They were not "innocent bystanders" although some innocents were killed. Japan was highly militarized, and every civilian adult was expected to fight if Japan was invaded. Japan had been butchering civilians throughout it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" - the conquered countries. They used biological warfare on Chinese, and in experiments on prisoners of war. They tortured and murdered prisoners of war. Japan was a racist society that accorded no humanity to anyone not Japanese.
The allies were planning to invade Japan, as that was the only way to end the very real threat from their vicious regime. The atomic bombs were dropped to shorten the war and lessen the number of lives killed. (although my Japanese relatives still would disagree_. While saving Japanese lives wasn't the intent - in those days, the enemy was the enemy - the effect of the bombings saved millions of Japanese lives.
Also, the atomic bombs killed fewer Japanese than a single night's firebombing of Tokyo.
So no, the US was hardly morally culpable for nuking the Japanese, and we in fact did them a favor!
If cars are this susceptible to microwave energy, then Iran will shortly have the ability to shut down much of our country, in an instant.
Exo-atmospheric nuclear EMP is easy to generate if you have a nuke (even a small one, although the area affected would be somewhat less) and can put it in a low orbit satellite. Iran has the latter (and is about to launch a couple more) and will soon have the former. Their nukes can be small (they have implosion technology).
They have also been testing an alternate delivery system - a SCUD launch with the warhead detected at the top of the trajectory - EMP is the only explanation for such tests.
So, if they are nutty enough (and do you want to bet your survival on the sanity of President ImANutJob?), they can kill tens of millions of Americans, with no warning at all. They can orbit a nuke in a satellite, to be detonated on command. Or, they could launch a few SCUDs from merchant ships hundreds of miles off our shores.
Imagine a US where a large area (say, 1000mi in diameter) suddenly has a destroyed electrical transmissions system,almost all telecoms down, and almost all vehicles unusable. It's not a pretty thought.
You are probably hearing aliasing. If your 19kHz has harmonic content (which can be introduced several ways), it will mix with the 44.1Khz sampling frequency, producing sounds at the sum and difference frequencies (for example 44.1 - 38 = 6.1).
Ah, you don't get to assert 'one killer', you've already said they were just suspects. And, no, because I'm a Christian, and, as such, is not supposed to cause harm to other people.
That killer(KSH) is a killer of thousands of innocent people - Americans and other nationalities in the WTC, and bragged about it to his interrogators.
Does your Christian duty prevent you from harming others in self defense or in defense of innocents?
So it's not just torture. Catholics, expect for you apparently, disapprove of innocent people merely being imprisoned.
I disapprove of known innocent people being imprisoned. But I am a realist enough to know that no system of deciding guilt or innocence is perfect, and therefore, if we are ever to imprison anyone, we are likely to end up imprisoning some innocents.
Shall we open the gates of all of our prisons?
From all you write, it would appear that you only view the world in terms of black and white. Are you really that dense, or just doing it for the sake of rhetoric?
Um, all torture of people in Gitmo is harming innocent people, as none of them have been found guilty of anything, and until then they are innocent. That's how 'guilt' works in...I almost said 'every civilized country', but it actually works that way in uncivilized countries, too, they just find people guilty without a trial.
Nonsense on stilts. Just because they haven't been found guilty does not mean they aren't guilty. You are using a particular legal system of a few countries to bolster an assertion about actual guilt. Do you mean that we shouldn't interrogate them unless we have judicially proven them guilty? Not even the police work that way.
By the way, nobody at Gitmo has ever been tortured, and nobody there has even been waterboarded. For that matter, only 3 people have been waterboarded by the CIA, one the planner of 9-11, and he broke and provided intelligence that saved many lives.
ME:Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.
Yeah, good plan. Fight someone who spoke out against such abuses that he saw in the middle of a war, which put someone back in office who actually tortures innocents. (And not in the heat of battle, either.) Way to defend this country's image. It's like fighting crime by arresting people who report crime. That will cause crime to decrease!
There's a little problem with your assertion. He did NOT see those abuses. I know people who served with him in the Swift Boats and the reason they went after him so hard was because he was tarring them especially with phony atrocity charges - and he had been one of them. John Kerry simply stated exactly the North Vietnamese (through their front, the PRG) line - exactly, which is not surprising since he met with them in Paris before he made his infamous appearance before the Senate. That there were some abuses by American soldiers in Vietnam is, of course, true. There are ALWAYS abuses in war, no matter how hard you try to stop them - no matter what the policy. But Kerry's statements were lies, just as his and Jane Fonda's phony Winter Soldier investigation was classic agitprop guerrilla theater instead of a search for truth. Read all about it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/.
You raise a numeric calculus in an attempt to prove moral relativism. So lets turn it around: are you willing to inflict 3 minutes of fear on one killer in order to save the lives of thousands of innocents?
Is your world monochromatic - one is a moral relativist if one is not an absolute moral absolutist?
You also play word games with the term Catholic. If you don't know exactly what I mean, I'd be really surprised. RCC, of course.
I am, but, you, by mentioning it in the discussion, are indicating that perhaps you do not. The 'War on Terror' doesn't fit the criteria for a just war, although that is more a problem with the fact it's not actually a war than it being unjust.
That's your opinion. I strongly disagree. And since it is the context of my interpretation that we are discussing, that rules.
Clearly there is a war - there are specific enemies and they have killed Americans, are killing Americans, and plan to kill many more. They are using military weapons (small arms, mortars, IEDs, artillery rockets, chemical weapons - chlorine and Sarin). They have stated their intent to kill our civilians by the millions. They are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That sure sounds like a war to me.
However, several of the requirements is that innocent people are not harmed, or harmed as little as possible, and certainly not harmed deliberately. Like if you, I dunno, tortured them. That would appear to void the 'Just war' warranty.
I know of no case where an known innocent was "tortured" or even coercively interrogated. There are, like on all sides in all wars, a few who violate policy and commit crimes (such as those toads at Abu Ghraib). But there is no policy I know of to inflict harm intentionally and unnecessarily on innocents.
Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.
Tell me - do you accept that we have enemies who represent a threat to kill many Americans, or is your head in the sand? How do you propose to deal with the likes of Al Qaeda and their millions of supporters? How about the whacko government of Iran, which until 9-11 was responsible for more American deaths by terrorism than anyone else?
To answer your question: Catholic. Not moral relativist (your stereotyping is turned on again) - perhaps more correct would be not being a moral absolutist in areas where interpretation is required. You are familiar with the "just war" doctrine of the church? But you are right, one can cherry pick the bible for all kinds of things - such as absolute pacifism or revenge (eye for an eye).
You are assuming that it is an absolute truth that waterboarding is torture. I disagree. Many others do also. One can define cruelty up or down.
War is ugly. Horrible things happen to guilty and innocent people. There are situations that force difficult moral decisions (I gave the example of Churchill and Coventry).
Americans who are afraid to confront the reality that we have a lot of really nasty enemies and need to protect ourselves against them are the pussies.
Americans who think the Patriot Act is an unprecedented erosion in our freedoms need to both read the Patriot Act (ever done it? You'll be surprised) and look at history. Everything the Patriot Act allows was unconditionally legal for the life of our republic until around 50 years ago! Look at history.
Yeah, there are things wrong. Bush isn't the best president (I've seen a lot worse, like Johnson, Nixon and Jimmy Carter). Iraq might or might not have been the right strategy, but Al Qaeda is certainly damned unhappy about it, and so is Iran. That in itself says it's got a lot going for it, since both of those are sworn to destroy us, and Al Qaeda killed more Americans in one attack on American soil than anyone since the civil war!
Katrina? Cut ur whining, dude. Katrina was a failure of all levels of government - but mostly it was a failure of the citizens of Louisiana to deal with the inevitability of catastrophic flooding. Inevitability. Those of us in the hurricane disaster mitigation world have long known that a Cat 3 or higher hurricane (Cat 3 or higher storm surge, to be precise) would inundate New Orleans. Guess what - it got hit by a Cat 5 record storm surge (even though the winds were only Cat 3 by that time). So big duh... it flooded. Wusses are those who are upset about what happened afterwards - to irresponsible people and their governments (the most corrupt in the US) and their media.
