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So,reasonjr, do you think violence on violence is the answer?
You got the facts right... The Americans are not important but the foreign oil and control are... We quickly send aids to Japan but we forget about New Orleans... How do you rationalize that?
Quickest way to start helping the Americans again is:
1 - Move the jobs and manufacturing back to US
2 - Elect other parties excluding Rep, Dem and Tea
3 - Stop military spending on foreign countries.
4 - Rise tax on the rich and corps etc etc etc
2950-10K - I agree with you. However you did miss out one of the group - natives... They were left out then and they are still left out now.
Since when did polititians. . . I mean CROOKS, work for us?
Where's it going to end? The day they breathe their last breath and not a second sooner.
Well, I gotta get back to cleaning my guns. Y'all have fun!
HEAVEN
On April 29, 2011 Thom for one of his segments talked basically about life after death. I will share with you some of my ideas and thoughts about life after death. Let me share with you some information on me. I am a sinner and only through the mercy of God will I have any chance to be with God and the communion of saints in heaven. My background is not philosophy (I did have two courses in college), religion, and theology. I have never had an out of body experience. I did have a massive heart attack in 1994. As I was in the emergency room, I did feel the presence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, over my bed to protect me against death and the devil. According to three doctors I beat the odds.
John Paul II, while he was pope, he said that hell is not a physical place. Hell is more like the realization we will never be with God and His communion of saints. I have thought about hell as brimstone and fire, a place of total hatred, and never to see the beatific vision of God for all eternity.
I am going to share with you an experience while my wife and I were visiting Yellowstone National Park. In the park there are two or three small waterfalls near each other. To reach these falls you have to go to a downward path for about one hundred feet. The downward path is not steep. As I reached the end of the path near the falls, I found myself in a totally quiet place, no wind or sound from the leaves. I felt totally at peace. I believe that heaven is a place where a person feels totally at peace; where there is an eternity of love; and where the beatific vision of God is shared with us upon our death. We will also be thankful to God for His mercy.
We will be in heaven in a spirit form. After God comes down for the Last Judgment and the souls are divided between heaven and hell, our bodies will return to you and me for eternity and our final destination. The Son of God will be in heaven with His human body. To be in hell will be like an endless nightmare where hatred never dies.
Thom your right, laws making it ever easier to flood the system with corporate cash both nurture and perpetuate a dysfunctional democracy which expresses the will of only a select group of people. When Cleisthenes first introduced the concept of democracy in 509 BC, democracy meant "PEOPLE POWER" coming from the Greek word demos. Their system was also far from functional. A huge segment of the population not represented were slaves and women.
How is it possible that after 2500+ years we have not progressed beyond ancient civilization when it comes to representative government? Our founders clearly intended "WE THE PEOPLE", much like Cleisthenes intended "PEOPLE POWER". If we are to progress the answer is Democratic Socialism, even if it's a Scandinavian model. It's both a democratic and humanitarian method of rule. The current system of, " those with the gold make the rule" , has proven over and over again to be a miserable republican failure.
Maybe we should change the wording of Democratic Socialism to DEMOCRATIC FUNCTIONALISM, even though I hate being apologetic due to a moronic demonization of the term socialism. Let's hope this pure form of democracy becomes the good place we all end up!
400 Americans Massacred in ONE day from Tornado's. Why the F--k are we spending Billions of dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq to "PROTECT" our homeland, We should be investing those Billions into developing space age state of the art Tornado , Earth quake, Sunami warning systems. OOOhhh it's the terrorist's that are gonna kill us all, how could i forget... sorry my mistake.
So what's with the Massachusetts Democrats voting to get rid of collective bargaining. It just goes to show that just because a politicain runs as a democrat doesn't make them one. We must go beyond titles and check our representatives. Ask them their policies and then demand that they follow through with their promises.
