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Ou812: I'm writing a book entitled The Conservative Playbook. Turns out it's going to be a short one because you all seem to stick together and spout the same schoolyard bully crap, offer platitudes without proof, say "not true" when faced with facts or research. I'll add you in with the rest of the tired and worn, know-it-all conservative phrases--you'll be just a number among the others, because it's been said millions of times before. Yawn!
DAnneMarc,
I could give you examples of kids who just graduated from high school this year who have started a business, or working there way through university, or started an apprenticeship. They are refusing to be victims. But you wouldn't believe that either. You victims tend to stick together.
Did anyone get a load of the BS peddler/oxymoron, "compassionate conservative," Arthur C. Brooks on Bill Moyers this week? I couldn't stand to watch more than 10 minutes--from the comments, the protect the wealthy, don't be jealous of the wealthy, minimum wage hikes will cost jobs, the free market should decide, let's help only the truly poor,...crap pile only got deeper.
Haven't we all heard that before? Isn't that why we are currently in the mess we are in?
Wherever the "Fed" is when we need them, they're not here to serve us. Not anymore.
bobcox ~ Yet again, my hat is off to you. Your understanding of international industrial arts is second to none. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. It has, indeed, shed light on many modern day marketplace mysteries! Thank you!
Greenthumb, Palindromedary and Aliceinwonderland ~ That is one disturbing documentary. This is so eerily reminiscent of the Hitler youth movement in Nazi Germany. Even Jim Jones and David Koresh didn't have the nerve to come out and announce that they wanted to create an army of suicide bombers and intended to brainwash children to do it. How is it possible that these people aren't in jail? That is perhaps the biggest question of all. This is no religion. This is a dangerous cult of child abusers that pose a serious threat to the public. Where is the Fed that raided Wacko when you need them?
Ou812 ~ O u sure do talk the big talk. However, I'd just love to see you repeat that little trick in today's world. If you did, I'm certain that you would be eating your own words--something that probably wouldn't be to hard for someone like YOU.
Yes maam.
Awww dang it. I hit the smiley face and got nothin'.
Greenthumb, that seems likely enough to give me the willies.
Gettin' ugly out there. Beam me up... before "out there" gets closer to home!
Don't reckon I see an end to this anytime soon. Fasten your seat belts! And pray. - AIW
Rich, in my career, which started in 1957 at age twelve selling vegetables door to door, I've been fired twice, and quit after a demotion. In every case, I rebounded with a better job. Along the way, I put myself through college. I have a BS and a MA from the University of Maryland. I paid the bill, no free ride, no student loans. I refuse to be a victim. You can go through life cursing everyone or you can choose to do something about It.
Greenthumb: Yeah, like who would Jesus kill? Shocking! And yet, I'd bet they are all for preventing a woman's right to choose birth control. I saw part of a show on TV the other night called "Red State"... with John Goodman. Recommended.
Palindromedary: thanks for the links. I don't watch TV, so this summer was the first time I heard about it. We got a flyer in the mail advertising a "christian" summer camp called God's Army and did some research and were SHOCKED!!! (I think Jesus would be shocked too).
I thought we weren't allowed to have terrorist training camps in the US. But these programs are clear that they want to inculcate children to be trained to die, like Taliban or ISIS suicide killers, FOR JESUS!!!!! They are training bigotry and hatred in little children, keeping them isolated from the rest of society throughout their college years (in christian fundamentalist colleges) and then encouraging them to infiltrate military or political positions. This is insane and all under the guise of "religious freedom." Freedom my eye! These children are being psychologically (and perhaps physically, since they promote punishment and spanking) abused in the most horrible and dangerous way.
Interest charged by banks is made up of at least three factors, the sum of which is that seen by the borrower. The three factors, and there may be more, are risk, profit and administrative costs. The risk for student loans is nil as the government guarantees the loans made by students on the basis that education is a investment in people and that is one of the objectives of good government.
Similarly, production is also made up of several factors. Increased productivity cause by better equipment requires different managerial and professional and labor-wise help. Some pieces of equipment merely replace low-cost manual labor and require a semi-proficient worker to operate several pieces of robotic equipment simultaneously. This happened when weaving looms became powered by water, stem, or electrical pour sources. One operator could handle several looms. Previously, with foot power, each loom had an operator. Skills of the operator was replaced by the punched boards determining the type of weave cause the "sabots" to be thrown into the looms by displaced workers in France. In the late 1700's factories in the colonies sprang up at the “water fall" sources on the rivers in New England. Alexander Hamilton was one of the developers of this industry. Young girls wee hired to work in the factories for very small wages. But Hamilton became wealthy.
