Or you know, the obvious solution of actively enforcing anti-corruption laws and all those 'small details'.
Good luck getting them to enforce corruption laws against themselves. That's been the problem. There've been plenty of anti-corruption/oversight laws passed, but the government will never convict itself, particularly once it has become such a behemoth as it is today, controlling trillions of dollars.
The more power you allow a government, the more prone to corruption and tyranny and the less accountable to its' citizens it becomes. It's like a 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' for governments. It is inescapable unless and until huge changes occur to basic human behavior that would render us an almost entirely different species that may not even require government at all.
Or simply kill the movie studio and MPAA/RIAA heads.
You'd likely get less than 10 years for that at least in time served, so why not? Same with Lords & MPs who are in favor of this expanded sentencing for copyright violations.
Off with their heads (which seems rather a popular pastime in the UK since the influx of young men from the ME ramped up)!
Is it still treason when what you're betraying are orders to hide the treason that's being committed against the country?
With the current leadership of the US, someone revealing their corruption is just about the *only* time serious talk of charges of treason are even discussed!
You can defy Congressional subpoenas, violate security protocols all day long, lie, cheat, steal, and kill, but as long as you're 'connected' to the current regime, you're good. However, uncover government corruption/lawbreaking and they'll come after you hard. Same as any other thoroughly-corrupt banana-republic. Why do you think Obama is so keen on Cuba? Mutual tyranny-admiration society.
There was a clear demarcation between the domestic related material and the foreign intelligence related material.
No, there was not.
That was the whole point and why people are upset! Supposedly 'foreign' intelligence-gathering scooping up masses of domestic data on US citizens and being retained in essence forever.
Way to (intentionally) miss the pachyderm sitting in your lap!
Of course it's quite likely you're paid (like many others posting on related topics in which governments have an interest) to post such utter nonsense so it's not really surprising.
The rule change says that IF a target computer is concealing itself through some technical means, like a VPN or TOR,...
Or NAT like most consumer routers employ? Who defines the terms? When are they defined, if they are defined...before civil rights are violated or belatedly (if at all) years later after a lengthy string of legal battles to nail down the meanings?
The other question this brings up is of "juris-my-diction" (Matrix). A court/judge either has full jurisdiction in a location/area or he does not. If a court/judge has a limitless jurisdiction over the internet in this case, that means courts/judges have limitless jurisdiction regarding the internet in all matters before them.
This is not a good thing. There are reasons why judges/courts were set up with limited jurisdictions, and it was not purely or even majorly a matter of slow transportation and communication at that time period.
Nice logic. When you are in a courtroom and put your hand on the bible to verify what you say is true, does that mean you read the whole bible?
If everyone is expected to have read and understood every single law on the books ('ignorance of the law is no excuse' even though after spending millions of $ on research they can't even say *how many* Federal laws there are [never mind local laws]) why would an exception be made here?
Oh sure, focus on the loss of wilderness rather than the energy and minerals that have been sourced!
As the saying some here like to quote goes; "With taxes I buy civilization" there's a corollary to that here; 'With energy and resources I build civilization".
IMO the ultimate goal should be to move as much industrialization, resource gathering, energy production/collection, and other manufacturing and industrial processes as possible & practical off of the planet. This will solve or greatly mitigate a whole host of problems.
In order to accomplish that goal, we must advance our scientific, industrial, and technical bases to a level sufficient to achieve that level of technological capability. This will at first require using finite planetary resources and energy.
Keeping in mind the finite nature of planetary resources, conserving too much for too long will mean passing the 'point of no-return' where there will no longer be sufficient resources available, thereby dooming civilization to disintegrate when sufficient planetary resources to maintain it are gone. Make no mistake, the clock is ticking on Man's window of opportunity to move his heavy industry (and himself) off-planet.
There has to be an optimum curve that describes the optimum usage rates/patterns vs tech/industrial/scientific advancement/capability vs pollution/AGW/resource-depletion, keeping in mind that once most heavy industrial/mining/energy production moves off-planet much of the damage will be healed/reclaimed by nature plus any reclamatory projects undertaken.
"You know why, since they vastly outnumber us, all the animals haven't just ganged up and killed all us humans?" "No, why?" "Because they know we're the only ones that have any hope of saving their asses from the *next* meteor!"
