No, I'm not. And it's the top 5% that pay around 60%. The "top 1%" pay around half of the tax burden. That's not in dispute; that's statistically what they actually pay. I know this might be difficult for you to believe.
Also, are you joking? In order to be in the top 1%, you don't need to be fabulously wealthy with private jets and 50 foot ocean yachts. You only need to make about $250,000 a year (as of 2000 figures). And uh, that's not that much of a stretch.
I don't care how much money you think they are squirreling away, or how much they actually are squirreling away, frankly. They STILL are paying that much of the tax burden. But see, even if we made the top 5% or 1% pay 100% of the tax, you'd still think they have too much money, right? Or we'd come back to the tired old sales tax vs income tax arguments.
The vast majority of people in these classes don't have secret trusts and offshore bank accounts. They're normal people who have family incomes of $300,000 a year. It doesn't take much at all to get to that point, and takes nothing more than a couple decent jobs after college to hit the top 5%. Those groups already pay a disproportionate share of the tax, and that is fine, but only to a point.
But you're probably one of those folks who thinks it's "unfair" they have as much as they do, and still wouldn't be satisfied even if they shouldered the entire tax burden - sales and income - for all of society (to say nothing of how ridiculously unfair that would be). Because they'd still have "too much" for your tastes.
"The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither." ~Thomas Jefferson
Ugh. Where to begin.
First of all, you got the quote wrong. It's:
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Second, it's Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson. (Wow.)
Anyway, note essential liberty...a little temporary safety.
Not that it's somehow never right to sacrifice any liberty for any amount of safety - we do it every day. It's called the rule of law and is necessary for collectively maintaining order and stability in society.
I can't believe how much this quote is bastardized and misinterpreted as it is continually trotted out in opposition to anything the "government" does in a free society in an attempt to fulfill its obligation to its citizens.
You kind of topped them all by completely misattributing it, though. Good job.
What's a fair level of wealth? What is unfair? Who gets to decide?
The power and connections that come along with wealth are unavoidable, and the saying, "It takes money to make money", is as true as ever.
Your conclusion that "most" wealthy are rich due to luck and don't actually contribute anything tangible to society is only correct if you are perhaps considering the super-wealthy, which constitute such a small number of people that they're not even worth discussing. And they aren't the ones controlling the world - it's a much, much larger group of people. To say that one is in the "wealthiest 1%", which has been a sound bite in many previous discussions on this topic, doesn't take a lot of income. As of 2000, it was just over $200,000/year. Is that what you consider "wealthy"? There are millions of these people, and most of them are wealthy because of their own hard work and contributions to society, including the business they often run which employ so many others. We're not talking about faceless megacorporations, here. We're talking about the millions of businesses that make economies run.
The bottom 50% of wage-earners in the US pay less than 3% of the tax burden (with many at the bottom paying nothing). The top 5% pay over 60% - the top 1% almost half themselves. What if we made the bottom pay nothing, and put all the tax burden, on, say the top 5% or 1%. Would that be fair? The rich would still have so much more than the poor. Should we maybe take some away from them and, you know, spread it around? How do you limit wealth you consider "unfair"? Why is it "unfair"? Who decides how much is too much?
If you're concerned about limiting freedoms, that would be one of the more egregious affronts to "freedom" I could think of.
And frankly, I don't think that is necessarily wrong (again, unless you believe in disproportionately "punishing" the attainment of wealth in some way).
I appreciate your healthy cynicism, but a stable society benefits all members. You argue, with some success, that the "rich" are somehow better protected or afforded more rights, but that is more a function of the fact that their possessions themselves often afford them a better lot in life notwithstanding specific "law" that that effect.
I think you're making connections that are a little too tenuous. If lawmakers are generally "wealthy" (in comparison with the rest of the population), then, sure, it's a true statement that the "wealthy" are implementing these policies. But it's not because they're wealthy. And this notion that there is a silent plot by the "wealthy" to constantly control the "sheep" of society via any means they can - such as drone aircraft used by law enforcement - is a little too much of a stretch for me, and for most people.
Yes, there are people with power and wealth who want to protect what they have. Society will be friendlier to the "rich" because everything is by nature "friendlier" for the rich. But it's not as direct a plot as you imagine by the ultra-rich to "control" society to their own benefit. That a stable societal structure benefits the "rich" is incidental, not causative. I won't disagree that the rich have things easier. But unless you believe in punishing the rich or in true communist/socialist ideals, wealth redistribution, and so on, I don't see how that reality will - or even should - change.
