This of course presumes that those carbon-centric banks yield their Cypt-Keeper claws from the tillers of economy and state. In fact, they have worked steadfastly to keep the world in a fossil fuel state of existence, and renewable sources have been resisted, avoided and limited at great cost to the people's of the world. The technology exists and the need has never been greater. It is now time to begin migrating to more sustainable energy sources.
Au contraire! We had a budding solar industry in the 70s, but Ronald Reagan made a point of killing that entire industry (at the behest of fossil fuel producers.) Even now fossil fuel producers are fighting solar energy tooth and nail. Both organic and thin film silicon have made huge advances and we have cells today that break the $1 per watt barrier (making them financially feasible in the face of fossil fuels), and $0.50 per watt panels are less than a year away.
Investing in the growth of an American solar industry is critical for the 21st century and will be one of the critical profit engines for are least the 50 years (depending on the advent of fusion.) China is defending its lock down on the solar market, using predatory practices. To that end we need to let them know that we will not simply put up with an attack on our current and future economy.
As for competing with China from an economic standpoint, Our economies will reach parity by 2015, and our average adjusted per capita income sometime in the mid to late 2020s (of course the wealth disparities in China will be as great or even greater than our own.) A number of businesses are just now beginning to look at coming back home to the U.S. That trend is certain explode in the next decade. This is particularly true as China finds itself facing greater and greater environmental crisis (there is solid evidence that the 3 Gorged damn may have been seminal in precipitating the horrific earthquake in Sichuan, killing 70,000 and making millions homeless.) China is facing terrible environmental and social stresses in its attempt to become the world's economic leader.
Its actually worse... because homo-erectii like this don't stop at having idiot opinions... they like to act them out. So if you don't happen to fit in his herd, he feels perfectly justified in bombing you out of existence (if you're a little brown person), or just crushing your skull with a shovel (if you're a transperson) walking down the street.
There's this thing called a hate crime. We want society to grow up. We want people to stop judging and assaulting one another because of their differences, because there are now 7,000,000,000 of us, and if we can't get along things are going to get really ugly soon. So stop making it alright to kill the pink ape (if you don't know the reference, look it up), the time for the worst of lower primate behavior among human beings has come and now should go. Please don't make an arguement for bigotry, hatred or phobic behavior and for the love of Jebus, don't blame the victims of hate for not being able to take a joke, because having a crowd of idiots chasing you down the street then beating you half to death just isn't as funny from the perspective of the poundee.
Friend, you should stop talking for God... I hear he doesn't like that. I know transpeople who are ordained ministers and lead lives of devout spiritual devotion. I know several transpeople who are lawyers and spend most of their time fighting for people's rights, protecting those that have no power and little say. I know transpeople (soldiers, fire fighters and police) whose heroism on and off the battlefield would shock you to within an inch of your life and shame you for your prejudice.
There is solid evidence that transgendered people are the result of a complex developmental anomaly resulting in a form of intersexing (we know the brain actually get's wired male during a fairly short period with the presence of testosterone.) If the process is disturbed, or happens at the wrong time, brain sex remains female (we all start out female and it take a series of events to make an embryo male.) This is further supported by the high frequency of other physical intersexing that transpeople frequently experience.
So tell me why, a process that occurs in the womb, and produces a human being with attributes of both sexes, and a highly feminized brain (and that has been demonstrated in research using MRI brain scans), would be a problem with the almighty seeing as since it happens in the womb, would arguably be the work of the almighty? It is only in our highly sexualized and fetishistic society that transpeople are tuned into wierd sex objects. In other societies and cultures, transpeople have been consistently respected and are mostly held as shamans, healers, clerics, and people of great intellect and spirituality. In my personal experience, gay men are typical a standard deviation more intelligent than the standard population and transpeople tend to be about 2 standard deviations more intelligent. A large percentage of transpeople are engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, professors, doctors, lawyers and scientists from many fields of study (please believe me when I say I've met more than a few of these folks.) Sadly, a large number of transpeople either come from poverty or are marginalized by a society filled with prejudice, and find themselves as sex workers or homeless and unemployed. Tell me that our society doesn't make entire classes of human beings disposable. Do you even think about such things?
