The whole point of creating a robotic soldier is that you don't risk the lives of any of your own side's human warriors in the effort to the kill other side's human warriors. The other side may not even have robots to be attacked. This is... just... so.... DUMB!!
Unless he's just trying to arrange so nobody ever develops and deploys combat robots, in which case rather than come up with stupid robotic laws that make it pointless to develop such robots, just say instead you don't want to see such robots developed. It's just dishonest otherwise.
Not that it would matter, when billions starve and get shot, bombed and nuked in the energy wars.
As opposed to billions of people starving, dying and otherwise suffering great misery from wars about things OTHER than energy?
Of course, we have an energy war going on in Nigeria, and some say that Iraq and Afghanistan would be in that category. And that's without considering historical wars for energy resources.
I wish they'd hurry up with portable fusion packs already!
Why do you have to be canadian to safely say the US government is stupid? I'm an US citizen and I'll say: my government is stupid. And insane. It hasn't given a damn about the constitution in what, 150 years at least? It's been all downhill since:-p
But not to worry, we're rapidly approaching the point where Our Robed Masters (i.e. the courts) will run the whole show anyways, so pretty soon it just won't matter who sits in Congress or the Oval Office. For some things they already do have the power, they just haven't been able to seize all the power for everything. Yet. But they're working on it!
Explicit codification of the "right to privacy" now derived in a tortured manner from the 1st, 5th, and 14th Amendments
Try the 9th and 10th amendments. The problem isn't that we don't have an explicit right to privacy, it's that people no longer understand the underlying basis for the operation of the constitution (the federal government is assumed to have no powers, except those explicitly granted it by the constitution - today people seem to think of it as being that the feds have all the power except those explicitly protected against).
Of course you can't expect the government to teach us the correct understanding - they only stand to lose from that! I'll spare you the rant against government (i.e. "public") schools:-p
And yet in your data set provided you will find your share of rural states giving more to the feds than they get back (e.g. NH, GA, IL, MN, NV, WI, etc. etc.), so it fails to make the point as strongly as you'd like.
But it's not terribly meaningful to break out the state data like it is there. Consider for example Virginia, which gets way more money than it takes in. It's both very densely urban, in the northeast part of the state, and extremely sparsely rural, in the southwest part of the state. I suspect much of the money it gets from the feds, however, has less to do with the rural areas being subsidized as it does the urban areas for their proximity to DC and national politics.
Same thing with Maryland.
Hawaii is another good example - while some of the islands are rural and sparsely populated, I would expect most of the "excess" money it gets is in relation to the military installations rather than to subsidizing the rural areas.
So that data isn't really all it's cracked up to be.
Here in Georgia there's always big feuds between the city of Atlanta (half the state's population in one city) versus, oh, the entire rest of the state, almost all of which is rural agrarian. The farmers always complain The City has too much influence on state politics.
They should have wondered about this a long time ago, before there were weapons all over the country, no ?
Huh? There were always weapons all over the country. 200 years ago, most of the country was still wilderness and guns were essential survival tools, whether against Indians, bears, or rustlers. The pervasiveness of guns in the US was notable even into the 20th century, where during WWI our troops had an advantage in marksmanship over the Germans (and the French and British, which is why it was so demoralizing to the Germans - they hadn't had to contend with such level of shooting skill in the years before the US entered the war).
Even today there are some parts of the US still remote enough and wilderness enough where guns would be considered essential for survival. Out in Montana or Idaho or Alaska, for example, there's plenty of wilderness, lots of potentially dangerous wild animals, and lots of small, isolated communities and loners at risk from those animals.
Congress has the authority to grant letters of marque and reprisal. This means letting private individuals own warships to hunt down enemy merchants.
In the 18th century, naval warships were indeed the most powerful weapons of the day, and the constitution specifically considers that private citizens could, would and should own them. Note the letters of marque aren't about letting private citizens gain access to warships, it's about letting private citizens use warships to attack ships of other nations. The only thing that stopped private citizens from owning warships in times of peace was the cost, not the constitution.
