Yeah I think they do. It just make sense given how people in the world are. I don't have "proof" the same way I don't have "proof" we need an army either post WWII either. Basically, if we had no spy agencies, other nations would be infinitely more aggressive and bellicose leading to who knows what. The best offense is a good defense sometimes. Everything I've read about terrorism and geopolitics indicates that a strong national defense is essential if you want to remain free and spy agencies are an essential part of that picture.

I assume this is clear- he's trying ot entrap them, as when Wyden forced Clapper to lie. Wyden KNEW the truthful answer to his question already, he was just forcing Clapper to lie before Congress.\

Same thing here, for sure . We can take from this that the NSA spies on Congress. Snowden has a story about it spying on Obama when he was a senator. Maybe a leak is coming about this and the Senators are preparing the ground ...

It's amusing to hear you argue that non-knowledge is somehow empowers the consumers to choose. What it does it empowers corporations to hide facts about their product so the market can'''t work. You're not pro free market- where consumers decide based on accurate information- your pro corporate . There's a big difference.

>>A very significant portion, when asked, also want a Lamborghini.

And a million dollars too ! So what? Are you conflating what laws people want passed in a democracy with their casual wishes for their personal lives?

>>The information is freely available, just because you are too lazy to do a five second Google search to find it does not mean it should be labeled. You are creating a controversy where none exists.

Yeah from who? Monsanto? Activists who had access to leaked information and published it? What kind of regulation is that? What kind of transparency is that?

>>The information is freely available, just because you are too lazy to do a five second Google search to find it does not mean it should be labeled. You are creating a controversy where none exists.

Yeah nice try. We're not discussing the science of GMO we're discussing the politics of it and the nature of the psychological impetus behind the desire to see labeling. But nice try.

>>TPP doesn't exist

  Why start with a with an easily verifiable untruth?

>>TPP wont' supercede any law-

In fact, the TPP will MAKE LAW of the most draconian type. Those laws will supercede existing laws on the same subject matter or create new laws making new actions criminal. That is a true fact. The latest law passed by Congress or agreed by treaty is The Law now and the older laws are voided. This is how the law works.

Old laws are modified, new laws are created. If I modify patents in some way via treaty and Congress Fast Tracks it, then buster, that law has been modified and the treaty law is the law. If I criminalize something via treaty and Congress Fast Tracks it then buster, that action is now a criminal offense.

If Congress permits TPP through , then it will be the Law of the Land. Later, only a 2/3 majority vote by Congress will change anything. The laws created by TPP in order to be overturned by SCOTUS would have to be found specifically unconstitutional and not just "a very very very bad idea".

Anyone who told you that the TPP does not exist or that treaty agreements do not result in the creation of laws lied to you. If before a treaty was passed the law read X was legal and the treaty reads X is illegal then guess what- the law was just changed by Congress to make X illegal and THAT is now the law oft he land.

Only in the very very very narrow case of the law actually being unconstitutional and having been found so by SCOTUS- will the treaty law not usurp the existing law.

Your same same logic applies equally to to all health codes- "if people wanted their food inspected, then they wouldn't buy food which wasn't inspected. " If people didn't want meat from cows who weren't slaughtered so as to prevent CJD, then they wouldn't buy meat from those sellers. It's the argument that savvy consumers will energetically and infallibly parse the marketplace and in the end, get what they want, sending those who don't give it to them away.

That idea has its root in a imaginary construction of mid 19th century economists -Ecco Homo- the economic man- who has infinite time energy attention ability and perfect information to parse all his economic decisions, always making the one which is best for himself.

None of this is true, as experiments have shown. Few economists under 40 believe it anymore, however the old walruses who are squatting in tenureship are still faithfully and with much gravitas packaging this crap up and having their students recite it line and verse, (all the while being snickered at by same.)

However if you need to think of the world in just the terms the 19th century left you , we will accommodate you. You can think of government inspection and labeling as the market's way to outsource the specialization of securing the integrity of the food supply, as the consumer wishes integrity to be defined.

It seems that this answer to this is a resounding "yes".

The internal logic seems to go something like this-

We are the NSA (true).

We are essential to the defense of this nation (true).

We are the subject matter experts on what it takes to perform this necessary function (true).