This is an expensive and profoundly painful process. A person doesn't do this on a whim. Its like cutting off your hand. If you saw the movies 127 hours, you understand a person only takes that kind of action when they experience their life being threatened. By the way, suicide levels among transpeople are off the chart, as are murders and violence perpetrated on them be people of prejudice. A transperson is hundreds of time more likely to be assaulted or murdered. So before you go around judging people (another one of those things I hear God doesn't like), bother to find out about who you are judging. A where the real sins rest.
Oh and just in case you're wondering, some of us have close family members who are trans. Some of us are very proud of the human beings they've become.
You don't know what you're talking about. There are only two issues for transpeople. Age and body type (ecto vs. endomorphic.) You begin hormone therapy early in puberty and you can't tell the person is trans... period. You catch a person in their 20s and they are reasonably endomorphic and they pass well after hormone therapy. In fact there are a number of professional models, a few actresses, and competitive beauty contestants in other countries who are transgendered. The key is bone structure and in some cases intersexing (the mixing of sexual expression from birth.) The reason you say transpeople don't pass is because all you've ever seen were the one's who didn't. The rest have simply melted into society and you'll never know who they are, because they lead quiet normal lives in their gender of choice.
Solar just passed the $1 per watt milestone so in fact it is now cost competitive with oil which is fully subsidized. And since the new cells can be deposited on a flexible plastic substrate, we can now cover all kinds of artifacts and structures with these new inexpensive solar cells. We live in a fantasy. The presumptions upon which our economy functions include infinite natural resources, infinite capacity to recover from prolific environmental abuse, and infinite capacity for the middle class to take the brunt of the fiscal misconduct of the wealthy and powerful.
There is a human tendency when raiding the cookie jar to just keep taking until nothing is left. This week the Cal State University Regents this week voted themselves a 10% increase in pay. This in a time where Universities across the state are being crushed by lack of state funding, teachers are being let go, classes eliminated from the curriculum and students everywhere are crumpling under draconian increases of tuition. Some of the top state CSU executives received raises as large as 22%. They had to close down several campuses for fear of violent protest. This is just one example of people who should be leading by example, instead using their position to take advantage of the public. These people all have salaries in excess of $250,000. You can't tell me that they were so underpaid that they couldn't keep a roof over their heads. I don't have a problem with people getting fair remuneration. Just not on the backs of the rest of society, and please stop at a fair share. Leave a couple cookies for the rest of us.
Excuse me, gas isn't toxic? Benzene is a serious carcinogen in fact the entire group of BTEX chemicals are known carcinogens and have known health impacts. Add to that the impact of MTBE (one of the most serious contaminants in ground water today), and gasoline leaks are a serious problem. By the way, though there is some metabolism of gasoline byproduct by some bacteria, it appears that fungus' do the heavy lifting when it comes to soil recovering from petrochemical spills.
I saw an old interview of George Carlin, and he said America today pretends to give its citizens choice. In fact we have no choice in the important issues and we perpetuate the illusion of choice with countless meaningless choices to keep the common man busy. Paper or Plastic? Smoking or non? Do you want fries with that? This is not free choice and it hasn't been for quite a while.
This is the very thing that's most important. We need to address our complacency, our resignation, despair and apathy. It is the internal dialogue that "I make no difference" and "I don't want to pay the price of being responsible for the future" that greases the road to a dark destinations. That yields the civilizing intent of men with vision and compassion to self obsessed despots who can only succeed when the many abdicate their say in the future.
Why would you volunteer to be a bleating herd animal waiting first to be sheered then rendered down to mutton? No matter how comfortable you are currently, dark orifices are a lousy place to plant your head. Perhaps its time to take inventory of your ethical stock?
You gotta stop watching programs owned by Rupert Murdoch for your opinions... besides being misinformed, you clearly don't understand either what's at stake or the fiscal realities we're facing.
The Republican predecessor to Obama, gave away the house, and for every penny of tax relief you saw, the wealthy saw ten thousand dollars. To do that he borrowed us into the poor house and stop maintaining any of the vital infrastructure in the country. He let cities flood, and he let the corporations write the laws to regulate themselves, which for all intents and purposes meant they have run roughshod over the entire nation for longer than the last 10 years. He let Dick Cheney and Karl Rove (a.k.a. TurdBlossom), get us into needless wars with people who were no threat.
