Would you want the police or security services to be able to listen in on the phone calls, or read the emails, of a gang that had kidnapped one of your loved ones and threatened to mail you various body parts each day until you paid the ranson?
For a week he was a side-show for gunmen who beat him with planks and pistol handles and gave him electric shocks to intensify his screams when they put him on the phone to his poverty-stricken family, demanding money for his release. The rest of the time, he says, he was forced to watch his captors going about the more serious business of torturing information out of captured members of the Gulf cartel by cutting off different pieces of their bodies each day for about a week. Then they were killed, their mutilated bodies burnt to dust on the mountainside.
"They told me the same thing would happen to me, if the ransom didn't arrive," he says.
The police can invade pretty much any home that they need to, why don't they? If there are limitations on them invading homes, how can there not be for electronic surveillance? Their numbers are not unlimited.
You may disagree with him, but I think this interview with Sir David Omand, former GCHQ Director, is worth listening to.
Your history is a bit off. The US had very little to do with arming Saddam. To the extent that it assisted Iraq in the war against Iran it was to prevent Iraq from losing which would have lead to greatly increased Iranian influence in the region.
The Ba'ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it's not surprising that--despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party--it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed. The other major patron of Saddam Hussein & his regime was France (which, among other things, was the main supplier for his nuclear-weapons program as far back as the early 1980s). Of course, the Iraqi Ba'ath regime was never a simple tool of any of these patrons. It had its own agenda, and it played off its patrons--as well as other supporters--against each other when that suited its purposes.
Much like those that are called terrorist are not actually what is considered by the people who agreed to the laws to be used against terrorists to be terrorists.
Such as people whose dogs poop in the streed and don't clean up the poop.
What you still haven't shown is the government making wide use of the label "terrorist" in an inappropriate manner. They may use the enforcement or investigative power from the antiterrorism laws to investigate other crimes, but they aren't labeling those other criminals as "terrorists" inappropriately. (Keeping in mind that terrorist groups often resort to various forms of ordinary crime to fund themselves.)
Saddam did invade Kuwait in 1990 and annexed it as another province for Iraq. That is why the 1991 Gulf War was fought.
As a result of the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam had a variety of obligations to disarm, to give up his WMDs that he had used against Iran and his people. He was found to be lying on repeated occasions about the progress on disarmament and weapons disclosures. In the end he tried to fool the Iranians that he still had WMD when he had secretly destroyed his last stockpiles after previously being caught cheating. Saddam had the government act like they still had WMD and thought that no action would be taken against him by the UN, US, and allied powers. It turns out he made yet another miscalculation. That is why the 2003 war was fought.
I guess we'll just disagree on this point since I don't think there is anything close to enough evidence to support it, and you seem to take that as evidence for a hidden agenda.
Were the people that claimed John McCain wasn't born in America, and therefore disqualified from running for president, racists too? (We'll leave President Clinton and Vince Foster out of it.) There seems to be an awful lot of labeling any opposition to President Obama or his agenda as racist. Handy way to end an argument though.
Hmmm... are you quite sure that the administration isn't just secretly communist like the Tea Party is secretly "Christian right" and it only slips occasionally, like Anita Dunn? It wouldn't be good politically if they were known to be communist.
Sorry, but no. What you are overlooking is that people don't leave their other beliefs behind when they join an organization. I have little doubt you could find all manner of different statements or actions among the many legislators and other people aligned with the Tea Party movement. That doesn't mean it is legitimate to generalize that one person's views to be a reflection of the movement as a whole. It may be entirely possible that people that are "Christian" and "right" are more inclined to join the Tea Party. But the movement itself doesn't have a religious component that I have seen, despite claims from various sources on the Left. If you looked around hard enough you could find Christians in various Marxist organizations, does that mean Marxism is a Christian movement? Hardly. Did the presence of Van Jones in the Obama administration mean that it was a Communist government?
Park said the administration expected 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. It got 250,000. Compare that with the similarly rocky debut seven years ago of exchanges to obtain Medicare drug coverage. The Bush administration projected 20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000.
That's the difference between competence and incompetence.
The too-much-demand excuse also is less than the full story. In addition to grossly underestimating demand, the administration and its contractors seem to have made mistakes in building the websites. The system for verifying consumer identity has had persistent problems, as have pull-down menus.
