"but by fixing it made the other party look excruciatingly ridiculous"
Its a nice sound dream, but it doesn't happen because it is quite thourougly impossible in the real world and you can't blame any group of politicians because they can't do anything about it.
The fundamental problem is one party can't fix anything unilaterally in this country. In particular the way the Senate rules are structured you have to have a supermajority, 60 votes, to get anything controversial done. The Dems don't even really have a majority, with Lieberman, being an independent. and in the mix. And of course the Dems don't currently control the White House so if they did ram something through the Senate it would get vetoed.
This system can be a very positive thing because it puts a brake on an malevolent and out of control party like we've had from 2000 to 2006. If the Republicans had changed the Senate rules to do everything on a simple majority, and they really wanted to, it would have been really DANGEROUS since the Republicans could have passed anything they could get 50 Republican votes for in the Senate. Then you would have seen some real abuse of power, worse than we saw. The only thing that stopped this is a gang of ten Republicans and Democrats banded together to stop it because they viewed it as scary to give one part this kind of power.
Unfortunately the Dems failed miserably numerous time from 2000-2006 to use their obstructionist powers to block bad things like the Patriot Act and the war powers act where they gave Bush a blank check to launch aggressive wars, and maybe torture and spy on people. They often didn't filibuster when they probably should have, because it was part of the deal the gang of ten struck.
If you were to see a landslide in 2008 and the Dems got 60 seats in the Senate, the presidency and held the house then they would have the power to do whatever they want and they could fix stuff, but chances are the things they would end up doing would be scary too, different scary from the Republicans doing it, but still very scary.
For the American political system to work you need enlightened politicians, willing to reach across the aisle with civility, to pass good laws. Unfortunately our political system has deteriorated to the point there is no civility or working together in the best interests of the American people. Not sure our political system has really ever worked but its certainly in worse shape now than any point in my lifetime. Unfortunately the only thing it does well is excessive taxation and excessive pork. People say they don't like pork but there is always someone who likes pork and is willing to payoff a politician to get some. I really wish there were total gridlock and the Federal government couldn't pass or fund anything new, and ideally would scale back all the out of control spending of the past.
America would be a lot better and happier place if most of the Federal government were just gone, other than basic self defense force, a minimal judicial system, and a few diplomats. Basically we need to be back to what the Constitution says, where it outlined a minimalist federal government and left most of the power in the hands of the states and the people, no Federal income tax and let the government run tarrifs, like it did for more than a hundred years, though now there are lots of Chinese goods to tax.
"I just see the Guantanamo situation as one step worse"
Not really. Most though not all of the people in Guantanamo are probably bad people who would as soon kill or torture an American as look at one. Most, though certainly not all, probably deserve to be prisoners of war. I wouldn't be surprised if the harsh treatment probably has yielded some useful information you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, though most information you get from torture is suspect if not useless. The American's being held by Al Qaeda in Iraq are probably getting a lot worse.
Most of the people in the Japanese internment camps were completely innocent men, women and children who were locked up because of the color of their skin and shape of their eyes. In my book that was quite a bit worse than the few hundred bad actors the U.S. is abusing in Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Guantanamo and Abu Graib were no doubt colossal blunders, if for no other reason than the horrible PR they generated. You could do stuff like that 40, 50 and 100 years ago and get away with it because it was so much easier to conceal it or shape the propaganda to make it seem like a good idea. Its not wise to do stupid things in the Internet and cable news era.
If you haven't you should read the 4 part series on Dick Cheney in the Washington Post online this week. It offers a lot of illumination on how Guantanamo and American's embrace of torture came to be, thanks to Dick Cheney and his minions. I'm about the last person to defend Dick Cheney but if you were in charge when 9/11 happened and you wanted to stop it from happening again I could see how he thought what he was doing was in the best interests of the nation. Hindsight being 20/20 obviously it wasn't but hindsight is easy. Cheney was consumed by paranoia post 9/11. If he had done nothing and there had been another catastrophic attack that would have been really bad too. You also have to remember when most of this started Bush/Cheney were on top of the world, could do no wrong, and were widely supported by the American people in everything they did. Most people favored being spied up on if it stopped the next 9/11.
Again back to my original point the American people as a heterogeneous whole are as much to blame for everything that has happened in the last 6 years as any one you can single out in the Bush administration. Laying it all on a few people, and pretending like somehow it wasn't America as a whole that did these bad things, and let these bad things happen, is kind of an easy copout.
"And for me at least, outrage is the first step toward action..."
Maybe it is but its more likely its a first step that will never be followed by a second. Your outrage might have had some value if you had and acted on it in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 but Americans didn't really have any outrage back then which is when it would have done some good. Right now your outrage is at least 4 years late and just piling on at a time when piling on the Bush administration is easy. Its kind of pointless because most of the damage has been done. I had serious outrage back in 2002-2004. I was rabidly against invading Iraq, against Bush/Cheney, against the Republicans.... and it was pissing in the wind because most American's are stupid and brainwashed. Americans didn't really care back then when it mattered and something could have been done about it, like in the 2004 elections, when as you recall the Republicans swept to victory in spite of Iraq and Guantanamo.
Bush said he was going to close Guantanamo a year ago. Rice, Gates and most of the generals want it shut down, but the fact is Dick Cheney has a complete mastery of all the levers of government, and over George W, and so far no one has come even close to matching him. At the moment as long as he wants Guantanamo open it will be open and the government will be spying on you. There is some talk of him being forced to step down this summer by Republicans who don't want another beating in the 2008 electio
"I've heard of the Syndicate, but they were always in that "tier 2" level of guilds."
Soooo...you are one of those elitist bastards....bastardettes....that 99% of the people in MMORPG's love to hate and not so secretly envy? Or maybe you just play one on Slashdot?
Not sure being in a top end guild in a game that has been dieing ever since WoW and EQ II came is exactly something to gloat about. EQ I deserved to die for no other reason than absence of instances and the absolute horror of people fighting over camps. If you are gonna fixate on being a "top end guild" you probably want to be playing in the big pond as horrible as WoW is, or maybe EvE, a small very elitist pond.
"The largest and most influential guild I've ever heard of would have to be Goonswarm / Goonfleet"
Let me guess....you're a member Goonswarm/Goonsfleet.....right?
So did you hurt your arm patting yourself on the back like that?
"online game, including Second Life"
I don't think Second Life really counts as a "game". It is an interesting experiment in virtual worlds...err wait its not really even interesting.... its an experiment in virtual worlds. The few hours I spent in it felt a lot more like "no life" rather than "second life" though I suppose if you stick with it and meet interesting people any virtual world can have redeeming value. Simple problem is its extremely hard to make virtual worlds rich and compelling and to make interesting things for people to do and Second Life mostly isn't and hasn't.
"Vote (did change some stuff), do it... Donate to opposing candidates, do it"
I hope you are right but I really doubt the Democrats are going to change much. In particular they lack the votes to do anything meaningful in the Senate, unless the Republicans come on board. When they do the U.S. will probably cut and run in Iraq and it will really explode and oil prices are going to go through the roof.
The key point on Iraq is I don't think your vote really changed much. The thing that changed is Bush administrations incompetence and the incompetence of the Iraq government lost the war in Iraq. The election results, the polls, the outrage are the logical result of the U.S. losing a war and American's have turned on it and are doing something about it now that its to late. Americans overwhelming cheered on Shock and Awe when it looked like America was sweeping to victory. The Germans loved the Nazi's as long as they were winning wars. Americans would still love Bush if he hadn't lost in Iraq.
Your vote isn't going to do much about Bush/Cheney other than deny them a rubber stamp Congress, and lead to a bunch of tiresome investigations that will also lead to nothing substantive.
" You're doing what now"
I'm not doing jack about it...other than rant on Slashdot:) I hold my nose and vote for the Democrats because they are only slightly less bad than the Republicans. The point is there is almost nothing you as a private citizen can do about it, so stop kidding yourself. Americans were herded in to the Bush camp due to Clinton weariness and they got locked in there after 9/11. Now they are being herding to the anti Bush camp because Bush is down on his luck and he is an easy target.
America has a two party system, with two completely corrupted parties and horrible politicians. The deck is completely stacked against a working political system so you are going to have a really bad government...deal with it....unless you are really great and enlightened leader, can get elected President, get Congress to do you bidding and fix a completely broken country.
Everything you've seen in the last 5 years was pretty much inevitable in the wake of 9/11. When a country is attacked like that there is ALWAYS a knee jerk reaction, civil liberties are trashed, people are spied on, wars are launched, people are hurt. As bad as 9/11 was Al Qaeda's actions were genius because the inevitable self inflicted wounds that followed were far worse than the damage from the original attack. If our leaders had been enlightened they wouldn't have changed a thing post 9/11 other than hunt down Bin Laden and kill him, strengthen civil liberties instead of strip them and stayed the hell away from Iraq.
You still don't appreciate the significance of the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor. Splitting hairs on how good or bad they were treated is foolishness on your part. The fact is they were stripped of all their civil liberties, en masse, by a Democratic President who is worshiped in many circles. IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME KIND OF THING YOU ARE RANTING AT BUSH FOR. It was due to exactly the same forces at work now, retaliation for a sneak attack, it was done by Democrats then and Republicans now. Its not something you can just hang all the blame on Bush and Republicans for, its just what people do in nation states when attacked, its bad but its an inevitable part of human nature and you aren't going to change it.
Not sure I follow your point. The whole point is we will look on all the excesses of the Bush administration exactly the same way in the future, but the next time there is a good reason for something resembling a war we will repeat them...again and again and again. Abuse is just an unavoidable consequence of giving flawed people great power. The only thing that has happened lately is:
A. the President and VP we gave the power to were much more flawed than usual B. they were given way more power than usual thanks to 9/11 and political opposition(the Democrats) who collapsed
George W. had some massive well known personality flaws that were completely glossed over when Americans went in to the voting booth, alcoholic, drug use, draft dodger, borderline deserter when it came to his National Guard responsibilities. He was just a spoiled rotten preppy, with bad grades and a weak mind, who played his family name and bare knuckle politics in to a job for which he was obviously never qualified and he's massively abused it since he got there.
Not sure its going to get better in 2008 since all the people in the current huge presidential field look pretty deeply flawed too. I don't think any really great people will go within a country mile of the insanity of politics today so we get a bunch of really flawed leaders who want power, shouldn't be trusted it but are.
"Nixon is the only "modern day" president on your list (sry, i'm only 30), and he got impeached by BOTH parties"
A. He didn't get impeached for spying on Americans, he got impeached for Watergate and the coverup that followed. B. I think you would be naive if you think Eisenhower, Johnson, Reagan, Bush 1 and Clinton haven't spied on Americans. The NSA has had a huge capacity under Echelon to do so C. You glossed over the fact all administrations HAVE been spying on American's since Nixon. As I said they just had to go the rubber stamp FISA court to get a warrant, FISA almost never rejects a request, so it was a very minimal check on abuse. The Bush administration just did away with it to save on the nearly pointless paperwork.
