WIP

Does this thread need a revival? It began under the premise that the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan was ending. Since Obama has announced a halt to the planned U.S. troop withdrawal....that new Afghan guy really wants America to stay! So, the scorecard for Obama will end up that- not only has he started new wars and something close to wars....Yemen, Somalia, northern Pakistan etc., he hasn't even closed the wars he inherited and promised to end! Does anyone believe they are going to be out before the next election?

As universities become more and more dependent on corporate funding....pretty much every time a new campus is added to a university today, it is being built by some billionaire's foundation grants....we are steadily losing the impartiality that accompanied higher institutions of learning. The corporations and their think tanks stock the new economics, medical or environmental research center with professors that they approve of. Point being that Monsanto is among a list of corporations that have the money and the need for influence to buy the kind of research they want! Remember, there have been so many dangerous products, that after being removed from the market, were discovered to have failed several double blind tests, until they could finally come up with one that presented the product (like Vioxx) as a safe product for use. Getting the product to market is not about the peer review process...or lack of process among the many scientific journals; it's about whether the regulating bodies will accept the new product for market. In the U.S., the FDA, like every other federal regulating agency is being corrupted, weakened and even having staff threatened by mostly Republican lawmakers. Many regulating bodies have ended up with administrators moving back and forth from the corporate world to government...weakening the agencies with every move! I would like to say that our government system is less corrupted than the U.S.....but we have Harper now, and we know where he gets his philosophical underpinnings from! He's trying to gut Environment Canada, I'm sure he has just as little respect for every other regulating agency that we depend on for health and safety! So, in the end, we are fast returning to the old norm of a 100 years ago, when the operating principle was Let The Buyer Beware, because any drug or chemical passing peer review in a journal and getting approved for market, will only require a little bribe money and some armtwisting to get er done! P

Thanks for this! A political forum I used to be a member of, started getting flooded with misogynistic trolls calling themselves: "Men's Rights Advocates." Sort of the equivalent of "White Power" in my estimation; but that's where I first came across this #womenagainstfeminism BS. One of the MRA trolls...who didn't have the capability of posting real arguments, let alone trying to rebut or refute others, kept churning out pictures on a daily basis from that stupid tumblr site. I wondered how many of the pictures were genuine...since many of them have girls and young women with some stupid antifeminist slogans posted across them. Even some of the ones that appear to hold up cards with slogans on them, could just as easily be photoshops because of the poor graphics. On Katy Perry or Lady Gaga....why would anyone expect that any women who become well-payed "stars" would give a crap about the lives of other women? I am sort of more suspicious of the pop stars calling themselves feminists or doing the meaningless "girl power" crappola, like the Spice Girls were doing back when my daughter was still in her formative years. Whatever that was supposed to be about....aside from selling dolls and hawking related merchandise....I should point out I'm a cynic of all pop culture in general. As for the final question: the justification for excluding women mostly boils down to the fact that the political goals and aspirations of the right, are that they have to focus on what are considered mostly male virtues/and vices: competition, independence, aggression etc.. So they want women in general, playing as little a role in public life as possible.

As I see it, it goes further than that. If things aren't equal...which they cannot be under any capitalist system...what are you going to do about those inequalities? And the question goes beyond gender to race and even the accelerating gaps in income and wealth we are experiencing in this brave new world of so called "free trade." Do you look at those gaps and say (like typical rightwingers)"oh well, unless someone can prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the gaps are structural or systemic, I advise doing nothing about it." or do you say:"if the system can't arrive at an equal balance, we'll step in and make it equal!" The answer determines how much you really believe in the principle of equality....everything that runs from anarcho-capitalist libertarian to anticapitalist uniformity....everyone's somewhere on that spectrum. *I learned a couple of years ago, that, just as conservatives create fake civil rights advocates, they even have a couple of fake feminists. One being the well-compensated Christina Hoffs-Somers, who speaks and writes endlessly about a rightwing-friendly form of feminism she labelled "Equity Feminism"....which boils down to do nothing other than that mythical even playing field! So, even David and Charles Koch could probably qualify as feminist...or feminist supporters by that definition. I'm on the side of what you call the extreme positions....really extreme positions: ending wars, ending corporate overreach that is instigating 99% of the wars since WWII, scrapping the WTO and so called free trade regimes that give international corporations power over nation-states, and since I had to play a part in this issue right at my own workplace as younger women started at what is usually considered traditionally 'men's work': establishing a firm policy against all forms of sexual harassment, and enforcing it, after waiting until signs of any problems was realized to be a disastrous approach!

