As someone who takes his laptop everywhere, this is chilling news about the ongoing erosion of our rights:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
For further Orwellian perspectives, take a look at this quote:
Customs Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern said the efforts “do not infringe on Americans’ privacy.”
Information must be impounded, shackled, and waterboarded in this New Republican United States of America.
Sounds like a great way to set people up. They take your laptop away from you, they ‘find’ terrioristic files on it, they divert your journey to Gitmo.
That’s why I take lots of pictures of my ass and put them in many folders with provocative or sinister names. Hey, if they’re gonna annoy me, why can’t I return the favour?
They do that anyway, or worse.. what makes you think they need an excuse?
This is less than 1/2 step away from Stalinism. Next they will be invading your home to access your desktop computer.
The entertainment industry has for several years now publicized the issue of pirating of copyrighted material being used to fund international terrorism.
Clearly we all should be against the terrorists and every means they use to fund themselves in their aim of destroying freedom. If you have no files on your laptop that infringe copyright then you should have nothing to worry about. If you DO then clearly you take the risk that all terrorist supporters take and must face the consequences.
It shouldn’t take much to create an protocol for such a terrorist funding screening (a simple search of the hard drive for movie files or mp3s should suffice).
Remember you are either with us or with the terrorists.
OK – its an exaggeration but would anyone put it past the entertainment industry to try to put this into law if they thought they could get away with it?
This is creepy. Given how much personal information is on a laptop, I don’t think this would hold up under court review.
I don’t think even cars, which are pretty much as unprotected from search and seizure as personal property can get, can be taken away from you to be searched without probable cause.
And there’s another problem — laptops are indispensible business tools for someone. If you’re a photographer going on a photoshoot, you might be screwed without your laptop to download and edit onto… not to mention the more quotidian business purposes…
Nuts.
Done and done.
intartubes FTW
Speaking of he government’s delightful infringement on us mindless civilians, check out the Bush Administration’s next trick!
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/08/01/todd.defining.abortion.cnn
In adition,there have been cases where the contents of USB memory sticks were also confiscated,some dude here in Australia got in trouble for having some kiddieporn on a USB stick,that was a random check as well.
One more reason I wont be travelling to the US in a hurry,that and the fact that you can be arrested and locked away for a month without seeing any legal help if the customs guy doesnt like your face.
I wish I could be shocked about this, but seven and a half years of Outrage Fatigue have hardened me to this type of news.
Wow. That’s evil.
I really do not understand the border security people in the US.
Recently it allowed entry to both Nick Griffin and David Irving. Griffin is the leader of the British National Party which espouses far right policies, and has advocated the forced “repatriation” of non-whites. He also has a conviction for racially motivated violence. Irving claims to be a historian but is better known as a holocaust denier. He sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel but lost when the judge ruled he was a holocaust denier and thus it was not libellous to call him one.
At the same time I am always reading in my paper of UK citizens who once overstayed their visa for the US and get detained overnight at the airport before being deported.
I just know if the government got ahold of my ufo evidence in my laptop, they’d confiscate it & me and it would get stored in area 51
This is really awful. taking into account this paragraph, from the Washington Post article, it seems like there’s very little it can’t include. It’s hard to think of something that could be more obviously an unwarranted search and seizure.
A fun exposé of how “border security” is a complete bullshit lie aimed at controlling US, not “dangerous aliens.”:
http://www.buffalobeast.com/129/Lake_Feary.html
I wonder how soon it will be before they start seizing EEGs and try to scan them to find seditious thoughts.
The really surprising part is that apparently they can break encryption now. Makes you wonder who else can?
My whole work revolves around my laptop. They would have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers. I have all my code backed up but to set up a new one just the way I like it would take a good week. Has anybody heard of instances when this has happened? Do they need probable cause or can they do it on a whim?
This settles it. I simply must get a job with Customs or Homeland Security. (Doesn’t “Homeland Security” evoke the image of a small, family-owned home alarm company located in Iowa? Or Minnesota?)
Once I have been trained in their methods of Grand Arcane Certainty Kinetics (GACK) then I can make a thing so simply by saying that is it. For instance, I could take someone’s laptop to an unknown location, keep it for an indeterminate time, rummage through its contents, and no one at all could possibly have “any suspicion of wrongdoing.”
What an amazing time we live in! And what great power to alter reality has accrued to us! To make a certainty vanish into oblivion be merely stating that it has certainly vanished. Just think of the Power!
“Has anybody heard of instances when this has happened? “
On slashdot they’ve talked about several cases where people had their laptops taken, and months later still havent had them returned.
breaking encription? how quaint. Over here in the UK the govt passed a law such that if I don’t give them the password to something they want access to I am in deep legal shit. Basically they can lock me up AND fine me per day until I give them the information and they may still prosecute for the initial withholding. So if you fly into Blighty with your laptop and they want a look and ask for your password, don’t even think about withholding it…
Well if you have serious encryption on your laptop that is just more evidence you are up to no good. So they will just waterboard you until you cough up the password.
I seriously doubt that they can break PGP.
I will be taking my laptop with me on a trip in September. It’s for research purposes and all of my data will be on the machine. If they want to take it from me, they can haul me off to jail for resistance because I promise that if they attempt to confiscate my laptop I will put up as much of a fight as I possibly can. I’d rather be in prison than subjected to tyranny, and frankly I would question the patriotism of any American who wouldn’t be. There are a lot of things not worth getting arrested for; this is very good reason to resist and face arrest.
Unless they have a warrant, or at least probable cause, they don’t get to search to search my personal property without my consent. All they’ll find on my computer is a lot of boring data about the lengths of beetle tarsomeres and mandibles, numerous papers about phylogeny, and coordinates mapping the locations from which I’ve collection specimens of fungi… and none of it is any of Homeland Security’s business.
I don’t think even cars, which are pretty much as unprotected from search and seizure as personal property can get, can be taken away from you to be searched without probable cause.
Actually at the border things get a lot looser wrt our constitutional rights. 9th Circuit opinion:
“reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other electronic device at the international border.”
In the 2004 case of Flores-Montano, the SCOTUS held 9-0 that the government can detain automobiles at the border for a relatively brief period of time to non-destructively search
likely drug smuggling places.
But given the ease at which data flows over the border I think seizing laptops of international travellers is entirely “unreasonable” in this day and age.
To Doug Little: your answer is directly in the post itself.
“without any suspicion of wrongdoing”
“I seriously doubt that they can break PGP.”
There are indications from recent cases that they can… it just takes them several weeks of brute force effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_warrant
Specifically: Conversely, in authoritarian regimes, the police typically have the right to search property and people without having to provide justifications, or without having to secure an authorization from the judiciary.
Craig #27, wouldn’t it depend on your password. If you had a random, sixty character alpha-numeric (upper and lower case) + symbol pass-phrase, it would take longer than a lifetime to crack it, even on a super computer. And you could encrypt your secret files within the encrypted folder, using a similarly complex password. Basically, if you want to completely protect your files, you can, with very little effort.
Truecrypt’s ‘plausible deniability’ feature makes it even easier, as there is no way of ascertaining whether or not there is a secret folder within your encrypted folder.
Basically, as a way of catching criminals/terrorists, this latest scheme is useless. As a way of pissing off innocent travelers and reducing tourism, it’s great.
Just to clear up some problems with PZ’s post.
1. This is not new. It’s been a standard policy for roughly 20 years now, if not more.
2. It’s not, and has never, been something about your rights. They don’t apply. You’re on the border, and the US has always claimed that the Border is not the United States. The Constitution does not apply there.
3. People have in the past been forced to log in to their laptops and permit the guards to review the laptop.
4. This policy is the first time it has ever been put in writing for the public, in spite of being used since well before the Bush Administration.
If you’re really worried, don’t bring the laptop with you. Fed/Ex it.
If you can’t fed/ex or mail it.
1. Create private areas on it for anything that might be questionable. Wipe your browser cache regularly, or better, use a browser that doesn’t create one at all.
2. Sanitize the laptop before you cross the border. Delete your desktop contents, download folders, etc. Just clear up anything that might be interpreted as incriminating.
3. Bring an inexpensive laptop you can afford to lose, leave it installed with a free OS like Ubuntu Linux, or similar. Regularly wipe and reinstall before a trip, and use TruCrypt or similar software to access data in a disk image on a USB stick.
4. Run TruCrypt’s hidden container mode. Create plausible doubt, and something you can share that’s mostly encrypt worthy but useless to most people.
And use backups of your data. All the time.
this really pisses me off AND freaks me out. I travel into the US with my work laptop frequently, which contains confidential government data (yes, I work for the gov’t). The idea of some mouthbreathing US customs guy taking my computer and being able to access confidential data about Canadian citizens (or about US citizens who do business in Canada) infuriates me.
Before my next trip I guess I’d better find out what our policy is regarding customs seizures…
Wow, my reality filter must have been on and automatically cut out that line from my concience. I’ll have to send a memo around at work telling people to package all their data up and send it before they cross a US border, and to make sure there are copious amount of porn for the agents viewing pleasure.
Hooray! I feel safer already! I eagerly await the day when any would-be traveler who makes a seditious-looking expression during the mandatory anal cavity search will be executed on the spot. It’s the only way to protect us from the terrorists, after all.
I’m sure they can’t break PGP, and even if they could they wouldn’t waste such a valuable secret on anything but the most important possible prosecution – since they really can only use it once.
It’s all password security that you need to work on. Random character strings of 12+ characters can be hard to remember, but fewer really isn’t very secure.
I should clarify something in my post.
Laptops are regarded as an extension of paperwork, and not bound to privacy rules or laws. Customs has always felt (and the courts agreed) they can search and go through paperwork that comes in to the United States. Therefor, they can access and review what’s on a laptop under that guise.
It was one thing for them to strip the 4th Amendment right against “unreasonable search & seizure” from hippie-looking types and darker-skinned people.
Now they’re going after the whites in suits – expect an extreme showdown. Remember Enron got away with everything they wanted – until they started burning their fellow fat cats.
Hard to imagine that it’s the “business class” that might save the Constitution…
This may also hammer what’s left of the airlines’ bottom line. (Hmm – does this policy also apply to those who fly on private jets?)
@ #31:
If it’s confidential, encrypt it. Period. Talk to your IT department and find out what the policy is on the data you have on the laptop in the first place.
What do you expect from an administration that screens homosexual and Democrat applicants to the DOJ and ignores congressional subpoenas?
Also, to those saying N+1 letters/numbers make a password more secure..
There are things like Password Safe to remember the BIG ones easier to remember, by letting you store them in a secure container.
There are also several thousand safe password generators out there, even my Blackberry has one.
You’re not going to break PGP with a passphrase alone. You break the private keys passphrase, and then there are problems for the Victim. Properly done, public key cryptography is not easily broken, and it’s not a trivial attack even for the most powerful of computers and agencies out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
So now terrorists know that their powerpoint briefings, placed on their laptops, describing plans in the US are subject to exposure upon entry to the US. Well, gee, now the possible ways of importing these plans has been reduced from 10001 to merely 10000.
We all should feel SO much safer.
The fact is this has nothing to do with terrorism but it has everything to do with the control of US citizens by an administration that cares nothing for the Constitution with the implicit consent of Congress.
One more nail in the coffin of what used to be at least a semi-free country. America is well and truly screwed. Pity. I wonder how many of the population blindly stumble along in their daily lives thinking that they live in the ‘land of the free’? Sitting over here in the southern hemisphere, we look at the USA, we look at Great Britain, and think, fuck, they’re NUTS. Every time you scratch your butt you’re on a security camera, or the CIA has planted a microphone in your breakfast cereal.
And then we wonder how long it will be before your government’s brand of insanity infects ours, and we become just like you.
That’s scary.
Of course the stupidity of all this is I just take in a blank laptop, get to my hotel, hook up to my server in the Canary Islands via a VPN, and download all the bomb plans for the Space Shuttle to do my evil deeds.
I’m sure if the people who made up these stupid policies had any intelligence, they’d be working at a higher tier job, like serving fries at McDonalds.
I visited the US a few years ago. I liked it. No way I’m ever going back though. Fred Bloggs is now a criminal. You already have the information-age equivalent of a body cavity search happening. Your country has a really nasty taste to it now as far as visitors are concerned. I really hope you get this stuff eliminated, but I don’t like your chances.
Bush once said that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms.
Not really a problem any more.
j @ # 35: Customs has always felt (and the courts agreed) they can search and go through paperwork that comes in to the United States. Therefor, they can access and review what’s on a laptop under that guise.
What about the precedent for confiscating “paperwork” for indefinite periods (and for grabbing such property from those leaving the US)?
It’s only for those entering the US, the last I’d been searched.
As for pulling the paperwork, the Customs Dept. would occasionally photocopy papers, review them on site, call in others to take a look, as needed. The only exception to these searches are (to the best of my knowledge), Diplomat Bags. They fall under specific agreements between countries.
History has shown us that when the government becomes a tyrannical force, the people revolt. Perhaps, it is time…
You guys are all overreacting. This does not in any way infringe on our freedoms. How do you expect us to win the war with Eurasia without these necessary measures? Do you want the double plus evil Eurasian terrorists to win? Why do you hate Big Brother?
I guess that I’ve taken my last trip to Police States of America. Your country is fucked up, and you all let it happen. Good luck wrestling your freedoms back, and with your tourism industry, you silly paranoid idiots.
/ present company excluded, of course.
one secure ftp site = Homeland Security can blow me.
Well, I’m not visiting the US anytime soon, at least until habeus corpus is restored. How’s that working out?
This is one scary step in the wrong direction. This is another thing that makes me want to stay away from traveling in your fine country.
“Well, I’m not visiting the US anytime soon, at least until habeus corpus is restored. How’s that working out?”
There’s hope. Instead of someone who will gleefully take away our constitutional rights, we now can choose a candidate who will pretend to be a little sorrowful when he does it.
The Fourth Amendment was originally eviscerated by the income tax and the ensuing regulations that followed it.
The courts determined you had no right to privacy when it came to anything that could be construed as “taxable”. Your families’ estates were all subject to search and seizure when a person died and tried to pass their belongings onward.
The fifth Amendment was routed as well. The IRS could behave as if you were guilty, requiring you to supply evidence on demand in regards to yourself. It is not uncommon for the IRS to freeze accounts or perform other abuses, without you ever recieving a trial by your peers.
The “progressive” Democrats in the House and Senate, with some exceptions, of course, voted for the “new and improved” FISA bill, which granted the government more rights than the Constituion allows for, AND immunity for companies that could have been held accountable by one of the only avenues for grievance the populace had. Obama voted for this, as well.