Now you do have a point with religious intolerance. I have never seen organized religion so attacked demeaned by the establishment of our society. Religious intolerance today is mostly intolerance of religion, enforced by truly freedom restricting speech codes in much of the west (you can go to jail in most western countries for preaching some doctrines), enhanced by the almost uniformly negative and stereotyped portrayal of religious people and leaders by our main stream media and Hollywood, enforced by governmental entities that force religious groups to take actions that go against their religion (such as forcing Catholic organizations to pay for birth control and abortions for their workers). Yep, we have religious intolerance, all right.
You want to talk about wakeup calls, how about...
WTC 1993 USS Cole 2000 WTC 2001 The fatwa authorizing Al Qaeda to kill up to 7 million Americans, and their continued determined attempts to do so The desire by the president of Iran to precipitate an apocalypse in order to cause the return of the 12th Imam - this while Iran is doing its best to acquire nukes The statement by the #2 Ayatollah in Iran that if Islam acquires nukes, it should use them to destroy Israel because there are so many Muslims that the retaliation won't serously injust Islam, but the destruction of the Jews will be significant (Rafsanjani, Dec 2002) Oppressive and undemocratic speech codes at most university cammpuses The attempt by the Democrat- dominated congress to silence dissent by banning talk radio Multiculturalism run amok, impeding our efforts to fight terrorism and crime, and damaging our social contract "reverse" racism The destruction of individual rights by environmental extremists Columbine - gee, do you suppose the widespread availability and marketing of all sorts of violent entertainm ent might have had an effect? Don't know. On the other hand, school mass murders have been going on as long as we have had schools, so it really isn't a new wakeup call after all.
....Unfortunately, the wiretaps (which were ONLY on international calls)........Do you have any proof of that whatsoever?........When the government does things in secret, and, what's more, lies about said things for three years, you'd have to be a particular sort of stupid to believe them now.
Do you have any proof to the contary? As for secrecy, duh.... did it occur to you that perhaps keeping secret methods of intelligence gathering might, just might, be a good idea? Consider that in WW-II, Churchill refused to warn the citizens of Coventry of a German retaliatory bombing raid, just to protect the Ultra secret... that was a pretty big sacrifice for protecting methods of intelligence. That should perhaps give pause to those who imagine that everything should be out in the open.....Exactly how is Blackwater immune to the laws of the US?......Because the executive branch refuses to investigate them? For?......You'll notice that there is no such suspension possible for cruel and unusual punishment. You'll also notice we are not in the middle of an invasion or rebellion. Sorry, but (1) what cruel and unusual punishment? (2) We are in the middle of a war (which oughta count)... or do you think Bush blew up the WTC on 9-11?...Hey, at least you're intelligent enough to realize we're doing it to suspected terrorists, not 'terrorists', although for some reason you didn't put 'suspected enemies', so I'm not convinced you actually believe it. And what you have failed to notice is that that torture is, in fact, wrong.
Well, gee, thanks for addressing my intelligence. Yeah, "suspected" because intelligence work is not perfect so not every suspect is actually guilty....I don't care what amoral atheists think, the Bible is pretty clear about this. You and all the other moral degenerates should go to some other country that wants that sort of filthy behavior, and not running around teaching our children it's acceptable.
So I'm a moral degenerate because I advocate tapping phone calls to overseas suspected terrorists and using unpleasant (but not damaging) techniques to protect the lives of Americans - techniques which our own soldiers are subject to as part of their training? Why do terrorists deserve better treatment than our own soldiers?
Oh, and are you accusing me of being an amoral atheist? If so, you are incorrect in both the adjective and the noun. I'm afraid you may have a tendency to stereotype. Now, would you tell me where in the Bible it says we must allow our enemies to convert us to radical Islam by terror or murder?
Torture is indeed a difficult subject. However, in today's political debate, waterboarding is a proxy for attacks against Bush and the war on terror. The debate is less about the real nature of waterboarding in the context of terror prevention than about finding another way to hurt the administration (and its war on terror, which is considered illegitimate by many). Also, there is a puritanism at work here - we must be perfect, fight by Marquis de Queensbury rules, even while opponents are committing the most terrible atrocities against others, and publicly proclaiming their intent to do the same to us and those we love. We must maintain our utopian perfection in the face of the most horrendous threats.
Thanks but no thanks.
The link that you provide is hardly conclusive given the sources it cites. This is a contentious topic and it is easy to find "experts" who are happy to both define most anything as torture, or to state that it isn't effective. For example, one in your cite says that if it worked, we would have heard about it. Perhaps he needs to stay up to date (see below)
Also, there are international conventions that are relatively recent which the US has *not* signed. Some of these have grossly broadened the definitions of all sorts of unpleasantries. By the standard of international law that we are obligated to, waterboarding is *not* torture.
That something is a matter of international law does not IMHO mean very much - especially when our opponents totally ignore it, and given the nature of the organizations that create many of these so-called laws. Consider, also, that one purpose of the law is to incentivize both sides of a conflict to follow it. But if we consider the Geneva Convention on the treatment of captives, we find two things: (1) The US has not fought an opponent who came close to following that since WW-II; and (2) the intent of the convention is that those who violate it both lose its protection and are supposed to be treated badly - to encourage others to follow that law. Under the intent of that Geneva Convention, for example, we can are are encouraged to shoot illegal combatants any time we want (as we did in WW-II after the Battle of the Bulge). So by international law we can kill them, but we can't scare them with waterboarding? Right.
That torture does not always or frequently provide useful intelligence is true - it is usually applied by oppressive governments against their own people as a matter of terror, rather than for intelligence. Saddam Hussein's government made this a matter of policy, as do many others.
That the CIA tried experiments in various ways to get the truth tells you not only about the many techniques that failed, but also about the amount of analysis that led to the use of waterboarding as an effective, but not perfect technique.
Furthermore, most potential interrogatees don't have useful intelligence.
Obviously, one reason we were taught about resisting torture was to *reduce* its effectiveness, which is not the same thing as rendering it useless.
However, in some cases, coercive interrogation does work (as every police department knows, and they don't go as far as waterboarding).
For example, the use of waterboarding is known to have broken Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief, in less than 3 minutes. That yielded vast amounts of intelligence and saved many lives.
As for my military instructors, they spoke not just from theory (as the folks in your cites) but from personal experience. They were mostly ex-POWs from places that used real torture, not just scaring people with waterboarding. They also had been extensively trained.
If waterboarding is torture, then it is a crime, and I would expect disgruntled members of our military (and there are always some) who have been waterboarded to file suit against the government for torturing them during training. Strange... there haven't been any.
So let me ask you the classic question that comes up on the e
And just exactly is how does Blackwater fit into your fascism theory? Do you see them running around the US doing evil?
They are a large security firm, hired by the government and many other organizations to help in dangerous areas, such as Iraq. They engage in lethal violence as part of their business, Legally (in spite of some misleading news reports). Furthermore, the government has used private companies for diplomatic and other security for a long time.
Exactly how is Blackwater immune to the laws of the US?
There's nothing fascist about them.
As for the start of fascism, I suggest again you look at history, because by your definition we have been in the start of fascism for most of the existence of the US.
Companies in tight with government? Check out the 1800s. Companies breaking laws with impunity... I don't know of any examples today, but there were times when this was certainly a popular passtime.
Wiretaps used to be routine without warrants or probable cause - did you know that?
Only 50 years ago, police did not have to "read people their rights." Evidence could not be thrown out if it was obtained improperly.
When we fought the civil war, Habeas Corpus was suspended by that evil fascist, Lincoln. Lots of companies were in bed with the government (can you say war profiteers?)
In World War II, we drafted millions of men, and we sent Japanese to concentration camps. The government spied on whomever it wanted to. It censored what it wanted to, and Hollywood produced only what censors allowed (and that censorship lasted into the 60s), and most of what it produced was propaganda under the direction of army captain Ronald Reagan.
In the Vietnam War, we drafted hundreds of thousands of men. Oh, and we had private companies involved in that war also. Do you see a draft today?
Companies used to hire private security firms to bust unions with violence. Don't see much of that these days.
So if you are afraid that we are becoming fascist, it might help to show the trend in that direction, since history appears to run against you in that regard. We are becoming more free, and fascism is inconsistent with freedom. The most likely way that our freedoms will be restricted, and fascist government will grow, is through environmental extremism, which confers upon its practitioners a moral authority to "do whatever is needed" to "save the earth." Corporations will be happy to join the government and profit from that, just like they now do with the absurd ethanol program. For example, Enron was in favor of the Kyoto treaty because of the money it expected to make from the carbon "offset" trading.
