Oddly I think the foreign reporting of NPR is still mildly left-wing, but the domestic reporting treats everyone equally, which, since the Republicans are making so much noise, makes them center-right.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
David, Coulter was clearly using satire in her column of June 3, 2009. She wasnt justifying terrorism, she was using the lefts justifications for abortions in jest.Originally Posted by KaiserD2
"I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?
Following the moral precepts of liberals, I believe the correct position is: If you don't believe in shooting abortionists, then don't shoot one"
the column: http://www.anncoulter.org/cgi-local/...gi?article=315
This of course is distorted, as usual, by those on the left and thrown around the internet and blogs as proof that the right is "dangerous".
Again, what talk show host has advocated terrorist acts?
You're kidding, right? First of all, she has said this hundreds of times. Second, she's saying people who shoot doctors who perform abortions shouldn't be punished. The Nazis made exactly the same claim on behalf of Storm Troopers who beat Communists to death.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
I think she's pretty clearly trying to point out the irony of people condemning the murder of abortionists while supporting abortion - in her typically inflammatory way.
That was my understanding as well. Of course, the difference here is that there is a universal agreement that the murder of a physician IS murder, while abortion is murder only in terms of pro-life ideology. But the sense of what she was saying is clear, and it's true that she wasn't trying to excuse murder, but to make fun of the "excusing" of abortion.
(I put "excusing" in quotes because there is, in fact, nothing to excuse.)
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
My blog: https://brianrushwriter.wordpress.com/
The Order Master (volume one of Refuge), a science fantasy. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GZZWEAS
Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/382903
NO, clearly she is mocking the logic of the argument of the "choice" advocates.
In a civilized nation you're not supposed to kill based on opinion--or anything else. You are supposed to obey the law. I certainly think non-violent civil disobedience has done a lot for the world, but again, murder ain't it. It's not liberal opinion that allows abortions, it's the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, laid down by a court that included four Republican appointees, and repeatedly reaffirmed.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Of course. David, your mistake here (and you are making one) is to take what Coulter said literally, when in reality it was a spoof of something abortion-rights advocates sometimes say, especially those who also say they personally don't believe in abortion. Here, I'll make it easy for you.
"I wouldn't have an abortion myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for abortion. But how will criminalizing women making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing abortions?"
Compare this with what Coulter said. Do you understand now? She was making what I regard (and I'm sure you do too) as a specious equivalency between abortion and murdering doctors, but she was NOT advocating murdering doctors. That's a complete misreading of where she was coming from here.
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
My blog: https://brianrushwriter.wordpress.com/
The Order Master (volume one of Refuge), a science fantasy. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GZZWEAS
Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/382903
Here's an outside perspective on the US
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...p_mostpop_read
Its utterly ridiculoous that a state worker can retire at 50 with 90% of his final wages. Im assuming with a COLA every year too. I guess I should go get a teaching job in Cali!
YEAH! Like cops ... and firefighters ... and military personnel ... and congress-peeps ...
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."
I meant to paste this link for the outside perspective, but that CA pension article aptly describes another problem. It makes me think that Europe is way more socialist than I thought.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...nt/8564159.stm
California is famous for trends that lead the rest of America. Its Proposition 13 (1978), which froze property taxes for any property owner or at least made them very difficult to raise, was the first portent of the recent 3T, and like much of the 3T it has had unintended and disastrous consequences. The most obvious is the deterioration of K-12 education, which had long been one of the best in America and is now among the worst among the states. The second is the heavy reliance upon the public college system to undo the damage, a very expensive way to educate people. In general it is far more economical to teach people how to read, write, and do math up to the Calculus in high school than in community colleges.
Large-scale property-owners get a huge tax break in California, and paradoxically the tax system encourages owners of slum properties to resist redevelopment. In 1978, California housing was largely new; such housing is now 32 years older. Tenants get no break; they pay the market rate.
Beyond any question, the educational system in California is breaking down. The system is perfectly made to create people who can work only as retail sales clerks, fast-food workers, busboys, and convenience-store employees who can never make a real living who stay because their aging parents still have good jobs or abundant pensions in houses that have continued to appreciate (most of the time) since the 1960s without property-tax increases because they would never move to a place where they might have to shovel snow out of the driveway. (OK, Michigan is even worse for economics!) But that system is harmful to anyone whose family hasn't been there for at least twenty years and has never bought real estate (unless during the Double-Zero Decade, when the corrupt boom supported by predatory lending destroyed wealth and created unpayable debt).
