An ordinance passed in 2005 in response to a 1990 incident? That's not terribly efficient. Regardless, much of the rhetoric from the city council and Mumbles Menino after both deaths centered around underage drinking. I was up here for both incidents, and each time cursed loudly at the television as the local anchors smoothly segued from stories on the deaths to stories on underage drinking. At least the Snelgrove death was blamed entirely on the police.
I have a choice of two companies for car insurance--because most insurance companies refuse to do business in MA. Why? There is heavy regulation of auto insurance by the state. Not insuring my car, of course, is not an option. It is a financial risk I'm willing to take, but the nanny-state says I can't.
I'm a graduate student earning a pittance of a stipend. The Federal Government seems to think that I needn't pay taxes for the next few years, as I've always gotten a full refund. But what about the People's Republic of Massachusetts? I get a refund of about 20% of what has been withheld from my paycheck. Incidentally, on my pay stub, "MA withholding" is typically about 85-90% of "FED Withholding."
If I wish to buy a barrel of beer in the city, the distributor is required to give my name and address to the BPD. This was largely a response to two incidents involving college students after major sports victories. One college student was fatally shot by the police, who were using non-lethal crowd-control weapons, after a Red Sox victory in the World Series. Another student was fatally struck by a car driven by a non-student after the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Neither student was intoxicated. The "real" culprit in both cases? Underage drinking by college students, of course. For a state with a population of such high intelligence, it has an incredibly stupid government at all levels.
Back to the topic at hand, though. The Commonwealth of Massacusetts, as the above examples hopefully illustrate, loves to tell people what to do. No matter how progressive or socially acceptable its policies may be (abolition, gay marriage, &c.), it still is authoritarian at heart. And the long-term residents are so polite that a special term (Massholes) has been created to describe them. Maybe you need to live or have lived here to truly appreciate it.
Your spelling rivals the coherence of your arguments. Last time here. Ignorent and warrent are not words in the English language. Perhaps I'd take your lunacy more seriously if you took the time to spell words correctly. Then again, perhaps I wouldn't. Nevertheless, I see you have questioned my credibility in calling you ignorant, but failed to say anything that might indicate your lack of ignorance.
I must have missed the concession in the Magna Carta about cell phone tracking. I also missed any precedent in the intervening 800 or so years that indicates an agent of the police cannot follow an individual in public without a court order.
If that's your point, then you did a poor job of demonstrating it. One doesn't need a court order to get a pilot's license, and, in addition to being able to fly, one needs to demonstrate that ability in both written and practical tests given by a person certified to do so. Similarly, in order to get a search warrant, you need to convince a judge that you have probable cause. If jurisprudence consists of making ill-fitting analogies followed by ad hominem attacks, as you seem to believe, then perhaps GWB should have nominated you for the open seat on SCOTUS. Your analogy is flawed, and proves only your ignorance.
And I'll change some more words and see if the new sentence makes any sense.
What exactly is the problem with allowing herrings to run for election with simple knowladge[sic] of how to solve quadratic equations. It's only the same standard required before they get a pilots hat, and still a few steps short of your oh-so-precisely-defined canard.
I can change words (and spell them correctly!), too, so what's your point?
That's a joke. How could the congressmen in 1986 have any idea what sort of application and usage cell-phones would have 10 years in the future? They probably gave wide-powers to the police, because at the time, it wasn't possible (and perhaps not even thinkable) for them to use those powers. You can't blame them for not forseeing the future, and to claim they did and that the law should still be used is ridiculous. That's like claiming the right to bear arms in the constitution gives every citizen the right to have nuclear weapons. There was no way nuclear weapons were invisaged when America was formed.
Read what you quoted. That particular piece of legislation was amended in 1994.
Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.
God bless us. Every one. (Thankfully they have been unsuccessful, although is that 100% of the time? I don't think so.)
Here's a standard lower than probable cause:
Reasonable Suspicion, which is the standard used by the police to stop and search an individual. Not a very strong standard, but certainly a few steps above of willy-nilly.
What exactly is the problem with allowing the police to use cellphone tracking with probable cause? It's only the same standard required before they get a search warrant, and still a few steps short of your oh-so-precisely-defined poilce state.
