...and it would also make it extremely easy for Big Brother to know exactly how you vote and to schedule you for your appointment at the Ministry of Love... all with utmost in security and efficiency.
There are probably several potential answers, take your pick based on your political leanings and naivete:
- A lot of absentee military ballots were at the center of the controversy in Florida in 2000 so someone in the DOD probably decided we needed to make sure the military could reliably vote.
- The U.S. military has its troops scattered farther afield than they've probably been since World War II at least. The administration probably wants to make sure all the troops vote, perhaps assuming they will go Republican though I wouldn't count on that with the apparently dismal morale in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- My personal opinion is the Republican's who control the DOD looked ahead at 2004 and anticipated another very close Presidential election. Their heads have become very bent for several reasons and they decided they might want a little insurance to insure their relection, and a pool of a 100,000 electronic votes fit the bill perfectly. The reasons the Repiblican heads are bent:
A. The shock of 9/11 B. They are drunk on the power they've gained in controlling the White House and both houses in Congress for the first time in nearly forever and they don't want to give it up. A lot of rich establishment types getting rich thanks to their largesse also want them to stay in power. C. They've convinced themselves they are the only ones capable of running America and effectively the world. To put it another way they've convinced themselves the Democrats are incompetent and dangerous and must be kept out of power by any means necessary. Democrats are pretty incompetent but I would lean towards Democrats as slightly less dengerous at the moment at least. D. Generals started dropping truly scary lines suggesting its God's will Bush is President in these trying times. You KNOW you have to be very afraid of people who claim divine right to power.
Its truly wonderful if this project is really scrapped but you have to be very afraid that, like Total Information Awareness, they are just scrapping it because it became so visible and it will be replaced with something just as dangerous but below the radar.
As a footnote, today on CNN I heard something verified I've suspected since I heard Kerry was a Yale grad. It appears Kerry, like George Bush the first and George Bush the second, is a member of Skull and Bones. The somewhat secretive fraternity at Yale who recruits a small number of Yale undergrads each year and grooms them for positions of power and wealth in the establishment. It is, I believe, the first time in history we will have two member of Skull and Bones running against each other for President. The establishment has assured themselves they will retain their strangle hold on power and wealth, no matter what happens. I'm not sure Skull and Bones rates its sometimes scary reputation as a secret society but it is most definitely very effective at using the power and wealth of its older members to elevate its younger members to lofty heights they don't deserve due to merit. It is a major reason the Bush family has acheived something resembling an aristocratic dynasty. It sure isn't because they are smart.
This is NOT a viable approach nor is it anonymous. If you give each person a receipt and a number associating them with their vote, then someone who is either buying votes or intimidating voters can demand to see your receipt and verify how you voted.
Because you dont have to maintain anonymity in those transfers, in fact, exactly the opposite you identify both parties with rigor. In voting you have to verify the identity of the voter with some certainty, but then switch to a mode where the actual vote they cast can not be associated with the specific voter. Very hard to do on the Internet. You also still have to make sure the integrity of this anonymous vote is retained and can be recounted. It is an ideal application for pieces of paper and a box.
In money transfers the books have to balance after the transfer is done and both parties will know what the result should be. In voting you don't know what the result is supposed to be, and the people controlling the system usually have a strong incentive to alter the outcome in there favor, and they will if its possible to do so. If you try to alter the results with a money transfers someone would instantly spot an attempt at theft unless their accounting is crap or someone goes to great lengths to obfuscate the theft.
Pure electronic voting is just a fundementally bad idea for anything where the outcome matters. You always want a voter to use paper, put in a box under the eyes of representatives of the interested parties, and maintain the security of those boxes at all times. We are blessed with all this electronic B.S. only because of the kneejerk reaction to the disaster in Florida and Congress throwing billions of dollars at the problem like they usually do. The end results was a swarm of sharks who wanted to either:
A. Get rich quickl B. Find new and creative ways to rig elections
Proven machines where you fill in the bubbles on a sheet of paper and run it through an optical scanner would do this job ten times better than any of these all electronic touch screens or online voting or punch cards. Its no accident lots of affluent communities were using this kind of voting machine in 2000 to make sure their votes counted, and places with lots of poor people the establishment wants to disenfrancise tend to have unreliable voting systems like punch cards.
The idea that suddenly after Challenger it was too dangerous to refuel in LEO is idiotic.
I think the key point is not that its dangerous to refuel in LEO. Its dangerous to store large quantities of volatile fuel and move it around near a very expensive space station full of people for no obvious reason other than to justify a space station. If you need a refueling station in LEO put a big tank of fuel in orbit, fly the space ship that needs it up to it and transfer it under the control of the ship. What exactly ithe space station adds to the equation that justifies the risk is a mystery.
I also see absolutely no case to "assemble" stuff in space, like you are going to build the Mars space ship in space or on the moon. It is so absurd. It is really hard to build space hardware on the earth with relatively cheap labor, and lots of tools and parts and 1 G. Costs would explode trying to build stuff in zero or low G with extraordinarily expensive astronaut labor and horrible logistics.
The only plus to space assembly is you can build more fragile structures since they don't have to survive launch stresses from earth. This benefit is dwarfed by all the down sides.
In-space assembly should be confined to docking together big modules and thats about it.
If you could mine propellent cheaply on the moon or an asteroid that would be one worthwhile in-space activity since you need a lot of mass and maybe you could learn to process it in space. It would probably still be better to just get launch costs way down and launch throw-weight way up which makes EVERYTHING easier in space.
"under pressure, NASA took risks that were too big", but I don't even really agree with that
The two key points about NASA doing stupid things under pressure, both happen to stem from Republican presidents, and are case studies in letting politics and bureaucracy take precedence over sound decision making and engineering:
A. They launched Challenger on one of the coldest mornings ever at Kennedy. There was ice everywhere and it was just patently unsound decision making to not wait until it was warmer. In particular the low temperatures made the SRB seals brittle which is why they failed. Even without that all the ice and frozen machinery on the launch pad was out of the norm and dangerous. All Indications are they pressed ahead because of major pressure from the White House since Ronald Reagan wanted some tasty sound bites in his state of the union speech about the teacher in space that night and they had already slipped the launch to many times.
B. When the foam struck Columbia, rather than making a sound engineering analysis of the risk, all of the managers were instead watching a little screen saver on their PC's counting down to when they had to launch a key component to finish the ISS. George Bush, though his bean counter administrator, had placed the Shuttle program on a rigid schedule to complete the ISS which is what really lead to the disaster. They stopped doing sound engineering and started cutting corners to keep all the launches on schedule. On Columbia they cut one to many corners on the foam impact.
Protection of privacy and right to free speech go hand in hand. Society is reaching the point where you wont have privacy, and won't leave an electronic trail when you buy the jock itch spray unless you:
- carry around lots of cash - use cash to buy everything - minimize the trail you leave when you get fresh cash - don't fly - don't use the Internet - don't use electonic toll paying devices - don't use a cell phone - etc.
Of course, this makes you a Luddite and it makes it vastly harder for you to function and to speak out against your government's evil tendencies. This is, of course one of the goals.
Now, if you still leave an electronic trail, and still exercise your right to free speech and say or do something that pisses off a government with an established tendency to punish critics, like the Bush administration (Remember Wilson and his CIA wife), they can then use your electronic trail to punish you in a variety of ways:
A. Find you to arrest you B. Detect associations with other people that may be terrorism suspects, rightly or wrongly. As I recall the Canadian programmer that was sent to Syria for a year of torture was mostly guilty of co-signing a lease for someone who was tenuosly linked to terrorism. C. Study your internet porn viewing habits including those blind links taking you places you really didn't want to go so they can arrest you for child porn. D. Detecting that you failed to report a little side income on your tax returns so they can arrest you for tax evasion. E. Find ways to get you fired and make you unemployable. Arresting protesters and tagging them with minor convictions or any other means to put a conviction on your record will work. Since 9/11 a myriad of companies have started doing extensive background checks and a record will make you vastly less employable. Making you unemployable in a capitalist economy is the kinder, gentler counterpart to the gulag's in the totalitarian state. You can end up starving with either approach. Taken to the extreme you end up homeless and you die without so much as a second thought from society.
The U.S. approach is much more clever and subtle than the Chinese approach. The Chinese use heavy handed censorship and arrest people directly for doing things like advocating democracy. It doesn't work real well and it triggers outrage.
The U.S. uses an approach that doesn't look totalitarian on the face of it, but can accomplish many of the same goals in suppressing dissent. They can arrest people for terrorism, child pornography or tax evasion instead of arresting them for exercising free speech and dissenting. The American public will never have a problem with arresting people for the former but would howl if it were for the latter.
Just look at the case of Captain Yee and a couple Muslim friends at Guantanamo.
http://www.counterpunch.org/wright02022004.html
Yee was put in solitary confinement, charged with espionage, and was facing a death penalty case. All indications are their main crime was they were Muslim, spoke Arabic and had some sympathy for the horrible plight of the people thrown in to Camp X-Ray without charges or legal process. The Christian, non arabic speaking soldiers around them apparently decided to crucify them for it.
The DOD eventually realized they had no case and they weren't guilty of anything except being Muslim and being surrounded by a bunch of American soldiers that didn't like the fact they could speak Arabic and wanted to easy the misery of "suspected" terrorists.
Last I heard Yee is now being charged with using a military computer to look at porn and adultery and is still facing a long term in Federal prison. His life is destroyed. If you charge all guilty soldiers for these things half the military would be in the brig.
Yee is in the military which means he has less rights than most, but he is a really good example of what might happen to you too if you let your government run amuck. Of course, its even more likely to happen to you if you try to keep your government from running amuck. This is Catch-23.
"There are plenty of old-school Republicans out there who really do support things like small government, low taxes, and individual rights."
I actually heard this same sentiment on CNN in the last couple of days though I don't recall who said it. I think it was in response to the revelation that the so called Medicare reform bill was going to cost way over 500 billion over ten years when a couple months ago Bush said he wouldn't sign anything over 400 billion. Apparently the people running the number then just made some convient assumptions and came out with $400 billion to get it passed, and now someone ran realistic numbers and its way over. Where is all that tax money going, straight in to the pockets of drug, HMO and insurance companies. Republicans sing praises to free markets but in this bill they forbad the government to do the most basic thing you do in free markets which is negotiate prices for quantity purchases. The end result drug companies can charge the government whatever they want for drugs and the price tag will sky rocket. Drug companies will get rich. Meanwhile the drug companies offer Billy Tauzin, who helped shove this crap through congress, for the drug companies, a multimillion dollar job as a pharmacuetical lobbyist, an extraordinarily blatant payoff. The family business of Senate Majority Leader Frist, who also helped shove this through, is one of the largest medical corporations in America who have been nailed in the past for hundreds of millions in overcharging on Medicaid and Medicare.
