Instead of a paltry 19 million why not toss them a billion bucks to build a computer that will rock the world. Apparently some nations now engage us in forms of cyber warfare daily. So lets not get slightly ahead. Let's get Star Wars types of ahead and build a computer that can easily handle any threats thrown at it. And such a machine just might get rid of problems like cancer, poverty and other plagues that mankind has always endured.
It really can be as simple as greed. Your power company likes its money and wants to keep it in pocket. Heavily populated areas can generate a lot of complaints and woes for the power company whereas smaller areas can not. You may be able to find that power crews do not stand at the ready to service outages near you. In my town we suffered a similar issue with cable TV. If a car smacked a pole and took out the cable or someone cut the cable in a digging operation on Friday night it would take until Monday to get the cable back on. It was really lousy as we do not get over the air tV here. I had lived in a highly populated area about 100 miles south of me and was accustomed to repair crews being able to jump to the job in a few minutes any time of day or night. Our area grew in poulation and service improved accordingly. That might be solely due to alternatives to cable becomming better in quality than they were 15 years ago.
It is as if they tried to study energy needs in a vaccuum. Yes, many changes will accompany a change to renewable energy. Getting rid of gasoline and diesel vehicles leaps to mind. Cutting back on the use of large ships is likely and international tourism may be sharply curtailed. Our appliances have been changing for quite some time already. Your lED monitor burns far less energy than your old tube monitor. We will see homes and buildings with plantings on the roofs or even fish ponds on the roofs. For much of the nation solar hot water heaters has worked well clear back to 1910 or maybe earlier. And bamboo may be the fuel winner of all times. Bamboo absorbs carbon for the first five years of its life and only returns that carbon to the atmosphere when burned. In addition bamboo can be very, very fast growing and is easy to harvest and requires no fertilizer or chemical sprays. We have plenty of space to grow bamboo forests and bamboo can also be used to make paper and build homes.
So yes, we will change almost everything to have renewable energy but guess what. All hell will break lose if we do not go to renewables and in that scenario everything would change for the far, far worse than we have now.
The US has gotten a bad image abroad that would make smarter people not want to immigrate here. Wretched social policies, too much poverty, a willingness to torture people, economic downfall and that all to real chance of being gunned down for next to no reason at all by poor people, the mentally ill and drug addicted, all tell a normal person to stay out of the US. European governments have actually had travelers warning zones for cities like Miami, Fl. due to excessive violence.
We have almost no option other than making certain that we can win a conflict regardless of the situation and high tech may be the more perfect form of sparing innocents.
But the current that flows in the opposite direction is that we will lose if we can not afford our modes of war. In other words we need to deliver a lot of hell for a tiny cost. Old ways won't work. For example if you take a machine gun that fires 50 caliber rounds at twenty rounds per second and each cartridge costs $12. as delivered to the battle field you quickly discover that you are spending a fortune and that when you run bullets through that weapon you may not hit a single enemy. And it gets worse. Imagine the cost of one napalm bomb dropped by a jet. We simply can not win without total bankruptcy as a consequence. It quickly turns into a situation where we must either use nuclear weapons or bio weapons to crush an enemy. And war cost compound with every new conflict. WW11,Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and other programs still cost us billions of dollars every year. There is a toggle point at which the US will perish from its war debts.
Instead of ranting about whether a cop was being fair or not consider what the cop is trained to do. If a situation gets to the point where a shot is fired cops do not stop shooting until the suspect is on the ground and unable to move. So we have a situation in which the offender was shot at close range and then started backing off. The cop did exactly what he is trained and required to do. He kept shooting until the offender was on the ground and still.
So all the nonsense about federal charges or civil rights charges will not be a matter of the officer's actions but will be an issue of whether he was following the materials and teachings he was required to follow. And yes, even throwing one punch at a cop does justify deadly force.
