Didn't Florida just put in the hotline where you could report "terrorism"? Spy on your neighbors, and report them if they do something you disagree with, eh?
Yes, they did, but so far it has not been very successful AFAIK. Tattle-tales have never been liked in our society and I don't see big government changing that attitude anytime soon.
The desire to know everything that can be possibly known goes back to the deception that was propagated way back in the Garden of Eden, "You shall be as God....". God alone knows all the thoughts and motivations of people and everything else that can be known. One reason that people get into government is that they can have power over other people. If governments, all governments, had their way and it was technically feasible, they would install a mandatory thought transmitting chip in everybody's head. Thousands of years before it was remotely possible, it was prophesied in the Bible that there would be a time when there would be a one world government under which no one would be allowed to buy or sell, without some sort of unique identifier, often referred to as the "mark of the beast". This FBI proposal is another step in that direction. Try and get a job without a Social Security number, rent a car without a credit card, or get a passport so you can even visit our neighbors in Canada. We are well on our way to have this and other prophecies of the end of days come to pass.
There are two kinds of "evildoers". There are also those who do it illegally and sometimes go to prison, but then there are also those who do it legally. That class of evildoers usually works for the government or in some cases for big corporations such as Monsanto.
The difference was that under the Third Reich and Communism your neighbor who did not like you for some reason could also report you and have you put into a concentration camp. Unless there is a huge culture change in the US, where squealers and informers are still looked down upon, that system is not likely to work, because there would not be enough squealers and informers.
The Communists and other totalitarian governments used people to denounce one another and report what some considered "aberrant" or suspicious behavior to the KGB and other police. This has never worked and won't ever work because in American Culture squealers and informers are looked down upon and in the minority. Even with rewards the three letter agencies that want this kind of spying capability, would never find enough Americans to do this for them. Therefore they now propose to make it mandatory that electronic communication devices owned by the people do this spying for them. How about our law enforcement agencies going back to the good old-fashioned police work they used to do, before all this modern technology enabled their lazy work style? In order to tap a phone in the old days, they had to send a man with alligator clips climbing up the nearest phone pole after they received a lawful order from a judge.
So which creatures at the bottom of the food chain would NOT thrive if the temperature of Earth on average increased 10 C over the next 400 to 500 years? NO creatures up higher on the food chain would starve because they could eat other creatures that survive better and multiply faster in warmer temperatures. No matter how you global warming scare mongers twist and turn, you can't get past the FACT that life is more prolific in warm places than in cold.
I don't know where you get your information, but the lowest mammal temperatures is the three toed sloth at 82 F and some birds get up to 104 F. What mammal gets down to 50 F? Are you telling me that the number of species on earth are more now than in the past? The reason the dinosaurs died out, is not because it got warmer, but because it got too cold for them. What about all the extinctions?
Polar bears that live in zoos where it is warm have the same internal body temperature as those out in the wild the Arctic. Mammals can adapt to a great range of external temperatures while maintaining their internal body temperature with remarkable accuracy. Humans are less able to do this physiologically, but have learned how to manipulate their environment through clothes and heated houses. Biological processes operate at their optimum rate at the internal body temperatures of most mammals. If you dispute that FACT, cite some data contrary to this. Life processes, ALL OF THEM slow down or stop at temperatures below which liquid water can exist. Warmth is better for life in general than freezing cold. Why are you disputing this?
... because it is well-known that living things do way better in warm places than in freezing cold.
You may be right but the 10,000 years or so it takes the biological systems to adjust to that new reality may be kind of rough.
SalemDave
That is patently false, because arctic animals such as penguins and polar bears and others, do just fine in warmer climates when they are captured and put in zoos. Most of them even reproduce in captivity.
Why is it then that evolutionary science tell us that life originated in the warm primordial seas at the time when the CO2 content of the atmosphere was much higher than today? Why is it then that dinosaurs and countless other species became extinct? Was it because it became too warm or was it because of cold? If life got started in warm "acidic" oceans, why won't it continue to thrive there, especially if the water is warmer?
