Gov .Walz will definitely strike a blow for normality, badly needed. And maybe the attacks on Harris and Walz as tne most liberal team to run for president will normalize the term 'liberal', since what they want is pretty commonsensical, humane and constructive.
Thanks for re-running your introductory post here. I am a later arrival so had not seen the passion and horror behind this page. Good start. Best wishes for its continuation, though I suppose we may both hope that some day it will become unnecessary, a curious historical artefact. But - alas! - not yet!
And this is why we love you, Nina! Thank you for flying in their faces with the truth. Perhaps we have at last found spokespersons who speak loudly and clearly enough to get the attention of those who are mired in horror and don't even know it. Thankful for you...
You seem to want to ignore basic math. What’s needed is entitlement reform and a rational federal spending. None of these four acknowledge that more deficit spending and their demagoguery means more inflation and bankruptcy for all of us.
But that's not "Marxism." And how else would you correct the terrible ravages "supply side economics" inflicted on the American middle and poor? Even Vance wants state intervention on some of these problems.
Hopefully times are a changin’ I write this from the 88 th Fiddlers festival in Galax, VA. Five yrs ago, we saw MAGA hats, Trump signs everywhere in town, a Trump booth, an incident when a mixed couple showed up. This week no MAGA hats, no signs, the dt booth no longer exists, instead a black mayor Willie Greene, black fiddlers, playing ‘Hillybilly music, looks as if people in the south are waking up.
What would your life be like without a social model that accumulates wealth massively, then disburses it, usually by the third or fourth generation, (but usually sooner), under the principles espoused by Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks dynamics”? Or Schumpeter’s “creative destruction of capital” ?
And all done with no “transportation tax” through Washington?
No Rockefeller funding startup money for the University of Chicago, Rockefeller Institute, Williamsburg, the national parks, or Spelman College, or Eastman’s wealth for MIT, or Sloan’s money for Sloan-Kettering, and MIT, or Stanford’s money for Stanford, or Cornell’s for Cornell, or Bloomberg’s money for Johns Hopkins, and black medical schools, or Langone’s for NYU Med. Or Henry and Edsel Ford’s Ford Foundation? Or the Cecil Rhodes Trust? Or what Gates and Buffet are currently doing?
As John D Rockefeller noted, “I am convinced that by the grace of God, I have been endowed with a gift to make money. And so shall I use this gift to make money, and make more money, so I can spend this money to benefit my fellow man, as I see fit”.
The fact that those funds exist proves the point that this is no Marxist nation, not even close. You left out Mercer and Mellon's money for lunatic causes, Uehlines for fighting against gun control, Barre Seid's $1.6 billion for crazy Catholic fanatic Leonard Leo to buy the Supreme Court ...
Agreed. The capitalist model, while not without its failings, has worked far better for the greater good than any alternative. But Harris - Walz socialist model will put us squarely on the path or directly into a dysfunctional neo-Marxist autocratic model. At best, that might further devolve into a Owen model, or a Oneida one, neither of which worked. Or perhaps like Cuba and Venezuela, which have turned out to be latter day successors to the Southern plantation antebellum slave model. Many of us, though, have been there, done that, and don’t need to an encore performance.
Remember, though, that Andrew Mellon’s money coupled with Carnegie’s was the basis of Carnegie Mellon. And Carnegie did lots of other stuff (as in libraries), as did Alfred Nobel. Then there were outfits like Bell Labs, funded by sanctioned monopolies, from which came the transistor, the microchip, satellite communications, and the Big Bang.
Suppose all the wealth accumulated had been divided equally along socialist lines among the masses. The vast majority of great research universities and hospitals simply would not exist today — just Federally funded mediocrity, with a handful of standout initiatives like DARPA, the Internet, and some of the land grant colleges (including MIT, Cornell, Purdue, and Cal Davis).
