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It seems like google fiber is the only fair ISP. I wish they would roll out to my area so they could kill off AT&T and Cox.
Too bad the current evile ISP monopoly was able to effectively kill the requirements of The 1996 Telecommunications Act (fiber to the home for everyone in Ameria with an open backbone for any provider to access) without killing their grants and tax breaks. They basically took the money that the taxpayers gave them to build out fiber, spent some of it bribing congress with lobbyists, and pocketed the rest. Then when netflix came along AT&T has the gaul to say that netflix should have to pay to upgrade AT&T's infrastructure because AT&T payed out in bonuses and dividends the money that we the taxpayers already gave them to upgrade said infrastructure. Every ISP exec, lobbyist, and congressman involved should be in prison for defrauding the taxpayers.

Or are government officials all demanding they be able to watch YouTube videos?http://theweek.com/articles/494883/secs-porn-scandal

The types of videos government officials watch aren't on YouTube.

You can rest easy, though. So many illiterate people have taken up "bold-faced" in lieu of "bald-faced"/"bare-faced" that it is rapidly becoming perfectly accepted.

This is a very specific linguistic phenomenon, known to usage experts these days as an eggcorn (itself a reference to people using the term eggcorn rather than acorn). There's an entry for bold-faced lie in the Eggcorn Database.

Eggcorns are interesting from a linguistic perspective, because they often involve three mechanisms which reinforce the change: (1) the new word or phrase sounds very similar to the old one, (2) the new word or phrase incorporates new elements that have a certain logical relationship to some meanings of the old word/phrase, and (3) the new components often substitute for archaic words or usage that often only have stuck around in obscure English idioms. (In this case, "bald" and "bold" sound similar, these types of lies often involve a sort of "boldness," and nobody uses the term "bald-faced" anymore outside of that idiom.)

Thus in tiny pieces a language is corrupted.

Meh. "Corruption" in language is a matter of perspective. Language naturally evolves. These types of "corruptions" have often been around for decades or even centuries. If they happen to date back more than a century or two, they're usually accepted as "legitimate English," even if their origin is as screwed up as your example (and often more so). If Shakespeare said it, by definition it's okay.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to hold to "standards," particularly in formal writing. But at some point these things become a lost cause. (See, for example, the word "decimate," which comes from a Latin practice of reduction by 1/10th, i.e., reducing to 90% of the original strength or size. NOBODY uses the word to mean this anymore -- instead implying a much greater reduction in size, if not complete destruction -- and if you try to imply the original meaning outside of describing Roman army practices, no one would understand your meaning. Outside of specific historical usage, "decimate" simply means something else now.)

And sometimes the people who complain about linguistic "decay" and "corruption" are the worst offenders -- in their zeal to "fix" English and stamp out usages that sound wrong to them, they often end up creating their own stupid errors.

It's one of the reasons English spelling is so screwed up. See here for a few quick examples of common English words where pretentious idiots tried to make English conform to a mistaken "rule" and added silent letters to words for no apparent reason.

TL;DR -- You're right, and careful writers should take heed. But easy on the "corruption" rant, lest you become a greater danger to English than those you criticize.

2 :in effect :virtually

http://i.word.com/idictionary/...

http://theweek.com/articles/46...

Words can means more than one thing. Literally is now ALSO = figuratively.

It's over. Multiple dictictionaries say so. Suck it up and deal with it, his usage was 100%, literally correct.

English is dynamic, a living language.

Funny thing about this world, sometimes a stranger (in this case a dog) can indeed save your life.
Often it's the dog's own family, but sometimes it's someone who just happened to need help and was lucky enough that their distress was noticed by a dog.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/georgia-bradley-dog-pepper_55d75fd3e4b04ae49703166e
http://theweek.com/articles/466829/7-inspiring-stories-stray-dogs-saving-perfect-strangers
http://www.dogguide.net/25-hero-dogs.php

"presidents dont make laws"

Except for the 34 executive order per year on average:

http://theweek.com/speedreads/...

Facebook click farms
https://theweek.com/articles/5...

