This is already done. Every DoD research project has to be tied to an element of the NDAA and/or the universal joint task list (what the military is told to do).
I don't see this being a bad thing at all requiring NATIONAL labs to sit down and make sure they spell out in clear language why their study should get taxpayer money. What is our potential payoff? In the private world for the most part we have to justify our costs or requests for funding. This is all about being good stewards of the taxpayer's money.... something that our government does very poorly.
Except most research done on the government's dime is done at universities. Back in the day, before I got told I could not get security clearance to enter the physics lab because my university's lab funding came from DoD and they HATED one of the groups I had many friends in, we used to call said projects 'babykiller grants'. They were basic research with an eye toward military applications. Hell, as an undergrad, one of our class assignments was to design a nuclear weapon of a specified yield while not exceeding a specified size and weight.
This isn't about saving money. This is about saving religion. I dare you to come up with a justification for research on evolution that satisfies the letter of this law to Republican congress-critters.
Yea, bull. It's probably more about stopping foolish spending on idiotic ideas. Like spending a million bucks on a study of how college students use "social media". Or $175,587 for a study on the link between cocaine and the mating habits of quail. Or The National Science Foundation awarded a $200,000 grant to study how the electorate reacts to political candidates‘ stances on climate change. I don't oppose research into climate change. But politicians should be using their own campaign funds to study how to talk about it - not taxpayer money.
Why is spending a few thousand bucks on studying college students' useage of social media a Bad Thing? Social media is one king hell political tool. Or is it a Bad Thing because your political opponents want to figure out the process so they can game the fuck out of it? When you look at the cost of TWO off the books wars that will total over a TRILLION dollars, a couple hundred thousand isn't even a statistical blip, it's barely donut and coffee money. This isn't about being penny-wise and dollar-foolish, this is about politicising science, strangling any research that might threaten your political party's campaign contributors' wallets. Say somebody wants to study ways and means of developing carbon-neutral renewable fuel sources. You think the senator from Standard Oil won't smack that down in a heartbeat?
The military, any military, uses the advantages it has. Asymmetrical warfare - such as running airplanes into the World Trade Center - means that a weaker enemy can achieve disproportional results. It does not mean that the stronger party should give up its advantages. To act in the face sufficient provocation, the US should retain the ability to turn an aggressor nation into a pool of lava.
Nuclear weapons can do that quite nicely, thank you. And the US still has more of them than anyone else, since the successors to the Soviet Union had the world's biggest yard sale and dumped weapons by the kiloton into the 3rd World while decommissioning their nukes.
Keep in mind also that carrier groups make nice fat juicy targets for nukes, and they can't dodge very fast.
Also keep in mind that not every asymmetrical warfare group has 'agressor nation' backing. The putzes that did 9/11 on half a million dollars didn't, they just talked a radical with a bigger checkbook than his brain into fronting the cash for it.
But don't you dare get on a soap box and preach about "true democracy" without answering the question: How do we protect it?
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay." It's okay to say everything they're doing is wrong; Afterall, this is a democracy right? But if you won't suggest an alternative, then you don't really care about democracy. You just want to rage against "the man" and be a rebel without a cause. You want to feel righteous, but without all that hard work of enduring tensions, making compromises, and reasoning out not what's best for you -- but what's best for an entire country.
You know, as someone that lives in a democracy where I feel I can actually have a part in the decision making process I don't have any urge to rage against "the man", simply because "the man" works for me. If you have a controlling ruler class "the man" you are doing democracy all wrong. Just saying. Maybe OP doesn't feel it's democratic anymore, when one of your own agencies is breaking the laws and getting away with it?
"In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master'" -- Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love/The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"
I agree on that point. However, I think we diverge when I say the enemies the United States really has are not necessarily the 'enemies' we see paraded about on the nightly news.
My email read by human beings? Not likely, unless the computer that does read it flags it for special attention of a pair of Mark 1 eyeballs. My email read by computers programmed to look for key words like jihad, Tealiban, plutonium, revolution, and so forth? Almost a certainty. Military hardware is a generation or more ahead of what you'll find on the street, and the TLAs have access to military hardware as well as the funding to pull it off.
Since when has free speech been squashed in the US?
The previous regime's 'Free Speech zones', located far far away from what was going on, far away from pesky news cameras and reporters. Step outside of them during an 'Event', and you got your head knocked in. And no pesky reporters and news cams to record said bashing.
Strange, I just got a letter from my provider saying my current plan doesn't meet Federal minimum requirements and they can't legally offer it anymore...
