I agree that both media outlets and politicians are heavily based on framing the information they are presenting to persuade the public to see there views even if it distrots the truth.

1. Is a rational democratic model ever possible in a free society where people have the choice of religion and cannot be forced to become aware of all of the information available?

2. Do you think that some form of the totalitarian model exists in the united states where some information is hidden from the public or presented in such a light as to not cause a negative effect?

I agree that this chart still is valid today despite being so old. I think that although using these groups is an easy way for politicians to gain and hold support they also can be used to manipulate the political system. If politicians are constantly worried about losing the support of a specific group (even ones considered "good") how can they fairly put forth legislation that is not preferential?

I don't think using target populations is fair to everyone as whole despite the fact it may help get a large amount of support if it is intentionally written from the point of view of serving a specific interest group the whole is still going to lose.

I think that deterrence is the main intent of the violence today. The problem becomes how conservative or liberal should we be when attempting to deter which may be even worse violence.

I think that data visualization is a powerful way to display information whether the internet existed or not but the internet has allowed for collection and dispersion of information for these visualizations to be collected and distributed on a scale never seen before.

I do agree that Data Visualization is a more effective means of displaying information. The internet and information age is a great example of this with the plethora of freely available information companies are spending more and more money on manipulating this leading to a boom in data visualization experts.

an interesting data viz contest by google -> http://datavizchallenge.org/

I think they are very important to the growth of a society but I think there is a natural hierarchy of growth in these different areas. I think economic growth will lead to increased education and health spending, then increased education leads to more culture and human rights, to get human rights implemented governance needs to be stable and accessible. Once all these are reached citizens will look outward to protecting the environment and society as a whole will move forward.