"If the Democrats courted instead of demonizing us, they'd have the Whitehouse and Congress."
Well actually people like you are why we back abortion. We were hoping all the barefoot, ignorant, bible thumpers who birth people like you would opt for abortion if it was cheap, safe and easy so we wouldn't have to put up with people like you for a lifetime, and even worse you reproduce and teach your kids to think like you so we will never be rid of your kind. I pity the poor little devils having you for a dad.
You see we don't want to court your vote or give you an alternative you like. We dislike everything you stand for so anyone you like is the last person on earth we want to get elected (ref. George W. Bush).
Unfortunately all the con men who stand at the pulpit every Sunday saw through the plan which is why they are so rabidly against abortion and contraception. The pro life preachers and popes really don't give a damn about the sanctity of life, they just want more butts in the seats because it translates in to more bucks in the plate. They want every white, trailer trash couple to have ten kids that they can't afford to properly raise or educate as long as they are in church every Sunday and you are putting their college fund in the collection plate.
So the abortion plan backfired. All the intelligent, well educated enlightened people are using contraception and having abortions so they only have one or two kids which they go all out to raise properly. All the morons who really believe the world is actually only 6,000 years old and that they can trace their begats back to Adam and Eve aren't getting abortions and are having ten kids who are so badly raised and educated they should qualify as a weapon of mass destruction. Its kind of selective breeding in reverse. The human race is rapidly, selectively breeding itself back in to the dark ages. The world is gonna be a wonderful place when scientists are persecuted by the church and burned at the stake for heresy(i.e. pointing out that our sacred fossil fuels are causing global warming and will eventually require a Noah Jr. to save us).
Plan B which hasn't worked so well either was for us to pretend like we are adamant supporters of gun control so you would all immediately rush out and buy as many guns as you could possibly afford, with your minimum wage job and after you've taken out your Budweiser allotment for the week, just to spite us. We were then hoping you would manage to accidentally shoot yourselves or the barefoot wife you beat twice a week would use one to put you out of our misery.
"We're making MORE terrorists, not fewer. Christ!"
I don't suppose it occurred to you that "the powers that be" (TM) actually WANT MORE terrorists. Things like Iraq and Abu Graib make total sense once you come to this simple realization. If you want a perpetual war, and you want a justification for building a police state, you really need a never ending supply of terrorists. God forbid you might run out!!! Its a basic tenant of 1984 that you need perpetual war for Big Brother to thrive. You need something for people to always be afraid of so they will turn to the state to "protect" them, and in the process give up every freedom they have in exchange for safety.
Those damn Russian Communists screwed "the powers that be" royally by throwing in the towel. Damn you Ronald Reagan you weren't actually supposed to beat the commies. Those damn Chinese Communists did the same damn thing and turned in to greedy Fasco-Capitalists over night so you can barely tell them from Americans now.
It sounds kind of far fetched but why else do you think the U.S. has made basically zero effort to capture Bin Laden, and Pakistan is still harboring a flourishing Al Qaeda and Taliban in its tribal regions. "The powers that be" have to be extremely careful that they don't WIN the "War on Terror" because if they did they would be screwed. No one would put up with their crap if there was no "War on Terror".
Remember what happened after the end of the cold war. Everyone started slashing defense spending, we had budget surpluses and prosperity, and "the powers that be" had absolutely no justification for grabbing more power at the expense of their real enemy, the ordinary citizens of the United States. Nothing pisses off the defense industrial complex more than cutting their budget, it eats in to their power and profitability.
"Don't think so, he'll rather say "OK, so no EU planes will land here anymore.", "
No he wont. The economic damage to the U.S. from such self imposed sanctions would be catastrophic. If the U.S. were to boycott EU planes you just boycott American airlines until the U.S. caves.
Everyone ought to call America's bluff on this and it would soon become obvious how much of a paper tiger the Bush administration is.
The U.S. is already doing grievous economic damage to itself in the wake of 9/11, squandering vast sums on useless false security measures and $400 billion squandered in Iraq for starters. But too, many bright people will no longer come to the U.S. for conferences or to work. The U.S. is driving graduate students and researchers away from the U.S. because visas are so much harder to get and U.S. protection of civil liberties has become so weak and capricious many people don't want to come to a nation which no longer has due process, especially if you aren't a U.S. citizen, aren't Judeo-Christian or you have dark skin. Of course U.S. citizens don't have any assurance of due process either, reference Jose Padilla though he does have dark skin and is a Muslim convert. Of course you aren't even really safe if you don't come to the U.S. since the U.S. created rendition it bestowed upon itself the power to snatch people anywhere in the world, in violation of national sovereignty and whisk you away to a secret prison to be tortured. Might not be so bad if this program had a 100% certainty of nabbing terrorists but it has provably snatched completely innocent people by mistake, destroying their lives.
Its kind of slow motion damage since it will take a few years before the damage is obvious but the U.S. has become completely dependent on brains coming from other countries for R&D and higher education and everything the U.S. does to discourage them from coming to the U.S. is akin to shooting itself in the foot. The U.S. was able to develop nuclear weapons during World War II because it welcomed highly educated refugees from Nazi Germany with open arms. Today the U.S. is more like Nazi Germany and the refugee flow is now in the opposite direction. The only people still welcomed with open arms are the largely uneducated cheap labor flowing across the border unchecked with NO RESTRICTION. The U.S. doesn't even know their names or where they came from, let alone have 45 personal information items on them.
It is a sign of complete insanity to impose these intrusive restrictions on legal travelers at the same time that you are still making NO effort to seal a massively porous border with Mexico 5 years after 9/11.
"Deception and Agendas are aplenty, and we will not know whether or not you are right for some time, but...consider Iran's step to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty."
There certainly are and the U.S. and Israel engage in more deception and agendas than anyone.
One agenda is that Israel, Pakistan and India never signed the NPT in the first place so why are you not up in arms about THEIR complete absence of ANY oversight. Israel is believed to have developed hundreds of nuclear weapons, and they have credible delivery mechanisms so could probably easily incinerate Iran TODAY. Where is your outrage about Israel's actual nuclear weapons development versus the maybe someday that is Iran's nuclear program.
Pakistan is thought to have been the world's largest proliferater of nuclear technology especially through the A.Q. Khan ring and when this fact was discovered the U.S. took no action against them other than MAYBE shutting down the proliferation ring. Khan was basically pardoned and as a national hero of Pakistan is still free today.
Then of course there is the U.S. which has some real deception and agendas of its own. The nuclear weapons haves in the NPT didn't submit themselves to ANY international oversight of their nuclear programs. In the treaty the nuclear powers DID commit to nuclear disarmament, an end to the arms race and end to the development of new nuclear weapons. The U.S., especially the Bush administration, largely defiant of all those sections in the preamble. The U.S. is in fact developing new nuclear weapons under the Bush administration and may well unilaterally withdraw from the test ban treaty someday in order to test them unless someone comes to their senses or more moderate people get elected. The Bush administration is doing its best to provoke a new arms race not end them, unless maybe the end comes because the U.S. acquires such an enormous lead Russia and China give up. And probably the most disturbing "agenda" which leaves the NPT in tatters, the Bush administration is seriously talking about and is developing tactical nuclear weapons that it fully intends to actually use in conventional wars, unless someone stops them. In particular they want to use small nuclear devices to incinerate cave complexes and bunkers that are difficult to destroy with conventional explosives.
Where does it leave the NPT if the U.S. actually starts using nuclear weapons as a matter of routine in future wars.
Below are some of the interesting sections of the NPT, which aren't exactly in the articles of the treaty but are more preamble referring to things like the U.N. Charter.
Especially note this section referencing and affirming the U.N. Charter which the U.S. pretty much violates everytime it invades a sovereign country, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, or acts to overthrow sovereign governments. The U.S. also diverts more to armaments than the rest of the world combined:
"States must refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations, and that the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security are to be promoted with the least diversion for armaments of the world's human and economic resources"
"Declaring their intention to achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament, Urging the co-operation of all States in the attainment of this objective".
"Recalling the determination expressed by the Parties to the 1963 Treaty banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water in its Preamble to seek to achieve the discontinuance of all test explosions of n
"I'm aware that the Israelis were very happy to nod in agreement with everything we said about Iraq--whether that was because they believed it or because they just wanted us to do it is up for debate"
Its clear Israel wanted the U.S. to take down Saddam more than anyone. He after all did lob missiles in to their cities in the first Iraq war and if they had had WMD's in them....
Its no coincidence that MOST of the people in the DOD who built the fabricated case for invading Iraq and pushed the war were Jewish and in some cases had dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel and had decidedly mixed loyalties. Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle are the three most disturbing actors. They may well have been the point men for an Israeli scheme to sucker the U.S. in to taking down Saddam for them, and they knew George W. was dumb enough to fall for it.
The rhetoric on Iran may well be a new round of Israel trying to con the U.S. in to taking out Iran for them which is the next country on their list they want taken down. If Iraq hadn't turned in to a debacle, the Bush administration was in fact ramping up the rhetoric to justify taking down both Syria and Iran right after Iraq. Iraq unfortunately went to bad, so they had to postpone the plan to cleanse the Middle East of the last remaining states who were still openly hostile to Israel.
Its noteworthy the U.S. treats North Korea completely differently though they really do have nukes. Why? Because North Korean isn't very close to Israel, isn't Arab or Muslim and isn't a particularly imminent threat to Israel.
I should note it is a baffling double standard for the U.S., Israel and the E.U. to be so rabidly against Iran getting nukes. Israel has enough nukes and delivery vehicles to easily incinerate Iran. Pakistan has nukes and they are one of the most rabidly fundamentalist Islamic states, they built the Taliban after all, and their current dictator could be replaced with an Islamic extremist over night who might want to use his nukes. I'm all for Iran not having nukes, but unless you are a flaming hypocrite you have to be as equally firm that Israel or Pakistan not have them too. And why stop there. EVERYONE should dismantle them. They serve no useful purpose since no one in their right mind would actually use them, and its just a matter of time, with the extent they have proliferated that someone not in their right mind gets hold of one, or a thousand, and does use them.
The nation with nukes that scares me the most, hands down, is the U.S. because the crazies in the Bush administration are actually working hard to come up with ways to actually justify using them in conventional conflicts. Most nations have nukes for deterrence, the U.S. is the only nation who has actually used them and which is actually talking about using them again.
"It's the Jordanian border guards who are preventing tht."
I think you misunderstood what I said. I wasn't saying the Palestinians should move to Jordan, I was saying they ARE living in Jordan, occupied Jordan. Thanks to Israel's seizure of their homes and homeland they are stateless refugees in occupied territory. No one wants them so they are sentenced to an eternity living under Israeli occupation mostly in abject poverty. And you wonder why they are so mad. They are enduring the same fate Jews did when they were scattered to the wind. You would think Jews of all people would have some empathy for this and not do the same thing to another people that was done to them.
