I hate to break it to you but you are falling in to the black and white trap everyone falls in to when they try to divide politics in to liberal and conservative. You seem to have lumped liberalism in with socialism and they are two different things. Most of the big governmentism that sprung out of the depression and FDR, which you rightly have problems with is much more socialism than liberalism. If you weren't politically naive you would realize politics is like the spokes in a wheel and not a turn signal.
I'm kind of curious, when you claim the moniker "compassionate conservative" does that mean you are a fervent supporter of the other self proclaimed "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush? If so I have news for you, you should probably start calling yourself a libertarian than the travesty "conservate" is in the U.S. today.
The "compassionate conservatives" who have a stranglehold on power at the moment are instituting "large powerful central government" faster than the "liberals" you hate ever did, though the Dem's are helping. They are doing the same injustice to "conservatism" that the Dems have done to "liberalism" over the years.
Here is the short list of the most obvious examples of Republican backed "large powerful central government":
- Patriot Act - Medicare "Reform" bill - Department of Homeland Security - Skyrocketing Federal budget and deficit - Skyrocketing defense spending - Preemptive warfare and nation building - Free speech zones which in fact prevent free speech - The rush to a National Intelligence Director is going to result in spying and law enforcement whose power to intrude in to your life is going to be unchecked and unstoppable. It is going result in an out of control spying agency like the CIA was in the 50's and 60's but with unfettered domestic spying powers. The Republican's are feigning reluctance but they are drooling at the prospect of creating it and of suckering the Dems in to being eager to do it too. - Detention of people without due process at the whim of the executive branch
I hate to break it to you but what the Dems and Republicans are both practicing are different flavors of "socialism". The Republicans talk big talk about free markets but they are in fact intervening in the economy and civil liberties in truly massive ways.
The medicare "reform" bill being the most obvious example of massive economic intervention. It has all the earmarks of classic Democratic socialism except they are instead using it as a thinly veiled disguise to pump large quantities of tax payer dollars in to the pockets of their friends in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and insurance industry. The Dems woudl have just pumped it in to a huge bureaucracy and the pockets of the poor and elderly.
The defence industrial complex is in fact one of the largest planned economies on the face of the earth, the Republicans love every bit of it and can't pump money in to it fast enough.
I hate to burst the bubble but the two offerings available in the U.S. today aren't true conservatism or liberalism. They are both Socialism, the democrats leaning towards classic socialism and the Republican's leaning more towards Fascism(substituting Muslims for Jews) every day.
There are two men I know who are both staunch Republicans and they are both the biggest cowards I know. They don't go ANYWHERE unless they have a bunch of guys surrounding them to protect them from every possible danger, including the danger of having their feelings hurt by people carrying signs saying bad things about them.
When they were both faced with the extreme danger of serving in the military they both did everything in their power and the power of their parents to make sure there was no chance they would EVER see combat themselves. They ran away from military service as fast as they could with their tails tucked between their legs, showing a yellow streak a mile long. They are totally cool with telling other people to go get killed as long as they stay safe.
They are the two biggest cowards I know and they are as Republican as they come. Case closed. Theory debunked.
You probably shouldn't waste your time arguing with Twirp when he wanders off on in to this paranoid haze. He lays awake nights playing out scenario after scenario where a terrorist might attack him. If you were to take his advice on how to make himself "safe" the entire world would grind to a halt under suffocating security and it still wouldn't stop a determined attacker willing to sacrifice himself for the cause.
"Oh, and that whole "9/11 was brilliant" thing? Disgusting."
At much as it chaps your ass, Twirp, it obviously was brilliant, and that says nothing about the motivations or morals of the people that did it. They spent maybe a half million dollars, and did hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in economic damage to their target and have completely tied the world up in knots in part thanks to the over of the U.S. government. By contrast the U.S. spends trillions on defense and was powerless to stop it. If they manage a few more of them they could well succeed in destroying the U.S. as we know it, not directly due to the attacks but because U.S. government's inevitable overreaction to the next attacks will probably result in a crippled economy, a police state and an America people who are miserable. While the U.S. spends these vast amounts of time, money, civil liberties and freedom trying to prevent the last attack, Al Qaeda no doubt working on a new attack strategy that will catch the U.S. as much by surprise as 9/11 did. Unless you stop them at the well spring you simply aren't going to be able to completely safeguard a nation as large as the U.S. without destroying it in the process. Israel hasn't been able to do it after more than 50 years trying and it is a tiny nation where nearly everyone is packing a machine gun.
Tommy Franks, he must be a hero of yours as much as you cherish the invasion of Iraq, in the new book he is plugging is pretty adamant it is thoroughly wrong headed to call the 9/11 attackers "cowards" or to otherwise try to denigrate them:
"I think we're, we're at peril if we underestimate our, our enemy. Going back into the '90s, Osama bin Laden indicated that he had great capacity, that, that he was ideologically supported by a lot of people. And he may or may not be a personal coward, but I do know that he is a worthy adversary, and it is in our best interest to, to treat him as such. And that, that actually is what I meant in the book."
"So which is it? The brownskins? The US senators? Elderly men? People with "funny clothes"?"
The answer is pretty simple. Its whomever the people running the system decide they want to target. You see it is a system that is the first stage of implementing the plot line of Minority Report. You see it is a system striving to predict the future and to apprehend people prior to committing a crime. The only problem is the Department of Homeland Security lacks the prescients Tom Cruise had to draw on so it is a system even more fallible than it was in the movie. They are attempting to predict the future predicated either whimsy, so it is whimsical as in the case of the infirm old man, or malevolence which is far more likely the case for Senator Kennedy who is the most vitriolic and famous critic of the people that just happen to own the no fly list.
There is a precedent for prescient security, an earlier attempt, that dates back to 1950, the last time Republicans held power in Congress. It was the Detention Act of 1950:
Sec. 103. (a) Whenever there shall be in existence such an emergency, the President, acting through the Attorney General, is hereby authorized to apprehend and by order detain, pursuant to the provisions of this title, each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or of sabotage,
You see it says people can be detained if there is "belief" that they "will" engage in espionage or sabotage. It is impossible for someone to defend themselves against such a belief or disprove that they wouldn't, at some point in the future, have engaged in criminal activity had they not been detained.
Actually the history of prescience U.S. security enforcement that goes back to World War II and the Japanese Exclusion Act, when the U.S. government stripped Japanese Americans of most of their property and their rights as they herded them in to concentration camps because there was a "belief" they "might" engage in sabotage or espionage (substitute terrorism today).
As I recall the Detention Act of 1950 was repealed in 1971, when the Democractic Congress was trying to rain in the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover, etc, but it is a concept that has interestingly largely returned since 9/11 once again thanks mostly to the Republicans and was referenced in the recent Supreme Court briefs on the aborted hearing on the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who is being held by the Bush administration in contravention of the Constition, due process and civil liberties American's are under the illusion they have. Mr. Padilla may be a bad man but its unclear if he's actually ever done anything illegal. He is in effect being held for future crime.
P.S.
I rather doubt Senator Kennedy's targeting was the accident Homeland Security says it is. It was most probably a delightfully funny way for the Bush administration to send him a signal that they don't appreciate the fact that he is the most vocal critic of the Bush administration in Congress and they can make him suffer for it so he will think twice the next time. Someone cited a passage from the Constitation pointing out it is illegal to prevent a Congressman from traveling to Congress. The forefathers were pretty prescient because they knew if they didn't put in that clause the party in power could use travel restrictions against the party out of power to deny them access to the making of laws. Unfortunately it appears today the no fly list could be used precisely to do just that. It is also almost certainly being used to blacklist less famous critics of the Bush administration
If you had RTFA you might have noticed he was proposing contact lenses as the primary display device so presumably the watch was just where the books were stored. Presumably you would be using speech to control it, or maybe an eye tracker in the lens as a pointer.
At the proposed density of memory storage and computing power he was presumably refering to a rather sleek watch rather than the bulky geeked out all in one watches of today. The power supply is likely to be the main bulk and weight problem since they are advancing much more slowly than everything else. I suppose it is a matter of debate if a watch is the best place to put your computing power but it is better than in your clothes since you are less like to lose it or wash it.
Uh....its not like its a hard problem. Put armored cockpit doors on all airliners...I think already done....improve screening for explosives, the technology does exist.
Maybe terrorists will still be able to attack passengers in an airplane, or crash one at worst, but there won't be any more hijackings, or targeted crashngs, it doesn't cost much, is pretty foolproof and no abuse of civil liberties.
I'm afraid in this case its pretty well established the TSA's no fly list is being used as a tool to punish political opponents of the current administration. They have pretty much banned less well known anti war activists from flying for some time now and they have no recourse to get their names cleared.
I'm wagering someone in the Bush administration thought it would be funny to punish Sen. Kennedy for his outspoken and harsh criticism of the Bush administration on a number of fronts, since they've already been doing it to less well known activists so the precedent is already set. The message being you better shut up because we have the power now and we can make your life a living hell if we want to and you can't stop us.
It might come back to haunt them since now they've pissed off someone with enough power to punish, or at least raise awareness, of no fly list abuses, along with the many other abuses of power by the current administration.
