Or at least have the federal government power pushed back to the spirit of the constitution, defense, freetrade and bill or rights.
The spirit of the Constitution has nothing to do with free trade. Congress is deliberately given broad power to regulate trade. According to Madison, the Constitution was intended to take the power to regulate commerce away from the states and to grant Congress more power that the British Legislature ever had.
Democracy, like Communism, works best at small to medium sized populations and regions. 50 staes must become 50 nations.
The historical ignorance, it burns, it burns...
Yeah, let's go back to the days when states could decide that people with dark skin couldn't sit at the same table as people with light skin. Let's let women in shithole red states be subject to state legislatures that think the world portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale would be a mighty good idea. Let's zip on back to the corruption of the Gilded Age
We can rationally argue about the current balance of federal and state power, sure. There are many areas where the feds have overstepped their bounds. But taking away anything to balance state power? I'm sorry, but that's just a damned stupid idea. The idea that state governments are more friendly to liberty than the federal government can only be entertained by someone ignorant of historical and political reality.
There has never been a time when the U.S. came close to living up to its hype. It was founded on slavery and genocide and dedicated to the proposition that the purpose of government is to preserve privilege for the wealthy.
Some Jews say that it does. Yitzhak Shapira and Yitzchak Ginsburg, both Israeli rabbis, have argued that killing innocent non-Jews for the benefit of Jews is a-ok under Jewish religious law.
Nope! It turns out, Senator McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.
"After reviewing evidence from Venona and other sources, historian John Earl Haynes concluded that, of 159 people identified on lists used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence was substantial that nine had aided Soviet espionage efforts." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
Any moron can predict that one government has spies in the employ of a rival government. Here, I'll do it: "The United States has spies in the Chinese government!" There, in fifty years you can talk about how history proved me right.
9 out of 159 does not make a person "right". McCarthy led a witch-hunt and ruined lives.
"It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
And of course, being a Communist, or believing in or speaking about communism, is not and cannot be a crime in the United States. It may be a silly, naive, and dangerous thing to be -- but the same is true about being a capitalist.
How about it? First Amendment, coming later, trumps Article I Section 8. If a "copyright" law interferes with freedom of speech, it goes out the window.
But make no mistake, it is still the speech that is criminal here, since nothing else has happened yet.
Speech alone does not constitute assault. For "imminent lawless action" to be a factor, there must be preparations for that lawless action taking place. No content, by itself, can be criminalized; only content delivered in a time, manner, and circumstance that violates the rights of someone else.
The government has no legitimate power to prevent civilians from disclosing "classified" information.
Even those civilians that work for the government? Or are you saying that they should conscript anyone whom they need to have access to classified information for work purposes?
Really, do you think that conscription is the only way that the government can get people to join the military?
If the government needs certain jobs done by people over whom it has more control than it has over civilians, then it needs to entice people who can do those jobs into joining the military.
If your life is being threatened then you cannot exercise the right to life or security of person effectively.
Making a credible threat against someone's life isn't "hate speech". It's assault, a crime since the old days of common law.
When the state threatens someone over their speech -- in essence, points a gun at them and says "STFU or we throw you in a cage" -- that denies that individual's "security of person".
If the First Amendment, for example, was absolute, it would be protecting slander and libel, imminent threats, arbitrary disclosure of classified information etc - but it does not.
Slander and libel are civil torts, not criminal charges brought under any law made by Congress (or the states) to restrict the freedom of speech.
Assault is based not merely on the content of the message but the circumstances. If you say, "I'm gonna punch Mr. Slippery in the nose!" that's protected speech; if you say it while walking towards me with you fist raised, it's a different matter.
The government has no legitimate power to prevent civilians from disclosing "classified" information.
I just think it would make sense for them to be more tightly controlled, so that it's not meaningfully harder for law-abiding citizens to get them but it's much harder for the gang-bangers to get them.
There is no way to do this. Inanimate objects that can be easily made and that many people want, cannot be controlled.
