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am i being intolerant?

no: intolerance of intolerance is not intolerance

scientology is not interested in your rights and freedoms. scientology is intent on enslaving gullible fools. opposing scientology is about protecting rights and freedoms

read this, get a primer on why you should oppose this fungus:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-06-24/news/Scientologys-Crushing-Defeat/

this nonsense should be outlawed

am i being too harsh on an alternative religion?

a system of overt financial enslavement is a valid religion in your mind?

why must the definition of a free society include tolerance of institutions hellbent on purposefully destroying rights and freedoms?

if a con man duped you into writing him a check, do you have to tolerate that crime in the name of free expression?

then why don't you see that is all scientology is and that you must stand against it in the name of your cherishing of human rights and freedoms and dignities?

I remember it well. The headline of the 'Village Vice' read; "Public Baffled As Fools Vie For Office". I just wish it was in their archives.

"I wish an independent 3rd party group could get together and see what they could get through security without being arrested for the experiment."

There used to be 'red team' testing of FAA security procedures - pretty much what you suggest, I think (it was largely government employees used, I think, but they were very capable). Ridgeway writes about what happened to this:

"Another 1993 report showed that in a test, people without authorization broke through the San Francisco airport security system three out of five times--a failure rate of 60 percent. By 1998, out of 450 attempts by the so-called Red Team to breach security at the same airport, 446 succeeded--a failure rate of 99.11 percent. Testers in 1996 at the Frankfurt airport, where the bomb was placed on Pan Am Flight 103, broke through security in 13 out of 13 tries. The situation was so embarrassing that the FAA security chief ordered the group to end its mission, leaving the job of improving security in the hands of the airlines."

Cleaning up the mess of any conceivable "dirty bomb" is a mop and bucket affair.

Mopping every square centimeter of every surface in a large area would be quite an undertaking. Then, how do you dispose of the slop?

Think clean-up from a toxic bomb would be easy? Seventy-five recovery workers from the WTC site have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that were likely caused by their exposure to the toxic stew of Ground Zero, while the EPA said everything was honky-dory. The total number of cancer cases caused by the toxic cloud may be in the hundreds. That wasn't even at attack designed to be toxic.

We can also look to the "clean up" in New Orleans to see just how well we could expect the government to respond to such a disaster. If a dirty bomb just needs a mop and a bucket, surely some spilled water would be even easier, right? Ha, ha. It's funny because it's tragic.

Shit, a full-on nuclear weapon exploded at altitude didn't render Hiroshima uninhabitable.

No, but it killed a whole lot of people - disproportionately children, who were working outdoors clearing firebreaks at the time of the attack - in very nasty ways. Then those who survived the first few years after the bombing had about a 9% chance of dying from cancer. (This study didn't start until 1950, so probably misses the worst of it - people who survived the initial blast and radiation exposure, but got fatal cancers in the first years afterwards.)

If you took a small amount of quality radiologicals, wrapped it around some semtex, and made it go boom! in the middle of Manhattan, you'd kill a couple of people in the explosion, create several score cancer patients, and for years you'd have an area of maybe a square kilometer where few people would be willing to live or work. That's a pretty significant impact.

According to FAS, with a one-foot-long chunk (about a kilogram and a half, if I calculated right) of radioactive cobalt from a food irradiation plant, you could contaminate 1,000 square kilometers and raise the cancer risk for everyone who stayed in Manhattan to 1 in 100. Manhattan real estate would get really cheap.

Now imagine a Ryder truck full of fuel oil, fertilizer, and various other common nitrate/hydrocarbon mixes to make up an explosive sundae, and for the cherry on top, say 8 kilograms of high grade uranium. Place in a highly populated area, preferably on a breezy day, and let the good times roll.

