OT. Quote of the Day

MooseFET wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@b30g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

Which is why it's wise to ask "What, exactly, are the Conservatives actually conserving?"

Our strength, so we can stomp the liberal wusses ;-)

...Jim Thompson

You didn't answer the question about what your favorite program is. I mean the one that consider vital and should never be cut. I too can think of many things to cut. We could cut all road building in Southern California , shut off the pumps that supply water to LA.

If you are going to balance the budget, you have to be willing to give up one of your own priorities. Until you do you have nothing to trade.

innews: snipped-for-privacy@b30g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

Very very few of them really are conservatives. They are being "conservative with the truth". To an engineer the term "conservative" means taking the safer or more trusted path or over designing a system. Many people who call themselves "conservative" would put the nation on a run away train into uncharted waters.

MooseFET wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@r15g2000prh.googlegroups.com:

Exactly.

What they ignroe is thwe fact that teh Constitution, and the legal and governemntal systems which started off by being based upon it, are quite liberal in spirit, because concepts such as "equality under the law" and "equal rights" and heck, teh entire notion the all individuals have an innate right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is liberal.

The COnstitution is a "living" document to an extent, meaning, open to interpretation, but too many people ahev taken those interpretations way to far this way, and tehn that, and the Law has become such a tangled mess that it often seems tht one could be accused of breaking the law no matter *what* one does.

THe Constitution overall seems to me to seek minimal goverenmtn, with minimakl gov.t interference in the lives of individuals. But we have "conservatives" claiming that the gov.t belongs in people's bedrooms and has the righto to tell them how to live, and others claiming that the gov.t is one oversized redistribution bureaucracy and has the right to tell people how to live. It's nuts. They're both so busy tryuing to tell everyone what to do, that their own lives get all FUBARed. Meanwhile, the rest of us just muddle through as best we can.

Personally, I increasingly suspect that, although the majority of people may be "statistically normal", that only means it's statistically normal to be totally whacked in the head :p

Ugh... as interesting as your posts are... I find them nearly impossible to read due to the high frequency of typos. Would you please read while you're typing, or proof read before sending? That's all it needs.

Tim

snipped-for-privacy@r15g2000prh.googlegroups.com:

There was quite a debate at the time about whether people were by nature good or evil. The argument for a powerful state with a king or a small group in charge was based on the theory that humans are basically evil and a strong government run by the chosen few was needed to cause them to behave.

The idea that humans are by nature good but that they may be overcome by the emotions of the moment won the day and the constitution reflects this. The whole idea of the rule of law and having those laws written by a large group of people who represent the public is based on this. The delays and drags built into the system slow things down enough that people have time to cool off from heated emotions. Making it so that laws must make things illegal before they happen means that it is less likely that emotions will get in the way.

You can always be accused of breaking the law. Part of the reason that intent is so important in the law is to reduce this problem.

I see most people as reasonable but perhaps misinformed. We are living today in what some people are calling a "post factual" time. Many people seem to think that the facts and science don't matter. They believe in many UFO theories. Most of them know that what they are believing is false but unlike computers we are able to believe things that we know are not true. The fact that science is no longer "cool" worries me.

mtn

to

ou're

It may not be all that it needs. Does he use a program that highlights the spelling errors? I use google partly because it does that. It is a great help to me because I am a truly awful speller.

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:28:58 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET wrote: [snip]

And AGW ;-)

Bothers me a lot that "scientific" decisions are being made by people who think "feel-good" is the all-important "freedom".

...Jim Thompson

innews: snipped-for-privacy@b30g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

And the leftist wusses would tax us into "equality" :-(

...Jim Thompson

Here's some news: I do not have a favorite program. I am a firm believer in small government and people rolling up there sleeves, pitching in, doing stuff themselves.

Case in point: The voters out here got suckered into a "community center, something for every kid and blah, blah, blah". Lil' secret is that we are now all assessed a sizeable extra chunk on the property tax, AFAIK for a whopping ten years. Needless to say all the rosy cost calculations went kablouie, nothing has materialized so far. Meantime our church has _received_ all the pledges from members for a building and a sports field. Of course the county stonewalled us for a long time, the permit process took years. Now we can build, and will build!

