Does the EFF have the right to speak politically? Is not the EFF nothing more than a group of like-minded citizens pooling their resources so a s to be better heard?
With McCain-Feingold before the Citizens United decision, the only people allowed to make political speech that could reach the masses were extremely wealthy because they could, from their own pockets, afford to purchase airtime. Most people need to band together to pool their resources to buy the airtime, etc. So, the progressives claim to believe in free (unhindered) speech (they're usually the ones griping about censorship issues) and claim to be looking out for the "little guy" (they only want to tax the wealthiest, etc.) yet they are exactly the ones trying to limit the ability of the non-wealthiest to participate in the political process by disallowing the pooling of money for such purposes.
Momma always said, "Actions speak louder than words."
Open your mind just a little bit and think about why the Founding Fathers were worried about "freedom of the press" and "free speech." They had just rid themselves of a government that issued death warrants against them for having had the audacity to speak against said government and to print and distribute pamphlets repeating that speech. I know progressives generally hate the phrase "Original Intent" but it is very instructive at times and could solve a whole range of problems. The original intent of the writers of the First Amendment was to point out that everyone had the right to speak out against the government and to publish and distribute such words as well. Apply the original intent to the modern environment and we see that distributing pamphlets and making speeches from a soapbox in the public square now include publishing and selling books, making, distributing and showing films (documentary or otherwise), airing radio and television ads, etc.
Want another example of how understanding original intent helps geekdom? Think about the original intent of being "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects". Everybody understands it generally means requiring warrants to search homes and intercept snail mail. That was basically all that was around in the "original" days. When telephones became popular, society still understood the original intent and warrants are required for wiretaps (probably had some fighting over that, though). If the progressives didn't absolutely hate the phrase, they would have a much easier time helping win the case for requiring warrants for looking at email and ISP traffic logs, etc. The original intent is that communications among individuals are part of their "papers, and effects" and are protected. Applying the original intent to the modern world means that modern forms of communications are no different. See, "Original Intent" is everyone's friend. Not simply a conservative way to keep society in the dark ages."
And yes, original intent of the Second Amendment was that the ordinary citizen could own and use any personal weapon or firearm that might be issued by the government to military or police forces. Personal weapons and firearms are generally considered to be rifles and handguns. Yes, selective fire variants would count under an original intent interpretation. read the writings of Hamilton and others as already posted elsewhere in this thread. No, grenades, RPGs, nukes, etc. would not be considered personal weapons or firearms and would still be banned from civilian ownership by nearly all rabid Second Amendment supporters. Sure you can find individuals or groups that think the Second Amendment gives them the right to own a nuke but nutjobs live at both ends of the spectrum.
OK, so I am also mathematically and reading ability challenged this morning. I used your daily figure as an annual figure. However, the numbers being thrown around were more in the 6 figure range than in the low 5 figures.
So, based on the 216,000 acres per day in the April, 1990 Vegetarian Times article your search turned up, my estimate was off by a factor of 4. As in, Vegeterian Times was claiming the denuding of the Earth by your figures every 4 years instead of every year. My recollection seems to be much closer the reality of environmental lying than the environmental lying is to the truth. Not even an order of magnitude vs. many orders of magnitude.
What are the chances that this AC agrees with the Slashdotters who frequently deride those who believe in some form of deity?
I've found that a strong belief that the Earth can actually make a decision and perform an action often seems completely normal to those who think only a babbling idiot would believe in a deity.
This whole discussion reminds me of the newspaper articles back in the late 70s / early 80s ranting about how many acres of rain forest we were losing to farming every day. The numbers were regurgitated again and again and they were so easily verified to be unrealistic. As in x acres per day times 365 days per year divide by surface area of the earth and we found that those evil farmers in the Amazon region were denuding the entire planet (including the surface of the oceans) every year. I was able to use these numbers a couple of times to "prove" that the rain forests are very resilient because they regenerated themselves multiple times per day. Since most environmentalist types are numerically challenged, they had trouble seeing the problem.
I also had a college professor that walked the class through how many Cat D-9 bulldozers would be required to perform all this clearing and it was more than Caterpillar had produced to date (assuming Cat was not underreporting their production by orders of magnitude) and the amount of fuel required to run all those bulldozers was somwehere in the neighborhood of all US fuel consumption for diesel, gasoline and heating oil combined.
Anyway, where did these numbers come from?... The newspapers were simply quoting a respected professor who was also an environmental activist from testimony he gave before the US Congress. When somebody finally decided to try to end the idiocy, he finally had to admit to that he had simply made the numbers up because he was put on the spot when someone asked him for an actual number of how many acres were being lost.
My point is that greedy, evil big business is not the only group to just make numbers up. The environmental movement has been doing it for decades.
Or, like "discovering" forms of matter that always existed.
Just because some people were already here and that other Europeans had been here but didn't know they were here does not lessen what Columbus did in discovering the "New World."
I know, it was old and already part of the existing one but we have to write such things so somebody has something to complain about.
If you are referring to Citizens United, then you are truly flame-baiting. The Citizens United decision does not allow unrestricted corporate donations to political campaigns. The majority opinion contains much detail about why restricting independent expenditures violates the First Amendment.
