I am not a "heavy" broadband user: my average usage is not high at all, but it goes up and down over time. I prefer to order or buy DVDs to downloading movies (not that I watch that many movies). I prefer to buy music online because I don't want to buy a whole album for the one song I want (not that I buy much music). That being said, my usage may be very low for weeks (web browsing and email) and then go up for several days. Maybe I do buy a video online, or decide to see a couple of episodes of a show I missed before the new series starts (several legitimate advertising supported sources for various series have popped up). But there are also business reasons, like having to transfer over my business website or move backups of my online store's catalog, downloading (probably via P2P) some OpenSource package or distribution. I do some work with a political organization and once in a fair while we use some sort of conferencing software. Right now, we are restocking our store before the start of the spring season, so we are uploading more photos than usual. Most of our steady bandwidth usage comes off of the site which we pay for someone else to host (with metered usage). I actually go through some trouble to do larger transfers off-peak; if it is business related, I have to anyway because it is a bad idea for me to tie up or munge my own website during peak hours (duh).
Traffic shaping based on protocol would nail me performing any of these actions, even though, as a rule, I am not a 'problem' user, even if actually using the service *I paid for* could be considered a 'problem'. I don't see why I should not be able to expect to make moderate use of the service most of the time and actually be able to run it out when I actually need it. *Why* I need it is none of the vendor's business. I pay them for the service and that is all they need to know.
I agree. But why send back the cheques at all? We haven't done that in Australia for years. But then we're mostly eftpos for everything above a newspaper purchase so we're not quite so addicted to posting paper. Most money travels via SWIFT, about three trillion per year. I have no idea what an "eftpo" is, but the scanned checks are used for fraud detection if there is anything else funny about the transaction. Does the signature match? Does the check itself match the other checks received on this account? The problem with not sending the paper is you cannot check a watermark on a scanned check. You can tell from a paper check that it is just a cheap laser-printer fake or that the amount was touched up with a different pen after it was written. There are people here who are bitten by check fraud and the banks, who only have a "substitute check" cannot investigate it. Legally here, checks are different from credit card transactions. With a credit card, you can deny transactions and someone has to prove that you made it. With a check, writing a bad check is criminal, and you are generally presumed to have written a check unless there is a strong indication that you did not.
Neither is eating, sleeping, or playing music. The Constitution was based on a legal system where powers are explicitly granted to the State and rights are reserved to the People. This is made explicit in the 10th Amendment. If flying is not mentioned, it is a Right. By that logic, drinking and driving is a right. So is wife beating and murder. Of course, let's not forget speeding, driving down the wrong side of the road and child molestation. We could do this for hours. The main point was that not being mentioned does not mean that it is not a right. Some of the things you mention are defined in terms of common law: murder directly deprives someone of their Right to life the State acts to protect the individual. In many cases, it *is* in fact, unconstitutional to regulate the things you mention: the federal government may not set a drinking age or speed limit, that is why they use federal highway funds as a bludgeon to make individual states set their own limits in sync with federal desires. Same with No Child Gets Ahead and federal education funds.
Wouldn't the house of the future be made up of easily interchangable parts that can be easily retrofitted to existing structures? It wouldn't be something designed from the ground up with today's bleeding-edge technologies. Part of the hassle of doing work in the houses of today are parts, fixtures, or even the location of holes, that are of a new standard and plain just don't work with anything else. For quite a while, I've wanted to redo a place with decorative chair rails that actually pop off to reveal a channel for all the wiring: electric, phone, network, whatever. You would put in standard modular outlet covers at various points and it would be a fairly quick and non-destructive job to, say, run speaker cable between two rooms and pop two-wire or RCA modules into the jack. You could also put a small hub or wireless access point in that space relatively easily and still get at it for maintenance. The chair rails themselves are practical in their own right.
An interesting idea to think about when people say "Arming everyone would make everyone safer because the criminals would be scared". Well, who wouldn't be? The Surgeon General estimates that at any point in time 20% of Americans are suffering from a diagnosable mental condition. Do you really want 60 million people with mental problems armed and ready to kill at the drop of a hat?
If you say no, then you're going against the intent of the constitution, if you say yes, well it's a blood bath waiting to happen.
There are almost no questions worth deciding that are rigidly yes or no, though some lean pretty hard to one side or the other. First, arming "everyone" is not the intent. Not everyone wants to carry a gun, even among those who support the right. I, myself, wouldn't touch the things for almost ten years because of something I went through, but I still was able to recognize that that was my problem and it did not affect other peoples' rights. I don't carry now, but that may change at some point. Secondly, it is not necessary to have everyone armed to change situations, any more than it is necessary to have everyone be a First Responder or otherwise Red Cross trained, although I think that in both cases the number of conscientious people who have opted to go through training and practice for these skills is less than it should be. One person at this council meeting with a concealed weapon would have been enough to change the odds and save lives. Unlike the police, the armed citizen is not a visible and obvious target. Attackers can plan for police/security. They cannot plan for a random citizen who is carrying and been trained to shoot well getting a bead on them while they are concentrating on whatever their objective is.
As for the mental illness question, of course people with (serious) mental illness should not have weapons, or chainsaws, or kitchen knives. If someone is declared a danger to themselves or others by a mental health professional and a judge of competent jurisdiction, then of course we should take that into account. On the other hand, the idea that a veteran who had PTSD five years ago and is no longer in treatment cannot carry a firearm is absurd. The same with the idea that someone is a danger to society because they said in public hearing at one point that one of the purposes of the 2nd Amendment was a check against the government. As one of the Uncle Posts mentioned, licensing can sometimes be a great vehicle for prejudice. You also don't mention that we do not allow violent criminals to carry.
We also simply do not have a bloodbath in the places where ownership is very permissive. Even the recent incident here is rather rare and gun violence is much lower here than in the cities even though it is more permissive and the guns-per-capita is quite high. People focus on it because it is spectacular, not because it is common. The whole "Wild West" analogy is a red herring: the West was a problem because of a lack of Law and because the Law that existed was as corrupt as the criminals. People were not punished or were not punished consistently for their crimes and had to defend themselves against the local gendarmes as often as anyone else. That's a problem, and it has nothing to do with guns. It occurred in the Orient in different times and places after all weapons were outlawed.
There's a difference between retarding rate of change and blocking certain changes. Fast-changing governments are inefficient and unstable, but so are governments literally incapable of listening to their people. We're fine for now, because we are running into problems (that need to be overcome) that were predicted by the founding fathers, but it's inevitable that things will change whether our society likes it or not. Sure and they do, they have, and they will continue to. How many amendments do we have?
As an example, the second amendment protects every citizen's right to bear arms. That was a fair call back in the late 16th century, when power was unstable, and people were more accountable for their votes. It was a necessary protection to ensure that people felt secure in using their due influence on the government. Nowadays, there's very little need for it, now that the country is large and its people largely anonymous parts of a huge crowd. Politicians and zealots alike are no longer capable of threatening the public, and most of the people live in the cities, where there isn't much call for a gun, except for protection against other guns. The right to bear arms is only relevant today because it has continued to be granted for so long, that now any potential criminal can get their hands on one. Any attempts to institute gun control are now not only futile (because pro-gun spokesmen can claim it as a constitutional right), but detrimental as well, despite what it does for the murder rate.
I cannot disagree with this strongly enough, especially the idea that governments are somehow harmless today. The right to life is one of the most fundamental. If I do not have the ability to defend my life, I have no other rights. The police rarely get to the scene of violence in time to prevent anything. Also, many people still live outside of cities where guns are as much tools as weapons (e.g. protecting my sheep from coy dogs).
Lastly, I think the UK has amply demonstrated that taking away guns cannot be done successfully enough to change the equation. In urban areas where they have had success seizing weapons, thugs *rent* weapons out for crimes, plus the fact that knife and other kinds of muggings, convenience store robberies have gone up because they know people are defenseless. Police often refuse to go after the criminals because no one was hurt, so violent crimes take priority (apparently some corners/stores are robbed pretty much on a regular schedule). Yes, their gun crime went down some, but it simply displaced a lot of the crime, and it did not go down enough that I would be comfortable giving up my right to defend myself when I know (and have experienced) that the police will not and physically can not defend me. An attorney locally in a city council meeting was reduced to throwing chairs at a shooter to try to defend himself after the attacker killed two police officers guarding the room *and took their guns* for use against the room's occupants. One of the council members actually had a carry permit but did not have his weapon with him. Bad mistake: carrying the thing for a hundred years without needing it is better than needing it once and not having it.
