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anti-ISIS "rebels" *cough* Al Qaeda *cough* CIA...

drones to here, guns to there
Money! Money! Everywhere! (this from almost two years ago) Tell me truthfully, is anybody really surprised why they're still around?

Oh, the twisted web...

It was quite well covered here in the UK by the BBC and others:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
http://www.independent.co.uk/v...
https://www.theguardian.com/fi...

It seems Catherine Deneuve has made a name for herself with this - just typing her name into Google turns up some of these links.

>The rate of population growth is proportional to the size of the female population, not the male.

Wrong, the rate of population grow is likely dependent on both but non linearly. A set of very simplified differential equations to
model the number of individual might be more like

dNF/dt = V_max * f(NM) * g(T) * NF - k * NF
dNM/dt = V_max * f(NM) * (1-g(T)) * NF - k * NF

N = NF + NM

where NF is the number of female, NM the number of male, N the number of individuals. f(NM) is a limiting function whose value is between 0 and 1, if no male then no 0 and g(T) determines the sex ratio in function of the temperature. k is the mortality rate (here constant but this is a simplification).

Examples of the typical shapes for f() and g() are the Michaelis–Menten function or the Hill equation or sigmoid function.

>While an entirely female turtle population would be bad,

Not bad. Just the end of the turtle. No male no reproduction.

>The more often turtles are to encounter each other during mating season, the fewer males are required to maximize population growth.

Not really, you miss the point. Just not any turtle should meet, two female meeting won't be good for the reproduction. If there is a too low number of male, every male will encounter the maximum number there are able to mate with and a lot of female will meet none. This is the f(NM) factor in the equations.

> the rate of population growth is maximized at some point above 50% female.

Within some specific environmental factors (Temperature, predation, ...) this true BUT that does not mean that every value above 50% is equally good in the long term. The ratio male/female varying with temperature is capable to cope to mitigate temporary temperature variation but if the temperature is on the average too high for a long period of time, this have got major consequences.

>(This is why we traditionally sent men off to fight wars, and not women. Any society which also sent its women to fight and die would stunt its own population growth, putting itself at a numeric disadvantage in future wars.

WoW, this is plain wrong. If you are the winner of the war because you send some woman and not your opponent in the long term you will be the winner. There is always a balance between various factor in a competitive environment. The only thing that count is the ability for a specie to perpetuate his gene, sometimes women have to fight, sometimes even only women have to fight. it depends the environment.

There is a lot of counterexamples of your affirmation in the nature, females eating males, penguins females and males both take considerable risk to feed their chick, ...

>o long as enough males survive to fertilize the remaining female population, the rest of the men are expendable

This is not the case. Each species have got reproductive habits. Some have evolved to have only one sexual partner, others have multiple, some species have a very low number of fertile female (bees). Sometimes males are needed to protect the female during gestation, sometimes they are the one educating the young. There is a lot of diversity. Males in the homo sapiens genus are not expendable. If they were, the 50%/50% ratio would be a awful lot of energy waste for the survival of his genome and probably a huge disadvantage in a highly competitive world.

That they don't realize this truth makes it all the more funny.

Well, except that they are now using the increased security of devices as rationalization to arrest people in more dangerous ways so as to get to the phone before it is locked down. An example (albeit in the UK, but same principles apply everywhere).

By gad you're right, it's criminal law.

Even the Koreans haven't - looks like the "Hot Line" uses XP: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

They've update it now it's

Don't be evil

Taxation is theft

Theft is evil

Don't pay taxes.

/s

There was a lot of anger in the UK about Google not paying taxes, with Google execs grilled by the PAC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said he is "perplexed" by the ongoing debate over the company's tax contributions in the UK.

Mr Schmidt told the BBC that the company did what was "legally required" to pay the right amount of taxes.

Google paid £10m in UK corporate taxes between 2006 and 2011.

Mr Schmidt said it was up to the government to change its tax system if it wanted companies to pay more taxes.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, he said: "What we are doing is legal. I'm rather perplexed by this debate, which has been going in the UK for some time, because I view taxes as not optional.

"I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required. It's not a debate. You pay the taxes.

