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protecting citizens' rights in the face of "for the children"

Democrats are just as willing to use that canard, they just use it to support violation of different rights than Republicans do. For example, this, or just as a general magic phrase to demand access to your wallet.

Well, for starters, civil forfeiture is about your non-living stuff, and the 4th Amendment applies to YOU

By that logic, attaching a GPS-tracker to your car would not fall under the Amendment either.

No, the Amendment does not just cover your person, but also "houses, papers, and effects". How can those be taken away by a cop without not only a trial, but even a Judge-issues warrant, I do not know... It is just so glaringly unconstitutional, it boggles the mind.

And of course, our hopey-changey President insists on making a prosecutor, who made herself particularly infamous using such confiscations, into a new Attorney General...

Reason.com has a story about how Somalia has done really well without a functioning government, so maybe she will let the warlords take over America and turn it into _another_ libertarian paradise

Here is her pitch to the small government crowd:
"A wide range of scholarship and commentary on Somalia, most with no ideological ax to grind, tells an interesting and even somewhat encouraging story—one about a society with an unusual and robust clan-based system of dispute resolution and goods provision that has managed to keep daily life moving along even without a "Somali government.""
http://reason.com/archives/201...

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

This one. The U.S. tops the world in education spending per student (p. 4, chart B1.1).

The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.

Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).

And that very graph you cite is for primary through tertiary [higher] education, not primary through secondary.
To quote from the paper "On average, OECD countries spend nearly twice as much per student at the tertiary level as
at the primary level."

You can't talk about the figures from that paper and talk about school districts in the next paragraph.

I looked up Texas spending per student for public education (primary and secondary) and it was $6000 per student last year, on the level of Czech Republic (for primary through tertiary)

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

This one. The U.S. tops the world in education spending per student (p. 4, chart B1.1).

The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.

Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).

http://reason.com/blog/2012/05...

Yes.

You mean the "campus rape crisis" that doesn't actually exist on the campuses where women are actually less likely to be raped than women in the general population? The entire thing is based on poor statistics, something for which the users of those statistics are at least as responsible for as the originators.

Any rape is too much rape, but by creating fairy stories about the prevalence, causes and definition of rape you won't do anything useful to reduce that figure. In fact you'll probably make it worse.

Posting ac because, unfortunately, it's just too dangerous to say things like this in connection with one's IRL identity these days.

No, it's several pages of regulations, and then hundreds of pages of "forebearances", describing how the ways the FCC is closing not to enforce some rules - at this time. That way if anyone gets uppity they can bring down the hammer.

Read the FCC commissioner interview for more information.

Another FCC commissioner seems to disagree:

The rules are eight pages. However, the details with respect to forbearance, the regulations from which we will not be taking action—that alone is 79 pages. Moreover, sprinkled throughout the document, there are uncodified rules — rules that won’t make it in the code of federal regulations that people will have to comply with in the private sector. On top of that, there are things that aren’t going to be codified, such as the Internet Conduct Standard, where the FCC will essentially say that it has carte blanche to decide which service plans are legitimate and which are not, and the FCC sort of hints at what factors it might consider in making that determination.

And if it's really responding to public comments to the rules... WHY IS RESPONSE TO PUBLIC COMMENT BEING KEPT SECRET?

Help, stop, the transparency, it's blinding me.

Particularly in drug crimes, prosecutors routinely use extreme penalties to win plea bargains. There is also a penalty for going to trial: people pleading guilty get much lower sentances on average than those found guilty at trial.

>"he provides Koran quotes objectively proving the opposite:This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, "Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.""

What I find interesting is that in Islam, Jesus is a Prophet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And let's examine what Jesus spent his life and sacrificed his life teaching:

* Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone

* A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another.

* Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

* But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

* If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

* All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

* For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

* if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins

* But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles

Jesus, a prophet of Islam, teaches forgiveness, tolerance, love, and non-violence.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/01...

