Considering the last declaration of war by the U.S. Congress was World War II, we have no enemies currently. We are currently "at peace" since there is no formal declaration of war, so the U.S. government's actions in other countries must be facilitated as if we were not at war, which we aren't, since there was no formal declaration.
It is beyond me why people have decided to interpret the Congress's power to declare war to mean that everything else pertaining to war in the constitution is void until Congress declares war, including the President's power as Commander in Chief. This was never imagined by those who wrote or ratified the document, and has never been practiced. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both waged war without declarations of war.
There are many things that are assumed as part of the context for the Constitution. Those include Common Law (including habeas corpus) and the Law of War. Part of these assumptions are that we don't extend the same rights to enemy combatants as we do to subjects of the government, as it would be impossible to so. Instead, we make every effort to spy on them without warrants and on the battlefield take their lives without due process. That is the meaning of war, and protecting a country against a determined enemy without doing so would be impossible.
The Federal government is there for four reasons: to PROTECT the inherent rights of individuals from any government or State, to coin money in gold or silver only, to call up militias of individuals in order to defend against a real attack within the borders of any State, and to defend against piracy on the high seas.
You're missing a few, for instance, To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; (note it's talking about currency, not just gold and silver coin. The states are limited to making gold and silver coins.) To establish post offices and post roads; To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
The rights written in the Bill of Rights apply to all humans, and are not granted by the Constitution. The Constitution just reminds the Federal government that it can not revoke these rights, or change them. Habeas Corpus is an inherent right for all humans that we must demand to keep fully removed from any government's desire to remove it or restrain it.
The bill of rights doesn't say anything about habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is part of Common Law. And as such, it has never been automatically applied to military detainees, either in practice or in theory. The only time it has been revoked in the US was during the Civil War, by President Lincoln.
Thanks for clarifying that. Maybe a few/.ers will become a little less politically challenged. Let me just add that at no time in the history of common law or the rules of war have military detainees been given automatic habeas corpus.
I don't know if it's funny or tragic, but when people only associate with others of similar political bent, and they all affirm and encourage any statements that further their shared political ends, no matter how divorced those statements are from reality, soon they all accept them as unquestioned truth. I can think of a dozen examples off the top of my head, but I would get modded "troll" if I listed them.
'In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves.'
This is a massive violation of human rights. The US DOD has many Australians in it, who may have therefore been spied on by the Australian government without a warrant. Therefore Australia is a police state.
"that can identify people suspected of making or planting bombs."
Why would you even need a spray to identify people suspected of making or planting bombs? If they're already suspected, then surely you know which people you suspect! Why is precise writing so hard for professional writers??? How about this -- It identifies people who have been in recent contact with certain types of possible explosives residue.
The agony the Raytheon gun inflicts is probably equal to anything in a torture chamber - these waves are tuned to a frequency exactly designed to stimulate the pain nerves.
But this is not true. Torture relies just as much on fear of death or permanent injury as it does on pain. I do not believe a pain-only device would make an effective torture device. Read a book like Bravo-Two-Zero, for an idea of what the torture was like practiced by Iraqis against coalition POW's in the first Iraq war; and more importantly, what the men who are able to resist it are like. They said they tested it on "hardened marines," and they couldn't withstand it more than a couple seconds. I'd like to see how Delta or SAS guys would do against it.
It's not a universal truism, but it is a valid concern these days, at a time when we are much closer to a society where the average citizen fears the police than we ever have been the past. Your argument ignores - implicitly rejects - that concern, in the face of increasingly frequent evidence to the contrary.
What do you base that on? I think the average citizen fears the police FAR less than they did in the 60's and 70's.
STFU. In the history of the united states, no one has ever been tasered for "asking too many question," "being in a library without a library card," or calling an ambulance. Every day there are large protests against the government in the USA, and the police show up to PROTECT them. In China or the USSR, they would be imprisoned, "disappeared," or executed.
Maybe it's not totally your fault -- maybe your local newspaper says, "student tasered for asking too many questions." But you're still an idiot for believing it.
Instead of vibrating a motor so you can consciously react, it would be cool if it could send electrical impulses down the appropriate nerve pathways to make you involuntarily avoid the object. Maybe it would even be possible to make a device that could let you dodge bullets.
although you should read up on those time courses and realize that your 800 year figure is also bogus
The original study said IIRC it ranged from 400 to 1200 years, with an average of 800. If there was a new study refining the lag, please reference it.
Global warming theories aren't based on correlations, they're based on fundamental principles of science.
