The top 1% in this country control over 40% of the wealth, and the top 10% control over 80%. We are a nation of slaves.

The latter does not follow from the former. While I agree with your overall view of the US problem, you (the average american citizen) are not slaves because of how the wealth distributes across the population, but because the means to improve your own situation and do something about it have been locked away from you with your own support, through all kinds of excuses that range from patriotic cheering to misguided belief in taxation as a social equality tool, etc.

In short, you are slaves because the wealth produced by your work (and I mean that not just in the fiduciary sense of "wealth", it is so much more than mere monies and goods) is siphonned from you with all kinds of "nice" excuses, to the point where all the future wealth you *may* produce in the rest of your lifetime has already been hypothecated twice over. Banksters, politicians, lawyers, interest groups, basically anyone with the political/corporate clout to drain it has done so, decades after decades, and you've been sucked dry. Debt-slavery, not wealth inequality, has you.

Obamacare is such a poor substitute for true national health care I almost makes me cry. You have to pay for it

Well, yes, unless you want doctors and nurses forced to work (more slavery) you'll always have to incite them somehow. Funny how they tend to demand that you help them further their own ends with some of your wealth in exchange for them furthering your own ends with some of their own... And if at any point you wish for wealthier people to help you with that, you'll have to get their agreement first. You want a more compassionate, generous and caring world ? You can't get that at gunpoint. Making people act with morality is done by example and caring and teaching around, not by passing laws and sending in the armed goons.

Also, the evolutions of crime rates don't follow the evolutions of the racial proportions of the population. Crime is going up or down, and the percentage of blacks isn't going up or down at the same time or even moving in the same direction most of the time. This further disproves correlation between the two, disproving causation as well.

Switzerland has gotten rich by allowing criminally obtained money to be stored in it's banks

And so did every single person who ever sold anything to a criminal, ever.

refusing to cooperate with the authorities of nations from where it was obtained illegally.

When do they do that ? Seems to me from the news that they've pretty much always cooperated with other countries in order to freeze criminals' assets, when their judicial system is provided with sufficient proof of the crimes. As detailed here:

However, Swiss bank secrecy is not absolute and offers no protection to criminals. It is lifted in all criminal proceedings, including cases involving money laundering, corruption, insider trading, manipulation of stock exchange rates and tax fraud (which targets acts of commission and not omission, that is, forged documents - such as false invoices, false accounts or false balance sheets - which have been used to deceive the tax authorities).

On the topic of 'tax evasion': to think it wrong that swiss banks refuse to cooperate with US authorities when the US try to apply their own standards of "taxation by nationality" rather than "taxation by residence" standards of all of Europe and most of the world, makes as little sense as demands that adulterous women residing in the US be stoned to death at the demand of Saudi authorities.

At the bottom line, "redistributing wealth" does not. All the incentives and subsidies on one side and additional taxes and contributions on the other just offset prices and wages the other way, by the same amount. And that is why all the government's money represents tangible wealth that was taken from everyone and not just those you think paid more taxes than others. Everyone pays, directly or indirectly, either by charging more and paying less wages to compensate the tax burden, or by getting less real wealth for the same buck and/or for the same amount of work.

Funny sad thing is, the more distortion is imposed on the price/wage structure, the wider the gap between the uber-rich and the very-poor. Adding more "redistribution" makes it wider as prices ramp up one way, wages ramp down the other way, while the same amount of total real wealth is still spread the same across everyone. Again, at the bottom line the tangible wealth equality has all to do with homogeneity of the population and nothing to do with the means of redistribution that the state institutes. You can check this discorrelation using Giny coefficients, though it takes a lot of work and much data is still missing.

And still at the bottom line yet, in the end, the difference all this shuffling back and forth of money on one side and of real wealth on the other, is that in the "more shuffling" world the entire population has to pay for the people doing the shuffling - people who get fed and housed and clothed etc. It's an added wealth drain, and makes everyone poorer - although the redistribution masters do benefit at their level, because no one can refuse to pay them thus they alone can exempt themselves from the counter-offset in wealth / wages.

your situation was not fairly earned

Yes it was. Someone building up riches in one place does not cause some other guy in another place to suddendly lose his.