There was way more life on earth in the time when fossil fuels were formed, including the duckweed. It is a FACT that all forms of life do better when it is warm, rather than freezing cold. When the fossil fuels were formed, there was no ice anywhere on this planet, but as the carbon was removed from the atmosphere by living things, it got colder and life had a harder time. There were other events, such as meteor strikes and volcanic activity that also caused cold and subsequent extinctions. The dinosaurs went extinct because it got too cold for them and their food sources. Do you think that it is an accident that the internal temperature of mammals is in the temperature range at which life processes operate the best?
Life is amazingly adaptable. Penguins do just fine in zoos located in different places away from the cold of Antarctica. Polar bears will also thrive almost anywhere if they can find enough to eat. You also ignore the fact that when the entire Earth warms up, there is MUCH more moisture in the atmosphere, so that it will rain even in places that now get very little precipitation. With more moisture in the atmosphere worldwide, there will be less water in the oceans, so the ocean rise will be minimal if it happens at all. Even people and their civilization can adapt easily, if the change happens over a few centuries. After all, the population of the US went from about 3 million to over 300 million in a little over 200 years.
I agree with you that this could come true if this change happened in the space of a generation or two. Most global warming scare mongers are thinking in terms of at least centuries for this to happen. Are you telling me that a population such as is in Florida could not be moved in three or 400 years? Besides that, the rise of the ocean levels that is predicted may be wrong. When the earth was warmer, the areas called the continental shelves were not underwater, even though there was little ice on the earth at that time. When the fossil fuels were made there was no ice anywhere on the whole planet.
What makes you think the Penguins will be gone? There are penguins in zoos all around the world and they don't mind living in temperate places at all. Polar bears also do rather well almost anywhere. Life is remarkably adaptable. Of course it's always easier to attack the messenger if you don't like the message.
If the change occurs in a few hundred years time span, humanity can adapt easily. The earth cannot get only warmer without also getting more humid, because warm air can hold considerably more water. More moisture in the air and warmer oceans distributes the heat more evenly, reducing extremes of dryness and coldness. There were obviously more species alive in the days when the fossil fuels were formed and they became extinct not because it the climate became too warm, but it became too cold. It is an incontrovertible FACT, and that is that life thrives better in warmth than in freezing temperatures.
I agree with you that this is just a moneymaking scheme so the ultra-rich of this world can get even richer at the expense of everybody else. It has no basis in science whatsoever, because it is well-known that living things do way better in warm places than in freezing cold. If human activities such as fossil fuel burning will make for a warmer Earth, let's do it. Let's scrap all these worries about carbon and bring as much carbon as possible to the surface and into the atmosphere where it used to be and make it available for plants to use. Let's RETURN the Earth to the conditions that prevailed before all that carbon was buried in the ground. Living things thrived back then, including dinosaurs! The latter became extinct because it became too cold for them. We are today burning the carbon that used to be a part of the dinosaurs and the food they ate.
Chicken Little said the sky was falling. The earth may be getting warmer, but is that so bad? Where was all that carbon, some of which now is being liberated by our modern civilization? The global warming scare mongers tell us that the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of the earth getting warmer. If that is true, the carbon that is now being released must have once been in the atmosphere for living things to use while they were alive, then died and were buried. Therefore in effect our civilization is RETURNING the carbon into the air. Therefore, when the fossil fuels were formed it must've been much warmer than today, but not warm enough to harm life on earth. Most living things generally do better in warmth that in freezing cold. Therefore if mankind managed to liberate ALL carbon now stored as fossil fuels, the cycle would repeat itself.
Recycling is generally considered good, so why is recycling the carbon be considered bad? We know most plants do better in warm places with a high carbon content in the atmosphere. This has been unequivocally established by EXPERIMENT, not mere mathematical modeling based on faulty assumptions. One real-life experiment is worth much more than hundreds of thousands of hours of computer time using up energy for mathematical modeling based on faulty assumptions and insufficient data. So far humanity has managed to release only a tiny fraction of the total carbon stored in the form of hydrocarbons in the crust of the earth. Global warming, bring it on! If the earth were warmer, humanity would need less fuel to keep warm and would have much more land available which is now freezing cold. There is a whole CONTINENT at the bottom of the earth that could become inhabited by people if it were warm.
