I think the more likely situation, if there was a conspiracy at all, would be that they would wait for the private insurers to have a crack at this for a few years, then people would see that no one's rates will decrease and that the private companies are just pocketing the difference.
I'm all for single-payer, complete with death panels. NHS in the UK has huge costs too, but at least they know when to give up on treating someone. (See the Quality-Adjusted Life Year -- we need a metric like that in our healthcare system.) We'll see if I get my wish.
You sound like you'd be a huge admirer of George Bernard Shaw.
You've got it backwards. That astroturf "movement" was funded and assisted so that large numbers of people that opposed the regulations that Koch and the other funders disliked could be bussed in to protests to give an appearance of a lot of support. The people that organised the transport, media releases etc were not "Tea Partiers" themselves but professionals paid to create events. Most of the tea party was literally a rented crowd which is why it has no cohesion and nobody within doing much in the way of organising anything. Left alone they do not appear to be able to organise a drunken party in a brewery. I'm not knocking the individuals who stand for whatever they do, but instead that it's a disorganised mob that cancel each other out and ultimately don't really stand for anything. They are a weird "only in America" footnote whose time passed once the adult supervision driving the busses decided to do something else.
The ironies are many, the largest of which are the strident calls for replacing the United States with the sort of fuedalistic system that the Boston tea party was a protest against. "Getting the government out of people's lives" really means letting the rich and powerful run a country without interference from the people - just like those English Lords could do.
And...and...one of the TEA Party people turned me into a newt, too!
"If court orders are legitimate..." -- see there Mr Judge, you've answered your own question.
[sarc] But...but...if a (secret) judge in a (secret) court (secretly) orders it under (secret) rulings/precedents, it *must* be legitimate by definition!
The government consulted with itself and assured itself that it was.
From a technological standpoint, shooting someone who is about to rape your daughter is the same as shooting someone because you want to drive the car they're in: the bullet punctures the skin and causes internal damage, temporarily (or permanently) disabling the person being shot. Therefore ban all guns.
Seriously, did you even think this through at all before posting?
It's more like forcing people to use only easily-defeat-able locks and/or send the government a copy of the keys to all locks because criminals sometimes use locks and the government may need easy and quick access to prevent/halt a crime or execute a search or arrest warrant in a timely manner.
Secret government-mandated backdoors and unreported zero-days don't care who exploits them, either.
Maybe the daughter in your example would not have been raped if the rapist had not been able to quickly defeat the LE/court-friendly weak door locks mandated on her house before rescue could arrive.
If you were aware of history, you'd know the USA has been much more totalitarian in the past. Say, the 1950s.
sarc/ Well, that's different then!
Bring on the oppression, both domestic and international! Just keep all the various forms of abuse/corruption and international skulduggery just *slightly* less-bad than it has ever been in the past.
After all, as long as whatever government corruption or abuse of power under discussion is not as bad as some arbitrary worst-case point in history, then all is fine, right?/sarc
I don't think things would be any better overall no matter which of the major "establishment" Parties were in power. They together are the ones that very intentionally guided us all here to this sorry state.
Both want as close to total monitoring and control of the population as they can get. It's just a fight over which faction gets the lion's-share of the power and the spoils.
The NSA conveniently has plenty of data to ruin/convict/destroy any politician, or most anyone else, who gets too far out of line and causes too many problems for the ruling elite.
The real fight is not liberal/conservative, capitalist/socialist, etc/etc, it's Authoritarianism vs Libertarianism, as in the big concepts, not any particular party. Under that filter, both major US parties are nearly indistinguishable.
Libertarianism vs Authoritarianism is basically the struggle between those who would want to live with the default being as much individual freedom as possible, versus those who believe individuals and everything about them and their lives as possible should be under as much monitoring & control of the State apparatus as possible.
What IS unfortunate is the loss of the old card catalogs. It used to be the case that multiple people could access the card catalog simultaneously but with the advent of PCs most have been replaced with a library-software equipped PC which limits use to the numbers of PCs on-hand. For a small library that is typically one.
Don't worry, the current administration is implementing the solution as we post!
After "Common Core" has been fully implemented for a generation or two, there won't be enough people around who are literate to worry about lines/waiting for the library catalog PC. Bonus, very seldom will you encounter "already on loan" when searching for a particular book.
