Viewing profile — jivatmanx

I really don't think asking too much of our presidents to try an instill in the public the value of Liberty and Democracy; nor is this some Herculean task. It costs nothing, nor do…

The USSR had dozens of nuclear ICBM's pointed at every major European city, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. city. They also had massive armies. If war had occurred, The …

A useful anecdote is that Sensebrenner, the substantial author of the Patriot act, seemed shocked and almost entirely unaware how it's provisions have been interpreted and used. If…

The Telecoms have long given total cooperation in exchange for monopoly privileges in cable and internet. Carrot before stick.

This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually …

Vietnam is a communist tyranny that simply applying existing laws and policies to a new medium, so this isn't really a change. Economists prefer percentages to absolutes, and trend…

Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ig…

Furthermore, there a large number of cultural precursors that existed from before Hitler was even born. Hitler didn't invent antisemitism. Martin Luther clearly envisioned a genoci…

The police are the executors of the state's monopoly on the use of force, and where a state exists by the consent of the governed, it is uniquely important that the police are, wit…

>Wiretaps were tolerated when we could trust in processes that would guarantee that they would not be abused. They were abused for a long time and we did nothing. The difference wa…

>Still, the spending, even on stuff that was just junk, got us out of The Great Depression. The U.S. was the only major country with cities and factories left standing, that weren'…

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." -Benjamin Franklin

You should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is going after drug crimes.

I wonder what logic Karp has used to convince Peter Thiel that he's still a libertarian? I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance. “If we as a democratic society believe that licens…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalist

Thanks Rhizome. I'd like to add, The Gulf States are already under Sharia, and have been since their founding almost a century ago. The Taliban copied Saudi Arabia, even using the …

Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all". It's just as important to …

>The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain. This is a great idea. Unpopular works would be inexpensive to acquire rights for, so dedicated fa…

He's not really an African-American in the strongest sense of this term, he doesn't have black American ancestors who lived through slavery, or even the civil rights movement.

Great post. I think my central point is that it's dangerous for a democratic society to believe that nine robed Brahmins are the only people qualified to interpret it.

Congress must take seriously the idea that upholding the Constitution is a central duty, and that the existence of the Supreme Court does not in any way eliminate that duty.

We now know that the DEA has been using laundered NSA intelligence. That's relevant to the Drug War, where primarily minority communities are routinely terrorized by soldiers, and …

Many countries have more powerful and interventionist Supreme Courts. Notable, Germany[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Constitutional_Court_of...

There's a big gap between the philosophies of "Everything is public by default" and "Secretly giving all of your private communications to the NSA". The former is utopian, though n…