In the new “bail-out” package (written by bankers about to lose their summer mansions and their winter islands) there was a law inserted requiring that ALL credit card companies turn over all information about your use of your credit cards.Everything you buy that isn’t paid for in cash, is recorded by your government because it doesn’t trust you.
The progressive and liberal use of government to take money from the populace by force and try and do good things with it, coupled with the new neo-conservative penchant for taking your money by force and trying to do good things overseas in ill-concieved military actions with it, is pushing the US economy and its populace right to the brink of a collapsing dollar. The dollar is losing its value, meaning everyone who saves money is being robbed from under the table without you being told, your privacy is gone and you don’t possess even habeus corpus rights even if your name isn’t Omar and you don’t send money home to Pakistan to feed an ailing aunt.
Americans make their living off of regulations and eating out and declaring their condos to be worth a million bucks, and no longer live within their means or create legitimate wealth (in proportion to what they consume).
The US government has been the greatest culprit in leading the charge down this path to nonsense.
And ya just gotta blame the liberals for half of these problems…
Interesting that the libertarian whines about how liberals screwed everything up but gives his conservative buddies a free pass. It wasn’t the Bush administration that pushed FISA, it was those dirty liburls.
What happens if I’m detained, and asked for my encryption passwords (referring to the UK case that allows for them to lock you up and throw away the key, while waiting on you to give up a password), and I tell them that I’m contractually obligated to keep the passwords a secret, due to sensitive data present in the encrypted files?
I don’t know what the law states so take this as just an idea, but a company I work for that deals with legal issues in an international arena does this to protect the confidentiality of their clients:
They fully encrypt the hard drives and don’t give the key to the person traveling. Then only after the person has arrived safely they give them the key to decrypt their hard drives.
However, that is besides that point that this is totalitarian and against our 4th Amendment rights. The republicans have turned the US into a totalitarian state.
I miss my country.
Encrypt your data and store on server that doesn’t travel with you?
And who do you blame for the other half?
“If you’re really worried, don’t bring the laptop with you. Fed/Ex it.”
What?
I’d sooner trust Mr Bean.
The best suggestion I’ve seen is storing all info on a server and traveling with a blank laptop…then, when at your location…login via VPN and access it. Vwalah!
Leigh #53 “What happens if I’m detained, and asked for my encryption passwords (referring to the UK case that allows for them to lock you up and throw away the key, while waiting on you to give up a password), and I tell them that I’m contractually obligated to keep the passwords a secret, due to sensitive data present in the encrypted files?”
Use Truecrypt. Then, when you are
askedforced to reveal your password, you do so, knowing that the files you really want to hide are safe.Can’t you just store all your data at one of those online backup sites, and travel with a laptop that has only programs, but no data at all?
@ #58: I’m with you, but if it’s not on you it’s not subject to search during your trip through the border.
Personally, I encrypt the sensitive stuff in a TrueCrypt container. JPG of my passport, bank account info, etc, is all in there. Emails aren’t store locally anymore, everything is on a server. Source code doesn’t “leave” the server either, really.
It’s just due diligence on my part.
For those that have to travel and bring some sensitive data with them, I suggest RDC, VNC, or similar remote desktop software.
I don’t know if this would do anything, but, a lot of intelligent people read this blog, so maybe somebody here would have an answer.
If a machine is run amok, sometimes you just have to push the self destruct button.
I’m guessing the NSA uses computer “data mining” to pick out suspicious communications, and flag them for later review by an actual person? What if the mine shaft collapsed, leaving the miners buried in a pile of information so deep, that it would take decades to actually dig trough it all? If millions of web users put a signature line on every blog, message board post, email, text mail, and even phone calls… you know a few key phrases like: Allah Akbar, Jihad, Death to America, Capitalist Infidels… etc… in a language from your home country… Would that actually have an effect in raising the amount of crap that these people would have to slog through, rending the process a colossal waste of time, money and resources?
/ not advocating, of course, just looking for information from a science blog.
@#60, I understand about truecrypt and its plausible deniability, I was just curious about situations where they force you to break a contract… you’re morally and legally obligated to follow the contract, but they’re effectively coercing you into breaking the contract.
Not that it matters, since I don’t live in the UK, but still.
#25 and #30 have it right, this has been the law for a long time. There are very old Supreme Court decisions allowing mail to be read as it crosses the border.
This whole concept of Security Nanny Staters is getting blown completely out of proportion. It doesn’t seem to matter which government rights to privacy and freedom of speech & expression are being eroded even in the nations that experience the most “freedom.” The UN is even starting to help out.
Check out this Macleans article:
http://www.macleans.ca/world/global/article.jsp?content=20080723_27859_27859
The best quote from the entire article:
“If an army came to our shores saying give up equal rights for women and your freedom of speech, we would defend ourselves, but when lawyers and lobbyists come, we are confused.”
#9 Clinteas
That shit is working both ways:
Scott Parkin, close personal friend from Hyooston
At least yall got rid of that Howard asshole, how’s the new guy?
Leigh #64, if you were threatened with jail for not revealing the password, and threatened with job-loss for revealing it, you’d certainly be trapped between a rock and a hard place. I wonder if you could sue the government for forcing you to break your contract? Probably not.
I wonder if U.S. corporations could get U.S. officials to seize the laptops (and thus confidential files) of employees from competing companies?
“…officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies…”
…does sound rather vague. I suspect that no-one would find out because the whole process would be kept secret for reasons of ‘national security’.
Tip for getting your laptop past customs: Hide it inside a bail of marijuana
Well surely the Democratically controlled House and Senate will add this to the pile impeachment charges they’ve already laid against George (the un-American) Bush… Oh wait, I forgot, they’re part of the problem as well.
People appear to be accepting prima facie that these regulations only apply at the literal geographical border. Bear in mind there are checkpoints within the US, such as the one spanning I-5 a few miles north of San Diego, or one I encountered in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma.
I don’t feel it would be much of a stretch to envisage such searches being given the go-ahead at internal venues like those, not merely airports and border crossings. After all, the international arrivals areas of airports are apparently deemed to be “outside” the US, established in case history.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It seems that that’s a pretty clear violation of the 4th amendment.
There is no such thing as hack-proof security. However, you can take measures to ensure that unauthorized access of your data is virtually impossible. I use TrueCrypt and Eraser.
“””#52Interesting that the libertarian whines about how liberals screwed everything up but gives his conservative buddies a free pass. It wasn’t the Bush administration that pushed FISA, it was those dirty liburls.”””
Ummm,you sir, JoJO, are math illiterate and logically impaired. In a two party system with little third party influence, if “half the problem is the responsibility of one party, who do you reckon is responsible for the other half? I am embarrassed for you that I have to spell it out for you. (Psssst, that would be those other guys, the neo-cons…)
Also, I am not a Libertarian. When government has become the problem and not the solution to problems, it is time to reassess what it is government is, and what should it be doing. When the problem is too much government, the solution is to have less government. How much less is an open debate question worth having, but wanting to travel in the same direction as Libertarians does not a Libertarian make.
Also, it was Congress that allowed FISA to pass, which has been close to 50% “Liberal” for as long as I can remember. It was Congress that allows for ALL of the dstruction of American liberties, not just the Cheney/Bush tag team. Congress makes the laws and controls the purse. Congress has been remiss in all of this, and Congress is half “liberal” and has been for a long time.
Congress ‘as a whole’ is allowing for your liberties to be taken from you, and this would include the Barack Obama crowd who thinks it is the government’s job to solve problems the government was a major factor in creating. If pointing this out to you JoJo upsets your equilibrium, then sit down and take something for it.
Here’s a question– does being a biologically astute athiest mean you have no political acumen and are blind to the machinations that got us to having our computers looked into?
One more giant shit on the Constitution in the name of security.
Can anyone reasonably deny that what they’re doing is an absolute violation of our 4th Amendment rights? What they’re doing is a giant ‘fuck you’ to the people and the rule of law.
The answer to 1984 is 1776!
After all, the international arrivals areas of airports are apparently deemed to be “outside” the US, established in case history.
Except when they don’t want it to be US territory.
Pre-WTC a friend of ours was almost detained while switching planes in LA. He wasn’t entering the US at all, in the technical/ledal sense. It took a call to his .gov to get him out of there.
“Travelling while black”
I was asked to sign an NDA which attempted to prohibit me from divulging any information (that I might happen across while working for/with the other party) to anyone (including police, courts, government agencies etc.) without informing the other contracting party and keeping quiet long enough to allow them to instigate legal proceedings to protect the information. My lawyer insisted on the addition of an “except where required by law” and the other party had no problem with the change: there are situations where you are legally obliged to surrender information to the police or the courts forthwith and every lawyer knows it or should know it, so I think a competently drafted contract would make that exception.
Secondly, I’m pretty sure that the “gag” clause would be held invalid, unenforceable or illegal, so that you could not be held liable in civil court for contravening it. For example, you cannot be contractually obliged to withhold information illegally. In Ireland, reporting of child pornography is mandatory. You are personally legally obliged, under criminal penalty, to report child pornography to the police. If, for example, you are a lecturer in a college and you see a student viewing child pornography on a computer, you must report it to the police immediately or face prosecution. Your employer (the college/university) absolutely cannot contractually oblige you to consult your boss and let him/her make a decision about whether/when the police are to be informed.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
If we’re talking about encryption, a one-time pad is unbreakable.
I have a 2 Gbyte memcard in my GSM, and a 4 Gbyte is only costing 30 EURO. Are they going to confiscate all the GSM handsets too? BTW, a 4 Gbyte microSD memcard is small enough to put under a stamp on an envelope. Conclusion : talking about data smuggling is bullshit.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Schneier estimated that the NSA were 15 to 20 years ahead of the academic crypto community (based on the s-boxes of DES being tweaked by the NSA to optimise them against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which wasn’t “discovered” until 18 years later). It’s not impossible that they’ve discovered some weakness in PGP that facilitates a crack that we won’t find out about for 15 years.
I talked to a guy who worked in that area for a government security agency and, although (of course) he said nothing about his work, he was casually dismissive of PGP, which surprised me. That was several years ago.
Taken together, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a “weakness in PGP makes brute-force crack feasible” paper in 10 years time.
Oh. Well, good then. I’m OK with it if everybody else is.
I was thinking, “Hey, these people can search through all of my personal files without a warrant or any cause. That sounds like a serious infringement on my privacy.” But then I was corrected.
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ea you oeio oe e,
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12 o uey, O O, you e e ieou;
you uou e i you ao a i a ie.
[Jack is banned and deserves deconsonanting]
It’s not an old policy. It’s just being used the Bush way.
I for one plan on leaving lots of porn on my laptop for customs officials. Not good porn mind you. Octopus porn.
Oh wait, forgot my audience. Okay, goldfish porn.
I found this can anyone answer it
(I think the empty laptop and server option sounds good as does overwhelming them with trash)
As we know, it’s often useful to frame technological questions in
a non-technology context for comparison.
Question: Does U.S. Customs (under “new” or “old” rules), have the
authority to inspect in detail (and/or copy) *anything* that a U.S.
citizen might bring in or out of the country in non-computerized
form? What about credit cards? Bank statements? Checkbook
registers? Personal diaries? Love letters? Undeveloped camera
film? Audio tapes? Video tapes? Medical records?
Answers anyone?
–Lauren–
Lauren Weinstein
84–
The short answer is yes. Except for registered diplomats, in which case what they can search is covered by treaties. This policy is ridiculous, but unfortunately, it’s by no means anything new.
The only requirement on a border search of *anything* is that it be “reasonable.” For searches deemed “non-routine,” i.e., cavity searches, strip searches, and the like, a search is only reasonable if there is an articulable suspicion of some kind of wrongdoing. For searches deemed “routine,” i.e., everything else (including searches of all property a traveler brings along), searches are presumed reasonable and require no suspicion at all. Two important cases in this realm are United States v. Montoya de Hernandez (2004, a 9-0 ruling) and United States v. Flores-Montano (1985, a 7-2 ruling).
“For searches deemed “non-routine,” i.e., cavity searches, strip searches, and the like, a search is only reasonable if there is an articulable suspicion of some kind of wrongdoing.”
Thank you sir. You have just inspired my latest invention – the USB flash drive butt plug.
Get truecrypt (it’s free) and never travel with your container file unlocked.
Heh, yeah, I wouldn’t keep the picture of the desecrated host in the “Host Desecration Pics” if I were you PZ.
You may not be a libertarian, but you spout the party line unerringly. Perhaps you’re not a libertarian. However while horseshit and bullshit come from completely different sources, they look and smell extremely similar.
I am not and do not claim to be a biologist or in any way biologically acute. But that’s a quibble that doesn’t make any difference. And I admit you’re right, FISA and similar acts have been passed with congressional Democrats voting for them. However, some Democrats are not liberal. In fact, one “Democrat” isn’t even a Democrat. I refer to Bush’s buddy Joseph Lieberman.
So what are you going to do about it? Vote for Ron Paul clones? Bob Barr is likely to do as well as Michael Badnarik did in 2004. You do remember that Badnarik didn’t get as many votes as Nader.
Your
libertarianviews are not considered even close to mainstream. But it is a free country, which includes the freedom to believe silly things.I’ve done a couple investigations involving encryption and in all three cases the encryption slowed the investigation down by a couple days at most.
If you’re using encryption follow these simple rules:
– NEVER use a passphrase that is likely to occur anyplace else in your data-space – you’d be surprised how many smart people Email themselves their passphrase
– Use a phrase not a word; and make it long. Substitute a few characters for nonprintables. I.e: “d1ckskovery institoot=l8merz”
– Physically control your system; hardware keystroke loggers are undetectable unless you’re extremely paranoid, and they are inexpensive
Always remember that if “they” can’t break your crypto, they’ll just waterboard you. As my accountant says, there are 2 kinds of people in hell: those who were caught in the act and those who kept notes.
That should be “Host Desecration Pics Folder”, sorry.
Anyway, yeah, this sucks, going to the US already feels like entering the seventh circle of hell, even without the prospect of a random dude snooping around your computer.
I’d recommend an external hard drive, TSA jerks are not known for their deductive skills, so they probably won’t think of plugging it in if you keep it somewhere discrete.
Addendum: do not cross-use passwords. I.e.: use your myspace password as a passphrase for your drive encryption, and you’re toast.
the government will do to its citizens as much as they will allow. It is incumbent upon us to regulate the actions of our government.
New Republican United States of America.
