Roger - Why are you still using a dead blog on Salon for you signature at NYTimes? I guess you know by now that the body wasn't thrown out of a helicopter, but I guess I followed the news feeds pretty closely, and I heard no one say the body was thrown out of a helicopter. Care to link your source?

"abandoned steel mills littered the landscape, killed in part by unions" What were the other parts? The Soviet Union went, in 40 YEARS, from a revolution of serfs to a man in space. Pretty creative, I'd say. Not that I admire the system, but that dislike doesn't blind me.

Your source? I got mine from yesterday's Paul Krugman. Sent from my iPad 2 3G 64GB or my MacBook Air :)

Billions spent on election campaigns argue that nearly all politicians are investments. No need to narrow things down so much. Sent from my iPad 2 3G 64GB or my MacBook Air :)

Sweden? The USA? China? Sent from my iPad 2 3G 64GB or my MacBook Air :)

I guess the real matter for discussion here is the place of governance in so-called private life, which has a wide band of grey, and not much black and white. How you think this particular administration is so much worse than the previous, with its voluntary wars, and giveaways to busines, escapes me. Perhaps you could give some concrete examples of the difference. Ormond

Certainly humanity has had no shortage of theories to supplement whatever the current state of physics was at the time. By the same token though, later minds, with better physics, very often didn't believe in gods at all. Perhaps as we know more about physics (Using physics as a general term for knowledge) we find less need for daimons. Thanks the reply, and the tone. Ormond

"Last word to you." Don't tease...

"steady erosion of the fiscal stability of the nation. Like the housing bubble, when this bursts it will be in a big way - unless we get a firm hold on things. Both parties GOP & Dem bear a responsibility for the trouble we are in." Responsibility in our original system of governance rests with the voters, who must educate themselves. Now we corporate contributions to campaigns warping the process through what is essentially bribery. Citizens United from SCOTUS legalized corporate bribery. Money is not speech. Ideas are speech. We always have had a problem with demagogues. Now we have professional demagoguery.

The best investment for a corporation is a congressman. If you agree with that, you've been bought. Try reading "Influence" by Cialdini.

"Socrates took the hemlock in defense of his one God" That wasn't a cherry you wanted to pick... [Apart from his views on politics, Socrates held unusual views on religion. He made several references to his personal spirit, or daimonion, although he explicitly claimed that it never urged him on, but only warned him against various prospective events. Many of his contemporaries were suspicious of Socrates's daimonion as a rejection of the state religion. It is generally understood that Socrates's daimonion is akin to intuition. Moreover, Socrates claimed that the concept of goodness, instead of being determined by what the gods wanted, actually precedes the entire business of deities.... ... Apparently in accordance with his philosophy of obedience to law, he carried out his own execution, by drinking the hemlock poison provided to him._ Wikipedia Trial of Socrates

The key part you missed is the cognitive science part about compartmentalization in the mind. Proven. People can literally be of two (or more) minds, and the interesting thing is that data in one compartment aren't necessarily available to other compartments. We're not talking about unified minds any more...

Just a guess :-)

" With a declining number of children being born there is no way the people contributing now will ever see social security in it's present form when they retire." Perhaps some of the people getting rich by extracting profits from phony financial deals could be tapped for those social benefits. I disagree, you see, with your assumption that there is no upper limit to what some should extract from society without paying into it.

I note you don't actually say what she said. Perhaps because it was too clear to see, but not to see through. In this kind of singing to the choir, the purpose of the blog is to have a group emotional orgasm. I'm just here to watch, really.

Well Vet666, you've got hundreds of millions of people to draw from, so if you were honest, you'd look at actual results from studies of all those people. The USA doesn't look so good then... (of course, such negative examples could be endlessly related from USA hospitals, but that wouldn't be the cherries you want to pick) My source? http://www.pnhp.org Yes, I know they advocate single payer, but they back up their claims with verifiable statistics, not anecdotes. As far as corruption in government goes, the solution is to repeal corporate personhood, and remove the mass media from profiteering on elections.

I've read We, the Living, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and many articles about Rand, long before computers and Wikipedia. Ms Rand and her acolytes built a large logical structure on a variety of axioms about human nature that have turned out not to have the interactions presumed. Although she was intelligent, she was severely challenged in the empathy department, and seemed to substitute rationality for human warmth. Just reviewing the romantic relations of her main characters shows you that.

In that vein, what does religion have to do with anything, if you define it as free from thinking. I acknowledge that you can compartmentalize your brain, and think a lot about physics, and still "believe" weirdnesses. Belief is by definition arational.

Well, if I must have an opinion, it's that Gods are an authoritizing mechanism for possibly useful social cohesion mandates. I can't prove there's no Gods, although I'd want a definition from you what you mean by Gods... I also can't prove, by your standard, the existence of gravity or phonons. But I'm getting old, and NO one has ever presented ONE piece of evidence for Gods, so I'll be brave and venture there are no Gods, and therefore I can kill anyone who disputes it, mirroring the behavior of the God positors. Yes, I've been through this dumb argument a million times. If you want to justify holding dangerous beliefs despite no evidence, feel free. But don't mess with MY freedoms to fuck because you do. Religion is personal. Society is real.

OBL won. The US citizen has cheerfully traded his freedom and privacy for cheap nationalism. We believe and paint our intervention in these religious lands today as benign and liberal, but that is what we want to believe. What the locals believe is, as Templer knew, what matters at the sharp point. Like Templer's ilk found out in the Pashtuns' lands, they will accomodate you up to a point, when you pay them. But they have their own deeply held beliefs and ideas. This great and terrible human trait." Nice thinking, and nice expression. Humans need their religion, at least until they grow up and learn to think.

Or maybe meant iconic...

I have no idea what your referent was. You seem as sloppy in speech as you are in thought. Why don't you sober up and speak clearly.

Your potty mouth escapes your notice, I gather.

Your assumptions are numerous, egregious and wrong. I've worked steadily my whole life, even now at seventy, and I have my small house, car, and food. My medical care is paid for by the taxes I've paid, my roads by the taxes I've paid. You're so quick to assume the worst, I wonder how you can walk without jumping across cracks in the sidewalk, for fear they'll turn into chasms.

Just amazing how blind you are, in this case to the reality that we're the only first world nation without such a system. Millions of doctors are glad to be paid well, but not obscenely well, by systems that are not grossly skewed toward care for the rich, and suffering for the poor. Your racist comments are par for the bigotry courses you're running here.