They scared these people into giving the money back. One guy gave most of it to charity -- which I thought was a much more classy and appropriate move. Congress didn't get the satisfaction of bullying him into giving it back, and it went to places where it could probably do more good than the government would have ever done.
Essentially, he said "Fine -- I won't keep it so you assholes will leave me alone, but it's still my money and I'm doing what I want with it -- not what you tell me." Good on ya, buddy.
I think you "misunderestimate" (heh) the symbiosis. I also don't buy that they benefit the most from infrastructure. Additionally, I think progressive taxation can be extremely dangerous for society if not very carefully managed.
NYC and NY State, just as an example, took HUGE budgetary hits when these execs refused their bonuses. Why? Because it turns out to be exactly as you said: they pay the bulk of the taxes. Great, but understand this: when this small segment of society bears the lion's share of the taxes, you need to make darn sure that those people's income is guaranteed. Otherwise you find yourself in the unenviable position of NYC and NY State -- either wholesale cutting of services or massive tax increases. Being government, they chose both roads. Why? Because these evil execs all of a sudden don't have the income to tax. Moral of the story: Progressive taxes set up the government for a massive fall if something happens to a relatively few people's income. It puts most of the eggs in one basket -- and then people are idiots enough to hate on that basket.
Remember that it is not them personally who benefit from infrastructure -- it's predominantly their businesses. Think about it: Why do you say they benefit the most? Because water supplies their businesses -- for use by their employees. Because subways and roads supply transit to their businesses -- for their employees. Because police keep whom in their businesses safe? Oh! Again: their employees.
The idea that they somehow personally benefit from roads more than the rest of us is ridiculous. They personally use them as much as anyone else. If you're talking about how it benefits their businesses then remember WHO is using those services: the employees.
Now I ask you: Where would you and I be without those businesses? Should we all run our own stores out of our garages? How much money do you think you'll make when your next 5 neighbors all sell the same thing as you out of their garages? The fact is that THE EMPLOYEES realize a HUGE benefit from these businesses and the surrounding infrastructure.
I think you'll find that the relationship is exactly the opposite as you suppose.
Well said. No argument from me. I even work for one of these companies and I was pissed when they got the money. Yeah, it probably would have meant I'd lose my job, but I'm not the type to declare defeat so quickly -- especially since I think that much of this "crisis" was manufactured early on and exacerbated until it became what it was. There was *tons* of money to be made by doing so.
One thing that upset me was that many of these smaller banks would have had a chance to step into the vacuum and really clean up. Yeah, some were badly run and they went under as they should have, but many, many more are well run without excessive risk. They deserved their shot, and the opportunity of a lifetime was taken away from them. Now the corrupt players are back in the game, ready to create more trouble -- so much the worse.
Have you seen they're starting to buy back the troubled assets? WTF?
I'm sorry you don't like that I reference a writing that was about abuse of power and the coming of totalitarianism and the public's silence as it happened. It's important to remind people of the price that will be paid for letting the little things slide. The "little things" add up pretty quickly, and before you know it, you're asking yourself how this could happen in your country.
You call Americans idiotic and dumb, but the poem written was about the idiocy of Europeans as they stood by and watched the worst happen. Excuse me if I don't want to do the same. Excuse me if I don't hold out hope that Europeans will come to fight for my freedom like Americans came to fight for theirs when they passively watched the rise of madmen.
I'm not a big fan of the national media. I don't like 90% of what they say, I don't like how they control the public conversation, I don't like the spin they put on issues so that rational discourse becomes impossible -- I like very little about them. Hell, they're the real Ministry of Truthiness that inspired my nick. They don't care about the truth as long as what they're saying sounds good and suits their purpose.
When totalitarianism comes to America, the press will be used to drive public opinion. When it's finally outlived its usefulness and its tremendous power becomes dangerous, they'll be eliminated like the "dangers" they denounced before them.
As for who should and should not be in jail, I suggest that you leave "the rich" label aside. Criminals are criminals. If they violated the law, they should be in jail. Leave class warfare out of it.
I got wrapped up in my example and forgot to come to the point:
The point is that you need to protect everyone -- especially groups that are unpopular. Those are the hardest ones because you yourself might harbor ill feelings toward them. It's still important to realize when "equal protection under the law" isn't being applied.