What needs to be controlled are the gang-bangers. That includes both preventing people from turning to that lifestyle via investments in the socioeconomic infrastructure, and keeping people who commit acts of violence under proper supervision: prison (with genuine rehabilitation programs, not warehousing people), parole, probation, and psychiatric care.
Any resources put into attempts to "control" guns are wasted, and would be better spent on controlling and reforming violent people.
Not too bad for things that are mostly only used safely and non-criminally as toys right?
Guns are not "toys". American citizens use firearms for self-defense.
Estimates of defensive gun use frequency vary enormously, from about 50,000 (certainly an under-count, as that number is based on a survey of people who reported crimes to police; people who use a gun to scare away an attacker without shooting him often don't want the hassle of getting the cops involved) to over 2,000,000 (almost certainly an over-count) times a year. Even at that lowest figure, DGU's outnumber homicides using a gun more than 4 to 1.
Of homicides, the majority are gang-related. Taking guns away from law-abiding citizens does nothing to stop gang-bangers from shooting each other and innocent by-standers; it may (though the research is contradictory and the effects small) even make those law-abiding citizens significantly more likely to be crime victims.
"as the American people were getting fatter, so were America's laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice"
A simple hypothesis occurs to me: as the American people were getting fatter, American researchers turned more of their time and resources into investigating obesity. They started doing more animal research (of questionable ethics and usefulness, but that's another rant) into obesity, and so there were more obese lab animals.
A friend of mine is a teacher. Her school got a bunch of these keyboardless RT tablets, one for each student. She brought hers out to our writer's group last night with the intention of getting sued to it.
It wouldn't boot up, so her techie boyfriend started messing with it, He got it to boot to an error message of the "Press F1 to continue" variety...
...on a keyboardless tablet. He and I had a good laugh.
Defendants cannot commit perjury, they have the right to lie.
I'm afraid you are confused. While rarely charged, defendants in criminal cases swear or affirm to speak the truth when testifying and are subject to charges of perjury.
Anyone in security will go "duh" when you tell him of the mutual exclusivity of security and freedom.
Not if they have a clue. A lack of freedom *is* a lack of security -- it means you are not secure against attacks by your government. A lack of security *is* a lack of freedom -- it means you can't act freely because you're subject to attacks by someone.
Security implies freedom. Freedom implies security. There is no "mutual exclusivity".
For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's. It is often said that the only way for science to move forward is for the old scientists to die.
Or, after a few decades in one field, they could retire, go back to school, and do something different. What if Einstein left physics and went to med school?
Ad-supported is not free. Advertisers raise their prices to pay for that ad space, and buyers pay those higher prices. It ends up working rather like a tax.
"If you're pointing out your virtues to others, you have none to speak of."
Try that in an interview sometime.... If someones life is on the line, and you are more competent than the person or people trying to save them, then it would be not only bad, but possibly deadly, not to point out your virtues.
Yes, but there's a difference between "virtue", in the ethical sense, and "skill" or "knowledge".
I've actually been in the situation you describe. Yelling out, "I used to be a CPR instructor, she's a nurse, anyone better qualified? No? She's in charge!" may have helped save a life here by cutting through the "OMG whut happened?!?!" confusion of the moment. But that's different than "I am an exceptionally honest person, and she is very charitable!":-)
Just recently, they decided they had the power to mandate that every single US citizen purchase a specific product or be fined (Obamacare).
Under the Constitution, the feds can tax you, or not tax you, pretty much any way they like. Paying a tax if you don't have health insurance is no more a violation of the Constitution than paying a tax if you don't have a mortgage. The ACA's mandate is bad policy, but is entirely Constitutional.
Possibly. But is there any particular reason it has to be the same Gallifreyan?
Yes. The same reason every Superman comic is about the same Kryptonian: he's the main character of the story.
All the instances of regeneration we've seen preserve gender. Not just the Doctor -- the Master and K'anpo Rimpoche stay male, while Romana, River Song, and Jenny stay female.
Yes, Romana's regeneration doesn't fit 100% with how the other instances of regeneration occur. and yes, one transgender Time Lord/Lady, the Corsair, is mentioned in one episode, but given the gender-preserving quality of all the regenerations we see it doesn't seem credible that regeneration is the source of that person's transgender status.
and this is one of those rare times when I actually believe they really are trying to protect the children.
