The Bhagavad Gita has no prophesy in it that has actually come true, nothing to root it to history. The Bible has.
I hate to break it to you, but it's really easy to go back an insert prophesy into older texts when you translate and compile them. Or just do what old prophecies say - if prophecy says the next Emperor of the United States will show up wearing a red, white, and blue feather boa, and I want to be Emperor, my costume choice is real easy.
Or if you can't manage to follow or retroactively create or edit prophecy, or find one vague enough to interpret the way you want, you can simply lie about what happened.
Sorry, but the Christos cult gets no extra points over others - including the tabloid psychics - on "evidence from prophecy".
Again, if the gospel accounts hadn't been true to what had really happened, they would have bene very quickly rubbished and dismissed by the Jews and Romans
Uh, they were, you know. Most contempory Jews dismissed the miracle stories about Jesus, or at least the big one about him being resurrected, and Romans went around killing Jeshua's disciples as you may recall - not the way you treat people you think might have buddies with the all-mighty.
and everyone would have ignored them as a nice fiction, yet they are still around 2000 years later.
So what? Buddhism and Taoism are older. Atheism too. Heck, so's astrology. Persistance of an idea is no proof of accuracy.
And again, it would have been almost impossible to change every single copy of the gospels in the world 100 years after Jesus died if someone had wanted to change it.
Actually it might have been pretty easy. I would be suprised if there were more than a few dozen written copies by 130 CE, literacy being rare.
But really, they had decades before things were written down at all to agree on a good story. (And they didn't, completely - the gospels contain numerous contradictions.)
Actually, even the Sunnis have turned out in large numbers. In the Al Anbar province, which is predominantly Sunni, they overwhelmed by the big turnout.
According to the article you link, they exceeded the low expectations, which may or may not have have been an large turnout. After all, if you expect 1% and get 2%, you're overwhelmed.
On the other hand, less than 400 people voted in Tikrit, and in Azamiyah the four polling places never even opened. In Samarra, out of 200,000 residents only 1,400 votes were cast.
it is definitely a "step toward an actual stable democracy with respect for human rights."
And how does the whole world not benefit from the fact that more than half of the Iraqi population just stepped up and voted, launching a democracy in an region famous for embracing midieval thoughts about things like space shuttles?
For all of it's faults, Hussein's Iraq was a secular state...it's likely that after all is said and done there, it will end up under the control of religious fundamentalists and be a region more tending towards medieval thoughts about technology.
If this was a step toward an actual stable democracy with respect for human rights, there might be some benefit to the world. But this elections is more show than substance. Sunni regions mostly boycotted.
We're still in for either years of occupation with tens-if-not-hundreds of thousands more human beings turned into bloody lumps of gristle and hundreds of billions of dollars spent - or an Iraqi civil war. Pardon me if I don't feel like cheering.
You're asking me to explain elements of the story. What I'm trying to point out to you is that there's no evidence at all that the story took place as told.
How do you know how big the stone was? How do you know Jeshua appeared to people after his death? You've only got the book to tell you, but why believe it? There are plenty of other books full of plenty of other stories just as (or more) interesting and incredible, which other people believe just as much as you believe yours. People have even been willing to kill and die for their beliefs in these other books.
Why don't you explain how Krishna appeared to Arjuna if Hinduism isn't the one true religion? Or how could Ancestor Lu have mastered spiritual alchemy if Taoism wasn't correct? Saul's conversion was no more exceptional that that of Ashoka the Great, so does that mean Buddhism is the one correct path? (The Buddha wouldn't say so!) And how is it that all this chaos is here if not for the work of Godess herself, Eris Discordia (kallisti!)
Uh, the execution of Jeshua hadn't happened yet in 20 CE...he was born around 4 BCE, executed at age 33 if I remember by C.C.D. classes right, so around 29 CE. I doubt Saul/Paul got his start the very next year.
And the Epistles are not the Gospels.
After the ressurection, the Jews didnt say 'the tomb is still occupied, see?', they said 'They've stolen the body!'.
According to the account given by the early Christians, yes. And we should believe that account because...?
The Romans and the Pharisees probably though the grisly public execution of the troublemaking leader of this little cult was sufficient. It was years before the early Christians were again of concern to anyone. They didn't have DNA evidence back then; a decade after the execution, the Romans could have produced the bones and believers would have just said "not him!". What would have been the point?
Therefore Jesus' body was gone. It wasnt stolen, as that would be completely pointless (jesus' disciples were completely mortified that Jesus was dead) and if they stole it why would they be willing to die for what they knew was a lie?
