30
Aug
From my buddy –H. This was posted as a comment, but merits it’s own post.
I had to re-read this piece couple times to make sure I did not mis-read it:
….. To help Americans reduce their debt, Kerry is proposing to cut credit card fees and rates, and put limits on below-prime or zero-interest loans, which Kerry said often hurt consumers when the rates rise or the principals come due. He also wants lenders to better disclose their policies for raising rates.
He described how credit card companies can increase interest rates up to 29 percent in some cases just for one late payment. “So all of a sudden, people get caught in a trap, the debt trap,” he said.
At the Daly City event, Lori Guy, a 35-year-old high-tech worker from San Jose, was held up as an example by Kerry as a victim of bad credit-card policies.
She told the crowd how her employer, a large semiconductor manufacturer whom she did not identify, cut her salary after she moved West in 2000 to take a job. Her credit card bills piled up and she got socked with late payments, but she had no place to turn until she finally got back on her feet.
She blamed her company’s outsourcing of jobs overseas for the cuts in salaries, and she had left many in the crowd believing she had been laid off.
In an interview later, however, Guy said she is still employed by the company and after two merit raises in the past year she now makes more money than she ever had ….
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Moon’s comment: Huh? He’s done this several times in speeches. I don’t know if he doesn’t clear people’s entire stories beforehand or what, but that entire presentation contradicted itself and debunked the point Kerry was making. It has been commented by several people that it appears Kerry is just winging it, and honestly, I see a lot more evidence to support that claim than evidence that he screens anything at all. His campaign is floundering for the very reason you show. He is not getting a coherent message accross other than “I was a Vietnam War Hero and Bush wasn’t”. His other theme is “vote for me, I’m not Bush”, but, he has muddled so many opportunities I think a lot of the ABB crowd are getting so confused that they will vote for Bush by accident.
A friend of mine posted this comment on The Motley fool: “God, you are skinny.”
This was my reply:
Yup, I’m skinny. Too skinny. Do you know what it’s like being too skinny in an obesity-conscious world? Huh? Do you? Try going to a decent restaurant right now and getting a meal guaranteed to clog arteries, thereby slowing my system down so I can gain some weight. Go ahead, do it! It can’t be done. Everywhere I turn are these damned low-carb starvation diets. Even if I try eating twice as much, it’s wasted ( get it, wasted? Too subtle probably ). Ever since these damned Santa Monica diets and low-carb diets have infiltrated main stream society, I have withered away to nothing. Even my damned beer gut is gone because my wife will only buy lite beer and tequila. I took up racquetball, within in a month or so, poof, another 10 pounds gone and people in sub-Sahara Africa are starting to feel pity for me. I will never die as long as the country obsesses with no-carb no fat food, I will fade away one molecule at a time till there is absolutely nothing left. I’m just waiting for that worm to turn again when the Surgeon General suddenly freaks out and realizes the country is over-whelmed with immaciated unhealthy people who are not getting all the vitamins and minerals they need every day to remain healthy and start encouraging McDonald’s to add natural lard to their french fries. It may not happen for me in my lifetime, but I don’t want my son to suffer this same fate.
I felt it was too important to not be on my blog.
30
Aug
“Bitch, go home! We don’t want you here!” At one point, police cordoned off a city block after several dozen demonstrators jeered and razzed the incoming audience.
Time for a quiz:
Did ya pass? If so, then we’ll come to the same conclusion. What is the point in protesting if no one has a clue what you’re protesting? If they are not protesting anything particular, then it seems to me all they are doing is entertaining themselves by shouting obscenities and harassing people exercising their rights under the Constitution. Namely, Article IX of the Ammendments to the Constitution, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” To wit, follow me here, the Federal government, by allowing others the ability to express their freedom of speech, is disparaging others to participate in the process defined by the US Constitution. Since these people are intent on disrupting the political process to choose our President, they are not protected under the definition of free speech, and are guilty of interfering with the delegates’ Constitutional Right.
