Until your enemy figures out how to jam your radio signals at which point your new army will be helpless. U.S. comm signals are hard to jam but its still possible.
Maybe you could use wire but then an infantryman with wire cutters, in the right place, takes down your expensive robot.
Its unlikely your going to have self contained AI's that anyone will trust to do friend or foe targeting any time soon. Of course the indications are the NI's(natural intelligence) in soldiers in Iraq are pretty bad at it too since they are routinely bathing innocent cilivians in machine gun fire everytime there is a loud bang in the area.
"The reason we spend so much is BECAUSE the rest of the world spends so little."
That is the silliest thing I've heard in a while. This old saw worked when there was a Soviet Union to at least maintain the pretense of holding up the other end of an arms race. There is really no good reason to run a race when you are the only runner.
When the rest of the world came to its senses and wound down the money they wasted on arms it was insane for the U.S. to accelerate its already massive defense spending. All of our weapons are a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world already. Most of these weapons are borderline useless:
- in a war against guerillas in the mountains of Afghanistan - They work great against a feeble military like Iraq's except most army's have learned by now the best strategy is to melt away when the American's actually start their war and then pick them off one by one during the occupation when the only weapons the American's have that matter are body armor and M-16's. For all the money the U.S. spend the U.S. Army in Iraq has next to no real superiority over the insurgent army they are fighting
There are only a couple explanations why we keep up this massive spending, neither of them good:
- The U.S. government has adopted a policy of overwhelming military superiority which is designed to make sure no one will dare challenge the U.S. or attempt to start a new arms race because they will be so far behind. It might be OK if the U.S. had this overwhelming superiority if our government could be trusted to use it sparingly and wisely. Recent events suggest they can't be trusted. You may be concerned about the "next dictator" who dares to challenge the U.S. The entire rest of the world is gravely concerned about an out of control, dangerous, American President. In everything coming out of Russia in recent weeks it appears they are going to try to restart the arms race precisely because the U.S. never stopped and is now abusing its power at ever turn.
- Boeing and Lockheed, among others, are very dependent on this spending for their profitability. They require a continuing stream of these exhorbinant defense contracts to remain profitable. The fact is EVERY contract has massive cost overruns and is massively behind schedule because these companies are milking every contract for all they can get out of it. Since half the generals in the Pentagon take lucrative jobs at these contractors when they retire they have zero incentive to keep these contracts under control. These Defense contractors are also huge benefactors of the Republican's in particular and they get paid back a million times over for the campaign contributions. You just have to look at the sordid underbelly of the 767 tanker deal to realize the DOD is there primarily to transfer tax money to big defense contractors.
The big plus about all these defense contracts is they are a stellar jobs program, and defense jobs are among the very few which are somewhat harder to outsource than the average.
"Meanwhile, the Warthog showed it could go into battle, get banged up and survive."
The only problem is the depleted uranium shells it fires turns everything in the area in to a low grade, invisible, toxic waste dump that is a health threat to the soldiers and civilians that wander through it for nearly ever.
True conservatives are for "government staying out of our lives", free markets, balanced budgets and low taxes. The Republican party hasn't been really conservative in a long time, just has the Democratic party hasn't been really liberal in a long time. The true conservative wing of the Republican party is as shocked by the current regime as the liberals are. Conservatism was useful rhetoric when the Republican's were out of power because they knew they wouldn't have to actually implement it and it was a convenient rhetorical attack against the big spending Democrats in power.
But, as Nader suggested today, both parties have been largely devoured by wealthy and powerful special interests so neither is true to their original ideals. The defense/intelligence-industrial establishment is one of the most powerful blocks that dominates the Republican party. The others are the moral majority, and the huge corporations that dominate energy, pharmacueticals, health care and finance.
The defense-industiral establishment has a vested interest in making sure that there are always "enemies" to be fought and that the government continues massive expenditures in military and intelligence because the resulting contracts are how the industrial part of the complex makes its money and the defense part of the complex expands its power. As a result they are pushing the Republican party away from true conservatism towards aggressive warfare abroad and authoritarianism at home.
A military, adequate for defense is essential to the well being of a nation when it faces real threats abroad. The problem is, once it reaches a certain mass, as the U.S. military did in World War II its enormously difficult to keep it in check. It starts seeking to justify its existence either by fabricating imaginary enemies or fomenting the creation of real ones by abusing its power abroad.
Militaries are also, by nature, the most undemocratic of institutions so they are constantly working against democracy and civil liberties in their host nation. I'm afraid what your seeing here is a defense industrial complex that has achieved critical mass and is going to turn the U.S. in to an authoritarian police state if its left unchecked.
You also need to factor in the massive influence the religious right has in the Republican party. They are also a strong force pushing authoritarian government, iron fisted law enforcement and are eager to sacrifice the constitution on every front. Separation of church and state will be decimated by Bush's faith based initiative when tax dollars will be pumped in to churches. This is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for our republic. They dismiss the danger but the founding fathers new first hand how dangerous it is to have religion infused in to government because a government so infused inevitably starts favoring a particular sect over everyone else. That favoritism almost inevitably turns to inflicting that sects world view on everyone in the nation and oppressing those who refuse to convert. Just look at Jeb Bush's Christian prison in Florida to visualize the danger.
The other special interests controlling the Republican's are equally successful. The pharmacuetical and health conglomerates received a massive infusion of fresh profits, coming out of our tax dollars and disguised as a Medicare drug benefit. You know its a sham when the bill mandates the government can't negotiate the prices it pays for drugs, insuring the drug companies unrestrained profits at tax payer expense. True conservatives are aghast at this bill.
The energy companies will get their first windfall when the delayed energy bill finally passes and are benefiting to an extent from the gutting of environmental enforcement already.
The financial institutions got their first gift with the massive tax cuts, especially in capital gains and dividends. They will get another one if Social Security is privatized so all that money is pumped in to the stock market.
"When will people step up to draw the line and, depending on how long it takes, what will it take to actually keep the government from crossing it?"
We alread have some recent historical precedent you can draw from. What it took last time was:
- A lengthy, ugly, pointless, war in Vietnam that killed and maimed large numbers of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese. Vietnam for the U.S. and Afghanistan for the U.S.S.R. created large numbers of returning veterans who were disillusioned with their government after being subjected to the senseless horrors they were producing in the name of their geopolitical and economic manuevering. - A CIA that had essentially run amuck and was using covert operations, coups, assasinations and rigged elections to install despotic regimes around the world - An FBI engaged in a massive domestic spying and social engineering campaign - A President, Richard Nixon, who was caught using dirty tricks to destroy political oponents and insure his reelection. - Economic upheaval thanks in part to the massive expenditures in Vietnam
America did manage to come back from the brink then for a time thanks to: - The antiwar movement. We forget this now but a lot of people were politically very active in the late sixties and early seventies. - Congressional investigations by the Church Commission which reined in the CIA and FBI for a time. - Investigate journalists, Woodward and Berstein, who refused to accept the mush being spoon fed them by the government and actually did what journalists are supposed to do which was find the truth.
Today many of the same elements are coalescing though it took time for them to develop in the 60's and it wont happen overnight this time either:
- the war in Iraq has the same potential as Vietnam to incite an anti war movement unless the U.S. is successful in disengaging its occupation army and fostering a stable government soon. Both are unlikely. If the U.S. were to disengage its army Iraq would likely devolve in to a civil war. Any real attempt to actually turn sovereignty over to the the Iraqs, with a democratic vote, would lead almost immediately to a Shia dominated Islamic republic which the U.S. won't tolerate. As a result the U.S. has to manipulate the politics in Iraq and maintain an occupation army, indefinitely, or cut and run and let it collapse like South Vietnam eventually did. If things continue as they are the root of an antiwar movement will form each time a new wave of 100,000 soldiers return from Iraq with the permenent scars of the horrors they are subjected to there. Occupations with a creditable insurgent resistance are always very ugly for everyone involved. This disillusionment would be an instantaneous process though. It will take years as it did in Vietnam. There are some forces that work against another Vietnam too. The Army learned a lot of lessons about what caused the moral collapse of the Army and public opinion in Vietnam and they have remedied some but not all. The three obvious ones are: - drug testing to prevent drug abuse - maintaining unit cohesion - suppressing media coverage of the ugly side of the war, in particular wounded soldiers screaming in pain and the unloading of the coffins in Delaware(the later insituted by non other than Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense). The media today obsesses endless over the sensational murder/kidnapping of the day, but the nearly daily causalties in Iraq pass by with little more than "2 soldiers were killed today by an IED".
- As for reining in the intelligence establishment with a new Church commission, there is one force working towards that and one against. The force working for it is growing public awareness of the blatant and obvious deception used to justify Iraq which should be grounds to once again rein in the CIA and to launch impeachment proceeding against the President. The force working against it is the Republicans control the government. As long as they do the deceipt will be
"What exactly is the US doing this arms race against? Aliens?"
All indications are the Bush administration is pursueing a doctrine of overwhelming military superiority. If I recall the wording they've been using the goal is to establish such military dominance that no country will even attempt to challenge it or match it. The thinking is they can prevent another Cold War style arms race this way. This doctrine does neglect to remember that overwhelming military superiority has been successfully challenged in the past through asymetric means, also known as guerilla warfare, or as its tagged today terrorism.
Indications are at least one country is going to try by conventional means though. It appears the Russians are fed up with being an American door mat, along with the rest of the world, and are gravely concerned that America and the Bush Administration are becoming the real clear and present danger to the world. Can't blame them since its become clear the U.S. will bully anyone and everyone using the "you are either with us or against" doctrine.
It appears the Russians are going to attempt to counter by trying to return to their former glory and are planning to restart the arms race. Russia has been engaged in the largest war games in 20 years this week and Putin, taking a page from Bush, has been riding around on a submarine in a naval uniform. One hitch in his plan was back to back catastrophic ballistic missile failures which suggest its an uphill battle to regain a creditable military especially with Russia's struggling economy. He's also reverting Russia to a one party state for all practical purposes and is siezing control of Russian industry starting with its largest oil company.
In other news, the Russians announced this week they are restarting development of new strategic missiles with manuevering warheads in an attempt to defeat Bush's massively expensive missile defense and are starting missile defenses of their own. Most knowledgable experts have contended it will be a lot cheaper and easier to defeat missile defenses than it will be to build them. So a missile defense race between the U.S. and Russia will potentially bankrupt both. They are also developing a six man capsule to replace the Soyuz so they can take over the ISS as Bush abandons it, and will no doubt make it pay off, on the cheap, as they did with Mir.
As bad as the Cold War was, especially in all the countries where the proxy wars were fought like Vietnam and Aghanistan, it was an era where the two super powers kept each other in check. In a lot of ways that balance is superior to the current environment where one super power is unchecked and unable to resist the temptation to abuse its power.
Meanwhile the Chinese are working to decimate the U.S. by subtler means, economic means, and are well on their way to becoming the world's new economic superpower alongside India.