"We're from the government and we're here to help."
So now Obama can agree to a later start of Obamacare without losing his face: He'll not give in to the Republicans, but just react to deficiencies in the technology.
To add insult to injury, the administration decided to take down the Amber Alerts website, blaming the shutdown, but Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" website is still up. They shut down the PX at Andrews AFB and the WW2 Memorial on the National Mall to WW2 vets, but the golf course at Andrews AFB, which Obama likes, is still open, as is the one at Camp David. Funny what this administration considers "essential".
For this administration it's about not compromising and punishing the American people for supporting their opposition. The pain they intentionally inflict they hope will convince most people to force the opposition to give in. A Park Services Ranger was quoted as saying they were told to make life as painful as possible for people.
"Tell your Senator/Representatives to cave or this kitten (or abducted child that won't show up on the shut-down Amber Alert website) gets it."
1. Nudge
2. Shove
3. Shoot
They are past "Nudge" and are now well into "Shove"...with scattered, mostly kept low-key (for now), but increasingly-numerous incidents where "Shoot" is starting to be employed.
The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.
Interesting.. You mention that SWAT raids increase, and more people incarcerated tallies up with fewer gun crimes being committed. That seems to imply that if you lock up (or shoot in a SWAT raid) the group that are prone to committing gun crime, they don't get to commit it. So the system seems to work as intended; the law abiding non-psychotic population are protected.
What's your beef with that?
Come on, now. You must have realized even as you typed this how specious and disingenuous an argument that weak-sauce post is.
The SWAT raids are in the vast majority drug-related, not firearm- or firearm-violence-related. That, and SWAT use for the serving of regular non-violent/non-firearm/gang-related misdemeanor warrants has also skyrocketed.
How about trying to have an actual discussion instead of spewing ideologically-driven nonsense arguments that only muddy the waters and provoke knee-jerk reactions that divide people? That might actually stand a chance of making some progress towards saving lives.
Not just non-essential, a counterproductive drain.
Add "dangerous" to that list.
Not just to stability in the ME and to US relationships with long-time allies.
More dangerous by orders of magnitude to US citizens' lives and freedom than the "terrists", or even any other hostile country, could possibly be.
Violent crime in the US, including gun crime, is at historic multi-decade lows (despite increased gun ownership, but I digress) according to official stats, yet the number of people killed by police (particularly unarmed people) and the number of para-military "SWAT" raids has steadily and rapidly increased over the last few decades, along with the prison population.
"National Security"? Ha!
*Real* national security would necessitate, in part, dismantling and/or massively-downsizing much of the myriad of current alphabet-soup domestic security/intelligence/enforcement agencies and departments, like DHS, TSA, and NSA for just a few examples, and either eliminating them outright, or at the least, stripping them of all but the barest minimum of powers and capabilities/infrastructure, like no more giant domestic data centers and "USS Enterprise bridge"-styled data/surveillance "command centers" at taxpayer expense to satisfy out-of-control and delusional sociopathic megalomaniacs with God-complexes, who also just happen to be US Generals.
Speaking of Gen. "Make it so!" Alexander, back in my day they used to send two big hospital orderlies with a net, a straight-jacket, and an ambulance for such people and placed them in mental institutions.
These days they hold high US political and/or government/military/intelligence positions.
I vote we simply wall-off all of Washington D.C. with all Federal government political/lobbying denizens inside, and make it a giant mental asylum ala "Escape From New York" and then throw a nationwide month-long block-party in celebration, using just a tiny fraction of the savings to the entire country.
modern rebellion is only done in 2 ways. 1. stop spending 2. stop working. guns would be ineffective...
Guns, lots of guns, are one of the biggest reasons behind what is currently dissuading the government from just saying "screw it", and going full martial-law/internment camp/mass graves/brutal tyranny. Civilian guns are a strong disincentive against widespread domestic use of government armed force against the population by making it a very very costly and, like occupying/pacifying Afghanistan, likely in reality to be an impossible goal to achieve or maintain for any meaningful length of time.
