When you take all individuality, personal choice, and incentive for achievment out of education, and create a vast national Soviet style education system, that is what you get (to be fair, even Soviet education wasn't as rigidly central planned as American education). School choice that is taken for granted in Europe is attacked as a "Right Wing Conspiracy To Destroy Public Education" in America. (Which is ironic, because Europeans are always stereotyped to be more socialist than Americans, yet they have more private schools and much more personal choice in public schools than the United States).
As long as the teachers unions are more concerned with creating a vast educational beurocracy that protects jobs, instead of allowing competition and personal choice in schooling, schooling is going to be commoditized, socialized crap! It isn't a funding problem (U.S. schools are #2 worldwide in funding), it isn't a problem with our culture not valuing education (otherwise we wouldn't spend to much money on it), it is that we are trying to run the educational system as a top-down dictatorship.
Would this be the same Europe you are talking about were in Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland abortions are illegal for religious reasons? ( http://baltimorechronicle.com/abortion_policies_eu rope.html ) Or the Europe where in Italy all classrooms were required to hang crusifixes until just a year ago ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/3215445.stm ), and insulting the Pope is still illegal? Or England where government funded schools are required to give religious education? Or would it be Denmark, Iceland, or Norway who have tax funded government churches, and Sweden had the same thing only until the year 2000? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion )
Sorry, but I much rather have a few loonies spend their own money to build a totally private theme park with animitronic dinosaurs, than to live with the kind of authoritarian state-mandated state-funded right-wing religious control that is so common in Europe.
Sorry, when I said "you", I was saying it in more of a rhetorical way, and not so much describing your politics specificly. I sometimes make this mistake, and should probably make it more clear that I am talking about people in general and not you in particular. It was a flaw in my writing style and not meant to be any sort of attack on you, and so I apologize if I caused any offense.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
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An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 1, Informative
Yes, but you are jumping from "There is consensus that global warming is real", to "There is consensus that the Kyoto protocal will help stop global warming", or consensus that "Free Markets cause enviornmental destruction and we need more central planning and socialism". Al Gore has a political agenda, and it is part of an anti-free market pro government central planning political agenda that pre-dates knowledge of global warming and the enviornmentalist movement.
0 of 928 scientific studies suggest a cetain political solution to the problem. The Kyoto protocal has some terrible flaws:
1. It doesn't allow nuclear power to be used as a substitute for greenhouse gas emitting power - meaning we can't meet the Kyoto protocal by adopting nuclear power like France has done. Therefore, nuclear power, the single most promising substitute for fossile fuels, is handicapped by Kyoto.
2. It doesn't allow for forest conservation and replanting to be used as a method of reducing greenhouse gasses to keet the Kyoto protocal... The United States, because of it's massive amount of uninhabited land, is in a perfect position to reduce CO2 by planting and conserving carbon sinks.
3. The Kyoto protocal places no limits on the "developing world", which means that instead of an overall decrease in world CO2 emissions, what will happen is that all CO2 producing industries will move to India, China, Indonesia, and places without an Kyoto obligations where the lax enviornmental laws mean they will produce EVEN MORE EMISSIONS AND POLLUTION!!! So while U.S. emissions may go down, they will go up by orders of magnitude somewhere else, and the jobs will follow emissions!
4. The Kyoto protocal doesn't provide any penalties for breaking the Kyoto protocal. Which means that countries that "fully adopted" the Kyoto protocal like Canada, are much farther away from meeting their obligations than countries like the U.S. who rejected the protocal. Kyoto provides an economy incentive to break Kyoto - As countries that follow Kyoto will be economicly handicapped while countries that violate Kyoto will gain advantage.
The Kyoto protocal is utterly retarded, and will cause CO2 emissions to rise instead of decline. And most of Al Gore's uber-government totalitarian solutions won't work to stop CO2 emissions any more than the uber-government War On Drugs has done anything to stop the drug trade (it actually increases the drug trade because by limiting supply it drives up price - The U.S. government is the OPEC of the illegal drug trade!).
There is absolutly no consensus on what political solutions will help solve global warming. But the solutions that are being presented by so-called enviornmentalists have nothing to do with solving global warming - the "solutions" predate knowledge of global warming, and are the same solutions that were presented 50 years ago as being the solution to creating a "workers paradise". There is a totalitarian agenda that is exploiting the consensus on global warming to make us think that there is a consensus on pro-totalitarianism as well!
The hard part about climate science, is that it doesn't produce testable theories. People can't do experimentation, or develop clear laws of cause and effect in climate science, the same way they can with chemistry, physics, etc.
