Gordon Brown is now talking about having a written constitution for Britain. It will be interesting to see how it skirts around all the infringements to our rights that have been passed under the Labour government. We had a million people March against the war and the government reacted by effectively banning protests within a half mile of parliament. They tried to pretend it was about removing Brian Haw but that was a pretty lame excuse.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm a UK citizen, but are you telling me there are no US regulatory bodies that can put pressure on news channels for wildly distorting facts etc?
Well, the factuality of this claim is in question.
I've seen the footage both with the sneaky editing and without it. It's pretty clear.
Oh yeah, that's a great idea. Let's bring the magically impartial people who, unlike the rest of the world, do not bring in bias to their thought process.
There's really nothing magical about it. For example, in the UK we have a regulatory body that ensures advertisements do not make false claims. Are you worried that they might not be impartial and would be turning a blind eye to the Coca Cola company or something? If you look at what the Venezuelan media is putting out, it's clear they need some kind of regulation.
That's the way international relations work, and if you can find a single country that hasn't done the same then please let me know.
That is the way they work when you are trying to exert control over foreign countries. It's easier to control a dictator (one man) that a democracy. No country in recent history has supported/installed so many dictators around the world. Is that the way you want US foreign policy to work?, because aside from the suffering it causes, it will end up backfiring spectacularly.
If that's the case, then what about Chavez, who staged his own failed military coup in 1992?
That's true, he did and was sent to Jail. There was another coup attempt while he was in prison. The people wanted the government out and Perez was actually impeached a year later.
This year, Chavez essentially gave himself the power to rule by decree - no need for those pesky congress people who all toe party line anyhow, but just to make sure no opposition forms he would prefer to have "temporary" dictatorial powers all put into himself and none other. Just to make sure the revolution goes right, of course...
The powers are limited and last for a limited time. Also the congress can overturn the powers, so there is democratic control. Several other Venezuelan presidents had similar enabling acts, yet there was little media attention for them, since they were US allies.
Venezuela has taken dramatic steps back in the last few years, and a new Latin American dictatorship is in the making not unlike that of Juan Peron in Argentina.
The people are free to vote Chavez out mid term if they want and they tend to have international monitors there to make sure everything is fair. As for "Latin American dictatorships", the US has created/supported quite a few in Central and South America (at great cost to human lives), including the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and Pinochet in Chile. The US was ordered by the world court to cease it's terrorist activities against Nicaragua in 1986. The US ignored the ruling and the UN General assembly voted twice to "order" the US to comply. Did you know the US even orchestrated the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in the50s because the United Fruit Company didn't like their new policies? It's that kind of behaviour in South America that leads to hatred of the US in the region.
All of these aggressive interferences have a very short term view. Ultimately they end up backfiring. For example, if the US has kept it's word to the Cuban people and pulled out after 1898, you probably wouldn't have Castro today.
These dictatorships have a long standing track record of ending in rui
Several previous Venezuelan Presidents had similar enabling acts and they did not receive the same attention. They were US allies. Also, the powers are limited, last for a limited time and the Venezuelan congress can overturn the powers, so there is democratic control.
I'm inclined to think that our fucked up administration has given the order to paint a bad picture of Chavez so that we hate him.
They don't need to give an order. The media knows what to do. They pretty much just parrot official announcements anyway.
He's really not a dictator though. He fairly won an election under international observation. In fact far from being a dictator he introduced new legislation that actually gives the people the power to remove any official from office mid-term. That's not the kind of thing a dictator does. His real crime is that he is not a US ally.
It's just as well for the Government of Saudi Arabia that it's a US ally, otherwise the US media would would be all over them just like they are over Chavez. I'm not comparing the two of course. Venezuela is a democracy whereas Saudi Arabia is once of the most oppressive countries in the world.
The international media is currently outraged about the shutdown, but if they were paying any attention to Venezuela at all they would be outraged on a daily basis at what the private media there is saying and doing.
