Some of the crap we've had to deal with down here with the veto-proof GOP takeovers of both houses of the legislature in 2010 includes:

• The state legislature interfering with local school boards (Wake and Guilford counties)
• Banning the use of LEED standards for public buildings (not just not requiring, banning)
• Jim Crow 2.0, oops, I mean, Voter ID laws (cuz there's fraud to be seen, if you really squint hard enough)
• Not just loosening enviro standards for fracking, but letting Halliburton re-write the rules
• Gutting pre-K educational funding
• ..and at least one legislator proposing a state religion in a bill that eventually was scuttled

So believe me, this is an incredibly minor incident, compared to the other B.S. that's been foisted on us by Art Pope and his cronies in the legislature and (since 2012) the governor's mansion. (I have friends who have protested in Raleigh and were arrested for trespassing as a result.) And oh yeah, nobody has explained how any of this will create jobs in a state that consistently has an unemployment rate that's 2% greater than the US average.

Nah, it'll just be subtitled: When Celestial Bodies Attack!

Me too - where do I send a few bucks?

Essentially do what the Chinese are doing, but add a crapload of special interest cash into the system. This would work. (I didn't say this was a good thing, I said this would work.)

"Beam him up?" Come one, that would assume he's a member of a non-human race with greater intelligence (or at least once that would take him). The correct response would be "somebody put this knuckle-dragger in the zoo already."

A corpse is a corpse, of course of course..

If only that were the case. The problem is that the higher costs are spread throughout the entire insurance risk pool (that is, everybody, even if the perpetrators are uninsured, oddly enough). If you smoke, I end up paying for it, one way or another. And IMO your right to your own particular lifestyle ought to end at my wallet.

Personally, I think smokers should be forced to waive any insurance or government benefits for treating the diseases they're foisting on themselves, period.

You commie liberals won't tell me what I can and cannot eat, drink, inhale, ingest, imbibe, consume, quaff, or absorb! I'm sick of government intrusion! So what if I drive up health care costs for everybody? I pay enough taxes already - too much in fact, for everything I get, without you whiny tards telling me what's good for me! If I want to sit on my front porch and eat an entire stick of butter in one sitting one day, you better stay the hell away! When I finally get up, if my knees can take it, you'll be looking down the barrel of my shotgun! YOU WILL TAKE MY FREEDOM BUTTER WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT !!!!1!!!!!

I know at least one (talented) person who has been let go from what was once EDS. I'm willing to bet that a lot more less-talented ones are on the way out.

Seriously. I really don't know what GM did to EDS before HP bought them, but from the stories I've heard, they have to be the largest collection of mental defectives to run an IT shop. Their processes were totally divorced from reality. I half expected Randall P. McMurphy to show up as new employee one day.

I'm no fan of "resource actions", having been through 2 myself, but purging the Enterprise Services division, or whatever EDS has been re-christened, was probably long long overdue.

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Check out the installment of "This American Life" (the NPR radio show) on the history of NUMMI, and how GM completely failed to capitalize on it, long before their implosion. Seriously, it's a fascinating installment, and one that echoes lessons from business school, particularly in the areas of operations and strategic transformation. I really really recommend it.

I think you could sum that up as "with liberty and justice for ME".

Most conservatives do cling very strongly to science, myself included. The wackos are just very loud

So.. where is this majority of conservatives to which you hint? They're too busy being the silent majority, I suppose.

Unfortunately for you, silence does imply approval.

I disagree with Lewis completely, if only because the teachings of Jesus have become mores in Western civilization and elsewhere, followed by Christians and non-Christians alike.

Ancient Rome was a horrific place, you know: the teachings of the prevalent state-sanctioned deities aligned themselves with the goals of the state exclusively, and dispensed morality for the benefit of the strong (think Neitzsche here..brrr). Murder of certain citizens was frowned upon, for example, but killing slaves and combatants in the gladiator's arena was morally neutral at worst. The very idea that morality must accommodate the weak - the weakest of us, in fact, was revolutionary.

Very few modern societies have since sanctioned the Roman practice of dressing up barbarism as moral rectitude, and the influence of Christianity in this respect is beyond doubt. Whether that particular brand of morality or ethics was followed, or just copied wholesale into other cultures, is incidental.

Besides, Lewis props up a straw man by saying that anyone who would believe those teachings by themselves must be a madman - without providing any evidence for such a goofy claim.

Um, "give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to the Lord what is the Lord's?". I remember that one. You lose.

And to equate belief in "government", whatever that means, with "religion" is simply farcical. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Jesus was neither a Republican or a Democrat, IIRC. And actually, I do know Catholic monks who are fed up with this "state = evil" attitude. They would and do insist that politics (and politicians) that both restrict/eliminate abortion, while also avoiding the use the power of the people to take care of the disadvantaged, cannot justifiably be called "pro-life". (Oddly enough, abortion rhetoric aside, the current pope would be to the left of Nancy Pelosi on America's socio-political scale.)

Oops, "divine" not "diving". Curse you, submit button!