US funded them through Pakistan. Where the hell do you think the money went? To bin Laden. To all the "foreign fighters" that were streaming to Afghanistan.
No, the money used to support the war effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan did not go to Bin Laden. Good grief, this is pitiful!
Scholars and reporters have called the idea of CIA-backed Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) "nonsense",[16] "sheer fantasy",[17] and "simply a folk myth."[18] They argue that:
- - with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land
- - that with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds
- - that Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of U.S. agents to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan;[19]
- - that the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even though they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen.
According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997,
The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.[18]
Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:
It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.[22]
- - -
Stating that US did not fund Taliban (later split off Al Quida) is like stating that CIA never were involved in drug trafficking.
Since the Taliban didn't form until after the Soviets left Afghanistan and the Afghan Communist government fell, I think we can dismiss charges that the Taliban were funded by the US. Al Qaeda was never part of the Taliban, they are a separate group. You information is bogus.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." -Benito Mussolini
What we currently have is corporations acting as arms of the government, and government acting as an arm of corporations, to the point where they aren't very distinguishable.
When commentators can't distinguish between government and contractors, the problem isn't fascism, the problem is nonsense passing as insight.
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information? We can torture people without leaving permanent physical injury, just like with the heat ray. So do we as a society really have moral qualms about torturing people because of the pain, or is it purely a pragmatic decision based on the low signal to noise ratio of intelligence from tortured prisoners?
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information?
Police are empowered to use force to compel compliance with the law. They can use force to clear an area, as in riots, or to take you and keep you in custody (detainment, arrest). They are not allowed to use force against you to compel you to say or admit anything. You have the right to remain silent, even if most people don't have the personal ability. (Note all the criminals who brag, or tape their crimes.) The right to remain silent is a basic Constitutional right in America. America and its courts take Constitutional rights seriously despite the nonsense you read in many places, including on Slashdot. Much of the confusion comes from the fact that many people want to deny that the US is fighting a war against Al Qaeda, and it is fighting under the rules of war, not under the rules of criminal law. As a result they scream bloody murder about actions taken under the law of war that are perfectly legal in that context and pretend that they are violations of criminal law, or even the Constitution. They are two completely separate questions, even if similar offenses are contained in each body of law. The German POWs that the US held in WW2 had no right of habeas corpus as they were taken as Prisoners Of War, not as assassins. One of the trade-offs of the law of war is that you can legally shoot and kill people, but if you are taken as a prisoner of war you have no right to habeas corpus, trial, or release, at least until the conflict is over.
Wright combed through the General Social Survey, a vast demographic study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that Christians, like adherents of other religions, have a divorce rate of about 42%. The rate among religiously unaffiliated Americans is 50%.
When Wright examined the statistics on evangelicals, he found worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees. . . ..
"You do hear, both in Christian and non-Christian circles, that Christians are no different from anyone else when it comes to divorce and that is not true if you are focusing on Christians who are regular church attendees," he said.
Wilcox's analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation.
Nominal conservative Protestants, on the other hand, were 20% more likely to divorce than the religiously unaffiliated.
"There's something about being a nominal 'Christian' that is linked to a lot of negative outcomes when it comes to family life," Wilcox said
-------
They booed Ron Paul when he said we should follow the Golden Rule in foreign policy. (Treat others the way you would want to be treated - do not bomb and kill them.) So called Christians often don't follow their own principles.
I think you need to understand the principles.
The Golden Rule's primary use is as a guide to individual conduct, not statecraft. It's not clear that Ron Paul would expect to receive reciprocal treatment from everybody, including the Iranians, for good treatment towards them, or what he would do in the face of bad behavior other than continue to act nicely. Among nations the expectation should be reciprocal. I don't think most Americans do, or should, have much confidence in Ron Paul's foreign policy in situations where the Golden Rule fails to elicit the desired response. Nor is it clear that a President Ron Paul would protect Americans and America's interests around the world as he seems to have made it clear that he would largely pull back. That's fine until the Iranians cut of 20% of the world's oil supply by blocking the Straits of Hormuz. It seems to me that he is also implicitly blaming America for the self-directed and self-interested bad behavior of other nations, like Iran.
