Frankly, I wouldn't mind if the NSA put a microphone up my butt if the alternative was having my daughter murdered by the bastards who murdered many other peoples' kids on 9-11.
It's your decision if you want a microphone up your butt, but it isn't your decision to go demanding that microphones be stuck up other people's butts. Would you also be prepared to pay for the microphone too? Remember that a factor in "9-11" was over reliance on high tech mass communication interception.
And if you are real human being, living in the real world, you wouldn't either.
In the real world idea that letting the government spy on you will somehow protect you from evildoers dosn't actually work. The reason it dosn't work is that spys are in it for their self interest, whereas something like a terrorist attack anything but a threat to their interests, they will just turn around and say "if we have more resources and powers we'll do better next time".
Certainly the government should try to prevent them, to the extent that its methods of prevention are in accordance with and furtherance of the principles of liberty. If they aren't, what's the point? We'd be trading one tyrant for another.
Between "home grown Stasi" and "foreign terrorists" the former tends to be a lot more of a threat than the latter. Actually the worst possible senario is that you get both with the same paymaster.
Forcing us to choose between terrorism and liberty is a false dilemma anyhow. Terrorism can be fought without compromising essential liberties.
It's also unclear that restricting civil liberties actually deters terrorism in the first place.
Under fascism, the people exist to serve the government, which represents a personified state.
There are also several other indicators of fascist states...
In promoting the power and survival of the state, the government has unlimited authority to oppress the people, who have no rights. Americans ought to guard against powers both foreign and domestic who seek to impose such a system on us.
Probably best to start with those who claim to be Americans, but support another country.
It does amaze me how quickly Americans have concluded that the terrorist threat is minor.
Compared with many other things the "terrorist threat" is minor. The terrorist threat in the US is minor compared with the terrorist threat in other parts of the world. (Including that from terrorists backed by the US Government.)
Al Qaeda is very smart to launch their attacks elsewhere now and wait until they have something really nasty, like a nuke, before they attack us again.
Al Qaeda are not the USSR, they are not even ETA or the IRA. At best "Al Qaeda" is a collective name for various groups at worst it's part of a conspiracy theory.
They saw how both Democrat and Republican administrations were too weak to respond to their overseas atrocities to our citizens (Carter - Iranian embassy takeover, Reagan -Marine barracks bombing, Clinto - first WTC attack, Mogadishu, USS Cole).
You examples don't really link to "Al Qaeda" at all. Most of them are attacks against US military forces, one took place in the US and one involves a popular revolution overthrowing a US backed tyrant. Maybe you should first consider the number of atrocities perpetrated by the US first. The people involved in your list could claim, with some justification, that they acted in relatiation.
So if I were a terrorist, I would use encryption and draw attention to my traffic, leading to further analysis.
If you were a terrorist with any sense you'd do whatever was appropriate to make your traffic not stand out.
And if I were an ordinary citizen, I would not normally use encryption (except perhaps for commercial secrets which I don't want *foreign* agencies grabbing) because I don't want to make the legitimate job of tracking terrorists harder.
Sometimes using encryption is probably about the worst thing you can do, since you've attached a piece of metadata saying "this is stuff I want kept secret".
Unlike many, simply do not fear the NSA scanning my traffic for keywords, maybe looking a bit harder on a call or two, and then ignoring me because I'm not a threat.
What makes you so sure that the people listening will not think you are a threat? What makes you think that they are are not a threat to you? Do you even know who they are?
I do, on the other hand, fear international modern terrorism, because their attacks can kill a whole lot of people, and that is very, very bad.
Governments also kill a lot of people, even when you can separate them from "terrorists", which certainly isn't always the case.
Or feed you some information about something nefarious and see if you use encryption to relay it to someone.
This is actually also a cryptoanalysis technique.The Venona project ( http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm ) worked because the Soviet organization for producing one time pads duplicated some of them. Oops! So much for high tech.
Not a tech problem so much as a problem with humans misusing the tech.
The only problem with synchronous algorithms is key exchange. Both parties need to have the same key, and therefore need to have a way to communicate unintercepted.