Maverick scientists cannot disprove anything... because climate science is mostly guesswork and speculation. If climatologists cannot predict precipitation levels 4 days in the future with any accuracy, then I find it hard to believe that climate science is at the point where we should abandon all debate on global warming - Especially when the scientific debate is being used as the pretense to further some rather extreme political positions.
You say "we need to act now"... but, what do we need to do right now exactly? It is the old pressure sale - "Act Now! Quantities are limited! Only $19.99". Get people to believe they need to do something right now or the world is going to end, because you don't what people to have time to question where we are going.
Global Warming has caused a sort of feeding frenzy for the folks who support a command economy. After the colapse of Communism, it became painfully clear that the command economy just doesn't work - The centrally planned economies of the Communist world were definitly not the "workers paradises" that were promised. There was no way to rationally argue for the command economy.
Until Global Warming became an issue. While it is silly to suggest that central planning will improve the lives of working people, now we can suggest that unless the government takes control of resources and the economy, and carefully manages them (i.e. a command economy), that the enviornment will be destroyed. This is why the old school left, who used to care less about the enviornment (just travel to the former Soviet Union if you want to see horrible enviornmental destruction), has suddenly latched on to the enviornmental issue. The enviornment is the new justification for massive government control and planning. The totalitarians, instead of arguing that the free market harms workers (which is hard to argue now that Communist or former communist countries are the place where we look to easily exploit workers), can argue that if we don't have a command economy that global warming will kill us all.
People like Al Gore want totalitarian government... even if he doesn't admit he supports "totalitarian government", he does openly admit that he can't see any part of people's life where government intervention shouldn't be massivly increased (essentially the same thing as being totalitarian, but he can avoid actually saying the word "totalitarian" because the word is unpopular).
Even if there is a consensus that global warming is happening, the action that Al Gore and enviornmentalist suggest that we take (massive government regulation and control of the economy - central planning - and strict resource rationing - socialism), will most likey harm the enviornment, not help the enviornment. The modivation of the political left isn't to stop global warming, but to destroy the free market have have the government take over economic planning.
The reason there is so much pressure "to do something now", is because so-called enviornmentalists don't want us thinking rationally about the problem. They want people to believe that if we don't immediatly accept totalitarian government, that the enviornment will be destroyed.
Re:Regardless of how you feel about global warming
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An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes... but the question is how you enforce the goal. Do you have the government put a gun to people's heads and threaten to kill them if they don't reduce consumption or make things more efficent, or is it a decentralized popular social movement? No one has a problem with protecting the enviornment... it is just the question of how much police powers to regulate private non-violent behavior that we disagree about.
Al Gore is of the school that thinks totalitarian government is the solution to enviornmental problems, which is why so many people hate him even if they agree with the science of global warming.
In the U.S., universities can be huge (imagine 40,000 students on some campuses), and are in effect small cities. Hence Universities have their own police department, but the police department still needs to go through normal law enforcement training, they are still regulated in exactly the same way normal police officers are, etc. It is just that they are permanently assigned to patrol or protect a university, as opposed a city. Given that universities often have unique problems related to young adults, it makes sense to have a police force specially trained to deal with young adults. Normally, university police forces are known for being extremly tolerant and non-violent compared to normal police... the kind of agressive gung-ho cops tend to see universities as a soft beat and stay away from those jobs, so the cops on universities are usually people that enjoy working with younger people.
There are not private security guards with official police powers, if that is what you are thinking though. They are normal, fully deputized law enforcement officers. Kind of like parks have Forest Rangers, who are police officers but are also trained in outdoor rescue and safety because they patrol wilderness instead of cities.
Because they would be shot and killed. How would YOU stop 4 cops, who obviously have no problem torturing people, from doing so? Perhaps most people don't have the killer ninja assasin skills that you do to take out 4 armed and highly trained police officers.
We only got to see part of the situation, because the police unions overwelming oppose all attempts to put cameras in cars, have cameras mounted on guns, or have portable shoulder mounted cameras for evidence gathering in the field (all which already exist as products right now any could be put into use at any time). If it was true that "we only see part of the picture" and we would be much more sympathetic to cops in these situations if we could see the whole picture, why not give cops shoulder mounted cameras? Then the whole picture would be on tape, and there would be no question of what happening.
It is the cops themselves who desperatly don't want people to see the whole picture, which is why they make sure their union fights hand and tooth to make sure cops are not videotaped!
No. citizens arrest works differently in different places (It can vary by city, state, and obviously country), but here is how it generaly works:
1. You tell the person they are under citizens arrest, and that they must wait until the cops arrive or they must follow you to the station. 2. If the person does not cooperate, you do not have any power to detain them or stop them or use force. The only thing you can do is tell them they are under citizens arrest. 3. The police then have the power to charge the person with "resisting arrest", "leaving the scene of a crime", "leaving the scene of an accident" or whatever else if they so choose if the person doesn't cooperate with you... but they usually don't bother.
