I couldn't agree with you more. Those of us who dislike living as slaves in a police state working for our government masters often find it tedious to argue with people like you who only know ad hominem arguments and simply do not have the capacity to stick to logic. You cannot think philosophically or understand ideas.
Try some reasoned arguments next time instead of ad hominem attacks. Or we could start talking about how you see the government as your daddy. I don't owe the government a goddamn thing. I am not a slave and they do not own me. If they want to bill me for services rendered that's fine, but I should have the choice as to whether or not I wish to use those services.
Also, what is often ignored in these 'discussions' is price. If taxes are just payments for services rendered then the question becomes whether the prices are reasonable or not. Private enterprise would go out of business if they charge prices that people cannot afford to pay. The government won't because they are more like a criminal enterprise then a business. The 'services' they offer are like the services the mafia offers you when offering you 'protection' against...unfortunate accidents. Thugs with guns who demand money for services that you never asked for are nothing new and nothing special and no different from any thief who sticks a gun to your head and demands your wallet. Because they title themselves, The Government doesn't change the dynamics of what is actually going on.
The only government services I actually need and use are the roads and their maintenance and trash pickup. Both could easily by done privately, but either way I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for said services. Ideally such payments would be based on use as in toll roads and price per unit of trash picked up and perhaps the distance from your house to the nearest landfill. That's the way a civilized society would work. Not by threatening to put people in cages if they don't pay you. If services are truly essential there is no need to force people to do anything. They will voluntarily pay for such essential services.
Time to move to Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, or Oregon. Alaska and New Hampshire also have no state income tax, but Alaska is isolated and has a cold climate until global warming makes it into a paradise sometime in the 3rd millenium and New Hampshire is only free when it comes to taxes. They have routine suspicionless roadblocks, stop and identify laws and other nasty police state stuff. Delaware can be ruled out immediately.
So that just leaves Montana vs Oregon. Unfortunately both have state income taxes. Oregon's income taxes are currently 9% if you make betwen 7750 and 125,000 which should cover pretty much everyone here. Montana has a much more incremental sliding scale at the low end. Only 1% if you manage to make less than 2,600 per year and still survive. 5% if you make between 9,400 and 12,100 as I do. 6.9% if you make more than 15,600 as I'm sure nearly all of you do.
So I guess Montana would win on taxes alone, but Montana also has suspicionless roadblocks which they call 'safety checks' or something like that because sobriety checkpoints are actually illegal there. Montana also shares a border with Canada so the northern half of the state is a constitution free zone from the POV of the CBP and is probably plagued with overzealous jackbooted thugs known as the border patrol who will be only too happy to interrogate you for half an hour every time you drive by even during the day and if you annoy them or 'stand up for your rights' you will probably end up in jail on contempt of cop charges. Maybe even after being beaten or killed. Attorney fees will easily trump sales tax for most of us and even if you make or spend enough that it doesn't take it from me that being locked in a cage is not much fun. Montana also has stop and identify laws. Oregon doesn't. So I think Oregon wins despite the (for most people) slightly higher income taxes.
As far as the 5 million dollar theft scenario the owner could probably get it back from the casino once it was shown to be stolen money. I don't think you are allowed to profit from stolen money. But obviously that misses your point. Maybe the thief hid the money somewhere, maybe buried it in some remote location. In that case I still wouldn't see the point of throwing the guy in jail. I think garnishing his wages so for the rest of his life he has to live at some minimum poverty level no matter how much money he makes in the future should be a decent deterrent. Or if society truly feels that putting the guy in a cage for a while will stop him from stealing in the future (a highly questionable assumption) then put the guy in jail, but make it a reasonable amount of time. For a nonviolent crime that should certainly be no more than a year.
It's nice to say "an eye for an eye", but what do you do if a blind man pokes your eyes out?
I never said "an eye for an eye". I talked of reasonable and fair punishments. Punishments appropriate to the crime. I believe prison should be mostly reserved for violent people. The way it is now the jails are filled with completely non-violent people. Well, non-violent until they've been through the US prison system at least.
I think my point was, calling something "hacking" doesn't mean it is just a minor inconvenience. If "hacking" a computer system is a minor inconvenience, then it is hard to claim that access to computer systems should be a basic human right.