You become so narcissistic that you begin to think you are the centre of the universe and that any obstacle you face is a moral outrage. Naturally you are outraged by taxes then.
The trouble is that normal people actually associate with other individuals and have compassion and empathy for them. Normal, sound human beings actually want to help others who are suffering.
Well then, it follows logically that if taxes == compassion & empathy, then the the only compassionate and empathetic thing to do is to tax 100% and distribute it where needed (we won't discuss who makes those decisions nor what standards/definitions they use).
Government is a necessary evil and so the taxes that are necessary to support it are likewise a necessary evil, the less of both we can comfortably and as a practical matter do without, the more free and wealthy everyone is. Government is by its' very nature a restriction of freedoms and liberties. That's all government is; an organization set up for the creation and enforcement of rules forbidding, restricting, or compelling under threat of organized lethal force. It consumes the wealth generated by peoples' labor, produces nothing, and pays no interest while redistributing the rest to political cronies, towards expanding their personal power, and furthering their ideological agendas.
In order to have a free & open society where individual rights and freedom are paramount and Rule of Law is the norm for rich and poor alike, government must be as local and decentralized as possible, putting the decisions affecting the peoples' lives and those who make them as close and accountable as possible to those they govern. Central governments must be kept only as powerful as necessary to maintain the functions of a nation, with only very narrow and compartmentalized domestic powers.
If there is great power there that someone could benefit from, it will be bought/sold (or blackmailed etc) somehow by someone somewhere along the way. It's human nature. The only practical way to mitigate the risks are to break up the power and decentralize it, just as a network of standalone boxes are more resilient to intrusions than a server/dumb-client network, all things being equal.
Those agencies still believe in the myth that big data can pull the One True Terrorist out of a hundred million, if you just give it a big enough data set. They can't. They don't have enough of a positive control population to train their algorithms. The data may be helpful, after the fact, to find co-conspirators, but even that hasn't really worked out so far. If big data really worked, I wouldn't be seeing ads for TVs for a month after I bought one.
Those agencies, at the top levels, never believed any such thing. It was never designed nor intended to catch "terrorists". That was just the cover story.
What it *is* ideal for is domestic surveillance (and blackmail) of journalists, activists, ideological/political opponents/candidates, parallel-construction, and planting evidence (at least, as long as they still bother with things like trials and evidence).
I can even get paid for it if I have a commercial license.
And that right there is why Flight Club exists and why you don't talk about Flight Club.
The cost, difficulty, and ongoing hassle & expense of obtaining and maintaining a commercial pilot's license and the restrictive nature of FAA rules surrounding non-commercial pilots accepting any money from a passenger and all the requirements for security/passenger-screening, registering routes, etc etc etc. You can't simply take the classes and pass the tests, buy/lease a passenger aircraft, hang a shingle, and start running radio ads like the local auto-parts store.
The entire system is unnecessarily designed so as to prevent individual entrepreneurship in passenger and cargo air transport. There are no "independent owner/operator truckers" of the airways except for a very few in places like Alaska where the major commercial operators have no interest in taking on services.
Preventing competition and small-business operators by raising the bar to entry to effectively restrict commercial air passenger & cargo transportation to a small number of large corporations by the government enacting the necessary laws, Acts, and regulations is intentional. A handful of large corporations are much easier to monitor and control to enable tracking and controlling individual domestic travel than thousands of small-time private operations.
I can arrive at my local, SF Bay Area commuter airport, drive straight up to my plane, pull the plane out, park in the hangar, taxi and be in LA, Reno or Las Vegas usually before a commercial flight takes off. People keep saying that General Aviation is suffering but it's only because people are willing to deal with 3 hour waits for security.
I rarely need to go across the country. You'll never see me at SFO, SJC or OAK for anyplace that I can fly to in less than a tank of gas for my private plane...
I'm surprised there hasn't been a huge uptick in private pilots being busted for flying people "under the table" to their destinations.
Then again I can understand why there hasn't been much in the news about it.
The first rule of Flight Club is; don't talk about Flight Club.
What replaces fossil fuels must have comparable energy densities and portability/replenishment/refueling cycle times and ranges.