Don’t kid yourself, PZ. The democrats have been entirely complicit in the attack on our civil rights, and have been since long before 9/11.
-jcr
Next they will be invading your home to access your desktop computer.
They already can. Google for “PATRIOT act”.
-jcr
“”Your libertarian views are not considered even close to mainstream. But it is a free country, which includes the freedom to believe silly things.””
I seem to have a consensus going on the usurpation of civil liberties amongst this crowd of (most likely) progressive liberals.
I believe the federal debt to overseas countries is the highest in the world.
I believe our national debt will top 10 Trillion just as soon as we have a few thousand more people walk away from their mortgages.
I believe it was Dodds, a Democrat, who pushed the new bail out legislation that included the requirement that ALL credit card transactions be reported to the government, and I believe it was the Democrats who held the majority in passing this.
I believe it is the Democrats who will not start impeachment proceedings against Bush…
I believe it is the Democrats who WANT the IRS to have full power over your personal finances, including power to disregard the Bill Of Rights completely. I believe this original infringement that is leading us down the path of total surveilance and very few “unaliable rights”, was mostly caused by well meaning liberal desires to use the federal government as a tool to adjust and tackle social concerns.
That’s a start…
Can you tell me what is silly in any of these beliefs?
Totally OT, but we are talking about computers and such…
Okay, I was going to delete cookies and such from IE now that I downloaded Firefox and when I launched IE it says all my add-ons are disabled. Anyone know why this happened or, better yer, what I should do about it?
This is a grass-roots voter issue. As far as I know, officials in the Department of Homeland Security and other such organizations are appointed. Since the US is government is still an elected body (last time I checked anyway), demand that prospective candidates abolish these types of activities or they simply won’t be put in office. No matter how power-hungry and corrupt they are, they can’t do a thing to you if they don’t get elected. Get involved.
“”New Republican United States of America.
Don’t kid yourself, PZ. The democrats have been entirely complicit in the attack on our civil rights, and have been since long before 9/11.””
See! Someone else who GETS IT!!
Smart people can understand that if two seemingly oppositional forces push against each other at the same 5 degrees off of perpendicular, you will get motion (or force) in one direction.
That direction has been a loss of virtually all of the rights in “The Bill OF RIGHTS”.
“So what are you going to do about it? Vote for Ron Paul clones? Bob Barr is likely to do as well as Michael Badnarik did in 2004. You do remember that Badnarik didn’t get as many votes as Nader.”
Man, you think like sheep.
I would start by voting in serious Constitutionally minded Reps and Senators. I would send letters to your local state government telling them you want them to reassert their rights to govern their own state.
States like California are fighting the feds over various issues. The feds won’t let the state set its own air quality standards. So much for government fixing pollution problems.
Oregon has to let a bunch of Christian George Bush appointees control our rapidly failing forests. Then we have to beg for the revenues from the timber sales which are essentially being sent to Iraq. We have no sheriff service where I live because the federal government stopped paying Oregon some of that timber money back.
And so on and so forth…
Barack Obama is part of the problem.
John McCain is part of the problem.
Figure it out.
It is useless. It will just push people (good and bad) into using advanced steganography. You can record your own unique audio (e.g. family vacation logs) into big files where the lower 12 bits, of the 24 bit recording, sound like tape hiss, but are actually your encrypted files. Without the unique extraction program, and the encryption keys, there is no way to even know that any data is there (i.e. no statistical analysis). They cannot legally make you produce a key for data that they cannot show has encryption.
The public can, also, protest against this by simply having everyone carry USB sticks in which all the unused space has been filled with random numbers from quantum noise sources.
Barack Obama lost my vote when he did a 180 and voted for that damned FISA bill that increased the executive’s warrantless wiretapping powers. I’ll be staying home election day and reading a good book. There’s no difference anymore other than the rhetoric imho.
Forgive me if this has already been mentioned … i couldn’t paw through 101 comments…
Since any storage media appears to be fair game, the government can just snatch all your photographs of your vacation from wherever you’re storing them. It seems to be a really … well .. asshole thing to do: snatch everyone’s vacation photos as soon as their vacation is over.
I can see this now:
TSA guard 1: hey, that chick is hot! Let’s check out her vacation photos.
TSA guard 2: yeah, I’ll just back them up to my hard drive….
Dreadneck,
I really can’t stand when people say ridiculous crap like there’s no difference between Obama and McCain. There is a difference. It may be a tiny difference that seems insignificant when one considers the vast spectrum of political belief, but it’s still a significant difference. That difference may mean eating a full meal in a safe residence vs. eating crackers with potted meat in a dangerous slum to many people. When you decide that you’re not going to vote at all, you let the totalitarians win.
Voting is an integral part of resisting the erosion of civil liberties, the accumulation of massive debt for wars of conquest while cutting taxes on people who have far too much, cutting benefits to those who need them most and so on.
Think about the what the country would be like if GWB had lost in 2000. I’m not saying things would be a whole lot better, but even a little better makes a big difference to a lot of people. Enough of the people who sat the election out were liberal enough to swing the vote for Gore, hanging chads not withstanding. Voting is never a waste of time. [/soapbox]
@103 – If the price of eating a full meal is living in a police state then I say ‘No, thank you.’ I don’t care what the differences on social and foreign policy are when both candidates show no respect for the Constitution. Barack Obama not only reneged on his promise to oppose the FISA bill, he voted for the damned thing. He’s a former constitutional law professor and he knew he was voting to undermine the Constitution. That’s enough in my book to not vote for him. Maybe you don’t give a damn, but I do – and I have every right to register my protest by not voting for either of the two major candidates.
Blaming everything on one party is disingenuous. The Democrats have been complicit with the Republicans from day one with everything from funding the war to voting for the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act and now the FISA bill. Go ahead and swallow the Kool-Aid if you want, but I’m done being played by both sides.
When the government is fucking you in the ass, does it really matter if one party offers you a reach around?
Dreadneck,
I never said you had to vote for one of those candidates, though I will admit that I implied it. However, you specifically stated you weren’t going to vote at all.
I’ll be staying home election day and reading a good book.
And yeah, to actual survival for millions of people it does matter “if one party offers you a reach around?”
Obama has reneged on FISA, but McCain is far more dangerous to your civil liberties. He apparently supports the Unitary Executive. It really sucks that we have limited choices right now, but that’s the fault of so many people not voting and corporate machines that use psychology to manipulate those who do. (I probably should have put those in reverse order; it’s the latter I find most repugnant)
Besides, Keith Olbermann has explained that Obama could pursue criminal charges against the telecoms…
@105 – I know the old canard about voting for the lesser of two evils, and I know that what you get by doing so is evil – just at a slower pace.
Go ahead and vote if you want to. I’m not voting and I’ve given my reasons. This country is nothing without the Constitution and any candidate who votes to undermine it will not receive my support.
Barack Obama had my support – in both money and active campaigning – until he voted to expand the unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping powers of the executive branch.
I can understand that you disagree with my position and such is your right. It’s also my right – as I have already stated – to register my protest by not voting.
I will not be parleyed, so we will have to agree to disagree.
“Besides, Keith Olbermann has explained that Obama could pursue criminal charges against the telecoms…”
And this is government by the people in what way?
Those who bought the “yes we can” Kool-aid are going to be quite shocked when Obama steps into the White House and it becomes apparent there is no money left to fulfill any of his promises. AS the dollar goes into free fall, all of his rhetoric will sound like pees shot into a tin can…
The system is ill and the government is trying to find ways to keep the charade from you. Even I knew the housing bubble was about to burst in 06, but the government lied about this to all of you. Now it is lying again.
Nancy Pelosi would rather promote her new book than hold Bush accountable for his lies in office. Need I say more?
We are the largest debtor nation on the planet.
Our government cannot afford the promises it has already made, is 10 trillion in debt, and our two party system has become two parties pushing the same boulder over the same precipice.
My wife is a psychologist – some of her laptop files are confidential medical information. So the jack-booted thugs can snoop in her laptop and get all excited about finding encrypted files, and (if they can break the encryption) turn her patients’ private information into publicly accessible discoverable information?
The phone lines between the Obama White House and the Hague War Crimes Tribunal are sure going to humming on January 21.
I stopped going to the US about 3 years into the first Dubya term and have not been back since. Used to go at least three times a year and often for a week or more at a time. Given the current state of affairs I will never be going there again. I don’t present any danger to anyone in the US, but I am friends with an very vocal anti-Bush blogger and we have communicated much about the state of your Administration and the shredding of your constitution in the name of “protecting your freedoms”. I imagine some agency or other has a file on him, and all of his friends are most likely noted in it. And I’m not going to be parted from my PowerBook either. Not for an hour, certainly not for a day.
Even if you elect someone sane in this round, it will take 30 years or more to undo the damage, if it can ever be undone. I see the US slipping more deeply into a fascist theocracy, and I don’t want to even tempt fate at the border. You folks have a real problem down there. I don’t know how you’ll ever get your civil liberties back.
Better get a copy of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and read it. It was written as fiction, but it’s on the way to becoming a documentary.
Dreadneck,
You, of course, have the right not to vote, but you are hardly registering a protest by doing so. I do understand you dissatisfaction in Obama. He was never my top choice for a variety of reasons, but “less evil” is still less evil. If you actually want to register a protest, why not vote for a third party candidate, or write-in someone you agree with? Those are both better options than not voting. If you don’t vote, your protest is not heard at all. It reduces you to irrelevance and allows an ever shrinking minority to dictate your leaders to you. I have voted in virtually every election since I turned 18 including all the local and state elections that are so poorly advertised you have to go out of your way to know they’re taking place. Not voting does nothing. When my state rep (the only person on the ballot) came out against medical marijuana for terminal cancer patients, I wrote-in a lawyer I know. It’s not much, but I do it because the alternative is to sit back and allow bad shit to happen through complicity with the current regime. I can’t do that.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing. (I know this quote is effectively anonymous, but I like it)
In the end, we’ll have to disagree, which is fine because I doubt either my vote or your protest will have much of an effect. In January we’ll be watching while McCain is inaugurated. *Sigh*
inkadu:
You think that? You’d be wrong. At least some of NASA’s research centers, including mine, do random car searches. Our union is fighting it, but in the current climate of paranoia, I don’t know whether they’ll prevail. And that’s at the front gate to a research center, not the US border.
Every time people start saying, ‘It doesn’t matter which one wins, the Repub wins, and IT MATTERS!
The quicker we erase this monstrosity from the law books and rebuild the bureaus wrecked by its creation, the better.
Canuck said:
That’s crux of the problem isn’t it. It’s easier for the govn’t to take away freedom than it is to give it back. It’s also easier to deregulate than it is to fix the damage from deregulation and roll-back of environmental regualtions. Scott from Oregon has at least one good point in that our system is dysfunctional. I see the major dysfunction now as a symptom of 30 years of Republican deregulation policies and “free trade” combined with the steady erosion of civil liberties through SCOTUS stacking (particularly in the last 8 yrs.) Oh, and I don’t consider Clinton a Democrat. He signed NAFTA.
What is really scary to me are the warnings we get on the news: “Worst housing slump since the Depression” or “Greatest Income Inequality since the Depression.” Don’t people realize the combination of eliminating regulations designed to prevent a Depression and new “free trade” agreements are going to send us right back into a Depression? Then what? People who are hungry will give up even more rights just to secure a meal for their family. I really believe 4 years of McCain will cause a major Depression, which will be capitalized on by the corporatocracy. It’ll be good-bye civil liberties and living wages.
Most Americans seem to have no idea what that will be like. They say crap like “During the Depression 75% of people had jobs. I think I could be in that 75%.” Yes, but if you lose that job, you’re competing with 25% of the population for jobs that aren’t there. Hell, during the Depression people were afraid to go to bathroom because there were a 100 guys outside waiting to take their position.
Sorry for the rambling, but I’m so frustrated right now I can hardly think about other things.
Ok, this HAS made me incredibly paranoid now… I am seriously freaked out… but it sorta strikes me as ridiculous too.
I mean I don’t have anything incriminating on my computer. Why should I be so afraid? The principle of the thing is absolutely terrifying… but if the feds stole my computer I don’t have anything that I could be arrested over.
So, a naive question from a very paranoid guy: this is scary as hell, but how much do most of us really have to fear?
Eli,
I don’t know about you, but I’m really paranoid. What happens if you’ve written anti-Republican screeds that are saved on your computer? Do you trust the people in power to not fabricate evidence on your computer of actual illegal activities to silence you? I don’t. The current administration is capable of anything. Cheney could have photographs and video of say a prosecutor having sex with a prostitute while selling nuclear secrets to Bin Laden and snorting cocaine and I still wouldn’t believe them. There is nothing Bush, Inc. could do to convince me someone committed a crime at this point. My automatic reaction is that the person in question was a political dissident. Bush and Cheney have lost any confidence I might have had that they are not Pure Evil TM (not that I had much to begin with).
Reading my last two posts makes me think I might have gone off the deep-end, so I’m going to calm down a bit and read some Janet Evanovich.
I’m pretty sure the entertainment industry would re-enact the opening scene from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, with their Orwellian redefinition of “piracy,” if they could get away with it.
I can give you two good reasons:
1) you probably have stuff that’s embarrassing.
2) given the sheer number of idiotic laws that are still on the books, how can you be sure?
@110 – I can accomplish the same thing by staying home on election day as I can by voting for a third party or doing a write-in and not waste my time, gas and money in the process.
So long as people continue to buy into the canard that ‘voting makes a difference’ when our ‘leaders’ don’t give a fig what the people think, or want, or need, absolutely nothing will change.
The system is broken. The Government has grown callous to the People and the rule of law. Continued attempts to work within the system will only prolong our suffering.
Unfortunately, things have not yet proven bad enough for the populace to rise up and throw off the chains we are slowly, but surely, being shackled with.
The answer to 1984 is 1776!
“”That’s crux of the problem isn’t it. It’s easier for the govn’t to take away freedom than it is to give it back. It’s also easier to deregulate than it is to fix the damage from deregulation and roll-back of environmental regualtions. Scott from Oregon has at least one good point in that our system is dysfunctional. I see the major dysfunction now as a symptom of 30 years of Republican deregulation policies and “free trade” combined with the steady erosion of civil liberties through SCOTUS stacking (particularly in the last 8 yrs.) Oh, and I don’t consider Clinton a Democrat. He signed NAFTA.”””
Dude, those thirty years that have gone by, the federal government ADDS regulation everytime it convenes for a “session”, most of which are written by the industries that they are supposed to regulate. The federal government’s “environmental regulations” regarding Oregon’s forests, for example, were written by the logging industry.