"If the British system changes the tax laws, then we will comply. If the taxes go up, we will pay more, if they go down, we will pay less. That is a political decision for the democracy that is the United Kingdom."

And as much as I dislike Google for its political meddling, bias, censorship and data mining, he's got a point.

Oddly enough the griller in chief was Margaret Hodge, MP was director of a company which paid very low levels of taxes, using the rules to the max

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

The Labour MP has been one of the fiercest critics of tax avoidance by companies such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon. However, she is likely to face questions over the limited tax paid by Stemcor, the steel trading company in which she owns shares and which was founded by her father and is run by her brother.

Analysis of Stemcor's latest accounts show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1bn in 2011. However. it is not known whether the company - which made profits of £65m - used similar controversial tax avoidance measures criticised in the past by Mrs Hodge.

Stemcor's tax bill to the exchequer equates to just 0.01pc of the revenues it booked through its UK-based business. In accounts filed with Companies House, Stemcor revealed that despite generating about one third of its revenues in Britain, its UK tax contribution made up only 2.7pc of the tax the company paid globally.

Stemcor was founded by Mrs Hodge's father Hans Oppenheimer more than 60 years ago.

Today, the business claims to be the sixth largest private UK company by turnover. Last year the company, which employs 2,000 people in 45 countries, generated sales of £6bn from trading about 20m tonnes of steel.

The majority of Stemcor's shares are still controlled by the Oppenheimer family and Mrs Hodge declares a "registrable shareholding" in the company, which is run by her brother Ralph Oppenheimer, executive chairman.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Mrs Hodge defended Stemcor's behaviour and said that the company had "assured" her it paid "every penny of tax that is owed", adding that she was only "a very small shareholder".

"Clearly, I have asked them the question," said Mrs Hodge. "They have always promised that they do absolutely nothing to avoid tax. I would be very mad if I found out differently."

Mrs Hodge said unlike other companies under the spotlight, Stemcor did not try to shield profits or "hide information" and that was the difference between Stemcor and Starbucks.

However, when pressed about the details of why so little tax was paid by Stemcor despite the billions of pounds it makes

Thanks for giving such a clear example of how climatologists can massage data to help push the agendas of their political masters. Your comment is very informative!

The problem is people. A lot of the electorate is not too bright and easily misled, particularly when they want to be. The anti intellectualism in this country is rampant and it is rampant in part because of laziness, and in part because certain people benefit from it.

Still, you can basically sum it up with charts like this. link

Humans need a pretty narrow band to live comfortably, so yah, it matters. The extra energy in the environment is bound to have repercussions, with more frequent and more intense hurricanes being one of the more straightforward likely occurrences.

Just in case anyone believes that Trump believes any of the shit he is shoveling, well you have things like link Basically his resort is getting walls to protect it from the effects of climate change. When his money is on the line he believes in it. When his cult following is on the line, he does not. Which should you believe?

Yes but given that

1) Washington, DC is politically sensitive location at the best of times
2) Inauguration Day was coming up which means extreme security and
3) The FBI/CIA/NSA etc were under enormous political pressure to find 'Russian hackers'

would it not have been prudent to exclude any IP address that geolocates there for a couple of months? Especially if you're doing it from Eastern Europe?

If you look at what happened it seemed like the Europol, the UK and the Netherlands all helped out with the investigation I.e. these idiots activated the very effective part of law enforcement that deals with threats to national security, which presumably woke up when politicians started talking about Russian hackers and did its damnedest to catch some.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

The EU police agency Europol says three other suspects were also arrested in Romania this month in a linked investigation into ransomware. The UK's National Crime Agency was involved in that investigation.

The three are suspected of infecting computers with CTB-Locker (Curve-Tor-Bitcoin Locker) malware.

A Europol statement says Romanian police were tipped off in early 2017 by the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit and other authorities about a group of Romanians sending spam messages.

The spam emails had attachments made to look as if they had come from well-known companies in Italy, the Netherlands and UK. Once opened on a Windows system, those malicious attachments encrypted computer files.

