President Obama & Debt Increase Negotiations

President Obama may have to agree to cut extended unemployment benefits in order to get agreement from Republicans to deepen the federal debt limit.

That concession would be a bitter for the President who gave Republicans two years of extended vast tax cuts in exchange for two more years of unemployment checks to those that had already got them two years.

President Obama seems especially inept at political budget negotiations and economic planning. The destitute working poor will neither find free medical care available during his administration. The President lacks any capacity for innovative economic reasoning going from his record.

If four years of unemployment benefits mollifies his supporters enough the President may be able to count on their votes in 2012. Yet without a prospect for another two years of more unemployment benefits to make it six years of unemployment benefits if the President were t be re-elected some of his loyalists may jump ship and swim to to another platform on the rising tide.

National Conservativism vs. Globalism

It is very challenging to interpret American economic conservativism today that supports global corporatism as conservative. One instead must regard it as a phenomenon of swollen egotists prosecuting an advantage to make cheap profits at the cost of national independence.

For now globalists may build up China, Red Army business ventures such as Lenovo, outsource U.S. telecommunications data stream analysis to foreign intelligence and security corporations and agitate against free medical care for the poor and veterans in the United States, for the role of false conservatives is simply to radically change the world in the effort to harvest cheap short-term profit.

In the future, after falsely labeled conservatives have their way organizing a world with decaying environmental resources and over-population, a world in which trans-national corporations avoid local taxation and concentrate wealth, exploit the environment and making human suffering increase at the bottom of the sky-hook to the clouds, the people too may overcome their own national boundaries and unite as a global polity to democratically vote a fair tax rate on 'conservatives'.

American conservatives in subverting nationalism will build the infrastructure for a one-world government reaction to the one world business environment exploiting nationalist 'locals' (those located somewhere). The U.N. may have security council resolutions to redistribute global capital to fully fund health care for the poor, invest on global environmental recovery and accelerate the pace of rational traditional living with economic liberty for all. That is the work that today's global conservatives are working for. That will be a world without much room for dissent nor any for national initiative such as might be valuable for space colonization.

Global conservatives today have political-economic philosophy expansion ideas reminiscent of Adolph Hitler's ideas about declarations of war. The historian John Lukacs in his book on the Churchill-Hitler contest of May-June 1940 reported that Hitler said of Mussolini's declaration of war "That will be the last declaration of war in the history of the world...Attack and March! That is the right and healthy way. I shall never sign a declaration of war. I shall act."

The United States today is effectively a one-party democracy of globalists. Nationalists and others opposed to illegal entry to the nation are in the power minority. Liberals and conservatives alike are cut of a globalist, swinging, raving telecommunications cloth as unreasoned as a blind wombat driving drunk at high speed during rush hour in the wrong direction. Democracy requires a foundation in real property and security boundaries to exist. Democracy also requires competition-a plethora of independent nation-states able to peacefully co-exist without being corrupted by trans-national corporate predators reducing locals to powerlessness politically with the worst case economic and health prospects personally.

President Obama throwing in the towel in December 2010 on letting Bush II tax cuts expire knew that he had already lost the House of Representatives to Republicans-it was the Democratic Party's last chance to recover a responsible U.S. economic footing for the next few years. He knew that no legislation would subsequently reach his desk for signature without Republican support, sohe v placed his party in a worst-case scenario for critical budget negotiations with little leverage on the Republican globalist position.

Republicans may actually have some support for leaving the federal borrowing and debt limit where it is and letting the chips fall where they may. If the cost for any further federal borrowing is higher after the appearance of default or delayed payment of federal debt, that could be an advantage to private sector borrowers that could find better terms from lenders than the U.S. Government.

If U.S. economic development can be stimulated by an increase of loans to private sector business after the U.S. Government's 800 pound guerrilla stops soaking up all the extra cash, there may arise a fiscal discipline in federal management of its budget resources. Means tests for social security, Medicaid and Medicare may become more realistic, illegal entry to the nation may be stopped with a comprehensive ecologically enhancing border control zone, full employment programs might be designed to keep people off federal subsistence programs and free public health care for the nation's poor may allow the poor to keep their sporadic dolops of capital for buying real estate, consumer goods or investing in small business (such as starting up a national D.N.A. bank so in the distant future one may be able to have one's body regrown-perhaps on another planet. Such a business charging a $500 fee for the service in some sort of 3 by 5 metal, holograph image bearing card with an adequate encapsulated D.N.A. sample in an underground, secure facility might be a good business plan).