Guess who has more money available to buy “regulation”??
Stop being dense and obtuse and blind and fixated on a single source for your enmity.
It is not the Republicans who did this to you.
It was a team effort, based on the singularly WRONGHEADED notion that the federal goernment can solve local problems better than the locals can.
The federal government is the prime feeding ground for regulation by corporations BECAUSE they can regulate their competition out of the picture.
Why don’t we have 40 oil companies?
Why don’t we have 50 auto companies?
Why are our public schools dictated to by a singular entity way off in Washington and run by cronies of whomever is in power?
Regulation does not solve anything, when the regulation doesn’t come from the populace who asks for it, but the industries that benefit from it.
“”That’s crux of the problem isn’t it. It’s easier for the govn’t to take away freedom than it is to give it back. It’s also easier to deregulate than it is to fix the damage from deregulation and roll-back of environmental regualtions. Scott from Oregon has at least one good point in that our system is dysfunctional. I see the major dysfunction now as a symptom of 30 years of Republican deregulation policies and “free trade” combined with the steady erosion of civil liberties through SCOTUS stacking (particularly in the last 8 yrs.) Oh, and I don’t consider Clinton a Democrat. He signed NAFTA.”””
Dude, those thirty years that have gone by, the federal government ADDS regulation everytime it convenes for a “session”, most of which are written by the industries that they are supposed to regulate. The federal government’s “environmental regulations” regarding Oregon’s forests, for example, were written by the logging industry.
Guess who has more money available to buy “regulation”??
Stop being dense and obtuse and blind and fixated on a single source for your enmity.
It is not the Republicans who did this to you.
It was a team effort, based on the singularly WRONGHEADED notion that the federal goernment can solve local problems better than the locals can.
The federal government is the prime feeding ground for regulation by corporations BECAUSE they can regulate their competition out of the picture.
Why don’t we have 40 oil companies?
Why don’t we have 50 auto companies?
Why are our public schools dictated to by a singular entity way off in Washington and run by cronies of whomever is in power?
Regulation does not solve anything, when the regulation doesn’t come from the populace who asks for it, but the industries that benefit from it.
I know I said I was gonna cool off, but…
Dude, those thirty years that have gone by, the federal government ADDS regulation everytime it convenes for a “session”, most of which are written by the industries that they are supposed to regulate. The federal government’s “environmental regulations” regarding Oregon’s forests, for example, were written by the logging industry.
Most of the corporate sponsored “regulations” are really an odd blend of deregulation and getting rid of the competition (as you rightly put it). However, some things must have at least some minimal regulation at the national level. Air quality regulations that provide for a minimally safe atmosphere have to be national (really global would be better) because air moves from state to state, ditto for water quality regs. That you seem to think the local way is better shows that you are ignorant.
If every local school district could set up the school system the way they wanted, half the small towns in this country would have creationist biology taught as fact. I don’t necessarily want a national school curriculum, but there need to be some standards to ensure that children in one area aren’t being short-changed in learning how the world works. Again, if you think local control is the solution, you’re a fool. Having national government is not inherently wrong. Having a national government composed of people who don’t put the rights, health, safety and general well-being of the populace is wrong.
@ Mike O’Risal #24, you said in part: “All they’ll find on my computer is a lot of boring data about the lengths of beetle tarsomeres and mandibles, numerous papers about phylogeny, and coordinates mapping the locations from which I’ve collection specimens of fungi… and none of it is any of Homeland Security’s business.”
But of course DHS knows that all that ‘data’ is merely code containing the highly detailed plans for AlQ to destroy a major part of the US. You evil terrist, you!
Ick, I’m having terrible proof reading problems tonight.
Having a national government composed of people who don’t put the rights, health, safety and general well-being of the populace first is wrong.
This has been unofficial law for a long time now, as other people have said. Also, those of you who are carrying confidential medical and legal records around, why are you doing this? If you wouldn’t be taking paper medical/legal records on your vacation/business trip/conference trip, why are they on your computer?
“”If every local school district could set up the school system the way they wanted, half the small towns in this country would have creationist biology taught as fact. I don’t necessarily want a national school curriculum, but there need to be some standards to ensure that children in one area aren’t being short-changed in learning how the world works. Again, if you think local control is the solution, you’re a fool. “”
Dude, after about four years of small towns teaching bad biolology to students, what do you think will happen? Universities will not accept students who fail basic biology and these kids will go home and get their backwards system changed. On the other side of the coin, some chool districts will be awash in new energy and new ideas, as they don’t have to listen to a bunch of Washington lifers who knew someone who knew someone, in order to design and implement awesome curriculums.
Darwinism would actually work as a social pressure and push some schools into greatness.
If I am the fool, why does the man who appoints the Department of Education heads think the jury is out on the theory of evolution?
You are falling victim to a mentality that you learned because you watch too much TV.
Television tells you government is WashingtonDC and you believe television.
And you call me a fool?
One other thing to think about before I head off to get a beer and chat with the ladies…
Barack Obama was raised in a non-religious household, plus he had international travel as a benefit as a child…
He became a Christian after his brain was fully developed…
That means he decided to believe in nonsense by CHOICE rather than by childhood indoctrination…
That means one of two things to me–
either he is not very bright, in spite of the facade…
or he decided he needed Christianity on his resume in order to become the politician he dreamed of being.
Either answer makes me loathe the guy. Either he is not a very bright man trying to fool America into thinking he has the intelligence to cure what ails it,
or he is a pre-planning, manipulative, lying political player who will do or say anything to win a seat of power…
Enjoy your liberalism and damn those Republicans!!
Scott,
I don’t watch much TV. Only one hour a day on average. Your opinions on education show that you know nothing about how education policy is set at the national, state or local level. Free market economics don’t work with things like education just like they don’t work with environmental regulations. Next thing I know, you’ll be arguing that if we just got rid of all those pesky environmental regulations people would be able to buy water from the least polluted source available and then corporations would have an incentive to keep the water supply clean.
Seriously, you’ve proven yourself foolish and ill-informed, so I’m going to let you talk to yourself now.
“Free market economics don’t work with things like education”
Who said anything about free market economics? All I said was that the federal government has no business dictating education policy to anybody.
States and communities can do it without the interference from the federal government.
The federal government can stop pulling income from communities and then runnning it through their Board of Education’s fingers (where much of it gets stuck) and then dictating back to the states what it is they should be doing.
The money should stay in the state and the states themselves can dictate their own education policies. That way, if you want to have a word with the guy who made your policy, you can DRIVE or take a bus over to see them.
And yes, education does improve with competition.
As we have seen by what is readily apparent, the federal government only makes the systems more expensive and not as good. “No Child Left Behind” anyone?
It’s for this reason, that I hide all personal files on a USB drive, hidden in my asshole.
I think you mean your ‘prison purse’. LOL :)
> This is not new. It’s been a standard policy for
> roughly 20 years now, if not more.
20 years ago? Did you travel with your computer often?
History of computers:
1989, GriD Systems Corporation introduces the first pen-based computer. 1989, PCMCIA trade association …
http://www.computerhope.com/history/198090.htm
Don’t worry guys, the New World Order is your friend. We need a one world government, a world army, a world court united under an atheistic regime of rationality. This will end all wars. For instance, what are the possibilities that Texas and Vermont will go to war? Exactly. And we must remember, brethren, the boogie man Osama Bin Laden and his Al”CIA”da is going to eventually kill us all; therefore, we must give away our liberty for security. Oh and, by the way, torturing goat herders in secret prisons is a good thing.
The ironic thing is, the mental midget Sam Harris advocated everything I’ve written above in his book End of Faith book LOL…
Interesting reading the commentaries that have sprung up during this thread. Yep, it probably will take 30 years to clean up the damage, that is, if you ever manage to do a 180 in the first place to get started.
So as an outsider looking in, I can ask you this: with all the stuff going on with the USA now… with the fascist-style infrastructure that allows you to get taken away without any legal representation, allows your government to monitor all of your communications, allows your government to peruse your personal data (paper or digital) for any reason whatsoever without warrant or cause…
Hey, isn’t this the very same sort of shit you Americans were fighting against with such chest-thumping during the Cold War? Isn’t this the very thing you were fighting against in the name of freedom? So what’s the difference now between the USA and the Iron Curtain Of Old, apart from the spelling, and perhaps another decade?
You’re rapidly becoming the new East Germany.
Seriously – what the HELL happened to you lot?
Legion is that you? You’re so cute when you get all rambling and blustery.
“Who said anything about free market economics? All I said was that the federal government has no business dictating education policy to anybody.
States and communities can do it without the interference from the federal government.”
Oh nonsense; states and communities are far too large units. Leave it to blocks or individual families to decide *everything*. Why should your family decide what the age of consent is for my family? How dare people on your block try to tell us on our block what we should do about murder!
What – you think that is silly? How is it different qualitatively?
“”Oh nonsense; states and communities are far too large units. Leave it to blocks or individual families to decide *everything*. Why should your family decide what the age of consent is for my family? How dare people on your block try to tell us on our block what we should do about murder!””
You know… I am really sadly disappointed. I thought, “cool”, a bright group of progressive people with open minds, willing to discuss things using reason and logic, hopeful to produce a better America, with less “bad things” like a Bush administration, and more good things like communities working together to solve their own problems…
And I get arguments like this.
No wonder America is teetering.
Not sure of this has been posted. This is CNET’s advice for people planning to take laptops through customs.
CNET’s Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop
I knew already about a very old female physics professor from the National University of Mexico that had an arab-related last name.
Just because of that, she was detained for several hours, and body searched at the airport by US security.
It simply is scary for those of us outside your country to watch how everything keeps going to hell with you and nobody stops it. It’s hard to do it from outside, as you would surely understand the bigger guns are the ones that matter, and are in the hands of the crazy people giving orders over your land…
Scott,
You are apparently some sort of weird libertarian/state’s rights/local liberal blend. It’s spooky and strange. Anyway, onward…
There’s this little place called the United States of America. It’s a geographic area that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. It is also a community. A community of people with a national government that is supposed to “promote the general Welfare.” This is where education/environmental regulations/a bunch of other stuff comes in. It’s all supporting the general Welfare. Something many states (I’m looking at you Deep South) simply don’t want to do.
You didn’t address my arguments about clean air and water being national (or really global) issues because these things move from state to state. People also move from state to state. Here’s the thing, we, as a nation, need to have at least minimum standards for some things. Things like pollution laws, education, labor laws, etc. need to be regulated at a much higher level than a small community. The corporations that run the world (and pollute it, corrupt it and prey on the laboring classes in it) don’t think in small community terms. A decent federal government works fine as long as the People exercise oversight.
You still don’t understand education. Competition does not necessarily improve education. There are many right-wing Xians who will voluntarily send their children to creationist, private schools for their whole life. Those children suffer because their parents are ignorant. The big problem here is that we, as a nation, suffer the loss of young minds in a war of attrition with Christofascists. I suffer because the loss of creativity and critical thinking skills associated with the stunting of mental growth in our children impairs the ability of my country to compete on solid economic footing with the rest of the world.
You have no idea what education costs or why the NEA opposes NCLB. Educators don’t oppose NCLB because it’s national oversight, but because it is an unfunded mandate based on testing rather than looking at other indicators of student success. At the time of the NCLB, many voters were clamoring for more standardization and oversight in education. Too many people think of teachers as glorified baby-sitters and their own personal employees. They want to dictate educational curriculum based on religious views and other ideologies (capitalism springs to mind). The result of voter wants mixed with Bush, Inc. idiocy is NCLB. It’s not about national standards, but bad policy.
Another major issue in education is funding. The infiltration of our schools by corporations is not a result of some order from the federal government, but a consequence of short-sighted voters who refuse to pay even slightly higher taxes for better schools and the incredibly inequitable distribution of wealth (most schools where I come from are funded by property taxes). Many families cannot afford to move to the wealthy school districts, and some parents would even choose not to. School districts trying to keep the schools open have to take money from Coke or Pepsi for the vending machines and Taco Bell for the right to be in the cafeteria. None of this is going to improve by getting rid of all national oversight, in fact the current situation of haves and havenots in education will get worse.
“Here’s the thing, we, as a nation, need to have at least minimum standards for some things”.
Ummm, we did. It was called the Constitution. Ever read it? In it, it outlined what was the responsiblity of the federal government. It outlined what rights each citizen had. It outlined our basic requirements as citizens and just what laws the federal government could impose.
Remember?
States were left to govern themselves and this worked in the rough manner of the early “wild west” years. Citizens of each state voted locally to get the government they needed locally.
It was basically in the intervention of the south during the “civil rights” period that federal government took over large tracts of power from the states.
Once this occured, there was a slow but steady migration of governmental powers all in one direction. The federal government came in, for example, and took all the timberlands from the state of Oregon, saying they “knew better” how to manage them.
This was not an improvement in the conservation of forests, as it turns out.
Every year since, the federal government takes more taxing privaleges from the citizens of each state, and does the allocating according to its traditions. Corporations learned to go where the money and the power was, and government stopped being “by the people” and became “by those who can afford to hang around Washington DC and hand out money”.
Any state can enact a law that says a corporation cannot sell pepsis in schools btw. I have no idea why or how you think a law by a state is not a law.
That is the perogative of people who govern themselves. If the local community wants Pepsis, who are you to tell them they can’t have them? If the community rejects Pepsis, then out they go.
There is nothing “special” or weird about seeing government as a necessary act of communities to make them function.
There is something weird, though, about accepting a dictatorial government too far removed from local areas to even understand what the governmental needs of the area actually are. Why let GW BUSH dictate what is proper forest management in Oregon, for example? What does his administration know about a forest? Or Barack Obama? The idea is ludicrous.
“Another major issue in education is funding. The infiltration of our schools by corporations is not a result of some order from the federal government, but a consequence of short-sighted voters who refuse to pay even slightly higher taxes for better schools and the incredibly inequitable distribution of wealth…”
Oregon is a poor state and can adequately fund a great education system if its income was not being siphoned off and spent on keeping sailors in bases in Okinawa…
Oregon citizens make more than enough capital, as a poor state, to fund a great system. The trouble is, our money goes into Washington instead, where we go to beg for it. Sometimes we get some, and we have to spend it right away on silly things we don’t need, so that we’ll get some next year. The system is ludicrous.
We would have a better system than we have now (maybe not as good as some other places but better funded than now), if locals were allowed to spend their income locally (or statewide)in the form of taxes for schools.
