AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

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Posted on 5th December 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

New York Fashion Week

Fashionistas pose for photographs in front of a homeless man outside Moynihan Station following a New York Fashion Week show in September.

Image by Lucas Jackson / Reuters

AMERICA

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Posted on 21st June 2012 by Administrator in Economy

 

WHEN AMERICANS GAVE A SHIT

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Posted on 21st April 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

This is an Op-Ed railing against the Democratic controlled Senate and their complete lack of courage and fortitude in not passing a budget for the last three years. The politicians in this country are just a reflection of our overall society. America has become a lazy, arrogant, bloated, delusional country of materialistic bullying assholes. Our fastest growing industries are self tanning and social network development. We’re fucked. Just read the list of things we accomplished in less than three years when this country still worked and cared about the future.

Senate Dems: We don’t need no stinkin’ budget

April 29 will mark three years since Senate Democrats passed a budget. This dereliction of duty flagrantly violates the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

“On or before April 15 of each year, the Congress shall complete action on a concurrent resolution on the budget for the fiscal year,” this statute states. Senate Democrats couldn’t care less about this federal law.

  This is a milestone in human sloth. While it has taken majority “leader” Harry Reid of Nevada and Senate Democrats 36 months to conceive zero budgets, House Republicans have delivered two — one for each year they governed.

  Nonetheless, Reid said on February 3: “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done. We don’t need to do it.”

 “This is the wrong time to vote on the floor,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D, declared Tuesday. “I don’t think we will be prepared to vote before the election.”

  Floor votes would require Senate Democrats to borrow and spend, which annoys taxpayers, or cut outlays, which aggravates liberal lobbyists and porcine government-employee unions. So, Senate Democrats break the law and, instead, demand continuing resolutions, which spend on autopilot.

  Meanwhile, consider what focused, energetic humans have completed in less time than Senate Democrats have consumed to accomplish nothing on the budget.

• Broad Group, a Chinese construction company, erected the 30-story Ark Hotel in just 15 days, late last year. Laboring around the clock, employees in Changsha used prefabricated modules to build an energy-efficient structure that reportedly can withstand a magnitude-9 earthquake. According to London’s Daily Mail, no worker was injured on this project.

• Producer David O. Selznick and director Victor Fleming took nine months and 16 days (January 26 to November 11, 1939) to shoot, edit, and release “Gone with the Wind.” This beloved Civil War epic features a huge cast, massive sets, lavish costumes, and landmark performances, all of which made it a box office smash. It eventually scored a then-record 10 Academy Awards.

• Led by Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, Allied forces landed on France’s Normandy Beach on June 6, 1944 and bravely battled Nazi Germany until Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945. American and allied GIs needed 11 months and 2 days to liberate Europe.

• Creating the Empire State Building required one year, three months, and nine days. Between January 22, 1930 and May 1, 1931, some 3,400 workers built what stood as the world’s tallest skyscraper for 42 years, rising 1,454 feet above the sidewalks of New York. (The late, great World Trade Center won that distinction in 1973.) As documentarian Ric Burns noted, the building’s steel beams were forged in Pittsburgh and whisked to the site via trains, barges, and trucks. As they were riveted into place, they still were warm

• The Pentagon’s construction began on Sept. 11, 1941 and ended one year, four months, and two days later, on January 15, 1943. Col. Leslie Groves (who later spearheaded the assembly of the atomic bombs that ended World War II) led the installation of this 6.5 million-square-foot office building, still Earth’s most vast. Oddly enough, the Sept. 11 hijackers crashed into the Pentagon on the 60th anniversary of its groundbreaking, killing 189 people.

• According to the latest Department of Education data, 656,784 students earned MBAs and other master’s degrees in 2008-09. Most secured these credentials within two academic years.

• In the War of 1812, American GIs spent two years, six months, and six days (June 18, 1812 to December 24, 1814) persuading revanchist British soldiers that we weren’t kidding when we declared independence on July 4, 1776.

  These triumphs of human action are both private and public. Even government sometimes can finish what it starts, assuming leadership, industriousness, and responsibility. Too bad these virtues are AWOL in today’s Democratic Senate.

      Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock@gmail.com

COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

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Posted on 15th March 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Below is a passage from Doug Casey’s Street Fighting Man article from a few years ago. He describes how America could go down the same path as Nazi Germany. The video below describes how the Germans were led down that path. Do you see any similarities?

Emigrants and Sociopaths

Americans no longer appear to be a special breed. Of course absolutely every nation likes to think it’s a special, better breed – the Chinese, the Japanese, the British, the French, the Germans, absolutely everybody. It’s a stupid but universal conceit, like the one putting God (presumably Yahweh) on their side during a war.

I used to fancy Americans actually could be a cut above simply because they’re all the progeny of emigrants, and there are at least three reasons emigrants tend to be the “best” kind of people — at least from the point of view of someone who values freedom. First, emigrants tend to be more enterprising than their neighbors at home, willing to leave everything they have to pursue opportunity. Second, they tend to be harder working, since they know they’ll get nothing they don’t earn from strangers in a new land. Third, they tend to be anti-political, since political elites and conditions are usually what caused them to emigrate in the first place. Whether these things are because of a genetic predisposition or whether it’s simply a cultural artifact within some families and groups, or both, I think it’s a fact.

From the founding of the country, America has always had a strong emigrant ethos, and that’s one of the things that has made it different and better. But all things degrade and revert to the mean with the passage of time. The country is now a fugitive from entropy.

Another reason for taking a pessimistic view is that — notwithstanding the point I made above — there’s no reason not to believe there’s a fairly uniform distribution of sociopaths across time and space, including in America today. All countries, in all eras, have them — but in good times, they stay under their rocks. Who would have guessed that the Germans of the last century, who had much more than their share of writers, composers, philosophers, scientists, plain middle-class shopkeepers, and a well-educated, orderly population would have bred the Nazis? The Turks in the ’20s, the Russians in the ’20s and ’30s, the Chinese in the ’50s and ’60s, the Serbs in the ’90s, the Rwandans It would be easy to recount dozens of recent examples of perfectly ordinary countries that have gone bonkers. The fact is that your neighbor or your mailman, who pets his dog, hugs his kids, and plays softball on the weekends, might exhibit a much less appealing, indeed an appalling, side when social conditions change.

You’ve, of course, heard of the Milgram experiment, wherein researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal levels. Most of them did it, after being assured that it was “alright” and “necessary” by men in authority.

The problem arises when a society becomes highly politicized. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he’ll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating it with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly and together, are replaced by regulation enforced by cops funded by taxes. And sociopaths start coming out of the woodwork and are drawn to the State, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they’ve always wanted to do. It’s very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate to each other: voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.

After a certain point, a critical mass is reached. The sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government start to dominate it. They reset the social mores of the country they control. And it’s game over. I suspect we’re approaching that point.



HALFTIME IN AMERICA

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Posted on 13th February 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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