Please view these excellent pictures from Michael Lai. You will agree they are an exceptional range of photos of high quality.
It troubles me believe that Americans (as represented by the NRA) are so naive or so stupid, that they fail to see that the problem is the ownership of guns, and especially those in the hands of mentally unstable young males.
The NRA response is typical of the introspective, red neck attitudes of those it seeks to represent.
Just where are the hundreds of thousands of schools in the US going to find enough intelligent, suitably qualified armed security guards to patrol and protect their schools?
More guns is not the solution! No guns is.
America; take a look a gun crime levels in countries where gun ownership is limited or restricted. Need I say more?
REPEAL THE 2ND AMENDMENT as it is longer valid, and I’m sure the founding fathers did not have the killing of American children in mind when it was drafted! Further inaction in gun control will only serve to belittle America in the eyes of the rest of the world.
The death of 20 innocent children and 6 adults in an elementary school in Connecticut, again demonstrates the absurdity of access to, and possession of firearms, especially high powered military style assault rifles by citizens of the US.
How many more innocent kindergarten and primary (elementary) school children will have to die unneceassrily before America re-examines the “right to bear arms”. Ask any US citizen about gun ownership, and they will remind you that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the 2nd amendment to their constitution. One needs to remember that this document was enacted in 1787, when the United States was emerging from the War of Independance with the British. The United States was very much a different place then than it is today, often lawless and fontier like. There was no army at the time, therefore “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It could therefore be argued that now a large, well trained and technically superior army is in place in the US, the 2nd Amendment is no longer valid. Gun control in the US is often a piecemeal affair which often means minimal or no control. I suspect the ‘founding fathers’ didn’t have the needless killing of children in mind when the Constitution was written.
America, I suspect, is in a no-win situation. Americans remain deeply mistrusting of their government, public administrators, their neighbours and minorities (both racial and religious). It never ceases to amaze me how they think that the solution to that fear and paranoia is the ownership of guns, when the real solution is the removal of those guns (and thus the associated crime) from their society. However should gun ownership be “outlawed” tomorrow, the chance of actually disarming America would be nigh on impossible, because of the sheer number of guns in public hands, and the reluctance to hand them in.
American paranoia knows no bounds.
In the meantime, 20 families will mourn the tragic loss of a young life, senselessly cut down by a gun toting “crazy”. I am saddened by this tragic occurrence, the loss of a child’s life is something that should not, and need not occur.
But what saddens me, nay, angers me further; is a realisation of the fact that nothing will change. Platitudes will be made to the grieving parents by politicians, administrators, psycologists and the like, but in the end the root cause (gun ownership), will be ignored.
To the parents of those children so tragically killed, I offer my deepest and sincerest condolences.
There’s nothing more I can add, as Andrew has so eloquently put his thoughts. As a fellow emergency service officer, I believe that one has their duty to do, and a real expectation that you will go home at the end of your shift. Rest In Peace.
The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney.
Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called ‘Naris.’This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.
RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama, one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?
William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.
RT: And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…
WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device, if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10-gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why they’re building Bluffdale [database facility], because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, emails are going to be stored there in the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.
RT: You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?
WB: Yes.
RT: Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90 percent of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?
WB: I would assume that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over of 100 billion 1,000-character emails a day. One device.
RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?
WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.
RT: Were you on the target list?
WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my email. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.
RT: Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?
WB: Sure!
RT: You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the president. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency, in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?
WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Bluffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.
RT: What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?
WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.
RT: Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?
WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it to begin with? What law were they breaking?
RT: In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private emails to this woman.
WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think that there was something going on in the background that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.
RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those who say, ‘I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?’ What do you say to those who think that it shouldnt concern them.
WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they aren’t doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.
RT: Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.
WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years.The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.
RT: It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…
WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.
RT: Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?
WB: No.
RT: You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics – I don’t know if there is such a thing – your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?
WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the Constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that Constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is, and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier as an executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme Court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.
RT: What are the chances of that? What are the odds?
WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the court is supposed to protect the Constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the Constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.