"Oh, intentionally blowing up young children, and taking pride in it, constitutes "somewhat extreme views" in your opinion...?"
Uh, Israel's military kills young children too. A 13 year old girl shot multiple times by an Israeli officer in cold blood for example. U.S. Marines murdered young children in Haditha Iraq, for example they executed a one year old girl. Thats what happens in bloody insurgencies stoked by mutual hatred and fear. You see you want to forget Israel and the U.S. kill children and only remember Palestinian suicide bombers kill children. I'm a little more intellectually honest and recognize Hamas is not particularly different from the U.S. or Israel in this regard. U.S. strategic bombing campaigns in Vietnam and World War II killed millions of civilians. Palestinian suicide bombers aren't even in the same ballpark if you want to talk about mass murder.
"is that it failed to prevent those acts"
Don't want to debate the subject since its impossible to sort out exactly what happened in those camps, but Israel invaded Lebanon pretty much in violation of international law, those camps were under Israeli military control, they let Christian militias who they knew had a blood feud with them, go in and slaughter unarmed refugees and did nothing in spite of hours of gunfire. Maybe Sharon and his officers were just ignorant or maybe they wanted the Palestinians slaughtered, we will really never know. There are plenty of other case studies of the Israeli military intentionally killing civilians but you are in denial on the subject so I'm not gonna waste the time recounting them as you rationalize that somehow you are somehow inherently better than your foe. I know full well you think you are inherently superior to Palestinians. They are always wrong and you are always in the right, right? That is in the nature of apartheid states.
" Illegal settlements are harshly evacuated by Israeli armed forces."
Dude all settlements in occupied territories are illegal, its just most of them were given under the table blessing of hard liners in the Israeli government. When you build settlements in occupied territories the only way you can do it is by seizing the land of the people that lived there before the occupation. It is against international law to seize the property of people in occupied territories. It is basically ethnic cleansing since you are ejecting the people who lived there to replace them with people of your race.
"But deciding to commit mass-murder"
Take off the blinders friend. There is no difference between a suicide bomb or an F-16 dropping a 1000 pound bomb in an apartment complex full of innocent women and children to assassinate one Palestinian leader. Again you are claiming some morale superiority that simply isn't there. The women and children end up just as dead in both cases. Your problem is you've rationalized that the two acts are inherently different when they are not.
"No one is asking Hamas to "disarm"."
Well at this point you seem to have no clue what you are talking about. EVERYONE is demanding Hamas disarm and recognize Israel's right to exist as a precondition of even entering negot
"why did they have to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza strip before the Palestinian Authority took over?"
Not sure I exactly follow your question or assertion. Israel unilaterally abandoned Gaza and they stripped everything of value out of Jewish settlements there so the Palestinians would get nothing of economic value during the transfer.
The Jewish settlements there were ridiculously hard and expensive to defend and the Israeli government was mostly glad to be rid of them. Gaza is a giant impoverished refugee camp about to explode and having illegal Jewish settlements in the middle of it was simply impractical.
By "abandoning" it Israel can pretend that it is not responsible for the miserable conditions there. It is not an economically viable state and its going to stay permanently impoverished especially with Israel dominating and controlling its borders and sending in tanks whenever it feels like it. By cutting it loose, Israel can pretend its not their fault, though 60 years of history says it is.
It also helps to reduce the count of Arabs living under Israeli control. Israel wants to insure that Arabs are never in the majority and if you count the occupied territories Arabs will soon eclipse Jews as the majority. By casting a million plus Arabs in Gaza to the wind they insure Jews are in the majority for a while longer.
Bottomline is there was nothing of value in Gaza for Israel and lot of liabilities. They gave up nothing in doing what they did, other than angering the hardline settlers there whose settlements were illegal by every definition. The settlers do have a right to be angry at the Israeli government since the government probably endorsed and encouraged them to settle there, under the table, as part of claiming greater Israel.
They might do the same for a few settlements in the West Bank that are high liability and low return but I really doubt Israel will give up any of the illegal settlements in the West Bank that it values, and based on Olmert's recent statements they are most probably going to seize East Jerusalem and cleanse it of Arabs.
"They are not Israeli citizens. They should not have voting rights in Israel, not any more than Americans should have voting rights in Canada."
They are however living under Israeli occupation and have been since 1967, thats 40 years. Now if the people living on the West Bank were voting in Jordanian elections you might have an analogy but Israeli border guards are for some reason not letting them be part of Jordan. Sure they can vote in Palestinian elections for a sham government that has no sovereign power, and if they vote for anyone Israel or the U.S. doesn't approve of Israel can, will and is strangling them. So yea I guess they can vote as long as they vote for whomever Israel and the U.S. tells them to.
You see there is a big difference, Canadians live in a sovereign nation so their vote counts for something, the Palestinians are living under permanent occupation, no end in sight, and don't have any rights other than those of people in occupied territories under international law, which Israel routinely ignores. The Israeli military can close their borders at their discretion, their military can enter any part of the occupied territories with tanks and bulldozers, arrest anyone they chose and hold them indefinitely and routinely bulldoze farms and homes, often with people still in them. They still routinely evict Palestinians from homes, farms and businesses to make way for Jewish settlements and for their wall which is create one big ghetto, both of which are completely illegal but sanctioned by the Israeli government and the rest of the world endorses them or looks the other way.
" Hamas is a party which organized hundreds of suicide bombings against Israeli population through the 90s."
Yes and the Israeli military has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians during the same period, Sabra and Shatila being one of the darker stains on Israel's credibility. Both side's hands are equally bloody. Its pretty disingenuous of you to pretend the Palestinians are the only ones that are killing civilians there. Just because the Israeli's have F-16, Apache helicopters, bulldozers and tanks to do the killing doesn't make them any more in the right.
"it rejects peace, or any acknoledgment of Israel and its right to exist"
Granted Hamas has somewhat extremes views. So would you if you had been ejected from your home and homeland and spent the last 60 years in impoverished refugee camps as a stateless person with no hope for a better life.
The demands the west makes of Hamas to even negotiate are ridiculous and unreasonable. They are basically demanding they completely capitulate to a bitter foe and disarm before the negotiations even begin. If they do then they can have the scraps the world feels like giving them since at that point they have nothing to bargin with. It appears at the moment, based on things Olmert recently said those scrap would mean living in the parts of the West Bank and Gaza Israel doesn't want inside a walled ghetto in borders unilaterally drawn up by Israel, and most probably with borders still routinely violated by Israel at their whim. To be honest I see why they don't capitulate and why in a free election Palestinians voted them in to office over the completely corrupt Fatah that is mostly capitulating and getting nothing in return for anyone except the graft for themselves.
"What that law does state is that Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens would not be automatically granted Israeli citizenship."
And it also means the Palestinian spouse can't move to Israel to live together as man and wife. I don't think an Israeli citizen can easily move to the West Bank to live with their spouse either. The Israeli military restricts who can move to the West bank, apparently favoring to only allow Jews to move their to create "illegal" settlements secretly blessed by the Israeli government. Yes I think you can get married but you probably wont be able to live together and any children you have will be in legal limbo.
Contrast this with any non Palestinian who can marry an Israeli and get citizenship with no problem. Any Jew from anywhere in the world can easily move to Israel and get citizenship and in fact many American Jews have duel citizenship where they are given an Israeli passport merely because they are Jewish. I think Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the disaster in Iraq, carries dual citizenship and duel alegience which is bad for a key decision maker in the Pentagon.
You can try to rationalize it anyway you like but in its current form it is a racist, apartheid policy designed to cement Israel as a Jewish state. It is a hard and fast rule a Jew from anywhere can get citizenship in a heart beat and its nearly impossible for Palestinians to even return to what was their home for centuries until they were driven out, often by threat of violence like the massacre at Deir Yassin.
"The Palestinians are currently at war with Israel."
Yes and likewise the Israelis have been at war with the Palestinians since they pushed them out of the homes 60 years ago. You act like its only the Palestinians who are at war. Far more of them die at the hands of the Israelis than the other way around. Its also unlikely there will ever be any real peace short of the Palestinians completely capitulating and accepting life in walled ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank for the rest of time, most probably in eternal povery since the occupied territories are economically unviable inside an Israeli noose.
If you had been driven out of your home and in to refugee camps for 60 years I'm pretty sure you would be doing the same things the Palestinians are doing.
"In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation?"
You are conveniently differentiating between Israel Palestinians and Palestinians in the occupied lands, land occupied for 40 years now. The Palestinians in the occupied land have no representation and no rights. The Palestinians in parliament as I said are being carefully engineered in to a minority which will never have any real power.
The Israelis are building a giant wall that is cutting Palestinians off from their work, farms, each other. They are building walled ghettos. Olmert recently said he is probably going to unilaterally draw the borders for their new state and take all of Jerusalem and several important big Jewish settlements in the West bank in violation of all previous negotiations.
The Israelis are collecting taxes at the borders of those ghettos that are supposed to go the Palestinians but since Hamas won a democratic election, and Israel and the U.S. didn't like how Democracy worked there, that money is being kept by the Israelis, along with most other aid. With no chance for a functional economy because Israel controlls the walls, cuts off traffic through the border at a whim the Israelis are today suffocating the Palestinians today more than they ever have. Its no secret if you are Palestinian the Israeli security forces are routinely humiliating you, arbitrarily arresting, routinely stopping you at blockades so you cant get to work.
The mere fact that a government is seeking to engineer how people think, speak and dress when it comes to Nazism is a Fascist tendency in its own right. Fascism operates under the tenant that people can't be trusted to think for themselves so the government has to regulate how they think and act for the good of the state.
The irony of rabid suppresion of Nazis is that many governments are leaning if not out right rushing to Fascism today. China, U.S., U.K., Australia, Russia and Israel are on the top of the Fascism scale in my book. Are they Nazi Germany, obviously not though China is pretty close with internal policy. Fortunately China at present seems to have no interest in aggressive warfare, a Fascist trademark, they are so busy just getting rich the old fashioned way. The U.S. has a superficially freer society though its getting less free every day, but its makes up for it on the Fascism scale with rampant militarism and advocacy of aggressive, preemptive war making.
Its my suspicion the world's governments need to suppress Nazi sympathizers because they want to return to Fascism as the world's dominant form of government, but to do that they need to erase the association between Fascism and the extreme turn it took in the 1930's and 1940's. If they outlaw and suppress the most notorious and superficial symbols of Fascism then OBVIOUSLY they must not be Fascist and Fascism must not exist today. If you make the false assertion that to be a Fascist you must wear a Swastika, and you outlaw the Swastika so no one wears them, then it follows there must not be any Fascists, right? It is an interesting con game.
