After watching PETA's ad it's no surprise that it didn't air. I doubt they even have the budget to air commercials during the Superbowl.
PETA probably commissioned a sexy ad knowing fully well it wouldn't be approved by NBC. The fact that it's "banned" gives PETA the Superbowl publicity it can't afford. (And as others have said, Superbowl watchers aren't exactly PETA's target audience.)
(...) or the ability of the government to stimulate by borrowing dollars from domestic and foreign holders of dollars and spending it in particular, focussed areas (since such policy does not rely on manipulate M1.)
The Fed's balance sheet was spent on the first bailouts, and the US is now printing money to cover the current bailouts. The government is manipulating M1.
The author of that piece attempts to confuse the issue by posting a different graph that shows a falling trend in how effective stimulative government deficit spending has been on average recently, and attempting to suggest, without any real reason, that the two graphs are directly related
You're confusing the issue by implying that they are not directly related. Manipulation of M1 leads to an even worse trend on the second graph.
The second graph does show a long-term problem, and particularly does show why, once this recession ends, the US government must, in the subsequent expansion, begin to pay down the debt or at least stop expanding the debt faster than the GDP during expansions
I love how people like yourself, Bernanke and Paulson concede under pressure that deficit spending is disturbing, but at the same time hold a Keynesian attitude of printing money to "stimulate" the economy.
There's only one correct attitude during a recession: liquidate bad debt and expose fraud. Deficit spending during a recession only drains money from healthy sectors of the economy.
If I borrow $100 now and put it to work now, that $100 will have a net effect of the $100 spent x the current multiplier
Right. And the multiplier has fallen below 1.0. The United States cannot print or borrow out of this mess, which is the point that the grandparent post was making.
It's not like the United States has a safe with trillions of dollars that can be distributed or invested in some central planning scheme. The trillions of dollars which are being offered represent money that the US government doesn't have.
From your response I can tell you are a Southern Baptist who has been exposed to "The Mormon Question" or know someone who has. It saddens me to see you so naively misled.
You're very off base. I'm not Southern Baptist. I'm not even American.
Here's the deal: Muslims claim Jesus was just a man. Christians claim that Jesus is God. Therefore, the God of Islam cannot be the God of Christians (because a regular man obviously cannot be the one and only God). QED. No need to invoke the Trinity.
Any religion which rejects Jesus as God is automatically incompatible with Christianity. Reducing the role of Jesus to that of a prophet contradicts the New Testament and the Christian concept of salvation through grace.
Actually, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, all worship the same God, they just disagree on who was the last prophet.
I respectfully disagree.
The Christian God is Triune, and this "last prophet" is actually the Christian God. The fact that Jews, Muslims and Christians disagree regarding Christ means that they have differing opinions regarding the essential nature of God.
Muslims worship a God which is not triune. Therefore, the Muslim God cannot be the Christian God.
If the prevelence of 40 as a figure is what turns you off, note that semetic languages commonly use the number 40 as a non-literal figure meaning "many" and somewhere around that order of magnitude. However, translations commonly take this literally. Hence, the prevelence of "40 days" for Noah's ark, "40 years" in the desert, etc.
Sufficiently accurate for a religious text, but not at all appropriate for a technical description.
Lending half a billion dollars to a company that's jumpstarting the electrification of transportation? Well that's just good sense right there. So take your libertarian viewpoint to a country that cares.
You don't get to pick which laws to follow and which to ignore. If you think federal funding for car manufacturers is good sense, then amend your Constitution to allow it. The law doesn't discriminate between car manufacturers simply because the Constitution makes no provision for any federal funding of this sort. And if the Constitution doesn't refer to something, then it's forbidden to the federal government.
I'm not even American but I know what the US Constitution says. It's a tiny document written in plain language which anyone with a high school education should be able to understand. You should try reading it some time.
Wait, so how is our current model not a free market? You're welcome to print your own currency; in fact, every nation I'm aware of does precisely that. That currency is given a value by a market (you may have heard of this value, it's often called the "exchange rate"). You're subject to legal restrictions against creating new United States Dollars, of course, but you can create as many Flavio Dubloons as you wish, which will then acquire a value from the market.
In the current model only governments are allowed to print money. It's against the law in the United States for me to issue Flavio Dubloons and use them as a replacement for the US Dollar. Similar laws exist in other countries. It's also illegal in many (most?) countries to buy and sell in foreign currencies, even if both parties agree to perform the exchange.
