31–40 of 176 posts
Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all Democrats, are United States senators. == Why isn't this adressed to Dianne Feinstein?
And now it's up to us, having failed to elect enough people who support the Constitution. Elections next year, and in 2016. Just sayin'.
It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering first-aid to accident victims out of fear of lawsuits, and of course the terrorism hysteria for which I have no words. I'm fortunate enough to have visited the US and have met mostly great people, but going by news reports the entire society seems paralyzed by fear.
I always thought of freedom as inversely proportional to safety. If you want to be perfectly safe, you'll never leave your house in case you catch a germ, get in a car accident or even slip on a banana peel. You'll never eat store bought food without first running it through a spectrometer. You'll want everything controlled, predictable, seen ahead of time so that nothing unexpected gets thrown your way.
I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs. And the cost seems to be freedom.
It's almost as if the author of the US national anthem knew this when he ended it with "land of the free and the home of the brave" (correct me if I got that wrong). Maybe he knew you couldn't have one without the other. I guess the brave isn't home anymore...
/disjointed philosophical rant
Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all Democrats, are United States senators. == Why isn't this adressed to Dianne Feinstein?
I think the bit about the single vote was about her? Does it mean they had just one vote in the committee or a single person quashed the bill? Feinstein lives in an ivory tower, completely isolated from the needs of ordinary citizens in California. She gets six years in office with every election, and was just recently re-elected. She's totally safe, like those tea-party republicans in gerrymandered districts. Califo…
Senators have to go to the press to try to stop the government from doing what clearly breaks the law -- the Constitution, no less -- using up billions of taxpayer funds and undermines American business for no clear benefit. Conventional wisdom says the Cold War was between the doctrines of Capitalism and Communism and that the doctrine of Capitalism won. It doesn't look like that view was right. The doctrine of the…
No. Capitalism clearly won. But Capitalism is not Freedom, not democracy and is not the rule of the law. Capitalism is a way to conduct business by letting people posess the means of production, and the capital to produce as well. It was not only rhetoric that in the fight between USA and UDSSR, there was a fight between freedom and authority. But mainly, it was a fight between different ways to regulate the means of…
Wanting to be? I'm afraid that China would never want trying again in the current reign. China just has not yet figured out which model of heaven could be used to replace the communist one. It is really a tough job to propose for a egalitarian heaven in an age of quickly increasing rich-poor gap.
Surveillance. It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering firs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the bit about the single vote was about her? Does it mean they had just one vote in the committee or a single person quashed the bill? Feinstein lives in an ivory tower, completely isolated from the needs of ordinary citizens in California. She gets six years in office with every election, and was just recently re-elected. She's totally safe, like those tea-party republicans in gerrymandered districts. Califo…
If she runs again in 2018, the best plan might be convince enough Democrats and Republicans to vote for an alternative Democrat in the primaries to make the general election Dem v. Dem. Then you'd get people actually considering the individuals... Of course, she's 80, so she might well not be running again anyway.
2012 was last year.
And herein lies the problem. Their job is not to keep us safe, it's to keep us free.
(I'm aware others in the thread have pointed this out, but less directly).
"Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism." There's the problem. Even by those protesting sweeping NSA collection, we're obsessed with this. When the axis powers threatened to plunge the world into 1000 years of darkness, the only thing we had to fear is fear itself, now - that's not good enough - we must fear the unending threat of terrorism. Letting the NSA run wild is a logical res…
I'm wondering whether it was stated as the first priority of the Intelligence Committee rather than the first priority of the Senate. I realize members of the Intelligence Committee are expected to bridge those two roles - but it also wouldn't strike me as unusual for the Intelligence Committee to prioritize things differently than the rest of the Senate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations don't have the legal right to take my property or harm me or my family. The two aren't equal.
Yeah, no bank has ever foreclosed on someone's home.