"known unknowns and unknown unknowns" Donald Rumsfeld

"The administration of George W. Bush attempted to portray the abuses as isolated incidents, not indicative of general U.S. policy. This was contradicted by humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. After multiple investigations, these organizations stated that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents, but were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. There was evidence that authorization for the torture had come from high up in the military hierarchy, with allegations being made that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had authorized some of the actions." - Wikipedia

What exactly did Scalia do that is so horrible people feel the need to shit on him after he is dead? Serious question. Because, from what I can tell from the comments on the Internet, it consists mostly of "I didn't agree with what he said so he should burn in hell."

Fuck that noise. That's partisan bullshit, the same kind the Republicans are pulling now (saying they won't allow any legislation to pass until Obama is out of office).

The man was a human being. He was a brilliant legal scholar. He viewed the law from a particular perspective and stayed true to that perspective until the very end. No, I don't agree with a lot of the arguments he made, but I do agree with some of them, like the argument that video games are a form of speech protected by the Constitution (read the majority ruling that he wrote for that case, it is brilliant).

As has been pointed out, he couldn't do jack shit without getting a majority opinion from the other justices on the court. And I've never read a legal opinion of his that wasn't grounded in a reasonable interpretation of the law. I don't need to agree with his interpretations to recognize them valid.

So again I ask, what did he do that was so atrocious that it warrants the hatred that's being direct at him. If it were Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush Jr., people who can (and should) be seen as directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe I could understand the vitriol.

Reagan was just the first stooge hired by the remnants of the Nixon administration. (By Bush Snr {his head of the CIA}, Donald Rumsfeld {2nd in command of the CIA} & Dick Cheney {3rd in command of the CIA}).

Literally an actor. And a 3rd rate cowboy actor at that (only for domestic & retarded audiences).

BTW Dubya was next & a gift to these fellas, none of them dumb enough to be the man out front making excuses.

They decided that a few million dead kids was fine if it swelled the family pile by 20%. Vietnam, East Timor, Iran Chile etc etc etc etc
.....Does anyone really know how much bank Cheney made from the slaughter/'rebuilding' in Iraq? A billion? 10 billion? 100 Billion? Will any American ever ask? Guess not.

In the future analysis of this time, these men will be held up worse that than Hitler, Stalin & Genghis Khan for sure. Their crimes are comparable in every way (especially the massive piles of dead kids) but without the personal trauma to explain psychosis. The US government of the last 50 years consists of the richest, fattest, most privileged men ever to live in millions of years of humanity, and yet they've committed the worst crimes of all time. Millions dead, crippled, traumatized, orphaned.
Is it their fault or the fault of those around them who do nothing or worse; cheer?

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>> ^aurens:

There's an old Jewish proverb that runs something like this:

"A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover."

Your stones, fortunately, aren't irrecoverable. I'll offer some counterpoints to a few of your claims, and I'll leave it up to you to fish for the truth about the others.
Kinda like a jet plane's black boxes aren't irrecoverable... no wait, they were. FBI: "None of the recording devices from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were ever recovered." But this defies reason. Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found? Anonymous source at the NTSB: "Off the record, we had the boxes,"
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't know what you mean by "produced,"He means if you have evidence that implicates a suspect of a crime, then you indict that person. You then find and arrest that person, charge them, and follow the rule of law. The FBI admits they have no "hard evidence" that OBL was behind the 9/11 attacks, yet he was immediately blamed for it. The Taliban offered extradition if we provided evidence and we refused. Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM, the South Tower at 9:03 AM, and the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. By my math, the Pentagon was hit fifty-one minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and thirty-four minutes after the second plane hit. The 9/11 Commission estimated that the hijacking of Flight 11, the first plane to hit the WTC, began at 8:14 AM. It's misleading, in this context...
You're talking about the Department of Defense. The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside? Never mind the approach the pilot took makes no sense. If your target is the Pentagon, you can cause the most damage and most causalities by doing a nose down crash in the top. Instead the amateur pilot does a high precision 360 degree turn, descending 7,000 feet in the last 2 minutes to impact the Pentagon in the front, the only spot with reinforced steel. He spends an extra 2 and half minutes in the air exposed and ends up hitting the exact spot that has been reinforced and also where the bookkeeping and accountants were. Day before 9/11: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announces that the Pentagon has lost track of $2.3 TRILLION DOLLARS of military spending.
Conspiracy? I think so. (Bonus: WeAreChange confronts Rumsfeld)
>> ^aurens:

Three videos, not one, were released.
And at least 84 remain classified. Why?
And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't fault you, or others like you, for wanting to "think twice" about the explanations given for certain of the events surrounding 9/11. I do fault you, though, for spending so little time on your second round of thinking, and for so carelessly tossing conspiracy theories to the wind.
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens. If you spent anytime at all "thinking" or looking at the evidence, then you would recognize government lies for what they are. You don't have to know the truth to recognize a lie.

Unknown Unknowns

By Thomas Sowell (Jul 13, 2011)

When Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, he coined some phrases about knowledge that apply far beyond military matters.

Secretary Rumsfeld pointed out that there are some things that we know that we know. He called those "known knowns." We may, for example, know how many aircraft carriers some other country has. We may also know that they have troops and tanks, without knowing how many. In Rumsfeld's phrase, that would be an "unknown known" -- a gap in our knowledge that we at least know exists.

Finally, there are things we don't even know exist, much less anything about them. These are "unknown unknowns" -- and they are the most dangerous. We had no clue, for example, when dawn broke on September 11, 2001, that somebody was going to fly two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center that day.

There are similar kinds of gaps in our knowledge in the economy. Unfortunately, our own government creates uncertainties that can paralyze the economy, especially when these uncertainties take the form of "unknown unknowns."

The short-run quick fixes that seem so attractive to so many politicians, and to many in the media, create many unknowns that make investors reluctant to invest and employers reluctant to employ. Politicians may only look as far ahead as the next election, but investors have to look ahead for as many years as it will take for their investments to start bringing in some money.

The net result is that both our financial institutions and our businesses have had record amounts of cash sitting idle while millions of people can't find jobs. Ordinarily these institutions make money by investing money and hiring workers. Why not now?

Because numerous and unpredictable government interventions create many unknowns, including "unknown unknowns."

The quick fix that got both Democrats and Republicans off the hook with a temporary bipartisan tax compromise, several months ago, leaves investors uncertain as to what the tax rate will be when any money they invest today starts bringing in a return in another two or three or ten years. It is known that there will be taxes but nobody knows what the tax rate will be then.

Some investors can send their investment money to foreign countries, where the tax rate is already known, is often lower than the tax rate in the United States and -- perhaps even more important -- is not some temporary, quick-fix compromise that is going to expire before their investments start earning a return.

Although more foreign investments were coming into the United States, a few years ago, than there were American investments going to foreign countries, today it is just the reverse. American investors are sending more of their money out of the country than foreign investors are sending here.

Since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the U.S. has lost more than $200 billion in investment capital." They add: "That is the equivalent of about two million jobs that don't exist on these shores and are now located in places like China, Germany and India."

President Obama's rhetoric deplores such "outsourcing," but his administration's policies make outsourcing an ever more attractive alternative to investing in the United States and creating American jobs.

Blithely piling onto American businesses both known costs like more taxes and unknowable costs -- such as the massive ObamaCare mandates that are still evolving -- provides more incentives for investors to send their money elsewhere to escape the hassles.

Hardly a month goes by without this administration coming up with a new anti-business policy -- whether directed against Boeing, banks or other private enterprises. Neither investors nor employers can know when the next one is coming or what it will be. These are unknown unknowns.

Such anti-business policies would just be business' problem, except that it is businesses that create jobs.

The biggest losers from creating an adverse business climate may not be businesses themselves -- especially not big businesses, which can readily invest more of their money overseas. The biggest losers are likely to be working people in America, who cannot just relocate to Europe or Asia to take the jobs created there by American multinational corporations.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I did, but it seemed like you said the reason we shouldn't care about Libya is because of Iraq. And then turned around and said this isn't like Iraq, even though it is clearly like Iraq. In other words, you were mad because this is just like Iraq, and because it isn't like Iraq.