Anyway back to the person contending Bush's conservative base was erroding because of his out of control spending, adventurism abroad, deficits and big brother government. He contended there was a chance that there was a danger real conservatives would just stay home and not vote, because they are getting the same affliction plaguing a lot of Americans. They can no longer tell the difference between the Democrats or Republican's anymore. They are all in the pockets of special interests, mostly corporate, they all say what they have to say to get elected and none of them do anything in the interest of the vast majority of Americans any more.
Its true as the followup to this post said that they wont vote Democratic but there is certainly a chance they will get fed up and not vote at all. The Democrats on the other hand are really energized to vote for the candidate named ABB(Anybody But Bush).
Unfortunately that may mean Kerry, who is from Bush's Alma Mater, Yale, is a blue blood establishment Northeastern democrat who hasn't stood up for anything he believes in since he spoke out against Vietnam 30 plus years ago.
I tend to not favor anyone hypocrital enough to make it to contender status in a presidential contest but Howard Dean did do a lot of things that showed signs of taking the country back from establishment politicians, Deomcrat or Republican. First and foremost he raised lots of money from ordinary, real, people over the Internet which freed him from the Democratic money machine and corprorate donations. He also stood up and actually spoke his mind instead of just telling everyone what they wanted to hear which is all Kerry and Bush do. Unfortunately he made a few gaffs and the establishment, primarily through TV news, have pretty much destroyed him. Its the first time in recent memory there was an actual chance the people would regain control of their government in the U.S. Unfortunately the establishment caught on, pulled together and snuffed it out the threat at the last second.
- Poindexter, when he was part of the DOD and DARPA, devises Total Information Awareness, which will collect vast amounts of data on everyone and then use data mining to spot terrorists, or maybe just to spy on everyone.
- In parallel Florida, presumably led by Jeb Bush, starts funding MATRIX to do pretty much the same thing though its less ambitious. Ironicly MATRIX is devised by a suspected drug smuggler and the person that helped rig the Florida election by disenfranchising black voters.
- Congress is enraged when TIA becomes public and kills it.
- The DOD changes the name to Terrorist Information Awareness
- As nearly as I can tell Congress is allowing Terrorist Information Awareness to continue but under severe restraints:
http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/tia_report_page.ht m
In particular TIA is allowed to use only these two kinds of data:
(a) foreign intelligence and counter intelligence information legally obtained and usable by the Federal Government under existing law
(b) wholly synthetic (artificial) data that has been generated, for research purposes only, to resemble and model real-world patterns of behavior.
It appears Congress must have forbidden using real data on American citizens.
Meanwhile MATRIX is doing basicly the thing Congress forbad TIA from doing. MATRIX was state funded but now the DOJ and Homeland Security are chipping in $12 million.
You have to wonder if Congress realizes what kind of suckers they've been played for.
Hah. Other posts have come out since I posted the similarity to TIA. This IS TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS in its infancy. Asher, the owner of the company doing this, is one of John Poindexter's Iran Contra cronies from way back, and TIA is Poindexter's baby. This is certainly version 0.1 of TIA and not even close to what they ultimately envisioned at DARPA before they got spanked by Congress, but you have to start somewhere.
By the way, here is the list of states enrolled in case you havn't seen it yet. They are all listed on their web site.
http://www.iir.com/matrix/
Utah Michigan Ohio New York Connecticut Pennsylvania Georgia Florida
You wish they all had Republican Governors, and most of them do, but Michigan and Pennsylvania are run by Dems at the moment.
Ya know this kinda of sounds like, John Poindexters's Total Information Awareness project at DARPA, though its a little more down to earth. That program became widely known, there was an uproar, Congress curtailed it. I think they changed the name to Terrorist Information Awareness, and it fell below everyones radar. What ever happened to it really? All my expectations at the time were they would just rename it, move it somewhat further away from the DOD, maybe rearrange it so it would fly a little lower below the radar.
Maybe this is TIA in its infancy. Its really hard to tell if MATRIX is sucking up as much information as TIA was planning, and analyzing as much as they planned to. This is certainly a broad and ambigious definition of what they are gathering:
"significant amounts of public data record entries"
This blurb you quoted sounds like it could have been taken from the TIA project proposal. Here is a rather more grandiose TIA equivalent:
"The goal is to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential activity."
"The project calls for the development of "revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual, centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data."
"A key component of the TIA project is to develop data-mining or knowledge discovery tools that will sort through the massive amounts of information to find patterns and associations. TIA will also develop search tools such as Project Genoa, which Admiral Poindexter's former employer Syntek Technologies, assisted in developing. TIA aims to fund the development of more such tools and data-mining technology to help analysts understand and even "preempt" future action."
"So, the IRS is probably the best model of a government agency protecting critical private information."
I'm willing to bet you all of your tax information is already being merged in to this grand unified domestic spying database. If it isn't already its just a matter of time. If they can look at all your bank records, and the books you read, what exactly is sacred about your tax returns. Maybe the IRS was good at protecting privacy but if the President, with the backing of a Republican congress, tells the IRS to turn over all their records it will happen in a heart beat.
Not sure what you mean by the trends where there 20 or 30 years ago. Almost 30 years ago, or actually in 1975 the Church commission actually reversed the tide and trend against domestic spying:
http://www.labournet.net/world/0109/us15.html
Maybe you're suggesting the trend was there because we acquired computers and everything moved to an electronic form which made this kind of domestic spying feasible.
I'm saying its really only been since Bush and Ashcroft came to power and 9/11 gave then the excuse, that domestic spying reacquired momentum and it also has the massive new danger that they can abuse computing to implement it now. This is not a long established trend, its very new as in about 3 years.
It is deeply disturbing to think about how dangerous domestic spying was in the '60's and '70's and then how really dangerous it will be today when its combined with massive computing power, databases and electronic tracking of everything every person does. In the old days they had to use shoe leather to spy on people so they had to identify people they considered dangerous and they couldn't track very many. Today they can use software to watch everyone and let a computer spot anyone they want to single out for punishment.
I think I actually have more confidence in the old 1960's brand of domestic spying to not make mistakes. Just look at all the people being red flagged as terrorists by the TSA simply because they have the same as a terrorist suspect, though NOTHING else matches. It gives you zero confidence that this massive loss of privacy and freedom will even result in the supposed goal, captured terrorists.
As another example I am relatively confident there are very few potential terrorists in the state of Utah. They would stick out like a sore thumb and you wouldn't need an intrusive database to spot them. A similar argument was made about the government using airline records to feed in to their new TSA scanners. The problem was there were no hijackings among all of the records they were analyzing, Northwest or JetBlue, so what is the point of searching for a person or event that wasn't in the data in the first place. Its not really trying to catch a terrorist, its trying to spying on everyone.
"we did need to figure out who was responsible for 9/11"
As I said the last time the PATRIOT act came up I dont think it really has a lot to do with 9/11 or preventing another one. 9/11 was more a convenient excuse for the right wing to reimplement domestic spying. Lets spell it, out the Patriot act is designed to reimplement domestic spying as it was prior to the 1970's.
The right wing has been really ticked since the early '70's when constraints were put on FBI and CIA domestic spying activities. We've pretty much forgotten why those constraints were put in place.
In a nutshell domestic spying seems like a great idea if it stays in the box and just focuses on dangerous foreign elements, terrotists, or maybe even dangerous domestic elements. The problem is once the ball gets rolling it never does stay in the box. Its just a matter of time before the people who control it, the people in power, redirect it from just the truly dangerous elements to spying on everyone they consider dangerous, which quickly becomes all their political opponents including people who aren't dangerous, but who are just exercising first amendment rights to disagree by doing things like opposing misguided wars like Vietnam or Iraq or advocating controversial things like equal rights and and end to segregation as was the case in the 60's.
Two classic examples:
J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to spy on everybody. He acquired dirt on basicly everyone including all politicians. As a result he became largely untouchable. No one would dare suggest replacing him, lest he pull out the file he had on them. Hoover probably had some serious skeletons in his own closet but no one would dare expose them. Hoover controlled the FBI for 48 years and didn't get ousted until God did it when he died. Its no coincidence major constraints were put on the FBI's abuse of domestic spying about the time Hoover died. It was the first time it was possible. 48 years is an unnaturally long and unhealthy time for one person to have unchallenged control of a nations domestic law enforcement, he had it thanks to domestic spying. Hoover in particular abused domestic spying in the case of Martin Luther King. King was not a violent person, not a terrorist. His main danger was exercising his first amendment right to speak out against segregation and the Vietnam war. Hoover made King's life a living hell by abusing domestic spying, for example by discovering extramarital affairs and using them as blackmail, and I wouldn't be suprised if he helped encourage his assasination because he was percieved as a threat by the established powers.
Richard Nixon became extraordinarily paranoid and was really obsessed with his reelection. As a result he abused both the FBI and the CIA to help insure he retained power. Let's remember that Watergate was Nixon abusing his domestic spying powers to spy on his political opposition in an effort to insure they didn't get elected. When a president uses domestic spying to hold power you are headed towards something that isn't democracy. We could very well be heading down the same road today.
Here is a thought experiment. If Jesus were alive today and he preached basicly the same message he did 2000 years ago, and just updated it for the times how would people like Bush and Ashcroft, supposedly devout Christians, recieve him.
If no one listened to him he would just be branded a left wing nut, pacifist, anti war, soft on terrorism, unpatriotic and probably a Democrat. Its a certainty he would have opposed the war on Iraq and all use of force by the U.S. Bush and Ashcroft would not appreciate that viewpoint. He might well be branded a communist since I doubt Jesus would have had anything good to say about investment bankers, stock brokers and the rampant greed that dominates America.