Why would you have mass-protests for police entities procuring increasingly more technologically sophisticated equipment to do their jobs more effectively? In any society, whether it is free or not, I fail to see how this is surprising. And in a free (or quasi-free, or however you want to frame it) society, I fail to see how this is surprising, or even wrong.
Telephones make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of telephones?
Computers make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of computers?
Vehicles make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of vehicles?
Helicopters make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of helicopters?
Remote controlled robots make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of remote controlled robots?
It's not about the tools; it's about the laws that govern their use. Why is a drone a problem? Cameras in public spaces? Because it makes law enforcement "too" aware? I'll accept that argument, but you'll have to make it a cogent and relevant one...
Yeah, law enforcement aren't looking for ways to better do their jobs...it's all about a much higher level plot - one that might not even be known by the front line or even higher ranking police officials - to "control society".
And I know the connotation in which you meant that, but that's exactly what law enforcement is, in case you hadn't noticed: the control of society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained in the 1762 The Social Contract Or Principles Of Political Right that "laws" are "the rules the members of a society create to balance the right of the individual to self-determination with the needs of society as a whole". Laws are "rules that mandate or prohibit certain behavior in society."
Since law enforcement is mandated to do what its name implies, is it any surprise that tools, whether they be telephones, computers, the internet, databases, night vision optical equipment, cameras, planes, helicopters, cars, trucks, weapons, office buildings, recording devices, radios, and so on are all adopted by this community?
Technology is a force multiplier for law enforcement just as it is for the general populace or an individual. No, a group of citizens is not likely to operate drone aircraft. Nor are they likely to maintain vehicle fleets or any manner of other things accepted for the execution of law enforcement.
If you don't want to believe the language of any statute - which, in the case of the MCA, is explicitly that it does not apply to US citizens - then what value does language have at all? If it's all meaningless, or means something other than what it says, or a politician will simply ignore it anyway, why does it even matter in the slightest what it says or doesn't say, by that logic?
You're telling me that technologies once developed by the military and/or used for military applications have started being used for other applications as they become more affordable, manageable, and available.
And that governments, law enforcement entities, and municipalities have increasing access to and leverage technologies to become more effective at the jobs with which they are charged by the public?
If you think this is paranoid ranting, well, so did people who thought habeus corpus would never be removed.
It hasn't been. The Military Commissions Act specifically and explicitly does not apply to US citizens, and doesn't even apply to the José Padilla example.
The Military Commissions Act properly handles terrorism against the United States as a military and national security issue, not a domestic civil or criminal matter (to treat it as such is ridiculous). This necessarily means that someone has to make a determination about who is or isn't an enemy combatant. If this means you fantasize about a scenario in which anyone could be declared and enemy combatant, and simply because that person doesn't have immediate recourse on demand through civilian courts it automatically means that habeas corpus has been removed, be my guest. But it is by no means as clear cut as you believe it is. The United States and the entire mechanics of the system supporting MCA, the legislators who crafted it, and everyone else involved has no interest or intent for MCA to apply to US citizens, and the law itself specifically says that.
Even Human Rights Watch, which is strongly opposed to MCA, still properly concludes that MCA does NOT apply to US citizens, or even legal or permanent resident aliens within the United States. MCA only applies to "aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States", period. All arguments that it could "really" still be applied to US citizens, when the law itself was written to prohibit just that, simply because anyone held under MCA provisions does not have immediate recourse in civilian courts (which would turn the very purpose of MCA on its head), removes all of the value of the intent and meaning of language - language carefully chosen in MCA such that it does NOT apply to US citizens or persons within the United States with a valid immigration status.
I suppose you're also one of the folks who believes the Insurrection Act updates (post-Katrina) are really a secret attempt to make declaring martial law easier, when it's just as easy (or hard) as it's ever been under the 200-year old law.
The internet (for which we have the military and the military-industrial complex in large part to thank) will not be "reined in". News and media will not be restricted in the ways you imagine. Commercial copyrighted entertainment content will be. (Also, uh, have we forgotten about printed media? Or are you thinking "yeah, but the internet allows people to organize against the government faster, man? Ok, and uh, yeah, that is the exact kind of content that will NEVER be restricted by DRM, right?)
