The subset of crazies seems to include a greater proportion of the Republican party than the Democratic party. Probably because the Southern racists moved to the Republican party after the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans even had a name for it, the "Southern strategy."
As Paul Krugman says, it's not an equivalence where both sides are partially right and partially wrong. It's mostly the Republicans' fault.
I wish the Republican crazies would get down to a manageable level and I could devote more of my efforts to crazies on the left.
Yeah, I hate that liberal attitude towards wealth and jobs too. "It's better if everyone had less, as long as the rich lose more."
It's better to live in a country where the average income is $50,000 a year and nobody makes less than $20,000 a year, than to live in a country where the average income is $60,000 a year and 20% of the population makes under $20,000 a year.
In round numbers, that could be Germany and the U.S., respectively.
The debate is over what's an effective way to protect our security.
As Bruce Schneier says, you don't find a needle in a haystack by piling on more hay.
Look at some of the articles that were written by real intelligence agents, like the ones who interrogated the Nazis during and after WWII. They all knew German very well. If you're interrogating German officers it's a good idea to know German. Duh.
If you think you're engaged in a war with with Arabic terrorists, it would be a good idea to learn Arabic and Farsi. Before you start tapping every cell phone and Internet connection in the world, it would be a good idea to start by reading their newspapers (rather than depending on MEMRI).
The lazy thing to do is to sit on your ass behind a computer and, if you have an infinite budget, scoop up every electronic communication the world and save it "just in case." Then if you see somebody talking about terrorism, arrest them and keep them in prison forever "just in case." Which is what we're doing.
The smart thing to do (and here I betray myself as a liberal) is to understand your adversary, and find out why they hate you so much and if there's anything you can do about it.
After 9/11, the Wall Street Journal offices, which faced the WTC, were destroyed and they had to put the next day's edition together in an editor's uptown apartment. They spent the next year using their network of reporters (many of whom did speak Arabic and Farsi) interviewing people around the world trying to figure out why they hated us. That's what Daniel Pearl was doing.
One of the themes that kept coming up again was Israel. One Arab businessman was a subscriber to the WSJ. He said, "I like America. I got my MBA in America. But you've got to do something about Israel." For the moderate, westernized Arabs, "doing something about Israel" means stopping the settlements (which is reasonable) and a two-state solution with Israel on the 1967 borders, which Hamas and the Arab League have already agreed to.
The way to protect our country is to do real intelligence, find out what the rest of the world is thinking, and go after the basic causes.
According to TFA most incidents were "self reported", meaning someone failed a polygraph. Since polygraphs are bullshit we know a lot of times the criminal abusing this power got away with it.
Demonstrating again that polygraphs don't work on their own merits; they're just a prop that interrogators use to bluff people while they ask improper, incriminating questions that nobody would ever answer with a lawyer present.
And demonstrating again that there are good, legitimate reasons why someone would take a course on how to beat the polygraph.
Obama implements his real agenda, namely oppression of everyone not merely the black man.
From reading the right-wing web sites, like the Wall Street Journal comments page, it's clear that racism is one of the things that drives the right-wing anti-Obama movement. And you can hear this from their right-wing "leaders" too.
They're recycling the Reagan-era tropes about welfare mothers and lazy, irresponsible black men. (Which were themselves recycled from the racist South.) Sometimes they use code words and sometimes they come right out and say it.
I saw one comment on the WSJ comments page saying that Charles Rangel should be "lynched." (Rangel is a real war hero, BTW. He saved the lives of 40 men in his unit. My question for right-wing assholes is, "Where did you earn your combat ribbons? That usually shuts them up. "Uh -- I had other priorities.")
There has always been a strain of racism in America -- half the country was slave states, after all, and it took years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before they were allowed to vote in those formerly slave states.
As conservatives like John Dean complain, the Republican Party made a Faustian bargain to win power by exploiting the stupid racist vote. After LBJ got the Democratic Party to support voting rights for blacks, the racists moved into the Republican party, and the South turned Republican (and racist), just as LBJ predicted.
It's true that there are some racist Democrats. But the Republicans use racism as a basic strategy to divide Democrats -- and Americans.
It's too bad racism distracts us from other important issues, like privacy and government snooping.
We used to have a great government-subsidized university system. It turned out Nobel laureates and captains of industry. It was a meritocracy. You could get in if your grades were good. It didn't matter whether you could afford to pay.
