Obviously people here do not see sarcasm and absurdity when it is right in front of them. That is the primary focus behind me asking those questions and making those statements originally. And then see what you do say when faced with that. See the original statement I responded to seem to be sarcastic and perhaps even absurd its self.

Since the saying goes, you do not know who your true friends are until you need them the most (Eg. crunch time). How do you know that the friends you have now, we be there when you might need them?

Perhaps it is the Australian English that causes problems.

As for tourist coming here. Is it not because everyone wants to see the kangaroo etc. After all, how many times does an Australian get asked if we have them in our backyard or as pets? (That doesn't require an answer).

Though I admit, I did find your answer about the US being a bunch of lines on a map somewhat funny.

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Never surrender and never give up. In the darkest hour there is always hope.

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Will we allow another bridge to fall?

By Eugene Robinson
THE WASHINGTON POST

August 3, 2007

How can such things happen? How can it be possible that one minute you're driving home from work, or riding in a school bus with your friends, or heading to a baseball game, and the next minute you're plummeting toward the Mississippi River as the bridge you're crossing suddenly collapses?

How, for that matter, can you be hurrying through Manhattan near Grand Central Station and suddenly a subterranean steam pipe explodes, sending a geyser hundreds of feet into the air and leaving a crater in the street big enough to swallow a tow truck?

It's easier to understand disasters if they have proximate causes – terrorism, earthquakes, tornados. It's much harder to get your mind around what happened during rush hour Wednesday evening in Minneapolis, when a busy downtown bridge across the river simply . . . collapsed. As U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said at a news conference Thursday, in a pithy statement of the obvious, “Bridges in America should not fall down.”

They shouldn't, but it's quite possible that more of them will. We should also expect that more steam pipes will blow, that water mains will burst, that dams will develop worrisome cracks and that sooner or later, probably during a heat wave, much of the country will suffer a crippling blackout.

The heavily used Interstate 35W bridge that catastrophically failed, spilling dozens of cars into the Mississippi, had been rated just 50 out of 100 for structural integrity at its last inspection two years ago, according to The Associated Press. That wasn't as much of a red flag as it seems in retrospect. Not for a moment did anyone believe there was any real danger of collapse, and the 40-year-old span wasn't considered near the end of its useful life. The rating just meant that the bridge had structural deficiencies that at some point should be addressed – just like 27.1 percent of all the nation's 590,750 bridges.

That estimate comes from the American Society of Civil Engineers, a trade group that every few years issues a report card on the nation's aging infrastructure. The engineers' most recent survey in 2005 gave the country an overall grade of “D” – and the reason for the low mark, as always, was that we don't spend nearly what we should on maintenance and repair.

Bridges were actually deemed to be in better shape than dams, roads or the power grid. But the civil engineers estimated it would cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years “to eliminate all bridge deficiencies.”

That's not a lot of money in the context of a $13 trillion economy. But does anyone think we're going to make infrastructure a national crusade? Have the presidential candidates been falling over themselves to stake out their positions on the oh-so-sexy infrastructure issue?

Of course not. Infrastructure is boring. Anyone who has ever owned a house knows that every once in a while you have to replace the gutters, buy a new furnace, waterproof the basement or insulate the attic. But the tendency is to spend the money on a new flat-panel TV, and let the infrastructure slide – until something breaks, floods or falls down. At that point, of course, the repair will cost twice as much as if you'd done it sooner.

In the case of a deficient bridge or dam, the added cost may come in human life. But given the restraints that entitlements and debt service impose on government spending, given the astronomical cost of the war in Iraq and given the urgency of problems such as health care and education, it's inevitable that technically deficient structures will go longer than they should without being repaired or replaced.

There are more than 160,000 “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete” bridges in the United States, according to the civil engineers' 2005 report. Of those deficient or obsolete bridges, 43,189 are in urban areas. There is no reason to think any particular one is about to collapse the way the bridge in Minneapolis did. But now we know that the theoretical possibility of sudden, catastrophic failure is real.

It's unrealistic to think this disaster is going to spur the nation to seriously address all its infrastructure problems. We'll talk about the issue for a while, then go out and buy another TV. But we can – and should – at least do a more rigorous inventory, and identify the structures that pose the most peril. Yes, it's boring stuff to even think about. But just look at the alternative.

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me@rescam.org

In defense of those tipsy astronauts

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

August 3, 2007

Someone's gotta do it. No one's gonna do it. So I'll do it. Your Honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts.

