it would be nice to retain ALL my memories of the past life
There's an implication here that you retain some of them?
I think that retaining more would probably not be helpful for most of us. Just looking around at the world, a person can see all manner of folly and its consequences, and yet people keep doing those things anyway. I think more memory would be more of a cause of pride and regret. How would you free yourself from the burden of past emotion so that you can deal with the present?
Also, how would you keep all the memories straight, so that you don't scramble together different times and places, and confuse what is you and what is someone else? The idea of there being a simple chain of past lives doesn't make sense to me. I'm not saying that its wrong, just that I don't see it. Life and identify seems more complicated to me then that, there's more ways to slice it. What would connect the life of a past person with me and make that person "me", rather than someone else? Memory? If you could 'remember' a 'past life', reaching beyond what is recorded in your brain, which is destroyed at death, what keeps you from reaching into other records besides 'yours'?
I try to tell myself that there is actually a silent, sane majority out there
I think its out there, but its not a majority. As I see it, as economic developments increasingly exposed the flaws in various people's world views, rather than reflecting on things and improving their views, the overwhelming majority of people just doubled down on whatever bullshit seemed to justify their desired place in the economic order. So now you see what we have now.
I do know a lot of Republicans that can't stand Palin. But the majority isn't producing significantly better alternatives, so mostly they just keep quiet, and often they don't vote.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
The problem seems more spread out than that to me. Consider the anti-Bush villainization, or the anti-Obama villainization now. Most people are still playing my-team vs your-team, and not really caring about the influence of the powerful on the government. If the influence of the powerful was the core problem, people would at least care about it. And actually they still have enough power to be able to do something about it if they wanted to. But nearly everybody is willing to mistreat other people in exchange for some apparent advantage for people more like themselves. Its not just the rich who are doing this, its most people. For example, the loss of manufacturing jobs is directly related to the way wall street profiteering dominates the economy. But try talking to any upper middle class people about our ethical responsibilities while investing and see how far you get. I'd give a similar example for lower middle class people, having to do with unreasonable collective bargaining demands or entitlements, but they don't really have that kind of power any more. They did have a hand in losing it though, and one can still see the same kind of selfish stupidity with public sector unions in many states.
I'm also optimistic that things can get better. A lot of things are a lot worse now than they ever were before, but a lot of things are better. I don't think what we've got now is worse than Jim Crow. And its not as if we lack the power to break the cycle. Wealth stops being power if people stop being willing to be bought.
Unfortunately most top secret information is top secret to cover someone's ass, not because its a real security risk. The system of classification of military information has been corrupted. So usually both sides are wrong, the guys who release it, and the guys who prosecute them for it.
I think that although the true nature of something does tend to get exposed eventually, people are often very much inclined to bury or ignore what's right in front of them. For the statements to be completely fulfilled in the sight of men, people would have to be completely honest.
Another version of the statement is "there is nothing hidden that will not become manifest". And a related commandment is "don't tell lies, and don't do what you hate". Those are from Gospel of Thomas.
Personally I don't look to scripture as an authority. Either 1+1=2 or it doesn't, irrespective of what a credentialed authority certifies as true. But those statements appear true to me.
To paraphrase Solzenitsyn: they have their punishment, they're turning into swine.
I agree with you halfway, but I see the other dynamic also. It doesn't always come around within a single lifetime, for a particular individual, but a society tends to pay eventually for its own corruption, in one way or another. The sins of the father visited upon the next generation, so to speak.
There's definitely that element, but I think at the same time most politicians don't realize it actually. Most of them are scared and trying to protect congress with anti-aircraft batteries and the like. And the phony doves on the left are as bad as any of them, their posturing nothwithstanding. That's why not much changed for the better when they got control of the House, and why funding for a lot of police-state surveillance development and activity went up quite a bit with Obama in office.
Maybe its because they've been trying to get away with not doing their real job for decades, and the inevitable fear just colors everything.
If it was all just worry about being labeled as blame-America-first liberals, then they wouldn't be funding secret programs to the extent they are. Unfortunately, one of the things about secret programs is its hard to call them on it, because its treason if you expose the details. Maybe another approach is to say that if they cared about peace, they'd try to find some kind of common ground with the anti-government right, because there's nothing small-government about the already enormous and rapidly expanding military/police complex.