If a lot of people heard Jesus's message and started to follow him, perhaps by engaging in passive resistance and peaceful protest the full weight of the FBI and the patriot act would be
Sorry dude, but this is way hard. Instead why dont you just put a server in the Pentagon and have all the people who live overseas, who used to vote absentee, vote electronicly through it without a paper trail. The guy that controlls that server, Donald Rumsfeld, can then pretty much come in and tell the admin what percentage of those votes he wants the Republicans to get, within reason, and with special attention to the votes in real close swing states like Folorida. Even if he opts to arrange a Republican landslide it can be argued that all those patriotic soldiers would, of course, vote Republican instead of for those soft on terrorism Democrats. Though, I believe its only the officer corps that trends strongly Republican.
I suppose its just coincidence that they both happen to be Republicans, and the Republican's are especially desperate to maintain and expand their control of the Senate and the state houses.
Did you ever stop and wonder about the odds of two Democractic Senate candidates, Wellstone and Carnahan dieing in suspicious airplane crashes, right before elections, within 2 years of each other. The odds must be astronomical.
A simple thought experiment, if you want to improve your odds of controlling the senate how could you do it.
Pick popular opposition senate contenders and arrange for them to have airplane accidents close to the election. It backfired in Carnahan's case, we got his wife instead on a sympathy vote and Ashcroft as Attorney General. it worked perfectly with Paul Wellstone though.
It really not hard to:
A. Sabotoge a critical instrument in an airplane about to fly in bad weather
B. Use an EMP weapon on an airplane approaching a landing at a rural airport. I'm pretty sure the spooks have one that would work and would be really hard to trace in an accident investigation.
Well chances are the people in power are doing their best to make elections vulnerable to rigging, by the people in power. The Diebold attempt it one that went kind of wrong because it got exposed, but even then may not be fixed to be cheat proof especially in time for the November election which is going to be one of the most important elections in U.S. history. There are plenty of others that aren't exposed yet and probably wont be the Pentagon's SERVE for example. With SERVE at least 100,000 votes will pass through the Pentagon where they can be changed at will by the political appointees who run the Pentagon and whose jobs are on the line.
Its a mistake to think you have to swing a lot of votes, at the server end, to rig the next election. You could very well just need to flip a few thousand votes in a place like Florida, and you could do that by compromising a fairly small number of polling places.
Chances are good mainstream media wont cover any of it because:
A. Its sounds like conspiracy theory and they are afraid everyone will think they are nuts. B. Its hard to explain to a mass audience that isn't very bright on averge and its kind of boring until you realize the implications of rigged elections (an end to democracy). So its controversial but boring, a bad combo for the media. C. We dont really have many good investigative journalists left, certainly not on the news networks. The network talking heads make there living regurgitating whatever their contacts at the White House, Pentagon, State depertment want them to say, or playing sound bites or doing lamer interviews or playing Dean's screech speach over and over in an effort to destroy him, because they want to decide the outcome of elections instead of reporting on them or insuring they are fair.
One thing this country REALLY needs to restore democracy and to reduce the ability to rig elections is to GET RID OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. It is an ancient anachronism. It does a few very corrosive things:
- It disenfranchies everyone who is in a substantial minority in a given state. Republican votes dont count for much in the Northeast and Democrats dont count for anything in the Rocky Mountain West and increasingly the South.
- Swing states, like Florida, that could go either way get an inordinate amount of attention and pork from politicians trying to curry their favor. States that are hard over in one column are dont care states and they get treated accordingly except for raising fund out of them.
- And most important it is a lot easier to rig elections if you know you just have to flip a few thousand votes in a few really close swing states.....like Florida.
If the presidential election was simple majority rule for the whole nation it would be a lot harder to rig elections since you would probably have to flip a lot more votes.
If we want to maintain any pretense that our presidential elections are really democratic the electoral college has to go. The problem is there are a lot of entrenched political and state interests that wont let a constiutional amendment pass to get rid of it. For example swing states like the power they have as swing states and the pork they get as a result of it.
I really doubt Hubble is used for intelligence work, at least very often, though it probably could be in a pinch. I doubt the Hubble control center or staff is setup or cleared to do serious classified work. Hubble sure wont be any use for spying if its gyros degrade further since spy sattelites need to do a lot of manuevering and pointing.
The NRO has its own really big telescopes which are specificly designed to look at the earth, manuever and point. They are called KH-11 or Keyhole. On the other hand the next generation Keyholes, KH-12 Improved Crystal, are proving to be a massively expensive and massively screwed up program, with TRW and Lockheed at the helm. They massively overpromised what they could do, government believed them and as usual they are probably using all the overruns to pad their bottomline. If Improved Crystal continues to slip, and KH-11's fail the NRO could get desperate enough to use Hubble assuming it still worked.
This whole Hubble situation should be taken as a lesson in why its bad to let an account, like O'Keffe, run a research agency like NASA. You need to get someone that has a technical, engineering background and who is able to manage projects and keep spending under control. As I've said before someone like Kelly Johnson, the genius behind the old Lockheed Skunkworks is what they need. The fact that Bush has O'Keffe in charge of NASA indicates he is more interested in just dicking with their books than he is in actually doing anything.
"With this push to go back to the Moon and to Mars, I think the space program will be revived"
I certainly hope this comes true but I'd rate it as something of a long shot especially if your risking so much of your future on it.
Its somewhat more likely that NASA will start to wind down the shuttle and the space station to free funds for Bush's bold new initiative so both of these old programs die. No serious money will be invested in Bush's new space initiative in the mean time. What money there is will go in to giant mounds of paper studies with little real value.
Most of the big spending on the new initiative wont begin until after Bush's second term. By that time, unless there is another bubble, chances are the U.S. government will be teetering on bankruptcy and spending large sums servicing a huge debt from huge budget deficits thanks to Bush's huge tax cuts coupled with spending that puts a drunken sailor to shame. Its unlikely very many politicians will risk there careers by suggesting the U.S. should borrow even more money to throw huge sums in to a bold new NASA space initiative, especially given NASA's recent track record in manned spaceflight, one of abysmal planning and wasteful spending. Its very possible the U.S. could end up with no shuttle and no replacement unless they buy the services of the Russians and the Chinese.
Maybe we'll get lucky and the relatively successful robotic programs will survive in tact but I wouldn't count on it thanks to the flawed decision making that can happen in flawed bureaucracies undergoing a large change in direction like the one NASA is about to attempt.
NASA will also probably still be very effectively standing in the way of any serious private space initiatives during all this.
I'm afraid I don't see the insight in this. The last time Disney produced really good movies was in the Lion King, Aladdin era. There was a simple reason, his name was Jeffrey Katzenberg
He was the last movie making genius to grace Disney's animation studio. When he had his fill of Eisner and moved on to form Dreamworks SKG (Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen) Walt Disney Studios was doomed. But we were blessed with a new studio that will be modern and probably great, Dreamworks sister studio PDI, home of Shrek. I wager PDI is going to give Pixar a run for their money for a long time.
I think its unrealistic to think most companies are going to stay great forever. Disney had a great run but its probably over at least as far as animation goes.
Problem number one is 3D caught them by suprise, Katzenberg would have caught the wave and was starting to in Lion King and Beauty and the Beast but when he left they lost the genius necessary to figure out how to do good 3D movies. They did manage to make some 3D movies but they didn't figure out the fact they needed a good story first and great 3D second.
They clung to 2D animation though they lost the producer and the artists who knew how to make 2D animation work and to make it art. Its probably just a fact of life that there never were many great 2D animators and there probably very few now since all the young people are gravitating to 3D and computer animation. 2D is tending to be a factory process being done in cheap off short sweatshops with low production values. Closing their Florida studios is probably just a recognition they didn't have what it takes to produce anything good there and it couldn't be fixed. The Florida studios weren't their animation heartland anyway, Burbank is. If there was talent in Florida it will show up in Legacy Studios where many of the artists went. If there wasn't then Legacy wont make it.
And most important indications are Eisner is a dick and until he's run out I doubt Disney animation will get better and it may not recover even when he's gone.
Probably best to remember Disney fondly for its past greatness, forget its recent efforts and be glad there is new young blood to takes its place in Pixar, Dreamworks and PDI.
"A catch-22 in flight design is if it hasn't flown before, we don't want to fly it. But at some point, someone has to fly the first generation (someone who is willing to take a huge risk)."
Or you fly it as a non mission critical experimental payload which is what we did back in the day I worked on avionics. You fly it as an experimental package so it gets the stress but if it breaks either its not in the mission critical loop, or if it is in the loop you can switch back to proven hardware. I kind of assumed this would be a standard part of qualifying electronics for space flight as well though its obviously a lot more expensive. Its not feasible to test it on Mars due the expense but you could test it in geostationary orbit where it will get lots of radiation and temperature extremes, as well as launch vibration and G's.
Control of the media player matters a LOT, partially because it also the means control of the format content is distributed in. Remember the network effect of Word and Excel documents. Everyone distributes documents as Word and Excel so everyone is compelled to switch to Office. Everyone starts distributing content in Media Player format and everyone has to have Windows and Media Player to view it.
Distribution of audio and video via PC's and settop boxes is exploding as broadband finally takes hold. The movie and recording industries are huge industries. If a company like Microsoft manages to gain control of the soon to be dominant distribution mechanism for these industries they will acquire a new monopoly, and get shiploads of cash in fresh profits, profits Microsoft desperately needs to keep growing. Apples ITunes is the one shining light that caused a glitch in Microsoft's plan to dominate digital media, but Apple has a formidable advesary now that Microsoft is getting serious about digital media, late as usual.
Microsoft can also use this dominance to further lock out non Windows platforms from burgeoning markets like settop boxes. If Linux can't play Media Player content and Media Player formats are what everyone is distributing content in then Linux is going to be shut out of settop boxes. The same goes for smartphones and PDA's. Appliances are one area Linux is doing pretty well and we sure dont want it go the way of the desktop and turn in to a new Windows monopoly.
Free speech zones, what a great tool for stifling dissent. They have a multifacted purpose.
- The Secret Service insists they are for the President's security though anyone who is a pro Bush supporter gets close to the President which completely undermines the security argument.
- Thanks to the careful positioning of the anti Bush pens the President never sees protestors, and always sees the pro Bush supporters, so if he is the naive idiot many think he is must think the whole world loves him, thanks to the rose colored glasses.