Let's assume there was a body (some hold that the execution was faked and Jeshua was spirited away to live out his days in relative peace and quiet, a nice thought if highly speculative), and that it was stolen. Was that a pointless act? If it was, we wouldn't be talking about this two millennia later.
Jeshua wasn't just a religious teacher. He wasn't some random guy born in a barn who rose to popularity solely on his merits - he was heir to the royal line ("Son of David") of a conquered nation, a nation looking for a leader ("Messiah") to toss off the Roman oppressors. (His choice to go into religion instead of politics pissed off a lot of people.)
Having the body disappear (if it really did) would be a smack to the Romans, their Jewish collaborators, and the corrupt Pharisees. Multiple smackdown!
Why would they be willing to die for a lie? Not all would know it was a lie - it would only take one guy to steal the body. And some would certainly be willing to die for the political ends. People have died for all sorts of ideas over the centuries, but being willing to die for an idea is no gauge of the correctness of that idea.
If we follow Occam's Razor, it certainly requires fewer assumptions to say that the body was there but the story faked, or the body was stolen, or even that the execution was faked, than that Jeshua was resurrected.
And you know what? Even if some weird freaky thing happened and a dead guy got up and walked around for a while 2,000 years ago, that proves nothing at all about the truth of Christian dogma - about the existance or nature of god(s), about the divinity of the walking dead guy, about original "sin" of the forgiveness thereof, about an afterlife, any of it.
The gospels were written minimum 20 years after Jesus died. People who disbelieved could have checked with those people whether the incidents mentioned actually took place.
Minimum 20 years, maximum what? 100? Your 20 is by far the lowest figure I've ever heard.
Anyway, I can imagine J. Random Roman saying "Think I'll start walking to Jerusalem, it's only 1,400 miles, see if any of these guys are still alive (if they existed in the first place) and can answer a few questions, maybe straighten out some of the contradictions in these `gospel' stories from this `Christos' cult. 'Cause I know they just love talking to random people from the city-state that's occupying their land and oppressing their people." Riiiight.
And what if someone did make the trip? I can find guys today who'll tell me about how they saw Elvis last week at the 7-11. Don't mean it happened.
The earliest copied of the gospels we have are far too early for any mythology to be put into them (it takes minimum of 4 generations for any mythology to even start to be woven into a story).
Not at all. It's clear that mythological elements were deliberately injected into the Christianity and the gospels right from the start. Jeshua's biographers stole liberally from Mithraism - from story elements like twelve followers, death and resurrection, a last supper, the "light of the world" image, to ritual elements like the timing of Christmas, the use of miters as sign of bishop's office, the title of "Father" for priests, and so on.
So me, as a computer scientist who has studied the pros and cons of Christianity as much as I can, and have come to the conclusion that God is real, is deluded?
Sorry, but, yes. (No big deal, we're all deluded about something...) The idea of "God" as presented in mainstream Christian teaching - an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, being that is separate from and creator of the rest of the Universe, big Daddy in the Sky, King of it All - is not logically defensible.
(There are, though, other concepts of the divine that are more resilient...And your credentials as a computer scientist certainly have nothing to do with it!)
If you havent [read and studied the gospels] how can you possibly say your opinion is right when you havent even studied the evidence?
See, that's the root of the problem. The gospels - while containing some interesting wisdom teachings from poor ol' Jeshua ben Joseph - aren't any sort of evidence for the supernatural. Any more than the Koran, the Dhamapada, the Vedas, the collected Greek myths, or the front page of the Weekly World News...
The gospels are only "evidence" if you beleive them to the the "word of god" or "divinely insprired" - which is circular reasoning at its best.
But, most of Jeshua's advice was still pretty good, even if he was just a regular guy at the end of it all.
(Of course it's a stupid idea that a competent adult needs a doctors permission slip to be able to buy medicine in the first place, except maybe antibiotics...)
Murder is the deliberate, unlawful, and malicious killing of a human being. While arguments can be made over whether a fetus is or is not a human being (not very good arguments, mostly, often rapidly descending into supernaturalism), despite the best efforts of "pro life" organizations abortion is still legal. And abortion is not, generally, malicious.
Sleeping less means more time available for eating!
Maybe, but I would suspect that stress may play a role: inadequate sleep means a stressed organism. Stress messes with body chemistry in ways that have been linked to obesity - and obesity itself is a stressor, creating a feedback loop. People also often turn to "comfort food" when stressed.
