or maybe that bible story means something else

I don't take that - are you sure it's not a real fruit?  Couldn't it be like a fig?  They ate a lot of figs back in those days I hear - story the same way you do.  I see it more as being Promethean, of man taking the handles of good and evil into his own hands and figuring it out himself, instead of saying "Yes Sir" everytime god thunders on about something, and you know he is always thundering on about something or other.  And you know I have long quibbled about just because he is all powerful doesn't mean he is always right about everything.  This whole thing about him wanting us to gather together on Sundays, awfully needy if you ask me.

And he put the damn tree right in the middle of the garden, and being all knowing, he knew that we would eat of the fruit, so what the hell?  What is he getting all righteous about it?

I think the riots of the sixties are overblown, not that many got killed, and I believe they were the rioters themselves, and what they ruined was their neighborhood, they didn't come downtown and they didn't come into any other neighborhoods.  But it did make splashy news, and I'm sure it scared some white people, but those people were already moving out to the burbs and taking their money with them, so I don't think the riots had much of an effect on white flight.

I don't think anybody, well hardly anybody, there are still objectivists running the land, is against helping the poor as a platitude, but when it comes to a particular situation and real money coming out of their pockets, they seem to find an excuse not to do it.  Like blaming the poor, like saying they ran their town into the ground and now they are coming to us for help, well the hell with them, which was your remark that set me off. 

In paragraph three you go into your anti-government rant, but somehow you involve the government in the siphoning of money that would otherwise go to the poor, like there is this mighty river of money which would go straight to the poor if it weren't for government interference, like somehow, if people didn't have to pay taxes that money would go straight into the poor box instead.  And then at the end of the paragraph we come across the odd phrase 'assuming that somebody wants to help them,' which implies that maybe you aren't that fired up about helping the poor and maybe that money river isn't there after all, so then how is government to be blamed for siphoning it off?

Back in the days of the 2008 republican debates, i had a soft spot for the elder Paul, mainly how he talked sense about not going to war while all the rest of them wanted to make the mideast sand glow.  Could he be so bad?  Sure most of his other ideas were bull goose loony, but what if we had peace, would that make up for the nutso stuff?  And then one day I heard an interview with him about food and drug regulations and of course he was against them.  "But," the interviewer stuttered, "what about drugs that don't contain what they say they do, and what about drugs that are flat out poison?"  Well then, he said with the calm countenance of somebody who has everything figured out, those companies would get a bad rep and nobody would buy their products and they would go out of business so there is another problem solved by the free market.

I don't think you feel the same way, I think when you go downtown and buy a bottle of aspirin you want to know there is aspirin in it and not sawdust or arsenic.  What I am trying to say is we need regulations.  I'm sure some are illogical and some are just the source for shakedowns, so I can see where it would make sense to campaign against certain regulations, but when your ilk gets roused it's generally all regulations that they want to get rid of.

I'm not sure where regulations come into it in Flint.  I'm sure some regulation was ignored.  There is certainly evidence that the people, including the guv who were running this operation knew the people were getting poisoned.  The last i heard was that there are some chemicals they can put in the water to keep the pipes from leaching lead, but when they went from Detroit water to the more corrosive Flint river water they stopped using the chemicals to save money.

Why would FEMA give money to your paper mill rather than you.  Where do you get this idea?

Hey, saw you on fb.