Totally skewed by your own perceptions, which are incorrect.

This is an assertion without foundation. You're dismissing any of the many corrective features of consumers and competition in the market. You're also assuming that there is no corrective mechanism for corruptions in your assumed democratically elected representative body. You have a lot of assumptions of elements in your model that are not necessary for free markets to exist and thrive. Indeed, history tells us that even huge and abusive corporations like Standard Oil cannot continue indefinitely. Look carefully at the history and you'll see that the "trust busting" activities of the Federal government during that episode was driven by corrupt ambitions of politicians, and the market was ALREADY CORRECTING. Standard Oil was losing market share, and competition, as well as blowback from high-level consumers, was working to bring things back into equilibrium.

Besides, we don't have anything better, or even as good, on a large scale.

No need for that. People that complain about capitalism never want to look at more than, at most, about 150 years of history. Look at a minimum of 800-1000 years if you want a significant sample size.

WTF? So you're going to ask a question like this as some sort of trap, where you pick apart everything I said. I guess you picked this up from Sean Hannity. Not taking the bait, sorry. Find your own definition. It's not hard. Keep in mind that in a free market (that's what I'm talking about, free market capitalism), the producers chase consumer resources. Consumers call the shots by voting for the best producers with their money. It requires enough regulation to prevent violence and fraud from having much of an impact. There's one of the issues with Somalia. It also requires limits on regulation to prevent THAT from having a significant impact on markets. Heavily regulated markets incentive producers to focus their efforts on influencing the regulating authority instead of serving consumer demands.

... in your twisted mind that values the well being of the collective more than the rights of individuals, I'm sure it is. Save it for someone that buys your idea that benevolent dictatorships can remain benevolent for any significant length of time.

Why? Because you say so? Or because you've seen it *sometimes* happen? I can certainly see that it's happened, but claiming it's an "unavoidable outcome" is simply an assertion without support. In fact, it seems to be a false one, since capitalistic markets have existing in many places throughout history without those issues surfacing.

Communism doesn't necessarily require an oppressive authority, that's just how it's usually implemented. In small groups, it works very well without a powerful leadership involved, but in large groups it becomes difficult to enforce the required contributions because of the complexity of the matrices of so many relationships. Communism should not require exchanging of tokens for resources, but "Communist" governments never seem to be able to eliminate it.

Nothing is free of problems when it involves humans. Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions. The biggest problem with it in the US today, IMHO, is the ability to buy and sell representatives and administrators. These people are not supposed be commodities, they are supposed to regulate the markets just enough to maintain a competitive environment in which consumers retain power over the producers. I don't think there is an easy answer to that problem, especially with such a large proportion of the population uninvolved and susceptible to marketing.

Yes, exactly. People that forget history is doomed to repeat it. Functioning capitalist markets enabled the vibrant middle class, and now that the elites have fiddled with interventionist policies to the point where capitalism has been transformed into some sort of corporatism/fascism hybrid, they've convinced a lot of people that capitalism is the problem and should be done away with. Why they think it will be better than the dark ages before capitalism I don't know.

This is why we need a wealth tax.

Indeed. Even the very wealthy complain about the high cost of iPhones.

Haha. Nice try, jackass. Total strawman, because I never made any assertion about anything, other than the WH narrative was false, and known false. Whether that is "untoward" or not is is an exercise left to those who would interpret the facts. The OP's rant was simply a distraction from his unwillingness to acknowledge facts. Your misguided attack is nothing but a way to distract yourself from uncomfortable truths about your own worldview.

The courts are starting to recognize that using technology in ways like this is different. They've decided that placing a GPS tracker on your car is different than than following you around, and that using infrared scanning of your house is different than a visual inspection, and that searching through your smart phone when they arrest you is different than looking through your wallet.

The reason these things are looked at differently is that courts have recognized that our privacy protections, as conceived in the 18th century, still need to be enforced, and that technology makes violating privacy a lot less costly for law enforcement. That is, there were natural protections due to resource constraints - pervasive surveillance of every citizen was simply not possible. Just because a technology comes along that eliminates those resource requirements does not mean that privacy is no longer protected.

I think you're saying something reasonable here about the warmongers that have been running the country for at least 20 years, and the way they orchestrate a bunch of theatrics to look like opposition when something goes wrong, as if there is anyone in power that's actually opposed to all the killing of brown people and promoting warfare.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to understand you with Obama's cock so far down your throat.

The only assertion I am making is that "the White House" did NOT tell the truth. That's backed up by the report and the USA Today link. Finding "nothing" doesn't really mean anything, other than we had Mike Morell to take the fall (and get a cushy high-paying gig, spreading propaganda via CBS, plus an "honorary" position on one of the administration's "advisory" boards).

The assertion that "it was bad intelligence" was false (this is, in fact, a lie). Mike Morell testified that he got reports from the CIA describing exactly what had happened, and scratched out everything that indicated Al Queida involvement or an orchestrated terrorist attack. We will never know who was involved in faking up the narrative, because Morell was the fall guy for the whole thing.

Will you acknowledge the facts or continue to defend the corrupt administration as "truthful" and "good" and "above reproach"? Most transparent administration ever?

Bazinga!

Oh, right, of course: CANNOT be the fault of the White House. It's "somebody else's fault". We can blame this one on Bush, too, right?

So, we can say they told "the truth", because, of course, the truth is fungible. It doesn't matter if it was completely wrong, or inaccurate, or that they kept promoting the false narrative even after the intelligence reports were corrected, only that we deflect blame before the elections!

LOL @ MediaMatters propaganda.

Oh, really??

From ABC: "The "talking points" memo on what the Obama administration should tell the public was the basis for statements made by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who appeared on talk shows five days after the Sept. 11 attack to explain what happened.
Rice insisted the attack emanated from a protest over an anti-Islam video produced in America that turned violent and that terrorism was not involved. The White House has since acknowledged the assault was a preplanned terror attack and no protest happened."

The temperature chart calculates a temperature of about -17C at 50 Km, with a pressure of about 5.4 mb. That's in line with everything else I can find. What do you think the temperature at 50 km is, anyway?

I appreciate Joel's reasoned criticism (you could have just posted a link, but it appears you don't like to reference any of your claims), but it seems all you can come up with is bullshit ad hominems.

The Earth has had much higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere before humans were around. And there is certainly plenty of CO2 (and methane) present there, which also makes it into the atmosphere. Clearly there is currently a lot of anthropogenic sources of CO2 today. So I'm not sure what you're referring to that the "authors" said, or why you think it's wrong.

What a fucking jackass tool you are. Stop posting on the Internet. You're making the whole thing dumber by your presence.