Of course DRM is about control. It's all about control. But it is, in fact, like it or not, also about protecting commercial content and squeezing as much money out of consumers as possible, protecting every possible moneymaking avenue for such content now and as far into the future as possible. With that I have no dispute. It IS also to extend copyright provisions, and sanctions, into the digital realm, no matter how wrongheaded and ultimately futile attempt it may be.
Ironically, if you are anti-DRM, you should understand that DRM's Achilles' Heel is that will ALWAYS be able to be defeated, and thus, no one is going to "rein in" anything.
Was 9/11 a conspiracy perfectly executed by the US government, that required hundreds, at a minimum, of people at all levels of government and private industry to be completely complicit (and silent after the fact, when we can't even keep our most classified programs secret), which murdered over 3000 US citizens, then made it look like it was mostly Saudis that did it and masterminded by a Saudi (when Saudi Arabia is an official ally), who had previously been partially aided by the CIA against the Russians, but then supposedly "concealed" that it was Saudis that did it, as an excuse to warmonger in completely and utterly unrelated nations in the mideast?
Look, this doesn't have ANYTHING to do with "mainstream media". If you believe the kinds of things you think these things are telling you, you MUST also believe what I said in the prior paragraph, and that makes no sense. If you DO, on the other hand, believe essentially that, then I feel very, very sorry for you, and there won't be any further productive discussion between us on this topic.
And yes, as someone who also happens to have formal education in physics, I can read a cold fusion physicist's paper and absolutely not "question" the "official story", which is that two of the largest buildings on earth collapsed in an unprecedented fashion in an unprecedented event. There is nothing in the mechanics of the collapse that contradicts any laws of physics in the "official" (i.e., true) story.
People don't think that is anywhere near comprehensive enough, and believe that the author (Benjamin Chertoff) is a cousin of DHS secretary Michael Chertoff (as if that, even if true, somehow invalidates the debunking).
Yeah. Because we do already know the "truth" about 9/11, and nearly all of the mechanics and particulars of the attack, holes and omissions and mistakes aside, is quite nicely, thoroughly, and comprehensively covered in the 9/11 Commission Report, which conspiracy theorists think is the biggest whitewash in US history to throw people off the "truth" of what "really happened" on 9/11.
And for people who point out holes and mistakes in the Commission's report, they apparently don't understand how commissions like this - and their reports - work. They're not living documents or someone's blog. They're painstakingly compiled with all of the information available at the time, and then written, edited, and frozen. And when they are frozen, they stay that way. Errors and all. Except that doesn't make the other 95% of the factual information in the report any less true.
Not to mention that all of the convoluted theories people have, a mere fraction of a fraction of some of the most common I rattled off in my reply, just utterly defy any kind of logic or common sense and usually both.
(Yes, it's related to Loose Change, but since Loose Change is a collection of some of the more popular conspiracy theories/doubts/etc. about 9/11, it's a good place to start.)
There might be a lot of corrupt politicians, ulterior motives, and evil deeds in the world, but the US executing 9/11 on itself, and all that is implicit in that from technical, personnel, logistics, military, and numerous other perspectives, simply doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
You can say the US invited the attacks because of mideast policy. You can even say that some people might have not shed a tear in terms of the ability to then use 9/11 as a "Pearl Harbor"-type incident. But unfortunately, it was 19 mostly Saudi radical Islamic extremists - even if one believes they are monsters of the United States' own creation - that attacked the US on 9/11.
Not the US government or military itself. Not the shadow government. Not the Illuminati.
It's actually quite incredible what some conspiracy loons believe about 9/11. It simply does not stand up to any logic at all, or even common sense. Buildings weren't wired with explosives. It wasn't a drone or missile that hit the Pentagon. It wasn't remote control military aircraft that hit the towers. Voice changing technology wasn't used to make fake cell phone calls from Flight 93. Cell phones *do* work on planes (in various circumstances). The FCC/FAA cell phone "ban" isn't a trick so that people will "find out" that cell phones "don't work" under Flight 93-like conditions. Saying that something falls at "free fall speeds" (e.g., in reference to WTC 7) is meaningless and has no bearing on the discussion. Bringing up things like some NORAD exercise or Operation Northwoods or all kinds of tenuous, ridiculous, and (co)incidental information about some pilot who worked some particular place 25 years ago is irrelevant and meaningless. All/some of the planes weren't secretly landed safely at a military installation and then the occupants murdered. Hundreds/thousands of people haven't been "bought off" or "disappeared" to "cover up" the "truth" about 9/11.
