We tried Annexing countless times. Literally. I can't count the times. Once during the Revolution, once during the War of 1812, another time in the 1830s when our Marshall in Detroit "accidentally" let Canadian rebels "borrow" the entire contents of the arsenal, numerous times in the late 1860s when the Fenians tried to conquer Canada...
They've always been quite adamant that they are quite happy to be her Majesty's Unamerican subjects.
And you're highly exaggerating our originality. The US System is precisely identical to the British system of 1789 except for three things: 1) instead of one document containing everything the Brits had multiple documents, 2) the King selected by much different means (descent from Electress Sophia vs. selection by the states), and 3) we had two levels of government (state and Federal). Other then that the whole thing is warmed-ovwer British mush combined with good-old American boastful bullshitting.
And the really smart people have done the math, and bought a fairly used but still reliable vehicle (ie: closer to $5k then $10k), that's gets at least 30 MPG. They maintain it at the dealer because they know he's only going to screw them over on the official bill; rather then screwing them over by trying to use plumbing parts in a car*. Then they drive it for at least a decade.
The easiest way to lose $3k a year every year forever is insist on having a recent-model $30k vehicle in your driveway at all times. The second-easiest is to try to keep a $500 hooptie running 365 days a year if you aren't a skilled mechanic.
*Yes this actually happens. No I do not understand why someone would think a part meant for room temperature to possibly 130 Fahrenheit would work in a fucking internal combustion engine for any meaningful period of time. But I have actually witnessed a backstreet mechanic spend an hour trying to find the plumbing fitting that matched the one he'd pulled from a car.
Strictly speaking the reason nobody in the US supports large Hydro projects is that most of them have already been completed. It's not like we can re-engineer Iowa to be a huge plateau so that the Mississippi dam in Nebraska can generate power from a 100 ft drop.
Nuclear is virtually impossible to get support for anywhere because it's a classic Black Swan risk. Yeah if everything works you're Sweden and you've got no environmental impact, but if there's a disaster after the power company's fucked up safety procedures you're doing $100 Billion in damage. Moreover in a loosish union of sovereign states it's really difficult to convince one to accept all the nuclear fuel.
Interestingly enough I've never heard a single environmentalist group make all four of those claims. To my knowledge no actual environmental group makes any claims regarding wind power and birds, that entire conversation is all conservative anti-environmentalists talking to themselves.
In other words this is the equivalent of a liberal arguing that conservatives are insane because they a) strongly support local law enforcement's right to stop damn near everybody, while b) claiming that opposing government authority with your personally-owned firearm is your sacred duty. Yes both of those guys probably voted for Romney, but they aren't the same guy.
Who said anything about what I think? There's a difference between understanding the intellectual underpinnings of a movement and agreeing with it.
Regardless, very few social movements in the US are totally divorced from self-interest. Black abolitionists, for example, were quite self interested. Even white abolitionists tended to frame their arguments in terms of their own self-interest -- "we can't compete with slave wages," "the slave power will take our freedoms," etc.
As far as I can tell the only Americans who currently support a system that will not result in nice things for other people being cut while nice things for them get a healthy boost are very wealthy limousine liberals and relatively poor working class white conservatives. And both of those groups actually believe that in the long term they'll be better off if their nice things get cut.
The 1% argument isn't just about helping poor people. It's about helping the everyone including the upper bits of the Middle Class (ie: all of the 99% who aren't in the 1%). It's also about reining in the people who are are in that 1%. Among most of it's adherents the idea is that you tax guys like Mitt Romney, and use the money to pay for nice things for everyone. Thus you get proposals like a financial transaction tax, ending the 529 deduction, etc.
Paul Ryan is thinking about the helping poor people side of the equation. But he doesn't seem to think the Middle Class seems serious economic help, and if he proposes any new spending it will almost certainly be paid for by cutting some other spending, not increasing the tax burden of the 1%. Whatever he ends up proposing will almost certainly be mostly tax cuts targeted at helping poor people, plus some rethinking of how current government money is spent.
I live in a very low-income Cleveland suburb (per capita income is roughly $20k). If you used the Carbon tax to pay for a much expanded Rapid (the local light rail service), or made the buses come every 15 minutes instead of every 40 or hour, most of my coworkers would probably stop driving their cars so much. They'd still need them for grocery-shopping, days when the kid would not go to fucking sleep so mommy really needs to sleep in, etc. but even if the tax doubles gas prices they'd probably save money if they just used the bus/Rapid three times a week.
BTW, this kind of thinking is one reason conservatives rarely get anywhere in the black community. If you think of a reason that a left-wing policy would hurt the poor (and blacks a) tend to be poor, and b) the ones who aren't tend to be very sympathetic to the poor), but the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supports it; your first reaction should not be "why are those morons voting against their own interest?" It should be "Why would those rational human beings disagree with me abhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/03/17/0025235/politics-is-poisoning-nasas-ability-to-do-science?sbsrc=md#out their own interests?" In this case the reason is a combination of coalition-building the CBC, and the blacks who overwhelmingly support it, thinks a government dominated by white pro-Carbon Tax liberals would be better for it then the alternative), and a very different definition of their own interests (ie: many of them would actually prefer to drive less and bus more).
It's similar to what happens when Liberals ask "What's the matter with Kansas?" The answer turns out to be a combination of a) different priorities (many Kansans prefer a universe where they make slightly less money and abortion is harder to get), and b) different perceptions of their interests (Kansans tend to think of themselves as people who will be ricvh real soon now; or at least as people who only have a middle-class lifestyle because some rich guy can afford to hire them; which means that if you start talking about taxing the rich they get uncomfortable).