America already had too many interests around the world in 1812 for a Ron Paul presidency and foreign policy to be successful.
Which is in turn spawned (pun intended) by the aberrant idea that sex is bad, dirty, and only acceptable between consenting heterosexual married couples.
That isn't really a mainstream Christian belief - the bad, dirty part. Or aberrant, for that matter.
Do you think there would be a problem giving kids sexual education if there wasn't a deranged stigma about sex in western society?
I don't know. How do we handle violence, tobacco, and other drugs?
They will figure out which holes to stuff things into, regardless of your puritanical controlling attempts to influence them into being sexless jeebus zombies.
Is it still OK to teach them not to lie, steal, hate, murder, etc.? Or will they just figure that out too?
It's just fallout from a blind belief that abstinence programs actually work
There is some scientific proof. Of course there are counter-studies, some of which have to be parsed carefully, and controversies. It is certainly an unpopular finding in some quarters - the idea that people can control themselves. It is demanded for cigarettes as that is the new taboo, but not sex, at least in many quarters.
The study found that abstinence-only sex education programs showed relative success in dissuading 12 year olds from having sex for two years afterward. It is the most comprehensive study to date to bolster an abstinence-only approach to reducing teen pregnancy. . . .
A new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine Monday showed that young teens given an abstinence-only message were significantly more likely to delay having sex than those receiving more comprehensive sex education.
The research is gaining attention since it’s the first rigorously conducted study demonstrating that an abstinence-only program can be effective.
“This is really game-changing research, because it provides the first strong evidence that abstinence-only education can help very young teens delay sex,” says Bill Albert, chief program officer for that National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonpartisan organization. “The menu of proven options just got larger, and that’s good news.”
The part about the length of the jail terms is enlightening, but I still have to wonder if the average American thinks it's okay that the closest comparison one can find is Russian Gulags from the 40s and 50s...
There is an important difference. Even if you disagree with the policy behind American law, such a drug crimes, the reason people are imprisoned is arguably criminal behavior. In the Soviet Union, you could find yourself in the Gulag for making a joke about Stalin, not meeting your production quota, completely imaginary crimes such as "wrecking", being denounced to cover someone else's crime or shortcoming, or simply to meet a quota of prisoners of a certain type or from a certain area. (Uranium mine No 7 needs more workers - order more arrests!) This doesn't cover the various deportations of entire ethnic groups to different parts of the country. I think most people would find American prisons far more hospitable than Soviet labor camps that often turned prison into a death sentence.
There are some qualitative differences between American prisons and the Soviet Gulags that I don't think you account for.
But that is exaxtly what most governments are doing - creating an environment of fear by constantly reminding us of how vulnerable we are. External terrorism is less common now than it was 30 years ago,
That's a bunch of baloney. Or maybe you can tell us which external terrorist groups where striking the continental United States in 1982 and killing large numbers of people? Did we all miss a couple of mass attacks?
They do this to achieve a political objective of control of the populace,
Really? How does that work? You get frisked at the airport so you stop voting? You walk through the metal detector so you stop making campaign contributions? Your baggage gets X-rayed so you stop going to church? I don't think you know what you are talking about.
How does that not satisfy the definition of "using terror to achieve a political objective"
Is the TSA leaving piles of dead bodies from groping next to the security lines at the airports? I hadn't noticed. Are they killing members of congress who vote against their budget? Are they disappearing journalists who take a stand against the use of X-Ray machines?
There is a critical piece of information that I think you are missing, as do most 9/11 "Truthers". It is true that the many thousands of gallons aviation fuel carried by the airliners into the World Trade Center didn't burn hot enough to melt the steel. That also happens to be irrelevant. Steel loses a large proportion of its structural strength long before it reaches its melting point. Combine the structural damage done by 80 tons of airliner smashing into the building, thousands of gallons of aviation fuel burning and progressive weakening the beams - rendering them malleable, and the enormous mass of the building above the floor pressing down on the beams, and the outcome shouldn't surprise anyone.
Most metals, including steel, lose strength and become malleable long before they melt. Blacksmiths know this. Truthers don't. Fundamentally, "Truthers" are baffled by things that blacksmiths know. (Watch a video of a blacksmith in action on Youtube sometime. They actually bend heated metal - no actual melting necessary.)