That aside it is insane to have a system which is punishing people based on nothing but names since it is inevitable there will be more than one person with that name in the world, and that a real terrorist will probably be using aliases at this point anyway. It is a system designed to punish the innocent and indicative of the insane measures the current government is implementing to create a facade of safety to hide their incompetence. I've said this before, if the TSA wanted to prevent another 9/11 put armored cockpit doors on all airplanes which I think they've done. It doesn't cost much, no more 9/11's and at a fraction of the cost of current TSA measures, no intrusion of personal liberties, no damage to the economic health of airlines.
I'll give you your point that both parties are pretty thoroughly corrupted by wealthy donors, the Democrats having trial lawyers and Hollywood in particular. But a couple of your points are well funny....
I'll stick to just discussing this one:
"Yes, both parties listen to money, but quit buying this rich fat cat propeganda that the Democrats are for small folk, pro minorities (look at which party fought for slavery and even ran a candidate against President Lincoln that promised to end the civil war and let the south keep the slaves)."
You are correct the Republican's were the party fighting for blacks...140 years ago but you are glossing over the fact a seismic shift occurred in the 1960's. Prior to that it is true Southern Democrats were pretty much the worst supporters of segregation. But starting in the Kennedy administration and especially in the Johnson administration the Democrats passed major pieces of civil rights legislation that put an end to apartheid in America. The result...blacks moved to the Democratic part en masse and whites, especially southerners, who were either overtly or not so overtly racist moved to the Republican party. The end result is the South moved from being overwhelmingly Democratic to what we have now where it is nearly solidly Republican.
So your key mistake is you are citing ancient history which no longer applies. It is well understood the Republicans are routinely playing the race card, sometimes subtlety and sometimes not so subtlety to hold whites, with rascist inclinations, in the Republican column and that is how they hold a lot of less than affluent whites in the West and South in their camp, along with massive pandering to fundementalist Christianity, gay bashing, and flag waving militarism, all of which play well in "fly over" country.
So you are correct that are a lot of less than affluent people vote Republican, but if you look at the Republican power base, the people that call the shots, they are overwhelmingly affluent white men, mostly businessmen.
I hate to break it to you but you simply can not engage in a lawful, non violent protest anyplace that you will be seen at the either of the party conventions or in fact ANY place the President goes. If you are carrying or wearing any sign critical of the president it is routine practice for you to either be detained or shunted to a "Free Speech Zone" where you can't see the President and he can't see you. If you doth protest to much about it you will usually be arrested.
A couple weeks ago George gave a speech in a quarry in Minnesota. To attend you had to have tickets and the tickets were supposed to go only to his loyal followers. A couple guys who weren't loyal followers got hold of a couple. One guy tried to get in wearing an anti bush T-shirt under another shirt. The SS spotted it, they were nearly arrested though the SS backed off and just:
- detained them for the duration of the event - ID'ed and filed them for future scrutiny
Another kid with his family was searched and when it was found he had a Kerry sticker on his wallet he was turned back and threatened with arrest if he didn't leave quietly. The event was only for the faithful.
All in all their is a beauty in your argument. You're saying we can't protest unless we do it "legally". The government currently has the power, in the name of "safety" and homeland security to protests illegal at their discretion therefor we can no longer protest, unless maybe we do it out in the middle of a corn field where no one will notice, (a corn field you own of course so you aren't trespassing).
I think it should be said that as protests go this is pretty mild mannered though it depends on how they go about it. If they use compromised machines then it should be condemned, it is illegal. If people voluntarily use their machines and their ISP to reload the RNC's web pages so what, go for it. The RNC can ban their IP address and their ISP can do something about it if it reaches the abusive stage.
I doubt this will be a very effective tactic but I think its their prerogative to try it as long as they don't do anything illegal.
I think the important thing to point out is how misplaced all the cries here are about intolerance and depriving the Republican's of their free speech. The Republican's have done far mor violence to free speech, open mindedness and tolerance than anyone in my lifetime though Hoover and Nixon were a close second. You'd have to go back to McCarthyism to match or top them. I should point out McCarthyism sprung in to existence the last time the Republican's had control of Congress and we aren't far from it now that they have power again. There is something about Republicans, when they have power, that drives them to intolerance and viciousness.
It should be pointed out that its been the right of American's to go to party conventions, carry signs and engage in non violent protest as long as I can remember, it was proof of how strong our democracy was, until this year of course. This year I defy you to engage in an unauthorized, nonviolent protest at either of the conventions. There was only one march that was allowed at the DNC, and it was the day before the convention, the police out numbered the protesters and it got almost no media coverage. I recall one attempt at an unauthorized protest, it also got no coverage and I wager the police shut it down instantly.
During the DNC if you wanted to protest you were put in a razor wire cage, euphemistcly called a "free speech zone", out of sight, out of mind and you were no doubt ID'ed and cataloged. I don't recall a single second of media coverage of any protestors actually stupid enough to subject themselves to it, though there were numerous clips of the empty cage. I imagine the same will hold true at the RNC and more so.
Aiming your indignation at Crimethics is misplaced little campaign is pretty lame when its compared to the harm being done to free speech and the right to protest by the Department of Homeland security with the blessing of both parties.
I recall a speech Bush gave in Minnesota a week or two ago in a quarry. A couple young guys managed to get tickets, you had to have tickets to see the President speak and they were supposed to be handed out only to the Bush faithful. One of them wore an antibush T shirt under another shirt. Well the secret service spotted it and the two were nearly arrested. The Secret Service apparently backed off realizing they hadn't actually done anything illegal. They were detained for the duration and had the opportunity to watch the speech accompanied by the Secret Service, and I assure you they are cataloged in the SS and FBI files now.
I assure we have a lot bigger issues with free speech and nonviolent protest than Crimethics silly little campaign. In fact I defy you to ever get within sight of the President carrying any kind of anti Bush sign. You will either be shunted to a "free speech zone" out of sight, detained by the Secret Service or out right arrested.
I just really wouldn't shed a tear about this Republican group's "free speech". They are the same group who smeared John McCain in the 2000 primaries using racist and sexual innuendo about his adopted Bangladesh child. I've lost some faith in McCain that he is endorsing Bush this year after the vicious stuff they did to him in 2000. Rumor is he's been promised Secretary of Defense as his payoff. I'd like to see him there to straighten out the Pentagon but I wager the Bush team conned him with the promise and will renege if the the time comes.
The original poster had a potentially accurate point except he should have said big coal companies instead of big oil. The coal companies have the Bush administration wrapped around their little finger, I think Kerry too. You know it when you hear both of them talk about "clean coal" technology as "the" solution to our electricity generation problems, Kerry just recently announced support for it probably to win over coal miners and big business in places like West Virginia, another example of how more alike Bush and Kerry are than different. Well you can make burning coal cleaner but you are not likely to ever make it "clean" especially when it comes to green house gases.
You might be right that energy companies would just jump on fusion if it were viable and go on its merry way. Not sure its true though. It would be a very disruptive technology were it to be developed. For one thing there aren't exactly reserves that a company could own. You can get the raw material from sea water with work, the next likely source that could be owned would be the moon. The beauty of fossil fuels are they are in pockets, and you have to gamble to find them, and the pockets can be owned, and they are finite resources resulting in them being excellent ways to make lots money and ideal for Machiavellian global geopolitics (which is why the Bush and Cheney clans love it so much). In the last few years an oil company found oil off the west coast of Africa. I think it was Mobile who took the rather dumb, greedy dictator to the cleaners in the negotiations. The dictator, his family and cronies are rich beyond their desires but the entire rest of the country is still in abject property when their standard of living should be way up. The oil company is for all purposes practically printing money doing what great business empires have often done, looting a 3rd world company for it.
With fusion pretty much anyone could get in the energy business as long as they had the capital to build the plant and to harvest the fuel. Getting the fuel wouldn't be as onerous as it is for fission reactors either and disposing of the waste would probably be no problem at all. There would be a business in building the plants which might be down GE/Westinghouse's ally but otherwise it would completely alter the current energy market, probably destroying some huge empires in the process. Huge empires usually don't like that and will do everything in their power to stop it. It would no doubt ripple in to the auto industry because cars would almost inevitably go electric. Detroit has been paying lip service to electric/hybrid but it took the rather more forward looking Japanese to actually make it a reality and Detroit looks to be more than a little reluctant to embrace moving away from fossil fuels.
All in all when it comes to breakthrough technologies you do need to be thoroughly aware that the current powers that be can and do actively throw road blocks in the way if it is potentially disruptive to their business, though it would be a massive benefit to the planet as a whole. We could have had vastly more fuel efficient cars if we'd just continued the trend started in the first oil embargo in the 70's towards higher MPG. Instead thanks to the direction most auto companies took, with the blessing of big oil fuel, efficiency has often gotten worse, not better which is a key reason the U.S. in particular is massively dependent on oil imports and is waging wars and trying to topple governments, like Venezuela's, to secure its supply.
Yes but they would have risked Netscape or someone else taking over the client side of interaction with the Internet and increasingly most applications since most applications are moving to a web and browser basis. Netscape had declared its intent to make its client platform independent. It could easily over time have made it irrelevant what your underlying OS was, destroyed Microsoft's monopoly and their stock price.
