OT - 10 steps to fascist police state

"ktbr" wrote in message
...
Larry Dighera wrote:


Actually, the problem is that the communications industry is
controlled by only a handful of large corporations, and thus what gets
reported must not taint the image of any of their holdings.



What would you rather have it controlled by... the Government?

As when the FCC pretty much caused the 2000 Telecom crash?

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/h...mm-telecom.htm

Matt Barrow wrote:
Quite!

But without a huge benefactor, they have a significant uphill battle.

Many surveys show a large share of people have libertarian leanings;
they just don't want to vote for them.

It has been pointed out quite often that if, today, you had a ticket
of Jefferson/Madison, they wouldn't get past the primaries, if they
made it that far.

And someone with JFK's positions would be run out of the Republican party
for being too far right.

The only way the Libertarians or any 3rd party is going to have a chance is
if they start at the lowest levels of politics. They need to first get in at
the city and county level. Once that is done then they have a chance at the
state level.

There is no way they are ever going to get a President elected until they
have several Governors and Congressmen in place and they really shouldn't
waste their limited resources trying.

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:46:48 -0400, Jose
wrote in :

Five year olds should be supervised by a parent. Anything less is
irresponsible.

I've heard the same about fifteen year olds.

And I believe it's true to a lesser extent. While I'm not going to
research the law, I'm reasonably sure there is one that prohibits a
parent from leaving a child of less than a certain age without
supervision.

With the loss of the nuclear family in our nation, and the prevalence
of working mothers, whether through necessity as a single parent or
ambition, there is no one at home to rear children these days. Even
the grand parents who might benefit themselves by supervising the
upbringing of their grand children are not on the scene. Latch-key
kids are left to their own, society suffers the consequences:
uncivilized behavior.

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:08:56 -0500, "Gig 601XL Builder"
wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote:

And someone with JFK's positions would be run out of the Republican party
for being too far right.


Agreed


The only way the Libertarians or any 3rd party is going to have a chance is
if they start at the lowest levels of politics. They need to first get in at
the city and county level. Once that is done then they have a chance at the
state level.


There I disagree. Local governments are far too much involved in
dividing spoils and making local projects happen. At least here in
Virginia, what the local governments can do is determined by the
guidelines set at the state level.

Imagine a Libertarian running for city council - "Vote for me and I
won't build the Stadium the State authorizes, but you will pay taxes
for the Stadiums built in every other city."

At the State level, at least you can say "Taxes should not be used for
the building of Stadiums and I will not authorize taxing you for any
Stadium."

There is no way they are ever going to get a President elected until they
have several Governors and Congressmen in place and they really shouldn't
waste their limited resources trying.


Also agreed, but the place to start is the State Legislatures.

Don

Don Tabor wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:08:56 -0500, "Gig 601XL Builder"
wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote:

And someone with JFK's positions would be run out of the Republican
party for being too far right.


Agreed


The only way the Libertarians or any 3rd party is going to have a
chance is if they start at the lowest levels of politics. They need
to first get in at the city and county level. Once that is done then
they have a chance at the state level.


There I disagree. Local governments are far too much involved in
dividing spoils and making local projects happen. At least here in
Virginia, what the local governments can do is determined by the
guidelines set at the state level.

Imagine a Libertarian running for city council - "Vote for me and I
won't build the Stadium the State authorizes, but you will pay taxes
for the Stadiums built in every other city."

At the State level, at least you can say "Taxes should not be used for
the building of Stadiums and I will not authorize taxing you for any
Stadium."

There is no way they are ever going to get a President elected until
they have several Governors and Congressmen in place and they really
shouldn't waste their limited resources trying.


Also agreed, but the place to start is the State Legislatures.

Don

I'm talking about building a party infrastructure not policies. State
legislature will work in some states and not others.

"Jose" wrote in message
...
[gatt] Say "Hang on. I need to go ask permission to go with you."

My impression (in general) is that our "safety conscious culture" is going
a bit overboard, and that this will have (is having) long term adverse
consequences. And although children are not little airplanes, the same
kind of thinking applies to them too. (just to bring it on topic)

Yeah, I agree with you wholly. I'm sure we've all seen both ends of the
spectrum; overprotective parents whose kids end up in trouble and
underprotective parents whose kids do the same. Or who don't end up in
trouble at all. (I ended up on both ends but managed to stay out of
trouble.)

If a kid doesn't skin his knees he'll not learn that missteps have painful
consequences, nor will he learn that he's tough enough to endure those
mistakes and improve because of them.

