Some one has to start it, Americas default.

http://w3.newsmax.com/a/aftershockb/video.cfm?s=al&promo_code=CBAD-1 "'Scared the Hell Out of Me. It Was a Great Wake-Up Call (Although I Wasn't Really Asleep)'
— Russell H., from Wichita, Kansas"

 

Private debt is way over 250% of GDP in the U.S., that is more important than the gummint debt so far as economic recovery is concerned. But there's no political points in it, that just grew like topsy with nary a whimper from any side of politics.

 

I can only see a recovery after total collapse as there is just too much toxic stuff hidden and ready to pounce on the unsuspecting... This feeling of bad things coming, applies to the WHOLE WORLD... sorry to say...

As Gerald Cilente (trends research Inc.), said, "" - when the people realise they have nothing left to loose, they will "loose-it" and times will become very dangerous with the anger at realisation that they have been "HAD" by those that they thought they could trust... ""

 

Most people who are complaining the loudest still have a pretty easy comfortable life compared to their parents or grandparents.

 

People used to say, "I bought it on the never-never", thinking presumably the accumulation of debt will only become a problem in the future, but the future kinda crept up.

 

All this stuff going on and Impish --still- thinks its OK.

I love optimism, its a wonderful trait but in the face of--well this mess all I can do is pat you on the back and say there there.

Who was was it said ' when all around you is panic while you stay calm is probably because you dont understand the situation" --

 

Even in Australia some are predicting volatility, most of these folk are from USA and seem to get it correct more often than most suspect else they would be a MANDATORY read...
http://www.moneymorning.com.au/ click on the essay title to go to that page...

 

Regardless of what you may have heard or may believe yourself, I repeat: it's the argument I've personally heard most often in casual conversation. And you can take my word for it that I'm not so addled I confuse abortion opponents with capital punishment opponents -- although I agree the two groups use remarkably similar arguments sometimes.

As a side bar: if you want a fascinating exercise, try tracking the tactics and strategies of anti-abortion activists, and comparing them to those of anti-gun activists. They've both been reading from the same playbook for years, when it comes to manipulating people's emotions while bypassing their brains.

For example, they've both realized that they have to get what they want in small bites. They do so by focusing in on on one thing at a time, and demonizing it. The first step is to rename whatever you're focusing on, so it becomes something horrific in the eyes of the public. For example, intact dilation and extraction became 'partial birth abortion.'

And Teflon-coated bullets, developed for police agencies to reduce barrel wear from steel-core or brass bullets designed for penetration of hard targets like cars, became 'cop killer bullets' -- even although they weren't available to the public, and there was no record of a policeman ever having been killed by a handgun bullet going through his vest.

And don't get me started on 'assault weapons'....

Getting back to the subject, it might also shock you to find that I don't have any anti-capital punishment friends as such -- although I have a couple who think it's unfairly administered, and others who think it's no longer worth the trouble and expense.

You really need to stop thinking in stereotypes, and stuffing people into little boxes fabricated from labels and preconceived notions....

Then you should bone up on both your political and naval history. You can't understand the end of the Vietnam War without understanding Melvin Laird, and Admiral Fiske played a very important part in developing modern naval warfare -- especially in the air.

That's very strange. I was around for John Kerry's campaign too, and the only universal service I ever heard him mention was universal internet service -- you know, like universal electrical service or telephone service? He was really big on that.

He did suggest some mandatory hours of community service for high school students, which is no more shocking than mandatory gym class; it's part of preparing students for real life. The state of Maryland had such a program already at the time, and so did numerous school districts across the country.

Kerry also proposed a voluntary program of service for young folks after high school:

Four Years of College Tuition for Two Years of Service: As President, John Kerry will call on young people to help strengthen America’s security and address unmet community needs. In return, Kerry believes that we should offer young Americans and their family’s peace of mind that they will be able to afford a college education. Under Kerry’s proposal America will pick up the tab for college tuition for every young person who serves the nation. Young people who serve for two years will receive the equivalent of four years of college tuition, or two years of college tuition in exchange for one year of service. The amount of the award will be based on the average tuition cost of attending a four-year public college.