Look up what happened to the Liberty Dollar if you want an example of how the government doesn't tolerate competition. In short, a private mint in the United States was making gold, silver and copper coins with their own private designs, intended as a barter currency and not legal tender. They were specially careful with this description, because barter is allowed by law. The mint's warehouse was raided by the FBI in 2007, and their whole stock of coins was seized on charges of money laundering, fraud, counterfeiting and conspiracy. The case still hasn't gone to court.
Since Hayek died in 1992, he could not possibly have made any statement whatsoever about this particular crisis.
I never said he did.
Hayek showed how the business cycle (i.e., the alternation of expansions and recessions) is intimately related to the government manipulation of interest rates, savings rates, and inflation through the central banks' manipulation of the money supply. This crisis is no exception -- the presence of financial instruments such as credit default swaps makes this scenario more serious, but does not change its fundamental nature.
In a free market model, money should work like any other commodity and derive its value from the market itself. Currencies should be present in many competing forms, and its issuance should not a privilege of the state. In contrast, Chicago school economists (like Milton Friedman, who most people think of when they hear of a free market) advocate government planning and intervention in the form of a central bank, which implies an obstructed economy and not a free market.
Give me a break. Why is it that any time someone disagrees with someone they call the other person a liar? There is a difference between being wrong and lying you know.
Because his association of austrian economics and flat-earthers was an obvious attempt to deceive. His comment never had an argument based on logic, science or history which could only pass as "wrong", because it wasn't the product of an honest mistake. It was a demonstrably false attempt to ridicule which deserved to be called upon.
I'm not going to tip toe around this matter just for the sake of being politically correct.
Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?
That means, quoted recently, specificly addressing this crisis; not quotes showing they said years ago "well, in the future when the mortgage default crisis is going to cause a liquidity crisis in the world, our theoretical analysis is going to recommend that no action should be taken."
I'm not going to do your homework for you because it sounds like you've already decided what to believe. Anyone who wants to find members of the Austrian school who predicted this disaster can look at Wikipedia's List of Austrian School Economists, select the younger individuals and find numerous articles. This is no surprise, since the current crisis is a textbook example of the business cycle recession/depression which Mises and Hayek (two Austrian economists) characterized.
American politicians used to talk a lot about the free market, while actually guiding the country in the opposite direction. Reagan used to quote Hayek, but his administration had a huge deficit spending binge. I also love how people now quote Greenspan for saying how he was mistaken about the free market, as if he could have a credible opinion on the subject.
Having the chairman of a central bank talk about the free market is like akin to asking a concentration camp director's opinion regarding liberty.
Quoting the austrian school in serious economic discussions is like quoting creationists or flat-earthers. It's pseudo-science to a degree that real economists are embarrassed by them.
Liar. Hayek is one of the best known economists in world history, who won the Nobel Prize for showing how government intervention is responsible for the business cycle. He was a member of the austrian school, and his advisor was Ludwig von Mises, a highly influential austrian school economist. A quick Wikipedia search will reveal many other noteworthy economists aligned with the austrian school.
You're probably just another dumbass who thinks the free market got us into this mess, when in fact all we've seen in the last 100 years is an interventionist economic policy based on central banking.
And what's amazing, and completely against capitalism, none of these web browser makers are charging any money for their products! All this great software is being developed and given away for free!
Capitalism and OSS are orthogonal concepts. Companies like IBM and Red Hat make money out of Linux and Mozilla with hardware and services (not by selling the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser), and would carry on investing in free software even if Microsoft suddenly went bankrupt. My company develops instrumentation using GNU tools, and we also support OSS.
Capitalism by definition is the free market, which when taken to the extreme is anarcho-capitalism. Thanks to Marx's poor definition of value (which is too dependent on labor) and his class war ideology, the concept of capitalism has been associated with fascism. As Hayek wrote, the easiest way to convince people of something is to redefine the meaning of words. Don't fall into this trap.
Capitalism is a system which allows people to be free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit and to cooperate on projects such as Mozilla. What we see on Washington, Wall Street and in central banks is a huge money laundering machine, where we can't tell apart where the government ends and where the corporations begin. This is the very definition of fascism.
Even now unabashed Hayek/Friedman fanboi come out of the woodwork to passive aggressively promote the often failed free market scam.
Hayek was from the Austrian school of economics. Friedman was from the Chicago school. Like every other Chicago school economist, Friedman defended government intervention through a central bank. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banking and the government manipulation of interest rates caused and aggravated recessions.