So, based on that, I would say that you have no legal authority whatsoever to make a citizens arrest on a cop... and even if you did, you wouldn't have the power to actually use any force on them, you would simply make a verbal demand.
Lets say you want to keep black people out of the library. Now, every student pretty much goes into the library without showing their library card, and everyone knows this. But technically, you can ask students for their library card. So you ask only the black students to show their library card, knowing that it is uncommon for anyone to have their library card with them. If the black guy does somehow show up with their library card, you say "well, that doesn't look like you, you have to leave asshole". You purposly talk to them and harrass them in such a way that they might say something back to you and give you an excuse to throw them out, beat their ass, whatever... knowing that people like you will take your word over some young black guy.
The situation I am describe is painfully common. I have seen white suburbs that make it a matter of policy to pull over every car with a black person in it. Technically, they will pull a person over for going 2 miles over the speed limit, but at the same time they let white people zoom by at 20 miles faster than the speed limit. When they pull the guy over, they will curse him out, harrass him, say sexual stuff to his girlfriend, try to get him riled up to say something back or give them the slightest pretense to torture him and make sure black people know not to go to that neighborhood.
It even sometimes happens to white people (although it is less likely). Drop off a friend or co-worker who lives in the wrong neighborhood, and the cop sees that you are white, and assumes that the only reason a white person would go to that neighborhood is to buy drugs. When the cop doesn't find drugs, he is going to get you for something, so most likely he will taser you, or beat you up a little bit, and let you know not to come back to that neighborhood.
And it doesn't even have to be about race. They could just not like the way you look, or think that you have a lot of money in your wallet and they can take some of it when they arrest you... or maybe one bar owner gets his cop friends to harrass customers at the bar across the street to drive them out of buisness. There are a lot of times that bribing a cop is par for the course (you are not going to be able to run a nightclub, for example, without paying protection money to the cops, period. Sometimes you can pay the cops directly, other times you hire off duty cops as "security" for about 10 or 20 times the going rate for security and maybe the cops show, maybe they dont).
There was some drug dealers that sold drugs in the school player at the end of the block in the last house I lived at. The drug dealers were there every night... and the playground and parking lot were on close circuit camera, so everything was being caught on tape. Why didn't the cops bust the drug dealers, when they know 100% they would be there every night, and even had them on video selling drugs? Well, cause the cops know that drug dealers pay a lot better than the city. The only people who are gonna get shot or tasered by the police is gonna be some uppity neighborhood activist that threatens those cops source of income.
Most likely you are white and upper middle class and immune from that kind of harrasment or danger, so you probably don't understand or even care. But a lot of cops are nothing more than criminals and thugs themselves. The fact that they have almost limitless power to beat, shoot, or electricute anyone they want, without any repercussions, tends to attract the wrong kinds of people and is prime for abuse. This isn't about "personal responsibility", this is about people who used to believe in the "Land of Free, Home of the Brave" now tolerating a police state.
Except that the do-gooder is doing nothing but designing a computer and demanding that people buy it. These computers are paid for by the government that purchase them, and hence the people in those countries. Do you think people living in huts in the cambodian jungle want their government to spend tens of millions of dollars on laptops? Is it a good, democratic process when rich folks in western nations putting all sorts of political pressure to buy a solution from western and asian tech companies for something people don't really want?
In many cases, there is so much political pressure to purchase these laptops, that the countries involved are really forced into purchasing millions of dollars of laptops against there will, lest they lose aid, face trade barriers, etc. This is an example of how rich white people in the west can make incredable retarded demands from poor people in third world countries based on what is fashionable and "cool". Next thing you know we will be threatening to cut aid unless Cambodia buys a $100 per child Kabbalah program from Madona.
Um, municiple wifi was NEVER about providing a nice service. Municiple WiFi was always a pork trough for big corporporations selling network gear and services, while at the same time giving government the oportunity to censor content and track online activity, making it a win/win situation for politicians and big corporations. Of course the system will lock out F/OSS... and it will also lock out "irresponsible lies" about powerful politicians... and it will lock out online gaming, pornography, information about guns or drugs, etc.
The price you pay for "free" is allowing your internet connection to be totally controlled by others. But you are misguided if you think this will only be a problem only where Microsoft runs the municiple wifi network.
Sadly I don't have the time to research all of their statements. I can't take them at face value either. How should I evaluate them then? If I look for vested interests then that can supply a hint at probable distortions of their conclusions and possibly allow me to dismiss it until I see something more convincing. I know this is a logical fallacy, but it also is likely to be correct anyway.