It's impossible with home equity, because most people don't actually know what their homes are worth.
Just do a survey of people at a dinner party about their guess as their home;s worth. Then use the Zillow zestimate tool. nLast time I tried this everyone was off by at least 25%, and despite the fact Zestimates are known to be high most of them were too high.
So if you didn't mind a) giving up your nice car for a slightly older one with better mileage, b) selling your house and moving to an apartment, c) declaring staycations to be the bomb, d) deciding that your kids would just have to live with a normal public school education and student loans, etc. you'd be fine.
But generally if you're the kind of person who actually buys a home, a couple cars, in a nice suburb with good schools, etc. you are not willing to do that kind of thing.
Strictly speaking if you asked anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement whether US taxes should go up to pay for hospitals and primary education in Mogadishu almost all of them would say yes. Add in the "why do we need to raise taxes? we can just cut defense spending and use that money" and you've got damn near everybody. The rest of the economic left would agree. And it's not like Paul Ryan is bitching about the evils of the 1%.
The reasons that aid isn't a lot larger is there's a) numerous veto-points in the US System for people like Paul Ryan who disagree with the "1%" argument and b) it's remarkably hard to get get everyone else to actually cut checks. They almost all show up for the big donor's conference, and say they'll donate a huge dollar amount, but very follow through is generally lacking.
Basically as a practical matter the policy you say liberals should implement can't happen until there's a One World Government which can just do shit without paying attention to the goddamn subcommittee chairman from Canada. And unless I'm mistaken* you would oppose that quite strongly.
*This assumption is based entirely on the strong correlation between criticizing the left for it's concern about economic inequality and opposing things like One World Government. In real life, unlike Sherlock Holmes, the guy who guesses based on correlation isn't always right.
What set the nazis apart (and may still do in times since) is the clean, industrial approach to destroying peoples and cultures that they employed. It terrified people not for the brutality, but for the complete divorce from human emotion.
So... ISIS????
What the OP meant is that the Nazis literally invented techniques of mass-murder because the old stand-by (shooting a bunch of people in the head) a) took a lot of labor (the Order Police who were supposed to be controlling Poland for them had time for very little except Jew-killing when they were shooting each one in the head individually), and b) gave tens of thousands of Germans PTSD from shooting little kids in the head. They kept doing it until they invaded Russia, but then they had a million-odd Soviet prisoners of war, the Russians would not trade for them (Stalin even refused to trade his son for a high-ranking German General). Rather then engage in the time-sink of killing a million of these guys one-by-one they invented a new kind of Gas Chamber. It looked safe (so the Soviet prisoners would go in without trying to over-power their guards), only brought a handful of Germans into the process, and solved the problem of what to feed these guys permanently.So they started applying the technique to the Jews too.
ISIS is definitely evil, but I sincerely doubt they have the ability to organize anything but a really big machete rampage. They are definitely not going to pioneer entirely new technologies of mass death.
In '47 there was a press release. China has never made a formal claim before any international legal body, or even bothered to explain precisely (as in which geographical coordinates) the line ends. The line is not connected, and even in the spots where there's actually as line the map is small enough (and the line wide enough) that it's like 5-10 miles wide.
If the "we owned it before you existed" legal standard was actually a legal standard maybe a half-dozen African states would have a legal right to exist. The others were all created by (and therefore owned) by various European Empires, and were therefore owned by Europe before they existed. The Americas south of the Rio Grande would be split between Spain and Portugal, north would be English. Austria-Hungary would have an extremely compelling legal case, to much of Eastern Europe, and the Turks could annex the Balkan peninsula up to (and including) the bits of Serbia not given back to the Habsburgs.
The only modern state which makes any claims based on something as tenuous as "600-year-old historical links" is Israel. I don't know if you'd noticed but in the Court of International law the only world leader who ever took their claim to Jerusalem even a little bit seriously was Dubya.
The Vietnamese will be likely to stop the flights.
Their current big international dispute is over their maritime boundaries with China. The CHinese claim almost the entire South China Sea on the basis of something called the "nine-dashed-line," and have a tendency to periodically engage in extreme brinksmanship with all their neighbors in the region, including Vietnam. They actually fought a war with the Chinese in '79. Which means if the Russian flights support China in any way the Vietnamese have every reason to stop them.
But they aren't involved, so we'll just have to put up with it like we do in Europe.
You're talking about FedEx and UPS. I've never made a post on the issue that wasn't a direct response to you talking about FedEx and UPS.
You're ignoring their justification, and that Wilson isn't using any legal recourse. They say they can refuse to ship products that are potentially illegal without proof that both sides of the transaction have the proper license/paperwork/etc. Since Wilson doesn't have a case against them in Court, that implies they do have the right to jerk his ass around until he comes up with firearm manufacturing licenses from his buyers. It's not like he a) doesn't know how to do this shit himself, or b) couldn't get a lawyer from Texas to sue them for him for the publicity.
And as I've said before, this isn't Wilson's major problem in the long-term. He can figure something out, even if it's only "I'll ship to gun stores who then hold the product for my clients," "I'll hire this random chick to mail packages on behalf of my subsidiary, and neither chick nor subsidiary's name will ever appear on my publicity," or "the post office better be nice to me or the entire NRA will call their Senators." His long-term problem is that any 3D printer company he uses is doomed on the global market, so no sane 3D printer company will allow Defense Distributed designs to be printed on their machines.