The fact that you've associated Hayek and Friedman as if they stood for the same concepts shows that you don't know what you're talking about.
"It's symbolic," Stauber, a 40-year-old pilot from Switzerland, said of the counter's lack of space. "It's a very big symbol. It's a complete failure of the system. It's the most powerful country in the world with a conservative government for the last eight years, and it's running the biggest debt ever."
Just because Bush claims to be a conservative doesn't mean he actually is one!
The US has an incredibly interventionist foreign policy, and Americans haven't experienced a free market for almost a century. I'd like to echo Jim Rogers, and say that all we've seen lately is socialism.
The housing bubble, which is undoubtedly the cause of the economic downturn, came about because democrats on capital hill thought every American should be able to live the "American dream," and buy houses which they couldn't afford.
The housing bubble is the Fed's work, which started back with Greenspan during the Clinton administration, and was merely continued during the Bush years. Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, seeing how both encouraged the artificially low interest rates and did nothing to stop it.
It's remarkable how many Americans fall for the Democrat vs. Republican false dichotomy. There's very little difference between both parties, and the sooner Americans realise this, the better chance they'll have to change things for the better. McCain represents Bush -- he's not a maverick. Obama voted in favor of the things he claims to oppose. Both parties voted to fund the war, and both promote an interventionist policy (in foreign affairs, domestic affairs and financial markets).
A vote for the Democrats or Republicans is a wasted vote. It does nothing to promote change, since the same interest groups control both parties. If you want change, vote for a third party or for an independent.
I'm looking the Democratic National Convention and its soon-to-come Republican counterpart, and I can't help but thinking that they are indeed fiddling while Rome burns.
I can understand why Microsoft might wish to run XP on the X0 but what I struggle to understand is why anyone is comparing them to one another.
The point of comparing Sugar to XP is to demonstrate what most of us predicted -- i.e., that XP is completely unsuitable for this application.
Having XP in the marketplace annoys me, but my irritation is limited because people have alternatives. A child who gets XP preinstalled on the XO will probably have no alternative and will be left with an inferior product. I hope reviewers keep denouncing Microsoft's involvement with the XO, because no good can come of it.
What I can't believe is that you can claim "Obama in no way voted for the Patriot Act. Ever", when in fact he DID vote for reauthorizing it (HR 3199, USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization), just like he voted Yes to fund the war.
How is a link that predates Obama's tenure considered "proof" of his voting record on anything? If somehow denying reality is more comfortable for you, here's a bit of unsolicited advice: SUCK IT UP. Either figure out a way to explain Obama's fuck ups or switch to a candidate who actually has a voting record consistent with his views. Don't call me a troll for stating the truth, because you're the one promoting a lie.
Given that Obama voted for the Patriot Act and to fund the Iraq war, I'd say that whatever values he's claiming to hold are weak at best.
His resume looks good, considering he actually taught constitutional law for many years in top colleges. But his voting record shows that he doesn't adhere to the principles he taught and swore to uphold.
Just because people don't understand the nuance of UAC and the "Vista Capable" debacle doesn't make them morons.
I know several engineers who understand this and keep using Vista.
For most people, when it comes to computers, just want their stuff to work. The computer is an appliance, not a hobby, not a career, not a way of life. As an appliance, a computer is way to complicated.
I gave up my UberGeek credentials long ago. I got sick of dealing with the sad state of affairs regarding usability, reinvention as a form of improvement, and fan boys each proclaiming their turd stinks the least.
My computer set up is whatever my machine came with, because quite frankly, I have better things to do with my time and it does what I want.
The people I know who use Vista waste so much time dealing with their computers' idiosyncrasies that they'd have much more free time if they invested a little effort to switch. That's why they're idiots. I couldn't care less about their respective OS choices if they were productive.
I don't know anyone who actually bought Vista unbundled, but I know plenty of people who got it pre-installed and kept using it.
They experience Vista's problems and huge system requirements, but they keep using it anyway. Maybe it's because they don't want to admit to themselves that they indirectly bought garbage. But I think it's because they want the newest, shiniest product, regardless of whether it's better.
You are correct that the commandment is "thou shalt not murder", and I agree with the theological rebuttal to the grandparent's post.
However, you are completely out of your mind to propose that guns aren't designed to kill, or that a soldier's purpose is to end war. To quote Forrest Gump, a soldier's purpose is to do whatever his superior tells him to. If the commander in chief wants eternal war, then the soldier's purpose is to execute that wish. An obedient soldier under a morally corrupt leader automatically becomes a morally corrupt.