This not to say that I'm happy with Obama. He promised change, and so far, the only thing that seriously different is the melanin level in the Oval Office. Don't get me wrong, though he's not the champion I was hoping for, I just don't see him skulking around desperately trying to tax everything is sight. That's simplistic, inaccurate, and clearly uninformed. In fact Obama seems to be answering to precisely the same kind of corporate masters that the last few Presidents have been owned by (media industry for Dems and Fossil Fuel for the Reps.) That said, I wouldn't mind paying higher taxes if it meant the roads would be maintained and schools actually taught kids, all I ever asked for was transparency and accountability. if you want services, you have to pay taxes. That's simple math. Sadly simple math is beyond most Americans these days, so maybe PBS should begin producing a Sesame Street for the uneducated over 20? At $25 million each, how many Jr. Colleges could you fund with this stealth bomber? Can you say 120! How many hands of 5 fingers is that? 24! Very nice... have a Coookie!
YOU ARE SLEEP WALKING and call it a life. You don't have to be a statistician to see the middle class is evaporating like a fragile mist on a summer morning... Those jobless hippies, used to be happily employed and have homes just like you. Then they sent their jobs to the third world. Destroyed their life savings by crashing the stock market. Gutted their retirement by turn entire states into economic wastelands call rust belts. Millions of people who did absolutely everything right, People who planned and saved and scrimped for their futures. Held diverse portfolios, and had property owned and paid for... got squashed like bugs. By the millions. You better believe they're pissed and ready to protest. Because they now live in vans and tent cities popping up outside of every major city in the country.
Your hubris would offend me, if it weren't so clear that you're simply ignorant. Sadly, you're ignorant by choice, and what you don't know my friend, really can kill you.
Clearly history is not your forte'. People have uttered your very words since the Babylonians, only acting when it was finally their necks on the chopping block, and by then far too late to save themselves. Read about wealthy Jews in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. They stayed because they were so certain it would never get them, they were happy, well to do, connected. Their bodies looked just like everyone else's stacked like cord-wood behind concentration camps.
You risk what have and what your children will have, by your inaction. You say your future is bright. So how will you handle economic or environmental collapse? This isn't to say that said collapse is inevitable or even imminent. But it is perfectly predictable, and without substantial intervention, the bright future you speak of is a pipe dream. You want to get grounded in reality and really begin getting interested in what is in your best interest now, and the future.
Being a bit older than you (I'm presuming by how you describe yourself), I've lived through a lot of the trends and choices that got us here. I've seen the big mistakes. Witnessed the stupid stuff at work, and made and lost fortunes in growing economic turmoil. Whatever it is that you think you're clinging to, its an illusion. The time to wake up is well past. Addressing reality with all due haste would behoove us all.
Actually I don't have a problem with psycho-Mom. The world is rife with people whose pants/panties are on WAY TO FRIGGIN TIGHT. You nod your head up and down, shake it occasionally when they break into tears, pat them on the back, and call their doctors to find out if their prescription needs adjustment.
I'm angry and more than a little upset with the School Administration. One of their most important jobs is to protect teachers from Idiot Parents. I mean if the teacher was reading to first graders, just let her know that the reading is being wasted on kids who won't be able to get the finer points of the story for at least 5 more years and that perhaps she should be reading selections from Harry Potter. Of course I'm clear that in this school reading from Harry Potter will probably get you lynched because of lack of a good solid Christian story line, but it would be more age appropriate.
If in fact her students were in middle school (the best time to read this story), then they should have read it themselves and reported on it, of course this a school in South Carolina (ranks at 42nd of 50, in a country that is ranked below Latvia in reading skill.) Perhaps the young teens couldn't read it for themselves. In any case, sexualizing a clearly non-sexual piece of literature and punishing people for reading it to children is demonstration of minds so small and closed as to be proper demonstration grounds for Van der valls forces. When faith destroys reason, then you end up with neither.
The cost of EVERY single stealth bomber (plane and supporting program) comes in around 3 billion dollars. So considering this is about creating a virtually endless supply of energy capable of sustaining us for thousands of years, Why is this even a consideration. Move $100 billion from defense (I would argue this is the most important defense spending in our history) and get'er done, once and for all.
Then we paid for it through our taxes. There is no sane argument to make citizens pay for it again. If the government contracted out the regulation to a private body, then the government should have paid for it and made it free to access for its citizens. If a private body offered to do it for free so that it could influence the nature of that body or regulations, then you best believe that they have already paid themselves and there is no sane grounds for them to avoid making those regulation available for the public at no cost. You can't charge people twice for the same thing (though I know that every corporation in the country is desperately looking at ways to do precisely that.)