As an interesting aside, Ron Paul introduced two bill into Congress in October 2001 (H.R. 3074, Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001, and H.R. 3076, September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001) in contemplation of letting private US citizens hunt down terrorists on their own (and keep any loot, er, terrorist owned assets they found along the way).
You can buy tanks, but only after they've been de-militarized (i.e. had the weapons systems removed). I remember some years ago a radio DJ talking about some guy in California who owned 5 Sherman tanks.
Considering the Constitution was written to be understood by people with little more than an elementary school education, I find your condescension towards those average Joe citizens who discuss the constitution to be amusing.
You don't need a Ph.D. (or a J.D.) to understand or talk intelligently about the constitution. To fancy that such in a pre-requisite tells us more about you than it does about those who hold is such disdain.
While a government having an army may very well be a given, the US constitution still explicitly enumerates this in Article I section 8.
This explicit grant of authority for a military was necessary because of the way our constitution was intended to be understood (which has long since been discarded) - the government by default has no authority to do anything, and then authority for specific things is explicitly granted by the constitution.
People today like to claim the "general welfare" clause invalidates this interpretation (they don't say it in that way, of course, but that's what they really mean), but that's because there are three things they haven't read, or if they have, they haven't understood: amendment 9, amendment 10, and Federalist 41.
In the unlikely event they have read and understood these things, but still insist the general welfare clause lets the feds do whatever their pet cause may be, what they are really telling you is they are government junkies who have no love of freedom and no respect for their fellow citizens.
See also Stefan Molyneux's The Gun in the Room, Part 1 and Part 2.
A homicide bomber is just as much a guided bomb as a JDAM. One is walked in to its target by a human, the other is flown in by a laser. Guided is guided, regardless of the level of sophistication of the guidance system.
Besides, most bombers are NOT poor and desperate, they are middle class with a real chance at a happy and fulfilling life. They are the exact opposite of the poor, oppressed masses who should be desperate.
The 9/11 hijackers weren't poor or desperate. Neither Amrozi bin Nurhasyim nor Imam Samudra, the two convicted in the Bali bombing, are, by any report I can find, poor or destitute or ignorant. In fact, quite the opposite they are described as being well educated and living comfortably. These are not anomalies, this is how it is with islamic terrorists.
No, the people strapping bombs to their backs and blowing themselves up aren't desperate in any normal sense of the word. They are the ones who actually have a chance at a decent life, but they decided for whatever reason that slaughtering jewish civilians (or hindu civilians, or christian civilians, or buddhist civilians, or taoist civilians, or catholic civilians, or atheist civilians, or orthodox christian civilians, or african animist civialians, or...) is more important than supporting their own families.
Nice religion they got there, eh? (What's the ratio of Christian palestinian bombers to Islamic palestinian bombers again?)
Now, we have camera phone pictures coming back from places like Lebanon, showing the devastation caused to people just like us, by our weapons.
And raw footage of the aftermath of a homicide bomber blowing up a bus.
But for some reason it doesn't seem to cause the same outrage to watch the slaughter of innocent civilians - grandmothers, little kids, students and the like. As long as they're jews, the world seems to just shrug its shoulders and not care. But should anybody ever fight back and harm a single hair on the head of an arab, all hell breaks loose.
*rolls eyes*
There are no innocent victims in the middle east, and there hasn't been for millenia. It's ALWAYS been the most fscked up part of the world since the dawn of civilization.
I suspect that a resignation a week or two ago not only wouldn't have helped the republicans, it might actually have hurt them. The democrats, sensing blood, would have gone into maximum frenzy mode motivating their base even more, while republicans would have stood around scratching their head wondering "WTF?" Might even have put people into conspiracy or scandal mode, and scandals and corruption hurt the republicans FAR more this year than Iraq ever did. Don't need to pile that on even deeper right before an election.
