The majority of arrests were of the bicycle brigade which WAS blocking streets and making it difficult for many old and infirm people to get home.
Erm. So you live in NYC, but you've never seen Critical Mass before? Admittedly it was a wee bit more impressive this time, from what I understand (not having been there), but if you're concerned about the little old ladies, I'm surprised you aren't out there sticking crowbars into bike wheels as they go by, every few weeks.
I wonder how many of the elderly and infirm were inconvienienced by all of the streets that were cordoned off by the RNC? Just a thought.
More than 10%. Less than 20%. A whole LOT less than 50%. It's a pity you're not going to bother to read any of their stories, or believe them if you read them, because some of them are quite chilling.
The other arrests occurred after police officers were attacked, one of whom is going to be seriously fucked up for the rest of his life. There is ample video footage of surround protestors doing NOTHING to stop the perpetrater of that crime from nearly kicking the cop to death, and many encouraged it.
Yeah, all of the other arrests, all 1500 of them, happened right after an incident where a couple of policemen were assaulted. Oh... wait... no, actually, they happened all over the place, before and after the assault on the police, in unrelated incidents. Perhaps you meant to argue that the police started arresting people after that because clearly every protester in the city was conspiring to kill that one policeman?
Maybe you really do believe that. Maybe you really think that the peace protesters actually were there hoping to kill a cop, but that only one of them had the guts to try it. But if so, that is your own reflection you're seeing in that mirror there, not ours.
As for the 'why didn't they intervene?' It's so easy to be brave when you're typing away behind your computer screen. Being brave and trying to get between a possible addict and probable madman and the poor, defenseless (plainclothes) cop he's assaulting is, oddly, more difficult. Now, I'm sure you're Rambo, I wouldn't question the fact that you'd have gone in there and killed him with your teeth, and welcomed the opportunity to find out what it was like to kill someone. But most of us aren't Rambo, and by the time we've spent our 30 seconds wavering and nerving ourselves up to jump in there, the incident is usually over.
Thankfully, I am not in a position of power because people like that would be executed for failing to act as a responsible citizen. It is a basic staple of civilized society to come to the aid of your fellow citizens.
Thankfully, you are not in a position of power, because people who actually enjoy the idea of going around killing other people should be treated for it, not canonized. Especially if you think they should be punished for not living up to some standard of behavior generated straight out of the male gonads.
Another non-NY resident talking about shit he doesn't know about.
The graffitti is EVERYWHERE. It is much more coordinated than random acts of spray painting. People use stencils, custom graphics are added to subway advertising, and fliers are applied to private property. This is all in addition to the regular bullshit involving markers and spr
The more technically-literate courts will no longer allow the police to get a warrant for your computer itself, only the data on the computer. Unless, that is, they need serial numbers or fingerprints, not just "this is the data that was on your computer on date x/x/x."
From what I understand, in the more difficult cases this is still rare, because they want not just what is on your hard drive, but what was on it last week, and possibly last month as well.
Which often requires destruction of the hard drive in question. Which in turn is why, so often, they don't come back. And if that is the case, there is no obligation to replace it, even if nothing is found.
You can sort of understand it, but damn, it still sucks.
BTW don't say warped political leanings if you're gonna uplift welfare its had 30 years and hasn't worked yet. Lets try something else instead of trying to keepa broken system.
This argument has always confused me. So are you saying that there are no fewer people starving to death now than there were before welfare was enacted? Or are you saying that there are no fewer people trying to work 80 hours a week while they raise two children than there were? Oddly, though, those two assertions are wrong.
Or maybe you mean simply that there are more poor people now than there were when welfare was enacted? Well, that's actually true. But welfare was never designed to keep people from being poor... it was more designed to keep poor people from dying, and let people get back on their feet after being poor for a while. As such, it does fairly well.
Then why do you want to raise taxes and socialize the nation's programs? Seems to me, that's taking stuff OUT of the citizens' and employers' hands.
A telling point!
Of course, what exactly it's telling is debatable.
If you see the government as your employees, then here's what you do: you give your employees enough of a budget to perform the tasks you've assigned for them. Or you give them less, and then you bitch about how they're not doing their jobs.
So, why do you want to raise taxes? Because you don't think your employees have enough money to perform the tasks you expect it to perform.