Kinda...
What it really needs, is lower cost. In stationary applications, cost per KwH is what matters. For transport fuels, it's cost per unit of payload * distance. Refueling time is a cost factor. Energy density is a cost factor.
Yes, I agree. I generalized greatly. My post was starting to get long. Posts on an internet forum are a clumsy & ham-handed way to discuss an extremely complicated and nuanced subject.
In an effort to promote clarity, I try to keep posts relatively brief and as a result have to stay away from 'going into the weeds' too far when covering multiple aspects of a subject, as the 'wall-O-text' effect can make reading it once posted frustrating and painful for the reader.
Energy is mostly a fungible resource. Whether you produce it with fossil fuels or renewable energy it's still the same thing. It's time to let go of the past and look to the future.
What replaces fossil fuels must have comparable energy densities and portability/replenishment/refueling cycle times and ranges.
What many fail to factor seriously enough is the effects of energy price increases on the poor and working-poor.
The effects of rising energy costs can be measured in lives lost among the most vulnerable. How many grannies freezing to death and babies starving per kilowatt/hour are you willing to pay for pushing energy costs up by pushing alternative energy sources that aren't yet mature/ready to meet energy needs at comparable costs etc (as outlined above)?
As electric vehicles grow in numbers a large amount will need to be spent on recharging infrastructure and they will also require a huge increase in electrical generation capacity of the US grid to basically switch all the energy formerly consumed by IC vehicles over to mostly being drawn from the national electrical grid which is already heavily stressed and at dangerously-low capacity due to the large numbers of coal plants taken offline and their capacity not being replaced (by anything, renewable/green or not) at anything like a 1:1 ratio.
It sounds like these people would welcome a global economic collapse, or at least a Western economic collapse, as a shortcut towards reducing major sources of GHGs like industrial/power generation activities and population numbers through attrition from the resulting wars, mass starvation, and domestic rebellion/violence/riots within the various affected developed nations that a major global economic disaster would precipitate.
You have read too much bad fiction. In reality armed people usually helped authoritarian governments because former soldiers and gun nuts are usually just fine with authoritarian governments, provided it is their kind of authoritarian.
I find it telling that out of all the things I listed which are pretty much equal in terms of building-blocks towards fomenting and enabling the rise of authoritarianism in a relatively free & open society, firearms are what you chose to focus on.
Yep. Any attempt to curb trolling would be tantamout to mandating that one only speaks the truth, and you can't do that.
Authoritarian regimes have been known to do a pretty decent (if shockingly brutal, bloody, & heartless at times) job of it (*their* version of it) given sufficient jackboots, strong domestic data/communications gathering/analysis, and a nearly disarmed (of any sort of effective combat-useful weapons, at least), disheartened, economically stressed, and divided population.....
A sniper rifle requires high quality manufacturing and accurate long range shooting, which is difficult even under the best of circumstances.
Sniping is a tactic, any ranged weapon can be employed to snipe a target.
Lee Harvey Oswald used a WW2 (mfg. ~1940) surplus Italian Carcano 91/38 6.5mm bolt-action carbine with a 4x Ordnance Optics telescopic sight to kill JFK with a headshot in a moving car. Neither the weapon nor 'scope were of what would be considered 'high quality' even by normal hunting/sport standards.
LHO was a good shot, achieving the "Sharpshooter" qualification twice while in the Marines, but that is not that unusual. My father also earned the "sharpshooter" bar in the US Army in WW2 and was a good shot, but he wasn't "amazing" or anything.
Something like a decent-condition WW2-surplus Mosin-Nagant 91/30 can be had for around ~$250 last I checked, and they are excellent weapons and make a great low-cost and quite powerful rifle to use for sniping. The 91/30 PU factory-setup sniper version with the rather strange looking offset-mounted 'scope is very sought-after. With a properly selected and adjusted 'scope on a regular 91/30 in the hands of a competent-but-not-'pro-level' shooter, 98%+ first-shot hits at ~600 yards on a 4-inch target aren't atypical.