It's also a marketing ploy, you can show your users are real.

Or are they?
Facebook click farms
https://theweek.com/articles/5...

Wow, you are out of touch together with Nate Silver...

An argument last made famous by Mitt Romney supporters. Not that Nate doesn't get things wrong every now and then, but this kind of blindly dismissive argument against Nate's data-driven analysis has proven in the past to be a really great way to make yourself look foolish.

Speaking of which, guess what happened less than 2 hours after you posted this? :-)

$51.1 billion? (I'll switch to 55 billion for 2015 numbers since they're close enough and 2015 numbers are what everyone uses now) You'd have to be crazy if you think it's going to be that low. The current estimate (Feb 2015) is for $68 billion for Phase 1, the Central Valley segment.

Don't let the facts get in your way, but Walmart pays well above minimum wage.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salar...

Raising the minimum wage will only make the problem worse. When the minimum wage goes up, there are less jobs. How far do you think McDonalds is from replacing their staff with robots? Another couple minimum wage hikes and many manual labor jobs will just disappear. Also, when minimum wage goes up, the costs for needed items rises as well quickly eating up any raises.

What you should really be advocating for a is a basic income.

http://theweek.com/articles/45...

Also, forget affordable healthcare, we need to just have single payer and get it over with. We pay so much more than all the other countries for health care, without any improvement of outcomes.

A smart bank robber would do it 3 or 4 times.

No such thing. A smart person is not going to gamble losing a few decades of their life over a four digit sum of money. That's assuming the teller(s) don't just dye pack the money, in which case you end up with nothing, even if you manage to elude the law enforcement response. In the United States you've also got a non-zero chance of running into an armed security guard, civilian, or off duty law enforcement officer.

The lottery has a higher return on investment than bank robbery, with zero chance of one ending up behind bars or dead.

Unfortunately, it's not just the right that wants to silence "offensive" speech; the left wants to as well: the SCOTUS refused to hear a case about high school students who wore t-shirts with the American flag to school on Cinco de Mayo and got in trouble because the school said this could "incite violence" among Hispanic students who apparently are offended by the US flag. This case was even supported by the students who had worn black armbands back in the 60s to protest the Vietnam war, and won the SCOTUS case, the decision of which said that free speech rights do not end at the schoolhouse door (these former students supported the flag-wearing teenagers' right to free speech).

It's weird how some on the left are so eager to push "diversity" that they'll compromise our own liberal western values in the process of pandering to people who do not share these values. These values are under assault from both sides: the wacky Christian religionists on the right, and the leftists who denounce right-wing Christians (for good reason) and then back up people with the same or worse values just because they're non-Western.

Just send him to Libertarian Island with Peter Thiel, and then they can all be killed by pirates once they're outside of US jurisdiction.

That software attorney has one immutable quality that could and absolutely should have a strong influence on how we regard it. It's not human. While it may be able to formulate expressions of law, prescribe paperwork, and maybe even construct strong arguments based solely upon a cold, mechanical interpretation of case law and legislation, it can not and never will be capable of feeling. If we exact the effect of law while sacrificing our humanity

Are you seriously arguing that lawyers are humans with feelings as regards their profession? You're too funny :-) Based on far more references than I could ever cite they long ago sacrificed their humanity in the name of war on terror / drugs / civil forfeiture / etc. The computers might at least get some of the obvious cases right like the Bill of Rights if we're being more serious or this case that the humans missed if we're looking for obvious mistakes: http://theweek.com/speedreads/...

Of course it is editorializing. But that still is a subset of journalism.

Sorry, I meant reporting. Editorializing is not reporting, and I would argue that conflating the two, often deliberately, is one of the biggest problems with modern journalism.

Here's Stewart's own explanation, though:

http://theweek.com/articles/44...

How many times has this administration embraced a petition and moved forward with it?

Yeah, because the white house peititions have been so wonderful, they should move forward.

http://theweek.com/article/ind...

Especially this one: Transfer funds from the drug war to fund the research and development of the genetic engineering of domestic cat girls. Total signatures: 838.