That's quite interesting. Actual science is based upon evidence. Since there the evidence has been consistently uncooperative with the CO2 warming theory on, you claim it's simply based on the "fundamental principles of science." Marvelous. We now understand the "fundamental principles of science" so well, that we can now simply stop observing the universe and simply deduce reality from the "fundamental principles of science." Take down all the weather stations now, and tell China they can blow up our weather satellites. We will simply model the weather system from here on out. We have enough data. Cancel those particle accelerators they're building. The climatologists will deduce for the physicists the behavior of subatomic particles from the "fundamental principles of science."
Increase CO2 in an atmospheric gas mix, and infrared absorption goes up. End of story.
Actually it's just the beginning of the story. It's a very narrow band of IR that CO2 absorbs. Even at the lowest CO2 concentrations, the entire band is nearly saturated. The only way that more CO2 can increase absorption is that the fringes of the absorption spectrum expand a little. By all available evidence, this has a negligible effect on the climate.
This theory started with the observations from Venus, with the idea that CO2 may be more effective greenhouse gas than N2 and O2. The data now suggests that this is not the case in any appreciable way. If this theory had not been politicized, I seriously doubt any scientists would still be clinging to it. Venus is hotter because it has a 70x denser atmosphere, not because its atmosphere is made of CO2 rather than other gasses.
After the temperature BEGAN to rise. Temperature and CO2 feed on each other in a positive feedback cycle. The Milankovitch cycles, by themselves, aren't enough to account for the temperature swings in the geological record. There needs to be some mechanism that amplifies the temperature swings, and CO2 accounts for it.
That positive feedback implies some important things for making policy. In particular, it means warming will go further than you'd expect -- CO2 production leads to more CO2 production, rising temperatures cause temperature to go up further.
There is NOTHING even APPROXIMATING a positive feedback cycle in the data. The data shows CO2 levels simply FOLLOWING temperature levels, delayed by an average of 800 years. Thus it is actually when CO2 is peaking that temperatures have started to plummet the fastest, and vise versa. Everything that is said to make it appear that this doesn't totally undermine the CO2 warming theory is nothing but double-speak.
A couple of fairly close descriptions are here already, but let me take a stab at it.
The Chernobyl test was to see if they could power all the plant from the momentum of the turbine after an emergency shut-down of one reactor before powering up another reactor. To do this, they had to take a reactor off-line. They gradually reduced its power output, but just before taking it off, there was some bureaucratic reason why they had to delay the test for 12 hours or so. This caused a problem, because at the low power the reactor was down to, "nuclear poison" build up which slows the reaction. After a point can leads to a complete stop, ruining all the fuel in the reactor. When it was time to perform the test the reactor power started dropping precariously, and to keep the power up, the ended up removing NEARLY ALL the control rods, FAR in excess of the number they are allowed to remove. At that point the water and the nuclear poison were slowing the reactions in place of the control rods. To perform the test, they also had to stop the water circulation that goes to the turbine. Eventually, the power level stabilized, as the nuclear poison started reacting more without the control rods. Then power started increasing, until in a matter of seconds all the nuclear poison was gone. Then, without the water circulation, steam bubbles formed as well, removing the water from between the fuel rods, making there be practically nothing in place to restrain the reaction. The meltdown happened well before there was a chance to replace the control rods, blowing many of the control rods out the top of the building. There were other factors, but I believe these are the central ones. Summary: Unsafe design + Unsafe operation + No containment building = bad.
In the parent post I state nothing but the simple fact that they arrested him for trying to incite a riot, and someone mods it "troll." WTF?! Police state! Police state!
This is some of what he said after being tasered. Someone modded this "troll" so I'm reposting it.
There are people that know I'm here. You can't... you can't... kill me. Oh my God, you're giving me to the government. They're giving me to the government! They're giving me to the government! Everyone who was here today, will you please go to the police station -- ask them, where's the guy who was arrested at the protest. Ask them where's the guy who was arrested today at the John Kerry rally. They're going to try to kill me. They're going to try to kill me.
I can agree that he was resisting arrest, but in this case there was no need for the arrest in the first place. Have we lost all touch with our freedoms that we think we are living in a police state that one can be arrested and detained for a non-threatening reason?
They started, not by trying to arrest him, but escort him out. They were there to escort him out before he even started with his question, so I think we're really missing a big part of how this all started. It seems like he must have crashed the event in the first place, and was taking the mic when it was someone else's legitimate turn to speak.
They ultimately arrested him for trying to incite a riot, which he almost did, as you can see in some of the camera shots, a number of students had gotten up and were yelling at the cops and moving towards them as the kid is shouting "ow, ow, ow, ow, police brutality!"
