You are a little confused. While you are correct that the 9th amendment has been interpreted as not referring to individual rights, it is no longer
true that the Bill of Rights as a whole does not apply to individual rights. The 14th amendment has been interpreted as incorporating protections
for the civil rights of individuals into all levels of government interference.
Great summary, thanks! I didn't mean to imply that the 9th was all that privacy rode on, just that because it was not explicitly written in, does not imply that the right does not exist.
And you are right that the Constitution does not protect individuals from commercial entitites. But legislators may regulate the activity of
commercial entitites so as to protect the privacy rights of individuals. But they first have to believe that there is such a thing as a right to privacy.
It is still possible to believe that there is a right to privacy when confronted with possible gov't action, but none when a commercial entitiy is involved. Libertarians might take such a view, for instance. But in this case, an enumeration of property rights to include private data about oneself might solve the problem without resort to a right to privacy. Where it gets murky are those cases where gov't requires you to provide data (e.g. property appraisals) which the gov't then makes public. After all, why shouldn't I be allowed to view my neighbor's tax appraisal? This allows any citizen to check the fairness of the tax appraisal system. But it also allows any commercial entity to cross ref that data with other similar data. And therein lies the danger. Some data must be made public so that we can all have an opportunity to check the fairness, efficiency, etc. of public entities. But now the existence of many such bits of public data, each made public for a good purpose, allows a commercial entity to cross ref all of it to create a single database that does violate our sense of privacy even though we have consented to the public release of each single data item.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The problem is that this (and the other amendments) applies to actions taken by government. The US Constitution guarantees no such right when data is collected by a commercial entitiy.
On a side note, Senator Santorum should more properly be labeled a paleoconservative a la Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak, not a neoconservative. The Economist has a recent article about the neocons here.
Paper doesn't need to absorb carbon. It already is carbon. Growing trees for pulp, turning the pulp into paper, burying the paper after it has been used and then growing still more trees makes some limited sense. Especially since trees do not absorb carbon in a linear fashion as they age. Their growth rates fall off as they get older. A strategy designed to maximize the use of trees as carbon sinks requires the trees to be cut down well before maturity and then buried so that newer growth with faster growth rates can replace the older slower growth. This is just a variation of a standard problem in forestry economics. Given a growth function for a tree, a fixed value per board foot for the wood, and an interest rate, calculate the profit maximizing age when the tree should be cut.
Dumping paper in the ocean? Paper isn't just pure pulp you know. It contains chemicals to.
Ocean dumping has been seriously considered as a resonable solution for many waste byproducts. After all, guess where it will all eventually end up anyway. Do you want the dioxins (a common problem with paper due to bleaching) to be buried near you where they might eventually leach into the groundwater or contaminate a nearby fishing hole? Maybe we are better off if they get dumped directly into the mid-Atlantic.
It's fun to snipe, of course, and it's nice to feel some kind of safety/security in the fact that they've been very late on many things and/or delivered with bugs.
Sorry, I didn't read the article and just skimmed the headline. Could someone tell me if the story is supposed to be about this or this?
All of this is great advice. But it gets even better. I spent a summer working for as an intern on Capital Hill. One thing I learned is that, for an issue where the average voter doesn't really care or pay attention and which is likely to be under the radar of the average Congressman (i.e. software patents), two or three hand crafted letters can make a huge difference. It doesn't take two or three hundred letters to make a Congressman pay attention to your concern. A few individuals can have a disproportionate impact in this situation.
Of course, the key phrase here is "under the radar." Don't expect to have the same influence if you are writing about abortion, gun control, or tax cuts. But I do encourage you to write on the larger issues. You will still an impact, but the impact approaches zero as the number of people who care approaches infinity.
Information has a time dimension. You may not want to buy a movie for $20 today, but might be willing to wait a year and buy it for $2 in the bargain bin. But if you make an illegal copy today, you won't buy it tomorrow for $2. Further, if you went to the trouble to illegally copy it, that does imply that it had some value to you. Otherwise why bother taking the time to locate it, download it, etc? The MPAA/RIAA have indeed lost something when a potential customer chooses to make an illegal copy today rather than purchase it for less tomorrow.
What scares me about that is that most folks don't understand the complexities of investment risk-reward tradeoffs. Try explaining beta, CAPM, or Sharpe Ratios to the average high school grad. I'm afraid that we'll see too many people putting too much of their assets into stocks, which then tank over a 20 year period. So 20 years from now, these folks will scream bloody murder and demand that the public treasury make up the difference.
