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Sexy isn't necessarily sexist. This isn't really either.

Video still available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA
and
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/25/the-e-u-s-breathtakingly-awful-science-video/

Even if you accept the pessimistic premise of your post there is still plenty of upward mobility available

That is straight up false.

"Minimum wage" is a modern invention.

Yeah, minimum wage is a modern idea all right. It's only 4,000 years old after all.

Government is the problem....not the solution.

Tell you what, why don't you go live in a government free zone like Somalia for a while. I think you'll find the experience enlightening.

Since the makers of Apple bling are now paid $285 a month, something that you could earn in 24 hours at $11.91/hour.

If a flunked math student can discover a theory of relativity [...]

I hope you're not referring to Einstein, because he never flunked math. See http://physics.about.com/b/2007/09/19/physics-myth-month-einstein-failed-mathematics.htm and http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1936731_1936743_1936758,00.html.

In fact, Einstein absolutely needed math to make the theory of Relativity.

Also, calm down :)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001206,00.html
Maybe this guy?

I'm sure it's great, until an unidentified and presumably foreign person assassinates you on the way to work.

Get some exercise. I know, it sounds crazy, but exercise can really help to relieve some anxiety.

No, it doesn't sound crazy. Here is an article on the subject from Time Magazine. Also look for the study done at Duke University in 1999 where they compared exercise to Zoloft.

Psion did not not "invent" the PDA any more than Apple "invented" the PDA in 1993 ..... 15 years after such products debuted.

Semantically, at least, Apple did actually invent the PDA:

Apple CEO John Sculley had coined the term in the keynote speech he made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7.

Read more

The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992 by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton.

confirmed

Psion did not not "invent" the PDA any more than Apple "invented" the PDA in 1993 ..... 15 years after such products debuted.

Semantically, at least, Apple did actually invent the PDA:

Apple CEO John Sculley had coined the term in the keynote speech he made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7.

Read more

Unfortunately, I have to watch on my computer to be able to provide that feedback. I generally only watch Hulu on my living room television. The only time my feedback ever changed the ads I received was when I wrote to them over the eHarmony ads I was receiving. I complained about the ads because I didn't want to see ads from a company with an anti-gay history(1,2,3). I will say, however, after I wrote, they responded promptly saying they would forward the complaint to marketing and I never saw the ads again. As far as clicking "No" on "Is this ad relevant to you?" I've watched a few shows on my computer with the specific intent on clicking "No" for the Charter Communications ads. At one point around half the ads I saw were for a cable company that doesn't even do business where I live.

(1) http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1627585,00.html
(2) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/26/BAGB1BNUE5.DTL
(3) http://mashable.com/2010/01/28/eharmony-lawsuit/

Australia's Gun Laws: Little Effect: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1736501,00.html [time.com]

From the article:
"Other researchers have focused on mass shootings: there were 11 in Australia in the decade before 1996, and there have been none since."

11 to zero.

For the rest, I said it didn't affect gun crime rates, only mass shootings. What do you think you're rebutting with an article that says the same thing?

You also glossed over the fact that in Australia you can still own rifles, shotguns and handguns, 16 years after the new laws. It still isn't a "total gun ban".

Taking the safety off my pistol while aiming it at you does not cause me to pull the trigger, it merely allows me to later pull the trigger.

So registrations are bad 100% of the time, because in a tiny percentage of cases it allowed total gun bans decades later? Are you sure you want to push that logic? Seriously? Because in every gun murder, the would-be murderer first had to get a gun. Therefore if you want a gun... And you've just rationalised total gun bans. The fact that only a tiny percentage of gun owners use their weapons in anger is irrelevant by your logic, as long as they can, they should be prevented from ever owning guns.

You've apparently got more in common with the anti-gun nuts than you think.

