We have the IRS attacking citizens that haven't broken any laws. I assume a lot of this spying is so they can expand those attacks to friends and family of those already being attacked.
Yeah. You know where this little toxic bit of "reasoning" comes from? From your grade school teacher
Teacher:
Mr Blah blah. I see you like to talk out of turn. I can assume you are planning to disrupt this class for the remainder of the year. Now I get to do this bad thing to you, because basically I don't like you and you've given me all the pretext I need to inflict arbitrary punishment on you.
Yes that' s right anonymous coward, you can assume whatthefuck ever you want to assume and base your insane actions on it because in your world you need no proof of anything and your assumptions should be, in your mind, somehow interesting to other people .
Jesus Christ.
Really, I i hope you were just pulling something random out of your ass because if THAT'S your level of reasoning about reality you're walking around with a lot of self inflicted mental anguish buddy.
Sorry but it appears you deliberately and malignantly excerpted half of what I said to make it appear I was saying something I wasn't saying. I was NOT saying and I explicitly made this point- that we don't need laws because people don't want to do bad things in general.
This is not arguing in good conscience. This is the same kind of malignant and deliberate distortion we see in the media and in Washington.
I can conclude that you're a partisan political hack who uses things like the Constitution in a purely instrumental way- to score partisan political points, and has no real interest in sincerely participating in an open debate in this democracy.
Wow I just wrote a reply to someone else that is a reply to you also:
Here ya go.
If you think I don't agree that this and every other government has abused its power then you're wrong. But that abuse was a function of the people who lived at that time. American Indians a case in point. People then just did not think as we moderns do. Sure, they did bad things using the government as a force multiplier with its armies and ability to fund via taxes and pass laws etc. etc. but it was THOSE people who did those things, through the government.
The Government is not a thing with a static, enduring , persitent "character" like people. Some people may not change that much- you knew them then, you know them now and they haven't changed at bit. Their character endures over time . That's actually an artifact of their biology. They learned a first language, English say, and now that's their primary language, forever. That persistence, that durable fact about them is a function of the biology of learning a language.
But governments don't have a biology and because of that they don't have an identity that endures the way people's endures. They change when society changes. They change when the people inside their offices change. They change to reflect the times they exist in.
You can't reason about what governments will and won't do the same way you can (reasonably) reason about what people will or won't do.
You're talking to someone who after due consideration of the facts has come to the conclusion that some part of the government likely had a hand in the assassination of JFK. Even though I think that's true, I don't ascribe to that part of the now government the same propensities and lawlessness that it I think it used to have then. Why? Because that kind of lawlessness was pandemic in the world Eisenhower order the assassination of the democratically elected heads of state Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq (sp?) in Iran and in this the American people probably would have backed him, had they known:
It's a function of the times which a shorthand way of saying it's a function of the people who live at that time in history. Ditto the American South. No Southerner today countenances slavery or owns slaves (generally this is accurate) . There is no point in generalizing to today's South on the basis of yesterday's South .
Today's government is more enlightened by our measure just because it is run buy us, I mean we moderns. They are not evil in the ways that past governments have been evil. If you're aq progressive like me, some things piss you off, like global warming and the lack of action. It's a crime perpetrated on future generations. But the non-action reflects about 50% of the US public's POV. That evil is a function of we "moderns."
There is no evidence I am aware of which indicates that some part of the US government, in this case the CIA and the NSA is independently and and in secret regressing to some previous state of society's developmental norms, much less to Stalin-esque or Pol Pot-esque type thinking.
Just because Pol Pot could have used the NSA doesn't mean the NSA is going to turn into Pol Pot.
I think the reasoning is how can you guess what might be needed? Either you capture it at the time it happens of it's lost forever. If they could, they would go back in time and get the info from the bad guys only. As it is, they DO capture it, bu they basically don't peek at it, so it's like it's not there. It's just sitting unread in a database UNTIL and UNLESS they get a court order permitting them to look at some of it. In order to do this, they have to prove they have a very good reason to do so.
I don't know how else to tell them to do this. I can't think of a better way that would work. If some administration tries to use this info against political enemies, as they have in the past, then I also believe there will be whistle blowers who will out them and the administration involved will ot be able to silence the outcry. If Obama was involved in the IRS scandal, then everyone on both sides of the political spectrum agree- he and his admin are toastitos.
It's pretty obvious that it's not the case (to me, using my historical and personal judgement) but Republicans love to dream big dreams about almost every molehill they can find; it's an addiction with Issa.
Re: the NSA- I am a freedom loving American as much or more than anyone else. I wonder how many of the people saying I don't care are in the least concerned with or even know that an entire population of full tax paying US citizens is systematically excluded from voting in Presidential elections. No taxation without representation, right Tea Party. yet people who just happen to live with the city of Washington D.C> cannot vote. You don't see these self proclaimed patriots and freedom defenders giving a shit about that, do you? You'd think it would be beyond all question absolutely item number one n their agenda, wouldn't you? The one thing that makes their blood boil and their fists shake with rage!
Oh wait, DC is a majority Black city.
That explains. it.
BTW no one's educational means anything WRT the validity of their political views in this country and especially it means exactly zilch to me.
Look to answer your challenge global warming. It's beyond ridiculous what's going on there. The fossil fuel industries are not just using the same tactics the tobacco companies used to deny the cigarette - cancer link, they're literally using the exact same personalities who are still alive and still doing industry's bidding.
If you want a concrete example of a desperately needed regulation being derailed through an industry's political efforts , then this is the atom heart mother of all examples.
I defy you or anyone else , irrespective of their pre-existing beliefs, the strengths of those beliefs and disinclination to believe anything else to read Merchants of Doubt and not come away with the absolute certain knowledge that carbon emissions caused, human invoked, global warming is real and the industries involved are systematically and knowingly lying about it.
As far as industry input goes, it was the Republicans who in concert with industry thought up cap and trade- a market based approach to emissions reduction incentives. When the Democrats went along with the idea, the Republicans abandoned it (! ! !) and started in with the suicidal denier shit.
We should change the nature of how that regulation gets put into place. Rather than granting different departments of each branch defacto ability to just regulate. Everything should be passed democratically through a people elected body and tested thoroughly against the constitution.
that is a direct democracy ( we have a representative republic) and presumes that the majority of the people have the knowledge and time to decide each and every issue.
