"The Romans drank all that lead from their plumbing, for generations. How could a society remain so advanced, and still so basically ignorant?"

Hunter Biden to Ukraine Gas Board

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/hunter-biden-ukraine-gas-board-106631.html

No one with children and two shreds of sense is buying the latest swindle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmgadgKNz0I
Go, George Will.

Ilya Shapiro introduces an all star panel:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/09/video-of-the-cato-institute-panel-on-the-origination-clause-challenge-to-the-obamacare-individual-mandate/
What's fascinating is that, for all anybody with a plural brain cell count knew that ObamaCare was a river of lies, seemingly nothing could stop the evil.

"The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana."
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

http://listverse.com/2013/07/05/top-10-most-bizarre-little-known-stories-of-science/

My tinfoil hat melted. Ron Paul puked. Good times:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-07/guest-post-false-eastwest-paradigm-hides-rise-global-currency
A taste:

My observation: people don't scale. Stuff just keeps falling apart, for all the efforts to build The Bigger, Shinier Things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51CwUAJ_qG8

Genuinely refreshing to hear a reasoned, respectful exchange of ideas, with time split for both sides to develop ideas without getting cut off by someone being rude.
The only thing new data point in all this was that the Left is chiefly using the pipeline as a rallying flag for the environmentalist base. I found the lady's argument that building the pipeline would drive up prices was completely nonsensical; if the government thought it could gain revenue with this (that is, taxes on increased gas prices), it should've long since been approved. Duh.

Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption', White House Science Adviser Suggests

Liars gonna lie.

Here it is, shocking in its brevity:

Just because bad pizza happens doesn't mean we should volunteer to deliver.
My gut feeling is that the country will survive Judas Prez, and all of the awful ideas he represents. Whether we analyze and reject this concentration of power is another question.

Look: we put an ass in the oval office. I have been and will continue to play the "I flipping told you so" card more or less indefinitely. Anyone who ever supported this used car salesman can just fall off the planet.
He is not, nor has he ever been "one of the brightest men ever to occupy the office". W is far smarter. If you even want to bother arguing the point, first produce BHO's transcripts.

We start here, where d_r said, emphasis mine:

To which I reply:

To which the response is:

Now, I understand that the game here is for the liar to make an outrageous claim (previous examples included saying that I had called for violent removal of the President, or that I had plagiarized a website) and then continue to pick away until I lose patience with the idiocy on his end. A few rebuttals:

1. FDR, LBJ, BHO, WTF?
2. It's 1/26 of the alphabet. Dude, are you really into policing at that level? Can't we all pitch in and get you a life?
3. Are you trying to contend that the Roman alphabet, itself, is the source of bigotry? While such would be outlandish, I am forced to admit that it's in keeping with your degenerate approach to argumentation.

I guess the only real regret I can muster is having ever read d_r in any serious light.

"Because that illusion keeps you on our side."

THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY

It doesn't matter how much food costs increase, doesn't matter if you can only afford fast food, we will always be able to buy steak. And we will invest heavily in fast food stocks to ensure we make money off this. Doesn't matter how much gas costs, we will always be able to afford it.

In addition to poor food choices and health coverage, your kids will grow up without proper nutrition which will cause them problems on every level, from physical to educational difficulties. Our kids will grow up straight and true and healthy.

It doesn't matter how much an education costs, doesn't matter if your kids can't afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-financed bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send your kid to school.

If you or your kids want to start a business, you will find that because we've sucked all the money out of the economy, there is simply no available cash around to help you finance your startup. (Unless you want to go to your friends online at sites like Indiegogo, and isn't that just cute?) We just cut our kids a check and tell them to go have fun.

Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.

If you accidentally provide incorrect information on your tax return, you could lose your house, your possessions, and your livelihood. We lie all the time on our tax information and none of us ever have to deal with this. We squirrel away trillions of dollars in overseas accounts and do all we can to ensure that your money never leaves our control because we'll doubtless need to scoop out more of it soon.

You live in a Company Town; we pay you to work for us, while making sure that we own all the stores in town that sell our goods, the doctors offices where you go in town, the restaurants where you eat, and that we charge you just enough to make sure that at the end of the week you don't have any leftover money to squirrel away, so you can never leave the company town, can never get ahead, and can never risk criticizing the company town. You work for us. We own the town where you live. We own you.

If one of you takes a hundred dollar bill from the cash register, you will go to jail. If we take billions out of the savings of ordinary people then crash the economy, costing thousands of jobs, not one of us will ever be prosecuted. Because the New Aristocracy is above such things. So we'll just keep on doing it. Enjoy the ride.

Your local police belong to us now. We have militarized them into soldiers who treat you like terrorists. If you speak against us, we will ensure that you are tear gassed and beaten and handcuffed and caged into "free speech zones" designed to make you forget that the whole country was supposed to be a free speech zone. But now you have free speech only when and where we say you can have it. Meanwhile, we can say and do pretty much anything we want, to you or anyone else, and get away with it.

If you happen to figure out our game and talk about it, we will accuse you of Class Warfare, in order to distract anyone from realizing that yes, there was a class war, that it was against you, that the war is over, and we won.

Yes, you get a chance to vote for congresspeople and senators and presidents. But only after we've decided, long before the first ballot is ever cast, which candidate we will finance. Those we like, those who will give us what we want first and foremost, we will finance and you will get to vote on one of the two pre-screened candidates we have given you. If we don't like them, if we think they will challenge us, we will not finance them and you will never have the chance to vote on them. Because you don't get a real vote in the New Aristocracy.

We own the White House. We own Congress. They pass the bills we write for them. They make the laws we want them to make, and make sure that they only limit you, never us. We own the courts. We own the lawyers. They are the club we use to beat you into submission.