- The media chasing the President doesn't see protestors so they never cover the protestors. Of course the new patriotic, corporate media doesn't much want to cover dissent these days anyway. Its unpatriotic.
- The protestors soon realize they are wasting their time so they give up which ensures no critical mass ever builds which would make someone take notice. So it looks like there is no serious dissent. Its a simple fact of life protests like those at the Democratic convention against Vietnam in 1968 couldn't happen today because it would be crushed to ensure "security".
- The Secret Service, in the process of sorting people between the pro Bush people and the anti Bush people, can thouroughly catalog and brand all the potential troublemakers and ensure they are hassled at every future opportunity. Its really quite orderly.
Wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of anti Bush protestors dressed up like good Republicans, with pro Bush signs. The Secret Service quickly ushers them up close to the President. When the President pulls up they rip away the pro bush signs to show anti Bush signs. The Secret Service would freak, though I assume they must look for and gaurd against fakers. Maybe good Republicans have a secret code word. To successfully pull this off the protestors would have to be people who hadn't previously been cataloged as anti Bush protestors, a.k.a. terrorists and a threat to the nation.
The fundemental problem with this law is who decides who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter. Left to our government's discretion they would brand anyone who they dislike or disagree with as a terrorist and would brand any terrorist who is doing something they like as a freedom fighter.
The Palestinians are the classic example. They've had their homeland taken from them, they are being brutually repressed by Israel, they are being slowly ethnicly cleansed from greater Israel and are slowly being shoved into walled gettos in an ever shrinking, starving west bank. You could choose to think that the Palastinians could just stop resisting and Isreal would shower them in milk and honey, give them a homeland and peace would be the order of the day. Unfortunately the reality is the Israels would most likely continue building settlements, continue taking or destroying Palastinian homes, would continue slowly starving the Palastinians until they flee Isreal and leave it to the Jews which is the one and only thing the Israel government will settle for. Isreal has to make sure, at all costs, that Arabs never reach a majority in their country because if they are to maintain the facade that they are a democracy they would either have to adopt apartheid with the ridicule that would bring from the world or relinquish power to Arabs. Neither are good options so their solution is to continue to driver Palastinians out of Isreal by any means they can get away with.
The Palastinians have no conventional military so their only avenue of resistance is suicide bombing. They either do that or quietly sit and let Isreal slowly starve them, take their homes and scatter them to the wind as was done to the Jews long ago.
Are the Palastinians terrorists for resorting to suicide bombs as their last defense against a foe whose military is vastly superior and routinely crushes them like a bug. Or are they freedom fighters for trying to defend their homes and their existence as a people. I tend to think they must not be particularly good terrorists since vastly more Palastinian civilians die at the hands of the Israeli militatary than Israeli jews do to suicide bombers.
Our government, through this law, decides the Palastinians are terrorists so everyone who supports them in their vain attempt at survival is a terrorist and can be arrested and have their assets seized by this law. Further our government tries to make the rest of the world toe the same line, which taken to its logical conclusion would ensure the Palastinians were strangled and a lot of people would be arrested for supporting an organization they see as freedom fighters not terrorists. It also happens that they are Muslim and its just another part of the U.S./Israeli war on Islam and Arabs under the guise of a war on terror.
OK, now the flipside. Under this law would the Mujahideen, the predecessor of Al Qaeda, fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union have been terrorists or freedom fighters. Their tactics resemble something we clearly call terrorism when its used against us in Iraq today. But the fact is since we funded them and armed them we would label them as freedom fighters, includinf Osama bin Laden in the 80's.
If the government used this law only to cut off Al Qaeda then it would perhaps be a tolerable law. But they aren't going to leave it at and are instead going to go after Palastinians too.
Another real conundrum is the biggest, most blatant supporter of Al Qaeda is Saudi Arabia, including members of its royal family and they get off scott free providing massive support to Al Qaeda, because:
A. They have lots of oil B. They have lots of money C. They are close friends and benefactors of the Bush family and a Bush family business concern, an arms dealer called the Carlyle Group.
So if this law isn't being enforced against Saudi Arabia but is going after the Palastinians it clearly isn't doing what it was intended to do which was fight Al Qaeda.
Bottomline I guess I'm saying this law, in practice, is just a tool to let the people in power pick their friends and enemies and ruthlessly punish anyone they decide is an enemy.
"I am a God fearing Christian"... "You kill every damned one of those sons of bitches"
I hate to point this out to you but you are a case study in what is wrong with modern, institutionalized Christianity, especially in the U.S.
If you were really a follower of the teachings of Christ and really understood his teachings you would realize Christ was the ultimate "pussy" to use your derogatory term. He was most certainly the most committed pacifist you could ever find.
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Matthew 5.38-41
Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword." Matthew 26.51-52
If Christ were alive to see people like our President or the officers in our military, tell you about what devoted Christians they are and then rush out to kill people in his name he would be devastated. No matter how justified they think they are, they are committing a hypocrisy of immense proportions.
There are only two paths, you are truly Christian in which case you would be a pacifist, a pussy to use your term, and you wouldn't kill people, no matter how much you were provoked.
Or you are using Christ's name out of political and social convenience because you have to be a good Christian to be elected President or rise in the ranks of the military or in many respects to be an accepted member of yout community especially in the U.S., one of the most fanaticly "Christian" countries. I'm pretty sure the later is the case for 90+% of the Christians in this country. People like the Quakers seem to be the only people who really understand Christ's teachings. Most of the supposedly Christian churches are institutions Christ would have abhored. They are social institutions worshiping him as an idol, regurgatating his teachings but never really listening to them, and certainly not understanding the most basic tenents of his teachings.
Most of our politicians and military officers should admit it. They are Machiavellians or Nietscheans to whom power is the true religion. Christianity is a badly worn facade of social convenience. Deep in their hearts they don't subscribe to it because it is a "pussy's" religion. George W. Bush no doubt found Christ about the same time he realized he and his family wanted him to be President.
"If Congress and the President were 'doing their best' and temporarily doing a power grab to defend us poor Americans from the evil terrorist infidels, then why didn't they include a sundown measure in the act where by it would expire after x,y,z number of years"
The Patriot Act does sunset in 2005 if I recall. If you watched the President's State of the Union, a remarkably and unabashedly far right speech, it was near the top of his list to make sure Congress extends it, along with his tax cuts for the rich, presumably indefinitely.
This sunset provision gave a lot of spineless Congressmen an out to explain why they voted for it the first time around. Its OK to destroy the constitution if its only for a while. After all we are in a war, a war on terrorism, so its OK just for the the war. Of course then Bush tells you the war on terrorism will probably never end so neither should the Patriot Act.
Never ending war is a central theme in Orwell's 1984. You need never ending war so people need to keep their polticians and military around to fight it. Without the threat of war governments start to look a little useless. The Cold War did the trick for almost a half century, but those damn Russians wimped out so we really needed a new never ending war. Terrorists are great for a never ending war because there will always be terrorists lurking in the shadows even if you can't see them. It was Anarchists in the early 20th century, then Communists and now Terrorists we need to live in fear of every day of our lives. If we forgot we need an Orange alert to remind us.
When it comes to the Patriot Act and a continuing parade of followons I think you need to think out of the box about why we are blessed with them. I would argue that the Patriot Act didn't entirely happen just because of 9/11. Rather 9/11 was a convenient excuse for the Bush administration to do a lot of things they wanted to do anyway but they couldn't get away with until they had 9/11 as an excuse.
If you scoff look at the war on Iraq. They wanted to attack Iraq and depose Hussein from the day Bush was inaugerated. Cheney, Perl and Wolfowitz wanted to and wrote about it years before that. 9/11 just gave the Bush crowd a convenient excuse. The fabricated a bunch of unproven ties between Iraq and Al Quida and trumped up non existent WMD's. Presto, they have an excuse to take down Iraq and radicly alter the world to conform to their world view, or at least they thought. It remains to be seen if Iraq turns in to more of a problem than it was under Hussein when the Shia's try to take the power that is their right in a real democracy (though I wager the U.S. will prevent any election that isn't rigged).
I'd argue the Patriot Act is also just a manifestation of the desires of a right wing administration that wanted repressive laws to enforce order and to stifle dissent, 9/11 just made it feasible to pass them. Right wing adminstrations like everyone to either agree with them or shut up. When an administration can spy on anyone without judicial oversight, watch everything you read, everything you buy, they make people live in fear and most people living in fear keep their mouths shut. Ideally they make everyone shut up without even arresting anyone. Though they will arrest and intimidate a few that keep dissenting. That is the thing they want most out of the Patriot Act, an end to criticism of them and a cowering populace.
The fact is the current administration loves 9/11. It is the best thing that could have happened to Bush. Before it happened his popularity was declining and he was looking like a one term President. Afterward he is a towering figure of strength, hard to beat, vote for him or America will go down in flames. Since 9/11 nearly every speech Bush gives is laden with the words terror and terrorism juxtaposed with freedom and patriotism. You are either with us or against us. If you disagree with us you are unpatriotic and soft on terrorists or practicly a terrorist yourself. Every speech is designed to drown America in fear so you will turn to them to "save" you from terrorists lurking in every shadow. The war against terror will never end, and they are the only ones who can fight it, so you have to keep them in power from now to eternity. Fear is a mind killer and the Republicans are using it to great effect to stiffle dissent and to protect their hold on power at all costs.
So the 9th circuit overturned one little piece of the Patriot Act. Well the 9th is the most overturned court and the most reviled by the right wing. Its a propaganda boon for them to say, there they go again, they are a bunch of left wing loons, they aren't with us, they are against us, they are practicly terrorists themselves. See why we need a bunch of right wingers in all the courts. Even if the Supreme Court does overturn this its one little piece and the Bush adminstration will just come back with a bunch of new pieces to replace it. They can currently pass dangerous laws a lot faster than the courts can overturn them. They probably put a few garbage pieces in, in the first place, so a couple would get overturned, people would cheer, and the really bad stuff would still be there.
If you want to get rid of the Patriot Act pretty much the only option is to put Bush and the Republicans in congress out of power in the next election, though we are bucking a head wind in the form of giants piles of cash to brainwash people through TV and the threat of rigged elections thanks to Diebold and the Pentagon's SERVE. The Democrats suck too but I think we all remember now why Republicans t
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...and it would also make it extremely easy for Big Brother to know exactly how you vote and to schedule you for your appointment at the Ministry of Love... all with utmost in security and efficiency.