It's irrelevant what it's called, how you label it. In this case it was nothing more than a minor inconvenience that Swartz caused. Nevertheless even when unauthorized computer access causes a major inconvenience I still don't believe it deserves any jail time. It's simply not an appropriate punishment. At worst it could be compared to trespassing or breaking and entering. Under no circumstances should unauthorized computer access have any greater punishment than physically breaking into someone's home. Not ever. That is clearly a much greater violation than accessing an electronic device.
A computer is not an extension of a person. It is merely an electronic device, like any other electronic device. If you are sitting next to someone in a class and they reach over and hit the clear button on your calculator or if you are listening to a radio and someone changes the station you wouldn't advocate life in prison or anything even remotely close to it. Well maybe you would, but that certainly wouldn't seem justified to me.
As for computer "access" being a right, that is just silly. There is no such thing as a right that someone else must provide for you. Human rights are negatives not positives. They are limits on what other people can do to you. When someone says something like that I immediately know that they don't believe in human rights. To posit positive rights is to negate negative ones, but it's the negative ones that prevent the knock on the door at 3 AM that puts you in a dark prison cell or a work camp for the rest of your life because of some comment you made about a government minister.
Hell, no. What you've missed is that the entire debate hinges on just how you define "torture", not whether actual torture is good or bad. Everyone can agree that "torture" is bad, n'kay? We pretty much all do. What we don't all agree on is what constitutes torture. An argument like "you think waterboarding is ok, I say that waterboarding is torture, so YOU think torture is ok" is quite dishonest.
Well I don't think that is the entire debate, but it is certainly part of it. Obviously causing any sort of physical pain in order to get a suspect to talk or confess is torture. Doing various things with water to make a victim think he might drown is more questionable, but I think it is better to err on the side of not using interrogation techniques that even might be 'mistaken' for torture. It is sad and emb
Or even better you could just press down on the clutch pedal to completely separate the engine from the transmission and then just let friction or hills gradually slow you down.
Do we know whether or not the car actually had an automatic transmission? Auto transmissions are mostly popular in the US and Japan. Everywhere else manual transmissions are at least as common as automatics. If the car did have a manual transmission that makes the story even more incredible. It means that he didn't have a traditional clutch and thus couldn't separate the engine from the transmission by merely pressing down his foot.
If no one is hurt physically then the punishment shouldn't be physical either. If money is taken then a fine would be appropriate. If inconvenience was caused as in this case then imposing a larger inconvenience would be appropriate. For instance losing his drivers license or getting his computer confiscated for a few months.
Life in prison for causing a minor inconvenience gives sadists a great big hard-on, but the punishment does not fit the incredibly trivial crime. Injustice is what is being served. For the benefit of a bunch of sick people who love to watch other people suffer or die.
I'd say one of the biggest problems in our country is that sadists seem to be in charge. Torture? Hell, yes! Life in prison, preferably one where getting raped and being infected with HIV is nearly certain? Hell, yes. It's the American way! Spending much of our resources building more and more prisons to hold everyone who can no longer be physically crammed together in small cages? Yes, damnit! Torture, suffering, death is what this country is all about. Why do you think we like war so much? Hurting the citizens of other countries is just as enjoyable as hurting our own.
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
Unless you are a cop. Or a prosecutor. So you are trying to say that Swartz was a violent guy. A menace to society who needed to be locked away before he physically hurt more people. I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with that based on what I have read about him.
"breaking into" is a physical analogy which doesn't work in this case. He didn't have to physically break into anything. No locks were picked or forced and even if there were forced entry it would just be a B&E charge which, as we all know, gets a slap on the wrist for a first offense. Probably just probation and no jail time. At worst a few months in a minimum security jail. One could argue trespassing, but it's questionable and obviously in that case the penalties are even lighter than a first offense for B&E.
She abused the law to attempt to further her political ambitions and in so doing she was at least partially responsible for the death of another human being. So, yes, I would like to see her imprisoned, but would settle for her being fired and not allowed to work as a prosecutor again anywhere in the US. She can get a job as a defense lawyer if she wants where her lack of ethics won't harm anyone.
If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied.
Speak for yourself. I would have zero interest in prosecuting the Chinese-American for industrial espionage and imposing absurd, draconian 30-50 year penalties. Especially since you haven't mentioned anything about him smuggling it to China. A Chinese-American is every bit as much of a true American as you or I. The idea that his loyalties would automatically be with another country is offensive and racist.
