Here's the unemployment rate for young veterans (16.6%, for vets up to 34). Note: from what I can tell from this Business Week analysis, they are using the weak measure of unemployment (not the one used during the Great Depression).
Combine that with:
- Lots of these guys are combat vets. They are typically the least employable given their training.
- There are many more yet to come. Hundreds of thousands have yet to be laid off. Big defense cuts are coming as the budget continues to gush red ink.
- Unemployment is going to get much worse in the next couple of years.
IF we keep going in this direction, and there's no reason to think we won't, these young men find new groups to care for them and they shift their loyalties to new gangs/mafias/cartels/militias etc. at a pretty amazing clip. Given the danger this shift in primary loyalties represents for the future, going it alone isn't an option. You need a community at your back.
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Warrantless access to Twitter data is a go.
The big problem with the warrantless access to domestic digital info is that it rapidly leads to the automated retrieval of it. Once it can be pulled automatically w/o judicial intervention or degree of specificity (read delay), then the volume of data acquired will grow without limit. In Communist Germany, the Stasi was responsible for building files on people that didn't fit in. They sifted and sorted their personal correspondence to find patterns. In the US today, that task is done by millions of tiny software bots that work 24x7x365. Watching you. Waiting for you to fit a "signature." Given the increasing disconnect between the governors and the governed, this vision of the future is not paranoia, it's common sense.
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