New York City had the City College system, which was free and turned out the leaders of American science and industry. New York State had the state university system, which was almost free. California created a state university system modeled on New York State. There were land grant agricultural and technical schools dotted across the country.
In around 1980, when the Republicans took over California, they cut taxes and now the university has to be close to self-supporting. The other universities followed. City College charged tuition. The money disappeared.
These anti-tax conservatives hate public education. They don't want to pay for other peoples' kids. They don't want to pay to have a more educated society. They especially don't want to pay to educate black people.
You are correct but at some point you must wonder whether it's worth it to go into debt, and by how much, to free your mind via Art History.
I agree that it's a bad idea to go into debt.
But I know a lot of people with art history degrees who are making a lot of money. In New York, art is a big industry.
It's hard to figure out what the value of a major is. There's no secure choice any more.
Science had an article recently about how people with anthropology degrees are doing very well.
A lot of scientists graduated with liberal arts degrees. Eric Kandell, who won a Nobel prize for his work in the neurobiology of smell, got a degree in European literature.
There are no degrees that are secure any more.
I know accountants who are out of work.
Engineering is feast and famine, depending on your major.
I used to go rock climbing in the Shawangunks, and sometimes I would climb some with some guys from the MIT outing club.
Once I was starting on a climb, and the MIT leader looked at my waist. He said, "Your rope isn't tied right." I thought it was tied safely, with several extra hitches, but it wasn't tied exactly the way it should be. He made me retie it, and made sure I understood how it was supposed to be tied.
One weekend a guy from Switzerland was climbing. Some of the Europeans were cavalier about safety. He just tied a bowline around his waist, and didn't bother with any safety hitches. He was climbing about 150 feet up, slipped, the rope came off, and he fell to his death.
People don't go rock climbing alone. It's the responsibility of the leader, and everybody else on the team, to make sure that everybody follows the safety rules.
It's simple. If you have one more person checking the rope, fewer people die.
And I would ask all those "individual responsibility" blowhards: Have you ever had to tell parents that their son died?
I'd like to know what you believe is inherently wrong with subcontractors that requires having an already oppressive government intervene.
The thing that's inherently wrong with subcontractors is "the curse of the lowest bidder." The one who bids the lowest is the one who wins the contract. And the easiest way to bid lower is to have workers who skip safety rules.
If you believe in the free market, that's what you would predict, and that's what happens.
The worker should have the right to say I don't feel safe doing this with the tools that the contractor gives them
The OSHA hotline is 1-800-321-OSHA.
I see you are not familiar with reality. Have you ever called that number? There are 2,200 OSHA inspectors and 8 million workplaces. How fast do you think an OSHA inspector is going to show up, and what do you think is going to happen when they do show up?
also get rid of pay per job that leads to rushing to fit more jobs into a day make it pay by hour.
The workers are already paid by the hour, and again I ask you: what makes you think this is a job for government? Adults should make safe decisions.
Workers are competing with each other. The worker who does the job fastest -- and least safely -- keeps the job. The worker who does the job slower -- and safer -- gets fired. This results in everybody speeding up, and people getting unnecessarily killed.
As the Wall Street Journal has reported, in most construction industries (like coal mining), you have safe operators and unsafe operators. The safe operators are just as profitable (or more profitable). Individual workers aren't able to force operators to be safe, unless they have a union.
If the government didn't intervene, more workers would get killed.
A lot of the state safety inspections were cut back. California had a model occupational safety administration, CalOSHA. They did studies monitoring workplace injuries, figured out how to stop them, and saved lives.
When Ronald Reagan was governor, he cut their budget.
My dad was an electrical instrument mechanic on the airlines. It wasn't his life at stake, but the lives of 250 passengers. He did everything by the book. Nobody rushed him. Even if they had an airline full of passengers screaming to take off, and he had to fix something, nobody rushed him. Least of all the pilot.
my concern wasnt along those lines. as you say, thats blatantly illegal.i cant really think a company would be so stupid (but then ive been surprised before) as to pressure people to simply ignore best safety practices. the penalties are simply too huge.
The penalties aren't that huge. How much are they? $100,000 at worst?
These are relatively small companies. When they do get hit with a huge penalty, or a big liability suit, the owners go bankrupt, and start again with a new business under another name.
How do you forget to clip on? Even after a decade working in the job how could you possibly forget? I
They don't forget. They don't bother, because it takes longer, and they're being pushed to get as much work done as possible. To prevent people from getting killed, you need a safety system. That requires government regulators, unions, and employers that are all committed to safety. We don't have those any more.
