The War on Drugs has been a failure- it's put millions of people in prison, cost our society billions of dollars, and fueled honest-to-God warfare in South America and Mexico- and Americans are slowly starting to realize this. That being said, I think we're running the risk of having things swing too far in the other direction. There seems to be this attitude out there that pot is harmless, and that's just not the case in my experience. In moderation, it's probably safe. But chronic use- long term use at high doses- seems to really fuck people up. I know people from high school who used to smoke once in a while, and they're fine- productive members of society, good spouses, good parents, etc. I also know people who went on to smoke weed daily for many years... and they're just not all there anymore. They're always in a pretty good mood, but it seems disconnected from what's going around. They're hard to connect to, they can't seem to empathize with other human beings, they seem scattered and their thought processes tend to run wild; there's a lot of creativity but they lack the focus to do anything with it. The PSAs were right: drugs DO fry your brain.

I think alcohol and Prohibition are a good parallel here. Prohibition was clearly a disaster, and when used in moderation, alcohol is harmless and probably even beneficial. But long-term, daily use of alcohol in high volumes can really screw you up. All things in moderation. Just because you can't OD on pot doesn't mean it's safe to take as much as you want as long as you want.

It's probably real. This is after all a group that engages in beheadings, mass murder of captives... even crucifixion. You're talking about a group with a medieval worldview, and you can't get much more medieval than the Black Plague.

Explain how invading and annexing the Crimea is 'staying out of direct conflict'. Even Putin eventually got to the point where he couldn't deny they were Russian troops and keep a straight face, and admitted his Little Green Men were in fact Russian military. And explain how Russian troops, captured on Ukrainian soil http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28934213, are 'staying out of direct conflict'. Russia doesn't even deny they're Russian troops. And explain why NATO satellites have caught Russian artillery on Ukrainian soil http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28972878 and that's not 'direct conflict'. And last of all, explain how Russian SA-11 surface-to-air-missiles shooting down Ukrainian aircraft and a civilian airliner is 'staying out direct conflict'. A SAM battery is a complex system, not the kind of thing where you can just pick up the instruction manual, and they're typically operated by a team. How would a popular uprising find a trained crew for a SAM battery? The Ukrainian military doesn't even use the SA-11, so the only place to get a trained crew is from Russia.

It's not even clear that the issue is weapons. This isn't 1980s Afghanistan we're talking about. Ukraine is a former member of the USSR and was within spitting distance of NATO, so they're armed with fighter and attack aircraft, helicopter gunships, transport aircraft, artillery, armored personnel carriers, etc. etc. The Ukrainian military clearly has issues that have nothing to do with armaments- early on in the conflict, a group of soldiers simply surrendered their armored personnel carriers without a shot being fired, so there are major issues with leadership, discipline, morale, and organization. This is where U.S. military advisors could play a key role, and the U.S. has sent advisors over there, and presumably they're offering intelligence support such as satellite photos as well. The fact that the Ukrainian army is getting its shit together may be related to this. The fact that Russia has kept escalating the situation is in fact evidence that it's working; if the rebels were doing well against the government, they wouldn't need to intervene.

This is just misleading. The US has sent body armor and night vision goggles. Perhaps more importantly, the West has committed $27 billion in aid to Ukraine over the next two years. With that kind of financial backing, they can simply buy whatever equipment they need.

There is a saying, attributed to Napoleon, 'never get in the way of your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself'. Putin may score points at home by annexing the Crimea and invading Ukraine. Internationally, however, Russia moving towards becoming a pariah state, like Iran, North Korea, or Libya under Qaddafi. He's invaded and annexed part of his neighbor, shot down a civilian airliner, imprisoned political opponents, clamped down on free speech and murdered journalists, criminalized having a different sexual orientation. If the long-term goal is to politically isolate Russia, to help contain Russian influence like during the Cold War, well, Putin is doing a fantastic job of it.

War has been called "politics by other means". Putin has launched this war because he is desperate not to let the Ukraine fall into the Western political sphere- probably the best analogy would be the way the U.S. got defensive about having communist governments in Cuba and Central America. At best, he'll manage to carve off the eastern edge of Ukraine to create some tiny, pro-Russian buffer states. In the process of gaining this territory, Russia will isolate itself and its political sphere of influence will shrink. Putin will never give up power, and the West will never trust him again, so we could be looking at another 10-25 years of this sort of behavior, before eventually someone succeeds him and tries to normalize relations with the West.

Given that Ukraine actually captured a group of Russian paratroopers, showed them on TV, and the Russians admitted they were in fact Russian troops, yes, I kind of think there are Russian troops in the Ukraine.

