And I was surprised to notice that nobody had referred OP to alt.syadmin.recovery, which makes abundantly clear what the only real way to stop being a sysadmin is.
Both MySpace and the Wall Street Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch. They are definitely not above using one division to boost another division (how much has Fox News reported on the British phone hacking scandal?).
So take this report with the grain of salt it deserves.
JESUS CHRIST HE WAS ON YOUTUBE ADVOCATING FOR VIOLENT JIHAD.
That's actually protected speech under the First Amendment. That's why authors of fictional books that involve sympathetic characters engaging in insurrection against the US government (e.g. The Turner Diaries) aren't in jail. To convict the guy, you'd need to demonstrate that he actually was involved in planning an attack.
And setting the Branch Davidian compound on fire was also illegal - in addition to never having indicted any of the Branch Davidians nor issuing warrants for their arrest, the Clinton administration also violated laws against using army units for domestic police work.
There was a lot of good intel saying that he was pretty proud of doing these things.
Says who? All the actual evidence of that is classified.
Not only that but I'd be willing to bet heavily that if we had done this legally it would've ended with a giant firefight and he'd have been dead anyway with out "due process" and everyone would be up in arms anyway.
He would have had due process if we'd indicted him and then issued a warrant for his arrest, and he'd resisted arrest. There'd be no legal problem whatsoever, and a lot of people who are up in arms about this would have been fine with it. The key difference here is that if things were done legally, Al-Awlaki would have the option of *not* resisting arrest and standing trial, where he'd have a chance to confront and refute the evidence against him.
You're allowing the executive branch to be the arbiter of what is legally true or not and what punishments would be in order. The United States Constitution is very clear that the executive branch does not have that power, only the judiciary does.
The fact that there was a targeted killing of an American is extremely chilling, but, while we're not at war, what Al-Awlaki did was a matter of insurrection and treason under Article 3, Section 3.
Seriously.
The constitutional definition of treason continues to state: "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." That never happened in the Al-Awlaki case. Ergo, what happened to him was not a legal execution for the crime of treason. It also wasn't the legal killing of a criminal suspect resisting arrest (because there was no arrest warrant, he had no way to surrender himself to a missile, and there was no attempt to apprehend him).
And lest you think that what happened to Al-Awlaki was ok because the judicial system didn't apply, you're wrong again. Article 3 Section 2 spells it out quite clearly: "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;" And of course the Fifth Amendment also makes it very clear that Al-Awlaki was entitled to a trial: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
The legal way to handle a case like this: 1. Prosecutors present the evidence against him to a grand jury. 2. Grand jury gives out an indictment, and a warrant for his arrest is issued. 3. US State Department talks to the Yemeni government (which the US has good relations with), requesting extradition of Al-Awlaki for trial for his crimes. 4. Yemeni army / police, possibly in cooperation with US forces, attempts to apprehend him. If he resists, they can respond with appropriate force. 5. He is tried for his crimes. Evidence is presented, his attorney has a chance to rebut the evidence, etc etc. If he is found guilty (by a jury, of course), he is locked up for the rest of his life and possibly executed. What part of this couldn't have happened with Al-Awlaki? And incidentally, the argument that the warrant would have tipped him off also makes no sense, given that there was a case pending in which Al-Awlaki's father sued in federal court for an injunction that his son be tried before he was executed.
Here's what actually happened, according to the Obama administration: 1. Intelligence officials presented a case for killing Al-Awlaki to the Obama appointees. 2. The Obama press office gives out a bunch of information to the public about how Al-Awlaki is a Bad Person. 3. Obama orders a missile strike on Al-Awlaki. Notice that Al-Awlaki never has a chance to confront or refute the evidence against him, and the only story the public has is the story the Obama administration wanted them to have.