Their surveilance didn't pick up on the weird stuff he was doing, rigging equipment to print his intitials, but would have noticed if he'd put a letter in the post?
That's the problem with street thugs these days, always playing with printers and other office gear, running diagnostics and what not, when they could be smoking a joint and listening to tunes.
So tell us, what is the smart way to protest online ?
Unfortunately any online action does involve 'pissing off' authorities, because they have made everything that hurts them illegal.
I guess creating websites advocating for their position with clever videos, news, and so forth is too much? Discussion forums? Press releases? Blogs? Opinion pieces? Trading links with other like minded sites? Developing issue resource centers? Starting local discussion & action groups. Seeking sponsors to fund them and extend their reach?
If they wanted to go a little shady, maybe advocacy spam?
Lots they could do if they were dedicated without DDOS, cracking, and stealing credit card numbers.
The military has now also gone "corporate" (and been infested with Bible Thumpers) such that the old "work hard, fight hard, play hard" attitudes are muted.
I'm pretty sure that "Bible thumpers" weren't involved in the normalization of open homosexuality in the Armed Forces. I think the phrase you are looking for is "political correctness".
Now our opponents AND clients are religious fanatics who BOTH hate "freedom".
Try reading Bin Laden's Letter to America. His demands before his followers would stop trying to slaughter Americans are that Americans convert to Islam, and that the Constitution be replaced by Sharia law. Most Americans would consider forced religious conversion on pain of death, loss of the Bill of Rights, including the 1st Amendment, the treatment of women, the fact that a woman's testimony in court could only be treated as at most half that of a man's, the execution of homosexuals, the prohibition of alcohol in addition to all drugs, and many other consequences of Sharia to be a significant loss of freedom. The Islamists literally do hate American's freedoms as an offence to their values. There is no corresponding movement of any significance to impose that type of law in America by Americans, all fantasies and polemics aside.
Maybe letting homosexuals serve openly will chase off some of the religionists. It should improve Sub Sailor recruiting! (I kid! I kid!)
I'm sure, I'm sure.
Homosexuals constitute approximately 1.7% of the general population. Something like 80-90% of Americans are religious. You would have to work that gay 1.7% pretty hard to make up for any significant loss of religious Americans due to institutional hostility to their faith. But cheer up! I'm sure that the Omama administration finally putting women on nuclear submarines, the navy's diversity policy, and open homosexuality can only combine to make the independant launch capable nuclear submarine force ever more capable and reliable in the hands of its diverse, navy chosen future leadership.
.
Puh: that's nothing. HMS Victory was launched in 1765, and is still in commission. She's even older than the United States!
If the UK doesn't reverse course on defense cuts, there may not be much more than HMS Victory left to protect the British Isles, and the only waves Britsh sailors will be familiar with are these.
you cannot have war profiteering with out new wars.
"War profiteering" isn't what it used to be. The percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending has been on an overall long downward trend for quite some time.
Clearly the "Military-Industrial Complex" doesn't have much real power.
Slashdot Mirror
US funded them through Pakistan. Where the hell do you think the money went? To bin Laden. To all the "foreign fighters" that were streaming to Afghanistan.
No, the money used to support the war effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan did not go to Bin Laden. Good grief, this is pitiful!
CIA – Osama bin Laden controversy
Scholars and reporters have called the idea of CIA-backed Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) "nonsense",[16] "sheer fantasy",[17] and "simply a folk myth."[18] They argue that:
- - with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land
- - that with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds
- - that Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of U.S. agents to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan;[19]
- - that the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even though they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen.
According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997,
The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.[18]
Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:
It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.[22]
- - -
Stating that US did not fund Taliban (later split off Al Quida) is like stating that CIA never were involved in drug trafficking.
Since the Taliban didn't form until after the Soviets left Afghanistan and the Afghan Communist government fell, I think we can dismiss charges that the Taliban were funded by the US. Al Qaeda was never part of the Taliban, they are a separate group. You information is bogus.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." -Benito Mussolini
What we currently have is corporations acting as arms of the government, and government acting as an arm of corporations, to the point where they aren't very distinguishable.
When commentators can't distinguish between government and contractors, the problem isn't fascism, the problem is nonsense passing as insight.
