Do you want high-risk open-heart surgery, with a fifteen-per-cent risk of dying during the operation, or would you rather continue as you are, with a fifty-per-cent chance you will be dead in two years?

Open-heart surgery, please. You can actually feel your heartbeat, and thinking there's a problem means every irregularity, real or imagined, is going to give you a start. This gets especially fun when you're trying to sleep because that, after all, involves heartbeat slowing down.

When it hurts to get out of bed and you can't go and do what you want when you want?

Isn't this true for most people most of the time?

What I find ironic is that supposedly one big reason for Obama's electoral success was due to his team's deep understanding of technology, the internet, and social media compared to Republicans

No, it's due to him not being a Republican. Personal qualifications might matter in party elections, but after that people are voting for a party, not a person.

Let's get off oil, then they will have no power, no funding, and thus, no threat.

I'd love to, especially since that would also force Russia to ditch dictatorship and start developing or become irrelevant. However, it's easier said than done, as oil happens to be near-ideal power source. The only technologically realistic alternative is nuclear, but that has political problems.

ItÃ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

What are flagpoles but shrines?

It's important to remember that our concept of divine is very different from a Roman's concept. Any fool could all but feel the omnipresent might of Rome, a pattern behind all the roads and aqueducts and legions and whatever. The Emperor was an easily identifiable focus point, giving name and face to something indescribable. But make no mistake, while we don't call them as such we too treat our nations the same way, waving flags, swearing allegiance and if called for, killing or dying for our gods.

So no, people don't deify Barack Obama personally. They deify his position. Power rests in the system itself, and Obama is simply the human currently most closely associated with it, hence any problems in said system get blamed on him. It's actually quite fascinating, the way our institutions take on lives of their own, escape from their founder's control, and all too often display a very human tendency towards megalomania and petty cruelty. And unless we learn to keep them focused on human good, rather than their own self-aggrandizement, and fast, I fear we'll meet the Great Filter.

There are good reasons to criticize the ACA, but the number of people who have gotten coverage for the first time because of the law is not one of them.

Unless, of course, your very ideology is to make the gap between rich and poor as wide as possible. Then it makes perfect sense that you'd be upset that everyone can afford medical care. And you can always explain away any attacks of conscience by claiming you simply want everyone to be personally responsible for themselves, even as your policies take away the means to do so from the majority of people.

My point is that democracy doesn't put competent people in charge most of the time. That's just the nature of the beast.

No known organizational model puts competent people in charge most of the time. Even the strickests of meroticracies are subject to the Peter Principle, even if they somehow fail to promote people who are best at promoting themselves. Democracy is superior because it lets outright lunatics to be constrained and removed as well as succession handled without bloodshed.

The cloud is not trustworthy, it was shown to not be many times over and no sane enterprise will allow the cloud to take over local desktops/servers.

Unless it's cheaper. Then as long as nothing happens, managers get bonuses for the savings their decisions have earned the company, and if something does, it's an unforeseeable event that was the fault of some evil haxor.

TLDs have certain requirements associated with them, unless Amazon magically also has some super special secret deal that Google hasn't told the world about after losing ... then Amazon won't be able to monopolize or otherwise use the TLD to an unfair advantage.

And yet that's exactly what Amazon will do. Even if they run their registry business as a separate department, the conflict of interests is always there. It's exactly like an ISP who also provides content has an incentive to make connections to Netflix suck.

Perhaps it would be best to simply forbid companies from expanding to arbitrary new segments?

Why would you think that they could not twist being treated like "normal" criminals as something special?

They can try and probably will. Think of it as attacking a heavily fortified bunker rather than open field; sure, it can be done, but it's a lot harder.

In the US, Muslim recruiting is prisons is very effective.

But this is only a problem if you buy Islamic State's claim of being a Caliphate and thus representing all Muslims. Otherwise we're just looking at criminals finding religion and straightening up, which is hardly a bad thing. And that again gets us into this being primarily a war between competing stories, rather than physical militaries.

Liars are gonna lie, nothing you do is going stop that.

Which is precisely why their story needs to be contradicted rather than confirmed at every turn.

Wars seldom end through peaceful negotiations. They end because one side completely and utterly destroys the other.

Well, no. A war most often ends in a negotiated truce. Otherwise most still-existing nations would have no lost ones in their history.

Then again, I can see you're working through some personal issues here, so I guess facts are of little importance. But perhaps you could choose some topic where you won't cause actual damage by venting?

That assumes that all those environments are pointless wastes of space, unfortunately that premise isn't true- those areas of land serve important purpose for example the sands of the Sahara blow across the Atlantic and fertilise the likes of the Amazon rainforest.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you work someplace that bad, get a new fucking job.

Every place is the same. They're made of people socialized into the same values, after all.

It's not like actual Stalinism, you don't go to the Gulag for trying to leave.

Of course not. You simply lose your mortgage and get thrown to the street. That's entirely different.

That's one (of many) good thing about capitalism, corporations aren't alone you can vote with your feet.

You can vote with your feet, but the candidates are pre-selected by the system, thus they all support its values - just like under communism.

Simple, trident missiles guarantee your enemies destruction. What you say? Scotland doesn't have enemies? Take away those missiles and we'll see about that.

The problem is, your enemy sees your Tridents and gets some of their own to ensure their safety, and then we all get to wonder how long till someon sneezes.

People remember Cuban crisis as the closest we ever came to nuclear war, but the fact is, close calls are a common occurrence. Radars malfunction, phone lines go dead, and people push the wrong buttons. Our luck will run out eventually; we either build sufficient international systems that nations can afford to de-escalate their armies to non-nuclear status, or we'll die. And bullshit like yours is advancing the latter option.

It not even hurt to brand them as crazy and to lock them up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Like we don't do to common criminals? Gee, you must be thinking of them as something else then, such as a legitimate if hostile power.

That would allow the state to medicate them and in some ways, to make an example out of them.

An example that the Islamic State can point to and say: "See, even our enemies agree that we're not just another gang and are afraid of us!"

Martyrdom? Nope, straight-jacketed and drugged and forced to talk about your feelings. No rewards of heaven for you.

"Our brave fighters are willing to face not only death but humiliation and torture before it! Truly, they shall be blessed and rewarded in Heaven!"

Seriously, stop helping the Islamic State. Stop supporting their story. Every time you suggest a "clever" punishment for them you're supporting their claim of being a Caliphate rather than a criminal gang, thus bringing them closer to victory.

You win a war like this by deciding on what view of reality you want to be commonly accepted, then behaving consistently as if it was. By doing this you're constantly telling a story to everyone you interact with, some of whom will accept it and start repeating it in turn. As the number of converts increases, it eventually reaches the tipping point and becomes the new "default" consensus reality, sweeping even those who originally rejected it in. That's what classic nation-building is about: storytelling. Islamic State is trying to short-circuit the process by baiting foreign powers into lashing out against them, effectively recruiting their enemies to testify for them. Such impatience is a serious weakness, since those foreign powers can as well deny the story. However, given how clumsily Al-Qaeda was handled, they probably thought the risk was worth it.

You know, this kind of basic mechanism should really be covered in elementary education. All our technological and economic might won't help us any more than their muscles and armor helped the dinosaurs if our situational awareness continues being that of a brain the size of a peanut.