It's just funny is all. Hey you can prostrate yourself at Chavez's bootheels if you like. He might even be one of the good guys in the end. But to claim that he's not an authoritarian is just too rich. Even my communist friends admit as much, but they defend it along the lines of 'well the country needs a strong hand right now, much like Cuba has prospered under Castro's strong hand....'

Again, he's your dog, you housebreak him. Maybe nationalizing the steel, banking & oil industries, closing all media which displease him, declaring himself president for life (or until 2025) and forcing the parliament to allow him to rule by decree will work out for them. It's been many years since I've been down that way so I couldn't tell you if it's better or worse.

Even with high oil prices the country is still mired in un/under employment and stagnation. Not up to the level of your typical South American hyperinflative disaster but not rosy either. Who knows? After all when Franco ruled Spain you REALLY could sleep on the streets of Madrid and people would leave you alone. And Tito kept Yugoslavia from plunging into civil war for more than 35 years. Sometimes autocrats work out. Maybe this will work out for the fine people of Venezuela too. But not an authoritarian? Bwahahahaha what dictionary do you own?

Stupid is as stupid does. Eventually whatever it is they wish for comes to be and everything stops functioning. America the Dumb will eventually wink itself out. Picture an ignorant near-theocratic reactionary bankrupt America 30 years in the future. A veritable backwater like Zimbabwe is today. Squalorous, dumb, inbred and violent. All the professional jobs are done by foreigners and Americans subsist on an economy of low wage service jobs and selling life insurance to one another.

Nuclear proliferation is scary on its own, but if America goes down that dark and dirty road you imagined, it's scarier still. We're Goliath, not David, lest anybody overlook that.

Russia hasn't managed to accidentally on purpose nuke anyone, yet. And everyone's darling, Iran will be a nuclear power in 20-30 months or so and many people are actually rather proud and happy about that. India and Pakistan are two not entirely rich not entirely stable countries and they have nukes too. No I think the looming specter of a less-than-exceptional nuclear armed USA is a little overblown. It takes a great deal of money to maintain that arsenal. Money which we might not have for very long.

Sure, until it's time to leave. I can recommend any number of other countries less insane and cheaper to live. Uruguay tops my list right now. 2nd highest standard of living in South America. In 20 years that will be an improvement over much of the US.

It's not as if he was saying anything his glint eyed zealots didn't already believe.

Well then you should get out more. They have an actual real live political party in France for instance. Mailing address and everything. Even a website.

Bottom line. This guy sucks. Are there any other issues from the floor?

Sorry. But until the powers that be censor me you'll be forced to ignore everything I say. Long boring pointless college try cut and paste screeds on your part notwithstanding. But feel free to explain to me all he wonderful things you learned in college philosophy class. I'm sure someone will be impressed.

1. sort of, not really

2. I hope so

3. depends what you mean

4. Not planning on Sweden. The cost of living is far far far too high for legal alien residents. The fact that it's the #1 destination for Iraqi expats today has more to do with aid organizations. Anyway most people don't emigrate as refugees.

5. It's actually quite easy to have dual/multiple citizenship. True enough that many countries erect barriers but for the most part they are financially driven. Though they really bristle when you point this out to them, for instance, you can in effect purchase Canadian citizenship. Many people leaving Hong Kong when it reverted did just that.

6. I don't fear it. I pointed that out. It doesn't worry me at all.

7. America doesn't have open immigration. It has a weird system of quotas that are promptly ignored once enough people ignore them.

8. Embracing creationism is a fad. America has had prior epochs of fundamentalism, like in the 1830s when many people then thought the world was coming to an end and they were all going to heaven. Joseph Smith's Mormonism is just the most prominent of those movements. Sooner or later they always abandon fundamentalism for decades before it reemerges again. Populism and fundamentalism rose and fell in the 1890's, 1920's to some extent in the 1950's and from about 1995 onward.

9. America has always been a little bit anti intellectual, xenophobic and has always flirted with fascism to some degree. That's why periodic populist movements like William Jennings Bryan (Pre Scopes monkey trial) always had traction and socialism (E.V. Debs) really never did. It's just part of our national character.

Oh I'm sorry I didn't mean the liberal rock candy mountain. I mean here like around Ft. Bragg where military families are slowly breaking under the strain of deployment. Just try telling them that someone other than the CinC is hurting them and they will beat you down. They know what's what.

Unless all your friends agree with you and tell you how handsome you are? My my aren't we wonderful. Yes don't you think?

Almost categorically listed nothing but advantages for women at every age and by every measure from adolescence to death. I would have thought someone would have caught that by now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/articles/results/ageing.shtml

It's hard to truly understand what you're complaining about. I fully expect Broadsheet to print an article complaining that because men die earlier than women it's men's fault that older women are lonely and frustrated.