We do know that corporations are a major source of unchecked power. We can limit them by undoing the doctrine of corporate personhood, ie. natural persons have the rights to free speech, etc., but corporations do not. We know that unlimited money in the process warps it beyond the bounds of democracy. We can reverse the Citizens United decision. We know that professional politicians are a pox on the body politic. We can implement strict & comprehensive term limits. When government is transparent, people can monitor and guide it. We need to absolutely rip away government pretense to secrecy. IOW we can do a lot to dismantle the sociopathic culture that is destroying us all. It is easier to fall back on glib pronouncements like "democracy is the worst of all political systems. Except for every other kind." But we've been doing that for 50 years and it has nearly destroyed us.

Time to bite the bullet and fix things.

That's my dream scenario. Who's working on this? Are they on Kickstarter?

That's what Moore's comments are. In front of the cameras all of the Washington crowd crows about democracy and rights and thinking of the children and the like, but they secretly despise all of those things and all of us who cherish them. They mock honesty because dissembling is the air they breathe. They hate action because the status quo fills their pockets. They hate freedom because it curbs their power. Think of the worst cartoonish super villain you can think of, then imagine an entire city filled with them, and you have the capitol of the United States. They're all psychopaths.

That's why we need to clear all of them out and do a serious reboot of the country. We know a lot of things now that we didn't know 200 years ago when the first iteration of the Constitution was written, and we've had 200 years to watch the outputs of the first system. We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.

Really, why do you still do it? Live sports. OK. Um, why not go watch the sports live? Season tickets can't be that much different in price from all the cable fees and DVR fees and fees, fees, fees. Plus there are no commercial interruptions in the games. You even get to be surrounded by other fans who are just as excited and focused as you are (unless you're at a baseball game haha)

Cable TV has become a massive time, money, and energy suck without providing much entertainment, and less and less distraction. Go outside and throw the ball around with your kid. You'll save a lot of time and money and have a better time connecting with your family.

It's time the American people clean house from top to bottom. Absolutely everyone in government and big business need to go. Prison, exile, whatever. They all just need to GTFO. Enough.

Why not extend the system to carry all kinds of freight? It would be awesome to resupply stores, deliver packages, and the like the same way. It would dramatically cut the truck traffic in the city, with all the noise, pollution, and traffic they create. It's probably even safer, from a security standpoint, to have an expertly monitored system like that than a hundred thousand random vans, delivery trucks, and semis running around.

This is exactly why XFCE is refreshing. I have a 7-yr old convertible tablet that I love like one of my own children--it's an extension of my self and makes me vastly more productive than any other hardware I've ever encountered. I bought it from EmperorLinux (those guys are phenomenal, BTW) and it has run like a top all these years.

Except, when I upgraded Ubuntu to oneiric and they put Unity on, I wanted to chew my eyes and hands off to get away. And I gave it an honest-to-goodness 2 months to get used to in case I had simply turned into an old curmudgeon while I wasn't looking. Nah, it was crap. So I switched back to Gnome, but Gnome3 was only slightly less a disaster.

I happened upon XFCE by accident, and it is great. Back in business. And it occured to me that there are productivity gains, tangible, measurable productivity gains from not messing with user interfaces just for the heck of it. And being able to stretch old hardware well past the planned obsolescence of Windows, Apple, and now (dammit!) certain linux distros has many benefits, only half of which are financial.

But one of the benefits is intangible, and more philosophical--discovering XFCE and considering the larger hardware & software picture around it has reminded me that in our game parsimony is always a good idea. But more than that, it's a way of life that will always serve us in good stead. After all, hardware mostly tends to keep pace with demands, until new demands arrive that dwarf the capacity of old hardware; at such times hewing to a philosophy of parsimony will always triumph over those who squander cycles just because they think they can.

Palm led the way to the mobile revolution. They had connectivity with the Palm VII before there was any such thing with any other device. When BB started, I scoffed. When Apple re-started mobile after the failure of the Newton, I scoffed. But from there it was a long, downhill slide for Palm. Just idiocy after idiocy. The Handspring/Palm split made it tough for a developer to choose sides. Then they refused to follow the "touch the screen with your finger" trend. You had to have their stylus.

For me, the end, the utter end, was the CREEPY strawberry blond girl in their Pre ads. I ran from that.

They flew an airplane 515 miles using nothing but the sun. They flew. Not drove, not sailed, not floated. It's impressive. Dead impressive. It's a vision of the world that could be.

I consign those who pooh-pooh this to go back and try to do something equally impressive without fossil fuels or equal cheats.

The best thing to do for national security is to immediately de-fund and dissolve the Department of Homeland Security. WTF is a "Homeland" anyway? Is that like a "Fatherland" or "Motherland?" As an American, as one whose ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence and also who got here long, long before, I am deeply offended by and opposed to calling this country anything but "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave."

DHS, and their child agency, TSA, need to clear out their desks immediately and to not let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. They must be not only barred from ever working in government again, but to be stripped of their citizenship and exiled to North Korea, Cuba, or some other sufficiently totalitarian state more predisposed to their dysfunction.

Thank you for posting this. It's important for those who don't suffer from depression and low self-esteem to understand how debilitating it is, and how close to impossible it is to get rid of it. Paths out of depression exist but are damn narrow and easy to slip off of.

Personally, after suffering all my life, trying everything including anti-depressants, I finally found a way to climb most of the way out of the abyss. I recognized that it was neuro-chemical in origin, that there was nothing I could physically do about it; so I decided to try to recognize the depression for what it was when it happened, to take a deep breath and try to zero out the dark thoughts, list out the empirical facts of a situation, then consciously work to spin those facts in a positive light to myself. I can now mostly function, but the darkness haunts me like a specter and even now cripples my productivity and drive sometimes. For me that's a victory, but one that has come with an enormous cost of will and almost at the expense of my very life (you know what I mean).

I hope that others who haven't met this particular demon will read what you wrote and try to put themselves in their shoes before they judge, or make glib remarks.

I didn't know that. Now I don't know whether to shake your hand or smack you. :-)

That is absolutely what is missing from today's education: hands-on, fun, engaging application of principles to reality. Want to teach hydrodynamics? Build a miniature dam. Teach them the knowledge while you're doing something real with it.

But I'll go one farther than this guy: throw entrepreneurship into the mix. Teach kids how to start businesses and do things on their own, with no starting capital. Teach them how to scrounge and improvise and. solve. problems. Nobody, nowhere, now, teaches that. If you've ever been to a Maker's Faire, you know how much brilliance and creativity are out there in America still, and if we could spread that culture to our schools our economy and society would take a quantum leap in the next ten years.

the math & science behind these objects, the objects themselves, or the woman who created them. I'm so overwhelmed with their hotness my neurons are freezing up.

It's funny you mention Russian natural gas, because it was when Russia shut down the gas pipeline that runs through the Ukraine to Germany and the rest of Europe that the Germans decided they needed to get real about renewable energy in a hot hurry. Now, the Russians did it to mess with the Ukraine, not with Germany or anyone else, but the collateral damage to the latter was considerable. Wonder how good an idea the Russians think that monkey business was now, with the rest of Northern Europe coming to see their gas supplies as a strategic vulnerability?

Anyway Germans shutting down their nuclear plants started when the Greens became a significant player in the coalition government. They've been anti-nuclear for 30-40 years, so when they got power they got busy immediately realizing their heart's desire. Fukushima is quite a recent development, but far from the only thing driving Germans to go to green power.

I'm curious to see what shifting their economy to local solar, wind, and biomass power will do for their overall competitiveness. Will they lure back even more manufacturing when future oil/gas/fossil fuel shocks hit other major economies?