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Post by jdredd on Jan 11, 2013 2:04:39 GMT -5
So I am sitting here contemplating the boredom of this Unawesome Century, thinking about how my grandparents grew up in an exciting time of the coming of motor cars and aviation. And when I was growing up we had the excitement of the space program. The world of Star Trek was on it's way! Well, as we all know that petered out and became just another boondoggle. What do we have now to be excited by? YouTube? I hate YouTube. Video games suck too. Politically, we just argue over boring taxes, while in the Middle East they fight neverending ethnic wars. Yawn. On second thought, maybe video games aren't so bad after all. At least they provide some escape...
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Post by jdredd on Apr 22, 2013 22:26:07 GMT -5
I'm watching the never ending Boston terror stories on Fox News, and I'm beginning to wonder who's War on Terrorism this is anyway. The Gratest Generation is almost extinct, except for a few annoying fossil billionaires unwilling to give up power. It looks like the Boomers and Gen X are on the War on Terrorism bandwagon, but how about the Millenials? It's been 13 years since 9/11. Young people have been living with the WOT almost all their lives, will they eventually lose interest in an open-ended war? Of course, the Cold War lasted 40 years, so these things do take on a life of their own.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 27, 2013 4:34:23 GMT -5
As a propaganda fan, I am really, really enjoying watching people try to exploit the Boston bombing by two losers (called that by their uncle) into a major reboot of a flagging War on Terrorism. 9/11 it was not, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor (Al Qaeda aircraft carriers did not appear off our shores). Actually, we should be happy that the bombing is the big news of 2013. It means that nothing that is a serious threat to our Republic is happening at the moment.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 3, 2013 3:10:40 GMT -5
Sadly, I actually verbally described something as "awesome" the other day. The word has gotten so ubiquitous in people's language now, it's hard not to use it.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 2, 2013 2:22:31 GMT -5
I'll tell ya, this century continues to go to hell in a handbasket. But hey, party on, kids!
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Post by jdredd on Sept 29, 2013 3:31:29 GMT -5
Is this going to be the century our democracy becomes completely dysfunctional? Be careful what you wish for, government haters.
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Post by Tired in CV on Oct 1, 2013 4:03:49 GMT -5
Is this going to be the century our democracy becomes completely dysfunctional? Be careful what you wish for, government haters. This country has CEASED being a democracy and is fast moving to the left! Becoming dysfunctional? Only if you mean it represents the people. Obama and the democrats have been concerned with their OWN agenda, not the peoples! From the November 2008 elections when a democrat won the whitehouse (thinks he won the lottery and it is his); the Senate became majority democrat and the House of Representatives became majority democrat, they passed laws without any input from the Republicans. They rammed Obamacare through with a wishlist leaving the bill with only 15% concerning actual medical care and the rest is taxes and regulatory issues taking away peoples rights. When the House of Representative became majority republican, the fun stopped and the House has been trying to right the wrongs the democrats forced through. This is what happens when one party becomes a majority and disregards the other party AND THE PEOPLE! Now YOU want to blame everything on the GOP, probably Ted Cruz in particular but decline to remember how arrogant the democrats threated the GOP and rammed through their own agenda! They did not do America any favors in doing so, just pushing us farther away from being a democracy!
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Post by jdredd on Oct 14, 2013 14:07:04 GMT -5
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/12/debt-ceiling-crisis_n_4090943.html"WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — World finance officials pledged on Saturday to deal with new risks to the global recovery while they kept up pressure on the United States to address the biggest threat of all — a market-rattling default on U.S. debt. The International Monetary Fund's policy committee said the United States needed to take "urgent action" to address the budget impasse that has blocked approval of legislation to increase the government's borrowing limit before a fast-approaching Thursday deadline." Lookslike there is a good chance the US will default for the first time in 237 years of business. I'm sure the government haters have no problem with it. Will it be no big deal or a whole new world? I really don't know enough how the financial world works to say one way or another. Will the Far Right be punished or rewarded? Can't say that either, since if the American voter voted a way that made sense to me, there would be no Republican Party.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 21, 2013 3:40:23 GMT -5
Did everyone enjoy our government being held hostage by the Tea Party thugs as much as I did? Unfortunately, this may happen again and again unless they get their way, and SS and other benefits will no doubt be slashed. But this obsession with our national debt will only last until America gets a REAL problem. But who knows when that will be? Meanwhile, the class war will continue.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2013 11:45:16 GMT -5
Did everyone enjoy our government being held hostage by the Tea Party thugs as much as I did? Unfortunately, this may happen again and again unless they get their way, and SS and other benefits will no doubt be slashed. But this obsession with our national debt will only last until America gets a REAL problem. But who knows when that will be? Meanwhile, the class war will continue. The Govt should be held hostage better yet default, Then the ass clowns voters would still be clueless when we start over from scratch! The govt shutdown does not effect everything, The liberal media keeps spinning to clueless morons it's the end f world! The govt should default! Then it would make the morons who believe in the tooth fairy wake up and see the reality and need to start over and remove the ass clowns in office!