They're all crap, and their basic business model of being part of the chain that has outsourced most production to slave labour havens half way round the world, and paying staff piss-poor wages in their stores, does not do consumers any favours in the long run! What good is saving a few bucks on a TV, when you are contributing to the WTO regime that's driving everyone's wages down? Piss on em all, and only buy what's necessary....not stupid crap you're going to buy on impulse after watching too many commercials!

Speaking of rubbish, why are you quoting from a "skeptic" site created by discredited fraudster - Brian Dunning? I used to listen to his short podcasts and when he was a guest of the Skeptics Guide To The Universe. So what does he do today to make a living? Collect payoffs directly from Monsanto and the oil companies like Steve Milloy and Marc Morano?

Define "advance." Because one of the greatest myths in our time is the myth of progress....which generally follows a narrative that we...as a species, were mired by deprivation until the wonders of the Enlightenment in Europe - when great European thinkers - Descartes and Francis Bacon started pointing the way to a new era in human history of unending progress and discovery, accompanied by technological progress. The myth of progress has had to come to grips with the fact that right from the beginning of the modernity - the age of agriculture - it was a great leap backwards for many, many generations of farmers...as their poor, limited diet and long hours of backbreaking work led to declining health for thousands of years, that didn't end for the majority until the past century. Even the 'dark ages' weren't quite as dark as we are continually told...or at least compared to the age of factory sweatshops that came after the imposition of enclosure acts to force people off their lands and into the cities to work in factories...a process that's still going on today in Africa and Asia! As Ian Welsh puts it: Serfdom Is Better Than What the West is Heading For 2. Yes, technology often comes with unknown risks. Which is exactly why new technologies and new innovations in production should be assessed for possible risks before they are dumped on the market, and declared too important to give up afterwards! If that means a slowdown in "progress," so be it! "Progress" is killing us right now because of the role wide application of new, untested products have on the environment. It would have been nice if the precautionary principle was applied at the end of WWII, before all of the wartime chemical manufacturers shifted to introducing new plastics and other chemical compounds into the environment, in the greatest scientific experiment in human history.....and we're all lab rats today! How dangerous and devastating will waste dumps like the Pacific Gyre be for the future? Who knows; but there's virtually nothing that can be done to stop the role it plays in destroying the food chain. 3. If the harms include the gradual poisoning of soils and the life dependent on them, how do you propose to assess those harms against the short term benefits? And, you know as well as I do, that the majority in today's ADHD culture can't contemplate anything more than a few years in advance. But, at least that's better than the corporate vision, which only sees the future in quarterly reports to shareholders!