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information? We can torture people without leaving permanent physical injury, just like with the heat ray. So do we as a society really have moral qualms about torturing people because of the pain, or is it purely a pragmatic decision based on the low signal to noise ratio of intelligence from tortured prisoners?
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information?
Police are empowered to use force to compel compliance with the law. They can use force to clear an area, as in riots, or to take you and keep you in custody (detainment, arrest). They are not allowed to use force against you to compel you to say or admit anything. You have the right to remain silent, even if most people don't have the personal ability. (Note all the criminals who brag, or tape their crimes.) The right to remain silent is a basic Constitutional right in America. America and its courts take Constitutional rights seriously despite the nonsense you read in many places, including on Slashdot. Much of the confusion comes from the fact that many people want to deny that the US is fighting a war against Al Qaeda, and it is fighting under the rules of war, not under the rules of criminal law. As a result they scream bloody murder about actions taken under the law of war that are perfectly legal in that context and pretend that they are violations of criminal law, or even the Constitution. They are two completely separate questions, even if similar offenses are contained in each body of law. The German POWs that the US held in WW2 had no right of habeas corpus as they were taken as Prisoners Of War, not as assassins. One of the trade-offs of the law of war is that you can legally shoot and kill people, but if you are taken as a prisoner of war you have no right to habeas corpus, trial, or release, at least until the conflict is over.
I was surprised to discover the rate of . . . divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.
Not exactly . . .
Christians question divorce rates of faithful
Wright combed through the General Social Survey, a vast demographic study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that Christians, like adherents of other religions, have a divorce rate of about 42%. The rate among religiously unaffiliated Americans is 50%.
When Wright examined the statistics on evangelicals, he found worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees. . . . .
"You do hear, both in Christian and non-Christian circles, that Christians are no different from anyone else when it comes to divorce and that is not true if you are focusing on Christians who are regular church attendees," he said.
Wilcox's analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation.
Nominal conservative Protestants, on the other hand, were 20% more likely to divorce than the religiously unaffiliated.
"There's something about being a nominal 'Christian' that is linked to a lot of negative outcomes when it comes to family life," Wilcox said
-------
They booed Ron Paul when he said we should follow the Golden Rule in foreign policy. (Treat others the way you would want to be treated - do not bomb and kill them.) So called Christians often don't follow their own principles.
I think you need to understand the principles.
The Golden Rule's primary use is as a guide to individual conduct, not statecraft. It's not clear that Ron Paul would expect to receive reciprocal treatment from everybody, including the Iranians, for good treatment towards them, or what he would do in the face of bad behavior other than continue to act nicely. Among nations the expectation should be reciprocal. I don't think most Americans do, or should, have much confidence in Ron Paul's foreign policy in situations where the Golden Rule fails to elicit the desired response. Nor is it clear that a President Ron Paul would protect Americans and America's interests around the world as he seems to have made it clear that he would largely pull back. That's fine until the Iranians cut of 20% of the world's oil supply by blocking the Straits of Hormuz. It seems to me that he is also implicitly blaming America for the self-directed and self-interested bad behavior of other nations, like Iran.
America already had too many interests around the world in 1812 for a Ron Paul presidency and foreign policy to be successful.
Which is in turn spawned (pun intended) by the aberrant idea that sex is bad, dirty, and only acceptable between consenting heterosexual married couples.
That isn't really a mainstream Christian belief - the bad, dirty part. Or aberrant, for that matter.
Do you think there would be a problem giving kids sexual education if there wasn't a deranged stigma about sex in western society?
I don't know. How do we handle violence, tobacco, and other drugs?
They will figure out which holes to stuff things into, regardless of your puritanical controlling attempts to influence them into being sexless jeebus zombies.
Is it still OK to teach them not to lie, steal, hate, murder, etc.? Or will they just figure that out too?
Actually, it's a lack of prohibition of having no religion that allows you to have no religion.
You are seldom, if ever, going to have that unless the state has some guarantee of religious freedom.
It's just fallout from a blind belief that abstinence programs actually work
There is some scientific proof. Of course there are counter-studies, some of which have to be parsed carefully, and controversies. It is certainly an unpopular finding in some quarters - the idea that people can control themselves. It is demanded for cigarettes as that is the new taboo, but not sex, at least in many quarters.