Ah, but that falls victim to a standard political trick - robo calling people pretending to be the other guy's campaign, ideally doing something outrageous. For instance, Dick Dodge's opponent might do a robo call with a script like: "This is Ruby calling on behalf of Dick Dodge for Congress. I wanted to let you know that if Dick wins, I and my hot friends will be at his victory celebration to help all gentlemen celebrate properly!"
Or another popular one: "This is Mike calling on behalf of Dick Dodge for Congress. I wanted to remind you to come out and vote Wednesday, November __!" (the election is of course on Tuesday)
Well, the sad thing is that when US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed with a missile without the slightest pretense of judicial due process, most polls suggested that about 65% of Americans approved, including substantial majorities of self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans. So by all appearances, US citizens don't actually care about whether the government follows its own rules.
This is obviously a scary fact, but something many totalitarian rulers discovered a long time ago is that the masses are generally fine with government oppression so long as they keep them distracted (with TV, iPhones, etc), target minorities that are small enough that they can't fight back (e.g. Japanese-Americans or German Jews), or create a subset of the population that thinks of themselves as privileged (members of the political party, following an established religion, dominant racial group, etc) and will fight to defend that privilege. Hence this comment from the 1930's: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."
Here here! Very frequently, after a disaster, all the phone lines to the affected area are tied up with people either calling to announce they're safe, or calling people that might be in the area to see if they're safe. The official that shut down the phone network did exactly the right thing, because this is precisely at the same time as you really want the lines to be focused solely on 911 and other emergency traffic. It's absolutely human instinct to do anything in your power to ensure that your loved ones are safe, but it's counterproductive when there are huge numbers of people affected.
So having something that would use far less bandwidth for "I'm OK" would solve a real problem. I'd actually recommend they make a little app that sends off something like a 100-byte message that would mark this on the website, so that users wouldn't have to browse to it. Even a false "I'm safe" followed by the person getting killed is actually an improvement, because the point of a tool like that is to prevent panic outside of the disaster area. The simple fact is that in a disaster, you or your loved one could well die very quickly, and there's absolutely nothing you can really do to prevent it. The best thing you can do inside the disaster zone is to aid the injured if you have the training, get out of Dodge, and/or help others get out of Dodge. The best thing you can do outside the disaster zone is stay as calm as possible, provide aid to any of the victims or rescuers that happen to show up, and otherwise get the heck out of the way and let the rescuers do their job.
They may have worked hard, but for every Bill Gates there are thousands of CEOs of tech startups that went nowhere who each worked their butts off. Bill Gates has always struck me as smart, hardworking, motivated, and a fantastic negotiator, but more than anything else he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to make the right deals with IBM and with Tim Patterson.
Heck, even in Horatio Alger stories, there was generally a bit of a deus ex machina to allow the virtuous poor person to become fabulously wealthy.
All they do now is declare that whoever died was a 'terrorist', 'militant', or 'insurgent', knowing full well that journalists and the American public will swallow that without any difficulties. In a related point, they also seem to have successfully convinced most Americans that the protests in Afghanistan is all over the burning of Korans, whereas if you read reports from journalists who actually talked to protesters, the primary motivation for most of them is US drones killing Afghan children and the Karzai government doing nothing to stop them.
"That's a really nice journal you have there. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it, say a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit. Not that we'd ever want to do that, of course, but if this particular story were published something like that just might happen."
George Washington in particular was against this - the reason he went by "Mr President" was that he wanted to have some sort of title that indicated that the President of the United States was on par with his counterparts in other countries (which were likely to be Kings, Dukes, or Princes), but he wanted to emphasize that the President is also just a regular citizen, so he started it with "Mister". One of the key reasons he was instrumental in creating American democracy is that after he won the American Revolutionary War he didn't take the army he'd just won with and try to take over the country, and then as President stepped down after 2 terms and peacefully transferred power to John Adams.
On the other hand, the RIAA takes their cut of something we could survive without, whereas Monsanto wants to demand a cut of every pound of food sold in the world.