As a french citizen I'm not so sure their choice is that ridiculous. You wouldn't believe the number of people here who seriously believe that Switzerland is sitting on "massive french tax-evaded riches", just because the government implied it over and over as it was doing all it could to avoid bankruptcy. We have worker unions who, in 1991, were caught piling up automatic rifles and ammunition in preparation for a coup, yet did not get any punishment for that. We have double-digit percentage of voters going to overtly revolutionary communist candidates. And there's much more of that sort going on everyday as normal...

Living in France is like living in Ionesco's Rhinoceros play.

Even better, black holes are time-stasis bubbles. Studying them from a spacetime metric POV and adding entropy considerations make for a fascinating journey.

Given the landscape of the gaming industry, the console-dumbing-down of games, the "next-gen" consoles rivaling in unattractiveness, the Nintendo sorry state of affairs, etc. the only thing Valve has to absolutely do to succeed, is just this: don't flunk it.

Doom did not ignite the 2.5D craze.. it was wolf3d that did that.

Wolf3D was the first FPS I ever played, sure, but it was Doom they went and made a movie out of instead.

We will eventually make machines be better than us at everything we do.

And thus achieving a more perfect Bureaucracy for all. Amen.

Wouldn't that be the communication stones from Stargate lore ?

For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results. Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ? Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.

You're right that we are more vindicative and aren't prone to political apathy, but it's clearly not helping when it's radical politicians who stand to be the only beneficiaries. If I were to summarize the mainstream french political sentiment, it would seem completely schizophrenic:
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.

I'm pretty sure some of it will sound familiar to Americans.

Well there is a massive export of brainpower underway, which has been ongoing for years: lately it seems that anyone who can expatriate does. Of the half dozen friends I kept in touch with since college, I am the only one who has not yet moved abroad, though I'm now looking for a job in Switzerland. The yearly canadian quotas of french immigrates are expended in mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. Swiss companies have started discriminating against cross-border candidates ("Swiss residency mandatory" is increasingly common in job ads). The economic crisis has worsened this situation, just like with Spain.

Letting anyone study anything is what we do here in France: public universities do not have admission exams nor selection process, their only limit enforced is their total capacity. The result is that the selection process is simply post-poned.

For example in medical universities, the real admission exam is at the end of first year instead of being at the start (if you've seen the movie The Adversary, the protagonist is noted for having redone the first year of medical university twelve times in a row, and never bothered attending the exam, until he simply faked being a MD).

A sick side effect is that for many studies (liberal arts ?) the selection is post-poned until after graduation, when those people enter the job market for the first time. We have lots and lots of students in litterary, artistic, sports and historical studies, lots more than jobs in those domains, while sectors like restaurants, tourism and construction have a hard time finding workforce. Tuition fees are heavily subsidised so universities benefit from keeping students as long as they can, students don't face any real test beyond what is enough to maintain the school's reputation, so all too often they pursue studies not as a step into a lifetime project, but rather as a passing interest, intellectual endeavours are highly regarded while anything to do with manual labor, entrepreneurship or commercial operations is dismissed as being much less prestigious ; and then the students are left on their own to face the hard cold reality of the marketplace.

Another consequence is that there are many people who are overqualified but inexperienced competing for jobs that require no specific qualifications, which often means having no diploma = no job at all, further inciting young people to get into college - any college that will have room left. As a result we spend less per student compared to neighbouring countries, and we may well have the most over-diplomed unemployed people on Earth, and the most professionally miserable employed people of the planet - doctors in all kinds of subjects, people with university baggage worthy of a college teacher, even engineers with high technical skills, and whose best career prospects are flipping burgers, managing office menial paperwork or, for the lucky few, teaching in junior high school.