IAlso, if Congress had to actually beg for money from the states (the way the founders envisioned) they would not have been able to fund Bush’s Iraq debacle without convincing 50 state governments to chip in. The added power sharing would have stopped the war from occuring, and state funding for education would include much money that was sent to bomb other places.
The bottom basement idea is this– government is intended to make societies function, not to dictate to societies or to control societies (in a manner beyond functionality).
There are very few things the federal government does that cannot be done by each state. Most of those were already outlined in that old document we no longer read.
If you think the federal governent is necessary because we need to make some of them ignorant southern people behave, then you have a Napoleanic disorder, and I am not impressed. Some southern states will always be behind the curve, but that is not the job of the federal government to correct.
You should read that old document some dudes wrote awhile back for our nation.
It has some good “weird” ideas in it.
Like the 4th amendment.
Also, if Congress had to actually beg for money from the states (the way the founders envisioned)
You’re talking about the Articles of Confederation, you dumbass. This was one of the main objections the Federalists had to the Articles. Don’t tell me to read the Constitution when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The fourth amendment has to do with unreasonable search and seizure, not taxation, education, federalism or anything else you mentioned in your post at #142, though it is relevant to whether they can search your laptop.
Why don’t you go read the Constitution? Check out the Articles of Confederation and the Federalist Papers while you’re at it.
Oh, as to why Pepsi shouldn’t have contracts where they pay the school large sums of money for exclusive vending rights, it’s the same reason no corporation should: money equals leverage. If information came up the showed Pepsi in a bad light or that Pepsi simply didn’t approve of part of the curriculum, Pepsi would have the leverage of money to change the curriculum.
This time I really am done with you. I will not waste my time with someone who wants to argue about the Constitution when he doesn’t know the difference between the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation or why we changed governing systems.
“You’re talking about the Articles of Confederation, you dumbass”
Ummm, no. I wasn’t.
The birth of federal taxation of income occured in 1913? I believe.
They had an amendment and everything.
Without this ability to tax, the federal government would be starved the finances to go to war.
Without state revenue handed over to the federal government, there would be no war machine.
There would be, as was intended, an army to protect sovereignty. Not a global army. Corporate MIC wealth and military appropriations would be greatly subdued.
We would not have military bases in 130 countries (I’ve been to 24 of those bases, btw…)
We would have several nuclear weapons rather than several thousand on hand to protect ourselves.
There never would have been “a neo-con agenda”.
etc…
You don’t hold much of a candle do you?
Actually, a federal income tax was instituted during the Civil War, and then cancelled by congress in the late 1860’s. Federal income tax wasn’t written into constitutional law until 1913, but this is not fairly labeled as “the birth of federal taxation of income” since it had clearly been done before then.
And of course there were other kinds of federal taxation going back to the beginning of the nation’s history, in the form of sales taxes on certain goods. Our federal government actually spent a good chunk of the 1800’s funded only on tarriffs on imported goods.
It’s hard to imagine what any of this has to do with the current government’s trouncing of the 4th amendment, though—despite Scott’s unproven assertion that somehow the 16th amendment had something to do with government intrusion on peoples’ lives and property.
I recently heard that german companies equip their travelling managers with a good heap of cash instead of a laptop, so they can buy one in the US and download all relevenat data from there via secure connections. And if german managers can snug their secret data into the US, anyone can -.-
Oh dear… now the CIA is going to shut down the entire internet to stop people getting stuff via VPNs. It’s going to make the Great Firewall of China look like a script kiddie party. But no need to worry – after all, it’s for your own good – you’re either for us or against us!
Free market economics don’t work with things like education
Of course it does. We have a coercive monopoly for primary schooling, and the results are abysmal. We have competition at the university level, and American colleges are world-class.
-jcr
Actually, a federal income tax was instituted during the Civil War
That figures. A lot of unconstitutional actions were taken during that war.
-jcr
@Phaedrus #135
So as an outsider looking in, I can ask you this: with all the stuff going on with the USA now… with the fascist-style infrastructure that allows you to get taken away without any legal representation, allows your government to monitor all of your communications, allows your government to peruse your personal data (paper or digital) for any reason whatsoever without warrant or cause…
Hey, isn’t this the very same sort of shit you Americans were fighting against with such chest-thumping during the Cold War? Isn’t this the very thing you were fighting against in the name of freedom? So what’s the difference now between the USA and the Iron Curtain Of Old, apart from the spelling, and perhaps another decade?
It’s easy. What the US gov failed to convey to its own populace is that winning the cold was didn’t mean destroying the totalitarian state, it meant doing it much better than the competition. And they’re now there. It’s rather sad that some of the old east block countries are more liberal and less policed than the so-called “good guys” in the west. The US is in grave peril, and honestly, I don’t know how they will get out of this. I’m inclined to agree with someone up thread that they will need a 1776 to break out of this, but that will be one bloody affair. There will be two kinds of “patriot”: those who support the neo-con fuckwits, and those who feel that the US has fallen to them and will defend their country by forcibly removing them. Like I said, get out a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. The backdrop of that story is what’s coming. We’ll have coffee and donuts for those who take refuge on this side of the border.
John C Randolph@148,
Ah another OWHITUSAC believer. Try looking outside the USA, at countries where primary and secondary education is far superior to that in the USA. Not one has a “free-market” system.
I just remembered something that is kind of interesting. There’s a video of Frank Zappa being interviewed on TV in 1986 (I think it as Crossfire) in which he argued vigourously that the US was headed toward a fascist theocracy. It’s easy to see now, but I was really surprised that he saw it coming more than 20 years ago. But then Frank was a very sharp mind.
@Scott
You know… I am really sadly disappointed. I thought, “cool”, a bright group of progressive people with open minds, willing to discuss things using reason and logic, hopeful to produce a better America, with less “bad things” like a Bush administration, and more good things like communities working together to solve their own problems…
And I get arguments like this.
Not sure why you are getting so much grief from people here. I think you make valid points. People are carrying your idea of local decisions to extremes. Pushing to the so-called “logical conclusion” is, in that case, a false argument. Your suggestion doesn’t imply that. And it may work, if it’s done the right way. What I think is a good idea is have standards for things like air and water quality set for the nation, but let the communities find their own ways to meet them. Good ideas will be generated, and they will spread. We struggle with the same kind of thing up here with respect to national health care standards, among others. We don’t have a perfect system, but it’s pretty consistent through the country (apart from remote northern communities).
As a foreigner here I have to say that one thing I do notice is that a lot of those who post comments suffer from binary objectivity (like the Bush proposition, you’re with us or you’re against us). Lots of you are bright and logical, but many don’t do “nuance” very well. It’s all black & white; no shades of gray. This seems to be a strong trait in the American mindset. It’s just my opinion, but I think this is one reason you folks hate the French so fervently. The French are, after all, the masters of nuance. (I’m now more than 15 years with my French wife, just for the record.) Not everything is clear cut and easy, and especially so when you don’t have all of the information.
You lads might want to really “discuss” stuff with Scott and not just call him names. He’s absolutely correct that the Dems are culpable. Sure, Cheney is pure evil and the Neo-con administration is the worst in the country’s history, but that doesn’t mean that the Dems are wonderful. These politicians all dance to the same masters. Follow the money. Your national clean up effort is going to be much harder than simply having the Dems in control of the executive and legislative branches of government. The rot is very deep in them too. De Toqueville would cry in his vichyssoise if he were to travel through the US today.
I second Canuck @154, but from a different perspective.
Ont the other hand, not long ago, here we had the disgraceful case of Mohamed Haneef.
The more blatant things get, the more people wake up to things. At least factor that in.
Ain’t it the truth. People should listen to Ralph Nader. You don’t have to vote for him, but give what he’s saying a fair hearing. The vast majority of Democrats are in corporate pockets nearly as far as are the Republicans. Remains to be seen whether Obama has the will and ability to buck that status quo.
“You Folks”
Not really a fair assessment. You are making broad sweeping generalizations of the American populace. The reason you hear so much about the french thing is because of the presiding president and his party’s rule for 6-7 of the last 8 years. Plus we have conservative talk radio that dominates the local AM airwaves. They LOVE using this example because its all about riling up their listeners. I hold no ill will towards the French. Well how could I? I’m a chef and wine lover :) But honestly you’ll find that the anti-french sentiment is not nearly as prevalent as the conservative talking heads would have you believe. Please don’t fall into the same trap you are accusing us of.
And yes sometimes it is tough going on this blog in the comments. People sometimes do find it hard being disagreeable without being an asshole. Myself included.
@ Rev #157
Fair enough. It’s your conservative media that trumpets the hatred of the French. And they reflect the administration. And I guess it’s a bit of stretch that they represent the general feeling on the street. I expect that the average individual in the US knows very little about France or the French. But there is a portion of the population who support what Faux news says, and do so with a lot of gusto. Most of them probably know nothing about the French either. There’s a lot of blind support for “the party”.
And you mention talk radio. That’s something I just don’t get. I can’t, for the life of me, understand how anyone can listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and conclude that he’s anything other than a bloviating ignoramus. And he’s just one of a stable of these raging morons that ride the air waves. Years ago I used to spend a lot of time in the US, and as a person who likes radio, I always found it rather strange traveling around the US. On the one hand you had these talk radio shows (include in that the constant mindless prattle about pro sports on other talk shows), and then there was a huge number of Christian radio stations. I used to hunt the dial looking for sanity somewhere, and in the prairie area it was hard to find. I could usually find NPR on the dial, but not always.
Of course this just points to yet another major issue, and that’s the one of media control. We also have that problem where I live, so it’s not unique to the US.
There’s a small community near DC called Garrett Park. Several years ago they designated themselves as a “nuclear free zone” This is in the middle of suburban DC, not a town in the middle of nowhere.
Everybody thought it was charming, including me. But now it seems like local government at its best.
SG
Canuck @#150:
I’ll definitely hunt down a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale.
But yes, America is screwed. I can’t see any way out except for a revolution. Might sound like tin foil hat melodrama to put it that way, but the system is totally corrupt and rotten. What scares us the most is that whatever America does, we’re sure to follow. We’re about a decade or so behind the USA in terms of “filter-down effect”.
This is a great shame: the USA has a lot of very, very clever people in it. Unfortunately, they’re outnumbered by the twats to the tune of several orders of magnitude.
Orwell got it so spot-on, except for the timing. Looks like he wasn’t out by that much, though.
Phaedrus
I hear you. We are in the same boat. Following a couple of decades behind the US. But I hope that when we see the worst of the shit they get up to we have time to stop the drop off of the precipice in this country. I’m no raving nationalist, but it would be nice if we could preserve some of what makes this a tolerable place to live.
It really is remarkable how insightful Orwell was. He saw what was necessary in the evolution of technology to support the pervasive mechanisms of control, he saw the inability of people to see what was happening and stop it, he saw how language would be a key weapon (newspeak) in the dumbing down and pacification of the proletariat. And you’re right, he didn’t miss it by much. The major difference is we have better food and some lingering illusion of liberty.
There’s another dystopia that’s very similar to 1984. It’s called “We”, and was written in Russia in the early 1920s by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I read it 24 years ago when living in Switzerland. Some people think that Orwell had a smuggled version of this manuscript, written in French, that he got while working in Paris, and that because the novel had not been published in the west, he based a lot of 1984 on it, figuring the resemblance wouldn’t be noted. The books have a great deal of similarity.
I guess the thing that is so frustrating about the situation today is that we have these “warnings” – heck, the term Orwellian has even become common in our language – and yet people don’t see that it’s happening now. It’s like a nation in a state of mental paralysis, or delusion, or something. What will it take to wake the fuck up?
P.S. Do you take your handle from the Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
“There’s a small community near DC called Garrett Park. Several years ago they designated themselves as a “nuclear free zone” – Science Goddess, #159
The City of Berkeley, California, declared itself a nuclear free zone in 1986 – see the third picture down at http://ecolocalizer.com/2008/04/10/pictures-from-the-berkeley-permaculture-bike-tour/
Canuck @#161:
Yes, America is Orwell’s Britain. I forget who it was, but there was a linguist in the 1930s (I think) who came up with the quite valid idea that if you restrict the language, you control what people can think, because you take away from them the mental machinery to express themselves – after all, who doesn’t think in their native language when they talk inside their own head? I know I do. I’m pretty certain Orwell drew upon this for 1984.
And as far as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is concerned, you’re bang on the money. I was down at Jindabyne (snow country over here) with a friend in 1986. He spotted the book on the rack and told me to get it. I asked him why… he said because the guy that wrote it sounded just like me, so I did.
Most important book I ever read in my life.
looks like its time to start using full-disk encryption as a matter of course.
idea #2: travel around with a cheap laptop and a hardrive full of Goatse, just for the hell of it.
“It’s hard to imagine what any of this has to do with the current government’s trouncing of the 4th amendment, though–despite Scott’s unproven assertion that somehow the 16th amendment had something to do with government intrusion on peoples’ lives and property”.
Ummmm, you ARE kidding, right? The IRS has been granted powers that step directly on the 4th Amendment. The power to make you “report” all of your financial activities to a central power. The power to confiscate without trial, merely suspician. The power to riffle through your “property” when a family member dies. My word, I knew there were those who lie with sheep… but to speak their language!
“You lads might want to really “discuss” stuff with Scott and not just call him names. He’s absolutely correct that the Dems are culpable. Sure, Cheney is pure evil and the Neo-con administration is the worst in the country’s history, but that doesn’t mean that the Dems are wonderful. These politicians all dance to the same masters. Follow the money. Your national clean up effort is going to be much harder than simply having the Dems in control of the executive and legislative branches of government. The rot is very deep in them too”.
The sad thing is, I’m talking to “progressive” open-minded folks (or so I thought).
Just imagine trying to have this conversation with one of those folks who voted not once, but twice, for GWB?
When the housing market slides into the Pacific in the spring of next year, and the Euros and the Asians stop taking bad paper for their goods, and Americans default on their record debt in record numbers, walking away from house, car, and credit cards… people will at least start to perk up and look around.
We’ll see if Micky D’s hasn’t rotted out their minds through their intestinal walls…
agree 100%
My take on conservative talk radio is there are those who just agree because they agree. Then there is the group that mostly agrees but don’t know enough about the issues to know any better and the border between entertainment and informative radio is blurred. The evil (and distortion) that Rush and his types spew out on the radio give the audience the excuse to not educate themselves on the issues and point to someone in power (perceived power or not) as a reason to believe these things or at least validate their opinions. If there is one thing that can be said about many in this country, is that we are lazy. And having someone tell you what you think is much easier than actually putting in the effort to find out the reality of the issues.