You mean like these ones?
It's hard to receive money from jerks!
Having diner with assholes.
Pope 23 and his three dadies.
The Talmud is horseshit.
Will do anything to get new customers!
Next week, I will show you the resurrection trick

Yeah, these guys went down on the extremists of some religions (the Christians, The Muslims and The Jews, the current largest in France) just as much as they did on politics, celebrities, social conflicts and others...
Growing up there, I saw plenty of these cartoons. Some are not very funny, some are, some are very intelligent, some very dumb... but if the one thing I remember is that : if it hurts you at some point, it means that there is a layer of truth deep down.

Monde de merde...

Your post is essentially misdirection. Strasser wasn't the only member of the Nazi party that favored socialism. I seem recall that both Goebbels and Eichmann survived the Night of the Long Knives (A bit of an understatement.) for example. The National Socialists were not simply engaged in rhetoric but enacted a variety of policies consistent with socialism. I can understand the desperate attempt to claim that the National Socialists weren't really socialists in any way since some people conflate the concepts of socialism and goodness and the Nazis were certainly not good.

Hitler's Handouts - Inside the Nazis' welfare state

Adolf Eichmann viewed National Socialism and communism as “quasi-siblings,” explaining in his memoirs that he “inclined towards the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.” As late as 1944, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels publicly celebrated “our socialism,” reminding his war-weary subjects that Germany “alone [has] the best social welfare measures.” ....

.... To “achieve a truly socialist division of personal assets,” he [Aly] writes, Hitler implemented a variety of interventionist economic policies, including price and rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes, frequent “polemics against landlords,” subsidies to German farmers as protection “against the vagaries of weather and the world market,” and harsh taxes on capital gains, which Hitler himself had denounced as “effortless income.”

Aly demonstrates convincingly that Nazi “domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime.” And with fresh memories of Weimer inflation, “transferring the tax burden to corporations earned the leadership in Berlin considerable political capital, as the government keenly registered.”

For instance, at the outset of war Nazi economists established a “wartime tax of 50 percent on all wages” that applied only to the wealthiest Germans. In the end, Aly writes, “only 4 percent of the population paid the full 50 percent surcharge.”

Putting the Socialism Back Into National Socialism:

The idea that Nazism was an extreme form of "capitalism" and Hitler primarily a tool serving the interests of "big business" is a longstanding myth that even now retains a measure of popularity in some quarters. This, despite the fact that the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and that Nazi political strategy was explicitly based on combining the appeal of socialism with that of nationalism (thus the choice of name). Once in power, the Nazis even went so far as to institute a Four Year Plan for running the German economy, modeled in large part on the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans.

I. The Socialist Elements of Nazism.

Two recent books further explain the socialist elements of Nazi economic policy, and will hopefully put the final nails in the coffin of the myth that the Nazis were "capitalists" or free marketeers. In The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, historian Adam Tooze describes the statist nature of Nazi economic policy in great detail, and concludes that the Nazis imposed greater government control over the economy than any other noncommunist regime in modern history. (pp. 658-60). Tooze notes that, even before the outbreak of World War II, government military spending accounted for some 20% of the GDP, while much of the rest of the economy came under government control as a result of the Four Year Plan and other similar measures.

In Hitler's Beneficiaries: : Plunder,

Okay, um, what WILL solve it?

Putting in place an environment in which people can feed themselves.

I'll grant you that some political systems or economic systems are not conducive to that, but no one wants to hear it because it doesn't fit into a 15 second soundbite.

The reality is that if you just feed people who already can't care for themselves, you just get more people who can't care for themselves.

Emergency situations do not apply, of course disaster relief is ok, people who are hit by major events such as the recent tsunami in Japan clearly need short term relief. The difference there is that they don't need it for the rest of their lives.

There are places in the world, Africa is the easy target, but there are others, that have been getting "humanitarian aid" for decades. At some point it moves from helping out people who are down on their luck to creating dependent people who cannot care for themselves because they are fed by someone else.

A good example is Zimbabwe... that country used to be a net exporter of food, until the people voted in a new leader who stole the farms from those who knew what they were doing (rich white men), and turned them over to people who had no idea what they were doing (poor black men) and now the county is starving.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/01...