Abstinence-only study could alter sex-education landscape
The study found that abstinence-only sex education programs showed relative success in dissuading 12 year olds from having sex for two years afterward. It is the most comprehensive study to date to bolster an abstinence-only approach to reducing teen pregnancy. . . .
A new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine Monday showed that young teens given an abstinence-only message were significantly more likely to delay having sex than those receiving more comprehensive sex education.
The research is gaining attention since it’s the first rigorously conducted study demonstrating that an abstinence-only program can be effective.
“This is really game-changing research, because it provides the first strong evidence that abstinence-only education can help very young teens delay sex,” says Bill Albert, chief program officer for that National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonpartisan organization. “The menu of proven options just got larger, and that’s good news.”
Mass incarceration isn't a libertarian issue.
America, Land of the Imprisoned
Victimless Crime Constitutes 86% of The Federal Prison Population
The part about the length of the jail terms is enlightening, but I still have to wonder if the average American thinks it's okay that the closest comparison one can find is Russian Gulags from the 40s and 50s...
There is an important difference. Even if you disagree with the policy behind American law, such a drug crimes, the reason people are imprisoned is arguably criminal behavior. In the Soviet Union, you could find yourself in the Gulag for making a joke about Stalin, not meeting your production quota, completely imaginary crimes such as "wrecking", being denounced to cover someone else's crime or shortcoming, or simply to meet a quota of prisoners of a certain type or from a certain area. (Uranium mine No 7 needs more workers - order more arrests!) This doesn't cover the various deportations of entire ethnic groups to different parts of the country. I think most people would find American prisons far more hospitable than Soviet labor camps that often turned prison into a death sentence.
There are some qualitative differences between American prisons and the Soviet Gulags that I don't think you account for.
What Were Their Crimes?
Have you ever been late to work?
In the Stalin era, a person who arrived late to work three times could be sent to the Gulag for three years.
Have you ever told a joke about a government official?
In the Stalin era, many were sent to the Gulag for up to 25 years for telling an innocent joke about a Communist Party official.
If your family was starving, would you take a few potatoes left in a field after harvest?
In the Stalin era, a person could be sent to the Gulag for up to ten years for such petty theft.
Living in the Gulag
Stalin World - Lithuania
But that is exaxtly what most governments are doing - creating an environment of fear by constantly reminding us of how vulnerable we are. External terrorism is less common now than it was 30 years ago,
That's a bunch of baloney. Or maybe you can tell us which external terrorist groups where striking the continental United States in 1982 and killing large numbers of people? Did we all miss a couple of mass attacks?
They do this to achieve a political objective of control of the populace,
Really? How does that work? You get frisked at the airport so you stop voting? You walk through the metal detector so you stop making campaign contributions? Your baggage gets X-rayed so you stop going to church? I don't think you know what you are talking about.
How does that not satisfy the definition of "using terror to achieve a political objective"
Is the TSA leaving piles of dead bodies from groping next to the security lines at the airports? I hadn't noticed. Are they killing members of congress who vote against their budget? Are they disappearing journalists who take a stand against the use of X-Ray machines?
Taking reasonable precautions against actual terrorists isn't "terrorism". TSA finds 4 guns per day at airports
There is a critical piece of information that I think you are missing, as do most 9/11 "Truthers". It is true that the many thousands of gallons aviation fuel carried by the airliners into the World Trade Center didn't burn hot enough to melt the steel. That also happens to be irrelevant. Steel loses a large proportion of its structural strength long before it reaches its melting point. Combine the structural damage done by 80 tons of airliner smashing into the building, thousands of gallons of aviation fuel burning and progressive weakening the beams - rendering them malleable, and the enormous mass of the building above the floor pressing down on the beams, and the outcome shouldn't surprise anyone.
Most metals, including steel, lose strength and become malleable long before they melt. Blacksmiths know this. Truthers don't. Fundamentally, "Truthers" are baffled by things that blacksmiths know. (Watch a video of a blacksmith in action on Youtube sometime. They actually bend heated metal - no actual melting necessary.)