Australia's Gun Laws: Little Effect: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1736501,00.html

How is China capitalist? It is certainly more capitalist than it was 10 years ago

It depends on how you define capitalism. 10 years ago I watched ARM Chairman Robin Saxby give a keynote speech where he said, "China is wonderful - it's the most capitalist country on Earth." What he meant was that, regardless of the central planning, China was actually a very good environment for doing business. Chinese suppliers were very competitive, and producing low price goods and materials. There were very limited regulations on employment, wages, manufacturing etc. and no need for employers to pay employee taxes, provide health care etc. China didn't even have free education for all children until 2006. That "central planning" that some people despise has led to China having a modern and efficient infrastructure, which in turn makes business more efficient.

In China, you can hire a person for $200/month, work them 100 hours a week, and fire them on the spot. That is a level of "capitalism" unmatched in Europe or the U.S.

TIME: Why China Does Capitalism Better than the U.S.

Actually I read about global cooling on the Time's website from 1974. Oh right, you environmentalist nutbags were looking for an excuse to stop fossil fuel use, so came up with global cooling. When that failed, you came up with global warming. Now that the globe really isn't warming, it is global climate change.

I have a better solution for all this. Methane is actually the #1 greenhouse gas emission from people. So if you believe in global warming, put a plastic bag over your head to capture all the methane coming out of your digestive system. (Since your environuts are kind of stupid, I'm saying that your buttocks is actually located on your head) Make sure you duct tape it real tight to make a strong seal and keep that evil global warming gas inside the bag. Then you can pay me $10,000 to dispose of your methane so that you feel better about yourself.

From: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/04/a-little-girl-finds-her-voice-thanks-to-threatened-new-ipad-app/#ixzz1xfwxflS6 Maya smiles and gives me a big hug as soon as I sit on the couch, or as big a hug as a tiny three-year-old girl can manage. Her mother, Dana Nieder, laughs and explains that because Maya has difficulty speaking, she often has to express herself in other ways. She is as smart and curious as any other girl her age; the problem is that the muscles that control her speech are weak and disorganized, making saying a single word incredibly difficult. Doctors have run multiple tests but all they can determine is that it is probably a genetic condition.

But if you REALLY want to lay the blame for Global Warming Theory. . . .blame Margaret Thatcher

Now, could we get back to talking about popularizing real science and maybe getting the species a foothold off-planet ???

It's a useful thing to be able to videotape cops. It's a check on them ABUSING THEIR POSITION, which they often do. It is also allowed by Law. I'd go one step further than that and say that it's an obligation to self to do all one can to protect oneself since NOBODY ELSE IS GOING TO DO IT FOR YOU. Do not ever kid yourself that anyone will.

P.S., here's a Time story from 2008 called "Why Circuit City Busted, While Best Buy Boomed." It claims Circuit City failed because it was poorly managed and complacent, while Best Buy flourished because it was the opposite. In other words, we always write the same post-mortem for dying or dead companies.

It's the tip of an iceberg.
http://missmoveabroad.com/how-many-americans-live-abroad/

There's an estimated 4-10 million Americans living abroad these days. Most of them probably hang onto their citizenship thinking they might need it someday, but that could change at any time, depending on how they're treated by the US government and IRS. With rules getting worse, thanks to the US's inane requirement that US citizens pay taxes on their income no matter which country it was earned in (the only industrialized country with this rule), more and more will opt out.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1983238,00.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/americans-renounce-citizenship-taxes_n_1435390.html

They could be spending their time fixing the education system...

They're trying to, but they're getting resistance for that, too: With few exceptions, teachers' unions fight against efforts to ground teacher evaluation in data and simultaneously resist giving administrators the discretion to remove teachers.

Completely and 100% wrong. The US is the #1 manufacturing economy in the world, and it is focused in exactly the right areas, high value technologically intensive products.

http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-top-manufacturing-countries.htm

Furthermore it is actually improving while China and Europe are in decline.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2012/05/24/seattle-is-leading-an-american-manufacturing-revival/

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
Time

But im sure you will just call me a "shill" too because you can't produce a rebuttal to simple facts like this.

