In New York State it was pretty clear what happened.
The institutionalized mental hospitals really were snake pits. They were badly run by incompetent, underpaid aides, and made their residents worse.
Psychiatrists found that the best way to help most of that population was to move them into supportive housing that was as close to normal living conditions as possible. It also made a big difference if they were living among friends and family, in a city for example, rather than off in an isolated prison-like hospital. A lot of these patients never should have been institutionalized. They were capable of holding jobs and functioning pretty well.
And there were new psychiatric drugs that helped with a lot of the worst symptoms of mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
Deinstitutionalization was very popular among liberal and conservative politicians, because it was cheaper than traditional mental hospitals. Their argument was, they would close down the institutions, and use the money to create community residences and mental health services.
But then, after they closed the hospitals, they didn't use the money for community residences and mental health services. They set up for example community mental health centers. But it was a lot cheaper for them to treat women with housewife blues than to treat schizophrenics.
So then these former residents wound up on the streets. Fortunately, the Partnership for the Homeless sued New York City, and then other cities around the country, to force them to provide housing for the homeless, as they were usually required under the "provide for the public welfare" provisions of most city and state constitutions.
There were a very few people who really did need to be institutionalized, because they were a danger to themselves or others. But we still don't have anyplace to put them. According to a recent New York Times series, those residences are still hellholes. Attendants were raping patients and kept on the job.
I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.
There have been lots of studies of the homeless. The one thing they found in common was that homeless people had no social networks. When people have family or friends to help them, they don't wind up on the streets. The people who wind up on the streets are those who have no one to help them.
I remember seeing some studies that found that half the homeless were mentally disturbed, and the other half were alcoholics or drug addicts.
One of the surprising things they found out in New York City was that they could simply give people housing, without social services, without counseling, and most of them did OK. Whatever the underlying pathology, it improves things to give them normal housing. Homeless people resist living in shelters that are run in some ways like prisons, but they usually are willing to live in normal housing.
I think it's comforting to people to tell themselves that were they in that situation, they could EASILY identify the problem and fix it in a snap. That way, they don't have to feel sorry for said people, and don't have to worry themselves about what they would do if they ever end up in such a situation. "Oh, I'd just not be lazy, and bam, I'm off the street."
That's known as the fallacy of the just universe: "The world is just, therefore, if somebody is having problems, he must have done something to deserve it."
Corollary: "Therefore, I shouldn't have to pay taxes to help them."
And the explanation the psychologists give for that fallacy is pretty much as you describe.
It brought popular recognition to the idea that we don't have a democracy because the richest 1% are running the country.
We can thank the Canadian left for coming down here and showing us how to do it.
Now it's up to us. If you don't like the idea of owing $50,000 or $100,000 in non-dischargeable college loans, or paying twice as much for health care as they do anywhere else in the world and still going bankrupt, or having the Republicans attack your Social Security retirement benefits, or shutting down government services with sequesters, or spending trillions in wars like the one in Iraq, or losing your constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from arbitrary searches, or working in minimum-wage, non-union jobs that don't pay enough to live on, then you have to do something about it.
It took the conservatives 30 years to destroy the country (starting from Ronald Reagan's presidency). It's going to take a long time to bring it back. Maybe we never will. It's not easy fighting billionaires. But maybe we will.
Plaintiffs contend the government has deprived them of their protected liberty interest in travel. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held “[t]he right to travel is part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.” Id. at 125.
As noted by the Ninth Circuit, “the [Supreme] Court has consistently treated the right to international travel as a liberty interest that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” DeNieva v. Reyes, 966 F.2d 480, 485 (9th Cir. 1992)(emphasis added)(citing Aptheker v. Sec’y of State, 378 U.S. 500, 505-08 (1964), and Califano v. Aznavorian, 439 U.S. 170, 176 (1978)). In DeNieva the plaintiff brought a claim under 42 U.S.C. 1983 after her passport was seized by government officials. The Ninth Circuit held the plaintiff had a right under the Fifth Amendment to travel internationally, and that right could not be deprived without a post-deprivation hearing. 966 F.2d. at 485.