Not only should these particular protesters who have no real cause be detained for disrupting the Conventions ( I mean Republican AND Democrat, this is not a party issue ), they should be charged for violating Delegates’ civil rights ( harassment ), and Constitutional Rights ( disparaging others retained by the people ).
Where is ACLU during these conventions? Why don’t we contact them and ask?
30
Aug
A while back, I was designing a website for my misguided step-son. We did the usual, inserting rock poses of the band members, making up a song list, the whole works. We were doing the history of the band, when he made a comment in it that just stuck with me, “While we were Rotted Soil, things happened, and the system forced us to change our name”.
How often do you hear of something being blamed on “the system”? This kid has no clue about law, responsbility, or any kind of obligation. He doesn’t even have a clue what “the system” is. But, at the age of 16, he’s already blaming things on it. Where do we learn to do that? Gotta put blame anywhere but on ourselves, even if we have to make up what it is we are blaming it on. People “work the system“, are “victims of the system“, are “oppressed by the system“. Hell, some people even “survive the system“.
The system’s” obviously a pretty horrible thing.
However, there really is no such thing as “the system”. It’s an imaginary cop-out for people who don’t want to spend the time to figure exactly what it is they’re fighting. Children in foster homes are not “victims of the system”, they’re victims of failed parents, families, or guardians. Put the blame where the blame is due. Battered women are not victims of “the system”, they are victims of individuals who only know violence as a means of negotiation. Blame it directly on their attackers. No one is oppressed by “the system” in the US, they have not bothered to find out exactly what their rights and resources are. The misguided step-son is blaming it on “the system” to pander to the other kids. Rockers love to blame everything on the system, it’s convenient when you’re protesting about something and you can’t figure out what it is you’re protesting.
Playing kids games is usually harmless. However, since so many adults do it, you have to wonder where it came from. I think it came from their childhood, “I didnt’ do it”, “someone else did it”, etc.. If no one ever told them it was wrong, how would they know now? I guess I’m the one to tell them it’s wrong. Blame something on exactly what it is that has bothered you and you MIGHT solve your problem. Blaming things on imaginary summations will never get your problem solved.
29
Aug
Remember the population bomb, the fertility explosion set to devour the world’s food and suck up or pollute all its air and water? Its fuse has by no means been plucked. But over the last three decades, much of its Malthusian detonation power has leaked out…..
Half the world’s population growth is in six countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh and China (despite its slowed birthrate).
Other than China, those five countries don’t have the land nor the resources to support their exploding populations. Whether it be famine, disease, war, or most likely a combination of all of the above, their rate will slow as well.
The prediction now is:
Ever since 1968, when the UN Population Division predicted that the world population, now 6.3 billion, would grow to at least 12 billion by 2050, the agency has regularly revised its estimates downward. Now it expects population to plateau at 9 billion.
Where did those billions go? Millions of babies have died, a fraction of them from AIDS, far more from malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, even measles. More millions have been aborted, either to avoid birth or, as in China and India, to avoid giving birth to a girl. (Cheap ultrasound technology has in the last decade made it easy to determine a child’s sex.)
But even AIDS and abortion are drops in the demographic bucket. The real missing billions are the babies who were simply never conceived.
They weren’t conceived because their would-be elder brothers and sisters survived, or because women’s lives improved. In the rich West, Mom went to college and decided that putting three children through graduate school would be unaffordable. In the poor Eastern or Southern parts of the globe, Mom found a sweatshop job and didn’t need a fourth or fifth child to fetch firewood.
“On a farm, children help with the pigs or chickens,” explained Joseph Chamie, director of the UN population division. Nearly half the world’s people live in cities now, he said, “and when you move to a city, children are not as helpful.”
Beyond that, simple public health measures like dams for clean water, vitamins for pregnant women, hand-washing for midwives, oral rehydration salts for babies, vaccines for youngsters and antibiotics for all helped double world life expectancy in the 20th century, to 60 years from 30.
More surviving children means less incentive to give birth as often. As late as 1970, the world’s median fertility level was 5.4 births per woman; in 2000, it was 2.9. Barring war, famine, epidemic or disaster, a country needs a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman to hold steady.