If milling parties are not so common that there are 3 million households with a fully milled AR-15 receiver they aren't common enough to seriously inconvenience gun-grabbers. You're treating the Feds, who literally have a $1 Trillion budget and the sovereign right to borrow $80 billion for no good reason, like they're the Ferguson PD or something.
To do this they'd need a Constitutional Amendment. That can;t happen unless 38 states want it to happen, and if 38 states want it to happen then 38 states are full of people who want your guns to be grabbed, and if the voters of 38 states send gun-grabbers to Congress and force a Constitutional Amendment it's likely that Congress adds Billion$ to the ATF budget every year until your ass is in jail.
That ATF that can track you down, get a warrant for the buddy they knew had to be at your party, when they find his receiver they can threaten him with prison until he snitches about the rest of your party-goers, who then get to choose between prison and snitching on the two guys your buddy forgot/that other milling party they heard about/etc.
You can't read the debates they had. There are no minutes for the Constitutional Convention. There are numerous high-IQ people who don't understand the difference between "the people" and an individsual person who swear up and down that every time a Founder mentioned the collective group klnown as the people have the right to own guns it means that every single individual among that group had the right to own precisely the arsenal he wanted, but these people suck at a) grammar, and b) history.
One of the defining elements of an individual right is they can't make you do it, if you choose to do it they can't say what you do with it, etc. Obama can't pass a law saying all people have to publicly denounce Mitt Romney, go to secret Kenyan Muslim Church, and subscribe to the New York Times. Yet George Washington ordered all American men to a) buy a gun, b) buy a specific model, and c) register it with a dual hatted state/Federal local militia captain so that he could force guys who had two to bring them to militia drill and share with the poor. That's not an individual right of every American to own whatever firearm he wants, it';s a collective right for the people of that local county to have enough arms (and proper arms) to defend themselves from a) the Indians, b) the British, and c) the Feds.
Note that I'm not saying the pro-gun control side is right with these posts. I honestly have no fucking idea how the Founders would apply a rule intended to create a vast militia to support a minuscule standing army in a time when a) no state actually has militia duty, and b) the Federal military is large enough that it could totally crush the rifle-armed militia of any individual state in a week.
So basically you're convinced that a government determined enough to grab all firearms won't bother to do any other kind of investigative work on you?
For example, a simple warrant for all credit card records relating to defense distributed would get all the guys who bought that mill. If they have the votes to ban AR-15s, they have the votes to ban the Mill. If the mill is banned, and they know you bought one, they have probable cause for a warrant to search your house.
And now you're in jail, and all your guns are grabbed.
Your example is a failure. Explosives are hazardous materials restricted by law, requiring special handling to ship. The parcel companies are required by law to refuse to ship explosives.
But they're not explosives. One of the packages looks like explosives, which could trigger the refusal, but the second package is just a package. If they can refuse to ship a package that's just a package from AQ, they can do it to anybody.
And you're ignoring the actual PR and potential legal costs associated with shipping the devices. Sure federal law says you can't be held liable if a weapon you made yourself legally is used to turn a kindergarten class into dog-food by your insane son, and Defense Distributed can also not be held liable, but it doesn't explicitly say anything about freight companies. And Juries are not known for being particularly rational when following the law means some pretty upper-middle-class white mom can lose her son to a brutal murderer and nobody can be punished. At a minimum shipping these things has a very good chance of being a PR nightmare.
As for the rest, you've managed to ignore my point. The printer company does not give two shits about your rights as an American, US Law, the Constitution, Apple Pie or the baby Jesus. It is a for-profit business and your rights as an American apply to a minuscule part of the global target market. It does give a shit about the likely reaction of politicians in countries that are reflexively anti-firearm to some asshole ion the internet declaring that he has created a program that will allow little old ladies to 3-D print enough materiel for a company of soldiers in their spare time.
Note that, given that this is about politicians, a logical reality-based argument is only relevant to precisely the extent the politician concerned agrees with a) logic and b) reality.
I gave two possible interpretations of the Amendment. You have explained the pro-gun rights interpretation quite well, but have neglected to provide any proof that the anti-gun rights interpretation is incorrect. Which means you haven't actually disagreed with anything I said, you've merely explained one side of the debate.
The anti-gun-rightsd position is that the Amendment allows states to create, regulate, and train militia forces. But that's a state right, not a personal right. The personal right is entirely dependent on the condition in the first half of the sentence. All of which means you (as an individual person) have no inalienable right to bear arms unless you are part of the organized militia (the disorganized militia we're all members of by statute is not "regulated" in the 1789 sense of the term) of your state. Mostly that's the National Guard, but almost half the states have their own separate militia organized around Title 32, Section 109 of the US Code.
To actually contradict my case you'll have to prove one of several very difficult things: Conditional clauses don't exist; This particular clause cannot (for some grammatical reason) be conditional; etc.
To figure out the exact implication for those folks you'd have to get a finance guy and a lawyer to read the bill.
I suspect that the applicability would depend on how easy it was to turn those dollars into real money (i.e.: if you can withdraw Linden Dollars as USD it's a problem), and how common hacks around the system are. So if people start using their Second Life accounts to wire money to the cousins in Peru it's likely Second Life will have to comply.
Regardless, if you're as rich as Blizzard you damn well better have the budget to pay for regulatory compliance that most check-cashing places do. If you're a start-up and you don't have that budget things will be complicated, but more then one startup has managed to avoid paying to deal with some regulatory hurdle until they were rich enough they had no excuse.
I can poke my dog all day and he won't bite me. This is more like biting a bear with rabies.
The more pertinent question is: why would anyone allow a rabid bear to even continue existing, much less let them into their workshops and bedrooms to threaten them.