Without that double taxation, the same investor has a new choice: Get $250 on a fixed income investment, or $500 on XYZ. All
of a sudden, that $10 stock is worth... more. How much more? Well, the reward has doubled, the risk hasn't. Lots of rich folks will
see that, and buy XYZ. XYZ's price will rise - in fact, it'll rise until its after-tax yield is what it was before.
You forgot that the investor is going to have to sell something else (those municipal bonds) in order to buy XYZ, thus increasing the rate of return on municipal bonds since the rate of return on a bond varies inversely with the price of the bond. Since there would be profitable arbitrage opportunities between municipal bonds and XYZ if they had different rates of return, the overall return on XYZ will not rise since other investors will sell XYZ and buy municipal bonds. Further, since companies have always been able to pay out the equivalent dividend through share buybacks, the net effect on XYZs share price is close to nil.
That same logic applies to the Social Security privatization that conservatives want as well. If the SSA is allowed to buy common stock, then it won't be buying Treasury obligations, thus reducing demand for Treasuries, lowering their price, and increasing the interest rate they must offer. With higher interest rates, people will sell stocks and buy bonds until arbitrage has driven the rates of return back into equilibrium. The end result is that the SSA has taken on more risk, but not necessarily a higher rate of return. This is especially worrysome since there have been 20 year periods where the ex-post return from bonds has beaten the stock market.
Government obligations are not risk free. At the least they suffer from purchasing power risk due to inflation.
No, the objective of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Some shareholders may prefer that those returns be paid out in the form of dividends, some may prefer that they be realised as capital gains. The idea that they MUST be paid out as dividends is absurd. It is especially stupid when the company has internal projects that need investment which can offer a higher rate of return than other possible projects where the investor could place his money. This is one of Warren Buffet's investment criteria. Look for a high rate of return on reinvested profits.
Dividends are a sign of a company that does not know what to do with its profits. A company that can find profitable internal opportunities to reinvest its profits would be stupid to give those profits to their shareholders in the form of a dividend. "Let's see," says the investor. "The CEO could have taken the profit, put it into a new project for me and made a 20% rate of return. Instead, he gave me a dividend which gave me a 5% rate of return. Fire his ass." Companies in old mature industries pay dividends, not fast growing companies in new industries. The tax code isn't the major reason why new industries don't pay dividends.
Most new companies are financed in multiple rounds. First financing is from your own pocket or with help from friends and family. Growth rates do not need to be implausible at this point.
Once you can prove the business model, then you turn to the angels for a round or two, followed by VCs. These latter groups do demand very high rates of potential return and a big chunk of the equity in exchange for their cash. But they are also taking a big risk. Junk debt is an alternative, but usually only for more established companies. Companies can deduct the interest payments, though, and the current owners won't have to dilute their ownership share. Dividends don't enter in to the equation at all here. No new company is going to pay dividends. If they can pay dividends, what did they need the capital for in the first place?
The double taxation argument is also bogus. First, most individuals who receive dividends hold the stocks in tax-free or tax-defered accounts such as IRAs and 401Ks. So in fact, it is the wealthiest taxpayers who will benefit from Bush's proposal. Most folks will not be helped at all by the removal of taxes on dividends. Second, dividends are far from unique in the so-called double taxation folder. I pay taxes twice: once on my income (city, state, and federal) and then again when I buy something (city, county, and state sales taxes). That is at least as unfair as dividend taxes. So lets eliminate sales taxes first if we are going to eliminate double taxation.
Oh, and by the way, it was the wife (Wendy Gramm) of a Republican Senator (Phil Gramm, Texas) who sat on Enron's Board of Directors. She was on the audit commitee. Enron was Phil Gramm's largest contributor.
I don't see Hindus or anyone
else lobbying to teach their religion in a public school science class.
Haven't been to India recently, have you? Hindu Fascism is a growing phenomena in India. Astrology is taught as a serious subject in some Indian universities.
I never claimed that the US leapt into action like a superhero in Rwanda. Only that we didn't have any real strategic interests when we finally did intervene. There is a lot of inertia to overcome before we will intervene in a crisis. That's part of the nature of a democratic government. Madeleine Albright once compared it to turning a supertanker.