Bullshit. Obama might not have handled things terribly well, but Bush bears most of the blame here. Let's look at the first issue: former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki pursued a divisive, sectarian agenda that caused the country to split along religious lines. Could Obama have done more to influence Maliki to be inclusive? Maybe. But who created him in the first place? That's right- George W. Bush. Maliki was brought to power in 2006 with extensive US involvement and support. If Maliki's politics are to blame, then Bush is ultimately the one to blame for Maliki.

Second Issue: withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. Damn you, Obama! Except wait a minute, who was it who approved a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq that called for all U.S. troops to leave in 2009... hm, it'll come to me... oh, that's right, it was BUSH! Maybe Obama could have pushed harder to keep a residual force, but he wasn't able to get an agreement. Turns out, he couldn't negotiate with Maliki. The guy, you will recall, put in power by the Bush administration.

Third Issue. These ISIS guys. Where do they come from? They're pretty badass, they act more like an occupying army than a terrorist organization. Turns out, there's a reason for that- they include a whole bunch of former Iraqi Army officers, who went to military academy and everything. Iraqi army officers who joined the insurgency after the Iraqi Army was disbanded by, wait for it... George W. Bush. Disbanding the Iraqi army was arguably the stupidest move of all, possibly even stupider than invading. It took the only force capable of holding the country together, destroyed it, and then then turned a bunch of disgruntled, unemployed soldiers and military officers loose to create an insurgency.

Fourth, Iraq invasion. It should be pretty obvious where the blame for that lies.

Minor detail- who's going to raise the children in this sci-fi scenario? You're going to have a whole generation of children brought along as frozen embryos, brought to term in artificial womb tanks, then fed and cared for as infants by robots, raised by robots, taught language by robots, getting the "where do babies come from" talk delivered by robots (in this case, they get a really freaky explanation), going through a rebellious teen phase ("What are you talking about? I do not dress like a little slut! All the cool girls dress like this! God! You're so lame! I just want to hang out with my friends at the supply depot! You never let me do anything fun! I hate you Matriarch-371B! You're a terrible parental simulacrum!")... most humans do a terrible job at this, do you really think an AI could handle this kind of stuff? Any AI capable of raising an infant to an adult and doing a good job would find interstellar exploration trivial by comparison.

I was wondering what was going on here. The NYC subway is plastered with these "Air Bnb is good for New York advertisements", and the CEO/founder recently did an appearance on the Colbert Report. It's not so much a campaign to use the company as a PR campaign to create support, and you definitely got the impression that they were on the defensive, and now we know who they were on the defensive against.

It has EVERYTHING to do with killing innovation. Think about it for a second, who benefits? The government is pushing this, but it's almost certainly at the request of the hotel industry who (correctly) see the innovation of Air BnB as a threat to their profit margins. The right wing is fond of arguing that government over-regulation is a major problem for businesses, and it's true. What they fail to mention is that this is often a result of other businesses, who lobby for legislation to regulate their competitors out of business. If you have a good lobbyist, government goes from being a hindrance to a giant hammer to crush your opponent. I guarantee you that NYC's many hotel owners did not sit back casually and go "hey, this new company is innovating to allow individuals to directly compete with us and cut into our profits. Good for them!" They've got lobbyists, and their only job is to talk to people in government to push for regulation favorable to their industry- and unfavorable to their competitors.

Yeah, they're idiots. I can think of another country where over twenty thousand people a year- far more than the Ebola epidemic- are killed because the ignorant beliefs of the society and lack of education put everyone in danger. People repeatedly try to educate them and show how with a few precautions, they could dramatically reduce the death rate from the epidemic. But no matter how many times you try to show those Americans the statistics on Canada, Australia, and the UK, no matter how many children are gunned down and slaughtered in school shootings, they stubbornly believe that their savage practice of letting everyone walk around with semiautomatic handguns and assault rifles actually makes them safer! But what are you going to do, they cling to their ignorant ideas and stubbornly believe in things that are false. They can't help themselves; it's probably easier to let these people accidentally shoot themselves than it is to change their minds...

Not necessarily. Following 9/11, the U.S. began two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush administration. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. has withdrawn from Iraq, wound down operations in Afghanistan, and begun to reduce the size of the army. As a result there is going to be a lot of equipment that simply isn't needed anymore; if we're not longer engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq for example, we don't need all those MRAP vehicles anymore. So what do you do with all this crap? One solution is to give it to the local police, but as we seen if you arm them with the tools of an occupying military force, they start acting like one. Another would be to give it to the Iraqis and Afghans or whatever regime we're trying to prop up this week... but as we've seen in Iraq, these weapons have a way of changing hands and now we've got ISIS militants armed with M-16s and driving humvees.