You're still making excuses for his own stupidity and arrogance! Would you be creating hypothetical alibis for someone, if the sides were reversed, and it was an environmentalist, for example? Not that I'm a fan of new, open source online science journals; but the established journals are losing credibility as the years go by, because they are becoming less willing to challenge research created by big pharma and big ag sources. All things being equal, I'm going to go with the presumption that a lot of brand new chemicals and organic materials that never existed before in the history of life on Earth, may have low to moderate levels of toxicity when combined with all of the other crap that's just carelessly dumped into landfills, waterways, and into the atmosphere! There is too much evidence growing that our declining levels of health from so called 'lifestyle' aillments, is connected with these mass produced cheap food products that don't even have to be on food labels...unless you live in Europe apparently. If all of the pesticides, herbicides, GMO's...especially GMO's designed to grow in soils doused with higher levels of Roundup....if all of this garbage was really as good and as harmless as claimed, then there wouldn't be such a well-financed campaign to keep the public from having the right to choose/or not choose them on the supermarket shelf. I don't want to stray off on a topic that scientists...except for those financed by petroleum interests...are trying to figure out right now (what happens in the next couple of years when we have ice-free Arctic summers), but doomsday is looking more and more like something this present generation has to worry about, and not have the luxury of pushing it off any further for the coming generations to have to deal with! I was sort of touching on the subject of how our capitalist economics has successfully externalized most of the costs of future damages from their products, by just dumping the wastes and leaving it up to people living near toxic wastes to deal with. When the wastes contaminate entire oceans, like the Pacific, then it could be a problem for the entire world to try to cope with....if at all possible. All of these chemicals that were never subjected to more than limited testing before approval for market, along with all of the plastics which could remain in the oceans for hundreds or thousands of years doing who knows what.....and, it's too late since the cows left this barn some time after WWII, but the precautionary principle should have been the guiding rule before all of this crap was approved. The chemical producers should have had the burden of proof that their products were completely safe, instead of the opposite situation where...after 20 or 30 years, they are still dismissing evidence connecting their products with a whole range of illnesses and environmental problems. The problem with Roundup is, after it's out there and everywhere in the environment, trying to determine percentage wise, how much of the problems are due to their product, and how much from other toxins, or a whole bunch of them having combined effects on soils, plants, animals...and US, is a mess worse than trying to sift through evidence from this latest airplane crash scene in the Alps.

Don't you ever get tired making excuses for pure evil? Monsanto Man got caught stepping in his own bullshit, plain and simple! He said:"you can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you." He just wasn't expecting to be confronted with the opportunity to put up or shut up. Forty years ago, when Monsanto introduced Roundup, the FDA testing was limited to cancer risks, and in recent years, the FDA like the rest of the U.S. regulating agencies have been turned into toothless tigers, who have their jobs threatened by bought-and-paid-for politicians, if they come down too hard on their paymasters...like Monsanto. Glyphosate, and other...what were believed to be inert chemicals in Roundup, are being connected with many long term health problems on the increase, as well as environmental effects on soil microbes. Glyphosate’s Suppression of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes and Amino Acid Biosynthesis by the Gut Microbiome: Pathways to Modern Diseases† Long, multi-topic critical article on Glysophate effects from Permaculture Research Institute: Why Glyphosate Should Be Banned – A Review of its Hazards to Health and the Environment

Here's someone all believers in War On Terror should be listening to: Writing About WarThink February 25, 2015 Elliot Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and earned a Purple Heart for his service. This hour, we’ll talk about how those years spent in a warzone informed his debut novel, Green on Blue (Scribner), which is set in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Ackerman concluded his last tour of duty as an instructor and 'adviser' for the U.S.-funded Afghan brigades known as Special Lashkar. Ackerman wanted to tell a war story from the point of view of a typical Lashkar recruit, whom he spent time with fighting small skirmishes in hit-and-run missions against the Taliban. So, he decided that writing the story as a novel, and creating a composite of a young recruit - Aziz, would be the best way to tell the stories he found typical among these Afghan soldiers who's home is a battlefield, fighting is a job usually with no endpoint or objective, and vengeance is a moral obligation on those who've lost family members. Of interest is Ackerman's assessment that soldiers (American, Iraqi, Afghani etc.) talk very little of politics or religion among fellow soldiers. It's just about the last mission, the next mission and what to do for fun in between. The only clear difference between the Americans and the Afghans, is that the American sees a finish line where he can go home if he survives, while the Afghan now sees the war as the permanent normal state of affairs, and chooses sides for financial reasons or revenge. And the commanders of brigades like Special Lashkar don't want an end! Their livelihood depends on the war, and an end to the war would leave them without employment in a land where there is no economic activity that is not related to the war. No wonder it's a war without end! The KERA Radio program- THINK, is a good title for a basic brain function we are supposed to do, but is almost completely missing in discussions on most issues these days. So, the program might be a good one to bookmark for other episodes. I listen mostly to podcasts I have Itunes subscriptions for. If you use Itunes, Think is a good one to add to the list on a whole range of subjects.