It won't take long for someone to figure out how to detect the gamma errors and create what amounts to a geiger counters on laptop computers. If this bill passes http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0803,thompson,78873,2.html will everyone be required to get a permit for their laptop computers? ;-)

In New York City there's a city councilman pushing an effort to (you sitting down?) force owners of biological, chemical, and radiological hazard detectors to register the devices with the police. This is to prevent widespread panic that can result from false positives which, as the article points out, has never actually happened. More likely to prevent citizens from monitoring air quality on their own (think the WTC cleanup.) Thankfully the city's science community had a conniption and has managed to put the kibosh on the effort - for now.

Cheney was encumbered by a conflict of interest because, in classic Washington revolving-door style, he was re-entering politics having just served as CEO of Halliburton who ended up profiting heavily from the Iraq war.

Guantanamo's detainees are not who you think they are. Only 5% of them were picked up "on the battlefield" by US forces. 55% are not even accused of engaging in hostile acts against the US, and many of the rest have been picked up after being identified by 3rd parties responding to a bounty program, or have been identified as having roles such as "cooks assistant."

Guantanamo is an utter travesty, a testament to a nearly sociopathic streak in US foreign policy.

Overview here. Detailed study here.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&view=text&hl=en-CA&q=flushing,+queens,+NY&ie=UTF8&ll=40.764324,-73.829842&spn=0.015342,0.040169&z=15&iwloc=addr&om=1

How can we even trust the rating system when it rates Sesame Street as "Adults Only" for the coverage/comments on /. and TFA.

God forbid this actually make it mainstream. I am not advocating that the subject is ok, but just who the hell mainly lives in Africa? No one complained during all the previous incarnations where it took place in America...hello?!? terrorist training ground via video game? FSCK! Get off the damn political correct horse and take responsibility for your life!

We visit the rating issue frequently, and I still stand by my comment to this from January last year.

Make it a felony, convict your opposition, now they can't vote you out... (Not saying it is done... but it sure must tempt some...)

Oh, it's been done. "At least 1.4 million black men--13 percent of all black men--cannot vote because of state felon disenfranchisement laws."

Is this the same IBM that assisted the Nazis during WWII?

I'm sure their intentions are pure.

There are two basic problems. The primary one is that doctors are legally restricted about how much medication they can give, and are taking professional risks if they don't seriously restrict the prescriptions they write for these medications. The government is stopping doctors from helping people in the name of the "War on Drugs."

The second problem is that only the pain sufferer knows what they are going through. I think some doctors do not give the sufferer enough choice about what degree of medication they take. My doctor denied me a hydrocodone (Vicodin) refill, despite these facts: 1. It provided pain relief when over the counter drugs did not. 2. My pain was very bad and was reducing my ability to work, sleep, and generally function. 3. I was only taking 50% of the maximum allowed daily dose. I had not abused the medication in any way, and used it only when most needed. 4. A reasonable dose of hydrocodone is actually safer than many over-the-counter pain drugs.

The only reason my doctor could give for denying my medication was the risk of developing addiction. But I had showed no signs of addiction, and when I stopped the medication I experienced no withdrawal. I just experienced a lot of pain.

For more very interesting thoughts see this article, "The DEA's War on Pain Doctors"

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be sufficiently self-aware to spend the rest of his days agonizing over the fact that he's been such an abysmal failure.

His record, as president, matches perfectly his business record.

The thing that scares me the most is I vaguely recall him saying something like, "I want to preside over the Rapture prophesied in Revelations" (which of course requires an Armageddon), and forcing Russia to change the direction their nukes are pointing seems like a good first step down the road to Hell for all of us.

I definitely remember him saying, "I want to be a war president."

(Holy fuck, when I started this I didn't realize that I'd find so much evidence to link to. Wow.)

Another poster mentioned this link . Interestingly the article was written back in 2003. The fact that we've lost so many soldiers with little means for a substantive response, suggests that this effort was an utter failure- at least for any military application. Used against a civilian population (which is probably the ultimate intent), may yield something more positive (but that depends on which side of the fence you happen to be standing).

