I stand corrected. On the other hand, lots of export MiG-23's have been shot down by a.o the Israeli's in the 80s. Still the Soviet ones may have been particularly interesting because systems were very likely different.
The Mikoyan MiG-23 Flogger dates from the 60's. We can safely assume that the NATO knows what it looks like, and the new NATO countries in Eastern Europe probably own or owned some of these things.
Most likely the less predictable debris of the plane was considered more dangerous than the plane itself.
I don't know about indefinite dentention, but it would seem that it should be illegal in the USA. All the imigrants that I have encountered over the years have never mentioned any sort of dentention that lasted over 1 year or that they did not have family notified within a short while of thier arrival.
Now if you are a combatant or a merc, the code of military law could apply ( my understanding is that merc's are in the gray area and have zero rights )
He is referring to section 412 of the Patriot Act, which allows indefinite detention of people that cannot be deported upon a determination that an individual threatens national security, or the safety of the community or any person. The detainees do not ever get a trial or hearing in which the government has to proof its claims. Instead there is a review every 6 months to verify that the detainee is still suspect (in the final version of section 412).
This provision basically allows the US government to detain any non-citizen indefinitely unless there is another government out there that cares for its lost citizen.
I would think the solution would be one of those worldwide initiatives that people around here seem so fond of. (That's sarcasm, if you couldn't detect it.) If a company's moving offshore to escape one country's laws, the only real solution is for that other country and all the other countries around it to enact the same laws. Right?
Only the important part of the world needs to cooperate voluntarily. Block internet access to countries that do not comply.
You are not the first to observe this. Only a few cables need to be cut in the right place to create a local Internet. Some political weirdos (text available in English, German, and Russian) advocate cutting the world off from the US by cutting the communication cables that link it to the rest of the world.
The difference between PD and MAD is that you can announce what you are going to do, and you can publicly change your position on what you are going to do. This is an essential characteristic of a legal system. See Why agents comply with norms, and why they should by Giovanni Sartor for a very accessible introduction.
The prisoners are not supposed to negotiate, and that is the essential difference. The MAD doctrine doesn't work if you keep it secret, or the opponent doesn't believe it is what you will do.
Things like that are just too hard to quantify. I work with complex systems all the time, and I'm keenly aware of the difficulty is scaling variables up that high. For example, how could you possibly account for the burning of wood for home fires? There is simply no way to accurately gauge this consumption.
The resources consumed are quantifiable if they are part of the world market. Even wood. You are right that it is very hard to take all local consumption of local production of energy into account, and that that means that the figures for the third world are not reliable. The relative figures for US, EU, Japan etc. are far more reliable.
For example, what about services? What about know-how?
The US mostly exports services. know-how cannot be exported in an economic sense.
BUT WE EXPORT MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR THOSE CARS.
You are importing cars. Global capital flows are actually from the EU and Asia to the US.
Tariffs are a barrier to consumption. If there were no tariffs, steel would be cheaper here. We'd import more of it, and consume *more* of it (plus the energy required to process it).
You are right. But this is no reason for tariffs.
So far so good, but you reference to the U.S. worldwide protection "racket" just makes me ill.
You are the one that introduces it to this topic. Does the US somehow have special economic rights because it protects us? The EU will disagree.
Europe has been under a Pax America for the last 50 years. Before that, well, let's see what the oh-so-civilized Europeans were up to: World War One, World War II, The Hundred Years War, The Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War, the Wars of the Roses, The bosnian conflict, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
This list spans quite a lot of time. Parts of Europe also had periods of relative peace under a British, Habsburg, Frankish, Roman etc. protection racket.
The US is not more peaceful than the average other country. It is just very big, and therefore rarely suffers the consequences directly. Smaller countries like mine are the ones that are completely destroyed once or twice in a century by a bigger one.
Also, "racket" is an unusual term in that normally the "victims" pay some sort of tribute to the racketeers. Funny, but I don't remember the Marshall Plan that way.
George C. Marshall was a far better man than many after him who keep making a connection between the "Pax Americana" and the "right" of the US to ignore treaties, make war, and create unfair economic advantages for itself.
"There always were more European than US tanks defending the Fulda gap." You mean tanks operating under the auspices of the U.S.-organized NATO? And clearly, I was simply using *tanks* as a metaphor for the massive U.S. defense subsidy of Western Europe, from boots on the ground to F-15s patrolling the skies overhead.
You connected steel and energy consumption to tanks. I can assure you we would have had even more tanks if the U.S.-organized NATO would not have existed. The European countries combined did have significantly more tanks than the US throughout the cold war.
Europe also used to have different type of armies (static mass conscript armies), because it prepared for a defensive and total war on its home turf. After the soviet union collapsed, we drastically reduced the size of the army because we perceive no threat that we cannot handle.
The US did not, and it is still present in Europe even though we do not need them for defense. Those bases in Europe are now used as support bases for operations in the middle east. The US is still very welcome as a NATO ally, but it is not "protecting" us.
The US is also giving the EU very confusing signals on whether it wants the EU to arm itself or be dependent on the US. When the EU for instance launches Galileo the US government is bitching about it because it makes European weapons technology independent fron US
Yeah, and afghan females just voted for the first time--ever--thanks to U.S. involvement.
Uh, no. Afghanistan did have universal suffrage from 1964 on. It was lost somewhere in the eighties while the US was arming muslim fundamentalists. One can argue about how democratic Afghanistan really was, but women did have largely equal rights in the constitutional monarchy and the socialist republic of Afghanistan.
I see this "25 percent of the world's resources" line constantly parroted by environmentalists, or those predisposed to... well, let's not say anti-Americanism; perhaps just those inclined to believe the worst about America.
It is just a fact, and the US has no good reason for consuming that much energy.
You point out that even if true, the statistic has to be stacked up next to the U.S.'s *output*. I think that's true. I also think you need to consider the nature of the output.
