Of course, because as any murderer will tell you, the first thing you do when you're off to murder someone is to call 911 before committing the murder and ask the dispatcher to send the police immediately to your location.
My God, are people really this dumb?
We can argue all day about what may or may not have been said, whether excessive force was used, who was at fault, etc, but to claim this was some kind of premeditated murder is beyond stupid.
In Arizona's case, the police can only ask about your immigration status if you're suspected of a crime and they have an articulable reason to specifically suspect that you're in the United States illegally (and that reason cannot be because of race, skin color, etc. according to the Arizona law). If an individual is suspected of driving through a red light, has no license, can't speak English, and has form of identification, they already have a laundry list of reasons to detain that individual. It is, per the Arizona law, specifically illegal for the police to detain an individual due to their race or skin color. It's illegal. You can argue all you want about what you think some cops might do in hypothetical scenarios, but the law clear and specifically states that isn't allowed. Further, if an individual is suspected of being in the country illegally in Arizona there, the police MUST accept any Federal, state, or local identification whose issuance requires proof of legal residence. Doesn't matter what other evidence they have. Doesn't matter if you flat admit to being here illegally. The moment you produce a drivers license or non-driver ID or government worker ID or any other ID that meets the criteria, any questioning of your legal status in this country ends immediately.
Now, if we're talking about ICE/DHS? They can pretty much do whatever the Hell they want. They can demand paperwork of a blonde haired, blue eyed woman walking through Central Park in NYC speaking perfect English to her group of friends. They can take the drivers license you have with you and laugh at it as they haul you off to detention. They can decide that whatever you show them proving you're here legally is worthless. They can decide that your drivers license, passport, birth certificate, and personal endorsement from President Obama himself is all worthless and then they can deport you.
In Mexico, the laws around this kind of thing are even crazier. You get zero due process there. They can simply remove you from the country if they even suspect you've engaged in such terrible things as being a foreigner in Mexico who participated in any way in a political or social movement or who bought any property in Mexico without the expressed consent of the government. No trial, no judge, just jail and/or GTFO and you're barred for life.
So you'll excuse me for laughing at this outpouring of horror over one of the most tame immigration laws in the region. Arizona took US Federal law, added a ton of protections to ensure legal residents aren't bothered, and is now somehow the devil. Meanwhile, US immigration authorities blatantly harass the Hell out of US citizens and other legal residents day-in and day-out with vastly more power and authority than any person or group should have and yet somehow Arizona has passed some terrible racist xenophobic thing.
When I see you people protesting Mexican immigration law and US Federal immigration law, I'll start to believe that maybe you're serious. Otherwise, I just can't bring myself to care.
When you're done with all that ad hominem, let me know.
Until then, learn the difference between something you can see with your natural, unaided eye (such as a billboard or something illegal on your front lawn) and something that requires a computer, wireless card, drivers that support promiscuous mode, an operating system that supports that driver with a network stack that supports that mode of operation, a sniffer program to pull down the data, and an application that can translate that data into human-readable content for the police to view with their natural, unaided eyes.
At the very least, this kind of logic would make it perfectly legal to intercept everything from your cell phone calls to your wireless Xbox controller's signals without a warrant.
The discussion is about what those restrictions are and the logic supporting them. Ergo, the point remains relevant. If the legal principle is how much effort gaining access requires and we're content to allow legal access when little effort is required to gain it and no changes are made in order to gain access, then police can march through an open door or climb through an open window.
I believe the standard should be whether a reasonable individual believes they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If one is standing in the public square yelling into their phone, no reasonable person has an expectation that agents of the government won't be able to hear their side of the conversation. They do, however, have a reasonable expectation that agents of the government won't sit in a van nearby pulling the entire conversation from the air so they can listen to it. Further, if one is scrawling a message in chalk in the public square, they cannot reasonably have an expectation that agents of the government won't be able to read what they've written. If they're typing that message into a computer and posting it in a private forum, they have a reasonable expectation that government agents aren't sitting in a van pulling their data out of the air and looking at it.
By that logic, if I don't close and lock my windows, the police can climb into my living room and wander around my house without a warrant, arresting me for anything they happen to see. After all, if the police didn't have to pick a lock or kick in a door or make any changes to my house to enter it, anyone can just climb on in and look around. Therefore it's also okay for the police to do that.
What makes you think that Arizona's law is "picking on foreigners"?
Arizona has copied parts of US Federal law, added extra protections for citizens and legal residents, and is now looking to actually enforce the pieces of US Federal law they've copied onto their own books. There's nothing in there which picks on anyone who's in the United States legally.
Have you actually read this law? Or are you commenting on what you've seen in the news or read on Internet forums?
No, I'm pissy about it because it allows a USA citizen to be detained until he produces papers just because he appears foreign and might be here illegally. My wife is a USA citizen, but she immigrated here from her home country, doesn't speak perfect English and still has a strong accent from her native language. What's to stop her from being stopped and detained until she produces documentation?
What's to stop her from being stopped and detained anywhere in the US by ICE agents? Again, your problem has nothing to do with what Arizona passed. There is absolutely NOTHING in the Arizona law which doesn't already exist in US Federal law. This isn't Arizona passing some new sweeping measure; this is Arizona looking at Federal law and saying "yeah, me too!"
The difference is, Arizona has built in protections to their law which don't exist in Federal law to minimize the chances of a US citizen being hassled over an immigration question. They can't simply stop you for no good reason and demand your papers. They must have a reasonable suspicion that you've committed a criminal act AND they must have an articulable reason to believe you're not just foreign, but here in the country illegally. Only THEN can the Arizona police ask for proof of legal residence and producing ANY Federal, state, or local identification whose issuance requires proof of legal residence immediately ENDS all question of your legal residency under Arizona's law. You don't get that in Federal law. Federal law says ICE can pull you AND your wife out of your car and detain you for however long it takes until the agents involved are damn good and ready to believe you have a right to be in the country.