The population of the US most emphatically does not want us to be the world's cop. A goodly share of the US population is descended from people who fled from areas where there were ongoing conflicts. My Great Grandfather left Germany after spending a couple of years in the army during the war of 1870 where he participated in the Seige of Paris. He left because he wanted no more part of Europe's wars. He and others like him have bequethed the US a strong isolationist streak. But we also, like most democratic societies -- France being the exception;) -- have a sense that it is our duty to help others out in times of crisis. This is the basic conflict. We the people of the US want to help where we are needed, but we must also overcome the isolationist impulse. So most conflicts where we intervene have to have some combination of need and strategic interest. The US population fully understands these criteria. Living outside the US, what you likely see are our lame attempts to sell the rest of the world that we are strictly humanitarian interventionists. And in the end we mostly are. We are just careful about where we choose to place our efforts.
You ever trip over something small in the dark? That's what happened to you. I don't think AOL or Mozilla or 90% of the IT industry knew you existed. By the sound of the yelp, I'd say that the Mozilla folks accidently stepped on IBPheonix's little "puppy".
We have a winner for best explanation of how this all happened.
And from another AC:
I don't think Mozilla did this to spite you. I had never heard of you until your childish email campaign.
And another winner for best description of FirebirdBrandSQL's response.
Sorry, no mod points, but both of these ACs needed to be heard.
Regarding the former Yugoslavia and the NATO led intervention, the US has never tried to cover up that they had very real
strategic goals with this campaign. Take a look at for example this report [iacenter.org].
One report from an unknown group in San Fransisco is your evidence?
What's scary is that so many of you americans, firmly believe that your leaders only
act out of a "pure" motive. I'm sure you're not so naive in other regards. The only explanation I've got, is that you must be
blinded with "patriotism".
No, we know full well that most US interventions have mixed motivations. We are a country of 290+ million people. To sell any intervention, you have to put a coalition of different interest groups together. Some buy the power politics angle. Some will support it if you can show them a profit. And yes, a large number of us (perhaps even most of us) will only support an intervention if you can show us that it is, indeed, The Right Thing To Do.
The phrase "Saddam gassed his own people" are getting tiresome. Saddam gassed the seperatist kurds in northern Iraq.
I suppose that makes it OK?
I suspect it is repeated over and over again to somehow draw attention away from the fact that NATO member Turkey are responsible for several massacres in the same area. At least they're not killing "their own people", right?
Those of us who give money and time to Amnesty Int'l have never, in any way, condoned this. The US State Dept has also pulled no punches in its human rights report on Turkey. But Turkey, at least, has something approaching a functioning democracy. Pressure in the form of govt reports, journalism stories, and conditions on entry into the EU may slowly move Turkey into a much better respect for human rights. Nothing like that was ever going to be possible with Iraq.
That's BS, too. There is an illegal oil pipeline running from Iraq to Syria. Iraq was also running illegal oil in barges into Iran. Where did the money get spent? In the 1980s, Iraq fought an 8 year war with Iran that cost Iraq at least US $10**11. Toss in Gulf War I and Iraq never had much left over for luxury goods like schools. In fact, Iraq's literacy rate is only 58% and has never been very high compared to its neighbors. Jordon, with no oil, has a literacy rate of 86%. Syria, again with no oil, has a literacy rate of 70%. No, the sanctions meant that the people of Iraq suffered because of the budget choices made by Saddam and his minions. Saddam and the military first. If there is anything left over, the people can eat. If not, tough. That was Saddam's choice.
Also remember that it was in Saddam's interest to make the sanctions look as horrible as possible in order to garner sympathy from Western pacifists. Iraq had quite a propaganda machine going to this end. I'm really quite skeptical that the sanctions caused as much heartache as people like you seem to believe. I'm open minded on this issue, but I want to see a real in-depth analysis from a UN or similar source.
Finally, the Geneva Convention also requires that you not hide military personell and equipment in and around civilian facilities. This was a common practice of the Iraqi military. And the GC frowns on the use of poison gas, especially on your own civilian population. Funny, too, that even though the GC came out before most westerners had electricity in their homes it now is considered a "means of survival". Next war you'll be telling us that it is against the GC to take away the enemy civilians Internet connections.
The fact is that killed more people, via direct war and 12 years of sanctions than Saddam ever did.
BULLSHIT! Hussein spent his oil money from the past decade on weapons, bribes to local elders, and his own luxury goods and bank acounts. It would not have been hard to have spent that money on food, medicine, schools, etc for his own people. The sanctions cannot be blamed for the state of Iraq or for ANY deaths that occured in the past decade. Only one man is to blame for those deaths and if we are lucky, God is judging him for those actions right at this very moment.