I'm not going to say that's right or wrong; that's an argument for a different day. But 'all taxes are evil, so therefore, if you see America as the property of its citizens, you should immediately start getting rid of taxes' is an argument that only works if you assume the truth of the first statement.
I have no clue of where you live but I know that most european countries have laws on privacy issues.
That is true. They do. And the US has very, very few.
Actually, I personally would be happy if we had a few in the United States. Carefully crafted, of course, so as not to infringe on the liberties that I consider important.
However, I also admit that everyone else in the US has a different idea of where to draw the line. And the more I argue that companies shouldn't be able to sell my personal information or publish it on the web, the harder it becomes for me to argue that other people's ideas of censorship are wrong.
Are you following me here?
Frankly, if I lived in some of the European countries, I would probably be pretty happy with the level of censorship that is in force there. (Yes, it is censorship.) No, censorship is not innately evil; it just means preventing the disseminiation of certain media. Almost everyone agrees that there should be some... for example, child pornography. It's just where the line is drawn. In the US, well, I don't trust the majority to stop at reasonable, so I want to keep it drawn as far out as I possibly can.
...there are large (actually larger) numbers of violent acts committed by pro-abortionists who want someone to have an abortion than by anti-abortionists who are trying to keep someone from having an abortion.
You know, I'm willing to admit that there are some whackos on both sides, but I would so love to see you try to prove that there have been more pro-lifers killed for their views than there have been pro-choicers.
Eileen Janezic was a total nutcase, and is probably one of the few who you really could say murdered someone for their pro-life views.
Byron Looper was only slightly less of a whacko, but there is zero evidence that he killed anyone because of their views on abortion. He was convicted of murder in the first degree for killing someone so that he could be elected in his stead. If you make the assumption that the only reason anyone would want to be a politician is to take sides on the abortion issue, then you might be right, by your definition. You'd be silly, by mine.
The murder of pregnant women by pro-abortion men happens far more often than most people imagine. At least three studies have shown that the most common cause of fatalities among pregnant women is murder, and statistics show that almost one-third of these are due to pro-abortion men who kill their wives or girlfriends simply because they are pregnant.
Ah, look, cut and pasted from the web site. Sadly, their numbers are actually spurious (drawing conclusions for the entire country based largely on behavior in heavily populated and low-income areas) and their assumptions are odious ('anyone who murders their pregnant girlfriend is by definition an abortion rights advocate, and is the moral equivalent of all other abortion rights activists'.)
That would be laughable, if it weren't so sad.
And the corollary has apparently not occurred to these people yet. That is to say, if, with abortion legal, people still kill their partners because they get pregnant......how many more will kill their partners if abortion is illegal? Because it sure as hell won't be less.
I find it ironic that a bunch of anti-violence, anti-gun, peacemongers, like Democrats would behave this way. The anti-Bush crowd is foaming at the mouth. Have you all had your shots?
That's SO funny to hear.
You know, I don't assume, when I hear of another abortion doctor being killed execution-style, that 'Republicans' in general are responsible. It's a lunatic fringe, who have as much right to call themselves Republicans as I have to call myself a martian. When I talk about Republicans did this and Republicans did that, I don't include things that the Republicans can't be proven to have done, and that most Republicans would be deeply ashamed of.
And, amusingly, neither do most other Democrats that I know of. They accept that mainstream Republicanism isn't all about shooting abortion doctors. But then, when some whacko drives by a RNC HQ and shoots at it, not only do the Republicans start yelling at the Democrats about it, as if Kerry somehow planned it, but you actually start hearing Democrats apologizing, as if they thought they were actually responsible!
Puh-leeze. Catch the bastards and get on with life, and don't tell me I'm responsible for their stupidity. (Well, actually, I'm not a Democrat. I just agree with a whole lot more of their platform than I do with the Republicans'.)
There were numerous reports from NYC of delegates to the RNC being accosted.
Yes. In New York, when going in and out of the meeting. That's part of life; protests are, at least in theory, still legal.
(There are also reports of non-violent, LICENSED protesters being jailed for three days, then never charged with anything, just to keep them off the street while the RNC was in town. (And people who were just walking to the corner grocery store getting caught up and locked up along with them.) Which is illegal, but is something it looks like we're going to have to get used to.)
There are many reports of campaign headquarters being shot at, ransacked and stormed in the past few days. I would say that this information was posted with the explicit purpose of targetting those people.
