WIP

What price did AIG pay? They were the primary recipient of the banking bailout -- even though they're an insurance company. They were too big to fail because they were the underwriter of of a lot of risky investments, and the general public learned a new word: Credit Default Swap. And Lehman! Can anyone really call the executives losers when their top executives walked away with salaries and bonuses intact after Lehman declared bankruptcy? Lehman's CEO, Richard Fuld, walked away with 484 million dollars. So what price did he pay for trusting the government? Somehow, we're supposed to feel sorry for bankers because of the actions of politicians that were bought and paid for.

It's a bogus claim considering that the banks don't have to assume the risk of non-payment anyway; since they usually sell the mortgages to third parties who bundle them as investments in mortgage-backed securities.

I believe there was an unmistakeable element of racism in the strategy of right wing media to blame the buyers rather than the sellers in the real estate meltdown. I still know a lot of fans of Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity, and they are able to connect the dots provided when Fox News makes sure that the majority being foreclosed are black. It's what they call dog whistle messaging, since they want to get the message across without being accused of racism. I have no doubt that in the current immigration problem, the right is using the same tactic by insinuating that Latinos in general are an immigrant problem, rather than focus any attention on conservative media's financial backers who exploit illegal immigrants as cheap labor that cannot object to poor working standards. The real illegal immigration scandal is that powerful corporations have created a class of indentured servants who also drive down the wages and working conditions of other Americans.

No, it can't all be blamed on "fly by night" mortgage companies. Goldman and the foreign banks bought mortgage-backed securities because they were insured by AIG in a completely unregulated market of credit default swaps as collateral. No one had any incentive to ensure that the loans were paid because housing prices kept going up in an inflated market, and bad mortgages were insured by CDS contracts. The mortgage companies were allowed to write mortgages for any borrower, and face no risk since they were sold off as investments to third parties. And those third parties buying mortgage securities were insured by A.I.G. And, once again after all of the blather about how great free enterprize is, and how well it works when free of government interference, they all go running to the government to bail them out. It's a shame that Wall STreet still controls Washington, so no real financial reform is possible, and another bubble and bust is just a matter of time.

We have no way of knowing how many people, if any, will be able to adapt to planetary conditions that haven't been seen for 15 million years. That was long before there were any humans walking the Earth, and it should be noted that modern humans almost became extinct 70,000 years ago, likely because of a supervolcanic eruption in one of the Indonesian islands. Genomic research has revealed that the scarcity of fossils from that period is due to a bottleneck in the population when there were as few as 2000 cro magnons left alive -- dangerously close to dwindling into extinction as happened to the Neanderthals. So don't take human survival for granted; we came close to dying out at least once in prehistoric times, so it can happen again. Naturally available resources eventually determine how large a population can grow and what's available for it to use, but our economic system is presently set up with the expectation of continual growth, add that to the social conservative demand for large families, and it's not a stretch to say that we may be in the situation that the inhabitants of Easter Island were before the arrival of James Cook. Their society grew and flourished, and kept on growing even after they cut down all of the trees on the island and degraded the land that they were trying to grow food on. The last survivors ended up as cannibals. The entire planet is finite, so we are living on one big Easter Island. I would rather believe that future generations can put a halt to the demands for growth than end up with the last survivors eating each other! I know! Part of the reason may be due to the fact that Canada is less densely populated; I'm not going to blame people living in rural areas for the amount of driving they do; I had to do the same thing when I was living in an isolated suburb out in the middle of nowhere. But, the primary reason why Canada's carbon footprint is getting bigger has a lot to do with the oil sands developments in Alberta...the other source of oil besides deep water drilling that believers in the Oil Economy are turning to. The last I heard, the oil sands projects were consuming 40% of Canada's annual usage of natural gas, for the purpose of extracting oil from tar sands. But since we have an oil-company backed government leading this country, there are few options to turn things around before a change in government. And, considering the power of the oil companies to buy the politicians they need, it will be as difficult to put a halt to tar sands up here as it is to stop deep water drilling in the U.S. The vast majority of the world's population is already suffering a degradation in the quality of life. Food and water shortages, disease and famine are growing because of the increase in extreme weather that is indirectly caused by man-made forcing of the climate. More energy in the planet's weather systems means more extremes, which is not conducive for modern agriculture that billions of people are dependent on.

