1. The Weathermen were serious about revolution and genocide. Ayers has passed up several opportunities to express regret over that. Both left and right have enough intellectual firepower without having to dip into the violent fever swamps. 2. Communism universally runs fine until the money runs out. There are a total of two paths that are taken at that crisis point. Either the experiment is declared a failure and the community disbands / goes to something else or communism is maintained at the point of a gun with increasing economic deprivation until the gun wavers and the system is abandoned. What makes fascism/national socialism so odious is the same impulse to pick up the gun when the economics goes wrong. There is your commonality, that and the strange fact that both movements tend to recruit from similar pools. 3. A much more devastating critique of Wall Street is that it is insufficiently capitalist, propping up economic losers and ripping off outsiders. Opposites come in more than one package. 4. The social sciences, if you have not noticed, have been dramatically affected for the worse by communism. In fact, a lot of OWS disenfranchised have been made so by communist and fellow traveler professors of one camp or another. It's all double plus ungood. 5. So far the Tea Party's done fairly well for itself. They've had a few clunkers on the federal level (3 Senate candidates come to mind) but they gave the GOP its strongest state house position since before WW II right in time for redistricting and ushered in an impressively large freshman class in the House. Rand Paul's performance in the Senate is also a mark in their favor. Something *is* seriously wrong with our economic policies. We've never cleaned out the corporatism and reversed the communist "march through the institutions" that's been going on for decades. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to reverse it. You have to identify all of the inappropriate legislation, rules, and regulations and then get rid of it. In pseudocode form it would be For each taxing authority identify all their laws, rules, and regulations packetize them into logical, small chunks evaluate each packet for its corporatist effect repeal all corporatist packets.

If somebody comes in to a tea party rally with a brown or black shirt and a nazi arm band, they get driven out, booed and utterly rejected. This is as it should be. The Tea Party has fairly well developed instincts to keep these people out. OWS does not. When you accept as teachers people who personally have blood on their hands like Ayers in Chicago and the various communist groups that work at penetrating and organizing various OWS, you are going to lose respect along the center and right. Unfortunately, it's not so much a problem on the left but it should be. The communists are inherently anti-democratic and have made an art form out of penetrating and turning inchoate organizations and taking them over. OWS is vulnerable to this because the kids making up its most visible segment are historically illiterate.

Since Ive seen several real world examples of this phenomenon, I think that your message is the propaganda one. Just because there is an oligarchy (and there is) does not mean that there is not also a genuine fight between big and small government solutions to problems. The world is more complicated than that.

Organizations that are split in this fashion almost universally tilt towards big government/socialism over time. I see no reason why this trend is not going to continue.

The difference is that war communism and the following NEP period quickly exposed the disaster of communist economic pretensions. The closer you got to "book communism" the worse the economy performed. Capitalism has proven over the long haul much the opposite. In large measure the closer you got to "book capitalism" the better off things got. Currently we are straying far from capitalist orthodoxy in the US and our results have been less than stellar.

Just because someone is a priest or a nun or even has a wooden ruler or a thimble does not make them infallible. "The Church" is the most frequent self-label, with "Catholic Church" and "Roman Catholic Church" being second and relatively distant third most common self-labels. The difficulty of labels includes the fact that beyond the Universal Church, there is a sub-category also called the Roman Catholic Church which consists that part of The Church that adheres to the Roman Rite. There are better than 20 other Rites, of equal dignity within The Church, besides the Roman. None of them are false. All are recognized by the Pope who heads both the Universal Church sometimes called Roman Catholic and the Roman Catholic Church within it. And if your priests and your nuns disagreed, you had the most unfortunate experience of being taught Catholicism by schismatics. These distinctions are subtle but important. Even for atheists, if you are interested in geopolitics, the subtle dynamics of the Great Schism still echo over the geopolitical stage. Putin, for example, is not only a political player, but also a religious one. His role in the recent unification of Russian Orthodoxy's red and white factions is instructive.