If an employer cared about their employees' lives, they would require them to clip on and fire them if they didn't. It's the employer's choice.
There's a similar situation with trench collapses, which is one of the major causes of workplace deaths.
If you do it right, you dig a trench with a back hoe, and reinforce the sides of the trenches with sheets of plywood and lumber.
If you don't do it right, and you don't reinforce the sides, you can save a lot of time and money. So many contractors don't do it.
But if you don't reinforce the sides, the trenches can collapse and kill the workers inside.
If you hire the lowest-bidding contractors, they're under pressure to work fast and skip the reinforcement.
In fact, if a contractor doesn't work fast and skip the reinforcement, they'll lose the bid to somebody who does, and they'll go out of business.
That's one of the problems with the unregulated free market. They're under a darwinian pressure to work unsafely and let workers die.
The only way to stop workers from dying is to have strong outside regulation forcing contractors to work in a safer, slower, and more expensive way.
You need strong state and federal workplace safety inspectors enforcing the safety rules. We don't have that any more. The states and federal governments cut back on workplace safety regulations since the 1970s. One of the leaders in cutting budgets for workplace safety was Ronald Reagan, who as governor cut back on the budget for CalOSHA, which was doing some of the best safety research in the country. I used to read their studies of workplace electrical accidents.
How often does an OSHA inspector show up at a job site? There are 2,200 OSHA inspectors and 8 million worksites. https://www.osha.gov/oshstats/commonstats.html You do the math. (BTW, falls and electrocutions are almost totally preventable.)
Shrink the government, get more workplace deaths.
You also need a strong union. Workers can't do things the slow, safe way if they'll get fired for it.
These wireless workers aren't even employees. The subcontractors hire them as "independent contractors," so they're not responsible for worker's compensation or liability. It's like the newspapers that hired teenagers to deliver their newspapers by bicycle. The newspapers weren't responsible if the "little merchant" got hit by a truck.
You also need employers who care about their workers, invest in their workers, and are willing to spend more to prevent their workers from being injured. Fat chance finding a company like that today. That also went out in the '70s. The old unionized monopolies were inefficient, but they could afford to spend money on employee safety.
So that's why those wireless workers are dying. It's because of the way our economic system is structured.
... and keep it forever and nothing you can do about it. I can post it on the internet and nothing you can do about it.
There's a difference in scale between you photographing every license plate that goes past your house, and a large organization photographing every license plate, on every road, in the entire state.
That's what the Germans decided. You could drive down a street in Germany and whatever you can see through your car windows is public.
You could probably take a video without legal challenges.
But when Google drove down every street in Germany and captured everything visible in public with 360-degree cameras, the German courts decided that it violated their privacy laws.
The hawk grabbed a small dog and tried to fly off with it. The lady who was walking the dog got into a tug of war with the hawk and started screaming. The hawk finally let go.
It got a lot of bad publicity in the newspapers. They cancelled the program.
I thought it was a basically good idea and was worth a try, but I don't own a small dog.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
What a dilemma. I can't talk to a lawyer to find out if I have a duty to answer questions.
I wonder if you have a right to a representative of your embassy.
There was a YouTube video of a law school class in which the instructor explained all the reasons why you could get in trouble for answering questions even if you are innocent of any crime.
For example, if you tell the truth, and they decide later that you were lying, you could be convicted later of lying to a law enforcement official.
Epidemiologists can now use DNA signatures to trace exactly where bacteria come from and where they've been. They can tell which individual in a hospital transmitted a disease to another individual.
There's no question that this cholera strain came from Asia and it wasn't there before. And the Nepalese had leaks in their sewage pipes that they didn't repair after they were warned about it.
There were several reports in medical and scientific journals about this, and people on this list have linked to them.
The scientists say that the cholera was likely to have come from Nepal and the politicians "categorically deny it." Who are you going to believe?
Cholera was absent from Haiti. Try reading some of the medical and scientific journal articles that people on this list have linked to, like the ones at NEJM.ORG.
Slashdot Mirror
The subset of crazies seems to include a greater proportion of the Republican party than the Democratic party. Probably because the Southern racists moved to the Republican party after the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans even had a name for it, the "Southern strategy."
As Paul Krugman says, it's not an equivalence where both sides are partially right and partially wrong. It's mostly the Republicans' fault.