I could go on and on and on and on. But ultimately, the people who want to believe 9/11 was an inside job will keep believing it, and any amount of proof otherwise won't sway them, and can indeed just be explained away as part of the conspiracy. Kind of like rabid Creationists, almost, frankly...
If you want to hate policy and a political view, go for it. But just realize that lunacy takes away any legitimacy from your debate, and getting other people to believe this tripe will eventually be the entire movement's undoing, or the end of *actual* truth (as opposed to your "truth") in any debate on this topic. And frankly, I think that may be what some people want.
Wrong. All Macs have FireWire. There are none that don't have FireWire, and there have been none that haven't had it since Macs started shipping with FireWire. Even FireWire 800 has been added *back* to some products that didn't have it at first (e.g., original MacBook Pro). But all still had at least FireWire 400, which has been the "standard" FireWire interface for years. There is no indication that any new Macs won't continue to have FireWire, considering so much depends on FireWire (see URL below).
The only Apple product to drop FireWire is the iPod, and that's because an iPod doesn't need FireWire for anything, and would only add cost, power consumption, chipsets, etc., that aren't necessary for an increasingly smaller product. (But even iPods without FireWire can even still be charged via FireWire.) (And yes, just because someone who has to be contrarian will respond, the internal iSight also doesn't use FireWire, but that's totally irrelevant, since the transport for an internal camera housed in a computer is utterly meaningless to the user. And no, AppleTV doesn't have FireWire, but it's also not a "Mac", regardless of what OS it can run.)
"Terroristic threat" isn't the same as a "terrorist threat" or "terrorism". "Terroristic threat" is a very old legal concept in many jurisdictions in the United States, that has been around for a lot longer than anyone in the US has worried about "terrorism" or "terrorists".
Making what someone determines to be a threat of violence often falls under the legal guise of "terroristic threat". Of course, the detectives who followed up on this determined there was no threat, and he isn't charged with any crime. The only "negative" was that he lost his contract job (which, without knowing more, is almost certainly a job that he can be released from at any time, for any, or even no, reason).
His interview with police will not show up on any background check, of any kind, anywhere, ever.
He will not be on any TSA, or any other, watch lists (and wouldn't be even if he was convicted of a crime - WTF? Oh, you're one of those people who think "terroristic threat" somehow is equated with "terrorism", even though they're utterly and completely different concepts, and unrelated).
He will not be "punished", for anything, and the only way anyone will know about this is because of the life it will have on blogs, and no one in any official capacity, save for possibly the individual detectives who talked to him about it remembering with their own minds, will have any knowledge of it.
I can't believe how wrong your entire post was, and that it got modded up to boot.
There may not be a "term", per se, and even if there is, the contract very likely includes language that says that the employer may terminate the contract at any time, which would be fairly standard.
Eh, I apologize for responding with that tone, then. My bad.
Since everyone else responding didn't seem to "get it", your humor deflected right off the stupidity helmet I had to don to respond to the other comments.
I guess that's why the legal concept and notion of "terroristic threat" (not with respect to "terrorism" or anything else) has been around for decades, then, and why police have investigated people merely threatening to kill others for just as long?
I'm not going to dispute that the political climate plays some role, but come on: people have been dismissed for much less, and had visits from police in response to a complain for lesser still. All before 9/11 and Bush, no less.
As a contractor, he can be released with even less cause (read: basically any cause, or no cause at all) than any other kind of employee, some of which themselves can be released with nearly no cause.
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The top 1% pay 60%? You must be joking.
No, I'm not. And it's the top 5% that pay around 60%. The "top 1%" pay around half of the tax burden. That's not in dispute; that's statistically what they actually pay. I know this might be difficult for you to believe.
Also, are you joking? In order to be in the top 1%, you don't need to be fabulously wealthy with private jets and 50 foot ocean yachts. You only need to make about $250,000 a year (as of 2000 figures). And uh, that's not that much of a stretch.
I don't care how much money you think they are squirreling away, or how much they actually are squirreling away, frankly. They STILL are paying that much of the tax burden. But see, even if we made the top 5% or 1% pay 100% of the tax, you'd still think they have too much money, right? Or we'd come back to the tired old sales tax vs income tax arguments.