In the course of nine years the Republican Party morphed into a bizarre theatrical Christian Nationalist death cult. Donald Trump led the historic takeover as avatar warrior priest. Feeding the Gods of wealth and power is tough work but someone’s gotta do it. Several years of ritual snorting crushed Adderall on the set of The Apprentice wiped out the membranes of Donald’s sinus passages. Sometimes stray chunks of Adderall fly out his mouth. Sometimes they lodge around the frontal, ethmoid, and sphenoid cavities of his sinuses, causing errant pulsing signals to randomly ping different parts of his brain. Three simultaneous but separate, perfectly rational trains of thought sound mixed up and demented to those not attuned to the ways and wisdom of The Shaman High Priest - Dear Leader. <> It's sad dear leader has to sacrifice himself so that we may be delivered to the holy colony of oligarchic custody, but here we are, just when the death cult is spectacularly flaming out on live TV every day. <> Please open your hymnals to page 6:
Marxism is the intellectual basis of socialism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Pol Potism, Communism and all its variations. Unfortunately for all its idealism, without imposing an authoritarian and autocratic discipline, it never has worked. Millions have been murdered or starved. But clowns like Harris and Trump keep up the word salad demagoguery to gull the body politic with spending neither are willing pay (or tax) for, or eliminate the waste by intelligently reallocating resources. They just keep promising more to be paid for by inflation and deficits. Then groan and moan about the homelessness, lack of housing and infrastructure, welfare dependency, inappropriate Covid responses — the list is as big as the Federal register, Federal budget, or US Code.
So Trump's tax cuts for billionaires were a good idea? Wealth hoarding a good idea?
Private equity buying trailer parks to suck up every last dollar from disabled and people on fixed income a good idea? Private equity getting into home ownership to reap rent income? Again for the tiniest percentage of upper income people.
Are you aware of the systems in Europe where the public pays for health care? Is that "Marxism?"
In Norway, the government gets involved when factories want to leave towns. Is that "Pol Pot ism"
And happy you drug (as they say in the South) Bob Kraft into this. He's a true vulgarian and proves the point, like Crowe and Thiel, that money doesn't care who has it.
Unfortunately weird is correct, but don’t say “weirdo” or you touch a nerve lol. It’s okay to some to say that immigrants should be sent back but gloss over the origin of their American identity. Or identity in general. Ever drive down the road and see an American flag, a Ukrainian flag, and a Confederate flag outside someone’s house? That’s weird. Especially for someone who lives in the North and wasn’t born in the South. And as someone born in the Deeeeeppppp South that does have relatives who were in the Civil War (one got shot in the butt stealing horses), I would never fly that flag outside my house and can’t understand why anyone would knowing the true history of it.
However, outside of the weirdness I think the bigger question I have is as a Supreme Court Justice should you not be smart enough to realize you are being bought? And if you are that smart and you are okay with that, then, you shouldn’t be one as you are already compromised. Although I wonder with all the praising of Putin lately by a certain fellow running for President, along with his history of sucking up to him, I have to ask: who else is compromised?
Unfortunately we now have a neo fascist ticket running against a neo Marxist ticket. Whatever happened to the centrist tradition of both parties going all the way back to Eisenhower?
I don't understand the "Marxist" part of your point of view. What is Marxist about these people? Are they seizing private equity funds and redistributing the wealth? Arresting factory owners and putting workers in charge?
How is allowing the destruction of inner cities like Minneapolis or Portland and doing nothing any different? Or allowing criminal shoplifting in NYC or San Francisco?
Last time I looked no one was "allowing" that. It is illegal. Are you suggesting that the Democrats are using homeless and criminal people to run a Marxist revolution? Is that what they report on Murdoch's voice of the billionaires network?
Start by considering Walz’ inane comment that “one man’s socialism is another man’s neighborliness”. Then consider Harris’ firing 87% of her staff with the other 13% quitting. That’s not the leadership we need.
More importantly, none of these four idiots recognize the urgency of entitlement reform or balancing the budget. Their continuing profligacy means ongoing inflation. But they all continue to demagogue to their base and dither in identity politics.
What this country needs is more unum and less pluribus.
Please be careful with your words. Profligacy, idiots, needing entitlement reform, etc, that's your opinion. And we can agree or disagree.
But w Marxism you are tossing around a slogan that Republicans like Ted Cruz paste on all their opponents, and completely divorced from history and meaning.
What about slashing some of the defense budget? Or the GOP's slashing the IRS budget so there are fewer agents to examine the wealthy holding so they can be taxed accordingly. Seems all you want @Logan is for the money to go into the pockets of corporations and the wealthy, instead of supporting people in this country.
Please, do tell which "entitlements" you find distasteful. Education? Sure, let's make that all for profit. Let's give Big Banks and Investment firms the chance to profit off of Social Security funds. Better yet, let's kill Medicare so that our Healthcare system can take further advantage to make profits off working people and they decide who receives care.
