One problem is that various forums don't have a way to add nofollow or other attributes to links... Where do people go to complain? Besides the various merchant review/complaint sites, they often go to forums. The second problem is that many forum scrips see something like a URL, they automatically parse that into a link as default behavior.
But the technology did not exist then to quickly calculate local taxes.
And you think the situation is better now? Hah! Sales tax is one of the most complicated things a business needs to understand. There's a few companies which exist solely for the purpose of keeping track and providing a database of state, county and city taxes, for each state, each county and each city for the entire US. They often provide a yearly subscription type of deal, and from what I understand, it's often not exactly easy, or cheap to integrate these ginormous databases into one's shopping cart of choice. Also recognize: there's special taxing districts and such, where one resident may have to pay a tax that his neighbor across the street does not! They also have to keep track of silly things like this!
The saving grace is that only large companies with a presence in that state need charge for these taxes. An outfit of that size can can easily afford these subscriptions and to pay for it to be integrated into their web-store. It might actually have been easier for an ye-old shopkeeper to be provided something analogous to a phone book where he could look up the local tax.
If congress ever approaches this issue, it's surely going to have to be applied fairly, and across the board. Which means that small businesses which deal across state lines will be in for a real...interesting experience. A VAT-like system would be the only practical solution which explains why it hasn't been tackled.
Well, if you eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise and sleep eight hours, counting the time spent on the throne because of all the fiber; it really doesn't leave much time for feeling tired or irritable, or girlfriend face-stabbing for that matter. Maybe that's the idea...
If I tried to find a country which is truly comparable to the US to make such a comparison, I would fail from the start. Our place pretty unique amongst the world's countries-one for being a relatively young nation, and two for being more diverse than most.
Besides the GDP and other social issues you bring up--and I agree with those points you've made....There's also the 'melting pot' factor of the US, it's certianly had it's positives and negatives, but I believe the former outweigh the latter. Outside of the recent immigration of millions of African/Turk/Arab (etc.) followers of Islam, I don't think many Europeans can truly appreciate how diverse our metropolitan cities are. If you point randomly on a globe, it's a guarantee we have people from that place!
At first, most all US immigrants formed ghettos around their cultural ties, and more or less left everyone else alone. The next generation saw more intermingling and more strife. And eventually it started to level off and finally reach a state of assimilation... However, the two cultures in the US which are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violence and crime are fractured from the culture-at-large and show no little need or want to assimilate--much like Europe's new Muslim contingent.
While there are surely different cultures and ethnicity in European life, you've mostly lived with each-other for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I think Russia shares similar problems thanks to the expansionist philosophy of the Russian Empire, which was going strong until the 19th century, and then it really picked up with the advent of the Soviet Union.
The USSR tried to force assimilation en masse--we see how well that worked out! I don't say these things to be racist, I'm fine with other peoples and cultures--but it's the way I see how all of these things came to be. It's a big complicated issue at any rate.
Sure, at least few of these countries fit your arbitrary 1/3d of USA's GDP benchmark:
Russia ~$15k USD Seychelles ~$23k Trinidad & Tobago ~$19k Barbados ~$22k Puerto Rico: ~$17k vs. USA's ~$45,000
There's surely more. The problem with many of these places is that the very wealthy skew the curve--isn't it? You have a clutch of multi-millionaires, maybe a billionaire or two, a mob of people who live in squalor and very few people in between... But the average GDP doesn't look so terrible.
Kind of like how certain US cities skew the curve for the rest of the country. Consider this: our national homicide rate is 5 out of 100,000. Cities like New Orleans (52), Detroit (46), Baltimore (37)--and that's just a handful... They really fudge it up for the rest of the country.
Getting back to my original point: even if I am comparing the US to third world countries, failed communist states... These are places which functionally have *complete bans on civilian ownership of firearms*, as are places in Europe which have half, or even a quarter of our national homicide rate.
The grand point is, if someone really wants to kill, they'll get it done regardless of the tools they have available. Furthermore, millions upon millions of Americans certianly have some of the best tools created by man to accomplish that particular end--and yet they overwhelmingly don't use them for that purpose!