The world's governments and media are in complete denial that Fascism could ever flourish again when in fact it is flourishing, its just no one will speak the name and on the Internet Godwin's law will be invoked, Godwin's law being the ultimate weapon to prevent anyone calling a spade a spade on the Internet.
The only time you hear anyone being called Fascist lately, is the Bush administration seems to have settled on Islamo-Fascist as their new buzz word since they've completely worn out the 'T' and 'R' keys on their keyboards using the word "Terrorist" a hundred times in EVERY speech and press release for the last 5 years, to refer to EVERYONE who is not "with them" in the "either you are with us or you are against us" equation. I would say there is another pretty heavy dose of smoke screen in their recent use of Fascist in describing their enemy. If there enemy is Fascist then that MUST mean that they are not, though in fact they are at least leaning that way.
Israel is another interesting case study. It was a state born out of the crucible of Fascism, but they treat Palestinians as sub human and with such contempt that it must ring a bell with Jews who lived in Europe in the 1930's. Just last week Israel's Supreme court affirmed a law effectively banning a Palestinian from marrying an Israeli citizen, a law so much like the Nazi prohibition of intermarriage with Jews. The law is not exactly predicated on race since its real motive is to prevent Palestinians from ever becoming the majority withing Israel. You see Palestinian are reproducing at a higher rate than Israel's Jews, especially if you count the occupied territories. so there is an imminent danger they will become the majority. Since Israel wants to maintain the facade it is a representative democracy it must do everything in its power to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority, because when they are either Jews surrender power at the polls or for all practical purposes Israel is an apartheid state, which is pretty much already is, with a minority controlling power through non Democratic means and ethnic "cleansing". This is a key motivator from the withdrawl from Gaza. Through withdrawl Israel can claim that all the Palestinians there are no longer a part of Israel while Israel still maintains a choke hold on every aspect of their day to day lives.
Well... given the choice between squandering at least $400 billion in a bloody quagmire, thats killeds tens of thousands of people, or spending it on ANY worthwhile R&D project the answer is obvious that R&D would be better. Maybe you wont achieve a successful commercial fusion reactor but as long as you insure sound R&D is happening in physics, materials, etc chances are you are going to get something worthwhile out of it.
I saw this illuminating article on what the U.S. has wrought in Iraq. All indications are Iraq is in really no better shape than it was under Saddam. At least then there was order, now there is chaos, with large numbers of people being killed, kidnapped and tortured under both regimes. Sure there are elections now but the government its lead to is just a bunch of factions who are carving up the country as they each try to grab a slice of the power and money. Corruption is rampant, militias are increasingly the only law and order and their brand of law and order is as arbitrary as Saddam's was.
The only people who benefit from the vast sums the U.S. is squandering in Iraq is the host of Republican connected U.S. companies that are profiteering off it, and the Iraqi factions that grabbed the biggest piece of the pie there.
The U.S. used to be the place where a large number of breakthroughs happened. Now the U.S. government doesn't invest in basic research, unless its related to weapons, spying or trying to attain a false sense of homeland security. American corporations increasingly slash research funding in pursuit of better quarters today while they destroy their long term well being, or they move it to places like China where the Chinese are likely to benefit from it more than America ever will.
Get used to a world where all the breakthroughs in science and engineering, outside of weaponry, happen someplace other than the U.S. because thats the road we are going down. Not sure we can even accomplish the weapons breakthroughs if the scientific, engineering and manufacturing base in the U.S. continues to hollow out.
It would be wonderful if the U.S. HAD spent that $400 billion on anything worthwhile versus wasting it which is what was done.
Education isn't the answer. Most of the people involved in corruption in the U.S. are extremely well educated, lawyers in particular, and they know perfectly well what is right and what is not. They no doubt had plenty of ethics classes.
Either you choose to have an ethical compass or you don't. The simple fact is corruption usually pays extremely well if you don't get caught. Most people don't go in to politics for the high pay because there isn't any. They go in for the power and the ability to do favors for their friends and to reap benefits for themselves. Most politicians are operating on an ethical razor's edge. Is what they are doing legitimate and just doling out pork to their constituents or does it cross the line in to corruption?
In Africa and Latin America economic opportunity is very limited so corruption becomes an appealing, or maybe the only, avenue to just make a living so it becomes very pervasive. There isn't much education will do to solve it unless it evolves in to economic opportunity through more legitimate avenues. Unfortunately most successful businessmen are also operating on an ethical edge. You can succeed in business operating ethically but its a LOT easier to profit through corruption and by taking advantage of those around you.
"Because hopefully educated people will be more concerned with creating a better world and not with waging war on each other. Right?"
In a word, NO! When Europeans came to the new world they were certainly better educated than the natives. Did they come in peace? No most came with superior weaponry due to their superior education and knowledge and proceeded to kill, enslave, plunder and ethnically cleanse the poorly educated and technologically inferior natives.
The two people running the U.S. executive branch are extremely well educated. The President had a prep school education, graduated Yale and then Harvard MBA. Now granted he was mostly partying and coasting on his family's influence during that education, and he in fact seems to have mush for brains and got nothing out of his education, but he is "educated" and he was so fond of the idea of war he launched several at his first opportunity much to the detriment of the world in at least one case.
So it is my contention that people who naively claim that "education == better people" are way off the mark. You can twist an education system in to creating Spartans and Nazi's who live for war and killing. The nature of the education is everything.
Giving kids networked laptops doesn't insure they will grow up to be saints and Einsteins. It does give them a better shot at being better people, a shot they make take advantage of or they may squander. They may be freed from some of their isolation and have better access to knowledge and a diversity of viewpoints but they may well pick viewpoints they find on the Internet that most people would consider negative. They may use their computers to learn, they may use them to look at porn or create new Nigerian email scams.
There are three aspects to education here:
- Enabling learning, which this project may offer especially in concert with networking and hopefully the network reaches the Internet - Direction, which this project may not offer since I don't think there are teachers or curricula attached at least in some cases - Self control and self motivation which depends on the heart, mind and life history of each individual kid
Chances are these laptops may help nurture both monsters and shining stars. Hopefully the number and impact of the shining stars will outweigh the monsters.
"Finally, some countries have a culture of corruption."
I think all countries have a culture of corruption, its just a question of degree and pervasiveness. The U.S. doesn't seem particularly superior in this regard. For example the pinnacle of U.S. governance our Congress and executive branch are apparently rife with corruption. Duke Cunningham was handing out defense contracts in exchange for expensive homes, a yacht, cars and antiques. A Louisiana Congressmen apparently had a freezer full of bribe money. Jack Abramoff apparently had Tom DeLay, Robert Ney and probably others in his back pocket and got legislation custom written to benefit himself and his clients. The Alaska delegation got a couple hundred million to build a bridge to nowhere. The Mississippi delegation, Trent Lott in particular, tacked $700 million or so on to a defense bill to move a rail line inland to improve the tourist, real estate and gambling potential of the Mississippi coast. This rail line had been destroyed in Katrina, and already rebuilt at a cost of a couple hundred million, now its being torn apart and moved at tax payer expense mostly to benefit local developers. The Iraq war turned out to be a giant candy store for war profiteering by one company after another with the right connections to the powers that be in the Republican party.
So no, you don't have to bribe local officials to deliver things in the U.S., usually, but then too the wholesale corruption in the Federal government involve sums that are larger than the GDP of many African nations.
"Neither of those two are valuable commodities today, unless perhaps you're making a zombie film."
I guess its a matter of taste and age. They were two of many actors who were at a peak during an era when film making was also peaking. Before TV, the internet and video games began to dominate people's lives people went to theaters as a dominant form of entertainment. Films of that era had a lot better dialog and were focused more on acting than today's are. There weren't special effects, sex, profanity, shock and awe or any of the other crutches today's film makers rely so heavily on to hold an audience's attention. Movies were heavily centered on actors acting and script writers writing compelling dialog. You find it boring, I still think they have something interesting to offer. How many of today's films are people going to still watch 50 years from now. I doubt very many. Unfortunately most of those old films don't hold the attention span of today's audience, whom unfortunately have no attention span unless they are being bombarded with non stop sensory overload and scripts at the level of a comic book.
Its hard to say which lobbyists this article was referring to but I'm guessing it was this case where a DOD employee leaked secrets about U.S. policy towards Iran to lobbyists for AIPAC. If you don't recognize the acronym AIPAC it is probably one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S. It stands for American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It is a key lobby which helps Israel exert massive influence over U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
Now why these lobbyists were given this information is another question but you can deduce that when the DOD was dominated by Jewish, pro Israel, mostly Neocons like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Fieth and Dov Zakheim that there was probably a pervasive attitude that Israel and its lobbyists rated special access.
There is at least some chance that the deception and push coming out of DOD to take down Saddam was because Israel wanted Saddam taken down, since he lobbed missiles at them in the first gulf war and they were afraid he would use WMD's against them. There is at least a chance all those high ranking pro Israel people in the DOD placed Israel's interest above those of the United States. The end result being Israel got rid of one of their most bitter and dangerous neighbors for no extra charge, and the U.S. impaled itself in a quagmire thats cost $400 billion, 2400 dead and thousands more maimed for life. Iran is the next nation at the top of Israel's list for regime change, and amazingly enough its on the top of the Bush administration's too while the continue to mostly ignore North Korea since its not much of a threat to Israel.
I'm pretty sure Wolfowitz and maybe Perle hold dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel and it is not good for high ranking people in the Defense department to have divided loyalties.
There is real peril to the integrity of the U.S. government when you have people serving in powerful positions in places like the DOD who are serving two masters and have loyalties that are frequently in contradiction to their oath to the U.S. and its Constitution.
CG actors aren't even close to replacing human actors for most things. CG actors are great for cartoony characters that humans couldn't do anyway. You try to sell a CG actor, in their current state of development, off as a real human actor people immediately spot the fact its synthetic, start noticing all the little traits that aren't human, it immediately starts bugging the audience, they get distracted and turned off by the whole movie. Animation tools simply aren't there to pull off a synthetic human for any length of time. Its really hard for an animator to key every nuance of a lifted eyebrow, or just to lip sync well to a sound track of a voice recording. When an actor speaks every motion and nuance is perfectly in sync with and natural for the audio track. It takes enormous effort for an animator to just get close and then they still don't nail all the nuances of emotion that goes along with whats actually being said. Again it works for cartoon characters because people don't expect perfection. As soon as you try to pull off a synthetic human everyone does expect perfection.
Human actors who have real character, like Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall are a pretty valuable commodity, though I will agree many actors today don't rate the salaries or praise they get. A key problem is they are often working off bad scripts and with bad directors.