Because historically the alternative to having a rabid bear in your capital is having somebody else impose their rabid bear on you. Native Americans, for example, had no governmental institutions with coercive authority at all. The Chief could not tax your ass, he could not stop you from killing that one white guy who was pissing you off, he could not arrest you after you did it, all he could do was take his loyal section of the tribe to the local US Army Fort in hopes that the Star-Spangled-Rabid Bear would only eat your dumb ass.
You can limit your rabid bear in certain ways and still survive. But you really, really need an entity with significant powers to restrict your own personal rights or those rights become obsolete.
It's so interesting how when people think of government-oppression scenarios like this they don't think things through.
If the government has passed a gun confiscation act they have changed the law including the Constitution. That means they can easily change the rules defining what a gun is to include the rest. If they don;t think of this the first time they can go back and amend it.
/'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed./'
Even though I disagree with this, this is pretty clearly spelled out: you can't put restrictions of the armament of the people.
That probably meant even heavy weapons and explosives. Communities should be able to form their own militaries, no matter if that militia is for patriotic or rebelious purpose.
At the very least I think every adult should be allowed to carry a pistol or sword in public and face the penalty for their misuse if they do partake in that privilege.
Quick grammar lesson: In the English language a sentence is a complete thought. They are started with a capital letter and end with a period. The bit of text you quote is not a complete sentence, because it does not start with a capital letter. The actual sentence includes another clause "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,..."
If that clause is a conditional clause, then the bit you quoted is only true to the extent keeping and bearing arms is necessary to maintain the militia.
If it's an explanatory clause then the first bit functions as an explanation of the second bit.
If you think it's clear which type of clause the Founders intended you are a textbook example of motivated reasoning. The Founders were dealing with a completely different military situation, the Federal Army was only 8 companies (about 1,000 men), and they only anticipated going above that number in war-time. State Armies were supposed to be a bulwark of the Armed Forces. Moreover individuals needed the ir own weapons to hunt, defend themselves from Indians, attack Indians, protect themselves from crime (which was orders of magnitude worse back then), etc. Given that state governments tended to be elected annually, by the people, and most of the Federal government was elected for much longer terms indirectly (i.e.: Senators chosen for six years by the State Legislature, and Presidents chosen by an elaborate Electoral College voted on by state legislators) it would probably take you days of explaining to a revived founder the difference between an individual right to bear arms and a state militia's right.
Do you think there's any chance at all that a group called Al Qaeda in America could FedEx a box that looked like a letter-bomb? Let's say it doesn't look like a bomb, but a FedEx guy notices the return address before accepting the package. That ain't getting shipped.
Remember what happened when one idiot decided to have an open carry demonstration in front of a polling place and said he was a Black panther?
Wilson's problem here is that a political-point-of-view that's relatively mainstream in America (very few people will agree that hobbyists should not have the right to make their own weapons) is one of the bannable ones in much of the world. The Mexicans are not gonna say "gee, this 3D printer technology is so amazing, it will allow every Mexican (including the cartels) to own the weapon of his choice with a mere few hours tinkering, let's subsidize the shit out of it so everyone can have guns." They are going to ban the import of everything related to the printer platform that Defense Distributed uses.
Most of Latin America has experienced at least one coup d'tat against an elected government that happened because the right-leaning conservatives have greater access to firearms due to their control of the military. In a country with a per capita income under $10k, where almost nobody has a full-sized computer much less a paper printer, a technology which turns a $15k printer into a gun factory is not gonna be seen as democratizing. It's gonna be seen as a really good way for Machiavellian rich guys to stage coups.
And much of the rest of the world is slightly less paranoid about weapons, but still extremely uncomfortable with private ownership of them, which means that if you sell Defense Distributed shit, and they put on their website "this company is great, you can use them to make REALLY COOL DEADLY GUNS!!!" whoever is unlucky enough to be this company will probably be banned from doing business in something on the order of half the world.
Curious how you felt about photographers who didn't want to shoot gay weddings getting forced to do that by the courts.
Should a company be able to decide to serve to because of ideology, or not?
Depends on the ideology, and the justification for not giving them business. Gay husbands are not gonna use their wedding photos as offensive weapons, and their is very little business reason for a photographer to turn down a wedding, so it's really hard for me to side with the photographer.
OTOH, if the "KKK Make This County Lily-White By Any Means Necessary" coalition is probably not a non-profit you should sell shit. Unless can prove, in both the Courts of Law and public opinion, they're hipsters being ironic or something.
In this case they seem to have excellent business reasons for turning this guy down. If you're a 3D printer manufacturer, and you want to sell printers in Latin America, it's probably a really bad idea for you to be associated with a right-leaning American group who can turn any home into a gun manufacturer with a $15-$20k printer. They have had experiences with the wealthy using private armies to destroy their governments, so they are highly unlikely to deb cool with that shit, which means there will be an entire continent on which your printer is illegal. Given that African states have problems with foreigners donating $20k to some crazy asshole who then turns it into a massive rebellion that kidnaps entire schools full of girls, that's another continent you're banned on. Add in the Chinese and Indians and you've risked being banned by half the human fucking race to sell printers to a population roughly the size of Canada (American gun hobbyists are only about 10% of our population).
I strongly suspect that a) the printer company does not give a shit about the Second Amendment, but nonetheless b) their next model will have firmware that bricks it if you try to print out a Defense Distributed design, and auto-updates when new designs are made, and phones the manufacturer if it's altered in any way by the end-user.