One significant "tell" is that all the politicians seem to be talking about lately is regulating/restricting/banning medium and long range semi-automatic rifles that history shows are used in so very few crimes it's ridiculous, not so much handguns. Handguns are not nearly as effective against a military or para-military occupation/pacification force as are rifles.
Guns, lots of guns, would be one of the biggest reasons the government would not simply immediately imprison/kill all those organizing, promoting, and/or participating in your "stop working and stop spending" plan.
Came here to say this. The NSA will at most only pretend to follow orders at this point. What do they have to fear?
From "Saving Private Ryan": --- Private Jackson: "Well, what I mean by that, sir, is... if you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler (Gen. Alexander/Clapper/etc etc) with a clear line of sight, sir... pack your bags, fellas, war's over. Amen." --- Which is why the government is pushing to further limit/restrict long gun ownership rather than handguns, even though long guns are only used in a vanishingly-tiny percentage of firearm-related domestic crime. They could care less about the slaughter going on in places like Chicago (with some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the US) with handguns.
Perhaps some enterprising jounalist, or the EFF could make some FOIA requests for phone records from the NSA, Whitehouse, etc.. Let the government say that the data is private!
They said their data is private.
Not anyone else's.
They'll put you or I in prison or kill us for obtaining their data.
Is this guy for real? He's talking about real-time information sharing, obviously with no judicial oversight of any sort, rubber-stamped or otherwise.
Unfortunately, he is real . . . and seems to be a bit of a megalomaniac to boot . . . totally intoxicated and ripped to his tits with his ever increasing power. Joe McCarthy and Edgar Hoover 2.0 . . . Enterprise Edition.
It doesn't seem like there is anyone in the government or general public who has the courage to stand up to him.
Yet, they'll be all shocked, surprised, and butt-hurt when someone shoves a bullet through his brain-pan or a pressure-cooker up this megalomaniac's ass.
There should be international "Wanted Dead Or Alive" posters in every nations' post offices with this scum-bucket's picture on it. That there are not says that most Western nations do data-sharing with the NSA regarding their respective populations. That way, the international status-quo can be maintained and make certain that any citizens who have the potential to become "game-changers" end up either disgraced/destroyed, in prison, or in organ banks if they can't be "turned".
Maybe it's time for a "EU/US Spring". France could get all those old guillotines out of mothballs, start the guillotine factories back up, and have itself a profitable new export industry.
Soon. Mothballed Spitfire drones above the Channel, to prevent the mothballed Messerschmitts drones of the EU from causing uproar in the parliament, lower house. "Ballsy move" was the statement received from the Buckingham Palace about the drone situation.
It does seem that way. Before you leak, destroy all your storage media lest you find unexpected photos appearing on them.
If you do not have incriminating media or devices, one will be provided for you by the state.
All part of the new government "transparency" initiative; "No Whistle-Blower Left Un-Smeared".
I don't know why anyone should be surprised. If Vince Foster, Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings, etc etc, hasn't clued everyone in that the US government is amoral, corrupt, power-hungry, arrogant, and is more than willing to destroy or kill it's political opponents or anyone that threatens the continued growth of their power & control, I don't know what would.
Do we need to see a US version of a "Final Solution"-type extermination/genocide program before people will finally allow themselves to wake up? (But, on the "plus" side, I did hear that the cattle-cars for those who go along and stay quiet now will be much nicer.)
It may already be too late to halt the US' slide into a full-on police state. Neither major political party will halt it as they agree on about 99% of major issues with the exception of a few "hot-button" publicly-divisive issues for political cover and to keep people distracted, and the only other people out there actually protesting in a serious, sustained, and credible manner and attempting to do something about the destruction of civil rights are mocked by those in the MSM and here on/. as racists and nut-cases that want the US to become Somalia, buying the government propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
jeopardizes... hundred of millions of taxpayer funds.
Bring the main hyperbole cannon on line! Maybe you could dial back the rhetoric to 11.
$285 million sounds like hundreds of millions to me.
Sounds like small cheese compared to what was thrown down the rat-hole with Solyndra, et al. And when IS Obama-backing GE going to pay taxes? Ever again?
Seriously, though, just because you say it doesn't make it true.
The simple fact that they felt it necessary, despite how self-incriminating it appears, for them to send out such a letter to their own people in essence, says many volumes about how much trust one should put in the NSA's "assurances".