The illegal occupation of Iraq is a perfect example of soldiers being used to start a war, not to end one. And if M16s weren't designed to kill, what were they designed for? Decorating birthday cakes?
Slashdot Mirror
After watching PETA's ad it's no surprise that it didn't air. I doubt they even have the budget to air commercials during the Superbowl.
PETA probably commissioned a sexy ad knowing fully well it wouldn't be approved by NBC. The fact that it's "banned" gives PETA the Superbowl publicity it can't afford. (And as others have said, Superbowl watchers aren't exactly PETA's target audience.)
(...) or the ability of the government to stimulate by borrowing dollars from domestic and foreign holders of dollars and spending it in particular, focussed areas (since such policy does not rely on manipulate M1.)
The Fed's balance sheet was spent on the first bailouts, and the US is now printing money to cover the current bailouts. The government is manipulating M1.
The author of that piece attempts to confuse the issue by posting a different graph that shows a falling trend in how effective stimulative government deficit spending has been on average recently, and attempting to suggest, without any real reason, that the two graphs are directly related
You're confusing the issue by implying that they are not directly related. Manipulation of M1 leads to an even worse trend on the second graph.
The second graph does show a long-term problem, and particularly does show why, once this recession ends, the US government must, in the subsequent expansion, begin to pay down the debt or at least stop expanding the debt faster than the GDP during expansions
I love how people like yourself, Bernanke and Paulson concede under pressure that deficit spending is disturbing, but at the same time hold a Keynesian attitude of printing money to "stimulate" the economy.
There's only one correct attitude during a recession: liquidate bad debt and expose fraud. Deficit spending during a recession only drains money from healthy sectors of the economy.
If I borrow $100 now and put it to work now, that $100 will have a net effect of the $100 spent x the current multiplier
Right. And the multiplier has fallen below 1.0. The United States cannot print or borrow out of this mess, which is the point that the grandparent post was making.
It's not like the United States has a safe with trillions of dollars that can be distributed or invested in some central planning scheme. The trillions of dollars which are being offered represent money that the US government doesn't have.
From your response I can tell you are a Southern Baptist who has been exposed to "The Mormon Question" or know someone who has. It saddens me to see you so naively misled.
You're very off base. I'm not Southern Baptist. I'm not even American.
Here's the deal: Muslims claim Jesus was just a man. Christians claim that Jesus is God. Therefore, the God of Islam cannot be the God of Christians (because a regular man obviously cannot be the one and only God). QED. No need to invoke the Trinity.
Any religion which rejects Jesus as God is automatically incompatible with Christianity. Reducing the role of Jesus to that of a prophet contradicts the New Testament and the Christian concept of salvation through grace.
Actually, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, all worship the same God, they just disagree on who was the last prophet.
I respectfully disagree.
The Christian God is Triune, and this "last prophet" is actually the Christian God. The fact that Jews, Muslims and Christians disagree regarding Christ means that they have differing opinions regarding the essential nature of God.
Muslims worship a God which is not triune. Therefore, the Muslim God cannot be the Christian God.
If the prevelence of 40 as a figure is what turns you off, note that semetic languages commonly use the number 40 as a non-literal figure meaning "many" and somewhere around that order of magnitude. However, translations commonly take this literally. Hence, the prevelence of "40 days" for Noah's ark, "40 years" in the desert, etc.
Sufficiently accurate for a religious text, but not at all appropriate for a technical description.
Lending half a billion dollars to a company that's jumpstarting the electrification of transportation? Well that's just good sense right there. So take your libertarian viewpoint to a country that cares.
You don't get to pick which laws to follow and which to ignore. If you think federal funding for car manufacturers is good sense, then amend your Constitution to allow it. The law doesn't discriminate between car manufacturers simply because the Constitution makes no provision for any federal funding of this sort. And if the Constitution doesn't refer to something, then it's forbidden to the federal government.
I'm not even American but I know what the US Constitution says. It's a tiny document written in plain language which anyone with a high school education should be able to understand. You should try reading it some time.
Wait, so how is our current model not a free market? You're welcome to print your own currency; in fact, every nation I'm aware of does precisely that. That currency is given a value by a market (you may have heard of this value, it's often called the "exchange rate"). You're subject to legal restrictions against creating new United States Dollars, of course, but you can create as many Flavio Dubloons as you wish, which will then acquire a value from the market.