A person or a class of persons being targeted for being exterminated in concentration camps does not need a machine gun. If such a person has an AR 15, it will take at least a SWAT team of 10 or more to successfully arrest or kill such a person. It might be possible to come up with a few hundred SWAT teams, but not thousands, tens of thousands or more. Those that want to eliminate their opposition, or even worse get rid of a given class of people know this. That is why every dictator in history has ALWAYS first disarmed the people he wanted to oppress. That is why the liberals at hot after "assault weapons" because these are plenty good enough to prevent wholesale takeover of an armed population. It is not likely that a wannabe dictator will be able to get the US Armed Forces to fire on their fellow Americans, because American soldiers have sworn to uphold the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief.
If any government ever passes legislation to confiscate weapons from the people, they will have a civil war on their hands orders of magnitude worse than what is going on in Syria right now. For a glimpse into such a future, consider what has been happening in Syria for over two years now. Although their dictator Assad has the military behind him, with much greater firepower, he has not been able to quell the revolt. This particular despot is not even up against a generally armed population, but a much smaller ragtag group of dedicated revolutionaries.
The FBI did not methodically want to exterminate a specific class of people, such as Nazis did with the Jews. The Nazis got away with it because the Jews were not armed so the Nazi goons could come in the middle of the night and haul the hapless Jews off to concentration camps. If only 10% of the Jews had killed a Nazi goon, the Nazis would have never been able to come up with enough goons carry out their dastardly deed. There would have been 600,000 dead Nazis. All dictators throughout history have always known that you must first disarm whoever you are going to want to exterminate for whatever reason. The kind of people that dictators can hire to round up defenseless victims are usually cowards anyway and because of that cowardice would balk at arresting people who could effectively resist being hauled off for extermination. Black males were never at any time being hauled off to concentration camps just because they were black.
The difference is that there is not a constitutional amendment that gives people the right to make and own bombs. The weapons carried by the infantry of the revolutionary army were the same as those among the civilian population. Many of the men in that army brought their own weapons with them from home. It was a BYOR (bring your own rifle) situation. If it were not an outrageous lie that the majority supports gun control, the Constitution could be amended by such a majority to erase the Second Amendment.
"Gun deaths in the US in 2010: 11,078 homicides, 19,392 suicides, and 606 unintentional killings."
The pharmaceutical/medical establishment kills 784,000* people each year. That is not counting the 1.5 million unborn children DELIBERATELY murdered each year by government licensed medical practitioners. If you want to do some math, that comes to over 13 Vietnam wars EACH year. Why is this never mentioned by our politicians or our liberal media?
I'm all in favor of focusing on preventing automobile deaths. In fact, if we scrapped the entire "war on terror" and used those hundreds of billions to build out public transport infrastructure befitting a first-world nation, we'd be doing far better in the "saving lives" department. However, a significant difference between cars and guns: cars provide a heck of a lot more than 50% more useful functionality to society than guns, so they're perhaps "worth" slightly more carnage. Which would cause more problems: all the guns in the country spontaneously jamming and failing to fire, or all the cars in the country breaking down?
If only a fraction of the Jews that were living in Hitler Germany would have had guns, 6 million+ murders would have been prevented. Tyrants can arise in any culture. The founding fathers of the US just had fought off a tyrannical government. It was for this reason that they included the Second Amendment in the Constitution, because they feared that generations later history might repeat itself. No draconian gun control law will ever prevent criminals obtaining or using guns.
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Didn't Florida just put in the hotline where you could report "terrorism"? Spy on your neighbors, and report them if they do something you disagree with, eh?