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We tried Annexing countless times. Literally. I can't count the times. Once during the Revolution, once during the War of 1812, another time in the 1830s when our Marshall in Detroit "accidentally" let Canadian rebels "borrow" the entire contents of the arsenal, numerous times in the late 1860s when the Fenians tried to conquer Canada...
They've always been quite adamant that they are quite happy to be her Majesty's Unamerican subjects.
And you're highly exaggerating our originality. The US System is precisely identical to the British system of 1789 except for three things: 1) instead of one document containing everything the Brits had multiple documents, 2) the King selected by much different means (descent from Electress Sophia vs. selection by the states), and 3) we had two levels of government (state and Federal). Other then that the whole thing is warmed-ovwer British mush combined with good-old American boastful bullshitting.
And the really smart people have done the math, and bought a fairly used but still reliable vehicle (ie: closer to $5k then $10k), that's gets at least 30 MPG. They maintain it at the dealer because they know he's only going to screw them over on the official bill; rather then screwing them over by trying to use plumbing parts in a car*. Then they drive it for at least a decade.
The easiest way to lose $3k a year every year forever is insist on having a recent-model $30k vehicle in your driveway at all times. The second-easiest is to try to keep a $500 hooptie running 365 days a year if you aren't a skilled mechanic.
*Yes this actually happens. No I do not understand why someone would think a part meant for room temperature to possibly 130 Fahrenheit would work in a fucking internal combustion engine for any meaningful period of time. But I have actually witnessed a backstreet mechanic spend an hour trying to find the plumbing fitting that matched the one he'd pulled from a car.
Strictly speaking the reason nobody in the US supports large Hydro projects is that most of them have already been completed. It's not like we can re-engineer Iowa to be a huge plateau so that the Mississippi dam in Nebraska can generate power from a 100 ft drop.
Nuclear is virtually impossible to get support for anywhere because it's a classic Black Swan risk. Yeah if everything works you're Sweden and you've got no environmental impact, but if there's a disaster after the power company's fucked up safety procedures you're doing $100 Billion in damage. Moreover in a loosish union of sovereign states it's really difficult to convince one to accept all the nuclear fuel.
Interestingly enough I've never heard a single environmentalist group make all four of those claims. To my knowledge no actual environmental group makes any claims regarding wind power and birds, that entire conversation is all conservative anti-environmentalists talking to themselves.
In other words this is the equivalent of a liberal arguing that conservatives are insane because they a) strongly support local law enforcement's right to stop damn near everybody, while b) claiming that opposing government authority with your personally-owned firearm is your sacred duty. Yes both of those guys probably voted for Romney, but they aren't the same guy.
Who said anything about what I think? There's a difference between understanding the intellectual underpinnings of a movement and agreeing with it.
Regardless, very few social movements in the US are totally divorced from self-interest. Black abolitionists, for example, were quite self interested. Even white abolitionists tended to frame their arguments in terms of their own self-interest -- "we can't compete with slave wages," "the slave power will take our freedoms," etc.
As far as I can tell the only Americans who currently support a system that will not result in nice things for other people being cut while nice things for them get a healthy boost are very wealthy limousine liberals and relatively poor working class white conservatives. And both of those groups actually believe that in the long term they'll be better off if their nice things get cut.
The 1% argument isn't just about helping poor people. It's about helping the everyone including the upper bits of the Middle Class (ie: all of the 99% who aren't in the 1%). It's also about reining in the people who are are in that 1%. Among most of it's adherents the idea is that you tax guys like Mitt Romney, and use the money to pay for nice things for everyone. Thus you get proposals like a financial transaction tax, ending the 529 deduction, etc.
Paul Ryan is thinking about the helping poor people side of the equation. But he doesn't seem to think the Middle Class seems serious economic help, and if he proposes any new spending it will almost certainly be paid for by cutting some other spending, not increasing the tax burden of the 1%. Whatever he ends up proposing will almost certainly be mostly tax cuts targeted at helping poor people, plus some rethinking of how current government money is spent.
Depends on what you use the tax for.
I live in a very low-income Cleveland suburb (per capita income is roughly $20k). If you used the Carbon tax to pay for a much expanded Rapid (the local light rail service), or made the buses come every 15 minutes instead of every 40 or hour, most of my coworkers would probably stop driving their cars so much. They'd still need them for grocery-shopping, days when the kid would not go to fucking sleep so mommy really needs to sleep in, etc. but even if the tax doubles gas prices they'd probably save money if they just used the bus/Rapid three times a week.
BTW, this kind of thinking is one reason conservatives rarely get anywhere in the black community. If you think of a reason that a left-wing policy would hurt the poor (and blacks a) tend to be poor, and b) the ones who aren't tend to be very sympathetic to the poor), but the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supports it; your first reaction should not be "why are those morons voting against their own interest?" It should be "Why would those rational human beings disagree with me abhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/03/17/0025235/politics-is-poisoning-nasas-ability-to-do-science?sbsrc=md#out their own interests?" In this case the reason is a combination of coalition-building the CBC, and the blacks who overwhelmingly support it, thinks a government dominated by white pro-Carbon Tax liberals would be better for it then the alternative), and a very different definition of their own interests (ie: many of them would actually prefer to drive less and bus more).
It's similar to what happens when Liberals ask "What's the matter with Kansas?" The answer turns out to be a combination of a) different priorities (many Kansans prefer a universe where they make slightly less money and abortion is harder to get), and b) different perceptions of their interests (Kansans tend to think of themselves as people who will be ricvh real soon now; or at least as people who only have a middle-class lifestyle because some rich guy can afford to hire them; which means that if you start talking about taxing the rich they get uncomfortable).
