligence collection". I don't lose my rights when I talk to someone outside the country - and more importantly, the Fourth Amendment states a "right of the people", not a right of citizens. Even a foreigner has right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and "against unreasonable searches and seizures".
Now the Protect America Act has expired with its automatic sunset, and ALL surveillance must again happen only via FISA.
So now we're right back where we started when the administration started its criminal eavesdropping.
There is no TSP or any warrantless surveillance program.
You really should read the articles you link to. Your Washington Times story notes, "existing warrantless surveillance begun under the temporary laws could continue for up to a year."
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on what "others" one is supporting, now, doesn't it?
To put yourself in harm's way in support of innocent people, to defend them against aggression, is indeed heroic.
To put yourself in harm's way to carry out an aggression in support of someone's political or economic interests is to be at best a sucker who mistakenly thinks he's supporting innocents, and at worst a villain who knows exactly what he's doing.
Determining which of these characterizations better fits military enlistees is left as an exercise for the reader. But certainly censoring information received by any group makes it easier to keep them suckers, doesn't it?
While the "depression is a chemical imbalance" line is heavily pushed by the companies that make SSRIs, it's not well supported.
If someone does have a demonstrated neurochemical imbalance, it might be appropriate to call that a disease. (Some caveats would still apply, such as "how do you determine what range is normal"?) But "clinical depression" is not diagnosed by chemical analysis, but by judgments of behaviors exhibited and ideas vocalized.
Well, if it makes you happy, I'll tell you to your face that they may not have a disease, depending on how we define it. I'll tell you that clinical depression is a very different sort of entity than physical ailments, since it is diagnosed based on judgments of behavior rather than physical evaluation.
I thought we'd broadened the topic to general "mental illness" by now. And if you don't think anger and depression are linked, ask around. But look, the reality of depression is not in dispute here; what is being questioned is its categorization.
A broken leg is a real problem but is not a disease. (Indeed, I think that the concept of "mental injury" might serve as decent analogy in many cases, such as PTSD.) Various sorts of ignorance are real problems, can even be fatal (e.g., "only gays and drug users get AIDS, so I'm safe!"), but ignorance is not a disease. Depression is a real problem; many people think that categorizing it as a disease is inaccurate and/or not helpful.
One big reason is the sort of interventions it suggests. Diseases don't get better when you learn new skills; but cognitive-behavioral therapies are quite effective at helping people with depression. Labeling depression a disease automatically puts the emphasis on drug therapies (and, gods forbid, on psychosurgery or shock treatment).
The "chemical imbalance" hypothesis is one of the big questions here. It's pushed by drug companies that make SSRIs, but there's a lack of evidence for it. (Which is not to say that mental activity doesn't have neurochemical correlates, just that they're not as simple as "low serotonin == depression".)
But yes, I've seen people - friends, family members, a housemate of mind - go into serious states of depression where they became unable to function. I fail to see how calling them "sick" would have helped.
Self-diagnosis is a minefield. But I will say that years ago, my doctor dropped several gentle hints that I should consider SSRIs. I'm glad I didn't; instead I've made positive changes in my life, and I'm feeling much better now. Probably the most important involved becoming more aware of my body, learning to break the feedback loops of muscular tension. (Which is not to say that some drugs don't help some people.)
Autopsies of people who committed violent suicide, which should hardly be taken as representative; and your linked article notes that "post mortem analyses are complicated by factors other than depression that may change brain chemistry. The mode of death, previous drug history, current therapy, and time between death and autopsy can all affect the results."
It may well be the case that some people who are diagnosed with "clinical depression" have a neurological disorder. But what is being diagnosed by the term "clinical depression" is not that neurological disorder, but a behavioral pattern.
Actually, what they found is more that placebos don't work as well in people with a serious depression: sayeth TFA, "The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication."
Actually, alcohol is one of the few genuine addictions, where continued use causes changes to the nervous system such that the drug must be present for normal functioning. Alcohol withdrawal can kill, so I'd say that's evidence of a genuine disease.
