Special day for some one.:)

Today is International Disadvantaged People's Day. Please send an encouraging message to a retarded friend...just as I've done. I don't care if you lick windows, screw farm animals, take the short bus or occasionally shit yourself... You hang in there sunshine, you're damn special.

Disadvantaged...that's so nice. It's interesting to see political correctness start to approach cryptology.

Disadvantaged huh... I can't figure out this complicated metastable combination logic problem in 1 minute...Damn! I feel disadvantaged. :P Or... I'm not a mulitbizzionaire...I'm disadvantaged :(...and I'm special too :) If only we could all be like Bill Gates... :P

D from BC

I pray that a miracle will overtake Jim Thompson, that his brain will be back-flushed and replaced with functioning neurons ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

That was beautiful, D. I'll send you an email to remind you just how disadvantaged you are. I hope I get my share, too.

Bob

I tried, but the Whitehouse.gov mailbox appears to be full.

Naaah! They just killfile leftist weenies ;-)

...Jim Thompson

It seems clear at this point they wouldn't know a weenie from a hamburger, leftist or otherwise. I especially enjoyed the FEMA news conference.

Yep. That was real cute. Wonder what hare-brain thought that one up?

...Jim Thompson

What a kind thought. The ones I've got used to do pretty well on IQ tests. but then again, so did Jim's.

Jim - of course - has troubles of his own.

He can't spell my name right, and he thinks that his spelling it Slowman all the time can be explained as a joke. We did have an engineer once - a very smart guy - whose particular form of dyslexia was to consider any spelling that sounded right equally valid - so that for him, there, they're and their were interchangeable.

Maybe Jim needs to come out of the closet.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Yeah, we're all disadvantaged, it's just a matter of degree.....

True, but the fact remains, just as Jim is an incorrigible neocon Bushist, you're an ineducable fanatical socialist.

So, you two are assentially cut of the same cloth, just from opposite extremes of the Statist spectrum.

Cheers! Rich

Your political spectrum seems to run from ultraviolet to indigo. I may be off your chart to the left, but the political spectrum outside the USA extends a long way further to the leftm and I'm barely middle of the road in my environment.

In the Netherlands I'd be a member of the Partij van de Arbeit (the Dutch equivalent of the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party) which is a member of the current coalition government.

There is a perfectly respectable political party to the left of them - the Socialist Party - with about half the number of seats in the legislature, whom I regard as too left-wing to vote for (not that I can vote in Dutch federal elections).

Sincere socialists are of the opinion that no party that you can vote for is going to be able to change the system enough to make an appreciable difference - this has always been an item of faith for anarcho-syndicalists, whose policy is to educate their membership so that they will be in a position to take over when the internal contradictions of the capitalist system pull it apart (as in Catalonia at the begiining of the Spanish Civil War).

Fanatical socialists work to exaggerate the internal contradictions of the capitalist system to encourage it to fall apart - I sometimes wonder whether Dubbya and Cheney are spectacularly successful sleeper agents for the lunatic fringe of the socialist movement.

As for ineducatable - granting your spectacular ingorance of any politics to the left of the Democrats, your opinion isn't exactly definitive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Well, I guess socialism can "work" in Europe, since apparently you people have been selectively bred for obedience.

Good Luck! Rich

There's not a lot of obedience in evidence around here, and any tendency to excessive obedience - manifesting itself as a willingness to obey suicidal orders - has been heavily selected against in recent wars. One of my great-uncles died in WW1. The next generation was a bit smarter.

You, on the other hand, seem to tolerate a government that tortures in your name, taps your phones and your e-mails, and delivers really poor social security and public health care.

The Germans were similarly complaisant in the 1930s. It cost them - and the rest of us - dearly in 1939-45.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Those problems aren't caused by Capitalism - they're caused by the bureaucrats and other power-trippers _interfering_ with the natural forces of the Free Market system, i.e., excessive, arbitrary regulation, socialism and its variants, and so on.

A Free Market is self-regulating, and is the only known way to ensure equitable distribution of products and services to everyone.

Hope This Helps! Rich

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

And you are trying to pretend that the various European governments are any better why?

It's not a pretence. Look at the public health statistics and the percentage of the GNP spent on health care. The advanced industrial states in Europe get better health care for everybody for something like half what it costs you - Germany and France spend about 8% of GDP against your 14% to get slightly better health care than the U.K, that only spends about 6%. All three have better health care statistics than the U.S.A. but then again so does Cuba.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Richard The Dreaded Libertarian snipped-for-privacy@example.net posted to sci.electronics.design:

Now all we need is true and proper markets, where reasonably complete knowledge can exist, is generally available, and is generally sought. This does not exist today, nor can it really.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

Post the links.