This is exactly the same issue that migrant laborers are stuck with. The claim is made that Americans will not do field labor. The food industry uses that excuse and pushes to not crack down on undocumented workers. But if we shut down undoucmented workers field labor would receive far higher wages and then those jobs might be much more attractive for American workers. And it extends into other areas as well. The guy that labors in construction has his wages controlled by the availability of labor. So if the farm workers were paid more people who labor or work as store clerks may also receive higher wages or decide to work in the fields.
And this conspiracy actually has official support. For example convicts on work programs are often assigned to work as field labor at very low pay rates with the lions share of their pay going back to the prison. Or the prison may have its own farm with the food being consumed by the convicts which also holds down the demand for field labor.
And to the right wing nuts this situation is a great example of why supply and demand is not meaningful in economics. It demonstrates that supply as well as demand can be controlled by forces other than exchange for goods and services.
I'm not so certain that humans can be considered to be conscious at all. The observational and computational process of the human mind barely exists. There are some viewpoints that suggest that a human and an earthworm are almost at the same level of intelligence. Just like a worm we have no real degree of control of all that is around us. And we are so very vulnerable. Look what a tiny virus like ebola can do to a two hundred pound man and our vulnerability becomes quite obvious.
More population requires more crops be grown which causes a disturbance in the CO2 cycle. It comes back to the same thing as almost all our other woes. Allowing people to reproduce irresponsably is our downfall. If we had half the population we now have we would have half the pollution, half the energy demands, half the urban sprawl, and half of just about every other problem that we currently face.
No just why does the nation and the world avoid confronting the real cause of our woes? Big business needs buyers. If we engineer society to have less people we then have a society that consumes less. Business loves runaway irresponsible consumption. Or put in a more ancient way business loves money. And being that one can not serve two masters business has taken on money as their god and rejected morality and faith.
The cost of medical care alone will start to severely limit our choices. For example if a robotic driver has 15% less accidents than a human driver the differential in medical loss to tax payers could be enough to cause a must have robotic ability at all times to be required in order to have a vehicle on the road. Guns and motorcycles will face similar legal challenges. For example one severely wounded motorcycle rider can have a lifetime medical care cost of over twenty million dollars and leave the rider with no way to earn any money at all on top of that. A bullet can cause similar nightmare medical situations. Since the tax payer always bears the brunt of the costs of such incidents our law makers may feel they have the right to either control or completley banish long established industries as well as restraining the rights of the people. This is one reason Obama care is a bad compromise. Only single payer medical with government as the payer can control medical costs and it is vital that those costs be controlled.
Some deliberate climate alteration can not possibly do harm. For example creating a lot more trees in cities and suburbs does have an effect on climate. Painting all roof tops white in hotter areas can be of great effect. And of all things dedicating land to bamboo that is harvested every five years can suck up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere. Florida has immense area that could be planted with aggressive bamboo species. Indoor farming can also have a big impact. And then we can do the social corrections such as making it illegal to ban clothes lines for drying clothes. Most places no longer allow a clothes line and I suppose don't mind the pollution it takes to spin turbines to generate all that eletricity. We could also limit the size of auto engines and take other simple steps to improve life without causing chaos.
Although such a program could help create a stronger and more succesful nation I do have issues with it. There are many types of people and ways of life. How would an Amish person fare on such an entry program. In other words some people are being devalued due to religions, or ethnic modes of life. And then we have the cheap labor issue. We already have a situation in which farm workers are paid far less due to illegal workers and it goes further than that. If the farms paid more other jobs would have to pay more as well as people would leave so-called better jobs to earn more money on the farms. And when we look at higher levels people like computer and software developers would also be paid more if we disallowed immigrant workers.
And sometimes we need to look at the end of a transaction chain before we judge. An example would be the corporations taking over food production. Does anybody not notice the price of food going up like crazy? We do we allow the export of food when prices are risng at home?