The vast majority of people in these classes don't have secret trusts and offshore bank accounts. They're normal people who have family incomes of $300,000 a year. It doesn't take much at all to get to that point, and takes nothing more than a couple decent jobs after college to hit the top 5%. Those groups already pay a disproportionate share of the tax, and that is fine, but only to a point.
But you're probably one of those folks who thinks it's "unfair" they have as much as they do, and still wouldn't be satisfied even if they shouldered the entire tax burden - sales and income - for all of society (to say nothing of how ridiculously unfair that would be). Because they'd still have "too much" for your tastes.
"The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither." ~Thomas Jefferson
Ugh. Where to begin.
First of all, you got the quote wrong. It's:
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Second, it's Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson. (Wow.)
Anyway, note essential liberty...a little temporary safety.
Not that it's somehow never right to sacrifice any liberty for any amount of safety - we do it every day. It's called the rule of law and is necessary for collectively maintaining order and stability in society.
I can't believe how much this quote is bastardized and misinterpreted as it is continually trotted out in opposition to anything the "government" does in a free society in an attempt to fulfill its obligation to its citizens.
You kind of topped them all by completely misattributing it, though. Good job.
So the UK government is planning on killing people (or enabling their killing) via the use of unmanned drone aircraft?
Please. Do tell.
What's a fair level of wealth? What is unfair? Who gets to decide?
The power and connections that come along with wealth are unavoidable, and the saying, "It takes money to make money", is as true as ever.
Your conclusion that "most" wealthy are rich due to luck and don't actually contribute anything tangible to society is only correct if you are perhaps considering the super-wealthy, which constitute such a small number of people that they're not even worth discussing. And they aren't the ones controlling the world - it's a much, much larger group of people. To say that one is in the "wealthiest 1%", which has been a sound bite in many previous discussions on this topic, doesn't take a lot of income. As of 2000, it was just over $200,000/year. Is that what you consider "wealthy"? There are millions of these people, and most of them are wealthy because of their own hard work and contributions to society, including the business they often run which employ so many others. We're not talking about faceless megacorporations, here. We're talking about the millions of businesses that make economies run.
The bottom 50% of wage-earners in the US pay less than 3% of the tax burden (with many at the bottom paying nothing). The top 5% pay over 60% - the top 1% almost half themselves. What if we made the bottom pay nothing, and put all the tax burden, on, say the top 5% or 1%. Would that be fair? The rich would still have so much more than the poor. Should we maybe take some away from them and, you know, spread it around? How do you limit wealth you consider "unfair"? Why is it "unfair"? Who decides how much is too much?
If you're concerned about limiting freedoms, that would be one of the more egregious affronts to "freedom" I could think of.
the rich benefit more
Because they benefit more from nearly everything.
And frankly, I don't think that is necessarily wrong (again, unless you believe in disproportionately "punishing" the attainment of wealth in some way).
I appreciate your healthy cynicism, but a stable society benefits all members. You argue, with some success, that the "rich" are somehow better protected or afforded more rights, but that is more a function of the fact that their possessions themselves often afford them a better lot in life notwithstanding specific "law" that that effect.
I think you're making connections that are a little too tenuous. If lawmakers are generally "wealthy" (in comparison with the rest of the population), then, sure, it's a true statement that the "wealthy" are implementing these policies. But it's not because they're wealthy. And this notion that there is a silent plot by the "wealthy" to constantly control the "sheep" of society via any means they can - such as drone aircraft used by law enforcement - is a little too much of a stretch for me, and for most people.
Yes, there are people with power and wealth who want to protect what they have. Society will be friendlier to the "rich" because everything is by nature "friendlier" for the rich. But it's not as direct a plot as you imagine by the ultra-rich to "control" society to their own benefit. That a stable societal structure benefits the "rich" is incidental, not causative. I won't disagree that the rich have things easier. But unless you believe in punishing the rich or in true communist/socialist ideals, wealth redistribution, and so on, I don't see how that reality will - or even should - change.
Why would you have mass-protests for police entities procuring increasingly more technologically sophisticated equipment to do their jobs more effectively? In any society, whether it is free or not, I fail to see how this is surprising. And in a free (or quasi-free, or however you want to frame it) society, I fail to see how this is surprising, or even wrong.
Telephones make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of telephones?
Computers make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of computers?
Vehicles make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of vehicles?
