Jay Marcyes

I've often found myself bewildered by people that argue that we should go back to just the constitution, and this post does a great teardown of just what that would entail, and it isn't pretty.

The two best quotes:

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another

and...

More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?'

the other 6 pages: 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Best quotes

From a senior adviser to McChrystal:

"If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular" (pg 6)

From Andrew Wilder on how useless throwing money at the problem is:

"A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" (pg 6)

And one final one about what the war actually is good at doing:

So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. (pg 6)

Another good read on understanding healthcare. Right up there with this introductory guide to healthcare.

I was reading this Gawker post on whether we will ever get a Frost/Bush type interview and one of the commenters pointed out the logical fallacy common among George Bush haters.

I was not trying to debate Bush's greatness […] but rather to get people to make up their minds as to whether he was stupid or cunning.

I've watched your argument being formed over the past eight years by the left.

- George Bush must be the stupidest President that ever lived.

- Wait! He took us to a false war. He must be crafty.

-Wait! He said something stupid, but we couldn't have been taken to war by someone stupid, so he must have been the puppet of smart people who are only good at taking us to war, but not at anything else. […] make up your mind and tell me what you think Bush is. (comment link)

I'm not a George Bush lover by any mean (nor a Republican for that matter). I just get annoyed by people blinded by hate. How can you not see the flaw in reasoning like this: On the one hand he is dumbest guy in the world not even capable of tying his shoes let alone running the country. On the other hand he was the political mastermind behind The Pentaverate that duped the American people into making him President in order to mold the good ole' USA into a Police State with him as its Emperor

Sadly, now the right does the same thing with Barack Obama. Will it never end?

I'm shocked to find that there is no true IT labor shortage in the US and that companies are just using H-1B visas for their own nefarious purposes. I would have never saw that coming.

Due to an extensive public relations campaign orchestrated by an
industry trade organization, the Information Technology Association
of America (ITAA), a rash of newspaper articles have been appearing
since early 1997, claiming desperate labor shortages in the
information-technology field. Frantic employers complain that they
cannot fill many open positions for computer programmers. Yet readers of the articles proclaiming a shortage would be perplexed if
they also knew that Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for
software positions, and that this rate is typical in the industry.
Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they
receive huge numbers of resumes but reject most of them without even
an interview. One does not have to be a "techie'' to see the
contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other
fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a "desperate''
labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly
not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.