Given how wrong you are, your sig is quite apropos.

Several of these programs date to after 2008. The rest Obama would have definitely been briefed on. Congress may not have known, but if you think he didn't you are pulling the wool over your own eyes. Just because you were in the dark doesn't mean he was. Notice how he has never claimed to not have known about what the NSA was doing? He knew because he authorized it. All of it.

These are his programs. Believing anything else is willful self-deception. It might help your cognitive dissonance, but it is ruining the country.

Bullshit. These are his programs. He wants them to continue.

No, you're just easily duped. Obama is, like Bush, a statist who supports the government's "right" to imprison, torture, and kill whoever they want for whatever reason they decide.

You jest, but, incidentally, in New Mexico a large portion of the poor who would have otherwise received the peanut butter would likely be Native Americans.

No, that was not the idea of the invisible hand. It's a nice straw man but it has nothing to do with what Adam Smith wrote.

The invisible hand is just a facile metaphor for how prices are set by supply and demand. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with regulated vs. unregulated markets. Moreover, nowhere in The Wealth of Nations does Smith ever say that the invisible hand will make everything work out for the best.

Just read Winthrop's own history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was pretty clear about it. The Puritans wanted religious freedom for the Puritans and none for anyone else.

I didn't. I did however assume a correlation between SAT scores and ADMISSIONS rates. I made no assumption about which of those admitted graduated. It's not relevant to my point.

If 50%-70% of HS students take the test (I'm guessing here, but it seems reasonable) and the top 50-70% of those are admitted and somewhere around 50-70% of those graduate my argument that a score from the 80th percentile of SAT takers will be around the middle or lower of scores of college graduates holds.

Around 25% of Americans complete college. If you score at the 80th percentile on a test that over half of graduating seniors are taking that puts you roughly in the middle quintile of future college graduates.

So yes, mediocre.

A more relevant reply than questioning the definition of mediocre would be to point out that its stupid to care about being mediocre on a test that is only ever used once in your life. On that we would agree. It would be similarly stupid to care about being mediocre at finger-painting or underwater basket weaving. However the fact that its stupid to care about it doesn't change the fact that you'd still be mediocre.

tldr; Middle of the pack of college grads is mediocre but it doesn't really matter for anything so who gives a fuck?

Depends on when you took it. In the days of the 1600 max score that'd be mediocre even with no sleep. In the days of the 2400 max score it's pitiful even with no sleep.

Those of us who use it for things connected to our real lives?

And as soon as I hit submit I remember that the army was segregated. Disregard me. I should not post before sunrise.

Checks and balances are federal, and there was no federal segregation. Moreover, the federal constitution was still in the process of being extended to apply to the states in the early 20th. It originally did not apply to the states at all.

TLDR: It wasn't unconstitutional at all until the USSC agreed that the new amendments made it unconstitutional.

Hilariously false. Dead trees last, at most, decades, and that's only if they're not used much. Under frequent use they last a few years max. My e-reader on the other hand, under almost daily use in sometimes rather adverse conditions (I've lugged it up mountains in Thailand, down the Mekong, across open ocean in an outrigger canoe, etc), has lasted four years in perfect functioning order. Dead trees would never have survived the abuse I've put my kindle through. The battery doesn't last as long as it used to (I used to be able to read seven to eight novels on a single charge, now I get about one or two novels), but it's long enough to still not matter much.

That some people don't know how to handle electronics is not the electronics fault.

I've read it. Probably five or six times. It's a brilliantly written, well-paced narrative that so trounced the genre conventions of its day that it invented a genre that still exists.

AND I HATE EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN IT.

From page one, I want them all to just die in a fire. Every one of those pathetic, entitled, spoiled snobs is a waste of time and oxygen.

I do have to admit though that I only have this reaction because it is so brilliantly written. It has to be for you to hate the characters like they were real.

Don't feed the trolls.