If the Right didn't constantly decrease funding by killing more tax collection from the wealthy and corporations, or rob the coffers of these programs and never putting the funding back, there would be less problems. But of course, you offer no solutions, just "reducing spending" or whatever you call it. You're just as bad as the GOP by creating problems to collapse the system, calling it Marxist or Socialist. Only then to have it all devolve into a place like Russia with oligarchs to rule them all. Really don't care for your vision of the USA.
You totally miss my point. Both political parties are addicted to more spending and lower taxes. Over 400 years ago, Hobbes assessed this in his “Leviathan”. Deficit spending and higher debt eventually leads to collapse. It has happened in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and every nation state since, including all the Western European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And don’t forget the collapse of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas. Or all of the Chinese empires, or the ROC’s loss of the mainland.
What I’m saying is that judicious budgeting and taxing is a required imperative across the board. Less defense, greater competition in medicine and health care, enforcing antitrust, increased taxes for social security and Medicare (tax rates have not kept pace with longevity), open up under-50 social security accounts to index funds, restricting student loans to critically needed STEM skills, greater licensing income from technologies developed in the National Labs, and from HHS and PHS pharma research. Even the Secret Service costs about $10 for every American man woman and child, and doesn’t do their job very well lately. And yes, higher taxes, as the bottom 50% pays nothing, and the upper 50% can easily pay more.
And please stop subsidizing electric cars. On balance, even when charged from non-fossil fueled sources, the lifetime environmental and economic cost of producing their batteries, recycling them, the weight of those batteries on rubber tires (they last 1/4 of the life of treads on gasoline cars) and concrete roads (cement production is the third largest source of greenhouse gas), and the need for stronger guard rails along the highways all increase carbon. EVs will only work with lighter batteries, and sourcing their power from non-fossil sources.
Volvo, Ford, and Rowan Atkinson (a Cambridge EE) have all concluded they don’t make economic or environmental sense — yet.
Trump is the Russia lover. Eisenhower was a Republican. He was okay with Jim Crow. Forced birth. Women not having their own credit cards. We are far better off now.
Gov .Walz will definitely strike a blow for normality, badly needed. And maybe the attacks on Harris and Walz as tne most liberal team to run for president will normalize the term 'liberal', since what they want is pretty commonsensical, humane and constructive.
Thanks for re-running your introductory post here. I am a later arrival so had not seen the passion and horror behind this page. Good start. Best wishes for its continuation, though I suppose we may both hope that some day it will become unnecessary, a curious historical artefact. But - alas! - not yet!
So excited about the Harris-Walz ticket. She made a fantastic choice. Down with "Weird", up with calling out naked wannabe emperors!
America is about to be reclaimed!! It is feeling so good to be ab American again
And this is why we love you, Nina! Thank you for flying in their faces with the truth. Perhaps we have at last found spokespersons who speak loudly and clearly enough to get the attention of those who are mired in horror and don't even know it. Thankful for you...
thank you for reading!
Always!
Wasn't it George W. who said, "Well, that was some weird shit,” after Trump's inaugural speech?
yup!
If we could put them all atop a Falcon 9 rocket along with musk et al … Musk wants to die on mars and he could have company..
You seem to want to ignore basic math. What’s needed is entitlement reform and a rational federal spending. None of these four acknowledge that more deficit spending and their demagoguery means more inflation and bankruptcy for all of us.
But that's not "Marxism." And how else would you correct the terrible ravages "supply side economics" inflicted on the American middle and poor? Even Vance wants state intervention on some of these problems.
Don't talk too much sense now. This is Weirdo world.
Hopefully times are a changin’ I write this from the 88 th Fiddlers festival in Galax, VA. Five yrs ago, we saw MAGA hats, Trump signs everywhere in town, a Trump booth, an incident when a mixed couple showed up. This week no MAGA hats, no signs, the dt booth no longer exists, instead a black mayor Willie Greene, black fiddlers, playing ‘Hillybilly music, looks as if people in the south are waking up.
What would your life be like without a social model that accumulates wealth massively, then disburses it, usually by the third or fourth generation, (but usually sooner), under the principles espoused by Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks dynamics”? Or Schumpeter’s “creative destruction of capital” ?
And all done with no “transportation tax” through Washington?
No Rockefeller funding startup money for the University of Chicago, Rockefeller Institute, Williamsburg, the national parks, or Spelman College, or Eastman’s wealth for MIT, or Sloan’s money for Sloan-Kettering, and MIT, or Stanford’s money for Stanford, or Cornell’s for Cornell, or Bloomberg’s money for Johns Hopkins, and black medical schools, or Langone’s for NYU Med. Or Henry and Edsel Ford’s Ford Foundation? Or the Cecil Rhodes Trust? Or what Gates and Buffet are currently doing?
