It makes me feel better knowing there are smart, tech-savvy people saying what you're saying.

I get a little disheartened when I hear otherwise informed people say, "It's the internet age. You don't have any privacy, so just get over it". They just don't seem to have any awareness of the role that privacy, agency and basic human liberty have played in getting us to a point where we can have such powerful technology.

If there had been ubiquitous surveillance thirty years ago, we might not even have an Internet as we know it today. And the gains we have made will not protect themselves.

I doubt you're a political dissident or whatever.

Well...

but I'd like to go on record as joining the beta sucks bandwagon

Instead of cursing the darkness, why not light a candle?

http://soylentnews.org/

If I stop eating meat that won't stop the California producers from exporting their product to Asia. Don't try to make me responsible for their excesses. By suggesting Californians should turn vegitarian to save water is blaming the victim, and if it has ANY effect on meat export, it will probably just increase it.

This guy's afflicted with the "good government" syndrome. His country can do no wrong. Love it or leave it. Just like a good little Nazi.

There is no way to avoid the war any longer. The invasion has happened.

You are oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

There is at the moment no legitimate Ukrainian government. Putin is a vile authoritarian asshole, but he is right about one thing: Yanukovych's de facto removal from office was a coup.

Yanukovych can still make a claim of legitimate legal authority to invite Russian troops in.

And some part of the population in Crimea wants them there.

So, an "invasion"? Not clear.

As for "an existential fight in the west", it's doubtful that Putin wants to absorb all of Ukraine. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a synthetic state, based on the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" set up by the USSR...which was created with a bunch of ethnic Russians exactly to keep Ukrainian nationalism in check. All in all, letting Crimea go back to Russia might be in everyone's best interest...but only if it's handled in a legitimate way. Right now, nothing happening over there has any legitimacy.

What is it with the constant disbelieving of Snowden?

One of the things Snowden exposed was systematic disinformation campaigns by the spooks to achieve various political goals, including the discrediting of their own critics.

Perhaps these comments are examples of such a program in action?

At present we have two parties that are both owned, for the most part, by the same people, and kept in power by gerrymandering and the systemic weakness of first-past-the-post elections.

Further, the people in control of the major parties themselves cheat when someone not of their faction tries to go the primary/caucus root. They change rules in midstream, miscount, break meeting rules, physically attack supporters of opponents, pass out bogus delegate slates, and a host of other dirty tricks.

For a list of the things the Republican have done to just one challenger in the last two cycles, check out the archives of any of the several sites where Ron Paul supporters congregate. (For example, The Daily Paul.)

The Democrats do this as well. (The riots in Chicago in 1968 were largely a public reaction to the party machine repelling a primary effort by Gene McCarthy, popular with the antiwar movement, in favor of Hubert Humphrey. The Paul/Romney nomination battle was eeriely similar.)

Democrat in Name Only. There's several of them. Plus the Dems aren't really in power. The Republicans have threatened to drive this country over a cliff multiple times (debt ceiling). This last time the Pres said: "Go for it, I think we can survive and you won't", but it wasn't that he called their bluff. They were never bluffing. The only reason they backed down is they thought they'd be hurt themselves....

it's that we're losing _any_. We've had 30 years of constant productivity increases. These are the sort of jobs we were promised would replace all the Manufacturing jobs that went away for those 30 years. Now some of them are going away. It's suppose to be growing, not shrinking.

You learn where not to go, and what not to see

The difference is, at the inner city school, the kids have next to nothing. It's gladiator school.

The kids at Francis Parker on the other hand, have every advantage. If you sit in the coffee shop across Clark Street facing the window at 7:30am, you will see the line of Bentleys, Aston Martins, etc, dropping off little Trevor for school. And those are the less wealthy families. You can tell the really wealthy families because the children are dropped off by a non-white driver, sitting alone in the front seat (and yes, I have seen little Driving Miss Daisy caps on the drivers). They don't give little Mitt a lunchbox, they give him a platinum visa so he can pop down the street at lunchtime and eat on proper tablecloths and terrorize the wait staff. The parents treat the faculty of Francis Parker a little worse than they treat the undocumented aliens they hire to do their lawn care and nannying.

Anyone who believes there are no social classes in the United States just needs to spend an hour at Francis Parker to learn the truth.

Francis Parker School in Chicago is where the 1% send their kids. So, there is a substantial number of entitled little turds who have learned from their parents that bullying is one of the perks of being rich and powerful.

It does not surprise me that this has happened at that school.

I have first-hand experience there and far poorer inner city schools, and there is behavior at FP that you would never see in the inner-city school.

Without authority, the use of force is criminal.

You're mistaken. Arkansas cops recently opened up on a guy who was driving away from them...yet none of them has been charged with a crime

First, in general, I am not mistaken. If the district attorney is complicit and refuses to prosecute, that only means it is a miscarriage of justice, not that it is any less inherently criminal.

Second, in this particular case the guy was in fact actively attempting to kill people (according to the news article, at least): "Mounted cameras from three police vehicles, led by Officer Vance Plumhoff, show Rickard weaving in and out of traffic, then ramming a police car head-on. The Honda is later surrounded and as the suspect tries to back up, he sideswipes another cop car, and almost strikes one of the officers." Before he rammed the police car, shooting was not justified. After, it was (as long as the guy continued to drive recklessly... if he slowed down the chase, e.g. OJ-style, shooting would stop being justified).

all cities have hipsters

If you told this data to most New Yorkers (or other high CoL areas) they'd say "but then I'd have to live in X."

So what you're saying is that most New Yorkers are ignorant bigots? I'd say that sounds reasonable, but I won't because I'm from the South where people are polite...