Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Story here:
Things like this are starting to have profound effects on my planning for the future and it’s making me very angry. And the “preparedness” types are sounding less and less crazy to me.
The situation is even tougher when 51% or more continue to vote for the wrong path. Most of the kids I talk to today “Aren’t interested in the issues, and can’t be bothered. Too much else to do”. But they’ll vote, probably after watching the Democrat media, SNL, Colbert, that other guy, and maybe the final debate if there is one a couple weeks before the election.
Same old. Except the country isn’t same old anymore of course.
And even if Santorum gets voted in and resides for 4 or 8, we’ll just hand it back to the Democrats intact so they can pick up where they left off.
The only right path solutions are pretty painful though. Deflation, Austerity measures, and pulling jobs out of a hat. We should have started all that October, 2007 with no bank bailouts.
NO, they DO have a plan. It is to run this country right off the rails.
Did you see Ramirez’s cartoon today? Obama holding his budget and a gun while demanding $9 Trillion from a baby. Pretty much sums it up. How do I tell my 4 year old son that he owes nearly $50,000 right now, and in all probability will owe over $100,000 by the time he hits High School?
Like the conversation I had with my 83 year old Dad.
He said, ” You know what? I don’t envy you and I really don’t envy your kids…”
These shallow bastards we elected have partied on our dime and the dimes of our great grandchildren all while telling us we haven’t sacrificed enough….Bastards.
We need to vote them out as until we do, we are the enablers.
This is the elephant in the room and damn few people are paying attention to it. Everyone thinks that somehow things are just going to continue on and on and on and on and on and on agin as they have in the past.
They are not.
We can have an adult conversation with some pain now….or we can have the adult conversation ten years from now with a massive order of magnitude more pain.
Damn few adults raising the issue in DC…Ryan is one of the few but I do not think there is yet a critical mass to do what needs to be done.
All I do know is that if they put me in charge of the Federal budget I would take a chainsaw to it….
It is a serious problem, but come on. Any time you see a financial chart with that smooth of a curve, you know someone’s just making it up. By the end of that chart the debt would be 9x GDP… so if interest was over 11%, the entire GDP would just be debt service. Uh huh… right. But that’s just arguing with the chart, not with the fact that there’s a huge problem.
Unfortunately, we’re probably screwed both ways. Historically, neither party has been fiscally responsible. It’s just a choice between getting screwed by a socially-liberal spendthrift or a socially-conservative spendthrift. Would you like your deck chair pointing to the left or to the right when the ship goes down?
If you look closely the red curve isn’t smooth until sometime in the 2020′s, which indicates that at that point compound interest on the debt dominates every other factor, resulting in smooth exponential growth.
To an extent you are correct, those forecasts are next to useless. That’s because all budget forecasts are next to useless, especially more than 2 years in the future (you’re guaranteed to have a new Congress in that time, and possibly a new Executive). One of the reforms I’d like to see out of the 113th Congress is an elimination of 10-year budget forecasts. Looking further ahead than 2 years is simply voodoo.
The system will collapse before then. The people with money aren’t stupid and will basically withdraw and quit throwing good money after bad.
The forecasts don’t take into account human nature because the people behind those forecasts are willfully blind.
The fix itself is easy. Reform entitlements. Eliminate some. Get rid of all of the dead wood in the bureaucracy by firing 70% of the Federal workforce. Get rid of whole departments of the government, like Education, Energy, the EPA, Homeland Security, etc. Sell a lot of this land our Imperial government owns. End all of the senseless regulations that strangle us. Simplify the tax code into some sort of flat tax. Corral the power of the judiciary, which aren’t gods by the way. Punish the hell out of defense contractors who can’t adhere to their budgetary forecasts on weapons systems.
The doing…hahahahaha. When our political class is nothing but whores ready to provide service in exchange for campaign cash and re-election, there’s no chance the leaks get fixed until the ship of state is deep in the depths of Davey Jones’ locker.
The problem is Obama wants us enslaved to debt, impoverished and withered. He’d enjoy it. He won’t suffer for it. It’s all in his grand scheme to punish America for its trangressions and foolishly hand our sovereignty to the “international community.” It’s all part of his master plan.