The climate has been changing since before humans evolved. How do you know what's causing it now? Sure, there may be a correlation between industrialization and mean global temperature, but how do you prove causation? There are likely tens of thousands of times that the mean global temperature has risen without human activity. Short of ceasing all industrial activity and observing it's effect, it's difficult to prove the hypothesized connection between carbon dioxide emissions and Global Warming.
Interesting idea--certainly better than the Robin Hood environmentalism we would have under Kyoto. Yes, the climate is changing. Hasn't it always been, what with ice ages and whatnot? Ocean levels rise and fall, as numerous pre-industrial, underwater archaeoloical sites would seem to indicate. Dealing with the implications of climate change--since it *will* happen regardless of whether human activity is to blame--is far more sensible than UN-mandated wealth-redistribution schemes.
While I'm not sure how effective doping the sea with Iron would be, the predicted result certainly would provide a nice out-of-the-way Carbon sink, allowing third-world farmers to clear-cut more rainforest rather then depending on a trickle-down effect from their government's selling emissions credits. Furthermore, more plankton = more whales, so the save the whales people should be happy.
...how 80% of the programmers are "White" and 7% are "Black" or "Hispanic." Where'd the rest of the programmers go? Is there some other minority involved that's not getting an equal demand for appeasement? Don't Asians play video games? Shouldn't they be demanding more Asian programmers?
Correlation does not imply causation. Here are a few factors that can also be correlated to the decrease in crime that began in the early '90s.
I could say that legalized abortion caused a decrease in crime, since those most likely to give birth to future teenage criminals began aborting them. While almost everyone disagrees with this for their own pet ideological reasons (anti-abortion people, liberals who think that the trend unfairly implies that poor minorities with underage single parents are more likely to become criminals, &c.). This is actually the subject of a serious, scholarly paper referenced in the aforelinked wikipedia article, and mentioned in the book Freakonomics, which should be required reading for everyone.
I could say that having a Republican-controlled Congress is responsible for a decrease in crime, since Republicans are tough on crime and Democrats are pussies. Note I provide as much evidence for this assertion as you have for yours.
I could say that the fall of the Soviet Union is responsible for a decrease in crime, since KGB agents caused all street crime in the US.
I could say that NAFTA is responsible for a decrease in crime, since most violent criminals just wanted free trade with Canada and Mexico, and their puropse for causing violence was eliminated when NAFTA was passed.
We'd take you more seriously if you didn't contradict yourself so quickly:
"Unless you can see the part of the subpoena that they won't let you see, it is best to assume that you have been given no information at all."
and, based on that no information at all
"Certainly it seems... that there was illegal activity on the part of the government."
As for the US government killing people, I might dispute your number, but 50,000 a year isn't really that many people to kill, considering that some seculargovernments have killed far more people in shorther periods of time. Stalin and Mao, for example, are estimated to have killed more people together than all of WWII (including the Holocaust). You, sir, are an ass.
Electoral fraud predates electronic voting machines. If you want to stop voter fraud, focus on the source of the problem: dead people voting, unregistered people voting, intimidation at and outside polling places, and individuals casting multiple "provisional" ballots in different locations. Besides, weren't Saddam and Arafat both elected with 100% majorities on paper ballots?
What assurance does any other U.S. citizen have that they may not be designated 'enemy combatants' and similarly 'disappeared'?
When they haven't renounced their citizenship by joining the military of a nation currently engaged in hostilities with the US? Granted the US was a little lenient with Johnny (Lindh) Taliban, but they needn't have been.
limiting protestors to a designated area isn't limiting their speech, and isn't an act limited to the giant neocon conspiracy (cf. protestors at the most recent Democratic Convention). They're still free to express themselves however they feel necessary, they simply must do it somewhere else.
The activity of Titanium Dioxide for this kind of stuff depends largely on the particle size. Plain old white paint ain't gonna do it, you need nanoparticles of a specific size distribution for it to work.