There are no laws to quote. Flying is not mentioned in the Constitution. Neither is eating, sleeping, or playing music. The Constitution was based on a legal system where powers are explicitly granted to the State and rights are reserved to the People. This is made explicit in the 10th Amendment. If flying is not mentioned, it is a Right.
Are we as bad as Soviet era Russia? No. As Iraq? No. As any number of 3rd world countries? No. As Nazi Germany? No.
In some ways, though, we are worse than the Soviets. I heard an ex-Russian national (granted asylum some time ago) comment that visibly marking on a plane ticket that you are considered untrustworthy is something that was and would never have been done in Soviet Russia, for instance. Foreign nationals were generally treated with much greater respect under the Soviets (within certain bounds). He made several other similar comments, but I don't recall them off-hand. There are places where we are even more brazen about distrusting and categorizing our citizens than they were (and places where we are still much better).
Are we as bad as Germany in the (early) '30s? Yes. Reading, e.g. some of Bonhoeffer's writings is strikingly apt. The level of distrust in many places, the slow accretion of government power, all of the rhetoric about having to defend ourselves, defend our honor, get revenge, the hate of Muslims mirrors some of it quite closely. The backlash against non-mainstream political opinions is also heading there. I was physically attacked (someone in a car, I was on the sidewalk) this last year for daring to hold a campaign sign and one of the others in our group was as well some time later. Our group has also suffered theft, vandalism, and harassment. (This just locally.) Treatment by the media was nearly obscene at points. And this is no where near as radical politics as during the Civil Rights Era, for instance: this type of reaction is now for fairly small divergences from the mainstream. So your joke about being harassed for Obama literature is not far off. The problem with most descents into darkness is it is not *just* the government. It is a general change in society as well that makes it easier for the government to do what it does. That is the real enemy and needs to be stopped before it gains momentum.
"Free Speech Zones"? Being tazed for being annoying at political events? For not being able to produce ID at a library? Knock-less warrants with full SWAT teams to deliver a summons? Large-scale crowd suppression devices being developed/deployed with local law enforcement? Don't tell me we shouldn't be concerned. How long should we wait to worry? In the electronics age, a police state does not *need* to be as visible to be effective.
That's one reason why I personally don't respect parts of the constitution. If there's a majority in the future, then, well, there is a majority. If you do anything else, you will piss a majority of people off. It seems kinda funny because the constitution was designed with the people (read: the majority of people at the time) in mind. But their influence couldn't stay in their own times when it was relevant, it had to spread to times where their wants become increasingly irrelevant. There are new majorities now with new needs and wants, and they can speak for themselves if they want. The constitution should really just stick to making sure they can speak for themselves, and that those in power listen. To some extent, the system was designed purposely to slow down the process of change, to balance toward conservative decision making (dictionary definition of "conservative"). This is, in general, a very good thing. You don't want to change your government according to the latest fad, you want slow change where you can get an idea of how things work as you go forward. A conservative government structure also tries to prevent thrashing (shifting majorities just changing the same things back and forth as Congress changes hands) and to try to encourage more rational decision making in times of crisis.
You should never make any long term decisions in a crisis. People are horrible at it and tend to be highly irrational at such times. Look how badly we have done after 9/11. How much worse would we have done with a more fluid government system? That is why we have checks and balances (among other reasons), why Supreme Court appointments are for life, and many other things. At the same time, the system does allow slow change, through new laws, amendments, new appointments to the judiciary over time, and so forth. Our system has changes a good bit since the Founders' day (some to the good, at this precise moment, much to the bad). Our government and Constitution is not perfect, certainly, but the Founder's did a pretty good job, if you think about it, of anticipating a lot of potential problems, quite a few of which warnings we have ignored. Sure, it can use touching up in places (I can think of several off hand), but if you think about the number of popular revolutions which ended in total chaos and bloodbaths (e.g. France, Russia, China), we didn't do badly at all.
I think you are largely right. My experiences were not much different from yours, including having had to do government work and obtain a clearance, but I have a few years of extra perspective which make a world of difference. The US is not the Soviet Union yet, but the atmosphere has definitely changed, like a cold draft from a window. The number of people who are affected, from minor to major ways, is increasing slowly but steadily, and waiting for things to get bad before complaining or saying "I can deal with it" personally are not good plans. Bad systems, once in place, reinforce each other. More and more people making it clear that this is not the direction we need to be going in is a very good thing.
For what it is worth, 9/11 was not as big a change as many people make it out to be. The Drug War really started a lot of the problems. 9/11 increased the pace of change and allowed some of it to be done more openly (people outright asking for it), but the trend was already there. I was actually surprised that 9/11 did not speed up the process more than it did. I am not in any way in favor of drugs, but the way we have gone about trying to eliminate them is asinine.
It was the perfect political opportunity. There was no down side. If WMD is found claim credit. If WMD is not found claim you were deceived.
The Bush Administration deceived first, then tried to rationalize. Not the other way around. For deceit to work, it has to be hidden. That the deceit is coming out now is just a natural progression of history. I think part of the point is that Congress went along with the plan without doing any real fact checking, asking any tough questions, or really even discussing anything. They just made pretty speeches and signed on the dotted line. And this is exactly in line with what the GP is saying: folks in Congress saw no downside; they could just blame Bush either way. Whether the blame is *deserved* is irrelevant to *that* question; Congress had the opportunity to avoid the situation and are now jumping up and down about how it wasn't "their fault" (except for the ones still saying "Gee, what a nice day this is!".) It is their *job* to be suspicious and not write blank checks. If Bush fooled them, they failed that job.
If the question is why were so many willing to believe in WMDs in the first place, this time around, there it is. That we did so is shameful, but it wasn't without cause.
[snip]
I guess my point is to emphasize that we weren't just lied to, and we weren't just sheep to believe the lies. We were misled by guys who later decided to take the heat as liars instead of guys who were too stupid to recognize bluff from data. I guess I'd damned well be neither, but if I had to admit to the American public that a) I'm a lying politician or b) I'm a politician dumber than Saddam, - well, let's just say I can maybe see how the choice was made.
[snip] I agree. There certainly was an attempt to produce weapons in the past and Saddam Hussein was "not a nice guy." Though why we propped him up with that in mind is also a good question. It should also be kept in mind that part of the reason for Iraq's underground nuclear program (part of) had nothing to do with weapons. It had been amply demonstrated to them by Israel that any peaceful nuclear power program had better be underground as well. Once you are breaking the law one way, why not do so in others? Iraq was in a very difficult position regarding energy independence and its future. It made some stupid choices, but you can see the thread of how it got there.
Saddam's bluster was pure idiocy and did not help his case, but it should have been ignored, and the fact that he had camel-dung for brains should not have resulted in us killing so many Iraqi people who perhaps did not. The big problem to me is that, even having made that decision, we took no thought whatsoever to the consequences of going in and what would be needed to get out and leave a functioning country behind. That would have taken an understanding of the fragile balance-of-power that kept Saddam in control in the first place. We would need to admit that, even having camel-dung for brains, he or something like him was what the Iraqi system demanded to keep from imploding. Instead, *we* have become Saddam Hussein, holding the system together with violence and suppressing dissent, and I don't think our brains are smelling much better as a result.
So "you haven't proved you don't" is good enough to invade a sovereign country.
The terms of the original gulf war cease fire agreement required him to do so. Iraq was not operating as a fully sovereign country until that agreement was fulfilled, certain restrictions were in place. As demonstrated by the no fly zone, certain economic restrictions, etc. That's the price a country pays for losing a war.
That:
Presumes the validity of the first war. Given communications with the State Department before the invasion of Kuwait, it can be viewed that we either severely dropped the ball or gave Iraq permission to invade Kuwait (by considering it an "internal problem"). Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, whether "justified" or not, had at least as much basis as our invasion of Iraq (repeated Kuwaiti violations of oil production treaties).
Presumes that the victor not only has the power but the moral right to impose whatever conditions they feel like. Look where that got us after WWI.
Presumes that Iraq violated the conditions and severely enough to warrant the reprisals. Scott Ritter, the former head of the inspection team, resigned over the fact that he did not believe the weapons were there and that his recommendations were not taken seriously. Similar circumstances lead to the Valerie Plame affair. On the balance, we had no reason to believe they had anything of the sort (and much evidence otherwise). "I don't like the guy's attitude," does not justify an invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. Even if it did, there are a lot of problems in the world and you pick your fights.
Pragmatically, we run the danger of teaching other countries that they will be punished whether they try to comply with our demands or not, so it is better to actually have WMDs as a bargaining chip. How many nuclear capable nations have we invaded recently?