I can't see why this one hasn't had more signatures. Maybe a conspiracy involving Batman.

Another question, do you think Obama even reads them?

I'd hope so! They're even better than the Onion.

I'll let somebody more experienced on it do the talking:

http://theweek.com/article/ind...

(And no, I'm not a fan of him, just I don't see any reason why he'd be wrong on this.)

Going quite a bit off topic here, but I'll bite:

Build a border that can be enforced

I hope you're not talking about building a wall. A wall is one of those ideas that seems pleasant, simple, and realistic at a quick glance, but when you get into details it starts to break down. Even the Great Wall of China failed many times.

Rather than trying to go back to Isolationist policies, we should be looking at A) why they come here, and B) what steps we can take to diminish A. In the long run, removing their need/desire to come to America illegally will have far more benefit for everyone than simply trying to hide the problem behind a chain-link fence.

A isn't easy; a lot of people will claim "because America is the greatest country in the world!" Except we aren't turning back a tide of Canadians at our northern border, so far as I'm aware, meaning either America and Canada are roughly equivalent in greatness or there are other reasons that Mexicans are risking quite a bit to come to the U.S. While I'm no expert on Hispanic relations, it seems to me that what is happening is not so much Mexicans wanting to come to the US, but Mexicans wanting to leave Mexico and the US being the most natural choice. (I'm not aware of Guatemala offering a lot, and in fact Mexico is facing its own illegal immigrant problem with Guatemalans)

The main cause that I'm aware of is the Mexican Cartels, who mainly use drugs as their source of revenue. The surging movement in America to legalize weed is having a growing impact on that. They still have crack and heroine, of course, but these are far more destructive drugs that will result in fewer return users.

There are likely other other factors, such as poverty, especially in the border towns (driving along the highway by the border in El Paso, TX gives you an eerie comparison between Juarez and El Paso, especially when you consider that much of the El Paso side is still lower class.) Government corruption might be a factor.

For B, I already mentioned the legalizing of weed in America. If we can change the discussion of our "War on Drugs" from punishment to rehabilitation, we could lower the demand for drugs from Mexico (and other countries dealing with the same thing) even further.

For poverty, I don't have a good plan. But let's consider that fence again. It could cost $22.4 Billion to build (though the full cost is hard to figure out, apparently). A quick search tells me that the estimated population amongst the six Mexican border states was 12,246,99... in 1990. So that number's a bit old, we'll bump it up to 20M (another source says 24M by 2020, but that's for both sides of the border.) With about 27.9% being kids, that's about 14M adults, giving us $1600/Mexican adult (more, actually, as the "kids" only includes up to age 14). The average yearly income for Mexico is about $13K, so that's significant but not huge.

What if, instead of spending that money on the border, we use it to improve the cities on the Mexican side of the border? They would give at least a small economical boost, though short-term, and while improving those cities we could have US law enforcement work with Mexican law enforcement to further route the gang

I just think our roads are engineered well

Umm... American's infrastructure is not in good shape.

The US ranks 22nd in personal freedom 10th in overall prosperityand Nobel prizes per capita. 101st in peace index 34th by life expectency I could go on but hey, at least the US is still #1 in military spending!

No. I pay taxes because it's my duty to society. [...] Perhaps you are a sociopath, and we need threats of violence to control people

No, dearest. It is the other way around. If, indeed, the tax-avoidance was only found among sociopaths, the Executive (IRS) wouldn't have needed the investigative apparatus, its own "Tax court" (whose Judges the President is empowered to remove at whim), and the power to confiscate property and bank-accounts (on mere suspicion, neither proof nor even an accusation of wrongdoing is required), and to garnish wages.

If parasitic sociopaths like myself truly were a tiny minority you allege us to be, why have the tax code at all? Have responsible folks like yourself pay what each believes their fair share to be, and shrug at the non-paying sociopaths the way you shrug at a similarly anti-social drunkards.

Indeed, why do you trust the IRS to determine your fair share — why don't you pay more? It is easy — and the Treasury encourages such gifts.

not all of us are that way

If most of us were not that way, then we would've been getting by just fine on voluntary donations — as, indeed, we were throughout the 19th century.

