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You don't know how to use google or bing do you?

Google - "prosecutor manufactures evidence kagan"

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/05/nation/la-na-court-framed5-2010jan05
http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/28/the-infallible-prosecutor
http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2009/3mer/1ami/2008-1065.mer.ami.html

in fact, any student of economic history knows that corporatism, monopolies, oligopolies are greater threats to capitalism than socialism or communism ever could be

the libertarian naivete that a free market of equals is a natural balance and that governments can only interfere in that is nonsense

Where did you get your education so that you know more about economics than Dr Milton Freidman who won the Nobel Prize in Economics?

the truth is that some players in the free market grow and begin to use their heft to suppress smaller players.

Maybe but that happens in other markets too, such as the mixed economy we have now. The large telecos and cablecos got the way they are not in a free market but because governments gave them monopolies. Nearly every large business got there with government assistance.

the way to fight that is to have a government with strong regulatory powers to enforce equality amongst 800 pound gorillas and tiny players. you want to be taxed to do this

No, the way to end it, the 800lb gorilla beating up the tiny players, is by allowing a free market not by granting monopolies.

you want the "bureaucracy" that does this

Again no, a free market needs no bureaucracy. At it needs are the courts. Before first the Federal Radio Commission then it's replacement the Federal Communications Commission licensed the airwaves courts used common law to allow people to homestead the airwaves.

insomuch as the government is merely a tool of the big time players is the extent which corporate dollars warp and infect and corrupt the government that is supposed to regulate them

That is precisely why the airwaves were licensed. Big broadcasters had trouble with the courts siding with those who started broadcasting on a given frequency in specific areas so they went to congress passing out money to buy congressional votes requiring licensing. They had the money to buy licenses while the neighborhood kids didn't. Oh, boo hoo the broadcasters claimed the airwaves were a scarcity, it wasn't true then and it's even less true today.

in other words, if you are a true believer in capitalism, you will lose your libertarian naivete and insist on a strong regulatory government to keep the marketplace healthy

Again no, it's precisely the opposite. The government created the problems we have today and more government won't solve it. What will solve it is a freer market, no government granted monopolies.

and you will recognize the greatest threat to capitalism is not the government, it is corporations and their corruption OF government

Which is why you want less government not more, the more government the more power corporations have. Say I, or you or someone else, runs a small lawn care and landscaping business in town. An 800lb gorilla comes to town but doesn't want to compeat with the local businesses, what is it going to do? Ah, "we've pay off the local government to require testing and licensing, that will reduce the competition."

Falcon

It is even worse in Northern Virginia

Trust who? Other cops or other people? Because they don't seem to trust anyone outside their group, and then defend the indefensible. Not writing tickets for certain individuals as "a professional courtesy" is corruption. No one is above the law.

The study you cite is flawed. Both diets contained about the same number of calories

Uh, that's not a flaw. That's good experimental design: holding all other factors constant while varying only the one under investigation, in this case the ketogenic nature of the diet. If two diets are similar except that one is ketogenic and one isn't, and they have the same weight-loss results, then this indicates that ketosis doesn't mean anything for weight loss.

The point of Atkins is that if you stick to the rules, it doesn't matter how much you eat

And the point of actual science is that yes, it does matter how much you eat. People who lose fat weight (not merely the initial dehydration of Atkins-style diets) do so because they reduce their caloric intake. Atkins "rules" are fairy dust that disguise the fact that when it works, it works because it's a restrictive diet that results in people eating fewer calories.

Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia say you have no right to know what they're doing

If it ever gets that bad, we really need to squawk about it.

That's interesting. The GP mentions Jaime Escalante. Jaime's solution to your problem was to allow anyone who wanted to succeed to take his class.

From the reason.com article:

Open Enrollment. Escalante did not approve of programs for the gifted, academic tracking, or even qualifying examinations. If students wanted to take his classes, he let them.

His open-door policy bore fruit. Students who would never have been selected for honors classes or programs for the gifted chose to enroll in Escalante's math enrichment classes and succeeded there.