I guess my concern in addition to the above is if the FBI is collecting and storing the emails of US citizens, then it is a mere progression to suspect (strongly) that FBI is also storing the emails of those from without who correspond with those US citizens.
Nobody the world is safe from the paranoia of the United States.
I have noticed over the last number of years the narrowing similarity between the former Soviet Union (and the KGB) and the United Sates in terms of the “surveillance state”.
As a teenager I read many Biggles books written by WE Johns with great interest. Biggles was a WW1 fighter hero who served on in the RFC/RAF after the war. He served during WW2 and later in the Air Police rising to the rank of Squadron Leader.
Now you will notice from my Goodreads widget that I am reading these stories over again, but of course, now with the view and wisdom of maturity. WE Johns wrote 169 books during his prolific writing career, stretching over 30 years, as well as being an aviation illustrator, an editor for a flying magazine of the 1930’s and working for the Air Ministry.
The Biggles series comprised 96 books published between 1932 and 1970 with an additional 6 omnibus editions published within this period, a total of 104 volumes. Two further books were published in the late 1990’s by Norman Wright and Jennifer Schofield.
What about Johns himself? Here is a short biography of the man who was W.E. Johns:
William Earl Johns
William Earl Johns was born in Bengeo, Hertfordshire, England. He was the son of Richard Eastman Johns, a tailor, and Elizabeth Johns (née Earl), the daughter of a master butcher. He had a younger brother, Russell Ernest Johns, who was born on 24 October 1895.He went to Hertford Grammar School where he was no great scholar but he did develop into a crack shot with a rifle. This fired his early ambition to be a soldier. He also attended evening classes at the local art school.
In the summer of 1907 he was apprenticed to a county municipal surveyor where he remained for four years and then in 1912 he became a sanitary inspector in Swaffham, Norfolk. Soon after taking up this appointment, his father died of tuberculosis at the age of 47.
On 6 October 1914 he married Maude Penelope Hunt (1882–1961), the daughter of the Reverend John Hunt, the vicar at Little Dunham in Norfolk. The couple had one son, William Earl Carmichael Johns, who was born in March 1916. This marriage lasted until 1923 when it completely broke down and Maude went back to live with her father, taking Johns son with her. While living in Edgbaston, Johns became friendly with neighbours the Leigh family. He fell in love with Doris May Leigh, and when Johns was posted to Newcastle, Doris went with him as his wife. They were inseparable until his death, although they never married.
With war looming he joined the Territorial Army as a Private in the King’s Own Royal Regiment (Norfolk Yeomanry), a cavalry regiment. In August 1914 his regiment was mobilised and was in training and on home defence duties until September 1915 when they received embarkation orders for duty overseas.
He fought at Gallipoli and in the Suez Canal area and, after moving to the Machine gun Corps, he took part in the spring offensive in Salonika in April 1917. He contracted malaria and whilst in hospital he put in for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps and on 26 September 1917, he was given a temporary commission as a Second Lieutenant and posted back to England to learn to fly, which he did at No. 1 School of Aeronautics at Reading, where he was taught by a Captain Ashton.
He was posted to No. 25 Flying Training School at Thetford where he had a charmed existence, once writing off three planes in three days. He moved to Yorkshire and was then posted to France and while on a bombing raid to Mannheim his plane was shot down and he was wounded. Captured by the Germans, he later escaped before being recaptured and where he remained until the war ended. Johns contrary to popular belief, was never a fighter pilot. He was a bomber pilot, and in WW1, the life expectancy of bomber crew was 11 days. In fact when Johns was shot down over Mannheim, his co-pilot/observer was killed. Johns sustained a thigh wound and had his goggles shot off.