How are you going to be able to run surveillance backward from a car bomb detonating to the origin point of the bombers -- or forward, following them to where they're hiding -- without a pervasive net of surveillance? And once you have the capacity to do this in a hostile environment, where you can assume that the opposing forces will place a priority on disabling the surveillance system, it's no stretch at all, given the track record of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, to see the government deploying these systems in the US for our 'protection', where the populace would have much less incentive to disable surveillance (after all, if you don't have anything to hide, why would you object to someone watching you?) -- particularly since this link in TFA, where it's specifically stated "The primary application is for homeland security"; you might want to try reading more deeply than just a light scan of the first few paragraphs. The potential of this technology reminds me strongly of David Drake's dystopian story collection Lacey and His Friends, written back in the '70s.

The misunderstanding of Islam is just plain dangerous. Many old ladies proudly display pictures of their favourite grandchildren wearing Ayatollah kit - the black adab - because Moslem's started the European academic tradition. The quads and cloisters at Oxford and Cambridge recreate the Andalusian universities, where they made sense. Academic citation recreates Muslim chains of transmission - roughly the equivalent of the Christian apostolic succession. Mathematicians chase "x" because Europeans didn't recognise "shai", the Arabic for "that which is sought", but Greek "chi" sounded similar and they wrote that instead. Chi Anglicized is "x" of course. Europeans got the point of algebra and algorithms, but alchemy - the art of transforming the operator and seeing things differently - was just too epistomoligically advanced and got converted by Chinese Whispers into wrong chemistry. With the exception of rare cases like Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton, most Europeans are still unable to get the point of alchemy. Many stars have funny sounding names because they are Arabic. "Doctor Mirabilis" by James Blish is a very good intro to this stuff. All this because while the Hebrews say the material world was created as a wind-up, and the Christians say it is a trick, and the Buddhists say it doesn't exist at all, Islam says it is the work of God, and it is our spiritual duty to study it. These days some people look at the primitive state of many Moslems and imagine that they were all sitting around going "More tea Vicar?" before Mohammad came along, and then they all went mad. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the Arabic language, the Arabs had absolutely nothing before Mohammad. Their entire society and culture comes from the genius of one man, who they believe was divinely inspired. That is in large part why they are so sensitive about his memory - they all know exactly what he did for them. Badmouthing Mohammad is like badmouthing Jesus, Washington, Lincon, Bacon and Thomas Crapper in one go. Interestingly, the so-called militant Islam is always strongest in populations where Western values have been or have become dominant - the Taleban were created and funded by the West, also look at Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Iran's still dealing with the backlash against the Shah. Turkey actually has more crazy Creationists than the USA: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/25 65/25653701.jpg And anyone who thinks the Taleban's mockery of Islam has a monopoly on lunacy hasn't been following the news: http://www.kxxv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5785699 http://www.bi-valley.com/Articles/GovernmentTerroi smAgainstPhysicians.htm http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0345,owen,48381,1 .html

> Censorship is the fault of the Chinese government, All Google ever
> did was respect and abide by the laws of the country they're trying to do business in.

When IBM installed and programmed card machines to sort out the Jews and Gays, they were thinking just like you.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0213/black.php

All that is required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing, and greedy ones to say they're just following the laws in the country they're trying to do business in. Just because your government tells you to lie to, rat on or murder your neighbor, doesn't mean you have to do it.

Speaking of mindless circular logic

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0638,tomorrow,744 87,9.html

My big concern is that the current US Administration thinks it's their duty to actually bring about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. If not the current administration, then at least some of the people who vote for them. After all, the main reason for supporting Israel is due to the belief that if the "Holy Land" is not controlled by the Jews at the time of Rapture, all humans will go to hell or Christ won't return or some other nonsense.

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/086669.htm

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0420,perlstein,53 582,1.html

Shitdrummer.