I wager part of the wasteland that is film today is because todays movie makers, script writers and actors grew up in the TV age and are remarkably devoid of creativity and character. This is a reason we see so many crappy remakes of medicore plots and TV shows like Bewitched. I'm wondering if the rising generations will do better. They grew up in the Internet age and have the ability to search for ideas, and their searches can take them in a billion different directions, versus the one spoon fed direction TV takes its viewers. They have an increasingly vast pool of information and ideas at their disposal so maybe they will be more creative than the current largely failed generation of film makers.
"make the case that returning to the moon is vital to defeating terrorism"
Defeating terrorism is a hard stretch to make.
An approach I could see working in the current climate is the need to place a cross on the Moon, to lay claim to it in the name of Christianity, and to insure all colonies are good Christian colonies.
Evangelism was a key motivation behind the Spanish drive to discover the new world. They had the added bonus of discovering millions of lost souls there they could convert to Catholicism or kill them in the process, something unfortunately lacking on the Moon or Mrs.
Europeans squandered vast treasure and many lives launching crusade after crusade over centuries to place the holy land under the shadow of the crucifix.
No one admits it but some of the enthusiasm driving the invasion of Afghanistan and especially Iraq is driven by Christianity expressing dominance over Islamic nations that are painted as barbaric and uncivilized.
Never underestimate the insanity you can get people to fall for in the name of religion.
I'll have to admit using religious fervor to justify the space program is a stretch. But if you do manage to put large colonies on Mars I'm sure the Mormons, at least, will have a church in every colony and some people in white shirts and ties who will be doing there best to show colonists the right path:)
"Safety, in '69 it was an adventure, costs didn't really matter, it was a first, and lives and comfort could be somewhat disregarded. Not so today, especially with the recent Space Shuttle issues."
Uh, that was true up until the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts. After that the program became much more safety conscious though they didn't do what the Shuttle program did, basically stop flying most of the time and spend all their time and money trying to make it perfectly safe just before the scrap it. They did stay on schedule in spite of the setback but they also redesigned and fixed the problems quickly. In particular they switch from a pure oxygen capsule and they cleaned up the hurried, poorly done wiring.
A key difference is Apollo didn't have have a fundamental design defect that was impossible to fix and the Shuttle does. Ice shedding off the ET has happened since STS-1, you can't stop it and they have a fragile thermal protection system right in the middle of it.
I think its not a good analysis to say Apollo did what they did because they threw safety to the wind, while now you have to be safety conscious. Apollo succeeded because it was well engineered, especially for the job it needed to do and they had enough of a safety program to catch most things without crippling the program doing it. The Shuttle isn't well engineered and the whole program has been crushed under a safety bureaucracy that mostly generates mile high stacks of paper works but STILL doesn't catch or stop them from doing things that are dangerous and stupid.
Either the new program will be well engineered and succeed or it wont and it wont. No amount of safety inspections and mile high piles of paper is going to make much of a difference if the engineering isn't good. I'm not sure the U.S. has the engineering horses to do it today. In the 60's engineering and technology was glamorous and the education system turned out a lot of quality engineers. It was deemed to be essential to national survival during the cold war. Today I really doubt many talented Americans place engineer, especially aerospace engineer, at the top of the list of most wanted jobs. Aerospace engineer in particular has been a boom or bust career, with the only place with any stability being defense. Its not a great job especially if you cant stand working for giant bureaucracies that don't get much done most of the time. The only place I've seen that sound like exciting places to be aerospace engineers are the little guys like Scaled Composites, Transformational and SpaceX but its open to debate if they can muster the resources to succeed or do anything big. SpaceX for example will crater if they have a couple more failed launches. Not sure Scaled or Transformational can do anything orbital unless they get NASA or DOD contracts and then they risk getting sucked in to the bureaucracy they despise. I hope they do all succeed though. The NASA/Lockheed/Boeing politburo isn't a path to success anymore. ISS and Shuttle prove that.
"Sometimes called majority rule, which is really the central point of my original post."
Mob rule and majority rule are two different things. In mob rule the mob violates the law as it acts on impulse. In majority rule you adhere to the law, even if you don't like it, and if you really don't like it you CHANGE THE LAW. The founding fathers wisely required a supermajority when it comes to mucking with the constitution so that a simple majority with blood in their eye couldn't muck it up on a whim. A simple majority and their elected representatives can still pass bad and unconstitutional laws but the courts are supposed to strike them down.
The bottomline is are we a nation of laws or a nation where some people just impose their will on the rest of us in contravention of our basic civil liberties. It doesn't matter if they ARE the majority they can't give away or take away the rights the Constitution gives me. I DON'T CARE HOW SCARED THEY ARE.
When George W., Gonzales and Ashcroft decided to lock up Jose Padilla without access to lawyer, family or a day in court he violated some of our most basic liberties. It appears certain that he wanted to establish precedent allowing him to lock up anyone he felt like, whenever he felt like, for as long as he felt like, wherever in the world he felt like, and also if he felt like torture you while you are locked in that black hole someplace. The Supreme Court after YEARS of delay GENTLY suggested he couldn't and Padilla's been moved at a glacial pace in to the court system. In reality the Bush administration should have been hammered for it, if not impeached and jailed themselves.
When the Bush administration decided to just ignore the FISA law rather than go to Congress to change it, once again they violated the law and should be held to account for it. FISA is a law that is there to insure our basic constitutional rights are protected. Just ignoring those rights is not allowed in our system of government.
When the government told the phone companies to turn over all their calling records they acted in violation of section 220 in the U.S. Communications Act which says phone companies don't turn over your calling records without a court issued warrant. Qwest is apparently the only big phone company that didn't break the law.
The Bush administration seems to be deluding itself that when Congress passed the bill that gave him authority to use all force necessary to deal with 9/11, they gave the President dictatorial power. The problem here is either the Bush administration is broadly misinterpreting the law or Congress passed a law that violates the Constitution and the courts should be striking it down.
When you have a government that just chooses to ignore any law or section of the Constitution it finds inconvenient, and gets away with it, you are no longer a nation of laws. You are a dictator's nation.
I like this part in the Slashdot submission which no one seems to be commenting on:
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."
I figured Slashdot readers were smarter than this.
The usefulness is obvious. Whenever you identify someone as a "person of interest" (i.e. a suspect with a reservation in his name at a secret East Europen prison and ticket in his name on Air Rendition) you immediately look up everyone who has ever called him and he has ever called. You eliminate all the 1-900 calls, calls to his mom and time spent talking to automated tech support lines. All the individuals left are then branded as suspects too, guilty until proven innocent, guilt through association. Of course these new suspects can't prove their innocence since they don't know they are a suspect and there is no court in the loop, thanks to George W. Bush, to insure there is probable cause to suspect them of something and to scrutinize them further.
You then walk the branches of the network and brand as suspects all the people who have talked to the 2nd layer in the network, and then the 3rd, and iterate. Needless to say the further out you get the less weight there is on the suspicion unless this calling tree intersects with another network of another "person of interest" at which point someone in the NSA yells "Eureka, I found it, a terrorist network". At this point presumably the Rendition team warms up their jet, puts on their black ninja gear and starts rounding people up, for... uh..... questioning, that it just questioning, don't mind the East Europen guy over their with the electrodes.
The beauty of computers is you can search for all kinds of correlations and linkages in these calling networks and who knows you might actually spot a terrorist. But you are somewhat more likely to violate the rights of and lay suspicion on lots of innocence people without cause. Or maybe you will just inundate yourself with information and false alarms and never catch the next 9/11 just before it happens.
It would be damn useful if instead of just recording the source and destination of every call made if you could also record the call so you could go back and see if they were plotting. This is probably the plan but they need more storage capacity and bandwidth.
"If you want to rail against someone for the loss of privacy, rail against the great silent majority in America who will not tolerate a repeat of 911."
So I take it you are a big fan of mob rule? If a crowd forms outside the jailhouse, and decides it wants to lynch someone before a trial to "prevent" some crime from every happening again, I'm guessing you would approve, assuming it is the silent majority of the town's citizens?
The founding fathers were well aware of the dangers of mob rule and the mistakes peoples and governments can make when they are stoked by emotions and nationalist fervor. They designed our constitution in such a way as to make it VERY hard for mob rule to alter it or trample it in the mud. It gives us basic rights that no one is supposed to take away, especially not a fevered mob.
Unfortunately the founding fathers knew how fragile the Constitution was, especially in the face of the indifference of the nation's people to defend and protect their system of government and their basic rights. They expected it to fail and it increasingly is. It was a grand experiment but it is sad to see it fail.
The most vivid example of why mob rule is wrong, and how we failed to protect our system of government, was in the wake of Pearl Harbor when Japanese Americans were rounded up wholesale, placed in concentration camps and had all their property stolen by their neighbors. They no doubt rationalized they were somehow stopping another Pearl Harbor, like you are, but in fact all they did was lock up mostly loyal citizens, stole their life's work, without cause or hearing, because of their race. I think most American, in hindsight, regret what was done to them and appreciate now that it was wrong, but unfortunately we now do it again but to a different race and religion.
I'm all for the government monitoring the communications of criminals and terrorists. BUT, they have to get a court order to do it. That is not so much to ask. That is the most basic of checks and balances in a democracy, and it was something we had in the FISA court which the Bush administration chose to trample. Sure it was an inconvenience but the court almost never denied a wiretap and it insured some 3rd party oversight. Under the Bush administration it appears they can most probably listen to anyone anytime they feel like. Under the new regime it would be trivial for them to spy on anti war protesters, political rivals or really anyone for any reason. There are no checks and balances now. J. Edgar Hoover and Richar Nixon spied on people wholesale too, it was massive abuse of their power, which is why we got the FISA court. They had to tap phone lines and plant bugs though. It would be their wet dream to use computers to spy on anyone anytime.
All in all this is fundamentally wrong and a contravention of our principles of governance. You could almost rationalize it in the face of a World War but the key difference is World War II was a fight to the finish and it had an end. The nature of the current threat is such that it most probably will NEVER END. There will always be a danger ten people with a cause can figure out a way to launch a suicide attack, and there is a chance all the spying in the world wont catch them, if for example they never discuss it except in whispered voices in a noisy place.
When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus or Roosevelt locked up the Japanese and spied on cable traffic it was an emergency measure and it had an end. The things the Bush administration is doing may never end unless an administration gains power and decides of its own volition to end them. It means we don't have basic civil liberties, we have liberties at the whim of whomever is in power which sounds more like third world dictatorship than great democracy.
What you did here was called an ad hominem attack. You didn't really debate any of the points I made, you just launched a bunch of vicious and unfounded attacks at me. It is one of the weakest and lowest forms of debate.
You don't really know anything about me so the the leap you made from a couple sentences about the "War on Drugs" to me being a "dope smoker" was really uncalled for.
Try to do better next time and debate the issues instead of just slinging mud, or can't you make reasoned arguments to get your point across.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the Democrats courted instead of demonizing us, they'd have the Whitehouse and Congress."