There are (obvious) problems with this but that's not what is important.
I would rather agree with you and say that any way we can find to make government regulation more accurate, more verifiable in its intended outcomes less costly and more scientific is for the good.
I happen not to believe that people voting on whether some molecule should be approved for human consumption would be anything other than the kind of political football that global warming has turned into and which cigarettes were in the past with industry paying off "experts' to lie about "scientific facts" and people getting bamboozled for decades by their campaigns.
It's just not the way to a good, accurate outcome and I am outcome oriented to a large degree especially in matters of science.
If you think I don't agree that this and every other government has abused its power then you're wrong. But that abuse was a function of the people who lived at that time. American Indians a case in point. People then just did not think as we moderns do. Sure, they did bad things using the government as a force multiplier with its armies and ability to fund via taxes and pass laws etc. etc. but it was THOSE people who did those things, through the government.
The Government is not a thing with a static, enduring , persitent "character" like people. Some people may not change that much- you knew them then, you know them now and they haven't changed at bit. Their character endures over time . That's actually an artifact of their biology. They learned a first language, English say, and now that's their primary language, forever. That persistence, that durable fact about them is a function of the biology of learning a language.
But governments don't have a biology and because of that they don't have an identity that endures the way people's endures. They change when society changes. They change when the people inside their offices change.
You can't reason about what governments will and won't do the same way you can (reasonably) reason about what people will or won't do.
You're talking to someone who after due consideration of the facts has come to the conclusion that some part of the government likely had a hand in the assassination of JFK. Even though I think that's true, I don't ascribe to that part of the now government the same propensities and lawlessness that it I think it used to have then. Why? Because that kind of lawlessness was pandemic in the world Eisenhower order the assassination of the democratically elected heads of state Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq (sp?) in Iran and in this the American people probably would have backed him, had they known:
It's a function of the times which a shorthand way of saying it's a function of the people who live at that time in history. Ditto the American South. No Southerner today countenances slavery or owns slaves (generally this is accurate) . There is no point in generalizing to today's South on the basis of yesterday's South .
Today['s government is more enlightened by our measure just because it is run buy us, I mean we moderns. They are not evil in the ways that past governments have been evil. If you're aq progressive like me, some things piss you off, like global warming and the lack of action. It's a crime perpetrated on future generations. But the non-action reflects about 50 of the US public's POV. That evil is a function of we "moderns."
There is no evidence I am aware of which indicates that some part of the US government i, in this case the CIA and the NSA is independently and and in secret regressing to some previous state of society's developmental norms, much less to Stalin-esque or Pol Pot-esque type thinking.
Just because Pol Pot could have used the NSA doesn't mean the NSA is going to turn into Pol Pot.
It's as if in this poster's mind the ability to do something automatically led to the desire to do something . It's just so psychologically , socially, and historically obtuse and frankly hysterical it's hard to think of the counter at first because it's hard to understand where he's coming from at all.
Give me some evidence the CIA or the NSA are attempting to control anything about internal American politics, control people's lives, the outcomes of political processes or even innocent individuals lives or even anything like business outcomes. Because without that you have no case that they are a nefarious force in our lives. They are not breaking any law-. If you don't like it, repeal the Patriot Act.
An ability to hypothetically do evil thing X is NOT NOT NOT the same as the desire to. They COULD nuke us! All move to a safe place and then push the button! Are you worried about that too?
Civil society runs on the fact that people do not WANT to do evil things and if you're the NSA or the CIA evil things include any form of taking over the country politically or financially or personally.
People do not want to do the Worst Case Scenario Evil things you are imagining. If that changes, then that's something to deal with. History is FILLED with people who have all kinds of power to do evil that they never avail themselves of. In fact, that's the normative case. I COULD shoot my dog. I don't want to. I COULD rob a bank. All of civilization goes forward on two legs. One is the basic decent impulses of people who are not anti-social but rather civic minded . The other is the law which forms a structural barrier against people who are bad and also guidance and directives for morally ambiguous or ethically complex situations.
Without BOTH of those, we're fucked. People can be individually good, but still create chaos , war and anarchy if there is no law. OTOH even if the law is very clear, if no one WANTS to obey it, we're all fucked.
We have law, we have decent people applying that law. We're not the Reichstag. We're not Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia . We're not Pol Pots' Cambodia.
To tell you the truth, those were nations who came under the control of MORAL ABSOLUTISTS like yourself who were in a perpetual internal RED ALERT , who saw no shades of gray, admitted of no degrees, could not process ambiguity,and harkened back in each case to a mythical yesteryear which had been corrupted by a cabal of evil men - a situation which required the collective violence of The People against the Oppressors to rectify.
Oh yeah and this constant war on drugs and REGULATION of every mother fucking technology and bit of commerce under the sun. And Hollywood and the RIAA. No we have had the opposite of a conservative federal government keeping a military to protect the individual states. No we have a centralized system of authority which oppresses everyone and ensures only the rich and wealthy can compete and that anyone not chosen to be part of the official ruling class can suffer.
Regulation- yeah let's deregulate some more. The financial meltdown of deregulated securities didn't cost us enough. I want to spend more money saving the whole economy from going off a cliff.
Wealthy etc. You have got to be kidding me. Who wants to tax the top 1% and who wants to let the super wealthy keep everything, free them from inheritance taxes so extreme wealth can be a perpetual inter-generational thing, , let them pollute everyone else's environment while paying nothing for what they destroyed and pocketing the profits they made by destroying it, deregulate the securities industry so they can amass MORE wealth while risking only OUR money, keep the minimum wage to below poverty levels and in some cases eliminate it entirely (so you can either starve or work for food only ), permit the collective coordinated action of scum like the Chamber of Commerce while undermining unions, and who works against eh public funding of elections so MONEY doesn't decide what gets done by whom in government?
PUBLICLY FUND ELECTIONS - GET MONEY OUT OF GOVERNMENT>
Oh that's right the conservative majority in SCOTUS decided money is a form of speech. So guess we'll never see that day.
That was right before they decided that your DNA could be taken just because you were arrested. Something they did over the objections of the liberal minority in the court.
Yeah we need more conservatives to decide things. Then we can finally get evolution thrown out of the schools and become the polluted religious backwater with ginormous disparities in income that characterize all other banana republics.. just like conservatives have always dreamed of.