The level of incompetence is to some extent related to the willingness of civil libertarians to compromise national security to promote their agenda, but more closely related to the amount which TSA screeners are paid and extent to which they are trained. They get paid little more than minimum wage, and are trained to do little more than randomly search bags, but they don't even get to do the random picking themselves.
Halliburton, however, isn't even remotely related to the airline security business. They're in the oil business, and most airline passengers don't have oil.
You speak of "bomb[ing] Iraq into a democracy". You really don't get it, do you? This isn't Bill Clinton's cruise-missile diplomacy here, there are people on the ground in Iraq, training a native police force and army, rebuilding a country that, with the exception of a small percentage of well-connected collaborators with Hussein's regime, lived in extreme poverty for the last decade. The job is made difficult foreigners who feel the need to blow themselves up in crowds of children, at police stations and hospitals, and plant bombs on vehicles in used-car lots. If we could talk to the so-called insurgents, they'd probably say "death to infidels." Why is it worse for us to invade for the sake of replacing an oppressive autocratic regime with parliamentary democracy than for Syrians and Muslim Palestinians--almost certainly with their governments' assistance--to destabilize any attempt for the Iraqis to rebuild a stable government? But we're the bad guys.
While nobody likes prison abuse, it isn't exactly ordered from on high, and still remains limited to isolated incidents of a few individuals. Then again, remind me who exactly is beheading whom in most of those videos? Ahhh, but what's a beheading compared to a few naked photos? And what about the mass graves that are uncovered daily in Iraq? But we're the bad guys.
I hardly think that Americans are the most self-deluded. We're not the ones running around trying to rebuild the Abbasid Caliphate, now are we?
If America cared so much about Hussein killing Iraqis, then why did they give him weapons to do it with?
We gave him the weapons to kill Iranians.
Because the middle east has the substance that you need like a crackhead needs crack. You'll do anything to get it. You'll support dictators, you'll support terrorists, and you'll be friends with the country that the terrorists who attacked you came from.
We don't need it nearly as badly as Europe does, and we have plenty of it from other, closer sources. If we did need it that badly, then why not seize the oilfields? Why would the US/UK/etc. have allowed corrupt, autocratic regimes to nationalize oil production in the first place? By your tone, I can only assume that you come from a country with either a completely clean history of foreign relations or that is so poor that it lacks to opportunity to meddle in other nations' affairs. Of course, it's also possible that you have no idea what you're talking about.
You had an opportunity to gain the support of the world after 9/11. You blew it.
There was never such an opportunity. The whole "we are all Americans" thing lasted about a week, after which the Socialists/Continental Europeans promptly returned to their player-hating rhetoric. America will be disliked as long as we continue to be the sole superpower in the world.
"Check out Al Jazeera, if you can find it. Then you might see a sampling of what's really going on over there: shot after shot of dead civilians, including many kids. Many more shots of civilians, barely alive, lying in squalid hospital beds, the remains of their arms and legs wrapped in bandages after being blown off by bombs. "
eh? Who exactly is blowing up civilians? The US, or the so-called insurgents? I can see why Iraqis might hate the US, when Syrians and Muslim Palestinians cross the border to blow them up. I'm curious, though. Are these "picture after picture of abuse of prisoners in US prison camps" the same damn pictures of incidents in ONE PLACE shown over and over, or are these new prison abuses about which *nobody* over here has heard? As for "people, most of them completely innocent even by admission of the US commanders, who disappear into them for years without charges, without lawyers and without any chance to defend themselves", it is pretty impressive that so many people could have disappeared for years at the hands of the US when we've only been in Afghanistan for 4 years and Iraq for 2 years. These both also pale in comparison to previous instances of Americans being held hostage in Middle Eastern countries. Maybe it's our collective lack of understaning of Arab culture to which you alluded, but why should they expect lawyers when "we can't assume they share our more abstract values like our Bill of Rights "?
Regardless, your talent for hyperbole is awesome. Fox News isn't state-run, and isn't even vaguely American-owned.
Al Jazeera, much like Fox News, or any other media outlet, does not distribute truth to the world; that has never been their raison d'etre. They exist to get seen as much as possible so they can charge more for advertising. Violence sells. Sex sells. Crazy fear-mongering sells.