Lukacs writes in his book 'The Duel' (page 145) of imprecise or unspecified terms in the Secret Protocols between Stalin and Hitler as well as in the Yalta Accords that allowed vagueness to expand later into the basis for conflict-possibly operation Barbarossa in addition to the cold war.

Mission creep in undeclared wars for the United States has become an issue since the Vietnam Conflict. Undefined economic-political creepis also a problem today in global corporatism and its reciprocal affect upon U.S. elections as well as military ventures abroad.

Asphalt Poisoning, Cell Phone Microwave Brain Frying; Arctic Permafrost Melting Next?

Scientists are researching poisoning of ancient Americans that paved their localities with bitumen-an asphalt like substance that may have poisoned them.

Americans use a lot of toxic substances and blow it off-fundamentally because they are stupid and don't really give a hoot about those non-immediate problems. Maybe humanity is more wired to respond to immediate threats and actual injuries much faster than invisible empire threats like cell phones, toxic asphalt highways, air pollutants, ground water contamination, global warming and so forth. Perhaps that's why the nation spends 4 trillion dollars more or less to track down the box cutter hijacker-crashers-a disproportionate response that may beditto'd in the trust in Wall Street gadgets and frauds that are too abstract to consider dangers.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028154.300-asphalt-may-have-poisoned-ancient-americans.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Americans are over-specialized and collectively stupid perhaps, and that may be hazardous to our health. What if a generation cooks their challenged brains with cell phones glued to their ears? I was generally too poor to afford a phone and have used them for only aboput 500 hours total. I recall watching raw shrimp cook on the seat of a skiff in some water in a baggy. I believe that the tight microwave beam emitted from cells phones could explain the stupidity of the U.S. Congress and the national debt as well as a host of other idiotic policies. Well, the best reply is denial, so they shall rave about that until its annihilated.

For the rest of this essay I shall put my phone on speaker phone aqnd keep that little brain cooker away from my head! You should do the same-or put some tin foil over your head as you walk around the city streets to keep all those stray microwave beams from frying your circuits. Wait-psychologists have already said that won't work-it makes sparks fly in the microwave oven or something.

A Thought to Consider On What A Thawed Arctic Would Be Like

With global warming increasing and U.S. Government plans to add to it by supporting high Arctic development of ports and other facilities in Northern Alaska and offshore in the Beaufort Sea-optimal locations to emit carbon monoxide and other warm gases to increase anthropogenic climate change- I wonder what the future Arctic coastal environment will be like.

Coastal plains with much permafrost-sometimes frozen year around to one thousand feet or more below the surface-may thaw and melt.

Ice expands when it freezes, so if the permafrost melts the ground may shrink and subside. The question is how much will frozen permafrost subside as it thaws out per ten feet or per one thousand feet?

A rise in sea level added to a subsidence of the ground level above sea level might move the Arctic ocean shore a good distance south onto the coastal plain.

The Legislation of Pigs With Wings ©2011GaryCGibson (poem)

Motivated to liberate the world
with disposable wrappers, boundaries and security diapers
forests for Boothia Felix
and democracy for Adolph's enthusiasts
grown so much bigger than thee
outsourced with the innocence of greed

Raved on politics of insiders
tattooed temporal recombinant headlines
ranted gems across the Marquee de Sade

Pigs with wings
beaming microwaves to brains
flinging foreign policy boogers
through crenalleted derivative chicanes

Lyrics of wiggle sloppers
driving dust clouds compiling work
networking mobs of border hoppers
small worlds networks clumping snirked

Enviro-flies buzz baft blippers bout
whip froth filters for each single snout
in sleepy wallows of that princely domain
ruled over by powerful winged pigs
in marmalade skies acid rain.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism?

The historian John Lukacs wrote on interesting history book on the subject of 80 days of intellectual, tactical military leadership dueling between Churchill and Hitler in 1940 that fundamentally decided the future of the world. In his particular history investigations Mr. Lukacs is quite a good author.

