Good point. I'm not a 9/11 conspiracy nutter, but the whole "government shot flight 93 down" thing at least seemed plausible to me. Not that I think it happened, but if it turned out that it did I wouldn't be "omg I'm totally surprised!"

No. There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.

We're still on soap. Our patriotic duty is to bitch about the current situation on the internet, to bitch about it on Facebook, to our friends and family, to write our representatives.

As for ballot, we have not had an election since the Snowden leaks broke. We do not yet know how big a deal domestic spying will be in 2014 and 2016 election campaigns.

Jury as well is just getting started. Now that Greenwald and Snowden have named some names with documented proof, those five men who were unjustly spied upon can start suing.

I don't think the first three boxes will be exhausted for at least five years. That said, I find it telling that the NRA crowd has said exactly nothing about this entire mess. They talk like this is their wet dream. For reals tyranny! Defense of liberty and all that crap! And nothing. They're never going to anything, because their entire idea that small arms mean a damn thing in 2014 against tanks and apache helicopters is stupid.

I support private gun ownership, simply because I believe self-defense is a natural right of all people, and handguns are the most appropriate tool for the job.

That said, this entire situation puts lie to the NRA, pro second amendment claim that "we gots to have our guns to protect from teh tyranny! The 2nd amendment protects all the others!"

You want to see tyranny? Well, here it is. The NSA is executing general warrants. There is no authorization for any government agency to do that in the constitution. The issuance of general warrants was one of the primary reasons the founding father declared independence. In the 1760s the King's men had general warrants they were using to search colonists' homes, rifling through their papers looking for seditious materials and unpaid taxes. About this Thomas Paine wrote "These are the times that try men's souls."

So, 2nd amendment heroes, here ya go. They've nullified the 4th amendment. It only allows specific warrants, and these are general warrants. So you going to round up your militia and march on the Utah data center? Demand access so you can shut the system down? What's that? Not a peep out of you fuckers? Then shut the fuck about the goddamn second amendment. Defense against tyranny my ass.

Blackmail? No, visible use of power is clumsy. Simply leak incriminating information about anyone running against a candidate sympathetic to your point of view.

Does that not imply that the plane broke apart while still airborne?

The House of Representatives have held votes to defend NSA spying programs. The results have been close. Let's see what happens when people have a chance to vote for a representative and ask the question, "domestic spying, for or against?" It wouldn't take many representatives to flip that vote.

Perhaps we're waiting to see how the next two election cycles play out before we jump to torches and pitchforks? We haven't had an election since the Snowden leaks came out. Let's see to what degree domestic spying becomes a campaign issue.

But it's nice if they don't have to, that there is at least some kind of rule saying "no, it's not cool to just take the shit somebody else already captured and mined." The rule may or may not be enforceable, but I think it's a good, common sense rule.

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a new story about five innocent Muslim Americans who were targeted by the NSA for collections, one of whom was surveiled without a warrant. These people were lawyers; one was a Republican candidate for state legislature and a former official in Bush's Department of Homeland Security. We were told the NSA was only spying on foreigners, and here they are caught in yet another bald-faced lie. To me, this is a huge story. Puts names and faces on the people illegally and unconstitutionally spied on by the government.

Let's see, front page of CNN.com? Nope. Foxnews.com? Nope. If you search you can find like a blog post mentioning it. Same thing happened last year when the Snowden leaks first came out. They either ignored it or ran "Hero or Traitor? You decide!" fluff pieces or showed pictures of his stripper girlfriend and completely ignored the whole "hey, isn't this creepy as fuck and blatantly unconstitutional and yet is supported by all three branches of government and the bulk of both parties?" thing.

I was never the kind of person who thought the media was necessarily a mouthpiece for the state. I thought they were just shitty at their jobs and it was easier to report horserace politics and debates on "controversial issues" than real journalism. But this kind of shit...fuck man. There's really no other conclusion you can draw. The media intentionally downplays the abuses of the fascist surveillance state. And it must be intentional, because this shit is real news about which they could have their fake talking head debates and get ratings. It's right there...easy stuff. And nothing. There is only one conclusion to draw from that.

So now threatening to deface a police website is a matter of national security. Got it.

Naw, he's still an a-rab, and terreristy trumps republican.

This is, however, part of what I've been waiting for for a year. I've always wanted Snowden through Greenwald to name names. They say they pick up everything but it's only the targets who get their emails read and their phone calls listened to. Okay, who are the targets? Names.

So first they told us it wasn't Americans, it was only foreign terrorists. Now we find out they were targeting Americans. Now the Fox News crowd is going to say "yeah but it was just scary mooslems!" and the NSA will lie and say that this was the extent of their targeting operations.

The next article, then, I expect to show that no, they were also targeting Americans completely unrelated to Islam, like Occupy organizers or Tea Partiers. Or even political candidates. That is when the shit will really hit the fan.

lmgtfy.

http://physics.stackexchange.c...

If you have two frames of reference that are not at rest with respect to each other (which is most all of them) and you move from one to the other faster than light and back, you arrive before you left. Any type of faster than light anything (communications or travel) regardless of method (ansible, warp drive, stargate, wormhole, whatever) violates causality because general relativity.

Take the energy of a baseball thrown at 90-something miles per hour. Now instead apply that energy to a single proton. That's an awful, awful lot of energy for one tiny particle.

Any form of faster-than-light communication naturally leads to the ability to communicate backwards in time via moving frames of reference. So FTL anything means the universe is non-causal and we haven't seen anything to suggest that.

Wow, thanks for the insight. That's fascinating. And terrifying.

I do wonder what's going to happen. Something's got to give. All over the world we have massive inequality because there just isn't enough work for everybody to do to stay employed.

There's been some kind of huge conflict/upheaval every 4 generations/80 years. 1776. 1861. 1941. 2021? Sounds about right.