Well, scojohnson, I see that you have an adult son, so you obviously cannot be very young, but allow me to make a comment that you seem to view the public through the government-designed prism that citizens that can only survive with government help and guidance. Clearly, these “teachings” are not new. Specifically, law enforcement is not the most dangerous profession, by far. Being a cab driver, gas station attendant or liquor store employee is more dangerous than being a cop. Those are facts. I can look up the references if you would like to see them. However, cab drivers don’t wear body armor, nor do they shoot customers that get argumentative. Nor do the courts protect just about any abuse that a gas station attendant decides to dish out upon a citizen, justifiable or not. So, now that we are on the way to establishing the fact that the police are “special” people and deserve more protection (from the law, very often), please tell me just how many law enforcement officers have actually been killed or injured by citizens with guns in their homes, let’s say in the last 100 years? Or are you just making up scary scenarios because being a policeman must be dangerous? And even in cases of emergencies, is there a single case (Katrina or other natural disasters) where a citizen used his rifle to steal food or anything else from another citizen? Or are we making up scenarios again? (I am talking about the US, not about the “skinnies” in Africa; let’s not take the warzone home.)
So, you think that the police are concerned about the Constitution. Please tell that to SWAT teams that practice on citizens, including toddlers, with flash grenades in their faces, full auto rifle fire against someone that might look like the suspect (but is not) and arresting people for anti-Obama remarks on Facebook. Yes, I would like to hear their view of the Constitution (that is the US Constitution; at this point, I think it would be necessary to point them at the document in question, lest they mix it up with some other departmental instructions).
During Katrina, they did not permanently imprison people. But they did imprison people. Why is any imprisonment for offenses not committed acceptable? And the weapons that were [illegally] confiscated were not returned. Law enforcement today has morphed into something different than it was ever intended to be. Its purpose is no longer to serve the citizen or attain justice; its purpose is to serve the State and increasingly, as your comment makes it obvious, the police see themselves in a warzone against the citizens. That is very troubling. Perhaps you may want to consider the purpose of law enforcement and whether today’s version fulfills that or not?

Then we need to build a new Atlantis on an island 100 miles west of the Cayman Islands supported by a 20 meter deep reef in the Caribbean plus necessary concrete and steel.

Yes; seems that the Egyptian military deserves more respect.

Desperate people tend to do very stupid things. This is always some vast conspiracy theory, when really, it comes down to the right of the police officer or the national guardsmen to go home and see their own families. The last thing you want is the idiots that didn't bother to adhere to the evacuation order running around with rifles looking for food & water and thinking that canteen the solider has looks pretty good. What now? If you are that soldier, do you fire on an American citizen that is pointing a gun at you?

Unlike anyone else here, I've been in that situation. I was deployed to Rwanda, and some skinnies were playing with a Russian BMP 20 mm turret and turned and pointed it at the great big C-5 I was sitting in the shade under. In half a second, myself and the three guys I was with had our rifles on those two skinnies, scopes dialed in and ready to fire. I had no problem taking their head off, because I was there, not wanting to be there, but trying to "help" under orders. I wasn't giving my life for that crap.

Luckily, they turned that turret. If they hadn't, neither of those two idiots would have survived the next 5 seconds.

You assume that police, fire, and military, sworn to uphold the constitution blindly do whatever some "leader" tells them to do. There has been no evidence of that in American history. The fact that you state and insinuate that is rather obvious that you lack the understanding of the high degree of professionalism that are armed forces and police forces have.

In the Katrina example you cite, did they permanently imprison people? Did they tear up the Constitution? No. In simple cases of police detainment, it is always stated "I am restraining you temporarily for your own protection and mine". The police officer handcuffs the drunk wife-beater and sits him down on the curb to get the story of what happened. The last thing you want is the upset/irate guy taking a swing at the police officer, and now he's dead because he was drunk, upset, and took a swing at a police officer. In the case of Katrina, how do you tell who stayed around to loot their neighbors, versus the ones that were just too dumb to leave?