I wish to examine two or three philosophical topics Mr. Lukacs raised that I take exception to. It is almost always useful when someone writes well enough to suggest a topic of philosophical interest, even if the topic is within the philosophy of history.

Mr. Lukacs seems to have felt that nationalism is a bad thing. Perhaps that is a consequence of his generation of scholars and their bad experience with one or two particularly bad and aggressive nations that prosecuted world wars. Nations are simply political districts though-even if one nation were to encompass the entire world. If a nation works badly it is because of the people in them-not the nation paradigm of political boundaries intrinsically.

I disagree that nationalism is a bad thing. A nation is just a particular polity that is ‘owned’ by its citizens. Nations are necessary for the existence of democracy. A democracy without a nation is like a subject without a predicate; meaningless for conveying meaning.

Winston Churchill was half American. Winston Churchill was also simultaneously 100% British and we Americans wouldn't have wanted a half-American in the White House to implement policy entirely of advantage to the Brits even during the war lest we be required to genuflect on her majesty (even if the present queen of England is quite a nice individual). That sort of thing is for the beknighted Elton Johns of teh world.

Citizens must have some land to control; not just their own, but the public lands too. Human beings all require air and land space to travel through and would be unhappy with a lifetime of house arrest. For the public democracy to have any meaning it requires a specific, real land or ocean to live within that it controls through its elections and representatives-and through laws the public supports.

Patriotism may be a kind of male shepherding of a people that may also be a nation. Mr. Lukacs interpreted Dr. Johnson’s famous phrase as ‘patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel’ as instead applying to nationalism. Though historical times change and meanings and concepts do change it is difficult to imagine that citizens of a representative democracy advocating for their well being through elections are scoundrels.

Nations do not require aggression or injustice to survive. Maybe the alternative though is a kind of imperialism and globalism over democratic, national particularism.

In some small nations with unsustainable economic methods it is easy to understand that some political leaders have sought to invade other nations to gain economic resources. Human leaders also have invaded simple to gain more power. Napoleon invaded Europe and Africa to expand France’s political power as the new Imperial Realm in contest with the Russian, Hapsburg and British Imperial powers.

Mr. Lukacs also wrote that parliamentary democracy was in decline and unpopular in the 20 years after the end of the first world war, yet I felt he misunderstood the reasons why the Balkan countries, Greece, Albania and Turkey were less than democratic Utopias; it is difficult to imagine the Sublime Porte as having set a stage for peaceful democracy in the region, and neither was China’s Imperial Empire, the Nationalist Leadership and organized crime in Shanghai supporters of traditional civil rights based democracy. Nationalism was not the essential agent for military and political conflict in the 20th century; instead it was as Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ prevalently against imperial rule, and of rule by aristocracy.

World War Two was the last battle of the Second World War. Hitler was a new proxy for the defeated aristocrats of Germany that had to give up power to the Weimar Republic. Germany narrowly avoided becoming socialist at the close of the First World War and the military leadership appointed Hitler to infiltrate and lead the way through the German National Socialist Worker’s Party to a new synthetic state corporatism in which aristocrats with capital might unify with the Nazi authority thus protecting their assets against the Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany. Because Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and others took that as better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for trade, Germany advanced under Hitler to the inexorable drive to dominate Europe.

Of course there is more to it than that. Yet the contest between imperialism in various forms and democracy with strong individual rights based in a real nation is fundamental in western civilization. Nationalism does not require aggression at all-it requires good ecological economic leadership, full employment, justice, security from illegal entry and mutually beneficial trade relationships. The United States can be a strong, independent nation and have a sustainable, self-reliant economy and ecology or it can become part of some global imperialism in which elections nationally are basically sham votes for items from a one party ruling class.

The last point I wanted to mention was Mr. Lukac’s statement that it isn’t idealism and realism that are antithetical, but idealism and materialism that are. That is quite a useful point to make.

Realism has a couple of meanings philosophically speaking (or more) as does idealism. Today we might be more accustomed to talking about realism vs. nominalism than idealism. I believe that Prof. Lukac’s meanings are of that of history and common sense, although he does mention Hegel, German idealism and determinism.

Realism has historically been a descendent of Plato’s realm of forms. Philosophically realism was a belief in the reality of perfect archetypes in a transcending realm of which all things in this world are replicas albeit imperfect forms.

