Chick-Fil-A doesn't refuse to serve gays. If they did, your analogy would apply. Instead, the owner supports policy (read: laws) that would deny gays certain rights (in this case, the right to marry).
A better analogy would be if a restaurant owner supported legislation banning interracial marriage, but still served blacks and interracial couples in the restaurant.
Support for the laws that discriminate is detestable, but it should not be illegal. Discriminating against who you serve, however is both detestable, AND illegal.
Do you think you can shoot down any aircraft that flies over your property?
These are / will be treated no differently than manned aircraft until such time as someone decides to pass a law / laws differentiating them.
Browse through the FARs. Most Federal Eviation Regulations make no mention / distinction between manned / unmanned aircraft.
It's unlawful to fire upon aircraft.
Doesn't matter if the aircraft is American or not, armed or not, manned or not. It's unlawful to fire upon, set fire to, explode, or otherwise screw with the operations of an aircraft registered in the U.S. or other countries. If it's manned, it also prohibits you from screwing with the crew.
Side note: RadioLab is a production of New York's NPR affiliate. Apparently the show is just a couple years old and apparently it's not carried on stations everywhere. If you haven't heard it, and you like science, check out their podcast. It's quirky, incredibly well produced, and overall very well done.
A database is updated with the OCR time and position of all cars. But only flagged cars are accessed.
The advantage of this is the ability to research later after the fact. "Oh, you were nowhere near that bar on the night of the 16th? Let's see if we can confirm that..."
Car stolen? Don't have LOJACK or whatever? File a police report and just as the cameras can continue to watch for your plates, they can go back and see if they already saw your plates before you even knew the car was missing.
Want to put legal protections into the system that keep it from being mined without probable cause? I can live with that.
Both casual observation and hard data disagree with your assertion.
Samsung makes lots of phones (I have not read that they make double the number of Apple, but I have read recently that they surpassed them. It's hard to imagine that they doubled Apple's production numbers the same quarter they surpassed them), but they make a lot of *different* phones.
All of the Android manufacturers do. How many Android phones do you think are one step up from a dumb flip phone, but run Android as an OS?
All the major carriers offer these phones.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of the "true" smart phones at the lower end aren't used as smart phones much, either.
Through observation in the wild, I see iPhones everywhere, every day. Android phones? They're there, but they are hardly ubiquitous like the iPhone.
Now the data: Look anywhere that is likely to have a wide representative share of users. Let's take Wikimedia, for instance: the iPhone accounts for 7% of traffic. Android is 4.73% (and tablets are probably included in this number, unlike iOS, which has the iPad segregated).
I think the Android market share is either inflated, or they're counting people who bought an Android phone, have no data plan, have never fired up a browser, never opened the app store, and never did anything but make calls with it.
It counts if all you're interested is how many devices are in the wild, but honestly, what can you do with this statistic that is useful?
If I want to develop and deploy an app, I want to know the actual audience that can potentially be reached by it. I have some visibility of that, but not much. It's further complicated by wide fragmentation on the Android platform.
According to the math they did here, Google is doing about 1 Billion downloads a month. Apple is doing about 1.25 Billion. That's a notable, but not insurmountable gap. But, yeah. Right now Apple is winning by any objective, realistic, meaningful measurement.
Disclaimer: I don't own any iOS products, and I really want Google to get their act together, because I really dislike the whole walled garden approach Apple and Microsoft are taking.
Android isn't something people *want* now. It's something people settle for because they don't want to pay the Apple premium. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows wasn't something people clamored for, either. It was just a standard.
My problem is that I don't want to see a standard that has a walled garden model win.
What makes it military equipment? The fact that the military has used it?
The military uses helicopters too. What about helicopters? Ban police use of them?
And underwear The military wears underwear. Should police be prohibited from wearing underwear too?
I get it. Drones are the scary thing de jure lately and the Slashdot crowd is particularly paranoid about privacy issues. But seriously, they can observe. So long as any non-public observation continues to require a warrant, I really don't care.
I've not heard of him, but looking over his Wikipedia entry, many of the books he's written ring a bell.
As for his definition, yes it *can* be. And it certainly is sometimes. But to say that that is what it is implies something else, that this is the exclusive, or at least main point of it.
In practice most people who would identify themselves as political scientists are closer to historians / sociologists.