Unless the program Daley is advocating actually grows in cost per student, this would be a great idea. Larger class sizes, in Escalante's case, did not detriment his student's ability to work hard and learn.

Our freedom in the US is quickly diminishing under the guise of "Terrorism". It makes me sick watching it happen and knowing there is nothing we can do about it.

Yes and no. Can I go to the airport, pay cash for a ticket, and hop on a plane to go anywhere I feel like whenever I do feel like it without showing ID? No but 30 years ago I couldn't either. Now we have any number of ways to communicate with others we didn't have before. I recall one place I lived the phone service we had was a party line, I could pick up the phone to call someone and hearing the next door neighbor on the phone I knew I'd have to wait for them to finish before I could make my call. Today I don't need a land-line phone, actually the only phone I have is my cell-phone. I can take it with me and it's cheaper than the land-line phone service I used to have. Now if only I was able to use it for wireless broadband access too. I can't, though my sister has wireless broadband. I haven't found it yet but Reason magazine had an article on this in a print issue, whether we're freer or less free today.

Falcon

Well it's obvious you went to the Keynesien school of economics.

Every dollar that goverment spends is one less dollar that the individual spends. In fact, the return on government spending is LESS than individual spending (I'm trying to dig up those numbers now).

You cannot spend your way out of a recession. That money is best left in the hands of the individuals to spend as they will. Will some people resort to the hoarder mentality? Yep but it's not an absolute.

I don't know the situation in WA but it's not like they're not in the same boat as every other state in the country - reduced revenues and all.

There really needs to be, in all states, a line by line audit of where the states are spending money and where they can cut that spending or eliminate it entirely.

Reason did an amazing series with Drew Carey about "saving Cleveland". It had some awesome ideas that have been shown to be successful in other parts of the country. They admit that what works one place may not work in another but honestly when you're faced with a $300m shortfall, maybe you should try something new?

http://reason.com/blog/2010/02/25/save-the-week-reason-saves-cle

1975 was 35 years ago.

And so the supply of doctors is no longer being kept artificially low? No. You still have not addressed this point. Doctors organizations do tightly control the number doctors in the US. More:
http://reason.com/archives/2009/08/27/the-evil-mongering-of-the-amer

Please, find me a citation saying 1/2 of all us docs are millionaires

Here's one: http://mediwire.skyscape.com/main/Default.aspx?P=Content&ArticleID=165292
Your can look around for yourself.

Dermatologists and radiologists are near the top of the pay scale ... pediatrics are at the bottom of the pay scale, making on average about 165,000 a year. Which is nothing to sneeze at, but hardly millionaire status

The bottom is 4 times the median salary in this country! And it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that it only takes 6 years to earn 1 million dollars at that rate. Even if you spend twice as much money as the average joe, you can still be a millionaire in 12 years.

4 years of medical school, followed 5 years of surgery residency, and an additional...

Blah blah blah. I'm sick of hearing this, oh I spent so much time training I deserve all this money crap. I spent 6 years in grad school getting paid even less, and 3 years doing a fellowship too, but I'm not making as much as the most lowly paid MD. Why? Because a cartel does not control how many people get PhDs.

Then again, ask the parents of the kid who had a life threatening brain tumor removed if they feel differently.

Think of the children! What I'm going to do is ask the families what they think of being forced into poverty by having to pay for such an operation, when they could have paid much less if there had been more doctors trained to do such procedures.

Here's a helpful infographic as well: http://reason.com/assets/db/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5ad.jpg

"Only out of political favor or fear" is a very large only... One that keeps entire industries running, in fact.

Maybe process controls isn't one of those industries with the right amount of pull in the right places. If so, I'm sorry about that.

That doesn't change the fact, though, that certain segements of business are recipients of massive public largess. Tax breaks, free land, direct payouts, access to Fed credit on extraordinarily generous terms, mineral extraction and grazing concessions on public land for laughably tiny sums. When even purely recreational crap like movie filming and sports arenas routinely scores substantial subsidies, particularly at the state and municipal level, I don't think that it is at all implausible for a mining outfit with access to the "national security" card to be angling for a hit of sweet, sweet, subsidy.

