US Egg

Not sure what you're leading to, but its late and the influence has got a hold on me. No hints yet, but each is not related, I think.

.....well he wasn't getting better looking into his teens. But who does?

Looks like its from my fathers all male graduate '56 Sr. Yearbook. The no smile look. Was it a "Rebel Without A Cause" influence? Whatever, I'm stymied.

My kid, due to Obamacare, had to go into a worse plan for more out of pocket money. So saying they "lost" their health insurance would be a lie.

I really enjoy this thread. Do another.

I couldn't "suffer" through another Borat movie. The 1st one was hysterical, bordering, seemingly, on surreal. Find it difficult believing so many were clueless.

Played some organized youth sports against Gronk's dad in the '70's. Very good athlete, Syracuse scholarship. Seemed like a genuine nice guy. Did not bean you or cheap shot you in football, was a big athletic kid.

Kid Rock?

Black sunflower seed ?

Old phone and crappy pic, but put up with this one and his parents screeching all summer. Often sat on the shed or in trees over it watching us in the pool.

.....easy to do when you don't remember any of it. Joe thinks he has Burisma in his elbow.

Those are Obama cages. https://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

.....these Depends were supposed to last longer.

.....or wondering why he hasn't got his night time tapioca snack and bathroom escort.

Like using your drug troubled kid for personal gain?

Has mentioning Tony Bobulinski been banned on Facebook and Twitter yet? Surely won't hear his name mentioned much, if at all, in the LW media.

If you watched this video far enough, its main reason for its posting was to follow some LW wannabe's pod cast. What spirit he has. 🤪 There's better LW posters in PPP than this guy.

If Biden becomes president, will he resign or be convicted? Maybe take up residence in one of Andy in Albany's nursing homes.

Well, I thought about more accurately describing Biden for what he is, a lying, plagiarist, racist, creepy hair smeller, who used the office of the President to gain financial favor with those in communists countries for personal gain at the risk of National security, career politician.....but went with treasonous. My bad.

For 3 yrs. she couldn't shut her mouth lying about Trump/Russia. Now, no comment on the most treasonous act ever committed by a Presidential candidate. The Left considers her silence on Biden's dirty work as Patriotic.

But Mr. President:

