Naturally, the government wants a way to find and squash video evidence taken by hobbyist drones of government incompetence and/or criminal actions, and be able to locate, silence, and/or imprison drone operators who would dare try to reveal what they want to remain hidden from the general public. Drones being used rather ubiquitously & anonymously by the general public aids in empowering them against government abuse, corruption/criminality, & overreach. Government already uses drones domestically and doesn't want the public having the same capabilities.
Now that the US military has started issuing infantry soldiers backpack recon drones, a 2nd Amendment case could be made that drones are a civil right.
I assumed they simply have a copper alloy evaporated on the surface.
The panels are made of arrays of cell-units which are themselves a number of cells. The cells themselves use a deposited conductor to transfer electricity to the edge where a larger conductor is required to carry the combined current.
You aren't going to put 10s or 100s of watts of power through tiny deposited-metal conductors without letting the magic smoke out. ('Magic smoke' is what actually makes all electronics work. Having it, or allowing it through error, to escape is what causes failures.)
Why would you use/need lead in a process producing silicon PV cells?
Solder for internal electrical connections. Of course these days the use of lead-based solder has been reduced significantly in favor of lead-free solder which can contain a mixture of tin, copper, silver, bismuth, indium, zinc, antimony, and traces of other metals. Although less toxic than lead solder, it's far from being a non-toxic or a non-pollutant. Most common lead-free solders also have a higher melting-point than traditional lead-based solder (there are some exceptions for low-melting-point solders, but those aren't generally used in solar panels).
So maybe it isn't your ISP's fault that your internet speed is so slow. It's the NSA that is adding all those extra hops over potentially congested links.:-)
This needs to be pointed out to more people, especially MMO gamers.
They'd be fine and likely not even notice if the government set up armed checkpoints and suspended civil rights, but screw with a gamer's lag & packet-loss/jitter, and you'll have an army of gamer-rage berserkers trailing Dorito crumbs headed to Washington, D.C. to burn it down!
Which is why shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is not free speech. Your understandable enthusiasm for free speech has clouded your judgement.
You're wrong under US law.
Shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, whether or not there actually is a fire, is protected speech and cannot be censored or preemptively blocked.
The *consequences* of that speech, however, are not protected by the 1st Amendment and are quite negative in nature if there were no fire.
As a side note, I wish more people understood that the free speech provisions in the 1st Amendment are there precisely to protect speech that is unpopular. These attempts to silence opposing views are ignorant in the extreme and quite dangerous, far more dangerous than any POTUS, no matter how ebil he/she might be.
If such opponents of free speech were to take power, they'd make anything Trump might do in anyone's wildest nightmares look like an ice-cream social.
If you really believe that the regulations aren't oppressive, go ahead and figure out how to legally string a one block sized network. I dare you. Oh wait, you're full of shit. There are no less than 3 dozen regulatory agencies with their fingers in the pie in Ohio.
What I'd love to see happen is for both the big ISPs and the government to end up being cut out of the loop entirely regarding controlling/regulating the internet by advances in technology making mesh-networks viable and destroying the choke-points used to limit access and enable monitoring & tracking of data traffic.
The NSA. It pooped it's pants right there in the public square. And rather than trying to clean up, it just stands there yelling "MY SHIT DON'T STINK!" while continuing to make squeaky farts..
This is probably go to a new school next year level public humiliation, but they apparently have no shame.
If you should see someone who works for the NSA, hand them a roll of toilet paper.
OMG I wish this would become a thing!
Order toilet paper sent to NSA HQ! Bury them in literally tons and tons of shit-paper every single day! Photos of piles of rolls at their doors and trucks lined up to unload more making the rounds on social media, the news cycle, etc!
Let's make it possible for drivers to see a new sign along the highways in Virginia; "See The World's Largest Mountain Of Toilet Paper! Visit NSA HQ Alexandria Next Exit!"
Destroy them with laughter! Make them such a worldwide joke (I know, they already do such a good job) that nobody takes them seriously and nobody wants to work for nor be associated with them.
Yes, exactly like guns. It's ludicrous to think you can proliferate millions of guns to "good" people, and they won't be also used by "bad" people.
Well, the horses have already left the barn on criminals having/using guns. They aren't going to turn them in if they were banned.
