Tioga-George Forum

What Occupy means

geysergazers — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:16:02 GMT

Any questions? Anyone not understand that at least some Red Blooded Murkans think there is something completely wrong, Evil even, with 400 Rich A$$holes owning more than the poorest 150,000,000 do?

Forum: Political & Religious

Ron Paul Neo-Nazi ties

geysergazers — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:46:34 GMT

The hacktivist collective Anonymous set out to take down the white supremacist American Third Party (A3P) in what they called Operation Blitzkrieg but they may have done much more.

In a document dump that includes private forum messages, emails, organization notes another other information the group found numerous connections between Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and A3P. According to the documents, all hosted here, Paul himself regularly met with many A3P members, engaged in conference calls with their board of directors and engaged in a bridging tactic between A3P and the Ron Paul Revolution.

Forum: Political & Religious

Adam Smith on Slavery

geysergazers — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:31:31 GMT

Remember Adam Smith, inventor/describer of Capitalism as we understand it? From his book on the subject, The Wealth of Nations:

The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master, when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked both by Pliny and Columella.
The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of slave cultivation. The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen. The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies, are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America; and the profits of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn, as has already been observed. Both can afford the expense of slave cultivation

Smith recognized that the practice of Human slavery can only work in situations with huge profits because people dont do much work when enslaved. Thus the argument made by Southern Elites that Slavery was necessary as the only way to make cotton/sugar/tobacco farming pay at all was completely disproven by Smith....Interesting that Southern apologists carry on to this day with that old disproven fallacy even in the face of sound economics.

Forum: Political & Religious

Occupy Thugs Attack Catholic Girls OpEd

Don — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:52:51 GMT

Hey Janet. You still think the OWS folks are great people?

Quote:

Originally Posted by http://www.eurasiareview.com/02022012-occupy-thugs-attack-catholic-girls-oped/
On January 25, Thomas Tobin, the Bishop of Providence, decided to reach out to Occupy Providence by allowing the homeless to seek shelter in Catholic churches; the city had turned down a request by the group to set up daytime shelters. The next day, Occupy Providence activists showed their gratitude by crashing a pro-life rally, shouting down a speaker, stopping a priest from offering a closing prayer, and throwing condoms at Catholic schoolgirls.

In short, these left-wing activists have turned into urban bullies who need to be stopped.

To say that Catholic bashing is in vogue is an understatement. From President Obama who is seeking to intimidate Catholic institutions by forcing them to prostitute their moral convictions, to Occupy maniacs who respond to goodwill by engaging in thuggery, it is open season on Catholics. We will do what we can to constructively channel the anger, which is palpable.

Contact Occupy Providence official Susan Beaty: beaty.susan@gmail.com

Forum: Political & Religious

Global Warming: One Man's 'End of the World' is Another Man's 'It's Nice Out'

Don — Thur, 02 Feb 2012 20:30:15 GMT

Dennis Miller said this.

Global Warming: One Man's 'End of the World' is Another Man's 'It's Nice Out'

http://dennismillerradio.com/b/Global-Warming:-One-Mans-End-of-the-World-is-Another-Mans-Its-Nice-Out/645531266689264258.html

Forum: Political & Religious

The Fallacy of Libertarianism'

geysergazers — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:35:50 GMT

The "Somalia" argument is a sore spot for libertarians. They either fall back on the old line of race and religious prejudice I outlined, or they claim that it isn't trueLibertarianism, you see: it's anarchy. TrueLibertarians believe in just enough government to protect private property and personal safety; without those protections, they argue, anarchy ensues.

The only problem for libertarians is that they cannot point to even a single current or historical example of a government that functions as they imagine it should. They have no concrete, real world examples, so they ply their arguments in a theoretical construct.

Each and every example of places with little centralized government is dismissed by libertarians as an anarchistic situation, not a "true" Libertarianism. It's the "no true Scotman" fallacy, Ron Paul edition. The hellish situation in Afghanistan is blamed on 30 years of war and tribal anarchy, rather than the lack of a central government. The case of Somalia is blamed again on war, on American intervention, and again on tribal anarchy. Historical examples of feudalism arising in the absence of a centralized state, or the repeated Dark Ages that arise after civilization collapses, are dismissed as either irrelevant to the modern world or invalid because of war and anarchy. The fact that corruption and the Mafia are more prevalent in southern Italy where tax collection and central government are weaker than in the North, is again dismissed as a cultural or anarchistic issue. It's always the same argument.

Libertarianism, in other words, is infallible. Wherever it fails, it does so because the people weren't ready for it, or there was too much violence to allow it to work, or because the government wasn't powerful enough to protect people from harm.

Libertarians fail to realize that there has never been--and never will be--a government that functions according to their principles because it runs entirely contrary to human nature.

Thats by David Atkins at Digbys place. He says it better than I can so there it is. There is no such thing as actual working libertarianism and never has been. It is a Notion: a favorite Daydream, which some people possess as a Shiny Thing, much as children are wont to do with a favorite object. Like Communism, Libertarianism has no application in meatspace.