This is where asynchronous algorithms come into play. An asynchronous algorithm has two seperate keys for the encrypted data: The public key, and the private key. The public key can only be usd o encrypt data, and the private key can only be used to decrypt it. So: Alice gives Bob her publi key. Bob uses the public key to encrypt his AES-256 key, and ten send this back to Alice. Alice then decrypts this using her private key, and then alice and bob can have a secre VOIP conversation.
Note that Bob does not need to use the same AES-256 key one could be randomly generated by his phone when he calls Alice and deleted from the memory of both phones when the call ends. If Bob's phone were to have a single AES-256 key stored in it would be possible for anyone who could get their hands on Bob's phone to decrypt all his calls. Using a transient key means that that an evesdropper has to brute force every call. To make things more difficult for evesdroppers there's nothing to stop the phones negotiating multiple keys and changing key every so often.
This is what VOIP already does -- and is it any wonder that commercial server-mediated VOIP services are being pushed in a situation where FOSS/P2P could do? FOSS/P2P VOIP could be easily disguised as music sharing...oops! That's under attack, too. I wonder why. Is it really just to protect the poor singer/songwriter (and the profits of RIAA members)? Or is it to stigmatize and have an excuse to monitor your most likely covert channel?
It's also easier to tap a system which which has some central "hub" than one which is entirely peer-peer. It's also easier to hide backdoors in proprietary software/devices.
Neither is there any indication that the phone switching equipment was "Made in USA" as you stated. There are plenty of other equipment manufacturers (Nokia, Siemens, etc).
Unless Ericsson manufactures non-NANP equiptment in the USA it almost certainly wasn't. Even if the hardware was made in the US it would be running the non-NANP software (all of the major manufactures have a special NANP version of software).
In fact, Greece would have been stupid to buy US equipment since we are a generation behind the rest of the world in phone technology.
More to the point US hardware would be rather incompatable in both hardware and software.
You don't tap foreign officials for things to be "admissible in court" - you tap them so that you get the information of what their plans are.
Which is why it's called "spying". Assuming you are a goverment about the only thing you can do to "foreign officials" is to boot them out of/stop them entering your country anyway.
The only thing the government provides for trade and capitalism is fiat money, and that isn't really a benefit.
The things government can provide which are of potential benefit are standard weights & measures and enforcement of contracts. The former is explicitally in the US Constitution as a government function. Anyway fiat money is in no way essential to government anyway.
It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems.
I have heard this described this as the "line" being more of a circle, hence going very far left or very far right winds up in the same place.
I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between the religions but between the tolerant and the intolerant in the same religion. The fundies, of each group, sounded just the same "blah blah blah [insert religion here] blah blah".
Sometimes the "insert religion here" bit is not even that obvious.
People who have a locked down mentality are I suspect attracted to extremes such as fundamentalism whether it is religion or politics.
A common behaviour appears to be that of angry mobs, be they burning embassies in Syria, "brownshirts", harassing alleged child abusers (and the occasional doctor), etc.
Organized crime? I don't think so. Why would the organized crime care about what greek human right activists and anarchists talk about just before and during the 2006 Olympic Games in Athens?
These "targets" tend to more imply government. Leaving the question of "which one". Of course it could be that organised crime put the taps in on behalf of a government...
People have been stepping on eachother's toes for centuries. The Civil Rights movement during the 1960s rubbed alot of people the wrong way, but it went through just the same. Where would we be today if Martin Luther King jr. had said, "Well, I'd like equal rights, but I don't want to piss off Jim Crowe."? King pissed off Jim Crowe, and made the world a better place. What if Gandhi had said, "Well I'd like independence for India, but I don't want to piss off the British Empire."? Gandhi pissed of the Brits, and now India is an independent nation.
In order to make any political change there WILL be toe treading and pissings off. People will defend the status quo for irrational and rational reasons. It may even not be the people you expect who cause most opposition.
Perhaps acting against your built-in sexuality is really the destructive lifestyle.
A person's "built-in sexuality" is likely to be an individual variable.