The question remaining is, do you allow people the ability to defend themselves, seeing as police rarely ever arrive in time to do anything other than write reports and gather evidence, or do you leave them defenseless?
Note that there are far more good people than bad people. That means that by allowing people to arm themselves there will be far more good people with guns vs bad people with guns, and the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
The option to disarm everyone is impossible in the US, too many guns already out there and far too easy to smuggle in across the land borders. Any serious attempt would only trigger a civil war.
If we play this right, and play each regime against the other, we can probably get all data banned, everywhere, which would be good for a laugh.
Look at the good side: we'd have some privacy again.
But young people would end up living in a world ruled by seniors who still remember how to live and function before there was an internet to order pizza delivered to mom's basement.
O give it a rest. The US/Western Governments aren't blameless. But it's not even CLOSE to the same. At least 'in theory' in the US we can at any time vote out the people running the show & get rid of any level of surveillance we want.
LOL!
You think they'd allow elections/votes to go forward that would actually, seriously, limit their power and abilities & methods to surveil and control the population? The *only* way such votes/elections would be allowed to go forward is if the 'fix' was already well-in. It would be Russian/Chinese/N. Korean hackers, voter fraud, climate change, stock market crash, terrorist attack...they'd throw something out there to stop it otherwise.
No, taking back freedom and liberty, this far along towards a police/surveillance-state, is going to eventually require bloodshed. Hopefully minimal, but not likely if history is any indicator.
I read about this one extreme religion where if a woman gets raped, she must be stoned to death, because she clearly didn't scream loud enough. The same religion says that women should not speak, and must submit to their husbands. It also says you have to pluck out your own eyes if you look at a woman with lust. My personal favorite is that if your child talks back to you, you should definitely beat him, and if that doesn't work, you can have the elders stone him to death.
Sounds pretty bad, right? Maybe we need to ban everybody from that religion, too. Oh wait, that's all from Christianity. Better pack your fucking bags, asshole.
Ignorant, profane, and smugly so. What a jewel in humanity's crown you are.
What you describe is Old Testament...they way things were before Jesus. Christianity reformed from that 6th-century BS with the New Testament. Islam, however, has not reformed and still clings to the same savage, uncivilized, brutal, murderous, and unjust practices of 6th-century barbarians.
Makes me wonder how many Romans with your point of view welcomed in the barbarians that killed them.
They should have done what was right in the first place.
Then the US would have remained a slave-holding British Colony, as the entire reason they were forced to compromise was the southern slave-states refused to join if they had to give up slavery.
Or, would you prefer we still owned slaves and remained a British Colony?
Beautiful strawman you've built there, but neither Trump's revised E.O. nor I said anything about "banning an entire religion".
So far, the vetting process has done an excellent job of keeping terrorists masquerading as terrorists out of the US, and I don't see why we can't keep doing that.
Yes, it's kept terrorists masquerading as terrorists out (LOL!) but there's no evidence it has kept out violent Islamic terrorists masquerading as refugees, as attacks sometimes take months or even a year or more to plan, coordinate, obtain resources, and execute.
Islam is not a death cult.
Wrong. It is an apocalyptic death-cult.
Check out the prophecies of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi. It requires Muslims to wash the world in blood to prepare for the return of the 12th Imam.
I didn't realize throwing burning tires filled with gasoline around traffic cameras was a mad max thing, I thought it was something that happened in the UK (among other places).
It's not, and you're correct re: UK, etc.
He's just a neurotic Progressive hoplophobe who has fixated on me and follows me around crapping on threads I comment in because I'm libertarian/constructionist/capitalist and favor permissive firearms laws and regulations. All of which he despises with a passion.
It's funny, as I can enjoy tormenting him with liberty 24/7 seeing as how he's given me rent-free space in his head.:D
Seriously, how the fuck can you support their "right" to teach hatred? Is be because you have some hatred towards the same groups?
"Politics makes for strange bedfellows."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Large global shifts in power, economics, and cultures are typically only achieved on large scales in relatively-short periods of time during times of global chaos and war.
Those who scheme for such large and rapid shifts want a lot of violence and chaos to 'soften-up' the old systems, and think they can step in and assume power after all the various groups have done their work for them in destroying civil order and rule of law.
The fools on the Left think they can buy-off or somehow placate and control the radical Islamists after they've helped collapse the West, the US, and Israel. They will suffer the same fate they've allowed others to suffer at the hands of the Islamists. During the Cold War Khrushchev called such people in the West "useful idiots". An apt description.