It's impossible with home equity, because most people don't actually know what their homes are worth.
Just do a survey of people at a dinner party about their guess as their home;s worth. Then use the Zillow zestimate tool. nLast time I tried this everyone was off by at least 25%, and despite the fact Zestimates are known to be high most of them were too high.
I get by on no home and $25k.
So if you didn't mind a) giving up your nice car for a slightly older one with better mileage, b) selling your house and moving to an apartment, c) declaring staycations to be the bomb, d) deciding that your kids would just have to live with a normal public school education and student loans, etc. you'd be fine.
But generally if you're the kind of person who actually buys a home, a couple cars, in a nice suburb with good schools, etc. you are not willing to do that kind of thing.
Strictly speaking if you asked anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement whether US taxes should go up to pay for hospitals and primary education in Mogadishu almost all of them would say yes. Add in the "why do we need to raise taxes? we can just cut defense spending and use that money" and you've got damn near everybody. The rest of the economic left would agree. And it's not like Paul Ryan is bitching about the evils of the 1%.
The reasons that aid isn't a lot larger is there's a) numerous veto-points in the US System for people like Paul Ryan who disagree with the "1%" argument and b) it's remarkably hard to get get everyone else to actually cut checks. They almost all show up for the big donor's conference, and say they'll donate a huge dollar amount, but very follow through is generally lacking.
Basically as a practical matter the policy you say liberals should implement can't happen until there's a One World Government which can just do shit without paying attention to the goddamn subcommittee chairman from Canada. And unless I'm mistaken* you would oppose that quite strongly.
*This assumption is based entirely on the strong correlation between criticizing the left for it's concern about economic inequality and opposing things like One World Government. In real life, unlike Sherlock Holmes, the guy who guesses based on correlation isn't always right.
What set the nazis apart (and may still do in times since) is the clean, industrial approach to destroying peoples and cultures that they employed. It terrified people not for the brutality, but for the complete divorce from human emotion.
So... ISIS????
What the OP meant is that the Nazis literally invented techniques of mass-murder because the old stand-by (shooting a bunch of people in the head) a) took a lot of labor (the Order Police who were supposed to be controlling Poland for them had time for very little except Jew-killing when they were shooting each one in the head individually), and b) gave tens of thousands of Germans PTSD from shooting little kids in the head. They kept doing it until they invaded Russia, but then they had a million-odd Soviet prisoners of war, the Russians would not trade for them (Stalin even refused to trade his son for a high-ranking German General). Rather then engage in the time-sink of killing a million of these guys one-by-one they invented a new kind of Gas Chamber. It looked safe (so the Soviet prisoners would go in without trying to over-power their guards), only brought a handful of Germans into the process, and solved the problem of what to feed these guys permanently.So they started applying the technique to the Jews too.
ISIS is definitely evil, but I sincerely doubt they have the ability to organize anything but a really big machete rampage. They are definitely not going to pioneer entirely new technologies of mass death.
Dude, learn some fucking international law.
In '47 there was a press release. China has never made a formal claim before any international legal body, or even bothered to explain precisely (as in which geographical coordinates) the line ends. The line is not connected, and even in the spots where there's actually as line the map is small enough (and the line wide enough) that it's like 5-10 miles wide.
If the "we owned it before you existed" legal standard was actually a legal standard maybe a half-dozen African states would have a legal right to exist. The others were all created by (and therefore owned) by various European Empires, and were therefore owned by Europe before they existed. The Americas south of the Rio Grande would be split between Spain and Portugal, north would be English. Austria-Hungary would have an extremely compelling legal case, to much of Eastern Europe, and the Turks could annex the Balkan peninsula up to (and including) the bits of Serbia not given back to the Habsburgs.
The only modern state which makes any claims based on something as tenuous as "600-year-old historical links" is Israel. I don't know if you'd noticed but in the Court of International law the only world leader who ever took their claim to Jerusalem even a little bit seriously was Dubya.
The Vietnamese will be likely to stop the flights.
Their current big international dispute is over their maritime boundaries with China. The CHinese claim almost the entire South China Sea on the basis of something called the "nine-dashed-line," and have a tendency to periodically engage in extreme brinksmanship with all their neighbors in the region, including Vietnam. They actually fought a war with the Chinese in '79. Which means if the Russian flights support China in any way the Vietnamese have every reason to stop them.
But they aren't involved, so we'll just have to put up with it like we do in Europe.
You're talking about FedEx and UPS. I've never made a post on the issue that wasn't a direct response to you talking about FedEx and UPS.
You're ignoring their justification, and that Wilson isn't using any legal recourse. They say they can refuse to ship products that are potentially illegal without proof that both sides of the transaction have the proper license/paperwork/etc. Since Wilson doesn't have a case against them in Court, that implies they do have the right to jerk his ass around until he comes up with firearm manufacturing licenses from his buyers. It's not like he a) doesn't know how to do this shit himself, or b) couldn't get a lawyer from Texas to sue them for him for the publicity.
And as I've said before, this isn't Wilson's major problem in the long-term. He can figure something out, even if it's only "I'll ship to gun stores who then hold the product for my clients," "I'll hire this random chick to mail packages on behalf of my subsidiary, and neither chick nor subsidiary's name will ever appear on my publicity," or "the post office better be nice to me or the entire NRA will call their Senators." His long-term problem is that any 3D printer company he uses is doomed on the global market, so no sane 3D printer company will allow Defense Distributed designs to be printed on their machines.