El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, South Africa, Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, Swaziland, Panama, Paraguay, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe, Lithuania, Thailand, Zambia, Belarus, Barbados, Seychelles, Uganda, Georgia, Estonia, Ukraine, Turkey, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Argentina?... In that order of homicides per capita?
All of whom lead the US in homicides, and all of whom have strict gun control laws? Admittedly, a lot of these places are shithole and third world countries, but there are many which aren't.
Maybe, just maybe it's about their culture? No... Then you would next recognize that a few of the US's larger cities are responsible for the vast majority of our so-called "gun crime", not because they have more guns, but because they are more prone to a culture of violence and lawlessness in general. You would also then learn that not only do they have vastly more firearm related homicides, they also have more non-gun related homicides per capita than any of the rest of our fine country.
You'd also find that many "USians" live in places with virtually no homicide, firearm related or otherwise, and it's a really big fucking deal when someone is killed--usually when some tramp comes to town, or in the passion of a domestic squabble. These are also the places which tend to have higher concentrations of gun owners. Imagine that.
Actually, you struck a chord that might yield interesting results: Serve on a jury, be immune to any state and federal income tax for that year. For many people that would basically be a 15-20% (or greater) bonus. It would cost the government (in terms of lost tax) a tiny amount, since relatively few people sit on a jury any given year.
That would bring in people who actually want to be on a jury, since they stand to benefit, and it would also encourage (presumably higher educated) high-earners to not use the "financial hardship" get out of jail card... It really would be like winning a lottery.
And how many years do we wait to execute death row inmates? I read something recently that indicated it's over ten years on average. Some have been detained over 30 years, and a quarter of the executionees die of natural causes! When we do finally get around to execution time, we often treat them better than our pets (giving them anesthetic before the lethal dose)--in a quiet setting.
And then we talk about it's lack of deterrent effect. I say give them one appeal in a court distant from their original trial to help weed out miscarriage of justice, and then get on with it, and make it public and make it bloody.
I think there is a pretty easy to see difference between removing a liver from a dead guy, and removing one from a living human being.
Picture this:
Bad Guy #1: Hey Doc, we need to cut this jerk open and take his liver.
Bad Guy #2: Yeah, we got an order, this guy in London needs a transplant, there's a healthy..finder's fee in it for ya. Demand has kind of increased now that we can't get our organs from the recently deceased.
Surgeon: Well, unfortunately he'll die without a liver. It's against the Hippocratic oath. You know, first, do no harm....Nobody was getting hurt the other way. It just wouldn't be right.
Bad Guy #1: *pulls out a pistol and racks the slide, sticks the gun to the victim's ear and blows his brains all over the makeshift ER*
Bad Guy #2: Whadya say now doc?
Surgeon: *gulp* Well, I guess it would be unethical to waste his organs now.
It's not much of a reach. People have done worse for less reward. Once you go down the road of taking things from folks without their permission, it gets progressively easier and easier to justify greater and greater transgressions. Today it's "well he's dead, nobody is hurt, and we'll save another life", tomorrow it could be "well, he's homeless and doesn't have any family. Nobody will miss him."
It's about respect. If you can't respect the dead body, you wouldn't respect it when it was walking and talking. If you're going to covertly play Invasion of the Body Snatchers with people's deceased loved ones, it's not that far of a leap to do it to a living human being.
Some might argue that our emotional bonds and reverence for the dead is one of the traits which helped divide our species from the rest of the animal kingdom... I for one, would agree and I find it disturbing that someone would engage in this activity for such casual reasons.
You're forgetting the 12k Shahzad received from someone in Pakistan, ostensibly to facilitate the 'attack'. You don't care to include that person, or persons as part of his asinine plan? How about the Pakistani training camp he admitted to attending? These people were somehow not a part of his operation, even though they weren't present, weren't charged and weren't convicted?
How convenient.
As for you-you're just a sufferer of rectal-cranial inversion syndrome. You're not creative, nor smart enough to counter anything I said in those small collections of words you call paragraphs, and instead choose to toss out a grade-school quality derision for the same reason a cephalopod squirts out ink; as a decoy, so that he may scurry away from whatever creature he deems a superior force.