I wish the Republican crazies would get down to a manageable level and I could devote more of my efforts to crazies on the left.
I don't understand you.
The person who is engaged in illegal, unconstitutional surveillance is the interrogator.
The person who takes the course on how to beat the polygraph is the person being tested.
The average annual income is $11,039.
Is that a middle-class income, or does that average in a mass of subsistence farmers and slum dwellers?
Yeah, I hate that liberal attitude towards wealth and jobs too. "It's better if everyone had less, as long as the rich lose more."
It's better to live in a country where the average income is $50,000 a year and nobody makes less than $20,000 a year, than to live in a country where the average income is $60,000 a year and 20% of the population makes under $20,000 a year.
In round numbers, that could be Germany and the U.S., respectively.
The debate is over what's an effective way to protect our security.
As Bruce Schneier says, you don't find a needle in a haystack by piling on more hay.
Look at some of the articles that were written by real intelligence agents, like the ones who interrogated the Nazis during and after WWII. They all knew German very well. If you're interrogating German officers it's a good idea to know German. Duh.
If you think you're engaged in a war with with Arabic terrorists, it would be a good idea to learn Arabic and Farsi. Before you start tapping every cell phone and Internet connection in the world, it would be a good idea to start by reading their newspapers (rather than depending on MEMRI).
The lazy thing to do is to sit on your ass behind a computer and, if you have an infinite budget, scoop up every electronic communication the world and save it "just in case." Then if you see somebody talking about terrorism, arrest them and keep them in prison forever "just in case." Which is what we're doing.
The smart thing to do (and here I betray myself as a liberal) is to understand your adversary, and find out why they hate you so much and if there's anything you can do about it.
After 9/11, the Wall Street Journal offices, which faced the WTC, were destroyed and they had to put the next day's edition together in an editor's uptown apartment. They spent the next year using their network of reporters (many of whom did speak Arabic and Farsi) interviewing people around the world trying to figure out why they hated us. That's what Daniel Pearl was doing.
One of the themes that kept coming up again was Israel. One Arab businessman was a subscriber to the WSJ. He said, "I like America. I got my MBA in America. But you've got to do something about Israel." For the moderate, westernized Arabs, "doing something about Israel" means stopping the settlements (which is reasonable) and a two-state solution with Israel on the 1967 borders, which Hamas and the Arab League have already agreed to.
The way to protect our country is to do real intelligence, find out what the rest of the world is thinking, and go after the basic causes.
According to TFA most incidents were "self reported", meaning someone failed a polygraph. Since polygraphs are bullshit we know a lot of times the criminal abusing this power got away with it.
Demonstrating again that polygraphs don't work on their own merits; they're just a prop that interrogators use to bluff people while they ask improper, incriminating questions that nobody would ever answer with a lawyer present.
And demonstrating again that there are good, legitimate reasons why someone would take a course on how to beat the polygraph.
Parent said
Obama implements his real agenda, namely oppression of everyone not merely the black man.
From reading the right-wing web sites, like the Wall Street Journal comments page, it's clear that racism is one of the things that drives the right-wing anti-Obama movement. And you can hear this from their right-wing "leaders" too.
They're recycling the Reagan-era tropes about welfare mothers and lazy, irresponsible black men. (Which were themselves recycled from the racist South.) Sometimes they use code words and sometimes they come right out and say it.
I saw one comment on the WSJ comments page saying that Charles Rangel should be "lynched." (Rangel is a real war hero, BTW. He saved the lives of 40 men in his unit. My question for right-wing assholes is, "Where did you earn your combat ribbons? That usually shuts them up. "Uh -- I had other priorities.")
There has always been a strain of racism in America -- half the country was slave states, after all, and it took years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before they were allowed to vote in those formerly slave states.
As conservatives like John Dean complain, the Republican Party made a Faustian bargain to win power by exploiting the stupid racist vote. After LBJ got the Democratic Party to support voting rights for blacks, the racists moved into the Republican party, and the South turned Republican (and racist), just as LBJ predicted.
It's true that there are some racist Democrats. But the Republicans use racism as a basic strategy to divide Democrats -- and Americans.
It's too bad racism distracts us from other important issues, like privacy and government snooping.
We used to have a great government-subsidized university system. It turned out Nobel laureates and captains of industry. It was a meritocracy. You could get in if your grades were good. It didn't matter whether you could afford to pay.
