Thank you again, Juan, for a valuable contribution. Why is that Americans take at face value the U.S. offical demonization routines without subjecting them to critical assessments based on a review of the evidence provided, the official motives and similar efforts in the past? At all times, one should begin in weighing these claims with an agnostic "show me" viewpoint instead of a presumption of validity. Once again, the mainstream "experts" are making the same mistakes. When a NY Times lead story has as its bottom line an assertion that we know that Russia was behind "the hacks" because "informed sources" believe that this is so, as was the case several days ago, all sorts of alarm bells should go off. Instead, people who should know better keep swallowing this type of nonsense.
This is the best column of the day. In a way, Trump offers the chance to restore politics, in which a solid left partzy opposes the self-serving policies of business and the right. This would not have occurred under Clinton. Now, if he can just avoid pressing the button with his twitchy finger when some foreign element provokes him....
Regarding your point about economic factors in the election, Paul Krugman has posted a blurb, with supporting graph, in his blog today in which he suggests that Israel "may be the most unequal society in the advanced world, surpassing even the U.S." He continues, "Goodbye kibbutz, hello Gilded Age." link to krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
Dresden is unique. Its extreme south-eastern location made it the only East German city to be outside the range of Western media signals during the Cold War, so it's been insular since 1945. It's also served as a symbol of victimization and fake moral equivalence by German right-wingers, who are fond of inflating the roughly 35,000 fatalities in the Dresden firebombings considerably and terming it a war crime, followed by: ..."you see, both sides committed genocide." It borders on a very conservative and economically weak rural, hilly area toward the south which extends to the Czech Republic -- this area undoubtedly is the source of a good many PEGIDA followers. It's also near the former Sudetenland. It's only speculation on my part, but I could well imagine that a sizable portion of nationalist Sudetenlaenders ended up there after being driven out of the former Czechoslovakia. Dresden has had a long history of right-leaning activist opposition to leftist authorities, starting with opposition to the original plan of the Communist authorities to clear the rubble of the Cathedral destroyed in the firebombing and replace it with a car park and became a center of protests against the regime in 1982 and again in 1989.
Does anyone know why Merkel signed on to "her" WaPo OpEd piece supporting the Iraq invasion in the weeks before the war? She was opposition leader at the time and she may have wanted to burnish her foreign affairs reputation in Germany and curry favor in Washington. However, she obviously did not write it -- her English isn't that good. If she didn't write it , who did? How did it get into the WaPo? Is the German official line about her entry into the higher circles in Germany (they claim her promise and East German background caught Helmut Kohl's eye) legit? East Germany still officially existed then, and her father had left the West for the East. two decades earlier. Wasn't Kohl afraid she was an East Block agent? This was only 15 years after Willy Brandt was brought down by an East Block spy in his cabinet. Did someone.... something.... very big ... on the other side of the Atlantic, ... vouch for her credibility? In short, does the US intelligence apparatus have some measure of control over her?
Ted Nugent's fried-brain logic apparently has its roots in some excessive consumption of illicit substances in the late 60's. Check out his then group's lyrics in Journey to the Center of the Mind, which feature theses pearls of wisdom:
Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Beyond the seas of thought beyond the realm of what
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not
Come along if you care...
But please realize you'll probably be surprised
For it's the land unknown to man
Where fantasy is fact
So if you can, please understand
You might not come back
Come along if you care
Come along if you dare
Take a ride to the land inside and you'll see
How happy life could be if all of mankind
Would take the time to journey to the center of the mind
--------
Clearly Ted has been living in a fantasy world of his own construction for a very long time. His willful departure from reality is consistent with the right's approach to things over the last generation. Recall, for example, Reagan's repeated characterization of the Contras as the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," the bogus link between Saddam and bin-Laden, the Bushies' claim, regarding Iraq, that reality was what they said it was, and Cheney's assertion that real men go to Teheran. All on journeys to the center of their minds.
We don't know enough to conclude that Obama was left out of the loop. Something doesn't add up with Merkel. Why did she "write" (ghost-write??) that Washington Post piece supporting the invasion of Iraq in the run-up to the war in early 2003? That article was certainly an odd piece for a foreign opposition leader. Her piece was published shortly after the beginning of the surveillance. Could it be that intercepted material was used against her to induce the article? If that's the case, US intelligence would want to keep tabs on her to be assured that she had not divulged anything.