Although Defendants do not dispute the United States Constitution affords procedural due-process protection to an individual’s liberty interest in travel, Defendants rely heavily on Gilmore v. Gonzales, 435 F.3d 1125 (9th Cir. 2006), and Green v. Transp. Sec. Admin., 351 F. Supp. 2d 1119 (W.D. Wash. 2005), to support their position that there is not a constitutional right to travel by airplane or to access the most convenient form of travel. In Gilmore the plaintiff challenged the government’s airline passenger identification policy as unconstitutional, alleging the policy violated his right to travel because he could not travel by commercial airline without presenting identification. The Ninth Circuit rejected plaintiff’s argument because “the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation.” 435 F.3d at 1136. The court also found the “burden” imposed by the challenged identification policy was not unreasonable. Id. at 1137. The plaintiffs in Green alleged they were innocent passengers without links to terrorist activity, but they had names similar or identical to names on the No Fly List and had been mistakenly identified by airport personnel as the individuals whose names appeared on that list. As a result, the plaintiffs were subjected to enhanced security screening. None of the plaintiffs ever missed a flight or were subjected to heightened screening for more than an hour. 351 F. Supp. 2d at 1122. The court denied the plaintiffs’ procedural due-process claim and held the plaintiffs did not have a right to travel throughout the United States “without any impediments whatsoever.” Id. at 1130.
The Court finds Green and Gilmore are distinguishable from this case for a number of reasons. These cases involve burdens on the right to interstate travel as opposed to international travel. Although there are perhaps viable alternatives to flying for domestic travel within the continental United States such as traveling by car or train, the Court disagrees with Defendants’ contention that international air travel is a mere convenience in light of the realities of our modern world. Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation. In Ibrahim v. Department of Homeland Security the Northern District of California recently rejected an argument similar to the one made by Defendants here:
While the Constitution does not ordinarily guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation
Many of these Plaintiffs cannot travel overseas by any way other than air because such journeys by boat or by land would be cost-prohibitive, would be time-consuming to a degree that Plaintiffs could not take the necessary time off from work, or would put Plaintiffs at risk of interrogation and detention by foreign authorities. In addition, some Plaintiffs are not physically well enough to endure such infeasible modes of travel.
Amayan Latif: Latif is a United States Marine Corps veteran and lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia, with his wife and children. Between November 2008 and April 2010 Latif and his family were living in Egypt. In April 2010 Latif and his family attempted to return to the United States. Latif was not allowed to board the first leg of their flight from Cairo to Madrid. One month later Latif was questioned by FBI agents and told he was on the No Fly List. Because he was unable to board a flight to the United States, Latif’s United States veteran disability benefits were reduced from $899.00 per month to zero because he could not attend the scheduled evaluations required to continue his benefits. In August 2010 Latif returned home after the United States government granted him a “one-time waiver” to fly to the United States. Because he cannot fly, Latif is unable to travel from the United States to Egypt to resume studies or to Saudi Arabia to perform a hajj, a religious pilgrimage and Islamic obligation.
After looking at campaign contributions from the health care industry to all the primary candidates, I decided that both candidates, Democratic and Republican, were taking money from the same interest groups and both candidates were forming policies to serve those interest groups. Those are primarily the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the hospital chains. Individual doctors are actually less of an influence than they used to be, although the AMA does spend a lot of money.
That's why Obama, as soon as he got into office, took single payer off the table, even though single payer was enormously popular among American voters, and Obama's supporters in particular. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was handling this issue, had a meeting with some single payer advocates and called them "fucking retarded" to their faces. Emanuel was also the Democratic Party's chief fund-raiser, so he sees everything in terms of how the White House can reward their contributors.
I think that when Obama reached out to the Republicans, what he was saying was, in effect, "Let's both work together to serve our fat cat campaign contributors, and give them billions of dollars in tax money, so we'll continue to get their campaign contributions, and get rich with jobs as lobbyists and corporate board members after we leave office." (That's what Al Gore did.)
