Yeah, it's worth it. The miniseries and first two seasons are great (although there are a handful of horrible episodes scattered throughout, including one called 'Black Market' which is probably the worst episode evar). Season 3 starts out pretty amazingly, as an allegory for the occupation of Iraq, where we actually empathize with 'insurgents' and even suicide bombers.

After that conflict resolves, the show begins its decent into the toilet, and the bad episodes outnumber the good ones by a healthy margin. If you make it that far, you'll probably want finish it out, but the ending is a complete let down. The writers completely lose there discipline in the 3rd and 4th seasons, and all of the logic of the BSG universe goes out the window. In the end, none of the mysteries or plot contrivances are tied up in any kind of satisfying way.

At least Netflick the miniseries and 1st season, and watch it with your girl.

I've not seen any of lost. Should I check that out?

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
So, I haven't watched BSG yet, but it seems like people are ticked about the ending. Is it worth watching the four or five seasons of BSG? Or is it a let down?

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Let's hope the Muppets actually stick to their plan.

I got my VCR off the black market, and I found a Zune inside it, not an I-Pod.

The claim, "there is no such thing as a free market" is incorrect. There are free markets, millions of them. The "free market" is not a single, static entity, nor is it some high level abstraction. In Soviet Russia, under the grip of communist rule, there were free markets. In Nazi Germany under fascist rule there were free markets. In Soviet Russia, despite the fact that 99% of farmlands were state-owned and controlled, official policy was that all farmers were allowed to use 1% of their land as they see fit--in order to provide food for themselves and their family. Yet this 1% of land formed a "black market" (a free market) which comprised over 30% of the nations crops!

If you don't think a free markets exist, stop at the next garage sale you see. What regulations are in place? Do you pay taxes on any of the transactions? Is there government oversight, or anti-trust law in force? Are there minimum or maximum prices set on the goods?

The truth is many "subsets" of markets are completely free of regulation, these "sub-markets" are actually entire markets in themselves, which are properly labeled as "free markets". One does not need all of the "sub-markets" which comprise a countries economy to be free, nor do they even need a majority for the theory to be valid. The theory works irregardless of the number of "sub-markets" free of regulation. The implications of the theory is that given two identical "sub-markets", the "sub-market" free of regulation will be superior. Historically, this data point has been recorded across millions of "sub-markets" in thousands of countries over hundreds of years and not once, not once, (try to find one) has it ever been proven false.

The smallest market is a single buyer and a single seller trading one good for another. If you want proof a free market exists, offer the next person you see $20 for anything on his person. Try to haggle and see what is the best thing you can get. Now tell me how government regulation could have improved the process for both parties.

Adding millions of sellers, millions of buyers, and millions of goods changes nothing about the underlying principle of voluntary cooperation. Two people trade because each thinks they benefit. That is free market theory. It predicts that given a choice, two people will trade if and only if both perceive that they gain something from the transaction. This simple fact leads to many corollaries such as supply and demand curves. It is a theory as firmly planted in science and reality as the theory of gravity.

>> ^chilaxe:
People are going to do drugs whether it's legal or illegal.
Regulate it so people aren't being duped into smoking rat poison, tax it, and remove one of the primary sources of funding for international crime families.


Lets not forget the major source of funding for domestic crime families.
In the early 70's, street gangs were far far more timid than they are now. Something that you might actually respect and consider a somewhat decent choice for your kids to get involved in.

Drugs ruined that, a cheap, easy way of getting massive ammounts of cash for the "boss" of the gang, while at the same time paying pittance to the crew, funneling in weapons and setting off turf wars.

You don't see the kind of gang wars over tobacco do ya ?
That shit is far more dangerous than pot, yet because its legal, taxed, regulated, and easily accessible, its not worth a dime to black-market trade the stuff.

You will see the same thing happen if you legalise all the other drugs. And I mean all of em.
Salvia, crack, heroine, ice...etc.
So long as its produced safely, and tightly regulated, those who want to use it, will...and no crime-rings benefit from it.

You'll also free up MASSIVE resources in your penitentiary system.

The trick is you have to earn exactly $200,000.00. You can't be over by even 1/10th of a cent. And if you are over by only a few cents Shulman gets to bludgeon you to death with a sack of rolled quarters and then sell your organs on the black market. An ingenious plan really.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Enter Single, 0 dependents and Income at $200,000. Wow, I want to be single with no children and making upwards of $200,000 in Obama's America!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It could lead to actors in production for multiple movies at the same time, just dub in the voice later.

