The tea party is a pretty amorphous thing. Originally it was just those of us that moneybombed Ron Paul starting on the tea party anniversary and set a bunch of records and forced people to pay attention to him and us for at least a short while. But after the media started paying attention others started trying to claim the name for their own purposes. Most of them have little or nothing to do with the real Tea Party or the Spirit of '76.

"Put Schneier in a ring with Bruce Wayne, Bruce Willis, and Bruce Lee. See who survives."

Obviously the answer is no one. Lee is already dead, and he will still kill all the others before they can make it over the rope.

You cant really be that dense?

The long ques of passengers waiting to be molested by 'security' are very dangerous. That is where any suicide bombers will strike - why try to sneak through security when you can do more damage by pushing the button right when you get to them?

The fact that no one has done this yet just goes to show that the threat of terrorism is dramatically exaggerated. You're more likely to be killed by falling furniture than a terrorist, thankfully. But it has nothing to do with this pointless and insecure charade performed by the TSA.

"I'm not convinced they're actually capable of being principled on these things"

Doesnt look to me like they even tried to pretend otherwise. Rather than taking a stand to censor or allow these videos, they seem to be saying they will censor them - but only if they dont like the reactions that are being posted. I believe that's the least principled stand they could possibly have taken here.

"hair protects your head from sunburn"

You know what works even better for that?

A hat.

"Ask BSCS grads who graduated in 2008 or earlier how much of what they learned in school is still relevant."

And if the answer is not most/all they got ripped off.

College is not supposed to teach you to use the current gadgets. It's supposed to teach you to read, write, and think. Those skills do not go out of date.

Your key lever for wiggle room is 'of US law' and the key pivot is 'in foreign countries.'

US law includes any international accord properly ratified by the Senate. And foreign countries includes many with whom we have friendly relations and various formal ties. And there are many cases where it is indeed forbidden by US and/or binding international law to do a lot of the things they have been doing. For instance bugging the phone of an accredited embassy or ambassador. Whether inside or outside of the US, that violates binding law.

Of course we all know that it was common practice in the cold war for cold combatants to bug each other anyway, and just try very hard not to get caught. All that plausible deniability stuff has worn thin over the years, these days they dont seem to care whether or not it's plausible anymore. But even back then no one was going around bugging tens of thousands of phones on either side. That scale of operation they had to have understood was way too big to stay secret for long.

The nations we are spying on now are supposedly friends, in several cases close allies.

You are not making any sense here.

Illegal actions taken by our government against foreigners, causing damage to our countries reputation, its relations, and indeed sparking violent blowback as well, is one of the major dangers that Americans face in todays world. Ignoring or avoiding those problems is pointless.

It's just F8 on earlier versions of Windows, and earlier versions give you a decent fraction of a second window to hit with it. On win8, it's shift-f8, and the window is so small that it's practically impossible to hit.

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

I know you probably are not old enough to remember it, but there was a time before this BS. Then came the cold war, and it made sense to build stuff like this to stop them. Then they keeled over dead from bad economics and we... started making new enemies. And by that time generations had gone by so constant wartime footing seems 'normal' to a lot of people.

But it's bad economics and if we keep it up we're going the way of the Soviet Union.

Spying on friendly governments *might* be technically legal, though I doubt it. Nonetheless it is certainly not what anyone tasked with national security *should* be doing, because it is completely contrary to the supposed goal.

"It's especially ballsy to try and argue that the Supreme Court doesn't have jurisdiction."

It's worse than you think.

They are simultaneously arguing in lower courts that the lower courts have no jurisdiction because it's a matter for the SC, AND in the SC that the SC does not have jurisdiction, because it's a question for the lower courts.

Actually they are supposed to be spying on *enemy governments*.

Problem is we dont have any more of those left, but bureaucracy doesnt know how to shut down when it is not needed. Instead they keep trying to make new enemies. And unfortunately succeeding...

I am not so sure this is insightful.

Much use of Mathematics in human/social science, in my experience, has more to do with Physics-envy than with real science. Another related function is to give a scientistic seal of approval on what amounts to modern witchcraft - this is particularly prevalent in the region of applied psychology I have found. It does not have to make sense, just be slightly denser than your grad students (and patients/clients) can parse, in order to give you the full and wondrous benefits of the holy placebo.

"The National Highway System isn't a constitutional mandate. Do you REALLY want to defund interstate highways?"

Absolutely.

That's effectively a subsidy to trucking, which distorts the market in favor of that method of shipping, to the detriment of competitors (air and train) and through this chain of unintended consequences works against the greater good and makes us all poorer. Get rid of it.

""Unproductive expenditures" to YOU might mean "the only thing keeping X industry from unceremoniously collapsing and causing a domino effect on the economy.""

If industry X is dependent on subsidies or supports in order to avoid collapse, that is exactly the situation where it is most critical that no such supports be provided, that the sick industry be allowed to collapse so that healing can then begin. Propping up a sick industry only allows the problem to fester and makes the effects of the inevitable collapse even more devastating in the end.

"Thats called throwing the neighbor's baby out along with your own dirty bath water."

Really? Your neighbors baby is pork funding? I dont think I want to meet your neighbor.