In different climates the biological succession works the other way. For instance, right now, in New England, if you leave bare rock undisturbed, it starts growing lichens. The lichens eventually trap enough material to make the wetter spots suitable for mosses which move in next. Then come the grasses, which turn the place into a field. Eventually, the field builds up enough soil that shrubs and pioneer tree species can show up. And finally, the larger canopy trees move in, and you have a forest again. This process actually happened over about 150 years, as the farming that used to happen in New England moved westward leaving land behind.
A particular scientific theory can be both well-proven and NP-Hard to determine. For instance, the process of determining that acceleration due to gravity is approximately 9.81 m/s^2 is NP-Hard. But that doesn't make the fact any less proven. That's because humans are smart enough to solve NP-Hard problems, and do so every day.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it!;)
I'm not sure precisely which country OP is in, but if it's Finland, he knows what he's talking about: Their education system is one of the best in the world, and way better than the US system. Most notable things the government does differently:
- Provides information to parents about raising newborns as soon as the child is born.
- Provides comprehensive day care / early childhood education starting at 8 months and going until 5 years. Alternately, the parents can choose to care for the child at home and receive periodic visits to ensure child safety.
- At about age 16, students choose between an academic upper school or a vocational school, which will focus on college prep or occupational training.
- Tuition is basically free at university / polytechnic. The difference is that university is more for theoretical and academic work, whily polytechnic is more for advanced practical skills.
- Teachers are highly paid, highly respected, highly competitive, and always have the equivalent of a master's degree.
It wasn't quite "allowing the banks to fail" in the sense that the Icelandic equivalent of FDIC kicked in and the banks were nationalized, but the key thing was that Iceland spent absolutely no cash on trying to bail out holders of stocks and bonds. It's that combination of socialism and capitalism that is not uncommon in European nations: The socialism is enough to ensure that you'll survive. The capitalism means that if you're invested in a big bank, or a CEO who's made some dumb decisions, you take your losses.
Your reading of Civil War history is flat out incorrect.
* November 1860: Abraham Lincoln gets elected on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery into territories that didn't already have it - i.e. When the federal government created states out of Arizona and New Mexico (which they weren't at the time), they'd be free states. His election campaign was centered around that argument, which was by far the biggest issue of the day, but he did not push for abolishing slavery in places where it already existed. This was significantly more moderate a position than what the notable abolitionists wanted. * Nov 1860-Feb 1861: Seven states secede from the United States and form the Confederacy, interpreting Lincoln's platform of not expanding slavery as a slippery slope towards abolishing slavery in their states. The rhetoric used to convince state legislatures to secede is very explicitly about slavery. * Mar 1861: Abraham Lincoln takes office. Notice that this happened after the Confederacy was already formed. * Apr 1861: South Carolina forces open fire on Fort Sumter, which has been beseiged for 5 months prior. There's no reasonable way to argue that the Confederacy did not start the war, and there's no reasonable way of reading the Confederacy's motives as being about anything other than slavery.
In addition, Lincoln was very very careful not to threaten slavery in states that already had it, because if he had, he would have lost the support of Maryland (leaving Washington DC surrounded by enemies), Kentucky, and possibly the newly-formed West Virginia, which were slave-holding states that did not secede.The Emancipation Proclamation (which created the stated goal of freeing the slaves) wasn't until the war had been going on for over 2 years, and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery wasn't passed until after the war was over.
However, depending on when and where you received your education, it's quite possible that you got the version of the "War of Northern Aggression" in which Abe Lincoln threatened people's freedom and then sent William T Sherman to wreck everything the South had for no reason whatsoever. But that view of things is simply not supported by the documents we have.
The Disunion series over at the New York Times has all sorts of excellent primary documents and articles by historians looking at almost every angle of the war, which I highly recommend.
Something New Hampshire has going for it is a very long tradition of giving priority to good and competent goverment. That means, for the judiciary, no nonsense, no wasting the court's time, and ruling based on law and case precedent rather than personal biases.