The US imports more than it exports. The US consumes most of its production itself. The US hardly exports energy-intensive goods, like steel or cars. I agree that the relation between energy consumption and output is relevant, but this analysis only makes countries like China and Japan look better. The US looks even worse.
U.S. goods and services are used all over the world.
Not energy intensive goods. US car brands, inasfar as they are successful at all internationally, produce their cars locally. In Germany for instance. Japan South Korea, and Germany are exporters of cars. The US steel industry only survives because of huge import tariffs that make US steel cheaper inside the US. The US exports scrap steel for steel mills abroad.
The US economy is dependent on exports of services and software licenses.
And I'm not just talking about trade. There are also things like defense.
For 50 years it was U.S. Army tanks standing between the Red Army and the Fulda Gap. As I've pointed out in other/. posts, these tanks represented a MASSIVE U.S. subsidy of Western Europe's defense.
Those tanks are made out of steel. Steel factories produce pollution. I guess the point is pretty clear, so I won't belabor it.
This reference to the US worldwide protection racket is irrelevant to this subject. There always were more European than US tanks defending the Fulda gap, and the US has a very easy task defending its home territory. I am aware that the US spends a huge amount of money on its army, but I do not buy the argument that it used more steel for tanks over the last decades than Europe or Russia. Besides that, the number of tanks is negligible compared to the number of cars, and tanks have a long lifespan.
That's something I've noticed here in the Netherlands; things look decrepit. I went to a city in the south of this country, which in in the big red blob on the map ( town where I live in just on the edge ) and during the train ride, I couldn't start counting the rusting barges in the water, the abandoned factories and production plants, the run-down warehouses filled with rusting barrels that contain god-knows what and a surprising amount of heavier industry such as steel mills, paper mills and chemical plants.
I don't know how often you go to other industrial areas in the world, but I can assure you that the Netherlands does not look 'decrepit' by international standards. My hunch is you hardly ever leave the Netherlands (except for mediterranean tourist areas maybe that are not at all representative of what the world looks like).
Visit the uglier parts of the Rust Belt in the USA. This area in the Netherland, Germany, and Belgium you talk about is the European equivalent of the Rust Belt. If you travel by train, you will obviously see the ugliest part of any country.
Been to Belgium a few years ago as well... One of the things I remember most was the state of the houses and roads down there. Everything just seemed undermaintained down to an atrocious level. It's scary to know that south of here in the NL and in Belgium, in the middle of that big red blob, everything seems to be stuck in the 70s in some sort of permanent economic paralysis. I thought both BE and the NL were supposed to be developed countries that were doing pretty decently?
Compared to the US this area is certainly not 'stuck in the 70s'. Remaining heavy industry in this area is cleaner than its American equivalent, and in many areas (like steel) far more competitive, without taxpayer support. Belgium is doing well. Germany is not.
People in the Netherlands north of the Rhine spend an unusually large amount of money on the maintenance of their house if they own it. Visit for instance Switzerland and compare the state of the houses with its GDP/capita. Compared to the Netherlands north of the Rhine most of the civilized world looks decrepit. It is a cultural thing. Some cultures prefer to invest their money in cars, or food.
That big red blob is mainly over the lowlands of Holland and surrounding areas, so it's either tulips or the output from the "coffee" shops of Amsterdam. I'm thinking it's probably not the tulips.;)
Amsterdam is actually close to the edge of the red blob. This area in the Netherlands (Rotterdam, Eindhoven), and the adjacent areas in Germany (Ruhr area), Belgium, and northern France are very heavily populated and have a very dense concentration of heavy industry (petro-chemical, chemical etc.).
Of course, per capita these countries still produce less pollution than the US. Netherlands and Belgium are among the most densely populated countries in the world.
Take note everyone, the biggest red blob is over China (insert communist jokes here). For all the whining and complaining about how the US should have joined the Kyoto accord, it's very easy to see that China is the #1 offender, and that Europe is not doing so hot itself.
The custom is obviously to rank offenders per capita. The EU and China have significantly more inhabitants than the US, and much higher population densities.
US carbon emmissions and energy consumption per capita are well over the EU level. Westerners have no moral right to tell the Chinese, who use just a fraction of what westerners use, that they are polluting the environment excessively. Chinese pollution will rise as its economy grows, even if they switch to cleaner production methods. The US is by far the #1 offender, and could easily - and more cheaply than its competitors - reduce its emissions.
If you insist on ranking terrirories on absolute emmissions I suggest that you stop inventing your own territorial units and compare sovereign countries. I can assure you that no European country comes even close to US levels.
I do have a thought on why North America sees less pollution than Europe, however. Since the North America has a massive amount of farmland and forest land, a good deal of the pollution is sapped up by these massive carbon sinks.
North America has a massive amount of farmland and forest because it has a low population density, and it has less pollution in absolute terms mostly because there are less polluters around.
If I extrapolate the population density of my country (the center of the red blob in the northwest of Europe) to the US, the US would have 3.8 billion inhabitants and US citizens would have to start being much more careful with pollution and the use of land.
Species going extinct is a part of the _natural_ evolution of this planet - and has always been long before man. Man is also part of this planet's natural evolution, which makes Man's actions _natural_.
It's _unnatural_ to keep species alive when they should've gone extinct due to _natural_ causes (changing climate etc).
A changing climate in combination with many land barriers that cannot be crossed by species of plants and animals is going to result in a massive loss of species. Even agricultural use of land may make it uninhabitable, certainly for large species.
Earth has survived periods of mass extinction before, but large animals will not be back in our lifetime and we will still be there to interfere with the process. They will not be back until we are gone.
It is in our interest to preserve the current biodiversity and study it. Extinction will result in an impoverishment of nature. Only if we understand what we are doing we want to interfere.