This opens up an interesting future. Will the U.S. be able to leverage its massive military superiority to stave off economic collapse. They certainly could because they can use their military to gain control, by force or intimidation, of the world's oil reserves and any other scarce resource they choose. No country is like to call in loans or openly challenge the U.S. if there are space weapons pointed at them, stealth bombers warming up on the ramp, and aircraft carriers off their coast.
I think the U.S. has realized they can no longer compete in a purely economic arena with China, India and even Europe so the Bush administation is opting to establish the worlds first truely global empire with the military to back it. It might work, or the U.S. might end up in economic ruin alongside Russia. If so China and India are poised to assume the role of the world's new leaders assuming the U.S. doesn't unleash its military, on the way down, and take the planet with it. As much as the U.S. whines about WMD's it needs to be remembered the U.S. has the worlds largest WMD stockpiles and to quote the rhetoric against Saddam, "Has used them in the past". As Bush has said in speeches a few times this week, can we tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a madman?
"So? Like I said before, no matter how he got in. I have no clue about that, and neither do you;"
You conveinently continue to ignore the URL to CNN which clearly states %40 of legacies get admitted to Yale. The fact that his dad and granddad were very powerful politicians pretty much insured his acceptance and that professors would pass him. His grandfather was the Senator from Connecticut, Yale's home state, for God's sake. Get a clue, you don't seem to grasp how influence works in this world. Yale isn't going to reject the grandson of an alumnust and Senator. Professors probably wouldn't give him A's for who he was but they were pretty sure to not flunk him and risk the wrath of his family and family friends.
You also fail to explain why lowly U of T rejected him if he was such a stellar candidate that Harvard's Business school snapped him up.
From CSPAN:
" In the election of 2000, "George W." had to fend off allegations that targeted his past lifestyle and questioned his intellectual prowess. Bush admitted to a history of alcoholic excess and academic mediocrity-a contrast to Gore's "straight arrow" persona. (In reality, while each had Ivy League credentials, neither had stellar academic records.)"
"Ah, yes, the old "they must have something to hide" argument."
Hardly. Simple fact of life. They had a picture of his Yale transcripts on the news a few days ago, from his just released Gaurd file. You could read the classes he took but the grades were blacked out. All of this records from Yale were seized, by the Secret Service if I recall. Maybe they do it for all Presidents but if George W. was a stellar student they would be flaunting his grades not hiding them. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar so you KNOW he had academic credentials. He certainly didn't graduate from Yale or Harvard with honors or that would be public record.
"These allegations failed to convince anybody in 2000, and they're failing to convince anybody now."
George W. was given a free pass in 2000. Its completely unobvious why the media and the Democrat's let most of the skeleton's in his closet go largely unchallenged. Part of it is Democrats are inept at dirty politics in recent times while the Republicans expose every detail about every Democract, real and fabricated. Is not likely George W. will get the same pass this year. The press knows they failed miserably in looking in to George W's background until now. A key problem is he, his family and their friends have managed to erase most of the written proof about his checkered past, and very few people who knew him are going to ruin their lives by coming forward. His National Gaurd file is full of holes. In particular how did he manage to refuse a mandatory medical exam, that grounded him, without disciplinary action.
"The joke was about Rockefeller's Standard Oil company. You can't get even the most basic citation right, huh?"
Geez. I heard it from Kevin Phillips on CSPAN discussing his book "American Dynasty" on the Bush family. Perhaps it was originally about Standard Oil though I imagine they did actually drill some producing wells. George W. drilled nothing but dry holes so the joke works a lot better for him. He made his wealth when family friends gave him a piece of the Texas Rangers at a huge discount and he sold it back a couple years later at a huge profit with no intervening effort required.
Bush's own family admit he was a "late bloomer", code word for partier and coaster. They'd pretty much written him off to carry the political torch in favor of Jeb until George W. quit drinking, found Jesus and boundless political ambition.
George W. is the son and grandson of Yale graduates. All schools give preference to the children of alumni, Yale especially so. 40% of alumni children are accepted there versus 11% of everyone else. It is a school striving to cultivate an aristocracy more than academic excellence. His dad was pretty smart, George W. was always a slightly below average, unmotivated, student:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/timep. af firm.action.tm/ http://zhongwen.com/bush/
All indications are George W. was a low C student at Yale though his handlers and the secret service go to great lengths to conceal his grades. They had his Yale transcript in in the military records released this week but the grades were blacked out again. If he was an exceptional student why are they hiding his grades.
He was rejected by the lowly University of Texas before he was admitted to the Harvard business school. Isn't it kind of odd U of T didn't take him but Harvard accepted a low C student in to their prestigous institution. Fact is he used connections to get in and get out with a degree, presumably leveraging his Skull and Bones connection.
It is well documented that the Bush family used connections to move George W. from the bottom of the list for the Texas Air National Gaurd to the top, otherwise he might have been slogging through the jungles of Vietnam packing an M-16 kind of like what he's making all the soldiers in Iraq do today, instead of partying in Alabama. Its also well understood that he refused to take his flight medical because 1972 was when drug testing was instituted. He should have been brough up on charges and may have been but as Governor of Texas he arranged for his aides to clense his Gaurd file in the late 1990's. There are large gaps in what was released this week.
Connections were used to get George H.W. Bush in to Naval Aviation in World War II as well. He was underage, straight out of prep school, and his commission was wildly out of the norm. Some indications are he was escaping the family scandal at the same time where his dad's bank was siezed for trading with the enemy, in particular Fritz Thyssen, Germany's richest industrialist and key benefector in Hitler's rise to power.
The Bush family has NEVER failed to use connections to get ahead. The old joke about George W.'s oil company endeavors, "he would drill dry wells and someone would come along and fill them with money."
"Iraq, the situation there is not especially comparable to that of Pakistan"
I agree with this statement a 100%. what Pakistan was doing was a hundred times more dangerous than what was going on in Iraq. Pakistan 's Khan was shopping working nuclear bomb designs and manufacturing centrifuges in Malaysia for sale to the highest bidder, which could easily have included terrorists. North Korea presumably has nukes now thanks to Pakistan so we have a really dangerous unstable regime with nukes thanks to Pakistan. Is there any evidence anyone has WMD's thanks to Iraq?
Iraq doesn't seem to have had any nuclear program since it was dismantled in the mid 90's. They certainly weren't real cooperative with the U.N. over time but as Bush was rushing to war they were cooperating with all the U.N inspections. Iraq offered to let CIA agents come in and find all the weapons the Bush administration claimed were there and claimed to know where they were. If this was really about WMD's the CIA would have just gone in, found the WMD's and proved their case. They didn't. This was about taking down Saddam and the fact he was trying to fully comply with inspections was an inconvenience as Bush/Cheney rushed to war. There is NOTHING Saddam could have done to comply with the U.N. to stop the invasion.
As Wolfowitz has said since, WMD's were just a convenient pretext for invading. It was one everyone could agree on.
Laying WMD charges against a country is a delightful rationalization for aggressive warfare. Its a charge you can lay against ANYONE. All you do is say "WE KNOW" they have chemical or biological weapons. Its impossible for the accused country to prove they do not no matter how much you inspect them. If you don't find any you just say, "They must have hid them really well". After all little vials of Anthrax can be hidden anywhere.
" It makes me sadder still that said people who say the U.S. is evil and makes things bad for its citizens and the rest of the world somehow never give any substantial evidence of that."
It makes me sad how ignorant Americans are of the most basic history of their government. There is no shortage of evidence that the U.S. has caused untold misery around the world for decades.
The U.S. has installed a non stop cavalcade of ruthless dictators since the end of World War II. The standard criteria is any government that "isn't with us is against us" so we arrange to topple democraticly elected leaders, who are usually nationalists or socialists and replace them with right wing dictators who are willing to do what we tell them, who are friendly to big American corporations and wealthy landowners, and are willing to ruthlessly kill anyone in their country who doesn't see things that way. Sometimes our puppets go bad, as in they stop doing what we tell them, for example Noriega in Panama and Sadam in Iraq and we even have to topple them:
Here are just a few examples, its a much longer list than this:
The Shah of Iran was installed in to power by a CIA sponsored coup in 1953 when they helped topple a democraticly elected nationalist leader,Mohammed Mossadegh . The Shah rivaled or surpassed Sadam in torture and oppression of the Iranian people and was a key reason why they seized they U.S. embassy when he was toppled and why the hate the U.S. with a passion to this day:
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtisirancoup.ht ml
In 1973 a CIA sponsored coup in Chile removed a democraticly elected, very popular, socialist and nationalist leader, Salvadore Allende and replaced him with General Pinochet, another ruthless military dictator and a 17 year reign of terror:
In 1954 a CIA coup overthrew the democraticly elected leftist Jacobo Arbenz, once again to be replaced by a string of ruthless military dictators in to the 90's:
http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/iachr/background.cfm
The CIA was also involved in the 1963 coup in which the Bathists took control of Iraq. The CIA apparently gave the Bathists a list of people, mostly left leaning, who were to be exterminated when they took power. Control of the Bathist party was eventually seized by Saddam Hussein:
http://www.bnfp.org/neighborhood/jmoore.htm
Lest you think this is all ancient history all indications are that the unrest in Venezuala a couple years ago which once again nearly toppled a popularly elected socialist leader was being stirred by the Bush administation through the CIA and the U.S. military which was meeting with the opposition leaders trying to overthrow Hugo Chavez who is very critical of the U.S. on all fronts:
http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/Ven787.htm
We are also on pretty reasonable terms with the dictator of Turkmenistan who surpasses Saddam in cult of personality:
http://archive.tol.cz/transitions/thedict1.html
It should also be pointed out President Mushareef of Pakistan, out close ally in the war on terror is also a military dictator who seized power in a coupe. So much for our advocacy of democracy and freedom. Its ironic that we took down Iraq for an imagined WMD threat while Pakistan has been actually selling critical nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran. Did we do anything about it, no. Mushareef just pardoned the man responsible and we look the other way.
Bottomline is if your government protects the wealthy 1% in your country that own all the land and industry, and you open your country to exploitation by American corporations and you do what the U.S. government tells you, you will have no problems with the U.S. Otherwise you are headed for a world of hurt.
All of this was well documented by the Church commission in 1975:
Your conveniently glossing over the fact Dean was far ahead in every national poll last year until just before Iowa when he starting sticking his foot in his mouth and the media started crucifying him. Clark was up there too and Kerry was an also ran.
I'll grant you Dean does have a lot better traction with the intelligent and well educated than he does with NASCAR dads who "buy the stuff on the side of the cars" and pick their candidates the same way. Of course you have to doubt NASCAR dads will vote for Kerry either.
I wager if you play Dean's stump speech from a year ago side by side with Kerry's today you couldn't tell the difference in the rhetoric. If you played Kerry's stump speech from a year ago I'm guessing he wasn't bashing Bush, Aschroft, the Iraq war, special interests or the Patriot Act like he is today.
Well it sure would be nice to know what exactly was in all those pages of the report on 9/11 that the Bush administration censored in order to protect the Saudis.