Common sense is the other meaning of realism we may consider now. Realism in politics is the pragmatic, the functional and the actual-the way things are. Realism tends to thus be associated with materialism and it is simple to clarify matters and pose materialism as the fundamental antithesis to idealism.

There is a funny thing about idealism that makes its meaning somewhat equivalent to the amount and quality of ideas that one has. It is easy to ossify idealism and say that it is Hegel’s world spirit evolving to actualize itself. We can even throw Darwin’s evolution theory along with Telhard Desjardin’s noosphere into such an evolution of idealism comprehensive of materialism, quarks, space-time and all-potential universes. That is, one may place that sort of idealist paradigm within the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus’ criterion of the non-static manifestation of temporality through various emanations from The One and transcend or bridge the gap between idealism and realism, so it is useful to allow realism and materialism to be equivalents and substitute the one for the other in our linguistic thesis vs. anti-thesis comparison.

Idealism has another meaning besides that of Hegel that I ought to mention. Bishop Berkeley developed a philosophy of idealism-or pure idealism that let the world of perceptions be a phenomenon of mind acceptable in a sense to Jean Paul Sartre’s approach to rationalism named existentialism. Basically Berkeley let the world of experience have no foundation objectively that could be greater than any world that could be created directly for our minds to experience.

If the world and Universe could be a kind of Matrix or virtual reality-an idea for Berkeley, Lukacs wrote that Hitler had the other sort of Hegelian idealism in mind. If one remembers reading Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ one recalls that G.W.F. Hegel believed the German state was the highest form that the world spirit had yet evolved mankind to. Thus Hitler might have had a similar historical misunderstanding and belief in determinism equal to that of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. I was unaware of that, and am a little skeptical that Hitler had much depth in reading philosophy. It is more credible to believe he had read Nietzsche.

At any rate, Mr. Lukac’s interesting point does stimulate one to consider a little how materialism might be the antithesis of idealism. I suppose I must upgrade a little the meaning of idealism and also that of materialism.

Idealism will mean that thought and design in a world-a kind of anthropic idealism, leads one’s way. Materialism shall mean that matter prevails over thought, and irrationalism is acceptable as it conforms to given material mass, energy and space-time.

With that clarification it is easy to see that idealism and materialism are antithetical. Because the only realms where anyone much cares about such a contest are philosophy and the philosophy of economics we must consider the salient point in the business environment in the ecosystem today; does capitalism work best to manage the world’s environment with faith in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’?

We might wonder if blind faith in material irrational evolution of parallel environmental reconstruction that may encapsulate the prevailing Wall Street approach to the world ecosphere that regards the ecosphere as n externality is opposed to an idealism that takes responsibility for human interaction within the world ecosphere. I believe the answer is yes.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a mechanism for economic determinism. It meant no more than let free enterprisers run their affairs without royalty (or large corporations) oppressing us. It was not in anthropomorphic sink for all social responsibility regarding the environment.

In building designs people think before building if they can. Usually the results turn out better than letting the blind forces of nature evolve an office tower. Materialism must be helped along by idealism if it is to work-yet the ideal world; a world of pure mind in which human beings construct any reality they like is equally absurd. Real limits exist in any era to what human beings may do to change the environment and world or even universe. Politically the challenge is to understand those limits and make of them not points of crisis and conflict, chaos and catastrophe but opportunities for progress, construction of new worlds, restoration of healthy ecosystems, sustainable habitations for all life forms.

God got all of that better of course. The Universe is a kind of tree of life sprung from a mustard seed of infinitesimally small size (or perhaps it is that small anyway comparatively). I appreciated the concept of materialism being the antithesis that Mr. Lukacs raised in his book about Hitler versus Churchill. Materialism without thought and vice versa tends to be incomplete, ineffective political philosophies.

My Reading list January-May 2011

My Reading list January-May 2011...