The NSA is going to have to engage heavily in blackmailing politicians, because nearly everyone...(D), (R), conservatives, liberals, politicians, journalists, progressives, capitalists, socialists, and communists...have realized that the NSA doesn't make any distinctions whatsoever concerning whose data they slurp up and whether or not it might be used for blackmail or for setting them up for a lengthy prison sentence if it becomes expedient for the government to make someone "go away", short of outright State-ordered murder.
Pay no attention to anything the NSA or the politicians say. Watch what they do, instead.
Anything that doesn't kill every last bacteria on the planet can almost necessarily be survived deep underground much more easily than in space -- and some things that do kill every last bacteria, too. There are no objects left of sufficient size in unstable orbits. Gamma ray bursts, too, are rather trivial to shield yourself from not very far underground. The only thing that will make the earth impractical is solar warming in a couple billion years, which obviously doesn't justify people over robots today.
There are good arguments for human space exploration -- but the survival of the species is a really bad argument for it because if that were your actual goal then there are so many smarter things you'd do before thinking of space.
You and your progeny are welcome to stay huddled deep underground in man-made caves while rationing-out ever smaller bits of what resources are left until either a planetary disaster or exhaustion of resources causes your deaths, just don't stand in the way of the rest of us getting off this single, vulnerable, orbiting rock with limited resources, and thus assure our species' survival while putting practically unlimited resources and wealth into our hands and hugely accelerating & advancing the level of human technological development & capability.
I do understand that there always has been and always will be those without imagination, vision, or courage. There were people at the time of every exploration of discovery in history who felt it was a waste of time and resources. People that think like you are the kind who were saying that Cook's proposed voyages were a waste, same with Darwin's voyages, Lewis & Clark's expeditions, and those explorers who discovered and explored the Americas, Antarctica, and the Arctic.
If humanity listened to those who think like you, humanity would likely already be extinct or still running and hiding from predators in Africa while dying before reaching 30, and Neanderthals would still occupy Europe.
No asteroid impact has ever or can ever extinguish all forms of life on earth or render the planet anywhere near as uninhabitable as the next best planet.
Might want to re-think that first part. There are some pretty big objects out there, and we really have little in effective observation & tracking of even the stuff in our own relative neighborhood. How about an impact with an object the size of Phobos, or even larger?
Besides, an impact that falls short your "extinguish all forms of life on Earth" is a distinction without a difference in outcome to the rest of us humans if we're all dead anyways, thanks very much. There are also gamma-ray bursts and other hazards that are even less foreseeable.
The point isn't how much worse another planet may be, it's the fact that if we achieve the goal of having significant numbers of humans living self-sustained off of Earth (planet, space habitat, whatever), it is then less likely a single planetary-scale disaster on Earth could result in total and immediate human extinction.
Of course, some people share the view of the human race as expressed by "Agent Smith": in the first "Matrix" movie:
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
I just don't know how I could possibly have any kind of useful dialog about advancing and expanding human civilization with someone holding such beliefs. Like those people that think that all but a sufficient number of people to assure sufficient genetic diversity (wasn't it something like slightly under a billion? Or a few hundred million?) should be exterminated so as to preserve the Earth's environment and it's resources.
All I can tell them is "You first, buddy!". I plan on us getting off of this rock so that resource depletion and pollution will cease to be an issue, and so that one cosmic "oopsie" doesn't cause our extinction. I want one of the future notations that go down in humanities' history to be the date of the first human baby born on a planet of another star.
"The purpose of all life everywhere in the universe is to spread life throughout the universe and to grow and learn all that is knowable, and thus enable the universe to know itself and become self-aware, the ultimate expression of God."
Slashdot Mirror
I think the more likely situation, if there was a conspiracy at all, would be that they would wait for the private insurers to have a crack at this for a few years, then people would see that no one's rates will decrease and that the private companies are just pocketing the difference.
I'm all for single-payer, complete with death panels. NHS in the UK has huge costs too, but at least they know when to give up on treating someone. (See the Quality-Adjusted Life Year -- we need a metric like that in our healthcare system.) We'll see if I get my wish.