You also fail to draw the connection that a lot of those wealthy Saudi's are the ones pumping massive funding in to Wasabi madrasas which are the sole schooling system for millions of Muslim children around the world and are widely recognized as the real training camps for fundementalist Islam and hatred of the west that will yield future generations for Al Quaida.
Its hard to sort out which wealthy Saudi families are intimately tied to Al Quaida, especially since the Bush administation suppresses all the information on this, but it is certain there are a lot more ties to wealthy Saudis than there has ever been to Iraq.
I can't give the Bin Laden family much credit for "condemning" their wayward son. They have a multibillion dollar global financial empire to protect. Its kind of given they wouldn't publicly support the head of Al Quaida. It is just bizarre beyond believe that America's enemy number 1, still at large, comes from a family so intimitatly tied to our first family, and our President is trying to tag Saddam with complicity in 9/11 with no obvious basis in fact.
Problem is all the third parties tend to operate on the fringes and don't have a prayer of pulling together enough votes to win. I often dream of a realignment of American parties like this:
- Put all the wealthy, executives, corporate special interests and establishment politicians in one party, lets call it the Aristocratic party. They deserve each other.
- Put all the ordinary working people in the other party, lets call it the Ordinary Joe and Jane party.
The aristocrats would have an advantage since they control all the wealth, the traditional media and the big corporations.
The ordinary Joe party would have a vast advantage at the ballot box because there are a whole lot more ordinary people than there are elitist aristocrats. They would use the Internet to communicate and defeat corporate control of the traditional media.
- The ordinary joe party would take what used to be a Republican mantra until they actually gained power, keep the size of government to a bare and essential minimum. The only twist would be to usurp the Democratic/Progressive mantra which is make the wealthy pay for it. Part of this would be to completely eliminate the staggering sums the government spends on pork. The dreaded pork laden Ombudsmen bill and farm subsidies would never again grace the halls of congress.
- The convoluted tax code would be abolished in favor of a simple and progressive tax to prevent concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations and wealthy families and to make tax accountants an endangered species. The ordinary joe party would no longer try to encourage or discourage behavior with a million gimmicky tax breaks.
- Maintain a military just big enough for defense instead of spending the ridiculous sums we spend on our current aggresive and offensive military, sums as great or greater than the rest of the world combined.
- Provide universal health care coverage for the simple reason that people shouldn't die or be bankrupted because they can't afford health insurance. Its also becoming obvious that our for profit medical, insurance and drug companies are going to bleed our country white if they are left unchecked.
- Keep just enough CIA/NSA to watch for foreign dangers but keep them from spying domesticly or toppling governments to install ruthless dictators.
- The FBI could stay around to bust criminals but it would not be used as a tool to rob people of their basic constitutional rights.
- Provide seed money for science, research, space but always strive to keep the work out of the hands of corrupt big corporations and bureaucracies.
- Then you have all the thorny wedge issues like abortion, equal rights and affirmative action. The ordinary joes would have to agree to disagree on all those. It would be a color blind party. Everyone's welcome but no group is courted based on ethnicity. The only caveat is we would strive to keep government from interfering in or dictating peoples private lives. We would be against discrimination but would not be for affirmative action. We would have to tolerate but not encourage abortion. Gays would have the right to civil unions but perhaps not marriages to avoid treading on the religious.
- Our education system is broken. How do fix it though. Presumably find a model past or present that works and implement it. Encourage free thinking in children but also make sure they don't come out of the system stupid.
- As for free trade and globalization, well how do you solve that one. Best I can think of is to be fore free trade but when a place like China stacks the deck in their favor you level the playing field.
"Dean has the opposite position of the average American on just about every political issue."
This is an odd assertion. I think its widely recognized that Dean was the only Democrat with the hutzpah to:
- attack Bush - oppose the Patriot Act - oppose the Iraq war both for the deception used in selling it and the mess its proving to be - denounce special interests and the way they are outright purchasing our government
Dean's fortunes really turned because Kerry, in particular, stole his message when he realized it was resonating with the majority of Democrats if not half the electorate as a whole. This leaves us with a bizarre hypocrisy where Kerry is now critical of the war in Iraq though he voted for it. He is critical of the Patriot Act though he voted for it and may have written predecessors of it. He is criticizing special interests though he takes more special interest money than anyone in the Senate.
A real plus about Kerry is, if you don't like his positions on the issues, you can just wait a while and he will flip sides to the one you like. Of course he also flips from positions you like to ones you don't with equal randomness. He is completely devoid of conviction which means he is "electable".
In all fairness, Dean did a lot of damage to himself when he stuck his foot in his mouth a few times on things like Saddam and Bin Laden. Its real hard to be a loose cannon, and take controversial positions, and also not stick your foot in your mouth sometimes.
If it hadn't been for Dean the Democrats would have gone in to this election cowering in fear of Bush's invincibility and they would have gone down in flames. Now they at least have a chance since Dean gave them a backbone. Dean also made the first attempt in a while to actually restore democracy to this screwed up country by getting ordinary people involved in politics again, especially with the aid of the Internet which is likely to be the only thing that might save democracy in America. Unfortunately all those people are tasting the bitter pill of how the establishment and the media destroy anyone trying to restore actual democracy, with a little d, to this country. End result is we will have two wealthy aristocrats, both Yale grads, both members of Skull and Bones squaring off in November, to see whether we will have an establishment Democrat or an establishment Republican taking their turn in the White House.
Dean might have said stupid things about Bin Laden, but its not quite as bad as the Bush family having intimate ties to the Bin Laden family. Bush also hushed up the extent Saudi Arabia was involved in 9/11 at the same time they were trying to pin it on Iraq which was probably the country in the Middle East that had the least involvement with Al Quaida, Bathists being secular socialists, not fundementalists, who claim to be Muslim mostly out of convenience. It still seems to be completely lost on Americans, smart people that they are, that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi for the most part. There were no Iraqi's.
Its not well known but George W. learned dirty campaign tricks as far back as the 1972 Senate campaign which is at the heart of his Alabama National Gaurd controversy. This campaign is noteworthy because Bush's team, though perhaps not him personally, apparently doctored and spliced audio tapes of their Democratic opponent so he appeared to say that he was in favor of busing to force desegration at a time when this was the kiss of death for a politician in Alabama. It didn't work but they tried. Indications are the picture of Kerry behind Jane Fonda doing the rounds this week is also a faked.
Also in 1972 Karl Rove "admitted using a false identity to gain entry to the campaign offices of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon. He admitted stealing letterhead stationary and sending out 1,000 fake invitations to the campaign headquarters opening, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." He was cleared after a Republican party investigation by none other than George H.W. Bush. After all, this was 1972 when Nixon and the Republicans were using dirty tricks on a massive scale in an effort to rig elections.
The southerner article, among others, raises the possibility George W. Bush refused to take his National Gaurd physical in 1972, which caused him to be grounded, because this was the year drug testing was instituted by the gaurd and reserves. Its likely he would have failed because he was known to indulge in cocaine and a marijuana while in Alabama, and may have done community service in Texas around this time to have a cocaine charge cleared off his record.
All indications are he received disciplinary action for refusing the physical, and a number of other transgressions, which is why he was transfered to the reserves, normally a sign of punishment for Gaurdsmen, which is where he was when he was finally discharged.
Its hard to figure out all of the machinations of his military service since there is at least a possibility Bush campaign operatives were given the chance to purge his military files of anything negative in the late 1990's.
It is pretty clear that he moved to Alabama without getting Gaurd approval for the transfer. He applied after the fact for a postal unit, which was denied, since the Gaurd frowns on expensive pilots becoming postal workers. They finally transfered him to a reconnaisance unit though they didn't have the F-102's he was qualified for.
The only reason he got in to the Gaurd in the first place was family connections which moved him from the bottom of the list, and destined for Vietnam, to the top of Texas Air National Country Club flying obsolete fighters that would never get sent to Vietnam.
"Companies promise to keep data private, only to sell or transfer it to third parties, as in the case of several airlines."
Actually on the evening news last night it appears you are giving the airlines a bad rap, though you are citing legitimate past transgressions. The TSA is apparently desperate to start testing its new screening program, which requires every detail about every passenger be exposed to TSA including credit history and any criminal record, including misdemeanors. If there are ANY issues in your background including simple errors in your credit history, you will be pulled aside every time you fly and be given "special treatment". I imagine it will be iffy if you will be able to count on getting on an airplane when this is in place, unless your electronic trail is squeaky clean. This is coming from the TSA which, in the rush to hire new screeners, hired nearly something approaching a hundred felons and still hasn't done background checks on many of the people who control what goes in to airports.
Apparently the TSA is having problems testing the program because airlines are refusing to participate or turn over the necessary data citing privacy concerns. Unfortunately is appears the government has a simple solution. The Department of Homeland security is planning to simply order the airlines to participate and they will have to unless someone stops Ridge and company.
If there is a person responsible for protecting privacy in the Department of Homeland Security I think they rate an F unless they stop this intrusive screening program which is more likely to hassle ordinary people and punish advesaries of the Bush administration than it is to catch any terrorists.
If you want to see what your government is now capable of look up a recent anti war conference at Drake University. The Bush administration started a massive, secretive investigation in an effort to identify everyone who attended and everything was said. The governement also tried to gag everyone at Drake so that this blatant assault on free spreech would remain secret, though thanks to the Internet is isn't:
I'm pretty skeptical a free flyer will be anything but a bunch of wasted R&D money just like the manned manuevering units were. Kind of the same thing except one has a man in it and one has a remote operator. Not sure which is more dangerous. You have to wonder how great the potential is for a mishandled free flyer to cause more damage than it will find. I guess its a plus you don't have to have an air lock for a free flyer but if the flyer actually finds damage I imagine I would like to have the air lock and MMU so an astronaut can go fix it without being completely dependent on the ISS.
Unfortunately all designs are flawed. Two approaches:
You can spend vast sums of money trying to make a flawless design, never succeed, and then fail miserably when a flaw surfaces which appears to be the current NASA.
Or you can have an organization which recognizes flaws when they surface, prioritizes them appropriately, corrects them when possible and learns to deal with or workaround them when things go wrong. NASA's manned space program seems to be completely lacking in these skills since as far back as the end of Skylab.
The fundement problem is not the "flawed designs", it is the failure of the organization to deal with them appropriately. The aging, overgrown bureaucracy IS THE PROBLEM. No one is responsible or accountable. Everything is being bucked up and down a chain of command that is 20 deep and jumping back and forth between Johnson, Kennedy, Headquarters and a half dozen other far flung centers. At a bare minimum shut down Johnson and put everyone in the one place, at Kennedy, Kennedy being chosen out of geographic necessity as long as you use rockets to get to space.
I did read the whole CAIB report. It is an excellent post mortem of what happened technicly. Unfortunately, like the Challenger report before it, it doesn't seem to have solved any of the structural problems at NASA. All thats really come out of these reports is an agency, a manned space program and a shuttle that has become progressively more crippled, expensive and useless. In particular NASA is so risk averse they can't do anything anymore except manage to not have the same accident twice but have different ones instead.