The best-known example of shrinkage is Italy, whose women were once symbols of fecundity partly because of the country’s peasant traditions and partly because of its Roman Catholicism, which rejects birth control. By 2000, Italy’s fertility rate was Western Europe’s lowest, at 1.2 births per woman. Its population is expected to drop 20 percent by midcentury.
Italy plummeted right past wealthy, liberal, Protestant Denmark, where women got birth control early.
Denmark was below population replacement level in 1970, at 2.0 births per woman, and slid to 1.7 by 2001. In Europe’s poorest country, Albania, where rural people still live in armed clan compounds, the 1970 rate of 5.1 births per woman fell to 2.1 in 1999.
Even in North Africa, regarded as the great exception to the shrinking population trend, birthrates have dropped somewhat. Egypt’s, for example, went from 5.4 births per woman in 1970 to 3.6 in 1999.
Chamie, of the United Nations, says the numbers refute what he calls the “myth of Muslim fertility,” an unfair characterization, he says, that will disappear as the lives of Muslim women ease. Jordanians, for example, he said, had eight children per woman in the 1960s; now the rate is 3.5. (Across the river, Israel’s numbers went from four in the 1950s to 2.7 today.) In Tunisia and Iran, the number may be close to two children, he said.
Old notions of Asian fertility are similarly false. China has pushed its fertility rate below that of France; Japan’s population is withering with age; and after five decades of industrialization, South Korea, a mostly rural country with six births per woman during the 1950s, now has 1.17 births per woman.
Alarmed by the trends, many countries are paying citizens to get pregnant. Estonia pays for a year’s maternity leave. The treasurer of Australia, Peter Costello, introduced $2,000-per-baby subsidies in that country’s 2004 budget. He told his fellow citizens to “go home and do your patriotic duty tonight.”
Japanese prefectures, tackling the problem at an earlier stage, arrange singles’ cruises. Unique among developed countries, the United States has little need to finance romance because its birthrate has held steady at 2.13 per woman. Its growth, about 3 million people a year, is mostly fueled by immigration, as it has been since the Mayflower.
Half the world’s population growth is in six countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh and China (despite its slowed birthrate). That makes doom-saying trickier than it was in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich frightened everyone with his book “The Population Bomb.” Fertility shifts in individual countries are notoriously unpredictable, said Nicholas Eberstadt, a population expert at the American Enterprise Institute, so one might just as well use a Ouija board to predict the fallout.
Local changes can be even harder to anticipate. Calcutta, for example, once the epitome of overcrowding, is starting to shrink, Eberstadt said. The father of the population bomb, Ehrlich, a professor of population studies and biology at Stanford, says he was “pleasantly surprised” by global changes that have undermined the book’s gloomiest projections. They include China’s one-child policy and the rapid adoption of better seeds and fertilizers by Third World farmers, meaning that more mouths can be fed, even if just with corn porridge and rice. (He notes, however, quoting UN figures, that about 600 million people go to bed hungry each night.) But Ehrlich still argues that the earth’s “optimal population size” is 2 billion. That’s different from the maximum supportable size, which depends on the consumption of resources.
“I have severe doubts that we can support even 2 billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.,” he said. “The world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than Hummer-driving idiots.”
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The New York Times Remember the population bomb, the fertility explosion set to devour the world’s food and suck up or pollute all its air and water? Its fuse has by no means been plucked. But over the last three decades, much of its Malthusian detonation power has leaked out.Birthrates in developed countries from Italy to South Korea have sunk below the levels needed for their populations to replace themselves; the typical age of marriage and pregnancy has risen, and the use of birth control has soared beyond the dreams of Margaret Sanger and the nightmares of the Vatican.
The threat is now more regional than global, explosive only in places like India and Pakistan. Ever since 1968, when the UN Population Division predicted that the world population, now 6.3 billion, would grow to at least 12 billion by 2050, the agency has regularly revised its estimates downward. Now it expects population to plateau at 9 billion.