In that case, CERA is a company that provides information and analysis to energy companies and investors. Since energy companies and investors have a vested interest in accurate information to base their investments on, it is not likely they are going to try to distort the truth - If they distort the truth, and thus invest billions in oil wells that will be providing rapidly dimishing returns, they have lost billions of dollars.
Refugees are almost certain to be shot by the NK before they ever get a chance to cross the border into the South. Civilians crossing the border isn't a realistic concern.
But even if possible civilian deaths WHERE a real concern, do you really have that much faith in the soldier not to fire at them?
- the inability of a bored tired 19 year old kid to make sufficiently informed decisions about threats?
- what about the massive moral issue of having a border patroled with young men who are prone to bordom, fear, anger, they might make them a little too eager to take a shot at something?
- What is that about war and humanitarian laws? Oh, I am sorry, those don't exist, except for the internal national laws of soveriegn countries. Show me the democratic legislative body for "international law", and show me the global police authorized to enforce it, or admit that international law is largly fiction.
- What about the fact that starving people can pretty much be used as a catch all excuse for any spending. Why spend so much on cancer research when there are millions of starving people in Africa? Why spend money on after-school sports and music programs when that money could be used to feed starving people?
Me, while I am skeptical of this kind of military industral complex spending, I realize that the era of mass destruction peaked with the nuke and bio programs of the late 60s and early 70s. Virtually all military research since then has been on how to make weapons that cause LESS death and destruction (I mean, the U.S. and Soviets could pretty much kill every human on the planet back in 1965... you can't make weapons more dangerous than EVERYONE DEAD!!!). I realize that in 10 years the same technology will be used to make some pretty wicked batting cages.:) If money is going to be spent on weapons (and we all prefer it not be spent that way, so save us the lecture), at least it is on dual use technology that will help the civilian world in the future.
I understand what you are saying, this system is not perfect.
But it is designed to replace a bored / scared / half-asleep 19 year old kid standing around 10 hours a day with a rifle... realisticly, NK could cross the border anywhere it damn pleases - the DMZ is more like the rope barrier they have at the bank that lets you know you are not supposed to cross an area. This robot sentry is not supposed to keep back the NK hordes, but provide a barrier to casual entry.
This law is really no worse than the laws that regulate health care, the economy, the enviornment, etc. You are simply a domain expert in this field, and thus you understand how stupid the law is. But when the government makes other stupid laws (for example, not allowing patients who are most certainly going to die to choose to try high-risk experimental treatments because the treatments are "too dangerous"... Or making "water saver" toilets manditory, that need two flushings to work properly, and thus use way more water that the old-school "wasteful" toilets... etc., etc.), you probably don't notice, or don't care. You probably say "Oh, a new drug safety law! I support drug safety!", or you say "A new water conservation law! I support protecting the enviornment!". Well, everyone else is saying "Wow, a new computer security law. I want computer security, so I support this!".
Laws are very crude tools... it is like doing brain surgery with hammers. This law was probably make with plenty of input from domain experts. Laws can be tricky enough when you are dealing with crimes like murder, rape, mugging, etc. But when you want a single code of rules to be used to micromanage the legality of acts of a highly technical nature outside the understand of the general voting public, and that are constantly changing, this is going to be the best you do. You create laws that are so overly vauge that the police have huge leeway to go after whoever they want on their own discretion, because you know that there is no way you can have hearings, discussions, commiteee meetings, and create a sensible set of rules in the time frame that things will keep up with technology. I am not saying I agree, but the people who make the laws trust the discrection of police and government officials more than they trust the general public to do OK without regulation.
Most people would rather deal with shitty laws, than leave things alone. I can't say I agree with that idea, but if YOU don't, then you are most certainly far outside the mainstream.
Why all this focus on the technology of voting, when voting is completly flawed before you ever enter the voting booth. With bans on political advertising, restricting ballots to only two parties, and limits on fundraising that only effect third parties, the vote is illegit even if ballots are counted with 100% accuracy.
If I am not allowed to vote for the party or candidate that I want, and am forced to vote for only one of two virtually identitcal political parties, does it really matter if the vote is 100% accurate? If Cuba determines that 98.554% of people vote for Castro, as opposed to 100%, does it really matter when it is a one party system? The U.S. system is only marginally better, in that it has two virtually identical parties instead of one party.
I know people are caught up in the Republican-Democrat sports rivalry mentality, but who really cares if one of those parties steals the election from the other party? It is not like people could choose a candidate in a fair election anyway!
