Forum Post: conservaschism
Posted 5 years ago on May 8, 2019, 8:26 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Conservatives are accusing Dems of a power grab. Gerrymandering isn't enough cheating to gain power for the GOP, they have to slow Dems by projecting. If it weren't for projection, Republicans would have no vision at all!
So what else is new?
Civilization is the story of ruling elite classes that measure the progress of our human community by their increases in wealth.
''Robert Mercer. A far-right billionaire, who is a major investor in Cambridge Analytica that data scrubbed Facebook for Trump, brought Bannon to the White House, and made his daughter the major owner of Breitbart News and board member of Cambridge Analytica.'' What followed next needs to be seen & understood by USA's 99% and is recounted in this excellent video documentary film ...
''Meet The Man Behind Cambridge Analytica, Who Made Trump President'': http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49042.htm - &/or see:
''The Bizarre Billionaire that Backed Bannon and Made Trump President'': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cWxyqVH90 (an alt. link)
omnia causa fiunt ...
Re. Ayn Rand "The right-wing love affair with (her) ... ties US Conservatism to one of the most disturbing sociopathic killers!'' by Thom Hartmann:
From which .... ''Rand’s philosophy, though growing in popularity on college campuses, never did—in her lifetime—achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. It was confined to college coffee shops, intellectual conferences, and true-believer journals, but never hit the halls of Congress, the mainstream television airwaves, or water-cooler political debates. There were the handful of “true believers,” but that was it… until today.
''Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.
''Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president.''
caveat emptor!
In 1973 the people of Chile owned their own farms and were free to grow what they wanted and needed. After Pinochet they worked on rich landowners farms and grew cash crops for export. That is: "fair trade."
In 1989 Iraq was an "emerging first world nation" with free education from pre-school through Phd. Gasoline was 5 cents per gallon for Iraqis. Medicine, electricity and communications were free.
Trade benefits no one but the traders. Like bankers, investors brokers and CEOs, traders don't actually do real work. They are parasites. Their activities, organizations and the profits produced by them are harmful to the community and will destroy the human race and the planet we live on, if allowed to continue to thrive.
If it weren't for Brown v Board and Roe v Wade only banksters, billionaires, CEOs and their upper middle class sycophants [or wannabees] would vote for conservatives. There would be no Republican party!
There are 2 kinds of conservatives. Liars and the fools who believe them. Most are both!
''Why America Is Moving Left'', by Peter Beinart:
''Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.'' - Also please
dum spiro, spero ...
Moving left is the only way we're gonna get stuff. Like, healthcare for all, free public education, retirement, infrastructure, protection for the environment, higher wages, you name it. If we move right, we'll never get a damn thing!
So, is .. "'The Road To Serfdom' – sponsored by big business"? Consider ...
multum in parvo ...
We need a revolution in economic thought. We need new, bold academicians to take on economics because we're still following old, antiquated ideologies that fail the masses of people.
From the article above:
"Although eight society members won Nobel prize in economics, the society hadn’t set high academic standards for its members in order to attract representatives of the big business and other influencers."
Bingo. The standard for economists has been extremely low because any real critical thought would NOT be good for corporations and the wealthy.
"Milton Friedman and George Stigler – with the help of corporate and political support – found the adequate tool to empower their ideas, which was the network of think-tanks, the use of scholarships provide by them, and the intensive use of media. This think-tank network wasn’t for creating new ideas, but for being a gatekeeper and disseminating the existing set of ideas, and the philosophy of freedom”."
Freedom, my ass! Freedom for the rich, that is all, and economic chains for the rest of us!
"Neoliberalism created the (econo)mist of scientism and economism, decreasing pluralism in economics. These mechanisms to indoctrinate young scholars into the simplistic but often irrelevant models are needed to stabilize the scientific paradigm and the social-economic system built on it (Earle et. al, 2016; Kwak, 2016). This distinctive feature of this system – as Dean Baker (2016) shows – is the protectionism of the capital owners and the maintenance of upward redistribution towards them, at the expense of wage growth of the labor force – this is why neoliberalism needs to capture the state."
Consider that "modern liberalism is a set of ideas about human freedom, markets, and representative government. In practice ... it has largely become a political affect, and a quintessentially conservative one at that: a set of reflexes common to those with a Panglossian faith in capitalist markets and the institutions that attempt to sustain them amid our flailing global order. In theory, it is an ideology of progress. In practice, it has become the secular theology of the status quo; the mechanism through which the gilded buccaneers of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and multinational capital rationalize hierarchy and exploitation while fostering resignation and polite deference among those they seek to rule." - from:
Many thanx for your excellent excerpts & I append the above in order to show how 'liberal' weakness & appeasement - has been an enabler of the Necro-Economics and Psycho-Politics of .. ''Neoliberalism''!
ad iudicium ...
"Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
Excellent article explaining what neoliberalism is, how it came to be, and what we can do about it.
''The Millennial Left Is Tired of Waiting!' by Ben Judah:
''Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, is working to build a generational movement.'' + Thanx for re-posting that excellent article about Neoliberalism, its history and FX!
per aspera ad astra .. et prospice!
"If you are our age—he’s 33 and I’m 31—the great events that shape your worldview are not a series of Western triumphs, but a succession of spectacular failures. Our formative experiences were the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the election of Donald Trump. That makes it hard to defer to a veteran like Pelosi on strategy, when her generation has racked up so many failures.
The Democrats are experiencing a clash of generations. As in all such clashes, each side thinks the other is delusional. When the Millennial left looks at the establishment, it sees leaders senescent with decades in the House, blindly clinging to bipartisan civility that no longer exists, unable to view men like Mitch McConnell as their opponents and not their colleagues, and believing that white voters are the only path to victory in 2020. The Millennials see themselves as the realists here."
"This Congress is among the oldest in history. The average member is 58 in the House and 62 in the Senate, with party leaders nearly a decade older. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 80. This aging cohort, on too many occasions, has shown itself not fit for purpose on 21st-century issues."
From: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/democrats-are-experiencing-clash-generations/594808/
These things just have to be said. It really is time to move our government on for future generations.
''The New Political Story That Could Change Everything!"
Re. Neoliberalism ... ''To get out of the mess we're in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for altruism and cooperation. So this contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future.''
dum spiro, spero ...
In 2020 millennials will be the largest voting block. And, they are proven to be the most progressive generation in American history.
https://www.mic.com/articles/35479/millennials-will-be-40-percent-of-the-electorate-by-2020
''Democrats Are Waging a Covert War on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez'', by Joshua Cho:
Yes "In 2020 millennials will be the largest voting block. And, they are proven to be the most progressive generation in American history", BUT the DNC will fight tooth and nail for their RW Corporate Overlords!
qui custodiet custodes?
AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have faced mountains of criticism from the establishment. All the more reason to give them respect. All the more reason to vote in more revolutionary politicians like them.
"This is what happens when you have a generation of young people whose central experiences with capitalism have been two recessions, a financial crisis, crushing college debt, flat wages and soaring income inequality. For young people, the devil they don’t know is looking better and better than the devil they do—and that sentiment is fueling insurgent challengers.
Many of these candidates continually emphasize the need to purge U.S. politics of corporate money, starting with the Democratic Party."