Specialty equipment requires much more specialized training to operate. The simple sheet metal bending machines used in the first steam powered mine pumps were so uneven that leather gaskets were used to seal the cylinder from the piston. Cheap but effective. Where higher pressures required different sealing techniques, higher precision milling of the cylinders was required. The development of numerical controlled five and seven axis milling machines made precision engineering of propeller blades, turbine blades and intricate parts with very high precision and specification in the millionths of an inch tolerances. Some of these machines required very highly trained technicians to maintain and operate. Costs of operation on these machines can be much higher than more simple machines. During WW2 it was found that air conditioning of the factories to enable control of thermal expansion of both cutting tools and work pieces made precisions much higher and worker training much more beneficial.
Because we bombed Germany and Japan production facilities so well, after the war the bombed out factories were replaced with more modern tools and equipment. Bother Germany and Japan and China (Formosa) took advantage of this whereas American industry thought because our production was so high we didn't have to improve industry any. Only in research universities in the U.S. was advanced engineering production procedure developed. American management was 30 or 40 years behind Germany and Japan. Therefore Japanese and German automobiles lasted longer, were better, could be developed less expensively than the Americans cold and until both Japanese and German vehicles began to be sold more that American made vehicles did the American management begin to take notice. An article in the IEE Spectrum several years ago analyzed the differences between American management practice and European and Japanese manufacturing practices in the automobile industry. They reported that the practice in Japan was that when a young engineer was found to be particularly good and potentially able to be developed further, they would send the young engineer to the U. for advanced engineering training. When he returned to Japan, his first assignment was to teach the Japanese engineers the newest techniques in automatic tools and managerial practices. In the U.S, management was 30 or 40 years behind. A young engineer would have to work for 10 or 20 years before he would rise to a position of management where he could put into practice the technicians he had learned many years before.
Production is made up of highly trained operators and engineers. Both of these are expensive. Because these tools are expensive, often bought with loans from bank, production became finance dependent.
In tersest on production tool financing by banks are counter productive. they are necessary but if the banks are too interested in increasing their profits, they negotiate a higher interest rate to maximize that profit component with reduces industrial productivity. Government taxes, when not used for necessary investments in people, education, infrastructures, etc, are negative on productivity. Military expenditures beyond the absolutely necessary defense requirement are also a negative influence on productivity. A bomb, once exploded has lost its investment. A rifle bullet, one fired, has lost its investment. A winded soldier or sailor is highly costly and the training of said individual is lost, perhaps forever. These costs must be weighed against the necessity for "necessary" defense.
catman306: Only an inch...not seemingly enough to matter one would think. There would be a redistribution of heat (or absence of heat..which is what "cold" is) when those melted arctic and antarctic ices get combined with the ocean's waters. But I guess we won't know till it happens..
A couple of years ago, we had a massive sun's corona mass ejection (CME)... a sun flare that would have fried all of Earth's communication and power infrastructure that would have taken years to recover from. We were lucky that the flare went off to a different direction just missing the earth. Electro Motive Pulse (EMP) from a nuclear detonation in the air can also cause a disruption in communications and the electrical grid. If the US and Russia keep going at it over Ukraine....
Greenthumb: I think that 60 minutes did a show on that once. Very scarey! I also had read about that as well.
It's also very scarey when these "Christians" go into West Point and the Air Force Academy and proselytize their cadets with Christianity (with threats and coercion in some cases) . Mikey Weinstein, a US Air Force Academy graduate and was legal council under Reagan, whose son and son-in-law both also graduates of the Air Force Academy, had written a lot about this practice. Although he is a Republican, he has been against forced proselytization in the military and has written several books:
"With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” in October 2006.
and:
“No Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, its Battle to Defend the Constitution, and One Family’s Courageous War Against Religious Extremism in High Places" in Jan. 2012
AIW: :-)
Palindromedary,
It's been over a week since we talked about the melting methane hydrates in the Arctic. The question was how much sea level rise will result when it is all released as methane and later decomposed to carbon dioxide and water. This was an interesting question that I had never seen explained. The best answers i can find at Real Climate and Climate Central is that about an inch of sea level rise could be attributed to the release of all of the frozen methane on the planet. Not enough to matter when the average air temperature of the planet would go up more than 10 degrees from the additional greenhouse gases, wreaking havoc on the entire biosphere and melting all of the land ice and perhaps raising sea level more than 100 feet.