After the war Johns continued in the RAF as a flying instructor and other duties. After leaving the service he became a prolific writer and editor. The characters of Worrals and Gimlet were added to his books at a request of the Air Ministry, when they became aware of how many RAF pilots attributed their entry into the RAF after being influenced by the adventures of Biggles. Of course, Worrals was female and was used to encourage women to join the WAAF. Johns was known embellish his military career, stating that he had served in India and Iraq. No RAF records exist to support this claim, although his stories were written with a familiarity of some one who had actually been there. Of course, then there is the use of the rank of “Captain”. Johns was never a Captain. He rose only to the rank of Flying Officer or Leiutenant as its army equivalent. He says he used the rank as readers would relate to that easier than that of Flying Officer. Interestingly, Johns uses RAF ranks and titles extensively through the Biggles series, so this explanation appears somewhat hollow.
On the 21st June 1968 at 8.30 a.m. William Earl Johns (born 5th February 1893) stopped mid-sentence, whilst writing “Biggles Does Some Homework” to make himself and Doris a cup of tea. He went upstairs to her and sat in his armchair and suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 75 years old. Doris was to die on 26th September 1969 from cancer. Interestingly, Biggles was to be retired from service in this novel. This novel was completed in February 1998 by Norman Wright and Jennifer Schofield.
It is often argued that Biggles books are littered with low grade racism and sexism. This may be considered so by today’s standards, but in the 1930’s this was accepted and usually harmless. It may have something to do with the mistaken belief that the officer classes and indeed the British considered themselves superior to every one else, including Americans. However there is little use of alcohol, and swearing is never used in his books, but cigarettes were smoked frequently. It must be remembered however that Johns’ target audience was young teenage males were swearing and alcohol use would have been considered unacceptable.
Biggles books in the main are exciting adventure books which follow a set formula, which I am enjoying reading again after so many years. They are enjoying a revival and most titles are again in print. Those original titles in good condition are now quite valuable. I have a original version of “Biggles Special Case” published in 1963.
I note that on the front page of today’s Newcastle Morning Herald (14/11/2012), that the premier of NSW. Mr Barry O’Farrell, has questioned the Catholic Church’s rule on reporting to police, admissions by priests of child sexual abuse made as part of a Confession.
I am not Catholic, but I understand that the seal of the Confessional is inviolable. Catholics understand that Confessions to their priest will remain confidential, as unsavoury as those Confessions may well be. This rite of confidentiality extends to all persons as part of the Confession, and that confidentiality includes priests themselves.
As part of the Rite of Confession, the priest may indicate a course of action which may include disclosure to police of illegal actions, and the witholding of absolution until an action is carried out. But it is up to the Confessor to carry out the actions as laid down in the Confessional. It is not, nor has it ever been, the role of the priest to disclose to police, or any other person, that which was heard during the course of a Confession.
Nor should this change.
If the NSW government make it a offence not to report a crime heard in a Confession, I suspect priests will choose to go to gaol rather than to make a disclosure.
But in real terms, only priests will know what was said, and by who, and considering that there is no recording of Confessions, who will know what was actually said by who, to who when the Confession is over.
As abhorant as child sexual abuse is, and there is no condoning this behaviour, the sanctity of the Confessional is and must remain inviolable and confidential.
So in the same week it is revealed to us who will be the next leaders of both superpowers: Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. The only difference is that we didn’t know it would be Obama until after Tuesday’s vote. By contrast, we knew it would be Xi long before the process that began in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Thursday, from which he will emerge as communist party leader, becoming the country’s president next spring.
A sand sculpture congratulating Barack Obama is seen in Puri, India (Beta/AP)
The coincidence prompts two questions: Which superpower is getting stronger? And which faces the deeper crisis of its economic and political system? Though this may sound contradictory, the answers are: China, and China.
Through its sheer size, developmental ‘advantages of backwardness’, entrepreneurial people, history of imperial statehood and manifest individual and collective hunger for ‘wealth and power’ (a proverbial phrase in Chinese), China will become relatively stronger and therefore, since all power is relative, the United States will become relatively weaker. But China also has the more profound systemic problems which, if not addressed, may both slow its rise and make it an unstable, unpredictable and even aggressive state. Over the last five years, starting already in the twilight of George W Bush, the US has gone through a great time of troubles. With no Schadenfreude at all, I predict that China will face its own time of troubles over the next five.