1) The Balkan Wars

2) The Persian Night; Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution-Amir Teheri

3) Age of Fracture- Daniel Rogers

4) Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe- Martin Bojowald

5) Infinite Ascent- David Berlinski

6) Freefall- Joseph Stiglitz

7) Unknown Shore- Robert Ruby

8) The Constants of Nature- John D. Barrow

9) The New Vichy Europe- Theodore Dalrymple

10) The Greatest Day in History- Best

11) The Philosopher and the Druids- Freeman

12) Maya Conquistador- Restall

13) Writing Mysteries- Sue Grafton editor

14) How to Write a Damn Good Novel- Frey

15) Crude World- Peter Maass

16) Dance of the Photons- Zeilinger

17) Just Six Numbers- Martin Rees

18) The Shadow Factory- Bamford

19) The Duel- Lukacs

Will Humanity Overcome Itself and Build A Sustainable Ecological Economy?

This time of year one wonders if U.S. political leadership will arise to lead humanity to full employment and a robust ecology that are sustainable facts of biodiversity-it seems unlikely.

Instead a feminized corporate global sprawl of organismic faithless amorality seems to be flowing to all regions of the globe to replace the local human life forms and culture. Sure one can argue that there are poitical cretins that need replacing. Yet degrading humanity to an amoebic form of acquiesing yes blobs seems a way to reduce human propects for sustainable life generally.

Corporate machines producing wealth unsustainable distributed to trained minions without an incorrect brain wave in their mind politically speaking sur won't work to keep strong U.S. nationalism or civil liberties much less a vigorous non-corporate free enterprise.

One might ask if great buildings are designed by Adam Smith's invisible hand-if non-sentient anthropomorphism is expected to design a better freedom tower or a wandering hollow mountain range housing a 100 million people? If the answer is no, then why should we accept the premise that irrational anthropomorphism will best design the world's ecology?

The world's ecology does require design today as much as any office building. The health of the ocean and all its fishes requires intentional design for health, as does biodiversity, a wild habitat and enough food to provide for every single human being adequately.

N.S.A. Mission & Priorities on a Tangent

The National Security Agency has built a constellation of computer processing facilities and supported development of super-computers to process telecommunications and Internet data at a speed faster than a quadrillion calculations per second with a goal of processing a quintillion operations per second (an exaflop). The rationale is to discover terrorist communications existentially by sorting through all of the world's telecommunications. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars are spent to locate a few Arabs with boxcutters-not to design an electromagnetic off-world linear space vehicle launcher, design a super-conducting interstate highway system or model economic full employment conditions for Americans. Needless to say no amount of computer processing capacity will inform the U.S. Government how to prevent illegal entry through its national borders.

One may guess that although modern urban structures have been enfiladed as flimsy and unable to withstand significant extra-normal stress in order to save construction cost and increase proplits, and no building plans for foliage covered buildings shaped as small, tough mountain ranges are scheduled for construction, the N.S.A. is neither set to discover encrypted messages written atom by atom or time-restructuring nano-bit messages placed in Fedex envelopes that might carry messages from the frontier of seriously evil applications of science to meglomaniacal conspirators.

The N.S.A. is building over-kill into reading the planet's email and listening to cell phones in order to defeat comparatively primitive perps that might be halted by other means such as competent physical defenses and a new national construction and agronomic ecological economic infrastructure could bring.

Because much of the invasive data acquired by the N.S.A. is outsourced to private and foreign corporations the information is distributed globally as well helping to build a new Orwellian evil empire. The Government should rethink some of its priorities and intentionally invest in economic and environmentally constructive construction and computation too.

President Obama's Disapproval Rating on U.S. Issues Climbs Scrimps Above 50%

While a majority of Americans disapprove of the President's management of eight key domestic issues the unanswered question of note is what potential candidate for the Presidency in 2012 does the electorate believe would do a good job on domestic issues?

I believe the correct answer is 'no one'. No potential candidate is thought to be competent enough to make the right changes to the nation to create full employment, a balanced budget, eliminate the federal debt, restore the nation's environment and restore security privacy in the telecom/Internet era.

No candidate is believed to have a realistic ability to provide no-problem free health care for the poor and veterans, to secure the nation's borders from illegal entry or even create a practical, efficient space transportation to a moon research base.

Writing from Wasilla Alaska I can say that I am glad Sarah Palin has gone on a bus tour of the nation's history sites-perhaps she will visit New Hampshire to learn more about the shot heard around the world, or New Jersey to see where Thomas Edison invented the Internet with his sidekick Dr. Watson.

