George Bush and Obama were also very popular at times. Is the majority of the USA suffering from mass psychosis?

Putin is popular because the economy of Russia has recovered a lot since he took power. There isn't really anything magical about this. It's the same with China. Leaders that make poor populations a lot wealthier get a lot of slack in the authoritarianism department.

Actually the latest polling on Scotland gives more like 38-40% in the "yes" block.

I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.

The problem here is that the west has already decided it doesn't matter what the outcome of the Crimean referendum is - if Russia wins, that must be because of foul play, intimidation or excessive "propaganda" (as if western elections are not also filled with propaganda). In fact, I don't see any way the people living there could ever actually decide they prefer to be aligned with Russia without western powers decrying it as the work of the dastardly Putin.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go compare American propaganda (Obama's comments) vs Russian propaganda (Putin's comments). In particular note that Obama doesn't even bother taking press questions any more, whereas Putin takes lots of very aggressive and straightforward ones.

I think it's something specific to MacBooks. I used to find I could hardly see the background, but if I tilted the screen a bit suddenly there it was back in the old yellow colour. The new yellow "Ad" icon is much easier to see though.

Google went public a decade ago. I think you have to do a better job of showing cause/effect than that.

"Mutual of Osama is people you can 'count on' when the going's tough"

Now, I never claimed the Vatican was not a business. I went to my church's business meeting Sunday night, in fact. You're attempting to shift the question off of what the Pope legally, personally owns, and whether or not there is power other than temporal wealth.

I'm sure you're only observing, and neither approving, nor suggesting alternatives.

You make winning the last two Presidential elections sound like a bad thing.

Half a billion dollars has been stolen. Where's the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department? This is their job. It's embarassing that they haven't made any arrests.

To me, it doesn't help things to have prep material for students be primarily available on the internet - that doesn't really seem to be leveling things with people that may not have good internet access.

Not that the SAT was great, but at least there were a ton of prep materials you could get and use from anywhere.

People don't live in tanning beds under power lines, so it doesn't lend much credence at all.

You may sometime want to look up the definition of "rhetorical question", which that plainly was... quite obviously the cost is far more than the sum mentioned.

Since I didn't care to know the exact answer, your looking up a figure was more to your benefit than mine. So why thank you for something I didn't ask for?

Yeah, how'd that work out for banking?

Pretty well until government protection of giant banks along with imposition of regulations smaller banks could not keep up with, meant all of the smaller banks got bought up or shut down.

Meanwhile, instead of competition we have Obamacare mandating that very expensive insurance plans be bought from a handful of providers, reducing competition further.

It's also just wrong. From 3G onwards phones authenticate the cell towers. Even with a full stack running you wouldn't be easily able to force a phone to associate to your tower, at least not without jamming all the other towers in your vicinity.