Their surveilance didn't pick up on the weird stuff he was doing, rigging equipment to print his intitials, but would have noticed if he'd put a letter in the post?
That's the problem with street thugs these days, always playing with printers and other office gear, running diagnostics and what not, when they could be smoking a joint and listening to tunes.
So tell us, what is the smart way to protest online ?
Unfortunately any online action does involve 'pissing off' authorities, because they have made everything that hurts them illegal.
I guess creating websites advocating for their position with clever videos, news, and so forth is too much? Discussion forums? Press releases? Blogs? Opinion pieces? Trading links with other like minded sites? Developing issue resource centers? Starting local discussion & action groups. Seeking sponsors to fund them and extend their reach?
If they wanted to go a little shady, maybe advocacy spam?
Lots they could do if they were dedicated without DDOS, cracking, and stealing credit card numbers.
In the 1980s, it seemed totally unbelievable that every passing alien ship could drive-by root their holodeck.
The sad thing is, the older I get and the more I experience real Internet security, the more depressingly probable that scenario seems.
Very true. People worry today about polymorphic viruses, but wait till they have to deal with holographic viruses.
Is the program ever complete?
Or do they?
The military has now also gone "corporate" (and been infested with Bible Thumpers) such that the old "work hard, fight hard, play hard" attitudes are muted.
I guess you don't keep up with the news: Military Chaplains Mull End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
I'm pretty sure that "Bible thumpers" weren't involved in the normalization of open homosexuality in the Armed Forces. I think the phrase you are looking for is "political correctness".
Now our opponents AND clients are religious fanatics who BOTH hate "freedom".
Try reading Bin Laden's Letter to America. His demands before his followers would stop trying to slaughter Americans are that Americans convert to Islam, and that the Constitution be replaced by Sharia law. Most Americans would consider forced religious conversion on pain of death, loss of the Bill of Rights, including the 1st Amendment, the treatment of women, the fact that a woman's testimony in court could only be treated as at most half that of a man's, the execution of homosexuals, the prohibition of alcohol in addition to all drugs, and many other consequences of Sharia to be a significant loss of freedom. The Islamists literally do hate American's freedoms as an offence to their values. There is no corresponding movement of any significance to impose that type of law in America by Americans, all fantasies and polemics aside.
Maybe letting homosexuals serve openly will chase off some of the religionists. It should improve Sub Sailor recruiting! (I kid! I kid!)
I'm sure, I'm sure.
Homosexuals constitute approximately 1.7% of the general population. Something like 80-90% of Americans are religious. You would have to work that gay 1.7% pretty hard to make up for any significant loss of religious Americans due to institutional hostility to their faith. But cheer up! I'm sure that the Omama administration finally putting women on nuclear submarines, the navy's diversity policy, and open homosexuality can only combine to make the independant launch capable nuclear submarine force ever more capable and reliable in the hands of its diverse, navy chosen future leadership.
.
Calm down dude, and explain why WTC7 came down.
I can help you with that.
Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation
World Trade Center Disaster Study
Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
I believe most people would agree that Austria and Switzerland have the most trustworthy admirals.
tEy VV4Z 3Lee7e.
Puh: that's nothing. HMS Victory was launched in 1765, and is still in commission. She's even older than the United States!
If the UK doesn't reverse course on defense cuts, there may not be much more than HMS Victory left to protect the British Isles, and the only waves Britsh sailors will be familiar with are these.
Cuts to the Royal Navy
British defence cuts will help make ADF shipshape
Navy chief: Britain cannot keep up its role in Libya air war due to cuts
Big British defense cuts weaken Pentagon's top military partner
Defense Cuts Mean UK Would Lose A New Falklands War, Veteran Claims
Sadly, these links never go out of style.
Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation
World Trade Center Disaster Study
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
QED
And guess who attacked Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place?
You have it backwards. The proper question is, what country did Iraq and Afghanistan attack in the first place?
you cannot have war profiteering with out new wars.
"War profiteering" isn't what it used to be. The percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending has been on an overall long downward trend for quite some time.
Clearly the "Military-Industrial Complex" doesn't have much real power.
Defense Spending as Percentage of GDP Well Below Historical Average
Isn't that what the US did in Iraq?
What do you think?