Re: Sanctimonious defense of injustice by Christtianity Today
I'm not a supporter, and I want the truth to fully come out. I am less than optimistic regarding politics these days. I am in no hurry to see him impeached only because Pence would not be any better for us.
Agreed.
But who knows how much Presidential power Pence has not already wielded? Trump and his ego are like that old-old Laugh-In joke: "Blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere." In all of Trump's "Christian" posturings and positions, who here wants to bet against Pence not having a hand in them? No, I didn't think so.
Doesn't matter to Trump's rumor mill which feeds his backing. All he ever needs is news releases that an investigation has started. Works in the Ukraine, works here.
Trickle down isn't that significant because even though the rich control a huge proportion of the wealth, there are not that many of them, and they can only buy so many houses, boats and planes, only throw so many parties, only buy so much jewelry and designer clothing.
What I've been saying for a long time. I even posted about it back on 02 August 2019 in Message 3175.
To summarize that message, what I heard in the lead-up to the Trump Tax Scam was that it would give the top 1% and 2% about $33,000 each. That amount of extra income would be a drop in the bucket for them and, since all their needs and luxuries have already been paid for with plenty left over, that extra $33,000 each would most likely never get spent and hence would never find its way into the economy.
Then I figured that the total amount the top 1-2%'ers would get comes out to be billions of dollars. Billions of dollars being kept out of the economy. To paraphrase from Hello, Dolly!, that money is like manure; it needs to be spread around for the economy to grow.
Then I took those same billions of dollars and distributed it equally to everybody in the population (not just to the 98%'ers) and it came to about $300 per person. The difference that would make is that an extra $300 per year is meaningful for the vast majority of the population. Then I discussed why:
DWise1 writes:
The difference is that while the rich would not spend their $33,000, thus keeping it out of the economy, the rest of us would most definitely spend our $300 on food, bills, durable goods, etc, sending those billions of dollars straight into the economy. With all that money entering the economy, stores could stay open and hire people, new stores and businesses could open and hire people, manufacturers would have more customers for their products and be able to expand and hire more workers, and so on.
Giving money to the rich starves the economy. Getting money into the hands of the middle class and the poor feeds and invigorates the economy.
One possible thing that a rich person would do with his $33,000 would be to gamble with it; i.e., to "invest" it in the stock market through speculative trading. While the stock market is a way for companies to raise capital in order to grow their business and hence the economy, once those stocks have been issued then they just get traded back and forth adding essentially nothing more to the economy. But then speculative trading adds far less since it's little more than placing bets on how certain markets will do. Instead of generating new wealth as capitalism is supposed to do (and does when it's working right), speculative trading only redistributes existing wealth, like a casino or a back-alley crap game. Basically, that would be a prime place for the rich's $33,000 to go, adding nothing to the economy.
An example was given in a really good movie, The Big Short, which chronicles and explains the collapse of the housing market and the world economy in 2008. To help explain the concepts, the film cuts to celebrities offering analogies, like Richard H. Thaler, PhD, and Selena Gomez explaining synthetic CDOs as being side bets being made on Selena's blackjack hand and then side bets on those side bets, etc -- you end up with more money riding on the side bets than on the original bet. That part starts around the 3:00 mark, but you should go back to at least the 2:00 mark to get more background information. This scene is Mark Baum talking with a CDO manager -- a CDO is collateralized debt obligation in which risk is supposedly minimized by bundling lots of mortgages together such that the entire bundle gets a AAA rating even though it's filled with a lot of sub-prime shit (the word Margo Robbie from her bubble bath advises us to think every time we hear "sub-prime"). For an explanation of CDO, refer to the clip at No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ho8y6Xg3SM -- note that there are no women in the scene, but then at 5:05 it's a woman's voice representing us, the audience, saying, "Say that again."
Dr. Thaler and Selena Gomez in Vegas explaining synthetic CDOs (again, at 3:00, but I recommend starting at 2:00):
$50 million in a CDO would translate to about a billion in synthetic CDOs (at about 2:40, which is why I recommend starting at 2:00 and preferably even earlier (so that you can catch the bit about creating CDOs of CDOs or "CDOs squared")).
IOW, a helluva lot of money being shuffled back and forth with practically none of it entering the economy. The stock market is going great guns while the economy is stagnant from being starved. That's the bottom line of trickle-down.