Microsoft did exactly what they knew they had to do to head off the gravest threat they faced to their monopoly in the '90's. I wager they have zero regrets. Besides which the price they've paid in antitrust penalties has been insignificant in both dollars and scrutiny, versus what they won. The Bush administration, being the huge fans of big business they are, gutted the U.S. antitrust decision. The EU appears to be mostly trying to pocket a big paycheck at the expense of the U.S. and maybe wage a futile war on media players. Japan's response remains to be seen. I wager if any foreign government attempts action that is to harsh on Microsoft the Bush administration will endeavor to bribe or intimidate them as necessary to adjust their attitude.
I'm willing to bet you Microsoft will in fact destroy the third party security software market just like they did browsers and they wont get a whimper of complaint from governments. You see since 9/11 the fear of cyber terrorist attacks and hacker attacks in general will trump anti trust concerns in a heart beat. Everyone will say Microsoft HAS to bundle security software to make everyone "safe". The 3rd party vendors, their share holders and employees will just be unfortunate casualties of the drive to make everyone "safe". Beside I imagine all the best employee will get job offers from Microsoft anyway. The 3rd party security software shareholders will eventually be screwed and Microsoft's will benefit again but everyone is used to that by now.
Well actually no it wont. They wont dominate firewall market because they have a deeply felt interest in security if thats what you meant by changing. They will come to dominate it because it is one area where consumers are still spending billions of dollars that aren't going in to Microsoft's pocket. This service pack is just the first step. Its designed to put Symantec, McAfee etc. off guard by putting their toe in the water in the security software market but without being really threatening. Once they dive all the way in they will turn in to Jaws.
I assure you this is already causing massive confusion with people that have a 3rd party firewall now. Will installing this screw it up, how do I turn off Microsoft's, should you turn off the firewall you already have. Should you jus not update to SP2 at all. What happens if both are running. Its way to complicated for most users just like replacing IE with Netscape was. Within a few years all but the most tech savvy will stop buying 3rd party security software and assume Microsoft's is good enough and of course its free, built in, no hassle, just like IE was.
What does Microsoft get out of it. Well they gain control of another large piece of the software market. Go to Walmart and see whats on the shelves, Microsoft XP and Office, 3rd party security software, tax software and games. They will in a couple years cross off all that 3rd party security software. They can increase the price of Windows and its still a net win for consumers who are paying less than they do now for Windows and 3rd party security software.
Security is also great since they can follow in Symantec's footsteps and charge annual fees for update services and get some steady software services revenue that they probably very much want so they can insure stable revenue as they saturate the OS and office markets, face competition from Linux and still need to grow their revenues to keep the sharks on Wall Street happy.
Well yes it is standard Venture Capital at work. Some people with no money and an idea want to start a company. They go out and seek funding and in the valley its almost venture capital in one form or another. Unfortunately the price they pay with each round of VC is they lose more and more control of their company and its fate. Each major venture capitalist demands seats on the board and in turn they get boxes in the corporate org chart.
A potential problem is the two guys in the dorm room or the garage had the mojo. All those VC's are just out to make a killing and they cause lots of bad things to happen to good technology and good people like Sergey and Larry. When they are ready to IPO they INEVITABLY tell the founders they have to bring in business people that will command respect on Wall Street so they bring there people in and at that point the founders lose control of their company, they still get rich unless they are really stupid, but they lose their baby.
You don't have to look at the Prospectus to guess where all the Google VC came from, just look at the board and you see all the usual suspects
Sun Sequoia capital Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Intel
Sherpalo I don't recall hearing before but they sound like classic VP.
John Hennessey is in there to cover the Stanford connection. If you don't recognize the name he wrote a classic tome on computer architecture.
You wonder who is really running Google now, Larry and Sergey as it should be, or the sharks that saw an opportunity to make a killing.
Your link doesn't seem to work. Here is Here is another one. Its the first I heard of it, its real interesting if true. It is pretty disturbing to hear that a 54 year old guy was fired right before an IPO, and they apparently screwed him out of $10 million dollars in options. To top it off a Google VP may have told the guy he was "incompatible with Google's youthful atmosphere", grounds for a successful age discrimination law suit if its substantiated.
This kind of confirms what I suspected about Google. I suspect Larry and Sergei mean well at heart but as soon as Google started to look like an IPO bonanza Googles ranks almost inevitably filled up with greedy people willing to do anything to make their killing that is mostly all you find in the valley any more. If they screwed him out of $10 million in options, then you see, thats more for everyone else to divvy up.
Unfortunately Silicon Valley as a whole is so infected with greed now I'm not sure it will ever be the great innovator it once was or even a barely tolerable place to work. Some greed is good, to much is a stalking killer.
The times I've lived in the valley nearly everyone there seemed to have one and only one mantra:
- Get the biggest piece of the hottest IPO you can find. Kiss up to or screw anyone necessary to get it.
Not sure I would trust anyone in the cabal that is Mt. View, Palo Alto or Stanford since they were infected with this disease. You see all the same names on their resumes, Netscape, SUN, @Home, SGI. You sense they are just bouncing from one source of hot IPO buzz to another in a desperate search for more 'F' you money.
You can be confident they will do anything necessary to acquire the most options possible, and sometimes that means incredible, stellar performance, othertimes it just means back stabbing and ask kissing. As soon as they can cash out the IPO then they are gone to the next killing or a luxurious and often ill deserved retirement. It is a system designed to fuel breakthroughs, it isn't a system designed to create businesses that last and that have sound values.
I've often wondered how people reconcile the contradiction between calling themselves Republican and continuing to worship the ground George W. walks on, since he's sold most of the principals of conservatism and the old Republican party down the river.
My dad is the staunchest Republican ever and yesterday he said he decided he was voting against Bush...my jaw dropped...since he ALWAYS votes Republican. For him the last straw was he can't tolerate George W. constantly injecting religion in to his public duties. For him religion is personal and it should never be allowed to creep in to public service. I'm afraid he may have to find a new party since it appears extremist Christians, you know they are like extremist Muslims except they are Christian, seem to have taken over the Republican party.
Anyway I was reading this this story on Linux insider and was interested to see there is actually a theory that seeks to explain how people can maintain fanatical devotion to a lost cause in fact of overwhelming evidence they are wrong, its Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. This article is actually councilling Linux fanatics to refrain from constantly bashing Windows, especially SP2.
From the article:
"In brief, however, the theory makes two critical predictions. First, people will try to strengthen existing beliefs by rejecting contrary information and actively seeking out supportive information. Second, the energy believers put into doing this will increase as the boundaries between believers and others get stronger."
"In other words, opposition strengthens belief and the more people believe in something, the harder they'll fight to keep that belief no matter how obvious the increasing absurdity of their beliefs and actions might be to the uninvolved."
"Festinger's best example of this process at work involves the response to failed religious prophecy: Do "world enders" change their opinions the day after it doesn't end? You'd think so, but they don't. On the contrary, they change the due date and double their efforts to convince others that their unique knowledge conveys or reflects moral superiority."
So it appears the Bush faithful, though they have encountered case after case that should have shattered their faith in George W. have crossed over a line where these traumas compel them to look ever harder to find reason to justify their faith.
Here for example is a pretty good run down of the probable reality of George W. services in the National Guard. His service should shatter all faith staunch republicans have in him since they cherish there military service. If a Democratic candidate had this record the Republican's would be pilloring him over all day every day. Kerry's service record is way less bad but the media is constantly beating him up over it and they say next to nothing about Bush's military disgrace.
Before all you right wingers hit that reply button to flame me in to charcoal just stop and think for a minute if maybe you've fallen in to the trap of cognitive dissonance.
Last night CSPAN was running ACLU speeches by Richard Clark and Bob Barr in particular. If you know Bob Barr he is one of the more rabid conservatives known to man. It was a mind blowing experience to see him addressing the ACLU and state the obvious, the Bill of Rights is already an endangered species and heading to extinction. He is the staunchest Republican and he mauled the Bush administration, state and local governments and the ever expanding corpratist cultures that is devastating the civil liberties staunch conservatives cherish so much. If I hadn't known who he was I would have though he was a flaming liberal but then I remembered the true conservatives on the far right and the left have pretty much been united by the massive danger the new Republican party poses to the U.S. constitution. If CSPAN replays the ACLU speeches from July Barr's speech and Richard Clark's are good oratory.
That is a great comeback to stupid French bashing. I'm sick of hearing, "there so ungrateful, we saved their asses in World War I and II so they are in our debt forever no matter what kind of dicks we've turned in to".
These same people conveniently forget that there might not be a good ole U.S. of A. were it not for the French during the American revolution, especially at Yorktown.
A French general, Rochambeau, devised the strategy.
Key intelligence enabling Yorktown came through Lafayette.
Rochambeau's French army held the left flank at Yorktown, Lafayette helped Washington command the American contingent.
A French fleet under Admiral de Grasse bombarded Cornwallis from the sea and prevented his escape on British ships otherwise the British might have lived to fight another day and there is a distinct chance America might not have been so lucky then.
The French made a grave mistake in just giving the statue to the U.S. They should have given it to the U.S. on loan under the condition the U.S. preserve and protect the liberties of which it is a symbol. If the U.S. failed in that, as it appears to be failing today, the French should have retained the right to repossess the statue and send it to a new home, a new place that is committed to liberty and to welcoming refugees, to insure the statue will always be the beacon of liberty it was intended to be.
"All and all it felt a bit like overkill, but considering that the statue is probably one of the most important symbols of America, it makes sense to so heavily guard it."