Or download the crack for the software that you didn't legally purchase. Do you really think Microsoft deserves to make money from this idiocy? Microsoft has reached a new low in draconian DRM. And just like all other forms it will only penalize the law abiding suckers who actually pay for it. The rest won't even know about the problem.
What about third party candidates? Or are you one of those voters who actually thinks your vote is going to actually determine who wins as long as you vote for one of the two major parties?
Minimum wage is only a factor in unemployment when it is higher than the market wage would have been. When it is higher, mostly what it does is encourage employers to be pickier about who they hire. At higher wages they can afford to hire people with more impressive job histories, with more experience. So for people like me in the lowest income bracket it is a mixed blessing. It means that if I can get a job I will make a bit more money than I would have otherwise, but it also means that I will be even less likely to get hired for one. For me, getting hired for any job is already practically impossible.
So it's a very mixed blessing. Perhaps a minimum wage could be combined with some sort of enforced hiring as well. Or you could rotate the jobs so everyone gets a chance to do some work. I guess that would mean forcing the employer to fire people, hehe. Or you could force employers to keep the same number of employees as before the minimum wage hike so they don't just downsize their workforce when the higher wages reduce executive and share holder profits.
In my area one of the biggest practical problems to even getting a job is the local immigrant population from Brazil. It's like a kind of reverse racism. The immigrants are often preferred because they are seen as hard workers and frankly a bit desperate. American citizens are considered a bit more hit and miss. We are considered less likely to make washing dishes or working as a cashier at a gas station a life-long career.
There's also the issue that many have worked their way up to manager and then have a preference for hiring other Brazilians. I don't want to get rid of such immigrants like some people. Immigrants are what this country is supposed to be about. Nevertheless it has been a practical problem for me. I can't do anything about the fact that I wasn't born in Brazil no matter how hard I am willing to work.
I don't support any sort of political solution to this problem. The point is just that actually getting a minimum wage job can be a bigger problem than what the wage is. The minimum wage here is $8/hour. That isn't much especially after all the 'quantitative easing' and higher prices we've seen in the past few years, but it is better than having no money at all. I was going to say that it was better than $0/hr but even volunteer jobs are difficult to get around here. They still at least contribute to your work history so that it is easier to get a real job eventually.
The Coming Ice Age headlines may not have been "taken very seriously" in scientific journals, but neither was global warming. It wasn't until the new millenium that the "consensus" you speak of was finally formed. It wasn't until very recently that the belief in global warming as a religion, uh, I mean theory was widespread. Before that it was a "the evidence isn't conclusive" kind of theory. Not a "no unbiased, sane, person could doubt it" kind of theory that it has become in the post-2k world.
There was never anything approaching a scientific consensus about global cooling, and indeed it was debunked as a hypothesis within a few months of appearing on the radar.
Were you even alive in the seventies? That wasn't how I remember it at all. It made the covers of a whole bunch of news magazines for a while. As child I remember reading about it a lot wondering about the threat of a new ice age. Except maybe politically, it was every bit as big of a deal then as global warming is now. Whether or not a 'consensus' was reached among scientists is irrelevant to me. I don't consider opinion polls to be science. All I know is that at the time it was a very big deal in magazines and on television. I don't remember exactly how long, but for more than a few months. There was one group of people who seemed pretty sure that we were headed towards another ice age and another group who were skeptical. Sounds familiar.
And global warming as a popular consensus is very recent. I can tell by your UID that you are at least old enough to know that. When I took my university meteorology class in the early 90s global warming was presented as a mere theory. Not a consensus. Not something that was proven. Just a theory that may or may not be true. The evidence that recent warming was caused by man was considered inconclusive by both the textbook and the professor teaching the glass. Now all of a sudden it has become a 'fact' despite the fact that the evidence for it hasn't changed much.
They have exactly the same rights that you do. So either they have rights or you don't. Hint: rights are not given to you by the government. Those are privileges. You might want to consider learning about the principles that the US was founded on. It wasn't the idea that there was something unique or special about human beings that just happened to be born in a particular geographic area. That certain groups of people have rights and others don't is actually something that sounds a lot like what the WWII Germans believed.
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I couldn't agree with you more. Those of us who dislike living as slaves in a police state working for our government masters often find it tedious to argue with people like you who only know ad hominem arguments and simply do not have the capacity to stick to logic. You cannot think philosophically or understand ideas.