Honestly your points are non sequitors. Your original point literally makes no sense, never mind what you thought you were saying and if THAT might make rational if not factual sense .
Fast and Furious was an attempt that failed. You're being ridiculous if you think nothing the government does should ever fail, or else it proves the government can't do anything right.
Vietnam was a conservative war, promulgated by conservative hawks who used the specter of socialism, and communism to spend a lot of American lives. Liberals protested it and finally ended it.
So let me ask you- do YOU remember Vietnam?
Your POINT is a totally unrelated to anything you said in any way anyone can make out.
Talking to other people is different from swearing at your TV.
It is, that's the problem. The question being 'does this benefit society'? The USA has a 240 year-old piece of paper that says it doesn't. Has that been wrong all this time or is the USA wrong now?
It can be right for a time and not as right for some future time. Possibly that is the case now; possibly it will become the case in the future. It depends on events and how strictly it gets interpreted.
Note that in this case, a strict interpretation (admitting that one is even possible ) actually militates against durability while a more flexible, responsive one improves durability. Note also that THAT fact makes the Constitution just like every other thing under the sun.
This is another 'think of the children' meme. How does knowing which phone number was dialed tell anyone who the terrorists are, what they're capabilities are, or that you're not a sympathizer.
Well actually it's exactly the opposite since I am suggesting that some loss of life and security should be acceptable because expecting none (not to say trying for none) will only lead to disappointment and a government no one wants including those in the government.
As far as telephone records go, let's be clear on the details. They collect the information, but need another court order available only when clear and compelling evidence is presented to use it, analyze it or know what its content is.
Could that help in an investigation? You bet. People need to conspire and to conspire they need to communicate. What's more, people who communicate with conspirators innocently often can provide valuable information. People establish friendships, , sources of knowledge and resources before they become radicalized and continue to use those after. Those are all helpful pieces of information. Even their location over time tells a story and is helpful.
You haven't noticed this story contains a vocal portion of the population saying "Not this". When is the USA counting dissent and following the will of its people?
Indeed I have and that's why I am saying we need to all talk through these things together and in public. That's the whole point. Reach a New American Consensus on Security, Privacy and Liberty. That's what we are doing here in a small way right now.
Then what? The government has already committed the crime. You spoke earlier of problems which "... makes this measure necessary". How about solving the problem of intolerable interference from the government before it happens?
In fact, the government has committed no crime. Section 215 of The Patriot Act authorizes them to do what they're doing. The government is not interfering with anything in doing this. Some people may have bad reactions. Their feelings matter, but under our system of government their feelings do not become determinative except through an election or a by seeking a court ruling .
Stop with a mantra that US people and US Christianity is more valuable than everybody else. Playing fair means the enemies who imitate the US are sufferable. And the enemies who don't will be very, very lonely.
We're in agreement on these points.
Because the government has jails, more money, bigger guns, than the population that funds it. That always demands distrust. To quote a movie, "government should be afraid of its people".
I can't accept and do not see the truth of your implicit premise that the government is set apart from and is different from the American people. I see the opposite- that the Congress is chock full of the same kind of religiously fanatic, extremist and doctrinal assholes who make of mess of everything they've ever touched and resist every forward step for society.
The people in the Cincinnati IRS who targeted conservative groups are atypical of how the IRS operates but their actions are typical of the shit th
"We acquired this knowledge by observation of empirical evidence. Things have not changed. They have only gotten worse."
What are you talking about? You acquired the evidence that the world does not need this action by the NSA... how??? Empirical evidence that things have gotten worse ??? How does that EVEN make sense ?
What if it IS a critical tool? Huh? What if it's a fact about the world that this is a critical tool and is being used in the way it should to be used?
Is that possibility so counter to known reality that it should just be rejected out of hand the way you-all are doing ?
Because most readers here are acting on the premise that it's a true fact about the world that it is NOT a critical tool.
How did you acquire that certain knowledge about a set of facts in the world that you have no special knowledge of- the information contained in the President's PDBs?
I don't think it's unrealistic to the world as I understand it. Even if today, it is strictly not necessary because , say, we are overestimating the capabilities terrorists, what about tomorrow? Nano-technology and artificial biology and genetic manipulation and high tech fabbing will come down to something close to the personal level sooner or later.
Civil secular society doesn't WANT to use those things to cause mass casualties to civilians and destablize the modern world, but sooner or later the steady increase of destructive power and the steady decrease in the number of people and resources it takes to wield that destructive power will intersect at an unfortunate point and it will be wielded by Christian or Islamic religionists who place no value on the affairs of men but only live to fight an unseen war taking place on some cosmic plane.
Then what?
Be truly rational and entertain the notion in your mind as a hypothesis that there is now or will be shortly something about the world that makes this measure necessary to countering acts of mass terrorism. . Now. What SHOULD we do?
We should have a national, open thorough, skeptical, informed and honest discussion across a wide range of topics around the security / privacy / liberty triad work out , aloud publicly and together what tradeoffs we're willing to endure and what ones we're not. What level of destruction and death and societal disruption we're collectively willing to endure and when - and if - that level ever becomes unacceptable.
We need to talk about this consciously and on a national scale. We need to talk as a nation and be explicit and be formal and capture as well as we can what we'll do and not do BEFORE anything happens.
Because what we have now is a strictly reactionary populace and to a degree government, who decides what the privacy liberty / security triad is going to look like right after and in response to terrorist events.
The result is anything but solidarity and unity. The Government hides its actions from the People. The People don't trust their Government and impugn ulterior - nearly insane - motives and this is as true on the left as it is on the right.
We are failing this national imperative. We are failing to plan and harden civil society for an inevitable war. We are at once protected, coddled and violated by our national security apparatus because it - and we - think we can't handle the truth.
I would love to think America would lead here, but America rarely leads. It's what Churchill said America will always do the right thing after every other possibility has been exhausted.
I think it has to be the EU that leads here. They are much more rational , less fanatically religious and absolutist in their world view , and inclined more towards collective action than the US.
Someone somewhere has to start talking about this and someone in government needs to give that discussion the imprimatur of officialdom and lift it up. We have to do this because the alternative is structural, institutionalized extremism, borne in reaction to random events, fueled by reactionary impulses and finally codified into law.