So there's no absolute prof yet, but hey, maybe that gun isn't loaded. Why not point it at your head, pull the trigger and see. But please, don't you take that risk with my future.
In support of this point of view: the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Institute of Meteorology) recently issued a warning that the weather of the last few years has now become 'statistically impossible' and that some climate change must be happening. Up till now they kept maintaining that the weather of the last few years could still be chance.
In the summer of 2003 drought caused the collapse of two dikes, and the water control boards had to reverse the direction of flow of the Amstel river to prevent other dikes from collapsing. Fortunately we still have the excess pump capacity to make that happen, but the system has been stretched to the limit in the last few years. In one case even the steam driven water pumps of a museum were used.
We have also seen a number of local floodings in the last decade caused by statistically unlikely amounts of rain. Dutch government started a massive national construction program for reinforcing the dikes and increasing their height by 2 meters a few years ago. In addition, less densely populated parts of the country are designated as flooding areas to relieve pressure on the dikes in case of emergency.
There is something seriously wrong with this concept of 'proof' if a country largely below sea level is already spending massive amounts of taxpayer money to cope with the consequences of global warming while another country that is the primary cause of it does not even acknowledge it is happening. In the US people can relocate if a cataclysmic climate change happens. The Netherlands will disappear in the sea.
Is this a valid reason to hate Americans for not signing the Kyoto protocol and their criminally irresponsible energy policy?
Ever notice that 99.999% of everything on the earth, sans most insects and domesticated animals are timid or downright afraid of people? They recognise who the greater species is maybe?
I wouldn't go that far in attributing cognition to animals, but apparently there is some very significant evolutionary advantage to the 'being afraid of people' gene. I wonder what it is.
There also appears to be a 'not being scary to people' gene that offers similar advantages.
It's interesting how the Animal Planet and Telegraph stories differ to the point of contradicting each other.
'Aggressive' is an ambiguous description. Is that aggressive as in:
hunts, and potentially preys on man.
is fiercely territorial and will attack competitors for food from the same or other species, possibly including man.
will scare away or attack potential predators that approach the vulnerable members of the group, including man.
The behaviour described, attacking silently and retreating if the situation turns out different from expectations, is consistent with a hunting party consisting of adult and strong animals only. Even cats are smart enough to retreat if they are surprised during a hunt.
An oversight in feces research from nesting areas is that most meat would be consumed while on a hunting party. Chimps are not known for their generosity as far as I know, and bring little, if anything, back to the weaker members of the group.
The spin on how 'aggressive' the great apes are reminds me of similar spin where 'proof' supposedly turned Homo Erectus from a noble hunter into a despicable carrion eater, completely ignoring the fact that all carnivores, including lions, never spurn an easy meal.
Also, if apes eat fruit most of the time, that doesn't prove anything about whether or not they are competent hunters. That conclusion presupposes that apes prefer chasing meat over picking fruit. Why would they do that? For the dignity of mankind, maybe? Because hunting is 'noble'?
Interpretation of evidence about our closest relatives and early hominids is somehow always affected by the position people take in nature-nurture debates about crime and war.
Everything else aside, the vehicle is LESS SAFE to the occupants because it's lighter. I suppose that makes it more safe to the people in the other vehicle.
If MOST people drive light cars, traffic is going to be safer for everyone. Look at the statistics of densely populated countries and compare it to the statistics of sparsely populated countries like the USA. Typically less people are going to be killed in the first type of country because the cars are lighter on average, even though driving is more demanding. The drivers of heavy vehicles are more likely to have an accident, and more likely to endanger others.
In Latin Multatuli means something like 'I have suffered a lot'. It is the pseudonym of a former colonial administrator, famous in the Netherlands for exposing the cruelty of Dutch rule in Indonesia for the first time. I don't think this author knew Finnish.
Multatuli is standard fare in Dutch schools, and every Dutchman ought to know that it is a century old. It is clear that the people who took down the website do not have the faintest clue about copyright, or are not Dutch.
Still, it is a bit of a stretch to think that we invaded Iraq to fend off the Euro. I'd like to see some hard evidence before spending more time entertaining the thought.
The US government had to either put its finances in order (by drastically reducing its defense budget for instance), or terrify the shit out of the rest of the world. I don't think it is THE reason, but it sure was a nice side-effect.
Oh, and one thing we both forgot to mention is the state of the European Union's economy. According to this article, it's been growing much slower that the US's -- and that in 2003, the US GDP per capita was 55 per cent higher than the EU's.
GDP per capita is irrelevant to economic strength. Absolute GDP is important to the extent that it allows one to dictate the rules of the game. China is for instance growing very fast, but remains poor in term of GDP/capita. The EU is absorbing much poorer countries regularly, but is gaining resources and low pay workforce.
Because China is buying huge amounts of US bonds to keep the Yuan pegged to the dollar, the euro is rapidly rising against the dollar as a side-effect. This seriously harms the competitiveness of the EU in general, but makes import products very cheap for us in the richer, western part of the EU. As long as the Chinese keep buying US bonds the US can afford its lax monetary policy (and mortgage rates remain artificially low, and consumers keep spending artificial wealth). See 'The dragon and the Eagle' in the last issue of The Economist. The rise of China has great consequences for the world economy, and is creating a scarcity of natural resources (including oil).
As a result drastically cutting labor costs is more urgent to the EU, even though it is the US that is in the deepest shit (as long as it limits itself to economic, and not political/military solutions).
To be fair the EU does have a number of other structural disadvantages, like a much more serious ageing problem. But in the US it is the government that is creating problems by seriously overspending for no apparent reason (well, besides control of the oil) in an otherwise healthier economy. Tax pressure in the US is still a few percent lower than in western Europe on average, but Europeans inherited more public services and infrastructure for that money. The difference in health costs alone compensates for the apparent difference in purchase power.
In your dreams. The Euro, while currently okay, is young and has questionable long-term stability. This is because France and Germany are breaking the Euro agreement, and the EU is currently expanding and can't even agree on a constitution.