We can have a debate about cell phone privacy, and extreme levels of data collecting, I'll be 100% on your side there. But when it comes to the rights of someone like my son, a police officer, to not be threatened by some a-hole sovereign citizen type, for only doing his job and go home to see his family every night, its something I will not support or ever agree to.

You "assume" that all people are law abiding citizens. In my experience, that couldn't be farther from the truth. Sometimes its hard to find the good guys in a certain situation.

I would agree with you that normally it is better to postpone the crash, even if it is inevitable, and to minimize the impact. There are, however, other factors. If the crash happens some years from now, there will not be any pilots or mechanics left alive (or young enough to be of use) to get the country flying again. Second, if the crash is mild, many, especially the majority with limited intellects, will not get the point and continue on the same path. Since we are today a fairly close repeat of the Soviet Union (in my opinion), we can use it as an example - they crashed, mildly, and the filth that destroyed the country bid its time and now is back in power, as filthy as ever before.

This country is filled with ex-military personnel.
The current administration doesn't understand this phenomenon.

GOOD.

Now the MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) in our cities is starting to make a lot more sense to me. The National Police (disguised as and know to you as Homeland Security) will be here in our cities to protect this administrations right to rule over you. And Eric Holder will uphold it sighting this Executive Order as justification under the law.

So this is your definition of "in peacetime"? And by the way, how well did the federal involvement help during Katrina? - they forcefully and anti-Constitutionally disarmed the law-abiding people so that they were not able to defend themselves against criminals. How well did that work out?

As a pilot since 1967 I have always subscribed to the old pilot adage that "if one is going to crash, at least make it look good".

The corollary to that has always been, "if one is going to crash, do your best and keep flying it through the crash no matter what" - with the idea that it might not be as bad of a crash that way (hope against hope when all you have in some cases is some hope - irrationally or otherwise).

Other observation/caution/question in this regard may be just as operable - "why die all tensed up in a inevitable crash?"

Seems to me there is a crash to be - wonder is of what severity? All dire predictions to-date are not necessarily a given - but certainly not desirable in any aspect and to be avoided (IMHO) at ALL COSTS.

Could be equally true that the crash doesn't kill the whole thing, and we will be able seize the opportunity to take the experiment off-line for some down-time to repair the broken bits, remove the idiots from the cockpit and re-tune the whole thing for the future before we can crank it up up again.

In any event - crashes are a matter of both routine happenstance and simple stupidity over time given that those that crash tend to become careless and complacent unless there is a very direct and imminent threat to their own pink matter, or that of their loved ones.

You have to look at it in the context of something like Katrina. If you live in a rural area, the breakdown of societal norms doesn't really impact your daily life much. Worst case, you can drink the water from the well and grow food in the garden and hunt deer or whatever.

In a large urban area, such as LA or New York, you can be looking at mass insurrection very quickly. What you say is true, but it ignores police powers and other responsibilities of the government woven into state constitutions, city charters, etc.

This comes down to the fact that a "well regulated militia"... aka the national guard... doesn't have the resources, the training, or the expertise to resolve a major disaster. The feds also limit themselves via Posse Comitatus Act, and cannot quarter or deploy military forces for police purposes.

We don't have a "states rights" type of confederation, we have a system where federal powers usurp state law, but respect state law in the absence of specifically-enumerated powers. In a case like this, it is basically "federalizing" local resources and manpower and empowering them with the resources of the 50 states, rather than their own tiny local budgets and manpower.

The Founding Fathers never envisioned global thermonuclear war, a population of 350 million, or cities of 20 million people living on an earthquake fault, or threats of things like ebola arriving on a 10 hour airplane flight from Africa.

I'm sorry, but your rather shallow personal liberty argument doesn't respect the needs of protecting human life and property.