That is when civil society stats to break down, not because of a bomb or disease or anything else but because we permitted ourselves to continue exist in a fantasy land of 18th century perspectives and values until that fantasy was exploded and we had no idea how to carry on.
Bulldozer 8150. It rocks the house. Headroom still for a 8350 without having to change platforms- thanks AMD ! 189 bucks. Can't touch it for the price. Highly recommended.
Really? Because of network effects. That's it. Everyone else is communicating on it.
It's purely a predatory play- they capture people who are at a time in their lives when they're well known to be indiscreet. They then record all that indiscretion. Then they monetize it.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is taking the results of that monetization and campaigning -hard - for XL Keystone pipeline.
who relishes the idea that he's smarter and more knowledgeable across a highly technical domain than are the the world's scientists who have spent their lives disciplined in and mastering that domain.
is he's going to be around long enough to be forced by society to bear, without reserve, the consequences of his actions today, which depending on how bad things get, could range anywhere from total dissolution of his personal wealth to fund emergency, remedial action against global warming - an outcome that is now a virtually certainty- to extended torture at the hands of enraged mobs / quasi-civilization, should we reach five degrees of warming and real civilization just breaks down.:
Come on. The description of research methods , procedures, tests and results scientific papers, exists for the betterment of humankind, not to make people who own it rich. Get rich by Making Stuff, not exerting a monopolist's control on Knowledge.
How hard is this? All research and results conducted by higher ed should be available for free and the costs rolled into the tax base.
This is as basic as it gets. Roads bridges security and advances in knowledge.
No you're wrong. Being detained is NOT the same as being under arrest. You can be detained on a suspicion. You have to have broken the law - and be charged with a crime- to be arrested. You can be detained briefly but not *forever* or even a long time. You can consider yourself detained if a cop comes up to you and starts talking about anything other than the weather.
If you're walking around thinking detained = arrested then you already have a chip on your shoulder since the circumstances that lead to being detained are intuitively NOT sufficient to warrant being arrested and you therefore feel like you're being unlawfully arrested every time you're being lawfully detained. That can't lead to anything good for you since you're already interpreting the cop as a bad apple when in fact, he's not. He's just doing his job.
If you're careful and have done nothing wrong,. being detained won't lead to being arrested. A lot depends on your attitude. If you're defiant, then it becomes way more likely in the cops mind that you also have an illegal weapon or narcotics on your person or in your car. Ever watch COPS? See how criminals act? Try not to act like that, even a little.
But the reality is that anyone can be arrested for anything. Someone broke into a house somewhere near where you are? And you were *around* at the time *active furtively*? Done.
Helpful Hints-
don't ever stop doing whatever it was you were doing when you notice you're being watched by the police. That's a red flag to them.
Be very polite and cooperative if stopped. The cop may decide to probe you for everything from attitude, to drunkeness, to excessive nervousness, to whatever it was he was looking for when he detained you. By way of this, he may speak in a way so as to provoke anger in you because he's trying to see if you're a hot head. Don't reply by being defiant or even sarcastic if he does this. Continue to cooperate. Be polite. Be serious.
Don't lie about anything , even something small. Of course don't be breaking the law in some way because none of this advice matters if you are.
Don't start asserting your rights before you're arrested or acting like you're going to. Most cops really are just people with jobs to do and you have temporarily become a part of their workday. Make it easy on them in every way. They don't want to be there either.
If arrested, shut completely up and call a lawyer. Completely.
They have better things to do than arrest someone doing nothing. Overall, they are not interested in you- they are interested in law breakers. Yes- that's true, that's what is relevant to them. You don't rate, at all. They get evaluated in part by number of arrests that lead to a conviction of some sort, especially felony convictions, which are just awesome.
OK then. All this cost savings is pocketed by billionaires , not passed on to you. The ONLY form in which it's ever passed on to ordinary people is at their own expense, e.g. Walmart prices and Walmart
So if you want to realize what any of the productivity gains / cost savings you've worked for and created, start a company, force everyone who works for you be to be part time, steal the benefits of THEIR increase in productivity, lobby your congresspig for tax breaks for the wealthy..... oh and shop at Walmart.
America is a nation of by and for billionaires, who fund our elections, occupy our political offices, write our laws and own our media. They do this for their own benefit and anything which does not effect their personal lives is not *real* and doesn't matter.
I actually agree with this to an extent and would mod you up had I points.
A lot of the alleged "intelligence" being pulled out of big data are merely correlational and of a unscientific sampling at that- example the bullshit about which states are unhappiest based on people's Twittering .
Upon this, as upon the credit default swaps and derivatives, an entire "science" of "big data" will be built. The chief and only certain beneficiaries will be the horseshit factories that churn this out out to the mathematically illiterate and experientially provincial.
In fact, since the data cannot be assumed to normally distributed and the variables in question independent of anything, including each other, most of mathematics CANNOT be used to analyze this data still less to predict future states of any system reified - and presumed to really exist- from that data.
Never mind though. Rest assured the asshole quants on working the case even now because while no KNOWLEDGE can be derived from it, a fuck of a lot of money sure can be had.
Still big data is interesting in some limited context and can be applied in useful ways to the betterment of applications, for instance.
But that's not what we're all about, is it ? We're all about putting some lipstick on that pig and selling it.
If you're the sorting type, it's only a matter of timing any Big Data fungus, er./.. I mean companies, as they crop up.
Slashdot Mirror
We have the IRS attacking citizens that haven't broken any laws. I assume a lot of this spying is so they can expand those attacks to friends and family of those already being attacked.
Yeah. You know where this little toxic bit of "reasoning" comes from? From your grade school teacher
Teacher:
Mr Blah blah. I see you like to talk out of turn. I can assume you are planning to disrupt this class for the remainder of the year. Now I get to do this bad thing to you, because basically I don't like you and you've given me all the pretext I need to inflict arbitrary punishment on you.
Yes that' s right anonymous coward, you can assume whatthefuck ever you want to assume and base your insane actions on it because in your world you need no proof of anything and your assumptions should be, in your mind, somehow interesting to other people .
Jesus Christ.
Really, I i hope you were just pulling something random out of your ass because if THAT'S your level of reasoning about reality you're walking around with a lot of self inflicted mental anguish buddy.
