The very best method to kill flies I have found is with a spray bottle of some kind of glass and surface cleaner. Something like Windex will work, or something stronger with chlorine/bleach will kill them faster. It's better to use the kind of bottle that lets you adjust the output from spray to stream. Stream is more effective but the mist will work if you get close enough. Give it a few practice squirts and you can easily refine your aim (if you ever do any target practice, this will be trivial). Nail 'em with a single squirt and they drop, crawl around a bit, and die. A single shot and they don't get back up. A follow-up shot makes them die faster, though I can't help think that this must be a very nasty and unpleasant fluid in which to drown.

It's much easier than trying to squash them with your hand and less unsanitary too, though definitely less sporting.

Does "shut down this agency permanently and don't replace it with anything similar" count as an enhancement?

If we want to fight terrorism we could always stop installing dictators and manipulating the affairs of other nations.

This happened because to become a judge, one must generally be a "believe in the system" type. This is why judges will automatically take the word of a police officer over yours, being impressed by the fact he/she is a "sworn officer", because this type of mentality doesn't consider that cops and other members of government could lie to get what they want. So now it finally bit the judge(s) and made them look bad, feel a little angry? It's been doing that to regular citizens for a long time now.

Because we as a society have fucked up priorities and overvalue things that are relatively meaningless?

The doctor who finally cures cancer will be anonymous to the general public compared to an NBA player, an NFL player, or the latest shallow whore who can (somewhat) sing with auto-tune.

I don't argue with your logic about the ratio of players to fans. Rather, I address why there would be so many fans and so much money to be extracted from them. Personally, I just can't get that worked up about other people playing a game, the outcome of which won't affect my life one way or another. I certainly can't identify with that team as though it were an extension of my ego, saying "we won" when I contributed no effort.

Now get off my lawn.

More like, the media discovered long ago that sensationalism sells better than rational thinking because emotions are much easier to manipulate. Being mostly followers who have been conditioned not to think critically, the public and thus the public's representatives simply follow.

Yes. When the news reports about the chemical weapons first started coming out, they kept making a big deal out of this. I kept wondering, "and if those people had been shot instead, would that make you feel better?" Seems I'm not the only one to think of that.

Out-of-control governments are the real terrorists. Al-CIA-da would salivate at doing one one-thousandth the damage a cancerous government can do.

That's hilarious because a non-racist would assume that all races are equally able to learn, read, and speak a national language. The person claiming a national language is "racist" is implying that some races are less able than others to cope with such a change, which is itself a racist belief. It is amazing to me the way this is so often glossed over and not pointed out.

I don't know about all of that, but being able to understand one another because there is a standard is how you maintain a nation long-term, without having it spilt into factions of people who see each other as different from the rest, only to become Balkanized over time.

Another sad truth: political power is gained and expanded by dividing people, not by uniting them. The extreme hypersensitivity encouraged by identity politics and the obsession with group identity has two major effects. One, it encourages emotional, irrational thinking which helps prevent the sort of attention and scrutiny those in power don't want. Two, it produces division and squabbling over matters that by design cannot be resolved, creating much distraction, wasting much energy, and most of all allowing politicians to keep (and expand) power by promising to protect each group from all of the others. It's classic divide-and-conquer.

Inventing "racists" where they do not actually exist is never going to lead to the sort of color-blind society that judges people by the content of their character. "I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law", Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Really? Because I make these decisions based on the facts of the matter, not the popularity of those involved. I suppose during the early 1500s you'd have sided with Tolosani against Copernicus because the latter was not considered credible (and by some, heretical - our version of a "crackpot") during his time.

I scrutinize the message, not the messenger. I doubt you appreciate just how easy it is to demagogue and character-assassinate, not to mention that both of those are carried out with emotional arguments/manipulation and other propaganda techniques. Reason is much more difficult to twist; facts are even more difficult still.

I'm not trying to be rude, but the mentality you demonstrate (which was instilled in you) is the major reason why society has as many faults as it does today.

I appreciate and admire your intentions here, but the sad fact is: you cannot reason with this kind of narrow-mindedness.

Although, I would be glad to be proven wrong on this one.

Is that how you describe the spying, manipulation, and dehumanization in which they engage? You rate them on how effectively they do so and express your disappointment that their art has not yet been perfected as a science?

Sometimes I suspect that this civilization is lost.

You never read 1984 or you didn't fully comprehend it.

The message is, "you will fall in line, or we WILL find you". The patient and therefore smart move is to set up the surveillence infrastructure first, get people used to the idea, and then become a more oppressive government. The only power governments have over their own citizens is against people who break the law.

If you do that then the marketing won't work! Why, they might even start evaluating their needs rationally...

When you have a culture in which average people believe thinking and reasoning is a terrible burden to be avoided or offloaded at every opportunity, you naturally will observe the kind of dependency and vulnerability you point out here. It leads to people who don't want to be involved in decisions that drastically affect their own lives.

Somehow there arose this myth that you either know nothing at all, or must be a fully trained expert, that no intermediate level of knowledge, no amount of reference could ever be useful.