Ted Rall for June 14, 2013

What’s interesting to me about this is that we spend so much money on NSA, but there are so few terrorists, and their search algorithms can’t possibly approach 99.9999% accuracy. So the point seems to be about enabling casual harassment, or to provide a blind for not-so-casual harassment.

Also it’s worth noting that many people in this world live in circumstances where Internet privacy is far from the top of their list of things to be concerned about. This all is in some ways an elitist concern.

Not to say I’m okay with fourth amendment violations. I’m most certainly not. I’m even more not okay with ones that are so blatantly falsely being sold as necessary, though.

You cannot seriously equate the Holocaust with what the NSA is doing. I don’t like it, but this is a totally ridiculous comparison. It isn’t a slippery slope. It isn’t even in the same effin’ ballpark as Jules would say.

One other thing. For those of us old enough to remember when airplane hijackings were commonplace, we didn’t overreact and establish a police state then.

Public resignation and apathy in face of the NSA spying revelations is more about Congressional leaders acting on their own over the wishes of the public. Note, huge majorities of voters want some as reasonable as universal background checks. However, Congressional reps and Senators who live in safe districts can completely bollocks the process and negate the majority’s wishes. We just feel powerless in the face of too much money and arrogant petty politicians.

Ted is really on his game today. It appears that he’s trying to show us ourselves and the lengths that a dominant group of humans will go to, using other, less socially acceptable groups of humans, as “necessary sacrifices”, to maintain a false sense of security. Bravo Ted!

“By this point we should be well past those more immediate, visceral reactions, but I think a kind of fatigue and apathy has set in.”

I think it’s more the Boy who Cried Wolf. We’ve been through all kinds of manufactured crises: he’s a Kenyan, he’s a Muslim, he’s a Socialist, he’s a Communist, he’s a White Supremacist, he tried to join Girl Scouts, he rips fetuses from women’s wombs and eats them in front of them……

When a real, legitimate issue comes up, we ain’t listening to those people anymore.

“A liar is not to be believed even when he tells the truth.”

It really IS true: everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten…..

If this is specifically in response to NSA metadata collection, I don’t really appreciate the comparison to the Jewish Holocaust, or any holocaust for that matter. It’s like comparing someone who stole your iPhone to a serial killer. I am as angered over the secrecy of PRISM as I am over the actual actions. You could argue that terrorists will switch to other methods of communication now that they know cell phone calls are being tracked, but they probably already suspected as much. Same thing goes for email, Facebook & probably most ‘chat’ type services. It’s a game of cat & mouse, & I can understand keeping a certain level of detail secret, but not the existence of the snooping.It’s also not a case where the government is targeting one group. We’re all being equally violated. When you take the overall pattern of how drone attacks are conducted, how minor leakers are being prosecuted as traitors, the NSA & the TSA… yeah, we are on a slippery slope. What can we do? Right now, contact your Congressional Representatives. Harass candidates at every opportunity.I think this is a rare issue that left & right should agree on.

So, how long before we see a “Hogan’s Heroes” remake called, “Hussein’s Heroes”, set in Gitmo?

Ted has a knack for hyperbole.

“aircraft impacts on that day defied laws of physics”.See funny thing about reality, it happens even if you don’t understand it. For years we were told “bummblebees shouldn’t be able to fly, they defy laws of physics and areodynamics.” And yet we could see with our own eyes that they fly just fine, a heck of a lot better than many birds! It wasn’t until we stopped assuming we knew what was happening and were able to slow down the process enough that we were able to see what was REALLY going on and THEN we could understand it.