The beauty of the system you just described is that it paints not just "opposing" authoritarians, but those of us who are more liberty-minded as well, as the enemy. Of both sides. It is perhaps the most demonically clever system of social control ever devised. It can tolerate a certain amount of dissent, which is why people like you and me are still alive. It knows that even if a few people discover that they are in a Matrix, they are very unlikely to ever convince enough others to matter. Now, let's see if it can handle the combination of Ebola plus a billion or so people who actually live out their faith, as opposed to simply using it as an excuse to live as they please. My guess is that it can't. Of course, even if it did, any system of tyranny always contains the seeds of its own destruction. Betting on the long-term survival of this wicked world empire would be an extremely bad bet, although it will likely still do a lot of damage before it finally goes away.

Not half. A tiny, tiny minority. However, I would be honored to be among that minority. There would be no doubt left at that point that anything that hurt the rogue U.S. regime would help the U.S. people (whom I have sworn an oath to defend against any enemy, foreign OR DOMESTIC) as well as the people of the entire world, and I will consider it an honor, if need be, to give my life in service of that oath. BTW, I also will happily give my life, if need be, to protect my Muslim neighbors or innocent Muslims elsewhere, even though I do not share their faith, culture, or heritage. They are good, peaceable, hospitable neighbors; they have done nothing to wrong me, and our disagreement is not sufficient reason for me to be able to justify taking their lives, whether directly, or through the same cowardly inaction that doomed so many Jewish people during the middle of the previous century.

Kickstarter is already providing the tools to connect innovators with investors, datamining investor information in order to target them personally like that may backfire and rather than entice them to invest more it may turn them against the very concept. Everybody needs a some degree of control over their actions and choices, stop pushing people, they are not your puppets.

By the way, what a horrendous summary.

Sergey Brin needs to remind himself what country he escaped as a child and stop helping American versions of the FSB from growing their powers. Of-course he hasn't been through a TSA experience himself and I am sure his and his family privacy are safe from Google's data mining operation, but he should not kid himself, he is on a special list of persons of interest, USA powers that be are certainly paying close attention to high profile targets like Brin and other influential and wealthy individuals. Does he really want to increase their powers? It would be a grave error on his part because private property rights are quite transient in the United Socialist States of Republicans (and Democrats).
Keeping all private information on line, where it can be data mined by Google and the NSA is profitable for Google but it also grows the power of the state and people should think really hard about letting the state have all that power.

If the CIA, NSA and other secret agencies were actually effective at their job and did what they profess to do efficiently and the oversight could just tamper with that efficiency, I might, ... might... buy your argument. But they do not. They are wasting resources, producing no significant results and still want their secrecy. Maybe it is time we tried it differently.

It works pretty well on garden variety missiles. But Russian's got something quite different. Those things can deploy decoys, multiple warheads, and they fly at speeds that are extremely hard to intercept, From what I know, we are still pretty far off, thankfully. Once some general decides the shield is good enough, than nothing can save us.

Actually I have heard that. Politicians say stuff, but it is only if people find the general idea acceptable and repeat it themselves when the politician gets a license to act.

As for the particular case, you mentioned, it was actually in response to US actions. First US government announced that they will start modernizing all Nuclear weapons, the Russian's announced the same a week later in response. The mention of Nuclear weapons on Russian side, at least the one I noticed, was in response to growing number of articles and statements advocating conventional war against Russia. They were simply reminding people that Russia is in fact one of the Nuclear powers and it is a Nuclear War that is at stake when attacking Russia. Seemed like a deterrent to me, but there might have been different statement I did not notice.

The anti-missile shield is nowhere close to functional. It might stop single missile by a rogue nation, maybe, but Russian ICBMs are a very different beast. There is no chance now or in reasonably close future this will be a problem. But there were treaties between Russia and US that expressly forbid development and deployment of this technology. Chief among them the one that prevented Cuban Missile Crisis. (Never understood, why that one was not called a Turkey Missile Crisis, since it started by US deploying Nuclear Warheads in Turkey). Anyway.