That and I truly feel that the base emotional release they get from having someone shouting their prejudices on 400 + stations across the county makes them feel their prejudices are legitimate and main stream.
Mix all those together and you get at least a glancing overview of 1 American’s opinion on the matter.
“Democracy isn’t dead it’s just weak right now and we all need to work to make it stronger.” – Ralph Nader
Okay, I don’t think anyone here thinks the Dems are blameless, but if you look at the unfolding of our current Orwellian drama from the sixties on there are a few things that have significantly affected the way the American people view their government. The first one that really changed our relationship to our government is Vietnam (a Democrat blunder). It’s very difficult to force citizens to participate in a war of imperialism and created a populace that feared and distrusted the government. Then you have Nixon and Watergate, which absolutely destroyed the confidence of many in both the presidency and the government. Nixon was one corrupt bastard and he was power hungry.
Around this time you see the far right-wing gain a real foothold among the population. A lot of people are angry at the anti-war movement and they transfer that anger to liberals in general and move to the political right. There’s also Roe V. Wade, which would later provide a point around which the Religious Right could crystallize.
So, in the background of the seventies there is the development of the vast right-wing conspiracy and the development of the blue collar voting blocks it would overtake in the interior of the country.
In 1980 a complete incompetent wins the presidency. Due to the onset of Alzheimer’s Reagan cannot actually perform the behind the scenes functions of the presidency, but this is no problem. His corporate buddies and the crazy right-wingers take over. Federal spending balloons while taxes stagnate. Reagan presided over the greatest increase in our debt to that point. Luckily we had a Democratic Congress to block the worst of what might have happened, but the ascendancy of the far right-wing is just over the horizon. Though Reagan was suffering from senility and dementia by his second term, people still love him (he ended the Cold War).
GHWB is elected in 1988 and we go to was in Iraq in 1990. This quick (and, for the citizenry, mostly painless) war started healing the wounds of Vietnam. We won. It was fast, in and out, and best of all! didn’t require a draft.
Bush made a mistake though, he raised taxes when he promised not to. It doesn’t matter why taxes went up. They did and so he had to go.
1992, Bill Clinton (a DINO) is elected to office. Clinton has a plan to help with health-care, do some welfare “reform” among other agenda items. Health-care fails because the Clintons had not yet learned the best way to operate in DC and didn’t go about the politics of the situation in a manner that would work. 1994, Gingrich convinces Americans that the Republicans will make government better, smaller, more efficient. His ascendancy ushers in the ballooning of the Corporate Welfare State. Over the next few years Gingrich, Delay, Frist and their whole cabal do everything they can to help corporate interests (often times with the complicity of Dems) and to make sure the atmosphere of Congress is not one of collegiality, but one of bitter rancor. One of the most important things Gingrich did was work hard to make sure government didn’t work. He then manages to convince the American public that this is the fault of the Dems and the Welfare State rather than a consequence of Republican rule.
Clinton suffers through various non-scandals aimed at reducing his effectiveness as President without removing power from the executive branch. Here comes GWB in 2000. Through the vagaries of the electoral college and various methods of vote suppression, Shrub becomes president through SCOTUS appointment. Our democracy has truly begun to break down as Bush and Cheney consolidate government power in the executive branch, treating a Republican Congress as a rubber stamp (a role the Repubs are more than happy to play). The Republican Congress that exercised so much oversight when Clinton was in office issued not a single subpoena for the executive branch despite overwhelming evidence of incompetency and illegal activities. Thus we stand today with a population that doesn’t trust the government
I know the Dems come out of my tale looking not to bad, but the truth is they’re not great. However, as an opposition party they kept the worst excesses of the far right in check until the Republican take over in 1994. With a DINO president we ended up with NAFTA and no health care. Damn.
Is the answer to all this another 1776? I hope not. Our government is armed to the teeth and a revolution would be bloody and costly. However, the right-wing control of the media (as Canuck pointed out) is nearly ubiquitous on the radio and only somewhat less on TV. Here’s the thing, Obama is certainly not my first choice. I really wish we could amend our system in such a way as to allow for third parties to have real power. However, as long as Obama isn’t taking corporate money I have hope for him. It’s a tiny smidge of hope, but it’s hope nonetheless.
“I know the Dems come out of my tale looking not too bad, but the truth is they’re not great. However, as an opposition party they kept the worst excesses of the far right in check until the Republican take over in 1994. With a DINO president we ended up with NAFTA and no health care. Damn”.
The trouble with your scenario is that, in your hatred of the Republican party (something I share btw…) you grant too much leniency to the opposition party. You don’t see that it was the Democratic party who wrote the latest law that mandates ALL of your credit card transactions get reported to the feds. You don’t see that the Dems voted in large number to go to Iraq. They voted for FISA. They refused to oppose The Patriot Act. And so on and so forth.
Not a single Democrat is advocating for the return of power to his/her local governments. They get to drive the big bus for a time. Weeee! They want more of your money so they can perform more big government wonders! Weee!
Local goverments (up to the state level) are all that are needed for almost everything that a society needs in government.
Schools, fire, police, basic behavior laws, environmental protection laws, welfare programs, health services programs. Everything can be done within a state, and the competition (albeit informal) between states just improves the systems.
The money we Americans pipe off to Washington every April could be kept in our local communities, where locals can participate in their own governance (ummm, that ‘We The People’ thing) and actual community NEEDS are met rather than federal desires dictated.
The problem with your scenario is that it fails to describe just how the whole corporate feeding frenzy in Washington came about. Washington is corrupted by corporations, because the corporations know where the money and the power now lies. Take the power away, and the corporations have no place to go to get laws passed for themselves.
Return government back to the people by inverting the power structure back to the original intent of those who founded the US, and you may have mistakes all over, but you won’t have ONE mistake all over.
Local goverments (up to the state level) are all that are needed for almost everything that a society needs in government.
Schools, fire, police, basic behavior laws, environmental protection laws, welfare programs, health services programs. Everything can be done within a state, and the competition (albeit informal) between states just improves the systems.
The money we Americans pipe off to Washington every April could be kept in our local communities, where locals can participate in their own governance (ummm, that ‘We The People’ thing) and actual community NEEDS are met rather than federal desires dictated.
You know, smaller communities are MORE fascist than larger communities.. what you are promoting is a true tyrany of the majority, I’m afraid.
It’s one of those things that looks good on paper, like communism, but don’t work so well when actual people get hold of it.
“You know, smaller communities are MORE fascist than larger communities.. what you are promoting is a true tyrany of the majority, I’m afraid”.
“A tyranny of the majority”…
You mean, states that decide for themselves what their state needs IS MORE tyrannical than a federal government that dictates what you need?
I am not even sure I understand the logic, here. How can a local government be more tyrannical, when locals can participate in their own governance? Are you suggesting that a federal dictator knows what is best for all, and can accomodate all with grand precision?
We here in Oregon, are dictated to by Washington DC “players” who know nothing about what we here in Oregon need to live and function. We have to go to Washington to beg for our own money back, and the money is given with strings.
And you are claiming that if Oregonians were able to govern Oregonians, then we’d most assuredly have more tyranny?
Because Oregonians would get the governance they asked for?
The mind boggles…
When a state or local government screws up, it affects, let’s say 1/50th of the nation.
When the federal government screws up, it affects all 300 million.
The mind is still boggling…
Scott, Scott, Scott. “States’ Rights” were the justification for the abomination of slavery, and all of the torture, murder, rape, and oppression that entailed.
And you have neglected the fact that state governments, being smaller and less powerful, are MORE easily purchased and dominated by corporations.
Finally, your amorality and cruelty is easily revealed by your dismissal of the effects of poor education, i.e. – so the ignorant will be rejected by colleges, and eventually the consumers will demand reforms. You ignore the brutality and the costs of all of those thousands of people who did not, could not get their education, and so are constrained and limited in their economic lives.
Government exists partly to identify these problems before they happen and do something about them (e.g. – establish education standards). As it stands you are revealed as a cruel person who doesn’t care for the damage done to people as long as your monomaniacal ideal is not contaminated.
City, Regional, State, and Federal governments all have their roles to play, and often the balance is out, as it is right now. And your point is correct, there.
Schools, fire, police, basic behavior laws, environmental protection laws, welfare programs, health services programs. Everything can be done within a state, and the competition (albeit informal) between states just improves the systems.
Scott,
This really is it. You have no reading comprehension so I’m going to go step by step as to why some laws have to be larger than the state.
Environmental Laws.
The case of water pollution and the Mississippi River: A hypothetical example of state environmental laws.
Iowa and Missouri.
Missouri passes high water pollution standards to clean up the Mississippi River because agricultural run-off and waste water plants have made the Mississippi River a disgusting, poisonous cesspool. Iowa doesn’t. In fact, there are virtually no rules in Iowa. Untreated sewage, agricultural run-off (including chemicals banned by Missouri), and untreated industrial waste pour into the Mississippi River. All of this pollution goes down stream mucking up the water Missourians are trying to clean up resulting in higher costs to make water drinkable if it’s even possible. Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi pass laws similar to Missouri because they also need potable water. Iowa voters don’t care though. They think the cost-benefit ratio of improving water quality is too high, so they continue to pollute the Mississippi River and their waste continues to travel downstream.
This is the kind of idiocy you’re proposing. WATER, AIR and other necessary things travel from state to state. One state’s poor regulation results in pollution in other states. If you can’t see this you’re a moron. If you simply don’t think it’s a problem, then you’re a moron. Either way you’re a moron.
Hairhead,
And you have neglected the fact that state governments, being smaller and less powerful, are MORE easily purchased and dominated by corporations.
Couldn’t agree with you more :)
And to Scott and others, I, as a Canadian, speak from experience when you talk about “local” rule.
Canada is a confederation, and the provinces in our confederation have more powerful than states in your union. In 1987 (Meech Lake Accord) and 1992 (Charlottetown Agreement), the federal and provincial governments tried to amend the Canadian Constitution (the Canada Act) to redistribute power from the federal level to the provincial level. The Meech Lake Accord was rejected by enough provincial governments to fail, so in the Charlottetown Agreement, they went to the people in a national referendum.
The Charlottetown Agreement was amazing in that it was backed by ALL of the power groups in country; the feds, the provinces, the Chambers of Commerce, and the Unions all agreed this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. All avenues of the media spread the word throughout the country, and it was a unanimous and unanswered chorus of “You must vote YES!” But as cynical Canadians (and we are very cynical about power, though we are polite) we (the electorate) realized that if ALL of the power groups of society were for it, then it MUST be bad for us, the people, the non-power group.
So, much to the collective shock of all of the various Establishments, the Canadian public, in its wisdom, voted against the Charlottetown Agreement; basically, we told them all to Fuck Off.
We knew that the devolution of power would work only to create a bunch of small fiefdoms unanswerable to any other power, for we saw all of the leaders of the various establishments fairly foaming at the mouth, fantasizing in public over all of the things they would be able to do to (or in their words: for) us.
“Darwinism would actually work as a social pressure and push some schools into greatness.”
Okay, one coffee soaked keyboard replaced for ability to comment.
What is Darwinism but a label by the creationists/IDers?
Secondly, when did evolutionary pressure turned into directional force towards betterment? I cannot recall where it is stated that evolution would create a better organism?
More suited to the surroundings is to my knowledge the right description. Schools would not reach greatness but a form more acceptable by the external pressures, like religions, ideologies and commerce.
Blandness is the description that keeps coming up to my mind.
Hairhead,
Thanks for the illuminating perspective from our northern neighbors. I recently read Free Lunch, which is about the corporate welfare state. Based on the instances in that book, it seems to me that when small communities compete, corporations win.
Random town/city: “Oh build your plant here! We’ll give you $50 million in tax breaks.”
Other town/city: “No, build it here! We’ll give you $100 million in tax breaks.”
Big Corporation: “We’ve go them by the balls now.” *evil laughter*
“Scott, Scott, Scott. “States’ Rights” were the justification for the abomination of slavery, and all of the torture, murder, rape, and oppression that entailed”..
And FEDERAL POWER was the tool used to kill millions of Vietnamee peasants. FEDERAL POWER was the tool used to create a nuclear arsenal quite unfitting the circumstances required…
Slavery was a European abomination imported into the US by way of culture. It was the institution of liberty and the idea of freedom that eventually defeated it (in a rather sloganesque way, I admit.)
“We knew that the devolution of power would work only to create a bunch of small fiefdoms unanswerable to any other power, for we saw all of the leaders of the various establishments fairly foaming at the mouth, fantasizing in public over all of the things they would be able to do to (or in their words: for) us”.
Not sure how this correlates. Canada, a small and ineffective country with no military to speak of, doesn’t need to be reigned in. It can’t even compete with California for economy. Besides, if Canadians can’t even vote to control their own little “fiefdoms”, why are we to assume they can vote and get a good national government? It seems to reason that if you can’t do something small and managable well, you can’t do something large and unweildy well.
“What is Darwinism but a label by the creationists/IDers?”
Point taken. Sloppy thinking and a lack of science vernacular training.
“Schools would not reach greatness but a form more acceptable by the external pressures, like religions, ideologies and commerce.
Blandness is the description that keeps coming up to my mind”.
Ummm, the best and the brightest schools are not government run. The worst of them are. Blandness occurs when top down homogenus directives encompass all schools in a system. What is “bland” about a human? A cheetah? A peacock?
It seems to me that the great objection to localized government control is that local governments will instill religion. This is still Unconstitutional.
The mind still boggles…
“This is the kind of idiocy you’re proposing. WATER, AIR and other necessary things travel from state to state. One state’s poor regulation results in pollution in other states. If you can’t see this you’re a moron. If you simply don’t think it’s a problem, then you’re a moron. Either way you’re a moron.”
Calling someone a moron does not a moron make. I never said DISBAND the federal government, nor did I say it has no role to play. If another state is polluting your state, your state has every right to seek redress via the courts provided by the federal government. Regulation of state filth then becomes an issue with its citizens, as its taxes are going to another state to pay for piping filth in their direction. When your taxe are leaving the state because of your local government, you will be motivated to change your local government.
I can also tell you things which are legetimate FEDERAL interests. The Aviation industry is one.
Immigration… Interstate commerce…
“And you have neglected the fact that state governments, being smaller and less powerful, are MORE easily purchased and dominated by corporations”.
And you have neglected the fact that if this occurs, you have MORE RECOURSE at your disposal to correct the imposition. As it stands now, you have effectively zero recourse when laws are made in favor of large corps. Every four years, you vote for a guy and you watch the system get more and more out of your control.