Thom, I think many of our progressive ideas that involve big business spending (for the betterment of the economy), raising the minimum wage, the opening of the banking floodgates enabling easy credit, and more equitable taxation will be explored by the GOPPs if they win the presidential in 2016. They will gloat and say that they are responsible for turning our economy around, raising the GNP, when it was their ideologies and obstructionism that made us wait 8 years. Meanwhile they will continue to fund the DOJ's and NSA's war on working Americans and minorities just in case not everyone is happy with their sliver of the economic pie.
The corporation aren't spending money because they want Obama and the democrats to fail.
What's even more disturbing is that these right wing "christians" have created a program called God's Army" to brainwash and indoctrinate their children to act like terrorists. Check out the documentary "Jesus Camp." http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/jesus-camp/. Yes we are training terrorists in the USA! Is this legal. Tom, perhaps you should do a segment on this. These unfortunate children do not have a chance. They are brainwashed from birth through homeschoolong and not allowed to associate with the rest of society. This is happening in America and apparently no one is doing anything about it.
Mr. Ford, you’re spot-on about mixing religion and politics. I couldn’t agree more, far as that goes. But I think the situation with Israel is a tad more complicated than what you’ve characterized it as. Being Jewish is about way more than religion; it’s about one’s ethnicity. For example, Hebrew law identifies anyone with a Jewish lineage passed down through the maternal side of one’s family as Jewish, regardless of that person’s religious persuasion. This is the means by which I came by that heritage myself. I am as secular as anyone you’ll ever meet, yet I am Jewish because my mother’s mother’s mother (my great grandmother) was Jewish. I wasn’t raised Jewish, yet I was born Jewish anyway.
Less than thirty years prior to Israel becoming a Jewish state, Hitler systematically rounded up and murdered six million Jews. He had every intention of wiping us off the face of the earth. Had the Nazis won that war, I believe there would not be a Jewish person alive, anywhere on this planet, who could have felt safe ever again.
I am not condoning Israel’s illegal settlements on the West Bank, nor would I attempt to justify the horrible abuse (and genocide!) Palistinians have suffered, and continue suffering to this day. It brings me great sorrow to have to acknowledge that Israeli leaders, and the Israeli military, are no better than the Nazis were, in their treatment of the Palestinians. I would have loved to embrace Israel as my “home away from home”. However under the circumstances, and the way things have unfolded over the past forty-plus years, that has turned out to be nothing more than a pipe dream. I hate Israel’s current prime minister so much, I have a pet name for him: Mister Yahoo. He’s like a Jewish Dick Cheney. My one comfort is in knowing there is a peace movement in Israel, that not all Israeli citizens approve of their country’s hideous behavior. Aside from the human suffering it has caused, what grieves me most about Israeli’s politics is the ammunition it gives anti-semitic racists who would love to see us all wiped out as Hitler intended.
My husband and I have been in the habit of watching Democracy Now over dinner. But these days, with all their coverage of Israeli's murderous rampage in Gaza, it's enough to spoil my appetite. - Aliceinwonderland
Wow Rich. A chilling tale indeed. Reading something like this, I feel a noose tightening around my neck, along with everyone else's. "How far must we fall" is a question I've asked many times, and heard others ask too. That boiling-frog parable comes to mind. - AIW
For the past twenty years - at least for me when on December 14, 1994 my upward career as a claims manager at an insurance company, a small brand, one of a hundred corporations owned by a billionaire family in Cincinnati, terminated my middle income, middle management position, and like millions of Americans, began a steady, downward direction since then.
All the managers were fired in the name of restructuring. There were likely a few CEO bonuses afterwards
The buyouts and restructuring of other jobs in the insurance industry have consolidate into six or seven super giant corporations. I was working at another insurance company when they sold out to one the giants further institutionalizing serfdom and taking away competition. They too lied to the consumer, selling their insurance service under a brand but owned by the good hands people. My current self employed income - taking into account not having company sponsored health, dental, vacation, and sick time, limited short term disability coverage - is about 50% less than 20 years ago. I look around my neighborhood and see the consequence of the loss of union jobs when they closed Ralph's - now a dollar store staffed by people who earn $70 per day - before taxes, no healthcare. How far must we fall before we take to the streets or will it by then be too late to save the Constitution?
Palin, you don't know what you've been missin'!