The chance of US invading Russia is growing though. They do all the steps that seem necessary for it. They got the 15 aircraft carries that can be used as mobile bases for air strikes. They secured full control over the Baltic Sea (to strike at Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg) and they tried through converting Ukraine and Georgia to secure full control over the Black Sea to get striking distance on Moscow. That was temporarily unsuccessful due to the Crimea issue. On top of this you got the shield project. So the moment the shield would be actually working, they might be ready for strike. Also, once you remove Russia's conventional means of defense, you leave them with ONLY the nuclear option. You could argue that with strictly conventional attack Russia might have a problem of using them first. It is a hard choice at that point. Do you let all your people die or do you try to defend conventionally and hope at least some will survive and rebuild... forcing this moral dilemma could be a way to win such strike. Despite what everyone keeps repeating about Putin, he has two soft spots. He is very nationalistic and proud of his people and he is conservative pro-life politician. I don't think he would have it in him to press the red button and start Nuclear War. So he does his very best so he would never get into a situation where he would have to make that impossible choice.

Take a look at his comments.. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so consistently moderated -1. Personally I think he's on some kind of long term false-flag crusade to discredit conservatives. But, if you like this sort of thing, there are some real gems in there:

No, limited liability is a rather newer invention than incorporation. Only by about a millennium and a half.

Wait, is this still about their refusal to support, much less join, the invasion of Iraq? Because they felt the reasons given were lies? Even though the U.S. threatened that when the time came for it spend Iraqi money on "reconstruction" they would exclusively source from fellow warmongers?

I'm not sure how you could've possibly missed this -- but it turned out they were right.

You know what is in my mind the most telling difference between Russians and Americans? Every single one of my American friends has at one point or another said something to the tune: "Let's nuke them!" in one situation or the other. I've not heard a talk like that from any of the Russians I know. Might be just my own experience, but I have plenty enough friends on both sides for it to count for something.

I have seen companies go bankrupt because of insane lawsuits that made 0 sense, where an ex employee maintained contact with a client and offered the client to gamble (literally) with his money, the client provided the ex-employee with 200,000, which was lost and the company was sued for this amount because it was the last entity where this ex-employee worked and the guy who lost the money was awarded it back from the company and the company went bankrupt, and this is one of many cases where liability of the company extended beyond any reason and the jury saw it fit to award insane non-existing damages that the company was absolutely not responsible for.

I saw many situations where companies were destroyed by insane anti-business laws and court decisions. I know of people who went to jail (owners / management) because they would not cooperate with insane government demands against the clients of the company.

You may want to think hard, when was the last time an ex-employee was sued by a company for leaving?

Now compare it to this: when was the last time a company was sued for firing somebody?

Now think about that and shut up.

Wait wait wait, never mind 'rights', you are saying that companies have 'fewer responsibilities', are you serious? Even a little bit serious?

A company that hires employees and has clients and is bound by various government regulations has fewer responsibilities than an individual who is not a company? Oh boy, I see where the problem here is, you have such a case of tunnel vision on this, it's not going to get any better any time soon.

Actually it is the case that people are losing rights as they start running businesses. As an individual you are free to discriminate as much as you like, it's not a government regulated offence.

As a business if you discriminate you are absolutely liable legally. You are liable when you hire people. You are liable when you fire people. You are liable when you build a product.

You are liable by the very fact that you are perceived to have more money than a non-company, you are sued simply because you are seeing as somebody that has money, nothing else matters and in such cases the courts are very receiving to the individuals and are very negative towards the businesses, they always see a business as a source of cash and an individual for some reason is always somebody that should get some of that cash. The anti-business environment is such that hiring people in USA is the worst possible thing you can do as a business, it's the worst idea at this point.

An even more amusing aspect of Gladio is that part of the funding was run through the Vatican Bank, and much of the organization and planning was done through the P2 Masonic Lodge (of which Berlusconi was a member at one point). Any of those points will make a lot of people blow their top, pointing fingers and screaming "Conspiracy Theorist!" Never mind that it's all well-documented.

Having missed that story, it seems to center around a calculation of needed energy if the whole planet displayed circa-2010 American consumption within two decades. That is, as far as I can tell at a glance, without accounting for improved efficiency of power generation, storage, distribution, and use.

Setting aside the question of whether the rest of the planet actually aspires to US consumption patterns (which I think are widely perceived as unnecessarily wasteful) the submission you linked to says

Which seems reasonable to me. Certainly such considerations do not in any way shape or form proscribe some kind of return to the bronze age.

But yes, in cases where the wants of a few are at odds with the needs of many, I would argue the latter should prevail. Especially if it turns out that the few are disproportionately responsible for causing the problem.