Europe is not so much more socialist as America is honest-to-Ayn-Rand... plutocratic.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 03-19-2010 at 02:06 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Ugh! I thought that happened only in Colombia, Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan!
Last edited by pbrower2a; 03-19-2010 at 02:18 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Yes, it seems most of California -- politically, economically, societally -- is breaking down. Odd, when it seems California was the 'model' for where the U.S., as a nation, was to go. High taxes, but significant social programs designed to help the needy. Green regulations. Strong governmental control and involvement.
What the #$%@ happened?
The Third Turning, plain and simple. People stayed on short time horizons that they developed during the Awakening. They came to value only immediate gain and what they could get with it. They pretended that credit was wealth instead of its diametric opposite. They quit seeing beyond themselves, even short-changing their children. They saw cheap labor as a solution to their immediate desires (maybe we can get some gardening done on the cheap), never realizing that such could be the fate of their kids who themselves might become day laborers. The Right offered tax cuts as the cure for all that ailed America, and people bought in because a little more money might buy a little hedonism. Religious fundamentalism offered pie-in-the-sky for elderly people who began to think only of themselves. People failed to invest in small businesses, and Big Business got all-powerful for lack of alternatives for most people, and look what that did to real wages.
But it wasn't all Big Business. People were putting cable TV and VHS and in turn DVD players into their kids' bedrooms instead of furnishing the bedrooms with books. Kids who in earlier times might have expanded their minds on novels and poetry were watching R-rated video, soap operas, Ultimate Fighting, and other sludge. Kids were taking jobs so that they could buy luxuries instead of doing their homework, and they were compromising their education by taking courses which required less homework. For what? More fashionable clothing? Video games and trashy movies?
People bought mind-numbing entertainment instead of putting attention into their kids' welfare. Sure, there were communities, like Asian and some Hispanic immigrants who did differently, but those were the people least assimilated into the worst ways of America. Those people may fare better than most native-born Americans in the 4T.
In the end they got the worst President since at least Andrew Johnson (Herbert Hoover at least had a moral conscience)
It may be that the parts of America least hurt by the 3T are those in which people were unable to buy into the consumerism and hedonism that gutted souls and drained wealth. That probably means rural America and some immigrant communities.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 03-19-2010 at 07:38 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
That's certainly true in the rural areas I come from.
You may like this new Jim Quinn post.
My quick guess as to why (it at the very least contributed somewhat to the mindset): Scare of Nuclear Annihilation
At some point you just stop saying "I'm scared of the bomb" and you just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.Funny thing is that this movie was released about the time America started shifting into Awakening mode.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 03-19-2010 at 02:55 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
I don't see the Federal Reserve as the problem. But we are in Potterville, like it or not. We bought glitz and abandoned substance; we allowed ourselves to be paid in credit instead of insisting on solid pay (which would have required unions and occasional strikes which might have been inconvenient). We quit investing in small businesses and ended up with a few giant corporations running the show. We rejected hard work that dirtied our hands for bureaucratic toadying that sullied our souls. We took on debt while pretending that what we got with the debt was either enriching experiences or the Good Life.
We debased college education from a predictable offering of cultural and intellectual values into an intellectual playground, a watered-down graduate school; with the debasement of education we ended up with sophisticated people with unsophisticated values. After that the teachers who came from college had no idea of the concept of the Educated Person. (Quinn missed that!) College was originally meant to teach the elite of leadership that there was more to life than material gain, display, and indulgence, and in essence that there was more than power and the sex drive and you can ask whether the typical MBA with a huge student debt and the prospect of a career of getting paid well for treating others badly whether there is anything more. Are you kidding! He is looking for payback, and not to change the world for the better. Meanwhile the people who work for near-starvation find themselves in a grim, dreary, joyless world in which prosperity is all for the few or on unrealistic sitcoms and dramas.
