We mark with some regret the passing of Ariel Sharon in Israel who has been surviving in a vegetative state since 2005. The regrets are not because the world has lost a person of any value but because he died in a long-term care facility rather than the prison cell which he deserved.

Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928 to Belarusian Zionist Jews who fled the Russian Revolution. His parents were a contentious couple who, it appears, reared him in the psychopathic spirit. He came to young manhood embodying the highest ideals of Zionism, in particular its antisocial character. By the age of 14 he was already involved in Zionist paramilitary groups that used terror and massacres to drive Palestinians off their lands.

You could say I grew up watching George Carlin.

He was always my favorite rhetoric-ist. The most logical. The most reasonable. He was in effect my only access to what I now know as the Trivium.

In my first 25 years of life, George Carlin's material truly made me laugh at what could only be defined as Carlin's hyper-realistic perspective stand-up routine. It was the most harsh and abusive form of truth intervention for the entire human species - and yet it was masked brilliantly as comedy.

At around age 25, I attended an event in Las Vegas that was the beginning of my own transformation and incremental arrival into the over-exposure of hyper-reality Carlin spewed. This event was George Carlin, live at the Bally's Casino resort. How wondrously excited I was to see up close and personal one of my few Idols in life. And the show went on...

But something was different.

Something just didn't feel right.

George wasn't the problem, for he was delivering his material just as rehearsed-ly as he always had, mentally re-ciphering eerily associative memory poems with endless lists of material and anecdotal stories with an almost autistic flair.

No, the problem laid elsewhere... It was the crowd. And it was myself.

A father will spend half of 2014 behind bars for doing too much for his son. After overpaying child support and seeing his son too often - breaking terms that were secretly modified without his knowledge - a judge sentenced him to a lengthy jail sentence.

Clifford Hall has been doing his best to give care to his 11-year-old son, who lives with his ex-wife. He pays his child support and visits regularly. "I'm his father it's my responsibility to take care of him," Hall said.

Last November, his child support payments were paid in full. Sometime between then and now, the child support agreement between Hall and his wife was modified without his knowledge.

Hall wound up overpaying by $3,000, a fact that Harris County District Court Judge Lisa Millard found contemptible.

Another term that was modified without his knowledge was his visitation schedule. Subsequently, Hall was found to have over-visited his son.

Judge Millard ended up finding Hall in contempt of court.

When she said I remand you to the Harris County Jail for 180 days my mouth just dropped," Hall told FOX 26 Houston.

With all due respect to Lizzie Velasquez, the vast majority of TED and TEDx talks are complete bullshit, and it's high time someone called them out on it.

Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, has a huge problem with TED, and he isn't afraid to tell them so right to their face.

At a recent TEDx event in San Diego, Bratton delivered a talk called "What's Wrong with TED Talks?"

"The first reason is over-simplification," Bratton says at the start of his speech. "To be clear, I have nothing against the idea of interesting people who do smart things explaining their work doing in a way that everyone can understand, but TED goes way beyond that."

Judicial Watch today released its 2013 list of Washington's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians." The list, in alphabetical order, includes:

• Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH)
• CIA Director John Brennan
• Senator Saxby Chambliss
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
• Attorney General Eric Holder
• Former IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller / Former IRS Official Lois Lerner
• Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
• President Barack Obama
• Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)
• Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

Dishonorable Mentions for 2013 include:

• Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
• Outgoing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) / Incoming Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D)
• Former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
• National Security Adviser Susan Rice

Protesters, buskers, preachers, the young: all could end up with 'ipnas'. Of course, if you're rich, you have nothing to fear

Until the late 19th century much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town.

Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.

Street life in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquillised shoppers. Spontaneous gatherings of any other kind - unruly, exuberant, open-ended, oppositional - are banned. Young, homeless and eccentric people are, in the eyes of those upholding this dead-eyed, sanitised version of public order, guilty until proven innocent.

Now this dreary ethos is creeping into places that are not, ostensibly, owned or controlled by corporations. It is enforced less by gates and barriers (though plenty of these are reappearing) than by legal instruments, used to exclude or control the ever widening class of undesirables.

The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands - mostly young and poor - to bespoke laws. They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.

Peter Baker's book, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House" is one of the latest efforts in an audacious rebranding effort.

It is a testament to the degree to which presentation overshadows practice in modern political life that 49 percent of Americans approve of George W. Bush. Here is a President not only on the wrong side of history in almost every particular, but one whose misjudgments continue to constrain the country in measurable ways into the present. He is the author of two wars, one entered into based on faulty information, that have cost thousands of American, Iraqi and Afghani lives and further destabilized the Middle East, delivering it to the machinations of Islamic militants and increasing threats to our national security. To fund these wars, he employed deficit spending that could have been used to grow human and material capital through investments in infrastructure, education, clean energy and scientific research, among other areas. In the process of ballooning the deficit, he put further pressure on entitlement programs that were already moving toward unsustainability, helping precipitate a political crisis 20 years earlier than necessary. His concrete domestic innovation is a sprawling and convoluted defense bureaucracy lacking adequate oversight. His signature domestic initiative, a stillborn plan to privatize social security and create an "ownership society," appears, five years into an economic downturn precipitated by unwise investments, astonishingly ill-conceived. His two most successful decisions, the 2007 "surge" and the 2008 bailout, were reversals of errors that he either caused or compounded. This would not, in sum, seem to be a politician who merits much affection from the electorate based on his policies. Yet here he is enjoying a 49 percent approval rating, the result of a successful rebranding in which his professed purity of motives have come to count for more than the quality of his actual performance.