OK. Are you interested, or is your mind made up from the outset, so that trying to explain myself better is a pointless excercise? I'm trying to finish other stuff this evening.
I buy stock, and I have no problem with other people buying stock. There isn't any other way to protect ourselves against inflation brought about by excessive government borrowing. And companies do need to raise capital somehow, which may at one time have been a larger function of the stock market than it is now.
Do you care about what the managers of a company do to increase the stock value, or do you look solely at your expected profit? If the latter, then you're culpable, because you're actions help select for amoral managers.
Do you care about what tax and market laws can maximize the vitality of industry, or do you lobby for laws that maximize the value of your portfolio? If the latter, then you're culpable.
Money isn't magic. If you're getting richer, do you care about fully understanding how that is happening, and what your responsibilities are, or do you just embrace whatever ideology seems to justify your earnings? If the latter, then you're culpable.
Shoplifting is a crime against the shop owner, and against everyone else who pays for things instead of stealing. It robs them of something value which they earned or built. Its also a crime against order. There are other and more fundamental kinds of order than written law however, even though it is one important kind. It is not the most important kind. Many kinds of horrible things are legal in some other countries, and often it has been recognizing the inherent immorality of those things that has inspired people to make them illegal here.
Whole sections of the American economy have almost completely vanished in recent decades, and its not all a matter of wage competition, greed on the part of labor unions, and over-regulation. The orientation of our society towards speculative investment has been a huge part of it. If you're an enthusiastic participant, then you're culpable. If you see some of the damage, in terms of what it does to honest people who are forced into personally destructive jobs to support their families, with most of the fruits of their labors going to other people, then I don't see how you can argue that profit-focused speculative investment is not at least on par with shoplifting. I don't know you, so I could be wrong, but if you haven't seen it at all, then I have to suspect you don't really care and I'm wasting my time trying to explain it.
Uh, wait, so shoplifting is morally equivalent to buying a portfolio of voting rights in productive enterprises
The people running those enterprises commonly steer them in directions that are less productive for the sake of short term stock market gains. Its a neat trick, because management says its being responsible to shareholders, and shareholders are just investing their money. Nobody accepts responsibility for tearing the company down. Many, many productive and profitable companies have been ruined in this manner.
Yes investment in the stock market also serves a useful and necessary purpose. But its dishonest to bury the destructive aspects of stock trade in the constructive aspects and pretend that only the latter are real. And its not entirely unavoidable, there's ways that laws and behavior could be changed that would make things better.
In the context of R&D, I'm talking about misrepresenting the state of development work for the sake of obtaining and continuing to obtain funding. Its misrepresentation by omission rather than by fabrication, and its pervasive.
As I have posted elsewhere, I was arrested and briefly jailed a few years ago because somebody thought, incorrectly, that I had stolen building supplies that they valued at $60. Yet I knowingly enabled the squandering of well over $1M of public money, and nobody who knows the details of what I did has any problem with it. Yes, its worse than shoplifting. And the destruction wrought by our "casino economics" (to borrow a phrase from The Economist), far, far exceeds the harm done by shoplifting.
OK. But here's some other considerations to throw into the mix. Half the population of China is impoverished, and somehow they've got to grow the economy fast enough to ward off social disasters that loom on the horizon. They're supposed to follow monetary principles that are designed for developed western economies, or else they're being completely unfair? Most of us are way better off than most of them are. And if you look at history, their lack of development is not exclusively the result of their own corruption. There has also been tremendously destructive meddling by foreign powers, way worse in important regards than what anyone is doing to us now. Militarily forcing them to allow opium trade would be one example. That was in the past, but the Chinese are still dealing with the effects now. Historically China has not been a backwards country, relatively speaking, it has only been for the past few hundred years that they've been struggling.
Likewise with our democratic ideals. Another culture can not impose a foreign political system on themselves and expect it to work. These things have to develop organically over time. The intolerance and corruption that is present in the Chinese ruling class runs deep in Chinese psychology. They can't change who they are by just snapping their fingers, and their authoritarian government reflects who they are at present. But in some regards they are already better than us also, freer even. Which country is it, for example, where you can't cut someone's hair without a license? Which country is it where intellectual property rackets make it practically impossible for small companies to innovate?