-c

"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

What would you rather have it controlled by... the Government?

As when the FCC pretty much caused the 2000 Telecom crash?

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/h...mm-telecom.htm

As a victim of the 2000 telecom crash, I disagree:

"The telecom collapse is now often chalked up to several years of irrational
exuberance on Wall Street, together with accounting fraud by WorldCom, one
of the industry's leaders. But-as Michael Powell, for one, appears to
recognize-there is a serious case to be made that the industry's refractory
problems can be traced to a single source: the FCC's own implementation of
the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Thereby hangs a most dismal tale."

Coincidence, but wrong. "Irrational exuberance" is the most accurate part of
this statement. I worked for the fifth largest network provider on the west
coast. They laid a multimillion dollar fiberoptic backbone between several
states, decided they didn't need it, leased it to Sprint, decided they
needed it and then had to lease it back from Sprint, thus basically blowing
millions of dollars. They spent tens of thousands of dollars to locate an
ideal office facility in Seattle and then realized they not only already had
one there, they'd been paying the lease and utilities on an empty building
for some time. It had just fallen off the Facilities record. THEN, the
same thing happened in San Francisco.

At the same time, salespeople were selling business based on the promise of
a future product, while all the engineers were trying to tell marketing that
the product that they were promising and were selling to investors was -not
technically possible-.

Meanwhile, they hired people at ridiculous salaries, gave them the
equivalent of a college education, and those employees went to places like
Time Warner, GST, because those companies would cheerfully pay for the
skills that our company had given them. But then when that company went
bankrupt, our company hired all those people back. But, somehow, they ended
up getting substantially more money than they did before they betrayed the
company in the first place, which meant they were making twice as much as
the people who remained loyal.

Basically people were just throwing money around and job-jumping, screwing
each other over, making promises and setting ridiculous stock
expectations...and people were buying into it, for awhile. A lot of people
in the industry saw it coming, but if you said anything about it--like the
engineers who said the product they were selling to investors was like
promising that next year's Toyota would fly--you were likely to be one of
the first to go when the layoffs happened.

But if it wasn't for that competition, you would not have the internet
diversity and bandwidth that you have now.

-c

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:35:28 GMT, ktbr wrote in
:

Larry Dighera wrote:


Actually, the problem is that the communications industry is
controlled by only a handful of large corporations, and thus what gets
reported must not taint the image of any of their holdings.



What would you rather have it controlled by... the Government?

It's not about who, but about _how_ _many_ _different_ entities
provide news content.

I would prefer that news media content were not controlled at all
other than being truthful and providing _all_ the news.

However, I do expect the government to control public resources like
the NAS and the electromagnetic frequency spectrum, and limit the
influence of any single entity from dominating the people's interests.

Don Tabor writes:

The problem is that if I, and other rational people, do not pay
attention, solutions to those problems will be proposed and enacted
which in many cases will be useless if not worse than the problem.

Actually, there's nothing you can do.

Most of what you see on the news does not affect you, and you cannot affect
most of what you see on the news. The reports are designed to make you
uneasy, so that you will seek reassurance--by watching more of the news. It
works very well with people who are not aware of how it is intended to work.

The reality is that if you stopped watching the news tomorrow, the world would
be neither a better nor a worse place in consequence. Most of what is on the
news is completely irrelevant to you, and you are irrelevant to it. There
isn't enough news that is truly linked to you in some way to fill all the
airtime that needs to be filled, and additionally the news that is linked to
you isn't scary, so it won't make you uneasy and eager to see more news.

But we can prevent some of them from happening again, or prepare to
deal more effectively with them if we cannot. Much as we analyze
aircraft mishaps to learn from our mistakes and those of others.

"We" meaning who? Certainly not you. There's nothing _you_ can do. That's
an illusion.

Actually, I am gathering signatures to run for the 14th Senate
District in Virginia this fall as the Libertarian Party candidate.

Which means you don't have a chance. It's ironic that a country that loves to
crow about its democratic tradition effectively prohibits the existence of
more than two parties, which effectively reduces many elections to merely a
choice between the incumbent and someone else ("change" or "don't change," a
bit like throwing dice).

--
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Don Tabor writes:

That will allow me, as a Libertarian to run to the "right" of my
opponent on taxes, gun laws, government spending and other
conservative issues, while also running to his "left" on issues of
personal liberty and pick up the Democrat votes. (Note: the LP
position is not really left or right of anything, we are really
individual vs collective on everything, but right and left are
understood better.)

Why don't you just run as an independent?

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