You mistake "taking something seriously" with "agreeing with everything in some random petition by an incredible minority of the electorate, in direct opposition to the majority view of the US public".

Petitions raise issues, they don't decide things. They especially don't decide things when it's clear that the petitioners don't speak for the American people. This isn't just for those inane secession petitions, it's also for the TSA.

The majority of Americans think the TSA is doing a good job. You (and I) disagree, but that is the way it is. So the Administration is not lying when they say they take petitions seriously. In this case, they rather seriously said "no, ending the TSA ain't going to happen". And then mentioned some things they're trying to do to improve the experience - which actually is a reasonable request. (From the actual response - "Current efforts include: changing the way TSA screens passengers ages 12 and under, evaluating the expanded use of behavior detection techniques, and piloting expedited screening for known travelers.")

So grow up. Sometimes in elections, you just hold the minority view. And juvenile alienation is not only extremely annoying, it's counterproductive. Or did you sign that dumb-ass secession petition as well?

Ayn Rand? The one who wrote a book in which her hero - "the ideal man" in her words - committed rape?

Doesn't sound much more sane to me.

Except that there is absolutely no evidence that "the press ignores all but the most egregious errors of Democrats". In fact, the reverse is the case. I went ahead and googled "media bias statistics 2012", and the first link that came up with was this and this.

For those who don't want to click through, the GOP is quoted at a rate of 59% to 41%, coverage towards Obama is 17% higher than Romney, reflected in all the major news organizations. Clearly, the people who are citing these statistics have a ideological axe to grind, but numbers don't lie: Republicans get to put out their message in free media significantly more than Democrats do.

For balance, I went at looked at a number of conservative blogs, and really found only gems like this: The #1 Reason Why The Press is Biased against Conservatives is because they don't highlight how bad the Soviet Union was. No actual statistics. Just a bald assertion, associated with nothing, as if Democrats were somehow asserting we should become the Soviet Union.

The attacks on Nate Silver are pretty classic of how this "media bias" works. Mr. Silver wasn't too popular with Democrats in 2010, because his model of the polls said that the GOP was going to win a landslide victory in the midterms. And he was proven right. However, now that he says that his polls show Obama winning a substantial EV victory over Romney? Oh, then it's suddenly MEDIA BIASS LIB LIB LIB LIB !!!!!!!!11111 . Signs of utter liberal media bias.

The lesson from this is the following. For whatever reasons, maybe due to the Evangelical takeover of the GOP or something else, pure magical thinking ("if I just believe hard enough, then reality will distort itself to please me") is now part of the American conservative culture. This is a purely U.S. phenomenon, as from an international perspective, it is conservatives who are considered the hard-eyed realists, compared to wishful thinkers on the left.

Of course, from a world perspective, Democrats are also considered a moderately conservative party. The GOP, insane.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

- Plato

Oh, and every geek I know cares about the funding of science, adherence to facts and logic, and simple budgetary arithmetic. The whole "Gee, who knows what's true or not?!? They're just fighting about things I'm too lazy and shallow to learn about, and isn't Snooki on TV?!?" thing is just about the opposite mentality of geekdom.

...I'm pissed off at all this hand-wringing.

Killing U.S. citizens actively engaged in treason without a proper trial? You know, Abraham Lincoln and the civil war kind of settled that - about 140 years ago.

It's never been this bad ever before? No, actually. It's never been this good, as the book Winning the War on War explains. We are, today, in a golden age of peace, where the media gets upset at literally a handful of people in Yemen doing bad things.

If you want to know about real war, we still have a few here and there. The Second Congo War (a.k.a. the Great War of Africa), from 1998-2003 had over 5.1 MILLION casualties. To put that in perspective, there were more casualties in a single week of that war, than all the deaths (PLO/Hamas terrorist and Israeli overreaction) attributable to 40 years of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But you didn't know about this war, did you? Because, of course, it's just black Africans dying. So nothing that anyone in the U.S. cares about.

Seriously. Having the President personally decide the fate every single person to be killed? That's a vast improvement. I'm not even sure Stalin, or Lincoln for that matter, could even count all the people who were killed by their more generalized orders. It takes forever to count that high.

Republic Commando was a gritty look that for once nearly made Star Wars look like an actual war. It had casual senseless death and the tactics in it were pure military.

I'm pretty sure the reason why it wasn't all that well received was that it was so jarringly different from the cheesy "war-esque" melodrama that pervades Star Wars, and never got the idea playing it, that the clones were really finding their situation terribly fun.