Yeah, like the definition of who is and is not a person. That worked out really well didn't it?
If you're referring to the "3/5ths Clause", that was to limit the ability of the southern states to use their slave populations to inflate their representation in Congress and thus their ability to block the abolition of slavery.
US slavery that was fought for official legal recognition by a black man, Anthony Johnson, who became the first legally-recognized (by King Henry's Colonial Courts) slave *owner* in the US, setting the legal precedent for slavery to become a US institution. This all happened decades before any of the Founding Fathers were born.
Except the "liberal" branch for various reasons does not want federalism as you have defined it. Their view is that, that "federalism" is the what is standing in the way of *civilization*.
This is spot-on. Progressivism is about 'progressing' past the limitations on Federal power in the Constitution.
This is actually an intractable problem the only way to solve it is for the liberal states to form their own sub government, which imho is not actually unconstitutional but even less practical than a full split.
It seems the Progressives have already chosen their own "final solution" at a recent Congressional charity baseball game practice. They say they want to ban guns, but when the Rule of Law stands in the way of their agendas, they become violent and pick up a gun. Time after time, a violent shooting occurs at a mall or school, and if it's not Muslims following the teachings of Mohamed to kill infidels, it's liberal-Progressive Democrat nut-jobs.
What they really want is everyone *except* them be disarmed, as cowards, murderers, and tyrants always do. They use your money to pay for armed security for themselves, but want to deny you the right to arm yourself for protection.
There are over a billion Muslims, that kind of makes the "cult" claim a bit absurd, and not all Muslims, so far as I'm aware, throw homosexuals off of buildings. In fact, it looks like it's a pretty damned small minority. Not that devout Muslims clearly don't have issues with homosexuals, but then again, I can go to a conservative Catholic forum and see the same anti-gay vitriol.
Just because a cult has a large following does not disqualify the 'cult' status, as Islam is a death-cult.
You point out that there's over a billion Muslims, and your claim of a "small percentage" being radical is arguable, but even a fraction of a billion people who believe God orders them to kill unbelievers and/or enslave them is one hell of a threat in anyone's book who is even remotely rational.
Please stop with the absurd comparisons between Muslims and Christians. Besides, even if every Christian horror story the Left spews were true, you can't justify bad actions of one with bad actions of another. "But Johnny did it too!" is the excuse of a 6-year-old. Are you emotionally/intellectually older than six?
You don't see a problem with an irrational fear of someone because of their religion?
For the gay that's in mid-fall after being thrown from a 5-story building and the woman that was raped and is being stoned to death as punishment for being a victim, I'd say their fears are VERY real, and so are the fears of any nation's citizens whose government chooses to ignore all that and allow these violent 6th-century cult-member killers and rapists into their country unchecked.
Or do they just not care, so long as they can peer into anyone and everyone's private business, regardless of being criminal/terrorist or being innocent of everything?
Pretty much this, to a greater or lesser degree.
Power, and the lust for more of it, not only corrupts it also blinds with hubris.
They dream that if they can just obtain *enough* power quickly enough, they will not suffer any negative consequences for any of their past or present actions.
I did not reply to your post, I replied to the smarmy little SJW AC and his 'white privilege' BS he attacked *you* with. I have no argument with what you posted, I'm not sure why you felt the need to snark at me. I actually defended you, after all.
The problem is that a while back folks in the entire world looked up to and respected the US legal system. And the governments of US were reciprocal in respecting the laws of other countries.
That legal system in the US is no more, gone to meet its maker, toast, pining for the fjord, stunned and resting. The governments and their puppet courts in the US no longer respect the laws of its Constitution protecting its own citizens, and certainly don't give a rat's ass about the "rights" of any other human beings on the planet.
If you want to drill-down to the primary cause, it's because the US has abandoned standing for principles in favor of acting on interests which change with the breeze and the 24-hr news cycle.
It's the abandonment of eternal principles in favor of fleeting interests which has done the most to damage the US both domestically and internationally, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally, the government wants a way to find and squash video evidence taken by hobbyist drones of government incompetence and/or criminal actions, and be able to locate, silence, and/or imprison drone operators who would dare try to reveal what they want to remain hidden from the general public. Drones being used rather ubiquitously & anonymously by the general public aids in empowering them against government abuse, corruption/criminality, & overreach. Government already uses drones domestically and doesn't want the public having the same capabilities.