Try some reasoned arguments next time instead of ad hominem attacks. Or we could start talking about how you see the government as your daddy. I don't owe the government a goddamn thing. I am not a slave and they do not own me. If they want to bill me for services rendered that's fine, but I should have the choice as to whether or not I wish to use those services.
Also, what is often ignored in these 'discussions' is price. If taxes are just payments for services rendered then the question becomes whether the prices are reasonable or not. Private enterprise would go out of business if they charge prices that people cannot afford to pay. The government won't because they are more like a criminal enterprise then a business. The 'services' they offer are like the services the mafia offers you when offering you 'protection' against...unfortunate accidents. Thugs with guns who demand money for services that you never asked for are nothing new and nothing special and no different from any thief who sticks a gun to your head and demands your wallet. Because they title themselves, The Government doesn't change the dynamics of what is actually going on.
The only government services I actually need and use are the roads and their maintenance and trash pickup. Both could easily by done privately, but either way I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for said services. Ideally such payments would be based on use as in toll roads and price per unit of trash picked up and perhaps the distance from your house to the nearest landfill. That's the way a civilized society would work. Not by threatening to put people in cages if they don't pay you. If services are truly essential there is no need to force people to do anything. They will voluntarily pay for such essential services.
Time to move to Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, or Oregon. Alaska and New Hampshire also have no state income tax, but Alaska is isolated and has a cold climate until global warming makes it into a paradise sometime in the 3rd millenium and New Hampshire is only free when it comes to taxes. They have routine suspicionless roadblocks, stop and identify laws and other nasty police state stuff. Delaware can be ruled out immediately.
So that just leaves Montana vs Oregon. Unfortunately both have state income taxes. Oregon's income taxes are currently 9% if you make betwen 7750 and 125,000 which should cover pretty much everyone here. Montana has a much more incremental sliding scale at the low end. Only 1% if you manage to make less than 2,600 per year and still survive. 5% if you make between 9,400 and 12,100 as I do. 6.9% if you make more than 15,600 as I'm sure nearly all of you do.
So I guess Montana would win on taxes alone, but Montana also has suspicionless roadblocks which they call 'safety checks' or something like that because sobriety checkpoints are actually illegal there. Montana also shares a border with Canada so the northern half of the state is a constitution free zone from the POV of the CBP and is probably plagued with overzealous jackbooted thugs known as the border patrol who will be only too happy to interrogate you for half an hour every time you drive by even during the day and if you annoy them or 'stand up for your rights' you will probably end up in jail on contempt of cop charges. Maybe even after being beaten or killed. Attorney fees will easily trump sales tax for most of us and even if you make or spend enough that it doesn't take it from me that being locked in a cage is not much fun. Montana also has stop and identify laws. Oregon doesn't. So I think Oregon wins despite the (for most people) slightly higher income taxes.
That shipping isn't really free. It's included in the cost of the products. If Amazon charged for shipping its prices would be even lower.
As far as the 5 million dollar theft scenario the owner could probably get it back from the casino once it was shown to be stolen money. I don't think you are allowed to profit from stolen money. But obviously that misses your point. Maybe the thief hid the money somewhere, maybe buried it in some remote location. In that case I still wouldn't see the point of throwing the guy in jail. I think garnishing his wages so for the rest of his life he has to live at some minimum poverty level no matter how much money he makes in the future should be a decent deterrent. Or if society truly feels that putting the guy in a cage for a while will stop him from stealing in the future (a highly questionable assumption) then put the guy in jail, but make it a reasonable amount of time. For a nonviolent crime that should certainly be no more than a year.
It's nice to say "an eye for an eye", but what do you do if a blind man pokes your eyes out?
I never said "an eye for an eye". I talked of reasonable and fair punishments. Punishments appropriate to the crime. I believe prison should be mostly reserved for violent people. The way it is now the jails are filled with completely non-violent people. Well, non-violent until they've been through the US prison system at least.
I think my point was, calling something "hacking" doesn't mean it is just a minor inconvenience. If "hacking" a computer system is a minor inconvenience, then it is hard to claim that access to computer systems should be a basic human right.
It's irrelevant what it's called, how you label it. In this case it was nothing more than a minor inconvenience that Swartz caused. Nevertheless even when unauthorized computer access causes a major inconvenience I still don't believe it deserves any jail time. It's simply not an appropriate punishment. At worst it could be compared to trespassing or breaking and entering. Under no circumstances should unauthorized computer access have any greater punishment than physically breaking into someone's home. Not ever. That is clearly a much greater violation than accessing an electronic device.