You're looking at it from entirely too low a level.
BOTH parties are actively seeking to ever grow the power and size and scope of the federal government.
BOTH parties are seeking to spend ever increasing amounts of money, and that means either tax and spend or borrow and spend, but that's a minimal difference since borrowed money has to come from somewhere at some point down the line.
BOTH parties want to impose ever greater controls on my life and on what I can and cannot do - oh sure, what parts of my life they want to control may be different, but that's not much consolation.
Growing the government, spending more money and controlling our lives - that's what BOTH parties stand for. In all these fundamental respects, the two parties are the same. Sure, a few details vary from day to day, but not in ways that are important in the grand scheme of things. I want a smaller government, less spending, and less control, in ALL areas, but NEITHER party is going to give that to me to ANY areas.
He was elected by basically being a Republican running on an independent ticket
You're so close to learning something here... that there is fundamentally no difference between the vast majority of politicians, and thus minimal difference between the two parties. Changing the house from R to D won't really change much of anything at the end of the day. SSDD.
I have to agree that Lieberman would be a very poor choice for VP candidate. He wouldn't go over well running for EITHER party at this point. He'll have to content himself as being a Senator for the rest of his career. But that's not so bad - the pay and the benefits of being a congress critter are quite handsome indeed. Far superior to what the vast majority of americans get...
I think you'll find that the only politician who may not have a history of voting for unconstitutional bills is Ron Paul (R-TX). If you want to set up treason tribunals for politicians running rough-shod over the constitution, there won't be anybody left in Congress, on EITHER side of the aisle.
Voting third party in our election system IS effectively throwing your vote away.
Only because you, and many like you, say it is. Just imagine everybody woke up and said "Wait, by voting R or D, THAT is throwing my vote away!"
You are perpetuating the stereotype and serving to only more deeply entrench an already deeply flawed system. The masses won't change their thought process on their own, they follow a strong example. If a critical mass of people voted third party, the masses might start wondering what the big deal is and slowly change their way of thinking about the system.
Oh, it won't happen by 2008, it may not happen for another 50 years - changing societal opinions take time. But failure to be part of the solution means you are only helping to keep a broken system broken.
Could politicians really believe that that many millions of Americans don't deserve to be represented in Congress or the Presidency?
Yes, yes they can believe that. And they do.
They'd HAVE to change the system to a more fair electoral system.
No, no they wouldn't. It took them over 100 years to entrench the two party system so firmly it will be nigh impossible to dislodge it. What in the world makes you think they are about to give that up? Because a couple of people don't like it?
As long as the majority of people continue to vote for the Big Two, they will only get further and further entrenched. Every election they see as a "mandate", regardless of how slim the actual victory margin may have been. Every time they win, no matter how narrowly, they see it as continued justification for continuing the system as is.
We need to alter the societal mentality that "throwing your vote away" means voting third party, to instead mean voting for the Big Two.
The pig was first domesticated in China, not North Korea. While block printing is perhaps debatable as to whether it was first in China or Korea, movable type absolutely originated in China.
The Chinese are the ones with the history of world-changing innovation, just not recently.
"Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." (Novum Organum, Liber I, CXXIX by Francis Bacon)
"Gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and founded the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites." Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, Division of Labour and Mechanical Workshop. Tool and Machinery by Karl Marx.
You are aware that the Korea War was one of only two wars ever sanctioned by the United Nations. This isn't just about the US, it's the entire world against North Korea. You might want to reconsider that the problem really does lie with North Korea, and not everybody else on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of creating a robotic soldier is that you don't risk the lives of any of your own side's human warriors in the effort to the kill other side's human warriors. The other side may not even have robots to be attacked. This is... just... so.... DUMB!!