Helicopters make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of helicopters?
Remote controlled robots make the job of law enforcement easier. Should we protest or prohibit their use of remote controlled robots?
It's not about the tools; it's about the laws that govern their use. Why is a drone a problem? Cameras in public spaces? Because it makes law enforcement "too" aware? I'll accept that argument, but you'll have to make it a cogent and relevant one...
Yeah, law enforcement aren't looking for ways to better do their jobs...it's all about a much higher level plot - one that might not even be known by the front line or even higher ranking police officials - to "control society".
;-)
And I know the connotation in which you meant that, but that's exactly what law enforcement is, in case you hadn't noticed: the control of society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained in the 1762 The Social Contract Or Principles Of Political Right that "laws" are "the rules the members of a society create to balance the right of the individual to self-determination with the needs of society as a whole". Laws are "rules that mandate or prohibit certain behavior in society."
Since law enforcement is mandated to do what its name implies, is it any surprise that tools, whether they be telephones, computers, the internet, databases, night vision optical equipment, cameras, planes, helicopters, cars, trucks, weapons, office buildings, recording devices, radios, and so on are all adopted by this community?
Technology is a force multiplier for law enforcement just as it is for the general populace or an individual. No, a group of citizens is not likely to operate drone aircraft. Nor are they likely to maintain vehicle fleets or any manner of other things accepted for the execution of law enforcement.
Come on, spun.
If you don't want to believe the language of any statute - which, in the case of the MCA, is explicitly that it does not apply to US citizens - then what value does language have at all? If it's all meaningless, or means something other than what it says, or a politician will simply ignore it anyway, why does it even matter in the slightest what it says or doesn't say, by that logic?
You're telling me that technologies once developed by the military and/or used for military applications have started being used for other applications as they become more affordable, manageable, and available.
And that governments, law enforcement entities, and municipalities have increasing access to and leverage technologies to become more effective at the jobs with which they are charged by the public?
O, the humanity.
If you think this is paranoid ranting, well, so did people who thought habeus corpus would never be removed.
It hasn't been. The Military Commissions Act specifically and explicitly does not apply to US citizens, and doesn't even apply to the José Padilla example.
The Military Commissions Act properly handles terrorism against the United States as a military and national security issue, not a domestic civil or criminal matter (to treat it as such is ridiculous). This necessarily means that someone has to make a determination about who is or isn't an enemy combatant. If this means you fantasize about a scenario in which anyone could be declared and enemy combatant, and simply because that person doesn't have immediate recourse on demand through civilian courts it automatically means that habeas corpus has been removed, be my guest. But it is by no means as clear cut as you believe it is. The United States and the entire mechanics of the system supporting MCA, the legislators who crafted it, and everyone else involved has no interest or intent for MCA to apply to US citizens, and the law itself specifically says that.
Even Human Rights Watch, which is strongly opposed to MCA, still properly concludes that MCA does NOT apply to US citizens, or even legal or permanent resident aliens within the United States. MCA only applies to "aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States", period. All arguments that it could "really" still be applied to US citizens, when the law itself was written to prohibit just that, simply because anyone held under MCA provisions does not have immediate recourse in civilian courts (which would turn the very purpose of MCA on its head), removes all of the value of the intent and meaning of language - language carefully chosen in MCA such that it does NOT apply to US citizens or persons within the United States with a valid immigration status.
I suppose you're also one of the folks who believes the Insurrection Act updates (post-Katrina) are really a secret attempt to make declaring martial law easier, when it's just as easy (or hard) as it's ever been under the 200-year old law.
The internet (for which we have the military and the military-industrial complex in large part to thank) will not be "reined in". News and media will not be restricted in the ways you imagine. Commercial copyrighted entertainment content will be. (Also, uh, have we forgotten about printed media? Or are you thinking "yeah, but the internet allows people to organize against the government faster, man? Ok, and uh, yeah, that is the exact kind of content that will NEVER be restricted by DRM, right?)
Of course DRM is about control. It's all about control. But it is, in fact, like it or not, also about protecting commercial content and squeezing as much money out of consumers as possible, protecting every possible moneymaking avenue for such content now and as far into the future as possible. With that I have no dispute. It IS also to extend copyright provisions, and sanctions, into the digital realm, no matter how wrongheaded and ultimately futile attempt it may be.
