It’s an interesting confluence between the left and right in the United States on the issue of the erosion of civil liberties. When Bush was president most of the left was vociferously united against his police state tactics but now that one of their own is president it’s no big deal because they get universal healthcare. The right is good either way so long as Pox Americana is dismantling the Bill of Rights. Unprincipled whores, the lot of them, who will deserve what they get once they rediscover the glaring historical truth that totalitarianism serves no one but itself.
I think I forgot to mention anti-science. Republicans are anti-science.
Human rights? Gitmo, baby. Adu Ghraid, man.
Human rights are earned. They are not given away or assumed. Back to dream world Fred. The UN was created by the US.
In Australia, they have a government standard for a cup of coffee. If you don’t adequately train someone to the government standard by law you could be held liable. If you need to engage lawyers it will cost you your livelihood.
You can download it here:
http://training.gov.au/TrainingComponentFiles/SIT12/SITHFAB204_R1.pdf
You don’t have human rights in the West unless they are scripted for you by some bozo. What do you discuss there at AIT how to smuggle drugs in aircraft food storage into the States?
George Orwell Shooting an Elephant tells the whole story of micro-managing humanity.
[quote]In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
[/quote]
The irony of those who quote Orwell…
Stop throwing Snowballs, Fred.
This seems unbelievable but has been mentioned in Time also. A writer apparently received an FBI visit after googling backpacks and pressure cookers. I’d like to think it’s a hoax.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”]This seems unbelievable but has been mentioned in Time also. A writer apparently received an FBI visit after googling backpacks and pressure cookers. I’d like to think it’s a hoax.
theatlanticwire.com/national … hes/67864/[/quote]
They will be getting a lot of chatter today. Which makes you wonder if over loading them with info isn’t the best means of combat. It’s what zebras use against lions. It is the primary defense of sheep so why not sheeple.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”]This seems unbelievable but has been mentioned in Time also. A writer apparently received an FBI visit after googling backpacks and pressure cookers. I’d like to think it’s a hoax.
theatlanticwire.com/national … hes/67864/[/quote]
This is the program that makes this possible. When Snowden said he could tap and get information about anyone with just an email, he wasn’t kidding. That’s what this is:
XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’
[quote]• XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history[/quote]
Government officials assure us that procedure is strictly observed. But with this government and the capability they have to do anything without authorization, you think they’re not gonna peek?
No sense fretting over the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. because the process has just begun. When America took sides in a thousand year religious war it doomed its democracy because the only place you can find refuge from the hatred and fanaticism unleashed by religious war is behind the walls of a police state.
It’s more of an open field at this point. The US has smashed the “enemy” into the ground and will keep doing so like an arcade game when their heads pop up overseas.
Hey, backpack pressure cooker Obamacare drone liar. 
Millions of people will be typing this kind of thing now, if they haven’t already.
Something tells me those folks had other flags in their baskets. What all us good citizens need to know is that the next Boston bomber will most likely be snatched out of Starbucks and thrown into a black SUV and we’ll never hear of him. 
As long as they’re catching the bad guys I don’t care. Snoop my email. I bought Mets tickets. IM SORRY! The Yankees were out of town!
Much ado, winston. Much ado.
Don’t let your guard down yet, rodeo. You’re not safe yet because there are still some civil liberties left in America and that’s how they’re going to sneak in and get you.
It’s odd reading such a casual dismissal of democratic principles in colloquial English. I’m used to reading such sentiments in translation from Germanic or Slavic languages. Looks like the Soviet Union won the Cold War after all.
I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to try it.
I guess nothing will happen though according to this update in that Atlantic article:
[quote]
Which prompts the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?
Update, 7:05 p.m.: Because the Googling happened at work.
The Suffolk County Police Department released a statement this evening that answers the great mystery of the day.
Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”
After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.[/quote]
It’s odd reading such a casual dismissal of democratic principles in colloquial English. I’m used to reading such sentiments in translation from Germanic or Slavic languages. Looks like the Soviet Union won the Cold War after all.[/quote]
Yeah, sure. Because the two countries look so much alike now. 
You read? Really? I figured you made most of this simplistic nonsense up. That you read books translated into English from “Germanic” and “Slavic” makes me wonder even more about your English reading skills. Go impress some schoolgirls. They find the elderly wise by definition in Taiwan. That may explain your heightened sense of intellectual superiority. 
