The Glade 4.0

http://video.pbs.org/video/2165096256/
http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Liberties- ... 957&sr=8-1



I'm about half-way through this book and so far I like it, but it makes me angry sometimes and I have to stop.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That someone is allowed to write a book critical of the government's response to terrorism is proof the terrorists are winning.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Ordering that book might get you on a watch list, but if you ask if you are on a watch list they won't tell you. If you suspect you are on a watch list, you can submit a form and then 6 months later they will tell you that you may or may not have been removed from a list that may or may not exist.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only terrorists are concerned with whether they're on a watch list.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

And only guilty people have anything to hide, lets get rid of those pesky search warrants. If you don't give the government the tools they need the terrorist will win.

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I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil

Not that I dont agree, but these responses are getting really old. Why don't you just go with, "Why do you hate freedom?"

I don't hate my government. As it was set up it could be wonderful. It is the people and human failure in general that make it about as viable as communism anymore.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

You're old enough to know we have it damn site better than any communist country ever did.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah that is a defense of a system. Hey we are punching you in the face but at least we aren't using a power sander on your balls.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yes DE, amazingly better up till now. The way things are going, we're headed towards elites and poor people, rebellion, insurrection, civil war, eating the rich, a reign of terror and eventually a government that is not afraid to give its citizens a whiff of grapeshot.

We, as a country haven't learned a damn thing, are repeating the mistakes of the past, and America will have been a noble experiment in history books to come.

Thomas Jefferson was right, it is time to shed the blood of tyrants and patriots, and if it doesn't happen soon, the Freedoms we used to enjoy in this country will be a dim memory.

I'm convinced Dr. Paul will only make things worse trying to fix the problem. Most of the other candidates are a joke. I kind of like Huntsman, but I don't think he stands a rat's chance in a prison camp.

I might have twenty years left, probably less. I've started believing in the inevitable collapse of our system through mismanagement for the last fifty years. I hope the collapse doesn't happen in my lifetime. Heck, I hope it doesn't happen at all, but I see it coming.

If you want to take a good lesson from the past and put it into play, try DDE's austerity based version of government until we're financially back on our feet again. The money we used to have is all gone, we''re in it up to our ears. How about we not spend anymore money we don't have?

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I am on a watch list because my name is super common in Ireland and one or more of these other mes was in the IRA.

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Only someone who's guilty ever pleads the fifth.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

How exactly do you think Paul would make it worse by at the very least vetoing enough garbage legislation over four years and ending the wars and Federal drug war?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I think he would fare worse than Carter and Obama in getting any kind of legislation passed that meant anything. He is despised by a large enough bloc in his own party that the Democrats would not have a hard time getting the votes to block anything he proposed. The Republicans can garner the votes to block Obama now, can they keep those votes to support Paul? I doubt it.

His frustration will make matters worse. He will veto everything he disapproves of and will make even more political enemies.

The recent reports of racism in publications he was responsible for will never go away, especially as they were never apologized for until brought up during this campaign and he has yet to rebut any of them as far as I know.

He is greatly flawed. He is not electable in my own opinion. I realize you are a big supporter of him, but I think you and most of his supporters are being blind to issues that will matter to the majority of the electorate. Yes, he has good ideas and plans, but they alone are not enough to secure the votes he will need.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

He is despised by certain elements that control funding. He is personally well liked because he doesn't insult the person or throw people under the buss for political leverage.

You worry about him not passing anything good. I worry what bad things others will pass. Find me all the good legislation you can from the last 12 years and I'll match you with bad.

I go by poll Micheal and in polls both he and Romney are dead even with Obama for the general election. You're coloring other people with your own bias.

He has denied the racist claims and rebuked the words in the newsletter when he first learned about it, two decades ago or so. The head of the Austin NAACP has come out to refute these charges and so has numerous black previous patients of his whom he treated before running for office - some at no charge one where it was a mixed race couple and one hospital called the cops on them to get them to be removed from the emergency room.

He has faced the same frustration for 30 years - I don't think a little more is going to bother him.

Of course without Congress he can:
End the wars.
Release all non violent drug offenders in the US.
Stop the Federal Government from prosecuting drug offenses.
Stop Executive Orders that strip rights.
Order the military to not arrest American citizens as NDAA allows them to do.
End warantless wiretapping.
And on
And on
And on.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Not a Ron Paul thread. FYI.

I'm mostly recommending this book. If you know a person saying that the PATRIOT Act isn't that bad and it's all no big deal, this book will be a good reference to convince them otherwise.

Sometimes I feel like she's saying that the laws are just needing to be rewritten and not done away with altogether, which I don't agree with, but it's still an informative book.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I dunno, why *do* you hate freedom Xeq?

/snark

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Holy shitsnacks!

I think you're buying into a lot of nonsense about how bad things are currently, given some of the past crises this country has weathered. They may not seem so bad now that we're not dealing with them, but I guarantee at the time a lot of them seemed like we weren't going to make it through.