You've got the Pope wrong and that part's going to seriously annoy a lot of Catholics (including me) but I'm much more interested in exploring what is the Church of Capitalism? What are its doctrines and who are its competitors? I find the comparison to royalty much more apt to Bernanke's corporatist role. Economic royalism indeed. I'm less impressed with Bernanke as Ideologue in Chief. I don't think that Bernanke's really pushing doctrine development in any particular way, just rehashing a lot of old policy choices and pushing them to their limits.

Actually, this is quite relevant. The orange triangles are mandated to prevent night accidents as there are no hour limits on when a horse drawn carriage can go out and the amish do drive at night. Google amish road accident to get a feel for the carnage. The principle that if your religion is getting non-believers hurt or killed, your religion is just going to have to accommodate some rule changes is a pretty deep unwritten ruleset in the US. Muslims are not alone in being inconvenienced and it is important for them to understand that. Populations with a feeling of isolation and alienation are where America's enemies recruit.

If you are so big that we can't let you fail, that means that we don't have the insurance funds necessary to handle your potential failure. That is practically the definition of TBTF. An institution that is insufficiently insured should be an immediate death sentence for any government contract, financial deposit, or anything else. Such entities should be declared too risky for the government to deal with. The rich fear hungry upstarts entering into the markets they are profiting from and arbitraging away all excess profits. So they set up regulations (for the children, of course) that keep the upstarts out. Those regulations need to be ruthlessly deleted from our legal codes, from the town all the way up to the federal government. Technology in the 21st century is poised to empower the little guy as never before and turn out a crop of garish nouveau riche knocking on the entrances of polite society in numbers not seen for over a century. The salvation of the country, frankly, lies in the US reforming its rules to enlarge and encourage the formation of these new upstarts.

The fundamental problem of communism is that it's method to calculate a price simply does not work. Ultimately, that makes it unsalvageable. Capitalism can calculate a price. In fact, it does it better than any competing systems available. That is a feature that is worth retaining, worth fighting for because prices are what make decentralized, widespread decision making even possible. Wealth stratification is something that occurs when the rich are protected from the effects of their foolishness while the poor are not. This is not a fundamental feature of capitalism. It is fixable by removing the legal protections against failure and exposing the rich to the full force of competition. TBTF is a consequence of underinsurance. If you have a sufficiently large insurance fund, any size enterprise is not TBTF. At a certain point, the insurance premiums exceed the profitability of just about any enterprise so you shed units to simplify the risks. Congratulations, a solution for TBTF. Btw, the FDIC has supposed risk based premiums. Do you know what the published extra risk premium is for highly complex financial institutions? It is currently assessed at 0%. Right there, that is the TBTF problem and you can fully lay it at the feet of government. You're going to have to explain why derivatives per se are a problem instead of any of a number of derivative market weaknesses causing actual problems for actual people. Your complaint sounds like somebody railing on about fractional reserve banking.

National Socialism failed prior to the first tank rolling into Poland. The covering up of that failure by looting conquered lands is one of the less appreciated important narratives of WW II.

You're glossing over a couple of very pertinent facts. The brittle version of Islam that really cannot adjust to the modern world has already been falsified by the archeologists. The discoveries in Yemen of alternate Koranic texts (trivially alternate) can be accommodated by the more flexible brands of Islam who are least likely to join in the modern jihadi movement but the Al Queda types are doomed by their own theological rigidity. All that awaits is for the archeologists to grow as much of a pair as the cartoonists and be willing to be on the run for the rest of their lives. Alternately, a non-islamic government could publish and promote the information as a psychological operation. The mass conversions out of Islam of the baseline muslim population that is not Al Queda yet but is a prime recruiting ground for them is going to hold the record of biggest systempunkt disruption for quite a long time, I predict.

Mohammed Iqbal - Do you have any actual evidence for your statement? Unlike Dr. King, you bear the moral burden of taking into account all the Soviet archive information that came out after the end of the Cold War. Parroting the Soviet line at this late date is no longer excusable as ignorance. Unless you come up with something novel, I'm afraid you're advocating a morally dubious position for any monotheist (or decent human being really). I await your new evidence with interest.