Realize that the first thing that happens when a group is targeted is that they are first vilified and made unpopular in order to not only avoid public outrage, but when done correctly, will allow you to do your work to the sound thunderous applause.
I put "the rich" in there because there's been a lot of public anger at them, and this populism was and is being used to confiscate their property. Witness the Congress using punitive taxation to confiscate money that they were legally owed. Witness the outrage over AIG paying people who had valid claims to money -- other companies and individuals.
I don't want my tax money going to pay these guys either, but when you give money to an organization to pay its obligations and they do, you can't get upset about it. Better to have let them go out of business, which was my position, and avoid the situation altogether.
That said, I don't think they need to have punitive taxation written expressly to target them once they've been given what they were contractually owed. That's an easily visible abuse of power on Congress's part, but who was outraged about that? What happens when Congress decides you shouldn't have your property?
I understand your point about jumping to conclusions of innocence, but at the same time, I'll assume he's innocent until he's proven otherwise, thank you very much. Attitudes like that are exactly the reason that there's very little outrage over abuses of power. People are so cynical that they figure the guy MUST have done something bad, or that it's a foregone conclusion that the "bear" will wake up and eat people who irritate them.
The fact is that irritating the police is not illegal -- and never should be -- and, if that's the extent of his offense, they really need to publicly own up to misconduct. The "bear" is not supposed to be able to eat people who poke them with sticks. We as a society put very strict limitations on the power of authorities -- doubly so on those who weild the power to incarcerate and kill people.
The articles they confiscated point to it being exactly as described. Now yes, it's possible he's all loaded up with kiddie porn, is evading taxes, and possibly administering a botnet, but I haven't heard anything about any of that.
The freedom of speech is not the freedom to say "fuck" in public places. It's to limit the government from taking retaliatory actions to your speech. It's the first line of defense against tyranny.
Says the man who can't spell "undereducated." Yes, I know what symbiosis is, but I meant that they're simply working for their own purposes. That they serve a beneficial purpose for us is not their intent. It's lucky for us, but they're not helping us out intentionally.
The post MrMarket was responding to was saying that every species works for its own benefit. That selfish intentions are sometimes mutually beneficial is a happy coincidence, but it's never done in the wild through some sense of altruism. MrMarket seemed to be suggesting otherwise by using his statement to refute the fairly obvious statement made by Rothic.
Go to their site (http://www.postgresql.org) and click "Documentation." Heck, I'll do it for you: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/
Witness online documentation (with and without comments!) for the last FIVE server versions. Start poking around in that documentation and it doesn't take long to realize that documentation is far from "lacking."
Or maybe seasoned programmers understand that they need to use every tool at their disposal to protect the integrity of their data. Maybe seasoned programmers have seen too many cases where a decent constraint on the table would have avoided a LOT of pain when an app bug comes along and inserts a bunch of garbage into a key field.
Maybe seasoned programmers realize that constraints are a form of documentation on the table that is actively enforced by the database engine, so you can be sure when you're kicking off that "delete" statement that the data is as you think it is.
Maybe seasoned programmers have seen too many tables polluted by orphaned records to not realize the value of a delete cascade?
Or maybe belittling as newbs all those professionals who understand the value of these features and the pain that can be caused with out them is a pretty silly way to promote a database that's likely to experience all that pain.
And maybe some time you'll understand that there exists something called "conflict of interest"; but to be fair, it is a shame that a huge piece of MySQL's "yeah but..." argument hinges on the good will of a competitor (Oracle), and that InnoDB development could become unfunded any time Ellison decides MySQL knocked a penny off of Oracle's stock price.
The "headache" is that it's secure by default and you need to edit pg_hba.conf (allowed IPs) and postgresql.conf (listen port) to get it opened up to the world. In other words, people want it to be insecure, and it takes effort to make it so. Sad that editing a line in two different config files once during the life of a database is now deemed "a headache" and a major reason not to use that database.
Maybe they're having a hard time finding it in Synaptic? Here's a hint, guys: it's sorted "alphabetically" and there's a search button on the top.
Otherwise, there are absolutely NONE of the headaches that come with Oracle: the licensing, the immense resource requirements, the bloated platform it brings along with it (several hundred megs for a database?! WTF?) It really is the best of Oracle without Oracle's headaches.
Oh -- and the killer features for me? ACID, MVCC, plpgsql and plperl, user-defined functions long before MySQL had them, a user and developer community that is second to none, a strong focus on doing it "right"...