Forum: Political & Religious

Occupoo shows their true colors

Don — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:13:37 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/300-arrested-daylong-occupy-oakland-protests-063814656.html

Forum: Political & Religious

Hull House Closes

geysergazers — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:51:31 GMT

After more than 120yrs of helping the poor&downtrodden, Hull House abruptly folded up, citing the ravages of the Great recession as the cause: increased need and decreased revenue.

This at the same time a would-be President maintains Offshore Bank Accounts to stash his effing money in.

SIFU&BS

http://news.yahoo.com/hull-house-closes-doors-more-120-years-183258990.html

Forum: Political & Religious

Buffett's Secretary and her big, fat, lie

Don — Thur, 26 Jan 2012 15:30:07 GMT

Everyone has heard about how Warren Buffett's secretary pays much more than he does. What they don't hear is how much his secretary makes.

According to this article she pays a tax rate of 35.8%

Now if we take a look at the 2011 tax brackets you'll see that to pay 35% you must be making at least $380,000.

Year 2011 income brackets and tax rates

Marginal Tax Rate	Single	Married Filing Jointly or Qualified Widow(er)	Married Filing Separately	Head of Household
10%	$0 $8,500	$0 $17,000	$0 $8,500	$0 $12,150
15%	$8,501 $34,500	$17,001 $69,000	$8,501 $34,500	$12,150 $46,250
25%	$34,501 $83,600	$69,001 $139,350	$34,501 $69,675	$46,251 $119,400
28%	$83,601 $174,400	$139,351 $212,300	$69,676 $106,150	$119,401 $193,350
33%	$174,401 $379,150	$212,301 $379,150	$106,151 $189,575	$193,351 $379,150
35%	$379,151+	$379,151+	$189,576+	$379,151+

I don't call that "average" at all.

Forum: Political & Religious

Seen on Facebook

Don — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:42:00 GMT

I don't know where this came from but it's quite correct.

Quote:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little..

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Forum: Political & Religious

Republican Family Values

geysergazers — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:44:31 GMT

Forum: Political & Religious

Rmoneys Taxes

geysergazers — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:17:42 GMT

Quote:

Originally Posted by PK
...Again, the point here is not that Romney did something wrong by paying the low rates current tax law lavishes on people like him. It is, instead, that in an election campaign that will be in part about issues of inequality, the likely GOP candidate is a living, breathing, coupon-clipping example of how favorable our system is to the very rich; and he also happens to be advocating policies that would greatly benefit people like him, while hurting the poor and the middle class.

PS: Yes, my tax rate is a lot higher than Romneys. And I support policies that would raise it further.

Yup. Romney started not on first base but rather in the dugout after a bases-loaded home run. Then he multiplied his Fathers fortune by becoming a Vulture Capitalist and Raping the companies he bought of their value before turning them over. After all that he pays a lower tax rate than Paul Krugman. And he may be the Republican nominee for Preznit. What is wrong with Republicans?

Forum: Political & Religious

Aljazeera

TiogaGeorge — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:07:06 GMT

I began reading Aljazeera several years ago. Back in 2003, Aljazeera was an extremely biased website spouting anti-western crap.

However, over the past few years, Aljazeera has changed. Come more to the middle. I am a little baffled by this change.

Like to know what others think about Aljazeera .

George

Forum: Political & Religious

An Open Letter to the Occupiers from Generation X

Don — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:45:59 GMT

Quote:

Originally Posted by http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2012/01/20/an_open_letter_to_the_occupiers_from_generation_x/page/full/
To the Occupy movement:

I know some of you mean well. I even share some of your concerns. The dismal economy has made it difficult to find a good job with benefits. Meanwhile, the government is bailing out the wealthy banks and mortgage lenders that helped precipitate this depressed economy.

I hear your frustrations about student loan debt. Generation X has a lot of student loan debt too, with little relief available. The older generations have indebted our generations for years down the road, and with the rising costs of school tuition, we have double the amount of debt. Social Security is expected to be insolvent by the time my generation reaches retirement age. We have been warned not to rely upon it. We are in the same boat as you. In some ways we are even worse off. Most of us have families, children and mortgages now. Losing a job hurts us much more than when we were 25 and single.

But where you are off base is demanding too much. There isnt enough money to go around for government to solve all your problems. We live in the wealthiest nation in the world. We are overindulged, not deprived. Americans are fat one-third are now obese - and suffering from an increasing number of illnesses because we live a sedentary lifestyle too lazy to cook, subsisting on unhealthy processed fast food as we drive instead of walk everywhere.

Your generation has been raised by helicopter parents who catered to your every whine, and praised you constantly in order to get you to be quiet instead of teaching you discipline. You have grown up thinking you are more accomplished than you really are. You expect to have it all at age 25 what my generation has worked for 10-20 years longer to achieve. My generation worked in fast food restaurants and low-level jobs in high school, college and shortly thereafter when we were your age. Most of us didnt have benefits and we didnt complain, we were just grateful not to work hard labor in the fields.