Nor were problems confined to the 36 state health exchanges run by the federal government. Sites run by 14 states and Washington, D.C., bogged down because they have to refer to federal databases to verify consumers' identity.
... your observation here seems pretty divorced from reality.
Make up your mind, it's either true or it isn't. The police and investigative agencies may use some of the powers they are granted by antiterrorism legislation for investigating other crimes,* but that doesn't mean the criminals they are investigating are then necessarily terrorist.
* You should be clear that terrorist groups often resort to ordinary criminal activity to fund themselves. Examples include bank robbery, kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, and so on. The terrorist group Hezbollah has hundreds of people involved with crime in the US to help provide funding. Cigarette smuggling (.pdf) is a common means.
Bin Laden didn't want Western societies to become ordinary dictatorships, he wanted them to become nations ruled by Muslims living under Islamic Sharia law. With the demographic implosion underway in Europe among native Europeans, the continuing import of vast numbers of immigrants that reject Western values, and religious conversion among native Europeans, it would be hasty to rule out that possibility in 100-200 years. There may be real trouble brewing in as little as 50 years since so many countries are hovering around the birthrate of 1.3 children per woman, which will halve an existing population in that time. While native Europeans are on a self-chosen road towards extinction (you can only halve a population so many times), natives continue to arrive.
Security through secrecy = no security.
You seem to be misapplying the idea of "Security through obscurity". As a principle of analysis in system security engineering or encryption algorithms its fine, but it has limited scope. Encryption algorithms that rely on obscurity for their protective power aren't strong enough. But even good encryption algorithms depend on you keeping your password secret. So no, there are many things that rely upon some measure of security through secrecy for their protection. That is a common means of protecting various national security matters. If you still don't believe it, then you should have no problem posting your real name, birth date, social insurance number, driver's license number, bank account numbers, and PINs.
I see that occurring on Slashdot, along with various claims of "everyone's a terrorist" for some reason or another generally involving disingenuous rhetoric. As a rule I don't see that from government. They seem to be a bit clearer about its meaning.
The question of accuracy in reporting is a separate question your liking their views. There are some hard truths out there, and apparently not all of them will be from sources you will listen to before judging.
That's what pisses me off about people who rag on social programs: the cost to run them is but a drop in an endless sea compared to what we spend killing foreigners, propping up dinosaur corporations, scratching banker's backs, etc.
It looks like you have a distorted view of Federal spending. You may want to view this chart. This chart adds some perspective.
... the military is still out killing brown people...
You should have left "brown" out of your statement since it doesn't really apply to the present conflicts as they aren't race based. There have been people of all races killed or captured as part of the war against al Qaida, including Asians, Europeans, and Africans.
The 300 essential personnel who would stay on include about 150 so-called "resident inspectors." They serve as the NRC's eyes and ears at nuclear plants. They also include employees who support emergency response, investigators, a skeleton management team, the five NRC commissioners and a few commission staff members, the NRC said.
The retained group would also include employees who support emergency response, investigators, a skeleton management team, the five NRC commissioners and a few commission staff members, the NRC said.
Approximately 83% of government employees are still at work, so why is the NRC being hit so hard?
I think there is still an interesting question of how much of this is "shutdown theater" to squeeze the public as has been occurring with the ParkService. Although there has been an issue with it in the past, the current administration seems to have kicked itup a level.
I think that your post nicely dovetails with my overall point - there will almost certainly still be black markets even after legalization of various drugs. There will still be people pursuing illegal highs.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know that NSA surveillance .... wait, did you say there was a story about Lindsay Lohan? In rehab? I can't find the link, do you have one? ;)
Terrorists are real.
So are bathtubs, so are stairs and so are traffic accidents, all which cause more lives lost than terrorists.
In 1941, traffic deaths accounted for about 13x the number of deaths at Pearl Harbor. The US still went to war with Japan. The same is true of 9/11.
Would you want the police or security services to be able to listen in on the phone calls, or read the emails, of a gang that had kidnapped one of your loved ones and threatened to mail you various body parts each day until you paid the ranson?
Tortured Mexican kidnap victim says: 'I would sit there wondering how people could be that bad'
For a week he was a side-show for gunmen who beat him with planks and pistol handles and gave him electric shocks to intensify his screams when they put him on the phone to his poverty-stricken family, demanding money for his release. The rest of the time, he says, he was forced to watch his captors going about the more serious business of torturing information out of captured members of the Gulf cartel by cutting off different pieces of their bodies each day for about a week. Then they were killed, their mutilated bodies burnt to dust on the mountainside.