The same can be said for oil and gas production. Ideas like butchering Canada to pipe oil to the Gulf of Mexico to refine it and then sell it abroad is way over the top offensive. Canada won't allow the refining to take place so the scheme is to pipe it all the way to Texas and Louisiana for refining which naturally will pollute the Gulf Coast like there is no tomorrow. So after ripping the surface of Canada to pieces and then ripping across the nation to the Gulf and then polluting the Gulf Coast we turn around and export that oil. That is insanity.
Purchases are not the real problem. Many shooters use stolen wepons. But we should have mental health testing in schools and in the work places and a good treatment system to help those who need help. Most of America has a joke for a mental health system and the way we structure our economy assures that we will not have good mental health care. For example many convicts have severe mental issues. But how do we provide seriously skilled physicians who command huge salaries to treat convictcs?
Bad guys spot cams easily and disable them. Sonic location works rather well. But since most modern schools are not prone to fires I see no reason that each wing of the school can not be sealed off with the flip of a switch and good security doors on every room would leave the shooter with no one to shoot at and capture him as well.
Our traditions have been to have the path hammered out by applying intense pressure of all kinds to oppositions. It may be rude but there is a point to it all. For example a person might remark that the governor of New Jersey could be mistaken for a blimp. But the remark points to the fact that a man who can not manage his own body should not be trusted to manage a state and there is reality in that view point,
So a girl can dance nude in public but insists that she has a right to keep that public performance history a secret. She must be a blond to think like that.
There is not one thing wrong with being a sex worker. She should be proud of what she did. And yes if she danced she was hooking.
I do understand that there are limits on when and why a prison can supply specialized diets. But the depression issue is much more serious. Obviously the prison systems are designed to create depression or worse. And that is flat out stupid. Many mental hospitals play the same game. People are given little or nothing to do that is fun or stress relieving. And much like many convicts many mental patients have nothing in life to look forward to as well. So the convicts become much harder to handle and much more prone to commit serious crimes upon release. After years of mental torture many inmates hate society so much that they are not only walking time bombs but they also seek revenge on all of society. The US prison system and jail systems can take a person with a minor problem and grow them into a monster.
Small examples are obvious. A person on probabtion or parole will be required to tell a future employer that they are a criminal. Jobs are hard to get and revealing that you are a criminal makes employment next to impossible. Th ex inmate is not going to starve and rot. if he can't get work he will turn back to crime. Even child support creates many criminals. A judge assigns too much child support and a full time job will not leave a man with enough money to survive. If he doesn't pay he goes to jail. He will turn to crime. Now his exwife and child will get zero support. When he gets out of prison he can not apply for any bennefits in some states so having nothing and being unemployable his only chance is crime. The system is creating criminals and creating some serious hatred within the inmates. These issues would not exist if the system did not want them to exist. To some people a convict means money and lucrative supply contracts and therefore the system seeks to create criminals. Yes we are that corrupt.
But if we are indeed simply creatures computer generated in some sort of matrix then the chunks of code that create our reality could be inserted in the program at any time, or several times after being withdrawn several times. So a universe that exists in code would not have to have linear events and cause and effect that are locked to a clock.
If God is efficient then what better way than to create the universe as an illusion with computer code at its base?
I have lived in Florida for 60 years and would not reccomend life in the Miami, Ft. lauderdale or Palm Beach area including Boca raton.
The southeastern coast of Florida has been destroyed by growth and the deliberate attraction of excessive population. Also considerable racial strife as well as a vivid gap between the haves and the have nots has resulted in an area prone to crime and violent crime at that.
There are areas in Florida that could be ideal for major businesses. Areas not too distant from Orlando that are still rural or uninhabited enable land purches at sane prices. Crime is much less of a problem in these areas and if you consult locals you can fine out about the effect of storms in the specific region. With intelligent designs and placements buildings and homes can be quite safe in almost any potential hurricane.
Casually buying into just any old place in Florida is a huge mistake. For example if a person dreams about buying land in California knowledge is required or you might end up in a really nasty desert or a wooded area prone to frequent forest fires. You need to know and understand exactly what you are buying.
