You want to suggest Voyage from Yesteryear as a suggestion for moving beyond what we have? What we have is a massive set of economic and psychological data which predict humans will never respond en masse like they do in that book. Is it possible we're just measuring some sort of inherited culture we could break from if only we could get a generation away from us to think on their own? Not really. Cultures have been abandoned repeatedly, for centuries, and never developed anything similar.

Furthermore, it posits unlimited resources. While possible, it's quite unlikely any time soon. Even granted that though, it completely neglects information cost! Even if raw materials and labor are practically limitless, the knowledge about what is worth having and what isn't is worth something. That knowledge must be transmitted somehow. Currently, it's in prices. In an unlimited resource society, it will still be prices. There is no evidence that anything else is remotely as efficient, and quite a bit that lots of specific other things aren't.

If by the US's 'ideological bubble' you mean a grounding in the observable and measurable, I aim to never escape it! I want to spread that bubble to encompass the world, that they may taste of fruit of knowledge! This is the foundation of science; no amount of wishful thinking is preferable.

Try reading the Declaration a bit more closely.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal,
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

Secure. Similar to protect. Not meaning provide, grant or give.

You cannot secure something which does not already exist. The rights governments (according to the authors) are instituted to protect are clearly preexisting, unlike rights to food, water, or other provision which does not and cannot exist without government of some form.

Similarly, "Promote the general welfare" does not imply "Provide for the needs of the public." It means exactly what it says, to promote our general welfare through protection of rights, enforcement of laws, and redress of grievances. The general welfare is promoted by any well-ordered government, regardless of whether it institutes a policy of provision for the unfortunate.

Trite phrases become trite through exhaustively correcting common errors. If the error wasn't common, or (more to the point) wasn't actually an error, it wouldn't be trite.

So, no, the plural of trite phrases is not rebuttal. But when the phrase in question is a rebuttal, then the triteness is irrelevant; it's still a rebuttal.

But if you want a slightly more long-winded rebuttal, here you go:

Statistics never prove anything. Seriously. At their best, when properly applied, they can tell you how likely something is to be true. In this case, what we'd like to know is if this guy's abnormally good play was simply a fluke. The best statistics can tell us is that there is an X% chance it wasn't. We have good data on the population of his previous plays, so, given an objective measure for the goodness of moves, we can tell a good bit about the distribution, and get a reasonable estimate of the probablity of playing one excellent (grandmaster-level) move. So we can give an estimate for how much of an outlier his play actually was. As far as the "we shut off the cameras and he started playing normally", that's pure anecdote. Correlation in a sample size of two is utterly useless in demonstrating anything. Now, if you toggled it off and on and off and on, and got a dozen data points, it might be helpful. But as it stands, all you can say is he started playing the most probable moves again at around the same time. That in no way counters the possibility that his good play was merely a statistical anomaly; it's imply the expected behavior, until your sample set is large enough to show correlation

Fairly trivial if you like the Fool's Mate. On the losing side of course.

And tends to need sample sizes higher than one as a result. The plural of anecdote is not data.

Nuts. Autocad is THE premier 2D CAD package. It's not quite as good as, say Solidworks, for 3D, but it's definitely professional. Whereas NX is the clumsiest, brokenest piece of CAD software I've ever had the privileged of being forced to use. Professional or no, NX can't hold a light to the better CAD packages.

Bricscad (based on the Intellicad fork of Autocad) runs on Linux. In some ways it isn't quite as good as Autocad or the better Intellicads for Windows (eg. Cadopia). In others though, it's better. For instance, it allows exporting to truly ancient DWG versions, which can really help exchanging files with customers, etc.

Well, if you happen to live in one of the larger countries (China, Canada, the US, etc.) it would also help intranational businesses. And commuters. And shoppers near the zone boundaries.

It's always work keeping track of the difference between equal creation, and equal importance to a given entity. Simply because they are equal does not mean they are equally important to me. For instance, given the choice between saving the lives of two people unknown to me, and one of my sisters, my sister will get my choice. Without regrets. She's more important to me than any random two fellow-citizens. By the same token, my fellow citizens are worth more to me than non-citizens. Probably not in a two-to-one ratio, but there still exists a difference.

Does that mean that I think my sisters are 'more equal' than others? No. It means that I personally place more value on them; not that they are better in any way. Valuing different people differently is both inevitable and proper. It's inevitable, because it's hard-wired into our brains to split the world into progressively smaller groups of more import. It's proper, as it's necessary to generate a nurturing environment for kids in most cases. People simply won't give as much for strangers as they will for their own kids. Preferential treatment allows their kids to grow up well, even if others are suffering.

Because nationalism is obviously wrong? Despite being a fairly popular viewpoint?

Come out of your bubble. While cosmopolitanism is common these days, it isn't necessarily any more right than nationalism. They both have downsides.

With the insignificant downside that government decides who goes to college... Sorry. Live free or die.

From personal experience, I can say this isn't true of all students. I worked nearly a full time job ~30 hours a week, commuted 1 hour each way to school, and still graduated with three degrees in four years. I can't be the only one who can do that; it's just that most people really don't begin tapping their potential.

The biggest problem with this is that people can't count. Seriously, get a half dozen people around a table, give'em each a sheet of paper, and swear them to silence. Pass out about a hundred black-eyed peas, and the same number dried peas, mixed. Allow each person to count them, marking them down on a sheet of paper.

The numbers will all be different by 2-3. That's the problem with people. Human-dependent measurement is inherently flawed. It's just cheap and straightforward. A proper, machine counter (maybe scantronics or similar) is much more reliable. But still needs audited...

I should note that I don't find ANY media completely credible. They all, Glenn Beck and MSNBC included, tend to tiwst true info to make a point. Which just means they require critical thinking; a skill rare, but useful.

Gently now... back up a bit and look at it. Persecution has occurred historically on the basis of race, creed, religion and ideology. Why do you fixate on one of these, rather than say that folks are inclined to persecute each other with the slimmest of reasons? Recall that secular societies have persecuted people as well. It seems as unlikely that religion is the cause of the persecution than that race is the cause of ethnic persecution.

So why villianize someone, linking them to atrocities they never supported, simply because they share a few beliefs with the perpetrators? Seriously, get a grip. I don't blame random Asians for the Virginia Tech shootings, Muslims for the 9/11 bombings, or random communists for the Soviet mass killings. Nor should you; it isn't rational or just.