No way in hell you went from middle class to the 1% No. Way. In. Hell. I can only assume you, like most Americans, have your own definition of middle class, attaching moral values to it, rather than a defined income level.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are talking about an dual income home. In 2003, $67,348 was the median household income for a household with two income earners.

in 2009, $343,927 was the minimum annual income to be considered in the 1%.

So you're telling me you increased your income by 5!? How many years of trading did this take?

What in the hell are you talking about? The Soviet Union was not any more militarized than we are now. What the terrorists accomplished was drawing us into a modern day crusade against Islam, torture, and being feared and looked down upon by the whole world. If you don't think that was their goal, well I think it worked out pretty well for them anyway. America, the torturing colonizer that covers its prisoners in shit and sics dogs on them.

I'd say they are absolutely tied to capitalism in that they are about ownership. There is no way to own the idea of an upgrade button the way you can own a mine, so the government created a fiction that lets corporations treat them the same way.

"by giving the people enough education to see through demagoguery."

We haven't even achieved that here in the U.S.

More like:

Officer: I need you to assess these senators and figure out how to convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission.
Jones: What's our mission?
Officer: To convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission.

I think what is really going on here is that video game designers have to limit the possible game outcomes due to their resources. So they do a good job of disguising the rails. I mean, whether you do A, B, or C, X is going to happen. But they spend a lot of effort making A, B, and C look like real choices. And they spend a lot of time making X look like a consequence. But an unavoidable event is not in fact a consequence.

Those aren't choices. Real choices usually have a lot of context and don't have completely surprising outcomes. How many times have you been playing a game, made a decision, and when you saw the outcome you were, "Huh?"

It's not just you. I remember when I first started using google and how amazingly appropriate its results were if you knew the right search terms. Now days I'm surprised more that it does so poorly on what seems like straightforward searches.

Why is this? SEO must be part. But I also know if anything I'm looking for is even slightly related to a product, forget it, you get pages and pages of shopping results. I too, have to result on my memory and knowledge of where to look for certain things more and more.

That's why I like the term Progressive. My political views are not about spending money but in making our country better. Sometimes that entails spending money (think infrastructure) but many times it can be achieved by being more efficient, trying counter-intuitive policies, etc.

A better name for conservatives would probably be Regresssives. They don't want to keep things as they are, they want to roll them back as far as they can in order to advantage themselves and their allies (think any kind of business regulation). The only defense "conservatives" have when you point out the actual happenings in the world is to say "Well, not all Republicans are conservatives," or "George Bush wasn't a real conservative." Both are fallacious, One True Scotsman thinking.

Mark my words, if we get a Republic president in 2012 we'll be at war within 2 years and our national debt will double in their first term.

Check out Swords & Wizardry:
http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/

or
Labyrinth Lord:
http://www.goblinoidgames.com/products.html

Either is 1 free book to get your oldschool game one.

WoTC jumped the shark.

Nah, I use OS X at work and Ubuntu at home: right side is the right side. You spend most of your time in a GUI opening, scrolling and closing windows. Putting controls on the left side means you have to cross the screen every time you want to work with a window. How do you accidently close a maximised window? I suppose your argument would make sense if a lot of what people did with windows was drag them all over their screen. Maybe people do. I certainly don't.

I like the earth tones. So now all you people bitching makes them change it to PURPLE!

What the hell!? Let me guess you probably like a blue scheme, like every other fricking GUI has been for decades?

Lame. Yeah, he didn't deserve the prize, he also didn't give it to himself. So to immediately quack out the republican talking points of "Big Ego" and "Too Exposed" shows you aren't thinking. Let me ask you this, every time Bush was on TV (which was about every day) were you saying "I wish he'd get back to work"? Or how about when Bush was saying "Bring it on" were you questioning the size of his ego then?

Yeah, that will be a shame, because the corporate governance we have on this and so many other issues is so awesome.