Surplus's cause depressions ? Thats pure Hogwash Every time we run up huge debt- give massive tax cuts to top- pay for nothing - wage long wars we get into big trouble. Reaganomics - Bush - Goldman FED boys made it far worse by givng huge cuts to CO that sent good jobs overseas.& pushing Free not fair markets & Trade . This led to a giant bubble that exploded ..leading to a recession- depression - Bush Paulson global crash TARP Clinton left a surplus-balanced budget -created millions of new jobs ...simply by some careful cutting & raising top tax rate a bit. Thats what we need now NOT more corp / billionaire cuts- loopholes & oil, gas subsides. Bush 's tax cuts did nothing for jobs, wages or our standard of living .
@Michael812
Thank you for making yourself, and your web site, known here. I stopped staying up till the wee hours of the night listening to Art Bell many years ago and have lost out on a lot of stuff. I still think about the distraught caller warning people of imminent danger to major US cities promulgated by our own government and then the satellite feed went dead for about 20 minutes. Scary! And I don't catch every Thom Hartmann show so I missed you when you appeared. I have also stopped going to the UFO conventions many years ago because they just cost too much. Anyway, thanks for posting here and I will now set out to read more of your articles.
We are unwilling surfers on a tidal wave of legalizing corporate crime, and yes buying elections is still a crime. The leaders of mega-corporations steal our resources, energy, homes, savings, elections, schools, churches and common institutions, slumify our infrastructure, deny us "workers" healthcare and living wages, systematically make us doubt ourselves, move us repeatedly all over the country and world splitting us from our families and friends, cause deliberate trauma, poisoning and suffering. These are effective mechanisms of keeping people weak, tired and stressed so they do not revolt against the tyrants of slavery and abuse. We must scrape ourselves up off the road and revolt with every speck of energy we can access from the universe.
Overpopulation is indeed at the core of our problems. And while I'm glad to see that there is information here about the extremes in the weather that we are just BEGINNING to see, I ask that you please read this information:
http://theyflyblog.com/ufos-extraterrestrials-and-the-weather/12/22/2010
We have had - since 1951 - an abundance of specific, scientific, impeccably accurate information provided by one man in Switzerland - who most of you have never heard of thanks to the successful job of suppression by military intelligence, the corporate media, religions, etc.
What we are going to face environmentally from here on is referred to as "apocalyptic" in this information. This transcends ALL of the political considerations, pros and cons, and other chase-your-tail aspects of the dead-end political game.
I was a guest on Thom's show a couple of years ago and I'd obviously welcome the opportunity to update him and his audience.
Please also see:
http://theyfly.com/WILL_HUMANITY_WAKE_UP.html
OFF topic I know, but republican politicians should be charged with crimes against humanity and genocide! THEY do not want the middle and lower classes to receive a living wage or decent health care both of which result in a slow death from exhaustion due to hard work and death from lack of good health care.
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
THEY are social darwinists who believe the government should help the rich live long and prosper. THE government should let the rich exploit the working class until they die from hard work and exhaustion. AND the government should just let the poor die off from starvation and disease because they never will amount to anything anyway and are a drain on the rich.
Just following up on my previous comment above. I just heard you announce that James Galbraith is on your TV show tonight. What a great guest to have on. Prof. Galbraith is very familiar with MMT (Modern Monetary Theory), which I referenced above. I hope that, in your discussion with him, you get into his view of the government deficit and why it is not a problem and why budget cuts and austerity measures at this time will be disastrous for the economy. In short, Prof. Galbraith can explain that, since we went off the gold standard in 1971, there is really no difference anymore between the government printing bonds or the government "printing money" -- both are just liabilities (IOUs) of the US government, one bears interest and the other doesn't. As a result, there is no solvency issue or bankruptcy risk for the US government as it cannot run out of US dollars that it alone creates. The only constraint with respect to deficit spending is inflation and right now, with unemployment and underemployment very high and lots of excess capacity in the economy, inflation does not pose any risk.
Are Satan’s disciples guilty of hate crimes? I believe definitely these devils are guilty of hate crimes.
