If you really think so, it's because you don't appreciate the (massive) distinction between cleverness and wisdom.

The way I like to explain it: if you take a childish, annoying, malicious, aggressive asshole and give him greater intelligence, do you know what happens? He becomes more effective at being a childish, annoying, malicious, aggressive asshole.

The problem with having them involved in government is that I can't decide not to sit in the pews of, or do business with, or adhere to the government. Government is founded on two related things: force and threat of force. You can't just ignore those.

Thank you. One definition of "psychotic" is "out of contact with reality". There are many psychotic people. In fact, I would venture that the majority of people in Western societies are psychotic. I believe forced ("public") schooling and mass media to be the two primary causes, with an almost hypnotic reverence for authority as an enabling factor.

There is a funny thing about compulsory education. Since ancient times, particularly ancient Greece and Rome, compulsory training was only for slaves. In fact the word "pedagogy" comes from an ancient word for "slave".

No shit. If we are going to have a system designed to restrict the availability of drugs, one would think it would be used to prevent the over-use of antibiotics so we can stop creating these "superbugs". But no one can get high on antibiotics, and that's all government seems concerned with, so their overuse continues...

Although I can predict its moves and articulate its faults, I will never truly understand this Puritannical need to meddle in the affairs of other adults, tell them how to live, and especially to get power-hungry government into that business. It must come from completely empty, desperate lives devoid of all purpose and joy, trying so hard to fill the vacuum within themselves by feeling powerful since they couldn't do it by feeling compassion.

That is a decent summary of what I stated, yes.

Heroin is just a form of morphine modified to more easily cross the blood-brain barrier. Thus if morphine has a medical use in pain management (and it does), one would expect heroin to have a similar use (as an aside, the hilarious part is that heroin was invented in an attempt to treat morphine addiction - they were trying to produce something like modern methadone but ended up creating a harder drug).

In our litigious society I feel a need to say that I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and if you thought it was medical advice you're a fuckin' moron. It's sad that saying such a thing would ever even cross my mind but there you have it. I am weary of this idea that anyone should disclaim things that were never claimed. The fact that they were not claimed is disclaimer enough.

It's not just government itself. The phenomenon I described above also explains why issues that should be factual/scientific are instead political. I'll give an example: marijuana is a Schedule I substance. Schedule I means "no medical use". Yet we have doctors prescribing it and patients using it who report relief of symptoms. We have lots of laws like this which directly contradict the available facts. It's because so many people aren't concerned with facts. They are concerned with their feelings, their fears, and with what offends them.

Don't worry. The next time you see it coming because you understand this concept of a "track record" or have read a little history, you'll still be called a tin-foil hatter.

There are large numbers of people who never really grew up emotionally and are unable to cope with reality despite possibly having high intelligence. It's not that they have any solid reason to doubt you (in fact it's the opposite if they bothered to look). It's that they want so badly to believe their government is not out-of-control that they're personally offended you would suggest otherwise. Of course anything that offends them must be wrong, right?

This is actually how the average person perceives reality. Yes it's scary. It's why so little effort is put towards prevention.

The US badly needs a loser-pays system for civil cases. Also, if you are accused of a crime and are found not guilty, the government (local, state, or federal) which tried to prosecute you should pay in full all the costs you sustained, including legal fees, time lost from work, time away from family and loved ones if jailed, and travel expenses. This money should come out of the prosecutor's budget in the case of criminal trials.

... which, unless you go to considerable time, effort, expense and maybe also some luck to change it, is in fact based on national origin. Think of national origin as the default state. It can be overcome, but otherwise, it is the default setting. For most people most of the time, they are a citizen of a nation because that is where they were born.

Everyone always eventually gets what they deserve, whether that is towards their benefit or their destruction. It's just that it usually takes a good god damned long time.

And that's the problem.

I'll add that the other powerful force destroying Western civilization (the US is merely the leading edge of this wave) is "how can I tell my neighbor how he should live, and back it with the police power of government while claiming that it's for safety or some other thinly veiled excuse?" It's just that this one has been around a long time. The idea that adult people must be protected from themselves is newer by comparison. Both ideologies require a powerful government with its fingers in everything, so the politicians are happy to endorse either.

What the fuck is wrong with "if you like Wild West and understand what that means, use our Bitcoin system. If you want nice and regulated, use standard currency"? In other words, why this one-size-must-fit-all mentality? Someone using a currency created for the very purpose of such anonymous transactions either understands what this means, or learns a valuable lesson about not diving into something before understanding it. Or decides that the learning and potential risk involved is not worthwhile and uses US dollars, Euros, or whatever else.

There is nothing wrong with that! This means a new option is available that wasn't there before. If you don't like the option, don't go out of your way to use it. No one is going to force you to use Bitcoin if you don't like (or understand) the terms under which it operates. This isn't broken. The effort to fix it will therefore fail and is likely to create additional problems.

It's subtle and there is a long sequence of events separating cause from effect, but this psychotic unwillingness to treat adult people like adults is the primary enabler for the US government's perpetual expansion of power and scope. That stupid, lazy, impetuous people who make bad decisions might hurt themselves is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only thing preventing the takeover of widespread, institutionalized stupidity. It is not an injustice when adults who make poor decisions suffer the consequences. No one was coerced and there is no victim in that picture. The effort to prevent this is well-intentioned and tragically misguided, but happily and diabolically exploited by politicians in the business of protecting you from yourself because to them it means opportunity to grab power that will never be given back.

Greed for money or goods is a material form of avarice. The lust to have and perpetually expand power at every opportunity is just a non-material form of greed. The latter is more dangerous by far because it is backed by the police power of government and there is no counter-force causing it to retreat. There is only incremental advancement.

This isn't a road or an essential utility or a national security issue. There is no real public interest here. Ergo, the correct solution would have been to dismiss the suit and tell the plaintiffs that they are free to form their own clone registry. The fact that the current registry is a monopoly would be immaterial because said monopoly excludes clones and thus wouldn't compete with a clone registry. The clone registry would probably find itself entirely without competition. Then those who are interested in cloned horses know where to look while those wanting horses bred the old-fashioned way also know where to look.

Apparently that's just not as fun as forcing people to do what they explicitly don't want to do.

Do you suppose they would also include a transparent HTTP proxy for people like me who run their own caching nameserver?

It remains that way because a much bigger segment has become completely oblivious. This is not mere ignorance. This is a self-protecting, oblivious, zombie-like sleep state. It includes an active hostility towards anyone who suggests that perhaps the increasingly centralized power and wealth of our society lends itself to being controlled by a small elite. You'll be called a tinfoil hatter no matter what evidence and reasoning you produce, not matter-of-factly either but often in an angry hostile fashion, because the zombies are deathly afraid of anything that might pierce a hole in their worldview of denial.