You sound like you'd be a huge admirer of George Bernard Shaw.
http://youtu.be/OBZsTf6oLfY
Strat
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20, 2013 @06:28PM (#45183607)
Punish the innocent, Promote the guilty, Reward the uninvolved
Wow! Thanks for posting on /. Mr. President!
Strat
You've got it backwards. That astroturf "movement" was funded and assisted so that large numbers of people that opposed the regulations that Koch and the other funders disliked could be bussed in to protests to give an appearance of a lot of support. The people that organised the transport, media releases etc were not "Tea Partiers" themselves but professionals paid to create events. Most of the tea party was literally a rented crowd which is why it has no cohesion and nobody within doing much in the way of organising anything. Left alone they do not appear to be able to organise a drunken party in a brewery.
I'm not knocking the individuals who stand for whatever they do, but instead that it's a disorganised mob that cancel each other out and ultimately don't really stand for anything. They are a weird "only in America" footnote whose time passed once the adult supervision driving the busses decided to do something else.
The ironies are many, the largest of which are the strident calls for replacing the United States with the sort of fuedalistic system that the Boston tea party was a protest against. "Getting the government out of people's lives" really means letting the rich and powerful run a country without interference from the people - just like those English Lords could do.
And...and...one of the TEA Party people turned me into a newt, too!
What? I got better!
Strat
"If court orders are legitimate..." -- see there Mr Judge, you've answered your own question.
[sarc]
But...but...if a (secret) judge in a (secret) court (secretly) orders it under (secret) rulings/precedents, it *must* be legitimate by definition!
The government consulted with itself and assured itself that it was.
Secretly, of course.
[/sarc]
Strat
From a technological standpoint, shooting someone who is about to rape your daughter is the same as shooting someone because you want to drive the car they're in: the bullet punctures the skin and causes internal damage, temporarily (or permanently) disabling the person being shot. Therefore ban all guns.
Seriously, did you even think this through at all before posting?
It's more like forcing people to use only easily-defeat-able locks and/or send the government a copy of the keys to all locks because criminals sometimes use locks and the government may need easy and quick access to prevent/halt a crime or execute a search or arrest warrant in a timely manner.
Secret government-mandated backdoors and unreported zero-days don't care who exploits them, either.
Maybe the daughter in your example would not have been raped if the rapist had not been able to quickly defeat the LE/court-friendly weak door locks mandated on her house before rescue could arrive.
Strat
If you were aware of history, you'd know the USA has been much more totalitarian in the past. Say, the 1950s.
sarc/ Well, that's different then!
Bring on the oppression, both domestic and international! Just keep all the various forms of abuse/corruption and international skulduggery just *slightly* less-bad than it has ever been in the past.
After all, as long as whatever government corruption or abuse of power under discussion is not as bad as some arbitrary worst-case point in history, then all is fine, right? /sarc
Strat
Wow, "-1 Flamebait"? Really?
Maybe I'm not being clear enough here..
I don't think things would be any better overall no matter which of the major "establishment" Parties were in power. They together are the ones that very intentionally guided us all here to this sorry state.
Both want as close to total monitoring and control of the population as they can get. It's just a fight over which faction gets the lion's-share of the power and the spoils.
The NSA conveniently has plenty of data to ruin/convict/destroy any politician, or most anyone else, who gets too far out of line and causes too many problems for the ruling elite.
The real fight is not liberal/conservative, capitalist/socialist, etc/etc, it's Authoritarianism vs Libertarianism, as in the big concepts, not any particular party. Under that filter, both major US parties are nearly indistinguishable.
Libertarianism vs Authoritarianism is basically the struggle between those who would want to live with the default being as much individual freedom as possible, versus those who believe individuals and everything about them and their lives as possible should be under as much monitoring & control of the State apparatus as possible.
Strat
Ah, so you're someone who has very little real knowledge of history, then.
Thanks. I'll be certain to give your critique all the attention it is due.
Strat
What IS unfortunate is the loss of the old card catalogs. It used to be the case that multiple people could access the card catalog simultaneously but with the advent of PCs most have been replaced with a library-software equipped PC which limits use to the numbers of PCs on-hand. For a small library that is typically one.
Don't worry, the current administration is implementing the solution as we post!