BTW... you say you don't watch the news. well, the news made a big deal about Blackwater after the incident where Iraq alleged misbehavior by Blackwater diplomatic security during a firefight. Congress is making a big deal.
Unfortunately, the wiretaps (which were ONLY on international calls) were also big news, since the mass media hates the current administration and will do anything (including crippling its anti-terrorist efforts) to hurt Bush. Some of these news stories have seriously damaged our ability to fight our very real enemies. So fear not, the populace is overly aware of the "dangers" they face from the administration...............
You may not have noticed, but we are in fact at war, with people who have vowed to kill us by the millions, and have tried numerous times. Cry all you want about Blackwater and AT&T. They are a small part of a huge, long term war, and they are hon our side.
Perhaps you don't see the threat, but the convergence of Islamofascist ideology (Al Qaeda's and Iran's - both forms) and modern technology, makes terrorism far more dangerous than it has ever been before. 9-11 showed how 19 people could turn civilian technology into weapons of mass destruction and kill thousands (and try to kill a lot more). Al Qaeda has attempted to procure nuclear material and biological weapon
In the *real* world, fascism includes a totalitarian government and big businesses that act more like arms of the mob.If you lived in a fascist society, you would NOT be3 posting this rubbish to Slashdot (or at least not without using about 10 cutouts), because you would be arrested. Hell, the US is so tame that you don't even have to worry about being drafted (unlike people my age). For the most part, the west - especially the US - is freer and less fascistic now than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to say silly things.
If you want to see fascism in action, look at:
China today
Russia after Stalin, Russia today (to some extent)
Saddam's Iraq
Many African governments
What you don't see in a fascist society is:
New media constantly against the head of government
A thriving entertainment industry which openly makes one anti-government film after another
An opposition party
Free and open forums
Democratic government
The closest we have to fascism is the incessant attempts by academia and the media to silence those who do not agree with *their* left-of-center viewpoint.
As far as corporations go, too often they will seek to buy power from whomever (which is why they are contributing twice as much to Democrats as Republics now that the tide has turned). They are inherently anti-democratic. They are also very important in making any useful economy go. It takes balance.
CO2 is a forcing factor? CO2 is also feedback. My point is that people need to understand that global temperature is also feedback, from a wide variety of very complex dynamical and perhaps chaotic systems (and don't trot out the old argument that climate isn't chaotic because the models aren't chaotic - sorry, that just isn't very solid proof). People also need to understand that CO2 is a trace gas - one which simple physics says will (as a first order effect) positively correlate with temperature.
The problem is that all sorts of folks are predicting all sorts of things, and scaring lots of people, when they really don't know if the effect is small or large, or whether it will be totally overwhelmed by some other, as yet inadequately characterized effect - such as changes in solar irradiance.
As for the market strawman you threw out...
"You seem to be under the impression that the advances in our country's infrastructure were largely due to the action of the market. "
I didn't say that the markets solve all. What I said is that we do not have the social engineering abilities "to make enough difference to count. There is a strong negative feedback effect there also: increase energy costs only in signatory countries by forcing CO2 emissions reduction and, voila, energy intensive human activities will move to places where they don't have those restrictions. Try to make the restrictions global, and then look around and see where the policeman is when some large country, because of the negative economic impact, is forced (by its citizens) to give up on the restrictions. Heck, even Europe is unable to meet its goals, and Kyoto was really a European thing.
But for fun, let's look at the "counterexamples" you threw out:
Who built freeways?
What created the demand for the freeways? The market, through the invention, production and marketing of automobiles. Duh. The other factor was national defense - the interstates were built specifically as military measures, during the cold war under Eisenhower. National Defense trumps all as a cause, when the measures taken are rational.
Who built railroads and secured the property to build them on?
Capitalists built the railroads. Government exercised its power of imminent domain (and some military power) to clear the right of ways.
Who invented railroad technology? Not the government.
Who researched and launched satellites?
A great example! The government-run space program is a sad joke. The inefficiencies and political craziness (like requiring all military satellites to be launged on the man-rated shuttle) have squandered enormous ammounts of money on pretty low-payoff projects (the international space station is virtually useless, but exceedingly expensive).
However, there is no doubt that technology developed by - gasp - capitalists at the behest of the government would not have been built without government involvement. The Apollo program was, IMHO, a good thing. Do I think the government is always wrong, as you imply? Not at all. But it should be the means of last resort.
Who invented and built the internet?
Government funded academics and corporate research labs (ever hear of BBN?) invented it, and government paid for the initial, limited implementation. When I first encountered the internet, it had four nodes. But government didn't invent most of the underlying technology, and it certainly didn't invent or fund the internet as we know it today. That was done by... yep... capitalists seeking profit. Cisco, to cite one of many examples, is not a government institution.
Who funds research into nearly every area of technological advancement? Yep, that's right, good old government with it's nasty market-interfering ways. Government intervention has played an important role in nearly every technological advance.
Government has paid a very critical role in basic research. It has been far less critical in applying that res
Yes, if you don't have a good argument, attack the messenger ("professional network of Greenhouse deniers") using religious terminology and conspiratorial implications, not the message.
Issues:
There are serious climatologists who believe the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is worthless. This is not to say that it might not happen or be happening, but that the issue is driven by speculation (primarily in the form of models which canbot be calibrated due to dramatic problems with the historical temperature record - especially before 1850 when thermometers started to be widely used). Furthermore, it has become highly politicized, with non-specialists (some of whom are qualified non-the-less) jumping in on both sides. I know some of these scientists, and they either don't publish, or have jumped to industry because then they can do their science without the threat of losing their funding due to their conclusions.
As an interesting side note, one of these guys approached Enron to see if they wanted him to provide his global warming expertise on their side. Their reaction was that they didn't want skeptics - they expected to make money on the carbon trading systems and disruptions caused by CO2 emissions control! So don't assume that industry, even the energy industry, is one sided on this.
The climate record does show a significant amount of warming in the 20th century BEFORE most of the CO2 rise. The "hockey stick" graph has been at least partly refuted.
The system in fact *is* too complicated and, importantly, undersampled for reasonable predictions to be made now. The "good" data is of way too short a time period to even deal with the shortest of natural climate factors. New, major factors are discovered frequently on both sides of the argument. Climatology as a predictive science is in its infancy. Don't be fooled by what models are saying - they don't even represent current understanding due to their poor calibration data, low temporal and spatial resolution, and the presence of a large number of calibration parameters. Furthermore, almost all quotes from the UN commission (IPCC) come from the heavily politicized introduction, not the carefully guarded language and details of the main report (which has lots of ifs, buts qualifications).
Science magazine, in particular, brands as scientific heretics anyone who doesn't already agree with the conclusion that significant man-caused global warming is happening and about to get worth. Read their editorials and you will see. They are biased.
There is a built-in bias in the rewards system, as there is in many areas of human endevour. Global warming fears generate money for climatologists, as long as they don't rock the boat. More money than the field would get if alarmist predictions weren't getting lots of public attention. Naturally this leads to distortion in the scientific process. The good thing about science is that it will correct this. The bad thing is that it might take decades or centuries.
Watch out when you bash the US for not entering Kyoto, which is a fraud and a Trojan horse. Note that even the "environment loving" Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the treaty (I think the Senate vote was 99-0). Even using the models it is based on, it would not be possible, after 100 years, to measure the effect of Kyoto on global mean temperature. Its real purposes are two:
1 - improve European competitiveness over the US
2 - put in place a framework for much more drastic cutbacks - to about 60% of 1990 carbon emissions. With corrent or accurately forseeable technology, this would lead to world wide global depression (see next point), and would be impossible to enforce. Furthermore, not that the two largest and nations with very rapid economic growth (China and India) are not requireed to sacrifice for it.
The real killer in Kyoto or similar approaches is that it is hubristic and arrogant. To see this, imagine that we had tried to put this in place in a period of more global stability -
I haven't followed the subject in a long time, and would be interested in a pointer to more current, much more qualified research.
When I was involved, way back shortly after P&F published, there was a mailing list with a number of researchers trying things and theoreticians theorizing stuff. One researcher did an exceedling careful job of calorimetry (his real job was as an instrumentation designer for one of the major accelerators) and his results were uniformly negative and very convincing. Others had varying degrees of success, with the success inversely proportional to the quality of the experimental design - a classic sign of pathological science.