Google didn't just buy dark fiber, Google also leased space in NYC in one of its largest buildings that happens to sit right on top of the 9th Avenue Fiber Highway and boasts one of the biggest Global Peering Facilities. From the article:

For the time being, by installing itself above Chelsea's broadband "fiber highway" at 111 Eighth Avenue, St. Arnaud explained, Google can bypass many of the major telecommunications firms and interface directly with Tier 2 service providers such as Level 3 Communications or XO Communications, which also are located in the building. This will significantly cut down the costs associated with reaching business customers on Wall Street and in the media and fashion worlds, and generally throughout the Northeast power corridor from D.C. to Boston. The arrangement also suits the Tier 2 providers, which are "thrilled because they can get content directly from Google and bypass" the major telecom and cable Tier 1 providers, St. Arnaud says.

I think this is Google's way of telling Ed Whitacre to "put this in your Pipes and smoke it." Y'all notice the date on that Voice article, I submitted it here the day after. Oh, and Google's been posting lots of NYC jobs on their website, though none are tech postings.

Countering propaganda by investigating and reporting on behind-the-scenes public relations campaigns by corporations, industries, governments and other powerful institutions.

Informing and assisting grassroots citizen activism that promotes public health, economic justice, ecological sustainability and human rights.

The link got all screwed up...sorry:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 04,5.html

Transporter_ii

Link got mangeled, sorry:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 04,5.html

Transporter_ii

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 Since 2003, the NYPD has been filming protesters at political demonstrations, regardless of whether anything illegal's going on. City lawyers were in court last month defending the practice, arguing that what happens in public view is fair game. But police evidently aren't so keen on surveillance when the cameras are turned on them--particularly when those cameras show them abusing free-street-parking privileges. Transporter_ii

wikipedia: A police state is a state in which the government maintains strict control over the population, particularly through suspension of civil rights...

One of the things I really appreciate about the founders is that they gave us equality under the law (if we could keep it, and apparently we couldn't).

One of my personal definitions of a police state, is when the police can do things that are illegal for "normal people" to do...because they are above the law.

Well, they want to photograph us, video tape us, monitor our every move, but they however, not only expect their privacy...they freaking get it by force of law and a jack boot for those that still don't "get it."

Here is a perfect example:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 04,5.html [villagevoice.com]

Since 2003, the NYPD has been filming protesters at political demonstrations, regardless of whether anything illegal's going on. City lawyers were in court last month defending the practice, arguing that what happens in public view is fair game.

But police evidently aren't so keen on surveillance when the cameras are turned on them--particularly when those cameras show them abusing free-street-parking privileges.

Transporter_ii

when people think they are above the law. Bush certainly thinks he is above the law, but you have to be careful how you point that out, or you get modded down around here.

Seriously, Bush signs bills into law, but then he goes to his little books and writes in a little exemption to the law for himself, as He sees fit. It doesn't matter what Congress or the courts say, Bush has a little book to write in, and he isn't afraid to do so. He has shown little regard for the rule of law, but he can get away with it because he has the support of all that is holy and moral in America, the churches.

As the police state writes laws that put themselves above the law, I think you are right, they looked straight to the top for their inspiration.

For example, they want to monitor and video tape our every move, but they are above the law:

Watching the Detectives
The NYPD wants to take your picture--but beware of turning your lens on the cops by Sarah Ferguson April 10th, 2006 5:30 PM

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 04,5.html

NYPD on filming protests: No harm, no foul
by Jarrett Murphy

Since 2003, the NYPD has been filming protesters at political demonstrations, regardless of whether anything illegal's going on. City lawyers were in court last month defending the practice, arguing that what happens in public view is fair game.

But police evidently aren't so keen on surveillance when the cameras are turned on them--particularly when those cameras show them abusing free-street-parking privileges....

Transporter_ii

wikipedia: A police state is a state in which the government maintains strict control over the population, particularly through suspension of civil rights...

One of the things I really appreciate about the founders is that they gave us equality under the law (if we could keep it, and apparently we couldn't).

One of my personal definitions of a police state, is when the police can do things that are illegal for "normal people" to do...because they are above the law.

