Well which is it?

Which is exactly why I cited examples where any rational person couldn't get it wrong. Nobody who is fighting for the power to take away other people's freedoms (say, of speech, assembly, religion, etc) is fighting for freedom. It's possible to objectively look at two different fights, and see where one is actually about freedom, and the other is about gaining power to deny freedom.

The governance of England (not to let it off the hook there, even so) was not the same as England's governance of the colonies. Don't tell me to learn more about it when you paint with a brush so broad you miss out on that reality. The Americans were fighting to be free of how England was ruling the colonies. Even if you consider the then-state-of-affairs in England to have been the model of freedom (plainly not true), the colonists did not enjoy the same liberties or representation.

"Became?" He started out that way, and didn't stop. He was no champion of a constitutional democracy. Didn't seek one, and didn't act to establish one. What he and dictators like Castro found to dislike about the regimes against which they rebelled has nothing to do with their vision for a totalitarian communist paradise. They set out to achieve what the Castros have been using violent oppression of their own people to preserve ever since.

If they were ever about freedom, they wouldn't need to lock people away or simply kill them for speaking their minds.

Yes, there is. The only way you can get a section 333 waiver is if you are a licensed pilot. Period. Here's the existing process:

https://www.faa.gov/uas/legisl...

Their currently proposed rule changes contemplate a simpler grade of permit, but still make no provision for BLOS flight. You'd still need to pass an FAA operator's test, and pay to sit and re-take it every year. The proposed rules also require each and every aircraft to be registered - something that makes flying continually changing prototypes off the work bench a near impossibility.

I'm not "totally off base," I'm aware of the actual situation. You're just engaged in wishful thinking, or making excuses for the administration, and hoping nobody will do any fact checking.

Do you mean that when a huge undertaking involving actual, you know, human beings taking action in opposition to a monstrously violent totalitarian regime sometimes involves some of those human beings doing assholish things ... that therefore the side that's acting to prevent oppressive totalitarianism is wrong to fight it? You'd rather allow groups like ISIS, or people like Stalin, or fun outfits like the Khmer Rouge to just carry on being brutal across the board as part of their purpose and policy than risk deploying against them on the off chance that not every action taken to oppose them, by everyone involved in the fight, will pass your purity test? Better to let the house burn down than to risk having anyone involved in trying to put out the fire be a jerk, I guess.

Right. Because that's what they (the country of Japan) set out to do. Cruelty and torture and rape weren't the actions of a few idiots/asshats in the Japanese army, those things were the stated tactics, the official policy, from the top down. That wasn't assholishness by abberration, and prosecuted (a la the WV guards at Abu Ghraib), that was marching orders. Your need to confuse the difference between that, and things like what Japan systematically did in China, shows you to be either completely misguided, or simply trolling. The latter, most likely.

When the people who actually drag school teachers out of their classroom to shoot them in the head for teaching girls publish videos of doing so online to show how serious they are about it, you can claim "land grab" and "it's all fake" to your heart's content, but you'll know you're lying, just like the rest of us will know you're lying.

Who's "we" and who is doing the telling? There are more women in college then there are men. So, basically you're just blathering.

They "land grabbing" revolutionaries you're complaining about fought, among other things, to tear down the form of government under which they were living ... one that DID establish a government-backed single religion. They were so opposed to that, in the form of the constitution's first amendment, they baked freedom from that ever happening again right into the nation's chartering document. Not that you've probably ever read it or anything.

No, the answer is: look at what they're actually fighting for. "Freedom fighters" who fight for the opportunity to deny women the right to go to school, or to set up a regime where people who aren't willing to claim faithfulness to one single state religion are not freedom fighters. It really is that simple. US revolutionaries fought to be free from what was essentially a military dictatorship (the monarchy) that didn't provide some rather important freedom-related features (like those we see protected in our constitution). When freedom fighters are fighting for actual freedoms, then that's what they are. When "freedom fighters" are fighting to institute totalitarian rule (like, say, Che Guevara and company did) they're not freedom fighters at all. The Taliban aren't fighting for freedom, they're fighting to set up a ruthless medieval theocracy. Doesn't matter what they call themselves, it's what they do.

Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?

And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.

There's only one way to punish Amazon for taking this activity outside of the US. We must find a way, since they have a business presence in the US, to add a larger regulatory and tax burden onto them until they submit, and return this activity, which we won't let them do anyway, to US soil. At which point of course we will not reduce that new tax or regulatory burden, but that'll show 'em anyway.

Way to go, Executive Branch.

Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.

We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.

But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.

Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.

I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the results and minimizes the contextual information that can be gleaned from the stripped-down information. That was a deliberate choice made by her. She chose to have her staff do more work, and to make far more work for the many third parties requiring the records. Just icing on the cake, to go with not having provided the records on the fly, during her tenure and at departure, as required by the FRA and NARA.

Because if you admitted that the odds of her having corresponded, even once, with another agency or external party in the course of doing her job were 100%, then you have to explain why you think that the complete absence of any of that in the FOIA requests doesn't impact your narrative about how she must have been BCC'ing all along to remain compliant. State has her correspondence with internal staff, but nothing external. She generated and received tens of thousands of emails, and you think that by sheer coincidence, flaky archiving at State accidentally lost ALL of the external stuff she faithfully CC'd, while happening to retain the stuff she sent internally? You can't actually believe that happened, which means you're spinning.

What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.

What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.

Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies ... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.

That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.

If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.

So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?

Failing to stop your multi-thousand-pound vehicle as you drive at a military checkpoint is telegraphing violent intent. At least, that's how the guards have to treat it. Driving a suicide car bomb at/through checkpoints is a well established tactic, and has produced a no-compromises protocol in response. When you give off all the signs of violent intent, there's really no way to just let them carry on and decide later if they were a threat. It's not video game with a retry button the guards can push after they've been blown to pieces.

No, you're getting your media memes all wrong. If they were brown, it would have been, by default and without any need for further analysis, another case of police brutality blah blah blah. Please get your coverage spin in sync with contemporary standards. There are people who make a living off of faux racial outrage, and if you don't help their hype, they're going to have to find other work.

A poor choice of things to compare.

"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.

"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."

No, it seems I'm not.

No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.

Hint: not everything you see on NCIS or CSI:Wherever actually works like it dos on TV.

It can definitely help to be able follow the trail after someone does something especially awful - sometimes bad guys actually have accomplices.

But more to the point in this case: reports are that the vehicle they used was stolen, along with its license plates.

To be, or not to be. That is the ques... no, it's not even a question in this case.