After "Common Core" has been fully implemented for a generation or two, there won't be enough people around who are literate to worry about lines/waiting for the library catalog PC. Bonus, very seldom will you encounter "already on loan" when searching for a particular book.
"We're from the government and we're here to help."
Strat
So now Obama can agree to a later start of Obamacare without losing his face: He'll not give in to the Republicans, but just react to deficiencies in the technology.
To add insult to injury, the administration decided to take down the Amber Alerts website, blaming the shutdown, but Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" website is still up. They shut down the PX at Andrews AFB and the WW2 Memorial on the National Mall to WW2 vets, but the golf course at Andrews AFB, which Obama likes, is still open, as is the one at Camp David. Funny what this administration considers "essential".
For this administration it's about not compromising and punishing the American people for supporting their opposition. The pain they intentionally inflict they hope will convince most people to force the opposition to give in. A Park Services Ranger was quoted as saying they were told to make life as painful as possible for people.
"Tell your Senator/Representatives to cave or this kitten (or abducted child that won't show up on the shut-down Amber Alert website) gets it."
1. Nudge
2. Shove
3. Shoot
They are past "Nudge" and are now well into "Shove"...with scattered, mostly kept low-key (for now), but increasingly-numerous incidents where "Shoot" is starting to be employed.
The USA is frighteningly-close to tumbling into full totalitarianism.
Strat
Interesting.. You mention that SWAT raids increase, and more people incarcerated tallies up with fewer gun crimes being committed.
That seems to imply that if you lock up (or shoot in a SWAT raid) the group that are prone to committing gun crime, they don't get to commit it. So the system seems to work as intended; the law abiding non-psychotic population are protected.
What's your beef with that?
Come on, now. You must have realized even as you typed this how specious and disingenuous an argument that weak-sauce post is.
The SWAT raids are in the vast majority drug-related, not firearm- or firearm-violence-related. That, and SWAT use for the serving of regular non-violent/non-firearm/gang-related misdemeanor warrants has also skyrocketed.
How about trying to have an actual discussion instead of spewing ideologically-driven nonsense arguments that only muddy the waters and provoke knee-jerk reactions that divide people? That might actually stand a chance of making some progress towards saving lives.
Strat
Add "dangerous" to that list.
Not just to stability in the ME and to US relationships with long-time allies.
More dangerous by orders of magnitude to US citizens' lives and freedom than the "terrists", or even any other hostile country, could possibly be.
Violent crime in the US, including gun crime, is at historic multi-decade lows (despite increased gun ownership, but I digress) according to official stats, yet the number of people killed by police (particularly unarmed people) and the number of para-military "SWAT" raids has steadily and rapidly increased over the last few decades, along with the prison population.
"National Security"? Ha!
*Real* national security would necessitate, in part, dismantling and/or massively-downsizing much of the myriad of current alphabet-soup domestic security/intelligence/enforcement agencies and departments, like DHS, TSA, and NSA for just a few examples, and either eliminating them outright, or at the least, stripping them of all but the barest minimum of powers and capabilities/infrastructure, like no more giant domestic data centers and "USS Enterprise bridge"-styled data/surveillance "command centers" at taxpayer expense to satisfy out-of-control and delusional sociopathic megalomaniacs with God-complexes, who also just happen to be US Generals.
Speaking of Gen. "Make it so!" Alexander, back in my day they used to send two big hospital orderlies with a net, a straight-jacket, and an ambulance for such people and placed them in mental institutions.
These days they hold high US political and/or government/military/intelligence positions.
I vote we simply wall-off all of Washington D.C. with all Federal government political/lobbying denizens inside, and make it a giant mental asylum ala "Escape From New York" and then throw a nationwide month-long block-party in celebration, using just a tiny fraction of the savings to the entire country.
"..And nothing of value was lost..."
Strat
So then why haven't the other governments around the world done that in their own countries, where no one has guns like they do in America?
You need to learn some history. Many other governments *have* "done that in their own countries".
Watch this YT video, go ahead and log in, and then we'll talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7vNj2sb_00
Strat
modern rebellion is only done in 2 ways. 1. stop spending 2. stop working. guns would be ineffective...