The distribution of this pork is hardly equitable, and I have no delusions about my ability to score any(from the bitterness of your tone, I'm guessing that neither do you); but that doesn't make its existence any less of a fact. Just ask AIG's counterparties...

Actually it was in the paper recently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html

However, it appears likely that the author of the book of the book, is overplaying his hand and it was in fact, ergot poisoning and not a CIA LSD experiment, at least according to some random poster who sounds reasonable here:
http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/12/cia-doses-french-bread-with-ls

So, make what you will of it.

One might question whether you read the sources you cited, as opposed to simply linking terms you heard a convincing speaker use one day.

Fortunately that's not true. In high school history we learned about Manifest Destiny.

Manifest destiny has little to do with Christians spreading the word across the world. While the idea existed that it was ordained by the Christian God, Manifest Destiny was the idea that Americans were charged with expanding capitalism, democracy, and even the American government to all of North and Latin America.

You left out "the idea that 'uncivilized' peoples could be improved by exposure to the Christian, democratic values of the United States." Or Native Americans and Christianity:
"White Attitudes. Among whites there were two common religiously based attitudes toward Native Americans. One was expressed in the notion of Manifest Destiny, the idea that white Christians had a God-given mission to expand their civilization and its ideals of liberty and democracy across the entire North American continent. From this point of view Indians who occupied valuable lands could be removed or even exterminated with few moral qualms. A second point of view held that the Indians did not have to be seen as a hindrance to white progress. Rather, they were simply ignorant heathens who could become part of American society if they were allowed to benefit from the civilizing instruction of whites. The first step toward civilization was believed to be conversion to Christianity. Although earlier missionaries to the Indians had produced few converts and much antagonism, the revivals of the early nineteenth century brought new impetus to the missionary movement. Most Protestant denominations as well as the Roman Catholic Church sent men and women to Indian tribes across the country, where they preached, distributed Bibles, and established schools."

"Christian Talibans" is a lovely buzz word... but wholly inappropriate as Taliban is neither an adjective

adjective: "noun: the word class that qualifies nouns.
verb: add a modifier to a constituent.
"Taliban" modifies "Christian".

t is instead a proper noun describing a terroristic dictatorship that was formerly the ruling body of Iraq and had strong control over Afghanistan and is currently engaging in guerrilla and terrorist assaults to prevent the peoples of those regions from asserting their own power.

And Christian Talibans such as those I already linked to would do the same thing. The difference is the religion, and the sect of the religion. Seeing as how either you can't be bothered to see that Dominionists and other Reconstructionists would do the same thing, that "civil government should be controlled by Christians alone and conducted according to Biblical law", I am left thinking you're trolling. All that's changed is the religion and the holy book.

And if you don't think stoning, which is what they plan, isn't terrorism then I don't want to live in your world. Even associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell said theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony positions on stoning were scary.
"In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment--which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or

yes, because instead of creating an environment of 40 hours being the norm, lets make everyone work 70 hours a week. That's a win~

Don't be ridiculous. But some union rules are so annoying that it becomes nearly impossible to fire the incompetent. For example, look at how difficult it is to fire an incompetent teacher in New York:

http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/how-to-fire-an-incompetent-tea

It is well documented how much damage incompetent teachers can do to student learning.

Somewhere between "minimum wage with no benefits" and "ridiculous union rules" exists a fair and reasonable middle ground.

What about linking the orginal source instead?

http://reason.com/blog/2010/02/06/video-nick-gillespie-debates-c
I think Lessig's fundamental problem is a belief that government ennobles.
Virtue adds like resistance in parallel, and an organization is measurably worse that its biggest cretin.
Trust government, but verify.

the better discussion is why we have not punished our civil leaders for putting us into this system where there is NO protectionism of the American economy and production system.