Well actually people like you are why we back abortion. We were hoping all the barefoot, ignorant, bible thumpers who birth people like you would opt for abortion if it was cheap, safe and easy so we wouldn't have to put up with people like you for a lifetime, and even worse you reproduce and teach your kids to think like you so we will never be rid of your kind. I pity the poor little devils having you for a dad.
You see we don't want to court your vote or give you an alternative you like. We dislike everything you stand for so anyone you like is the last person on earth we want to get elected (ref. George W. Bush).
Unfortunately all the con men who stand at the pulpit every Sunday saw through the plan which is why they are so rabidly against abortion and contraception. The pro life preachers and popes really don't give a damn about the sanctity of life, they just want more butts in the seats because it translates in to more bucks in the plate. They want every white, trailer trash couple to have ten kids that they can't afford to properly raise or educate as long as they are in church every Sunday and you are putting their college fund in the collection plate.
So the abortion plan backfired. All the intelligent, well educated enlightened people are using contraception and having abortions so they only have one or two kids which they go all out to raise properly. All the morons who really believe the world is actually only 6,000 years old and that they can trace their begats back to Adam and Eve aren't getting abortions and are having ten kids who are so badly raised and educated they should qualify as a weapon of mass destruction. Its kind of selective breeding in reverse. The human race is rapidly, selectively breeding itself back in to the dark ages. The world is gonna be a wonderful place when scientists are persecuted by the church and burned at the stake for heresy(i.e. pointing out that our sacred fossil fuels are causing global warming and will eventually require a Noah Jr. to save us).
Plan B which hasn't worked so well either was for us to pretend like we are adamant supporters of gun control so you would all immediately rush out and buy as many guns as you could possibly afford, with your minimum wage job and after you've taken out your Budweiser allotment for the week, just to spite us. We were then hoping you would manage to accidentally shoot yourselves or the barefoot wife you beat twice a week would use one to put you out of our misery.
"We're making MORE terrorists, not fewer. Christ!"
I don't suppose it occurred to you that "the powers that be" (TM) actually WANT MORE terrorists. Things like Iraq and Abu Graib make total sense once you come to this simple realization. If you want a perpetual war, and you want a justification for building a police state, you really need a never ending supply of terrorists. God forbid you might run out!!! Its a basic tenant of 1984 that you need perpetual war for Big Brother to thrive. You need something for people to always be afraid of so they will turn to the state to "protect" them, and in the process give up every freedom they have in exchange for safety.
Those damn Russian Communists screwed "the powers that be" royally by throwing in the towel. Damn you Ronald Reagan you weren't actually supposed to beat the commies. Those damn Chinese Communists did the same damn thing and turned in to greedy Fasco-Capitalists over night so you can barely tell them from Americans now.
It sounds kind of far fetched but why else do you think the U.S. has made basically zero effort to capture Bin Laden, and Pakistan is still harboring a flourishing Al Qaeda and Taliban in its tribal regions. "The powers that be" have to be extremely careful that they don't WIN the "War on Terror" because if they did they would be screwed. No one would put up with their crap if there was no "War on Terror".
Remember what happened after the end of the cold war. Everyone started slashing defense spending, we had budget surpluses and prosperity, and "the powers that be" had absolutely no justification for grabbing more power at the expense of their real enemy, the ordinary citizens of the United States. Nothing pisses off the defense industrial complex more than cutting their budget, it eats in to their power and profitability.
"Don't think so, he'll rather say "OK, so no EU planes will land here anymore.", "
No he wont. The economic damage to the U.S. from such self imposed sanctions would be catastrophic. If the U.S. were to boycott EU planes you just boycott American airlines until the U.S. caves.
Everyone ought to call America's bluff on this and it would soon become obvious how much of a paper tiger the Bush administration is.
The U.S. is already doing grievous economic damage to itself in the wake of 9/11, squandering vast sums on useless false security measures and $400 billion squandered in Iraq for starters. But too, many bright people will no longer come to the U.S. for conferences or to work. The U.S. is driving graduate students and researchers away from the U.S. because visas are so much harder to get and U.S. protection of civil liberties has become so weak and capricious many people don't want to come to a nation which no longer has due process, especially if you aren't a U.S. citizen, aren't Judeo-Christian or you have dark skin. Of course U.S. citizens don't have any assurance of due process either, reference Jose Padilla though he does have dark skin and is a Muslim convert. Of course you aren't even really safe if you don't come to the U.S. since the U.S. created rendition it bestowed upon itself the power to snatch people anywhere in the world, in violation of national sovereignty and whisk you away to a secret prison to be tortured. Might not be so bad if this program had a 100% certainty of nabbing terrorists but it has provably snatched completely innocent people by mistake, destroying their lives.
Its kind of slow motion damage since it will take a few years before the damage is obvious but the U.S. has become completely dependent on brains coming from other countries for R&D and higher education and everything the U.S. does to discourage them from coming to the U.S. is akin to shooting itself in the foot. The U.S. was able to develop nuclear weapons during World War II because it welcomed highly educated refugees from Nazi Germany with open arms. Today the U.S. is more like Nazi Germany and the refugee flow is now in the opposite direction. The only people still welcomed with open arms are the largely uneducated cheap labor flowing across the border unchecked with NO RESTRICTION. The U.S. doesn't even know their names or where they came from, let alone have 45 personal information items on them.
It is a sign of complete insanity to impose these intrusive restrictions on legal travelers at the same time that you are still making NO effort to seal a massively porous border with Mexico 5 years after 9/11.
"Deception and Agendas are aplenty, and we will not know whether or not you are right
for some time, but...consider Iran's step to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty."
There certainly are and the U.S. and Israel engage in more deception and agendas than anyone.
As an interesting intellectual exercise people should actually read theNuclear Non Proliferation Treaty
One agenda is that Israel, Pakistan and India never signed the NPT in the first place so why are you not up in arms about THEIR complete absence of ANY oversight. Israel is believed to have developed hundreds of nuclear weapons, and they have credible delivery mechanisms so could probably easily incinerate Iran TODAY. Where is your outrage about Israel's actual nuclear weapons development versus the maybe someday that is Iran's nuclear program.
Pakistan is thought to have been the world's largest proliferater of nuclear technology especially through the A.Q. Khan ring and when this fact was discovered the U.S. took no action against them other than MAYBE shutting down the proliferation ring. Khan was basically pardoned and as a national hero of Pakistan is still free today.
Then of course there is the U.S. which has some real deception and agendas of its own. The nuclear weapons haves in the NPT didn't submit themselves to ANY international oversight of their nuclear programs. In the treaty the nuclear powers DID commit to nuclear disarmament, an end to the arms race and end to the development of new nuclear weapons. The U.S., especially the Bush administration, largely defiant of all those sections in the preamble. The U.S. is in fact developing new nuclear weapons under the Bush administration and may well unilaterally withdraw from the test ban treaty someday in order to test them unless someone comes to their senses or more moderate people get elected. The Bush administration is doing its best to provoke a new arms race not end them, unless maybe the end comes because the U.S. acquires such an enormous lead Russia and China give up. And probably the most disturbing "agenda" which leaves the NPT in tatters, the Bush administration is seriously talking about and is developing tactical nuclear weapons that it fully intends to actually use in conventional wars, unless someone stops them. In particular they want to use small nuclear devices to incinerate cave complexes and bunkers that are difficult to destroy with conventional explosives.
Where does it leave the NPT if the U.S. actually starts using nuclear weapons as a matter of routine in future wars.
Below are some of the interesting sections of the NPT, which aren't exactly in the articles of the treaty but are more preamble referring to things like the U.N. Charter.
Especially note this section referencing and affirming the U.N. Charter which the U.S. pretty much violates everytime it invades a sovereign country, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, or acts to overthrow sovereign governments. The U.S. also diverts more to armaments than the rest of the world combined:
"States must refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations, and that the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security are to be promoted with the least diversion for armaments of the world's human and economic resources"
"Declaring their intention to achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament, Urging the co-operation of all States in the attainment of this objective".
"Recalling the determination expressed by the Parties to the 1963 Treaty banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water in its Preamble to seek to achieve the discontinuance of all test explosions of n
"I'm aware that the Israelis were very happy to nod in agreement with everything we said about Iraq--whether that was because they believed it or because they just wanted us to do it is up for debate"
Its clear Israel wanted the U.S. to take down Saddam more than anyone. He after all did lob missiles in to their cities in the first Iraq war and if they had had WMD's in them....
Its no coincidence that MOST of the people in the DOD who built the fabricated case for invading Iraq and pushed the war were Jewish and in some cases had dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel and had decidedly mixed loyalties. Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle are the three most disturbing actors. They may well have been the point men for an Israeli scheme to sucker the U.S. in to taking down Saddam for them, and they knew George W. was dumb enough to fall for it.
The rhetoric on Iran may well be a new round of Israel trying to con the U.S. in to taking out Iran for them which is the next country on their list they want taken down. If Iraq hadn't turned in to a debacle, the Bush administration was in fact ramping up the rhetoric to justify taking down both Syria and Iran right after Iraq. Iraq unfortunately went to bad, so they had to postpone the plan to cleanse the Middle East of the last remaining states who were still openly hostile to Israel.
Its noteworthy the U.S. treats North Korea completely differently though they really do have nukes. Why? Because North Korean isn't very close to Israel, isn't Arab or Muslim and isn't a particularly imminent threat to Israel.
I should note it is a baffling double standard for the U.S., Israel and the E.U. to be so rabidly against Iran getting nukes. Israel has enough nukes and delivery vehicles to easily incinerate Iran. Pakistan has nukes and they are one of the most rabidly fundamentalist Islamic states, they built the Taliban after all, and their current dictator could be replaced with an Islamic extremist over night who might want to use his nukes. I'm all for Iran not having nukes, but unless you are a flaming hypocrite you have to be as equally firm that Israel or Pakistan not have them too. And why stop there. EVERYONE should dismantle them. They serve no useful purpose since no one in their right mind would actually use them, and its just a matter of time, with the extent they have proliferated that someone not in their right mind gets hold of one, or a thousand, and does use them.
The nation with nukes that scares me the most, hands down, is the U.S. because the crazies in the Bush administration are actually working hard to come up with ways to actually justify using them in conventional conflicts. Most nations have nukes for deterrence, the U.S. is the only nation who has actually used them and which is actually talking about using them again.
"It's the Jordanian border guards who are preventing tht."
I think you misunderstood what I said. I wasn't saying the Palestinians should move to Jordan, I was saying they ARE living in Jordan, occupied Jordan. Thanks to Israel's seizure of their homes and homeland they are stateless refugees in occupied territory. No one wants them so they are sentenced to an eternity living under Israeli occupation mostly in abject poverty. And you wonder why they are so mad. They are enduring the same fate Jews did when they were scattered to the wind. You would think Jews of all people would have some empathy for this and not do the same thing to another people that was done to them.