If you have anything to be pissy about, it's the Federal statutes. Those are VASTLY more stringent and have a lot less protections for your rights and your wife's.
The USA of all nations has little right to claim that only those that are here legally have a right to be here, given our history.
Every nation has the right to police its borders as part of its national sovereignty. To believe otherwise puts you in the extremist fringe next to anarchists and "sovereign citizens".
If the TSA actually believes what they're doing today increases security and doesn't impede liberty, we've got even bigger problems. I choose to believe that the people at the top of the TSA know their policies are ineffective and violate the rights of Americans because the alternative is so much more dangerous.
The Arizona law does nothing that isn't already in Federal law or that hasn't been in Federal law for a long, long time. All immigrants in the United States are required by Federal law to have their immigration paperwork with them at all times and to present it to law enforcement and immigration officials upon request.
The only reason you or anyone else is pissy about Arizona's law is because you're 1) ignorant of existing Federal law and/or 2) supportive of people violating our borders and flooding into the country illegally.
Nations have a right as part of their national sovereignty to know who is crossing their borders and they have the right to deny entry to non-citizens at will. Anyone found to have crossed illegally should be returned to their nation of origin and barred for legal entry for a long, long time.
Actually, it was both. The point being made was that small business owners didn't build the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure necessary to support their business and thus did not build their businesses on their own.
Neither side is accurately presenting the quote. One side seems intent on ignoring the first subject of the antecedent of "that" because it brings up difficult questions that can't be answered in a 30-second sound byte. The issue for them is taxation and a challenge to their ideal that people with wealth don't "owe" (should not be taxed) anything back to society. The other side strongly denies the second subject of the antecedent of "that" because it makes them appear (or perhaps exposes them as for some segments) extremist on issues of property rights and wealth. The implication being that one cannot build (and therefore cannot own) anything since society at large has provided the things that made it all possible. Ergo, society is entitled to take anything (and possibly everything) you have for its own purposes.
It's an interesting quote because the challenging questions it raises will never be widely discussed. What it really exposes is how 95% of the battle in public debate today is framing the question or issue. If you can make it about greedy rich people or you can make it about radical socialism, you put the other side on a constant back foot. If you can make it about killing babies or about invading a woman's body, you don't have to actually debate anything. Thus, we never solve problems or answer questions anymore because all our time and energy is spent on bullshit that has nothing to do with solving problems or answering questions.
At least the Romans had bread and circus. We seem to only get shit and more shit. Bring back the lions, I say.
"Funny how it's the racist party trying to defend their agenda."
This alone makes the comment a -1 Troll. The rest is debatable, but this is nothing but ignorant and inflammatory rhetoric designed to stifle debate. You see, when one has confidence in their own positions, they don't need to engage in that kind of ad hominem.
You're forgetting the fact that this planet never had a species like Humans for Millions of Years. We have done more damage to this planet in the last few hundred years, than nature could do in thousands of years.
That's simply absurd. Nature can toss a black hole toward Earth and do more damage to this planet in seconds than humans will ever be able to do if we exist for a hundred million years.
That's a severe failure of an argument. It assumes that human beings (from whom legal/judicial relief can be had) have acted against you. It further assumes that you're being used to artificially sustain another individual; not through any means found in the natural world. It's nothing but a ball of non sequiturs wrapped up in a poorly written package to push a ridiculous agenda justifying murder (if the premise is granted that a fetus is human).
Let's work backwards through this mess. First, if you wake up next to this person, we aren't talking about unplugging an artificial link between circulatory systems. We're talking about you paying someone to rip body parts off the violinist until the bed next to you is empty. Or to puncture his skull and vacuum out the contents. Who would seriously argue that such actions would be legal? That this person is connected - against your will - to your circulatory system is irrelevant. You also can't shoot the violinist. You also can't stab him. You also can't poison him. None of these would be legal. Disconnecting the circulatory system link? Almost certainly legal anywhere in the western world and basically a slam dunk to be granted a court order for a medical doctor to do so. But no, you can't attack the unconscious violinist with a knife simply because his friends are violent psychos.
But then who are the actual friends in this case, and how are you actually connected? Well, the friends don't even exist. And nobody had to connect the violinist to you. By some natural process (that we won't get into because it doesn't exist and I don't care to invent the particulars for this absurd exercise), you've become connected to this famous violinist who you laid down next to last night. You don't want to be connected to him, so you grab a rock and smash his skull, right? Perfectly legal to smash some unconscious person's skull with a brick who hasn't attacked you in any way? What kind of lawless hellhole does one have to grow up in to believe that to be legal or moral?
But then, this isn't actually a famous violinist, is it? It can't be, because it's just an infant child. Through some act of nature, you went to bed one night and woke up the next morning with an unconscious infant attached to your body. You then call up someone and pay them money to cut up the infant with a knife and have its dismembered body dumped in a trash bin. And this is legal? Really?
There's only one defense to the abortion procedures that currently exist (all of which are direct attacks against the baby/fetus/collection-of-cells-thing/parasite/etc) and that is if it's not human and not something entitled to any rights or protections. This, by the way, would make it less worthy of legal protection than a dog or a cat. You couldn't dismember your pet dog. You'd be arrested for (among other things) animal cruelty. However, you're suggesting it's perfectly okay to cut up an infant child if a natural process connects them to you.
Is a fetus a human being? That's an interesting question and one I honestly can't yet answer. I haven't seen a truly compelling argument either way. But make no mistake: if it is a human being, then any abortion procedure in existence today is a truly horrifying exercise in cruel and heartless murder. If we're dealing with a human being, we are - by any reasonable, objective understanding of the procedures involved - murdering a living, defenseless human being. That's a big, unresolved if, but don't think for a second that granting that if helps the pro-choice argument in any way whatsoever. If you want to go down that road, you'd best invent some very different methods of ending pregnancies before doing so.
