http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/windows.asp
Per Snopes, although it is true that Romney made that remark, it was clearly told as a joke meant to lighten the mood. It was not a serious comment.
Sorry: I'm not going to join an argument about that. I will only reiterate what I said: our rights exist independent of the technologies used to implement those rights. If we have the right to freely communicate with other human beings, then we also have the right to put up web pages: the technology exists to facilitate our right. Too many people in these debates focus on technologies rather than principles.
Yes: and in a very real sense, you've got the facts exactly right and the conclusions exactly wrong.
You have the right to keep and bear arms. That right exists independent of technological developments. If you had instead, say, the right to keep and bear a flintlock pistol, then the instant cap-and-ball revolvers were developed you'd be unable to use them. Flintlocks, cap-and-ball, semiautomatics, the whole nine yards, are technologies that implement one of your natural rights: but your right is to keep and bear arms, not to keep and bear only the technologies of a given time.
In a similar vein, you have no right to a secret ballot. Your right is to have a say in participatory democracy via the voting process. The secret ballot, like the absentee ballot and the public ballot, are all technologies that exist to implement your right. You really don't want a Constitutional guarantee of a secret ballot, because then you'd be unable to use absentee ballots, nor would you be able to use new technologies yet to be developed that are superior to the secret ballot. Requiring, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a secret ballot," is really not that far from, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a flintlock pistol." It confuses a technology meant to facilitate the exercise of a right with the right itself.
Read up on the secret ballot, please. Just because nominations are made secretly and in writing is insufficient for them to be considered secret ballots. I'd suggest starting with the Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot ), myself: it has an excellent overview.
You already can prove who you voted for: use an absentee ballot. If your boss is offering you $1000 to vote for his candidate, give your blank absentee ballot to your boss, let him fill it out how he wants and let him mail it in.
The entire State of Oregon has moved to absentee ballots. It's not possible to file a truly secret ballot in Oregon any more. The residents of Oregon like it just fine, and they haven't reported any significant hike in vote fraud.
It's quite possible -- likely, even! -- that yes, we have discovered better ways. That doesn't mean those better ways are Constitutionally required, though.
If you go to the Jefferson Memorial in DC, carved on one wall is a speech from Jefferson in which he declares that he knows the Constitution to be an imperfect document, and that he entrusts future generations with the task of correcting it by the process of amendment. If you believe the secret ballot is a fundamental right, then you need to acknowledge the absence of that as a flaw in the Constitution, and seek to correct that flaw by the process of amendment.
No -- the Supreme Court gets the last say.
You're right that the Supreme Court has the right to declare that the secret ballot is now a Constitutional requirement. There are many ways they could do this, the most obvious being to incorporate it under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process. (SDP guarantees "those things inherent in the very concept of ordered liberty". If SCOTUS decides the secret ballot is inherent in the concept of ordered liberty, bang, there you go.)
However, given the absence of SCOTUS precedent stating that the secret ballot is a fundamental right, the judge is absolutely correct to say there is no fundamental right.
What the French considered to be a "secret ballot" would not be considered one by today's standards. See Wikipedia's page on the secret ballot for a good overview of what a secret ballot requires, and why.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until 1888. The secret ballot cannot be something the Framers envisioned as one of our natural rights, because the secret ballot wasn't even invented until the 1850s. (Seriously.)
If this nation conducted its presidential elections by a variety of non-secret ballot systems from 1792 to 1892, it's hard for me to take you seriously when you say that the secret ballot is a fundamental right.
There is no Constitutional right to a secret ballot.
In the State of Oregon, all voting is done by absentee ballot. There's no privacy screen around you as you cast your vote. Your employer can stop by and say, "I'll pay you $1000 for your unused ballot, so I can fill it out how I want and submit it." If you're in an abusive family, your domineering alcoholic bipolar parent might force you to fill out the absentee ballot in front of them so they can control how you vote. There is no way the absentee ballot is considered a secret ballot, and yet we have no trouble when an entire state converts to voting by absentee ballot.
The State of West Virginia guarantees, in its state constitution, every resident's right to cast a public ballot. There's no mention of the secret ballot.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until it was first adopted by the city of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888. The State of Massachusetts followed soon after. The first President to be elected by secret ballot was Grover Cleveland, in 1892.
We didn't use secret ballots to elect Washington, Jefferson, Jackson or Lincoln.
So, yeah. Anyone who claims we have a constitutional right to a secret ballot has an uphill road to hoe. History clearly shows that at no point in our nation's history has any court held the secret ballot to be a right.
For long-term storage I've had good luck with the following. You will need:
Place your objects in a vacuum-sealable bag. Use the vacuum cleaner to extract as much air as possible from the bag. Replace the air with dry nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen at 0% humidity), but do not overinflate: leave some room for the nitrogen to expand with temperature changes. Seal the bag. Place the bag inside an opaque plastic bag (a black garbage bag works well) and put into storage.
