alt.society.civil-liberty Google Group

"Democracy's Greatest Defect" [must reading from misguided and ill-advised Bigger Government-lovers!]

2009-10-28T11:46:18Z

[link]
'The Independent Institute'
"Democracy’s Most Critical Defect"
By Robert Higgs on Oct 27, 2009
"Although democracy now comes closer than anything else to serving as a
world religion, it has never lacked critics. For millennia those critics,
such as Aristotle, had large followings among political thinkers and

Re: Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)

2009-10-22T23:55:19Z

In article <70d251fe-b1bc-4e4c-9495-6cda3 8bd5...@a6g2000vbp.googlegroup s.com>,
Hmmm, Monday.
I was with Bamford and David Kahn last week. Got Kahn to sign a
calendar with a quote of his. Norman Polmar was there, too.
This isn't a very good book. Bamford's Body of Secrets is somewhat better.
The anatomical structure somewhat better structures Bamford's book, but

Prisons -- still a growth industry!

2009-10-20T20:36:31Z

Ackman Says Pershing Owns 9.5% of Corrections Corp. (Update1)
[link]
By Eric Martin
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- William Ackman said he bought shares of
Corrections Corp. of America, giving his Pershing Square Capital
Management LP hedge fund a 9.5 percent stake in the biggest U.S.

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-20T20:21:00Z

More generally, they are supposed to be respected
because they represent the State, which in supposed
to be "the people" -- something like the Flag. Equally
mystical. Just so, the power of the king was supposed
to represent divine will and contradicting it or impugning
the king was not only treason but blasphemy. The

Re: Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)

2009-10-20T20:07:33Z

10^24, I suppose. (That's supposed to be a caret in there.) or
10 ** 24.
I don't know how meaningful the numbers are. A septillion
pages would be 150 quadrillion pages per person on earth
today (unless I've lost a few digits or marbles), whereas I
think the facts about me could be easily summed up in a

Re: Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)

2009-10-20T13:53:28Z

It says 10^24 bytes in the article. It just looks like 1024 because
the superscript font was lost when the OP copy and pasted the text.

Re: Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)

2009-10-20T05:29:50Z

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:58:32 -0700 (PDT), Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
I thought 1024 bytes was a Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes was a Megabyte, and
1024 Megabytes was a Gigabyte.
It's a bit like saying that the ocean could potentially increase tro a level
of millilitres by 2015 (as a result of the melting of the popar icecaps,

Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)

2009-10-19T20:58:32Z

Who's in Big Brother's Database?
By James Bamford
[review of] The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National
Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00
On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where
temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-19T00:01:51Z

Catherine Jefferson
To fill in the missing steps:
"Disturbing the peace" is behavior that is likely to
lead to an ass kicking.
Observed behavior of the police is that when one person,
not a cop, disturbs the peace by behaving offensively to
another person, not a cop, and the other person, not a
cop, kicks his ass, the police are apt to arrest the guy

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-18T19:56:20Z

What has that got to do with what the founding fathers would have
believed was appropriate behavior by the *government*? They were
vehemently insistent on keeping government limited and largely out of te
private sphere of life. For example, government was forbidden to mess
with religion, but most of the founding fathers attended church and many

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-18T14:02:32Z

On Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:27:11 -0700 (PDT), "*Anarcissie*"
They must be respected because they are altruistic, they are 'public
servants', people that have given away their personal interest to work
for the general well being. I am sure this is written theory, probably
in the constitutional documents of police forces.

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-18T10:24:32Z

"*Anarcissie*"
James A. Donald
People complained this was excessive, but he was not convicted of any
crime.
Hamilton had previously had duels with William Gordon (1779), Aedanus
Burke (1790), John Francis Mercer (1792-1793), James Nicholson (1795),
James Monroe (1797), and Ebenezer Purdy/George Clinton (1804).

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-18T04:24:19Z

Tell us what became of him afterward.

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-18T04:13:20Z

On Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:27:11 -0700 (PDT), "*Anarcissie*"
The founders were apt to kill a person in single combat in a formal
duel when that person disparaged their sacred honor, so I doubt they
shared your interpretation.
Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton over remarks made at a dinner
party.

Re: It's Illegal To Look At The Police, Or Talk About What They Do

2009-10-17T23:27:11Z

Actually, it is more peculiar than that. In dealing with
the situation in the streets, the police would, from time
to time, give an order to a crowd to disperse. This was
a public order given openly to a crowd in the streets.
Someone would text this in to the accused, and he
would then distribute the news: "The police have given