"They told me the same thing would happen to me, if the ransom didn't arrive," he says.
The police can invade pretty much any home that they need to, why don't they? If there are limitations on them invading homes, how can there not be for electronic surveillance? Their numbers are not unlimited.
You may disagree with him, but I think this interview with Sir David Omand, former GCHQ Director, is worth listening to.
Your history is a bit off. The US had very little to do with arming Saddam. To the extent that it assisted Iraq in the war against Iran it was to prevent Iraq from losing which would have lead to greatly increased Iranian influence in the region.
Who armed Saddam? - Some reality checks
The Ba'ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it's not surprising that--despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party--it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed. The other major patron of Saddam Hussein & his regime was France (which, among other things, was the main supplier for his nuclear-weapons program as far back as the early 1980s). Of course, the Iraqi Ba'ath regime was never a simple tool of any of these patrons. It had its own agenda, and it played off its patrons--as well as other supporters--against each other when that suited its purposes.
And the tax and (newly invasive) healthcare records?
Much like those that are called terrorist are not actually what is considered by the people who agreed to the laws to be used against terrorists to be terrorists.
Such as people whose dogs poop in the streed and don't clean up the poop.
QED.
What you still haven't shown is the government making wide use of the label "terrorist" in an inappropriate manner. They may use the enforcement or investigative power from the antiterrorism laws to investigate other crimes, but they aren't labeling those other criminals as "terrorists" inappropriately. (Keeping in mind that terrorist groups often resort to various forms of ordinary crime to fund themselves.)
10 years for growing the wrong plant.
Not if it is less than 50 plants.
But we know the real issue isn't horticulture, don't we?
Saddam did invade Kuwait in 1990 and annexed it as another province for Iraq. That is why the 1991 Gulf War was fought.
As a result of the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam had a variety of obligations to disarm, to give up his WMDs that he had used against Iran and his people. He was found to be lying on repeated occasions about the progress on disarmament and weapons disclosures. In the end he tried to fool the Iranians that he still had WMD when he had secretly destroyed his last stockpiles after previously being caught cheating. Saddam had the government act like they still had WMD and thought that no action would be taken against him by the UN, US, and allied powers. It turns out he made yet another miscalculation. That is why the 2003 war was fought.
Based on what?
I guess we'll just disagree on this point since I don't think there is anything close to enough evidence to support it, and you seem to take that as evidence for a hidden agenda.
Were the people that claimed John McCain wasn't born in America, and therefore disqualified from running for president, racists too? (We'll leave President Clinton and Vince Foster out of it.) There seems to be an awful lot of labeling any opposition to President Obama or his agenda as racist. Handy way to end an argument though.
Hmmm... are you quite sure that the administration isn't just secretly communist like the Tea Party is secretly "Christian right" and it only slips occasionally, like Anita Dunn? It wouldn't be good politically if they were known to be communist.
I think this is what you are looking for:
Occupy organizers linked to Cleveland bridge bombing plot
Fellow activists express disbelief at arrest of NATO summit bomb plot suspects
I think there are one or two more, at least, associated with Occupy.
Domestic Eco-Terrorism Has Deep Pockets. And Many Enablers.
Sorry, but no. What you are overlooking is that people don't leave their other beliefs behind when they join an organization. I have little doubt you could find all manner of different statements or actions among the many legislators and other people aligned with the Tea Party movement. That doesn't mean it is legitimate to generalize that one person's views to be a reflection of the movement as a whole. It may be entirely possible that people that are "Christian" and "right" are more inclined to join the Tea Party. But the movement itself doesn't have a religious component that I have seen, despite claims from various sources on the Left. If you looked around hard enough you could find Christians in various Marxist organizations, does that mean Marxism is a Christian movement? Hardly. Did the presence of Van Jones in the Obama administration mean that it was a Communist government?
Exchange launch turns into inexcusable mess: Our view
Park said the administration expected 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. It got 250,000. Compare that with the similarly rocky debut seven years ago of exchanges to obtain Medicare drug coverage. The Bush administration projected 20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000.
That's the difference between competence and incompetence.
