John McDonald

"Like a plastic anvil filled with helium!" - John McDonald

"And they've managed to turn it into the next synonym for welfare or food stamps." - John McDonald

"Well, we'll just make a law that requires you to pay your rent or mortgage on time, as well. That should fix everything!" - John McDonald

">The bill provides coverage for 36 million currently uninsured Americans The bill forces 36 million Americans to buy a bullshit insurance product. FTFY" - John McDonald

"By giving the insurance companies more money and power than ever!" - John McDonald

"I don't see anything good here." - John McDonald

"Its not just duct tape and chewing gum, its a threat against those who don't support the private insurance industry. Fuck them, fuck congress, and fuck anyone who expects me to buy a useless product." - John McDonald

"So instead, he should shack up with the first crack whore who winks at him?" - John McDonald

"Unless you count, I don't know, the IRS enforcing who buys and doesn't buy health insurance?" - John McDonald

">Except for the mandate Yeah, I remember that being the specific issue that made me decide to give Obama a chance. The mandate was so obviously corrupt that I wouldn't vote for anyone claiming to support it..." - John McDonald

"Holy crap, merciless downvoting. Anyway, American anarchism has always been of the individualist variety, even if elsewhere the words libertarian and anarchist do imply collectivism influenced by anti-authoritarianism. If we could get rid of the wars, the spying, the corporate welfare, maybe I wouldn't mind paying taxes so much." - John McDonald

"What I think is selfish is the health insurance industry, and I also don't want a penny of my money going to support that system. Its very nature is a series of incentive structures that undermine health and efficiency." - John McDonald

"You get to keep paying taxes if you ever want to return." - John McDonald

"He didn't refute it, he's saying its not a big deal and any poor people affected are probably stupid and wasting income on lottery tickets so its a good thing that the government tells them what to do with their money instead." - John McDonald

">You will not find as many ARM loans here as other states. People have savings. Remember, we did not enjoy all of the boom side benefits that are now being realized in the bust side repercussions. Exactly. Instead of directing capital toward speculative credit in unproductive investments (bigger houses), capital was put into productive investments like producing energy and food. The "boom side benefits" involved a lot of conspicuous consumption, but no real wealth was created for average people. Instead, it ultimately means more consumption debt hangover, and fewer jobs offering fewer hours at lower wages. We all would have been better off without these "boom side benefits."" - John McDonald

"Luckily, Obama can spend a whole lot more money by combining war and non-war expenses! Ahh, that's so much better isn't it?" - John McDonald

"You think McCain would have let our financial elite down? And you think those paper pushing billionaires are also somehow relevant to the overall health of our economy?" - John McDonald

">manslaughter Pretty generous" - John McDonald

"Did you really have something to say or do you just want to insult people who disagree with you and disagree with "justifying" civilian murders? The conversation is over when you stop cluttering my inbox with ad hominem, "retard!"" - John McDonald

"Stop smoking Mexicrap. I'm personally more worried about the moral implications of paying income taxes to the federal government." - John McDonald

"Dressing the murder of civilians up in fancy linguistic robes isn't a sign of keen intellect or cognitive fortitude." - John McDonald

"There's still plenty of good ones that are [verifiable](http://etext.virginia.edu/jeffers...). >[The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?" - John McDonald

"So what do you think about bacterial communication and social behaviors? If its all just deterministic chemical machinery, where (if ever) does thought appear in the evolutionary process?" - John McDonald

"So where on the chain of evolution does thought appear? If thought is defined as neural response to an electrochemical stimuli, a similar process would still exist in life too simple to have specialized nerve cells." - John McDonald

"GMAC is a finance company, spun off from GM in 2006 and purchased by Cerberus Capital Management - one of the world's largest capital investment firms. Cerberus happens to employ people like Dan Quayle and former Bush Treasury Sec. appointee John Snow." - John McDonald

"I think you may be giving medical science a bit more credit than it deserves. It was only in the 1860s that Pasteur conclusively disproved spontaneous generation, and 1890 when solid proof confirming the germ theory of disease was published. Of course they knew people were "sickly" or "prone to illness" before then, but no one made a specific connection to wheat until after WW2. Celiac wasn't even defined uniformly until the late 60s, and its been much more recent that the majority of doctors went to med school after this knowledge became widespread." - John McDonald

"I think that rate is a little bit low. Usually, I see 1.0-1.3%, but there's still a problem of how Celiac is defined. The disease is currently defined as a certain level of atrophy in the intestinal villae, basically an end-game state of slow starvation. Dr. Fine at Enterlabs came up with a fecal antibody test, and he's finding wheat antibodies in about 10-20% of the population. Its not clear though what kind of effects milder cases have. Anyway, [U Chicago](http://www.celiacdisease.net/) says that 97% of expected Celiac cases in America are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, and the avg time to diagnosis for the lucky few is about 10-12 years. I wonder if that has anything to do with commercial interests, be it that of the wheat farmer or that of the doctor who can't write a prescription and cash in on people who eat a diet better suited to their genetic makeup..." - John McDonald

"So, it sounds like you're in a better financial position than them. They won't be able to get the financing when prices come down to a good level, and you'll have your cheap house. Seriously, there's no reason to be angry at the people who needed somewhere to live and wanted to own their own home. Should they all be attached to a lifelong contract because the timing of their lives and starting their families doesn't match the real estate market? I've got a friend in strategic default. He and his wife each owned a home prior to getting married. Now they have two mortgages and they've been through three sets of deadbeat renters who trash the place and don't pay rent. Is it their moral obligation to continue paying the second mortgage so that some bank and its investors can profit?" - John McDonald