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Your tax dollars are being wasted on way or another. I would rather my tax dollars support saving the life of a moron who didn't wear a seatbelt than my tax dollars being wasted to enforce a law that infringes on people's freedom to take a stupid risk.

Yes. And even as bad as the theoretical improvement outlined above would be (requiring one person to subsidize another's health care), it's nowhere near as bad as the status quo, which is this: those who "infringe" on these laws (whether they actually harmed anyone or not, or cost you a single dime) are targeted for "enforcement", thus having dollars siphoned out of their pockets by the millions daily by corrupt judges to support corrupt police departments, who then turn around and spend that cash to stockpile assault rifles, body armor, and other tools of oppression, while hiring juiced up control freak ex-soldiers, fresh from the hell of Iraq, ready to inflict suffering and exert control on people's lives.

All of which come in handy when storming in someone's house at 3AM on a no-knock raid, shooting the dog (a very aggressive Pomeranian) and humiliating the wife, then systematically destroying their lives by outright seizing their house, car, and all other valuable possessions, just for being accused (not convicted--accused or even acquitted) of a drug-related "crime", such as allegedly planting seeds and sprouting a common plant that has lived in harmony with mankind since the dawn of civilization. This is assuming they don't somehow "find" a bag of weed in your house and some scales while you were pinned down on the floor struggling to breathe, thus sealing the case against you. Hope you got a few tens of thousands for lawyer fees stashed away in buried mayonnaise jars or in an offshore bank account, if you expect to ever see your kids again.

I hope nobody reading this thinks I'm exaggerating. All of the above has happened, tons of times, and only continues to escalate. I could put in a lot more links, to various stories I remember seeing on the news, but I would rather spend my time stocking up on supplies for the upcoming potential World War than educating some slashdot readers who are presumably still clueless (in this day and age?) about the goings-on of our police state. As much as I despise them, seatbelt laws are actually the least of our nation's concerns right now.

The Fed was also created and owned by a private companies, and how many people know who made it? Homeland security is just following their example. http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm

The upper 50% of the wage earners pay @97% of all tax collections, and the lower ones only @3%

Since that mirrors the distribution of wealth that would make sense. How about we ask the wealthy if they'd like to give up all of their assets in exchange for a lower effective federal tax rate? And instead of just sitting on their ass, investing in financial companies that exploit people and resources, they'd actually have to show up and do some real fucking work?

Oh, suddenly there's no problem? That's what I thought.

And by the way, go ahead an call me an anti-American commie. I'm in great company.

At the first session of our legislature after the Declaration of Independence, we passed a law abolishing entails. And this was followed by one abolishing the privilege of Primogeniture, and dividing the lands of intestates equally among all their children, or other representatives. These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of Pseudo-aristocracy. And had another which I prepared been adopted by the legislature, our work would have been complete.

It was a Bill for the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every county into wards of 5 or 6 miles square, like your townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might recieve at the public expence a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completly prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at efiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country

-Thomas Jefferson

A wise man once told me, "10% of life is what happens to you, the other 90% is how you deal with it."

Sound like this quote by Charles Swindoll:

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes.

You probably tell your kids that you love them constantly too. And never perform any form of disciple besides "don't do that."

Evil has to be fought with vigilance, everywhere. Thoughts are not crimes until an action is taken on those thoughts. I prefer for the fight to be outside my country.

OTOH, **any** policy that infringes on an adult citizen's freedoms or right to privacy is a major concern.

Banks have been doing what the government tells them with the "Total Information Awareness" http://www.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/duncan-hunter-lette r.php program for some time.

Here's a story of a man who had his life savings taken away because someone thought his actions were similar to a drug dealer's actions. http://www.bigeye.com/forfeit.htm He did nothing illegal, yet the government stole his money. A few other stories are told there too. I saw the Houston man's story on 20/20. Give me a break!

Says Eric Sterling, who helped write the law a decade ago as a lawyer on a congressional committee: "The innocent-until-proven guilty concept is gone out the window."

If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.

If you look at history, you sound confused.