Exactly. It just seems like a tool to facilitate gathering evidence once someone's actually been charged with a crime. It's somewhat analogous to having an actual physical safe full of documents, as opposed to encrypted file(s). Sure, the police can crack it open, and they're going to get the information they're after eventually, but it's quicker and easier for everyone involved just to give them the damn combination.
Slashdot Mirror
An ordinance passed in 2005 in response to a 1990 incident? That's not terribly efficient. Regardless, much of the rhetoric from the city council and Mumbles Menino after both deaths centered around underage drinking. I was up here for both incidents, and each time cursed loudly at the television as the local anchors smoothly segued from stories on the deaths to stories on underage drinking. At least the Snelgrove death was blamed entirely on the police.
Ever been to Massachusetts?
I have a choice of two companies for car insurance--because most insurance companies refuse to do business in MA. Why? There is heavy regulation of auto insurance by the state. Not insuring my car, of course, is not an option. It is a financial risk I'm willing to take, but the nanny-state says I can't.
I'm a graduate student earning a pittance of a stipend. The Federal Government seems to think that I needn't pay taxes for the next few years, as I've always gotten a full refund. But what about the People's Republic of Massachusetts? I get a refund of about 20% of what has been withheld from my paycheck. Incidentally, on my pay stub, "MA withholding" is typically about 85-90% of "FED Withholding."
If I wish to buy a barrel of beer in the city, the distributor is required to give my name and address to the BPD. This was largely a response to two incidents involving college students after major sports victories. One college student was fatally shot by the police, who were using non-lethal crowd-control weapons, after a Red Sox victory in the World Series. Another student was fatally struck by a car driven by a non-student after the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Neither student was intoxicated. The "real" culprit in both cases? Underage drinking by college students, of course. For a state with a population of such high intelligence, it has an incredibly stupid government at all levels.
Back to the topic at hand, though. The Commonwealth of Massacusetts, as the above examples hopefully illustrate, loves to tell people what to do. No matter how progressive or socially acceptable its policies may be (abolition, gay marriage, &c.), it still is authoritarian at heart. And the long-term residents are so polite that a special term (Massholes) has been created to describe them. Maybe you need to live or have lived here to truly appreciate it.
Your spelling rivals the coherence of your arguments. Last time here. Ignorent and warrent are not words in the English language. Perhaps I'd take your lunacy more seriously if you took the time to spell words correctly. Then again, perhaps I wouldn't. Nevertheless, I see you have questioned my credibility in calling you ignorant, but failed to say anything that might indicate your lack of ignorance.
I must have missed the concession in the Magna Carta about cell phone tracking. I also missed any precedent in the intervening 800 or so years that indicates an agent of the police cannot follow an individual in public without a court order.
If that's your point, then you did a poor job of demonstrating it. One doesn't need a court order to get a pilot's license, and, in addition to being able to fly, one needs to demonstrate that ability in both written and practical tests given by a person certified to do so. Similarly, in order to get a search warrant, you need to convince a judge that you have probable cause. If jurisprudence consists of making ill-fitting analogies followed by ad hominem attacks, as you seem to believe, then perhaps GWB should have nominated you for the open seat on SCOTUS. Your analogy is flawed, and proves only your ignorance.
And I'll change some more words and see if the new sentence makes any sense.
What exactly is the problem with allowing herrings to run for election with simple knowladge[sic] of how to solve quadratic equations. It's only the same standard required before they get a pilots hat, and still a few steps short of your oh-so-precisely-defined canard.
I can change words (and spell them correctly!), too, so what's your point?
That's a joke. How could the congressmen in 1986 have any idea what sort of application and usage cell-phones would have 10 years in the future? They probably gave wide-powers to the police, because at the time, it wasn't possible (and perhaps not even thinkable) for them to use those powers. You can't blame them for not forseeing the future, and to claim they did and that the law should still be used is ridiculous. That's like claiming the right to bear arms in the constitution gives every citizen the right to have nuclear weapons. There was no way nuclear weapons were invisaged when America was formed.
Read what you quoted. That particular piece of legislation was amended in 1994.
Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.
