By Carl Sagan.

Changed my perspective quite a bit, haven't looked back since.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Demon_Haunted_World.html?id=Yz8Y6KfXf9UC

This is simply wrong.

Communism is indeed an economic system, like capitalism.

The political system you seem to equate with communism is totalitarianism, but that is a direct result of propaganda, much like the joining of capitalism with democracy in the heads of most people.

We've seen a lot of totalitarian communism throughout history, as well as some democratic capitalism, but instead of experimenting with democratic communism we seem to be heading full steam in the direction of totalitarian capitalism (such as Taiwan, Singapore and most recently China).

You might say Godwin's law is one of the mechanisms used to make any such comparison taboo by default.

Here is one I think has real potential:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/omate/omate-truesmart-water-resistant-standalone-smartwa

It was mentioned here on /. not long ago:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/26/0454236/omate-truesmart-watch-stands-alone-no-phone-required

They have already reached some amazing stretch goals, such as Sapphire Crystal Glass, and are
aiming for further ones, like 720p video recording.

At last there's a plausible cause for a zombie apocalypse.

Reviewing this I realize my humor-detector may be a bit off today, well played.

How is that an upside? I can't really think of a less important thing to remember than a commercial jingle.

In this era of unsustainable consumption, progress should be measured in consuming less, not more, while maintaining an acceptable standard of living.

Agreed.

Say the Chinese communist party were to split into two factions, both deeply committed to communism, but with subtle differences when it comes to implementation details, then all of a sudden you'd have a model democracy, right?

Your comment does a pretty good job of describing how extremely successful the public relations industry is. First, these people protesting know something is horribly wrong with their society, but the way their society actually works has been so carefully muddled and obfuscated that when they try to tell you what's wrong and how to fix it they tend to become confused and incoherent. Second, the public viewing thousands of people trying to organise in order to improve their society as spoiled squatting bums, now that's a a PR success if there ever was one.

It is irrelevant how many American votes of agreement the war got, congressional or otherwise, I'm talking about the war being illegal from the UN point of view, hence an international crime.

What about committing the supreme international crime, a war of aggression against Iraq?

Is that an "atrocity" enough for you?

Well yes, the rich will allow you to climb pretty high, but only as long as you serve their interests.

If you can't beat them, join them, if you can't join them, serve them.