There have been high-stress low-sleep times in my life when I've tried to substitute food for sleep; fortunately I was aware enough to see what I was doing and restore my old eating habits after the stress had passed and sleep patterns were more normal.
When I was a student at the University of Maryland College Park (late 80s/early 90s), there was a small building (between the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the old Computer Science Building) from which you could sometimes see a green beam shooting up into the sky. IIRC it was a laser targeted at a reflector on the moon for precise rangefinding.
For the first time rather than having three hundred asp/php pages with cut-and-copy disease we had a way to make structured code that could be developed very quickly and maintained easily.
I never touch ASP, but if your PHP suffers from "cut-and-copy" you need to take a cattle prod to the developers.
This is a coding practices issue, not a language issue - the legacy code at my current employer is C++ CGI programs that suffer greatly from the use of cut-and-paste rather than code libraries. It's just about the worst C++ code I've ever seen, but that's not C++'s fault. PHP makes it easy to create reusable modules that you can just "require_once"; if developer's don't, that's not PHP's fault.
"Our old code in Language X sucks, our new code in Language Y is better written" doesn't mean that X is better than Y.
Either way, viruses would still exist without Microsoft.
True, there has been, and probably always will be, malware targeted at pretty much every platform in common use.
The only reason that there are so many for Windows is because of its widespread use.
they attempted to block us from going to war...in our own security interests...in the world's security interests...in accordance with previous UN resolutions
When did this happen? Because what you're describing in no way resembles the current U.S. invasion of Iraq.
You go up to them, tell them to cut the crap, and take their laser pointer.
Then they, or there parents, press theft or even assault charges against you for your vigilante action.
Tell 'em to cut it out is fine, and might be effective, though the little brats might well just tell you to fsck off. Stealing their stuff is a bad idea, however badly they might be misusing it.
I described seeing glass worms floating...My guess is they came from looking at the sun at an earlier age
No worries, many of us have those "glass worms". Often it's the remains of the hyaloid artery, not a sign of damage.
I'm 20/20 in both eyes, but sometimes I can see an occasional transparent worm or dot float across the field of vision, really only noticeable when looking at a blank surface.
Copyleft licences - like the GPL - go beyond free software licences in that they require that you pass onto others the same freedoms that you enjoy w.r.t the software.
Liv Tyler was born in 1977, so she'll be 60 or 67 when the asteroid hits... uh, go ahead, take her, she's all yours!
Well, I born in 1970 so I'd be 67 or 74, and I'm unlikely to have the kind of money that makes hot 20-somethings go with senior citizens...so, sure I'd take her!:-)
My point though was more to being tied to a single community...The successfull young person will get mobile and STAY mobile
Depends on your defintion of "success", I suppose. I don't find the idea of chasing a career across country appealing; my family and friends are here. I'd rather make less $$$ - or even change careers - and stay here. YMMV.
Remember that there's an entire political party whose platform involves cutting back on government services and letting the private sector step in to handle things competitively
Yes, I'm familiar with the Libertarian party, and have even voted for Libertarian candidates. But I don't agree with their sophmoric worship of the "free market" and property rights.
Off-topic political rambling follows:
Libertarian capitalists aren't so much about "letting the private sector step in to handle things competitively" as about simply removing government services - the Libertarian party platform is opposed to the very existance of taxation, public utilities, public schools, worker protection laws, OHSA, etcetera.
Now, Zenarchist, that I am,
I'm not opposed to the eventual achievement of these goals. As Thoreau put it, "`That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Or
But men are certainly not prepared for it just yet. As Thornley said, "Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn." I don't thnk we're near that prerequisite of Universal Enlightenment quite yet. In the meantime, I don't think that removing the governors of regulation from the engine of state capitalism, taking the brakes off of a system which is designed to consolidate wealth and power into the hands of a small class of "owners" backed by government force, is a wise move.
Want a smaller and less-power government? Fine. Let's start by revoking government-issued corporate charters, land deeds, mineral and other natural resource rights. Also out the window with government-created patents and copyrights. And the reserve banking system that concentrates wealth in the hands of bankers and capitalists, that's got to go.
Capitalism is not some natural "ground state" that government interferes with; it is the product of state power. Shrink the engine of capitalism, then we can talk about removing the governors that keep it from running out of control.
DO NOT BUY A HOUSE regardless of how rich you think you are in any job
Owning a home is still one of the best investments you can make - rent is money pissed away, while house payments build equity, and there's that nice tax break.
But you have to buy based on the assumption that your future income may be lower. (And you might think about renting out a room.)