But even "controlling" or "influencing" people isn't always necessarily nefarious. The League of Women Voters has political scientists. Their primary concern is how do they increase the amount of information available to voters and maximize voter turnout. They also are jealously non-partisan.
But why should it surprise you that you've never heard of a board for what may be a one-off prototype?
Particularly since Zelda was the first game to have battery-backup save (and you can plainly see what looks like a battery on the board), it would make sense that they might create a custom board for testing.
I get your point, and I agree with your sentiment. But I think you have your facts wrong in this case.
I don't think Ride was eligible for any kind of federal benefits. She wasn't a career federal employee. She served as an Astronaut from 1978 to 1987. After that, as far as I know she returned to academia in California.
Would nine years as a federal employee have made her eligible for spousal death benefits after she left?
First her first flight was in 1983. 49 years before her flight would be 1934. Clearly this is not correct.
Second, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space flew 1963. But the Soviets didn't fly a second woman in space until Svetlana Savitskaya 19 years later. And she flew just a year before Ride's first flight.
So even though she was beat by 20 years, Ride was actually the third woman in space. So it's unlikely that one of the two before her was a lesbian also.
Both the Russians who went before her are still alive and as far as I know still married. But who knows for sure?
Personally I think it's a irrelevant to her legacy. Her accomplishments were the things she did, not the things she did as a woman, or the things she did as a lesbian.
Scientist, astronaut, educator. She sat on the Rogers Commission, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and the Augustine Commission. Her contributions to human spaceflight are innumerable. The way she touched the next generations are incalculable.
Just because you brandish a gun to "defend" yourself, does not mean that you would have died otherwise.
One need only look at statistics in other countries with lesser rates of gun ownership to see this.
Now, you can make the argument that the U.S. is tainted by the flood of guns and that since it is tainted, gun ownership is sensible (similar concept to MAD), but by and large, in the civilized world, you don't need a gun to be safe.
In fact, even in the U.S, if you've got the cash to spare on a gun, you're statistically better off spending the money on an automatic defibrillator.
This isn't to take away for other gun uses. I've fired M-16s at the range and enjoyed myself quite a bit. You like to hunt? Not my thing, but good for you. I just don't buy the defense claim. I've looked into it extensively and I think while possible, you can find a few incidents here and there where a gun clearly saved a life, I think it's wildly overblown.
Maybe your theory will prove true, but I don't think it has in the recent past.
Where are the high DPI Android tablets that came out to keep up with the iPad?
There are a half dozen or so Android and Symbian phones with resolutions higher than the latest iPhone. And many more with lower, but comparable resolutions.
But all I've seen so far on the tablet front is talk. Microsoft says Windows 8 devices will support crazy high resolutions, which is nice, I guess. Samsung shows off a prototype panel. That's about it.
How to dress in *total*. According to the person who's post I was replying to, it can be. The thermometer alone only tells you the temperature. It won't tell you if it's raining or not.
Some may prefer a light jacket in the rain even if the temperature would not suggest a jacket would be desirable. In that way, it is helpful, but not the whole picture.
So you've proven that a thermometer provides inadequate data to make the decision on how to plan one's dress for the day.
You've then implied that perhaps IQ tests as measuring tools are similarly faulty.
But surely your solution to this is not to abandon thermometers in favor of other measurements exclusively? Surely the correct thing to do is to use thermometers in concert with the other data they cannot provide. Much as is done in practice in meteorology today.
And if that *is* the correct approach, how does it discredit the use of IQ tests? Would they not continue to be appropriate for use (assuming the analogy is a valid one) in concert with other data that they cannot measure, just as thermometers are?
Does this not support Lev13than's ultimate point that the test may not provide all desirable useful data, but it none the less still provides useful data?
This is the first I'd heard of him. I had no idea he was a well known figure when I posted this.
Since then, I've read some of the comments here about his background and followed some links and poked around his site. He just strikes me as a whiny control freak. The world has to be his way, and if not, he'll cry about it.
That's not so bad in and of itself. I like activism. I support it. But he the fights he picks are... trivial to say the least.
That some kid somewhere might learn what (and where) a clitoris is is kind of the least of my worries. But to him, the world might end.
What should we do about Slashdot's Larry Sanger problem?
