winsor

Good post. Except I rather doubt he's trying to keep a serious discussion on the topic. you haven't addressed my point regards blacks not being 'immigrants'. do you think this is relevant? No. I do not recall you saying anything of significance. Ever. i wasn't asking you

Good post. Except I rather doubt he's trying to keep a serious discussion on the topic. you haven't addressed my point regards blacks not being 'immigrants'. do you think this is relevant? No. I do not recall you saying anything of significance. Ever. i wasn't asking you

Good post. Except I rather doubt he's trying to keep a serious discussion on the topic. you haven't addressed my point regards blacks not being 'immigrants'. do you think this is relevant? No. I do not recall you saying anything of significance. Ever.

Tell you what, Sparky, there is no such thing as "reverse racism." Racism is racism. If you start a thread based on race, that's racist. no it's not - that's a stupid argument

so you're saying that only whites get 'A's'? Nah, asians do pretty well, too. aahhh...the return of a usual suspect

I made it about a quarter of the way through the video, and lost interest in what might follow. I again state that the only inexhaustable natural resource is stupidity - and here was a veritable wellspring. Nothing requires "belief" of its adherents unless it is pure, unadulterated bullshit. "Creationism" qualifies in spades.

so you're saying that only whites get 'A's'? Nah, asians do pretty well, too.

On the whole, I consider money spent caring for sick and aged Americans and looking after public health in the USA to be a far better use of taxpayer money than killing brown people, who have done nothing to us, half a world away in a futile search for mythical WMDs. Look, WMDs are real. It just turned out to be safer to demonstrate what we would do to the places that actually have them by attacking Iraq. Since we made an example of a key element of the Axle of Evel, there has not been a peep from those locales known to be heavily armed. When was the last time you heard the people in North Dakota or New London rattling sabres? I rest my case.

okay

I just ran the numbers. According to http://www.usdebtclock.org/, the US Government has an outstanding balance of $13,000,000,000,000 or so, amounting to $42,000 per citizen or $118,000 per taxpayer. Using the mortgage calculator at: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/mortgage-calculator.aspx, a 40 year fixed mortgage (the longest term calculated at this site) gives us payments of $733.29 at 7%. If you take Government employees out of the picture, you are looking at $167,000 per taxpayer, and monthly payments of $1,037.79. Thus, if we quit spending more than we take in right now, every non-governmental taxpayer would have to cough up another $1,000 a month, every month, for 40 years for us to be broke. Now, if we look at our total debt, things get a bit more interesting. Our total debt of $55 Trillion corresponds to $720,648 per non-governmental taxpayer. Again, using 40 years at 7% as our basis, this amounts to $4,478.33 per taxpayer per month. I realize that, if we were to somehow balance the budget, an extra $4.5k a month per taxpayer is chump change. It's only money, right? I get the impression that people hope that a Band-Aid is going to fix arterial bleeding, and that things will just go back to "normal." Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. If we, as a society, were to have 100% buy-in to a set of optimal policies dedicated to getting us out of this mess, our chances of success would be less than average. Given the flailing that is now the norm, the chances of our achieving a sustainable economic recovery at this point are about the same as walking away from a no-parachute freefall by simply doing a good PLF on concrete - zero. Again, it's been fun while it lasted. Enjoy yourself - it's later than you think. BSBD, Winsor

Probably, but you have slavery in your regon too and woman are openly opressed. And the prophet that is worshipped, married a child less than 10years old. The title of this thread is far from what would be acceptable in my country, but hey, thats just my little country. there is nothing unacceptable about calling black people black, at all. It is ambiguous, which is unacceptable. "Little Black Sambo" was, in fact, Burmese. Asian, not African. The negative connotations that arise with each successive renaming are not the result of the moniker. "A rose by any other name..." and all that.

He's a mulatto. By Zulu standards, he's a "zebra."

i disagree. you as an individual cant borrow and spend your way to wealth and prosperity and neither can the country as a whole. my 2 cents Of course you can. You go to the bank with a business plan to make a better computer. Bank lends you money. You start making computers in your garage. People buy them. You make better computers. People buy them. You introduce a better portable music device. People buy them You introduce a better phone. People buy them. You are Steve Jobs, a billionaire. Much the same story with Motorola, Microsoft, HP, Google and countless others where the company was started with borrowed money and a good idea. It's called investing for the future. Of course, we could also borrow money and piss it away on a war fought under false pretenses. If you read Sun Tzu or Niccolo Machiavelli or Carl von Clausewitz it becomes apparent that a war can wipe you out economically - regardless of the casus belli (or absence thereof). Baseless Blitzkrieg has a lot more to recommend it economically than does a fully justified military quagmire. Unfortunately, we, as a country, have a pretty sorry record of both going to war ("Remember the Maine!") and muddling through the end game. Perhaps a working knowledge of History would help some of our decision-makers, but we may never know. BSBD, Winsor

Okay, we get it. Republicans bad, Democrats good - Bush dumb, Obama smart. I realize that blamestorming makes some people happy, but the truth is that there is plenty of blame to go around. FWIW, both sides of the aisle are bastions of mediocrity, so getting smug about how wretched is the other side does not buy you much.