I'm sorry, I missed a solution in there somewhere.
That's the point. There is no solution, other than to stop giving nutjobs a reason to sacrifice themselves (and anyone who happens to be in their vicinity)--and we likewise fail hard on that issue.
Security is like the layers of an onion. The more secure you make the center of the onion, the more you neglect the outer layers. I'm going to make a prediction here: There will not, I repeat, will never be an attack on a single airliner the magnitude of 9/11, ever again.
We've already made it to the point of diminishing returns. Metal detectors and bomb sniffers will catch 99.9%+ percent of the external threats against aircraft, and I feel sorry for that 0.1% who actually make it on the plane to cause a scene. They'll have their lights snuffed out by their fellow passenger in a blink.
The center of the onion (aircraft) is/was so well guarded, even without x-rays and groping that the chances of a successful, conventional attack against an airliner is absurdly low. Mission accomplished. There simply is no further justification for throwing money at this perceived problem, no less for violating people with personal x-rays and unwarranted physical contact to their private parts.
But what have they done in the process of eliminating the risk to the aircraft? They've pushed the outer layer of security out into the airport terminals. Where there's lines of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people waiting to chose their poison of high-energy photons or gonad groping. There is no meaningful way to stop even the stupidest, least creative of attackers. Do you really need to have it spelled out further?
TSA's track record? Yeah, they've done a pretty good job. Lord knows they're great at catching nail clippers and tiny bottles of fluid. And the things which could have been improved have been improved.... Namely the presence of explosive sniffers--which would have caught the retarded "shoe bomber" were they installed in 2001, and had the flight originated in the US, anyway.
But the other way to look at it: there really hasn't been a significant terrorist op against US soil since 2001. The shoe & underwear bombers have been their best tries so far (that we, the public, know about) and those were both haphazard, poorly executed attacks, with little chance of success--originating at foreign airports! And then you have the retards in Times Square. On the whole, it just doesn't seem like the bad guys have their shit together, and thank $deity for that.
Who says it couldn't be one of the security people themselves? I mean, look at the security screeners we hire to watch us. Heck, I'd put money on some of the guys I've seen being felons.
There's undoubtedly A TON of ways to get contraband into an airport. Just like getting things into prison--they routinely get drugs, weapons and all kinds of crap in so-called secure areas of prisons... And that's a place where your 'customers' are locked up most of the time, and are subject to even more invasive searches. Screw the cliched file-in-a-cake shit! Who wants to bet this contraband most often comes from prison guards?
It all comes down to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as usual. For every wall they put up, where's there's a will, there's a way to get around it.
You know, he's right--in the sense that some Muslim individuals did great things, particularly in mathematics, old world physics, and the various other sciences (indeed aiding the creation of the modern scientific method). These individuals contributed to many things we know and love today. True enough.
Now, Islam? Did Islam say "go and do these things, and learn about the world!"? Not as far as I know. Getting down to it, claiming these advances in understanding to the Islamic faith is like attributing Isaac Newton's, or Leibniz, or any number of other discoveries to Christianity.
No, the attribution should be placed where it is deserved--to the individuals who discovered and distilled these ideas into something useful. These people just happened to be Christian, or Muslim, or Hindi, or whatever.
Voting for a third party is (unfortunately) a pretty ineffectual protest move
I don't know about that. The recent race for governor in Colorado worked out this way:
Hickenlooper (D) 54% Tom Tancredo (American Constitution Party) 33% Dan Maes (R) 10%.
Right up till the end, it was forecasted that Hickenlooper and Tancredo would be neck and neck, and I think what happened was this: A lot of Republicans voted Democrat, as well as third party, simply because there was no way in hell Maes was going to win, and they didn't like that asshat Tancredo. I'm no friend to the American Constitutional party--but if Maes would have dropped from the race like Tancredo wanted, Colorado may have had a third-party governor. What's really interesting is that Colorado has only ~2,200 voters registered to the American Constitutional Party, yet their candidate won 33% of the vote.