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When you take all individuality, personal choice, and incentive for achievment out of education, and create a vast national Soviet style education system, that is what you get (to be fair, even Soviet education wasn't as rigidly central planned as American education). School choice that is taken for granted in Europe is attacked as a "Right Wing Conspiracy To Destroy Public Education" in America. (Which is ironic, because Europeans are always stereotyped to be more socialist than Americans, yet they have more private schools and much more personal choice in public schools than the United States).
As long as the teachers unions are more concerned with creating a vast educational beurocracy that protects jobs, instead of allowing competition and personal choice in schooling, schooling is going to be commoditized, socialized crap! It isn't a funding problem (U.S. schools are #2 worldwide in funding), it isn't a problem with our culture not valuing education (otherwise we wouldn't spend to much money on it), it is that we are trying to run the educational system as a top-down dictatorship.
Would this be the same Europe you are talking about were in Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland abortions are illegal for religious reasons? ( http://baltimorechronicle.com/abortion_policies_eu rope.html ) Or the Europe where in Italy all classrooms were required to hang crusifixes until just a year ago ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/3215445.stm ), and insulting the Pope is still illegal? Or England where government funded schools are required to give religious education? Or would it be Denmark, Iceland, or Norway who have tax funded government churches, and Sweden had the same thing only until the year 2000? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion )
Sorry, but I much rather have a few loonies spend their own money to build a totally private theme park with animitronic dinosaurs, than to live with the kind of authoritarian state-mandated state-funded right-wing religious control that is so common in Europe.
I am so seriously going to visit this meuseum! Animitronic Dinosaurs coexisting with humans? This totally rocks!
Sorry, when I said "you", I was saying it in more of a rhetorical way, and not so much describing your politics specificly. I sometimes make this mistake, and should probably make it more clear that I am talking about people in general and not you in particular. It was a flaw in my writing style and not meant to be any sort of attack on you, and so I apologize if I caused any offense.
Yes, but you are jumping from "There is consensus that global warming is real", to "There is consensus that the Kyoto protocal will help stop global warming", or consensus that "Free Markets cause enviornmental destruction and we need more central planning and socialism". Al Gore has a political agenda, and it is part of an anti-free market pro government central planning political agenda that pre-dates knowledge of global warming and the enviornmentalist movement.
0 of 928 scientific studies suggest a cetain political solution to the problem. The Kyoto protocal has some terrible flaws:
1. It doesn't allow nuclear power to be used as a substitute for greenhouse gas emitting power - meaning we can't meet the Kyoto protocal by adopting nuclear power like France has done. Therefore, nuclear power, the single most promising substitute for fossile fuels, is handicapped by Kyoto.
2. It doesn't allow for forest conservation and replanting to be used as a method of reducing greenhouse gasses to keet the Kyoto protocal... The United States, because of it's massive amount of uninhabited land, is in a perfect position to reduce CO2 by planting and conserving carbon sinks.
3. The Kyoto protocal places no limits on the "developing world", which means that instead of an overall decrease in world CO2 emissions, what will happen is that all CO2 producing industries will move to India, China, Indonesia, and places without an Kyoto obligations where the lax enviornmental laws mean they will produce EVEN MORE EMISSIONS AND POLLUTION!!! So while U.S. emissions may go down, they will go up by orders of magnitude somewhere else, and the jobs will follow emissions!
4. The Kyoto protocal doesn't provide any penalties for breaking the Kyoto protocal. Which means that countries that "fully adopted" the Kyoto protocal like Canada, are much farther away from meeting their obligations than countries like the U.S. who rejected the protocal. Kyoto provides an economy incentive to break Kyoto - As countries that follow Kyoto will be economicly handicapped while countries that violate Kyoto will gain advantage.
The Kyoto protocal is utterly retarded, and will cause CO2 emissions to rise instead of decline. And most of Al Gore's uber-government totalitarian solutions won't work to stop CO2 emissions any more than the uber-government War On Drugs has done anything to stop the drug trade (it actually increases the drug trade because by limiting supply it drives up price - The U.S. government is the OPEC of the illegal drug trade!).
There is absolutly no consensus on what political solutions will help solve global warming. But the solutions that are being presented by so-called enviornmentalists have nothing to do with solving global warming - the "solutions" predate knowledge of global warming, and are the same solutions that were presented 50 years ago as being the solution to creating a "workers paradise". There is a totalitarian agenda that is exploiting the consensus on global warming to make us think that there is a consensus on pro-totalitarianism as well!
The hard part about climate science, is that it doesn't produce testable theories. People can't do experimentation, or develop clear laws of cause and effect in climate science, the same way they can with chemistry, physics, etc.
Maverick scientists cannot disprove anything... because climate science is mostly guesswork and speculation. If climatologists cannot predict precipitation levels 4 days in the future with any accuracy, then I find it hard to believe that climate science is at the point where we should abandon all debate on global warming - Especially when the scientific debate is being used as the pretense to further some rather extreme political positions.