It's completely different to the WannaCry attack where no one got caught and North Korea got blamed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The WannaCry ransomware attack was a May 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It propagated through EternalBlue, an exploit in older Windows systems released by The Shadow Brokers a few months prior to the attack. While Microsoft had released patches previously to close the exploit, much of WannaCry's spread was from organizations that had not applied these, or were using older Windows systems that were past their end-of-life. WannaCry also took advantage of installing backdoors onto infected systems.

The attack was stopped within a few days of its discovery due to emergency patches released by Microsoft, and the discovery of a kill switch that prevented infected computers from spreading WannaCry further. The attack was estimated to have affected more than 300,000 computers across 150 countries, with total damages ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Security experts believed from preliminary evaluation of the worm that the attack originated from North Korea or agencies working for the country.

In December 2017, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia formally asserted that North Korea was behind the attack.

Mind you WannaCry probably helped wake up international law enforcement too. I.e. it's another reason these guys got caught effectively.

No you didn't, and none of it is true.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-p...

. For example, they could start a co-op in Haiti which fixes roads and water distribution systems. They could take a job in a failing school and try to raise test scores among students at risk of dropping out. They could start an IT consultancy which makes hiring female programmers a top priority.

I listened to an interesting interview with Peter Tatchell today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

Tatchell is a gay rights campaigner. He's been beaten up by the NF and BNP and by Mugabe's thugs when he attempted a citizen's arrest of Mugabe over Mugabe's anti gay policies.

And he's also been called a racist, homophobe, transphobe etc by lefty Twitter cunts. As Brendan O'Neill put it modern activism consists of ranting on Twitter and 'getting an Uber into town to shout at a working class Trump supporter'. The problem with the SJW left is that their activism doesn't cost them anything, and they don't have any principles.

Tatchell was very against no platforming people and trying to censor them. He wants his ideological opponents to debate him and lose. The lefty Twitter cunts just want to signal how virtuous they are with no costs to themselves. Which is why they won't do anything which means they have to leave their bubble of privilege. So instead they shout abuse at people like Tatchell - calling them transphobes for standing up to free speech for transphobes for example.

As Libby Purves observed

http://theafterword.co.uk/virt...

"The most savage, bilious, self-righteous rants are from people living affluent self-pleasing lives in comfortable homes, doing lucky and rewarding jobs with like-minded friends. What they are doing (I risk losing a friend or two) is "virtue-signalling": competing to seem compassionate. Few are notably open-handed: St Matthew would need a rewrite of Chapter 19. "Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. So he went on Twitter instead and called Michael Gove a 'vile reptilian evil tory scumbag', and linked to a cartoon of Iain Duncan Smith stealing a paralysed woman's wheelchair. And lo, he felt better and went for a £3.50 caramel macchiato with some mates from the BBC"

Their activism is empty. And they have no principles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

Why? Last I heard diesel looks and smells worse (at least in the typical American engine), but gasoline exhaust was a significantly larger health hazard.

Then it turned out that every single one of the diesel manufacturers (is Ford an exception? I haven't seen explicit evidence yet.) was lying about their pollution. indpendent testing shows that diesels put out much more than the manufacturers claim.

I thought so after Trump's tweet but now it's official. The Yanks are as dumb as the Paddies.

they should have employed dogs instead of cats

I thought so after Trump's tweet but now it's official. The Yanks are as dumb as the Paddies.

They did both, and Real Time. It looks as if it's still online.

There was a BBC article a few years ago about a man trolling though his local rubbish dump looking for a HDD with bitcoins on:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-w...

Here is what's boring brother;

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sorry for the slow reply, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-3...

Actually came in in 2015, thought it was more recent than that, how time flies!

Compared to current state of countries like the US, Japan looks quite sane to me.

It may look "sane" from the outside, but Japan remains one of the most racist societies in the world.

* Many landlords won't rent apartments to non Japanese (even Japanese people born in the US)
* Korean and Chinese people are treated especially harshly (probably because of historical issues)
* Ethnic minorities (Ainu, Ryu/Okinawan) cultures are not well respected politically

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asi...

I'm sorry you tried to use Japan to make your point, because I think it is lost because of that...

The BBC have an opinion piece that sums-up the changes across America in the last 50 years, and from my only semi-informed opinion it does have some plausible points.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

The main thrust being that the US works better when it has a common foe to unite against. When the shared values between the different political parties are more obvious because of the scary 'other' that the Soviets represented. When enemies are taken away then internal divisions become paramount, and paralysis occurs.