", but to compare taking away property with torture is just insane"
Wow you sure did minimize that. It was way past taking away their property. Whole families, a whole people, were locked up in squalid concentration camps for "the duration" without any recourse to the courts. I think you missed the point. It was a wholesale denial of basic due process, based on ethnicity, and due process was one of the items on your list. It was exactly what the Bush administration does now to Muslims except on a grander scale.
I'm sure if you had been one of them you would have a different opinion on the trauma of being stripped of all your belongings and having your entire family imprisoned indefinitely when you had done nothing wrong.
"The presidents that I've lived through... Regean, Bush I, Clinton"
I think you are pretty naive then. None of those presidents had 9/11 on their watch if they had they would have gone off the deep end too. The Reagan administration was not a pillar of virtue. They ran a dirty war in Central America, they armed what was to become Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, invaded Granada based on pure fabrication, etc. If Reagan had 9/11 on his watch that administration would have gone over the top too.
I'm pretty sure Rendition, snatching people and spiriting them away to secret prisons was an established program under Clinton if not before. The Bush administration just dramatically escalated it post 9/11.
"I've never "given the president a blank check"
Have you done anything to oppose it besides pointless ranting on slashdot. Did you go to any protests, get arrested, carry signs at a Presidential visit and get locked in a pen. Did you do.....anything? OK...then yes you along with everyone else gave your President a blank check to do everything he's done.
"Aren't you a republican?"
Geez spare me the name calling and painting me with a brush when you have no possible clue what color I wear. If you got the gist of my post the Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for all the absuses you listed. The Democrats helped vote in the Patriot Act and they helped give Bush a sweeping expansion of his powers when they voted in a resolution that gave him authority to attack just about anyone he felt like, and do whatver he liked in the "War on Terrorism" after 9/11. The Democrats are just as much to blame as anyone else. If they had voted in unison against the patriot act and the war resolution they might have a leg to stand on, they don't.
I think your problem is you are kind of young and very short on historical perspective. Big governments in general and America's is no exception, have always abused their power and probably always will. It take some enormous will on the part of the people being governed to prevent it, and American's completely lack that will, especially lately. As I said about the only thing different now is there are a lot more diverse communication channels now so you are somewhat more aware of the abuses. The other fatal flaw in the Bush administration was they were so incompetent they basically lost the war in Iraq so everyone turned on them. If they had won, like they though they would, they would have swept on to Iran and Syria, they would still controll Congress and Americans would still be cheering them on. Everyone loves a winner no matter how horrible they really are.
"nearly everything that I would have listed as to why our country was great BEFORE bush came along has been tainted or flat out ruined"
A problem is Americans, well all people with a national identity, have a pronounced tendency to want to believe they are "great" or greater than they really are.
The American government has spied on its citizens throughout its history, Lincoln did it in the Civil War, happened in World War I, many of the precedents Bush cites are from Roosevelt in World War II, massive spying during McCarthyism and the red scare, and of course Nixon was massively spying on the Americans on his "enemies" list. J. Edgar Hoover cemented his hold on power because he had a file on everyone. Not spying on Americans was a brief respite we had post Nixon because a Democratic Congress was appalled by what Nixon, the CIA and FBI had done. The Republicans hated FISA etc. so all that's happened recently is the Bush administration used 9/11 to dismantle it. Even with FISA there was still spying on Americans, since FISA is mostly a rubber stamp court that seldom denies warrents to spy on Americans when the DOJ comes asking.
As for torture well the U.S. has tortured, massacred etc through much of it history. Its the shit that happens in war, all sides do it, there are just degrees in how much, and how well its brushed under the rug. All we have today is an internet and 24/7 news to focus a floodlight on it so we are more aware of it. Massacres of Native Americans was routine, POW camps in the Civil War were horrors, the U.S. occupation of the Philipines in the early 20th century was met with an insurgency that was met by the U.S. with raw brutality including torture, they had a device to slowly crush skulls as I recall. There were units in Vietnam that ran rampant through Vietnam killing and torturing civilians and guerrillas alike(they look a lot alike).
How easily we forget that, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and confiscated all their property. What the Bush administration has done incarcerating people is pretty tame compared to that.
The Bush administration has been kind of over the top, but the fact is 9/11 gave them a blank check to go over the top, and if you recall back then just about everyone was cheering them on....I guess the bottomline is that we really only have ourselves to blame for the excesses of the Bush administration. We gave them a blank check for six years....and they used it. They were drunk on the power we gave them.
I think I'm saying the idea that in 1999 America was a pillar of virtue and its all Bush's fault that now we are a horror is really not true. Bush made things worse but America has periodically had serious issues in all the areas you list, usually anytime there is a war on, or there is a third world dictator we want to prop up to protect U.S. economic interest. Thanks to global communication everyone is just more aware of it now.
"USA has never really been expanisionist in the same sense..."
Whoa that is a whopper. The U.S. has been VERY expansionist for all of its 200+ years. They even had a term for it, Manifest Destiny
As you recall it started as 13 little colonies on the east coast, and even those were carved out with imperial expansion based on genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous peoples. Texas was seized from Mexico by a migration of Americans in to it who rebelled and took it from Mexico. The SouthWest was taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American war. The Spanish American war was largely a concoction of the Hearst Newspaper empire used to seize control of Cuba and the Phillipines from the Spanish. The Phillipines was occupied by the U.S. until World War II and the U.S. waged a bloody counter insurgency against Phillipines rebels for much of that period. The U.S. then propped up a corrupt dictator named Marcos keeping it as a defacto colony until recently.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the basis for the U.S. to exert extensive control over all of Central and South America. It lead to Banana Republics throughout much of the Hemisphere. The United Fruit company backed by American marines insured regimes throughout the region were friendly to American interests and United Fruit's profit margins. These regimes were typically brutal right wing dictatorships whose only redeeming quality was they protected American business and political interests.
The U.S. has engineered the overthrow of countless regimes around the world for at least a century and most of the regimes they've installed haven't been enlightened or democratic or improvements over what was there before. Whenever the democratic process in some country elected someone who was.... gasp..... Socialist a U.S. backed coup was sure to follow. You see America has always touted Democracy to the world but only when the right people win.
Its just a complete and utter travesty for American's and America to paint themselves and purveyors of freedom and democracy around the globe. The history just isn't there to support the claim. After all from Jamestown until the Civil War America was one of the world's leading slave states. From the end of the civil war until very recently America was an apartheid state segregating minorties.
Russia and the U.S. are two peas in pod, they've spent the last century trying to carve up the world, mostly at the rest of the world's expense and it appear this is likely to continue. Russia is feeling its oats lately because it is sitting on top of vast oil and gas reserves and it and a trade s
The U.S. trying to force a missile defense in to Europe is a ridiculously provactive power play. There is no threat to Europe from Iran, this is just designed to further antagonize Russia and continue the campaign to expand NATO to the gates of Moscow. If Moscow wants to bring Europe to its knees all it has to do is shut off its gas pipelines in the middle of winter.
" It won't be long before the European factory is, say, using only 1/3 the energy of a US factory"
Coal is cheap and the U.S. and China have vast reserves of it. As long as you can throw people at mining it or strip mine it, and you can stand the mercury and CO2 pollution there isn't going to be any particularly serious energy related spike there. Why do you think the U.S. and China are on a binge of building coal fired power plants. Industries dependent on oil and gas could certainly benefit from the efficiency you cite.
As an aside you have to love the Bush administration and coal industry propaganda about "Clean Coal" technology. Last time I looked this is still at least a decade away if if will be done at all. They can use the term now though in saturation advertising as they build lots of coal fired power plants, which while cleaner than they were, are still spewing vast quantities of CO2 and some mercury. Everyone thinks they are "Clean" though thanks to advertising.
The critical point about greenhouse emissions control is it is an extremely intricate economic, political and environmental maneuver. You try to control CO2 and you do it wrong there is a high probability of unintended consequences and a net worsening of the situation. There isn't exactly a right and wrong way to do it, its more likely to be a case of some people will win and some will lose under a CO2 control regime which is why its so controversial.
Businesses and nations which ignore emission controls are almost assured to benefit economically. If they use cheap power, have no carbon taxes to pay and no expensive pollution controls they will kill their competitors who are facing such controls, they already are(a.k.a China). The trading regime instituted in Europe has already caused stress to clean efficient plants trying to control their emissions because they face competitors in places like Morocco with no control regime who undersell them. If this happens on a large scale Europe looks great on the CO2 front but only because all the big emitters have gone off shore to Asia and Africa. The end result could be a net worsening of the climate problem because there will be a bunch of dirty plants spewing CO2 in all the "developing" world replacing cleaner but too expensive ones in developed countries.
The key point to CO2 control is it has to be applied globally and evenly or it isn't going to work. If it isn't applied globally countries who aren't participating have to have exports heavily taxed so they are forced to pay for abusing CO2 emissions. The Kyoto protocol is indeed deeply flawed because it exerts little control over India and China because they are "developing" countries but their CO2 emissions are exploding. If you crack down on the U.S., Japan and Europe but leave India and China unchecked you will just give them yet another competitive advantage. They will build even more really dirty power plants and factories and the global CO2 situation will get worse not better.
A cynic could say CO2 controls on developed countries is just another ploy to further devastate the economies of developed countries to the benefit China, India and other cheap off shoring destinations.
In China's defense they are realizing their massive abuse of coal is an ecological disaster in the making, or already made, and they are undertaking a massive switch to nuclear energy. This is a key reason processed Uranium has gone from $10/lb to $130/lb since 2003 and Toshiba bought Westinghouse's Nuclear division, to build China nukes. They are building something like 32 nuclear power plants by 2020 and 10 times that by 2050. They've also broken ground on a huge nuclear waste dump. Going nuclear is obviously a double edged sword but it is one of the not so many viable options to what China is doing now, throwing up rat trap coal fired power plants at a furious pace, with no pollution controls, terrible efficiency and which are spewing vast quantities of CO2 and Mercury in to the air.
.. in gaming with Ventrillo and Teamspeak. It boggles the mind that companies are still using horribly painful teleconferencing services and phones to do teleconferencing. If companies just setup well organized and managed Ventrillo services, with an associated chat channel like guild chat in WOW, it would probably revolutionize business communication with almost no new R&D. About the only thing you need is a virtual white board that works integrated with ventrillo or teamspeak for engineering discussions and those are available. For weekly meetings I would take a point and click on a Ventrillo channel any day over punching numbers in to a phone teleconferencing system. Would also take a Ventrillo list of people in the channel over trying to sort out whose on and whose not in a teleconference.
