There is already today an excess of food production. People do not starve because there is not enough food, they starve because they are not given the food, usually because they are too poor to afford it, or because their supply lines have been cut by wars or embargoes. There is no need to increase world food production, only to get the food to those needing it.

I read the headline like some anonymous oligarch pledged the money out of its own pocket...

Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.

That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.

Amen to that. My mom used to have a Kubuntu PC I set up. It ran fine most of the time, but sometimes there were problems with Pulseaudio and Skype would not work properly. Getting my mom to install Team Viewer was not an option (she is almost completely computer illiterate, despite using a Linux machine for over 5 years now. Not the learning type), it was difficult enough to teach her to switch windows from the task bar.

For Christmas I gave her an Android tablet (Samsung GT2), and amazingly (after I configured it) I still haven't heard of any problems, even though it is a new machine, new environment, new paradigm and new control method. She even showed initiative at installing some apps to learn English.

That's far from the complete truth. The unsaid fact is that Mosaddegh was trying to nationalize British and American owned oil operations, which was what prompted our actions.

Ahem, he was trying to stop the US and the UK from stealing Iranian oil. That's a good thing. The US and the UK wanted to continue stealing, so they put a figurehead in place that would allow them to continue sacking the country.

Far from me to defend the regime of the regime of the ahund, but you are painting a way exaggerated picture. I know several Iranians at my university (and speak some Persian to boot), and I can say that:

• There is no problem with shaving in Iran. You are confusing them with the Talibans in Afghanistan. Long story short, Afghanistan is like Iran's Mexico—a source of cheap labor and illegal immigrants. At my university there is one Iranian guy who is a supporter of the regime (over about a hundred who despise it openly), and he happens to have no beard.
• Almost all Iranians I know are atheists or at least non-religious, and no one ever mentioned being locked up for insufficient muslim-ness. Of course you will be locked up if you insult Islam publicly (it's a lousy dictatorship after all), but they don't really care about you praying regularly.
• The story of the word "pizza" being translated into Persian is a funny story of an overzealous language institute, not different from Western institutes such as the Academie Francaise that proposed "Nourriture rapide" instead of fast food. "Pizza" is a furthermore word that does not fit well Persian phonology, as they have no /ts/ affricate. Anyway, they still call it pizza in Iran, the translated word is mostly jocular.
• Prison or death penalty for being raped is plain false. It may be true for tribal traditions in some areas, but then there are such backwards places in the West too. They do have death penalty for adultery, but being victim of a rape is not considered adultery. Of course, since the penalty for rape is death (for the aggressor), in a trial the aggressor will try to frame the victim as a consensual partner, a fact that for a married woman carries the death penalty. Since corruption is rampant, a rapist may buy the sentence. You don't need to make up the story of death penalty for rape victims, death penalty for adultery is bad enough.
• Supporting medieval-minded terrorist groups is something that the US did as well in Afghanistan when it served their interest. Neither excuses the other, but support of terrorist activities in enemy countries is a fairly normal practice, however execrable.

Just like the driver with seatbelts who gets stuck in a burning car, the man who finds out at the wrong time he is allergic to latex in condoms, or the patient who gets a vaccine develops the disease because the virus in the vaccine batch was not really dead after all.

Not owning a gun makes you safer . You may feel safer with a gun because you think you are in control, just like people feel safer in their cars but not in aeroplanes (even though last year only over 30,000 people died on cars in the US, none in airliners AFAIK).

The whole picture includes you having a gun during a serious depression and killing yourself over a moment of desperation, your children finding the gun the one time you left it loaded, you discovering you are a sleepwalker the day you shoot your wife in your dreams, and that angry dumb person with a gun (who might have been satisfied by robbing you) that turns out to be a faster shot than you are, and leaves you in a pool of blood.

Are you always less safe with a gun? No, in some limited cases it makes sense, such as when going in areas with aggressive wildlife (e.g. polar bears). In some occasions even in normal, civilian life it might be advantageous to have a gun to scare a casual would-be thief. But on average, all things considered, statistics shows that it is a safer decision not to have a gun around.

You're smart person is going to look pretty dumb

Your aliterate person who can't handle homophones [...]

Damnit, I had just recalibrated my irony meter. Now it went off the scale again.

Since when Homeland Security has started investigating something as trivial as copyright violation, even on a grand scale? Aren't they supposed to deal with terrorism, natural disasters and more serious threats to life and property? Wouldn't this be the competence of the FBI instead? And what jurisdiction do the US have over this man, as the crimes committed in China?

Curious, I read it. It demonstrated nothing about inflation, in fact it said "I’ll consider the inflation objection at length in my next post".

However, I don't need a Interwebs wacko to tell me that you can dry water and drink it. If you produce money with no actual wealth to back it up, be it old-style gold reserve or economic worth of the issuing country, it will cause inflation the moment it hits the economic system. Of course if you kept the quadrillion-dollar coin under your bed and told no one, it would cause no inflation as no one would know it existed; but if you use to pay the US government's debts, you have more currency around and no wealth to back it up; by simple supply and demand, value of currency will plummet (there is less than a trillion dollar circulating worldwide), i.e. inflation will boom so much it will make Zimbabwe look like Switzerland.