There are probably several potential answers, take your pick based on your political leanings and naivete:
- A lot of absentee military ballots were at the center of the controversy in Florida in 2000 so someone in the DOD probably decided we needed to make sure the military could reliably vote.
- The U.S. military has its troops scattered farther afield than they've probably been since World War II at least. The administration probably wants to make sure all the troops vote, perhaps assuming they will go Republican though I wouldn't count on that with the apparently dismal morale in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- My personal opinion is the Republican's who control the DOD looked ahead at 2004 and anticipated another very close Presidential election. Their heads have become very bent for several reasons and they decided they might want a little insurance to insure their relection, and a pool of a 100,000 electronic votes fit the bill perfectly. The reasons the Repiblican heads are bent:
A. The shock of 9/11
B. They are drunk on the power they've gained in controlling the White House and both houses in Congress for the first time in nearly forever and they don't want to give it up. A lot of rich establishment types getting rich thanks to their largesse also want them to stay in power.
C. They've convinced themselves they are the only ones capable of running America and effectively the world. To put it another way they've convinced themselves the Democrats are incompetent and dangerous and must be kept out of power by any means necessary. Democrats are pretty incompetent but I would lean towards Democrats as slightly less dengerous at the moment at least.
D. Generals started dropping truly scary lines suggesting its God's will Bush is President in these trying times. You KNOW you have to be very afraid of people who claim divine right to power.
Its truly wonderful if this project is really scrapped but you have to be very afraid that, like Total Information Awareness, they are just scrapping it because it became so visible and it will be replaced with something just as dangerous but below the radar.
As a footnote, today on CNN I heard something verified I've suspected since I heard Kerry was a Yale grad. It appears Kerry, like George Bush the first and George Bush the second, is a member of Skull and Bones. The somewhat secretive fraternity at Yale who recruits a small number of Yale undergrads each year and grooms them for positions of power and wealth in the establishment. It is, I believe, the first time in history we will have two member of Skull and Bones running against each other for President. The establishment has assured themselves they will retain their strangle hold on power and wealth, no matter what happens. I'm not sure Skull and Bones rates its sometimes scary reputation as a secret society but it is most definitely very effective at using the power and wealth of its older members to elevate its younger members to lofty heights they don't deserve due to merit. It is a major reason the Bush family has acheived something resembling an aristocratic dynasty. It sure isn't because they are smart.
This is NOT a viable approach nor is it anonymous. If you give each person a receipt and a number associating them with their vote, then someone who is either buying votes or intimidating voters can demand to see your receipt and verify how you voted.
Nice try but its not acceptable.
Because you dont have to maintain anonymity in those transfers, in fact, exactly the opposite you identify both parties with rigor. In voting you have to verify the identity of the voter with some certainty, but then switch to a mode where the actual vote they cast can not be associated with the specific voter. Very hard to do on the Internet. You also still have to make sure the integrity of this anonymous vote is retained and can be recounted. It is an ideal application for pieces of paper and a box.
In money transfers the books have to balance after the transfer is done and both parties will know what the result should be. In voting you don't know what the result is supposed to be, and the people controlling the system usually have a strong incentive to alter the outcome in there favor, and they will if its possible to do so. If you try to alter the results with a money transfers someone would instantly spot an attempt at theft unless their accounting is crap or someone goes to great lengths to obfuscate the theft.
Pure electronic voting is just a fundementally bad idea for anything where the outcome matters. You always want a voter to use paper, put in a box under the eyes of representatives of the interested parties, and maintain the security of those boxes at all times. We are blessed with all this electronic B.S. only because of the kneejerk reaction to the disaster in Florida and Congress throwing billions of dollars at the problem like they usually do. The end results was a swarm of sharks who wanted to either:
A. Get rich quickl
B. Find new and creative ways to rig elections
Proven machines where you fill in the bubbles on a sheet of paper and run it through an optical scanner would do this job ten times better than any of these all electronic touch screens or online voting or punch cards. Its no accident lots of affluent communities were using this kind of voting machine in 2000 to make sure their votes counted, and places with lots of poor people the establishment wants to disenfrancise tend to have unreliable voting systems like punch cards.
I think the key point is not that its dangerous to refuel in LEO. Its dangerous to store large quantities of volatile fuel and move it around near a very expensive space station full of people for no obvious reason other than to justify a space station. If you need a refueling station in LEO put a big tank of fuel in orbit, fly the space ship that needs it up to it and transfer it under the control of the ship. What exactly ithe space station adds to the equation that justifies the risk is a mystery.
I also see absolutely no case to "assemble" stuff in space, like you are going to build the Mars space ship in space or on the moon. It is so absurd. It is really hard to build space hardware on the earth with relatively cheap labor, and lots of tools and parts and 1 G. Costs would explode trying to build stuff in zero or low G with extraordinarily expensive astronaut labor and horrible logistics.
The only plus to space assembly is you can build more fragile structures since they don't have to survive launch stresses from earth. This benefit is dwarfed by all the down sides.
In-space assembly should be confined to docking together big modules and thats about it.
If you could mine propellent cheaply on the moon or an asteroid that would be one worthwhile in-space activity since you need a lot of mass and maybe you could learn to process it in space. It would probably still be better to just get launch costs way down and launch throw-weight way up which makes EVERYTHING easier in space.
"under pressure, NASA took risks that were too big", but I don't even really agree with that
The two key points about NASA doing stupid things under pressure, both happen to stem from Republican presidents, and are case studies in letting politics and bureaucracy take precedence over sound decision making and engineering:
A. They launched Challenger on one of the coldest mornings ever at Kennedy. There was ice everywhere and it was just patently unsound decision making to not wait until it was warmer. In particular the low temperatures made the SRB seals brittle which is why they failed. Even without that all the ice and frozen machinery on the launch pad was out of the norm and dangerous. All Indications are they pressed ahead because of major pressure from the White House since Ronald Reagan wanted some tasty sound bites in his state of the union speech about the teacher in space that night and they had already slipped the launch to many times.
B. When the foam struck Columbia, rather than making a sound engineering analysis of the risk, all of the managers were instead watching a little screen saver on their PC's counting down to when they had to launch a key component to finish the ISS. George Bush, though his bean counter administrator, had placed the Shuttle program on a rigid schedule to complete the ISS which is what really lead to the disaster. They stopped doing sound engineering and started cutting corners to keep all the launches on schedule. On Columbia they cut one to many corners on the foam impact.
Protection of privacy and right to free speech go hand in hand. Society is reaching the point where you wont have privacy, and won't leave an electronic trail when you buy the jock itch spray unless you:
- carry around lots of cash
- use cash to buy everything
- minimize the trail you leave when you get fresh cash
- don't fly
- don't use the Internet
- don't use electonic toll paying devices
- don't use a cell phone
- etc.
Of course, this makes you a Luddite and it makes it vastly harder for you to function and to speak out against your government's evil tendencies. This is, of course one of the goals.
Now, if you still leave an electronic trail, and still exercise your right to free speech and say or do something that pisses off a government with an established tendency to punish critics, like the Bush administration (Remember Wilson and his CIA wife), they can then use your electronic trail to punish you in a variety of ways:
A. Find you to arrest you
B. Detect associations with other people that may be terrorism suspects, rightly or wrongly. As I recall the Canadian programmer that was sent to Syria for a year of torture was mostly guilty of co-signing a lease for someone who was tenuosly linked to terrorism.
C. Study your internet porn viewing habits including those blind links taking you places you really didn't want to go so they can arrest you for child porn.
D. Detecting that you failed to report a little side income on your tax returns so they can arrest you for tax evasion.
E. Find ways to get you fired and make you unemployable. Arresting protesters and tagging them with minor convictions or any other means to put a conviction on your record will work. Since 9/11 a myriad of companies have started doing extensive background checks and a record will make you vastly less employable. Making you unemployable in a capitalist economy is the kinder, gentler counterpart to the gulag's in the totalitarian state. You can end up starving with either approach. Taken to the extreme you end up homeless and you die without so much as a second thought from society.
The U.S. approach is much more clever and subtle than the Chinese approach. The Chinese use heavy handed censorship and arrest people directly for doing things like advocating democracy. It doesn't work real well and it triggers outrage.
The U.S. uses an approach that doesn't look totalitarian on the face of it, but can accomplish many of the same goals in suppressing dissent. They can arrest people for terrorism, child pornography or tax evasion instead of arresting them for exercising free speech and dissenting. The American public will never have a problem with arresting people for the former but would howl if it were for the latter.
Just look at the case of Captain Yee and a couple Muslim friends at Guantanamo.
http://www.counterpunch.org/wright02022004.html
Yee was put in solitary confinement, charged with espionage, and was facing a death penalty case. All indications are their main crime was they were Muslim, spoke Arabic and had some sympathy for the horrible plight of the people thrown in to Camp X-Ray without charges or legal process. The Christian, non arabic speaking soldiers around them apparently decided to crucify them for it.
The DOD eventually realized they had no case and they weren't guilty of anything except being Muslim and being surrounded by a bunch of American soldiers that didn't like the fact they could speak Arabic and wanted to easy the misery of "suspected" terrorists.
Last I heard Yee is now being charged with using a military computer to look at porn and adultery and is still facing a long term in Federal prison. His life is destroyed. If you charge all guilty soldiers for these things half the military would be in the brig.
Yee is in the military which means he has less rights than most, but he is a really good example of what might happen to you too if you let your government run amuck. Of course, its even more likely to happen to you if you try to keep your government from running amuck. This is Catch-23.
"There are plenty of old-school Republicans out there who really do support things like small government, low taxes, and individual rights."
I actually heard this same sentiment on CNN in the last couple of days though I don't recall who said it. I think it was in response to the revelation that the so called Medicare reform bill was going to cost way over 500 billion over ten years when a couple months ago Bush said he wouldn't sign anything over 400 billion. Apparently the people running the number then just made some convient assumptions and came out with $400 billion to get it passed, and now someone ran realistic numbers and its way over. Where is all that tax money going, straight in to the pockets of drug, HMO and insurance companies. Republicans sing praises to free markets but in this bill they forbad the government to do the most basic thing you do in free markets which is negotiate prices for quantity purchases. The end result drug companies can charge the government whatever they want for drugs and the price tag will sky rocket. Drug companies will get rich. Meanwhile the drug companies offer Billy Tauzin, who helped shove this crap through congress, for the drug companies, a multimillion dollar job as a pharmacuetical lobbyist, an extraordinarily blatant payoff. The family business of Senate Majority Leader Frist, who also helped shove this through, is one of the largest medical corporations in America who have been nailed in the past for hundreds of millions in overcharging on Medicaid and Medicare.