In 2012, someone submitted an article to Slashdot whining of an imagined problem on the website Wikipedia. Citing the 'controversial content', he whined about the lack of a filter even weaker than Google's SafeSearch.
Since then, after growing calls to "show us the porn" by some Slashdot users, some users have made it clear that they do not expect this to be able to filter Larry Sanger. Nevertheless, Slashdot continues to host an enormous amount of extremely gross whining and other complaining that most users don't want clogging up the front page. And this content is some of the website's most-accessed. Nevertheless, Sanger remain one of Slashdot's most self-righteous users. Slashdot founder CmdrTaco (blessings and peace be upon him) has recently reiterated his support for a Larry Sanger filter, but no work is being done on it, and the editors have not yet issued any statement about whether they intend to work on it.
On top of that a friend of mine went through a quest for a "proper" external keypad a few years back.
He went through a half dozen external keypads, and discovered that they all simply emulate the 0-9 keys at the top of the keyboard (same charcode value, but different keycode value).
That's fine if all you want to do is numeric entry into a spreadsheet. But if the software you are using is expecting input from the keypad specifically, or is using the keypad as a kind of cursor control in menus, etc., it will break things.
I don't recall why this was a problem for my friend, but it may have been for use with some kind of poorly coded legacy software (he worked with animal rescues at the time, they're not known for being well funded).
I assume that the niche was small enough that even though there were a bunch of products on the market, they were probably all relying on a logic chip from a single manufacturer, though we never tore them down to verify this.
You're right about the philosophic aspects of your argument. We are in total agreement.
But is it a philosophy for you, or a religion?
Are is Hamilton Moses to you?
Jefferson?
Why have amendments at all?
Oh, wait, these were imperfect men that founded an imperfect nation.
Still, the fundamentals of the republic are sound.
Yes, torture is bad. Newsflash: you're making an anti-torture argument to someone who agrees with you. Torture is bad. Also illegal.
And yes, people are often stupid. This is one of the reasons we have representative democracy rather than direct democracy.
There are three important points to your freedom argument:
1) The world is different than when the founders met and drafted a constitution. A right to bear arms should not include nuclear arms. I agree that our military is too big, and we use it too aggressively. But Jefferson's idea of "never keep an unnecessary soldier" is quaint, but unrealistic today. You can't train an modern army by drafting people, teaching them how to march, and issuing them a musket. Medicare may very well be unconstitutional. But there are practical reasons for central administration of such a system (so why not amend the constitution?). 2) The founders were not just limited by the things they couldn't see in the future, they were limited by the prejudices of their times. Again, we've amended the constitution to abolish slavery. But we still have no equal rights amendment. Both are mistakes the founders made. One was corrected, the other was not. 3) I understand Locke's philosophy of "natural rights". And it is just that - a philosophy. It's not an empirical fact. Do I agree with the TSA screening process? No, I think it's stupid, degrading, and ineffective. But I don't think that government can't do what the TSA does, just that it shouldn't. I think the problem is that you're dealing in absolutes. Jefferson said X, therefore X is always 100% true, regardless of context. Much of the rest of the world sees nuance and context. It doesn't mean we disagree with you fundamentally.
Our form of government serves the people. Sometimes it makes decisions that are unpopular (TSA). Sometimes it makes decisions that are unpopular and wrong (Iraq war). Sometimes it makes decisions that are popular and wrong (Medicare part D).
The task we are handed is to inform the public, marshal them, and restore sane governance.
Or to quote Barney Frank: "In democracies, there are no guarantees. Elect good people."
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that that's not a good analogy.
Chick-Fil-A doesn't refuse to serve gays. If they did, your analogy would apply. Instead, the owner supports policy (read: laws) that would deny gays certain rights (in this case, the right to marry).
A better analogy would be if a restaurant owner supported legislation banning interracial marriage, but still served blacks and interracial couples in the restaurant.
Support for the laws that discriminate is detestable, but it should not be illegal. Discriminating against who you serve, however is both detestable, AND illegal.
Are you kidding me?
Do you think you can shoot down any aircraft that flies over your property?
These are / will be treated no differently than manned aircraft until such time as someone decides to pass a law / laws differentiating them.
Browse through the FARs. Most Federal Eviation Regulations make no mention / distinction between manned / unmanned aircraft.
It's unlawful to fire upon aircraft.