Pape's exhaustive analysis of suicide terrorism shows that it does not grow out of terrorist groups escalating their methods. Rather, it grows out of guerrilla/insurrection movements (not previously "terrorist") when they are not having an effect and run out of options. What do desperate people do when we back them into the corner where even suicide terrorism is not getting our attention? Add in the point above and connect the dots.
...and for non-believers who deny the existence of a Force that attracts the buttered side of the toast to the ground, well... what about taping two cats together, back to back ?
Just put on your leather jacket and gloves before attempting to do so... (shhhhhh ! DO NOT WANTZ !)
I'm calling bullshit. You don't hear Islamists complaining about the 1980s, they're complaining about today. We didn't turn Afghanistan into a bloodbath in 2001, everyone including the UN attests to the fact that the Taliban were pillaging and raping the people and the land. The security situation might suck there now that it's better to have that and hope for a better future than being raped on a daily basis without hope at all. The Afghanistan mission is backed by both the UN and NATO.
All right. You tell me where the Taliban came from. You are totally right that it was *already* a bloodbath before 2001. We put them in power. We pulled out of Afghanistan and left their country in a tailspin it *never* came out of. It was *our* weapons they were shooting at us (mostly). How is that not relevant? Does it "justify" them raping and murdering in their own country? Absolutely not. Is it relevant? Hell yes.
Furthermore, the US is a Democracy with a rotating leadership. It makes as much sense to refer to a 30-year old President as it does treating today's Germany like Hitler's Nazi Germany. Different leaders, different attitudes, different countries.
It's a leadership which, supposedly, we elect. We are all part of the problem. We should be part of a solution. We have had an ongoing attitude of heavy-handed intervention which, if anything, has been getting worse. Besides, from their point of view they should what? Drop all of their grievances and forgive us because we had an election? Would we do that for them? I wouldn't.
Bottom line is that the West does its best to kill terrorists with minimal collateral cost but it's not easy and *everyone* makes mistakes sometimes, including Britain, Spain, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. I find it peculiar that a few months ago Lebanon bombed the crap out of their local Palestinian refugee camp, killing hundreds of civilians in the process and not a single person condemned them. Not in the media. Not in the UN. I would go further and say that the media only published the official government version and the UN actually passed a resolution expressing full support of their actions. So apparently it's okay for Muslims to massacre their own civilians on purpose but when someone in the West does it by accident while trying to target terrorists that hide in civilian structures, well suddenly we're evil or something. Give me a break!
I certainly have a problem with Lebanon's actions. I don't think that has any bearing on ours.
The problem is not with collateral damage in our quest to kill terrorists per se, though I think we do idiotic things on that score as well. That ranges from happenstance to stupidity; war is hard; mistakes do happen. The problem is what we are doing which has little or nothing to do with terrorism and a lot more to do with imperialism, putting ourselves in places we shouldn't be in in the first place and then saying "oops" when we kill civilians. That's not collateral damage. That's not accident. It's not even stupidity. It is much worse, and dropping a 500lb bomb on a wedding party and saying "Oh Man!" doesn't seem much different than blowing up a marketplace even if one of the attackers is wearing a uniform and flying an expensive jet. In some totally fscked way, the guy in the market has the high ground since at least he is willing to give his own life for his cause. The fact that we have fallen so far as to fail that comparison is shockingly sad. In some cases (*not all*) our warfare has turned into video games with no connection to people bleeding and dying. The guy living there does not have that luxury and it's not that entertaining to him.
The only difference is that people know that they can criticize the West without having their skull smashed open, while the same is not true in Egypt or Lebanon. People are chicken shits that way. For every one thing the West does wrong you could find one hundred things countries in the middle-east do wrong yet you will
I am not an USA citizen. Taking that into consideration, and also the fact that at least 1/5 of the/. users are not USA citizens or native English speakers (judging by the number of spelling mistakes not usually found in texts written by US citizens or native English speakers), would you care to answer to the following questions ?
* Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
How do you propose to do that ? The US have low population density and a extremely long coastline and border. Do you think that would be possible without enforcing 3 to 5 years of mandatory military service for each adult citizen ?
Maxo-Texas answered some of this in the UP (Uncle-Post?), but another useful factor is bringing our troops home from abroad. Right now, our National Guard, the forces that are supposed to be protecting our home ground under the state governors, is overseas. Additionally, once you shift more of the regular troops home and plunk a few of their bases on the border, illegal aliens would probably be a little more reluctant to traipse across an active military base. Another interesting idea I have heard is a strategically placed dam on the Rio Grande. Just a small increase in width and depth would make as much difference as 50 fences. Right now, according to a border guard I was conversing with, we largely know when groups are crossing the border because they set off monitoring equipment. We don't have anyone near enough to do anything about it. More personnel (which we have to pay anyway) and the ability to slow them down a touch on the crossing will make a huge difference in ability to respond.
* H.R. 3305 would allow pilots and specially assigned law enforcement personnel to carry firearms in order to protect airline passengers, possibly preventing future 9/11-style attacks.
To my knowledge, the possession of firearms while flying in a plane is forbidden because of the danger of accidents caused by firearms misfiring, such as decompression. How does Ron Paul plan to prevent those accidents ? How does Ron Paul plan to prevent rogue law enforcement personnel or criminals impersonating them from taking advantage of the firearms they were allowed to take on board ?
Special ammunition prevents decompression-related issues. The security issues you mention are no worse (and no different) than exist now, at much greater expense, with current policies. With the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) hiring gobs of people to handle more and more sensitive tasks, they cannot possibly continue to be picky about who they hire. Any terrorist getting into one of these positions can bring down the whole house of cards. At least by using more organic methods, you end up with a less complex, less expensive solution that has no more downside.
This question not related to your post, but I would be grateful if you would answer, since no one really addressed the issue:
Were the US to stop stop, as the campaigner who answered the original questions that started this thread said, subsidizing the defense of foreign states, how would the US be able to influence the foreign policy of those states ? Would not USA become less secure by renouncing the leverage offered by the said subsidies ? Considering also that most of those subsidies are spent on US military equipment and maintenance for equipment purchased previously, wouldn't you lose more, in terms of security, if you renounced this opportunity to have a say in how other countries, which are not always well intentioned or governed, direct their foreign policy ?
This question assumes that we are usefully affecting their policies. Mostly what has been happening is that the world has been becoming more violent, we have been going into debt, and mult
"Who cares who Spain morally supported? Is holding an opinion justification for mass-murder now? The fact of the matter is that we have a heck of a lot more reasons to justify taking out their people than they do to take ours out. If they were to lay down their arms today and promise to stop attacking us then there is a really good chance this war would end. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for us laying down our arms."
Morally supported? Opinion? They had *troops* on the Arabian peninsula. Does freedom of speech include shooting people now?
That is also, incidentally, why Al Qaeda has not launched any attacks in the States recently. They said in one of their strategy documents in 2004 that attacking us at home was not their best strategy, Instead, they were going to attack countries that were part of our coalition (with troops in the region) to get them to pull out so that we had to bear the cost ourselves. They thought that once we realized how much running an empire was costing, *we'd stop doing it*. They were right on Spain: they attacked and Spain withdrew. Most of our other allies have scaled back support and the wars are costing us a fortune. They were wrong on the effect: we aren't smart enough to balance our checkbook.
Murdering civilians for no good reason is wrong. We should probably think about that too. We should probably have thought about that before we turned Afghanistan into a bloodbath (in the '80s) and armed bin Ladin. You might remember we turned the whole region into a battleground in WWII as well. Unfortunately, they don't separate us very well from the Russians and the Germans either, so the distrust of us "Westerners" goes rather deep, just in the modern age.
The problem with blaming the victim at this point is figuring out who it is.
If you live in New York, you can't mail order power from Arizona. There is no way to tell specific electrons where to go; they follow potentials. When demand shifts and the grid suddenly has to cross-ship power to balance itself out, transmission lines not meant to take that load can and do fry.
You cannot just let everyone put power into the grid willy nilly, not unless you want it to be real dark half the time and the fire department to be real busy the other half. Power does not just have to be there, it has to be *clean*: right voltage and amperage, right polarization, and *in sync* with the rest of the grid. Spikes or brown outs, bad polarization or out of sync power can cause fried equipment, can cause fires, it can cause serious damage to the turbines of other generators. This is what happened in New York a bit ago where they lost power Upstate for a couple of *months* in some places. It started with one plant putting out badly polarized power. Another plant had to shut down to avoid damage to its turbines. This meant that power had to suddenly cross the grid in a way it wasn't supposed to and things fried. Because of "deregulation," nobody had a clue whose problem it was, how to find out what went wrong, or how to fix it.