"Oh, intentionally blowing up young children, and taking pride in it, constitutes "somewhat extreme views" in your opinion...?"
Uh, Israel's military kills young children too. A 13 year old girl shot multiple times by an Israeli officer in cold blood for example. U.S. Marines murdered young children in Haditha Iraq, for example they executed a one year old girl. Thats what happens in bloody insurgencies stoked by mutual hatred and fear. You see you want to forget Israel and the U.S. kill children and only remember Palestinian suicide bombers kill children. I'm a little more intellectually honest and recognize Hamas is not particularly different from the U.S. or Israel in this regard. U.S. strategic bombing campaigns in Vietnam and World War II killed millions of civilians. Palestinian suicide bombers aren't even in the same ballpark if you want to talk about mass murder.
"is that it failed to prevent those acts"
Don't want to debate the subject since its impossible to sort out exactly what happened in those camps, but Israel invaded Lebanon pretty much in violation of international law, those camps were under Israeli military control, they let Christian militias who they knew had a blood feud with them, go in and slaughter unarmed refugees and did nothing in spite of hours of gunfire. Maybe Sharon and his officers were just ignorant or maybe they wanted the Palestinians slaughtered, we will really never know. There are plenty of other case studies of the Israeli military intentionally killing civilians but you are in denial on the subject so I'm not gonna waste the time recounting them as you rationalize that somehow you are somehow inherently better than your foe. I know full well you think you are inherently superior to Palestinians. They are always wrong and you are always in the right, right? That is in the nature of apartheid states.
" Illegal settlements are harshly evacuated by Israeli armed forces."
Dude all settlements in occupied territories are illegal, its just most of them were given under the table blessing of hard liners in the Israeli government. When you build settlements in occupied territories the only way you can do it is by seizing the land of the people that lived there before the occupation. It is against international law to seize the property of people in occupied territories. It is basically ethnic cleansing since you are ejecting the people who lived there to replace them with people of your race.
"But deciding to commit mass-murder"
Take off the blinders friend. There is no difference between a suicide bomb or an F-16 dropping a 1000 pound bomb in an apartment complex full of innocent women and children to assassinate one Palestinian leader. Again you are claiming some morale superiority that simply isn't there. The women and children end up just as dead in both cases. Your problem is you've rationalized that the two acts are inherently different when they are not.
"No one is asking Hamas to "disarm"."
Well at this point you seem to have no clue what you are talking about. EVERYONE is demanding Hamas disarm and recognize Israel's right to exist as a precondition of even entering negot
"why did they have to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza strip before the Palestinian Authority took over?"
Not sure I exactly follow your question or assertion. Israel unilaterally abandoned Gaza and they stripped everything of value out of Jewish settlements there so the Palestinians would get nothing of economic value during the transfer.
The Jewish settlements there were ridiculously hard and expensive to defend and the Israeli government was mostly glad to be rid of them. Gaza is a giant impoverished refugee camp about to explode and having illegal Jewish settlements in the middle of it was simply impractical.
By "abandoning" it Israel can pretend that it is not responsible for the miserable conditions there. It is not an economically viable state and its going to stay permanently impoverished especially with Israel dominating and controlling its borders and sending in tanks whenever it feels like it. By cutting it loose, Israel can pretend its not their fault, though 60 years of history says it is.
It also helps to reduce the count of Arabs living under Israeli control. Israel wants to insure that Arabs are never in the majority and if you count the occupied territories Arabs will soon eclipse Jews as the majority. By casting a million plus Arabs in Gaza to the wind they insure Jews are in the majority for a while longer.
Bottomline is there was nothing of value in Gaza for Israel and lot of liabilities. They gave up nothing in doing what they did, other than angering the hardline settlers there whose settlements were illegal by every definition. The settlers do have a right to be angry at the Israeli government since the government probably endorsed and encouraged them to settle there, under the table, as part of claiming greater Israel.
They might do the same for a few settlements in the West Bank that are high liability and low return but I really doubt Israel will give up any of the illegal settlements in the West Bank that it values, and based on Olmert's recent statements they are most probably going to seize East Jerusalem and cleanse it of Arabs.
"They are not Israeli citizens. They should not have voting rights in Israel, not any more than Americans should have voting rights in Canada."
They are however living under Israeli occupation and have been since 1967, thats 40 years. Now if the people living on the West Bank were voting in Jordanian elections you might have an analogy but Israeli border guards are for some reason not letting them be part of Jordan. Sure they can vote in Palestinian elections for a sham government that has no sovereign power, and if they vote for anyone Israel or the U.S. doesn't approve of Israel can, will and is strangling them. So yea I guess they can vote as long as they vote for whomever Israel and the U.S. tells them to.
You see there is a big difference, Canadians live in a sovereign nation so their vote counts for something, the Palestinians are living under permanent occupation, no end in sight, and don't have any rights other than those of people in occupied territories under international law, which Israel routinely ignores. The Israeli military can close their borders at their discretion, their military can enter any part of the occupied territories with tanks and bulldozers, arrest anyone they chose and hold them indefinitely and routinely bulldoze farms and homes, often with people still in them. They still routinely evict Palestinians from homes, farms and businesses to make way for Jewish settlements and for their wall which is create one big ghetto, both of which are completely illegal but sanctioned by the Israeli government and the rest of the world endorses them or looks the other way.
" Hamas is a party which organized hundreds of suicide bombings against Israeli population through the 90s."
Yes and the Israeli military has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians during the same period, Sabra and Shatila being one of the darker stains on Israel's credibility. Both side's hands are equally bloody. Its pretty disingenuous of you to pretend the Palestinians are the only ones that are killing civilians there. Just because the Israeli's have F-16, Apache helicopters, bulldozers and tanks to do the killing doesn't make them any more in the right.
"it rejects peace, or any acknoledgment of Israel and its right to exist"
Granted Hamas has somewhat extremes views. So would you if you had been ejected from your home and homeland and spent the last 60 years in impoverished refugee camps as a stateless person with no hope for a better life.
The demands the west makes of Hamas to even negotiate are ridiculous and unreasonable. They are basically demanding they completely capitulate to a bitter foe and disarm before the negotiations even begin. If they do then they can have the scraps the world feels like giving them since at that point they have nothing to bargin with. It appears at the moment, based on things Olmert recently said those scrap would mean living in the parts of the West Bank and Gaza Israel doesn't want inside a walled ghetto in borders unilaterally drawn up by Israel, and most probably with borders still routinely violated by Israel at their whim. To be honest I see why they don't capitulate and why in a free election Palestinians voted them in to office over the completely corrupt Fatah that is mostly capitulating and getting nothing in return for anyone except the graft for themselves.
"What that law does state is that Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens would not be automatically granted Israeli citizenship."
And it also means the Palestinian spouse can't move to Israel to live together as man and wife. I don't think an Israeli citizen can easily move to the West Bank to live with their spouse either. The Israeli military restricts who can move to the West bank, apparently favoring to only allow Jews to move their to create "illegal" settlements secretly blessed by the Israeli government. Yes I think you can get married but you probably wont be able to live together and any children you have will be in legal limbo.
Contrast this with any non Palestinian who can marry an Israeli and get citizenship with no problem. Any Jew from anywhere in the world can easily move to Israel and get citizenship and in fact many American Jews have duel citizenship where they are given an Israeli passport merely because they are Jewish. I think Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the disaster in Iraq, carries
dual citizenship and duel alegience which is bad for a key decision maker in the Pentagon.
You can try to rationalize it anyway you like but in its current form it is a racist, apartheid policy designed to cement Israel as a Jewish state. It is a hard and fast rule a Jew from anywhere can get citizenship in a heart beat and its nearly impossible for Palestinians to even return to what was their home for centuries until they were driven out, often by threat of violence like the massacre at Deir Yassin.
"The Palestinians are currently at war with Israel."
Yes and likewise the Israelis have been at war with the Palestinians since they pushed them out of the homes 60 years ago. You act like its only the Palestinians who are at war. Far more of them die at the hands of the Israelis than the other way around. Its also unlikely there will ever be any real peace short of the Palestinians completely capitulating and accepting life in walled ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank for the rest of time, most probably in eternal povery since the occupied territories are economically unviable inside an Israeli noose.
If you had been driven out of your home and in to refugee camps for 60 years I'm pretty sure you would be doing the same things the Palestinians are doing.
Onealternative viewpoint to consider and .
"In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation?"
You are conveniently differentiating between Israel Palestinians and Palestinians in the occupied lands, land occupied for 40 years now. The Palestinians in the occupied land have no representation and no rights. The Palestinians in parliament as I said are being carefully engineered in to a minority which will never have any real power.
The Israelis are building a giant wall that is cutting Palestinians off from their work, farms, each other. They are building walled ghettos. Olmert recently said he is probably going to unilaterally draw the borders for their new state and take all of Jerusalem and several important big Jewish settlements in the West bank in violation of all previous negotiations.
The Israelis are collecting taxes at the borders of those ghettos that are supposed to go the Palestinians but since Hamas won a democratic election, and Israel and the U.S. didn't like how Democracy worked there, that money is being kept by the Israelis, along with most other aid. With no chance for a functional economy because Israel controlls the walls, cuts off traffic through the border at a whim the Israelis are today suffocating the Palestinians today more than they ever have. Its no secret if you are Palestinian the Israeli security forces are routinely humiliating you, arbitrarily arresting, routinely stopping you at blockades so you cant get to work.
The mere fact that a government is seeking to engineer how people think, speak and dress when it comes to Nazism is a Fascist tendency in its own right. Fascism operates under the tenant that people can't be trusted to think for themselves so the government has to regulate how they think and act for the good of the state.
The irony of rabid suppresion of Nazis is that many governments are leaning if not out right rushing to Fascism today. China, U.S., U.K., Australia, Russia and Israel are on the top of the Fascism scale in my book. Are they Nazi Germany, obviously not though China is pretty close with internal policy. Fortunately China at present seems to have no interest in aggressive warfare, a Fascist trademark, they are so busy just getting rich the old fashioned way. The U.S. has a superficially freer society though its getting less free every day, but its makes up for it on the Fascism scale with rampant militarism and advocacy of aggressive, preemptive war making.
Its my suspicion the world's governments need to suppress Nazi sympathizers because they want to return to Fascism as the world's dominant form of government, but to do that they need to erase the association between Fascism and the extreme turn it took in the 1930's and 1940's. If they outlaw and suppress the most notorious and superficial symbols of Fascism then OBVIOUSLY they must not be Fascist and Fascism must not exist today. If you make the false assertion that to be a Fascist you must wear a Swastika, and you outlaw the Swastika so no one wears them, then it follows there must not be any Fascists, right? It is an interesting con game.
