Putin was a hood, too (though not the head of the KGB).

Actually, I believe that in the thousands of years humans have been using cannabis recreationally, SEVEN people have died: 2 got the munchies and ate themselves to death, 1 got the giggles and laughed himself to death, and 4 got horny and f*cked themselves to death... (At least, that's what Timothy Leary said when I heard him speak, back in the late 80s.)

Wait 'til Lucasfilm sues the Germans for copyright infringement. Even Google had to put a little "used with permission of Lucasfilm Ltd." notice on everything using "Droid".

Not at all. I'm sure Microsoft itself has filed a patent for "A Technique for Improving Internet Searches Using Other Search Engines' Results".

I'm sure I'm just being paranoid, but the fact that the lastpass offices are just down the road from Ft. Meade gives me the willies.

I think he means Noam Chomsky... >_______>

Nice job on the selective quotations -- did you do that yourself or did you snip it out of some paranoid pamphlet?

Not that I'd recommend actually reading that whole Club of Rome document -- the style is tedious -- but those playing along with the home game should know that the second quoted sentence above occurs five dense pages of prose before the first quote, and that the meaning of the whole is very different indeed from the parent's portrayal.

The "need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor" line falls in the middle of a lengthy discussion of how the political landscape of the world has become much more complex and multi-focal since the demise of the Soviet Union, and how (unlike those bad old days) there aren't any easy black-and-white geopolitical conflict lines to dominate decision making on problems of international scope. The whole chapter is called "The Vacuum", and this is the opening of an explanatory paragraph -- "see, we've always had obvious conflicts and enemies, real or imagined, to tell us what ought to be done", not a statement of strategy. A few paragraphs prior they're bemoaning the fact that "It is not easy to stimulate a universal debate on ideas", and this line explains part of why that is.

They go on to say that nations are so used to thinking in terms of enemies that the downfall of the traditional ones has left a void in politics and public opinion which makes any concerted action difficult. They identify a set of problems of international scope which require concerted action to address (pollution, water shortage, famine, malnutrition, illiteracy, and unemployment -- surely uncontroversially identified as 'bad things' -- are noted in the next paragraph; global warming is conspicuously absent from this list). Only after pages further elaboration on the nature of government and politics as they see it do we find the closing paragraph which contains the first quote from the parent post... sort of. Here's the full quote, including [in bold] what was elided (elipt? Anyway, omitted through the use of ellipsis) from the parent:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these as enemies we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

Boy, those Club of Rome guys sure are sneaky, listing their agenda in once sentence and immediately saying "but if you treat these as an enemy you're falling into a trap" to distract us from their devious plot! Or maybe I just lost my Illuminati decoder ring, so now I can't understand the machinations of secret global conspiracies anymore...

This:

Talk to your Congressman or the President. The president is charged with the power to set foreign policy. Currently, US policy is to increase freedom in China via economic growth. Like it or not, that's the policy, and it hasn't changed in 30 years.

...meshes quite tidily with this, a couple posts further up:

It's a dangerous world you wish for, where corporations pressure governments into taking certain actions or making certain policies.

It wasn't clear to me whether the earlier post was intended to be ironic, but the irony is made explicit here. Of course corporations "pressure governments", and nothing could make this clearer than the hypocricy of US policy, foreign and domestic, endlessly talking about human rights while acting largely or solely in the interests of corporate wealth. Cf. the embarrassing inclusion of verbatim text from lobbyists in the Congressional Record (from NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html). The distinction between corporate "influence" and simple corruption is very hard to see sometimes.

Well, she was a scamp, a camp, and a BIT of a tramp...