You haven't proven the absurdity of my statement. The military isn't an institution of socialism. It's an institution that protects democracy. How well do you think socialism would work if it hard to protect itself and didn't have a superpower doing the job for it? The old Soviet Union comes to mind, but also Communist China and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Yes, we are forced to pay for the military for our common protection against systems that don't believe in democracy and that military has allowed socialism to exist in Western Europe. My point is that peaceful socialism doesn't exist if it has to protect itself and we'd have a better standard of living than Norway if we weren't maintaining peace in the world. We don't have anybody to protect us, so we must do the job ourselves. The danger of socialism is that it causes economic decline. If we continue down that road, our standard of living will drop and the world will destabilize at the same time.

Whose military is guaranteeing freedom on trade on the high seas? Is it Norway's? Norway can afford a little socialism as the democracies freed it from Nazism in the second world war, kept it free during Soviet times. This isn't off topic. The United States is a superpower maintaining an American Peace. We don't have much option but to maintain that. But to compare the world's only superpower to Norway and expect me to believe that socialism is workable. You've got to be kidding me.

I don't understand why anyone would want to turn this thing around. The ACA is another incremental step toward socialism. Socialism has always resulted in a lower standard of living for the people it's purported to help. The ACA is doomed to failure,as the Democratic Party doesn't understand where money comes from: it comes from hard work, not redistribution of somebody else's hard work. It's going to fail eventually. I hope it's now and not later, when it might take our entire economy down the tubes as it fails.

What is your opinion of the recent work on "junk" DNA? If an intelligent creator wouldn't have created junk DNA, what do we conclude as we learn that "junk" DNA really isn't junk?

I want a free market. Obamanomics != free market.

Yep. I choose not to murder people. There's no way the state can make good people. The church has done a lot better job at keeping us from killing each other than the state ever could. I choose not to rob convenience stores. I choose to drive the speed limit. Do you really think the state can make us do anything?

No. They're not against energy efficiency. They're against the state dictating what light bulbs people buy. It's just freedom. I used compact fluorescents and encourage others to also. I also wear a seat belt. But I'm 100% against the state telling me to wear a seat belt or what light bulbs to buy, or anything else for that matter.

I did a book on contract for BMW. I started with Word, but didn't like Equation 3.0 for equations. The results look good, but too slow for a tech book. I didn't want to use Tex (done that, too slow for a long book on a schedule). I ended up using StarOffice, but today I'd use OpenOffice. The equation formatting is pretty fast. The figures you can create inside are a bit too simplistic for a tech book, but on par with Word.

Oh, something else. You don't have life while you're writing. I borrowed a travel trailer from my in-laws and rented space in a trailer park. I put the computer in there and went back and forth from work to the trailer until the book was done. It's a lonely existence. After a while, I knew the radio schedules by heart and that's about all I knew of life in the outside world.