Actually, there is one report of a campaign headquarters being shot at. Yes, a Republican campaign HQ, and yes, it is fairly well substantiated. It amazes me, because of course the dramatic majority of Democrats are pro gun-control. It looks like Rush -- er, that is to say, Bush -- has pissed someone else off besides the Democrats, eh?
One report of a Republican campaign headquarters being 'ransacked'. That is to say, someone broke into it and stole three laptops, possibly some office equipment, and possibly some money (this is in dispute). The assumption is, although the HQ was a juicy target and the laptops were out in plain sight, it must have been Democrats who did it. Well, possibly it was; it's hardly like the Democratic party can make any claims to sainthood, and I'd find it MUCH more likely that they'd stoop to stealing than they would attempt a drive-by shooting.
And the usual random assortment of graffiti, vandalism, and silliness on both sides. Which is almost certainly just drunk partisan college student asshats.
But hey, you notice that with the information out there, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and all that stuff, for all the RNC delegates... with the information STILL out there... with the information still out there and READILY AVAILABLE... there haven't been any serious incidents?
I mean, hell, if I were one of them, I would be terribly disappointed. 'What, am I not important enough for a few death threats?'
If these were Communists, people would be screaming about "black listing".
Nope, that screaming would start when someone interviewed for a job and was told that they couldn't be hired because they were on 'the list'.
Lists of names don't kill people. People kill people. With guns and lists of names. Why do you want to outlaw the lists of names?
Not necessarily. It could be that the admin of the box nocked off his crack dealer so he did not have to pay him what he owed him. Nothing too interesting with that.
Uh... huh. It could be that, well, maybe it was the United States federal authorities that ordered these hard drives, which were in the United Kingdom, which, you'll note, is a different country, seized.
Without, in fact, going through the UK government, because otherwise it would have been the UK authorities who had them seized. And then, there are specific procedures under which intelligence agencies share data, so they have to go through channels and such. If this were an ordinary criminal case, it would be even more involved.
As it is, the legality of this move is not clear to me. It's a US company which has overseas customers, and hangs onto their equipment for them. If the FBI called up a US-based property management corporation that had offices for rent in London and told them to go into the offices and bundle up a filing cabinet and ship it overseas, I suspect they'd have had a lot more resistance than they apparently did. (Or perhaps a closer parallel would be 'U-Stor' sending the contents of a storage area off to the FBI from, say, Belize.)
I'd have to say that, even so far, this is a bit more interesting than your average crack dealer being 'nocked off'.
(leaks of the RNC delegates home addresses? How would we feel if it was the DNC delegates? Or your home address) until proven otherwise.
I would be annoyed. But I wouldn't call the FBI, because, of course, that is not in any way illegal. It may be harassment, if it was posted along with an exhortation to spam these guys into submission. It could even be conspiracy to commit assault (or murder) if it says, 'Here are the addresses, I want each group to move in at about 4 PM and watch the front doors until you see the target come home. Once the target is at home, you...' and so forth. But posting someone's home address, name, and phone number is perfectly legal, and is in fact no more than every commercial interest that sells lists of names does.
So don't give me this garbage about how I would feel. I don't like the idea that someone could post my address and phone number on the net so that a group of dicks could harass me, but I like even less this whole 'nanny state' censorship issue. And I hate the idea that something like this can be done for a reason that isn't even actually illegal. What's good for the goose is damn well good for the gander.
Now, that said, I think the likelihood that 'RNC' appears in any way on the warrant is vanishingly small. If, in fact, this is in retaliation for the RNC names thing, it's going to have some actual legal basis that is nearly or wholly unrelated.
In 2003, the Iraqis let the inspectors go everywhere, at any time they wanted to, without holding them up. The inspectors said so. So Bush's threat of military force worked! And I thought that was great, right up until the time when he decided to kill thousands of innocent Iraqis and American soldiers (and Iraqi people who had been pressganged into the army) even though it had worked.
If we were trucking around hydrogen, maybe. But harden millions of miles of high tension power lines? Harden thousands and thousands of microwave links and telephone trunk lines? How do you even do that? Put them underground, sunk in concrete? But then who's to stop people from hitting them with a jackhammer (to make the hole) and then a few pounds of high explosives?
Hardening the entire country against terrorism is the kind of reaction that would seem silly if people weren't so inclined to actually think that way these days.
I think this is pretty ridiculous too, but there certainly is an argument, however weak.
