Here is a list of the 100 best American films according to the AFI. Less than 5% of them are available to stream over Netflix, but over 95% are available through Netflix DVD. If you limit yourself to Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming, you are watching the results of the best ROI for production investment for their shareholders, not the best art. I'd rather get a great story than a cost effective one, even if it means I have to put in two minutes of physical effort every 90 minutes.

You are confused between two products: "Netflix" which is their streaming service with about 6,000 titles, and "Netflix DVD" which has over 100,000 titles.

Consider understanding what someone has stated before you dive into personal attacks. It makes you look ignorant and petty.

Netflix DVD is the original version of the Netflix product. You get so many DVD/Blu-ray discs at a time, and drop them in the mail after you watch them. No lag/jitter problems and better audio/video quality across the board. It's not an option for people with phones and tablets only, but a much better experience if you have a TV with an HDMI input.

Every month I spend an hour or two looking for movie recommendations, and 10-15 minutes filling my queue. I rarely lose time scrolling through the endless, mostly bland choices on six different streaming services. I have seen more fantastic movies and television in the last six months than I have in the last five years of slogging through broken interfaces.

You've been a corporate apologist for years. Your tongue must be raw from all the boot licking. When are you going to stand up and demand some accountability?

ATF uses fake drugs, big bucks to snare suspects

You know what the US government won't do for that same individual? Ensure they have a decent education, a basic level of care for their mental and physical health, a safe neighborhood, and a real shot at becoming a contributing member of society even though that would cost less than convicting them of thoughtcrime and throwing them in prison for fifteen years. Instead we pay for some kitted out machine gun-toting pigs to play cowboy rather than policing the streets like officers. Not incidentally, they're too chickenshit to get out of their cars in a lot of those neighborhoods. Yet they still collect their paycheck and their pension, live way out in the suburbs to avoid the desperation they help create with their cowardice, and pat themselves on the back for being heroes.

Now imagine you're an immigrant, or an Iraqi, Yemeni, Afghani, or Syrian. You're worth even less than a citizen. You're trash. You're not even a speedbump on the way to some policy goal rooted in geopolitical theories that have been dead to the rest of the world since the 80s. The kind of policy that sends a million troops and five trillion dollars to a sanctioned, isolated nation, and ends up destabilizing the entire region, massively aiding Iran, and stoking tensions between Shia and Sunni, all while avoiding a single hint of punishment for Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where all of the funding and most of the terrorists for 9/11 came from. Oh, and as a plus: where al Qaeda was unheard of before, they now have another weak state to operate from. Brilliant.

That's why the rest of the world despises the American government. It's not our freedom. It's our complete lack of principle, abject hypocrisy, and massive state violence that they hate. And with our apathetic political landscape, they're beginning to tire of Americans individually for being lazy, ignorant, wasteful, and greedy. We just sit here and take it; a nation of lolling toddlers waiting on the next innovation in fast food and reruns of Pawn Stars while our wealth is squandered in military adventurism that has killed millions of innocent people in only five decades.

PRISM is just icing on the rotting carcass that once was America, and our allies are starting to look towards the exit. Our government has taken another step on the road to fascism and failed statehood: it has declared unlimited surveillance and assassination rights over every human being on the planet; it has declared war on the truth, and it has promised (and delivered) punishment for anyone who dares to speak it. Despite that, the same throwaway phrase about America not being the worst country in the world is still technically true, if you're not allowed to consider how it treats non-citizens. But if the best thing about your country is that it isn't Somalia, do you think there are a few things you could work on?

Anyway. There's my two minutes of well-earned hate for the state of democracy in America. Enjoy the decline.

Well, if you want to get into raw numbers, the United States is responsible for at least a few million deaths worldwide since the end of WWII. If you count our proxy wars and the wars we helped arrange, such as the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet-Afghan conflict, various central American death squads, etc, then it is upwards of 20-30 million dead in the last sixty years or so.

(Here's a weak source, but discussing our empire isn't exactly acceptable conversation in regular media outlets. The basic facts are undeniable, even if you'd like to discount our role in arranging, funding, and supplying arms for war that are in our own interest.)

We're not above watching people die of starvation either:

As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council. ...
The sanctions were imposed by the Security Council after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Led by the United States, the Council has rejected many Iraqi appeals to lift the restrictions, which have crippled the economy, until Iraq accounts for all its weapons of mass destruction and United Nations inspectors can certify that they have been destroyed in accordance with several Council resolutions.

I think we all remember how many WMDs were found after we spilled the blood of our own and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, along with emptying our treasury of five trillion dollars.

In any case, what is undeniable is that the United States of today and the Stalinist era of the USSR both share one common feature: the respective governments of both nations are hiding their decisions to have people killed and imprisoned from a transparent judicial process. Our government has now openly declared that the political elite are above the law.

But instead of talking about those hard realities, you have backpedaled to the position that we are not as bad as Stalin.

Well, that's a load off my mind! I hope Obama spends the 4th helping military doctors force feed hunger striking prisoners at Guantanamo while they celebrate spending the rest of their lives without the right to a trial. I even have an idea of what we can write on the cake:

"NOT AS BAD AS STALIN!"
"USA! USA! USA!"

Tell me about the 'secret laws'

You don't fucking get it, do you? How can he tell you about a secret law? The ACLU and other organizations continue to ask the government that very same question, but the government refuses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of the Nation's Capital, and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed a motion today with the secret court that oversees government surveillance in national security cases, requesting that it publish its opinions on the meaning, scope, and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That section, which authorizes the government to obtain "any tangible thing" relevant to foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigations, was the legal basis for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order revealed last week by The Guardian requiring Verizon to turn over months' worth of phone-call data.