Not sure that's really true if in the process of guarding it you undermine the thing it stands for and if everything else going on in America today have turned it on to a symbol of something America is losing, fast.
You see it is a symbol of liberty, people seem to forget that, as is the case with most idols. The French gave it to the U.S. because at the time, at least relative to most of the rest of the world, America was dramatically freer. You could come here with nothing and have a chance. You didn't have to worry so much about secret police coming in the night, hauling you away to never be seen again, as you did many other places. If you were a refugee from a bad place you could come here and things would probably be better.
Today a fair number of Americans are looking to Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark or a lot of other places for those same reasons, to escape an increasingly bad place to find something better and freer. There are, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, a lot of places that do a better job at liberty than America these days.
Perhaps if America wants to both keep the statue "safe" and preserve its meaning they should consider shipping it to another country where Liberty has a better chance of lasting for a while. Maybe it should be a rule that if you want to keep the "Statue of Liberty" you need to insure that your preserve and defend the liberties in your country. If you don't you have to pass the statue on like a baton so that wherever the statue is in the world you know thats the place where refugees can go and liberty can still be found, that way it would always be the beacon it was meant to be.
Maybe the fingerprints are just a convenient mechanism to run locks, but you unfortunately have to be pretty sure that if you use them the prints are being sent out for computerized fingerprint matching and if a red flag comes back they are going to pull you aside and you will probably disappear. Whether you are guilty of anything or not it really isn't right that you give up a little piece of liberty to visit a symbol of liberty. Kinda sad.
Your assertion is usually true but in this case these two quotes aren't really being taken out of context:
"We will not wait as our enemies gather strength against us. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action, and this nation will act." G.W.Bush, West Point, June 2002
"In this new world, declarations of war serve no purpose. Our enemies must be defeated before they can harm us. I will never declare war, but will take action!" Adolph Hitler, June 1940
They carry most of their context with them. The only thing different are the specific enemies they were facing. For Hitler it was communism, Jews and the powers that humiliated Germany at Versailles. For George W. its pretty much anybody who isn't in the "with us" column in "you are either with us or against" though in particular its Islamic extremists.
They are both saying they have enemies and they will use preemptive, aggressive warfare to eliminate them before they can strike. Not sure what context you could put around these two statements that would make them not mean the same thing.
Enemies from without or within, whether they be real, imagined or manufactured are probably the oldest tool for expanding the power of a government over its people. If people feel threatened or endangered they will usually sacrifice just about anything to be safe. The people in Germany did sacrifice everything but in the end it didn't lead to safety.
The key questions American's need to ask themselves today and aren't:
- how much are you willing to sacrifice to be "safe". - are the sacrifices you're making actually resulting in improved safety.
Unfortunately many of the insane measurements being taken by an out of control government in Washington are, at the end of the day, more smoke and mirrors than real improvements.
If the sacrifices you are making are making you "safe" then you just need to ask yourself is it worth it.
If the sacrifices you are making aren't really make you much safer then why should you be making them.
A simple example, the way to prevent another 9/11 was extraordinarily simple. You put armored cockpit doors in all airliners. It cost a few million dollars and it didn't trample any civil liberties. Sure highjackers might still be able to take over the passanger compartment or blow up the plane but if you want to live in a free society you need to accept there are some risks. You make modest improvements in screening passengers and baggage if you want to minimize them. But instead your government responded to 9/11 with measures that were extraordinarily disruptive, expensive and trampled civil liberties in a major way. They border on making flying so unappealing people start to avoid it, especially if you fly to the U.S. from another country. At that point the measures to improve safety have surpassed the break even point, you would prefer being a little less safe so flying wont be so onerous that you stop doing it.
They are doing the same thing in their response to years old video footage found on suspected Al Qaeda. Rather than quietly tightening security on the targets and seek to foil any plots, instead they used them as a mechanism for pumping fear in the American people. In the process they tipped off Al Qaeda in a major way to the fact one of their networks was compromised which is just really bad intelligence work no matter how you look at it. They key benefit they got out of it though is they were able to use it as an excuse to further expand their self granted authority to randomly stop people both on the street and on the highways to engage in what would otherwise be illegal searches. You know you are in a police state when you can't drive down the highway without the risk of hitting a checkpoint where you are going to be ID'ed, searched and potentially detained for thouroughly vague reasons.
Thanks to the Reg here is another example of George W. making an ass out of himself. Its something film makers can use to poke fun at him, or maybe it will be the source of another copyright fight.
The guy really is embarrassing when he has to ad lib on something unexpected, something his handlers haven't trained him to respond to like a parrot... Polly want a war on terror....
I should clarify my main issue is not with the fact that civilians get killed in armed conflicts. In fact I think I'd say there is just a degree of inevitability in it unless the war is being waged in the middle of an empty desert, arctic wastes or the middle of an ocean.
The problem you have using heavy weapons for targeted assassination in Gaza is its one of the more densely populated strips of ground on earth. You simply can't kid yourself that you are going to be able to use high explosives there without killing innocent bystanders.
If you don't want civilians killed then don't wage war.
The thing I can't stomach is the hypocrisy of one side saying, "we don't kill civilians", its only the other side that does that. We are saints, they are devils. Its normally just empty propaganda and the only reason you do it is because it works to further inflame the passions of the people who are already on our side so they are more willing to kill some more.
Its the nature of war for both sides to commit atrocities and kill civilians. Any side that tries to deny they do it is probably lieing.
Maybe you will sway some people reading this thread but not me. You see you keep saying it was the Arabs that did everything wrong and the Jews are right, right, right. The Arabs have to stop doing this and must do that and then maybe we will treat them as human beings again. All their misery and suffering is their fault, they are just getting whats coming to them.
You see your Palestinian favoring counterpart is going to have a list just as long as yours listing all the things Israel and the Jews have done and how they are wrong, wrong, wrong and the Arabs are right, right, right.
To break the deadlock in the Middle East everyone involved needs to admit both sides have reached the point that they are just wrong, wrong, wrong, do a master clear, get over it, move ahead and and reach a settlement where they are both equally unhappy and learn to deal with it.
I will grant you Arafat deserves to burn in hell for passing on Clinton's peace proposal. It was about as good as he could hope for and by passing on it he's just got countless thousands more people killed for no good reason. Unfortunately the only way Arafat can define himself and hold power is by defying Israel. It appears he will always be a guerilla and he passed on his once chance to be a great statesman. If the Palestinian's ever get a clue they will get rid of him and maybe they can move forward. Of course Israel needs to get rid of Sharon for pretty much all the same reasons.
"Japanese zero pilots Kamakazied their planes into American aircraft carriers during WWII.
That didn't make them "right.""
Again I'm not seeing your point. You seem to be saying they are wrong because they were willing to sacrifice themselves defending their country in a declared war. Most nations would define that as heroic behavior by a soldier, they were attacking military targets after all. Of course most adversaries would try to paint it as "wrong" but its a weak argument.
Probably shouldn't throw in another match in a thread soaked with gasoline, but if you want an example of the kind of "wrong" in World War II you seem to be grasping consider carpet bombing, and nukeing, cities. Germany did it to an extent, inviting reciprocation, but the allies took it to a new level in intentional and massive killing of civilians in both Germany and Japan, and later in Vietnam, under the guise of "strategic bombing". Its a little hard to stomach America's hypocrisy on its holier than thou rhetoric on killing civilians because the U.S. Air Forces has killed millions of them somewhat intentionally over the last 65 years.
OK, I'll grant you Bush played voters as chumps in 2000 too. But you see Bush was a lot smarter about it. He lied consistently throughout the campaign. It was only after he was elected that he proved himself a liar.
Kerry changes his position every few weeks in the middle of a campaign making it obvious he doesn't believe at least half of what he says. It makes it extremely easy for his opponent to highlight this fact and it makes potential voters feel like chumps if they vote for him because its obvious he is pandering to the voters he happens to be talking to at the moment.
I guess I've answered why the media never mentions the fact because you instantly get tagged for antisemitism and racism.
When you are running for President your life should be an open book. The fact that your surname is a fabrication is just a fact the people voting for you should now. I just find it amazing and interesting its NEVER mentioned. I heard it once on CNN in the middle of the night when their editorial control was probably weak.
When your country is engaged in a massive never ending war against Islam having a president who is to some extent Jewish is going to add a new and interesting twist. You see in the U.S. and Europe it may be brushed under the rug, but the rest of the world, especially the Islamic world will notice and it will be cited as further evidence of the reach of Zionism in the U.S. The implication will be someone who is openly Jewish, like Leiberman is unlikely to be elected President, so the next approach was to run someone whose Jewish ancestry is thinly veiled. Before you slam me for saying this I am again just outlining what you will see in the Arab press if he is elected.
I really wish I could say that there wasn't anything to Zionism and Jewish influence in the U.S. but its a fact that Zionism is a powerful global force and there is an extremely powerful Jewish influence in the U.S. Its a tribute to its power that you can't point out this obvious fact without being rabidly attacked and facing massive denial of something that is obvious. Like I said any politician running for a major office in the U.S. who isn't rabidly pro Israel has NO chance of getting elected in this country. That is an indicator of a lobby with massive power.
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I hate to break it to you but you are falling in to the black and white trap everyone falls in to when they try to divide politics in to liberal and conservative. You seem to have lumped liberalism in with socialism and they are two different things. Most of the big governmentism that sprung out of the depression and FDR, which you rightly have problems with is much more socialism than liberalism. If you weren't politically naive you would realize politics is like the spokes in a wheel and not a turn signal.