Obama's health plan was literally adopted from a Heritage Foundation white paper. The Democratic strategists thought that if they gave the Republicans enough, the Republicans would go along. There was no significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans on this and most other important issues.
The Republicans told him, in effect, "No, we want it all for ourselves, and we're going to beat you by destroying the federal government so you can't even give your voters these moderate reforms."
This is the best quick explanation that I've seen of what Obama is about. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript1.html It's a panel with Bill Moyers, Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi about Obama's health reform. Kuttner is a nice, sincere guy who believed in Obama. Taibbi I think was more realistic (smarter) than Kuttner.
In a free and democratic society based on the rule of law, one who BOTH unilaterally decides to subvert the law, and along with it the processes we have built, AND flees from all consequences of their actions must be counted as an enemy of democracy.
You're assuming we have a free and democratic society based on the rule of law.
I don't. We had a presidential election in 2008 in which the Democrats raised $1 billion, even more than the Republicans, and spent it primarily on TV attack ads that ignored the issues.
In order to raise that $1 billion, they had to sell out the interests of their voters to big business, such as the health insurance companies. Why do you think we didn't have a single payer health care option? Why do you think Obama continued GWB's No Child Left Behind education policies with Race to the Top, which attacks unions and turns the education system into a big computer-scored test? Why do you think Obama bailed out the banks, rather than sending their officer to jail, and rather than helping the homeowners they cheated? For details, I refer you to Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
phone call metadata collection (which is explicitly lawful and Constitutional, by definition, because of a Supreme Court ruling 34 years ago)
You're assuming the Supreme Court follows the Constitution. I don't.
I can't even take that assumption seriously since Bush vs. Gore.
You really think that's what we need to "blow the whistle" on? That one person can decide, on their own, that they "disagree" with something, and publicly leak it?
Well, uh, yeah. Who else should decide? The people who lied to us and told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? The people who got us into the war in Iraq that cost 3,000 American lives, 150,000 Iraqi lives, and $3 trillion? The billionaires who run the country through their lobbyists?
I'm confident that, when lives are at stake, I can make a better decision than George W. Bush.
Maybe it's because everything in the NSA is so compartmentalized, that the people who understand security don't know what's going on in the other compartments.
If you restrict the dissemination of information too much, people can't do their jobs.
If everybody only learns on a need-to-know basis, they won't realize they needed to know something until after it creates a problem.
The good news is that now they'll restrict information even more.
Good news if you think that it would be good for America to have the NSA fall flat on its face again and replaced with an organization that promotes rational security.
As a journalist, I would point out that you can divide journalists into 2 kinds:
(1) generalists who report on everything, and understand nothing in depth.
(2) people who specialize in science (me) and at least know when they're getting in over their heads and know when and how to call an expert who can explain it to them. And then I call an expert who disagrees with the first expert.
For my own news, I read Science magazine. When I read IEEE Spectrum it was pretty good. People who need to know about medicine read the New England Journal of Medicine. The Wall Street Journal was the best news source in the world until Murdoch took it over. The daily newspapers have some good writers but I have to hunt for them.
Computer magazines have the problem that readers have such different levels of background knowledge that it's difficult to write one story that everybody would want to read. Spectrum does it but it's hard.
I'd be interested to know what computer news sources people here find reliable and useful.
BTW Paul Krugman said that when he first started writing his column for the New York Times, his editors didn't let him write that people were lying, even when they were lying.*
After he became their most popular columnist by page views, and won a Nobel prize, he could write whatever he wanted.
So that's one more RSS feed if you want to know what's really gong on. _________________________ *Think about that for a second.
There are enough lying right-wing sources (mostly Republicans but also Democrats) that a journalist could easily spend the rest of her life asking tough questions of people who will never talk to her again, and still not run out.