I'll wager that big foot is found before any nation allows free speech. How is it that people have any faith in the notion of rights when nonsense like spying on lawyers and journalists is tolerated?
OK, buck up folks. Grow a pair. Stop living like cowards. These days if Jackie Gleason balled up his fist and sain "To the moon Alice" it would be taken as a criminal offense and endless nonsense would have followed.
Yes life is filled with danger. Italways has been. And we have less danger now than at any time in history. We no longer live if terror waiting for the next Viking raid or Apache war party. Getting a tooth pulled is so easy i can't believe it. Imagine getting a tooth pulled in 1850. We have it easy in so many ways that most folks have no clue as to how easy things are for us. But we still have cowards and people of low faith who think every casual remark is a deadly threat. Guns are not seen as a useful tool but viewed like a deadly viper that is likely to strike at any moment dispite the fact that very few people have ever sen a gun incident much less get involved in one. And get real folks. Your doctor knows long lists of diseases that can torture you beyond all understanding. By comparison a bullet or death by a knife or bomb is trivial and rather fast. If my forefathers coul survive crossing vast oceans in wooden boats and crossing a new continent I think I can do just fine and not be nervous about childish threats.
Obviously this law is poorly written. So the question becomes whether the government is required to apply the law the way they think it should be seen or the way it is actually written. This becomes critical in the instance of the congress approving Supreme Court judges. The law says that congress should advise and consent the president as to the wisdom of accepting the applicant. Nowhere does the law suggest that congress has ever had the power to reject the applicant but it has always been taken as if it did. In other words congress can recommend that the applicant be rejected but the president is really under no obligation to accept the advice given by congress.
In essence as usual we don't really believe in truth, justice or law at all. Our justice system and laws are simply a formal dance during which the prejudices of the community are brought to bear on a defendant.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if we can just write a chess program that this machine can make use of--------
Instead of a paltry 19 million why not toss them a billion bucks to build a computer that will rock the world. Apparently some nations now engage us in forms of cyber warfare daily. So lets not get slightly ahead. Let's get Star Wars types of ahead and build a computer that can easily handle any threats thrown at it. And such a machine just might get rid of problems like cancer, poverty and other plagues that mankind has always endured.
It really can be as simple as greed. Your power company likes its money and wants to keep it in pocket. Heavily populated areas can generate a lot of complaints and woes for the power company whereas smaller areas can not. You may be able to find that power crews do not stand at the ready to service outages near you. In my town we suffered a similar issue with cable TV. If a car smacked a pole and took out the cable or someone cut the cable in a digging operation on Friday night it would take until Monday to get the cable back on. It was really lousy as we do not get over the air tV here. I had lived in a highly populated area about 100 miles south of me and was accustomed to repair crews being able to jump to the job in a few minutes any time of day or night. Our area grew in poulation and service improved accordingly. That might be solely due to alternatives to cable becomming better in quality than they were 15 years ago.
It is as if they tried to study energy needs in a vaccuum. Yes, many changes will accompany a change to renewable energy. Getting rid of gasoline and diesel vehicles leaps to mind. Cutting back on the use of large ships is likely and international tourism may be sharply curtailed. Our appliances have been changing for quite some time already. Your lED monitor burns far less energy than your old tube monitor. We will see homes and buildings with plantings on the roofs or even fish ponds on the roofs. For much of the nation solar hot water heaters has worked well clear back to 1910 or maybe earlier. And bamboo may be the fuel winner of all times. Bamboo absorbs carbon for the first five years of its life and only returns that carbon to the atmosphere when burned. In addition bamboo can be very, very fast growing and is easy to harvest and requires no fertilizer or chemical sprays. We have plenty of space to grow bamboo forests and bamboo can also be used to make paper and build homes. So yes, we will change almost everything to have renewable energy but guess what. All hell will break lose if we do not go to renewables and in that scenario everything would change for the far, far worse than we have now.