Now, give me one example of a conflict where the US unselfishly involved itself for no other cause than "good".
A reasonable case can be made that Roosevelt worked hard to help the Brits out prior to the US formal entry into WWII because it was The Right Thing To Do.
More recently, the US entered Somalia because the population was starving due to a combination of long-term drought and local warlords who didn't seem to give a damn about the local people.
Rwanda is another recent case where the US intervened when there was no strategic reason for doing so. Just a nasty local ethnic cleansing problem.
And then there is the whole leftover Yugo mess. One of the major reasons the US got involved was because we perceived (rightly or wrongly) that the Europeans did not seem to care very much about the thousands of people whose lives were being lost. Remember, it was a group of Dutch "peacekeepers" who stood by while the Srebrenitza Massacre took place.
Most European capital cities have a "Never Again" museum where they walk schoolchildren through the brutality of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of their country. And yet Europeans are the most obstinant about refusing to help others out of similar fixes the way the US helped them out of theirs.
Bottom line for me is that I'll gladly accept a mixture of both pure and selfish motivations if that is what it takes to rid the world of bastards like Hussein.
But, you forgot that most judges in the united states are liberals...
The Republicans have held the Presidency for 14 of the past 22 years. I'd be skeptical if they appointed many liberals to the federal bench in that time. They've also controlled a lot of state governorships and legislatures so the same likely holds true at the state level. You must be way out there on the far right to think that most judges are liberals these days.
They don't have to publish an exploit. They just have to publish a story similar to the headline here on/. Just the facts, Ma'am.
Articles generally have to go through approval before being published,
by groups that each have their own agenda. Most of the time, these groups take a hands-off approach, but there have been
incidents where articles were pulled because they weren't in the best interests of the school. Publishing an article that
practically invites legal action would probably set off some red flags in one of the councils.
Sounds just like every other local daily newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a little confused. While you are correct that the 9th amendment has been interpreted as not referring to individual rights, it is no longer true that the Bill of Rights as a whole does not apply to individual rights. The 14th amendment has been interpreted as incorporating protections for the civil rights of individuals into all levels of government interference.
Great summary, thanks! I didn't mean to imply that the 9th was all that privacy rode on, just that because it was not explicitly written in, does not imply that the right does not exist.
And you are right that the Constitution does not protect individuals from commercial entitites. But legislators may regulate the activity of commercial entitites so as to protect the privacy rights of individuals. But they first have to believe that there is such a thing as a right to privacy.
It is still possible to believe that there is a right to privacy when confronted with possible gov't action, but none when a commercial entitiy is involved. Libertarians might take such a view, for instance. But in this case, an enumeration of property rights to include private data about oneself might solve the problem without resort to a right to privacy. Where it gets murky are those cases where gov't requires you to provide data (e.g. property appraisals) which the gov't then makes public. After all, why shouldn't I be allowed to view my neighbor's tax appraisal? This allows any citizen to check the fairness of the tax appraisal system. But it also allows any commercial entity to cross ref that data with other similar data. And therein lies the danger. Some data must be made public so that we can all have an opportunity to check the fairness, efficiency, etc. of public entities. But now the existence of many such bits of public data, each made public for a good purpose, allows a commercial entity to cross ref all of it to create a single database that does violate our sense of privacy even though we have consented to the public release of each single data item.
You never had a right to privacy.
Yes, we do have a right to privacy.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The problem is that this (and the other amendments) applies to actions taken by government. The US Constitution guarantees no such right when data is collected by a commercial entitiy.
On a side note, Senator Santorum should more properly be labeled a paleoconservative a la Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak, not a neoconservative. The Economist has a recent article about the neocons here.
Paper doesn't need to absorb carbon. It already is carbon. Growing trees for pulp, turning the pulp into paper, burying the paper after it has been used and then growing still more trees makes some limited sense. Especially since trees do not absorb carbon in a linear fashion as they age. Their growth rates fall off as they get older. A strategy designed to maximize the use of trees as carbon sinks requires the trees to be cut down well before maturity and then buried so that newer growth with faster growth rates can replace the older slower growth. This is just a variation of a standard problem in forestry economics. Given a growth function for a tree, a fixed value per board foot for the wood, and an interest rate, calculate the profit maximizing age when the tree should be cut.
