It's possible that both of you are right: politicians in Sacramento are self-serving power grabbers, AND global climate change is real and occurring right now and action is needed.

... of corporations? I mean, now that companies are considered to be people, shouldn't their rights be weighed equally against those of their workers?

Nope, wrong. Clinton did the same thing and there were legions of educated, reputable people who fervently defended him. Petraeus deserves the same treatment.

Maybe he deserves the same treatment and doesn't want it. :-) Remember that Clinton was indicted, not for having an affair, but for perjury (attempting to conceal it)? Remember how much damage it did to him, where if he had just come clean (so to speak) it seems to me he would have been much better off. The point is that being ashamed of your secret affair provides leverage to your enemies, whereas just enjoying some good ol' side nookie only damages your marriage (usually).

It's not the lack of ability to conceal the affair that is a problem, it's the intention to conceal it that is a problem.

What the hell are you talking about? I never defended the USA's idiocy, nor did I talk about other nations. I simply said that instead of comparing religion to oppression, we should understand that religion leads to oppression. The USA is highly religious and because of that we do idiotic things all the time. Here is an example.

This is a false dichotomy. The question is whether religion leads to oppressive politics and low technology, not whether oppressive politics are more correlated with oppression and low technology than religion.

Is it possible that if a few brave scientists start publishing to the open source environment, scientists with the street cred to do so without scorn, then others might see the value in it and start pimping themselves to the new venue?

All along this has looked like a continuation of Steve Jobs' fury over Google's android challenging the iPhone, which he thought of as a betrayal. Being motivated by spite, it has backfired. As an Apple user and iPhone owner, I am disappointed. I don't think you can just throw money at this problem -- Google has been rolling out infrastructure for a long time and Google Maps is a great product. Why jettison it?

No matter how abhorrent the movie, what sparked the violence was the acceptance that violence in the name of Islam is justified.

The way I see it, increasing spending on regulations is not the same thing as regulating. Spending money on regulating just means more bureaucrats shuffling papers and more lawyers. The size of the government is also the wrong thing to measure. The things to measure are stability, justice and infrastructure, which can be indirectly measured with the percentage of people in prison, the number of people on welfare, and the success of NEW business ventures. GDP is another red herring which tends to measure nowadays the success of the financial sector (investment banks) and a few mega corporations. We need to stop focusing on money and start focusing on real results.

"Free market" is a canard. Every market exists within a society and the rules and norms of the society operate to distort every market on planet Earth. An unfettered free market is a bad thing.

Right, and of course the laws are always just, the people enforcing them are good people, and those people from the government are really here to help you.

Instead of trying to hold onto our vanishing privacy, which is already a losing battle, we need to shift focus onto shining the light on corporate and government officials' activities. Honestly, they mostly don't care what we're up to, most people lead boring lives, but we all know that they mega-rich don't want us knowing what they are doing behind closed doors to the rest of us.