First MH: I love Bill Maher, so I have seen this more than a few times. You can have all the problems you want with whoever is in charge in this country but they just seem so confused and unjustified: first Obama is a liar about Iraq, well you were wrong, second the youtube video: not enough proof, next you put this up with Bill Maher and still manage not to discuss one valid point but yet perpetuate another bold lie:
"I deal with our socialist government encroaching on my private life by "joking" about it because I dont know what else to do."
I wish our government was socialist, that is one of my biggest problems with our country is the unfettered capitalism that leads to this type of shit, where corporations have a ridiculous amount of power and say over governance. If you keep saying things that are flat out untrue, how do you expect anyone with any intelligence to respond? I am not attacking you, don't know you and I am sure just by the fact that we are both members here we could sit back and enjoy a spliff given the right timing. I do not intend to bait you either, I am simply stating when you make untrue statements and explaining why. If you think this country is socialist than please start by a definition of socialism and we can proceed from there. There is no western country on this earth more capitalistic than the U.S..
Kolah: Let me start by saying I hear ya, I was reading "Behold the Pale Horse", by William Cooper almost 20 years ago. I love the idea of grand conspiracies from Orwell's "1984", to modern day Zietgiest. But, while conspiracies most definitely exist the one thing that I had to reconcile was human intervention. The idea of grand conspiracies leads one down quite the gloomy path, everything that is spoken would somewhat be fake even the idea of language itself posses certain intellectual barriers, but human variation, much like plant variation, is really hard to call at times. What I mean is, the grand conspiracy ideas span over generations and fortunately humans don't always come out like their parents, and therefore bring too much variation for these ideas to exist too long. While again I am not saying conspiracies don't exist, they surely do, but there is balance out there and not everything happening is part of a grand scheme, that would be nice if it were because just like the opposite idea that everything is happening on some sort of grand good scheme both eliminate constructive thought, but the world is more complicated than that. At least imo. And to address your last paragraph, sure all empires rise and fall it is post fall that is interesting, it would be nice to end up like the U.K. and not Rome. Who knows on that one though.