When all of the internet is being filtered through five or six main providers, it is easier for the NSA to funnel all of the information into its data analysis machines. Can you image the headaches the NSA would have if all the little mom and pop companies (if they were still around to do internet), would not provide for a free backdoor to the operations...
Not really. All they have to do is put their taps on the backbone servers. Since everything is routed through them, they see everything.
People will pay whatever is charged up to the point that the market will bear. It's not that far off from an unregulated utility at this point. Television content delivery has similarly pulled their prices up through the roof, because people will pay it.
I haven't paid for either service (at least intentionally) since 2009. Under the right circumstances I might be persuaded to get the broadband again, but not cable or satellite television.
I pay for satellite service here for TV because there is no cable company locally. I live in a town of about 3000, 40 miles from anywhere. Likewise, only ONE internet provider here, and the lines are slow as hell and expensive. Why? Because there is no competition.
On the one hand, we've had a lot of experience with spectroscopy, and on the other we have a rover actually there.
Depending on exactly where in the atmosphere the light used for the spectroscopy data is coming from, they might both be accurate: If you were working by telescope, Earth should show plenty of ozone; but if your ground-level sampling station is turning up any nontrival amount, that means that something is rather wrong...
Were that the case, I have no doubt that all sorts of vexing questions about how such a methane distribution could come to be would come up; but atmospheres do vary by location.
Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere nor much atmospheric pressure. I'm thinking methane just disperses fast and gets blown away on the solar wind.
Yes, but not a good one. Eric Cantor and Mitch McConell have yet to do anything useful or intelligent.
They're not supposed to. They're meat puppets. They got the corporate hand shoved so far up their asses, they're chewing the Koch brothers' fingernails.
And there were some of us who were hoping that Obama would do BETTER
You don't vote in a constitutional lawyer if you want to change things, you just find out then that "conservative" does not equal Republican but instead means someone that wants to keep stuff mostly the way it is, especially when he's under a lot of pressure to not do the few changes he promised like shutting down a torture camp that makes the US look bad internationally. Obama is better but not in the way you hoped - in a lot of ways he's baby Bush if he'd bothered to come into work.
Keep in mind that Congress passed a bill to prevent the government from moving anybody out of Camp X-Ray and defunded any attempt to move any prisoners scheduled for release back home.
When are people going to realise that whoever sits in the Oval Office is not a whole lot more than a figurehead?
Not sure what you're aiming at. It's Obama's job to know what the NSA is doing. Are you saying, "Obama didn't lie intentionally, he's just horribly bad at doing his job"?
Well at least, screwing up is morally superior to buttfucking a whole nation intentionally.
I'm saying the TLAs routinely lie to their bosses. The heads of the various TLAs are politicians, not intel professionals, they're kept out of the loop for black projects/ops because their job is to go to Congress and say 'Nothing is wrong, we're cool, we're obeying the law, now can we have our funding please?' while the deputies do the dirty work. I'm saying nobody told Obama anything about the illegal shit the TLAs do on a regular basis as there is 'no need to know' the nuts and bolts, only the results. It's been that way since Day 1 of every TLA in existence.
Obama told us that program is not being abused. If the American people examine what was going on the people would say it was ok, they are following the law, they would be ok with what is going on.
I'm having a hard time finding a statement by Obama since reelection where he told the truth. Am I the only one that finds that odd?
Do you REALLY believe any intelligence agency is going to tell the truth to their supposed bosses? TLAs, especially those involved in espionage, deal in lies every day. They call it 'disinformation' or 'security procedures', no matter what their country of origin or who the ultimate boss is. Just look at the CIA under Dubyah. They got told to 'find the WMDs' and came up with the sketchiest evidence possible, then sold it to the powers that were because if they found nothing, they woulda been fired and replaced by somebody who could. Look at Team B under Reagan. They indulged in wishful thinking and stacked 'what ifs' to the point where their final report was total paranoia and science fiction, but it convinced Reagan et al to continue pressuring the Soviets and kept the Cold War going for another decade. Team B wasn't CIA professionals, but the CIA was watching over their shoulders and learned from them that the bosses want to hear what they want to hear, so if you wanna keep your jobs, tell them what they want to hear.
Didn't the FISA court just reveal a few days ago that they can't do proper oversight on NSA? And nothing from the House Intelligence Committee either...
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This is already done. Every DoD research project has to be tied to an element of the NDAA and/or the universal joint task list (what the military is told to do).
I don't see this being a bad thing at all requiring NATIONAL labs to sit down and make sure they spell out in clear language why their study should get taxpayer money. What is our potential payoff? In the private world for the most part we have to justify our costs or requests for funding. This is all about being good stewards of the taxpayer's money.... something that our government does very poorly.