The War on Drugs as a policy started with Johnson, a Democrat. Also the one who started the Great Society bullshit, which arguably was the greatest single cause in the rise of single motherhood among the black population. Nixon gave the policy a catchy name and consolidated the disparate efforts already ongoing in the US federal govt. Reagan inherited a rapidly growing problem, and while he certainly didn't help the situation, did pretty much what every adviser and think tank apart from the hippies and libertarians at the time was telling the federal govt to do.
Approximately correct in the essential facts, some brevity of comments on a forum being necessary. There was a lot going on then just as now, and again as now, there were many disparate groups on the left that ended up contributing towards certain common Progressive goals even if there was no conscious or active coordination.
It never ceases to amaze how quickly people forget even quite-recent history and/or accept a "revised and edited" version of what actually transpired even when they are aware of the disparity. Then again, the human ability to hold two totally conflicting beliefs simultaneously while totally convinced of the truth of both is what tyrants and despots have always counted on.
These particular powerful people are more powerful than most governments.
Unlike powerful governments, powerful *people* can be stopped by a nobody with the motivation and a 50-cent bullet in a sub-$200 military-surplus rifle.
Why do you think the gun-banners are going after rifles first instead of handguns which are used in orders-of-magnitude greater numbers of crimes/murders? The powerful know a sniper with a rifle is a far more deadly threat to them than someone with a handgun which requires being close and visible to security personnel.
May I suggest an Honest tag line? Liberalism: Ideas so good they require an end to the world's largest prison state that has supported fascism for so many years.
I thought you said "Honest"?
Liberalism ("Progressivism") is precisely what has led to the creation of the US prison state and fomented the spread of fascism in the US. I've personally watched it happening in real-time over the last 5+ decades.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but in reading further I see AMD is joining the conga-line of criminal-collusion also.
I guess this means buying used/older hardware from this point on. At least, until Intel/AMD/MS lobby for laws making the sale/transfer of old PC hardware and running of non-MS approved OSes illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you know, the obvious solution of actively enforcing anti-corruption laws and all those 'small details'.
Good luck getting them to enforce corruption laws against themselves. That's been the problem. There've been plenty of anti-corruption/oversight laws passed, but the government will never convict itself, particularly once it has become such a behemoth as it is today, controlling trillions of dollars.
The more power you allow a government, the more prone to corruption and tyranny and the less accountable to its' citizens it becomes. It's like a 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' for governments. It is inescapable unless and until huge changes occur to basic human behavior that would render us an almost entirely different species that may not even require government at all.
Strat
A tax-cheat alcoholic?
Sounds like just the sort a corrupt industry wants in power because he's easily blackmailed/bribed.
Strat
Don't be and Online Pirate.
Or simply kill the movie studio and MPAA/RIAA heads.
You'd likely get less than 10 years for that at least in time served, so why not? Same with Lords & MPs who are in favor of this expanded sentencing for copyright violations.
Off with their heads (which seems rather a popular pastime in the UK since the influx of young men from the ME ramped up)!
Strat
Is it still treason when what you're betraying are orders to hide the treason that's being committed against the country?
With the current leadership of the US, someone revealing their corruption is just about the *only* time serious talk of charges of treason are even discussed!
You can defy Congressional subpoenas, violate security protocols all day long, lie, cheat, steal, and kill, but as long as you're 'connected' to the current regime, you're good. However, uncover government corruption/lawbreaking and they'll come after you hard. Same as any other thoroughly-corrupt banana-republic. Why do you think Obama is so keen on Cuba? Mutual tyranny-admiration society.
Strat
There was a clear demarcation between the domestic related material and the foreign intelligence related material.
No, there was not.
That was the whole point and why people are upset! Supposedly 'foreign' intelligence-gathering scooping up masses of domestic data on US citizens and being retained in essence forever.
Way to (intentionally) miss the pachyderm sitting in your lap!
Of course it's quite likely you're paid (like many others posting on related topics in which governments have an interest) to post such utter nonsense so it's not really surprising.
Strat
The rule change says that IF a target computer is concealing itself through some technical means, like a VPN or TOR,...
Or NAT like most consumer routers employ? Who defines the terms? When are they defined, if they are defined...before civil rights are violated or belatedly (if at all) years later after a lengthy string of legal battles to nail down the meanings?