The countries that switched to keeping most of their reserve in euro's (like for instance Iraq and North Korea) gained a huge amount of ppp income over the last years. The risk of keeping your national reserve in EU euro's is that most resources can only be bought with dollars at the moment. The risk of keeping US dollars is that the value of the dollar largely depends on its status as an international fiat currency. The US is not a very solid world bank at the moment.
France and Germany may be violating the rules of the monetary stability pact, but so does the US. France, Germany and the US are spending too much, but only France and Germany have commmitted themselves to rules.
Before the attack on Iraq Russia, Venezuela, and even Saudi Arabia were publicly considering accepting oil transactions in euro's. Right now only Iran still dares to entertain that thought.
9/11 is not the ghost of us cold war sins come back to haunt us. believe it or not, the whole world is not centered on the us. there are other areas of the world with their own agendas and concerns, and believe it or not, some of those agendas and concerns are capable of their own original sins.
I do think that Osama has a genuine problem with US support of the Saudi regime, and the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia. He said so repeatedly, and there is no reason not to believe him. If the US goes away, he will turn his attention to the Saudi regime. Or at least he would have, if the US would not have occupied an adjacent country.
if the us turned into a lake tomorrow, al qaeda would not celebrate and become pastoral sheep farmers
Not likely. Being a terrorist is far more glamourous than being a sheep farmer. Terrorist movements do stop eventually simply because there are no new recruits and there is no longer any support left in the group on whose behalf they are fighting. If your strategy is based on suicide bombing and you choose targets without any moral restrictions you are even more vulnerable to lack of new recruits.
This may incidently be the reason why Al Qaeda is apparently not able to organize another 9/11. In Madrid nobody committed suicide for the cause.
in what world do you live in where a military response from the us is not appropriate or just, to prevent something like 9/11 from ever happening ever again?
In what world do you live if you think that the military adventures of this US government have anything to do with preventing something like 9/11? Exactly how would it prevent 9/11? The only relevant military responses from the US I have seen are some failed attempts at arresting and assassinating Osama in Afghanistan and a successful assassination in Yemen. These actions did not require a military occupation. The US WAS entitled to a military response, but most of the world objected to the response the US government chose.
Saddam Hussein was a socialist. There is more to tyranny than merely bipolar duality. Fascists are corporate, as Mussolini innovated in Italy. The difference is that Hussein controlled all the state corporations for his sole, personal benefit, while fascists control the government for the benefit of the corporations (and their owners).
Saddam's power is based on support by tribes and factions, and he held on to it because they saw no acceptable alternative for him. Saddam himself is just a thug without any clear political affinities.
As Ofra Bengio points out in "Saddam's Word" the political discourse in Iraq in the last decades has degenerated from the 'Arab national socialist' social-economic concepts of Ba'athism to just tribe, family, loyalty, heroism, blood, honor, and Islam.
Mussolini and Hitler were both launched into power by corporations and civil servants, but these supporters hardly benefited in the long term from this decision. Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Saddam are very similar people operating against different political backgrounds.
Even if that gives us the right to invade Iraq, the question is, was it in our best interest?
Certainly not from a strictly military perspective, as pointed out recently by a retired Dutch general on Dutch television. This US government:
committed basically the whole US army to irrelevant skirmishes without keeping a sizable free reserve,
signals the first point to his enemies by considering removing troops from South Korea and Europe,
demoralizes its militia reserves (which should be reserved for WWII-like situations or homeland defense) by using them in a guerilla situation in Iraq,
consistently shows by its arrogance that they overestimate the fighting strength of the US army (which can only fight in a few theatres at the same time),
ignores the advice of its wisest generals,
lies to its closest allies, insuring that next time they will not believe intelligence provided by the US,
fails to insure itself of unanymous support in NATO, which is a defence alliance, and its members remember (WWI) that it is very dangerous to be in a defence alliance with countries that start wars for frivolous reasons.
Surely the US is so big and powerful that it can afford military stupidity to some extent, but do US soldiers want to die because of it?
Most of the countries that followed the US into this war in Iraq will not follow this US government into another one. In the case of the Netherlands the PM testified in parliament that he had personally been shown convincing evidence by the US government that Iraq had WMD. Dutch intelligence services did not see this evidence and explicitly did not support these conclusions at the time. 80% of the population considered the PM 'unreliable' in a recent opinion poll (which is exceptional for a former professor in Calvinist theology), and there is a socialist absolute majority (socialist, social democrats, greens) in the opinion polls for the first time in Dutch history.
The word 'monarchy' means a system with power concentrated in one person. Our system is in many ways the opposite of that, concentrating power in the hands of elected colleges and mostly status to hereditary or Royally appointed (Her Majesty's Governor and the Mayor) offices at the top of the hierarchy. In emergency situations these people have real power, but in normal situations they are a kind of chairman (the queen chairing the Council of State, the highest administrative court).
The king must have a queen, after all, and the "First Lady", who has no official status, perhaps corresponds much more closely with a king's consort than our President does with your king. (Queen now, but you know what I mean.)
Our queen is actually 'King' according to the constitution. Luxemburg seceeded from the Netherlands on this semantic issue: they claimed that a 'King' can only be male according to Salic law and appointed another successor to king William III in 1890.
For the first time in more than a century we will get a male king again, and he will automatically become Admiral and commander in chief of the armed forces when he is crowned. A leftover from 1890 that was never changed.
Perhaps that's just closer to what I'm used to, but I can also point to periods in history where this has worked very well indeed.
We switched systems several times between 1648 and now, and one historical observation that is obvious from our history is that the national debt was firmly under control only when we had a strong monarch. Another observation is that the Dutch army only wins wars when led by a strong monarch, that the Netherlands will automatically turn into a monarchy in wars that threaten its existence (1672, 1812), and that parliament will collaborate with an occupying enemy (Napoleon, Hitler) while the monarch organizes armed resistance from abroad.