I'm kind of curious, when you claim the moniker "compassionate conservative" does that mean you are a fervent supporter of the other self proclaimed "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush? If so I have news for you, you should probably start calling yourself a libertarian than the travesty "conservate" is in the U.S. today.
The "compassionate conservatives" who have a stranglehold on power at the moment are instituting "large powerful central government" faster than the "liberals" you hate ever did, though the Dem's are helping. They are doing the same injustice to "conservatism" that the Dems have done to "liberalism" over the years.
Here is the short list of the most obvious examples of Republican backed "large powerful central government":
- Patriot Act
- Medicare "Reform" bill
- Department of Homeland Security
- Skyrocketing Federal budget and deficit
- Skyrocketing defense spending
- Preemptive warfare and nation building
- Free speech zones which in fact prevent free speech
- The rush to a National Intelligence Director is going to result in spying and law enforcement whose power to intrude in to your life is going to be unchecked and unstoppable. It is going result in an out of control spying agency like the CIA was in the 50's and 60's but with unfettered domestic spying powers. The Republican's are feigning reluctance but they are drooling at the prospect of creating it and of suckering the Dems in to being eager to do it too.
- Detention of people without due process at the whim of the executive branch
I hate to break it to you but what the Dems and Republicans are both practicing are different flavors of "socialism". The Republicans talk big talk about free markets but they are in fact intervening in the economy and civil liberties in truly massive ways.
The medicare "reform" bill being the most obvious example of massive economic intervention. It has all the earmarks of classic Democratic socialism except they are instead using it as a thinly veiled disguise to pump large quantities of tax payer dollars in to the pockets of their friends in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and insurance industry. The Dems woudl have just pumped it in to a huge bureaucracy and the pockets of the poor and elderly.
The defence industrial complex is in fact one of the largest planned economies on the face of the earth, the Republicans love every bit of it and can't pump money in to it fast enough.
I hate to burst the bubble but the two offerings available in the U.S. today aren't true conservatism or liberalism. They are both Socialism, the democrats leaning towards classic socialism and the Republican's leaning more towards Fascism(substituting Muslims for Jews) every day.
There are two men I know who are both staunch Republicans and they are both the biggest cowards I know. They don't go ANYWHERE unless they have a bunch of guys surrounding them to protect them from every possible danger, including the danger of having their feelings hurt by people carrying signs saying bad things about them.
When they were both faced with the extreme danger of serving in the military they both did everything in their power and the power of their parents to make sure there was no chance they would EVER see combat themselves. They ran away from military service as fast as they could with their tails tucked between their legs, showing a yellow streak a mile long. They are totally cool with telling other people to go get killed as long as they stay safe.
They are the two biggest cowards I know and they are as Republican as they come. Case closed. Theory debunked.
You probably shouldn't waste your time arguing with Twirp when he wanders off on in to this paranoid haze. He lays awake nights playing out scenario after scenario where a terrorist might attack him. If you were to take his advice on how to make himself "safe" the entire world would grind to a halt under suffocating security and it still wouldn't stop a determined attacker willing to sacrifice himself for the cause.
"Oh, and that whole "9/11 was brilliant" thing? Disgusting."
At much as it chaps your ass, Twirp, it obviously was brilliant, and that says nothing about the motivations or morals of the people that did it. They spent maybe a half million dollars, and did hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in economic damage to their target and have completely tied the world up in knots in part thanks to the over of the U.S. government. By contrast the U.S. spends trillions on defense and was powerless to stop it. If they manage a few more of them they could well succeed in destroying the U.S. as we know it, not directly due to the attacks but because U.S. government's inevitable overreaction to the next attacks will probably result in a crippled economy, a police state and an America people who are miserable. While the U.S. spends these vast amounts of time, money, civil liberties and freedom trying to prevent the last attack, Al Qaeda no doubt working on a new attack strategy that will catch the U.S. as much by surprise as 9/11 did. Unless you stop them at the well spring you simply aren't going to be able to completely safeguard a nation as large as the U.S. without destroying it in the process. Israel hasn't been able to do it after more than 50 years trying and it is a tiny nation where nearly everyone is packing a machine gun.
Tommy Franks, he must be a hero of yours as much as you cherish the invasion of Iraq, in the new book he is plugging is pretty adamant it is thoroughly wrong headed to call the 9/11 attackers "cowards" or to otherwise try to denigrate them:
"I think we're, we're at peril if we underestimate our, our enemy. Going back into the '90s, Osama bin Laden indicated that he had great capacity, that, that he was ideologically supported by a lot of people. And he may or may not be a personal coward, but I do know that he is a worthy adversary, and it is in our best interest to, to treat him as such. And that, that actually is what I meant in the book."
"So which is it? The brownskins? The US senators? Elderly men? People with "funny clothes"?"
The answer is pretty simple. Its whomever the people running the system decide they want to target. You see it is a system that is the first stage of implementing the plot line of Minority Report. You see it is a system striving to predict the future and to apprehend people prior to committing a crime. The only problem is the Department of Homeland Security lacks the prescients Tom Cruise had to draw on so it is a system even more fallible than it was in the movie. They are attempting to predict the future predicated either whimsy, so it is whimsical as in the case of the infirm old man, or malevolence which is far more likely the case for Senator Kennedy who is the most vitriolic and famous critic of the people that just happen to own the no fly list.
There is a precedent for prescient security, an earlier attempt, that dates back to 1950, the last time Republicans held power in Congress. It was the Detention Act of 1950:
Sec. 103. (a) Whenever there shall be in existence such an emergency, the President, acting through the Attorney General, is hereby authorized to apprehend and by order detain, pursuant to the provisions of this title, each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or of sabotage,
You see it says people can be detained if there is "belief" that they "will" engage in espionage or sabotage. It is impossible for someone to defend themselves against such a belief or disprove that they wouldn't, at some point in the future, have engaged in criminal activity had they not been detained.
Actually the history of prescience U.S. security enforcement that goes back to World War II and the Japanese Exclusion Act, when the U.S. government stripped Japanese Americans of most of their property and their rights as they herded them in to concentration camps because there was a "belief" they "might" engage in sabotage or espionage (substitute terrorism today).
As I recall the Detention Act of 1950 was repealed in 1971, when the Democractic Congress was trying to rain in the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover, etc, but it is a concept that has interestingly largely returned since 9/11 once again thanks mostly to the Republicans and was referenced in the recent Supreme Court briefs on the aborted hearing on the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who is being held by the Bush administration in contravention of the Constition, due process and civil liberties American's are under the illusion they have. Mr. Padilla may be a bad man but its unclear if he's actually ever done anything illegal. He is in effect being held for future crime.
P.S.
I rather doubt Senator Kennedy's targeting was the accident Homeland Security says it is. It was most probably a delightfully funny way for the Bush administration to send him a signal that they don't appreciate the fact that he is the most vocal critic of the Bush administration in Congress and they can make him suffer for it so he will think twice the next time. Someone cited a passage from the Constitation pointing out it is illegal to prevent a Congressman from traveling to Congress. The forefathers were pretty prescient because they knew if they didn't put in that clause the party in power could use travel restrictions against the party out of power to deny them access to the making of laws. Unfortunately it appears today the no fly list could be used precisely to do just that. It is also almost certainly being used to blacklist less famous critics of the Bush administration
"He wants to read an e-book on his watch?!"
If you had RTFA you might have noticed he was proposing contact lenses as the primary display device so presumably the watch was just where the books were stored. Presumably you would be using speech to control it, or maybe an eye tracker in the lens as a pointer.
At the proposed density of memory storage and computing power he was presumably refering to a rather sleek watch rather than the bulky geeked out all in one watches of today. The power supply is likely to be the main bulk and weight problem since they are advancing much more slowly than everything else. I suppose it is a matter of debate if a watch is the best place to put your computing power but it is better than in your clothes since you are less like to lose it or wash it.
Uh....its not like its a hard problem. Put armored cockpit doors on all airliners...I think already done....improve screening for explosives, the technology does exist.
Maybe terrorists will still be able to attack passengers in an airplane, or crash one at worst, but there won't be any more hijackings, or targeted crashngs, it doesn't cost much, is pretty foolproof and no abuse of civil liberties.
I'm afraid in this case its pretty well established the TSA's no fly list is being used as a tool to punish political opponents of the current administration. They have pretty much banned less well known anti war activists from flying for some time now and they have no recourse to get their names cleared.
I'm wagering someone in the Bush administration thought it would be funny to punish Sen. Kennedy for his outspoken and harsh criticism of the Bush administration on a number of fronts, since they've already been doing it to less well known activists so the precedent is already set. The message being you better shut up because we have the power now and we can make your life a living hell if we want to and you can't stop us.
It might come back to haunt them since now they've pissed off someone with enough power to punish, or at least raise awareness, of no fly list abuses, along with the many other abuses of power by the current administration.
That aside it is insane to have a system which is punishing people based on nothing but names since it is inevitable there will be more than one person with that name in the world, and that a real terrorist will probably be using aliases at this point anyway. It is a system designed to punish the innocent and indicative of the insane measures the current government is implementing to create a facade of safety to hide their incompetence. I've said this before, if the TSA wanted to prevent another 9/11 put armored cockpit doors on all airplanes which I think they've done. It doesn't cost much, no more 9/11's and at a fraction of the cost of current TSA measures, no intrusion of personal liberties, no damage to the economic health of airlines.