There are many real journalists in the US. The problem is that we don't have many real voters, who want to inform themselves of the issues, and take time to understand things. The last time it mattered, they fell in love with Obama, who betrayed his old liberal friends, and became a friend of the Republicans (a lot of good it did him). It's amazing what a billion dollars in campaign contributions will do to you.
I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Now, I don't want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don't want your pleasure yacht.
All I want's just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.
We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You've stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.
So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed.
Take the two old parties, Mister,
No difference in them I can see.
But with a Farmer-Labor Party
We could set the people free.
So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
The moral argument is a bullshit argument and you know it.
Will somebody please explain to me why poison gas is worse than napalm, cluster bombs, land mines, air-to-surface missiles, machine guns and bombs that we use in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Then, there are also groups who actually want a free Syria - free from Assad's tyranny AND from the Islamic nut-jobs who try to take over their country - From the West's point of view - these are the groups that should be assisted.
I used to have a hand-made mercury laboratory thermometer that was accurate to 0.1 degree. (In fact, fever thermometers have a nominal accuracy of 0.1 degree.) That's accurate enough to measure the difference between a weather station that was painted black or white.
There are a few politicians who really do represent the people rather than corporate interests. Bernie Sanders is the first I would mention. Most (not all) of the progressive caucus fit into that category. I admit these are dark times and people are apathetic. But we do win some battles. If the Republican Supreme Court justices die off under a Democratic president and Senate, that would change things.
Slashdot Mirror
In New York State it was pretty clear what happened.
The institutionalized mental hospitals really were snake pits. They were badly run by incompetent, underpaid aides, and made their residents worse.
Psychiatrists found that the best way to help most of that population was to move them into supportive housing that was as close to normal living conditions as possible. It also made a big difference if they were living among friends and family, in a city for example, rather than off in an isolated prison-like hospital. A lot of these patients never should have been institutionalized. They were capable of holding jobs and functioning pretty well.
And there were new psychiatric drugs that helped with a lot of the worst symptoms of mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
Deinstitutionalization was very popular among liberal and conservative politicians, because it was cheaper than traditional mental hospitals. Their argument was, they would close down the institutions, and use the money to create community residences and mental health services.
But then, after they closed the hospitals, they didn't use the money for community residences and mental health services. They set up for example community mental health centers. But it was a lot cheaper for them to treat women with housewife blues than to treat schizophrenics.
So then these former residents wound up on the streets. Fortunately, the Partnership for the Homeless sued New York City, and then other cities around the country, to force them to provide housing for the homeless, as they were usually required under the "provide for the public welfare" provisions of most city and state constitutions.
There were a very few people who really did need to be institutionalized, because they were a danger to themselves or others. But we still don't have anyplace to put them. According to a recent New York Times series, those residences are still hellholes. Attendants were raping patients and kept on the job.
I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.
There have been lots of studies of the homeless. The one thing they found in common was that homeless people had no social networks. When people have family or friends to help them, they don't wind up on the streets. The people who wind up on the streets are those who have no one to help them.
I remember seeing some studies that found that half the homeless were mentally disturbed, and the other half were alcoholics or drug addicts.
One of the surprising things they found out in New York City was that they could simply give people housing, without social services, without counseling, and most of them did OK. Whatever the underlying pathology, it improves things to give them normal housing. Homeless people resist living in shelters that are run in some ways like prisons, but they usually are willing to live in normal housing.
I think it's comforting to people to tell themselves that were they in that situation, they could EASILY identify the problem and fix it in a snap. That way, they don't have to feel sorry for said people, and don't have to worry themselves about what they would do if they ever end up in such a situation. "Oh, I'd just not be lazy, and bam, I'm off the street."
That's known as the fallacy of the just universe: "The world is just, therefore, if somebody is having problems, he must have done something to deserve it."
Corollary: "Therefore, I shouldn't have to pay taxes to help them."
And the explanation the psychologists give for that fallacy is pretty much as you describe.
No, we need a program to divert them from destroying society.
What did OWS achieve?
It brought popular recognition to the idea that we don't have a democracy because the richest 1% are running the country.