You've all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized tones on the evening news or as guaranteed punch lines for the late-night comics, that at least two astronauts had alcohol in their systems before flights. A stern and sober NASA has assured an anxious nation that this matter, uncovered by a NASA-commissioned study, will be thoroughly looked into and appropriately dealt with.

To which I say: Come off it. I know NASA has to get grim and do the responsible thing, but as counsel for the defense – the only counsel for the defense, as far as I can tell – I place before the jury the following considerations:

Have you ever been to the shuttle launch pad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it's you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies – the “closeout crew” – who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.

Three miles! That's how far they calculate they must be to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launch pad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts – out of dozens – were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today's fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.

Cut these cowboys some slack. These are not wobbly Northwest Airlines pilots trying to get off the runway and steer through clouds and densely occupied airspace. An ascending space shuttle, I assure you, encounters very little traffic. And for much of liftoff, the astronaut is little more than spam in a can – not pilot but guinea pig. With opposable thumbs, to be sure, yet with only one specific task: to come out alive.

And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering – docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in Zero G – they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.

OK?

The most dismaying part of this brouhaha is not the tipsy Captain Kirk or two, but the fact that space makes the news today only as mini-scandal or farce. It all started out as a great romance in the 1960s, yet by the 1970s – indeed, the morning after the 1969 moon landing – romance had turned to boredom.

When the Apollo 13 astronauts gave their live broadcast from space, not a single network carried it. No interest. Until, that is, the explosion that nearly killed them, at which point the world tuned in with rapt and morbid attention.

Well, we are now in stage three of our space odyssey: mockery and amusement. The last big space story was the crazed lady astronaut on her supposed diapered drive to a fatal-attraction rendezvous.

It's hard to entirely blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low Earth orbit. The Bush administration has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, Mars. If his successors don't screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong – on other worlds.

At which point, we'll remember why we did this in the first place. And when we once again thrill to seeing humans on the moon – this time, making it their home – we won't much care whether the extra bounce in their gait is the effect of the one-sixth gravity or a touch of moonshine.

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me@rescam.org

Sending the innocent to prison

By Richard Moran

August 3, 2007

Last week Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Boston awarded more than $100 million to four men whom the FBI had framed for the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a local gangster. It was compensation for the 30 years the men had spent behind bars while agents withheld evidence that would have cleared them and put the real killer – a valuable FBI informant by the name of Vincent Flemmi – in prison.

Most coverage of the story described it as a bizarre exception in the history of law enforcement. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior by those whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law is all too common. In state courts, where most death sentences are handed down, it occurs regularly.

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel. There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one way or another.

Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law – all of which I found in my research – as merely mistakes or errors. Mistakes are good-faith errors, such as taking the wrong exit off the highway or dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them.

However, when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law. Perhaps this explains why, even when a manifestly innocent man is about to be executed, a prosecutor can be dead set against reopening an old case.

Since so many wrongful convictions result from official malicious behavior, prosecutors, police officers, witnesses or even jurors and judges could themselves face jail time for breaking the law in obtaining an unlawful conviction. Strangely, our misunderstanding of the real cause underlying most wrongful convictions is compounded by the very people who work to uncover them.

Although the term “wrongfully convicted” is technically correct, it also has the potential to be misleading. It leads to the false impression that most inmates ended up on death row because of good-faith mistakes or errors committed by an imperfect criminal justice system, not by malicious or unlawful behavior.

For this reason we need to reframe the argument and shift our language. If a death sentence is overturned because of malicious behavior, we should call it for what it is: an unlawful conviction, not a wrongful one.

In the interest of fairness, it is important to note that those who are exonerated are not necessarily innocent of the crimes that sent them to death row. They have simply had their death sentences set aside because of errors that led to convictions, usually involving the intentional violation of their constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial. Very seldom does the court go the next step and actually declare them innocent.

In addition, some of these unlawful convictions resulted from criminal justice officials trying to do the right thing: A police officer, say, plants evidence on a defendant he is convinced is guilty, fearing that otherwise the defendant would escape punishment. In cases such as these, officers or prosecutors have been known to “frame a guilty man.”

The malicious or even well-intentioned manipulation of murder cases by prosecutors and the police underscores why it's important to discard, once and for all, the nonsense that so-called wrongful convictions can be eliminated by introducing better forensic science into the courtroom. Even if we limit death sentences to cases in which there is “conclusive scientific evidence” of guilt, as Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts has proposed, we still would not eliminate the problem of wrongful convictions.

