Rattle wrote:
I am seriously disheartened by what I'm seeing take place in Murfreesboro. It's a town that I love, but I'm ashamed of what's going on down there.

The arson in Murfreesboro was an act of terrorism. These people are moving in a direction which will ultimately make them just as evil as the people they oppose.

Beyond what this says about how people don't get the 1st amendment, it's also helping our enemies recruit:

What Bin Lauden wanted to spark was total conflict between Islam and the west. People who believe in such a conflict walk with him, regardless of what side of it they think they're on. The politicians who have pushed this issue ought to know better.

RE: Taliban Using Mosque Controversy to Recruit

I've purposefully avoided taking a position on the "Wikileaks - threat or menace" debate. Here, Rattle does:

I completely agree with Gen. Hayden's comments in this article. Wikileaks has been completely irresponsible. I don't see any positive side to the release of these documents.

Hayden's essay sure throws down a gauntlet at the hacker scene:

And all of this because of some corrupted view of the inherent evils of the modern state, a pseudo-romantic attachment to the absolute value of transparency, a casual indifference to inevitable consequences and a neurotic attachment to one individual's self importance. Rarely have we seen such a dangerous combination of arrogance and incompetence.

This isn't just a challenge to Wikileak's disclosure of this particular set of documents. This is a challenge to the idea of transparency itself. In this regard, Stratfor is wrong. The Wikileaks event isn't really about the war in Afghanistan - its about the Internet.

Apparently, this leak wasn't all that valuable to the general public. The event certainly has focused the public's attention on facts that insiders already know about the war, and the importance of the focus of the public's attention should not be underestimated. However, given that there is no great secret here that insiders were unaware of - this event represents an opportunity to debate the subject of freedom of information in a context where there is nothing to loose from siding with the establishment.

The results of this debate, in terms of public opinion, as well as the resulting legal framework within which the state can respond to public disclosures of this sort, will impact future situations in which the leak does matter to the general public, because it does reveal a secret that insiders weren't aware of.

In the world of the eternity service, ultimately, some things are going to be posted there that you'd rather not have out in the open. If you believe that there should be information resources that are beyond the reach of the state, you have to accept that. If you can't accept it, its all a matter of where and how to draw the line - the events of the past few weeks have circled around that very question.

So it doesn't really matter whether or not Wikileaks was irresponsible. It is inevitable that Wikileaks or someone like them is going to do something irresponsible, or at least something that a lot of people think is irresponsible. The important question is what ought to be done about it.

If you stop at simply deciding that you think Wikileaks was irresponsible, you avoid the opportunity to address the more important question being debated, and you concede the matter to a particular side by association.

The leaders of the Republican party have made their case - they would draw the line in such a manner that the military can use any and all capabilities at its disposal... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: WikiLeaks disclosures are a 'tragedy' - CNN.com

The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.

Stratfor strongly implies that the US intentionally "leaked" all this information in order to influence the political debate over the war and help build the case for withdrawl.

At some point, the U.S. Government is going to have to sell the American people on withdrawing from Afghanistan without Bin Lauden and letting the Taliban come back into power. I don't know how they hell are going to accomplish that.

This also raises the question of what the hell is going on with Bradley Manning? Its interesting that Manning appears to be responsible for all the leaks *except* this one, which is the important one.

WikiLeaks and the Afghan War | STRATFOR

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies equally to the federal government and the states."

The only justice who got this right was Thomas.

Justices extend gun owner rights nationwide.

dc0de wrote:
If Obama thinks that blaming someone is going to make the problem go away, he's a bigger fool than anyone has pointed out to date.

I agreed with this sentiment at the time you first posted it, but it appears some new information has come to light about NSA intercepts that might have given the Nigerian warning more credibility if the two where connected... Perhaps there are changes to intelligence collection and synthesis that would have caught this. My personal jury is still out (FWTW), and I am still annoyed by the calls to put every victim of an anonymous tip on the no-fly list - which seem to have grown in quantity and volume over the past few days, but perhaps the administration has something more thoughtful in mind...

RE: 44 - Obama blames 'human and systemic failures' in Detroit incident

noteworthy wrote:
Barbara Elias:

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

You cannot beat an ideology with bullets. There will always be Taliban. The question is how influential their ideas are with common people.

RE: Know Thine Enemy | Foreign Affairs

Anne Frank:

Whenever you're feeling lonely or sad, try going to the loft on a beautiful day and looking outside. Not at the houses and the rooftops, but at the sky. As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

That's Anne Frank in a nutshell. A girl at a window, looking fearlessly at the sky.

Ghost Story

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

Blindness, and Seeing

flynn23 wrote:
It makes me sick.

Complete non sequitur, but this CNN story is like a poster child for news media hypocrisy. They talk and talk about all the myths that were born of news media sensationalism of the incident and then they engage in exactly the same sort of sensationalistic tone:

I referred to him — and I'm dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School," says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and '60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. "He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he'd tell you what you wanted to hear."

When he wasn't, he mixed napalm in the kitchen .

Was that comment about napalm really necessary? Does it help promote a better understanding of why this happened?

The bottom line is that Harris was a psychopath. He had mental illness that is most likely biological in origin that made it impossible for him to feel empathy. No external factor made him what he was. The story dances around this subject but does not hit it head on. This is a clinical disorder that effects a large number of people. It cannot be treated and it has terrible consequences.

If you want to reduce the risk of this kind of thing happening, the best way to do that is to advocate more funding for psychiatric research. I don't understand why all of the people who have been motivated to do something about Columbine never zeroed in on that simple answer. We are not spending enough money on understanding and treating these illnesses, and they are baddly misunderstood by the general public.

Donate to NARSAD, the International Mental Health Research Organization, or the American Mental Health Foundation.

Columbine

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Lies We Tell Kids