Funny that none of the rightwing koolaid drinkers gathered here can tell me how pro-war media can be liberal.

Elimination of scarcity, is only a temporary achievement, if the fundamentals aren't changed. That was the point Norman Borlaug - the primary developer of the new Green Revolution hybrid seeds tried to make back in the late 60's! At the time, Earth's human population was half of what it is now, and many highly populated regions, like China and the Indian Subcontinent, were being plagued with food shortages. Borlaug warned the global policymakers NOT to receive the Revolution (which was equally dependent on pumping down aquifers and more aggressive use of fertilizers) as a permanent solution to food shortages and expect new improvements in food production to keep fixing the problem in the coming years. But....guess what happened! In the 70's, population reduction steps like guaranteeing access to birth control, were abandoned, and populations started rising significantly again as more children began having children of their own in the last 15 years. Today, the world has over 7 billion and climbing; and our world is struggling with declining agricultural zones, because of exhausting the soil and more volatile climate changes. And yet we are told, that population will rise above 9 billion before there is any chance of a plateau and a modest decline in population numbers. What happens when there are too many people and too little food available? There are rising food prices for sure, but the negative fallout, like food riots, mass migrations, civil wars etc., will make the world a more dangerous place to live in in the coming years, because of the failure to plan ahead effectively. There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat! Further food production increases will have to come at high cost: an increased destruction of natural environments/leading to increasing the already alarming rates of species extinctions....we're already in the sixth mass extinction, in case nobody is aware of it. Are you sure of that? Why have newspapers been dumbed down to a grade six level today? I was struck by how far we've fallen back when the Lord of the Rings movies were in the theaters, and I was motivated to finish the first book and the other three...and then I decided to buy The Hobbit...even though it had been traditionally tagged as a children's book. I doubt the reading level of any 10 year old today is high enough to read the Hobbit. Even most highschoolers probably would fail the test also. If you're old enough to have parents who came of age during the Depression and before the modern age of consumerism, you would find that the only thing they would consider buying on credit was a house. Aside from a mortgage, nobody of the pre-WWII generation ever wanted to take out a loan on anything. They never bothered applying for credit cards either. It's a whole different world today. We're being told now that the reason for our latest economic malaise is because most consumers are already maxed out on their credit, and can't borrow to buy any more now. Regardless of what you were told at business school, slavery never actually ended in our world! The strategy called Enclosure of the Commons in 17th century England, was applied in large part to force peasants off the land and provide a cheap and desperate source of labour in the new factories that were being constructed, and supplied with the slave labour from the plantations of the colonies. Formal slavery may have come to an end, but the strategy of driving people in third world nations off the land and into already crowded cities to fight for dismal jobs in textile factories is still the same basic strategy. And I still would argue that the Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan (or wherever the cheapest sweatshop labour is today) textile worker is living a poorer existence than the hunter-gatherer who had none of modern technology's benefits.

I hope you weren't expecting anything new or relevant!

Besides personal attacks on the Premier for nothing other than her sexual orientation, and this Dr. Levin (whom I'll admit I know nothing about), what are your objections to revising a curriculum on sexual education? Specifically, what in the new proposals is it that you find offensive and have some better proposal? I have to ask this because I listened to the CBC Radio show The Current, do a segment on this topic, and the conservative advocates opposed to the new curriculum. All I heard was the usual droning canard that it's up to the parents to teach their children these things. Which translates in English as: I want my child to be totally ignorant about sex and remain a virgin until their wedding night. In other words, people who do not live in the real world! Children learn all sorts of new and bizarre things, and they are NOT going to tell their parents about it! That's the first problem here. If children are getting their sexual education from porn and pop media, there needs to be some venue where they can be exposed to balanced information on the risks and older children who are likely to be already experimenting sexually, need to know how to protect themselves. And the other problem is that children are beginning puberty at earlier ages today, for a variety of reasons, most notably because of rising body fat content etc. So, if changing the curriculum is bad, let's see what's wrong with it, and what better proposals are offered by critics. The "let the parents decide" mantra, tells me that conservatives would rather children not be taught anything about sex, or about their bodies, and end up with the high STD and teen pregnancy rates that are found in U.S. states that have the most restrictions on sex education and availability of birth control.