Dumping paper in the ocean? Paper isn't just pure pulp you know. It contains chemicals to.
Ocean dumping has been seriously considered as a resonable solution for many waste byproducts. After all, guess where it will all eventually end up anyway. Do you want the dioxins (a common problem with paper due to bleaching) to be buried near you where they might eventually leach into the groundwater or contaminate a nearby fishing hole? Maybe we are better off if they get dumped directly into the mid-Atlantic.
It's fun to snipe, of course, and it's nice to feel some kind of safety/security in the fact that they've been very late on many things and/or delivered with bugs.
Sorry, I didn't read the article and just skimmed the headline. Could someone tell me if the story is supposed to be about this or this?
All of this is great advice. But it gets even better. I spent a summer working for as an intern on Capital Hill. One thing I learned is that, for an issue where the average voter doesn't really care or pay attention and which is likely to be under the radar of the average Congressman (i.e. software patents), two or three hand crafted letters can make a huge difference. It doesn't take two or three hundred letters to make a Congressman pay attention to your concern. A few individuals can have a disproportionate impact in this situation.
Of course, the key phrase here is "under the radar." Don't expect to have the same influence if you are writing about abortion, gun control, or tax cuts. But I do encourage you to write on the larger issues. You will still an impact, but the impact approaches zero as the number of people who care approaches infinity.
Information has a time dimension. You may not want to buy a movie for $20 today, but might be willing to wait a year and buy it for $2 in the bargain bin. But if you make an illegal copy today, you won't buy it tomorrow for $2. Further, if you went to the trouble to illegally copy it, that does imply that it had some value to you. Otherwise why bother taking the time to locate it, download it, etc? The MPAA/RIAA have indeed lost something when a potential customer chooses to make an illegal copy today rather than purchase it for less tomorrow.
Actor: Its 2003, we were promised flashbacks! Where are the flashbacks?
Voiceover: With IBM, you can have flashbacks.
Fade to picture of OS/2 Warp...
What scares me about that is that most folks don't understand the complexities of investment risk-reward tradeoffs. Try explaining beta, CAPM, or Sharpe Ratios to the average high school grad. I'm afraid that we'll see too many people putting too much of their assets into stocks, which then tank over a 20 year period. So 20 years from now, these folks will scream bloody murder and demand that the public treasury make up the difference.
Without that double taxation, the same investor has a new choice: Get $250 on a fixed income investment, or $500 on XYZ. All of a sudden, that $10 stock is worth... more. How much more? Well, the reward has doubled, the risk hasn't. Lots of rich folks will see that, and buy XYZ. XYZ's price will rise - in fact, it'll rise until its after-tax yield is what it was before.
You forgot that the investor is going to have to sell something else (those municipal bonds) in order to buy XYZ, thus increasing the rate of return on municipal bonds since the rate of return on a bond varies inversely with the price of the bond. Since there would be profitable arbitrage opportunities between municipal bonds and XYZ if they had different rates of return, the overall return on XYZ will not rise since other investors will sell XYZ and buy municipal bonds. Further, since companies have always been able to pay out the equivalent dividend through share buybacks, the net effect on XYZs share price is close to nil.
That same logic applies to the Social Security privatization that conservatives want as well. If the SSA is allowed to buy common stock, then it won't be buying Treasury obligations, thus reducing demand for Treasuries, lowering their price, and increasing the interest rate they must offer. With higher interest rates, people will sell stocks and buy bonds until arbitrage has driven the rates of return back into equilibrium. The end result is that the SSA has taken on more risk, but not necessarily a higher rate of return. This is especially worrysome since there have been 20 year periods where the ex-post return from bonds has beaten the stock market.
Government obligations are not risk free. At the least they suffer from purchasing power risk due to inflation.
No, the objective of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Some shareholders may prefer that those returns be paid out in the form of dividends, some may prefer that they be realised as capital gains. The idea that they MUST be paid out as dividends is absurd. It is especially stupid when the company has internal projects that need investment which can offer a higher rate of return than other possible projects where the investor could place his money. This is one of Warren Buffet's investment criteria. Look for a high rate of return on reinvested profits.
Dividends are a sign of a company that does not know what to do with its profits. A company that can find profitable internal opportunities to reinvest its profits would be stupid to give those profits to their shareholders in the form of a dividend. "Let's see," says the investor. "The CEO could have taken the profit, put it into a new project for me and made a 20% rate of return. Instead, he gave me a dividend which gave me a 5% rate of return. Fire his ass." Companies in old mature industries pay dividends, not fast growing companies in new industries. The tax code isn't the major reason why new industries don't pay dividends.