The problem is, if we bail them out, then the people there will have learned nothing about their poor choices in leaders. It sounds cruel, but unless you plan to invade and force a change of government, let them be and let them starve. They'll figure it out sooner or later that they made a huge mistake and perhaps toss out their current leaders and find better solutions.

If people don't have to suffer the consequences of their poor decisions, then they'll keep making them.

The supreme court just found that even if a cop did something not exactly lawful, if the breaking of the law was reasonable then that's fine and forget the 4th amendment.

In a decision issued this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police in a case arising from an officer’s “mistake of law.” At issue in Heien v. North Carolina was a 2009 traffic stop for a single busted brake light that led to the discovery of illegal drugs inside the vehicle. According to state law at the time, however, motor vehicles were required only to have “a stop lamp,” meaning that the officer did not have a lawful reason for the initial traffic stop because it was not a crime to drive around with a single busted brake light. Did that stop therefore violate the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure? Writing today for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts held that it did not. “Because the officer’s mistake about the brake-light law was reasonable,” Roberts declared, “the stop in this case was lawful under the Fourth Amendment.”

Roberts’ opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan. Writing alone in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues for giving the police far too much leeway. “One is left to wonder,” she wrote, “why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretative question.” In Sotomayor's view, “an officer’s mistake of law, no matter how reasonable, cannot support the individualized suspicion necessary to justify a seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”

Unless you are a cop.

So why don't do the same thing with police officers? Make an app so that people can sign up and when a real police is sick, some random guy gets a gun and a badge for a day. If he makes a mistake, it's not the end of the world, because real police officers also make mistakes. Right?

You might have missed the last year or so of police reporting in the US but we're already there. Just sampling from last week:

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12...

I could go on...

Police also need to respect citizens. Being on camera all the time will help that at lot. Everyone behaves better when they're on camera.

Example from the article:

In 2013, The New York Times reported that the city of Rialto, Calif., was able to cut down on complaints against officers by 88 percent over the previous year when it gave its officers body cameras. Use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent.

Minister for Women and Equality in the UK.

Don't forget other nice things like
http://reason.com/archives/200...

Lets not explore the raft of professions in which men are extremely under represented, many of which are safe, comfortable jobs - unlike jobs with low female participation, like mining, refuse collection and dying in warzones.

It's still Federally illegal. Even in any state that it is "legal" it can still be prosecuted. It won't be under the current president, but that can change in 2 years.

I cannot imagine how, after 6 years, you Obama supporters are still so starry eyed and ignorant. Under the "current president", prosecutions of legal marijuana use are *up* over the levels seen during the Bush administration. This isn't exactly a well-guarded secret.

Obama Explains Increasing Medical Marijuana Crackdowns
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Obama’s War On Medical Marijuana Steps Up
http://www.fitsnews.com/2013/1...

Judging From Prosecutions, Obama Is 80 Percent Worse Than Bush on Medical Marijuana
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06...

Republican Rand Paul has stated that DC should be able to legalize marijuana if they want:
http://www.washingtonexaminer....

There is a pattern, however, of government agencies shaking down law-abiding companies. Unfortunately most companies stay silent when the government goons show up to abuse their business. Those that speak up are heros.

    Gibson Guitar
    Mountain Pure Water Company
    IRS Presures Patriot Groups

There are more.

Who Gets an Exemption From Obamacare?

How About a National Obamacare Waiver?

To date, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has approved 1,372 Obamacare waivers, covering 3.1 million Americans. Yesterday, The Daily Caller reported that among HHS’s most recent round of 204 Obamacare waivers, “38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.” That’s right: Nearly 20 percent of exemptions from Pelosi’s crowning health care achievement were doled out in her backyard.

If that’s not enough irony for you, try this waiver on for size: On Monday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Nevada—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state—received a partial statewide Obamacare waiver, too. If you’re keeping score, Reid was Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate fighting to get Obamacare passed into law. Now his state will be one of three to get a waiver from the law’s requirements, while the rest of America suffers.