I should point out that this is definitely changing. For instance, my mother worked family law for about a decade in New Hampshire. The judges there seemed to have a basic rule of 50-50 division of the assets, joint custody of the kids, no child support or alimony. If one parent wanted to avoid custody (more common than you might think), then they'd have to pay child support.
For instance, if she claimed abuse, they'd want to talk to a coworker or somebody else who saw her regularly to see if there was a pattern of unexplained injuries. If she claimed that he was molesting the kids, they'd have the kids talk to a shrink to see if she was right. If there was a question of drug addiction or alcoholism, they'd check on that. The kids had representation in court with the power to reject custody arrangements that put the kids in a bad situation, and older kids were asked what they wanted with an expectation that this request would be followed if it was reasonable.
In other words, it was far more sane and equitable than you're making it out to be. Now, that was New Hampshire, I wouldn't be surprised if things were different in Mississippi, but don't hate on the people that are actually trying to do things the right way.
If you're a US citizen, and go to a US-Canada border crossing, it's a Canadian official, not a US official, that checks your passport. The passport is to help you get permission from the Canadians to enter their country, not to get permission from the US to leave. The reason airlines check passports before boarding international flights is to prevent a situation where somebody flies from the US to, say, France, and then is denied entry to France and has to either turn around and go back or create a bunch of work for the nearest US consulate. It actually makes some sense.
Of course, where this gets tricky is if the Canadians and Mexicans sign agreements with the US that say they won't let any US citizens over the border without a passport.
Don't forget banking and finance. They definitely need capital markets if they're going to accomplish anything. After all, without the possibility of great monetary reward, there's no way anybody would bother to build a shelter for themselves or gather fruit to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
And I was surprised to notice that nobody had referred OP to alt.syadmin.recovery, which makes abundantly clear what the only real way to stop being a sysadmin is.
Both MySpace and the Wall Street Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch. They are definitely not above using one division to boost another division (how much has Fox News reported on the British phone hacking scandal?).
So take this report with the grain of salt it deserves.
JESUS CHRIST HE WAS ON YOUTUBE ADVOCATING FOR VIOLENT JIHAD.
That's actually protected speech under the First Amendment. That's why authors of fictional books that involve sympathetic characters engaging in insurrection against the US government (e.g. The Turner Diaries) aren't in jail. To convict the guy, you'd need to demonstrate that he actually was involved in planning an attack.
And setting the Branch Davidian compound on fire was also illegal - in addition to never having indicted any of the Branch Davidians nor issuing warrants for their arrest, the Clinton administration also violated laws against using army units for domestic police work.
There was a lot of good intel saying that he was pretty proud of doing these things.
Says who? All the actual evidence of that is classified.
Not only that but I'd be willing to bet heavily that if we had done this legally it would've ended with a giant firefight and he'd have been dead anyway with out "due process" and everyone would be up in arms anyway.
He would have had due process if we'd indicted him and then issued a warrant for his arrest, and he'd resisted arrest. There'd be no legal problem whatsoever, and a lot of people who are up in arms about this would have been fine with it. The key difference here is that if things were done legally, Al-Awlaki would have the option of *not* resisting arrest and standing trial, where he'd have a chance to confront and refute the evidence against him.
You're allowing the executive branch to be the arbiter of what is legally true or not and what punishments would be in order. The United States Constitution is very clear that the executive branch does not have that power, only the judiciary does.
The fact that there was a targeted killing of an American is extremely chilling, but, while we're not at war, what Al-Awlaki did was a matter of insurrection and treason under Article 3, Section 3.
Seriously.
The constitutional definition of treason continues to state: "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." That never happened in the Al-Awlaki case. Ergo, what happened to him was not a legal execution for the crime of treason. It also wasn't the legal killing of a criminal suspect resisting arrest (because there was no arrest warrant, he had no way to surrender himself to a missile, and there was no attempt to apprehend him).