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Post by jdredd on Oct 31, 2013 12:09:25 GMT -5
Unfortunately, I don't think we have heard the last from the government haters in the US. In some ways, it is a phenomenon that is happening all over the world, as governments are becoming less and less relevant, and the world is becoming more and more a plutocracy run by worldwide "investors" and bankers, assisted by the IMF and World Bank, etc. The Libertarian freaks and their pseudo-anarchist ilk don't have a clue what they are really buying into by making our government dysfunctional.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 2, 2014 1:20:28 GMT -5
While I think that the chances of anything significant happening because of Russia's reassertion of it's former influence on world affairs as very small, it is an interesting break from the tiresome non-events in the Arab World and our lame and unproductive "War on Terrorism" which has dominated geopolitics so far this century. When you have the right's Golden Boy de jour Charles Krauthammer suggesting America needs to send the fleet to the Black Sea to support the Ukrainians, I see shades of 1914. But I think we are smarter than that now, aren't we? I could be wrong.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 21, 2014 3:11:15 GMT -5
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26672422"Heroin abuse in the US has been spreading beyond inner cities, resulting in a sharp rise in addiction and death. Chicago is a hub for cheap, pure and plentiful heroin, much of it supplied by Mexican drug cartels. Chicago's "L" train green line leads directly to the open-air drug markets on the city's west side. As we travel the route with one of the addicts, Jason, he phones his contact. He wants two bags of heroin, each costing just $10 (£6). The dealer meets us, and within seconds two tiny bags are handed over. This part of Chicago has been ground down by neglect, drugs and crime, and residents talk openly about the narcotics on sale. Of the four people who stopped to ask what we were filming, all said they had taken heroin." What's wrong with these people? Isn't living in our "meritocracy" exciting enough for them? They don't enjoy competing with their fellow Americans for that minimum-wage job at Taco Bell? Go figure.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 29, 2014 11:15:16 GMT -5
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26669971"Decades ago, the American dream inspired employees, offering the promise of the good life. But now, with jobs disappearing, that dream has become a nightmare for the unemployed who see their joblessness as a personal - and shameful - failure. Victor Tan Chen studies some of the unluckiest people in the US. The sociology fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, researches car workers in cities like Detroit, hard-hit by the economic downturn and by long-term trends in the US industrial base. "But they used to be the luckiest men in America," Chen says. Decades ago, car workers lived the quintessential American Dream: they pursued stable, well-paying, union-backed jobs, often straight out of high school. They were able to build a middle-class life and provide the promise of something better to their children. Times have changed" Of course it is in the interests of right-wing politicians for the millions of unemployed to blame themselves and not the system.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 30, 2014 0:58:12 GMT -5
america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/30/wildlife-populationsfallsbyhalffourdecades.html"The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 percent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, according to a new study by one of the biggest environmental groups. In a study released on Tuesday, the Swiss-based World Wildlife Fund blamed human threats to nature for the decline particularly in tropical regions like Latin America. The group described the study it has carried out every two years since 1998 as a barometer of the state of the planet. "There is no room for complacency," said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini, calling for a greater focus on sustainable solutions to the impacts that people are inflicting on nature, particularly through the release of greenhouse gases." This is hardly worth commenting on. The extermination of much of the the wild things (except for the annoying ones like rats and mosquitos) is pretty much a given in this century. There is just not the political will to do anything about it. People have got to have their vacation homes carved out of the Belize jungle, ya know. And just keep voting Republican because they protect property rights. You have to have priorities, don't you? Millennials and their children will just have to live without wildlife. Not my problem.
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