Of course, it's just a coincidence that all these waivers are going out to coverage which meets or surpasses the general basic requirements of Obamacare, just as it is a total coincidence that leftish institutions offered health care plans which were generous.

ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption

Secret in the sense that it was only reported by the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, McClatchy Newspapers, USA Today, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and, obviously, WSJ; but not reason.com or askheritage.org. Actually, I'm just guessing that it wasn't reported on the last two, maybe it was.

Who Gets an Exemption From Obamacare?

How About a National Obamacare Waiver?

To date, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has approved 1,372 Obamacare waivers, covering 3.1 million Americans. Yesterday, The Daily Caller reported that among HHS’s most recent round of 204 Obamacare waivers, “38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.” That’s right: Nearly 20 percent of exemptions from Pelosi’s crowning health care achievement were doled out in her backyard.

If that’s not enough irony for you, try this waiver on for size: On Monday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Nevada—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state—received a partial statewide Obamacare waiver, too. If you’re keeping score, Reid was Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate fighting to get Obamacare passed into law. Now his state will be one of three to get a waiver from the law’s requirements, while the rest of America suffers.

ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption

The whole purpose of juries is to create the possibility of nullification. However, the government hates this limitation of its preferably unfettered powers and tries to prevent jurors being informed of their right to strike down unjust prosecution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
http://reason.com/blog/2014/10...

You don't read the news much, do you? Here's a primer if you're actually interested.

Hand grenade? I can't take you seriously if you're going to spin the story like that.

"ATLANTA - A family says a SWAT team raided their home in the middle of the night and seriously injured a 19-month-old boy with a stun grenade. Alecia Phonesavanh told Channel 2's Ryan Young her child is at the Grady Memorial Hospital burn unit, and is in a medically induced coma..."

Sources: (left-leaning) and (right-leaning).

Fuck the police.

Can you point me at an example of this verbiage somewhere?

I found this pretty quickly. It seems like local officials are using overbroad interpretations of codes to keep people from disconnecting from the grid. I don't know how widespread it is.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/02...

Pardon my linking to Reason Magazine. I don't like to use them as a news source because they're kind of unhinged over there. But they have the most thorough coverage of this story that I've found. If you want a more balanced source, the same story is covered by Al Jazeera and several local Florida sources.

Reining in Forfeiture

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Federal Asset Forfeiture Continues to Skyrocket Under Obama

http://reason.com/blog/2012/07...

Rand Paul introduces bill to reform civil asset forfeiture

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The Stealing of America By the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

(As usual, the Huff Post gives the primary culprit, the head of the executive branch, a pass.)

Oh I understand the issue just fine. But, they have to have a minimum level of proof to do the seizure and they also have to defend the action in court if/when the property owner objects.

Neatly proving that you don't have a clue. Read this and see how asset forfeiture happens in the real world.

CBC's article is just a Canadian take on things. The original article (just as scary) is here:

Well, yes. But it's hardly "original" -- this is a problem that has been profiled extensively for years, yet few people seem to realize how far it extends. A couple of times over the past year, when posters on Slashdot mentioned random forfeitures that happened to them, they were met with comments saying, "You must have done something suspicious" or "What's the rest of the story," and I tried to provide links to point out the systemic problem, but have been met with ignorance and resistance.

For a sample of past coverage, here's an extensive piece from The New Yorker a year ago, a piece from Reason in 2012, a piece from Forbes in 2011, pieces in Slate and The Economist from 2010, a detailed piece on NPR from 2008, etc., etc., etc. Here's an extensive account of problems with the system from PBS almost 15 years ago (around the time that legal reform forced money to go to local municipalities in many cases rather than the federal government). The ACLU has been fighting this for decades.

I know some people here may be well aware of this problem, and others may find this shocking and new. Regardless, it's very sad that it may take other countries' shaming us into taking action to fix an unjust assault on our citizens that has been going on for many years.

one was a free market fundamentalist: Pinochet

Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true.

Pinochet was resistant to free market, through most of 1974 his own style of handling economic problems left in the wake of Allende meant putting the army in charge of alleviating penuries through requisitions, rationning and distribution, and it was a complete failure. Chile kept printing money just like under Allende, leading to 300% inflation in 1974 and 1975.