A university town in Alabama is devastated by a tornado. This red state wants the federal government to help rebuild the town with taxpayers’ money. This same red state refuses to increase taxes on the rich and on corporations and now they want tax money for help. Why should Alabama receive any taxpayer money? These acts of nature will continue and more and more money will be needed and so tax increases for the rich and for corporations are needed and required.
Jeb Bush will be the great white hope riding into the ring with his white horse as the Anti-Christ Party’s great white hope. Jeb will be elected the next president. You can bank on my prediction. Why do you believe that Satan’s disciples are flooding Latino talk shows? Jeb’s wife is a Latino!
I am not happy that I have to shock Thom’s posters with words like Anti-Christ, Satan’s disciples, and devils. If you can offer me different names, please let me know. Thank you for any help in this matter!!!
Progressives are grasping to be excited at anything. Here is an example. The polls reveal that Nazi governors’ numbers are low in the polls. Polls do not excite me because the Nazis will always remain in the majority. Here are my reasons. Our electronic voting machines are rigged. Factual! The Nazis will eliminate from voting – low income people, students, and racial minorities. Factual! In heavy Democratic districts voting booths will be scarce so that the voting lines are long. Factual! The lobbyist party with the money will pay off politicians to vote a certain way. Factual!
The poem below by Langston Hughes reveals his feelings and thoughts and his feelings and thoughts are similar to my personal feelings and thoughts.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609
What Dr. Batra pointed out regarding the relationship between deficit reduction and economic crashes has been pointed out by economist Randy Wray and other MMT economists: Per Dr. Wray:
"With one brief exception, the federal government has been in debt every year since 1776. In January 1835, for the first and only time in U.S. history, the public debt was retired, and a budget surplus was maintained for the next two years in order to accumulate what Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury called “a fund to meet future deficits.” In 1837 the economy collapsed into a deep depression that drove the budget into deficit, and the federal government has been in debt ever since. Since 1776 there have been exactly seven periods of substantial budget surpluses and significant reduction of the debt. From 1817 to 1821 the national debt fell by 29 percent; from 1823 to 1836 it was eliminated (Jackson’s efforts); from 1852 to 1857 it fell by 59 percent, from 1867 to 1873 by 27 percent, from 1880 to 1893 by more than 50 percent, and from 1920 to 1930 by about a third. Of course, the last time we ran a budget surplus was during the Clinton years. I do not know any household that has been able to run budget deficits for approximately 190 out of the past 230-odd years, and to accumulate debt virtually nonstop since 1837.
"The United States has also experienced six periods of depression. The depressions began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1929. (Do you see any pattern? Take a look at the dates listed above.) With the exception of the Clinton surpluses, every significant reduction of the outstanding debt has been followed by a depression, and every depression has been preceded by significant debt reduction. The Clinton surplus was followed by the Bush recession, a speculative euphoria, and then the collapse in which we now find ourselves."
The reason is that running surpluses takes money out of the private economy (the nongovernment sector) because the government takes more money out of the economy through taxation than it adds to the economy through government spending.
With all the discussions about Moral Hazards, the great Moral Hazard of our time is that Corruption has become self funding and only a very active set of laws and government oversight (that itself needs careful oversight) can avoid that being the case. If that fails then personal benefit by the destruction of others becomes an ever more profitable enterprise, easily out competing any attempt at honest business, even in the competition for investment monies. By contrast the prevention of such distruction becomes ever more expensive, in monies and lives, with no personal benefit to those who pay such a price. That there are humans with a concience, who seek moral sanity is all the force that drives it, but since it is the opposite of self funded, the ability to pay the price is not unlimited, and there is a tipping point, where even the attempt to return sanity is of itself a disaster of civil war or worse.
And the really tough moral issue of dramatic human population increase can be responded-to by dramatically increasing access to effective birth control measures in the entire world - industrialized as well as developing countries. Sadly, there are entrenched religious and cultural forces that blindly push for all women to bear as many children as they can before they die. Also not peculiar to developing countries.