Yes, they did, but so far it has not been very successful AFAIK. Tattle-tales have never been liked in our society and I don't see big government changing that attitude anytime soon.
The desire to know everything that can be possibly known goes back to the deception that was propagated way back in the Garden of Eden, "You shall be as God....". God alone knows all the thoughts and motivations of people and everything else that can be known. One reason that people get into government is that they can have power over other people. If governments, all governments, had their way and it was technically feasible, they would install a mandatory thought transmitting chip in everybody's head. Thousands of years before it was remotely possible, it was prophesied in the Bible that there would be a time when there would be a one world government under which no one would be allowed to buy or sell, without some sort of unique identifier, often referred to as the "mark of the beast". This FBI proposal is another step in that direction. Try and get a job without a Social Security number, rent a car without a credit card, or get a passport so you can even visit our neighbors in Canada. We are well on our way to have this and other prophecies of the end of days come to pass.
The makers of tin cans and string will also have to comply with this?
There are two kinds of "evildoers". There are also those who do it illegally and sometimes go to prison, but then there are also those who do it legally. That class of evildoers usually works for the government or in some cases for big corporations such as Monsanto.
You mean the government would not abuse its power to spy on people any more than it has abused its power to tax in the ongoing IRS scandal?
The difference was that under the Third Reich and Communism your neighbor who did not like you for some reason could also report you and have you put into a concentration camp. Unless there is a huge culture change in the US, where squealers and informers are still looked down upon, that system is not likely to work, because there would not be enough squealers and informers.
The Communists and other totalitarian governments used people to denounce one another and report what some considered "aberrant" or suspicious behavior to the KGB and other police. This has never worked and won't ever work because in American Culture squealers and informers are looked down upon and in the minority. Even with rewards the three letter agencies that want this kind of spying capability, would never find enough Americans to do this for them. Therefore they now propose to make it mandatory that electronic communication devices owned by the people do this spying for them. How about our law enforcement agencies going back to the good old-fashioned police work they used to do, before all this modern technology enabled their lazy work style? In order to tap a phone in the old days, they had to send a man with alligator clips climbing up the nearest phone pole after they received a lawful order from a judge.
So which creatures at the bottom of the food chain would NOT thrive if the temperature of Earth on average increased 10 C over the next 400 to 500 years? NO creatures up higher on the food chain would starve because they could eat other creatures that survive better and multiply faster in warmer temperatures. No matter how you global warming scare mongers twist and turn, you can't get past the FACT that life is more prolific in warm places than in cold.
I don't know where you get your information, but the lowest mammal temperatures is the three toed sloth at 82 F and some birds get up to 104 F. What mammal gets down to 50 F? Are you telling me that the number of species on earth are more now than in the past? The reason the dinosaurs died out, is not because it got warmer, but because it got too cold for them. What about all the extinctions?
Polar bears that live in zoos where it is warm have the same internal body temperature as those out in the wild the Arctic. Mammals can adapt to a great range of external temperatures while maintaining their internal body temperature with remarkable accuracy. Humans are less able to do this physiologically, but have learned how to manipulate their environment through clothes and heated houses. Biological processes operate at their optimum rate at the internal body temperatures of most mammals. If you dispute that FACT, cite some data contrary to this. Life processes, ALL OF THEM slow down or stop at temperatures below which liquid water can exist. Warmth is better for life in general than freezing cold. Why are you disputing this?
You may be right but the 10,000 years or so it takes the biological systems to adjust to that new reality may be kind of rough.
SalemDave
That is patently false, because arctic animals such as penguins and polar bears and others, do just fine in warmer climates when they are captured and put in zoos. Most of them even reproduce in captivity.
Why is it then that evolutionary science tell us that life originated in the warm primordial seas at the time when the CO2 content of the atmosphere was much higher than today? Why is it then that dinosaurs and countless other species became extinct? Was it because it became too warm or was it because of cold? If life got started in warm "acidic" oceans, why won't it continue to thrive there, especially if the water is warmer?
