"Greece, the warm-up act for Spain, Italy, and maybe, the way things are going, for France."

Germany will have gone down somewhere between Spain and Italy. Do you imagine for a second if this comes true, we won't be in the toilet as well?

Regulate drones as you would cell phone interceptions. You can pick up cell phone conversations for virtually no cost violating people's privacy. The same civil penalties should apply to private parties.

The threat of civil measures may not stop everybody however. Drones will lead to technological war to find countermeasures, such as being able to scramble, disable, or destroy drones that come within a certain range.

I've always thought of burritos as variations on empanadas. You throw the kitchen sink into empanadas as well. And invention of ethnic food is hardly restricted to Mexican food. Examples I can think of off the top of my head are egg fu yung, egg rolls, and pizza.

Recoil? Are you kidding? I thought it was hilarious. Even better than the "Buy this magazine or we'll shoot the dog" cover.

Jennifer Rubin's take is pretty good on this. The election is six months out. Guys like Brooks have to produce newsprint so they produce newsprint that has a shelf life of maybe 24 seconds. Nobody will remember day after tomorrow what David Brooks wrote. The election will be determined by events and my guess is events will not be in Obama's favor as there is just too much uncertainty out there.

Ignorance and idiocy are not the same thing and you seem to have them conflated. I don't know philosophy -- what I have read I've always thought garbage built on false, oversimplified assumptions -- so don't particularly care.

We are most certainly becoming more knowledgeable about how the universe works. That doesn't mean lots of blind alleys are followed. They should be. We don't know they are blind alleys until somebody goes down them. The other thing is how quickly information travels now compared to the past. Some of that information is false which will be believed. So there are tradeoffs.

But as for "smarter"? And "we"? We are a species whose brains have evolved over millions of years. Why should you expect to see any difference within a person's lifetime?

Why does it have to be either/or, EJ? Never has been for me.

The Rolling Stones Live and Keith Richards!

Stasiland is an extremely good account of what it was like to like to live in East Germany and re-unified Germany and how people made the transition. The book gives insites about color as well -- buildings were only painted to a certain height so that the big shots when riding around in the cars would see painted buildings, but otherwise why bother with paint. The book also gives accounts from those who were pro-DDR and members of the Stasi.

I saw that and thought it was rather poorly done as far as the details of this affair.

I would thank Obama for making the economy so bad that the terrorists couldn't afford to attack us.

Oddly, that's one of the few good things about Facebook I've seen -- reconnecting with friends who have scattered to all parts of the globe. High school was far more intimate than undergrad days in university. But then it's a matter of a few hundred people vs. thousands. As far as defining, depends on what you mean. I learned much in both. Had good teachers and some really wretched ones in both. Had good friends in both. I've kept in close contact with only a few. Going to a reunion though was one of the most depressing acts of my life. Took me several days to get over. I had this realization that seeing all these people I used to see every day and was good friends with and now they're complete strangers.

It isn't merely knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But it also foolishness to think you can do something about it right now which is the impulse of many people. And what exactly is it you would do if you could do something about it? Something destructive? Something expensive? Kill people to keep people from being killed? Spend billions in some program where half the money winds up in secret bank accounts of corrupt officials as in Afghanistan?

Not all problems have solutions. And there are those who are closer and could supposedly do something about it themselves (South Korea), but they either don't want to or don't have a clue as to what to do. Pretty presumptuous of us to think we can, isn't it?

And about Mitt Romney's speeches. The one after the PA primary was excellent, but he's been making similar speeches for a couple of months. It's not that new.

Wish one of you had pinned Roberts down a bit harder on Depression & WW2. Does he really think that there was more privation in terms of consumer spending during WW2 than during the depression? The other point to make is that most of the federal spending went through private companies, e.g., Ford, GM, Kaiser, which made capital investments, and not into a federal bureaucracy with virtually no capital investments. In addition, much of those capital investments were what today would be called dual use technologies, i.e., military & civilian applications. Much depends on how the government money is spent.

"Small annual deficits, 5% GDP growth, and 5% unemployment, if only politically, allow foreign policy options that chronic $1 trillion deficits, 2% GDP growth, 8% plus unemployment do not. U.S. foreign policy and military stature are rapidly under this president becoming a question of math. "

It's always been a question of math. Always. For this or any other President. The other vast difference between this debt and previous debt is we got stuff for previous debt and what exactly do we have for this debt? Building dams under Roosevelt; highways under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in no small part with debt; a defeat of the Soviet Union under Reagan; with Bush it was wasted money paying for idiotic wars; with Obama it's a lot more wasted money paying for current consumption.