Despite the problems and conflicts, there are also deep affinities between China and the US. This is one reason the two countries have generally gotten along well, despite the wars in Korea and Vietnam. For the most part, Chinese people like Americans, and in a lot of ways they think like we do. I think its a mistake to focus too much on the differences. America and western Europe have dominated the world's economy for a long time. Let the rest of the world catch up.
All of these principles apply to individuals also. Earlier I said lots of nasty things about white collar Americans. And in the past I've criticized China's monetary policy, even though I've described the other side of the picture here. Which is more of a problem, American cultural corruption, or my moral arrogance and anger? In my own way I'm just as much a part of the problem as anyone else. Maybe it helps a little for me to describe what I know about China and America, since I have a lot of Chinese friends and relatives, and I've worked in segments of the American economy that other people may know less about. But mostly I think I just need to reign in my own bullshit. Some people call this "liberal guilt", and in another context they call it "blame America first". But it doesn't seem very productive to me to focus too much on stuff that we only half understand and can't change, while ignoring what we're immediately responsible for.
I've noticed a tendency of most people to define ethics in a way that gives their own group an edge, and using that standard to measure everyone else's behavior. For example, black people 'steal' at a higher rate than white people, but white people actually steal vastly more wealth, they just do it through white collar tricks that they don't consider stealing. For example, they get money for R&D that never pans out, and which they could have known from the outset would never pan out, but they didn't ask the relevant questions because they didn't want to endanger the flow of money. Then they pretend that's just how R&D is. Or, the let their money "work for them" in the stock market, and pretend that they deserve high returns because their money is making the economy more efficient. They ignore the dynamics where they're getting richer because someone else in a less advantageous position is seeing their savings evaporate through inflationary effects that they can't protect themselves against.
So yes, Chinese people are dishonest, and have some other traits that are even worse, as well as virtues that compare favorably to Europeans. But in the graduate school I went to, all the Americans except myself were cheating, and professionally most of the Americans I've worked with have effectively been stealing. So I'm tired of hearing how corrupt other peoples are when our own culture is destroying itself. We are the reason our economy has been going down the shithole, its not the immigrants.
Ha ha. There's some truth to that I think. We embraced "rock and roll", because "rock will never die!", even most of the best bands and songs were mostly about self-destruction. So now 40 years later rock is pretty much dead, and most of us are underemployed. I was in Berkeley this weekend, and many if not all of the 60's types I saw around were homeless. It does not look like the Berkeley of the 70's and 80's.
There's some truth in what you say, but it isn't at all the whole story, at least not where I've worked. Probably there are regional differences.
I agree that immigration isn't the real problem, and certainly the immigrants aren't to blame in any case.
I graduated from a decent school twenty years ago with an engineering degree, high grades, and a strong work ethic. I was never able to get so much as an interview at a company like Intel. The people who I know who got in all had some kind of nepotist connection, except for one guy who eventually snuck in via technical support and got an engineering job later. I was never given a chance. Its true that you probably wouldn't be able to hire me, because my skills are probably not exactly in the area you need. Everything is so highly specialized now. But companies are short sighted, and managers put their own needs before the needs of the larger organization. I know I could have been much more effective than a great many of the people they wound up with.
I think its too late already. From the start something was corrupt in our nation's idea of freedom, and now its caught up with us. But not all is lost really, because its only American-born people of our generation who are screwed, an even then only insofar as we try to hold onto the old order. Those foreigners you speak of will not "all go home". Many, many smart and hard working ones are staying. Right now they don't share all the values that made us successful, but they share a lot of them, and eventually they'll dust off some of our best ideas and build something better.
I'm probably being too harsh, but Ron Paul always struck me as someone who was in love with the drama of the stand he was taking, rather than someone who looked to see what action would actually be most productive.
But that is less profitable. Homeland security is a huge industry. Eisenhower, who was no pacifist of course, warned us about the military industrial complex for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be nice to retain ALL my memories of the past life
There's an implication here that you retain some of them?
I think that retaining more would probably not be helpful for most of us. Just looking around at the world, a person can see all manner of folly and its consequences, and yet people keep doing those things anyway. I think more memory would be more of a cause of pride and regret. How would you free yourself from the burden of past emotion so that you can deal with the present?