But the unions will probably be against that.

Joerg, Have you ever considered leaving California? There are some higher elevation places in AZ that are like northern CA, but without the government BS.

...Jim Thompson

"Tim Williams" wrote in news:P3bok.17718$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe07.iad:

I have some brain and physical glitches that mess me up :( - sometimes I can re-read a post three times, and it still looks fine to me (but isn't). I don't have a spellchecker on this newsreader, either... All I can say is I'll try to be more careful - unless you know of an easy-to-use reader taht also spellchecks or does substitutions...? Word has that - there are some errors I know I make repeatedly, so I can enter them into a substitution table and Word auto-corrects. I don't know whether any newsreaders do that...if you knwo of one, that'd be great :) ! I mean that seriously - no joke, no sarcasm - I know my typing is, er, highly problematic :(

MooseFET wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:

The sad thing is that I know how to spell well - it's just that what my fingers do, what my eyes see, and what my brain knows, are often at odds when it comes to both typing, and numbers (like, I know how to balance a checkbook, but have to concentrate very, very hard so as to not mix 3,5,8; or 7,9 - and teh family dcision is that I keep my mitts off of it :o ). It's extremely frustrating :p . I don't know how to use Google as a newsreader, plus I don't trust it ebcasue I recently learned that they save all their searches, and I'm bothered by the principle of lack of privacy. But, as per my other reply, I'd *like* a newsreader taht does Word-like subtitutions (wwhere you ender common mistakes, with the correct word), if it's easy to use. So, yeah, I'd appreciate recommendations/suggestions :)

Agent has a very fine spell checker, with a user-specific dictionary as well.

...Jim Thompson

MooseFET wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@i20g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

(I'll type slowly and hope that makes this more readable...) Yes, that is how I learned it. I was raised with the idea that, although there were some laws that were unjust and others that were a bit silly, teh law overall was protective, existing not only to protect one person from another, but also to protect a person from himself. If a law seemed wrong, people could act to change it; but by and large, it was safe/smart to obey most laws.

That attitide, tho', seems to be increasingly rare - which of course may just be a misperception on my part, but that's how it seems.

Which is also quite a liberal idea; even today, there are places where intent means nothing and, if you do somehting, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident.

Yes, that's probably right - I do sometimes fall prey to a bit of despair.

I have a sort of archetype tat occurred to me just a few years back, which I call the Felix The Cat Syndrome. Felix had that 'bag of tricks', but had originally gotten it from the "evil Professor" who had invented it in the first place. But hat didn't matter - Felix, who had all the brains of a box of rocks, was *pleasant* - always smiling and whistling. OTOH, the Professor was "cranky" and scowling and had bags under his eyes. Which made sense, considering that he'd been robbed! Felix got to keep the bag, not because of any ethical superiority, and certainly not because he had the brains to comprehend the thing - but merely becasue of sheer dumb luck.

THat seems to be analogical to the general Cultural attitude in the US in recent years.

We see it in presidential elections - you're not "supposed" to vote for someone because they are intelligent, have good analytical capabilities, and a broad, sound education - you're "supposed" to vote for them because they seem to be someone you'd like to have a beer with.

We also see it in schools, media, business, and pretty much everywhere. A lot of people will oooh and aaaah about the Fortean imposition of "causation by mystic forces" on things that were unexplained back on

In short, it's egocentrism - a rejection of testing one's notions against the physical world, and replacing that with the voices in one's head.

THat's what's scary to me.

Yes, at times I did. But upon closer examination I found that the grass isn't always greener elsewhere. Don't remember AZ but AFAIR it was some kind of tax that I found excessive (property tax?). Once I looked at Clark Country in NV. They were dangling a better biz climate in front of us which they probably have. Then came the sobering surprise: 3% prop tax. Ouch! You've really got to watch it these days. The only place I found favorable so far was Arkansas. Who knows, maybe some day.

Oh, and I sure won't move anywhere they don't have something similar to our prop 13 (tax increase caps). I have met folks who were taxed out of their houses on the east coast.

Do you like police and fire etc? How about roads?