Even if the quadrillion-dollar coin would not start inflation, it would tell the rest of the world that the US are ready to issue fiat currency to pay their debt: that would start a bank run to get rid of their petrodollars (guess what, there is no fiat fuel, and you would not be able to buy much oil with those petrodollars). See the link above, according to the Fed most dollars are outside the US, a lot of them in the coffers of countries that need to buy oil.

What the US need is not "more" or "less" spending, it is more of the right spending and less of the wrong spending. The US have humongous military spending, which is by definition unproductive (in fact, destructive by its very nature, though the destruction is usually externalised to other countries). Yes, the military also finances R&D, but that R&D would be better aimed for the US economy if it were financed by universities or the private sector with governmental financial support, instead of being trickle-down adaptations of military technology.

The US have too low welfare, with insane amounts of poverty rampaging across the country; these people have no opportunity of becoming productive citizens because they never receive appropriate education. The point is not giving the poor food and shelter (which is of course still necessary), but giving their children good public schools that give them an alternative to crime as the best option for gaining wealth.

Also, there is a disproportionate amount of inmates in US jails. US prisons house more inmates than China, not just per capita— in absolute numbers . All these have to be fed, clothed and guarded, and this is expensive. It is way cheaper to institute education programs to make sure they don't recidivate, but then again some politicians would not look though on crime, which seems to be more important than to be smart on crime. Also, several states outsourced jail management to privates, who are paid by the inmate and have thereby no interest in re-educating their inmates (in fact, they do want their customers to come back!). More government, less market here.

[...] suicides (which would occur with or without guns)

No they wouldn't. Suicide is not something that is decided upon irreversibly by the person who does it. It can be a moment of desperation that could very well wear off after a few minutes. In fact, if you have any experience with crying children (or adults), you probably noticed that there is a brief transient of desperation while the person calms down. If the desperation is high enough, and this person has undisturbed access to a gun, they can kill themselves on the spot; if they need to hang themselves, cut themselves to bleed to death, take poison, all of these operations require a minimum of preparation, and most importantly they take time (e.g. poison and drug overdose are not immediate; there is still time to call a doctor).

As far as murder rate, the US is relatively far down the list with approximately 4.2 per 100,000. Compare this to ~91 per 100,000 for Honduras.

Seriously? Then I guess the air quality in Beijing must be pretty good, compared to the atmosphere on Venus. Honduras is a crime state that went through a coup just a few years back, and is basically a failed state. The US murder rate is 4.2 (see the wiki), let's see which countries have a lower one...

• Turkey, 3.3
• Uzbekistan, 3.1
• Cambodia, 3.4
• Niger, 3.8 (the poorest country on the planet)
• Afghanistan, 2.4 (war casualties excluded)
• Syria, 2.2 (again, war casualties excluded)
• Jordan, 1.8
• Sri Lanka, 3.6
• Iran, 3.0
• Bangladesh, 2.7
• China, 1.0
• Egypt, 1.2
• Western Europe, average 1.0

So yes, the US murder rate is unparalleled for a developed nation, and much closer to that of poor or half-failed countries. Of course if you drag into the picture narcorepublics and countries that are more like institutionalised criminal syndicates than republics, the statistics look a bit better, but it's like putting lipstick on a pig—it's still 4.2 by 100k.

Actually no he is right, regulated means trained and properly equipped in this sense. The English language has been corrupted over time to mean strictly mean only regulated in the sense of controlled under the law.

I have to call bullshit on this one, barring extraordinary proof. "Regulate" comes from the Latin regula , which means rule, as in "regulation" or "law". It can also mean "adjusted" or "tuned", but normally referred to machinery or procedures, not people or military units such as a militia.

If "regulated" ever meant what you are saying, you are telling us that English imported the word, changed its meaning by the time the US Constitution was written, and then its meaning reverted to its original one (as it is in Latin and Romance languages). I find that unlikely.

Some of the most widely respected invertebrate zoologists I know are also creationists.

Respected by whom? If you appeal to authority, then name it. I for one will not respect to a zoologist who believes in creationism any more than I would respect a chemist who believes in the philosopher's stone or an engineer who as a hobby tries to build a perpetuum mobile.

The US extradition treaty with Sweden has some very curious provisions. See this commentary by a lawyer. Section VI b of the supplement to extradition treaty, in force since 1984, states that:

If the extradition request is granted in the case of a person who is being prosecuted or is serving a sentence in the territory of the requested State for a different offense, the requested State may: (a) [...] or (b) temporarily surrender the person sought to the requesting State for the purpose of prosecution. The person so surrendered shall be kept in custody while in the requesting State and shall be returned to the requested State after the conclusion of the proceedings against that person in accordance with conditions to be determined by mutual agreement [*7] of the Contracting States.

So, in force of this particular clause, once in Sweden Assange may well be quickly aquitted of the trumped-up rape charges, then sent to the Guantanamo concentration camp, and the US government may keep him there indefinitely "pending prosecution" along with hundreds of illegally detained political and war prisoners. Note that section VI b makes no mention whatsoever of the conditions in which Assange would be detained, nor does it specify any time limit for the prosecution. Even if Sweden requested the US to return Assange, the US would likely just ignore the request once they have Assange in their hands, citing national security concerns.

So you are neither Christian nor Jew, since Deuteronomy 17, 1-5 clearly states that infidels must be stoned to death. Or let me guess, you are one of those Christians who never read their own bible?