The problem as I see it is this: we need to get third party candidates in lower offices before they'll be seriously considered for higher offices, yet there is just about zero effort put into getting those offices. People are dead tired of our major parties getting into office and jerking off. The energy to boot them out is building, if we could only figure how to use it.
Well, I guess what I mean is that most people don't even realize it's possible to bring a firearm along on a jet ride, and naturally assume it's not something that is done.
Yeah, you're not going to make it far trying to carry it on. Not even Joe Blow Police Officer can do that.
If I understand correctly, a blank-firing starter pistol also qualifies for this restriction.
That it does indeed. Someone wrote a guide to doing the checked firearm thing in far more detail than I can echo here (and I can't find the article), but it's also important to pack another lock or two for the case--in the event the retards cut your lock, you can always lock the case back up and be on your merry way.
Also, the airlines may have rules above and beyond TSA's, so it's necessary to check that out.
The reason I became interested in it, is I often check camera equipment that's just not practical to carry on... And I have a CCW with reciprocity in most states I travel to, so... Bonus.
Always check a firearm--and make sure the case for the firearm is capable of holding your valuables. Cameras, computers, whatever. It's perfectly legal, and usually easy enough. Use a throw-away pistol if you don't want to risk loosing fancy guns.
And, unlike standard baggage, you have to use a lock and case THEY can't open... And if they want to see the contents, by their own regulations YOU have to be present! Make sure your cell # is plastered all over the case.
If someone (TSA, airport, whoever) ever lost or stole a checked in case containing a gun... Well, let's just say there's no surer or quicker way to see their representatives collectively crap their pants.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem is that various forums don't have a way to add nofollow or other attributes to links... Where do people go to complain? Besides the various merchant review/complaint sites, they often go to forums. The second problem is that many forum scrips see something like a URL, they automatically parse that into a link as default behavior.
But the technology did not exist then to quickly calculate local taxes.
And you think the situation is better now? Hah! Sales tax is one of the most complicated things a business needs to understand. There's a few companies which exist solely for the purpose of keeping track and providing a database of state, county and city taxes, for each state, each county and each city for the entire US. They often provide a yearly subscription type of deal, and from what I understand, it's often not exactly easy, or cheap to integrate these ginormous databases into one's shopping cart of choice. Also recognize: there's special taxing districts and such, where one resident may have to pay a tax that his neighbor across the street does not! They also have to keep track of silly things like this!
The saving grace is that only large companies with a presence in that state need charge for these taxes. An outfit of that size can can easily afford these subscriptions and to pay for it to be integrated into their web-store. It might actually have been easier for an ye-old shopkeeper to be provided something analogous to a phone book where he could look up the local tax.
If congress ever approaches this issue, it's surely going to have to be applied fairly, and across the board. Which means that small businesses which deal across state lines will be in for a real...interesting experience. A VAT-like system would be the only practical solution which explains why it hasn't been tackled.
Well, if you eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise and sleep eight hours, counting the time spent on the throne because of all the fiber; it really doesn't leave much time for feeling tired or irritable, or girlfriend face-stabbing for that matter. Maybe that's the idea...
If I tried to find a country which is truly comparable to the US to make such a comparison, I would fail from the start. Our place pretty unique amongst the world's countries-one for being a relatively young nation, and two for being more diverse than most.
Besides the GDP and other social issues you bring up--and I agree with those points you've made....There's also the 'melting pot' factor of the US, it's certianly had it's positives and negatives, but I believe the former outweigh the latter. Outside of the recent immigration of millions of African/Turk/Arab (etc.) followers of Islam, I don't think many Europeans can truly appreciate how diverse our metropolitan cities are. If you point randomly on a globe, it's a guarantee we have people from that place!
At first, most all US immigrants formed ghettos around their cultural ties, and more or less left everyone else alone. The next generation saw more intermingling and more strife. And eventually it started to level off and finally reach a state of assimilation... However, the two cultures in the US which are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violence and crime are fractured from the culture-at-large and show no little need or want to assimilate--much like Europe's new Muslim contingent.