See, if you know the details of outages and why they occurred, then it's a lot easier to make your own. And if you don't release enough information to make it at least marginally useful to terrorists, you don't release enough information to make it even vaguely useful to businesses.
Here is the difference between a success and a failure.
Good to know there's an expert among us.
Its the same one as thinking raising cigartte taxes will make people stop smoking
Well... actually, it does.
...and installing light rail will make people stop driving.
Well... actually, it does.
I took light rail to work every day for six months, as did tens of thousands of other people who work in my city. If the light rail weren't there, I suppose I would have had to drive. If you have a place with congested traffic, and you install light rail, and nobody uses it, it is because you aren't promoting it right, or pricing it right, or scheduling it right, or because your population is as dumb as stones.
The best products make their own demand, and making the people what they think they want will never sell as well as making them want something that they've never thought about before.
When you are working in a free society, success comes from giving people what they want, not telling them what they want.
Let's look at carpool lanes. It's very rare to find a place where carpool lanes are approved of by half or more of the populace. But when you actually install them, not only do they let people who carpool get to work faster, they also actually cut down on other people's commute times too, because there are fewer cars on the road. And yet, because people see other people driving by faster than they are, they still don't like them.
People aren't always smart enough to know what's good for them, and yet that doesn't in fact mean that we shouldn't try it. Carpool lanes being a case in point. Protections for minorities being another.
If there were no such thing as IP rights, the small company that I am currently contracting for would probably have been started, and developed the first version of its product, and then instantly been put out of business by MS downloading the software and bundling it in with Windows.
The software would have been created, and it would have been available 'free'. Best of both worlds, right?
How about Reasoned Compromise: "May not agree with his every last item of policy, but in comparing the two likely candidates, he is at least closer to the preferred side of issues involving government spending, taxation, business incentives, and military functions."
Of a simple six-question quiz on stances that the candidates hold on major issues, the average person got less than three questions right. 'Who wants to privatize Social Security?' 'Which one doesn't like assault weapons?' 'What is the cutoff income for Kerry's tax increases?' (50k, 100k, 200k, or 500k) 'Who is a former prosecutor?' 'Who favors making the recent tax cuts permanent?' 'Who wants to make it easier for labor unions to organize?'
People who didn't watch any 'late-night comedy show' scored 2.6 out of 6 right. 2.6. Now, even being charitable and assuming that people can't remember numbers (200k, hint hint) and that people don't remember that before becoming President, GWB's only political experience AT ALL was as Governor of Texas, that's still totally utterly pathetic. Do you realize that it means that MORE THAN HALF of those surveyed scored between 0 and 2 out of 6? And that only one of the questions had more than two possible choices?
If you answer that quiz randomly, you get 2.75 right, on average. Let me say that again. If you don't speak English, and just randomly pick an answer for each question, you get a 2.75.
People who watched Jay Leno got 2.95, David Letterman viewers got 2.91, and viewers of The Daily Show, astoundingly enough, got 3.59. Frequent (more than 3 days a week) network news viewers got 40% right, frequent cable news viewers got 48% (they didn't differentiate out Fox viewers, which might have told a different story), and newspaper readers got 46%. Less than half! The only group of people who averaged more than half were viewers of The Daily Show, who were what, 14% more informed than newspaper readers? (Wow, not to digress or anything, but that's kind of neat.)
Anyone who was paying any attention at all got six, and could have done so while drunk and standing on his or her head. The amount of illegal substances that would have been required to make me score 2 would have incapacitated a small midwestern town.
The American public doesn't even know what the two candidates stand for, and you think they're seriously giving weighted averages of all of the different stances and coming up with a decision?
If you hold your hand in front of your face and wave it back and forth really quickly, so that your fingers intermittently interrupt the image, I find that it gets rid of all of the illusory movement in all of the images.
Looking at the top image and blinking my eyes really fast is *very* strange. It turns it greyscale, sorta.
The strange thing is, Mr. Hussein could have had the sanctions on Iraq removed at any time over the past decade by allowing weapons inspectors back into the country to confirm that the weapons had been destroyed.
He made it pretty clear that he didn't believe this. In fact, he thought that any inspection regime designed to do this would basically be a cover for a spy team sent from the USA to gather intelligence, with the express aim of overthrowing him.
He was, yes, a wee bit paranoid. (Actually, he was a big-time nutcase.) In his defense, though, it's not at all unlikely that that would have been the case.