This rebranding had several sources. The first was historical logic: the dissatisfaction that Bush helped precipitate among Republicans ended up empowering figures so radical that he appeared prudent by comparison. The second was Bush's own canny performance once he was out of office: unlike, say, Dick Cheney, he stayed on the political sidelines and devoted himself to benign initiatives helping African AIDs victims and U.S. veterans. The third, and most instrumental, was a Washington press corps habitually focused on stark narrative contrasts, which helped publicize the benign storyline that the former president was quietly crafting (Bush vs. the Tea Partiers, Bush vs. Cheney). The opening of the Bush Presidential Library in April functioned as the opportunity for this process to go public, and, specifically, for longtime Bush supporters to press their case for redemption in a newly receptive environment. Against the backdrop of partisan logjam in Washington, the event was portrayed in the rosy hues of reunion: in Peggy Noonan's unabashed rendering, "What was nice was that all of them - the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons - seemed like the old days. 'The way we were.'" The exhibition itself included prominent places for Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley and Andrew Card, those figures marginally less tarnished by the Administration's blunders, and none at all for the reviled troika of Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. Political commentary tended to revolve around the President's charitable initiatives or, more insistently, his "character."

Record heatwaves and wildfires, widespread and severe flooding, massive sinkholes swallowing buildings and people, mass animal deaths, an asteroid exploding over Russia, thousands more fireballs lighting up the sky throughout the year, record-breaking blizzards snowfall, the coldest northern spring in 100 years, massive landslides, 'rare' tornadoes occurring in places they shouldn't, the widest tornado ever observed, more volcanic eruptions, more major earthquakes forming new islands, the strongest tropical storm in recorded history, successive hurricanes in Europe, the coldest temperature ever recorded, snow in Cairo... these are signs of climate change, aka Earth Changes.

Welcome to the new normal.

Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian or a gun owner? Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations or the New World Order?

Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the "end times" or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a "potential terrorist" according to official U.S. government documents. At one time, the term "terrorist" was used very narrowly. The government applied that label to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists. But now the Obama administration is removing all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term "terrorist" is being applied to large groups of American citizens. And if you are a "terrorist", that means that you have no rights and the government can treat you just like it treats the terrorists that are being held at Guantanamo Bay. So if you belong to a group of people that is now being referred to as "potential terrorists", please don't take it as a joke.

The first step to persecuting any group of people is to demonize them. And right now large groups of peaceful, law-abiding citizens are being ruthlessly demonized.

Below is a list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be "extremists" and "potential terrorists" in official U.S. government documents. To see the original source document for each point, just click on the link. As you can see, this list covers most of the country...

1. Those that talk about "individual liberties"

2. Those that advocate for states' rights

3. Those that want "to make the world a better place"

4. "The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule"

5. Those that are interested in "defeating the Communists"

6. Those that believe "that the interests of one's own nation are separate from the interests of other nations or the common interest of all nations"

This will be the fourth consecutive emigration of the last three generations of my immediate family. My grandparents emigrated from Portugal to Mozambique during the 1940s and 50s in search of a better life. The massive and undeveloped colony seemed like the land of milk and honey for those willing to get their hands dirty. A few decades later my parents-to-be immigrated to South Africa as Mozambique headed towards what would become a 10-year war for independence. Then when I was just 4 years old they decided that a fascist state fully enveloped with the evils of apartheid was no place to raise a child. My mother was fortunate enough to get a work visa into the United States and that's where we've been ever since.

Now the time has come for me to follow in my family's footsteps. Maybe it's in our blood to not only yearn for change but to have the fortitude to go out into the unknown in search of it. But this time something is different. I'm leaving the United States of America, the shining city on the hill; a land where millions of people try to enter each year, often at great risk.

Upon learning of my wife and my decision to leave our friends, family, great jobs, and fantastic home, everyone immediately asks us: Why? It's such a painfully awkward question to answer. How could the answer be anything but obvious? That said, we learned our lesson early and have stopped telling people the truth behind our exodus. Instead we've been answering with generic statements like "Oh, just for a change of pace" or "We've always wanted to experience another culture."

I'm tired of holding my tongue. It's not healthy to keep so much bottled up inside and it's even more painful to watch those closest to me living a most ignorant and animal-like existence. So here are our real, unfiltered, and honest reasons for fleeing the land of the free.