20th Century Civilians Killed:
Stalin=4x10^7
Mao=3.5x10^7
Hitler=1.2x10^7
Ot toman Empire(Armenian Genocide)=2x10^6
Pol Pot=1x10^6
Saddam=6x10^5
Hutu-Tutsi Rivalry=5x10^5

As you can see, Hitler's not even close to first, and Saddam is way down at the bottom. Educate yourself on history. It's the only antidote to propaganda.

Sources:
this article
khmer rouge
Saddam

• Philanthropist or Opportunist?
• BILL GATES': KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND PR. MR. BUSH'S BOGUS AIDS OFFER
• India Rebuffs Bill Gates in AIDS Row

I don't suppose that ridding them of the dictator that caused the armed conflicts in the first place, along with the "brutal sanctions" counts for anything

From BigEye:

In the 1980s the United States supported Saddam's totalitarian regime and showed little concern for its victims. American exports helped launch Iraq's biological weapons program. Saddam's horrific violations of international law, such as his use of poison gas on the battlefield, had minimal effect on US-Iraqi cooperation. And while the tilt toward Saddam began with Jimmy Carter ("We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the US and Iraq" -- National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, April 1980), it was the Reagan and Bush I administrations that brought it to full flower.

All of this has long been a matter of public record. US shipments of deadly biological agents to Iraq, for example, were detailed in a 1994 Senate Banking Committee report and a follow-up letter from the Centers for Disease Control in 1995. They showed that Iraq was allowed to purchase batch after batch of lethal pathogens -- anthrax, botulism, E. coli, West Nile fever, gas gangrene, dengue fever. At a time when Washington knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons to kill thousands of Iranian troops, the CDC was shipping germ cultures directly to the Iraqi unconventional weapons facility in al-Muthanna.

Ignoring reality is something American's do best. Toppling Saddam's reign wasn't an act of kindness to the Iraqi people, it was making up for a 25 year old mistake.

USA owes everyone in Iraq more than you could ever imagine. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. On to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, etc...

People are scared. They are covering their asses, they are not listening with their ears wide open and their minds in full-tilt. They are scared. You must invoke arguments that include their safety, because none of you do, and safety is what the herd of buffalo is worried most about.

Yeah, this article is from the same guy who once stated that: "the US and its allies should recognize Taliban as the legitimate Afghan government".

He also stated in regards to Bin Laden that "the US has blown him out of all proportion".

The article is available here

Read a few of his other articles, and you might notice that this person may not be the most objective source of information.

Why would Palestinian terrorists target the USA?

Well, perhaps because the USA has exacerbated the mid-East problems, rather than help reduce them.

From BigEye's Foreign Correspondent. No idea how truthful all this is, mind you, but I'm fairly sure it's worth consideration:

BUSH FIDDLES WHILE PALESTINE BURNS

NEW YORK - Pre-election concerns that George W. Bush had a weak grasp of world affairs have been confirmed by a succession of ideology-driven blunders and amateurish fumbles made by his administration that have damaged America's interests and image around the globe.

To whit: trying to rush the anti-missile defense project when there was no need for haste; the tactless rejection of the Kyoto environment accords; Washington's crude enlistment of India in a new anti-Chinese alliance; boycotting this weekend's UN racism conference at Durban: and, most disturbingly, fiddling while Palestine burns.

Who, one wonders, is running US foreign policy? Certainly not the nearly invisible `stealth' Secretary of State Colin Powell. America's first black Secretary of State was not allowed to go to an African-oriented conference in Durban because Israel was being accused of racism.

Last week, Bush berated PLO chief Yasser Arafat for failing to end `Palestinian violence.' Soon after, Israel assassinated Mustafa Zibri, a senior Palestinian political leader, by firing Maverick missiles from Apache helicopter gunships into his office.

The next day, Israeli M-60 tanks and M-113 armored personnel carriers occupied the Palestinian Christian town of Beit Jala.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Israel is using the M494 105mm APERS-T tank round against Palestinians. This deadly round, designed for use against enemy anti-tank missile crews, disperses a conical spray of 5,000 tiny, razor-sharp darts known as flechettes. In the past, Israel has also used anti-personnel cluster bombs against Palestinian refugee camps.