Unless he's just trying to arrange so nobody ever develops and deploys combat robots, in which case rather than come up with stupid robotic laws that make it pointless to develop such robots, just say instead you don't want to see such robots developed. It's just dishonest otherwise.
Not that it would matter, when billions starve and get shot, bombed and nuked in the energy wars.
As opposed to billions of people starving, dying and otherwise suffering great misery from wars about things OTHER than energy?
Of course, we have an energy war going on in Nigeria, and some say that Iraq and Afghanistan would be in that category.
And that's without considering historical wars for energy resources.
I wish they'd hurry up with portable fusion packs already!
Why do you have to be canadian to safely say the US government is stupid? I'm an US citizen and I'll say: my government is stupid. And insane. It hasn't given a damn about the constitution in what, 150 years at least? It's been all downhill since :-p
But not to worry, we're rapidly approaching the point where Our Robed Masters (i.e. the courts) will run the whole show anyways, so pretty soon it just won't matter who sits in Congress or the Oval Office. For some things they already do have the power, they just haven't been able to seize all the power for everything. Yet. But they're working on it!
Explicit codification of the "right to privacy" now derived in a tortured manner from the 1st, 5th, and 14th Amendments
:-p
Try the 9th and 10th amendments. The problem isn't that we don't have an explicit right to privacy, it's that people no longer understand the underlying basis for the operation of the constitution (the federal government is assumed to have no powers, except those explicitly granted it by the constitution - today people seem to think of it as being that the feds have all the power except those explicitly protected against).
Of course you can't expect the government to teach us the correct understanding - they only stand to lose from that! I'll spare you the rant against government (i.e. "public") schools
And yet in your data set provided you will find your share of rural states giving more to the feds than they get back (e.g. NH, GA, IL, MN, NV, WI, etc. etc.), so it fails to make the point as strongly as you'd like.
But it's not terribly meaningful to break out the state data like it is there. Consider for example Virginia, which gets way more money than it takes in. It's both very densely urban, in the northeast part of the state, and extremely sparsely rural, in the southwest part of the state. I suspect much of the money it gets from the feds, however, has less to do with the rural areas being subsidized as it does the urban areas for their proximity to DC and national politics.
Same thing with Maryland.
Hawaii is another good example - while some of the islands are rural and sparsely populated, I would expect most of the "excess" money it gets is in relation to the military installations rather than to subsidizing the rural areas.
So that data isn't really all it's cracked up to be.
Here in Georgia there's always big feuds between the city of Atlanta (half the state's population in one city) versus, oh, the entire rest of the state, almost all of which is rural agrarian. The farmers always complain The City has too much influence on state politics.
They should have wondered about this a long time ago, before there were weapons all over the country, no ?
Huh? There were always weapons all over the country. 200 years ago, most of the country was still wilderness and guns were essential survival tools, whether against Indians, bears, or rustlers. The pervasiveness of guns in the US was notable even into the 20th century, where during WWI our troops had an advantage in marksmanship over the Germans (and the French and British, which is why it was so demoralizing to the Germans - they hadn't had to contend with such level of shooting skill in the years before the US entered the war).
Even today there are some parts of the US still remote enough and wilderness enough where guns would be considered essential for survival. Out in Montana or Idaho or Alaska, for example, there's plenty of wilderness, lots of potentially dangerous wild animals, and lots of small, isolated communities and loners at risk from those animals.
Congress has the authority to grant letters of marque and reprisal. This means letting private individuals own warships to hunt down enemy merchants.
In the 18th century, naval warships were indeed the most powerful weapons of the day, and the constitution specifically considers that private citizens could, would and should own them. Note the letters of marque aren't about letting private citizens gain access to warships, it's about letting private citizens use warships to attack ships of other nations. The only thing that stopped private citizens from owning warships in times of peace was the cost, not the constitution.
As an interesting aside, Ron Paul introduced two bill into Congress in October 2001 (H.R. 3074, Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001, and H.R. 3076, September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001) in contemplation of letting private US citizens hunt down terrorists on their own (and keep any loot, er, terrorist owned assets they found along the way).