That was Congressman; William Clay, Sr. and he also said; "I have no intention of representing those powerful interests who walk over powerless people." He had some interesting events (read controversies) in his career, but overall, was a strong champion for the environment, civil rights, and the advancement of black Americans.
The "Them" that makes my hinny pucker most lives in Washington D.C. The NSA is now building the largest information management system in history so it can actually capture and evaluate every phone call, email, or electronic conversation you and every other American will ever have. No need for wire taps. No need for court orders, they just grab it all.
Who or what is to stop our government from coercing a corporation, to allow it to have access to its information. Who if anyone is in a position to protect us from our own government run amok?
The problem is that some places do a pitiful job of vetting candidates for the death penalty, and when they have virtual express lanes to the death house (like... uh Texas?) the number of almost certainly innocent victims of social execution begins to approach an embarrassingly large percentage. You can get precisely the same result by sticking a violent offender in solitary confinement, away from the general population. You can save anywhere from 3-10 million dollars as well. You can claim moral high ground, and Gawd forbid, if DNA should prove the guy you locked up was in fact innocent 10 years later, he's still around to pardon.
By the way, Texas just executed a man that is WIDELY agreed was almost certainly innocent. His trial was a joke. The only evidence, provided by the local Fire Marshall has since been proven by science to be complete and utter bovine feces, and armed with all of this information, the Governor of Texas still let them kill this man, because he's "Hard on Crime!"
A better solution against corporations, is to separate them from government like we do with church (or at least as we should do), then create a strong body of regulations designed to promote an empower enterprise by protecting small business against predatory practice, protect a healthy human environment, and a vibrant and happy middle class. Its not hard to see we are quick approaching social free-fall. This little 30 year experiment has run its course and the religious thinkers who keep chanting, don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up, need to be gently asked to sit the next few out. Let's all stop, and clean up the mess before we drown in it.
I need only point at the recent resignation of "Greg Smith" from "Goldman Sachs" that the men in charge of business today, this very day, in many areas of the public sector are interested in only one thing. Protecting their huge salary and stock shares (though the systematic process of squeezing profit out of any damn thing they can.) The will turn on their own customers (tell me that's not a sign of profound insanity), they will lie and cheat and steal to the ultimate death and dismemberment of their own stock holders. All inside the near bullet proof corporate veil.
The men that planned this in 80s, filled our courts with compliant judges and top colleges with ideological clones to teach our best business schools, and now Reaganomics and deregulation is the Koolaid everyone's drinking. The sad part is that when you wipe Ronny's smiling face off Reaganomics what you have left is simple Fascism. Today America passes virtually all the tests for a fascist state. We've demonstrated time and time again, that fascist states destroy human rights and ultimately implode... I'm sorry... suffer immense recessions. Even "Adam Smith" warned about the dangers of concentrated wealth and the destruction of a health working class. Sadly, we don't teach that anymore, that would be sanity, and we're fresh out.
Watching giant corporate interests fighting in court after the last scraps of IP and means of transporting it, seems more than a wee bit like everybody is loosing except the corporate interests.
So you don't think keeping women bare-foot and pregnant, and destroying public education because it causes people to give up magical thinking isn't radical? To paraphrase Bill Maher, the Mullahs of the middle east want to take the world back to the 13th century, but Rick Sanitarium wants to party like it 999. He doesn't just pander to the Religious Right... he goes them one better (a big one.) How long do think it would be, before everyone and their third cousin lynched Rick, if he got his way and nobody (including married folk) should or could have sex except for procreation. The guy is in that rarefied region of the WackoSphere where even the deranged fear to go.
If elected President, you don't think this guy would go full on Rambo against the LesBiGay community, or anyone that disagreed with the Poope? Don't get me wrong, I actually have some sentiment for the Catholic Church (my Dad gave up Catholicism one year for lent.) My Ganny was staunch Irish Catholic right to the grave, and though I didn't always agree with her opinions, she was a pretty awesome lady, and I respected both her point of view and her integrity to her beliefs. I don't doubt that Rick means well. I do doubt that he's sporting a full deck. We've done criminally stupid in the White House, lets avoid fsck nuts.
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This of course presumes that those carbon-centric banks yield their Cypt-Keeper claws from the tillers of economy and state. In fact, they have worked steadfastly to keep the world in a fossil fuel state of existence, and renewable sources have been resisted, avoided and limited at great cost to the people's of the world. The technology exists and the need has never been greater. It is now time to begin migrating to more sustainable energy sources.