From:
http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_political_revolution_candidates.html
''For Sanders, political revolution means shifting control of American politics away from corporate interests, convincing non-voters to go to the polls and attracting white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, all while moving the party left enough to embrace democratic socialist policies.
''A political revolution of that kind is going to require two things: a wave of candidates committed to a bold set of progressive ideas and a mass of voters with the political will to elect them. There’s evidence both of these are already here.
''What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucusgoers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in.
''What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucus goers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in.'' - from your important link:
http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_political_revolution_candidates.html
And also see ''Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio?'', by Edward Curtin ... http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52240.htm
spero meliora ...
Consider ''Depoliticization Is a Deadly Weapon of Neoliberal Fascism'' by Henry Giroux:
caveat!
to understand the rise of neo liberalism after Brown v Board and it's further energization by Brown v Board etc. read "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy Maclean.
Re.''Neoliberalism'', please consider ...
https://truthout.org/articles/neoliberalism-the-ideology-at-the-root-of-all-our-problems/
& this too: link http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ particular to the U$A
e tenebris, lux?
A new economic system is possible.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jun/25/the-new-left-economics-how-a-network-of-thinkers-is-transforming-capitalism
"There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet."
"A huge political space has opened up. In Britain and the US, in many ways the most capitalist western countries, and the ones where its problems are starkest, an emerging network of thinkers, activists and politicians has begun to seize this opportunity. They are trying to construct a new kind of leftwing economics: one that addresses the flaws of the 21st-century economy, but which also explains, in practical ways, how future leftwing governments could create a better one."
“We’re stripping economics back to basics,” she says. “We want economics to ask: ‘Who owns these resources? Who has power in this company?’ Conventional economic discourse obfuscates these questions, to the benefit of those with power.”
''Conservatives, the Far Right, Fascists and How We Defeat Them All!'' - by Ashley Smith ...
''The left has no choice but to take today’s right deadly seriously - understand its specific nature and develop effective strategies to combat it. David Renton’s brilliant new book, 'The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right', does just that.'' Also fyi ...
per aspera ad astra ...
Great read by George Monbiot. The main crux is it's about Brexit but it's really about so much more, the ideology of neoliberalism, our greatest enemy.
"At first sight it’s incomprehensible. Why risk everything for a no-deal Brexit? Breaking up their own party, losing their parliamentary majority, dismantling the UK, trashing the economy, triggering shortages of food and medicine: how could any objective, for the Conservative and Unionist party, be worth this? What good does it do them?
Yes, some people will benefit. To judge by recent donations to the Conservative party, some very rich people approve of Boris Johnson’s policies. A no-deal Brexit might favour hedge funds that thrive on uncertainty, financiers seeking to short the pound, vulture capitalists hoping to mop up cheap property if markets collapse. But the winners are likely to be greatly outnumbered by the losers, among whom are many powerful commercial interests. Neoliberalism promised freedom – instead it delivers stifling control
We make a mistake when we assume that money is the main motivation. Our unreformed, corrupt and corrupting political funding system ensures it is an important factor. But what counts above all else is ideology, as ideology successfully pursued is the means to power. You cannot exercise true power over other people unless you can shape the way they think, and shape their behaviour on the basis of that thought. The long-term interests of ideology differ from the short-term interests of politics.
This, I believe, is the key to understanding what is happening today. The Brexit ultras in government are not just Brexit ultras. They are neoliberal ultras, and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology. It’s the ultimate shock doctrine, using a public emergency to justify the imposition of policies that wouldn’t be accepted in ordinary times. Whether they really want no deal or not, the threat of it creates the political space in which they can apply their ideas.
Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity’s defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and “the market” as society’s organising principle. The market, it claims, sorts us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt by politics to intervene disrupts the discovery of this natural order.
It was embraced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and most subsequent governments. They sought to implement the doctrine by cutting taxes, privatising and outsourcing public services, slashing public protections, crushing trade unions and creating markets where markets did not exist before. The doctrine was imposed by central banks, the IMF, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization. By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.
It has failed on its own terms, and in many other ways. Far from creating general prosperity, growth has been slower in the neoliberal era than it was in preceding decades, and most of its fruits have been gathered by the rich. Far from stimulating an enterprise economy, it has created a gilded age for rent-seekers. Far from eliminating bureaucracy, it has created a Kafkaesque system of mad diktats and stifling control. It has fomented ecological, social, political, economic and financial crises, culminating in the 2008 crash. Yet, perhaps because its opponents have not produced a new, compelling story of their own, it still dominates our lives.
Unsurprisingly, people have reacted to the closure of political choice and the multiple disasters it caused. But because neoliberalism, in broad terms, was adopted not only by the right, but also by the Democrats, New Labour and similar parties, there were few places to turn. Many people responded with nationalism and nativism. The new politics that Boris Johnson’s government represents incorporates both neoliberalism and the reaction to it. The glitter-eyed essentialists on the frontbenches – such as Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Sajid Javid – still seek to implement the ideology in its most extreme form. The opportunists, such as Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel, appeal to those who seek scapegoats for the disasters it has created.
Johnson uses neoliberal framing to justify his attacks on public safety. He wants to pull down environmental standards, create free ports in which businesses can avoid tax and regulation, and strike a rapid trade deal with the United States that is likely to rip up animal welfare rules and threaten the survival of the NHS.
He rages against red tape, but the real red tape is created by the international trade treaties he favours, that render democratic change almost impossible, through rules that protect capital against popular challenge, and shift decision-making away from parliaments and into unaccountable offshore courts (“investor-state dispute settlement”). This explains the enthusiasm among some on the left for Brexit: a belief that escaping from the EU means escaping from coercive trade instruments. In reality, it exposes us to something even worse, as the UK enters negotiations with the US, holding a begging bowl. UK too desperate to secure US trade deal, says Clinton's treasury secretary.
Now, as the professor of political economy Abby Innes argues, neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase: “ossification, self-dealing, and directionless political churn”. Like Leninism, neoliberalism claims to be an infallible science. Its collision with the complexities of the real world has caused political sclerosis of the kind that characterised the decline of Soviet communism. As a result, “the only way to complete this revolution today is under cover of other projects: Brexit is ideal”.
The creation of emergency is the inevitable destination of an absolutist, failed system. But emergency also provides the last means by which the failed system can be defended and extended."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/11/brexit-ultras-triumph-neoliberalism
Again ''The New Political Story That Could Change Everything!" ...
Re. Neoliberalism ... ''To get out of the mess we're in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for altruism and cooperation. So this contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future.'' Also fyi & to follow your excellent link, consider ...
''Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio?'', by Edward Curtin: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52240.htm & also see:
https://truthout.org/video/sanders-says-democratic-socialism-means-creating-an-economy-that-works-for-all/ - Sen. Bernie Sanders with Democracy Now!
at spes non fracta ...
"..the joke will be on you if you listen to NPR" From,
''Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio?'', by Edward Curtin: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52240.htm
"So we are reassured that the new head of NPR, the chief of all U.S. propaganda, is a champion of a free press. Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning, by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden, by exposing the US government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job the American mainstream "free press" failed to do. What NPR failed to do. Perhaps they will ask him if he objects to the way his own government "interfered" in the lives of these three courageous people who revealed truths that every citizen of a free country is entitled to. Perhaps they will ask him if the US government’s persecution of these truthtellers is what he means by there being "a war on truth." Perhaps they will ask him if he thinks the Obama and Trump administrations have been "distorting reality" and waging a war on truth.
