I guess because our society has become such heavy drug users, many seem inclined to ignore the damage done by the drugs and the law. Do you think the pharmaceutical industry and insurance system of health and the power of money lobbying in the Beltway has anything to do with our heavy drug use. Alcohol can't be advertised on TV, but other drugs sure are.

The pharmas and lobbying is certainly part of the problem.

However, if you pack rats too closely they start acting in self destructive ways. I don't think humans are all that different from rats in many respects.

To a big extent I blame television and advertising, they promote a lifestyle which we are supposed to hold as the epitome of being, and yet virtually no one can reach that level of consumption, beauty and status.

We are a nation with our noses pressed against the glass teat, wistfully longing to be like the fantasy which is constantly served to us in order to drive the engine of the economy. Like the man running downhill we can never even slow down lest we fall on our faces.

Advertising is rarely aimed at the rational portion of our minds, rather it is aimed at our emotions, it is designed to make us feel inadequate unless we have the very latest in fashion/cars/gadgets/cleaning products/you name it.

We are living a very unnatural and stressful life, psychosocially we are evolved to live in small bands of hunter/gatherers of no more than a few dozen people. Civilization is such a recent phenomenon evolutionarily speaking that we have not adapted to it at all mentally.

I've been fitfully reading the evolutionary psychology mailing list for quite a few years now.. There is a lot of it which is beyond my ken, but what I do understand is fascinating to me.

So much of human behavior is determined by evolutionary pressures of which we are only starting to get a glimmer of awareness. There is much to be learned when it comes to the genesis of human psychology.

Democracy can be a totalitarianism of fifty percent plus one.

You really don't have any idea what any of the words you use actually mean. According to you, every democracy on the planet is totalitarian. You right wing anarchists/antistatists are all crackpots.

At least I can read what is actually written.

Parse my words carefully o ye jumper to conclusions.

"can be" != "is"

Since conspiracy theorists are always wrong, the assassination of Ms Bhutto was the work of a lone gunman (bombman?).

At least that is the case if we follow the "reasoning" of LWM.

At some small risk of being accused of bullying again, I just want to note that LWM has once more not answered my simple question.

Do you have to piss in a jar to prove you are not an apostate?

And another simple question has occurred to me..

Do you believe in guilty until proven innocent?

Touched a nerve, eh?

As I already stated, I love it when my opponent descends to personal insults, that is proof they have no heavier caliber ammunition.

Now if I were going to insult someone I would say something like this:

"I saved your life today, I shot a coprophagic dog."

But then I don't have the benefits of a high class education which teaches you to use words like "moron".

Buh bye

There is nothing more frightening than a clown after midnight. -Lon Chaney

I did not know that.

(/johnny carson)

This is your brain on drugs, eh?

So that you do not any words out.

My wife would be extremely upset were I to pull an "Elvis" and shoot the TV.

Newton Minow called television "a vast wasteland" on May 9, 1961.. It has not appreciably improved in the intervening years.

In fact what has happened is that the rest of the media has descended to the level of television, bubble gum for the mind, something of no nutritional value which only serves to rot your little gray cells as Poirot calls them.

I am gross and perverted

Im obsessed n deranged

I have existed for years

But very little had changed

I am the tool of the government

And industry too

For I am destined to rule

And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious

But you cant look away

I make you think Im delicious

With the stuff that I say

I am the best you can get

Have you guessed me yet?

I am the slime oozin out

From your tv set

You will obey me while I lead you

And eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we dont need you

Dont got for help...no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

And you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold

Thats right, folks..

Dont touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video

Oozin along on your livinroom floor

-Frank Zappa

Dictionaries don't define usage.

They report it.

Have you learned to spell "secede" yet?

In claiming that prohibition, not drug abuse, is the problem, the one idiot totally loses sight of the underlying problem and concludes that the wrong solution is in fact, the problem.

You misstate my position o ye pisser in cups..

Prohibition makes the problem of drug abuse worse.

Alcoholism did not go away with the passage of the twentieth Amendment, but the violence and corruption associated with the distribution of alcohol did.

It's interesting to note, that since the nineteenth Amendment passed between the eighteenth and twentieth, women did not vote on the prohibition of alcohol but they did vote on its repeal.

I wonder why that might be.