Au contraire! We had a budding solar industry in the 70s, but Ronald Reagan made a point of killing that entire industry (at the behest of fossil fuel producers.) Even now fossil fuel producers are fighting solar energy tooth and nail. Both organic and thin film silicon have made huge advances and we have cells today that break the $1 per watt barrier (making them financially feasible in the face of fossil fuels), and $0.50 per watt panels are less than a year away.
Investing in the growth of an American solar industry is critical for the 21st century and will be one of the critical profit engines for are least the 50 years (depending on the advent of fusion.) China is defending its lock down on the solar market, using predatory practices. To that end we need to let them know that we will not simply put up with an attack on our current and future economy.
As for competing with China from an economic standpoint, Our economies will reach parity by 2015, and our average adjusted per capita income sometime in the mid to late 2020s (of course the wealth disparities in China will be as great or even greater than our own.) A number of businesses are just now beginning to look at coming back home to the U.S. That trend is certain explode in the next decade. This is particularly true as China finds itself facing greater and greater environmental crisis (there is solid evidence that the 3 Gorged damn may have been seminal in precipitating the horrific earthquake in Sichuan, killing 70,000 and making millions homeless.) China is facing terrible environmental and social stresses in its attempt to become the world's economic leader.
Amir... I think we have fleas!!!
Of course with the exception of those who are oriented towards stabbing, shooting or strangling their sex partners...
Its actually worse... because homo-erectii like this don't stop at having idiot opinions... they like to act them out. So if you don't happen to fit in his herd, he feels perfectly justified in bombing you out of existence (if you're a little brown person), or just crushing your skull with a shovel (if you're a transperson) walking down the street.
There's this thing called a hate crime. We want society to grow up. We want people to stop judging and assaulting one another because of their differences, because there are now 7,000,000,000 of us, and if we can't get along things are going to get really ugly soon. So stop making it alright to kill the pink ape (if you don't know the reference, look it up), the time for the worst of lower primate behavior among human beings has come and now should go. Please don't make an arguement for bigotry, hatred or phobic behavior and for the love of Jebus, don't blame the victims of hate for not being able to take a joke, because having a crowd of idiots chasing you down the street then beating you half to death just isn't as funny from the perspective of the poundee.
"Broad Tent"?... is that some kind of transgendered erection joke???
Friend, you should stop talking for God... I hear he doesn't like that. I know transpeople who are ordained ministers and lead lives of devout spiritual devotion. I know several transpeople who are lawyers and spend most of their time fighting for people's rights, protecting those that have no power and little say. I know transpeople (soldiers, fire fighters and police) whose heroism on and off the battlefield would shock you to within an inch of your life and shame you for your prejudice.
There is solid evidence that transgendered people are the result of a complex developmental anomaly resulting in a form of intersexing (we know the brain actually get's wired male during a fairly short period with the presence of testosterone.) If the process is disturbed, or happens at the wrong time, brain sex remains female (we all start out female and it take a series of events to make an embryo male.) This is further supported by the high frequency of other physical intersexing that transpeople frequently experience.
So tell me why, a process that occurs in the womb, and produces a human being with attributes of both sexes, and a highly feminized brain (and that has been demonstrated in research using MRI brain scans), would be a problem with the almighty seeing as since it happens in the womb, would arguably be the work of the almighty? It is only in our highly sexualized and fetishistic society that transpeople are tuned into wierd sex objects. In other societies and cultures, transpeople have been consistently respected and are mostly held as shamans, healers, clerics, and people of great intellect and spirituality. In my personal experience, gay men are typical a standard deviation more intelligent than the standard population and transpeople tend to be about 2 standard deviations more intelligent. A large percentage of transpeople are engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, professors, doctors, lawyers and scientists from many fields of study (please believe me when I say I've met more than a few of these folks.) Sadly, a large number of transpeople either come from poverty or are marginalized by a society filled with prejudice, and find themselves as sex workers or homeless and unemployed. Tell me that our society doesn't make entire classes of human beings disposable. Do you even think about such things?