Assuming we eventually throw away ISS and the Shuttle, what exactly is it thats changed that will assure us future programs will work when the same organization is in charge, its structurally unchanged, and its failed on two programs in a row.
"There are future plans for a free-flyer inspector, but that is years away."
One has to ask why NASA is spending a bunch of money for a free flyer that won't be ready for years, for a vehicle that will be end of lifed in six years, and which NASA apparently will refuse to fly anyplace but the ISS where you can presumably inspect it without a free flyer. Classic NASA'think. Whatever happened to the Manned Manuevering Units anyway, CYA NASA decided they were too dangerous after spending massive money to develop them.
I am really at a complete loss to know how NASA is going to do anything in space in the future when its willing to adopt this lengthy and ridiculous list of flight constraints. Sure these are just for the shuttle, because its old and risky, well Apollo was like a hundred times more risky and we would have never gone to the Moon with this brand of hopeless bureaucratic, cover your ass, thinking. You're never going to get back to the Moon or Mars if your going to continue this trend to try and generate a 100% certainty of success.
After all, we are just talking about getting in to LEO here, something we've been for something like 40 years now. You're making this sound like something new and dangerous.
Challenger and Columbia happened because bureaucrats on the ground did stupid things. Fix the organization creating the stupid bureaucratic thinking, don't completely cripple space exploration with stupid flight constraints.
Challenger happened because they had iffy O rings, but it mostly happened because, thanks to political pressure from the Reagan administration, they launched on one of the coldest mornings possible in Florida. There was ice everywhere and it stiffened the O rings to the point they failed. Obvious solution is don't launch on a cold morning just so Reagan could get a sound bite in his state of the union address about a teacher in space.
Columbia happened because the Bush Administration and O'Keefe had a screen saver on everyone's desk pressuring them to keep a string of launches on schedule so the ISS was finished by a hard date. As a result when they had clear evidence of a potentianly serious problem they glossed it over to stay on schedule.
Fix these problems at the source, the hopeless bureaucracy, not with absurd flight constraints that destroy the whole point of the space program in the first place. Constraints that give you false sense of security, that might prevent an accident like the last one but will do nothing to stop a new one due to a completely different reason which is much more likely.
You are correct that they generally don't, BUT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO. The entire Republican rationale for cutting the tax on dividends was that it was double taxation, the corporation paid taxes on their profits, then gave them out again as dividends which were taxed again.
The problem is that all big corporations have adept accountants that exploit every loop hole in the tax code imaginable, something beyond the means of small companies and individuals. They also pay off their congressman, in the form of campaign contributions, to insert new loopholes they can exploit if they start to run out.
So the big companies generally don't pay taxes on their profits and now dividend taxes have been slashed which means wealthy stockholders make out like bandits. Its no coincidence Microsoft has started paying dividends since they are now a great tax dodge, especially for the wealthy. Meanwhile interest rates are so low and taxes on interest income is so high that you have to be insane to actually save mony in CD's or money markets which is why American's don't save money anymore. They run up credit card bills and gamble on the stock market.
Its also no accident the stock market is in a new bubble. It is so juiced by the new tax rates, subsidized by massive budget deficits, everyone is rushing back in. This new bubble is very desirable for the Republicans because real soon now they are going to want to "reform" Social Security. To translate they are going to start pushing people to put their social security taxes in to the stock market which will juice the profit margins and wealth of Wall Street. Perhaps it will make big returns for you when you retire, or perhaps stock market crashes and manipulation will wipe it out and you will starve on the streets like people did before Social Security.
I have one question as to why people think investing in the stock market always creates new jobs. The only time it leads to new capital for a company is in an IPO or a subsequent stock offering. When you buy stock from another shareholder all you're doing is enriching that shareholder as a reward for their gamble. It is true that the company has an incentive to grow, and perhaps create jobs, to push their stock price up but that is an indirect incentive.
Venture capitalists, wealthy snakes that they are, tend to be the ones that really create companies and jobs. The stock market tends to just be a mechanism to reward them when their gambles succeeed. Its pretty much just high stakes gambling for everyone else.
In the modern age where capital and jobs can flow easily around the world its even less likely an investment in the stock market is going to create jobs in the U.S.
"It's really bad as a PDA, the user interface badly needs massive amounts of work to make it as usable as the competition."
Perhaps you could be more precise on what needs to be fixed. This sounds somewhat more like an opportunity than a problem.
As far as embedding objects, that is cool but I'm not sure how critical it is to the majority of cell phone user or to the success of the platform. Not sure most people have to have a full featured word processor or spreadsheet on a phone. A good calendar, todo list and adress book, with sync, are things that need to be nailed.
I agree Qt's weight is something of a problem but there aren't a lot of available options that aren't incomplete by comparison.
The key point about making Linux competitive on the desktop or a handheld is to settle on a single platform and develop and polish it until its a beauty. Perhaps this is to much to hope for the ragtag army of geeks that use Linux. Its a lot easier to just say "It sucks", start divisive religious wars, and develop a dozen incomplete, badly polished, competing GUI's with applications that don't interoperate at all. Then just say everything SUCKS and switch to a proprietary platform. Thats kind of a damning commentary on the future of open source development though.
By just mentioning Qt I instantly invited the wrath of the half of the community whose motto is "GTK or die". Maybe Linux is doomed outside of the server world as the original poster suggested.
Linux competing with Microsoft on the desktop is a whole different thing from Linux competing on devices. Microsoft has already won the desktop war so its a matter of defeating an entrenched monopoly which is really hard to do. They most definitely have not won anything in consumer electronics yet and Linux is still very much in the running so DON'T GIVE UP before the fights really even started.
Linux, especially running Qt.Embedded and Qtopia, is a great platform and gaining an OK application base thanks to Zaurus. Its most definitely a serious competitor in this arena though its probably a year or two out from becoming something that starts taking serious market share on phones. One down side is its a little heavy so it needs a little higher end hardware.
Asia already loves Linux. They are smart enough to realize that Microsoft is not someone you really want to partner with. If cell phones go the same route as PC's they realize Microsoft will be the only one that really wins, not the hardware manufacturers.
Nokia is a direct competitor to Siemens, Samsung and LG so its just a matter of time before Nokia uses their new absolute control of Symbian to give themselves an inside track technically or financially. Having now been burned by a competitor seizing a controlling stake in their software platform I imagine the true openness of Linux is looking real attrractive to them right now.
Linux is also a logical successor to TRON which is the OS Asian companies use overwhelmingly in consumer electronics now.
"The upper 20% are the ones forking out the cash to invest in business and capital to provide jobs (and not JUST in the IT industry)."
This might have been a valid argument in the past but it doesn't work well any more. Most of the big corporations and the wealthy who have capital are not investing it to create good jobs and have zero allegiance to creating jobs in the U.S. since off shoring and outsourcing became the norm. These days investors are always looking for the cheapest labor they can find, capable of doing the work, in order to maximize their profit. That is a fundemental law of capitalism. That is why the new market bubble, in the post dot com bubble era, is in any stock with a China connection, the largest pool of the cheapest labor.
Jobs and working people in the U.S. are doomed thanks to the advent of:
Cheap container ships allowed moving manufacturing jobs to the cheapest labor market. When NAFTA was first signed manufacturing jobs fled to Mexico and Canada. But even Mexican labor was been undercut by even cheaper labor in China coupled with ever larger and more efficient container ships. When longshoreman were largely removed from unloading of ships, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were doomed
Cheap telecommunications is doing the same thing to information worker jobs. It started out as call centers, labor intensive programming and is moving into all kinds of information jobs. Paralegal work is an example of the newest wave.
This leaves us with jobs that required a warm body be in the United States to do the job, picking crops, doing the nails of rich laides, etc. This was easily solved. Big business applied political pressure and the government simply stopped enforcing the integrity of borders and in employment. This resulted in many low end jobs going to illegals and massive downward pressure on wages for American's at the low end. Bush's new worker program is ultimately designed to drive down wages. In some respects driving down wages is essential for American competitiveness in the global economy. Problem is it will be ugly for working Americans.
It is a fact of life in the modern capitalist world that capital is going to flee to the cheapest labor market and you can't easily stop it.
The massive stimulus the Bush administration is applying to the economy is doing a few things but job creation in the U.S is not really on the list.
- it juiced the stock market by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains. The stock market can go up in the current environment even if the underlying economy is not. Lots of ordinary people benefit from the stock market going up today, but it benefits the wealthy much more than the average investor because they know how to play the market and they tend to get lots of edges ordinary investors don't. Small investors were hurt much more severely in the last down turn than large investors. - its infusing large amount of tax money into the wealthy and large corporations further creating the facade of a booming economy. The massive funds the Medicare "reform" bill is going to pump in to drug companies is a good example. The Energy bill that was voted down would have done the same thing for energy companies. They might create some jobs but they are mostly going to make wealthy the executives and large stock holders of these large corporations who are the benefactors of the Bush administation. - Its pumped the economy, short term, to help insure the Bush administration is reelected in November at the price of a massive deficit that will haunt us forever. Its simply not sound economics and that is exemplified by the fact the dollar is plunging against the Euro and even the lowly Canadian dollar. Its so unprecedent that the IMF and World Bank, typically lap dogs of the U.S., are raising serious warning flags about the danger of the Bush administrations reckless fiscal policies.
It depends on the individal congressman but all indications are just writting a letter is unlikely to make any difference unless you enclose a sizable campaign contribution in the $1,000+ range. If you get a couple hundred people to write the same letter with the same size checks then you MIGHT get some congressman in your pocket assuming the competition doesn't outspend you. The competition being, for example, the trade association formed last December by the electronic voting equipment companies, led by Diebold. They have a vested interest , backed by lots of cash, in defending their cuts of the multibillion dollar voting machinery pie Congress handed out after the 2000 election.
The original poster explicitly said you would get a receipt with the ID number on it which is the only way anyone is going to remember a long string of digits. The intimidator will know what the receipt looks like and will want to see so you better be good at photoshop forgery if your workaround is going to work.
As for the going to the police part that works great unless the people doing the intimidation are the local sheriff, police or party in power in which case you will most probably just get in more trouble filing a complaint.
Rigging elections is an art as ancient as voting. You have to work really hard to prevent it. Because you apparently don't live in a totalitarian country where voter intimidation is the norm you seem to lack an appreciation of its effectiveness and its danger.
Some other posts argue anonymity is no longer needed because there are millions of votes and you cant buy or intimidate that many. Those posts miss the point that there are local elections routinely swung by a few votes. It is still pretty common for an ethnic majority, usually blacks or hispanics, to be intimidated by a local minority, usually white, as the only means a dominant minority can maintain power. Even in our Presidential elections, thanks to the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college, it is possible to swing a close election by swinging a few thousand votes in a few states, reference Florida 2000.
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"or used radio"
Until your enemy figures out how to jam your radio signals at which point your new army will be helpless. U.S. comm signals are hard to jam but its still possible.
Maybe you could use wire but then an infantryman with wire cutters, in the right place, takes down your expensive robot.