Now, does having a disease mean that your drinking is "unwilling"? That's a whole different question. Certainly it provides a strong motivation - "if I don't drink, I feel very ill, and indeed might die. Bottoms up!"
But alcoholism is quite likely overdiagnosed, a confusion of alcohol abuse with alcohol addiction.
A friend of mine recently remarked that she feels better just having the prescription for some of these drugs. She never even fills them. It's the ultimate in homeopathy!
I heard a tremendously interesting episode of Radiolab a few days ago dealing with the placebo effect, worth checking out.
The problem is there are two distinct messages: "it's a disease" and "it's not your fault". The one has nothing to do with the other. For example, if despite knowing full well the risks and having resources to help quit, you smoke three packs a day and get lung cancer, it is a disease and it's your fault. And of course, having a disease doesn't imply that it can be cured.
Also implicit in the disease model is that the treatment comes from outside: take this pill or have this surgery to get fixed. But if these conditions are regarded as "problems of living", this introduces the possibility of the sufferer being the primary problem-solver, of taking positive action (with therapist as guide and assistant) rather than being a passive patient.
Is it a "disease" if someone lacks normal and usual cognitive and behavioral skills to deal with, say, anger? I don't think it's useful to categorize such a lack alongside clear biological dysfunctions like the flu and coronary artery disease. Is it their fault if they lack these skills? No, not unless they've been given full opportunity to acquire them and have chosen not to.
"It's not your fault, you haven't done anything wrong" and "there are solutions, and you can get help to find them" are good messages. Very good messages indeed. But "your condition is a disease" doesn't really encompass either of those.
Welcome to SOP at Big Pharma.
And of course drug companies have no agenda at all in promoting their use of their products, which they make no profit on and produce solely out of their wish to alleviate human suffering.
Ha! Watch more late-night TV, see more ads for penis pills, and reconsider that.
Depression is certainly not illusionary, and is certainly a real problem.
Whether it is helpful to call depression, and other "problems in living" that are not directly diagnosed as neurological lesions or malfunctions, "diseases" or "illnesses", is questionable. I suggest reading Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness (available also in an expanded book form, but the original paper gives the gist of it):
I'm not sure whether I agree with him entirely or not. I do think that "mental illness" is at least in part a social construct - but the same is true of a lot of physical illness.
Of course. Inspiration is a subjective experience. Thus, "I've got to say I find the scientific account not only more rational, but orders of magnitude more inspiring." If you don't find it inspiring, fine, it's a aesthetic judgment.
Beyond that, sorry but I don't think I see your point...do you think I'm arguing in favor of eugenics or something? Absolutely not. The best thing we can do to "help" evolution is promote diversity.
It is a horrible idea, because market conditions do not apply to health care - there can be external costs when you decide not to seek care.
Because many diseases are contagious, your failure to seek care can affect not just you but everyone in the community. It is very bad policy to have a healthcare system that discourages you from seeking care - if you might have SARS, bird flu, TB, hepatitis, AIDS, herpes, or any infectious disease, it's in everyone's interest that you get your ass to a doctor before you spread your germs around. But high deductible plans encourage subscribers to not seek care: "Oh, it's probably just a cold, why pay for an office visit to find out for sure?"
The potential costs only get higher as the threat of bioterrorism grows. I can see it now: "We would have known about the attack sooner, but the vector was released at a Libertarian Party meeting. The first infected group all had HSAs and high deductible health plans, and most decided to save the cost of an doctor's office visit and tough it out...now the epidemic is raging out of control..."
There is. It's called "health".
I don't care if you start doing coronary bypasses for free, paying for the sick leave, and giving away movie tickets with every surgery; I still would rather avoid being the experience of being sick enough to need one, and the experience of having my chest cracked open.
You ever see somebody in the cardiac ICU right after open heart surgery? It's a real incentive to take good care of yourself.
The local anarchist bookstone, Red Emmas, developed a POS and inventory system called Infoshopkeeper that might be a useful starting point.
...is a front for MEGA Life and Health. Though they certainly try to hide it, NASE is not an actual indepentent "association", but the marketing arm of MEGA. Fortunately, the high-pressure sale techniques of the agent I encountered were enough to tip me off that something was wrong, and I Googled before I bought and so learned how bad the "coverage" MEGA provides actually is.