This is an expensive and profoundly painful process. A person doesn't do this on a whim. Its like cutting off your hand. If you saw the movies 127 hours, you understand a person only takes that kind of action when they experience their life being threatened. By the way, suicide levels among transpeople are off the chart, as are murders and violence perpetrated on them be people of prejudice. A transperson is hundreds of time more likely to be assaulted or murdered. So before you go around judging people (another one of those things I hear God doesn't like), bother to find out about who you are judging. A where the real sins rest.
Oh and just in case you're wondering, some of us have close family members who are trans. Some of us are very proud of the human beings they've become.
You don't know what you're talking about. There are only two issues for transpeople. Age and body type (ecto vs. endomorphic.) You begin hormone therapy early in puberty and you can't tell the person is trans... period. You catch a person in their 20s and they are reasonably endomorphic and they pass well after hormone therapy. In fact there are a number of professional models, a few actresses, and competitive beauty contestants in other countries who are transgendered. The key is bone structure and in some cases intersexing (the mixing of sexual expression from birth.) The reason you say transpeople don't pass is because all you've ever seen were the one's who didn't. The rest have simply melted into society and you'll never know who they are, because they lead quiet normal lives in their gender of choice.
Cute, a simple ring cypher where a=n, and I'm sorry, with the NSA looking up your skirt 24/7 even outlaws won't have privacy.
Solar just passed the $1 per watt milestone so in fact it is now cost competitive with oil which is fully subsidized. And since the new cells can be deposited on a flexible plastic substrate, we can now cover all kinds of artifacts and structures with these new inexpensive solar cells. We live in a fantasy. The presumptions upon which our economy functions include infinite natural resources, infinite capacity to recover from prolific environmental abuse, and infinite capacity for the middle class to take the brunt of the fiscal misconduct of the wealthy and powerful.
There is a human tendency when raiding the cookie jar to just keep taking until nothing is left. This week the Cal State University Regents this week voted themselves a 10% increase in pay. This in a time where Universities across the state are being crushed by lack of state funding, teachers are being let go, classes eliminated from the curriculum and students everywhere are crumpling under draconian increases of tuition. Some of the top state CSU executives received raises as large as 22%. They had to close down several campuses for fear of violent protest. This is just one example of people who should be leading by example, instead using their position to take advantage of the public. These people all have salaries in excess of $250,000. You can't tell me that they were so underpaid that they couldn't keep a roof over their heads. I don't have a problem with people getting fair remuneration. Just not on the backs of the rest of society, and please stop at a fair share. Leave a couple cookies for the rest of us.
Excuse me, gas isn't toxic? Benzene is a serious carcinogen in fact the entire group of BTEX chemicals are known carcinogens and have known health impacts. Add to that the impact of MTBE (one of the most serious contaminants in ground water today), and gasoline leaks are a serious problem. By the way, though there is some metabolism of gasoline byproduct by some bacteria, it appears that fungus' do the heavy lifting when it comes to soil recovering from petrochemical spills.
I saw an old interview of George Carlin, and he said America today pretends to give its citizens choice. In fact we have no choice in the important issues and we perpetuate the illusion of choice with countless meaningless choices to keep the common man busy. Paper or Plastic? Smoking or non? Do you want fries with that? This is not free choice and it hasn't been for quite a while.
This is the very thing that's most important. We need to address our complacency, our resignation, despair and apathy. It is the internal dialogue that "I make no difference" and "I don't want to pay the price of being responsible for the future" that greases the road to a dark destinations. That yields the civilizing intent of men with vision and compassion to self obsessed despots who can only succeed when the many abdicate their say in the future.
Why would you volunteer to be a bleating herd animal waiting first to be sheered then rendered down to mutton? No matter how comfortable you are currently, dark orifices are a lousy place to plant your head. Perhaps its time to take inventory of your ethical stock?
You gotta stop watching programs owned by Rupert Murdoch for your opinions... besides being misinformed, you clearly don't understand either what's at stake or the fiscal realities we're facing.
The Republican predecessor to Obama, gave away the house, and for every penny of tax relief you saw, the wealthy saw ten thousand dollars. To do that he borrowed us into the poor house and stop maintaining any of the vital infrastructure in the country. He let cities flood, and he let the corporations write the laws to regulate themselves, which for all intents and purposes meant they have run roughshod over the entire nation for longer than the last 10 years. He let Dick Cheney and Karl Rove (a.k.a. TurdBlossom), get us into needless wars with people who were no threat.
