I had to look up the "We oppose the teaching of...critical thinking skills." bit.

"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

But they do support beating snot-nosed punks at least...
"Classroom Discipline –We recommend that local school boards and classroom teachers be given more authority to deal with disciplinary problems. Corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas."

But damn it, they want to illegalize pornography, this cannot stand!
"Addictive Behaviors – We encourage state and federal governments to severely prosecute illegal dealers and manufacturers of addictive substances and pornography. We urge Congress to discourage import of such substances into our country. Faith based rehabilitation programs should be emphasized. We oppose legalization of illicit drugs. We support an effective abstinence-based educational program for children. We oppose any “needle exchange” program. We urge vigorous enforcement of our DUI laws."

Anyway, even if they didn't mean to include the words "critical thinking skills", they still don't want people to have the ability to reevaluate fixed-beliefs. Which require critical thinking skills. Damn, they accidentally said what they meant.

Sure, North Korea needs some decent competition in the crazy/useless to society department. But leaving a country with nearly nil doctors and scientists is kind of like abuse.

>> ^Yogi:

Can we like...split into two countries or something?

I was with him until he suggested Ron Paul could change a single thing about how the government was run.

Well... they've never had to do any accent other than their own. So some props for that at least.
It's weird, I didn't recognize Antonio until I read the caption after, must not have seen him in a while.

Well, traveling at 100,000 mph, it would take a mere 93 million years to reach it. The solar probe on close approach to the sun can reach about 200km/s, so only about 864,000 years that way. I doubt we'll be able to travel faster than that in interstellar space in the next few hundred years.

Yea, we're not going to these planets any time soon. Let's hope for our inter-dimensional friends to hook us up with some loopholes to travel faster, eh?

Chemistry allows for silicon based life forms, it's just not as likely as carbon.

The story of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute was basically made up afaik. I'm too lazy to look up a good source so here's some wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene

Regardless of how sexist Jesus may or may not have been, the various christian churches since then were.

Hey, just because we could fit 216,000 of our galaxies into IC1011 doesn't mean we aren't the center of attractive in the universe.

It should probably make someone a little skeptical of that idea though.

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
"one-in-five people who identify themselves as atheist (21%)... express a belief in God or a universal spirit." The breakdown appears to be 6% believe in a personal god, 12% believe in an impersonal force, and 3% don't know/other. The question then becomes, do they understand what atheist means? The sample size was 35,000, of which 560 (1.6%) were atheists including 120 of whom didn't know what atheist meant. Ok then. I'm sure that's representative of atheists as a whole. It's not possible a study on the varying views between religious groups would overlook a group that was non-religious.

Also... Shinnyblurry's comment looks suspiciously like
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2718697/posts

He is just a troll right?

Yea, he was tricky. All he says, I can come back any time, so just be ever vigilant for my return. It wasn't his fault that many people took that to mean he would come back within their lifetimes. Which is one explanation why it took so long to start cranking out books, because if judgment day is tomorrow, you're better off trying to save as many people as possible by direct preaching. Silly sand people, they had no idea he meant, oh, give it a few thousand years, I'm going to be a fairly weary zombie. Need to go up and get situated first, ya know how it is.

There's passages like -- "6 God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you 7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you."

So this 'You' will be alive when he comes back to bask in his glory in his holy place? Wonder how that person would ever get the mistaken impression that this would go down anytime in the next couple millennium. And what if his given testimony was contradictory and full of flaws, or he was simply a poor persuader? That listener is going to be tortured for eternity for having the ability to process logic! That hardly seems just to me.
Sorry if I don't believe in multidimensional space pixies until I see some evidence buddy.

He means the site prisonplanet, and infowars, which was the only sources he used to corroborate that the Osama videos were fake, because Osama has apparently been dead for years. That's the conspiracy.

The other mainstream sources were just used for the setting.

I think I'm going to go all in, Uranus. Final answer.

No argument from me, just seemed weird he dismissed magic saying it was either too complicated or he didn't want to change cards for elements based on what he was fighting.

So he apparently didn't get past the first story mission. I don't blame him, 20 hours into the game, I still haven't bothered to get onto the main island which is 3x as large as the first biggish island.

On another note, Magic is a tad overpowered in this game; when you can summon 8 lvl 32 monsters with 160% health and damage at level 20, there's not much point in doing anything else other than summoning a whirling rock barrier so nothing can possibly reach you. Then proceed to instant casting 1000 damage homing fireballs that also stuns everything within 8 meters.