Then what if we all acted against our own sexuality. We would all be extremely unhappy, and I don't know, commit mutual suicide probably, and THIS would be very destructive for the world.
To an extent we (probably) already have this situation through the idea that everyone should be hetero-monogamous. Allowing an additional option of "homo-monogamy" probably isn't going to help matters much. Because it appears that only a minority of people have a built-in sexuality strongy biased towards monogamy.
I have to concede the point that if we are to infer God's intention from his design, then it seems reasonable to conclude that he wants heterosexuality. However, this is not Biblical, and research may still very well show that homosexuality is inherently biological as well. I'm not an expert on this, though, so I can't argue for it, and frankly even if there is no biological basis for homosexuality,
How could you rationaly separate "God's design" from "bilogical basis". If the universe is the creation of God then how can any aspect of it be "against" God's design?
As I understand it, the explicit law against lying (or is it laying, I'm never quite sure...) with another man is a matter of ritual, just like, say, not eating pork.
Avoiding eating pork may well have been perfectly rational in Bronze age "Arabia".
After Jesus, it is probably no longer relevant.
There is something rather ironic about "Christians" quoting the Torah (out of context) whilst failing to even mention Jesus.
Actually "nature" would tend to imply that homosexuality is perfectly natural. The "un-natural" part of "gay marriage" is actually the marriage bit, since this is something which no other creature on the planet does.
The bible is VERY clear about a man lying with a man, no if and or buts about it.
Presumably you mean Leviticus 18:22. Nothing makes this rule any more important than the large number of rules enumerated in the Torah. Unless you are an Orthodox Jew you probably break several of these a day anyway.
I guess you missed the part where the homosexuals tried to molest the angels and had an entire city was destroyed due to their sinful ways.
Is the issue with the Angels homosexuality or rape? Note that Lot is apparently perfectly ok with the mob raping his (virgin) daughters and a few paragraphs further on Lot's daughters drug and rape their father.
There a psychology behind it. The Christian way is to destroy or outlaw that which they find offensive. It's a pretty potent philosophy: tie some vague Biblical phrase to your cause, instill moral outrage in your followers on Sundays and let the most violent and shackle-minded loose on those people or institutions who make them uncomfortable, imbued with complete moral immunity as they believe they are acting on the belief God wants them to do it.
The thing to remember is that this isn't "Christian", it's rather more general than that...
From the census bureau definition page:
The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).
Do they also exclude wealth transfers such as alimony and "child support" (a complete misnoner, since in virtually all cases this is paid to adults without even the most trivial attempt at auditing), which whilst they may or may not alter the number of "poor" are very likely to alter the demographics of the poor.
So if one of the Google founders takes his $1 salary and just sells a billion dollars in stock at the end of the year(capital gains) and somehow manages to otherwise keep his bank account interest income under the poverty line, he also would qualify for being "under the poverty line" that year.
The "somehow" most likely relys on having enough money to pay a good accountant. i.e. one which will allow the avoidance of tax exceding their fee.
But those are the kinds of anomolies you get when your census definitions are designed to try to make things look worse than they are.
Probably also to make things look certain ways for primarily political reasons, which can be more complex than simply "worst".
Annual income doesn't equal wealth level or living standards. At best it's a very poor correlation in the US, with students and especially the retired being probably the most glaringly obvious exceptions.
The other obvious exception is marriage where the two people have very different income levels. (Including marriages which have ostensivly ended, but financial relationships continue/are mandated by the state.)
What I should have said was that in this country Licenses were an outgrowth of interracial marriage.
It would be better to state which country, rather than using a pronoun. Especially when refering to a historical document in a country which has changed its borders between then and the present.
Indeed, and in every US state there are ministers, priests, rabbis and/or imams who are willing to perform same-sex marriages. If their religious sect doesn't permit it, they do it anyway; they just don't tell their superiors.
Assuming they recognise a (human) superior in the first place. Just because Roman Catholics have a complex hierarchical system amongst their priesthood does not mean that all Abraham derived monotheistic groups do.
This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.
Another possibility is that following the money leads somewhere which it would be politically incorrect to accuse.
I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone calls.