While there are surely different cultures and ethnicity in European life, you've mostly lived with each-other for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I think Russia shares similar problems thanks to the expansionist philosophy of the Russian Empire, which was going strong until the 19th century, and then it really picked up with the advent of the Soviet Union.
The USSR tried to force assimilation en masse--we see how well that worked out! I don't say these things to be racist, I'm fine with other peoples and cultures--but it's the way I see how all of these things came to be. It's a big complicated issue at any rate.
I would not go around pointing out inconvenient facts like that--someone might color you racist.
Sure, at least few of these countries fit your arbitrary 1/3d of USA's GDP benchmark:
Russia ~$15k USD
Seychelles ~$23k
Trinidad & Tobago ~$19k
Barbados ~$22k
Puerto Rico: ~$17k
vs. USA's ~$45,000
There's surely more. The problem with many of these places is that the very wealthy skew the curve--isn't it? You have a clutch of multi-millionaires, maybe a billionaire or two, a mob of people who live in squalor and very few people in between... But the average GDP doesn't look so terrible.
Kind of like how certain US cities skew the curve for the rest of the country. Consider this: our national homicide rate is 5 out of 100,000. Cities like New Orleans (52), Detroit (46), Baltimore (37)--and that's just a handful... They really fudge it up for the rest of the country.
Getting back to my original point: even if I am comparing the US to third world countries, failed communist states... These are places which functionally have *complete bans on civilian ownership of firearms*, as are places in Europe which have half, or even a quarter of our national homicide rate.
The grand point is, if someone really wants to kill, they'll get it done regardless of the tools they have available. Furthermore, millions upon millions of Americans certianly have some of the best tools created by man to accomplish that particular end--and yet they overwhelmingly don't use them for that purpose!
You mean countries/territories like:
El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, South Africa, Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, Swaziland, Panama, Paraguay, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe, Lithuania, Thailand, Zambia, Belarus, Barbados, Seychelles, Uganda, Georgia, Estonia, Ukraine, Turkey, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Argentina?... In that order of homicides per capita?
All of whom lead the US in homicides, and all of whom have strict gun control laws? Admittedly, a lot of these places are shithole and third world countries, but there are many which aren't.
Maybe, just maybe it's about their culture? No... Then you would next recognize that a few of the US's larger cities are responsible for the vast majority of our so-called "gun crime", not because they have more guns, but because they are more prone to a culture of violence and lawlessness in general. You would also then learn that not only do they have vastly more firearm related homicides, they also have more non-gun related homicides per capita than any of the rest of our fine country.
You'd also find that many "USians" live in places with virtually no homicide, firearm related or otherwise, and it's a really big fucking deal when someone is killed--usually when some tramp comes to town, or in the passion of a domestic squabble. These are also the places which tend to have higher concentrations of gun owners. Imagine that.
Actually, you struck a chord that might yield interesting results: Serve on a jury, be immune to any state and federal income tax for that year. For many people that would basically be a 15-20% (or greater) bonus. It would cost the government (in terms of lost tax) a tiny amount, since relatively few people sit on a jury any given year.
That would bring in people who actually want to be on a jury, since they stand to benefit, and it would also encourage (presumably higher educated) high-earners to not use the "financial hardship" get out of jail card... It really would be like winning a lottery.
And how many years do we wait to execute death row inmates? I read something recently that indicated it's over ten years on average. Some have been detained over 30 years, and a quarter of the executionees die of natural causes! When we do finally get around to execution time, we often treat them better than our pets (giving them anesthetic before the lethal dose)--in a quiet setting.
And then we talk about it's lack of deterrent effect. I say give them one appeal in a court distant from their original trial to help weed out miscarriage of justice, and then get on with it, and make it public and make it bloody.
It's also against the law to assault or murder people, but those things happen at a frequency that's disturbingly high, don't they?
I think there is a pretty easy to see difference between removing a liver from a dead guy, and removing one from a living human being.
Picture this:
Bad Guy #1: Hey Doc, we need to cut this jerk open and take his liver.