I'll give you your point that both parties are pretty thoroughly corrupted by wealthy donors, the Democrats having trial lawyers and Hollywood in particular. But a couple of your points are well funny....
I'll stick to just discussing this one:
"Yes, both parties listen to money, but quit buying this rich fat cat propeganda that the Democrats are for small folk, pro minorities (look at which party fought for slavery and even ran a candidate against President Lincoln that promised to end the civil war and let the south keep the slaves)."
You are correct the Republican's were the party fighting for blacks...140 years ago but you are glossing over the fact a seismic shift occurred in the 1960's. Prior to that it is true Southern Democrats were pretty much the worst supporters of segregation. But starting in the Kennedy administration and especially in the Johnson administration the Democrats passed major pieces of civil rights legislation that put an end to apartheid in America. The result...blacks moved to the Democratic part en masse and whites, especially southerners, who were either overtly or not so overtly racist moved to the Republican party. The end result is the South moved from being overwhelmingly Democratic to what we have now where it is nearly solidly Republican.
So your key mistake is you are citing ancient history which no longer applies. It is well understood the Republicans are routinely playing the race card, sometimes subtlety and sometimes not so subtlety to hold whites, with rascist inclinations, in the Republican column and that is how they hold a lot of less than affluent whites in the West and South in their camp, along with massive pandering to fundementalist Christianity, gay bashing, and flag waving militarism, all of which play well in "fly over" country.
So you are correct that are a lot of less than affluent people vote Republican, but if you look at the Republican power base, the people that call the shots, they are overwhelmingly affluent white men, mostly businessmen.
I hate to break it to you but you simply can not engage in a lawful, non violent protest anyplace that you will be seen at the either of the party conventions or in fact ANY place the President goes. If you are carrying or wearing any sign critical of the president it is routine practice for you to either be detained or shunted to a "Free Speech Zone" where you can't see the President and he can't see you. If you doth protest to much about it you will usually be arrested.
A couple weeks ago George gave a speech in a quarry in Minnesota. To attend you had to have tickets and the tickets were supposed to go only to his loyal followers. A couple guys who weren't loyal followers got hold of a couple. One guy tried to get in wearing an anti bush T-shirt under another shirt. The SS spotted it, they were nearly arrested though the SS backed off and just:
- detained them for the duration of the event
- ID'ed and filed them for future scrutiny
Another kid with his family was searched and when it was found he had a Kerry sticker on his wallet he was turned back and threatened with arrest if he didn't leave quietly. The event was only for the faithful.
All in all their is a beauty in your argument. You're saying we can't protest unless we do it "legally". The government currently has the power, in the name of "safety" and homeland security to protests illegal at their discretion therefor we can no longer protest, unless maybe we do it out in the middle of a corn field where no one will notice, (a corn field you own of course so you aren't trespassing).
I think it should be said that as protests go this is pretty mild mannered though it depends on how they go about it. If they use compromised machines then it should be condemned, it is illegal. If people voluntarily use their machines and their ISP to reload the RNC's web pages so what, go for it. The RNC can ban their IP address and their ISP can do something about it if it reaches the abusive stage.
I doubt this will be a very effective tactic but I think its their prerogative to try it as long as they don't do anything illegal.
I think the important thing to point out is how misplaced all the cries here are about intolerance and depriving the Republican's of their free speech. The Republican's have done far mor violence to free speech, open mindedness and tolerance than anyone in my lifetime though Hoover and Nixon were a close second. You'd have to go back to McCarthyism to match or top them. I should point out McCarthyism sprung in to existence the last time the Republican's had control of Congress and we aren't far from it now that they have power again. There is something about Republicans, when they have power, that drives them to intolerance and viciousness.
It should be pointed out that its been the right of American's to go to party conventions, carry signs and engage in non violent protest as long as I can remember, it was proof of how strong our democracy was, until this year of course. This year I defy you to engage in an unauthorized, nonviolent protest at either of the conventions. There was only one march that was allowed at the DNC, and it was the day before the convention, the police out numbered the protesters and it got almost no media coverage. I recall one attempt at an unauthorized protest, it also got no coverage and I wager the police shut it down instantly.
During the DNC if you wanted to protest you were put in a razor wire cage, euphemistcly called a "free speech zone", out of sight, out of mind and you were no doubt ID'ed and cataloged. I don't recall a single second of media coverage of any protestors actually stupid enough to subject themselves to it, though there were numerous clips of the empty cage. I imagine the same will hold true at the RNC and more so.
Aiming your indignation at Crimethics is misplaced little campaign is pretty lame when its compared to the harm being done to free speech and the right to protest by the Department of Homeland security with the blessing of both parties.
I recall a speech Bush gave in Minnesota a week or two ago in a quarry. A couple young guys managed to get tickets, you had to have tickets to see the President speak and they were supposed to be handed out only to the Bush faithful. One of them wore an antibush T shirt under another shirt. Well the secret service spotted it and the two were nearly arrested. The Secret Service apparently backed off realizing they hadn't actually done anything illegal. They were detained for the duration and had the opportunity to watch the speech accompanied by the Secret Service, and I assure you they are cataloged in the SS and FBI files now.
I assure we have a lot bigger issues with free speech and nonviolent protest than Crimethics silly little campaign. In fact I defy you to ever get within sight of the President carrying any kind of anti Bush sign. You will either be shunted to a "free speech zone" out of sight, detained by the Secret Service or out right arrested.
I just really wouldn't shed a tear about this Republican group's "free speech". They are the same group who smeared John McCain in the 2000 primaries using racist and sexual innuendo about his adopted Bangladesh child. I've lost some faith in McCain that he is endorsing Bush this year after the vicious stuff they did to him in 2000. Rumor is he's been promised Secretary of Defense as his payoff. I'd like to see him there to straighten out the Pentagon but I wager the Bush team conned him with the promise and will renege if the the time comes.
Karl Rove in his
The original poster had a potentially accurate point except he should have said big coal companies instead of big oil. The coal companies have the Bush administration wrapped around their little finger, I think Kerry too. You know it when you hear both of them talk about "clean coal" technology as "the" solution to our electricity generation problems, Kerry just recently announced support for it probably to win over coal miners and big business in places like West Virginia, another example of how more alike Bush and Kerry are than different. Well you can make burning coal cleaner but you are not likely to ever make it "clean" especially when it comes to green house gases.
You might be right that energy companies would just jump on fusion if it were viable and go on its merry way. Not sure its true though. It would be a very disruptive technology were it to be developed. For one thing there aren't exactly reserves that a company could own. You can get the raw material from sea water with work, the next likely source that could be owned would be the moon. The beauty of fossil fuels are they are in pockets, and you have to gamble to find them, and the pockets can be owned, and they are finite resources resulting in them being excellent ways to make lots money and ideal for Machiavellian global geopolitics (which is why the Bush and Cheney clans love it so much). In the last few years an oil company found oil off the west coast of Africa. I think it was Mobile who took the rather dumb, greedy dictator to the cleaners in the negotiations. The dictator, his family and cronies are rich beyond their desires but the entire rest of the country is still in abject property when their standard of living should be way up. The oil company is for all purposes practically printing money doing what great business empires have often done, looting a 3rd world company for it.
With fusion pretty much anyone could get in the energy business as long as they had the capital to build the plant and to harvest the fuel. Getting the fuel wouldn't be as onerous as it is for fission reactors either and disposing of the waste would probably be no problem at all. There would be a business in building the plants which might be down GE/Westinghouse's ally but otherwise it would completely alter the current energy market, probably destroying some huge empires in the process. Huge empires usually don't like that and will do everything in their power to stop it. It would no doubt ripple in to the auto industry because cars would almost inevitably go electric. Detroit has been paying lip service to electric/hybrid but it took the rather more forward looking Japanese to actually make it a reality and Detroit looks to be more than a little reluctant to embrace moving away from fossil fuels.
All in all when it comes to breakthrough technologies you do need to be thoroughly aware that the current powers that be can and do actively throw road blocks in the way if it is potentially disruptive to their business, though it would be a massive benefit to the planet as a whole. We could have had vastly more fuel efficient cars if we'd just continued the trend started in the first oil embargo in the 70's towards higher MPG. Instead thanks to the direction most auto companies took, with the blessing of big oil fuel, efficiency has often gotten worse, not better which is a key reason the U.S. in particular is massively dependent on oil imports and is waging wars and trying to topple governments, like Venezuela's, to secure its supply.
Yes but they would have risked Netscape or someone else taking over the client side of interaction with the Internet and increasingly most applications since most applications are moving to a web and browser basis. Netscape had declared its intent to make its client platform independent. It could easily over time have made it irrelevant what your underlying OS was, destroyed Microsoft's monopoly and their stock price.
Microsoft did exactly what they knew they had to do to head off the gravest threat they faced to their monopoly in the '90's. I wager they have zero regrets. Besides which the price they've paid in antitrust penalties has been insignificant in both dollars and scrutiny, versus what they won. The Bush administration, being the huge fans of big business they are, gutted the U.S. antitrust decision. The EU appears to be mostly trying to pocket a big paycheck at the expense of the U.S. and maybe wage a futile war on media players. Japan's response remains to be seen. I wager if any foreign government attempts action that is to harsh on Microsoft the Bush administration will endeavor to bribe or intimidate them as necessary to adjust their attitude.