In our environment too much battery power will be spent heating the car.
I hadn't thought of that. Granted, in SoCalif it's not much of an issue, but I'm also a veteran of 5 North Dakota winters and I remember how even with the heat turned up all the way it was still too cold.
The heat for the heater in a gasoline car comes from the engine coolant, so it's practically a free by-product of driving. In an all-electric car, you wouldn't have that so you would have to use some of the battery energy to generate heat (and in the Northern Tier a considerable amount of heat would need to be generated, plus a cold battery doesn't work as well). I have a hybrid in which a gas engine turns on to recharge the battery, so there's no constant supply of heat -- I'd never given it any thought, but I must be getting my heat mainly from the battery too.
The big problem with EVs is that many people don't live in circumstances where it is easy to plug in.
A few years ago, somebody did a practical experiment by driving across the USA twice, first in the south and back again in the north, in an all-electric car (a Leaf, as I seem to recall). I caught one of his reports on NPR as he was crossing North Dakota on the return leg of the trip and on one of the few dry stretches, so he was having to watch his speed in order to make it across. Basically, he had had little trouble finding where to plug in. So even then it turned out to be doable.
Since I have a hybrid, I haven't had to think about this, but how long does it take to recharge a plug-in all-electric car? If you're on a cross-country drive where you're trying to make time, how long is the downtime for recharging? Also, as more people go electric, there will be increasing demand on charging stations such that existing charging stations may prove inadequate.
Funny story: While stationed in North Dakota (in the cold part, Grand Forks, subject to those arctic air masses coming down from Canada), we had block heaters installed in our cars. For the sake of others (I had never heard of it before), a car engine has a cooling jacket through which the coolant flows to cool down the engine and which has a number of freeze plugs which will pop out in case the coolant freezes so that the engine won't be cracked by that freezing (if freezing water can tear mountains apart, so will it do to your car engine). A block heater replaces one of the freeze plugs with a heating coil that is powered by an extension cord that usually sticks out of the front grill. Many businesses and hotels/motels in North Dakota have power outlets in their parking lots.
When we returned to Southern California, people would see that power cord sticking out the the front grill and ask me if that was an electric car.
Double posts happened to me today in another topic. It was on my beater laptop that I use away from home. Never happened to me before. Only difference this time was that I was using the touchpad instead of the wireless mouse, which I forgot to bring with me today.
I read Percy's text as saying that that is an actual photo after an actual storm (a major storm, maybe a hurricane or at least a tropical storm, both of which dump a lot of water resulting in massive flooding). Then, as I read it, Percy stated that this will be the norm, not the exception.
We'll need to hear from Percy about whether that photo is real.
Sorry, didn't realize the problems Miami is already having with flooding weren't widely known.
A few months ago, PBS played a series about the problems that rising sea levels post to cities and how they are trying to address the problem with each episode dedicated to one of four cities (London, New York City (as I recall), Tokyo (as I recall), and of course Miami.
At present, they've been raising the height of the major streets, which are now well above the sidewalk at this time. They examine the idea of creating a sea wall (as depicted around New York City in sci-fi, such as in The Expanse) or reclaiming land from the sea as in Dutch dikeworks and windmill pump houses. Geology works against them there, since the state is built atop fossiliferous limestone through which water passes as if it's not even there (most of the southern half of the state has an incredibly massive aquifer). Then the well-to-do will start migrating inland to higher ground, displacing the poor communities that already live there, but even that is still just a temporary measure. There's no good solution.
When you think everyone else is upside down, guess what?
In group partner dance classes, many if not most students show up without a partner. The normal class structure is for students to pair up (randomly or otherwise) with partnerless students distributing themselves as evenly as possible between couples in order to facilitate rotation. Then periodically the teacher will have the students rotate (normally, the followers will rotate for two main reasons: 1) guys are terrible at rotating and get confused easily, and 2) this encourages guys to come back to the next class because they think that women come to them (not an official reason , but it does seem to work. )).
Some rank beginner couples (usually married, some even fundies (I know this from actual friends)) are too embarrassed or uncomfortable with rotating to other partners and so place themselves at a disadvantage in learning, because instead of rotating to experienced students who can help them learn how it should be done (a lot of dancing basics have to be learned by feel and by experiencing them) they are arbitrarily getting themselves stuck with a newbie who has no idea what he/she is doing. Despite the standard joke about Baptists ("Why do Baptists disapprove of having sex while standing? Because they're afraid it might lead to dancing."), there's nothing inherently sexual about partner dancing, but still too many non-dancers continue to have such misconceptions.
