You make some persuasive points, but I'm not totally convinced just yet.

I wonder at all the opulence in the ancient world (the Colossus, the great pyramid, the continual philandering of places like Pompeii, Sodom, etc) that people didn't have to work so much for food in some places.

Also most of the ancient empires seemed to fall when they were taken over militarily by other civilizations. Assyria, Mongolia, Medo-Persia, the Huns, the Goths, the Vikings, Rome, etc. I'm guessing the conquerors weren't bean poles.

I think you are a liberal pretending to be a racist conservative.

Whoa, whoa. Listening to your claims might outright kill me, so I am just going to disregard them and live in my basement.

Huh?

Having worked 7 years in the public sector and 4 years in the private, I can tell you this is entirely false all day long.

Why do you think private mail companies perform better while operating in the black while USPS peforms far worse and operates waay far in the red?

If you save a lot of lives you should make boat loads of money.

What? After getting approval for widespread use, most drugs only last 1 year before the generic brand shows up.

Would you invest millions of dollars to make a 20% profit for a year?

If profit is so ineffecient, why haven't any Soviet bloc countries or China allies produced any wonder drugs?

And, incidentally, are you working for free?

... and people with prostate cancer in the UK are twice as likely to do from it compared to the same group in the US.

And why you can't get medication for blindness in the UK until you are blind in one eye.

Then why do all the big name drugs originate in the countries where people are allowed to keep what they earn?

So you are saying the rich get richer 60x or so faster than everyone else.

Are you acknowledging that expanding government means broadening the tax base?

I just don't want pre-masticated opinions mixed in with reporting.

I agree on the investigative journalism part, though.

You'd think someone would get around to finding out what happened in Benghazi.

I don't see any relationship between function and value.

I like it when women have long hair and paint their nails. What do these features accomplish? What purpose do they solve? They don't. But I still like them.

I like listening to Moby, the Moody Blues, Modest Mouse, etc. What purpose does this music serve to me? It doesn't serve a purpose. But I like it.

See Kierkegaard, Nietchze, Unamo, etc.

If technology gets to the point where babies no longer need human wombs, that will in no way reduce the value I place on the women I know.

There are a ton of men and a ton of women who value themselves based on their masculinity or femininity, when neither role gives them an individual identity or any kind of meaning.

"the beanpoles require less food per person per winter"

I highly doubt civilizations have ever risen and fallen based on the amount of food they consume.

If it's happened, it's probably because the setting was at an extreme tipping point and, like a butterfly's wings "causing" weather pattern changes on the other side of the planet a civilization is "caused" to fall ... but with more obvious causes at hand (fronts, el nino, etc).

I majorly increased my metabolism in the last year and it hasn't made a noticeable difference in my food budget. If anything it's dropped (again due to a more salient factor: in this case shopping at Walmart).

I think we have a philosophical difference about the value of affectation, high brow approval from experts.

To me these are usually indications of smoke surrounding low quality.

Anecdotally, being the most profitable company in the world suggests to me they are doing something right.

That being said ... shovelware has been known to doom entire industries (e.g. ET on the Atari, which Nintendo corrected by actively certifying 3rd party titles).

The political differences between going after Obama and Brennan are thin.

Obama can fire or reprimand Brennan at any point (still waiting on that one), and for any body of the US Congress to go after Brennan is going to be interpreted by the White House as an attack on the white house.

So ... I see some validity to your point, but politically it's negligible unless somehow the DNC can convince voters that Obama is the victim of his subordinates who he hasn't publicly disagreed with, rebuked, or pushed out the door.

If the richest 20% had all their annual incomes confiscated (100% tax rate at all levels) it would fund the government by itself for a year and a half.

In other words, the rich are not the potential piggy banks Hollywood makes them out to be.

If you want to fund just our existing government programs (not counting the welfare pipe dreams, etc) the non-rich are going to have to pay dearly.