As John D Rockefeller noted, “I am convinced that by the grace of God, I have been endowed with a gift to make money. And so shall I use this gift to make money, and make more money, so I can spend this money to benefit my fellow man, as I see fit”.
That’s trickle down.
The fact that those funds exist proves the point that this is no Marxist nation, not even close. You left out Mercer and Mellon's money for lunatic causes, Uehlines for fighting against gun control, Barre Seid's $1.6 billion for crazy Catholic fanatic Leonard Leo to buy the Supreme Court ...
Agreed. The capitalist model, while not without its failings, has worked far better for the greater good than any alternative. But Harris - Walz socialist model will put us squarely on the path or directly into a dysfunctional neo-Marxist autocratic model. At best, that might further devolve into a Owen model, or a Oneida one, neither of which worked. Or perhaps like Cuba and Venezuela, which have turned out to be latter day successors to the Southern plantation antebellum slave model. Many of us, though, have been there, done that, and don’t need to an encore performance.
Remember, though, that Andrew Mellon’s money coupled with Carnegie’s was the basis of Carnegie Mellon. And Carnegie did lots of other stuff (as in libraries), as did Alfred Nobel. Then there were outfits like Bell Labs, funded by sanctioned monopolies, from which came the transistor, the microchip, satellite communications, and the Big Bang.
Suppose all the wealth accumulated had been divided equally along socialist lines among the masses. The vast majority of great research universities and hospitals simply would not exist today — just Federally funded mediocrity, with a handful of standout initiatives like DARPA, the Internet, and some of the land grant colleges (including MIT, Cornell, Purdue, and Cal Davis).
In the course of nine years the Republican Party morphed into a bizarre theatrical Christian Nationalist death cult. Donald Trump led the historic takeover as avatar warrior priest. Feeding the Gods of wealth and power is tough work but someone’s gotta do it. Several years of ritual snorting crushed Adderall on the set of The Apprentice wiped out the membranes of Donald’s sinus passages. Sometimes stray chunks of Adderall fly out his mouth. Sometimes they lodge around the frontal, ethmoid, and sphenoid cavities of his sinuses, causing errant pulsing signals to randomly ping different parts of his brain. Three simultaneous but separate, perfectly rational trains of thought sound mixed up and demented to those not attuned to the ways and wisdom of The Shaman High Priest - Dear Leader. <> It's sad dear leader has to sacrifice himself so that we may be delivered to the holy colony of oligarchic custody, but here we are, just when the death cult is spectacularly flaming out on live TV every day. <> Please open your hymnals to page 6:
https://youtu.be/lDBPq_9hKqE?si=pQL4vJQhJzzKA0T0
Marxism is the intellectual basis of socialism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Pol Potism, Communism and all its variations. Unfortunately for all its idealism, without imposing an authoritarian and autocratic discipline, it never has worked. Millions have been murdered or starved. But clowns like Harris and Trump keep up the word salad demagoguery to gull the body politic with spending neither are willing pay (or tax) for, or eliminate the waste by intelligently reallocating resources. They just keep promising more to be paid for by inflation and deficits. Then groan and moan about the homelessness, lack of housing and infrastructure, welfare dependency, inappropriate Covid responses — the list is as big as the Federal register, Federal budget, or US Code.
So Trump's tax cuts for billionaires were a good idea? Wealth hoarding a good idea?
Private equity buying trailer parks to suck up every last dollar from disabled and people on fixed income a good idea? Private equity getting into home ownership to reap rent income? Again for the tiniest percentage of upper income people.
Are you aware of the systems in Europe where the public pays for health care? Is that "Marxism?"
In Norway, the government gets involved when factories want to leave towns. Is that "Pol Pot ism"
Wonderful origin story for "Freakshow."
And happy you drug (as they say in the South) Bob Kraft into this. He's a true vulgarian and proves the point, like Crowe and Thiel, that money doesn't care who has it.
Unfortunately weird is correct, but don’t say “weirdo” or you touch a nerve lol. It’s okay to some to say that immigrants should be sent back but gloss over the origin of their American identity. Or identity in general. Ever drive down the road and see an American flag, a Ukrainian flag, and a Confederate flag outside someone’s house? That’s weird. Especially for someone who lives in the North and wasn’t born in the South. And as someone born in the Deeeeeppppp South that does have relatives who were in the Civil War (one got shot in the butt stealing horses), I would never fly that flag outside my house and can’t understand why anyone would knowing the true history of it.