You can have people putting small amounts of power into the grid and this is especially helpful during peak load or if those small power sources can come online quickly when needed. (Coal plants put out a lot of power efficiently but take hours to warm up and come on line. Natural gas plants are wasteful but can be running from a cold start in 15 minutes). Somewhere, though, you have to have *baseline power*-- a source that is large enough to meet a chunk of the demand, is steady and stable, and has turbines with enough mass to absorb significant surges or spikes. The momentum of the turbines (and force of the magnetic field) actually helps to clean up the power. Hydro, nuclear, and coal are the best sources for baseline power in this respect, especially nuclear. Beyond that, there needs to be clear lines of responsibility for who is in charge of synchronizing power (making sure sine waves and polarity match up) and who decides when sources need to come on and off-line (and prepare other plants for the resulting effect on the grid).
"De-regulation" in the face of these issues is nuts, not because of economics, but because of physics. The fact of natural monopolies (who owns the poles?) and the last mile problem (why compete for a rural customer?) makes it a potential economic problem as well.
To some extent, I agree with you that a free market requires some regulation. Otherwise it is feudalism. However:
Your MS example is fatally flawed in two ways:
1) The regulation has not worked on the federal level either. We are at what? 15 years now and how much taxpayer money with *no change whatsoever*? One thing to realize with some of the state vs. federal or government vs. non argument is that where the less regulated option does not work in theory, the more regulated option fails repeatedly in practice. The *customers* are still giving them money. * I was in a discussion with folks recently who do certified organic farming. The guy from the USDA comes in, looks at their farm, checks their papers, and drives off. They could spray plutonium on their fields the moment his pickup leaves that driveway, and they would still be "certified organic." * SEC regulations did not stop Enron. Although some investors who bothered to do their own market analysis and arithmetic and smelled something rank avoided the mess, the others felt safe *because of* the SEC and got hooked. There are trade-offs to both sides, each case is different, and regulation can often bite in very perverse ways.
2) As the previous poster pointed out, the office suite monopoly is enforced by government IP laws. In your state vs. MS example, and in the face of less restrictive IP law (protecting interoperability rights, for example), someone could just reverse engineer the thing legally, MS would not be able to bludgeon startups into non-existence, and a lot of other things. Making these laws sane would not eliminate the problems, but they might eliminate 90% of them, and then you could come up with a rational and targeted solution for 8%, and just suffer with the 2% that will never be solved no matter what.
A counter-example where I would agree with you solidly is utility regulation. Everybody is all about "deregulating" utilities without thinking about why they were regulated in the first place: natural monopoly and the last mile problem. Basically, you can't have two competing power companies both running competing telephone poles into the same city and the same houses, and somebody has to maintain the lines if they are shared (a big expense and one the utility has some unique knowledge for handling). Additionally, you have the problem that utilities would waste resources competing over lucrative urban customers (more than one customer per pole) and ditch the rural customer (several dozen poles per customer). So, we granted regional utilities a monopoly on urban areas in exchange for a requirement that they service the last mile without prejudice. Now we have "municipal electric" coops taking over the urban areas and expect utilities to compete over rural customers? Are people on crack?
So what am I missing? Are my examples of better jobs really worse than digging ditches? (I suppose ditch digging can develop your work ethic and physique, whereas retail sales may just develop your misanthropy) Have I been looking at the unskilled job market in the wrong cities, or not recently enough?
Yes, there's a lot of competition for many of those retail jobs, especially with employers reluctant to take seasonal help (except Christmas), especially in rural America, where there happen to be more immigrants too. Even "Do you want fries with that?" can be hard to get. Now, young folks that can't get those jobs just get food stamps and TANF which is one of the real horrors of illegal immigration-- ballooning entitlement programs (and not necessarily by the immigrants) and no way off them. (Not that immigration is the sole cause.)
Anyway, regarding Paul and immigration it's a question of principles. Someone who values freedom should have more respect for freedom of movement; even if someone can't vote or collect welfare here, if someone wants to sell or rent them a home here the government shouldn't get in the way. It's also a question of humility: a good politician should also have more respect and fear for unintended consequences. Not every job in America can be done by a non-American, but many of the rest can be outsourced regardless of whether or not you let the non-American inside US borders. The only difference immigration restrictions make in those cases is to ensure that a multinational corporation gets to take a cut as middleman.
A Republic protects the community from the excesses of the individual and it also protects the individual from the mob. Freedom vs. private property rights. You have every right to express your opinion and disagree with me in public, but not in my home, like someone who stole my political sign out of my yard last night. My sign, my property, my speech. You don't like my candidate, put a sign on your own property. Same thing with immigration. I have the right to move to another state, but I follow that state's rules, I buy or rent a place to live. I don't party crash. We live here and we have the right to set rules around our home. Sometimes I wonder if the people who support freedom of movement to an extreme would feel the same if I moved into their house.
There are boundaries. We loosen those boundaries every day out of an expectation of courtesy and civility, but if they do not exist, chaos ensues. Many of these folks don't just violate our immigration laws, and it's not just a matter of legalizing them. There are illegal aliens here living a dozen or more to a house, well outside what our health or building codes allow (and they are awfully lax here). That's one of the ways they can work for so little. If I tried that, they'd take my kid. That's not a free market and that's not a civil society, and we can't sustain anything approaching a standard of living here under those conditions.
Now, if we got some breathing room, work on getting our industry back, anything more than service jobs, rebuild the economy, then, when the 'Boomers retire en masse, we'll need more immigrants and be better placed to handle them (legally) and maintain a standard of living. If white trash doesn't want to take a $10 an hour job (2007 dollars!) at that point and is displaced by a legal immigrant, let the shiftless bum rot. In the meantime, we have a lot of things to straighten out on both sides of the border and the refugee flood just makes it all the more complicated.
I would prefer that there be no illegal immigration to this country. I would prefer that all immigrants be legal. Unfortunately, that can't happen with our current immigration policies. I think I read that with the current immigration quotas, the queue of people waiting to immigrate from Mexico and Central America is over 100 years.
I suspect that for most of these people, it's not that they want to break the law, they simply have no choice if they want to feed their families.
It may be harsh, but their need does not mean we need to change our laws. Any society can only accept immigrants at a certain rate without destabilization. We have been fairly liberal with that in the past, but would go well past that today if we let everyone come, especially given that we have no more frontier to absorb them. I speak Spanish poorly; I started learning too late. My daughter will do better, but many people have not gone down that road at all. It takes at least a full generation for both society and the immigrants to adapt.
Part of the sacrifice my family made is that they could not all come at once, and some of them never came at all. They stayed behind when the Communists took over their country and we do not know what ever became of them. But that is not America's fault. The fact that America took any of us in at all, gave us a chance to start over, is a kindness. We were not owed anything. Charity and compassion is a good thing, but the idea of entitlement to that generosity is dangerous and mildly disturbing.
The better approach is to change some of our practices, like destructive trade agreements that wiped out Mexican farmers, change our approach to the drug war which will reduce the corruption and instability in their country, reduce the welfare state here that is part of the attraction. There are lots of ways to approach the problem without opening the flood gates. The same practices that will help them may also prevent us from going down the tubes, so there is much to gain by looking at the real problems. My family fled one country that let itself come apart. I don't intend to flee this one.
I agree with most of what you say. There has to be a balance between Federalism and States Rights. The Articles of Confederation failed miserably because they did not provide enough central government. There has to be a balance somewhere (whether it is ever or ever has to be "comfortable" is another argument), but we have far overshot it. I am religious, and I hope that my actions, when I am not royally screwing up, might interest others in my beliefs, but hitting people over the head with them is just not the way to go.
One of the few statements I disagree with is on immigration. A good chunk of my family were recent immigrants, but they came here legally, working hard and sacrificing to do so. As for most of the jobs you mention, I did many of them growing up to pay my way through school. I also worked the bunker in trap shoots, over 110F operating the machine. My dad did the same thing picking potatoes for 60 cents a day growing up. I have gutted chickens. I have dug ditches and hauled rocks. I have worked in a butcher shop. Good luck doing any of that now. You can't compete with the illegal immigrants for those jobs that were traditional for high school or college students on break or temp jobs while trying to land better employment. I'd do dirty jobs, but not if I have to break the law and can't pay even my (basic) rent, buy food, or get to the job and back, again, without breaking the law.
