How soon before we can send the rest of them?

The luxury drink in questionâ"Kopi Luwakâ"is produced from coffee beans pooped out by the palm civet, a time-consuming process that helps contribute to the beverage's price tag of between $330 to $500 per kilogram.

I have a word for this fetishistic novelty which is pursued for the sheer purpose of displaying wealth:

Decadence.

With it comes the downfall of empires. Don't adjust your set!

Society was happier when people were focused on family and behaved in a (relatively) chaste manner.

Part of maintaining that structure requires a clear sexual values system, including a sense of what is normal.

When we go pluralistic, or make "anything goes" the new normal, this traditional order is threatened.

While I will never support the persecution of someone for being quietly gay, I think a lot of the excesses of that time were designed to counter-act the rising sexual liberation movement.

Mars was once a thriving world.

Its citizens became decadent, and they turned their technology on each other in a final war.

A few brave ones came to earth and made it resemble their erstwhile home, which they could observe through telescopes in its final nuclear holocaust.

All technology is used by those who are in power, or want power.

That surveillance is one of those powers isn't particularly new. People had networks of spies in ancient times.

The real question is the people in power. They will have this power, and they will use it; toward what end? And, what is their level of moral rectitude?

I don't think we can use rules, laws and regulations to keep them in line. They need to be good people.

When being nice becomes more important than being right, reality is optional.

When having everyone get along is more important than promoting the best and booting the worst, expect a loss of quality spiraling out of control.

There are some truths about reality that offend our sense of personal importance.

1. World peace can't be done. There will always be irrational people, and you must oppose them with force.

2. Pluralism doesn't work. Society only functions when there's a single standard of values and thus behavior.

3. Diversity doesn't work (corollary to point #2). The happiest societies are unified in values, heritage, culture, language and basic philosophy.

4. Group delusion is normal. A large group of people will settle on not only a lowest common denominator but on a wishful thinking illusion.

5. We are not all equal. Some are better at others than certain things and deserve more power.

There are more, but these are some starter heresies for our modern time. Our society is as controlled as the Soviets, as lynch mobby as the Salem witch-burning days, and as closed-minded as the toughest religious fanatics.

We're just doing it in subtler ways.

You know what's valuable now?

The best kind of fake ID -- someone's eyeball, removed.

"It's him, we've got the iris scan... it does look a little dead... oh well, ring him in just in case."

Snowden? I thought his name was Kim Philby.

He betrayed the USA for supposedly lofty goals, but now he's hanging out with our enemies and leaking secrets totally unrelated to his "whistleblower" mission.

Over the last week, he's started to look less like white knight and more like garden variety traitor.

No one's going to blink when Obama drones him.

AT&T wants us to believe that because their website was so insecure that feeding it sequential data would reveal private customer information, the problem can be solved by throwing the "hacker" -- who notified them immediately and did not leak the customer information -- into jail.

Yeah, right. The overseas hackers aren't going to even care that much. They'll take your information, use it to rob you blind, and presumably AT&T will cover it up, since their response has not been to address the actual problem in this case.

Weev is caught in the crossfire. American industry wants to have government protect it from its own sloppy coding. The truth is that protecting industry encourages more sloppy coding, which then helps the Chinese hackers who are robbing us blind.

FREE WEEV!

Because closed source is obscure. And security by obscurity is a fallacy.

Any time dogma takes precedence over reality, you're going to fall like the Soviet Union.

With the planned immigration amnesty, you'll soon be competing against another 30 million people, who will displace enough people from their jobs that they'll be aiming for yours.

Enjoy your future as perpetual serfs of the corporate-media-globalist machine!