Perhaps not. Of course not.
Don’t laugh, for the joke will be on you if you listen to NPR and its sly appeal to "liberal" sensibilities. If you are wondering why we have had the Russia-gate hoax and who was responsible (see/hear Russia expert Prof. Stephen Cohen) and are now involved in a new Cold War and a highly dangerous nuclear confrontation with Russia, read Lansing’s July 10, 2019 testimony before the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs: "United Sates Efforts to Counter Russian Disinformation and Malign Influence."
For anyone thinking US MSM has a liberal bias .. the assumption-shattering film from Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman & Justin Lewis will surely make them think again. Making a common-sense case that mainstream news media are more committed to their bottom-line interests as Corporations than to any left/liberal advocacy, the film dissects how news content is shaped within a narrow & an ultimately RW, conservative, institutional framework that mostly marginalizes any progressive perspectives of a broad cross-section of the US public. This film (made before the rise of Fox News) is now only more relevant with the passage of time. I can't recommend it enough to any and all who still read & learn here & they are actually more than we may realize - especially with people inspired by Bernie, AOC, Omar & Tlaib!
''The Myth of the Liberal Media'' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8oHl3ooeZo (60m) &..
https://shop.mediaed.org/the-myth-of-the-liberal-media-p114.aspx (alt link but w/vid.watermark)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9OgL-LNtj4 'Propaganda Model of News' (an 18m excerpt)
NB: "If you want to understand the way a system works, you look at its institutional structure. How it is organized, how it is controlled, how it is funded." (Noam Chomsky)
and "The Mainstream media really represent elite interests and what the propaganda model tries to do is stipulate a set of 'institutional variables' - reflecting this elite power, that very powerfully influence the media." (Edward Herman) Furthermore & from the Ed Curtin link in your reply above, again consider ...
"Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning - by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden ... by exposing the US government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job The American Mainstream "free press" has failed to do. What NPR failed to do. Perhaps they'll ask him if he objects to the way his own government "interfered" in the lives of these three courageous people, who revealed truths that every citizen of a free country is entitled to. Perhaps they'll also ask him if the US government’s persecution of these truthtellers is what he means by there being "a war on truth." Perhaps they will ask him if he thinks the Obama and Trump administrations have been "distorting reality" and waging a war on truth. Perhaps not. Of course not.''!!! Please also consider another excellent & revealing doc:
'''OutFoxed' • Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism''...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74oHhU5MDk (77m)
This film which examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know. Finally, please do reflect that ...
e tenebris, lux?
Just don't believe in ideologies. It's perfectly fine to pick and choose ideas from different ideologies but the ideas must fit into the confines of our goals.
Ideologies developed in a certain socio-politico-economic context. Whenever we adopt ideas from an ideology, we must remember to dig deeply and understand this context first and well. It's a bit like driving a car which has swerved into a ditch on the right side. The correct action is to steer towards the left to get back onto the road to continue on. If instead it has swerved into a ditch on the left side. The correct action is to steer towards the right to get back onto the road to continue on to our goals. Buddhism's Middle Path makes sense. I loved eating "gourmet chicken butts" but sitting on a stool set on one side of a wooden chair going head-to-head against my [teenager! yep, without a fully developed brain until age 25; of course, I was a kiddie idiot following "the very-very-late white rabbit"] Big Brother sitting on a stool on the opposite side devouring a total of four pounds (I ate more than one pound, for sure) set in the middle on top of the seat of the chair was just very silly. For much more than a decade, I felt nauseated every single time just by thinking about "gourmet chicken butts." Moderation was the way!
It's NOT whether steering towards left or steering towards right being correct or not. It's all about getting back on track to continue on towards our goals.
There ARE incompatible values due to one's following different ideologies. One has to know the context of what one's doing. For example, in U.S. schools' cafeterias, people gather various food plates and cups to put them on a meal tray. Some cultures consider that as being rude, hogging, and wasteful (if one doesn't finish the foods and drinks.) However, it's more hygienic because people don't share their foods and drinks with each other so they don't infect each other with the diseases and germs they may have via their saliva and oral sores such as herpes, mononucleosis, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, etc.
In China, periodontal disease, hepatitis-A, and eventually liver cancers are endemic due to the people's communal and familial shared-eating habits but it's definitely far more subdued in the "wasteful" U.S. whose way actually makes sense considering the vastly higher cost of healthcare relative to food cost here. There are also more efficient transcultural compromises and variations possible (e.g. using serving utensils instead of everyone using their own eating utensils to scoop up food, or having the kitchen staff apportion the food onto individual containers before having a waiter/waitress passing them out one by one at the dining table) because even in the olden days, "uppercrust" people lived with their servants, too, but with strictly followed procedures and/or etiquettes. My Mom told me about these because she had taken care of babies before in these households in her youth.
For these people, going outside of an estate amounted to a security operation which needed to be scheduled and planned in advance so that they can be protected in a convoy by security guards and their vehicles. In a sense, they locked other people out but they also locked themselves in like caged birds. When I reflect upon it, I am amazed in contrast at the apparent safety of our shantytown where the children ran around freely, without any fear of car traffic, or any adult supervision (as long as they stay within the stranger-trapping labyrinth; its urban ¿design? of people-sorting-and-trapping passageways sent my new-to-the-neighborhood well-dressed and running Big Brother into a feeding trough full of hoggyswasch!) I didn't know how to cross a street around that time so I always went with my Big Brother when we left the boundary of our shantytown to play in our many square miles of countryside and mountainous "backyard." Equality of conditions can obviate the need for many defensive measures.
Germ theory is one of the greatest discovery of all time! Everytime I think of it and our U.S. independence from the far-too-hands-on ¿suspected? royal inbred George III, I become a francophile. Health starts with clean water, soap, and good habits (here's why early education or inculcation is important; Hong Kongers and Chinese Mainlanders do differ in this respect; no "Black Lives Matter" [skincolor-based police brutalities in the U.S. DO need to be stopped] demonstrators put up a sign apologizing for the inconvenience and delays their actions had caused the public but some Hong-Konger demonstrators did, so they were polite or well bred.) Health is the foundation on which to build all other attainments such as education, livelihood, and passion.
When one encounters an absolute incompatibility, one has to cut and choose and henceforth see things with a proper part of one's mind shut down! Having eyes wide shut can actually be eyes being wide open but with a conscious decision to shut them. It can be a virtue.
Schizophrenia is an affliction only if one cannot shut down and/or reduce the number of personalities to a very few number or keep them under conscious control.
"Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 and, it won't end well this time either''! by Arwa Mahdawi:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/26/joe-biden-is-the-hillary-clinton-of-2020-and-it-wont-end-well-this-time-either & compare and contrast that ..
with this https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/coming-generation-war/588670/ now!
Finally, please consider: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/joe-biden-is-a-phony-plain-and-simple/
multum in parvo?
Joe Biden, loser, thinks we don't need Medicare for All because healthcare is "personal." WTF does that even mean? Is it "personal" to have to worry about healthcare every day of your life? How can this man claim to care about the American people and not want coverage for ALL Americans. Disgraceful.