The best trained and most honest forensic scientists can only examine the evidence presented to them. They cannot be expected to determine if that evidence has been planted, switched or withheld from the defense.

The cause of malicious unlawful convictions doesn't rest solely in the imperfect workings of our criminal justice system – if it did, we might be able to remedy most of it. A crucial part of the problem rests in the hearts and souls of those whose job it is to uphold the law. That's why even the most careful strictures on death penalty cases could fail to prevent the execution of innocent people – and why we would do well to be more vigilant and specific in articulating the causes for the overturning of an unlawful conviction.

- Moran is a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

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me@rescam.org

Of Marx, Christ, and the Persecution of Radicals: How Will Humanity Survive the Capitalist Threat?

Interesting read.

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Account frozen...

Nowadays racism in America

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Account frozen...

Interesting read.

If you're an idiot and already believe that crap.

Just one example of the stupidity in that article:

"Shortages of consumer goods is another 'communist failure' apologists for capitalism love to trot out as 'proof' that their beloved license to plunder and conquer is inherently superior to a more just economic system. Yet time and again they suppress the real reasons these shortages occurred. Recognizing the existential threat that Marxist ideals posed to their Anglo, imperial, and patriarchal plutocracy, the United States ruling class and its allies circled the wagons and imposed crippling economic sanctions on nations attempting to implement communism (i.e. Russia and Cuba)."

Jason Miller obviously has no idea what he is talking about. Ummmm, Jason, are you too blinded by ideology to note the hypocrisy contained in your statement? Does it strike you as odd at all, that to hear you tell it, the Soviets and Cuba needed to trade, on the open, laissez-faire, capitalist market to survive? In other words, it was capitalism that kept/keeps those systems alive? Note the irony there? I mean, you seem to understand why economic sanctions are crippling, but can't seem to fathom that those same economic rules apply in communist countries too: they must use the free, capitalist market to obtain what they cannot produce on their own.

Rest assured, Cuba does not buy it's "free" drugs from huge Cuban drug conglomerates...

You see, communists have no need of free trade, right? They just build themselves a wall, and everything should go puffing right along. Let's see, the Soviets had themselves a nice wall, what the hell would they need anything from the outside for? And the Cubans still have themselves a nice wall, why should they need to trade in the laissez-faire capitalist system?

Once again, more empty ideology.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Separating religion from politics

MICHAEL GERSON
THE WASHINGTON POST

August 4, 2007

The first Mormon to run for president was the first Mormon. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formally announced his candidacy on Jan. 19, 1844, urging his supporters to “tell the people we have had Whig and Democrats Presidents long enough. We want a President of the United States.” Smith's campaign lasted about five months before it – along with his life – was ended by a violent mob in Carthage, Ill.

Mitt Romney's campaign has been better received. He possesses a winning public personality, enough personal wealth to ensure he will be around when the voting starts, and durable strength in Iowa and New Hampshire that could slingshot him to the nomination. As the author of an impressive oxymoron – Republican governor of Massachusetts – Romney stakes a strong claim to electability. And even after some recent ideological reinvention on social issues, he has successfully courted conservative supporters. The only criticism I have heard of Romney after these meetings is that he may be “too perfect” because of his Osmond-like looks and wholesomeness – which is another way of saying he might seem “too Mormon.”

Without intending or desiring it, the Romney campaign has poked the sleeping bear of debate about the role of religion in American politics. Liberals tend to argue that all theological beliefs, including Mormonism, are fundamentally private and dangerously coercive as the basis of public policy. Some religious conservatives are concerned that this particular theology is too eccentric to be welcomed at the White House.

Facing even deeper suspicions about his Catholicism while running for president in 1960, John Kennedy gave a response at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that was politically masterful, historically influential – and should not be Romney's model. Kennedy said a candidate's “views on religion are his own private affair,” which should not be “imposed by him upon the nation.” Kennedy did more than reassure Americans that his public decisions would not be dictated by the pope. He claimed that his public decisions would not be influenced by his religious convictions at all.

There is a long tradition of American leaders who believe that religion is so personal it shouldn't even affect their private life. But this rigid separation between religious conviction and public policy lies outside the main current of American history. Abraham Lincoln's theology, while hardly orthodox, was not his “own private affair.” “Nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness,” he asserted, “was sent into the world to be trodden on.” Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that to find the source of our rights, “it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given.”

These were theological arguments, not merely rhetorical adornments. But they were also carefully limited.

American political leaders have generally not talked about soteriology – how the individual soul is saved. In Christian theology, these choices are fundamentally private, and government attempts to influence them are both doomed and tyrannical. American leaders have also wisely avoided the topic of eschatology – inherently speculative theories about the end or culmination of history.