Ironically, if you are anti-DRM, you should understand that DRM's Achilles' Heel is that will ALWAYS be able to be defeated, and thus, no one is going to "rein in" anything.
Uh, that illustrates the Dixie Chicks' stupidity quite appropriately, thanks.
. chicks.reut/a l_controversy ...lead singer Natalie Maines said in a concert in London earlier this week that she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/14/dixie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks#Politic
That it's embarrassing to be from Texas?
Steven Jones is a godsend to you guys, I know.
I'm sorry, but you have to ask yourself:
Was 9/11 a conspiracy perfectly executed by the US government, that required hundreds, at a minimum, of people at all levels of government and private industry to be completely complicit (and silent after the fact, when we can't even keep our most classified programs secret), which murdered over 3000 US citizens, then made it look like it was mostly Saudis that did it and masterminded by a Saudi (when Saudi Arabia is an official ally), who had previously been partially aided by the CIA against the Russians, but then supposedly "concealed" that it was Saudis that did it, as an excuse to warmonger in completely and utterly unrelated nations in the mideast?
Look, this doesn't have ANYTHING to do with "mainstream media". If you believe the kinds of things you think these things are telling you, you MUST also believe what I said in the prior paragraph, and that makes no sense. If you DO, on the other hand, believe essentially that, then I feel very, very sorry for you, and there won't be any further productive discussion between us on this topic.
And yes, as someone who also happens to have formal education in physics, I can read a cold fusion physicist's paper and absolutely not "question" the "official story", which is that two of the largest buildings on earth collapsed in an unprecedented fashion in an unprecedented event. There is nothing in the mechanics of the collapse that contradicts any laws of physics in the "official" (i.e., true) story.
People don't think that is anywhere near comprehensive enough, and believe that the author (Benjamin Chertoff) is a cousin of DHS secretary Michael Chertoff (as if that, even if true, somehow invalidates the debunking).
Here, have a sampling of the wackos.
Yeah. Because we do already know the "truth" about 9/11, and nearly all of the mechanics and particulars of the attack, holes and omissions and mistakes aside, is quite nicely, thoroughly, and comprehensively covered in the 9/11 Commission Report, which conspiracy theorists think is the biggest whitewash in US history to throw people off the "truth" of what "really happened" on 9/11.
And for people who point out holes and mistakes in the Commission's report, they apparently don't understand how commissions like this - and their reports - work. They're not living documents or someone's blog. They're painstakingly compiled with all of the information available at the time, and then written, edited, and frozen. And when they are frozen, they stay that way. Errors and all. Except that doesn't make the other 95% of the factual information in the report any less true.
Not to mention that all of the convoluted theories people have, a mere fraction of a fraction of some of the most common I rattled off in my reply, just utterly defy any kind of logic or common sense and usually both.
It wasn't done by the US, as much as people like you seem to believe/wish it were.
And yes, we've all seen the alleged "proof" (which is laughable at best).
A decent compendium debunking most of the more common little tidbits is here:
http://www.loosechangeguide.com/
(Yes, it's related to Loose Change, but since Loose Change is a collection of some of the more popular conspiracy theories/doubts/etc. about 9/11, it's a good place to start.)
There might be a lot of corrupt politicians, ulterior motives, and evil deeds in the world, but the US executing 9/11 on itself, and all that is implicit in that from technical, personnel, logistics, military, and numerous other perspectives, simply doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
You can say the US invited the attacks because of mideast policy. You can even say that some people might have not shed a tear in terms of the ability to then use 9/11 as a "Pearl Harbor"-type incident. But unfortunately, it was 19 mostly Saudi radical Islamic extremists - even if one believes they are monsters of the United States' own creation - that attacked the US on 9/11.
Not the US government or military itself. Not the shadow government. Not the Illuminati.
It's actually quite incredible what some conspiracy loons believe about 9/11. It simply does not stand up to any logic at all, or even common sense. Buildings weren't wired with explosives. It wasn't a drone or missile that hit the Pentagon. It wasn't remote control military aircraft that hit the towers. Voice changing technology wasn't used to make fake cell phone calls from Flight 93. Cell phones *do* work on planes (in various circumstances). The FCC/FAA cell phone "ban" isn't a trick so that people will "find out" that cell phones "don't work" under Flight 93-like conditions. Saying that something falls at "free fall speeds" (e.g., in reference to WTC 7) is meaningless and has no bearing on the discussion. Bringing up things like some NORAD exercise or Operation Northwoods or all kinds of tenuous, ridiculous, and (co)incidental information about some pilot who worked some particular place 25 years ago is irrelevant and meaningless. All/some of the planes weren't secretly landed safely at a military installation and then the occupants murdered. Hundreds/thousands of people haven't been "bought off" or "disappeared" to "cover up" the "truth" about 9/11.