I'm doing my part....improved insulation, replaced windows, put in a new furnace etc. We only eat meat once a week for health reasons, but that also reduces carbon footprint. About ten years ago, I moved from the suburbs to be closer to work...although that was more for economic and time management reasons than the environment. The 45 mile daily commute was costing a fortune in gas, repairs, not to mention needing a new car every four of five years. Plus the commute was getting too long to be worth the trouble...especially in the winter! And I rarely drive to work now, since I only have to travel about 3.5 miles. I usually run with a backpack on most days, ride my bike when I don't feel up to running...and again, that's mostly for exercise, but it still reduces my carbon footprint nevertheless. And I don't let my son take the car unless he has to travel more than two miles and can't get a bus back home. If we don't end the hydrocarbon economy, we can still do a lot to reduce the upward spiral in coal,gas and oil consumption because of health and economic reasons.

Yeah right! It seems that power-hungry right wingers have created so many disasters on so many fronts, that their defenders can only resort to attempts to reverse the blame. I'm not gay, but I'm not going to stop defending gays just because there are bullies like you who are well aware that it is impossible to oppress minorities of whatever description if outsiders are willing to speak on their behalf. If the majority stand by and say or do nothing, then the bullies feel free to intimidate their targets. Racists have to look over their shoulder in most places before telling racist jokes, since they never know if they will be called out unless they are among like-minded friends -- and the same thing will happen on this issue as well, since younger people have a more rational understanding of the determinants of sexual orientation than their elders do. Now, as for this George Rekers character -- so far, considering that this guy is a co-founder of Family Research Council, on the board of directors of NARTH, and a pivotal "intellectual" of the so-called gay reparative therapy movement, the lack of MSM coverage of Reker's scandal looks like evidence that media is mostly conservative, not liberal...of course that liberal media claim is just another example of rich conservatives playing the victim, as if their money doesn't buy them all of the press that they want. Regardless, today it appears that conservative Christian leaders are showing the same love and forgiveness that they did for Ted Haggard: FRC has already tossed him overboard and erased his reference on the Family Research Council website, and Tony Perkins issued a press statement that he had no contact with George Rekers during the last ten years. Meanwhile, over at NARTH, they've issued this statement: "We are always saddened when this type of controversy impacts the lives of individuals, and we urge all parties to allow a respectful and thorough investigation to take place." Which likely translates into the same strategy that the evangelical leaders did with Ted Haggard -- wait till the hanging before throwing him under the bus. Nancy Pelosi's daughter made a short documentary on Ted Haggard that was on HBO awhile back, that was supposed to be about the then leader of the National Association of Evangelicals; but ended up showing Haggard as a tragic character, as a scandal that revealed him to be a gay meth-head left him abandoned by his church, fellow preachers, and almost bankrupt with only the support of his immediate family as he tries to figure out how a man who has spent his life in front of the pulpit can carry on and earn a living. The real tragedy was that Haggard appeared to be still living in denial, hoping to be cured of his homosexual tendencies that he claimed were caused by sin. It just doesn't sink in that when most of us commit sexual sins, it is not going to be with guys! But when sleuthing reporters and bloggers went sifting through the record of Haggard's sermons, lectures and public statements, they found surprisingly few references to homosexuality. Sure, he parroted the party line, but it was not his mission as it was for George Rekers. And that's why Rekers is going to be an object of scorn from all sides. Whether or not he was still trying to cure his own homosexuality by going to the extreme as anti-gay, he has done an incalculable amount of damage to gay youth who grow up in fundamentalist Christianity. They are told from the time they have their first sexual urges that their feelings are abhorrent, and if they are discovered by family to be gay, they may have the crap beat out of them, or if they have enlightened parents, sent to one of those reparative therapy sessions to fix them. So there's your vehemence! A superstitious tradition at war with modern science, insists on carrying on with their theories and bogus cures that can't work, and just leave a victim feeling shame, anguish, and often living in denial, even when they are heading into their senior years like George Rekers.