As well as being able to place their own taps (on any line) organised criminals are also likely to want to find out which taps are in place. It would probably be a safe assumption that these people have at least the same abilities as official "snoops".
It's time for end to end encryption of all communications. We should get an SSL session from one handset to the other.
That would upset governments who want to be able to tap people's phone calls. The problem is that as soon as you create a communication system which allows for interception by any group of people it becomes insecure. Effectivly you get domestic intelligence, foreign intelligence, telco suppliers, telco employees, organised crime as a package deal when it comes to who can listen to telephone calls.
If your partner has an accident and the decision needs to be made if machines shall be turned off, it should be yours, not his parents' who might not have talked to him in 20 years.
A really radical idea would be to allow people to make a binding record of which person (or people) they give consent to make such as decision. Which need not be a relative or someone they are sleeping with.
Marriage takes care of all this in a simple package, but so can other contracts.
If there are alternatives (usable by anyone) then there fairest thing to do would be to remove the special legal status attached to marriage, since married people can just as well use those alternatives.
Marriage as conceived in the modern world is fundamentally about mutual aid. This is a new, radical idea, at most a few hundred years old and probably a good deal less than that. There have been at various times and places in history a huge range of marriage arrangements, from arranged marriages to plural marriages to things that to a modern eye look far more like concubinage than marriage.
This passage is misleading, since it implies that there is only one form of marriage currently in operation. One of this "historical" examples that of arranged marriage is still commonplace, including in North America and Europe.
It's not only jumping to a conclusion, it's a complete fallacy. People have become so conditioned to using this "two parents of opposite sex" argument they utterly fail to see reality. Reality is that kids are often raised in environments with either of the "opposite" gender missing. Interestingly (and thankfully), a child's family is not the only source of role models - I'd opine that they receive the majority of their ques from outside the family anyway.
If the real concern were lack of "balance" in role models you'd expect a lot of fuss to be made about men being "under-represented" in teaching and child minding.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if the NSA put a microphone up my butt if the alternative was having my daughter murdered by the bastards who murdered many other peoples' kids on 9-11.
It's your decision if you want a microphone up your butt, but it isn't your decision to go demanding that microphones be stuck up other people's butts. Would you also be prepared to pay for the microphone too? Remember that a factor in "9-11" was over reliance on high tech mass communication interception.
And if you are real human being, living in the real world, you wouldn't either.
In the real world idea that letting the government spy on you will somehow protect you from evildoers dosn't actually work. The reason it dosn't work is that spys are in it for their self interest, whereas something like a terrorist attack anything but a threat to their interests, they will just turn around and say "if we have more resources and powers we'll do better next time".
Certainly the government should try to prevent them, to the extent that its methods of prevention are in accordance with and furtherance of the principles of liberty. If they aren't, what's the point? We'd be trading one tyrant for another.
Between "home grown Stasi" and "foreign terrorists" the former tends to be a lot more of a threat than the latter. Actually the worst possible senario is that you get both with the same paymaster.
Forcing us to choose between terrorism and liberty is a false dilemma anyhow. Terrorism can be fought without compromising essential liberties.
It's also unclear that restricting civil liberties actually deters terrorism in the first place.
Under fascism, the people exist to serve the government, which represents a personified state.
There are also several other indicators of fascist states...
In promoting the power and survival of the state, the government has unlimited authority to oppress the people, who have no rights. Americans ought to guard against powers both foreign and domestic who seek to impose such a system on us.
Probably best to start with those who claim to be Americans, but support another country.
It does amaze me how quickly Americans have concluded that the terrorist threat is minor.
Compared with many other things the "terrorist threat" is minor. The terrorist threat in the US is minor compared with the terrorist threat in other parts of the world. (Including that from terrorists backed by the US Government.)
Al Qaeda is very smart to launch their attacks elsewhere now and wait until they have something really nasty, like a nuke, before they attack us again.
Al Qaeda are not the USSR, they are not even ETA or the IRA. At best "Al Qaeda" is a collective name for various groups at worst it's part of a conspiracy theory.
