So you're ok with punishing innocent people for the crimes of their tyrants? It's not like the people who are suffering from the sanctions have any influence over the actions of their government. Their leaders aren't even democratically elected. Additionally, the people at the top who are actually responsible for the evil that the sanctions are in response to are incredibly well-insulated from the effects of those sanctions. In fact, the crazy dictators who run these countries actually use these foreign sanctions to their advantage, as a rallying cry to motivate their people to hate the "evil" western powers that are making them suffer.

Your incredibly short-sighted revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes that corrupt dictators represent the will of their subjects, and that punishing their subjects somehow punishes them. I hope you're just a troll.

I have a good friend who is a proud owner of a very large TV. He is also one of those weirdos who likes to watch everything squished. When I ask him why, his response is that he feels like he's not getting his money's worth unless every inch of the screen is in use. Black bars make him feel like he's just not getting full value out of his expensive, giant TV.

I don't really understand it, myself. I have a very hard time watching incorrect aspect ratio TV for more than a couple minutes (unless it's animation). If I'm watching squished (or pan & scan) content, I don't feel like I'm getting full value out of the content. I don't even notice black bars if I'm enjoying what I'm watching. Different people have different priorities, I guess.

You can't get good drugs? That sucks man... maybe try hanging around your local college campus?

You mean like google?

This country's addiction to fossil-fuel-intensive travel is inappropriate and unsustainable, and actively fucking the environment of the entire planet from multiple directions. This conspiracy to make travel undesirable/expensive might actually be in the service of a greater good.

Or it could just be about good old totalitarian control, restricting the movements of the slave class.

Most likely both.

The in-between unit isn't missing, it's "half". Perhaps you don't realize "quart" is just shorthand for "quarter gallon"?

I agree 100% with your point about digital copies being preferable, but as long as we're still buying media on discs, this may be the best $17 I have ever spent:

http://www.amazon.com/SkipDr-Manual-Disc-Repair-System/dp/B0015ACUKC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1301969120&sr=8-3

Ok, you're probably a troll, but I'll bite. This has nothing to do with socialism or communism. Socialism and communism are economic models. They are both quite neutral on the subject censorship of political speech. What's going on here is called fascism. Fascism, defined as a system of absolute governmental control, is compatible with any economic model, including the form of capitalism practiced by the western world.

I understand that the american media deliberately makes this point hard to understand, but socialism/communism are opposed to capitalism, while fascism is opposed to a democracy/republic model. You can easily have fascist capitalism, and you can easily have democratic communism.

This is a true statement. However, it is still a true statement if you take out the word "muslim". Let's not contribute to divisiveness....

Well, yes. Your argument would make sense if pot were currently legal. However, it's not. The growers, even the ones approved by the state for medical purposes, have to keep a low profile from the feds. Armed guards patrolling the garden are not really compatible with stealth.

Also, the only reason people are so interested in stealing the marijuana is because it's so valuable, and the only reason it's so valuable is that it's still a controlled substance. Once it is legal, secrecy and security will not be as necessary because robbing the pot garden won't be any more profitable to the thief than robbing a tobacco plantation.

Scarcity (even when artificially imposed) creates value. Value attracts thieves. Remove the scarcity, remove the value, remove the thieves. Pretty simple, actually.

While this does sound like it really ought to be true, actual peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that pot smoke has no measurable harmful effect when it comes to lung cancer. Weird and counter-intuitive, but apparently true.

I have met a pretty large sample base of adults who smoked pot back in the 60s and 70s. They run the complete range from six-figure-salary CEO to career fuck-up jailbird, just like any other fairly large sample group. As also appears to be the case with your sample group, it is much easier to draw a correlation between heavy alcohol use and mush-brain than it is to correlate it to pot.

While it is universally accepted that some aspects of cognition are impaired when actively under the influence of marijuana, I see no evidence of long-term effects.

Did you just seriously call the person arguing to end drug prohibition a control freak?

Seriously?

Cognitive dissonance much?

Ok, I want to end our foreign wars as much as the next guy (maybe even more - my brother-in-law is risking his life in Iraq as we speak, but that's besides the point), but we can't just up and leave without making an even bigger mess than we already have. If we were to just pull out now, the power vacuum will be almost immediately filled by some very unpleasant local religious zealot warlords that will make life shitty for everyone nearby for a very long time.

We have to finish what we started or it gets even worse. That's the sad reality of the situation. It would have been better to not get involved in the first place (or at least to get involved very differently than we did), but now that we're here the only responsible action is to see it through.

No, the CIA knows better than to make a martyr out of him with simple assassination. That's why he's being discredited with sexual assault charges. Character assassination is far more effective.

It isn't "leet" unless you spelled it something like c10n3. Just tacking numbers on the end of a normal word isn't the same thing at all.

Also, this is the internet. Somebody always cares.