I always find it fascinating how weak non-US allies are subjected to such enormous media scrutiny. If you are a US ally you can get away with boiling people alive on a daily basis and the media are not at all interested. Yet if Chavez sneezes it will hit the front pages. If we somehow swapped the US with China, the US media would be continuously focusing on the Government of Taiwan and how evil and wrong it is.
Imagine if Chavez was arresting people who he declared to be enemies of the state and was holding them without charge or trial for years and torturing them in secret prisons and using waterboarding etc etc. It would probably get more front page attention in the US than when the US is doing similar things.
I know it all looks rather dictatoreque of Chavez to refuse to renew their licence, but if any western media channel behaved in the way they did, normal regulatory bodies would have shut them down long ago. Imagine the bias of Fox news multiplied by 100 and you begin to get the picture. During the coup attempt against the Chavez government in 2002 the news channels deliberately manipulated news footage to make it look like Chavez supporters were shooting people. What do you think would happen to a US TV Station if it did something like that and the whole Channel was behind it? I should imagine if the BBC had supported a foreign-backed coup against the democratically elected government of the UK, they would be shut down as well.
What Venezuela needs is effective media monitors like Ofcom, perhaps with international observers. Also, the reason we keep hearing so much about Chavez is not because of his actions, it is because he is not a US ally. If he was a US ally and was doing these things, the media would be largely disinterested. That is important to realise. For example, much was made of his enabling act, yet the same kind of act was used by several previous Venezuelan presidents. The difference being that they were US allies and he isn't.
They are very unscrupulous people. They use all kinds of tricks like pretending to be other companies, pretending to be personal calls, or (one of their favourites) pretending to be doing surveys. You can ask them 10 times whether they are a recruitment agency and they will deny it 10 times, before the truth finally emerges. I used to work for a company with some very paranoid bosses and recruitment consultants forcefully trying to cold call individuals would end up causing a lot of stress and aggravation for everyone.
In the end we started to have fun with them. When they'd ask what we did, we'd just make up bizarre stuff like we hand knit wigs from Yak hair, or we make designer frying pans. After a few days of practice you don't feel at all awkward or embarrassed coming out with this sort of nonsense and it actually starts to make the calls more of a fun experience.
What makes this even funnier is that the sex offenders using their legitimate names (assuming they aren't complete idiots) are the ones we should least worry about.
I suppose they may soon have a big drive to eliminate any terrorists from their community as well. They will have to search for all the honest terrorists who ticked the "I am a terrorist" check box.
I'm really sick and tired of the hypocrisy. When we lose our jobs to cheaper workers overseas, big business tells us that it's unfortunate but it's the harsh realities of the international business etc. Yet when that same market threatens them, the government steps in to protect them.
Finding errors can be hard enough, but it becomes much harder when they are non-repeatable. That's exactly the sort of bug you get with multi-threaded programming. Run a function 99 times, fine. Run it the 100th time, bang!. On the 100th run the threads were juggled by the OS in such a way that your flawed programming suddenly shows up and the threads clash. I've already used some graphics software that had this exact problem. Thinking in a parallel/multi-threaded way may be a challenge, but I think debugging is the real issue.
It's the same in the UK. The first-past-the-post system means that many peoples votes count for nothing just because they live in the wrong area. Not surprisingly, when people's votes count for nothing, many of them don't bother voting. The new leader of the Labour party has suggested he will implement PR, but they promised that many years back and failed to deliver.
Hitachi probably say all the recent AACS compromises and thought "Well, people are obviously going to need more hard drive space now". Hitachi have their finger on the pulse:)
Since they are going for ridiculous extremes, how about passing a law so that exaggerating or cherry picking intelligence to justify a war is punishable by being hung drawn and quartered in front of your family who are also simultaneously being boiled alive.
I notice you selected the SNIPPED version. Here's a link to the full version.
I was just trying to find a link as quickly as possible. I have seen the full version before and you get to see both ends of the tube at different points in the footage. It does not look like and SA-7, since they are bulky towards one end.
"Or executing a wounded Iraqi"
How would/do/have YOU act/acted when you suspect(ed) an enemy fighter may be "playing possum"?