We can thank the Canadian left for coming down here and showing us how to do it.
Now it's up to us. If you don't like the idea of owing $50,000 or $100,000 in non-dischargeable college loans, or paying twice as much for health care as they do anywhere else in the world and still going bankrupt, or having the Republicans attack your Social Security retirement benefits, or shutting down government services with sequesters, or spending trillions in wars like the one in Iraq, or losing your constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from arbitrary searches, or working in minimum-wage, non-union jobs that don't pay enough to live on, then you have to do something about it.
It took the conservatives 30 years to destroy the country (starting from Ronald Reagan's presidency). It's going to take a long time to bring it back. Maybe we never will. It's not easy fighting billionaires. But maybe we will.
I was wondering how many of them were named Mohammed.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1244
The opinion and order explains that in detail.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/latif_v_holder_opinion_and_order.pdf
1. Right to Travel
Plaintiffs contend the government has deprived them of their protected liberty interest in travel. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held “[t]he right to travel is part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.” Id. at 125.
As noted by the Ninth Circuit, “the [Supreme] Court has consistently treated the right to international travel as a liberty interest that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” DeNieva v. Reyes, 966 F.2d 480, 485 (9th Cir. 1992)(emphasis added)(citing Aptheker v. Sec’y of State, 378 U.S. 500, 505-08 (1964), and Califano v. Aznavorian, 439 U.S. 170, 176 (1978)). In DeNieva the plaintiff brought a claim under 42 U.S.C. 1983 after her passport was seized by government officials. The Ninth Circuit held the plaintiff had a right under the Fifth Amendment to travel internationally, and that right could not be deprived without a post-deprivation hearing. 966 F.2d. at 485.
Although Defendants do not dispute the United States Constitution affords procedural due-process protection to an individual’s liberty interest in travel, Defendants rely heavily on Gilmore v. Gonzales, 435 F.3d 1125 (9th Cir. 2006), and Green v. Transp. Sec. Admin., 351 F. Supp. 2d 1119 (W.D. Wash. 2005), to support their position that there is not a constitutional right to travel by airplane or to access the most convenient form of travel. In Gilmore the plaintiff challenged the government’s airline passenger identification policy as unconstitutional, alleging the policy violated his right to travel because he could not travel by commercial airline without presenting identification. The Ninth Circuit rejected plaintiff’s argument because “the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation.” 435 F.3d at 1136. The court also found the “burden” imposed by the challenged identification policy was not unreasonable. Id. at 1137. The plaintiffs in Green alleged they were innocent passengers without links to terrorist activity, but they had names similar or identical to names on the No Fly List and had been mistakenly identified by airport personnel as the individuals whose names appeared on that list. As a result, the plaintiffs were subjected to enhanced security screening. None of the plaintiffs ever missed a flight or were subjected to heightened screening for more than an hour. 351 F. Supp. 2d at 1122. The court denied the plaintiffs’ procedural due-process claim and held the plaintiffs did not have a right to travel throughout the United States “without any impediments whatsoever.” Id. at 1130.
The Court finds Green and Gilmore are distinguishable from this case for a number of reasons. These cases involve burdens on the right to interstate travel as opposed to international travel. Although there are perhaps viable alternatives to flying for domestic travel within the continental United States such as traveling by car or train, the Court disagrees with Defendants’ contention that international air travel is a mere convenience in light of the realities of our modern world. Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation. In Ibrahim v. Department of Homeland Security the Northern District of California recently rejected an argument similar to the one made by Defendants here:
While the Constitution does not ordinarily guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation
These problems were discussed in detail in the Opinion and Order.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/latif_v_holder_opinion_and_order.pdf
Many of these Plaintiffs cannot travel overseas by any way other than air because such journeys by boat or by land would be cost-prohibitive, would be time-consuming to a degree that Plaintiffs could not take the necessary time off from work, or would put Plaintiffs at risk of interrogation and detention by foreign authorities. In addition, some Plaintiffs are not physically well enough to endure such infeasible modes of travel.