They'll be cell mates

Yeah, I’m really only a Marxist in the sense that I think good ol’ Karl and Mr. Engels did an excellent job articulating the problems with laissez-faire capitalism. From the convenient vantage point of living in the early twenty-first century, however, I have to say that their nineteenth-century solutions to capitalism’s problems left a lot to be desired. With human nature having evolved into the current form that it did, I don’t think communism will work any time soon for complex social structures larger than a few hundred or so people. The classical liberal values of money, property, and socioeconomic stratification are here to stay…and that’s perfectly fine by me, really. I’m very much a pro-capitalism person. I just happen to believe that government has a significant role to play in saving capitalism from itself. So for the time being, I’ll proudly wear the scarlet letters, “S.D.,” in this country to identify myself as a social democrat. But I ultimately favor pragmatism and common sense over political and economic dogmatism, so who knows where my weird brain will be in, say, November 2024?? I hope you did well on your midterm exam?! Yes, Polish people rock! That’s why Hitler invaded our homeland first. Unbridled JEALOUSY. Cinga, I think we’re moving closer to a mutual understanding, but I need to make a few more clarifications. I’m defining tyranny simply as “any unreasonable and excessive control over an individual’s life.” That 1-D line you reference, as I understood it, is strictly a measure of the amount of GOVERNMENT control. Government control is distinct from corporate control in that a government can exercise its power to enforce law and order as well as its power to tax. One’s ability to escape government tyranny (leave country, vote for new politicians, peaceful activism/violent revolution) is quite different from one’s ability to escape corporate tyranny (leave job, boycott goods/services, use government to enforce regulations). I’m also defining corporate tyranny as the end state of either neoliberalism (companies hijacking a feeble government for the people) or of anarcho-capitalism (companies ruling in total absence of government restraint). These following three contentions undergird my definition of corporate tyranny: laissez-faire capitalism is terrible at resolving many market failures, it does not lead to anything close to optimal economic utility (i.e. well-being) at the aggregate (i.e. societal) level, and it is an amoral system frequently overrun with immoral sociopaths (as in…clinical diagnoses using DSM-5 criteria). With all of that out of the way, I’ll now restate two important themes from my last post: 1. More government control does not necessarily equate to less individual freedom. Equivalently, less government control doesn’t necessarily mean more liberty. One easily understood thought experiment among so many: a black family driving through a desolate region of the Deep South, desperately searching for food and gasoline service during the Jim Crow era, before all that pesky government intervention (1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act, etc.). 2. The Democratic Party, relative to the Republican Party on that 1-D line of yours, is not consistently about more government control over the individual’s life. A prominent example among multiple: the broad Christian Coalition platform embedded within the Republican Party. Ok, so let’s parse through your list of 12 a little more. I assume by “income equality” you mean less extreme income inequality? The political right generally sees the extreme inequality as a feature and not a flaw of capitalism. Both sides may agree on 3 of these (eliminating racial bias, equal rights for everyone, a clean environment) in the abstract, but they often disagree greatly when you examine specific cases…to the point that the political left doesn’t believe the political right views these as legitimate societal problems to solve anymore. 7 of these that you list (better education, better health care, eliminating poverty, less people in prison, eliminating hunger, solving student debt problems, good housing for everyone) are often treated among the political right as individual moral failings (laziness, irresponsibility, hopeless incompetence) and not systemic problems for politicians to address. The right DOES make (valid) arguments that government intervention can make these 7 issues worse and that private charity can help redress them, but I always find these arguments partially adequate at best and willfully oblivious to the systemic flaws ingrained within capitalism. For the last one (good paying jobs for everyone), the political right simply has lower standards for what constitutes a “good paying job” at the lowest tiers of the wage scale. I encourage you to look into all of the advancements (energy transfer efficiencies, energy storage capabilities, materials engineering, etc.) that have been made in renewable energy technology within the past 5-10 years, compared to the first 10-15 years of this century (especially with solar!). Also, look into other countries around the world and examine how they have been transitioning their electric power infrastructures away from fossil fuels. Lots of quality academic research literature exists out there on electric power grid performances and costs using fully renewables, hybrid renewables with nuclear (my personal favorite!), and hybrid renewables that couple home/building energy systems with traditional fossil fuel power grids. The research is based on both international case studies and speculative ones for the future. This statement is worth exploring further: “When inequality grows, wages stagnate.” From a theoretical economics perspective, this doesn’t HAVE to be the case, but if often ends up being the case. Why exactly is that? Globalization, the destruction of unions, crony capitalism, and wealth-hoarding billionaires/multi-millionaires are 4 big reasons that I’m sure Robert Reich thoroughly covers in his “Inequality for All” documentary (oddly enough, I have yet to see it but eventually will!). By “wealth-hoarding” behavior, I specifically mean not investing money saved from marginal tax rate reductions back into society via domestic job-creating companies or social welfare programs like education. There’s another possible reason that I’m not sure gets discussed much. If we focus on the histogram shape of wage frequency versus wage distribution across the total U.S. population and run it through time (say, from 1980 through 2020), we’ll notice a couple interesting things. The first is that the middle class has been hollowing out for sure. The second is that there’s still more than enough “thickness” on the approximate upper half of the histogram to sustain a healthy-enough economy! In other words…if you do enough back-of-the-envelope area-under-curve calculations on the histograms and make temporal comparisons between them all, you will easily see how you can quietly convert a macroeconomy into one that caters predominantly to the wealthier portion at the near exclusion of the less wealthy portion. So contrary to what economic libertarians often argue, wages at the lower end don’t necessarily NEED to be increased in accordance with all the extra wealth creation (as measured by GDP) in order to have enough people purchasing these extra goods and services. Also not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between highest education level attained and wage tier. So how have we allowed all this to happen? Simple: corporate media propaganda and voter suppression. I have sooo much more to say on wealth inequality and wage stagnation, but it kinda looks like we have kidnapped the thread topic like it’s a governor of Michigan…so I will talk about this stuff somewhere else and sometime after the election hysteria dies down. Look for a new thread of mine in November. Here are some working titles: 1. “Neoliberalism and the death of the American Dream.” Not bad, Kay, not bad… 2. “Reaganomics: the hideous love child of Barry (Goldwater) and Ayn (Rand).” Meh… 3. “A 40-year golden shower: what really trickled down from Art Laffer.” Ew. 4. “K-shaped recovery, economic depression, socialist revolution.” Oooh I like it! Provocative AND apropos of current events. I think I’ll go with this one! ...... yeah, whatever.

No doubt even Bill and Hillary are embarrassed this tube puller is associated with the Left.