I'm willing to bet you Microsoft will in fact destroy the third party security software market just like they did browsers and they wont get a whimper of complaint from governments. You see since 9/11 the fear of cyber terrorist attacks and hacker attacks in general will trump anti trust concerns in a heart beat. Everyone will say Microsoft HAS to bundle security software to make everyone "safe". The 3rd party vendors, their share holders and employees will just be unfortunate casualties of the drive to make everyone "safe". Beside I imagine all the best employee will get job offers from Microsoft anyway. The 3rd party security software shareholders will eventually be screwed and Microsoft's will benefit again but everyone is used to that by now.
Well actually no it wont. They wont dominate firewall market because they have a deeply felt interest in security if thats what you meant by changing. They will come to dominate it because it is one area where consumers are still spending billions of dollars that aren't going in to Microsoft's pocket. This service pack is just the first step. Its designed to put Symantec, McAfee etc. off guard by putting their toe in the water in the security software market but without being really threatening. Once they dive all the way in they will turn in to Jaws.
I assure you this is already causing massive confusion with people that have a 3rd party firewall now. Will installing this screw it up, how do I turn off Microsoft's, should you turn off the firewall you already have. Should you jus not update to SP2 at all. What happens if both are running. Its way to complicated for most users just like replacing IE with Netscape was. Within a few years all but the most tech savvy will stop buying 3rd party security software and assume Microsoft's is good enough and of course its free, built in, no hassle, just like IE was.
What does Microsoft get out of it. Well they gain control of another large piece of the software market. Go to Walmart and see whats on the shelves, Microsoft XP and Office, 3rd party security software, tax software and games. They will in a couple years cross off all that 3rd party security software. They can increase the price of Windows and its still a net win for consumers who are paying less than they do now for Windows and 3rd party security software.
Security is also great since they can follow in Symantec's footsteps and charge annual fees for update services and get some steady software services revenue that they probably very much want so they can insure stable revenue as they saturate the OS and office markets, face competition from Linux and still need to grow their revenues to keep the sharks on Wall Street happy.
Well yes it is standard Venture Capital at work. Some people with no money and an idea want to start a company. They go out and seek funding and in the valley its almost venture capital in one form or another. Unfortunately the price they pay with each round of VC is they lose more and more control of their company and its fate. Each major venture capitalist demands seats on the board and in turn they get boxes in the corporate org chart.
A potential problem is the two guys in the dorm room or the garage had the mojo. All those VC's are just out to make a killing and they cause lots of bad things to happen to good technology and good people like Sergey and Larry. When they are ready to IPO they INEVITABLY tell the founders they have to bring in business people that will command respect on Wall Street so they bring there people in and at that point the founders lose control of their company, they still get rich unless they are really stupid, but they lose their baby.
You don't have to look at the Prospectus to guess where all the Google VC came from, just look at the board and you see all the usual suspects
Sun
Sequoia capital
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Intel
Sherpalo I don't recall hearing before but they sound like classic VP.
John Hennessey is in there to cover the Stanford connection. If you don't recognize the name he wrote a classic tome on computer architecture.
You wonder who is really running Google now, Larry and Sergey as it should be, or the sharks that saw an opportunity to make a killing.
Your link doesn't seem to work. Here is Here is another one. Its the first I heard of it, its real interesting if true. It is pretty disturbing to hear that a 54 year old guy was fired right before an IPO, and they apparently screwed him out of $10 million dollars in options. To top it off a Google VP may have told the guy he was "incompatible with Google's youthful atmosphere", grounds for a successful age discrimination law suit if its substantiated.
This kind of confirms what I suspected about Google. I suspect Larry and Sergei mean well at heart but as soon as Google started to look like an IPO bonanza Googles ranks almost inevitably filled up with greedy people willing to do anything to make their killing that is mostly all you find in the valley any more. If they screwed him out of $10 million in options, then you see, thats more for everyone else to divvy up.
Unfortunately Silicon Valley as a whole is so infected with greed now I'm not sure it will ever be the great innovator it once was or even a barely tolerable place to work. Some greed is good, to much is a stalking killer.
The times I've lived in the valley nearly everyone there seemed to have one and only one mantra:
- Get the biggest piece of the hottest IPO you can find. Kiss up to or screw anyone necessary to get it.
Not sure I would trust anyone in the cabal that is Mt. View, Palo Alto or Stanford since they were infected with this disease. You see all the same names on their resumes, Netscape, SUN, @Home, SGI. You sense they are just bouncing from one source of hot IPO buzz to another in a desperate search for more 'F' you money.
You can be confident they will do anything necessary to acquire the most options possible, and sometimes that means incredible, stellar performance, othertimes it just means back stabbing and ask kissing. As soon as they can cash out the IPO then they are gone to the next killing or a luxurious and often ill deserved retirement. It is a system designed to fuel breakthroughs, it isn't a system designed to create businesses that last and that have sound values.
If you look at Google's org chart three of the top five people are Sun business veterans. The other two being Larry and Sergei.
Of course, Sun looks kind of like a ship without a rudder headed for a reef so maybe Google picked the wrong ship to recruit their bridge crew from.
Their head of product management is from @home which isn't exactly a success story at this point.
I've often wondered how people reconcile the contradiction between calling themselves Republican and continuing to worship the ground George W. walks on, since he's sold most of the principals of conservatism and the old Republican party down the river.
My dad is the staunchest Republican ever and yesterday he said he decided he was voting against Bush...my jaw dropped...since he ALWAYS votes Republican. For him the last straw was he can't tolerate George W. constantly injecting religion in to his public duties. For him religion is personal and it should never be allowed to creep in to public service. I'm afraid he may have to find a new party since it appears extremist Christians, you know they are like extremist Muslims except they are Christian, seem to have taken over the Republican party.
Anyway I was reading this this story on Linux insider and was interested to see there is actually a theory that seeks to explain how people can maintain fanatical devotion to a lost cause in fact of overwhelming evidence they are wrong, its Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. This article is actually councilling Linux fanatics to refrain from constantly bashing Windows, especially SP2.
From the article:
"In brief, however, the theory makes two critical predictions. First, people will try to strengthen existing beliefs by rejecting contrary information and actively seeking out supportive information. Second, the energy believers put into doing this will increase as the boundaries between believers and others get stronger."
"In other words, opposition strengthens belief and the more people believe in something, the harder they'll fight to keep that belief no matter how obvious the increasing absurdity of their beliefs and actions might be to the uninvolved."
"Festinger's best example of this process at work involves the response to failed religious prophecy: Do "world enders" change their opinions the day after it doesn't end? You'd think so, but they don't. On the contrary, they change the due date and double their efforts to convince others that their unique knowledge conveys or reflects moral superiority."
So it appears the Bush faithful, though they have encountered case after case that should have shattered their faith in George W. have crossed over a line where these traumas compel them to look ever harder to find reason to justify their faith.
Here for example is a pretty good run down of the probable reality of George W. services in the National Guard. His service should shatter all faith staunch republicans have in him since they cherish there military service. If a Democratic candidate had this record the Republican's would be pilloring him over all day every day. Kerry's service record is way less bad but the media is constantly beating him up over it and they say next to nothing about Bush's military disgrace.
Before all you right wingers hit that reply button to flame me in to charcoal just stop and think for a minute if maybe you've fallen in to the trap of cognitive dissonance.
Last night CSPAN was running ACLU speeches by Richard Clark and Bob Barr in particular. If you know Bob Barr he is one of the more rabid conservatives known to man. It was a mind blowing experience to see him addressing the ACLU and state the obvious, the Bill of Rights is already an endangered species and heading to extinction. He is the staunchest Republican and he mauled the Bush administration, state and local governments and the ever expanding corpratist cultures that is devastating the civil liberties staunch conservatives cherish so much. If I hadn't known who he was I would have though he was a flaming liberal but then I remembered the true conservatives on the far right and the left have pretty much been united by the massive danger the new Republican party poses to the U.S. constitution. If CSPAN replays the ACLU speeches from July Barr's speech and Richard Clark's are good oratory.
That is a great comeback to stupid French bashing. I'm sick of hearing, "there so ungrateful, we saved their asses in World War I and II so they are in our debt forever no matter what kind of dicks we've turned in to".
These same people conveniently forget that there might not be a good ole U.S. of A. were it not for the French during the American revolution, especially at Yorktown.
A French general, Rochambeau, devised the strategy.
Key intelligence enabling Yorktown came through Lafayette.
Rochambeau's French army held the left flank at Yorktown, Lafayette helped Washington command the American contingent.
A French fleet under Admiral de Grasse bombarded Cornwallis from the sea and prevented his escape on British ships otherwise the British might have lived to fight another day and there is a distinct chance America might not have been so lucky then.
The French made a grave mistake in just giving the statue to the U.S. They should have given it to the U.S. on loan under the condition the U.S. preserve and protect the liberties of which it is a symbol. If the U.S. failed in that, as it appears to be failing today, the French should have retained the right to repossess the statue and send it to a new home, a new place that is committed to liberty and to welcoming refugees, to insure the statue will always be the beacon of liberty it was intended to be.
