I can't wait to see how they fit this into the "climate change" theory. The ice is melting, it's climate change; the ice is not melting, it's climate change; more ice is forming, it'll be climate change.

And of course the irony of a "climate change" research expedition getting stuck in sea ice will be entirely lost on them.

Eventually insurance companies will make use of these sensors required in order for you to purchase their policies (or at least not pay exorbitant rates), and of course they'll penalize you if the sensors detect you living an unhealthy lifestyle, not following your doctor's instructions, and so on. And now that we have compulsory insurance in this "free country," there'll be no escaping being surveilled and coerced like this.

Aren't you glad you supported Obamacare? Say goodbye to yet more of your freedom.

'We believe that the case is closed — supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit ...

So, if most have no clear benefit, that means some do, and considering most Americans are not well-nourished, but eat quite unhealthy diets, the results of this study don't apply to them. Perhaps multivitamins provide a benefit to people who don't get the 100% daily allowance of all those vitamins from their diet.

Of course, multivitamins are a form of (self-)medication outside the control and regulation of the medical establishment, so the self-serving results of this study (or rather, the weasely way it's been summarized) are no surprise to me.

Whining by buggy whip salesmen. That's all.

And post a dupe of URL three days later.

The parallels to certain historical incidents in the same country are rather interesting, aren't they?

Seems nearly every population needs a hated underclass to dump on. Let's them avoid dealing with whatever their true problems are.

#1. Absolute freedom of (written) speech, at least for the most part, to a degree that I am not aware of existing anywhere in the civilized world.

It's true that the U.S. has the broadest free-speech laws in the world, but I'd hardly say it's "absolute" (and you even immediately contradicted this with "at least for the most part").

As another comment pointed out, there's libel and slander.

Then, apropos to the article here, there's hate speech, where if the government can claim that it was an immediate exhortation to violence, they can prosecute it. This is an expansion of the old court precedent against "fighting words."

And then there's so-called "child pornography," laws which started out meaning actual pornographic images of children, but which have been broadened to mean anyone under 18 and/or depictions of children that aren't in any way "pornographic" but might be considered somewhat sexual in nature to someone, such as fully-clothed child models. The rationales for these laws have been used to create ever more laws proscribing "harmful" imagery such as so-called "animal crush videos" and other depictions of animal cruelty, gory accident and crime scene photos and videos, and the like. And on the reverse side, despite the fact that these laws were rationalized as not prohibiting speech but intending to prohibit actual harm (to the children, animals, &c., in the photos), the government has also attempted---but so far failed, but only after lengthy court battles---to expand child-porn laws to cover cartoon/CGI imagery in which no real children were actually depicted let alone harmed.

There are also still plenty of old-fashioned obscenity laws on the books, and the government regularly uses these against more extreme kinds of pornography. Bush II's attorney general John Ashcroft launched several major prosecutions, and state governments do it all the time.

Then there are laws against making threatening statements. These laws may have started out meaning things like making direct "I'm going to kill you"-style threats, but nowadays anyone claiming to feel "threatened" by someone else's speech can get someone in trouble. There are both general "criminal threatening" laws in most jurisdictions and special laws protecting our privileged classes such as the president, judges, politicians, and so on.

The Federal Government still has a law on the books from 1918 that directly prohibits political speech if it calls for the overthrow of the government itself. Many states have copies of this law from the same era. There are laws against espionage that can be used to go after political speech, too. Look at what happened to Edward Snowden and what would probably happen to Julian Assange if they got their hands on him.

And of course there's the government's massive and ever-expanding war on "piracy." Try distributing someone else's "copyrighted" speech without their permission and see what happens.

There are also many, many laws prohibiting publishing "advice" without the requisite government permission. Try giving investment or medical advice without a license, or legal advice without being a lawyer, and see what happens. The IRS also regularly goes after people publishing books on how to get around taxes, books that claim the income tax scheme is illegal, unconstitutional, and so on.

There's no freedom of speech when "commerce" is involved (or the government can claim it is). Advertising, packaging, labeling, and so on, are highly regulated. Companies are prohibited from including a multitude of claims on labels, prohibited from using certain terms, required to use others, and in certain fields like alcohol and tobacco, there are even more stringent regulations, such as advertising that seems to appeal to minors. I know a microbrewer who was told by the ATF that he could not include an American flag on his label.

There's no freedom of speech on network television or radio. They censor anything the FCC considers "harmful to minors" such as sex, nudity, strong language, or violence.

So, there is your "freedom of speech" in the United States. This is the legal landscape we ended up with even with something as strong as "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" in the Constitution.

They've been prohibiting Nazi-type groups since WWII. And as the article said, they're still a major problem in Germany. So yeah, it is working out about as well as the drug war. But hey, it lets the politicians say they're "doing something" and lets the cops get all sorts of new toys (and ever more tax dollars to buy more cool toys), so it's all good, right?

You forgot the part where they link _____ to global warming.

I was wondering how long it would take for people to try to shift the blame from the incompetent government to "evil corporations."

For those wondering what this is.

Just like everything else involving the State, they have their own legal redefinition of the words "right" and "wrong", in order to make sure things like morality or logic don't get in the way of convicting people. M'Naghten rules.

Let’s see if this works for “smart” quotation marks, too.

Considering the supply of neither is fixed (ever heard of mining? Both gold, and bitcoin...), your entire argument is built upon a straw man.

And the government doesn't "regulate the currency's value." They destroy it with inflation. That your dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power in the past century is a good thing to you? Maybe if the government kept the value of the dollar fixed, kept the money supply in sync with the size of the economy, rather than printing more and more and more dollars, you'd have a point. But instead what your "regulators" have done over the past century is proven that they are the last people who should be trusted to dictate the value of the currency.

You take your chances with government-backed currency, too. Many, many government currencies have gone down the drain, have fallen victim to hyperinflation, were "demonetized" by their governments, and so on. Stability is just a matter of degree and probabilities.

Bitcoin's value is backed up by the thousands (millions?) of people using it. No one can just up and choose to make it worthless overnight, unlike what a central bank could do to your government-backed currency tomorrow.