Most new companies are financed in multiple rounds. First financing is from your own pocket or with help from friends and family. Growth rates do not need to be implausible at this point. Once you can prove the business model, then you turn to the angels for a round or two, followed by VCs. These latter groups do demand very high rates of potential return and a big chunk of the equity in exchange for their cash. But they are also taking a big risk. Junk debt is an alternative, but usually only for more established companies. Companies can deduct the interest payments, though, and the current owners won't have to dilute their ownership share. Dividends don't enter in to the equation at all here. No new company is going to pay dividends. If they can pay dividends, what did they need the capital for in the first place?
The double taxation argument is also bogus. First, most individuals who receive dividends hold the stocks in tax-free or tax-defered accounts such as IRAs and 401Ks. So in fact, it is the wealthiest taxpayers who will benefit from Bush's proposal. Most folks will not be helped at all by the removal of taxes on dividends. Second, dividends are far from unique in the so-called double taxation folder. I pay taxes twice: once on my income (city, state, and federal) and then again when I buy something (city, county, and state sales taxes). That is at least as unfair as dividend taxes. So lets eliminate sales taxes first if we are going to eliminate double taxation.
Oh, and by the way, it was the wife (Wendy Gramm) of a Republican Senator (Phil Gramm, Texas) who sat on Enron's Board of Directors. She was on the audit commitee. Enron was Phil Gramm's largest contributor.
That's because without them, Star Trek would be senseless.
I don't see Hindus or anyone else lobbying to teach their religion in a public school science class.
Haven't been to India recently, have you? Hindu Fascism is a growing phenomena in India. Astrology is taught as a serious subject in some Indian universities.
Bredesen's degree is in Physics (Harvard, 1967) according to his bio. He worked as a computer programmer right after he finished his degree.
I never claimed that the US leapt into action like a superhero in Rwanda. Only that we didn't have any real strategic interests when we finally did intervene. There is a lot of inertia to overcome before we will intervene in a crisis. That's part of the nature of a democratic government. Madeleine Albright once compared it to turning a supertanker.
The population of the US most emphatically does not want us to be the world's cop. A goodly share of the US population is descended from people who fled from areas where there were ongoing conflicts. My Great Grandfather left Germany after spending a couple of years in the army during the war of 1870 where he participated in the Seige of Paris. He left because he wanted no more part of Europe's wars. He and others like him have bequethed the US a strong isolationist streak. But we also, like most democratic societies -- France being the exception ;) -- have a sense that it is our duty to help others out in times of crisis. This is the basic conflict. We the people of the US want to help where we are needed, but we must also overcome the isolationist impulse. So most conflicts where we intervene have to have some combination of need and strategic interest. The US population fully understands these criteria. Living outside the US, what you likely see are our lame attempts to sell the rest of the world that we are strictly humanitarian interventionists. And in the end we mostly are. We are just careful about where we choose to place our efforts.
From one AC:
You ever trip over something small in the dark? That's what happened to you. I don't think AOL or Mozilla or 90% of the IT industry knew you existed. By the sound of the yelp, I'd say that the Mozilla folks accidently stepped on IBPheonix's little "puppy".
We have a winner for best explanation of how this all happened.
And from another AC:
I don't think Mozilla did this to spite you. I had never heard of you until your childish email campaign.
And another winner for best description of FirebirdBrandSQL's response.
Sorry, no mod points, but both of these ACs needed to be heard.
Regarding the former Yugoslavia and the NATO led intervention, the US has never tried to cover up that they had very real strategic goals with this campaign. Take a look at for example this report [iacenter.org].
One report from an unknown group in San Fransisco is your evidence?
What's scary is that so many of you americans, firmly believe that your leaders only act out of a "pure" motive. I'm sure you're not so naive in other regards. The only explanation I've got, is that you must be blinded with "patriotism".
No, we know full well that most US interventions have mixed motivations. We are a country of 290+ million people. To sell any intervention, you have to put a coalition of different interest groups together. Some buy the power politics angle. Some will support it if you can show them a profit. And yes, a large number of us (perhaps even most of us) will only support an intervention if you can show us that it is, indeed, The Right Thing To Do.
The phrase "Saddam gassed his own people" are getting tiresome. Saddam gassed the seperatist kurds in northern Iraq.