Anyway back to the person contending Bush's conservative base was erroding because of his out of control spending, adventurism abroad, deficits and big brother government. He contended there was a chance that there was a danger real conservatives would just stay home and not vote, because they are getting the same affliction plaguing a lot of Americans. They can no longer tell the difference between the Democrats or Republican's anymore. They are all in the pockets of special interests, mostly corporate, they all say what they have to say to get elected and none of them do anything in the interest of the vast majority of Americans any more.
Its true as the followup to this post said that they wont vote Democratic but there is certainly a chance they will get fed up and not vote at all. The Democrats on the other hand are really energized to vote for the candidate named ABB(Anybody But Bush).
Unfortunately that may mean Kerry, who is from Bush's Alma Mater, Yale, is a blue blood establishment Northeastern democrat who hasn't stood up for anything he believes in since he spoke out against Vietnam 30 plus years ago.
I tend to not favor anyone hypocrital enough to make it to contender status in a presidential contest but Howard Dean did do a lot of things that showed signs of taking the country back from establishment politicians, Deomcrat or Republican. First and foremost he raised lots of money from ordinary, real, people over the Internet which freed him from the Democratic money machine and corprorate donations. He also stood up and actually spoke his mind instead of just telling everyone what they wanted to hear which is all Kerry and Bush do. Unfortunately he made a few gaffs and the establishment, primarily through TV news, have pretty much destroyed him. Its the first time in recent memory there was an actual chance the people would regain control of their government in the U.S. Unfortunately the establishment caught on, pulled together and snuffed it out the threat at the last second.
This is a great post. If so then it appears:
t m
- Poindexter, when he was part of the DOD and DARPA, devises Total Information Awareness, which will collect vast amounts of data on everyone and then use data mining to spot terrorists, or maybe just to spy on everyone.
- In parallel Florida, presumably led by Jeb Bush, starts funding MATRIX to do pretty much the same thing though its less ambitious. Ironicly MATRIX is devised by a suspected drug smuggler and the person that helped rig the Florida election by disenfranchising black voters.
- Congress is enraged when TIA becomes public and kills it.
- The DOD changes the name to Terrorist Information Awareness
- As nearly as I can tell Congress is allowing Terrorist Information Awareness to continue but under severe restraints:
http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/tia_report_page.h
In particular TIA is allowed to use only these two kinds of data:
(a) foreign intelligence and counter intelligence information legally obtained and usable by the Federal Government under existing law
(b) wholly synthetic (artificial) data that has been generated, for research purposes only, to resemble and model real-world patterns of behavior.
It appears Congress must have forbidden using real data on American citizens.
Meanwhile MATRIX is doing basicly the thing Congress forbad TIA from doing. MATRIX was state funded but now the DOJ and Homeland Security are chipping in $12 million.
You have to wonder if Congress realizes what kind of suckers they've been played for.
Hah. Other posts have come out since I posted the similarity to TIA. This IS TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS in its infancy. Asher, the owner of the company doing this, is one of John Poindexter's Iran Contra cronies from way back, and TIA is Poindexter's baby. This is certainly version 0.1 of TIA and not even close to what they ultimately envisioned at DARPA before they got spanked by Congress, but you have to start somewhere.
By the way, here is the list of states enrolled in case you havn't seen it yet. They are all listed on their web site.
http://www.iir.com/matrix/
Utah
Michigan
Ohio
New York
Connecticut
Pennsylvania
Georgia
Florida
You wish they all had Republican Governors, and most of them do, but Michigan and Pennsylvania are run by Dems at the moment.
Ya know this kinda of sounds like, John Poindexters's Total Information Awareness project at DARPA, though its a little more down to earth. That program became widely known, there was an uproar, Congress curtailed it. I think they changed the name to Terrorist Information Awareness, and it fell below everyones radar. What ever happened to it really? All my expectations at the time were they would just rename it, move it somewhat further away from the DOD, maybe rearrange it so it would fly a little lower below the radar.
Maybe this is TIA in its infancy. Its really hard to tell if MATRIX is sucking up as much information as TIA was planning, and analyzing as much as they planned to. This is certainly a broad and ambigious definition of what they are gathering:
"significant amounts of public data record entries"
This blurb you quoted sounds like it could have been taken from the TIA project proposal. Here is a rather more grandiose TIA equivalent:
"The goal is to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential activity."
"The project calls for the development of "revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual, centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data."
"A key component of the TIA project is to develop data-mining or knowledge discovery tools that will sort through the massive amounts of information to find patterns and associations. TIA will also develop search tools such as Project Genoa, which Admiral Poindexter's former employer Syntek Technologies, assisted in developing. TIA aims to fund the development of more such tools and data-mining technology to help analysts understand and even "preempt" future action."
"So, the IRS is probably the best model of a government agency protecting critical private information."
I'm willing to bet you all of your tax information is already being merged in to this grand unified domestic spying database. If it isn't already its just a matter of time. If they can look at all your bank records, and the books you read, what exactly is sacred about your tax returns. Maybe the IRS was good at protecting privacy but if the President, with the backing of a Republican congress, tells the IRS to turn over all their records it will happen in a heart beat.
Not sure what you mean by the trends where there 20 or 30 years ago. Almost 30 years ago, or actually in 1975 the Church commission actually reversed the tide and trend against domestic spying:
http://www.labournet.net/world/0109/us15.html
Maybe you're suggesting the trend was there because we acquired computers and everything moved to an electronic form which made this kind of domestic spying feasible.
I'm saying its really only been since Bush and Ashcroft came to power and 9/11 gave then the excuse, that domestic spying reacquired momentum and it also has the massive new danger that they can abuse computing to implement it now. This is not a long established trend, its very new as in about 3 years.
It is deeply disturbing to think about how dangerous domestic spying was in the '60's and '70's and then how really dangerous it will be today when its combined with massive computing power, databases and electronic tracking of everything every person does. In the old days they had to use shoe leather to spy on people so they had to identify people they considered dangerous and they couldn't track very many. Today they can use software to watch everyone and let a computer spot anyone they want to single out for punishment.
I think I actually have more confidence in the old 1960's brand of domestic spying to not make mistakes. Just look at all the people being red flagged as terrorists by the TSA simply because they have the same as a terrorist suspect, though NOTHING else matches. It gives you zero confidence that this massive loss of privacy and freedom will even result in the supposed goal, captured terrorists.
As another example I am relatively confident there are very few potential terrorists in the state of Utah. They would stick out like a sore thumb and you wouldn't need an intrusive database to spot them. A similar argument was made about the government using airline records to feed in to their new TSA scanners. The problem was there were no hijackings among all of the records they were analyzing, Northwest or JetBlue, so what is the point of searching for a person or event that wasn't in the data in the first place. Its not really trying to catch a terrorist, its trying to spying on everyone.
"we did need to figure out who was responsible for 9/11"
As I said the last time the PATRIOT act came up I dont think it really has a lot to do with 9/11 or preventing another one. 9/11 was more a convenient excuse for the right wing to reimplement domestic spying. Lets spell it, out the Patriot act is designed to reimplement domestic spying as it was prior to the 1970's.
The right wing has been really ticked since the early '70's when constraints were put on FBI and CIA domestic spying activities. We've pretty much forgotten why those constraints were put in place.
In a nutshell domestic spying seems like a great idea if it stays in the box and just focuses on dangerous foreign elements, terrotists, or maybe even dangerous domestic elements. The problem is once the ball gets rolling it never does stay in the box. Its just a matter of time before the people who control it, the people in power, redirect it from just the truly dangerous elements to spying on everyone they consider dangerous, which quickly becomes all their political opponents including people who aren't dangerous, but who are just exercising first amendment rights to disagree by doing things like opposing misguided wars like Vietnam or Iraq or advocating controversial things like equal rights and and end to segregation as was the case in the 60's.
Two classic examples:
J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to spy on everybody. He acquired dirt on basicly everyone including all politicians. As a result he became largely untouchable. No one would dare suggest replacing him, lest he pull out the file he had on them. Hoover probably had some serious skeletons in his own closet but no one would dare expose them. Hoover controlled the FBI for 48 years and didn't get ousted until God did it when he died. Its no coincidence major constraints were put on the FBI's abuse of domestic spying about the time Hoover died. It was the first time it was possible. 48 years is an unnaturally long and unhealthy time for one person to have unchallenged control of a nations domestic law enforcement, he had it thanks to domestic spying. Hoover in particular abused domestic spying in the case of Martin Luther King. King was not a violent person, not a terrorist. His main danger was exercising his first amendment right to speak out against segregation and the Vietnam war. Hoover made King's life a living hell by abusing domestic spying, for example by discovering extramarital affairs and using them as blackmail, and I wouldn't be suprised if he helped encourage his assasination because he was percieved as a threat by the established powers.
Richard Nixon became extraordinarily paranoid and was really obsessed with his reelection. As a result he abused both the FBI and the CIA to help insure he retained power. Let's remember that Watergate was Nixon abusing his domestic spying powers to spy on his political opposition in an effort to insure they didn't get elected. When a president uses domestic spying to hold power you are headed towards something that isn't democracy. We could very well be heading down the same road today.
Here is a thought experiment. If Jesus were alive today and he preached basicly the same message he did 2000 years ago, and just updated it for the times how would people like Bush and Ashcroft, supposedly devout Christians, recieve him.
If no one listened to him he would just be branded a left wing nut, pacifist, anti war, soft on terrorism, unpatriotic and probably a Democrat. Its a certainty he would have opposed the war on Iraq and all use of force by the U.S. Bush and Ashcroft would not appreciate that viewpoint. He might well be branded a communist since I doubt Jesus would have had anything good to say about investment bankers, stock brokers and the rampant greed that dominates America.