...and once you get into the paying versions, you're going to pay dearly. I run my business on Postgres and have been extremely happy with it. I've never lost data, as a development platform it's a joy to work with, and I'll NEVER face a hike in licensing fees. What's not to like? Why "upgrade?" There's very little Oracle or anyone else can offer me that I don't already have with PG.
Someone will come along and say "Well that's good for YOU, but not everyone can do with PG." To that snarky fellow I say, "That's right. It's absolutely perfect for me, and I don't concern myself with everyone else's requirements."
Coincidentally, as I was reading your comment, Matthew Lesko's free government money for whatever you want commercial came on. Besides that one, I've been seeing more and more commercials about how to get "free money" from the government. Ridiculous. Snuggle on up to the teat, folks. Parasitical behavior has finally gone mainstream.
My first thought was that this guy's encouraging people to take more and more of my money and that of other hard-working taxpayers like myself, because after all, it's not like money just appears out of thin air by the trillions! Then I remembered: it does now.
Disregarding the machine, TFA says there actually was vote-buying going on:
While the Early Voting scheme involved finding voters who might wish to be paid to have their vote cast a certain way
I think this was more to do with buying absentee ballots or something, rather than having anything to do with the machines, but it's a gaping loophole that puts Goatse Guy to shame.
I see what you're saying, but no, I don't think there's a lot of room for interpretation. It's pretty clear that it's intended to be during wartime (though, apparently, we're at war permanently at this point.) It has more to do with becoming an enemy combatant, spy, or abettor (e.g. the American Taliban kid.)
Don't try too hard to stretch the meaning. We've been getting into a lot of trouble over that already. Breaking any law can be construed as "treason" if you try hard enough, because, generally speaking, breaking the law means you've probably hurt the common good. Think of all the trouble that would be caused by an expanding definition of treason. I don't think you want to go down that road. What you're talking about is a dictator's dream, and is exactly why the Constitution didn't leave a lot of room for interpretation.
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
I started posting AC that day because the all-powerful/. mod system decided I shouldn't post anymore as my regular ID -- not because I wanted to remain anonymous. I'm perfectly happy to post controversial statements as my own ID, which is why my karma is in the crapper.
Wikipedia is as politicized as anything else. They don't want to make a fuss when it doesn't suit them, and they're more than willing to make a fuss when it does.
Of course, explaining the "mentality" of Wikipedia is like explaining the "mentality" of Slashdot. There are different groups and cultures involved, and it can look a bit schizophrenic on the outside looking in.
Overall, though, the pattern is as clear there as everywhere else: say one thing, do another, and accuse your opponent of whatever it is you're doing behind closed doors.
The "god" behind nature's balance is essential natural scarcity economics. Supply and demand. Move supply, and demand adjusts or moves to a complementary good.
The Earth is a dynamic system, and the fact that it's generally in balance is a product of the fact that plants and animals adjust to their surroundings. Push off the balance, and it wobbles around until it finds another balance point -- still balanced, but differently so.
We may or may not like the new balance point, but that's another discussion entirely. Likely over time we'll adjust right along with everything else because, simply put, there's no choice in the matter.
No, putting things into context is fine. Using it as an excuse or to deflect criticism as you and many others are doing is another thing entirely, so cut it with the straw man. You know what I was saying and you're trying to change the topic.
I agree on the massive spending, which is why I'm upset at the fact that Obama has put even Bush to shame in that regard, and has done it in record time.
"Terrifying totalitarian regime??" You've obviously never seen a terrifying totalitarian regime, because we're nowhere close. More emotional hyperbole -- as expected from a leftist. I'm not excusing what Bush did because I didn't agree with much of his second term either, which was why I didn't vote republican in the last election, but to say we're a "terrifying totalitarian regime" just shows that you're either going for the emotional shock value or are simply deluded.
And your last paragraph makes very little sense, devolves into name calling, and won't be dignified with a response.
Slashdot Mirror
They scared these people into giving the money back. One guy gave most of it to charity -- which I thought was a much more classy and appropriate move. Congress didn't get the satisfaction of bullying him into giving it back, and it went to places where it could probably do more good than the government would have ever done.
Essentially, he said "Fine -- I won't keep it so you assholes will leave me alone, but it's still my money and I'm doing what I want with it -- not what you tell me." Good on ya, buddy.
