How exactly have you gone ten years without hearing about rendition. The U.S. especially JSOC and SOCOM, have been snatching people all over the world since 9/11 and making them disappear. Many of them have been rendered based on the flimsiest of evidence or have even been totally the wrong people because of mistaken identity. These people have been disappeared in to secret U.S. prisons abroad and to states like Egypt for interrogation and torture where they have no access to the Red Cross, lawyers or family. They actually totally disappear. Try reading Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars.

There is also an issue with the U.S. using drones and cruise missiles over large swaths of the globe to conduct summary executions of individuals based on often flawed intelligence, and frequently killing large numbers of women and children in the process. At least three of the executions have been U.S. citizens, including a 16 year old boy.

Just because they are Muslim does that mean they don't count in your book?

You seem to be a little naive my friend.

Common characteristics of a police state, wide spread spying on citizens, warrantless arrest and detention, torture, rigged judicial system and trials, execution of citizens without due process, suppression of a free press, suppression of opposition parties, censorship, seizure of property, targeting of opposition groups and minorities, prevent freedom of movement.

You do realize the U.S. and U.K. have engaged in all of these. I can run through examples of each if that will help enlighten you. The U.S. and U.K are not particularly iron fist police states, they prefer more the velvet gloved fist. They aren't particularly wide spread or oppressive police states yet, just give them time and a few more excuses.

It is no secret the U.S. has tortured people on a wide scale and very recently. This precedent has been set and the people who did it got away with it. Obama has dialed it back some, preferring to let third parties do it so he can claim the U.S. isn't torturing but the U.S. is still actively participating in and bankrolling it.

Obama has executed at least three American's by drone, which is the new prefered means of execution. Thre is no judicial process or if there was it is secret. One the the people killed was a 16 year old boy who apparently was targetted because he was the son of someone the U.S. hated.

Obama has been he most aggressive adminstration in targetting journalists in recent history, especially ones who are telling stories the U.S. doesn't want told. Obama had a journalist in Yemen jailed for 3 years for exposing a cruise missile strike that killed civilians and interviewing Anwar Awliki.

Try bring any of the recent abuses of our Constituion to a court of law and most are shut down by State Secret privlideges. Many abuses of civil rights are currently untriable.

The U.S. pretends to have opposition parties but in fact the two parties we have are two sides of the same coin pursuing the same agenda on most issues that count, and only differing on wedge issues or where tax money is squandered. Third parties are ruthlessley suppressed, marginalized and muzzled in the U.S. especially ones which challenge the status quo.

The U.S. doesn't practice overt censorship, the U.K. is farther down this road. The U.S. favors more suble censorship and propaganda using a small number of corporate controlled media companies who do most of the shaping of public opinion. The U.S. prefers just listening to and recording what everyong is watching, reading, listening to and saying so they can spot the troublemakers.

The U.S. is actively planing for the near future when there will more terrorist attacks (i.e. 9/11), natural disasters(i.e. Katrina), protest movements (i.e. Occupy) and resource shortage shocks and when they occur they will ratchet up the police state a few more notches.

If you want an eye opener on the next generation global police state the U.S. has become grab a copy of Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars. U.S. special forces and intelligence are now roaming the globe engaging in largely unsupervised executions, renditions, torture and spying. This started under Bush/Cheney and Obama has actually dramatically accellerated and extended it. Some of their attacks have been very successful like killing Bin Laden, many of them are deeply flawed, killing large numbers of innocents, including women and children, and spawning new generations who hate America. The important part being they have almost no oversige from Congress or the judiciary, and often inadequate oversight from the White House and Pentagon who are running this global police apparatus.

The Tea Party is half of what the Republican party should be. If they'd stuck to fiscal conservatism and stayed focused on reigning in the out of control Federal government they would have been widely embraced by the American people and would be running the country by now.

Unfortunately they were infiltrated by a bunch of crazies pushing social conservatism with a dose of religious fanaticism and worse a bunch of political opportunists who've been milking and co-opting them for their own benefit. They should have shown Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Mike Huckabee and Glen Beck the door with extreme prejudice and haste.

At this point the Tea Party brand has been trashed by political opportunists whom are the people to whom the Tea Party should be diametrically opposed .

My deepest desire is for an party that is a cross between the Tea Party and Occupy. The two movements have a lot more in common than most people realize. This new party should be equally opposed to both out of control Federal government and rapacious banks, corporations and plutocrats at . It should be a party with a big and open tent that will stay completely out of social and religious issues and let people decide for themselves what their values are, which is why the founders separated church and state in the first palce. Meanwhile it should be bare knuckled brawling with the blood suckers who are really killing America.

This is a pretty flawed analogy when it comes to digitial information. There is nothing on a laptop or smartphone that can't be sent in and out of the U.S. on a digitial network and bypass border inspection entirely, especially if its encrypted.

If they want to do a physical inspection to insure there is no contraband in the device, preferably while the owner is watching, that's fine. Imaging the digital contents of the device, copying your contacts, email and phone history is pretty much invasion of privacy and targetted harassment.

There is also a high risk that while they have your devices they will install spying hardware or software so once you get your device back you can no longer trust it.

Many multinationals simply wont let travelers carry anything important across borders any more. Its safer to transfer it digitally over networks and have the traveler pick up their gear and data in country.