It's not a question of how I would act. It's a question of how you are supposed to act. Executing unarmed wounded soldiers is generally viewed as unacceptable. As for "Playing Possum", for all you know the Iraq may have been fading in and out of conciousness. If you don't want to have wounded and unarmed US soldiers being similarly executed in future conflicts, it might be a good idea to desist from the practice now.
Nor does using them for military purposes, which removes their protected status under the GC.
Well we get told all sorts of things which seek to give retroactive justification for attacks don't we. The soldiers who were opening up on civilians in Afghanistan (who later confiscated the reporters footage) said they were being fired on, yet it seems that was not the case.
"The famous "Awe Dude" air-strike on a crowd of civilians."
Post-strike assertions go both ways, but the ground controller called it in during the ground battle.
The aircrew report seeing a crowd of individuals and they are immediately given permission to fire. It seemed to be a "shoot anything that moves policy." . Insurgents are not likely to be dumb enough to run down the middle of the street in a big crowd, getting in each others line of fire. Frightened civilians would though.
I'm really hoping for some experimental episodes where the camera just slowly pans up and down Tricia Helfer's body while she tries on different outfits for 40 minutes.
Ars Technica has a story about the Terrorist Hoax Improvements Act, a bill introduced recently by the Senate.
I completely misunderstood the purpose of the bill. I thought it was aimed at creating more convincing false flag plans like Operation Northwoods. Silly me.
Indeed. A lot of British toops went to Canada to help after victories against Napoleon freed them up. At the time of the attempted 1812 invasion, there was quite a bit of resistance in the US. Some towns even flew their flags at half-mast in protest. New England even refused to send any troops. There were various pretexts for the invasion, but the real reason was expansionism.
Later expansionist adventures were of course much more successful. The Spanish were driven out many areas. There's always a pretext though.
Slashdot Mirror
Gordon Brown is now talking about having a written constitution for Britain. It will be interesting to see how it skirts around all the infringements to our rights that have been passed under the Labour government. We had a million people March against the war and the government reacted by effectively banning protests within a half mile of parliament. They tried to pretend it was about removing Brian Haw but that was a pretty lame excuse.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm a UK citizen, but are you telling me there are no US regulatory bodies that can put pressure on news channels for wildly distorting facts etc?
Well, the factuality of this claim is in question.
I've seen the footage both with the sneaky editing and without it. It's pretty clear.
Oh yeah, that's a great idea. Let's bring the magically impartial people who, unlike the rest of the world, do not bring in bias to their thought process.
There's really nothing magical about it. For example, in the UK we have a regulatory body that ensures advertisements do not make false claims. Are you worried that they might not be impartial and would be turning a blind eye to the Coca Cola company or something? If you look at what the Venezuelan media is putting out, it's clear they need some kind of regulation.
That's the way international relations work, and if you can find a single country that hasn't done the same then please let me know.
That is the way they work when you are trying to exert control over foreign countries. It's easier to control a dictator (one man) that a democracy. No country in recent history has supported/installed so many dictators around the world. Is that the way you want US foreign policy to work?, because aside from the suffering it causes, it will end up backfiring spectacularly.
If that's the case, then what about Chavez, who staged his own failed military coup in 1992?
That's true, he did and was sent to Jail. There was another coup attempt while he was in prison. The people wanted the government out and Perez was actually impeached a year later.
This year, Chavez essentially gave himself the power to rule by decree - no need for those pesky congress people who all toe party line anyhow, but just to make sure no opposition forms he would prefer to have "temporary" dictatorial powers all put into himself and none other. Just to make sure the revolution goes right, of course...
The powers are limited and last for a limited time. Also the congress can overturn the powers, so there is democratic control. Several other Venezuelan presidents had similar enabling acts, yet there was little media attention for them, since they were US allies.
Venezuela has taken dramatic steps back in the last few years, and a new Latin American dictatorship is in the making not unlike that of Juan Peron in Argentina.