In my opinion the benefits of videoconferencing are overrated. Sure sometimes visual cues help you understand subtleties of meaning but most of the time it really adds very little to the substance of the communication, and instead results in people focusing more on appearance and dress of their coworkers instead of the substance of whats being said.
Ventrillo and Teamspeak are light years ahead in ease of use, ease of management and cost. If you talk the WoW guild paradigm and translated it in to a channel for geographically scattered sales or engineering teams to shoot the shit, brainstorm and generally stay in touch it would probably help most businesses. Only challenge is to keep it from becoming an out of control distraction like a lot of WoW guild chats. It would also be a pretty good performance evaluation tool, its pretty easy to spot idiots in WoW guild chat.
$16K IS chump change compared to what you could make exploiting a flaw in this critical infrastructure or selling it to people who would. Of course maybe you would prefer the $16K over the much higher return and a potential criminal record.
Expanding Iraq oil production, preferably under the influence of U.S. oil companies was certainly a motivator in the invasion. Not sure anyone real knows all the motives outside the inner circle of the Bush administration. They obviously tipped the fact it was one of their priorities by guarding the oil ministry, oil fields and oil infrastructure after Saddam fell and letting a museum full of priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization be looted along with just about everything else.
With Iraq embargoed under Saddam it was significantly under producing. It peaked at 3.7 million barrels in 1979 and was down to 2.6 million barrel in 2003 before the invasion. The oil fields were under a mix of Russian, French and Chinese companies under Saddam as I recall which may be one reason they were cool to the idea of toppling Saddam. It certainly would have eased current oil shortages and price spikes if Iraqis had welcomed us with the roses and oil production had gone up instead of down, or barely held even.
The company that announced the big Anbar reserves is a U.S. company, Colorado based IHS, according to this article though its not clear yet which oil companies are going to get to develop the new fields. U.S. and British companies certainly have an inside track at the moment since the U.S. has the Iraqi government by the jugular. As I recall Poland's foreign minister admitted a key reason Poland joined the coalition of the willing in 2003 was to gain an inside track on some oil business.
The discovery of oil in Anbar probably is the single best shot there is for peace in Iraq. It is a seismic shift in Iraq more important than the misguided troop surge or anything else that's happened since 2003. This discovery may be why Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar have turned on Al Qaeda recently. Those tribal leaders are now realizing they are sitting on their own gold mine and its in their interest to work with the global oil establishment to develop it and cash in on it. Prior to this it appeared the Kurds and the Shia were going to keep their oil fields to themselves and the Sunnis were facing long term poverty, which was a driving force behind the Sunni insurgency. The Iraqi government could, if they are wise, let each of the three factions have control of their own oil reserves and go their own way and Iraq could suddenly become a peaceful success story. If the Shia try to screw the Sunni's out of the new oil revenues from Anbar the war in Iraq will never end. People who are poised to reap billions in oil revenue have very little motivation to wage a guerrilla war.
The whole dynamic of Saddam's Iraq is the Sunni were reaping the lion's share of the oil revenue while the Kurds and Shia were screwed, and currently that situation has been completely reversed. If all three factions have their own huge oil fields and revenues from them the whole dynamic changes.
"support the person we wanted to take control of post-war Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi."
Charlie Rose had an interview recently with 3 Iraqi journalists, all of whom are currently in the U.S. studying Journalism, or really escaping the oppressive violence and smoldering pit that is their homeland thanks to George W, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Rummy and Wolfy.
One of them spelled it out, pretty much all the Iraqi exiles who swept in to take over Iraq after the invasion are viewed as "thieves" by the Iraqi people. Chalabi is at the top of the list since he is still under indictment in Jordan for a gigantic bank fraud.
One of facts about Iraq a lot of people seem to gloss over is there is a gigantic pool of oil riches in that country and the people who gain control over the government can enrich themselves and their friends with that control. EVERYONE jockeying for control there, Iraqi and American alike, is angling for control over its oil wealth because they know if they get it they will end up like Saudi princes. This simple reason is why the Shia have zero incentive to pass legislation to equitably share the oil wealth with Kurds and Sunnis and without that there is ALWAYS going to be a civil war there. I'm not sure you will every strike a deal everyone will consider fair.
A recent report suggests large quantities of Iraq's oil is disappearing in to the black market to enrich the people who have gained control over the wells or pipelines, who are mostly Shia in the South and Kurds in the north (though its also possible oil production is also being exaggerated).
I'm not really sure Iraq will ever find peace as long as there is oil wealth to fight over. The fight for control of oil is a source of strife everyplace it is found today. The original Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was for control of oil, and I'm not sure the corrupt Emir of Kuwait has any more right to control it than Saddam did. The genocide in Darfur is largely over the oil fields there. A key element in the coup attempt in Venezuela was over oil fields which were recently nationalized. In Russia a bunch of kleptocrats suckered Yeltsin in to giving them control of the oil and gas fields and they got rich, Putin threw the ring leader in jail and seized control of the oil for himself and his dictatorial government. The Saudi royal family rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist to insure they get the lions share of the oil riches. Not much chance of real Democracy in Saudi Arabia because the Saudi royal family wouldn't get most of the oil revenue in a real Democracy. Iran is in the mess its in after an American backed coup threw out a popular leader who nationalized the oil fields at Britain's expense. The U.S. installed the Shah as dictator who gave U.S. companies control over the oil fields to Britain's dismay. The Shah was so hated he was overthrown in favor of the Ayatollah so there is a repressive theocracy there that hates the U.S. to this day as a result. Its kind of routine in countries on the west coast of Africa with oil wealth for the people in power to pocket much of the oil wealth while most of their countrymen starve.
Not sure you will find Peace in Iraq until you just partition the country, let the ethnic cleansing finish, and let each of the three factions control their own oil fields. The Sunnis were the odd man out but recent oil discoveries in their base in Anbar province suggest all three groups could have their own oil fields. The down side to this is Turkey will probably never tolerate an independent Kurdistan waging a guerrilla war to try to seize the Kurdish regions of Turkey.
I was going to place that caveat in my post but it was already getting long. It certainly is helping Boeing bury Airbus because they have a 20%+ price advantage on airline deals which are usually done in dollars.
The obvious flaw is our biggest trade problem is with China, and since the Chinese peg the Yuan to the dollar we can't gain any trade balance there because the currencies aren't floatng against each other to correct the forces driving the trade balance. To peg the Yuan the Chinese buy lots of treasuries so they are subsidizing U.S. debt and gaining increasing economic leverage over the U.S. at the same time.
As someone else posted here, the U.S. increasingly has very little to export.
Devaluing your currency does help competitiveness but it is a very dangerous game. As your currency devalues it makes foreigners stop investing in your economy or currency which causes it to devalue further. If the world decides dollars are worthless and switches to selling oil in Euros or pounds then as our currency devalues the price of oil explodes and then oil import completely offset any economic advantage of a lower dollar.
The only reason the U.S. economy and the stock market isn't in a complete shambles is because most big U.S. companies have globalized so they do great exploiting cheap Chinese and Indian labor and selling in foreign markets while the fundamentals of the U.S. economy is mostly in really poor shape.
I forgot to add, this is a really inaccurate statement. Satelite imagery of China can't be and isn't "forbidden". All those commercial satelites and a bunch of military satellites don't suddenly go blind when they are flying over China(unless China lases them some day). If Google doesn't have imagery of China its more likely just because China has bullied either them or the commercial satellite companies in to not posting it.
In a lot of ways its China's loss. I imagine there are all kinds of economically useful applications for that data they are screwing themselves out of. And its not like they are hiding anything from the U.S., E.U. or Russian satellites which are the potential military adversaries that matter.
I'm really skeptical there is actually that much in satellite imagery to really hide since you CAN'T hide it from adversaries with their own spy satellites. Thinking you are going to really hinder a terrorist attack by denying them an an overhead view of a target is kind of delusional. Terrorist and insurgent attacks will adapt to the information they have.
Yea but that has nothing to do with the Chinese handing out imagery of the U.S. and U.S. military assets around the world.
I don't think this General was worried about suppressing detailed imagery of China on the Internet.
The one thing in this General's court is its true that Russia, China, India and the EU are probably about as paranoid as the U.S. is about the free flow of information they don't control.
Exactly. The U.S. bureaucracy in particular, and America in general has such a massive dose of arrogance they are under the delusion they can still dictate anything and everything to the whole planet.
90% of whats gone wrong in the last six years is almost entirely due to a acute arrogance mixed with bad case of ignorance on the part of the people in the Bush administration. That's a really dangerous cocktail.
Russia, China, the E.U., Japan and India all have respectable capabilities to build and launch satellites, and more are joining the club. When the Space Shuttle is scraped there is probably going to be a very long window in which Russia and China will be able to put men in to orbit and the U.S. wont. The U.S. tries to bottle up satellite imagery I'm sure Russia or China will fill the void just to poke a finger in the eye of the U.S.
To me this just sounds like another round of post 9/11 fear mongering.
The U.S. seriously needs to wake up to the fact that the biggest threat to its National security is its massive trade and budget deficits, broken education system, energy dependence on parts of the world it can no long control, and a plunging dollar because no one has confidence in the U.S. anymore.
If the U.S. were spending money on those issues instead of on an out of control defense industrial complex:
A. It would be a lot more prosperous and secure B. The rest of the world would hate the U.S. a lot less and have fewer reasons to want to attack it
The best defense program the U.S. could invest in right now is a serious effort to improve car mileage ASAP and then to develop clean, renewable and affordable energy sources.
"Providing our nation with a wide variety of local legal options had nothing to do with it"
Uh yea it did. That was exactly the point. People in the Southern states didn't want to be dictated to by people in the North and vice versa. As you recall the U.S. fought the bloodiest war in its history because a Northern biased Federal government wanted to abolish slavery, and the South being very dependent on plantation agriculture didn't appreciate the intrusion. Various states a predisposition to have very different views on social issues, economics, taxation, religion then and now.
A strong central government has advantages in things like international relations, defense, sometimes economics. Its a reason Europe has rushed in to the arms of the EU in an effort to improve its global position, efficiency and economics against the U.S., India and China.
A strong central government tends to be extremely bad for things like excessive taxation, privacy invasion, bureaucracy, inefficiency, wasting tax money(leading to more excessive taxation), foreign adventurism, etc.
The biggest danger of centralized government is a political party scrapes together a slim majority to gain control over the levers of power at the national level and then inflicts all kinds of mischief on a big minority. For example, the last six years have seen an ultra conservative, fascist leaning, right wing Christian block forged out of the South and Midwest doing things that the majority of the people in more liberal states in the more liberal NorthEast and Pacific coast completely abhor.