You say "we need to act now"... but, what do we need to do right now exactly? It is the old pressure sale - "Act Now! Quantities are limited! Only $19.99". Get people to believe they need to do something right now or the world is going to end, because you don't what people to have time to question where we are going.
Global Warming has caused a sort of feeding frenzy for the folks who support a command economy. After the colapse of Communism, it became painfully clear that the command economy just doesn't work - The centrally planned economies of the Communist world were definitly not the "workers paradises" that were promised. There was no way to rationally argue for the command economy.
Until Global Warming became an issue. While it is silly to suggest that central planning will improve the lives of working people, now we can suggest that unless the government takes control of resources and the economy, and carefully manages them (i.e. a command economy), that the enviornment will be destroyed. This is why the old school left, who used to care less about the enviornment (just travel to the former Soviet Union if you want to see horrible enviornmental destruction), has suddenly latched on to the enviornmental issue. The enviornment is the new justification for massive government control and planning. The totalitarians, instead of arguing that the free market harms workers (which is hard to argue now that Communist or former communist countries are the place where we look to easily exploit workers), can argue that if we don't have a command economy that global warming will kill us all.
People like Al Gore want totalitarian government... even if he doesn't admit he supports "totalitarian government", he does openly admit that he can't see any part of people's life where government intervention shouldn't be massivly increased (essentially the same thing as being totalitarian, but he can avoid actually saying the word "totalitarian" because the word is unpopular).
Even if there is a consensus that global warming is happening, the action that Al Gore and enviornmentalist suggest that we take (massive government regulation and control of the economy - central planning - and strict resource rationing - socialism), will most likey harm the enviornment, not help the enviornment. The modivation of the political left isn't to stop global warming, but to destroy the free market have have the government take over economic planning.
The reason there is so much pressure "to do something now", is because so-called enviornmentalists don't want us thinking rationally about the problem. They want people to believe that if we don't immediatly accept totalitarian government, that the enviornment will be destroyed.
Yes... but the question is how you enforce the goal. Do you have the government put a gun to people's heads and threaten to kill them if they don't reduce consumption or make things more efficent, or is it a decentralized popular social movement? No one has a problem with protecting the enviornment... it is just the question of how much police powers to regulate private non-violent behavior that we disagree about.
Al Gore is of the school that thinks totalitarian government is the solution to enviornmental problems, which is why so many people hate him even if they agree with the science of global warming.
In the U.S., universities can be huge (imagine 40,000 students on some campuses), and are in effect small cities. Hence Universities have their own police department, but the police department still needs to go through normal law enforcement training, they are still regulated in exactly the same way normal police officers are, etc. It is just that they are permanently assigned to patrol or protect a university, as opposed a city. Given that universities often have unique problems related to young adults, it makes sense to have a police force specially trained to deal with young adults. Normally, university police forces are known for being extremly tolerant and non-violent compared to normal police... the kind of agressive gung-ho cops tend to see universities as a soft beat and stay away from those jobs, so the cops on universities are usually people that enjoy working with younger people.
There are not private security guards with official police powers, if that is what you are thinking though. They are normal, fully deputized law enforcement officers. Kind of like parks have Forest Rangers, who are police officers but are also trained in outdoor rescue and safety because they patrol wilderness instead of cities.
Because they would be shot and killed. How would YOU stop 4 cops, who obviously have no problem torturing people, from doing so? Perhaps most people don't have the killer ninja assasin skills that you do to take out 4 armed and highly trained police officers.
We only got to see part of the situation, because the police unions overwelming oppose all attempts to put cameras in cars, have cameras mounted on guns, or have portable shoulder mounted cameras for evidence gathering in the field (all which already exist as products right now any could be put into use at any time). If it was true that "we only see part of the picture" and we would be much more sympathetic to cops in these situations if we could see the whole picture, why not give cops shoulder mounted cameras? Then the whole picture would be on tape, and there would be no question of what happening.
It is the cops themselves who desperatly don't want people to see the whole picture, which is why they make sure their union fights hand and tooth to make sure cops are not videotaped!
No. citizens arrest works differently in different places (It can vary by city, state, and obviously country), but here is how it generaly works:
1. You tell the person they are under citizens arrest, and that they must wait until the cops arrive or they must follow you to the station.
2. If the person does not cooperate, you do not have any power to detain them or stop them or use force. The only thing you can do is tell them they are under citizens arrest.
3. The police then have the power to charge the person with "resisting arrest", "leaving the scene of a crime", "leaving the scene of an accident" or whatever else if they so choose if the person doesn't cooperate with you... but they usually don't bother.