Except most research done on the government's dime is done at universities. Back in the day, before I got told I could not get security clearance to enter the physics lab because my university's lab funding came from DoD and they HATED one of the groups I had many friends in, we used to call said projects 'babykiller grants'. They were basic research with an eye toward military applications. Hell, as an undergrad, one of our class assignments was to design a nuclear weapon of a specified yield while not exceeding a specified size and weight.
This isn't about saving money. This is about saving religion. I dare you to come up with a justification for research on evolution that satisfies the letter of this law to Republican congress-critters.
Yea, bull. It's probably more about stopping foolish spending on idiotic ideas. Like spending a million bucks on a study of how college students use "social media". Or $175,587 for a study on the link between cocaine and the mating habits of quail. Or The National Science Foundation awarded a $200,000 grant to study how the electorate reacts to political candidates‘ stances on climate change. I don't oppose research into climate change. But politicians should be using their own campaign funds to study how to talk about it - not taxpayer money.
Why is spending a few thousand bucks on studying college students' useage of social media a Bad Thing? Social media is one king hell political tool. Or is it a Bad Thing because your political opponents want to figure out the process so they can game the fuck out of it? When you look at the cost of TWO off the books wars that will total over a TRILLION dollars, a couple hundred thousand isn't even a statistical blip, it's barely donut and coffee money. This isn't about being penny-wise and dollar-foolish, this is about politicising science, strangling any research that might threaten your political party's campaign contributors' wallets. Say somebody wants to study ways and means of developing carbon-neutral renewable fuel sources. You think the senator from Standard Oil won't smack that down in a heartbeat?
The military, any military, uses the advantages it has. Asymmetrical warfare - such as running airplanes into the World Trade Center - means that a weaker enemy can achieve disproportional results. It does not mean that the stronger party should give up its advantages. To act in the face sufficient provocation, the US should retain the ability to turn an aggressor nation into a pool of lava.
Nuclear weapons can do that quite nicely, thank you. And the US still has more of them than anyone else, since the successors to the Soviet Union had the world's biggest yard sale and dumped weapons by the kiloton into the 3rd World while decommissioning their nukes.
Keep in mind also that carrier groups make nice fat juicy targets for nukes, and they can't dodge very fast.
Also keep in mind that not every asymmetrical warfare group has 'agressor nation' backing. The putzes that did 9/11 on half a million dollars didn't, they just talked a radical with a bigger checkbook than his brain into fronting the cash for it.
But don't you dare get on a soap box and preach about "true democracy" without answering the question: How do we protect it?
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay." It's okay to say everything they're doing is wrong; Afterall, this is a democracy right? But if you won't suggest an alternative, then you don't really care about democracy. You just want to rage against "the man" and be a rebel without a cause. You want to feel righteous, but without all that hard work of enduring tensions, making compromises, and reasoning out not what's best for you -- but what's best for an entire country.
You know, as someone that lives in a democracy where I feel I can actually have a part in the decision making process I don't have any urge to rage against "the man", simply because "the man" works for me. If you have a controlling ruler class "the man" you are doing democracy all wrong. Just saying. Maybe OP doesn't feel it's democratic anymore, when one of your own agencies is breaking the laws and getting away with it?
"In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master'" -- Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love/The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"
People forget that we do have enemies;
I agree on that point. However, I think we diverge when I say the enemies the United States really has are not necessarily the 'enemies' we see paraded about on the nightly news.
Maybe not so much an 'obivous lie' as a failure to remember history correctly and failure to check facts before posting.
My email read by human beings? Not likely, unless the computer that does read it flags it for special attention of a pair of Mark 1 eyeballs. My email read by computers programmed to look for key words like jihad, Tealiban, plutonium, revolution, and so forth? Almost a certainty. Military hardware is a generation or more ahead of what you'll find on the street, and the TLAs have access to military hardware as well as the funding to pull it off.
Since when has free speech been squashed in the US?
The previous regime's 'Free Speech zones', located far far away from what was going on, far away from pesky news cameras and reporters. Step outside of them during an 'Event', and you got your head knocked in. And no pesky reporters and news cams to record said bashing.
Strange, I just got a letter from my provider saying my current plan doesn't meet Federal minimum requirements and they can't legally offer it anymore...
Yeah, awful nice of them to point out these guys. New torrent sites to loot...
When all of the internet is being filtered through five or six main providers, it is easier for the NSA to funnel all of the information into its data analysis machines. Can you image the headaches the NSA would have if all the little mom and pop companies (if they were still around to do internet), would not provide for a free backdoor to the operations...
Not really. All they have to do is put their taps on the backbone servers. Since everything is routed through them, they see everything.