A better discussion is that protectionism harms the economy. Try it some tyme. Look up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and what it did. Because the US passed a protectionist law other nations did the same in retaliation. Some economists, though not all, blame protectionism on causing the Great Depression.

Also, what happens to our "neighbours" ... our FUCKING neighbours! Flooding Mexico with our governments subsidized corn has repurcussions.

Ah, something we agree with. I have railed on about how because of NAFTA Mexican farmers are being driven off their farms because NAFTA allows large US agricultural businesses to export food and sell it in Mexico cheaper than Mexicans can grow it because of the massive subsidies these businesses get.

However you talk about "libertarian think-tanks that live in a dream world" but Libertarians, large and small "l", have called those subsidies corporate welfare. The article "Confessions of a Welfare Queen: How rich bastards like me rip off taxpayers for millions of dollars" was published in one of those libertarian magazine, "Reason". The libertarian think-tank CATO Institute has the article Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study In Corporate Welfare on it's website as well as the CATO Handbook For Congress on corporate welfare. For more on what CATO has about corporate welfare check out the link.

Of course I don't expect anything more than "libertarians are evil" from many slashdotters.

Falcon

Ahhh finally the whole meat of the bleeding heart argument. How about I take the opposite position? Let's turn loose every single murderer in prison because one of them might be innocent.

Consider this: you are driving, and summoned to stop. It just so happens to be that the cops are corrupt and have to make their monthly quota. One of 'm plants a baggie in your vehicle, and you go off to the Tent Camp. It doesn't even have to be about corrupt cops if you think this is implausible.

Honestly, I would take my chances with a "less than perfect" justice system that offers greater deterrence

Here's the trick though: death penalty doesn't offer greater deterrence per se.

And, as Terry Pratchett once said, the death penalty combines the maximum deterrence with the minimum chance of recurrence.

Terry Pratchett writes satire. Errors (which are made a-plenty) can never, ever be righted again. But do continue your belief in your own infallibility and the absolute correctness of the justice system, because these are all disgusting liberal bleeding hearted links, and I'm obviously very much misguided, being a subject in the People's Republic of Europe.

I'm sure everything would've been right if they just would've manned up.

That's a horrible fallacy. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't make it "highly unlikely." Reason.

You have an interesting way of looking at statistics. The "odds" that you will get into a car accident are based on the number of times you step into a vehicle. If I drive one a day for a year and have one accident in that time, then my odds are 1/365. If you take the number of people in the nation driving per day, let's just say it's a third of the population, or 100 million people, and 3000 of them died, then the odds of dying in an accident on any one day are 3000/100,000,000, or 1/33,333 or .003% chance on any one day that you will be killed on the road. That's pretty highly unlikely to me. I wasn't attempting to put any value as to human life into the equation. Sorry that offends you.

And as bad as 3000 deaths a month sounds, the part of that sample you don't mention are the number of people who go from point A to point B each day unscathed.

That's a horrible fallacy. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't make it "highly unlikely." Reason.

BTW, I've got some bad news for you: There is a 1 in 96 chance that you will die in a car accident in your lifetime. The odds seem pretty gruesome to me... Do the math yourself: Population = 300,000,000 people; Deaths/year = 40,000 people/year; Life expectancy = 78.2 years. If your family has four members, then there is a 1 in 24 chance that one of you will die in a car accident during their lifetime.

"Ah, but you don't consider the people that DON'T die" sounds nice, until one of your family members or maybe even YOU are one of them.

Well, I guess every parent (myself included) is in violation of child porn laws. Every parent takes bath time photos of their kids. These aren't "sexually suggestive" in any way, just kids playing in a tub. And, since they're in the bathtub, they have no clothes on. My parents took them of me, I took them of my kids and I'm sure my kids will take them of my future grandchildren.

Exactly correct. These days people are being arrested for doing exactly that.