And lest you think that what happened to Al-Awlaki was ok because the judicial system didn't apply, you're wrong again. Article 3 Section 2 spells it out quite clearly: "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;" And of course the Fifth Amendment also makes it very clear that Al-Awlaki was entitled to a trial: ... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury
The legal way to handle a case like this:
1. Prosecutors present the evidence against him to a grand jury.
2. Grand jury gives out an indictment, and a warrant for his arrest is issued.
3. US State Department talks to the Yemeni government (which the US has good relations with), requesting extradition of Al-Awlaki for trial for his crimes.
4. Yemeni army / police, possibly in cooperation with US forces, attempts to apprehend him. If he resists, they can respond with appropriate force.
5. He is tried for his crimes. Evidence is presented, his attorney has a chance to rebut the evidence, etc etc. If he is found guilty (by a jury, of course), he is locked up for the rest of his life and possibly executed.
What part of this couldn't have happened with Al-Awlaki? And incidentally, the argument that the warrant would have tipped him off also makes no sense, given that there was a case pending in which Al-Awlaki's father sued in federal court for an injunction that his son be tried before he was executed.
Here's what actually happened, according to the Obama administration:
1. Intelligence officials presented a case for killing Al-Awlaki to the Obama appointees.
2. The Obama press office gives out a bunch of information to the public about how Al-Awlaki is a Bad Person.
3. Obama orders a missile strike on Al-Awlaki.
Notice that Al-Awlaki never has a chance to confront or refute the evidence against him, and the only story the public has is the story the Obama administration wanted them to have.
Ah, but that falls victim to a standard political trick - robo calling people pretending to be the other guy's campaign, ideally doing something outrageous. For instance, Dick Dodge's opponent might do a robo call with a script like:
"This is Ruby calling on behalf of Dick Dodge for Congress. I wanted to let you know that if Dick wins, I and my hot friends will be at his victory celebration to help all gentlemen celebrate properly!"
Or another popular one:
"This is Mike calling on behalf of Dick Dodge for Congress. I wanted to remind you to come out and vote Wednesday, November __!" (the election is of course on Tuesday)
Who are the tax payers who do? Can I get a list?
Well, the sad thing is that when US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed with a missile without the slightest pretense of judicial due process, most polls suggested that about 65% of Americans approved, including substantial majorities of self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans. So by all appearances, US citizens don't actually care about whether the government follows its own rules.
This is obviously a scary fact, but something many totalitarian rulers discovered a long time ago is that the masses are generally fine with government oppression so long as they keep them distracted (with TV, iPhones, etc), target minorities that are small enough that they can't fight back (e.g. Japanese-Americans or German Jews), or create a subset of the population that thinks of themselves as privileged (members of the political party, following an established religion, dominant racial group, etc) and will fight to defend that privilege. Hence this comment from the 1930's: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."
Here here! Very frequently, after a disaster, all the phone lines to the affected area are tied up with people either calling to announce they're safe, or calling people that might be in the area to see if they're safe. The official that shut down the phone network did exactly the right thing, because this is precisely at the same time as you really want the lines to be focused solely on 911 and other emergency traffic. It's absolutely human instinct to do anything in your power to ensure that your loved ones are safe, but it's counterproductive when there are huge numbers of people affected.
So having something that would use far less bandwidth for "I'm OK" would solve a real problem. I'd actually recommend they make a little app that sends off something like a 100-byte message that would mark this on the website, so that users wouldn't have to browse to it. Even a false "I'm safe" followed by the person getting killed is actually an improvement, because the point of a tool like that is to prevent panic outside of the disaster area. The simple fact is that in a disaster, you or your loved one could well die very quickly, and there's absolutely nothing you can really do to prevent it. The best thing you can do inside the disaster zone is to aid the injured if you have the training, get out of Dodge, and/or help others get out of Dodge. The best thing you can do outside the disaster zone is stay as calm as possible, provide aid to any of the victims or rescuers that happen to show up, and otherwise get the heck out of the way and let the rescuers do their job.