Remember, it was for Saddam to prove he did not have weapons. It was not the job of the UN, the inspectors, or the USA to prove he did or didnt.
Which is a beautifully convenient piece of sophistry. Anyone with even a little bit of education knows that you can't prove a negative. You can't even come close.
"Where are your hidden weapons labs?" "We have none!" "Well, show us." "Show you what?" "Your weapons labs." "But we have none." "Well, prove it." "All right. Where would you like to look?" "You tell us." "But if we have no weapons labs, we have nowhere to tell you about." "Ah, so, then, you refuse to be cooperative."
At the last, when the inspectors were still in there, just before they were pulled out, the Iraqis were cooperating to the fullest extent of their abilities. There were some major paperwork problems, apparently generated because when they destroyed some of their weapons they didn't document them sufficiently. But they were even being allowed to inspect within all the places that had previously been off-limits, and in fact were even allowed unannounced visits with no warning time.
Strangely, the rest of the world thought they were doing fine. Given that, one must either assume that every single other country with the exception of England* is bone stupid, or that we are warmongers who above all else didn't WANT the inspections to work.
Makes you feel good to be an American, don't it?
-fred
* - (Yes, we had other allies eventually. But at that point we still hadn't scraped them together, so it was just GWB and GB)
(1) many of us Americans would rather take a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to a hostile nation that may or may not be developing nuclear weapons
That's quite true. Plus, many Americans would rather kill 10 innocent people than allow one guilty person to go free. We call these people 'lunatics' and we don't listen to them. Or, well, we used to, anyway.
(2) many people, if pressed to do so, would agree that the world is at least a little bit safer without Saddam Hussein in charge in Iraq, regardless of whether he had any WMD's.
Even granting this highly dubious assertion (chaos and insanity rein in Iraq, and there is no sign that that will even begin to change anytime soon), exactly HOW much safer? Is it 1000 dead Americans safer? 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians? Is it umpteen-odd-thousands (America refuses to keep track) of dead forced conscripts (that is to say, innocent people drafted into Sadaam's army and forced to fight the Americans, regardless of personal inclination) safer? (Ah, I know, Americans don't count the dead unless they're American dead. I should be ashamed of myself.)
Is it, in fact, enough safer that we can feel justified in basically ticking off the entire rest of the world aside from England, making our intelligence services into a laughingstock, and swelling the ranks of Al Quaida tenfold?
Yep, sure is. Great war. Fully justified. We should teach those Koreans a lesson too. After all, it's not like their atomic weapons would take out more than a few thousand Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm. So you live in NYC, but you've never seen Critical Mass before? Admittedly it was a wee bit more impressive this time, from what I understand (not having been there), but if you're concerned about the little old ladies, I'm surprised you aren't out there sticking crowbars into bike wheels as they go by, every few weeks.
.protest/
I wonder how many of the elderly and infirm were inconvienienced by all of the streets that were cordoned off by the RNC? Just a thought.
And I'll assume that you are merely ill-informed and not actually lying about 'the majority of arrests' being from Critical Mass. 264 people were arrested in Critical Mass.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/28/rnc.bike
1821 people were arrested in total:
http://www.dfw.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/957815 9.htm?1c
More than 10%. Less than 20%. A whole LOT less than 50%. It's a pity you're not going to bother to read any of their stories, or believe them if you read them, because some of them are quite chilling.
Yeah, all of the other arrests, all 1500 of them, happened right after an incident where a couple of policemen were assaulted. Oh... wait... no, actually, they happened all over the place, before and after the assault on the police, in unrelated incidents. Perhaps you meant to argue that the police started arresting people after that because clearly every protester in the city was conspiring to kill that one policeman?
Maybe you really do believe that. Maybe you really think that the peace protesters actually were there hoping to kill a cop, but that only one of them had the guts to try it. But if so, that is your own reflection you're seeing in that mirror there, not ours.
As for the 'why didn't they intervene?' It's so easy to be brave when you're typing away behind your computer screen. Being brave and trying to get between a possible addict and probable madman and the poor, defenseless (plainclothes) cop he's assaulting is, oddly, more difficult. Now, I'm sure you're Rambo, I wouldn't question the fact that you'd have gone in there and killed him with your teeth, and welcomed the opportunity to find out what it was like to kill someone. But most of us aren't Rambo, and by the time we've spent our 30 seconds wavering and nerving ourselves up to jump in there, the incident is usually over.