UK university principals and vice-principals earn megabucks just like drug cartels (around £260,000/year). Prime minister earns around £150K
Starting salaries for higher education (HE) lecturers range from around £33,943 to £41,709.
At senior lecturer level, you'll typically earn between £41,709 and £55,998. Head of department earns £70K
Stipends for a PhD are around £14K/year. TA duties are £5/hour. It was more cost effective Amazon Turking since the minute you do part-time work, you are liable for council tax.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/educ...
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impacto...

Plumbers earn up to £50/hour or £100K/year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

My point is that nobody left

Yes they did!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...

And so on.

Google were pretty quick to respond so many of the advertisers returned.

they simply can't afford to.

Except that they can and they did.

The greenhouse effect is established science. Its basic physics than can be demonstrated in a laboratory. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere makes the greenhouse effect stronger.

True, but the effects are diminishing with increasing concentrations. That's because CO2 acts like an optical filter, and most of the radiation is already absorbed.

Yes, the effect is logarithmic. This has been known since Arrhenius calculated it in 1896 [ref]. And it is incorporated into every single greenhouse model that is run.

It's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect-- about 1 degree C so far-- is so vastly smaller than the natural greenhouse effect, about 33 degrees C.[ref].

Really. This is already part of the science. You're not telling us anything that the scientists aren't already incorporating into their models.

So, if that basic physics was all there was to the science, we clearly wouldn't have to worry about carbon emissions at all.

That's not true. Again: all of the current models already incorporate the effect you notice.

In order to conclude that there is any significant danger from greenhouse gases, you have to run climate models that make various assumptions about positive feedback loops;

The main feedback effect is known as "constant humidity." If you want to turn this feedback off, you need to come up with a mechanism that decreases the humidity as the temperature rises. I'm not saying that such a model is impossible... but it's hard to come up with a realistic mechanism.

those feedback loops are not "basic physics",

They most certainly are.

can't be "demonstrated in a laboratory",

Humidity can't be measured in a laboratory? I beg to differ.

and are largely speculative and unproven at this point.

They are not.

You also have to assume that there are no additional negative feedback loops to counteract the effects, again something we don't know.

People have been searching for such a negative feedback loop for several decades. So far all of the ones proposed have been disproven by measurements.

Uh, you do know that people measure the properties of the atmosphere, right? And that climate models are baselined against measured values?

It's dishonest for you and others to conflate the basic physics of the greenhouse effect with the speculative models involving assumptions about feedback that are used to argue for the need to reduce carbon emissions.

Except for the most part these aren't speculative models. They're well-tested models that are checked against measurements. And, there are many thousands of models run-- by independent groups on all five continents-- and cross-checked against each other to see which effects dominate. That's why the climate study outputs have error bars, because one of the things we do know is how much we don't know.

Yes, that's right: the actual science includes error bars. That's one of the ways you can tell the science from the speculation, like yours.

Great tits acquire taste for bats. Did the beaks change for them? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8245165.stm

Sorry you're missing much of whats gone on.

Start by looking at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... and there are others that start their time line long before this year.

What I want to point out is

2009 January - North Korea says it is scrapping all military and political deals with the South, accusing it of "hostile intent".

2009 is NK giving the world a finger and renewing their effort to get nukes. Before that date you see much plotical strong arming from various countries. After that date what do you see? Not much except for NK progress Nuke and missles.

What we have now is years of failed attempts to control NK. The blame isnt on Trump, hes an idiot, but NK is a problem being handed to him.

We should have been doing this political strong arming back in 2009.

Now NK have nukes and the tech to deliever it. Although I suspect they have or will tunnel a warhead under Seoul. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/02/...

The armed forces of USA needs to act on behalf of SK and Japan, not just for the USA. For them, NK is a huge risk, they can't afford to retaliate. They also lack the ability to. We are in a posision of put-up or shut-up.

Either NK gets what they want or we stop them.

The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam

Interesting that Scottish electricity producers have to pay to connect to the grid because there is so much electricity being produced and not enough population density to use it; whereas electricity producers in England (much more densely populated) are subsidised to connect to the national grid.