Also, how would you keep all the memories straight, so that you don't scramble together different times and places, and confuse what is you and what is someone else? The idea of there being a simple chain of past lives doesn't make sense to me. I'm not saying that its wrong, just that I don't see it. Life and identify seems more complicated to me then that, there's more ways to slice it. What would connect the life of a past person with me and make that person "me", rather than someone else? Memory? If you could 'remember' a 'past life', reaching beyond what is recorded in your brain, which is destroyed at death, what keeps you from reaching into other records besides 'yours'?
The Democrats produced a terrible opponent. It was a judgment call on the lesser of evils. Kerry was as arrogantly stupid as Bush in his own way.
I try to tell myself that there is actually a silent, sane majority out there
I think its out there, but its not a majority. As I see it, as economic developments increasingly exposed the flaws in various people's world views, rather than reflecting on things and improving their views, the overwhelming majority of people just doubled down on whatever bullshit seemed to justify their desired place in the economic order. So now you see what we have now.
I do know a lot of Republicans that can't stand Palin. But the majority isn't producing significantly better alternatives, so mostly they just keep quiet, and often they don't vote.
Many of us here have an aversion to these things...But most people do not place any value in having control over their own hardware...
People are that way about what they ingest into their bodies also.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
The problem seems more spread out than that to me. Consider the anti-Bush villainization, or the anti-Obama villainization now. Most people are still playing my-team vs your-team, and not really caring about the influence of the powerful on the government. If the influence of the powerful was the core problem, people would at least care about it. And actually they still have enough power to be able to do something about it if they wanted to. But nearly everybody is willing to mistreat other people in exchange for some apparent advantage for people more like themselves. Its not just the rich who are doing this, its most people. For example, the loss of manufacturing jobs is directly related to the way wall street profiteering dominates the economy. But try talking to any upper middle class people about our ethical responsibilities while investing and see how far you get. I'd give a similar example for lower middle class people, having to do with unreasonable collective bargaining demands or entitlements, but they don't really have that kind of power any more. They did have a hand in losing it though, and one can still see the same kind of selfish stupidity with public sector unions in many states.
I'm also optimistic that things can get better. A lot of things are a lot worse now than they ever were before, but a lot of things are better. I don't think what we've got now is worse than Jim Crow. And its not as if we lack the power to break the cycle. Wealth stops being power if people stop being willing to be bought.
Unfortunately most top secret information is top secret to cover someone's ass, not because its a real security risk. The system of classification of military information has been corrupted. So usually both sides are wrong, the guys who release it, and the guys who prosecute them for it.
I think that although the true nature of something does tend to get exposed eventually, people are often very much inclined to bury or ignore what's right in front of them. For the statements to be completely fulfilled in the sight of men, people would have to be completely honest.
Another version of the statement is "there is nothing hidden that will not become manifest". And a related commandment is "don't tell lies, and don't do what you hate". Those are from Gospel of Thomas.
Personally I don't look to scripture as an authority. Either 1+1=2 or it doesn't, irrespective of what a credentialed authority certifies as true. But those statements appear true to me.
To paraphrase Solzenitsyn: they have their punishment, they're turning into swine.
I agree with you halfway, but I see the other dynamic also. It doesn't always come around within a single lifetime, for a particular individual, but a society tends to pay eventually for its own corruption, in one way or another. The sins of the father visited upon the next generation, so to speak.
Are they native to an urban area like Chicago?
Yes, its the streets and buildings that are invasive.
Now there you go being all judgmental.
If your heart was in the right place, you wouldn't so rudely intrude with reality.
Where's Eisenhower when we need him. Nobody else has the credibility.
Most politicians realize this.
There's definitely that element, but I think at the same time most politicians don't realize it actually. Most of them are scared and trying to protect congress with anti-aircraft batteries and the like. And the phony doves on the left are as bad as any of them, their posturing nothwithstanding. That's why not much changed for the better when they got control of the House, and why funding for a lot of police-state surveillance development and activity went up quite a bit with Obama in office.
Maybe its because they've been trying to get away with not doing their real job for decades, and the inevitable fear just colors everything.
If it was all just worry about being labeled as blame-America-first liberals, then they wouldn't be funding secret programs to the extent they are. Unfortunately, one of the things about secret programs is its hard to call them on it, because its treason if you expose the details. Maybe another approach is to say that if they cared about peace, they'd try to find some kind of common ground with the anti-government right, because there's nothing small-government about the already enormous and rapidly expanding military/police complex.
