Absolutely false. Those two groups have benefited the most from the attacks, the banks and government were not targets of the attack.

Cui Bono becomes very interesting when finding out that numerous officials provided false information to the press and public about what we knew regarding the attacks. For example Bush flat out lied that we never considered such an attack, the FAA and military ran a simulation a year prior regarding the exact scenario of a plane being flown into WTC in an act of terrorism. The Secret Service also ran simulations about planes being flown into the White House prior to the attacks.

I hate to break the news to you, but you are very ignorant.

Take your example of comparing a soldier to a guy working at Bell Tire or some Amazon shipping. Sure, not all soldiers are deployed to a combat theater, but all soldiers must be trained and capable of being deployed. This means training. Lots and lots of training, which is often quite dangerous. Have you ever seen a person fall 70 feet repelling as part of their duty at jiffy lube? How about a guy at Bell Tire get his face shredded by a weapon malfunction at a range training for combat? The guy at Amazon risks a tank not seeing him and killing him while he's working at Amazon? None of those things real or realistic

That's not to imply you should give military people sympathy, we still have an all voluntary military in the US. People going in know the risks, just like a police officer in a big city knows their risks. You should however respect that these men and women regularly risk life and limb so that they are ready to protect you from enemies at all times, even if they are not out directly engaging foreign armies/militants every day.

Yet another completely ignorant statement. Every military person gives up rights as a citizen for the duration of their military career. This is not optional, and there is no choice that is not criminal. If you defy the orders and regulation, you spend hard time in a penitentiary and are dishonorably discharged from the military. Go ahead and try to get a job with that on your application.

As a veteran, I speak from experience and first hand knowledge. I was not deployed to an active combat zone, but was on the ready line numerous times and saw people die from all of the examples I gave above. You don't recognize the sacrifice because you have never made the same sacrifice, and never bothered to consider what a person gives up to serve in the Military.

Oh no, it goes way beyond Reagan. He was an easy example for me since the I started to wake up to how corrupt things were under Reagan (I was in the military during his last term). The Gary Allen book was published in I believe 1972, and will open your eyes to corruption going back to at least the very early 1960s..

If people could get a fair trial, then the law wouldn't need to change. But how, pray tell, are you going to accomplish that? One of the purposes of the civil forfeiture laws is to prevent you from being able to hire a decent lawyer. (Mind you, even if you could get a decene lawyer, a fair trial would mean that if you were found not guilty not only would all your expenses be recompensed, but also you would be paid at a fair rate for all the time you were compelled to spend and the personal endangerment that you endured.)

So, yes, the law needs to change. But that is not nearly sufficient. The entire court system needs to be altered so that the accused does not unfairly bear the burden of a corrupt legal system. And somehow this needs to be done without creating a perverse incentive against finding someone innocent.

I think you need to look a bit closer at the history of the US. The persecution of minorities and less powerful is something that has a very long history in the US. They don't tend to cover it in grade school history, but if you read the actual histories, you'll see it.

OTOH, those who romanticize the Indians are equally wrong. They were more done to than doing, but they also weren't innocents. They were, however, less powerful, so they couldn't enforce treaties. You could also investigate how the Chinese and Irish immigrants were treated. Or the Italian, or Spanish, or...well, anyone who wasn't northern European. Also look into the history of child labor (although, to be fair, nobody had decent treatment of poor children near the top of their social concerns...though some claimed to do so, what they meant was religious instruction happened as well as economic bondage).

How much time do you have to study on issues and events?

The "accidental theorists" will tell you that this all came as a big shock. Those same people will tell you that despite having massive think tanks and the highest levels of education available, politicians "never saw that coming" on just about any event in history. You know, like Reagan never realized that "Trickle Down" would benefit the rich much more than the poor that was just a big 'Whoops!' which has been policy since the 1980s. None of them ever guessed that arming, funding, and training "terrorists" would come back to bite us in the ass so we continue that policy for at least the same duration of time.

None of this was surprising, except that people have had almost no reaction to it. People have been warning about the state we are currently in since I was a little kid. The take over of media was planned, and took time. People warned about the dangers and were silenced. I'm sure that the accidental theorist would claim that was yet another "whoops" but lets be real. Accidental theory is completely irrational and illogical.

If you really and truly want to answer your question, jump back and read a book by Gary Allen called "None Dare Call it Conspiracy". Take every fact he provides in the book and check it for truthfulness, you will find nothing inaccurate. That book will point you to other sources to read, which will begin to map out a nice web of people that will answer your question.

You can choose the red pill or the blue pill, but if you take the red pill there is no turning back and your life will never be the same.

There is not such thing as "proper DRM".

One benefit of this ruling is that when (if?) a work goes out of copyright, it will still be available, even though the publisher refuses to sell copies.

That said, current copyright law is so irresponsibly excessive that I have my doubts that (in the US, at least) anything will ever go out of copyright that isn't already out of copyright.

One small problem with your statement:

A very significant portion of the public does use iPhones (here in PDX it's roughly half and half). The only two human beings I've seen who use and *like* Windows Phones were as follows: a gent who wanted something cheap and worked in .NET for a living, and a visiting Microsoft TAM.