Hence I would be interested if folks have found replicable experiments with good calorimetry and results significant enough to not be flukes. My definition of good calorimetry includes, at a minimum, a fully closed system where the released D2 and O2 are recombined inside the calorimeter, and well calibrated instruments sampled many times per second with all samples stored for analysis.
There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's.
NONSENSE!
See my previous posting on the numerous experimental errors in their original experiment and paper. What they demonstrated is that they were very poor at experimental design, and did extremely sloppy calorimetry. I would suggest that anyone who tends to believe this stuff look into both the history of experiments in cold fusion in the late '80s, and then the fascinating story of the very similar polywater controversy of the late '60s.
The cold fusion episode was a classic example of pathological science.
Furthermore, people have been studying the thermodynamics of deuterium adsorption into palladum since the 19th century! Nothing new here.
The original Pons-Fleischman experiments suffered from several defects:
1) The test tubes containing the D2O were open to the air. Diffusion thus removed very quickly the deuterium. Hence the claim that they had Deuterium in their "fusion" is wrong.
2) The calorimetry was done poorly. Again, the system wasn't closed. The electrical power input was measured as if it was DC, but my measurements of such cells show that the signal has significant frequency components in it - probably due to bubbling.
3) The test tube temperature was measured in a way that could be sensitive to local hot spors.
4) Because the calorimeter was not a closed system, the amount of heat loss due to evaporation, and the energy carried off by the liberated hydrogen and oxygen were calculated, not measured. Furthermore, the energy calculations used the D2O hydrolysis energy rather than the H2O energy, even though the D had diffused away very early in the experiment.
5) The calculation of excess power involved a denominator that was the difference between two large quantities that were very close in value and had significant error bars. This is a classic mistake that greatly inflates the apparent effect, and also the error.
6) The calculations that showed that the "pressure" in the palladium on the adsorbed deuterium was very high were meaningless, because the quantity calculated was not a true pressure.
In other words, the original experiments and the backing theory were meaningless - rather surprising given the good qualifications of Pons and Fleishman.
It would be one heck of a coincidence if the same people who made this large number of experimental mistakes now happened to produce a valid result.
Since nobody seems to have anything other than the usual paranoid theories, perhaps some facts are in order.
This stash of documents (tens of thousands) had been in government possession for a long time. It was also indexed.
A writer (Stephen Hays) at The Weekly Standard has been running a campaign to have them released to the public. At one time, the government was planning on destroying them.
Then, ( congresscritters) asked that they be released, and after some fussing, the release was agreed to.
The idea to release the documents onto the internet is brilliant. It is, in fact, the government recognizing the "Army of Davids" concept and using it. Since the Bush administration has demonstrated almost a total lack of ability to defend itself against even the most ludicrous of charges, this represents a rare instance where they have done something smart - put out the raw source material and let anyone on the internet translate and interpret it - with blogspace functioning as quality control if controversial documents are found (such as a couple already translated showing ties (fairly weak) between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda.
One would hope that the internet and blogger community would welcome this for what it is: the US government recognizing the power of blogspace and the net, unorganized and ad hoc, to do useful information processing. Also, importantly, one would expect the openness shown here to be applauded - the "cursory readings" are hardly enough to ferret out all documents that might be either damaging or helpful to the administration.
Of course Al Qaeda folks know about phone taps. They may or may not know have known about FISA until this flap got publicized. They are not all knowing.
They probably didn't know the extent of tapping, or the capabilities involved.
At least one plot was foiled by these taps - so obviously they didn't know enough then.
But they do now.
It is really quite foolish to assume that one's enemy is going to be either smart or dumb.
I would also point out that lots of smart people thought that this was an important program. Furthermore, opponents of the administration who were briefed on it, and who could use it against the administration, kept their mouths shut. It would seem that they thought it had value also.
Furthermore, Al Qaeda has used some operatives in the past who made serious tradecraft mistakes, including the 9-11 hijackers. So assuming that they are master spies who will never do something dumb, like calling internationally on their phones, is, well just as dumb as they were. The quality of training and adherence to training of Al Qaeda operatives, and Al Qaeda sympathizers, is not always great. Furthermore, as central Al Qaeda has splintered, and many of the better trained operatives have been killed or captured, and Al Qaeda is trying to use non-profilable people, the quality of their operatives will inevitably go down. And that means they will do things that may be detectable - if the idiots in our own country don't hobble us so badly that we can't do the detecting.
Note that once the program was widely briefed to congress, congress including the Democrats all shut up about it. Do you suppose that they now know how useful it was? Do you?
As to the "war mongering" - who is war mongering? Al Qaeda very specifically has declared war on us. They also killed 3000 civilians in one strike on our homeland. Congress almost unanimously gave the president the authority to wage war on them.
Get it? We are at war. The enemy started it. They are still at it, and have declared so in the last month. It isn't war mongering to claim that or to advocate keeping secret some of our ways of fighting the war.
It is, however, dismayingly stupid to imagine that we are not at war. That this is some Bush plot made up for some nefarious reason, or whatever fantasy led to the "war mongering" quote.
Sometimes I think there are enough idiotic Americans that we almost deserve to be blown to hell by these eighth century fanatics. At least they understand some of the fundamentals of warfare.
No, the problem is that the media is one sided in its choices.
But more importantly, it is revealing critical secrets.
Whatever its political differences with Bush, it should not reveal signals intelligence.
As far as the legality of the NSA program:
1) The 2001 war powers resolution gives the president the right to prosecute the war. That includes monitoring international communications that are thought to be related to terrorists.
2) The FISA Court of Appeals, in 2002, held that the program was legal and outside of FISA's jurisdiction.
But it matters not anymore. The whistle has been blown. The Times is very proud of this - having told Al Qaeda and sympathizers of one of our most critical and secret ways of monitoring them.
Oh well.
Perhaps someday citizens of this country will again realize that with freedoms and civil liberties come responsibilities.
The guy making the call specifically stated that the reference did NOT exist.
And no, that was not the reference. And btw, I know the authors of Unfit for Command and would suggest that your slur on them is badly unfounded. The reference was Burkette's Stolen Valor.
I am saying that the media is dramatically one sided in its portrayal of the war (just as it was in Vietnam - starting with the Tet offensive). I constantly read letters from soldiers who return from Iraq and say they are startled at how much worse the situation looks in the main streaam media than it did actually in country.
Wars can be protested. But when we have the media doing things like revealing highly sensitive and critical secrets (NSA wiretaps, CIA overseas prison facilities), then you have a media that is dramatically injuring the war effort - that is, the effort to fight Islamofascism and protect Americans.
The hypocrisy of that media is easy to see...
The New York Times (and the MSM in general) made a very big deal about the leak of Valery Plame's CIA status. They constantly reported on (and crowed about) the hunt for the leaker in the administration.
Then they published very highly classified information (signals intelligence information is so sensitive that there is a special statute for it beyond the normal classified material statutes). When the NSA started investigating for leakers, using exactly the same format as the CIA search for the Plame leaker, the media hardly reported it. Did YOU know there was an investigation going on? Did you know that some people in government committed high crimes in releasing that information?
I have no doubt that the NYT and other MSM outfits have no qualms about publishing information that endangers out fellow countrymen, in and outside of the US - as shown by many examples (don't forget the Abu Ghraib circus - a great way to damage our efforts to win hearts and minds). As long as the media reports hurt the BushHitler "regime," they'll publish them.
And that is so reprehensible it borders on treason.
As for your laundry list, it's BS. Sure, the Democrats can show support for some bill with a nice name. But their actions are what counts. They constantly attack our president and our policy while we have over 100,000 troops in the field. They have shown a propensity for letting the rest of the world dictate what we should or should not do in the international arena.
Furthermore, do you really believe your laundry list means that those ideas were a Democrat innovation? Duh... I guess us Republicans just never considered such bloody obvious ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
They were not "innocent bystanders" although some innocents were killed. Japan was highly militarized, and every civilian adult was expected to fight if Japan was invaded. Japan had been butchering civilians throughout it's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" - the conquered countries. They used biological warfare on Chinese, and in experiments on prisoners of war. They tortured and murdered prisoners of war. Japan was a racist society that accorded no humanity to anyone not Japanese.