They may have worked hard, but for every Bill Gates there are thousands of CEOs of tech startups that went nowhere who each worked their butts off. Bill Gates has always struck me as smart, hardworking, motivated, and a fantastic negotiator, but more than anything else he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to make the right deals with IBM and with Tim Patterson.
Heck, even in Horatio Alger stories, there was generally a bit of a deus ex machina to allow the virtuous poor person to become fabulously wealthy.
All they do now is declare that whoever died was a 'terrorist', 'militant', or 'insurgent', knowing full well that journalists and the American public will swallow that without any difficulties. In a related point, they also seem to have successfully convinced most Americans that the protests in Afghanistan is all over the burning of Korans, whereas if you read reports from journalists who actually talked to protesters, the primary motivation for most of them is US drones killing Afghan children and the Karzai government doing nothing to stop them.
This is definitely a bigger problem than just Detroit. It's big enough, in fact, that the USDA did a national survey of it:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/fooddesert/fooddesert.html
(Yes, I know, government statistics may be fabricated, but there's very little reason for them to do so here)
"That's a really nice journal you have there. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it, say a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit. Not that we'd ever want to do that, of course, but if this particular story were published something like that just might happen."
Nope, not at all threatening.
George Washington in particular was against this - the reason he went by "Mr President" was that he wanted to have some sort of title that indicated that the President of the United States was on par with his counterparts in other countries (which were likely to be Kings, Dukes, or Princes), but he wanted to emphasize that the President is also just a regular citizen, so he started it with "Mister". One of the key reasons he was instrumental in creating American democracy is that after he won the American Revolutionary War he didn't take the army he'd just won with and try to take over the country, and then as President stepped down after 2 terms and peacefully transferred power to John Adams.
On the other hand, the RIAA takes their cut of something we could survive without, whereas Monsanto wants to demand a cut of every pound of food sold in the world.
In different climates the biological succession works the other way. For instance, right now, in New England, if you leave bare rock undisturbed, it starts growing lichens. The lichens eventually trap enough material to make the wetter spots suitable for mosses which move in next. Then come the grasses, which turn the place into a field. Eventually, the field builds up enough soil that shrubs and pioneer tree species can show up. And finally, the larger canopy trees move in, and you have a forest again. This process actually happened over about 150 years, as the farming that used to happen in New England moved westward leaving land behind.
There was a Zune mess alright, but no Zune Messiah.
A particular scientific theory can be both well-proven and NP-Hard to determine. For instance, the process of determining that acceleration due to gravity is approximately 9.81 m/s^2 is NP-Hard. But that doesn't make the fact any less proven. That's because humans are smart enough to solve NP-Hard problems, and do so every day.
In other words, you're living up to your sig.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it! ;)
I'm not sure precisely which country OP is in, but if it's Finland, he knows what he's talking about: Their education system is one of the best in the world, and way better than the US system. Most notable things the government does differently:
- Provides information to parents about raising newborns as soon as the child is born.
- Provides comprehensive day care / early childhood education starting at 8 months and going until 5 years. Alternately, the parents can choose to care for the child at home and receive periodic visits to ensure child safety.
- At about age 16, students choose between an academic upper school or a vocational school, which will focus on college prep or occupational training.
- Tuition is basically free at university / polytechnic. The difference is that university is more for theoretical and academic work, whily polytechnic is more for advanced practical skills.
- Teachers are highly paid, highly respected, highly competitive, and always have the equivalent of a master's degree.
It wasn't quite "allowing the banks to fail" in the sense that the Icelandic equivalent of FDIC kicked in and the banks were nationalized, but the key thing was that Iceland spent absolutely no cash on trying to bail out holders of stocks and bonds. It's that combination of socialism and capitalism that is not uncommon in European nations: The socialism is enough to ensure that you'll survive. The capitalism means that if you're invested in a big bank, or a CEO who's made some dumb decisions, you take your losses.