But religious convictions on the topic of anthropology– the nature and value of men and women – have profoundly and positively influenced American history. Many of the greatest advances toward the protection of minority rights, from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement, came in part because people of faith pushed for them. And religious men and women made those efforts because they were convinced that all human beings – not just all believers – are created in God's image.

So what does this mean for Romney? Many Christians have serious problems with Mormon theology on personal salvation and the nature of history – disputes that go much deeper than those between, say, Baptists and Presbyterians. These disagreements are theologically important. But they are not politically important, because they are unrelated to governing.

Romney, however, should not make Kennedy's mistake and assert that all religious beliefs are unrelated to politics. What Mormonism shares with other religious traditions is a strong commitment to the value and dignity of human beings, including the unborn, the handicapped and the poor. This conviction is unavoidably political, because it leads men and women to act in the cause of justice; not in order to impose their religion, but to protect the weak.

Given this common ground, evangelicals and other religious conservatives should not disqualify Romney from the outset. There may be other reasons to oppose him for president, but his belief about the destiny of the soul is not one of them.

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me@rescam.org

It's not Obama who is naive

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

August 8, 2007

The conventional thinking – especially in Washington D.C.– is that Barack Obama is flunking foreign policy. But this is one case where conventional thinking may be too closely tied to convention and not all that well thought out.

Yes, we've had a glimpse of the world according to Obama. And it doesn't look half bad.

Not the world itself, which is as dangerous and unpredictable as ever – full of petty tyrants, enemies posing as friends and rogue states in search of nuclear weapons.

I'm talking about the worldview of the junior senator from Illinois. What seemed like a rookie mistake – i.e., suggesting that, as president, he'd meet with dictators from countries such as Cuba, Iran or North Korea – may actually wind up serving Obama well.

First, it let him draw a distinction between himself and the front-runner. Hillary Clinton helped the cause when she blasted Obama's comments as “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

That's baby boomer code for “young and immature.” The 46-year-old Obama stresses the fact that he's of a different generation than his opponents. This was Clinton pushing back. She might as well have sent the whippersnapper to his room without dessert. After all, Clinton lectured, the president of the United States must be careful not to be used “for propaganda purposes.”

But the idea of talking to rogue states such as Iran and Syria has been suggested before, most recently by the Iraq Study Group. Obama's critics insist that there's a difference between diplomatic envoys and a presidential visit. But that distinction may be lost on many Americans, who will embrace the larger point that Obama is making – that presidents shouldn't just meet with people who always agree with them and tell them what they want to hear.

The Washington establishment may scoff at that message, but I have a hunch it'll play well in Middle America. It should play especially well with Democratic voters who fault the Bush administration for its stubborn refusal to venture beyond its diplomatic comfort zone.

Second, Obama's foray into foreign policy gave him a chance to continue the conversation and provide specifics. Last week, in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, he urged getting out of Iraq and moving “on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Obama is wrong about leaving Iraq before the job is done but right about not losing sight of the goal of ferreting out terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And yet the candidate took fire from both parties for pledging that, if elected president, he would act on intelligence about “high-value terrorist targets” within Pakistan.

The media made it sound as if Obama was ready to launch a full-scale invasion of Pakistan. And pundits and politicians rushed to defend a country that Washington treats as an ally in the war on terror.

Rudy Giuliani suggested that Obama probably wished he could rephrase his remarks to be more accommodating of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Mitt Romney said that Obama was “confused as to who are our friends and who are our enemies.” John McCain called Obama's remarks “kind of typical of his naivete.” And Clinton couldn't resist scolding Obama again, insisting that how we capture or kill bin Laden or his lieutenants “should not be telegraphed.”

But Obama wasn't hatching an invasion. He was talking about going into Pakistan if our military was in hot pursuit of “high-value terrorist targets.”

There is no target of higher value than Osama bin Laden, and our intelligence agencies say that he's in the remote tribal areas of western Pakistan. Most Americans would probably agree that this is one person we have the right to pursue to the ends of the Earth. That includes going into Pakistan.

But the Pakistani ambassador to the United States insists that, if the U.S. military went into Pakistan after bin Laden, it would destabilize the region and hurt relations between the two countries. In fact, Mahmud Ali Durrani told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux that if the United States were to locate and kill bin Laden inside Pakistan it would so inflame the Pakistani people that it could actually hurt the war on terror.

