Tuesday, December 17, 2013

If they can see and hear everything, why can't they keep that *&^%$ from right hooking me?


Yeah. I'm watching YOU
So finally, a Federal judge has called the NSA to task for its unwarranted, Orwellian, and uncontrolled snooping on American citizens. Its about time.

Get off the road and
submit to electronic monitoring
Frankly, all this Orwellian nonsense doesn't make me feel one bit safer in real life, since the closest I've repeatedly come to death has not been at the hands of some nefarious terrorist, but at the hands of some clueless or careless fellow citizen from Anytown, USA. who is ensconced in his or her cage and oblivious to my safety.  I doubt I'm alone, either. Bin Laden and his gang killed 3,000 of us in one brutal attack on NYC. We kill about 11 times that number, year in and year out, on our own, using our cars as speeding weapons.

"Our constitution guarantees a system in which the people have the right to argue their case against the government in an open forum before an independent judiciary. But until recently, this debate has been carried out primarily in a secret court in which only one side — the government's — is represented. With this case, Americans got their day in court. "  -- U.S. Senator Tom Udall, as quoted in the Daily Post.

Americans 33,000: Terrorists 3,000. 
Anywhere else this would be called a lopsided game
NHTSA would be rich and NSA begging


1 comment:

Ian Brett Cooper said...

If we include the whole world in the calculation, the daily death toll on the world's roads almost exactly equals the 9/11 death toll... but unlike Bin Laden's cronies, who only managed one day of nearly 3,000 dead, motorists kill 3,000 people every single day of every single year. Terrorists, armies (outside of world wars), bacteria and viruses (except for the great flu pandemic of 1918) are mere amateurs at killing when compared with motorists, who are the greatest threat to life on the face of the Earth, yet we rarely jail motorists who kill.

It ought to be a scandal, but it's a case of the fox guarding the henhouse: judges, juries, lawyers and lawmakers are all drivers, and their car ownership seems to make them unwilling to turn on any of their own. If only those of us who don't own cars made and implemented laws, I suspect it would be a different story.