Bullshit Biden ''wants people to think that implementing Medicare for All would involve blowing up the healthcare system as it stands and leaving people with no health insurance for some period. In fact it would cover every person in the US, with no lapse in coverage." from ...
Yet this is the man that the fkn quisling (with The 1%!) DNC/DLC desperately want to run against tRUMP but the mind boggles at such stupidity, unless ... stopping Bernie is far more important than beating DJT!
e tenebris, lux?
Truth. Give the people Joe Biden and they WILL give you Trump again.
''Requiem For An American Dream'' ... + NB: this is one of only a few free to watch links for this doc.
^this^ is an Essential Doc.Film, for all who care about America. The problem is way bigger than Biden!
e tenebris, lux?
''Trump’s July 4th Tank Display is a Glaring Sign of Fascism'' - Important OP by William Rivers-Pitt:
https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-july-fourth-tank-display-is-a-glaring-sign-of-fascism/ - but also:
https://truthout.org/articles/massive-anti-fascist-coalition-rebuffs-far-right-proud-boys-in-portland/
omnia causa fiunt!
Despite propaganda. On the waning US influence accentuated by a failed sanctions strategy:
"Yes, let’s parade some tanks around town. And let’s praise the heroic UK marines who seized an utterly defenseless oil tanker manned by a bunch of dirt-poor Philippinos. Yay! There is probably some profound irony that explains why Trump and Bolton and Pompeo want a military parade at the very moment the US military must concede defeat in all theaters but the propaganda one."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/ilargi-memo-to-the-us-the-winds-are-shifting.html
''In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an “aggressor” anywhere?'' - from ...
https://truthout.org/articles/the-mainstream-media-wont-name-us-military-aggression/ +NB:
https://truthout.org/articles/lies-about-iran-killing-us-troops-in-iraq-are-a-ploy-to-justify-war/
https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-trump-is-consolidating-far-right-power-globally/
bella detesta matribus!
"the US military must concede defeat in all theaters but the propaganda one."
Whether it's a defeat or not hinges a lot on the definition one agrees to. The U.S. is NOT a traditional colonial power which likes to occupy and lord it over the other countries to milk them. We like to trade, fairly. This inclination has much to do with our geopolitical circumstance. We already have a huge piece of home turf with temperate climate to cultivate and develop. We are not a country with high population density aside from a few of our coastal cities. We have our own vast "sandbox" to play with.
Every time we set out from our home away from America, we need ships and airplanes so it's natural that with our global trading interests to protect, we have ended up having the largest and most powerful navy and airforces (the U.S. Navy has the largest airforce in the world, second only to the U.S. Airforce.) I think that many countries engaging in trading globally appreciate the security provided on the highseas by a somewhat benign but rather dominant power assuring "the freedom of navigation" on the highseas.
Imagine what would happen if the U.S. were to withdraw its overseas forces to get them home. I am sure that many countries would regret seeing that. The U.S. has already withdrawn from some countries, only to be invited back to help stabilize the security situation. If the U.S. were to withdraw from the current high-tension area around the strait of Hormuz, guess what would happen? Kaboom! Fugushima, Fukushima! "Is it two already?" "Fewer." Oil and gas, antagonistic intolerant ideologies, and nuclear weapons are Allahu Akbar!
It's God's Will for the transgenders there ("we have no homosexuals, we execute them" [but we have weak males who take estrogen and stay uncut to accrue and collect female privileges with their bulging boobs and dangling balls, while retaining their male strength].)
Men sometimes celebrate by grabbing their crotches because they itch, I believe, after a testosterone rush from a victory having triggered a rising erection. God knows where men's hands have been!
Like Halliburton slant drilling under the Kuwait-Iraq border to start the war that culminated with US corporations owning Iraqi oil after two wars and a shitload of bombs. Or the 1950s coup in Iran that installed the "trade friendly" dictator that led to the religious counter revolution in 1980. Then there's Pinochet's reign of terror commencing on September 11, 1973 with the help of the CIA that led to the reenslavement of the peasant class on the land Aliende took from the feudal lords and Pinochet gave back.
What planet do you come from? How the hell can you believe the US trades fairly? You must have the most thoroughly conditioned mind American schools and Fox news can ever hope to own.
Exactly! Trade wars are NOT restricted to import export fees. In fact Trade wars are all too often ACTUAL wars in support of Business - Multinational Business and is quite frequently about Fossil Fuel Access and Control! But can be as mundane as Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Nike! Real wars fought by American Military to secure the interests of Corporations!
Generally, most trades not done under duress are fair. Actual wars in support of businesses tend to occur more for the U.S. because many of our businesses are global in nature and they get into worldwide conflicts of interest that in the case of the U.S. can only be handled by our country as a whole.
For example, where could Google go for help when Red China, the country's entire might, was thrown against Google? I'm telling you that Google is one toughie on the technological front but it just cannot match what the U.S. has on the national scale. Google could conceivably own and operate super aircraft carrier strike groups to exert power and defend against Red China. Hmm, we've been there before, haven't we? How did Hong Kong get to become such a weird, strange, and intriguing place? (British East India Company, British Government, Qing Dynasty, Qing's subjects there, their local militias, and Red China constituted quite a strange historical brew of interests, jurisdictions, fights, surrenders, victories, loyalties, treaty, accords, independence, sovereignties, etc.) Yeah, it's the British East India Company which owned and operated its own army and navy and took up the fight against the Qing Dynasty of China. Even the Queen of the British Empire wanted to be subtitled as the Queen of India. It's a case of a very huge "penis wagging the dog" while fucking around.
Do you really want to see a number of these corporate-owned armed forces going all around the world fighting their own battles? Yeah, here come the Google security agency, Facebook bomber squadron, the Amazon drone strike force and mine sweepers, and Apple reconnaissance balloons. Not I because there would be a lot more wars.
All in all I read too many words that, in the end, are only a gaseous expulsion of the trite propaganda with which we were socialized as preschoolers. When the regurgitation of the partially digested mess is complete, no new idea or insight has been forthcoming.
Trump had the new idea of wriggling tariffs to deal with bilateral trade issues.
Of course, other countries have long been using tariffs to gain trading advantages for a long time. The U.S. is a recent latecomer. However, it's a novel and new idea for our overly compressed plutonium world.
For Project Genesis deployment, Trump 2020! 5-FU may help slow the rate of the already unleashed by neoliberalism Project Genesis to allow the lesson of the K-19 incident to be more thoroughly absorbed into the Collective Unconscious (the Soviet submarine K-19 incident's horrendous results had probably saved the world from the nuclear holocaust arising from the Cuban Missile Crisis, via Akhipov's vote not to retaliate while being attacked by the U.S. Naval Blockade,) and thus allowing stabilizing and ameliorating the excessive cultural whiplash which would otherwise result from the pootinium-triggered plutonium implosion->explosion ignition sequence.
Only Trump has the don't-give-a-shit-hitting-the-fan potential to change the rigged system. If it can't be fixed safely, getting it destroyed may also offer a new beginning for the survivors, if any. Some bomb-disposal experts blew themselves up while dismantling bombs. They succeeded in their mission. There are risks but there are counter-balancing rewards, too. Look at why Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb. Why does Iran keep on producing so much enriched uranium? Hmm, does it generate far too much electricity for its own population to use? I doubt it.