I don't think anyone has ever eaten some guy's face after smoking a cigarette or filling up their car with gas, so no... the same reason shouldn't be used to ban cigarettes and fossil fuels.

There are rational arguments for why you might want to ban either (and arguments for why you shouldn't), but the one you're presenting here makes no sense whatsoever.

The only evidence that the face-eating zombie guy was on bath salts is speculation by a police officer, who was previously quoted in the Miami Herald as saying that the cause of the attack was "cocaine" and "a new form of LSD" time.com. They're just pulling it out of their rear ends to fit an anti-drug agenda. In fact, no drugs were found on the suspect, and no toxicology reports have been released proving he was on ANY drugs. The other high-profile murder attributed to bath salts was the murder of a New Jersey student that led to the passing of Megan's Law, criminalizing possession and sale of bath salts. Well lo and behold, the murderer turned out not to have any bath salts in his system. What a shock! I wouldn't be surprised if the same is the case with the face-eating zombie. Why is it so hard for people to accept that people can commit horrific acts without the aid of drugs or demons? Some people are just mentally ill.

Smokers poison the air that everyone around them is trying to breathe, and it's perfectly reasonable to insist they go do that somewhere else.

Says you. What if the smoker owns the property? Are you saying it's reasonable to make someone leave their own property to enjoy a legal product?*

Second hand Slurp-ee generally isn't a problem.

Think so?

Think again.


*Smoking bans are kind of a hot topic in my area right now, and I've already heard all the weak arguments and ad hominem attacks of the anti-smoking crowd, so you might as well keep that malarky to yourself.

Yes there would.

This is reflected in the bell curves - women have less variation than men. This is why more boys are born than girls - more boys die because they tend to take chances growing up.

Birth rates are generally pretty close with less than a .1% variance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio As for taking chances growing up meaning more boys die... citation please (i expect you have none as collecting data on this would be impossible). What about gender specific diseases such as breat cancer altering that ratio? What about the impact of certain mental illnesses being different between the sexes? Perhaps men have a higher rate of birth (again less than .1%) because they are more likely to be affected by X chromosome health issues and a higher birth rate is a built redundancy.
What biological expense of child birth? Women live longer than men. If women incur a 'biological expense' death rates certainly don't support your argument. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827162,00.html
Please provide data confirming that women are risk adverse more so than men. Your bell curve argument is hack science and you argument(s) over all are weak. Your 'business requires the ability to take risk and so men are better at it' is long bow to draw as well. Australians richest woman (and one of the richest people in the world) is a woman, same for the PM, same for an ex New Zealand PM and the list goes on.

Well, we are patenting a cut of meat. as the next step in the patent insanity.

As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias points out, such a patent on a process — “an algorithm for butchering a cow” — rather than a product, isn’t dissimilar from existing business and software copyrights. But that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. If the cutting of a steak can be considered intellectual property, we wonder what else would qualify. Haircuts perhaps? We’re just waiting for someone to patent the “Rachel.”

Once you take the first step, for "patenting a process", you can patent anything, as "it is a process".

Cancer and birth defects are terrible illnesses, but the radiation levels from Fukushima are so low as to get lost in the background noise of, say, radiation from a nearby kumquat.

Do kumquat trees draw cesium or some other isotope from the soil like sunflowers do? Sunflower seeds often show radiation. They were even testing them in Japan as a possible measure to help clean the soil, but from what I read they didn't remove enough to be useful, and the plants themselves needed special disposal afterwards.

The U.S. levels in the air were low, yes (expect very few cases of lung cancer from that compared to other sources such as decaying radon coming from our soil, building materials, and in water supplies - especially in Texas), but there were much higher concentrations seen in some rainfall. Although not reported on the EPA site, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had both Iodine-131 and Cesium 134/137 showing up in the milk from the university dairy unit pasture-fed cows. Some places in the U.S. had rainfall testing 1000 times the FDA allowable limit for drinking water. Even the Cal Poly milk was above the amount allowed in drinking water. At least I-131 doesn't last long. They quit showing test results for S.L.O. milk, so it isn't apparent just how much of the cesium present had been directly deposited on the grass the cows ate versus how much was absorbed through the soil. The amounts are not huge, but whatever is left in the soil is going to be there for decades. Average figures tend to hide the fact that there are hot spots, some seen even on the east coast. Most of the radiation that caused cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl is believed to have been the result of what was in rainfall on a particular day.