Well, they want to photograph us, video tape us, monitor our every move, but they however, not only expect their privacy...they freaking get it by force of law and a jack boot for those that still don't "get it."

Here is a perfect example:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0615,ferguson,728 04,5.html

Since 2003, the NYPD has been filming protesters at political demonstrations, regardless of whether anything illegal's going on. City lawyers were in court last month defending the practice, arguing that what happens in public view is fair game.

But police evidently aren't so keen on surveillance when the cameras are turned on them--particularly when those cameras show them abusing free-street-parking privileges.

Transporter_ii

The case of Maher Arar suggests no such restrictions encumber U.S. efforts. In September 2002, Arar was returning to Canada from Tunisia when he was detained by U.S. immigration authorities while in transit at JFK. He was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for 12 days and interrogated, he said, by FBI and immigration officials. Then he was put on a small plane, and after a stopover in Washington, flown to Amman, Jordan, where Arar was handed over to Jordanian authorities. He said the Jordanians beat him for hours, and then took him to Syria. His Syrian captors tortured him, beating him on the palms, hips, and lower back with electric cables.

After Arar's release, which caused a storm in Canada but barely raised a whisper in the U.S., Syrian authorities said they had no interest in him, and had interrogated him in a show of goodwill towards the U.S. Arar believed his interrogation was largely related to a casual acquaintance, a terrorism suspect who has also been released from jail in Syria.

"Oh yes I loved being in new york when the trains werent running. 60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50. No one owes you a job or a life you have to make your own."

Yeah, because 60k in NY is such a fortune. The city needs to keep its working class and not allow the state operated MTA to drive them away, no pun intended.
Can't have a big apple that has a super rich and shiny skin, a poverty stricken core, and no middle...

In NYC it was just reported how non-union employers are still hiring thugs from the ghetto to come up to picket lines and threaten strikers with guns. But this is 2006, corporate doesn't need professional strike breakers anymore when they have all of you non-union employees willing to do the dirty work for them. http://villagevoice.com/news/0619,robbins,73148,5. html

It's unbelievable how non-union employees try to drag union workers down to their disposebable level. Keep sacrificing yourself and your family to the major shareholders instead of trying to achieve the same shared successes that union workers won.

I think the Exxon Valdez has a hole in a nd is a good example of the problems of the MI Complex, so I don't know why it's mentioned here.

Selling weapons is ethically questionable -- A nation selling wepaons to other countries in this way is repugnant, and if nothing else serves to weaken the high moral pro-life stand of many powerful Americans.

Weapons may be well tested before they're depolyed, but they command a better price if you can show the client that they helped defeat such and such in a real battle, and experiences like the timing problems of the patriot anti-missile missile show that real world use is essential to discover all the little bugs. Besides, using up munitions means more must be purchased from GE.

Traditionally a "battle hardened" force is more effective than "Green" troops, but I agree that this is much less relevant in modern warfare. However, it helps that the next generation can remember individuals from the previous generation who fought and/or died for their country, it establishes a tradition of honour and nobility and defence of the flag etc etc etc.

He possibly got the ideas from John Ralston-Saul, a critical thinker. Perhaps the poster got these ideas from an objective observation of the things around him. The crusader is a massive artillery piece produced by a member of the Carlyle Group called United Defence. Find out more here:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0218,gray,34384,6 .html

I agree with you that China is much much worse than the US, and I applaud the senator for trying to make companies try to take responsibility for their actions. However, when it comes to personal freedoms, under the current US administration things have taken a sharp turn for the worse, that is why I feel I have to comment this statement:

When was the last time the FBI showed up at someone's house simply for running a blog criticizing the US government?

Appearently you can get an intimidating visit for having an anti-Bush poster on your wall, or saying something negative about him at the gym.

The expression of the opinion was in a newspaper, a very public forum. I don't care if they claimed they weren't an official spokesperson or not, they made a very public statement.