If Pinochet was, as you put it, a "free-market fundamentalist", then explain why did oil and copper industries remain state-owned all through his regime, and why did the fishing and forestry industries remain syndicate-run (CORFO) ? Why did he keep in place many programs of subsidies ? Why did he have several failing corporations bailed out (like the Osorno bank) ? Why did his constitution of 1980 keep copper resources as irrevocably public property ? Why was the Peso pegged to the USD, chinese-style, in the early 80s (leading to a monetary crisis and recession), instead of maintaining a free-floating exchange rate like Friedman advocated in his speeches and books ?

Oh, right: that's because Pinochet was NOT a free-market advocate. He was not even right-wing either - his wife was a senator in the Radical Party, an ally of Allende's Unidad Popular, and he was a close collaborator of Allende until the coup d'état. Instead, his pragmatism at least let him put people who mostly were free-market enthusiasts in charge of some of his government's economic policies. He, himself, had no such convictions, he was just an autoritarian voluntarist. But I guess that makes for an insufficiently romantic narrative to convince you.

Sergio de Castro Spikula was one such free-market enthusiast in Pinochet's government, and he had to bitterly fight (there even was one incident with a gun) with other members, like General Gustavo Leigh, Admiral José Toribio (president of the government's economic committee), or Raul Saez (the man who was responsible for planning the economy of Chile in the Junta), in order to get the reforms done.

Im not 100% clear why we wouldnt want to get involved here, if ever there were a time to get involved.

Because of natural gas interests to benefit Europe, naturally. European countries are spending themselves into the ground so they lean on the US to be World Police. Oligarchs protecting oligarchs, that is all.

And see, we can discredit everybody who claims this will be yet another "war for oil". "War for hydrocarbons" just doesn't have the same ring to it. There's no appetite for a "war for energy" because then people would point out that we have many safe ways of producing all the energy we need already (but the corporate arms dealers don't much care for those).

How, praytell, did he "disturb the school" while he was "difficult during questioning" AFTER they "took Stone in for questioning" which, by common American syntax, means at the police station?

Despite the wording here, Stone was questioned at the school. See this article, for example, for clarification:

The police report suggests that the entire incident was handled as if Stone was an active shooter, rather than a kid who had written an obviously fantastical story: "While administrators, Officer Floyd and I looked for the suspect all students were held in their homeroom classes, until the suspect was located, bookbag located, and locker was cleared with negative results for a weapon."

Stone was then brought to the principal's office, where police questioned him about the gun comment in the story. He "became very irate stating that it was just a joke," and then "continued to be disruptive and was placed in handcuffs, which were double locked and check for fit, and was advised he was being detained for Disturbing Schools."

According to Aylor, Stone was taken to the police station and booked like a common criminal. He was released after his mother arrived and signed a Custodial Promise form. The charge is "disorderly conduct based on the alleged interviews related to when they were discussing the writing," said Aylor.

I agree that the response to all of this sounds rather crazy, and there seems to be little reason that this should have escalated to an arrest. However, let's keep to the facts here. Whatever Stone is accused of doing in terms of "disorderly conduct" happened at the school.

Ah, Rush Limbaugh's famous "Greenies made nuclear power unsafe" meme. A darling here on slashdot, despite so many annoying facts that tend to discredit it.

In the Real World ®, American Greens are the most ineffective political movement since the vegetarians. They have accomplished pretty much nothing since Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The real actors are the majority of hard-headed average Americans (who are hardly "green", but who are sensible enough to know they don't want or need nuclear power) and the simple realities of market economics.

The cold hard truth is that no private entity has ever made an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission power plant. Ever. Only socialist and totalitarian regimes can do it, because they can effectively ignore insurance costs, which the USA shouldn't (and although the Price-Andersen subsidies do exactly that, US plants still aren't cost-effective). In a truly free and fair market it would cost far more money for construction, insurance, and decommissioning than an operator could ever possibly recoup. Even the ultra-right wing Cato Institute admits this!