In a way, it may be entertaining to have someone with two, three or more personalities arguing against each other online.

Did you bother reading anything I posted before? I never said there were no wars prior to the Euro Conquest; I pointed to the archaeological evidence showing that the periods of wars and violence over the ages in the Americas correlate with population densities and transitions back and forth between hunter-gatherer migratory life (times of peace), and times when the horticulture portion of farming was widely adopted (the ages that led to wars). Which was where the eastern woodlands were at the time of Champlain's arrival! But, it has to be noted that there had also been a trend towards forming larger alliances, like the Iroquois Confederacy, and establishing clear territorial boundaries, and judicial bodies, to reduce the likelihood of raids and inter-tribal skirmishes. Needless to say, Champlain's strategy...which is evidenced right in his diaries, was to pick a side and exacerbate the differences for his own advantages. Unfortunately, he didn't understand what was actually happening on the ground and picked the wrong side....similar to empire-builders today! The effects of having to kill, on most normal people are not different from murder...whether they or their leaders concoct fanciful ways to justify the killing.

Technology doesn't change who we are inside! That's the point I'm trying to make here. So, when new technologies are invented or placed into mass circulation and adopted by the majority of people, we may indeed have changes in culture, in personal wellbeing, and changes in the way people interact. And, I would submit that, since the introduction of television in the post-war period, these new technologies have had some benefits, but overwhelmingly negative effects on child development and the way people interact in their daily lives. The expert consensus today is firmly established that TV should not become a large part of young children's daily lives, and no young child should have a TV in their bedroom. TV has not only worked against literacy, it has also made modern consumerism...where masses of people buy products on impulse to try to fill deep-seated psychological needs/ rather than the consumer of previous times, who generally bought new products when they felt they were needed. The new consumerism, made possible with absorbing media like TV and all of the new personal technologies added since, have created an average consumer who is slightly neurotic at best, and at worst - puts things ahead of people in their lives. So, sure enough technology is changing us....but most of the changes are not for the better! Because the majority of our physical and mental adaptations are for an active life in wide, open spaces, carrying few (if any) personal possessions (negating the formation of organized hierarchies), being resourceful and hunting and gathering food from the land and bringing it back to camp for a common meal shared by all the tribe members. That is most of the common features of life for most of human history, and ever since "civilization" began a few thousand years ago, we have already had to adapt, with varying degrees of success to life in more crowded environs...especially cities, extreme hierarchies, occasional wars and genocides, a poorer diet, and the simple fact that modern technologies have not improved the lives of the majority of people. There was a long decline for most people after the advent of agricultural life, and in modern times even today, it's a tough case to make that the billions living on less than two dollars a day, and having to pick through garbage and eat substandard food with no access to safe drinking water working in hell-on-earth sweatshops....are living better than our distant ancestors 10 or more thousand years ago!

Does Admin keep track of IP addresses? That is the usual way multiheaded hydras are prevented from using multiple ID's, or coming back after being banned.