The two major contributors to chemical decomposition over time are oxygen and energy. By purging the air (78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, approx) with nitrogen, you get rid of most of the oxygen. By making sure you're using dry nitrogen there's no water present in the bag, and water as you can probably figure out is an oxygen source. No oxygen equals no oxidation reaction. Nitrogen is also a fairly inert gas: it's not argon-level of inert, but it's pretty damned unreactive.
By putting things into a black garbage bag, you seal it off from sunlight. No more ultraviolet light doing ultraviolent things to valence shells, kicking out electrons, etcetera.
Now that you've got oxidation and ultraviolet light controlled, store it in a fairly temperature-controlled place. 25 years of thermal shock can destroy things, and your keepsakes deserve better. A basement works well.
Insofar as how to make sure the digital media is still readable... buy a cheap laptop and put that in the nitrogen-atmosphere, UV-shielded, temperature-controlled time capsule, too, along with a USB-to-RS232 cable. In 25 years we'll still be able to read data out over a serial connection, even if Ethernet is still a thing of the past.
Strange: Slashdot seems to have eaten my original reply. C'est la vie.
No, Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was from the Old Testament Books of Isaiah and Micah, where the authors were speaking about what life would be like once God's plans came to fruition: an end to war, no one will lift a weapon against each other, and so forth.
Christ, for his part, said he did not come to bring peace to the Earth, but instead to bring a sword (Matthew 10:34).
Further, Christ almost certainly celebrated the Jewish Feast of Purim, which celebrates the avoidance of a genocide. The evil Haman tried to organize a Go-Murder-Your-Jewish-Neighbors-And-Take-Their-Stuff Day, but Mordecai and Esther were able to persuade the King to enact a By-The-Way-The-Jews-Get-To-Carry-Swords Day. Haman's attempted genocide failed due to the Jews being armed. To this day, the Feast of Purim is one of the best celebrations in Judaism -- it's a day whereupon observant Jews believe they are commanded by God to get shitfaced drunk until they can no longer tell the name of Haman from the name of Mordecai. (It takes a lot of wine to get that far.) I have fond memories of being in college and Rabbi Avi walking across campus, waving his arms and calling out "WHO WANTS TO GET LIT FOR GOD? FREE BOOZE AT CHABAD!"
Further, Christ said quite clearly he did not come to change even one letter of the Law, but only to fulfill it. Part of the Jewish Law involves how one treats rodef -- those who seek to shed another's blood unjustly. Jewish Law says, point blank, to give them one warning to stop. If they don't, then all Jews are commanded to stop the rodef by any means necessary, even if it means bloodshed.
So if the din rodef is part of the Law, and that's part of the Law that Christ said he did not come to change but to fulfill... then yes. The only way you can get the idea Christ was a pacifist is if you decide he was lying about not changing the Law. Christ advocated the possession of arms, and the ethical use of the same.
You can rail all you want against weapons. Go ahead, doesn't matter to me a bit. But when you try to rewrite history in order to satisfy your psychological hangups, then I have to quietly insist, "no, that is not how it happened."
You need to re-read your Bible. Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was Isaiah (and later Micah) talking about what life would be like in God's heavenly kingdom. Christ said (Matthew 10:34), "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
Incidentally, I'm a little irritated at your assumption that I'm any of (a) a Christian, (b) an American, or (c) a firearms owner. Someone asked a question, particularly with respect to whether Christ would have supported the NRA. The answer to that one is "almost certainly."
One of the biggest festivals of the Jewish year is the Feast of Purim, where Jews celebrate the story of Esther and Mordecai and their triumph over the evil Haman. When Haman plotted genocide against the Jews, Esther and Mordecai were able to convince the king to permit the Jews to carry swords to protect themselves. Haman's treachery was discovered, the Jews were armed, and those who wished to murder all the Jews in the country were too afraid to take on Jews armed with swords. This long predated Christ's ministry. Given that Christ also said he did not come to alter one letter of the Law but rather to fulfill it, it's quite likely that Christ celebrated Purim, the survival of the Jews against the first recorded attempted genocide against them, and how the civil possession of armaments let them survive.
I'm not arguing one way or another that firearms are good, bad, or the product of space aliens from Zarbnulax. Really, whatever politics you want to project onto them is your call. But when it comes to history, we have some pretty clear answers. Christ was in favor of arms and the ethical use of them.
Do you think Jesus would have supported the NRA?
Let's take a look at the text, shall we?
"Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. -- And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough." (Luke 22:36, 38)
So, yeah, I think Christ would've approved of the NRA. He directly advised his disciples to be armed. Also, "turning the other cheek" was never intended to mean passive submission to violence. The culture of the day was one where the wealthy would often slap around the poor using the right hand, but using the left was a mortal insult and would provoke a fight. Christ was telling the poor that if someone wants to bully them and shove them around, they should not initiate violence, but demonstrate their willingness to end a fight if the other guy wanted to start one -- that's what "turning the other cheek" meant.
Christ was not a pacifist. This is the guy who chased moneychangers from the temple with a whip (probably more for preying on the poor than defaming the faith), and who openly welcomed a Roman centurion as one of his followers, and didn't demand the guy give up his life of the sword. Christ's message had more to do with the ethical use of violence than it did with the total abjuration of it.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
