GG: A rational citizen, by definition, praises and supports political leaders only when they do the right thing (regardless of motive), and criticizes and opposes them when they don’t. It's just that simple.

How do you know the difference between "the right thing" and the not-so-right thing?

...

How does a "rational citizen" differ from you and me and all who agree? How does an "enemy" differ from those who disagree?

You just have to listen to what they say. Most people will tell you what they believe is the right thing.

When conservatives claim to love freedom and the Constitution, then blindly support a President who busies himself with eliminating many of our civil liberties, you know they are either hypocrites or just plain stupid. It certianly isn't rational.

Disagreement is OK. It's the blatant disconect between rhetoric and deed that tips you off to the fact they aren't really sincere when it comes to their professed beliefs.

Mexico is going to be a failed state shortly. The government faces dwindling revenues from declining oil production (a decline that will not be reversed). In many locations it's the drug lords, and not the government, who hold power. This trend will only intensify with time.

The world is literally starting to unravel.

Even here in the US the financial elite is basically asserting itself and nakedly accumulating wealth and power at the expense of the public.

My only comfort is that the fat cats will eventually get it in the neck just like the rest of us. With a little luck, I might even live to see it. Cold comfort, I know, but you take what you can get.

I commented on this the other day. One of the things that interested me was the fact that a lot of cross border cartel activity is being armed by US legal weapons dealers.

Yep. You wouldn't be suggesting the free market, and making a profit, might be part of the problem, are you? Heaven forbid!

But since then, I find the confluence of Hillary Clinton's interest in Mexico with the explosion of "failed state" stories a bit odd. Is this the tail [or any other extremity] wagging the dog?

Who knows why these things gain critical mass when they do. But they do - all of a sudden everyone focuses on an issue that was ignored for the last 4 years, or whatever.

Anyay, Mexico really will be a failed state soon, in the sense that the government will not control the country. Parts of it maybe, but it will lose it's grip on power in many places. You can see it happening already.

There are many reasons, of course, but the primary reason is their declining oil production. Oil exports is how Mexico gets a lot of its hard currency. Their extraction rate has been pretty robust because they were blessed with the second largest oil field in the world, Cantarell. Flow rates from Cantarell are now in free fall, declining 10-15% a year. In a few years Mexico will no longer be an oil exporter.

The implications are profound, and dire. The government will no longer be able to pay its workers, at least at the current level, and they will no longer be able to compete with the drug lords. Mexico's future is grim.

It's getting harder and harder for Obama to deny that we have reached the point where "high officials knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront".

Well, I hope you're right. I'm not confident though - the American political class is getting pretty good at ignoring things they don't want to deal with.

In fact, the more time passes, the more the US is turning into an unaccountable oligarchy, ruled by former Goldman-Sachs executives. And the ideology of the Cheneyites in the Republican party is permeating through the entire elite social strata, who are absorbing it into their sub-conscious.

It's enough to make one wonder if the RNC has secretly planted tape recorders that play subliminal messages to all the movers and shakers at night, you know, "civil liberties are for wussies," and "an unregulated financial system is next to godliness," etc.

A thread based comment section would be wonderful. I'm often only interested in 1 or 2 (out of many) active threads, and making this explicit would be a big help.

I second the motion of having some kind of filter to have the comments of a particular poster not show up.

And finally, I like the notion of rating people so that if your "score" is really low, then you just get censored entirely.

Maintaining an acceptable signal to noise ratio is essential for a comment section to be productive and useful.