2. they were dirt cheap vs. the alternative, building a proportionate conventional army, so they left money for other things, included, I must say, aids to poor countries.
The US introduced AIDS to poor countries? I always thought that accusation was a bit farfetched.
If you meant to say aid, then that is nonsense. The US has never given more aid as a share of GDP than comparable countries do. 0.1-0.15 is normal for the US, except for the 1948-1951 period. That is very low for a developed country. Even the Soviet Union was more generous, with a fraction of US GDP. The Soviet Union certainly never had anything close to the US defense budget and was apparently still competitive militarily (according to some). The US started the arms race, and the US still maintains a cold war army today for no apparent reason. I don't see what the US taxpayer gets in return for that money except enemies its government makes.
The US taxpayer certainly doesn't get homeland defense. The USAF was many minutes away on 9/11. That could never have happened in Europe. With several minutes advance warning after the first attack those hijacked planes would have been intercepted by at least three different national airforces.
Slashdot Mirror
It happened in 1989.
I stand corrected. On the other hand, lots of export MiG-23's have been shot down by a.o the Israeli's in the 80s. Still the Soviet ones may have been particularly interesting because systems were very likely different.
The Mikoyan MiG-23 Flogger dates from the 60's. We can safely assume that the NATO knows what it looks like, and the new NATO countries in Eastern Europe probably own or owned some of these things.
Most likely the less predictable debris of the plane was considered more dangerous than the plane itself.
I don't know about indefinite dentention, but it would seem that it should be illegal in the USA. All the imigrants that I have encountered over the years have never mentioned any sort of dentention that lasted over 1 year or that they did not have family notified within a short while of thier arrival.
Now if you are a combatant or a merc, the code of military law could apply ( my understanding is that merc's are in the gray area and have zero rights )
He is referring to section 412 of the Patriot Act, which allows indefinite detention of people that cannot be deported upon a determination that an individual threatens national security, or the safety of the community or any person. The detainees do not ever get a trial or hearing in which the government has to proof its claims. Instead there is a review every 6 months to verify that the detainee is still suspect (in the final version of section 412).
This provision basically allows the US government to detain any non-citizen indefinitely unless there is another government out there that cares for its lost citizen.
I would think the solution would be one of those worldwide initiatives that people around here seem so fond of. (That's sarcasm, if you couldn't detect it.) If a company's moving offshore to escape one country's laws, the only real solution is for that other country and all the other countries around it to enact the same laws. Right?
Only the important part of the world needs to cooperate voluntarily. Block internet access to countries that do not comply.
You are not the first to observe this. Only a few cables need to be cut in the right place to create a local Internet. Some political weirdos (text available in English, German, and Russian) advocate cutting the world off from the US by cutting the communication cables that link it to the rest of the world.
The prisoners are not supposed to negotiate, and that is the essential difference. The MAD doctrine doesn't work if you keep it secret, or the opponent doesn't believe it is what you will do.
Things like that are just too hard to quantify. I work with complex systems all the time, and I'm keenly aware of the difficulty is scaling variables up that high. For example, how could you possibly account for the burning of wood for home fires? There is simply no way to accurately gauge this consumption.
The resources consumed are quantifiable if they are part of the world market. Even wood. You are right that it is very hard to take all local consumption of local production of energy into account, and that that means that the figures for the third world are not reliable. The relative figures for US, EU, Japan etc. are far more reliable.
For example, what about services? What about know-how?
The US mostly exports services. know-how cannot be exported in an economic sense.
BUT WE EXPORT MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR THOSE CARS.
You are importing cars. Global capital flows are actually from the EU and Asia to the US.
Tariffs are a barrier to consumption. If there were no tariffs, steel would be cheaper here. We'd import more of it, and consume *more* of it (plus the energy required to process it).
You are right. But this is no reason for tariffs.
So far so good, but you reference to the U.S. worldwide protection "racket" just makes me ill.
You are the one that introduces it to this topic. Does the US somehow have special economic rights because it protects us? The EU will disagree.
Europe has been under a Pax America for the last 50 years. Before that, well, let's see what the oh-so-civilized Europeans were up to: World War One, World War II, The Hundred Years War, The Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War, the Wars of the Roses, The bosnian conflict, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
This list spans quite a lot of time. Parts of Europe also had periods of relative peace under a British, Habsburg, Frankish, Roman etc. protection racket.
The US is not more peaceful than the average other country. It is just very big, and therefore rarely suffers the consequences directly. Smaller countries like mine are the ones that are completely destroyed once or twice in a century by a bigger one.
Also, "racket" is an unusual term in that normally the "victims" pay some sort of tribute to the racketeers. Funny, but I don't remember the Marshall Plan that way.
George C. Marshall was a far better man than many after him who keep making a connection between the "Pax Americana" and the "right" of the US to ignore treaties, make war, and create unfair economic advantages for itself.
"There always were more European than US tanks defending the Fulda gap." You mean tanks operating under the auspices of the U.S.-organized NATO? And clearly, I was simply using *tanks* as a metaphor for the massive U.S. defense subsidy of Western Europe, from boots on the ground to F-15s patrolling the skies overhead.
You connected steel and energy consumption to tanks. I can assure you we would have had even more tanks if the U.S.-organized NATO would not have existed. The European countries combined did have significantly more tanks than the US throughout the cold war.
Europe also used to have different type of armies (static mass conscript armies), because it prepared for a defensive and total war on its home turf. After the soviet union collapsed, we drastically reduced the size of the army because we perceive no threat that we cannot handle.
The US did not, and it is still present in Europe even though we do not need them for defense. Those bases in Europe are now used as support bases for operations in the middle east. The US is still very welcome as a NATO ally, but it is not "protecting" us.