I think you "misunderestimate" (heh) the symbiosis. I also don't buy that they benefit the most from infrastructure. Additionally, I think progressive taxation can be extremely dangerous for society if not very carefully managed.
NYC and NY State, just as an example, took HUGE budgetary hits when these execs refused their bonuses. Why? Because it turns out to be exactly as you said: they pay the bulk of the taxes. Great, but understand this: when this small segment of society bears the lion's share of the taxes, you need to make darn sure that those people's income is guaranteed. Otherwise you find yourself in the unenviable position of NYC and NY State -- either wholesale cutting of services or massive tax increases. Being government, they chose both roads. Why? Because these evil execs all of a sudden don't have the income to tax. Moral of the story: Progressive taxes set up the government for a massive fall if something happens to a relatively few people's income. It puts most of the eggs in one basket -- and then people are idiots enough to hate on that basket.
Remember that it is not them personally who benefit from infrastructure -- it's predominantly their businesses. Think about it: Why do you say they benefit the most? Because water supplies their businesses -- for use by their employees. Because subways and roads supply transit to their businesses -- for their employees. Because police keep whom in their businesses safe? Oh! Again: their employees.
The idea that they somehow personally benefit from roads more than the rest of us is ridiculous. They personally use them as much as anyone else. If you're talking about how it benefits their businesses then remember WHO is using those services: the employees.
Now I ask you: Where would you and I be without those businesses? Should we all run our own stores out of our garages? How much money do you think you'll make when your next 5 neighbors all sell the same thing as you out of their garages? The fact is that THE EMPLOYEES realize a HUGE benefit from these businesses and the surrounding infrastructure.
I think you'll find that the relationship is exactly the opposite as you suppose.
Well said. No argument from me. I even work for one of these companies and I was pissed when they got the money. Yeah, it probably would have meant I'd lose my job, but I'm not the type to declare defeat so quickly -- especially since I think that much of this "crisis" was manufactured early on and exacerbated until it became what it was. There was *tons* of money to be made by doing so.
One thing that upset me was that many of these smaller banks would have had a chance to step into the vacuum and really clean up. Yeah, some were badly run and they went under as they should have, but many, many more are well run without excessive risk. They deserved their shot, and the opportunity of a lifetime was taken away from them. Now the corrupt players are back in the game, ready to create more trouble -- so much the worse.
Have you seen they're starting to buy back the troubled assets? WTF?
http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE53258J20090403
Talk about a cycle of stupidity.
I do not speak for my employer, yadda yadda.
How about another one?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance?"
I'm sorry you don't like that I reference a writing that was about abuse of power and the coming of totalitarianism and the public's silence as it happened. It's important to remind people of the price that will be paid for letting the little things slide. The "little things" add up pretty quickly, and before you know it, you're asking yourself how this could happen in your country.
You call Americans idiotic and dumb, but the poem written was about the idiocy of Europeans as they stood by and watched the worst happen. Excuse me if I don't want to do the same. Excuse me if I don't hold out hope that Europeans will come to fight for my freedom like Americans came to fight for theirs when they passively watched the rise of madmen.
I'm not a big fan of the national media. I don't like 90% of what they say, I don't like how they control the public conversation, I don't like the spin they put on issues so that rational discourse becomes impossible -- I like very little about them. Hell, they're the real Ministry of Truthiness that inspired my nick. They don't care about the truth as long as what they're saying sounds good and suits their purpose.
When totalitarianism comes to America, the press will be used to drive public opinion. When it's finally outlived its usefulness and its tremendous power becomes dangerous, they'll be eliminated like the "dangers" they denounced before them.
As for who should and should not be in jail, I suggest that you leave "the rich" label aside. Criminals are criminals. If they violated the law, they should be in jail. Leave class warfare out of it.
I got wrapped up in my example and forgot to come to the point:
The point is that you need to protect everyone -- especially groups that are unpopular. Those are the hardest ones because you yourself might harbor ill feelings toward them. It's still important to realize when "equal protection under the law" isn't being applied.
Realize that the first thing that happens when a group is targeted is that they are first vilified and made unpopular in order to not only avoid public outrage, but when done correctly, will allow you to do your work to the sound thunderous applause.
I put "the rich" in there because there's been a lot of public anger at them, and this populism was and is being used to confiscate their property. Witness the Congress using punitive taxation to confiscate money that they were legally owed. Witness the outrage over AIG paying people who had valid claims to money -- other companies and individuals.