The people are free to vote Chavez out mid term if they want and they tend to have international monitors there to make sure everything is fair. As for "Latin American dictatorships", the US has created/supported quite a few in Central and South America (at great cost to human lives), including the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and Pinochet in Chile. The US was ordered by the world court to cease it's terrorist activities against Nicaragua in 1986. The US ignored the ruling and the UN General assembly voted twice to "order" the US to comply. Did you know the US even orchestrated the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in the50s because the United Fruit Company didn't like their new policies? It's that kind of behaviour in South America that leads to hatred of the US in the region.
All of these aggressive interferences have a very short term view. Ultimately they end up backfiring. For example, if the US has kept it's word to the Cuban people and pulled out after 1898, you probably wouldn't have Castro today.
These dictatorships have a long standing track record of ending in rui
Several previous Venezuelan Presidents had similar enabling acts and they did not receive the same attention. They were US allies. Also, the powers are limited, last for a limited time and the Venezuelan congress can overturn the powers, so there is democratic control.
They don't need to give an order. The media knows what to do. They pretty much just parrot official announcements anyway. He's really not a dictator though. He fairly won an election under international observation. In fact far from being a dictator he introduced new legislation that actually gives the people the power to remove any official from office mid-term. That's not the kind of thing a dictator does. His real crime is that he is not a US ally.
It's just as well for the Government of Saudi Arabia that it's a US ally, otherwise the US media would would be all over them just like they are over Chavez. I'm not comparing the two of course. Venezuela is a democracy whereas Saudi Arabia is once of the most oppressive countries in the world.
The international media is currently outraged about the shutdown, but if they were paying any attention to Venezuela at all they would be outraged on a daily basis at what the private media there is saying and doing.
I always find it fascinating how weak non-US allies are subjected to such enormous media scrutiny. If you are a US ally you can get away with boiling people alive on a daily basis and the media are not at all interested. Yet if Chavez sneezes it will hit the front pages. If we somehow swapped the US with China, the US media would be continuously focusing on the Government of Taiwan and how evil and wrong it is.
Imagine if Chavez was arresting people who he declared to be enemies of the state and was holding them without charge or trial for years and torturing them in secret prisons and using waterboarding etc etc. It would probably get more front page attention in the US than when the US is doing similar things.
The real reason is that using crappy old technology helps to suspend the viewers disbelief (even if it really shouldn't).
I know it all looks rather dictatoreque of Chavez to refuse to renew their licence, but if any western media channel behaved in the way they did, normal regulatory bodies would have shut them down long ago. Imagine the bias of Fox news multiplied by 100 and you begin to get the picture. During the coup attempt against the Chavez government in 2002 the news channels deliberately manipulated news footage to make it look like Chavez supporters were shooting people. What do you think would happen to a US TV Station if it did something like that and the whole Channel was behind it? I should imagine if the BBC had supported a foreign-backed coup against the democratically elected government of the UK, they would be shut down as well.
What Venezuela needs is effective media monitors like Ofcom, perhaps with international observers. Also, the reason we keep hearing so much about Chavez is not because of his actions, it is because he is not a US ally. If he was a US ally and was doing these things, the media would be largely disinterested. That is important to realise. For example, much was made of his enabling act, yet the same kind of act was used by several previous Venezuelan presidents. The difference being that they were US allies and he isn't.
They are very unscrupulous people. They use all kinds of tricks like pretending to be other companies, pretending to be personal calls, or (one of their favourites) pretending to be doing surveys. You can ask them 10 times whether they are a recruitment agency and they will deny it 10 times, before the truth finally emerges. I used to work for a company with some very paranoid bosses and recruitment consultants forcefully trying to cold call individuals would end up causing a lot of stress and aggravation for everyone.
In the end we started to have fun with them. When they'd ask what we did, we'd just make up bizarre stuff like we hand knit wigs from Yak hair, or we make designer frying pans. After a few days of practice you don't feel at all awkward or embarrassed coming out with this sort of nonsense and it actually starts to make the calls more of a fun experience.
I suppose they may soon have a big drive to eliminate any terrorists from their community as well. They will have to search for all the honest terrorists who ticked the "I am a terrorist" check box.
The other week Sony unveiled their thin flexible screen. I'm sure you could combine that with existing multi-touch membrane technology.
