Much of those funds come with stipulations on how they must be spent; namely, on military hardware from US Defense manufacturers. So the aid ends up back in the US ultimately and effectively acts as a subsidy to the Defense industry.
This may be a dumb question, but how are subsidies compatible with trade agreements? It doesn't seem fair from a free market point of view. Or are foreign competitors allowed to subsidize their industries to similar levels as part of trade agreements?
Native New Yorker here. Growing up in the 80's and 90's (when crime was at it's peak), it was common among everyone I grew up with to ride the subway/bus alone and generally explore the neighborhood alone/with friends. I remember my mother being slightly apprehensive when I started commuting to school alone in 4th grade, but it wasn't a major issue.
As many have pointed out, the culture has simply changed. Crime is way down, but ironically people are more afraid to let their children travel unsupervised than when I was a kid.
As a side note, I did get lost on the train once (while in the care of a relative. She got off the train and forgot to take me with her.) I was asleep and woke up at a stop I didn't recognize. While I remember being a little apprehensive, I simply walked over to the woman in the token booth, explained I was lost and had gotten separated from my aunt. She let me inside the booth and called my mom, who came and picked me up. All in all, it wasn't a huge affair. I think if that happened today police and CPS will probably turn it into a major incident of possible child neglect.
> Most of the greatest inventions of the past 100 years have come from large businesses that had the man-power and capital to invest in significant R&D departments.
Your narrative leaves out the huge sums of public dollars that underpinned those innovations.
Given that the original search was blatantly illegal, the original citations were not in fact reasonable.
Law Enforcement generally gets away with this behavior, in part, because the public only pays attention to the end result (in this case "no insurance") and pays no mind to the fact that a search was never justified in the first place.
Generally yes, although the cashier might be momentarily confused when the machine prompts her to get a signature since everyone else just uses their pin.
The only place it won't work at all is self-service kiosk.
> and started to mean "USA" in the heads of US citizens
You're being a little pedantic. It's usually understood to refer to US citizens by just about everyone outside the USA as well, not just US citizens themselves.
I guess you are being a little bit insensitive by calling him "pedantic".
As an "American" from the South, and having friends in both Central and North, we constantly make fun of the fact that we can't call ourselves Americans the way Europeans and Asians do.
Another "interesting point" though is that the Indigenous population are still called Indians and the the real Indians are not identified as Asians.
You can call yourselves "South Americans" though, and everybody would understand.
Not all taxonomies consider "America" as one continent. In geography school we were taught of North America and South America as different continents. And if you check Wikipedia, you'll see there are several ways to divide the continents, and they cound from 5 to 7 depending on how you look at it, IIRC.
>Another "interesting point" though is that the Indigenous population are still called Indians and the the real Indians are not identified as Asians.
In my corner of Europe we don't consider the "real Indians" as Asians either. Some cultures do, but we prefer to reserve the "Asian" moniker for the far east (Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea etc). I don't see much cultural or historical resemblance between these and Indians.
(Details: Google actually serves redirect pages in its results page, to track which results are clicked. I copied the URL I was served rather than clicking it and allowing my browser to redirect, so you can click it too and look like you're coming from Google :). )
Why did you put trial in quotes? (Genuinely curious) I was under the impression that that's what we did as a society with people suspected of major crimes. Even Nazi war criminals, people responsible for the suffering and death of untold millions, were put on trial.
The Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials were show trials. The US wanted to have trials, the UK just string the losers up post haste and the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial, was really thrilled.
There's no question some horrible people who did dreadful things were hanged as a result of those trials.
But nn such a context it's impossible to not to have any decision overshadowed as "victor's justice" no matter how seemingly legitimate. And there _was_ ambiguity in some cases. Example: the victor decides that "waging war" is the crime while the general from the losing side is professionally executing his judgement in fighting a battle. Or where the losers were punished for something that the winners also did (e.g. destruction of Dresden: terrible, ineffective in pursuit of the war, and completely understandable in context).
Basically trials, in this context, are solely to assuage the guilt of the victors. They are no more just than simply executing those the victors have decided are guilty.
BTW there was a lot of contemporary discussion on this; this is not an ex post facto opinion.
> The Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials were show trials.
In addition to Hans Fritzsche, Franz von Papen, and Hjalmar Schacht in Nuremberg, over 1,000 Japanese defendants were acquitted of war crimes in the trials in the Far East.
That seems a pretty staggering number of acquittals for "show trials," if you're using "show trial" in its normal sense, where a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion.
If you just mean it would have been unlikely for Göring to mount a satisfactory defense, when he conspired to confiscate Jewish property after Kristallnacht and allowed the attempted extermination of the Hungarian Jews, you'd be right. But that has more to do with the nature of his involvement.
Consider the higher ranking Dönitz, effectively head of state. His defense actually worked fairly well, and he thus received a lighter sentence. (On charges that he sunk neutral vessels, his defense countered that the US had done the same, and he received no additional jail time for it. On charges that he waged unrestricted warfare against British merchants, he received a "not guilty" as his defense argued that they all supported the war effort, etc. He claimed that he didn't know anything about the policy in the camps, he was just a naval man. He received a 10 year sentence - that's lighter than some murderers get.)
I think it is important to point out that no one has been declared guilty of "waging war" at the Nuremberg Trials but for waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties and conspiring for such a war. (The full quote can be found under "Nuremberg Principles".) You are certainly right that such trials always will feel wrong and I'm sure a lawyer could bring up several good arguments why they are wrong.
I still think they are better than plain shooting someone because they indicate a willingness to follow higher standards than the other party. Moral high ground is important in conflicts motivated by ideology. On a tangent I also feel that the lack of moral high ground is why approval of U.S. foreign policy is declining among its allies and even more so among neutral countries.
You are correct that there were many problems and no small amount of hypocrisy involved in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. (Much more so in the latter, but that's a different discussion)
But the point I was responding to was of the parent's usage of, what I interpreted to be, sarcasm quotes around the word trial; implying that the idea of trying Bin Ladin was ludicrous on it's face. I disagree. Despite all the valid criticism one can levy against any system of criminal justice, it's an important pillar of our society that when a crime has occurred, no matter how heinous or vile, the suspected perpetrators are apprehended, and evidence must be produced against them before punishment is meted out. We don't just take them out back and shoot them in the head, no matter how obvious we imagine their guilt to be. This process has value, despite it's many flaws in the way it's actually implemented.
Which society? The US isn't the ruler of the world. It can't purport to impose criminal jurisdiction on foreigners waging war against it, and any attempt to pretend to do so would be a sham. There is the domestic criminal justice system, and internationally there is only war between sovereign actors.
63 countries have US military bases and troops, 156 countries have US troops (overlapping sets), 46 have no US military presence[0]. The Five Eyes are basically the US's subalterns in Empire. Outside of Russia , North Korea and China calling non US countries independent is a bit of a stretch. Classical international law certainly wouldn't have considered any country with another's military bases anything but a protectorate.
In other words: one should nuance that a bit. Yes, in NATO, he USA is by far the biggest player, and it contributes beyond its size, but protectorate stretches it, certainly in some cases.
>...Implying that the idea of trying Bin Ladin was ludicrous on
> it's face. I disagree.
I'm with you. In fact it's a really a terrible shame that the original attack in 2001 was not treated as the work of gangsters, which it was, rather than an act of war, which it clearly was not. Once the latter path had been seized upon, war was waged back against....what? A movement?
The use of war vocabulary simply legitimized bin Laden in the eyes of many terrible people. He definitely surfed the US's response effectively.