Part of the group class rotation experience is that you will get some good partners and some bad partners, some experienced partners and some rank beginners. IOW, your own experience will be mixed, but by rotating through everybody it should balance itself out. There are also ways in which an experienced student can compensate for an inexperienced partner, such that I as an experienced leader can make my lead stronger for an inexperienced follower, even to the point of almost manhandling her -- I don't know how the experienced followers deal with inexperienced leaders except possibly to try to avoid physical injury (eg, in my early college years in karate class wall stretches, I was paired with a beginner who apparently dislocated my hip though it apparently popped back into the socket immediately -- after a year or three of recovery, I migrated to Aikido and that hip is still not quite right after more than 40 years, especially during sex (missionary style), though sitting during long stretches of driving comes close).
Now for the payload/punch line.
Our Lindy Hop instructor was a younger guy. In one class, he told us that as we rotate in class, we get some partners who are good and some partners who are not good and some partners who are a problem. If all your partners are a problem, then you are the problem.
That should be a lesson for Faith. We all know that she will not learn it.
One man's terrorist is another man's patriot. Just ask the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and many other groups. Especially when one must wage asymmetric warfare wherein the side with far less brute-force military power must resort to other means including unconventional warfare methods, not unlike our colonial forces fighting against the militarily superior British forces in our Revolutionary War. If you cannot fight through more sheer brute force, then you must fight smarter.
As I understand it, Soleimani's basic approach was to work with other groups with the same anti-America agenda (NOTE: not necessarily the same as anti-American). Thus he could get those other groups in many different countries to act as proxy fighters against the USA, which could also be used diplomatically to support claims that Iran was not involved -- fighting smarter, as I said. We could argue that Soleimani had some control over these groups, such that they would attack us when he needed them to, but also not attack us when it would be disadvantageous to him and to Iran. Now part of the problem of having eliminated Soleimani is that that coordinating control of those allied groups is not gone, leaving them to attack us at will.
In the early 70's in college I was a foreign language major (German primarily, though I also studied 8 or 9 other languages, including Koine Greek -- I can only claim any degree of proficiency in 5 languages, though my Russian (not one of the 5) keeps surprising me). I enlisted as a computer technician (1976) which led to my earning my BS Computer Science while on active duty. My initial approach to programming languages was that they are indeed languages and I have a lot of training in learning languages -- especially in my first programming class, FORTRAN, I was the only student who read my programs for content, for what I was actually telling the computer what to do (most of the other students were trying random changes, much like your own "trial and error" nonsense).
Well, what happened on active duty was that I had the opportunity to take a language course. Stupid me, instead of taking Spanish (I had married into a Mexican family where Spanish was very much alive -- I ended up making full use of OJT (on-the-job training) I chose to take an ancient Greek class. It was very informative and worth-while.
Part of what the professor taught was some ancient history. One of the major outcomes of the Peloponnesian War in Greece came at the end of the war. Once "peace broke out", you had all these trained soldiers and all these weapons just lying there unused and now rendered very cheap. Now suddenly all these tiny kingdoms who could never before afford to wage war on their neighbors had not only very cheap weapons but also highly trained and experienced mercenaries who knew how to use them. What our professor presented to us was a sudden rash of bush wars fed by those left-over resources of the Peloponnesian War.
So then circa 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, while everybody else was celebrating the outbreak of peace, I was bracing myself for the subsequent bush wars. And indeed, former Soviet military was outright selling their hardware on the black market, since that was the only way that they could afford to eat. So many Soviet engineers, including nuclear and nuclear weapons engineers, ended up going to wherever they could make a living and in the process made all our lives far less secure.
Please note that Soleimani's primary goal was to drive the USA out of the Middle East. Because of our provocative actions which led to the Iranian missile attacks against Iraqi installations, Iraq wants us to leave. Doesn't that serve Iran's purpose to drive us out of the region?
... and how Iranians have been tweeting pictures of celebrating his death and thanking Trump.
Some Iranians, maybe yes. The majority? Gimme a break!
Only a minority supports Trump. So if Trump gets taken out, who would be upset?
Think about Clue: killed in the bathroom by Col. Sanders with a chicken bone.