I was lucky enough to get into the workforce and buy my house before the dot-com boom and bust, so my house payment is at a level I could afford at my entry level salary, which was around 42k.
With my experience I can work part-time and still make the houe payment. (Working part-time as I shift into a new business that's unlikely to be outsourced, and that doesn't have the age ceiling that programming has.)
The obvious solution is: less taxes on companies and workers
Would you care to explain your reasoning behind that "obvious" solution?
Is the idea that with lower taxes - and therefore either massive public debt, or inadequate government services - our standard and cost of living will eventually fall to that of India, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but it's really easy to go back an insert prophesy into older texts when you translate and compile them. Or just do what old prophecies say - if prophecy says the next Emperor of the United States will show up wearing a red, white, and blue feather boa, and I want to be Emperor, my costume choice is real easy.
Or if you can't manage to follow or retroactively create or edit prophecy, or find one vague enough to interpret the way you want, you can simply lie about what happened.
And yes, other relgions claim all sort of fulfilled prophecies. The Baha'i claim their leader is the fulfillment of prophecies from every major world religion. Muslims will tell you all about the prophecies that Muhammad fulfilled.
Sorry, but the Christos cult gets no extra points over others - including the tabloid psychics - on "evidence from prophecy".
Uh, they were, you know. Most contempory Jews dismissed the miracle stories about Jesus, or at least the big one about him being resurrected, and Romans went around killing Jeshua's disciples as you may recall - not the way you treat people you think might have buddies with the all-mighty.
So what? Buddhism and Taoism are older. Atheism too. Heck, so's astrology. Persistance of an idea is no proof of accuracy.
Actually it might have been pretty easy. I would be suprised if there were more than a few dozen written copies by 130 CE, literacy being rare.
But really, they had decades before things were written down at all to agree on a good story. (And they didn't, completely - the gospels contain numerous contradictions.)
According to the article you link, they exceeded the low expectations, which may or may not have have been an large turnout. After all, if you expect 1% and get 2%, you're overwhelmed.
On the other hand, less than 400 people voted in Tikrit, and in Azamiyah the four polling places never even opened. In Samarra, out of 200,000 residents only 1,400 votes were cast.
That would be nice, but I'm doubtful.
For all of it's faults, Hussein's Iraq was a secular state...it's likely that after all is said and done there, it will end up under the control of religious fundamentalists and be a region more tending towards medieval thoughts about technology.
If this was a step toward an actual stable democracy with respect for human rights, there might be some benefit to the world. But this elections is more show than substance. Sunni regions mostly boycotted.
We're still in for either years of occupation with tens-if-not-hundreds of thousands more human beings turned into bloody lumps of gristle and hundreds of billions of dollars spent - or an Iraqi civil war. Pardon me if I don't feel like cheering.
You're asking me to explain elements of the story. What I'm trying to point out to you is that there's no evidence at all that the story took place as told.
How do you know how big the stone was? How do you know Jeshua appeared to people after his death? You've only got the book to tell you, but why believe it? There are plenty of other books full of plenty of other stories just as (or more) interesting and incredible, which other people believe just as much as you believe yours. People have even been willing to kill and die for their beliefs in these other books.
Why don't you explain how Krishna appeared to Arjuna if Hinduism isn't the one true religion? Or how could Ancestor Lu have mastered spiritual alchemy if Taoism wasn't correct? Saul's conversion was no more exceptional that that of Ashoka the Great, so does that mean Buddhism is the one correct path? (The Buddha wouldn't say so!) And how is it that all this chaos is here if not for the work of Godess herself, Eris Discordia (kallisti!)
Do you see the problem here yet?
Uh, the execution of Jeshua hadn't happened yet in 20 CE...he was born around 4 BCE, executed at age 33 if I remember by C.C.D. classes right, so around 29 CE. I doubt Saul/Paul got his start the very next year.
And the Epistles are not the Gospels.
According to the account given by the early Christians, yes. And we should believe that account because...?
The Romans and the Pharisees probably though the grisly public execution of the troublemaking leader of this little cult was sufficient. It was years before the early Christians were again of concern to anyone. They didn't have DNA evidence back then; a decade after the execution, the Romans could have produced the bones and believers would have just said "not him!". What would have been the point?
Let's assume there was a body (some hold that the execution was faked and Jeshua was spirited away to live out his days in relative peace and quiet, a nice thought if highly speculative), and that it was stolen. Was that a pointless act? If it was, we wouldn't be talking about this two millennia later.