States rights is an almost universally good thing in that it allows states to settle controversial issues in a way acceptable to most of the people in that state, like abortion, gay marriage and civil unions, gun control, taxation, government subsidized social programs etc. If the right or left lean of the state you are in is unacceptable to you, you have the option of moving to another state without the massive trauma of emigrating to another country more akin to your views. This happens on a wide scale as young liberals routinely migrate out of the rigidity of the bible belts of the South and Midwest to the liberal coasts. Socialists have done just this with a pretty extensive migration to Vermont where they have influenced legislation and pick law makers attune to their views (one of their senators is a Socialist independent caucusing with the Democrats). Me personally I have no use for Vermont's socialism, to much taxation and intrusion in to people's lives, but its nice there is an enclave in the U.S. where socialists can feel at home.
If you want a big bureaucracy dictating every aspect of your life, taxing you in to the ground, and completely unresponsive to your views then yes a big centralized government is for you. Me I would be overjoyed if the Federal government was gutted overnight, and all the power and money it has usurped were returned to the states.
Decentralization, would if nothing else, prevent another debacle like the last 6 years where one group of completely incompetent people managed to seize power and have pretty much wrecked the nation as a whole. In a states right system at least the carnage would have been confined to an individual state like Texas which deserves the carnage for giving George W. his leg up.
" If WoW has proven anything, it's overwhelmingly that players want an extremely narrow, object-oriented game environment for the most part. They need objectives spelled out for them extremely precisely."
This is a very insightful comment. The same applies to Second Life. Second Life comes across as intensely boring to me because there really aren't any really obvious objectives in it other than:
- Start a club and be an online DJ while peoples avatars run a dance program - Figure out innovative ways to milk other people for Linden dollars - Virtual sex, but ya know... virtual sex is extremely stupid - Chatting
Its why its often said in Second Life that is more like No Life, because you have to have No Life to waste time in Second Life. Its just not really a very interesting place, and it is, as you said because there aren't really many interesting objectives built in to it.
I think I need to reread Neal Stepheson's Snowcrash because it managed to make virtual worlds seem really interesting, something most virtual worlds today really aren't, and I need to remember why the concept was so interesting in his book.
WoW manages better than most because it does pull together large numbers of people, who are climbing over each others bodies trying to attain goals. It is a pretty interesting slice of life, though I quickly tire of being bombarded with all the negative personality traits of the people that play it. It gets really old seeing people back stab each other, and having people share their substance abuse, sexual issues, sick sense of humour or absence there of etc. The other down side to WoW is it is a horrendous time sink and it does in fact became extremely boring and repetitive.
I tried LOTRO during the free beta but it came across as just a really boring regurgitation of its MMORPG predecessors. The artwork was horrible and drab after you've played in the rich looking WoW world. It felt like EQ in it is early days but even drabber. The fact that it had vague hints of Tolkien's mythology behind it wasn't even close to redeeming it in my opinion.
" If you're on the side of capitalism, support China"
China isn't really Capitalist in the free market sense of the word. Fascist is probably a more accurate term. China embraced capitalism but only under extensive state control of the Communist Party. When big companies and the state get in bed together this is kind of what Fascism is. The Communist party elite made this leap because it allowed them to get rich, something that was awkward to do under Maoist ideology, OK more like forbidden to do and it would land you in a reeducation camp.
The Communist party elite used their control over the state and its resources to create multi-billion dollar companies over which they and their family members are often given a controlling interest. Of course the U.S., Russia and a host of other countries have seen politicians hand out huge windfalls to the politically well connected so this isn't exactly unique. The naive fail to understand the draw of becoming a politician because the pay is bad and the work sucks. The motivation for many is it allows you to enrich yourself and your friends under the table once you've gained control over the levers of power and all the wealth most governments control.
China is really disturbingly like Nazi German was in the '30's. Americans were rushing to invest in Nazi Germany in the 30's too because its economy was booming at a time the rest of the world was in depression. It was a profitable place to invest. Fascism can be an extremely efficient economic system if you strike the right balance between state control and greed. Too much state control and not enough greed people lose the incentive to make money, and central planning isn't nimble enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Some central planning and state control and the injection of large amounts of state funds at the right places can remove barriers free markets might not and really accelerate growth. A police state is also really good at keeping workers in line.
Fascism became a dirty word thanks to World War II but its been making a stealth come back ever since and there is more than a scent of it in Russia, China, U.S., U.K., Israel and Columbia to name just a few.
"This is not some big conspiracy theory as I'm sure many people here will immediately cry out about."
You are probably right.....but you can certainly wonder about the motivations. If you look at the kind of operations the U.S. military is engaging in in Iraq you have to figure there is really very little critically sensitive data to divulge and most of it is very short lived. Its not like there are many D-Day invasions which compelled the massive long term secrecy you found in World War II. About the biggest secret you will find is a raid on a house where they think there is someone from Al-Qaeda or who is aiding the insurgency. You would figure the people involved in those operations would be running security tight enough that emails and blogs wouldn't even enter in to the picture. These are also very short lived secrets.
The biggest source of leaks about operations in Iraq is the Iraqi military and police which are massively infiltrated by insurgents, militias and probably Al Qaeda. They recruit just about everyone who walks in the door. The U.S. military can't tell them anything sensitive because it leaks immediately. The Iraqi security forces are such an infiltrated and biased disaster they will either never be able to take over Iraqi security or if they do they will become a tool for their various masters known of whom are the Iraqi government.
I could maybe see a case for restricting blogging since insurgents could be reading those on a daily basis and gleaning intelligence from them. Censoring all personal email, especially to family, is completely over the top in this day and age.
If you want to dream up a conspiracy theory to explain this, the best one is the U.S. is in the middle of Plan A, a troop surge to try to stabilize Iraq. There is no plan B, other than Plan A has to work. Congress is on the verge of cutting funds for the war and force the U.S. out of Iraq especially if Plan A doesn't work. The Bush administrations only strategy for success is to make Plan A work. Sometime around September some generals are going to parade through Congress and tell everyone Plan A is working whether it really is or not. The military and the Bush administration have a strong motivation to suppress all channels of communication by which Congress or the American people might hear that Plan A really isn't working. I can assure you the #1 channel of communication the military wants to suppress with this plan is officers and soldiers giving their Congressmen an earful, via email, about how messed up Iraq really is, and there have been some emails to Congressmen just like that over the last 4 years.
Operational security is certainly always important for the military, but censorship is just as much about propaganda, and the military trying to shape what everyone thinks about whats happening in a war.
"Could this be because Reagan ended up outspending the russians and with his famous MAD scenario, took the only real leverage the Russians had off the table?"
Its more likely the Soviet Union collapsed be because the Russians foolishly got bogged down in a decade long war in Afghanistan. A war that tore Russia apart from the inside. The scarred veterans returning from the horrors of Afghanistan were an integral part of the uprising against the Communist party that sent them there.
The only credit I'm willing to give Reagan in toppling the Soviet Union was the weapons he gave the Muhjadeen. As a cruel and ironic twist it turns out he was also helping build the Taliban and Al Qaeda at the same time. Reagan's arms build up had no clearly defined role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its main accomplishment was to enrich U.S. defense contractors. Most of the weapons he spent massive sums on were a joke, Star Wars never did anything worthwhile, his battleships were billion dollar artillery pieces that just diverted funds from more useful projects, and the B-2 and B-1B were a complete joke that are largely shunned to this day in favor of the B-52 which cost a fraction of the price.
I would give far more credit to Pope John Paul and Gorbachev for toppling the U.S.S.R than Reagan. They used peaceful persuasion, and accomplished a lot more, than squandering money on staggeringly expensive and largely ineffective weapons.
"Why should I have to go outside US media outlets to find out how many "insurgents" we are killing vs. how many soldiers we are losing."
Chances are you will never find any source that will reliably report how many "insurgents" are being killed in an insurgency. It is a notoriously hard number to arrive at for a host of reasons. The main one being "insurgents" don't wear uniforms and dog tags. They basically look like civilians except they are packing, and they can pick up or drop a weapon in a heart beat. And of course in a war zone real civilians often pack weapons too because they live in a very dangerous place. In Iraq it is legal for every household to have a gun, and the AK-47 is the weapon of choice for home defense.
So #1 when you see a body count in an insurgency it is nearly impossible for anyone to sort out the real insurgents from the innocent civilians who got caught in the cross fire. As a result all the bodies get counted as insurgents and you get a gloriously high number that just gets better when you accidentally kill a bunch of civilians.
Point #2 the U.S. military was notorious for inflating its body count in Vietnam. It was the one and only measure of success in Vietnam so the military exaggerated it intentionally and also counted dead civilians as insurgents to inflate it further. As a result body counts became a totally meaningless statistic, no one believed it, and its a key reason its not used now. It would bring back scary echoes of Vietnam. The reason U.S. causalties are reported is because it is a very precise and well known number and it translates directly in to family and friends in the U.S. who have lost someone they loved in a senseless optional war.
All you Bush fan boys so eager to find "success" in Iraq and Afghanistan just need to pack it in. There is almost never anything resembling success by an occupying power against an insurgency, any insurgency. The more people you kill the more animosity you create amongst all their friends and relatives. You can clear and hold territory as is the current "strategy" for "success" in Iraq and the insurgency just moves where you aren't, which it has in Iraq, and when you get tired of holding a place and leave they just move back in.
I recently heard the most insightful comment on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think on Charlie Rose, but I can't remember who said it. Insurgencies are something you have to try to keep a lid on an let run their course, if you can afford it and stand it. Once they get rolling they almost never end until both sides just get tired of the slaughter and decide to stop. That takes a long time. You simply wont stop them with the application of force by the military and police.
The only winning strategy in Iraq was to not make the horrendously stupid mistakes that were made right after the war, 1) insufficient boots on the ground to prevent looting and lawlessness, 2) Debaathification which insured all the Baathist Sunni's jumped on the insurgent bandwagon 3) disbanding the military and police which created even more unemployed to join the insurgency and a worse security vacuum, 4) creating a massively corrupt rebuilding campaign that was more to enrich loyal Republicans than rebuild Iraq or keep Iraqis employed so they could feed their families. At this point there is really no winning strategy in Iraq. If you wanted to win you had to do it in a few critical months after Saddam was toppled, but you had to do everything right then and the U.S. did every thing wrong.
Afghanistan is more complex but isn't exactly going that great either. It has turned in to a completely corrupted narco state sending massive quantities of opiates around the world, far worse than anything that happened under the Taliban. I don't think you can call a state a success whose one and only real export is opium.
