False. In fact, "democracy" means people making decisions collectively. As Publius wrote in Federalist 10, it's a society of people assembling and administering the government in person. For example, in Massachusetts, the residents, at a town meeting can pass any rules they wish for the town (subject to state and federal law, etc.). That's, arguably, actual democracy. But voting for your leaders is not. We call it "representative democracy," to highlight the fact that we're collectively voting for people to make decisions for us, but that's not a "type" of democracy, it's actually a different thing. We have small pieces of democracy -- town meetings, voter initiatives, and so on -- but not much of it.

You can make an argument for their being different degrees of democracy, but there are plenty of democracies in this world including the country you currently live in (unless you finally moved away from the USA).

Only in the exact same sense that there are different degrees of socialism, and there are plenty of socialist regimes in this world.

It only seems that way to morons like you. Really.

Literally no one agrees with you on this, no matter their opinions of my beliefs. I don't even believe you believe this. I can tell you're trying to hurt my ego, but you'll have as much luck doing so by attacking my intelligence and knowledge as you would for calling me short or hairless.

Translation: "crap, you caught me in a lie again, so I'll just lie some more and pretend that I wrote it and you just ignored/missed it."

Of course, this is the same idiot who lied about Democracy being responsible for more deaths than Socialism, even though the essentially socialist regimes Soviets and Chinese in the 20th century killed many times more than all democracies put together. Right, right, they aren't True Socialists. Well, there's never been a True Democracy either -- thankfully -- so it's a dishonest claim no matter how you slice it.

Not that we're surprised.

there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.

Most Western European countries are mixed economies, mostly capitalist, with some socialism, and a welfare state.

East Germany and the Soviet Union really bought into the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything. Private property was outlawed. You could go to jail for making a profit.

The East Germans were so committed to the idea that the state owned everything that they believed they had a right to build an enormous wall to keep the governments property (people) from escaping to the West.

The way he defines success and failure is framed to say all missile defense fails.

Iron Dome uses a combination of a proximity (radar activited) fuse and fragmentation. Sometimes the interceptor destroys the warhead. Sometimes it causes an explosion of the propellant which destroys the warhead. Sometimes it simply breaks the incoming missile or rocket into segments or destroys its ability to follow its planned ballistic path. According to Lloyd and Postol, if the warhead isn’t destroyed the interceptor failed.

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see the immense flaw in this logic: if someone fires a missile at you and you aren’t hit that is good news.

And no matter how much evidence the US or Ukrainian government produces, no matter how detailed and annotated, Russia will dismiss it with a wave of a hand as fabricated, slanted, biased...whatever they want. They'll never admit responsibility.

Yes, because UN peacekeepers have such a long, sterling reputation on stopping stuff like this from happening.

But regardless, the UN will never do anything in this conflict. Russia holds a veto in the Security Council, and they will stop any such measures from ever happening.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

...to end drug prohibition since at least 1996, on both practical and 10th Amendment grounds. Statists love the "War on Drugs" because it gives them more ways to control people.

Meanwhile, President Obama, the first president who openly admitted to using illegal drugs, has cracked down harder on medical marijuana and other uses of "choom" far harder than Bush ever did.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.