Wow -- you are the worst type of enemy America has -- bootlickers like you who would sacrifice America's values for the most insignificant reasons are the worst kind of traitors. You infect the US with an underlying rot that will eat away its soul until we are nothing but another authoritarian dictatorship. And the scale of your irrational fear is just silly -- bathtubs are a bigger threat to Americans than ISIS will ever be, s why don't you start a war on showering ... stinker.

If Peter King can be an elected Congressional member after supporting a terrorist group, why should the kid go to jail for less support?

What you are really supporting here is for an arbitrary designation of groups to have legal consequences, which means things have devolved down to the point that whoever is in charge gets to decide whether belonging to a group, or supporting a group, is worthy of being gulaged or disappeared. We're entering a very dangerous time I think, not from ISIS (*), but from our own government.

(*) ISIS can't do squat aside from engaging in random crimes in the US -- there's just no way they are an existential threat to America. They're like a stubbed toe -- annoying, momentarily painful, and totally not a big deal.

It's a crime to support certain terrorist organizations and perfectly acceptable to support others -- which congress member was a supporter of the IRA? Oh yeah -- Peter King: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...

I find it very disturbing that certain beliefs are so totally verboten that to speak of them at all seems to be a Federal crime, and worse than that, so many people don't even see it as a problem. What we have are random politicians or cabinet members declaring a group to be off limits -- no declaration of war, no trial with public evidence, just a bureaucratic determination. So what group is next? Model rocketeers? Certainly the Sierra Club. At the word of an official in DC you could basically be killed or imprisoned -- at least this kid got a show trial. God Bless America, Home of the Free [to think and speak in an approved manner].

You're right about "PC" as used in the past. The 80s were a time when there were a lot of choices for a home computer -- not just different brands that behaved identically (e.g. dell v. lenovo), but totally different visions about home computers: Atari, TRS-80 (I had a 16k CoCo), Commodore, Apple, IBM, TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam (my cousin had one of these), and I'm probably missing a dozen other manufacturers or more.

These were all distinctive systems and back then, "PC" really did mean an IBM, and then later "PC Clone/Compatible" came into vogue for non-IBM computers that functioned like an IBM. Nobody called a C64 a "PC Clone" exactly because people expected "PC" to mean something that worked like an IBM PC.

Today though, it seems the distinction has sort of faded away. IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, even the clone market is highly consolidated, and the hardware is basically intercompatable no matter where you get it -- you can install Windows on your Apple if you want and people have been doing hackintoshes for quite a while (running OSX on non-Apple hardware). Somewhere along the way in all of this, PC seemed to become a rather generic term -- I can't pinpoint when -- maybe around the time Apple went Intel.

It's a shame in a lot of ways that there is so little computer variety anymore -- maybe someday we'll suffer a "great computer famine" due to the intensive monocropping consumer computer gear has experienced.

It depends on what you mean by criminals. Do you mean regulated businesses paying taxes, wages, FICA on employees, operating under the supervision of the Washington State Liquor Control Board merely because there is conflict between State and Federal laws on the issue? The people operating farms, processing facilities and stores in Washington state are doing so in a heavily regulated environment, moreso than most businesses. Are you saying they are criminals of the same type who would shoot up a town merely because of a conflict of laws? That's a little absurd.

Note if it is not clear, all legal pot sold in WA is grown in WA in licensed facilities. No money is going to any violent gangs.

Come to Washington. All the pot sold in the legal recreational marijuana shops is grown here. Smoke all you want, no Mexican kingpin was enriched, and no innocent person shot.

The ONLY reason there is violence associated with the manufacture and distribution of pot in other places, is because it is illegal. That leaves the market only to criminals, and criminals use violence as part of their business plan. When was the last time the CEOs of Coors and Budweiser got in a shoot out with each other?

The problem with drug gangs could be eliminated immediately by legalizing drugs.

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.