Here in North America, the monotheism we have to deal with is Christianity, not Islam. I know what problems they have, and I don't see a whole lot of value in targeting what Muslims are doing over there, especially when right wing Christians are trying to move in the same direction here, and increase the power of Christendom. And since this is off topic, I'm sure the problems for gays are worse there, especially since homosexuality is a capital offense, even in places where America is interfering with, such as Iraq. But it must be noted that, thanks to American evangelicals like Rick Warren, homosexuality may be a capital offense here as well. The criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda was not caused by Muslims, but by the influence of Warren and other American evangelicals. They are acting out there the kind of things they would do here if they had the power to do so! A lot of the problems in the Muslim World have come as a result of a giant inferiority complex and attempt to act out and look for blame. While Islam was growing and considered the center of the civilized world, they were far more liberal and tolerant than the Christian West. That is how they ended up with most of the Jewish Diaspora after all. But, by the end of the Ottoman Empire, fingers were pointing in lots of directions, and rather than look inside and re-evaluate the control of religious clerics on society, they mostly decided that the problem was lack of religion, rather than too much religion. Combine the fundamentalist fervor with the interference of Western infidel empires taking oil, building military bases, controlling their shipping lanes, and you have the mix that spawns a continual supply of new terrorists. It's worth noting that Muslim terrorism is a recent phenomena, especially suicide bombing. The first suicide bombers were Tamils fighting in Sri Lanka, not the Palestinians. Don't look now, but the rhetoric of the right in the U.S., with it's "Christian Nation" and "American Exceptionalism" themes are heading right down the same road. America is looking like an empire about to collapse and acting hostile and impulsively just like most past failing empires have. And that's the main reason why I have had to move away from attempts by the right to focus all of our attention on what the Muslims are doing, rather than look at what's happening to Christianity here in North America. There are many progressive Muslims who are trying to reform their societies and attitudes about religion, women and law, but as long as the term 'secularism" is connected with American values or atheists who want an end to all religion, secularism will be impossible to sell under the present situation. It would be a big help to back off the automatic support for everything Israel does, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially end dependence on Mideast oil. Then the Muslim World will figure out what role religion should play in their societies.

Thanks! Couldn't have said it better. The question is not whether the human race becomes extinct in a hundred years, it's what sort of life they will have to live. The present course leads to disaster on scales only science fiction writers can deal with. The CIA is expecting resource-based wars and mass migrations from climate change and trying to draw up contingency plans to deal with the results. The Green Revolution depends on present climate trends, and any large shifts are going to cause famines of unimaginable proportions. And the fallout could indeed bring an end to civilization as we know it.

It is not an either/or situation. There is always a tension between the rights of the individual and the welfare of the group. And when the group's safety or wellbeing is threatened, individual rights and desires take the back seat. Conservatives recognize this when it comes to threats of foreign invasion, and in the latest example after 9/11, they over-reacted like a hyperactive immune system because of what the rest of us would discover was a terrorist threat from a group that did not have the capability to continue sustained terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Nevertheless, it did not stop the Bush Administration from attacking every civil right that had not already been compromised by the War On Drugs. If the left compromises property rights and economic rights to try to adjust incomes and living standards, the right does the same thing in the same of public safety and morality standards. I'm anything but a financial expert, but the blame it on Fannie and Freddie strategy is a red herring, since Fannie and Freddie were stuck assuming a lot of bad loans from other sources, and many of these mortgage contracts should have been considered fraudulent to start with, such as escalator mortgages and no-money-down mortgages. The mortgage lenders were parceling up their risky loans as mortgage securities, dumping the risk of a bad loan on to third parties. That is the key problem I think...if the lender still had the responsibility of collection, they would have been a lot more concerned about ensuring that the borrower could pay. There was also the obvious implications from the way right wing media covered the story, that their blame-the-borrower strategy focused on race. Over and over again, Fox News made sure they featured stories of blacks going into foreclosure, in an attempt to cement the impression that Wall Street wasn't to blame, it was those blacks buying houses they weren't entitled to in the first place. Considering some of the other inflammatory racial rhetoric that accompanies the illegal immigration issue, I have to wonder if the right wing strategy is to keep their people loyal by appealing to white racial identity. As soon as we abandon all forms of government, we end up with something like Somalia. A vacuum can't stay empty for long, and the divide between left and right has little to do with the size and scope of government; the defining line is what the role of government will be. A right wing big government wants lots of money for military spending and interfering with the sexual and lifestyle habits of the population. They may concede property rights, but on the other hand it's interesting to note that it was the right wing members of the Supreme Court who were responsible for adding to the power of Eminent Domain -- essentially giving private corporations the power to expropriate property for the public good! When it comes to the rights of the individual, the leaders of influence on the right are more concerned about the individual corporation than the individual citizen.