The majority opinion was all about defending the First Amendment and the liberal establishment is actually opposed to it. Just imagine, the liberal left in America being opposed to First Amendment freedoms.
"The First Amendment does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance attorney, conduct demographic marketing re-search, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing the most salient political issues of our day." pg 7
"While some means of communication may be less effective than others at influencing the public in different contexts, any effort by the Judiciary to decide which means of communications are to be preferred for the particular type of message and speaker would raise questions as to the courts’ own lawful authority. Substantial questions would arise if courts were to begin saying what means of speech should be preferred or disfavored. And in all events, those differentiations might soon prove to be irrelevant or outdated by technologies that are in rapid flux." pg 9
"First Amendment standards, however, 'must give the benefit of any doubt to protecting rather than stifling speech.'" pg 10
"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form." pg 33
The majority opinion also points out the absurdity of treating some corporations as special (GE, Disney, Newscorp, etc.) because they consider themselves to be media corporations (or members of THE PRESS). The majority opinion of the court is simply that a corporation is a corporation and if they had ruled that Citizens United enjoyed no First Amendment protections, then neither did ABC (Disney), NBC, MSNBC, CNBC (GE) or even Simon & Schuster, etc.
So, if you don't want corporations to have the right to make political speech, please don't support any corporation that does so. No more Huffpo, MoveOn, Slate, Mother Jones, Chris Matthews, et al on the air, etc. No more SNL doing political skits. No more discussion of Climate Change on any commercial venue. No more hearing from the ACLU or the Free Software groups.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the majority in the US stopped expecting the government to find the least intrusive route long ago. I see the government always moving in the how intrusive can we be direction and, over time, the citizens stopped asking for this to be limited and started asking for it to be expanded. First we wanted limits on business practices (anti-trust laws to reign in the railroads by calling them robber barons), then we pass laws dictating with whom I must associate if I want to operate a business (first it was who I have to serve and then it is who I have to hire and how much I have to pay them). We are now in the middle of actually requiring that we all purchase a specific government-mandated financial product from a list of government-approved vendors.
Many on here hailed the decision by the government to declare what we exhale when breathing to be a pollutant so we should probably not complain about government intrusion in a very small area when most of us (population in general) are constantly begging for major intrusions in nearly every other aspect of our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the EFF have the right to speak politically? Is not the EFF nothing more than a group of like-minded citizens pooling their resources so a s to be better heard?
With McCain-Feingold before the Citizens United decision, the only people allowed to make political speech that could reach the masses were extremely wealthy because they could, from their own pockets, afford to purchase airtime. Most people need to band together to pool their resources to buy the airtime, etc. So, the progressives claim to believe in free (unhindered) speech (they're usually the ones griping about censorship issues) and claim to be looking out for the "little guy" (they only want to tax the wealthiest, etc.) yet they are exactly the ones trying to limit the ability of the non-wealthiest to participate in the political process by disallowing the pooling of money for such purposes.
Momma always said, "Actions speak louder than words."
Open your mind just a little bit and think about why the Founding Fathers were worried about "freedom of the press" and "free speech." They had just rid themselves of a government that issued death warrants against them for having had the audacity to speak against said government and to print and distribute pamphlets repeating that speech. I know progressives generally hate the phrase "Original Intent" but it is very instructive at times and could solve a whole range of problems. The original intent of the writers of the First Amendment was to point out that everyone had the right to speak out against the government and to publish and distribute such words as well. Apply the original intent to the modern environment and we see that distributing pamphlets and making speeches from a soapbox in the public square now include publishing and selling books, making, distributing and showing films (documentary or otherwise), airing radio and television ads, etc.
Want another example of how understanding original intent helps geekdom? Think about the original intent of being "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects". Everybody understands it generally means requiring warrants to search homes and intercept snail mail. That was basically all that was around in the "original" days. When telephones became popular, society still understood the original intent and warrants are required for wiretaps (probably had some fighting over that, though). If the progressives didn't absolutely hate the phrase, they would have a much easier time helping win the case for requiring warrants for looking at email and ISP traffic logs, etc. The original intent is that communications among individuals are part of their "papers, and effects" and are protected. Applying the original intent to the modern world means that modern forms of communications are no different. See, "Original Intent" is everyone's friend. Not simply a conservative way to keep society in the dark ages."
And yes, original intent of the Second Amendment was that the ordinary citizen could own and use any personal weapon or firearm that might be issued by the government to military or police forces. Personal weapons and firearms are generally considered to be rifles and handguns. Yes, selective fire variants would count under an original intent interpretation. read the writings of Hamilton and others as already posted elsewhere in this thread. No, grenades, RPGs, nukes, etc. would not be considered personal weapons or firearms and would still be banned from civilian ownership by nearly all rabid Second Amendment supporters. Sure you can find individuals or groups that think the Second Amendment gives them the right to own a nuke but nutjobs live at both ends of the spectrum.
OK, so I am also mathematically and reading ability challenged this morning. I used your daily figure as an annual figure. However, the numbers being thrown around were more in the 6 figure range than in the low 5 figures.