People who don't know what we know and who lack our accumulated organizational knowledge as a consequence can't understand the world as it needs to be understood in order for us to be effective.(true)

Any decision we've made with respect to how we should conduct ourselves and any action we've taken is because we think it will best serve the needs of this national security needs of this nation (true).

Conclusion- we would do no wrong and have done no wrong no matter what we've done and any oversight by an entity outside ourselves, including (and especially) politicians or any event which,if made public, would diminish our stature, decrease our funding or increase oversight is a mortal threat (is there any other kind!!?) to the national security of this nation and deserves to be dealt with accordingly by us, without exception (false!)

This is the logic of the computer Hal 9000 in Kubrik's 2001, A Space Odyssey .

Fame it has to be said is also a promise of future wealth.

Even if a groupie hooks up with a rock star for a night then goes back to her life with no expectation of benefiting at any future time, it's STILL a case of genetically driven preference for men with money and power .

Why? Because back when sexual selection was evolving, merely screwing the most powerful male WAS a ticket to preferential treatment for you and your offspring. The powerful male will calculate (unconsciously) that groupie's baby COULD be his and accord its mother and it , the bearer of his genes, preferential treatment. More food from the kill. More protection from adversaries. More favorable social-political judgments from the group. These are the things a one night stand can bring a female who finds men who control resources and other men extremely attractive.

A man who stands up on stage and displays his sexuality with shows of power and expression to the adulation of other men is SOMETHING women pattern match at the genetic level. There is no substitute for power for women.

It's what Joey Ramone once said- "If we weren't The Ramones, we wouldn't even HAVE girlfriends." All rock stars more or less cop to this. Led Zeppelin started as a way to get chicks, or so says Robert Plant. Girls swooon and freak out over the male rock star in a way that is just alien to men. No guys freak out over Brittney Spears or Miley Cyrus. They'd do her. But they'd do her if they saw her in a bar too. That's all the sexual cache a female rock star gets for her trouble.

For most species, the male is the more magnificent site. Peacocks, lions and weird birds that live at the top of trees in the rain forest and have huge globular translucent bright-red ball-sack like things under their throat that when they puff them up with air causes them to nearly double in size and which is used as. basis by the female of the same species as a criteria for copulatory rights using the unbeatable rule : "the bigger, the better".

Why? Because chicks get of on huge globular translucent bright-red ball-sack like things that can be puffed up with air to huge proportions. Why? Because.

Is this supposed to somehow be different than your earlier argument? It just goes to show you still don't get it. You're not making your point "clearer" by making the example more ridiculous.

In a democratic republic the whole point of government is to enact the will of the people, excepting when that will tramples the inalienable rights of a minority.

What you're saying with your argument is that if people want something YOU consider to be pointless and stupid, then the government should ignore THEM and do what YOU want because YOU know better than they do. That's rule by fiat and nothing more. Someone other than the People - who knows better, always - has decided the issue for them. This is not democracy in any form. Quite the opposite.

People with strongly held values have a right to see those values enacted into law through legislative process. Where people disagree, then it's a battle with compromise. I don't know of anyone who feels strongly that they don't want accurate and complete information about the food they eat except people who are employed by food companies who are afraid it will hurt their sales if people have that information. There is no constituency for "don't let us know" . People want this and because they want it, because it's important to them because it's their value they should get it. Same thing with dolphin-free tuna. Same thing with country of origin.

People with dollar signs in their eyes grotesquely underestimate the passion that the human animal brings to the subject of what it eats. Don[t fuck with it. Don't even think of fucking with people's food in a way they don't like. You have no idea the depth of feeling involved with this. It's genetic and primal, coming virtually straight out of the brain stem. People are born to be obsessed with food and its safety and security. Food insecurity topples governments. Anything that even comes near to invoking food insecurity gets the hammer of the gods drawn down upon it.

Supposing you're from the industry, believe me. you want to pick another fight. You want to work your PR from another angle. Label it and let people get used to it, then it won't matter. But if people want GMO labeling, they're going to have it or heads are going to roll, THEN they're going to have it.