Sounds like the guy falling from the skyscraper who says:"so far, so good!" On a serious note, we have to go back 15 million years to find the last time atmospheric CO2 levels are as high as they are today. Even present levels will radically transform the planet into something we have never had to deal with in the history of the human race..let alone since we became dependent on high yield agriculture to feed a population getting close to 7 billion. "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm The Age of Oil is only about a hundred years old, so we have already had a long history before becoming oil-dependent and we can find alternatives again. Oil is just the path of least resistance, which will be catastrophic for coming generations if we don't make a few sacrifices and have something other than hedonism as our primary value. You mentioned population first, not me; nevertheless population is central to every other environmental, resource and economic issue. And yes, the population has to come down, not just level off, especially since large populations in the Third World are trying to achieve Western standards of living. This requires huge increases in energy and consumption of natural resources, so a gradual decrease in world population is going to be essential for long term survival of the human race. The present population level is unsustainable for more than a few decades. The best estimates are that if the almost 7 billion people on Earth were consuming energy and resources at the American rate, it would require three planet earths to supply all of the resources. One way or another, the population is going to fall; it can either go easy or go hard, but it's coming down one way or another! Too bad you don't take the future seriously, because the bad stuff may occur in your lifetime as well.

I started wondering the same thing about a friend at work, when he sheepishly asked me to help him clean up his computer. Seems Mr. Family Values was going on gay forums and chat rooms to vent his bile at homos and got loaded with malware. He was especially concerned that his wife would discover a gay screensaver that was uploaded to his computer. I never did get a complete answer for why he felt so motivated to go out of his way to do this in the first place. On the public stage, there's the continual rumours about Fred Phelps and I can't forget the the founder of Exodus International -- the Christian gay fixing group who got caught walking out of a gay bar in Miami a couple of years back. His excuse was remarkably similar to George Reker's -- he said he was frequenting gay nightclubs as part of his soul-saving mission....but if he convinced anyone, unfortunately it wasn't James Dobson, who was providing the bulk of his funding and demanded that he resign from Exodus International. Looking at the big picture, these sorts of problems are caused by holding on to old superstitions that are outdated. It's especially tragic when young people grow up in fundamentalist homes and internalize these beliefs. No surprise that gay teens have the highest suicide rates, and these gay preachers and priests that occasionally come stumbling out of the closet in sex abuse scandals are often there because they thought joining the ministry or the priesthood would cure them of their homosexuality. Whenever, if ever the day comes when people can just be themselves, wherever they fit on the spectrum of sexual attractions, these sorts of problems will not have to exist.

from the Daily Beast: Who hasn’t accidentally hired a male hooker as a luggage boy? Anti-gay leader and co-founder of the Family Research Council George Alan Rekers claims he was just looking for someone to help him carry his luggage when he hired a male prostitute whose online profile (probably NSFW) advertises his taste for “spanking” and “shaving,” among other sexual acts. Contacted by the blog Joe.My.God. via Facebook, Rekers said that “due to surgery I require assistance in lifting luggage when traveling,” and goes on to claim that he was helping the prostitute/luggage boy known as “Luicen” by teaching him that “[1] It is possible to cease homosexual practices to avoid the unacceptable health risks associated with that behavior, and [2] the most important decision one can make is to establish a relationship with God for all eternity by trusting in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, including homosexual sins. If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called ‘Lucien,’ you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.” Hmmmm, I wonder if the Religious Right will buy it, or will they have to throw him under the bus like Ted Haggard.

So trying to prevent ecological disaster is a special interest! Maybe if all the people living in the year 2050 are a special interest -- they will likely see it differently. In the short term, the "drill baby drill" crowd are seeing their chickens come home to roost since they carelessly disregarded the warnings against more deep water drilling. This was an accident that was bound to happen, and the more deep water drilling rigs, the greater the odds. A climate websiteI check regularly posted a link to this oilpatch site that featured an interview with a survivor of the fire on the Transocean Horizon. He noted the safety awards as evidence that this rig's operation were considered by regulators to be exemplary, and blamed the high wellhead pressures (30,000 to 40,000 p.p.sq. inch) as the cause of the explosion. The caller "James" claimed that gas gets kicked up frequently and has to be vented before drilling can resume, and for that reason, equipment on the floor of the rig has to be non-sparking. But in this case, because of the high pressure, there was such a high volume of gas coming up so fast that it engulfed the rig and could have been sparked by anything. Long story short, if this rig was supposed to be among the safest and best operating, then this disaster was something that can be expected when drilling for oil at these depths, and not mere negligence or a freak accident that will not be repeated. I'll assume this convoluted statement has something to do with population growth, which wasn't what I was talking about, but is the central problem in environmental issues, since an increasing population demanding higher standards of living will make all other efforts futile. As for that abortion red herring -- thanks in part to the efforts of Republican administrations since Reagan, U.N. sponsored birth control programs have been seriously damaged. Today, more than a quarter of the world's population is under 15, so we can expect another surge in population growth when these children come of age....especially since there is a decline in availability of birth control and legal abortion over the last 30 years. And this is how concern over fetuses, such as expressed recently by our idiot prime minister, adds to the crisis.