Sorry but it appears you deliberately and malignantly excerpted half of what I said to make it appear I was saying something I wasn't saying. I was NOT saying and I explicitly made this point- that we don't need laws because people don't want to do bad things in general.
This is not arguing in good conscience. This is the same kind of malignant and deliberate distortion we see in the media and in Washington.
I can conclude that you're a partisan political hack who uses things like the Constitution in a purely instrumental way- to score partisan political points, and has no real interest in sincerely participating in an open debate in this democracy.
You're the problem with our country.
Wow I just wrote a reply to someone else that is a reply to you also:
Here ya go.
If you think I don't agree that this and every other government has abused its power then you're wrong. But that abuse was a function of the people who lived at that time. American Indians a case in point. People then just did not think as we moderns do. Sure, they did bad things using the government as a force multiplier with its armies and ability to fund via taxes and pass laws etc. etc. but it was THOSE people who did those things, through the government.
The Government is not a thing with a static, enduring , persitent "character" like people. Some people may not change that much- you knew them then, you know them now and they haven't changed at bit. Their character endures over time . That's actually an artifact of their biology. They learned a first language, English say, and now that's their primary language, forever. That persistence, that durable fact about them is a function of the biology of learning a language.
But governments don't have a biology and because of that they don't have an identity that endures the way people's endures. They change when society changes. They change when the people inside their offices change. They change to reflect the times they exist in.
You can't reason about what governments will and won't do the same way you can (reasonably) reason about what people will or won't do.
You're talking to someone who after due consideration of the facts has come to the conclusion that some part of the government likely had a hand in the assassination of JFK. Even though I think that's true, I don't ascribe to that part of the now government the same propensities and lawlessness that it I think it used to have then. Why? Because that kind of lawlessness was pandemic in the world Eisenhower order the assassination of the democratically elected heads of state Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq (sp?) in Iran and in this the American people probably would have backed him, had they known:
http://millercenter.org/president/eisenhower/essays/biography/5 [millercenter.org]
It's a function of the times which a shorthand way of saying it's a function of the people who live at that time in history. Ditto the American South. No Southerner today countenances slavery or owns slaves (generally this is accurate) . There is no point in generalizing to today's South on the basis of yesterday's South
.
Today's government is more enlightened by our measure just because it is run buy us, I mean we moderns. They are not evil in the ways that past governments have been evil. If you're aq progressive like me, some things piss you off, like global warming and the lack of action. It's a crime perpetrated on future generations. But the non-action reflects about 50% of the US public's POV. That evil is a function of we "moderns."
There is no evidence I am aware of which indicates that some part of the US government, in this case the CIA and the NSA is independently and and in secret regressing to some previous state of society's developmental norms, much less to Stalin-esque or Pol Pot-esque type thinking.
Just because Pol Pot could have used the NSA doesn't mean the NSA is going to turn into Pol Pot.
I think the reasoning is how can you guess what might be needed? Either you capture it at the time it happens of it's lost forever. If they could, they would go back in time and get the info from the bad guys only. As it is, they DO capture it, bu they basically don't peek at it, so it's like it's not there. It's just sitting unread in a database UNTIL and UNLESS they get a court order permitting them to look at some of it. In order to do this, they have to prove they have a very good reason to do so.
I don't know how else to tell them to do this. I can't think of a better way that would work. If some administration tries to use this info against political enemies, as they have in the past, then I also believe there will be whistle blowers who will out them and the administration involved will ot be able to silence the outcry. If Obama was involved in the IRS scandal, then everyone on both sides of the political spectrum agree- he and his admin are toastitos.
It's pretty obvious that it's not the case (to me, using my historical and personal judgement) but Republicans love to dream big dreams about almost every molehill they can find; it's an addiction with Issa.
Re: the NSA- I am a freedom loving American as much or more than anyone else. I wonder how many of the people saying I don't care are in the least concerned with or even know that an entire population of full tax paying US citizens is systematically excluded from voting in Presidential elections. No taxation without representation, right Tea Party. yet people who just happen to live with the city of Washington D.C> cannot vote. You don't see these self proclaimed patriots and freedom defenders giving a shit about that, do you? You'd think it would be beyond all question absolutely item number one n their agenda, wouldn't you? The one thing that makes their blood boil and their fists shake with rage!
Oh wait, DC is a majority Black city.
That explains. it.
BTW no one's educational means anything WRT the validity of their political views in this country and especially it means exactly zilch to me.
What freedom have you lost ? Please tell me and the world what freedom your government has taken away from you.
Look to answer your challenge global warming. It's beyond ridiculous what's going on there. The fossil fuel industries are not just using the same tactics the tobacco companies used to deny the cigarette - cancer link, they're literally using the exact same personalities who are still alive and still doing industry's bidding.
If you want a concrete example of a desperately needed regulation being derailed through an industry's political efforts , then this is the atom heart mother of all examples.
I defy you or anyone else , irrespective of their pre-existing beliefs, the strengths of those beliefs and disinclination to believe anything else to read Merchants of Doubt and not come away with the absolute certain knowledge that carbon emissions caused, human invoked, global warming is real and the industries involved are systematically and knowingly lying about it.
http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
As far as industry input goes, it was the Republicans who in concert with industry thought up cap and trade- a market based approach to emissions reduction incentives. When the Democrats went along with the idea, the Republicans abandoned it (! ! !) and started in with the suicidal denier shit.
We should change the nature of how that regulation gets put into place. Rather than granting different departments of each branch defacto ability to just regulate. Everything should be passed democratically through a people elected body and tested thoroughly against the constitution.
that is a direct democracy ( we have a representative republic) and presumes that the majority of the people have the knowledge and time to decide each and every issue.
There are (obvious) problems with this but that's not what is important.
I would rather agree with you and say that any way we can find to make government regulation more accurate, more verifiable in its intended outcomes less costly and more scientific is for the good.
I happen not to believe that people voting on whether some molecule should be approved for human consumption would be anything other than the kind of political football that global warming has turned into and which cigarettes were in the past with industry paying off "experts' to lie about "scientific facts" and people getting bamboozled for decades by their campaigns.
It's just not the way to a good, accurate outcome and I am outcome oriented to a large degree especially in matters of science.