I don't want my tax money going to pay these guys either, but when you give money to an organization to pay its obligations and they do, you can't get upset about it. Better to have let them go out of business, which was my position, and avoid the situation altogether.
That said, I don't think they need to have punitive taxation written expressly to target them once they've been given what they were contractually owed. That's an easily visible abuse of power on Congress's part, but who was outraged about that? What happens when Congress decides you shouldn't have your property?
I understand your point about jumping to conclusions of innocence, but at the same time, I'll assume he's innocent until he's proven otherwise, thank you very much. Attitudes like that are exactly the reason that there's very little outrage over abuses of power. People are so cynical that they figure the guy MUST have done something bad, or that it's a foregone conclusion that the "bear" will wake up and eat people who irritate them.
The fact is that irritating the police is not illegal -- and never should be -- and, if that's the extent of his offense, they really need to publicly own up to misconduct. The "bear" is not supposed to be able to eat people who poke them with sticks. We as a society put very strict limitations on the power of authorities -- doubly so on those who weild the power to incarcerate and kill people.
The articles they confiscated point to it being exactly as described. Now yes, it's possible he's all loaded up with kiddie porn, is evading taxes, and possibly administering a botnet, but I haven't heard anything about any of that.
The freedom of speech is not the freedom to say "fuck" in public places. It's to limit the government from taking retaliatory actions to your speech. It's the first line of defense against tyranny.
Thank you for proving the point.
When the Police came for the bloggers,
I remained silent;
I was not a blogger.
Then they locked up the rich,
I remained silent;
I was not rich.
Then they came for the gun owners,
I did not speak out;
I was not a gun owner.
Then they came for the press,
I did not speak out;
I was not a member of the press.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
Says the man who can't spell "undereducated." Yes, I know what symbiosis is, but I meant that they're simply working for their own purposes. That they serve a beneficial purpose for us is not their intent. It's lucky for us, but they're not helping us out intentionally.
The post MrMarket was responding to was saying that every species works for its own benefit. That selfish intentions are sometimes mutually beneficial is a happy coincidence, but it's never done in the wild through some sense of altruism. MrMarket seemed to be suggesting otherwise by using his statement to refute the fairly obvious statement made by Rothic.
Are you kidding? PG has incredible docs.
Go to their site (http://www.postgresql.org) and click "Documentation." Heck, I'll do it for you: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/
Witness online documentation (with and without comments!) for the last FIVE server versions. Start poking around in that documentation and it doesn't take long to realize that documentation is far from "lacking."
Or maybe seasoned programmers understand that they need to use every tool at their disposal to protect the integrity of their data. Maybe seasoned programmers have seen too many cases where a decent constraint on the table would have avoided a LOT of pain when an app bug comes along and inserts a bunch of garbage into a key field.
Maybe seasoned programmers realize that constraints are a form of documentation on the table that is actively enforced by the database engine, so you can be sure when you're kicking off that "delete" statement that the data is as you think it is.
Maybe seasoned programmers have seen too many tables polluted by orphaned records to not realize the value of a delete cascade?
Or maybe belittling as newbs all those professionals who understand the value of these features and the pain that can be caused with out them is a pretty silly way to promote a database that's likely to experience all that pain.
And maybe some time you'll understand that there exists something called "conflict of interest"; but to be fair, it is a shame that a huge piece of MySQL's "yeah but..." argument hinges on the good will of a competitor (Oracle), and that InnoDB development could become unfunded any time Ellison decides MySQL knocked a penny off of Oracle's stock price.
The "headache" is that it's secure by default and you need to edit pg_hba.conf (allowed IPs) and postgresql.conf (listen port) to get it opened up to the world. In other words, people want it to be insecure, and it takes effort to make it so. Sad that editing a line in two different config files once during the life of a database is now deemed "a headache" and a major reason not to use that database.
Maybe they're having a hard time finding it in Synaptic? Here's a hint, guys: it's sorted "alphabetically" and there's a search button on the top.
Otherwise, there are absolutely NONE of the headaches that come with Oracle: the licensing, the immense resource requirements, the bloated platform it brings along with it (several hundred megs for a database?! WTF?) It really is the best of Oracle without Oracle's headaches.