Like the vast planet Jupiter clearing out the inner solar system of debris with its gravity that might reach other, Sarah Palin may enter Republican primaries to sweep and clear her male rivals with the automatic 50% gender vote as candidate Hillary Clinton cleared the field for Barrack Obama and the black advantage. If the Republican candidates for the 2012 election continue to fail at persuading the nation that they have the intelligence and the plans to make things right, a last minute October 2011 primary entry of Stanford President Condolizza Rice may be in demand-the nation has elected Woodrow Wilson like academics before.

If the race narrows down to a basic Palin-Rice contest, former Sect. of State Rice will likely answer difficult debate questions such 'what year did Crispus Attucks C.E.O. of Crispy Creme?' best.

The National Security Agency May Simultaneously Decrease National Security

The N.S.A. following the end of the cold war was ordered to downsize it's personnel by about a third. After 9-11 it recovered and ramped up its budget considerably building new facilities, hiring new people and finding new ways to tap into fiber optic communications. Perhaps because of the Bush-Cheney crank ideas about economics and privatization the N.S.A. also outsourced much of its work surveilling foreign and domestic communications through private contractors: more than 4000 contractors.

Today the major world fiber optic cables for communications send data globally at the speed of light. Even local calls and Internet messages in Asia may pass through California. The content may be copied live to be fed into N.S.A. computers-all of it.

Because of the vast amount of data-exabytes in the surveillance-industrial complex processing require advanced artificial intelligence and sorting programs technology to find those very dangerous terrorists in some fetid foreign swamp or hanging out in a motel outside Ft. Meade-the foreign contractors scanning through the data work for not only the U.S. Government but also for more than 50 other governments providing the same services not uncommonly.

Privatizing intelligence and Medicare would tend to make select private sector corporations 'too big to fail' and distribute U.S. data to the globe for their analysis and use. Americans will have no firewalls on foreign intelligence and global corporate intelligence analysts from knowing who they call on the phone, where they shop, what they eat, and what their business plans and energy usage is.

National security should create serious boundary firewalls to intelligence to stop the contemporary Internet and telephone infrastructure of the private sector from annihilating U.S. national security. While some Americans just don't care about keeping their personal affairs private, many do, and others haven't foreseen any deleterious future consequences as a result of the hegemony of adverse global corporate intelligence activity.

The U.S. Congress has failed to adapt to build firewalls and amorphous opacity requirements into telecommunications that would prevent the Microsofts, Googles,Nices, Narus' China Unicoms and Verints from capturing data for analysis in vast data storage facilities. Internet and telephone transactions could be constructed with an innate emphemerality that would scramble electrons after use. Entire bureaucracies and corporate sectors have evolved to function as Orwell's vampires on individual civil liberty. Government should continually work to build new national defense infrastructure into technology that assaults national sovereignty at the same time as it innovates and improves technical virtuosity.

An American citizen might wonder how full employment, good wages and a healthy environment might ever be constructed when the U.S. Government has heavily invested in privatizing much of its intelligence functions to global corporations, allowed the communications data of Americans to be pervasively captured by foreign agencies and let its employment sector become controlled by foreign or transnational corporations that may in effect keep U.S. employment levels wherever they like.

A citizen should encourage the U.S. Government to invest in philosophical research and analysis about the overall effect global corporations have on U.S. economic development, signals intelligence, acquisition and security of private Internet and telecommunications data transactions. The U.S. Government should invest in social philosophy analysis so far as to consider if the weight of economic capitalization and technical advantages of global corporations are helping or harming U.S. national economic development and the actual standard of living of the citizens of the United States.

The National Security Agency should be encouraged to develop a systems analysis capacity for the conservation of data security in the high-tech telecommunications environment. While the N.S.A. presently seems to be based upon copying data from telecoms and Internet corporations and fiber optics lines and further to develop private contractors to analyze the data, it should also find technical means to scramble all private data going in to the Internet cloud or wireless and land phone networks through necessary encryption of data such that only the private citizen can put the data together meaningfully with his/her 'half' of the technology. The danger to national security and civil liberties especially in the realm of free enterprise appear to far greater from corporate and government data acquisition than from terrorist attack.

Terrorist attacks might be better defended against through increased border security (no illegal entries to the U.S.A.), better, less destructable building designs, more surveillance of biological developers and so forth.