If you think I don't agree that this and every other government has abused its power then you're wrong. But that abuse was a function of the people who lived at that time. American Indians a case in point. People then just did not think as we moderns do. Sure, they did bad things using the government as a force multiplier with its armies and ability to fund via taxes and pass laws etc. etc. but it was THOSE people who did those things, through the government.
The Government is not a thing with a static, enduring , persitent "character" like people. Some people may not change that much- you knew them then, you know them now and they haven't changed at bit. Their character endures over time . That's actually an artifact of their biology. They learned a first language, English say, and now that's their primary language, forever. That persistence, that durable fact about them is a function of the biology of learning a language.
But governments don't have a biology and because of that they don't have an identity that endures the way people's endures. They change when society changes. They change when the people inside their offices change.
You can't reason about what governments will and won't do the same way you can (reasonably) reason about what people will or won't do.
You're talking to someone who after due consideration of the facts has come to the conclusion that some part of the government likely had a hand in the assassination of JFK. Even though I think that's true, I don't ascribe to that part of the now government the same propensities and lawlessness that it I think it used to have then. Why? Because that kind of lawlessness was pandemic in the world Eisenhower order the assassination of the democratically elected heads of state Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq (sp?) in Iran and in this the American people probably would have backed him, had they known:
http://millercenter.org/president/eisenhower/essays/biography/5
It's a function of the times which a shorthand way of saying it's a function of the people who live at that time in history. Ditto the American South. No Southerner today countenances slavery or owns slaves (generally this is accurate) . There is no point in generalizing to today's South on the basis of yesterday's South
.
Today['s government is more enlightened by our measure just because it is run buy us, I mean we moderns. They are not evil in the ways that past governments have been evil. If you're aq progressive like me, some things piss you off, like global warming and the lack of action. It's a crime perpetrated on future generations. But the non-action reflects about 50 of the US public's POV. That evil is a function of we "moderns."
There is no evidence I am aware of which indicates that some part of the US government i, in this case the CIA and the NSA is independently and and in secret regressing to some previous state of society's developmental norms, much less to Stalin-esque or Pol Pot-esque type thinking.
Just because Pol Pot could have used the NSA doesn't mean the NSA is going to turn into Pol Pot.
It's as if in this poster's mind the ability to do something automatically led to the desire to do something . It's just so psychologically , socially, and historically obtuse and frankly hysterical it's hard to think of the counter at first because it's hard to understand where he's coming from at all.
Give me some evidence the CIA or the NSA are attempting to control anything about internal American politics, control people's lives, the outcomes of political processes or even innocent individuals lives or even anything like business outcomes. Because without that you have no case that they are a nefarious force in our lives. They are not breaking any law-. If you don't like it, repeal the Patriot Act.
An ability to hypothetically do evil thing X is NOT NOT NOT the same as the desire to. They COULD nuke us! All move to a safe place and then push the button! Are you worried about that too?
Civil society runs on the fact that people do not WANT to do evil things and if you're the NSA or the CIA evil things include any form of taking over the country politically or financially or personally.
People do not want to do the Worst Case Scenario Evil things you are imagining. If that changes, then that's something to deal with. History is FILLED with people who have all kinds of power to do evil that they never avail themselves of. In fact, that's the normative case. I COULD shoot my dog. I don't want to. I COULD rob a bank. All of civilization goes forward on two legs. One is the basic decent impulses of people who are not anti-social but rather civic minded . The other is the law which forms a structural barrier against people who are bad and also guidance and directives for morally ambiguous or ethically complex situations.
Without BOTH of those, we're fucked. People can be individually good, but still create chaos , war and anarchy if there is no law. OTOH even if the law is very clear, if no one WANTS to obey it, we're all fucked.
We have law, we have decent people applying that law. We're not the Reichstag. We're not Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia . We're not Pol Pots' Cambodia.
To tell you the truth, those were nations who came under the control of MORAL ABSOLUTISTS like yourself who were in a perpetual internal RED ALERT , who saw no shades of gray, admitted of no degrees, could not process ambiguity,and harkened back in each case to a mythical yesteryear which had been corrupted by a cabal of evil men - a situation which required the collective violence of The People against the Oppressors to rectify.
Want to read something? Read Animal Farm.
Oh yeah and this constant war on drugs and REGULATION of every mother fucking technology and bit of commerce under the sun. And Hollywood and the RIAA. No we have had the opposite of a conservative federal government keeping a military to protect the individual states. No we have a centralized system of authority which oppresses everyone and ensures only the rich and wealthy can compete and that anyone not chosen to be part of the official ruling class can suffer.
Regulation- yeah let's deregulate some more. The financial meltdown of deregulated securities didn't cost us enough. I want to spend more money saving the whole economy from going off a cliff.
Wealthy etc. You have got to be kidding me. Who wants to tax the top 1% and who wants to let the super wealthy keep everything, free them from inheritance taxes so extreme wealth can be a perpetual inter-generational thing, , let them pollute everyone else's environment while paying nothing for what they destroyed and pocketing the profits they made by destroying it, deregulate the securities industry so they can amass MORE wealth while risking only OUR money, keep the minimum wage to below poverty levels and in some cases eliminate it entirely (so you can either starve or work for food only ), permit the collective coordinated action of scum like the Chamber of Commerce while undermining unions, and who works against eh public funding of elections so MONEY doesn't decide what gets done by whom in government?
PUBLICLY FUND ELECTIONS - GET MONEY OUT OF GOVERNMENT>
Oh that's right the conservative majority in SCOTUS decided money is a form of speech. So guess we'll never see that day.
That was right before they decided that your DNA could be taken just because you were arrested. Something they did over the objections of the liberal minority in the court.
Yeah we need more conservatives to decide things. Then we can finally get evolution thrown out of the schools and become the polluted religious backwater with ginormous disparities in income that characterize all other banana republics .. just like conservatives have always dreamed of.
Honestly your points are non sequitors. Your original point literally makes no sense, never mind what you thought you were saying and if THAT might make rational if not factual sense .
Fast and Furious was an attempt that failed. You're being ridiculous if you think nothing the government does should ever fail, or else it proves the government can't do anything right.
Vietnam was a conservative war, promulgated by conservative hawks who used the specter of socialism, and communism to spend a lot of American lives. Liberals protested it and finally ended it.