Huh? Killing bin Laden would hurt the war on terror? And some presidential hopefuls consider these folks our friends, and others think these matters ought not even be discussed?

Suddenly, Barack Obama seems like the least-naive person in the race.

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me@rescam.org

Libs push car-crush solution
Article from: The Mercury
MARK WORLEY

TASMANIAN Liberals are pushing again to have the cars of street-racing hoons crushed.
They say they want laws similar to those suggested in New South Wales.

Street-racers killed an elderly couple in Sydney last week. And on Sunday, NSW Police Commissioner Ken Maroney said he believed crushing hoons' cars was "a message they can understand".

"You have to question whether, as in the case of the US, the solution to this problem is in part the compacting of vehicles into a cube dropped on the front lawns of their homes," Mr Maroney said.

Tasmanian Liberal Party spokeswoman Georgia Warner said the Liberal Party had proposed similar legislation several months ago.

"We strongly believe the State Government should look at all of the options," Ms Warner said.

In October last year, Liberal police and public safety spokesperson Peter Gutwein said consideration should be given to the option of having serial offenders' cars seized and crushed.

Tasmania Police Deputy Commissioner Jack Johnston said he thought it would be necessary to consider all aspects of Mr Maroney's statement before making a comment.

"Commissioner Maroney's observation -- that he makes right on the eve of his retirement -- I find to be quite interesting and provocative," Mr Johnston said.

"I would want to consider the implications of such action, prior to making any observations along a similar line."

State Government spokesperson Shaun Rigby said the Police Minister would be paying close attention to the events in NSW.

"We already have the toughest anti-hooning legislation in the country and we are also looking to extend our vehicle confiscation laws from 48 hours to seven days, for a first offence," Mr Rigby said.

"We will be watching NSW with interest."

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Join Calm Chaos

In Russia, a jury's verdict is hardly the last word

By Steve Gutterman
ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 9, 2007

MOSCOW – It might have been the end of Valery Zhak's ordeal: For the second time, a jury acquitted him of charges that he hired a hit man to murder a developer in a property dispute.

But for the second time, prosecutors have appealed his acquittal and Zhak, a director of musicals on the Moscow stage, could face a third trial.

“Of course we thought it was over,” the 66-year-old impresario said, surrounded by case files in his apartment. “A jury's verdict should be final.”

But not in Russia, where there is no effective protection against double jeopardy. Here, juries that vote to acquit seldom have the last word.

Jury trials, banned by the Bolsheviks, were reintroduced in 1993 in a signature reform of the post-Soviet era. But legal experts say they have been weakened by a criminal justice system compromised by politics, corruption and authorities who assume guilt.

Sergei Pashin, a retired federal judge who helped write the law reinstating them, said authorities are angry because jurors render not-guilty verdicts far more often than judges do.

About two out of 10 defendants tried by juries are acquitted, compared with fewer than one in 100 tried by judges. (It takes seven votes on a 12-person jury to convict.)

Russian prosecutors “are not used to proving anything,” said Karinna Moskalenko, a human rights lawyer. “Usually, they come to court and before they even open their mouths, the judge already agrees with them. They say, 'We say it is so, so it must be so' – and this does not work in a jury trial.”

Only the most serious crimes warrant a jury, and only if a defendant requests one. And even then, prosecutors pressure them not to do so, said lawyer Viktor Parshutkin, who represents Zhak.

They can tell defendants they'll get harsher sentences if convicted by a jury, or they can reduce the charges to make defendants ineligible for trial by jury, Parshutkin said.

Last year, only 700 of 1.2 million criminal cases were tried by a jury.

Some lawyers claim state security agencies regularly infiltrate juries with operatives who will vote to convict, or blackmail jurors into providing information that can be used to challenge acquittals. Juries are sometimes disbanded in midtrial, which attorneys suspect is a pretext for removing jurors likely to acquit.

Valentin Danilov, a physicist accused of espionage, had his acquittal by a jury thrown out by the Supreme Court and is serving a 14-year prison term after being convicted in his second trial.

Russia's high court tossed out almost three-quarters of jury acquittals in the first half of 2006, said Mara Polyakova, director of the Independent Council for Legal Expertise.

Zhak used jurors' distrust of authority to his advantage by portraying himself as fighter for justice who antagonized corrupt local officials. He was arrested in August 2005 on charges of offering a hit man $25,000 to kill the developer of his apartment building. His alleged motive was to gain control of commercial space in the building.

Zhak was acquitted and released in June 2006, but prosecutors won an appeal, claiming the judge had misdirected the jury.