Its unlikely your going to have self contained AI's that anyone will trust to do friend or foe targeting any time soon. Of course the indications are the NI's(natural intelligence) in soldiers in Iraq are pretty bad at it too since they are routinely bathing innocent cilivians in machine gun fire everytime there is a loud bang in the area.
"The reason we spend so much is BECAUSE the rest of the world spends so little."
That is the silliest thing I've heard in a while. This old saw worked when there was a Soviet Union to at least maintain the pretense of holding up the other end of an arms race. There is really no good reason to run a race when you are the only runner.
When the rest of the world came to its senses and wound down the money they wasted on arms it was insane for the U.S. to accelerate its already massive defense spending. All of our weapons are a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world already. Most of these weapons are borderline useless:
- in a war against guerillas in the mountains of Afghanistan
- They work great against a feeble military like Iraq's except most army's have learned by now the best strategy is to melt away when the American's actually start their war and then pick them off one by one during the occupation when the only weapons the American's have that matter are body armor and M-16's. For all the money the U.S. spend the U.S. Army in Iraq has next to no real superiority over the insurgent army they are fighting
There are only a couple explanations why we keep up this massive spending, neither of them good:
- The U.S. government has adopted a policy of overwhelming military superiority which is designed to make sure no one will dare challenge the U.S. or attempt to start a new arms race because they will be so far behind. It might be OK if the U.S. had this overwhelming superiority if our government could be trusted to use it sparingly and wisely. Recent events suggest they can't be trusted. You may be concerned about the "next dictator" who dares to challenge the U.S. The entire rest of the world is gravely concerned about an out of control, dangerous, American President. In everything coming out of Russia in recent weeks it appears they are going to try to restart the arms race precisely because the U.S. never stopped and is now abusing its power at ever turn.
- Boeing and Lockheed, among others, are very dependent on this spending for their profitability. They require a continuing stream of these exhorbinant defense contracts to remain profitable. The fact is EVERY contract has massive cost overruns and is massively behind schedule because these companies are milking every contract for all they can get out of it. Since half the generals in the Pentagon take lucrative jobs at these contractors when they retire they have zero incentive to keep these contracts under control. These Defense contractors are also huge benefactors of the Republican's in particular and they get paid back a million times over for the campaign contributions. You just have to look at the sordid underbelly of the 767 tanker deal to realize the DOD is there primarily to transfer tax money to big defense contractors.
The big plus about all these defense contracts is they are a stellar jobs program, and defense jobs are among the very few which are somewhat harder to outsource than the average.
"Meanwhile, the Warthog showed it could go into battle, get banged up and survive."
The only problem is the depleted uranium shells it fires turns everything in the area in to a low grade, invisible, toxic waste dump that is a health threat to the soldiers and civilians that wander through it for nearly ever.
http://www.cadu.org.uk/intro.htm
True conservatives are for "government staying out of our lives", free markets, balanced budgets and low taxes. The Republican party hasn't been really conservative in a long time, just has the Democratic party hasn't been really liberal in a long time. The true conservative wing of the Republican party is as shocked by the current regime as the liberals are. Conservatism was useful rhetoric when the Republican's were out of power because they knew they wouldn't have to actually implement it and it was a convenient rhetorical attack against the big spending Democrats in power.
But, as Nader suggested today, both parties have been largely devoured by wealthy and powerful special interests so neither is true to their original ideals. The defense/intelligence-industrial establishment is one of the most powerful blocks that dominates the Republican party. The others are the moral majority, and the huge corporations that dominate energy, pharmacueticals, health care and finance.
The defense-industiral establishment has a vested interest in making sure that there are always "enemies" to be fought and that the government continues massive expenditures in military and intelligence because the resulting contracts are how the industrial part of the complex makes its money and the defense part of the complex expands its power. As a result they are pushing the Republican party away from true conservatism towards aggressive warfare abroad and authoritarianism at home.
A military, adequate for defense is essential to the well being of a nation when it faces real threats abroad. The problem is, once it reaches a certain mass, as the U.S. military did in World War II its enormously difficult to keep it in check. It starts seeking to justify its existence either by fabricating imaginary enemies or fomenting the creation of real ones by abusing its power abroad.
Militaries are also, by nature, the most undemocratic of institutions so they are constantly working against democracy and civil liberties in their host nation. I'm afraid what your seeing here is a defense industrial complex that has achieved critical mass and is going to turn the U.S. in to an authoritarian police state if its left unchecked.
You also need to factor in the massive influence the religious right has in the Republican party. They are also a strong force pushing authoritarian government, iron fisted law enforcement and are eager to sacrifice the constitution on every front. Separation of church and state will be decimated by Bush's faith based initiative when tax dollars will be pumped in to churches. This is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for our republic. They dismiss the danger but the founding fathers new first hand how dangerous it is to have religion infused in to government because a government so infused inevitably starts favoring a particular sect over everyone else. That favoritism almost inevitably turns to inflicting that sects world view on everyone in the nation and oppressing those who refuse to convert. Just look at Jeb Bush's Christian prison in Florida to visualize the danger.
The other special interests controlling the Republican's are equally successful. The pharmacuetical and health conglomerates received a massive infusion of fresh profits, coming out of our tax dollars and disguised as a Medicare drug benefit. You know its a sham when the bill mandates the government can't negotiate the prices it pays for drugs, insuring the drug companies unrestrained profits at tax payer expense. True conservatives are aghast at this bill.
The energy companies will get their first windfall when the delayed energy bill finally passes and are benefiting to an extent from the gutting of environmental enforcement already.
The financial institutions got their first gift with the massive tax cuts, especially in capital gains and dividends. They will get another one if Social Security is privatized so all that money is pumped in to the stock market.
"When will people step up to draw the line and, depending on how long it takes, what will it take to actually keep the government from crossing it?"
We alread have some recent historical precedent you can draw from. What it took last time was:
- A lengthy, ugly, pointless, war in Vietnam that killed and maimed large numbers of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese. Vietnam for the U.S. and Afghanistan for the U.S.S.R. created large numbers of returning veterans who were disillusioned with their government after being subjected to the senseless horrors they were producing in the name of their geopolitical and economic manuevering.
- A CIA that had essentially run amuck and was using covert operations, coups, assasinations and rigged elections to install despotic regimes around the world
- An FBI engaged in a massive domestic spying and social engineering campaign
- A President, Richard Nixon, who was caught using dirty tricks to destroy political oponents and insure his reelection.
- Economic upheaval thanks in part to the massive expenditures in Vietnam
America did manage to come back from the brink then for a time thanks to:
- The antiwar movement. We forget this now but a lot of people were politically very active in the late sixties and early seventies.
- Congressional investigations by the Church Commission which reined in the CIA and FBI for a time.
- Investigate journalists, Woodward and Berstein, who refused to accept the mush being spoon fed them by the government and actually did what journalists are supposed to do which was find the truth.
Today many of the same elements are coalescing though it took time for them to develop in the 60's and it wont happen overnight this time either:
- the war in Iraq has the same potential as Vietnam to incite an anti war movement unless the U.S. is successful in disengaging its occupation army and fostering a stable government soon. Both are unlikely. If the U.S. were to disengage its army Iraq would likely devolve in to a civil war. Any real attempt to actually turn sovereignty over to the the Iraqs, with a democratic vote, would lead almost immediately to a Shia dominated Islamic republic which the U.S. won't tolerate. As a result the U.S. has to manipulate the politics in Iraq and maintain an occupation army, indefinitely, or cut and run and let it collapse like South Vietnam eventually did. If things continue as they are the root of an antiwar movement will form each time a new wave of 100,000 soldiers return from Iraq with the permenent scars of the horrors they are subjected to there. Occupations with a creditable insurgent resistance are always very ugly for everyone involved. This disillusionment would be an instantaneous process though. It will take years as it did in Vietnam. There are some forces that work against another Vietnam too. The Army learned a lot of lessons about what caused the moral collapse of the Army and public opinion in Vietnam and they have remedied some but not all. The three obvious ones are:
- drug testing to prevent drug abuse
- maintaining unit cohesion
- suppressing media coverage of the ugly side of the war, in particular wounded soldiers screaming in pain and the unloading of the coffins in Delaware(the later insituted by non other than Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense). The media today obsesses endless over the sensational murder/kidnapping of the day, but the nearly daily causalties in Iraq pass by with little more than "2 soldiers were killed today by an IED".
- As for reining in the intelligence establishment with a new Church commission, there is one force working towards that and one against. The force working for it is growing public awareness of the blatant and obvious deception used to justify Iraq which should be grounds to once again rein in the CIA and to launch impeachment proceeding against the President. The force working against it is the Republicans control the government. As long as they do the deceipt will be
"What exactly is the US doing this arms race against? Aliens?"
All indications are the Bush administration is pursueing a doctrine of overwhelming military superiority. If I recall the wording they've been using the goal is to establish such military dominance that no country will even attempt to challenge it or match it. The thinking is they can prevent another Cold War style arms race this way. This doctrine does neglect to remember that overwhelming military superiority has been successfully challenged in the past through asymetric means, also known as guerilla warfare, or as its tagged today terrorism.
Indications are at least one country is going to try by conventional means though. It appears the Russians are fed up with being an American door mat, along with the rest of the world, and are gravely concerned that America and the Bush Administration are becoming the real clear and present danger to the world. Can't blame them since its become clear the U.S. will bully anyone and everyone using the "you are either with us or against" doctrine.
It appears the Russians are going to attempt to counter by trying to return to their former glory and are planning to restart the arms race. Russia has been engaged in the largest war games in 20 years this week and Putin, taking a page from Bush, has been riding around on a submarine in a naval uniform. One hitch in his plan was back to back catastrophic ballistic missile failures which suggest its an uphill battle to regain a creditable military especially with Russia's struggling economy. He's also reverting Russia to a one party state for all practical purposes and is siezing control of Russian industry starting with its largest oil company.
In other news, the Russians announced this week they are restarting development of new strategic missiles with manuevering warheads in an attempt to defeat Bush's massively expensive missile defense and are starting missile defenses of their own. Most knowledgable experts have contended it will be a lot cheaper and easier to defeat missile defenses than it will be to build them. So a missile defense race between the U.S. and Russia will potentially bankrupt both. They are also developing a six man capsule to replace the Soyuz so they can take over the ISS as Bush abandons it, and will no doubt make it pay off, on the cheap, as they did with Mir.
As bad as the Cold War was, especially in all the countries where the proxy wars were fought like Vietnam and Aghanistan, it was an era where the two super powers kept each other in check. In a lot of ways that balance is superior to the current environment where one super power is unchecked and unable to resist the temptation to abuse its power.
Meanwhile the Chinese are working to decimate the U.S. by subtler means, economic means, and are well on their way to becoming the world's new economic superpower alongside India.
This opens up an interesting future. Will the U.S. be able to leverage its massive military superiority to stave off economic collapse. They certainly could because they can use their military to gain control, by force or intimidation, of the world's oil reserves and any other scarce resource they choose. No country is like to call in loans or openly challenge the U.S. if there are space weapons pointed at them, stealth bombers warming up on the ramp, and aircraft carriers off their coast.