The Vatican is a sovereign country. Could the Pope bestow a passport? Could he grant asylum? The humanitarian dimension of Snowden's plight would justify Francis's intervention.
We've been engaging in a long-term subtle shift in emphasis in our interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment consists of two conjoined main clauses which operate with potential dissonance: (1) "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 (2) "and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause," etc. etc. The focus used to be on the warrant clause, with the idea that warrants are always required unless the search falls into narrow, traditionally recognized exceptions (eg. search incident to arrest, plain view), or the search was an administrative search in a traditionally heavily regulated activity. The requirement of a warrant was most important to the Founding Fathers, many of whom were upset and even personally affected by the tendency of the Brits to break into houses of suspected smugglers and tax evaders without warrants. This warrant requirement strand isn't dead -- it's slumbering, however. In the conservative trending 80's, the emphasis began to shift to the "reasonableness" clause. Previous thought equated "reasonableness" as the requirement of obtaining a warrant unless those traditional narrow exceptions existed. In the 80's, judicial opinions began to proclaim that the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment was "reasonableness," and a process of partial decoupling between the two clauses began. Thus, in New Jersey v. T.L.O., the Supreme Court in 1985 allowed public school officials to search a student's bag for evidence of marijuana dealing in a reasonable manner based on reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing without any need for a warrant. This was and is a problematic development, because "reasonableness" is a most subjective standard. Once this shift in emphasis occurred, it became only a matter of time, and one national security crisis, to accept the idea that an search of persons was constitutionally "reasonable" so long as national security officials issued a "national security letter." Thus, from 2003 to 2006 the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued 192,499 national security letter requests. With this shift, it's easy to see how we've gotten to our present situation. How we're going to recouple the two clauses of the Fourth Amendment and regain our rights under that Amendment is much harder to envision.
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Thank you again, Juan, for a valuable contribution. Why is that Americans take at face value the U.S. offical demonization routines without subjecting them to critical assessments based on a review of the evidence provided, the official motives and similar efforts in the past? At all times, one should begin in weighing these claims with an agnostic "show me" viewpoint instead of a presumption of validity. Once again, the mainstream "experts" are making the same mistakes. When a NY Times lead story has as its bottom line an assertion that we know that Russia was behind "the hacks" because "informed sources" believe that this is so, as was the case several days ago, all sorts of alarm bells should go off. Instead, people who should know better keep swallowing this type of nonsense.
This is the best column of the day. In a way, Trump offers the chance to restore politics, in which a solid left partzy opposes the self-serving policies of business and the right. This would not have occurred under Clinton. Now, if he can just avoid pressing the button with his twitchy finger when some foreign element provokes him....
Regarding your point about economic factors in the election, Paul Krugman has posted a blurb, with supporting graph, in his blog today in which he suggests that Israel "may be the most unequal society in the advanced world, surpassing even the U.S." He continues, "Goodbye kibbutz, hello Gilded Age." link to krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
Dresden is unique. Its extreme south-eastern location made it the only East German city to be outside the range of Western media signals during the Cold War, so it's been insular since 1945. It's also served as a symbol of victimization and fake moral equivalence by German right-wingers, who are fond of inflating the roughly 35,000 fatalities in the Dresden firebombings considerably and terming it a war crime, followed by: ..."you see, both sides committed genocide." It borders on a very conservative and economically weak rural, hilly area toward the south which extends to the Czech Republic -- this area undoubtedly is the source of a good many PEGIDA followers. It's also near the former Sudetenland. It's only speculation on my part, but I could well imagine that a sizable portion of nationalist Sudetenlaenders ended up there after being driven out of the former Czechoslovakia. Dresden has had a long history of right-leaning activist opposition to leftist authorities, starting with opposition to the original plan of the Communist authorities to clear the rubble of the Cathedral destroyed in the firebombing and replace it with a car park and became a center of protests against the regime in 1982 and again in 1989.
