The majority of Californians sympathize with the Democrat platform.
The Democrat platform is all about more government control of (almost) everything: healthcare, education, regulation, business... everything.
When you've been elected to go to Washington and gain control over everything, it shouldn't surprise those who elected you that you run a giant spying apparatus to watch the same citizens who elected you to control them.
The only thing that should surprise any honest person is that the people who elected Feinstein over and over are angry that she went to Washington and did exactly what they elected her to do: grow the government, give it more power, and let it control everything it touches.

I'd say she is representing the views of the majority of Californians quite well. They're just suffering mass cognitive dissonance over the fact that they're being forced to reap what they've sown.

You can get a copy of the Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook with free 2-day shipping from Amazon Prime. I have a copy on my bookshelf, and yeah, it's pretty much every common explosive, producible in the home, with ingredients and equipment you're passing in the store aisles every day already.

Are they going to install these in EVERY sewer in all of Europe? How much will that cost?

What is the price that the innocent populace will pay in violation of their civil liberties from false positives? You do know that virtually every common explosive is made from ingredients available at hardware stores, pharmacies, and groceries, right? Are you okay with the police raiding your house because you and your neighbors happened to innocently wash the wrong combination of common ingredients down the drain at the same time?

What will they do about bombs made in the country-side in places with no sewer system?

Just another way to line a crony's pockets in the name of fighting terrorism.

Do you live in America? There are over 320,000,000 guns in private hands here. How do you propose to take care of that low hanging fruit?

I would propose that you are not anti-gun at all. You, in fact, love guns. You just want them to be in the government's hands and not the citizens' hands. I say this because as we both know, it would take government agents, WITH GUNS, to go around collecting a small fraction of the 320,000,000 guns in the country that people would give up.

But let's look at the statistics:

By conservative estimates there are at least 300,000,000 guns in the US. For the most recent year that statistics are available, there were about 11,000 non-suicide gun deaths (but this number still includes lawful homicide [ie, death by cop], lawful self defense, accidents, criminal on criminal murder [the most common type in gun control utopias like Chicago] and finally, bad guys killing good guys).

That means that 0.00366% of guns were used in a "gun death", and again that number still reflects a lot deaths that are not representative of people breaking the law.

Again, by conservative estimates, there are at least 80,000,000 gun owners in the US. If we still (wrongfully) assume that all 11,000 of those deaths were "bad" (ie, by ignoring the socially beneficial effect of cops lawfully killing bad guys, citizens lawfully killing bad guys, and bad guys killing bad guys), then 0.013% of gun owners caused a gun death. It looks like more than 99.987% of gun owners do, in fact, act responsibly with their firearms.

Given the relative rarity of gun crimes in the US compared to ownership rates, and the President's recent failure to get an anti-gun law passed in his own Democrat-controlled senate, I'd argue that guns really aren't a low hanging fruit at all. They're one of the highest fruits since you'd need to remove 300,000,000 guns to even try to get at the ~11,000 used in crimes each year.

You're onto it. In reality handguns are terrible at killing people. It's not unheard of for people to be shot 10+ times with a handgun and keep going for several minutes before dying, or even live if they get medical treatment before they bleed out.

People have a skewed perception when their only experience is watching movies like Taken where Liam Neson kills 30 guys in a row with a single shot from a handgun each, and every one of them falls right to the ground, instantly dead.

If the country has a gun violence problem, and we seek to solve it by removing guns, then we'll still be left with a violence problem and we will have not actually fixed anything.

Wait a second. You went from, "King Kong / Planet of the Apes = anti-black" to "zombies = anti-black" with no logical link. Now, your KK/PotA argument is interesting on the surface, and it may be entertaining to explore it more, but your zombie argument doesn't even pass the sniff test. In my experience, zombie movies have a pretty normal representation of races among their zombies. I've never seen a zombie movie where all the humans were one race, and all the zombies were a very obviously different race.