Oh -- and the killer features for me? ACID, MVCC, plpgsql and plperl, user-defined functions long before MySQL had them, a user and developer community that is second to none, a strong focus on doing it "right"...
...and once you get into the paying versions, you're going to pay dearly. I run my business on Postgres and have been extremely happy with it. I've never lost data, as a development platform it's a joy to work with, and I'll NEVER face a hike in licensing fees. What's not to like? Why "upgrade?" There's very little Oracle or anyone else can offer me that I don't already have with PG.
Someone will come along and say "Well that's good for YOU, but not everyone can do with PG." To that snarky fellow I say, "That's right. It's absolutely perfect for me, and I don't concern myself with everyone else's requirements."
That's pretty weak, dude. Those things are all working for themselves. We just exploit them to our own purposes. They aren't doing us any favors.
Coincidentally, as I was reading your comment, Matthew Lesko's free government money for whatever you want commercial came on. Besides that one, I've been seeing more and more commercials about how to get "free money" from the government. Ridiculous. Snuggle on up to the teat, folks. Parasitical behavior has finally gone mainstream.
My first thought was that this guy's encouraging people to take more and more of my money and that of other hard-working taxpayers like myself, because after all, it's not like money just appears out of thin air by the trillions! Then I remembered: it does now.
Disregarding the machine, TFA says there actually was vote-buying going on:
I think this was more to do with buying absentee ballots or something, rather than having anything to do with the machines, but it's a gaping loophole that puts Goatse Guy to shame.
I see what you're saying, but no, I don't think there's a lot of room for interpretation. It's pretty clear that it's intended to be during wartime (though, apparently, we're at war permanently at this point.) It has more to do with becoming an enemy combatant, spy, or abettor (e.g. the American Taliban kid.)
Don't try too hard to stretch the meaning. We've been getting into a lot of trouble over that already. Breaking any law can be construed as "treason" if you try hard enough, because, generally speaking, breaking the law means you've probably hurt the common good. Think of all the trouble that would be caused by an expanding definition of treason. I don't think you want to go down that road. What you're talking about is a dictator's dream, and is exactly why the Constitution didn't leave a lot of room for interpretation.
It's not treason, it's elections fraud.
Treason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Three_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_3:_Treason
I know "treason" is a good, emotion-filled word, but this ain't it.
I started posting AC that day because the all-powerful /. mod system decided I shouldn't post anymore as my regular ID -- not because I wanted to remain anonymous. I'm perfectly happy to post controversial statements as my own ID, which is why my karma is in the crapper.
It's not odd at all. They're intolerant of your intolerance, but supremely tolerant of their own. In other words, self-serving hypocrites.
Exactly. It's not like they've never censored anything else:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,507244,00.html
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91114
Wikipedia is as politicized as anything else. They don't want to make a fuss when it doesn't suit them, and they're more than willing to make a fuss when it does.
Of course, explaining the "mentality" of Wikipedia is like explaining the "mentality" of Slashdot. There are different groups and cultures involved, and it can look a bit schizophrenic on the outside looking in.
Overall, though, the pattern is as clear there as everywhere else: say one thing, do another, and accuse your opponent of whatever it is you're doing behind closed doors.
The "god" behind nature's balance is essential natural scarcity economics. Supply and demand. Move supply, and demand adjusts or moves to a complementary good.
The Earth is a dynamic system, and the fact that it's generally in balance is a product of the fact that plants and animals adjust to their surroundings. Push off the balance, and it wobbles around until it finds another balance point -- still balanced, but differently so.
We may or may not like the new balance point, but that's another discussion entirely. Likely over time we'll adjust right along with everything else because, simply put, there's no choice in the matter.
No, putting things into context is fine. Using it as an excuse or to deflect criticism as you and many others are doing is another thing entirely, so cut it with the straw man. You know what I was saying and you're trying to change the topic.
I agree on the massive spending, which is why I'm upset at the fact that Obama has put even Bush to shame in that regard, and has done it in record time.
"Terrifying totalitarian regime??" You've obviously never seen a terrifying totalitarian regime, because we're nowhere close. More emotional hyperbole -- as expected from a leftist. I'm not excusing what Bush did because I didn't agree with much of his second term either, which was why I didn't vote republican in the last election, but to say we're a "terrifying totalitarian regime" just shows that you're either going for the emotional shock value or are simply deluded.
And your last paragraph makes very little sense, devolves into name calling, and won't be dignified with a response.