If a lot of people heard Jesus's message and started to follow him, perhaps by engaging in passive resistance and peaceful protest the full weight of the FBI and the patriot act would be
Sorry dude, but this is way hard. Instead why dont you just put a server in the Pentagon and have all the people who live overseas, who used to vote absentee, vote electronicly through it without a paper trail. The guy that controlls that server, Donald Rumsfeld, can then pretty much come in and tell the admin what percentage of those votes he wants the Republicans to get, within reason, and with special attention to the votes in real close swing states like Folorida. Even if he opts to arrange a Republican landslide it can be argued that all those patriotic soldiers would, of course, vote Republican instead of for those soft on terrorism Democrats. Though, I believe its only the officer corps that trends strongly Republican.
I suppose its just coincidence that they both happen to be Republicans, and the Republican's are especially desperate to maintain and expand their control of the Senate and the state houses.
Did you ever stop and wonder about the odds of two Democractic Senate candidates, Wellstone and Carnahan dieing in suspicious airplane crashes, right before elections, within 2 years of each other. The odds must be astronomical.
A simple thought experiment, if you want to improve your odds of controlling the senate how could you do it.
Pick popular opposition senate contenders and arrange for them to have airplane accidents close to the election. It backfired in Carnahan's case, we got his wife instead on a sympathy vote and Ashcroft as Attorney General. it worked perfectly with Paul Wellstone though.
It really not hard to:
A. Sabotoge a critical instrument in an airplane about to fly in bad weather
B. Use an EMP weapon on an airplane approaching a landing at a rural airport. I'm pretty sure the spooks have one that would work and would be really hard to trace in an accident investigation.
Well chances are the people in power are doing their best to make elections vulnerable to rigging, by the people in power. The Diebold attempt it one that went kind of wrong because it got exposed, but even then may not be fixed to be cheat proof especially in time for the November election which is going to be one of the most important elections in U.S. history. There are plenty of others that aren't exposed yet and probably wont be the Pentagon's SERVE for example. With SERVE at least 100,000 votes will pass through the Pentagon where they can be changed at will by the political appointees who run the Pentagon and whose jobs are on the line.
Its a mistake to think you have to swing a lot of votes, at the server end, to rig the next election. You could very well just need to flip a few thousand votes in a place like Florida, and you could do that by compromising a fairly small number of polling places.
Chances are good mainstream media wont cover any of it because:
A. Its sounds like conspiracy theory and they are afraid everyone will think they are nuts.
B. Its hard to explain to a mass audience that isn't very bright on averge and its kind of boring until you realize the implications of rigged elections (an end to democracy). So its controversial but boring, a bad combo for the media.
C. We dont really have many good investigative journalists left, certainly not on the news networks. The network talking heads make there living regurgitating whatever their contacts at the White House, Pentagon, State depertment want them to say, or playing sound bites or doing lamer interviews or playing Dean's screech speach over and over in an effort to destroy him, because they want to decide the outcome of elections instead of reporting on them or insuring they are fair.
One thing this country REALLY needs to restore democracy and to reduce the ability to rig elections is to GET RID OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. It is an ancient anachronism. It does a few very corrosive things:
- It disenfranchies everyone who is in a substantial minority in a given state. Republican votes dont count for much in the Northeast and Democrats dont count for anything in the Rocky Mountain West and increasingly the South.
- Swing states, like Florida, that could go either way get an inordinate amount of attention and pork from politicians trying to curry their favor. States that are hard over in one column are dont care states and they get treated accordingly except for raising fund out of them.
- And most important it is a lot easier to rig elections if you know you just have to flip a few thousand votes in a few really close swing states.....like Florida.
If the presidential election was simple majority rule for the whole nation it would be a lot harder to rig elections since you would probably have to flip a lot more votes.
If we want to maintain any pretense that our presidential elections are really democratic the electoral college has to go. The problem is there are a lot of entrenched political and state interests that wont let a constiutional amendment pass to get rid of it. For example swing states like the power they have as swing states and the pork they get as a result of it.
I really doubt Hubble is used for intelligence work, at least very often, though it probably could be in a pinch. I doubt the Hubble control center or staff is setup or cleared to do serious classified work. Hubble sure wont be any use for spying if its gyros degrade further since spy sattelites need to do a lot of manuevering and pointing.
h -1 2.htm
The NRO has its own really big telescopes which are specificly designed to look at the earth, manuever and point. They are called KH-11 or Keyhole. On the other hand the next generation Keyholes, KH-12 Improved Crystal, are proving to be a massively expensive and massively screwed up program, with TRW and Lockheed at the helm. They massively overpromised what they could do, government believed them and as usual they are probably using all the overruns to pad their bottomline. If Improved Crystal continues to slip, and KH-11's fail the NRO could get desperate enough to use Hubble assuming it still worked.
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/k
This whole Hubble situation should be taken as a lesson in why its bad to let an account, like O'Keffe, run a research agency like NASA. You need to get someone that has a technical, engineering background and who is able to manage projects and keep spending under control. As I've said before someone like Kelly Johnson, the genius behind the old Lockheed Skunkworks is what they need. The fact that Bush has O'Keffe in charge of NASA indicates he is more interested in just dicking with their books than he is in actually doing anything.
"With this push to go back to the Moon and to Mars, I think the space program will be revived"
I certainly hope this comes true but I'd rate it as something of a long shot especially if your risking so much of your future on it.
Its somewhat more likely that NASA will start to wind down the shuttle and the space station to free funds for Bush's bold new initiative so both of these old programs die. No serious money will be invested in Bush's new space initiative in the mean time. What money there is will go in to giant mounds of paper studies with little real value.
Most of the big spending on the new initiative wont begin until after Bush's second term. By that time, unless there is another bubble, chances are the U.S. government will be teetering on bankruptcy and spending large sums servicing a huge debt from huge budget deficits thanks to Bush's huge tax cuts coupled with spending that puts a drunken sailor to shame. Its unlikely very many politicians will risk there careers by suggesting the U.S. should borrow even more money to throw huge sums in to a bold new NASA space initiative, especially given NASA's recent track record in manned spaceflight, one of abysmal planning and wasteful spending. Its very possible the U.S. could end up with no shuttle and no replacement unless they buy the services of the Russians and the Chinese.
Maybe we'll get lucky and the relatively successful robotic programs will survive in tact but I wouldn't count on it thanks to the flawed decision making that can happen in flawed bureaucracies undergoing a large change in direction like the one NASA is about to attempt.
NASA will also probably still be very effectively standing in the way of any serious private space initiatives during all this.
I'm afraid I don't see the insight in this. The last time Disney produced really good movies was in the Lion King, Aladdin era. There was a simple reason, his name was Jeffrey Katzenberg
He was the last movie making genius to grace Disney's animation studio. When he had his fill of Eisner and moved on to form Dreamworks SKG (Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen) Walt Disney Studios was doomed. But we were blessed with a new studio that will be modern and probably great, Dreamworks sister studio PDI, home of Shrek. I wager PDI is going to give Pixar a run for their money for a long time.
I think its unrealistic to think most companies are going to stay great forever. Disney had a great run but its probably over at least as far as animation goes.
Problem number one is 3D caught them by suprise, Katzenberg would have caught the wave and was starting to in Lion King and Beauty and the Beast but when he left they lost the genius necessary to figure out how to do good 3D movies. They did manage to make some 3D movies but they didn't figure out the fact they needed a good story first and great 3D second.
They clung to 2D animation though they lost the producer and the artists who knew how to make 2D animation work and to make it art. Its probably just a fact of life that there never were many great 2D animators and there probably very few now since all the young people are gravitating to 3D and computer animation. 2D is tending to be a factory process being done in cheap off short sweatshops with low production values. Closing their Florida studios is probably just a recognition they didn't have what it takes to produce anything good there and it couldn't be fixed. The Florida studios weren't their animation heartland anyway, Burbank is. If there was talent in Florida it will show up in Legacy Studios where many of the artists went. If there wasn't then Legacy wont make it.
And most important indications are Eisner is a dick and until he's run out I doubt Disney animation will get better and it may not recover even when he's gone.
Probably best to remember Disney fondly for its past greatness, forget its recent efforts and be glad there is new young blood to takes its place in Pixar, Dreamworks and PDI.
"A catch-22 in flight design is if it hasn't flown before, we don't want to fly it. But at some point, someone has to fly the first generation (someone who is willing to take a huge risk)."
Or you fly it as a non mission critical experimental payload which is what we did back in the day I worked on avionics. You fly it as an experimental package so it gets the stress but if it breaks either its not in the mission critical loop, or if it is in the loop you can switch back to proven hardware. I kind of assumed this would be a standard part of qualifying electronics for space flight as well though its obviously a lot more expensive. Its not feasible to test it on Mars due the expense but you could test it in geostationary orbit where it will get lots of radiation and temperature extremes, as well as launch vibration and G's.
Control of the media player matters a LOT, partially because it also the means control of the format content is distributed in. Remember the network effect of Word and Excel documents. Everyone distributes documents as Word and Excel so everyone is compelled to switch to Office. Everyone starts distributing content in Media Player format and everyone has to have Windows and Media Player to view it.
Distribution of audio and video via PC's and settop boxes is exploding as broadband finally takes hold. The movie and recording industries are huge industries. If a company like Microsoft manages to gain control of the soon to be dominant distribution mechanism for these industries they will acquire a new monopoly, and get shiploads of cash in fresh profits, profits Microsoft desperately needs to keep growing. Apples ITunes is the one shining light that caused a glitch in Microsoft's plan to dominate digital media, but Apple has a formidable advesary now that Microsoft is getting serious about digital media, late as usual.
Microsoft can also use this dominance to further lock out non Windows platforms from burgeoning markets like settop boxes. If Linux can't play Media Player content and Media Player formats are what everyone is distributing content in then Linux is going to be shut out of settop boxes. The same goes for smartphones and PDA's. Appliances are one area Linux is doing pretty well and we sure dont want it go the way of the desktop and turn in to a new Windows monopoly.
Free speech zones, what a great tool for stifling dissent. They have a multifacted purpose.
- The Secret Service insists they are for the President's security though anyone who is a pro Bush supporter gets close to the President which completely undermines the security argument.
- Thanks to the careful positioning of the anti Bush pens the President never sees protestors, and always sees the pro Bush supporters, so if he is the naive idiot many think he is must think the whole world loves him, thanks to the rose colored glasses.