In the current model only governments are allowed to print money. It's against the law in the United States for me to issue Flavio Dubloons and use them as a replacement for the US Dollar. Similar laws exist in other countries. It's also illegal in many (most?) countries to buy and sell in foreign currencies, even if both parties agree to perform the exchange.
Look up what happened to the Liberty Dollar if you want an example of how the government doesn't tolerate competition. In short, a private mint in the United States was making gold, silver and copper coins with their own private designs, intended as a barter currency and not legal tender. They were specially careful with this description, because barter is allowed by law. The mint's warehouse was raided by the FBI in 2007, and their whole stock of coins was seized on charges of money laundering, fraud, counterfeiting and conspiracy. The case still hasn't gone to court.
Since Hayek died in 1992, he could not possibly have made any statement whatsoever about this particular crisis.
I never said he did.
Hayek showed how the business cycle (i.e., the alternation of expansions and recessions) is intimately related to the government manipulation of interest rates, savings rates, and inflation through the central banks' manipulation of the money supply. This crisis is no exception -- the presence of financial instruments such as credit default swaps makes this scenario more serious, but does not change its fundamental nature.
In a free market model, money should work like any other commodity and derive its value from the market itself. Currencies should be present in many competing forms, and its issuance should not a privilege of the state. In contrast, Chicago school economists (like Milton Friedman, who most people think of when they hear of a free market) advocate government planning and intervention in the form of a central bank, which implies an obstructed economy and not a free market.
Give me a break. Why is it that any time someone disagrees with someone they call the other person a liar? There is a difference between being wrong and lying you know.
Because his association of austrian economics and flat-earthers was an obvious attempt to deceive. His comment never had an argument based on logic, science or history which could only pass as "wrong", because it wasn't the product of an honest mistake. It was a demonstrably false attempt to ridicule which deserved to be called upon.
I'm not going to tip toe around this matter just for the sake of being politically correct.
Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?
That means, quoted recently, specificly addressing this crisis; not quotes showing they said years ago "well, in the future when the mortgage default crisis is going to cause a liquidity crisis in the world, our theoretical analysis is going to recommend that no action should be taken."
I'm not going to do your homework for you because it sounds like you've already decided what to believe. Anyone who wants to find members of the Austrian school who predicted this disaster can look at Wikipedia's List of Austrian School Economists, select the younger individuals and find numerous articles. This is no surprise, since the current crisis is a textbook example of the business cycle recession/depression which Mises and Hayek (two Austrian economists) characterized.
American politicians used to talk a lot about the free market, while actually guiding the country in the opposite direction. Reagan used to quote Hayek, but his administration had a huge deficit spending binge. I also love how people now quote Greenspan for saying how he was mistaken about the free market, as if he could have a credible opinion on the subject.
Having the chairman of a central bank talk about the free market is like akin to asking a concentration camp director's opinion regarding liberty.
Quoting the austrian school in serious economic discussions is like quoting creationists or flat-earthers. It's pseudo-science to a degree that real economists are embarrassed by them.
Liar. Hayek is one of the best known economists in world history, who won the Nobel Prize for showing how government intervention is responsible for the business cycle. He was a member of the austrian school, and his advisor was Ludwig von Mises, a highly influential austrian school economist. A quick Wikipedia search will reveal many other noteworthy economists aligned with the austrian school.
You're probably just another dumbass who thinks the free market got us into this mess, when in fact all we've seen in the last 100 years is an interventionist economic policy based on central banking.
And what's amazing, and completely against capitalism, none of these web browser makers are charging any money for their products! All this great software is being developed and given away for free!
Capitalism and OSS are orthogonal concepts. Companies like IBM and Red Hat make money out of Linux and Mozilla with hardware and services (not by selling the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser), and would carry on investing in free software even if Microsoft suddenly went bankrupt. My company develops instrumentation using GNU tools, and we also support OSS.
Capitalism by definition is the free market, which when taken to the extreme is anarcho-capitalism. Thanks to Marx's poor definition of value (which is too dependent on labor) and his class war ideology, the concept of capitalism has been associated with fascism. As Hayek wrote, the easiest way to convince people of something is to redefine the meaning of words. Don't fall into this trap.
Capitalism is a system which allows people to be free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit and to cooperate on projects such as Mozilla. What we see on Washington, Wall Street and in central banks is a huge money laundering machine, where we can't tell apart where the government ends and where the corporations begin. This is the very definition of fascism.