So, based on that, I would say that you have no legal authority whatsoever to make a citizens arrest on a cop... and even if you did, you wouldn't have the power to actually use any force on them, you would simply make a verbal demand.
Lets say you want to keep black people out of the library. Now, every student pretty much goes into the library without showing their library card, and everyone knows this. But technically, you can ask students for their library card. So you ask only the black students to show their library card, knowing that it is uncommon for anyone to have their library card with them. If the black guy does somehow show up with their library card, you say "well, that doesn't look like you, you have to leave asshole". You purposly talk to them and harrass them in such a way that they might say something back to you and give you an excuse to throw them out, beat their ass, whatever... knowing that people like you will take your word over some young black guy.
The situation I am describe is painfully common. I have seen white suburbs that make it a matter of policy to pull over every car with a black person in it. Technically, they will pull a person over for going 2 miles over the speed limit, but at the same time they let white people zoom by at 20 miles faster than the speed limit. When they pull the guy over, they will curse him out, harrass him, say sexual stuff to his girlfriend, try to get him riled up to say something back or give them the slightest pretense to torture him and make sure black people know not to go to that neighborhood.
It even sometimes happens to white people (although it is less likely). Drop off a friend or co-worker who lives in the wrong neighborhood, and the cop sees that you are white, and assumes that the only reason a white person would go to that neighborhood is to buy drugs. When the cop doesn't find drugs, he is going to get you for something, so most likely he will taser you, or beat you up a little bit, and let you know not to come back to that neighborhood.
And it doesn't even have to be about race. They could just not like the way you look, or think that you have a lot of money in your wallet and they can take some of it when they arrest you... or maybe one bar owner gets his cop friends to harrass customers at the bar across the street to drive them out of buisness. There are a lot of times that bribing a cop is par for the course (you are not going to be able to run a nightclub, for example, without paying protection money to the cops, period. Sometimes you can pay the cops directly, other times you hire off duty cops as "security" for about 10 or 20 times the going rate for security and maybe the cops show, maybe they dont).
There was some drug dealers that sold drugs in the school player at the end of the block in the last house I lived at. The drug dealers were there every night... and the playground and parking lot were on close circuit camera, so everything was being caught on tape. Why didn't the cops bust the drug dealers, when they know 100% they would be there every night, and even had them on video selling drugs? Well, cause the cops know that drug dealers pay a lot better than the city. The only people who are gonna get shot or tasered by the police is gonna be some uppity neighborhood activist that threatens those cops source of income.
Most likely you are white and upper middle class and immune from that kind of harrasment or danger, so you probably don't understand or even care. But a lot of cops are nothing more than criminals and thugs themselves. The fact that they have almost limitless power to beat, shoot, or electricute anyone they want, without any repercussions, tends to attract the wrong kinds of people and is prime for abuse. This isn't about "personal responsibility", this is about people who used to believe in the "Land of Free, Home of the Brave" now tolerating a police state.
You do realize that bloggers can be arrested for "inciting religious hatred" in any number of so-called western democracies, right?
Except that the do-gooder is doing nothing but designing a computer and demanding that people buy it. These computers are paid for by the government that purchase them, and hence the people in those countries. Do you think people living in huts in the cambodian jungle want their government to spend tens of millions of dollars on laptops? Is it a good, democratic process when rich folks in western nations putting all sorts of political pressure to buy a solution from western and asian tech companies for something people don't really want?
In many cases, there is so much political pressure to purchase these laptops, that the countries involved are really forced into purchasing millions of dollars of laptops against there will, lest they lose aid, face trade barriers, etc. This is an example of how rich white people in the west can make incredable retarded demands from poor people in third world countries based on what is fashionable and "cool". Next thing you know we will be threatening to cut aid unless Cambodia buys a $100 per child Kabbalah program from Madona.
Um, municiple wifi was NEVER about providing a nice service. Municiple WiFi was always a pork trough for big corporporations selling network gear and services, while at the same time giving government the oportunity to censor content and track online activity, making it a win/win situation for politicians and big corporations. Of course the system will lock out F/OSS... and it will also lock out "irresponsible lies" about powerful politicians... and it will lock out online gaming, pornography, information about guns or drugs, etc.
The price you pay for "free" is allowing your internet connection to be totally controlled by others. But you are misguided if you think this will only be a problem only where Microsoft runs the municiple wifi network.
Who told you there was a free market for health care in the United States?
Sadly I don't have the time to research all of their statements. I can't take them at face value either. How should I evaluate them then? If I look for vested interests then that can supply a hint at probable distortions of their conclusions and possibly allow me to dismiss it until I see something more convincing. I know this is a logical fallacy, but it also is likely to be correct anyway.