People will pay whatever is charged up to the point that the market will bear. It's not that far off from an unregulated utility at this point. Television content delivery has similarly pulled their prices up through the roof, because people will pay it.
I haven't paid for either service (at least intentionally) since 2009. Under the right circumstances I might be persuaded to get the broadband again, but not cable or satellite television.
I pay for satellite service here for TV because there is no cable company locally. I live in a town of about 3000, 40 miles from anywhere. Likewise, only ONE internet provider here, and the lines are slow as hell and expensive. Why? Because there is no competition.
On the one hand, we've had a lot of experience with spectroscopy, and on the other we have a rover actually there.
Depending on exactly where in the atmosphere the light used for the spectroscopy data is coming from, they might both be accurate: If you were working by telescope, Earth should show plenty of ozone; but if your ground-level sampling station is turning up any nontrival amount, that means that something is rather wrong... Were that the case, I have no doubt that all sorts of vexing questions about how such a methane distribution could come to be would come up; but atmospheres do vary by location.
Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere nor much atmospheric pressure. I'm thinking methane just disperses fast and gets blown away on the solar wind.
Back in the day, they used to teach gun safety and marksmanship in schools. It was part of PE. Nobody shot up school campuses back in those days.
Course, back then, they actually funded things like mental hospitals to treat mental patients, not elect them to Congress...
Yes, but not a good one. Eric Cantor and Mitch McConell have yet to do anything useful or intelligent.
They're not supposed to. They're meat puppets. They got the corporate hand shoved so far up their asses, they're chewing the Koch brothers' fingernails.
Thank you, RMS. Now go take a shower already.
Give me a break!
is what people will scream when the phone bricks up on them.
The kids too busy updating their Facebook statuses? Can't do that on a programmable calculator that I know of...
Why do you assume I'm 'perfectly fine' with the NSA actively and openly breaking the law and having zero oversight?
You don't vote in a constitutional lawyer if you want to change things, you just find out then that "conservative" does not equal Republican but instead means someone that wants to keep stuff mostly the way it is, especially when he's under a lot of pressure to not do the few changes he promised like shutting down a torture camp that makes the US look bad internationally. Obama is better but not in the way you hoped - in a lot of ways he's baby Bush if he'd bothered to come into work.
Keep in mind that Congress passed a bill to prevent the government from moving anybody out of Camp X-Ray and defunded any attempt to move any prisoners scheduled for release back home.
When are people going to realise that whoever sits in the Oval Office is not a whole lot more than a figurehead?
Not sure what you're aiming at. It's Obama's job to know what the NSA is doing. Are you saying, "Obama didn't lie intentionally, he's just horribly bad at doing his job"?
Well at least, screwing up is morally superior to buttfucking a whole nation intentionally.
I'm saying the TLAs routinely lie to their bosses. The heads of the various TLAs are politicians, not intel professionals, they're kept out of the loop for black projects/ops because their job is to go to Congress and say 'Nothing is wrong, we're cool, we're obeying the law, now can we have our funding please?' while the deputies do the dirty work. I'm saying nobody told Obama anything about the illegal shit the TLAs do on a regular basis as there is 'no need to know' the nuts and bolts, only the results. It's been that way since Day 1 of every TLA in existence.
Obama told us that program is not being abused. If the American people examine what was going on the people would say it was ok, they are following the law, they would be ok with what is going on.
I'm having a hard time finding a statement by Obama since reelection where he told the truth. Am I the only one that finds that odd?
Do you REALLY believe any intelligence agency is going to tell the truth to their supposed bosses? TLAs, especially those involved in espionage, deal in lies every day. They call it 'disinformation' or 'security procedures', no matter what their country of origin or who the ultimate boss is. Just look at the CIA under Dubyah. They got told to 'find the WMDs' and came up with the sketchiest evidence possible, then sold it to the powers that were because if they found nothing, they woulda been fired and replaced by somebody who could. Look at Team B under Reagan. They indulged in wishful thinking and stacked 'what ifs' to the point where their final report was total paranoia and science fiction, but it convinced Reagan et al to continue pressuring the Soviets and kept the Cold War going for another decade. Team B wasn't CIA professionals, but the CIA was watching over their shoulders and learned from them that the bosses want to hear what they want to hear, so if you wanna keep your jobs, tell them what they want to hear.
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Acton
Yeah, but we need the electricity.
Really is anyone surprised?
Wasn't the oversight supposed to prevent this?
Didn't the FISA court just reveal a few days ago that they can't do proper oversight on NSA? And nothing from the House Intelligence Committee either...
Nixon mask might be more appropriate.
But, quote to the contrary, Nixon really was a crook...