The allies were planning to invade Japan, as that was the only way to end the very real threat from their vicious regime. The atomic bombs were dropped to shorten the war and lessen the number of lives killed. (although my Japanese relatives still would disagree_. While saving Japanese lives wasn't the intent - in those days, the enemy was the enemy - the effect of the bombings saved millions of Japanese lives.
Also, the atomic bombs killed fewer Japanese than a single night's firebombing of Tokyo.
So no, the US was hardly morally culpable for nuking the Japanese, and we in fact did them a favor!
If cars are this susceptible to microwave energy, then Iran will shortly have the ability to shut down much of our country, in an instant.
Exo-atmospheric nuclear EMP is easy to generate if you have a nuke (even a small one, although the area affected would be somewhat less) and can put it in a low orbit satellite. Iran has the latter (and is about to launch a couple more) and will soon have the former. Their nukes can be small (they have implosion technology).
They have also been testing an alternate delivery system - a SCUD launch with the warhead detected at the top of the trajectory - EMP is the only explanation for such tests.
So, if they are nutty enough (and do you want to bet your survival on the sanity of President ImANutJob?), they can kill tens of millions of Americans, with no warning at all. They can orbit a nuke in a satellite, to be detonated on command. Or, they could launch a few SCUDs from merchant ships hundreds of miles off our shores.
Imagine a US where a large area (say, 1000mi in diameter) suddenly has a destroyed electrical transmissions system,almost all telecoms down, and almost all vehicles unusable. It's not a pretty thought.
See US Gov report at http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf (pdf)
You are probably hearing aliasing. If your 19kHz has harmonic content (which can be introduced several ways), it will mix with the 44.1Khz sampling frequency, producing sounds at the sum and difference frequencies (for example 44.1 - 38 = 6.1).
That killer(KSH) is a killer of thousands of innocent people - Americans and other nationalities in the WTC, and bragged about it to his interrogators.
Does your Christian duty prevent you from harming others in self defense or in defense of innocents?
So it's not just torture. Catholics, expect for you apparently, disapprove of innocent people merely being imprisoned.
I disapprove of known innocent people being imprisoned. But I am a realist enough to know that no system of deciding guilt or innocence is perfect, and therefore, if we are ever to imprison anyone, we are likely to end up imprisoning some innocents.
Shall we open the gates of all of our prisons?
From all you write, it would appear that you only view the world in terms of black and white. Are you really that dense, or just doing it for the sake of rhetoric?
Um, all torture of people in Gitmo is harming innocent people, as none of them have been found guilty of anything, and until then they are innocent. That's how 'guilt' works in...I almost said 'every civilized country', but it actually works that way in uncivilized countries, too, they just find people guilty without a trial.
Nonsense on stilts. Just because they haven't been found guilty does not mean they aren't guilty. You are using a particular legal system of a few countries to bolster an assertion about actual guilt. Do you mean that we shouldn't interrogate them unless we have judicially proven them guilty? Not even the police work that way.
By the way, nobody at Gitmo has ever been tortured, and nobody there has even been waterboarded. For that matter, only 3 people have been waterboarded by the CIA, one the planner of 9-11, and he broke and provided intelligence that saved many lives.
Yeah, good plan. Fight someone who spoke out against such abuses that he saw in the middle of a war, which put someone back in office who actually tortures innocents. (And not in the heat of battle, either.) Way to defend this country's image. It's like fighting crime by arresting people who report crime. That will cause crime to decrease!
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There's a little problem with your assertion. He did NOT see those abuses. I know people who served with him in the Swift Boats and the reason they went after him so hard was because he was tarring them especially with phony atrocity charges - and he had been one of them. John Kerry simply stated exactly the North Vietnamese (through their front, the PRG) line - exactly, which is not surprising since he met with them in Paris before he made his infamous appearance before the Senate. That there were some abuses by American soldiers in Vietnam is, of course, true. There are ALWAYS abuses in war, no matter how hard you try to stop them - no matter what the policy. But Kerry's statements were lies, just as his and Jane Fonda's phony Winter Soldier investigation was classic agitprop guerrilla theater instead of a search for truth. Read all about it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/
John Kerry was not a whistle blower. He was a liar and aided our enemies. If you want to hear a bit more about this, check out the interview with Swiftboat spokesman John O'Neil at http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2007/09/16/behind-the-scenes-swift-boat-veterans-vs-john-kerry/
As for the "someone who actually tortures innocents" "not
You raise a numeric calculus in an attempt to prove moral relativism. So lets turn it around: are you willing to inflict 3 minutes of fear on one killer in order to save the lives of thousands of innocents?
Is your world monochromatic - one is a moral relativist if one is not an absolute moral absolutist?
You also play word games with the term Catholic. If you don't know exactly what I mean, I'd be really surprised. RCC, of course.
I am, but, you, by mentioning it in the discussion, are indicating that perhaps you do not. The 'War on Terror' doesn't fit the criteria for a just war, although that is more a problem with the fact it's not actually a war than it being unjust.
That's your opinion. I strongly disagree. And since it is the context of my interpretation that we are discussing, that rules.
Clearly there is a war - there are specific enemies and they have killed Americans, are killing Americans, and plan to kill many more. They are using military weapons (small arms, mortars, IEDs, artillery rockets, chemical weapons - chlorine and Sarin). They have stated their intent to kill our civilians by the millions. They are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That sure sounds like a war to me.
However, several of the requirements is that innocent people are not harmed, or harmed as little as possible, and certainly not harmed deliberately. Like if you, I dunno, tortured them. That would appear to void the 'Just war' warranty.
I know of no case where an known innocent was "tortured" or even coercively interrogated. There are, like on all sides in all wars, a few who violate policy and commit crimes (such as those toads at Abu Ghraib). But there is no policy I know of to inflict harm intentionally and unnecessarily on innocents.
Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.
Tell me - do you accept that we have enemies who represent a threat to kill many Americans, or is your head in the sand? How do you propose to deal with the likes of Al Qaeda and their millions of supporters? How about the whacko government of Iran, which until 9-11 was responsible for more American deaths by terrorism than anyone else?
To answer your question: Catholic. Not moral relativist (your stereotyping is turned on again) - perhaps more correct would be not being a moral absolutist in areas where interpretation is required. You are familiar with the "just war" doctrine of the church? But you are right, one can cherry pick the bible for all kinds of things - such as absolute pacifism or revenge (eye for an eye).
You are assuming that it is an absolute truth that waterboarding is torture. I disagree. Many others do also. One can define cruelty up or down.
War is ugly. Horrible things happen to guilty and innocent people. There are situations that force difficult moral decisions (I gave the example of Churchill and Coventry).
Americans who are afraid to confront the reality that we have a lot of really nasty enemies and need to protect ourselves against them are the pussies.
Americans who think the Patriot Act is an unprecedented erosion in our freedoms need to both read the Patriot Act (ever done it? You'll be surprised) and look at history. Everything the Patriot Act allows was unconditionally legal for the life of our republic until around 50 years ago! Look at history.
Yeah, there are things wrong. Bush isn't the best president (I've seen a lot worse, like Johnson, Nixon and Jimmy Carter). Iraq might or might not have been the right strategy, but Al Qaeda is certainly damned unhappy about it, and so is Iran. That in itself says it's got a lot going for it, since both of those are sworn to destroy us, and Al Qaeda killed more Americans in one attack on American soil than anyone since the civil war!
Katrina? Cut ur whining, dude. Katrina was a failure of all levels of government - but mostly it was a failure of the citizens of Louisiana to deal with the inevitability of catastrophic flooding. Inevitability. Those of us in the hurricane disaster mitigation world have long known that a Cat 3 or higher hurricane (Cat 3 or higher storm surge, to be precise) would inundate New Orleans. Guess what - it got hit by a Cat 5 record storm surge (even though the winds were only Cat 3 by that time). So big duh... it flooded. Wusses are those who are upset about what happened afterwards - to irresponsible people and their governments (the most corrupt in the US) and their media.
Now you do have a point with religious intolerance. I have never seen organized religion so attacked demeaned by the establishment of our society. Religious intolerance today is mostly intolerance of religion, enforced by truly freedom restricting speech codes in much of the west (you can go to jail in most western countries for preaching some doctrines), enhanced by the almost uniformly negative and stereotyped portrayal of religious people and leaders by our main stream media and Hollywood, enforced by governmental entities that force religious groups to take actions that go against their religion (such as forcing Catholic organizations to pay for birth control and abortions for their workers). Yep, we have religious intolerance, all right.