Amayan Latif: Latif is a United States Marine Corps veteran and lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia, with his wife and children. Between November 2008 and April 2010 Latif and his family were living in Egypt. In April 2010 Latif and his family attempted to return to the United States. Latif was not allowed to board the first leg of their flight from Cairo to Madrid. One month later Latif was questioned by FBI agents and told he was on the No Fly List. Because he was unable to board a flight to the United States, Latif’s United States veteran disability benefits were reduced from $899.00 per month to zero because he could not attend the scheduled evaluations required to continue his benefits. In August 2010 Latif returned home after the United States government granted him a “one-time waiver” to fly to the United States. Because he cannot fly, Latif is unable to travel from the United States to Egypt to resume studies or to Saudi Arabia to perform a hajj, a religious pilgrimage and Islamic obligation.
After looking at campaign contributions from the health care industry to all the primary candidates, I decided that both candidates, Democratic and Republican, were taking money from the same interest groups and both candidates were forming policies to serve those interest groups. Those are primarily the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the hospital chains. Individual doctors are actually less of an influence than they used to be, although the AMA does spend a lot of money.
That's why Obama, as soon as he got into office, took single payer off the table, even though single payer was enormously popular among American voters, and Obama's supporters in particular. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was handling this issue, had a meeting with some single payer advocates and called them "fucking retarded" to their faces. Emanuel was also the Democratic Party's chief fund-raiser, so he sees everything in terms of how the White House can reward their contributors.
I think that when Obama reached out to the Republicans, what he was saying was, in effect, "Let's both work together to serve our fat cat campaign contributors, and give them billions of dollars in tax money, so we'll continue to get their campaign contributions, and get rich with jobs as lobbyists and corporate board members after we leave office." (That's what Al Gore did.)
Obama's health plan was literally adopted from a Heritage Foundation white paper. The Democratic strategists thought that if they gave the Republicans enough, the Republicans would go along. There was no significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans on this and most other important issues.
The Republicans told him, in effect, "No, we want it all for ourselves, and we're going to beat you by destroying the federal government so you can't even give your voters these moderate reforms."
This is the best quick explanation that I've seen of what Obama is about. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript1.html It's a panel with Bill Moyers, Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi about Obama's health reform. Kuttner is a nice, sincere guy who believed in Obama. Taibbi I think was more realistic (smarter) than Kuttner.
OK. But you have to pass a lie detector test.
In a free and democratic society based on the rule of law, one who BOTH unilaterally decides to subvert the law, and along with it the processes we have built, AND flees from all consequences of their actions must be counted as an enemy of democracy.
You're assuming we have a free and democratic society based on the rule of law.
I don't. We had a presidential election in 2008 in which the Democrats raised $1 billion, even more than the Republicans, and spent it primarily on TV attack ads that ignored the issues.
In order to raise that $1 billion, they had to sell out the interests of their voters to big business, such as the health insurance companies. Why do you think we didn't have a single payer health care option? Why do you think Obama continued GWB's No Child Left Behind education policies with Race to the Top, which attacks unions and turns the education system into a big computer-scored test? Why do you think Obama bailed out the banks, rather than sending their officer to jail, and rather than helping the homeowners they cheated? For details, I refer you to Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
phone call metadata collection (which is explicitly lawful and Constitutional, by definition, because of a Supreme Court ruling 34 years ago)
You're assuming the Supreme Court follows the Constitution. I don't.
I can't even take that assumption seriously since Bush vs. Gore.
You really think that's what we need to "blow the whistle" on? That one person can decide, on their own, that they "disagree" with something, and publicly leak it?
Well, uh, yeah. Who else should decide? The people who lied to us and told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? The people who got us into the war in Iraq that cost 3,000 American lives, 150,000 Iraqi lives, and $3 trillion? The billionaires who run the country through their lobbyists?
I'm confident that, when lives are at stake, I can make a better decision than George W. Bush.
