There’s a biometric database of all adult Americans hidden in the immigration reform bill. Good thing the federal government is in charge of this, otherwise there would be real cause for concern. If this were some corrupt oligarchy people would worry about the information being misused, for example to target opponents of the regime for harassment.
Still, being a paranoid right-wing nut, I will actively work against the re-election of any politician who votes for this.
If we’re going to have them, they need to protect all of us, not just Democrats.
FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists, or gay rights advocates, if their speech of a sexual nature is “unwelcome” by religious conservatives. — Wendy Kaminer, quoted by the Instapundit
Oh, surely federal laws and regulations will be fairly enforced, whether the accused is liberal or conservative. Why would anyone think otherwise?
Water is reality. H2O is a model.
All sorts of critically important things go on, out of sight of most of us: dredging operations on the Mississippi; rail freight operations; undersea cable maintenance. Here’s a mostly-live map that tells where ships are all over the world. Seen here.
For some time I bought from Walmart a particular brand of canned herring I like, for a dollar a can. Then last year they bumped the price up to a dollar eighteen. Eighteen percent seemed a bit much, so I stopped eating herring – surprisingly, it wasn’t all that difficult.
Then around the beginning of lent they dropped the price back to a dollar a can, so I stocked up and ate a lot of herring.
The other day I looked and they wanted a dollar thirty-eight a can. That’s just not happening. Frankly, I question who besides me is buying very much canned herring. We’ll see if it goes on sale. Until then I’m switching to sardines and salmon.
Crack-brained zero-tolerance policies are condemned as stupid by everyone but the school administrators who impose them. You’ve read about these. A little girl points her Hello Kitty Magic Bubble Gun at a classmate, and gets suspended. A little boy gnaws his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun, and gets suspended. Another points his pencil and says “pow!” and gets suspended.
Regular people think these are just kids playing, and educated idiots making fools of themselves. In fact the suspending authority will be an experienced teacher with a Ph.D. in Educational Administration or a similarly rigorous field. He-or-She is teaching the children a great lesson, teaching their parents too, and doing it all by in an inclusive cross-cultural modality. You may not speak English or know much about America before the lesson, but after the lesson you’ll be an American patriot committed to the constitution. By suspending a boy for making a threatening gesture with his fruit snack, the child who might otherwise have become a solid citizen respectful of authority is radicalized into a conservative patriot who respects the constitution.
It’s an end run, just like the liberals’ brilliant campaign to make every American buy a rifle and a thousand rounds. If President Obama had issued an executive order that everyone had to buy and maintain an AR-15, people would have fought for the right to be gun-free. Instead, he took the shrewd approach of a master psychologist. Every time a politician says something stupid about guns, a hundred more people buy guns. Merely an accident by tone-deaf nit-wits stunningly out of touch with the people who elect them? I think not.
This level of ignorance just isn’t natural, it’s deliberate. They’re maximizing the number of stupid things they say about guns. When Senator Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, people wondered if he was crazy (wondered if Obama was crazy, I mean, not Biden…) Hah! Obama was crazy like a fox! Similarly, those elementary school principals are shrewd operators who know exactly what they’re doing. They have graduate degrees, after all. It’s not like you can finish grad school and be a idiot.
They’re doing it on purpose. Every time a school administrator suspends a second-grader for pointing his pop-tart aggressively, a family joins the Tea Party.
Michael Chertoff says Google Glass is like a drone:
“Now imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them.”
Google Glass is a drone on your head. A security camera is a stationary drone. Conventional aircraft are drones with an on-board operators. Cameras are personally operated drones. Heck, an AR-15 is a personally operated drone. That makes as much sense as anything else pundits say about the AR-15. In fact, a pundit is basically a talking drone, apparently self-operated.