If you really want to bring your victimization mentality into a discussion of zombie fiction, you should do it from the angle of, "zombies = poor people," or "zombies = sick people," or "zombies = liberals." At least each of those has some logical support that can be argued.... a little.

IMO, zombie fiction is great. It gets people to think about preparedness for natural and man-made disasters since zombies would pretty much be the ultimate disaster. Not surprisingly, that's why a lot of government agencies use it as a plot for their own disaster drills. Also, your "tactical readiness" should be independent of what you think the threat is going to be.

No resource allocates well at a cost of zero, credit included. Keeping interest rates near zero is hurting a lot of people and is not a wise strategy.

Please see my other post a couple up for my explanation of the "crisis."

I would argue that they don't disagree with me, but rather that we're talking with different sets of assumed semantics. Let me explain.

If you ran past the debt limit deadline, and the US couldn't borrow any more money, then **someone** would have to make some choices on who gets paid and who doesn't. Either the President, as head of the executive, would order the treasury about who gets paid, or the treasury would decide on its own, or congress could pass a balanced budget effectively doing the same. Regardless, not everyone who was promised money would get paid. By any definition, that is absolutely a default.

The problem is that it's only a general default on our promised expenditures. It does not have to be a default on our debt service. Any default on our debt obligations would be undertaken on a purely voluntary basis by the President or SecTres, not withstanding any debate over the effect of amendment 14 section 4.

So yes, not raising the debt ceiling or not ignoring it on 10/17 would have been A default on our promises, but it would not have been THE cataclysmic default on our debt obligations. It would have meant we had a balanced budget instantly, and, if certain people chose to, it could have also meant that the US's credit rating went to pot and then all the doomsday stuff happened, but again, that decision rested entirely in the executive branch in the short term.

The treasury department is partisan by virtue of its head being appointed by the president. It quite simply can't be taken at face value. On any given issue it may be right or wrong, but it simple being the treasury and saying something doesn't make it correct.

As far as the economic establishment disagreeing, I've seen a lot that doesn't, and I've seen a lot that does. I've also seen plenty of "economics" "journalists" who are, on a daily basis, baffled by the movements of stocks, gold, unemployment, business, etc when they are all easily explainable with a supply/demand curve and a little reasoning on human behavior. There are a lot of hacks in the economics world, so being at odds with any in particular doesn't bother me.

The point was that the US was at 0% risk of defaulting on its debt.

You might as well write a long post about the potential ills of earth being invaded by married bachelors; it had an equal chance of happening.

Gold dropped because the market's built-in assumption that the Fed would keep printing money to finance the government's deficits forever was temporarily shaken by the possibility of maybe some sane fiscal policy showing its head for once. Then gold went back up when the deal was signed, signifying full steam ahead on printing and deficits. It made absolute sense.

But yeah, this article in particular is just a bad case of hindsight bias.

Have you ever tried to hand-fit a 1911 from individual parts, and blend the contours of the grip safety, mainspring housing and the frame into each other using only a dremel tool? Man, 3D printing will make it gloriously easy!

Please take the time to read about the distinction between positive rights and negative rights. Wherever a positive right is claimed to exist, there must necessarily exist slavery in order to provide it, and thus there can be no valid positive rights, only negative rights. In modern America, we've simply decided that in order to indulge a lot of positive rights that we create by fiat, we will enslave wage earners. It neither makes it moral, nor rational. Claiming to have a right that requires the enslavement of others is no more rational than claiming to be a married bachelor.

It's not a challenge at all. Texas does it. We're required by our state constitution to have a balanced budget, and we only let our legislature meet for 150 days every other year. The result: once they are in session, they're working to hammer out the new budget and fix the real problems, instead of constantly being in session feeling the need to legislate something, messing things up, and wrecking the economy.

It works so great that our economy in Texas attracts a constant stream of refuges fleeing the charred ruins of California's economy and its legislature that occasionally takes a two week break between sessions of wrecking the state.