I may be getting old. I can feel the weather in my broken ankle. Like some blue-haired, chain-smoking, old woman predicting a hurricane.
At least I’m not as stupid as you idiots though.
You ignorant, childish, vapid, weak-willed idiots.
Did you ever think it was any different than this? And if so, how long ago was it that you pulled your head out of your ass.
There has been mass transit by air for probably over 65 years now. Big ol’ flying hunks of steel and copper carrying big ol hunks of flesh and drool at hundreds of an hour at thousands of feet in the air.
And there are people who hate us — Americans. When you park a battleship off someone’s coastline and start lobbing 30-inch shells into their country, they may get miffed. Or maybe we bought them a new President. Or we told them if they make our Nikes for 60 cents a piece, we won’t nuke them until they become puddles of irradiated genetic stew.
And you’re suprised these people dropped a couple jetliners on our cities?

“I’m saddened to admit that this job is even necessary, but it is necessary. Our nation faces an unusual threat that it’s never faced before.”

— Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge

This man was just appointed head of “homeland security”. And he is already feeding you a line of bullshit so long it dwarfs our welfare lines.
People hate us. Lotsa reasons. Some not even so reasonable. But they do. And they have been trying to kill us. In large numbers. One by one. Any way that works. Do you think all those nuclear weapons pointed at our collective asses are there for show?
They get stopped. 99.999 percent of the time.
How many people died on American soil at the hands of foriegn terrorism in the last 20 years? a little over 5,000? I’m willing to bet that gang killings in this country dwarf that number considerably. And suicides. And negligent homicide.
We are much better at destroying ourselves than they are.
This is not new. They’ve been doing it forever. This is not different. I can’t think of a decade in the last 50 years when a couple of planes and/or buildings haven’t been blown up in the name of a cause.
The people in government are not stupid. They know all this.
With one hand they are wiping away your tears while the other hand is pushing through legislation that is going to do to you what is probably being done to Ted Kazinsky right now.
Legislation to require any cryptography created to have a backdoor that the US government can exploit. So you are allowed to have secrets from anyone except a government employee? Forgetting that, this would effectively be the end of cryptography, period. Once it is known every crypto system has a exploitable weakness, it will be exploited, in very short order, by anyone with half a clue about computer programming.
Of course, you might also want to ask why this is being passed to protect us when it would have done nothing to prevent the very incident that spurred it’s presentation.
Legislation that would allow the INS and Attorney General to lock up and deport ‘foriegners’ with no evidence of wrongdoing, and basically no chance to appeal the decision.They’re not just talking about people who step off a flight from Iraq with a load of C-4 in their suitcase. They mean every international citizen in this country. All the friends I had in college who were there on educational Visas. Probably all the cab drivers in New York City. The computer programs who flocked here a few years ago.
And just in case you think the government is run by reasonable people who wouldn’t let this get out of hand, consider the words of Lousiana Representative John Cooksey, who is running for Senate next year:

“If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked,”

This Congressman sits on the Committee on International Relations.
Apparently you dont have civil rights unless you were born in East Bumpafuck, NJ.
Just a taste of what we’re in for.
Rule of thumb: Everytime someone tells you they are doing something to protect you, cover your ass (in every sense of the phrase).