A 60 year old grandmother took some pictures to walmart to develop, same type of pictures you describe. Walmart workers turned her in and she was arrested.
Fortunately after a year and a half or so they dropped the charges and let her go, but holy fuck.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/04/grandma-arrested-for-child-por

Hear, hear. Your chances of dying in an aircraft terrorism incident are really, really tiny. People need to stop wetting their pants every time they get a whiff of some kind of terrorist activity - it only encourages more of the same. You are far more likely to die in an auto accident, from some other form of murder, by slipping in your bathtub, or even by being struck by lightning, than you are to be killed by a terrorist. So enough with the inane security bullshit, already.

Um... you can still go to jail for porn in the USA

Unfortunately, we still aren't jailing people for being whiny cosmotarians....

Um... you can still go to jail for porn in the USA

Um... sorry, does anyone know how to spell "Whooosh!" in Chinese ?

Ni hao?

Um... you can still go to jail for porn in the USA

Um... sorry, does anyone know how to spell "Whooosh!" in Chinese ?

Um... you can still go to jail for porn in the USA

Right after they make Total Eclipse, showing the brutality of Stalin's Russia.

Thousands of people killed by Christians during the Middle Ages was a horror. Millions of people killed by atheist Soviets was worse by at least an order of magnitude.

Sure the Patriot Act didn't help and was treasonous to pass in the first place, but neither did "liberal" policies such as gun control. It was making domestic military bases into gun-free zones that allowed Hasan to go around mowing down people without hindrance. More guns were most certainly the solution there and until people realize "gun-free-zone" translates into "sitting-duck-zone" this sort of thing will continue to happen. -1 off-topic, I know.

Video of said bust: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dc9_1228632109

Small article and clip of local news coverage on it (might want to turn the sound down, some dope cranked it way up for the video). http://reason.com/blog/2008/12/06/gotcha

You sound like you're arguing from information given to you by Al Gore. I'm not sure he's a trustworth source.

Since I think the Polar Bear thing is particularly funny (I think a lot of teen girls think they are so cute, in spite of the fact that they are apparently some of the most aggressive and violent bears), this is certainly not Fox News. nor are these folks. But with proof like simply SEEING them so far off shore and presuming global warming is the reason, it's so obvious that any criticism must be wrong! I guess since the food that Polar Bears eat - like seals - are remaining completely stationary while the snow/ice presumably recedes. I've seen reports that polar bears can swim anywhere from 60 to 100s of miles, so apparently they aren't completely sure.

To me, the Polar Bear thing is a good example of someone seeing something and it getting blown completely out of proportion and people like Al Gore picking up on it and trying to use it for their own gain. Al Gore does not appear to be struggling financially.

Incidentally, from here:

Gore shows an animation of a polar bear (very reminiscent of the Coca Cola bears) swimming pitifully in the sea trying to haul itself up onto the last piece of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. In 2002, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report warning that global warming was endangering polar bears. Arctic sea ice is thawing sooner and this means that the bears who hunt seals on the ice have fewer opportunities to feed themselves. This week saw an alarming report that hungry polar bears are turning cannibal. Yet, the WWF report itself found that most bear populations are either stable or increasing (see page 9 of the report). And remember, polar bears evidently survived when Arctic temperatures were warmer 6000 years ago. Of course, if predictions that the entire Arctic Ocean will be ice free in 100 year turn out to be right, then the polar bears will have a problem.

(emphasis mine)

That "ice free" bit was a link to "sciencedaily.com."

Say there was a dirty bomb attack on a city. Is it not the government's job to get everyone out of there? Why is it any different with a natural disaster? I watched as Katrina exploded into a category 5 storm and couldn't believe that the government (state and federal) was just sitting on their hands. They didn't walk anywhere because there was nowhere for them to go. We all know how well the Superdome turned out. You ever tried to get a hotel on the gulf coast when there is a hurricane anywhere near there? It is fucking impossible. Never mind the fact that most of the people who got stuck didn't have the money to rent a room to begin with. So I ask you again, where were they supposed to walk to?

And I call bullshit on your anecdote.