Jeshua wasn't just a religious teacher. He wasn't some random guy born in a barn who rose to popularity solely on his merits - he was heir to the royal line ("Son of David") of a conquered nation, a nation looking for a leader ("Messiah") to toss off the Roman oppressors. (His choice to go into religion instead of politics pissed off a lot of people.)
Having the body disappear (if it really did) would be a smack to the Romans, their Jewish collaborators, and the corrupt Pharisees. Multiple smackdown!
Why would they be willing to die for a lie? Not all would know it was a lie - it would only take one guy to steal the body. And some would certainly be willing to die for the political ends. People have died for all sorts of ideas over the centuries, but being willing to die for an idea is no gauge of the correctness of that idea.
If we follow Occam's Razor, it certainly requires fewer assumptions to say that the body was there but the story faked, or the body was stolen, or even that the execution was faked, than that Jeshua was resurrected.
And you know what? Even if some weird freaky thing happened and a dead guy got up and walked around for a while 2,000 years ago, that proves nothing at all about the truth of Christian dogma - about the existance or nature of god(s), about the divinity of the walking dead guy, about original "sin" of the forgiveness thereof, about an afterlife, any of it.
Minimum 20 years, maximum what? 100? Your 20 is by far the lowest figure I've ever heard.
Anyway, I can imagine J. Random Roman saying "Think I'll start walking to Jerusalem, it's only 1,400 miles, see if any of these guys are still alive (if they existed in the first place) and can answer a few questions, maybe straighten out some of the contradictions in these `gospel' stories from this `Christos' cult. 'Cause I know they just love talking to random people from the city-state that's occupying their land and oppressing their people." Riiiight.
And what if someone did make the trip? I can find guys today who'll tell me about how they saw Elvis last week at the 7-11. Don't mean it happened.
Not at all. It's clear that mythological elements were deliberately injected into the Christianity and the gospels right from the start. Jeshua's biographers stole liberally from Mithraism - from story elements like twelve followers, death and resurrection, a last supper, the "light of the world" image, to ritual elements like the timing of Christmas, the use of miters as sign of bishop's office, the title of "Father" for priests, and so on.
Sorry, but, yes. (No big deal, we're all deluded about something...) The idea of "God" as presented in mainstream Christian teaching - an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, being that is separate from and creator of the rest of the Universe, big Daddy in the Sky, King of it All - is not logically defensible.
(There are, though, other concepts of the divine that are more resilient...And your credentials as a computer scientist certainly have nothing to do with it!)
See, that's the root of the problem. The gospels - while containing some interesting wisdom teachings from poor ol' Jeshua ben Joseph - aren't any sort of evidence for the supernatural. Any more than the Koran, the Dhamapada, the Vedas, the collected Greek myths, or the front page of the Weekly World News...
The gospels are only "evidence" if you beleive them to the the "word of god" or "divinely insprired" - which is circular reasoning at its best.
But, most of Jeshua's advice was still pretty good, even if he was just a regular guy at the end of it all.
One poster did. A reply made the abortion comparison.
Actually, some radical "pro-life" pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills now, and some doctors refsuing to issue them in the first place.
(Of course it's a stupid idea that a competent adult needs a doctors permission slip to be able to buy medicine in the first place, except maybe antibiotics...)
He didn't. He compared it to abortion.
Murder is the deliberate, unlawful, and malicious killing of a human being. While arguments can be made over whether a fetus is or is not a human being (not very good arguments, mostly, often rapidly descending into supernaturalism), despite the best efforts of "pro life" organizations abortion is still legal. And abortion is not, generally, malicious.
Still - the comparion is in poor taste.
Maybe, but I would suspect that stress may play a role: inadequate sleep means a stressed organism. Stress messes with body chemistry in ways that have been linked to obesity - and obesity itself is a stressor, creating a feedback loop. People also often turn to "comfort food" when stressed.
There have been high-stress low-sleep times in my life when I've tried to substitute food for sleep; fortunately I was aware enough to see what I was doing and restore my old eating habits after the stress had passed and sleep patterns were more normal.
Depends on the strength of the beam. While your typical laser pointer won't show up, a stronger beam is quite visible in ordinary atmosphere. This guys sells a 5 mW green laser for just that purpose.
When I was a student at the University of Maryland College Park (late 80s/early 90s), there was a small building (between the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the old Computer Science Building) from which you could sometimes see a green beam shooting up into the sky. IIRC it was a laser targeted at a reflector on the moon for precise rangefinding.
