not worth the mod point.

I could either mod you down, or stay on to say you are a major asshole. You really advocate Iran getting nuclear weapons in hopes that a nuclear war gets started? Fuck you.

Why does everyone assume that the rebels are hostile to the US? I mean the FSA, and obviously not al Qaeda or MB franchises like al Nusra.

America has already decended into Cold War-style proxy wars - such as Syria, and also Georgia - and things are just getting worse. Just look at the state-owned media in Russia. The cheerleading for the Putin adminstration and the constant state of fear maintained with the US and NATO being the no. 1 baddies in the world is pervasive. The fall of the Soviet Union was perhaps the deepest humiliation Russia faced since the Mongol invasions, but Russia is not going to get it back by either conventional or nuclear warfare. In the former, they are nowhere near what they used to be, the latter MAD would certainly apply. If the West had backed the FSA two years ago (perhaps with a "no-fly zone" a la Libya), this would put Russia in a lose-lose situation, instead of the lose-lose situation that the US is now in. Putin could have either rolled over, thus being shown as weak, and lost assets, including weapons sales and a possible gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe, breaking the monopoly on gas. The financial repercussions probably cause rioting, since ordinary Russians see little, if any, of the benefits to all the money flowing in. Or Russia could intervene militarily, but this would most likely turn out to be a repeat of Afghanistan, which Russia certainly does not want.

The porn film industry in particular.

There is a big difference between the negative portrayals of Russia in Western media and the hysterical anti-Western portrayal in Russia, where the US and NATO are regularly depicted as the biggest threats to Mother Russia since Hitler's Germany. The Fox News story was, of course widely reported in the Russian media, and milked for all it was worth as a portrayal of Western - particularly American - media bias, but I'd be more inclined to believe it was journalistic incompetence than a need to falsify reports to get an angle - there were literally tens of thousands of them - unless the Russian authorities really had the region so tightly locked down that no journalist would have had access to Georgian refugees. Which brings up the point of Russian media bias- the cheerleading for the Russian invasion of Georgia put anything Fox News did for the US invasion of Iraq to shame. Instead of bringing WMD, the Russians inflated the number of civilian casualties when Georgia moved to retake South Ossetia by orders of magnitude.

You just hit the nail on the head. They have the USA (and by extension, NATO, and the EU) depicted as the fountain head of all the world's ills. Sort of like the constant fear of "terrorism" kept alive in the USA, only it is applied to literally everything.

Exactly. Most Russians probably have never even heard of RT.

It's been my experience that Russians do not trust Western media at all, and consider it to have a strong anti-Russian bias.

There are a number of reasons already mentioned in response, including the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. One more is that if you have proof of some wrongdoing by the government, the government can take action to ensure no one else sees said proof.

Care to provide a citation? Actually there is a very good economic reason why carnivore meat is not widely consumed: you will need to grow, say, 1,000 kg of grain to raise 100 kg of herbivore meat; for 100 kg carnivore meat, you will need to grow 10,000 kg of grain to feed 1,000 kg of herbivore to raise 100 kg of carnivore. Jared Diamond - whom I am paraphrasing here - claims to have tried lion meat and found it delicious.

I have to agree with everything except point 1. We do not know what information China and Russia got out of this, and may never know. In my book, he is at least part hero on account of point 3. He probably gave some (relatively) harmless information about hacking of Chinese universities as a bargaining chip to get safe passage. But if he brought any really sensitive information that should be kept secret along with him, he acted either very foolishly, since Russia and/or China would find a way to obtain it, or he acted treasonously in giving it to an unfriendly foreign government.

The paper ballots introduced a few years ago really left a lot to be desired. You filled the things out at a desk with a visor that just about anyone can look over, and would be in plain sight to anyone who happened to be walking behind you. You put the ballot in a manilla envelope that would only partially cover it and walked across the room and fed into a reader, that was out in the open. Not one iota of privacy. With the voting booths, you pulled a lever and a curtain closed around you. You could probably change your clothes in the thing without anyone noticing.

you don't eat softshell crab?

NK has a very strong IT sector - http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/for-outsourcing-it-have-you-considered-north-korea