The other question this brings up is of "juris-my-diction" (Matrix). A court/judge either has full jurisdiction in a location/area or he does not. If a court/judge has a limitless jurisdiction over the internet in this case, that means courts/judges have limitless jurisdiction regarding the internet in all matters before them.
This is not a good thing. There are reasons why judges/courts were set up with limited jurisdictions, and it was not purely or even majorly a matter of slow transportation and communication at that time period.
Strat
Caught that too. Incompetent buffoons.
They likely have CRT monitors to boot.
What's with the CRT-hate?
I'll have you know my SGI 061-0025-001(Sony GDM4011P) 20" 1900x1280 monitor looks *great* running on my SGI Octane!
Strat
"Loonies Threaten To Throw Rice!"
Ah, what a great read!
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" - Robert A. Heinlein
Strat
Nice logic. When you are in a courtroom and put your hand on the bible to verify what you say is true, does that mean you read the whole bible?
If everyone is expected to have read and understood every single law on the books ('ignorance of the law is no excuse' even though after spending millions of $ on research they can't even say *how many* Federal laws there are [never mind local laws]) why would an exception be made here?
Strat
Oh sure, focus on the loss of wilderness rather than the energy and minerals that have been sourced!
As the saying some here like to quote goes; "With taxes I buy civilization" there's a corollary to that here; 'With energy and resources I build civilization".
IMO the ultimate goal should be to move as much industrialization, resource gathering, energy production/collection, and other manufacturing and industrial processes as possible & practical off of the planet. This will solve or greatly mitigate a whole host of problems.
In order to accomplish that goal, we must advance our scientific, industrial, and technical bases to a level sufficient to achieve that level of technological capability. This will at first require using finite planetary resources and energy.
Keeping in mind the finite nature of planetary resources, conserving too much for too long will mean passing the 'point of no-return' where there will no longer be sufficient resources available, thereby dooming civilization to disintegrate when sufficient planetary resources to maintain it are gone. Make no mistake, the clock is ticking on Man's window of opportunity to move his heavy industry (and himself) off-planet.
There has to be an optimum curve that describes the optimum usage rates/patterns vs tech/industrial/scientific advancement/capability vs pollution/AGW/resource-depletion, keeping in mind that once most heavy industrial/mining/energy production moves off-planet much of the damage will be healed/reclaimed by nature plus any reclamatory projects undertaken.
"You know why, since they vastly outnumber us, all the animals haven't just ganged up and killed all us humans?" "No, why?" "Because they know we're the only ones that have any hope of saving their asses from the *next* meteor!"
Strat
You become so narcissistic that you begin to think you are the centre of the universe and that any obstacle you face is a moral outrage. Naturally you are outraged by taxes then.
The trouble is that normal people actually associate with other individuals and have compassion and empathy for them. Normal, sound human beings actually want to help others who are suffering.
Well then, it follows logically that if taxes == compassion & empathy, then the the only compassionate and empathetic thing to do is to tax 100% and distribute it where needed (we won't discuss who makes those decisions nor what standards/definitions they use).
Government is a necessary evil and so the taxes that are necessary to support it are likewise a necessary evil, the less of both we can comfortably and as a practical matter do without, the more free and wealthy everyone is. Government is by its' very nature a restriction of freedoms and liberties. That's all government is; an organization set up for the creation and enforcement of rules forbidding, restricting, or compelling under threat of organized lethal force. It consumes the wealth generated by peoples' labor, produces nothing, and pays no interest while redistributing the rest to political cronies, towards expanding their personal power, and furthering their ideological agendas.
In order to have a free & open society where individual rights and freedom are paramount and Rule of Law is the norm for rich and poor alike, government must be as local and decentralized as possible, putting the decisions affecting the peoples' lives and those who make them as close and accountable as possible to those they govern. Central governments must be kept only as powerful as necessary to maintain the functions of a nation, with only very narrow and compartmentalized domestic powers.
If there is great power there that someone could benefit from, it will be bought/sold (or blackmailed etc) somehow by someone somewhere along the way. It's human nature. The only practical way to mitigate the risks are to break up the power and decentralize it, just as a network of standalone boxes are more resilient to intrusions than a server/dumb-client network, all things being equal.
