No surprises here. By now we assume they spy on everyone of interest. I think it would be a surprise to hear we weren’t spying on someone of interest. No wonder the wealthy and big Corps. still use couriers. They just assume their electronic com. is being recorded by some super Comp. somewhere and that they also might be being followed by a Sat. or soon a drone. What else are all these hundreds of thousands of human drones going to do all day to collect their 125K a yr.? Spying on each other is the “new economy.”

Snowden blew the whistle on what many Americans believe are patently unconstitutional programs. The truth is the people who run and create these programs are the traitors and oath violators, all of them. Snowden is a HERO.

The NSA , CIA, FBI, Homeland Security etc. et al. The “secret Gov’t.” These agencies never slept and never go away. They watch everyone and everything. A threat is by definition anyone or thing that threatens “THEM.” That means we are all the potential threat and have to be watched. It will only get worse unless we smash all the nets and all the computers. The robots have taken over.

I was wondering why State Farm Ins. is pushing this policy and buying huge amounts of cable TV time in the process.

The left never had a chance in the 60′s. It was ruthlessly crushed by the gigantic Intell./ military wing of the Gov’t abetted by both so called parties. The right was allowed to run rampant after that. The Vietnam War was the end of the organized left . The really big irony of that era was how Nixon effectively made a deal with the Chinese that eventually destroyed the Union movement in this country and led to the de-Industrialization of the country and the rise of Modern China. Who would have ever guessed that Richard Nixon is the real godfather of modern China and in a sense modern America. Reagan is given the credit , but Nixon was really @ the turning pt.

Jon your making a huge assumption here. That the Dems. wanted it to work. Maybe, they want it to fail or at least some of them do. It doesn’t seem to make political sense does it? If allowing Health Care Corps. that directly profit from it to design it in the first place made political sense then I’d agree it made no sense to design it the way they did, but of course the only rational way to design it was a single payer system or add a Public option at a min., but that didn’t work because the D’s owners ( the health care Corp. goons) would lose money then and they’d also lose hold of our throats. Can’t have that now, can we.

In another decade America will I predict host enormous tent and cardboard cities where hundreds of millions will try and survive. They will exist on the fringes of the crumbling older cities and suburbs of the late 20th century. If things keep up in the direction there now going by then almost no state social services will exist and a collapsed middle class would have turned mall world into a vast new ghost town of empty parking lots and abandoned stores. The pols and their Int’l Corp. owners will be demanding even deeper austerity style cuts along with public executions of petty thieves and j-walkers. Drones will fill the skies over these new ghettoes picking off the “new” labor and eco-terrorists or anyone else that voices dissent of the new order. The War on Terror will be in it’s 25 yr.

Why is it that many techies seem to think that their skills and ideas somehow exist apart from the rest of society in some tech space above the average worker? Your right it’s simply arrogance and having worked in that world for many yrs. and worked in the other most of the rest of my life , it was galling.

2001 – 2011

How do you get around Ricardo’s law of labor when the labor can be moved from one location to another at light speed?