However, outside of the weirdness I think the bigger question I have is as a Supreme Court Justice should you not be smart enough to realize you are being bought? And if you are that smart and you are okay with that, then, you shouldn’t be one as you are already compromised. Although I wonder with all the praising of Putin lately by a certain fellow running for President, along with his history of sucking up to him, I have to ask: who else is compromised?
Unfortunately we now have a neo fascist ticket running against a neo Marxist ticket. Whatever happened to the centrist tradition of both parties going all the way back to Eisenhower?
I don't understand the "Marxist" part of your point of view. What is Marxist about these people? Are they seizing private equity funds and redistributing the wealth? Arresting factory owners and putting workers in charge?
How is allowing the destruction of inner cities like Minneapolis or Portland and doing nothing any different? Or allowing criminal shoplifting in NYC or San Francisco?
Last time I looked no one was "allowing" that. It is illegal. Are you suggesting that the Democrats are using homeless and criminal people to run a Marxist revolution? Is that what they report on Murdoch's voice of the billionaires network?
Start by considering Walz’ inane comment that “one man’s socialism is another man’s neighborliness”. Then consider Harris’ firing 87% of her staff with the other 13% quitting. That’s not the leadership we need.
More importantly, none of these four idiots recognize the urgency of entitlement reform or balancing the budget. Their continuing profligacy means ongoing inflation. But they all continue to demagogue to their base and dither in identity politics.
What this country needs is more unum and less pluribus.
But Logan, none of that equals "Marxism" !
Please be careful with your words. Profligacy, idiots, needing entitlement reform, etc, that's your opinion. And we can agree or disagree.
But w Marxism you are tossing around a slogan that Republicans like Ted Cruz paste on all their opponents, and completely divorced from history and meaning.
You seem to be on the wrong site, Sir.
What about slashing some of the defense budget? Or the GOP's slashing the IRS budget so there are fewer agents to examine the wealthy holding so they can be taxed accordingly. Seems all you want @Logan is for the money to go into the pockets of corporations and the wealthy, instead of supporting people in this country.
Please, do tell which "entitlements" you find distasteful. Education? Sure, let's make that all for profit. Let's give Big Banks and Investment firms the chance to profit off of Social Security funds. Better yet, let's kill Medicare so that our Healthcare system can take further advantage to make profits off working people and they decide who receives care.
If the Right didn't constantly decrease funding by killing more tax collection from the wealthy and corporations, or rob the coffers of these programs and never putting the funding back, there would be less problems. But of course, you offer no solutions, just "reducing spending" or whatever you call it. You're just as bad as the GOP by creating problems to collapse the system, calling it Marxist or Socialist. Only then to have it all devolve into a place like Russia with oligarchs to rule them all. Really don't care for your vision of the USA.
You totally miss my point. Both political parties are addicted to more spending and lower taxes. Over 400 years ago, Hobbes assessed this in his “Leviathan”. Deficit spending and higher debt eventually leads to collapse. It has happened in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and every nation state since, including all the Western European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And don’t forget the collapse of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas. Or all of the Chinese empires, or the ROC’s loss of the mainland.
What I’m saying is that judicious budgeting and taxing is a required imperative across the board. Less defense, greater competition in medicine and health care, enforcing antitrust, increased taxes for social security and Medicare (tax rates have not kept pace with longevity), open up under-50 social security accounts to index funds, restricting student loans to critically needed STEM skills, greater licensing income from technologies developed in the National Labs, and from HHS and PHS pharma research. Even the Secret Service costs about $10 for every American man woman and child, and doesn’t do their job very well lately. And yes, higher taxes, as the bottom 50% pays nothing, and the upper 50% can easily pay more.
And please stop subsidizing electric cars. On balance, even when charged from non-fossil fueled sources, the lifetime environmental and economic cost of producing their batteries, recycling them, the weight of those batteries on rubber tires (they last 1/4 of the life of treads on gasoline cars) and concrete roads (cement production is the third largest source of greenhouse gas), and the need for stronger guard rails along the highways all increase carbon. EVs will only work with lighter batteries, and sourcing their power from non-fossil sources.
Volvo, Ford, and Rowan Atkinson (a Cambridge EE) have all concluded they don’t make economic or environmental sense — yet.
Trump is the Russia lover. Eisenhower was a Republican. He was okay with Jim Crow. Forced birth. Women not having their own credit cards. We are far better off now.