The US has gotten a bad image abroad that would make smarter people not want to immigrate here. Wretched social policies, too much poverty, a willingness to torture people, economic downfall and that all to real chance of being gunned down for next to no reason at all by poor people, the mentally ill and drug addicted, all tell a normal person to stay out of the US. European governments have actually had travelers warning zones for cities like Miami, Fl. due to excessive violence.
We have almost no option other than making certain that we can win a conflict regardless of the situation and high tech may be the more perfect form of sparing innocents. But the current that flows in the opposite direction is that we will lose if we can not afford our modes of war. In other words we need to deliver a lot of hell for a tiny cost. Old ways won't work. For example if you take a machine gun that fires 50 caliber rounds at twenty rounds per second and each cartridge costs $12. as delivered to the battle field you quickly discover that you are spending a fortune and that when you run bullets through that weapon you may not hit a single enemy. And it gets worse. Imagine the cost of one napalm bomb dropped by a jet. We simply can not win without total bankruptcy as a consequence. It quickly turns into a situation where we must either use nuclear weapons or bio weapons to crush an enemy. And war cost compound with every new conflict. WW11,Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and other programs still cost us billions of dollars every year. There is a toggle point at which the US will perish from its war debts.
Instead of ranting about whether a cop was being fair or not consider what the cop is trained to do. If a situation gets to the point where a shot is fired cops do not stop shooting until the suspect is on the ground and unable to move. So we have a situation in which the offender was shot at close range and then started backing off. The cop did exactly what he is trained and required to do. He kept shooting until the offender was on the ground and still. So all the nonsense about federal charges or civil rights charges will not be a matter of the officer's actions but will be an issue of whether he was following the materials and teachings he was required to follow. And yes, even throwing one punch at a cop does justify deadly force.
This is exactly the same issue that migrant laborers are stuck with. The claim is made that Americans will not do field labor. The food industry uses that excuse and pushes to not crack down on undocumented workers. But if we shut down undoucmented workers field labor would receive far higher wages and then those jobs might be much more attractive for American workers. And it extends into other areas as well. The guy that labors in construction has his wages controlled by the availability of labor. So if the farm workers were paid more people who labor or work as store clerks may also receive higher wages or decide to work in the fields. And this conspiracy actually has official support. For example convicts on work programs are often assigned to work as field labor at very low pay rates with the lions share of their pay going back to the prison. Or the prison may have its own farm with the food being consumed by the convicts which also holds down the demand for field labor. And to the right wing nuts this situation is a great example of why supply and demand is not meaningful in economics. It demonstrates that supply as well as demand can be controlled by forces other than exchange for goods and services.
I'm not so certain that humans can be considered to be conscious at all. The observational and computational process of the human mind barely exists. There are some viewpoints that suggest that a human and an earthworm are almost at the same level of intelligence. Just like a worm we have no real degree of control of all that is around us. And we are so very vulnerable. Look what a tiny virus like ebola can do to a two hundred pound man and our vulnerability becomes quite obvious.
More population requires more crops be grown which causes a disturbance in the CO2 cycle. It comes back to the same thing as almost all our other woes. Allowing people to reproduce irresponsably is our downfall. If we had half the population we now have we would have half the pollution, half the energy demands, half the urban sprawl, and half of just about every other problem that we currently face. No just why does the nation and the world avoid confronting the real cause of our woes? Big business needs buyers. If we engineer society to have less people we then have a society that consumes less. Business loves runaway irresponsible consumption. Or put in a more ancient way business loves money. And being that one can not serve two masters business has taken on money as their god and rejected morality and faith.