I think the U.S. has realized they can no longer compete in a purely economic arena with China, India and even Europe so the Bush administation is opting to establish the worlds first truely global empire with the military to back it. It might work, or the U.S. might end up in economic ruin alongside Russia. If so China and India are poised to assume the role of the world's new leaders assuming the U.S. doesn't unleash its military, on the way down, and take the planet with it. As much as the U.S. whines about WMD's it needs to be remembered the U.S. has the worlds largest WMD stockpiles and to quote the rhetoric against Saddam, "Has used them in the past". As Bush has said in speeches a few times this week, can we tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a madman?
"So? Like I said before, no matter how he got in. I have no clue about that, and neither do you;"
You conveinently continue to ignore the URL to CNN which clearly states %40 of legacies get admitted to Yale. The fact that his dad and granddad were very powerful politicians pretty much insured his acceptance and that professors would pass him. His grandfather was the Senator from Connecticut, Yale's home state, for God's sake. Get a clue, you don't seem to grasp how influence works in this world. Yale isn't going to reject the grandson of an alumnust and Senator. Professors probably wouldn't give him A's for who he was but they were pretty sure to not flunk him and risk the wrath of his family and family friends.
You also fail to explain why lowly U of T rejected him if he was such a stellar candidate that Harvard's Business school snapped him up.
From CSPAN:
" In the election of 2000, "George W." had to fend off allegations that targeted his past lifestyle and questioned his intellectual prowess. Bush admitted to a history of alcoholic excess and academic mediocrity-a contrast to Gore's "straight arrow" persona. (In reality, while each had Ivy League credentials, neither had stellar academic records.)"
"Ah, yes, the old "they must have something to hide" argument."
Hardly. Simple fact of life. They had a picture of his Yale transcripts on the news a few days ago, from his just released Gaurd file. You could read the classes he took but the grades were blacked out. All of this records from Yale were seized, by the Secret Service if I recall. Maybe they do it for all Presidents but if George W. was a stellar student they would be flaunting his grades not hiding them. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar so you KNOW he had academic credentials. He certainly didn't graduate from Yale or Harvard with honors or that would be public record.
"These allegations failed to convince anybody in 2000, and they're failing to convince anybody now."
George W. was given a free pass in 2000. Its completely unobvious why the media and the Democrat's let most of the skeleton's in his closet go largely unchallenged. Part of it is Democrats are inept at dirty politics in recent times while the Republicans expose every detail about every Democract, real and fabricated. Is not likely George W. will get the same pass this year. The press knows they failed miserably in looking in to George W's background until now. A key problem is he, his family and their friends have managed to erase most of the written proof about his checkered past, and very few people who knew him are going to ruin their lives by coming forward. His National Gaurd file is full of holes. In particular how did he manage to refuse a mandatory medical exam, that grounded him, without disciplinary action.
"The joke was about Rockefeller's Standard Oil company. You can't get even the most basic citation right, huh?"
Geez. I heard it from Kevin Phillips on CSPAN discussing his book "American Dynasty" on the Bush family. Perhaps it was originally about Standard Oil though I imagine they did actually drill some producing wells. George W. drilled nothing but dry holes so the joke works a lot better for him. He made his wealth when family friends gave him a piece of the Texas Rangers at a huge discount and he sold it back a couple years later at a huge profit with no intervening effort required.
Bush's own family admit he was a "late bloomer", code word for partier and coaster. They'd pretty much written him off to carry the political torch in favor of Jeb until George W. quit drinking, found Jesus and boundless political ambition.
George W. is the son and grandson of Yale graduates. All schools give preference to the children of alumni, Yale especially so. 40% of alumni children are accepted there versus 11% of everyone else. It is a school striving to cultivate an aristocracy more than academic excellence. His dad was pretty smart, George W. was always a slightly below average, unmotivated, student:
. af firm.action.tm/
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/timep
http://zhongwen.com/bush/
All indications are George W. was a low C student at Yale though his handlers and the secret service go to great lengths to conceal his grades. They had his Yale transcript in in the military records released this week but the grades were blacked out again. If he was an exceptional student why are they hiding his grades.
He was rejected by the lowly University of Texas before he was admitted to the Harvard business school. Isn't it kind of odd U of T didn't take him but Harvard accepted a low C student in to their prestigous institution. Fact is he used connections to get in and get out with a degree, presumably leveraging his Skull and Bones connection.
It is well documented that the Bush family used connections to move George W. from the bottom of the list for the Texas Air National Gaurd to the top, otherwise he might have been slogging through the jungles of Vietnam packing an M-16 kind of like what he's making all the soldiers in Iraq do today, instead of partying in Alabama. Its also well understood that he refused to take his flight medical because 1972 was when drug testing was instituted. He should have been brough up on charges and may have been but as Governor of Texas he arranged for his aides to clense his Gaurd file in the late 1990's. There are large gaps in what was released this week.
Connections were used to get George H.W. Bush in to Naval Aviation in World War II as well. He was underage, straight out of prep school, and his commission was wildly out of the norm. Some indications are he was escaping the family scandal at the same time where his dad's bank was siezed for trading with the enemy, in particular Fritz Thyssen, Germany's richest industrialist and key benefector in Hitler's rise to power.
The Bush family has NEVER failed to use connections to get ahead. The old joke about George W.'s oil company endeavors, "he would drill dry wells and someone would come along and fill them with money."
1. Distort scientific results
2. Poison environment and accelerate global warming
3. ????
4. Profit!
Believe it or not this does actually work and is profitable so I guess its really an old economy business plan.
"Iraq, the situation there is not especially comparable to that of Pakistan"
I agree with this statement a 100%. what Pakistan was doing was a hundred times more dangerous than what was going on in Iraq. Pakistan 's Khan was shopping working nuclear bomb designs and manufacturing centrifuges in Malaysia for sale to the highest bidder, which could easily have included terrorists. North Korea presumably has nukes now thanks to Pakistan so we have a really dangerous unstable regime with nukes thanks to Pakistan. Is there any evidence anyone has WMD's thanks to Iraq?
Iraq doesn't seem to have had any nuclear program since it was dismantled in the mid 90's. They certainly weren't real cooperative with the U.N. over time but as Bush was rushing to war they were cooperating with all the U.N inspections. Iraq offered to let CIA agents come in and find all the weapons the Bush administration claimed were there and claimed to know where they were. If this was really about WMD's the CIA would have just gone in, found the WMD's and proved their case. They didn't. This was about taking down Saddam and the fact he was trying to fully comply with inspections was an inconvenience as Bush/Cheney rushed to war. There is NOTHING Saddam could have done to comply with the U.N. to stop the invasion.
As Wolfowitz has said since, WMD's were just a convenient pretext for invading. It was one everyone could agree on.
Laying WMD charges against a country is a delightful rationalization for aggressive warfare. Its a charge you can lay against ANYONE. All you do is say "WE KNOW" they have chemical or biological weapons. Its impossible for the accused country to prove they do not no matter how much you inspect them. If you don't find any you just say, "They must have hid them really well". After all little vials of Anthrax can be hidden anywhere.
" It makes me sadder still that said people who say the U.S. is evil and makes things bad for its citizens and the rest of the world somehow never give any substantial evidence of that."
It makes me sad how ignorant Americans are of the most basic history of their government. There is no shortage of evidence that the U.S. has caused untold misery around the world for decades.
The U.S. has installed a non stop cavalcade of ruthless dictators since the end of World War II. The standard criteria is any government that "isn't with us is against us" so we arrange to topple democraticly elected leaders, who are usually nationalists or socialists and replace them with right wing dictators who are willing to do what we tell them, who are friendly to big American corporations and wealthy landowners, and are willing to ruthlessly kill anyone in their country who doesn't see things that way. Sometimes our puppets go bad, as in they stop doing what we tell them, for example Noriega in Panama and Sadam in Iraq and we even have to topple them:
Here are just a few examples, its a much longer list than this:
The Shah of Iran was installed in to power by a CIA sponsored coup in 1953 when they helped topple a democraticly elected nationalist leader,Mohammed Mossadegh . The Shah rivaled or surpassed Sadam in torture and oppression of the Iranian people and was a key reason why they seized they U.S. embassy when he was toppled and why the hate the U.S. with a passion to this day:
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtisirancoup.ht ml
In 1973 a CIA sponsored coup in Chile removed a democraticly elected, very popular, socialist and nationalist leader, Salvadore Allende and replaced him with General Pinochet, another ruthless military dictator and a 17 year reign of terror:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,13755,10 38 615,00.html
In 1954 a CIA coup overthrew the democraticly elected leftist Jacobo Arbenz, once again to be replaced by a string of ruthless military dictators in to the 90's:
http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/iachr/background.cfm
The CIA was also involved in the 1963 coup in which the Bathists took control of Iraq. The CIA apparently gave the Bathists a list of people, mostly left leaning, who were to be exterminated when they took power. Control of the Bathist party was eventually seized by Saddam Hussein:
http://www.bnfp.org/neighborhood/jmoore.htm
Lest you think this is all ancient history all indications are that the unrest in Venezuala a couple years ago which once again nearly toppled a popularly elected socialist leader was being stirred by the Bush administation through the CIA and the U.S. military which was meeting with the opposition leaders trying to overthrow Hugo Chavez who is very critical of the U.S. on all fronts:
http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/Ven787.htm
We are also on pretty reasonable terms with the dictator of Turkmenistan who surpasses Saddam in cult of personality:
http://archive.tol.cz/transitions/thedict1.html
It should also be pointed out President Mushareef of Pakistan, out close ally in the war on terror is also a military dictator who seized power in a coupe. So much for our advocacy of democracy and freedom. Its ironic that we took down Iraq for an imagined WMD threat while Pakistan has been actually selling critical nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran. Did we do anything about it, no. Mushareef just pardoned the man responsible and we look the other way.
Bottomline is if your government protects the wealthy 1% in your country that own all the land and industry, and you open your country to exploitation by American corporations and you do what the U.S. government tells you, you will have no problems with the U.S. Otherwise you are headed for a world of hurt.
All of this was well documented by the Church commission in 1975:
http://history-matters.com/store/store
Your conveniently glossing over the fact Dean was far ahead in every national poll last year until just before Iowa when he starting sticking his foot in his mouth and the media started crucifying him. Clark was up there too and Kerry was an also ran.
I'll grant you Dean does have a lot better traction with the intelligent and well educated than he does with NASCAR dads who "buy the stuff on the side of the cars" and pick their candidates the same way. Of course you have to doubt NASCAR dads will vote for Kerry either.
I wager if you play Dean's stump speech from a year ago side by side with Kerry's today you couldn't tell the difference in the rhetoric. If you played Kerry's stump speech from a year ago I'm guessing he wasn't bashing Bush, Aschroft, the Iraq war, special interests or the Patriot Act like he is today.
Well it sure would be nice to know what exactly was in all those pages of the report on 9/11 that the Bush administration censored in order to protect the Saudis.