I'm really sick and tired of the hypocrisy. When we lose our jobs to cheaper workers overseas, big business tells us that it's unfortunate but it's the harsh realities of the international business etc. Yet when that same market threatens them, the government steps in to protect them.
Finding errors can be hard enough, but it becomes much harder when they are non-repeatable. That's exactly the sort of bug you get with multi-threaded programming. Run a function 99 times, fine. Run it the 100th time, bang!. On the 100th run the threads were juggled by the OS in such a way that your flawed programming suddenly shows up and the threads clash. I've already used some graphics software that had this exact problem. Thinking in a parallel/multi-threaded way may be a challenge, but I think debugging is the real issue.
It's the same in the UK. The first-past-the-post system means that many peoples votes count for nothing just because they live in the wrong area. Not surprisingly, when people's votes count for nothing, many of them don't bother voting. The new leader of the Labour party has suggested he will implement PR, but they promised that many years back and failed to deliver.
Hitachi probably say all the recent AACS compromises and thought "Well, people are obviously going to need more hard drive space now". Hitachi have their finger on the pulse :)
They should have kept quite about that. Any would-be assassins are now fitting their bombs with Moron-Detectors instead.
Don't they have subsidiaries that also have loads of patents?
Since they are going for ridiculous extremes, how about passing a law so that exaggerating or cherry picking intelligence to justify a war is punishable by being hung drawn and quartered in front of your family who are also simultaneously being boiled alive.
I was just trying to find a link as quickly as possible. I have seen the full version before and you get to see both ends of the tube at different points in the footage. It does not look like and SA-7, since they are bulky towards one end.
SA-7 picture http://www.army.cz/images/id_5001_6000/5069/02.jp
"Or executing a wounded Iraqi" How would/do/have YOU act/acted when you suspect(ed) an enemy fighter may be "playing possum"?
It's not a question of how I would act. It's a question of how you are supposed to act. Executing unarmed wounded soldiers is generally viewed as unacceptable. As for "Playing Possum", for all you know the Iraq may have been fading in and out of conciousness. If you don't want to have wounded and unarmed US soldiers being similarly executed in future conflicts, it might be a good idea to desist from the practice now.
Nor does using them for military purposes, which removes their protected status under the GC.
Well we get told all sorts of things which seek to give retroactive justification for attacks don't we. The soldiers who were opening up on civilians in Afghanistan (who later confiscated the reporters footage) said they were being fired on, yet it seems that was not the case.
"The famous "Awe Dude" air-strike on a crowd of civilians." Post-strike assertions go both ways, but the ground controller called it in during the ground battle.
The aircrew report seeing a crowd of individuals and they are immediately given permission to fire. It seemed to be a "shoot anything that moves policy." . Insurgents are not likely to be dumb enough to run down the middle of the street in a big crowd, getting in each others line of fire. Frightened civilians would though.
I don't suppose they will be posting these:
The famous "Awe Dude" air-strike on a crowd of civilians. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQUK5rA4DaI
Or this apparent murder of civilians driving by in their cars. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnyjH5wusqs
Or the Apache killing these unarmed men in a farmers field, working on a tractor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmZRyNd6ru8
Or executing a wounded Iraqi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W41srr6CQU
Blowing up Mosque's doesn't look so good either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFVnqUJWsiU
They are also seeking new business in the US, Australia and the Middle East.
I'm really hoping for some experimental episodes where the camera just slowly pans up and down Tricia Helfer's body while she tries on different outfits for 40 minutes.
I hope they don't start building these devices into women's clothing.
I completely misunderstood the purpose of the bill. I thought it was aimed at creating more convincing false flag plans like Operation Northwoods. Silly me.
Indeed. A lot of British toops went to Canada to help after victories against Napoleon freed them up. At the time of the attempted 1812 invasion, there was quite a bit of resistance in the US. Some towns even flew their flags at half-mast in protest. New England even refused to send any troops. There were various pretexts for the invasion, but the real reason was expansionism.
Later expansionist adventures were of course much more successful. The Spanish were driven out many areas. There's always a pretext though.