PLEASE NOW ADMIT THAT AMERICA IS A FASCIST POLICE STATE

You racist fucktards will do anything to shit on Obama, won't you? He can't do anything right, and you'll find any excuse to oppose him. Fascist police state, yeah right. You just have these fantasies of revolution and restoring the white race to its rightful place at the top of society. FUCK YOU. Fuck the horse you rode in on. Fuck your ridiculous "fascist police state" bullshit. Racist asshole. Why hasn't your post been deleted by moderators?

Yes, but what CAUSED this to happen? East Germany was a model socialist state, "scarcity threatening day to day living" is a capitalist problem. Let's dig a bit deeper, shall we? We might not like what we find, though.

Really? Let's consult Hamas' founding document and see what it says. Remember, this is where Hamas writes out why it exists in the first place. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but it's kind of a slog so I've taken a few good parts out:

Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.

Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.

Leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason and it will bring curse on its perpetrators.

The Slogan of the Hamas
Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Qur'an its Constitution, Jihad its path and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.

So, we can see that Hamas is just following what it was organized to do. It's not difficult to understand.

Well if that isn't a lovely self-serving rationalization. Any communist who would do anything like that is no true Scotsman, because a true communist would never do anything like that! Therefore Marxism is still a good idea and we should try it again and again until it works.

Communism causes Stasi. It can hardly co-exist with other political ideologies! It seeks to eradicate them and institute a one-party state. One can hardly do something like this when right-wingers are allowed free speech right alongside the good people. Thus, the state needs to defend itself - for everyone's own good, of course.

"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.
-- Mao Zedong

They are strange creatures, these Bolsheviks. They talk of freedom and the reconciliation of the peoples of the world, of peace and unity, and withal they are said to be the most cruel tyrants history has ever known. They are simply exterminating the bourgeoisie, and their arguments are machine-guns and the gallows. My talk to-day with Joffe has shown me that these people are not honest, and in falsity surpass all that cunning diplomacy has been accused of, for to oppress decent citizens in this fashion and then talk at the same time of the universal blessing of freedom - it is sheer lying.
-- Count Ottokar Czernin, Former Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, "In the World War" (1920)

"In comparison to conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise."
-- Noam Chomsky

Well, my current employer is happy for me to use work time to do Coursera courses related to my job.

As an organisation accredited to be following PCI-DSS, we would be crucified if the PCI auditor found us holding the PAN (the long number on the front of your credit card, PAN = primary account number) in plain text. Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?

You were one of those people who wanted to block all traffic and email from .com domains back in the day, weren't you?

Your racism is showing. You were for the government before you were against it. You just can't stand that Obama is president, and that he's black, so you find any other excuse to criticize him.

Well, jeez, in the case of China, the alternative is "stark poverty" so it's not really a choice. Forty years of Marxism reduced their people to equality - equally poor. The Communist Party hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road and it's been all up since then. And the EPA really does have uptight, business-hostile practices. Just ask the people who work there what they think about the very idea that businesses should be allowed to exist, much less make a profit.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

Odd that you choose that "people who disagree with me weren't allowed to vote" part...that's pure projection. I see a lot of that attitude today and it's always by leftists who are utterly frustrated that opposition is allowed to exist. After all, their policies are correct and anyone who disagrees is a fascist-KKK-nazi. Seriously, you would not believe the villianization and dehumanization that occurs.

Poetry dug its own grave. It's hard to have sympathy with them.

"Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's," wrote Philip Larkin, "and everybody else can fuck off."

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

You might not be terrible at math. I thought I was terrible at math (I'm also a software developer). I also thought I was only good at discrete mathematics (which was a course I took during my university degree, heavily related to programming and CS). Furthermore I thought I was terrible at learning human languages, after having had 7 years of compulsory French at school and not being able to form a coherent sentence in French.

It turned out I was wrong on two counts:

A while back I started learning Spanish. The way I was being taught now was in a fun and easy way. I was also self motivated. In six months after starting, I could actually use some of it and knew more Spanish than I did French from 7 years of French lessons. 14 months after starting I was giving a technical talk in Spain (with an admittedly terrible accent and many grammar errors). Later today I'm off to Spain to help organise RetroEuskal with a bunch of Spanish friends. I started learning Spanish in my mid-30s, not as a kid. I learned it far faster than I would have as a child.

More recently I realised I needed better mathematics skills to be able to do more complex things in my electronics hobby, so I took an algebra course on Coursera. At school I had pretty much flat out failed algebra. In fact I was put into the lower maths set with all the thick kids (where you could only score a C at most in the GCSE, the exam we take at age 16) because both myself and my teachers were convinced that I was bad at the subject. But doing algebra in a course that was interactive, fun and gave instant results - I passed that with a distinction. I then did a pre-calculus course, and passed that with a distinction. I then did Jim Fowler's (Ohio State University) calculus 1 course on Coursera and passed that with a distinction too.

So it turns out that I was wrong about myself. In reality I was not bad at maths nor human languages. Now I admit I will probably never be a mathematician or linguist, but I can now do two things I never thought I ever would be able to. The reason I never succeeded at these things at school was because they were taught in a very boring and overly complex manner, and I was also pathologically lazy and didn't pay enough attention. The reason I succeeded now is due to having more motivation to do it and being exposed to teaching methods that inspire, and that aren't just hours of boredom.

Furthermore, while I don't usually use calculus or algebra in my day job, I have found that learning these things has improved the way I approach a problem.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.