This guy's a moron, and maybe it's OK that they ran him in ...

Really? What makes him a moron -- the fact that our society has become so ridiculously rigid you can't wear a costume outside? Are we all going to have assume the uniform of loafers, dockers, and a button down shirt?

The morons here are the cops, the principal, and a society that has totally lost any contact with good sense. But then, this is Massachusetts -- home of the city that accepted a total eradication of the 4th Amendment (1) and lost it's shit over a blinky toy (2).

(1) http://poorrichardsnews.com/po...
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

Exactly. The mantra of Blame Bush is so old and tired. Yeah, I blame Bush for what he did, and I blame Obama for making the crap Bush did the new normal, which is actually worse. GWB was seen as on the radical side of exercising presidential powers -- Obama's making that the new baseline makes reform much less likely and so Obama's presidency is ultimately even a worse disservice than GWB's was. Unless of course you want to live in a US where most all power, eventually all, lies in the Executive branch.

I wouldn't be so sure that IP will evaporate -- the US Fed. government is still economically powerful, but having decided to allow offshoring of most work, there isn't much left for America aside from focusing on a patent-troll/RIAA-ish economy. I'm guessing it will use its economic and military power (both the local military called police, and the foreign military branches) to push IP rights along for decades to come, because that is what the people who finance elections want.

Making the tools illegal doesn't mean people who plan on doing illegal things won't have them.

I think there is a better than even chance that the lawmakers understand this perfectly well, but that the real purpose of the law is to harass people who hold and publish views the government doesn't like by putting together a persecution [intended typo] with a 100 year sentence based on extreme applications of criminal laws. Their hope is that the target either plea bargains to something less that will still remove that person from the general population, or better yet from the Fed's perspective, prompts that person to just kill him/herself out of hopelessness.

We always hear about how the US does a ton of good around the world -- what do you have for valid citations for the good the US does that others don't?

So for example, shifting rubble in Nepal wouldn't count because lots of other nations have such helpers. Aid in the form of arms to $randomWarlord doesn't count because that's just a symptom of the military-industrial complex. I want to hear about what the US government does around the world that nobody else does, that is objectively a "good", and an estimation of the value of that service, because let's be honest, spending a billion (or whatever -- number totally made up) on droning random people per year is not balanced by spending a million on digging wells in the Sahara.

Awesome post.

Maybe, but there is also a bias in favor of women during sentencing.

If you're a criminal defendant, it may helpâ"a lotâ"to be a woman. At least, that's what Prof. Sonja Starr's research on federal criminal cases suggests. Prof. Starr's recent paper, "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases," looks closely at a large dataset of federal cases, and reveals some significant findings. After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen areâ¦twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.

https://www.law.umich.edu/news...

It will be long fucking time till the US runs out of workers and demand for labor boosts wages -- there's what, 7 or 8 billion people in the world to import at the behest of big business.

That's a lot to assume based on nothing and in fact contrary to plain language of the document.

But that's really a side issue. No law should be passed in secret, or the text sequestered in a special room where only a representative or senator can read it and can't take notes or copies or get expert guidance on unfamiliar topics -- the congresspeople can't even discuss what they remember reading.

http://www.politico.com/story/...

The ONLY reason this is being done in secret, is because the special corporate interests it is designed to further know people would bitch about it if it was public. That's anti-democratic and the entire process surrounding this bill should be enough of a basis, on its own, to reject it out of hand.

The final laws aren't secret, but during some parts of the lawmaking process, their details may be kept secret, for exactly the reason in TFS.

Actually, and incredibly, the final law will be secret for a while:

The chapter in the draft of the trade deal, dated Jan. 20, 2015, and obtained by The New York Times in collaboration with the group WikiLeaks, is certain to kindle opposition from both the political left and the right. The sensitivity of the issue is reflected in the fact that the cover mandates that the chapter not be declassified until four years after the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes into force or trade negotiations end, should the agreement fail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...

Not only is it outrageous and unconstitutional, it's totally valueless. The Feds can't even stand in the way of people for whom they have good information that they might be interested in doing harm, let alone find anything new. The real purpose of a program that is so ineffective, can only be to retroactively find dirt on political outcasts and then put them in prison.

Citations:

• Feds warned about Boston bombers: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
• The Feds monitored one of the Texas shooters, and he spent time in jail: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/p...
• Uselessness of the mass surveillance program:
  http://www.tomsguide.com/us/rs...
  http://articles.chicagotribune...

I second the motion.

More to the point, Amazon or Google can't lock you up in prison or legally kill you. The government can. That's not a small difference.

This is a correlation thing. It is conceivable that whatever caused him to commit suicide is the same thing that caused him to use drugs and that instead of cutting his life short, the drugs made his life tolerable enough to stay in it longer.

re soul.

What does that even mean really?

Why do people grieve when a loved one is rendered brain dead? If all that matters is that the cells are human, it makes no sense to grieve for a brain dead person. Under that paradigm, having thought, emotion, memory, intellect, etc. is simply not relevant because all nonthinking human cells are magically transformed into something uber-special.

In reality, the brain matters -- a lot -- and everyone knows this intrinsically. To apply a different standard to embryos is irrational and inconsistent. We don't have a funeral every time we get a haircut and millions of human cells get lopped off and tossed into landfills.

If there is a soul, our sorrow tells us it is in the brain.