There isn't enough gold (or silver) in the world to support a pure specie currency, even with a serious correction to the value of the dollar, so you are correct on that point. A gold-stabilized standard failed in the '70s for various reasons. Ron Paul and the economists advising him advocate a hybrid gold-stabilized standard where the laws forbidding trade of gold/silver specie are lifted and the specie-pegged currency competes with the fiat currency giving people a hedge against paper instability and stagflation like we are going into (and discourages runaway printing of new paper). There is apparently a bit more to it than that, but I am not an economist.
I never meant to imply that the Department of Education did a wonderful job. However, I am saying that I am more confident in their ability to run an infinitely better school system than either individual states or the private sector. The Department of Education hasn't always done a bad job, just under the current administration. A competent president can, and hopefully will, turn it around. [emphasis mine]
Then (I assume) you haven't seen charter schools, private schools under a decent voucher system, Montessori schools, or active homeschool groups (with shared activities and teacher/specialist swapping, shared seminars) in operation. I have, and the quality of education I have seen far outstrips what comes out of (most) public schools. The small underfunded private school I went to growing up ranked 3rd overall in the state. We regularly beat public schools in scholastic competitions and the high school had no idea what to do with us because we already had HS/Regents credit in a number of courses when we got there, freeing us up for APs in High School, even though I left two years early. When I got to college, a friend of mine was younger than I was, was homeschooled, and already had his AA. The charter elementary school my company was helping wire a few years back had phenomenal tech education and computer labs (they taught UNIX/Linux, basic programming). A small homeschool group I tutored medieval history for had eight-year-olds reading Virgil in the original. I am working on possible weed walks and field biology outings for a group here. There are more and I have yet to see one bad example, though I know there must be. A local public high school regularly graduates people who can't read more than road signs, and they get decent grades. That has been true before the current administration and I don't see it changing any time soon.
Are all private schools good? No, but they do have to compete and that puts them under a good deal of pressure, to rank well, educate well (get kids into good colleges), and keep costs down. For the most part, that process works. Public schools can dip into your wallet whenever they want. You have a chance of influencing that locally-- you directly elect your school board-- but your effect over the Department of Education is negligible.
The complaint is as much about the concept of exclusion as anything. One of the points of a primary is to build consensus on a platform and debate issues, not just to choose a candidate. His movement has certainly raised issues and brought people to the party which used to be part of the core platform ("Free men, Free soil," anybody?) that haven't been discussed in years.
These issues obviously have active support, he has out lasted three other candidates, including two "first tier," and his block of delegates (completely different from the number of votes and based on separate caucuses where he is actually doing quite well) will affect the national convention which almost certainly will be brokered, and Huckabee has actually changed some of his rhetoric based on Dr. Paul's platform. The idea of excluding anybody in the race from the *debate* is idiotic, win or lose.
Even Giuliani supporters affected the issues and had a voice that needed to be heard. That's how a Republic (you know, "Republican") is meant to work, and that is why I support Dr. Paul's campaign as much as anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a "heavy" broadband user: my average usage is not high at all, but it goes up and down over time. I prefer to order or buy DVDs to downloading movies (not that I watch that many movies). I prefer to buy music online because I don't want to buy a whole album for the one song I want (not that I buy much music). That being said, my usage may be very low for weeks (web browsing and email) and then go up for several days. Maybe I do buy a video online, or decide to see a couple of episodes of a show I missed before the new series starts (several legitimate advertising supported sources for various series have popped up). But there are also business reasons, like having to transfer over my business website or move backups of my online store's catalog, downloading (probably via P2P) some OpenSource package or distribution. I do some work with a political organization and once in a fair while we use some sort of conferencing software. Right now, we are restocking our store before the start of the spring season, so we are uploading more photos than usual. Most of our steady bandwidth usage comes off of the site which we pay for someone else to host (with metered usage). I actually go through some trouble to do larger transfers off-peak; if it is business related, I have to anyway because it is a bad idea for me to tie up or munge my own website during peak hours (duh).
Traffic shaping based on protocol would nail me performing any of these actions, even though, as a rule, I am not a 'problem' user, even if actually using the service *I paid for* could be considered a 'problem'. I don't see why I should not be able to expect to make moderate use of the service most of the time and actually be able to run it out when I actually need it. *Why* I need it is none of the vendor's business. I pay them for the service and that is all they need to know.
Go ahead, I haven't had a chance to do it yet. Better that someone gets use out of it. Let me know how it works.
An interesting idea to think about when people say "Arming everyone would make everyone safer because the criminals would be scared". Well, who wouldn't be? The Surgeon General estimates that at any point in time 20% of Americans are suffering from a diagnosable mental condition. Do you really want 60 million people with mental problems armed and ready to kill at the drop of a hat?
If you say no, then you're going against the intent of the constitution, if you say yes, well it's a blood bath waiting to happen.
There are almost no questions worth deciding that are rigidly yes or no, though some lean pretty hard to one side or the other. First, arming "everyone" is not the intent. Not everyone wants to carry a gun, even among those who support the right. I, myself, wouldn't touch the things for almost ten years because of something I went through, but I still was able to recognize that that was my problem and it did not affect other peoples' rights. I don't carry now, but that may change at some point. Secondly, it is not necessary to have everyone armed to change situations, any more than it is necessary to have everyone be a First Responder or otherwise Red Cross trained, although I think that in both cases the number of conscientious people who have opted to go through training and practice for these skills is less than it should be. One person at this council meeting with a concealed weapon would have been enough to change the odds and save lives. Unlike the police, the armed citizen is not a visible and obvious target. Attackers can plan for police/security. They cannot plan for a random citizen who is carrying and been trained to shoot well getting a bead on them while they are concentrating on whatever their objective is.
As for the mental illness question, of course people with (serious) mental illness should not have weapons, or chainsaws, or kitchen knives. If someone is declared a danger to themselves or others by a mental health professional and a judge of competent jurisdiction, then of course we should take that into account. On the other hand, the idea that a veteran who had PTSD five years ago and is no longer in treatment cannot carry a firearm is absurd. The same with the idea that someone is a danger to society because they said in public hearing at one point that one of the purposes of the 2nd Amendment was a check against the government. As one of the Uncle Posts mentioned, licensing can sometimes be a great vehicle for prejudice. You also don't mention that we do not allow violent criminals to carry.
We also simply do not have a bloodbath in the places where ownership is very permissive. Even the recent incident here is rather rare and gun violence is much lower here than in the cities even though it is more permissive and the guns-per-capita is quite high. People focus on it because it is spectacular, not because it is common. The whole "Wild West" analogy is a red herring: the West was a problem because of a lack of Law and because the Law that existed was as corrupt as the criminals. People were not punished or were not punished consistently for their crimes and had to defend themselves against the local gendarmes as often as anyone else. That's a problem, and it has nothing to do with guns. It occurred in the Orient in different times and places after all weapons were outlawed.
I cannot disagree with this strongly enough, especially the idea that governments are somehow harmless today. The right to life is one of the most fundamental. If I do not have the ability to defend my life, I have no other rights. The police rarely get to the scene of violence in time to prevent anything. Also, many people still live outside of cities where guns are as much tools as weapons (e.g. protecting my sheep from coy dogs).Lastly, I think the UK has amply demonstrated that taking away guns cannot be done successfully enough to change the equation. In urban areas where they have had success seizing weapons, thugs *rent* weapons out for crimes, plus the fact that knife and other kinds of muggings, convenience store robberies have gone up because they know people are defenseless. Police often refuse to go after the criminals because no one was hurt, so violent crimes take priority (apparently some corners/stores are robbed pretty much on a regular schedule). Yes, their gun crime went down some, but it simply displaced a lot of the crime, and it did not go down enough that I would be comfortable giving up my right to defend myself when I know (and have experienced) that the police will not and physically can not defend me. An attorney locally in a city council meeting was reduced to throwing chairs at a shooter to try to defend himself after the attacker killed two police officers guarding the room *and took their guns* for use against the room's occupants. One of the council members actually had a carry permit but did not have his weapon with him. Bad mistake: carrying the thing for a hundred years without needing it is better than needing it once and not having it.
Are we as bad as Soviet era Russia? No. As Iraq? No. As any number of 3rd world countries? No. As Nazi Germany? No.
In some ways, though, we are worse than the Soviets. I heard an ex-Russian national (granted asylum some time ago) comment that visibly marking on a plane ticket that you are considered untrustworthy is something that was and would never have been done in Soviet Russia, for instance. Foreign nationals were generally treated with much greater respect under the Soviets (within certain bounds). He made several other similar comments, but I don't recall them off-hand. There are places where we are even more brazen about distrusting and categorizing our citizens than they were (and places where we are still much better).
