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Comment Re:I am shocked! (Score 1) 670

need a large standing military?

The intention was to have no standing military and limited policing, these might be noble goals but in 2009 on earth they are simply not feasible, so holding text written assuming these would be true as sacred is ignoring reality.

Don't take the Founding Fathers word for it though -- Dwight Eisenhower said almost the same thing just 50 years ago.

I wouldn't take Eisenhower's words any more sacredly than the Founding Fathers, we're not living in 1959 any more than we are living in 1788.

I see no reason why that's any less relevant today than it was 200 years ago. In fact, I would argue that it's more relevant today.

How about the fact that they have tanks, planes, uavs, missiles and complex tactical training that a civilian population doesn't. Sure you might get lucky and take out a key figure from a bookshop, but if you think your rifle is going to help in a civil war in 2009 you have another thing coming.

The 20th century was filled with genocides of unarmed people, genocides that might not have happened if the victims had been armed and able to resist.

It is also filled with genocides by unarmed people, arming both sides doesn't make the problem go away.

It would be far better for our Republic if as many of those things as possible were handled at the state and local level.

Why? Why would you be any better of with all of those handled at a state/local level? In some cases you have more possibility for fraud, others lose out on benefits of the economy of scale and in the worst case scenarios you have races to the bottom that make legislation ineffective, so why is the Federal government doing something, inherently worse than the state/local government doing it?

Comment Re:I am shocked! (Score 1) 670

Jobs - 200 years ago there were slaves.
Jobs - 200 years ago there was no protection for workers against their bosses, no minimum wage, no unions, nothing.
Jobs - 200 years ago there was the potential of work for everybody, soon (if not now) there will be so much technology replacing cannon fodder that there will be permanent unemployment
Education - 200 years ago, education for all was not even an option
Healthcare - 200 years ago, people got sick they died. On the whole there was no expensive medicine that could help them if they could afford it.
Food/Shelter - 200 years ago, the technology didn't exist to make it feasible to provide shelter/food for everybody it does now (or will soon)

We do not live in the same world we did 200 years ago, it's not even the same as 50 years ago, ideologies from such times are not applicable today!

Comment Re:Polyethalene = oil doesn't it (Score 1) 262

I last failed chemistry 1 year ago and we're still fucked! The only solution is to grow plastics (like we grow biofuels), but that comes with significant downsides because farming is harder than drilling and well we need food too. IMO long term the solution is factory farming (they are starting to research this in Japan), but that requires a lot of energy.

Comment Re:Nuclear power plants are offtopic, but here goe (Score 1) 262

insightful my ass! Nuclear power for civilian purposes produces enough energy for France, in fact it produces enough excess that they can run CERN with no negative effect on the environment. The only thing keeping it down are the lobbiests for coal/oil, big woop obsolete jobs are obsolete, while that sucks for the people who work in the coal industry it's just the way it is.

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