There was way more life on earth in the time when fossil fuels were formed, including the duckweed. It is a FACT that all forms of life do better when it is warm, rather than freezing cold. When the fossil fuels were formed, there was no ice anywhere on this planet, but as the carbon was removed from the atmosphere by living things, it got colder and life had a harder time. There were other events, such as meteor strikes and volcanic activity that also caused cold and subsequent extinctions. The dinosaurs went extinct because it got too cold for them and their food sources. Do you think that it is an accident that the internal temperature of mammals is in the temperature range at which life processes operate the best?
Life is amazingly adaptable. Penguins do just fine in zoos located in different places away from the cold of Antarctica. Polar bears will also thrive almost anywhere if they can find enough to eat. You also ignore the fact that when the entire Earth warms up, there is MUCH more moisture in the atmosphere, so that it will rain even in places that now get very little precipitation. With more moisture in the atmosphere worldwide, there will be less water in the oceans, so the ocean rise will be minimal if it happens at all. Even people and their civilization can adapt easily, if the change happens over a few centuries. After all, the population of the US went from about 3 million to over 300 million in a little over 200 years.
I agree with you that this could come true if this change happened in the space of a generation or two. Most global warming scare mongers are thinking in terms of at least centuries for this to happen. Are you telling me that a population such as is in Florida could not be moved in three or 400 years? Besides that, the rise of the ocean levels that is predicted may be wrong. When the earth was warmer, the areas called the continental shelves were not underwater, even though there was little ice on the earth at that time. When the fossil fuels were made there was no ice anywhere on the whole planet.
What makes you think the Penguins will be gone? There are penguins in zoos all around the world and they don't mind living in temperate places at all. Polar bears also do rather well almost anywhere. Life is remarkably adaptable. Of course it's always easier to attack the messenger if you don't like the message.
If the change occurs in a few hundred years time span, humanity can adapt easily. The earth cannot get only warmer without also getting more humid, because warm air can hold considerably more water. More moisture in the air and warmer oceans distributes the heat more evenly, reducing extremes of dryness and coldness. There were obviously more species alive in the days when the fossil fuels were formed and they became extinct not because it the climate became too warm, but it became too cold. It is an incontrovertible FACT, and that is that life thrives better in warmth than in freezing temperatures.
I agree with you that this is just a moneymaking scheme so the ultra-rich of this world can get even richer at the expense of everybody else. It has no basis in science whatsoever, because it is well-known that living things do way better in warm places than in freezing cold. If human activities such as fossil fuel burning will make for a warmer Earth, let's do it. Let's scrap all these worries about carbon and bring as much carbon as possible to the surface and into the atmosphere where it used to be and make it available for plants to use. Let's RETURN the Earth to the conditions that prevailed before all that carbon was buried in the ground. Living things thrived back then, including dinosaurs! The latter became extinct because it became too cold for them. We are today burning the carbon that used to be a part of the dinosaurs and the food they ate.
Don't worry that won't happen in your time or in your great grandchildren's time. So don't get excited and use bad language
Chicken Little said the sky was falling. The earth may be getting warmer, but is that so bad? Where was all that carbon, some of which now is being liberated by our modern civilization? The global warming scare mongers tell us that the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of the earth getting warmer. If that is true, the carbon that is now being released must have once been in the atmosphere for living things to use while they were alive, then died and were buried. Therefore in effect our civilization is RETURNING the carbon into the air. Therefore, when the fossil fuels were formed it must've been much warmer than today, but not warm enough to harm life on earth. Most living things generally do better in warmth that in freezing cold. Therefore if mankind managed to liberate ALL carbon now stored as fossil fuels, the cycle would repeat itself.
Recycling is generally considered good, so why is recycling the carbon be considered bad? We know most plants do better in warm places with a high carbon content in the atmosphere. This has been unequivocally established by EXPERIMENT, not mere mathematical modeling based on faulty assumptions. One real-life experiment is worth much more than hundreds of thousands of hours of computer time using up energy for mathematical modeling based on faulty assumptions and insufficient data. So far humanity has managed to release only a tiny fraction of the total carbon stored in the form of hydrocarbons in the crust of the earth.