Stopping people from sharing photos of the abuse of children no more stops the abuse of children than stopping people from sharing photos of murder would stop murder.
The death penalty removes any motivation to cooperate in revealing the extent of the treason.
"Treason"? There is no treason in exposing the activities of the U.S. government to its citizens; if anything, the "treason" is in the acts of the military/intelligence/industrial complex.
Slashdot Mirror
The spirit of the Constitution has nothing to do with free trade. Congress is deliberately given broad power to regulate trade. According to Madison, the Constitution was intended to take the power to regulate commerce away from the states and to grant Congress more power that the British Legislature ever had.
The historical ignorance, it burns, it burns...
Yeah, let's go back to the days when states could decide that people with dark skin couldn't sit at the same table as people with light skin. Let's let women in shithole red states be subject to state legislatures that think the world portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale would be a mighty good idea. Let's zip on back to the corruption of the Gilded Age
We can rationally argue about the current balance of federal and state power, sure. There are many areas where the feds have overstepped their bounds. But taking away anything to balance state power? I'm sorry, but that's just a damned stupid idea. The idea that state governments are more friendly to liberty than the federal government can only be entertained by someone ignorant of historical and political reality.
Really? The U.S. was a great beacon on liberty in the 1980s, when Regan and his buddies were propping up death squads in Latin America, and selling weapons to Iran, and used the NSA to spy on Congress-critters who opposed their policies? When the War on (Some) Drugs was getting ramped up and the great boom of the prison-industrial complex took off?
There has never been a time when the U.S. came close to living up to its hype. It was founded on slavery and genocide and dedicated to the proposition that the purpose of government is to preserve privilege for the wealthy.
Some Jews say that it does. Yitzhak Shapira and Yitzchak Ginsburg, both Israeli rabbis, have argued that killing innocent non-Jews for the benefit of Jews is a-ok under Jewish religious law.
"After reviewing evidence from Venona and other sources, historian John Earl Haynes concluded that, of 159 people identified on lists used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence was substantial that nine had aided Soviet espionage efforts." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
Any moron can predict that one government has spies in the employ of a rival government. Here, I'll do it: "The United States has spies in the Chinese government!" There, in fifty years you can talk about how history proved me right.
9 out of 159 does not make a person "right". McCarthy led a witch-hunt and ruined lives.
"It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
And of course, being a Communist, or believing in or speaking about communism, is not and cannot be a crime in the United States. It may be a silly, naive, and dangerous thing to be -- but the same is true about being a capitalist.
Anyone who believes in "self documenting code" does not understand computer programming.
How about it? First Amendment, coming later, trumps Article I Section 8. If a "copyright" law interferes with freedom of speech, it goes out the window.
Speech alone does not constitute assault. For "imminent lawless action" to be a factor, there must be preparations for that lawless action taking place. No content, by itself, can be criminalized; only content delivered in a time, manner, and circumstance that violates the rights of someone else.
Really, do you think that conscription is the only way that the government can get people to join the military?
If the government needs certain jobs done by people over whom it has more control than it has over civilians, then it needs to entice people who can do those jobs into joining the military.
Making a credible threat against someone's life isn't "hate speech". It's assault, a crime since the old days of common law.
When the state threatens someone over their speech -- in essence, points a gun at them and says "STFU or we throw you in a cage" -- that denies that individual's "security of person".
Slander and libel are civil torts, not criminal charges brought under any law made by Congress (or the states) to restrict the freedom of speech.
Assault is based not merely on the content of the message but the circumstances. If you say, "I'm gonna punch Mr. Slippery in the nose!" that's protected speech; if you say it while walking towards me with you fist raised, it's a different matter.
The government has no legitimate power to prevent civilians from disclosing "classified" information.
There is no way to do this. Inanimate objects that can be easily made and that many people want, cannot be controlled.
