That may be true but at the end of the day it's still going to come down to self control. We're one of the few (the only?) animals blessed with the ability to override our base instincts. I guess some people are too powerless to do that.

Run 20 to 40 miles a week and you will sneeze at a 1.5 mile "jog" :)

(Those numbers would be totals, not net, obviously. My net intake averages around 2,500, which is about right for a high metabolism male....)

What's the obesity rate in those populations vis-a-vis the Western World?

Anecdote time: My family has a history of heart disease and diabetes, largely self-inflicted via eating ourselves to death. My blood markers (fasting glucose and cholesterol) follow my weight, up and down. Weight loss brought them into the normal range; dietary changes made no discernible impact whatsoever. I eat all the things that are supposedly bad for you, refined carbs, alcohol, greasy foods, and so on. The difference between me and the rest of the family is I exercise self-control and keep my net calories to a reasonable level. Reasonable ranges from 2,000 on days of doing nothing to >5,000 on days with mega hikes or long runs.

People need to stop buying into fad diets and nonsense theories. Barring allergies, most humans are fully capable of assimilating anything they throw at their GI system. Exercise some bloody portion control and get off the couch once in awhile. The rest will take care of itself.

Which Government on this planet is willing to negotiate with accused criminals in order to bring them to trial? It doesn't happen, not in Democracies or Dictatorships. The most you might get is "I'll surrender at the station tomorrow morning so you don't have to haul me out of my house in handcuffs." but even that isn't a sure thing.

Yeah; the dumb kids sitting at the back of the class eating their crayons, who didn't realize Orwell was referring to communist regimes which already existed at the time. In other words, the same idiots who make up the majority of the various Conspiracy Theory movements today.

Man, I wish I were psychic :(

I totally get your point though. If only we'd never invented the printing press and the telegraph, we'd be completely tyrant-free by now. These newfangled gadgets are always making the world more dangerous for us. Pretty soon we won't even have lawns for yelling at kids to get off of.

Complete fucking nonsense. The average American is more afraid of vaccines than they are of terrorists.

Only in the mind of a delusional sociopath is being ignored the same as being oppressed. And what kind of egomaniac do you have to be in order to believe that you have a right to other peoples attention?

Also, your tinfoil hat seems to be leaking.

So secret that you and your cat were able to find loads of evidence which you would happily share with others if only the MIBs hadn't stolen it from you!

Yeah, very little difference. I mean, both parties are human. And they firmly obey the laws of physics. And no matter how many Americans would like to repeal the law of gravity, it never seems to happen. OPPRESSION!

Only a ignorant child who's never stepped foot outside the western sphere could EVER make such an absurd claim. You have absolutely no idea what real oppression and control are. You're so completely obsessed with your own petty grievances that you can't even be bothered to try and understand the plight of people who's entire lifetimes are spent in absolute terror of saying the wrong thing, or being perceived to be anything short of completely dedicated to the wishes of the state. You have no idea how disgusting your words truly are.

That's hilarious. You're talking about the country which built concentration camps for Japanese citizens, had an official policy of enslaving and then later segregating blacks, and treated the Jews and the Irish as second-class citizens for centuries. That's the country which you think is "doing an increasingly good job on [brutalizing] minorities".

You've either never picked up a history book in your life, or you care more about politics and ideology than you do about reality.

Well while we're making up numbers, why not say it's 3%? Or 93%? As long as you can just pull numbers out of your ass you can make any kind of long-winded comment you like!

That's the inevitable result of constant FUD; people just ignore everything. That's why I'm ok with the idea of labelling "GMO", as long as we go ahead and label everything else.

"May contain trace amounts of Dihydrogen Monoxide".
"Possibly manufactured near tumour-inducing cell towers".
"Likely produced adjacent to a haunted graveyard".

Label everything so people will stop worrying about stupid labels.

So true. It's really time you guys did something about the affordability of your mental-health services.

Kinda funny, then, that bankrupt regimes with 1980s era electronics are orders of magnitude better at this "oppression" thing than our own high-tech governments.

I strongly suspect that those people can still be safely dismissed as tinfoil hat wearers. When you spit out a hundred different conspiracy theories every day, one of them is bound to be right eventually. That's the magic of probability and large numbers.

Everything is ambiguous if you're ignorant. Why does that matter? Should I stop using words with more than three syllables just because someone might misunderstand them?

The phrase "begs the question" is never ambiguous to an educated individual who actually looks at the context in which it's employed. It's only ambiguous to those who either don't understand it's original meaning, or don't bother paying attention to the discussion.

Debatable, the takeaway I had from the show was that the Psi-Corps was largely responsible for it.

I'm going to ignore the hyperbolic statement about 9/11 (really dude?) and just point out the fact that the Shadows never really seemed to give two shits about the domestic politics of any of their puppet races, least of all humanity. And in such a situation as the B5 universe, humanity would have to be incredibly stupid not to take advantage of any scraps of technology the Shadows were willing to dole out, particularly given the aforementioned issues on Minbar and the fact that the survival of the human race depends on being able to effectively defend it against aliens with many times our technology.