Actors will be all about licensing their image instead of actually having to show up.

Once Angelina Jolie's scan hits the black market - a new porn era will begin.

>> ^persephone:
The testosterone in this thread is overpowering.
Considering that these weapons may be used to slaughter women and children - I don't see the coolness factor.
Guns are bad -'m-kay?


Oh, right, because nothing else can. Not cars. Not knives, not poisons, not a freakin soda can ripped in half...


Almost anything can be used to kill someone, "m-kay"?

You are wrong dystop-it is possible to make any gun yourself, and, produce the ammunition for it-just lookit these iindustrious fellows.....
http://www.videosift.com/video/Largest-illegal-black-market-of-guns-in-pakistan


and that's w/o mechanized machinist's tools

> Guns are not a deterrent to violence, they are a threat and cause of greater violence. Guns were created for one purpose alone - killing. Shotguns weren't invented for skeet shooting, and hand guns weren't invented for target practice. Just because someone uses one for those purposes does not change what it is.


Among countries, there is no strong correlation between gun control and violent crime. There are countries with strict gun control and high violent crime (the UK), and countries with lax gun control and lower violent crime (Canada).

Most handgun wounds are nonlethal. You can aim for the arms or the legs to disable a criminal enough to stop him from doing whatever he was doing. If half the students at Virginia tech were armed, Cho would not have gotten far.

Florida adopted a right-to-carry law in 1987. Between 1987 and 1996, its homicide rate decreased by 36%.

If no civilian is armed, no civilian has a good chance of stopping an armed criminal. If a criminal knows he is surrounded by armed civilians, that is just as good a deterrent as being surrounded by cops.

Although guns may assist outlaws, guns also assist citizens in apprehending those outlaws. Prohibition of ANY kind of small object is extremely difficult to enforce, and determined criminals could obtain them on the black market regardless of their illegality (just as they can obtain crack even though it has been illegal for 80 years with billions of dollars spent on attempted enforcement).

There are costs and benefits of civilian gun ownership, and which outweighs the other is not clear. However prohibition of said guns is as futile as the drug war.

It is odd that fundies like Huckabee support the NRA even though their hero preached absolute nonresistance and nonviolence. (e.g. Matthew 5:33-48)

Here's some questions for both Dem frontrunners, via columnist Lawrence Elder. Why does the mainstream media focus on this fluff while issues with real impact go unaddressed?

Don't Obama supporters also deserve straight answers?

As of March 2008, kids applying for a job at Burger King have been given tougher interview questions (+ a drug test) than Clintobama.


1. Sen. Clinton, you oppose the Bush tax cuts because they unfairly benefit the rich. Since the top 1 percent of taxpayers -- those making more than $364,000 annually -- pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes, don't all across-the-board tax cuts, by definition, "unfairly" benefit the rich?

2. Sen. Obama, you also oppose Bush tax cuts, and claim that they take money away from the Treasury. But President Kennedy signed across-the-board tax cuts in the 1960s and said, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low -- and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now." Was he wrong?

3. Sen. Clinton, you criticize President Bush for inheriting a surplus and turning it into a deficit. The National Taxpayers Union added up your campaign promises, and they came to an increase of over $218 billion per year. What would this do to the deficit?

4. Sen. Obama, if elected, you promised to raise minimum wage every single year. But isn't it true that most economists -- 90 percent, according to one survey -- believe that raising minimum wages increases unemployment and decreases job opportunities for the most unskilled workers? What makes you right, and the majority of economists wrong?

5. Sen. Clinton, you want universal health care coverage for all Americans -- every man, woman and child. When, as First Lady, you tried to do this, 560 economists wrote President Clinton, and said, "Price controls produce shortages, black markets and reduced quality." One economist who helped gather the signatures explained, "Price controls don't control the true costs of goods. People pay in other ways." Are those 560 economists wrong?

6. Sen. Obama, you once said you understand why senators voted for the Iraq war, admitted that you were "not privy to Senate intelligence reports," that it "was a tough question and a tough call" for the senators, and that you "didn't know" how you would have voted had you been in the Senate. And over a year after the war began, you said, "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." How, then, can you say that you consistently opposed the war from the start?