Strat
Those agencies still believe in the myth that big data can pull the One True Terrorist out of a hundred million, if you just give it a big enough data set. They can't. They don't have enough of a positive control population to train their algorithms. The data may be helpful, after the fact, to find co-conspirators, but even that hasn't really worked out so far. If big data really worked, I wouldn't be seeing ads for TVs for a month after I bought one.
Those agencies, at the top levels, never believed any such thing. It was never designed nor intended to catch "terrorists". That was just the cover story.
What it *is* ideal for is domestic surveillance (and blackmail) of journalists, activists, ideological/political opponents/candidates, parallel-construction, and planting evidence (at least, as long as they still bother with things like trials and evidence).
Strat
I can even get paid for it if I have a commercial license.
And that right there is why Flight Club exists and why you don't talk about Flight Club.
The cost, difficulty, and ongoing hassle & expense of obtaining and maintaining a commercial pilot's license and the restrictive nature of FAA rules surrounding non-commercial pilots accepting any money from a passenger and all the requirements for security/passenger-screening, registering routes, etc etc etc. You can't simply take the classes and pass the tests, buy/lease a passenger aircraft, hang a shingle, and start running radio ads like the local auto-parts store.
The entire system is unnecessarily designed so as to prevent individual entrepreneurship in passenger and cargo air transport. There are no "independent owner/operator truckers" of the airways except for a very few in places like Alaska where the major commercial operators have no interest in taking on services.
Preventing competition and small-business operators by raising the bar to entry to effectively restrict commercial air passenger & cargo transportation to a small number of large corporations by the government enacting the necessary laws, Acts, and regulations is intentional. A handful of large corporations are much easier to monitor and control to enable tracking and controlling individual domestic travel than thousands of small-time private operations.
Strat
I can arrive at my local, SF Bay Area commuter airport, drive straight up to my plane, pull the plane out, park in the hangar, taxi and be in LA, Reno or Las Vegas usually before a commercial flight takes off. People keep saying that General Aviation is suffering but it's only because people are willing to deal with 3 hour waits for security.
I rarely need to go across the country. You'll never see me at SFO, SJC or OAK for anyplace that I can fly to in less than a tank of gas for my private plane...
I'm surprised there hasn't been a huge uptick in private pilots being busted for flying people "under the table" to their destinations.
Then again I can understand why there hasn't been much in the news about it.
The first rule of Flight Club is; don't talk about Flight Club.
Strat
Yes, I agree. I generalized greatly. My post was starting to get long. Posts on an internet forum are a clumsy & ham-handed way to discuss an extremely complicated and nuanced subject.
In an effort to promote clarity, I try to keep posts relatively brief and as a result have to stay away from 'going into the weeds' too far when covering multiple aspects of a subject, as the 'wall-O-text' effect can make reading it once posted frustrating and painful for the reader.
Strat
Energy is mostly a fungible resource. Whether you produce it with fossil fuels or renewable energy it's still the same thing. It's time to let go of the past and look to the future.
What replaces fossil fuels must have comparable energy densities and portability/replenishment/refueling cycle times and ranges.
What many fail to factor seriously enough is the effects of energy price increases on the poor and working-poor.
The effects of rising energy costs can be measured in lives lost among the most vulnerable. How many grannies freezing to death and babies starving per kilowatt/hour are you willing to pay for pushing energy costs up by pushing alternative energy sources that aren't yet mature/ready to meet energy needs at comparable costs etc (as outlined above)?
As electric vehicles grow in numbers a large amount will need to be spent on recharging infrastructure and they will also require a huge increase in electrical generation capacity of the US grid to basically switch all the energy formerly consumed by IC vehicles over to mostly being drawn from the national electrical grid which is already heavily stressed and at dangerously-low capacity due to the large numbers of coal plants taken offline and their capacity not being replaced (by anything, renewable/green or not) at anything like a 1:1 ratio.
Strat
It sounds like these people would welcome a global economic collapse, or at least a Western economic collapse, as a shortcut towards reducing major sources of GHGs like industrial/power generation activities and population numbers through attrition from the resulting wars, mass starvation, and domestic rebellion/violence/riots within the various affected developed nations that a major global economic disaster would precipitate.
Strat
You have read too much bad fiction. In reality armed people usually helped authoritarian governments because former soldiers and gun nuts are usually just fine with authoritarian governments, provided it is their kind of authoritarian.