The US is also giving the EU very confusing signals on whether it wants the EU to arm itself or be dependent on the US. When the EU for instance launches Galileo the US government is bitching about it because it makes European weapons technology independent fron US
Yeah, and afghan females just voted for the first time--ever--thanks to U.S. involvement.
Uh, no. Afghanistan did have universal suffrage from 1964 on. It was lost somewhere in the eighties while the US was arming muslim fundamentalists. One can argue about how democratic Afghanistan really was, but women did have largely equal rights in the constitutional monarchy and the socialist republic of Afghanistan.
I see this "25 percent of the world's resources" line constantly parroted by environmentalists, or those predisposed to ... well, let's not say anti-Americanism; perhaps just those inclined to believe the worst about America.
/. posts, these tanks represented a MASSIVE U.S. subsidy of Western Europe's defense.
It is just a fact, and the US has no good reason for consuming that much energy.
You point out that even if true, the statistic has to be stacked up next to the U.S.'s *output*. I think that's true. I also think you need to consider the nature of the output.
The US imports more than it exports. The US consumes most of its production itself. The US hardly exports energy-intensive goods, like steel or cars. I agree that the relation between energy consumption and output is relevant, but this analysis only makes countries like China and Japan look better. The US looks even worse.
U.S. goods and services are used all over the world.
Not energy intensive goods. US car brands, inasfar as they are successful at all internationally, produce their cars locally. In Germany for instance. Japan South Korea, and Germany are exporters of cars. The US steel industry only survives because of huge import tariffs that make US steel cheaper inside the US. The US exports scrap steel for steel mills abroad.
The US economy is dependent on exports of services and software licenses.
And I'm not just talking about trade. There are also things like defense.
For 50 years it was U.S. Army tanks standing between the Red Army and the Fulda Gap. As I've pointed out in other
Those tanks are made out of steel. Steel factories produce pollution. I guess the point is pretty clear, so I won't belabor it.
This reference to the US worldwide protection racket is irrelevant to this subject. There always were more European than US tanks defending the Fulda gap, and the US has a very easy task defending its home territory. I am aware that the US spends a huge amount of money on its army, but I do not buy the argument that it used more steel for tanks over the last decades than Europe or Russia. Besides that, the number of tanks is negligible compared to the number of cars, and tanks have a long lifespan.
That's something I've noticed here in the Netherlands; things look decrepit. I went to a city in the south of this country, which in in the big red blob on the map ( town where I live in just on the edge ) and during the train ride, I couldn't start counting the rusting barges in the water, the abandoned factories and production plants, the run-down warehouses filled with rusting barrels that contain god-knows what and a surprising amount of heavier industry such as steel mills, paper mills and chemical plants.
I don't know how often you go to other industrial areas in the world, but I can assure you that the Netherlands does not look 'decrepit' by international standards. My hunch is you hardly ever leave the Netherlands (except for mediterranean tourist areas maybe that are not at all representative of what the world looks like).
Visit the uglier parts of the Rust Belt in the USA. This area in the Netherland, Germany, and Belgium you talk about is the European equivalent of the Rust Belt. If you travel by train, you will obviously see the ugliest part of any country.
Been to Belgium a few years ago as well... One of the things I remember most was the state of the houses and roads down there. Everything just seemed undermaintained down to an atrocious level. It's scary to know that south of here in the NL and in Belgium, in the middle of that big red blob, everything seems to be stuck in the 70s in some sort of permanent economic paralysis. I thought both BE and the NL were supposed to be developed countries that were doing pretty decently?
Compared to the US this area is certainly not 'stuck in the 70s'. Remaining heavy industry in this area is cleaner than its American equivalent, and in many areas (like steel) far more competitive, without taxpayer support. Belgium is doing well. Germany is not.
People in the Netherlands north of the Rhine spend an unusually large amount of money on the maintenance of their house if they own it. Visit for instance Switzerland and compare the state of the houses with its GDP/capita. Compared to the Netherlands north of the Rhine most of the civilized world looks decrepit. It is a cultural thing. Some cultures prefer to invest their money in cars, or food.
That big red blob is mainly over the lowlands of Holland and surrounding areas, so it's either tulips or the output from the "coffee" shops of Amsterdam. I'm thinking it's probably not the tulips. ;)
Amsterdam is actually close to the edge of the red blob. This area in the Netherlands (Rotterdam, Eindhoven), and the adjacent areas in Germany (Ruhr area), Belgium, and northern France are very heavily populated and have a very dense concentration of heavy industry (petro-chemical, chemical etc.).
Of course, per capita these countries still produce less pollution than the US. Netherlands and Belgium are among the most densely populated countries in the world.
Take note everyone, the biggest red blob is over China (insert communist jokes here). For all the whining and complaining about how the US should have joined the Kyoto accord, it's very easy to see that China is the #1 offender, and that Europe is not doing so hot itself.
The custom is obviously to rank offenders per capita. The EU and China have significantly more inhabitants than the US, and much higher population densities.
US carbon emmissions and energy consumption per capita are well over the EU level. Westerners have no moral right to tell the Chinese, who use just a fraction of what westerners use, that they are polluting the environment excessively. Chinese pollution will rise as its economy grows, even if they switch to cleaner production methods. The US is by far the #1 offender, and could easily - and more cheaply than its competitors - reduce its emissions.
If you insist on ranking terrirories on absolute emmissions I suggest that you stop inventing your own territorial units and compare sovereign countries. I can assure you that no European country comes even close to US levels.
I do have a thought on why North America sees less pollution than Europe, however. Since the North America has a massive amount of farmland and forest land, a good deal of the pollution is sapped up by these massive carbon sinks.
North America has a massive amount of farmland and forest because it has a low population density, and it has less pollution in absolute terms mostly because there are less polluters around.