- The media chasing the President doesn't see protestors so they never cover the protestors. Of course the new patriotic, corporate media doesn't much want to cover dissent these days anyway. Its unpatriotic.
- The protestors soon realize they are wasting their time so they give up which ensures no critical mass ever builds which would make someone take notice. So it looks like there is no serious dissent. Its a simple fact of life protests like those at the Democratic convention against Vietnam in 1968 couldn't happen today because it would be crushed to ensure "security".
- The Secret Service, in the process of sorting people between the pro Bush people and the anti Bush people, can thouroughly catalog and brand all the potential troublemakers and ensure they are hassled at every future opportunity. Its really quite orderly.
Wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of anti Bush protestors dressed up like good Republicans, with pro Bush signs. The Secret Service quickly ushers them up close to the President. When the President pulls up they rip away the pro bush signs to show anti Bush signs. The Secret Service would freak, though I assume they must look for and gaurd against fakers. Maybe good Republicans have a secret code word. To successfully pull this off the protestors would have to be people who hadn't previously been cataloged as anti Bush protestors, a.k.a. terrorists and a threat to the nation.
The fundemental problem with this law is who decides who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter. Left to our government's discretion they would brand anyone who they dislike or disagree with as a terrorist and would brand any terrorist who is doing something they like as a freedom fighter.
The Palestinians are the classic example. They've had their homeland taken from them, they are being brutually repressed by Israel, they are being slowly ethnicly cleansed from greater Israel and are slowly being shoved into walled gettos in an ever shrinking, starving west bank. You could choose to think that the Palastinians could just stop resisting and Isreal would shower them in milk and honey, give them a homeland and peace would be the order of the day. Unfortunately the reality is the Israels would most likely continue building settlements, continue taking or destroying Palastinian homes, would continue slowly starving the Palastinians until they flee Isreal and leave it to the Jews which is the one and only thing the Israel government will settle for. Isreal has to make sure, at all costs, that Arabs never reach a majority in their country because if they are to maintain the facade that they are a democracy they would either have to adopt apartheid with the ridicule that would bring from the world or relinquish power to Arabs. Neither are good options so their solution is to continue to driver Palastinians out of Isreal by any means they can get away with.
The Palastinians have no conventional military so their only avenue of resistance is suicide bombing. They either do that or quietly sit and let Isreal slowly starve them, take their homes and scatter them to the wind as was done to the Jews long ago.
Are the Palastinians terrorists for resorting to suicide bombs as their last defense against a foe whose military is vastly superior and routinely crushes them like a bug. Or are they freedom fighters for trying to defend their homes and their existence as a people. I tend to think they must not be particularly good terrorists since vastly more Palastinian civilians die at the hands of the Israeli militatary than Israeli jews do to suicide bombers.
Our government, through this law, decides the Palastinians are terrorists so everyone who supports them in their vain attempt at survival is a terrorist and can be arrested and have their assets seized by this law. Further our government tries to make the rest of the world toe the same line, which taken to its logical conclusion would ensure the Palastinians were strangled and a lot of people would be arrested for supporting an organization they see as freedom fighters not terrorists. It also happens that they are Muslim and its just another part of the U.S./Israeli war on Islam and Arabs under the guise of a war on terror.
OK, now the flipside. Under this law would the Mujahideen, the predecessor of Al Qaeda, fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union have been terrorists or freedom fighters. Their tactics resemble something we clearly call terrorism when its used against us in Iraq today. But the fact is since we funded them and armed them we would label them as freedom fighters, includinf Osama bin Laden in the 80's.
If the government used this law only to cut off Al Qaeda then it would perhaps be a tolerable law. But they aren't going to leave it at and are instead going to go after Palastinians too.
Another real conundrum is the biggest, most blatant supporter of Al Qaeda is Saudi Arabia, including members of its royal family and they get off scott free providing massive support to Al Qaeda, because:
A. They have lots of oil
B. They have lots of money
C. They are close friends and benefactors of the Bush family and a Bush family business concern, an arms dealer called the Carlyle Group.
So if this law isn't being enforced against Saudi Arabia but is going after the Palastinians it clearly isn't doing what it was intended to do which was fight Al Qaeda.
Bottomline I guess I'm saying this law, in practice, is just a tool to let the people in power pick their friends and enemies and ruthlessly punish anyone they decide is an enemy.
"I am a God fearing Christian" ...
"You kill every damned one of those sons of bitches"
I hate to point this out to you but you are a case study in what is wrong with modern, institutionalized Christianity, especially in the U.S.
If you were really a follower of the teachings of Christ and really understood his teachings you would realize Christ was the ultimate "pussy" to use your derogatory term. He was most certainly the most committed pacifist you could ever find.
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Matthew 5.38-41
Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword." Matthew 26.51-52
If Christ were alive to see people like our President or the officers in our military, tell you about what devoted Christians they are and then rush out to kill people in his name he would be devastated. No matter how justified they think they are, they are committing a hypocrisy of immense proportions.
There are only two paths, you are truly Christian in which case you would be a pacifist, a pussy to use your term, and you wouldn't kill people, no matter how much you were provoked.
Or you are using Christ's name out of political and social convenience because you have to be a good Christian to be elected President or rise in the ranks of the military or in many respects to be an accepted member of yout community especially in the U.S., one of the most fanaticly "Christian" countries. I'm pretty sure the later is the case for 90+% of the Christians in this country. People like the Quakers seem to be the only people who really understand Christ's teachings. Most of the supposedly Christian churches are institutions Christ would have abhored. They are social institutions worshiping him as an idol, regurgatating his teachings but never really listening to them, and certainly not understanding the most basic tenents of his teachings.
Most of our politicians and military officers should admit it. They are Machiavellians or Nietscheans to whom power is the true religion. Christianity is a badly worn facade of social convenience. Deep in their hearts they don't subscribe to it because it is a "pussy's" religion. George W. Bush no doubt found Christ about the same time he realized he and his family wanted him to be President.
"If Congress and the President were 'doing their best' and temporarily doing a power grab to defend us poor Americans from the evil terrorist infidels, then why didn't they include a sundown measure in the act where by it would expire after x,y,z number of years"
The Patriot Act does sunset in 2005 if I recall. If you watched the President's State of the Union, a remarkably and unabashedly far right speech, it was near the top of his list to make sure Congress extends it, along with his tax cuts for the rich, presumably indefinitely.
This sunset provision gave a lot of spineless Congressmen an out to explain why they voted for it the first time around. Its OK to destroy the constitution if its only for a while. After all we are in a war, a war on terrorism, so its OK just for the the war. Of course then Bush tells you the war on terrorism will probably never end so neither should the Patriot Act.
Never ending war is a central theme in Orwell's 1984. You need never ending war so people need to keep their polticians and military around to fight it. Without the threat of war governments start to look a little useless. The Cold War did the trick for almost a half century, but those damn Russians wimped out so we really needed a new never ending war. Terrorists are great for a never ending war because there will always be terrorists lurking in the shadows even if you can't see them. It was Anarchists in the early 20th century, then Communists and now Terrorists we need to live in fear of every day of our lives. If we forgot we need an Orange alert to remind us.
When it comes to the Patriot Act and a continuing parade of followons I think you need to think out of the box about why we are blessed with them. I would argue that the Patriot Act didn't entirely happen just because of 9/11. Rather 9/11 was a convenient excuse for the Bush administration to do a lot of things they wanted to do anyway but they couldn't get away with until they had 9/11 as an excuse.
If you scoff look at the war on Iraq. They wanted to attack Iraq and depose Hussein from the day Bush was inaugerated. Cheney, Perl and Wolfowitz wanted to and wrote about it years before that. 9/11 just gave the Bush crowd a convenient excuse. The fabricated a bunch of unproven ties between Iraq and Al Quida and trumped up non existent WMD's. Presto, they have an excuse to take down Iraq and radicly alter the world to conform to their world view, or at least they thought. It remains to be seen if Iraq turns in to more of a problem than it was under Hussein when the Shia's try to take the power that is their right in a real democracy (though I wager the U.S. will prevent any election that isn't rigged).
I'd argue the Patriot Act is also just a manifestation of the desires of a right wing administration that wanted repressive laws to enforce order and to stifle dissent, 9/11 just made it feasible to pass them. Right wing adminstrations like everyone to either agree with them or shut up. When an administration can spy on anyone without judicial oversight, watch everything you read, everything you buy, they make people live in fear and most people living in fear keep their mouths shut. Ideally they make everyone shut up without even arresting anyone. Though they will arrest and intimidate a few that keep dissenting. That is the thing they want most out of the Patriot Act, an end to criticism of them and a cowering populace.
The fact is the current administration loves 9/11. It is the best thing that could have happened to Bush. Before it happened his popularity was declining and he was looking like a one term President. Afterward he is a towering figure of strength, hard to beat, vote for him or America will go down in flames. Since 9/11 nearly every speech Bush gives is laden with the words terror and terrorism juxtaposed with freedom and patriotism. You are either with us or against us. If you disagree with us you are unpatriotic and soft on terrorists or practicly a terrorist yourself. Every speech is designed to drown America in fear so you will turn to them to "save" you from terrorists lurking in every shadow. The war against terror will never end, and they are the only ones who can fight it, so you have to keep them in power from now to eternity. Fear is a mind killer and the Republicans are using it to great effect to stiffle dissent and to protect their hold on power at all costs.
So the 9th circuit overturned one little piece of the Patriot Act. Well the 9th is the most overturned court and the most reviled by the right wing. Its a propaganda boon for them to say, there they go again, they are a bunch of left wing loons, they aren't with us, they are against us, they are practicly terrorists themselves. See why we need a bunch of right wingers in all the courts. Even if the Supreme Court does overturn this its one little piece and the Bush adminstration will just come back with a bunch of new pieces to replace it. They can currently pass dangerous laws a lot faster than the courts can overturn them. They probably put a few garbage pieces in, in the first place, so a couple would get overturned, people would cheer, and the really bad stuff would still be there.
If you want to get rid of the Patriot Act pretty much the only option is to put Bush and the Republicans in congress out of power in the next election, though we are bucking a head wind in the form of giants piles of cash to brainwash people through TV and the threat of rigged elections thanks to Diebold and the Pentagon's SERVE. The Democrats suck too but I think we all remember now why Republicans t