We could use a good deal more of these "revolutionary, radical, outspoken pamphleteers" this very day. Thank goodness there are records of such thought.

It would seem to me that those with little care for truth and those for little care for the source or circumstance of their pecuniary gain are kindred of spirit and on much the same moral, ethical and principled plane. Sounds quite a bit like many of those that inhabit the halls of Congress.

Richard Feynman: a folk hero/legend [in physics] in his own time. He was spot on here (and it was written a number of years ago). A few years before his death, the astrophysicist Carl Sagen had a series on TV called Cosmos. In it he stated many times over that the cosmos contained "billions and billions of stars." At the time it was a number we couldn't get our minds around. Unfortunately, it's now a number the politicians in power have forced us to get our minds around. I've always thought that if these people would simply treat these hard come by monies as if they were their own, saved for over a long period of time and thought of as something difficult to replace, we'd never have found ourselves in such a fiscal situation. The level of incompetence shown thus far in dealing with the current financial difficulty is so unbelievble, one wonders if it is all part of some greater unspeakable design ... think Soros and his ilk with Obama as a mere functionary.