If you had an ebola outbreak in your little town... what exactly is the local sheriff going to do about that? How about the unionized nursing staff? Are you going to hope for the best or would you rather see 300 epidemiology, virology, and bacterial infection specialists trained in containing epidemics fan out and quarantine the town?

Try to stand back as a detached observer of President O.
This is an administration which creates chaos in order to seize power.
Then abstract into the future with the chaos scenario which would allow him to implement this plan as a type of "blitzkrieg".
You'll get it...

You can use any justification that comes to mind, but the last time that I read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as I recall, these were explicitly the things that those two documents forbid the federal government to do.

Watch out for a lot of people all wearing the same color shirts.

Haste towards collapse is exactly what both sides' ultimate goal is. On the side of the statist; their end game is to create chaos to get the masses to beg for further government solutions to fix the problems manufactured by the very people who will fix it. On the liberty side; those who think for themselves simply want to be let alone to do so. The conundrum occurs when the statist commits their power over all subjects and any dissent from this power is subject to punishment by thugs with orders to silence all who oppose them. This is how every single country before us has fallen to the statist ideology. The practice of politics is not uninterested in any individual who claims to not be interested in politics. Furthermore politics is the study of the control of mankind, one will submit to this control either willingly or by force. The fact that there exists fewer places for dissent to hide from this in the world is the overarching problem that I am personally having trouble wrapping my mind around. There are just too many useful idiots in this world standing in the way of my right to think, create, and produce without being punished for my virtues.

The government at any time can create a false flag event to justify an emergency and then the President can declare dictator powers. Isn't the USA since 2001/09/11 still under Emergency Powers?

Actually, something similar to this has been done by pretty much every President. This indicates that in times of war, civil unrest, or national response to a catastrophe, he has delegated much of his authority as President to the cabinet he has appointed for certain areas. Sec Def for water resources might be the only one that I turned up at an ear on.

I'm not an Obama fan by any means, but this is rather typical continuity of operations planning for the federal government, every agency has to have an enacted and viable COOP... certainly he would. I'm sure there was a preceding one, this probably just changes some of the delegation or something.

The subsidies & payments sections probably empowers him to authorize resource for military black budgets... you can't debate the amount of money we're spending on the next generation completely optically-camoflouged stealth fighter and which contractors are involved and in what cities... but you can authorize a black budget and allow the executive branch to carry out the details outside of public print or scrutiny.

From a national defense perspective, global warming and the extremely unpredictable weather patterns emerging are the greatest threat at present. Let's say we lost 55% of the food crop with the current floods in the Midwest (very unusual as they are for July). People get a little weird by 48 hours without food, and are basically dying by day 3. In the west, with extreme drought, we're looking at one more year of fresh water reserves remaining before... I don't know, we're drinking pee-water. By about the 4th day without food, people get relatively crazy.

What happens if a carrot costs $4.00?

These are real things happening right now.

Any industry and activity can be viewed as part of the military industrial complex, including food production (farms). Do you think that the gong ho SWAT [legal] criminals will stop and debate whether to raid and trash any place of business or residence based on the finer definitions of the law when given an order [let off the leash]?

The reference to "in peacetime and in times of national emergency" is for controlling the Military Industrial complex. So it is not a blanket "dictator" powers list of total control. However, the government's control of production has a big mal-investment effect. To read a great example of this and the bad effects read "Iron Fist" http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Fist-Lives-Ca... as Mercury Marine almost went under during WW2 and Korean War due to the government favoring OMC Motors with less requirements.

this piece of paper references domestic product an awful lot. it is gone from the usa and more is leaving. it matters not, nobody in the highest levels of government from the opposing party will do anything about it, even as we see talk about it because they like it. the downward spiral is moving even faster than I thought.

Essentially, yes. He has been purging the DoD for years, kind of like Stalin did in the '30's, but in a milder way, of the undesirables. Most of the top brass right now are total "yes" men. Our only hope is in the middle ranks - the captains and the majors are still dedicated to the Constitution.

The final nail.