If milling parties are not so common that there are 3 million households with a fully milled AR-15 receiver they aren't common enough to seriously inconvenience gun-grabbers. You're treating the Feds, who literally have a $1 Trillion budget and the sovereign right to borrow $80 billion for no good reason, like they're the Ferguson PD or something.
To do this they'd need a Constitutional Amendment. That can;t happen unless 38 states want it to happen, and if 38 states want it to happen then 38 states are full of people who want your guns to be grabbed, and if the voters of 38 states send gun-grabbers to Congress and force a Constitutional Amendment it's likely that Congress adds Billion$ to the ATF budget every year until your ass is in jail.
That ATF that can track you down, get a warrant for the buddy they knew had to be at your party, when they find his receiver they can threaten him with prison until he snitches about the rest of your party-goers, who then get to choose between prison and snitching on the two guys your buddy forgot/that other milling party they heard about/etc.
You can't read the debates they had. There are no minutes for the Constitutional Convention. There are numerous high-IQ people who don't understand the difference between "the people" and an individsual person who swear up and down that every time a Founder mentioned the collective group klnown as the people have the right to own guns it means that every single individual among that group had the right to own precisely the arsenal he wanted, but these people suck at a) grammar, and b) history.
One of the defining elements of an individual right is they can't make you do it, if you choose to do it they can't say what you do with it, etc. Obama can't pass a law saying all people have to publicly denounce Mitt Romney, go to secret Kenyan Muslim Church, and subscribe to the New York Times. Yet George Washington ordered all American men to a) buy a gun, b) buy a specific model, and c) register it with a dual hatted state/Federal local militia captain so that he could force guys who had two to bring them to militia drill and share with the poor. That's not an individual right of every American to own whatever firearm he wants, it';s a collective right for the people of that local county to have enough arms (and proper arms) to defend themselves from a) the Indians, b) the British, and c) the Feds.
Note that I'm not saying the pro-gun control side is right with these posts. I honestly have no fucking idea how the Founders would apply a rule intended to create a vast militia to support a minuscule standing army in a time when a) no state actually has militia duty, and b) the Federal military is large enough that it could totally crush the rifle-armed militia of any individual state in a week.
So basically you're convinced that a government determined enough to grab all firearms won't bother to do any other kind of investigative work on you?
For example, a simple warrant for all credit card records relating to defense distributed would get all the guys who bought that mill. If they have the votes to ban AR-15s, they have the votes to ban the Mill. If the mill is banned, and they know you bought one, they have probable cause for a warrant to search your house.
And now you're in jail, and all your guns are grabbed.
Your example is a failure. Explosives are hazardous materials restricted by law, requiring special handling to ship. The parcel companies are required by law to refuse to ship explosives.
But they're not explosives. One of the packages looks like explosives, which could trigger the refusal, but the second package is just a package. If they can refuse to ship a package that's just a package from AQ, they can do it to anybody.
And you're ignoring the actual PR and potential legal costs associated with shipping the devices. Sure federal law says you can't be held liable if a weapon you made yourself legally is used to turn a kindergarten class into dog-food by your insane son, and Defense Distributed can also not be held liable, but it doesn't explicitly say anything about freight companies. And Juries are not known for being particularly rational when following the law means some pretty upper-middle-class white mom can lose her son to a brutal murderer and nobody can be punished. At a minimum shipping these things has a very good chance of being a PR nightmare.
As for the rest, you've managed to ignore my point. The printer company does not give two shits about your rights as an American, US Law, the Constitution, Apple Pie or the baby Jesus. It is a for-profit business and your rights as an American apply to a minuscule part of the global target market. It does give a shit about the likely reaction of politicians in countries that are reflexively anti-firearm to some asshole ion the internet declaring that he has created a program that will allow little old ladies to 3-D print enough materiel for a company of soldiers in their spare time.
Note that, given that this is about politicians, a logical reality-based argument is only relevant to precisely the extent the politician concerned agrees with a) logic and b) reality.
I gave two possible interpretations of the Amendment. You have explained the pro-gun rights interpretation quite well, but have neglected to provide any proof that the anti-gun rights interpretation is incorrect. Which means you haven't actually disagreed with anything I said, you've merely explained one side of the debate.
The anti-gun-rightsd position is that the Amendment allows states to create, regulate, and train militia forces. But that's a state right, not a personal right. The personal right is entirely dependent on the condition in the first half of the sentence. All of which means you (as an individual person) have no inalienable right to bear arms unless you are part of the organized militia (the disorganized militia we're all members of by statute is not "regulated" in the 1789 sense of the term) of your state. Mostly that's the National Guard, but almost half the states have their own separate militia organized around Title 32, Section 109 of the US Code.
To actually contradict my case you'll have to prove one of several very difficult things: Conditional clauses don't exist; This particular clause cannot (for some grammatical reason) be conditional; etc.
To figure out the exact implication for those folks you'd have to get a finance guy and a lawyer to read the bill.
I suspect that the applicability would depend on how easy it was to turn those dollars into real money (i.e.: if you can withdraw Linden Dollars as USD it's a problem), and how common hacks around the system are. So if people start using their Second Life accounts to wire money to the cousins in Peru it's likely Second Life will have to comply.
Regardless, if you're as rich as Blizzard you damn well better have the budget to pay for regulatory compliance that most check-cashing places do. If you're a start-up and you don't have that budget things will be complicated, but more then one startup has managed to avoid paying to deal with some regulatory hurdle until they were rich enough they had no excuse.
I can poke my dog all day and he won't bite me. This is more like biting a bear with rabies.