Your reading of Civil War history is flat out incorrect.
* November 1860: Abraham Lincoln gets elected on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery into territories that didn't already have it - i.e. When the federal government created states out of Arizona and New Mexico (which they weren't at the time), they'd be free states. His election campaign was centered around that argument, which was by far the biggest issue of the day, but he did not push for abolishing slavery in places where it already existed. This was significantly more moderate a position than what the notable abolitionists wanted.
* Nov 1860-Feb 1861: Seven states secede from the United States and form the Confederacy, interpreting Lincoln's platform of not expanding slavery as a slippery slope towards abolishing slavery in their states. The rhetoric used to convince state legislatures to secede is very explicitly about slavery.
* Mar 1861: Abraham Lincoln takes office. Notice that this happened after the Confederacy was already formed.
* Apr 1861: South Carolina forces open fire on Fort Sumter, which has been beseiged for 5 months prior.
There's no reasonable way to argue that the Confederacy did not start the war, and there's no reasonable way of reading the Confederacy's motives as being about anything other than slavery.
In addition, Lincoln was very very careful not to threaten slavery in states that already had it, because if he had, he would have lost the support of Maryland (leaving Washington DC surrounded by enemies), Kentucky, and possibly the newly-formed West Virginia, which were slave-holding states that did not secede.The Emancipation Proclamation (which created the stated goal of freeing the slaves) wasn't until the war had been going on for over 2 years, and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery wasn't passed until after the war was over.
However, depending on when and where you received your education, it's quite possible that you got the version of the "War of Northern Aggression" in which Abe Lincoln threatened people's freedom and then sent William T Sherman to wreck everything the South had for no reason whatsoever. But that view of things is simply not supported by the documents we have.
The Disunion series over at the New York Times has all sorts of excellent primary documents and articles by historians looking at almost every angle of the war, which I highly recommend.
I don't - the greatest antidote to war machines is a ragtag bunch of young misfits, and there's really no trouble finding those in K-12 schools.
Same story, with the roles reversed.
Something New Hampshire has going for it is a very long tradition of giving priority to good and competent goverment. That means, for the judiciary, no nonsense, no wasting the court's time, and ruling based on law and case precedent rather than personal biases.
I should point out that this is definitely changing. For instance, my mother worked family law for about a decade in New Hampshire. The judges there seemed to have a basic rule of 50-50 division of the assets, joint custody of the kids, no child support or alimony. If one parent wanted to avoid custody (more common than you might think), then they'd have to pay child support.
For instance, if she claimed abuse, they'd want to talk to a coworker or somebody else who saw her regularly to see if there was a pattern of unexplained injuries. If she claimed that he was molesting the kids, they'd have the kids talk to a shrink to see if she was right. If there was a question of drug addiction or alcoholism, they'd check on that. The kids had representation in court with the power to reject custody arrangements that put the kids in a bad situation, and older kids were asked what they wanted with an expectation that this request would be followed if it was reasonable.
In other words, it was far more sane and equitable than you're making it out to be. Now, that was New Hampshire, I wouldn't be surprised if things were different in Mississippi, but don't hate on the people that are actually trying to do things the right way.
If you're a US citizen, and go to a US-Canada border crossing, it's a Canadian official, not a US official, that checks your passport. The passport is to help you get permission from the Canadians to enter their country, not to get permission from the US to leave. The reason airlines check passports before boarding international flights is to prevent a situation where somebody flies from the US to, say, France, and then is denied entry to France and has to either turn around and go back or create a bunch of work for the nearest US consulate. It actually makes some sense.
Of course, where this gets tricky is if the Canadians and Mexicans sign agreements with the US that say they won't let any US citizens over the border without a passport.
Don't forget banking and finance. They definitely need capital markets if they're going to accomplish anything. After all, without the possibility of great monetary reward, there's no way anybody would bother to build a shelter for themselves or gather fruit to eat.