In 30 years, when the F-22 has a close match in the skies over a hostile nation, we'll have the AI drones in place that'll be pulling 20g turns and landing on the enemy planes to yank the cockpit canopies right off. Maybe they'll even drill into the gas tank to refuel before they let the now-useless plane go. The possibilities get fun when you have computers which are capable of utilizing the collective experience of every fighter ace in the country in a fraction of a second to come up with the perfect attack plan every time. No need to waste space, weight, and design time with silly things like missiles and guns. Just find enemy planes and pull them apart.
They'll cost us $300 million a piece to build and we'll almost never lose them. No one will bother sending up planes after about day 3.
I'll take some B-52s in my air force too, but I'll keep the B-2s. Drones are fine against soft targets, but they're about damned worthless for hitting hardened C&C facilities at the start of the war. With things like air defense grids in place, I'm sure as heck not sending in B-52s. The alternative is to send in B-2s to nail those facilities and open the door for less defensible bombers (like a B-52) to come in and mop up what's left.
These are what are called "unknown unknowns". In other words, while Lockheed (and the US Air Force) may know that there's a good chance the plane isn't perfect, there's no way to know whether we're talking about bad screws that make the pilot seat shake or whether we're talking about structural issues that'll make the entire plane fly apart (see also: F-117a). Or maybe we're talking about protruding screws nobody realized would saw through a major wiring harness, but only during the stresses of flight (see also: F-16). Or maybe the turbine blades like to fail randomly and destroy critical parts of the engines (see also: F-14).
The list goes on, but suffice it to say that when you're dealing with an aircraft this complex, the best you can do is design and build everything the best you can, test the heck out of it, and then sit back and wait. This is the price we pay for wanting our military aircraft to skip so far ahead technologically.
When Boeing's commercial aircraft customers start demanding aircraft that can cruise at 1,220mph, fly to 65,000ft, launch precision weapons from internal bays, be nearly invisible to radar, use thrust vectoring to achieve ridiculous maneuverability (J-turn, Pugachev's Cobra, the Kulbit, etc), refuel mid-flight, and be able to land safely after being shot up with bullets during combat, I'll buy that commercial aircraft are as complex. Until then, commercial aircraft are just scaled-up versions with a whole lot less requirements for performance and capabilities. What can a commercial aircraft do? Take off and land. If that were all anyone asked of Lockheed Martin for the F-22, I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem (especially since the problem in question only results from a combination of factors directly related to the high-performance characteristics of the aircraft).
In the commercial world, Delta Airlines isn't flying missions over Tehran and evading mobile SAM sites. Take off in Dallas and land in DC. Then take off in DC and land in Dallas. The F-22 can do that a lot faster than any 747 and it can do it with the same (or higher) level of safety. The reason Lockheed isn't on the hook is that all the other requirements meant they had to invent new materials, new manufacturing techniques, new paints, new software, new life support systems, etc to take a giant leap beyond what the F-15's level of capability (which is also vastly higher than any commercial aircraft).
In the case of the F-22, the aircraft does not fail to meet spec. The US military tested it extensively and determined that it does meet spec. The F-16 met spec also, despite a design flaw which left dozens of pilots dead. The simple fact is, you don't get to jump 10 steps forward and then expect the manufacturer to fix the problems that result from skipping ahead so far. The military accepts the fact that you accept a certain level of risk if you want to stay very far ahead of everyone else. If you want to go one step at a time (as is done in the commercial aircraft industry), you can expect something closer to perfection from the manufacturer. When you expect them to get 25 years of progress jammed into 5 years, you should be prepared to throw tons of money at them and know that some bugs will likely exist in what's delivered. Those bugs get ironed out during maintenance or upgrades (unless it's a showstopper, in which case they'll ground everything while a fix is implemented).
The reason widows can't sue the Air Force when their husbands die in crashes related to aircraft defects is because those pilots accept that very well known risk whenever they get into the cockpit. The reason they can't sue the manufacturer is because once the military declares the aircraft has met expectations/matched specs, it then accepts all the risks of its pilots flying the thing. This relieves the manufacturer of liability so long as they're forthcoming to their customer (the military, not the pilots) about any issues found.
If we didn't do it this way, we'd just now be seeing the F-14s being delivered and it'd be 25 years before the F-15 and F-16 would be "ready". But hey, if GD hadn't found and solved that wire chaffing problem, the Air Force would get to make them fix it on their own dime! So we'd have that going for us.
1. I'm far less worried about China or Russia than I am about their customers. We may have disputes over Georgia (with Russia) and Taiwan (with China), but you're right that MAD and economic factors generally keep us from getting into too much of a fight. However, both of those countries regularly sell their stuff directly to our enemies. They do so not because they need the cash but because those countries then work as a proxy; draining our resources as we struggle to maintain the kind of dominance in conflict Americans have come to expect.
2. The F-15 isn't really superior to new jets being fielded by others around the world at this point. Russia, China, and Europe all have planes that can match the F-15 strictly in terms of performance characteristics. All of them have sold planes to our enemies in the past (the French Mirage is an Arab tyrant favorite). Where we do still have an advantage is pilots. Bruised egos aside, few will argue that anyone trains their pilots like the Americans. We have the military budget to keep our guys flying real planes all the time and to put them in large scale exercises all the time. But eventually we'll find ourselves in a position where the F-15 is so far behind that its pilots just can't make up the difference any longer. And the last thing we want in war is a fair fight.