OK. Are you interested, or is your mind made up from the outset, so that trying to explain myself better is a pointless excercise? I'm trying to finish other stuff this evening.
I buy stock, and I have no problem with other people buying stock. There isn't any other way to protect ourselves against inflation brought about by excessive government borrowing. And companies do need to raise capital somehow, which may at one time have been a larger function of the stock market than it is now.
Do you care about what the managers of a company do to increase the stock value, or do you look solely at your expected profit? If the latter, then you're culpable, because you're actions help select for amoral managers.
Do you care about what tax and market laws can maximize the vitality of industry, or do you lobby for laws that maximize the value of your portfolio? If the latter, then you're culpable.
Money isn't magic. If you're getting richer, do you care about fully understanding how that is happening, and what your responsibilities are, or do you just embrace whatever ideology seems to justify your earnings? If the latter, then you're culpable.
Shoplifting is a crime against the shop owner, and against everyone else who pays for things instead of stealing. It robs them of something value which they earned or built. Its also a crime against order. There are other and more fundamental kinds of order than written law however, even though it is one important kind. It is not the most important kind. Many kinds of horrible things are legal in some other countries, and often it has been recognizing the inherent immorality of those things that has inspired people to make them illegal here.
Whole sections of the American economy have almost completely vanished in recent decades, and its not all a matter of wage competition, greed on the part of labor unions, and over-regulation. The orientation of our society towards speculative investment has been a huge part of it. If you're an enthusiastic participant, then you're culpable. If you see some of the damage, in terms of what it does to honest people who are forced into personally destructive jobs to support their families, with most of the fruits of their labors going to other people, then I don't see how you can argue that profit-focused speculative investment is not at least on par with shoplifting. I don't know you, so I could be wrong, but if you haven't seen it at all, then I have to suspect you don't really care and I'm wasting my time trying to explain it.
"casino economics" (to borrow a phrase from The Economist)
"casino capitalism" rather
Uh, wait, so shoplifting is morally equivalent to buying a portfolio of voting rights in productive enterprises
The people running those enterprises commonly steer them in directions that are less productive for the sake of short term stock market gains. Its a neat trick, because management says its being responsible to shareholders, and shareholders are just investing their money. Nobody accepts responsibility for tearing the company down. Many, many productive and profitable companies have been ruined in this manner.
Yes investment in the stock market also serves a useful and necessary purpose. But its dishonest to bury the destructive aspects of stock trade in the constructive aspects and pretend that only the latter are real. And its not entirely unavoidable, there's ways that laws and behavior could be changed that would make things better.
In the context of R&D, I'm talking about misrepresenting the state of development work for the sake of obtaining and continuing to obtain funding. Its misrepresentation by omission rather than by fabrication, and its pervasive.
As I have posted elsewhere, I was arrested and briefly jailed a few years ago because somebody thought, incorrectly, that I had stolen building supplies that they valued at $60. Yet I knowingly enabled the squandering of well over $1M of public money, and nobody who knows the details of what I did has any problem with it. Yes, its worse than shoplifting. And the destruction wrought by our "casino economics" (to borrow a phrase from The Economist), far, far exceeds the harm done by shoplifting.
OK. But here's some other considerations to throw into the mix. Half the population of China is impoverished, and somehow they've got to grow the economy fast enough to ward off social disasters that loom on the horizon. They're supposed to follow monetary principles that are designed for developed western economies, or else they're being completely unfair? Most of us are way better off than most of them are. And if you look at history, their lack of development is not exclusively the result of their own corruption. There has also been tremendously destructive meddling by foreign powers, way worse in important regards than what anyone is doing to us now. Militarily forcing them to allow opium trade would be one example. That was in the past, but the Chinese are still dealing with the effects now. Historically China has not been a backwards country, relatively speaking, it has only been for the past few hundred years that they've been struggling.
Likewise with our democratic ideals. Another culture can not impose a foreign political system on themselves and expect it to work. These things have to develop organically over time. The intolerance and corruption that is present in the Chinese ruling class runs deep in Chinese psychology. They can't change who they are by just snapping their fingers, and their authoritarian government reflects who they are at present. But in some regards they are already better than us also, freer even. Which country is it, for example, where you can't cut someone's hair without a license? Which country is it where intellectual property rackets make it practically impossible for small companies to innovate?