It was, needless to say, the best Star Wars game I played, at least in terms of actual suspension of disbelief.

Now, whether you agree with a US soldier's rationale for killing a 12yo boy or an Al-Qaeda follower planting an IED that kills whoever detonates it is a different story, but they all have a definite rationale.

I think what drives more U.S. Soldiers to commit suicide than are actually killed in combat, is that it's often the case that the Al-Qaeda follower planting an IED is a 12 year old boy

In addition to the nice AC post, already showing how you're pulling "quotes" completely out of your ass, let me add a few things.

"Anti-war" means to minimize U.S. involvement in conflicts - not to prevent war around the globe, which is not only impossible, it would bankrupt us to try it. So how many ground troops did he commit to Libya? Zero. How many U.S. casualties? Zero. This was largely a revolution inside the country. And killing a handful of terrorists is what you do to avoid war. We wouldn't have been attacked on 9/11 had we focused on Bin Laden like President Clinton advised Bush to do.

>>>Is that why he signed the NDAA after saying he would veto it?

He threatened a veto. Congress changed the law to make it more acceptable. He still didn't like it, but it had a veto-proof majority of both chambers of Congress by then. Here's a clue: it's the National Defense Authorization. Voters will not vote for people who are against our military. So instead, Obama signed it, added a signing statement that he believed parts of it were unconstitutional, and then a few months later, issued an Executive Order saying that none of the unconstitutional parts would be enforced. Voila! Law defanged.

We elect Presidents in the country, not dictators, or all-seeing Gods who can immediately stop every incompetent bozo who is hired into the TSA. There really is only so much a President can do when the majority of the U.S. public strongly supports "security theater".

>>>The Democrats had full control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.

The Republicans filibuster everything in the Senate, not just tax increases, but that too obviously. And they never had a filibuster proof majority of Democrats. But instead had to deal with Lieberman of the "Connecticut for Lieberman" Party (who campaigned for McCain), and Ben Nelson who votes with the GOP far more than he votes with Democrats. That's not "full control".

He offered the GOP a mix of far too small tax increases and far too big spending cuts. But even giving them 90% of what they wanted, the GOP still went batshit insane.

And do you know why? Let me tell you. Because many conservatives, like yourself, don't care about facts. As with your fabricated "quote", they're not even self-aware enough to acknowledge that they're lying. They actually believe the complete bullshit they pull out of their asses, literally as they do so. U.S. politics these days is dealing with Birfers, Flat Earthers, Anti-science loons, and other nutcases, as the horde of racists who were adults in the 1950s start hitting the age of senility.

But at least they have racist upbringing as an excuse for putting their pride in front of any neutral reading of the facts. What's yours?

Obama is anti-war, he is getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan as gracefully as possible.

Obama is pro bill-of-rights. He's signed three laws allowing for better access to firearms (not passed when the GOP was fully in charge under Bush), and unlike Ron Paul, he doesn't think government should be regulating women's wombs.

Obama is anti deficit spending. He has come out publicly in favor of making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rates of their secretaries and taxing corporations that outsource jobs rather than those that keep jobs in the U.S.

Further, as you will see from this chart, the deficit is almost entirely due to things done during Bush's term. And the chart doesn't even point out that the "Economic downturn" was caused by the GOP and conservatives deregulating banks so they could gamble with depositor's money backed by the taxpayer. (Nothing forces a brokerage to take FDIC insurance, but if you do, you shouldn't be able to gamble with other people's money.)

So now will you be intellectually honest enough to support Obama now that all your concerns are addressed? I doubt it. Everything I just wrote was just a google search away, but you clearly didn't bother doing that. So I conclude that your reasons are little more than excuses, because you have a dream that some day you'll actually end up wealthy enough to pay the Buffet tax.

Ain't going to happen, pal.

If I'm in a public setting, I can pull out my camera and take a picture, "spying" on anything in its viewfinder. This is 100% legal. I can also "spy" by taking a photo out of an airplane. Police can do this as well. Out west, we have airplanes which monitor traffic to see if you are vastly exceeding the speed limit, being a "spy" to see how fast you are driving. They even post signs that they do this.

It isn't strange that our military also has the authority to take footage. What is strange, and wonderful, is that our military removes this footage after 90 days. I have many pictures of all sorts of places, with images of fellow tourists accidentally being "spied" on in them. I am keeping these photos forever.

(Note: YMMV. Certain conservative State legislatures are trying to make it illegal to record police, so as to allow the police to cover up any of their criminal acts; however I am confidant that these laws are destined to eventually be fully overturned by the courts.)