3. The F-22 makes it an unfair fight in our favor anywhere in the world regardless of what everyone else builds or sells in the next 20 years. The F-35 is obsolete already. It's no better than the F-15 in air-to-air combat. The F-22 will absolutely murder it the same way the F-22 murders the F-15 in every exercise today. People like to downplay stealth as though it's not really a big deal. Well, first of all, they don't start exercises with the F-22 beyond visual range. They found out quickly that was a waste of gas. The F-15s (and others) were dead before they knew the F-22s were even there in most cases. Secondly, F-15 pilots report from exercises that even when directly behind an F-22 (a position difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain), it can still be next to impossible to get the targeting system to lock the plane. When the best pilots in the world flying a plane that's undefeated in combat (zero combat losses to enemy fire in its operational history) start saying that, it tells me we've really got something.
Drones have their role and so does the F-15 for a while. There's no sense risking a lucky shot against an F-22 when you're up against a nation with 1970s Russian aircraft that can't hope to compete against F-15s. But eventually the F-15s will age too far and the aircraft our enemies field will become too advanced. When that happens, we need the ability to respond in a completely overwhelming way. And in the meantime, we need a deterrent against Russian and Chinese proxy wars. With the F-22 patrolling the skies, nobody sane will launch aircraft against us anywhere in the world.
The best fight you can have is the one you win without firing a shot.
I never said I wanted to completely eliminate it; merely that it shouldn't be a focus of the plane. "it would be a huge mistake to try and add any significant ground attack capability to the plane". In other words, sure, keep the Small Diameter Bomb capability as long as it isn't costing you an inch in the air dominance role. However, adding a significant (read: F-16 level Air-to-Ground attack capability) ground attack capability would require compromises like what we see in the F-35 (aka "The Flying Shitbox"). The F-22 is an air dominance fighter. Anything that takes an ounce away from that shouldn't even be on the drawing board. If there's something that's nice to have which doesn't compromise that role in any way, then by all means roll it in as part of an upgrade package.
No, wire chaffing is a design problem when it's happening on brand new planes during flight that are just rolling off the assembly line. I was referencing a very specific issue with the F-16 and its potential wire chaffing problem that killed dozens of pilots. The first fly-by-wire plane had a serious and known (by both General Dynamics and the US military, but not by pilots or their families) problem with protruding screws sawing into a major wiring harness and shorting primary systems. General Dynamics was actually sued and beaten in court (though reversed on appeal due to government contractor's being given immunity from such suits).
This isn't about possible issues for aging planes. This is about the fact that we've never released a perfect plane in the history of controlled, powered flight. This is particularly true in the case of military aircraft which tend to push the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of aeronautical engineering. Planes like the F-4, the F-117a, the F-16, etc have all had vastly worse problems than what we're facing with the F-22's oxygen system issue. It's about putting that issue into perspective now that we're in the 24-hour news cycle where every little thing is obsessed over as though it were the most critical piece of information in the world.
The F-22 has a problem. It's killed one pilot. It's been an inconvenience otherwise. That puts the F-22 up there as about the safest groundbreaking plane we've ever built. Perspective; it's important.
Next, please look up the number of deaths associated with the F-16 potential wire chaffing problem (hint: dozens). Then, please look up deaths associated with all the various issues of the F-4 (hint: more). Then look up the deaths associated with design flaws in every combat aircraft ever produced.
Result: The F-22 is possibly the safest and most well-designed (nearly flawless) aircraft developed for combat in the history of air combat aircraft. It just so happens that in the era of 24-hour news, the Internet, and the high profile of that aircraft, we hear about every single issue in incredible detail. That's not a bad thing (transparency in government never is), but we need to keep perspective.
Building weapons of war works a little differently than building a Prius. Once the government accepts a contractors product as meeting the specifications requested, and so long as the contractor does not conceal relevant information from the government, it's nearly impossible to hold the contractor liable for defects in the design. Basically, we're asking Lockheed Martin to design and build the most complex flying machine ever imagined by mankind. It wouldn't be possible - let alone financially feasible - to expect each and every single aspect of the product to be perfect from day one, nor would it be viable to expect Lockheed to go back and find, diagnose, and fix every single problem in every single aircraft produced. It'd put military contractors out of business to do so (and that isn't fixing your planes either).
Now I completely agree that we should be doing a whole lot more to fix the issues of cost overruns without sacrificing quality control, but holding them to your average consumer product warranty isn't the answer. We'll end up with nobody left to build any of this stuff and nobody else willing to try.
There were a handful of reports of some ground crew members experiencing some similar symptoms. However, any psychologist will tell you that could very easily be psychosomatic response to a perception that something about the aircraft causes those kinds of symptoms. If it were widely reported that the A-10 were giving the pilots skin cancer, the ground crews would see members freaking out over every bump, blister, rash, and zit they found for months afterwards.
I'm not saying they've 100% nailed this problem and case-closed. I'm only saying that the most logical thing to do is sit back in a wait-and-see mode until we find out whether pilots continue experiencing symptoms during flight. If pilots are still blacking out at (or close to) the rates from before the 'fix', then we have no actual fix. If pilots are pretty much all ok after this, then the ground crew reports are almost certainly unrelated to this particular issue.
Neither the F-22 nor the F-35 are a "bargain" at close to a quarter billion dollars apiece, flyaway.
Ahem, the F-22's flyaway cost is $150 Million. 150 is not "close" to 250. Further, if you streamline the F-22 production chain such that it isn't spread all over the country to force politicians to vote for its funding (or cut off jobs to their own people), it'll be closer to $125 Million flyaway cost.
By all means, take all the money from the F-35 program and feed it into an overhauled and streamlined F-22 production line to pump out as many air dominance aircraft as that'll get us. That buys us complete control of the skies anywhere and everywhere in the world for the next 25+ years if we don't bother developing any other aircraft between now and then. You cannot win a modern war militarily without control of the air. It simply cannot happen.