But terrestrial fission power plants are a masturbatory fantasy akin to Steampunkery, only with less whimsical charm. A fever dream of a world that never was, full of steam engines and glowing rocks. They are an obsolete and unnecessary technology fetishized by aficionados, who often seem to be quite willing to give up any form of representative government or free market if only they can have their beloved nuke plants. No tax burden is too high! Because it's not a reasoned argument for them, it's an obsession. So blaming the failings of their fellow travelers on their opposition fits their mindset perfectly - it couldn't possibly be the fault of the nuclear operators that they purposely built the cheapest, least safe designs allowed by law! It must have been those devil-greens! It's their fault!

Microsoft has openly discussed its use of image-processing software to detect suspected paedophiles in the past...

Really now. And a false positive fucks over a person for life. Justice? Please! Not when it comes to child porn, drugs, and terrorism. Getting accused of those things is enough to ruin you.

There have been HUMANS who have fucked up interpreting what child pornography is.

It's a Goddamn modern day witch hunt!

My parents of pictures of me that would probably have sent to jail if they took them today - you know, naked baby in bathtub, running around naked, etc .....

Well, this just tells me that the "Cloud" is untrustworthy, regardless of who the vendor is - obviously they are snooping into the contents.

> I wish I could read the linked study, but it's blocked by a pay wall

If you google the title of a study or some of the phrases from the abstract you can usually find a freed up version.

> But when it comes to heroin/meth related crimes, there are instances where people are so addicted to the drug that they
> rob stores just to come up with enough money for their next fix. Decriminalizing the drug wouldn't eliminate these kinds of crimes.

Free treatment clinics would eliminate those kinds of crimes. Furthemore you can't baseline at zero - just because it is illegal doesn't mean there are zero abusers. In fact, despite all the billions spent on the drug war, addiction rates have been essentially unchanged.

> The bottom line is that outlawing drugs reduces their use,

Your bottom line is false. Look at this chart of US drug addiction rate versus US federal drug control spending from 1970-2010. Despite a massive increase in drug enforcement, the addiction rate is essentially unchanged.

Police are allowed to do any search, reasonable or otherwise, with a warrant. They have the warrant. Which means that, by definition, it's not the government breaking the law. it's the Court that issued the warrant.

That's kinda why the anti-NSA side keeps losing in Court. They think of this as the NSA breaking the law, when the NSA is doing precisely what it is supposed to do : gather all information for which they have a warrant.

And one can make a similar argument for the court that issues that warrant. They're issuing warrants on the basis of what facts the NSA gives them. It's easy to rationalize. But not so easy to bring any of them to justice when every aspect of the above process is secret.

The track record of businesses is much worse then the Feds on pretty much every issue. Generally the entire reason the feds got their current powers is because some businessman 40 years ago decided to oppress some private citizen.

I already gave the example of NSA tapping all internet traffic. And business can't pull the sort of frivolous rent seeking and jack booting that comes naturally to government such as creation of a tart cherry oligopoly. We also have the militarization of law enforcement (and not just in the US).

there is (practically) NO "normal" channel! you literally have to be lucky to get a green card. got skills? let's see you go through a gauntlet of legal procedures that are complex, illlogical, and inconsistent.
http://reason.com/assets/db/07...

Here is what the Cato institute put out about the rise of SWAT teams:

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

http://store.cato.org/reports/...

To demonstrate how much of a problem this is, there is even a map of incidents:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap

Reason hasn't had a commentary on it yet, but they have already posted information about the privatized SWAT teams:

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06...

I expect in a day or two, you'll see a Reason article condemning the practice strongly for what it is: crony capitalism, lack of government accountability, and government overreach.

I don't have a detailed breakdown but according to the CBO over 25% of all Highway Fund expenditures are for "non-highway uses". Also "Congress allocates highway money to truck parking facilities, safety incentives to prevent operation of motor vehicles by intoxicated persons, grants for anti-racial profiling programs, magnetic levitation trains, and dozens of other non-road activities. The main diversion is to rail and public transit"

It is partially a revenue problem but as usual with our government it is also a SPENDING PROBLEM.