Despite the problems and conflicts, there are also deep affinities between China and the US. This is one reason the two countries have generally gotten along well, despite the wars in Korea and Vietnam. For the most part, Chinese people like Americans, and in a lot of ways they think like we do. I think its a mistake to focus too much on the differences. America and western Europe have dominated the world's economy for a long time. Let the rest of the world catch up.
All of these principles apply to individuals also. Earlier I said lots of nasty things about white collar Americans. And in the past I've criticized China's monetary policy, even though I've described the other side of the picture here. Which is more of a problem, American cultural corruption, or my moral arrogance and anger? In my own way I'm just as much a part of the problem as anyone else. Maybe it helps a little for me to describe what I know about China and America, since I have a lot of Chinese friends and relatives, and I've worked in segments of the American economy that other people may know less about. But mostly I think I just need to reign in my own bullshit. Some people call this "liberal guilt", and in another context they call it "blame America first". But it doesn't seem very productive to me to focus too much on stuff that we only half understand and can't change, while ignoring what we're immediately responsible for.
I've noticed a tendency of most people to define ethics in a way that gives their own group an edge, and using that standard to measure everyone else's behavior. For example, black people 'steal' at a higher rate than white people, but white people actually steal vastly more wealth, they just do it through white collar tricks that they don't consider stealing. For example, they get money for R&D that never pans out, and which they could have known from the outset would never pan out, but they didn't ask the relevant questions because they didn't want to endanger the flow of money. Then they pretend that's just how R&D is. Or, the let their money "work for them" in the stock market, and pretend that they deserve high returns because their money is making the economy more efficient. They ignore the dynamics where they're getting richer because someone else in a less advantageous position is seeing their savings evaporate through inflationary effects that they can't protect themselves against.
So yes, Chinese people are dishonest, and have some other traits that are even worse, as well as virtues that compare favorably to Europeans. But in the graduate school I went to, all the Americans except myself were cheating, and professionally most of the Americans I've worked with have effectively been stealing. So I'm tired of hearing how corrupt other peoples are when our own culture is destroying itself. We are the reason our economy has been going down the shithole, its not the immigrants.
Ha ha. There's some truth to that I think. We embraced "rock and roll", because "rock will never die!", even most of the best bands and songs were mostly about self-destruction. So now 40 years later rock is pretty much dead, and most of us are underemployed. I was in Berkeley this weekend, and many if not all of the 60's types I saw around were homeless. It does not look like the Berkeley of the 70's and 80's.
Newt Gringrich, Mr. "Contract with America", said recently that China is successful because they don't have a capital gains tax.
Though I agree that the attitude of many conservatives towards China is generally more xenophobic than admiring.
There's some truth in what you say, but it isn't at all the whole story, at least not where I've worked. Probably there are regional differences.
I agree that immigration isn't the real problem, and certainly the immigrants aren't to blame in any case.
I graduated from a decent school twenty years ago with an engineering degree, high grades, and a strong work ethic. I was never able to get so much as an interview at a company like Intel. The people who I know who got in all had some kind of nepotist connection, except for one guy who eventually snuck in via technical support and got an engineering job later. I was never given a chance. Its true that you probably wouldn't be able to hire me, because my skills are probably not exactly in the area you need. Everything is so highly specialized now. But companies are short sighted, and managers put their own needs before the needs of the larger organization. I know I could have been much more effective than a great many of the people they wound up with.
I think its too late already. From the start something was corrupt in our nation's idea of freedom, and now its caught up with us. But not all is lost really, because its only American-born people of our generation who are screwed, an even then only insofar as we try to hold onto the old order. Those foreigners you speak of will not "all go home". Many, many smart and hard working ones are staying. Right now they don't share all the values that made us successful, but they share a lot of them, and eventually they'll dust off some of our best ideas and build something better.
There's several brands, typically sold in packs of 216. My six year old loved them, and they're also fun for adults who like math or chemistry.
I'm probably being too harsh, but Ron Paul always struck me as someone who was in love with the drama of the stand he was taking, rather than someone who looked to see what action would actually be most productive.
This is way off topic, but the parent post reminds me of my favorite line from The Onion:
"Wherever two come together in my name, all over the altar boy's back, there is my church."
But that is less profitable. Homeland security is a huge industry. Eisenhower, who was no pacifist of course, warned us about the military industrial complex for a reason.