You want to talk about wakeup calls, how about...
WTC 1993
USS Cole 2000
WTC 2001
The fatwa authorizing Al Qaeda to kill up to 7 million Americans, and their continued determined attempts to do so
The desire by the president of Iran to precipitate an apocalypse in order to cause the return of the 12th Imam - this while Iran is doing its best to acquire nukes
The statement by the #2 Ayatollah in Iran that if Islam acquires nukes, it should use them to destroy Israel because there are so many Muslims that the retaliation won't serously injust Islam, but the destruction of the Jews will be significant (Rafsanjani, Dec 2002)
Oppressive and undemocratic speech codes at most university cammpuses
The attempt by the Democrat- dominated congress to silence dissent by banning talk radio
Multiculturalism run amok, impeding our efforts to fight terrorism and crime, and damaging our social contract
"reverse" racism
The destruction of individual rights by environmental extremists
Columbine - gee, do you suppose the widespread availability and marketing of all sorts of violent entertainm ent might have had an effect? Don't know. On the other hand, school mass murders have been going on as long as we have had schools, so it really isn't a new wakeup call after all.
....Unfortunately, the wiretaps (which were ONLY on international calls) ........Do you have any proof of that whatsoever? ........When the government does things in secret, and, what's more, lies about said things for three years, you'd have to be a particular sort of stupid to believe them now.
....Exactly how is Blackwater immune to the laws of the US? ......Because the executive branch refuses to investigate them? ......You'll notice that there is no such suspension possible for cruel and unusual punishment. You'll also notice we are not in the middle of an invasion or rebellion. ...Hey, at least you're intelligent enough to realize we're doing it to suspected terrorists, not 'terrorists', although for some reason you didn't put 'suspected enemies', so I'm not convinced you actually believe it. And what you have failed to notice is that that torture is, in fact, wrong.
...I don't care what amoral atheists think, the Bible is pretty clear about this. You and all the other moral degenerates should go to some other country that wants that sort of filthy behavior, and not running around teaching our children it's acceptable.
Do you have any proof to the contary? As for secrecy, duh.... did it occur to you that perhaps keeping secret methods of intelligence gathering might, just might, be a good idea? Consider that in WW-II, Churchill refused to warn the citizens of Coventry of a German retaliatory bombing raid, just to protect the Ultra secret... that was a pretty big sacrifice for protecting methods of intelligence. That should perhaps give pause to those who imagine that everything should be out in the open.
For?
Sorry, but (1) what cruel and unusual punishment? (2) We are in the middle of a war (which oughta count)... or do you think Bush blew up the WTC on 9-11?
Well, gee, thanks for addressing my intelligence. Yeah, "suspected" because intelligence work is not perfect so not every suspect is actually guilty.
So I'm a moral degenerate because I advocate tapping phone calls to overseas suspected terrorists and using unpleasant (but not damaging) techniques to protect the lives of Americans - techniques which our own soldiers are subject to as part of their training? Why do terrorists deserve better treatment than our own soldiers?
Oh, and are you accusing me of being an amoral atheist? If so, you are incorrect in both the adjective and the noun. I'm afraid you may have a tendency to stereotype. Now, would you tell me where in the Bible it says we must allow our enemies to convert us to radical Islam by terror or murder?
Thanks...
Torture is indeed a difficult subject. However, in today's political debate, waterboarding is a proxy for attacks against Bush and the war on terror. The debate is less about the real nature of waterboarding in the context of terror prevention than about finding another way to hurt the administration (and its war on terror, which is considered illegitimate by many). Also, there is a puritanism at work here - we must be perfect, fight by Marquis de Queensbury rules, even while opponents are committing the most terrible atrocities against others, and publicly proclaiming their intent to do the same to us and those we love. We must maintain our utopian perfection in the face of the most horrendous threats.
Thanks but no thanks.
The link that you provide is hardly conclusive given the sources it cites. This is a contentious topic and it is easy to find "experts" who are happy to both define most anything as torture, or to state that it isn't effective. For example, one in your cite says that if it worked, we would have heard about it. Perhaps he needs to stay up to date (see below)
Also, there are international conventions that are relatively recent which the US has *not* signed. Some of these have grossly broadened the definitions of all sorts of unpleasantries. By the standard of international law that we are obligated to, waterboarding is *not* torture.
That something is a matter of international law does not IMHO mean very much - especially when our opponents totally ignore it, and given the nature of the organizations that create many of these so-called laws. Consider, also, that one purpose of the law is to incentivize both sides of a conflict to follow it. But if we consider the Geneva Convention on the treatment of captives, we find two things: (1) The US has not fought an opponent who came close to following that since WW-II; and (2) the intent of the convention is that those who violate it both lose its protection and are supposed to be treated badly - to encourage others to follow that law. Under the intent of that Geneva Convention, for example, we can are are encouraged to shoot illegal combatants any time we want (as we did in WW-II after the Battle of the Bulge). So by international law we can kill them, but we can't scare them with waterboarding? Right.
That torture does not always or frequently provide useful intelligence is true - it is usually applied by oppressive governments against their own people as a matter of terror, rather than for intelligence. Saddam Hussein's government made this a matter of policy, as do many others.
That the CIA tried experiments in various ways to get the truth tells you not only about the many techniques that failed, but also about the amount of analysis that led to the use of waterboarding as an effective, but not perfect technique.
Furthermore, most potential interrogatees don't have useful intelligence.
Obviously, one reason we were taught about resisting torture was to *reduce* its effectiveness, which is not the same thing as rendering it useless.
However, in some cases, coercive interrogation does work (as every police department knows, and they don't go as far as waterboarding).
For example, the use of waterboarding is known to have broken Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief, in less than 3 minutes. That yielded vast amounts of intelligence and saved many lives.
As for my military instructors, they spoke not just from theory (as the folks in your cites) but from personal experience. They were mostly ex-POWs from places that used real torture, not just scaring people with waterboarding. They also had been extensively trained.
If waterboarding is torture, then it is a crime, and I would expect disgruntled members of our military (and there are always some) who have been waterboarded to file suit against the government for torturing them during training. Strange... there haven't been any.
So let me ask you the classic question that comes up on the e
And just exactly is how does Blackwater fit into your fascism theory? Do you see them running around the US doing evil?
..............
They are a large security firm, hired by the government and many other organizations to help in dangerous areas, such as Iraq. They engage in lethal violence as part of their business, Legally (in spite of some misleading news reports). Furthermore, the government has used private companies for diplomatic and other security for a long time.
Exactly how is Blackwater immune to the laws of the US?
There's nothing fascist about them.
As for the start of fascism, I suggest again you look at history, because by your definition we have been in the start of fascism for most of the existence of the US.
Companies in tight with government? Check out the 1800s. Companies breaking laws with impunity... I don't know of any examples today, but there were times when this was certainly a popular passtime.
Wiretaps used to be routine without warrants or probable cause - did you know that?
Only 50 years ago, police did not have to "read people their rights." Evidence could not be thrown out if it was obtained improperly.
When we fought the civil war, Habeas Corpus was suspended by that evil fascist, Lincoln. Lots of companies were in bed with the government (can you say war profiteers?)
In World War II, we drafted millions of men, and we sent Japanese to concentration camps. The government spied on whomever it wanted to. It censored what it wanted to, and Hollywood produced only what censors allowed (and that censorship lasted into the 60s), and most of what it produced was propaganda under the direction of army captain Ronald Reagan.
In the Vietnam War, we drafted hundreds of thousands of men. Oh, and we had private companies involved in that war also. Do you see a draft today?
Companies used to hire private security firms to bust unions with violence. Don't see much of that these days.
So if you are afraid that we are becoming fascist, it might help to show the trend in that direction, since history appears to run against you in that regard. We are becoming more free, and fascism is inconsistent with freedom. The most likely way that our freedoms will be restricted, and fascist government will grow, is through environmental extremism, which confers upon its practitioners a moral authority to "do whatever is needed" to "save the earth." Corporations will be happy to join the government and profit from that, just like they now do with the absurd ethanol program. For example, Enron was in favor of the Kyoto treaty because of the money it expected to make from the carbon "offset" trading.