There is still no theory to explain what consciousness is or how much of our internal beliefs about our own consciousness: unitary mind directing a physical body, and permanently existing till death (and after death for some believers) is the product of self-generated delusions and along with our sensory maps of the world, it's likely for the purpose of keeping a complex physical organism functioning in this world. Whenever a subject suffers damage to one or more centers in the brain, we find all of these perceptions, including unified consciousness fall apart. So, exactly what sort of consciousness would Kurzweil and his acolytes be uploading to the future super-computer? It doesn't matter what technology is developed in the future, it can't transfer a sense of consciousness from a biological organism to a computer microchip if it's self-generated illusion to begin with. That computer joining the Singularity may gather information from billions of people today that hypothetically carry on like the biological organisms they gathered information from, but whatever "life" the Singularity contains afterwards in digital nirvana, will be a complete break from the hosts they gathered their information from. They will still be a computer simulation of real conscious beings. Maybe a convincing simulation, but a simulation nonetheless. Kurzweil seems to think that an exponential growth of information will continue until it 'saturates' the Universe...whatever the hell that means! I wondered if he was reading Deepak Chopra when he wrote that book. Chopra comes out with the same pointless claims of information being eternal and existing without the physical sources that created it. To me, it still sounds like another attempt to cheat death. The sense of consciousness hardwired into us put a high premium on generating fear of death. So at some point in human evolution, when we started thinking about the future, we started cobbling ideas together to cheat death and live forever. Hunter-gatherers reincarnate as birds, lions, bears, whales, fish etc.., and later on we got heaven and hell and now we have the Singularity! A psychological theory - Terror Management Theory proposes that fear of death exists in the background regardless of how much we try to accept it or drive it out of existence...it's sort of always there according to TMT, motivating our cultural developments and monument and legacy building, and wars...fear and anxiety can drive some people to commit acts of wreckless violence and risk their lives. So, I'll just wait for the boatman to take me off to hades some day and ignore the supernatural and the super-technical attempts that promise me eternal life!

A couple of points need to be clarified here: genetics and environment do not exist separate from each other. The environment plays a large and important role in how genes code the production and direction of proteins for growth and development. On the old nature vs. nurture debate that used to go on endlessly between behaviourists and determininsts who believed that personality traits and brain development were locked in at birth and could hardly be altered throughout life. Nowadays, studies of neuroplasticity and other new research, reveal that the environmental factors that can alter brain and other physical development begin even prior to birth - when the baby is still in the womb. Nutrition is certainly a strong factor, but studies of women who went through pregnancies during major conflicts going back as far as WWII Europe, show that the stress hormones released by the mother had negative and damaging effects on the babies they gave birth to. And, even after adulthood, neuroplasticity is still going on...though at a much slower pace. So genetic traits don't exist separately from social adaptations, and the past 10,000 years of "civilization" has no doubt altered us at least slightly, though it is very difficult to prove evolution over short timeframes. You may have noticed that there are articles popping up on a regular basis arguing back and forth whether recent changes in technology have changed the course of human evolution. No doubt they will in the long run, but the other point that needs to be stressed is that evolution does not make complete or nice and neat changes to an animal's physical development. So, giant pandas...who were once omnivores and ate large quantities of meat, shifted to a vegetarian diet for unknown reasons, and have made some adaptations to breaking open and eating bamboo chutes. BUT, their digestive tracts are still too short for a vegetarian, and they become clogged with bamboo fiber if they live to old age and die from malnutrition. Humans follow the exact opposite trend: coming from a vegetarian lineage, with a long digestive tract and teeth that though small compared to other vegetarians...are designed for eating plants...not meat. But, our high protein demands pushed our ancestors towards hunting, consuming insects, and making fire at a very early stage in human development. And, just like the Pandas, we are not perfectly adaptive to either a vegetarian nor an omnivore diet....but that won't stop anyone from arguing endlessly on the point! So, on this recent topic, when I ask for evidence that basic human behaviour drives us (or at least males) to be violent and homocidal if we can get away with it, I want to see more evidence for the claimed widescale violence in hunter-gatherers that cannot be explained by environmental factors alone, such as fights between two individuals that may have went out of control of the group, or violence that connects with times of high stress: major environmental shifts causing food shortages or encroachment by outsiders....which is happening to the few last hunter-gatherer bands that have resisted joining "civilization" in our time. The evidence suggests that healthy human societies develop many violence reduction and aversion strategies to limit violence. And the few who have no capacity for empathy and can commit evil without conscience, are the kinds of people who have been marginalized by all societies traditionally. This may be changing in our time, since modern industrial capitalist society seems to provide many opportunities for psychopaths to express themselves and not face repercussions. For example, a lot of circumstantial evidence gathered from many long-running conflicts would indicate that the psychopath is the most suitably adapted to life in a war zone, or to become the career soldier going from one battlefield to another. In past wars, returning veterans with PTSD have had impacts on the societies they return to, but returning psychopaths who may be lauded as war heroes for committing unspeakable crimes with no consequences in a war theater, are a threat to the general public, if and when they decide to bring the war home with them! There have been a number of articles written in recent years questioning the business culture of short term profit, and much less willingness to prosecute financial malfeasance at the top of the pyramid. How many psychopaths are Wall Street traders or hedge fund investors these days? That's what I'd like to know! The next stage in human evolution will be to gradually turn more and more people into psychopaths as they chase the brass ring and try to become billionaires themselves.