Too bad it doesn’t carry.
Your intense fascination with The Man is entertaining. You must be a retro blast at cocktail parties…in the 1980s.
A wise man once said, many years ago, that democracy will be destroyed by an excess of democracy.
Maybe we have learned that lesson after all. In this day when gross violence is far too easily accomplished, you worry about someone, no, some mindless computer program scanning your emails? What a head you have. Too bad your shoulders are lacking the muscles to support it. :loco:
I imagine that none your emails, and chats, and searches are interesting or vital enough to national security that they would turn up, anywhere on the type of NSA searches going on. But please, go on and play the odds. As they say in the NY Lotto: YOU NEVER KNOW! It could be you!
But I’m sure your grandchildren will remember you as a well meaning albeit crazy old fucker whose paranoid predictions thankfully, and obviously, never met fruition.
Now, are you going to say “Fuck you” to me again? Oh wise one?
It’s interesting how this generation of Americans can’t wait to shed its civil liberties in exchange for protection from The Bogeyman and regards the whole shedding process as much ado about nothing. Looking forward to the day the other shoe drops and the American people relearn the history lesson that The Man and The Bogeyman are actually one and the same person.
No, what’s amazing is that you still pretend to live as though this is the 1950s. Security sucks, Patdowns sucks. But you know what sucks more? Bombs. In Boston, on airplanes. There should have been a lot more attacks. There haven’t been. Why not? Did the bad guys give up? No. We did something and the awful effect it had on us, joe blow, is that our fucking email was scanned. Stop being a vagine majori.
If you really think that they are reading your email you’re either a fool or have an overactive ego. There are billions, perhaps trillions of emails, Facebook posts, phone calls, tweets, blogs, forum postings etc made every day. These may be scanned for certain keywords but unless you trip multiple triggers, no human will ever read anything you write or listen to anything you say (other than those you intend too).
Trip enough triggers, and there’d need to be multiple levels of automated scanning first, and perhaps some agent may get tasked with assessing it.
[quote=“cfimages”]If you really think that they are reading your email you’re either a fool or have an overactive ego. There are billions, perhaps trillions of emails, Facebook posts, phone calls, tweets, blogs, forum postings etc made every day. These may be scanned for certain keywords but unless you trip multiple triggers, no human will ever read anything you write or listen to anything you say (other than those you intend too).
Trip enough triggers, and there’d need to be multiple levels of automated scanning first, and perhaps some agent may get tasked with assessing it.[/quote]
So that’s OK? It might not be a problem. What are you thinking? Let’s target the private emails of all those who enter parliament. If they have done nothing wrong what do they have to worry about? Let the people decide. Let’s target the private email of all leaders of the media. If they have done nothing wrong what do they have to worry about?
No, what’s amazing is that you still pretend to live as though this is the 1950s. Security sucks, Patdowns sucks. But you know what sucks more? Bombs. In Boston, on airplanes. There should have been a lot more attacks. There haven’t been. Why not? Did the bad guys give up? No. We did something and the awful effect it had on us, joe blow, is that our fucking email was scanned. Stop being a vagine majori.[/quote]
I don’t have a problem with America’s descent into totalitarianism. I find it highly amusing and look forward to the inevitable further tightening of the screws. Have a nice trip.
[quote=“Fox”][quote=“cfimages”]If you really think that they are reading your email you’re either a fool or have an overactive ego. There are billions, perhaps trillions of emails, Facebook posts, phone calls, tweets, blogs, forum postings etc made every day. These may be scanned for certain keywords but unless you trip multiple triggers, no human will ever read anything you write or listen to anything you say (other than those you intend too).
Trip enough triggers, and there’d need to be multiple levels of automated scanning first, and perhaps some agent may get tasked with assessing it.[/quote]
So that’s OK? It might not be a problem. What are you thinking? Let’s target the private emails of all those who enter parliament. If they have done nothing wrong what do they have to worry about? Let the people decide. Let’s target the private email of all leaders of the media. If they have done nothing wrong what do they have to worry about?[/quote]
The first access I ever had to the net was in the early 90’s at uni. The professor told us then that nothing on the net is private.