I have two concerns about this. I'm not sure where you come up with these numbers. The national debt is currently $13T and the labor force has 150M people. It would take a little over 7 years--not 50 years--to pay it off at $1k/month for each person. Second, even if it WERE 50 years, people shouldn't throw up their hands and throw in the towel. People should be thinking in terms of what kind of America they want to leave their children and grandchildren. If it takes 50 years to pay it off it still should be done to leave a better America for future generations. People should be thinking in terms of what needs to be done in the current situation, not rolling over and playing dead a-la KAQ or TS. A third of the population works for the Governement, which I list as "overhead." Necessary though they may be, they do not bring anything to the table economically speaking. If you throw in interest, it changes the equation completely. Perhaps the model of a 30 year mortgage, where you don't make a dent in the principal for the first 20 years, is more accurate, but it still is not going to happen in my lifetime. I do not recommend throwing in the towel, but I also would not recommend expecting much of anyone inside the beltway to get a clue. They tend to have only the most garbled concept of what happened when all the facts are in, and for them to make sense of what is going on in real time is out of the question. Face it - Congress is hardly a Mensa Convention. The people that elect them are no better, and all too many people go through life convinced of an endless litany on nonsense. Thus there is, unfortunately, zero chance that the population will catch on and come to a set of conclusions that is consistent with long-term survival. It has been fun while it lasted. Enjoy yourself - it's later than you think. BSBD, Winsor

If the US of A were to balance trade, and then to export an extra $1,000 a month worth of goods and services for every gainfully employed citizen, it would take half a century for us to be out of debt - not blood likely. As it stands, if we were to find ourselves without foreign subsidies and thus forced to operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, our way of life would implode in minutes. Functioning on 4.7 million barrels a day? Right. How about buying sneakers, jeans and a tee shirt made here? Sure. We have been living on the basis of charging whatever we want for a generation, and there is not a thing anyone could do to have things "return to normal" in the forseeable future. "Normal" for us is another way of saying "living beyond our means." We are beyond the tipping point, and my guess is that it will be a crisis on the part of our creditors that will bring things to a head. The moment other countries quit buying our debt and try to cash in, we're hosed - big time. We are in the early stages of an era that will have us looking at the '30s as the "Pretty Good Depression." What we are calling a recovery is akin the medical condition of Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlain. The situation may be stable, after a fashion, but the idea that the patient is going to get up and start dancing is ludicrous. The outcome is a given; the only question is when and how bad. I wish I was wrong, but I'm not. BSBD, Winsor

Who cares? His absence is welcome, regardless of the reasons.

I do not know whether you are simply trolling or if you are as completely technically illiterate as you portray yourself to be. I kind of prefer to think that maybe you are someone with advanced knowledge who somehow finds it entertaining to play the fool. If you are, in fact, simply pretending to be stupid, I assure you that you are overplaying your hand. You should let the faintest glimmer of intelligence come through to give your ruse some plausibility. BSBD, Winsor

Nah - the Unibomber had some modicum of technical competence.

What angle, your thread has no relevant content. After your YouTube display of someone flunking Physics 101 in their evaluation of the WTC collapse, I do not think you have much of a basis to criticize.

Belief is anathema to scientific method.

The legality of the issue is pretty much a function of who you ask. During the War of Northern Agression, for example, the President pretty much threw the Constitution out the window to "preserve" a no-longer existant union. Arguing the legality of the issue with someone dumb enough to field combat troops in a civil-unrest situation strikes me as an exercise in futility. BSBD, Winsor