God bless us. Every one. (Thankfully they have been unsuccessful, although is that 100% of the time? I don't think so.)
Here's a standard lower than probable cause:
Reasonable Suspicion, which is the standard used by the police to stop and search an individual. Not a very strong standard, but certainly a few steps above of willy-nilly.
What exactly is the problem with allowing the police to use cellphone tracking with probable cause? It's only the same standard required before they get a search warrant, and still a few steps short of your oh-so-precisely-defined poilce state.
The climate has been changing since before humans evolved. How do you know what's causing it now? Sure, there may be a correlation between industrialization and mean global temperature, but how do you prove causation? There are likely tens of thousands of times that the mean global temperature has risen without human activity. Short of ceasing all industrial activity and observing it's effect, it's difficult to prove the hypothesized connection between carbon dioxide emissions and Global Warming.
Interesting idea--certainly better than the Robin Hood environmentalism we would have under Kyoto. Yes, the climate is changing. Hasn't it always been, what with ice ages and whatnot? Ocean levels rise and fall, as numerous pre-industrial, underwater archaeoloical sites would seem to indicate. Dealing with the implications of climate change--since it *will* happen regardless of whether human activity is to blame--is far more sensible than UN-mandated wealth-redistribution schemes.
While I'm not sure how effective doping the sea with Iron would be, the predicted result certainly would provide a nice out-of-the-way Carbon sink, allowing third-world farmers to clear-cut more rainforest rather then depending on a trickle-down effect from their government's selling emissions credits. Furthermore, more plankton = more whales, so the save the whales people should be happy.
Since it's going to screw up your golden age regardless of what's causing it, why aren't you interested in doing whatever is possible to reverse it?
If we're not causing it, then curtailing behavior that didn't cause it won't reverse it.
...how 80% of the programmers are "White" and 7% are "Black" or "Hispanic." Where'd the rest of the programmers go? Is there some other minority involved that's not getting an equal demand for appeasement? Don't Asians play video games? Shouldn't they be demanding more Asian programmers?
Correlation does not imply causation. Here are a few factors that can also be correlated to the decrease in crime that began in the early '90s.
I could say that legalized abortion caused a decrease in crime, since those most likely to give birth to future teenage criminals began aborting them. While almost everyone disagrees with this for their own pet ideological reasons (anti-abortion people, liberals who think that the trend unfairly implies that poor minorities with underage single parents are more likely to become criminals, &c.). This is actually the subject of a serious, scholarly paper referenced in the aforelinked wikipedia article, and mentioned in the book Freakonomics, which should be required reading for everyone.
I could say that having a Republican-controlled Congress is responsible for a decrease in crime, since Republicans are tough on crime and Democrats are pussies. Note I provide as much evidence for this assertion as you have for yours.
I could say that the fall of the Soviet Union is responsible for a decrease in crime, since KGB agents caused all street crime in the US.
I could say that NAFTA is responsible for a decrease in crime, since most violent criminals just wanted free trade with Canada and Mexico, and their puropse for causing violence was eliminated when NAFTA was passed.
nice try, though
We'd take you more seriously if you didn't contradict yourself so quickly:
"Unless you can see the part of the subpoena that they won't let you see, it is best to assume that you have been given no information at all."
and, based on that no information at all
"Certainly it seems... that there was illegal activity on the part of the government."
As for the US government killing people, I might dispute your number, but 50,000 a year isn't really that many people to kill, considering that some secular governments have killed far more people in shorther periods of time. Stalin and Mao, for example, are estimated to have killed more people together than all of WWII (including the Holocaust). You, sir, are an ass.
Electoral fraud predates electronic voting machines. If you want to stop voter fraud, focus on the source of the problem: dead people voting, unregistered people voting, intimidation at and outside polling places, and individuals casting multiple "provisional" ballots in different locations. Besides, weren't Saddam and Arafat both elected with 100% majorities on paper ballots?
When they haven't renounced their citizenship by joining the military of a nation currently engaged in hostilities with the US? Granted the US was a little lenient with Johnny (Lindh) Taliban, but they needn't have been.
limiting protestors to a designated area isn't limiting their speech, and isn't an act limited to the giant neocon conspiracy (cf. protestors at the most recent Democratic Convention). They're still free to express themselves however they feel necessary, they simply must do it somewhere else.
