Wow. If you aren't down with King and Ghandi, then you most definitely have issues with race. This isn't a personal attack, but rather an observation.

I believe your earlier "racism" barb was the personal attack. By now I'm used to it. As I've said to any and all, if you want to pleasantly debate an issue in depth, stop on by!

As for King and Gandhi, I don't dispute their contributions to the world. However, while you and I are entitled to our opinions of these men, we are not entitled to our own facts. They were flawed, imperfect men...using them as billy clubs on a less knowledgable individual might have worked, but facts is facts, and as this is the internet, no one cares anyway.

I can tell by the words you use that these ideas are not your own (which is a good thing). These are regurgitated talking points from political talk radio and message boards.

In my younger years I was a liberal and then an anarchist. The libs are still spewing the same emotionally charged half-truths they were a decade ago, and decades before that. They never change their tune.

My later experience combined with new understandings led to my present belief system ("conservatarian") which includes facts and historical learnins where possible. It is a grave error to think righties have their brains switched off; we have to live with facts, including knowledge of our limitations; they are often depressing and often no fun.

The main difference between left and right? The left is forever selling impossible (and costly) solutions while the right illuminates the tradeoffs between one way of doing things and another.

Yeah, I should have included the schizoid lyrics, stark poetry;

Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

To quote the ZPRs, I'd rather shove a string of barbed wire into my left ear, pull it out of my right, and floss with it before ever having to hear that godawful song ever again.

I, too, have an issue with tasers. Being that they're non-lethal and leave little damage outside of the barb marks, they give the officer an easy excuse to embarass and force compliance without giving the officer pause he'd normally experience when considering whether to pull his billyclub (or gun) from his belt. Still, upvote for looking cool.

I hear some styles of barb wire can work... else it'll scratch the paint job and really piss them off

What you call social engineering, when viewed from the other side of the wealth-equation, many would call social justice.

Here's an interesting read from Forbes on the subject of taxation which presents a picture quite different from that which you've offered.

http://www.forbes.com/ceonetwork/2004/02/12/0212chat_transcript.html

CEO Network Chat
Q&A: David Cay Johnston
02.12.04, 4:11 PM ET

"What follows is the transcript of a Feb. 11 online chat on the Forbes.com CEO Network with New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else (Portfolio, $25.95). The chat was moderated by Mark Lewis of Forbes.com.

Mark Lewis: Welcome, everyone. Let's get started. David, you begin your book with the statement, "I believe that taxes are at the core of our democracy." What do you mean?

David Cay Johnston: All governments have taxes. And governments that lose their tax systems cease to exist. Taxes are the means by which we decide how we're going to finance maintaining our democracy--who pays how much, how the burdens are distributed.

What's wrong with our current tax system?

Most Americans believe what turns out to be a myth--that we heavily tax the highest-income Americans to subsidize the poor. What the government's data show is that the middle class and upper middle class--people making $30,000 to $500,000 per year--are subsidizing the highest-income taxpayers. Tax rates on the middle and upper middle classes are rising, the government's data show, but for the people who make millions per year, effective tax rates are falling dramatically.

Secondly, law enforcement has collapsed. I name two billionaires who've testified under oath that for 30 years they never filed a tax return while running a business in New York. Nothing has happened to them, or to most of the many other people I name in my book who admit or even brag about not paying taxes.

How did things get this way?

Most Americans, if they ever meet a senator or congressman, shake their hand in the mall at election time. Important donors, about one in 850 Americans, get to sit down with their congressman and explain in detail their grievances. Every politician will tell you, you cannot buy their vote. All you can buy is access. Well, access has bought the attention of Congress, so that members are focused on the needs and welfare of their donors, not their typical constituents.

Proof? Two days after 9/11, the first tax bill introduced in Congress was estate tax relief for the victims, which did absolutely nothing for the firefighters, police officers, secretaries and volunteers who died. It wasn't a guaranteed college education for the orphans of 9/11. It was tax relief for the very narrow group, probably less than 2% of those who died, who would owe estate taxes.

How would you change the tax system?

I don't know, but you do. By "you" I mean that all of us, if we understand the reality of how our current tax system works and the principles of taxation, can come up with a better system, one that encourages strivers and rewards those who play by the rules instead of focusing its benefits on those who are already stunningly rich.