I cannot support Dr. King's idea that the US bore the greatest responsibility for ending the war in Vietnam. I also cannot support the idea that at the time the speech was written, the US was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". His blindness to the threat of communism, its atheism, its dehumanizing aspects is an indictment of the seriousness of his christian ministry. From the future we have the advantage of knowing of the boat people, the killing fields, and the painful legacy of communism in SE Asia. So it is not entirely fair to beat Dr. King over the head with things he might not have been aware of. But before one pronounces on a conflict it really is unacceptable to have rose colored glasses on only for your country's enemies. The reality of the communism-in-reality as opposed to the books of the theorists had long ago been available to anyone who wanted to see it. Dr. King obviously did not take advantage of that testimony. Dr. King seems to also have little understanding of the capitalist "soft kill" process and how the connectivity capitalists create also creates the baseline conditions for the progressive end to oppression. Dr. King says "an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring" but where is the individual responsibility of the beggar in a land where it was and still is possible to start from zero and build up a decent life? Is this christian minister so focused on institutional faults that he cannot see the edifice of spiritual poverty that is at the heart of so much of american poverty? Dr. King verges on the delusional when he says "communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated." The reality that communism was a failed economic system that produced misery and poverty was already well established by the time of this speech. Its social promise was a shameful lie that was explicitly anti-christian (anti-muslim too for that matter). I view this speech the same way that I view Thomas Paine's later works. Historically we take both figures and cherry pick their best out and hold it up as worthy of study but their later work is an embarrassment, unworthy of their potential. But you like this speech. I cannot see why you would buy in to so many discredited concepts.

No idea of the religious implications but from a purely chemical standpoint, there are fairly conventional solutions for arsenic removal. Put the correct filter on the water output and the problem is solved.

So, let's see, the KKK decries, the Democrat party, the Republican party, the Tea Party, the Westboro Baptists, and the Rev. Jones Koran burning types. So all of these groups are in "you might be a redneck" territory? If some and not others, what is the differentiator that makes condemnation by the KKK into a badge of honor instead?

$150 oil *in combination with* other measures that keep alternative sources of fuel off the market like FT plants will set up the cycle you predict. But FT plants can be profitable at a lot lower than $150/bbl oil equivalent and they *are* being built.

svend - A christian does not make any sort of separation between God's power and Jesus' power. They are the same as both are God, one and indivisible. The distinction of persons that most christians use is an accommodation for human language in an attempt to describe a complex phenomenon, one that we humans have always had difficulty doing, using words to describe God (Allah). I wish you all a blessed Easter season.

It always astonishes me the superficial level of analysis on the left about how the big bad capitalists tilt the system to nefariously aid their interests. Of course they do, but how? Dig deep into the details and you will find, time after time, the use of big government to pass rules and regulations that hinder their upstart competitors (direct and indirect) and leave themselves largely free to continue making disproportionate profits. The solution seems obvious, to enumerate all the regulations, sift through them, get rid of the ones who give the rich an unfair advantage, and maintain the structure as a regular counter to the inevitable attempts the well off will sponsor to put in a new crop in future. But looking at the mechanics of getting rid of the unfair privileges of the upper classes and you find yourself looking at a process that is a lot more like a tea party Republican's platform than a progressive Democrat's. So put your shoulder to the grindstone and enumerate all the governments, enumerate all their laws, rules, and regulations. Identify in each what is upholding unfair privilege for the rich and you'll find a large cadre of tea party people right there supporting the repeal. I don't believe for a minute that the left will actually do this because their anti-corporatism is a sham, a shakedown, an appeal for a check written to shut the leadership up. I would be pleasantly surprised to be wrong and more than happy to collaborate on freeing up our economy from welfare for the rich which is another thing that is choking this country.

You are right that some people will be inspired to take action or get more politically involved. It does not follow automatically that they will be on your side. We're obviously both partisans and thus unreliable to judge how the center emotionally twitched to this video clip when it was broadcast. The professionals at Fox thought this was a good idea. But what do they know? They've just got the biggest brand in American news broadcasting.

