Relaxed Focus: "...this massive system that's been built, the huge bulk of it, has nothing to do with national security."

"Come summer, we at first tentatively abandoned shoes. No one thought this odd, because it wasn’t. Soon our soles toughened to leather and we walked everywhere, even on gravel, without ill effect. And nobody cared. Oh sweet age of nobody cared. Child Protective Services didn’t show up, officious passive-aggressive snots, to carry my parents away. Today they would, droning censoriously of hygiene and worms and crippling cuts from broken glass and parental irresponsibility...

BB guns, I said. We all had them. Most were the Red Ryder model, costing I think $4.95 in as-yet uninflated currency. Mine was the Daisy Eagle, a more glorious version with a plastic telescopic sight. Every corner store sold big packs of BBs. We went everywhere with these lethal arms, often with a ball glove hung of the barrel for convenient carrying. Today children of six years are led from classrooms in handcuffs for merely drawing a rifle (curious in the world's most militarily aggressive country). I suppose we would have been executed for actually having one. But, as I say, the saving benefits of federal counsel had not yet reached Athens. What did we do with these weapons? First, we didn’t shoot each other, or anyone else. We weren’t stupid. Stupidity properly comes with adolescence, and then is directed into drink and insane driving, as it should be.

Today they would be a protected species. Buying a BB gun would require proof of adulthood, capacity would be restricted by federal law to six BBs, the purchase of which would require registration and a waiting period. In 1957 Athens figured that BB guns were none of the government’s goddamed business. The concept has been forgotten."

Look closely.

Wait, there's no such thing as unicorns?:

"that guy’s phone in the first panel became more high tech in tony stark’s presence"

Glenn Greenwald on Edward Snowden - "He did give us a lot of documents and what he said when he did that was 'I don't think all of this should be public. There's a lot in here that I'm giving you here for your own edification to understand how the system works as journalists, but I don't want this published.' And the vast majority of what he gave us, what he gave the Washington Post, hasn't been published... and much of it will never be, at his request precisely because the government does have some things that it keeps legitimately secret.
But among those things the government keeps legitimately secret is not the fact that they're collecting everybody's communication data regardless of whether you've done anything wrong. Or the fact that they're able to invade Facebook and Google and Yahoo without any kind of court supervision. Those are the kinds of things that citizens have a right to know in a healthy democracy..." Brane Space: Obama & Bill Maher: Mental Captives of the NSA - Security State: "Maher replied that Snowden said: "These programs were never about terrorism they were about social control and diplomatic manipulation." Maher adding: "That's crazy. They were about stopping terrorists." Then asked Greenwald, 'This is nuts, right?'
To which Greenwald replied: "No, Bill, what's nuts is the fact that you think that's nuts. Let me explain why. A lot of the stories we've reported have nothing to do with terrorism. They're about spying on economic summits in Latin America, oil companies in Brazil, democratically elected leaders of our closest allies who have nothing to do with terrorism. His point is that, of course, some of this is directed at terrorism, but this massive system that's been built, the huge bulk of it, has nothing to do with national security. It has to to do with the reasons why the people in political power always want to surveil various populations because it does give them greater power."