It's not accurate. The Fast Track authority the administration seeks would effectively permit Congress to abrogate it's responsibility in this matter. If granted Fast Track, the procedure becomes as outlined below (see wikipedia page on fast track) . As you can see it's only needs a simple majority and amputates discussion severly along with preventing anyone from filibustering it since if time expires without a vote, it passes automatically.

This is what Obama wants and his college crony Michael Froman want to do to us. Michael Froman is a piece of work. He had "some trouble" being confirmed as USTR because he at the time he was nominated he was hiding somewhere above 500,000 in a Cayman Islands tax haven . People who know him say that he's extremely cold and sarcastic and just basically your typical inside the beltway psychopath "player".

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/politics/trade-nominee-has-500000-in-cayman-islands.html?_r=0

You can rest assured if he can get this through he'll spend the rest of his days be richly rewarded by the corporations whom he's helping to bring establish a draconian IP regime , including things like "patents software as such" and "patenting mathematics as such"

From the leaked agreement:

http://www.techblog.co.nz/601-NZsPatentsActunderthreatbyTransPacificPartnership

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/public-interest-coalition-letter-no-fast-track-authority-trans-pacific-partnership

Bad Debating technique #354- change the subject to something no one is contemplating.

We're not talking about infinite other hypothetical possibilities, we're talking about this real one.

In the real world, where real people live their real lives, only a subset of possibilities is ever realized and those are the ones we address.

If there ever IS a significant percentage of the populace that feels strongly about some other label, then those should be provided also. It is, after all, the 21st century- we're not running out of "room for information" wrt to the things we purchase.

Really when it comes down to it, that's a very 20th century concern.. so many labels, why In can't even tell what the product is! Time to update that one.

It's amazing to me to listen to people actually argue that factual information needs to be suppressed from consumers. It's really.. something.

I trust the NSA. I CERTAINLY trust the ordinary people who work there. What I don't trust today are the actions of a small set of players within that organization who have proven themselves to be liars. What I don't trust going forward are the structural safeguards which must stand against the actions of future, unknown people who will come to work there or command those who work there.

It's not about feelings of trust. It's about the ability to trust but verify.

Yeah, actually, it's not about the links, AC, it's about the content of the pages which those links point to.

And this one's for you:

How does the Internet work?

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet.htm

According to your logic, we should never complain about legislation we are forbidden to know the content of. Furthermore, again by your argument, the past extensive track record of such legislation can not be used to fill in any blanks that, once again, we're not permitted to know about. Finally, once again by your own argument, should a news organization with an excellent track record of leaking official documents provide us with a leaked version of the pending law, we should in no way assign credibility to such a leak.

Pretty interesting logic you have there , mythosaz. Not sure how many people are going to credit you much for maintaining it.

I agree. We've been here before on all counts. Vietnam was a series of lies told by officials to the public. See book: A Bright Shining Lie . What a totally engrossing read . And of course the FISA courts EXIST only because of past NSA abuses. But this is government as populated by humans. There is no alternative. Wherever you want to go, you have to take where you are as a starting point.

Abstractly considered, the functions of the NSA et al are not something we can do without. They're mandatory if we're going to stay free. Now the actions of some of the individuals which lead within those organization is another matter entirely. It is a true fact that unchecked spying power at the disposal of the executive upon anyone anywhere for any reason is a road to loss of freedom also. This appears to be what we have. I personally doubt they even restrain themselves from the full content of all websites and emails and phone calls. That's great for national security and also great for fascism. Obviously they're focused on one of those things
and have not a care in the world about the other.

We're not a nation of philosophers. We're a nation of advocates for ourselves, our side, our party, our department our acquisition of power. Few people in our nation have the developed perspective and character which would lead them to abstain from something which would result in an increase in to their personal power.

You have to believe we can get there. Consider the people of Denmark. 2000 years ago they were marauding assholes on the people's of Britannia . Now they're exactly the opposite and lead the developed world in international equality fairness civility and peaceful relations. Peoples and nations change their collective character. It's never pretty. It's the road were on; we just have to walk it, there's nothing else to do.

Write your congressperson. It carries a lot of weight, actually. Talk to your neighbors and encourage them to do the same. Vote for people who have a proven track record of representing your concerns. Or run for office yourself .

Talking, reading, writing voting. These are the tools that change democracies. If that sounds idealistic to you consider that despots everywhere and at all times fear those things the most.