If I extrapolate the population density of my country (the center of the red blob in the northwest of Europe) to the US, the US would have 3.8 billion inhabitants and US citizens would have to start being much more careful with pollution and the use of land.
Species going extinct is a part of the _natural_ evolution of this planet - and has always been long before man. Man is also part of this planet's natural evolution, which makes Man's actions _natural_.
It's _unnatural_ to keep species alive when they should've gone extinct due to _natural_ causes (changing climate etc).
A changing climate in combination with many land barriers that cannot be crossed by species of plants and animals is going to result in a massive loss of species. Even agricultural use of land may make it uninhabitable, certainly for large species.
Earth has survived periods of mass extinction before, but large animals will not be back in our lifetime and we will still be there to interfere with the process. They will not be back until we are gone.
It is in our interest to preserve the current biodiversity and study it. Extinction will result in an impoverishment of nature. Only if we understand what we are doing we want to interfere.
In support of this point of view: the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Institute of Meteorology) recently issued a warning that the weather of the last few years has now become 'statistically impossible' and that some climate change must be happening. Up till now they kept maintaining that the weather of the last few years could still be chance.
In the summer of 2003 drought caused the collapse of two dikes, and the water control boards had to reverse the direction of flow of the Amstel river to prevent other dikes from collapsing. Fortunately we still have the excess pump capacity to make that happen, but the system has been stretched to the limit in the last few years. In one case even the steam driven water pumps of a museum were used.
We have also seen a number of local floodings in the last decade caused by statistically unlikely amounts of rain. Dutch government started a massive national construction program for reinforcing the dikes and increasing their height by 2 meters a few years ago. In addition, less densely populated parts of the country are designated as flooding areas to relieve pressure on the dikes in case of emergency.
There is something seriously wrong with this concept of 'proof' if a country largely below sea level is already spending massive amounts of taxpayer money to cope with the consequences of global warming while another country that is the primary cause of it does not even acknowledge it is happening. In the US people can relocate if a cataclysmic climate change happens. The Netherlands will disappear in the sea.
Is this a valid reason to hate Americans for not signing the Kyoto protocol and their criminally irresponsible energy policy?
Ever notice that 99.999% of everything on the earth, sans most insects and domesticated animals are timid or downright afraid of people? They recognise who the greater species is maybe?
I wouldn't go that far in attributing cognition to animals, but apparently there is some very significant evolutionary advantage to the 'being afraid of people' gene. I wonder what it is.
There also appears to be a 'not being scary to people' gene that offers similar advantages.
'Aggressive' is an ambiguous description. Is that aggressive as in:
The behaviour described, attacking silently and retreating if the situation turns out different from expectations, is consistent with a hunting party consisting of adult and strong animals only. Even cats are smart enough to retreat if they are surprised during a hunt.
An oversight in feces research from nesting areas is that most meat would be consumed while on a hunting party. Chimps are not known for their generosity as far as I know, and bring little, if anything, back to the weaker members of the group.
The spin on how 'aggressive' the great apes are reminds me of similar spin where 'proof' supposedly turned Homo Erectus from a noble hunter into a despicable carrion eater, completely ignoring the fact that all carnivores, including lions, never spurn an easy meal.
Also, if apes eat fruit most of the time, that doesn't prove anything about whether or not they are competent hunters. That conclusion presupposes that apes prefer chasing meat over picking fruit. Why would they do that? For the dignity of mankind, maybe? Because hunting is 'noble'?
Interpretation of evidence about our closest relatives and early hominids is somehow always affected by the position people take in nature-nurture debates about crime and war.
If MOST people drive light cars, traffic is going to be safer for everyone. Look at the statistics of densely populated countries and compare it to the statistics of sparsely populated countries like the USA. Typically less people are going to be killed in the first type of country because the cars are lighter on average, even though driving is more demanding. The drivers of heavy vehicles are more likely to have an accident, and more likely to endanger others.
In Latin Multatuli means something like 'I have suffered a lot'. It is the pseudonym of a former colonial administrator, famous in the Netherlands for exposing the cruelty of Dutch rule in Indonesia for the first time. I don't think this author knew Finnish.
Multatuli is standard fare in Dutch schools, and every Dutchman ought to know that it is a century old. It is clear that the people who took down the website do not have the faintest clue about copyright, or are not Dutch.
Still, it is a bit of a stretch to think that we invaded Iraq to fend off the Euro. I'd like to see some hard evidence before spending more time entertaining the thought.
The US government had to either put its finances in order (by drastically reducing its defense budget for instance), or terrify the shit out of the rest of the world. I don't think it is THE reason, but it sure was a nice side-effect.
Oh, and one thing we both forgot to mention is the state of the European Union's economy. According to this article, it's been growing much slower that the US's -- and that in 2003, the US GDP per capita was 55 per cent higher than the EU's.
GDP per capita is irrelevant to economic strength. Absolute GDP is important to the extent that it allows one to dictate the rules of the game. China is for instance growing very fast, but remains poor in term of GDP/capita. The EU is absorbing much poorer countries regularly, but is gaining resources and low pay workforce.
Because China is buying huge amounts of US bonds to keep the Yuan pegged to the dollar, the euro is rapidly rising against the dollar as a side-effect. This seriously harms the competitiveness of the EU in general, but makes import products very cheap for us in the richer, western part of the EU. As long as the Chinese keep buying US bonds the US can afford its lax monetary policy (and mortgage rates remain artificially low, and consumers keep spending artificial wealth). See 'The dragon and the Eagle' in the last issue of The Economist. The rise of China has great consequences for the world economy, and is creating a scarcity of natural resources (including oil).
As a result drastically cutting labor costs is more urgent to the EU, even though it is the US that is in the deepest shit (as long as it limits itself to economic, and not political/military solutions).