Bad Guy #2: Yeah, we got an order, this guy in London needs a transplant, there's a healthy..finder's fee in it for ya. Demand has kind of increased now that we can't get our organs from the recently deceased.
Surgeon: Well, unfortunately he'll die without a liver. It's against the Hippocratic oath. You know, first, do no harm....Nobody was getting hurt the other way. It just wouldn't be right.
Bad Guy #1: *pulls out a pistol and racks the slide, sticks the gun to the victim's ear and blows his brains all over the makeshift ER*
Bad Guy #2: Whadya say now doc?
Surgeon: *gulp* Well, I guess it would be unethical to waste his organs now.
It's not much of a reach. People have done worse for less reward. Once you go down the road of taking things from folks without their permission, it gets progressively easier and easier to justify greater and greater transgressions. Today it's "well he's dead, nobody is hurt, and we'll save another life", tomorrow it could be "well, he's homeless and doesn't have any family. Nobody will miss him."
In my locality it's more like plaid fedoras, crusty skater shoes, perpetual three day beards and lesbian haircuts.
It's about respect. If you can't respect the dead body, you wouldn't respect it when it was walking and talking. If you're going to covertly play Invasion of the Body Snatchers with people's deceased loved ones, it's not that far of a leap to do it to a living human being.
Some might argue that our emotional bonds and reverence for the dead is one of the traits which helped divide our species from the rest of the animal kingdom... I for one, would agree and I find it disturbing that someone would engage in this activity for such casual reasons.
"Retard." Singular....Clip.
You're forgetting the 12k Shahzad received from someone in Pakistan, ostensibly to facilitate the 'attack'. You don't care to include that person, or persons as part of his asinine plan? How about the Pakistani training camp he admitted to attending? These people were somehow not a part of his operation, even though they weren't present, weren't charged and weren't convicted?
How convenient.
As for you-you're just a sufferer of rectal-cranial inversion syndrome. You're not creative, nor smart enough to counter anything I said in those small collections of words you call paragraphs, and instead choose to toss out a grade-school quality derision for the same reason a cephalopod squirts out ink; as a decoy, so that he may scurry away from whatever creature he deems a superior force.
I'm sorry, I missed a solution in there somewhere.
That's the point. There is no solution, other than to stop giving nutjobs a reason to sacrifice themselves (and anyone who happens to be in their vicinity)--and we likewise fail hard on that issue.
Security is like the layers of an onion. The more secure you make the center of the onion, the more you neglect the outer layers. I'm going to make a prediction here: There will not, I repeat, will never be an attack on a single airliner the magnitude of 9/11, ever again.
We've already made it to the point of diminishing returns. Metal detectors and bomb sniffers will catch 99.9%+ percent of the external threats against aircraft, and I feel sorry for that 0.1% who actually make it on the plane to cause a scene. They'll have their lights snuffed out by their fellow passenger in a blink.
The center of the onion (aircraft) is/was so well guarded, even without x-rays and groping that the chances of a successful, conventional attack against an airliner is absurdly low. Mission accomplished. There simply is no further justification for throwing money at this perceived problem, no less for violating people with personal x-rays and unwarranted physical contact to their private parts.
But what have they done in the process of eliminating the risk to the aircraft? They've pushed the outer layer of security out into the airport terminals. Where there's lines of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people waiting to chose their poison of high-energy photons or gonad groping. There is no meaningful way to stop even the stupidest, least creative of attackers. Do you really need to have it spelled out further?
TSA's track record? Yeah, they've done a pretty good job. Lord knows they're great at catching nail clippers and tiny bottles of fluid. And the things which could have been improved have been improved.... Namely the presence of explosive sniffers--which would have caught the retarded "shoe bomber" were they installed in 2001, and had the flight originated in the US, anyway.
But the other way to look at it: there really hasn't been a significant terrorist op against US soil since 2001. The shoe & underwear bombers have been their best tries so far (that we, the public, know about) and those were both haphazard, poorly executed attacks, with little chance of success--originating at foreign airports! And then you have the retards in Times Square. On the whole, it just doesn't seem like the bad guys have their shit together, and thank $deity for that.
the car-bomb only set the terrorists on fire who then got beaten up by baggage handlers.