That’s doable, especially if half of that is pocketed in isolated areas. The problem in other areas, especially Europe, is now the opposite of what it was 35 years ago:
The best-known example of shrinkage is Italy, whose women were once symbols of fecundity partly because of the country’s peasant traditions and partly because of its Roman Catholicism, which rejects birth control. By 2000, Italy’s fertility rate was Western Europe’s lowest, at 1.2 births per woman. Its population is expected to drop 20 percent by midcentury.
Italy plummeted right past wealthy, liberal, Protestant Denmark, where women got birth control early.
Denmark was below population replacement level in 1970, at 2.0 births per woman, and slid to 1.7 by 2001. In Europe’s poorest country, Albania, where rural people still live in armed clan compounds, the 1970 rate of 5.1 births per woman fell to 2.1 in 1999.
Even in North Africa, regarded as the great exception to the shrinking population trend, birthrates have dropped somewhat. Egypt’s, for example, went from 5.4 births per woman in 1970 to 3.6 in 1999.
Chamie, of the United Nations, says the numbers refute what he calls the “myth of Muslim fertility,” an unfair characterization, he says, that will disappear as the lives of Muslim women ease. Jordanians, for example, he said, had eight children per woman in the 1960s; now the rate is 3.5. (Across the river, Israel’s numbers went from four in the 1950s to 2.7 today.) In Tunisia and Iran, the number may be close to two children, he said.
As the rest of the world moves into the 21st century, I expect the same results. In the last 30 years, the peak population estimate has dropped from 12 billion to 9 billion. Hopefully by 2050 it will be dropped a lot lower. As China follows the aggressive move to a modern economy, people stop needing kids to work the farms, and the cost of children starts interfering with their ability to buy convertibles and nice houses, their population rate will drop as well. That could knock another billion off that projection real quick. Eight billion people spread out all over the world is very sustainable. We just have to be more efficient and supporting them than we are now.
26
Aug
Kerry’s book, The New Soldier, is out of print, and Kerry won’t release new prints, so, here it is:
Download new_soldier_epilogue.pdf
If you haven’t understood why the SBV’s are so angry with Kerry, read this and you will.
24
Aug
I am shamelessly stealing this from bankrate.com.
| Year of Death | Federal Exemption | Highest Rate | Family Burden* |
| 2005 | $1,500,000 | 47% | $235,000 |
| 2006 | $2,000,000 | 46% | 0 |
| 2007 | $2,000,000 | 45% | 0 |
| 2008 | $2,000,000 | 45% | 0 |
| 2009 | $3,500,000 | 45% | 0 |
| 2010 | No tax | no tax | 0 |
| 2011 | $1,000,000 | 55% | $550,000 |
* This is only an approximation based on a $2,000,000 estate, and disregards state estate taxes.
Now, if a person were to die in 2010, the family/spouse pays nothing in estate taxes. If that person were to die in 2011, they pay nearly a half a million dollars.
We better look closely at all deaths where estates are worth more than $1,000,000 in 2010 unless this tax is permanently repealed. I for one am contacting my representatives to prevent this senseless slaughter.
Kudos to rigoletto39 of The Motley Fool for the heads up on this article from The Free Republic.
The Free Republic is about as liberal within normal standards as you’ll find. For them to issue this opinion is rather damning if you ask me. And. coming from a middle of the road conservative, I agree with it. When liberals and conservatives agree on something, it has to be true!
23
Aug
Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas is proposing breaking up the CIA and creating several agencies to operate in it’s place.
I think this is just a horrible idea. The 9/11 Commission suggested streamlining the CIA and FBI and coordinating them under one Cabinet level position. Senator Roberts’ proposal IMO will only compound the existing problems within the CIA by a multiple of three.
The fact that Senator Roberts doesn’t see this means he is seeing something else. IMO, what he is doing is pandering to the masses.
And that’s never a good plan. Get your information czar, but simplify the information process, don’t make it more complicated than it is already.
23
Aug
I am shamelessly stealing this one from Kcourt of The Motley Fool ( Kathy ), it’s too good to pass up.
This is courtesy of ancestry.com, and one of the cleverest finds of this political race:
Does explain a lot.