Now that the US military has started issuing infantry soldiers backpack recon drones, a 2nd Amendment case could be made that drones are a civil right.
Strat
I assumed they simply have a copper alloy evaporated on the surface.
The panels are made of arrays of cell-units which are themselves a number of cells. The cells themselves use a deposited conductor to transfer electricity to the edge where a larger conductor is required to carry the combined current.
You aren't going to put 10s or 100s of watts of power through tiny deposited-metal conductors without letting the magic smoke out. ('Magic smoke' is what actually makes all electronics work. Having it, or allowing it through error, to escape is what causes failures.)
Strat
Why would you use/need lead in a process producing silicon PV cells?
Solder for internal electrical connections. Of course these days the use of lead-based solder has been reduced significantly in favor of lead-free solder which can contain a mixture of tin, copper, silver, bismuth, indium, zinc, antimony, and traces of other metals. Although less toxic than lead solder, it's far from being a non-toxic or a non-pollutant. Most common lead-free solders also have a higher melting-point than traditional lead-based solder (there are some exceptions for low-melting-point solders, but those aren't generally used in solar panels).
Strat
So maybe it isn't your ISP's fault that your internet speed is so slow. It's the NSA that is adding all those extra hops over potentially congested links. :-)
This needs to be pointed out to more people, especially MMO gamers.
They'd be fine and likely not even notice if the government set up armed checkpoints and suspended civil rights, but screw with a gamer's lag & packet-loss/jitter, and you'll have an army of gamer-rage berserkers trailing Dorito crumbs headed to Washington, D.C. to burn it down!
Strat
Which is why shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is not free speech. Your understandable enthusiasm for free speech has clouded your judgement.
You're wrong under US law.
Shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, whether or not there actually is a fire, is protected speech and cannot be censored or preemptively blocked.
The *consequences* of that speech, however, are not protected by the 1st Amendment and are quite negative in nature if there were no fire.
As a side note, I wish more people understood that the free speech provisions in the 1st Amendment are there precisely to protect speech that is unpopular. These attempts to silence opposing views are ignorant in the extreme and quite dangerous, far more dangerous than any POTUS, no matter how ebil he/she might be.
If such opponents of free speech were to take power, they'd make anything Trump might do in anyone's wildest nightmares look like an ice-cream social.
Strat
If you really believe that the regulations aren't oppressive, go ahead and figure out how to legally string a one block sized network. I dare you. Oh wait, you're full of shit. There are no less than 3 dozen regulatory agencies with their fingers in the pie in Ohio.
What I'd love to see happen is for both the big ISPs and the government to end up being cut out of the loop entirely regarding controlling/regulating the internet by advances in technology making mesh-networks viable and destroying the choke-points used to limit access and enable monitoring & tracking of data traffic.
Strat
The NSA. It pooped it's pants right there in the public square. And rather than trying to clean up, it just stands there yelling "MY SHIT DON'T STINK!" while continuing to make squeaky farts..
This is probably go to a new school next year level public humiliation, but they apparently have no shame.
If you should see someone who works for the NSA, hand them a roll of toilet paper.
OMG I wish this would become a thing!
Order toilet paper sent to NSA HQ! Bury them in literally tons and tons of shit-paper every single day! Photos of piles of rolls at their doors and trucks lined up to unload more making the rounds on social media, the news cycle, etc!
Let's make it possible for drivers to see a new sign along the highways in Virginia; "See The World's Largest Mountain Of Toilet Paper! Visit NSA HQ Alexandria Next Exit!"
Destroy them with laughter! Make them such a worldwide joke (I know, they already do such a good job) that nobody takes them seriously and nobody wants to work for nor be associated with them.
Strat
Yes, exactly like guns. It's ludicrous to think you can proliferate millions of guns to "good" people, and they won't be also used by "bad" people.
Well, the horses have already left the barn on criminals having/using guns. They aren't going to turn them in if they were banned.
The question remaining is, do you allow people the ability to defend themselves, seeing as police rarely ever arrive in time to do anything other than write reports and gather evidence, or do you leave them defenseless?