In that case, CERA is a company that provides information and analysis to energy companies and investors. Since energy companies and investors have a vested interest in accurate information to base their investments on, it is not likely they are going to try to distort the truth - If they distort the truth, and thus invest billions in oil wells that will be providing rapidly dimishing returns, they have lost billions of dollars.
It doesn't matter who pays their bills.
a ntial-ad-hominem.html
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/circumst
Refugees are almost certain to be shot by the NK before they ever get a chance to cross the border into the South. Civilians crossing the border isn't a realistic concern.
But even if possible civilian deaths WHERE a real concern, do you really have that much faith in the soldier not to fire at them?
What about:
:) If money is going to be spent on weapons (and we all prefer it not be spent that way, so save us the lecture), at least it is on dual use technology that will help the civilian world in the future.
- the inability of a bored tired 19 year old kid to make sufficiently informed decisions about threats?
- what about the massive moral issue of having a border patroled with young men who are prone to bordom, fear, anger, they might make them a little too eager to take a shot at something?
- What is that about war and humanitarian laws? Oh, I am sorry, those don't exist, except for the internal national laws of soveriegn countries. Show me the democratic legislative body for "international law", and show me the global police authorized to enforce it, or admit that international law is largly fiction.
- What about the fact that starving people can pretty much be used as a catch all excuse for any spending. Why spend so much on cancer research when there are millions of starving people in Africa? Why spend money on after-school sports and music programs when that money could be used to feed starving people?
Me, while I am skeptical of this kind of military industral complex spending, I realize that the era of mass destruction peaked with the nuke and bio programs of the late 60s and early 70s. Virtually all military research since then has been on how to make weapons that cause LESS death and destruction (I mean, the U.S. and Soviets could pretty much kill every human on the planet back in 1965... you can't make weapons more dangerous than EVERYONE DEAD!!!). I realize that in 10 years the same technology will be used to make some pretty wicked batting cages.
I understand what you are saying, this system is not perfect.
But it is designed to replace a bored / scared / half-asleep 19 year old kid standing around 10 hours a day with a rifle... realisticly, NK could cross the border anywhere it damn pleases - the DMZ is more like the rope barrier they have at the bank that lets you know you are not supposed to cross an area. This robot sentry is not supposed to keep back the NK hordes, but provide a barrier to casual entry.
This law is really no worse than the laws that regulate health care, the economy, the enviornment, etc. You are simply a domain expert in this field, and thus you understand how stupid the law is. But when the government makes other stupid laws (for example, not allowing patients who are most certainly going to die to choose to try high-risk experimental treatments because the treatments are "too dangerous"... Or making "water saver" toilets manditory, that need two flushings to work properly, and thus use way more water that the old-school "wasteful" toilets... etc., etc.), you probably don't notice, or don't care. You probably say "Oh, a new drug safety law! I support drug safety!", or you say "A new water conservation law! I support protecting the enviornment!". Well, everyone else is saying "Wow, a new computer security law. I want computer security, so I support this!".
Laws are very crude tools... it is like doing brain surgery with hammers. This law was probably make with plenty of input from domain experts. Laws can be tricky enough when you are dealing with crimes like murder, rape, mugging, etc. But when you want a single code of rules to be used to micromanage the legality of acts of a highly technical nature outside the understand of the general voting public, and that are constantly changing, this is going to be the best you do. You create laws that are so overly vauge that the police have huge leeway to go after whoever they want on their own discretion, because you know that there is no way you can have hearings, discussions, commiteee meetings, and create a sensible set of rules in the time frame that things will keep up with technology. I am not saying I agree, but the people who make the laws trust the discrection of police and government officials more than they trust the general public to do OK without regulation.
Most people would rather deal with shitty laws, than leave things alone. I can't say I agree with that idea, but if YOU don't, then you are most certainly far outside the mainstream.
Why all this focus on the technology of voting, when voting is completly flawed before you ever enter the voting booth. With bans on political advertising, restricting ballots to only two parties, and limits on fundraising that only effect third parties, the vote is illegit even if ballots are counted with 100% accuracy.
If I am not allowed to vote for the party or candidate that I want, and am forced to vote for only one of two virtually identitcal political parties, does it really matter if the vote is 100% accurate? If Cuba determines that 98.554% of people vote for Castro, as opposed to 100%, does it really matter when it is a one party system? The U.S. system is only marginally better, in that it has two virtually identical parties instead of one party.
I know people are caught up in the Republican-Democrat sports rivalry mentality, but who really cares if one of those parties steals the election from the other party? It is not like people could choose a candidate in a fair election anyway!
If you are running a website, limiting bandwidth to 128k is restrictive if that 128k of bandwidth has to serve lots and lots of people.