They saw how both Democrat and Republican administrations were too weak to respond to their overseas atrocities to our citizens (Carter - Iranian embassy takeover, Reagan -Marine barracks bombing, Clinto - first WTC attack, Mogadishu, USS Cole).
You examples don't really link to "Al Qaeda" at all. Most of them are attacks against US military forces, one took place in the US and one involves a popular revolution overthrowing a US backed tyrant.
Maybe you should first consider the number of atrocities perpetrated by the US first. The people involved in your list could claim, with some justification, that they acted in relatiation.
So if I were a terrorist, I would use encryption and draw attention to my traffic, leading to further analysis.
If you were a terrorist with any sense you'd do whatever was appropriate to make your traffic not stand out.
And if I were an ordinary citizen, I would not normally use encryption (except perhaps for commercial secrets which I don't want *foreign* agencies grabbing) because I don't want to make the legitimate job of tracking terrorists harder.
Sometimes using encryption is probably about the worst thing you can do, since you've attached a piece of metadata saying "this is stuff I want kept secret".
Unlike many, simply do not fear the NSA scanning my traffic for keywords, maybe looking a bit harder on a call or two, and then ignoring me because I'm not a threat.
What makes you so sure that the people listening will not think you are a threat? What makes you think that they are are not a threat to you? Do you even know who they are?
I do, on the other hand, fear international modern terrorism, because their attacks can kill a whole lot of people, and that is very, very bad.
Governments also kill a lot of people, even when you can separate them from "terrorists", which certainly isn't always the case.
Or feed you some information about something nefarious and see if you use encryption to relay it to someone.
This is actually also a cryptoanalysis technique.The Venona project ( http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm ) worked because the Soviet organization for producing one time pads duplicated some of them. Oops!
So much for high tech.
Not a tech problem so much as a problem with humans misusing the tech.
The only problem with synchronous algorithms is key exchange. Both parties need to have the same key, and therefore need to have a way to communicate unintercepted.
This is where asynchronous algorithms come into play. An asynchronous algorithm has two seperate keys for the encrypted data: The public key, and the private key. The public key can only be usd o encrypt data, and the private key can only be used to decrypt it. So: Alice gives Bob her publi key. Bob uses the public key to encrypt his AES-256 key, and ten send this back to Alice. Alice then decrypts this using her private key, and then alice and bob can have a secre VOIP conversation.
Note that Bob does not need to use the same AES-256 key one could be randomly generated by his phone when he calls Alice and deleted from the memory of both phones when the call ends. If Bob's phone were to have a single AES-256 key stored in it would be possible for anyone who could get their hands on Bob's phone to decrypt all his calls. Using a transient key means that that an evesdropper has to brute force every call.
To make things more difficult for evesdroppers there's nothing to stop the phones negotiating multiple keys and changing key every so often.
This is what VOIP already does -- and is it any wonder that commercial server-mediated VOIP services are being pushed in a situation where FOSS/P2P could do? FOSS/P2P VOIP could be easily disguised as music sharing...oops! That's under attack, too. I wonder why. Is it really just to protect the poor singer/songwriter (and the profits of RIAA members)? Or is it to stigmatize and have an excuse to monitor your most likely covert channel?
It's also easier to tap a system which which has some central "hub" than one which is entirely peer-peer. It's also easier to hide backdoors in proprietary software/devices.
Neither is there any indication that the phone switching equipment was "Made in USA" as you stated. There are plenty of other equipment manufacturers (Nokia, Siemens, etc).
Unless Ericsson manufactures non-NANP equiptment in the USA it almost certainly wasn't. Even if the hardware was made in the US it would be running the non-NANP software (all of the major manufactures have a special NANP version of software).
In fact, Greece would have been stupid to buy US equipment since we are a generation behind the rest of the world in phone technology.
More to the point US hardware would be rather incompatable in both hardware and software.
I'm sure the US embassy already has recording devices on all the phones; it's hard for me to believe US spies would tap the US embassy.
Maybe the existing recordings wern't going to the "right" spys. There's also the issue of CYA, i.e. bug yourself to avoid being suspected.
You don't tap foreign officials for things to be "admissible in court" - you tap them so that you get the information of what their plans are.
