What has the US done in Iraq and Afghanistan? One shot, no one knows what the target may have been, and hordes of US military are kicking down doors and arresting anyone in sight.

Have one of your militia take a shot at a convoy and see how his neighbors like the retaliation.

It’s sort of like a hijacking. The hijackers kill someone, anyone, right off to demonstrate that your life has become worthless and any resistance will be met with lethal force. Immediately.

If you acknowledge the danger of the misuse of government power in the case of spying on it’s citizens, then you validate the fear of them coming for your guns.

they wouldn’t be needed.

However, just as we need illegal immigrant workers to keep wages low, we need enemies abroad to justify spending an unconscionable amount of money on “defense”, which is not being spent on “defense” except against enemies our actions have created.

It’s all folly, being sold as “defense”, “safety” and “security”. And it will go on as long as people are told the same story from birth.

However, the cast will change. The US is being marginalized, has less economic clout, less to export and is less able to protect Western interests. Those same multinationals for which the military is working now will abandon the US as soon as it is economically feasible to ally with other countries.

America could have accomplished the same thing with libraries and hospitals as it did with bombs and troops kicking in doors, and slept even better, but chose to continue war and violence as a means of national influence.

Sad, but it’s in the adolescent genes.

It’s pretty silly to lump together, on the one hand, the first, fourth, and fifth amendments that are individually vital and also together add up to a right to privacy being shredded today; versus the phony reinterpretation of the second amendment that the NRA started pushing in the 1970s, which retired SC Justice Burger called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” (For a good time google “burger second amendment fraud”).

Nor is it entirely rational to lump together Snowden’s words plus documents, which the NSA to its credit didn’t bother trying to deny (but proceeded directly to rationalize and minimize), therefore an undisputed transgression by the government against the American people; with the paranoid belief that the Socialist Kenyan Usurper has a secret plan to take away all yer guns. A conspiracy theory isn’t in the same league as a documented and undisputed leak.

This argument’s over a decade old. I was against the Patriot Act, and I think that time has validated my concerns. Events today were inevitable and flow directly from the precedents set in those dark days.

Thanks.

Besides, am I the only one to see the irony of quoting George Orwell right about now? You know, the guy who wrote 1984 about a fictional precursor to today’s surveillance state? Ring any bells?

Do you think maybe the NSA wasn’t quite the benevolant-yet-rough night watchman that Orwell had in mind?