I suppose that makes it OK?
I suspect it is repeated over and over again to somehow draw attention away from the fact that NATO member Turkey are responsible for several massacres in the same area. At least they're not killing "their own people", right?
Those of us who give money and time to Amnesty Int'l have never, in any way, condoned this. The US State Dept has also pulled no punches in its human rights report on Turkey. But Turkey, at least, has something approaching a functioning democracy. Pressure in the form of govt reports, journalism stories, and conditions on entry into the EU may slowly move Turkey into a much better respect for human rights. Nothing like that was ever going to be possible with Iraq.
That's BS, too. There is an illegal oil pipeline running from Iraq to Syria. Iraq was also running illegal oil in barges into Iran. Where did the money get spent? In the 1980s, Iraq fought an 8 year war with Iran that cost Iraq at least US $10**11. Toss in Gulf War I and Iraq never had much left over for luxury goods like schools. In fact, Iraq's literacy rate is only 58% and has never been very high compared to its neighbors. Jordon, with no oil, has a literacy rate of 86%. Syria, again with no oil, has a literacy rate of 70%. No, the sanctions meant that the people of Iraq suffered because of the budget choices made by Saddam and his minions. Saddam and the military first. If there is anything left over, the people can eat. If not, tough. That was Saddam's choice.
Also remember that it was in Saddam's interest to make the sanctions look as horrible as possible in order to garner sympathy from Western pacifists. Iraq had quite a propaganda machine going to this end. I'm really quite skeptical that the sanctions caused as much heartache as people like you seem to believe. I'm open minded on this issue, but I want to see a real in-depth analysis from a UN or similar source.
Finally, the Geneva Convention also requires that you not hide military personell and equipment in and around civilian facilities. This was a common practice of the Iraqi military. And the GC frowns on the use of poison gas, especially on your own civilian population. Funny, too, that even though the GC came out before most westerners had electricity in their homes it now is considered a "means of survival". Next war you'll be telling us that it is against the GC to take away the enemy civilians Internet connections.
The fact is that killed more people, via direct war and 12 years of sanctions than Saddam ever did.
BULLSHIT! Hussein spent his oil money from the past decade on weapons, bribes to local elders, and his own luxury goods and bank acounts. It would not have been hard to have spent that money on food, medicine, schools, etc for his own people. The sanctions cannot be blamed for the state of Iraq or for ANY deaths that occured in the past decade. Only one man is to blame for those deaths and if we are lucky, God is judging him for those actions right at this very moment.
Now, give me one example of a conflict where the US unselfishly involved itself for no other cause than "good".
A reasonable case can be made that Roosevelt worked hard to help the Brits out prior to the US formal entry into WWII because it was The Right Thing To Do.
More recently, the US entered Somalia because the population was starving due to a combination of long-term drought and local warlords who didn't seem to give a damn about the local people.
Rwanda is another recent case where the US intervened when there was no strategic reason for doing so. Just a nasty local ethnic cleansing problem.
And then there is the whole leftover Yugo mess. One of the major reasons the US got involved was because we perceived (rightly or wrongly) that the Europeans did not seem to care very much about the thousands of people whose lives were being lost. Remember, it was a group of Dutch "peacekeepers" who stood by while the Srebrenitza Massacre took place.
Most European capital cities have a "Never Again" museum where they walk schoolchildren through the brutality of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of their country. And yet Europeans are the most obstinant about refusing to help others out of similar fixes the way the US helped them out of theirs.
Bottom line for me is that I'll gladly accept a mixture of both pure and selfish motivations if that is what it takes to rid the world of bastards like Hussein.
But, you forgot that most judges in the united states are liberals...
The Republicans have held the Presidency for 14 of the past 22 years. I'd be skeptical if they appointed many liberals to the federal bench in that time. They've also controlled a lot of state governorships and legislatures so the same likely holds true at the state level. You must be way out there on the far right to think that most judges are liberals these days.
They don't have to publish an exploit. They just have to publish a story similar to the headline here on /. Just the facts, Ma'am.
Articles generally have to go through approval before being published, by groups that each have their own agenda. Most of the time, these groups take a hands-off approach, but there have been incidents where articles were pulled because they weren't in the best interests of the school. Publishing an article that practically invites legal action would probably set off some red flags in one of the councils.
Sounds just like every other local daily newspaper.
All politics is local. I would think that every student newspaper where these cards are used would be interested in this story.