"All and all it felt a bit like overkill, but considering that the statue is probably one of the most important symbols of America, it makes sense to so heavily guard it."
Not sure that's really true if in the process of guarding it you undermine the thing it stands for and if everything else going on in America today have turned it on to a symbol of something America is losing, fast.
You see it is a symbol of liberty, people seem to forget that, as is the case with most idols. The French gave it to the U.S. because at the time, at least relative to most of the rest of the world, America was dramatically freer. You could come here with nothing and have a chance. You didn't have to worry so much about secret police coming in the night, hauling you away to never be seen again, as you did many other places. If you were a refugee from a bad place you could come here and things would probably be better.
Today a fair number of Americans are looking to Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark or a lot of other places for those same reasons, to escape an increasingly bad place to find something better and freer. There are, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, a lot of places that do a better job at liberty than America these days.
Perhaps if America wants to both keep the statue "safe" and preserve its meaning they should consider shipping it to another country where Liberty has a better chance of lasting for a while. Maybe it should be a rule that if you want to keep the "Statue of Liberty" you need to insure that your preserve and defend the liberties in your country. If you don't you have to pass the statue on like a baton so that wherever the statue is in the world you know thats the place where refugees can go and liberty can still be found, that way it would always be the beacon it was meant to be.
Maybe the fingerprints are just a convenient mechanism to run locks, but you unfortunately have to be pretty sure that if you use them the prints are being sent out for computerized fingerprint matching and if a red flag comes back they are going to pull you aside and you will probably disappear. Whether you are guilty of anything or not it really isn't right that you give up a little piece of liberty to visit a symbol of liberty. Kinda sad.
Your assertion is usually true but in this case these two quotes aren't really being taken out of context:
"We will not wait as our enemies gather strength against us. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action, and this nation will act." G.W.Bush, West Point, June 2002
"In this new world, declarations of war serve no purpose. Our enemies must be defeated before they can harm us. I will never declare war, but will take action!" Adolph Hitler, June 1940
They carry most of their context with them. The only thing different are the specific enemies they were facing. For Hitler it was communism, Jews and the powers that humiliated Germany at Versailles. For George W. its pretty much anybody who isn't in the "with us" column in "you are either with us or against" though in particular its Islamic extremists.
They are both saying they have enemies and they will use preemptive, aggressive warfare to eliminate them before they can strike. Not sure what context you could put around these two statements that would make them not mean the same thing.
Enemies from without or within, whether they be real, imagined or manufactured are probably the oldest tool for expanding the power of a government over its people. If people feel threatened or endangered they will usually sacrifice just about anything to be safe. The people in Germany did sacrifice everything but in the end it didn't lead to safety.
The key questions American's need to ask themselves today and aren't:
- how much are you willing to sacrifice to be "safe".
- are the sacrifices you're making actually resulting in improved safety.
Unfortunately many of the insane measurements being taken by an out of control government in Washington are, at the end of the day, more smoke and mirrors than real improvements.
If the sacrifices you are making are making you "safe" then you just need to ask yourself is it worth it.
If the sacrifices you are making aren't really make you much safer then why should you be making them.
A simple example, the way to prevent another 9/11 was extraordinarily simple. You put armored cockpit doors in all airliners. It cost a few million dollars and it didn't trample any civil liberties. Sure highjackers might still be able to take over the passanger compartment or blow up the plane but if you want to live in a free society you need to accept there are some risks. You make modest improvements in screening passengers and baggage if you want to minimize them. But instead your government responded to 9/11 with measures that were extraordinarily disruptive, expensive and trampled civil liberties in a major way. They border on making flying so unappealing people start to avoid it, especially if you fly to the U.S. from another country. At that point the measures to improve safety have surpassed the break even point, you would prefer being a little less safe so flying wont be so onerous that you stop doing it.
They are doing the same thing in their response to years old video footage found on suspected Al Qaeda. Rather than quietly tightening security on the targets and seek to foil any plots, instead they used them as a mechanism for pumping fear in the American people. In the process they tipped off Al Qaeda in a major way to the fact one of their networks was compromised which is just really bad intelligence work no matter how you look at it. They key benefit they got out of it though is they were able to use it as an excuse to further expand their self granted authority to randomly stop people both on the street and on the highways to engage in what would otherwise be illegal searches. You know you are in a police state when you can't drive down the highway without the risk of hitting a checkpoint where you are going to be ID'ed, searched and potentially detained for thouroughly vague reasons.
Thanks to the Reg here is another example of George W. making an ass out of himself. Its something film makers can use to poke fun at him, or maybe it will be the source of another copyright fight.
The guy really is embarrassing when he has to ad lib on something unexpected, something his handlers haven't trained him to respond to like a parrot... Polly want a war on terror....
I should clarify my main issue is not with the fact that civilians get killed in armed conflicts. In fact I think I'd say there is just a degree of inevitability in it unless the war is being waged in the middle of an empty desert, arctic wastes or the middle of an ocean.
The problem you have using heavy weapons for targeted assassination in Gaza is its one of the more densely populated strips of ground on earth. You simply can't kid yourself that you are going to be able to use high explosives there without killing innocent bystanders.
If you don't want civilians killed then don't wage war.
The thing I can't stomach is the hypocrisy of one side saying, "we don't kill civilians", its only the other side that does that. We are saints, they are devils. Its normally just empty propaganda and the only reason you do it is because it works to further inflame the passions of the people who are already on our side so they are more willing to kill some more.
Its the nature of war for both sides to commit atrocities and kill civilians. Any side that tries to deny they do it is probably lieing.
Maybe you will sway some people reading this thread but not me. You see you keep saying it was the Arabs that did everything wrong and the Jews are right, right, right. The Arabs have to stop doing this and must do that and then maybe we will treat them as human beings again. All their misery and suffering is their fault, they are just getting whats coming to them.
You see your Palestinian favoring counterpart is going to have a list just as long as yours listing all the things Israel and the Jews have done and how they are wrong, wrong, wrong and the Arabs are right, right, right.
To break the deadlock in the Middle East everyone involved needs to admit both sides have reached the point that they are just wrong, wrong, wrong, do a master clear, get over it, move ahead and and reach a settlement where they are both equally unhappy and learn to deal with it.
I will grant you Arafat deserves to burn in hell for passing on Clinton's peace proposal. It was about as good as he could hope for and by passing on it he's just got countless thousands more people killed for no good reason. Unfortunately the only way Arafat can define himself and hold power is by defying Israel. It appears he will always be a guerilla and he passed on his once chance to be a great statesman. If the Palestinian's ever get a clue they will get rid of him and maybe they can move forward. Of course Israel needs to get rid of Sharon for pretty much all the same reasons.
"Japanese zero pilots Kamakazied their planes into American aircraft carriers during WWII.
That didn't make them "right.""
Again I'm not seeing your point. You seem to be saying they are wrong because they were willing to sacrifice themselves defending their country in a declared war. Most nations would define that as heroic behavior by a soldier, they were attacking military targets after all. Of course most adversaries would try to paint it as "wrong" but its a weak argument.
Probably shouldn't throw in another match in a thread soaked with gasoline, but if you want an example of the kind of "wrong" in World War II you seem to be grasping consider carpet bombing, and nukeing, cities. Germany did it to an extent, inviting reciprocation, but the allies took it to a new level in intentional and massive killing of civilians in both Germany and Japan, and later in Vietnam, under the guise of "strategic bombing". Its a little hard to stomach America's hypocrisy on its holier than thou rhetoric on killing civilians because the U.S. Air Forces has killed millions of them somewhat intentionally over the last 65 years.
OK, I'll grant you Bush played voters as chumps in 2000 too. But you see Bush was a lot smarter about it. He lied consistently throughout the campaign. It was only after he was elected that he proved himself a liar.
Kerry changes his position every few weeks in the middle of a campaign making it obvious he doesn't believe at least half of what he says. It makes it extremely easy for his opponent to highlight this fact and it makes potential voters feel like chumps if they vote for him because its obvious he is pandering to the voters he happens to be talking to at the moment.
I guess I've answered why the media never mentions the fact because you instantly get tagged for antisemitism and racism.
When you are running for President your life should be an open book. The fact that your surname is a fabrication is just a fact the people voting for you should now. I just find it amazing and interesting its NEVER mentioned. I heard it once on CNN in the middle of the night when their editorial control was probably weak.
When your country is engaged in a massive never ending war against Islam having a president who is to some extent Jewish is going to add a new and interesting twist. You see in the U.S. and Europe it may be brushed under the rug, but the rest of the world, especially the Islamic world will notice and it will be cited as further evidence of the reach of Zionism in the U.S. The implication will be someone who is openly Jewish, like Leiberman is unlikely to be elected President, so the next approach was to run someone whose Jewish ancestry is thinly veiled. Before you slam me for saying this I am again just outlining what you will see in the Arab press if he is elected.
I really wish I could say that there wasn't anything to Zionism and Jewish influence in the U.S. but its a fact that Zionism is a powerful global force and there is an extremely powerful Jewish influence in the U.S. Its a tribute to its power that you can't point out this obvious fact without being rabidly attacked and facing massive denial of something that is obvious. Like I said any politician running for a major office in the U.S. who isn't rabidly pro Israel has NO chance of getting elected in this country. That is an indicator of a lobby with massive power.