Are you implying that anyone with a job can not talk to a newspaper about a controversial personal opinion? Some free country! Read the article, it never mentions her ex-employer (and hey, she is seriously cute!).

In this particular case, she also made the comment "If there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them." I'm sure this goes over well in a LAW firm that has serious concerns like attourney-client privledge.

She it talking about holding down Shift key while inserting a music CD. Sure you want to do a business with a lawyer who installs root kits on his PC?

Wikipedia is an adhocracy. It's also anarcho-syndicalist, or libertarian, or communist, depending on what filter you apply. Co-founder Larry Sanger called it a polity; I'd say that's accurate (though the stakes aren't as high as in real polities -- nobody can get shot at through the monitor).

Just to add to the discussions of the relative evils of PKing, and avatar rape, the essay "A Rape in Cyberspace" by Julian Dibbell is interesting reading for the effect avatar rape can have:

http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/0543,50thdibb ell,69273,31.html

Another 'trend' in US property crime statistics is that often unless the victim can prove that the property was intentionally stolen, the police are systematically and fraudulently classifying the thefts instead as 'lost property' to reduce their reported crime rates.

Bill's choices in charities don't make sense. He's basically taken money from the first world (with monopolistic practices) and is busily pouring it down the blackhole of 3rd world charities.

The money that he pours into Africa gets stolen by the corrupt heads of the countries. As long as African truckers can buy whores for a few dollars at truck stops, they'll be having "dry sex" and spreading AIDs.

He could copy Soros and get more bang for the buck if he invested in somewhat less hopeless causes. I'm not saying I agree with Soros's goals; I'm just saying that he will likely have a greater effect on the world by spending money in places like Ukraine, Russia and Hungary.

Unless Bill can come up with a cure for AIDS that costs a few dollars to deliver to someone in the bush, all his AIDS-in-Africa charities won't do much. I figure Bill must know this, and figures that if he gives enough money to non-whites, liberal white people will think he's a good person.

On the other hand, I found out today that Google pays for pizza in the CS labs at various university's throughout the country. I think that's really impressive. They certainly have their eye on the prize!

Check out this article from back in 1999. 6 years ago - and this guy said he was going to be raking in millions in profits by 2000.

There may be anomolous results this guy has seen, but that doesn't mean his claims or explanations for his observations are all correct. But hey, I'd be first in line to party as soon as somebody actually builds a free-energy machine. Just show me and 20 friends (all physicists of course), allowing for free inspection of the apparatus, and I'll concede this one.

... you've come a long way

FYI, the Dome radio station went live yesterday. They ended up sidestepping the local Harris County/FEMA hacks who wouldn't give them access to set up a transmitter inside the Astrodome and got the FCC to issue a new license to let them broadcast from the parking lot. here's a Village Voice update: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0537,fergusonweb2 ,67837,2.html

I didn't have time to fact check this article, but it sure was an interesting read. And many of the facts seem to jive with the other articles noted here.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0537,ferguson,677 01,2.html

1. Sign a busty, untalented ethnic pop diva at your record company
2. Pay radio stations around the country hoards of money to play her phony 'hits'
3. Declare 'hits' too popular for existing iTunes pricing structure
4. Profit!

They've been allowing "terrorists" to have lawyers, etc.

While they may allow "terrorists" to have attorneys, these people have to get permission from their persecuters to talk to the lawyer. They may be slapped with another charge if they don't get that permission, violating a gag order. Though that's not exactly what happened to Sibel Edmonds, she did have a gag order slapped on her. A translator hired by the FBI after 9/11 she became a whistleblower when she got fed up with the incompetence of the people in her office and yet ran right into supervisors covering their asses. The Justice Department, an oxymoron, fired her then classified what she had to say, after she testified and supplied the information to congress."

In the Name of Sibel Edmonds
Intelligence whistleblowers storm Capitol Hill, asking for the right to be heard.
by James Ridgeway
April 29th, 2005 11:11 AM

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Galvanized by the case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, intelligence agents representing more than 50 current and former federal employees--calling themselves the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition--stormed Capitol Hill yesterday to demand Congressional protection from retaliation by their dead beat bosses in the intelligence bureaucracy.