By next April, you will see a rather rude display of the effects on that, and you will not be happy.
Nick,
As it happens, I grew up outside of the USA, and while it’s true that other countries also have tax-funded schooling for the most part, you ignore the key difference between the American schooling cartel and the European system.
In Europe, kids aren’t simply geographically assigned to a school. They choose which schools to apply to, and the funding follows the student. In other words, there’s a market for schooling there, albeit at the taxpayers’ expense. The situation there is effectively a voucher system.
-jcr
“Ummm, the best and the brightest schools are not government run. The worst of them are.”
‘Annoying buzzer’ That does not equate evolution but skims close to eugenics. The above situation is mostly about funding.
Private schools have it for the select few, governments have comparable little funds and they need to spread it so it reaches all, at various degrees of efficiency. Do not get me wrong, any organization is inherently bent on inequality, corruption and other ails.
It does not take much to see why governments will have problems with schooling. Short-term planning being also one of the great educational problems.
You cannot treat education as profit/loss equation per quarter but as long-term investment with profit/loss turnover point being counted in tens of years if one is to use fiscal terms.
The point I am actually trying to make is that using evolutionary terms on matters of societal problems will lead to confusion and we all know how confusion leads to bananas being frightful for the non-believer.
America is Orwell’s Britain.
No, Britain is Orwell’s Britain. You can actually be prosecuted for offending the superstitious gits around you in that country.
-jcr
It does not take much to see why governments will have problems with schooling.
Well, some governments do a far better job of it than others. Here in the USA, there’s a cartel similar to the military-industrial complex which has managed to vastly increase the funding for schools, despite failing for decades to deliver the promised results.
-jcr
You have no reading comprehension
Pygmy,
You are practicing the standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, of insisting that someone who disagrees with you isn’t as smart as you are. It’s fucking snotty, and it does nothing at all to support your position. All it does is demonstrate that you’re a pompous asshole.
-jcr
The above situation is mostly about funding.
Nope. The USA outspends Germany and Japan per capita for schooling, and we don’t get the results we pay for.
-jcr
“The point I am actually trying to make is that using evolutionary terms on matters of societal problems will lead to confusion and we all know how confusion leads to bananas being frightful for the non-believer.”
Fair enough. I was just trying to speak the lingo of the crowd. Me, I think in construction terms and tend to use construction analogies. “Need a strong foundation…” that sort of thing.
“You are practicing the standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, of insisting that someone who disagrees with you isn’t as smart as you are”.
I am amazed to find that kind of discourse here. I thought getting around my peeps would make this a viable discussion.
I am just trying to get people to look at alternatives to the two-party, bi-polar political paradigm we have lost ourselves in, offering possible alternatives and mind-bendingly simple solutions to the problems presented to us by our own government.
The first step is to analyze just what government IS, and how much of it do we need? Then analyze where are we to center its power and why?
Just because the power has gravitated to Washington doesn’t mean that that is the most effective government for Americans. Washington had the ear of Ted Haggart not too long ago. That should tell you something about Washington.
You are practicing the standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, of insisting that someone who disagrees with you isn’t as smart as you are. It’s fucking snotty, and it does nothing at all to support your position. All it does is demonstrate that you’re a pompous asshole.
-jcr
Actually, I present an argument for why Scott has no reading comprehension. I don’t know if I’m smarter that Scott (whatever “smarter” means), but I am, apparently, better informed. Every time I make an argument he casually dismisses it with the tired old canard of “the Dems are just as bad.” So what? That doesn’t change the Republicans being the incarnation of corporate power and greed while using the psychology of media and propaganda to manipulate the citizenry. Scott’s complete lack of understanding of how the government (at all levels) works shows that he shouldn’t really be having this argument with me.
For instance:
“Regulation of state filth then becomes an issue with its citizens, as its taxes are going to another state to pay for piping filth in their direction. When your taxe are leaving the state because of your local government, you will be motivated to change your local government.”
This doesn’t make any sense. The federal courts don’t have the power to take the tax money from one state and give it to another (unless you’re talking about federal taxes, but that’s not what Scott is saying).
“This doesn’t make any sense. The federal courts don’t have the power to take the tax money from one state and give it to another (unless you’re talking about federal taxes, but that’s not what Scott is saying)”.
Ummm, dude. The federal courts have the power to assign DAMAGES. DAMAGES equals money. Money equals taxes. A state has attorneys and it is common for a state to sue a corp. for example. They can also sue another entity like a state.
California is suing the federal government over the degree of emissions standards required on cars. Get this, the feds want to limit California’s stricter standards.
You really DO take the cake!
“Well, some governments do a far better job of it than others.”
So are you claiming that the funding available to private schools is less that the funding of public schools, which is the situation I was pointing to?
There are several countries which are able to facilitate better education with less but there generally is also less of various focus groups, demanding various privileges and amenities and getting them, which easily can bleed out the otherwise sufficient funds.
Also comparing two countries with such a large difference in area and populace is not going to give proper view of the issue even by using the per capita comparison. Borrowing more from the fiscal game book; Distance equals loss and overly large customer base leads to failed sales.
Even countries with high education scores are suffering from the lack of resources in form of limited number of teachers for all the small schools set outside the main population centers. The somewhat absurd desire to centralize all services is undercutting the right of all for equal education regardless of location, even in countries which otherwise are labeled as well educated.
The mentioned cartels exist in all countries in various sized and forms as it has long been known that unskilled labor is cheap but it cannot work without educated people directing the efforts towards desired outcome.
Education is not only necessary for advancement but it is also needed for sustaining reached levels.
All of which has little to do with civil liberties, right?
Just to be nit-picky
“Washington had the ear of Ted Haggart not too long ago. “
What you meant to say was, “Ted Haggard had the ear of Washington not too long ago.”
“have the ear of A” means that A listens to you, so if Washington had the ear of Ted Haggard, that means Ted Haggart listened to Washington and he, Ted Haggard, gave the ideas and opinions of Washington more weight.
Of course this statement assumes that having the ear of the President=having the ear of Washington. I think there are a number of Senators and Representatives who would disagree.
Therefore the factually correct phrase would be “Ted Haggard had the ear of President Bush not too long ago.”
Scott (only once this time:)
You said: And FEDERAL POWER was the tool used to kill millions of Vietnamee peasants. FEDERAL POWER was the tool used to create a nuclear arsenal quite unfitting the circumstances required…
Scott, California, a State power, could, without federal regulation, attack and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Take a look at “small”, “local” Rwanda, for instance, and the consequences of a government you could “get in your car and drive to.” Your response is a non-sequiter. Federal government did kill millions of Vietnamese; local governments committed millions of atrocities on slaves. This says only that governments (of ALL sizes) should be watched very carefully.
You said: Slavery was a European abomination imported into the US by way of culture. It was the institution of liberty and the idea of freedom that eventually defeated it (in a rather sloganesque way, I admit.)
Scott, do you know anything about history at all? Slavery existed throughout human history and in virtually all cultures. It was an abomination not limited to Europe, in fact indigenous North American cultures also had slavery. The elimination of slavery was a culmination of many intellectual, religious, economic, and political forces, all of which you seem ignorant of.
I said: “We knew that the devolution of power would work only to create a bunch of small fiefdoms unanswerable to any other power, for we saw all of the leaders of the various establishments fairly foaming at the mouth, fantasizing in public over all of the things they would be able to do to (or in their words: for) us”.
You said: Not sure how this correlates. Canada, a small and ineffective country with no military to speak of, doesn’t need to be reigned in. It can’t even compete with California for economy.
I say: California, pop 45 million GDP 2005 – 1.5 trillion, per capita, 33,000 Canada, pop 32 million GDP 2005 – 1.2 trillion, per capita 38,000 Canada is the home to the eighth largest economy in the world [1](measured in US dollars at market exchange rates)[2], is one of the world’s wealthiest nations, and a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Group of Eight (G8)
Scott if you’re going to argue, at least argue from facts, not ignorance. Canada is competitive with California, and its inhabitants, in per capita GDP and in health, are better off than Californians.
You said: Besides, if Canadians can’t even vote to control their own little “fiefdoms”, why are we to assume they can vote and get a good national government? It seems to reason that if you can’t do something small and managable well, you can’t do something large and unweildy well.
I say: Scott, you are so politically naive! We Canadians kept the current system we have because it pits the provinces and feds against each other. The Meech and Charlottetown Accords would have nicely divided up the pie between the two levels of government, who would have been able to then put all of their attention on screwing the electorate. Its Canada’s very own system of checks and balances, different in execution from yours, but with the same effect.
Other commenter: “Schools would not reach greatness but a form more acceptable by the external pressures, like religions, ideologies and commerce.
Blandness is the description that keeps coming up to my mind”.
You said: Ummm, the best and the brightest schools are not government run. The worst of them are.
I say: once again, Scott, you’re wrong. The worse schools are the fundamentalist extremist madrassas and Christian schools, which abhor science, elevate prejudice and bigotry, and teach hate and divisiveness. Privately-run schools. Ignorance, Scott, is a curable condition. Acquaint yourself with some facts.
I said: “And you have neglected the fact that state governments, being smaller and less powerful, are MORE easily purchased and dominated by corporations”.
You say: And you have neglected the fact that if this occurs, you have MORE RECOURSE at your disposal to correct the imposition.
I say: Scott, Scott. Large corporations can and do control small governments, up to and including the courts, and all of the political parties which are allowed. Small governments mean LESS RECOURSE because of the power of corporations (of whatever kind: I include the Mafia as a corporation). Once again, you make your ignorance pointedly visible. The whole point of the Meech and Charlottetown Accords was to take recourse away from people who had problems with their provincial governments — which is why we rejected the agreements.
You said: As it stands now, you have effectively zero recourse when laws are made in favor of large corps. Every four years, you vote for a guy and you watch the system get more and more out of your control.
I say: Scott, States and cities, at the behest of their electorate, can and do fight against absurd and bad federal laws. Take a look at the list of states who are refusing to comply with (on behalf their electorate) the federal RealID laws.
You say: By next April, you will see a rather rude display of the effects on that, and you will not be happy.
I say: You seem to think that I think Obama is the Great Liberator. He isn’t. He’s corporate tool and he won’t usher in any great reforms. But he is not an ill-educated, sadistic, psychopath, crony-capitalist. He won’t be great, but he’ll be an improvement. As for the rest of your comments, your sheer ignorance, lack of facts, and knee-jerk ideological answers render you immune to fisking, and I shan’t waste time on you. I think readers other than you will gain more from what I have written.
And I’ll continue to be glad that I’m a Canadian.
@ Phaedrus
And as far as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is concerned, you’re bang on the money. I was down at Jindabyne (snow country over here) with a friend in 1986. He spotted the book on the rack and told me to get it. I asked him why… he said because the guy that wrote it sounded just like me, so I did.
Most important book I ever read in my life.
I can relate. I’ve read it 10 or 12 times. Even made the trip out to Yellowstone via Red Lodge in 1990 and was reading it as I went (though I was in a SAAB, not on a motorcycle at the time – but I have had a motorcycle since 1977). I even walked around Bozeman, Montana for a while trying to find the building on campus that is written into one of the scenes – the place where he taught rhetoric. Hell, for the last 10 years, I’ve even had the mildly autistic son he had with him on that trip. But we have yet to make our motorcycle journey, though it is going to come to pass. Kind of odd. Anyway, it’s just a handle one doesn’t see a lot. I figured it might have been from that book. Interesting connections.
Sorry the post is so late replying. I’ve been out all day with my wife and kids on a bicycle trip. Just back to the computer now.
Scott, do you know anything about history at all? Slavery existed throughout human history and in virtually all cultures. It was an abomination not limited to Europe, in fact indigenous North American cultures also had slavery. The elimination of slavery was a culmination of many intellectual, religious, economic, and political forces, all of which you seem ignorant of.
Sorry Hairhead, but I don’t think Scott has the most basic understanding of history. He doesn’t know the difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, nor does he understand why the latter replaced the former. He’s basically arguing for a return to the Articles.
Just so you know, Scott, Great Britain abolished slavery before the US did, as did Mexico, Haiti, Spain and numerous other countries. Slavery was one of the reasons behind the Texas Revolution. The culturally American settlers wanted their slaves and Mexico said no. Then they fought to keep their slaves.
Scott,
You want to take away the power of the feds. That would inevitably lead to a weak federal court system and the inability of the federal government to enforce the rulings. Again, we tried confederation and deemed the federal government too weak under that system. The Framers then wrote the Constitution to fix that.
Also, you’re assuming people are rational when it comes to the way taxes are distributed. They’re not. If the federal courts told Iowa to pay up in my hypothetical example, the population would probably be angry with the federal government for taking away their tax money without ever realizing that passing stricter laws on water quality might get them out of the mess.
Yes, I know about the California situation. This has less to do with outright federal power and more to do with the current administration. Again and again you fail to understand the extent to which the judiciary at all levels has been shifted to the corporatist right.
If you really want to see a corrupt government, check out some of the states. Illinois and Texas are great examples.
“What you meant to say was, “Ted Haggard had the ear of Washington not too long ago.”
Ummm, yes. That is what I meant to say.
“He doesn’t know the difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, nor does he understand why the latter replaced the former. He’s basically arguing for a return to the Articles”.
(This is the guy who accused me of reading comprehension problems?)
We didn’t have the income tax until 1913. Without the income from that tax, the federal government would not have the power it does today. The powers granted to the federal government are laid out within the Constitution. Go read them.
“Scott, do you know anything about history at all? Slavery existed throughout human history and in virtually all cultures. It was an abomination not limited to Europe, in fact indigenous North American cultures also had slavery.”
Do you argue just to argue? Fact- America was a colony and a “new world” that was populated on top of the indigenous populations by Europeans, who brought the practice of the African slave trade with them, therefore what I said was basically true. The Americans who held slaves in the practice of the times were of European ancestry.
“You seem to think that I think Obama is the Great Liberator. He isn’t. He’s corporate tool and he won’t usher in any great reforms. But he is not an ill-educated, sadistic, psychopath, crony-capitalist. He won’t be great, but he’ll be an improvement. As for the rest of your comments, your sheer ignorance, lack of facts, and knee-jerk ideological answers render you immune to fisking…”
I SEEM TO THINK WHAT? Oh dear me!
“Scott, States and cities, at the behest of their electorate, can and do fight against absurd and bad federal laws. Take a look at the list of states who are refusing to comply with (on behalf their electorate) the federal RealID laws”.
