Me: I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the same liberal democrats who shriek about the separation of church and state whenever evangelicals are more politically involved than going to vote to come out and denounce these nuns on similar church-state grounds...

pjhorrex: I think you're confused. Nuns, as citizens of the United States, have every right to write to their lawmakers (publicly or otherwise) about what laws they believe should be passed. One could even argue it is their civic responsibility (just as it is everyone's) to do so.

Politically involved evangelicals are something else entirely. They tell their following how they should vote while paying no taxes, state or federal. It's highly unethical.

Me: No, I think **you** are confused. Evangelicals, as US citizens, have every right to discuss politics in church per the 1st amendment: freedom of religion, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. Not only that, but the average member of those evangelical congregations pays state and federal taxes. Since nuns take vows of poverty, that is virtually impossible for them.

So really, you are just saying a group of mostly tax-paying US citizens trying to exercise 3/5 of the 1st amendment: "you can't get involved because the incorporated entity which owns the build you're in doesn't pay taxes."

pjhorrex: I never said evangelicals did not have the right to discuss politics in their churches. I said it was unethical. If evangelical leaders participated in letter writing campaigns to their representatives or held political discussion forums on their own time there would be little (if any) ethical problems.

However, that is not what you were referring to. They preach about politics as the leaders of organizations that do not pay taxes. They attempt to manipulate a system (as an organization) they have no stake in. It is unethical.

Want to lessen the ethics problems? Do away with tax exemption for churches. Then they can preach that Barrack Obama is the Antichrist for all I care.

Me: It's still not unethical. The congregation pooled its money together to build the building and hire the pastor. Most of them pay taxes which means that most of the people you are claiming are participating in an unethical process are stakeholders under your own criteria.

The left has no problem with this when it's labor unions that do it or groups like the ACLU and others which send out voter guides to their members. None of those groups pay taxes. Yet I don't hear anyone on the left saying it's unethical for labor unions and groups like the ACLU to go out and suggest how their members should vote.

Pjhorrex is typical of liberals in that he/she gets its panties in a knot at the idea of religious groups organizing and preaching about political subjects. The kindest interpretation of this is that he/she worships legal procedure; it would be ethical for them to have the same conversation at a coffee shop, but apparently, banding together and using personal funds to build a religious organization changes everything. That is clear evidence that it is an undeniable prejudice against religion.

You can’t conjure up goods and services merely by proclaiming your belief that these things are a “civil right.” This is the basic problem with socialism: Eventually, you run out of other people’s money. [H/T: The Camp of the Saints]

The mainstream American view toward technology is sort of like a sophisticated cargo cult mentality where strange beings called engineers, programmers and scientists work strange crafts in realms beyond mortal understanding to deliver increasingly magical goods and services to them. Provide some supplication and lucre to these demi-gods and break-through cures, new TV and movie standards and green technology will be dropped in for them to consume. There is little appreciation for the fact that someone has to research these things, design new products, test them, pass them through quality assurance and get them to market.

It's an established fact that the current system cannot be socialized because it is too inefficient. Medicare alone is now looking at $89 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the future and it excludes a significant swath of the American public. The government will try to socialize it, and as the system invariably and predictably spirals out of control, it'll impose stricter and stricter controls on services and prices. That'll drive many out of the profession and discourage many students from studying it. There will be less profit to be had for private researchers which means fewer medical companies producing drugs and devices. Many Americans, unwilling to accept basic economics and a somewhat tragic view of the realities of life, will sheepishly despair like a Pacific islander wondering why the sky gods no longer love them enough to send them new gifts.

In some respects, it may be hyperbole to invoke the image of a cargo cult here, but underlying mental state is based on the assumption that the goods will magically appear if we use the right invocation. For the south Pacific islands' isolated tribes, that's making a giant replica airplane and worshiping it. For us, it's legislating it into existence as an act of imposing our will to power on the universe.

Original code:

With advanced optimizations enabled, it was able to save a whopping 92.4% of the space required for the original!

Here is the sane version using SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATION:

I was just curious to see what it looked like with the advanced optimizations. I knew that it would be useless without passing in the entire ExtJs library because it would rename the references to ExtJs. I had no idea it would just truncate most of the code!