What needs to be controlled are the gang-bangers. That includes both preventing people from turning to that lifestyle via investments in the socioeconomic infrastructure, and keeping people who commit acts of violence under proper supervision: prison (with genuine rehabilitation programs, not warehousing people), parole, probation, and psychiatric care.
Any resources put into attempts to "control" guns are wasted, and would be better spent on controlling and reforming violent people.
Guns are not "toys". American citizens use firearms for self-defense.
Estimates of defensive gun use frequency vary enormously, from about 50,000 (certainly an under-count, as that number is based on a survey of people who reported crimes to police; people who use a gun to scare away an attacker without shooting him often don't want the hassle of getting the cops involved) to over 2,000,000 (almost certainly an over-count) times a year. Even at that lowest figure, DGU's outnumber homicides using a gun more than 4 to 1.
Of homicides, the majority are gang-related. Taking guns away from law-abiding citizens does nothing to stop gang-bangers from shooting each other and innocent by-standers; it may (though the research is contradictory and the effects small) even make those law-abiding citizens significantly more likely to be crime victims.
A simple hypothesis occurs to me: as the American people were getting fatter, American researchers turned more of their time and resources into investigating obesity. They started doing more animal research (of questionable ethics and usefulness, but that's another rant) into obesity, and so there were more obese lab animals.
A friend of mine is a teacher. Her school got a bunch of these keyboardless RT tablets, one for each student. She brought hers out to our writer's group last night with the intention of getting sued to it.
It wouldn't boot up, so her techie boyfriend started messing with it, He got it to boot to an error message of the "Press F1 to continue" variety...
...on a keyboardless tablet. He and I had a good laugh.
I'm afraid you are confused. While rarely charged, defendants in criminal cases swear or affirm to speak the truth when testifying and are subject to charges of perjury.
Not if they have a clue. A lack of freedom *is* a lack of security -- it means you are not secure against attacks by your government. A lack of security *is* a lack of freedom -- it means you can't act freely because you're subject to attacks by someone.
Security implies freedom. Freedom implies security. There is no "mutual exclusivity".
Or, after a few decades in one field, they could retire, go back to school, and do something different. What if Einstein left physics and went to med school?
Happened to see this just yesterday: http://potomac.patch.com/groups/transportation-and-transit/p/a-brief-history-of-speed-camera-vandalism-in-maryland_41236013
Or finds them useful and doesn't give a toss whether it meets with your approval.
Ad-supported is not free. Advertisers raise their prices to pay for that ad space, and buyers pay those higher prices. It ends up working rather like a tax.
Yes, but there's a difference between "virtue", in the ethical sense, and "skill" or "knowledge".
I've actually been in the situation you describe. Yelling out, "I used to be a CPR instructor, she's a nurse, anyone better qualified? No? She's in charge!" may have helped save a life here by cutting through the "OMG whut happened?!?!" confusion of the moment. But that's different than "I am an exceptionally honest person, and she is very charitable!" :-)
True. That goes back to at least 1798.
Under the Constitution, the feds can tax you, or not tax you, pretty much any way they like. Paying a tax if you don't have health insurance is no more a violation of the Constitution than paying a tax if you don't have a mortgage. The ACA's mandate is bad policy, but is entirely Constitutional.
We became a developed nation by robbing (via colonialism, and even outright slavery, theft of human beings) those undeveloped nations.
Yes. The same reason every Superman comic is about the same Kryptonian: he's the main character of the story.
All the instances of regeneration we've seen preserve gender. Not just the Doctor -- the Master and K'anpo Rimpoche stay male, while Romana, River Song, and Jenny stay female.
Yes, Romana's regeneration doesn't fit 100% with how the other instances of regeneration occur. and yes, one transgender Time Lord /Lady, the Corsair, is mentioned in one episode, but given the gender-preserving quality of all the regenerations we see it doesn't seem credible that regeneration is the source of that person's transgender status.
Stopping people from sharing photos of the abuse of children no more stops the abuse of children than stopping people from sharing photos of murder would stop murder.
"Treason"? There is no treason in exposing the activities of the U.S. government to its citizens; if anything, the "treason" is in the acts of the military/intelligence/industrial complex.