As for Jefferson, the rest of the Founding Fathers should have held him down and beat his *** for that ****. The whole point of what they created was to avoid having to shed anyone's blood. There's a good reason it was Jefferson and not Washington or Hamilton that said that. It's really **** easy to talk about shedding blood until it's time to do it, and it's telling that one of the FF's that wasn't actually a soldier was the one that said it. (Yeah, he got fairly close to the fighting at some points, but he wasn't the one freezing his *** off at Valley Forge.)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Just how demolished does the Constitution have to get before it's bad enough?

The real price of freedom is vigilance. Terrorists have less power to take my freedoms than a congressman or FBI agent does. I think we've all heard the quote about trading the illusion of safety for freedoms.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Washington wasn't freezing his *** off at Valley Forge. Multiple times a year I've been at his encampment there (I live 3 miles away). That is not a house one freezes in at all.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I still cannot comprehend how people can claim that "our freedoms are being eroded." That might be true compared to some ideal, never realized standard, but compared to the US's actual history, our freedoms are increasing, not being eroded.

The fact is, the Patriot Act making warrantless wiretapping legal is a step up from the previous status quo where wiretapping was illegal, but the federal government just did it anyway. I do not agree with the Patriot Act either, but it's still an improvement, freedom-wise, over how things used to work. At least people today know that the government can wiretap you, rather than before when they assumed that the government couldn't, while the government was doing it anyway.

Do you really believe that today we are worse off, freedom-wise, than we were during the Red Scare in the 50s with the HUAAC hearings and the blacklists? Corolinth just made a joke about, "Only someone who's guilty ever pleads the fifth." The thing is, today that is a joke, in the 50s the vast majority believed it. That's why people who refused to testify in front of HUAAC got blacklisted, because people believed that because they took the fifth, they must be criminals!

Xec, wiretapping is a tip of the iceberg. You should find a copy of this book. Some of the court proceeding are downright Kaffkaesqe and I'm not using a hyberbole.

Librarians can be handed National Security Letters from the FBI which forbid them to speak of the NSL. So that makes fighting it very hard. People can have charges against them, but then the FBI keeps the evidence "secret."

We haven't made a concentration camp for Muslims, but that doesn't mean we aren't taking steps, slowly but surely, into a fascist state. That is generally how it happens. Other countries with such fates were similarily surprised.

Mission creep also comes into play. For instatnce, it was important for them to create a link between terrorisim and the drug war, now the FBI can use the PATRIOT Act to do a lot more under such auspices.

Seriously, I reccomend reading the book instead of listening to me. I'm a terrible debatorer. Rent it from a library or something or it's like $9 on a kindle. It will tell you what the goverment is now allowed to do.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This must be an older book, or the author just declined to mention that the NSL gag orders were ruled unconstitutional years ago.

Like I said before, I think it's a step up if the government actually makes something legal, rather than leaving it illegal and doing it anyway. Because that's what they used to do. The FBI used to wiretap whoever they wanted and break in wherever they wanted, without any kind of warrant or actually any kind of oversight outside of the FBI whatsoever. They engaged in a decades-long covert campaign against basically anyone that campaigned for more rights or more government oversight, and many individuals used information gathered by the FBI this way for personal gain. Incumbent politicians would use the FBI to burglarize and covertly gather dirt on their opponents. Nothing the Patriot Act authorizes is anywhere near as bad as this, and there's no evidence that the FBI is continuing to engage in abuses as severe as these. In fact the main limitation of the FBI at this time was technology, they actually had to break in places and that required a lot of resources and risk. Just imagine what it would be like if we had Hoover running the FBI with 21st century technology and basically a blank check to do whatever he wanted. Would that really be better than what we have today?

You cannot possibly tell me that today we are worse off, freedom-wise, than the 1950s where the private sector voluntarily blacklisted individuals who simply invoked their Fifth Amendment rights in front of the HUAAC. Not blacklisted by the government, but voluntarily blacklisted by almost the entire private sector, indicating the vast majority of the population actually bought the line, "Only someone who's guilty ever pleads the fifth." Today, the private sector actively fights such laws, like the case that got the NSL gag orders ruled unconstitutional.

Another example: The 1960 U-2 incident. Eisenhower blatantly lied, repeatedly, to everyone about it. This wasn't like the Bush WMD "lies" where there's no proof that he actually lied about them, but where they stated the exact opposite of the truth and several agencies conspired to cover it up. When this came out, the people praised him for this. In fact, when Gary Powers was repatriated, he was snubbed by the population for basically failing to commit suicide in order to protect the CIA's reputation.

I'm not sure if today's politicians are more power-hungry than the politicians of 50-60 years ago, but "vigilance" by the average person is orders of magnitude better than it was and thus the problems can't be worse.

Secret means it isn't accepted by the populace and its use will be rare. Legal means it is or will be and its use will be more and more common.

I don't care about 60 years ago. I care about this year from last year.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

60 years ago is important when you're trying to establish a longstanding trend of the erosion of rights.

I 100% agree that the Patriot Act is terrible, but it strikes me more as the government jumping on the opportunity 9/11 gave them, not the continuation of a trend of the gradual erosion of rights.