Global warming, bring it on! If the earth were warmer, humanity would need less fuel to keep warm and would have much more land available which is now freezing cold. There is a whole CONTINENT at the bottom of the earth that could become inhabited by people if it were warm.
A person or a class of persons being targeted for being exterminated in concentration camps does not need a machine gun. If such a person has an AR 15, it will take at least a SWAT team of 10 or more to successfully arrest or kill such a person. It might be possible to come up with a few hundred SWAT teams, but not thousands, tens of thousands or more. Those that want to eliminate their opposition, or even worse get rid of a given class of people know this. That is why every dictator in history has ALWAYS first disarmed the people he wanted to oppress. That is why the liberals at hot after "assault weapons" because these are plenty good enough to prevent wholesale takeover of an armed population. It is not likely that a wannabe dictator will be able to get the US Armed Forces to fire on their fellow Americans, because American soldiers have sworn to uphold the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief.
If any government ever passes legislation to confiscate weapons from the people, they will have a civil war on their hands orders of magnitude worse than what is going on in Syria right now. For a glimpse into such a future, consider what has been happening in Syria for over two years now. Although their dictator Assad has the military behind him, with much greater firepower, he has not been able to quell the revolt. This particular despot is not even up against a generally armed population, but a much smaller ragtag group of dedicated revolutionaries.
The FBI did not methodically want to exterminate a specific class of people, such as Nazis did with the Jews. The Nazis got away with it because the Jews were not armed so the Nazi goons could come in the middle of the night and haul the hapless Jews off to concentration camps. If only 10% of the Jews had killed a Nazi goon, the Nazis would have never been able to come up with enough goons carry out their dastardly deed. There would have been 600,000 dead Nazis. All dictators throughout history have always known that you must first disarm whoever you are going to want to exterminate for whatever reason. The kind of people that dictators can hire to round up defenseless victims are usually cowards anyway and because of that cowardice would balk at arresting people who could effectively resist being hauled off for extermination. Black males were never at any time being hauled off to concentration camps just because they were black.
The difference is that there is not a constitutional amendment that gives people the right to make and own bombs. The weapons carried by the infantry of the revolutionary army were the same as those among the civilian population. Many of the men in that army brought their own weapons with them from home. It was a BYOR (bring your own rifle) situation. If it were not an outrageous lie that the majority supports gun control, the Constitution could be amended by such a majority to erase the Second Amendment.
...unless you are Native American. Then there would be a lot more of you here.
Except that so-called "Native Americans" are not natives either, but just happened to come here a little sooner than the Europeans.
"Gun deaths in the US in 2010: 11,078 homicides, 19,392 suicides, and 606 unintentional killings."
The pharmaceutical/medical establishment kills 784,000* people each year. That is not counting the 1.5 million unborn children DELIBERATELY murdered each year by government licensed medical practitioners. If you want to do some math, that comes to over 13 Vietnam wars EACH year. Why is this never mentioned by our politicians or our liberal media?
* http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm
I'm all in favor of focusing on preventing automobile deaths. In fact, if we scrapped the entire "war on terror" and used those hundreds of billions to build out public transport infrastructure befitting a first-world nation, we'd be doing far better in the "saving lives" department. However, a significant difference between cars and guns: cars provide a heck of a lot more than 50% more useful functionality to society than guns, so they're perhaps "worth" slightly more carnage. Which would cause more problems: all the guns in the country spontaneously jamming and failing to fire, or all the cars in the country breaking down?
If only a fraction of the Jews that were living in Hitler Germany would have had guns, 6 million+ murders would have been prevented. Tyrants can arise in any culture. The founding fathers of the US just had fought off a tyrannical government. It was for this reason that they included the Second Amendment in the Constitution, because they feared that generations later history might repeat itself. No draconian gun control law will ever prevent criminals obtaining or using guns.