Does anyone know why Merkel signed on to "her" WaPo OpEd piece supporting the Iraq invasion in the weeks before the war? She was opposition leader at the time and she may have wanted to burnish her foreign affairs reputation in Germany and curry favor in Washington. However, she obviously did not write it -- her English isn't that good. If she didn't write it , who did? How did it get into the WaPo? Is the German official line about her entry into the higher circles in Germany (they claim her promise and East German background caught Helmut Kohl's eye) legit? East Germany still officially existed then, and her father had left the West for the East. two decades earlier. Wasn't Kohl afraid she was an East Block agent? This was only 15 years after Willy Brandt was brought down by an East Block spy in his cabinet. Did someone.... something.... very big ... on the other side of the Atlantic, ... vouch for her credibility? In short, does the US intelligence apparatus have some measure of control over her?
Ted Nugent's fried-brain logic apparently has its roots in some excessive consumption of illicit substances in the late 60's. Check out his then group's lyrics in Journey to the Center of the Mind, which feature theses pearls of wisdom:
Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Beyond the seas of thought beyond the realm of what
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not
Come along if you care...
But please realize you'll probably be surprised
For it's the land unknown to man
Where fantasy is fact
So if you can, please understand
You might not come back
Come along if you care
Come along if you dare
Take a ride to the land inside and you'll see
How happy life could be if all of mankind
Would take the time to journey to the center of the mind
--------
Clearly Ted has been living in a fantasy world of his own construction for a very long time. His willful departure from reality is consistent with the right's approach to things over the last generation. Recall, for example, Reagan's repeated characterization of the Contras as the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," the bogus link between Saddam and bin-Laden, the Bushies' claim, regarding Iraq, that reality was what they said it was, and Cheney's assertion that real men go to Teheran. All on journeys to the center of their minds.
We don't know enough to conclude that Obama was left out of the loop. Something doesn't add up with Merkel. Why did she "write" (ghost-write??) that Washington Post piece supporting the invasion of Iraq in the run-up to the war in early 2003? That article was certainly an odd piece for a foreign opposition leader. Her piece was published shortly after the beginning of the surveillance. Could it be that intercepted material was used against her to induce the article? If that's the case, US intelligence would want to keep tabs on her to be assured that she had not divulged anything.
A while back, I read that they have the means to attack from Georgia. Is this still the case?
The Vatican is a sovereign country. Could the Pope bestow a passport? Could he grant asylum? The humanitarian dimension of Snowden's plight would justify Francis's intervention.
We've been engaging in a long-term subtle shift in emphasis in our interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment consists of two conjoined main clauses which operate with potential dissonance: (1) "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 (2) "and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause," etc. etc. The focus used to be on the warrant clause, with the idea that warrants are always required unless the search falls into narrow, traditionally recognized exceptions (eg. search incident to arrest, plain view), or the search was an administrative search in a traditionally heavily regulated activity. The requirement of a warrant was most important to the Founding Fathers, many of whom were upset and even personally affected by the tendency of the Brits to break into houses of suspected smugglers and tax evaders without warrants. This warrant requirement strand isn't dead -- it's slumbering, however. In the conservative trending 80's, the emphasis began to shift to the "reasonableness" clause. Previous thought equated "reasonableness" as the requirement of obtaining a warrant unless those traditional narrow exceptions existed. In the 80's, judicial opinions began to proclaim that the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment was "reasonableness," and a process of partial decoupling between the two clauses began. Thus, in New Jersey v. T.L.O., the Supreme Court in 1985 allowed public school officials to search a student's bag for evidence of marijuana dealing in a reasonable manner based on reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing without any need for a warrant. This was and is a problematic development, because "reasonableness" is a most subjective standard. Once this shift in emphasis occurred, it became only a matter of time, and one national security crisis, to accept the idea that an search of persons was constitutionally "reasonable" so long as national security officials issued a "national security letter." Thus, from 2003 to 2006 the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued 192,499 national security letter requests. With this shift, it's easy to see how we've gotten to our present situation. How we're going to recouple the two clauses of the Fourth Amendment and regain our rights under that Amendment is much harder to envision.
Excellent, and scary, con law analysis. And Obama was a con law prof.!!
Thanks for the link to the German TV spot. Chilling report. The German MSM coverage on Fukushima has been franker than the US reports.