You also fail to draw the connection that a lot of those wealthy Saudi's are the ones pumping massive funding in to Wasabi madrasas which are the sole schooling system for millions of Muslim children around the world and are widely recognized as the real training camps for fundementalist Islam and hatred of the west that will yield future generations for Al Quaida.
Its hard to sort out which wealthy Saudi families are intimately tied to Al Quaida, especially since the Bush administation suppresses all the information on this, but it is certain there are a lot more ties to wealthy Saudis than there has ever been to Iraq.
I can't give the Bin Laden family much credit for "condemning" their wayward son. They have a multibillion dollar global financial empire to protect. Its kind of given they wouldn't publicly support the head of Al Quaida. It is just bizarre beyond believe that America's enemy number 1, still at large, comes from a family so intimitatly tied to our first family, and our President is trying to tag Saddam with complicity in 9/11 with no obvious basis in fact.
Problem is all the third parties tend to operate on the fringes and don't have a prayer of pulling together enough votes to win. I often dream of a realignment of American parties like this:
- Put all the wealthy, executives, corporate special interests and establishment politicians in one party, lets call it the Aristocratic party. They deserve each other.
- Put all the ordinary working people in the other party, lets call it the Ordinary Joe and Jane party.
The aristocrats would have an advantage since they control all the wealth, the traditional media and the big corporations.
The ordinary Joe party would have a vast advantage at the ballot box because there are a whole lot more ordinary people than there are elitist aristocrats. They would use the Internet to communicate and defeat corporate control of the traditional media.
- The ordinary joe party would take what used to be a Republican mantra until they actually gained power, keep the size of government to a bare and essential minimum. The only twist would be to usurp the Democratic/Progressive mantra which is make the wealthy pay for it. Part of this would be to completely eliminate the staggering sums the government spends on pork. The dreaded pork laden Ombudsmen bill and farm subsidies would never again grace the halls of congress.
- The convoluted tax code would be abolished in favor of a simple and progressive tax to prevent concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations and wealthy families and to make tax accountants an endangered species. The ordinary joe party would no longer try to encourage or discourage behavior with a million gimmicky tax breaks.
- Maintain a military just big enough for defense instead of spending the ridiculous sums we spend on our current aggresive and offensive military, sums as great or greater than the rest of the world combined.
- Provide universal health care coverage for the simple reason that people shouldn't die or be bankrupted because they can't afford health insurance. Its also becoming obvious that our for profit medical, insurance and drug companies are going to bleed our country white if they are left unchecked.
- Keep just enough CIA/NSA to watch for foreign dangers but keep them from spying domesticly or toppling governments to install ruthless dictators.
- The FBI could stay around to bust criminals but it would not be used as a tool to rob people of their basic constitutional rights.
- Provide seed money for science, research, space but always strive to keep the work out of the hands of corrupt big corporations and bureaucracies.
- Then you have all the thorny wedge issues like abortion, equal rights and affirmative action. The ordinary joes would have to agree to disagree on all those. It would be a color blind party. Everyone's welcome but no group is courted based on ethnicity. The only caveat is we would strive to keep government from interfering in or dictating peoples private lives. We would be against discrimination but would not be for affirmative action. We would have to tolerate but not encourage abortion. Gays would have the right to civil unions but perhaps not marriages to avoid treading on the religious.
- Our education system is broken. How do fix it though. Presumably find a model past or present that works and implement it. Encourage free thinking in children but also make sure they don't come out of the system stupid.
- As for free trade and globalization, well how do you solve that one. Best I can think of is to be fore free trade but when a place like China stacks the deck in their favor you level the playing field.
"Dean has the opposite position of the average American on just about every political issue."
This is an odd assertion. I think its widely recognized that Dean was the only Democrat with the hutzpah to:
- attack Bush
- oppose the Patriot Act
- oppose the Iraq war both for the deception used in selling it and the mess its proving to be
- denounce special interests and the way they are outright purchasing our government
Dean's fortunes really turned because Kerry, in particular, stole his message when he realized it was resonating with the majority of Democrats if not half the electorate as a whole. This leaves us with a bizarre hypocrisy where Kerry is now critical of the war in Iraq though he voted for it. He is critical of the Patriot Act though he voted for it and may have written predecessors of it. He is criticizing special interests though he takes more special interest money than anyone in the Senate.
A real plus about Kerry is, if you don't like his positions on the issues, you can just wait a while and he will flip sides to the one you like. Of course he also flips from positions you like to ones you don't with equal randomness. He is completely devoid of conviction which means he is "electable".
In all fairness, Dean did a lot of damage to himself when he stuck his foot in his mouth a few times on things like Saddam and Bin Laden. Its real hard to be a loose cannon, and take controversial positions, and also not stick your foot in your mouth sometimes.
If it hadn't been for Dean the Democrats would have gone in to this election cowering in fear of Bush's invincibility and they would have gone down in flames. Now they at least have a chance since Dean gave them a backbone. Dean also made the first attempt in a while to actually restore democracy to this screwed up country by getting ordinary people involved in politics again, especially with the aid of the Internet which is likely to be the only thing that might save democracy in America. Unfortunately all those people are tasting the bitter pill of how the establishment and the media destroy anyone trying to restore actual democracy, with a little d, to this country. End result is we will have two wealthy aristocrats, both Yale grads, both members of Skull and Bones squaring off in November, to see whether we will have an establishment Democrat or an establishment Republican taking their turn in the White House.
Dean might have said stupid things about Bin Laden, but its not quite as bad as the Bush family having intimate ties to the Bin Laden family. Bush also hushed up the extent Saudi Arabia was involved in 9/11 at the same time they were trying to pin it on Iraq which was probably the country in the Middle East that had the least involvement with Al Quaida, Bathists being secular socialists, not fundementalists, who claim to be Muslim mostly out of convenience. It still seems to be completely lost on Americans, smart people that they are, that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi for the most part. There were no Iraqi's.
Its not well known but George W. learned dirty campaign tricks as far back as the 1972 Senate campaign which is at the heart of his Alabama National Gaurd controversy. This campaign is noteworthy because Bush's team, though perhaps not him personally, apparently doctored and spliced audio tapes of their Democratic opponent so he appeared to say that he was in favor of busing to force desegration at a time when this was the kiss of death for a politician in Alabama. It didn't work but they tried. Indications are the picture of Kerry behind Jane Fonda doing the rounds this week is also a faked.
a mp aigns/wh2000/stories/rove072399.htmo utherner.net/blog/awolbush.html
Also in 1972 Karl Rove "admitted using a false identity to gain entry to the campaign offices of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon. He admitted stealing letterhead stationary and sending out 1,000 fake invitations to the campaign headquarters opening, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." He was cleared after a Republican party investigation by none other than George H.W. Bush. After all, this was 1972 when Nixon and the Republicans were using dirty tricks on a massive scale in an effort to rig elections.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/c
http://www.s
The southerner article, among others, raises the possibility George W. Bush refused to take his National Gaurd physical in 1972, which caused him to be grounded, because this was the year drug testing was instituted by the gaurd and reserves. Its likely he would have failed because he was known to indulge in cocaine and a marijuana while in Alabama, and may have done community service in Texas around this time to have a cocaine charge cleared off his record.
All indications are he received disciplinary action for refusing the physical, and a number of other transgressions, which is why he was transfered to the reserves, normally a sign of punishment for Gaurdsmen, which is where he was when he was finally discharged.
Its hard to figure out all of the machinations of his military service since there is at least a possibility Bush campaign operatives were given the chance to purge his military files of anything negative in the late 1990's.
It is pretty clear that he moved to Alabama without getting Gaurd approval for the transfer. He applied after the fact for a postal unit, which was denied, since the Gaurd frowns on expensive pilots becoming postal workers. They finally transfered him to a reconnaisance unit though they didn't have the F-102's he was qualified for.
The only reason he got in to the Gaurd in the first place was family connections which moved him from the bottom of the list, and destined for Vietnam, to the top of Texas Air National Country Club flying obsolete fighters that would never get sent to Vietnam.
"Companies promise to keep data private, only to sell or transfer it to third parties, as in the case of several airlines."
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/2004021 1092740.asp
Actually on the evening news last night it appears you are giving the airlines a bad rap, though you are citing legitimate past transgressions. The TSA is apparently desperate to start testing its new screening program, which requires every detail about every passenger be exposed to TSA including credit history and any criminal record, including misdemeanors. If there are ANY issues in your background including simple errors in your credit history, you will be pulled aside every time you fly and be given "special treatment". I imagine it will be iffy if you will be able to count on getting on an airplane when this is in place, unless your electronic trail is squeaky clean. This is coming from the TSA which, in the rush to hire new screeners, hired nearly something approaching a hundred felons and still hasn't done background checks on many of the people who control what goes in to airports.
Apparently the TSA is having problems testing the program because airlines are refusing to participate or turn over the necessary data citing privacy concerns. Unfortunately is appears the government has a simple solution. The Department of Homeland security is planning to simply order the airlines to participate and they will have to unless someone stops Ridge and company.
If there is a person responsible for protecting privacy in the Department of Homeland Security I think they rate an F unless they stop this intrusive screening program which is more likely to hassle ordinary people and punish advesaries of the Bush administration than it is to catch any terrorists.
If you want to see what your government is now capable of look up a recent anti war conference at Drake University. The Bush administration started a massive, secretive investigation in an effort to identify everyone who attended and everything was said. The governement also tried to gag everyone at Drake so that this blatant assault on free spreech would remain secret, though thanks to the Internet is isn't:
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02102004.html
I'm pretty skeptical a free flyer will be anything but a bunch of wasted R&D money just like the manned manuevering units were. Kind of the same thing except one has a man in it and one has a remote operator. Not sure which is more dangerous. You have to wonder how great the potential is for a mishandled free flyer to cause more damage than it will find. I guess its a plus you don't have to have an air lock for a free flyer but if the flyer actually finds damage I imagine I would like to have the air lock and MMU so an astronaut can go fix it without being completely dependent on the ISS.
Unfortunately all designs are flawed. Two approaches:
You can spend vast sums of money trying to make a flawless design, never succeed, and then fail miserably when a flaw surfaces which appears to be the current NASA.
Or you can have an organization which recognizes flaws when they surface, prioritizes them appropriately, corrects them when possible and learns to deal with or workaround them when things go wrong. NASA's manned space program seems to be completely lacking in these skills since as far back as the end of Skylab.
The fundement problem is not the "flawed designs", it is the failure of the organization to deal with them appropriately. The aging, overgrown bureaucracy IS THE PROBLEM. No one is responsible or accountable. Everything is being bucked up and down a chain of command that is 20 deep and jumping back and forth between Johnson, Kennedy, Headquarters and a half dozen other far flung centers. At a bare minimum shut down Johnson and put everyone in the one place, at Kennedy, Kennedy being chosen out of geographic necessity as long as you use rockets to get to space.
I did read the whole CAIB report. It is an excellent post mortem of what happened technicly. Unfortunately, like the Challenger report before it, it doesn't seem to have solved any of the structural problems at NASA. All thats really come out of these reports is an agency, a manned space program and a shuttle that has become progressively more crippled, expensive and useless. In particular NASA is so risk averse they can't do anything anymore except manage to not have the same accident twice but have different ones instead.