New York City had the City College system, which was free and turned out the leaders of American science and industry. New York State had the state university system, which was almost free. California created a state university system modeled on New York State. There were land grant agricultural and technical schools dotted across the country.
In around 1980, when the Republicans took over California, they cut taxes and now the university has to be close to self-supporting. The other universities followed. City College charged tuition. The money disappeared.
These anti-tax conservatives hate public education. They don't want to pay for other peoples' kids. They don't want to pay to have a more educated society. They especially don't want to pay to educate black people.
You are correct but at some point you must wonder whether it's worth it to go into debt, and by how much, to free your mind via Art History.
I agree that it's a bad idea to go into debt.
But I know a lot of people with art history degrees who are making a lot of money. In New York, art is a big industry.
It's hard to figure out what the value of a major is. There's no secure choice any more.
Science had an article recently about how people with anthropology degrees are doing very well.
A lot of scientists graduated with liberal arts degrees. Eric Kandell, who won a Nobel prize for his work in the neurobiology of smell, got a degree in European literature.
There are no degrees that are secure any more.
I know accountants who are out of work.
Engineering is feast and famine, depending on your major.
I used to go rock climbing in the Shawangunks, and sometimes I would climb some with some guys from the MIT outing club.
Once I was starting on a climb, and the MIT leader looked at my waist. He said, "Your rope isn't tied right." I thought it was tied safely, with several extra hitches, but it wasn't tied exactly the way it should be. He made me retie it, and made sure I understood how it was supposed to be tied.
One weekend a guy from Switzerland was climbing. Some of the Europeans were cavalier about safety. He just tied a bowline around his waist, and didn't bother with any safety hitches. He was climbing about 150 feet up, slipped, the rope came off, and he fell to his death.
People don't go rock climbing alone. It's the responsibility of the leader, and everybody else on the team, to make sure that everybody follows the safety rules.
It's simple. If you have one more person checking the rope, fewer people die.
And I would ask all those "individual responsibility" blowhards: Have you ever had to tell parents that their son died?
Do you have a family to support?
I'd like to know what you believe is inherently wrong with subcontractors that requires having an already oppressive government intervene.
The thing that's inherently wrong with subcontractors is "the curse of the lowest bidder." The one who bids the lowest is the one who wins the contract. And the easiest way to bid lower is to have workers who skip safety rules.
If you believe in the free market, that's what you would predict, and that's what happens.
The OSHA hotline is 1-800-321-OSHA.
I see you are not familiar with reality. Have you ever called that number? There are 2,200 OSHA inspectors and 8 million workplaces. How fast do you think an OSHA inspector is going to show up, and what do you think is going to happen when they do show up?
The workers are already paid by the hour, and again I ask you: what makes you think this is a job for government? Adults should make safe decisions.
Workers are competing with each other. The worker who does the job fastest -- and least safely -- keeps the job. The worker who does the job slower -- and safer -- gets fired. This results in everybody speeding up, and people getting unnecessarily killed.
As the Wall Street Journal has reported, in most construction industries (like coal mining), you have safe operators and unsafe operators. The safe operators are just as profitable (or more profitable). Individual workers aren't able to force operators to be safe, unless they have a union.
If the government didn't intervene, more workers would get killed.
That's why it's a job for the government.
A lot of the state safety inspections were cut back. California had a model occupational safety administration, CalOSHA. They did studies monitoring workplace injuries, figured out how to stop them, and saved lives.
When Ronald Reagan was governor, he cut their budget.
My dad was an electrical instrument mechanic on the airlines. It wasn't his life at stake, but the lives of 250 passengers. He did everything by the book. Nobody rushed him. Even if they had an airline full of passengers screaming to take off, and he had to fix something, nobody rushed him. Least of all the pilot.
He had a good union.
my concern wasnt along those lines. as you say, thats blatantly illegal.i cant really think a company would be so stupid (but then ive been surprised before) as to pressure people to simply ignore best safety practices. the penalties are simply too huge.
The penalties aren't that huge. How much are they? $100,000 at worst?
These are relatively small companies. When they do get hit with a huge penalty, or a big liability suit, the owners go bankrupt, and start again with a new business under another name.
How do you forget to clip on? Even after a decade working in the job how could you possibly forget? I
They don't forget. They don't bother, because it takes longer, and they're being pushed to get as much work done as possible. To prevent people from getting killed, you need a safety system. That requires government regulators, unions, and employers that are all committed to safety. We don't have those any more.