Now you want the government to put you in the place that someone much older than you has worked years to achieve. The same government that messed everything up in the first place by meddling with the housing and financial markets. The Democrats are the party primarily behind more government manipulation in the economy and bailouts, although a small minority of Republicans - including some in the executive branch no doubt influenced by Goldman Sachs - were complicit. Democrat Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner crafted the bank bailouts. 172 House Democrats voted for the bank bailout bill which established TARP, along with 91 Republicans. 39 Democrats and 34 Republicans in the Senate voted for the bill. It was mainly Democrats who ordered the quasi-governmental lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide subprime loans to people who could not possibly afford homes. Now, those homeowners are defaulting and the rest of us are paying for it, as we are left stuck in homes we cannot sell and probably cannot afford anymore due to losing our jobs.

The only solution the Democrats in government offer for you is big government with more unaffordable spending that will favor certain groups of people over others. This cannot work since we have already run out of money; we are borrowing 40% of every dollar we spend. There is no more money to spend. Spending new money will be charged to future generations. You will be doing to your children and grandchildren exactly what you complain the older generations did to us.

And you would go even further. The Occupy symbol of a clenched fist is the same symbol the Socialist Party uses. This is no coincidence. Your leaders come from the radical left and denounce our American system of capitalism, calling for the redistribution of wealth instead. They want to end our freedoms guaranteed to us in the U.S. Constitution and replace them with government control.

You claim to represent the 99% but the polls show that significantly less than 99% support you. Only 28% of Americans support the Occupy movement. That number is equivalent to the percentage of the population that supports Democrats and the left. You resent the 1% and their wealth, but their wealth is what creates jobs, not government. If everyone ends up on the government dole, there will be no one left to pay their government salaries.

The masks you wear of Guy Fawkes represent violent overthrow of the government. That mask was worn by an anarchist character named V in the 2005 movie V for Vendetta, who uses violence to overthrow a despotic government and murder everyone in Parliament. The government portrayed in the movie is not like ours. Our government does not capture women and rape them. While it is true that Thomas Jefferson once said, The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants, he was not referring to unjust uprisings. As an Anti-Federalist, he was opposed to big government; he did not want to overthrow a government just to replace it with a bigger government.

You claim that the movement is peaceful and about exercising free speech. Occupiers endlessly retweet the phrase, You cant evict an idea. Who are you fooling? There have been 5897 arrests so far, for everything from vandalism to assault to trespassing. If Occupiers are allowed to get by with crimes by claiming they are part of free speech, then why cant the rest of us get by with committing crimes too, in the name of free speech?

The Occupy movement is being evicted from downtown public spaces in cities all across the country due to breaking the law. Occupiers are trying to keep the movement alive through a cyber presence on Twitter. I read tweets from the Occupiers regularly that are full of exaggerations and false statements about the evictions. If you have to use dishonesty in order to gain support for your position, there is something fundamentally wrong with your integrity. Occupiers regularly accuse the police of multiple things, but the facts come out differently. Occupiers accused police at the University of California-Davis of pepper spraying them, but one Occupier admitted later that the Occupiers had surrounded the police with locked arms blocking them, refusing to let them move. It is hard to believe that multiple police agencies across the country are all coincidentally engaging in illegal behavior regarding the handling of protests. It is more likely these arent just protests but rather something more sinister. Your alliance with the anarchist hacking group Anonymous, which has no regard for the laws, is telling. I am afraid you are trying to use violence to force your unpopular socialist and communist forms of government upon America.

What you are asking for is more big government that we cannot afford. You want the government to redistribute the income of the wealthiest 1% of Americans, but this would not solve the problems you complain about. The rich provide investment capital for business ventures that create jobs. If you take away their money, we will lose even more jobs. 80% of millionaires in America are self-made; they did not inherit their wealth. Only 14% are in the banking industry. The top 1% earns 14% of all income but pays 36.7% of all federal income taxes. There are even fewer millionaires now due to the recession; the number of Americans earning $1 million or more dropped by 40% between 2007 and 2009.

Socialism and communism are not the answer. Look how well communism has worked for the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Socialism is gradually destroying Europe as those countries discover the hard way they can no longer afford massive government entitlement programs. Tearing down the top echelon of society and replacing their ability to create jobs with government job creation sends countries into poverty.

The best solution is the opposite of what you think you need. The solution is less government, not more. If government had stayed out of the housing and financial markets, we would not be in this recession. Instead, overreaching banks and mortgage lenders would have been forced to learn the hard way not to make irresponsible financial decisions. Direct your protests at the president and Congress instead who are responsible for the market meddling. Wall Street is only a symptom of the problem. Please do not indebt our grandchildren. Your parents may not have taught you the values of rugged individualism that formed the backbone of this country, but you can still teach those values to your children. We in America are better off than 99% of the rest of the world. We are all actually the 1%

Forum: Political & Religious

Reagan Murkan Morning

geysergazers — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:50:02 GMT

From 1945 until today per capita GDP has grown at fairly constant rate, doubling about every 35 years. During the time of Americas real Morning, from 1945 until about 1980, Median Family income grew at about the same rate. From Reagans election until now median income has stagnated and all that GDP growth has gone to the top 1% (actually, about 70% to the top 0.1%). So much for the Ratwing myth of Reagans morning in America: only if you were already Rich.

Forum: Political & Religious