A computer is not an extension of a person. It is merely an electronic device, like any other electronic device. If you are sitting next to someone in a class and they reach over and hit the clear button on your calculator or if you are listening to a radio and someone changes the station you wouldn't advocate life in prison or anything even remotely close to it. Well maybe you would, but that certainly wouldn't seem justified to me.
As for computer "access" being a right, that is just silly. There is no such thing as a right that someone else must provide for you. Human rights are negatives not positives. They are limits on what other people can do to you. When someone says something like that I immediately know that they don't believe in human rights. To posit positive rights is to negate negative ones, but it's the negative ones that prevent the knock on the door at 3 AM that puts you in a dark prison cell or a work camp for the rest of your life because of some comment you made about a government minister.
Hell, no. What you've missed is that the entire debate hinges on just how you define "torture", not whether actual torture is good or bad. Everyone can agree that "torture" is bad, n'kay? We pretty much all do. What we don't all agree on is what constitutes torture. An argument like "you think waterboarding is ok, I say that waterboarding is torture, so YOU think torture is ok" is quite dishonest.
Well I don't think that is the entire debate, but it is certainly part of it. Obviously causing any sort of physical pain in order to get a suspect to talk or confess is torture. Doing various things with water to make a victim think he might drown is more questionable, but I think it is better to err on the side of not using interrogation techniques that even might be 'mistaken' for torture. It is sad and emb
Or even better you could just press down on the clutch pedal to completely separate the engine from the transmission and then just let friction or hills gradually slow you down.
Do we know whether or not the car actually had an automatic transmission? Auto transmissions are mostly popular in the US and Japan. Everywhere else manual transmissions are at least as common as automatics. If the car did have a manual transmission that makes the story even more incredible. It means that he didn't have a traditional clutch and thus couldn't separate the engine from the transmission by merely pressing down his foot.
If no one is hurt physically then the punishment shouldn't be physical either. If money is taken then a fine would be appropriate. If inconvenience was caused as in this case then imposing a larger inconvenience would be appropriate. For instance losing his drivers license or getting his computer confiscated for a few months.
Life in prison for causing a minor inconvenience gives sadists a great big hard-on, but the punishment does not fit the incredibly trivial crime. Injustice is what is being served. For the benefit of a bunch of sick people who love to watch other people suffer or die.
I'd say one of the biggest problems in our country is that sadists seem to be in charge. Torture? Hell, yes! Life in prison, preferably one where getting raped and being infected with HIV is nearly certain? Hell, yes. It's the American way! Spending much of our resources building more and more prisons to hold everyone who can no longer be physically crammed together in small cages? Yes, damnit! Torture, suffering, death is what this country is all about. Why do you think we like war so much? Hurting the citizens of other countries is just as enjoyable as hurting our own.
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
Unless you are a cop. Or a prosecutor. So you are trying to say that Swartz was a violent guy. A menace to society who needed to be locked away before he physically hurt more people. I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with that based on what I have read about him.
So you admit that you are scared then? Killing yourself takes a great deal of courage. Cowards are incapable of it.
"breaking into" is a physical analogy which doesn't work in this case. He didn't have to physically break into anything. No locks were picked or forced and even if there were forced entry it would just be a B&E charge which, as we all know, gets a slap on the wrist for a first offense. Probably just probation and no jail time. At worst a few months in a minimum security jail. One could argue trespassing, but it's questionable and obviously in that case the penalties are even lighter than a first offense for B&E.
If that happened to me I'd work for the other side as a double agent. I would never help these bastards under any circumstances. I'd rather die.
She abused the law to attempt to further her political ambitions and in so doing she was at least partially responsible for the death of another human being. So, yes, I would like to see her imprisoned, but would settle for her being fired and not allowed to work as a prosecutor again anywhere in the US. She can get a job as a defense lawyer if she wants where her lack of ethics won't harm anyone.
In some cases there shouldn't be any consequences to your actions. For instance when the alleged victim doesn't want there to be any as in this case.
If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied.
Speak for yourself. I would have zero interest in prosecuting the Chinese-American for industrial espionage and imposing absurd, draconian 30-50 year penalties. Especially since you haven't mentioned anything about him smuggling it to China. A Chinese-American is every bit as much of a true American as you or I. The idea that his loyalties would automatically be with another country is offensive and racist.