7. Sen. Clinton, you want to begin withdrawing the troops within the first 60 days of your administration, with all the troops out within a year. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker of the Baker-Hamilton report said that such a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq would create a staging ground for al-Qaida, increase the influence of Iran over Iraq, and result in "the biggest civil war you've ever seen." What would you like to say to Secretary Baker?

8. Sen. Obama, the church you attend, according to its Web site, pursues an Afrocentric agenda. Your church rejects, as part of their "Black Value System," "middleclassness" as "classic methodology" of white "captors" to "control subjugated" black "captives." Your pastor, Jeremiah Wright, recently called the Nation of Islam's Minister Louis Farrakhan -- a man many consider anti-Semitic -- a person of "integrity and honesty." What would happen to a Republican candidate who attended a Caucasian-centric church, and who praised David Duke as a man of "integrity and honesty"?

9. Sen. Clinton, you recently criticized NAFTA, the free trade agreement signed into law by President Clinton. The conservative Heritage Foundation says that NAFTA-like free trade benefits the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, resulting in increased trade, higher U.S. exports and improved living standards for American workers. Explain how President Clinton and the Heritage Foundation got it wrong then, but that you are right now.

10. Sen. Obama, this question is about global warming, something about which you urge extreme action to fight. You criticize President Bush for going to war in Iraq, even though all 16 intelligence agencies felt with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs. Critics of Bush say he "cherry-picked" the intelligence. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists consider concerns about global warming overblown. Isn't there far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq? If so, as to the studies on global warming, why can't you be accused of cherry-picking?

When Rumsfeld came in it was supposed to be all Star Wars, high tech stuff... and it's turned out to be the opposite. Low-tech politics and social networks and IED's. It's the geopolitics, stupid. Better to engage root causes than rely on the latest BFG.

There are actually real problems and crimes to solve out there. The drug war is only cultivating an underground business that is never going to go away, and will only perpetuate the allure of gangs and organized crime (Prohibition...history repeating itself...). There are proposed solutions, and there are arguments against those, but I think the U.S. is grown up enough as a nation to stop beating a dead horse and develop a true drug policy that reflects realistic goals and specific outcomes. I have relatives who are addicted to meth, and seeing the police waste their time on something that is inconsequential, when compared to the real gateway drug (alcohol), makes me sick. I know that keeping cannabis illegal is far too profitable for law enforcement, and in a way it may help to fund other genuinely beneficial endeavors, but there's another side to that coin. Excise taxes are proven to be a good way to raise funds for education or whatever a state government needs, and cannabis is a gold mine that is waiting to be exploited. Good old capitalism is at work in the black market, and opening the blinds to lighten that dirty place up a bit will certainly be a step toward solving problems, rather than creating new ones like what's happened to the people in this video. I do have to agree that they shouldn't have broken the law that they are so lucky to have in the first place, but a little civil disobedience can go a long way.

@moonsammy:
Ron Paul has said he is not going to just abolish it, you can't do that because of those who are currently dependent on it. But he does want to phase it out. There is a lot of misunderstanding about Social Security. A lot is from an ignorant optimism in our current economic situation, and also from the well-intentioned but flawed socialist ideologies you espouse. Right away, I can see you failed to catch the point about what causes mass poverty in the first place. Your concern is wholly placed in addressing the problem, assuming, erroneously, that poverty is the product of greedy rich people who will stop at nothing to collude and hoard all the wealth in the world, and not the result of government intervention in the free market through the federal reserve's inflationary control over the money supply, high taxes to fund do-good big government agencies and programs like SS, and government intervention via managed trade agreements and acts like Sarbanes Oxley.

Most wealthy people spend or invest their money, either through employing people, philanthropy, or consumption. A yacht or a car are both products produced by workers either in this country or another. It is more likely to be from this country if inflation, taxes, and government regulations are low, because then there will be no incentive for the producer or consumer to go overseas. Much of the time rich people spend their wealth on employing people for their business, buying products themselves, and it generally fuels the production means of the consumption ends. So in the free market system, the money is transferred naturally through production and consumption, which is good for everybody. In the socialist system, someone who has worked hard to earn wealth is getting their wealth stolen from them by the federal government to be redistributed to someone poorer which you claim is more fair. Money that would have ultimately gone towards someone else's income/productive effort is simply taken and transferred. On the most extreme hypothetical scale, everyone's wealth is redistributed to equality, removing most incentive to work harder and get more than the person next to you. So greed and wanting more fuels production and consumption, which inadvertently has the effect of helping everyone far more than stealing and redistributing would have. Social security and the income tax are both in the same destructive boat, because they are taxes on production, not on consumption. That isn't to say the free market is capable of eliminating poverty completely, or addressing the needs of a small percentage which is incapable of working. But in that scenario, you have voluntary stuff easily footing the bill through local churches and non-profit organizations.

