Yes.
POTUS45* insisting his name be on the $1200 stimulus checks was the same thing. Of all the things he had to think about at the height of a pandemic, that was Number 1 for awhile
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Financially, as I see it, the problem for the US is there presence in 150 countries. Policing the world is a costly business. IMO it drains the prosperity of the country for a large part. If only part of this money could be spent on internal projects and the own population it would be very beneficial all around.
Before 1940 there was hardly an army and navy and no separate air force! The size of the U.S. military exploded in World War II, as army numbers alone soared from 174,000 to over 11 million.
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A couple of the main factors that caused the fall of the Roman Empire were military overexpansion and government corruption. Sound familiar?
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The Hitler family history is a bit more complicated than that:
Good point JD. I was oblivious to the obvious.
Trump is one and done. He’s only mentioning infrastructure these days because he’s trying to deflect attention away from his grossly negligent response to the pandemic.
Infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of his platform along with border defense since day one. You may be right that he is bringing it out to the forefront to distract attention but it’s not something he just made up recently.
As to the one and done, I wouldn’t bet on it. The ‘slam dunk’ democrats were quite confident in the last election and ended up with egg on their face.
I’m not sure it was obvious, it was to me as not that long earlier my father had changed his name from Jaime to James.
To continue the brief encounters with TV news types thread, I met Geraldo when I was 12, in a break from family tradition, we had Thanksgiving with the weird cousins of my weird cousins in Manhattan. Geraldo lived in the same building and stopped for dessert. After the required unimpressed greetings, I went back to the other room to watch the Heisman trophy award (it went to a guy from Penn State, and by marriage I am now obligated to root for PSU).
To conclude, in around 1995 I spent about 15 or 20 minutes throwing a tennis ball to Tom Brokaws dog while trying to explain the finer points of whitewater slalom (to Brokaw, not his dog).
It should have been obvious. As soon as you mentioned it I knew what I said was in poor taste irrespective of what I think of Geraldo’s reporting abilities.
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He has had almost 4 years to do something with the infrastructure, but he hasn’t done anything.
On November 4th, the headlines will say: Voters to Trump: You’re Fired.
Then he’ll be prosecuted in New York and elsewhere for tax fraud, etc.
Not to mention all of the Banking Institutions he is in hock to for millions who will be hounding him. But if he declares bankruptcy…yet again
When on the campaign trail Trump, the Republicans presidential nominee, had sold himself as a businessman who has made billions of dollars and was beholden to no one. But since, much info about this has surfaced. He may be billions of dollars in debt to Bank of China, Deutsche Bank, and a host of others and these debts will begin to come due by 2022 and 2023.
Trump Org Reportedly Seeking Debt Help From Deutsche As Bank Is Probed By DOJ
Good to know Madame Zelda’s Fortune Teller Parlour and Emporium is still open. I need to talk to her about the stock market.
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One an only hope.
The recent news story about the 5 year-old heading to California in his mom’s SUV to buy a Lamborghini struck me as a near perfect parallel to the Cretin in Chief.
Unfortunately, a more accurate comparison might be to a 5 year-old in possession of an automatic weapon.
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First a disclaimer: if you’re a citizen of a certain persuasion prone to oral ejaculation of “fake news” consider this your trigger warning.
Granted she could have made her point in less time which I suppose was some folks are eager to explain away bad news and the need for any controls within society to get a grip on this but the visualization included in this presentation is worth it.
So you can skip all the way to about 3:30 and see what at least some data says about the wisdom of allowing large masses to work together back in that time frame.
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You can start with healthy skepticism vs. overriding suspicion. As a scientist, I’m obviously skeptical. I’m questioning anything people say. I look at my own data and other people’s data with a skeptical eye. But after skeptics have been skeptical, they are quite capable of accepting evidence. Once something has withstood scrutiny, you accept it. Otherwise you’re in a state of complete nihilism and you can’t believe anything.
That crucial second step of acceptance is absent in conspiracy theorists. That is where conspiracy theorists are different. Their skepticism is a bottomless, never-ending pit of skepticism about anything related to the official account. And that skepticism is accompanied by extreme gullibility to anything related to the conspiracy. It’s an imbalance between skepticism for anything an official may say and complete gullibility for something some random dude on the internet will tweet out. It’s that imbalance that differentiates conspiracy thinking from standard cognition.
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Building on recent post in WW2 Books, I was looking for some further readings in one of my local Library websites. The irony of this review of a book left me laughing. But after the initial levity I could see the implied caution regarding “information, misinformation, and disinformation”.
A friend of mine was a pharmacy rep and he explained to me that at one time they would underline things in literature that they gave the Doctors. Then they were told NOT to do that by their company. The reasoning is that it may alter the original message of the literature and thus alter the administration of the med to the patients.(thus misinforming them)
But this is what I saw in the review:
Many, many little vignettes, interwoven into a long month-of-reading patchwork, 740 pages thick. Keeping track is impossible, so read as though you are living through a turbulent mess of a time, watc> hing new shows, hearing gossip, and forgetting who is who half the time, until they come to get you, that is. And if it is a library book, do not underline fascist speeches that sound like Republicans on Fox TV. Let the future readers figure it out themselves Blockquote
Source: Title: Mussolini’s Italy : life under the fascist dictatorship, 1915-1945
If it’s on the internet, it must be true.