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Of course, because as any murderer will tell you, the first thing you do when you're off to murder someone is to call 911 before committing the murder and ask the dispatcher to send the police immediately to your location.
My God, are people really this dumb?
We can argue all day about what may or may not have been said, whether excessive force was used, who was at fault, etc, but to claim this was some kind of premeditated murder is beyond stupid.
In Arizona's case, the police can only ask about your immigration status if you're suspected of a crime and they have an articulable reason to specifically suspect that you're in the United States illegally (and that reason cannot be because of race, skin color, etc. according to the Arizona law). If an individual is suspected of driving through a red light, has no license, can't speak English, and has form of identification, they already have a laundry list of reasons to detain that individual. It is, per the Arizona law, specifically illegal for the police to detain an individual due to their race or skin color. It's illegal. You can argue all you want about what you think some cops might do in hypothetical scenarios, but the law clear and specifically states that isn't allowed. Further, if an individual is suspected of being in the country illegally in Arizona there, the police MUST accept any Federal, state, or local identification whose issuance requires proof of legal residence. Doesn't matter what other evidence they have. Doesn't matter if you flat admit to being here illegally. The moment you produce a drivers license or non-driver ID or government worker ID or any other ID that meets the criteria, any questioning of your legal status in this country ends immediately.
Now, if we're talking about ICE/DHS? They can pretty much do whatever the Hell they want. They can demand paperwork of a blonde haired, blue eyed woman walking through Central Park in NYC speaking perfect English to her group of friends. They can take the drivers license you have with you and laugh at it as they haul you off to detention. They can decide that whatever you show them proving you're here legally is worthless. They can decide that your drivers license, passport, birth certificate, and personal endorsement from President Obama himself is all worthless and then they can deport you.
In Mexico, the laws around this kind of thing are even crazier. You get zero due process there. They can simply remove you from the country if they even suspect you've engaged in such terrible things as being a foreigner in Mexico who participated in any way in a political or social movement or who bought any property in Mexico without the expressed consent of the government. No trial, no judge, just jail and/or GTFO and you're barred for life.
So you'll excuse me for laughing at this outpouring of horror over one of the most tame immigration laws in the region. Arizona took US Federal law, added a ton of protections to ensure legal residents aren't bothered, and is now somehow the devil. Meanwhile, US immigration authorities blatantly harass the Hell out of US citizens and other legal residents day-in and day-out with vastly more power and authority than any person or group should have and yet somehow Arizona has passed some terrible racist xenophobic thing.
When I see you people protesting Mexican immigration law and US Federal immigration law, I'll start to believe that maybe you're serious. Otherwise, I just can't bring myself to care.
When you're done with all that ad hominem, let me know.
Until then, learn the difference between something you can see with your natural, unaided eye (such as a billboard or something illegal on your front lawn) and something that requires a computer, wireless card, drivers that support promiscuous mode, an operating system that supports that driver with a network stack that supports that mode of operation, a sniffer program to pull down the data, and an application that can translate that data into human-readable content for the police to view with their natural, unaided eyes.
At the very least, this kind of logic would make it perfectly legal to intercept everything from your cell phone calls to your wireless Xbox controller's signals without a warrant.
The discussion is about what those restrictions are and the logic supporting them. Ergo, the point remains relevant. If the legal principle is how much effort gaining access requires and we're content to allow legal access when little effort is required to gain it and no changes are made in order to gain access, then police can march through an open door or climb through an open window.
I believe the standard should be whether a reasonable individual believes they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If one is standing in the public square yelling into their phone, no reasonable person has an expectation that agents of the government won't be able to hear their side of the conversation. They do, however, have a reasonable expectation that agents of the government won't sit in a van nearby pulling the entire conversation from the air so they can listen to it. Further, if one is scrawling a message in chalk in the public square, they cannot reasonably have an expectation that agents of the government won't be able to read what they've written. If they're typing that message into a computer and posting it in a private forum, they have a reasonable expectation that government agents aren't sitting in a van pulling their data out of the air and looking at it.
By that logic, if I don't close and lock my windows, the police can climb into my living room and wander around my house without a warrant, arresting me for anything they happen to see. After all, if the police didn't have to pick a lock or kick in a door or make any changes to my house to enter it, anyone can just climb on in and look around. Therefore it's also okay for the police to do that.
What makes you think that Arizona's law is "picking on foreigners"?
Arizona has copied parts of US Federal law, added extra protections for citizens and legal residents, and is now looking to actually enforce the pieces of US Federal law they've copied onto their own books. There's nothing in there which picks on anyone who's in the United States legally.
Have you actually read this law? Or are you commenting on what you've seen in the news or read on Internet forums?
No, I'm pissy about it because it allows a USA citizen to be detained until he produces papers just because he appears foreign and might be here illegally. My wife is a USA citizen, but she immigrated here from her home country, doesn't speak perfect English and still has a strong accent from her native language. What's to stop her from being stopped and detained until she produces documentation?
What's to stop her from being stopped and detained anywhere in the US by ICE agents? Again, your problem has nothing to do with what Arizona passed. There is absolutely NOTHING in the Arizona law which doesn't already exist in US Federal law. This isn't Arizona passing some new sweeping measure; this is Arizona looking at Federal law and saying "yeah, me too!"
The difference is, Arizona has built in protections to their law which don't exist in Federal law to minimize the chances of a US citizen being hassled over an immigration question. They can't simply stop you for no good reason and demand your papers. They must have a reasonable suspicion that you've committed a criminal act AND they must have an articulable reason to believe you're not just foreign, but here in the country illegally. Only THEN can the Arizona police ask for proof of legal residence and producing ANY Federal, state, or local identification whose issuance requires proof of legal residence immediately ENDS all question of your legal residency under Arizona's law. You don't get that in Federal law. Federal law says ICE can pull you AND your wife out of your car and detain you for however long it takes until the agents involved are damn good and ready to believe you have a right to be in the country.
