Badges ?

lol man it became like a cult think when i was growing up...everyone was running around saything that line about everything you could think of, like a teacher asking do you have a hall pass ? and we would all laugh and say "passes ? we dont need no stinking passes ! lol "
get my drift man ? hehe it just was a lot of fun then, it was like the resistance to many authorative people and commands tooo...you know when you take a cliche` and just go with it, like rocky and bullwinkle once bullwinkle said "get off me rock your sinking me" lol when rocky was riding on his back swimming across the river, well we would always say that like when someone said" hey man can i have a cigarette ? " we would say get off me rock your sinking me lol in otherwords no you cant have a cigarette off me because your depriving me of what little i already have hahahaha get off me rock hehehehe
your sinking me hahahaha..so that saying was used i nthe same way and frame of mind.Badges? Liscense ? ticket ? surfboard ? Clothes ? we dot need no stinking lothing lol

Tèrràçà§tèr®©

I have never known anyone incinerated by our government. It's extremely rare here. It's mostly in Buddhist countries where people are incinerated and they usually do it to themselves as a protest. Also, the government has not been festering my religious lunacy for years. I have had a couple of splinter wounds that festered, but the government didn't do it. Where is it that you live where these terrible things happen?

But who will protect us from the excessive use of bold face type?

Name me one Nation, one Society, one anything for the past 10,000 years where a unarming the population has protected or saved a nation government society from destructin, invasion, corruption, annihilation ...

The Soviet Union fell without a shot being fired.

The next attack/invasion will come from within our borders as it already has begun. Or at the least that is a possibility. Nukes or not a ground war is inevitable in today's world. Your right about my age and that I first heard that badges thing was a later comical version is why I confused things. But we still used to laugh and tell clerks or service people something of a variation of the OG quip.

Our experience with Great Britain had been that the Mother Country had a bad habit of using a standing army to impose violence on the civilian population. Our militia attempted to protect the civilian population, but after success at Concord and a failure at Breed's Hill, though it was a costly victory for the British, most of the fighting in the ensuing revolution was conducted by Continental regulars.

The militia system never worked well in the United States. Nevertheless, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention steadfastly distrusted standing armies and wanted to keep our standing army as week as possible, even zero out its size, if they could. So, they provided for a strong militia.

By the time of World War II technology had evolved to the point that militia were no longer sufficient to protect the country. The Korean War taught us that, like it or not, our role on the world stage dictates that we have a strong national force to protect our own shores and to project power overseas when needed. Our experience in the two world wars had also taught us that we were much better off if we reached out and protected ourselves against burgeoning threats when they were still far away, rather than let them reach our shores. In both of those catastrophic wars we were able to live normal, or near normal lives at home while our military fought in other people's countries. They suffered the destruction of war, while our homeland remained safe. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 only reinforced those lessons.

However, most of our population remains skeptical of too much power in our central government. I hope they always hold on to that skepticism, but do not let rational suspicion of the accumulation of power turn into paranoia. Even though I have spent my adult life as a "running lackey dog of the imperialist war machine," I generally trust my government. Still, I share some skepticism with my fellow Americans, and I do not trust a government that does not trust me to own my own militarily effective firearm.

If you don't live here, don't ease your paranoia by knocking our constitutionally protected freedoms. Just quietly eat your heart out and worry about what your national government can do to you.

The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.