The too-much-demand excuse also is less than the full story. In addition to grossly underestimating demand, the administration and its contractors seem to have made mistakes in building the websites. The system for verifying consumer identity has had persistent problems, as have pull-down menus.
Nor were problems confined to the 36 state health exchanges run by the federal government. Sites run by 14 states and Washington, D.C., bogged down because they have to refer to federal databases to verify consumers' identity.
Your post give a hint of the right answer: a "registered sex offender" is .... a registered sex offender, not a terrorist.
I guess that might be considered true,...
... your observation here seems pretty divorced from reality.
Make up your mind, it's either true or it isn't. The police and investigative agencies may use some of the powers they are granted by antiterrorism legislation for investigating other crimes,* but that doesn't mean the criminals they are investigating are then necessarily terrorist.
* You should be clear that terrorist groups often resort to ordinary criminal activity to fund themselves. Examples include bank robbery, kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, and so on. The terrorist group Hezbollah has hundreds of people involved with crime in the US to help provide funding. Cigarette smuggling (.pdf) is a common means.
Bin Laden didn't want Western societies to become ordinary dictatorships, he wanted them to become nations ruled by Muslims living under Islamic Sharia law. With the demographic implosion underway in Europe among native Europeans, the continuing import of vast numbers of immigrants that reject Western values, and religious conversion among native Europeans, it would be hasty to rule out that possibility in 100-200 years. There may be real trouble brewing in as little as 50 years since so many countries are hovering around the birthrate of 1.3 children per woman, which will halve an existing population in that time. While native Europeans are on a self-chosen road towards extinction (you can only halve a population so many times), natives continue to arrive.
Security through secrecy = no security.
You seem to be misapplying the idea of "Security through obscurity". As a principle of analysis in system security engineering or encryption algorithms its fine, but it has limited scope. Encryption algorithms that rely on obscurity for their protective power aren't strong enough. But even good encryption algorithms depend on you keeping your password secret. So no, there are many things that rely upon some measure of security through secrecy for their protection. That is a common means of protecting various national security matters. If you still don't believe it, then you should have no problem posting your real name, birth date, social insurance number, driver's license number, bank account numbers, and PINs.
MI5 is more right than you are.
That is just rhetoric which I assume results from your Leftist alignment. It isn't true though.
I see that occurring on Slashdot, along with various claims of "everyone's a terrorist" for some reason or another generally involving disingenuous rhetoric. As a rule I don't see that from government. They seem to be a bit clearer about its meaning.
The Tea Party is primarily about economics and government fiscal policy, not religion. That's where the name comes from: Taxed Enough Already.
Here, knock yourself out. I doubt you'll like it any more.
The question of accuracy in reporting is a separate question your liking their views. There are some hard truths out there, and apparently not all of them will be from sources you will listen to before judging.
That's what pisses me off about people who rag on social programs: the cost to run them is but a drop in an endless sea compared to what we spend killing foreigners, propping up dinosaur corporations, scratching banker's backs, etc.
It looks like you have a distorted view of Federal spending. You may want to view this chart. This chart adds some perspective.
This chart shows the long range problem.
... the military is still out killing brown people...
You should have left "brown" out of your statement since it doesn't really apply to the present conflicts as they aren't race based. There have been people of all races killed or captured as part of the war against al Qaida, including Asians, Europeans, and Africans.
Other than that, I agree with your statement.
It looks like the personnel necessary for safety and immediate response are still on the job.
Shutdown furloughs about to hit nuclear safety agency
The 300 essential personnel who would stay on include about 150 so-called "resident inspectors." They serve as the NRC's eyes and ears at nuclear plants. They also include employees who support emergency response, investigators, a skeleton management team, the five NRC commissioners and a few commission staff members, the NRC said.
The retained group would also include employees who support emergency response, investigators, a skeleton management team, the five NRC commissioners and a few commission staff members, the NRC said.
Approximately 83% of government employees are still at work, so why is the NRC being hit so hard?
I think there is still an interesting question of how much of this is "shutdown theater" to squeeze the public as has been occurring with the Park Service. Although there has been an issue with it in the past, the current administration seems to have kicked it up a level.
I think that your post nicely dovetails with my overall point - there will almost certainly still be black markets even after legalization of various drugs. There will still be people pursuing illegal highs.