Re: Collective Salvation

Evidently.

After everything I've posted, your concern is how you've made out thanks to our administrations activities. Not what sorts of offenses they have committed in your name.

Since the USA as Jim knows it today is pretty much a figment of his imagination, this is a non-issue.

Jim knows very little about the real world, and what he thinks he knows is almost always wrong.

Every self-deluding conservative fantasist will take this warning seriously.

worse than the carpetbaggers

Dream on Jim. Your nightmares have an appealling surreal element. You need to take Ken Livingstone's manta to heart - "If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Can you even pick her up? One small step at a time! ;-)

--

aioe.org, Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages.

If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account:

There are two kinds of people on this earth: The crazy, and the insane. The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.

No, in Florida you can shoot them and end their misery.

If Europeans would pay a little attention to what goes on on their own continent they'd probably get a collective heart attack. Banking privacy no longer exists, some countries openly debate spurning GVT trojans onto computers, in the UK you are on surveillance video pretty much all day long, and so on.

Then I'd just tell them why.

My comeuppance was >20 years ago. Had some stepper motors in the checked baggage, long wires, curled up. My name was called over the PA system at SeaTac. Oops ... Was escorted to a restricted area. Huge room, my suitcase in the middle, lots of folks with guns standing at a safe distance. "Open that suitcase and slowly unpack it!" ... "Ok" ... ... "What are those?" ... "Stepper motors, Sir" ... ... "Don't ya ever put that kind of stuff into checked baggage again, Sir" ... "I won't, Sir" .. "Have a safe trip" ... "Thank you, Sir".

All of the issues you have mentioned are being openly discussed by EU citizens. So they are in fact paying attention.

Try opening a bank or brokerage account in the EU as an American. Odds are they will kindly escort you to the exit one they discover your citizenship. Why? Because hosting an account would invite a level of espionage into their affairs that they don't have to worry about with any other EU citizen.

For most radical conservatives, the real world ends at the US borders. Ignorance is taken as a point of pride.

There is this recurring theme that everything must be viewed in the context of a conflict. There are no win-win situations. Everything is a zero-sum game. Its telling that this doesn't fit well with the traditional conservatives. The people who advocated unimpeded global trade, selling anyone anything that they couldn't shoot back at us and promoting the wealth of the developing world as potential customers for their business.

The bomb shelter loonies are going to let everyone else bypass us.

What does the contents of my laptop have to to with security?

Its being searched _after_ I've arrived. If it was a bomb, it would be too late. If it was full of classified information, it would be searched going out, not coming in (they only x-ray it prior to boarding).

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in news:c7b39cda-73ed-4816-9c99-e983ec946642 @o40g2000prn.googlegroups.com:

Wait up, Bill - I'm a gun owner. And, seeing as how my politics are not to the right of Atilla the Hun, I guess that makes me a "liberal".

Even Obama said, in his Nomination Acceptance speech, QUOTED: "The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those

plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals."

Worse than th ecarpetbaggers...

As opposed to the Republicans expanding the gov.t's "authority" to seize private property from average foplks and pay them a mere pittance, so thaey could put up parks named after living Rebublicans...

As opposed to having consistently allowed a few people to simply ignore the laws that had been keeping the stock market from being fleeced - a number of comopanies, *and* various Retirement accounts of average citizens, were decimated. Or don't one's savings/money/investments count as property...?

As opposed to having contributed to the destruction of the US auto industry's competitiveness by killing the MPG requirements and encouraging the substitution of gas-guzzlers for fuel-efficient cars (McCain's voting record there has been consistent), thereby leading to massive losses of jobs (that paid for property), losses that wouldn't have been necessary if teh past 30 years' worth of knowledge re: oil production had been heeded rather than denegrated and ignored so that a very few individuals could make ever-larger profits.

As opposed to doing away with what little was left of mortgage regulations, encouraging banks to come up with beanbrained things like "interest-only mortgages" and, again, with a very few people paying themselves million upon millions of dollars in "rewards" for this nonsense, *and* _encouraging_ people to buy "as much house as possible", cynically based upon a known fallacy, namely, that "house proces will go up forever". Resulting, again, is massive losses of property.

And so on.

The "carpetbaggers" have been thriving for the past 8 years.

Bill would be in BIG trouble. Everything he does, bombs. :(

A good description of NeoCon thinking.

I listened to Tom Friedman on Charlie Rose last night. The points he made parallel yours, with the basic question being

-or- will the USA *lead* the way into the future?**.

Right. That's when you are boarding.

But when someone is coming back:

But not you. The gov't probably know's you and what you've got and that it isn't worth peeking at.

So you deny the historical reality of republican senator Joseph McCarthy?

Also not that McCarthy didn't accuse anyone of being a Communist that didn't turn out to be a Soviet agent. "McCarthy" is just a scarecrow the leftists like to take out and beat.

"More likely"?

You had better read the congressional record again.

equate

searched

You'd better study some history, rather than weenie fantasy.

Last time I checked, the thought police (i.e., Homeland "security"), were a completely neocon (read "Cheney/Bush") phenomenon.

Thanks, Rich

Perhaps you don't need a history lesson, but you certainly do need a psychiatrist.

Oh, I'm definitely crazy - in fact, I might be the craziest of the lot! Thus, having been through all of the stages/degrees of insanity, I have a unique perspective on the various neuroses/psychoses of everybody else.

But I ain't stupid. I'm not a neocon dupe, any more than I'm a liberal weenie dupe.

The "terrorists" won the "war on terror" the day the Cheney/Bush regime started strip-searching American citizens at the airports.

Thanks, Rich