These good samaritans were clearly trying to extinguish the fire, they should be awarded a medal or something.
Who says it couldn't be one of the security people themselves? I mean, look at the security screeners we hire to watch us. Heck, I'd put money on some of the guys I've seen being felons.
There's undoubtedly A TON of ways to get contraband into an airport. Just like getting things into prison--they routinely get drugs, weapons and all kinds of crap in so-called secure areas of prisons... And that's a place where your 'customers' are locked up most of the time, and are subject to even more invasive searches. Screw the cliched file-in-a-cake shit! Who wants to bet this contraband most often comes from prison guards?
It all comes down to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as usual. For every wall they put up, where's there's a will, there's a way to get around it.
You know, he's right--in the sense that some Muslim individuals did great things, particularly in mathematics, old world physics, and the various other sciences (indeed aiding the creation of the modern scientific method). These individuals contributed to many things we know and love today. True enough.
Now, Islam? Did Islam say "go and do these things, and learn about the world!"? Not as far as I know. Getting down to it, claiming these advances in understanding to the Islamic faith is like attributing Isaac Newton's, or Leibniz, or any number of other discoveries to Christianity.
No, the attribution should be placed where it is deserved--to the individuals who discovered and distilled these ideas into something useful. These people just happened to be Christian, or Muslim, or Hindi, or whatever.
In any case, it would share many of the qualities of hummus; most notably, texture.
I'd assume they're recharging radios, GPS devices, or even a Predator ground station, not an iPhone ;)
I wouldn't be so sure of that
Voting for a third party is (unfortunately) a pretty ineffectual protest move
I don't know about that. The recent race for governor in Colorado worked out this way:
Hickenlooper (D) 54%
Tom Tancredo (American Constitution Party) 33%
Dan Maes (R) 10%.
Right up till the end, it was forecasted that Hickenlooper and Tancredo would be neck and neck, and I think what happened was this: A lot of Republicans voted Democrat, as well as third party, simply because there was no way in hell Maes was going to win, and they didn't like that asshat Tancredo. I'm no friend to the American Constitutional party--but if Maes would have dropped from the race like Tancredo wanted, Colorado may have had a third-party governor. What's really interesting is that Colorado has only ~2,200 voters registered to the American Constitutional Party, yet their candidate won 33% of the vote.
The problem as I see it is this: we need to get third party candidates in lower offices before they'll be seriously considered for higher offices, yet there is just about zero effort put into getting those offices. People are dead tired of our major parties getting into office and jerking off. The energy to boot them out is building, if we could only figure how to use it.
Gesundheit
Well, I guess what I mean is that most people don't even realize it's possible to bring a firearm along on a jet ride, and naturally assume it's not something that is done.
Yeah, you're not going to make it far trying to carry it on. Not even Joe Blow Police Officer can do that.
If I understand correctly, a blank-firing starter pistol also qualifies for this restriction.
That it does indeed. Someone wrote a guide to doing the checked firearm thing in far more detail than I can echo here (and I can't find the article), but it's also important to pack another lock or two for the case--in the event the retards cut your lock, you can always lock the case back up and be on your merry way.
Also, the airlines may have rules above and beyond TSA's, so it's necessary to check that out.
The reason I became interested in it, is I often check camera equipment that's just not practical to carry on... And I have a CCW with reciprocity in most states I travel to, so... Bonus.
Always check a firearm--and make sure the case for the firearm is capable of holding your valuables. Cameras, computers, whatever. It's perfectly legal, and usually easy enough. Use a throw-away pistol if you don't want to risk loosing fancy guns.
And, unlike standard baggage, you have to use a lock and case THEY can't open... And if they want to see the contents, by their own regulations YOU have to be present! Make sure your cell # is plastered all over the case.
If someone (TSA, airport, whoever) ever lost or stole a checked in case containing a gun... Well, let's just say there's no surer or quicker way to see their representatives collectively crap their pants.