As I recall, a contingent of the 82nd Airborne was available - all of whom had been well trained on non-lethal crowd control. The Governor, for reasons that had to do with money or political control, used the National Guard instead. The Guardsmen who were deployed to Kent State came directly from a protracted and particularly ugly mine strike that got zip for national coverage. The environment surrounding the Kent State uprising was not "Summer of Love," but "Days of Rage." The troops were sent there with raw nerves, amid reports of buildings being occupied and burned. Issued live ammunition and deployed with fixed bayonets, the scene was set for what then occurred. Whether the first bang was the result of agents provocateur or an accidental discharge, the volleys that preceded the cease-fire order were a foregone conclusion. In a sense, the same ill-training that had these people firing live ammo in the first place also helped to keep the casualties down. Well-trained marksmen using M-1 Garands would be expected to achieve 1 certified kill for every 1.3 rounds fired, or 51 dead and 16 wounded instead of 4 killed and 9 wounded for the 67 shots fired. Then again, the well-trained troops they had on hand would not have been shooting in the first place. This, of course, is Wendy's point - one with which I wholeheartedly agree. BSBD, Winsor

I'm sure some of these are covered elsewhere. Alec Guinness - Royal Navy David Niven - Lt. Col. (Sandhurst), British Commandos Desi Arnaz - US Army Martin Balsam - USAAC Lloyd Bentsen - USAAC David Brinkley- US Army Mel Brooks - US Army Lenny Bruce - US Navy Art Buchwald - US Marine Corps James Doohan - Canadian Army Don Adams- USMC Peter Sellers - RAF Ian Fleming - Royal Navy Christopher Lee - RAF Donald Pleasance - RAF Pilot/POW Charlton Heston - USAAF Charles Durning - US Army Ranger Charles Bronson - USAAF Tail Gunner Eddie Albert - US Navy George C. Scott - USMC Brian Keith - USMC Robert Ryan - USMC/OSS Tyrone Power - USMC Pilot Alan Alda - US Army Dennis Franz - US Army Airborne Jay North - US Navy John Russell - USMC Don Bellasario - USMC Hugh Hefner - US Army Sid Caesar - US Coast Guard Art Carney - US Army Johnny Carson - US Navy William Casey - OSS US Navy Warren Christopher - US Navy Lee van Cleef - US Navy Carroll O'Connor - Merchant Marine William Conrad - US Army Air Corps Ken Curtis - US Army Jack Dempsey - US Coast Guard David Dinkins - US Marine Corps Buddy Ebsen - US Coast Guard Norman Fell - US Army Air Corps Gerald Ford - US Navy John Ford - US Navy Daryl Gates - US Navy John Glenn - US Marine Corps Barry Goldwater - US Army Air Corps Joseph Heller - US Army Air Corps William Patrick Hitler - US Navy William Holden - US Army Air Corps Rock Hudson - US Navy E. Howard Hunt - US Navy and US Army Air Corps Daniel Inouye - US Army Chappie James, US Army Air Corps Lyndon B. Johnson - US Navy Russell Johnson - US Army Air Corps James Jones - US Army DeForest Kelley - US Army Air Corps George Kennedy - US Army Jack Kerouac - Merchant Marine Hank Ketcham - US Navy Henry Kissinger - US Army Werner Klemperer - US Army Jack Klugman - US Army Ted Knight - US Army Don Knotts - US Army Ed Koch - US Army Nancy Kulp -, US Navy Burt Lancaster - US Army Tom Landry - US Army Air Corps Frank Lautenberg - US Army Norman Lear - US Army Air Corps Roy Lichtenstein - US Army Charles Lindbergh - flew 50 combat missions as a civilian (was a combat ace...) Norman Mailer - US Army Walter Matthau - US Army Air Corps Joseph McCarthy - US Marine Corps Robert McNamara - US Army Air Corps James A. Michener - US Navy Zero Mostel - US Army Paul Newman - US Navy Tom Poston - US Army Air Corps Mario Puzo - US Army Air Corps Tony Randall - US Army Carl Reiner - US Army Gene Roddenberry - US Army Air Corps Andy Rooney - US Army Telly Savalas - US Army George Schultz - US Marine Corps Charles M. Schulz - US Army Rod Serling - US Army Alan Shepard - US Navy Deke Slayton - US Army Air Corps Robert Stack - US Navy Charles Thone -, US Army Leon Uris - US Marine Corps Kurt Vonnegut -, US Army Mort Walker - US Army George Wallace - US Army Air Corps Sam Walton - US Army Jack Warden - US Army Airborne Jack Webb - US Army Air Corps Caspar Weinberger -, US Army Charles Willeford - US Army Jonathan Winters -n, US Marine Corps Ed Wood - US Marine Corps Howard Zinn - US Army Air Corps

"The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize." Lenin The way it has been described, it would have been closer to Hollywood special-effect than a military-grade. However, given that the whole point is to freak everyone out, a lot of photogenic visuals would serve the purpose much better than a more lethal, but understated, setup. It would have made for some real Jerry Bruckheimer video for whatever tourist had a camera running. BSBD, Winsor