It seems logical to try to find a use for all this material but arguably giving people weaponry tends to fuel conflict. We saw something similar happen after the end of the Cold War. The USSR and Warsaw Pact countries produced millions of AK-47s with the idea that they could hand them out to peasants in case they ever got in a fight with NATO. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, you had all these extra guns nobody needed. Enterprising people figured you could make a lot of money flying them into conflict zones in places like Africa, fueling civil wars and militias.

Eisenhower said that war was humanity hanging on a cross of iron- that "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." But its worse than that- those billions of dollars spent after 9/11 in the name of defending our freedoms are not just stolen from the American people, but are now being used to oppress them and spy on them.

Speaking as a loud, proud AMERICAN, I'll give all you international whiners out there one more reason to learn traditional units. Next time you strike oil, and we elect someone with the IQ of a pygmy marmoset to the presidency, and the CIA gets the intelligence disastrously wrong, what happens next??? The bombs are gonna start raining down on your ASSES, the bullets are gonna start flying... ANDIT AINT GONNA BE IN METRIC!!! You all are gonna be welcome to sit there and sip your expressos with a smug, superior European expression on your faces and lecture all us Americans in your snooty European accents about how REALLY, they should be 226.8 kilogram bombs, and not 500 pound laser guided bombs, and it should be 12.7 millimeter machine gun bullets and not .50 inch, but FRANKLY I wouldn't recommend it. Cause when that happens, and you better BELIEVE it's gonna happen, we are gonna be opening up a big ol' can of American whoop-ass and when we do, well, you better believe that whoop-ass comes in good ol' 1 POUND can, just like the dirt-like substance we proudly sell as ground coffee in the USA, and it sure as freakin' hell DOES NOT COME in a can measured with some INTERNATIONAL system of measurements invented by SOCIALISTS in FRANCE! AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

Terrorism refers to a specific tactic, the deliberate targeting of civilians to create fear and terror in the population rather than for a specific military objective such as the destruction of industry. If Hamas is launching rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians, then they are engaging in terrorism, pure and simple. Israel does not have a policy of deliberately targeting civilians, although some days it's pretty hard to tell that from the news. The irony is that while Israel might not be engaging in terrorism as a matter of policy, their military activity does far more to terrorize the civilian population and results in far more civilian deaths that Hamas. So I guess that raises a question- from a moral standpoint, which is worse? Deliberately targeting civilians but not being that good at hitting them? Or deliberately avoiding civilians, but not being that good at missing them?

These kinds of myths and frauds aren't unique to Wikipedia. For example, there's a myth out there that prior to the Vietnam War, soldiers were reluctant to kill the enemy, and that during WWII, about half of them would either refuse to fire their guns at the enemy, or would aim to miss. This story is repeated a lot, because it's an appealing idea. It paints human nature in a positive light, it says that fundamentally we don't really want to kill other people, and it takes a lot to get us to do it. In this narrative, people are fundamentally good, until the military corrupts us and turns us into killers. Unfortunately, it's a myth, based on academic fraud. The "discovery" is based on the work of a single researcher, who never published any of the primary data or interviews his conclusions are supposedly based on, and no one- certainly no military historian- has ever found even a shred of evidence to back it up. If you think about it for even a moment, it becomes obvious that it has to be a fraud. The Japanese fought to the death over those little scraps of coral in the Pacific, preferring to commit suicide to surrender. A group of Marines isn't going to be able to take those islands unless every single soldier is fighting with the willingness and intent to kill the enemy. Contemporary accounts of the battles make it clear they were bloody and vicious, and the behavior of American soldiers wasn't always merciful. One diary talks about machine gunners gleefully using parachuting Japanese aviators as target practice, and the skipper got pissed- mostly because they were wasting ammunition.

Years ago, this myth was exposed by an article in the New York Times. And yet the myth keeps getting repeated. A couple of years ago, I saw this nonsense being perpetuated- ironically, in an article in the Times. I wrote the editor of the article to complain that he was repeating something that the Times itself had debunked, and that they should publish a correction; they never did (the Times are a bunch of smug, lazy hacks).

I do think Wikipedia is probably worse for this than most other sources of information, but the bigger problem is that people are insufficiently skeptical. We assess information based on how well it fits what we already know, and what we want to believe- instead of trying to verify it. Slashdot is a perfect example of this- people constantly prefer to pull bullshit facts out of the air to support their opinions, rather than spend two minutes to read the original article or look up a statistic online.

Here's the current list of the top 5 most read articles on the New York Times:

1. Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, Officials Say

2. Obama Points to Pro-Russia Separatists in Downing of Malaysia Airlines Plane

3. Fallen Bodies, Jet Parts and a Child’s Pink Book

4. Maps of the Crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

5. World Leaders Match Anger With Calls for Inquiry Into Ukraine Plane Crash

I'm going to really go out on a limb say that Putin has already lost the propaganda war here...