Possessing a nuclear bomb is believed to be prestigious in international relations to the shut-inside-a-drum dwellers. It's a bit like Imperial Japan emulating the old ways of the rapacious Western colonial countries. Having so many nuclear bombs around provided the postwar Long Peace of the Cold War, despite the dozens of close calls. MAD is mad but rational, so is Trump (who is actively manufacturing future MS-13 members from the asylum seekers being mistreated on our southern border; I wonder whether he understands how violent gangs form, obviously not. It's helpful to try to understand and learn why people joined ISIL despite its brutality and oppression, especially women.)
He's a LOSER though on his failed immigration policy on the southern border where he has created a crisis getting us and the migrants all fucked up out of nothing at all. There was no crisis but Tweety's melodrama regarding the border created the tsunami of migrants responding to the "get in now or miss out forever" rush rush exhortations befitting a bazaar hawker.
Halliburton was using a superior technology akin to that used by the Red Chinese in the South China Sea. Huawei also comes into mind. A major difference is that the U.S. Government or its military forces neither know nor own Halliburton's superior technology. If you recall the BP Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, you can see how obviously true my statement is for many commercial U.S. technologies (a lot of these!) The U.S. Government is already busy and challenged enough just to control and manage its military technologies.
The U.S. is a deeply technological nation whose technologies are mostly privately owned and controlled. Red China has everything owned by its single-party dictatorship operating its armed wing, the PLA. Essentially, what the U.S. perceives as unfairness is due to something like the PLA hacking Google customers' Gmail accounts to oppress political dissidents. The equivalent would be for the dozens of U.S. alphabet-soup intelligence agencies to hack into Red China's centralized databases and track and "neutralize" what the U.S. doesn't like using the U.S. military forces. Where there is no clear boundary observed, disputes often arise. We'll see what comes out if we go down this slippery slope. I am sure that the U.S. intelligence agencies can launch many investigations into the finances and personal lives of the world leaders to assure their peoples that their leaders are not corrupt. Hmm, why have so many world leaders' relatives and friends become so wealthy in such a short time, isn't it interesting? Maybe a U.S. Congressional investigation is in order... Our people will certainly benefit from learning "How to make dough and affluence people." We may not even need to do any new hacking because we can just comb through the massive amount of data our intelligence agencies have already collected (guess where? it needs a lot of cheap and reliable electricity in a sparsely populated, centrally located for continent-wide access, and easily guarded and defended area; electricity needs a lot of water.) The man who had lost a parrot told the KGB, "I just want you to know that I don't agree a thing with what my parrot has to say."
If you actually look at who owns the oil in Iraq, you will know that it's not the U.S. corporations. Why do you think that Obama was willing to pull ALL U.S. troops out of Iraq? The U.S. no longer had [largely oil] interest to protect there. Iraq invited the U.S. troops back when ISIL successfully kicked Iraq's ass.
It's a similar story in the Philippines. There were lots of demonstrations against U.S. military bases so the U.S. pulled its troops out. Then the Philippines got bullied (by XXX "state secret") and the security situation deteriorated. The U.S. was invited back.
I generally didn't approve of what the CIA, born of the Cold War, was doing circumventing the legitimate channel for initiating the usage of force and that is constitutionally the U.S. Congress. The U.S. got into a lot of terrible messes (South Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, Hondurás, Guatemála, Colombia, Chilé, etc.) because of the CIA's practically acting as a private and secretive paramilitary force serving the President alone. Fuzzy wars are messy wars (not only for the U.S; Russia and China have the same problem of hernia and keeping [often dishonorable] things covered up under dark wet blankets.) They are like the results of using wet hands for grabbing flour, just creating gooey messes, but without the wherewithals to wash the hands off cleanly and completely with Congressional-approved funding for mass action (the U.S. created a lot of new enemies by supporting rebels to overthrow their own governments but letting them down without full-scale U.S. military actions to back them up causing them to be purged.) I think that it has been illegal for a long while already for the CIA to carry out any assassination of foreign leaders, as reined in by the U.S. Congress.
I came from Ute-rus, the result of an insemination during Project K-19 Genesis, whose e-mission was "to put a kid on Earth before the period is out and to return him safely." Ute-rus was ruled by a de facto matriarchal dictatorship serving "Russian-root soup," fried gourmet chicken butts, and fried residue of porky rinds but it's better than the patriarchal "sal, aceite de sésamo, con arroz" or "cold water and bread."
In 1989 Iraq was an "emerging first world nation" with free education from pre-school through Phd. Gasoline was 5 cents per gallon for Iraqis. Medicine, electricity and communications were free.
In 1973 the people of Chile owned their own farms and were free to grow what they wanted and needed. After Pinochet they worked on rich landowners farms and grew cash crops for export. That is: "fair trade."
Trade benefits no one but the traders. Like bankers, investors brokers and management, traders don't actually do anything useful. They are parasites that are harmful to the community and will destroy the human race and the planet we live on, if allowed to continue to thrive.
If you do any buying or selling, you are a trader. I'm sure that you have not created your own electronic gadget to access the internet which you are using.
Trade is the handmaiden of prosperity, for the very simple and obvious reason that one man's garbage can be another man's treasure. In the bilateral trade of garbage for garbage, both sides may come home with [their own] treasures. Of course, the trade must be voluntary and adhere to fair rules such as transparency of information and honesty in the instruments of exchange.
Superimpose a map of trading volume with a map of prosperity. It's very clear that they have very high correlation. I propose that it's actually causal: trade->prosperity.
The problem you mentioned with your run-of-the-mill people not sharing in the prosperity arising from trade is a societal governance and economic distribution problem. It's not a problem with trading itself. There are some countries which trade a lot and are very happy. There are others (such as Hong Kong) which trade a lot and are very unhappy. Then you look at why. It's the vastly higher inequality of wealth in the unhappy countries which was the source of the unhappiness, not the absolute amount of wealth having been increased by trading. The unhappiness comes from not "keeping up with the Joneses." It doesn't come from "keeping down the paupers."
Living in the wealthiest city of Red China, Hongkongers enjoy material prosperity more than the average Red Chinese but they are unhappy seeing that Shenzhen, just across the Special Administrative Region's border, is eating their lunch. The young people are especially unhappy because they couldn't get an easy start on their lives, while being squeezed hard by the real estate prices around them. I understand because I myself lived through that phase of life. I had to buy a car to get to work when new car loans were charging around 16% of interest per year. Then my apartment rent more-than-tripled in slightly over two years. I cut expenses drastically to cope with these financial "torpedo hits." Other unfortunate tenants were simply squeezed out of their abodes of life. It's why I suspect that people had been killed (as in being murdered) over these financial shenanigans, most likely from "leveraged buyouts" using "created-out-of-thin-air" credit faking as "real money."
With fair trading, most parties involved tend to come out better off. It's the reason that countries with high degrees of economic freedom tend to get better off faster in the long run. Red China is economically freer than the U.S. so it's no surprise that it grows faster. The U.S. has a lot of professional structural licensing barriers erected to protect special interests so competition is reduced in favor of de facto monopolies. Everything becomes more expensive when competition is squelched. Red China, excluding the party which de facto owns everything with the gun, is more egalitarian than the U.S. on the wealth distribution scale so it's not surprising that its people tend to be happier about their economic advancement than the people in the U.S. having their stalled or sporadically retreating economic well-being.