Avoid NASE. It's a scam.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is truly wasting your vote.
Sure, just use the typo-fixed version I posted on my blog
It's a question of semantics and context. Many terms have technical scientific usages that are different from their use by educated native speakers.
In a biology class, yes, absolutely, we, chimps, and our common great-great-great....great-grandparents are all, biologically, apes. But in a lay discussion, to John and Jane Q. Public, "ape" means a non-human primate, a chimp or gorilla. As Wikipedia notes, "[A]lthough the superfamily of Hominoidea has always included great apes such as humans, as well as the Hylobatidae, a different connotation of the word 'ape' exists in the vernacular. The historical, common usage of the word often excludes humans when referring to apes."
When I try to play amateur biologist and explain to folks we all evolved from an ape-like ancestor, it's to counter-act the common mistaken notion that we evolved from chimps; IMHO it's more important to get that clear than to get all taxonomic or cladistic on their ass.
But I'm proud to be an ape. Primate pride!
Well, feel free to write me in (I'm Constitutionally qualified, as a native born citizen over 35), and send those donations donation to tms@infamous.net via PayPal... :-)
Support for religion X IS "an establishment" of religion X.
It's as if you were to argue that "the Second Amendment doesn't protect your right to own a gun, only your right to 'keep and bear arms'!"
Not so much. If you don't "believe" in science, it won't work for you because you'll simply disregard any observations that disagree with what you do believe.
Science is a method of arranging observations into patterns. The problem is that our observations are heavily biased by our beliefs - this can even be seen in the way science is done, for example the develpment of the measured value of the charge of a electron. The creationist disregards the observations of fossil evidence just as Millikan threw out observations he thought were too far off.
The real "trick" in science is to overcome this selection bias as much as one can. You can find this in some artistic, and even religious (certainly not mainstream Western ones, though) practices also.
Or you were tossing a softball.
"Why, yes, O'Brien, according to our best evidence we did descend from apes - mor precisely, we and modern apes descended from a common, ape-like ancestor. And I'm proud of how far our species has developed, how far up from the muck we've come, how far towards grace we've climbed; and I hope that our umptity-great grandchildren will be as far above us as we are above the Australopithecines. My opponent the Biblical literalist, on the other hand, seems to hold that we're all the fallen result of incestuous inbreeding from a single original pair of idiots dumb enough to be fooled by a talking snake. I've got to say I find the scientific account not only more rational, but orders of magnitude more inspiring."
The decision was that there would be no case, on the basis that only people who could prove that they'd been spied on had standing to bring a case to prove that they'd been spied on.
The problem here is that under the prevailing theory, no one has standing.
No one was on a fishing expedition. The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation believed the NSA was snooping on them because the government accidentally sent them a copy of call logs during a court case regarding their alleged ties to Al Qaeda.
Sure, criminals would be really stupid to come forth with a list of their victims. But people performing legitimate surveillance show the list before the begin the wiretaps. They show it to a court, one target at a time, in a process called "getting a warrant."
Irrelevant. "I know I shot that guy last year, your honor, but I haven't shot anyone since then, so let's just forget the whole thing."
In a sane country, we would be able to have the court cases to figure out what happened, which laws were broken, and which Bush administration officials should be jailed for it and for how long.
But as the ACLU pointed out, here in Bizzaro America the Bush administration could easily restart their snooping, since they voluntarily ended the warrantless wiretapping and have not been smacked by the courts.
Sorry, but the government doesn't get to do an end run around the Constitution by calling its surveillance "foreign intelligence collection". I don't lose my rights when I talk to someone outside the country - and more importantly, the Fourth Amendment states a "right of the people", not a right of citizens. Even a foreigner has right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and "against unreasonable searches and seizures".
So now we're right back where we started when the administration started its criminal eavesdropping.
You really should read the articles you link to. Your Washington Times story notes, "existing warrantless surveillance begun under the temporary laws could continue for up to a year."