But don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.
You keep using that word.
I'm waiting to see how the resident MS shills are going to positively spin this one. No unbiased person could be in favor of this.
Or download a crack to use the software they paid for.
Or download the crack for the software that you didn't legally purchase. Do you really think Microsoft deserves to make money from this idiocy? Microsoft has reached a new low in draconian DRM. And just like all other forms it will only penalize the law abiding suckers who actually pay for it. The rest won't even know about the problem.
What about third party candidates? Or are you one of those voters who actually thinks your vote is going to actually determine who wins as long as you vote for one of the two major parties?
Minimum wage is only a factor in unemployment when it is higher than the market wage would have been. When it is higher, mostly what it does is encourage employers to be pickier about who they hire. At higher wages they can afford to hire people with more impressive job histories, with more experience. So for people like me in the lowest income bracket it is a mixed blessing. It means that if I can get a job I will make a bit more money than I would have otherwise, but it also means that I will be even less likely to get hired for one. For me, getting hired for any job is already practically impossible.
So it's a very mixed blessing. Perhaps a minimum wage could be combined with some sort of enforced hiring as well. Or you could rotate the jobs so everyone gets a chance to do some work. I guess that would mean forcing the employer to fire people, hehe. Or you could force employers to keep the same number of employees as before the minimum wage hike so they don't just downsize their workforce when the higher wages reduce executive and share holder profits.
In my area one of the biggest practical problems to even getting a job is the local immigrant population from Brazil. It's like a kind of reverse racism. The immigrants are often preferred because they are seen as hard workers and frankly a bit desperate. American citizens are considered a bit more hit and miss. We are considered less likely to make washing dishes or working as a cashier at a gas station a life-long career.
There's also the issue that many have worked their way up to manager and then have a preference for hiring other Brazilians. I don't want to get rid of such immigrants like some people. Immigrants are what this country is supposed to be about. Nevertheless it has been a practical problem for me. I can't do anything about the fact that I wasn't born in Brazil no matter how hard I am willing to work.
I don't support any sort of political solution to this problem. The point is just that actually getting a minimum wage job can be a bigger problem than what the wage is. The minimum wage here is $8/hour. That isn't much especially after all the 'quantitative easing' and higher prices we've seen in the past few years, but it is better than having no money at all. I was going to say that it was better than $0/hr but even volunteer jobs are difficult to get around here. They still at least contribute to your work history so that it is easier to get a real job eventually.
The Coming Ice Age headlines may not have been "taken very seriously" in scientific journals, but neither was global warming. It wasn't until the new millenium that the "consensus" you speak of was finally formed. It wasn't until very recently that the belief in global warming as a religion, uh, I mean theory was widespread. Before that it was a "the evidence isn't conclusive" kind of theory. Not a "no unbiased, sane, person could doubt it" kind of theory that it has become in the post-2k world.
You are simply wrong, kid.
There was never anything approaching a scientific consensus about global cooling, and indeed it was debunked as a hypothesis within a few months of appearing on the radar.
Were you even alive in the seventies? That wasn't how I remember it at all. It made the covers of a whole bunch of news magazines for a while. As child I remember reading about it a lot wondering about the threat of a new ice age. Except maybe politically, it was every bit as big of a deal then as global warming is now. Whether or not a 'consensus' was reached among scientists is irrelevant to me. I don't consider opinion polls to be science. All I know is that at the time it was a very big deal in magazines and on television. I don't remember exactly how long, but for more than a few months. There was one group of people who seemed pretty sure that we were headed towards another ice age and another group who were skeptical. Sounds familiar.
And global warming as a popular consensus is very recent. I can tell by your UID that you are at least old enough to know that. When I took my university meteorology class in the early 90s global warming was presented as a mere theory. Not a consensus. Not something that was proven. Just a theory that may or may not be true. The evidence that recent warming was caused by man was considered inconclusive by both the textbook and the professor teaching the glass. Now all of a sudden it has become a 'fact' despite the fact that the evidence for it hasn't changed much.
Illegals have no constitutional rights
They have exactly the same rights that you do. So either they have rights or you don't. Hint: rights are not given to you by the government. Those are privileges. You might want to consider learning about the principles that the US was founded on. It wasn't the idea that there was something unique or special about human beings that just happened to be born in a particular geographic area. That certain groups of people have rights and others don't is actually something that sounds a lot like what the WWII Germans believed.