Assuming we eventually throw away ISS and the Shuttle, what exactly is it thats changed that will assure us future programs will work when the same organization is in charge, its structurally unchanged, and its failed on two programs in a row.
"There are future plans for a free-flyer inspector, but that is years away."
One has to ask why NASA is spending a bunch of money for a free flyer that won't be ready for years, for a vehicle that will be end of lifed in six years, and which NASA apparently will refuse to fly anyplace but the ISS where you can presumably inspect it without a free flyer. Classic NASA'think. Whatever happened to the Manned Manuevering Units anyway, CYA NASA decided they were too dangerous after spending massive money to develop them.
I am really at a complete loss to know how NASA is going to do anything in space in the future when its willing to adopt this lengthy and ridiculous list of flight constraints. Sure these are just for the shuttle, because its old and risky, well Apollo was like a hundred times more risky and we would have never gone to the Moon with this brand of hopeless bureaucratic, cover your ass, thinking. You're never going to get back to the Moon or Mars if your going to continue this trend to try and generate a 100% certainty of success.
After all, we are just talking about getting in to LEO here, something we've been for something like 40 years now. You're making this sound like something new and dangerous.
Challenger and Columbia happened because bureaucrats on the ground did stupid things. Fix the organization creating the stupid bureaucratic thinking, don't completely cripple space exploration with stupid flight constraints.
Challenger happened because they had iffy O rings, but it mostly happened because, thanks to political pressure from the Reagan administration, they launched on one of the coldest mornings possible in Florida. There was ice everywhere and it stiffened the O rings to the point they failed. Obvious solution is don't launch on a cold morning just so Reagan could get a sound bite in his state of the union address about a teacher in space.
Columbia happened because the Bush Administration and O'Keefe had a screen saver on everyone's desk pressuring them to keep a string of launches on schedule so the ISS was finished by a hard date. As a result when they had clear evidence of a potentianly serious problem they glossed it over to stay on schedule.
Fix these problems at the source, the hopeless bureaucracy, not with absurd flight constraints that destroy the whole point of the space program in the first place. Constraints that give you false sense of security, that might prevent an accident like the last one but will do nothing to stop a new one due to a completely different reason which is much more likely.
"First of all, corporations don't pay taxes."
You are correct that they generally don't, BUT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO. The entire Republican rationale for cutting the tax on dividends was that it was double taxation, the corporation paid taxes on their profits, then gave them out again as dividends which were taxed again.
The problem is that all big corporations have adept accountants that exploit every loop hole in the tax code imaginable, something beyond the means of small companies and individuals. They also pay off their congressman, in the form of campaign contributions, to insert new loopholes they can exploit if they start to run out.
So the big companies generally don't pay taxes on their profits and now dividend taxes have been slashed which means wealthy stockholders make out like bandits. Its no coincidence Microsoft has started paying dividends since they are now a great tax dodge, especially for the wealthy. Meanwhile interest rates are so low and taxes on interest income is so high that you have to be insane to actually save mony in CD's or money markets which is why American's don't save money anymore. They run up credit card bills and gamble on the stock market.
Its also no accident the stock market is in a new bubble. It is so juiced by the new tax rates, subsidized by massive budget deficits, everyone is rushing back in. This new bubble is very desirable for the Republicans because real soon now they are going to want to "reform" Social Security. To translate they are going to start pushing people to put their social security taxes in to the stock market which will juice the profit margins and wealth of Wall Street. Perhaps it will make big returns for you when you retire, or perhaps stock market crashes and manipulation will wipe it out and you will starve on the streets like people did before Social Security.
I have one question as to why people think investing in the stock market always creates new jobs. The only time it leads to new capital for a company is in an IPO or a subsequent stock offering. When you buy stock from another shareholder all you're doing is enriching that shareholder as a reward for their gamble. It is true that the company has an incentive to grow, and perhaps create jobs, to push their stock price up but that is an indirect incentive.
Venture capitalists, wealthy snakes that they are, tend to be the ones that really create companies and jobs. The stock market tends to just be a mechanism to reward them when their gambles succeeed. Its pretty much just high stakes gambling for everyone else.
In the modern age where capital and jobs can flow easily around the world its even less likely an investment in the stock market is going to create jobs in the U.S.
"It's really bad as a PDA, the user interface badly needs massive amounts of work to make it as usable as the competition."
Perhaps you could be more precise on what needs to be fixed. This sounds somewhat more like an opportunity than a problem.
As far as embedding objects, that is cool but I'm not sure how critical it is to the majority of cell phone user or to the success of the platform. Not sure most people have to have a full featured word processor or spreadsheet on a phone. A good calendar, todo list and adress book, with sync, are things that need to be nailed.
I agree Qt's weight is something of a problem but there aren't a lot of available options that aren't incomplete by comparison.
The key point about making Linux competitive on the desktop or a handheld is to settle on a single platform and develop and polish it until its a beauty. Perhaps this is to much to hope for the ragtag army of geeks that use Linux. Its a lot easier to just say "It sucks", start divisive religious wars, and develop a dozen incomplete, badly polished, competing GUI's with applications that don't interoperate at all. Then just say everything SUCKS and switch to a proprietary platform. Thats kind of a damning commentary on the future of open source development though.
By just mentioning Qt I instantly invited the wrath of the half of the community whose motto is "GTK or die". Maybe Linux is doomed outside of the server world as the original poster suggested.
Linux competing with Microsoft on the desktop is a whole different thing from Linux competing on devices. Microsoft has already won the desktop war so its a matter of defeating an entrenched monopoly which is really hard to do. They most definitely have not won anything in consumer electronics yet and Linux is still very much in the running so DON'T GIVE UP before the fights really even started.
Linux, especially running Qt.Embedded and Qtopia, is a great platform and gaining an OK application base thanks to Zaurus. Its most definitely a serious competitor in this arena though its probably a year or two out from becoming something that starts taking serious market share on phones. One down side is its a little heavy so it needs a little higher end hardware.
Asia already loves Linux. They are smart enough to realize that Microsoft is not someone you really want to partner with. If cell phones go the same route as PC's they realize Microsoft will be the only one that really wins, not the hardware manufacturers.
Nokia is a direct competitor to Siemens, Samsung and LG so its just a matter of time before Nokia uses their new absolute control of Symbian to give themselves an inside track technically or financially. Having now been burned by a competitor seizing a controlling stake in their software platform I imagine the true openness of Linux is looking real attrractive to them right now.
Linux is also a logical successor to TRON which is the OS Asian companies use overwhelmingly in consumer electronics now.
"The upper 20% are the ones forking out the cash to invest in business and capital to provide jobs (and not JUST in the IT industry)."
This might have been a valid argument in the past but it doesn't work well any more. Most of the big corporations and the wealthy who have capital are not investing it to create good jobs and have zero allegiance to creating jobs in the U.S. since off shoring and outsourcing became the norm. These days investors are always looking for the cheapest labor they can find, capable of doing the work, in order to maximize their profit. That is a fundemental law of capitalism. That is why the new market bubble, in the post dot com bubble era, is in any stock with a China connection, the largest pool of the cheapest labor.
Jobs and working people in the U.S. are doomed thanks to the advent of:
- cheap telecommunications
- cheap container ships
- massive illegal immigration
- free trade
Cheap container ships allowed moving manufacturing jobs to the cheapest labor market. When NAFTA was first signed manufacturing jobs fled to Mexico and Canada. But even Mexican labor was been undercut by even cheaper labor in China coupled with ever larger and more efficient container ships. When longshoreman were largely removed from unloading of ships, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were doomed
Cheap telecommunications is doing the same thing to information worker jobs. It started out as call centers, labor intensive programming and is moving into all kinds of information jobs. Paralegal work is an example of the newest wave.
This leaves us with jobs that required a warm body be in the United States to do the job, picking crops, doing the nails of rich laides, etc. This was easily solved. Big business applied political pressure and the government simply stopped enforcing the integrity of borders and in employment. This resulted in many low end jobs going to illegals and massive downward pressure on wages for American's at the low end. Bush's new worker program is ultimately designed to drive down wages. In some respects driving down wages is essential for American competitiveness in the global economy. Problem is it will be ugly for working Americans.
It is a fact of life in the modern capitalist world that capital is going to flee to the cheapest labor market and you can't easily stop it.
The massive stimulus the Bush administration is applying to the economy is doing a few things but job creation in the U.S is not really on the list.
- it juiced the stock market by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains. The stock market can go up in the current environment even if the underlying economy is not. Lots of ordinary people benefit from the stock market going up today, but it benefits the wealthy much more than the average investor because they know how to play the market and they tend to get lots of edges ordinary investors don't. Small investors were hurt much more severely in the last down turn than large investors.
- its infusing large amount of tax money into the wealthy and large corporations further creating the facade of a booming economy. The massive funds the Medicare "reform" bill is going to pump in to drug companies is a good example. The Energy bill that was voted down would have done the same thing for energy companies. They might create some jobs but they are mostly going to make wealthy the executives and large stock holders of these large corporations who are the benefactors of the Bush administation.
- Its pumped the economy, short term, to help insure the Bush administration is reelected in November at the price of a massive deficit that will haunt us forever. Its simply not sound economics and that is exemplified by the fact the dollar is plunging against the Euro and even the lowly Canadian dollar. Its so unprecedent that the IMF and World Bank, typically lap dogs of the U.S., are raising serious warning flags about the danger of the Bush administrations reckless fiscal policies.
It depends on the individal congressman but all indications are just writting a letter is unlikely to make any difference unless you enclose a sizable campaign contribution in the $1,000+ range. If you get a couple hundred people to write the same letter with the same size checks then you MIGHT get some congressman in your pocket assuming the competition doesn't outspend you. The competition being, for example, the trade association formed last December by the electronic voting equipment companies, led by Diebold. They have a vested interest , backed by lots of cash, in defending their cuts of the multibillion dollar voting machinery pie Congress handed out after the 2000 election.
The original poster explicitly said you would get a receipt with the ID number on it which is the only way anyone is going to remember a long string of digits. The intimidator will know what the receipt looks like and will want to see so you better be good at photoshop forgery if your workaround is going to work.
As for the going to the police part that works great unless the people doing the intimidation are the local sheriff, police or party in power in which case you will most probably just get in more trouble filing a complaint.
Rigging elections is an art as ancient as voting. You have to work really hard to prevent it. Because you apparently don't live in a totalitarian country where voter intimidation is the norm you seem to lack an appreciation of its effectiveness and its danger.
Some other posts argue anonymity is no longer needed because there are millions of votes and you cant buy or intimidate that many. Those posts miss the point that there are local elections routinely swung by a few votes. It is still pretty common for an ethnic majority, usually blacks or hispanics, to be intimidated by a local minority, usually white, as the only means a dominant minority can maintain power. Even in our Presidential elections, thanks to the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college, it is possible to swing a close election by swinging a few thousand votes in a few states, reference Florida 2000.