After a second jury trial, Zhak was acquitted in April.

Zhak claimed he was framed because he fought for tenants' rights and had uncovered a shady real estate deal between his alleged target, Soyun Sadykov, and corrupt local officials. Sadykov, a leader of Russia's Azerbaijani community, claims the juries that acquitted Zhak were motivated by bias against his people, and that Zhak was able to “buy the jurors, the judge and walk free.”

Now Zhak awaits word on whether he will face a third trial. Not surprisingly, he believes passionately in the jury system.

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me@rescam.org

wire tapping

On 13 Sept '04, Before there was any political thread- indeed even before the crap spewed forth from the woowoo man which eventually resulted in the choking off of freedom of speech on the Seti boards, I started a thread with a post titled 'Get'em while they last'

The thread got very busy and before long it had evolved or maybe degenerated is a better word, into alot of hollering and posturing and - well, 'political' excretions that I could never much get interested in.

Today I got an email from Misfit to inform me that the post had been 'moderated' for 'historical purposes'.

I think that's really cool to have some of my addlebrained post midnight drivel consigned to history so I reproduce the opening post here in it's entirety just because my man Misfit, the moderator, has seen fit to classify it as history.


Get'em while they last

Hey Kids! - STARTING TODAY!
Due to the US government being tied up with their crusade for the hearts of the muhammadans and with a little help from arms lobbyists, These neat assault weapons can now be purchased in accordance with the law of the land for your bullet spraying enjoyment:

- AK-47 and all models of the Norinco, Mitchell and Poly Technologies Avtomat Kalashnikovs, designed in the former Soviet Union.
-Uzi and Galil, both made by Action Arms Israeli Military Industries.
- TEC-9, TEC-22 and TEC-DC9, manufactured by Intratec.
-SWD M-10, M-11, M-11-9 and M-12. Based on the design of the MAC-10, their full-automatic cousin, these assault pistols are designed to fire many bullets over a wide area in seconds.
- Street Sweeper and Striker 12 and other revolving cylinder semiautomatic shotguns. (GREAT FOR RABBITS AND SPRUCE HENS)
- Beretta AR-70 and SC-70, used by armed forces in a number of countries including Italy, Jordan and Malaysia.
- Colt AR-15, the civilian version of the M-16 rifle that is the U.S. military's standard-issue rifle.
- Weapons manufactured by Fabrique Nationale, the FN-FAL, FN-LAR and FNC. The guns are used by the armed forces of more than 90 countries.
-Steyr AUG, a rifle made in Germany.

IT'S THE LAW- if you are a criminoid you aren't allowed to play with these.
They are legal ONLY for regulated sport hunting and target practice.
Please dont use ILLEGAL conversion kits enabling full automatic firing modes.
Remember- dont take your assault weapons to school and NEVER drink and shoot.
Thanks George- for your continuing assurance to every American that their security is #1 on your 'to do' list.

Carl Cuseo- Boquerón, Puerto Rico

Actually the entire thread was moved into this forum. It's the first (oldest) one.
Meanwhile some 20 threads later...

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me@rescam.org

Putin's missle defense proposal and the emerging world order

By Henry A. Kissinger; former secretary of state.

August 12, 2007

The debate about missile defense, nearly 50 years old, has been reignited by the plan to deploy elements of the American missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland. Familiar Cold War arguments have re-emerged as Russia challenges the necessity of the deployment and asserts that it is really designed to overcome Russian strategic forces rather than Iranian threats as the U.S. administration claims. But in addition to invective, the Kremlin has also put forward a bold initiative for creating an unprecedented NATO-Russian collaboration in resisting an Iranian nuclear missile threat.

The Cold War aspect of the debate harks back to an issue that has bedeviled strategists ever since the advent of nuclear weapons: whether it is possible to distil from the cataclysmic consequences of nuclear war a military strategy that a society can survive. During the Cold War, the dominant American strategic doctrine sought deterrence through the mutual capacity for annihilation. But as the projected casualties of the mutual assured destruction, or MAD, strategy approached tens of millions, governments recoiled before the implications of what their planners had wrought. The advent of ballistic missiles in the 1960s produced pressure for a defense against the new threat. In practice, only the United States and the Soviet Union had the military capacity to develop what amounted to shooting down the equivalent of a bullet in space, and only the United States had the industrial capacity to build it on a global basis.