Of course, there are intrinsic problems with rampant trading, such as contagion and invasive species. We must guard against these, so tariffs and fumigants are sometimes justified.
I am for fair trade, not rabid free trade. I am for peace but I go to war. It's not contradictory. I believe that the trade with Red China must be structurally rebuilt because how Red China behaves is an existential threat to our children and our children's children. If it were just about me, I would call off the "trade war" completely because I am unlikely even to be alive when the spoon is stirred around to sink the tea leaves but the conflict is about the freedom of the world and Hong Kong is the linchpin of this struggle against power arbitrariness in which whether smaller or weaker countries are bullied will be decided for posterity. We must therefore resolve this conflict, using our nuclear arsenal (atoms for peace, remember HEU gifts? there are even more critical gifts than these) if need be, within my lifetime. My Dad's generation didn't leave the problem of totalitarianism ambiguously unresolved. Greatest Generation.
conflating individual consumers with exploitive trade oligarchs is obtuse to say the least. For profit organization of peoples' labor is a crime against humanity. Ie: you're full of shit!
Baby Trump on the National Mall for 4th of July festivities & protests.
Code pink secured the right to have it there filled with air, not helium. See:
https://www.newsweek.com/baby-trump-blimp-protest-july-4th-washington-1446227
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/activists-permit-baby-trump-balloon-july-4th-events/story?id=64087947&fbclid=IwAR3CcsGeYmQ-6oi_U3H3enGF466JbUl2YJR0HyzJ8sNm2q4RqEvOBNm6YhQ
To America: ''Trump’s tank parade isn’t alien to anything you’ve ever stood for. The only way to make it more American would be to add a few monster trucks and a Kardashian. This parade is your reflection. This parade is you!'' Harsh but true from ...
Pax Americana? Temet Nosce!
Trump's attempt to co-opt the 4th of July celebration is likely to blow-up in His face!
''American Exceptionalism and American Innocence'', by David William Pear:
''Stupid Dumb Fuck Move. The Criminal-N-Chief is just looking for an excuse to attack them. Now I suppose if The Orange one can show some restraint - he will only have the Navy take out all of their missile launchers and radar sites and call it good.'' in relation to Iran - made here ...
cave pax america ...
''Jingoistic Military Fetishization is as American as Bald Eagle McNuggets!'' by Caitlin Johnson:
cave - bellum se ipsum alet!
& is Exactly why, that when the Dem party establishment goes to screw Bernie again, "that" Bernie MUST continue the run this time as an Ind Dem & take all who are like Him "with" Him!
If the establishment structure of the Dem party insists on standing in the way of sanity - then the sane must leave the party & start their own!
Joe Biden is a Bad Bet.
https://www.thenation.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-economy-2020/
But, of course, a Biden candidacy is probably a good bet for establishment Democrats who stand with the wealthy, corporations and warmongerers and who prefer Trump to any of the other Democratic candidates, most of whom at this point, are to the left of Biden.
(edit) Joe Biden is a candidate that the wealthy feel safe with as Joe won't represent the middle class nor the working poor nor the simply poor - he will cater to the wealthy few.
Biden is another sHillary = lip service to get elected and then all campaign promises to the general population are null and void.
As such - he will also fail - as the people who support Bernie and the agenda this country desperately need, will refuse to vote for Biden just the same as they refused to vote for sHillary!
So
Bernie MUST continue His run for the Presidency as an Ind Dem, if the Public is gonna have a chance to vote for Him and start the necessary changes this country MUST Have!
EDIT:
The wealthy few who are destroying this world feel so safe with Joe that even wealthy Republican Donors are giving to his campaign!
Biden is another Hillary. Bingo.
With ALL of The Crap in Biden's Past - one would think that he would be the last choice for anyone to consider voting for - even (especially?) running against the Criminal-N-Chief! & yet He is the New Darling of the DNC! Which says a lot about why the average citizen has NO TRUST In Gov & it's Establishment Parties!
Dem establishment will take Trump over Sanders and until the Democratic Party electorate opens their eyes to realize this we may just end up with another 4 years of Trump!
(edit) If we end up with another four years of Trump. . . then any sort of democracy will have died and this will be a much more violent country
EDIT:
Replying to @DKAtoday @SpeakerPelosi
@SpeakerPelosi If we end up with another 4 yrs of Trump because U refused 2 impeach Him & t @DNC tried 2 force Biden down our throats & he loses. This will become a much more violent country! Defend the Rule of Law as well as the continued existence of democracy = IMPEACH Trump!
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1142876903310798850
It is all about democracy in the end isn't it? If we don't get money out of politics we won't be able to get anything done because it won't be the people running things. Bernie said it at the debate and so did Kirsten Gillibrand.
And, the question remains, does Pelosi really want to get money out or is she a corporate stooge. Sadly, I think the latter. She doesn't care if our democracy is bought and paid for by corporations and the wealthy because she's done nothing about it for the past 40 years.
Replying to @SpeakerPelosi
Yes = Congress MUST act!
& 1st order of business should b t Impeachment of @realDonaldTrump, so tht the damage He has done (with full @GOP support) can be stopped.
Tht way Dems would do better in coming elections too!
Do What Needs To Be Done!
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1144996923683823617
Replying to @SpeakerPelosi : Yes = Congress MUST act! (CONT)
U say U want to see @realDonaldTrump in prison - BUT - ur failure (refusal) to start impeachment proceedings so that he can be removed from office & prosecuted - Kinda Puts The Lie to that claim!
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1144998425190182915
Yes = Congress MUST act! (CONT)
The reasons (reasoning) you have given so far For Not Beginning The Impeachment Proceedings are to be quite blunt "Are BS!"
The longer @realDonaldTrump remains in office - the MORE CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE he is allowed to continue doing!
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1145002760003293184
Yes = Congress MUST act! (CONT)
2 hve t ability 2 confront (successful or not) evil being done & thn 2 choose NOT 2 confront (impeach) makes U complicit n t evil/crimes tht @realDonaldTrump does & continues 2 do!
2 condemn in words means nothing if u do not take t actions u can!
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1145018599071014914
"Democrats need a leader who can puncture Trump’s populist con and lay out a bold vision and agenda for change."
It's not just Democrats but all others worldwide. Trump is simply too mentally antiquated to "lay out a bold vision and agenda for change." Biden is probably the same. Obama did a layout but the (aptly named for retarding our National agenda for their treasonous and sleeping-with-Red-China partisan gains) Retards cut him off at his knees. The Blue Dogs gnawed at and feasted on the knifefall. It was much more than a lost decade for the U.S. because Bushit ran a trainwreck down a ravine.