"The ultimate check on governmental overreach is the American public," said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "For years, the government has secretly relied on sweeping interpretations of its surveillance powers, preventing the very debate it has now belatedly invited on the wisdom and legality of those powers."

In addition to the initial rulings by the court on Section 215, the motion filed today also asks whether earlier opinions have been revisited in light of more recent rulings by other courts, such as the Supreme Court's 2012 decision in the GPS tracking case U.S. v. Jones. Another answer sought by the motion is whether the FISA Court has considered the constitutionality of the "gag order" that bars companies from revealing that they have been ordered to turn over information under Section 215. (In 2008, a federal appeals court agreed with the ACLU that an analogous gag order provision relating to "national security letters" was unconstitutional.)

"In a democracy, there should be no room for secret law," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. "The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government's surveillance authority, and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy."

Also, don't wonder why the world tells you to go fuck yourself when you ask for Snowden. If you weren't murdering teenagers with completely illegal and immoral drone strike programs after killing a few hundred thousand civilians in multiple wars of aggression, maybe everyone wouldn't burst out in laughter every time you uttered the phrase "rule of law."

Easy, buddy. Back in the day it was an old joke:

Fanboi: Name one thing that your PC can do that my Mac can't!!
Operator: Right-click.

Today's analog is:

Fanboi: Name one thing that your Android can do that my iPhone can't!!
Operator: Run applications without Apple's permission.

There is a significant difference between the two. For example, one is involved here and the other is not. The article (and the underlying letter) clearly explain that it is the Department of State that has taken these actions. The summary and headline must be changed.

It's a net win - just like factory automation reducing the number of factory workers is a net win. Also, Walmart really pisses off hipsters, so it's twice as good

Yeah, I fucking replaced ten people with one robot, and I was the last manufacturing business in town. It's a win-win! Well, if you count me twice. Which I do.

Higher taxes for everyone else comes from voting for bigger government, not from Walmarts.

Oh, Fuck. Off. When Walmart drives out all of the Mom and Pops where any slacker in the 90s could earn 9-12 dollars an hour can't make 7.50 an hour plus benefits because instead of the store being a little lax on inventory, or God Forbid you had to wait an entire week to get that thing you saw in the catalog, we decided to get everything fast and now and made like shit by child laborers in southeast asia. And we got to buy the Waltons a goddamn hawaiian island so they can drink themselves to death in front of a nice view.

Gee, for me, there's a downside in that scenario. But as long as we get more efficient, everything's good for everyone equally, right?

You have to make a lifestyle change. If you eat shit, and you sit there like a pile of shit, you will look like a pile of shit, and you will feel like a pile of shit.

We are mammals, and we aren't supposed to sit inside all day. We need to move around and get some sun, or our biological systems are going to continue to store fat like it's winter. Without Vitamin D and exposure to fresh air instead of the toxic inside environments we work in, including low levels of oxygen due to poor ventilation, we have trouble getting all of our biological systems to run like they are supposed to.

I am in a constant battle with my weight, which I am usually on the losing side of. When I cut out all sugar, including sugar in coffee, and I focus on eating vegetables and non-meat sources of protein, I feel like absolute hell for three days and then I feel amazing until I start eating crap again. This time around I'm going kind of nuts with pressed kale/apple/carrot juices and very little meat. The change is astounding. Within a week all of the weird aches and pains I had, including some of my back pain, began to disappear. (I am down to a BMI of 30 from 36, and still trending down).

I really think the Western diet starves us of basic building blocks for repairing and maintaining our bodies, and as we discover more about our symbiotic relationship with bacteria, I bet they will find out that the ingestion of products (sugar, processed flour, etc) that easily turn into glucose make our symbiotic bacteria go apeshit and stop serving their purpose. It's like stuffing petri dishes into your body and hosting a microbiological world war.

The funny thing is that once I rid my tongue of the expectation of a wall of salt and fat and sugar, healthy foods that seemed bland are suddenly rich with flavors and it's no problem snacking on carrots and raw broccoli with hummus or whatever and staying away from sugar drinks which are now overly sweet. I can get an Americano with a touch of milk and it tastes like chocolate if the beans are good. Roasted whole vegetables (which I am trying to learn how to cook myself) are as satisfying as any fast food meal, but I don't feel like shit an hour later.

Probably the best side affect is that my body now tells me when it's full. Two years ago I could eat an entire pizza without really thinking about it. Now I can have a bowl full of vegetables and feel more satisfied. (Not sure what the science behind that is, exactly, but it works.)

Mass produced foods are designed to addict, and kicking that addiction is just as important as kicking a smoking habit, if not more. Once I hit my target BMI, if I can stay on track, I will introduce a small amount of meat back into my diet, but I'm fairly convinced that processed sugar and processed wheat are literally poison for our mammalian biological systems. Now that it's out of mine, I don't have to think about going outside. Getting up and moving around is no longer a chore. It's actually becoming a joy that I haven't felt since I was a kid and spent every possible moment outside.

Anyway, tl:dr; Pollan seems to be right. Eat lots of veggies, a little bit of dairy, and a tinier bit of meat. Drink water. Go outside. Do not drink sodas or eat fast food, ever. If you put garbage in your body, your body will turn into garbage.

Do you understand the difference between an anecdote and a falsifiable assertion?

Colonel Korn is a hopeless fucking idiot and doesn't understand the difference between falsifiable assertions and anecdotes. It is safe to ignore him on every subject ever.

He's probably a libertarian blowhard who's worldview is so damaged that he thinks plastic bags -- cheap, frivolous, lazy, horrible for the environment -- are somehow representative of an American way of life. Well, stopped clocks are right twice a day too, I guess.

That's why I love my fellow citizens. They're more offended by talking about death and destruction than they are about paying for it.