Ditto on that. Would love to go "fishing" with you guys. Like Tex, I haven't been fishing since I lived in Wisconsin, but I definitely miss sitting on a pontoon boat drinking beer, shooting the shit, and waiting for a tasty bluegill or 20 to move the bobber.

Screwy Iowa....we have virtually no lakes. I miss the taste of panfish.

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Hey, people will tell you I rant and whine about bureaucrats and other rule-makers and interfering busybodies at all levels of "guvmint".

As part of what you call my "propaganda/indoctrination" teaching, I occasionally mention the fact that the Federal Register (where fed regulations are all published for those of you don't know the name) adds over 100 thousand pages of rules every year. And probably 75,000 of those pages get "promulgated" and published in the Code of Federal Regulations.

That works out to about 300 books worth of legalese per year. Okay, everyone who has the time to read 300 books every year, or a staff to read them for you and give you "executive summaries", please raise your hand.

(I'd been wanting to bring a copy of the CFR to class for years when I saw John Stoessel do it on one of his YouTube videos. Alas, I've never had that kind of funds available.)

Call me paranoid. Call me loony. But I fail to see what makes a Department of Homeland Security any more trustworthy with respect to its actions than any of those other unelected bureaucrats are with regard to theirs. And I fail to see how Congresscritters who have enabled ("delegated") all that rule-making by the unelected with respect to people's daily lives and business are somehow more trustworthy when it comes to doing so with respect to terrorism.

Nor do I trust state government.

Local government -- I trust them a bit more because I live in a town of 1200 and so they're typically neighbors who have to deal with my bitching in person if they get too far out of line.

But I don't bitch about state and local government as much as I bitch about the federals (and in particular TSA and Homeland Security), because unlike state and locals, they don't interfere in any significant way with my ability to travel or trade.

Thanks to Justice Jackson and the Wickard v. Filburn court, there's not a damn part of economic life that is immune from federal government interference, legislative AND bureaucratic, via the Commerce and Supremacy clauses and the delegation doctrine.

You'll dismiss this as trivial, but in my "pursuit of happiness" as a collector of obselete and/or casino chips, I buy a lot of stuff on ebay, some from international sellers. Every time I do so, I have to walk over to the post office and sign for the package. And every time that I sign, my signature and my dealings, go into who knows how many government databases.

This makes us safer how?

Another bit. Do you know how many containers come into a port like Long Beach or Seattle every day? Do you really think Homeland Security, ATF, Border Control, and the dozen other agencies/departments regulating such imports can inspect anything more than a tiny fraction of what comes in by ship? Do you really think the terrorist bad guys are too stupid to know this? Do you really think that making every air traveler go through a security checkpoint is going to significantly impact terrorist plans to do terrorist stuff, when who knows what might be aboard the tens (hundreds?) of millions of semi-size containers that come into the country every year. Hell, there are between 8000 and 10000 separate truck loads hitting American highways and railways every day from Long Beach alone.

IMO, The damage that terrorists could do to us via another 9/11 or another Boston is TRIVIAL compared to what they could do us by taking out a container port. If you think a terrorist could hide and deliver a significant amount of NBCs hidden in his shoes and carryon bag in a commuter jet, just think of what he might hide and deliver via those ports and semi-trailers.

You want to be afraid of what terrorists can do, be afraid of THAT. Stop yammering about the trivial increase in safety that has come from interfering with my air travel and my chip collecting.

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As seems to happen so often with you, Wade, you miss the point. It's not about Department of Homeland Security necessarily being trustworthy. It is TWO factors: 1. as I/we have said a lot of times already, the stakes are higher in the realm DHS deals with than with other agencies, and 2. the concept that really seems to fly right over the heads of you guys, there is little or no motivation. WHY would you paranoically conclude that Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z, three random government workers, presumably just simple normal people like you and I, would get their jollies messing with the freedoms you/we cherish so much? Go a level higher to their bosses - same question. Go up another level and another, ditto. If they have any ulterior motive at all other than just going to work and doing whatever they do, the obvious presumption is that they consider themselves patriots - the thin line of defense standing between the horrendously evil terrorist enemy and the American citizenry. WHY would you be so paranoid as to assume other motives to them?

Inconvenience: I too fly occasionally - probably not as much as you, but I ask you, seriously, are the anti-terrorist measures REALLY that bad - moderate lines, taking your shoes off, etc. - that it is worse than the prospect of a significant terrorist act? And going to the post office and SIGNING for a package? Sheesh! That isn't even a terrorist thing. That is about making sure that YOU got what you ordered - not somebody else by mistake or theft.

And your thing about the ports, thank you very much, you illustrate my point very well. Hell yeah, they CAN'T inspect every container. Yet no hidden nuke or dirty bomb or chem- or bio- thing has been delviered that way. What does that tell you? What it SHOULD tell you is there is a helluva lot going on behind the scenes that we never hear about, but it is highly effective at combating the bad guys - which brings us right back to square one, the Patriot Act, government surveillance, whatever other measures the good guys do to foil the bad guys - the exact stuff you guys love to complain about. I'm damn thankful for all of that - you're not?

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