Thankfully, you are not in a position of power, because people who actually enjoy the idea of going around killing other people should be treated for it, not canonized. Especially if you think they should be punished for not living up to some standard of behavior generated straight out of the male gonads.
Actually, they are independent in nearly every sense of the word.
They are also biased in at least one sense of the word.
Fox News is certainly not independent in most senses of the word. Their degree of bias will be left as an exercise to the reader.
-fred
Which often requires destruction of the hard drive in question. Which in turn is why, so often, they don't come back. And if that is the case, there is no obligation to replace it, even if nothing is found.
You can sort of understand it, but damn, it still sucks.
-fred
Or maybe you mean simply that there are more poor people now than there were when welfare was enacted? Well, that's actually true. But welfare was never designed to keep people from being poor... it was more designed to keep poor people from dying, and let people get back on their feet after being poor for a while. As such, it does fairly well.
-fred
-fred
Of course, what exactly it's telling is debatable.
If you see the government as your employees, then here's what you do: you give your employees enough of a budget to perform the tasks you've assigned for them. Or you give them less, and then you bitch about how they're not doing their jobs.
So, why do you want to raise taxes? Because you don't think your employees have enough money to perform the tasks you expect it to perform.
I'm not going to say that's right or wrong; that's an argument for a different day. But 'all taxes are evil, so therefore, if you see America as the property of its citizens, you should immediately start getting rid of taxes' is an argument that only works if you assume the truth of the first statement.
-fred
Actually, I personally would be happy if we had a few in the United States. Carefully crafted, of course, so as not to infringe on the liberties that I consider important.
However, I also admit that everyone else in the US has a different idea of where to draw the line. And the more I argue that companies shouldn't be able to sell my personal information or publish it on the web, the harder it becomes for me to argue that other people's ideas of censorship are wrong.
Are you following me here?
Frankly, if I lived in some of the European countries, I would probably be pretty happy with the level of censorship that is in force there. (Yes, it is censorship.) No, censorship is not innately evil; it just means preventing the disseminiation of certain media. Almost everyone agrees that there should be some... for example, child pornography. It's just where the line is drawn. In the US, well, I don't trust the majority to stop at reasonable, so I want to keep it drawn as far out as I possibly can.
-fred
Eileen Janezic was a total nutcase, and is probably one of the few who you really could say murdered someone for their pro-life views.
Byron Looper was only slightly less of a whacko, but there is zero evidence that he killed anyone because of their views on abortion. He was convicted of murder in the first degree for killing someone so that he could be elected in his stead. If you make the assumption that the only reason anyone would want to be a politician is to take sides on the abortion issue, then you might be right, by your definition. You'd be silly, by mine.Ah, look, cut and pasted from the web site. Sadly, their numbers are actually spurious (drawing conclusions for the entire country based largely on behavior in heavily populated and low-income areas) and their assumptions are odious ('anyone who murders their pregnant girlfriend is by definition an abortion rights advocate, and is the moral equivalent of all other abortion rights activists'.)
That would be laughable, if it weren't so sad.
And the corollary has apparently not occurred to these people yet. That is to say, if, with abortion legal, people still kill their partners because they get pregnant...
-fred
You know, I don't assume, when I hear of another abortion doctor being killed execution-style, that 'Republicans' in general are responsible. It's a lunatic fringe, who have as much right to call themselves Republicans as I have to call myself a martian. When I talk about Republicans did this and Republicans did that, I don't include things that the Republicans can't be proven to have done, and that most Republicans would be deeply ashamed of.
And, amusingly, neither do most other Democrats that I know of. They accept that mainstream Republicanism isn't all about shooting abortion doctors. But then, when some whacko drives by a RNC HQ and shoots at it, not only do the Republicans start yelling at the Democrats about it, as if Kerry somehow planned it, but you actually start hearing Democrats apologizing, as if they thought they were actually responsible!
Puh-leeze. Catch the bastards and get on with life, and don't tell me I'm responsible for their stupidity. (Well, actually, I'm not a Democrat. I just agree with a whole lot more of their platform than I do with the Republicans'.)