In the United States, the concept of missile defense had a rough passage. Proponents of the MAD strategy rejected it as unnecessary and wasteful; advocates of arms control denied that the consequences of nuclear war should – or could – be mitigated. To their mind, making nuclear war more tolerable might also make it more likely, tempting a first strike by one side or the other in the belief that its defenses could blunt the counterblow. Arguments such as these led Congress to strangle the missile defense system that President Richard Nixon had proposed in 1969. In order to preserve its nucleus, the Nixon administration, in 1972, negotiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which froze existing missile defenses on both sides in parallel with an agreement that achieved the first restraints on the Soviet offensive missile buildup.

In the following decades, the international environment changed dramatically and forced a reconsideration of the earlier decisions: First, the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated for the foreseeable future the conceptual basis for the MAD doctrine; second, technical progress made missile defense a much more realistic prospect; third, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology has generated unprecedented dangers of accidental and rogue state launches. Involved as well was a moral issue. How could any president explain, after even the most limited nuclear attack, why, in possession of a plausible technology to mitigate its consequences or to avoid them altogether, he chose to leave the population unprotected?

These considerations persuaded the Bush administration to withdraw from the ABM treaty in 2002 and to begin construction of a global missile defense system aimed at overcoming limited attacks, especially from rogue states. Deployment has started in Alaska, and some existing radar stations elsewhere are being integrated into the system. The prospective deployment of a radar site in the Czech Republic and a small number of interceptors in Poland would be the first new installations outside the United States explicitly designed for missile defense. Russia, which accepted the withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2002 with little, if any, controversy, has reacted in a neuralgic manner to the Polish and Czech deployment. This should not be a surprise. Moscow has always shown great interest in missile defense – indeed, the Soviet Union was a pioneer in deploying missile defenses around Moscow in the mid-1960s. In 1967, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin scornfully rejected a proposal by President Lyndon B. Johnson that both sides forgo missile defense. Three years later after an American missile defense effort was under way, Moscow reversed its position – perhaps concerned that America's technological prowess might give it an edge. Ten years later, the Soviet response to the Reagan Star Wars proposal followed a similar trajectory, initial criticism followed by constructive U.S.-Soviet dialogue.

The current American-Russian dialogue, therefore, on one level repeats a traditional pattern. But its implications go well beyond strategic considerations. Implicit in President Vladimir Putin's conduct since his critical Munich speech is a deep resentment over the advance of the NATO military establishment toward Russia's frontiers in disregard of what Moscow regards as assurances that this would not happen – especially with respect to advanced military technology. The American argument that the deployment is modest and designed to deal with attacks from Iran is dismissed on the ground that an Iranian missile capability to reach the United States is probably 10 years or more away. Therefore the deployment, in Russian eyes, must by its very nature involve a deeper design aimed at Russian interests.

Moscow's tactics reflect its rhetoric. It has launched an intense diplomatic campaign to pressure NATO and the United States to revoke the missile defense deployment in Central Europe. It has withdrawn previous assurances that none of Russia's missiles would be aimed at NATO territory.

But there are straws in the wind that imply a more constructive attitude. Putin has made an intriguing proposal of potentially profound, long-range significance: to link Russia's existing missile tracking radar installations in Azerbaijan or those planned for southern Russia to the American and NATO defense missile system against Iran. While the proposal is unacceptable as put forward, it contains a vision of how to implement parallel strategic interests that might set a precedent for overcoming other global challenges.

Russia and the United States face an emerging world order whose threats as well as prospects transcend what any national state, no matter how powerful, can deal with by itself. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, radical jihadism, the environment, a global economy all impose the need for cooperative approaches. At the level of the presidents and foreign ministers, this seems to be understood, and relations are friendly and characterized by serious cooperative efforts. Yet in the public dimension, something approaching Cold War attitudes is re-emerging.

This trend must not be permitted to take hold. The United States and Russia are no longer in a competition for global leadership. The military deployments of the two sides are no longer aimed at each other because each faces greater perils than that represented by the other. Serious Americans understand that many global problems crucially affecting future stability and progress can best – perhaps only – be solved by American-Russian cooperation. By the same token, Russian leaders cannot fail to know that while their country has made a spectacular recovery, it has a long way to go and nothing to gain from a global contest with the United States.

Each side, of course, has also national interests that are not necessarily congruent. America needs to show greater sensitivity to Russian complexities. Moscow must understand that its point regarding being taken for granted has been made and that threats are not the way to achieve a sense of common purpose. The immediate challenge is to deal with the missile defense issue. For America, the NATO alliance has been the bedrock of its move from isolation to international engagement. It therefore should not be asked to bargain away an enterprise agreed to by the Czech Republic and Poland to underline their ties to America and that U.S. leaders consider important for American security. But what America can and should do is to limit the proposed deployment to its stated objective of overcoming rogue state threats and find ways to define specific steps that separate the anti-missile deployment in Central Europe from a strategy for a hypothetical and highly implausible war against Russia.