Guns, lots of guns, are one of the biggest reasons behind what is currently dissuading the government from just saying "screw it", and going full martial-law/internment camp/mass graves/brutal tyranny. Civilian guns are a strong disincentive against widespread domestic use of government armed force against the population by making it a very very costly and, like occupying/pacifying Afghanistan, likely in reality to be an impossible goal to achieve or maintain for any meaningful length of time.
One significant "tell" is that all the politicians seem to be talking about lately is regulating/restricting/banning medium and long range semi-automatic rifles that history shows are used in so very few crimes it's ridiculous, not so much handguns. Handguns are not nearly as effective against a military or para-military occupation/pacification force as are rifles.
Guns, lots of guns, would be one of the biggest reasons the government would not simply immediately imprison/kill all those organizing, promoting, and/or participating in your "stop working and stop spending" plan.
Strat
Came here to say this. The NSA will at most only pretend to follow orders at this point. What do they have to fear?
From "Saving Private Ryan":
---
Private Jackson: "Well, what I mean by that, sir, is... if you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler (Gen. Alexander/Clapper/etc etc) with a clear line of sight, sir... pack your bags, fellas, war's over. Amen."
---
Which is why the government is pushing to further limit/restrict long gun ownership rather than handguns, even though long guns are only used in a vanishingly-tiny percentage of firearm-related domestic crime. They could care less about the slaughter going on in places like Chicago (with some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the US) with handguns.
It's the long guns that are a threat to them.
Strat
Perhaps some enterprising jounalist, or the EFF could make some FOIA requests for phone records from the NSA, Whitehouse, etc.. Let the government say that the data is private!
They said their data is private.
Not anyone else's.
They'll put you or I in prison or kill us for obtaining their data.
Strat
Yet, they'll be all shocked, surprised, and butt-hurt when someone shoves a bullet through his brain-pan or a pressure-cooker up this megalomaniac's ass.
There should be international "Wanted Dead Or Alive" posters in every nations' post offices with this scum-bucket's picture on it. That there are not says that most Western nations do data-sharing with the NSA regarding their respective populations. That way, the international status-quo can be maintained and make certain that any citizens who have the potential to become "game-changers" end up either disgraced/destroyed, in prison, or in organ banks if they can't be "turned".
Maybe it's time for a "EU/US Spring". France could get all those old guillotines out of mothballs, start the guillotine factories back up, and have itself a profitable new export industry.
Strat
Soon. Mothballed Spitfire drones above the Channel, to prevent the mothballed Messerschmitts drones of the EU from causing uproar in the parliament, lower house. "Ballsy move" was the statement received from the Buckingham Palace about the drone situation.
Look out for the Mistels!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkLvyXY1LV0
Strat
All part of the new government "transparency" initiative; "No Whistle-Blower Left Un-Smeared".
I don't know why anyone should be surprised. If Vince Foster, Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings, etc etc, hasn't clued everyone in that the US government is amoral, corrupt, power-hungry, arrogant, and is more than willing to destroy or kill it's political opponents or anyone that threatens the continued growth of their power & control, I don't know what would.
Do we need to see a US version of a "Final Solution"-type extermination/genocide program before people will finally allow themselves to wake up? (But, on the "plus" side, I did hear that the cattle-cars for those who go along and stay quiet now will be much nicer.)
It may already be too late to halt the US' slide into a full-on police state. Neither major political party will halt it as they agree on about 99% of major issues with the exception of a few "hot-button" publicly-divisive issues for political cover and to keep people distracted, and the only other people out there actually protesting in a serious, sustained, and credible manner and attempting to do something about the destruction of civil rights are mocked by those in the MSM and here on /. as racists and nut-cases that want the US to become Somalia, buying the government propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
God forbid the wrong lizard gets in, eh?
Strat
Sounds like small cheese compared to what was thrown down the rat-hole with Solyndra, et al. And when IS Obama-backing GE going to pay taxes? Ever again?
Strat
I wonder if they were there BECAUSE the airport was there. .
Save wildlife - build more giant complexes of buildings and asphalt
FTA: "...among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley..."
Save the Slizards!
Drill baby, drill!
What sweet irony it would be to see the likes of The Sierra Club, PETA, ELF, etc protesting because new oil rigs aren't going up fast enough!