-fred
(There are also reports of non-violent, LICENSED protesters being jailed for three days, then never charged with anything, just to keep them off the street while the RNC was in town. (And people who were just walking to the corner grocery store getting caught up and locked up along with them.) Which is illegal, but is something it looks like we're going to have to get used to.)Actually, there is one report of a campaign headquarters being shot at. Yes, a Republican campaign HQ, and yes, it is fairly well substantiated. It amazes me, because of course the dramatic majority of Democrats are pro gun-control. It looks like Rush -- er, that is to say, Bush -- has pissed someone else off besides the Democrats, eh?
One report of a Republican campaign headquarters being 'ransacked'. That is to say, someone broke into it and stole three laptops, possibly some office equipment, and possibly some money (this is in dispute). The assumption is, although the HQ was a juicy target and the laptops were out in plain sight, it must have been Democrats who did it. Well, possibly it was; it's hardly like the Democratic party can make any claims to sainthood, and I'd find it MUCH more likely that they'd stoop to stealing than they would attempt a drive-by shooting.
And the usual random assortment of graffiti, vandalism, and silliness on both sides. Which is almost certainly just drunk partisan college student asshats.
But hey, you notice that with the information out there, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and all that stuff, for all the RNC delegates... with the information STILL out there... with the information still out there and READILY AVAILABLE... there haven't been any serious incidents?
I mean, hell, if I were one of them, I would be terribly disappointed. 'What, am I not important enough for a few death threats?'Nope, that screaming would start when someone interviewed for a job and was told that they couldn't be hired because they were on 'the list'.
Lists of names don't kill people. People kill people. With guns and lists of names. Why do you want to outlaw the lists of names?
-fred
Without, in fact, going through the UK government, because otherwise it would have been the UK authorities who had them seized. And then, there are specific procedures under which intelligence agencies share data, so they have to go through channels and such. If this were an ordinary criminal case, it would be even more involved.
As it is, the legality of this move is not clear to me. It's a US company which has overseas customers, and hangs onto their equipment for them. If the FBI called up a US-based property management corporation that had offices for rent in London and told them to go into the offices and bundle up a filing cabinet and ship it overseas, I suspect they'd have had a lot more resistance than they apparently did. (Or perhaps a closer parallel would be 'U-Stor' sending the contents of a storage area off to the FBI from, say, Belize.)
I'd have to say that, even so far, this is a bit more interesting than your average crack dealer being 'nocked off'.
-fred
So don't give me this garbage about how I would feel. I don't like the idea that someone could post my address and phone number on the net so that a group of dicks could harass me, but I like even less this whole 'nanny state' censorship issue. And I hate the idea that something like this can be done for a reason that isn't even actually illegal. What's good for the goose is damn well good for the gander.
Now, that said, I think the likelihood that 'RNC' appears in any way on the warrant is vanishingly small. If, in fact, this is in retaliation for the RNC names thing, it's going to have some actual legal basis that is nearly or wholly unrelated.
(And may well be fictional.)
-fred
Grr. Okay, fine.
#import "ObligatoryAuralSexJoke.h"
-fred
#import
-fred
-fred
In 2003, the Iraqis let the inspectors go everywhere, at any time they wanted to, without holding them up. The inspectors said so. So Bush's threat of military force worked! And I thought that was great, right up until the time when he decided to kill thousands of innocent Iraqis and American soldiers (and Iraqi people who had been pressganged into the army) even though it had worked.
-fred
...no way.
If we were trucking around hydrogen, maybe. But harden millions of miles of high tension power lines? Harden thousands and thousands of microwave links and telephone trunk lines? How do you even do that? Put them underground, sunk in concrete? But then who's to stop people from hitting them with a jackhammer (to make the hole) and then a few pounds of high explosives?
Hardening the entire country against terrorism is the kind of reaction that would seem silly if people weren't so inclined to actually think that way these days.
-fred
I think this is pretty ridiculous too, but there certainly is an argument, however weak.
See, if you know the details of outages and why they occurred, then it's a lot easier to make your own. And if you don't release enough information to make it at least marginally useful to terrorists, you don't release enough information to make it even vaguely useful to businesses.
-fred
I took light rail to work every day for six months, as did tens of thousands of other people who work in my city. If the light rail weren't there, I suppose I would have had to drive. If you have a place with congested traffic, and you install light rail, and nobody uses it, it is because you aren't promoting it right, or pricing it right, or scheduling it right, or because your population is as dumb as stones.