All of the above-noted weapons were supplied to Israel by the United States. Israel is also using an arsenal of other US-supplied weapons, from F-16 fighters to M-16 rifles, against Palestinians. Israeli-designed Merkava tanks `pacifying' rebellious Palestinians were built with US military aid.

Israel is the largest ever recipient of US foreign aid - at least $91 billion since 1949, a sum that could have bought four complete aircraft carrier battle groups ( about 80 ships) for the US Navy. Each year, Israel gets $3-5 billion in US aid.

The 1998 Wye River `peace' accords negotiated by President Clinton gave Israel an extra US $380 million for Apache helicopter gunships and armored vehicles - both currently being used against Palestinians. Just before leaving office, Clinton, quietly sent Congress a request for an additional US$800 million in military aid for Israel, a gift no doubt aimed at securing his future in publishing and Hollywood. Soon after, in a startling coincidence, Clinton received a book contract for $12 million.

Many American conservatives and Jewish Americans are praising Bush for giving Israel's rightwing government carte blanche to crush the Palestinian uprising and assassinate its leadership. VP Dick Cheney has repeatedly accused Palestinian of `terrorism' while praising Israel's `restraint.' One wonders what Washington's response would be if the PLO began assassinating Israeli politicians who advocate murdering or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Israel brushes aside occasional tut-tuts from the US State Department, and ignores charges its American-supplied weapons are being used in direct violation of the US Arms Export Control Act, which forbids recipients use of American arms except for national self defense in wartime.

The White House and US Congress, fearful of antagonizing the Israel lobby, have refused to address this issue. Ironically, it was left to Gush Shalom, the courageous Israeli peace movement, to protest to Bush the clearly illegal use of American arms against Palestinians.

It is increasingly clear that unless the mayhem in Palestine is ended, the entire Mideast could careen towards an explosion. Ariel Sharon, Israel's rightwing Prime Minister, has painted himself into a corner by vowing to crush the `intifada' and never allow a viable Palestinian state. Having provoked the current uprising, and vowed to break its back, Sharon now finds himself trapped in a cycle of violence, terror and counter-terror.

Sharon's only answer so far is more of what he has done his entire career: blowing up houses, assassination, martial law, collective punishments. Now Sharon's aides are hinting at attacks against Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and even Egypt. Israeli critics are warning the Sharon is running amok and must be reigned in.

Given Sharon's adamant refusal to halt Jewish colonization or allow a Palestinian state, Palestinians have no reason to halt their uprising. Only America has the power to push the two sides into an eventual peace agreement.

Israel's brutal repression of the Palestinian `intifada' is being telecast around the globe, producing rage against Israel and its patron, the United States, and a worldwide surge of anti-semitism. America's strategic and economic interests across the Mideast and Muslim World are being threatened by the agony of Palestine, which inevitably invites terrorist attacks against US citizens and property.

President Bush needs to act urgently. He needs to help Sharon find a way out of the corner in which he is stuck. Sharon has left himself no line of political retreat - other than being seen to bow to irresistible American pressure. Bush and VP Dick Cheney should cease helping Israel's rightwing and its American media mouthpieces demonize Yasser Arafat, who, however guilty of condoning violence, is the man with whom Israel has to make peace. Being rightwing does not automatically make one right.

Bush's vanishing act over the Mideast has handed the initiative by default to Arab and Israeli extremists. Unless the US forcefully intervenes, Hamas suicide bombers and Sharon's death squads will determine policy. The result will be a disaster for Jews and Arabs alike.

Bush is being irresponsible and dishonest by pretending America has nothing to do with this horrible mess. America has everything to do with it and could stop the carnage overnight if the White House showed sufficient political will and courage. Bush needs to recall the old adage, he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

Copyright: Eric S. Margolis 2001

Again, perhaps this fellow is lying or out-to-lunch. But if what he states is truthful, I think it's fair to say that the fanatics have just cause to be pissed off (and that's not to say that they are excused for being terrorists.)