But then the government types decided, the benevolent and omniscient government officials are better at running various things — and the taxes went up... Today I pay at least 50% of my earnings to various tax-authorities (Federal, State, and local) — plus the sales tax. I don't like it one bit — I'm perfectly certain, I would've spent it better than Charlie Rangels in Congress do — and only the threat of violence keeps me in line.

I also don't rob banks, because I consider it an obligation to society not to do so.

No, it is not your obligation to society — it is your obligation to the owner(s) of what you would've misappropriated. Derived, of course, from your inner subliminal unwillingness to see the same sort of thing ever done to yourself.

But I do find your equating obligations to the government with those towards fellow men interesting. Perhaps, you'd be better in a country driven by Confucian or similarly Socialist principles, rather than the Individualist America...

You're right about the US in general; I should have said in SOME parts of the US: http://theweek.com/article/ind....

> We're not developing new rockets from scratch because we forgot, we're doing it because the old tech is obsolete and being replaced by new tech.

If by 'new tech' you refer to the SLS, it's largely based on the space shuttle, which is 1970's technology.

> Down in this sense means no advances or even the forgetting of things. Name one field where this is occurring to any significance.

I'll name two. Nuclear and space technology are areas where this has happened due to a large proportion of research in the 1960's and 1970's being conducted by the government and thus classified. This includes developments in nuclear refinement and reactor technology, nuclear simulation technology, rocketry, space-based optics, and many more. Most of this information is still highly confidential. As the people who had this knowledge or means of accessing this knowledge in their heads have been retiring and dying off, we've lost a huge amount of information. As a result companies like SpaceX have had to 'reinvent' a lot of old technology.

leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists

Can't we just shoot these doubt-mongering denialists and move on to the great new world of next Tuesday? What is it, that keeps the rest of us so cautious in dealing with these contemptible human beings? They are traitors to humanity and should be executed — instead of being allowed to affect the good scientists' work, while secretly scheming to escape to a private Elysium of their own, when the Earth is no longer habitable.

We — historians of science, politicians, music professors, and actors alike — know better!

Don't forget Australia's law where if the person looks young, it counts as CP. It effectively puts a ban on taking pictures of women with small breasts (if they're in their 20s or otherwise look young). http://theweek.com/article/ind...

What this means is that it would be illegal to take pictures of a young-ish looking 24 year old with A-cups, but perfectly legal to have sex with her 16-year-old sister as long as you didn't take pictures of it.

Remember, laws always exactly reflect what is moral. If it's not illegal, it's not immoral!

Now you know how Windows/Android/Linux users feel.

You know Windows/Android/Linux users that have to deal with the Hatorade Distortion Effect?

They are most certainly ignoring solar.

Solar potential:
http://media.theweek.com/img/g...

And I agree about the breeding bit, the Chinese were doing it right for a while, shame they stopped.

A great, recent example of this is some panel on Fox where one of their blowhards--er, commentators--Eric Bolling spent a good 5-10 minutes ostracizing Pres. Obama for his "latte salute" (despite their beloved Pres. Bush II doing the "dog salute") and saying that they need to respect the troops. Then--in the very same broadcast!--when another commentator reports about the United Arab Emirate's first female fighter pilot dropping bombs on ISIS/Daesh alongside American pilots, he immediately makes the crack "So should we call this 'Boobs on the Ground'?"

Jon Stewart does an excellent review of all this. You can tell he's getting tired of Fox News because, rather than use the usual banter to highlight their hypocrisy, he straight up says "Fuck you and your false patriotism."

17K lives by one estimate
http://www.newrepublic.com/art...

A testimonial:
http://theweek.com/speedreads/...

I'm unsure home how that compares to the millions of lives W. saved when he invaded Iraq ;)

Meanwhile, interest charges add up on the money borrowed to finance construction. A single day of delay in Georgia could cost $2 million, according to an analysis by utility regulators.

This help explain why a good 35% of adult Americans' debt is in collections.