One thing I've realized of late is that everything the U.S. has been accusing China of doing, with self righteous indignation, the U.S. has been doing too, usually better and more zealously.

The U.S. and U.K. are pretty far down the road to becoming xenophobic, pariah states. Its an extremely unwise path to choose, especially if you want a healthy economy. Its reaching the point that anyone who has a choice will refrain from engaging with them in economic, academic and scientific endeavors. If you are well educated, skilled entrepenuer or acadamic you would have to be a little nuts to want to work or study in the U.S. or U.K. these days.

Its sad that the U.S. and U.K. have self inflicted more damage on themeselves and their citizens than terrorist attacks could ever have dreamed. That is the whole idea behind terrorism, the reaction and countermeasures are usually more damaging to the target than the actual attacks.

And what about the applications the undercover NSA employees take? They are quite active in the open source community.

Civil servants are frequently working for the chance to retire after 30 years, with a life time pension, and the ability to start a new career in the private sector, often exploiting their government connections, and working for the contractors they once managed. This is often refered to as double dipping. If you do military, civil service and then private sector its triple dipping. There salaries may not be great but their life time payout is actually really good. Life time pensions are increasingly rare in the private sectors because they are staggeringly expensive with people increasingly living to be a 100.

If you actually compare private sector versus civil service salaries, civil service salaries are starting to outpace the private sector in many fields. This is partially a product of private sector salaries being stagnant in many fields for decades.

Certainly Wall Street banker and hedge fund manager out performs civil service. In the case of SEC civil servents they are usually there to do favors for the big banks and brokers they are supposed to be regulating and then they cash in the favors for high paying job with the people they used to regulate. There is a similar revolving door in just about every Federal agency. And yes it is also known as corruption.

OWS scared the crap out of DHS and just about every law enforcement agency at Federal, state and local levels where they were occurring. Thats why they so ruthlessly destroyed them, and DHS was coordinating the strategy for destroying them nation wide. If Occupy hadn't been crushed it would have become very dangerous to the entrenched, corrupt people who've stolen our country.

Its purely amazing that enough American's participated in Occupy to actually scare the police state that was built post 9/11. Just about everyone had written Americans off has hopelessly apathetic and too scared to do anything about anything, and Occupy disproved that. That is a seminal accomplishment.

The next crash, and another crash is inevitable since absolutely none of the factors that caused the last crash were fixed, in fact they've been massively amplified, there is a high probability American's will finally say enough is enough with the massive corruption that has engulfed Wall Street and Washington D.C.

When that time comes the occupy movement will be the framework for the next attempt to take our country back from the people who stole it from us.

Its not revolution to take your country back, its a patriotic restoration and an obligation. The Founding Fathers would be cheering it on.

Yea and they can brick those in approximately the same time it takes to acquire them. If law enforcement can do the bricking it saves tham having to rely on the phone company.

I'm talking here about a street demonstration which law enforcement wants to bring under control and which is being coordinated and filmed by people with phones. You brick all the phones in the problem area and you shut off most of their cameras and coordinatopm, they are put back in the stone age while the police are using every technology available.

Shutting off cells towers is substantially less effective than bricking all the phones because bricking kills the cameras and GPS too. Will also inflict immediate financial and organizational damage on all the protestors.

Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.

How is he supposed to serve as a lesson to others if they're busy purging all records of him?

"Remember what happened to Jang Song Thaek before you think about crossing me!"
"Who? I don't remember him at all."
"Exactly!"

Sounds a bit more like bad comedy than a real threat.

Hey, maybe _your_ universe only has ten dimensions, but _my_ universe goes to eleven!

"two years ago Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss set off on a barnstorming tour to save the world from religion and promote science."

That is exactly the wrong way to do things. I'm not going to argue whether it is reasonable or not to believe in both science or religion, because regardless of that if you frame an argument as A is wrong and B is right then everyone who already believes in A is going to get defensive and angry and be even _less_ likely to accept B.

If that's not actually a misrepresentation and he's actually approaching the perceived problem by trying to bludgeon the opposing side into adopting his beliefs then he's doomed to failure, and the whole things is really just a "feel good" tour for atheists to feel superior about their "enlightened" beliefs.

This is all an overreaction. Everyone knows that a single isolated incident of a car bursting into flames after some kind of impact is no big deal. We shouldn't be concerned until at least three reports surface in the news. At which point it instantly becomes SERIOUS BUSINESS and must be investigated!

Every time there's a story about the trend of automating everything people worry that all the jobs are going to go away and there will be nothing left for anyone who isn't a brilliant scientist or talented artist. Well it actually makes sense to outlaw the automation of C&D letters by bots like the media industry is currently doing. One can make an entirely reasonable argument that this kind of legal activity needs to be performed by a human, not a machine. (At least up up until the point where we get true AI at least, and then everything goes out the window anyways.)

All we have to do is get a law passed saying that each C&D claim has to be reviewed by a real human who is employed by the company whose content is supposedly being infringed, plus specify a minimum amount of time necessary for the review. Huzah! At a minimum of one minute per C&D review (which could certainly be increased to five or even ten minutes if necessary,) 6.5 million C&Ds per week is at least 2,700 new jobs, and if the number keeps doubling every year... In less than two decades we could have an entire economy based around C&D letters!