Nobody said they weren’t. But as it stands now, those states’ citizens are under federal laws to fly. They can’t win the battle because the feds hold the trump cards. No ID, no fly!
“Scott, Scott. Large corporations can and do control small governments, up to and including the courts, and all of the political parties which are allowed. Small governments mean LESS RECOURSE because of the power of corporations (of whatever kind: I include the Mafia as a corporation). Once again, you make your ignorance pointedly visible”.
I am talking about within the walls of the US, where we have a tradition of law, and whereby there IS still a document that prescribes the rights of a populace. Comparing anything I say to Rwanda is silly and irrelevant.
“The worse schools are the fundamentalist extremist madrassas and Christian schools”,
Once again taking the argument outside of the box that contains the Bill Of Rights. Irrelevant.
“You want to take away the power of the feds. That would inevitably lead to a weak federal court system and the inability of the federal government to enforce the rulings”.
Says who? How does limiting the feds in Education affect the courts?
How does limiting the feds in search and seizure affect the courts?
How does limiting the feds in overseas military expenditures affect the courts?
The courts are in the Document. The Department of Education is not.
“If you really want to see a corrupt government, check out some of the states. Illinois and Texas are great examples”.
No doubt. But those governments are the responsibility of the people who live in those states. If the citizens of those states do not accept that responsibility, then they deserve to live in a corrupt state.
Having the entire nation focused on the election and politics of Washington only enhances this corruption, as it saturates people with the wrong government coverage.
Who pays any attention to state politics anymore?
Not many. Why? Because we have been led to believe in the great nanny man in the White House and we have taken our eyes off of our own backyards.
Scott,
You’re fixated on the Income Tax. There are other taxes. Eliminate the income tax and the feds will replace it with something else.
I understand that you hate the income tax. I’m not particularly fond of it, but I don’t have your attitude that it’s the Root of All Evil.
Who pays any attention to state politics anymore?
Basically everyone in my region pays greater attention to state and local politics than national politics.
Besides, if Canadians can’t even vote to control their own little “fiefdoms”, why are we to assume they can vote and get a good national government? It seems to reason that if you can’t do something small and managable well, you can’t do something large and unweildy well.
Well, we can have an election in which black people aren’t told they can’t vote because of a past crime, or in which people aren’t turned away for not having registered properly, in which we all mark paper ballots, and in which we have the results in a few hours. And any member of the public who was registered to vote can go and watch the count in their precinct. We can recount physical ballots, when and if there is a dispute. Turning over your voting system to computers was sheer lunacy. You didn’t just invite tampering, you guaranteed it. Just another part of the wake up call the US needs.
Turning over your voting system to computers was sheer lunacy.
But Canuck, computers will fix all of our problems! I just know it. :P
Really, you’re right. The whole computer voting with no paper trail was a foolish move. It’s ridiculously easy to hack those systems and there’s no possibility of a recount over disputed results. It’s monumentally stupid.
Well, we can have an election in which black people aren’t told they can’t vote because of a past crime, or in which people aren’t turned away for not having registered properly,
Don’t forget the poor whites who were turned away too, and now, thanks to ID laws, senior citizens and non-drivers who just don’t have a current state issued ID. I thought we’d grown out of rigging elections through voter exclusion and then 2000 happened.
This is the guy
I’m a woman.
“You’re fixated on the Income Tax. There are other taxes. Eliminate the income tax and the feds will replace it with something else”.
You’ve just granted “the feds” with dictatorial powers. The federal government is an extension of the populace. It is not separate from the populace. It is not “above” the populace.
I am not “fixated” on the income tax. The income tax was the precursor to the full abolition of the 4th Amendment.
The decimation of all 10 items on the original Bill Of Rights IS, however, a fixation of mine.
As it should be to all.
This is where Scott tries to respond to Hairhead:
“Scott, Scott. Large corporations can and do control small governments, up to and including the courts, and all of the political parties which are allowed. Small governments mean LESS RECOURSE because of the power of corporations (of whatever kind: I include the Mafia as a corporation). Once again, you make your ignorance pointedly visible”.
I am talking about within the walls of the US, where we have a tradition of law, and whereby there IS still a document that prescribes the rights of a populace. Comparing anything I say to Rwanda is silly and irrelevant.
Perhaps you have a point in not comparing us to Rwanda. That’s not the point of the passage you quote from Hairhead though. Again, check out Texas and Illinois if you want to understand how corporations control the states. Look into Boeing and Wichita too.
“The worse schools are the fundamentalist extremist madrassas and Christian schools”,
Once again taking the argument outside of the box that contains the Bill Of Rights. Irrelevant.
Again Scott, your response makes no sense. Do you think there aren’t religious private schools in the USA? There are both fundamentalist Christian schools and fundamentalist Muslim schools in the USA.
The decimation of all 10 items on the original Bill Of Rights IS, however, a fixation of mine.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that by “items” you mean amendments. I hope you realize there are more than 10 rights protected by the Bill of Rights.
I understand that you hate the income tax. I’m not particularly fond of it, but I don’t have your attitude that it’s the Root of All Evil.
It is an evil in itself, and it’s an enabler of many more evils. Particularly, as Scott mentioned above, the income tax is a pretext for routine violations of our right to privacy. It’s also a very convenient means for politicians to spy on their opponents (Nixon and Clinton both abused the IRS for that purpose, and it wouldn’t surprise me if every other president since 1913 did the same).
The worst thing about the income tax though, is the immoral pretext on which it’s promulgated: the premise that we are the property of the state, and that the fruit of our labor is for the state to take from us by force.
Bastiat did a fine job of explaining the moral basis of power. The legitimate powers of the state are a delegation of our rights, which we make in order to secure our liberty. There is nothing that is immoral for an individual to do, that becomes moral because the state does it.
So, if a cop pulls you over for driving like a maniac and endangering other people, that’s a legitimate exercise of power. If he kicks in your door to search for marijuana and shoots you if you resist, that’s not a legitimate exercise of power.
Some of the most egregious crimes that the federal government has sanctioned that spring to mind, are the theft of property in order to sell it to a company that will pay more taxes on it (Kelo v. New London), and the imprisonment of peaceful citizens for non-crimes like having Japanese ancestors.
Power is intrinsically dangerous, just like radiation. Let too much of it concentrate, and Bad Things Happen. That’s why our constitution was carefully written to limit the powers delegated to the federal government, and why it’s so important to reverse the expansion of the federal government that we’ve allowed to happen since we overthrew our king.
-jcr
The Americans who held slaves in the practice of the times were of European ancestry.
Not all of them. There were indians who owned slaves, both before and after the europeans showed up, and there were free blacks who owned slaves themselves.
There’s a lot more to the story of slavery in America than the fables we were taught in government schools. Slavery was not a sin of the south alone; there were yankees who owned plantations in the south, and the transatlantic slave trade was banned over the objections of the yankee shipping interests who owned those horrific floating monstrosities.
-jcr
“Power is intrinsically dangerous, just like radiation. Let too much of it concentrate, and Bad Things Happen. That’s why our constitution was carefully written to limit the powers delegated to the federal government, and why it’s so important to reverse the expansion of the federal government that we’ve allowed to happen since we overthrew our king.”
Exactly.
“Not all of them. There were indians who owned slaves, both before and after the europeans showed up, and there were free blacks who owned slaves themselves”.
Yep.
Canuck @#191:
Seems we have some areas of overlap :)
Tell you what, this thread seems to have diverged quite a bit and rather than conduct a personal conversation in amongst the noise, you can get me at [email protected]
Would like to discuss this stuff more.
Regards.
States and cities, at the behest of their electorate, can and do fight against absurd and bad federal laws.
I wish!
I haven’t seen our attorney general lift a finger to keep the feds from harassing medical marijuana patients in my state. Hell, the feds even get local and state police to go along with them on raids that are illegal under state law.
-jcr
On a side note, Alexsandr Solzhentisyn is dead at 89. The Gulag Archipelago is a book that was instrumental in my education, which anyone who cares about their freedom should read.
I read it in my sophomore year of high school, and it made me aware of the dangers of power, much more so than Orwell’s 1984, since it was about a horror that actually happened, and was ongoing at the time.
-jcr
BTW, I’m going to give Lord Acton’s favourite quote on power, but I’m going to quote the *whole thing*.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
Scott,
First, I cannot tell for sure from your writing, but I just want to make sure you are aware that the 16th amendment did not grant the federal government any powers directly contravening the 4th amendment. Its full, and brief, text is as follows: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
If you yet insist that the 16th amendment was the first step to the evisceration of our 4th amendment (and other) rights, please note that it was proposed by a congress that was overwhelmingly republican. I note this only because you want us to assign the democrats their fair share of the blame. I see no evidence that they were blameless, but I also see no evidence that their share of the blame is significant. If states’ rights is one of your causes célèbre, also note that the amendment was ultimately ratified by 42 of the (then) 48 states.
The questionable powers that the IRS enjoys today are almost certainly the result of subsequent legislation and court rulings over the decades since the 16th amendment was set into constitutional law, and are really what you must take issue with. But you haven’t given any examples of such, and that is why I say your claim as written is unsubstantiated. Not necessarily false, but so far unjustified. As a result one gets the impression that you paint blame on the Democrats (over the income tax issue) with too broad a brush.
I think we already agree that we are dealing with a federal government that is essentially broken, but with enough awkward momentum to be dangerous and difficult to fix. I don’t think we agree on what has gotten us here, and knowing who and what to blame is vitally important in avoiding hazardous missteps on the path to recovery. Authoritarianism, as I see it, is the critical problem, and the Republicans have shown much more authoritarian tendencies in the last half-century than have the Democrats. We can’t likely wipe the slate clean, but must guide our government back onto a more constitutional path by degrees, and IMHO we are more than a few degrees right of true course.
“”If you yet insist that the 16th amendment was the first step to the evisceration of our 4th amendment (and other) rights, please note that it was proposed by a congress that was overwhelmingly republican. I note this only because you want us to assign the democrats their fair share of the blame. I see no evidence that they were blameless, but I also see no evidence that their share of the blame is significant.””
Hidden inside the new “bail out” legislation, is the new mandate that ALL credit card purchases, EVERYTHING YOU BUY with a credit card, MUST be reported to the federal government.
And WHO do you suppose was the leading proponents of this bill?
Take a look at the yay votes for FISA.
Take a look at the yay votes for the Patriot Act.
Take a look at the yay votes for the congressional hand-over of responsibility to the Executive branch for the war decision for both Iraq and now Iran.
Go look.
Don’t wait to be told your Dems are a bunch of big government quasi-fascists.
Just go see for yourself.
I was talking about the 16th amendment and the income tax, but since you’ve sidestepped and laid on the fast-forward button, I will try my best to keep up.
The Democrats have been in a very difficult position for a long time now. I see the rift between them and the Republicans as somewhat similar to that between atheists and theists, to wit: we (atheists) tend to be wider of opinion and difficult to unify ideologically, whereas they (theists) tend to close ideological ranks around their commonality when faced by the “other” as if by instinct. In the current political climate, their nuanced and varied policy views make certain Democrats easy targets for certain groups of Republicans’ single-minded accusations of vascillating, limp-wristed flip-floppery, which are mostly groundless but easily spread among an undereducated populace addicted to mindless infotainment. Somewhat hyperbolic, yes, but hopefully you get my point. And hopefully you notice my restriction of focus to only certain members of each party—this is important because I dislike painting too-broad strokes when assigning such attributes to groups.
With this as the backdrop, my theory is that since at least the Reagan era, Democrats aren’t good at winning elections—Republicans are prodigious at losing them by reminding us voting folks of how often they tend to be authoritarian, corrupt, bigoted, shallow self-styled “patriots” (the kind that talk endlessly about their love of America, while simultaneously working against most of its citizens’ best interests). When the Repubs lose, certain of their prominent members spend their time in the minority pecking away at the integrity of the majority in inane but very organized ways until they manage to convince somewhat more than half of the voters that a change of balance is again necessary, allowing the right back in.
It’s all the worse lately, because the margins are so thin that no Democratic congress can get much done amid Republican filibusters on important bits of legislation, making them look even weaker. This gets us to the recent FISA bill vote. You see, in the scenario that I’ve painted, and which I and others believe is the reality right now in Washington, it is left to the Democrats to (reluctantly) vote in favor of such compromise legislation because it allows them to take a little bit of good with the bad and at the same time prevents them from looking like a totally useless, do-nothing party. They are between the “rock and a hard place” of proverb.
I have no doubt that you disagree. If so, that’s OK—you are entitled to your opinion (at least for now, *wink*). And at least you’re not saying that you think Bush is outright awesome and Republicans poop solid gold! That something has gone very wrong in our government and it needs fixing is a good enough point of agreement for me in this venue:o)
The taking of the laptop is not the goal. The goal is to send a chill through society so that you will always be afraid to look at any sights that might result in your losing your computer, your job, your freedom. Which sites am I talking about? EXACTLY! Who knows? Every website is a potential prison sentence, every email a thought crime, every picture of the family picnic a possible seditious act.
Fear is the goal. The crimes can never be enumerated so to leave one with the impression that anything can be prosecuted. The safest road is to do as little as possible so as to live unnoticed. So much for the home of the brave – land of the free.
This is pretty appropriate:
http://www.mattbors.com/strips/421.gif
I notice several people have advocated putting your data on the cloud so it isn’t on your laptop. Are you aware (sorry if this has been pointed out) that the FBI can look at any data on the cloud any time it wants? The Register reported that the Canadian govt has forbidden govt depts and agencies from using the Cloud for this very reason. The Feds must really like the Cloud, do industrial espionage from your office, all perfectly legally.
I have a $50 bet with a friend that the U.S. will be in a civil war in the next year. He thinks Bush will invade Iran, call it a crisis, and then suspend elections. The more stories I read of this nature, the more concerned I get I might lose my $50.
It’s stuff like this that makes me as a foreigner get even more twitchy and worried about my own country. I don’t want it to become horrible either, and it’s already headed too much in that direction. Stupid FRA-law, among many, many other things. :-/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
It still strikes me as odd to have such a different standard for electronic media than anything else. Not so much for the cursory glance itself, but moreso the idea of withholding a traveler’s items. It would be completely unreasonable if I had to wait more than an hour on a suitcase of clothing, but to wait months on a laptop? And to physically copy the data and worry about mismanagement?
Perhaps I’m just picky about electronic media, but that sort of standard reminds me of judges (in the US) previously ruling that password protection is not equivalent to a physically locked box in terms of search security. Why a different standard?