Note that there are far more good people than bad people. That means that by allowing people to arm themselves there will be far more good people with guns vs bad people with guns, and the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
The option to disarm everyone is impossible in the US, too many guns already out there and far too easy to smuggle in across the land borders. Any serious attempt would only trigger a civil war.
Strat
But young people would end up living in a world ruled by seniors who still remember how to live and function before there was an internet to order pizza delivered to mom's basement.
Strat
That was obveioulsy a typo. AC wants to figure out which war is the fastest.
The only winning move is not to play.
Strat
O give it a rest. The US/Western Governments aren't blameless. But it's not even CLOSE to the same. At least 'in theory' in the US we can at any time vote out the people running the show & get rid of any level of surveillance we want.
LOL!
You think they'd allow elections/votes to go forward that would actually, seriously, limit their power and abilities & methods to surveil and control the population? The *only* way such votes/elections would be allowed to go forward is if the 'fix' was already well-in. It would be Russian/Chinese/N. Korean hackers, voter fraud, climate change, stock market crash, terrorist attack...they'd throw something out there to stop it otherwise.
No, taking back freedom and liberty, this far along towards a police/surveillance-state, is going to eventually require bloodshed. Hopefully minimal, but not likely if history is any indicator.
Strat
I read about this one extreme religion where if a woman gets raped, she must be stoned to death, because she clearly didn't scream loud enough. The same religion says that women should not speak, and must submit to their husbands. It also says you have to pluck out your own eyes if you look at a woman with lust. My personal favorite is that if your child talks back to you, you should definitely beat him, and if that doesn't work, you can have the elders stone him to death.
Sounds pretty bad, right? Maybe we need to ban everybody from that religion, too. Oh wait, that's all from Christianity. Better pack your fucking bags, asshole.
Ignorant, profane, and smugly so. What a jewel in humanity's crown you are.
What you describe is Old Testament...they way things were before Jesus. Christianity reformed from that 6th-century BS with the New Testament. Islam, however, has not reformed and still clings to the same savage, uncivilized, brutal, murderous, and unjust practices of 6th-century barbarians.
Makes me wonder how many Romans with your point of view welcomed in the barbarians that killed them.
Strat
They should have done what was right in the first place.
Then the US would have remained a slave-holding British Colony, as the entire reason they were forced to compromise was the southern slave-states refused to join if they had to give up slavery.
Or, would you prefer we still owned slaves and remained a British Colony?
Strat
Banning an entire religion...
Beautiful strawman you've built there, but neither Trump's revised E.O. nor I said anything about "banning an entire religion".
So far, the vetting process has done an excellent job of keeping terrorists masquerading as terrorists out of the US, and I don't see why we can't keep doing that.
Yes, it's kept terrorists masquerading as terrorists out (LOL!) but there's no evidence it has kept out violent Islamic terrorists masquerading as refugees, as attacks sometimes take months or even a year or more to plan, coordinate, obtain resources, and execute.
Islam is not a death cult.
Wrong. It is an apocalyptic death-cult.
Check out the prophecies of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi. It requires Muslims to wash the world in blood to prepare for the return of the 12th Imam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Many key power figures in the ME are adherents.
Strat
I didn't realize throwing burning tires filled with gasoline around traffic cameras was a mad max thing, I thought it was something that happened in the UK (among other places).
It's not, and you're correct re: UK, etc.
He's just a neurotic Progressive hoplophobe who has fixated on me and follows me around crapping on threads I comment in because I'm libertarian/constructionist/capitalist and favor permissive firearms laws and regulations. All of which he despises with a passion.
It's funny, as I can enjoy tormenting him with liberty 24/7 seeing as how he's given me rent-free space in his head. :D
Strat
Seriously, how the fuck can you support their "right" to teach hatred? Is be because you have some hatred towards the same groups?
"Politics makes for strange bedfellows."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Large global shifts in power, economics, and cultures are typically only achieved on large scales in relatively-short periods of time during times of global chaos and war.
Those who scheme for such large and rapid shifts want a lot of violence and chaos to 'soften-up' the old systems, and think they can step in and assume power after all the various groups have done their work for them in destroying civil order and rule of law.
The fools on the Left think they can buy-off or somehow placate and control the radical Islamists after they've helped collapse the West, the US, and Israel. They will suffer the same fate they've allowed others to suffer at the hands of the Islamists. During the Cold War Khrushchev called such people in the West "useful idiots". An apt description.
