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The second article appeared in The Spectator, like I said. That's where I read it. The Catholic website is just the place where it's free online. You've really got to have a grudge against Catholics if you won't take a free link from them. City Journal, where the other article appears, is also a completely secular website.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that there are any mainstream Christians claiming that sex is evil. None since Origen, certainly. I happen to be an atheist, and I don't think that sex is evil. I know that Scruton doesn't. As far as sexual mores go, I see a lot of similarity between Christians and non-Christians. The biggest cultural differences are between the polygamous parts of the world and the monogamous parts of the world. As Sir Richard Burton says, that's mainly a function of climate. The non-monogamous parts of the world tend to have more serious strictures against sex outside of marriage, and fathers are expected to do more. The polygamous, mainly tropical, parts of the world tend to have less serious strictures against sex outside of marriage, and fathers are expected to do less. Those are the main outlines of sexual morality, not any of this Christian versus non-Christian crap.

Which type of sex suits your psychology, polygamous mating patterns versus monogamous mating patterns, probably depends more on genes than on culture.

As far as judging other people goes, check out the philosopher Roger Scruton's article Bring back Stigma in City Journal. He also has another good article Shameless and Loveless that appeared in the Spectator.

You are not a troll, you are simply a confused person, who thinks that "powers that be" are interested in improving the education. Well, they are, but their ideas of improvement are very different from your own ones.

There is a vast amount of information on all aspects of problem with the education system available, but here are some quick links.

http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
http://www.beverlye.com/article1.html
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-c lassics.html

Read up on Educational Quality Assessment test, on two-corridor educational system, on the emergence of standardized testing, on the origins of the American public school system. It isn't that there is a conspiracy to enslave and dumb down the kids, it's that the main participants who shaped the education system are not interested in having a well-educated populace and that shows.

BTW, contrast it with the Soviet Union and other socialist/communist countries where education was perceived as a goal in itself (In 1970s an international survey on automation showed that among factory workers about twice as many had completed secondary education in the USSR as in the US. At the same time it was perceived in the Soviet Union that the workers had not enough educaiton, while in the USA it was perceived that the workers had too much education).

Schools mindlessly spending on tech is a symptom, not a problem.

Certainly the energy has to come from somewhere, but the efficiency doesn't have to be the same for two somewheres.

While this site has a pro-nuclear axe to grind, one point it discusses is how much it costs to generate a Kilowatt/Hour using various methods:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_nuclear_powe r.html

If you don't want to bother with the whole article, here's one of the quotes I based my admittedly rough guestimate on.

"Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city's heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines."

My local power cost is only about 3.5 cents (living near several hydro plants, one coal burner, and one nuke plant). For me, charging the batteries off of home current would be about 90% s cheaper than charging them off the vehicle's engine, and even 2.00 gas looks like a great incentive. For others, the savings are smaller, but still likely to prove persuasive.

I'd like to get rid of the coal plant, and actually burn less oil as well (reserving more for durable plastics and lubricants), but if New York needs the power that bad, it's probably not going to happen. Burning the same amount of oil in a few large plants will at least pollute my air less than in millions of cars, for more total power.

Only an educated populace can appreciate the freedoms. It always was so and always will be.

"Teaching" about the First Amendment is pointless. The understanding of its role and importance can only come from reading the great books of Plato, Voltair and Hegel and learning about world history from books and museums. Watching History Channel (if even that) is not a valid substitute.

Since you seem to be so skeptical about the usefulness of computerized crime tracking technology, I think you might find this article from the Economist an interesting read. I couldn't tell whether it's subscriber-only, so I'll reproduce part of it here:

CRIME maps, which record the locations of incidents in order to help predict where criminals are going to strike next, are used by police throughout the world. But the past is not always a helpful guide to the future, and a team of criminologists from University College, London, led by Kate Bowers, think they can do better. A test of their new model, unveiled in this month's British Journal of Criminology, suggests it is 30% better at predicting crime than traditional methods.

It is a cliché to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread. Using statistical techniques developed to study the transmission of infections, they found that burglaries cluster in space and time in predictable ways. For example, properties within 400 metres of a burgled home, particularly those on the same side of the road, are at an increased risk of being broken into for up to two months after the initial incident.