If an employer cared about their employees' lives, they would require them to clip on and fire them if they didn't. It's the employer's choice.
There's a similar situation with trench collapses, which is one of the major causes of workplace deaths.
If you do it right, you dig a trench with a back hoe, and reinforce the sides of the trenches with sheets of plywood and lumber.
If you don't do it right, and you don't reinforce the sides, you can save a lot of time and money. So many contractors don't do it.
But if you don't reinforce the sides, the trenches can collapse and kill the workers inside.
If you hire the lowest-bidding contractors, they're under pressure to work fast and skip the reinforcement.
In fact, if a contractor doesn't work fast and skip the reinforcement, they'll lose the bid to somebody who does, and they'll go out of business.
That's one of the problems with the unregulated free market. They're under a darwinian pressure to work unsafely and let workers die.
The only way to stop workers from dying is to have strong outside regulation forcing contractors to work in a safer, slower, and more expensive way.
You need strong state and federal workplace safety inspectors enforcing the safety rules. We don't have that any more. The states and federal governments cut back on workplace safety regulations since the 1970s. One of the leaders in cutting budgets for workplace safety was Ronald Reagan, who as governor cut back on the budget for CalOSHA, which was doing some of the best safety research in the country. I used to read their studies of workplace electrical accidents.
How often does an OSHA inspector show up at a job site? There are 2,200 OSHA inspectors and 8 million worksites. https://www.osha.gov/oshstats/commonstats.html You do the math. (BTW, falls and electrocutions are almost totally preventable.)
Shrink the government, get more workplace deaths.
You also need a strong union. Workers can't do things the slow, safe way if they'll get fired for it.
These wireless workers aren't even employees. The subcontractors hire them as "independent contractors," so they're not responsible for worker's compensation or liability. It's like the newspapers that hired teenagers to deliver their newspapers by bicycle. The newspapers weren't responsible if the "little merchant" got hit by a truck.
You also need employers who care about their workers, invest in their workers, and are willing to spend more to prevent their workers from being injured. Fat chance finding a company like that today. That also went out in the '70s. The old unionized monopolies were inefficient, but they could afford to spend money on employee safety.
So that's why those wireless workers are dying. It's because of the way our economic system is structured.
... and keep it forever and nothing you can do about it. I can post it on the internet and nothing you can do about it.
There's a difference in scale between you photographing every license plate that goes past your house, and a large organization photographing every license plate, on every road, in the entire state.
That's what the Germans decided. You could drive down a street in Germany and whatever you can see through your car windows is public.
You could probably take a video without legal challenges.
But when Google drove down every street in Germany and captured everything visible in public with 360-degree cameras, the German courts decided that it violated their privacy laws.
They tried that in New York City.
The hawk grabbed a small dog and tried to fly off with it. The lady who was walking the dog got into a tug of war with the hawk and started screaming. The hawk finally let go.
It got a lot of bad publicity in the newspapers. They cancelled the program.
I thought it was a basically good idea and was worth a try, but I don't own a small dog.
Well, you know what Henry Kissinger said.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
What a dilemma. I can't talk to a lawyer to find out if I have a duty to answer questions.
I wonder if you have a right to a representative of your embassy.
There was a YouTube video of a law school class in which the instructor explained all the reasons why you could get in trouble for answering questions even if you are innocent of any crime.
For example, if you tell the truth, and they decide later that you were lying, you could be convicted later of lying to a law enforcement official.
Still, they've got a clever answer: given infinite time, we can solve that problem.
Conveniently, they won't be around in infinite to be accountable if it doesn't work.
It's an acquired taste, like roquefort cheese.
It might be hard to find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Haiti_cholera_outbreak
Epidemiologists can now use DNA signatures to trace exactly where bacteria come from and where they've been. They can tell which individual in a hospital transmitted a disease to another individual.
There's no question that this cholera strain came from Asia and it wasn't there before. And the Nepalese had leaks in their sewage pipes that they didn't repair after they were warned about it.
There were several reports in medical and scientific journals about this, and people on this list have linked to them.
The scientists say that the cholera was likely to have come from Nepal and the politicians "categorically deny it." Who are you going to believe?
Here's the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Haiti_cholera_outbreak
Cholera was absent from Haiti. Try reading some of the medical and scientific journal articles that people on this list have linked to, like the ones at NEJM.ORG.