And Mussolini made the trains run on time?

I don't know. I was busy looking at the bottom of the page for the footnote to the asterisk.

"You think this began with THIS president?"

No, but many of us were hoping it would at least be reduced by this president. I am finally getting it through my head that Romney or Obama would have both basically done the same job of letting our rights slide down the tubes. This goes for any Democrat or Republican candidate. As long as Americans are fooled into not-voting or into voting for either of the two big parties nothing will change.

"It has taken care of us very well."

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Nature also took quite good care of the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, etc.

We are part of an ecosystem. I guess we're going to find out how much of that system we can destroy until we ourselves go extinct, or figure out a way to exist outside of the food web. Remember, just because you don't care about some little tree frog somewhere doesn't mean that the symbiotic and inter-connected nature of the system doesn't care.

Nothing is obvious to the uninformed.

Nope. Go ahead and build anything and eat everything. Nature will take care of the human population eventually.

Pax vobiscum.

The surprise twist ending is when we end up with an authoritarian regime because too many people just sighed and said, "this is news?" any time something that should outrage us happened.

I think that's a little backwards. We have used math to model the universe. The universe is just the universe. It's an impediment to thinking when you mistake the model for the reality.

Not sure about a movie, but it IS a line from a Firesign Theatre piece. :-)

Sounds like a cool idea to me, but it seems a bit like a cosmic joke that we would in a way be reverting to a past we had here on earth by living in caves. The symbolism is nice, though; starting over in a new environment.

"At some point you sometimes simply have to live with a certain level of risk..."

The problem is, the risk isn't yours. It's on the people whose private data you've leaked to the world. This just happened to me. My former employer (of about 8 years ago) had his laptop stolen while on location. Names, SSN's and who knows what else from former employees were all on that laptop. No encryption I assume. I got an email of warning but I'm too angry to make contact for more information.

They may say he's in jail for crimes against humanity, but what he's really in jail for is pissing off the US.

No, the US is an oligarchy.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/d...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

"By comparison the US notes have a very short life expectancy and hence are some of the most expensive to maintain currencies in the world."

Yes, but they don't smell as bad when CEOs use $100 bills to light their cigars.