I only see and hear some good ideas from the younger members of the Left. I count Bernie Sanders among them because we need a dose of democratic socialism to rein in and counterbalance the excesses of many decades of rampant corporate kleptocracy impeding the common good (Why did Los Angeles have such terribly dirty air? Cheap oil and lobbying there by the maker of buses - GM or General Motors - captured its government so it built freeways instead of subways (not so for New York.) Jam, jam, jam, I was flying into a reddish brown soup-bowl of smog there!) Bernie is not mentally antiquated. New York was special, on a higher-level of evolution than others because the far-flung subway system connects newbies and experts together like nowhere else and the culture of the U.S. is so informal that newbies may even mingle with Nobel-prize winners. Open societies innovate and achieve breakthroughs faster. Even the Mongols' conquest of eastern Europe could be said to have created an openness in European societies (yeah, there was a rich and powerful superpower semi-locked beyond the steppe, the deserts, the high snow-and-ice-capped mountains, the arid and cold plateau, etc. in the Far East/East Asia called Cathay/China to learn from and trade with,) paving the way for Europe to rise to global dominance and conquests (we are still wrestling with the aftermath of European Colonialism which started retreating after the Great War/World War I but Imperial Japan didn't get the message that conquering and pillaging were no longer cool so World War II had to be fought in East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean to modernize the Japanese mind which had grown resentments towards being discriminated against as a victorious Yellow nation awarded with no booties despite having defeated the White country of Russia so it spearheaded the discrimination in the opposite direction, with some Indians long oppressed by the colonial Brits joining the Japanese "freedom" fighters.) Of course, there are other cities that even surpass New York in scale and connectedness but they don't have the informality and openness. Silicon Valley pops to mind as a potential exception (not on the scale and diversity though) because it possesses the informal and open "traitorous" culture and even has the advantage of good climate relative to New York. I saw and heard people mingling in street café there.
When everyone tries to get their "free" way, no one gets the "sub" way so everyone stews in the orange marmalade.
When a longtime Manhattanite took me to ride the subway at the first time, I was greatly impressed by how fast and convenient it was without much waiting at redlights at all. Sometimes on a subway ride in the years when New York was in living Hell (but with Dad not travelling for his work, our family was happily together as one in full employment and study, before its splintering colonization phase started,) there was even underground music from "the Godfather" and "Cats." The convenience of subway was in great contrast with the difficulty of my hauling groceries home bumping with the street curbs: turning the heavy and fully loaded shopping cart around, waiting for redlights to change to green, lowering the cart down the street curb onto the street, turning it around, pulling it to cross the street, lifting it up the curb onto the pedestrian pavement, pulling it on the pavement, and repeat upon reaching another street. Manhattan was chock full of street curbs after street curbs! I was quasi-disabled.
This street curb hindrance has largely disappeared in New York. When the disabled people are enabled, the quasi-disabled ones who are far more numerous benefit greatly, too. Although I don't use a shopping cart to haul groceries anymore, traffic congestion was eased because the cut-away pavement and ramped curbs allow deliverers who operate handtrucks to clear the roadways faster.
Yeah, a teacher at a school for the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, had the obssession of trying to help his hard-of-hearing mother but even we the vast majority of the not-so-deaf people have all benefited greatly from his inventing the telephone which is essentially made of hearing-aids combined with a telegraph. It vastly improved our modern living.
Can you guess why my Big Brother paid for the installation and the monthly rent for a telephone and its service at our home soon after he had started working and received a paycheck? The other "dog owners" (young women) wanted to talk with him on the telephone! I think that he probably understood the social message after some had asked him for his "number" but he could come up with none to fix it. I understand his blushing because what could I have brought up about on-campus streaking myself? A friend told me about having spring-break fun streaking in Florida but this was years later, too late to relate as a "decent" answer to the sensuous company.
Regarding the federal deficit issue from 'the coming generation war':
"The experience of Japan suggests that, so long as interest rates remain low enough and the demand for government bonds high enough, difficult fiscal decisions can be postponed for much longer and public debt accumulated to much higher levels than conventional economics led us to expect."
I disagree with the statement above because Japan is a savings-intensive country, directly opposite from the U.S. which is a consumption-intensive country. Japan has its domestic savings to buy up its own government's bonds and it has been in a GDP-depression for decades so keeping interest rates low did not lead to inflation which triggers capital flight. The Japanese Yen was a safe-haven currency for hedge funds during financial turmoils for a long time despite Japan's owing a huge amount of debt to its own citizens who actually could not do much to cause a major financial panic in Japan by liquidating their bond holdings en masse. The Japanese Yen does not have the global reserve currency status that the U.S. dollar has. What will the Japanese do with the Yens they get if they cash in their Japanese government bonds en masse? Invest them overseas and take on the currency exchange rate risk in retirement? Remember that Japan is rapidly aging demographically due to its low birth rate so more and more retirees need Japanese Yens for consumption in Japan. Besides, although the U.S. has very high nominal corporate income tax rates on corporations, the taxes are largely minimizable and evadable by playing an overseas shellgame to give overseas profits their quantum property (when you see them, they squirt elsewhere, not where you have looked.) I doubt very much that Japan has a very wealthy (by and large "the ..... t..sh" who get Lippenbekenntnis don't count except during elections) ruling party in power which creates more tax loopholes (tax expenditures to stimulate the economy, create jobs, spur investments and research, equalize taxing inequities to ease tax burden on the drones so that they can get more access time for fucking with the Queen Bee and donating the fair share via an MBA-magical-and-chivalrous act to the nobly busy and beknighted child worker bees via inflation-indexing adjustment, bail out the "win-win-win" but tax "lose-lose-lose" losers, etc.) and cuts the budget of the tax-collecting government agency to make sure that the fat Cheshire Cat can laugh aloud on the very very tough but holey income tax and/or tariff wall. It seemed to me that unlike the U.S., Japan was fairly aloof from global financial markets' turmoils in how quickly it had responded to global news as the World turned. Japan is "insular," not as global as the U.S.
The U.S. is opposite from Japan. We probably have the wealth in our rich people to buy up most of our government's debt issues, too. However, they are globally financial-literate and have gone around the World before with overseas investments (and to evade taxes by moving capital to offshore tax havens near the U.S. such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, etc.; the former British Empire's colonial possessions, the last one being Hong Kong, are favored due to the shared language of English; of course, their tax laws' leniency on U.S.-based customers matters but their being lax is quite understandable because most goods are often more expensive on an island than on the coastal land of a continent so islands need to offer something special such as tax breaks; however, for the well-to-do and/or the criminals, secrecy and exclusiveness outweigh the cheapness of goods), unlike many of the Japanese. When the U.S. keeps interest rates too low, their flight capital shoots away from the U.S. at nearly the speed of light (figuratively speaking but actually the capital is being accounted for overseas so the capital "flight" is just correlated account-balance adjustments, done in units of the global-reserve currency of the U.S. dollar). It can cause a financial panic. All instabilities, financial or otherwise, begin as opposing forces growing to counter each other and eventually slipping over and past each other. The trick to unwinding growing instabilities is to shore them up for stability via a different means and gently reduce them in magnitude. Once they have achieved small magnitudes, ease away the temporary means.
We cannot count on our rich people's patriotic loyalty to keep their capital in the U.S. In fact, the current trade war with Red China stems precisely from this flightiness of the capital of U.S. corporations and wealthy individuals. They would rather employ cheaper labor overseas to maximize their own profits than to keep their fellow Americans employed. They also keep their accumulated profits overseas rather than paying U.S. taxes to repatriate the profits while hoping for yet another tax cut.