Many of these whistleblowers have tried to get someone to listen to what they know about national security issues, from cover-ups to possible espionage. More often than not, they say, their protests result in vicious, demeaning, ruinous retaliation by the bosses. In any number of cases, they're put under gag orders.

Edmonds, a translator hired to bolster the FBI's weak languages staff after 9-11, says she was forced to go public with accusations that the work she was observing was not just flawed but was actually dangerous to national security. The government responded by firing her and classifying all of her attempts to speak out, including an interview with 60 Minutes. She is suing the feds for violation of First Amendment rights. A judge this month moved to close the hearings, over the objections of national media.

The list of her supporters yesterday ran the gamut of the federal intelligence community, including more than half a dozen FBI agents along with federal employees from the National Security Agency, Customs, Homeland Security, Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, Defense Intelligence, Department of Energy, the FAA, and the CIA.

The theme was the same throughout: How to stop their supervisors from retaliating against them for protesting wrongdoing within their agencies. One NSA agent told how when he raised questions about a fellow worker, saying he'd spotted the telltale signs of possible espionage, he was ignored, then sent for an emergency psychological examination and stripped of his security clearance because he was found to be crazy.

Demoted from his job as an analyst, he was dispatched to the motor pool and made to drive the higher-ups around. Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who blew the whistle on the bureau's handling of warnings before 9-11. John Vincent, a retired longtime FBI counterterrorism agent from Chicago who currently works for Judicial Watch, came to speak for--not himself but for fellow agent Robert Wright, who is under a gag order. A former U.S. marshal told how his supervisors retaliated against his protests and "left me on a stakeout to die."

No one in the intelligence community has whistleblower protection of any kind. Most observers would think it sheer madness for these people to speak out. According to a new study by the Project on Government Oversight, what happens is a slow stigmatizing of the whistleblower. It begins with marginalizing the employee by taking away his or her job. Next, the security clearanced it taken away, effectively firing him. A lie detector test is given. If the whistleblower persists, he or she is subjected to a retaliatory investigation.

FWIW, this comes from Dan Savage's sex advice column. I can't find the original column, but here is a link: http://www.villagevoice.com/people/0349,savage,491 52,24.html Essentially, Savage was outraged by Santorum's rabid homophobia and wanted to coin a phrase based on his name. Since this is a family website, I won't tell you what he and his readers came up with, but you can read for yourself. Savage's column is one of the best. His attitude is usually do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. So he naturally gets pissed when senators like Santorum meddle in the bedroom

Are you afraid that someone is going to track down your Super-Private online goings-on and share your secret with others? For example... is Safeway (grocery chain) going to track down all your online purchases of ass ailment treatments, and then, in their store, announce over the loud speaker, John Doe, We're currently featuring 10 cents off Assinol Plus with the purchase of Roidwipes2000?

No, they've already done much worse than that. Like turning those records over to federal law-enforcement.

Also, the cornerstone of paranoia is the mistaken belief that others actually care. They just don't. You're not that interesting (nor am I), nobody really cares, so relax.

That was true fifty years ago. Now everyone is a potential drug user or anti-globalization activist or copyright violator or terrorist or something the state doesn't like; and data surveillance is cheap and easy. The easier it gets, the more the question moves from "Why should we bother watching this guy?" to "Why not?"

Surveillance is moving to an opt-out model, rather than an opt-in.

last year I had a research assignment based on modifying our dna and transgenics, and it's quite an interesting subject, i won't be so arrogant as to link to that assignment, but I will post links to some of the articles i referred to..

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Today-Food-Tomorrow-Hu mans.htm
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/index/fdavet/1999/july.html #transgenics
http://www.ifgene.org/proscons.htm
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0317,baard,43560, 1.html
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1640

and no, i did not RTFA.