This not to say that I'm happy with Obama. He promised change, and so far, the only thing that seriously different is the melanin level in the Oval Office. Don't get me wrong, though he's not the champion I was hoping for, I just don't see him skulking around desperately trying to tax everything is sight. That's simplistic, inaccurate, and clearly uninformed. In fact Obama seems to be answering to precisely the same kind of corporate masters that the last few Presidents have been owned by (media industry for Dems and Fossil Fuel for the Reps.) That said, I wouldn't mind paying higher taxes if it meant the roads would be maintained and schools actually taught kids, all I ever asked for was transparency and accountability. if you want services, you have to pay taxes. That's simple math. Sadly simple math is beyond most Americans these days, so maybe PBS should begin producing a Sesame Street for the uneducated over 20? At $25 million each, how many Jr. Colleges could you fund with this stealth bomber? Can you say 120! How many hands of 5 fingers is that? 24! Very nice... have a Coookie!
YOU ARE SLEEP WALKING and call it a life. You don't have to be a statistician to see the middle class is evaporating like a fragile mist on a summer morning... Those jobless hippies, used to be happily employed and have homes just like you. Then they sent their jobs to the third world. Destroyed their life savings by crashing the stock market. Gutted their retirement by turn entire states into economic wastelands call rust belts. Millions of people who did absolutely everything right, People who planned and saved and scrimped for their futures. Held diverse portfolios, and had property owned and paid for... got squashed like bugs. By the millions. You better believe they're pissed and ready to protest. Because they now live in vans and tent cities popping up outside of every major city in the country.
Your hubris would offend me, if it weren't so clear that you're simply ignorant. Sadly, you're ignorant by choice, and what you don't know my friend, really can kill you.
Clearly history is not your forte'. People have uttered your very words since the Babylonians, only acting when it was finally their necks on the chopping block, and by then far too late to save themselves. Read about wealthy Jews in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. They stayed because they were so certain it would never get them, they were happy, well to do, connected. Their bodies looked just like everyone else's stacked like cord-wood behind concentration camps.
You risk what have and what your children will have, by your inaction. You say your future is bright. So how will you handle economic or environmental collapse? This isn't to say that said collapse is inevitable or even imminent. But it is perfectly predictable, and without substantial intervention, the bright future you speak of is a pipe dream. You want to get grounded in reality and really begin getting interested in what is in your best interest now, and the future.
Being a bit older than you (I'm presuming by how you describe yourself), I've lived through a lot of the trends and choices that got us here. I've seen the big mistakes. Witnessed the stupid stuff at work, and made and lost fortunes in growing economic turmoil. Whatever it is that you think you're clinging to, its an illusion. The time to wake up is well past. Addressing reality with all due haste would behoove us all.
Actually I don't have a problem with psycho-Mom. The world is rife with people whose pants/panties are on WAY TO FRIGGIN TIGHT. You nod your head up and down, shake it occasionally when they break into tears, pat them on the back, and call their doctors to find out if their prescription needs adjustment.
I'm angry and more than a little upset with the School Administration. One of their most important jobs is to protect teachers from Idiot Parents. I mean if the teacher was reading to first graders, just let her know that the reading is being wasted on kids who won't be able to get the finer points of the story for at least 5 more years and that perhaps she should be reading selections from Harry Potter. Of course I'm clear that in this school reading from Harry Potter will probably get you lynched because of lack of a good solid Christian story line, but it would be more age appropriate.
If in fact her students were in middle school (the best time to read this story), then they should have read it themselves and reported on it, of course this a school in South Carolina (ranks at 42nd of 50, in a country that is ranked below Latvia in reading skill.) Perhaps the young teens couldn't read it for themselves. In any case, sexualizing a clearly non-sexual piece of literature and punishing people for reading it to children is demonstration of minds so small and closed as to be proper demonstration grounds for Van der valls forces. When faith destroys reason, then you end up with neither.
Only if you're pulling it...
The cost of EVERY single stealth bomber (plane and supporting program) comes in around 3 billion dollars. So considering this is about creating a virtually endless supply of energy capable of sustaining us for thousands of years, Why is this even a consideration. Move $100 billion from defense (I would argue this is the most important defense spending in our history) and get'er done, once and for all.