Do you still have the freedom to speak if someone tells you to "SHUT UP!"? - What if the government tells you "SHUT UP! thats not "allowed here." The answer is you only have the rights you are willing to fight for. You only have the freedom if you say "NO, I WILL NOT SHUT UP!" - and nobody stands up for their rights anymore because THIS is what happens to them.
If that was the kind of society we lived in, then only the loudest, most obnoxious people would ever get to be heard. Fortunately, it is not, and we can have forums with rules, where people can take turns speaking, and those who want to disrupt them can be removed.
He was handcuffed, on the ground, with six cops kneeling on him when he was tasered. How was that appropriate?
It's not what happened. It looks like they got one hand cuffed, and then he started struggling again, and they couldn't get the other hand. That's when they had to resort to a low power stun gun (not a taser). And it worked, as it got him quickly under control with causing any serious harm to him or the officers.
No, that story claims that people have been convicted of neglecting their duty by performing machine counts instead of manual counts. That's a whole lot different than election fraud. And the only basis I see for Greg Palast claiming that Kerry won Ohio instead of Bush, is the idea that the exit polls results should be considered to be more accurate than the actual vote. Which is of course absurd.
There are people that know I'm here. You can't... you can't... kill me. Oh my God, you're giving me to the government. They're giving me to the government! They're giving me to the government! You know who I am. Will you please tell people? Will you please tell people why I'm being arrested today? I didn't do anything. Everyone who was here today, will you please go to the police station -- ask them, where's the guy who was arrested at the protest. Ask them where's the guy who was arrested today at the John Kerry rally. They're going to try to kill me. They're going to try to kill me.
So what's the consensus? Drugs, or unassisted left-wing delusion?
Slashdot Mirror
It is beyond me why people have decided to interpret the Congress's power to declare war to mean that everything else pertaining to war in the constitution is void until Congress declares war, including the President's power as Commander in Chief. This was never imagined by those who wrote or ratified the document, and has never been practiced. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both waged war without declarations of war.
There are many things that are assumed as part of the context for the Constitution. Those include Common Law (including habeas corpus) and the Law of War. Part of these assumptions are that we don't extend the same rights to enemy combatants as we do to subjects of the government, as it would be impossible to so. Instead, we make every effort to spy on them without warrants and on the battlefield take their lives without due process. That is the meaning of war, and protecting a country against a determined enemy without doing so would be impossible.
You're missing a few, for instance,
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; (note it's talking about currency, not just gold and silver coin. The states are limited to making gold and silver coins.)
To establish post offices and post roads;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy;
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
The bill of rights doesn't say anything about habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is part of Common Law. And as such, it has never been automatically applied to military detainees, either in practice or in theory. The only time it has been revoked in the US was during the Civil War, by President Lincoln.
No, it's an attempt to mock left-wing logic.
Thanks for clarifying that. Maybe a few /.ers will become a little less politically challenged. Let me just add that at no time in the history of common law or the rules of war have military detainees been given automatic habeas corpus.
I don't know if it's funny or tragic, but when people only associate with others of similar political bent, and they all affirm and encourage any statements that further their shared political ends, no matter how divorced those statements are from reality, soon they all accept them as unquestioned truth. I can think of a dozen examples off the top of my head, but I would get modded "troll" if I listed them.
'In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves.'
This is a massive violation of human rights. The US DOD has many Australians in it, who may have therefore been spied on by the Australian government without a warrant. Therefore Australia is a police state.
"that can identify people suspected of making or planting bombs."
Why would you even need a spray to identify people suspected of making or planting bombs? If they're already suspected, then surely you know which people you suspect! Why is precise writing so hard for professional writers??? How about this -- It identifies people who have been in recent contact with certain types of possible explosives residue.
But this is not true. Torture relies just as much on fear of death or permanent injury as it does on pain. I do not believe a pain-only device would make an effective torture device. Read a book like Bravo-Two-Zero, for an idea of what the torture was like practiced by Iraqis against coalition POW's in the first Iraq war; and more importantly, what the men who are able to resist it are like. They said they tested it on "hardened marines," and they couldn't withstand it more than a couple seconds. I'd like to see how Delta or SAS guys would do against it.
What do you base that on? I think the average citizen fears the police FAR less than they did in the 60's and 70's.
STFU. In the history of the united states, no one has ever been tasered for "asking too many question," "being in a library without a library card," or calling an ambulance. Every day there are large protests against the government in the USA, and the police show up to PROTECT them. In China or the USSR, they would be imprisoned, "disappeared," or executed.
Maybe it's not totally your fault -- maybe your local newspaper says, "student tasered for asking too many questions." But you're still an idiot for believing it.
Instead of vibrating a motor so you can consciously react, it would be cool if it could send electrical impulses down the appropriate nerve pathways to make you involuntarily avoid the object. Maybe it would even be possible to make a device that could let you dodge bullets.