Now what you have to prove is that government redistributing wealth is an evil in itself. I have only met a few anarcho-capitalists in my time who would argue for no government services and no taxes. The conservatives who want small government seem to see no contradiction in supporting a huge military-industrial complex, or even social programs that they benefit from -- for example, most older conservatives are adamant that the most expensive domestic programs - health care and pensions are a fundamental right that cannot be touched...spending has to be cut elsewhere, not the programs that they depend on! And as for regulation...well, we're seeing what's happening in the Gulf now, and the damage done by ineffective regulating agencies that are compromized by the industries they are supposed to monitor. Lack of regulation is a bigger problem than too much regulation over the last 30 years. The doctrine of mutual self-interest has fallen apart over the last couple of years, after seeing how greed and irrational behaviour cause market bubbles and collapses, not to mention how the wealth becomes increasingly concentrated at the top, among the wealthiest citizens. Eventually, economic inequality makes democracy obsolete. You can have an plutocracy or a democracy, but you can't have both. And this is exactly what happens when a society moves towards fascism. The basic definition is having all of the most powerful interests in a society working together in close collaboration. When the political leaders, the wealthiest bussinessmen, the military and religious leaders all get together to run a nation, then you have fascism. And fascists use the symbols and emotional touchstones of the common people to keep them in line and continuing to support a small class of people who are working directly against their economic interests. Back during the Depression, when the Nazis and Fascists had taken over much of Europe, the American playwright Sinclair Lewis noticed this fact and stated:"when fascism comes to America, it will be wearing a cross and flying the stars and stripes." When it comes to the struggle between fascism and socialist revolutionary movements like communism, the left will use resentment against the rich and powerful ruling class to rally people behind them, while the fascists will use religion, racial identity, nationalism and fear of foreigners to gain loyal followers. Therefore, these two movements are not the same, and work at cross purposes from each other. And, in spite of the success of Marxism in Russia and China and elsewhere in the 20th century, most of the battles between left and right wing are won by the fascists, since they usually have most of the levers of power on their side, along with the handy emotional appeals to religion, race and nationalism to draw upon.

If you send a laser guided bomb from a drone airplane into the middle of a wedding happening in my village, I might consider it a terrorist attack!

Funny thing that creationists propose an alibi and never bother to follow up and see if it could any real scientific merit! Sure there are examples of mountain ranges rising from the sea floor (the Himalayas for example), but the problem with a worldwide flood and the alibi that creationists use to explain the record in the rocks (hydrological sorting) is that there is overwhelming evidence from all around the world for the"Geologic Column," which demonstrates that animals and plants are layered according to the eras that they lived on Earth, not from the sorting of some giant flood.

Gee, why am I not surprised! Yesterday on the news, they had a short segment on some of the 700 fishermen who were to be hired by BP for the cleanup operation, and at the last minute BP presented them with a waiver that they were told they would have to sign. This little contract clause would release BP from any financial obligations for health problems suffered by cleanup workers. After a near riot, BP retracted the waiver, since this whole tactic of hiring the fishermen is a PR move to begin with and they didn't want the bad optics of breaking windows and rioting fishermen. It just goes to show that for all of the public promises that they will pay the costs for damages, behind the scenes they are already using any and every maneuvre to minimize their losses. An oil cleanup expert on As It Happens last night said that many cleanup workers and residents around the area of the Exxon Valdez disaster have never been compensated for their long term health problems. It's just one more "cost of doing business" that becomes the responsibility of the state and local charities. As in the Banking scandal, profits are private, but losses are the public's problem!