I could go on and on and on and on. But ultimately, the people who want to believe 9/11 was an inside job will keep believing it, and any amount of proof otherwise won't sway them, and can indeed just be explained away as part of the conspiracy. Kind of like rabid Creationists, almost, frankly...
If you want to hate policy and a political view, go for it. But just realize that lunacy takes away any legitimacy from your debate, and getting other people to believe this tripe will eventually be the entire movement's undoing, or the end of *actual* truth (as opposed to your "truth") in any debate on this topic. And frankly, I think that may be what some people want.
Wrong. All Macs have FireWire. There are none that don't have FireWire, and there have been none that haven't had it since Macs started shipping with FireWire. Even FireWire 800 has been added *back* to some products that didn't have it at first (e.g., original MacBook Pro). But all still had at least FireWire 400, which has been the "standard" FireWire interface for years. There is no indication that any new Macs won't continue to have FireWire, considering so much depends on FireWire (see URL below).
For more info, see:
http://appleintelfaq.com/#17.3
The only Apple product to drop FireWire is the iPod, and that's because an iPod doesn't need FireWire for anything, and would only add cost, power consumption, chipsets, etc., that aren't necessary for an increasingly smaller product. (But even iPods without FireWire can even still be charged via FireWire.) (And yes, just because someone who has to be contrarian will respond, the internal iSight also doesn't use FireWire, but that's totally irrelevant, since the transport for an internal camera housed in a computer is utterly meaningless to the user. And no, AppleTV doesn't have FireWire, but it's also not a "Mac", regardless of what OS it can run.)
Unless someone, you know, googles him or something. But what are the chances of that happening?
Yeah, uh, and as I said:
and the only way anyone will know about this is because of the life it will have on blogs
I'm not making any negative judgments against him for choosing to do this, but it's him who chose to air this incident.
Not the government, and not his employer.
I can't believe you don't see the distinction.
Wow. Just...wow.
"Terroristic threat" isn't the same as a "terrorist threat" or "terrorism". "Terroristic threat" is a very old legal concept in many jurisdictions in the United States, that has been around for a lot longer than anyone in the US has worried about "terrorism" or "terrorists".
Making what someone determines to be a threat of violence often falls under the legal guise of "terroristic threat". Of course, the detectives who followed up on this determined there was no threat, and he isn't charged with any crime. The only "negative" was that he lost his contract job (which, without knowing more, is almost certainly a job that he can be released from at any time, for any, or even no, reason).
His interview with police will not show up on any background check, of any kind, anywhere, ever.
He will not be on any TSA, or any other, watch lists (and wouldn't be even if he was convicted of a crime - WTF? Oh, you're one of those people who think "terroristic threat" somehow is equated with "terrorism", even though they're utterly and completely different concepts, and unrelated).
He will not be "punished", for anything, and the only way anyone will know about this is because of the life it will have on blogs, and no one in any official capacity, save for possibly the individual detectives who talked to him about it remembering with their own minds, will have any knowledge of it.
I can't believe how wrong your entire post was, and that it got modded up to boot.
There may not be a "term", per se, and even if there is, the contract very likely includes language that says that the employer may terminate the contract at any time, which would be fairly standard.
Eh, I apologize for responding with that tone, then. My bad.
Since everyone else responding didn't seem to "get it", your humor deflected right off the stupidity helmet I had to don to respond to the other comments.
it's kind of like a tinfoil hat, but different.
I guess that's why the legal concept and notion of "terroristic threat" (not with respect to "terrorism" or anything else) has been around for decades, then, and why police have investigated people merely threatening to kill others for just as long?
I'm not going to dispute that the political climate plays some role, but come on: people have been dismissed for much less, and had visits from police in response to a complain for lesser still. All before 9/11 and Bush, no less.
As a contractor, he can be released with even less cause (read: basically any cause, or no cause at all) than any other kind of employee, some of which themselves can be released with nearly no cause.
So yeah, it's "all good".
. . .