You can buy tanks, but only after they've been de-militarized (i.e. had the weapons systems removed). I remember some years ago a radio DJ talking about some guy in California who owned 5 Sherman tanks.
Considering the Constitution was written to be understood by people with little more than an elementary school education, I find your condescension towards those average Joe citizens who discuss the constitution to be amusing.
You don't need a Ph.D. (or a J.D.) to understand or talk intelligently about the constitution. To fancy that such in a pre-requisite tells us more about you than it does about those who hold is such disdain.
While a government having an army may very well be a given, the US constitution still explicitly enumerates this in Article I section 8.
This explicit grant of authority for a military was necessary because of the way our constitution was intended to be understood (which has long since been discarded) - the government by default has no authority to do anything, and then authority for specific things is explicitly granted by the constitution.
People today like to claim the "general welfare" clause invalidates this interpretation (they don't say it in that way, of course, but that's what they really mean), but that's because there are three things they haven't read, or if they have, they haven't understood: amendment 9, amendment 10, and Federalist 41.
In the unlikely event they have read and understood these things, but still insist the general welfare clause lets the feds do whatever their pet cause may be, what they are really telling you is they are government junkies who have no love of freedom and no respect for their fellow citizens.
See also Stefan Molyneux's The Gun in the Room, Part 1 and Part 2.
A homicide bomber is just as much a guided bomb as a JDAM. One is walked in to its target by a human, the other is flown in by a laser. Guided is guided, regardless of the level of sophistication of the guidance system.
...) is more important than supporting their own families.
Besides, most bombers are NOT poor and desperate, they are middle class with a real chance at a happy and fulfilling life. They are the exact opposite of the poor, oppressed masses who should be desperate.
The 9/11 hijackers weren't poor or desperate. Neither Amrozi bin Nurhasyim nor Imam Samudra, the two convicted in the Bali bombing, are, by any report I can find, poor or destitute or ignorant. In fact, quite the opposite they are described as being well educated and living comfortably. These are not anomalies, this is how it is with islamic terrorists.
No, the people strapping bombs to their backs and blowing themselves up aren't desperate in any normal sense of the word. They are the ones who actually have a chance at a decent life, but they decided for whatever reason that slaughtering jewish civilians (or hindu civilians, or christian civilians, or buddhist civilians, or taoist civilians, or catholic civilians, or atheist civilians, or orthodox christian civilians, or african animist civialians, or
Nice religion they got there, eh? (What's the ratio of Christian palestinian bombers to Islamic palestinian bombers again?)
Now, we have camera phone pictures coming back from places like Lebanon, showing the devastation caused to people just like us, by our weapons.
And raw footage of the aftermath of a homicide bomber blowing up a bus.
But for some reason it doesn't seem to cause the same outrage to watch the slaughter of innocent civilians - grandmothers, little kids, students and the like. As long as they're jews, the world seems to just shrug its shoulders and not care. But should anybody ever fight back and harm a single hair on the head of an arab, all hell breaks loose.
*rolls eyes*
There are no innocent victims in the middle east, and there hasn't been for millenia. It's ALWAYS been the most fscked up part of the world since the dawn of civilization.
Why limit yourself to Fox? Remember the New York Times' Jayson Blair? Outright fabricating stories. Or CBS and Dan Rather, "Fake but accurate!"
You can't trust the politicians, but you also can't trust the media. ANY of the media.
I suspect that a resignation a week or two ago not only wouldn't have helped the republicans, it might actually have hurt them. The democrats, sensing blood, would have gone into maximum frenzy mode motivating their base even more, while republicans would have stood around scratching their head wondering "WTF?" Might even have put people into conspiracy or scandal mode, and scandals and corruption hurt the republicans FAR more this year than Iraq ever did. Don't need to pile that on even deeper right before an election.
