Iran, too has been invaded before. Iraq invaded Iran within living memory and attempted to annex and wipe out Iran (Hussein cited the original Muslim invaders of Persia as rallying cries for his invasion). In doing so, Iraqi troops performed acts of brutality, and WMDs (supported by the US) against both military and civilian targets, as well as engaging in terror bombing.

Why isn't it acceptable for Iran to say "Never again" and defend itself against neighbors that would see Iran destroyed? (Also keeping in mind that iran hasn't engaged in any aggressive actions or invasions against her neighbors since the 18th century or so, while Israel has bombed and invaded all of its neighbors at some pont, and its most recent war happened in only 2006.

He may be nutty, but how many aggressive actions has Iran actually performed in the last hundred years?

Much is made of Ahmadinejad and his supposed nuttiness and his Holocaust denial, but what has he actually done. Iran actually has a large Jewish population minority the largest of any Muslim country. Much is made of his supposed threat to Israel, but Iran hasn't invaded any country in the last century and more, whereas Israel has invaded all of its neighbors on several occasions and even annexed land in just the last 50 years, and the US has invaded two of Iran's neighbors. Iran is building nuclear reactors where Israel and the US already has them. Why can Pakistan, which actively supported the Taliban, and terrorists in India, and harbored bin Laden, allowed to legitimately own nukes (and is even a US ally) while Iran can't even have reactors?

As for supporting terrorism? All but one of the 9/11 hijackers were from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt, the US's supposed allies. There hasn't been a single instance of an Iranian suicide bomber anywhere. Iran however, was invaded jointly by the UK and Soviet Union in World War 2 to provide a seaport for shipping supplies to Russia. The US deposed its former democratically elected President in the 1950s. When the despotic Shah was deposed, and Iraq invaded Iran, the US actively supposed Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction (poison gas) were used against the Iranians, while the US at best turned a blind eye, and at worse, aided and abetted Iraq. During said war, the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and to this day refuses to apologize for the incident. And now, Iran is suffering from sabotage of its facilities and assassinations of some of its smartest scientists.

Or did you have the silly impression that bad relations were solely because of the current Iranian president, or that all the bad blood came solely from the Iranian side?

The US's roads, bridges, and highways are massively subsidized. It's a myth that the gas tax comes anywhere near close to paying the required maintenance for the roads you drive on. Those roads are actually subsidized by all taxpayers, including non-drivers.

Gas taxes, and tolls account for only 51% of spending on road infrastructure in the United States. http://subsidyscope.org/transportation/highways/funding/state/

You can see from the comparisons that for infrastructurally-dense states like California, non-user fees make up over a quarter of the revenue for building and maintaining roads.

We're a democratic republic.

We're a republic because we're not a monarchy and instead represented solely by elected representatives. We're a democracy because the people have a vote and voice in the government.

Another democratic republic is India (The Republic of India)
Sweden, by virtue of being a monarchy, is a democratic and constitutional monarchy but not a republic
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, is a non-democratic monarchy.
Switzerland has direct democracy, but is still a republic.
Libya is a republic, since it has no monarchy, but is not a democracy, either.

Everyone get the difference now? The only reason the government has been trying to shift the definitions of "republic" and "democracy" are for political reasons, and wanting to emphasize the Republican Party at the expense of the Democrats, and also possibly to de-emphasize the one-man, one-vote principle. "I'm sorry, did you actually want your vote to count? Sorry, but we're not a democracy, if your vote counts, it'll inevitably lead to the tyranny of the majority!" (never mind that we have constitutional protections against that, and that the clearest example of tyranny of the majority was Prop 8 in California denying the rights of homosexuals).

So? How is that our problem? It's certainly not our fault that their governments chose to waste their country's incredible natural wealth and squander it on funding terrorists and enriching themselves with gigantic yachts instead of building a diversified economy and modernizing their societies. (For an example of how much is squandered, Saudi Arabia spends double digits of its GDP as a personal spending account for their royal family alone).

Maybe after we've left the Middle East to their own devices and withdrawn our military due to have nothing worthwhile to fight for, the man on the street in the those Middle Eastern countries will see their countries plight was not the fault of the western countries and instead direct their anger at the corrupt rulers responsible. It's not that far-fetched, just look at Tunisia.

There's various Chinese input methods. Some of them type out phonetically, but the fastest methods involve typing using representations of the written components of the characters.

People imagine Chinese to be an endless mass of randomly-drawn pictograms, but the reality is that every single character in the written language is composed of combinations of one of seven strokes. These strokes construct about two dozen simple characters which are pictograms called 'radicals'. Every character in the Chinese language is composed of one or these radicals

Fast typing methods usually map the keyboard to either a stroke, or a radical. The stroke-mapping method is common for cell-phone texting, because the 9-number keypad maps easily to the 7 brush strokes in Chinese. A person who knows how to write Chinese can easily send text messages much faster than a person texting in English, because the English speaker has to fumble with entering 26 letters on a keypad, and typical word requires many letters, but a typical Chinese character requires only a few brush strokes before reaching a unique pattern mapping to a character, or a few radicals.

Speak for yourself. As an American living in one of it's densest cities (San Francisco), I appreciate the density and quality of living I enjoy.

Rather than living amid an endless sea of surburban houses, and having the nearest groceries in the form of big-box Wal-Mart, a handful of chain restaurants and fast food, and having the only form of entertainment in town be the local movie theater, I like the advantages to the density of my city. I can literally go to a different restaurant for dinner every day of the year within 20 minutes of walking or cheap public transportation from my apartment, and never go back to the same place. I don't have to spend hours commuting to work every day in congested traffic jams. I have access to cultural and entertainment venues, like ballparks, museums, concert and symphony halls, recreation centers, zoos, pubs, bars, and clubs all facilities that require the support of a large population to be economically feasible.

Get real. Population density does not equal slums. Quite to the contrary, I live in one of the healthiest, most beautiful, and most affluent cities in the world.

This is in fact ignorance. Because you are exactly cherry-picking the facts that you like, and ignoring the rest that doesn't suit the conclusion you would like to draw.

In real science (not the parody of it practiced by Creationists), if all the evidence doesn't fit the theory, the theory is changed, not the evidence.

I have only one finger, you insensitive clod!

Atlantis was never a real myth believed in by the Ancient Greeks.

It was a story introduced by Plato. Plato admired the simple, warrior ways of the Spartans. In his view, the Spartans were simple and noble men who didn't venture out of their lands because they were content with all they had. On the other hand, the Athenians at the time were establishing maritime trading league, of which Athens was being increasingly dominant, bringing with it foreign influence, and the wages and costs of maintaining a military and fleet to keep the other cities in the league under Athenian submission.

Thus Plato wanted to write a parable of a civilization not too dissimilar to Athens, a sea-borne civilization in its golden age, but brought to collapse through its own hubris.

It refers to a goddess named Nuwa: It sounds like just cherry-picking of selected elements that are convenient. The Chinese myth of Nuwa seems superficially similar in pronunciation to Noah, but the myth is nothing like Noah. For one thing, Nuwa is a woman, not a man, and is a creator-deity, which is expressly counter to Christian theology.

Chinese mythology does have some myths about floods, but they involve the Yellow Emperor teaching the commoners irrigation and flood control (of the Yellow River, not the sea) in order to bring about the creation of civilization.

Christian creationists like to mix and match selected similar elements from myths, ignoring the rest, and use that as reason to support the "fact" of the Great Flood. At best this is ignorant, and at worse sheer dishonesty.