That's really the whole point of social security - it isn't to benefit the lazy and the worthless that are such a plague upon us upstanding citizens, but to preserve some degree of dignity and humanity amongst our fellow countrymen who have, totally or at least largely through no fault of their own (none of us are perfect), become unable to adequately maintain themselves.

This shows me how little you actually researched before responding. Social Security is payed and received by everyone. It's a "retirement" program. Even Donald Trump can get an SS check when he retires. Don't pass this guilt trip garbage on people, this is what gets them trusting in the government in the first place.

In terms of your suggested alternative to the social security system: I'd love to see that be practicable. Unfortunately it is almost certainly too utopian to have a real chance.

Oh, you mean like all those years before it was implemented?

Until all corruption, greed, and prejudice is eliminated from our society there will *always* be people who are unfairly screwed over in life.

And politicians are incapable of these things, so we should entrust them to legislate the market in our best interest? We should trust them to spend money more wisely than the people who worked for it? That's stupid, that's exactly how we got in this position. Big business in bed with big government, legislating under the do-good pretense of taking care of people. Of course there are always going to be people getting screwed. But far more people get screwed with your system, making free market capitalism the better tradeoff. It's the same short-sighted argument from gun control advocates. Since gun violence exists, we should work to ban guns. Yet when these bans are implemented gun violence actually increases. The criminals get them on the black market and don't think twice against citizens they know are defenseless. Meanwhile, the gun-law advocates finally figure it out: guns actually prevented far more crime than they caused through coercion, and that didn't show up in the statistics. They took a knee-jerk reaction to media stories covering gun crimes in schools, and the immediate emotional outcry overpowered actual reason.

Here, you claim that SS isn't in trouble financially or a tax burden on the economy. Just do some research:

http://www.socialsecurity.org/quickfacts/

http://www.socialsecurity.org/reformandyou/faqs.html

Just look at the UK. Recently gun crime has suffered a massive increase, despite the handgun ban. Know why that is? Because we were never allowed to carry loaded guns on our person anyway, so they were never a defensive mechanism. Removing them did nothing. Modern gun crime in the UK is committed by people who wouldn't have been able to gain legal access to a firearm in the first place and all of them are black market goods.

What do you think would happen in the US if you introduced a handgun ban? Suddenly a lot of criminals would be armed while the populace would become defenceless. Its not like the UK where very few people have guns, so only the gangs get them, nearly any criminal is likely to be armed because they have been so freely available before.

The most telling point in this show was that killing sprees tend to occur in "Gun free zones". Now make the entire country a "gun free zone" and see what happens

I still find the argument that you could even suggest that guns are beneficial ludicrous. Instead of looking at the actual facts they scrutinise the etymology of the 2nd amendment. Penn talks about armed rebellions, and about revolting against government but does he actually give one good reason we would need this in this day and age? No, because it's ridiculous. Not like you could rebel against a plutocratic kleptocracy anyway.

Additionally, anyone who were to propose that guns should be allowed to be carried by citizens in schools and universities, in a developed country outside of the US would be ridiculed. Why is it that gun advocates always ignore the fact that they could be funding security guards in these locales? No doubt, handing them out to some erratic, potentially emotional cornered and irrational youth is a far better solution. Instead they make ludicrous arguments suggesting that just because extending gun laws to allow concealed firearms hasn't enveloped a region in a bloodbath that they are somehow justified. Well yes, not everyone is a vicious murder and mentally unstable person, but some are.

Guns don't deter people from robbing a store, they empower them. Anyone unable to conceptualise the fact that a criminal will inevitably have the upper hand by carrying a gun and pointing it first with free gun ownership and not the other way around is fooling themselves. Any odd criminal who would have previously been hard pressed to acquire a firearm from the black market can just go into a store and buy an AK. Better yet just go to a gun show, I heard they don't require any background checks. There, now you're more than capable of suppressing a number of people of better physical stature than yourself while you clean out the cashier instead of brandishing around a knife.