I just hope the madness doesn’t spread to New Zealand. The world is running out of places to flee tyranny. Forty years was all it took for a bunch of spoiled-brat commie finks to undermine and destroy this country. That’s not a lot of time.
You sound like someone getting ready to vote for Ron Paul.
I hate RP’s foreign policy. It’s cowering in the faces of our enemies. But no politician on either side says what needs to be said. No one has more of the right answers than he does. I’m not the biggest fan, but he’s better than Romney. Better than Santorum. Better than Gingrich. With those three big-government “conservatives,” it’ll be more of the same, spend, spend, spend, spend….
I want real change. I want limited government. I want a balanced budget that doesn’t exceed 10 percent of GDP. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, now is it? Shoot, I’d just like a budget period.
You’re not going to love New Zealands foreign policy then, makes RP look positively militaristic.
GC, you gotta keep in mind: 95% brilliant, 5% bat$h!t insane isn’t a winning hand, any more than 95% non-poisonous, 5% deadly makes for a good snack for the kids.
Paul’s foreign policy insanity is a 100% disqualifier, regardless of how good his domestic policy might be.
Our internal policies won’t matter if we’re not secure; we won’t be allowed to keep them.
I dunno, candidates at least that insane have been winning for a while, as far as I can tell. It’s just that they hide it better during the election, so it’s a big surprise once they get into office.
In my opinion Ron Paul has the right ideas, he just takes them too far. Whereas most of the other candidates have the wrong ideas, and take them just as far.
I’m more comfortable starting off in the right direction and hoping we stop before going too far, rather than starting off in the wrong direction and hoping to reverse course later.
If we don’t get the domestic problems solved, you going to get Ron Paul’s foreign policy anyway because we won’t have the money for anything else.
I still have to agree with you on Ron Paul. Everyone else is a Neocon (big government “conservative,” it is not a code word for Jooooos) and are really just status quo types.
“Punish the hell out of defense contractors who can’t adhere to their budgetary forecasts on weapons systems.”
Fine — then punish the hell out of the Service leadership who suffer from Good Idea Fairy-itis and keep moving the goalposts of requirements while insisting on fixed price contracts…and then salami-slicing procurement. Oh, and lock down the revolving door between active duty GOFO and retired-now-on-defense-industry-board-of-directors-and-doubling-my-income-GOFO
Sauce for the goose – sauce for the gander.
w/r, SJS
If Warren Buffett votes for/supports Obama again, his children, grandchildren and greats are going to be very, very disappointed in him — and Warren already knows it.
Debt doesn’t even matter….to those who pay nothing. So you see the problem. Yes?
Where is Ross Perot with his ‘charts’?
What this country needs are elected leaders. What we have are celebrity rulers. Rulers who fully expect their existence of privilege and following groupies to continue no matter what happens to the country.
And we have only ourselves to blame. Wasn’t it Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money” in ‘Democracy in America’?
And we have an educational system dictated to from Washington that does not teach this. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.
A couple of days ago Athens was burning because idiots thought torching cars and buildings would fix an economic problem, as if exchange rates and interest rates and bond yields would change if they only knew somebody felt bad.
80% of the US population lives within an hour of the coasts, and are likely to be just as dependent upon government for their lifestyle and to believe their feelings and protests will matter.
Now is a good time to move to Idaho and plant popcorn so you’ll have something to munch on while you watch the cities burn.
– Max
Several here and others in previous posts on this topic have hit on the long-term problem; namely the general ignorance of today’s youth in all things, be it financial, economic science, history, civics–you name it–all due to the deadly combination of the leftist domination of our nations education system and the technological revolution that has spawned a “social media” matrix in which the majority of the nations youth submerge themselves in social trivia 24/7 when they aren’t in school or at work. My wife sees this all the time every time she goes back to work the occasional shift as an agency nurse just to keep her hand in. Doesn’t matter which hospital she goes to–ALL the young RN, LPN, nurses aids, med-tech’s, etc., spend every available free minute on twitter, FB, etc. The result of this deadly marriage? A nation of ignorant, propagandized naifs that are easy pickings for the Donkey Party propaganda machine and their cohorts in the MSM. Think of the implications for a nation in which the majority of its youth who are the future of the country qualify for the Darwin Awards en mass. Think extinction..
VX, you are depressing me. I guess I’ll have to stand with Flit to get my flogging.