But then, we go ahead and brag about how good a standard of living we enjoy as compared to those other world citizens, conveniently refusing to mention that most of that standard of living is financed by borrowed cash!

This is why many multinational companies have often have shell companies.

Car analogy:
Toyota is generally considered to be a Japanese multinational company. It is not one company, though. It includes Toyota Motor Corp in Japan, but also Toyota Industries Corporation and Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc. and probably many others. Since Toyota itself is not in the US, it cannot be subjected to US law. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. or Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc. can be. That is how Toyota can make lists such as The 7 most made-in-America cars that you can buy.

The idea that "the sheeple" need to be lead by smart people who will make the best decisions for them is sort of endemic to that side of the aisle.

It's a single data point, strictly anecdotal, pure chance, perhaps.

But since the day I first purchased a dial-up modem, I have never heard words like "sheepie" used outside a geek forum.

The Democrats tend to draw the wonkiest of the wonks and the elite professional class into their orbit.

That is a pretty fair description of the framers of the American Constitution.

Though there are exceptions to the downward intellectual spiral on the right --- Ross Douthat at The New York Times, the people involved in this reformist project, the writers associated with The American Conservative and Front Porch Republic, and the "Postmodern Conservatives" at National Review Online --- the general trend on the right in recent years has been away from reflection on ideas for their own sake, and toward fashioning an ideology to galvanize the "conservative movement" and electorally empower its chosen political vehicle: the Republican Party.

George Will has shown an admirable independence of mind over the years: denouncing Nixon's corruption during the pre-resignation period of the Watergate scandal, when most Republicans were still defending him; calling Americans "undertaxed" during the early years of the Reagan revolution; criticizing the Iraq War at a time when dissent from George W. Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror was verboten on the right. And then there was his thoughtful 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft, which made a communitarian case for using government to instill civic virtue.

One wonders what the author of that book would make of the George Will of today --- peddler of Tea-Party-approved libertarian bromides, promoter of know-nothing climate-change denialism, serial spewer of bile against the all-purpose bogeyman of "progressivism." (Reading Will's column these days, you get the feeling he thinks the Republican Party needs to position itself to the right of Theodore Roosevelt circa 1912.)

The sad, sorry decline of George F. Will

"Now" is misleading when the article is 2 years old?

lol :D

Oh well, more recently they hit 74% with all renewable energy combined:
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

Maybe the 50% is correct for this year or other pages have just picked up the hype and not checked the sources or noticed the dates either.
http://www.thelocal.de/2014061...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/qu...

Did I Fucking Love Science got it wrong?
http://www.iflscience.com/tech...

More 2012:
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
I can't see a year here:
http://theweek.com/speedreads/...

Anyway, even if it has happened recently too it's less impressive when it has already been done more than 2 years ago..

I love The Week. It's a reasonably objective collection of the best news articles/opinions each week. Each Sunday, I sit down with a cup of coffee for a half hour and get a broad overview of what happened in the world that week, and what people said about it.

It's basically a printed new aggregator, showing only the most insightful and informative opinions (from all sides) each week -- the exact opposite of the Internet news I consume daily.

In a few decades, flying a blimp might become a bit difficult.

I'll have to keep this short as its late..1.-Yes, in fact not 3 hours from me is a KKK compound and they have their marches and white power picnics and nobody cares. The closest thing you get to "censoring" is the fact that the media doesn't care enough to show up but if the viewers don't care neither does the media.

2- The USA is the size of the EU so you will ALWAYS have a few "gangbangers with badges" somewhere that will act like Brownshirts. I'm sure those protesters got a big ass check after they got done suing while the brownshirts are working as mall cops.

3.-As far as "legalizes lying" I'd say the UK has that done pat thanks to their libel laws, look at how nobody would say shit about the Top Of The Pops DJ being a Pedo until AFTER he had died, even though they knew as early as 1971. And it isn't like its trivially easy to fight back thanks to the net but call me crazy, I'd rather not have a world where rich pervs like Jimmy can do what they want because the press is afraid to say boo.