From http://reason.com/archives/201...

Oh surprise surprise, this can't possibly be Congress's fault because that would imply the party with a majority there would somehow be responsible.

Both parties have majorities. And this really is a stupid excuse for ignoring malfeasance. Further, it is worth noting that the IRS shenanigans started after several requests by congress members. So Congress may well be involved, just not in the way you expect.

Hilarious!

Government, Not Globalization, Destroyed Detroit

How the Democrats Destroyed Detroit

How Coleman Young Ruined Detroit

With Detroit bankrupt, is 'blue model' to blame?

Yep, next thing you know Democrats will again be trying to get into our bedrooms.

California Legislators Want to Tell College Kids When to Have Sex

If it works at $15 why wouldn't it work at $100?

Of course, it doesn't work at $15, or any other price. Sure, it helps those who manage to keep their jobs, but everyone else... well... http://reason.com/blog/2014/05...

Thank you, gullible tool, for helping us propagate the message that earning a living wage is bad for workers.
Your friends,
The One Percent

If it works at $15 why wouldn't it work at $100?

Of course, it doesn't work at $15, or any other price. Sure, it helps those who manage to keep their jobs, but everyone else... well... http://reason.com/blog/2014/05...

In his memoir My Grandfather’s Son, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to his years at Yale Law School as the genesis of his hostility to affirmative action. “Before long I realized that those blacks who benefitted from it were being judged by a double standard,” Thomas wrote. “As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”

http://reason.com/blog/2013/06...

I would submit that the teachers' unions are practically the only thing keeping the U.S. public school system halfway functioning.

It's really hard to take your claim seriously when you have things like this. Maybe things are different where you live, and that is why we have different perspectives. From what I've seen (and what that chart points out), unions are more interested in protecting bad teachers than they are in making sure kids get good educations.

It's no wonder that Republicans are so hated around here, where so many of you geeks and nerds are young and have barely begun paying taxes and a often fresh out of university.

Sorry, I'm 35 and vote Libertarian because I've frankly had it with Republican hypocrisy and lies. I'm sick of being told I've got the freedom to do whatever you tell me to do. I'm sick of hearing about state's rights, as long as the states don't use them. I'm sick of being told how evil government is, now bend over while the government thug snaps on his rubber glove for your safety. I'm sick of spending billions of dollars on the war against our own citizens, I'm sick of spending trillions of dollars on the war for oil, I'm sick of claiming the moral high ground while acting as bad as the people we claim to be against.

BTW, I was home schooled.

what is so bad about individual liberty

As long as you don't use that liberty to harm anyone else, I've got nothing against it.

natural rights

Like the stuff growing in my backyard?

and limited government

LOLOLOLOLOL

unplug that cable from the back of your heads for a few minutes and let reason take over for a bit, and to see what comes from that?

Reason, you say?

it should be legally obvious that you can't be arrested *only* for "resisting arrest"

Logically, that makes complete sense. However, police officers and District Attorneys, and the legal system in general, do not operate on a purely logical basis.

"Resisting arrest" should probably be renamed "Contempt of Cop"

If Ukraine does go nuclear again they will only be following Putin's advice.

Is Ukraine about to go nuclear again?

Ironically, the notion of reacquiring nuclear weapons as a security guarantee is a position publicly advocated by Putin himself: "If you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. ... This is logical: If you have the bomb, no one will touch

Putin: Both causing and suggesting the solution to Ukraine's security problems. Thanks Vladimir Vladimirovich!

And look! He's turning up the heat because in brinkmanship too much is never enough.

Russia Threatens Invasion Unless Ukraine Stops Stopping Separatists

Dutch scramble jets after Russian bombers approach

The Dutch defense department says several NATO member countries scrambled jets Wednesday afternoon after a pair of Russian bomber planes approached their airspace over the North Sea.

The Dutch ministry identified the planes as two Russian TU-95 Bears, and said it had launched two F-16s from Volkel air force base to intercept them. The Russian jets were escorted by aircraft from the Netherlands, Britain and Denmark until they departed.