I never touch ASP, but if your PHP suffers from "cut-and-copy" you need to take a cattle prod to the developers.
This is a coding practices issue, not a language issue - the legacy code at my current employer is C++ CGI programs that suffer greatly from the use of cut-and-paste rather than code libraries. It's just about the worst C++ code I've ever seen, but that's not C++'s fault. PHP makes it easy to create reusable modules that you can just "require_once"; if developer's don't, that's not PHP's fault.
"Our old code in Language X sucks, our new code in Language Y is better written" doesn't mean that X is better than Y.
True, there has been, and probably always will be, malware targeted at pretty much every platform in common use. The only reason that there are so many for Windows is because of its widespread use.
No. From a security perspective, Windows is fundamentally flawed, and is a great host for malware.
When did this happen? Because what you're describing in no way resembles the current U.S. invasion of Iraq.
France attempted to dissuade the U.S. from taking an illegal, immoral, and stupid action. Unfortunately Bush II has had a hard-on for a Gulf War II since coming into power, and has taken full advantage of our version of the Reichstag fire to make it happen.
The links you gave work fine. Space characters are not permitted in URLs, they're supposed to be escaped as "%20". No weirdness here.
Then they, or there parents, press theft or even assault charges against you for your vigilante action.
Tell 'em to cut it out is fine, and might be effective, though the little brats might well just tell you to fsck off. Stealing their stuff is a bad idea, however badly they might be misusing it.
No worries, many of us have those "glass worms". Often it's the remains of the hyaloid artery, not a sign of damage.
I'm 20/20 in both eyes, but sometimes I can see an occasional transparent worm or dot float across the field of vision, really only noticeable when looking at a blank surface.
Exactly. "Open Source" is no better a term than "Free Software" in terms of lingusitic confusion.
Not correct. The BSD licence is a free software licence and is GPL-compatible. It is not a copyleft licence.
Copyleft licences - like the GPL - go beyond free software licences in that they require that you pass onto others the same freedoms that you enjoy w.r.t the software.
Well, I born in 1970 so I'd be 67 or 74, and I'm unlikely to have the kind of money that makes hot 20-somethings go with senior citizens...so, sure I'd take her! :-)
Depends on your defintion of "success", I suppose. I don't find the idea of chasing a career across country appealing; my family and friends are here. I'd rather make less $$$ - or even change careers - and stay here. YMMV.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Libertarian party, and have even voted for Libertarian candidates. But I don't agree with their sophmoric worship of the "free market" and property rights.
Off-topic political rambling follows:
Libertarian capitalists aren't so much about "letting the private sector step in to handle things competitively" as about simply removing government services - the Libertarian party platform is opposed to the very existance of taxation, public utilities, public schools, worker protection laws, OHSA, etcetera.
Now, Zenarchist, that I am, I'm not opposed to the eventual achievement of these goals. As Thoreau put it, "`That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Or
But men are certainly not prepared for it just yet. As Thornley said, "Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn." I don't thnk we're near that prerequisite of Universal Enlightenment quite yet. In the meantime, I don't think that removing the governors of regulation from the engine of state capitalism, taking the brakes off of a system which is designed to consolidate wealth and power into the hands of a small class of "owners" backed by government force, is a wise move.
Want a smaller and less-power government? Fine. Let's start by revoking government-issued corporate charters, land deeds, mineral and other natural resource rights. Also out the window with government-created patents and copyrights. And the reserve banking system that concentrates wealth in the hands of bankers and capitalists, that's got to go.
Capitalism is not some natural "ground state" that government interferes with; it is the product of state power. Shrink the engine of capitalism, then we can talk about removing the governors that keep it from running out of control.
Owning a home is still one of the best investments you can make - rent is money pissed away, while house payments build equity, and there's that nice tax break.
But you have to buy based on the assumption that your future income may be lower. (And you might think about renting out a room.)
I was lucky enough to get into the workforce and buy my house before the dot-com boom and bust, so my house payment is at a level I could afford at my entry level salary, which was around 42k. With my experience I can work part-time and still make the houe payment. (Working part-time as I shift into a new business that's unlikely to be outsourced, and that doesn't have the age ceiling that programming has.)
No. Corporate taxes have been on the decline for a long time.
Corporate tax rates have nothing to do with the issue of outsourcing.
Would you care to explain your reasoning behind that "obvious" solution?
Is the idea that with lower taxes - and therefore either massive public debt, or inadequate government services - our standard and cost of living will eventually fall to that of India, or what?