You're looking at it from entirely too low a level.
BOTH parties are actively seeking to ever grow the power and size and scope of the federal government.
BOTH parties are seeking to spend ever increasing amounts of money, and that means either tax and spend or borrow and spend, but that's a minimal difference since borrowed money has to come from somewhere at some point down the line.
BOTH parties want to impose ever greater controls on my life and on what I can and cannot do - oh sure, what parts of my life they want to control may be different, but that's not much consolation.
Growing the government, spending more money and controlling our lives - that's what BOTH parties stand for. In all these fundamental respects, the two parties are the same. Sure, a few details vary from day to day, but not in ways that are important in the grand scheme of things. I want a smaller government, less spending, and less control, in ALL areas, but NEITHER party is going to give that to me to ANY areas.
He was elected by basically being a Republican running on an independent ticket
You're so close to learning something here... that there is fundamentally no difference between the vast majority of politicians, and thus minimal difference between the two parties. Changing the house from R to D won't really change much of anything at the end of the day. SSDD.
I have to agree that Lieberman would be a very poor choice for VP candidate. He wouldn't go over well running for EITHER party at this point. He'll have to content himself as being a Senator for the rest of his career. But that's not so bad - the pay and the benefits of being a congress critter are quite handsome indeed. Far superior to what the vast majority of americans get...
I think you'll find that the only politician who may not have a history of voting for unconstitutional bills is Ron Paul (R-TX). If you want to set up treason tribunals for politicians running rough-shod over the constitution, there won't be anybody left in Congress, on EITHER side of the aisle.
Wait... now that you mention it...
Funny thing, that, Democrats finally manage to rig enough elections to win seats, and they magically stop complaining about voter fraud.
They did spend weeks, if not months, telling us that if they fail to win the reason would necessarily have to be because of fraud.
Hmmmmm...
Voting third party in our election system IS effectively throwing your vote away.
Only because you, and many like you, say it is. Just imagine everybody woke up and said "Wait, by voting R or D, THAT is throwing my vote away!"
You are perpetuating the stereotype and serving to only more deeply entrench an already deeply flawed system. The masses won't change their thought process on their own, they follow a strong example. If a critical mass of people voted third party, the masses might start wondering what the big deal is and slowly change their way of thinking about the system.
Oh, it won't happen by 2008, it may not happen for another 50 years - changing societal opinions take time. But failure to be part of the solution means you are only helping to keep a broken system broken.
Could politicians really believe that that many millions of Americans don't deserve to be represented in Congress or the Presidency?
Yes, yes they can believe that. And they do.
They'd HAVE to change the system to a more fair electoral system.
No, no they wouldn't. It took them over 100 years to entrench the two party system so firmly it will be nigh impossible to dislodge it. What in the world makes you think they are about to give that up? Because a couple of people don't like it?
As long as the majority of people continue to vote for the Big Two, they will only get further and further entrenched. Every election they see as a "mandate", regardless of how slim the actual victory margin may have been. Every time they win, no matter how narrowly, they see it as continued justification for continuing the system as is.
We need to alter the societal mentality that "throwing your vote away" means voting third party, to instead mean voting for the Big Two.
How about a free jar of Vaseline with your voting stub? :-/
The pig was first domesticated in China, not North Korea. While block printing is perhaps debatable as to whether it was first in China or Korea, movable type absolutely originated in China.
The Chinese are the ones with the history of world-changing innovation, just not recently.
"Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." (Novum Organum, Liber I, CXXIX by Francis Bacon)
"Gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and founded the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites." Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, Division of Labour and Mechanical Workshop. Tool and Machinery by Karl Marx.
And why were the sanctions put into place?
You are aware that the Korea War was one of only two wars ever sanctioned by the United Nations. This isn't just about the US, it's the entire world against North Korea. You might want to reconsider that the problem really does lie with North Korea, and not everybody else on the planet.