Even now unabashed Hayek/Friedman fanboi come out of the woodwork to passive aggressively promote the often failed free market scam.
Hayek was from the Austrian school of economics. Friedman was from the Chicago school. Like every other Chicago school economist, Friedman defended government intervention through a central bank. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banking and the government manipulation of interest rates caused and aggravated recessions.
The fact that you've associated Hayek and Friedman as if they stood for the same concepts shows that you don't know what you're talking about.
"It's symbolic," Stauber, a 40-year-old pilot from Switzerland, said of the counter's lack of space. "It's a very big symbol. It's a complete failure of the system. It's the most powerful country in the world with a conservative government for the last eight years, and it's running the biggest debt ever."
Just because Bush claims to be a conservative doesn't mean he actually is one!
The US has an incredibly interventionist foreign policy, and Americans haven't experienced a free market for almost a century. I'd like to echo Jim Rogers, and say that all we've seen lately is socialism.
Education is too important to be left to the state.
The housing bubble, which is undoubtedly the cause of the economic downturn, came about because democrats on capital hill thought every American should be able to live the "American dream," and buy houses which they couldn't afford.
The housing bubble is the Fed's work, which started back with Greenspan during the Clinton administration, and was merely continued during the Bush years. Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, seeing how both encouraged the artificially low interest rates and did nothing to stop it.
It's remarkable how many Americans fall for the Democrat vs. Republican false dichotomy. There's very little difference between both parties, and the sooner Americans realise this, the better chance they'll have to change things for the better. McCain represents Bush -- he's not a maverick. Obama voted in favor of the things he claims to oppose. Both parties voted to fund the war, and both promote an interventionist policy (in foreign affairs, domestic affairs and financial markets).
A vote for the Democrats or Republicans is a wasted vote. It does nothing to promote change, since the same interest groups control both parties. If you want change, vote for a third party or for an independent.
I will give you one hint - it costs about 30$ to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground, at the most (think oil sands in Ontario).
This answer would only make sense if Ford sold oil instead of cars.
I'm looking the Democratic National Convention and its soon-to-come Republican counterpart, and I can't help but thinking that they are indeed fiddling while Rome burns.
You should check out the Rally for the Republic.
I can understand why Microsoft might wish to run XP on the X0 but what I struggle to understand is why anyone is comparing them to one another.
The point of comparing Sugar to XP is to demonstrate what most of us predicted -- i.e., that XP is completely unsuitable for this application.
Having XP in the marketplace annoys me, but my irritation is limited because people have alternatives. A child who gets XP preinstalled on the XO will probably have no alternative and will be left with an inferior product. I hope reviewers keep denouncing Microsoft's involvement with the XO, because no good can come of it.
What I can't believe is that you can claim "Obama in no way voted for the Patriot Act. Ever", when in fact he DID vote for reauthorizing it (HR 3199, USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization), just like he voted Yes to fund the war.
How is a link that predates Obama's tenure considered "proof" of his voting record on anything? If somehow denying reality is more comfortable for you, here's a bit of unsolicited advice: SUCK IT UP. Either figure out a way to explain Obama's fuck ups or switch to a candidate who actually has a voting record consistent with his views. Don't call me a troll for stating the truth, because you're the one promoting a lie.
Given that Obama voted for the Patriot Act and to fund the Iraq war, I'd say that whatever values he's claiming to hold are weak at best.
His resume looks good, considering he actually taught constitutional law for many years in top colleges. But his voting record shows that he doesn't adhere to the principles he taught and swore to uphold.
I don't know anyone who actually bought Vista unbundled, but I know plenty of people who got it pre-installed and kept using it.
They experience Vista's problems and huge system requirements, but they keep using it anyway. Maybe it's because they don't want to admit to themselves that they indirectly bought garbage. But I think it's because they want the newest, shiniest product, regardless of whether it's better.
Fact: most people are MORONS.
You are correct that the commandment is "thou shalt not murder", and I agree with the theological rebuttal to the grandparent's post.
However, you are completely out of your mind to propose that guns aren't designed to kill, or that a soldier's purpose is to end war. To quote Forrest Gump, a soldier's purpose is to do whatever his superior tells him to. If the commander in chief wants eternal war, then the soldier's purpose is to execute that wish. An obedient soldier under a morally corrupt leader automatically becomes a morally corrupt.
The illegal occupation of Iraq is a perfect example of soldiers being used to start a war, not to end one. And if M16s weren't designed to kill, what were they designed for? Decorating birthday cakes?