[ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!)

Omar Rahman rahmans at me.com
Wed Oct 9 11:12:55 UTC 2013


> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 00:45:37 -0400
> From: Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie
> 	Apocalypse!)
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAAc1gFjybYHLpvWxKXNqxj9F2BYci6XnB4X9p4yO4V0_mwumCg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> For something written by someone with a sense of humor please check out John
>> Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
> 
> ### I abstain from listening to CC. Their humor is too often of the
> servile kind, laughing with the master, not at him.
> 
> -----------------
>> 
>> The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and
>> balances". The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not
>> accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be
>> funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5
>> branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against.
>> Time to check your balance I'd say.
> 
> ### To go back to the initial contention: Congress gave the president
> about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president
> refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken
> the money and done his job but refused to.
> 
> Do you agree that the president shut down the government?

In a word; no.

> 
> ------------------
>> 
>> Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but
>> he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern. All we have to
>> do to prove this is imagine what chaos would occur if Congress were to take
>> aim at the laundry list above 'unless' they get x, y, or z.
> 
> ### Yes, let's imagine: Maybe, if there was a balance between drunken
> sailors and accountants, we would not have about 250 - 300 trillion
> dollars in unfunded government liabilities. Maybe, if the doves could
> keep the hawks in check, our nation would not have the blood of
> millions of brown people on our hands. Perhaps a few refuseniks could
> say no to the fifth estate (the permanent government,) and the Federal
> Register would be 700 pages, instead of 79,000 pages long.
> 
> Would that be chaos? Dunno. But, to quote Mr Obama, "and make no
> mistake about it" - chaos is now, and it is the result of our
> "sensible" way of governing.
> 
> Rafal

I wholeheartedly agree that US foreign policy has resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths for very little gain or service to the American people. I also agree that we have 'chaos' now and it is the result of "sensible" governing, which is to say nonsensical governing.

Your point about the Federal Register is actually the one that most impacts us as Extropians I think. How do we avoid binding ourselves in overly complicated and inevitably contradictory legislation? As we move towards an existence as information in a machine a process for 'negotiating protocols' and 'maintaining backward compatibility' needs to be designed. We started with such a lovely 'kernel', the Constitution, and people have put so many layers on top of that now that it's hard to see the beauty of the original implementation. That said, we could have the modern generation of apps that we have with out all those APIs.

Regards,

Omar Rahman

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20131009/208f5174/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list