The cost of medical care alone will start to severely limit our choices. For example if a robotic driver has 15% less accidents than a human driver the differential in medical loss to tax payers could be enough to cause a must have robotic ability at all times to be required in order to have a vehicle on the road. Guns and motorcycles will face similar legal challenges. For example one severely wounded motorcycle rider can have a lifetime medical care cost of over twenty million dollars and leave the rider with no way to earn any money at all on top of that. A bullet can cause similar nightmare medical situations. Since the tax payer always bears the brunt of the costs of such incidents our law makers may feel they have the right to either control or completley banish long established industries as well as restraining the rights of the people. This is one reason Obama care is a bad compromise. Only single payer medical with government as the payer can control medical costs and it is vital that those costs be controlled.
Some deliberate climate alteration can not possibly do harm. For example creating a lot more trees in cities and suburbs does have an effect on climate. Painting all roof tops white in hotter areas can be of great effect. And of all things dedicating land to bamboo that is harvested every five years can suck up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere. Florida has immense area that could be planted with aggressive bamboo species. Indoor farming can also have a big impact. And then we can do the social corrections such as making it illegal to ban clothes lines for drying clothes. Most places no longer allow a clothes line and I suppose don't mind the pollution it takes to spin turbines to generate all that eletricity. We could also limit the size of auto engines and take other simple steps to improve life without causing chaos.
Although such a program could help create a stronger and more succesful nation I do have issues with it. There are many types of people and ways of life. How would an Amish person fare on such an entry program. In other words some people are being devalued due to religions, or ethnic modes of life. And then we have the cheap labor issue. We already have a situation in which farm workers are paid far less due to illegal workers and it goes further than that. If the farms paid more other jobs would have to pay more as well as people would leave so-called better jobs to earn more money on the farms. And when we look at higher levels people like computer and software developers would also be paid more if we disallowed immigrant workers. And sometimes we need to look at the end of a transaction chain before we judge. An example would be the corporations taking over food production. Does anybody not notice the price of food going up like crazy? We do we allow the export of food when prices are risng at home? The same can be said for oil and gas production. Ideas like butchering Canada to pipe oil to the Gulf of Mexico to refine it and then sell it abroad is way over the top offensive. Canada won't allow the refining to take place so the scheme is to pipe it all the way to Texas and Louisiana for refining which naturally will pollute the Gulf Coast like there is no tomorrow. So after ripping the surface of Canada to pieces and then ripping across the nation to the Gulf and then polluting the Gulf Coast we turn around and export that oil. That is insanity.
Purchases are not the real problem. Many shooters use stolen wepons. But we should have mental health testing in schools and in the work places and a good treatment system to help those who need help. Most of America has a joke for a mental health system and the way we structure our economy assures that we will not have good mental health care. For example many convicts have severe mental issues. But how do we provide seriously skilled physicians who command huge salaries to treat convictcs?
Bad guys spot cams easily and disable them. Sonic location works rather well. But since most modern schools are not prone to fires I see no reason that each wing of the school can not be sealed off with the flip of a switch and good security doors on every room would leave the shooter with no one to shoot at and capture him as well.
Our traditions have been to have the path hammered out by applying intense pressure of all kinds to oppositions. It may be rude but there is a point to it all. For example a person might remark that the governor of New Jersey could be mistaken for a blimp. But the remark points to the fact that a man who can not manage his own body should not be trusted to manage a state and there is reality in that view point,
So a girl can dance nude in public but insists that she has a right to keep that public performance history a secret. She must be a blond to think like that. There is not one thing wrong with being a sex worker. She should be proud of what she did. And yes if she danced she was hooking.