The more pertinent question is: why would anyone allow a rabid bear to even continue existing, much less let them into their workshops and bedrooms to threaten them.
Because historically the alternative to having a rabid bear in your capital is having somebody else impose their rabid bear on you. Native Americans, for example, had no governmental institutions with coercive authority at all. The Chief could not tax your ass, he could not stop you from killing that one white guy who was pissing you off, he could not arrest you after you did it, all he could do was take his loyal section of the tribe to the local US Army Fort in hopes that the Star-Spangled-Rabid Bear would only eat your dumb ass.
You can limit your rabid bear in certain ways and still survive. But you really, really need an entity with significant powers to restrict your own personal rights or those rights become obsolete.
It's so interesting how when people think of government-oppression scenarios like this they don't think things through.
If the government has passed a gun confiscation act they have changed the law including the Constitution. That means they can easily change the rules defining what a gun is to include the rest. If they don;t think of this the first time they can go back and amend it.
/'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed./'
Even though I disagree with this, this is pretty clearly spelled out: you can't put restrictions of the armament of the people.
That probably meant even heavy weapons and explosives. Communities should be able to form their own militaries, no matter if that militia is for patriotic or rebelious purpose.
At the very least I think every adult should be allowed to carry a pistol or sword in public and face the penalty for their misuse if they do partake in that privilege.
Quick grammar lesson:
In the English language a sentence is a complete thought. They are started with a capital letter and end with a period. The bit of text you quote is not a complete sentence, because it does not start with a capital letter. The actual sentence includes another clause "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,..."
If that clause is a conditional clause, then the bit you quoted is only true to the extent keeping and bearing arms is necessary to maintain the militia.
If it's an explanatory clause then the first bit functions as an explanation of the second bit.
If you think it's clear which type of clause the Founders intended you are a textbook example of motivated reasoning. The Founders were dealing with a completely different military situation, the Federal Army was only 8 companies (about 1,000 men), and they only anticipated going above that number in war-time. State Armies were supposed to be a bulwark of the Armed Forces. Moreover individuals needed the ir own weapons to hunt, defend themselves from Indians, attack Indians, protect themselves from crime (which was orders of magnitude worse back then), etc. Given that state governments tended to be elected annually, by the people, and most of the Federal government was elected for much longer terms indirectly (i.e.: Senators chosen for six years by the State Legislature, and Presidents chosen by an elaborate Electoral College voted on by state legislators) it would probably take you days of explaining to a revived founder the difference between an individual right to bear arms and a state militia's right.
Depends on the political point of view.
Do you think there's any chance at all that a group called Al Qaeda in America could FedEx a box that looked like a letter-bomb? Let's say it doesn't look like a bomb, but a FedEx guy notices the return address before accepting the package. That ain't getting shipped.
Remember what happened when one idiot decided to have an open carry demonstration in front of a polling place and said he was a Black panther?
Wilson's problem here is that a political-point-of-view that's relatively mainstream in America (very few people will agree that hobbyists should not have the right to make their own weapons) is one of the bannable ones in much of the world. The Mexicans are not gonna say "gee, this 3D printer technology is so amazing, it will allow every Mexican (including the cartels) to own the weapon of his choice with a mere few hours tinkering, let's subsidize the shit out of it so everyone can have guns." They are going to ban the import of everything related to the printer platform that Defense Distributed uses.
Most of Latin America has experienced at least one coup d'tat against an elected government that happened because the right-leaning conservatives have greater access to firearms due to their control of the military. In a country with a per capita income under $10k, where almost nobody has a full-sized computer much less a paper printer, a technology which turns a $15k printer into a gun factory is not gonna be seen as democratizing. It's gonna be seen as a really good way for Machiavellian rich guys to stage coups.
And much of the rest of the world is slightly less paranoid about weapons, but still extremely uncomfortable with private ownership of them, which means that if you sell Defense Distributed shit, and they put on their website "this company is great, you can use them to make REALLY COOL DEADLY GUNS!!!" whoever is unlucky enough to be this company will probably be banned from doing business in something on the order of half the world.
Curious how you felt about photographers who didn't want to shoot gay weddings getting forced to do that by the courts.
Should a company be able to decide to serve to because of ideology, or not?
Depends on the ideology, and the justification for not giving them business. Gay husbands are not gonna use their wedding photos as offensive weapons, and their is very little business reason for a photographer to turn down a wedding, so it's really hard for me to side with the photographer.
OTOH, if the "KKK Make This County Lily-White By Any Means Necessary" coalition is probably not a non-profit you should sell shit. Unless can prove, in both the Courts of Law and public opinion, they're hipsters being ironic or something.
In this case they seem to have excellent business reasons for turning this guy down. If you're a 3D printer manufacturer, and you want to sell printers in Latin America, it's probably a really bad idea for you to be associated with a right-leaning American group who can turn any home into a gun manufacturer with a $15-$20k printer. They have had experiences with the wealthy using private armies to destroy their governments, so they are highly unlikely to deb cool with that shit, which means there will be an entire continent on which your printer is illegal. Given that African states have problems with foreigners donating $20k to some crazy asshole who then turns it into a massive rebellion that kidnaps entire schools full of girls, that's another continent you're banned on. Add in the Chinese and Indians and you've risked being banned by half the human fucking race to sell printers to a population roughly the size of Canada (American gun hobbyists are only about 10% of our population).
I strongly suspect that a) the printer company does not give a shit about the Second Amendment, but nonetheless b) their next model will have firmware that bricks it if you try to print out a Defense Distributed design, and auto-updates when new designs are made, and phones the manufacturer if it's altered in any way by the end-user.