Maybe it's because everything in the NSA is so compartmentalized, that the people who understand security don't know what's going on in the other compartments.
If you restrict the dissemination of information too much, people can't do their jobs.
If everybody only learns on a need-to-know basis, they won't realize they needed to know something until after it creates a problem.
The good news is that now they'll restrict information even more.
Good news if you think that it would be good for America to have the NSA fall flat on its face again and replaced with an organization that promotes rational security.
As a journalist, I would point out that you can divide journalists into 2 kinds:
(1) generalists who report on everything, and understand nothing in depth.
(2) people who specialize in science (me) and at least know when they're getting in over their heads and know when and how to call an expert who can explain it to them. And then I call an expert who disagrees with the first expert.
For my own news, I read Science magazine. When I read IEEE Spectrum it was pretty good. People who need to know about medicine read the New England Journal of Medicine. The Wall Street Journal was the best news source in the world until Murdoch took it over. The daily newspapers have some good writers but I have to hunt for them.
Computer magazines have the problem that readers have such different levels of background knowledge that it's difficult to write one story that everybody would want to read. Spectrum does it but it's hard.
I'd be interested to know what computer news sources people here find reliable and useful.
BTW Paul Krugman said that when he first started writing his column for the New York Times, his editors didn't let him write that people were lying, even when they were lying.*
After he became their most popular columnist by page views, and won a Nobel prize, he could write whatever he wanted.
So that's one more RSS feed if you want to know what's really gong on.
_________________________
*Think about that for a second.
Try Democracy Now. http://www.democracynow.org/
There are enough lying right-wing sources (mostly Republicans but also Democrats) that a journalist could easily spend the rest of her life asking tough questions of people who will never talk to her again, and still not run out.
For example http://www.democracynow.org/features/bill_clinton_interview
There are many real journalists in the US. The problem is that we don't have many real voters, who want to inform themselves of the issues, and take time to understand things. The last time it mattered, they fell in love with Obama, who betrayed his old liberal friends, and became a friend of the Republicans (a lot of good it did him). It's amazing what a billion dollars in campaign contributions will do to you.
(Carole Coleman is Irish, but she deserves a mention. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040625-2.html )
I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Now, I don't want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don't want your pleasure yacht.
All I want's just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.
We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You've stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.
So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed.
Take the two old parties, Mister,
No difference in them I can see.
But with a Farmer-Labor Party
We could set the people free.
So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
So which weapons manufacturers should I invest in?
There are rights and there are rights. Too much of anything is a bad thing.
And giving Chinese workers the right to bargain with their employers and demand anything they want in exchange for working would be too much rights.
The moral argument is a bullshit argument and you know it.
Will somebody please explain to me why poison gas is worse than napalm, cluster bombs, land mines, air-to-surface missiles, machine guns and bombs that we use in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Yeah, Gaza and the West Bank are fine.
Then, there are also groups who actually want a free Syria - free from Assad's tyranny AND from the Islamic nut-jobs who try to take over their country - From the West's point of view - these are the groups that should be assisted.
What groups are those?
Where can I go to get paid to work for the Daily Kos downmodding your posts?
I used to have a hand-made mercury laboratory thermometer that was accurate to 0.1 degree. (In fact, fever thermometers have a nominal accuracy of 0.1 degree.) That's accurate enough to measure the difference between a weather station that was painted black or white.
Here's a graph that shows a 0.8 degree rise. http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn11639/dn11639-2_808.jpg
Are you saying that if in 1900 they had thermometers with greater accuracy, they would have only gotten a 0.7 degree rise?
Oh. Well. The debate is over what's an effective way to protect our security, within the requirements of our rights and freedoms.
There are a few politicians who really do represent the people rather than corporate interests. Bernie Sanders is the first I would mention. Most (not all) of the progressive caucus fit into that category. I admit these are dark times and people are apathetic. But we do win some battles. If the Republican Supreme Court justices die off under a Democratic president and Senate, that would change things.
I think you're agreeing with me.
In that case, I agree.