The world's governments and media are in complete denial that Fascism could ever flourish again when in fact it is flourishing, its just no one will speak the name and on the Internet Godwin's law will be invoked, Godwin's law being the ultimate weapon to prevent anyone calling a spade a spade on the Internet.
The only time you hear anyone being called Fascist lately, is the Bush administration seems to have settled on Islamo-Fascist as their new buzz word since they've completely worn out the 'T' and 'R' keys on their keyboards using the word "Terrorist" a hundred times in EVERY speech and press release for the last 5 years, to refer to EVERYONE who is not "with them" in the "either you are with us or you are against us" equation. I would say there is another pretty heavy dose of smoke screen in their recent use of Fascist in describing their enemy. If there enemy is Fascist then that MUST mean that they are not, though in fact they are at least leaning that way.
Israel is another interesting case study. It was a state born out of the crucible of Fascism, but they treat Palestinians as sub human and with such contempt that it must ring a bell with Jews who lived in Europe in the 1930's. Just last week Israel's Supreme court affirmed a law effectively banning a Palestinian from marrying an Israeli citizen, a law so much like the Nazi prohibition of intermarriage with Jews. The law is not exactly predicated on race since its real motive is to prevent Palestinians from ever becoming the majority withing Israel. You see Palestinian are reproducing at a higher rate than Israel's Jews, especially if you count the occupied territories. so there is an imminent danger they will become the majority. Since Israel wants to maintain the facade it is a representative democracy it must do everything in its power to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority, because when they are either Jews surrender power at the polls or for all practical purposes Israel is an apartheid state, which is pretty much already is, with a minority controlling power through non Democratic means and ethnic "cleansing". This is a key motivator from the withdrawl from Gaza. Through withdrawl Israel can claim that all the Palestinians there are no longer a part of Israel while Israel still maintains a choke hold on every aspect of their day to day lives.
Well... given the choice between squandering at least $400 billion in a bloody quagmire, thats killeds tens of thousands of people, or spending it on ANY worthwhile R&D project the answer is obvious that R&D would be better. Maybe you wont achieve a successful commercial fusion reactor but as long as you insure sound R&D is happening in physics, materials, etc chances are you are going to get something worthwhile out of it.
I saw this illuminating article on what the U.S. has wrought in Iraq. All indications are Iraq is in really no better shape than it was under Saddam. At least then there was order, now there is chaos, with large numbers of people being killed, kidnapped and tortured under both regimes. Sure there are elections now but the government its lead to is just a bunch of factions who are carving up the country as they each try to grab a slice of the power and money. Corruption is rampant, militias are increasingly the only law and order and their brand of law and order is as arbitrary as Saddam's was.
The only people who benefit from the vast sums the U.S. is squandering in Iraq is the host of Republican connected U.S. companies that are profiteering off it, and the Iraqi factions that grabbed the biggest piece of the pie there.
The U.S. used to be the place where a large number of breakthroughs happened. Now the U.S. government doesn't invest in basic research, unless its related to weapons, spying or trying to attain a false sense of homeland security. American corporations increasingly slash research funding in pursuit of better quarters today while they destroy their long term well being, or they move it to places like China where the Chinese are likely to benefit from it more than America ever will.
Get used to a world where all the breakthroughs in science and engineering, outside of weaponry, happen someplace other than the U.S. because thats the road we are going down. Not sure we can even accomplish the weapons breakthroughs if the scientific, engineering and manufacturing base in the U.S. continues to hollow out.
It would be wonderful if the U.S. HAD spent that $400 billion on anything worthwhile versus wasting it which is what was done.
Education isn't the answer. Most of the people involved in corruption in the U.S. are extremely well educated, lawyers in particular, and they know perfectly well what is right and what is not. They no doubt had plenty of ethics classes.
Either you choose to have an ethical compass or you don't. The simple fact is corruption usually pays extremely well if you don't get caught. Most people don't go in to politics for the high pay because there isn't any. They go in for the power and the ability to do favors for their friends and to reap benefits for themselves. Most politicians are operating on an ethical razor's edge. Is what they are doing legitimate and just doling out pork to their constituents or does it cross the line in to corruption?
In Africa and Latin America economic opportunity is very limited so corruption becomes an appealing, or maybe the only, avenue to just make a living so it becomes very pervasive. There isn't much education will do to solve it unless it evolves in to economic opportunity through more legitimate avenues. Unfortunately most successful businessmen are also operating on an ethical edge. You can succeed in business operating ethically but its a LOT easier to profit through corruption and by taking advantage of those around you.
"Because hopefully educated people will be more concerned with creating a better world and not with waging war on each other. Right?"
In a word, NO! When Europeans came to the new world they were certainly better educated than the natives. Did they come in peace? No most came with superior weaponry due to their superior education and knowledge and proceeded to kill, enslave, plunder and ethnically cleanse the poorly educated and technologically inferior natives.
The two people running the U.S. executive branch are extremely well educated. The President had a prep school education, graduated Yale and then Harvard MBA. Now granted he was mostly partying and coasting on his family's influence during that education, and he in fact seems to have mush for brains and got nothing out of his education, but he is "educated" and he was so fond of the idea of war he launched several at his first opportunity much to the detriment of the world in at least one case.
So it is my contention that people who naively claim that "education == better people" are way off the mark. You can twist an education system in to creating Spartans and Nazi's who live for war and killing. The nature of the education is everything.
Giving kids networked laptops doesn't insure they will grow up to be saints and Einsteins. It does give them a better shot at being better people, a shot they make take advantage of or they may squander. They may be freed from some of their isolation and have better access to knowledge and a diversity of viewpoints but they may well pick viewpoints they find on the Internet that most people would consider negative. They may use their computers to learn, they may use them to look at porn or create new Nigerian email scams.
There are three aspects to education here:
- Enabling learning, which this project may offer especially in concert with networking and hopefully the network reaches the Internet
- Direction, which this project may not offer since I don't think there are teachers or curricula attached at least in some cases
- Self control and self motivation which depends on the heart, mind and life history of each individual kid
Chances are these laptops may help nurture both monsters and shining stars. Hopefully the number and impact of the shining stars will outweigh the monsters.
"Finally, some countries have a culture of corruption."
I think all countries have a culture of corruption, its just a question of degree and pervasiveness. The U.S. doesn't seem particularly superior in this regard. For example the pinnacle of U.S. governance our Congress and executive branch are apparently rife with corruption. Duke Cunningham was handing out defense contracts in exchange for expensive homes, a yacht, cars and antiques. A Louisiana Congressmen apparently had a freezer full of bribe money. Jack Abramoff apparently had Tom DeLay, Robert Ney and probably others in his back pocket and got legislation custom written to benefit himself and his clients. The Alaska delegation got a couple hundred million to build a bridge to nowhere. The Mississippi delegation, Trent Lott in particular, tacked $700 million or so on to a defense bill to move a rail line inland to improve the tourist, real estate and gambling potential of the Mississippi coast. This rail line had been destroyed in Katrina, and already rebuilt at a cost of a couple hundred million, now its being torn apart and moved at tax payer expense mostly to benefit local developers. The Iraq war turned out to be a giant candy store for war profiteering by one company after another with the right connections to the powers that be in the Republican party.
So no, you don't have to bribe local officials to deliver things in the U.S., usually, but then too the wholesale corruption in the Federal government involve sums that are larger than the GDP of many African nations.
Lauren Bacall isn't dead but at 82 she does have limited casting opportunities :)
"Neither of those two are valuable commodities today, unless perhaps you're making a zombie film."
I guess its a matter of taste and age. They were two of many actors who were at a peak during an era when film making was also peaking. Before TV, the internet and video games began to dominate people's lives people went to theaters as a dominant form of entertainment. Films of that era had a lot better dialog and were focused more on acting than today's are. There weren't special effects, sex, profanity, shock and awe or any of the other crutches today's film makers rely so heavily on to hold an audience's attention. Movies were heavily centered on actors acting and script writers writing compelling dialog. You find it boring, I still think they have something interesting to offer. How many of today's films are people going to still watch 50 years from now. I doubt very many. Unfortunately most of those old films don't hold the attention span of today's audience, whom unfortunately have no attention span unless they are being bombarded with non stop sensory overload and scripts at the level of a comic book.
Its hard to say which lobbyists this article was referring to but I'm guessing it was this case where a DOD employee leaked secrets about U.S. policy towards Iran to lobbyists for AIPAC. If you don't recognize the acronym AIPAC it is probably one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S. It stands for American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It is a key lobby which helps Israel exert massive influence over U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
Now why these lobbyists were given this information is another question but you can deduce that when the DOD was dominated by Jewish, pro Israel, mostly Neocons like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Fieth and Dov Zakheim that there was probably a pervasive attitude that Israel and its lobbyists rated special access.
There is at least some chance that the deception and push coming out of DOD to take down Saddam was because Israel wanted Saddam taken down, since he lobbed missiles at them in the first gulf war and they were afraid he would use WMD's against them. There is at least a chance all those high ranking pro Israel people in the DOD placed Israel's interest above those of the United States. The end result being Israel got rid of one of their most bitter and dangerous neighbors for no extra charge, and the U.S. impaled itself in a quagmire thats cost $400 billion, 2400 dead and thousands more maimed for life. Iran is the next nation at the top of Israel's list for regime change, and amazingly enough its on the top of the Bush administration's too while the continue to mostly ignore North Korea since its not much of a threat to Israel.
I'm pretty sure Wolfowitz and maybe Perle hold dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel and it is not good for high ranking people in the Defense department to have divided loyalties.
There is real peril to the integrity of the U.S. government when you have people serving in powerful positions in places like the DOD who are serving two masters and have loyalties that are frequently in contradiction to their oath to the U.S. and its Constitution.
Uh...in a word.....no.
CG actors aren't even close to replacing human actors for most things. CG actors are great for cartoony characters that humans couldn't do anyway. You try to sell a CG actor, in their current state of development, off as a real human actor people immediately spot the fact its synthetic, start noticing all the little traits that aren't human, it immediately starts bugging the audience, they get distracted and turned off by the whole movie. Animation tools simply aren't there to pull off a synthetic human for any length of time. Its really hard for an animator to key every nuance of a lifted eyebrow, or just to lip sync well to a sound track of a voice recording. When an actor speaks every motion and nuance is perfectly in sync with and natural for the audio track. It takes enormous effort for an animator to just get close and then they still don't nail all the nuances of emotion that goes along with whats actually being said. Again it works for cartoon characters because people don't expect perfection. As soon as you try to pull off a synthetic human everyone does expect perfection.
Human actors who have real character, like Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall are a pretty valuable commodity, though I will agree many actors today don't rate the salaries or praise they get. A key problem is they are often working off bad scripts and with bad directors.