If you have anything to be pissy about, it's the Federal statutes. Those are VASTLY more stringent and have a lot less protections for your rights and your wife's.
The USA of all nations has little right to claim that only those that are here legally have a right to be here, given our history.
Every nation has the right to police its borders as part of its national sovereignty. To believe otherwise puts you in the extremist fringe next to anarchists and "sovereign citizens".
If the TSA actually believes what they're doing today increases security and doesn't impede liberty, we've got even bigger problems. I choose to believe that the people at the top of the TSA know their policies are ineffective and violate the rights of Americans because the alternative is so much more dangerous.
The Arizona law does nothing that isn't already in Federal law or that hasn't been in Federal law for a long, long time. All immigrants in the United States are required by Federal law to have their immigration paperwork with them at all times and to present it to law enforcement and immigration officials upon request.
The only reason you or anyone else is pissy about Arizona's law is because you're 1) ignorant of existing Federal law and/or 2) supportive of people violating our borders and flooding into the country illegally.
Nations have a right as part of their national sovereignty to know who is crossing their borders and they have the right to deny entry to non-citizens at will. Anyone found to have crossed illegally should be returned to their nation of origin and barred for legal entry for a long, long time.
Actually, it was both. The point being made was that small business owners didn't build the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure necessary to support their business and thus did not build their businesses on their own.
Neither side is accurately presenting the quote. One side seems intent on ignoring the first subject of the antecedent of "that" because it brings up difficult questions that can't be answered in a 30-second sound byte. The issue for them is taxation and a challenge to their ideal that people with wealth don't "owe" (should not be taxed) anything back to society. The other side strongly denies the second subject of the antecedent of "that" because it makes them appear (or perhaps exposes them as for some segments) extremist on issues of property rights and wealth. The implication being that one cannot build (and therefore cannot own) anything since society at large has provided the things that made it all possible. Ergo, society is entitled to take anything (and possibly everything) you have for its own purposes.
It's an interesting quote because the challenging questions it raises will never be widely discussed. What it really exposes is how 95% of the battle in public debate today is framing the question or issue. If you can make it about greedy rich people or you can make it about radical socialism, you put the other side on a constant back foot. If you can make it about killing babies or about invading a woman's body, you don't have to actually debate anything. Thus, we never solve problems or answer questions anymore because all our time and energy is spent on bullshit that has nothing to do with solving problems or answering questions.
At least the Romans had bread and circus. We seem to only get shit and more shit. Bring back the lions, I say.
"Funny how it's the racist party trying to defend their agenda."
This alone makes the comment a -1 Troll. The rest is debatable, but this is nothing but ignorant and inflammatory rhetoric designed to stifle debate. You see, when one has confidence in their own positions, they don't need to engage in that kind of ad hominem.
It's large enough to keep our military moving long enough to beat the shit out of whoever's disrupting supply.
You're forgetting the fact that this planet never had a species like Humans for Millions of Years. We have done more damage to this planet in the last few hundred years, than nature could do in thousands of years.
That's simply absurd. Nature can toss a black hole toward Earth and do more damage to this planet in seconds than humans will ever be able to do if we exist for a hundred million years.
Think before you type.
That's a severe failure of an argument. It assumes that human beings (from whom legal/judicial relief can be had) have acted against you. It further assumes that you're being used to artificially sustain another individual; not through any means found in the natural world. It's nothing but a ball of non sequiturs wrapped up in a poorly written package to push a ridiculous agenda justifying murder (if the premise is granted that a fetus is human).
Let's work backwards through this mess. First, if you wake up next to this person, we aren't talking about unplugging an artificial link between circulatory systems. We're talking about you paying someone to rip body parts off the violinist until the bed next to you is empty. Or to puncture his skull and vacuum out the contents. Who would seriously argue that such actions would be legal? That this person is connected - against your will - to your circulatory system is irrelevant. You also can't shoot the violinist. You also can't stab him. You also can't poison him. None of these would be legal. Disconnecting the circulatory system link? Almost certainly legal anywhere in the western world and basically a slam dunk to be granted a court order for a medical doctor to do so. But no, you can't attack the unconscious violinist with a knife simply because his friends are violent psychos.
But then who are the actual friends in this case, and how are you actually connected? Well, the friends don't even exist. And nobody had to connect the violinist to you. By some natural process (that we won't get into because it doesn't exist and I don't care to invent the particulars for this absurd exercise), you've become connected to this famous violinist who you laid down next to last night. You don't want to be connected to him, so you grab a rock and smash his skull, right? Perfectly legal to smash some unconscious person's skull with a brick who hasn't attacked you in any way? What kind of lawless hellhole does one have to grow up in to believe that to be legal or moral?
But then, this isn't actually a famous violinist, is it? It can't be, because it's just an infant child. Through some act of nature, you went to bed one night and woke up the next morning with an unconscious infant attached to your body. You then call up someone and pay them money to cut up the infant with a knife and have its dismembered body dumped in a trash bin. And this is legal? Really?
There's only one defense to the abortion procedures that currently exist (all of which are direct attacks against the baby/fetus/collection-of-cells-thing/parasite/etc) and that is if it's not human and not something entitled to any rights or protections. This, by the way, would make it less worthy of legal protection than a dog or a cat. You couldn't dismember your pet dog. You'd be arrested for (among other things) animal cruelty. However, you're suggesting it's perfectly okay to cut up an infant child if a natural process connects them to you.
Is a fetus a human being? That's an interesting question and one I honestly can't yet answer. I haven't seen a truly compelling argument either way. But make no mistake: if it is a human being, then any abortion procedure in existence today is a truly horrifying exercise in cruel and heartless murder. If we're dealing with a human being, we are - by any reasonable, objective understanding of the procedures involved - murdering a living, defenseless human being. That's a big, unresolved if, but don't think for a second that granting that if helps the pro-choice argument in any way whatsoever. If you want to go down that road, you'd best invent some very different methods of ending pregnancies before doing so.