There are no Democratic or Republican Senators, or Congresspeople or Presidents. Those parties have not existed for decades. There is only the Party of the New Aristocracy. The rest is Kabuki theater. It is Mexican Wrestling. It is the illusion of choice, of difference, of democracy. This is not a democracy. It is a monarchy of money. In that monarchy, we are the Aristocracy, the royalty, and what we say, goes.

If you dump trash illegally, you will be fined and potentially arrested. If we dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste into rivers and streams, none of us will ever be arrested and if we are fined, we will simply raise our prices so that you are the one to actually pay for what we did.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we do not pay fines.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we are immune from prosecution.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we find your poverty and your powerlessness and your struggles disgusting. You are beneath us.

Understand something: we don't want you to succeed. We don't want someone coming along to slice the pie into smaller pieces. We want to own all of it. If we really wanted more of you where we are, do you think we would have spent the last thirty years consolidating every major company into smaller and smaller groups owned by fewer and fewer people?

We are the New Aristocracy because we were born into it. We got our money the old fashioned, Medieval way: our parents gave it to us. We were born into the wealth that we stole from you and your family over the last fifty years. You were not born into anything other than poverty and struggle. You will never be us. You will never have our advantages. And we like it that way.

We like that you peer through the bars of your cage to all that we have. We like that you think you can have it yourself one day. Because that illusion keeps you on our side. But you will never have those things. We've made sure of that. Because what you're looking at is ours, and we do not share.

The world we have carefully constructed for you is like one of those boardwalk games of chance where if you knock down the big pins with a baseball, you win a huge prize. But the pins are weighted and positioned so that you will never, ever knock them down. Yet you'll keep paying anyway, and keep throwing, until you exhaust yourself and your wallet. And we like it that way.

We don't want you to have opportunities, we don't want you to have an education, we don't want you to have a voice in what happens to you, we don't want you healthy, we don't want you to do anything but be frightened, helpless, docile consumers who will eat and watch and buy what we tell you to eat and watch and buy while we keep all the good stuff to ourselves.

Because you're not in our club.

Because we are the New Aristocracy.

And you are the New Peasants.

And we very, very, very much like it that way.

This really requires its own post:

In defense of d_r's viewpoint, there may be some (or even a huge chunk of people) who adhere to some notion of a "Christian Ummah". After the Second Coming of Christ (soon, please) we may arrive near there, I suppose. However, short of such an unambiguous, global, history-making-a-sharp-turn event, the whole notion's a wash.
In me, you have a specimen of what Marxist Hacker 42 might call sola scriptura fundamentalism, though I really don't consider myself "Protestant" in that sense. It's possibly to cheer the Pope when he's Biblically on point, and fade when he drifts (in my opinion) into arbitrary tradition.
Ultimately, there is the individual, and there is the Almighty. God will remain "unprovable" at an intellectual level while we're here under the sun, before the Second Coming. Why, you ask? Not claiming to speak for God, but it sure seems, that all individual specimens of mankind must be on the hook for what they do or leave undone with the information given them about What Life Means.
Thus, "diversity in thought", itself, is a kind of a bugaboo. But who can deny that it's a shiny one for the fallen mind? Are you really after more noise in the signal? Do you really want more illness with your health? Hangovers with sobriety? Truly, everybody has to explore truth and falsehood on their own, but it seems that the basic objects of male, female, family, right & wrong don't have much deviation across the human experience. One seeks "diversity of thought" to roughly the extent one mixes buggy functions into the final code release.
But let's go after a kind of diversity. A Venn diagram of various faiths indicates substantial overlap. It's more fun to rejoice in the commonality of faiths than it is to spend time thumb-wrestling on whether zippers are sinful and buttons are the only proper closure for clothing. To me, "diversity" means that we don't run around thrashing each other on fine points of Calvinism vs. Arminianism, and we certainly don't waste time trying to regulate morality via legislation (Roman Epistle). On Tuesday, I had lunch with a Muslim fellow at my company, and shared with him the plot for a "boy meets girl in Afghanistan" novel I'm working on. It's important to capture the Islamic faith of the girl in a way that's accurate and educational for the reader, and doesn't bring a fatwah down on my head. Osama is actually a cool chap, and I'm blessed that the Almighty arranged for him to be my church deacon's next door neighbor, and work at my company.
Back on topic: that which is proper, pleasing, useful, and consistent over time is far from "new". Only technology has varied, not human nature. If you think "diversity" == "velcro genitals" and the Sexual Geometry of the Week Club, I only ask that I be excused, and the right to protect my children from such confusion in their formative years. Once they have a foundation in good vs. evil, I can only pray that my teaching guides them toward the former.
To summarize: your criticism has substantial basis, but is by no means the whole of the conversation.

It's odd to come to agreement with someone this way, but I lament the lack of spiritual diversity in this country, too. Holy Progress, our secular anti-faith, is really nihilism. We "borrow it forward" with gusto, tricking people into giving up liberty for a false sense of security "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."
You have the partisan lie of the GOP claiming to want something other than ObamaCare, and, yet, magically, getting all balky right around the point where the actually could've done something.
After November, we'll have the spectacle of a GOP Congress, flush with power. . .somehow forget that elections have consequences, or something.
This might all seem strange, until you recall that the geniuses driving this bus, Democrat and Republican, don't really have any principles anymore, other than power. They are pretty much rudderless as individuals, swept along by a hellish current that says we are all Ambassador Stevens, and Progress will devour us if that's what's convenient. Unholy, unholy, unholy is the Progress.

Racism: it's what seems to be on their minds.