So let me ask you- do YOU remember Vietnam?
Your POINT is a totally unrelated to anything you said in any way anyone can make out.
Talking to other people is different from swearing at your TV.
It is, that's the problem. The question being 'does this benefit society'? The USA has a 240 year-old piece of paper that says it doesn't. Has that been wrong all this time or is the USA wrong now?
It can be right for a time and not as right for some future time. Possibly that is the case now; possibly it will become the case in the future. It depends on events and how strictly it gets interpreted.
Note that in this case, a strict interpretation (admitting that one is even possible ) actually militates against durability while a more flexible, responsive one improves durability. Note also that THAT fact makes the Constitution just like every other thing under the sun.
This is another 'think of the children' meme. How does knowing which phone number was dialed tell anyone who the terrorists are, what they're capabilities are, or that you're not a sympathizer.
Well actually it's exactly the opposite since I am suggesting that some loss of life and security should be acceptable because expecting none (not to say trying for none) will only lead to disappointment and a government no one wants including those in the government.
As far as telephone records go, let's be clear on the details. They collect the information, but need another court order available only when clear and compelling evidence is presented to use it, analyze it or know what its content is.
Could that help in an investigation? You bet. People need to conspire and to conspire they need to communicate. What's more, people who communicate with conspirators innocently often can provide valuable information. People establish friendships, , sources of knowledge and resources before they become radicalized and continue to use those after. Those are all helpful pieces of information. Even their location over time tells a story and is helpful.
You haven't noticed this story contains a vocal portion of the population saying "Not this". When is the USA counting dissent and following the will of its people?
Indeed I have and that's why I am saying we need to all talk through these things together and in public. That's the whole point. Reach a New American Consensus on Security, Privacy and Liberty. That's what we are doing here in a small way right now.
Then what? The government has already committed the crime. You spoke earlier of problems which "... makes this measure necessary". How about solving the problem of intolerable interference from the government before it happens?
In fact, the government has committed no crime. Section 215 of The Patriot Act authorizes them to do what they're doing. The government is not interfering with anything in doing this. Some people may have bad reactions. Their feelings matter, but under our system of government their feelings do not become determinative except through an election or a by seeking a court ruling .
Stop with a mantra that US people and US Christianity is more valuable than everybody else. Playing fair means the enemies who imitate the US are sufferable. And the enemies who don't will be very, very lonely.
We're in agreement on these points.
Because the government has jails, more money, bigger guns, than the population that funds it. That always demands distrust. To quote a movie, "government should be afraid of its people".
I can't accept and do not see the truth of your implicit premise that the government is set apart from and is different from the American people. I see the opposite- that the Congress is chock full of the same kind of religiously fanatic, extremist and doctrinal assholes who make of mess of everything they've ever touched and resist every forward step for society.
The people in the Cincinnati IRS who targeted conservative groups are atypical of how the IRS operates but their actions are typical of the shit th
"We acquired this knowledge by observation of empirical evidence. Things have not changed. They have only gotten worse." What are you talking about? You acquired the evidence that the world does not need this action by the NSA ... how??? Empirical evidence that things have gotten worse ??? How does that EVEN make sense ?
Authorized in the Patriot Act. http://www.politicususa.com/bernie-sanders-blames-congressional-support-patriot-act-verizonnsa-snooping.html
What if it IS a critical tool? Huh? What if it's a fact about the world that this is a critical tool and is being used in the way it should to be used?
Is that possibility so counter to known reality that it should just be rejected out of hand the way you-all are doing ?
Because most readers here are acting on the premise that it's a true fact about the world that it is NOT a critical tool.
How did you acquire that certain knowledge about a set of facts in the world that you have no special knowledge of- the information contained in the President's PDBs?
I don't think it's unrealistic to the world as I understand it. Even if today, it is strictly not necessary because , say, we are overestimating the capabilities terrorists, what about tomorrow?
Nano-technology and artificial biology and genetic manipulation and high tech fabbing will come down to something close to the personal level sooner or later.
Civil secular society doesn't WANT to use those things to cause mass casualties to civilians and destablize the modern world, but sooner or later the steady increase of destructive power and the steady decrease in the number of people and resources it takes to wield that destructive power will intersect at an unfortunate point and it will be wielded by Christian or Islamic religionists who place no value on the affairs of men but only live to fight an unseen war taking place on some cosmic plane.
Then what?
Be truly rational and entertain the notion in your mind as a hypothesis that there is now or will be shortly something about the world that makes this measure necessary to countering acts of mass terrorism. . Now. What SHOULD we do?
We should have a national, open thorough, skeptical, informed and honest discussion across a wide range of topics around the security / privacy / liberty triad work out , aloud publicly and together what tradeoffs we're willing to endure and what ones we're not. What level of destruction and death and societal disruption we're collectively willing to endure and when - and if - that level ever becomes unacceptable.
We need to talk about this consciously and on a national scale. We need to talk as a nation and be explicit and be formal and capture as well as we can what we'll do and not do BEFORE anything happens.
Because what we have now is a strictly reactionary populace and to a degree government, who decides what the privacy liberty / security triad is going to look like right after and in response to terrorist events.
The result is anything but solidarity and unity. The Government hides its actions from the People. The People don't trust their Government and impugn ulterior - nearly insane - motives and this is as true on the left as it is on the right.
We are failing this national imperative. We are failing to plan and harden civil society for an inevitable war. We are at once protected, coddled and violated by our national security apparatus because it - and we - think we can't handle the truth.
I would love to think America would lead here, but America rarely leads. It's what Churchill said America will always do the right thing after every other possibility has been exhausted.
I think it has to be the EU that leads here. They are much more rational , less fanatically religious and absolutist in their world view , and inclined more towards collective action than the US.
Someone somewhere has to start talking about this and someone in government needs to give that discussion the imprimatur of officialdom and lift it up. We have to do this because the alternative is structural, institutionalized extremism, borne in reaction to random events, fueled by reactionary impulses and finally codified into law.
That is when civil society stats to break down, not because of a bomb or disease or anything else but because we permitted ourselves to continue exist in a fantasy land of 18th century perspectives and values until that fantasy was exploded and we had no idea how to carry on.
You just haven't lived until an AC has called you a fag on /.