Slashdot Mirror
"but by fixing it made the other party look excruciatingly ridiculous"
Its a nice sound dream, but it doesn't happen because it is quite thourougly impossible in the real world and you can't blame any group of politicians because they can't do anything about it.
The fundamental problem is one party can't fix anything unilaterally in this country. In particular the way the Senate rules are structured you have to have a supermajority, 60 votes, to get anything controversial done. The Dems don't even really have a majority, with Lieberman, being an independent. and in the mix. And of course the Dems don't currently control the White House so if they did ram something through the Senate it would get vetoed.
This system can be a very positive thing because it puts a brake on an malevolent and out of control party like we've had from 2000 to 2006. If the Republicans had changed the Senate rules to do everything on a simple majority, and they really wanted to, it would have been really DANGEROUS since the Republicans could have passed anything they could get 50 Republican votes for in the Senate. Then you would have seen some real abuse of power, worse than we saw. The only thing that stopped this is a gang of ten Republicans and Democrats banded together to stop it because they viewed it as scary to give one part this kind of power.
Unfortunately the Dems failed miserably numerous time from 2000-2006 to use their obstructionist powers to block bad things like the Patriot Act and the war powers act where they gave Bush a blank check to launch aggressive wars, and maybe torture and spy on people. They often didn't filibuster when they probably should have, because it was part of the deal the gang of ten struck.
If you were to see a landslide in 2008 and the Dems got 60 seats in the Senate, the presidency and held the house then they would have the power to do whatever they want and they could fix stuff, but chances are the things they would end up doing would be scary too, different scary from the Republicans doing it, but still very scary.
For the American political system to work you need enlightened politicians, willing to reach across the aisle with civility, to pass good laws. Unfortunately our political system has deteriorated to the point there is no civility or working together in the best interests of the American people. Not sure our political system has really ever worked but its certainly in worse shape now than any point in my lifetime. Unfortunately the only thing it does well is excessive taxation and excessive pork. People say they don't like pork but there is always someone who likes pork and is willing to payoff a politician to get some. I really wish there were total gridlock and the Federal government couldn't pass or fund anything new, and ideally would scale back all the out of control spending of the past.
America would be a lot better and happier place if most of the Federal government were just gone, other than basic self defense force, a minimal judicial system, and a few diplomats. Basically we need to be back to what the Constitution says, where it outlined a minimalist federal government and left most of the power in the hands of the states and the people, no Federal income tax and let the government run tarrifs, like it did for more than a hundred years, though now there are lots of Chinese goods to tax.
"I just see the Guantanamo situation as one step worse"
.... and it was pissing in the wind because most American's are stupid and brainwashed. Americans didn't really care back then when it mattered and something could have been done about it, like in the 2004 elections, when as you recall the Republicans swept to victory in spite of Iraq and Guantanamo.
Not really. Most though not all of the people in Guantanamo are probably bad people who would as soon kill or torture an American as look at one. Most, though certainly not all, probably deserve to be prisoners of war. I wouldn't be surprised if the harsh treatment probably has yielded some useful information you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, though most information you get from torture is suspect if not useless. The American's being held by Al Qaeda in Iraq are probably getting a lot worse.
Most of the people in the Japanese internment camps were completely innocent men, women and children who were locked up because of the color of their skin and shape of their eyes. In my book that was quite a bit worse than the few hundred bad actors the U.S. is abusing in Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Guantanamo and Abu Graib were no doubt colossal blunders, if for no other reason than the horrible PR they generated. You could do stuff like that 40, 50 and 100 years ago and get away with it because it was so much easier to conceal it or shape the propaganda to make it seem like a good idea. Its not wise to do stupid things in the Internet and cable news era.
If you haven't you should read the 4 part series on Dick Cheney in the Washington Post online this week. It offers a lot of illumination on how Guantanamo and American's embrace of torture came to be, thanks to Dick Cheney and his minions. I'm about the last person to defend Dick Cheney but if you were in charge when 9/11 happened and you wanted to stop it from happening again I could see how he thought what he was doing was in the best interests of the nation. Hindsight being 20/20 obviously it wasn't but hindsight is easy. Cheney was consumed by paranoia post 9/11. If he had done nothing and there had been another catastrophic attack that would have been really bad too. You also have to remember when most of this started Bush/Cheney were on top of the world, could do no wrong, and were widely supported by the American people in everything they did. Most people favored being spied up on if it stopped the next 9/11.
Again back to my original point the American people as a heterogeneous whole are as much to blame for everything that has happened in the last 6 years as any one you can single out in the Bush administration. Laying it all on a few people, and pretending like somehow it wasn't America as a whole that did these bad things, and let these bad things happen, is kind of an easy copout.
"And for me at least, outrage is the first step toward action..."
Maybe it is but its more likely its a first step that will never be followed by a second. Your outrage might have had some value if you had and acted on it in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 but Americans didn't really have any outrage back then which is when it would have done some good. Right now your outrage is at least 4 years late and just piling on at a time when piling on the Bush administration is easy. Its kind of pointless because most of the damage has been done. I had serious outrage back in 2002-2004. I was rabidly against invading Iraq, against Bush/Cheney, against the Republicans
Bush said he was going to close Guantanamo a year ago. Rice, Gates and most of the generals want it shut down, but the fact is Dick Cheney has a complete mastery of all the levers of government, and over George W, and so far no one has come even close to matching him. At the moment as long as he wants Guantanamo open it will be open and the government will be spying on you. There is some talk of him being forced to step down this summer by Republicans who don't want another beating in the 2008 electio
"I've heard of the Syndicate, but they were always in that "tier 2" level of guilds."
Soooo...you are one of those elitist bastards....bastardettes....that 99% of the people in MMORPG's love to hate and not so secretly envy? Or maybe you just play one on Slashdot?
Not sure being in a top end guild in a game that has been dieing ever since WoW and EQ II came is exactly something to gloat about. EQ I deserved to die for no other reason than absence of instances and the absolute horror of people fighting over camps. If you are gonna fixate on being a "top end guild" you probably want to be playing in the big pond as horrible as WoW is, or maybe EvE, a small very elitist pond.
"The largest and most influential guild I've ever heard of would have to be Goonswarm / Goonfleet"
.... its an experiment in virtual worlds. The few hours I spent in it felt a lot more like "no life" rather than "second life" though I suppose if you stick with it and meet interesting people any virtual world can have redeeming value. Simple problem is its extremely hard to make virtual worlds rich and compelling and to make interesting things for people to do and Second Life mostly isn't and hasn't.
Let me guess....you're a member Goonswarm/Goonsfleet.....right?
So did you hurt your arm patting yourself on the back like that?
"online game, including Second Life"
I don't think Second Life really counts as a "game". It is an interesting experiment in virtual worlds...err wait its not really even interesting
"Vote (did change some stuff), do it ... Donate to opposing candidates, do it"
:) I hold my nose and vote for the Democrats because they are only slightly less bad than the Republicans. The point is there is almost nothing you as a private citizen can do about it, so stop kidding yourself. Americans were herded in to the Bush camp due to Clinton weariness and they got locked in there after 9/11. Now they are being herding to the anti Bush camp because Bush is down on his luck and he is an easy target.
I hope you are right but I really doubt the Democrats are going to change much. In particular they lack the votes to do anything meaningful in the Senate, unless the Republicans come on board. When they do the U.S. will probably cut and run in Iraq and it will really explode and oil prices are going to go through the roof.
The key point on Iraq is I don't think your vote really changed much. The thing that changed is Bush administrations incompetence and the incompetence of the Iraq government lost the war in Iraq. The election results, the polls, the outrage are the logical result of the U.S. losing a war and American's have turned on it and are doing something about it now that its to late. Americans overwhelming cheered on Shock and Awe when it looked like America was sweeping to victory. The Germans loved the Nazi's as long as they were winning wars. Americans would still love Bush if he hadn't lost in Iraq.
Your vote isn't going to do much about Bush/Cheney other than deny them a rubber stamp Congress, and lead to a bunch of tiresome investigations that will also lead to nothing substantive.
" You're doing what now"
I'm not doing jack about it...other than rant on Slashdot
America has a two party system, with two completely corrupted parties and horrible politicians. The deck is completely stacked against a working political system so you are going to have a really bad government...deal with it....unless you are really great and enlightened leader, can get elected President, get Congress to do you bidding and fix a completely broken country.
Everything you've seen in the last 5 years was pretty much inevitable in the wake of 9/11. When a country is attacked like that there is ALWAYS a knee jerk reaction, civil liberties are trashed, people are spied on, wars are launched, people are hurt. As bad as 9/11 was Al Qaeda's actions were genius because the inevitable self inflicted wounds that followed were far worse than the damage from the original attack. If our leaders had been enlightened they wouldn't have changed a thing post 9/11 other than hunt down Bin Laden and kill him, strengthen civil liberties instead of strip them and stayed the hell away from Iraq.
You still don't appreciate the significance of the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor. Splitting hairs on how good or bad they were treated is foolishness on your part. The fact is they were stripped of all their civil liberties, en masse, by a Democratic President who is worshiped in many circles. IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME KIND OF THING YOU ARE RANTING AT BUSH FOR. It was due to exactly the same forces at work now, retaliation for a sneak attack, it was done by Democrats then and Republicans now. Its not something you can just hang all the blame on Bush and Republicans for, its just what people do in nation states when attacked, its bad but its an inevitable part of human nature and you aren't going to change it.
Not sure I follow your point. The whole point is we will look on all the excesses of the Bush administration exactly the same way in the future, but the next time there is a good reason for something resembling a war we will repeat them...again and again and again. Abuse is just an unavoidable consequence of giving flawed people great power. The only thing that has happened lately is:
A. the President and VP we gave the power to were much more flawed than usual
B. they were given way more power than usual thanks to 9/11 and political opposition(the Democrats) who collapsed
George W. had some massive well known personality flaws that were completely glossed over when Americans went in to the voting booth, alcoholic, drug use, draft dodger, borderline deserter when it came to his National Guard responsibilities. He was just a spoiled rotten preppy, with bad grades and a weak mind, who played his family name and bare knuckle politics in to a job for which he was obviously never qualified and he's massively abused it since he got there.
Not sure its going to get better in 2008 since all the people in the current huge presidential field look pretty deeply flawed too. I don't think any really great people will go within a country mile of the insanity of politics today so we get a bunch of really flawed leaders who want power, shouldn't be trusted it but are.
"Nixon is the only "modern day" president on your list (sry, i'm only 30), and he got impeached by BOTH parties"
A. He didn't get impeached for spying on Americans, he got impeached for Watergate and the coverup that followed.
B. I think you would be naive if you think Eisenhower, Johnson, Reagan, Bush 1 and Clinton haven't spied on Americans. The NSA has had a huge capacity under Echelon to do so
C. You glossed over the fact all administrations HAVE been spying on American's since Nixon. As I said they just had to go the rubber stamp FISA court to get a warrant, FISA almost never rejects a request, so it was a very minimal check on abuse. The Bush administration just did away with it to save on the nearly pointless paperwork.