Which is why it's called "spying". Assuming you are a goverment about the only thing you can do to "foreign officials" is to boot them out of/stop them entering your country anyway.
The only thing the government provides for trade and capitalism is fiat money, and that isn't really a benefit.
The things government can provide which are of potential benefit are standard weights & measures and enforcement of contracts.
The former is explicitally in the US Constitution as a government function. Anyway fiat money is in no way essential to government anyway.
It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship ... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems.
I have heard this described this as the "line" being more of a circle, hence going very far left or very far right winds up in the same place.
I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between the religions but between the tolerant and the intolerant in the same religion. The fundies, of each group, sounded just the same "blah blah blah [insert religion here] blah blah".
Sometimes the "insert religion here" bit is not even that obvious.
People who have a locked down mentality are I suspect attracted to extremes such as fundamentalism whether it is religion or politics.
A common behaviour appears to be that of angry mobs, be they burning embassies in Syria, "brownshirts", harassing alleged child abusers (and the occasional doctor), etc.
Organized crime? I don't think so. Why would the organized crime care about what greek human right activists and anarchists talk about just before and during the 2006 Olympic Games in Athens?
These "targets" tend to more imply government. Leaving the question of "which one". Of course it could be that organised crime put the taps in on behalf of a government...
People have been stepping on eachother's toes for centuries. The Civil Rights movement during the 1960s rubbed alot of people the wrong way, but it went through just the same. Where would we be today if Martin Luther King jr. had said, "Well, I'd like equal rights, but I don't want to piss off Jim Crowe."? King pissed off Jim Crowe, and made the world a better place. What if Gandhi had said, "Well I'd like independence for India, but I don't want to piss off the British Empire."? Gandhi pissed of the Brits, and now India is an independent nation.
In order to make any political change there WILL be toe treading and pissings off. People will defend the status quo for irrational and rational reasons. It may even not be the people you expect who cause most opposition.
Perhaps acting against your built-in sexuality is really the destructive lifestyle.
A person's "built-in sexuality" is likely to be an individual variable.
Then what if we all acted against our own sexuality. We would all be extremely unhappy, and I don't know, commit mutual suicide probably, and THIS would be very destructive for the world.
To an extent we (probably) already have this situation through the idea that everyone should be hetero-monogamous. Allowing an additional option of "homo-monogamy" probably isn't going to help matters much. Because it appears that only a minority of people have a built-in sexuality strongy biased towards monogamy.
I have to concede the point that if we are to infer God's intention from his design, then it seems reasonable to conclude that he wants heterosexuality. However, this is not Biblical, and research may still very well show that homosexuality is inherently biological as well. I'm not an expert on this, though, so I can't argue for it, and frankly even if there is no biological basis for homosexuality,
How could you rationaly separate "God's design" from "bilogical basis". If the universe is the creation of God then how can any aspect of it be "against" God's design?
As I understand it, the explicit law against lying (or is it laying, I'm never quite sure...) with another man is a matter of ritual, just like, say, not eating pork.
Avoiding eating pork may well have been perfectly rational in Bronze age "Arabia".
After Jesus, it is probably no longer relevant.
There is something rather ironic about "Christians" quoting the Torah (out of context) whilst failing to even mention Jesus.
Homosexuality is a perversion of nature.
Actually "nature" would tend to imply that homosexuality is perfectly natural. The "un-natural" part of "gay marriage" is actually the marriage bit, since this is something which no other creature on the planet does.
The bible is VERY clear about a man lying with a man, no if and or buts about it.
Presumably you mean Leviticus 18:22. Nothing makes this rule any more important than the large number of rules enumerated in the Torah. Unless you are an Orthodox Jew you probably break several of these a day anyway.
I guess you missed the part where the homosexuals tried to molest the angels and had an entire city was destroyed due to their sinful ways.
Is the issue with the Angels homosexuality or rape?
Note that Lot is apparently perfectly ok with the mob raping his (virgin) daughters and a few paragraphs further on Lot's daughters drug and rape their father.