Are we as bad as Germany in the (early) '30s? Yes. Reading, e.g. some of Bonhoeffer's writings is strikingly apt. The level of distrust in many places, the slow accretion of government power, all of the rhetoric about having to defend ourselves, defend our honor, get revenge, the hate of Muslims mirrors some of it quite closely. The backlash against non-mainstream political opinions is also heading there. I was physically attacked (someone in a car, I was on the sidewalk) this last year for daring to hold a campaign sign and one of the others in our group was as well some time later. Our group has also suffered theft, vandalism, and harassment. (This just locally.) Treatment by the media was nearly obscene at points. And this is no where near as radical politics as during the Civil Rights Era, for instance: this type of reaction is now for fairly small divergences from the mainstream. So your joke about being harassed for Obama literature is not far off. The problem with most descents into darkness is it is not *just* the government. It is a general change in society as well that makes it easier for the government to do what it does. That is the real enemy and needs to be stopped before it gains momentum.
"Free Speech Zones"? Being tazed for being annoying at political events? For not being able to produce ID at a library? Knock-less warrants with full SWAT teams to deliver a summons? Large-scale crowd suppression devices being developed/deployed with local law enforcement? Don't tell me we shouldn't be concerned. How long should we wait to worry? In the electronics age, a police state does not *need* to be as visible to be effective.
You should never make any long term decisions in a crisis. People are horrible at it and tend to be highly irrational at such times. Look how badly we have done after 9/11. How much worse would we have done with a more fluid government system? That is why we have checks and balances (among other reasons), why Supreme Court appointments are for life, and many other things. At the same time, the system does allow slow change, through new laws, amendments, new appointments to the judiciary over time, and so forth. Our system has changes a good bit since the Founders' day (some to the good, at this precise moment, much to the bad). Our government and Constitution is not perfect, certainly, but the Founder's did a pretty good job, if you think about it, of anticipating a lot of potential problems, quite a few of which warnings we have ignored. Sure, it can use touching up in places (I can think of several off hand), but if you think about the number of popular revolutions which ended in total chaos and bloodbaths (e.g. France, Russia, China), we didn't do badly at all.
I think you are largely right. My experiences were not much different from yours, including having had to do government work and obtain a clearance, but I have a few years of extra perspective which make a world of difference. The US is not the Soviet Union yet, but the atmosphere has definitely changed, like a cold draft from a window. The number of people who are affected, from minor to major ways, is increasing slowly but steadily, and waiting for things to get bad before complaining or saying "I can deal with it" personally are not good plans. Bad systems, once in place, reinforce each other. More and more people making it clear that this is not the direction we need to be going in is a very good thing.
For what it is worth, 9/11 was not as big a change as many people make it out to be. The Drug War really started a lot of the problems. 9/11 increased the pace of change and allowed some of it to be done more openly (people outright asking for it), but the trend was already there. I was actually surprised that 9/11 did not speed up the process more than it did. I am not in any way in favor of drugs, but the way we have gone about trying to eliminate them is asinine.
The Bush Administration deceived first, then tried to rationalize. Not the other way around. For deceit to work, it has to be hidden. That the deceit is coming out now is just a natural progression of history. I think part of the point is that Congress went along with the plan without doing any real fact checking, asking any tough questions, or really even discussing anything. They just made pretty speeches and signed on the dotted line. And this is exactly in line with what the GP is saying: folks in Congress saw no downside; they could just blame Bush either way. Whether the blame is *deserved* is irrelevant to *that* question; Congress had the opportunity to avoid the situation and are now jumping up and down about how it wasn't "their fault" (except for the ones still saying "Gee, what a nice day this is!".) It is their *job* to be suspicious and not write blank checks. If Bush fooled them, they failed that job.
If the question is why were so many willing to believe in WMDs in the first place, this time around, there it is. That we did so is shameful, but it wasn't without cause.
[snip]
I guess my point is to emphasize that we weren't just lied to, and we weren't just sheep to believe the lies. We were misled by guys who later decided to take the heat as liars instead of guys who were too stupid to recognize bluff from data. I guess I'd damned well be neither, but if I had to admit to the American public that a) I'm a lying politician or b) I'm a politician dumber than Saddam, - well, let's just say I can maybe see how the choice was made.
[snip] I agree. There certainly was an attempt to produce weapons in the past and Saddam Hussein was "not a nice guy." Though why we propped him up with that in mind is also a good question. It should also be kept in mind that part of the reason for Iraq's underground nuclear program (part of) had nothing to do with weapons. It had been amply demonstrated to them by Israel that any peaceful nuclear power program had better be underground as well. Once you are breaking the law one way, why not do so in others? Iraq was in a very difficult position regarding energy independence and its future. It made some stupid choices, but you can see the thread of how it got there.
Saddam's bluster was pure idiocy and did not help his case, but it should have been ignored, and the fact that he had camel-dung for brains should not have resulted in us killing so many Iraqi people who perhaps did not. The big problem to me is that, even having made that decision, we took no thought whatsoever to the consequences of going in and what would be needed to get out and leave a functioning country behind. That would have taken an understanding of the fragile balance-of-power that kept Saddam in control in the first place. We would need to admit that, even having camel-dung for brains, he or something like him was what the Iraqi system demanded to keep from imploding. Instead, *we* have become Saddam Hussein, holding the system together with violence and suppressing dissent, and I don't think our brains are smelling much better as a result.
The terms of the original gulf war cease fire agreement required him to do so. Iraq was not operating as a fully sovereign country until that agreement was fulfilled, certain restrictions were in place. As demonstrated by the no fly zone, certain economic restrictions, etc. That's the price a country pays for losing a war.
That:
Pragmatically, we run the danger of teaching other countries that they will be punished whether they try to comply with our demands or not, so it is better to actually have WMDs as a bargaining chip. How many nuclear capable nations have we invaded recently?
Pape's exhaustive analysis of suicide terrorism shows that it does not grow out of terrorist groups escalating their methods. Rather, it grows out of guerrilla/insurrection movements (not previously "terrorist") when they are not having an effect and run out of options. What do desperate people do when we back them into the corner where even suicide terrorism is not getting our attention? Add in the point above and connect the dots.
...and for non-believers who deny the existence of a Force that attracts the buttered side of the toast to the ground, well... what about taping two cats together, back to back ?
Just put on your leather jacket and gloves before attempting to do so... (shhhhhh ! DO NOT WANTZ !)
Siamese Twins?
I'm calling bullshit. You don't hear Islamists complaining about the 1980s, they're complaining about today. We didn't turn Afghanistan into a bloodbath in 2001, everyone including the UN attests to the fact that the Taliban were pillaging and raping the people and the land. The security situation might suck there now that it's better to have that and hope for a better future than being raped on a daily basis without hope at all. The Afghanistan mission is backed by both the UN and NATO.
All right. You tell me where the Taliban came from. You are totally right that it was *already* a bloodbath before 2001. We put them in power. We pulled out of Afghanistan and left their country in a tailspin it *never* came out of. It was *our* weapons they were shooting at us (mostly). How is that not relevant? Does it "justify" them raping and murdering in their own country? Absolutely not. Is it relevant? Hell yes.
Furthermore, the US is a Democracy with a rotating leadership. It makes as much sense to refer to a 30-year old President as it does treating today's Germany like Hitler's Nazi Germany. Different leaders, different attitudes, different countries.
It's a leadership which, supposedly, we elect. We are all part of the problem. We should be part of a solution. We have had an ongoing attitude of heavy-handed intervention which, if anything, has been getting worse. Besides, from their point of view they should what? Drop all of their grievances and forgive us because we had an election? Would we do that for them? I wouldn't.
Bottom line is that the West does its best to kill terrorists with minimal collateral cost but it's not easy and *everyone* makes mistakes sometimes, including Britain, Spain, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. I find it peculiar that a few months ago Lebanon bombed the crap out of their local Palestinian refugee camp, killing hundreds of civilians in the process and not a single person condemned them. Not in the media. Not in the UN. I would go further and say that the media only published the official government version and the UN actually passed a resolution expressing full support of their actions. So apparently it's okay for Muslims to massacre their own civilians on purpose but when someone in the West does it by accident while trying to target terrorists that hide in civilian structures, well suddenly we're evil or something. Give me a break!
I certainly have a problem with Lebanon's actions. I don't think that has any bearing on ours.