The key question that you and your evil ilk avoid is this: And then what?
OK, let's take this bad guy out. And then what?
In every single international negotiation or something far worse, that is one of the most important three-word questions there could possibly be. And then what?
You consistently demonstrate that you certainly do not know the difference between good and evil. No I don't think anyone WANTS to take the side of evil, they just can't tell the difference, as you can't.
Faith, we keep trying to explain it to you and you keep refusing to ever learn.
That person you see in the mirror and curse as evil, etc. That's you.
I really really really wish it was possible to split this nation geographically so I could live with the conservatives and never have to hear another insane word from the Left.
A friend has a t-shirt depicting that. The new red nation is called Dumbfuckistan.
Unfortunately, North Dakota would be included in Dumbfuckistan. When I was stationed there on a SAC base, word was that if it were to become its own country then it would be the sixth most powerful nuclear power.
I guess there's no way to bring that about unfortunately.
Yes, that is a pity. It would stop the red states from sucking up so much of the tax money from the blue states to compensate for GOP mismanagement.
Re: Heritage Foundation Senior Analyst on the deficit and Natoinal Debt
Funny then that they do in fact add to the deficit. Duh.
Really? So then you can easily demonstrate that "fact"!
Do so! Demonstrate the fact of what you are asserting!
Of course, we all know that you will not. You never do. You never have and you never will.
All you ever do is make blatant and obvious false assertions contrary to reality and then try to suck everybody down into your Black Hole of Shtupidity.
Remember: the deficit is not the same thing as the National Debt!
Yes I know they are called entitlements, that's what I was calling them until I encountered people like the Heritage Foundation official calling them mandatory. Apparently both words are used.
I've never heard them called mandatories, only entitlements. The payroll deduction for Social Security is mandatory - maybe that's what you're thinking of.
First Faith was challenged repeatedly by the concept of plurals in the English language, then by the fact that the federal deficit and the National Debt are two very different things, and now she is being challenged by the fact that most things have more than one property (eg, ice is both cold and slippery).
Social Security and Medicare are entitlements. We paid into them for decades (over four decades in my own case) so we are entitled to the promised benefits. Same thing for any life insurance (or auto or homeowners insurance), in which you have paid your premiums so you are entitled to the benefits of that coverage.
Instead, the Wrong (how could anyone possibly call them "right"?) has shifted the meaning to "freebies", that we are lazy bums who "feel entitled" to get something for nothing. As noted above, we paid into the program which entitles us to the benefits.
At the same time, those payments are mandatory and make up the part of the Federal Budget called "Mandatory Spending" in contrast to "Discretionary Spending". From that Wikipedia link:
quote:Expenditures are classified as "mandatory", with payments required by specific laws to those meeting eligibility criteria (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), or "discretionary", with payment amounts renewed annually as part of the budget process. Around two thirds of federal spending is for "mandatory" programs. CBO projects that mandatory program spending and interest costs will rise relative to GDP over the 2016—2026 period, while defense and other discretionary spending will decline relative to GDP.
Mandatory spending and social safety nets
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid expenditures are funded by more permanent Congressional appropriations and so are considered mandatory spen. Social Security and Medicare are sometimes called "entitlements", because people meeting relevant eligibility requirements are legally entitled to benefits, although most pay taxes into these programs throughout their working lives. Some programs, such as Food Stamps, are appropriated entitlements. Some mandatory spending, such as Congressional salaries, is not part of any entitlement program. Mandatory spending accounted for 59.8% of total federal outlays (net of receipts that partially pay for the programs), with net interest payments accounting for an additional 6.5%. In 2000, these were 53.2% and 12.5%, respectively.
I read "funded by more permanent Congressional appropriations" as referring to Social Security and Medicare Part A funding coming from specific payroll taxes that go into specific trust funds (Medicare B is funded by participants' monthly insurance premiums while Parts C and D are private insurance).
The primary source of the deficit is in the discrepancy between revenues and outlays under "Discretionary Spending", with some of the other mandatory spending (eg, Congressional salaries and pensions) also contributing to the deficit. So then if Congress were truly committed to cutting mandatory spending that would actually affect the deficit, then they should vote to eliminate salaries for congressmen and senators. That would certainly contribute much more to reducing the deficit than cuts to Social Security or Medicare ever could.
, but it does seem to work. )).
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