I think you nailed it when you said that companies treat us like this because they know we have no choice. I have one cable provider to choose from and one ISP to choose from. When I became frustrated with the cable company's appalling customer service and high prices, I tried satellite but quickly discovered that I could not count on maintaining a signal because I couldn't maintain a clear line-of-sight from the dish. This is the price we pay for permitting monopolies.

I don't think that most mainstream Protestants and Catholics have much interest in converting anybody. Many of the evangelical fundamentalist Christians, on the other hand, seem to be quite interested in converting atheists and Jews.

They do seem to be closing at an astounding rate. My blogroll seems to get shorter and shorter every time I update it.

Good point. It does seem like that could be a reasonable solution if he could be persuaded that he's not under threat of an imminent invasion. I'm assuming that he's viewing nukes as an effective deterrent against such an invasion. In that case, giving them up doesn't make much sense. Of course, I don't know if this is really how he's thinking of the situation or not. I certainly hope a deal like what you describe could be worked out. I actually thought Trump was on the right track when he said something about how he'd be willing to talk with North Korea even though he received a great deal of criticism for saying so and appears to have changed his mind.

Sure thing. I will be curious to see how they might manage the information overload in the future. I like the idea of giving users some control over the sort of content they see, but I suppose that most would use that to make sure they only see content with which they agree. I have to admit that one of the things I've come to appreciate about Minds is that I cannot use it even for a minute without coming across content with which I strongly disagree. That makes it a vastly different experience than Facebook.

I'd have to agree that there has been entirely too much of that sort of thing happening and that is has been detrimental.

I can see why that poster would piss people off. It is hard to believe nobody recognized the problem with it until it was too late. Still, concluding on the basis of that one incident that the entire organization is racist and should not be supported seems a bit excessive.

In a different interview than the one I mentioned above, she made it sound like she did not think Sanders worked hard enough to promote her after she won the nomination. If I remember correctly, she was referring specifically to him not endorsing her at the convention in the same way she endorsed Obama after losing to him. I'm skeptical that this was much of a factor too.

I think one could probably make the argument that the campaign Sanders ran against her exposed some of her weaknesses and that this probably didn't help her, but I haven't heard her make this claim.

As long as they continue to view their jobs as being more about getting re-elected (i.e., the never-ending campaign) than actually governing, this sort of thing is going to be tough to fix. I suppose we'll have to figure out how to change the rules so that those who do this sort of thing lose their jobs to make room for those more interested in governing than campaigning.

Isn't Cory Booker the guy who sold us out on affordable prescription drugs in exchange for pharmaceutical company dollars? I suppose that was only one vote, but it seems like an important one.