4.-As for Faux News...I guess you missed the memo because not only is Fox News missing the mark but they are bleeding the right wing dry by making them out to be the "rich old white people party" and thus showing that yes free speech works because people WILL see through the bullshit in time.

By redefining marriage, in turn the effect is telling religions that they must redefine themselves. Are you really going to claim that all religions, many with histories extending back for millennia, must all redefine themselves? All the Jewish variants, the Christian and assorted protestant faiths, the Muslim believers, the native American nations with their beliefs, they must all redefine their religions for the convenience of the US government?

I don't care whether or not churches redefine themselves. I make no demand on them whatsoever. They can do whatever they please within the bounds of the law because it does not affect me. I even respect their right to grant the marriage sacrament only to straight couples, though I would personally prefer that such discrimination not be legal for an organization which is able to claim significant tax privileges.

My point in my first post was that if a religious organization wants a sacrament of union that doesn't share a name with a civil status that can be conferred on homosexual couples then the churches can rename their sacrament. That's all.

Maybe I got a little carried away by telling religious groups to suck it up but it makes so unhappy to hear about people who oppose gay marriage and homosexuality in general, or think that homosexuality is a choice, or a sign of moral decay, or a result of sexual trauma. Many of the staunchest critics of homosexuality push their views in the context of an organized religion, which tends to make me think poorly of organized religions in general since I can find no logical reason to be opposed to homosexuality.

I decided to spend 5 minutes looking into the precedence issue and found a random online source about the history of marriage which seems to suggest that civil marriage predates religious marriage in Rome anyway. This may persuade some (if civil marriage does truly predate religious marriage), but religious and civil origins or marriage are both millennia past and don't matter much in my opinion.

The bigger problem is antibiotic use on farms, and the FDA's recent toothless rules ( http://theweek.com/article/index/254057/why-the-fdas-new-antibiotic-rules-fall-short ) rely on the farmers who use them to mediate the results of cruel conditions (overcrowding, etc) and the companies who sell them to voluntarily cut back on their use. Good luck with that.

Meantime they hit hard on Purell users. Bah.

... if there's vast clouds of alcohol floating about in space ...

No "if" about it, thats old news.

In a prelude to the more recent gross attacks on democracy, the US and UK have both been consistently shitting on whistleblowers for many decades.

Snowden's method will probably only work if your leak will make you famous. For everyone else, anonymity would be advised.

The author of Spyblog has been documenting the progress of the UK's seemingly-inexorable descent into a Stasi police state for about 10 years.

In 2006, he started posting tips on whistleblowing. This has since evolved into a more comprehensive website.

http://ht4w.co.uk/

You are essentially right, and the effects are felt in many sectors of the econemy.

Bio fuel corn is exactly the same as livestock corn, and often the same mills turn out the same product (distillers dried grains, or DDGs) for both uses. The farmer isn't put in a box of having to sell only to one market.

But what does happen is the price of beef and pork rises, to the point where feedlots can't survive meaning cattle ranchers have to resort to more costly means of feeding a herd longer on range land.

Government subsidies have paid about 45 cents for every gallon of Ethanol produced.

In addition there has sprung into being an entire secondary market for RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) like bitcoin without the math or verifiability). This has actually boosted ethanol production above demand, which causes them to over-blend (slamming the racks) ethanol to the point where you can't be sure what you are getting at the pump.

Sorry, but you are confused. Progressive lobbyists helped the Democrats write that bill. Republicans had nothing to do with it. (Are you going to call the President of the Center For American Progress* (a fellow "progressive") a liar when she claims credit for her work?

Sorry, repeating Big Lies doesn't make them true, it just makes you a bigger and more pathetic liar. The mandate has been a Republican idea for decades, and that's just a fact you'll have to deal with. As well as Romneycare literally being the inspiration for Obamacare. You'll have to deal with that as well.

Are you going to claim with a straight face that the progressive (not to be confused with Obamabots) position was the mandate? This on some planet where progressives didn't want single payer, and then the public option as a compromise?

That would be difficult for you to do since I'm simply relying on the facts.