In 30 years, when the F-22 has a close match in the skies over a hostile nation, we'll have the AI drones in place that'll be pulling 20g turns and landing on the enemy planes to yank the cockpit canopies right off. Maybe they'll even drill into the gas tank to refuel before they let the now-useless plane go. The possibilities get fun when you have computers which are capable of utilizing the collective experience of every fighter ace in the country in a fraction of a second to come up with the perfect attack plan every time. No need to waste space, weight, and design time with silly things like missiles and guns. Just find enemy planes and pull them apart.
They'll cost us $300 million a piece to build and we'll almost never lose them. No one will bother sending up planes after about day 3.
I'll take some B-52s in my air force too, but I'll keep the B-2s. Drones are fine against soft targets, but they're about damned worthless for hitting hardened C&C facilities at the start of the war. With things like air defense grids in place, I'm sure as heck not sending in B-52s. The alternative is to send in B-2s to nail those facilities and open the door for less defensible bombers (like a B-52) to come in and mop up what's left.
These are what are called "unknown unknowns". In other words, while Lockheed (and the US Air Force) may know that there's a good chance the plane isn't perfect, there's no way to know whether we're talking about bad screws that make the pilot seat shake or whether we're talking about structural issues that'll make the entire plane fly apart (see also: F-117a). Or maybe we're talking about protruding screws nobody realized would saw through a major wiring harness, but only during the stresses of flight (see also: F-16). Or maybe the turbine blades like to fail randomly and destroy critical parts of the engines (see also: F-14).
The list goes on, but suffice it to say that when you're dealing with an aircraft this complex, the best you can do is design and build everything the best you can, test the heck out of it, and then sit back and wait. This is the price we pay for wanting our military aircraft to skip so far ahead technologically.
When Boeing's commercial aircraft customers start demanding aircraft that can cruise at 1,220mph, fly to 65,000ft, launch precision weapons from internal bays, be nearly invisible to radar, use thrust vectoring to achieve ridiculous maneuverability (J-turn, Pugachev's Cobra, the Kulbit, etc), refuel mid-flight, and be able to land safely after being shot up with bullets during combat, I'll buy that commercial aircraft are as complex. Until then, commercial aircraft are just scaled-up versions with a whole lot less requirements for performance and capabilities. What can a commercial aircraft do? Take off and land. If that were all anyone asked of Lockheed Martin for the F-22, I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem (especially since the problem in question only results from a combination of factors directly related to the high-performance characteristics of the aircraft).
In the commercial world, Delta Airlines isn't flying missions over Tehran and evading mobile SAM sites. Take off in Dallas and land in DC. Then take off in DC and land in Dallas. The F-22 can do that a lot faster than any 747 and it can do it with the same (or higher) level of safety. The reason Lockheed isn't on the hook is that all the other requirements meant they had to invent new materials, new manufacturing techniques, new paints, new software, new life support systems, etc to take a giant leap beyond what the F-15's level of capability (which is also vastly higher than any commercial aircraft).
In the case of the F-22, the aircraft does not fail to meet spec. The US military tested it extensively and determined that it does meet spec. The F-16 met spec also, despite a design flaw which left dozens of pilots dead. The simple fact is, you don't get to jump 10 steps forward and then expect the manufacturer to fix the problems that result from skipping ahead so far. The military accepts the fact that you accept a certain level of risk if you want to stay very far ahead of everyone else. If you want to go one step at a time (as is done in the commercial aircraft industry), you can expect something closer to perfection from the manufacturer. When you expect them to get 25 years of progress jammed into 5 years, you should be prepared to throw tons of money at them and know that some bugs will likely exist in what's delivered. Those bugs get ironed out during maintenance or upgrades (unless it's a showstopper, in which case they'll ground everything while a fix is implemented).
The reason widows can't sue the Air Force when their husbands die in crashes related to aircraft defects is because those pilots accept that very well known risk whenever they get into the cockpit. The reason they can't sue the manufacturer is because once the military declares the aircraft has met expectations/matched specs, it then accepts all the risks of its pilots flying the thing. This relieves the manufacturer of liability so long as they're forthcoming to their customer (the military, not the pilots) about any issues found.
If we didn't do it this way, we'd just now be seeing the F-14s being delivered and it'd be 25 years before the F-15 and F-16 would be "ready". But hey, if GD hadn't found and solved that wire chaffing problem, the Air Force would get to make them fix it on their own dime! So we'd have that going for us.
1. I'm far less worried about China or Russia than I am about their customers. We may have disputes over Georgia (with Russia) and Taiwan (with China), but you're right that MAD and economic factors generally keep us from getting into too much of a fight. However, both of those countries regularly sell their stuff directly to our enemies. They do so not because they need the cash but because those countries then work as a proxy; draining our resources as we struggle to maintain the kind of dominance in conflict Americans have come to expect.
2. The F-15 isn't really superior to new jets being fielded by others around the world at this point. Russia, China, and Europe all have planes that can match the F-15 strictly in terms of performance characteristics. All of them have sold planes to our enemies in the past (the French Mirage is an Arab tyrant favorite). Where we do still have an advantage is pilots. Bruised egos aside, few will argue that anyone trains their pilots like the Americans. We have the military budget to keep our guys flying real planes all the time and to put them in large scale exercises all the time. But eventually we'll find ourselves in a position where the F-15 is so far behind that its pilots just can't make up the difference any longer. And the last thing we want in war is a fair fight.