Beyond this vestige of traditional arms control looms the prospect of a new approach to international order. Putin's initiative to link NATO and Russian warning systems could be – or could be made – an historic initiative in dealing jointly with issues that threaten all countries simultaneously. It is one of those schemes easy to disparage on technical grounds but, perhaps like Reagan's Star Wars vision, a harbinger of a future posing entirely new creative opportunities. It permits one to imagine a genuinely global approach to the specter of nuclear proliferation, which has heretofore been treated largely through national policies. And such an approach could become a forerunner for other issues of comparable dimension.

Of course, it is quite possible – perhaps even likely – that the Kremlin proposal is largely a tactical maneuver: to “expose” non-existent American designs against Russian strategic forces; to split NATO by exploring Russian proposals in the NATO-Russian Council; and to make the new proposal conditional on abandoning the planned U.S. deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic.

It would be a pity. For a successful negotiation – even a serious effort at one – would put the non-proliferation negotiations with Iran in a radically new framework and, in time, perhaps lead to a wider approach to other global challenges. The Russian proposal therefore deserves detailed exploration. How would such a system operate? How would the proposed system respond to its own warnings? How would other nations with comparable interests be brought into it?

If these questions can be answered positively – if, in other words, the countries involved link their strategies on the non-proliferation issue – a new framework for a host of other issues will come about. A debate started over the most destructive weapons will have culminated in sketching a road toward a more peaceful world.

Russia and the United States face an emerging world order whose threats as well as prospects transcend what any national state, no matter how powerful, can deal with by itself. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, radical jihadism, the environment, a global economy all impose the need for cooperative approaches. At the level of the presidents and foreign ministers, this seems to be understood, and relations are friendly and characterized by serious cooperative efforts. Yet in the public dimension, something approaching Cold War attitudes is re-emerging.

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500th POST!

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Memo to E. German guards reveals shoot-to-kill orders
Disclosure comes with anniversary of the Berlin Wall

By Judy Dempsey
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

August 13, 2007

BERLIN – Seventeen years after German reunification, archivists have found the first written proof that East German border guards had been ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to escape to West Germany, including women and children.

The seven-page order, dated Oct. 1, 1973, was discovered last week in the regional archive office in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. Though unsigned, it shows that the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, had told guards that they must “stop or liquidate” anyone trying to cross the border.

“Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used,” the document said.

The revelations, which stunned politicians here across the political spectrum, were made public just days before the 46th anniversary today of the building of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city and became the symbol of the Cold War. The wall was toppled Nov. 9, 1989, and paved the way for the reunification of the two Germanys.

The number of East Germans who successfully crossed the border is unknown. According to historians, about 2,800 border guards crossed the border from 1961 to 1989. The Center for Contemporary Historical Research in Potsdam, near Berlin, said 270 to 780 people trying to flee were killed by border guards.

Politicians from eastern Germany said yesterday that they had no doubt that the document was authentic. Some were skeptical, however, that it would lead to prosecutions of any former senior Stasi officers or Communist officials.

Wolfgang Thierse, a legislator in the Bundestag, or German Parliament, and a leading Social Democrat from eastern Berlin, said the document carried no names, so it would be difficult to initiate any new trials.

Ever since reunification, former East German Communist Party leaders and senior functionaries have repeatedly denied that the Stasi, one of the largest and most pervasive of the secret police organizations in the former Communist Eastern Europe, had given any shoot-to-kill orders.

But yesterday, Marianne Birthler, director of the government office that manages the millions of Stasi files, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, the leading conservative newspaper: “The document is so important because the political leaders of the time continue to deny there was an order to shoot.”

Egon Krenz, the last Communist leader of East Germany, denied that there had been any such orders. “I don't know this from files. I know this from my own experience. Such an order would have contradicted East German law,” he said in an interview to be published today in the Bild Zeitung newspaper. Krenz served four years of a 6½-year prison sentence for manslaughter related to deaths of East Germans trying to cross the Berlin Wall. He was released in 2003.

According to the document, the orders were issued to a special Stasi unit attached to the regular East German border guards in the Magdeburg region, which bordered West Germany. The Stasi unit was charged with preventing border guards from fleeing to the West with their families.

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