"As a brit in this damn place i can tell you its not legal unless you have a licence, which covers shotguns and gun clubs, even airsoft guns are now illegal to buy unless you are a club member and skirmish. Criminals have more rights than straight ppl here now on the protecting your family front , you cant touch them if they break in your home, they can sue you for assault" - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071014223548AAfrOyQ

"Yes you can legally own a gun if you have a permit, but you have to prove you have legitimate reason for having a gun and this is usually because its needed in your line of work - ie you are a policemen, soldier, farmer, member of a gun club etc. Its very, very hard to get a gun."

"The 2012 Olympics

Following the awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London, the government announced that special dispensation would be granted to allow the various shooting events to go ahead, as had been the case previously for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. However, it was still illegal for Britain's top pistol shooters to train in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result, British shooters currently spend 20 to 30 days a year training in Switzerland, and receive no public sports funding because their events are considered illegal in the UK" - wikipedia

Gun Control's Twisted Outcome (Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S.)
http://reason.com/archives/2002/11/01/gun-controls-twisted-outcome

but it's already happening...

"I'm not trying to say degradation of society is directly linked to violence in video games"

Good thing you're not saying that since there is actually no degradation of society to speak of:

    http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/14/us-violent-crime-rates-lowest

That's what always baffles me about the people who do draw that conclusion: the numbers, if anything, indicate that since the dawn of violent video games things have got better. I don't believe there's causation either way, but you'd think that such facts would put a nail in the coffin of those who think there is.

Cheers

This thread really demonstrates how narrowly most /.'ers view libertarianism, which isn't surprising considering the recent antics of the national LP like nominating that fraud Bob Barr and the ridiculous wikipedia article. As a voluntaryist/anarchist/"little l" libertarian, I'd like to point out that the philosophy of individual liberty requires as an absolute, the respect of everyone else's liberty first and foremost, provided they are not harming anyone or anyone's property (generally speaking. discussions on property rights abound. libertarians would never oppose voluntary communes, etc. as long as violence is not used to force others to participate). This boils down to the non-aggression principle. Because of this ultimately respectfully pacifist ethos, most libertarians do not actively seek to suppress fringe speech or otherwise interfere with the nonviolent activities of other individuals. This does not mean that they agree with said (often crazy) speech. For instance, I've never even heard of the Heartland Institute, nor any of the other allegedly-libertarian organizations or individuals referenced in TFA for attacking free software. Free software is incredibly libertarian, though telling me how I can or cannot prioritize traffic on my network is not. My customers are not forced to remain so.

People interested in individual liberty should check out The Free State Project and Reason Magazine. For fun, check out Free Talk Live, a liberty-oriented radio show that takes calls on absolutely any subject and reports regularly on the FSP.

I have to agree... without family ties in America the citizenship process can become a complicated decade long endeavor.

If you need more proof, just check out this handy flowchart

This was already picked apart. The authors did not control for the risk faced by the gun owners. People are more likely to be armed if they are likely to be attacked. http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/05/why-skydivers-would-be-better

People keep mentioning that statistic about spending more for lower life expectancy, but it's kind of bullshit.
http://reason.com/news/show/135458.html

The US's lower life expectancy has nothing to do with its healthcare being poor, and everything to do with our having 2x as many car accidents and 12x as many homicides as most of the western world. You factor that out and the US actually has a higher life expectancy.

We also spend more on elective and cosmetic surgeries, as well as drugs like viagra and prozac that can improve for quality of life, but do nothing for life expectancy.

Also, insurance companies and drug manufacturers are BACKING the government insurance plans. They want their slice of the pork.

Our current health insurance system was created by a government tax loophole that caused in the current employer-paid system, which is a large cause of increased costs and the reason most people who want insurance and can't get it don't have it.

Finally, the horrible profit-driven medical industry in the US spends more on new treatment research than the entire EU combined.

I dunno, with what it does have going for it, I'm a little concerned about turning over 15% of the economy to the government to run, considering they do so well with what they already do.

