What you have described is a society being unable to discuss its problems openly for fear of making the problem worse. Altogether, it's a great argument for monoethnic societies: let's get rid of all minorities so we can finally talk about our problems without having to pretend like they are of a different nature than they actually are, thus being open to cheap accusations of stupidity and/or philosophical incoherence, when all we are trying to do is fix a fucking problem.

This is the real world though, meaning you are actually educating your competitors and people who will be clever enough to undermine US power and promote their own nations instead. I understand that's a hard concept for the average liberal to understand, but if you open a history book and let go of your childlike daydreaming you might realize that's how things really work.

Not really an expert blogger, but the solution to your problem is this guy: http://nextdraft.com/ I stopped reading any news website altogether. By the end of the day I read his daily email and figure out what happened. I can't recommend this anough.

I read Slashdot, Lifehacker, The Atlantic, Sherdog (yeah, I like MMA) and take a look at the main topics of Google News (US and my country's, Brazil) through my iGoogle page. Anything beyond that, I don't care. I am ignorant of everything else only in the sense that I am ignorant of Soviet architecture: I am not supposed to know everything nor will I try to, so it is only natural to always be ignorant about something. 20 years ago I would be forced to read a whole newspaper daily just to find out these same things and would end up knowing more about things I don't care about? Bummer.

You forgot one thing: if they say we can't be sure if the fetus is alive or not, than its about 50% chance to each. Well, you can't put someone in 50% chance of being killed. If there's 50% chance there's someone in a house, you can't explode it and after claim it was not murder because there was 50% chance the house was empty. Prove me a fetus is not a human being. If you can't, become anti-abortion right now or admit yourself to "maybe" support the murder of innocent babies. If you choose the former, go fuck yourself.

As an anti-abortion guy, I can say that you are wrong about the "anti-choice" (anti-infanticide) folks: we know abortion to be the murder of a baby, don't want any of that to happen, and are very preoccupied with the future of a society which believes killing babies to be right or acceptable in any way. As for the anti-life people, as I see them, they like everything related to sexual liberation and don't want anything to bother them while at it. To me, that's acting just like an animal (pleasure/pain and to hell with moral) and also the recipe for destroying our civilization.

Jokes such as this make me want two things: 1. Some way to mod a commentary as "Brilliant", so that, when growing bored of a topic, I don't miss something truly awesome. 2. Some part in Slashdot where we can read all these "Brilliant" commentaries, the funny, the insightful etc. This would be one fucken awesome book. Sometimes I feel we are loosing great material here, things which are really interesting and get lost in the hundreds ofn topics, never to be read again. ??? Still not convinced whether I should create a signature or not.

Every now and then we read about some new energy producing mean, it just makes me wonder... Can anyone even begin to imagine what would a society based on these technologies look like? They are very diverse and seem to cover ever encreasing aspects of our lives. Each one could take care of a bit of our smaller needs and nuclear energy could be the only massive one, providing for larger needs in a world with ever more energy-efficient technologies. What if through technology we can reach a society with no more big energy concerns, just by sort of cutting the sharp edges of our wastes? Anyone knows some hard science fiction dealing with this kind of society?