If you look at cancer reporting in California tabulated over the years and broken out by group, there are a couple of cancers rising significantly particularly in women, and the curves are getting steeper. Yes, the total percentage of the population affected is small, but people are being affected. (The timing of the rises would correlate with Chernobyl as the cause). The fact that there is some radiation from the soil and space (even brief spikes during solar flares), doesn't make radiation any more desirable.

I actually thought the head of the NRC, Chairman Gregory Jaczko, had recently done a reasonable job, but I'd like to know more. Not everyone that has concerns about nuclear power or feels that low-level radiation is still worth minimizing is anti-nuclear. Don't discredit citizens with legitimate concerns, throwing out utter nonsense about threats. Talk about pure FUD...

Republican Congressman Lee Terry of Nebraska had a few things to say, but was exceptionally vague. It's hard to trust much during an election year, especially attacks, but the fact that Jaczko resigned seems to validate that there was an issue. It seems to be a combination of management style and selectively withholding information to get his way. We should demand transparency, even if some of the details require educating people to keep the public calm. He does deserve credit for the U.S. being more on target than what Japanese officials were saying as to the (greater) area that was a high risk place to be. A campaign of lies, denying the consequences of releases, seems a big mistake to me. Only through honestly facing important issues can we hope to effectively manage them.

http://leeterry.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1712
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2115375,00.html

Insightful? Interesting? It's Funny FFS

It may be funny, but it's also true.

Don't be an idiot. The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource. Without people eventually development would stagnate or even reverse itself. It has happened before when there were large population implosions (fall of the Roman Empire, Black Death, etc).

A Brief History Of China's One-Child Policy :
"Even if China's population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production," Mao Zedong proclaimed in 1949. "Of all things in the world, people are the most precious." The communist government condemned birth control and banned imports of contraceptives.

Combining rampant population growth with the disastrous industrial and agricultural follies of the Great Leap Forward , China experienced one of the largest famines in modern history -- the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1962.

just need some vetted moderators

Perhaps the TSA has some qualified folks for this job...

to rank the attractiveness of people from either gay or straight perspective

Apparently, we don't need real live moderators to rank attractiveness.. On the gay vs straight issue, not sure this helps much in a bar scene (for example, from a straight perspective, maybe I find a lesbian very attractive... not gonna help me much). However, if perhaps there really is gaydar and they can figure out how to automate that...

then making tallies per gender per estimated age buckets (21-24, 25-28, 29-32, etc.)

That's what they are doing w/o the vetted moderators...

THEN you'd really have something.

I think privacy advocates already think there is something here...

No, I meant that I don't have friends with low GPAs, read this:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1891111,00.html

Anyways, it's funny: a couple of years ago people who didn't watch reality shows were considered "anti-social", now those who don't have a facebook account. I guess that the kind of "audience" is the same. I don't "like" them, sorry.

You might actually do better on Windows Phone 7 than Android if Microsoft is throwing $$$$$ at you to write apps for their struggling platform.

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/06/microsoft-wants-developers-to-create-windows-phones-apps-so-bad-its-paying-them/

I read an extensive piece in Time about fracking the Marcellus play. The piece seemed pretty balanced and authoritative. My take away was that if done using best practices fracking can be made relatively safe -- at least as extractive processes go. But there is a lot of room for damage if it is done irresponsibly. IMHO society and industry can both benefit from the positive dynamic of competent government regulation to make fracking -- or for that matter -- any large-scale mineral extraction work.

