moment

I am amazed that people blow off encroaching, overwhelming power with hey, I am good. The government is giving me goodies so why worry. I say go for it. The going tit for tat on this freedom or that freedom is a specious argument when it makes you comfortable with the government detaining US citizens indefinitely without trial or accusing and killing US citizens without open review. What part of: "you lessen the rights of one without due process you lessen the rights of all" is not being gotten here. President Obama blighted his legacy when he signed into law indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.

Read approximately 10:15PM

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, and this power has been extended including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. The Patriot act now allows the surveillance and monitoring of US citizens without justifying cause or allowing review. The government has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. The administration uses GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review.

Agreed. But, I want both.

I respectfully suggest you actually do some research as to their credibility.

The most important point here imo, is that the USA is losing out competitively to many other countries in the most important arena of all. Our freedom.

Once rated the freest country in the world by every credible freedom watch organization, the USA is now rated between #11 and #20 by those same groups.

Are you talking about the mythical Goddess Guan Yin?

Hand Art

Separation- Edward Munch, 1896

Georgia O'keeffe, the mother of American modernism. "White Flower"

Blue and Green Music (1919) by Georgia O'Keeffe

Chauvet cave paintings (30, 000 years ago)

Claude Monet literally created the impressionist movement with his painting "Sunrise" in 1874.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking. Marcus Aurelius

When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves. Viktor Frankl

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.-- Will Rogers

The only journey is the one within.-- Rainer Maria Rilke

enlightenment- what a concept!? -- Jed Stuart

Dr. Seuss

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” -- Alan Watts

Rembrandt

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”-- Kurt Vonnegut