Doesn't matter if the aircraft is American or not, armed or not, manned or not. It's unlawful to fire upon, set fire to, explode, or otherwise screw with the operations of an aircraft registered in the U.S. or other countries. If it's manned, it also prohibits you from screwing with the crew.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/32
Just out of curiosity, what keeps you from shooting at the guy who hands menus on your door knob from local restaurants?
WNYC's excellent program, RadioLab will have a Google Hangout and possible a meatspace meetup somewhere in the Lower East Side in NYC.
Headliners for their event include:
Side note: RadioLab is a production of New York's NPR affiliate. Apparently the show is just a couple years old and apparently it's not carried on stations everywhere. If you haven't heard it, and you like science, check out their podcast. It's quirky, incredibly well produced, and overall very well done.
I can see a compromise making sense.
A database is updated with the OCR time and position of all cars. But only flagged cars are accessed.
The advantage of this is the ability to research later after the fact. "Oh, you were nowhere near that bar on the night of the 16th? Let's see if we can confirm that..."
Car stolen? Don't have LOJACK or whatever? File a police report and just as the cameras can continue to watch for your plates, they can go back and see if they already saw your plates before you even knew the car was missing.
Want to put legal protections into the system that keep it from being mined without probable cause? I can live with that.
Both casual observation and hard data disagree with your assertion.
Samsung makes lots of phones (I have not read that they make double the number of Apple, but I have read recently that they surpassed them. It's hard to imagine that they doubled Apple's production numbers the same quarter they surpassed them), but they make a lot of *different* phones.
All of the Android manufacturers do. How many Android phones do you think are one step up from a dumb flip phone, but run Android as an OS?
All the major carriers offer these phones.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of the "true" smart phones at the lower end aren't used as smart phones much, either.
Through observation in the wild, I see iPhones everywhere, every day. Android phones? They're there, but they are hardly ubiquitous like the iPhone.
Now the data: Look anywhere that is likely to have a wide representative share of users. Let's take Wikimedia, for instance: the iPhone accounts for 7% of traffic. Android is 4.73% (and tablets are probably included in this number, unlike iOS, which has the iPad segregated).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_chart.png
I think the Android market share is either inflated, or they're counting people who bought an Android phone, have no data plan, have never fired up a browser, never opened the app store, and never did anything but make calls with it.
It counts if all you're interested is how many devices are in the wild, but honestly, what can you do with this statistic that is useful?
If I want to develop and deploy an app, I want to know the actual audience that can potentially be reached by it. I have some visibility of that, but not much. It's further complicated by wide fragmentation on the Android platform.
According to the math they did here, Google is doing about 1 Billion downloads a month. Apple is doing about 1.25 Billion. That's a notable, but not insurmountable gap. But, yeah. Right now Apple is winning by any objective, realistic, meaningful measurement.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/google-play-about-to-pass-15-billion-downloads-pssht-it-did-that-weeks-ago/
Disclaimer: I don't own any iOS products, and I really want Google to get their act together, because I really dislike the whole walled garden approach Apple and Microsoft are taking.
Android isn't something people *want* now. It's something people settle for because they don't want to pay the Apple premium. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows wasn't something people clamored for, either. It was just a standard.
My problem is that I don't want to see a standard that has a walled garden model win.
What makes it military equipment? The fact that the military has used it?
The military uses helicopters too. What about helicopters? Ban police use of them?
And underwear The military wears underwear. Should police be prohibited from wearing underwear too?
I get it. Drones are the scary thing de jure lately and the Slashdot crowd is particularly paranoid about privacy issues. But seriously, they can observe. So long as any non-public observation continues to require a warrant, I really don't care.
I've not heard of him, but looking over his Wikipedia entry, many of the books he's written ring a bell.
As for his definition, yes it *can* be. And it certainly is sometimes. But to say that that is what it is implies something else, that this is the exclusive, or at least main point of it.
In practice most people who would identify themselves as political scientists are closer to historians / sociologists.
But even "controlling" or "influencing" people isn't always necessarily nefarious. The League of Women Voters has political scientists. Their primary concern is how do they increase the amount of information available to voters and maximize voter turnout. They also are jealously non-partisan.
Certainly less useful. But not useless.
I agree that we have our priorities backwards, but that doesn't mean being physically fit can't be nice.
I agree that $150K seems way overly optimistic.