The root problem is not the technology. It is corruption. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico proved that. It is a simple fact of life that fossil fuel really brings it when it comes to providing cost-effective, portable efficient energy. However, if we ruin our quality of life while extracting it we obviate its advantages. We have people watching these industries, but "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

$129,000

Unless I am totally mistaken, the people who view the scanner images aren't even within sight of the screening area, precisely for this reason (so people can't be forced through the scanner to satisfy the prurient interests of creeps.)

Indeed. However the easiest way around it is for people in the booth to have friends that pick who to scan, rescan and rescan again.

Exactly. The grandparent is complete bullshit and should be modded down.

The US is the world's largest manufacturing nation in terms of economic output. People seem to forget giant companies like Intel, Caterpillar, Boeing, Cisco, ADM etc. not to mention the pharmaceuticals and the farming industry which are world leading. Not only that but the US does it with a mere 8% of its workforce. The economic output of the average US worker is more than 10 times that of his Chinese equivalent because he's more technically skilled and produces far more valuable products in a highly automated setting.

The Boeing main aircraft assembly building in the Seattle area is the largest manufacturing facility in the world.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/facilities/

It was Boeing who discovered the Y2K problem because they are such a large consumer of aluminum they have to project consumption of aluminum a decade in advance so the aluminum industry can scale their capacity to match their consumption.

I don't know where people get the idea the US isn't competitive in manufacturing. It is a huge force on a global scale in manufacturing, and factors like low energy costs because of the vast natural gas reserves being developed are likely to keep it that way. Anyone writing that the US has no manufacturing capability is full of bullshit.

http://www.shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756

http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

Do remember the NYT is a very left-wing paper and that climate change supporters are majority left-wing.

In a way that's true. Just as evolution "supporters" are more left wing.

Really?

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."

1) Reality has a well know liberal bias.
2) On average liberals are more intelligent than right-wingers.

1) When I hear liberals say things like, "Obama is doing a great job with the economy", I see that bias has affected what some see as reality.

2) Bullshit. I hear that spouted all the time, but only by liberals. Many of the media driven surveys that claim this usually did so by asking respondents questions that liberals are more likely to know the answer to, like "Where was Obama born" or "Did Iraq have something to do with 9-11". They don't ask questions like, "Who said that she could see Alaska from her house."

The more professional studies used to come up with that conclusion used kids to make the determination. KIDS! They also allowed the kids to determine their political affiliation themselves rather than determining them from the ideals the children hold dear.

The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge — more than 20,000 kids — and this difference is highly statistically significant.

But self-identification is often misleading; do kids really know what it means to be liberal? The GSS data are instructive here: Kanazawa found that more-intelligent GSS respondents (as measured by a quick but highly reliable synonym test) were less likely to agree that the government has a responsibility to reduce income and wealth differences. In other words, intelligent people might like to portray themselves as liberal. But in the end, they know that it's good to be the king.

In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.

Was when the FBI encouraged a young immigrant boy in Portland, OR to try and carry out an attack on a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. The boy by all accounts had no prior involvement in anything radical beyond browsing the internet, and seemed more angry at his parents than the US or any 'infidels', was approached by undercover FBI agents and brought into this plan as the trigger man.

While that is interesting in itself, the really telling part comes from the fact that the City of Portland refused to cooperate with the FBI after 9/11, refusing to allow agents unfettered library access and other information into the citizens of Portland. Not only this, and while it may be conjecture, Portland has never seemed to be on the top of anyones attack list as far as foreign terrorists go... Needless to say Portland quickly subscribed to the FBI's intelligence program after the attempted attack and decreed that it would fully cooperate in the future with any investigations.

The article sounds sketchy and it's the NY Post. I suspect this is being written as if you won't be able to use Hulu at all without cable in order to make it sensational, but it's probably just some marketing strategy Hulu is considering for specific shows. This article calls it a "rumor".

hasn't been released yet. Playing with W8 pushed me to look seriously into Linux alternatives. (#! and Linux Mint) Valve should release Steam for Linux this year. Gabe Newell trashes Win8/Linux client near: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/25/steam-native-linux-client-near-gabe-newell-trashes-windows-8/

Whew...it's a good thing people never die at the hand of an expert...oh, wait.

