Welcome to my musings on whatever topic catches my eye, plus stories, recipes, handyman tips, welding, photography, and what have you. Oh, and analog/digital hardware design, and software. Please comment on the blog post so everyone who visits can see your comments.
Have a neighbor you don’t like? Now you can go to this web site, mark their house on the map, and write an anonymous report on their nefarious activities.
I’m sure the cops are very pleased with this web site and will be watching it closely. It reminds me of what neighbors did to each other in the Soviet Union, only in the United States we choose to do it voluntarily. Haha. But what happens when people post phony accusations, which they surely will? Now you can anonymously defame anyone.
Half of all Americans became poorer while the richest 1 percent became richer under Bush’s policies. Are these two facts related? Apologists for Bush’s pro-rich policies say no, that economics is not a zero sum game. But that argument is false in this case.
Economics is not a zero sum game if the economy is growing at a good pace–there’s more to go around for everybody. Even with a growing economy, it’s still possible for wealth to move from the poor to the rich if the rules are designed to make that happen. After taking inflation into account, the U.S. economy is not growing, so it amounts to a zero sum game.
If the economy is stagnant or shrinking, as the inflation-corrected numbers show, then wealth moved from the less-fortunate half of Americans into the pockets of the richest one percent. Wealth trickled up, not down. Bush’s policies, which are designed to tilt the table in favor of the rich, are doing just what they were designed to do.
The last time the richest Americans had such a large slice of the pie was in the 1920’s, before the Great Depression.
Gee, isn’t that what we were doing before the Bushes got their hands on the political steering wheel? Hmm. We’d be better off putting Saddam back in power in Iraq. Oops, I forgot, we killed him. Well, now what? The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq but Saddam was a Sunni. Oh dear, what HAVE we done? This problem was plainly visible to me back in 2003, which is one of the many reasons I spoke against attacking Iraq, but nobody seemed to care because the desire for Iraq’s oil and the phony propaganda linking Saddam with 9/11 was clouding everyone’s minds. So now we have an enormous mess. We have badly upset the balance of power in the Middle East by removing the one force that was directly counterbalancing Iran (Iraq, led by Sunni, Saddam Hussein).
We can’t restore the balance now because we removed Saddam. It was he, as a Sunni leader of a country with a Shiite majority, who created the balance. We’ve now forever lost the ability to restore the balance.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1009/p01s01-usfp.html
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Not all, of course, but a study of Ivy League colleges and universities shows that around 15 percent of the white kids in attendance did not meet the academic entrance requirements. Instead they were admitted because their parents made large contributions to the school or had a lot of pull with the alumni association. Is this a form of affirmative action for dumb rich white kids?
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