They are the slow-mo collapse of an Age. The very idea of paying for content has become passe for anyone under the age of 30. My wife and I pay for Netflix because it's convenient. Everyone I know younger than us goes to the movies on Bit Torrent. Yes, that's anecdotal, but larger socioeconomic trends lend credence to personal observation.

Student loans and massive unemployment for millenials has put severe pressure on their disposable income. And it's been going on for at least 7 years. That's the formative years of the generation's early adulthood spent in penury when their predecessors have formed brand attachments and gotten started on careers making increasingly better wages. Check the news articles about how car ownership among younger cohorts is declining steeply, or how student loan default rates are rising sharply.

That means that those age cohorts are learning how to live differently than their older siblings or parents because they have to. They rent instead of own, they bike instead of drive, they torrent instead of paying. It all goes hand-in-hand, and the longer our system insists on beggaring them, the less likely they are to change even if/when conditions improve.

Of course, there's also the possibility that our system will not stop beggaring them and will move up the age cohort scale to completely beggar others too. Reverse mortgages are off to a great start to nuke the traditional wealth transfer that occurs when one generation leaves this earth to its descendents.

No clemency for Feinstein, Rogers, Obama, Bush, Cheney, Clapper, Alexander, or any other the hundred or more other people who swore oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. They are the rankest, vilest of traitors and have done more damage to our country than anyone else in history. They deserve the death penalty.

Yes, China's 5 time zones operate on a single time zone, which works great if you're in Beijing, but sucks balls if you're one of the poor schmucks in Urumqi who has to get to work at 3am.

They're reporting this evening Sen. Feinstein is backpedaling on surveillance after defending the NSA's crimes all summer. Did one of her grandchildren chew her out for turning the country into a police state? Or is she so stupid that she hasn't actually paid attention to the issue and its implications til now? Or is it a dodge to deflect the criticism until the public forgets and moves on and all can return to status quo ante?

Honestly, I'm kind of to the point where the situation won't be made right until the people at the NSA responsible for this are in prison, the NSA is dismantled, and everyone in the Whitehouse and Congress are impeached and thrown into the deepest, darkest hole we've got.

So Gen. Alexander releases a propaganda video saying he believes the journalists releasing the stories ought to be silenced, and now the UK is echoing that? It seems to me that we are well on our way to the point of no return.

The thing about all this is, the speed of the reaction is inversely proportional to the size of the truth. When a reality star is caught with drugs, the reaction is instantaneous. When Congress self-destructs, it takes months and years for the reaction and its consequences to fully unfold. What we're talking about here is the ripping away of the entire illusion under which we've been living the past 60 years. It's big, and most people don't even want to try to wrap their heads around what it means; but denial won't make it go away. This is a turning point in history, mark my words.

From here, more forward-thinking people and groups will begin moving in different directions than before and when the changes come they will be breath-taking. Recall the fall of the Berlin Wall. Glasnost and Perestroika had been going on for years at that point under Gorbachev, and suddenly in the space of a few weeks the Berlin Wall fell, and nearly every country locked away behind the Iron Curtain was free. It took another two years for Romania and Russia to sort themselves out, but they did.

What shape will those changes take, exactly? Who knows. But eventually Washington DC must fall and its masters brought to justice. We may suffer through a true police state with gulags before then, but eventually we will have a new social compact. I hope that the reset is clean, with none of the old masters surviving into the new system. Those sociopaths threaten the entire species.

I've been reading Der Spiegel for 25 years. I've never seen them get angry about anything, not even when Russia shut off the natural gas pipeline running to Central Europe to mess with the Ukraine and whacked Germany in the process. They're white hot mad about this. The German Interior Minister is talking about bringing the NSA to justice. The SPD is pushing to drop trade talks with the US unless Washington does something real about it. Meanwhile, Obama wants to talk about immigration and fly off to visit schools in Crown Heights rather than deal with this directly. Caught in lie after lie after lie about the NSA he owns this now, and he owns the consequences for the entire world if he doesn't deal with it.

Consider, fellow Americans, what goes if Germany goes. That's NATO and the EU. That's all our happy European client states cheerily playing along when Washington wants to force the President of Bolivia's plane down and search it. That's an economy bigger than ours, a continent whose population is much bigger than ours, suddenly not playing ball with us any more and pushing back hard on everything. That's a profoundly different world for American geopolitical power that will have material consequences for every American.

This, the government shutdown, the near default, the promise of more of the same in February, it all has everyone who has been on our team the last 50 years looking for the exits at once. The American government has proven it can't even get a website right; there's no way in hell they can deal with all of this at once. A fat, happy American middle class would have been a bulwark against it, but the elites have spent 20 years scraping out their substance. Most of us are running mighty thin. The risk of a trigger event, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the Rodney King verdict, bringing it all down is growing.

Pity they don't piggyback public wifi onto the lights with those LED wifi bulbs in the news a couple days back. It nicely resolves right-of-way concerns and power supply requirements.

