His special plane could be smaller, and he could fly less. Especially since this president in particular likes to complain about everyone else’s carbon footprint.
The security measures applied to the president of the USA are increasingly reminiscent of those which surround a hated dictator or a god-king, rather than what the president is, which is my hired help. I’d like to see it scaled back quite a bit in fact.
That’s pretty much the same thing. It’s financially impossible to build a public transport system where I live that will do my commute (and those of my neighbors) in less than 2x-3x the time it takes me to drive. Regardless of the reason, that is the fact in place.
What? Are you kidding?
How many people do you think actually know or care about the scanners?
Have we lost many BoingBoing users because they couldn’t deal with the privacy intrusion and died in a car wreck?
And to put the group filing the suit (CEI) into perspective, they’re the ones that sued Subway that their ‘footlong’ subs were not really 12" https://cei.org/litigation/subway-footlong-sandwich-marketing-and-sales-practices-litigation
Edit: they didn’t actually do the initial suit, they are suing against the settlement which only paid the lawyers and not the plaintiffs… So, I guess these guys want some of that free lawyer money.
Don’t worry, I’ve just had a run in with @Mister44 over the bombing of Dresden. I may be wrong and this might be a tiny bit ad hominem, but let me put it like this; he wouldn’t be my go-to source for German history, German psychology, or knowledge of contemporary Germany.
The least of it.
Think about it. The Stasi had to rely on a network of informers to keep track on what East Germans were up to.
The US came up with Facebook, whereupon people queued up to report on themselves. Ex-Stasi members must be kicking themselves; all that following people and hanging out listening for subversion when if they’d had the Internet they could just have let people get on with it, right down to obligingly posting incriminating photos and videos.
Like those morons who record themselves speeding and post the result to YouTube.
As one of the Founding Fathers nearly said, those who sacrifice privacy for a little narcissism deserve to have their iPhones inserted into an orifice.
Oh I believe it. But what threw me off was the “home of the free”. And they are in Germany. So why would the SS, excuse me, Secret Service (don’t want to add more confusion), act like they are in the Home of the Free in Germany with respects to personal rights.
Though I could see them doing something similar here.
I wouldn’t either. But it was more of a tongue in cheek comment, not 100% serious. Though I did take 3 years of German in High School. So I got that going for me.
Eh, but we are talking security and specifically government security. So the more recent Gestapo and Stasi (which wast just East Germany), who really did kick in doors and search homes for any reason, makes the comment more relevant. But again, it was more of a tongue in cheek comment. I am sure most modern Germans don’t condone secret police tactics.
I agree “Don’t look out of the windows” goes way too far, though I’d be curious if that was a Secret Service directive or something the local police cooked up.
That said, I would note that of the 43 men who have served as president, four were murdered in office, and in my lifetime there have been five publicly known assassination attempts on the president in which he was in the direct line of fire and survived only because of dumb luck. There’s a reason for the security paranoia.
The leaflet was written by the local police, so it’s most likely not the verbatim position of the secret service. But the wording is not typical for state visits (in 2013 the showcased country of the fair was Russia - Putin’s visit was not accompanied by hundreds of Russian special forces and thousands of German police officers).