I'm sorry, but equating the current situation in Libya with the almost-decade-long debacle in Iraq is completely retarded. In no way did I say the two were alike. In no way at all did I even imply that the two were alike in any way. You said that. I didn't.

Iraq was brought about by post 9/11 crazy-fervor. Donald Rumsfeld flat out lied to America by saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The administration did everything they could to imply that Iraq was even somehow responsible for the World Trade Center attack and the vast majority of this country bought into it. Even supported it while somehow managing to feign complete ignorance of the whole Saudi Arabia issue. Remember the coalition of the willing? England and Poland and a long list of tiny countries with no military power whatsoever? How about the fact that there have been massive amounts of troops stationed in Iraq since the very beginning? Or that our then president Bush was informed, by God, via revelation that it was time to attack Iraq?

Meanwhile, this year in Libya, in a time of protests all over the world, we have reputable sources (not government investigators) reporting that not only are people in Libya protesting and trying to overthrow the government (a movement which never got off the ground during Saddam's regime) but that the dictator of the country is encouraging anyone on his side to kill any civilians who disagree with him. Now remember, this wasn't a secret plan carried out by word of mouth, it was a major news broadcast. And you have a problem with the fact that the president wanted to do something about it? I'd think that standing up for the basic human right to not be killed for your opinion would be seen as meritorious. Unlike the last president who needed a lame excuse.

As yet, there are no troops on the ground. The motive is not some concocted story. No one is even arguing over the motive for going in. It's been very clearly established. The US isn't even doing the largest portion of the work. Our partners include actual countries (no offense to Mauritania and the glorious country of Pitcairn Island) who are taking part in the assault as well.

Maybe this too will be proven to be a lie but the fact is people's lives are allegedly in danger NOW. And it's not like we're invading the country any time soon. We're not even trying to strike directly at troops. Sorry, but it seems like complete ignorance to me to claim that these to events are similar in any way. It seems like people are just looking for a way to blame the current president for the state of the world.

Yes, I would recommend him if you're into cynical, neurotic, angry comedy that only a Jew can provide. That all may sound pejorative, but I mean it in an endearing and honest sense. If you're into that kind of comedy, he's definitely worth seeing.

Here's some stuff, just in case you didn't look him up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up0IP9fQu9Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hThVrcnIRV8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npinfttlj-c

In reply to this comment by kymbos:
Marc Maron is coming to Melbourne for the Comedy Festival this year - would you recommend seeing him? I only heard of him because of that interview he did with Louis CK not so long ago...

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
O&A are sophomoric, but so am I. Also, their show is a great forum to hear a lot of my favorite comedians. Bob Kelly, Bill Burr, Marc Maron, Patrice O'Neal...and my favorite on the show, Jim Norton. If it wasn't for these rotating guests and Jim Nortons residence, I don't think I could listen to the show.

Oh and just so you guys know, Anthony was playing good cop, I don't think he gives a shit about Donald Rumsfeld.

Marc Maron is coming to Melbourne for the Comedy Festival this year - would you recommend seeing him? I only heard of him because of that interview he did with Louis CK not so long ago...

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
O&A are sophomoric, but so am I. Also, their show is a great forum to hear a lot of my favorite comedians. Bob Kelly, Bill Burr, Marc Maron, Patrice O'Neal...and my favorite on the show, Jim Norton. If it wasn't for these rotating guests and Jim Nortons residence, I don't think I could listen to the show.

Oh and just so you guys know, Anthony was playing good cop, I don't think he gives a shit about Donald Rumsfeld.

Great interview. Well played by both Jon Stewart and Donald Rumsfeld, in service to both of their views.

There's a reason why Donald Rumsfeld won't give this a straight answer: lizard people are neurologically incapable of lying. THINK ABOUT IT. (damnit, Louis CK made the same joke later in the clip...)

O&A are sophomoric, but so am I. Also, their show is a great forum to hear a lot of my favorite comedians. Bob Kelly, Bill Burr, Marc Maron, Patrice O'Neal...and my favorite on the show, Jim Norton. If it wasn't for these rotating guests and Jim Nortons residence, I don't think I could listen to the show.

Oh and just so you guys know, Anthony was playing good cop, I don't think he gives a shit about Donald Rumsfeld.