I fail to see how this is in any way a terrible thing. The outside is a public setting. Always has been.

...to see so many ignorant posts following up yours, clearly having not even read the article, being modded up - while your reference is stuck at a "1". Just to correct rainmouse's claim of mere "indirect" evidence, here is a quote from the link you provided:

The most direct observational evidence to date for dark matter is in a system known as the Bullet Cluster. In most regions of the universe, dark matter and visible material are found together,[33] as expected because of their mutual gravitational attraction. In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter. X-ray observations show that much of the baryonic matter (in the form of 107–108 Kelvin[34] gas, or plasma) in the system is concentrated in the center of the system. Electromagnetic interactions between passing gas particles caused them to slow down and settle near the point of impact. However, weak gravitational lensing observations of the same system show that much of the mass resides outside of the central region of baryonic gas.

In other words, gravitational lensing of light waves - which is 100% direct evidence of matter - shows a region where there is matter that is clearly non-baryonic (i.e. does not interact with the electromagnetic field, a.k.a. "dark"). This is not subject to dispute. The question of what, exactly, is dark matter - is indeed still a subject of scientific research. There are, however, a number of super-symmetric theories which posit super-partners for well known particles, the most stable of which turn out to have the exact characteristics we're noting observationally. It is important to note that these theories were not tailored to account for the dark matter, but seem to fit the observational evidence quite well so far. As with all science however, theories are subject to falsification at any times as soon as new evidence comes on the scene.

Pollsters, of course, don't say what your fantasy pollster is saying. They don't make judgements on the phone. They follow the script exactly, because anything else would skew the results.

They also don't reference an unnamed study which costs absurd amounts of money for a marginal result, unless they are (as others have already mentioned) lying though a complete bullshit push-poll.

The fact that you can't even approach this issue with anything other than a completely fallacious straw-man (and the fact that you got others to mod you up for such bullshit), really helps underscore the fact that many modern-day conservatives reject facts, reason, logic, and science - preferring instead magical thinking and cheap emotional rejection.

The funny thing is, the OP is absolutely right: it didn't used to be this way. When I was a kid, conservatives prided themselves on being the cold-eyed realists. But with the theocratic takeover of the GOP, and the non-stop propaganda from FOX news that makes it culturally okay to just make crap up (instead of spinning the undisputed facts), even relatively sane conservatives like yourself can't actually form a coherent argument anymore. You argue against stawmen, and get karma from anonymous upvoters.

We elect Presidents in the U.S. Not dictators. The fact that you don't understand, or are unwilling to admit, how powerful Congress is, and how dysfunctional they've become, is the real source of your sickness.

For anyone who did a TL;DR on this, the "No Strings attached" link goes to a WSJ opinion piece complaining about doling out dollars only when States are willing to pony up part of it - a practice that's well over 100 years old (and well known to save money because while anyone will take a 100% free gift, less money is spent when people have to pay a part of it). There's some whaaagarble about not being able to continue to pay for benefits after the money has run out, which is an obvious (and stupid) point to make. You don't get something if you don't pay for it. Then, there's bashing over non-transference clauses (so if you say you're going to build a road with Fed dollars, you don't switch around your budget to lower what you were going to pay for the road anyway, and use the savings to put into some lawmaker's slush fund). Again - these types of clauses are literally over a century old, so it's hardly a "string", other than a standard "do what you say you're going to do with the money" type of string.

I'm not going to even go into the rest. It's pure partisan bullshit. It's Republican farmers who are against the Keystone pipeline, for example. They're terrified about what a leak will do to their water supply. And the President isn't getting a single vote from them.

But look, ArcherB is going to believe what Archer B wants to believe, no matter what. When someone decides to believe something, there's not a single fact that's going to keep them from doing so.

The problem in the real world with XKCD/diceware-style phrases, is that English words become keys. You don't have 44 bits of entropy. Rather, the vocabulary of the average American is the entropy.

In the XKCD example, for instance, the true number of permutations you have to check to brute force a password is: Size of Average Person's Vocabulary (about 25,000 words) - from which "correct" "horse" "battery" "stable" is selected - raised to the 4th power, or 3.906 * 10^17 combinations. That's not a huge amount for a password cracking algorithm.

Add in that many words are going to be used far more frequently than others, and it really isn't much different than the "misspell and stick in an odd character" method. And it's actually worse than sticking an odd character or two somewhere in the middle of your password.