Using these and other findings, the team created algorithms that predict where criminals will strike next, and then used those algorithms to generate "prospective hot-spot maps". These divide an area into 50-metre squares--a level of resolution chosen because 50 metres is a typical line-of-sight for a police officer in an urban area--and give a crime forecast for each square.

In their paper, Dr Bowers and her colleagues reveal the results of a study of burglaries in Merseyside, in northern England. Using historical data, they pitted their predictive modelling method against two traditional crime-mapping systems. They found that their method successfully "hindcasted" 62-80% of burglaries. The traditional techniques, by contrast, hindcasted only 46% of those incidents.

Computerized crime tracking technology like COMPSTAT is already helping to make police departments more efficient, focused and accountable in the real world. No, it won't alert you to a Stop'n'Go shooting spree in the last 3 hours, but it does help you clarify the big picture, about where carjackings are becoming more common, which neighborhoods are becoming more robbery-prone, that sort of thing. And that information can be immensely useful to an overworked precinct with limited resources (overtime, etc.) to do their jobs.

I'm not defending this expensive realtime display covering three walls of a command center, but I don't think the facts justify your skepticism about the use of trend-finding in police work.

A layman's (read: Slashdot punk's) guide to misconceptions about the Patriot Act.

Right. 'Cause the Patriot Act does things like lets the FBI check into our library records without obtaining judicial consent, right? Everyone knows that.

Except it's wrong. The Patriot Act doesn't do what a lot of /. kiddies seem to think it does. Go here for a pretty good explanation of this.

The real question is, why would a regressive tax like VAT ever be a good thing in the highly civilized countries of Europe? 15%? 25%? It seems to me that the only reason for a highly applicable and highly regressive tax like this, that is also combined with a high income tax is to keep poor people poor and dependent on the state for most of their needs. Heaven help us if somebody try to rise above their proper station in life. This is a pretty good
story illustrating this point

What the homelessness industry really wants is total exemption from the law for street vagrants, so that they can remain publicly visible until the final throes of alcoholism and schizophrenia drive them to the hospital or the grave.

... the Manhattan Institute, a CIA initiated "think tank" funded by far right Eugenics advocates like the Pioneer Fund and corporations such as the Rockefeller's Chase Bank which have historically promoted the Eugenics agenda. The Manhattan Institute has sponsored research projects and books like the Bell Curve, Fixing Broken windows and numerous others which propose the idea that blacks are mentally inferior. While the Manhattan Institute is not publicly advocating mass extermination or mass relocation of minorities the policies it does promote are mostly about targeting black and Latino inner City populations in such a way as to make relocation an attractive option and elimination a day to day reality. ...

The corporations, banks and far right race-obsessed groups that fund the Manhattan Institute today were in many cases backing Hitler's rise to power just 70 years ago. They are also the same groups behind Giuliani's Senate campaign and GW Bush's Presidential bid. Chase Bank, the Manhattan Institute's main sponsor, has publicly apologized on numerous occasions for its avid support of Hitler and its enthusiasm to turn over Jewish Bank accounts to the Nazis before they were ever asked to do so. ...

The Manhattan Institute's founder, former CIA director William Casey, ... ...

Along with ongoing subsidies from a number of large conservative foundations, the Manhattan Institute has gained funding from such corporate sources as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and State Farm Insurance, as well as the Lilly Endowment and philanthropic arms of American Express, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CIGNA and Merrill Lynch. Boosted by major firms, the Manhattan Institute budget reached $5 million a year by the early 1990s."

You would think so, but that would ignore the fact that since guns were completely banned in England, their rate of gun crime has gone up drastically -- see this article for more.

You should also keep in mind that the rate of violent crime in London is now substantially higher than, for example, New York.

Thanks mostly to the unconstrained greed of the "elite," the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger than ever, and it continues to grow.

Apparently, you only have to do 3 things in America to avoid poverty: finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do these 3 things are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do them are poor. The greedy elites may have made holding onto a middle class life-style harder than ever, but avoiding poverty seems doable.

How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?

None! At least in the 19th and 20th centuries, revolutions are largely middle class affairs, backed by disaffected soldiers. In Latin America there are instances of peasant revolts but they are typically defeated. There might be a case for a successful peasant revolt in China except one arrogant set of rulers seems to have been replaced with another.

Despite the damage you say the greedy elites have done to America, I can't think of even one who is an object of puplic hatred. America is beset with many problems but the threat of a popular uprising is perhaps the most remote.