BTW... you say you don't watch the news. well, the news made a big deal about Blackwater after the incident where Iraq alleged misbehavior by Blackwater diplomatic security during a firefight. Congress is making a big deal.
Unfortunately, the wiretaps (which were ONLY on international calls) were also big news, since the mass media hates the current administration and will do anything (including crippling its anti-terrorist efforts) to hurt Bush. Some of these news stories have seriously damaged our ability to fight our very real enemies. So fear not, the populace is overly aware of the "dangers" they face from the administration.
You may not have noticed, but we are in fact at war, with people who have vowed to kill us by the millions, and have tried numerous times. Cry all you want about Blackwater and AT&T. They are a small part of a huge, long term war, and they are hon our side.
Perhaps you don't see the threat, but the convergence of Islamofascist ideology (Al Qaeda's and Iran's - both forms) and modern technology, makes terrorism far more dangerous than it has ever been before. 9-11 showed how 19 people could turn civilian technology into weapons of mass destruction and kill thousands (and try to kill a lot more). Al Qaeda has attempted to procure nuclear material and biological weapon
In the *real* world, fascism includes a totalitarian government and big businesses that act more like arms of the mob.If you lived in a fascist society, you would NOT be3 posting this rubbish to Slashdot (or at least not without using about 10 cutouts), because you would be arrested. Hell, the US is so tame that you don't even have to worry about being drafted (unlike people my age). For the most part, the west - especially the US - is freer and less fascistic now than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to say silly things.
If you want to see fascism in action, look at:
China today
Russia after Stalin, Russia today (to some extent)
Saddam's Iraq
Many African governments
What you don't see in a fascist society is:
New media constantly against the head of government
A thriving entertainment industry which openly makes one anti-government film after another
An opposition party
Free and open forums
Democratic government
The closest we have to fascism is the incessant attempts by academia and the media to silence those who do not agree with *their* left-of-center viewpoint.
As far as corporations go, too often they will seek to buy power from whomever (which is why they are contributing twice as much to Democrats as Republics now that the tide has turned). They are inherently anti-democratic. They are also very important in making any useful economy go. It takes balance.
Ah, so the link spammers have finally reached Slashdot.
CO2 is a forcing factor? CO2 is also feedback. My point is that people need to understand that global temperature is also feedback, from a wide variety of very complex dynamical and perhaps chaotic systems (and don't trot out the old argument that climate isn't chaotic because the models aren't chaotic - sorry, that just isn't very solid proof). People also need to understand that CO2 is a trace gas - one which simple physics says will (as a first order effect) positively correlate with temperature.
The problem is that all sorts of folks are predicting all sorts of things, and scaring lots of people, when they really don't know if the effect is small or large, or whether it will be totally overwhelmed by some other, as yet inadequately characterized effect - such as changes in solar irradiance.
As for the market strawman you threw out...
"You seem to be under the impression that the advances in our country's infrastructure were largely due to the action of the market. "
I didn't say that the markets solve all. What I said is that we do not have the social engineering abilities "to make enough difference to count. There is a strong negative feedback effect there also: increase energy costs only in signatory countries by forcing CO2 emissions reduction and, voila, energy intensive human activities will move to places where they don't have those restrictions. Try to make the restrictions global, and then look around and see where the policeman is when some large country, because of the negative economic impact, is forced (by its citizens) to give up on the restrictions. Heck, even Europe is unable to meet its goals, and Kyoto was really a European thing.
But for fun, let's look at the "counterexamples" you threw out:
Who built freeways?
What created the demand for the freeways? The market, through the invention, production and marketing of automobiles. Duh. The other factor was national defense - the interstates were built specifically as military measures, during the cold war under Eisenhower. National Defense trumps all as a cause, when the measures taken are rational.
Who built railroads and secured the property to build them on?
Capitalists built the railroads. Government exercised its power of imminent domain (and some military power) to clear the right of ways.
Who invented railroad technology? Not the government.
Who researched and launched satellites?
A great example! The government-run space program is a sad joke. The inefficiencies and political craziness (like requiring all military satellites to be launged on the man-rated shuttle) have squandered enormous ammounts of money on pretty low-payoff projects (the international space station is virtually useless, but exceedingly expensive).
However, there is no doubt that technology developed by - gasp - capitalists at the behest of the government would not have been built without government involvement. The Apollo program was, IMHO, a good thing. Do I think the government is always wrong, as you imply? Not at all. But it should be the means of last resort.
Who invented and built the internet?
Government funded academics and corporate research labs (ever hear of BBN?) invented it, and government paid for the initial, limited implementation. When I first encountered the internet, it had four nodes. But government didn't invent most of the underlying technology, and it certainly didn't invent or fund the internet as we know it today. That was done by... yep... capitalists seeking profit. Cisco, to cite one of many examples, is not a government institution.
Who funds research into nearly every area of technological advancement? Yep, that's right, good old government with it's nasty market-interfering ways. Government intervention has played an important role in nearly every technological advance.
Government has paid a very critical role in basic research. It has been far less critical in applying that res
Yes, if you don't have a good argument, attack the messenger ("professional network of Greenhouse deniers") using religious terminology and conspiratorial implications, not the message.
Issues:
There are serious climatologists who believe the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is worthless. This is not to say that it might not happen or be happening, but that the issue is driven by speculation (primarily in the form of models which canbot be calibrated due to dramatic problems with the historical temperature record - especially before 1850 when thermometers started to be widely used). Furthermore, it has become highly politicized, with non-specialists (some of whom are qualified non-the-less) jumping in on both sides. I know some of these scientists, and they either don't publish, or have jumped to industry because then they can do their science without the threat of losing their funding due to their conclusions.
As an interesting side note, one of these guys approached Enron to see if they wanted him to provide his global warming expertise on their side. Their reaction was that they didn't want skeptics - they expected to make money on the carbon trading systems and disruptions caused by CO2 emissions control! So don't assume that industry, even the energy industry, is one sided on this.
The climate record does show a significant amount of warming in the 20th century BEFORE most of the CO2 rise. The "hockey stick" graph has been at least partly refuted.
The system in fact *is* too complicated and, importantly, undersampled for reasonable predictions to be made now. The "good" data is of way too short a time period to even deal with the shortest of natural climate factors. New, major factors are discovered frequently on both sides of the argument. Climatology as a predictive science is in its infancy. Don't be fooled by what models are saying - they don't even represent current understanding due to their poor calibration data, low temporal and spatial resolution, and the presence of a large number of calibration parameters. Furthermore, almost all quotes from the UN commission (IPCC) come from the heavily politicized introduction, not the carefully guarded language and details of the main report (which has lots of ifs, buts qualifications).
Science magazine, in particular, brands as scientific heretics anyone who doesn't already agree with the conclusion that significant man-caused global warming is happening and about to get worth. Read their editorials and you will see. They are biased.
There is a built-in bias in the rewards system, as there is in many areas of human endevour. Global warming fears generate money for climatologists, as long as they don't rock the boat. More money than the field would get if alarmist predictions weren't getting lots of public attention. Naturally this leads to distortion in the scientific process. The good thing about science is that it will correct this. The bad thing is that it might take decades or centuries.
Watch out when you bash the US for not entering Kyoto, which is a fraud and a Trojan horse. Note that even the "environment loving" Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the treaty (I think the Senate vote was 99-0). Even using the models it is based on, it would not be possible, after 100 years, to measure the effect of Kyoto on global mean temperature. Its real purposes are two:
1 - improve European competitiveness over the US
2 - put in place a framework for much more drastic cutbacks - to about 60% of 1990 carbon emissions. With corrent or accurately forseeable technology, this would lead to world wide global depression (see next point), and would be impossible to enforce. Furthermore, not that the two largest and nations with very rapid economic growth (China and India) are not requireed to sacrifice for it.
The real killer in Kyoto or similar approaches is that it is hubristic and arrogant. To see this, imagine that we had tried to put this in place in a period of more global stability -
I haven't followed the subject in a long time, and would be interested in a pointer to more current, much more qualified research.
When I was involved, way back shortly after P&F published, there was a mailing list with a number of researchers trying things and theoreticians theorizing stuff. One researcher did an exceedling careful job of calorimetry (his real job was as an instrumentation designer for one of the major accelerators) and his results were uniformly negative and very convincing. Others had varying degrees of success, with the success inversely proportional to the quality of the experimental design - a classic sign of pathological science.