A bigger and more pathetic liar. Heritage had no problem with Romneycare, for years. Pretending their about-face has nothing to with partisan politics is as absurd as pretending that Obama's election had nothing to do with anti-war Democrats turning into supporters of drones in January 2009.

Sounds like one of the annual half dozen food recalls for e-coli here in the US, Captain Anecdote.

Really? Cholera reportedly kills 15, sickens hundreds in eastern Cuba [miamiherald.com]

Really, you can't read? Murika: ecoli sickens people in 5 states.

Individual mandate is not part of the Republican plan

It's always been the Republican plan.

States constitutionally are granted more power in this area than the federal government is. So it is quite constitutional for Massachusetts to have Obamacare, but not the federal government because of this separation of powers.

Still a Republican plan, and was pushed nationally by Republicans in the 90's. Republicans only turned against it because

1) Any successes would be credited to the Democrats
2) Republicans can reap the voter backlash from the mandate

It doesn't matter that the mandate was their idea, they wont be the ones who voted it into law. The only good thing about Obomneycare is that it's an easy way to find out if someone is a tribalist partisan hack.

There are more recent examples such as Saudi Arabia accusing a condor of spying Or Egypt Blaming Isreal for shark attacks. The fact is that the Egyptian government wants to distract it's people from the latest military takeover of the government and finding something to blame on the "Zionists" is a time tested way to do that.

I used to have a Moroccan co worker who blamed Israel for everything bad in life down to his country's poor economy. It really is a weird how an otherwise intelligent person could miss the game of misdirection being played out repeatedly.

Wikipedia has an entry on it: X-Keyscore

Good background story: Solving the mystery of PRISM

Spiegel Online covered it: 'Key Partners': Secret Links Between Germany and the NSA

Oddly enough it appears that news about intelligence programs used by America and its allies is reported in Persian. Go figure.

Why the geographical comparisons?

I expect that it is because it makes it easier for people to relate to the enormous numbers being talked about while both innumeracy and illiteracy are a problem.

I've used an example like that myself to explain to people why the lottery and gambling are nothing to pin your hopes on. (When they draw the ticket, it will be like randomly picking 1 person west of the Rhine/Mississippi to win. Are you that person?)

While the Egyptian Army is certainly no paragon of freedom (or battle prowess, but that's another story...), at least there is a formidable power in Egypt that leans toward secular sanity and against Islamist lunacy. Egypt could again one day stand with Turkey (for all its troubles) and Jordan as examples of modern, stable states among the insane theocracies that surround them.

The Egyptian military has very strong ties with the Egyptian economy. What's bad for Egypt's economy impacts the Egyptian military's bottom line. Making sure the Suez keeps traffic flowing, making sure tourists aren't killed/taken hostage are very high priorities for the military. Also the US spends $1bn/year propping up the military.

It's not all about secular vs. islamist either. Mubarak wasn't exactly an islamist, but still managed to steal billions from the country over his 30 year reign: http://theweek.com/article/index/212105/hosni-mubaraks-stolen-70-billion-fortune

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/oak-cliff/headlines/20130301-firing-and-arrests-of-dallas-police-officers-could-be-opening-salvo-in-another-departmental-scandal.ece
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704720804576009812869266014.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-04-15/news/chi-schaumburg-drug-conviction-dropped-20130415_1_john-cichy-hudak-drug-conspiracy
http://theweek.com/article/index/220367/planting-drugs-on-innocent-people-nypds-shocking-scandal

I could go on, but you can read the results of searching for cops planting drugs on google yourself rather than plugging your ears and screaming at the top of your lungs how it can't be happening.

Counter Point with links: No idea which (if either) are true.

The Esquire interview with the guy who claims to have shot Bin Laden.

One of several sources claiming it is probably a fraud. (Google "esquire osama bin laden interview".)

Again, I don't know which if either are true (could be politics on several levels), but I thought I'd post both links for others to peruse.

But if you are very lucky, they will let you intern for them:

http://theweek.com/article/index/242065/america-is-raising-a-generation-of-interns