If you think that Fox couldn't have avoided the shouted protests with its live shots, you are not using your imagination very well. It's not a hard technical matter to just put up a camera in the capitol and put the reporter in a room with a blue screen. There's no law that Fox cameras have to have any identifying marks. A smarter question is why is Fox provoking the protest against them? They are constructing a narrative, successfully in my view, where the protestors marginalize themselves in the eyes of the middle-of-the-road people who will occasionally tune in to Fox but watch other channels as well. The left, especially the hard left, is so wrapped up in its own world that they don't see how they are hurting themselves. They are, and badly.

From your first link: In fact, Olmsted said he had "recently learned that many other violations . . . have been taking place at" facilities operated by Catholic Healthcare West, which owns St. Joseph's, including the provision of birth-control pills and other forms of contraception, sterilizations and abortions "due to the mental or physical health of the mother or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest." It's a bit much to think that a hospital can do sterilizations and continue to call itself Catholic. From that bit, it's clear that this is about an institution that liked the association with the Catholic Church far more than it liked the actual policies of the Catholic Church that it would have to follow to maintain that association. Its association was dishonest and the bishop was right to terminate. And let's be clear about what the penalty is. Priests won't come over and do liturgies in the chapel and they won't store consecrated hosts on site. Oh the injustice!

Structurally, people who do not waste their money on intoxicants and live modestly can get their own place to live in within a year. You are assuming that the problem is an uncaring society. The problem is that most people are convinced that the major problem is circumstance when usually the major problem is bad habits that can be only helped by caring and love. But government programs don't love, don't care. They are mechanistic and without heart and we've turned over our obligation to care for our fellow man to them. It's disgusting. Our consciences will never awaken to our own obligations to the poor so long as the convenient crutch of "the government's taking care of it" is available as an excuse. And our conscience does need to awaken. There is a desperate need for change there. The structural inequalities that I see are largely because the politicians have been superempowered to put their thumbs on the scales that determine winners and losers. The rich rent politicians to keep out those who are on the bottom from overturning their applecarts and so we have the establishment of stable over and under classes. An actual free market system does not do this because people don't have perfect track records of good decisions and when they blow it, they pay for it. The rent-a-politician system cushions the rich from the consequences of their bad decisions and shuts the door of economic progress for many poor people when they do what is right and make good decisions. The cure for this is not to empower the politicians even more but rather to clip their wings. Let the fat cats fall when they foul up. They do it very often. Social mobility will increase. Let charity come from those who see helping their fellow man as more than giving them a check but rather amending their bad habits that keep them from rising on their own. Anybody who wants a computer can get one. If you want a workstation capable of running a modern operating system, there are plenty of efforts to rehab computers and put ubuntu on them and give them away for free. If you want to create a local freenet, there's nothing stopping you. A business class line can be had for not much money and shared out among a few dozen families making it affordable even to the poor. Access to technology is large and growing larger. But you can have all the access there is and if you lack the supporting culture, kids are still going to be crippled in their employment prospects.

If you stay off drugs, live a disciplined life, and work, you can escape poverty fairly quickly in the US. When, time after time, investigation of somebody's hard luck story reveals some vice or other that sucks up all available money and then some, sympathy tends to evaporate. Is this disapproval of poor habits something you're criticizing?

From a religious standpoint, it would be helpful to explain where the destination of the soul of this suicide bomber is. If this man is condemned in the next life it would seem to me an obligation of muslims to teach that he's gone to hell, why he's gone to hell, and how others can avoid sharing his fate (if I've got the wrong labels, please substitute appropriately). I've heard hints about a muslim theology that places these bombers in hell but were that a genuinely widely and strongly held view I would expect to have heard a lot more about it to this point. Every Islamic figure should start with the plain statement that XYZ suicide bomber is in hell, why Islam says he is there, and explain the struggle to keep more muslims from being tricked into going to hell via explosives. There are very well known propaganda principles about how and how often you must repeat a message before it penetrates into a population. In the war between the two memes of suicide bomber going to paradise or hell, your position is losing. Why?