Welcome to 1995, FBI!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/03/20/fbi.email.ap/index.html?section=cnn_topstories

While I can understand security concerns, they’re saying “As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts,”.

Oh please! They can’t afford a server dedicated to email? For 2,000 email accounts, they could buy a couple of the nicer desktops you can buy at Best Buy, throw Linux and Postfix on there and enable SSL for SMTP so there’s encryption of the messages and/or use a PGP key. All for the cost of two standard desktops.

Yet, the “Patriot Act” allows the FBI to tap into email. That’s like saying “Ok, we know you’re like only 10 years old and stuff, but we’re passing a bill to force you to drive a car”. Next thing you know, they’ll make rock, scissors, paper a freakin sport! Oh wait…they have…

So let me get this straight – $9 billion goes missing in Iraq, the war has cost US taxpayers about $250 billion so far, oil companies have record profits, our national debt ceiling was raised to $9 trillion and we can’t afford to supply email to the FBI? That and I’ll bet most of us would like an employer who told us by the end of the year to get 2000 email accounts set up.

On the bright side, all FBI agents are certified in morse code and at least half of them have some training in semaphore and the next highest placing class out of quantico will be introduced to the fancy new ‘telephone’ that is rumored that a guy name Alexander Graham Bell has perfected.

The next time you hear a politician use the word “billion” in a casual manner, think about whether you want the “politicians” spending your tax money.
A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.

- A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

- A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

- A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

- A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans – It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans.

Interesting number, what does it mean?

Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.

Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787

Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

Washington, D.C. are all your calculators broken? WTF?!

Maybe everyone should just flood their houses, then we can all be on the “big easy” street for the rest of our lives, and forget about working, and paying taxes and all that useless stuff!

Well, here we go again – and once again, here’s my stance on the whole .xxx idea:

- “Harmful to minors” is in the eye of the beholder. It is unconstitutional for a law to be vague, since it means people can’t know if they’re breaking the law or not. Is a warez site “harmful to minors” since it corrupts their morals? How about frank discussions of wartime atrocities? Sites that debunk Santa Claus?

- This particular proposed law would require, for instance, websites for crappy teenage hijinks movies (Dukes of Hazard, etc) to use the .xxx domain. Basically, anything sexual that has no artistic or social merit gets taggede

- Laws like this impringe on adults’ rights to free speech. Have a blog where you share your innermost thoughts? Hosted on a .com? Write about the hot sex you had last night, get fined (or go to jail).

And, of course, in addition to the blatant unconstitutionality, there’s the fact that it’s pointless: .com is an international domain.

The only solution for this kind of thing is a .kids type domain, where only content that meets certain criteria is allowed in. Trying to regulate the entire world’s speech in the .com domain “for the children” is a bad idea, totally unconstitutional, and ultimately doomed to failure anyway, since .com is an internataionl domain.

Then thinking logically about this, let’s look at it the other way around. The government has harmed more minors than any pedophile on the planet:

- They wont pass national healthcare, so millions of children do not have healthcare.

- They do not properly fund education, thus hurting millions of children

- They allow corperations to dictate our country and outsource jobs at an alarming rate, thus putting the parents of children out of work, thus taking away any healthcare they had. (if they had any)

- They send the children of parents off to die in an illegal war, started by the criminals that run our country. Bush, Cheney, Wolfiwitz, Rove, Powell, Delay, Abramof, Frist, Santorem, hatch, Leiberman, Kerry, and countless others. The ones that survive come back seriously injured and need special care their entire lives…which the government fails to provide.

Yes, they most certainly do hurt far more children than all the pedophiles on the planet combined. I’m not saying that porn something that should be mainstream, but come on. This is one of the worst parts of our American culture. Killing people is glorified but OH CHRIST DON’T LET ANYONE BE SEEN MAKING LOVE!