Uh... I call bullshit on this.

The USA is the world's largest manufacturing nation. We make more stuff than anyone else. China may eventually pass the US, however that's because it has 4x the population. In addition the US share of world manufacturing capability has been relatively constant for decades.

http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

In addition there is starting to be evidence that it's gaining on competitors like China. Labor and energy costs there are rising fast while labor costs are flat and energy costs are falling in the US due to domestic oil and gas production and advances in automation.

So don't let BS handwringing from political pundits fog the issue. The facts are out there.

Dude your forgetting India is where we dump our e-waste. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2071920,00.html

What did you think they would do with it?
BR> They also have built the first fully functional 35$ computer (keybaord, monitor, os,etc) , before the raspberry pie (you have to provide monitor, keyboard, etc). http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/2011/10/india-introduces-the-aakash-a-35-dollar-tablet-computer.html

Sure they seem haphazard in their ways http://lh6.ggpht.com/-UhCp2pPblI0/R-1DtL5owuI/AAAAAAAABEw/ZSn9PR4RDCs/P1040295.JPG

But they are a head of a few things, regardless of how they do things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourced_(TV_series)

This isn't quite true, the new more efficent toilets have trouble flushing down larger turds.

This time magizine article details the grey market surfacing around buying toilets from Canada, and smuggling them back into the country, to get around the 1.6 gallon flush law.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996507,00.html

The irony is that if you have a low flow toilet, you may need to flush multiple times for particularly gargantuan turds.

There are a few citations, here's one from Time and another from NPR saying that about a third of women in the armed forces are raped during their time in the service. It's not really surprising when you consider that you take a group of men, teach them to dehumanise people and that force is a valid way of solving disagreements...

While I personally am in favor of vaccination (the autism connection theory is too weak), I agree that parents should have the right to refuse to have their children vaccinated.

When more than X% of a population is vaccinated against a disease, the chance of an epidemic or wide spread outbreak is low. As you increase the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated, the risks from the disease continue to decrease. At some point, the risk from the disease (risk of contagion times risk of significant impairment from contagion) becomes lower than the risks of the vaccine. The exact percentage necessary varies based upon the communicability of the disease, and the risks of the disease. The point at which the vaccine becomes more or a risk than the disease depends upon those, and the risks of the specific vaccine. So, as long as a significant majority of the population chooses to get the vaccine, everyone is better off.

The CIA only -ahem- "freed" countries when it was economically advantageous to replace the established regime.

The CIA helped to support local peoples fighting to roll back Communism, such as in Poland and other places.
Was that economically advantageous in any immediate sense? What about Korea? The CIA also assisted the Kurds resist Saddam. I think you've got some bad data there.

And are you really trying to argue that America is still a force of freedom in the world?

There is no need to argue the point - I would say that overall it is an established fact. Recent example: Iraq is now a democracy, has been runing it's own affairs for some years, asked American to withdraw its combat troops - and it did. Iraq has many challenges as a country, the ultimate of which is to keep their democracy which is a challenge for every such country. ( Iraqi news )

Of course it isn't just freedom, or the CIA:

Navy sends 8 ships to provide tsunami relief (2011)
TSUNAMI DISASTER: Relief Effort (2005)

Clearly, you haven't had an American corporation step into your life and tell you how things are going to be from now.

I'm pretty sure that American corporations: 1 - Aren't the government. 2 - Aren't allowed to keep slaves and serfs

Your perception of the circumstance is about 50 years outdated, my friend.

You might be missing a few years of news and events.

Without a huge enemy, America has no choice but to bully.

Without a huge enemy, America cuts its defense spending drastically (as it did in the 90's after the Cold War ended) and tries to go about its business.

I think, my friend, that you would benefit from a wider range of news sources. Peace.

Joining the other unemployed 54%

* http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/10/survey-85-of-new-college-grads-moving-back-in-with-mom-and-dad/