^You know, what's really amazing about you is how you are never wrong, or ambivalent, about anything. Not even the smallest doctrinal shade of dogma.^

First of all, that's not true, as any long-time poster would tell you.

Second? Yes, I have a set of principles. And no, I don't change them every week. I've been studying, reading, and thinking about this subject and related subjects for well over three decades. The actors have changed, but the ideologies, basic concepts, and more importantly, the methods, haven't. Not in my lifetime, or many years before that.

Tell me, how long should it take me to figure things out?

Oh, wait, you've formally discarded ideology, objectivity, political principles, and, by extension, reason in the realm of politics and social thinking. I won't go as far as to say you're discarding history, but it gets close sometimes.

So you're going to lecture me because I haven't discarded ideas I've thought years about, when you as much as tell me they can't be thought about? That you're not going to think about these things, but you don't like my thinking?

You don't really think there are answers. I have found that there are. Not by revelation, or being told by some leader, or blind adherence to some dogma, but by hard work, false starts, mistakes, and many years. Would you believe I voted for McGovern? My first legal presidential vote, too. I was furious with Nixon, but still.

In a good contract year, I get paid six figures to do aerospace concept design. Basically, I am paid to think. Not just go outside the box, but to build new boxes. I was at the beginning of the private space movement, back when the idea was considered lunacy. Some of the current companies making headlines are run by people who used to work for companies that I helped found.

I have trained myself to construct new concepts from a wide range of individual items and other concepts. And I worked with other people who were even better at it. I think what bothers you the most is that I don't fit nicely into the "stupid redneck Tea Partier" slot, and I've still come up with different conclusions than you have.