", but to compare taking away property with torture is just insane"
Wow you sure did minimize that. It was way past taking away their property. Whole families, a whole people, were locked up in squalid concentration camps for "the duration" without any recourse to the courts. I think you missed the point. It was a wholesale denial of basic due process, based on ethnicity, and due process was one of the items on your list. It was exactly what the Bush administration does now to Muslims except on a grander scale.
I'm sure if you had been one of them you would have a different opinion on the trauma of being stripped of all your belongings and having your entire family imprisoned indefinitely when you had done nothing wrong.
"The presidents that I've lived through... Regean, Bush I, Clinton"
I think you are pretty naive then. None of those presidents had 9/11 on their watch if they had they would have gone off the deep end too. The Reagan administration was not a pillar of virtue. They ran a dirty war in Central America, they armed what was to become Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, invaded Granada based on pure fabrication, etc. If Reagan had 9/11 on his watch that administration would have gone over the top too.
I'm pretty sure Rendition, snatching people and spiriting them away to secret prisons was an established program under Clinton if not before. The Bush administration just dramatically escalated it post 9/11.
"I've never "given the president a blank check"
Have you done anything to oppose it besides pointless ranting on slashdot. Did you go to any protests, get arrested, carry signs at a Presidential visit and get locked in a pen. Did you do.....anything? OK...then yes you along with everyone else gave your President a blank check to do everything he's done.
"Aren't you a republican?"
Geez spare me the name calling and painting me with a brush when you have no possible clue what color I wear. If you got the gist of my post the Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for all the absuses you listed. The Democrats helped vote in the Patriot Act and they helped give Bush a sweeping expansion of his powers when they voted in a resolution that gave him authority to attack just about anyone he felt like, and do whatver he liked in the "War on Terrorism" after 9/11. The Democrats are just as much to blame as anyone else. If they had voted in unison against the patriot act and the war resolution they might have a leg to stand on, they don't.
I think your problem is you are kind of young and very short on historical perspective. Big governments in general and America's is no exception, have always abused their power and probably always will. It take some enormous will on the part of the people being governed to prevent it, and American's completely lack that will, especially lately. As I said about the only thing different now is there are a lot more diverse communication channels now so you are somewhat more aware of the abuses. The other fatal flaw in the Bush administration was they were so incompetent they basically lost the war in Iraq so everyone turned on them. If they had won, like they though they would, they would have swept on to Iran and Syria, they would still controll Congress and Americans would still be cheering them on. Everyone loves a winner no matter how horrible they really are.
"nearly everything that I would have listed as to why our country was great BEFORE bush came along has been tainted or flat out ruined"
A problem is Americans, well all people with a national identity, have a pronounced tendency to want to believe they are "great" or greater than they really are.
The American government has spied on its citizens throughout its history, Lincoln did it in the Civil War, happened in World War I, many of the precedents Bush cites are from Roosevelt in World War II, massive spying during McCarthyism and the red scare, and of course Nixon was massively spying on the Americans on his "enemies" list. J. Edgar Hoover cemented his hold on power because he had a file on everyone. Not spying on Americans was a brief respite we had post Nixon because a Democratic Congress was appalled by what Nixon, the CIA and FBI had done. The Republicans hated FISA etc. so all that's happened recently is the Bush administration used 9/11 to dismantle it. Even with FISA there was still spying on Americans, since FISA is mostly a rubber stamp court that seldom denies warrents to spy on Americans when the DOJ comes asking.
As for torture well the U.S. has tortured, massacred etc through much of it history. Its the shit that happens in war, all sides do it, there are just degrees in how much, and how well its brushed under the rug. All we have today is an internet and 24/7 news to focus a floodlight on it so we are more aware of it. Massacres of Native Americans was routine, POW camps in the Civil War were horrors, the U.S. occupation of the Philipines in the early 20th century was met with an insurgency that was met by the U.S. with raw brutality including torture, they had a device to slowly crush skulls as I recall. There were units in Vietnam that ran rampant through Vietnam killing and torturing civilians and guerrillas alike(they look a lot alike).
How easily we forget that, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and confiscated all their property. What the Bush administration has done incarcerating people is pretty tame compared to that.
The Bush administration has been kind of over the top, but the fact is 9/11 gave them a blank check to go over the top, and if you recall back then just about everyone was cheering them on....I guess the bottomline is that we really only have ourselves to blame for the excesses of the Bush administration. We gave them a blank check for six years....and they used it. They were drunk on the power we gave them.
I think I'm saying the idea that in 1999 America was a pillar of virtue and its all Bush's fault that now we are a horror is really not true. Bush made things worse but America has periodically had serious issues in all the areas you list, usually anytime there is a war on, or there is a third world dictator we want to prop up to protect U.S. economic interest. Thanks to global communication everyone is just more aware of it now.
"USA has never really been expanisionist in the same sense..."
.... gasp..... Socialist a U.S. backed coup was sure to follow. You see America has always touted Democracy to the world but only when the right people win.
Whoa that is a whopper. The U.S. has been VERY expansionist for all of its 200+ years. They even had a term for it, Manifest Destiny
As you recall it started as 13 little colonies on the east coast, and even those were carved out with imperial expansion based on genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous peoples. Texas was seized from Mexico by a migration of Americans in to it who rebelled and took it from Mexico. The SouthWest was taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American war. The Spanish American war was largely a concoction of the Hearst Newspaper empire used to seize control of Cuba and the Phillipines from the Spanish. The Phillipines was occupied by the U.S. until World War II and the U.S. waged a bloody counter insurgency against Phillipines rebels for much of that period. The U.S. then propped up a corrupt dictator named Marcos keeping it as a defacto colony until recently.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the basis for the U.S. to exert extensive control over all of Central and South America. It lead to Banana Republics throughout much of the Hemisphere. The United Fruit company backed by American marines insured regimes throughout the region were friendly to American interests and United Fruit's profit margins. These regimes were typically brutal right wing dictatorships whose only redeeming quality was they protected American business and political interests.
The U.S. has engineered the overthrow of countless regimes around the world for at least a century and most of the regimes they've installed haven't been enlightened or democratic or improvements over what was there before. Whenever the democratic process in some country elected someone who was
Its just a complete and utter travesty for American's and America to paint themselves and purveyors of freedom and democracy around the globe. The history just isn't there to support the claim. After all from Jamestown until the Civil War America was one of the world's leading slave states. From the end of the civil war until very recently America was an apartheid state segregating minorties.
Russia and the U.S. are two peas in pod, they've spent the last century trying to carve up the world, mostly at the rest of the world's expense and it appear this is likely to continue. Russia is feeling its oats lately because it is sitting on top of vast oil and gas reserves and it and a trade s
The U.S. trying to force a missile defense in to Europe is a ridiculously provactive power play. There is no threat to Europe from Iran, this is just designed to further antagonize Russia and continue the campaign to expand NATO to the gates of Moscow. If Moscow wants to bring Europe to its knees all it has to do is shut off its gas pipelines in the middle of winter.
" It won't be long before the European factory is, say, using only 1/3 the energy of a US factory"
Coal is cheap and the U.S. and China have vast reserves of it. As long as you can throw people at mining it or strip mine it, and you can stand the mercury and CO2 pollution there isn't going to be any particularly serious energy related spike there. Why do you think the U.S. and China are on a binge of building coal fired power plants. Industries dependent on oil and gas could certainly benefit from the efficiency you cite.
As an aside you have to love the Bush administration and coal industry propaganda about "Clean Coal" technology. Last time I looked this is still at least a decade away if if will be done at all. They can use the term now though in saturation advertising as they build lots of coal fired power plants, which while cleaner than they were, are still spewing vast quantities of CO2 and some mercury. Everyone thinks they are "Clean" though thanks to advertising.
The critical point about greenhouse emissions control is it is an extremely intricate economic, political and environmental maneuver. You try to control CO2 and you do it wrong there is a high probability of unintended consequences and a net worsening of the situation. There isn't exactly a right and wrong way to do it, its more likely to be a case of some people will win and some will lose under a CO2 control regime which is why its so controversial.
Businesses and nations which ignore emission controls are almost assured to benefit economically. If they use cheap power, have no carbon taxes to pay and no expensive pollution controls they will kill their competitors who are facing such controls, they already are(a.k.a China). The trading regime instituted in Europe has already caused stress to clean efficient plants trying to control their emissions because they face competitors in places like Morocco with no control regime who undersell them. If this happens on a large scale Europe looks great on the CO2 front but only because all the big emitters have gone off shore to Asia and Africa. The end result could be a net worsening of the climate problem because there will be a bunch of dirty plants spewing CO2 in all the "developing" world replacing cleaner but too expensive ones in developed countries.
The key point to CO2 control is it has to be applied globally and evenly or it isn't going to work. If it isn't applied globally countries who aren't participating have to have exports heavily taxed so they are forced to pay for abusing CO2 emissions. The Kyoto protocol is indeed deeply flawed because it exerts little control over India and China because they are "developing" countries but their CO2 emissions are exploding. If you crack down on the U.S., Japan and Europe but leave India and China unchecked you will just give them yet another competitive advantage. They will build even more really dirty power plants and factories and the global CO2 situation will get worse not better.
A cynic could say CO2 controls on developed countries is just another ploy to further devastate the economies of developed countries to the benefit China, India and other cheap off shoring destinations.
In China's defense they are realizing their massive abuse of coal is an ecological disaster in the making, or already made, and they are undertaking a massive switch to nuclear energy. This is a key reason processed Uranium has gone from $10/lb to $130/lb since 2003 and Toshiba bought Westinghouse's Nuclear division, to build China nukes. They are building something like 32 nuclear power plants by 2020 and 10 times that by 2050. They've also broken ground on a huge nuclear waste dump. Going nuclear is obviously a double edged sword but it is one of the not so many viable options to what China is doing now, throwing up rat trap coal fired power plants at a furious pace, with no pollution controls, terrible efficiency and which are spewing vast quantities of CO2 and Mercury in to the air.
.. in gaming with Ventrillo and Teamspeak. It boggles the mind that companies are still using horribly painful teleconferencing services and phones to do teleconferencing. If companies just setup well organized and managed Ventrillo services, with an associated chat channel like guild chat in WOW, it would probably revolutionize business communication with almost no new R&D. About the only thing you need is a virtual white board that works integrated with ventrillo or teamspeak for engineering discussions and those are available. For weekly meetings I would take a point and click on a Ventrillo channel any day over punching numbers in to a phone teleconferencing system. Would also take a Ventrillo list of people in the channel over trying to sort out whose on and whose not in a teleconference.