The scandal is the number of members of our own U.S. Congress who blandly choose to, "not rock the boat" and bow to the extreme anti-women forces that equate contraception with abortion of a viable fetus. We urgently need respected public figures to publicly promote smaller families and unfettered access to contraception and sterilization as a positive public benefit.
China may be having social difficulty with the dramatic drop in the number of marriageable women as one result of the, "one child" policy - but the next generation may see the economic benefit to their entire population of a slow decrease in Chinese population. For generations, China's people suffered the tragedy of tens of thousands of deaths from famine - being unable to provide enough food for the growing numbers.
The Ayn Rand adherents generally believe that there is no public responsibility, for example to make a compassionate effort to help limit population growth. In unguarded moments we're likely to hear them say, "let 'em die!" And their journalists are the cynics who cite Nazi eugenics policy as the equivalent of responsible family planning. And they have no shame.
Yes, of course. Those of us who don't find science a matter of faith, but faith in a process of inquiry fear that Al Gore, and his heroic efforts, are sadly correct.
Thanks, yankeerebel64, for saying it another way! And one that, also, is true. The wolves that the lunatic fringe in Idaho and Montana want so badly to kill know instinctively not to soil their territory.
But, when they come to positions of power, the right wing banksters really don't believe in anything but their own sacred right - demonstrated by their wealth - to do what they want to do.
Tom Friedman gets credit for one idea, in my book: being, "as dumb as we want to be," is destructive of the welfare of the planet and of the people whose impact is go great. Somebody needs to make a new bumper sticker,"you're so rich: why aren't you smart?"
God revenge, LOL.. I recognise the only reason we would use this wording is because the conservatives like to claim god as their own..
Revenge for taxing the rich; I realized todays conservatives that vote against their best interests (taxing the super wealthy), reminds me of how people worshiped the pharaoh's.. I believe, it was believed that the pharaoh's lived after death, but the average person did not.. I wonder how they controlled the masses in this case? Probably no wonder the new religuion (christianity) took over because the promises were targeted at the average person..
Hear the Warning The End is Begining
When you Break The Circle you Have no right to Live
When you Kill The Mother There is no Other
Global Warming! What about Moral Turpitude? Nature triumphs over Nature.
XXXXX
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~ Plato.
Ron - maybe in our discourse we should slack off on the words such as “Ignorant" and "Stupid". I know I am guilty of the same thing when I get exasperated and frustrated.
Lots of times this is nothing but 'Lack of Knowledge'. Many smart people are not always knowledgeable in other areas of expertise then their own. They may have graduated only from High School, if at all, but are very smart none the less. It's the knowledge they lack, not the intelligence. It is very difficult for someone who did not have the luxury of acquiring the knowledge like you, I and Thom may have, but that does mean that they are ignorant or stupid.
There was a time when even I, as a college graduate, even with all the knowledge I had, got caught up in this 'Water Bottle" thing where you if you fed a mist of H2O into a carburetor, you got better mileage! I fell for this! But not for long as I quickly realized through more reading that this was a pretty “stupid” thing to do! So I can see where those who have way less accumulated knowledge can sometimes think very illogically. Even today I still catch myself in logical inconsistencies! Besides, we only alienate them and then even if we try to impart the correct knowledge, they decline to listen, as they now label us as condescending and patronizing.
So we should try to stop calling others as stupid and ignorant, when in fact all they lack is knowledge and critical thinking abilities. The dangerous ones are those who do have the knowledge, know what they are doing, and make decisions based only on self-interest and greed. For these types there is no excuse. The Koch brothers are a prime example of this type.
Hi Thom,
Today, you had a caller that made references to a "brown dwarf" in our solar system. Poor chap. There were so many problems with his statement, I woudn't have known where to start. Here is a link to the current state of nearbye brown dwarfs: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cool-brown-dwarf-may-be-a-newfound-2010-04-09.
It is so hard to have intelligent discussions with ignorant people. Exactly what the Republicans want!
You are terrific!
-Ron