Then we paid for it through our taxes. There is no sane argument to make citizens pay for it again. If the government contracted out the regulation to a private body, then the government should have paid for it and made it free to access for its citizens. If a private body offered to do it for free so that it could influence the nature of that body or regulations, then you best believe that they have already paid themselves and there is no sane grounds for them to avoid making those regulation available for the public at no cost. You can't charge people twice for the same thing (though I know that every corporation in the country is desperately looking at ways to do precisely that.)
That was Congressman; William Clay, Sr. and he also said; "I have no intention of representing those powerful interests who walk over powerless people." He had some interesting events (read controversies) in his career, but overall, was a strong champion for the environment, civil rights, and the advancement of black Americans.
The "Them" that makes my hinny pucker most lives in Washington D.C. The NSA is now building the largest information management system in history so it can actually capture and evaluate every phone call, email, or electronic conversation you and every other American will ever have. No need for wire taps. No need for court orders, they just grab it all.
Who or what is to stop our government from coercing a corporation, to allow it to have access to its information. Who if anyone is in a position to protect us from our own government run amok?
The problem is that some places do a pitiful job of vetting candidates for the death penalty, and when they have virtual express lanes to the death house (like... uh Texas?) the number of almost certainly innocent victims of social execution begins to approach an embarrassingly large percentage. You can get precisely the same result by sticking a violent offender in solitary confinement, away from the general population. You can save anywhere from 3-10 million dollars as well. You can claim moral high ground, and Gawd forbid, if DNA should prove the guy you locked up was in fact innocent 10 years later, he's still around to pardon.
By the way, Texas just executed a man that is WIDELY agreed was almost certainly innocent. His trial was a joke. The only evidence, provided by the local Fire Marshall has since been proven by science to be complete and utter bovine feces, and armed with all of this information, the Governor of Texas still let them kill this man, because he's "Hard on Crime!"
A better solution against corporations, is to separate them from government like we do with church (or at least as we should do), then create a strong body of regulations designed to promote an empower enterprise by protecting small business against predatory practice, protect a healthy human environment, and a vibrant and happy middle class. Its not hard to see we are quick approaching social free-fall. This little 30 year experiment has run its course and the religious thinkers who keep chanting, don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up, need to be gently asked to sit the next few out. Let's all stop, and clean up the mess before we drown in it.
I need only point at the recent resignation of "Greg Smith" from "Goldman Sachs" that the men in charge of business today, this very day, in many areas of the public sector are interested in only one thing. Protecting their huge salary and stock shares (though the systematic process of squeezing profit out of any damn thing they can.) The will turn on their own customers (tell me that's not a sign of profound insanity), they will lie and cheat and steal to the ultimate death and dismemberment of their own stock holders. All inside the near bullet proof corporate veil.
The men that planned this in 80s, filled our courts with compliant judges and top colleges with ideological clones to teach our best business schools, and now Reaganomics and deregulation is the Koolaid everyone's drinking. The sad part is that when you wipe Ronny's smiling face off Reaganomics what you have left is simple Fascism. Today America passes virtually all the tests for a fascist state. We've demonstrated time and time again, that fascist states destroy human rights and ultimately implode... I'm sorry... suffer immense recessions. Even "Adam Smith" warned about the dangers of concentrated wealth and the destruction of a health working class. Sadly, we don't teach that anymore, that would be sanity, and we're fresh out.
Watching giant corporate interests fighting in court after the last scraps of IP and means of transporting it, seems more than a wee bit like everybody is loosing except the corporate interests.
So you don't think keeping women bare-foot and pregnant, and destroying public education because it causes people to give up magical thinking isn't radical? To paraphrase Bill Maher, the Mullahs of the middle east want to take the world back to the 13th century, but Rick Sanitarium wants to party like it 999. He doesn't just pander to the Religious Right... he goes them one better (a big one.) How long do think it would be, before everyone and their third cousin lynched Rick, if he got his way and nobody (including married folk) should or could have sex except for procreation. The guy is in that rarefied region of the WackoSphere where even the deranged fear to go.
If elected President, you don't think this guy would go full on Rambo against the LesBiGay community, or anyone that disagreed with the Poope? Don't get me wrong, I actually have some sentiment for the Catholic Church (my Dad gave up Catholicism one year for lent.) My Ganny was staunch Irish Catholic right to the grave, and though I didn't always agree with her opinions, she was a pretty awesome lady, and I respected both her point of view and her integrity to her beliefs. I don't doubt that Rick means well. I do doubt that he's sporting a full deck. We've done criminally stupid in the White House, lets avoid fsck nuts.