According to this article your lifetime chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 83.

Per-person odds, I'd take a one-time shuttle ride over a lifetime of driving.

In a fatal collision...

Ah, but what about the collisions that never happened? That's the point. A rider without the protection of a cage will driver gingerly and NOT GET into a fatal collision. Whereas, a driver who knows that their airbag will deploy will drive less carefully than a car without airbags.

But, says Steven Peterson, professor of economics at Virginia Commonwealth University, "An airbag allows me to drive more aggressively but not face any more risk." In fact, drivers of airbag-equipped cars get into and cause more accidents, negating the safety benefits for drivers and increasing the risk to others.

And here's a stat you won't find... Bikers with NO helmet, NO leather will drive VERY carefully. NOT relying on airbag or even traffic laws to protect them.

The person surfing the web should be babysitting their OWN stuff because anti-phishing measures make better phishers, and idiot proofing makes better idiots.

And when I get an email from Bank0fAmerica telling me my account needs X, click here to login... I delete it without reading it. Zero or not. Keep telling them that they are safe and they eventually won't be.

... is just as bad as a person who's murdered his own countrymen for decades.

Ahh, like Saddam Hussein? To be consistent I'm sure you have praised Bush for bringing him to justice? And what, no mention of cop-killer Bill Ayers, buddy to Our Dear Leader?

You have called me an idiot 3 times. It has been my experience that those who resort to name-calling do so because they are intellectually bankrupt, and so no offense is taken. I know (as do you apparently) there is clearly nothing substantive behind your feeble attempts to belittle my intelligence.

And now, regarding your quote from the Wik ... I call BS. Yes, that quote appears on the Wik, but did you happen to go look at that quote in context? Well I did. I went to the BNC's web page (via the reference provided in the Wik article). Here is a quote from their policy statement on healthcare:

For decades, the British National Health Service was looked upon by the rest of the world as one of the most successful state run health services in the world. Today, it is a laughing stock. The NHS is critically ill. NHS Trusts are sacking staff, closing wards, cancelling operations and refusing patients vital life-saving drugs. Meanwhile, 'health tourists' are costing the NHS £2 billion a year, and diseases such as TB and AIDS are on the increase as a result of immigration ... Sixty percent of NHS staff are bureaucrats, and there are now more managers in the NHS than beds -- with many earning more than £100,000 per year.

In short, while socialized medicine may be laudable from a naive and idealistic perspective, every implementation to date has become, or will soon be, a disaster. And this is no surprise, because that is what happens when you socialize anything. Quality drops through the floor, and costs rise out of control. And why is that? Human nature. Where there is no competition and no profit incentive people lose their initiative and become lazy. Look at the USPS ($11B loss last year), or public schools (shudder), or insert your favorite government agency ... RMV? DHS? FEMA? Or instead of those tangential agencies, let's consider instead a direct analogy ... Medicare? Costs are spiraling out of control -- it is a ticking timebomb. Here are some interesting references (warning, they are not written in crayon):

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29339.html
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3700

The only remedy will be to severely rationing care, after first taxing the crap out of "the rich" until they are no longer rich, find even more creative ways to hide their income, or leave the country.

No thanks.

True, gun crimes gone up as they clamped down on hand guns, taking them away from law abiding citizens. The pattern is clear, in the uk, people give up their rights, then when they are disarmed the criminals get ever more brazen and empowered, the fear spreads, and then more police powers are given. The police powers do nothing, whether its random stop and search or ridiculous police state camera systems, so more money and power is dumped on the police state...and the cycle just keeps repeating. The criminals don't care, and theres just no way for there to be enough police on the ground to protect everyone. The ugly truth the uk folk seem to be denying is that unless you have a personal body guard, the job of the police is to avenge your death or try to catch the criminal after you've been violated. They cant really protect you. good article from reason magazine on gun controls twisted outcome in the uk http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html

It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant.