I do understand that there are limits on when and why a prison can supply specialized diets. But the depression issue is much more serious. Obviously the prison systems are designed to create depression or worse. And that is flat out stupid. Many mental hospitals play the same game. People are given little or nothing to do that is fun or stress relieving. And much like many convicts many mental patients have nothing in life to look forward to as well. So the convicts become much harder to handle and much more prone to commit serious crimes upon release. After years of mental torture many inmates hate society so much that they are not only walking time bombs but they also seek revenge on all of society. The US prison system and jail systems can take a person with a minor problem and grow them into a monster. Small examples are obvious. A person on probabtion or parole will be required to tell a future employer that they are a criminal. Jobs are hard to get and revealing that you are a criminal makes employment next to impossible. Th ex inmate is not going to starve and rot. if he can't get work he will turn back to crime. Even child support creates many criminals. A judge assigns too much child support and a full time job will not leave a man with enough money to survive. If he doesn't pay he goes to jail. He will turn to crime. Now his exwife and child will get zero support. When he gets out of prison he can not apply for any bennefits in some states so having nothing and being unemployable his only chance is crime. The system is creating criminals and creating some serious hatred within the inmates. These issues would not exist if the system did not want them to exist. To some people a convict means money and lucrative supply contracts and therefore the system seeks to create criminals. Yes we are that corrupt.
We are what we eat is a lie. We are that we intake but do not poop.
But if we are indeed simply creatures computer generated in some sort of matrix then the chunks of code that create our reality could be inserted in the program at any time, or several times after being withdrawn several times. So a universe that exists in code would not have to have linear events and cause and effect that are locked to a clock. If God is efficient then what better way than to create the universe as an illusion with computer code at its base?
Well our prisons have plenty of crime inside the walls and maximum security and other measures have not stopped crime in prisons.
I have lived in Florida for 60 years and would not reccomend life in the Miami, Ft. lauderdale or Palm Beach area including Boca raton. The southeastern coast of Florida has been destroyed by growth and the deliberate attraction of excessive population. Also considerable racial strife as well as a vivid gap between the haves and the have nots has resulted in an area prone to crime and violent crime at that. There are areas in Florida that could be ideal for major businesses. Areas not too distant from Orlando that are still rural or uninhabited enable land purches at sane prices. Crime is much less of a problem in these areas and if you consult locals you can fine out about the effect of storms in the specific region. With intelligent designs and placements buildings and homes can be quite safe in almost any potential hurricane. Casually buying into just any old place in Florida is a huge mistake. For example if a person dreams about buying land in California knowledge is required or you might end up in a really nasty desert or a wooded area prone to frequent forest fires. You need to know and understand exactly what you are buying.
I'll wager that big foot is found before any nation allows free speech. How is it that people have any faith in the notion of rights when nonsense like spying on lawyers and journalists is tolerated?
OK, buck up folks. Grow a pair. Stop living like cowards. These days if Jackie Gleason balled up his fist and sain "To the moon Alice" it would be taken as a criminal offense and endless nonsense would have followed. Yes life is filled with danger. Italways has been. And we have less danger now than at any time in history. We no longer live if terror waiting for the next Viking raid or Apache war party. Getting a tooth pulled is so easy i can't believe it. Imagine getting a tooth pulled in 1850. We have it easy in so many ways that most folks have no clue as to how easy things are for us. But we still have cowards and people of low faith who think every casual remark is a deadly threat. Guns are not seen as a useful tool but viewed like a deadly viper that is likely to strike at any moment dispite the fact that very few people have ever sen a gun incident much less get involved in one. And get real folks. Your doctor knows long lists of diseases that can torture you beyond all understanding. By comparison a bullet or death by a knife or bomb is trivial and rather fast. If my forefathers coul survive crossing vast oceans in wooden boats and crossing a new continent I think I can do just fine and not be nervous about childish threats.
Obviously this law is poorly written. So the question becomes whether the government is required to apply the law the way they think it should be seen or the way it is actually written. This becomes critical in the instance of the congress approving Supreme Court judges. The law says that congress should advise and consent the president as to the wisdom of accepting the applicant. Nowhere does the law suggest that congress has ever had the power to reject the applicant but it has always been taken as if it did. In other words congress can recommend that the applicant be rejected but the president is really under no obligation to accept the advice given by congress. In essence as usual we don't really believe in truth, justice or law at all. Our justice system and laws are simply a formal dance during which the prejudices of the community are brought to bear on a defendant.