This is exactly what is required. We all need to out these people, all of them who work for the NSA and CIA, and subject them to constant surveillance, harassment, and ostracism. Perhaps an open source project to map and publicize the personnel of these agencies, as an exercise in democratic resistance to creeping tyranny. Heck, we can even enlist the assistance of kindly freedom-loving people around the world to ensure it will be impossible to shut down. The American government needs to understand the American people are onto them and deem them the enemies of freedom they are. Whether further, more stringent measures are required remains to be seen.

The science and the math behind the tools of control are not classified. There is no classified physics, chemistry, and math. You and I can access them and learn. The components and sensors and knowledge required to build resistance measures are open source. You and I can see them, understand them, and employ them. In Today's--though perhaps not in "Tomorrow's"--America, you can still acquire the tools you need to resist and defeat Tyranny.

Take stock. Search your own heart. Can you live in a world where you are not free? Most of you will choose controlled comfort. You will cede control over your very existence to some remote, faceless drone within a bureaucracy, be it government- or corporate-controlled. Still there are a few who would rather die, no matter how much they have to lose, than acquiesce to petty, stupid tyrants.

I have a wife and kids. I love them dearly. I want to live a long life with them. But if I could trade my life for their freedom, I would do so in an instant. Those of you who are like me, assess and consider. We have been in a bubble of denial, but now that time is over. We all must choose whether to stand and be counted, or to kneel and submit. Choose the former and you're an American, choose the latter and you're a slave.

Decide.

You don't get to redefine political terms on the fly to mean something utterly different than what the rest of the world understands them to mean. If you do that then you might as well start calling the sky yellow and grass grey, because it amounts to the same thing, which is Orwellian doublespeak a la "Freedom is Slavery" and "War is Peace."

Here is the standard understanding of the political spectrum, since you don't seem to know what that is, or because you're being cute, "According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, opposite fascism and conservatism on the right."

That means authoritarianism is not the sole province of the left (to which "liberal" belongs) or of the right (to which "conservative" belongs). The entire rest of the world understands that fascism and socialism are distinct political philosophies that stand on the opposite ends of that left-right political axis. Conflating the two is ludicrous and bespeaks profound ignorance of political science. It is nonsense. It is like asserting that democracy=fascism=socialism=monarchy=theocracy because they all have hierarchy and are not the one truly moral and good political philosophy, anarchy. You see? I have just done exactly what you have done by claiming Republicans are "left of Stalin," and it's ridiculous.

"Conservative" does not mean what you think it means, as a catch-all for everything sweet and light in the world like chocolate fudge sundaes and bunny rabbits and sweet, blond haired blue-eyed children gamboling on a sunny meadow. "Liberal" also does not mean what you think it means, as a catch-all for everything dark and evil in the world like taxes and public education and rules and safe food in your grocery store and helping out a random person whose car died on the side of the road. They are both political labels that describe political philosophies that are different, not smears. This is easily understandable by acknowledging that liberals also like sundaes, bunnies, and children, and that conservatives also like education and help random strangers whose cars are broken down on the side of the road.

Please quit perpetuating the idiotic meme that claims otherwise. Calling Obama a socialist fascist marxist muslim, all of which are mostly diametrically opposed (marxism espouses atheism, for example), does not tar him with anything because all of the tar has already wound up on you.

A few years back my wife got us a 2-for-1 compartment deal on Amtrak from NYC Penn Station to New Orleans. We didn't realize that made us effectively first-class passengers until we showed up at Penn Station to check in and they ushered us into the first class lounge to wait. Extremely plush furniture, complimentary drinks, free newspapers, TVs, wifi, etc. Porters took our bags to the compartment for us, and we had a steward serve us throughout the trip. Free sodas, first call to dinner (which was included), power and TVs/DVD players in our compartment, and a bathroom in our compartment. It was wonderful. We left New York in the evening and arrived in New Orleans in city center the next day. Took the streetcar to our hotel. No taxi, no airport shuttle, no AirTrain BS. Fantastic.

I will take that luxury over the misery of flying any day. Any day. Unless they bring back zeppelins and replicate the civilized experience of the train.

I can dream.

I was particularly struck by the cost per unit he cited for 32-bit processors: $0.49/processor. At that cost profile the possibilities for DIY swarm and fabrication projects is compelling; a vision of autonomous mesh nodes spreading throughout our cities, powered by ambient backscatter chips, and forming the ultimate redundant network danced through my head.

Exciting times.

That's what she said...

Hillary Clinton is as dirty and corrupt as they come. I used to work for the Clintons, so I assert that with more inside-baseball knowledge than the average bear. Want an example? Bill Clinton is now in bed with the guy who started and funded the Vince Foster witchhunt against them. See, most humans with any scruples would not choose to do that. But gold rules.

Hillary will say whatever she needs to say to get enough sucke...er, voters, to vote for her. Then if successful she'll turn right around and dish out more of the same 'ole, same 'ole on Americans. Electing her to President is no solution at all.

Stop pretending it is.

The only solution seems to now be, given that neither the judiciary nor the legislative branches have put a stop to it, to have everyday Americans converge on DC and burn the place to the ground. Also, the Hamptons, and Newport, and Westchester, and every other gated community where DC's true masters sequester themselves.

Then we can all sit down at a new Constitutional Convention and figure out America 2.0 where crap like this can't happen again.