You direct numerous barbs at the "super-rich," whom we at Forbes like to celebrate as wealth-creators. Do you think the tax system should be designed to prevent the amassing of great fortunes?

The tax system should be encouraging prosperity and wealth, and making sure those are as widespread as possible. But what the government's data show is that we are taxing away the ability of the middle class to save, and damaging their prosperity. And by radically lowering the effective tax rates of the highest-income Americans, we are concentrating wealth and income very, very, very narrowly.

In 1970, the top 1/100th of 1% of Americans had about 1% of the income. And the bottom third of Americans had more than 10% of the income. Now, they're equal. Just 27,000 people have as much income as the bottom 96 million Americans, who in real terms have less income today than in 1970. And the number of people it takes today to account for 1% of all income? In 1970 it was more than 20,000 people. Today it's less than 400.

How high would the top rate be in your tax system?

Again, I don't know. What we do know is that relatively lower marginal rates reduce tax cheating, but for them to work, we have to broaden the tax base. We only tax about half of income each year. So if we tax all income, clearly we could significantly lower rates on everyone.

What do you think Congress should do about the Alternative Minimum Tax?

The taxpayer advocate at the IRS recommends repeal. The problem is, some really good tax lawyers say that would create new loopholes. Some other ways to address this are to set a high-income threshold for the tax to apply, say $500,000 per year and up, and eliminate, in the AMT calculations, the ordinary deductions and exemptions people take for themselves, their spouses, their children, their state and local income and property taxes, and the standard deductions. Otherwise, in 2013 about 43 million households will be on the AMT.

In this morning's New York Times you write about a gentleman named Irwin Schiff, who asserts that the federal income tax is illegal and does not have to be paid. Schiff clearly is an extreme case, but how deeply do Americans in general resent the current tax system? Can that resentment be harnessed to support the reforms you advocate?

The number of people who believe that the United States government is a criminal organization that illegally extracts income taxes and imprisons those who challenge it with no legal cause is a lot bigger than I ever imagined. There are at least 7,500 business owners who don't withhold taxes and turn them over, according to the General Accounting Office--and those are just the ones the government knows about. There are people all over the country who grit their teeth and pay their taxes but subscribe to this dangerous and nutty idea that the federal government is a criminal organization. That's a sign of how oppressive the tax system has become on the bottom third of Americans whose incomes in real terms have been falling for years, while they're being squeezed by rising taxes at all levels of government.

Every thoughtful American should be concerned when a man whose own psychiatrist says he's crazy--Irwin Schiff--has among his supporters business owners and others who are not on the economic fringe.

Any final thoughts?

The promise of our Constitution is that we together can work out the solutions to our problems. But doing that requires that, one, people understand what's actually happening in our tax system rather than the blather of politicians, and two, that people participate as voters and as citizens who discuss public issues with their friends and neighbors. The reason our tax system is out of whack is that the narrow segment of very high-income people who don't want to pay taxes has been actively engaged in exercising their citizenship. And too many of the rest of us have been watching Jennifer Lopez.

That's all we have time for today. Thanks for participating."

240v feels like barbed wire ripping through you. You can 'hear' the electricity in your head-it's incredibly fast. Nerves jump around for days afterwards.

1) Deport all illegals from USA.

2) Giant wall along entire border defended by barbed wire, night-vision cameras, sniper squads, drones, land mines, helicopter gunships, satellites.

3) Seize Mexican oil reserves to pay for #'s 1 and 2.

@ Fletch. First, it is surreal to argue about religion with a happy pig named "Mr. Happy."I think it is cool actually.

You said "Atheist-leaning agnostic? Lol! Sounds like you are almost on one side of the fence but your pant leg is caught on a barb. Evolution doesn't disprove Santa either. Still think he exists? Might exist? Your assertation that science can't disprove god implies that science is trying to disprove god. No more than trying to disprove Santa. And I thinks all religions are cults of a sort."

First, importantly, science is not about disproving God. That is not its focus. It is about understanding life and nonliving systems, processes, reactions, functions... In any dcredible scientific journal, you will not see this-disproves-God's-existence postulated in the discussion segments.