3. The F-22 makes it an unfair fight in our favor anywhere in the world regardless of what everyone else builds or sells in the next 20 years. The F-35 is obsolete already. It's no better than the F-15 in air-to-air combat. The F-22 will absolutely murder it the same way the F-22 murders the F-15 in every exercise today. People like to downplay stealth as though it's not really a big deal. Well, first of all, they don't start exercises with the F-22 beyond visual range. They found out quickly that was a waste of gas. The F-15s (and others) were dead before they knew the F-22s were even there in most cases. Secondly, F-15 pilots report from exercises that even when directly behind an F-22 (a position difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain), it can still be next to impossible to get the targeting system to lock the plane. When the best pilots in the world flying a plane that's undefeated in combat (zero combat losses to enemy fire in its operational history) start saying that, it tells me we've really got something.
Drones have their role and so does the F-15 for a while. There's no sense risking a lucky shot against an F-22 when you're up against a nation with 1970s Russian aircraft that can't hope to compete against F-15s. But eventually the F-15s will age too far and the aircraft our enemies field will become too advanced. When that happens, we need the ability to respond in a completely overwhelming way. And in the meantime, we need a deterrent against Russian and Chinese proxy wars. With the F-22 patrolling the skies, nobody sane will launch aircraft against us anywhere in the world.
The best fight you can have is the one you win without firing a shot.
I never said I wanted to completely eliminate it; merely that it shouldn't be a focus of the plane. "it would be a huge mistake to try and add any significant ground attack capability to the plane". In other words, sure, keep the Small Diameter Bomb capability as long as it isn't costing you an inch in the air dominance role. However, adding a significant (read: F-16 level Air-to-Ground attack capability) ground attack capability would require compromises like what we see in the F-35 (aka "The Flying Shitbox"). The F-22 is an air dominance fighter. Anything that takes an ounce away from that shouldn't even be on the drawing board. If there's something that's nice to have which doesn't compromise that role in any way, then by all means roll it in as part of an upgrade package.
No, wire chaffing is a design problem when it's happening on brand new planes during flight that are just rolling off the assembly line. I was referencing a very specific issue with the F-16 and its potential wire chaffing problem that killed dozens of pilots. The first fly-by-wire plane had a serious and known (by both General Dynamics and the US military, but not by pilots or their families) problem with protruding screws sawing into a major wiring harness and shorting primary systems. General Dynamics was actually sued and beaten in court (though reversed on appeal due to government contractor's being given immunity from such suits).
This isn't about possible issues for aging planes. This is about the fact that we've never released a perfect plane in the history of controlled, powered flight. This is particularly true in the case of military aircraft which tend to push the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of aeronautical engineering. Planes like the F-4, the F-117a, the F-16, etc have all had vastly worse problems than what we're facing with the F-22's oxygen system issue. It's about putting that issue into perspective now that we're in the 24-hour news cycle where every little thing is obsessed over as though it were the most critical piece of information in the world.
The F-22 has a problem. It's killed one pilot. It's been an inconvenience otherwise. That puts the F-22 up there as about the safest groundbreaking plane we've ever built. Perspective; it's important.
One known death associated with this issue.
Next, please look up the number of deaths associated with the F-16 potential wire chaffing problem (hint: dozens). Then, please look up deaths associated with all the various issues of the F-4 (hint: more). Then look up the deaths associated with design flaws in every combat aircraft ever produced.
Result: The F-22 is possibly the safest and most well-designed (nearly flawless) aircraft developed for combat in the history of air combat aircraft. It just so happens that in the era of 24-hour news, the Internet, and the high profile of that aircraft, we hear about every single issue in incredible detail. That's not a bad thing (transparency in government never is), but we need to keep perspective.
Building weapons of war works a little differently than building a Prius. Once the government accepts a contractors product as meeting the specifications requested, and so long as the contractor does not conceal relevant information from the government, it's nearly impossible to hold the contractor liable for defects in the design. Basically, we're asking Lockheed Martin to design and build the most complex flying machine ever imagined by mankind. It wouldn't be possible - let alone financially feasible - to expect each and every single aspect of the product to be perfect from day one, nor would it be viable to expect Lockheed to go back and find, diagnose, and fix every single problem in every single aircraft produced. It'd put military contractors out of business to do so (and that isn't fixing your planes either).
Now I completely agree that we should be doing a whole lot more to fix the issues of cost overruns without sacrificing quality control, but holding them to your average consumer product warranty isn't the answer. We'll end up with nobody left to build any of this stuff and nobody else willing to try.
There were a handful of reports of some ground crew members experiencing some similar symptoms. However, any psychologist will tell you that could very easily be psychosomatic response to a perception that something about the aircraft causes those kinds of symptoms. If it were widely reported that the A-10 were giving the pilots skin cancer, the ground crews would see members freaking out over every bump, blister, rash, and zit they found for months afterwards.
I'm not saying they've 100% nailed this problem and case-closed. I'm only saying that the most logical thing to do is sit back in a wait-and-see mode until we find out whether pilots continue experiencing symptoms during flight. If pilots are still blacking out at (or close to) the rates from before the 'fix', then we have no actual fix. If pilots are pretty much all ok after this, then the ground crew reports are almost certainly unrelated to this particular issue.
Neither the F-22 nor the F-35 are a "bargain" at close to a quarter billion dollars apiece, flyaway.
Ahem, the F-22's flyaway cost is $150 Million. 150 is not "close" to 250. Further, if you streamline the F-22 production chain such that it isn't spread all over the country to force politicians to vote for its funding (or cut off jobs to their own people), it'll be closer to $125 Million flyaway cost.
By all means, take all the money from the F-35 program and feed it into an overhauled and streamlined F-22 production line to pump out as many air dominance aircraft as that'll get us. That buys us complete control of the skies anywhere and everywhere in the world for the next 25+ years if we don't bother developing any other aircraft between now and then. You cannot win a modern war militarily without control of the air. It simply cannot happen.