I wager part of the wasteland that is film today is because todays movie makers, script writers and actors grew up in the TV age and are remarkably devoid of creativity and character. This is a reason we see so many crappy remakes of medicore plots and TV shows like Bewitched. I'm wondering if the rising generations will do better. They grew up in the Internet age and have the ability to search for ideas, and their searches can take them in a billion different directions, versus the one spoon fed direction TV takes its viewers. They have an increasingly vast pool of information and ideas at their disposal so maybe they will be more creative than the current largely failed generation of film makers.
"make the case that returning to the moon is vital to defeating terrorism"
:)
Defeating terrorism is a hard stretch to make.
An approach I could see working in the current climate is the need to place a cross on the Moon, to lay claim to it in the name of Christianity, and to insure all colonies are good Christian colonies.
Evangelism was a key motivation behind the Spanish drive to discover the new world. They had the added bonus of discovering millions of lost souls there they could convert to Catholicism or kill them in the process, something unfortunately lacking on the Moon or Mrs.
Europeans squandered vast treasure and many lives launching crusade after crusade over centuries to place the holy land under the shadow of the crucifix.
No one admits it but some of the enthusiasm driving the invasion of Afghanistan and especially Iraq is driven by Christianity expressing dominance over Islamic nations that are painted as barbaric and uncivilized.
Never underestimate the insanity you can get people to fall for in the name of religion.
I'll have to admit using religious fervor to justify the space program is a stretch. But if you do manage to put large colonies on Mars I'm sure the Mormons, at least, will have a church in every colony and some people in white shirts and ties who will be doing there best to show colonists the right path
"Safety, in '69 it was an adventure, costs didn't really matter, it was a first, and lives and comfort could be somewhat disregarded. Not so today, especially with the recent Space Shuttle issues."
Uh, that was true up until the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts. After that the program became much more safety conscious though they didn't do what the Shuttle program did, basically stop flying most of the time and spend all their time and money trying to make it perfectly safe just before the scrap it. They did stay on schedule in spite of the setback but they also redesigned and fixed the problems quickly. In particular they switch from a pure oxygen capsule and they cleaned up the hurried, poorly done wiring.
A key difference is Apollo didn't have have a fundamental design defect that was impossible to fix and the Shuttle does. Ice shedding off the ET has happened since STS-1, you can't stop it and they have a fragile thermal protection system right in the middle of it.
I think its not a good analysis to say Apollo did what they did because they threw safety to the wind, while now you have to be safety conscious. Apollo succeeded because it was well engineered, especially for the job it needed to do and they had enough of a safety program to catch most things without crippling the program doing it. The Shuttle isn't well engineered and the whole program has been crushed under a safety bureaucracy that mostly generates mile high stacks of paper works but STILL doesn't catch or stop them from doing things that are dangerous and stupid.
Either the new program will be well engineered and succeed or it wont and it wont. No amount of safety inspections and mile high piles of paper is going to make much of a difference if the engineering isn't good. I'm not sure the U.S. has the engineering horses to do it today. In the 60's engineering and technology was glamorous and the education system turned out a lot of quality engineers. It was deemed to be essential to national survival during the cold war. Today I really doubt many talented Americans place engineer, especially aerospace engineer, at the top of the list of most wanted jobs. Aerospace engineer in particular has been a boom or bust career, with the only place with any stability being defense. Its not a great job especially if you cant stand working for giant bureaucracies that don't get much done most of the time. The only place I've seen that sound like exciting places to be aerospace engineers are the little guys like Scaled Composites, Transformational and SpaceX but its open to debate if they can muster the resources to succeed or do anything big. SpaceX for example will crater if they have a couple more failed launches. Not sure Scaled or Transformational can do anything orbital unless they get NASA or DOD contracts and then they risk getting sucked in to the bureaucracy they despise. I hope they do all succeed though. The NASA/Lockheed/Boeing politburo isn't a path to success anymore. ISS and Shuttle prove that.
"Sometimes called majority rule, which is really the central point of my original post."
Mob rule and majority rule are two different things. In mob rule the mob violates the law as it acts on impulse. In majority rule you adhere to the law, even if you don't like it, and if you really don't like it you CHANGE THE LAW. The founding fathers wisely required a supermajority when it comes to mucking with the constitution so that a simple majority with blood in their eye couldn't muck it up on a whim. A simple majority and their elected representatives can still pass bad and unconstitutional laws but the courts are supposed to strike them down.
The bottomline is are we a nation of laws or a nation where some people just impose their will on the rest of us in contravention of our basic civil liberties. It doesn't matter if they ARE the majority they can't give away or take away the rights the Constitution gives me. I DON'T CARE HOW SCARED THEY ARE.
When George W., Gonzales and Ashcroft decided to lock up Jose Padilla without access to lawyer, family or a day in court he violated some of our most basic liberties. It appears certain that he wanted to establish precedent allowing him to lock up anyone he felt like, whenever he felt like, for as long as he felt like, wherever in the world he felt like, and also if he felt like torture you while you are locked in that black hole someplace. The Supreme Court after YEARS of delay GENTLY suggested he couldn't and Padilla's been moved at a glacial pace in to the court system. In reality the Bush administration should have been hammered for it, if not impeached and jailed themselves.
When the Bush administration decided to just ignore the FISA law rather than go to Congress to change it, once again they violated the law and should be held to account for it. FISA is a law that is there to insure our basic constitutional rights are protected. Just ignoring those rights is not allowed in our system of government.
When the government told the phone companies to turn over all their calling records they acted in violation of section 220 in the U.S. Communications Act which says phone companies don't turn over your calling records without a court issued warrant. Qwest is apparently the only big phone company that didn't break the law.
The Bush administration seems to be deluding itself that when Congress passed the bill that gave him authority to use all force necessary to deal with 9/11, they gave the President dictatorial power. The problem here is either the Bush administration is broadly misinterpreting the law or Congress passed a law that violates the Constitution and the courts should be striking it down.
When you have a government that just chooses to ignore any law or section of the Constitution it finds inconvenient, and gets away with it, you are no longer a nation of laws. You are a dictator's nation.
I like this part in the Slashdot submission which no one seems to be commenting on:
... uh ..... questioning, that it just questioning, don't mind the East Europen guy over their with the electrodes.
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."
I figured Slashdot readers were smarter than this.
The usefulness is obvious. Whenever you identify someone as a "person of interest" (i.e. a suspect with a reservation in his name at a secret East Europen prison and ticket in his name on Air Rendition) you immediately look up everyone who has ever called him and he has ever called. You eliminate all the 1-900 calls, calls to his mom and time spent talking to automated tech support lines. All the individuals left are then branded as suspects too, guilty until proven innocent, guilt through association. Of course these new suspects can't prove their innocence since they don't know they are a suspect and there is no court in the loop, thanks to George W. Bush, to insure there is probable cause to suspect them of something and to scrutinize them further.
You then walk the branches of the network and brand as suspects all the people who have talked to the 2nd layer in the network, and then the 3rd, and iterate. Needless to say the further out you get the less weight there is on the suspicion unless this calling tree intersects with another network of another "person of interest" at which point someone in the NSA yells "Eureka, I found it, a terrorist network". At this point presumably the Rendition team warms up their jet, puts on their black ninja gear and starts rounding people up, for
The beauty of computers is you can search for all kinds of correlations and linkages in these calling networks and who knows you might actually spot a terrorist. But you are somewhat more likely to violate the rights of and lay suspicion on lots of innocence people without cause. Or maybe you will just inundate yourself with information and false alarms and never catch the next 9/11 just before it happens.
It would be damn useful if instead of just recording the source and destination of every call made if you could also record the call so you could go back and see if they were plotting. This is probably the plan but they need more storage capacity and bandwidth.
"If you want to rail against someone for the loss of privacy, rail against the great silent majority in America who will not tolerate a repeat of 911."
So I take it you are a big fan of mob rule? If a crowd forms outside the jailhouse, and decides it wants to lynch someone before a trial to "prevent" some crime from every happening again, I'm guessing you would approve, assuming it is the silent majority of the town's citizens?
The founding fathers were well aware of the dangers of mob rule and the mistakes peoples and governments can make when they are stoked by emotions and nationalist fervor. They designed our constitution in such a way as to make it VERY hard for mob rule to alter it or trample it in the mud. It gives us basic rights that no one is supposed to take away, especially not a fevered mob.
Unfortunately the founding fathers knew how fragile the Constitution was, especially in the face of the indifference of the nation's people to defend and protect their system of government and their basic rights. They expected it to fail and it increasingly is. It was a grand experiment but it is sad to see it fail.
The most vivid example of why mob rule is wrong, and how we failed to protect our system of government, was in the wake of Pearl Harbor when Japanese Americans were rounded up wholesale, placed in concentration camps and had all their property stolen by their neighbors. They no doubt rationalized they were somehow stopping another Pearl Harbor, like you are, but in fact all they did was lock up mostly loyal citizens, stole their life's work, without cause or hearing, because of their race. I think most American, in hindsight, regret what was done to them and appreciate now that it was wrong, but unfortunately we now do it again but to a different race and religion.
I'm all for the government monitoring the communications of criminals and terrorists. BUT, they have to get a court order to do it. That is not so much to ask. That is the most basic of checks and balances in a democracy, and it was something we had in the FISA court which the Bush administration chose to trample. Sure it was an inconvenience but the court almost never denied a wiretap and it insured some 3rd party oversight. Under the Bush administration it appears they can most probably listen to anyone anytime they feel like. Under the new regime it would be trivial for them to spy on anti war protesters, political rivals or really anyone for any reason. There are no checks and balances now. J. Edgar Hoover and Richar Nixon spied on people wholesale too, it was massive abuse of their power, which is why we got the FISA court. They had to tap phone lines and plant bugs though. It would be their wet dream to use computers to spy on anyone anytime.
All in all this is fundamentally wrong and a contravention of our principles of governance. You could almost rationalize it in the face of a World War but the key difference is World War II was a fight to the finish and it had an end. The nature of the current threat is such that it most probably will NEVER END. There will always be a danger ten people with a cause can figure out a way to launch a suicide attack, and there is a chance all the spying in the world wont catch them, if for example they never discuss it except in whispered voices in a noisy place.
When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus or Roosevelt locked up the Japanese and spied on cable traffic it was an emergency measure and it had an end. The things the Bush administration is doing may never end unless an administration gains power and decides of its own volition to end them. It means we don't have basic civil liberties, we have liberties at the whim of whomever is in power which sounds more like third world dictatorship than great democracy.
What you did here was called an ad hominem attack. You didn't really debate any of the points I made, you just launched a bunch of vicious and unfounded attacks at me. It is one of the weakest and lowest forms of debate.
You don't really know anything about me so the the leap you made from a couple sentences about the "War on Drugs" to me being a "dope smoker" was really uncalled for.
Try to do better next time and debate the issues instead of just slinging mud, or can't you make reasoned arguments to get your point across.