Comparing God and Santa is really a false analogy. One is an Earth-bound fable and the other is most likely mischaracterized if it does in fact exist. Santa can be disproved easily yet the Universe is too vast to discredit the existence of a higher power. I choose not to follow any religion because I don't want to settle on something so absolute in its beliefs without any yearning for the truth or even reforming around science.

@marr:

Then how can you believe ANY of it? My god (pun intended), there are as many interpretations of the bible as there are people who read it. If it really is the word of god, then it MUST be factual if you believe god to be infallible. If you don't believe it to be completely factual, then how can you believe it is the word of god? If you believe some parts are literal and some are open for interpretation, then who decides which is which? You? Your pastor? Religion keeps trying to cram viability into the cracks of scientific knowledge. Always trying to reinvent itself so that science and religion can co-exist peacefully. Who are you to say the bible isn't all factual? Is your grip on belief so tenuous that you must create your own set of rules? "God is outside of time"? Who says? I wonder what concept of time they had around 80AD.

And, cave beetles is your example of something becoming less complex? Strengthens evolution if you ask me. If they lost their eyes, how do you know other senses didn't become more complex? Maybe losing eyesight was due to evolutionary pressure for using other senses that increased survival. I don't know, but you surely don't. I just refuse to fill in the blanks with "god did it". Throw away the Kent Hovind DVDs and think for yourself man!

@doremifa:

"As an atheist-leaning agnostic, I think it is important to show tolerance (cults are a different story)."

Atheist-leaning agnostic? Lol! Sounds like you are almost on one side of the fence but your pant leg is caught on a barb. Evolution doesn't disprove Santa either. Still think he exists? Might exist? Your assertation that science can't disprove god implies that science is trying to disprove god. No more than trying to disprove Santa. And I thinks all religions are cults of a sort.

Are the conservatives posting here aware that George H. W. Bush had a mistress all through the time he was Ambassador to China (he took his mistress with him, and Barb stayed at home), when he was head of the CIA, and when he was Vice-President and President? Her name is Jennifer Fitzgerald. This information is not from a scandal sheet, but from the Times of London.

The right-wing attack machine spent a huge pile of the American people's money attacking Bill Clinton relentlessly and nothing they came up with stuck. Finally, they got him to testify before a grand jury and and were able to ask questions about the one subject that every single human lies about - sex.

I have no doubt that George W. Bush is currently faithful to his wife. But that's the only positive thing I can say about the man, and that hardly seems like the most important criteria for President of the United States. The fact that he let the man who killed thousands of Americans in the World Trade Center get away in his haste to fight a pointless war against a tin-pot dictator that his OWN FATHER had good reasons to leave in power (read Bush and Scowcroft's book for the full story).

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

OK, I've started burying cans of soup in the backyard - this will be the standard currency in the city state of Dagopia. Deploy the barb wire! Ready the MadMax Mobile!


... or am I over-reacting?

ARRRRRRRR that's nothing mate I like to floss my crack with barb wire

You got all yer gonna get outta me for free, this gold shit has gone to my heads...It's Straight up Biblical references from here on out, the Sift's worse nightmare, "The Goldfrapp Translation"-nothing but the esoteric!

Thanks, my posts are more like barbs from venomous, pollen-gathering killers, memorable, but for uncomfortable reasons.

OHH!, And I'll add, that getting 50 injected into this little cabal, was like gunning for a glory hole drilled for a gnat! Understandable, but a frustrating pain in the ass, nonetheless!

Way to Sift!!!, My own mothers could not have done better!!

"Yes, Worthy of a Darwin Award for stupidity. I've seen this before, I believe it's called "backyard wrestling" and it's a growing trend on the internet. People filming wrestling moves that are IRL extremely dangerous"

In fact, it turns out that "backyard wrestling", at least in this version where kids jump off roofs, or in more extreme cases, use barbed wire and glass for their "rings", is almost entirely a product of the media. When the media stopped paying attention, the vast majority of kids (who had started doing their jackassery due to what they saw on news shows about the NEXT BIG THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN) stopped doing stupid things pretending to wrestle and instead went on to doing other stupid things not involving wrestling.

Such is the way of the world.