It seems new production records are announced every few months

In the early days, Slashdot was the place that broke many IT news stories and acted as the bridge to get these into the mainstream media. Something that was acknowledge BBC back in 1999 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci... Things have changed a little, it is no longer slashdot taking the same lead but the role of the net in breaking news has only increased.

We also shouldn't forget the Slashdot Effect which unintentionally knocked sites of the net with the amount of inbound traffic it provided.

in back taxes as it had been given an unfair tax deal in Luxembourg. OK: Amazon saved some tax, but that saving allowed it to under-cut its rivals, some of who have been put out of business - will there be any compensation for those competitors, the cost of which could dwarf the back-tax bill ? I suspect that the answer is no in which case Amazon's dodgy dealings have been highly profitable and will continue to be so in the future -- as it has fewer competitors.

Exactly this. The U.K. has been working on becoming a full police state for many years now. And every time I point this out I get downmodded here on /.

That's probably because you misunderstand completely. Our poor police are downtrodden and subject to austerity. The UK is becoming a Group 4 security state in which the only freedom the average police officer will have is to rape children and falsely accused foreign students against his will and under the supervision of an elite cabal of bullingdon boys and psychotic robots.

But guess what, the joke's on you, silly Brits. You get what you vote for.

You are assuming some kind of proper democracy where people's votes count equally. Unfortunately there's this thing called the "first past the post constituency system" which means the result doesn't have to match the voting.

The U.S. voted for a clown and got a clown. The U.K. voted for a police state, and got a police state.

Trump votes 46.4% - primary opponent 48.5%. Conservative votes 42.4% Opponents 57.6%. In neither case could the "winnner" be said to have been voted for by the nation. At least in the US you could say that it's possible Trump would have won if he had chosen to target the popular vote, whilst it's clear that would never have happened in the UK.

Definitely both countries have a bunch of voters that need to understand that what they vote for is what they might actually get, however that doesn't mean that the entire country deserves to suffer.

How many people daily drive their Veyrons?

Probably not this guy anymore. or this guy. or this one. or ....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ent...

Reprogram your systems so they won't hit tall buildings

Not an issue when the buildings have a habit of catching fire all by themselves.

Reprogram your systems so they won't hit tall buildings

Not an issue when the buildings have a habit of catching fire all by themselves.

[Gates] hailed search technology firm Google as a "great company"; its approach reminded him of Microsoft 20 years ago. But he also predicted that Microsoft search technology would soon outpace that of its rival.

I suspect Prince's powers of prognostication are no better than Gates'.

Not the first time taking the first result from a Google Search has bit someone in the ass.

Bert from Sesame street appeared next to Osama Bin Laden on some protest posters in Bangladesh back in 2001.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sou...

...unless you live in a hole in Botswana you have education readily available. If you want to know something "innately", just pay attention in school...

WTF are you talking about? That's a big, crowded hole. 57 million children isn't a huge piece of the population, but it's a hell of a lot more than a "hole in Botswana".

There was a recent case over in the UK where a judge found a sex doll designed to look like a child to be an obscene item.

BBC Link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-4...

And yet, perfectly ok to sell sheep ones. But those are for the benefit of the Welsh who move to cities.

There was a recent case over in the UK where a judge found a sex doll designed to look like a child to be an obscene item.

BBC Link :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-4...

Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome. It's a thing. First mentioned on the BBC's premier film programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj/episodes/downloads) and detailed in their Witterpedia, http://witterpedia.net/wiki/index.php?title=AALS.

Consider Russia as a likely culprit, not because of the tide of anti-Russian paranoia in the US right now, but simply because of the politics of it.

The US has in the last 9 months (since this started happening) expelled more and more Russian diplomats from it's soil and denied it access to a number of it's buildings in the US that were typically used as listening stations. The US/Russia tacitly accepted these in each others countries as it meant they had less secrets from each other and built trust post-cold war. Now they're being shut down on both sides in the US and Russia proper.

Russia closed it's listening post in Cuba for exactly this reason back in 2001, because with the cold war supposedly having come to an end, and tacit acceptance of such listening posts in the territories themselves meant it was largely defunct.