Giving Young People Tools to Succeed in the 21st Century: Kerry’s plan will also allow national service members to take classes to make sure they have the skills they need to succeed in college. If service members decide not to go to college, their award can be used for job training, to help start a business, or to make a down payment on the purchase of a home. Anyone who elects to serve after they have already completed college can use their award for loan repayment.

http://www.mcgath.com/kerryslavery.html

And I didn't say it was a Republican plan. I simply pointed out that it's ridiculous to label it a Democratic plan because some Democrats advocated it, when some Republicans have also been advocating it -- for several generations.

Nor do I despise Republicans, as such. I was a Republican my whole life, right up until they started trying to stuff a flag-burning amendment into the Constitution -- at which time I realized it was no longer the party I had grown up in.

What I do despise is the unholy alliance which has been forged in the Republican Party between fundamentalist Christians, big business and the wealthy, during the last twenty years. Somehow, I doubt Jesus would suggest cutting Social Security and Medicare while extending Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, in the name of 'no new taxes on the American people.'

Funny thing. None of the Republicans suggested keeping Obama's tax credits for the middle and lower classes, while proclaiming 'no new taxes for the American people.

As regards slavery vs. forced labor, you're trying to split semantic hairs.

slave la·bor
noun
Labor that is coerced and inadequately rewarded, or the people who perform such labor
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=slav..._gc.r_pw.&fp=b7ae9c78318186a&biw=1323&bih=650

The 1926 Slavery Convention's definition of slavery was broadened to include forced or compulsory labor in 1930 in the ILO Convention (No. 29) concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour (article 2.1):

"...all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily."
http://www.hrea.org/index.php?doc_id=430

Don't be absurd. I'm not complaining about what I pay; I think I'm damned lucky to be making enough money to put me in the tax bracket I'm in.

And unlike folks who think the government is a magic box, whereby you stick smaller taxes in one one side and more revenue comes out the other side when you turn the crank, I understand that governing a modern, complex country takes money.

No... you missed my point entirely; I guess I wasn't clear. I don't think I pay too much; I think the richest people in the country are shirking, because they won't even keep up with me.

I don't know where or how you came up with that figure, but I suspect it's derived through some pretty colorful and creative accounting.

I suppose you haven't even noticed that those first two statements totally contradict each other? The first one says the government has no legal right to draft our children, and the second one says it has not only the legal right, but an obligation to do so.

I've already addressed this one; you're splitting semantic hairs, playing word games, drawing arbitrary distinctions, and basically using your own definitions.

 

College isn't for everybody. We need trade schools so we won't lose our manufacturing base. Ivy League will destroy us, given the opportunity.

 

Hence the last paragraph concerning Kerry's proposal : "Giving Young People Tools to Succeed in the 21st Century: Kerry’s plan will also allow national service members to take classes to make sure they have the skills they need to succeed in college. If service members decide not to go to college, their award can be used for job training, to help start a business, or to make a down payment on the purchase of a home. Anyone who elects to serve after they have already completed college can use their award for loan repayment."

 

A little perspective on the ratings dance.

Was S&P downgrade an act of revenge?

You might think Standard & Poor’s has something against the U.S. government, the way the ratings firm treated the nation's credit rating on Friday.

In fact, it does.

It's hard to view the monumental ratings downgrade in context without understanding the long-running feud between the government and ratings agencies. In April, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., issued a scathing 650-page report contending that malfeasance at ratings bureaus like Standard & Poor’s was as much to blame for the housing bubble as any bank, and included a series of smoking gun e-mails that suggested that the firms knew they were profiting from unethical behavior. A little-known section of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill also hits the rating agencies with new limits destined to undercut their lucrative business; the Securities and Exchange Commission is discussing right now just how to implement the new rules. The public comment period on new rules ended Monday.

Is the timing a coincidence? Or could the ratings downgrade from Standard & Poor’s be viewed as a shot back at a government that's been taking plenty of shots at the ratings industry lately?

The rest of the article is here: http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/09/7321296-was-sp-downgrade-an-act-of-revenge

I personally think it's quite possible that S & P was firing a shot across the bow of the government -- in essence telling them, "if you don't back off, maybe we'll find out what happens when we knock you down another step."

Yes, I believe they're capable of attempting extortion on such a scale. Anyone who looks at the ratings given all those sub-prime mortgage packages before the crash understands that ratings agencies have no integrity. They're out to make a buck.

 

http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/edition/everything-gold-bulls-predicted-coming-true I found some interesting stuff here...