A lot more people on the left than the right, have figured out the game the big money plays with their accepted range of liberal and conservative opinion. Nobody on the left....not even real liberals, consider NBC..let alone MSNBC to be on their side! Any liberal with a brain knows that NBC has been in the business of spreading propaganda for military contractors, the banks and other major corporations. All three Sunday morning "news" roundup shows are stages for advocates of more wars and more war spending and more domestic security spending etc.! Hardly anybody watches whatever stupid thing John McCain or the various retired generals who are on-the-take have to say, but they stay on the air no matter how bad they are, or how few people bother to watch them. To think that David Gregory was getting paid 7 million per year just to host Meet The Press is mind-blowing!

Like they say: a picture is worth a thousand words. And let's not forget that the authorities set up "free speech zones" blocks away from any important event like political conventions and especially when the BORG gathers in any particular city in the world. I don't think a lot of people in Toronto will forget what happened when they were the lucky winners for hosting that G-8/G-20 Summit a few years back! Stepping outside the "free speech zone" and walking down the wrong street left a lot of people thrown in jail for the night with no charge, just for trying to go about their daily lives on a weekend when the Important people of the world were gathered. That should be the lesson for any idiot who's willing to do what Ben Franklin warned against so long ago: trade away rights and freedoms for a promise of safety and security!

They are dopplegangers and in reality - feed off each other. The worst nightmare for any totalitarian empire builder, is to lose an enemy! Then, the people that feed the beast might look up and notice just how much of their hard work and sacrifices go to feeding the beast! What I find most alarming about the new generation of despots and their loyal followers, is the complete lack of effort to learn about or try to understand the thinking of their 'enemies.' Back in the days of the Cold War, that went on all through my early life...the U.S. made a number of mistakes (Vietnam quagmire); but they didn't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again like they are doing now! With one hand, the Neoconservatives are feeding the beast (Saudi Arabia&allied Gulf sheikdoms) and with the other hand, spending billions making weapons and raising armies and proxy armies to fight the spawn of that same beast, and yet there is not one stupid conservative with access to a microphone who points out the idiocy. The last one who tried to get access to ask simple questions about policies designed by the Military-Industrial Complex was Ron Paul, and he and his followers have been shut out by mainstream conservative media like Faux News! An even worse example of ignorance that will destroy us all, is the disaster unfolding in the Ukraine, as the Obama Administration is deliberately risking a direct war with Russia....something that no previous U.S. administration considered throughout the Cold War. We are closer to nuclear annihilation than we have ever been, and there is no sign that there are any guaranteed high level communications between the U.S. and Russia today, and no interest in the threat of nuclear extinction in any mainstream media...either conservative or liberal! It's a subject that is never discussed anymore, unlike back in the 60's and 70's, when nuclear disarmament was a general topic that even the most extreme warhawk Republicans couldn't ignore. But, that's another disaster, I'll have to start a thread on this Ukraine debacle, because so much oxygen seems to be wasted here on inconsequential foreign policy issues, while the biggest one never comes up for discussion.

But Fox is standing by O'reilly, while NBC put Brian Williams on hiatus...and rumours are he's damaged them so badly that he will never be back on NBC News again. Quite a difference in how they've handled the situation. But, that's largely because Fox knows their audience....and they know they don't give a damn about the truth, since 75 year old conservatives don't care either, and will still support him anyway.