But Russia reopened it in 2014, and with it's US mainland listening posts now shut down it wants to make damn sure that the US and Cuba don't get close - given Cuba's proximity to the mainland US it would be astoundingly easy for the US to make Cuba Western within a very short time period because fully opening up to each other would create such a massive flow of Western culture, coupled with the ageing leadership that change in Cuba could occur in less than a decade. See here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

So ignoring the whole Trump/Russia thing as irrelevant, there is a very strong incentive for Russia to keep the US out of Cuba and they have both the skills and the technological capability to design, build, and deploy such a weapon as well as the political and security reason to want to do so.

I don't believe any Cuban group could build anything like this. It would require money, skills, and technology that a rag tag bunch of ex-rebels simply do not possess. This is something that requires a fairly powerful nation state behind it - I think even Venezuela would struggle, so you'd be looking at a European nation (none of which hate the US, or Cuba enough to have reason to do this), India, which has no interest in Cuba/US relations, Brazil, which again has no real reason to do this, China - again, not clear what this would achieve, very little for them to gain here, or some wealthy arab states or Israel - a possibility perhaps, but again, not the clear motive that Russia has.

Not surprised at all. Considering a study that came out of California regarding T. gondii, it does raise concerns to the scientific community as to WHY there is such radical difference there than anywhere else in the country.

If you want something even more creepy, try parasites that control their hosts.

Li'l warning for those like me that aren't too fond of the creepy-crawly: It gets VERY creepy-crawly! Because as one can assume, most affected organisms are relatively primitive insects.

BBC news article from 2015
Nerdalize

Baird didn't sue Farnsworth, so I have no idea what that has to do with anything.

Baird's demonstration in early 1926 is widely documented. Here's a BBC article, for example

Steve Jobs and Wozniak are praised as gods having created the computer! It's ridiculous you know, because they reused past knowledge. Even in the mini-computer front, there were people already doing it.

The way you put it sounds like you half-believe it yourself. It is not ridiculous because "they re-used past knowledge", it is ridulous because computers were in use before they were born. Actually, it is more common for people to belive that Gates invented the computer :
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...

.... or at least the PC :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/new...

Give the guy a little credit for creating a working email _system_ in an era where email hadn't proliferated very far.

Sorry, you've already blown your own credit away (see above)

This asshole insists on filming peacekeepers doing their jobs...

Ah, now peacekeepers is one epithet I've never heard anyone here call the polis...most of them could never be repeated in polite society (but there's a lot of fuckers, bawbag, cunts etc. etc. involved)
 

..in the hope that he will catch one of them slipping up.

Slipping up? sorry but that's endemic in the current disorganisation from the top down...

No journalist has ever been threatened arrested or beaten for photographing the police in the US, despite it being legal.

I didn't say that. I specifically said that if you do run into trouble for photographing the police in the USA, there will very likely be a horde of lawyers beating a path to your door to take your case.

Despite whoever modded my original post as "Troll", the fact is, photographing law enforcement in the UK is more loophole-y than it is in the USA. We take our constitutional rights quite literally. Just ask any fan of the second amendment how they feel it should be interpreted.

For an "oppressive agenda" I need look no farther than the unfolding catastrophe around me in my major US city that has been brought about by decades of liberal incompetance and insanity. Seeing human beings decomposing in the streets before my eyes, smelling the feces and urine, while we are invaded by throngs of illegals all while the politicians scream "sanctuary" is evidence enough to me of an "oppressive agenda".

Ah. Because the human beings chose to decompose at you. How oppressive of them.

"Liberals", the inventers of Laissez-faire, have always believed in leaving people alone to their own devices and letting them rot in the streets if that's what it comes to. Your country is run by oligarchs, including Liberal ones like Trump. Until you rebel against the liberals in your Tea Party and GOP (not to mention the Democrats, who are almost as Liberal as your "Conservatives" (note the quotes)) you have no chance of anything changing.

As for spy agencies - I expect them to spy. That's their job. They probably are way more in touch with how effed up the situation is than most people can even imagine.

Sure. How about them spying on their enemies instead of their own people and allies? Currently it seems the Russians know more about what goes on in the CIA and the NSA than the US government does.