Bulldozer 8150. It rocks the house. Headroom still for a 8350 without having to change platforms- thanks AMD ! 189 bucks. Can't touch it for the price. Highly recommended.
Really? Because of network effects. That's it. Everyone else is communicating on it.
It's purely a predatory play- they capture people who are at a time in their lives when they're well known to be indiscreet. They then record all that indiscretion. Then they monetize it.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is taking the results of that monetization and campaigning -hard - for XL Keystone pipeline.
http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_23151754/keystone-xl-foes-rally-front-facebook-protest-zuckerbergs
a fact he's aggressively trying to lie about:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/04/30/1943091/facebook-rejects-ad-highlighting-zuckerberg-groups-support-for-keystone-xl/
because like all other deniers,. he's first and foremost a narcissist:
http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-disorder/
who relishes the idea that he's smarter and more knowledgeable across a highly technical domain than are the the world's scientists who have spent their lives disciplined in and mastering that domain.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm
But one thing he doesn't have in common with other deniers
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
is he's going to be around long enough to be forced by society to bear, without reserve, the consequences of his actions today, which depending on how bad things get, could range anywhere from total dissolution of his personal wealth to fund emergency, remedial action against global warming - an outcome that is now a virtually certainty- to extended torture at the hands of enraged mobs / quasi-civilization, should we reach five degrees of warming and real civilization just breaks down.:
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nRf2RTqANg
Come on. The description of research methods , procedures, tests and results scientific papers, exists for the betterment of humankind, not to make people who own it rich. Get rich by Making Stuff, not exerting a monopolist's control on Knowledge.
How hard is this? All research and results conducted by higher ed should be available for free and the costs rolled into the tax base.
This is as basic as it gets. Roads bridges security and advances in knowledge.
No you're wrong. Being detained is NOT the same as being under arrest. You can be detained on a suspicion. You have to have broken the law - and be charged with a crime- to be arrested. You can be detained briefly but not *forever* or even a long time. You can consider yourself detained if a cop comes up to you and starts talking about anything other than the weather.
If you're walking around thinking detained = arrested then you already have a chip on your shoulder since the circumstances that lead to being detained are intuitively NOT sufficient to warrant being arrested and you therefore feel like you're being unlawfully arrested every time you're being lawfully detained. That can't lead to anything good for you since you're already interpreting the cop as a bad apple when in fact, he's not. He's just doing his job.
If you're careful and have done nothing wrong,. being detained won't lead to being arrested. A lot depends on your attitude. If you're defiant, then it becomes way more likely in the cops mind that you also have an illegal weapon or narcotics on your person or in your car. Ever watch COPS? See how criminals act? Try not to act like that, even a little.
But the reality is that anyone can be arrested for anything. Someone broke into a house somewhere near where you are? And you were *around* at the time *active furtively*? Done.
Helpful Hints-
don't ever stop doing whatever it was you were doing when you notice you're being watched by the police. That's a red flag to them.
Be very polite and cooperative if stopped. The cop may decide to probe you for everything from attitude, to drunkeness, to excessive nervousness, to whatever it was he was looking for when he detained you. By way of this, he may speak in a way so as to provoke anger in you because he's trying to see if you're a hot head. Don't reply by being defiant or even sarcastic if he does this. Continue to cooperate. Be polite. Be serious.
Don't lie about anything , even something small. Of course don't be breaking the law in some way because none of this advice matters if you are.
Don't start asserting your rights before you're arrested or acting like you're going to. Most cops really are just people with jobs to do and you have temporarily become a part of their workday. Make it easy on them in every way. They don't want to be there either.
If arrested, shut completely up and call a lawyer. Completely.
They have better things to do than arrest someone doing nothing. Overall, they are not interested in you- they are interested in law breakers. Yes- that's true, that's what is relevant to them. You don't rate, at all. They get evaluated in part by number of arrests that lead to a conviction of some sort, especially felony convictions, which are just awesome.
HTH
Productivity of the average American worker went through the roof since 1979:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-worker-productivity-rising-faster-wage-growth-1114871
Did your inflation-adjusted paycheck? Oh hell no, you're (the average American ) treading water.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3220
http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6
and have been for decades... DECADES
OK then. All this cost savings is pocketed by billionaires , not passed on to you. The ONLY form in which it's ever passed on to ordinary people is at their own expense, e.g. Walmart prices and Walmart
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/03/1213437/-What-Walmart-Costs-Taxpayers
http://www.walmarteffectbook.com/
So if you want to realize what any of the productivity gains / cost savings you've worked for and created, start a company, force everyone who works for you be to be part time, steal the benefits of THEIR increase in productivity, lobby your congresspig for tax breaks for the wealthy..... oh and shop at Walmart.
America is a nation of by and for billionaires, who fund our elections, occupy our political offices, write our laws and own our media. They do this for their own benefit and anything which does not effect their personal lives is not *real* and doesn't matter.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2296684923/
So no- it's not for you.
Now get back to work.
I actually agree with this to an extent and would mod you up had I points.
A lot of the alleged "intelligence" being pulled out of big data are merely correlational and of a unscientific sampling at that- example the bullshit about which states are unhappiest based on people's Twittering .
Upon this, as upon the credit default swaps and derivatives, an entire "science" of "big data" will be built. The chief and only certain beneficiaries will be the horseshit factories that churn this out out to the mathematically illiterate and experientially provincial.
In fact, since the data cannot be assumed to normally distributed and the variables in question independent of anything, including each other, most of mathematics CANNOT be used to analyze this data still less to predict future states of any system reified - and presumed to really exist- from that data.
Never mind though. Rest assured the asshole quants on working the case even now because while no KNOWLEDGE can be derived from it, a fuck of a lot of money sure can be had.
Still big data is interesting in some limited context and can be applied in useful ways to the betterment of applications, for instance.
But that's not what we're all about, is it ? We're all about putting some lipstick on that pig and selling it.
If you're the sorting type, it's only a matter of timing any Big Data fungus, er./.. I mean companies, as they crop up.
I agree but if it doesn't make money, if it's not self supporting, then what good is it unless the government is not going to support it?
For things to exist in this world they at least have to break even. The hardest part of any venture is coming up with a credible business plan.
Just speaking from experience.
Now I'll never be able to tell the schizophrenics from everyone else on the street.