In my opinion the benefits of videoconferencing are overrated. Sure sometimes visual cues help you understand subtleties of meaning but most of the time it really adds very little to the substance of the communication, and instead results in people focusing more on appearance and dress of their coworkers instead of the substance of whats being said.
Ventrillo and Teamspeak are light years ahead in ease of use, ease of management and cost. If you talk the WoW guild paradigm and translated it in to a channel for geographically scattered sales or engineering teams to shoot the shit, brainstorm and generally stay in touch it would probably help most businesses. Only challenge is to keep it from becoming an out of control distraction like a lot of WoW guild chats. It would also be a pretty good performance evaluation tool, its pretty easy to spot idiots in WoW guild chat.
$16K IS chump change compared to what you could make exploiting a flaw in this critical infrastructure or selling it to people who would. Of course maybe you would prefer the $16K over the much higher return and a potential criminal record.
Expanding Iraq oil production, preferably under the influence of U.S. oil companies was certainly a motivator in the invasion. Not sure anyone real knows all the motives outside the inner circle of the Bush administration. They obviously tipped the fact it was one of their priorities by guarding the oil ministry, oil fields and oil infrastructure after Saddam fell and letting a museum full of priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization be looted along with just about everything else.
With Iraq embargoed under Saddam it was significantly under producing. It peaked at 3.7 million barrels in 1979 and was down to 2.6 million barrel in 2003 before the invasion. The oil fields were under a mix of Russian, French and Chinese companies under Saddam as I recall which may be one reason they were cool to the idea of toppling Saddam. It certainly would have eased current oil shortages and price spikes if Iraqis had welcomed us with the roses and oil production had gone up instead of down, or barely held even.
The company that announced the big Anbar reserves is a U.S. company, Colorado based IHS, according to this article though its not clear yet which oil companies are going to get to develop the new fields. U.S. and British companies certainly have an inside track at the moment since the U.S. has the Iraqi government by the jugular. As I recall Poland's foreign minister admitted a key reason Poland joined the coalition of the willing in 2003 was to gain an inside track on some oil business.
The discovery of oil in Anbar probably is the single best shot there is for peace in Iraq. It is a seismic shift in Iraq more important than the misguided troop surge or anything else that's happened since 2003. This discovery may be why Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar have turned on Al Qaeda recently. Those tribal leaders are now realizing they are sitting on their own gold mine and its in their interest to work with the global oil establishment to develop it and cash in on it. Prior to this it appeared the Kurds and the Shia were going to keep their oil fields to themselves and the Sunnis were facing long term poverty, which was a driving force behind the Sunni insurgency. The Iraqi government could, if they are wise, let each of the three factions have control of their own oil reserves and go their own way and Iraq could suddenly become a peaceful success story. If the Shia try to screw the Sunni's out of the new oil revenues from Anbar the war in Iraq will never end. People who are poised to reap billions in oil revenue have very little motivation to wage a guerrilla war.
The whole dynamic of Saddam's Iraq is the Sunni were reaping the lion's share of the oil revenue while the Kurds and Shia were screwed, and currently that situation has been completely reversed. If all three factions have their own huge oil fields and revenues from them the whole dynamic changes.
"support the person we wanted to take control of post-war Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi."
Charlie Rose had an interview recently with 3 Iraqi journalists, all of whom are currently in the U.S. studying Journalism, or really escaping the oppressive violence and smoldering pit that is their homeland thanks to George W, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Rummy and Wolfy.
One of them spelled it out, pretty much all the Iraqi exiles who swept in to take over Iraq after the invasion are viewed as "thieves" by the Iraqi people. Chalabi is at the top of the list since he is still under indictment in Jordan for a gigantic bank fraud.
One of facts about Iraq a lot of people seem to gloss over is there is a gigantic pool of oil riches in that country and the people who gain control over the government can enrich themselves and their friends with that control. EVERYONE jockeying for control there, Iraqi and American alike, is angling for control over its oil wealth because they know if they get it they will end up like Saudi princes. This simple reason is why the Shia have zero incentive to pass legislation to equitably share the oil wealth with Kurds and Sunnis and without that there is ALWAYS going to be a civil war there. I'm not sure you will every strike a deal everyone will consider fair.
A recent report suggests large quantities of Iraq's oil is disappearing in to the black market to enrich the people who have gained control over the wells or pipelines, who are mostly Shia in the South and Kurds in the north (though its also possible oil production is also being exaggerated).
I'm not really sure Iraq will ever find peace as long as there is oil wealth to fight over. The fight for control of oil is a source of strife everyplace it is found today. The original Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was for control of oil, and I'm not sure the corrupt Emir of Kuwait has any more right to control it than Saddam did. The genocide in Darfur is largely over the oil fields there. A key element in the coup attempt in Venezuela was over oil fields which were recently nationalized. In Russia a bunch of kleptocrats suckered Yeltsin in to giving them control of the oil and gas fields and they got rich, Putin threw the ring leader in jail and seized control of the oil for himself and his dictatorial government. The Saudi royal family rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist to insure they get the lions share of the oil riches. Not much chance of real Democracy in Saudi Arabia because the Saudi royal family wouldn't get most of the oil revenue in a real Democracy. Iran is in the mess its in after an American backed coup threw out a popular leader who nationalized the oil fields at Britain's expense. The U.S. installed the Shah as dictator who gave U.S. companies control over the oil fields to Britain's dismay. The Shah was so hated he was overthrown in favor of the Ayatollah so there is a repressive theocracy there that hates the U.S. to this day as a result. Its kind of routine in countries on the west coast of Africa with oil wealth for the people in power to pocket much of the oil wealth while most of their countrymen starve.
Not sure you will find Peace in Iraq until you just partition the country, let the ethnic cleansing finish, and let each of the three factions control their own oil fields. The Sunnis were the odd man out but recent oil discoveries in their base in Anbar province suggest all three groups could have their own oil fields. The down side to this is Turkey will probably never tolerate an independent Kurdistan waging a guerrilla war to try to seize the Kurdish regions of Turkey.
I was going to place that caveat in my post but it was already getting long. It certainly is helping Boeing bury Airbus because they have a 20%+ price advantage on airline deals which are usually done in dollars.
The obvious flaw is our biggest trade problem is with China, and since the Chinese peg the Yuan to the dollar we can't gain any trade balance there because the currencies aren't floatng against each other to correct the forces driving the trade balance. To peg the Yuan the Chinese buy lots of treasuries so they are subsidizing U.S. debt and gaining increasing economic leverage over the U.S. at the same time.
As someone else posted here, the U.S. increasingly has very little to export.
Devaluing your currency does help competitiveness but it is a very dangerous game. As your currency devalues it makes foreigners stop investing in your economy or currency which causes it to devalue further. If the world decides dollars are worthless and switches to selling oil in Euros or pounds then as our currency devalues the price of oil explodes and then oil import completely offset any economic advantage of a lower dollar.
The only reason the U.S. economy and the stock market isn't in a complete shambles is because most big U.S. companies have globalized so they do great exploiting cheap Chinese and Indian labor and selling in foreign markets while the fundamentals of the U.S. economy is mostly in really poor shape.
"Satelite imagry is totaly forbidden."
I forgot to add, this is a really inaccurate statement. Satelite imagery of China can't be and isn't "forbidden". All those commercial satelites and a bunch of military satellites don't suddenly go blind when they are flying over China(unless China lases them some day). If Google doesn't have imagery of China its more likely just because China has bullied either them or the commercial satellite companies in to not posting it.
In a lot of ways its China's loss. I imagine there are all kinds of economically useful applications for that data they are screwing themselves out of. And its not like they are hiding anything from the U.S., E.U. or Russian satellites which are the potential military adversaries that matter.
I'm really skeptical there is actually that much in satellite imagery to really hide since you CAN'T hide it from adversaries with their own spy satellites. Thinking you are going to really hinder a terrorist attack by denying them an an overhead view of a target is kind of delusional. Terrorist and insurgent attacks will adapt to the information they have.
Yea but that has nothing to do with the Chinese handing out imagery of the U.S. and U.S. military assets around the world.
I don't think this General was worried about suppressing detailed imagery of China on the Internet.
The one thing in this General's court is its true that Russia, China, India and the EU are probably about as paranoid as the U.S. is about the free flow of information they don't control.
Exactly. The U.S. bureaucracy in particular, and America in general has such a massive dose of arrogance they are under the delusion they can still dictate anything and everything to the whole planet.
90% of whats gone wrong in the last six years is almost entirely due to a acute arrogance mixed with bad case of ignorance on the part of the people in the Bush administration. That's a really dangerous cocktail.
Russia, China, the E.U., Japan and India all have respectable capabilities to build and launch satellites, and more are joining the club. When the Space Shuttle is scraped there is probably going to be a very long window in which Russia and China will be able to put men in to orbit and the U.S. wont. The U.S. tries to bottle up satellite imagery I'm sure Russia or China will fill the void just to poke a finger in the eye of the U.S.
To me this just sounds like another round of post 9/11 fear mongering.
The U.S. seriously needs to wake up to the fact that the biggest threat to its National security is its massive trade and budget deficits, broken education system, energy dependence on parts of the world it can no long control, and a plunging dollar because no one has confidence in the U.S. anymore.
If the U.S. were spending money on those issues instead of on an out of control defense industrial complex:
A. It would be a lot more prosperous and secure
B. The rest of the world would hate the U.S. a lot less and have fewer reasons to want to attack it
The best defense program the U.S. could invest in right now is a serious effort to improve car mileage ASAP and then to develop clean, renewable and affordable energy sources.
"Providing our nation with a wide variety of local legal options had nothing to do with it"
Uh yea it did. That was exactly the point. People in the Southern states didn't want to be dictated to by people in the North and vice versa. As you recall the U.S. fought the bloodiest war in its history because a Northern biased Federal government wanted to abolish slavery, and the South being very dependent on plantation agriculture didn't appreciate the intrusion. Various states a predisposition to have very different views on social issues, economics, taxation, religion then and now.
A strong central government has advantages in things like international relations, defense, sometimes economics. Its a reason Europe has rushed in to the arms of the EU in an effort to improve its global position, efficiency and economics against the U.S., India and China.
A strong central government tends to be extremely bad for things like excessive taxation, privacy invasion, bureaucracy, inefficiency, wasting tax money(leading to more excessive taxation), foreign adventurism, etc.
The biggest danger of centralized government is a political party scrapes together a slim majority to gain control over the levers of power at the national level and then inflicts all kinds of mischief on a big minority. For example, the last six years have seen an ultra conservative, fascist leaning, right wing Christian block forged out of the South and Midwest doing things that the majority of the people in more liberal states in the more liberal NorthEast and Pacific coast completely abhor.