The original study said IIRC it ranged from 400 to 1200 years, with an average of 800. If there was a new study refining the lag, please reference it.
That's quite interesting. Actual science is based upon evidence. Since there the evidence has been consistently uncooperative with the CO2 warming theory on, you claim it's simply based on the "fundamental principles of science." Marvelous. We now understand the "fundamental principles of science" so well, that we can now simply stop observing the universe and simply deduce reality from the "fundamental principles of science." Take down all the weather stations now, and tell China they can blow up our weather satellites. We will simply model the weather system from here on out. We have enough data. Cancel those particle accelerators they're building. The climatologists will deduce for the physicists the behavior of subatomic particles from the "fundamental principles of science."
Actually it's just the beginning of the story. It's a very narrow band of IR that CO2 absorbs. Even at the lowest CO2 concentrations, the entire band is nearly saturated. The only way that more CO2 can increase absorption is that the fringes of the absorption spectrum expand a little. By all available evidence, this has a negligible effect on the climate.
This theory started with the observations from Venus, with the idea that CO2 may be more effective greenhouse gas than N2 and O2. The data now suggests that this is not the case in any appreciable way. If this theory had not been politicized, I seriously doubt any scientists would still be clinging to it. Venus is hotter because it has a 70x denser atmosphere, not because its atmosphere is made of CO2 rather than other gasses.
There is NOTHING even APPROXIMATING a positive feedback cycle in the data. The data shows CO2 levels simply FOLLOWING temperature levels, delayed by an average of 800 years. Thus it is actually when CO2 is peaking that temperatures have started to plummet the fastest, and vise versa. Everything that is said to make it appear that this doesn't totally undermine the CO2 warming theory is nothing but double-speak.
Sure, mass hysteria caused by an psychoactive alien virus.
A couple of fairly close descriptions are here already, but let me take a stab at it.
The Chernobyl test was to see if they could power all the plant from the momentum of the turbine after an emergency shut-down of one reactor before powering up another reactor. To do this, they had to take a reactor off-line. They gradually reduced its power output, but just before taking it off, there was some bureaucratic reason why they had to delay the test for 12 hours or so. This caused a problem, because at the low power the reactor was down to, "nuclear poison" build up which slows the reaction. After a point can leads to a complete stop, ruining all the fuel in the reactor. When it was time to perform the test the reactor power started dropping precariously, and to keep the power up, the ended up removing NEARLY ALL the control rods, FAR in excess of the number they are allowed to remove. At that point the water and the nuclear poison were slowing the reactions in place of the control rods. To perform the test, they also had to stop the water circulation that goes to the turbine. Eventually, the power level stabilized, as the nuclear poison started reacting more without the control rods. Then power started increasing, until in a matter of seconds all the nuclear poison was gone. Then, without the water circulation, steam bubbles formed as well, removing the water from between the fuel rods, making there be practically nothing in place to restrain the reaction. The meltdown happened well before there was a chance to replace the control rods, blowing many of the control rods out the top of the building. There were other factors, but I believe these are the central ones. Summary: Unsafe design + Unsafe operation + No containment building = bad.
In the parent post I state nothing but the simple fact that they arrested him for trying to incite a riot, and someone mods it "troll." WTF?! Police state! Police state!
They started, not by trying to arrest him, but escort him out. They were there to escort him out before he even started with his question, so I think we're really missing a big part of how this all started. It seems like he must have crashed the event in the first place, and was taking the mic when it was someone else's legitimate turn to speak.
They ultimately arrested him for trying to incite a riot, which he almost did, as you can see in some of the camera shots, a number of students had gotten up and were yelling at the cops and moving towards them as the kid is shouting "ow, ow, ow, ow, police brutality!"
If that was the kind of society we lived in, then only the loudest, most obnoxious people would ever get to be heard. Fortunately, it is not, and we can have forums with rules, where people can take turns speaking, and those who want to disrupt them can be removed.
It's not what happened. It looks like they got one hand cuffed, and then he started struggling again, and they couldn't get the other hand. That's when they had to resort to a low power stun gun (not a taser). And it worked, as it got him quickly under control with causing any serious harm to him or the officers.
No, that story claims that people have been convicted of neglecting their duty by performing machine counts instead of manual counts. That's a whole lot different than election fraud. And the only basis I see for Greg Palast claiming that Kerry won Ohio instead of Bush, is the idea that the exit polls results should be considered to be more accurate than the actual vote. Which is of course absurd.
Also, they arrested him for trying to incite a riot.
So what's the consensus? Drugs, or unassisted left-wing delusion?