The best products make their own demand, and making the people what they think they want will never sell as well as making them want something that they've never thought about before.Let's look at carpool lanes. It's very rare to find a place where carpool lanes are approved of by half or more of the populace. But when you actually install them, not only do they let people who carpool get to work faster, they also actually cut down on other people's commute times too, because there are fewer cars on the road. And yet, because people see other people driving by faster than they are, they still don't like them.
People aren't always smart enough to know what's good for them, and yet that doesn't in fact mean that we shouldn't try it. Carpool lanes being a case in point. Protections for minorities being another.
-fred
If there were no such thing as IP rights, the small company that I am currently contracting for would probably have been started, and developed the first version of its product, and then instantly been put out of business by MS downloading the software and bundling it in with Windows.
The software would have been created, and it would have been available 'free'. Best of both worlds, right?
-fred
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/28/comedy.p
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2
Of a simple six-question quiz on stances that the candidates hold on major issues, the average person got less than three questions right.
'Who wants to privatize Social Security?'
'Which one doesn't like assault weapons?'
'What is the cutoff income for Kerry's tax increases?' (50k, 100k, 200k, or 500k)
'Who is a former prosecutor?'
'Who favors making the recent tax cuts permanent?'
'Who wants to make it easier for labor unions to organize?'
People who didn't watch any 'late-night comedy show' scored 2.6 out of 6 right. 2.6. Now, even being charitable and assuming that people can't remember numbers (200k, hint hint) and that people don't remember that before becoming President, GWB's only political experience AT ALL was as Governor of Texas, that's still totally utterly pathetic. Do you realize that it means that MORE THAN HALF of those surveyed scored between 0 and 2 out of 6? And that only one of the questions had more than two possible choices?
If you answer that quiz randomly, you get 2.75 right, on average. Let me say that again. If you don't speak English, and just randomly pick an answer for each question, you get a 2.75.
People who watched Jay Leno got 2.95, David Letterman viewers got 2.91, and viewers of The Daily Show, astoundingly enough, got 3.59. Frequent (more than 3 days a week) network news viewers got 40% right, frequent cable news viewers got 48% (they didn't differentiate out Fox viewers, which might have told a different story), and newspaper readers got 46%. Less than half! The only group of people who averaged more than half were viewers of The Daily Show, who were what, 14% more informed than newspaper readers? (Wow, not to digress or anything, but that's kind of neat.)
Anyone who was paying any attention at all got six, and could have done so while drunk and standing on his or her head. The amount of illegal substances that would have been required to make me score 2 would have incapacitated a small midwestern town.
The American public doesn't even know what the two candidates stand for, and you think they're seriously giving weighted averages of all of the different stances and coming up with a decision?
The extent of your optimism awes me.
-fred
If you hold your hand in front of your face and wave it back and forth really quickly, so that your fingers intermittently interrupt the image, I find that it gets rid of all of the illusory movement in all of the images.
Looking at the top image and blinking my eyes really fast is *very* strange. It turns it greyscale, sorta.
-fred
He was, yes, a wee bit paranoid. (Actually, he was a big-time nutcase.) In his defense, though, it's not at all unlikely that that would have been the case.
-fred
"Where are your hidden weapons labs?" "We have none!" "Well, show us." "Show you what?" "Your weapons labs." "But we have none." "Well, prove it." "All right. Where would you like to look?" "You tell us." "But if we have no weapons labs, we have nowhere to tell you about." "Ah, so, then, you refuse to be cooperative."
At the last, when the inspectors were still in there, just before they were pulled out, the Iraqis were cooperating to the fullest extent of their abilities. There were some major paperwork problems, apparently generated because when they destroyed some of their weapons they didn't document them sufficiently. But they were even being allowed to inspect within all the places that had previously been off-limits, and in fact were even allowed unannounced visits with no warning time.
Strangely, the rest of the world thought they were doing fine. Given that, one must either assume that every single other country with the exception of England* is bone stupid, or that we are warmongers who above all else didn't WANT the inspections to work.
Makes you feel good to be an American, don't it?
-fred
* - (Yes, we had other allies eventually. But at that point we still hadn't scraped them together, so it was just GWB and GB)
Is it, in fact, enough safer that we can feel justified in basically ticking off the entire rest of the world aside from England, making our intelligence services into a laughingstock, and swelling the ranks of Al Quaida tenfold?
Yep, sure is. Great war. Fully justified. We should teach those Koreans a lesson too. After all, it's not like their atomic weapons would take out more than a few thousand Americans.
-fred