...but that's just Karl Rove exercising his right to free speech, not the government abridging said right..
The activity of Titanium Dioxide for this kind of stuff depends largely on the particle size. Plain old white paint ain't gonna do it, you need nanoparticles of a specific size distribution for it to work.
That's a not a good idea. Ionizing the air will produce more ground-level ozone, which is already a significant problem in smog-ridden areas.
The level of incompetence is to some extent related to the willingness of civil libertarians to compromise national security to promote their agenda, but more closely related to the amount which TSA screeners are paid and extent to which they are trained. They get paid little more than minimum wage, and are trained to do little more than randomly search bags, but they don't even get to do the random picking themselves.
Halliburton, however, isn't even remotely related to the airline security business. They're in the oil business, and most airline passengers don't have oil.
You speak of "bomb[ing] Iraq into a democracy". You really don't get it, do you? This isn't Bill Clinton's cruise-missile diplomacy here, there are people on the ground in Iraq, training a native police force and army, rebuilding a country that, with the exception of a small percentage of well-connected collaborators with Hussein's regime, lived in extreme poverty for the last decade. The job is made difficult foreigners who feel the need to blow themselves up in crowds of children, at police stations and hospitals, and plant bombs on vehicles in used-car lots. If we could talk to the so-called insurgents, they'd probably say "death to infidels." Why is it worse for us to invade for the sake of replacing an oppressive autocratic regime with parliamentary democracy than for Syrians and Muslim Palestinians--almost certainly with their governments' assistance--to destabilize any attempt for the Iraqis to rebuild a stable government? But we're the bad guys.
While nobody likes prison abuse, it isn't exactly ordered from on high, and still remains limited to isolated incidents of a few individuals. Then again, remind me who exactly is beheading whom in most of those videos? Ahhh, but what's a beheading compared to a few naked photos? And what about the mass graves that are uncovered daily in Iraq? But we're the bad guys.
I hardly think that Americans are the most self-deluded. We're not the ones running around trying to rebuild the Abbasid Caliphate, now are we?
"Check out Al Jazeera, if you can find it. Then you might see a sampling of what's really going on over there: shot after shot of dead civilians, including many kids. Many more shots of civilians, barely alive, lying in squalid hospital beds, the remains of their arms and legs wrapped in bandages after being blown off by bombs. "
eh? Who exactly is blowing up civilians? The US, or the so-called insurgents? I can see why Iraqis might hate the US, when Syrians and Muslim Palestinians cross the border to blow them up. I'm curious, though. Are these "picture after picture of abuse of prisoners in US prison camps" the same damn pictures of incidents in ONE PLACE shown over and over, or are these new prison abuses about which *nobody* over here has heard? As for "people, most of them completely innocent even by admission of the US commanders, who disappear into them for years without charges, without lawyers and without any chance to defend themselves", it is pretty impressive that so many people could have disappeared for years at the hands of the US when we've only been in Afghanistan for 4 years and Iraq for 2 years. These both also pale in comparison to previous instances of Americans being held hostage in Middle Eastern countries. Maybe it's our collective lack of understaning of Arab culture to which you alluded, but why should they expect lawyers when "we can't assume they share our more abstract values like our Bill of Rights "?
Regardless, your talent for hyperbole is awesome. Fox News isn't state-run, and isn't even vaguely American-owned.
Al Jazeera, much like Fox News, or any other media outlet, does not distribute truth to the world; that has never been their raison d'etre. They exist to get seen as much as possible so they can charge more for advertising. Violence sells. Sex sells. Crazy fear-mongering sells.
IANAB, but is this common practice in the UK?
Exactly. It just seems like a tool to facilitate gathering evidence once someone's actually been charged with a crime. It's somewhat analogous to having an actual physical safe full of documents, as opposed to encrypted file(s). Sure, the police can crack it open, and they're going to get the information they're after eventually, but it's quicker and easier for everyone involved just to give them the damn combination.