But why should it surprise you that you've never heard of a board for what may be a one-off prototype?
Particularly since Zelda was the first game to have battery-backup save (and you can plainly see what looks like a battery on the board), it would make sense that they might create a custom board for testing.
No, political science isn't about controlling people any more than zoology is about controlling animal populations.
It's a study. It's no more unified than politics is, because that's what political science is: the study of politics, government, and state.
Also, I'm sure some fringe school somewhere does what you say, but the UK has a standardized uniform grading system that is widely used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_Kingdom
I think this guy's idea is dumb too. But your assertions don't seem grounded in reality.
I get your point, and I agree with your sentiment. But I think you have your facts wrong in this case.
I don't think Ride was eligible for any kind of federal benefits. She wasn't a career federal employee. She served as an Astronaut from 1978 to 1987. After that, as far as I know she returned to academia in California.
Would nine years as a federal employee have made her eligible for spousal death benefits after she left?
I don't think so, but does anyone know for sure?
A couple problems:
First her first flight was in 1983. 49 years before her flight would be 1934. Clearly this is not correct.
Second, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space flew 1963. But the Soviets didn't fly a second woman in space until Svetlana Savitskaya 19 years later. And she flew just a year before Ride's first flight.
So even though she was beat by 20 years, Ride was actually the third woman in space. So it's unlikely that one of the two before her was a lesbian also.
Both the Russians who went before her are still alive and as far as I know still married. But who knows for sure?
Personally I think it's a irrelevant to her legacy. Her accomplishments were the things she did, not the things she did as a woman, or the things she did as a lesbian.
Scientist, astronaut, educator. She sat on the Rogers Commission, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and the Augustine Commission. Her contributions to human spaceflight are innumerable. The way she touched the next generations are incalculable.
No, but that doesn't negate the point either.
Defensive gun use != a life saved.
Just because you brandish a gun to "defend" yourself, does not mean that you would have died otherwise.
One need only look at statistics in other countries with lesser rates of gun ownership to see this.
Now, you can make the argument that the U.S. is tainted by the flood of guns and that since it is tainted, gun ownership is sensible (similar concept to MAD), but by and large, in the civilized world, you don't need a gun to be safe.
In fact, even in the U.S, if you've got the cash to spare on a gun, you're statistically better off spending the money on an automatic defibrillator.
This isn't to take away for other gun uses. I've fired M-16s at the range and enjoyed myself quite a bit. You like to hunt? Not my thing, but good for you. I just don't buy the defense claim. I've looked into it extensively and I think while possible, you can find a few incidents here and there where a gun clearly saved a life, I think it's wildly overblown.
Maybe your theory will prove true, but I don't think it has in the recent past.
Where are the high DPI Android tablets that came out to keep up with the iPad?
There are a half dozen or so Android and Symbian phones with resolutions higher than the latest iPhone. And many more with lower, but comparable resolutions.
But all I've seen so far on the tablet front is talk. Microsoft says Windows 8 devices will support crazy high resolutions, which is nice, I guess. Samsung shows off a prototype panel. That's about it.
I've met both. I think the biggest factor is motivation behind homeschooling, followed by ability of the folks who will teach them.
Homeschooling seems to attract two extremes of the intellectual spectrum.
Here are ten numbers. Average them.
10
30
60
70
80
80
90
90
100
100
How many of these numbers are below the average? What percent?
How to dress in *total*. According to the person who's post I was replying to, it can be. The thermometer alone only tells you the temperature. It won't tell you if it's raining or not.
Some may prefer a light jacket in the rain even if the temperature would not suggest a jacket would be desirable. In that way, it is helpful, but not the whole picture.
Okay, let's extend the analogy further.
So you've proven that a thermometer provides inadequate data to make the decision on how to plan one's dress for the day.
You've then implied that perhaps IQ tests as measuring tools are similarly faulty.
But surely your solution to this is not to abandon thermometers in favor of other measurements exclusively? Surely the correct thing to do is to use thermometers in concert with the other data they cannot provide. Much as is done in practice in meteorology today.
And if that *is* the correct approach, how does it discredit the use of IQ tests? Would they not continue to be appropriate for use (assuming the analogy is a valid one) in concert with other data that they cannot measure, just as thermometers are?
Does this not support Lev13than's ultimate point that the test may not provide all desirable useful data, but it none the less still provides useful data?