The problem is not with collateral damage in our quest to kill terrorists per se, though I think we do idiotic things on that score as well. That ranges from happenstance to stupidity; war is hard; mistakes do happen. The problem is what we are doing which has little or nothing to do with terrorism and a lot more to do with imperialism, putting ourselves in places we shouldn't be in in the first place and then saying "oops" when we kill civilians. That's not collateral damage. That's not accident. It's not even stupidity. It is much worse, and dropping a 500lb bomb on a wedding party and saying "Oh Man!" doesn't seem much different than blowing up a marketplace even if one of the attackers is wearing a uniform and flying an expensive jet. In some totally fscked way, the guy in the market has the high ground since at least he is willing to give his own life for his cause. The fact that we have fallen so far as to fail that comparison is shockingly sad. In some cases (*not all*) our warfare has turned into video games with no connection to people bleeding and dying. The guy living there does not have that luxury and it's not that entertaining to him.
The only difference is that people know that they can criticize the West without having their skull smashed open, while the same is not true in Egypt or Lebanon. People are chicken shits that way. For every one thing the West does wrong you could find one hundred things countries in the middle-east do wrong yet you will
I am not an USA citizen. Taking that into consideration, and also the fact that at least 1/5 of the /. users are not USA citizens or native English speakers (judging by the number of spelling mistakes not usually found in texts written by US citizens or native English speakers), would you care to answer to the following questions ?
* Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
How do you propose to do that ? The US have low population density and a extremely long coastline and border. Do you think that would be possible without enforcing 3 to 5 years of mandatory military service for each adult citizen ?
Maxo-Texas answered some of this in the UP (Uncle-Post?), but another useful factor is bringing our troops home from abroad. Right now, our National Guard, the forces that are supposed to be protecting our home ground under the state governors, is overseas. Additionally, once you shift more of the regular troops home and plunk a few of their bases on the border, illegal aliens would probably be a little more reluctant to traipse across an active military base. Another interesting idea I have heard is a strategically placed dam on the Rio Grande. Just a small increase in width and depth would make as much difference as 50 fences. Right now, according to a border guard I was conversing with, we largely know when groups are crossing the border because they set off monitoring equipment. We don't have anyone near enough to do anything about it. More personnel (which we have to pay anyway) and the ability to slow them down a touch on the crossing will make a huge difference in ability to respond.
* H.R. 3305 would allow pilots and specially assigned law enforcement personnel to carry firearms in order to protect airline passengers, possibly preventing future 9/11-style attacks.
To my knowledge, the possession of firearms while flying in a plane is forbidden because of the danger of accidents caused by firearms misfiring, such as decompression. How does Ron Paul plan to prevent those accidents ? How does Ron Paul plan to prevent rogue law enforcement personnel or criminals impersonating them from taking advantage of the firearms they were allowed to take on board ?
Special ammunition prevents decompression-related issues. The security issues you mention are no worse (and no different) than exist now, at much greater expense, with current policies. With the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) hiring gobs of people to handle more and more sensitive tasks, they cannot possibly continue to be picky about who they hire. Any terrorist getting into one of these positions can bring down the whole house of cards. At least by using more organic methods, you end up with a less complex, less expensive solution that has no more downside.
This question not related to your post, but I would be grateful if you would answer, since no one really addressed the issue:
Were the US to stop stop, as the campaigner who answered the original questions that started this thread said, subsidizing the defense of foreign states, how would the US be able to influence the foreign policy of those states ? Would not USA become less secure by renouncing the leverage offered by the said subsidies ? Considering also that most of those subsidies are spent on US military equipment and maintenance for equipment purchased previously, wouldn't you lose more, in terms of security, if you renounced this opportunity to have a say in how other countries, which are not always well intentioned or governed, direct their foreign policy ?
This question assumes that we are usefully affecting their policies. Mostly what has been happening is that the world has been becoming more violent, we have been going into debt, and mult
"Who cares who Spain morally supported? Is holding an opinion justification for mass-murder now? The fact of the matter is that we have a heck of a lot more reasons to justify taking out their people than they do to take ours out. If they were to lay down their arms today and promise to stop attacking us then there is a really good chance this war would end. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for us laying down our arms."
Morally supported? Opinion? They had *troops* on the Arabian peninsula. Does freedom of speech include shooting people now?
That is also, incidentally, why Al Qaeda has not launched any attacks in the States recently. They said in one of their strategy documents in 2004 that attacking us at home was not their best strategy, Instead, they were going to attack countries that were part of our coalition (with troops in the region) to get them to pull out so that we had to bear the cost ourselves. They thought that once we realized how much running an empire was costing, *we'd stop doing it*. They were right on Spain: they attacked and Spain withdrew. Most of our other allies have scaled back support and the wars are costing us a fortune. They were wrong on the effect: we aren't smart enough to balance our checkbook.
Murdering civilians for no good reason is wrong. We should probably think about that too. We should probably have thought about that before we turned Afghanistan into a bloodbath (in the '80s) and armed bin Ladin. You might remember we turned the whole region into a battleground in WWII as well. Unfortunately, they don't separate us very well from the Russians and the Germans either, so the distrust of us "Westerners" goes rather deep, just in the modern age.
The problem with blaming the victim at this point is figuring out who it is.
If you live in New York, you can't mail order power from Arizona. There is no way to tell specific electrons where to go; they follow potentials. When demand shifts and the grid suddenly has to cross-ship power to balance itself out, transmission lines not meant to take that load can and do fry.
You cannot just let everyone put power into the grid willy nilly, not unless you want it to be real dark half the time and the fire department to be real busy the other half. Power does not just have to be there, it has to be *clean*: right voltage and amperage, right polarization, and *in sync* with the rest of the grid. Spikes or brown outs, bad polarization or out of sync power can cause fried equipment, can cause fires, it can cause serious damage to the turbines of other generators. This is what happened in New York a bit ago where they lost power Upstate for a couple of *months* in some places. It started with one plant putting out badly polarized power. Another plant had to shut down to avoid damage to its turbines. This meant that power had to suddenly cross the grid in a way it wasn't supposed to and things fried. Because of "deregulation," nobody had a clue whose problem it was, how to find out what went wrong, or how to fix it.
You can have people putting small amounts of power into the grid and this is especially helpful during peak load or if those small power sources can come online quickly when needed. (Coal plants put out a lot of power efficiently but take hours to warm up and come on line. Natural gas plants are wasteful but can be running from a cold start in 15 minutes). Somewhere, though, you have to have *baseline power*-- a source that is large enough to meet a chunk of the demand, is steady and stable, and has turbines with enough mass to absorb significant surges or spikes. The momentum of the turbines (and force of the magnetic field) actually helps to clean up the power. Hydro, nuclear, and coal are the best sources for baseline power in this respect, especially nuclear. Beyond that, there needs to be clear lines of responsibility for who is in charge of synchronizing power (making sure sine waves and polarity match up) and who decides when sources need to come on and off-line (and prepare other plants for the resulting effect on the grid).
"De-regulation" in the face of these issues is nuts, not because of economics, but because of physics. The fact of natural monopolies (who owns the poles?) and the last mile problem (why compete for a rural customer?) makes it a potential economic problem as well.
To some extent, I agree with you that a free market requires some regulation. Otherwise it is feudalism. However:
Your MS example is fatally flawed in two ways:
1) The regulation has not worked on the federal level either. We are at what? 15 years now and how much taxpayer money with *no change whatsoever*? One thing to realize with some of the state vs. federal or government vs. non argument is that where the less regulated option does not work in theory, the more regulated option fails repeatedly in practice. The *customers* are still giving them money. * I was in a discussion with folks recently who do certified organic farming. The guy from the USDA comes in, looks at their farm, checks their papers, and drives off. They could spray plutonium on their fields the moment his pickup leaves that driveway, and they would still be "certified organic." * SEC regulations did not stop Enron. Although some investors who bothered to do their own market analysis and arithmetic and smelled something rank avoided the mess, the others felt safe *because of* the SEC and got hooked. There are trade-offs to both sides, each case is different, and regulation can often bite in very perverse ways.
2) As the previous poster pointed out, the office suite monopoly is enforced by government IP laws. In your state vs. MS example, and in the face of less restrictive IP law (protecting interoperability rights, for example), someone could just reverse engineer the thing legally, MS would not be able to bludgeon startups into non-existence, and a lot of other things. Making these laws sane would not eliminate the problems, but they might eliminate 90% of them, and then you could come up with a rational and targeted solution for 8%, and just suffer with the 2% that will never be solved no matter what.