I used to buy in to the basic right wing premise that a collection of individuals motivated solely by greed and self-interest will reach mutual accommodation for the benefit of society as a whole, without any outside interference in commerce or markets. But this is simply a libertarian fantasy and doesn't stand up to scrutiny, account for irrational behaviour in business and financial markets, and worse of all -- it doesn't deal with the fact that most people focus on short term interests, and cannot rationally deal with longterm, slowly building crises like Climate Change. And this is where government (government that is brave enough to risk the wrath of the public) has to step in and try to get the majority to look beyond short term gains and losses. It would have been nice if America elected a president who came in as an outsider and remained an outsider - refusing to be co-opted by the powerful special interests...but they didn't! Instead, they got a president who compromized with the health insurance companies that feed off of illness to get a health care bill passed, and compromised with the most powerful investment banks to propose a timid financial reform, and on this front, President Obama was willing to compromise with the oil industry and it's political backers to get a bill supposedly for cutting CO2 emissions? Now that the dangers of offshore drilling are coming home to Republican free enterprizers that live around the Redneck Riviera along the Gulf, maybe now some real leadership can focus people's attention beyond narrow short term interests and phase out the Age of Oil. It will take real leadership to get real energy conservation policies in place, along with shifting energy sources away from oil to nuclear, wind and solar energy, but the costs of failure to change the present course could mean extinction of the human race in a few generations.

I'd rather give McGuinty a backbone than have another wreckless conservative to go with the one in charge of the federal government.

Greed trumps all in so called free market economics!

I heard today that the maximum liability BP could face is 10 billion dollars, so regardless of what Obama says about BP getting the bill, as soon as the total tops 10 B that's it...and no doubt they will have an army of lawyers to negotiate the final settlement down significantly, just like Exxon did with the Exxon Valdez. Just as in the banking meltdown, profits go to the corporations, but as soon as they are faced with losses, it becomes a collective responsibility of that government that they want to reduce in size. I've heard some oil industry analysts state that Canada has a worse record than the U.S. at applying safety regulations for offshore oil development. Whether or not it's true, it seems obvious that we are most at risk with these Arctic Ocean developments. It's bad enough trying to stop a blown well under water without having to deal with freezing water and ice.

By your definitions, North Korea is a democratic nation since Kim Il Sung called his country the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Sounds like a good reason not to believe the entries in Conservapedia! Socialism is a political philosophy that encompasses various theories of economic organization based on either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources. Socialists generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system of exploitation. This in turn creates an unequal society, that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential,[6] and does not utilise technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public.[7] and from this we can see that capitalist nations with large public sectors such as Western Europe are not really socialists Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and programme; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalisation (usually in the form of economic planning), but sometimes oppose each other. A dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split between reformists and revolutionaries on how a socialist economy should be established. Some socialists advocate complete nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism So, state control of capital is the only unifying value of various socialists and that means the Glenn Beck type of definitions you are using are just labels applied by conservative fascist leaning talking heads, who want to divert public attention from the obscene increase in wealth of a powerful elite. Fascists use fear of outsiders (different races, different religions etc.) and resentment against the poorest segments of society to maintain loyalty to a wealthy powerful ruling class that acts against the economic interests of average citizens.

We've covered this topic a number of times before, and I already mentioned floods caused by retreating glaciers; but the theory of a Black Sea Flood flooding out the entire Mesopotamia Valley is proposed by one geologist and not widely accepted by other colleagues -- therefore it's an hypothesis, but not something bankable that can be used as factual evidence yet. I'll go by expert consensus when it comes to science, rather than run off with the ideas of an outlier who may be a crackpot. Even some of the most brilliant scientists like Nikola Tesla and Fred Hoyle had some crazy ideas that they refused to give up on when evidence piled up against them. When it comes to geology, the history of earth science began with early geologists who assumed that a worldwide flood 4000 years ago was a fact. Their efforts to find evidence for the universal flood 200 years ago ended up with the discovery that the Earth was much older than previously believed, and at no time in Earth's history was the entire land mass covered with water at the same time! If you check through the Talkorigins pages devoted to responding to creationist claims and so called Flood Geologists, it becomes clear that real geologists have numerous lines of evidence to prove that a recent worldwide flood of the earth is impossible.

Before I vote, I want the definition of terrorism to include state sponsored terrorism, plus many terrorist attacks you would include could fall in the category of reprisals by locals against foreign invaders.