So, based on the 216,000 acres per day in the April, 1990 Vegetarian Times article your search turned up, my estimate was off by a factor of 4. As in, Vegeterian Times was claiming the denuding of the Earth by your figures every 4 years instead of every year. My recollection seems to be much closer the reality of environmental lying than the environmental lying is to the truth. Not even an order of magnitude vs. many orders of magnitude.
Debate about the utility of ice cores in describing past events? Heresy!!!
Next you'll be claiming that the debate on AGW is not yet over.
Expect to hear from our friend Al soon...
he probably needs another "massage."
What are the chances that this AC agrees with the Slashdotters who frequently deride those who believe in some form of deity?
I've found that a strong belief that the Earth can actually make a decision and perform an action often seems completely normal to those who think only a babbling idiot would believe in a deity.
This whole discussion reminds me of the newspaper articles back in the late 70s / early 80s ranting about how many acres of rain forest we were losing to farming every day. The numbers were regurgitated again and again and they were so easily verified to be unrealistic. As in x acres per day times 365 days per year divide by surface area of the earth and we found that those evil farmers in the Amazon region were denuding the entire planet (including the surface of the oceans) every year. I was able to use these numbers a couple of times to "prove" that the rain forests are very resilient because they regenerated themselves multiple times per day. Since most environmentalist types are numerically challenged, they had trouble seeing the problem.
I also had a college professor that walked the class through how many Cat D-9 bulldozers would be required to perform all this clearing and it was more than Caterpillar had produced to date (assuming Cat was not underreporting their production by orders of magnitude) and the amount of fuel required to run all those bulldozers was somwehere in the neighborhood of all US fuel consumption for diesel, gasoline and heating oil combined.
Anyway, where did these numbers come from?... The newspapers were simply quoting a respected professor who was also an environmental activist from testimony he gave before the US Congress. When somebody finally decided to try to end the idiocy, he finally had to admit to that he had simply made the numbers up because he was put on the spot when someone asked him for an actual number of how many acres were being lost.
My point is that greedy, evil big business is not the only group to just make numbers up. The environmental movement has been doing it for decades.
Unless you are a popular actor (at the time) in a bar in Florida with the teenage "victims" mother also being involved.
Then you get in trouble and mom and daughter get money.
Or, like "discovering" forms of matter that always existed.
Just because some people were already here and that other Europeans had been here but didn't know they were here does not lessen what Columbus did in discovering the "New World."
I know, it was old and already part of the existing one but we have to write such things so somebody has something to complain about.
If you are referring to Citizens United, then you are truly flame-baiting. The Citizens United decision does not allow unrestricted corporate donations to political campaigns. The majority opinion contains much detail about why restricting independent expenditures violates the First Amendment.
The majority opinion was all about defending the First Amendment and the liberal establishment is actually opposed to it. Just imagine, the liberal left in America being opposed to First Amendment freedoms. "The First Amendment does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance attorney, conduct demographic marketing re-search, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing the most salient political issues of our day." pg 7 "While some means of communication may be less effective than others at influencing the public in different contexts, any effort by the Judiciary to decide which means of communications are to be preferred for the particular type of message and speaker would raise questions as to the courts’ own lawful authority. Substantial questions would arise if courts were to begin saying what means of speech should be preferred or disfavored. And in all events, those differentiations might soon prove to be irrelevant or outdated by technologies that are in rapid flux." pg 9 "First Amendment standards, however, 'must give the benefit of any doubt to protecting rather than stifling speech.'" pg 10 "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form." pg 33 The majority opinion also points out the absurdity of treating some corporations as special (GE, Disney, Newscorp, etc.) because they consider themselves to be media corporations (or members of THE PRESS). The majority opinion of the court is simply that a corporation is a corporation and if they had ruled that Citizens United enjoyed no First Amendment protections, then neither did ABC (Disney), NBC, MSNBC, CNBC (GE) or even Simon & Schuster, etc. So, if you don't want corporations to have the right to make political speech, please don't support any corporation that does so. No more Huffpo, MoveOn, Slate, Mother Jones, Chris Matthews, et al on the air, etc. No more SNL doing political skits. No more discussion of Climate Change on any commercial venue. No more hearing from the ACLU or the Free Software groups.
What other type of claim is there about the effects of climate change?
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the majority in the US stopped expecting the government to find the least intrusive route long ago. I see the government always moving in the how intrusive can we be direction and, over time, the citizens stopped asking for this to be limited and started asking for it to be expanded. First we wanted limits on business practices (anti-trust laws to reign in the railroads by calling them robber barons), then we pass laws dictating with whom I must associate if I want to operate a business (first it was who I have to serve and then it is who I have to hire and how much I have to pay them). We are now in the middle of actually requiring that we all purchase a specific government-mandated financial product from a list of government-approved vendors. Many on here hailed the decision by the government to declare what we exhale when breathing to be a pollutant so we should probably not complain about government intrusion in a very small area when most of us (population in general) are constantly begging for major intrusions in nearly every other aspect of our lives.