Wow, AmiMoJo so perfectly proved the point, you'd swear it was masterful trolling.

That's cute. Look up "reapportioning" or "gerrymandering". That and the costs involved to win an election. Plus, all three branches collude to violate the US Constitution. So, no, we're not responsible for our government directly anymore. If we could be, that'd probably be made illegal as well. Protests will be cordoned off into "free speech zones", far from the folks they wish to protest. Riots will be put down by thousands of police officers. Petitions will be ignored. All of these have been done, and will continue to be done. And all safely ignored by those in power.

Most folks just keep their head down, mind their business and pay their taxes. I'm one of those. Sure, I vote and give money to good causes, but that's a negligible impact.

Yep, because we can't do much else. American citizens don't have that much of a say. Our elections are not quite rigged, but highly controlled by both political parties to be expensive and lopsided (voting districts are designed to be overwhelming of one political party). Our government's structure isn't designed well to handle collusion between all three branches of government. The only way to make an impact is to get a LOT of people together that are willing to spend a lot of money. That's enough to keep what you got, maybe small advances. AARP is the king of this, NRA and AFL–CIO are a much smaller examples. I wish the EFF was a bigger example.

So, the only way things like this could be stopped is a civil war. Which you probably wouldn't want, as it'd have global repercussions. If the federal government won, imagine our current system only twenty times as bonkers. If the federal government lost, there is no guarantee the new government won't be twenty times as bonkers as the current government. The Hunger Games is an literary example of California beating DC, there's plenty of other fiction and nonfiction examples.

I grew up within line of sight of Three Mile Island. Not one person got sick or died from the accident there.

We SHOULD be building new nuke plants, with lessons learned from older nuke plants. I always want to strangle folks that don't want to build new plants because old plants are "dangerous" (which they're not, they're much safer than even solar power). It's downright disturbing that we're relying on such old plants for so much of our national power grid.

That's a VAT or consumption tax.

A flat tax is just that. Same tax rate for everyone. Devil is in the details, most flat tax supporting politicians want to exclude capital gains and solely tax wages. That's essentially not going to work. Total wages were $6,009,831,055,912.11. FY2013 budget is $3.803 trillion. You'd need a 63% tax rate on all wages, with no exceptions, exemptions, EIC or deductions.

Current tax system is partly as FUBAR as it is because folks want to gouge the rich, and the rich don't want to be gouged. So you end up with both. If you're an honest self-employed contractor making between $35k-70k, your tax rate is about 44% in my state. Half of social security taxes are paid by the business, unless you're self-employed. The rich didn't like their 12.4% + 2.9% haircut on something they'll never use, so the SS and Medicare taxes cap out at $113,700.

If everyone paid their share without trying to gouge anyone else, it wouldn't be a nasty mess. But good luck trying to teach economics and tax codes to Occupy Wall Street crowd, and surprisingly some of the dumber or more short term focused rich folks.

Except most fair tax or flat tax proposals try to slip in no capital gain taxes. They'd find a lot more traction if it was on all income. Even if a flat tax rate existed, you'd still need an IRS.

NPS (National Park Service) is the agency in charge of US federal parks and monuments. Usually. They have intentionally blockaded monuments normally left "open" (it's a pile of metal or stone, in the open). That wasn't enough, so NPS Rangers blockaded private businesses that were located on public but federal land. Say, an inn that leases land along a highway on federal land. They can't turn off the federal highways (don't ask, long story), so they try to annoy citizens by blocking the sides of the road or chasing you off if you stop to take a picture. NPS officially acknowledged they got their orders from OMB, which is part of the White House.

Doesn't really stop anyone. 80-90 year old WWII vets basically dared NPS Rangers to try and arrest them. NPS backed down. It's meant to annoy Americans as a political gesture. That shutdowns are very bad, and it's all the fault of the other party.

One bad point is federal law enforcement and US military personnel are also experiencing pay issues. For instance, death benefits of US military personnel are not being paid. This is extremely unwise for anything other than extremely short. Shorting the pay of the Praetorian Guard tends to be a dangerous endeavor.

And all of that collected data can end up on a torrent. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of all those lawsuits.

Actually, it does. Or should, rather. It doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Label or slander, for instance.

Even cheaper to just mine photos posted by the protesters themselves, and run photo analysis combined with time stamps on the photos themselves.

Well, here's hoping that Abrahams gets a fairly long sentence. Coercion and blackmail is coercion and blackmail, regardless of the circumstances.

Tapping undersea cables.

Powered glider, sure, you could make solar powered. Conventional aircraft for moving people or cargo don't have the surface area to be solar powered, even with 99.999% efficient cells. Too much power requirements for too small of a space.

My dad was a mid level political player in state politics. Even he joked that if voting could change anything, it'd be illegal. He grew up with the Philly Democrat machine. Every election was basically fixed. Republicans have their own parts of the country that they "own" as well.

Funny part is, even the people within the political machines with near certain victories tend to feel like they can't radically fix things because the system won't allow it. I'm not kidding, I've had politicians basically tell me so while intoxicated. "Your district is 99.99% (insert Repub or Dem), short of being caught with a live boy or dead girl, you're getting re elected. What's stopping you from going Ron Paul*? - You don't understand. You can't fight the system. You only have so much leeway to work within." * Not specifically endorsing Ron Paul, he's just well known for bucking the party line when it came to votes. I meant "Do whatever you want regardless of your party's desires."

Meh. Most people don't care because they're generally too busy trying to pay the bills, raise their kids, keep the car running, etc. More than 70% of Americans don't want to get involved in Syria. A lot of the more neutral polls show much much softer support for indefinite detention, pervasive surveillance state and the rest. Without rigged polls, the majority wants basically the status quo. They're fine with some degree of horrific government authority, for edge cases. They're not exactly drooling for the NSA to become the next Stasi.

That's how it always has been, that's how it always will be. The majority don't want to rock the boat because they're too busy trying to live. It's only a relatively handful of ideological extremists on either end of the spectrum that tend towards radical change, usually for the worse.