Value Added as a % of GDP
Industry 1970 1980 1990 2000 2008
Manufacturing 22.7% 20.0% 16.3% 14.5% 11.5%
Construction 4.8% 4.7% 4.3% 4.4% 4.1%
Retail & Wholesale Trade 14.5% 14.0% 12.9% 12.7% 11.9%
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate 14.6% 15.9% 18.0% 19.7% 20.0%
Professional Services 5.4% 6.7% 9.8% 11.6% 12.7%
Educational Services 0.7% 0.6% 0.7% 0.8% 1.0%
Health Services 3.2% 4.4% 6.0% 6.1% 7.1%
Government 15.2% 13.8% 13.9% 12.3% 12.9%
Other 18.9% 19.9% 18.1% 17.9% 18.8%
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
Source: BEA
Manufacturing has taken a huge drop in its share of GNP -- nearly a half -- since 1970. It's worth remembering that manufacturing used to be the default route to middle-income life, where people of limited or inadequate education got to exchange their labor and effort for a semblance of the American dream.
Construction has also shrunk significantly. It has always been cyclical, but like manufacturing it typically offered middle-income pay for people of limited formal education. The sheer number of people in it suggests about a 15% drop. Of course construction is cyclical, but the downward spiral is obvious.
I am surprised to find that "retail and wholesale trade" has taken a beating. maybe Wal-Mart and other box stores are more efficient than the mom-and-pop outfits that the giant retailers have put out of business. But that is a loss of about 17% of the share of GNP. The mom-and-pop stores that the giant chains replaced used to charge more... but somehow, what one bought from them one cherished because the owner was able to tell you why you wanted something and was capable of servicing what one bought after one left the store. We are buying a lot of stuff from Wal-Mart and the like only to cast it quickly into the landfill, which is no bargain for ourselves, let alone for the environment.
Education seems to be steady except that it is almost counter-cyclical; as the economy worsens, people tend to stay in school longer or get retraining. Health services have just about doubled, which reflects in part an aging population that needs more medical care, that medical treatments are more expensive than they used to be, and that the pharmaceutical industry is able to gouge for more. I can attribute most of the growth to an aging population, so I won't complain. Government has been in steady decline.
I have no idea of what "other" means -- agriculture? entertainment? advertising? The portmanteau category has been steady.
Now look at two other categories:
1. Professional services. Litigation? It's hard to do anything without a lawyer, and the way things are going we may eventually need to consult an attorney just to breathe. Architecture relates closely to building construction, and engineering to public works and manufacturing. As the latter two are in decline, attorneys' fees must be becoming a bigger chunk of the economy. I doubt that CPA and consulting activities can outgrow the economy on the whole.
Could that be political operatives? Consider how expensive politics has become. Much of political life is an attempt to grab the graft.
2. Finance, Insurance, Real estate. Real-estate activity seems mostly connected to the stock of housing and commercial property. Insurance? It keeps rising especially as medical costs and litigation costs rise. Finance?
BINGO! Add retail and wholesale trade to "finance, insurance, and real estate", and you realize that people are paying more for credit on what they bought earlier than what they are buying now. What people are spending on insurance isn't going through stores and restaurants. Add the two and you have 30% in 1970 and 32% in 2008. More money is flowing to lending entities from the somewhat-honorable banks to the licit loan-sharks (payday lenders, for example).
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
However, "The Day After" (1983) was released right around the time the Unraveling hit, give or take. It could very well be that people indulged in mindless hedonism and a he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins philosophy of life because, on some primal level, they suspected that they wouldn't live to have grandchildren anyway.My quick guess as to why (it at the very least contributed somewhat to the mindset): Scare of Nuclear Annihilation
At some point you just stop saying "I'm scared of the bomb" and you just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Roadbldr '59; 03-20-2010 at 09:00 PM.
"Better hurry. There's a storm coming. His storm!!!" :-O -Abigail Freemantle, "The Stand" by Stephen King
John Lewis called a "N***er" Barney Frank called a "F**got" today on the Hill by teabaggers.
Those f***ing bigoted bastards!
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
I was digusted when I heard about this as well. This just shows you the lack of sophistication within the movement, and how desperate the teabaggers are getting.John Lewis called a "N***er" Barney Frank called a "F**got" today on the Hill by teabaggers.
Those f***ing bigoted bastards!
Eh, this just shows how much disrespect there is for the government.
There's more to it than just disrespecting the government. Their fear of the impending vote and their lack of political sophistication has given them no other choice (in their minds) but to intimidate certain members of Congress (namely those who are homosexual and African American)through spitting and racial/homophobic insults.