States rights is an almost universally good thing in that it allows states to settle controversial issues in a way acceptable to most of the people in that state, like abortion, gay marriage and civil unions, gun control, taxation, government subsidized social programs etc. If the right or left lean of the state you are in is unacceptable to you, you have the option of moving to another state without the massive trauma of emigrating to another country more akin to your views. This happens on a wide scale as young liberals routinely migrate out of the rigidity of the bible belts of the South and Midwest to the liberal coasts. Socialists have done just this with a pretty extensive migration to Vermont where they have influenced legislation and pick law makers attune to their views (one of their senators is a Socialist independent caucusing with the Democrats). Me personally I have no use for Vermont's socialism, to much taxation and intrusion in to people's lives, but its nice there is an enclave in the U.S. where socialists can feel at home.
If you want a big bureaucracy dictating every aspect of your life, taxing you in to the ground, and completely unresponsive to your views then yes a big centralized government is for you. Me I would be overjoyed if the Federal government was gutted overnight, and all the power and money it has usurped were returned to the states.
Decentralization, would if nothing else, prevent another debacle like the last 6 years where one group of completely incompetent people managed to seize power and have pretty much wrecked the nation as a whole. In a states right system at least the carnage would have been confined to an individual state like Texas which deserves the carnage for giving George W. his leg up.
" If WoW has proven anything, it's overwhelmingly that players want an extremely narrow, object-oriented game environment for the most part. They need objectives spelled out for them extremely precisely."
This is a very insightful comment. The same applies to Second Life. Second Life comes across as intensely boring to me because there really aren't any really obvious objectives in it other than:
- Start a club and be an online DJ while peoples avatars run a dance program
- Figure out innovative ways to milk other people for Linden dollars
- Virtual sex, but ya know... virtual sex is extremely stupid
- Chatting
Its why its often said in Second Life that is more like No Life, because you have to have No Life to waste time in Second Life. Its just not really a very interesting place, and it is, as you said because there aren't really many interesting objectives built in to it.
I think I need to reread Neal Stepheson's Snowcrash because it managed to make virtual worlds seem really interesting, something most virtual worlds today really aren't, and I need to remember why the concept was so interesting in his book.
WoW manages better than most because it does pull together large numbers of people, who are climbing over each others bodies trying to attain goals. It is a pretty interesting slice of life, though I quickly tire of being bombarded with all the negative personality traits of the people that play it. It gets really old seeing people back stab each other, and having people share their substance abuse, sexual issues, sick sense of humour or absence there of etc. The other down side to WoW is it is a horrendous time sink and it does in fact became extremely boring and repetitive.
I tried LOTRO during the free beta but it came across as just a really boring regurgitation of its MMORPG predecessors. The artwork was horrible and drab after you've played in the rich looking WoW world. It felt like EQ in it is early days but even drabber. The fact that it had vague hints of Tolkien's mythology behind it wasn't even close to redeeming it in my opinion.
" If you're on the side of capitalism, support China"
China isn't really Capitalist in the free market sense of the word. Fascist is probably a more accurate term. China embraced capitalism but only under extensive state control of the Communist Party. When big companies and the state get in bed together this is kind of what Fascism is. The Communist party elite made this leap because it allowed them to get rich, something that was awkward to do under Maoist ideology, OK more like forbidden to do and it would land you in a reeducation camp.
The Communist party elite used their control over the state and its resources to create multi-billion dollar companies over which they and their family members are often given a controlling interest. Of course the U.S., Russia and a host of other countries have seen politicians hand out huge windfalls to the politically well connected so this isn't exactly unique. The naive fail to understand the draw of becoming a politician because the pay is bad and the work sucks. The motivation for many is it allows you to enrich yourself and your friends under the table once you've gained control over the levers of power and all the wealth most governments control.
China is really disturbingly like Nazi German was in the '30's. Americans were rushing to invest in Nazi Germany in the 30's too because its economy was booming at a time the rest of the world was in depression. It was a profitable place to invest. Fascism can be an extremely efficient economic system if you strike the right balance between state control and greed. Too much state control and not enough greed people lose the incentive to make money, and central planning isn't nimble enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Some central planning and state control and the injection of large amounts of state funds at the right places can remove barriers free markets might not and really accelerate growth. A police state is also really good at keeping workers in line.
Fascism became a dirty word thanks to World War II but its been making a stealth come back ever since and there is more than a scent of it in Russia, China, U.S., U.K., Israel and Columbia to name just a few.
"This is not some big conspiracy theory as I'm sure many people here will immediately cry out about."
You are probably right.....but you can certainly wonder about the motivations. If you look at the kind of operations the U.S. military is engaging in in Iraq you have to figure there is really very little critically sensitive data to divulge and most of it is very short lived. Its not like there are many D-Day invasions which compelled the massive long term secrecy you found in World War II. About the biggest secret you will find is a raid on a house where they think there is someone from Al-Qaeda or who is aiding the insurgency. You would figure the people involved in those operations would be running security tight enough that emails and blogs wouldn't even enter in to the picture. These are also very short lived secrets.
The biggest source of leaks about operations in Iraq is the Iraqi military and police which are massively infiltrated by insurgents, militias and probably Al Qaeda. They recruit just about everyone who walks in the door. The U.S. military can't tell them anything sensitive because it leaks immediately. The Iraqi security forces are such an infiltrated and biased disaster they will either never be able to take over Iraqi security or if they do they will become a tool for their various masters known of whom are the Iraqi government.
I could maybe see a case for restricting blogging since insurgents could be reading those on a daily basis and gleaning intelligence from them. Censoring all personal email, especially to family, is completely over the top in this day and age.
If you want to dream up a conspiracy theory to explain this, the best one is the U.S. is in the middle of Plan A, a troop surge to try to stabilize Iraq. There is no plan B, other than Plan A has to work. Congress is on the verge of cutting funds for the war and force the U.S. out of Iraq especially if Plan A doesn't work. The Bush administrations only strategy for success is to make Plan A work. Sometime around September some generals are going to parade through Congress and tell everyone Plan A is working whether it really is or not. The military and the Bush administration have a strong motivation to suppress all channels of communication by which Congress or the American people might hear that Plan A really isn't working. I can assure you the #1 channel of communication the military wants to suppress with this plan is officers and soldiers giving their Congressmen an earful, via email, about how messed up Iraq really is, and there have been some emails to Congressmen just like that over the last 4 years.
Operational security is certainly always important for the military, but censorship is just as much about propaganda, and the military trying to shape what everyone thinks about whats happening in a war.
"Could this be because Reagan ended up outspending the russians and with his famous MAD scenario, took the only real leverage the Russians had off the table?"
Its more likely the Soviet Union collapsed be because the Russians foolishly got bogged down in a decade long war in Afghanistan. A war that tore Russia apart from the inside. The scarred veterans returning from the horrors of Afghanistan were an integral part of the uprising against the Communist party that sent them there.
The only credit I'm willing to give Reagan in toppling the Soviet Union was the weapons he gave the Muhjadeen. As a cruel and ironic twist it turns out he was also helping build the Taliban and Al Qaeda at the same time. Reagan's arms build up had no clearly defined role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its main accomplishment was to enrich U.S. defense contractors. Most of the weapons he spent massive sums on were a joke, Star Wars never did anything worthwhile, his battleships were billion dollar artillery pieces that just diverted funds from more useful projects, and the B-2 and B-1B were a complete joke that are largely shunned to this day in favor of the B-52 which cost a fraction of the price.
I would give far more credit to Pope John Paul and Gorbachev for toppling the U.S.S.R than Reagan. They used peaceful persuasion, and accomplished a lot more, than squandering money on staggeringly expensive and largely ineffective weapons.
"Why should I have to go outside US media outlets to find out how many "insurgents" we are killing vs. how many soldiers we are losing."
Chances are you will never find any source that will reliably report how many "insurgents" are being killed in an insurgency. It is a notoriously hard number to arrive at for a host of reasons. The main one being "insurgents" don't wear uniforms and dog tags. They basically look like civilians except they are packing, and they can pick up or drop a weapon in a heart beat. And of course in a war zone real civilians often pack weapons too because they live in a very dangerous place. In Iraq it is legal for every household to have a gun, and the AK-47 is the weapon of choice for home defense.
So #1 when you see a body count in an insurgency it is nearly impossible for anyone to sort out the real insurgents from the innocent civilians who got caught in the cross fire. As a result all the bodies get counted as insurgents and you get a gloriously high number that just gets better when you accidentally kill a bunch of civilians.
Point #2 the U.S. military was notorious for inflating its body count in Vietnam. It was the one and only measure of success in Vietnam so the military exaggerated it intentionally and also counted dead civilians as insurgents to inflate it further. As a result body counts became a totally meaningless statistic, no one believed it, and its a key reason its not used now. It would bring back scary echoes of Vietnam. The reason U.S. causalties are reported is because it is a very precise and well known number and it translates directly in to family and friends in the U.S. who have lost someone they loved in a senseless optional war.
All you Bush fan boys so eager to find "success" in Iraq and Afghanistan just need to pack it in. There is almost never anything resembling success by an occupying power against an insurgency, any insurgency. The more people you kill the more animosity you create amongst all their friends and relatives. You can clear and hold territory as is the current "strategy" for "success" in Iraq and the insurgency just moves where you aren't, which it has in Iraq, and when you get tired of holding a place and leave they just move back in.
I recently heard the most insightful comment on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think on Charlie Rose, but I can't remember who said it. Insurgencies are something you have to try to keep a lid on an let run their course, if you can afford it and stand it. Once they get rolling they almost never end until both sides just get tired of the slaughter and decide to stop. That takes a long time. You simply wont stop them with the application of force by the military and police.
The only winning strategy in Iraq was to not make the horrendously stupid mistakes that were made right after the war, 1) insufficient boots on the ground to prevent looting and lawlessness, 2) Debaathification which insured all the Baathist Sunni's jumped on the insurgent bandwagon 3) disbanding the military and police which created even more unemployed to join the insurgency and a worse security vacuum, 4) creating a massively corrupt rebuilding campaign that was more to enrich loyal Republicans than rebuild Iraq or keep Iraqis employed so they could feed their families. At this point there is really no winning strategy in Iraq. If you wanted to win you had to do it in a few critical months after Saddam was toppled, but you had to do everything right then and the U.S. did every thing wrong.
Afghanistan is more complex but isn't exactly going that great either. It has turned in to a completely corrupted narco state sending massive quantities of opiates around the world, far worse than anything that happened under the Taliban. I don't think you can call a state a success whose one and only real export is opium.