Outwardly, the Chinese and the Japanese look rather alike because other people had mentioned to me the difficulty of telling them apart. However, I could tell them apart from afar when they had come in a group. Chinese tourists were often dispersed but the Japanese ones stayed close together. I believe that it's due to cultural training.
Individually, I can still tell them apart by listening to their speech. The Japanese speak phonemes much faster than the Chinese, probably due to their language Japanese having lower information content per phoneme than that of the Chinese. Do U.S.-Americans behave more like the Chinese or Japanese? I think that we behave more as the Chinese do -- we don't stick together. Akin to the Chinese languages, English has an unusually large vocabulary. Even after my decades of using English, every now and then I still encounter English vocabulary words which I had never encountered before. It seems that English has at least one very specific word for every combination of ideas. Its vocabulary is not particularly mathematically "orthogonal" relative to German's much-compounding-word vocabulary, for example. Maybe it's because English has stitched together the vocabularies of many different languages due to its having many starting fabrics to make a big quilt.
Island nations close to continents tend to have etymologically diverse vocabularies. England has been invaded and invaded others many times.
"The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young — and the consequences could be profound.''
The article above was mainly authored by Niall Ferguson - who is actually a RW reactionary & defender of the Psycho-Crapitalism & Necro-Economics of Neoliberalism ... YET U, have picked a line & an issue in the article in order to blowviate your extensive & reactionary opinions .. based on little else other than generalizations based on your subjective reading of history, propaganda &, what you regard as possible axioms but what I may well regard as B-S! I say ''may'' - because I have not fully read your overly long & digressive reply above. Now don't gripe grapes .. but short and succinct and 'to the point' has real value!
multum in parvo?
All three branches of the U.S. Government are either under the domination of or being incapacitated by the Right (i.e., the Retards.) Most of what you have listed will therefore not happen until 2020 at the earliest if at all. Meanwhile, listen to the countdown to "Daisy" before the election.
The Retards had stymied the U.S. from making national progress on anthropogenic climate change for at least ten years already. We are all strapped down to ride this Hair-Scheisser thing to our children's magic-mushroom-filled future fortified with Strontium 90 and Cesium 137.
The predictions from climate model more than a decade ago included:
More frequent and powerful storms in or near the Gulf of Mexico - check.
Receding shorelines in low-lying coastal areas - check.
Numerous and vastly more widespread wildfires due to droughts in the West and the West Coast - check.
More frequent and intense drenching of the Middle section of the U.S. - check.
Many bad things have already happened but the Retards are still pretending that the happenings were just random events. We hold this truth [a statistical "fact"] to be self-evident: that 90% of our citizens are more intelligent than our average citizen. Our U.S. Government sings "Daisy" to our citizens who had been moving both left and right while being strapped down (Joe Biden started the tradition of stuffing the U.S. Supreme Court with "the Immoral Majority" of "the pubic hair on my Coke" genre.)
We can travel through our time portal to visit Laika, the Soviet Union's heroic space dog.
What does Leon Susskind's Universe being a hologram say about Tankman of Tiananmen Square Massacre? Isn't it unsurprising that YouTube is banned by Red China (to preserve the walls of the funky dark cave for growing Red-Chinese mushrooms for "the beautiful letter" ξ Xi)? Red China protects the world's peoples' freedom from the truths with 歹戏 Dai Xi. Only societies on a higher-level of evolution can tolerate peoples' freedom of expression. Yeah, I am patriotic on this. U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! I back up my First Amendment right to freedom of religion, the press, association, assembly, petition for redress, and free speech with my Second Amendment right to bear arms (it doesn't mean that I oppose arms regulations; we regulate alcohol, cigarettes, automobiles, driving, etc. for our common good so arms are not exempt, either.) Of course, there are also other countries on our level of evolution but happenstance steered me to "I am American," and also by my choice ( I was lured by my Dad's promise of having running hot water in the bathroom, chickens at every meal, a diverse racially tolerant immigrant society {Noticing our German Telefunken wooden-cabinet black-and-white vacuum-tube and cathode-ray-tube television set and Siemens' stainless-steel-drum-and-lock-ring-on-glass-door side-loading clotheswasher, I suggested emigrating to Germany but Dad shot it down with "Germany is not an immigrant country," likely due to the difficulty of gaining legal German residency for our family [Dad had switched his connections to the U.S.A. and the British Empire and our connections with Germany died with Grandpa] and Germany's Nazism before and during WWII which had almost killed him but for an old [graceful] German cultural relic "Vergiss nicht, dass du ein Deutscher bist," and definitely not due to the German people or their craftsman culture with which my Grandpa had previously worked,} and cultural compatibility -- knowing English being the most important for transcending with ease ghetto boundaries on a quilt of U.S. neighborhoods; loving Coca-Cola, orange juice, chewing gums, and ice-creams also helped although they hurt my milk teeth as I had not yet learnt from the discoveries of my hero, Dr. Pasteur of France; although Mom had already given me a toothbrush and an orange-colored plastic Ovaltine cup to brush my teeth with, I had not yet connected the sugary treats and my Big Brother's "license-to-roam" tributes to my toothache. Yeah, know thy toothache's origin and in advance, seek prophylactic measures to take, such as using a blind trust to encapsulate {a concept also central to Christianity for repentance} prior private wealth to prevent a potential contagion/blowback from the new life of public service. Just because something is a very pleasant brotherly ¿bribe? to roam doesn't mean that it won't turn into a pain in the mouth later if one doesn't brush one's teeth clean after eating the sugary treats. Ships also have separate watertight compartments to avoid being sunk in a mishap. Values matter. I learnt from my childhood days encountering the bombs while walking to school the importance of never "kicking a can down the road" despite my childhood hobby of playing football/soccer. 》,,Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute,'' sagen alle faulen Leute.《 As a schoolkid who had figured out what death was by attending an elderly relative's funeral and burial, I decided to become a procrastinator regarding doing my homework because I would get one extra day free from doing homework -- yeah, it was a terrible idea! I've never won that bet. Probability poked unnervingly into my kiddie life. Understanding anthrogenic climate change may elude those people not knowing probabilities but like my kiddie experience about doing homework, curbing the magnitude of the changes must be tackled NOW! For example, buses in a city can run on electricity by being recharged at bus stations when they are waiting to pick up or discharge passengers. Then a well-bus-served city may justify an automobile-free zone at the city center where people can mingle and connect rather than sitting in traffic jams inside of their metal boxes. )
Time is a bivector that can be distorted by a spacetime rotation of the time axis to admix with a spatial direction through a motion of an object or observer in that spatial direction.
Exactly! The Republican Party has been running Austerity Programs and Worse on the General Population for decades!
Then when the Shit Hits The Fan - they Blame it ALL on the Democrats!
& the Democrats are so timid , that they let the Republicans get away with it!
No one looks at actual voting records - nor do they look to see who authored legislation and then pushed it through! So - yeah - a lot of Dummies buy the lies and swear by them! The Dummies!
But AGAIN the Democrats let them get away with this SHIT!
I really have no faith that the Drumpf will be Impeached - because, all the Democrats have on Him, Is The Smoking Gun in His Hand and Lots of Dead bodies with bullets from that smoking gun in them!
They probably will fritter away the opportunity to tear down the Bastard!