For example see attached "Year-to-date.jpg"

 

thing didn't let me sign it Troy.

 

I didn't say that they use similar arguments; I just suggested that you were confusing them. It just doesn't make any sense as an anti-abortion argument; it reads more like a caricature of an anti-abortion argument by someone who does not really grasp the anti-abortion position. The anti-abortion position is that abortion is murder, infanticide. You don't need to appeal to the sacredness of life to convince most people that murder is wrong. What you have to do is convince them that abortion is murder, and the sacredness-of-life thing does nothing in that direction.

All political movements work that way.

Ah, yes. You are talking about the procedure used on babies who are nearly ready to be born. If you just pull them out, they become real babies as soon as their head leaves the body of the mother and then you have to take care of them. To save the parents from this unpleasantness, the doctor pulls the baby partly out of the mother, leaving the head inside. While the baby's little hands and feet are wiggling with the first feeling of freedom, the doctor reaches back inside the mother with some sharp instrument, pierces the the little skull and scrambles the baby's brain to kill him. I imagine that the the little hands and feet spasm at that point. Once the baby stops moving, the doctor pulls him the rest of the way out and throws him in the trash.

Obviously no one is going to have a problem with this procedure if you just call it by the right name. But calling it "partial birth abortion", well, that just makes it seem like a cruel and barbaric murder of a helpless little baby. Darn those political word choices.

I didn't call it shocking any more than I called it slavery. All I said is that I was opposed to it. I don't know why you insist on exaggerating my opposition to this plan.

There is a difference between a plan being advocated by a couple of people, decades apart, who happen to be Republicans and a plan being "advocated by Republicans", which implies at the very least that there was a significant movement within the Republican party to take up the plan. According to your way of thinking, there are no Democrat plans at all because there are no plans that have not been endorsed at some time or another by a few Republicans.

You've got to be kidding. You left the party that thinks you shouldn't have a right to burn a flag in a symbolic gesture of contempt for your own country for the party that thinks you should not have the right to keeps and bear arms to defend yourself? That strikes me as rather poor set of priorities.

Pure Democrat propaganda. Democrats receive just as much money from big business and support crony capitalism just as much as Republicans do. And the wealthy support the Democrats by a wide margin.

Somehow I doubt that you have any idea what Jesus would suggest.

And as to the "wealthy" that you want to tax --why is it that Democrat plans to tax the "wealthy" always end up hitting the upper middle class harder than they hit the actually wealthy? And why has no Democrat ever shown any interest in my plan (which I explained earlier in this thread) to actually tax the wealthy?

Oh, so you are arguing that that John Kerry's plan should be called slavery. I'm afraid that I still can't agree. Words are defined by usage, not by official proclamations, and the word "slavery" is just not applied to programs like the one that John Kerry proposed. According to that official proclamation, the snotty 12-year-old who accuses his mother of slavery for making him take out the garbage would be literally accurate.

Governing any country takes money, but the reason that governing our country takes so much money is because government thinks that they have to control every aspect of our lives because we are too stupid to make our own decisions. It takes a lot of money to be a nosy, nagging old school marm to 250 million people.

There was no contradiction. I rejected the notion that the government has a "right" to draft people and send them off to "foreign wars". There are two points here: the legitimacy of a draft is not based on any right of the government but on the obligations of the citizens. This is an important difference because when deciding whether any particular draft is legitimate or not you don't ask "does the government have a right to draft people for this conflict?" Instead, you ask "do the people have an obligation to fight in this conflict?" I hope you can see the difference.

Second, the phrase "foreign wars" is ambiguous, but the overall way that you phrased it suggested to me that you were asking if the government can legitimately draft people for any wars that it wants to, and I answer "no" to that. The government has an obligation to only draft people for wars that the people have an obligation to fight.

 

Liz was peaking over my shoulder and snickered, why is it always a bunch of guys debating what I have to do. Thought I'd pass that along. I'm 100% pro choice, but then again its not a choice I'm going to have to make. Also 100% for complete legalization but then again I don't do drugs. Deal is if the anti choice crowd wants to dictate choices so badly then maybe abortion should be mandatory for a few weeks or months and we'll see how long it takes them to want a choice. Something tells me the value of following ones own convictions would appear abundantly clear to them if it was they who's choice was being denied.

Cheers
B