Thankfully, this is little known, because it is false. Prosecutors can be sued for malicious prosecution, which in most jurisdictions requires a final dismissal of the action and a showing that it was brought by the prosecutor knowing that the charge was groundless. The link you supplied says that they cannot be sued in 1983 actions (a civil rights action against a state actor in federal court), which may be true as far as it goes, but it hardly represents the sole theory of liability. Also, as a profession prosecutors can be disciplined by the ethics committee--for example Mike Nifong, the prosecutor who made the rape allegations against the Duke students, presumably for political ends, was disbarred.

>Not all "soft" drug users are addicts, but pretty much anyone doing anything but marijuana are addicts as most recreational drugs are almost as addictive as nicotine.

No, not really. Most drug users, even heroin users, are casual users. For every tweeked out meth head, there are 10 people that just use it occasionally. I know quite a few people who have used all sorts of drugs without ever developing a problem. Quoting the linked article:

"A 1976 study by the drug researchers Leon G. Hunt and Carl D. Chambers estimated there were 3 or 4 million heroin users in the United States, perhaps 10 percent of them addicts. "Of all active heroin users," Hunt and Chambers wrote, "a large majority are not addicts: they are not physically or socially dysfunctional; they are not daily users and they do not seem to require treatment." A 1994 study based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey estimated that 23 percent of heroin users ever experience substance dependence.

The comparable rate for alcohol in that study was 15 percent, which seems to support the idea that heroin is more addictive: A larger percentage of the people who try it become heavy users, even though it's harder to get. At the same time, the fact that using heroin is illegal, expensive, risky, inconvenient, and almost universally condemned means that the people who nevertheless choose to do it repeatedly will tend to differ from people who choose to drink. They will be especially attracted to heroin's effects, the associated lifestyle, or both. In other words, heroin users are a self-selected group, less representative of the general population than alcohol users are, and they may be more inclined from the outset to form strong attachments to the drug."

It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant. Prosecutors are truly the worst part of the system since they are unaccountable to the public and are rewarded for getting convictions, not enforcing the law wisely. As a profession, they are so corrupt that they make civil lawyers look sympathetic since civil lawyers are at least limiting themselves to cases where you can kinda sorta see how their client was genuinely harmed.

Most prosecutors answer to the District Attorney, and can be fired by the DA almost at will. The District Attorney is an elected official. In those cases where the prosecutor doesn't answer to the elected District Attorney (or essentially the same office with a different title), they answer to the elected head of the of the executive branch of whatever level of government they represent (Mayor, Governor, President, etc). If your local prosecutors are loose cannons, campaign against their boss.
The only reason that prosecutors appear to be unaccountable to the public is because the public doesn't pay enough attention to local politics/civics

It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant. Prosecutors are truly the worst part of the system since they are unaccountable to the public and are rewarded for getting convictions, not enforcing the law wisely. As a profession, they are so corrupt that they make civil lawyers look sympathetic since civil lawyers are at least limiting themselves to cases where you can kinda sorta see how their client was genuinely harmed.

Check out this article on what happened to paypal. I thought it was pretty interesting since I remember paypal being an innovative (pretty much pioneered captchas), competitive company that did a good thing for consumers and was able to out-compete ebay on their own turf (remember billpoint?). Nowadays when someone like google wants to compete on ebays turf, the just get turned away--ebay seems to forget that one of the reasons everyone used paypal was because paypal could do a better job than ebay's own in-house service. I think this quote from the article is most telling about paypal's stagnation and change into a pure revenue stream:

Safely nestled within the belly of the eBay monopoly, and without Billpoint to foster a competitive itch, PayPal is far removed from the market forces that sparked the rapid innovation and entrepreneurial fire that marked its early days.

As a citizen of "crime ridden" city I'll admit that I'm far more afraid of police dressing up in the black commando gear and playing urban ninja than I am of the scary gang flavor of the month. Long after MS-13 (or the Bloods or the Crips or the those darn Irish gangs [starring Leo DiCaprio]) is gone we'll still have para-military police kicking in the wrong door and shooting citizens and their pets.