Hence I would be interested if folks have found replicable experiments with good calorimetry and results significant enough to not be flukes. My definition of good calorimetry includes, at a minimum, a fully closed system where the released D2 and O2 are recombined inside the calorimeter, and well calibrated instruments sampled many times per second with all samples stored for analysis.
There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's.
NONSENSE!
See my previous posting on the numerous experimental errors in their original experiment and paper. What they demonstrated is that they were very poor at experimental design, and did extremely sloppy calorimetry. I would suggest that anyone who tends to believe this stuff look into both the history of experiments in cold fusion in the late '80s, and then the fascinating story of the very similar polywater controversy of the late '60s.
The cold fusion episode was a classic example of pathological science.
Furthermore, people have been studying the thermodynamics of deuterium adsorption into palladum since the 19th century! Nothing new here.
The original Pons-Fleischman experiments suffered from several defects:
1) The test tubes containing the D2O were open to the air. Diffusion thus removed very quickly the deuterium. Hence the claim that they had Deuterium in their "fusion" is wrong.
2) The calorimetry was done poorly. Again, the system wasn't closed. The electrical power input was measured as if it was DC, but my measurements of such cells show that the signal has significant frequency components in it - probably due to bubbling.
3) The test tube temperature was measured in a way that could be sensitive to local hot spors.
4) Because the calorimeter was not a closed system, the amount of heat loss due to evaporation, and the energy carried off by the liberated hydrogen and oxygen were calculated, not measured. Furthermore, the energy calculations used the D2O hydrolysis energy rather than the H2O energy, even though the D had diffused away very early in the experiment.
5) The calculation of excess power involved a denominator that was the difference between two large quantities that were very close in value and had significant error bars. This is a classic mistake that greatly inflates the apparent effect, and also the error.
6) The calculations that showed that the "pressure" in the palladium on the adsorbed deuterium was very high were meaningless, because the quantity calculated was not a true pressure.
In other words, the original experiments and the backing theory were meaningless - rather surprising given the good qualifications of Pons and Fleishman.
It would be one heck of a coincidence if the same people who made this large number of experimental mistakes now happened to produce a valid result.
Since nobody seems to have anything other than the usual paranoid theories, perhaps some facts are in order.
This stash of documents (tens of thousands) had been in government possession for a long time. It was also indexed.
A writer (Stephen Hays) at The Weekly Standard has been running a campaign to have them released to the public. At one time, the government was planning on destroying them.
Then, ( congresscritters) asked that they be released, and after some fussing, the release was agreed to.
The idea to release the documents onto the internet is brilliant. It is, in fact, the government recognizing the "Army of Davids" concept and using it. Since the Bush administration has demonstrated almost a total lack of ability to defend itself against even the most ludicrous of charges, this represents a rare instance where they have done something smart - put out the raw source material and let anyone on the internet translate and interpret it - with blogspace functioning as quality control if controversial documents are found (such as a couple already translated showing ties (fairly weak) between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda.
One would hope that the internet and blogger community would welcome this for what it is: the US government recognizing the power of blogspace and the net, unorganized and ad hoc, to do useful information processing. Also, importantly, one would expect the openness shown here to be applauded - the "cursory readings" are hardly enough to ferret out all documents that might be either damaging or helpful to the administration.
Nice try, but no cigar.
Of course Al Qaeda folks know about phone taps. They may or may not know have known about FISA until this flap got publicized. They are not all knowing.
They probably didn't know the extent of tapping, or the capabilities involved.
At least one plot was foiled by these taps - so obviously they didn't know enough then.
But they do now.
It is really quite foolish to assume that one's enemy is going to be either smart or dumb.
I would also point out that lots of smart people thought that this was an important program. Furthermore, opponents of the administration who were briefed on it, and who could use it against the administration, kept their mouths shut. It would seem that they thought it had value also.
Furthermore, Al Qaeda has used some operatives in the past who made serious tradecraft mistakes, including the 9-11 hijackers. So assuming that they are master spies who will never do something dumb, like calling internationally on their phones, is, well just as dumb as they were. The quality of training and adherence to training of Al Qaeda operatives, and Al Qaeda sympathizers, is not always great. Furthermore, as central Al Qaeda has splintered, and many of the better trained operatives have been killed or captured, and Al Qaeda is trying to use non-profilable people, the quality of their operatives will inevitably go down. And that means they will do things that may be detectable - if the idiots in our own country don't hobble us so badly that we can't do the detecting.
Note that once the program was widely briefed to congress, congress including the Democrats all shut up about it. Do you suppose that they now know how useful it was? Do you?
As to the "war mongering" - who is war mongering? Al Qaeda very specifically has declared war on us. They also killed 3000 civilians in one strike on our homeland. Congress almost unanimously gave the president the authority to wage war on them.
Get it? We are at war. The enemy started it. They are still at it, and have declared so in the last month. It isn't war mongering to claim that or to advocate keeping secret some of our ways of fighting the war.
It is, however, dismayingly stupid to imagine that we are not at war. That this is some Bush plot made up for some nefarious reason, or whatever fantasy led to the "war mongering" quote.
Sometimes I think there are enough idiotic Americans that we almost deserve to be blown to hell by these eighth century fanatics. At least they understand some of the fundamentals of warfare.
No, the problem is that the media is one sided in its choices.
But more importantly, it is revealing critical secrets.
Whatever its political differences with Bush, it should not reveal signals intelligence.
As far as the legality of the NSA program:
1) The 2001 war powers resolution gives the president the right to prosecute the war. That includes monitoring international communications that are thought to be related to terrorists.
2) The FISA Court of Appeals, in 2002, held that the program was legal and outside of FISA's jurisdiction.
But it matters not anymore. The whistle has been blown. The Times is very proud of this - having told Al Qaeda and sympathizers of one of our most critical and secret ways of monitoring them.
Oh well.
Perhaps someday citizens of this country will again realize that with freedoms and civil liberties come responsibilities.
The guy making the call specifically stated that the reference did NOT exist.
And no, that was not the reference. And btw, I know the authors of Unfit for Command and would suggest that your slur on them is badly unfounded. The reference was Burkette's Stolen Valor.
You might learn something from reading it.
I am saying that the media is dramatically one sided in its portrayal of the war (just as it was in Vietnam - starting with the Tet offensive). I constantly read letters from soldiers who return from Iraq and say they are startled at how much worse the situation looks in the main streaam media than it did actually in country.
Wars can be protested. But when we have the media doing things like revealing highly sensitive and critical secrets (NSA wiretaps, CIA overseas prison facilities), then you have a media that is dramatically injuring the war effort - that is, the effort to fight Islamofascism and protect Americans.
The hypocrisy of that media is easy to see...
The New York Times (and the MSM in general) made a very big deal about the leak of Valery Plame's CIA status. They constantly reported on (and crowed about) the hunt for the leaker in the administration.
Then they published very highly classified information (signals intelligence information is so sensitive that there is a special statute for it beyond the normal classified material statutes). When the NSA started investigating for leakers, using exactly the same format as the CIA search for the Plame leaker, the media hardly reported it. Did YOU know there was an investigation going on? Did you know that some people in government committed high crimes in releasing that information?
I have no doubt that the NYT and other MSM outfits have no qualms about publishing information that endangers out fellow countrymen, in and outside of the US - as shown by many examples (don't forget the Abu Ghraib circus - a great way to damage our efforts to win hearts and minds). As long as the media reports hurt the BushHitler "regime," they'll publish them.
And that is so reprehensible it borders on treason.
Actually, it's consistent poll results.
As for your laundry list, it's BS. Sure, the Democrats can show support for some bill with a nice name. But their actions are what counts. They constantly attack our president and our policy while we have over 100,000 troops in the field. They have shown a propensity for letting the rest of the world dictate what we should or should not do in the international arena.
Furthermore, do you really believe your laundry list means that those ideas were a Democrat innovation? Duh... I guess us Republicans just never considered such bloody obvious ideas.
Polls consistently show the public's perception.
Their behavior, especially with regards to the war on Islamofascism shows that many are not to be trusted with secrets on national defense decisions.
The Democratic Party has a problem: the public (correctly IMHO) perceives them to be weak on national security.
Solution: run vets for office.
Of course, in 2004, that didn't work too well, because Kerry was such a poor choice (and a terrible vet as well).
Now they are trying other vets.
It is simple triangulation.