I find it telling that out of all the things I listed which are pretty much equal in terms of building-blocks towards fomenting and enabling the rise of authoritarianism in a relatively free & open society, firearms are what you chose to focus on.
Strat
Yep. Any attempt to curb trolling would be tantamout to mandating that one only speaks the truth, and you can't do that.
Authoritarian regimes have been known to do a pretty decent (if shockingly brutal, bloody, & heartless at times) job of it (*their* version of it) given sufficient jackboots, strong domestic data/communications gathering/analysis, and a nearly disarmed (of any sort of effective combat-useful weapons, at least), disheartened, economically stressed, and divided population.....
"Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!"
Strat
A sniper rifle requires high quality manufacturing and accurate long range shooting, which is difficult even under the best of circumstances.
Sniping is a tactic, any ranged weapon can be employed to snipe a target.
Lee Harvey Oswald used a WW2 (mfg. ~1940) surplus Italian Carcano 91/38 6.5mm bolt-action carbine with a 4x Ordnance Optics telescopic sight to kill JFK with a headshot in a moving car. Neither the weapon nor 'scope were of what would be considered 'high quality' even by normal hunting/sport standards.
LHO was a good shot, achieving the "Sharpshooter" qualification twice while in the Marines, but that is not that unusual. My father also earned the "sharpshooter" bar in the US Army in WW2 and was a good shot, but he wasn't "amazing" or anything.
Something like a decent-condition WW2-surplus Mosin-Nagant 91/30 can be had for around ~$250 last I checked, and they are excellent weapons and make a great low-cost and quite powerful rifle to use for sniping. The 91/30 PU factory-setup sniper version with the rather strange looking offset-mounted 'scope is very sought-after. With a properly selected and adjusted 'scope on a regular 91/30 in the hands of a competent-but-not-'pro-level' shooter, 98%+ first-shot hits at ~600 yards on a 4-inch target aren't atypical.
Strat
The War on Drugs as a policy started with Johnson, a Democrat. Also the one who started the Great Society bullshit, which arguably was the greatest single cause in the rise of single motherhood among the black population. Nixon gave the policy a catchy name and consolidated the disparate efforts already ongoing in the US federal govt. Reagan inherited a rapidly growing problem, and while he certainly didn't help the situation, did pretty much what every adviser and think tank apart from the hippies and libertarians at the time was telling the federal govt to do.
Approximately correct in the essential facts, some brevity of comments on a forum being necessary. There was a lot going on then just as now, and again as now, there were many disparate groups on the left that ended up contributing towards certain common Progressive goals even if there was no conscious or active coordination.
It never ceases to amaze how quickly people forget even quite-recent history and/or accept a "revised and edited" version of what actually transpired even when they are aware of the disparity. Then again, the human ability to hold two totally conflicting beliefs simultaneously while totally convinced of the truth of both is what tyrants and despots have always counted on.
Strat
These particular powerful people are more powerful than most governments.
Unlike powerful governments, powerful *people* can be stopped by a nobody with the motivation and a 50-cent bullet in a sub-$200 military-surplus rifle.
Why do you think the gun-banners are going after rifles first instead of handguns which are used in orders-of-magnitude greater numbers of crimes/murders? The powerful know a sniper with a rifle is a far more deadly threat to them than someone with a handgun which requires being close and visible to security personnel.
Strat
May I suggest an Honest tag line?
Liberalism: Ideas so good they require an end to the world's largest prison state that has supported fascism for so many years.
I thought you said "Honest"?
Liberalism ("Progressivism") is precisely what has led to the creation of the US prison state and fomented the spread of fascism in the US. I've personally watched it happening in real-time over the last 5+ decades.
Strat
You don't think Apple can afford to put Intel chips in their Mac lineup moving forward?
Don't know, don't care. I don't run Apple walled-garden software/hardware, never have, and likely never will.
Strat
Sorry for replying to my own post, but in reading further I see AMD is joining the conga-line of criminal-collusion also.
I guess this means buying used/older hardware from this point on. At least, until Intel/AMD/MS lobby for laws making the sale/transfer of old PC hardware and running of non-MS approved OSes illegal.
Strat