To be fair the EU does have a number of other structural disadvantages, like a much more serious ageing problem. But in the US it is the government that is creating problems by seriously overspending for no apparent reason (well, besides control of the oil) in an otherwise healthier economy. Tax pressure in the US is still a few percent lower than in western Europe on average, but Europeans inherited more public services and infrastructure for that money. The difference in health costs alone compensates for the apparent difference in purchase power.
The countries that switched to keeping most of their reserve in euro's (like for instance Iraq and North Korea) gained a huge amount of ppp income over the last years. The risk of keeping your national reserve in EU euro's is that most resources can only be bought with dollars at the moment. The risk of keeping US dollars is that the value of the dollar largely depends on its status as an international fiat currency. The US is not a very solid world bank at the moment.
France and Germany may be violating the rules of the monetary stability pact, but so does the US. France, Germany and the US are spending too much, but only France and Germany have commmitted themselves to rules.
Before the attack on Iraq Russia, Venezuela, and even Saudi Arabia were publicly considering accepting oil transactions in euro's. Right now only Iran still dares to entertain that thought.
I do think that Osama has a genuine problem with US support of the Saudi regime, and the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia. He said so repeatedly, and there is no reason not to believe him. If the US goes away, he will turn his attention to the Saudi regime. Or at least he would have, if the US would not have occupied an adjacent country.
if the us turned into a lake tomorrow, al qaeda would not celebrate and become pastoral sheep farmers
Not likely. Being a terrorist is far more glamourous than being a sheep farmer. Terrorist movements do stop eventually simply because there are no new recruits and there is no longer any support left in the group on whose behalf they are fighting. If your strategy is based on suicide bombing and you choose targets without any moral restrictions you are even more vulnerable to lack of new recruits.
This may incidently be the reason why Al Qaeda is apparently not able to organize another 9/11. In Madrid nobody committed suicide for the cause.
in what world do you live in where a military response from the us is not appropriate or just, to prevent something like 9/11 from ever happening ever again?
In what world do you live if you think that the military adventures of this US government have anything to do with preventing something like 9/11? Exactly how would it prevent 9/11? The only relevant military responses from the US I have seen are some failed attempts at arresting and assassinating Osama in Afghanistan and a successful assassination in Yemen. These actions did not require a military occupation. The US WAS entitled to a military response, but most of the world objected to the response the US government chose.
Saddam's power is based on support by tribes and factions, and he held on to it because they saw no acceptable alternative for him. Saddam himself is just a thug without any clear political affinities.
As Ofra Bengio points out in "Saddam's Word" the political discourse in Iraq in the last decades has degenerated from the 'Arab national socialist' social-economic concepts of Ba'athism to just tribe, family, loyalty, heroism, blood, honor, and Islam.
Mussolini and Hitler were both launched into power by corporations and civil servants, but these supporters hardly benefited in the long term from this decision. Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Saddam are very similar people operating against different political backgrounds.
Certainly not from a strictly military perspective, as pointed out recently by a retired Dutch general on Dutch television. This US government :
Surely the US is so big and powerful that it can afford military stupidity to some extent, but do US soldiers want to die because of it?
Most of the countries that followed the US into this war in Iraq will not follow this US government into another one. In the case of the Netherlands the PM testified in parliament that he had personally been shown convincing evidence by the US government that Iraq had WMD. Dutch intelligence services did not see this evidence and explicitly did not support these conclusions at the time. 80% of the population considered the PM 'unreliable' in a recent opinion poll (which is exceptional for a former professor in Calvinist theology), and there is a socialist absolute majority (socialist, social democrats, greens) in the opinion polls for the first time in Dutch history.
You can say "kingdom" because you have one.
The word 'monarchy' means a system with power concentrated in one person. Our system is in many ways the opposite of that, concentrating power in the hands of elected colleges and mostly status to hereditary or Royally appointed (Her Majesty's Governor and the Mayor) offices at the top of the hierarchy. In emergency situations these people have real power, but in normal situations they are a kind of chairman (the queen chairing the Council of State, the highest administrative court).
The king must have a queen, after all, and the "First Lady", who has no official status, perhaps corresponds much more closely with a king's consort than our President does with your king. (Queen now, but you know what I mean.)
Our queen is actually 'King' according to the constitution. Luxemburg seceeded from the Netherlands on this semantic issue: they claimed that a 'King' can only be male according to Salic law and appointed another successor to king William III in 1890.
For the first time in more than a century we will get a male king again, and he will automatically become Admiral and commander in chief of the armed forces when he is crowned. A leftover from 1890 that was never changed.
Perhaps that's just closer to what I'm used to, but I can also point to periods in history where this has worked very well indeed.
We switched systems several times between 1648 and now, and one historical observation that is obvious from our history is that the national debt was firmly under control only when we had a strong monarch. Another observation is that the Dutch army only wins wars when led by a strong monarch, that the Netherlands will automatically turn into a monarchy in wars that threaten its existence (1672, 1812), and that parliament will collaborate with an occupying enemy (Napoleon, Hitler) while the monarch organizes armed resistance from abroad.
2. they were dirt cheap vs. the alternative, building a proportionate conventional army, so they left money for other things, included, I must say, aids to poor countries.
The US introduced AIDS to poor countries? I always thought that accusation was a bit farfetched.
If you meant to say aid, then that is nonsense. The US has never given more aid as a share of GDP than comparable countries do. 0.1-0.15 is normal for the US, except for the 1948-1951 period. That is very low for a developed country. Even the Soviet Union was more generous, with a fraction of US GDP. The Soviet Union certainly never had anything close to the US defense budget and was apparently still competitive militarily (according to some). The US started the arms race, and the US still maintains a cold war army today for no apparent reason. I don't see what the US taxpayer gets in return for that money except enemies its government makes.
The US taxpayer certainly doesn't get homeland defense. The USAF was many minutes away on 9/11. That could never have happened in Europe. With several minutes advance warning after the first attack those hijacked planes would have been intercepted by at least three different national airforces.