> Or do you put everything in one pile?

The people who visit my office might think I do ...

Yeah, right. You'd rather have the surcharge hidden so you could pretend it did not exist. I bet you think the Affordable Care Act actually was about health care and not about insurance.

Frankly, the confluence of islamofascist infiltration and political correctness drive my strong tendency to arm myself to the limits allowed by the laws in effect at the time I am arming, hence my 50-round clips are not registered and never will be. Because my other on-line persona are not nearly so gracious as this one, as in other venues I refer to the islamofascists in far less civilized terms (even, gasp, presenting pictures of Mohamet in unflattering ways). And a large caliber with high rate of fire works pretty well in defending against onesies and twosies of any religious sect.

The people who argue that we are (im)morally equivalent to these goat-fekkers are confusing the 1400s (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition) with the 1960s. The separation of Church and State (such as it is in the West, see Magna Carta) has not been discovered yet in the MIddle East. Only the Europeans and in some sense the Chinese-Japanese-Koreans and similar have separated the two.

Footnote: high-caliber and high fire rate do not help at all against the mob (adverts not-withstanding, so don't look for me in cities.

Ooops, the 3.5-4 was suppposd to be a [WAG]3.5-4[/WAG]

Idiocratic journalists don't even ask the first order correcting question let alone the second. The first is, how much is their spending per capita compared to ours (duh, about a factor of 4 or 5 there), and second, how much is their spending per engineer/scientist (or whatever subgroup that actually needs that spending). Again, duh, about a factor of 3.5-4? Of course, we ARE producing the worlds most educated baristas, busquers and bloggers.

We also get Google and Wikipedia ... doing for free (with tip jars ala NPR/PBS) what AOL, Yahoo, etc could not do. This is just like musicians having to learn to make their money off their IP by selling concerts rather than by selling the songs. They make less on average as a consequence, but there are more people making those token wages as 2nd income (my perception, no data). Sure, we still have the top-pop-40 industrial-"musak" feeding the masses, but who cares? Let them tear each other apart in the free market while the rest of us enjoy the new subsistence economy.

One thing that Henry Ford was noted for was his idea that the workers should be paid well enough to afford the products they produce (at least, in basic industries like car production). This idea (that workers are also customers) may need to be revisited. How will a world operate when it is producing all the electric cars we need with only a handful of technicians running massively automated factories? More importantly, how will we keep clothing and food production factories running when the only work available is as baristas and busquers? The automated workplace needs a new model for (re)distributing income, or it will collapse from lack of markets. And we cannot simply borrow against equity (like we did in the 1990s with housing) to fuel the consumer-based economy. The transition from industrial to the new subsistence society is not going to be any smoother than any other massive shifts in economic systems were.. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a rough ride.

Well, I could turn this around and claim that the thing we are doing over and over is making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change. But then I am more of an evidence-based decision maker rather than a simple ideologue.

An aside: Be careful what you wish for (lower cancer rates), treating cancer as a terminal condition might be cheaper than treating it as a disease then turning around and also paying for heart failure as the terminal condition. By the way, Total Cost of Ownership type analyses are really frowned on in a society that has disconnected health care costs from the health care consumers. So go ahead and pick from the menu 'cause the kids'll pick up the bill (a switch on the usual parents-as-ATMs, no?).

New regs are all about making it harder to fly, so we can reduce our carbon footprints, so we can delay the end of the current ice age by another 100 years (it's coming whether we all start walking yesterday).

Hey, remember 1945? Don't make me open up another can o' whoop-ass on you.

I'll bet if you do the regression analysis to predict success you would find the coefficient on "ethnicity" large and statistically significant while the coefficient on "race" was small and statistically insignificant, which is to say that "ethnicity" (culture, nurture and life style) is important and "race" (genes and biology) is not. But then, I am just a mathematician working in medical research and am not a political scientist working in the surreal world.

But correlation is not causation, and "personal testimonials (n=1)" are not "evidence-based analysis (n>>1)". Try looking at a few GOOD clinical trials and see what you think then.

Now that MN is a political monoculture (the Governor and both House and Senate (state level) are Democratic) I am going to propose to my fellow Libertarians and the estimated 20-30% of the rational Republicans that we " New Hampshire " the MN Democratic party, so that when we discuss (for example) how bad defined benefits state pension plans are when compared with defined contribution plans, that debate is carried on within the ruling class rather than between the two competing ruling classes. Only this way can we shed the religious conservatives, with their big-government social agenda, who have hijacked the Republican party. We will carry our sustainable is important thinking along as we attempt to teach economics to the Democrats (who deny economic science the way the Republicans deny evolutionary science).

Freedom first, then peace, then justice. You can't have justice without peace because for that is mob tyranny.. You cannot have peace without freedom for that is slavery. And you have to deliver them to yourself in the only order that can sustain itself during the transitions. Freedom first. Then peace. Then justice.