This is the first I'd heard of him. I had no idea he was a well known figure when I posted this.
Since then, I've read some of the comments here about his background and followed some links and poked around his site. He just strikes me as a whiny control freak. The world has to be his way, and if not, he'll cry about it.
That's not so bad in and of itself. I like activism. I support it. But he the fights he picks are... trivial to say the least.
That some kid somewhere might learn what (and where) a clitoris is is kind of the least of my worries. But to him, the world might end.
What should we do about Slashdot's Larry Sanger problem?
In 2012, someone submitted an article to Slashdot whining of an imagined problem on the website Wikipedia. Citing the 'controversial content', he whined about the lack of a filter even weaker than Google's SafeSearch.
Since then, after growing calls to "show us the porn" by some Slashdot users, some users have made it clear that they do not expect this to be able to filter Larry Sanger. Nevertheless, Slashdot continues to host an enormous amount of extremely gross whining and other complaining that most users don't want clogging up the front page. And this content is some of the website's most-accessed. Nevertheless, Sanger remain one of Slashdot's most self-righteous users. Slashdot founder CmdrTaco (blessings and peace be upon him) has recently reiterated his support for a Larry Sanger filter, but no work is being done on it, and the editors have not yet issued any statement about whether they intend to work on it.
They ALL have more than just 9 keys. You misunderstood what I was saying.
0-9 is ten keys. And yes, they all had + - Enter / * etc.
On top of that a friend of mine went through a quest for a "proper" external keypad a few years back.
He went through a half dozen external keypads, and discovered that they all simply emulate the 0-9 keys at the top of the keyboard (same charcode value, but different keycode value).
That's fine if all you want to do is numeric entry into a spreadsheet. But if the software you are using is expecting input from the keypad specifically, or is using the keypad as a kind of cursor control in menus, etc., it will break things.
I don't recall why this was a problem for my friend, but it may have been for use with some kind of poorly coded legacy software (he worked with animal rescues at the time, they're not known for being well funded).
I assume that the niche was small enough that even though there were a bunch of products on the market, they were probably all relying on a logic chip from a single manufacturer, though we never tore them down to verify this.
I am. And I weep for his / her inability to get into those nations. Truly a tragedy.
You're right about the philosophic aspects of your argument. We are in total agreement.
But is it a philosophy for you, or a religion?
Are is Hamilton Moses to you?
Jefferson?
Why have amendments at all?
Oh, wait, these were imperfect men that founded an imperfect nation.
Still, the fundamentals of the republic are sound.
Yes, torture is bad. Newsflash: you're making an anti-torture argument to someone who agrees with you. Torture is bad. Also illegal.
And yes, people are often stupid. This is one of the reasons we have representative democracy rather than direct democracy.
There are three important points to your freedom argument:
1) The world is different than when the founders met and drafted a constitution. A right to bear arms should not include nuclear arms. I agree that our military is too big, and we use it too aggressively. But Jefferson's idea of "never keep an unnecessary soldier" is quaint, but unrealistic today. You can't train an modern army by drafting people, teaching them how to march, and issuing them a musket. Medicare may very well be unconstitutional. But there are practical reasons for central administration of such a system (so why not amend the constitution?).
2) The founders were not just limited by the things they couldn't see in the future, they were limited by the prejudices of their times. Again, we've amended the constitution to abolish slavery. But we still have no equal rights amendment. Both are mistakes the founders made. One was corrected, the other was not.
3) I understand Locke's philosophy of "natural rights". And it is just that - a philosophy. It's not an empirical fact. Do I agree with the TSA screening process? No, I think it's stupid, degrading, and ineffective. But I don't think that government can't do what the TSA does, just that it shouldn't. I think the problem is that you're dealing in absolutes. Jefferson said X, therefore X is always 100% true, regardless of context. Much of the rest of the world sees nuance and context. It doesn't mean we disagree with you fundamentally.
Our form of government serves the people. Sometimes it makes decisions that are unpopular (TSA). Sometimes it makes decisions that are unpopular and wrong (Iraq war). Sometimes it makes decisions that are popular and wrong (Medicare part D).
The task we are handed is to inform the public, marshal them, and restore sane governance.
Or to quote Barney Frank: "In democracies, there are no guarantees. Elect good people."