Strat
"Everything else can be handled by the states."
Yeah, like the definition of who is and is not a person. That worked out really well didn't it?
If you're referring to the "3/5ths Clause", that was to limit the ability of the southern states to use their slave populations to inflate their representation in Congress and thus their ability to block the abolition of slavery.
US slavery that was fought for official legal recognition by a black man, Anthony Johnson, who became the first legally-recognized (by King Henry's Colonial Courts) slave *owner* in the US, setting the legal precedent for slavery to become a US institution. This all happened decades before any of the Founding Fathers were born.
Strat
Except the "liberal" branch for various reasons does not want federalism as you have defined it. Their view is that, that "federalism" is the what is standing in the way of *civilization*.
This is spot-on. Progressivism is about 'progressing' past the limitations on Federal power in the Constitution.
This is actually an intractable problem the only way to solve it is for the liberal states to form their own sub government, which imho is not actually unconstitutional but even less practical than a full split.
It seems the Progressives have already chosen their own "final solution" at a recent Congressional charity baseball game practice. They say they want to ban guns, but when the Rule of Law stands in the way of their agendas, they become violent and pick up a gun. Time after time, a violent shooting occurs at a mall or school, and if it's not Muslims following the teachings of Mohamed to kill infidels, it's liberal-Progressive Democrat nut-jobs.
What they really want is everyone *except* them be disarmed, as cowards, murderers, and tyrants always do. They use your money to pay for armed security for themselves, but want to deny you the right to arm yourself for protection.
Ammo-up.
Strat
There are over a billion Muslims, that kind of makes the "cult" claim a bit absurd, and not all Muslims, so far as I'm aware, throw homosexuals off of buildings. In fact, it looks like it's a pretty damned small minority. Not that devout Muslims clearly don't have issues with homosexuals, but then again, I can go to a conservative Catholic forum and see the same anti-gay vitriol.
Just because a cult has a large following does not disqualify the 'cult' status, as Islam is a death-cult.
You point out that there's over a billion Muslims, and your claim of a "small percentage" being radical is arguable, but even a fraction of a billion people who believe God orders them to kill unbelievers and/or enslave them is one hell of a threat in anyone's book who is even remotely rational.
Please stop with the absurd comparisons between Muslims and Christians. Besides, even if every Christian horror story the Left spews were true, you can't justify bad actions of one with bad actions of another. "But Johnny did it too!" is the excuse of a 6-year-old. Are you emotionally/intellectually older than six?
Strat
You don't see a problem with an irrational fear of someone because of their religion?
For the gay that's in mid-fall after being thrown from a 5-story building and the woman that was raped and is being stoned to death as punishment for being a victim, I'd say their fears are VERY real, and so are the fears of any nation's citizens whose government chooses to ignore all that and allow these violent 6th-century cult-member killers and rapists into their country unchecked.
Strat
Muggles should not be allowed to create laws pertaining to magic.
That'll only happen when you can 'magic'-away bullets.
Strat
Or do they just not care, so long as they can peer into anyone and everyone's private business, regardless of being criminal/terrorist or being innocent of everything?
Pretty much this, to a greater or lesser degree.
Power, and the lust for more of it, not only corrupts it also blinds with hubris.
They dream that if they can just obtain *enough* power quickly enough, they will not suffer any negative consequences for any of their past or present actions.
Strat
I guess that the infection having been discovered means people will have to go back to placing burning tires filled with gasoline on them! :P
Strat
I did not reply to your post, I replied to the smarmy little SJW AC and his 'white privilege' BS he attacked *you* with. I have no argument with what you posted, I'm not sure why you felt the need to snark at me. I actually defended you, after all.
Strat
The problem is that a while back folks in the entire world looked up to and respected the US legal system. And the governments of US were reciprocal in respecting the laws of other countries.
That legal system in the US is no more, gone to meet its maker, toast, pining for the fjord, stunned and resting. The governments and their puppet courts in the US no longer respect the laws of its Constitution protecting its own citizens, and certainly don't give a rat's ass about the "rights" of any other human beings on the planet.
If you want to drill-down to the primary cause, it's because the US has abandoned standing for principles in favor of acting on interests which change with the breeze and the 24-hr news cycle.
It's the abandonment of eternal principles in favor of fleeting interests which has done the most to damage the US both domestically and internationally, IMHO.
Strat