There a psychology behind it. The Christian way is to destroy or outlaw that which they find offensive. It's a pretty potent philosophy: tie some vague Biblical phrase to your cause, instill moral outrage in your followers on Sundays and let the most violent and shackle-minded loose on those people or institutions who make them uncomfortable, imbued with complete moral immunity as they believe they are acting on the belief God wants them to do it.
The thing to remember is that this isn't "Christian", it's rather more general than that...
From the census bureau definition page:
The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).
Do they also exclude wealth transfers such as alimony and "child support" (a complete misnoner, since in virtually all cases this is paid to adults without even the most trivial attempt at auditing), which whilst they may or may not alter the number of "poor" are very likely to alter the demographics of the poor.
So if one of the Google founders takes his $1 salary and just sells a billion dollars in stock at the end of the year(capital gains) and somehow manages to otherwise keep his bank account interest income under the poverty line, he also would qualify for being "under the poverty line" that year.
The "somehow" most likely relys on having enough money to pay a good accountant. i.e. one which will allow the avoidance of tax exceding their fee.
But those are the kinds of anomolies you get when your census definitions are designed to try to make things look worse than they are.
Probably also to make things look certain ways for primarily political reasons, which can be more complex than simply "worst".
Annual income doesn't equal wealth level or living standards. At best it's a very poor correlation in the US, with students and especially the retired being probably the most glaringly obvious exceptions.
The other obvious exception is marriage where the two people have very different income levels. (Including marriages which have ostensivly ended, but financial relationships continue/are mandated by the state.)
What I should have said was that in this country Licenses were an outgrowth of interracial marriage.
It would be better to state which country, rather than using a pronoun. Especially when refering to a historical document in a country which has changed its borders between then and the present.
Indeed, and in every US state there are ministers, priests, rabbis and/or imams who are willing to perform same-sex marriages. If their religious sect doesn't permit it, they do it anyway; they just don't tell their superiors.
Assuming they recognise a (human) superior in the first place. Just because Roman Catholics have a complex hierarchical system amongst their priesthood does not mean that all Abraham derived monotheistic groups do.
This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.
Another possibility is that following the money leads somewhere which it would be politically incorrect to accuse.
I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone calls.
As well as being able to place their own taps (on any line) organised criminals are also likely to want to find out which taps are in place.
It would probably be a safe assumption that these people have at least the same abilities as official "snoops".
It's time for end to end encryption of all communications. We should get an SSL session from one handset to the other.
That would upset governments who want to be able to tap people's phone calls. The problem is that as soon as you create a communication system which allows for interception by any group of people it becomes insecure. Effectivly you get domestic intelligence, foreign intelligence, telco suppliers, telco employees, organised crime as a package deal when it comes to who can listen to telephone calls.
If your partner has an accident and the decision needs to be made if machines shall be turned off, it should be yours, not his parents' who might not have talked to him in 20 years.
A really radical idea would be to allow people to make a binding record of which person (or people) they give consent to make such as decision. Which need not be a relative or someone they are sleeping with.
Marriage takes care of all this in a simple package, but so can other contracts.
If there are alternatives (usable by anyone) then there fairest thing to do would be to remove the special legal status attached to marriage, since married people can just as well use those alternatives.
Marriage as conceived in the modern world is fundamentally about mutual aid. This is a new, radical idea, at most a few hundred years old and probably a good deal less than that. There have been at various times and places in history a huge range of marriage arrangements, from arranged marriages to plural marriages to things that to a modern eye look far more like concubinage than marriage.
This passage is misleading, since it implies that there is only one form of marriage currently in operation. One of this "historical" examples that of arranged marriage is still commonplace, including in North America and Europe.
It's not only jumping to a conclusion, it's a complete fallacy. People have become so conditioned to using this "two parents of opposite sex" argument they utterly fail to see reality. Reality is that kids are often raised in environments with either of the "opposite" gender missing. Interestingly (and thankfully), a child's family is not the only source of role models - I'd opine that they receive the majority of their ques from outside the family anyway.
If the real concern were lack of "balance" in role models you'd expect a lot of fuss to be made about men being "under-represented" in teaching and child minding.