Being incompatible with Marxism doesn't mean it's not socialism. Fascism isn't necessarily socialistic, but it can be. As defined by Mussolini (who coined the word) Fascism is the state working together with the corporations. "The corporate state" for short. IIRC both the Nazis and the Fascisti claimed to be socialists. They seem, to me, to have had a better claim to the term than Stalin's Russia had to being either communist or Marxist.

Basically a Socialist state is one where the state assumes the role of emergency service provider that was previously held by the village. The village failed in this role when the mobility of the population increased. The Socialist state, however, cannot really fill the role because the village worked by everyone knowing everyone, and so they knew who was suffering ill-fortune, who needed material help, and how much, and who needed emotional support, and what kind. It wasn't perfect, but in many ways it was better than the replacement. But it depended on everyone knowing everyone else, and having known them as they grew up together. This is INDEPENDENT of any other economic axis. You can have capitalist socialist countries, fascist socialist countries, marxist socialist countries, and even free-market socialist countries. (Note that I distinguish between free-market countries and capitalist countries. I don't think the first has ever existed, but it is a logical possibility.)

You left out Stalin. Arguably the worst of the tyrants of the 20th century. I do not believe that he has any claim to being a communist.

OTOH, I don't think that genuine communism scales effectively. On an extremely small scale it's one of the most humane systems. A healthy family operates this way. Scaled up to a village, there needs to be a strong ideology backing it. Usually religious, but not always. Even so, the cracks start showing. Larger than a village and there is generally an increasing requirement for force to hold things in place.

Note that communism is not (necessarily) Marxism, and the most successful forms (lasting more than a decade) are NOT Marxism. Marxism wants to be applied at a large scale, where communism does not work without extreme force, and such an application of force tends to lead to tyrants of one stripe or another at the top. Lennin, I believe, was a genuine Communist. (Note the capital C...that denotes Marxist flavored communism.) I did need to use an increasing amount of force, because that's the nature of the beast, but he also used ideology, which reduced the need...though not enough. He did, however, create a situation that was ripe for a non-ideological tyrant to take over. And this was probably unavoidable. Communism of either flavor doesn't work on a large scale. (I don't know about Anarcho-Syndicalism. I have my doubts, but perhaps it could scale to a small country.)

Please note, it's not clear that Democracy (in the US style) is stable when scaled to a large country. It worked pretty well when the power was held by the states, but with the feds holding the power it seems to be rapidly devolving into a plutocratic tyranny. How long the plutocrats will hold power over the tyrant isn't clear, but in Rome it worked for a reasonable while before a tryant seized power. It did cause a few civil wars as the citizenry rebelled against the plutocrats, but the plutocrats won...so when the tyrant seized power, the citizenry didn't care, and were actually hopeful that things would improve. And they, sort of, did. The tyrants didn't oppress the common people as much as the plutocrats had. (Most of the violence was at the upper layers.) OTOH, the romans didn't have robots and didn't have a police force. ISTM that the development of robot soldiers is specifically aimed at making civil war only winnable by the government. Similar considerations may go to the distribution of military equipment to the local police forces. Also the establishment of police checkpoints at such places as the entrances to hospitals, airports, etc. (I was shocked the last time I went to the Emergency Room to find that a checkpoint had been established at the entrance.) Currently many of them seem to be more security theater than real, but such things can, once in place, be tightened at will.

So ISTM that Democracy is currently failing in the US, and steps are already being taken to win an expected civil war. (I'm not commenting on the farce that elections have become. That's an old story by now, except at the very local level.)

ISTM that ALL the prisoners in Gitmo are political prisoners. Clearly the ones held without trial are such. Possibly in some cases there are valid reasons, but that has not be publicly proven, so the defalut position is that they are innocent. I feel that I'm understating the case, but don't know how to properly put it more strongly. Let me try this....

If they have committed a crime, they should be brought to trial. If they have not committed a crime, they should never have been held captive.

Presuming that you are serious rather and trying for funny...

I know that *I've* made errors in proofs. I know that at various times articles have been recalled from mathematical journals because of errors in the proof. IIRC there was a proof recalled 6 mo.s after it had been published just a year or two ago.

Math is a lot more secure at it's foundations than any other physical science, basically because the foundations are of the form "If we assume...". This doesn't mean any proofs derived from those foundations are unassailable. Errors in reasoning happen, and can be quite difficult to detect.

If a bad guy "jumps you" then unless you're Aikido dude or what have you, you're probably already fucked no matter how you intend to defend yourself. Initiative is massively important, and I don't mean that in a dungeons and dragons kind of way. Often, the first shot decides the fight.

On the other hand, most people aren't carrying around long sheathed knives, if the knife is big enough to need a weapon to defend against it then it's probably a folder and you very much can draw a gun, point it, and shoot in about the same kind of time.

At a shorter distance, guns are still massively deadly. Point blank is scary for a reason. I don't want to be involved in a close-quarters fight with someone with any kind of weapon. The best defense is to be somewhere else. Yeah, blaming the victim, but if you have the opportunity to be somewhere [relatively] nonviolent, take that option.

Today, the US military fields equipment which can tell where a gunshot occurred, and what kind of firearm was responsible, and what kind of ammunition it uses. Granted, it must require training, but since cops have to qualify with their sidearm that's an ideal time. Let's get some of those into the field rather than MRAPs.

It Cuba had had oil, the embargo would have been over really fast. Today, if Cuba had oil, TERRISTS! TERRISTS ALL OVER CUBA! WE MUST BLOW THEM UP!