A counter-example where I would agree with you solidly is utility regulation. Everybody is all about "deregulating" utilities without thinking about why they were regulated in the first place: natural monopoly and the last mile problem. Basically, you can't have two competing power companies both running competing telephone poles into the same city and the same houses, and somebody has to maintain the lines if they are shared (a big expense and one the utility has some unique knowledge for handling). Additionally, you have the problem that utilities would waste resources competing over lucrative urban customers (more than one customer per pole) and ditch the rural customer (several dozen poles per customer). So, we granted regional utilities a monopoly on urban areas in exchange for a requirement that they service the last mile without prejudice. Now we have "municipal electric" coops taking over the urban areas and expect utilities to compete over rural customers? Are people on crack?
So what am I missing? Are my examples of better jobs really worse than digging ditches? (I suppose ditch digging can develop your work ethic and physique, whereas retail sales may just develop your misanthropy) Have I been looking at the unskilled job market in the wrong cities, or not recently enough?
Yes, there's a lot of competition for many of those retail jobs, especially with employers reluctant to take seasonal help (except Christmas), especially in rural America, where there happen to be more immigrants too. Even "Do you want fries with that?" can be hard to get. Now, young folks that can't get those jobs just get food stamps and TANF which is one of the real horrors of illegal immigration-- ballooning entitlement programs (and not necessarily by the immigrants) and no way off them. (Not that immigration is the sole cause.)
Anyway, regarding Paul and immigration it's a question of principles. Someone who values freedom should have more respect for freedom of movement; even if someone can't vote or collect welfare here, if someone wants to sell or rent them a home here the government shouldn't get in the way. It's also a question of humility: a good politician should also have more respect and fear for unintended consequences. Not every job in America can be done by a non-American, but many of the rest can be outsourced regardless of whether or not you let the non-American inside US borders. The only difference immigration restrictions make in those cases is to ensure that a multinational corporation gets to take a cut as middleman.A Republic protects the community from the excesses of the individual and it also protects the individual from the mob. Freedom vs. private property rights. You have every right to express your opinion and disagree with me in public, but not in my home, like someone who stole my political sign out of my yard last night. My sign, my property, my speech. You don't like my candidate, put a sign on your own property. Same thing with immigration. I have the right to move to another state, but I follow that state's rules, I buy or rent a place to live. I don't party crash. We live here and we have the right to set rules around our home. Sometimes I wonder if the people who support freedom of movement to an extreme would feel the same if I moved into their house.
There are boundaries. We loosen those boundaries every day out of an expectation of courtesy and civility, but if they do not exist, chaos ensues. Many of these folks don't just violate our immigration laws, and it's not just a matter of legalizing them. There are illegal aliens here living a dozen or more to a house, well outside what our health or building codes allow (and they are awfully lax here). That's one of the ways they can work for so little. If I tried that, they'd take my kid. That's not a free market and that's not a civil society, and we can't sustain anything approaching a standard of living here under those conditions.
Now, if we got some breathing room, work on getting our industry back, anything more than service jobs, rebuild the economy, then, when the 'Boomers retire en masse, we'll need more immigrants and be better placed to handle them (legally) and maintain a standard of living. If white trash doesn't want to take a $10 an hour job (2007 dollars!) at that point and is displaced by a legal immigrant, let the shiftless bum rot. In the meantime, we have a lot of things to straighten out on both sides of the border and the refugee flood just makes it all the more complicated.
I would prefer that there be no illegal immigration to this country. I would prefer that all immigrants be legal. Unfortunately, that can't happen with our current immigration policies. I think I read that with the current immigration quotas, the queue of people waiting to immigrate from Mexico and Central America is over 100 years.
I suspect that for most of these people, it's not that they want to break the law, they simply have no choice if they want to feed their families.
It may be harsh, but their need does not mean we need to change our laws. Any society can only accept immigrants at a certain rate without destabilization. We have been fairly liberal with that in the past, but would go well past that today if we let everyone come, especially given that we have no more frontier to absorb them. I speak Spanish poorly; I started learning too late. My daughter will do better, but many people have not gone down that road at all. It takes at least a full generation for both society and the immigrants to adapt.
Part of the sacrifice my family made is that they could not all come at once, and some of them never came at all. They stayed behind when the Communists took over their country and we do not know what ever became of them. But that is not America's fault. The fact that America took any of us in at all, gave us a chance to start over, is a kindness. We were not owed anything. Charity and compassion is a good thing, but the idea of entitlement to that generosity is dangerous and mildly disturbing.
The better approach is to change some of our practices, like destructive trade agreements that wiped out Mexican farmers, change our approach to the drug war which will reduce the corruption and instability in their country, reduce the welfare state here that is part of the attraction. There are lots of ways to approach the problem without opening the flood gates. The same practices that will help them may also prevent us from going down the tubes, so there is much to gain by looking at the real problems. My family fled one country that let itself come apart. I don't intend to flee this one.
I agree with most of what you say. There has to be a balance between Federalism and States Rights. The Articles of Confederation failed miserably because they did not provide enough central government. There has to be a balance somewhere (whether it is ever or ever has to be "comfortable" is another argument), but we have far overshot it. I am religious, and I hope that my actions, when I am not royally screwing up, might interest others in my beliefs, but hitting people over the head with them is just not the way to go.
One of the few statements I disagree with is on immigration. A good chunk of my family were recent immigrants, but they came here legally, working hard and sacrificing to do so. As for most of the jobs you mention, I did many of them growing up to pay my way through school. I also worked the bunker in trap shoots, over 110F operating the machine. My dad did the same thing picking potatoes for 60 cents a day growing up. I have gutted chickens. I have dug ditches and hauled rocks. I have worked in a butcher shop. Good luck doing any of that now. You can't compete with the illegal immigrants for those jobs that were traditional for high school or college students on break or temp jobs while trying to land better employment. I'd do dirty jobs, but not if I have to break the law and can't pay even my (basic) rent, buy food, or get to the job and back, again, without breaking the law.
There isn't enough gold (or silver) in the world to support a pure specie currency, even with a serious correction to the value of the dollar, so you are correct on that point. A gold-stabilized standard failed in the '70s for various reasons. Ron Paul and the economists advising him advocate a hybrid gold-stabilized standard where the laws forbidding trade of gold/silver specie are lifted and the specie-pegged currency competes with the fiat currency giving people a hedge against paper instability and stagflation like we are going into (and discourages runaway printing of new paper). There is apparently a bit more to it than that, but I am not an economist.
Then (I assume) you haven't seen charter schools, private schools under a decent voucher system, Montessori schools, or active homeschool groups (with shared activities and teacher/specialist swapping, shared seminars) in operation. I have, and the quality of education I have seen far outstrips what comes out of (most) public schools. The small underfunded private school I went to growing up ranked 3rd overall in the state. We regularly beat public schools in scholastic competitions and the high school had no idea what to do with us because we already had HS/Regents credit in a number of courses when we got there, freeing us up for APs in High School, even though I left two years early. When I got to college, a friend of mine was younger than I was, was homeschooled, and already had his AA. The charter elementary school my company was helping wire a few years back had phenomenal tech education and computer labs (they taught UNIX/Linux, basic programming). A small homeschool group I tutored medieval history for had eight-year-olds reading Virgil in the original. I am working on possible weed walks and field biology outings for a group here. There are more and I have yet to see one bad example, though I know there must be. A local public high school regularly graduates people who can't read more than road signs, and they get decent grades. That has been true before the current administration and I don't see it changing any time soon.
Are all private schools good? No, but they do have to compete and that puts them under a good deal of pressure, to rank well, educate well (get kids into good colleges), and keep costs down. For the most part, that process works. Public schools can dip into your wallet whenever they want. You have a chance of influencing that locally-- you directly elect your school board-- but your effect over the Department of Education is negligible.
The complaint is as much about the concept of exclusion as anything. One of the points of a primary is to build consensus on a platform and debate issues, not just to choose a candidate. His movement has certainly raised issues and brought people to the party which used to be part of the core platform ("Free men, Free soil," anybody?) that haven't been discussed in years.
These issues obviously have active support, he has out lasted three other candidates, including two "first tier," and his block of delegates (completely different from the number of votes and based on separate caucuses where he is actually doing quite well) will affect the national convention which almost certainly will be brokered, and Huckabee has actually changed some of his rhetoric based on Dr. Paul's platform. The idea of excluding anybody in the race from the *debate* is idiotic, win or lose.
Even Giuliani supporters affected the issues and had a voice that needed to be heard. That's how a Republic (you know, "Republican") is meant to work, and that is why I support Dr. Paul's campaign as much as anything else.