We all know about America’s problems, which were comprehensively aired in the election campaign and referred to by Obama in an acceptance speech that at times sounded more like a civics lecture. Deficit and debt, gridlocked Congress, a tax code longer than the Bible, neglected infrastructure and schools, dependence on foreign oil, the stranglehold of money over politics: I don’t underestimate the difficulty of tackling them.
But we all know about them – and that’s the point. We don’t know the full extent of China’s problems because Chinese media are not allowed to report them properly. In official party-state deliberations, the issues are hidden behind ideological code-phrases. Now some of China’s developmental challenges would exist even if it had the best political system in the world. It has gone through the biggest, fastest industrial revolution in human history. Its urban population has grown by some 480 million in 30 years, so that more than half its people now live in cities. It may be close to the so-called ‘Lewis turning point’, when the supply of cheap labour from the countryside begins to dry up. It must attend to its own domestic demand, for it cannot rely on the US being forever the consumer of last resort.
But many of its problems do result from its very peculiar system, which may be called Leninist Capitalism. Since the mechanics of America’s electoral college have been explained to the point of exhaustion, let me just remind me you of the Chinese version. 2,270 delegates to the 18th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which started on Thursday, ‘elect’ some 370 members of the Central Committee, who in turn ‘elect’ some two dozen members of the Politburo, who in turn ‘elect’ a nine- or perhaps now only seven-member Standing Committee, which stands at the pinnacle of the party-state. All the key appointments will in fact have been decided in advance, in horsetrading and intrigue behind closed doors. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would thoroughly approve.
Yet at the same time, the vast Chinese state has a staggering degree of barely controlled decentralisation and a no-holds-barred hybrid kind of capitalism, both of which would have the wax melting on Lenin’s mummified brow. The result is dynamic but deformed economic development in which, for example, cities have run up mountains of bad debt with financial institutions ultimately controlled by the party-state. To call the allocation of capital in China ‘sub-optimal’ would be beneath understatement.
The nexus of money and politics may be at the heart of America’s systemic blockage, but so it is of China’s. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe you see former communist party leaders who have become mega-rich practitioners of capitalism-in-one-family; in China, their counterparts have become mega-rich practitioners of capitalism-in-one-family, but remained communist party leaders. A Bloomberg investigation recently estimated the total private wealth of incoming president Xi’s family at close to $1billion; a New York Times inquiry put that of outgoing premier Wen Jiabao’s family at around $2.7 billion. Why, between the two families they could have funded Mitt Romney’s entire election campaign.
In China, as anywhere else, a crisis can catalyse reform or revolution. Pray that it is reform. This increasingly urgent reform, if it happens, will not result in a Western-style liberal democracy any time soon, if ever. But even some communist party analysts acknowledge that, in China’s own long-term national interest, the changes will need to go in the direction of more rule of law, accountability, social security and ecologically sustainable development.
Now here’s the rub. We, in the rest of the world, have an existential interest in the success of both America’s and China’s reforms. The bellicose edge to confrontations in the Asia-Pacific region between China and American allies such as Japan is deeply worrying at such a relatively early stage of an emerging superpower rivalry. A recent Pew poll shows mutual distrust between the Chinese and American publics growing rapidly. Unhappy countries, unable to solve their own structural problems at home, are more likely to vent their anger abroad. We must want them both to succeed.
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.Lest We Forget.
Remembrance Day 2012
Photo: Darren Bark
It’s a sacred ritual of American elections that supporters of the losing party threaten to leave the country, and then of course do not. We can see this phenomenon in effect by examining instances of the phrase “I’m moving to [country]” on Twitter around the time the election was called.
Curiously, Canada–long the imagined haven of liberals in years in which Republicans win–is the most popular choice. (Perhaps it’s just close?) Australia comes in second, followed by … Colorado? The people promising to move there are perhaps motivated by electoral news other than the winner of the presidency.
The sad thing here is that Americans don’t seem to know that Colorado is in the USA!
Words, By George! 