Strat
Seriously, though, just because you say it doesn't make it true.
The simple fact that they felt it necessary, despite how self-incriminating it appears, for them to send out such a letter to their own people in essence, says many volumes about how much trust one should put in the NSA's "assurances".
The NSA is going to have to engage heavily in blackmailing politicians, because nearly everyone...(D), (R), conservatives, liberals, politicians, journalists, progressives, capitalists, socialists, and communists...have realized that the NSA doesn't make any distinctions whatsoever concerning whose data they slurp up and whether or not it might be used for blackmail or for setting them up for a lengthy prison sentence if it becomes expedient for the government to make someone "go away", short of outright State-ordered murder.
Pay no attention to anything the NSA or the politicians say. Watch what they do, instead.
Strat
And you're ignoring that the cards can be written and read in parallel with a simple metadata header to allow re-ordering at the receiving end.
Are you including the time required for the NSA to make their copies?
What, you actually thought that ICE/TSA/DHS/Border Patrol roadside checkpoints were looking for illegal aliens?
Strat
Anything that doesn't kill every last bacteria on the planet can almost necessarily be survived deep underground much more easily than in space -- and some things that do kill every last bacteria, too. There are no objects left of sufficient size in unstable orbits. Gamma ray bursts, too, are rather trivial to shield yourself from not very far underground. The only thing that will make the earth impractical is solar warming in a couple billion years, which obviously doesn't justify people over robots today.
There are good arguments for human space exploration -- but the survival of the species is a really bad argument for it because if that were your actual goal then there are so many smarter things you'd do before thinking of space.
You and your progeny are welcome to stay huddled deep underground in man-made caves while rationing-out ever smaller bits of what resources are left until either a planetary disaster or exhaustion of resources causes your deaths, just don't stand in the way of the rest of us getting off this single, vulnerable, orbiting rock with limited resources, and thus assure our species' survival while putting practically unlimited resources and wealth into our hands and hugely accelerating & advancing the level of human technological development & capability.
I do understand that there always has been and always will be those without imagination, vision, or courage. There were people at the time of every exploration of discovery in history who felt it was a waste of time and resources. People that think like you are the kind who were saying that Cook's proposed voyages were a waste, same with Darwin's voyages, Lewis & Clark's expeditions, and those explorers who discovered and explored the Americas, Antarctica, and the Arctic.
If humanity listened to those who think like you, humanity would likely already be extinct or still running and hiding from predators in Africa while dying before reaching 30, and Neanderthals would still occupy Europe.
Strat
No asteroid impact has ever or can ever extinguish all forms of life on earth or render the planet anywhere near as uninhabitable as the next best planet.
Might want to re-think that first part. There are some pretty big objects out there, and we really have little in effective observation & tracking of even the stuff in our own relative neighborhood. How about an impact with an object the size of Phobos, or even larger?
Besides, an impact that falls short your "extinguish all forms of life on Earth" is a distinction without a difference in outcome to the rest of us humans if we're all dead anyways, thanks very much. There are also gamma-ray bursts and other hazards that are even less foreseeable.
The point isn't how much worse another planet may be, it's the fact that if we achieve the goal of having significant numbers of humans living self-sustained off of Earth (planet, space habitat, whatever), it is then less likely a single planetary-scale disaster on Earth could result in total and immediate human extinction.
Of course, some people share the view of the human race as expressed by "Agent Smith": in the first "Matrix" movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Na9-jV_OJI
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
I just don't know how I could possibly have any kind of useful dialog about advancing and expanding human civilization with someone holding such beliefs. Like those people that think that all but a sufficient number of people to assure sufficient genetic diversity (wasn't it something like slightly under a billion? Or a few hundred million?) should be exterminated so as to preserve the Earth's environment and it's resources.
All I can tell them is "You first, buddy!". I plan on us getting off of this rock so that resource depletion and pollution will cease to be an issue, and so that one cosmic "oopsie" doesn't cause our extinction. I want one of the future notations that go down in humanities' history to be the date of the first human baby born on a planet of another star.
"The purpose of all life everywhere in the universe is to spread life throughout the universe and to grow and learn all that is knowable, and thus enable the universe to know itself and become self-aware, the ultimate expression of God."
Strat